State enrolment and energy-carbon transitions: syndromic experimentation and atomisation in England

This article analyses how national governments seek to enrol different subjects and objects in energy-carbon restructuring. It takes analysis beyond consideration of particular subjectivities and governmentalities to consider an expanded range of objects and subjects of governing at a distance. Developing an analytical model of ‘modes of enrolment’ focusing on power modalities, forms of policy integration and policy targets, the article explores five broad modes of enrolment employed in England. The article shows how policy across all modes of enrolment in England has increasingly tended towards disordered, syndromic experimentation and government by-project rather than any systematic programme of government

Creative space - creating space - digital technology in a women's prison : a case study

Prison education has the potential to transforms offenders. It forms part of prison regimes for female offenders. At the beginning of the 21st century prison education and basic skills development are at the centre of rehabilitation debates. Computer technology has transformed human communication and interactions rendering digital literacy a basic skill in the 21st century and part of the rehabilitation agenda. However, prison education is not just entangled within rehabilitation debates. It is also an economic and prison security debate. Computer technology is already in use to manage offenders in local institutions and within wider prison and probation networks. Its application in prison education has been slow due to security imperatives of prisons. However, it has great potential to, on one hand, enhance learning opportunities for prisoners and, on the other, create inclusive prison classrooms that account for the diversity of its learners. The focus of this thesis is the application of computer technology in prison education for women. It, however, extends its view outside of ICT prison classrooms to account for the actors involved in shaping local classroom contexts. The thesis is not concerned with teaching techniques nor does it attempt to provide teaching guidelines. Using an actor-network approach, it, however, analysis how groups such as the female offender are stabilised to inform local procedures. It understands prison induction as start points of (in)dividual prison learner journeys. It examines closely the technologies and procedures that create educational data fragments - ‘virtual’ educational risk and needs potentialities - used to allocate learner in classes, but, more importantly, to create tightly managed, pre-formatted learning spaces. It, further, analyses how tutors and women appropriate those pre-designed spaces and provides detailed recommendations for the implementation of computer technology in prison classrooms for women

Integrating knowledge in the face of epistemic uncertainty : dialogically drawing distinctions

In this article, we contribute to a processual understanding of knowledge integration in interdisciplinary collaboration by foregrounding the role of dialogue in dealing with epistemic uncertainty. Drawing on an ethnographic study of collaboration among scientists involved in developing a highly novel bioreactor, we suggest that knowledge integration is not a homogeneous process but requires switching between different knowledge integration practices over time. This is particularly notable in the case of ‘epistemic breakdowns’ – deeply unsettling events where hitherto-held understandings of the nature of problems appear unworkable. In such cases, it is not sufficient to deal solely with coordination issues; collaborators need to find ways to address generative knowledge integration processes and to venture, collectively, into the unknown. We demonstrate how this generative quest of knowledge integration is achieved through a dialogical process of drawing and testing new distinctions that allows actors to gradually handle the epistemic uncertainty they face

The Kennedy Miller method: a half-century of Australian screen production

Kennedy Miller is the most notable of Australian film and television production companies since the industry's `revival' in the 1970s, and arguably even across the entire century or more of the Australian film industry. Despite this, the company (now known as Kennedy Miller Mitchell) has been largely under-researched and incompletely understood. What scholarship there is tends to focus strictly on its co-founder, internationally lauded filmmaker George Miller, or its most famous franchise, the Mad Max films, or else dates only to a short phase of its unusually long-lasting operations. Drawing on extensive primary sources, including oral histories, company documentation, and new qualitative interviews with past Kennedy Miller creative personnel, this production history of Kennedy Miller gives an account of the company across its four main periods of operation: from its founding and first works in the 1970s, to its time of continuous production in the 1980s, its reshaping in the 1990s, and its ambitious expansion in the 2000s and 2010s. Particular attention is given to the concept of the Kennedy Miller `method', a label once applied to the collaborative principles that were said to characterise the company's operations. The `method' is redefined here as describing the firm's corporate culture, collaborative production practices, and house style. I argue that by understanding the Kennedy Miller method we can better observe the conditions underlying the firm's sustainability, as well as its corporate authorship over production, and its place in the Australian national industry. This thesis not only fills a significant gap in Australian screen scholarship, and in our understanding of recent Australian screen history, but also builds a conceptual foundation for future scholarly research on this globally influential company, its creative principals, and its productions

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Charting Literary Urban Studies

Guided by the multifaceted relations between city and text, Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City attempts to chart the burgeoning field of literary urban studies by outlining how texts in varying degrees function as both representations of the city and as blueprints for its future development. The study addresses questions such as these: How do literary texts represent urban complexities – and how can they capture the uniqueness of a given city? How do literary texts simulate layers of urban memory – and how can they reinforce or help dissolve path dependencies in urban development? What role can literary studies play in interdisciplinary urban research? Are the blueprints or 'recipes' for urban development that most quickly travel around the globe – such as the 'creative city', the 'green city' or the 'smart city' – really always the ones that best solve a given problem? Or is the global spread of such travelling urban models not least a matter of their narrative packaging? In answering these key questions, this book also advances a literary studies contribution to the general theory of models, tracing a heuristic trajectory from the analysis of literary texts as representations of urban developments to an analysis of literary strategies in planning documents and other pragmatic, non-literary texts

Negotiating dependence: Independent television producers in England

The thesis analyses the independent television production sector focusing on the role of the producer. At its centre are four in-depth case studies which investigate the practices and contexts of the independent television producer in four different production cultures. The sample consists of a small self-owned company, a medium-sized family-owned company, a broadcaster-owned company and an independent-corporate partnership. The thesis contextualises these case studies through a history of four critical conjunctures in which the concept of ‘independence’ was debated and shifted in meaning, allowing the term to be operationalised to different ends. It gives particular attention to the birth of Channel 4 in 1982 and the subsequent rapid growth of an independent ‘sector’. Throughout, the thesis explores the tensions between the political, economic and social aims of independent television production and how these impact on the role of the producer. The thesis employs an empirical methodology to investigate the independent television producer’s role. It uses qualitative data, principally original interviews with both employers and employees in the four companies, to provide a nuanced and detailed analysis of the complexities of the producer’s role. Rather than independence, the thesis uses network analysis to argue that a television producer’s role is characterised by sets of negotiated dependencies, through which professional agency is exercised and professional identity constructed and performed. It offers a networked brokerage model of producing to identify the producer’s resources as cultural, social and economic capital and the producer’s function as their translation, transformation, accumulation and dissemination across professional networks. It employs the concept of diasporic networks to encapsulate the different contexts and outcomes of networking, arguing that the strong ties of co-working remain dormant or residual rather than being broken at the end of a working partnership and are able to be re-formed

An evaluation of partnership in the development of strategic health policy

This PhD analyses strategic health partnerships, focusing on Health Improvement Programmes (HImPs) and Health Action Zones (HAZs). It is a case study of four English health districts, based on 81 semi-structured interviews, and on partnership documents and observations. Partnership - central to New Labour's modernisation agenda for the NHS - was intended to improve the quality of health services and reduce health inequalities. This thesis conceptualises three dimensions of partnership - coordination, collaboration, participation. It uses three theoretical frameworks to interpret the nature of partnership in the study sites. Governance Theory - market, hierarchy and networks - provided a framework to conceptualise the broader context in which partnership was developed but also to explore the influence of central government on local statutory agencies. Over-use and poor co-ordination of central command and control tools strengthened hierarchical relations. Coupled with a shift towards healthcare delivery, this undermined the development of autonomous, lateral relationships. Resource Dependency Theory provided a framework to analyse the influences on horizontal relationships between local partners. This theory sees actors as selfinterested, manipulating the environment to enhance their resources while reducing their resource dependency on others. A model was developed to explain how resource motivations and symmetry combined with local circumstances to shape partnerships. Collaboration Theory provided a normative framework to assess the quality of the partnership process. According to this theory, innovative and consensual solutions to social problems emerge through inclusive processes - often involving conflict and requiring impartial facilitation. In the study sites, these processes were constrained by overbearing hierarchical relations and local influences, resulting in policy co-ordination, not radical innovation. The thesis argues that government reforms resulted mainly in partnership as coordination. Partnership as participation marginally increased while partnership as collaboration was barely evident. The shift from market to networks was undermined by the government's strengthening and (mis)management of hierarchical relations.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Charting Literary Urban Studies

Guided by the multifaceted relations between city and text, Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City attempts to chart the burgeoning field of literary urban studies by outlining how texts in varying degrees function as both representations of the city and as blueprints for its future development. The study addresses questions such as these: How do literary texts represent urban complexities – and how can they capture the uniqueness of a given city? How do literary texts simulate layers of urban memory – and how can they reinforce or help dissolve path dependencies in urban development? What role can literary studies play in interdisciplinary urban research? Are the blueprints or 'recipes' for urban development that most quickly travel around the globe – such as the 'creative city', the 'green city' or the 'smart city' – really always the ones that best solve a given problem? Or is the global spread of such travelling urban models not least a matter of their narrative packaging? In answering these key questions, this book also advances a literary studies contribution to the general theory of models, tracing a heuristic trajectory from the analysis of literary texts as representations of urban developments to an analysis of literary strategies in planning documents and other pragmatic, non-literary texts