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The British migration-citizenship regime : from decolonisation to Brexit
No full textObjectives • This chapter asks how recognising connected sociologies and histories transforms how we understand who can move, where, and on what terms, today • It sets out the connections between the formation of national citizenships and the colonial governance of populations, including their access to mobility. This is illustrated through a retelling of the development of the British immigration and citizenship regime over the course of the twentieth century • It examines, in detail, the shifting status of the people of Hong Kong to demonstrate the significance of the coloniality of British citizenship for making sense of the post-Brexit migration regime • It reveals that the provisionality and contingency of the legal statuses are an integral mechanism of migration governanc
Gamers: Cultivating Sustainable Practices for Electronics Care
No full textElectronic waste (e-waste) is one of the fastest growing waste streams in the word and poses significant harm to both the environment and to human life. The development of poorly designed electronic products, and the over marketing of these products and services, their so-called planned obsolescence, has meant more and more e-waste is being produced each year. However, not all electronic devices share this same bleak lifespan; for example, computer games consoles are often kept far longer than anticipated or driven by consumer markets. This opposition that is extending the lifespan of gaming consoles, is being instigated by Gamers and the gaming communities they are connected to. Gamers have a unique connection to their gaming devices as the experience of playing involves the players relationship with both hardware and software. They keep and maintain their gaming devices in opposition to market trends which often encourage the premature replacement of electronic products. Gamers are part of gaming communities, which form intricate networks of connected people. Gaming devices are the nexus connecting these different groups. They are simultaneously a source of entertainment but also a social construct, so they become important and meaningful objects. Understanding the nature of how this connection is formed and fostered, could provide insights into both how future electronic products could be designed, and how a culture of repair and maintenance could be fostered
Learning Analytics and the Empowerment Paradox : A Foucauldian analysis of sector policy versus lived experience
Get PDFThe discourse of educational technology within Higher Education is imbued with notions of technology’s capacity to empower its stakeholders, and this is particularly evident in the promissory narrative surrounding Learning Analytics. Learning Analytics represent a significant area of growth and investment, with universities introducing sophisticated data infrastructures to track engagement, monitor activity, enhance attainment, and boost retention. Nevertheless, claims of empowerment do not go unchallenged, and a growing body of critical work highlights the inherent complexities surrounding Learning Analytics and power. Using a Foucauldian lens of governmentality and subjectification, this study examines how empowerment is constructed in sector discourse and how it is enacted, negotiated, or resisted in everyday lived experience. The study adopts a multi-organisational design, combining a Critical Discourse Analysis of sector texts with an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of lived experience. Drawing on sixteen documents and nineteen interviews across seven UK universities, the study traces how sector rhetoric translates into concrete artefacts and rules-in-use. It specifies the institutional conditions under which Learning Analytics are experienced as supportive rather than disciplinary—namely, arrangements of knowledge, control, and voice. In doing so, this thesis contributes to the critical study of educational technology by reframing Learning Analytics as a governance design problem and offering practical implications for care-first, participatory configurations of Higher Education
The shape of a kiki : Sound symbolism affects production of figures
No full textPrevious laboratory-based studies of sound symbolism tend to use established sound and meaning distinctions and find strong effects in participants forming mappings between them. Yet sound symbolism in natural language is extant, but only a weak effect. Without constraints and cueing to categorical distinctions in meaning, are sound symbolic effects still observable? We asked 40 participants to draw figures in response to 20 novel words presented auditorially varying in consonant and vowel properties. Plosives and front vowels resulted in more angular and straight-lined figures, whereas sonorants and back vowels elicited more rounded and curved shapes. The results are consistent with the classic bouba-kiki (takete-maluma) effect and show that both consonants and vowels can systematically shape sound-meaning mappings in the absence of explicit constraints. While natural language statistics may partly explain these effects, the consistency across phonemes – including those not frequent in English – suggests deeper perceptual or cognitive origins
The Sustainability Change Laboratory : Fostering Transformative Agency for Sustainability Integration in Higher Education
Get PDFDespite the urgency of sustainability transformation, Higher Education (HE) institutions worldwide have been slow to embrace their role in promoting sustainable development. The extant literature about HE sustainability integration debates this issue frequently in terms of organisational barriers and drivers such as leadership, collaboration, resourcing, incentives, and stakeholder engagement. However, there is growing recognition that static views of these barriers are insufficient, and a more dynamic understanding of transformative efforts is needed. This requires attention to the processes by which this change can be achieved and to the concept of agency in this context - areas still largely underexplored in this field. This thesis explores process and agency in sustainability integration in higher education by considering a research intervention at an Austrian University. Using Change Laboratory methodology grounded in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), the project engaged staff and student participants in online sessions to examine current sustainability practices and co-develop new solutions, such as strategies for curricular integration and new learning options for students. The research focuses on how transformative agency, understood in turn through the lenses of expressions, turning points, and the Transformative Agency through Double Stimulation (TADS) model, emerged throughout the intervention. Research data are derived from session recordings, collaborative participant outputs, surveys, and a research diary. The findings show how transformative agency, traced through participants’ agentic expressions, emerged throughout the intervention, with three turning points denoting a shift in emphasis from explicating the university’s role in sustainable development and criticizing current conditions, to envisioning shared solutions, and finally to developing concrete implementation plans for sustainability learning pathways. TADS analysis further explores the process and mechanisms by which sustainability agency emerged as aspirational and systemic conflicts of motives were surfaced, reflecting the nature of sustainability-focused projects where motivated participants, driven by their own values and broader social concerns, are challenged by institutional realities. Participants demonstrated agency by rejecting researcher-provided stimuli in favour of their own, and by arguing strongly that all students should engage with sustainability issues, even when this conflicted with arguments about upholding student choice. This study contributes to the literature investigating HE sustainability integration approaches by advancing a dynamic, participatory and process-oriented approach that foregrounds learning, systemic understanding and the transformative agency of participants and productively employs contradictions as catalysts for change. It contributes a detailed, theory-informed account of how collective agency develops through mediated engagement. Conceptually, it proposes reframing the fragmented notion of sustainability agency as a form of transformative agency, offering a new model of sustainability agency based on the theoretical foundations rooted in CHAT
Valorisation of beetroot pulp and banana plant pseudostem by a combined mild enzymatic hydrolysis to fermentable sugars and bioconversion of hydrolysates to organic acids
No full textBeetroot pulp (BP) and banana plant pseudostem (PS) are abundant agricultural residues composed of lignocellulosic biomass (LB), which is rich in structural polysaccharides that can be converted to soluble sugars. However, they remain underutilized after beetroot juice production and banana fruit harvesting. Despite their widespread availability, a consistent and efficient strategy for the recovery of fermentable sugars and the subsequent fermentation of the resulting hydrolysates into value-added products is still absent. This study proposes a consolidated bioconversion route applicable to each of the BP and PS, by applying a tailored enzymatic cocktail (EC) for maximising the release of simple sugars and subsequently fermenting them to valuable organic acids. This EC, composed of cellulase, laccase, and pectinase was designed and employed for the first time to hydrolyse both LBs under comparable conditions. The enzymatic hydrolysis resulted in fermentable sugars’ recoveries of 860.53 ± 2.65 mg/g for BP and 744.82 ± 15.43 mg/g for PS, values that are equal or higher than those reported for other LBs treated enzymatically (425–776 mg/g) or by acid/base hydrolysis (114–486 mg/g). Subsequent fermentation of the simple sugars contained in the hydrolysates led to the production of acetic, butyric, and lactic acids, with concentrations of 4.04 ± 0.31 g/L and 3.91 ± 0.31 g/L for BP and PS, respectively. These results demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of the same enzymatic pre-treatment and fermentation strategy for two distinct agricultural residues, providing a practical methodology for LB valorisation and the sustainable production of organic acids relevant to industrial biotechnology and biorefinery applications
Non-Hermitian Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model with the energy levels of free parafermions
Get PDFUsing a parent Hermitian tight-binding model on a bipartite lattice with chiral symmetry, we theoretically generate non-Hermitian models for free fermions with orbitals per unit cell satisfying a complex generalization of chiral symmetry. The complex energy bands in space are given by a common -dependent real factor, determined by the bands of the parent model, multiplied by the th roots of unity. When the parent model is the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model, the single-particle energy levels are the same as those of free parafermion solutions to Baxter's non-Hermitian clock model. This construction relies on fully unidirectional hopping to create Bloch Hamiltonians with the form of generalized permutation matrices, but we also describe the effect of partial unidirectional hopping. For fully bidirectional hopping, the Bloch Hamiltonians are Hermitian and may be separated into even and odd parity blocks with respect to inversion of the orbitals within the unit cell. Partially unidirectional hopping breaks the inversion symmetry and mixes the even and odd blocks, and the real energy spectrum evolves into a complex one as the degree of unidirectionality increases, with details determined by the topology of the parent model and the number of orbitals per unit cell, . We describe this process in detail for =3 and 4 with the SSH model. We also apply our approach to graphene, and we show that -stacked bilayer graphene evolves into a square-root Hamiltonian of monolayer graphene with the introduction of unidirectional hopping. We show that higher-order exceptional points occur at edge states and solitons in the non-Hermitian SSH model, and at the Dirac point of non-Hermitian graphene
