210 research outputs found
Conversation with Lisa Garforth / Conversatorio con Lisa Garforth
No full text\ua9 2023, Universidad Compultense Madrid. All rights reserved. Julia Ram\uedrez-Blanco interviews Lisa Garforth, author of the book Green Utopias and specialist in environmental utopias. With her, we talk about the possible ways of defining ecotopias, and how they manifest themselves both in literature and in different forms of social practice
Let's Get Organised: Practicing and Valuing Scientific Work Inside and Outside the Laboratory
No full textOver the past thirty years there has been a significant turn towards practice and away from institutions in sociological frameworks for understanding science. This new emphasis on studying \'science in action\' (Latour 1987) and \'epistemic cultures\' (Knorr Cetina 1999) has not been shared by academic and policy literatures on the problem of women and science, which have focused on the marginalisation and under-representation of women in science careers and academic institutions. In this paper we draw on elements of both these approaches to think about epistemic communities as simultaneously practical and organisational. We argue that an understanding of organisational structures is missing in science studies, and that studies of the under-representation of women lack attention to the detail of how scientific work is done in practice. Both are necessary to understand the gendering of science work. Our arguments are based on findings of a qualitative study of bioscience researchers in a British university. Conducted as part of a European project on knowledge production, institutions and gender the UK study involved interviews, focus groups and participant observation in two laboratories. Drawing on extracts from our data we look first at laboratories as relatively unhierarchical communities of practice. We go on to show the ways in which institutional forces, particularly contractual insecurity and the linear career, work to reproduce patterns of gendered inequality. Finally, we analyse how these patterns shape the gendered value and performance of \'housekeeping work\' in the laboratory.Women, Science, Laboratory, Epistemic Community, Organisation, Value, Work, Career, Housekeeping
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Effective communication to improve udder health: can social science help?
No full textImproved udder health requires consistent application of appropriate management practices
by those involved in managing dairy herds and the milking process. Designing effective
communication requires that we understand why dairy herd managers behave in the way they
do and also how the means of communication can be used both to inform and to influence.
Social sciences- ranging from economics to anthropology - have been used to shed light on
the behaviour of those who manage farm animals. Communication science tells us that
influencing behaviour is not simply a question of „getting the message across‟ but of
addressing the complex of factors that influence an individual‟s behavioural decisions. A
review of recent studies in the animal health literature shows that different social science
frameworks and methodologies offer complementary insights into livestock managers‟
behaviour but that the diversity of conceptual and methodological frameworks presents a
challenge for animal health practitioners and policy makers who seek to make sense of the
findings – and for researchers looking for helpful starting points. Data from a recent study in
England illustrate the potential of „home-made‟ conceptual frameworks to help unravel the
complexity of farmer behaviour. At the same time, though, the data indicate the difficulties
facing those designing communication strategies in a context where farmers believe strongly
that they are already doing all they can reasonably be expected to do to minimise animal
health risks
Staying with trouble: Critical and Creative Approaches to Biodiversity and Climate Crises
No full textThis Landscape Research Group, Landscape Symposium 2019 will explore another of our Research Strategy themes, Critical and Creative Landscape Thinking. With a varied group of collaborators (see below), we will form a conversational space to apply this to the climate and biodiversity crises.
The Symposium title is from Staying With the Trouble, Donna J. Haraway (c) 2016, Duke University Press – borrowed with very kind permission!
Colloborators:
Amanda Thomson, lecturer, artist, writer, Glasgow School of Art
Andrew Patrizio holds the Chair of Scottish Visual Culture at Edinburgh College of Art.
Anupama Ranawana is a theologian, writer and researcher currently a Visiting Researcher at Oxford Brookes University.
George Revill is a musician and Senior Lecturer in Geography at the Open University.
Lisa Garforth, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University
Ruth Little will facilitate the symposium, and works as a theatre and dance dramaturg, a teacher and writer
Enhanced feedstock recycling of post-consumer plastic
No full textFeedstock recycling of waste plastics is becoming more crucial as a method to convert plastics back into a source of useful platform chemicals. Although thermal cracking presents easier options, the products have limited utility and present a higher energy burden than the method proposed in this paper, that of catalytichydrocracking a mildly exothermic process. This paper reports the use of metal loaded zeolite catalysts at much reduced temperatures (200 °C - 350 °C) to convert mixed plastic waste at significantly shorter reaction times (typically 5 min), making the continuous processing of polymer waste a possibility
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Fragmentation or creative diversity? Options in the provision of land management advisory services
No full textRural land managers need access to sound advice and information to respond to pressures from environmental regulations, declining farm incomes, changing patterns in international trade and new institutional arrangements within the domestic food chain. Governments have cut back their provision of advisory services but need more than ever to influence land managers' decisions to achieve a growing array of policy objectives: The paper develops a conceptual framework for analysing advisory services and concludes, through a review of sixteen case studies, that the needs of both governments and land managers can be met by a diverse mixture of private and public sector provision. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
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Farmers' willingness to pay for agricultural extension service: evidence from Nigeria
No full textThe study was undertaken to investigate how willing would farmers be to pay for agricultural extension service in Nigeria. A multistage random sampling technique was used to select 268 respondents. Results showed that most farmers (95.1 per cent) were willing to pay for improved extension
service as long as the service remained relevant to their needs. Farmers were willing to pay N1000 annually as their own share of the service cost. The most important factors that influenced farmers’ willingness to pay were states of origin, items originally paid for, major occupation, minor occupation, number of years in school and sale of farm produce
Control of CydB and GltA1 Expression by the SenX3 RegX3 Two Component Regulatory System of Mycobacterium tuberculosis
No full textThis is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited
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Improving the use of white clover through a better understanding of farmer attitudes and behaviour
No full textHydrocracking of mixed polymer waste, NovaCrack
No full textSince plastics are extremely stable, decomposition in a landfill occurs over extended periods, and with the introduction of more stringent environmental regulation and rising landfill costs there is an increasing need to redirect plastic waste from landfill towards recycling options, enhancing recovery of raw materials.There are two major routes for the recycling of plastic waste; mechanical and feedstock. The most widespread approach to feedstock recycling is the pyrolysis (or cracking) of the plastic waste. However, this process requires high operating temperatures (typically 500°C – 900°C) with a subsequent large adiabatic temperature drop across the reactor (fixed bed or fluidised) which combined with catalyst deactivation results in significantprocessing issues[1,2]. Work at Manchester[3] from 1994 focussed on a fluidised bed reactor where there are advantages in terms of heat and mass transfer. HDPE cracking was carried out using pure zeolites and fresh,steam deactivated and “equilibrium” catalysts (E-Cats) with different rare earth oxides and Ni and V loadings (Table 1).The effect on product distribution of zeolite type and the influence in the formulated FCC catalyst can be seen in the changing yields of paraffins and olefins (Fig. 2 and Table 2). The anticipated loss in reactivity is also seen from fresh to steam deactivated FCC catalysts and rare earth stabilisation in Cat 7/7S activities compared to Cat 1/1S. There appeared little effect in the significant increase in Ni and V loading in the ECats tested suggesting a “waste catalyst for waste recycling” strategy might be appropriate as the cost of disposal increases significantly.Before design predictions could be made, an understanding of the interface between the polymer and the catalyst must be developed. The mechanism of interaction is highly complex, with three phases (liquid polymer, solid catalyst and gaseous products), mass transfer by diffusion, convection and bulk flow as well as cracking type reactions with a large number of products. Fig. 3 shows a scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of a finelyblended mixture of high density polyethylene (HDPE) and ZSM-5 after heating from ambient to 573 K and the melted polymer can be seen to have completely “wetted” the zeolite particles (Fig. 3).A more energy neutral option to catalytic cracking of plastics is that of hydrocracking, which in the presence of a suitable catalyst not only offers the potential for the selective recovery of useful chemical fractions, but is also is tolerant of the presence of heteroatoms such as chlorine or fluorine in the plastic. The hydrocracking process offers the opportunity to produce medium chain hydrocarbons such as naphtha and diesel fuel.The focus of work on hydrocracking has been batch reactor studies on polymers or blends of polymers withcoal or vacuum gas oil (Table 3). Since 2005, work at Manchester has demonstrated that the mildly exothermic process can be carried out at much reduced temperatures (200°C–350°C) whilst maintaining production/conversion yields comparable to the cited literature values. Most importantly, significantly shorter reaction times (typically 5 mins) now make continuous processing of polymer waste a possibility (Table 3)
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