Unfixing knowledges: Queering the literacy curriculum

In the literacy classroom, students have few opportunities to use their literacy practices to contest narratives of race, class, gender and sexuality. Instead, extensive time is spent completing literacy activities associated with what 'good' readers and writers do. Students' literacy practices are often formulaic, repetitive, and serve classroom management strategies producing a mythic narrative of good literacy teaching. This paper introduces a queer literacy curriculum that poses pedagogy as a series of questions: What does being taught, what does knowledge do to students? How does knowledge become understood in the relationship between teacher/text and student? (Lusted, 1986) It emphasizes developing critical analyses of heterosexism, heteronormativity and normativity with the goal of helping students understand binary categories are not givens, rather social constructions we are often forced to perform (Butler, 1990) through available discourses. The paper highlights an interruption into the literacy curriculum where, through collective memory work, students investigated, analysed and contested the usually-not-noticed ways a small understanding of heterosexuality has come to structure their lives

Reassessing Putin's project : reflections on IR theory and the West

Putin's aim was not to isolate Russia from international society but to challenge the West's claim to define its norms

Bedrock geology of Carroll County, Illinois

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Nation Branding and Policy transfer: Insights from Norden. EL-CSID Working Paper Issue 2018/22 • October 2018

Recent years have seen an interesting development in practices and policies of nation branding. Alongside an emphasis in which nation branding programmes seek to activate desires of conspicuous consumption in consumers, or to use branded messages to attract investment, there has also been a growing emphasis placed on policy transfer as a part of nation branding strategies. Thus, we see countries emphasising the possibility of exporting (amongst others) their educational, environmental, gender, criminological and even administrative policies, models and approaches. Instead of jealously guarding points of possible competitive advantage the message is instead apparently benevolent, a declaration that such countries may have something to offer that they are willing to share for the greater good. To date, this shift towards the incorporation of policy transfer within nation branding practices has received only limited analysis (e.g. Marsh and Fawcett 2011a; 2011b). Questions that arise, therefore, include: why are countries increasingly shifting their nation branding programmes in this direction? What do they seek to gain by engaging in such exports? And should we take the ostensibly beneficent nature of such practices at face value? The aim of this working paper is therefore to consider what the shift to policy transfer may tell us about the developing politics of nation branding, with particular focus placed on how policy transfer can be seen as a form of branded identity politics that arguably belies its apparently benevolent intentions by reaffirming hierarchical geopolitical imaginaries that remain premised on a politics of leveraging perceived competitive advantage. However, while the paper indicates why such a shift in nation branding strategies may be attractive, it also considers the potential pitfalls and limitations of such an approach. The working paper first discusses the shift towards nation branding through policy transfer at a general level, before ending with a discussion that draws on examples from Norden – the countries of which frequently populate the upper echelons of numerous nation branding and benchmarking indices, which have historically presented themselves as a model for export, and which, following an extended period of post-Cold War identity crisis and doubt, have more recently rediscovered a sense of self-confidence and self-identity, not least manifest in a resurrection of ideas of Nordic knowledge exports and policy transfer that re-instantiates more historical notions of Nordic exceptionalism

A Real Nullstellensatz for Matrices of Non-Commutative Polynomials

This article extends the classical Real Nullstellensatz to matrices of polynomials in a free $\ast$-algebra \RR\axs with $x=(x_1, \ldots, x_n)$. This result is a generalization of a result of Cimpri\vc, Helton, McCullough, and the author. In the free left \RR\axs-module \RR^{1 \times \ell}\axs we introduce notions of the (noncommutative) zero set of a left \RR\axs-submodule and of a real left \RR\axs-submodule. We prove that every element from \RR^{1 \times \ell}\axs whose zero set contains the intersection of zero sets of elements from a finite subset S \subset \RR^{1 \times \ell}\axs belongs to the smallest real left \RR\axs-submodule containing $S$. Using this, we derive a nullstellensatz for matrices of polynomials in \RR\axs. The other main contribution of this article is an efficient, implementable algorithm which for every finite subset S \subset \RR^{1 \times \ell}\axs computes the smallest real left \RR\axs-submodule containing $S$. This algorithm terminates in a finite number of steps. By taking advantage of the rigid structure of \RR\axs, the algorithm presented here is an improvement upon the previously known algorithm for \RR\axs

Bedrock geology map, Jo Daviess County, Illinois

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