Education as Re-Embedding: Stroud Communiversity, Walking the Land and the Enduring Spell of the Sensuous

How we know, is at least as important as what we know: Before educationalists can begin to teach sustainability, we need to explore our own views of the world and how these are formed. The paper explores the ontological assumptions that underpin, usually implicitly, the pedagogical relationship and opens up the question of how people know each other and the world they share. Using understandings based in a phenomenological approach and guided by social constructionism, it suggests that the most appropriate pedagogical method for teaching sustainability is one based on situated learning and reflexive practice. To support its ontological questioning, the paper highlights two alternative culture’s ways of understanding and recording the world: Those of the Inca who inhabited pre-Columbian Peru, which was based on the quipu system of knotted strings, and the complex social and religious system of the songlines of the original people of Australia. As an indication of the sorts of teaching experiences that an emancipatory and relational pedagogy might give rise to, the paper offers examples of two community learning experiences in the exemplar sustainable community of Stroud, Gloucestershire in the United Kingdom where the authors live

In Search of... Exploration of the boundaries, scope and definitions of the social economy: a discussion paper. Working Paper # 2009-4

This working paper presents an extensive, albeit not exhaustive, review of available literature has been made to support the policy scan and research to consider definitions of ‘social economy’, ‘social enterprise’ and ‘social economy enterprise’,‘social capital’and ‘public policy’. In this discussion paper, the definitions provided by a number of authors and organisations are examined. While not providing an overall agreed definition,they do help to provide key characteristics (and to some extent boundaries) of the concept. From this review, an outline of primary and supporting characteristics is suggested to provide a starting point for further dialogue on what the ‘social economy’ looks like in Atlantic Canada

Calculating the chiral condensate diagrammatically at strong coupling

We calculate the chiral condensate of QCD at infinite coupling as a function of the number of fundamental fermion flavours using a lattice diagrammatic approach inspired by recent work of Tomboulis, and other work from the 80's. We outline the approach where the diagrams are formed by combining a truncated number of sub-diagram types in all possible ways. Our results show evidence of convergence and agreement with simulation results at small Nf. However, contrary to recent simulation results, we do not observe a transition at a critical value of Nf. We further present preliminary results for the chiral condensate of QCD with symmetric or adjoint representation fermions at infinite coupling as a function of Nf for Nc = 3. In general, there are sources of error in this approach associated with miscounting of overlapping diagrams, and over-counting of diagrams due to symmetries. These are further elaborated upon in a longer paper.Comment: presented at the 32nd International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2014), 23-28 June 2014, New York, NY, US

Public service ethos: the blending values of public and mutual organisations

The previous Labour and Coalition governments both promoted experimentation in mutual and social enterprise run services, a trend the current government continues. At the same time, complexity in the range of stakeholders and vehicles for public service delivery has led to calls for agencies to share a common public service ethos. John Maddocks and Jan Myers explore the combination of mutual and public to see if there is room for a blended approach, and if so who will benefit from it

The effects of socio-cultural factors on public service motivation: Insights from the Lebanese public service

The infusion of market and business management principles into the public sector has impeded the behaviour of public service motivated employees who are motivated by intrinsic motives. Besides, the infusion of such principles caused great threats to basic values of the civil service, like equity, fairness, justice, accountability, impartiality, public welfare and other values related to the public sector. From here, public service motivation (PSM) emanates as a reaction against these principles/techniques in the civil service. Public management scholars have studied PSM from different angles and perspectives; however, no one has studied the effects of socio-cultural factors on PSM. This study will fill this gap in PSM literature by studying how socio-cultural factors impede/block the development of this construct with lessons learnt from the Lebanese civil service

Entanglement, Holography and Causal Diamonds

We argue that the degrees of freedom in a d-dimensional CFT can be re-organized in an insightful way by studying observables on the moduli space of causal diamonds (or equivalently, the space of pairs of timelike separated points). This 2d-dimensional space naturally captures some of the fundamental nonlocality and causal structure inherent in the entanglement of CFT states. For any primary CFT operator, we construct an observable on this space, which is defined by smearing the associated one-point function over causal diamonds. Known examples of such quantities are the entanglement entropy of vacuum excitations and its higher spin generalizations. We show that in holographic CFTs, these observables are given by suitably defined integrals of dual bulk fields over the corresponding Ryu-Takayanagi minimal surfaces. Furthermore, we explain connections to the operator product expansion and the first law of entanglement entropy from this unifying point of view. We demonstrate that for small perturbations of the vacuum, our observables obey linear two-derivative equations of motion on the space of causal diamonds. In two dimensions, the latter is given by a product of two copies of a two-dimensional de Sitter space. For a class of universal states, we show that the entanglement entropy and its spin-three generalization obey nonlinear equations of motion with local interactions on this moduli space, which can be identified with Liouville and Toda equations, respectively. This suggests the possibility of extending the definition of our new observables beyond the linear level more generally and in such a way that they give rise to new dynamically interacting theories on the moduli space of causal diamonds. Various challenges one has to face in order to implement this idea are discussed.Comment: 84 pages, 12 figures; v2: expanded discussion on constraints in section 7, matches published versio

Ecological conditions of the nordpatagonic native forest in an Andean basin of southern Chile (43°30' - 44°00'S)

Analizamos en una cuenca andino-patagónica de Chile meridional, la intensa degradación de los ecosistemas forestales constatada en la cuenca superior del río Palena (43° 30' - 44° 00' S). Extensivos incendios producidos en la montaña andina, entre los años 1930 a 1955 iniciaron la alteración y retrocesodel bosque nativo con predominio de Nothofagus. La erosión y la activa dinámica geomorfológica de la cordillera (derrumbes, deslizamientos, rodados), ha contribuido también de modo importante en la pérdida de los árboles. La quema del bosque con el objeto de obtener espacios para praderas junto con laextracción de leña, constituyen el factor antrópico constante en el desarrollo de este proceso. Actualmente se observa, sólo en algunos sectores, una lenta y dificultosa regeneración de especies leñosas, la que va acompañada por la intrusión de arbustos exóticos.We analyzed in a Chilean Andean southern basin, the intensive degradation of the forest ecosystems in the upper basin of the Palena river (43° 30' -44°00'S) Extensive fire forest produced dunng 1930 to 1955 in the Andean mountain, generated the impact of the native forest wich is predominantly Nothofagus.The erosion and the intense geomorphic dynamic of the mountain (landslide, landslipping) have also contributed to the destruction of the tres. The controlled fire forest in order to obtain room for prairies along with the wood log extraction, are the constant anthropogenic factor in the development of this process. In the days it isrecognized, in just few places, a slow and difficult regeneration of wood species,wich is accompany with exotic bushes