An Examination of the Experiences of BAME Students in the Community and Criminal Justice Division

Freedom to Achieve is De Montfort University’s commitment to its students, whatever their ethnicity, to ensure there is an equal playing field. The attainment gap between Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME)1 and white students within UK Higher Education (HE) is well documented and DMU are part of a ground-breaking project to positively address this issue. As part of this multi-faceted programme, the Community and Criminal Justice Division (CCJ) undertook a pilot study to explore our BAME students’ experiences at the university. The aim of these results is to help establish preliminary short term and long term strategies to help deliver overall improvements in the BAME attainment gap and aspirations to achieve at DMU. After undertaking a survey of BAME students within the CCJ, a series of key thematic areas emerged, namely: 1) Assessments, 2) Discrimination, 3) Diversity, 4) Lecture Style, 5) Support, and 6) Universal Design for Learning. We examine and explore these issues in relation to three key theoretical models used to explore BAME attainment in Higher Education. Nigrescence Theory, Social Identity Theory, and Critical Race Theory are all used to help understand the experiences of BAME students. Using the results, we have identified a series of short and long term recommendations that could be utilised to ensure and take steps towards addressing the attainment gap between BAME and White students at DMU

What’s next? Beyond the USA and European climate change counter movement

The existing and fruitful body of literature on the climate change counter movement is well documented in the USA, European and Australian context. This presentation charts what future climate obstruction and climate counter movement research could look like. It outlines the emerging areas of discussion drawing on the emerging data particularly on Latin America on the climate counter movement, while exploring the contours of potential counter movement exploration across other regions. Finally, it identifies some pathways forward for academic research in the field of climate change counter movement studies identifying a series of potential research questions that can be taken forward to advance our understanding of climate obstruction

Personal safety mobile applications: Just another way of responsibilising survivors of IPV or a tool for empowerment? A survivor’s view!

Research and the academic literature have indicated the growing use of technologies such as the use of mobile phone applications as a tool either for the commission of IPV by perpetrators (‘tech abuse’) or as an ‘educational’ or ‘awareness raising’ forum/feature for both perpetrators and survivors of IPV. However, there is less exploration currently regarding whether and how this technology might be used as an empowerment tool in cases of IPV. Our research contributes towards closing this current gap. In this paper we focus on the preliminary results of our project examining the use of a mobile personal safety application in cases of IPV with a group of individual survivors assessed as medium/standard risk of ‘Domestic Violence’ in the UK. Our research sample consists of voluntary participants receiving services from specialist domestic abuse support agencies in one region of England. We also completed a qualitative analysis of data collected from a series of group and individual interviews. Results Drawing on the findings we examine the perceptions of the personal safety of survivors of IPV comparing those who choose to use the personal safety application with a control group whom did not. We explore intersectional differences between groups and what role the mobile phone safety application played as both a tool to assist towards the ‘protection’ of survivors as an element of their ‘safety plans’, and whether the personal safety application was perceived as an empowerment and personal resilience tool. We provide some recommendations which outline the strengths and challenges of personal safety mobile phone applications and how their utilisation can be disseminated more widely across the Domestic Violence sector

Generic Personal Safety Applications; empowering victims of Domestic Violence and Abuse? A Practitioner Lens

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Bespoke and generic Domestic Violence and Abuse (DVA) Personal Safety Applications (PSAs) have become a popular choice for strategic crime prevention projects by those in the criminal justice sector; to achieve justice through digital means as part of the wider digital justice project. These PSAs have been heralded as tools for the protection, empowerment, and resilience building of victims in DVA, despite limited independent evaluations. This article explores the use of a generic PSA, which the police have adopted for rollout to victims of DVA in one region of the United Kingdom. We undertook a thematic analysis of data taken from a roundtable and three follow up focus groups with practitioners from the police, criminal justice, DVA specialist sector, and victim services, alongside the PSA development team. We found both some support for using this PSA and serious concerns regarding its use in DVA situations

A Perspective on the Historical Analysis of Race and Treatment Storage and Disposal Facilities in the United States

Studies of environmental injustice have been intensely scrutinized by social science researchers since the publication of the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice report entitled Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States in 1987. Importantly, there has been an emphasis on analysing longitudinal data to answer the question 'which came first, people or pollution?' In addition, determining where environmental hazards are located and how demographics around those hazards are estimated has become central to any empirical enquiry on the topic. This new letter by Mohai and Saha (2015 Environ. Res. Lett. 10 115008) adds to our emerging understanding of environmental justice by analysing the distribution of Treatment, Storage and Disposal Facilities across the United States to determine why they are concentrated in non-white and low income neighbourhoods. The researchers clearly demonstrate how longitudinal analysis and advances in geographic information system methodology can help address meaningful social questions about environmental inequality that are central to environmental policy and practice

CSSN Research Report 2021:2: The Mises Institute Network and Climate Policy. 9 Findings

Think tanks have played a decisive role in the organised obstruction of climate action, denying, minimising, or derailing ambitious climate change mitigation. This research briefing reviews the case of the Ludwig von Mises Institutes and the Property and Freedom Society, a network of ultra-libertarian groups active around the world, which we refer to as the Mises Institute Network in the mobilisation and the dissemination of climate policy opposition discourse. We review the origins, the history, the global distribution and the climate-related output of 31 Mises Institutes between 2000 and 2021. Our analysis reveals climate obstruction messaging based on a critique of climate science, principled objections to state intervention and planning and the social forces supporting climate change mitigation, as well as advocacy of free-market environmentalism as a suitable alternative to established climate politics. While Mises social theory includes a determined critique of environmentalism, it paid limited attention to climate change before 2016. From 2016, there has been a concerted effort to disseminate climate opposition discourse featuring a clear spike in published articles during 2019. Contextually, 2019 saw the U.S. Green New Deal proposal and the European Union Green Deal decision suggesting a tipping point for advocating free-market environmentalism in response to climate change to contend the increased state intervention discourse emerging in domestic and international climate policy planning. Additionally, ties exist between scholars of Mises Institutes to a broad range of business groups ranging from gold, trade and investment firms in Germany, tobacco companies in the U.S., business school, consulting and service firms in Spain, and metal employer association and financial groups in Sweden. Furthermore, the network is engaging in an international effort to recruit new members into the ultra-libertarian movement, with an active university presence and active online campaign to spread Mises’ philosophy and recruit more members, particularly students and young people, to the movement. Despite the lack of transparency and limited evidence of fossil industry funding, the Mises Network of think tanks has a clear voice in the denial and delaying think tank train, gaining speed at this pivotal moment in time. Our results indicate a dedicated effort to spread climate change opposition messages across the network. The core ideology of the Austrian economics tradition related to Ludwig von Mises provides the climate change opposition with a straightforward repertoire of arguments. Put simply, the coordinated activities of Mises Institutes across countries illustrates an attempt to circulate widely opposition to climate policy based on the radicalism of Mises social theory that focuses on resistance to government intervention and a form of market fundamentalism as a primer to maintain business as usual at the behest of the planet

Climate Obstruction in the Global South: Future Research Trajectories

open access article“Climate Obstruction” broadly refers to campaigns and other policy actions led by well-organized and financed networks of corporate and other actors who have actively sought to prevent global and/or national action on climate change over the past four decades. In turn, these campaigns often shape public debates, which can affect political support and collective mobilization to mitigate climate change. However, to date, most of the research on climate obstruction has focused on countries in the Global North, especially the United States. Given considerable gaps in research and knowledge, this opinion paper presents a future research agenda needs to shine greater light on if and in what form climate obstruction in the Global South appears