2,340 research outputs found
Perceptions, Actors, Innovations
With Agenda 2030, the UN adopted wide-ranging Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that integrate development and environmental agendas. This book has a unique focus on the political tensions between environmental and socio-economic objectives and advocates for a cooperative shift towards environmentally sound sustainability
Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies
Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants. The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the institutionalised responses in agrarian settings, highlighting what exclusions and inclusions result. It explores how different people — in relation to class and other co-constituted axes of social difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, age and occupation — are affected by climate change, as well as the climate adaptation and mitigation responses being implemented in rural areas. The book in turn explores how climate change – and the responses to it - affect processes of social differentiation, trajectories of accumulation and in turn agrarian politics. Finally, the book examines what strategies are required to confront climate change, and the underlying political-economic dynamics that cause it, reflecting on what this means for agrarian struggles across the world. The 26 chapters in this volume explore how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world and, in particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change. Through a huge variety of case studies alongside more conceptual chapters, the book makes the often-missing connection between climate change and critical agrarian studies. The book argues that making the connection between climate and agrarian justice is crucial
Navigating to the Island of Hope - a Pacific response to globalisation, environmental degradation and climate change
Navigating to the Island of Hope - A Pacific Response to Climate Change, Environmental Degradation and Economic Globalisation in Oceania explores and seeks to understand indigenous responses to the powerful forces of globalisation and climate change through ethnographic research and cultural analysis spanning more than eight years in totality, and the Pacific renaissance concept of the Island of Hope. The Island of Hope serves as a lens, and is of interest both from a scholarly perspective and a praxis perspective, as the Island of Hope is a complex amalgamation and synthesis of Pacific ethics elements, economic justice, communal interconnectedness, cosmology and the Christian idea of heaven on Earth. This dissertation, just as the Island of Hope itself does, aims to critique and offer a unique perspective on a motivating and unifying principle in Oceania, which extends from the personal to international in scope, and explores the political and economic, the religious and spiritual, the local and global, as well as nature conservation and climate change activism. Global connections dictate global obligations
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Towards a Global System of Innovation: the Role of Donors in Immunisation for International Development
This research examines what role donors play with respect to innovation in immunisation for international development. It uses as its conceptual framework the global innovation system (GIS) model to examine the principal donors within the sector. Because the empirical data is in-depth, contextualised, and qualitative, the research design adopted is that of a multiple case-study of donor organisations, using triangulated, mixed-methods qualitative data collection. The examined cases are UNICEF, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance.
Knowledge gaps in the existing literature related to how these donors engage actors and institutions across different spatial levels for innovation; to how donors’ manifold power relations affect this; and to how donor structure and capabilities determine their particular roles in innovation.
The research finds strong evidence of an emerging GIS in immunisation for international development. This consists of a global sub-system and a set of sub-systems at the national level, each representing a country receiving development assistance in immunisation. Donors perform four principal roles within this GIS. Firstly, they provide, maintain and extend structural elements of the GIS, especially its networks and linkages between sub-systems. Secondly, donors generate and utilise resources of financial investment, market access and innovation legitimacy for the valuation of innovation. Thirdly, donors coordinate to ensure complementarity in the activities they and other actors provide, which enables effective distributed agency across the GIS. Fourthly, donors navigate the rules, norms and presumptions of the GIS on behalf of partnerships of actors, variously complying, co-opting or contesting them.
The relationship is shown between each of these principal roles and the system’s spatial levels, inter-actor power relations and donors’ structure and capabilities. This offers new, detailed understanding to close significantly the previously-identified knowledge gaps
Multilingualism and the Public Sector in South Africa
This book contributes to the discourse on language in South Africa with a specific focus on multilingualism and the public sector
Shaping Engineers, Making Gender Politics: Swedish Universities of Technology and the Creation of a Policy Field, 1976–1998
Despite a global reputation as a gender-equal nation, the labour market in Sweden is segregated. This particularly applies to engineering. Five decades of national gender equality policies and engineering recruitment campaigns have only partially transformed the situation. This thesis combines the study of two parallel and interlinked phenomena: the development of Swedish engineering education and profession, and the evolution of a national gender equality policy field. It examines how the Swedish engineering profession – represented by the universities of technology – from the mid-1970s, responded to demands from both national policies and from within the engineering communities. The push to act went in two directions; national policies pressured universities of technology to take measures, and representatives from the engineering communities often shaped gender equality policies. How engineering educators steered definitions of gender equality and the corresponding solutions in directions that suited their professional needs are at the heart of the analysis here. Drawing on previously unexplored archival sources and interviews and deploying a theoretical framework of professional boundary work (Thomas F. Gieryn), the dissertation argues that the Swedish male-dominated engineering profession, represented by their technical universities, conducted gender equality politics. The study adds to an emerging international research field on the history of gendered engineering (e.g. Amy Sue Bix, Nathan Ensmenger, Laura Ettinger, Mar Hicks, Alice Clifton-Morekis, Londa Schiebinger, Karin Zachmann) and the Swedish historiography of national gender equality politics. It presents Swedish historiography on the gendered culture in engineering and national gender equality policy to an international audience
The Living Archive as Pedagogy: A Conceptual Case Study of Northern Uganda
The Living Archive as Pedagogy emerges from Northern Uganda’s experience of war 1986- 2008, between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Uganda People’s Defense Force previously named the National Resistance Army. This period of war and post-war has been a difficult experience where finding solutions and mechanisms for transition or justice remain complex, restricted, delayed and consequently concealing the reality of lived marginalization from below. The Acholi of Northern Uganda went through predatory atrocities, painful humiliation and unwilled cohabitations with their oppressors during war and post-war. The study explores how the interlinking of archives and pedagogy as independent disciplines can extend possibilities for more transformative education horizons in bottom-up, post-conflict expressions. The study is immersed through a conceptual and theoretical framing in the boundaries of archiving and pedagogy, to understand how the war constructs Acholi’s lived experience in multiple complex ways. While the Acholi re-orient their lives post- war, we recognize their attention in affirming their human agency, ordering of new and different meanings, desiring a different liberation in post-conflict where responsibility in contexts of “up againstness” validates their dwelling and being in spaces that exclude them. The research acknowledges that pedagogy and archiving studies in post-conflict, needs restructuring to challenge the preserving of external and dominant epistemological purviews that order post-conflict reconstruction life. These traditions exclude the experiences of survivor-victims, are tone deaf to community-based groups articulations of post-conflict repair, and neither does lived experiences of the everyday gets organized as an outcome for knowledge. This is discussed at length, as the research responds to its central question of how living archive as pedagogy can offer a transformative education discourse. The conclusion of the study emphasizes self-representation through transformative knowledge positions of I am whom I am, Where I am, Where I Speak, and Where I think. These positions articulate a self-understanding that supports rehistrocizing of post-conflict society as a body resisting exclusion in dominant knowledge formation and institutional omissions. There is evidence of the research foregrounding the formation of person-hood from experiences of ‘up againstness” and knowledge/under-stand[ing] from below. The research facilitates a hermeneutical encounter with specific inscribed bodies of post-conflict experience, the Acholi and Wanjiku whose bodies archive a horizon of possibilities if a different and difficult reading vii of the world is done from locations of struggle to produce consciousness of re-becoming, or returning to the human. These pedagogical experience positions Acholi and Wanjiku as educators, and their lives a living archive. We the readers are invited to a learning process as willing ‘hearers’ of Acholi and Wanjiku testimony, to own responsibility as our practice to ensure they appear in the world to say their truth, as they defy conditions of their oppression.Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Education, School of Education Research and Engagement, 202
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Intertwined Histories and Ecologies: Early architectural and hydraulic treatises and practices in the Venetian Region.
Looking critically at ecology, contemporary thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Philippe Descola, and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa make a case that the idea of nature has changed throughout history. This requires a new perspective that overcomes established divisions between humans and non-humans, moving beyond the dualism of nature and culture. Their contributions emphasise a new philosophical framework for an ecological vision that suggests alternate ways of working through them.
To define an imaginary narrative for cities and their territories, the thesis adopts the lens of the Arcadian discourse, meant as a narrative, historical and conceptual tool for unearthing ecological concepts in history according to three dimensions: the physical, the political, and the symbolic. Coined by Donald Worster through reading Gilbert White’s works, and rooted in Virgil’s works, this definition embodies a sympathetic approach towards nature, posing an alternative to imperialist approaches that assert dominion over nature.
This research focuses on the historical period between the 15th and 17th centuries, corresponding to rhetorical Arcadian naturalism in architecture, just before what Manfredo Tafuri defined as Enlightenment naturalism, and to the revival of the Arcadian genre in Italian literary works. Among these, Theogenius by Leon Battista Alberti explores a conception of nature that echoes Arcadian components in terms of their implications for architectural theory. Subsequent comparison with Daniele Barbaro’s Commentary provides an opportunity to move from the world of abstract ideas to the concrete matter of fact of Venice and its surrounding territory, which had always experienced the negative impacts of human beings on their environment.
Situating these discourses and their effects in the reading of early hydraulic theories, projects, visual and graphic representations, laws, and human and non-human stories related to Venice’s practices of land and water management, the re-articulation of contemporary ecological concerns has been prompted through a historical lens
The Memory of Meanings : The Images of Jewish-Catholic Relations in Interwar Lublin in Oral Histories
This work explores narratives of Jewish-Catholic relations in interwar Lublin, as recalled by its Jewish and Catholic inhabitants by the end of their lives. Thus, it concerns both memory and intergroup relations and seeks to understand the attitudes towards the religious Other. The main body of sources for this qualitative study is a collection of oral histories from the Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Centre in Lublin, which were analyzed thematically focusing on the memory of everyday interactions between Jews and Catholics. Particular attention is paid to the link between memory and identity. The analysis of the narratives draws extensively from theories regarding intergroup contact (Gordon Allport’s intergroup contact theory later developed by i.a. Linda R. Tropp and Thomas Pettigrew), the relation between personal agency versus social structures (Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic sequence), as well as the theory of communication based on context (Dorota Kuncewicz et al.). The latter, combined with an adaptation of Erwin Panoffsky’s iconology, provides an insight into the meaning of the stories – how the religious Other is perceived, why it could be so, and what consequences it has on intergroup relations decades after the recalled events took place. The findings are grouped into two analytical parts of the dissertation: one dedicated to identity, and another concentrating on relations, which are described on three levels – spatial, interpersonal and interreligious. On the one hand, the study indicates sensitive points in intergroup relations such as the role of social class and gender relations, which can be used to strengthen existing intergroup separation. On the other hand, it points to instances of overcoming separation and segregation through affective ties, especially of friendship, common socio-economic background, education and personal values. It points to (inter)religious literacy fortifying prejudice. The main finding, however, is the fundamental difference in perceiving the same past by the minority and the majority group, which has dire consequences for the relationship between these two groups until today. The study suggests the need for further research on how this memory gap can be addressed to find constructive ways of producing inclusive collective memory in both groups, recognizing the experience of the Other
Patterns of Tactility and Sound:Collaboration through Sensory Textile Practice with the Visually Impaired at Macclesfield Museums
This practice-led research explores community engagement practices using textile practices of hand and digital printing, and hand weaving by a textile artist through a longitudinal case study with two museums in the historical silk town of Macclesfield, England. This research was undertaken by me as the artist-researcher together with a community of visually impaired participants who live locally to the museums. The community group experienced barriers in fully engaging with the museums. This study forms part of a wider debate on heritage sites collaborating with contemporary artists, community engaged textile practices within the museum context and the use of sensory encounters with archive objects to attract new audiences from diverse backgrounds such as disabled people. This research focuses on the two specific museum locations The Silk Museum and Paradise Mill. Visually impaired members of the charity called the East Cheshire Eye Society participated through creative practice community engagement events by exploring further into the archive unearthing hidden histories. This creative textile practice produced a catalogue of experimental artworks and two on-site art installations. My findings came through the documentation and analysis of ethnographic and autoethnographic methods of observations, reflections, and participants voices. Incorporating the senses of touch and sound into my textile practices brought about new connections of knowledge to place, and cultural identity. The museum and the textile artist acted as a conduit to resume the need to gather in a place and have social connection, with those interactions acting as a method of bonding to people and place. The considerations and sensibilities of working with the museum, the visually impaired and the exploration of materials is outlined as a note for future collaborations. The exhibitions raised awareness that the visually impaired can equally take part in the arts, raising the profile of the charity of those with sight loss showing that the unseen can be seen. The working with and making of silk textiles acted as a metaphor for the challenges and difficulties faced both in its contemporary construction with the visually impaired just as it was for the ninetieth century blind mill workers
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