Communication practices of the Karen in Sheffield: Seeking to navigate their three zones of displacement

This study investigates communication practices of a newly arrived Karen refugee community in the UK who, as well as establishing themselves in a strange country, seek to keep in touch, campaign politically and maintain identity collectively through communication and contact with their global diaspora. We look at the technologies, motivations and inhibiting factors applying to the communication by adult members of this community and construct the idea of three zones of displacement which help to model the particular contexts, challenges and methods of their communication. We find that overall, they are using a wide range of internet-based technologies, with the aim to 'keep-in-touch' (personal contacts) and to 'spread the word' (political communication). This also includes archaic, traditional and hybrid methods to achieve extended communication with contacts in other 'zones'. We also identify the importance of the notion of ‘village’ as metaphor and entity in their conceptualisation of diasporic and local community cohesion. We identify the key inhibitors to their communication as cost, education, literacy and age. Finally, we speculate on the uncertain outcomes of their approach to digital media in achieving their political aims

Biodigital publics: personal genomes as digital media artifacts

The recent proliferation of personal genomics and direct-to-consumer (DTC) genomics has attracted much attention and publicity. Concern around these developments has mainly focused on issues of biomedical regulation and hinged on questions of how people understand genomic information as biomedical and what meaning they make of it. However, this publicity amplifies genome sequences which are also made as internet texts and, as such, they generate new reading publics. The practices around the generation, circulation and reading of genome scans do not just raise questions about biomedical regulation, they also provide the focus for an exploration of how contemporary public participation in genomics works. These issues around the public features of DTC genomic testing can be pursued through a close examination of the modes of one of the best known providers—23andMe. In fact, genome sequences circulate as digital artefacts and, hence, people are addressed by them. They are read as texts, annotated and written about in browsers, blogs and wikis. This activity also yields content for media coverage which addresses an indefinite public in line with Michael Warner’s conceptualisation of publics. Digital genomic texts promise empowerment, personalisation and community, but this promise may obscure the compliance and proscription associated with these forms. The kinds of interaction here can be compared to those analysed by Andrew Barry. Direct-to-consumer genetics companies are part of a network providing an infrastructure for genomic reading publics and this network can be mapped and examined to demonstrate the ways in which this formation both exacerbates inequalities and offers possibilities for participation in biodigital culture

Simulation-based model course to demonstrate seafarers' competence for deck officers' discipline

Postprint (published version

Neo-Statecraft Theory, Historical Institutionalism and Institutional Change

This article provides a critical examination of the contribution that statecraft theory, which has been subject to recent revision and development, makes to the literature on institutional change. It articulates an emergent neo-statecraft approach that offers an agent-led form of historical institutionalism. This overcomes the common criticism that historical institutionalists underplay the creative role of actors. The article also argues that the approach brings back into focus the imperatives of electoral politics as a source of institutional change and provides a macro theory of change which is also commonly missing from historical institutionalist work. It can therefore identify previously unnoticed sources of stability and change, especially in states with strong executives and top-down political cultures

Fewer Flops at the Top: Accuracy, Diversity, and Regularization in Two-Class Collaborative Filtering

In most existing recommender systems, implicit or explicit interactions are treated as positive links and all unknown interactions are treated as negative links. The goal is to suggest new links that will be perceived as positive by users. However, as signed social networks and newer content services become common, it is important to distinguish between positive and negative preferences. Even in existing applications, the cost of a negative recommendation could be high when people are looking for new jobs, friends, or places to live. In this work, we develop novel probabilistic latent factor models to recommend positive links and compare them with existing methods on five different openly available datasets. Our models are able to produce better ranking lists and are effective in the task of ranking positive links at the top, with fewer negative links (flops). Moreover, we find that modeling signed social networks and user preferences this way has the advantage of increasing the diversity of recommendations. We also investigate the effect of regularization on the quality of recommendations, a matter that has not received enough attention in the literature. We find that regularization parameter heavily affects the quality of recommendations in terms of both accuracy and diversity

Competitiveness and sustainability: can ‘smart city regionalism’ square the circle?

Increasingly, the widely established, globalisation-driven agenda of economic competitiveness meets a growing concern with sustainability. Yet, the practical and conceptual co-existence—or fusion—of these two agendas is not always easy. This includes finding and operationalising the ‘right’ scale of governance, an important question for the pursuit of the distinctly transscalar nature of these two policy fields. ‘New regionalism’ has increasingly been discussed as a pragmatic way of tackling the variable spatialities associated with these policy fields and their changing articulation. This paper introduces ‘smart (new) city-regionalism’, derived from the principles of smart growth and new regionalism, as a policy-shaping mechanism and analytical framework. It brings together the rationales, agreed principles and legitimacies of publicly negotiated polity with collaborative, network-based and policy-driven spatiality. The notion of ‘smartness’, as suggested here as central feature, goes beyond the implicit meaning of ‘smart’ as in ‘smart growth’. When introduced in the later 1990s the term embraced a focus on planning and transport. Since then, the adjective ‘smart’ has become used ever more widely, advocating innovativeness, participation, collaboration and co-ordination. The resulting ‘smart city regionalism’ is circumscribed by the interface between the sectorality and territoriality of policy-making processes. Using the examples of Vancouver and Seattle, the paper looks at the effects of the resulting specific local conditions on adopting ‘smartness’ in the scalar positioning of policy-making

From policy to pedagogy: widening the discourse and practice of the learning society in the European Union

This paper explores the policy turn of the learning society, and how the academic world is responding to new social and political demands. It highlights some of the criticisms levelled at the learning society, as well as the voices of support. The paper also showcases the European Language Portfolio and the Transferable Skills project as two examples of good practice. Cet article examine le tournant de la politique de la socie´te´ du savoir ainsi que la re´ponse du monde intellectuel face aux nouvelles exigences sociales et politiques. Il met en lumie`re certaines des critiques souleve´es par la socie´te´ du savoir ainsi que par les voix favorables. L’article s’appuie sur deux exemples pratiques, a` savoir le Portfolio Europe´en des Langues et le Project des Compe´tences Transmissibles

Sustainable development program at the Faculty of Nautical Studies of Barcelona, Nautical engineering education

Nautical engineering education institutions play an important role and are a key tool in the future sustainable maritime transport and naval world. This paper addresses the role of nautical engineering education in the learning and implementation of the competence of sustainability and social commitment (SSC) in the Nautical Faculty of Barcelona and presents results of the first year of the implementation of the environmental program STEP2015 at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.Postprint (published version

Indymedia and the long story of rebellion against neoliberal capitalism

Indymedia was born of the anti-globalisation movement of the late 1990s and quickly spread to become a social movement in its own right. This article reflects on how prescient the claims of the anti-globalisation movement have proven to be and how 20 years ago Indymedia and the anti-globalisation movement predicted there was trouble ahead and that neoliberalism was a central part of the problem. It notes how a history of struggle and protest emanating from the days of Indymedia has developed over time building a counter-politics that is becoming ever wiser about the multiple intersectional harms of capitalism and ever more sophisticated in its political response. The challenge is what comes next

Gender, foundation degrees and the knowledge economy

This article questions the concept of ‘education for employment’, which constructs a discourse of individual and societal benefit in a knowledge‐driven economy. Recent policy emphasis in the European Union promotes the expansion of higher education and short‐cycle vocational awards such as the intermediate two‐year Foundation Degree recently introduced into England and Wales. Studies of vocational education and training (VET) and the knowledge economy have focused largely on the governance of education and on the development and drift of policy. Many VET programmes have also been considered for their classed, raced and gendered take‐up and subsequent effect on employment. This article builds on both fields of study to engage with the finer cross‐analyses of gender, social class, poverty, race and citizenship. In its analysis of policy texts the article argues that in spite of a discourse of inclusivity, an expanded higher education system has generated new inequalities, deepening social stratification. Drawing on early analyses of national quantitative data sets, it identifies emerging gendered, classed and raced patterns and considers these in relation to occupationally and hierarchically stratified labour markets, both within and without the knowledge economy