Transforming departmental culture: Empowering a department through Appreciative Inquiry

This article outlines an appreciative inquiry (AI) into a departmental professional development process and describes the resulting implementation of an appreciative peer evaluation meeting as one part of the new professional development process. Using AI, a departmental faculty development committee sought to re-envision the professional development process. Also, the authors discuss how using AI can result in positive impacts for culture change and the model for peer evaluation can promote both individual and collective development of faculty.

Promises and challenges of Blockchain in education

Blockchain is arguably the next technology-mediated socioeconomic mega trend after the ongoing era of Net Neutrality and Big Data. This theoretical paper explores blockchain technology and its impacts on education. It is argued that we cannot take for granted that the network neutrality, popularized accessibility of the Internet and its influence on education will remain as we know it today. Blockchain promises, among others, a greater control over financing and investing in education, implementing instructional projects, a certification/accreditation system and learning. Education blockchain with its distributed ledgers would set novel standards of crypto-learning and crypto-administration that are acceptable across organizations and nations, enhancing thus the objectivity, validity and control of information without being compromised by socio-economic instabilities. The slow rate of adoption of blockchain technology in education reflects the rate in the fields of finance and management but, at the same time, it poses a few critical challenges such as lacking tangible incentives for technology maintenance or ‘blockchain mining’ (inward sustainability) coupled with a rather feeble orientation to collective development of education (outward sustainability).

SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE AUDIENCE ECONOMY: BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS PARTNERSHIPS AND CO-DEPENDENCE

Social media platforms’ digital advertising revenues depend considerably on partnerships. Business partnerships are endemic and essential to the business of platforms, yet their role remains relatively underexplored in the literature on platformisation and platform power. This paper considers the significance of partnerships in the social media ecosystem to better understand how industry platforms, and the infrastructure they build, mediate and shape platform power and governance. We argue that partners contribute to ‘platformisation’ through their collective development of business-to-business platform infrastructures. Specifically, we examine how they have integrated social media platforms with what we call the audience economy – an exceptionally complex global and interconnected marketplace of intermediaries involved in the creation, commodification, analysis, and circulation of data audiences for purposes including but not limited to digital advertising and marketing. We determine which relationships exist, which are exclusive or shared, and identify key ecosystem partners. Further, we find that partners build and integrate extensive infrastructures for data-sourcing and media distribution, surfacing infrastructural and strategic sources and locations, or ‘nodes’, of power in this ecosystem. The empirical findings thus highlight the significance of partnerships and partner integrations and call attention to the powerful industry players and intermediaries that remain largely invisible to us as audiences.

SOLVING DYNAMIC PLANNING PROBLEMS ON THE BASIS OF GROUP DECISION METHODS

This article discusses problems based on group methods of decision-making based on a multimodal approach to solving the problems of dynamic planning of Smart City development. In particular, the main tool for decision-making in the process of dynamic planning is a system of models and methods, which are the basis for creating the structure of the dynamic plan, optimizing the plan and finding the desired solution. Collective decision-making methods are used in the collective development of planning decisions, including in the context of solving the problems of dynamic planning of Smart City development and group decision-making, which requires the agreed decisions of several specialists.

On Online Practices of Hospitality in Higher Education

This article contributes to conversations on hospitality in educational settings, with a focus on higher education and the online context. We integrate Derrida’s ethics of hospitality framework with a focus on practices of hospitality, including its affective and material, embodied dimension (Zembylas: Stud Philos Educ 39:37–50, 2019). This article offers empirical examples of practices of what we termed ‘virtual academic hospitality’: during a series of online collaborative and cross borders workshops with teachers of English based in the Gaza Strip (Palestine), we performed academic hospitality through virtual convivial rituals and the sharing of virtual gifts, which are illustrated here. We propose a revision of the concept of academic hospitality arguing that: firstly, academic hospitality is not limited to intellectual conversations; secondly, that the relationship between hospitality and mobility needs to be revised, since hospitality mediated by the technological medium can be performed, and technology may even stretch hospitality towards the unreachable ‘unconditional hospitality’ theorised by Derrida (Of hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invited Jacques Derrida to respond. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2000); and thirdly, that indigenous epistemics, with their focus on the affective, may offer alternative understandings of conviviality within the academy. These points may contribute to the collective development of a new paradigmatic understanding of hospitality, one which integrates Western and indigenous traditions of hospitality, and which includes the online environment.

Public discourses about work: narrative sources with a high pedagogical-social value

Is there a work and organizations’ethnography and anthropology that has passed and passes through words and discourses? Is it possible to extract from the analysis of public discourse about work the narration to outline an idea of work not only set up and carried out but also told, imagined, desired and above all educating? Printed paper, educational, scientific and political production can be considered very important sources to build a discourse about work and “popular pedagogy” and common sense connected to it in the sense of narration as historical and metabletic tool that contributes to individual and collective development. Words and speeches are epistemological frames and glances at the world have a connection with things. The word is not only a sign, it is also an image. The word brings, somewhat enigmatic, a connection with what it represents. Words therefore also have the power to produce transformations, to change the world, the way they see it and to represent it. Foucault had also written that words are fundamental codes behind a culture and influence experience and thought. Words and speeches about work, spoken and written, then, are a meta-narrative and can help to draw and dissect an unprecedented, alternative, parallel story. Also, a history of pedagogy of work is full of theories, models, methods but also of stories, of speeches of intellectuals, trade unionists, scholars, prominent figures, entrepreneurs who have dedicated their lives to the cause of a dignified and good work. For example, the speeches of Vittorio, Adriano Olivetti, the encyclicals of the different popes that have succeeded each other in history, the many aphorisms and speeches made by great entrepreneurs such as Cucinelli, Steve Jobs etc. that, in different ways, have helped to build an idea of work that - over the centuries - has profoundly changed. Starting from these reflections, the contribution aims to highlight the baggage of intangible assets and the implicit educational deposited in some exemplary narrative passages on the work that have helped to build collective stories and produce a shared sense, to give a specific identity to work and to propose its widespread representation with a high pedagogical-social value.

Governmentality and the new spirit of exploitation: the politics of legitimacy and resistance to Canadian mining in Guatemala and Honduras

The activities of Canadian mining companies operating abroad are often carried out under the banner of bringing badly-needed development and democracy to impoverished regions of the globe. Many of these projects, however, can often lead to increased poverty, conflict and insecurity in communities near the mines. There have also been egregious violations of human rights and grave environmental damages documented at Canadian mines worldwide. As a result, numerous countries in the Americas and beyond have seen burgeoning grassroots resistance movements rejecting the presence of Canadian extractive projects on their territory — movements that are almost invariably rejected as illegitimate by industry and Canadian government representatives, and almost always repressed by host country governments. Using critical discourse analysis and Foucault’s work on governmentality and biopower, this dissertation argues that discourses of democracy and development are increasingly being used to advance projects that are often fundamentally anti-democratic, destructive and exploitative, and that this represents a critical component of a nascent strategy by which neoliberal regimes of capital accumulation are advanced and legitimized today. Through discursive construction of Canadian mining regimes as purveyors of collective “development,” and strategic delegitimization of critics of Canadian mining activities as irrational, radical, dangerous threats to the betterment of society at large, support for the mine is galvanized and conflict surrounding the mine intensifies. This argument is grounded in exploration of three case studies: two open-pit gold/silver mines owned/operated by Goldcorp — their Honduran San Martín mine and their Guatemalan Marlin mine — and the politics of land claims near a non-functioning Guatemalan nickel mine previously owned by Canada’s Skye Resources and HudBay Minerals. Further evidence for this argument is offered in two accompanying documentary films that I have produced, exploring these particular case studies. In demonstrating how foot soldiers are being enlisted into an army that defends the interests of Canadian mining companies and the neoliberal economic order that they proliferate and prosper from — despite the fact that local benefits may be negligible and the harms incurred can be severe — this dissertation seeks to shed light upon a broader dynamic of resistance/counter-resistance playing out globally in areas beyond resource extraction.

Governmentality and the new spirit of exploitation: the politics of legitimacy and resistance to Canadian mining in Guatemala and Honduras

The activities of Canadian mining companies operating abroad are often carried out under the banner of bringing badly-needed development and democracy to impoverished regions of the globe. Many of these projects, however, can often lead to increased poverty, conflict and insecurity in communities near the mines. There have also been egregious violations of human rights and grave environmental damages documented at Canadian mines worldwide. As a result, numerous countries in the Americas and beyond have seen burgeoning grassroots resistance movements rejecting the presence of Canadian extractive projects on their territory — movements that are almost invariably rejected as illegitimate by industry and Canadian government representatives, and almost always repressed by host country governments. Using critical discourse analysis and Foucault’s work on governmentality and biopower, this dissertation argues that discourses of democracy and development are increasingly being used to advance projects that are often fundamentally anti-democratic, destructive and exploitative, and that this represents a critical component of a nascent strategy by which neoliberal regimes of capital accumulation are advanced and legitimized today. Through discursive construction of Canadian mining regimes as purveyors of collective “development,” and strategic delegitimization of critics of Canadian mining activities as irrational, radical, dangerous threats to the betterment of society at large, support for the mine is galvanized and conflict surrounding the mine intensifies. This argument is grounded in exploration of three case studies: two open-pit gold/silver mines owned/operated by Goldcorp — their Honduran San Martín mine and their Guatemalan Marlin mine — and the politics of land claims near a non-functioning Guatemalan nickel mine previously owned by Canada’s Skye Resources and HudBay Minerals. Further evidence for this argument is offered in two accompanying documentary films that I have produced, exploring these particular case studies. In demonstrating how foot soldiers are being enlisted into an army that defends the interests of Canadian mining companies and the neoliberal economic order that they proliferate and prosper from — despite the fact that local benefits may be negligible and the harms incurred can be severe — this dissertation seeks to shed light upon a broader dynamic of resistance/counter-resistance playing out globally in areas beyond resource extraction.

Defining the Building Blocks and the Priority Areas for Cooperation Under the Belt and Road Initiative

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a China’s endeavour to globally connect the countries along two major routes. This paper examines the keywords defining the building blocks and priority areas under the BRI and their relationship in order to foster a practical understanding of the BRI for enhancing regional cooperation and connectivity along the routes. The methodology employed was a systematic literature review involving four stages. Firstly, a broad search in the Scopus database (2016-2020) using BRI or similar terms returned n=1,710 articles which were further limited using the keywords: building blocks, priority areas, policy coordination, infrastructure connectivity, unimpeded trade, financial integration and people-to-people exchange. Other keywords considered were community and Silk Road. The articles were then screened and assessed resulting in 155 articles reviewed in this study. The review reveals that while the building blocks are the aim motivating the BRI, hence the spirit behind it, the five priority areas provide practical methods through which China and other countries along the Belt and Road routes will focus their collective development. The relationship between the two aspects owes to the fact that people are involved at all spheres of the initiative bringing about emphasis on the people-to-people exchange which is a core part of social dimension in sustainable development. In contribution, this paper presents a unique perspective for looking at the BRI for a focused discussion of its cooperative framework which could serve as a foundation for further research in various sectors