Accomplishments of the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa, 2000-2010

Details the investments and impact of a funder collaborative focused on higher education in nine African countries, and each foundation's contribution. Discusses enduring improvements, increased resources, value added, and additional foundation efforts

Question your teaspoons : tea-drinking, coping and commercialisation across three planning organisations

Purpose As part of a wider ethnographic project that examines the significance of the public interest across three public and private sector UK planning organisations, this paper uses tea-drinking as a lens to understand structural forces around outsourcing and commercialisation. Reflecting across the five case studies, the analysis supports Burawoy's (2017) recent critique of Desmond's Relational Ethnography (2014). Using Perec's (1997[1973]) notion of the “infra-ordinary” as an anchor, it highlights the insight that arises from an intimate focus on mundane rituals and artefacts. Design/methodology/approach The data were gathered through participant observation, chronicling the researchers' encounters with tea in each of the sites. A respondent-led photography exercise was successful at two sites. Up to 40 days of ethnographic fieldwork were carried out in each site. Findings The tea-drinking narratives, while providing an intact description of discrete case study sites, exist in conversation with each other, providing an opportunity for comparison that informs the analysis and helping us to understand the meaning-making process of the planners both in and across these contexts. Originality/value The paper contributes to critical planning literature (Murphy and Fox-Rogers, 2015; Raco et al., 2016), illuminating structural forces around outsourcing and commercialisation. It also generates methodological reflection on using an everyday activity to probe organisational culture and promote critical reflection on “weighty” issues across study sites

The terrorism novel in a surrealist mode

The Terrorism Novel in a Surrealist Mode is a practice-led research project comprising a novel (The Science of a Single Cabbage) and an accompanying reflective commentary. The research question to which my novel responds is: Can a surrealist writing mode help expand the terrain of the literary terrorism novel? I distinguish my surrealist “mode” from historical surrealism by identifying the movement as an unfinished project survived by a certain state of mind, while acknowledging the intellectual debt by noting five central preoccupations that are common to surrealism and my project: 1) the interplay of dream-life and conscious experience; 2) playful black humour; 3) anti-fascism; 4) engagement with spectacular crime; and 5) exploitation of paranoia as both a subject and a tool for querying reality as a social and psychological construct. My thesis argues that a surrealist mode can expose and unsettle the implicit givens of what can be termed a terrorism/national security ontology, thereby contesting the assumptions that circumscribe the permissible in our age. By employing this literary mode, The Science of a Single Cabbage contributes to a disruption of terrorism narrative through a destabilising interrogation of the boundaries between the real and the unreal

‘Communities of resistance’ and the use of newspaper discussion boards Polish workers in Japanese foreign investments

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Maciej Bancarzewski, and Jane Hardy, ‘‘Communities of resistance’ and the use of newspaper discussion boards: Polish workers in Japanese foreign investments’, New Technology, Work and Employment, Vol. 32 (2): 160-173, July 2017, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12091. Under embargo until 25 July 2019. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.This article examines the content of two hundred posts on newspaper discussion boards by workers in a cluster of Japanese foreign investments in Poland. The conclusions are first, that the material experiences of workers generate a set of themes in relation to the labour process with regard to wages and working conditions, bullying and monitoring that exhibit similarities across countries. Second, we argue that an analysis of the discourse used is shaped by political and institutional conditions, which reveal national differences in how workers perceive and locate their exploitation. Finally, in relation to debates about workers’ resistance and the use of the internet we argue that the interaction of themes related to the material experience of work are intertwined with institutionally embedded understandings of exploitation, which not only enable a shared framework for venting, but also provide the basis for a community of resistance.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Drag of flexible vegetation and bed shear stress in emergent riparian vegetation

Die Dissertation beschäftigt sich mit dem Widerstandsverhalten flexibler, belaubter Vegetation und dem Sohlen- und Vegetationswiderstand in durchströmten Bewuchsfeldern. Hierzu wurde im Rahmen von Laboruntersuchungen systematisch die Vegetationsdichte, die Vegetationsanordnung, die Sohlenrauheit, die Fließtiefe und die Pflanzenstruktur variiert, um den Anteil des Sohlen- und Vegetationswiderstandes am Gesamtfließwiderstand in durchströmten Bewuchsfeldern zu untersuchen. Zur Quantifizierung des Vegetationswiderstandes wurde ein neues Kraftmesssystem entwickelt, welches eine direkte, und simultane Ermittlung der Widerstandskräfte von bis zu zehn Vegetationselementen mit einer hohen Genauigkeit ermöglichte, ohne das Strömungsfeld zu beeinflussen. Neben künstlichen flexiblen Vegetationselementen wurden zur besseren Vergleichbarkeit mit bereits bestehenden Arbeiten Messungen mit starren, zylindrischen Vegetationselementen vorgenommen. Die Ergebnisse zum Sohlenwiderstand zeigten, dass der Anteil des Sohlenwiderstandes am Gesamtwiderstand in der gleichen Größenordnung wie der Vegetationswiderstand liegen kann und nicht pauschal vernachlässigt werden darf. Die Ergebnisse deuten zudem darauf hin, dass für die starren und flexiblen Elemente ein konstanter und von der mittleren Strömungsgeschwindigkeit unabhängiger Anteil des Sohlenwiderstandes am Gesamtwiderstand angenommen werden kann.The present work deals with the flow resistance of foliated flexible riparian vegetation and the contribution of bed shear stress and vegetative drag to total hydraulic resistance. In order to investigate the flow resistance of flexible vegetation, drag forces on up to ten vegetation elements were measured directly and simultaneously with specifically designed drag force measurement sensors. The drag force data were used to estimate bed shear stress and to assess its contribution to total hydraulic resistance dependent on vegetation density, vegetation pattern, bed roughness, flow depth and vegetation structure. The experiments were carried out with artificial vegetation elements to ensure that plant characteristics did not change during the experiments. In addition, experiments with rigid cylindrical vegetation elements were conducted to enable the comparability with existing publications. The application of the shear stress superposition principle showed that the contribution of bed shear stress to total stress can be in the same order of magnitude as vegetation stress and should not be neglected a priori. The results further indicated that the contribution of bed shear stress to total stress is constant for a given setup and independent from the mean flow velocity for the flexible and rigid elements

Fenham Pocket Park: a holding ground

Fenham Pocket Park (FPP) is a community-led urban space, founded in 2016 in a context of austerity imposed by the British Government. Beginning as a University-third-sector collaboration, the project transformed an undefined soulless space between a swimming pool and a library into a place for exchange, dwelling and celebrating. It also gave rise to a residents’ group, the Friends of Fenham Pocket Park (FFPP), who became custodians of the space and committed to developing it further. Six years on, the area has suffered further from the impact of austerity and retreat of public services, and the FFPP group has experienced setbacks and a lull in participation. This study documents, through student journals and participant observation, the role played by BA Architecture-and-Urban- Planning students in re-charging the project through playful creative practice interventions and dialogue with residents. It explores the entanglement of civil society with students in a process that is framed by Freire’s critical pedagogy and recent scholarship on lively materials. Here, making is theorised as a vehicle through which pedagogies of hope can embed themselves in the community. The paper thus meditates on the agency of emplaced student-led making in (re)kindling community action, creating collectively shaped social and climate futures

Drag Force Measurements of Vegetation Elements

Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchiv

Working in the Public Interest? What must planners do differently? Critical thoughts on the state of planning

The current moment is generating huge challenges and raising significant questions about how our societies operate and the future of our cities and countryside. Economic shutdowns are bringing structural inequalities into sharp relief even as they illustrate the daunting scale of the transformations required to reduce our environmental impacts. Many pieces have already been written about how we might not just adapt to a post-Covid world but take the opportunity to build better, healthier, fairer, greener cities. Any hopes for significant change would entail fundamental shifts in the role of planning. At the same time, however, powerful property lobbies threaten a return to a business-as-usual model of development that is led not by care for people and place but the greedy hand of an ever less fettered free market. In England, this is symbolised by a new Conservative government promising to yet again radically streamline a planning system it sees as an impediment to economic recovery. Current circumstances also therefore challenge us to think more broadly about what planning and being a planner really mean in 2020. What is the purpose of planning? Do planners have the tools, resources, and capabilities to address significant societal challenges, and are they trusted to do so? What role should public authorities have and how might this interface with the logics of the market and private-sector driven development? And finally, what is the ‘public interest’ that planners often invoke as the foundation for their work, and how might it be compromised by the nature of the systems we operate in and where we work? The ESRC-funded Working in the Public Interest project has been seeking answers to these questions over the past three years. The project team from the University of Sheffield, Newcastle University and University College London has been engaging closely with contemporary planning practice in both the public and private sectors, focusing attention on what planners do all day. In depth interviews, focus groups to discuss contemporary challenges in planning, and extensive and engaged ethnography have yielded a rich set of insights into the state of planning and the nature of contemporary planning work across the UK. In this booklet we offer a series of brief overviews of key themes that this research has highlighted. Our aim here is not to offer a definition or detailed theoretical discussion of the public interest. Instead we hope to explore how various different facets of planning work are changing. At a broad level our argument is that a much wider range of issues and practices, including for example work-life balance and organisational change, need to be considered alongside issues such as professionalism and ethics when thinking about what it means to work in the public interest. In doing so we hope to stimulate broader debate within and beyond the planning profession about the nature and value of planning. We also aim to highlight a series of key questions and challenges that are shaping planners’ work and that will have significant implications for the future