Tensions in Young People's Conceptualisation and Practice of Politics

Young people have been characterised as apathetic and disengaged from mainstream politics. This discourse draws upon a narrow, regulatory and hegemonic model of politics that centres on parliamentary politics. This paper reports findings from a qualitative study of young people drawn from across the political spectrum that also found most participants to adhere to this dominant model of politics. However, this conceptualisation of politics did not match their forms of socio-political engagement, instead it generated a series of tensions and worked to discount their actions as not \'genuine\' or \'real\' politics. It is argued that this narrow, regulatory model of politics does not reflect contemporary social conditions and actually militates against young people understanding themselves as political actors and beings.Activism, Feminism, Politics, Young People

Ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew agrarianism: an ecocritical study of Hesiod\u27s Works and Days and the Book of Proverbs

The subject of this thesis revolves around the “Western” view of nature and its social origins. The author advances the subject through a comparison of two ancient texts: Hesiod’s Works and Days and the Old Testament book of Proverbs. He concludes that the Western view of nature gestated in agricultural societies of small-farmers who saw themselves as being both part of and separate from the natural world. Their ability to control nature being limited, they saw civilization as fulfilling a limited agricultural role in the cosmos, as being different but part of and not controlling the whole. In the last chapter, the author moves to discussing the forces at play within the Western view of nature that have resulted in the environmental situation of the twenty-first century. The author advances that a view of the physical realm as secondary, or degraded vis-à-vis the realm of the intellect entered Christianity through Platonic philosophy, and therefore is not original to the Western view of nature. Furthermore, he contends that the original interaction of Western man with nature was through physical work, and that both Platonic philosophy and modern science have influenced this original relationship

Myers Street Streetscape Plan

The Scott’s Addition neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia has faced growing density and redevelopment as the neighborhood has become an appealing place to live, work, and play. Myers Street sits directly East from most of Scott’s Addition and has historically housed many industrial businesses. The street is rapidly transforming as many commercial/retail businesses are moving into the corridor. Streetscape redevelopment of the corridor will cause a need for complete streets infrastructure allowing the street to be a safe place for all people, urban design to provide visual aesthetics, and sustainable water runoff catchments to help displace stormwater to name just a few. This plan examines impacts on the Scott’s Addition neighborhood and specifically, Myers Street. Incremental land use changes have hindered safety within various corridors in the neighborhood as density has increased. Corridor observations have provided evidence that streetscape redevelopment of Myers Street would further its sustainability for the future. Thorough community outreach was conducted to gather input on how the streetscape should be managed and what elements of the corridor need the most attention. Surveys were distributed and interviews and observations were conducted with City of Richmond community members to gather this data. Results of the data gathering were analyzed to tailor the recommendations made for the corridor. To implement this plan, it is recommended to seek out grant funding

Educated, engaged, and critical: young British Muslims making new claims on citizenship amidst ongoing forms of marginalisation

Drawing on qualitative research with young Muslims in Bradford, Nathan Manning and Parveen Akhtar find that most respondents, despite being disillusioned with politics, were politically engaged. In contrast to an older generation who were seen as prioritising local issues and representation much more closely tied to kinship and ethnic identity, respondents also voiced claims for a substantive representation which addressed mainstream and often national political issues

'The Great Meeting Place': A Study of Bradford's City Park

noCity Park opened in early 2012 and despite some on-going criticism, during the summer the site drew thousands of people to the heart of Bradford and was the scene of much relaxed and good natured conviviality amongst socially diverse groups. As a new and unique public space in Bradford and a focal point for the city, a number of staff from the Centre for Applied Social Research believed researching City Park to be a fruitful endeavour to help promote a dialogue with the public and other sectors about living together in Bradford

Global Weyl modules for equivariant map algebras

Equivariant map algebras are Lie algebras of algebraic maps from a scheme (or algebraic variety) to a target finite-dimensional Lie algebra (in the case of the current paper, we assume the latter is a simple Lie algebra) that are equivariant with respect to the action of a finite group. In the first part of this paper, we define global Weyl modules for equivariant map algebras satisfying a mild assumption. We then identify a commutative algebra A that acts naturally on the global Weyl modules, which leads to a Weyl functor from the category of A-modules to the category of modules for the equivariant map algebra in question. These definitions extend the ones previously given for generalized current algebras (i.e. untwisted map algebras) and twisted loop algebras. In the second part of the paper, we restrict our attention to equivariant map algebras where the group involved is abelian, acts on the target Lie algebra by diagram automorphisms, and freely on (the set of rational points of) the scheme. Under these additional assumptions, we prove that A is finitely generated and the global Weyl module is a finitely generated A-module. We also define local Weyl modules via the Weyl functor and prove that these coincide with the local Weyl modules defined directly in a previous paper. Finally, we show that A is the algebra of coinvariants of the analogous algebra in the untwisted case.Comment: 38 pages. v2: Section numbering changed to match published version. Minor typos correcte