Solar Cities in Europe: a material semiotic analysis of innovation in urban photovoltaics

This thesis explores the gradual and by no means unproblematic emergence of solar photovoltaic technologies (PV) in European cities. It is a qualitative study of innovation in urban PV across three European cities: Barcelona (Spain), London (UK) and Paris (France) which draws on documentary evidence and interview data with a broad range of urban professionals engaged in implementing the technology. The thesis interrogates current understandings of how ‘green’ technologies such as PV are thought to bring about ‘sustainable’ transformations by ‘breaking through’ from the margins into mainstream society. Several innovation studies frameworks are assessed in terms of their merits and shortcomings for understanding innovation in urban PV. It is argued that extant literatures succinctly frame innovation as an interplay between that which is ‘novel’ and that which is ‘in place’, however, that they fail to address three issues that are critical for understanding how new technologies may emerge and transform: the multiplicity and heterogeneity of actors and their means for contesting ‘sustainable’ (or other) transformations, the complex spatio-temporality of ‘barriers’ to innovation, and the ways in which technologies gather humans, materials and spaces into new, potentially more ‘sustainable’ constellations. The thesis develops ‘material semiotics’ as a conceptual foundation and methodology for understanding innovation. Material semiotics provides powerful analytical sensibilities that enable the thesis to radically re-imagine the objects, processes and places involved in innovation. Through understanding innovation as characterised by attempts to bring forth into the present aspirations for alternative futures, urban PV is understood as simultaneously a vehicle for, as well as an outcome of, sustainable transformation. Its entanglement in a myriad of social, material, spatial and temporal relations is shown to engender a geography of ‘sustainable’ innovation that is much more partial and imperfect than current understandings suggest

Interdisciplining Digital Humanities: Boundary Work in an Emerging Field

The first book to test the claim that the emerging field of Digital Humanities is interdisciplinary and also examines the boundary work of establishing and sustaining a new field of stud

Reversible Computation: Extending Horizons of Computing

This open access State-of-the-Art Survey presents the main recent scientific outcomes in the area of reversible computation, focusing on those that have emerged during COST Action IC1405 "Reversible Computation - Extending Horizons of Computing", a European research network that operated from May 2015 to April 2019. Reversible computation is a new paradigm that extends the traditional forwards-only mode of computation with the ability to execute in reverse, so that computation can run backwards as easily and naturally as forwards. It aims to deliver novel computing devices and software, and to enhance existing systems by equipping them with reversibility. There are many potential applications of reversible computation, including languages and software tools for reliable and recovery-oriented distributed systems and revolutionary reversible logic gates and circuits, but they can only be realized and have lasting effect if conceptual and firm theoretical foundations are established first

FAMILY AND OTHER RELATIONS A thesis examining the extent to which family relationships shape the relations of art.

Access to the full-text thesis is no longer available at the author's request, due to 3rd party copyright restrictions. Access removed on 28.11.2016 by CS (TIS).This thesis is sited in contemporary issues concerning gender and identity in relation to the arts. It aims to examine the nature of the family and the extent to which relationships and identities in the family might be analogous to the relations of fine art; these include relations between the artist and the artwork, between what is defined as 'art' and what is not, between the artwork and the viewer. It also touches on some of the other, innumerable relationships encountered in the arts: relations of materials form, feeling, thinking and making. The thesis contains a discussion of the nature of family identities and relationships based on my own experiences in the mid-twentieth century and today. Families are at first divided into two main types, nonnative and ethicaL These types represent the difference between ideal or stereotypical family relations and the way families actually live in practice. Analogies are made between normative families and traditional modes of defining art and ethical family relations and ethical notions of art. In the last chapter I suggest that relations that are core and normative are linked to marginal relations through ethical links made by liminal figures that pass between them. Although issues of identity, patriarchy and binary difference appear in theoretical writings on art criticism and practice, there appears to be little contemporary debate in these issues in relation to the family and its relationships. The thesis begins to map out the terrain of such a field of enquiry

Affect[ing] the Theory-Practice Gap in Social Justice Teacher Education: Exploring Student Teachers’ “Stuck Moments”

Set within a discursive field of humanist and neoliberal thought, this post-qualitative study attended to student teachers’ “stuck moments” in a university-based, social justice-oriented teacher education program (SJTE). It sought to problematize the familiar tendency of ascribing student teachers’ stuck moments as symptomatic of the theory-practice gap, an argument frequently lobbied by policy makers to dismantle university-based teacher education in favor of alternative (read: more lucrative) programs. Challenging the representational logic that undergirds prevailing conceptualizations of stuckness and the theory-practice gap obsession in teacher education, this study conceptualized stuck moments as a fluid, moving assemblage of bodies (human and nonhuman), and discursive, affective, and material forces. Informed by posthumanist theories of affect, this case study of six preservice teachers enrolled in an SJTE program used a rhizomatic mapping process that entailed assembling a series of wonder cabinets to map the discursive, affective, and material forces that shape student teachers’ stuck moment(s) and explore what these stuck moments do to student teachers. Data sources included field notes and jottings, individual and group conversations, and the creation of wonder cabinets of stuckness. The findings of this study suggest that the materiality of field placement sites (i.e., the physical and discursive), the pressure on student teachers to achieve teaching mastery, participants’ desire to have an impact on their students, and the challenges of enacting critical/justice practices, constitute the stuck moment assemblage. These constituting elements also illuminate the infiltration of learning discourses in student teachers’ stuckness. With their focus on mastery, normative teacher identity categories, measurable goals, and telos-driven progress narratives, learning discourses—while seductive for student teachers—collide with the tenuousness and uncertainty of social justice work. These discourses also generate and intensify the negative affects that animate student teachers’ stuck moments. These affects include, among others, worry, shame, and loneliness. This research foregrounds how stuckness holds the potential to simultaneously expose and oppose the conflicting discourses, affective attachments, and intensities, that student teachers encounter as they navigate through the various spaces of their SJTE program

Front-Line Physicians' Satisfaction with Information Systems in Hospitals

Day-to-day operations management in hospital units is difficult due to continuously varying situations, several actors involved and a vast number of information systems in use. The aim of this study was to describe front-line physicians' satisfaction with existing information systems needed to support the day-to-day operations management in hospitals. A cross-sectional survey was used and data chosen with stratified random sampling were collected in nine hospitals. Data were analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistical methods. The response rate was 65 % (n = 111). The physicians reported that information systems support their decision making to some extent, but they do not improve access to information nor are they tailored for physicians. The respondents also reported that they need to use several information systems to support decision making and that they would prefer one information system to access important information. Improved information access would better support physicians' decision making and has the potential to improve the quality of decisions and speed up the decision making process.Peer reviewe