Walking women: shifting the tales and scales of mobility

Narratives attached to walking practices, influenced by the Romantic, Naturalist and avant-garde movements, continue to frame and prioritise aestheticised acts of walking as heroic, epic, individualist, and conquering. This reiteration of dominant knowledge risks obscuring certain types of walking and other ways to think about and recognise walking art’s potentialities. Encountering work by contemporary women artists and interviewing them about their motivations and experiences suggests the need for a radical mobilization of the rhetorics of scale, a task we begin here. The walking art works we introduce propose a destabilisation of values, unsettling familiar analytical and interpretative approaches: the local is magnified to the scale of the epic; the epic is one small step after another; the familiar is a site of risk; and walking a means for building relations rather than escaping them. Whilst assumptions about who walks, in what way and with what value are confronted, so too is the nature of the task in hand, as the walking body remains entangled in monumental historical and social structures, including the spatial

The utilization of Faith Development Theory and Faith Styles perspective to shape a Christian education program

The purpose of this study was to investigate characteristics of the faith development of members of the congregation of Oak View Methodist Church. The research evaluated the relationship between a person’s faith level and his/her participation in Christian education. Contributing to the body of faith development research, this research served as an extension of Fowler’s (1981) Faith Development Theory (FDT), as well as the Faith Styles Model (Streib, 2001; 2005), which is an advancement of FDT. In this mixed-method study the researcher also investigated whether there is a significant relationship between the Faith Development Interview (FDI), a qualitative measure of faith development and the Religious Schema Scale (RSS), a quantitative measure of faith development. The quantitative instrument was a 15-questions likert-scale survey administered to 900 adult worship service attendees with a response rate of 666 surveys, or 74%. From this sample twenty-one interviewees were randomly selected. Through a series of twenty-five Faith Development Interview questions, respondents were encouraged to experientially address faith issues by sharing details and feelings about their lived experiences. The data from the RSS showed there is no significant relationship between a person’s faith level and his/her participation in Christian education programs. Thus, if the goal of Bible study classes is to develop a stronger faith in the participants, this study indicates that the goal is not being achieved. The Religious Schema Scale shows promise as a predictor of Faith Development Interview scores and could provide a much more time and cost effective method of measuring faith levels than the FDI. The FDI offers rich text about the attitudes and values in life that have shaped the faith of the interviewees and proves useful in providing data for Christian educators about faith levels of the congregation. The Religious Schema Scale results reveal an unanticipated yet important conclusion. The RSS score on one subscale does not predict the score on another subscale. Finally, Faith Development Interviews offer rich text about the attitudes and values in life that have shaped the faith of interviewees and proves useful in providing data for Christian educators about the faith levels of the congregation

The Rebound Effect: Some Questions Answered

Greenhouse gas (and other pollutant) emissions from energy use are now taken to be a problem both internationally and for individual national and regional governments. A number of mechanisms are being employed to reduce energy consumption demand as part of climate and energy policies internationally. A central policy focus is increased efficiency in the use of energy. However, the straightforward link between increased energy efficiency and reduced energy consumption has been questioned. This is due to the notion of the ‘rebound effect’. Rebound occurs when improvements in energy efficiency actually stimulate the direct and indirect demand for energy in production and/or consumption. It is triggered by the fact that an increase in the efficiency in the use of energy acts to reduce the implicit price of energy, or the price of effective energy services for each physical unit of energy used. Thus, it is an economic phenomenon. The rebound effect implies that measures taken to reduce energy use might lead to increases in carbon emissions, or at least not offset them to the extent anticipated. It is possible to distiguish between direct rebound effects in energy consumption in the activity where energy efficiency has increased, indirect rebound effects from income and substitutuion effects and economy-wide rebound effects (impacts on macro-level energy use). This paper attempts to provide a non-technical overview of work on the latter, carried out under an ESRC-funded project investigating the source and magnitude of econom-wide rebound effects from increased energy efficiency in the UK.General equilibrium, energy efficiency, rebound effects, disinvestment.

Performance and the Stratigraphy of Place: Everything You Need to Build a Town is Here

Referencing the public art project project Everything You Need to Build a Town is Here, Wrights & Sites invite the reader to treat the chapter as a site rather than as a treatise. We have structured the text in four layers. Some materials drop through from one layer to another. Elements are introduced at one level and imitated or digested at another. The layers are variously unfinished and indiscrete, subject to influences and interferences, partly reconciled and partly not. While each of the layers has been written towards something, they were all attenuated at approximately the same time. There are coincidences. The writing attempts to address the editor's brief to: consider how archaeological methodologies and techniques might be used to reflect more directly on the contemporary world itself; how we might undertake archaeologies of, as well as in the present

Walking women: interviews with artists on the move

No abstract available

The Rebound Effect: Some Questions Answered

Greenhouse gas (and other pollutant) emissions from energy use are now taken to be a problem both internationally and for individual national and regional governments. A number of mechanisms are being employed to reduce energy consumption demand. A central one is increased efficiency in the use of energy. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations (IPCC, 2007) projects that by 2030 energy efficiency gains will provide a substantial part of the remedy for climate change by reducing global energy consumption to approximately 30% below where it would otherwise be. Such a reduction is argued to be almost sufficient to offset energy consumption increases driven by projected global economic growth. Similarly the widely cited Stern report (Stern, 2007), and the International Energy Agency (e.g. IEA, 2009), attach crucial importance to the potential for efficiency improvements to reduce energy use and related emissions. Within the European Union, one of the EU 20-20-20 targets for member states is to reduce energy consumption by 20% through increased energy efficiency (see, for example, European Commission, 2009). Moreover, the European Strategic Energy Technology Plan (SET-Plan) – see, for example, European Commission (2010) – places energy efficiency at the centre of its Smart Cities and European Electricity Grid Initiatives (among the European Industrial Initiatives (EII)). At the UK level, the UK Energy White Paper (2003) describes energy efficiency as one of the most cost effective and safest ways of addressing energy and climate policy objectives. In Scotland, the recently published ‘Energy Action Plan’, the Scottish Government sets out Scotland’s first national target to improve energy efficiency and how this will be achieved with the use of grants given to local authorities. In the Appendix to this paper, for the reader’s information, we provide a summary overview of energy efficiency policy instruments currently active within the UK and Scotland. The purpose of the current paper is to clarify some issues relating to the phenomenon of rebound effects. The paper originates from an interview with the Principle Investigator, Dr Karen Turner (University of Stirling, formerly of the University of Strathclyde) by Maggie Koerth-Baker, a science journalist working on a book for Wiley & Sons about the future of energy in the United States. The following is not a precise transcript of that interview; rather it picks out and develops key issues from the questions posed and the answers given

Input-output analyses of the pollution content of intra- and inter-national trade flows

This paper considers the application of input-output accounting methods to consider the pollution implications of different production and consumption activities, with specific focus on pollution embodied in intra-and inter-national trade flows. We consider the illustrative case studies of interregional trade flows between two regions of the UK and between five Mid-West regions/states within the US. We focus on different types of air pollutant of current policy concern in each case and demonstrate how use of the environmental input-output framework allows us to analyse the nature and significance of interregional pollution spillovers. Our results raise questions in terms of the extent to which authorities at regional level can control local emissions where they are limited in the way some emissions can be controlled, particularly with respect to changes in demand elsewhere within the national economy. This implies a need for policy co-ordination between national and regional level authorities to meet emissions reductions targets. Moreover, the existence of pollution trade balances between regions also raises issues in terms of net losses/gains in terms of pollutants as a result of interregional trade. In conducting analyses for different types of air pollutant (here CO2 as a global warming gas, GHG, in the UK case and ammonia, NH3, as a pollutant of more local concern in the US case) we also consider how pollution embodied in international trade flows may be accounted for and attributed