3. Toward a Theory of Social Innovation in Higher Education

<?page nr="49"?>Abstract A necessary response to addressing complex global problems rests in the theoretic and practice of social innovation: approaches to solving intractable social issues on a local and global scale. The logic, language, and practices of social innovation can, in turn, motivate energies toward conceptualizing college students as social innovators: individuals capable of meaningfully and cooperatively responding to persistent and transdisciplinary problems including social inequities, environmental change, and public health crises. To provide a philosophical anchor needed to ultimately sustain these propositions, we unite social innovation with Honneth’s concept of social freedom. We then introduce an expanded definition of the prototype as a mechanism that can be utilized to embed social innovation and social freedom throughout the contemporary collegiate academic curriculum. The subsequent section considers students in two interdependent forms of relation—student-student and student-faculty—within the dynamic context of postsecondary learning. We conclude by incorporating our ideas around an imagined possibility for securing social freedom amidst present ecological fragility and provide long-range considerations of our theory for the higher education enterprise.

Raymond Williams and the politics of the commons: The performative quality of the intellectual

The first part of this article seeks to return to some of the questions posed by Raymond Williams in respect of the critical role that could be played by art in the struggle for a world beyond capitalism. Here I defend the performativity of public intellectuals like Williams as he sought to reconnect ideas produced in the academy to social movements and artistic forms of production which remain necessary in the age of austerity and ecological fragility. Also I explore the art of the commons through an investigation of the cultural production of Raymond Williams and the more recent debates on the commons and neoliberalism.

Thoughts on Developing of Jujube Industry in Southern Xinjiang under Ecological Fragility

Southern Xinjiang is a ecological vulnerable area, It mainly reflects in tree aspects: desertification, serious drought, saline-alkali, srong wind and dusty. Jujube tree can resist on drought, wind and dusty, saline-alkali, so we should develop jujube industry vigorously. This thesis description the natural ecological environment of Southern Xinjiang from geography environment, solar-thermal resource, water and land resource, and advantage of the development of jujube industry in Southern Xinjiang ,analyses the existing problems during jujube industry development, puts forward solutions,so this thesis has a big guide meaning to healthy and sustainable development of jujube industry in Southern Xinjiang.

Representations underlying social learning and cultural evolution

Social learning is a source of behaviour for many species, but few use it as extensively as they seemingly could. In this article, I attempt to clarify our understanding of why this might be. I discuss the potential computational properties of social learning, then examine the phenomenon in nature through creating a taxonomy of the representations that might underly it. This is achieved by first producing a simplified taxonomy of the established forms of social learning, then describing the primitive capacities necessary to support them, and finally considering which of these capacities we actually have evidence for. I then discuss theoretical limits on cultural evolution, which include having sufficient information transmitted to support robust representations capable of supporting variation for evolution, and the need for limiting the extent of social conformity to avoid ecological fragility. Finally, I show how these arguments can inform several key scientific questions, including the uniqueness of human culture, the long lifespans of cultural species, and the propensity of animals to seemingly have knowledge about a phenomenon well before they will act upon it.