Parasitism Revealed: On the Absence of Concession

An examination of the role of ideologies from the past in shaping educational thought, action, policy and practice in the present. Takes the position that inequality is an expression of a fundamentally parasitic relationship forged during the 17th century colonial push and cemented institutionally in the early 20th century by a progressive version of social Darwinist thought known as eugenic ideology. Considered are the roles of historical disciplinary limitations, memory, and the co-optation of the language of social justice in perpetuating a racist, classist, hierarchy in education that has been bearing fruit for nearly two centuries. Warns against uncritical use of the language and framework of social justice specifically and progressivism in general

Soap opera and social order: Glenroe, Fair City and contemporary Ireland.

How far can contemporary Ireland recognise itself in Glenroe and Fair City? To what extent do its characters, settings and storylines testify to the temper of the times? What relation do these serials bear to the lives we lead? This paper will look at Ireland's two running television serials in terms of the larger pattern of social experience. It will query both the presences and the absences in their representation of contemporary Ireland. It will explore the soap opera form in terms of its potential for imagining Ireland in a more expansive and penetrating fashion. It will draw strong conclusions about the failure of existing serials to fulfill this potential

Open Innovations and Living Labs: Promises or Challenges to Regional Renewal

The paper brings to the foreground modes and strategies of organising purposeful action that may be conductive to local and regional actors’ successful coping in the more and more competitive environment. The paper is pragmatist by its approach in a sense that it emphasises preconditions and possibilities for making ideas work. However, to do this is a difficult task. In the maze of multifaceted information flows and revolutionary technologies for reaching them enterprises and public actors need to find and construct better structured information that really helps them to operate. The paper introduces two sets of case activities that build on open innovation and living lab approaches in their attempts to make the boundaries between organisations and their environment more permeable. Its findings support the structuralist idea that spatial attributes matter more than as a mere venue, platform, or even container of social action. The venues studied in the paper are unique: one of the oldest still remaining factory buildings in the innermost core of the city of Tampere and a re-used loghouse in a peri-urban landscape outside the city. They both serve now as true exploratory spaces with no functional or institutional lock-ins stemming from them to bond their present-day users

Personal indebtedness, spatial effects and crime : a comparison across the urban hierarchy

The recent recession has made understanding the relationship between economic conditions and crime crucial to public debate. In this paper we seek to understand the spatial pattern of property and theft crimes using a range of socioeconomic variables, as well as data on the level of personal indebtedness, for two regions of the UK: London (the capital city) and the North East of England (a peripheral region). Building on earlier published work in this area, this paper will contrast the regression results obtained in both of these regions. This allows a comparison of the factors that are important in explaining the observed pattern of theft and property crimes, including an analysis of the spatial dimension of these factors, between these two regions. Doing so will allow a comparison of the elements that are important in explaining the observed pattern of theft and property crimes across the two regions

THE DESIGN OF A PLURAL LAND USE PLANNIG SYSTEM - A TENTATIVE PROPOSAL FROM AN ITALIAN PERSPECTIVE

The main approaches to planning developed during planning history are essentially three: the ritual one, the engineering one and the ethical one. With reference to the last category, classical ethical approaches to planning are those based on the principles of utilitarian (oriented to ensure efficiency and effectiveness for spatial changes), contractualist (oriented to pursue ends of social and environmental equity) and dialogical type (oriented to define planning ends in a public fair dialogue). But these ethical approaches seem inadequate, in their pure forms, to respond to policy-making requirements in our complex urban and regional societies. A really effective and fair system of spatial planning should instead respond not only to situations where ends and means are clear and well-defined but also to situations where there is strong conflict as regards the ends and to situations – perhaps the most frequent ones – where both ends and means are at the same time uncertain. From this standpoint it would seem that experiences (with particular reference to the Italian context) tending towards mixed and plural planning systems, should be regarded with interest. In this perspective, the contribution of the paper is finally addressed towards the definition of a mixed and plural, but loosely coupled, spatial planning system.