Engaging citizens for biodiversity exploration: a case study in the Bay of Biscay based on family photographs

The emergence of the global digital world has created large-scale transformation in how individuals and societies function. Citizenship in twenty_first century society now includes digital citizenship – which is described in the research as the norms of appropriate, responsible behaviour regarding technology use. The rapid change of digital technologies has generated a need for new ways to develop responsible citizens. Schools are being challenged to address an increasing range of broader societal issues that influence individuals’ responsible citizenship such as cyber bullying and identity theft. The research problem addressed in this thesis concerns how learning communities cultivate responsible citizens. How this issue has been addressed is by school leaders implementing digital citizenship teaching and learning opportunities in the curriculum. The research purpose is to explore how students, teachers and leaders of one secondary school experience a curriculum that integrates digital citizenship. Three specific research questions focus the conduct of this study: How do members of a secondary school community experience a curriculum that integrates digital citizenship? How do members of a secondary school community engage with a curriculum that integrates digital citizenship? How does a curriculum that integrates digital citizenship influence members of the school community? Case study is the methodology adopted for the research. Participants are purposely selected from the student, teacher and leader body of a Catholic secondary college in Queensland. In total, 300 participants are involved. Data are gathered through focus group interviews, individual interviews, online questionnaires and participant observation. For the purpose of the research, the Constant Comparative Method of data analysis is applied. This research generates 10 conclusions: First, Ribble and Bailey’s Nine Elements Framework (2007; updated by Ribble, 2011) offers a productive strategy for school educators to conceptualise the issues concerning digital participation. It provides a defensible framework to prepare curriculum that incorporates digital citizenship themes. Staff and students confirm that a common language for digital citizenship is productive, however the Nine Elements Framework and digital citizenship terminology may be more meaningful for staff than students. Second, it is appropriate for digital citizenship teaching and learning opportunities to be included in school curriculum. Participants consider digital citizenship as a necessary and relevant focus for schools. Third, a curriculum that integrates digital citizenship promotes online behaviour standards in schools. Participants consider the integrated curriculum a relevant educative approach for developing staff and students’ capacities for responsible online participation. Fourth, there is a need for government informed leadership to school systems and schools concerning digital citizenship. Direction on the relationship between digital citizenship and Australian education priorities is required. The deficit of leadership is problematic for school staff striving to facilitate curriculum that integrates digital citizenship. Fifth, schools and families share responsibility for developing students’ digital citizenry. Staff and students consider that digital citizenship is productively developed when parents and teachers cooperatively guide the process. Sixth, there is a deficit in teacher knowledge and confidence in teaching digital citizenship. There is a need for more and improved quality teacher education concerning digital citizenship. Seventh, a curriculum that integrates digital citizenship opportunities is a preferred teaching and learning model for staff and students. Contextualising digital citizenship learning in an established educational program encourages a school-wide digital citizenship focus. The integrated curriculum generates connections for students between online and offline contexts. Eighth, a curriculum that integrates digital citizenship is a productive approach to the enculturation of digital citizenship in a school community. Contextualised teaching of digital citizenship develops five areas of school life: digital citizenship awareness; common language concerning the digital context; professional expectations; staff and student interactions, and practice. Ninth, specialised professional development is critical for all school staff facilitating digital citizenship education. Staff members require initial and ongoing education concerning the digital context and digital citizenship themes. The development should particularly engage with Australian Curriculum digital citizenship requirements and implications; and how students approach, value and relate to digital technologies. Tenth, in a school where digital citizenship is a curriculum priority it is productive for school-based and system accountability processes to include digital citizenship themes.

Performative Microforests: Investigating the potential benefits of integrating spatial vegetation environments into buildings, in regards to the performance of buildings, their occupants + local ecosystems

This thesis looks at how and why 'lifestyle' (understood as diet, exercise and other health behaviours) became the primary focus of public health in post-war Britain. It uses Britain's biggest killer - heart disease - as a lens through which to view this paradigm, tracing lifestyle's development from its roots in risk-factor epidemiology, through health promotion campaigns, to its embedment in the practices of everyday life. Lifestyle’s origins in post-war social medicine and epidemiology are explored through two case studies. Firstly, the identification of physical inactivity as a risk factor, and how exercise was reinvented as a preventive health activity, consciously practiced to compensate for sedentary working lives. The second explores how research on sugar, a putative risk factor for heart disease, was unsuccessful, with its nutritional, rather than epidemiological, approach. Such epidemiological research was translated into the political and policy spheres via the consensus for prevention that developed in 1970s. This viewed lifestyle as a means of halting the rise of non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, and the concomitant burden that they placed on the welfare state. Lifestyle was conceived as a set of practices that individual citizens were encouraged to perform as a quid pro quo for the continuation of the NHS free at the point of delivery. This focus on personal responsibility continued into the 1980s, as a major campaign on heart disease tried to persuade a sceptical public to exercise and eat healthily. In doing so, it appealed to Thatcherite values of self-reliance and family values, suggesting a confluence between lifestyle public health, neoliberalism and social conservatism. However, an explicitly class-based analysis of public health also emerged concurrently. Health inequalities research, specifically the Whitehall studies, disrupted the lifestyle paradigm, highlighting the structural determinants of health and suggesting an alternative narrative for public health in Britain.

Developing spatial prioritisation strategies to maximise conservation impact

Bio-economy strategies are considered effective tools to provide the use of renewable natural resources in order to reduce the emissions green house gas (GHG), and simultaneously to improve biodiversity, environment resilience and food security. However, several barriers affect the implementation of the bio-economy strategies. The present PhD thesis has investigated the employment of these strategies both in developed and in developing Countries. Three different case studies were analysed, whereof two based on the use of agricultural by-products (Sicily, Italy) while, the last one has regarded an agricultural strategy cultivation in Uganda (Africa). As for the agricultural by-products valorisation, citrus and olive transformation by-products (the so-called “pastazzo” and the olive cake, respectively) have been considered. Contract attributes more preferred by interviewed entrepreneurs have been explored with the aim to point out determinants and barriers of one of the most important cooperation mechanism (i.e. the contract) of supply chains. In the third case study, the one about the crop mixtures cultivation, determinants and barriers for the mixtures’ adoption were explored. Furthermore, the yield increment both for bean and banana crops was quantified. In the present thesis it is emphasized that it is possible to implement bio-economy strategies both in developed and developing Countries. Indeed, in developed countries the advanced innovation technologies allow to transform agricultural wastes or by-products in products with added value, therefore eliminating the competition for the land use. Nevertheless, in developing Countries, where the innovation is not so widespread, the adoption of bio-economy strategies is also possible. In the case of by-products valorisation, determinants and obstacles of the effective strategies’ adoption were highlighted. Moreover, stakeholders’ preferences about specific contract attributes (both for pastazzo and olive cake supply chains) were determined. As for the bean and banana mixtures’ adoption, the case study has shown that some aspects of both the farmers and farms could either decrease or increase the propensity to adopt mixtures cultivation. Finally, the increment of yield results different depending whether one is dealing with the bean or the banana cultivation.

“City With Lifted Head Singing” explores the practice and politics of music education in Chicago within the context of urban neoliberalism: how intersecting layers of both formal and informal cultural policy shape, and are shaped by, on-the-ground music pedagogy, with a particular focus on music programs at the boundaries, and therefore on the peripheries, of the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. The dissertation is an ethnography of cultural policy in practice, examining the ideological, political, and day-to-day effects of the 2012 Chicago Cultural Plan and the 2012-2015 Chicago Public Schools Arts Education Plan. In this dissertation, I argue that Chicago’s 2012 cultural policy interventions were primarily about positioning Chicago as a global city. Arts education in this context is a mechanism for bringing Chicago closer to global-city status through training children in the practices and behaviors of citizens of the global city. In a neoliberal context in which policy interventions must be justified in terms of economic utility, both policymakers and practitioners frame music education as a response to either of two problems (or to both): first, the problem of unevenly distributed access to music education; and second, to a broader set of “urban problems” in which music education is believed to be able to intervene. This problematization of the city, explored in the dissertation’s second chapter, shapes the ways in which music education programs are conceived and run, and the terms on which philanthropists and foundations relate to programs and their administrators, administrators to teachers, and teachers to students and their families. The “solutions” to these “problems” center around music education’s purported ability to effect social mobility by training students in middle-class behavior, as described in the fifth chapter. The fundamental logic of problematization also provides the ideological and financial grounds on which Chicago’s music teaching workforce has been privatized and destabilized; the 2012 cultural policy interventions did not initiate this shift, but merely officialized it. In the third chapter, I examine the rise of the figure of the “teaching artist” and dissect, via ethnographic case studies, what the teaching artist’s newfound prominence means for both teachers and students. The fourth chapter, a companion to the third, describes the working lives of music teachers as they become destabilized. I argue that music teachers’ work experiences are shaped by the competing archetypes of the craftsman, the professional, and the amateur, and that the tensions among these archetypes in practice explain many facets of Chicago music teachers’ working lives, especially the emotional and ethical labor that they are asked to provide in addition to teaching musical skill attainment. Finally, in the fifth chapter I connect discourses around class and “classical music” to discourses around citizenship. I argue that the performance of music associated with the upper classes is discursively and politically tied to the performance of social mobility and thus, in theory, to actual social mobility. I conclude by questioning the utility of the rhetoric of problematization, offering alternative intellectual and political ways forward that integrate music education into holistic concepts of urban education.

Since the introduction of performance related pay into Chinese public sector organisations in 2009, there has been growing interest in performance management and measurement (PMM) in public sector organisations in China. This research project is to investigate the purposes and impact of PMM practices that are implemented in Chinese public sector organisations. An intensive literature review was conducted to examine the studies on PMM, the purposes of PMM, the direct impact of PMM used for monitoring and decision making purposes on the job performance (including task performance and organizational citizenship behavior - OCB) of individuals in general, in Chinese public sector organisations in particular. The review also studied the indirect impact of PMM that is directed towards the monitoring and decision making purposes on their job performance through the mediating function of role conflict. Based on the extant literature review and lacunas identified, two broad research questions were raised for this study. The first question is focused on the examination of relationships between PMM, job performance, and role conflict, whereas the second one is related to why and how these relationships may occur. Seven research hypotheses were proposed to address the first research question. Given the nature of the research questions and hypotheses, a mixed methods design combining a quantitative survey and a qualitative case study was adopted. A Chinese public university was selected for conducting this research and its middle-level managers became the focus of the study. A questionnaire survey was first conducted with 693 respondents (including 212 middle-level managers and 481 middle-level managers’ superiors and subordinates) in the university. The quantitative findings of this research suggest that PMM practices for middle managers in the case university have been used for monitoring and decision making purposes. From the perspective of middle managers, these two purposes are highly correlated and should be combined to one variable – PMM used for monitoring and decision making purposes. Hypotheses concerning the positive and direct relationship between PMM used for monitoring and decision making purposes and job performance (task performance and OCB) are confirmed only based on the self-report data of middle managers. However, these hypotheses are rejected if tested with the other-report data of job performance which were collected from managers’ superiors and subordinates. The quantitative results of the survey illustrate that role conflict does not mediate the relationships between PMM used for monitoring and decision making purposes and job performance (for both self-report and other-report data of task performance and OCB). As the quantitative evidence provides only limited support for the hypotheses, the discrepancies between the hypotheses and the quantitative results need to be further examined. A qualitative case study was conducted to explore these discrepancies and also address the second research question. A total of 18 interviews were conducted among middle managers who perform both academic and administrative roles. Relevant archives were obtained to study relevant policies on PMM used in the case university. Among these, three performance appraisal systems currently implemented for middle-level managers in the university were identified. Two of them (i.e., probation appraisal and annual appraisal) were studied, including their implementation process and impacts on middle managers. The case study explored the perceptions and experiences of middle managers regarding their perceptions of the purposes of PMM used by the university, how and why they experienced role conflict as well as the impact of PMM and role conflict on their subsequent task performance and OCB. The qualitative findings of this research suggest that the Western originated PMM practices seem to be used in this case university. However, the qualitative evidence indicates that the Western developed concept of PMM has been superficially applied. The PMM used in this university is very narrowly focused. It uses broad and abstract measurements and it is ‘flexible’ in its implementation due to a lack of transparency. Hence the theoretical and practical development of PMM in this Chinese public university is still in an early stage of development. The Western originated PMM practices are not adapted to suit the unique organizational and cultural environment of the case university. The deficiencies identified by this study in current appraisal practices could be attributed to political, institutional, cultural factors indigenous to China that inform managerial practices there. These deficiencies could negatively impact on managers and their superiors and subordinates, such as their lack of trust and confidence in current appraisal practices. These problems will be difficult to be picked up by the quantitative study, and thus we should be cautious when we directly test Western developed theories in a non-Western context using a quantitative study. Theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed. Limitations of this study and areas for future research are suggested.

Native trees and shrubs are essential components of rural landscapes in the semi-arid inner-Andean valleys of Bolivia. They can be found as hedges and bushes in various agroecosystems such as terrace walls, slopes, field boundaries and fallow land. Their distribution and floristic composition are the result of dynamic spatial and temporal interactions between local farmers and the environment. Local uses of natural resources and biodiversity reflect the constantly evolving Andean culture, which can be generally characterised as an intertwining of the human, natural, and spiritual worlds. The aim of the present ethnobotanical study was to analyse the dynamics of traditional ecological knowledge, to ascertain local farmers’ perceptions and uses of native woody species in Andean communities and to associate the results with local conservation activities for the trees and shrubs concerned. Our case study was carried out within two communities of the Tunari National Park (Dept. Cochabamba) in Bolivia. For data collection, research methods from social science (semi-structured interviews, participative observation, participatory mapping) as well as vegetation surveys were combined. Local actors included women and men of all ages as well as families from different social categories and altitudinal levels of permanent residence. Our study indicates that, due to a multitude of socio-economic pressures (e.g. migration of young people) as well as changes in use of biodiversity (e.g. replacement of native by exotic introduced species), the traditional ecological knowledge base of native trees and shrubs and their respective uses has become diminished over time. In many cases it has led to a decline in people’s awareness of native species and as a consequence their practical, emotional and spiritual relationships with them have been lost. However, results also show that applied traditional ecological knowledge has led to local conservation strategies, which have succeeded in protecting those tree and shrub species which are most widely regarded for their multifunctional, constant and exclusive uses (e.g. Schinus molle, Prosopis laevigata, Baccharis dracunculifolia). The presentation will discuss the question if and how applied traditional ecological knowledge positively contributes to local initiatives of sustainable use and conservation of biodiversity in rural areas.

Understanding stakeholder involvement in the policy and management of migratory taxa in the Australian marine environment: a case study approach

Conflicten over Haagse Stadsbeelden : Van Willemspark tot Spuiforum

Conflicten over Haagse stadsbeelden

This thesis examines the discourse, policy and intervention surrounding ‘problem families’ in post-war Britain from 1943 to 1974. Its contemporary salience is provided with comparisons of the Coalition and Conservative Governments’ Troubled Families Programme launched in 2011, committed to turning around the lives of Britain’s 120,000 ‘troubled’ families.’ Current historiography has emphasised its discursive formation in constituting an ‘underclass,’ linking it to the pathologisation of the behaviour of the poor. This thesis explores the operationalisation of the label by the state, and the processes of identification and intervention pursued to produce the desired outcome of self-sustaining citizenship. The principal source for the thesis are the surviving 1,817 case histories of 1,702 mothers and their children who attended the Brentwood Recuperative Centre for rehabilitation as a ‘problem family’ from 1943 to 1970. The North West provides a regional and local focus, as statutory and voluntary organisations operating within the county and boroughs council boundaries of Lancashire and Cheshire sent 1,196 of the 1,817 cases, permitting a closer scrutiny of the meaning and application of the label. Supplementing this archival source are the case paper and committee file evidence and minutes of the statutory or voluntary agencies which referred the families. By linking records of the mothers who went and the individuals who sent them, the process by which certain families were identified and the legitimation of their intervention, permits a deeper exploration of the conflicting roles of welfare and the state in post-war Britain. The reconstruction of this process of identification and intervention is undertaken on three interconnected levels. Firstly, the personal encounter between the family and the official, considering the role of professional, ideological and local discourses in singling out families for intervention. Secondly, the role of the local authority and council in structuring social service policies which framed the personal encounter and the workplace culture of officials: what Lipsky terms ‘street-level bureaucracy.’ Thirdly, the relationship of this pattern of personal and local practice to central government, national discourse and other ‘problem family’ policies in authorities beyond the North West. This demonstrates not only the need to return the state to analysis of the welfare state, but also that common experience and understanding of the welfare state is mediated through street-level bureaucrats and the subject of official discretion, rather than simply in legislation. Ultimately, the ‘problem family’ should be seen not as the preserve of a handful of experts, but embedded in the operational implementation of family welfare policy and practice across post-war Britain.

What co-curricular interventions contribute to the academic success and retention of non-traditional commencing undergraduate students identified to be at risk of academic failure or early attrition from university when taking into account distal and proximal factors?

Abundance distribution models and diversity-area relationships are tools of biological diversity analysis that have been used by ecologists for decades. In a case study by Ibez et al., these techniques are considered in a mor e general setting, and have been applied to explore notions such as pedodiversity (as an example of geodiversity in a broad sense, including also geomorphic diversity), in order to detect the differences and similarities between both natural resources, biological and non-biological.The discussion has mainly been conducted through the study of the Aegean Islands by the Spanish research team. Standard statistical techniques have been applied to analyze how the pedotaxa-abundance distribution conforms to the abundance distribution models and how pedorichness-area data fit to the diversity-area models.No statistically significant difference has been observed between the abundance distribution models and the diversity-area relationships followed by biodiversity and pedodiversity data in similar situations. Thus, the studied results may suggest that some assumptions underlying biodiversity analysis ought to be carefully re-examined.Since results in ecological literature are usually interpreted in biological terms, the analysis by Ibaez et al. may be relevant to offer some suggestions to the following questions: What are the reasons for the similarities obtained between biotic and soil resources? Should the ecological theory modify some of its constructs once the said similarities have been proven? and what are its implications for environmental management and assessment?

The legal status and living conditions of migrants in host countries reflect contemporary forms of inequality arising from the uneven distribution of wealth and power among states. Over the past decades, the transnational social impacts of global movements of people have raised concerns about the appropriateness of the premise of self-contained nation-states, which have led some authors and social actors to reevaluate the notion of nation-based citizenship and to consider alternative conceptions that fit better to the changing complexities of international migration. In 2008, a constitutional amendment in Ecuador introduced the concept of universal citizenship, granting citizens’ rights independently of national affiliation. This provides a valuable case study for the exploration of the real implications of a de-nationalized citizenship when adopted under the current international framework, and particularly for understanding the way normative orders and migration policies in transnational social spaces are interconnected. This article examines the way in which the rights of both emigrants and immigrants are included in the Ecuadorian Constitution and analyzes three cases that reflect the kind of interdependent limitations and constraints that Ecuador faces for its migration policy choices and constitutional rules on universal citizenship, including its unintended consequences.