Struggles to remain in Kigali’s “unplanned” settlements: the case of Bannyahe

Examining the precarious status of informal settlements in Kigali at a time of large-scale planning-induced expropriation, this article considers urban contestation in the context of the city’s changing spatial-legal regime. We analyse the case of one informal settlement’s expropriation and relocation – the settlement of Bannyahe – and the contestation that has ensued as resident property owners take the District of Gasabo to court. Through interviews with settlement residents, we follow the fates of these displaced urban citizens and consider their struggles to remain in their homes. Finally, we suggest that such contestation over legal procedural regularity and negotiation over property valuation at the neighbourhood level forms the limit of overt opposition to the city’s masterplan. Terming these limits to contestation “silent boundaries” that circumscribe contestation for property owners in the Bannyahe settlement, we offer perspectives on contestation and compromise amidst urban socio-spatial reordering in the “new Kigali”

Local P-shtukas and their relation to global G-shtukas

This is the first in a sequence of two articles investigating moduli stacks of global G-shtukas, which are function field analogs for Shimura varieties. Here G is a flat affine group scheme of finite type over a smooth projective curve, and global G-shtukas are generalizations of Drinfeld shtukas and analogs of abelian varieties with additional structure. Our moduli stacks generalize various moduli spaces used by different authors to prove instances of the Langlands program over function fields. In the present article we explain the relation between global G-shtukas and local P-shtukas, which are the function field analogs of p-divisible groups with additional structure. We prove the analog of a theorem of Serre and Tate stating the equivalence between the deformations of a global G-shtuka and its associated local P-shtukas. We also investigate local P-shtukas alone and explain their relation with Galois representations through their Tate modules. And if P is a smooth affine group scheme with connected reductive generic fiber we prove the existence of Rapoport--Zink spaces for bounded local P-shtukas as formal schemes locally formally of finite type. In the sequel to this article we use these Rapoport--Zink spaces to uniformize the moduli stacks of global G-shtukas.Comment: 37 pages, v3: generalization to flat affine group schemes of finite type, v3: final version which appears in Muenster J. of Mathematic

Does Lecture Capturing Impact Student Performance and Attendance in an Introductory Accounting Course?

The study empirically examines the interplay between lecture capturing viewership, performance and attendance for students in the Middle Eastern country of Qatar. The sample consists of 254 students enrolled in an introductory accounting class either in the Fall semester or in the Spring semester. We show a weak positive relationship between lecture capturing and performance, especially in the presence of other variables such as GPA, attendance, gender and seniority. However, we do not find that lecture capturing reduces attendance. Actual performance results are contrasted with students' perception of the usefulness and effectiveness of lecture capturing. Survey responses reveal that, overall, students attribute a great deal of credit to this pedagogical resource. They stated that lecture capturing clarifies concepts discussed in class, assists in studying for exams, enhances exam results and increases interest in the course. However, the majority of low-performing students believe lecture capturing to be a substitute for attending traditional lectures.Scopu