Exploring circularity in African cities: barriers and opportunities for meaningful action

In this viewpoint I argue for a perspective on climate change in African cities that focuses on challenges and also opportunities for action. Delivering climate change adaptation in cities in the first instance requires addressing immediate infrastructure and service provision needs, because increasing climate change resilience in cities also requires improving the delivery of services to all citizens. However, there is a risk that climate change discourses facilitate the deployment of technocratic, expert-led forms of planning, particularly when climate change is used as an excuse to facilitate the intervention of international planning consultants who most often know little about the local context of planning. This paper advocates instead approaches to climate change action that harness opportunities on the ground to engage with the creative potential that urban citizens already have and to draw attention to the need to develop planning skills from within the city.

ObjectivesThe aim of this study was to characterise the local foods and beverages sold and advertised in three deprived urban African neighbourhoods.DesignCross-sectional observational study. We undertook an audit of all...

<h3>Objectives</h3> The aim of this study was to characterise the local foods and beverages sold and advertised in three deprived urban African neighbourhoods. <h3>Design</h3> Cross-sectional observational study. We undertook an...

Gleaning the Current Conjuncture: Notes from the 3rd <i>Antipode</i> Institute for the Geographies of Justice

The authors describe how a community museum created and curated by adult education students acted as an innovative and student‐centered model to support learners in developing and demonstrating their literacy skills and knowledges. Using a case study approach to document and analyze students’ counterstories (i.e., stories that disrupt dominant narratives), the authors highlight the ways in which creating and curating a community museum leveraged adult students’ expertise and opened opportunities for meaningful civic action through counterstorying. The authors aim to provide adult literacy educators with a concrete example of how an expansive understanding of literacy skills within their curriculum, including the literacies of making and design, can support students’ development of relevant content literacies and workforce competencies, including researching, multimodal composing, speaking, and collaborating.

Some comments on and criticism of Class Power and Alienated Labor, by Bowles and Gintis in the March 1975 issue of Monthly Review: Alienated labor, which provides no opportunity for worker self-development or meaningful collective action with others, is primarily what they discuss. Alienation itself they do not explain. So by a process of verbal drift, the article represents the worker, particularly the industrial worker, as exemplifying alienation. By suggestion he or she is a defeated, apathetic, isolated, human being. In fact, if we put Bowles' and Gintis' conception of alienated labor as the emptying from work of content allowing self-development, together with their quotation from Eliot Jacques that man's work…gives him a measure of his sanity, we should conclude that industrial workers in general are insane. So the underlying message, to contrast with the written one (that socialism is necessary) is hopelessness.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

This article provides a brief overview of the framework of nonlinear pedagogy and evidence emanating from motor learning literature that underpins a nonlinear pedagogical approach. In addition, challenges for nonlinear pedagogy and a discussion on how nonlinear pedagogy support the work of physical education (PE) teachers will be shared. Evidence from the increasing volume of work on nonlinear learning from motor learning literature is used to suggest how acquisition of movement skills is supported by nonlinearity. The emergence of goal-directed behaviors is a consequence of the performer, environmental, and task constraints. With a nonlinear pedagogy approach, the focus is on the individual learner where opportunities for meaningful actions can be learnt. Design principles based on representativeness, focus of attention, functional variability, manipulation of constraints, and ensuring relevant information-movement couplings can be delivered via pedagogical channels of instructions, practices, and feedback to the learners. Importantly, this focus on the individual sets the foundation for a developing nonlinear pedagogy framework to enhance teaching in PE although the challenges are non-trivial.