Groundwater management zones for conjunctive water conservation in Hays County and the Hill Country region of Central Texas

This report examines a provision of Texas groundwater law granting authority to Groundwater Conservation Districts (GCDs) to create Groundwater Management Zones (GMZs) to address significant differences in hydrogeological conditions or groundwater use in specific areas of an aquifer. The report considers whether these management zones are effective tools for conserving groundwater in order to preserve surface water flows particularly in the Hays Trinity Groundwater Conservation District and, more generally, in the Hill Country region of Central Texas. It presents two case studies of existing GMZs in Barton Springs Edwards Aquifer Conservation District and Hill Country Underground Water Conservation District and insights from interviews with GCD staff involved in establishing and refining these zones. The report then evaluates how effective the zones would be for protecting the Middle Trinity Aquifer in the area around Jacob’s Well Spring and the Cypress Creek Watershed. It concludes by providing a road map and recommendations based on best practices drawn from the findings described above.Community and Regional Plannin

Discutindo a educação ambiental no cotidiano escolar: desenvolvimento de projetos na escola formação inicial e continuada de professores

A presente pesquisa buscou discutir como a Educação Ambiental (EA) vem sendo trabalhada, no Ensino Fundamental e como os docentes desta escola compreendem e vem inserindo a EA no cotidiano escolar., em uma escola estadual do município de Tangará da Serra/MT, Brasil. Para tanto, realizou-se entrevistas com os professores que fazem parte de um projeto interdisciplinar de EA na escola pesquisada. Verificou-se que o projeto da escola não vem conseguindo alcançar os objetivos propostos por: desconhecimento do mesmo, pelos professores; formação deficiente dos professores, não entendimento da EA como processo de ensino-aprendizagem, falta de recursos didáticos, planejamento inadequado das atividades. A partir dessa constatação, procurou-se debater a impossibilidade de tratar do tema fora do trabalho interdisciplinar, bem como, e principalmente, a importância de um estudo mais aprofundado de EA, vinculando teoria e prática, tanto na formação docente, como em projetos escolares, a fim de fugir do tradicional vínculo “EA e ecologia, lixo e horta”.Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educació

Performing that-which-will-become posthuman and queer bodies in the works of Heinrich von Kleist and Oscar Wilde

textThis dissertation focuses on two playwrights, at either end of the nineteenth century, who engage problems of the human body as a site of legitimation and authentication of identity by staging inversions of the categories of natural and artificial. Against the backdrop of increasing mechanization and dematerialization of embodiment, Heinrich von Kleist and Oscar Wilde explore the transgressive possibilities of artificial bodies as reactions against the erasure of the diversity of actual bodies. I read in their works similar rejections of the body as a site that narrowly prescribes gender identity and sexual behavior according to mechanistic views of physiology. In doing so, I argue that their aesthetic theories and dramas evince a longing for more flexible and complex models of embodiment that do not prescribe or authenticate gender and sexuality as functions of a mechanistic physiological nature. This project, then, locates some roots of posthuman and queer theories of embodiment in the dramas and aesthetic theories of these two dramatists. Kleist and Wilde use the dialogue form to explore the paradoxes produced by the distinction between the natural and the artificial and by the construction of the natural body as fundamentally mechanical. Kleist’s Penthesilea and Wilde’s Salomé resist the humanist naturalization of gender and sexuality via the mechanization of the body. As anti-humanist counter-discourse and performance, the femme-fatales of their dramas are virtual bodies or bodies yet-to-come. I examine how these virtually queer, posthuman bodies in the text are performatively actualized on stage to provoke audiences to imagine modes of embodiment yet-to-come, or to pretend them into existence. I read theatre theory and practice as part of the complex technical and philosophical tools, for imagining bodies, as well as defining and performing identities, that precede the concept of the virtual in the context of computer technology. I conclude by arguing for the importance of literature, dialogue, drama, and the embodied materialities of performance to digital media or new media, as an attempt to steer thinking away from the VR model to the MOO model, from readymade product to participatory, dialogic process.Comparative Literatur

Financial conditions and financial sustainability in higher education: A literature review

This chapter offers a necessary summary of the key concepts of the financial conditions in the higher education (HE) sector, through a close examination of different approaches. Focusing on a review of current literature, the chapter provides an overview of the transformation and main uses of performance information in the HE sector as the result of public policy changes. The chapter also defines some of the key theoretical and practical elements to describe the financial conditions and distress of public universities, while also clarifying the distinctive features of financial sustainability. The authors highlight in their closing remarks the implications for future research developments. These issues touch the core of the financial challenges in the HE sector and require thought and resolution to ensure the long-term success of public universities worldwide