Universities as Living Labs for Climate Praxis

HighlightsUniversity living lab success relies on careful navigation of complex relationships between different actors. Maximising change through living labs requires educational objectives and learning processes embedded in governance.

An action researcher in an advisor’s hat: A short reflection on lessons the OECD has learned from undertaking action research in the realm of policy and politics

Action research has enormous potential for policymakers, and those who advise them, to work in more iterative, reflective, and collaborative ways. For complex systems facing wicked problems, any approach that gets it closer to framing a problem well and drawing upon diverse forms of knowledge to bring about change, is good. Advisors who do action research in policymaking or political settings should be sensitive to the fact that this methodology may confound expectations regarding the ‘traditional’ advisor role. As such, some careful navigation of this approach (and what it means for the relationship and perception policymakers may have with those they engage to advise them) is required. This opinion piece shares lessons from an advisor working in the OECD’s innovation team, which embraced the action research methodology to reflect on and design innovative policy interventions with public sector policymakers. Action researchers who are using this methodology to produce policy advice may be more successful in auguring, and better navigating, new kinds of relationships with government if they heed the following lessons: frame the value of action research with decision makers, diversify your data and follow the story, and prime practitioners to participate.

Unpacking the Complexities of NGO Participation among the Youth of Makhanda, South Africa

The primary feature of NGO development intervention is the role that organisations play in extending access to services and opportunities to marginalised populations. Participation, however, as an ideal and central organising principle in these efforts, comes with a host of complexities that requires careful navigation of the cross-cutting contexts within which organisations exist and function. This paper discusses the intricacies of NGO participation within the context of youth-centred initiatives carried out in Makhanda in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province. In particular, the paper outlines the dynamics and trends of NGO participation among school-going and out-of-school youth living in a context of acute inequity and socio-economic exclusion. Data collected from young people, parents, teachers and community members in the Makhanda-east township of Joza, indicate that access to NGO services and consistent participation therein are differentiated and unequal in ways that sustain existing inequities in prospects and opportunity. A network of pre-existing features at an institutional, community, family and individual level sustains unequal access to non-state support that replicates dominant trends of inequity among the youth in this context. Consequently, this bears heavily on the choice and likelihood of who—among the youth in Joza—participates in NGOs; and more significantly, why, and why not? In an age where “popular participation” is heralded as the hope for a more egalitarian society, this paper proposes more careful consideration of the fact that NGO intervention exists within a dense and multi-layered network of inequities that, if not met with equally unbridled mediation, will persist and find refuge within a sector that seeks to confront the existing orders of inequity and exclusion.

Co-researching complexities: Learning strategies for edge walking in community–university research partnerships

Community–university research partnerships (CURPs) comprise a diverse group of stakeholders who share differing capabilities and diverse insights into the same issues, and they are widely regarded as valuable to navigate the best course of action. Partnering as co-researchers is core to nurturing these partnerships, but it requires careful navigation of complexities. The different insider and outsider positionalities occupied by co-researchers highlight experiences of ‘walking on the edges’ of each other’s worlds. This not only challenges these collaborations, but also enables a depth of understanding that may not be achieved in CURPs where the luxury of, or effort in, building a team of co-researchers to collect, analyse and write up data is not present. This article focuses on learning strategies to advance the co-researching capacities of CURPs where stakeholders occupy divergent positions. The focus will be on lessons from a co-researching partnership comprising a university-affiliated academic researcher, a local Kenyan non-governmental organization (NGO) and members of a community in which the NGO worked. We argue that applying selected learning strategies may facilitate positive experiences of edge walking and enhance the meaningful two-way sharing required for cross-cultural CURPs. It is recommended that community and university research partners examine the utility of these learning strategies for strengthening co-researching in CURP contexts.

Frances Brown and the ‘Modern’ Market for Print

In this chapter, I focus on a writer who got her start writing poetry and prose for the cheap popular press: Frances Brown. Like Cook, Brown was working class, but her impoverished upbringing as the daughter of a postmaster in a remote Ulster village placed her on a lower rung of the social ladder than Cook with fewer resources at her disposal. She lost her sight to smallpox when she was eighteen months old and learned about the world by listening to her siblings’ lessons and having family members read aloud to her. Once she began writing, her sister Rebecca served as her amanuensis. She began her career contributing poetry to the Irish Penny Journal, later published her work in the Penny Magazine, and developed an extensive career contributing poetry and prose to Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal. Her careful navigation of the market for popular literature reveals the importance of cheap media formats (with differing levels of copyright protection) in a fashioning a writing career. Even though Brown’s work was often repurposed by scissors-and-paste journalists as if it were free content within the public domain, she was successful in establishing a celebrity identity and publishing her work in book form.

The Woman’s Voice in Zionism: Disentangling Paula Winkler from Martin Buber

This article calls for a reassessment of the thought of Paula Winkler (1877–1958), paying renewed attention to her contributions to the cultural Zionist movement in her work on the domestic space as a site of Jewish cultural renewal. Criticizing the trend in modern Jewish scholarship of focusing on Winkler’s biography and her relationship with her husband Martin Buber at the expense of appreciating her innovations as a Zionist thinker, it proposes and demonstrates a close reading of her work as a corrective. Focusing on Winkler’s 1901 essays on Zionism and the Jewish woman, this article illustrates the important challenges Winkler leveled to Buber and the young Zionist intellectual community by awarding the Jewish woman and the private sphere an active and positive role in the Zionist transformation of Jewish life. It concludes that questions of Winkler’s identity are best approached through her own careful navigation of her liminal status in the Jewish and Zionist communities, and the way that she engages the perspective awarded to her as a woman and a non-Jew to formulate her arguments.

Republished: Embolization of a cavernous carotid fistula through the vein of Labbé: a new alternative transvenous access route

Endovascular treatment of carotid cavernous fistulas (CCFs) via a transvenous approach is standard, but in rare cases this approach is challenging due to absence or thrombosis of the commonly used venous routes. A 61-year-old woman presented with a symptomatic CCF with all but one of the venous access routes to the CCF thrombosed, leaving an engorged superficial middle cerebral vein (SMCV) as the only venous outflow from the cavernous sinus. Access to the CCF was made possible after careful navigation of the sigmoid sinus, the vein of Labbé and the SMCV, bypassing the need for surgical access to the SMCV or for a direct transorbital puncture. The CCF was completely occluded by coiling and Onyx embolization. The patient made an uneventful recovery, with resolution of her symptoms. To the best of our knowledge, this access route has not been previously reported in the treatment of CCFs.

Cloud Computing and Gov 2.0

This article seeks to dissect the evolution of digital governance within the Canadian public sector at an expansionary time for cloud computing and wider reforms often referred to as Gov 2.0. Beyond infrastructure, the notion of the cloud may also be viewed as a proxy for a wider societal transformation that, in turn, impacts government both administratively and politically. This wider transformational nonetheless faces tensions between traditional proprietary concepts and mindsets and newer emerging models of open source and shared openness. The future of the Canadian public sector requires a careful navigation and blending of these two worldviews. While some observers may prefer to decouple cloud computing from new governance capacities associated with Gov 2.0 (viewing the cloud instead strictly through a prism of internal architecture and infrastructure), the evidence presented in this article suggests that both directions are intimately related in shaping the public sector going forward.

Cloud Computing and Gov 2.0

This article seeks to dissect the evolution of digital governance within the Canadian public sector at an expansionary time for cloud computing and wider reforms often referred to as Gov 2.0. Beyond infrastructure, the notion of the cloud may also be viewed as a proxy for a wider societal transformation that, in turn, impacts government both administratively and politically. This wider transformational nonetheless faces tensions between traditional proprietary concepts and mindsets and newer emerging models of open source and shared openness. The future of the Canadian public sector requires a careful navigation and blending of these two worldviews. While some observers may prefer to decouple cloud computing from new governance capacities associated with Gov 2.0 (viewing the cloud instead strictly through a prism of internal architecture and infrastructure), the evidence presented in this article suggests that both directions are intimately related in shaping the public sector going forward.