329 research outputs found
Speculative futures at the bottom of the pyramid
Celebrated as creative, flexible catalysts of inclusive capitalism, urban youth are central to bottom‐of‐the‐pyramid (BoP) models of development, which set out to repurpose the jobless as entrepreneurs in the making. We explore the multiple (at times conflicting) temporalities – the practices, technologies, and representations of time – which figure in a BoP initiative offering entrepreneurial opportunities to unemployed youth in Nairobi's slums: from the invocation of clock‐time discipline to the professional time of entrepreneurial subjectivities and the enchantments of the not‐yet. But the appeal of BoP, we suggest, does not turn either on the here‐and‐now of survival or on an impossible pipe dream of prosperity, but rather resides firmly in the medium term: a foreseeable future of modest desires, which nonetheless remain tantalizingly just out of reach for most. By examining how these temporal conflicts play out in attempts to fashion a cadre of self‐willed, aspiring entrepreneurs, we reveal the limits to entrepreneurial agency, and the contradictions inherent in the mission of (self‐)empowerment through enterprise upon which the ideology of inclusive markets is built
Black brookite rich in oxygen vacancies as an active photocatalyst for CO2 conversion: experiments and first-principles calculations
Photocatalytic CO2 conversion is a clean technology to deal with CO2
emissions, and titanium oxide (TiO2) polymorphs are the most investigated
photocatalysts for such an application. In this study, black TiO2 brookite is
produced by a high-pressure torsion (HPT) method and employed as an active
photocatalyst for CO2 conversion. Black brookite with a large concentration of
lattice defects (vacancies, dislocations and grain boundaries) showed enhanced
light absorbance, narrowed optical bandgap and diminished recombination rate of
electrons and holes. The photocatalytic activity of the black oxide for CO2
conversion was higher compared to commercial brookite and benchmark P25
catalyst powders. First-principles calculations suggested that the presence of
oxygen vacancies in black brookite is effective not only for reducing optical
bandgap but also for providing active sites for the adsorption of CO2 on the
surface of TiO2
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