'By ones and twos and tens': pedagogies of possibility for higher education

This paper concerns the relationship between teaching and political action both within and outside of formal educational institutions in the UK. The context of this relationship is the recent period following the Browne Review on the funding of higher education in England (2010). Rather than speaking directly to debates around scholar-activism, about which much has already been written (Autonomous Geographies Collective 2010; Haworth 2012; Thornton and Maiguashca 2006), I want to stretch the meanings of both teaching and activism. The purpose is to contextualise the politics of contemporary higher learning in light of the diverse histories and geographies of critical education more generally, and to think about the relationship between critical knowledge that is produced within and for the university and that which is produced in other spaces, particularly informal educational projects. My primary interest is the sorts of learning that are cultivated in projects working on principles of ‘prefigurative politics’ in the UK and internationally. My argument is that some of the knowledge which is most needed to fight for the university as a progressive social institution is being produced not within the institution’s physical and conceptual walls, but in more informal and politicised spaces of education. Being receptive to these alternative forms not only can expand scholarly thinking about how to reclaim intellectual life from the economy, but can emancipate the imagination which is required for dreaming big about the creation of higher education as and for democratic life

Selection and Appraisal of Digital Research Datasets

As the currency of science, data are important to preserve. However, since scientific research is producing ever-increasing volumes of data, it is impossible to preserve it all. Even if it were, not every data set ought to be preserved. For this reason, academic libraries need policies with criteria governing which data sets will be preserved and how to appraise them against those criteria. Appraisal and selection policies are commonplace in academic libraries for other materials, but many do not have complementary policies for data sets. If data are to be preserved, then academic libraries must have clear and useful selection and appraisal policies to govern which data sets will be selected for preservation. This chapter discusses challenges to creating and executing an appraisal and selection policy. Important considerations are whether it should be a sub-section of the library’s overall material collection development policy or a separate policy on its own. Likewise, should it be more similar in scope and form to the library’s traditional collection development policy or more similar to a special collections appraisal and selection policy? Should the policy be comprehensive across the entire lifecycle from ingest to disposition or just cover ingest? This chapter discusses these issues and offer alternatives for libraries to consider. Furthermore, this chapter introduces and explains the range of selection criteria libraries may consider when developing policies. It discusses each important criteria in depth, such as scientific or historical value, scarcity, relevance to institutional mission, and others. Lastly, it discusses life cycle management of data sets, such as periodic refreshing of files and determining when to deaccession data sets. Readers will find a thorough overview of the issues surrounding appraisal and selection of digital research data and will be equipped with the knowledge and resources to develop such policies in their institutions

Beyond the Frontier: Sustainable Futures for North Australia

A word we heard from time to time during the symposium, perhaps not often enough, is integration. How do we integrate perspectives on the theme—Beyond the Frontier: Sustainable Futures for North Australia? My approach will combine my intellectual safety zones of economics and anthropology, with my new aspirational disciplinary approach, ecology, and with the perspectives of Indigenous people, Indigenous knowledge, and reflecting the views of people with whom I have collaborated for many years. I will try to bring these diverse perspectives to bear on the term ‘sustainable’ with its economic, ecological and social elements. The focus is more on the Northern Territory than north Australia, and I take on board criticisms of this geographic bias noted by presenters like Rosemary Hill (who in turn sought to focus more on Cape York and the Kimberley). Unfortunately this bias is historic caused by some straight politically-inspired lines drawn on the Australian landscape early last century and so is hard to overcome or ignore

Heroes of Agricultural Innovation

New technology has a prominent place in the theory and practice of innovation, but the association between high tech and innovation is not inevitable. In this paper, we discuss six metaphorical heroes of agricultural innovation, starting with the dominant hero of frontier science and technology. At first sight, our six heroes can be divided in those who are pro- and those who are anti-technology. Yet in the end technology, and more specifically GM technology, does not emerge as the main issue. Empowering the poor, finding solutions for urgent climate problems, and enhancing the quality of our daily relations to food and the environment – these are the issues the heroes are fighting for. Relations between innovation and (frontier) technology are better seen as a matter of pragmatic consideration, we will argue

Foreword

A “trust in youth” challenge In their rationale for “Young Shakespeare”, the 2015 Conference of Société Française Shakespeare, Dominique Goy-Blanquet and François Laroque called Shakespeare’s works “a ‘trust in youth’ challenge.” The speakers met the challenge with papers (gathered here in their revised versions) tackling various meanings of the relation between Shakespeare and youth: the playwright’s own young age when he wrote some of his plays, but also the age of his younger characters, ..

How to Talk about Gender-Based Violence?

The articles discusses the challenges for transnational feminists to talk about gender-based violence in an intersectional manner

What Could Possibly Go Wrong? The Impact of Poor Data Management

This chapter highlights the importance of good data management practices by providing examples of problems a researcher may encounter when research data is poorly managed. It provides examples of actual situations when bad data management led to serious problems with data loss, research integrity, and worse. It also provides tips on how data management could have been done differently to encourage a more positive outcome

What Kind of Teacher for Our Citizens? A Book Review of \u3cem\u3eWhat Kind of Citizen? Educating Our Children for the Common Good\u3c/em\u3e

Westheimer’s central argument in What Kind of Citizen? Educating our Children for the Common Good is that the current climate around public education—marked, in general, by standardization in our schools—is not conducive to the development of thoughtful and critically engaged public citizens. Westheimer demonstrated convincingly that schools—in response to recent education reform and, in some cases, pressure from parents and other education stakeholders—have increasingly emphasized individual goals at the expense of educating children for the common good. Furthermore and related, in this age of standardized testing, school curricula have become more narrowly focused on achievement in math and literacy at the expense of the broader (and less testable) aims of citizenship education. Westheimer’s goal in this book was to chart a corrective course for our schools by focusing our attention on important questions about the kind of society we imagine, the kind of citizens we want our children to be, and the kind of educational programs required to develop such citizens. This is a sympathetic review that seeks to extend Westheimer’s thinking more explicitly to teacher education by asking what kind of teacher education programs we need in order to develop thinking, engaged citizen teachers