2,536 research outputs found
Information actors beyond modernity and coloniality in times of climate change:A comparative design ethnography on the making of monitors for sustainable futures in Curaçao and Amsterdam, between 2019-2022
In his dissertation, Mr. Goilo developed a cutting-edge theoretical framework for an Anthropology of Information. This study compares information in the context of modernity in Amsterdam and coloniality in Curaçao through the making process of monitors and develops five ways to understand how information can act towards sustainable futures. The research also discusses how the two contexts, that is modernity and coloniality, have been in informational symbiosis for centuries which is producing negative informational side effects within the age of the Anthropocene. By exploring the modernity-coloniality symbiosis of information, the author explains how scholars, policymakers, and data-analysts can act through historical and structural roots of contemporary global inequities related to the production and distribution of information. Ultimately, the five theses propose conditions towards the collective production of knowledge towards a more sustainable planet
Fostering Graduate Student Creative Problem Solving in a Professional Military Education Context
In military contexts, a tension exists between the need for rapid, unquestioning obedience to orders, especially early in one’s career, and the need for senior leaders to solve complex problems creatively. For officers in the Marine Corps, a key milestone in their careers is the Marine Corps’ Command and Staff College, an intermediate-level professional military education master’s degree program. In 2015, the College, and the wider Marine Corps University community, established a plan to improve student creative problem solving; however, the plan did not meet its outcome goals by 2021.
The purpose of this study is twofold. First, using a convergent parallel mixed methods design, this study examined factors related to creative problem solving and their application to Command and Staff College curriculum. Key results of interviews, surveys, and secondary data analysis included the perceived need for additional time for students to think creatively, and the need to address the tension between authoritarian thinking and the imperative to develop new creative solutions. The second part of this study examined an intervention designed to give students more time to think and to give them structural, metacognitive supports for their thinking. Using a quasi-experimental design, the two key factors of concern for the study were metacognition and creative problem solving.
Improvements in the students’ metacognitive abilities were expected to lead to improvements in their creative problem-solving ability. Quantitative results showed no significant improvement in creative problem solving while there was actually a significant decrease in perceived metacognitive ability for both the comparison and intervention groups. According to explanatory interviews, one key factor in these results may have been the use of a perception survey, in which decreases in one’s perception of one’s metacognitive ability might mask actual improvements in real metacognitive ability. Another factor that emerged from the explanatory interviews was the need for the intervention to be more fully integrated across the whole curriculum. This study underscores the difficulty of making significant changes to student creative problem solving, especially in a military community. Further study could examine the relationship between perceptions of metacognitive ability and actual metacognitive ability
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
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum
Bringing Back the Love. The Emotional Connection of Growth and Change through Multi-Community Local Area Planning in Calgary, AB.
This study examines the complexities of community planning and the significant role of human emotion in the process. Using a practice-based approach, the study explored an innovative codesign strategy as implemented in the Local Area Planning Program (LAP) of The City of Calgary to address these challenges. The LAPs embody a community-led approach to policy and growth planning in established areas, prioritizing emotional co-authorship and the integration of community-specific knowledge in planning. Using a series of semi-structured interviews, six distinguished practitioners provided their diverse perspectives and approaches, with the goal of generating new considerations, tools, and recommendations to integrate into my practice. Applying the LAPs as working models of community connection, this study employed a design science methodology to collect information, reflect, and obtain expert feedback on both practice and design. The aim was to curate a contemporary collection of practice-based tools, strategies, and insights that contribute to The Handbook for Community Connection, a practitioner's guide for fostering emotional connections between communities and the redevelopment process. The Handbook offers a range of practical tools that can fit into a variety of contexts, scales, and available resources, enabling a
redefinition of planning processes. The study concludes that by prioritizing empathy and building relationships, redefining planning processes becomes more habitual in practice. Furthermore, continually reflecting on your practice is key to facilitating meaningful connections within community. Relying solely on policy to address societal issues yields limited results; the profession needs a more nuanced and holistic approach. Ultimately, with the study in mind, community planning can be an act of of caring, one that helps to build stronger, more connected, and loving communities
The International Forestry Review: special issue: the social impacts of logging
Global Challenges (FSW
Under construction: infrastructure and modern fiction
In this dissertation, I argue that infrastructural development, with its technological promises but widening geographic disparities and social and environmental consequences, informs both the narrative content and aesthetic forms of modernist and contemporary Anglophone fiction. Despite its prevalent material forms—roads, rails, pipes, and wires—infrastructure poses particular formal and narrative problems, often receding into the background as mere setting. To address how literary fiction theorizes the experience of infrastructure requires reading “infrastructurally”: that is, paying attention to the seemingly mundane interactions between characters and their built environments. The writers central to this project—James Joyce, William Faulkner, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Mohsin Hamid—take up the representational challenges posed by infrastructure by bringing transit networks, sanitation systems, and electrical grids and the histories of their development and use into the foreground. These writers call attention to the political dimensions of built environments, revealing the ways infrastructures produce, reinforce, and perpetuate racial and socioeconomic fault lines. They also attempt to formalize the material relations of power inscribed by and within infrastructure; the novel itself becomes an imaginary counterpart to the technologies of infrastructure, a form that shapes and constrains what types of social action and affiliation are possible
Healing That Leads to Action : Restorative Justice, School Leadership, and Institutional Change
When immigrant youth are harmed by institutional policies and practices that reinforce idealized notions of nationalism and assimilation through subtractive and coercive strategies, school leaders can turn to restorative justice as a technology of resistance. This participatory action research study, with the author as a participant, captures four school leaders from Colorado, New York, and New Jersey, who interrogated institutional policies and practices and promoted authentic inclusion and equity for immigrant youth through restorative justice. As we participated in a process of collective restorative contemplation, we engaged in a form of personal healing that guided intentional and thoughtful action to transform our school environments into inclusive spaces. This year-long study emphasizes the critical role school leaders play when challenging institutional culture and negotiating policies and practices that harm immigrant youth
The origins and early development of Copenhagen International School, 1962-1973
This thesis critically examines the origins and early development of Copenhagen International School (CIS, Denmark), which evolved from an American outpost secondary school, attached to the American embassy, to one of the first International Baccalaureate (IB) trial schools, in 1968. The case study places the school’s history in the Danish context of the mid-1960s and early 1970s, and in the wider international and geopolitical configurations of the same period. Using an insider approach, as a full member of the school, I apply a participative method which includes the role of school’s informants particularly in the preservation and the access to the data. By drawing on cross-analysis of the school unexplored records, donated materials, unofficial written histories and oral testimonies from alumni and staff members, the research addresses three questions:
1 What does the school’s early history reveal about the inception of international schooling in the mid-1960s and early 1970s?
2 Why and how did the foundation years of the school embody and reflect broader aspects and interests at stake in the world order?
3 What does the school’s early history unveil about its institutional identity?
The findings provide insights on the interplay and power games between multiple actors in a small international institution under a strong American influence where many interests were at stake. More specifically, it shows how the concept of internationalism embodied a range of different interpretations and had to be negotiated in the school day-to-day life between the different board members, students, parents, headmasters and teachers. Finally, the findings give evidence on the sensitive role and newly increasing power given to international schooling in the changing world order of the mid-twentieth century
Collaborative Leadership Skills and Competencies in Emergency Management and Resilience: Lessons and Implications from the Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic
Collaborative leadership is a critical component in emergency management and resilience. Although cross-sector leadership is considered compulsory in the management of many disasters, the skills and competencies for successful execution of collaborative leadership approaches in emergency management and resilience are still largely unknown, especially as it pertains to the COVID-19 pandemic response. The perspectives of emergency management and resilience leaders may fill in this research gap.
This qualitative study relies on semi-structured interviews to explore the needed skills and competencies for collaborative leadership in emergency management and resilience during the response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the South-Atlantic states. The study relies on Transformational Leadership and Integrative Public Leadership theories to answer the research questions. This study employs qualitative methodology to gain in-depth information of emergency management and resilience leaders’ stories. The researcher used a thematic analysis approach to categorize the identified skills and competencies from the literature and the generated themes from the qualitative data from interview participants.
These findings contribute to public administration by broadening the leadership concept through the exploration of collaborative leadership skills and competencies in emergency management and resilience. State-level emergency management and resilience leaders are stewards of our health and safety, tax dollars, and trust, putting them at the center of scholarly conversations about the COVID-19 pandemic and building effective collaborative teams. The study has implications for practitioners and theorists alike
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