Teaching for Better Learning: A Blended Learning Pilot Project with First-Year Geography Undergraduates

Internationally, recognition is growing that the transition between post-primary and higher education is raising a number of challenges for both students and educators. Simultaneously with growing class sizes, resources have become more constrained and there is a new set of expectations from the “net generation” (Mohanna, 2007, p. 211) The use of e-learning in medical education, Postgraduate Medical Journal, 83, p. 211). Within this transforming context, modes of instruction that cater for different paces of learning and learning styles by combining traditional and electronic media have become increasingly important. This paper discusses the transformation of an introductory human geography module at University College Dublin using a blended learning approach that extends beyond the media used to incorporate all aspects of, and inputs into, the learning process. Our experience highlights how blended learning can aid the achievement of a range of objectives in relation to student engagement and the promotion of deeper learning. However, blended learning is not a quick-fix solution to all issues relating to new university students and our analysis draws out a more complex relationship than anticipated between blended learning and student retention that will require further examination

What Ireland tells us about the politics of ‘places that don’t matter’

The Irish general election in February saw Sinn Féin win the highest share of the vote. John Tomaney and Niamh Moore-Cherry write that while Sinn Féin’s success captured the headlines, the election also underlined the extent to which geographical inequalities can be rapidly and unexpectedly politicised. With Covid-19 reinforcing inequalities between Irish regions, there is now a growing need for power to be dispersed to local and regional levels

Growing intimate privatepublics: Everyday utopia in the naturecultures of a young lesbian and bisexual women’s allotment

The Young Women’s Group in Manchester is a ‘young women’s peer health project, run by and for young lesbian and bisexual women’, which runs an allotment as one of its activities. At a time when interest in allotments and gardening appears to be on the increase, the existence of yet another community allotment may seem unremarkable. Yet we suggest that this queer allotment poses challenges for conventional theorisations of allotments, as well as for understandings of public and private. In this article we explore how the allotment project might be understood to be intensely engaged in ‘growing intimate publics’, or what we term ‘privatepublics’. These are paradoxical intimacies, privatepublic spaces which are not necessarily made possible in the usual private sphere of domestic homes. Here we focus on the work involved in materialising the allotment, which we understand as a queer privatepublic ‘natureculture’ (Haraway, 2008) which appears as an ‘everyday utopia’ (Cooper, 2014)

DIY academic archiving:Mischievous disruptions of a new counter-movement

Against increasing injunctions in research governance to create open data, and knee-jerk rejections from qualitative researchers in response to such efforts, we explore a radical counter movement of academics engaged in what we term “DIY Academic Archiving,” the creation of open and accessible archives of their research materials. We turn to interviews with three DIY academic archivists, each drawing on an ethos of community archiving, as opposed to emerging open data schemes: Melissa Munn on The Gaucher/Munn Penal Press Collection,1 Eric Gonzaba’s Wearing Gay History,2 and Michael Goodman’s Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive.3 We see these archives as engaged in a “politics of refusal,” which challenges both conventional methods and ethics in qualitative research as well as new moves toward open data. On the one hand, academics are tasked to “protect” their data by destroying it, under the guise of a supposed mode of “care.” On the other hand, open data makes quite contrary demands, to care for data by making it “open” for further extraction through (re)use. DIY Academic Archiving is a practice of refusal that supports a redirection away from this binary. In this article, we explore how DIY academic archivists play with coding as a form of mischievous disruption, and so are contributing to new data imaginaries. We offer insight into how DIY Academic Archiving supports researchers in their theoretical, methodological and political commitments, and at the same time, how it can enable researchers to take the care-full risk of archiving our research data

The Ontology of the Archive

This first seminar will focus on examining conceptualisations of ‘the archive’ across disciplines. The friction between the novelty of the archive for social scientists, and the very ordinariness of the archive for historians, seems a productive tension with which to start. The sense that the archive is the site of the trace of the old, the place of collective memory, underlies anxieties about the suitability of the archive for researching the sociological present. Questioning assumed temporalities of the archive seem key to unpacking our understandings of the possibilities of archival research. As well as examining the key disciplines engaged in archives, we will also consider the impact of the work of Foucault and Derrida on archives, and Latour and ANT on laboratories, and those informed by these theorists across disciplines. Whether the archive is understood as a place, a site of texts and artefacts where history is documented or as a process whereby knowledge is produced through the assemblage of artefacts, archiving techniques and disciplinary research practices, the aim will be to unpack how these different ontologies of the archive inform how the possibilities of archival research are imagined

Ethics and Archives

Whether novel or mundane, for many the concept of the archive does seem to produce some kind of ‘mal d’archive’, an archive fever, whether following Derrida or Steedman, which merits further attention. We might understand ethics as the ‘mal d’archive’ for sociologists, as the site of sociologists’ anxieties about, resistance to, and general feverishness about the archive. Sociological resistance to archiving partly revolves around questions of the meaning of informed consent when future use of data cannot be anticipated; with the challenges of maintaining confidentiality and the possible limitations to use of data when data has been anonymised, and stripped of identifying names and places. Yet oral historians have long been grappling with ethics and informed consent with respect to interview material and transcripts. Historians who consult government records are faced with a 30 year rule, and sometimes a 100 year rule, governing access to public documents. So for historians questions of ethics are posited entirely differently. Anthropologists often face the challenge of negotiating consent over long period of fieldwork, or returns to the field over time, and even returns to their own personal archive of fieldnotes, photographs, maps, kinship diagrams and field recollections. Literary theorists frequently grapple with the challenges of bringing the privately written letters and diaries of writers and their correspondents into the public domain. Oral historians insist on history from below, on agentic subjects making history, inserting themselves into the record and on the importance of using the names of ordinary people. This seminar explores what ethical dilemmas and possible resolutions emerge out of encounters between the vulnerable, at risk subject of the social scientist, who needs to be protected by the cloaks of informed consent, anonymity and confidentiality, and the robust subject of oral history, insisting on their names and deeds being recorded for posterity, and on the project of inserting him or herself into history. This seminar will also examine the relevance of ethics at a time when mal d’archive threatens to become a full blown paralysis in an age of over-information, and when the very personal, private and intimate is to be found everywhere in blogs and various online fora

Mapping Green Dublin: Co-Creating a Greener Future With Local Communities

Mapping Green Dublin is a transdisciplinary, collaborative action research project led by University College Dublin’s School of Geography in collaboration with arts organisation Common Ground, artist Seoidín O’Sullivan, and event facilitators Connect the Dots. It took place in an inner-city neighbourhood of Dublin 8 between 2019 and 2020 and was funded by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency. This article outlines the methodological approach taken to develop a community-led greening strategy that is both inclusive and planning-policy relevant. The first phase of the project involved scientifically mapping the span and territories of trees and greenspace across Dublin 8, identifying their location and quality, greenspace deficits, and future needs. Phase two included a series of curated events from March to August 2020 to map out a proposed process for co-creating urban greening solutions focusing more on local identity and the possibilities for future creation. The scientific data was presented to communities in a way that opened up a creative and supportive space for dialogue on the wider role of trees and greening in enhancing urban resilience. Such a co-created greening plan ensures that interventions respond to neighbourhood needs, have high social and cultural value within the community, and maximise opportunities for community wellbeing. The final phase of the project identified specific areas for focused greening interventions. An important output from this action research project is a co-creation process to enable communities, local authorities, and policymakers to engage with and develop a new governance arrangement for more inclusive and appropriate urban greening strategies

Introduction:More-than-human participatory research: contexts, challenges, possibilities

This collection arises from an AHRC-funded research project called In Conversation with. . .: codesign with more-than-human communities that ran in 2013, as well as a series of panels held at the RGS-IBG International Conference in 2014 on the Co-Production of knowledge with non-humans. In both cases we sought to explore the notion of a ‘more-than-human participatory research’. Yet to say ‘more-than-human participatory research’ seems like too much of a mouthful. These are words that do not roll easily off the tongue, but instead suggest some kind of cacophony, some noisy dissonance. These are words that seem like they should not really sit beside each other, words that do not quite make sense