Editorial

Frances Bell and Rhona Sharpe became co-editors of ALT-J in September 2007, experiencing generous support from the previous team of editors, Grainne Conole, Martin Oliver and Jane Seale, during the handover period. With the support of the Editorial Board and ALT's new Director of Development, Mark van Harmelen and Publications Officer, Louise Ryan, we have a great opportunity to build on the many strengths introduced at ALT-J by the previous editors. My first venture was to commission a special issue on Learning and Teaching in Immersive Virtual Worlds, with Maggi Savin-Baden and Robert Ward as co-editors. Projects in immersive virtual worlds were proliferating, raising questions about the opportunities for learning offered by these new spaces, and how students and academics would respond to them. There was a place for the publication of early findings, and theories to guide and inform ongoing research. Are immersive virtual worlds 'disruptive technologies' (Bower and Christensen 1995) in education? To answer this question, we need to pay close attention to their use in new applications, rather than in re-creations of traditional learning activities online. Learning and teaching in Immersive Virtual Worlds This special issue comprises a number of exciting initiatives and developments that begin to put issues of learning in immersive virtual worlds centre stage. Although learning through specific types of serious games has been popular for some years, the pedagogical value of immersive worlds is currently not only inchoate but also under-researched. Whilst several of the articles here are not based on empirical research, what they do offer is new ways of considering the pedagogical purposes of using these kinds of digital spaces. The difficulty with the perception of immersive virtual worlds is that there is often a sense that they are seen as being dislocated from physical spaces, and yet they are not. Web spaces are largely viewed as necessarily freer locations where there is a sense that it is both possible and desirable to 'do things differently'. The consequence is that digital pedagogies tend to be, or at least feel, less ordered than much of face-to-face learning, forcing a reconsideration of how learning spaces in digital contexts are to be constituted (for further discussion on this see Savin-Baden 2007). Immersive virtual worlds demand that we confront the possibility of new types of visuality, literacy, pedagogy, representations of knowledge, communication and embodiment. Thus, as Pelletier has argued, “technologies are systems of cultural transmission, creating new contexts within which existing social interests express themselves” (2005, 12). Yet there remain conflicts about whether “pedagogy must lead the technology”, a stance Cousin (2005) believes has become something of a mantra. Although this position would seem plausible and convincing to adopt, it denies the difficulties inherent in putting technology in the lead. It seems that many of the difficulties about the reflexive relationship between pedagogy and technology stem from a failure to ask what might appear to be some straightforward questions, such as: * What do we mean by pedagogy in immersive virtual worlds? * For what is the learning technology to be used? * Is it learning technology, teaching technology, technology to enhance teaching and learning, or something else? * What is the relationship between the type of pedagogy to be adopted and the type of pedagogy currently being used? Cousin (2005) also points out that technology is not just lying there waiting for pedagogues to put to good use - but it might be that that is how some innovators see the situation. Knowledge to go, knowledge on the move is embodied by open source systems and in particular Web 2.0 technologies, with their emphasis on user-generated content. Yet what remains problematic is students' engagement with immersive worlds: there seems to be a marked contrast between how such spaces are used by students within the university and what they do outside formal learning environments. We hope that through this special issue some of the queries and questions raised here will promote engagement in ongoing debates that begin to move forward both the arguments and practices, in interesting and innovative ways. References 1. Bower, J. L. andChristensen, C. M. (1995) Disruptive technologies: Catching the wave. Harvard Business Review pp. 43-53. 2. Cousin, G. Land, R. and Bayne, S. (eds) (2005) Learning from cyberspace. Education in cyberspace pp. 117-129. RoutledgeFalmer , Abingdon. 3. Pelletier, C. Land, R. andBayne, S. (eds) (2005) New technologies, new identities: The university in the informational age. Education in cyberspace pp. 11-25. RoutledgeFalmer , Abingdon. 4. Savin-Baden, M. Learning spaces. Creating opportunities for knowledge creation in academic life McGraw Hill , Maidenhead

How to make a city into a firetrap: Relations of land and property in the UK's cladding scandal

Despite legislation banning combustible cladding materials after the 2017 Grenfell fire, at least 10,000 buildings were still awaiting remediation in 2022. This is in large part because fragmented ownership and management structures alongside the specificities of British property law produced a situation in which individual apartment owners (leaseholders) were liable for the costs of remediation rather than those who own the buildings (freeholders) or the developers who built them. Faced with unaffordable remediation bills, leaseholders became stuck in uninsurable, unsellable, potentially fire‐prone units. Through the case of a London housing block, we trace the relationship between the structure of landed property, value extraction, and the distribution of risk to understand how a significant portion of the UK's housing stock have remained firetraps. We argue that institutionalised value grabbing not only created the conditions of social murder but also became an obstacle to remediation, resulting in a politically charged “asset class struggle” over the way in which the structure of housing property and its capitalisation mediates social harm

Order, Order! Edmund Burke, the Body Politic and Arbitrary Power.

In his early work A Vindication of Natural Society (1756), Burke wrote of the political imaginings of ‘old Hobbes’ that ‘War was the State of Nature’ and that the ‘artificial Division of Mankind, into separate Societies, is a perpetual Source in itself of Hatred and Dissension among them’. This thesis, with extensive reference to his Writings and Speeches, argues that Burke offers a comprehensive refutation of Hobbesian modernity and ‘sovereignty’ located with the independent state and ‘sovereign’ individual. Instead, Burke is understood as a Christian Platonist thinker who drew on traditions of classical and mediaeval thought, including Cicero, Paul, Augustine, Aquinas and Hooker, to champion liberal constitutionalism as the best defence against manifestations of autocratic and arbitrary power in civil, social, political and international spheres. ‘I love order, for the universe is order’, he wrote, and this thesis takes ‘order’ as a key concept, understood analogically, to explore the relevance of Burke’s understanding of constitutional power today, in the face of the challenges of climate catastrophe, the emergence of the sovereign individual and autocrat, conflicting notions of civil rights and the populism, post-truth and polarizations that threaten modern ‘democracy’. The argument is that Burke offers an alternative modernity upon which a constructive theo-political imaginary can be based, characterized not by the assumption of atheism, but rather an openness to a sense of divine providence that orders the ends of human affairs towards the common good, or commonwealth. Burke’s refusal of the ‘abstractions’ of ideology in preference for a circumstantial wisdom and a philosophic spirit of analogy commends a political imagination for contemporary times that stretches towards the whole, rather than the part, the prescriptions of tradition rather than the ideologies of utopianism, and the duties of public service rather than the will to arbitrary power

How to Make a City into a Firetrap: Relations of Land and Property in the UK's Cladding Scandal

Despite legislation banning combustible cladding materials after the 2017 Grenfell fire, at least 10,000 buildings were still awaiting remediation in 2022. This is in large part because fragmented ownership and management structures alongside the specificities of British property law produced a situation in which individual apartment owners (leaseholders) were liable for the costs of remediation rather than those who own the buildings (freeholders) or the developers who built them. Faced with unaffordable remediation bills, leaseholders became stuck in uninsurable, unsellable, potentially fire-prone units. Through the case of a London housing block, we trace the relationship between the structure of landed property, value extraction, and the distribution of risk to understand how a significant portion of the UK's housing stock have remained firetraps. We argue that institutionalised value grabbing not only created the conditions of social murder but also became an obstacle to remediation, resulting in a politically charged “asset class struggle” over the way in which the structure of housing property and its capitalisation mediates social harm

Method Development for the Stereoselective Synthesis of Heterocycles.

Efforts made to improve the scope of palladium-catalyzed carboetherification and carboamination reactions are illustrated herein, and strategies for overcoming various limitations to the method are discussed. As described in this thesis, the synthesis of bis-, fused- and poly-substituted tetrahydrofurans, 1,3-oxazolidines, benzopyrans and benzoxepines was achieved through the palladium-catalyzing coupling of γ-hydroxy alkenes, O-vinyl-1, 2-amino-alcohols, homoallylphenols and 2-(pent-4-en-1-yl)phenols with aryl and alkenyl halides. The synthesis of the aforementioned heterocycles represents a significant advancement in the methodology toward the synthesis of natural products, especially the annonaceous acetogenins. In Chapter 2, a novel strategy for the synthesis of bis- and fused-tetrahydrofurans is described. Sequential Pd-catalyzed carboetherification reactions were performed to yield bis- and fused-THFs, which enabled access into biologically active compounds such as the annonaceous acetogenins. As described in Chapter 3, the diastereoselectivity of Pd-catalyzed carboetherification reactions of substrates bearing internal alkenes was improved by employing S-Phos, an electron-rich, bulky monodentate biaryl ligand, which promoted reductive elimination and suppressed β-hydride elimination. As a result, poly-substituted tetrahydrofurans were produced in excellent diastereoselectivity, and biologically active compounds possessing this motif, such as Simplakidine A, a cytotoxic marine natural product, may be synthesized using the proposed methodology. In Chapter 4, the synthesis of 1,3-oxazolidines using a catalyst system based on S-Phos is described. The use of S-Phos promoted reductive elimination, which was disfavored due to the presence of electron withdrawing substituents on the substrate. Through the work described in this thesis, 1,3-oxazolidines, an important structural motif in organic synthesis, can be obtained using Pd-catalyzed carboamination reactions. A catalyst system composed of Pd2(dba)3/S-Phos also proved to be useful for the production of benzopyrans, which are common in antioxidants and were previously inaccessible through our methodology. As outlined in Chapter 5, the scope of the methodology was expanded to include homoallylphenols, highlighting the ability of the catalyst to overcome entropic effects and the low nucleophilicity of phenols. Heterocycles containing 6-membered rings were produced in a convergent manner, allowing access into motifs common in biologically active materials. In Chapter 6, the methodology was extended towards benzoxepines, enabling the synthesis of biologically relevant materials.Ph.D.ChemistryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91561/1/amanfran_1.pd

Anticipating demand shocks: Patient capital and the supply of housing

‘Patient capital’ is presented by many policymakers as a panacea to address domestic (and sometimes city-level) gaps in financing urban development, particularly housing, that emerged in the post-2008 credit crunch. In this article, we analyse the complexities of patient investors’ entry into residential markets in London and their response to the first major, and unexpected, crisis of demand: the COVID-19 pandemic and immediate falls in market demand. We focus on how patient capital and the firms invested in the professionalised rental market, build to rent (BTR), have responded. We highlight three main responses: (1) advancing their lobbying efforts to secure a more supportive political environment; (2) protecting their income streams by offering new payment plans and adaptability to prevent void rates; (3) turning to a ‘reserve army’ of renters backed by the state – so-called Key Workers (KWs). We argue these demonstrate a continual and co-evolutionary dimension to policy promoting patient capital and the need for patient planning to govern patient investment in housing systems. Our findings are in ‘real-time’ and highlight the importance of structural uncertainties and the breakdown of long-term assumptions in shaping investment decisions

Theological Teflection : Methods

Reviewed by Rev. Susan Conra

State capitalism, capitalist statism: Sovereign wealth funds and the geopolitics of London’s real estate market

We respond to the special issue’s call for a multiscalar, historicised approach to state capitalism through an exploration of Sovereign Wealth Fund investment into London real estate. We point to how the UK’s ostensibly market-led recovery since the 2008 financial crisis has relied in part on attracting ‘patient’ state capitalist investments. In this, we contextualise the relational regulation of real estate markets as the outcome of intersecting state projects by considering the investment motivations of the single largest owner of London real estate, the Qatari Investment Authority, and the utilisation of their investment by UK governance actors. Focusing on Qatari Investment Authority’s involvement in London’s Olympic Village, we highlight how this strategic coupling in the real estate market realised domestic and geopolitical aims for the Qataris while facilitating the UK government's strategy to ameliorate London’s housing shortage by fostering a ‘build to rent’ asset class. In doing so, we contribute to readings of state capitalism as an ‘uneven and combined’ process beyond the traditional state/market binary by placing sovereign wealth fund investment into the context of city governance, the geopolitics of real estate and resultant relational forms of regulation

The unrecognized co-educator in academic service-learning: Community partners’ perspectives on college students serving diverse client populations

Universities strive to teach about diversity through their curriculum and classroom discussions; however, students may rarely encounter diverse populations on the college campus. Thus, faculty members have turned to academic service-learning to expose students to diverse client populations. Scholarship on academic service-learning has focused primarily on faculty and student perspectives, rarely accounting for the crucial role of community partners as co-educators in this endeavor. The present study investigates community partners’ perspectives on how academic service-learning impacts students whose backgrounds differ from those of their organization’s clients. The study highlights two main themes that community partners view as central to their role as co-educators in diversity education: college students’ initial responses to diverse clients, and the process through which community partners help college students understand different ways of life. Eliciting community partners’ perspectives will help university administrators, college students, and faculty understand the significant role community partners and clients can play in advancing diversity education.