Evaluating New Digital Technologies Through a Framework of Resilience

© 2015 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This paper explores how an evaluative framework of resilience might be utilised to assess the impact of new digital technologies. This paper outlines key themes and indicators from recent literature on community-level and rural resilience and incorporates insights from work on digital inclusion and rural information and communication technologies to build a framework of rural community resilience. It then highlights a successful case study carried out by the Digital Engagement and Resilience project and describes some of the methodological challenges that can be encountered in cross-cutting evaluative work in a digital economy context. Finally, it contextualises this work in the current policy climate of rural digital agendas to stress the growing need for holistic and critical approaches to ‘resilience’

Superfast broadband and rural community resilience: examining the rural need for speed

This paper examines the relationship between rural dwellers and Internet technology and aims to understand how that relationship is altered with a significant increase in broadband speed. It presents an argument for using ‘resilience’ as a framework for such technological impact research, positing its potential usefulness for identifying alternative development narratives. Using interview data from 36 individuals in a study conducted with two rural community-based superfast broadband organisations in the UK, it identifies whether superfast broadband plays a role in enhancing rural community resilience. Anticipated outcomes are identified including an increased use of high-capacity services, specifically video services, and also the potential for making new patterns and habits of usage through alternative connection possibilities. Superfast access is equated to increased control over everyday actions, and the need for speed is positioned in relation to the reliability that speed provides for users. Finally, the Internet is perceived broadly as an individualised tool, one that can be accessed for personal skill building, empowerment and ultimately individual scale resilience. These findings highlight the complex, and at times contradictory nature of the relationship between superfast broadband, rural users and potential individual and community resilience. This paper concludes by identifying future research directions

Analysing the role of Superfast Broadband in enhancing rural community resilience

Superfast broadband services (Internet connections with downstream speeds of thirty megabits per second or more) are becoming a constant presence in marketing and government literature, which often detail the beneficial impacts on individuals’ social and leisure activities, employment options, and overall community well-being. This paper presents findings from a multi-phase project examining community-led superfast broadband initiatives in the United Kingdom. It includes methods of analysis of communities prior to obtaining superfast services as well as following a period of connectivity. The framework for assessing effects on rural community resilience of both the superfast broadband adoption, and the presence of community participation in its physical development, is outlined with early indications given. Finally, this paper postulates several transformative facets of digital connectivity and community-based broadband organisations

Community-led broadband in rural digital infrastructure development: implications for resilience

Community-led broadband initiatives represent a relatively recent shift in rural broadband provision. They are locally-led organisations that voluntarily spring up to respond to the lack, or perceived lack, of adequate broadband in their communities. Particularly present in rural spaces, few studies have investigated this mode of broadband delivery, which is gaining attention in the United Kingdom and internationally. This paper seeks to explore the implications of the participatory nature of such broadband initiatives, identifying a) whether pursuing a participatory community-led model for broadband deployment plays a role in enhancing rural social resilience, and b) specifically how leadership and informal digital champions are positioned and perceived throughout this process, and their relationship with rural social resilience. The conceptual framework of ‘social resilience’ acts as a contemporary analytical tool for understanding the impact of community-led broadband. Using findings from 56 semi-structured interviews across two phases from two community-led broadband organisations, Broadband for the Rural North (B4RN) in England and Broadband for Glencaple and Lowther (B4GAL) in Scotland, this paper contributes to both digital scholarship and the theoretical development of ‘resilience’ as a concept. Community-led broadband is shown to reflect a ‘localism’ development approach, and this process has strengthened local rural identity for individuals. The role of digital champions, as leaders in the community-led broadband movement, is key to developing the digital resource within rural communities. However, it can also be problematic, entrenching existing inequalities and feelings concerning exclusion, ultimately detracting from individuals' ability to participate. The process and the eventual presence of new technology have contributed to new spatial understandings of community identity, based on regional linkages, and new communities of interest. We conclude that community-led broadband, and in particular the leadership and participation processes, can contribute to social resilience overall, but ultimately is another example of uneven rural development

Transformation in a changing climate: a research agenda

The concept of transformation in relation to climate and other global change is increasingly receiving attention. The concept provides important opportunities to help examine how rapid and fundamental change to address contemporary global challenges can be facilitated. This paper contributes to discussions about transformation by providing a social science, arts and humanities perspective to open up discussion and set out a research agenda about what it means to transform and the dimensions, limitations and possibilities for transformation. Key focal areas include: (1) change theories, (2) knowing whether transformation has occurred or is occurring; (3) knowledge production and use; (4), governance; (5) how dimensions of social justice inform transformation; (6) the limits of human nature; (7) the role of the utopian impulse; (8) working with the present to create new futures; and (9) human consciousness. In addition to presenting a set of research questions around these themes the paper highlights that much deeper engagement with complex social processes is required; that there are vast opportunities for social science, humanities and the arts to engage more directly with the climate challenge; that there is a need for a massive upscaling of efforts to understand and shape desired forms of change; and that, in addition to helping answer important questions about how to facilitate change, a key role of the social sciences, humanities and the arts in addressing climate change is to critique current societal patterns and to open up new thinking. Through such critique and by being more explicit about what is meant by transformation, greater opportunities will be provided for opening up a dialogue about change, possible futures and about what it means to re-shape the way in which people live

The Discovery of a Potent, Selective, and Peripherally Restricted Pan-Trk Inhibitor (PF-06273340) for the Treatment of Pain

The neurotrophin family of growth factors, comprised of nerve growth factor (NGF), brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), neurotrophin 3 (NT3), and neurotrophin 4 (NT4), is implicated in the physiology of chronic pain. Given the clinical efficacy of anti-NGF monoclonal antibody (mAb) therapies, there is significant interest in the development of small molecule modulators of neurotrophin activity. Neurotrophins signal through the tropomyosin related kinase (Trk) family of tyrosine kinase receptors, hence Trk kinase inhibition represents a potentially “druggable” point of intervention. To deliver the safety profile required for chronic, nonlife threatening pain indications, highly kinase-selective Trk inhibitors with minimal brain availability are sought. Herein we describe how the use of SBDD, 2D QSAR models, and matched molecular pair data in compound design enabled the delivery of the highly potent, kinase-selective, and peripherally restricted clinical candidate PF-06273340

A review of the rural-digital policy agenda from a community resilience perspective

© 2016 The Authors This paper utilises a community resilience framework to critically examine the digital-rural policy agenda. Rural areas are sometimes seen as passive and static, set in contrast to the mobility of urban, technological and globalisation processes (Bell et al., 2010). In response to notions of rural decline (McManus et al., 2012) rural resilience literature posits rural communities as ‘active,’ and ‘proactive’ about their future (Skerratt, 2013), developing processes for building capacity and resources. We bring together rural development and digital policy-related literature, using resilience motifs developed from recent academic literature, including community resilience, digital divides, digital inclusion, and rural information and communication technologies (ICTs). Whilst community broadband initiatives have been linked to resilience (Plunkett-Carnegie, 2012; Heesen et al., 2013) digital inclusion, and engagement with new digital technologies more broadly, have not. We explore this through three resilience motifs: resilience as multi-scalar; as entailing normative assumptions; and as integrated and place-sensitive. We point to normative claims about the capacity of digital technology to aid rural development, to offer solutions to rural service provision and the challenges of implementing localism. Taking the UK as a focus, we explore the various scales at which this is evident, from European to UK country-level

A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF RURAL COMMUNITY LEADERSHIP: TOWARDS SYSTEMATISED UNDERSTANDING AND DIALOGUE ACROSS LEADERSHIP DOMAINS

Key texts in leadership research outline the attributes and practices of the effective leader, consistently emphasising relationship-building, trust, reciprocity, Emotional Intelligence and effectiveness of leadership styles. In rural community development research, there are descriptions of local leaders engendering and sustaining the confidence, resilience and capacity of ‘their’ communities. Such leaders are seen as "champions" working with a cohort of "usual suspects". These arrangements are particularly accentuated and fragile in remoter settlements. With limited exceptions, understanding tends to be largely case-study based. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to bring together for the first time the "macro" depictions and recommendations for sound leaders and leadership (from key texts) alongside the "micro"-level findings of rural community leadership literature, to review the extent to which the two sets of thinking and evidence resonate and reinforce one another. My analysis shows that: social embeddedness is consistently identified across both literatures, with extra-local links being a focus of the rural literature; Emotional Intelligence and leadership styles are investigated in the leadership literature, but only in one instance in the rural literature; and individual and collective agency and leadership are identified in both literatures. I conclude by identifying the implications of this critical analysis for leadership investment and training: tailored to complexity and embeddedness whilst also operationalising those transferable components of effective individual and group leadership observable in the literature. My findings contribute to understandings that move beyond the "mystique" of rural community leadership towards analyses that are: more systematic; based on an increasing evidence-base across domains; and likely to lead to more robust outcomes in and for remote and rural communities