7,978 research outputs found

    Urbanised forested landscape: Urbanisation, timber extraction and forest care on the Vișeu Valley, northern Romania

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    By looking at urbanisation processes from the vantage point of the forest, and the ways in which it both constitutes our living space while having been separated from the bounded space of the urban in modern history, the thesis asks: How can we (re)imagine urbanisation beyond the limits of the urban? How can a feminine line of thinking engage with the forest beyond the capitalist-colonial paradigm and its extractive project? and How can we “think with care” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) towards the forest as an inhabitant of our common world, instead of perpetuating the image of the forest as a space outside the delimited boundaries of the city? Through a case study research, introducing the Vișeu Valley in northern Romania as both a site engaged in the circulation of the global timber flow, a part of what Brenner and Schmid (2014) name “planetary urbanisation”, where the extractive logging operations beginning in the late XVIIIth century have constructed it as an extractive landscape, and a more than human landscape inhabited by a multitude of beings (animal, plant, and human) the thesis argues towards the importance of forest care and indigenous knowledge in landscape management understood as a trans-generational transmission of knowledge, that is interdependent with the persistence of the landscape as such. Having a trans-scalar approach, the thesis investigates the ways in which the extractive projects of the capitalist-colonial paradigm have and still are shaping forested landscapes across the globe in order to situate the case as part of a planetary forest landscape and the contemporary debates it is engaged in. By engaging with emerging paradigms within the fields of plant communication, forestry, legal scholarship and landscape urbanism that present trees and forests as intelligent beings, and look at urbanisation as a way of inhabiting the landscape in both indigenous and modern cultures, the thesis argues towards viewing forested landscapes as more than human living spaces. Thinking urbanisation through the case of the Vișeu Valley’s urbanised forested landscape, the thesis aligns with alternate ways of viewing urbanisation as co-habitation with more than human beings, particularly those emerging from interdisciplinary research in the Amazon river basin (Tavares 2017, Heckenberger 2012) and, in light of emerging discourses on the rights of nature, proposes an expanded concept of planetary citizenship, to include non-human personhood

    The discursive construction of higher education policies in Greece during the financial crisis (2011-2014): a critical discourse analysis of the debate around the policy-making of the 4009/2011 framework act

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    During the past decade Greece has been experiencing a tremendous fiscal crisis. The recession ensued by the crisis along with the adopted austerity measures have dealt a severe blow not only to the basic, daily operations of Greek HE institutions but even to their very survival. Within this adverse financial context, a major framework act was passed (Law 4009/2011 “Structure, function, quality assurance of studies and internationalisation of institutions of higher education”) with a view to address some of the deficiencies and challenges in the sector. The major changes that this law brought referred to a new governance and structure model and the reintroduction and strengthening of quality assurance procedures, with the aim to set the Greek higher educational agenda one step closer to the Bologna process and the European Union directives. Albeit being voted by a wide political margin in the Greek parliament the 2011 Law failed to be efficiently implemented within the specified time period. This failure can be attributed to the interweavement of various structural and political factors, such as the strong opposition by the academic community and the inconsistent political communication and amendments taking place after the 2011 Act’s enactment. Consequently, these developments gave rise to a variety of new competing ideas and discourses about the character of higher education reform and its social and economic implications. This thesis critically explores the role and function of the competing discourses between the various political and public actors (politicians, academics, students, etc.) in the construction and (de-) legitimation of the Greek HE reforms during the financial crisis, from 2011 until 2014 focusing on the enactment of the 4009/2011 Law. The objectives of this study are (a) to explore how the political and public debate regarding the HE reforms that were introduced by the 4009/2011 Law in Greece has been developed in the light of the recent financial crisis; (b) how the debate has impacted on the construction and dissemination of the HE policies introduced by the 4009/2011 Law; and (c) to examine the co-articulation of the debate with the structural and contextual features that surround it. The research is rooted in a critical realist theoretical approach that acknowledges the co-articulation and interaction between policy, discourses and contextual/ structural factors. A qualitative approach was adopted, which involved the analysis of parliamentary policy speeches and face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with actors that have been specifically involved in the policy-making process of the 2011 reforms (i.e. rectors, academics, journalists, trade union members and politicians). The framework of Critical Policy Discourse Analysis (CPDAF) was used for the analysis of the textual data. The analysis of the data revealed two overarching discourse themes: (a) University Governance and the issue of University Councils and (b) Quality Assurance and Internationalisation of Greek Higher Education. Overall, the thesis has identified a division between the ideas, imaginaries, goals and/or interests that underpin policy actors’ discourses - which was discursively built upon a political and ideological polarisation. Two discursive coalitions thus emerged: those who support the 2011 reforms and those who oppose them. However, the new knowledge discovered through this research indicated the existence of moderate or even similar opinions - especially with regard to the implementation of quality assurance and accreditation processes. The external policy actors’ influence (such as the EU and OECD) along with the pivotal historical moment of financial crisis have been crucial to building the common ground found in the actors’ discourses. Overall, the commonly accepted imaginaries tend to be promoted by different coalitions in such a way that contribute to a hyperbolic account of the various differences that separate the political parties. This results in the misconception of having two distinct, polarised coalitions involved in the policy process. This has influenced the way policy problems have been defined as well as what solutions are being offered by the policy actors, creating more conflict and increasing ambiguity in regard to core issues such as the purpose of HE, its governance, academic freedom and the character of higher education degrees. This study provides novel insights about the discourse dynamics that take place within the Greek HE policy sphere. At the same time, it contributes to relevant literature through the adoption and use of a critical discursive approach to policy-making while at the same time providing a robust analysis of the interaction between policy discourses and contextual and structural factors (such as the financial crisis)

    Post-Growth Geographies: Spatial Relations of Diverse and Alternative Economies

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    Post-Growth Geographies examines the spatial relations of diverse and alternative economies between growth-oriented institutions and multiple socio-ecological crises. The book brings together conceptual and empirical contributions from geography and its neighbouring disciplines and offers different perspectives on the possibilities, demands and critiques of post-growth transformation. Through case studies and interviews, the contributions combine voices from activism, civil society, planning and politics with current theoretical debates on socio-ecological transformation

    Meta-ontology fault detection

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    Ontology engineering is the field, within knowledge representation, concerned with using logic-based formalisms to represent knowledge, typically moderately sized knowledge bases called ontologies. How to best develop, use and maintain these ontologies has produced relatively large bodies of both formal, theoretical and methodological research. One subfield of ontology engineering is ontology debugging, and is concerned with preventing, detecting and repairing errors (or more generally pitfalls, bad practices or faults) in ontologies. Due to the logical nature of ontologies and, in particular, entailment, these faults are often both hard to prevent and detect and have far reaching consequences. This makes ontology debugging one of the principal challenges to more widespread adoption of ontologies in applications. Moreover, another important subfield in ontology engineering is that of ontology alignment: combining multiple ontologies to produce more powerful results than the simple sum of the parts. Ontology alignment further increases the issues, difficulties and challenges of ontology debugging by introducing, propagating and exacerbating faults in ontologies. A relevant aspect of the field of ontology debugging is that, due to the challenges and difficulties, research within it is usually notably constrained in its scope, focusing on particular aspects of the problem or on the application to only certain subdomains or under specific methodologies. Similarly, the approaches are often ad hoc and only related to other approaches at a conceptual level. There are no well established and widely used formalisms, definitions or benchmarks that form a foundation of the field of ontology debugging. In this thesis, I tackle the problem of ontology debugging from a more abstract than usual point of view, looking at existing literature in the field and attempting to extract common ideas and specially focussing on formulating them in a common language and under a common approach. Meta-ontology fault detection is a framework for detecting faults in ontologies that utilizes semantic fault patterns to express schematic entailments that typically indicate faults in a systematic way. The formalism that I developed to represent these patterns is called existential second-order query logic (abbreviated as ESQ logic). I further reformulated a large proportion of the ideas present in some of the existing research pieces into this framework and as patterns in ESQ logic, providing a pattern catalogue. Most of the work during my PhD has been spent in designing and implementing an algorithm to effectively automatically detect arbitrary ESQ patterns in arbitrary ontologies. The result is what we call minimal commitment resolution for ESQ logic, an extension of first-order resolution, drawing on important ideas from higher-order unification and implementing a novel approach to unification problems using dependency graphs. I have proven important theoretical properties about this algorithm such as its soundness, its termination (in a certain sense and under certain conditions) and its fairness or completeness in the enumeration of infinite spaces of solutions. Moreover, I have produced an implementation of minimal commitment resolution for ESQ logic in Haskell that has passed all unit tests and produces non-trivial results on small examples. However, attempts to apply this algorithm to examples of a more realistic size have proven unsuccessful, with computation times that exceed our tolerance levels. In this thesis, I have provided both details of the challenges faced in this regard, as well as other successful forms of qualitative evaluation of the meta-ontology fault detection approach, and discussions about both what I believe are the main causes of the computational feasibility problems, ideas on how to overcome them, and also ideas on other directions of future work that could use the results in the thesis to contribute to the production of foundational formalisms, ideas and approaches to ontology debugging that can properly combine existing constrained research. It is unclear to me whether minimal commitment resolution for ESQ logic can, in its current shape, be implemented efficiently or not, but I believe that, at the very least, the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings that I have presented in this thesis will be useful to produce more foundational results in the field

    Ab Initio Language Teaching in British Higher Education

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    Drawing extensively on the expertise of teachers of German in universities across the UK, this volume offers an overview of recent trends, new pedagogical approaches and practical guidance for teaching at beginners level in the higher education classroom. At a time when entries for UK school exams in modern foreign languages are decreasing, this book serves the urgent need for research and guidance on ab initio learning and teaching in HE. Using the example of teaching German, it offers theoretical reflections on teaching ab initio and practice-oriented approaches that will be useful for teachers of both German and other languages in higher education. The first chapters assess the role of ab initio provision within the wider context of modern languages departments and language centres. They are followed by sections on teaching methods and innovative approaches in the ab initio classroom that include chapters on the use of music, textbook evaluation, the effective use of a flipped classroom and the contribution of language apps. Finally, the book focuses on the learner in the ab initio context and explores issues around autonomy and learner strengths. The whole builds into a theoretically grounded guide that sketches out perspectives for teaching and learning ab initio languages that will benefit current and future generations of students

    The Aesthetic Philosophy of John Cage and the Visual Arts of the Twentieth Century

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    This thesis presents a biographical analysis of the role of American composer, writer, and artist John Cage (1912-1992) in the evolution of visual arts in the twentieth century. The origins of Cage\u27s aesthetic stance are discussed, particularly his melding of Marcel Duchamp\u27s Dada orientation with philosophical positions derived from the study of Zen Buddhism. The influence of His views on painters, sculptors, and performance artists of the postwar period is documented, along with the aesthetic foundations of his own work in the visual arts

    A Working History of Digital Zoom, Medieval to Modern

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    [Article draft from 2020: very of its mid-lockdown moment, but unlikely to be revisiting this, so here it is!] This article examines one of the most familiar elements of digital interfaces: the zoom tool. By tracing the conceptual, technical, and material histories of zooming from the late Middle Ages to the present day, it demonstrates how historians of the medieval book might turn their attention to the digital tools on which we increasingly depend not just in our academic work, but in all areas of life. It also considers some of the broader ramifications of looking beneath the screens of our smart devices: the complex and often discontinuous histories of information technologies, the hollowness of powerful corporations’ claims of “innovation” and “disruption,” the various forms of extractivism on which the digital realm depends, and the modern regimes of worker “flexibility” and “knowledge work.

    Reproducible and relocatable regional ocean modelling: Fundamentals and practices

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    In response to an increasing demand for bespoke or tailored regional ocean modelling configurations, we outline fundamental principles and practices that can expedite the process to generate new configurations. The paper develops the principle of Reproducibility and advocates adherence by presenting benefits to the community and user. The elements to this principle are reproducible workflows and standardised assessment, with additional effort over existing working practices being balanced against the added value generated. The paper then decomposes the complex build process, for a new regional ocean configuration, into stages and presents guidance, advice and insight on each component. This advice is compiled from across the user community, is presented in the context of NEMOv4, though aims to transcend NEMO version. Detail and region specific worked examples are linked in companion repositories and DOIs. The aim is to broaden the user community skill base, and to accelerate development of new configurations in order to increase available time exploiting the configurations
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