3,322 research outputs found

    Mapping Critical Practice In A Transdisciplinary Urban Studio

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    Architecture and Planning exist to make positive changes to our environment. Future practitioners in these disciplines will be responsible for how our cities develop and are managed - they will be required to exercise their professional judgement in complex and unpredictable contexts. There is increasing interest in transdisciplinary urbanism, but implementation in academic contexts has to date been relatively limited. This thesis aims to build on these examples, through a detailed account of one academic design studio which operates across architecture and urban planning; in doing so it aims to make the case for transdisciplinary, problem and place-based studio teaching. The study considers how a transdisciplinary studio environment supported students to develop a critical approach to practice through collaborative discourse. It looked at studio methods/practices; what it means to practice ‘critically’ in the context of design; and the role ‘going public’ by sharing ideas in public fora might play in developing critical positions. The study was undertaken in collaboration with nine students, a single cohort undertaking the final year of a hybrid master’s qualification in Architecture with Urban Planning. It adopts socio-material and spatial approaches to follow how the studio environment and the students’ emerging interdisciplinary identities shaped both their individual and their shared work. It mapped how their approach to their practice evolved through observations, interviews, and informal conversations, and through their drawings, models and journals. In carrying out these observations, and their analysis, I have returned to drawing methods common in architecture. This allowed me to explore and record aspects of studio practice which might otherwise be missed and revealed the importance of visual and spatial thinking to my own practice. Observations revealed how material spaces, tools and artefacts acted to structure social relations in the studio, and how these relations shaped individual approaches to critical practice

    Non-Market Food Practices Do Things Markets Cannot: Why Vermonters Produce and Distribute Food That\u27s Not For Sale

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    Researchers tend to portray food self-provisioning in high-income societies as a coping mechanism for the poor or a hobby for the well-off. They describe food charity as a regrettable band-aid. Vegetable gardens and neighborly sharing are considered remnants of precapitalist tradition. These are non-market food practices: producing food that is not for sale and distributing food in ways other than selling it. Recent scholarship challenges those standard understandings by showing (i) that non-market food practices remain prevalent in high-income countries, (ii) that people in diverse social groups engage in these practices, and (iii) that they articulate diverse reasons for doing so. In this dissertation, I investigate the persistent pervasiveness of non-market food practices in Vermont. To go beyond explanations that rely on individual motivation, I examine the roles these practices play in society. First, I investigate the prevalence of non-market food practices. Several surveys with large, representative samples reveal that more than half of Vermont households grow, hunt, fish, or gather some of their own food. Respondents estimate that they acquire 14% of the food they consume through non-market means, on average. For reference, commercial local food makes up about the same portion of total consumption. Then, drawing on the words of 94 non-market food practitioners I interviewed, I demonstrate that these practices serve functions that markets cannot. Interviewees attested that non-market distribution is special because it feeds the hungry, strengthens relationships, builds resilience, puts edible-but-unsellable food to use, and aligns with a desired future in which food is not for sale. Hunters, fishers, foragers, scavengers, and homesteaders said that these activities contribute to their long-run food security as a skills-based safety net. Self-provisioning allows them to eat from the landscape despite disruptions to their ability to access market food such as job loss, supply chain problems, or a global pandemic. Additional evidence from vegetable growers suggests that non-market settings liberate production from financial discipline, making space for work that is meaningful, playful, educational, and therapeutic. Non-market food practices mend holes in the social fabric torn by the commodification of everyday life. Finally, I synthesize scholarly critiques of markets as institutions for organizing the production and distribution of food. Markets send food toward money rather than hunger. Producing for market compels farmers to prioritize financial viability over other values such as stewardship. Historically, people rarely if ever sell each other food until external authorities coerce them to do so through taxation, indebtedness, cutting off access to the means of subsistence, or extinguishing non-market institutions. Today, more humans than ever suffer from chronic undernourishment even as the scale of commercial agriculture pushes environmental pressures past critical thresholds of planetary sustainability. This research substantiates that alternatives to markets exist and have the potential to address their shortcomings

    Assessing the Role and Regulatory Impact of Digital Assets in Decentralizing Finance

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    This project will explore the development of decentralized financial (DeFi) markets since the first introduction of digital assets created through the application of a form of distributed ledger technology (DLT), known as blockchain, in 2008. More specifically, a qualitative inquiry of the role of digital assets in relation to traditional financial markets infrastructure will be conducted in order to answer the following questions: (i) can the digital asset and decentralized financial markets examined in this thesis co-exist with traditional assets and financial markets, and, if so, (ii) are traditional or novel forms of regulation (whether financial or otherwise) needed or desirable for the digital asset and decentralized financial markets examined herein? The aim of this project will be to challenge a preliminary hypothesis that traditional and decentralized finance can be compatible; provided, that governments and other centralized authorities approach market innovations as an opportunity to improve existing monetary infrastructure and delivery of financial services (both in the public and private sector), rather than as an existential threat. Thus, this thesis seeks to establish that, through collaborating with private markets to identify the public good to which DeFi markets contribute, the public sector can foster an appropriate environment which is both promotive and protective of the public interest without unduly stifling innovation and progress

    Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies

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    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

    Digital Innovations for a Circular Plastic Economy in Africa

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    Plastic pollution is one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century that requires innovative and varied solutions. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, this book brings together interdisciplinary, multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder perspectives exploring challenges and opportunities for utilising digital innovations to manage and accelerate the transition to a circular plastic economy (CPE). This book is organised into three sections bringing together discussion of environmental conditions, operational dimensions and country case studies of digital transformation towards the circular plastic economy. It explores the environment for digitisation in the circular economy, bringing together perspectives from practitioners in academia, innovation, policy, civil society and government agencies. The book also highlights specific country case studies in relation to the development and implementation of different innovative ideas to drive the circular plastic economy across the three sub-Saharan African regions. Finally, the book interrogates the policy dimensions and practitioner perspectives towards a digitally enabled circular plastic economy. Written for a wide range of readers across academia, policy and practice, including researchers, students, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), digital entrepreneurs, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and multilateral agencies, policymakers and public officials, this book offers unique insights into complex, multilayered issues relating to the production and management of plastic waste and highlights how digital innovations can drive the transition to the circular plastic economy in Africa. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license

    Fictocritical Cyberfeminism: A Paralogical Model for Post-Internet Communication

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    This dissertation positions the understudied and experimental writing practice of fictocriticism as an analog for the convergent and indeterminate nature of “post-Internet” communication as well a cyberfeminist technology for interfering and in-tervening in metanarratives of technoscience and technocapitalism that structure contemporary media. Significant theoretical valences are established between twen-tieth century literary works of fictocriticism and the hybrid and ephemeral modes of writing endemic to emergent, twenty-first century forms of networked communica-tion such as social media. Through a critical theoretical understanding of paralogy, or that countercultural logic of deploying language outside legitimate discourses, in-volving various tactics of multivocity, mimesis and metagraphy, fictocriticism is ex-plored as a self-referencing linguistic machine which exists intentionally to occupy those liminal territories “somewhere in among/between criticism, autobiography and fiction” (Hunter qtd. in Kerr 1996). Additionally, as a writing practice that orig-inated in Canada and yet remains marginal to national and international literary scholarship, this dissertation elevates the origins and ongoing relevance of fictocriti-cism by mapping its shared aims and concerns onto proximal discourses of post-structuralism, cyberfeminism, network ecology, media art, the avant-garde, glitch feminism, and radical self-authorship in online environments. Theorized in such a matrix, I argue that fictocriticism represents a capacious framework for writing and reading media that embodies the self-reflexive politics of second-order cybernetic theory while disrupting the rhetoric of technoscientific and neoliberal economic forc-es with speech acts of calculated incoherence. Additionally, through the inclusion of my own fictocritical writing as works of research-creation that interpolate the more traditional chapters and subchapters, I theorize and demonstrate praxis of this dis-tinctively indeterminate form of criticism to empirically and meaningfully juxtapose different modes of knowing and speaking about entangled matters of language, bod-ies, and technologies. In its conclusion, this dissertation contends that the “creative paranoia” engendered by fictocritical cyberfeminism in both print and digital media environments offers a pathway towards a more paralogical media literacy that can transform the terms and expectations of our future media ecology

    University bulletin 2023-2024

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    This catalog for the University of South Carolina at Beaufort lists information about the college, the academic calendar, admission policies, degree programs, faculty and course descriptions

    Shaping the metaverse into reality: multidisciplinary perspectives on opportunities, challenges, and future research

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    The term metaverse is described as the next iteration of the Internet. Metaverse is a virtual platform that uses extended reality technologies, i.e., augmented reality, virtual reality, mixed reality, 3D graphics, and other emerging technologies to allow real-time interactions and experiences in ways that are not possible in the physical world. Companies have begun to notice the impact of the metaverse and how it may help maximize profits. The purpose of this paper is to offer perspectives on several important areas, i.e., marketing, tourism, manufacturing, operations management, education, the retailing industry, banking services, healthcare, and human resource management that are likely to be impacted by the adoption and use of a metaverse. Each includes an overview, opportunities, challenges, and a potential research agenda
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