Conscientisation and Communities of Compost: Rethinking management pedagogy in an age of climate crises

The unprecedented scale of the climate crisis has led to a questioning of conventional approaches to sustainability in management education, centred around business case for sustainability narratives. Such critique gives rise to serious questions around how we approach teaching the universality of the climate crisis, species extinction and biodiversity loss differently. Working with Freire’s stress on the political role of the educator, action rooted in the concrete, and the interconnections he establishes between pedagogy and political organization, our contribution is to connect these interventions with Haraway’s (2016) call to stay ‘with the trouble’ and generate Communities of Compost - that is, collective more than human communities of multi-species flourishing. In doing so, we propose threading together ecocentric and political economy approaches in management education, to present an alternative to corporate sustainability solutionism and to politically rethink scalar mismatches - that is when problems and proposed ‘solutions’ to the climate crisis apply to different sets of relations. As a way of addressing this, we develop pedagogical practices around Haraway’s multi-species Communities of Compost and combine this with the political movement of La Via Campesina - focusing on its campaigns for agroecology and food sovereignty

Atypical measures of diffusion at the gray-white matter boundary in autism spectrum disorder in adulthood

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a highly complex neurodevelopmental condition that is accompanied by neuroanatomical differences on the macroscopic and microscopic level. Findings from histological, genetic, and more recently in vivo neuroimaging studies converge in suggesting that neuroanatomical abnormalities, specifically around the gray-white matter (GWM) boundary, represent a crucial feature of ASD. However, no research has yet characterized the GWM boundary in ASD based on measures of diffusion. Here, we registered diffusion tensor imaging data to the structural T1-weighted images of 92 adults with ASD and 92 matched neurotypical controls in order to examine between-group differences and group-by-sex interactions in fractional anisotropy and mean diffusivity sampled at the GWM boundary, and at different sampling depths within the superficial white and into the gray matter. As hypothesized, we observed atypical diffusion at and around the GWM boundary in ASD, with between-group differences and group-by-sex interactions depending on tissue class and sampling depth. Furthermore, we identified that altered diffusion at the GWM boundary partially (i.e., ~50%) overlapped with atypical gray-white matter tissue contrast in ASD. Our study thus replicates and extends previous work highlighting the GWM boundary as a crucial target of neuropathology in ASD, and guides future work elucidating etiological mechanisms

Panama and the WTO : new constitutionalism of trade policy and global tax governance

"Corrigendum" in Review of International Political Economy, 24(4), p. 738 (DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2017.1332547).Tax havens and tax flight have lately received increasing attention, while interest toward multilateral trade policies has somewhat diminished. We argue that more attention needs to be paid exactly to the interrelations between trade and tax policies. Drawing from two case studies on Panama's trade disputes, we show how World Trade Organization (WTO) rules can be used both to resist attempts to sanction secrecy structures and to promote measures against tax flight. The theory of new constitutionalism can help to explain how trade treaties can 'lock in' tax policies. However, our case studies show that trade policy not only 'locks in' democratic policy-making, but also enables tax havens to use their commercialized sovereignty to resists anti-secrecy measures. What is being 'locked in' are the policy tools, not necessarily the policies. The changing relationship between trade and tax policies can also create new and unexpected tools for tackling tax evasion, underlining the importance of epistemic arbitrage in the context of new constitutionalism. In principle, political actors with sufficient technical and juridical knowledge can shape global tax governance to various directions regardless of their formal position in the world political hierarchies. This should be taken into account when trade treaties are being negotiated or revised.Peer reviewe

The rise of impact in academia: repackaging a long-standing idea

Since the Research Excellence Framework of 2014 (REF2014) ‘impact’ has created a conceptual conundrum gradually being pieced together by academics across the Higher Education sector. Emerging narratives and counter-narratives focus upon its role in dictating institutional reputation and funding to universities. However, not only does literature exploring impact, rather than ‘REF2014 impact’ per se, seldom see it as part of a changing sector; it often treats it as a new phenomenon within the political and social sciences. Here, drawing on academic perceptions of impact set in motion in the UK during the 1970s, we critique the underlying assumption that impact is new. We argue three key points to this end. Firstly, contrary to much of the literature examining academic perceptions of impact, it is a long-standing idea. Secondly, within such accounts, the effect of academic research on policy and society (which is longstanding) and the instrumentalisation of impact as a funding requirement (which is relatively new) are conflated. Thirdly, this conflation creates a novelty effect. In the context of a wider sea change to Higher Education, we examine different forms of consent, acceptance, endorsement and resistance surrounding the ‘new’ impact agenda to argue that this ‘novelty effect’ masks an important transitory process of acclimatisation among academics

Co-optation and empowerment : A multi-level analysis of the discourse and practice of social development at the world bank

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Conscientization and communities of compost: Rethinking management pedagogy in an age of climate crises

The unprecedented scale of the climate crisis has led to a questioning of conventional approaches to sustainability in management education, centred around business case for sustainability narratives. Such critique gives rise to serious questions around how we approach teaching the universality of the climate crisis, species extinction and biodiversity loss differently. Working with Freire's stress on the political role of the educator, action rooted in the concrete, and the interconnections he establishes between pedagogy and political organization, our contribution is to connect these interventions with Haraway's (2016) call to stay 'with the trouble' and generate Communities of Compost-that is, collective more than human communities of multi-species flourishing. In doing so, we propose threading together ecocentric and political economy approaches in management education, to present an alternative to corporate sustainability solutionism and to politically rethink scalar mismatches-that is when problems and proposed 'solutions' to the climate crisis apply to different sets of relations. As a way of addressing this, we develop pedagogical practices around Haraway's multi-species Communities of Compost and combine this with the political movement of La Via Campesina-focusing on its campaigns for agroecology and food sovereignty