How to Implement Safe, Efficient and Cost-Effective SARS-CoV-2 Testing in Urban and Rural Schools within One Month

(1) Background: With vaccination and new variants of SARS-CoV-2 on the horizon, efficient testing in schools may enable prevention of mass infection outbreaks, keeping schools safe places and buying time until decisions on feasibility and the necessity of vaccination in children and youth are made. We established, in the course of the WICOVIR (Where Is the COrona VIRus) study, that gargle-based pool-PCR testing offers a feasible, efficient, and safe testing system for schools in Germany when applied by central university laboratories. (2) Objectives: We evaluated whether this approach can be implemented in different rural and urban settings. (3) Methods: We assessed the arrangements required for successful implementation of the WICOVIR approach in a variety of settings in terms of transport logistics, data transfer and pre-existing laboratory set-up, as well as the time required to establish the set-up. (4) Results: We found that once regulatory issues have been overcome, all challenges pertaining to logistics, data transfer, and laboratory testing on different platforms can be solved within one month. Pooling and depooling of samples down to the individual test result were achievable within one working day in all settings. Local involvement of the community and decentralized set-ups were keys for success. (5) Conclusion: The WICOVIR gargle-based pool-PCR system is so robust and simple that it can be implemented within one month in all settings now or in future pandemics.

Confronting Complex Accountability in Conservation With Communities

Increasingly, conservation organizations are conducting conservation activities with local communities. Many conservation organizations now position their work as contributing to sustainable development initiatives, and local involvement in conservation is understood to increase conservation and sustainability success. Aside from communities, however, conservation organizations are accountable to funders and partners, and values and priorities vary across actor type. Mismatched goals combine with power imbalances between conservation actors, and create decision-making conflict throughout conservation processes, from objective setting through implementation and evaluation. As a result, communities may lose local decision-making power or face new negative consequences, trust in organizational/community partnerships may be undermined, and conservation organizations’ reputations (and the reputation of the sector as whole) may suffer. In this commentary we point out processes and conditions that can lead conservation organizations to privilege accountability to funders and others over accountability to communities, thereby undermining community-level success. We follow with suggestions for how funders, conservation organizations and others may improve community engagement and community-level outcomes, and improve their reputations in general and in their work with communities, by actively leveraging accountability to the community and involving local community members in decision-making.

Using Patient and Public Involvement to elicit opinion on Gamified Cognitive Training and Assessment for People living with Dementia (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED This paper reports on a series of Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) workshops with people living with dementia and carers where they discussed cognitive training and screening technologies designed to reduce the risk of dementia and identify changes in cognition. Little is known about the factors influencing the acceptance of such technologies. Four linked workshops were conducted with the same group, each focusing on a specific topic: meaningful improvement, learning and motivation, trust in digital diagnosis and barriers to technology adoption. Participants in the workshops included local Involvement Team members as well as those recruited via Join Dementia Research and researcher took part in some activities. The group activities were recorded, and transcripts were analyzed using thematic analysis with a combination of a priori and data-driven themes. Several important findings emerged, including the importance the group placed on maintaining good cognitive health, the importance of community activities within dementia and self-care and need for more support after a dementia diagnosis. The implications for researchers and technology developers are discussed. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT RR2-10.1007/978-3-030-49065-2_4

Local involvement in modern Greek revivals of ancient theatres: Delphi and Epidaurus in the inter-war period

Local community participation in the revival of ancient theatres as venues in Greece shaped the dynamics of the cultural reception of inter-war performances at Delphi and Epidaurus. Here I analyse local involvement within and beyond the theatrical context of the Delphic Festivals, as well as the long-standing identification of the village of Ligourio with the theatre of Epidaurus. These relationships reflect distinctive dimensions of the clash between community-led and institutional archaeology, which dominated national discourse on authenticity and identity. At the same time, the prospects of economic development through tourism in such remote areas encouraged local receptiveness to the revival of ancient theatres.

Conclusion

This Conclusion brings together the three cases, underlining the importance of locality and how it is has been lastingly tainted by KZ history. Across European borders, amidst diverging national war histories, different heritages of guilt and myth, and diverse paths of national remembrance each with its own timeline and combination of motivational factors, it highlights some of the common denominators in the histories of camps and their neighbouring communities. Local populations shared the physical fate of close proximity; but they also commonly espoused stories of interaction (wartime and post-war), as well as undergoing processes of realization and recognition of being intertwined KZ history, and attempting to justify and rationalize their coexistence with a KZ. The Conclusion accounts for the different nature of local involvement in KZ commemoration across the three locations, and closes with some of the broad distinctions this reveals about KZ memory more generally.

Records of Dispossession: Archival Thinking and UNESCO's Nubian Campaign in Egypt and Sudan

This article discusses the creation of architectural and archaeological archives in newly independent Egypt and Sudan during the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, organized by UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). This initiative took place in the contiguous border regions of Egyptian and Sudanese Nubia from 1960 until 1980 in response to the building of the Aswan High Dam. Contingency in these archives demonstrates the necessity of acknowledging the (post-) colonial social and historical conditions in which they were produced. UNESCO's campaign sought to record ancient remains that would be submerged by the High Dam's floodwaters. During the campaign, UNESCO set up 'documentation centres' that helped codify what knowledge about Nubian architecture/archaeology might be archive-worthy, producing index cards dedicated to this purpose in Egypt (concentrating on monuments) and Sudan (centring on archaeological sites). This practice ‐ echoed by other organizations involved in the work ‐ was often purposefully forgetful of contemporary Nubia, whose material traces were also soon to be flooded. Nevertheless, such practices rendered visible other unauthorised histories of Nubia that subverted archival knowledge production: histories of local involvement with the campaign and now-submerged Nubian settlements. This article therefore argues that it is not only possible, but also ethically imperative, to repurpose the Nubian campaign's archives towards the acknowledgement of erased Nubian histories.

Rural social enterprises in Europe: A systematic literature review

There is a growing perception that social enterprises represent a significant solution to the range of contemporary challenges facing rural areas across Europe. However, while much of the existing studies of European rural social enterprises provide a rich insight into specific case studies, as of yet, there is no comprehensive review of the breadth of research currently published on rural social enterprises in Europe. We respond to this gap by providing a systematic literature review incorporating 66 studies of rural social enterprise in Europe. We highlight the range of research in this field and demonstrate how the organisations act as key actors in fulfilling needs of rural areas that are not met otherwise. This systematic literature review confirms that rural social enterprises are characterised by strong local involvement with an ability to combine different goals and resources. Based on this review, we suggest that the rural and local contexts, often combined with tailored external support, are important factors in enabling rural social enterprises. This review also indicates that the academic field is relatively young and rapidly growing, leaving room for new lines of potential research to improve our understanding of these enterprises and their contribution to the development of rural places.