Disability activism and the politics of scale

In this paper, we examine the role of spatial scale in mediating and shaping political struggles between disabled people and the state. Specifically, we draw on recent theoretical developments concerning the social construction of spatial scale to interpret two case studies of disability activism within Canada and Ireland. In particular, we provide an analysis of how successful the disability movement in each locale has been at 'jumping scale' and enacting change, as well as examining what the consequences of such scaling-up have been for the movement itself. We demonstrate that the political structures operating in each country markedly affect the scaled nature of disability issues and the effectiveness of political mobilization at different scales

Resourcing Scholar-Activism: Collaboration, Transformation, and the Production of Knowledge

In this article we offer a set of resources for scholar-activists to reflect on and guide their practice. We begin by suggesting that research questions should be triangulated to consider not only their scholarly merit but the intellectual and political projects the findings will advance and the research questions of interest to community and social movement collaborators

Planning domain definition using GIPO

In this paper an object-centric perspective on planning domain definition is presented along with an overview of GIPO (graphical interface for planning with objects), a supporting tools environment. It is argued that the object-centric view assists the domain developer in conceptualizing the domain’s structure, and we show how GIPO enables the developer to capture that conceptualization at an appropriate and matching conceptual level. GIPO is an experimental environment which provides a platform for exploring and demonstrating the range and scope of tools required to support the knowledge engineering aspects of creating and validating planning systems, both for classical pre-condition planning and hierarchical planning. GIPO embodies the object-centric view, leading to a range of benefits typically associated with object-oriented methods in other fields of software engineering such as highly visual development methods, code reuse and efficient, reliable developmen

Knowledge representation in planning: a PDDL to OCL h translation

Recent successful applications of AI planning technology have highlighted the knowledge engineering of planning domain models as an important research area. We describe an implemented translation algorithm between two languages used in planning representation: PDDL, a language used for communication of example domains between research groups, and OCL h , a language developed specifically for planning domain modelling. The algorithm is being used as part of OCL h ’s tool support to import models expressed in PDDL to OCL h ’s environment. Here we outline the translation algorithm, and discuss the issues that it uncovers. Although the tool performs reasonably well when its output is measured against hand-crafted OCL h , it results in only partially specified models. Analyis of the translation results shows that this is because many natural assumptions about domains are not captured in the PDDL encodings