71 research outputs found

    Sustainable Societies: Transition from theories to practice

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    The national economic situation, rapidly changing societies, increasing environment pollution amidst global warming around us are some of the most burning topics in day-to-day discussions, news and scholarly discourses. What we see are only the consequences of protracted actions, policies and decisions. The issues associated with these phenomena are highly complex that challenge a direct interpretation of their root causations, indications, results and long-term impacts. For instance, is the issue of managing natural resources for industry & business operations within a country an economic problem? Or is it an ecological one? Or rather a social one? Could it be resolved with theories and techniques of either of these fields? Well, the issue and its redressal requires a combination of all the three disciplines. And yet actions to integrate all of these fields have typically by-passed one or more. The framework that has over the years most commonly explained the convergence of different spheres of disciplinary knowledge has been sustainability. At the same time, its pursuit in practice, the dominant public perception, political agendas and the mainstream media remains elusive. In absence of a critical theory on ‘sustainable societies’, the contemporary development model is misinformed by vague notions of greening, green growth, eco-development, ecotourism, smart cities, etc. largely steered by corporates and vested business groups. The contemporary societies exist and continue to develop without genuine knowledge about sustainability that lies fragmented in its contributing disciplinary streams. This book unfolds the inherent dilemmas, contradictions and paradoxes within the current sustainability paradigm to form a rather nuanced and inside view of what constitutes sustainability and how it could be realized with socio-technical, institutional, policy and management solutions. In the process, the research comprehensively reviews about a hundred environmental, social and economic theories to deliberate on the way forward. Considering that sustainability is a politico-economic and socio-cultural challenge, the transitions need to be culturally diverse and inter-generational, requiring infusion of fresh values, messaging and leadership while conserving traditional knowledge, prevailing institutions. The book culminates with a transition architecture bearing policy recommendations for governing without governmentality with plausible regulatory instruments, capacitating mechanisms, planning and voluntary measures that can be implemented in practice

    Uberising the Urban. Labour, Infrastructure and Big Data in the Actually Existing Smart City of Toronto

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    This thesis explores how Uber reformats the urban and vice versa. Rather than taking for granted Uber’s success in remoulding the emerging ‘smart city’ in its own image, Uberising the Urban pays close attention to the contradictory, variegated and far from frictionless encounters between Uberisation and urbanisation. The thesis is particularly interested in those neuralgic points of contact where the abstract logics of Uber’s business model – its vectors of data extraction, labour exploitation and platform expansion – hit the urban ground of existing social and physical geographies. The Uberisation of the urban – such is this thesis’s main argument – does not take place in a material and social void; it unfolds in, with and against the dense social and material thickness of existing urban space. This argument is deepened in three case studies. Zooming in from different angles, these case studies show how the vectors of Uberisation have come up against the multiscalar and variously uneven urban grounds of the actually existing smart city of Toronto. While the first case study provides a detailed discussion of the conflictive processes leading up to the legalisation of Uber in Toronto and the parallel ‘regulated deregulation’ of the city’s taxi-cum-ridehail market, the second case study tackles the next subsequent ‘stage’ of Uberisation in Toronto: the proliferation of various public-private ridehail partnerships (PPRPs) between Uber and Lyft on the one hand and local and regional transit agencies in the GTA on the other. The third case study is concerned with Uber’s self-driving car programme and, in particular, the invasive practices of data extraction that Uber has implemented in Toronto – turning the city into a real-life urban data reservoir for the development of its self-driving software. A conclusion, shedding light on a potential reconfiguration of Uber towards more socially emancipatory ends, rounds out the dissertation

    The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory

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    This companion explores ANT as an intellectual practice, tracking its movements and engagements with a wide range of other academic and activist projects. Showcasing the work of a diverse set of ‘second generation’ ANT scholars from around the world, it highlights the exciting depth and breadth of contemporary ANT and its future possibilities. The companion has 38 chapters, each answering a key question about ANT and its capacities. Early chapters explore ANT as an intellectual practice and highlight ANT’s dialogues with other fields and key theorists. Others open critical, provocative discussions of its limitations. Later sections explore how ANT has been developed in a range of social scientific fields and how it has been used to explore a wide range of scales and sites. Chapters in the final section discuss ANT’s involvement in ‘real world’ endeavours such as disability and environmental activism, and even running a Chilean hospital. Each chapter contains an overview of relevant work and introduces original examples and ideas from the authors’ recent research. The chapters orient readers in rich, complex fields and can be read in any order or combination. Throughout the volume, authors mobilise ANT to explore and account for a range of exciting case studies: from wheelchair activism to parliamentary decision-making; from racial profiling to energy consumption monitoring; from queer sex to Korean cities. A comprehensive introduction by the editors explores the significance of ANT more broadly and provides an overview of the volume. The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory will be an inspiring and lively companion to academics and advanced undergraduates and postgraduates from across many disciplines across the social sciences, including Sociology, Geography, Politics and Urban Studies, Environmental Studies and STS, and anyone wishing to engage with ANT, to understand what it has already been used to do and to imagine what it might do in the future

    Energy Access in an Era of Low Carbon Transitions: Politicising Energy for Development Projects in India

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    This thesis examines the role of low carbon energy projects in widening energy access, progressing energy transitions and furthering development goals in rural India. Currently in development contexts, energy access and transitions are mobilised through micro energy projects like solar lanterns and micro-grids. The successes and failures of these projects are primarily assessed quantitatively – number of villages covered, number of households connected etc. However, this approach fails to understand how energy transitions projects perform in people’s everyday lives. It does not capture the reasons why they work for particular groups of people and not for others. To go beyond the quantitative understanding, this thesisfocuses on the micro-politics of everyday life that shape the effects energy transitions projects have on different groups of people. Itconsiders how power, politics and culture are vital for understanding the successes and failures of these projects. Theoretically the thesis conceives low carbon projects as low carbon assemblages to understand their fluid and contingent nature and the ways in which they are configured and reconfigured through relationships of power and everyday politics. Engaging with governmentality studies, it further considers how different, pre-existing and newly configured relationships of power conduct people’s conducts and sometimes lead to resistances for low carbon projects. The thesis critically examines three crucial aspects of low carbon energy projects by engaging with three key ideas – trusteeship, significances and resistances. Firstly, it explores how, by positioning themselves as trustees, particular actors seek to assemble and govern low carbon projects in order to achieve specific outcomes. Secondly, it investigates how, by focusing on particular significances of electricity, these interventions work to achieve particular development goals in different spaces of everyday life. Finally, it asks how and why different pressures and contestations emerge as everyday resistances in low carbon transitions. The thesis takes an ethnographic route of enquiry in order to examine energy in everyday life, using participant observations, interviews and photography. It explores two different low carbon projects – Lighting a Billion Lives (LaBL) solar lanterns project and Husk Power Systems (HPS) biomass micro-grids project – and contrasts them against the central grid and kerosene oil networks, in five villages in Bihar. Three key arguments emerge from the thesis. Firstly, electricity access should be understood as a spatially heterogeneous and temporally fluid idea. Its firm quantification and standardisation are problematic because electricity access is geographically and socially differentiated.It needs to be explored in an ethnographic manner, in which not onlyquestions of ‘how much’ but also of who, how and where are critical. Secondly, in energy and development projects, context matters. The society, culture, politics and economy of spaces in which projects are implemented mediate their impacts. Finally, the upkeep and maintenance of low carbon energy projects is not just about economies and supply chains of spare parts but also about cooperation and coordination between the project designers and users.Being able to fulfil people’s changing electricity requirements by building flexibility in the projects is critical to respond to these three issues. This will make projects more sustainable and increase people’s trust on low carbon projects leading to a convergence between energy access and energy transitions

    Earth resources: A continuing bibliography with indexes (issue 61)

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    This bibliography lists 606 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system between January 1 and March 31, 1989. Emphasis is placed on the use of remote sensing and geophysical instrumentation in spacecraft and aircraft to survey and inventory natural resources and urban areas. Subject matter is grouped according to agriculture and forestry, environmental changes and cultural resources, geodesy and cartography, geology and mineral resources, oceanography and marine resources, hydrology and water management, data processing and distribution systems, and instrumentation and sensors, and economic analysis

    Marshall News Releases: March, 1960

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    These news releases were written by and distributed by Marshall during the period indicated in the title.https://mds.marshall.edu/marshall_news_releases_archives/1068/thumbnail.jp

    Exploring the Working-Lives of Unemployed and Underemployed Teachers in Ontario

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    This dissertation explores the working-lives of unemployed and underemployed teachers in the Canadian province of Ontario. Over the past decade, the number of new teachers unable to secure employment within the teaching profession in Ontario has continued to grow. As the oversupply of teachers is expected to persist, an extremely competitive labour market has made the position of being an un(der)employed teacher increasingly “precarious” (Ontario College of Teachers, 2014, 2015). However, such concerns must also be examined within the context of the contemporary world of work and society. Standing’s (2011) understanding of precarious work and the precariat provides a theoretical and conceptual framework from which to further explore and interrogate the experiences of un(der)employed teachers in relation to work, employment, unemployment, underemployment and precarity today. Through a qualitative study of 24 teachers, the working-lives of un(der)employed teachers are examined—specifically in relation to issues of precarious work, control, identity and emotion. Teachers revealed that precarious work and precarity have both become common features of, and in, their work and lives as they navigate the labour market in Ontario. Moreover, their work, employment relationships and social relations with teaching appear to be distinctive from those in more traditional permanent teaching positions. For all of these teachers, the inability to secure full-time, permanent employment in a crowded teacher labour market was a shared experience. However, their challenges with un(der)employment were not homogeneous, nor did they experience precarity in the same manner. Changes in the nature of teaching work and employment reveal the numerous ways in which many teachers’ working-lives have changed in Ontario and warrant further consideration for issues surrounding educational equity, access and quality in the 21st century

    From corporeality to virtual reality: theorizing literacy, bodies, and technology in the emerging media of virtual, augmented, and mixed realities

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    This dissertation explores the relationships between literacy, technology, and bodies in the emerging media of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR). In response to the recent, rapid emergence of new media forms, questions arise as to how and why we should prepare to compose in new digital media. To interrogate the newness accorded to new media composing, I historicize the literacy practices demanded by new media by examining digital texts, such as video games and software applications, alongside analogous “antiquated” media, such as dioramas and museum exhibits. Comparative textual analysis of analogous digital and non-digital VR, AR, and MR texts reveals new media and “antiquated” media utilize common characteristics of dimensionality, layering, and absence/presence, respectively. The establishment of shared traits demonstrates how media operate on a continuum of mutually held textual practices; despite their distinctive forms, new media texts do not represent either a hierarchical or linear progression of maturing development. Such an understanding aids composing in new VR, AR, and MR media by enabling composers to make fuller use of prior knowledge in a rapidly evolving new media environment, a finding significant both for educators and communicators. As these technologies mature, we will continue to compose both traditional and new forms of texts. As such, we need literacy theory that attends to both the traditional and the new and also is comprehensive enough to encompass future acts of composing in media yet to emerge

    Expanding Fields of Architectural Discourse and Practice: Curated Works from the P.E.A.R. Journal.

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    Expanding Fields of Architectural Discourse and Practice presents a selection of essays, architectural experiments and works that explore the diversity within the fields of contemporary architectural practice and discourse. Specific in this selection is the question of how and why architecture can and should manifest in a critical and reflective capacity, as well as to examine how the discipline currently resonates with contemporary art practice. It does so by reflecting on the first 10 years of the architectural journal, P.E.A.R. (2009 to 2019). The volume argues that the initial aims of the journal – to explore and celebrate the myriad forms through which architecture can exist – are now more relevant than ever to contemporary architectural discourse and practice

    A Socio-History and Genealogy of Dementia Thought and Conceptualisation in Western Society

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    Background: Debates concerning the conceptualisation of dementia in Western society, including its framing as a specific type of disorder (such as neuro-psychiatric, part of the natural aging process, cognitive, and so on) are important in understanding how it has come to be problematized. The manner by which this has been framed has implications not only for the perceived disciplinary ownership of dementia, but also for the lived experience of people diagnosed with dementia, their families, and the care professionals and nurse educators supporting them or their carers. The work of Michel Foucault is useful in setting this debate within a critical socio-historical context. Aims: The problematization and conceptualisation of dementia in Western society, including its socio-history, is re-examined, drawing on an approach influenced by Foucault’s history of problematization. Here, through exploring alternative conceptualisations, using a Foucauldian critical history, this study reviews society’s understanding of what it is to be a person with dementia. The aim of this study then is to challenge dominant neuro-psychiatric conceptualisations of dementia in Western society and to examine and explore how alternative conceptualisations have existed through our history. This requires taking a critical review of the historical evidence of the different ways of seeing, speaking about, or understanding dementia and its subsequent problematization. Methods: An in-depth analysis of 500 documents, spanning 4,000 years, covering early Egyptian, Greek and Roman periods, through to the twenty-first century, are examined. These were sourced through academic databases and archival sources as well as snowball sampling from reference lists and bibliographies. Based on carefully considered inclusion and exclusion criteria, including personal reflexivity and consideration for researcher bias, relevant documents were compiled into an Archive representing a socio-history of dementia thought. Framework analysis was then used to examine the manner in which dementia is conceptualised and problematized in different texts or fields of discourse taken from the Archive, and emerging analytical themes were then interpreted using Foucauldian analysis. Results: Six differing conceptualisations or problematizations of dementia were found (as a natural consequence of ageing, a mental or neuro-psychiatric disorder, a bio-medical disorder, a neuro-cognitive disorder, a disability; and, a terminal illness). Conclusion: What it is to be a person with dementia is located within a particular conceptual framework, with ideas or considered truths about the condition reliant upon historically-contingent assumptions. It is here, through understanding the inter-connectedness, dominance, and the subjugation of dementia discourse, we are able to understand a range of possibilities in how we ‘make up people’ (classifications based on social determinants) with dementia. Through this critically reflective position, taken-for-granted assumptions about dementia are called into question
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