Democracy, emancipation and widening participation in the UK: changing the ‘distribution of the sensible’

The broad concern of this paper is how the relationship between education, democracy and emancipation might be conceived. This theme is explored through examining the contribution of a Rancierian conception of emancipation and democracy to rethinking widening participation in higher education. Following Ranciere, it is argued that taking equality as a starting point in higher education, rather than as a goal to be achieved through education, disrupts a prevailing logic of education as necessarily providing a pathway to emancipation. From this view the pedagogic practices of explication and mastery, which Ranciere argues work to separate academic reason and practical reason, need no longer be understood as the only way to be academic. It is proposed that this ‘redistribution of the sensible’ enables higher education to be conceived in ways other than available in ongoing educational debates and enables a move beyond an assimilation/recognition binary. Instead, widening participation can be understood as a space for opening up to experience, transformation and change for both academics and students. From this view, democracy is enacted in the here and now, rather than a goal for the future, and practice can be understood as a site for change

Evidence of Quaternary climatic variations in a sequence of loess and related deposits at Birch Creek, Alaska: implications for the stage 5 climatic chronology

A 45 m outcrop of Quaternary sediments on Birch Creek, near Circle, Alaska, reveals a record of fluctuating environmental conditions that probably spans several glacial-interglacial cycles. From base to top the deposits are forested floodplain (warm), colluvium with ice wedges (cold), forest soil (warm), loess (cold), paleosol containing Old Crow Tephra (OCt) (cool-to-warm), loess (cold), lacustrine (very warm), loess (cold), and modern forest soil (warm). Resolution of the paleoclimatic history associated with the OCt event is critical to understanding the nature of stage 5 in the western North American Arctic. Application of recent age estimates for the OCt tephra (ca. 140,000 yr BP) to the Birch Creek section would indicate that either (i) the tephra/paleosol dates from the 6/5.5 transition, a strongly developed glacial interval occurred within stage 5, and the overlying very warm interval occurred in 5.3 or 5.1, or (ii) the tephra was deposited during a non-Milankovitcha warming event late in stage 6. A paleoclimate chronology provides analternative interpretation, (iii), in which the tephra/paleosol corresponds to stage 6 or even stage 7, the overlying loess to stage 6, and the lake sediments to all or part of stage 5, but the OCt is older than 140,000 yr BP. Chronologies (ii) and (iii) imply a very warm beginning to stage 5, consistent with paleoclimate model simulations and data from other regions