Material Circumstances Research Articles

Inside the Teaching Machine: Rhetoric and the Globalization of the U.S. Public Research University

Inside the Teaching Machine: Rhetoric and the Globalization of the U.S. Public Research University

Children's Literature in the Nordic World by Nina Christensen and Charlotte Appel

Reviewed by: Children's Literature in the Nordic World by Nina Christensen and Charlotte Appel Marianne Stecher-Hansen (bio) Children's Literature in the Nordic World. By Nina Christensen and Charlotte Appel. Aarhus University Press and University of Wisconsin Press, 2021. Children's Literature in the Nordic World serves as a concise introduction to children's reading cultures in the Nordic countries and demonstrates a significant evolution in reading practices, genres, and educational circumstances over the past 250 years. The book is co-authored by scholars at Aarhus University, Denmark: Nina Christensen, professor of children's literature and head of the Centre for Children's Literature and Media, and Charlotte Appel, professor of early modern cultural history. The work is published in the University of Wisconsin's small-book Nordic World series, as a co-publication with the Aarhus University Press; the series seeks to feature top thinkers in the Nordic countries—Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland—in order to explore the region's history, culture, and values. Although the title Children's Literature in the Nordic World might suggest content from the entire Nordic region, which would include Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) as well as Finland, Iceland and Greenland, the study rests primarily on Denmark as "the main example" (7), making use of Danish children's books and Danish writers as case studies. That said, there are interspersed texts and examples from Norway (notably, that country was part of the Danish realm until 1814) as well as from [End Page 345] Sweden and Swedish-Finland mentioned in the study. In making use of the term children's literature, the title might also seem to suggest the analysis of literary texts for children; however, the study avoids close readings of the selected texts and media, instead focusing on the institutions, national policies, reading practices, and socio-economic circumstances that shaped the reading cultures of Nordic (i.e. mainly Danish) children. Christensen and Appel include precise descriptions of the material culture of children's literature and include a wide variety of texts, genres, and other media. The book includes good quality, color illustrations that accompany each chapter. The narrative is organized into six short chapters, each framed by the evolving conceptions of childhood in Scandinavia, from the Enlightenment to the present. The content of each chapter is illuminated by the legal, educational, and socio-economic developments in Scandinavian societies which determined children's reading practices, their access to books and materials, and their agency as citizens. The authors' approach involves opening each chapter with individual case studies that describe the reading practices and environments of two or three individual children (historical personages) of the respective eras, who are carefully selected to illustrate socio-economic and gender differences. In the opening three chapters, "Introduction," "Educating Young Hearts and Minds, 1750-1820" and " The Child as a Future Patriotic Citizen, 1820-1900," the authors illuminate the romantic concept of childhood which emerged in Europe during the Enlightenment and, subsequently, inspired the development of children's literature as a distinct genre (particularly via the popularized folk fairy tale) during the nineteenth century. In the opening chapter which explores the period 1750 to 1820, the humble childhood of the celebrated Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), the son of an itinerate shoemaker, is effectively contrasted with that of the lesser-known Danish-German writer Friederike Bruun (1765-1835), a product of upper-class birth and private education. Scholars who are seeking a deeper discussion of H. C. Andersen's profound contribution as a radical innovator of children's literature via the fairy tale genre may be disappointed by this cursory treatment of his legacy, especially given that Andersen may be credited as the first modern writer to give voice and validation to the experiential world of the child. Nonetheless, the study does a fine job at painting a historical picture of children (such as young Andersen) as readers who were shaped and often limited by specific socioeconomic and material circumstances. Whereas the first half of the study delineates the gradual emergence of children as a new reading public and books for children as a distinct genre, the last three chapters depict a Nordic...

The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children ed. by Marina Balina and Serguei Oushakine

Reviewed by: The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children ed. by Marina Balina and Serguei Oushakine Megan Swift (bio) The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children. Edited by Marina Balina and Serguei Oushakine. University of Toronto Press, 2021. The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children is a major new contribution to the field of children's literature. The volume is edited by two leading figures in Russian and Soviet children's literature, Marina Balina and Serguei Oushakine, and includes sixteen chapters by contributors from Russia, Europe, and North America. It is lavishly illustrated with over 250 beautifully-reproduced color illustrations from Princeton University's collection of Soviet illustrated children's literature at the Cotsen Children's Library. Thomas Keenan, one of the Slavic librarians at the Cotsen, is a contributor to the volume. Keenan and another contributor, Katherine Reischl, co-created an accompanying digital humanities project based on the same rare books, "Playing Soviet: The Visual Language of Early Soviet Children's Books" (https://commons.princeton.edu/soviet/books/). While this website features the full texts of over 50 Soviet illustrated children's books from the 1920s and 1930s, researchers will want to turn to The Pedagogy of Images for comprehensive analyses of these and other works. The first innovation of the volume is its thematic approach, with divisions into three sections dedicated to Mediation, Technology, and Power. As the editors explain in their introduction, they wanted to focus beyond the "institutions of power" towards "various practices of expression and narration" (5). The first part, Mediation, looks at how the Soviet picture book helped mediate between traditional print practices and new visual practices coming from film, photography, and "how to" books. Chapters examine the negotiation between the figuration of the past and the avantgarde geometry of the future (Helena Goscilo); the so-called "cine-book," a picture book influenced by contemporary film techniques (Yuri Leving); the use of children as active co-creators in their role as photo-correspondents and worker-correspondents for early Soviet journals (Erika Wolf); the concept and inspiration behind the unrealized "book-toy" (Aleksandar Bošković); and the material implications of the Soviets' "paper regime" on children's books (Birgitte Beck Pristed). This section will beckon readers interested in hybrid book forms, in the influence of avant-garde techniques on book-making, and in the material and sociological circumstances that led to the early Soviet focus on do-ityourself and make-it-yourself books. The second part of the book, which focuses on Technology, is the longest section. This part is dedicated to the "representational capacity" of the [End Page 348] new Soviet book to capture categories crucial to the Soviet state such as industrialization, technology, and modernity (207). Larissa Rudova's chapter explores how, in order to represent the Soviet theme of struggle with nature, children's books "used anthropomorphism and animation to blur the distinction between nature and culture" (208). Sara Pankenier Weld investigates depictions of hybrid human-machines as harbingers of the biomechanical future. Kirill Chunikhin's chapter looks at how to represent the largely-invisible technological advancement of electricity and its treatment as a hybrid of materialism and magic; Maria Litovskaya examines "Do It All Yourself!" (Delai vse sam), a do-it-yourself magazine that encouraged technological literacy among children; Michael Kunichika explores how modernity was envisioned in a Stalin-era picture book about the construction of the Turkestan-Siberia railroad; and Katherine M. H. Reischl looks at the category of Soviet transportation and the theme of hyper-mobility. Part three is dedicated to the theme of Power. Kevin M. F. Platt explores the "representations of temporality in spatial forms" during Stalin's infamous 5-Year plans for rapid industrialization. Daniil Leiderman and Marina Sokolovskaia's chapter looks at images of Lenin's death and its representation in children's books as the end of time and the passage to immortality. Stephen M. Norris examines how images of Red Army soldiers taught child readers how to "see in Soviet"; and Alexei Golubev's chapter explores images of the laboring body and its association with economic class. In the final chapter of the volume, Thomas Keenan discusses how—counterintuitively—the...

Crisis policy enactment: primary school leaders’ responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in England

ABSTRACT This paper explores the enactment of government policy during the Covid pandemic in primary schools in England. Based on interviews with school leaders and teachers across the period 2020–21 (n = 66), drawn from two major studies of primary schools’ priorities during the crisis, we argue that school leaders’ responses can be understood as a distinct form of policy enactment particular to an unprecedented crisis. Policy arrived in schools differently, and was enacted differently. Our findings suggest that enacting policy during the Covid crisis was a process dominated by the need to act at speed, informed by the prioritisation of children’s basic needs and based on a knowledge of the local circumstances. Thus dimensions of context which affect policy enactment were altered during the crisis, with the material circumstances of the school and the values of the headteacher becoming highly significant. The approach we term crisis policy enactment is response to policy which is focused first on coping but is also agentic, demonstrating a commitment to children’s welfare and a belief in the power of schools to make a difference.

The figure of the ‘Indian’ in 1920s Bolivian theater

ABSTRACT This article examines the treatment of the figure of the ‘Indian’ in the Bolivian theater of the 1920s. It opens up with a presentation of the theatrical work of Bolivia’s generación del 21. The selected corpus is then read as a set of texts that discuss the intersections between the notions of the ‘Bolivian nation’ and ‘indigeneity,’ two key elements in the intellectual debates of early 20th century Bolivia. It attends to the connection between these plays and Bolivian indigenismo and inter-American indigenismo more broadly, thereby highlighting how the ‘Indian’ was understood to be a contemporary subject constrained by specific material circumstances. The article considers the plays Supay marca (1928), by Zacarías Monje Ortiz, which premiered in 1920; two plays by Antonio Díaz Villamil: La voz de la quena (1988), which premiered in 1922 and La Rosita ([1928] 2001), which premiered in 1925; and Los lobos del Altiplano (1930), by Federico Ávila.

The Rhetoric of Enslavement in White Confederate Planter Women’s Civil War Diaries (1861–65)

ABSTRACT Recent historiography has shown how slaveholding white women in the antebellum South United States often played active and eager roles in the administration of slavery and used violence against enslaved persons. Building on this recent historiography, this article will show how in the American Civil War (1861–65), such white middle and planter class women not only played central roles in slavery on antebellum plantations, but how this rhetoric of enslavement played a central role in how these women discussed their own experiences of war in the Confederate South. Particularly from 1862, when the ideology of secession and nationalism met the material circumstances of surviving on a wartime home front, middle and planter class white women resorted to the language of secular and non-secular enslavement to convey their own lived wartime experiences. As both enslaver and “enslaved”, these planter women framed their wartime identities in the same system of power, violence and degradation they had been instrumental in sustaining before the war.

Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes: Violent Myths of the U.S.-Mexico Frontier by Rafael Acosta Morales

Reviewed by: Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes: Violent Myths of the U.S.-Mexico Frontier by Rafael Acosta Morales Cordelia E. Barrera Rafael Acosta Morales, Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes: Violent Myths of the U.S.-Mexico Frontier. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2021. 246 pp. Hardcover, $55; e-book, $43.99. In Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes Rafael Acosta Morales argues for the impossibility of displacing affect from fictional and historical representations of cowboys, bandits, and desperadoes, “cultural heroes” that shape narratives of political violence on the US–Mexico frontier. In so doing, he probes the discourses and systems embedded in these archetypes alongside the unrecognized, nonconscious experiences of readers and audiences. Expanding on the work of noted scholars of affect, he proposes the notion of “affective assemblage” to examine the paradoxical persistence of these archetypes. The paradox lies in the gap between the immaterial structure of the narrative traditions themselves and the material forms they produce and replicate. These stories, bound by promises of regeneration through violence, redistributive justice, and the weaponization of historical trauma not merely disenfranchise entire segments of the population, they put into question the perverse sense of innocence that justifies the use of violence for national ends. The book is comprised of an introduction, three long body chapters, and an afterword. In alternating between US–Mexico and Mexico–US, the author illustrates interrelationships between fictional and historical representations of cultural heroes in a shifting territory. Because the frontier signifies a space where these icons belie dominant narratives of US political schema, Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes expands the frontier’s role in narratives of Mexican history. This is illustrated in chapter 1, “Drug Lords,” wherein Acosta Morales interprets banditry as a form of resistance to strategies of exclusion and excess capitalization shaped by modernity. Just as nineteenth-century corridos foreground historical [End Page 199] figures who oppose unequal distribution of capital, so too do novels like Luis G. Inclán’s Astucia (1865) and Yuri Herrera’s 2010 narco novel, Trabajos del reino, divulge how social banditry forms an affective loop that recreates the same adversarial system it seeks to topple. In further analyzing the struggle for legitimacy of contemporary drug lords in Mexico, Acosta Morales shows how affective assemblages shape models of behavior. In chapter 2 the cowboy is a point of departure for ideas about how legitimacy and violence are packaged for entertainment as well as how cowboy narratives justify violence and weaponize trauma. To uncover relationships among trauma, states of exception, violence, and subjectivity, the author looks to films like John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter (1973) and Unforgiven (1992), and Cormac McCarthy’s epic novel of westward expansion, Blood Meridian (1985). A focus on affect reveals how these narratives bring neither regeneration nor judicial or bodily protection for those who require it most: women and sufferers of colonial conquest. Affect factors into the naturalization of the cowboy as a force of good. As such, it steers the preservation of a nostalgic past and an uncritical view of history within these narratives as well as influences action. Even revisionist Westerns like Unforgiven and the television series Justified, which question histories of oppression or turn the cowboy myth on its head, gloss over the “original sin” of colonial barbarism (149). As such, these stories retain the capacity to absorb violence, a quality of affect that instills a state of exception—for the white cowboy. Chapter 3, “Desperadoes,” examines stories of “icons of bandit-ry” (163) found in historical corridos that detail the exploits of cultural heroes like Gregorio Cortez and Joaquin Murrieta to illume how Mexican Americans experienced US law though an “applied and designed otherness” based in ingrained affective assemblages that inherently transmit a biased system of attitudes and laws (153). A close reading of Rolando Hinojosa’s fictional Belken County coalesces the ways that affect becomes a condition of thought produced by material circumstances continually responsive to them. The accounts of drug lords, cowboys, and desperadoes Acosta Morales surveys offer solutions that have already been accepted [End Page 200] by readers or viewers. As such, a focus on affect reveals how the...

Irrepresentable Corporealities: The Staging of Las paredes oyen in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract: Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s Las paredes oyen is an exceptional comedia in that it captures the embodied experience of living with a physically marked body and it does so from the perspective of a disabled author. Cultural and social attitudes towards deviant corporealities, however, have prevented the staging of the leading part, Don Juan, as physically marked, from the play’s first staging in 1618 to the last third of the twentieth century. This article reconstructs the material circumstances in which Las paredes oyen has been historically staged, from 1829 to 1975, in continental Europe, Mexico, and Canada, and discusses the logic behind not staging Don Juan’s body as deviant in each production during this period. For this reconstruction, this study avails itself of a variety of archival sources, from newspaper ads and articles to programs, and rehearsal copies of the play.

The awkward question: What baseline should be used to measure biodiversity loss? The role of history, biology and politics in setting up an objective and fair baseline for the international biodiversity regime

Temporal baselines constitute common elements of good policy design and are necessary to set scenarios, targets and to measure changes over time. The choice of baselines not only can have a profound influence on outcomes but represent a political decision when included in governmental or intergovernmental instruments. Therefore, setting up baselines has technical and political consequences and they should be evidence-based to make them politically and technically stronger. Contrary to the Climate Change regime, which has an internationally agreed baseline set up at preindustrial times, there is no baseline to measure historical biodiversity loss. This feature results in the lack of a necessary reference to foster a fair implementation and monitoring of biodiversity conventions. This article looks throughout history to find regional, temporal and material circumstances related to biodiversity loss in order to suggest an evidence-based baseline. Facts show that almost all regions share a common substantially and temporally related pattern: unsustainable deforestation processes were massively conducted once the industrial revolution began, in order to respond to the external demand for raw materials. Facts also prove that other regions and/or countries had already lost their biodiversity way before industrial times to cover their internal demand for food and wood. This research aims at showing interlinkages among history, biodiversity loss and politics to suggest an evidence-based baselines to measure biodiversity loss in order to (i) increase the ambition of the Post 2020 Global Biodiversity Framework; (ii) recognize historical contributions to biodiversity loss and responsibilities to repair it; and (iii) establish conditions for a fair transition in developing countries toward sustainable development.

The Effectiveness of Risk Management in Achieving Sustainability of the University of Hail

The research aims to study the effectiveness of Risk Management (RM) in achieving sustainability for the University of Hail (UOH). The research tools were represented in the general data questionnaire, the RM effectiveness questionnaire, and the university sustainability questionnaire. The research was conducted on 510 employees (leaders, faculty members, and staff) at the UOH. The research followed the descriptive and analytical approach. It was evident that the UOH attained a high degree of sustainability as a sustainable university (with a sustainable vision and mission, policies and goals, and infrastructure). On the other hand, human cadres’ sustainability was medium. RM’s effectiveness (planning, implementation, and evaluation) at the UOH was high. A directly proportional statistically significant correlation was found at a level of 0.01 between RM and reaching sustainability for the university. The effectiveness of RM as a whole was the most contributing factor in predicting the extent of the impact on achieving the sustainability of UOH as a whole. A statistically significant indication was also found in both achieving sustainability and the level of effectiveness of RM in the UOH, which was perceived by leaders, faculty members, and staff. Administrators and educators at UOH must account for how definitions of RM are tied to an institution’s goals, agendas, and material circumstances. Developing a better understanding of how such definitions emerge can provide greater clarity in enacting change.

MISREPRESENTATION SEBAGAI FRAUD DALAM PERKARA KONTRAK ASURANSI YANG DILAKUKAN PENANGGUNG

Insurance companies in Indonesia are currently trapped in the stigma of seeking the highest premiums. Many agents do not work according to standards and do not explain in detail the insured party’s rights and obligations. This study aims to determine the meaning of misrepresentation and forms of misrepresentation made by the insurer in an insurance contract case based on court decisions. This normative juridical approach uses content analysis method. The results showed that the insurer failed to provide correct information about the importance of medical check-ups about life insurance, failed to explain the relationship between honesty in disclosing material circumstances with the risk of cancellation of the policy or the consequences of an insurance claim being rejected, failed to present the correct information to policyholders and gives the impression that insurance claims can be made easily, only with a photocopy of the receipt for payment of hospital fees, and the failed to present correct information that the policy can only be closed to other people if the prospective insured has a birth certificate and cannot be replaced by a statement only.

Organizational bases of the preparatory stage of the inspection of the scene of a traffic accident

This article analyses the activities of the internal affairs bodies in the field of solving and investigating crimes, related to the violation of traffic rules and the operation of vehicles, focuses on the specifics of preparation for the investigative action inspection of the scene of a traffic accident, as one of the main investigative actions, as well as the importance of the actions of the investigator, related to the detection and fixation of the material and road situation at the scene of a traffic accident. The article emphasizes: a methodology for documenting crimes committed in the field of traffic safety and operation of transport, characterized by the fact that qualified persons are important from the moment such facts are reported, timely and competent actions of the investigator related to the detection and recording of the physical and road situation at the scene of a traffic accident, and the seizure of physical objects and traces due to the fact that they are subject to change within a short period of time. The inspection of the scene of a traffic accident is presented in the form of an investigative action, the essence of which is the direct perception by the person producing it of the material situation displayed on the road and the elements adjacent to it (objects) as a result of a traffic accident, in order to detect, fix and remove material traces and circumstances that make it possible to subsequently recreate the mechanism of the event, as well as other circumstances of the incident that need to be established in order to solve the tasks of criminal procedure.

Smart Home Masculinities

ABSTRACT Existing research has shown dominant smart home imaginaries to be gendered visions of technologically deterministic lives of affluent young white men and middle-class hetero-normative white cultures. Instead, we argue, a more realistic, plausible and ethical approach to smart home design needs to originate from the different starting point of gender diversity and equality in the home. To demonstrate this, we situate smart home design within the dominant masculine and colonising narratives of industry and science. We then develop a design anthropological analysis of the everyday experiences as reported by four middle-class white Australian men living in heteronormative family households. We propose that existing masculinist imaginaries of smart home futures are not only limited because they fail to account for the diverse experiences and aspirations of heterogeneous households but because they also fail to recognise the messiness, contingency and processual nature of the social, material and experiential circumstances of the very heteronormative households they appear to be aligned with. A feminist approach to the smart home would need to be designed from and with gender-equal relations in the very site of the home.

Sexuality on the move: gay transnational mobility embedded on racialised desire for ‘white Asians’

This paper offers a Bourdieusian field analysis to unpack the intersection among sexuality, place, and mobility through an ethnographic study of Taiwanese gay men’s trips to Bangkok. It unveils that how the societal cause of ‘Eastern orientation’— a racialised sexual desire for ‘white Asians’ among Thai gay men — and other material circumstances have transformed distinct scales of territory, including nation-states and gay establishments, into nuanced yet not thoroughly disparate sexual fields. Such nuances are closely associated with gay men’s intra-Asian mobility between Thailand and Taiwan that I elucidate through the concept of ‘sexuality on the move.’ This concept suggests that individuals’ geographical movements may diversify their sexual habitus as well as fluctuate their tiers of desirability and vice versa, delineating how different aspects of human sexuality are reshaping and reshaped during or after their embodied mobility. At the same time, their yearning for sexuality alterations also shapes the pattern of individuals’ trans-national and intra-urban movements. Moreover, the paper underscores that these alterations are not just objective reality but these gay men’s subjective belief which, along with their sexual desire, embodied practices and personal experiences composing a conceptual ‘circuit of sex and tourism’, attracting and captivating gay men to participate in and then be obsessed with this form of sexual/touristic practice.

Love Story's Ontology: Species Feeling in New Grub Street

Naturalism is an under-acknowledged posthumanism, and George Gissing's New Grub Street helps to reveal its ontologically and formally intricate aesthetics. Posthumanism challenges conventional humanism in insisting on the self as materially embodied, situated, and impinged: the self is not transcendent or etherealized, as in Cartesian philosophy. Gissing's Darwinian fiction often, interestingly, implies the premise of human non-specialness through stories of love and marriage. This essay claims that New Grub Street—with all its attention to writing, the print marketplace, and consumer appeal—metafictionally suggests the popular love story of the marriage plot as a particularly delusive product in that it encourages the false notion of human species distinction. New Grub Street's characters absorb this plot as a pattern for their own lives, which then fools them into thinking that a mere emotion, love, has a grand power to shape their futures, whatever their material circumstances. In other words, Gissing represents the feeling of love as a rhapsodic exaggeration of interiority and of interiority's supposed freedom from embodied conditions. But New Grub Street does not simply satirize its characters' ontological mistake. Rather, it demonstrates naturalism's complicated formal tendency to oscillate between two scales: the macroscale—deep, long species history—and, every bit as important, the microscale, or characters' small, daily, felt sense of their lives. Naturalism holds both versions of reality as equally valid; it is a fundamentally dual, dynamic form of realism, whose aesthetics, moreover, also works dynamically with readers themselves, implicating them, too, in a perplexed account of human being.

Xiong Shili, Kiyozawa Manshi, and the Logic of Transformation

This paper offers a comparative-philosophical examination of how the early 20th-century Chinese philosopher Xiong Shili (1885–1968) and late 19th-century Japanese philosopher Kiyozawa Manshi (1863–1903) thought about the topic of transformation. Although the two thinkers face similar material and intellectual circumstances – both attempt to develop an idealist philosophy of mind to combat naturalism – my focus is on demonstrating that they occupy inverted philosophical positions on transformation. I begin by discussing their different evaluations of logic. Xiong considers logic nothing more than a tool for combating false views that must be abandoned upon achieving its goal. Kiyozawa has a positive understanding of logic and thinks that it can be used speculatively to conceive of our relation to the unlimited. I then show how their differing evaluations of logic are rooted in their divergent views on transformation. Kiyozawa conceives of transformation as a process of spiritual evolution from matter to mind; that is, for him something transforms into something else. To Xiong, transformation is the sole reality; that is, for him there is only: transformation. In the last part, I supplement idea-historical reasons for their inverted positions vis-à-vis transformation with a philosophical examination aimed at revealing the existential attitudes from which Xiong and Kiyozawa theorize and engage in practice. To that end, I heuristically apply Kiyozawa’s two-gate theory. Within the framework offered by this theory, Xiong can be considered a philosopher of self-power, and Kiyozawa one of other-power.

Features of the criminalistic characteristics of economic transnational crimes committed with the use of modern computer technologies

The article discusses the concepts and structure of the forensic characteristics of economic transnational crimes committed using modern computer technologies. It is noted that with the help of forensic characteristics in the investigation of transnational crimes, it is possible to: develop effective methods of investigation; construction of programs, versions and investigation algorithm; determination of directions and forms of interaction between the competent authorities of the interested states during the investigation; drawing up a complete and clear request for international legal assistance, taking into account all the characteristics of crimes of a certain category. The structural elements of the forensic characteristics of economic, transnational crimes include: the subject and setting of the crime, the personality (persons) of the criminal.
 There are two groups of objects of criminal encroachment: the main (referred to the category of object-related economic crimes); subordinates (referred to as the subjects of crimes in the field of the use of computer technology). Therefore, the subjects of economic transnational crimes committed with the use of modern computer technologies include: computer information; documents for the transfer of funds; various means of access to bank accounts, etc. The material carriers of such items of this category of crimes are: payment order, bank check, plastic payment card of any kind, identification card.
 It is noted that the peculiarities of the situation of economic transnational crimes committed with the use of modern computer technology, it is appropriate to consider the scheme: material, technical, spatial, temporal and socio-psychological circumstances of the crime.
 It is stated that crimes of this category are usually committed by persons who have a high intellectual and professional level. There are three groups of people who commit economic transnational crimes using computer technology. However, in a more detailed consideration of the characteristics of persons who committed crimes of this category, it is proposed to study them according to the scheme: 1) general features of the offender who committed economic transnational crime, using computer technology and 2) crimes, taking into account the distribution of roles in an organized criminal group.
 Given that the forensic characterization of transnational economic crimes committed with the use of modern computer technology is somewhat complex, it requires in-depth theoretical research in various scientific categories - legal, economic, informational and international.

Communities' Perceptions on Covid-19 Health Risk Communication and Behaviour Change: A Study of Communities' Engagement during the Covid-19 Pandemic in Uasin Gishu County, Kenya.

The aim of the study is to investigate the communities’ perceptions on health risk communication on covid-19 prevention, treatment and management in Uasin Gishu County, Kenya. The study adopted a social constructivist-interpretive philosophical worldview and a qualitative-case study design. The target population comprised the ministry of health representatives, communities' elders (both men and women), men and women, health workers (doctors, nurses, and public health workers), youth and youth leaders, media & business community representatives. A sample size of 60 participants was selected. Purposive, quota and snowball sampling techniques were used. Data generation techniques were in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and observation. Data were analysed thematically. Key findings indicate that communities’ perceived public health communication as having empowered communities in understanding the pandemic preventive and control measures; however, they did not trust the public health agencies due to communication gaps on testing, isolation and treatment. This influenced how they implemented the risk messages. The study concludes that for effective communication to yield the desired behaviour and attitude changes expected by the ministry on covid-19, there was a need to adopt a more behavioural and social communication framework that resonates with people's values, beliefs, priorities, resources and social, cultural and material circumstances. This paper recommends the use of participatory communication media in risk communication such as dialogue, alongside the top-down communication inform of directives with a focus on communication for behavioural impact.

Digital transformation and its impact on our digital wellbeing

The pandemic has transformed how we engage with digital technologies. Technology is now used to support all facets of our daily lives, including work, learning, and enjoyment (Schleicher, 2020). While the pandemic may have accelerated our adoption, this upward trend has been happening for many years, and we are no longer in a world where the digital, virtual or online can be viewed as separate from our everyday life (Myers, Erikson & Small 2013). The effects of digitalisation have been felt at all levels, including education. As educators we can be optimistic, pessimistic or pragmatic about many of these changes, but they cannot be ignored (Gluckman & Allen, 2018). 
 The influence of digital transformation has highlighted the critical need to better manage our students' and our wellbeing. Wellbeing, as a concept has been challenging to define due to its complex and multi-faceted nature. More recent approaches have shifted towards ideas around the quality of life and the notion of flourishing in the positive psychology movement (Dodge et al 2012). In an endeavour to explain wellbeing which moves from the binary positive versus negative wellbeing, Dodge et al (2012), proposed that wellbeing is “the balance point between an individual’s resource pool and the challenges faced” (p. 230). In other words, people's wellbeing can be positively influenced if they are given the resources to address and overcome the adversities they face. Using their balance metaphor, a person's feeling of wellbeing can be stabilized when they feel that they have the psychological, social and physical resources and skills necessary to meet a particular psychological, social and/or physical challenge. This approach, therefore, acknowledges the see-saw effect of wellbeing but also that individuals have agency over their wellbeing.
 So what does this mean for student wellbeing in the context of learning technologies? As highlighted by Gluckman and Allen, (2018) “to understand wellbeing in the 21st century requires an understanding of transformative digital technologies as drivers of change not just in human material circumstances, but also in human values and organisational systems that support wellbeing.” (p. 10). Therefore, when considering digital wellbeing we need to acknowledge the transformative power of digital technology to drive both positive and negative outcomes and ask how we can tip the balance by leveraging the positives of this transformation.
 The presentation will explore the challenges that digital transformation brings to education and how as educators we can tip the balance to leverage technology to support our student’s and our digital wellbeing. The presentation will also focus on ways as educators we can use learning technologies to support students with the resources and skills to enhance their digital wellbeing.

Re-orienting the Diaspora–Development Nexus

Abstract Since the 1990s diasporic communities have increasingly been recognized as agents of development, with states, citizens, and the global development community keen to harness their knowledge, skills, and economic capital. Approaches to the ‘diaspora option’ tend to be rooted in the discourses, practices, and products of neoliberal globalization. Yet the most recent decade of the 21st century has witnessed a backlash against this cosmopolitanism. This paper pushes for a re-orientation of the diaspora-development nexus that looks to respond to the contemporary realities of (and the backlash against) neoliberal globalization: (re)bordering, European and North American ethnonationalism, nativist politics, and anti-migrant discourses. Thinking through a post-diasporic lens foregrounds the interconnected geographies, the complex temporalities, and the (racialized) inequalities within the diaspora–development nexus. The paper concludes that through a post-diasporic lens the diaspora–development nexus can be centred on everyday social, cultural, material, and political circumstances and experiences and feelings of belonging through multiple locales, re-orienting the nexus to advance the everyday socio-economic, cultural, and political liberation of diasporic communities.