Citizenship and the Politics of Civic Driven Change

Nation states are premised on the legitimizing presence of a polity comprised of citizens. The politics of this relationship is central to discourse on how societies evolve. Yet in the discipline of international development studies the topic remains peripheral. Reasons can be found in conceptual confusion, in selectivity in donor thinking and policies towards civil society and in the growth-driven political economy of NGO-ism. Remedies for the political lacunae are being sought through a concerted focus on people's rights, citizenship and qualities of leadership that all show valuable progress. This chapter will examine a comprehensive complement to such efforts referred to as civic driven change (CDC). Originating in a grounded empirical approach, the constituent principles and elements of CDC offer a lens that can both sharpen and deepen insights and advance analysis of civic agency in socio-political processes. As an ontologically grounded normative proposition, CDC allows exposure and examination of 'uncivil' forces stemming from contending claims on citizenship. These factors are typically ignored or denied in an historical harmony model of societal change. A CDC narrative is illustrated by reference to contemporary examples of citizen action that play out at multiple sites of governance

“No powers, man!”: A student perspective on designing university smart building interactions

Smart buildings offer an opportunity for better performance and enhanced experience by contextualising services and interactions to the needs and practices of occupants. Yet, this vision is limited by established approaches to building management, delivered top-down through professional facilities management teams, opening up an interaction-gap between occupants and the spaces they inhabit. To address the challenge of how smart buildings might be more inclusively managed, we present the results of a qualitative study with student occupants of a smart building, with design workshops including building walks and speculative futuring. We develop new understandings of how student occupants conceptualise and evaluate spaces as they experience them, and of how building management practices might evolve with new sociotechnical systems that better leverage occupant agency. Our findings point to important directions for HCI research in this nascent area, including the need for HBI (Human-Building Interaction) design to challenge entrenched roles in building management

Educational innovation, learning technologies and Virtual culture potential’

Learning technologies are regularly associated with innovative teaching but will they contribute to profound innovations in education itself? This paper addresses the question by building upon Merlin Donald's co‐evolutionary theory of mind, cognition and culture. He claimed that the invention of technologies for storing and sharing external symbol systems, such as writing, gave rise to a ‘theoretic culture’ with rich symbolic representations and a resultant need for formal education. More recently, Shaffer and Kaput have claimed that the development of external and shared symbol‐processing technologies is giving rise to an emerging ‘virtual culture’. They argue that mathematics curricula are grounded in theoretic culture and should change to meet the novel demands of ‘virtual culture’ for symbol‐processing and representational fluency. The generic character of their cultural claim is noted in this paper and it is suggested that equivalent pedagogic arguments are applicable across the educational spectrum. Hence, four general characteristics of virtual culture are proposed, against which applications of learning technologies can be evaluated for their innovative potential. Two illustrative uses of learning technologies are evaluated in terms of their ‘virtual culture potential’ and some anticipated questions about this approach are discussed towards the end of the paper

Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Britain

This is a monograph analysing the symbolic role played by contemporary fiction in the break-up of political and cultural consensus in British public life. This study explores how British identity has been explored and renegotiated by contemporary writers. It starts by examining the new emphasis on space and place that has emerged in recent cultural analysis, and shows how this spatial emphasis informs different literary texts. Having first analysed a series of novels that draw an implicit parallel between the end of the British Empire and the break-up of the unitary British state, the study explores how contemporary writing in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales contributes to a sense of nationhood in those places, and so contributes to the break-up of Britain symbolically. Dix argues that the break-up of Britain is not limited to political devolution in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It is also an imaginary process that can be found occurring on a number of other conceptual coordinates. Feminism, class, regional identities and ethnic communities are all terrains on which different writers carry out a fictional questioning of received notions of Britishness and so contribute in different ways to the break-up of Britain

Innovating Pedagogy 2017: Exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers. Open University Innovation Report 6

This series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. This sixth report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. To produce it, a group of academics at the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University collaborated with researchers from the Learning In a NetworKed Society (LINKS) Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE). Themes: • Big-data inquiry: thinking with data • Learners making science • Navigating post-truth societies • Immersive learning • Learning with internal values • Student-led analytics • Intergroup empathy • Humanistic knowledge-building communities • Open Textbooks • Spaced Learnin

Spatial updating in narratives.

Across two experiments we investigated spatial updating in environments encoded through narratives. In Experiment 1, in which participants were given visualization instructions to imagine the protagonist’s movement, they formed an initial representation during learning but did not update it during subsequent described movement. In Experiment 2, in which participants were instructed to physically move in space towards the directions of the described objects prior to testing, there was evidence for spatial updating. Overall, findings indicate that physical movement can cause participants to link a spatial representation of a remote environment to a sensorimotor framework and update the locations of remote objects while they move

Evolutionary biology for the 21st century

New theoretical and conceptual frameworks are required for evolutionary biology to capitalize on the wealth of data now becoming available from the study of genomes, phenotypes, and organisms - including humans - in their natural environments.Molecular and Cellular BiologyOrganismic and Evolutionary Biolog

Differential recruitment of brain networks following route and cartographic map learning of spatial environments.

An extensive neuroimaging literature has helped characterize the brain regions involved in navigating a spatial environment. Far less is known, however, about the brain networks involved when learning a spatial layout from a cartographic map. To compare the two means of acquiring a spatial representation, participants learned spatial environments either by directly navigating them or learning them from an aerial-view map. While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), participants then performed two different tasks to assess knowledge of the spatial environment: a scene and orientation dependent perceptual (SOP) pointing task and a judgment of relative direction (JRD) of landmarks pointing task. We found three brain regions showing significant effects of route vs. map learning during the two tasks. Parahippocampal and retrosplenial cortex showed greater activation following route compared to map learning during the JRD but not SOP task while inferior frontal gyrus showed greater activation following map compared to route learning during the SOP but not JRD task. We interpret our results to suggest that parahippocampal and retrosplenial cortex were involved in translating scene and orientation dependent coordinate information acquired during route learning to a landmark-referenced representation while inferior frontal gyrus played a role in converting primarily landmark-referenced coordinates acquired during map learning to a scene and orientation dependent coordinate system. Together, our results provide novel insight into the different brain networks underlying spatial representations formed during navigation vs. cartographic map learning and provide additional constraints on theoretical models of the neural basis of human spatial representation

Employee imagination and its implication for entrepreneurs : inspiration from Chinese business enterprises

Purpose: In 2015 the European Group of Organisation Studies released a call for papers highlighting poor knowledge of employee imagination in organisations. To address this need, the current study hypothesises employee imagination consisting of seven conditions common to the organisational experience of Chinese Entrepreneurs. Design/methodology/approach: The current paper reviews the Chinese enterprising context. Cases from China are used to illustrate the effects of proposed conditions and their value for entrepreneurs and innovators in businesses undergoing change. Findings: Employee imagination underpins and conditions how Chinese employees make sense of their organisations and better understand the process of organisational change. From the viewpoint of human resource management, coaching and developing imagination enables businesses to stay competitive and adapt to environmental demands such as lack of information, too much information, or the need for new information. Research limitations/implications: The proposed conditions apply to the Chinese context, however, their application to wider contexts is suggested and requires attention. Originality/Value: Theoretically, our research adds new insights to knowledge of a poorly understood organisational behaviour topic – employee imagination. Practically, the research findings provide mangers with knowledge of conditions, which could be adopted as powerful tools in facilitating organisational change management