Foucauldian Peacekeeping: On the Dispersion of Power and the Futility of Change

Foucault is widely known for the radical nature of his work, for his idiosyncratic approach to history, and for his reconfiguration of the concept of power. Curiously though, his conceptions of history and power might act to undermine their potential to incite radical critique of systems of education and wider society; resulting in a more patient, restrained and ultimately conservative scholarship than you would at first expect. The apparent points of similarity between Michel Foucault, Herbert George Wells and the reformist, statistician and eugenicist, Karl Pearson, will be outlined in order to exemplify this apparent danger. Whilst Foucault would be at odds with Pearson’s authoritarian view of education, the Foucauldian account of power seems, oddly, to lead to agreement with Pearson on the futility of revolutionary change

Education for power: English language in the workplace

Developed countries around the world are increasingly competing for highly skilled, educated immigrants. A case in point is Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ). The NZ Immigration Service actively encourages skilled migrants, and around the country there are numerous English language programmes focussing on English for employment. The dominant focus of these programmes is on migrants' acquisition of correct, appropriate language form, with some attention to intercultural communication. In the view of the authors, this focus is reductionist and provides inadequate preparation for communication in the workplace. This article considers ambiguity and power relations in positioning and interpreting migrant employees in the workplace. Two sets of data are drawn upon. First, a workplace ethnography in a 'migrant friendly' NZ engineering office reveals a management culture that exercises the power of the dominant Anglo-Saxon population to control and exclude a Japanese migrant engineer. Second, a published analysis of immigrant employees' interactions is revisited in order to interrogate the interpretation of workplace texts and underlying discourses of 'appropriate' workplace language. The analysis traces implications for both formal and informal education, and the discussion raises larger questions of social justice concerning migrants

Power

We consider the exercise of power in competitive markets for goods, labour and credit. We offer a definition of power and show that if contracts are incomplete it may be exercised either in Pareto-improving ways or to the disadvantage of those without power. Contrasting conceptions of power including bargaining power, market power, and consumer sovereignty are considered. Because the exercise of power may alter prices and other aspects of exchanges, abstracting from power may miss essential aspects of an economy. The political aspect of private exchanges challenges conventional ideas about the appropriate roles of market and political competition in ensuring the efficiency and accountability of economic decisions

What is a categorical model of arrows?

We investigate what the correct categorical formulation of Hughes’ Arrows should be. It has long been folklore that Arrows, a functional programming construct, and Freyd categories, a categorical notion due to Power, Robinson and Thielecke, are somehow equivalent. In this paper, we show that the situation is more subtle. By considering Arrows wholly within the base category we derive two alternative formulations of Freyd category that are equivalent to Arrows—enriched Freyd categories and indexed Freyd categories. By imposing a further condition, we characterise those indexed Freyd categories that are isomorphic to Freyd categories. The key differentiating point is the number of inputs available to a computation and the structure available on them, where structured input is modelled using comonads

Towards a generation-based semantic web authoring tool

Widespread use of Semantic Web technologies requires interfaces through which knowledge can be viewed and edited without deep understanding of Description Logic and formalisms like OWL and RDF. Several groups are pursuing approaches based on Controlled Natural Languages (CNLs), so that editing can be performed by typing in sentences which are automatically interpreted as statements in OWL. We suggest here a variant of this approach which relies entirely on Natural Language Generation (NLG), and propose requirements for a system that can reliably generate transparent realisations of statements in Description Logic

The 24 hour challenge: creating a multidiscipline environment for design and entrepreneurship in engineering and design. Enhancing Employability through Enterprise Education

This Innovation and Creative Exchange (ICE) is an inter-school enterprise opportunity exclusively for second year Engineering and Design students at the University of Huddersfield. Its primary objective is to bring the best of innovative design and industry thinking into the undergraduate curriculum and to embed the latest innovation and design methodologies into the curriculum for engineering and design students – the next generation of employees for UK knowledge-based industries