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Colour in art education: does the history of colour matter for practice?
No full textThe focus of this chapter is colour education in art and design disciplines within post-secondary university-level programmes, and how disciplines use the history of colour in practice. While focusing on the Global North, UNESCO and the OECD inform global practice and promote the idea of disciplines having broad and coherent bodies of knowledge that provide the basis for independent lifelong learning. Sources closer to disciplinary teaching suggest that colour is often not a core part of current art and design curricula and, when present, is subject to misconceptions and misinformation. This is reflected in the visibility of colour in subject teaching frameworks. As ‘creative’ subjects, the understanding of creativity in contemporary art and design practice and theory, frames consideration of colour knowledge and practice. The chapter concludes with studies by the author that interrogated how we have not been colouring the curriculum. Contemporary art and design practices are operating relatively effectively without explicit understanding of current colour knowledge. As such, the chapter concludes support for some of the colour literacy project objectives in relation to the training of fine artists and designers and agrees that undergraduate curricula do need review
Class Struggles : Educational Value, Labour and Play
Get PDFPlay supports a child’s healthy physical, cognitive, emotional, and social development, whilst research reveals that neoliberal education is antagonistic to play. It has been widely argued that there is an antagonism because neoliberal education normatively values economics over a broader range of educational concerns. But if neoliberal education’s human capital-based foundation has refocused education around raising educational productivity, and if play supports the development of a child’s productive capacities, the argument that economics is normatively valued over play does not fully explain the antagonism. This thesis uses this contradiction as the basis for an original examination into why neoliberal primary education in England is antagonistic to play. It is argued that to understand the contradiction, it is necessary to consider neoliberal education and play as forms of productive activity. Drawing on the latest thinking from Open Marxism, this thesis uses empirical data collected from one primary school in England to develop the original concept of educational value production (EVP). EVP allows both the subject and the object of neoliberal primary education to be located within a specific type of productive activity. It provides a negative critique that can consider the human content, social relationships, and experiences of struggle that a ‘positive’ focus on abstract commensurability variously denies. The work suggests that the productivity that defines neoliberal education in England can be considered a contradictory process of class reproduction that aims to reproduce pupils as potential personifications of the category of labour, a potential working class, by leveraging the teachers’ class need to personify the category of labour. It is argued that such productivity can be understood as a process of fetishisation as it denies the antagonistic practice and social relations that constitute it. Here, teacher and pupil engagement in EVP is understood to constitute class within and through an antagonistic, contradictory and practical experience of struggle, in-against-and-beyond the category of labour. Neoliberal primary education’s antagonism to play in England can be considered in the context of the struggle to reproduce and personify the category of labour, by raising standards and progress within and through a high-stakes engagement in EVP, that relegates the pupils’ subjective desire to engage in play to a secondary concern. The central argument developed is that neoliberal primary education’s antagonism to play can be understood in terms of the economic and social need to objectively classify a potential labour force, to reproduce class relations in a fetishised form, that variously and contradictorily struggles in-against-and-beyond, the needs of the subjects who engage in it. The thesis provides an original empirical contribution to Marxian educational research that has traditionally been heavily theory-based. It develops Rikowski’s ‘web of capital’s forms in education’ argument, Ozga and Lawn’s notion of ‘proletarianization’, it expands on Das’s ‘classroom as a site of class struggle’ and critiques the idea that ‘productivity is almost everything’. The work raises questions about quality and freedom regarding education’s relationship to both economic and child development which aim to facilitate a reflexive consideration of educational practice, beyond the limitations that neoliberal education imposes
The AI Adoption Puzzle : An Integrative Model of Innovation Barriers, Enablers, and Digital Dynamic Capabilities
No full textDespite the transformative potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI), many firms struggle with its adoption, encountering significant barriers that stifle successful AI adoption in their innovation activities. However, existing technology adoption frameworks do not adequately explain why some firms can navigate these factors more effectively than others. This paper addresses this theoretical problem by developing and testing a theoretical model that integrates theory of digital dynamic capabilities. We posit that digital dynamic capabilities—a firm’s ability to digitally sense, digitally seize, and digitally transform—are the crucial organizational engine mediating the relationship between innovation factors and successful AI adoption in product / service innovation. We test our hypotheses using survey-based data collected from senior executives in 101 firms. The results show that digital dynamic capabilities play an important role in the AI adoption for innovation. Further, we find that in organizations with high innovation barriers innovation enablers lose their positive effect on digital dynamic capabilities. These findings allow us to gain a more holistic understanding of the AI adoption process and offer actionable insights for managers
The hybrid war scandal
No full textThis article considers the recent emergence of the concept of “hybrid warfare” in international politics. Rather than viewing the concept of hybrid warfare as a reflection of a new and distinct modality of war, this article argues that discourses of hybrid war have appeared in the form of a “geopolitical scandal” through which states have sought to recriminate and publicize the perceived transgressions of adversary states. Drawing on scholars of secrecy, scandal, and security, I argue that “the hybrid war scandal” has been underwritten by uneven and ultimately contradictory imaginations of war’s ontology, namely claims that (a) that the boundary between war and peace has been transgressed, (b) that the boundary between war and peace had previously been stable, and (c) that the West eschews this transgression while non-Western adversaries embrace it. I argue that by presenting the boundary between war and peace as transgressed, the hybrid war scandal ultimately places the civilian sphere in a position subordinate to war. I conclude with a call for critical scholars to “forget hybrid warfare” and insist upon the fundamentally political nature of questions concerning war's ontology
Multi-Dimensional Coupling Perspective on the Compatibility of Ecosystem Service Supply and Demand in Megacities and Future Scenario Simulation : The Case of Shanghai
No full textAmid global climate change and rapid urbanization, megacities such as Shanghai confront prominent ecological challenges. A critical issue is the growing mismatch between the supply of and demand for urban green space (UGS) ecosystem services. This study aims to explore the supply–demand compatibility of Shanghai’s UGS ecosystem services and simulate future scenarios. Guided by the SSP1-2.6 scenario, it integrates the PLUS model, InVEST model, and nSFCA method to conduct dynamic analysis, quantifying supply–demand alignment and identifying imbalance areas. Results show a significant spatial mismatch: high demand but low supply in Shanghai’s inner ring and low demand but high supply in the outer ring. UGS attractiveness presents a core-concentrated and peripheral-diffused pattern by level. By 2030, a coordinated supply framework of “city-level dominance, community-level support, and neighborhood-level supplementation” will form, improving supply–demand alignment, though accessibility gaps persist. The study reveals that urbanization, planning policies, and population–spatial expansion asynchrony drive these patterns, providing scientific decision-making support for optimizing Shanghai’s green space planning and building an ecologically livable city
The Value of Citizens’ Juries on Assisted Dying : Hearing the Public Voice
No full textNuffield Council on Bioethics Member Professor Suzanne Ost shares insights from her role as an expert adviser to citizens’ juries on assisted dying both in Jersey and in England
Bi-Objective Strategic and Operational Decision-Making in Redundancy Allocation Problems with Dynamic Maintenance
No full textDeterministic optimisation considers problems in which a decision-maker makes a single strategic decision, which are commonly formulated as mixed-integer linear programmes (MILPs). In contrast, stochastic dynamic optimisation considers problems involving sequential operational decisions in a random environment, typically modelled as Markov decision processes (MDPs). Separate still is bi-objective optimisation, in which trade-offs between competing objectives are explored. Frameworks that integrate strategic and operational decisions through MILPs and MDPs can be known as MDP Design frameworks, and the existing literature on this is limited to two prior studies each with their own approach, highlighting the complexity of merging these two disparate types of decision making. Furthermore, no previous attempts have been made to introduce multiple objectives into MDP Design. This thesis lies at the intersection of deterministic, stochastic dynamic, and bi-objective optimisation, seeking to answer questions as to how to formalise such problems, how to optimise such problems either exactly or approximately, and how the resulting modelling framework and solution methodologies can be applied in the context of redundancy allocation, i.e. the allocation of copies or backups of components in some system to improve its reliability, and the operational decisions as to how to maintain such systems to balance between reliability and costs. This thesis provides a novel MDP Design framework that is well-suited to modelling more complex structural relationships between design decisions and the resulting state and action spaces of the MDP. Any problem within this framework is a MILP, and can therefore be solved exactly by a MILP solver. However, this is known to be computationally expensive, so approximate solution methodologies are required to solve larger problems. A common theme throughout this thesis is the use of decomposition to break problems up into smaller subproblems, either breaking the strategic and operational stages of the MDP Design problem back into two distinct phases, or breaking a large and specially structured MDP down into smaller MDPs. The computational results show that these methods are effective, with a massive improvement in terms of scalability to larger problem instances, and solution quality comparable to that of the exact solver on smaller instances. The results of these experiments demonstrate that solving problems with the proposed MDP Design framework is not beyond the current capabilities of Operational Research. As such, especially when paired with the structural flexibility of the framework, it is believed that these modelling and solution techniques could be suited to the integration of problems outside of system design and maintenance
Family Experiences of Caring for Someone with Heart Failure and Cognitive Difficulties and Living with Heart Failure as A Couple : A Thematic Synthesis
No full textMindful Eating Aspects as Bridging Concepts Represented through the MEDEC Cards : Towards a Design Framework for Mindful Eating Technologies
No full textEating is complex, as is people's relationship to food, which significantly impacts wellbeing and health. Mindful eating interventions have been shown to be effective in addressing problematic eating, and mindful eating has also gained increasing interest as a research topic in HCI, albeit with limited grounding in health research, so that we know little about how HCI work could be informed by health research on mindful eating and its interventions. Such a theoretical foundation grounded in health research is crucial to ensure the design of safe and effective mindful eating technologies and interventions. To address this gap, we present an analysis of health research on mindful eating principles, measurement scales, and therapeutic interventions such as the MB-EAT program, which helped us identify the main aspects of mindful eating. Then, we conducted a scoping review on technologies targeting these aspects, from which we curated 16 design exemplars representing the breadth of these technologies and generated a new SmartPlate conceptual design. Then, we designed the Mindful Eating Design Critique (MEDEC) cards and reported workshops with 36 mindful eating practitioners who used the MEDEC cards to critique the set of design exemplars. Our main contributions include a solid theoretical foundation grounded in health research for the design of mindful eating technologies, the MEDEC cards as a novel critique tool consisting of 29 cards improved based on practitioners' feedback, and a design framework to further support research and development of mindful eating technologies
“When I went for a fitting, I was told I was too fat for a stab vest, so I didn’t have one for seven years” : uniforms, (un)belonging and women’s bodies in policing
No full textThis article examines the lived experiences of female police officers in relation to uniform provision, particularly body armour, in England and Wales. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), the study draws on interviews and focus groups with 88 women across five police forces in 2023-24 to explore how the police uniform fails to accommodate women’s bodies, resulting in pain, discomfort, and restricted movement - especially for those with larger breasts or bodies. Officers described being unable to breathe, suffering long-term back issues, and feeling shamed for requesting refits. Access to better-fitting equipment was inconsistent and often role-dependent, fuelling perceptions of unfairness and exclusion. This study focuses specifically on the institutional infrastructures that govern body-armour provision, including procurement processes, fitting protocols, and role-based access to PPE and discusses recommendations for establishing minimum standards, reintroducing fitting infrastructures and strengthening accountability in procurement