Book review: Diversity, inclusion, and decolonization: practical tools for improving teaching, research, and scholarship edited by Abby Day, Lois Lee, Dave S.P. Thomas and James Spickard

In Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization: Practical Tools for Improving Teaching, Research, and Scholarship, Abby Day, Lois Lee, Dave S.P. Thomas and James Spickard bring together academics from across the globe to explore tangible actions those within the academy can take to foster diversity, inclusion and decolonisation. If there were a global syllabus for academics, this collaborative work should be required reading, writes Ellen Frank Delgado

Book review: Diversity, inclusion, and decolonization: practical tools for improving teaching, research, and scholarship edited by Abby Day, Lois Lee, Dave S.P. Thomas and James Spickard

In Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization: Practical Tools for Improving Teaching, Research, and Scholarship, Abby Day, Lois Lee, Dave S.P. Thomas and James Spickard bring together academics from across the globe to explore tangible actions those within the academy can take to foster diversity, inclusion and decolonisation. If there were a global syllabus for academics, this collaborative work should be required reading, writes Ellen Frank Delgado. Diversity, Inclusion, and Decolonization: Practical Tools for Improving Teaching, Research, and Scholarship. Abby Day, Lois Lee, Dave S.P. Thomas and James Spickard (eds). Bristol University Press. 2022

Promoting Sustainability to First-Year Students

Over 700 universities across the United States (AASHE, 2010), seeking to be progressive and containing the resources for change, have partnered together under the American Colleges and Universities President\u27s Climate Commitment to lower their carbon footprints and increase sustainability education on their campuses (ACUPCC, 2014). The President\u27s Climate Commitment includes 7 tangible actions, of which the University of Richmond must follow two or more. With the University of Richmond\u27s date for carbon neutrality set for 2050, advancing these actions is crucial (ACUPCC, 2014). On the list of tangible actions are increasing use of public transportation and increasing energy efficiency on campus. For the university to successfully implement these actions, the university must gain student support for the projects. In order to target students on campus, we structured an informative and fun sustainability education session to take place during First Year Seminar classes. These sessions aim to inform students about the importance of using public transportation, recycling, and conserving water and energy on campus, while also giving students a better understanding of how to participate in these actions. We believe students find public transportation and recycling on campus to be confusing and find water and energy conservation daunting because the university does not properly explain how to use these services and conserve. Our First Year Seminar session will be led by students so first year students will have peer role models. Poster prepared for the Environmental Studies Senior Seminar/Geography Capstone

The Exploitation of Indonesian Migrant Workers When Abroad

The exploitation of Indonesian migrant workers continues to be an issue. They struggle to avoid falling prey to exploitation and trafficking. This study used normative legal research, which included many complaints noted in the BP2MI data. However, migrant workers who are prevented from complaining to the government due to their circumstances were not included in the calculation. The state must be present in order to safeguard migrant workers, and this protection must be not only written legislation but also tangible actions that serve as evidence of the presence of the state. Keywords: Problems, Exploitation, Indonesian Migrant Workers, Abroa

Report on the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2)

This technical report records and discusses the Second Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experiences (WSSSPE2). The report includes a description of the alternative, experimental submission and review process, two workshop keynote presentations, a series of lightning talks, a discussion on sustainability, and five discussions from the topic areas of exploring sustainability; software development experiences; credit & incentives; reproducibility & reuse & sharing; and code testing & code review. For each topic, the report includes a list of tangible actions that were proposed and that would lead to potential change. The workshop recognized that reliance on scientific software is pervasive in all areas of world-leading research today. The workshop participants then proceeded to explore different perspectives on the concept of sustainability. Key enablers and barriers of sustainable scientific software were identified from their experiences. In addition, recommendations with new requirements such as software credit files and software prize frameworks were outlined for improving practices in sustainable software engineering. There was also broad consensus that formal training in software development or engineering was rare among the practitioners. Significant strides need to be made in building a sense of community via training in software and technical practices, on increasing their size and scope, and on better integrating them directly into graduate education programs. Finally, journals can define and publish policies to improve reproducibility, whereas reviewers can insist that authors provide sufficient information and access to data and software to allow them reproduce the results in the paper. Hence a list of criteria is compiled for journals to provide to reviewers so as to make it easier to review software submitted for publication as a “Software Paper.

What are some Best-in-Class Examples of Corporate Cultures and Values Brought-to-Life in Workplace Behaviors that drove Clear Business Results?

Prominent workplace culture and values have been proven to strengthen employee loyalty time and again, yet there is still a need to understand how these nebulous ideas translate into real business practices. Culture can be the driving force in connecting employees directly to the mission of the company, and therefore creating results for all company stakeholders including employees, customers, and shareholders. But in order to produce these outcomes, companies must create values that represent the workplace culture they want to achieve and have merit and teeth, which requires what the Harvard Business Review refers to as “guts”

Biodiversity footprint of companies - Summary report

Companies are becoming increasingly aware of their impact on biodiversity and natural capital. This may result from their implicit dependence on natural capital, from increasingly more critical consumers, or from the genuine concern of company managers and owners. Consequently, companies have an increasing need for tools to enable them to gain insight into their impact on biodiversity, and to measure and assess the effects of measures to limit this impact. The Natural Captains project of the Platform Biodiversity, Ecosystems & Economy (Platform BEE) is stimulating companies to translate thinking and working with natural capital into tangible actions. This means making visible the impact of their activities on biodiversity and natural capital in terms of their biodiversity footprint. One way to assess a company’s impact on biodiversity is to measure the biodiversity footprint of their current activities and possibly also to compare this footprint with that of alternative measures

Transforming Pervasive into Collaborative: Engaging Youth as Leaders with GIS through a Framework that Integrates Technologies, Storytelling, and Action

This paper presents the methods and preliminary results gained in geographic information systems (GIS)-based participatory activities designed to engage youth in urban planning. We describe our engagement framework that integrates such pervasive IT tools as GIS, online serious games, agent-based modeling, and mobile participatory GIS into engagement strategies that tap into what we see as the storytelling capabilities of these tools. We show how these methods help citizens, in our case youth, assume leadership roles and take positive, tangible actions in their communities. This paper summarizes the elements of our framework and the initial results of a program called “Community Growers” that we created between our Iowa State University research team and a chapter of the Boys & Girls Club of Central Iowa. Participants included middle school-age youth from three resource-vulnerable neighborhoods in Des Moines, the capital city of Iowa, USA. We conclude the paper with a discussion and further research directions

Institutional conditions and social innovations in emerging economies: insights from Mexican enterprises’ initiatives for protecting/preventing the effect of violent events

Latin-American countries are characterised by societal problems like violence, crime, corruption, the informality that influence any entrepreneurial activity developed by individuals/organisations. Social innovations literature confront “wicked problems” with strong interdependencies among different systems/actors. Yet, little is known about how firms use innovation to hedge against economic, political or societal uncertainties (i.e., violence, social movements, democratisation, pandemic). By translating social innovation and institutional theory approaches, this study analyses the influence of formal institutions (government programs and actions) and informal institutions (corruption, extortion and informal trade) on the development/implementation of enterprises’ technological initiatives for protecting/preventing of victimisation. By using data from 5525 establishments interviewed in the 2012/2014 National Victimisation Survey of the Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), our findings shows that formal conditions (government programs) and informal conditions (corruption, extortion and informal trade) are associated with an increment in the number of enterprises’ social innovations. Our findings also contribute to the debate about institutional conditions, social innovations, and the role of ecosystems’ actors in developing economies. A provoking discussion and implications for researchers, managers and policymakers emerge from this study