Movement knowledge: what do we know, how do we create knowledge and what do we do with it?

It is with great pleasure that we present the first issue of Interface: a journal for and about social movements, on the special theme of "movement knowledge": how movements produce knowledge, what kinds of knowledge they produce and what they do with it when they have it

Movement knowledge: what do we know, how do we create knowledge and what do we do with it?

It is with great pleasure that we present the first issue of Interface: a journal for and about social movements, on the special theme of "movement knowledge": how movements produce knowledge, what kinds of knowledge they produce and what they do with it when they have it

Public engagement with climate change: what do we know and where do we go from here?

Climate change is an issue with fundamental implications for societies and individuals. These implications range from our everyday choices about resource use and lifestyles, through how we adjust to an unprecedented rate of environmental change, to our role in debating and enacting accompanying social transitions. This article outlines the various ways in which members of society (‘publics’) may be engaged in efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change, and then provides a synthesis of lessons about public engagement which span both theoretical and practical insights. These include the diverse drivers of, and barriers to, engagement; the importance of multiple forms of engagement and messages; and a critical need to evaluate and identify successful examples of engagement. We conclude by outlining priorities for future research, policy and practice

Unfixing knowledges: Queering the literacy curriculum

In the literacy classroom, students have few opportunities to use their literacy practices to contest narratives of race, class, gender and sexuality. Instead, extensive time is spent completing literacy activities associated with what 'good' readers and writers do. Students' literacy practices are often formulaic, repetitive, and serve classroom management strategies producing a mythic narrative of good literacy teaching. This paper introduces a queer literacy curriculum that poses pedagogy as a series of questions: What does being taught, what does knowledge do to students? How does knowledge become understood in the relationship between teacher/text and student? (Lusted, 1986) It emphasizes developing critical analyses of heterosexism, heteronormativity and normativity with the goal of helping students understand binary categories are not givens, rather social constructions we are often forced to perform (Butler, 1990) through available discourses. The paper highlights an interruption into the literacy curriculum where, through collective memory work, students investigated, analysed and contested the usually-not-noticed ways a small understanding of heterosexuality has come to structure their lives

Reflections from Participants

The Road Ahead: Public Dialogue on Science and Technology brings together some of the UK’s leading thinkers and practitioners in science and society to ask where we have got to, how we have got here, why we are doing what we are doing and what we should do next. The collection of essays aims to provide policy makers and dialogue deliverers with insights into how dialogue could be used in the future to strengthen the links between science and society. It is introduced by Professor Kathy Sykes, one of the UK’s best known science communicators, who is also the head of the Sciencewise-ERC Steering Group, and Jack Stilgoe, a DEMOS associate, who compiled the collection

Designing the interface between research, learning and teaching.

Abstract: This paper’s central argument is that teaching and research need to be reshaped so that they connect in a productive way. This will require actions at a whole range of levels, from the individual teacher to the national system and include the international communities of design scholars. To do this, we need to start at the level of the individual teacher and course team. This paper cites some examples of strategies that focus on what students do as learners and how teachers teach and design courses to enhance research-led teaching. The paper commences with an examination of the departmental context of (art and) design education. This is followed by an exploration of what is understood by research-led teaching and a further discussion of the dimensions of research-led teaching. It questions whether these dimensions are evident, and if so to what degree in design departments, programmes and courses. The discussion examines the features of research-led departments and asks if a department is not research-led in its approach to teaching, why it should consider changing strategies

Practical Moore Sentences

I discuss what I call practical Moore sentences: sentences like ‘You must close your door, but I don’t know whether you will’, which combine an order together with an avowal of agnosticism about whether the order will be obeyed. I show that practical Moore sentences are generally infelicitous. But this infelicity is surprising: it seems like there should be nothing wrong with giving someone an order while acknowledging that you do not know whether it will obeyed. I suggest that this infelicity points to a striking psychological fact, with potentially broad ramifications concerning the structure of norms of speech acts: namely, when giving an order, we must act as if we believe we will be obeyed

Seeing sustainable futures: the potential of design education

The process of sustainable development requires us all to think differently about what we do, how we do it and why we do what we do. Questioning activities in the context of sustainability can often result in difficult and perhaps uncomfortable conclusions about our current development paradigm – one that gives primacy to economic growth and wealth creation over welfare and well-being. The practice of design operates within this development paradigm and is complicit in the unsustainable activities of the business domain. Designers support the economic system through the conceptualisation and production of goods: goods multiplying in variety and number, responding to escalating global demand. Unfortunately most current business operates for economic profit alone, ignorant of key sustainable ecological and social parameters. For example material throughput is linear rather than cyclic in nature; social inequities exist in relation to trade and well-being; and natural resources are considered convenient dumps for pollutants and toxins. Designers, among many others, are thus implicated in the augmentation of unsustainable outcomes rather than the reduction of them. This paper aims to explore how this situation can be reversed to enable design to play a positive and supporting role towards the goals of sustainable development. Challenging the current paradigm of development will need people who have the ability to think creatively and laterally and draw on disparate areas of knowledge to vision new, more sustainable futures. Design education has a big role to play in this transformation and as such needs to alter its focus from the current outcomes of design activity to a range of alternative responses that embrace joined-up thinking and generate apposite learning outcomes. This paper investigates the sort of knowledge required and discusses the potential shift in values needed for design for sustainability to be accepted as a catalyst for change. It addresses the potential of current design education in channelling such change and investigates the sort of tools required for this to happen. Ultimately, the paper proposes, it is a key responsibility of existing design educators to prepare the graduate designers of tomorrow with the skills and inspiration to vision sustainable futures for this century and beyond