The future of urban biodiversity research: Moving beyond the ‘low-hanging fruit’

In this era of rapidly urbanising human populations, urban practitioners are under increasing pressure to create resilient and sustainable cities and towns. Urban ecologists currently have a unique opportunity to apply solid, evidence-based research to help create biodiversity-rich and sustainable cities and towns for the future. Unfortunately, there is currently a mismatch between the questions planners, designers and decision-makers are asking urban ecologists that would allow them to improve the biodiversity outcomes in urban areas, and the questions urban ecologists must ask to contribute to the development and application of the science of urban ecology. For a number of reasons, urban ecologists over the past 25 years have primarily focused on describing the patterns of biodiversity in cities and towns using broad, aggregate predictor variables (e.g., distance to city center, land-use, percent cover of impermeable surfaces and vegetation, etc.). We refer to these results as ‘low-hanging fruit’. If the discipline of urban ecology is going to provide the necessary information to inform actions to preserve and enhance urban biodiversity, we need to move beyond place-based research, and work towards the development of confirmed generalizations regarding the relationship between the structure and function of urban ecosystems and biodiversity. We propose three essential strategies for achieving this refined understanding: 1) defining the study window to place the study into a broader global context, 2) collecting and using more explicit question-driven measures of the urban condition in order to improve our understanding of urban ecological drivers, as well as recording more detailed ecological responses to provide insights into the ecological mechanisms underlying an observed response, and 3) expanding studies to include multiple cities, regions and countries. These strategies will help to expedite the ability of urban ecology to contribute to the creation of biodiversity-rich, healthy, resilient cities and towns.     

上海教育国际化的配套政策及服务体系研究

上海教育国际化的核心内涵是通过教育活动国际化、教育者与受教育者的国际化、教学机构国际化以及国际维度与观念融入过程的国际化等途径，推动上海整体教育水平的提高，吸引和培养高素质的国际型人才，服务于上海经济社会可持续发展的大局。上海教育国际化的配套政策要围绕优质教育资源的引入和输出展开：制定“引智”政策，以吸引优秀海外专家、学者，扩大开放现行科研体系，引入教育国际化高端资源；制定教学计划与课程国际化建设、“留学上海”系列服务、优质教育资源引进、“国际化品牌项目”支持、全社会共同参与、服务体系信息化等政策。建立以政府各相关部门为主体的管理体系、以高校及其他办学机构为主体的教学体系及以企业、各类社会组织及市民为主体的社会服务体系。     

上海推进“城中村”改造研究

改造"城中村",有利于改善居民居住生活质量,促进城乡统筹发展;有利于盘活存量用地,推进土地的节约、集约利用;有利于改善城乡形象、推进宜居城市建设。上海进一步推进"城中村"改造,须加强领导,推进"城中村"改造的体制机制建设;要均衡各方利益,调动政府、开发商和农民三方的积极性;要摸清底数,对纳入全市统一改造计划内的"城中村"实行目录管理;要因地制宜,针对各个"城中村"不同的情况进行分类指导;要突破创新,建立、健全支持"城中村"改造的政策体系;要营造氛围,形成有利于推进"城中村"改造的良好外部环境。     

The big data divide and its consequences

Recent advances in technology and the increasing volumes of data that they enable have led to a wave of scholarly and popular attention to big data. While big data is often heralded for its ability to provide insight, the data, its analysis, and its outcomes are not evenly distributed. Currently, scholarship on big data is extending past work on the digital divide, theorizing a new big data divide. While this work most directly addresses the issues of ownership and access to big data, some work extends the divide to issues relating to skill and use. This extension opens up new complications relating to identity, social sorting, use, agency, and global development that are inextricably related to the issues above and to the study of big data. These issues go beyond the simple language of the digital divide extending inquiries into the realm of digital inequalities more generally. Any work on big data and the big data divide needs to engage with a more broad‐based notion of digital inequalities to be better equipped to handle the complex issues above, as well as the material, democratic, and identity problems that big data bring about.     

Child Sexual Abuse Attributions Among Undergraduate Psychology Students in Singapore

ABSTRACT

Experimental vignettes were used to investigate attributions relating to child sexual abuse with a focus on the degree of blame allocated to the family and to society, factors thought to be particularly relevant in a collectivist society. One hundred and sixty-two undergraduates in Singapore evaluated media reports describing a case of child sexual abuse. A 2 x 2 x 2 between-subjects design manipulated victim sex, perpetrator sex, and victim–perpetrator relationship. Participants rated the vignettes on degree of blame and prevention potential and rated the abusiveness of the case. Individualism and collectivism attitudes of the participants were also measured. While the highest blame ratings were attributed to perpetrators, significantly more blame was attributed to the family and to society than to the victim. The demonstration of the present attributions of blame to family and to society is a timely finding given recent recommendations to broaden approaches to child abuse prevention by moving away from a reliance on school based child protection programs, which leave the onus on the child to prevent and report abuse, toward a public health approach, which is particularly inclusive of parent and community education approaches . Allocation of some blame to victims, in spite of their status as children, while not a unique finding in victimology research, emphasizes the challenges still to be faced in encouraging the reporting of child sexual abuse.     

Women Survivors Confronting Their Abusers:

This article presents data from a longitudinal study of 72 women who entered therapy in the mid-1980s to deal with the longterm consequences of childhood sexual abuse. Voluntary participants, who were initially reached through their therapists, were surveyed in 1986, 1988, and 1992. With the help of their therapists, the women whose abusers were alive and available faced the questions of whether to confront them, and if so, when and how. In general, responses to the first survey were characterized by a desire to confront without the readiness to do so, responses to survey two by completed confrontations, and responses to survey three by reconfrontations. Findings supported recommendations regarding helping clients to plan, practice, and carry out confrontations safely. They also showed that more recognition should be given to the aftermath of confrontation, debriefing, and reconfrontation, and to survivors with specialized needs, such as women formerly amnesic to their abuse. Clinical implications of these findings and recommendations for clinicians are discussed.     

Involuntary Immobility and the Unfulfilled Rite of Passage: Implications for Migration Management in the Gambia,West Africa

Gambia, the smallest country on the African continent, is one of the largest contributors, per capita, to irregular migrants in Europe. Aspirations to migrate are ingrained culturally, to the extent that they can be understood as a rite of passage. Unfilled rites, associated with involuntary immobility, have led to pervasive frustration and feelings of entrapment, locally referred to as having the nerves syndrome. This article explores the societal and cultural significance of migration in this context, exploring the meanings that this especially has for effective migration management. It provides evidence and context for the deep motives, embedded socially and culturally, for migration as a significant mechanism to maintain status and achievement of adulthood. In view of this, initiatives by foreign and domestic governments and NGOs to work on campaigns and strategies to entice citizens to remain and work at home should be carefully considered. Foreign policies and funds to so-called empower youth to stay in their home countries may be misleadingly ineffective. The academic literature does not sufficiently address this.     

Economic Incorporation,Civil Inclusion,and Social Ties: Plans to Return Home Among Central Asian Migrant Women in Moscow,Russia

This study uses data from a survey of female labor migrants from three Central Asian countries – Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan – in Moscow, Russia, to examine factors that influence these women's plans to return to their home countries. The conceptual framework considers three types of factors of migrants' attachment to the host society – economic incorporation, civil inclusion, and social connectedness – while also accounting for migrants' ties to their homelands. The results of multivariate analyses point to the importance of sector and type of employment, income, legal status, experience of ethnically motivated harassment, and social ties to adults relatives and friends in the host society in shaping return plans. In contrast, connections in the home country do not appear to influence the likelihood of having plans to return. These findings are contextualized within the political, socioeconomic, and ethnocultural reality of the post‐Soviet world and related to the cross‐national scholarship on return migration.     

Gendered Perspectives in Psychology: Immigrant Origin Youth

In this article, we contend that the field of psychology has largely failed to foreground the role of gender in its study of immigration. Here, we review studies that address gender and migration focusing on the experience of children and adolescents. We provide developmental perspectives on family relations, well‐being, identity formation, and educational outcomes, paying particular attention to the role of gender in these domains. We conclude with recommendations for future research, which include the need to consider whether, and if so, how, when, and why it makes a difference to be an immigrant, to be from a particular country, or to be female rather than male. We argue that it is important to consider socioeconomic characteristics; to consider resilience as well as pathology; and to work in interdisciplinary ways to deepen our understanding of the gendered migratory experience of immigrant origin youth.     

Editorial

This editorial introduces a journal devoted to the issues surrounding women and their rights. As the development debate moves from women's need to their rights and to an understanding of the cultural roots of legal systems and the effects of the mass media in presenting alternative life styles as possibilities, the immense implications of using rights-based language in development emerge. This debate moves women from being the recipients of welfare to a state of empowerment. Women must be afforded individual rights which are linked to community rights. In addition, rights must be granted to women in their public and private domains. The dangers of using a rights-based language to assert women's claims to economic, political, and social equality in economic, political, and social life arise from the reality that the social position of men will usually place men at an advantage with the law. Legal processes which stress dichotomies may fail to improve real social situations. Also, the language of human rights may pit one set of rights (a woman's right to choose abortion) against another (the fetuses' right to live) to women's disadvantage. Areas governed by both customary and civil law pose other difficulties, especially since they require women to understand the law in order to use it. Development efforts which stress rights hope to meet immediate needs and to achieve a strategic end. Nongovernmental organizations can play an important role in asserting and enforcing the freedom of individuals and groups within groups. They can also build capacity at all levels of society and explore linkages between women's economic participation, decision-making within the home, and wider political participation.     

Self-harm among adolescents with developmental disabilities. What are they trying to tell us?

Self-harm behavior exhibited by adolescents with developmental disabilities can be the most challenging behavior for caregivers and health care professionals to address. Past interventions have taken a behavioral approach and focused on functional analysis to guide assessment and treatment. However, self-harm behavior is becoming more recognized as a means of communication. Therefore, it is important for health care professionals and caregivers to listen to adolescents' attempts to communicate and try to understand the meaning of the behavior. Early assessment is crucial to understanding the meaning of the behavior, and early intervention is necessary to prevent escalation or chronicity. Thorough assessment guides interventions and must be implemented in the context of clients' families and social world, and the broader community. Establishment of trusting relationships among adolescents, their families, and health care professionals is imperative. This article discusses self-harm behavior from a psychosocial perspective related to prevalence, onset, purpose, maintenance, and escalation. It also introduces a comprehensive framework to guide assessment and intervention.     

Contested memories: efforts of the powerful to silence former inmates' histories of life in an institution for 'mental defectives'

This paper discusses the barriers encountered in undertaking an oral history project with survivors of a total institution for 'mental defectives' in the province of Alberta, Canada. Powerful social actors were able to bar access to survivors through legal guardianship orders, and to make access to the institution and its grounds and to publicly archived materials quite prohibitive to the researcher. In addition to overt efforts on the part of powerful social actors to block the project, concerns about the potential to discredit survivor narratives led to changes in the research design. Specifically, research and literature about the 'acquiescence' of intellectuals with intellectual impairments led the researcher to broaden the sources for this history as a preemptive strategy. Despite these barriers, survivors of the institution provided a rich and powerful testimony to the brutality of institutionalization, and provide us with an emancipatory history from the perspectives of those most oppressed by disability policies and practices.     

Operative strategies of HLB's scouts of a citrus property within the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil

This research aimed to study the activity of the HLB's scouts, workers whose function is to identify symptomatic plants, in order to understand the physical constraints, cognitive and organizational involved in accomplishing the task, characterizing the operative approach used to identify diseased plants, and to elucidate what aspects hinder the identification of symptoms. The method adopted for the research was the Ergonomic Analysis of Work--EAW [6]. The results, after validation with the operators and management, allowed understanding the complex relationships between the physical, cognitive and organizational aspects present on activity. Major difficulties were observed mainly in relation to the disposal of the scouts on the platforms and in relation to working hours, at the beginning and end of the journey. Important findings have highlighted strategies, unknown by the organization, used by scouts to locate candidates' trees to the fine analysis of investigation of symptoms. In conclusion, the analysis enable to understand the constraints and find technical and organizational solutions to the survey work on citrus groves as well as it showed signs and symptoms not investigated yet or rarely considered by researchers involved on searches aimed at increasing the ability to diagnose the disease in the field.     

MODERN SCIENCE: Institutionalization of Knowledge and Rationalization of Power

This essay explores the relationship of scientific knowledge to political and economic power. By comparing intellectual production to economic production, the author identifies three preconditions for a knowledge discourse to achieve monopoly domination or hegemony in its market sector or cognitive domain. First, the knowledge discourse must be perceived as specialized; that is, as a unique product or service. Second, it must be credently represented as useful to dominant groups. Finally, it must achieve institutionalization. Ethnographies of scientific discourse and practice, as well as social histories of science, provide data relevant to this model. Such studies reveal the rhetorically constructed character of scientific knowledge, and hence its openness to social and political influence. But these studies also show how scientists strive to standardization; that is, they seek to render their somewhat ad hoc activities in the laboratory into replicable and reputable public accounts. The norms and techniques of this locally created standardization emerged historically, mainly in the form of objectivity and numeracy. These standards in turn serve politically to demarcate legitimate scientists from amateurs and quacks, thereby satisfying the first precondition of the model—that to be successful a knowledge discourse must be perceived as specialized. Cognitive boundaries enabled social boundaries-chiefly the marking of distinctions between disciplines and the organization of their practitioners into professional guilds. Through the creation and enforcement of such distinctions, product identification, market allocation, and oligopolization were secured. These processes also required investment capital to sustain intellectual production. Thus, to institutionalize their disciplines and themselves in research universities and specialized scientific-administrative centers, practitioners sought to demonstrate their utility to potential clients and patrons. Along the way, the disciplines became more instrumentally oriented, their concepts, methods, and topics shaped to conform to the requirements of professionalization and institutionalization. The very language of science also changed in accordance with its new emphases. The close institutionalized affinity of cognitive, political, and economic interests was largely established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The new, institutionalized, scientific knowledge and the new, rationalized, statist and corporate     

Women with Disabilities: Abortion and Liberation

In this, the United Nations Decade of the Disabled, much is being done to improve the lives of those with disabilities, and to enable them to participate as equals in the everyday life of their communities.

At the same time, however, more and more technological 'advances' are being deployed to detect handicap in the unborn, with the aim of killing as many of them as possible before birth.

Feminists, though accustomed to fighting for the emancipation of women, are failing to address this incongruous situation, and the double discrimination faced by women with disabilities. This is partly due to the fact that they tend to regard abortion as an unequivocal 'right'.

I will argue that far from being a right, abortion underlines women's oppression and is counter-productive to women in general, and to disabled women in particular.     

The particularity of the universal: critical reflections on Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power and the state

A critical review of Bourdieu’s theory of the state is developed here against the backdrop of both his wider theoretical project and empirical studies. Elaborating the concepts of symbolic capital, symbolic violence, and symbolic domination, the centrality that Bourdieu accords to symbolic forms is compared to benchmark Weberian accounts that start with the state monopoly of violence. Reviewing also some of the burgeoning secondary literature discussing his theory of the state, Bourdieu’s writings, which encompass various antinomies, are shown to vacillate between two distinct perspectives—a strong and a weak theory of the state. His rejection of the “physicalist” approaches of Marx, Elias, and Tilly is elaborated and subject to a counter-critique, particularly in relation to the notion of symbolic “violence.” Bourdieu’s account of the state is shown to be as much a political as theoretical intervention. His antagonism towards Marxist accounts in particular is shown to be rooted in a pragmatic interest in the role of the “left hand of the state” in progressive reform; and this perspective is traced back to the twin influences of Durkheim and Hegel, French republicanism, and in particular the potential of the state to express a universal interest. At the same time, compared with sophisticated Marxist and Weberian accounts and the work of Norbert Elias and Gramsci, Bourdieu’s theory is shown to be severely lacking in the way that he deals with violence and coercion. His “expanded materialism,” particularly with the “strong theory,” bends the stick too far and overplays the symbolic basis of consent. Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s insights with regard to the pervasive influences of state practices of classification, taxonomy, delegation, and naming are shown to have real utility with regard to focused empirical investigations of the state in modern societies.     

Rock Up: An initiative supporting students' wellbeing in their transition to secondary school

This paper reports the background and findings of the community-based pilot program ‘Rock Up’ to school. The Rock Up program was directed at a niche section of young students in Grades 5, 6, and 7 to respond to identified risk factors associated with disengagement from formal education. The Rock Up approach was to energise these students' connection to learning as they approach the difficult stage of transition from primary school to secondary school. Ultimately, Rock Up aims to assist those students in their development of wellbeing, within and outside of the school environment. The operational measures of wellbeing covered; academic, social, emotional, behavioural, and school absence. Thirteen students, who had been identified by their respective teachers, were invited to participate in individual and/or group activities that focused on their wellbeing and developing their readiness for secondary school. Written and verbal feedbacks from students, teachers, parents, and the program facilitator, were in the main very positive. Analysis of the data of the first round of the program using a three-wave questionnaire and a participatory action research approach indicated the need to proceed to a new round using more refined processes. When fully developed, Rock Up is intended to be the vanguard for collaborative practice between the education and community sectors throughout Victoria and to be an example of an efficient and effective model of transition for this age-group.     

What’s off-centre of empire? Introduction to the special issue

ABSTRACT

In this Introduction, we discuss the aims of this publication along with guidelines to locate and connect the essays part of the edited volume. We start by highlighting the original contribution of our intervention in terms of what off-centring empire offers in relation to scholarship that de-centres empire. To us, this means to look at the processes, dynamics, and movements that connect empire (as a centre of power) to its peripheries (as a site of difference, struggles, and resistance). To be sure, attempts to off-centre and de-centre empire are related, relational, and they both commit to the project of challenging the centrality of empire, to confronting its lasting legacies and normative powers. Yet to off-centre, as we argue, is to focus on the electrifying force-field generated by the poles of imperial power, rather than oppose centre and peripheries to subvert their relationship. Our aim is to reveal the complex ways centre and periphery connect and distance with the aim to highlight emerging modes of counter-imperial practice. Further, this introduction serves as the opportunity to discuss the structure of the SI and its three main sections – Public Memory, Orientations, and More-than-human. Here we reflect upon how each essay brings to the fore a unique way to off-centre empire, and thus provide examples that may inspire future research. Finally, we highlight how conversations emerging from individual essays can be assembled and read into threads, pointing to multiple ways in which we seek to off-centre empire through empirical research.