Three provocations for civic crowdfunding

The rapid rise of crowdfunding in the past five years, most prominently among US-based platforms such as Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, has begun to attract the attention of a wide range of scholars, policymakers and practitioners. This paper considers civic crowdfunding – the use of crowdfunding for projects that produce community or quasipublic assets – and argues that its emergence demands a fresh set of questions and approaches. The work draws on critical case studies constructed through fieldwork in the United States, the UK and Brazil, and a discourse analysis of civic crowdfunding projects collected from platforms by the author. It offers three provocations to scholars and practitioners considering the practice, questioning the extent to which civic crowdfunding is participatory, the extent to which it addresses or contributes to social inequality, and the extent to which it augments or weakens the role of public institutions. In doing so, it finds that civic crowdfunding is capable of vastly divergent outcomes, and argues that the extent to which civic crowdfunding produces outcomes that are beneficial, rather than harmful to the public sphere, will be determined by the extent to which the full range of stakeholders in civic life participate in the practice.     

Learning ‘Large Ideas’ Overseas: Discipline, (im)mobility and Political Lives in the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny

Abstract

In February 1946, the 20,000 sailors of the Royal Indian Navy, the colonial navy of the Government of India, mutinied. Having a number of grievances, from colonial rule of India, inefficient demobilisation procedures and ill treatment from superior officers, sailors on ships and shore establishments across the Indian Ocean took part in the mutiny, which represented the largest time a military force had disobeyed British Rule since the Mutiny of 1857. This paper examines the ways in which the geographies and mobilities of naval service shaped the political lives of the sailors in the RIN. On the one hand, both military (naval) and colonial forms of discipline worked through the spaces of the ship to attempt to control and order sailors’ lives. On the other, the mobile nature of life at sea, travelling from place to place and encountering colonial difference within the RIN, opened the door to different political ideas to influencing the sailors. At the same time, far from being a disconnected space, separate from the land, the naval ship combined with sailors’ land-based connections allowed them to contest and rework ‘landed’ political activity from the sea.     

A scientist's viewpoint on promoting effective use of experimental design: Ten things a scientist wants to know about experimental design

This paper tackles the practical application of statistical tools. Chemical development is a rich area for collaboration between statisticians and chemists, but most statisticians encounter difficulties in promoting the tools to this client group. This paper, presented from a chemist's perspective, is intended to help bridge the gap between the two professions. The paper explores differences in uptake and attitudes towards adopting these techniques and suggests what has hindered or helped the process of effective application of experimental design. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Change,clarity and clausewitz

The framework of laws which in the past has governed the interaction of technology and business is proving inadequate as the scale and interconnectedness of economic, social and technological problems accelerate. The author evinces the need for new systems of control wherein both the macro and micro levels of perception of and response to large scale, multifaceted problems can be harmonised.     

Deprivation and lifestyles in rural Wales. — I. Towards a cultural dimension

This paper reports on the preliminary findings of research into deprivation in mid-Wales. It argues that the current debate on rural deprivation has left many important questions unanswered. In particular, we still know relatively little about the extent of deprivation, the specific social groups affected by it, the particular experiences of these groups, and the importance of cultural dimensions to that experience. Indeed, the very term deprivation has become somewhat chaotic, and may subsume a number of different ways in which individuals and groups can become marginalised in rural areas. The two case studies in rural Wales discussed here give some indication of the extent and anatomy of marginalisation within particular communities. Perhaps more importantly they highlight the need to consider the importance of cultural marginalisation within a wider understanding of the problems of living in rural areas.