Multi-functional roles of grassland in organic farming systems

This report was presented at the UK Organic Research 2002 Conference. Grassland supports commodity production and maintenance of soil fertility, as well as environmental, economic and social functions beyond the farm. These include biodiversity and landscape; soil, air and water quality; recreation, rural employment and social benefits. This paper discusses whether organic grassland management delivers benefits, compared with other farming systems, within this multifunctional context, and how future land-use systems might meet a wider range of objectives

Contesting Genetic Knowledge-Practices in Livestock Breeding: Biopower, Biosocial Collectivities, and Heterogeneous Resistances

Cattle and sheep breeders in the UK and elsewhere increasingly draw on genetic techniques in order to make breeding decisions. Many breeders support such techniques, while others argue against them for a variety of reasons, including their preference for the ‘traditions' of visual-based and pedigree-based selections. Meanwhile, even for those institutions and breeders who promote genetic techniques, the outcomes are not always as predicted. We build on our recent use of Foucault's discussions of biopower to examine the effects of the introduction of genetic techniques in UK livestock breeding in order to begin to explore the diffuse and capillary nature of resistance within relations of biopower. We focus specifically on how resistance and contestation can be understood through the joint lenses of biopower and an understanding of livestock breeding as knowledge-practices enacted within heterogeneous biosocial collectivities. In some instances these collectivities coalesce around shared endeavour, such as increasing the valency of genetic evaluation within livestock breeding. Yet such mixed collectivities also open up opportunities for counter-conduct: heterogeneous resistances to and contestations of genetic evaluation as something represented as progressive and inevitable. We focus on exploring such modes of resistance using detailed empirical research with livestock breeders and breeding institutions. We demonstrate how in different and specific ways geneticisation becomes problematised, and is contested and made more complex, through the knowledge-practices of breeders, the bodies of animals, and the complex relationships between different institutions in livestock breeding and rearing

The contested aesthetics of farmed animals : visual and genetic views of the body

Farmed animals have long been the subject of aesthetic appreciation. They are valued for their particular contribution to the aesthetics of agricultural landscapes and can act as important visual signifiers of geographical locality (Evans and Yarwood 1995). In these ways farmed animals may be seen as contributing to the formation of a longstanding romantic or pastoral gaze upon rural or farmed landscapes, a gaze associated with notions of the rural idyll which structure many visitors’ appreciation of the countryside (Urry 1990, 1995). For those actually involved in agriculture, as livestock breeders and farmers, the visual evaluation of farmed animals in the particular sites and spaces of the farm has further layers of interest and intricacy centring around a persistent tension: that within the particularly embodied, biological practices of livestock breeding, there is a constant and complex interplay and relationship between these animals’ functionality and aesthetic appeal. Although anyone might experience an aesthetic response to a farmed animal, it is the particularly intense engagements with them experienced by breeders that produce the situated aesthetic encounters with and knowledges of them that interest us in this chapter

Simple Strategies for Broadcasting Repository Resources

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PostersNSDL's data repository for STEM education is designed to provide organized access to digital educational materials through its online portal, NSDL.org. The resources held within the NSDL data repository along with their associated metadata can also be found through partner and external portals, often with high quality, pedagogical contextual information intact. Repositories are not, however, usually described as web broadcast devices for their holdings. Providing multiple contextual views of educational resources where users look for them underscores the idea that digital repositories can be systems for the management, preservation, discovery and reuse of rich resources within a domain that can also be pushed out from a repository into homes and classrooms through multiple channels. This presentation reviews two interrelated methods and usage data that support the concept of â resource broadcastingâ from the NSDL data repository as a method that takes advantage of the natural context of resources to encourage their additional use as stand-alone objects outside of specific discipline-oriented portals.National Science Foundatio

Teaching in Context: Integrating Mathematical Thinking and Personal Development Planning into the Curriculum for Part-Time, Distance-Learning Engineering Students

This paper describes changes to the way mathematics is taught to engineering students at The Open University, moving away from service teaching via generic mathematics modules to incorporating mathematics teaching into the core engineering curriculum. Mathematics is taught in the context of engineering with the aim of reducing the emphasis on derivations and mathematical proofs and putting greater emphasis on understanding basic concepts and being able to create useful models. Mathematical methods are taught and practised, then extended and applied to different engineering contexts as students’ progress through modules, in order to develop students’ mathematical thinking and build confidence. Professional development planning has also been embedded into engineering teaching for improved context and relevance and a more integrated approach to assessment has been taken across the whole qualification

Making meat collectivities : entanglements of geneticisation, integration and contestation in livestock breeding

To explore some of the contours of this meat ‘supply chain integration’ - ‘the phrase of the moment’ according to Farmers Weekly - this chapter draws on research conducted as part of a project exploring the effects of the emergence of particular types of genetic knowledge-practice in beef cattle and sheep breeding in the UK and their entanglement with ‘traditional’ ways of knowing and valuing livestock. The research is interested in the production and circulation of genetic knowledge-practices in agriculture, in examining how such knowledge-practices become established and gain legitimacy, how they become tangled up with visual and other traditional knowledge-practices, and in the effects of genetic knowledge-practices on how cattle and sheep are bred and managed and on human-nonhuman animal relationships in livestock farming. The research has increasingly led us to explore the process of ‘geneticisation’ beyond the farm gate, to look at how the establishment of particular genetic truths or ways of rendering ‘life itself’ (Franklin, 2000) are entangled with processes of restructuring and differentiation within UK food systems

Editorial: Gender and Intersectionality in Engineering

This Special Issue of the “International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology” focuses on the issue of gender, and of how gender intersects with other aspects of diversity, in engineering. Published in 2019 in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Women’s Engineering Society, and to coincide with the International Women in Engineering Day on 23rd June, we have brought together some of the latest work on this critical area, from multiple perspectives and contexts, and from across the globe

An exploration of the co-production of performance running bodies and natures within "Running Taskscapes"

This article explores the interrelationship between particular “natural” spaces and the production of middle- and long-distance performance running bodies. It argues that running bodies and nature are actively co-produced, thus blurring the commonly made distinction between the “social” and the “natural”. In doing so, the article extends the geography of sports literature by adopting a “post-constructivist” perspective on nature as elucidated in Tim Ingold's concepts of “dwelling” and “taskscape”. This illuminates the (re)production of sporting bodies through the materiality of nature and in turn contributes to research on embodiment within sports studies that highlights the importance of space and the natural environment. The article draws on ethnographic material and textual sources to illuminate the running taskscape associated with the production of performance running bodies and highlights how three forms and functions of nature are co-produced through this mode of dwelling