Perspectives on evaluating global health research for development : a background paper - taking stock of current practice and ways to improve it

There is growing recognition of complex global challenges that affect all countries in terms of health research needs and capacities in low-income countries. These challenges require special approaches for evaluation of multi-disciplinary and inter-sectoral knowledge production and application. The report provides “research on research” regarding assessments and evaluation methods of impact and outcomes in Global Health Research for Development (GHR4D). Drawn from the literature review, several innovative approaches in the use of evaluation findings are described. Although most of these have been developed in high-income country settings, they could be adapted and tested with the evaluation of GHR4D in mind

Preparing Students with ASD for Inclusive Classrooms: A Case Study of Giant Steps

Giant Steps is a therapeutic school for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) founded in 1995 by a group of parents who felt that the public school system was not fully able to meet the needs of their children. While the education system has progressed through the years to offer all students with access to public education, many educators still are not adequately prepared to provide inclusive learning environments for students with ASD. Given the prevalence of ASD in southern Ontario (1 in every 42 boys and 1 in every 189 girls), research on ASD and inclusive practices is both vital and timely. The purpose of this qualitative case study is to understand how the Giant Steps program prepares and transitions students with ASD for inclusive classrooms. Data was collected through two rounds of in-depth interviews, and was subsequently analyzed and interpreted into research findings that are presented through three major themes (i.e., unique program aspects, holistic approach, inclusion not integration). Collectively, the themes provide insights about how students at Giant Steps are prepared for inclusion, as well as how different stakeholders within the Giant Steps program perceive inclusion and their role in preparing students for inclusive classrooms

Co-Creativity and Engaged Scholarship

This open access book explores creative and collaborative forms of research praxis within the social sustainability sciences. The term co-creativity is used in reference to both individual methods and overarching research approaches. Supported by a series of in-depth examples, the edited collection critically reviews the potential of co-creative research praxis to nurture just and transformative processes of change. Included amongst the individual chapters are first-hand accounts of such as: militant research strategies and guerrilla narrative, decolonial participative approaches, appreciative inquiry and care-ethics, deep-mapping, photo-voice, community-arts, digital participatory mapping, creative workshops and living labs. The collection considers how, through socially inclusive forms of action and reflection, such co-creative methods can be used to stimulate alternative understandings of why and how things are, and how they could be. It provides illustrations of (and problematizes) the use of co-creative methods as overtly disruptive interventions in their own right, and as a means of enriching the transformative potential of transdisciplinary and more traditional forms of social science research inquiry. The positionality of the researcher, together with the emotional and embodied dimensions of engaged scholarship, are threads which run throughout the book. So too does the question of how to communicate sustainability science research in a meaningful way

International and Comparative Studies in Adult and Continuing Education

This volume gives theoretical and practical insights in international and comparative research in the field of adult and continuing education. The 16 contributions of this volume give three perspectives on international and comparative adult education. The first perspective focuses on the question how internationalisation and comparative adult and continuing education can be taught. The second perspective gives insights into the results of comparative research that has been conducted throughout a two-week Winter School that took place in February 2019 in Würzburg. The third perspective complements the two perspectives with insights into international projects and practices in adult and continuing education. The authors of this volume are contributing to the transnational Winter School International and comparative studies in adult and continuing education in Würzburg, Germany since 2014

Gaywaves: Transcending Boundaries - the Rise and Demise of Britain's First Gay Radio Program

At the beginning of 1982 an array of conflicting forces were working to shape the landscape of Europe's metropolitan radio services, and to alternatively control, commodify or liberate its gay communities. This paper examines the drivers, which inspired Gaywaves, a nascent weekly gay community radio programme broadcasting to an inner London audience on pirate station Our Radio from May 1982 until March 1983

Transnationalizing Radio Research: New Approaches to an Old Medium

Transnationalizing Radio Research presents a theoretical and methodological guide for exploring radio's multiple »global ages«, from its earliest years through its recent digital transformations. It offers radio scholars theoretical tools and concrete case studies for moving beyond national research frames. It gives radio practitioners inspiration for production and archiving, and offers scholars from many disciplines new ways to incorporate radio's vital voices into work on transnational institutions, communities, histories and identities

Running hand in hand : the librotraficantes mapping cultural resistance in the US Mexico borderlands

In January 2012, a groundbreaking K-12 Mexican American Studies [MAS] program in Tucson was dismantled by the State. The program had been implemented in the late 1990s to help reverse negative educational and socioeconomic trends within local Chicanx communities. The MAS curriculum had questioned prevailing national identity discourse, countering majoritarian myths of the founding and the functioning of the United States. Despite validated evidence of the program’s successful learning outcomes, it was ruled anti-American and seditious by a right-wing conservative legislature, and subsequently found to contravene state law. The books of the program’s bibliography were removed from the classrooms, these included texts considered a critical part of the canon of Chicanx, African American, and Native American literature. The news of the State’s dismantling of the MAS program resonated with Chicanx community groups across the Southwest, communities long embattled by the outcomes of majoritarian politicking and definitions of justice. One such group, Houston-based Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say [NP], decided to act. NP’s strategy was to return books from the removed MAS bibliography to the program’s students. To do so, the group applied a critical understanding of the racialized criminalization of their communities to then fourteen years of counter/storytelling organizing. Hereby, the Librotraficante Movement was born. In praxis, a group of thirty-eight “book smugglers” who, over a period of five days in March 2012, took a caravan of texts to Tucson, engaging on route with community sites in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. My project utilizes the caravan’s route as a framework to investigate Chicanx resistance in the contested US Mexico borderlands. I pay particular attention to Texas. Annexed in 1845 by the White Supremacist urges of Manifest Destiny, and bordered in 1848 when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo saw Mexico stripped of fifty-percent of its territory, Texas has long been on the frontline of the making of the United States. This “making” brought about not only much of the geopolitical space of the nation, but the racialization of those who now found themselves, in the words of Mexican General José Mariano Salas in 1856, “strangers in their own land” (qtd. in Griswold del Castillo 1990, 3). Post-Hidalgo, said “strangers” were disenfranchised by settler-colonialism. They were surveilled and brutalized by the Texas Rangers, and from 1924 by the US Border Patrol whose praxis at that time, as Kelly Lytle Hernández argues, “was a matter of community, manhood, whiteness, authority, class, respect, belonging, brotherhood, and violence in the greater Texas-Mexico borderlands” (2010, 41). Little has changed. Yet, in this often-visceral contested space, Mexican heritage communities continue to struggle and thrive. The Librotraficante caravan’s Texas journey maps myriad resistance to historical and contemporary trauma as it “operates”, in Ofelia Garcia and Camila Leiva’s words, “within a dynamic network of cultural transformation” (2014, 203). This dissertation brings to light a legacy of Chicanx cultural resilience that troubles US-centric narrative constructions of identity and belonging. My work is located at the intersections of Cultural, Chicanx, Borderlands, American, Literary, and Ethnic Studies, and the Political and Social Sciences. It is at these intersections that sites in my four case-study cities (Tucson, Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso) operate in response to, and despite, historical and contemporary oppressions. Said oppressions take the shape of, but are not limited to, epistemological colonization, NAFTA, gentrification, right-wing politicking, border militarization, anti-immigrant discourse, and the persistent marking of brown bodies as “illegal”. My goal is to elevate the historical, cultural, political, and literary consciousness produced by the resistance organizing of the sites. This, I argue, is a consciousness that arises from within the community’s collective experiences