Cities of refuge Asylum and the politics of hospitality

This thesis draws upon ethnographic work in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, to interrogate asylum as a spatial experience. Arguing that the routine framing of asylum as either an issue of national securitisation or cosmopolitan and humanitarian ethics serves to overlook the visceral and prosaic practices of living asylum in contemporary Britain, this thesis develops an account of responding to asylum seekers through everyday life which is immersed in the tacit sociality, and spatiality, of the city. Through detailing the complex negotiations which emerge as asylum seekers encounter and create an array of spaces within the city, this thesis considers how accounts of sovereignty, welcome, charity and generosity are actively performed, worked upon and fractured within daily practices of hospitality. Here national accounts of 'domopolitics' and 'secure borders' intermingle and conflict with emergent modes of ethical sensibility, as individuals respond to asylum seekers through a series of shared spaces of encounter and accomplishment. Of central importance throughout these chapters is the need to take seriously both the unique and fragile experiences of space which form part of asylum as a lived experience, and the inherently negotiated, tentative and contextual nature of these spaces of asylum, riven as they are by differing visions of asylum, ethics and politics. Five chapters seek to document and approach these spaces of asylum as sites of affective belonging, and each draws together a range of accounts from social and political theory in order to engage with Sheffield's diverse politics of asylum. In doing so these chapters fuse a series of research encounters, engagements and events with an account of politics, ethics and social theory which is emergent from the contextual negotiations of the present. Achapter on Sheffield's past illustrates how national accounts of asylum as a begrudging act of welcome infuse the negotiations of the city with asylum seekers in the present. This is then counterposed in the following chapter by an account of Sheffield as a 'City of Sanctuary', built upon a micropolitics of cultural change and a recognition of the city's relational responsibilities. Three chapters then focus on specific spaces within the city. The first of these examines the spatial negotiations of two weekly drop-in centres for asylum seekers, suggesting that these may act as sites of ethical improvisation and tacit learning. The second extends these ethical developments into the public spaces of Sheffield, arguing that a minimal politics of access and 'small achievements' arises from the particular fusion of encounter, material and memory thrown up by being among others in the city. The third of these chapters considers the varied spaces of accommodation for asylum seekers in Sheffield, arguing that these act as key constraints on an affective connection to the city and to others. These chapters develop an account of asylum as a lived, practiced and felt experience not simply occurring in Sheffield, but occurring through Sheffield. Through these chapters I then develop a possible 'politics of becoming' for asylum seekers, grounded in the opportunity for mutual and generous encounters with others, a reassertion of sanctuary as a public good and a recognition of the relational responsibilities asylum as a spatial connection throws up

Church and state: some reflections on church establishment in England

The papers begin at Chapter 1 with a response to the Mapping document from Dr Edward Norman. He raises questions about how establishment should be viewed, the extent to which nowadays the state’s moral basis is in fact a form of secularized Christianity, and how far the state understands the implications of its own policies in respect of multiculturalism. Chapters 2-4 offer the perspectives of Christian dissenters, respectively Baptists, the United Reformed Church and Quakers. Historically, each suffered persecution in the days when the state still tried to enforce religious uniformity. Whilst ancient urgent asperities have faded as state toleration matured into a more positive acceptance of religious freedom, each retains serious, principled reservations about the state and the position of the Church of England in relation to it. In all cases, however, actively pressing for changes is not high on their agendas. On the other hand, all have thought-provoking points to make about the place of religion in modern civic life. Whilst the Mapping paper spent a good deal of time at looking at church/state relations in Scotland and Scandinavia because they were analogous to, if in detail different from, the system in England, it omitted to consider the arrangements in southern Europe’s most catholic societies. The balance is redressed by Javier Oliva’s review at Chapter 5 of the situation in Spain and Italy. There, although one church is notably dominant, the legal forms addressing its position have evolved distinct patterns. The two papers from non-religious organizations – the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society – at Chapters 6 and 7 argue the case for a thoroughly secular as opposed to a merely more tolerant society. Whilst notably different in tone and emphasis, they argue essentially for the abolition of the legal privileges of the Church of England and for the entire separation of the state and religion. Finally, in Chapter 8, William Fittall offers a view from the Church of England which reminds that establishment has drawbacks as well as advantages for that Church, and contends that thorough-going disestablishment would leave gaps in public life that would need addressing

Climate-ready conservation objectives: a scoping study

AbstractAnticipated future climate change is very likely to have a wide range of different types of ecological impact on biodiversity across the whole of Australia. There is a high degree of confidence that these changes will be significant, affecting almost all species, ecosystems and landscapes. However, because of the complexity of ecological systems and the multiple ways climate change will affect them, the details of the future change are less certain for any given species or location. The nature of the changes means that the multiple ways biodiversity is experienced, used and valued by society will be affected in different ways. The likely changes present a significant challenge to any societal aspiration to preserve biodiversity in its current state, for example, to maintain a species in its current abundance and distribution. Preserving biodiversity ‘as is’ may have been feasible in a stationary climate (one that is variable but not changing), but this will not be possible with the widespread, pervasive and large ecological changes anticipated under significant levels of climate change. This makes the impacts of climate change quite unlike other threats to biodiversity, and they challenge, fundamentally, what it actually means to conserve biodiversity under climate change: what should the objectives of biodiversity conservation be under climate change? And what are the barriers to recalibrating conservation objectives?Based on key insights from the scientific literature on climate change and biodiversity, the project developed three adaptation propositions about managing biodiversity:Conservation strategies accommodate large amounts of ecological change and the likelihood of significant climate change–induced loss in biodiversity. Strategies remain relevant and feasible under a range of possible future trajectories of ecological change.Strategies seek to conserve the multiple different dimensions of biodiversity that are experienced and valued by society. Together these propositions summarise the challenge of future climate change for biodiversity conservation, and define a new way of framing conservation we called the ‘climate ready’ approach. In the near term, conservation strategies may be able to include some consideration of these propositions. However, under significant levels of climate change many of the current approaches to conservation will become increasingly difficult and ineffective (e.g. maintaining community types in their current locations). This challenge is fundamentally different from that posed by other threats to biodiversity, and the climate-ready approach is akin to a paradigm shift in conservation.The project used a review of 26 conservation strategy documents (spanning scales from international to local) and four case studies with conservation agencies to test and refine the climate-ready approach. The project found the approach to be robust and highly relevant; in the majority of situations, if adopted, it would lead to significant changes in the objectives and priorities of conservation. There were also many ‘green shoots’ of elements of the new approach in existing conservation practice. However, the project found there are currently substantial barriers to fully adopting a climate-ready approach. These include the need for: further development of ecological characterisation of ecosystem health and human activities in landscapesmuch better understanding of how society values different aspects of biodiversity, including ecosystems and landscapesdevelopment of policy tools to codify and implement new ecologically robust and socially endorsed objectives.  Anticipated future climate change is very likely to have a wide range of different types of ecological impact on biodiversity across the whole of Australia. There is a high degree of confidence that these changes will be significant, affecting almost all species, ecosystems and landscapes. However, because of the complexity of ecological systems and the multiple ways climate change will affect them, the details of the future change are less certain for any given species or location. The nature of the changes means that the multiple ways biodiversity is experienced, used and valued by society will be affected in different ways. The likely changes present a significant challenge to any societal aspiration to preserve biodiversity in its current state, for example, to maintain a species in its current abundance and distribution. Preserving biodiversity ‘as is’ may have been feasible in a stationary climate (one that is variable but not changing), but this will not be possible with the widespread, pervasive and large ecological changes anticipated under significant levels of climate change. This makes the impacts of climate change quite unlike other threats to biodiversity, and they challenge, fundamentally, what it actually means to conserve biodiversity under climate change: what should the objectives of biodiversity conservation be under climate change? And what are the barriers to recalibrating conservation objectives?Based on key insights from the scientific literature on climate change and biodiversity, the project developed three adaptation propositions about managing biodiversity:Conservation strategies accommodate large amounts of ecological change and the likelihood of significant climate change–induced loss in biodiversity. Strategies remain relevant and feasible under a range of possible future trajectories of ecological change.Strategies seek to conserve the multiple different dimensions of biodiversity that are experienced and valued by society. Together these propositions summarise the challenge of future climate change for biodiversity conservation, and define a new way of framing conservation we called the ‘climate ready’ approach. In the near term, conservation strategies may be able to include some consideration of these propositions. However, under significant levels of climate change many of the current approaches to conservation will become increasingly difficult and ineffective (e.g. maintaining community types in their current locations). This challenge is fundamentally different from that posed by other threats to biodiversity, and the climate-ready approach is akin to a paradigm shift in conservation.The project used a review of 26 conservation strategy documents (spanning scales from international to local) and four case studies with conservation agencies to test and refine the climate-ready approach. The project found the approach to be robust and highly relevant; in the majority of situations, if adopted, it would lead to significant changes in the objectives and priorities of conservation. There were also many ‘green shoots’ of elements of the new approach in existing conservation practice. However, the project found there are currently substantial barriers to fully adopting a climate-ready approach. These include the need for: further development of ecological characterisation of ecosystem health and human activities in landscapesmuch better understanding of how society values different aspects of biodiversity, including ecosystems and landscapesdevelopment of policy tools to codify and implement new ecologically robust and socially endorsed objectives. Please cite this report as: Dunlop M, Parris, H, Ryan, P, Kroon, F 2013 Climate-ready conservation objectives: a scoping study, National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, Gold Coast, pp. 102

Discovering the Common Good in Practice: The Catholicity of Catholic Charities

This research examines a group of UK Catholic charities working in the field of homelessness and social exclusion in order to understand how their Catholicity is constituted and how this impacts on their practice. I argue that their Catholicity is primarily found in how their practices enact, test and extend Catholic social vision rather than in institutional alignment. I demonstrate that the charities have an ecclesiological specificity which official Catholic texts fail to recognise. They operate across the porous boundaries of the visible Church, drawing into their work people who share elements of the social vision articulated in Catholic thought and tradition. Theologically, they enact the Catholic intuition about the meaning of social bonds and reciprocal human flourishing by working to counter social exclusion and vulnerability and point social realities towards the Kingdom. Their location on ecclesial boundaries, their inclusiveness, and their embeddedness in secular structures of social welfare and politics, are necessary conditions of social mission. I use the concept of the common good as a hermeneutic in order to read the charities as a case study testing how Catholic social teaching’s methodological strategies propose shared moral horizons. Using Thomas Bushlack’s concept of civic virtue in conversation with normative Catholic social teaching about the common good enables fresh insights into the practices which enact this principle. The charities discover the meaning of the common good by recognising and wrestling with the absence of the conditions that enable people to seek fulfilment. Their asymmetrical relational work, shaped by their narratives, renders an abstract and elusive concept as a real and practical task. Their communally held and inclusively enacted intuitions disclose pragmatic coherence with Conciliar ecclesiology and validate its orientations. The charities act as agents and inventors of mediated social mission, illuminating an expansive Catholicity

The Muslim Question in Europe

The book challenges the popular notion of a clash of cultures pitting Muslim and non-Muslim Europeans against one another. The study finds instead vehement conflict among three longstanding European public philosophies: liberalism, nationalism, and postmodernism. The consequential differences of outlook are demonstrated in four policy areas: 1) citizenship requirements, 2) the headscarf debate, 3) mosque-state relations and 4) counter-terrorism. The book reaches three important conclusions. First, Muslim Europeans do not represent a monolithic anti-Western bloc -- a Trojan Horse -- within Europe. They vehemently disagree among themselves but along the same basic liberal, nationalist, and postmodern contours as non-Muslim Europeans. Second, ideological discord significantly contributes to policy “messiness,” that is, to inconsistent, contradictory policies

Sustainable tourism development management in Central Africa: a case study of the tourism industry in Cameroon

The tourism industry in sub-Saharan Africa has been experiencing one of the fastest growth rates in the last decade at more than 10% in 2006, +7% in 2007 and +5% in 2008 and 2009 respectively and this positive trend is predicted to continue in future in spite of the present global recession. However, there are significant variations in tourism growth between the various countries and different sub-regions. Until now, there has been no detailed examination by researchers to find out the reasons for these variations in general and the stagnation and even decline in tourism growth observed in countries of the Central African sub-region in particular, which have recognised natural and socio-cultural potentials of developing a thriving sustainable tourism industry. Using Cameroon as a case study, this research examines the reasons of this stagnation in the Central African sub-region, and explores the possibility of tailoring, adapting and/or applying the key concepts of sustainable tourism in developing and managing the tourism industry in the Central African sub-region which is still at an early stage of development through the conception of a strategic framework for sustainable tourism development management in Cameroon. The principal objectives of the thesis are: a. To identify and outline the growth potential of the tourism industry in Cameroon as a means of improving the socio-economic conditions of the local communities. b. To examine the contradictions and challenges facing the development of a viable sustainable tourism industry in Cameroon. c. To determine how far sustainable tourism concepts successfully applied in other countries can be adapted and used in developing and managing the tourism potential of Cameroon in particular, and its sub-region

Designing Institutional Infrastructure for E-Science

A new generation of information and communication infrastructures, including advanced Internet computing and Grid technologies, promises more direct and shared access to more widely distributed computing resources than was previously possible. Scientific and technological collaboration, consequently, is more and more dependent upon access to, and sharing of digital research data. Thus, the U.S. NSF Directorate committed in 2005 to a major research funding initiative, “Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery”. These investments are aimed at enhancement of computer and network technologies, and the training of researchers. Animated by much the same view, the UK e-Science Core Programme has preceded the NSF effort in funding development of an array of open standard middleware platforms, intended to support Grid enabled science and engineering research. This proceeds from the sceptical view that engineering breakthroughs alone will not be enough to achieve the outcomes envisaged. Success in realizing the potential of e-Science—through the collaborative activities supported by the "cyberinfrastructure," if it is to be achieved, will be the result of a nexus of interrelated social, legal, and technical transformations.e-science, cyberinfrastructure, information sharing, research

Art Administration as Performative Practice / Organizing Art as Institutional Critique

A propositional rethinking of art administration within the artist-run institution, this thesis contributes new conceptualizations of operations of the artist-run centre in Canada. The suggestion is that art administration practiced therein is a specialized embodied expression of the institution as apparatus. Proposing that the Canadian artist- run context is a form of and forum for institutional critique, this analysis argues that the art administrator is a unique practice of mediation in art called “diagnostic organizing;” a negotiative role gesturing toward performative relationships to protocol. Recontextualizing art administration as embodying the interface between art and policy, this study also names “performing the context” as an experimental and critical approach to arts facilitation. The work of artist Andrea Fraser is investigated for her writing and practices of institutional critique, as is the arts presentation project Kunstverein Toronto where Co-Director’s Kari Cwynar and Kara Hamilton’s performative language and gestures communicate their facilitative practices

Transforming Theological Knowledge

A number of outstanding public intellectuals such as Jonathan Jansen, Crain Soudien and Lis Lange have been invited to present papers to clarify the conceptual challenge and what this might entail for theology. Well-known theologians such as Conrad Wethmar, Allan Boesak and Martin Prozesky reflect on the nature of theology and religion at universities amidst social exigencies. Two international theologians – Harold Attridge from the prestigious Yale Divinity School and Bram van de Beek from the Free University of Amsterdam – share their experiences of institutions that exemplify excellence and ecumenical openness