University of Northern British Columbia: Open Journal Systems
Not a member yet
560 research outputs found
Sort by
“Teaching ‘The Big Two-Hearted River’: A Cognitive Approach to Leading Students into the Swamp”
Full text linkThe focus of this essay concerns the overlapping, potentially illuminating and educational contexts specific to Hemingway’s “The Big Two-Hearted River.” These contexts fall broadly into four categories: 1) those related to the intra- and extra-diegetic levels of the narrative and, specifically, the story of the protagonist’s fishing expedition; 2) those tied to the narrative’s creation, including those specific to Hemingway’s life and work; 3) those more elusive and yet no less important theoretical ones, including formalism, poststructuralism, ecocriticism, and, more recently, those that fall under the umbrella of cognitive-ecological understandings of literature; and, finally, 4) those contexts specific to contemporary environmental literature courses
Hansen, Peter H. The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2013.
No full textBest practices and recommendations on policy packaging
Full text linkThis report, which is the final deliverable of the Optic project (Optimal Policies for Transport In Combination), summarises two years of collaborative research into the policy process of combining individual measures into policy packages. Six stages of the policy process are identified. This report gives practical and general advice for each of these stages: Define objectives and targets Create an inventory of measures, identify potential primary measures and detect causal relationships Assess policy package Modify package Package implementation Evaluate effects, introduce remedial actions In addition, this report explores in further detail indicators and tools for the assessment of policy packages; the management of barriers; and issues of transferability
Entangled Species: The Inclusive Posthumanist Ecopoetics of Juliana Spahr
Full text linkIn her most recent collection, Well Then There Now (2011), Juliana Spahr promotes an inclusive posthumanist ethics by composing poetry that adopts the complex patterns of nature, a poetry that models the shared, connective spaces we inhabit with others. Reacting to our contemporary moment of intense globalization and economic imperialism, and the environmental changes accompanying these giant social forces, Spahr conducts investigations of and through language in order to become more fully aware of the interconnections between self and others; and between self, others and environment, including how material interconnections shape our social and cultural conditions. Through her signature use of Steinian repetition and parataxis—alongside a process of cutting up, hashing, and recycling text—Spahr looks critically at the systemic intersection of all organisms, including the artificial or non-living other. As this essay argues, by emphasizing points of convergence between human, machine, and animal, Spahr’s inclusive poetics teaches us how to live intersectionally with respect and regard for other species, and encourages us to acknowledge our existence as co-existence
The Ambitions of Policy Design
Full text linkPublic policy is concerned with solving or ameliorating social problems. Public policy design involves conscious invention, development, and application ofpatterns of action in problem resolution. Contemporary perceptions of widespread (if not wholesale) failure in purposive public policy should warn us that would-be policy designers face no easy task. Certainly, there has been no shortage of cautions against excessive ambition in consciously- pursued public policy. Our contention is that these critics have missed the target. Based on a correction of their aim, we will suggest there is little reason to eschew ambition in policy design, provided only that one attends closely to the conditions of policy formation. This is not to say that ambition should be pursued for its own sake, or that it is always appropriate, merely that fear of ambition should not act as a constraint. We warn the reader in advance that our survey of the critics is brief, in order to provide space for fuller articulation of our own position
Dirty, Pretty Trash: Confronting Perceptions through the Aesthetics of the Abject
Full text linkBoth abjection and the return of the abject are crucial feedback. We send away what we don’t want, but the forced confrontation of the abject can have a transformative power when we actually perceive what is a part of us and not apart from us. Visual feedback serves as a potential “event” that can let us experience how our behaviors are problematic; in turn, this knowledge can result in potential for change. When the abject appears in the form of art, it becomes enframed for our scopic pleasure and itself becomes an object to observe and reflect upon: abject as object. When it comes to our encounters with the material world of nature and art, both are more than the picturesque or the sublime, but instead embody the cultural connections that we sometimes wish we could ignore and keep safely out of sight or at a distance. This is why confrontations with the aestheticized abject can serve as potential sites for encounter and possibly of transformation. Artist Mark Dion conceives of art as part of this transformation, asserting that one way to encourage care for the more-than-human world is through an “aesthetic sensibility.” It is this sensibility that Dion employs in his work to address environmental concerns. Rather than ruminate on the sublime or pastoral, Dion explores the frequently invisible urban ecologies that the vast majority of people encounter but frequently keep at a distance. Dion’s work explores what happens to trash and the othered animals that inhabit such trashscapes. By framing the aestheticized abject in the gallery, we grant our bodies the opportunity to perceive and not to simply to look away
Iannini, Christopher P. Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2012.
Full text linkExperiments on Crowdsourcing Policy Assessment
Full text linkCan Crowds serve as useful allies in policy design? How do non-expert Crowds perform relative to experts in the assessment of policy measures? Does the geographic location of non-expert Crowds, with relevance to the policy context, alter the performance of non- experts Crowds in the assessment of policy measures? In this work, we investigate these questions by undertaking experiments designed to replicate expert policy assessments with non-expert Crowds recruited from Virtual Labor Markets. We use a set of ninety-six climate change adaptation policy measures previously evaluated by experts in the Netherlands as our control condition to conduct experiments using two discrete sets of non-expert Crowds recruited from Virtual Labor Markets. We vary the composition of our non-expert Crowds along two conditions: participants recruited from a geographical location directly relevant to the policy context and participants recruited at-large. We discuss our research methods in detail and provide the findings of our experiments