Processes of Proliferation

While scalability and growth are key concerns for mainstream, venture-backed digital platforms, local and location-oriented collaborative economies are diverse in their approaches to evolving and achieving social change. Their aims and tactics differ when it comes to broadening their activities across contexts, spreading their concept, or seeking to make a bigger impact by promoting co-operation. This paper draws on three pairs of European, community-centred initiatives which reveal alternative views on scale, growth, and impact. We argue thatproliferation -- a concept that emphasises how something gets started and then travels in perhaps unexpected ways -- offers an alternative toscaling, which we understand as the use of digital networks in a monocultural way to capture an ever-growing number of participants. Considering proliferation is, thus, a way to reorient and enrich discussions on impact, ambitions, modes of organising, and the use of collaborative technologies. In illustrating how these aspects relate inprocesses of proliferation, we offer CSCW an alternative vision of technology use and development that can help us make sense of the impact of sharing and collaborative economies, and design socio-technical infrastructures to support their flourishing.

Pan Arabism 2.0? The Struggle for a New Paradigm in the Middle East

The Abraham Accords, signed in September 2020 have helped shed a light on a new discourse emerging from the Gulf that seeks to challenge some of the old dogmas that have dominated the region in the last few decades. A decade of turmoil that followed what was once dubbed as the “Arab Spring” finds a divided region, full of ethnic and religious conflict, ungoverned territories, and the growing reality of failed states. An “axis of resistance”, led by radical elements from both the Shi’a and the Sunni world, is perceived as a growing challenge to a group of actors led by a number of Gulf countries who identify radicalization as an existential threat. Facing the “axis of resistance”, a new “axis of renaissance” is coming of age with an alternative vision that seeks to change the face of the Middle East. In parallel to the rapid decline of the traditional Arab capitals, the Gulf is emerging as a more significant voice in the region due to its economic, political, and media influence. This article seeks to capture and explain the rise of this new Gulf-led axis and the early formulation of a new agenda of a more tolerant Middle East through a radical reshuffling of the order of priorities in the region.

Planning for freedom: From human capital to human capabilities

In this article, I build on critiques of the dominant skills orthodoxies that underpin National Skills Planning Systems (NSPS). I respond to calls for a broader conceptualisation of skills planning by discussing the contribution that the capability approach brings to the reconceptualisation of the role, purpose, and orientation of NSPS. Applying the capability approach as a thinking tool for building a broader approach to skills planning led to the identification of seven dimensions that frame an emancipatory approach to skills planning. My core argument is that COVID-19 has laid bare the urgent need for new approaches to skills planning that are informed by a different set of assumptions, driven by a different set of indicators, inclusive of different voices, undertaken through different processes, and, importantly, driven by a different set of goals. Responding to the call for a broader approach to skills planning and taking seriously the seven dimensions of an emancipatory skills planning system will require an alternative vision not only of skills and of work, but of society as a whole.

Density and Desire: Toward's New Zealand's peculiar urban dream

<p>Density and Desire explores changes in the social organisation of New Zealand, the notion and use of the home, the contribution of dwellings in our cities and an alternative vision for the future dwelling. New Zealand is experiencing a period of rapid transformation that is changing the way we live, work and socialise, as well as our sense of cultural identity. Our population is becoming dramatically more diverse, more urban, and of very different age and family profiles, creating demand for a wider range of housing options that can adapt to changing social patterns. For these reasons and more, we face new questions about living in a community, of dwelling diversity, of promoting sociability, and of creating conditions for neighbourliness. The move towards higher density living in New Zealand’s major cities provides an exciting opportunity for architecture. There is an urgent need to build dwellings and this thesis argues that apartments are a necessary part of our future. However, there is a certain stigma attached to apartment dwelling as ‘second best’ — if you can’t afford a house, you’ll settle for an apartment. The romance of the ‘Quarter-Acre Pavlova Paradise’ (Mitchell) is traded in for a plot peppered with horror stories: paper-thin walls, shoebox-sized ‘chicken coop’ confinement, lack of flexibility, onerous body corporate rules… the list could go on, and it does. The research benchmarks itself against the quantity and the quality of the single detached dwelling on a quarter-acre block both as a spatial measure and the representation of home. By asking ‘how many more dwellings can we get on that space’ and ‘what is the notion of home in the future’, it seeks to resolve some of the problems associated with our initial round of higher density. Domestic architecture can be defined as a system of relationships between oppositions — this thesis explores these relationships through three strategies: Hybrid, Separations & Connections, and Looseness. Each of these deals with the spatial and social characteristics of the city and the home and are used as a technique for controlling relationships at a range of scales and intimacies — from urban to interior — and as a tool for connecting or interrupting the public and private, inside and outside, and building and landscape. Density and Desire offers a conceptual framework with a series of strategies that demonstrate the potential of the apartment building to re-define urban living and the peculiar New Zealand urban dream.</p>

Density and Desire: Toward's New Zealand's peculiar urban dream

<p>Density and Desire explores changes in the social organisation of New Zealand, the notion and use of the home, the contribution of dwellings in our cities and an alternative vision for the future dwelling. New Zealand is experiencing a period of rapid transformation that is changing the way we live, work and socialise, as well as our sense of cultural identity. Our population is becoming dramatically more diverse, more urban, and of very different age and family profiles, creating demand for a wider range of housing options that can adapt to changing social patterns. For these reasons and more, we face new questions about living in a community, of dwelling diversity, of promoting sociability, and of creating conditions for neighbourliness. The move towards higher density living in New Zealand’s major cities provides an exciting opportunity for architecture. There is an urgent need to build dwellings and this thesis argues that apartments are a necessary part of our future. However, there is a certain stigma attached to apartment dwelling as ‘second best’ — if you can’t afford a house, you’ll settle for an apartment. The romance of the ‘Quarter-Acre Pavlova Paradise’ (Mitchell) is traded in for a plot peppered with horror stories: paper-thin walls, shoebox-sized ‘chicken coop’ confinement, lack of flexibility, onerous body corporate rules… the list could go on, and it does. The research benchmarks itself against the quantity and the quality of the single detached dwelling on a quarter-acre block both as a spatial measure and the representation of home. By asking ‘how many more dwellings can we get on that space’ and ‘what is the notion of home in the future’, it seeks to resolve some of the problems associated with our initial round of higher density. Domestic architecture can be defined as a system of relationships between oppositions — this thesis explores these relationships through three strategies: Hybrid, Separations & Connections, and Looseness. Each of these deals with the spatial and social characteristics of the city and the home and are used as a technique for controlling relationships at a range of scales and intimacies — from urban to interior — and as a tool for connecting or interrupting the public and private, inside and outside, and building and landscape. Density and Desire offers a conceptual framework with a series of strategies that demonstrate the potential of the apartment building to re-define urban living and the peculiar New Zealand urban dream.</p>

Whiteness Owns it, Blackness Defines it

Any examination of schools and schooling in the rural Southern Black Belt must interrogate the enduring logic of plantation politics and examine rural equity work through a racialized lens. We defined rural and identify a rural reality for life in the Black Belt South. Critical Race Theory (CRT) and antiblackness are offered as potential race-conscious theoretical frameworks to a plantation rurality, and we propose an alternative vision of rural education scholarship in the Southern Black Belt that invites space for anticolonial liberation.

Alternatives to Commodification

This chapter discusses alternatives to commodification. The opposite of commodification is de-commodification. De-commodification imposes limits on the commodity character of goods and services traded on markets, but it does not provide for an alternative. Following an understanding of commodification as subjugation of use value to market/exchange value, the chapter argues that an alternative must seek to “free” use value and reinstate it as the primary goal of production. Or put differently, an alternative to commodification must focus on the satisfaction of human needs rather than the expansion of private profit. Three elements are crucial for the promotion of (collective and ecological) use value: democratization, sustainability, and solidarity. The chapter discusses each one in a separate section. It then brings the three elements together into an alternative vision that is called use-value society.

What is life?

Background Many traditional biological concepts continue to be debated by biologists, scientists and philosophers of science. The specific objective of this brief reflection is to offer an alternative vision to the definition of life taking as a starting point the traits common to all living beings. Results and Conclusions Thus, I define life as a process that takes place in highly organized organic structures and is characterized by being preprogrammed, interactive, adaptative and evolutionary. If life is the process, living beings are the system in which this process takes place. I also wonder whether viruses can be considered living things or not. Taking as a starting point my definition of life and, of course, on what others have thought about it, I am in favor of considering viruses as living beings. I base this conclusion on the fact that viruses satisfy all the vital characteristics common to all living things and on the role they have played in the evolution of species. Finally, I argue that if there were life elsewhere in the universe, it would be very similar to what we know on this planet because the laws of physics and the composition of matter are universal and because of the principle of the inexorability of life.

Public education unbounded

Green School New Zealand is a private school whose school fees confirm for critics the inequity of private education, but the school may contribute to an alternative vision of public education if its commitment to sustainability is recognised as a public good. Conventional understanding of public education is challenged by contemporary political and democratic theory on the nature of publics. While public education generally refers to education funded by the state, if public education is limited to education provided by the state it restricts the good that it can do because the state is not equitable in whose interests it serves. Concepts of public education need updating to reflect understandings of varied publics and the individuals of which they are comprised (pluralist publics); the freedom of publics in subjectivity and sovereignty (unbounded publics); and the mutuality and equality of relations within publics (publicness). Green School New Zealand undoubtedly works against public interests in some respects; however, its focused concern for the environment represents an emergent publicness that is not apparent in schools that are more closely bound to the priorities of the state. When we recognise their public dimensions, schools like Green School New Zealand may help with rethinking public education and how we develop new systems of education that act for the good of pluralist, unbounded but connected publics.

Designing for Youth-Centered Moderation and Community Governance in Minecraft

Online settings have been suggested as viable sites for youth to develop social, emotional, and technical skills that can positively shape their behavior online. However, little work has been done to understand how online governance structures might support (or hinder) such learning. Using mixed-methods research, we report findings from a 2-year, in-the-wild study of 8–13 year olds on a custom multiplayer Minecraft server. The two-part study focuses on the design of youth-centered models of community governance drawn from evidence-based offline practices in the prevention and learning sciences. Preliminary results point to a set of socio-technical design approaches shaping player behavior while also supporting youth interest in Minecraft-like online environments. More broadly, the findings suggest an alternative vision of youth’s capacity for ownership and control of mechanisms shaping the culture and climate of their online communities: managing player behavior while challenging current norms around adult control and surveillance of youth activity.