Adaptive capacity and learning to learn as leverage for social-ecological resilience

Ioan Fazey, John A. Fazey, Joern Fischer, Kate Sherren, John Warren, Reed F. Noss, Stephen R. Dovers (2007) Adaptive capacity and learning to learn as leverage for social?ecological resilience. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 5(7),375-380. RAE2008

An impression of home: player nostalgia and the impulse to explore game worlds

This is the accepted version of the paper following peer review.

The Offstage of Democracy: The Problem of Social Dialogue in John Dewey’s and Walter Lippmann’s Writings

The aim of this article is to present and discuss John Dewey’s and Walter Lippmann’s views on the problem of communication in a democratic society, particularly their views on the question of a role of communication in forming social processes. First part of the paper outlines the framework of this problem and its meaning to the question of possibility of democracy. Part two is concerned with anthropological and socio-political considerations: I discuss the Deweyan and the Lippmannian understanding of individual, society, intelligence and democracy. In part three I examine in detail the problem of communication, with special attention given to the questions of the role of communication in forming social processes, the foundations and conditions of communication, the debaters, and a subject matter of a debate as well as the questions of who and what forms this debate and whether we can form it altogether.

The island empire of the East : being a short history of Japan and missionary work therein with special reference to the mission of the M.S.C.C. / by Rev. J. Cooper Robinson ; with an introduction by the lord bishop of Algoma.

http://www.archive.org/details/theislandempire00robiuoft

The Private Sector and HIV/AIDS in Africa: Taking Stock of Six Years of Applied Research

Background: Until recently, little was known about the costs of the HIV/AIDS epidemic to businesses in Africa and business responses to the epidemic. This paper synthesizes the results of a set of studies conducted between 1999 and 2006 and draws conclusions about the role of the private sector in Africa’s response to AIDS. Methods: Detailed human resource, financial, and medical data were collected from 14 large private and parastatal companies in South Africa, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, and Ethiopia. Surveys of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) were conducted in South Africa, Kenya, and Zambia. Large companies’ responses or potential responses to the epidemic were investigated in South Africa, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, and Rwanda. Results: Among the large companies, estimated workforce HIV prevalence ranged from 5%¬37%. The average cost per employee lost to AIDS varied from 0.5-5.6 times the average annual compensation of the employee affected. Labor cost increases as a result of AIDS were estimated at anywhere from 0.6%-10.8% but exceeded 3% at only 2 of 14 companies. Treatment of eligible employees with ART at a cost of $360/patient/year was shown to have positive financial returns for most but not all companies. Uptake of employer-provided testing and treatment services varied widely. Among SMEs, HIV prevalence in the workforce was estimated at 10%-26%. SME managers consistently reported low AIDS-related employee attrition, little concern about the impacts of AIDS on their companies, and relatively little interest in taking action, and fewer than half had ever discussed AIDS with their senior staff. AIDS was estimated to increase the average operating costs of small tourism companies in Zambia by less than 1%; labor cost increases in other sectors were probably smaller. Conclusions: Although there was wide variation among the firms studied, clear patterns emerged that will permit some prediction of impacts and responses in the future.

Lonely voices of the south: exploring the transnational dialogue of Flannery O'Connor and Frank O'Connor

Accepted Version

The corporate social responsibility movement and law's empire: Is there a conflict?

At the heart of corporate governance and social responsibility discourse is recognition of the fact that the modern corporation is primarily governed by the profit maximisation imperative coupled with moral and ethical concerns that such a limited imperative drives the actions of large and wealthy corporations which have the ability to act in influential and significant ways, shaping how our social world is experienced. The actions of the corporation and its management will have a wide sphere of impact over all of its stakeholders whether these are employees, shareholders, consumers or the community in which the corporation is located. As globalisation has become central to the way we think it is also clear that ‘community’ has an ever expanding meaning which may include workers and communities living very far away from Corporate HQ. In recent years academic commentators have become increasingly concerned about the emphasis on what can be called short-term profit maximisation and the perception that this extremist interpretation of the profit imperative results in morally and ethically unacceptable outcomes.1 Hence demands for more corporate social responsibility. Following Cadbury’s2 classification of corporate social responsibility into three distinct areas, this paper will argue that once the legally regulated tier is left aside corporate responsibility can become so nebulous as to be relatively meaningless. The argument is not that corporations should not be required to act in socially responsible ways but that unless supported by regulation, which either demands high standards, or at the very least incentivises the attainment of such standards such initiatives are doomed to failure. The paper will illustrate by reference to various chosen cases that law’s discourse has already signposted ways to consider and resolve corporate governance problems in the broader social responsibility context.3 It will also illustrate how corporate responsibility can and must be supported by legal measures. Secondly, this paper will consider the potential conflict between an emphasis on corporate social responsibility and the regulatory approach.4 Finally, this paper will place the current interest in corporate social responsibility within the broader debate on the relationship between law and non-legally enforceable norms and will present some reflections on the norm debate arising from this consideration of the CSR movement.

The lived experience of Irish diocesan priests. A qualitative study of clerical identity, obedience and celibacy.

The main aim of this thesis is to document and explore the lived experience of Irish diocesan priests and former priests, in order to explore the reality of diocesan priesthood in contemporary Ireland, and to investigate how, if at all, diocesan priesthood has changed in Ireland during the past fifty years. It sought to do this by interrogating the stories of thirty-three diocesan priests and former priests, and by placing their individual stories within the broader context of Irish society and the Catholic Church, during the fifty-year period, 1962–2012. The research focused on three core areas of priesthood – identity, obedience, and celibacy – and it addressed the following questions. First, how do Irish diocesan priests understand their priesthood and how has this understanding changed over time, if at all? I will argue that three paradigms of priesthood co-exist in the contemporary Irish Church, and that each of these models corresponds with a distinct period in contemporary Irish Church history. I will also demonstrate the existence of underlying similarities in the cultural practice of priesthood that transcend the different generations of priests. Second, how do Irish diocesan priests negotiate their priesthood within a large and complex institution? My study suggests that Irish diocesan priests are typically loyal and obedient. However, they are not necessarily subservient. Third, how do Irish diocesan priests understand and experience celibacy in their day-to-day lives? My study demonstrates that celibacy is typically understood and experienced along a continuum, ranging from total acceptance to total rejection, with most priests somewhere in between. Fourth, I will argue that while priests are experiencing many difficulties in their lives, there is insufficient evidence from the present study to indicate they are experiencing a crisis.

The politics of hazard: imminent critique and deconstruction of ecological modernisation in Ireland

This dissertation sets out to provide immanent critique and deconstruction of ecological modernisation or ecomodernism.It does so, from a critical social theory approach, in order to correctly address the essential issues at the heart of the environmental crisis that ecomodernism purports to address. This critical approach argues that the solution to the environmental crisis can only be concretely achieved by recognising its root cause as being foremost the issue of material interaction between classes in society, and not simply between society and nature in any structurally meaningful way. Based on a metaphysic of false dualism, ecological modernisation attributes a materiality of exchange value relations to issues of society, while simultaneously offering a non- material ontology to issues of nature. Thus ecomodernism serves asymmetrical relations of power whereby, as a polysemic policy discourse, it serves the material interests of those who have the power to impose abstract interpretations on the materiality of actual phenomena. The research of this dissertation is conducted by the critical evaluation of the empirical data from two exemplary Irish case studies. Discovery of the causal processes of the various public issues in the case studies and thereafter the revelation of the meaning structures under- pinning such causal processes, is a theoretically- driven task requiring analysis of those social practices found in the cognitive, cultural and structural constitutions respectively of actors, mediations and systems.Therefore, the imminent critique of the case study paradigms serves as a research strategy for comprehending Ireland’s nature- society relations as influenced essentially by a systems (techno- corporatist) ecomodernist discourse. Moreover, the deconstruction of this systems ideological discourse serves not only to demonstrate how weak ecomodernism practically undermines its declared ecological objectives, but also indicates how such objectives intervene as systemic contradictions at the cultural heart of Ireland’s late modernisation.

Exploring the Zionist evolution of Robert Briscoe: History and memory

Robert Briscoe was the Dublin born son of Lithuanian and German-Jewish immigrants. As a young man he joined Sinn Féin and was an important figure in the War of Independence due to a role as one of the IRA’s main gun-procuring agents. He took the anti-Treaty side during an internecine Civil War, mainly due to the influence of Eamon de Valera and retained a filial devotion towards him for the rest of his life. In 1926 he was a founding member of Fianna Fáil, de Valera’s breakaway republican party, which would dominate twentieth-century Irish politics. He was first elected as a Fianna Fáil T.D. (Teachta Dála, Deputy to the Dáil) in 1927, and successfully defended his seat eleven times becoming the first Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1956, an honour that was repeated in 1961. On this basis alone, it can be argued that Briscoe was a significant presence in an embryonic Irish political culture; however, when his role in the 1930s Jewish immigration endeavor is acknowledged, it is clear that he played a unique part in one of the most contentious political and social discourses of the pre-war years. This was reinforced when Briscoe embraced Zionism in a belated realisation that the survival of his European co-religionists could only be guaranteed if an independent Jewish state existed. This information is to a certain degree public knowledge; however, the full extent of his involvement as an immigration advocate for potential Jewish refugees, and the seniority he achieved in the New Zionist Organisation (Revisionists) has not been fully recognised. This is partly explicable because researchers have based their assessment of Briscoe on an incomplete political archive in the National Library of Ireland (NLI). The vast majority of documentation pertaining to his involvement in the immigration endeavor has not been available to scholars and remains the private property of Robert Briscoe’s son, Ben Briscoe. The lack of immigration files in the NLI was reinforced by the fact that information about Briscoe’s Revisionist engagement was donated to the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv and can only be accessed physically by visiting Israel. Therefore, even though these twin endeavors have been commented on by a number of academics, their assessments have tended to be based on an incomplete archive, which was supplemented by Briscoe’s autobiographical memoir published in 1958. This study will attempt to fill in the missing gaps in Briscoe’s complex political narrative by incorporating the rarely used private papers of Robert Briscoe, and the difficult to access Briscoe files in Tel Aviv. This undertaking was only possible when Mr.Ben Briscoe graciously granted me full and unrestricted access to his father’s papers, and after a month-long research trip to the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv. Access to this rarely used documentation facilitated a holistic examination of Briscoe’s complex and multifaceted political reality. It revealed the full extent of Briscoe’s political and social evolution as the Nazi instigated Jewish emigration crisis reached catastrophic proportions. He was by turn Fianna Fáil nationalist, Jewish immigration advocate and senior Revisionist actor on a global stage. The study will examine the contrasting political and social forces that initiated each stage of Briscoe’s Zionist awakening, and in the process will fill a major gap in Irish-Jewish historiography by revealing the full extent of his Revisionist engagement.

A river of memory: landscape, narrative and identity in the Lee Valley, Co. Cork, Ireland

In moments of rapid social changes, as has been witnessed in Ireland in the last decade, the conditions through which people engage with their localities though memory, individually and collectively, remains an important cultural issue with key implications for questions of heritage, preservation and civic identity. In recent decades, cultural geographers have argued that landscape is more than just a view or a static text of something symbolic. The emphasis seems to be on landscape as a dynamic cultural process – an ever-evolving process being constructed and re-constructed. Hence, landscape seems to be a highly complex term that carries many different meanings. Material, form, relationships or actions have different meanings in different settings. Drawing upon recent and continuing scholarly debates in cultural landscapes and collective memory, this thesis sets out to examine the generation of collective memory and how it is employed as a cultural tool in the production of memory in the landscape. More specifically, the research considers the relationships between landscape and memory, investigating the ways in which places are produced, appropriated, experienced, sensed, acknowledged, imagined, yearned for, appropriated, re-appropriated, contested and identified with. A polyvocal-bricoleur approach aims to get below the surface of a cultural landscape, inject historical research and temporal depth into cultural landscape studies and instil a genuine sense of inclusivity of a wide variety of voices (role of monuments and rituals and voices of people) from the past and present. The polyvocal-bricoleur approach inspires a mixed method methodology approach to fieldsites through archival research, fieldwork and filmed interviews. Using a mixture of mini-vignettes of place narratives in the River Lee valley in the south of Ireland, the thesis explores a number of questions on the fluid nature of narrative in representing the story and role of the landscape in memory-making. The case studies in the Lee Valley are harnessed to investigate the role of the above questions/ themes/ debates in the act of memory making at sites ranging from an Irish War of Independence memorial to the River Lee’s hydroelectric scheme to the valley’s key religious pilgrimage site. The thesis investigates the idea that that the process of landscape extends not only across space but also across time – that the concept of historical continuity and the individual and collective human engagement and experience of this continuity are central to the processes of remembering on the landscape. In addition the thesis debates the idea that the production of landscape is conditioned by several social frames of memory – that individuals remember according to several social frames that give emphasis to different aspects of the reality of human experience. The thesis also reflects on how the process of landscape is represented by those who re-produce its narratives in various media.

Investigation of population genetic structure and mating system in the ant Pheidole pallidula

The origin of eusociality in haplo-diploid organisms such as Hymenoptera has been mostly explained by kin selection. However, several studies have uncovered decreased relatedness values within colonies, resulting primarily from multiple queen matings (polyandry) and/or from the presence of more than one functional queen (polygyny). Here, we report on the use of microsatellite data for the investigation of sociogenetic parameters, such as relatedness, and levels of polygyny and polyandry, in the ant Pheidole pallidula. We demonstrate, through analysis of mother-offspring combinations and the use of direct sperm typing, that each queen is inseminated by a single male. The inbreeding coefficient within colonies and the levels of relatedness between the queens and their mate are not significantly different from zero, indicating that matings occur between unrelated individuals. Analyses of worker genotypes demonstrate that 38% of the colonies are polygynous with 2-4 functional queens, and suggest the existence of reproductive skew, i.e. unequal respective contribution of queens to reproduction. Finally, our analyses indicate that colonies are genetically differentiated and form a population exhibiting significant isolation-by-distance, suggesting that some colonies originate through budding.

Randomized, controlled trial investigating short-term health-related quality of life with doxorubicin and paclitaxel versus doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide as first-line chemotherapy in patients with metastatic breast cancer: European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer Breast Cancer Group, Investigational Drug Branch for Breast Cancer and the New Drug Development Group Study.

PURPOSE: To compare health-related quality of life (HRQOL) in patients with metastatic breast cancer receiving the combination of doxorubicin and paclitaxel (AT) or doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide (AC) as first-line chemotherapy treatment. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Eligible patients (n = 275) with anthracycline-naive measurable metastatic breast cancer were randomly assigned to AT (doxorubicin 60 mg/m(2) as an intravenous bolus plus paclitaxel 175 mg/m(2) as a 3-hour infusion) or AC (doxorubicin 60 mg/m(2) plus cyclophosphamide 600 mg/m(2)) every 3 weeks for a maximum of six cycles. Dose escalation of paclitaxel (200 mg/m(2)) and cyclophosphamide (750 mg/m(2)) was planned at cycle 2 to reach equivalent myelosuppression in the two groups. HRQOL was assessed with the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) Quality of Life Questionnaire C30 and the EORTC Breast Module at baseline and the start of cycles 2, 4, and 6, and 3 months after the last cycle. RESULTS: Seventy-nine percent of the patients (n = 219) completed a baseline measure. However, there were no statistically significant differences in HRQOL between the two treatment groups. In both groups, selected aspects of HRQOL were impaired over time, with increased fatigue, although some clinically significant improvements in emotional functioning were seen, as well as a reduction in pain over time. Overall, global quality of life was maintained in both treatment groups. CONCLUSION: This information is important when advising women patients of the expected HRQOL consequences of treatment regimens and should help clinicians and their patients make informed treatment decisions.

Toward the development of national telehealth services: the role of Veterans Health Administration and future directions for research.

The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) in the Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) has emerged as a national and international leader in the delivery and research of telehealth-based treatment. Several unique characteristics of care in VA settings intersect to create an ideal environment for telehealth modalities and research. However, the value of telehealth experience and initiatives in VA settings is limited if telehealth strategies cannot be widely exported to other public or private systems. Whereas a hierarchical organization, such as VA, can innovate and fund change relatively quickly based on provider and patient preferences and a growing knowledge base, other health provider organizations and third-party payers may likely require replicable scientific findings over time before incremental investments will be made to create infrastructure, reform regulatory barriers, and amend laws to accommodate expansion of telehealth modalities. Accordingly, large-scale scientifically rigorous telehealth research in VHA settings is essential not only to investigate the efficacy of existing and future telehealth practices in VHA, but also to hasten the development of telehealth infrastructure in private and other public health settings. We propose an expanded partnership between the VA, NIH, and other funding agencies to investigate creative and pragmatic uses of telehealth technology. To this end, we identify six specific areas of research we believe to be particularly relevant to the efficient development of telehealth modalities in civilian and military contexts outside VHA.

Effects of neuronal PIK3C3/Vps34 deletion on autophagy and beyond.

PIK3C3/Vps34 plays important roles in the endocytic and autophagic pathways, both of which are essential for maintaining neuronal integrity. However, it is unclear how inactivating PIK3C3 may affect neuronal endosomal versus autophagic processes in vivo. We generated a conditional null allele of the Pik3c3 gene in mouse, and specifically deleted it in postmitotic sensory neurons. Subsequent analyses reveal several interesting and surprising findings.