6,294 research outputs found

    Machine Learning Research Trends in Africa: A 30 Years Overview with Bibliometric Analysis Review

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    In this paper, a critical bibliometric analysis study is conducted, coupled with an extensive literature survey on recent developments and associated applications in machine learning research with a perspective on Africa. The presented bibliometric analysis study consists of 2761 machine learning-related documents, of which 98% were articles with at least 482 citations published in 903 journals during the past 30 years. Furthermore, the collated documents were retrieved from the Science Citation Index EXPANDED, comprising research publications from 54 African countries between 1993 and 2021. The bibliometric study shows the visualization of the current landscape and future trends in machine learning research and its application to facilitate future collaborative research and knowledge exchange among authors from different research institutions scattered across the African continent

    A Comparative Study on Students’ Learning Expectations of Entrepreneurship Education in the UK and China

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    Entrepreneurship education has become a critical subject in academic research and educational policy design, occupying a central role in contemporary education globally. However, a review of the literature indicates that research on entrepreneurship education is still in a relatively early stage. Little is known about how entrepreneurship education learning is affected by the environmental context to date. Therefore, combining the institutional context and focusing on students’ learning expectations as a novel perspective, the main aim of the thesis is to address the knowledge gap by developing an original conceptual framework to advance understanding of the dynamic learning process of entrepreneurship education through the lens of self-determination theory, thereby providing a basis for advancing understanding of entrepreneurship education. The author adopted an epistemological positivism philosophy and a deductive approach. This study gathered 247 valid questionnaires from the UK (84) and China (163). It requested students to recall their learning expectations before attending their entrepreneurship courses and to assess their perceptions of learning outcomes after taking the entrepreneurship courses. It was found that entrepreneurship education policy is an antecedent that influences students' learning expectations, which is represented in the difference in student autonomy. British students in active learning under a voluntary education policy have higher autonomy than Chinese students in passive learning under a compulsory education policy, thus having higher learning expectations, leading to higher satisfaction. The positive relationship between autonomy and learning expectations is established, which adds a new dimension to self-determination theory. Furthermore, it is also revealed that the change in students’ entrepreneurial intentions before and after their entrepreneurship courses is explained by understanding the process of a business start-up (positive), hands-on business start-up opportunities (positive), students’ actual input (positive) and tutors’ academic qualification (negative). The thesis makes contributions to both theory and practice. The findings have far reaching implications for different parties, including policymakers, educators, practitioners and researchers. Understanding and shaping students' learning expectations is a critical first step in optimising entrepreneurship education teaching and learning. On the one hand, understanding students' learning expectations of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education can help the government with educational interventions and policy reform, as well as improving the quality and delivery of university-based entrepreneurship education. On the other hand, entrepreneurship education can assist students in establishing correct and realistic learning expectations and entrepreneurial conceptions, which will benefit their future entrepreneurial activities and/or employment. An important implication is that this study connects multiple stakeholders by bridging the national-level institutional context, organisational-level university entrepreneurship education, and individual level entrepreneurial learning to promote student autonomy based on an understanding of students' learning expectations. This can help develop graduates with their ability for autonomous learning and autonomous entrepreneurial behaviour. The results of this study help to remind students that it is them, the learners, their expectations and input that can make the difference between the success or failure of their study. This would not only apply to entrepreneurship education but also to other fields of study. One key message from this study is that education can be encouraged and supported but cannot be “forced”. Mandatory entrepreneurship education is not a quick fix for the lack of university students’ innovation and entrepreneurship. More resources must be invested in enhancing the enterprise culture, thus making entrepreneurship education desirable for students

    'Exarcheia doesn't exist': Authenticity, Resistance and Archival Politics in Athens

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    My thesis investigates the ways people, materialities and urban spaces interact to form affective ecologies and produce historicity. It focuses on the neighbourhood of Exarcheia, Athens’ contested political topography par excellence, known for its production of radical politics of discontent and resistance to state oppression and eoliberal capitalism. Embracing Exarcheia’s controversial status within Greek vernacular, media and state discourses, this thesis aims to unpick the neighbourhoods’ socio-spatial assemblage imbued with affect and formed through the numerous (mis)understandings and (mis)interpretations rooted in its turbulent political history. Drawing on theory on urban spaces, affect, hauntology and archival politics, I argue for Exarcheia as an unwavering archival space composed of affective chronotopes – (in)tangible loci that defy space and temporality. I posit that the interwoven narratives and materialities emerging in my fieldwork are persistently – and perhaps obsessively – reiterating themselves and remaining imprinted on the neighbourhood’s landscape as an incessant reminder of violent histories that the state often seeks to erase and forget. Through this analysis, I contribute to understandings of place as a primary ethnographic ‘object’ and the ways in which place forms complex interactions and relationships with social actors, shapes their subjectivities, retains and bestows their memories and senses of historicity

    Exploring Employees\u27 Perceptions of the Learning Organization and Their Learning Experiences in a Georgia State Government Agency – A Concurrent Mixed Methods Study

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    This concurrent Mixed Methods (MM) research study explored employee learning perceptions and experiences in a state of Georgia government agency. The study used the Dimension of the Learning Organization Questionnaire (DLOQ) to examine employee perceptions of a learning organization across management levels and tenure. It also used semi-structured phenomenological interviews to examine learning experiences. The two questions that framed the study were: (1) How do employees navigate learning individually, in teams, and organizationally? (2) How do employee perceptions of the learning organization compare based on tenure and management level? The concurrent mixed methods design allowed for comparison of findings from the questionnaire and the interviews. Participants were simultaneously recruited from the same state of Georgia government agency to complete the questionnaire and interview voluntarily. Three hundred and thirty-eight (338) employees responded to the questionnaire, the quantitative (QUAN) strand. Five (5) employees participated in the interviews, the qualitative (QUAL) strand. The interview data was analyzed using a hybrid/eclectic methodology of coding, theming, and analytic memos. The questionnaire data was analyzed using descriptive and non-parametric statistical tests. The findings of the study suggest that leadership influences learning critically. For this organization to continue learning and growing, it must focus on the leaderships’ impact on its employees\u27 learning in the work environment. Additionally, significant differences in employee perceptions of the learning organization were observed. These differences were between employees with 6 to 10 years and those with 16 to 20 years of tenure on Inquiry/Dialogue (Dimension 2), Organization Environment Connection (Dimension 6), and Individual Level learning (Level 1). While the findings present possible explanations for the differing perceptions, future research should examine this further

    The historical consciousness of eighteenth-century Britain: Viscount Bolingbroke and Edmund Burke

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    How did eighteenth-century Britain deal with the tension between its traditional political and religious foundations and the rise of commercial society with its emphases on individual self-interest and the accumulation of wealth? This thesis explores one major response to the tension – the effort to discern a historical consciousness that would help to understand change and to preserve the social order. It focuses on two major conservative thinkers: Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751) and Edmund Burke (1729-1797), and it shows how their different understandings of the historical consciousness shaped their attitudes toward the emerging commercial society, individual self-interest, the expansion of empire, and political reform movements. The thesis maintains that Bolingbroke and Burke represented two distinct versions of historical consciousness. Bolingbroke’s historical consciousness was characterized by a linear view of history which considered the past, present and future as separate spaces of time. The thesis shows how Bolingbroke’s rejection of the political management and promotion of commercial interests represented by Sir Robert Walpole’s Whig party was based on an historical consciousness that idealized England’s ancient constitution and traditional social morality, and was motivated by a patriotic effort to restore a past golden age. The thesis also shows how Bolingbroke’s historical consciousness reflected his Deist religious beliefs, his notion of natural law, and his rationalist philosophical approaches. The thesis shows how Bolingbroke’s radical historical consciousness was later taken up by French Enlightenment philosophers and English Dissenters – who in turn developed views of social progress based on natural rights theory. Edmund Burke, on the other hand, saw a threat to the existing order coming from these emphases on natural law and natural rights. Burke’s historical consciousness confronted Bolingbroke and his successors by taking fundamentally different positions on the origin and formation of civil order, on continuity and change of society, and on the relationship between divine will, human reason and history. Burke’s historical consciousness assumed that society was a living partnership between different generations. The past, the present and the future were not separate spaces of time but co-existed in the same space of time, and society was constantly in a changeable state, as a union of the principles of “renovation”, “permanence” and “change”. Burke rejected Bolingbroke’s idea of a past golden age and an ancient constitution. For Burke, society and the state were offspring of social conventions and human history, rather than of natural law and natural rights. Moreover, Burke conceived human history as unpredictable, shaped by uncertain and obscure factors. There was, for Burke, no ultimate cause or general rule determining the course of history. The thesis concludes that Burke understood the history of human society to be a process that transcended any systematic design that could be discerned by human reason alone

    Epistemologies of possibility: social movements, knowledge production and political transformation

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    Urgent global problems - whether military conflicts, economic insecurities, immigration controls or mass incarceration-not only call for new modes of political action but also demand new forms of knowledge. For if knowledge frameworks both shape the horizons of social intelligibility and chart t he realms of political possibility, then epistemological interventions constitute a crucial part of social change. Social movements play a key role in this work by engaging in dissident knowledge practices that open up space for political transformation. But what are the processes and conditions through which social movements generate new ways of knowing?'What is politically at stake in the various knowledge strategies that activists use to generate social change? Despite a growing literature on the role of epistemological dimensions of protest, social movement studies tend to neglect specific questions of epistemological change. Often treating knowledge as a resource or object rather than a power relation and a social practice, social movement scholars tend to focus on content rather than production, frames rather than practices, taxonomies rather than processes. Missing is a more dynamic account of the conditions, means and power relations through which transformative knowledge practices come to be constituted and deployed. Seeking to better understand processes of epistemological transformation, this thesis explores the relationship between social movements, knowledge production and political change. Starting from an assumption that knowledge not only represents the world, but also works to constitute it, this thesis examines the role of social movement knowledge practices in shaping the conditions of political possibility. Drawing from the context of grassroots queer, transgender and feminist organizing around issues of prisons and border controls in North America, the project explores how activists generate new forms of knowledge and forge new spaces of political possibility. Working through a series of concepts-transformation, resistance, experience, co-optation, solidarity and analogy - this thesis explores different ways of understanding processes of epistemological change with in social movement contexts. It considers processes that facilitate or enable epistemological change and those that limit or prohibit such change. Bringing together a range of theoretical perspectives, including feminist, queer, critical race and post-structuralist analyses, and drawing on interviews with grassroots activists, the thesis explores what is politically at stake in the different ways we conceptualise, imagine and engage in processes of epistemological change

    THE DREAM OF A ZERO WASTE SOCIETY: EXPLORING THE PRACTICES AND BEHAVIOURS OF WASTE GENERATION IN GREATER MEXICO CITY

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    This research aims to re-conceptualise consumption and waste generation through a broader set of theoretical questions and analytical methodologies to establish a more holistic theoretical framework for comprehending the global South's "waste crisis." This thesis is primarily based on the following question: "why do we dispose of things?". By focusing on practices and behaviours of consumption and disposal by citizens of GMC, this thesis seeks to unpack the networks, symbols, skills, and meanings of these practices. This moves the conceptualisation of waste generation away from being conceived as an irremediable consequence of population growth or as primary responsibility on the consumers' shoulders. Therefore, this thesis proposes that consumers are embedded in a "throwaway environment" that pushes them toward unsustainable practices. However, this does not mean that the consumers have a "throwaway culture"; consumers might be "carriers" of practices, but they are still active participants. By unravelling the multiple layers of framing that aggregate into the consumption and disposal of citizens in GMC, we shall see how GMC society's historical, social, and political framework serves as dispositions that guide an individual to act. This study focuses on modifying the narrative of considering consumers as careless, lazy, or consumption-driven. It also sheds light on how ignoring these behaviours and practices will only bring temporary and reactionary solutions when dealing with waste. This dissertation also offers an analytical framework that explores how consumers' elements interrelate and are synergetic. By re-conceptualising consumption and waste generation, I propose not focusing on the insidious moral narrative of whether consumption and disposal are acceptable and to what degree. Instead, we should concentrate on a policy strategy that will help reduce the flow of materials. As a result, we might be able to curve a waste crisis by accepting shared responsibility (mostly borne by governments and businesses

    B/order work: recomposing relations in the seamful carescapes of health and social care integration in Scotland

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    As people, ageing and living with disabilities, struggle with how care is enacted through their lives, integrated care has gained policy purchase in many places, especially in the United Kingdom. Accordingly, there have been various (re)forms of care configurations instigated, in particular, promoting partnership and service redesign. Despite integrations apparent popularity, its contribution to improved service delivery and outcomes for people has been questioned, exposing ongoing uncertainties about what it entails and its associated benefits. Nonetheless, over decades, a remarkably consistent approach to integrated care has advanced collaboration as a solution. Equally, any (re)configurations emerge through wider infrastructures of care, in what might be regarded as dis-integrated care, as complex carescapes attempt to hold and aporias remain. In 2014, the Scottish Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Act mandated Health and Social Care Integration (HSCI), as a means to mend fraying carescapes; a flagship policy epitomising public service reform in Scotland, in which normative aspirations of collaboration are central. What then are the accomplishments of this ambitious legislation? From the vantage point of 2021, HSCI has been assessed as slow and insubstantial, but this is not the complete picture. Narratives about failing to meet expectations obscure more complicated histories of cooperation and discord, successes and failures, and unintended consequences. Yet given collaborative ubiquity, if partnerships are contested how then are they practiced? To answer this question, I embarked on an interorganisational ethnography of the enactment of a Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP), which went ‘live’ on April 1st, 2016; in a place I call ‘Kintra’. I interrogate what happened when several managers (from the NHS and Council) endeavoured to implement HSCI according to the precepts of the Act; working to both (re)configure and hold things together behind care frontiers; away from the bodywork of direct care, immersed in everyday arrangements in the spaces of governance and operations. I chart their efforts to comply with regulations, plan, and build governance apparatuses through documents. I explore through coalescent objects how distributed forms of governance, entwined in policy implementation, were subsequently both sustained, and challenged. I observed for seven months actors struggling to (re)configure care services embedded in a collaborative approach, as well as establish the legitimacy of the HSCP; exemplified through the fabrication of what was understood as a 'must-do' commissioning plan. In tracing documents, I show the ways in which HSCI was simultaneously materialised and constituted through documentation. I reveal how, in the mundane mattering of document manufacturing, possibilities for (re)forming the carescape emerged. By delving into inconspicuous, ‘seamful’ b/order work that both sustained distinctions between the NHS and Council and enabled b/order crossings, I expose how actors were knotted, and how this shaped efforts to recompose the contours of the carescape. While ‘Kintra’s story might be familiar, situated in concerns that may resonate across Scotland; I reveal how collaboration-as-practice is tangled in differing organisational practices, emerging from quotidian intra-actions in meeting rooms, offices, car parks and kitchenettes. I deploy a posthuman practice stance to show not only the way in which public administration ‘does’ care, but it’s world-making through a sociomaterial politics of anticipation. I was told legislation was the only way to make HSCI in ‘Kintra’ happen, nevertheless, there was resistance to limit the breadth and depth of integrating. Consequently, I show how the (re)organising of b/orders was an always-ongoing act of maintenance and repair of a (dis)integrating carescape; as I learnt at the end of my fieldwork, ‘it’s ‘Kintra, ‘it’s aye been!
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