Climate Change Engagement: Results of a Multi-Task Game with a Purpose

Addressing the challenge of engaging people with climate change, this paper sheds light on the Climate Challenge, a crowdsourcing application in the tradition of games with purpose that relies on different strategies for informing and inviting users to adopt sustainable lifestyle choices. Towards building an extensive perspective of engagement, we statistically analyse specific game strategies based on users’ participation and performance, and build a panorama of users’ positioning in a behaviour change process. Preliminary results suggest features that should be considered in a Climate Challenge design roadmap

Application Design and Engagement Strategy of a Game with a Purpose for Climate Change Awareness

The Climate Challenge is an online application in the tradition of games with a purpose that combines practical steps to reduce carbon footprint with predictive tasks to estimate future climate-related conditions. As part of the Collective Awareness Platform, the application aims to increase environmental literacy and motivate users to adopt more sustainable lifestyles. It has been deployed in conjunction with the Media Watch on Climate Change, a publicly available knowledge aggregator and visual analytics system for exploring environmental content from multiple online sources. This paper presents the motivation and goals of the Climate Challenge from an interdisciplinary perspective, outlines the application design including the types of tasks built into the application, discusses incentive mechanisms, and analyses the pursued user engagement strategies

Creative Approaches to Landscape Research: Multisensory Multispecies Storytelling

The authors are the project team for the UKRI-funded ‘Multisensory Multispecies Storytelling to Engage Disadvantaged Groups in Changing Landscapes’ (2020-22) project, which used creative artist-led workshops to enable people from disadvantaged groups (young people with autism, deaf children, disabled adults, GP referrals, long-term unemployed and students) to explore and communicate their relationships with nature and landscapes. Participants engaged in activities in situated and specific landscapes in the north-west of England, producing creative works that represent their sensorial responses to those environments. The use of artistic and creative approaches as both a research tool and as a method of communicating outcomes enables forms of engagement with the topic that respond to the experiences of those who have taken part and the particularities of the selected locations. Drawing on participants’ experiences of these workshops, and the resulting creative works, this paper outlines the aims and outcomes of this project and examines the interrogative possibilities enabled by its creative approaches. In doing so it foregrounds the inclusive potential of such methods, and thereby the opportunities that creative methodologies offer in enabling marginalised and disadvantaged groups to engage in debates about nature and landscape use

Arthritogenic alphaviral infection perturbs osteoblast function and triggers pathologic bone loss

Arthritogenic alphaviruses including Ross River virus (RRV), Sindbis virus, and chikungunya virus cause worldwide outbreaks of musculoskeletal disease. The ability of alphaviruses to induce bone pathologies remains poorly defined. Here we show that primary human osteoblasts (hOBs) can be productively infected by RRV. RRV-infected hOBs produced high levels of inflammatory cytokine including IL-6. The RANKL/OPG ratio was disrupted in the synovial fluid of RRV patients, and this was accompanied by an increase in serum Tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase 5b (TRAP5b) levels. Infection of bone cells with RRV was validated using an established RRV murine model. In wild-type mice, infectious virus was detected in the femur, tibia, patella, and foot, together with reduced bone volume in the tibial epiphysis and vertebrae detected by microcomputed tomographic (μCT) analysis. The RANKL/OPG ratio was also disrupted in mice infected with RRV; both this effect and the bone loss were blocked by treatment with an IL-6 neutralizing antibody. Collectively, these findings provide previously unidentified evidence that alphavirus infection induces bone loss and that OBs are capable of producing proinflammatory mediators during alphavirus-induced arthralgia. The perturbed RANKL/OPG ratio in RRV-infected OBs may therefore contribute to bone loss in alphavirus infection

Critical international relations and the impact agenda

How should critical International Relations (IR) scholars approach the ‘impact agenda’? While most have been quite resistant to it, I argue in this essay that critical IR should instead embrace the challenge of impact – and that both IR as a field and the impact agenda more broadly would gain greatly from it doing so. I make this case through three steps. I show, firstly, that critical IR has till now been very much at the impact agenda’s margins, and that this situation contrasts strikingly with its well-established importance within IR teaching and research. I argue, secondly, that critical IR scholars both could and should do more impact work – that the current political conjuncture demands it, that many of the standard objections to doing so are misplaced, and indeed that ‘critical’ modes of research are in some regards better suited than ‘problem-solving’ ones to generating meaningful change – and offer a series of recommended principles for undertaking critically-oriented impact and engagement work. But I also argue, thirdly, that critical social science holds important lessons for the impact agenda, and that future impact assessments need to take these lessons on board – especially if critical IR scholarship is to embrace impact more fully. Critical IR, I submit, should embrace impact; but at the same time, research councils and assessments could do with modifying their approach to it, including by embracing a more critical and political understanding of what impact is and how it is achieved

Vegan celebrity activism: an analysis of the critical reception of Joaquin Phoenix’s awards speech activism

Acceptance speeches have long been used by celebrity activists as platforms from which to promote their personal, political or ethical agendas. The actor Joaquin Phoenix, an outspoken proponent for animal rights and veganism, dominated the Hollywood awards season in 2020 for his portrayal of Arthur Fleck in Joker and used his platform to address this cause. The reaction to Phoenix’s speech in the trade and mainstream press reveals much about the role of the celebrity activism in the contemporary cultural and political climate. This article analyses the critical reception of Phoenix’s Oscar speech across thirty-seven US and UK trade press and mainstream news articles. In doing so, we explore three key areas: firstly, we examine the notion of ‘acceptance speech activism’ and consider to what extent such speeches are culturally licensed. Secondly, we address the way in which Phoenix presents as an activist and as a celebrity to explore the tensions between these two identities. In doing so we highlight how gender and notions of hegemonic masculinity are managed and reproduced through the press discourse on celebrity animal rights activism. Finally, we seek to address the issues of authenticity by examining the press treatment of Phoenix’s veganism