Becoming curious about cats: A collaborative writing project

Students’ interests and achievement in writing are often debated and located in theoretical and pedagogical arguments. These issues can polarise understandings of effective teaching practice. This article describes one teacher’s classroom practice in a New Zealand primary school. It outlines a collaborative project between a local teacher and a university lecturer. The two educators were concerned about political and educational changes and the influence this had on teachers’ writing pedagogy. They were concerned about the differences between the children’s reading and writing achievement evident in this year three classroom. As researchers they were keen to explore the ‘power of literature’ as a way of enriching children’s oral and written language experiences. The writers argue that by using quality literature in the classroom, with an explicit focus on authors’ literary techniques, students develop an awareness of how authors craft and construct texts. The young writers were apprenticed to experts and developed a metalanguage, which enhanced their own writing skills

Globalisation contested

This exciting book provides an illuminating account of contemporary globalization that is grounded in actual transformations in the areas of production and the workplace. It reveals the social and political contests that give 'global' its meaning, by examining the contested nature of globalization as it is expressed in the restructuring of work. Rejecting conventional explanations of globalization as a process that automatically leads to transformations in working lives, or as a project that is strategically designed to bring about lean and flexible forms of production, this book advances an understanding of the social practices that constitute global change. Through case studies that span from the labour flexibility debates in Britain and Germany, to the strategies and tactics of corporations and workers, the author examines how globalization is interpreted and experienced in everyday life. Contestation, she argues, is about more than just direct protests and resistances. It has become a central feature of the practices that enable or confound global restructuring. This book offers students and scholars of international political economy, sociology and industrial relations an innovative framework for the analysis of globalisation and the restructuring of work

Globalization contested: an international political economy of work

This exciting book provides an illuminating account of contemporary globalization that is grounded in actual transformations in the areas of production and the workplace. It reveals the social and political contests that give 'global' its meaning, by examining the contested nature of globalization as it is expressed in the restructuring of work. Rejecting conventional explanations of globalization as a process that automatically leads to transformations in working lives, or as a project that is strategically designed to bring about lean and flexible forms of production, this book advances an understanding of the social practices that constitute global change. Through case studies that span from the labour flexibility debates in Britain and Germany, to the strategies and tactics of corporations and workers, the author examines how globalization is interpreted and experienced in everyday life. Contestation, she argues, is about more than just direct protests and resistances. It has become a central feature of the practices that enable or confound global restructuring. This book offers students and scholars of international political economy, sociology and industrial relations an innovative framework for the analysis of globalisation and the restructuring of work

Ambiguities of Global Civil Society

The concept of an emergent global civil society (GCS), an identifiable public sphere of voluntary association distinct from the architecture of states and markets, has become voguish in some approaches to international relations and international political economy, and in the practices of global governance. This article seeks to reveal the limitations of the prevailing commonsense framing of GCS. Challenging the idea that we can isolate an unambiguous GCS sphere, we focus instead on the particular uses of GCS – on the practices that are shaped in its name. We make a number of interventions to emphasise the conceptual and political ambiguity of GCS. First, we shift the emphasis from GCS as a bounded ‘non-governmental’; space to GCS as precisely a means of making global politics governable in particular ways. Second, we question the assumption of GCS as ‘voluntary association’, asking what it means for GCS to embody or represent the interests of social groups. Finally, we raise questions of the image of empowerment through GCS, highlighting the power relations, tensions and contradictions at the heart of a transformative politics

Data, interface, security: Assembling technologies that govern the future

© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. Over the last decade, fire governance practices in the British Fire and Rescue Service (FRS) have undergone fundamental transformation. Rather than just being responded to as and when they occur, the FRS have adopted a range of anticipatory governing strategies to govern fires in anticipation of their occurence. This turn towards anticipatory governance has been facilitated in no small part by the digital infrastructure now embedded in the FRS. Composed of data, hardware, software, fibre-optic cables along with human analysts and organisational processes, this infrastructure operates to make risk projections on fire which shape and condition strategic decision making. This paper explores the operation of this digital infrastructure through the notion of interface. Drawing on empirical material relating to processes of data sourcing and risk calculation, interfaces account for the sites, moments and experiences in which human and non-human agents relate to one another in making fire risk projections. Showing relations to exist spatially, temporally and sensually, I argue that interfaces are crucial to the operation of an anticipatory security apparatus which relies on digital devices

Synthesis and coordination chemistry of 2-(di-2-pyridylamino)pyrimidine; structural aspects of spin crossover in an Fe(II) complex

This paper was accepted on February 26 20122-(Di-2-pyridylamino)pyrimidine (L), a potentially ditopic tetradentate ligand, was synthesized from commercially available di-2-pyridylamine and 2-chloropyrimidine. Despite being capable of bridging two metal atoms with bidentate chelation of both metal centres, L prefers to chelate or bridge through the more basic pyridyl donors of the di-2-pyridylamine moiety. Mononuclear trans-[Fe(NCS)2(L)2] and [Cu(L)2(H2O)](BF4)2•H2O complexes, and a discrete [Ag2(L)4](PF6)2 metallomacrocycle were isolated and structurally characterized by X-ray crystallography. A mononuclear palladium complex [PdCl2(L)]•(solvate), where solvate = ½H2O or CH2Cl2, was also readily obtained in 71% yield. One example of the ligand acting as a bis(bidentate) bridging ligand was observed in a dinuclear [(PdCl2)2(L)]•¾H2O complex that was obtained only in very low yield (ca. 3%) from the reaction that produced [PdCl2(L)]•½H2O. trans-[Fe(NCS)2(L)2] undergoes a temperature dependent HS-LS (HS = high spin; LS = low spin) crossover at ca. 205 K that was 2 observed by X-ray crystallography and magnetic measurements and attempts were made to understand the structural basis of this process. Despite efforts to isolate examples of L bridging two iron(II) centres, only the mononuclear trans-[Fe(NCS)2(L)2] species could be obtained.Rachel S. Crees, Boujemma Moubaraki, Keith S. Murray, and Christopher J. Sumb