The Art and Science of Light Painting

A short overview of the making of light painting portraits explained by the artist

Thomas Hardy and Education

Thomas Hardy wrote during a time of extraordinary growth in British education when the purposes of learning were being passionately questioned. This thesis situates Hardy’s writing both within and beyond these debates, showing how his writing avows a Victorian fascination with education while contesting its often rigid actualization in nineteenth-century society. This project places new emphasis on the range of educationalists that Hardy counted as friends. These included the dialect poet and early-Victorian schoolmaster, William Barnes; the influential architect of the 1870s board schools, Thomas Roger Smith; and the leader of late-century reforms to female teacher training colleges, Joshua Fitch. Caught between life in rural surroundings and systemized forms of education, Hardy's characters frequently endure dislocation from community and estrangement from natural environments as penalties of their intellectual development. Much previous scholarship has for this reason claimed education as a source of despair in Hardy’s writing. However, this thesis reveals the people and experiences which rigid institutions exclude, and foregrounds Hardy’s depiction of the natural environment as an alternative source of learning. Exploring Hardy's representations of education as both reflective of contemporary change and suggestive of new possibilities, chapters focus on aspects of education most resonant with Hardy's own life and central to his fiction, including the professionalization and training of schoolmistresses, the working-class movement for liberal education, educational architecture, and rural forms of education. By exploring connections between fiction and social and political concerns, the thesis demonstrates how the idea of education relates to some key characteristics of Hardy's writing, for example the observant onlooker and the native returned.The National TrustGreat Western Researc

Politics, Voice, and Just Transition: Who has a Say in Climate Change Decision Making, and Who Does Not

The city of Bristol, UK, set out to pursue a just transition to climate change in 2020. This paper explores what happened next. We set out to study how just transition is unfolding politically on the ground, focusing on procedural justice. Over the course of a year, we conducted interviews and observations to study decision making at three levels – public sector, private sector and civil society. We found that not only is it difficult to define what just transition means, even for experts, but that the process of deciding how to pursue such a transition is highly exclusionary, especially to women and ethnic minorities. We therefore argue there is an urgency to revise decision-making procedures and ensure that there is ample opportunity to feed into decision-making processes by those who are typically excluded. Inclusive decision making must be embedded into the process of just transition from the beginning and throughout its implementation – it is not a step that can be ‘ticked off’ and then abandoned, but rather an ongoing process that must be consistently returned to. Finally, we conclude that cities have the unique opportunity to pilot bottom-up participatory approaches and to feed into the process of how a just transition might be pursued at the global level – for example, through their participation in the United Nations Framework for the Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) processes