Suchergebnisse

Five years ago I began to experience a "push‐pull" feeling. The "push" made me feel there was something fundamental missing from my present job, something which was causing me to look further afield. The "pull" was a strong attraction towards a specific new area. I realized I was ready for a radical career change. Daunting as such a change appeared, determination removed many barriers.

There is a growing body of research signaling the health and wellbeing benefits of being in blue space. Here, we advance this intellectual agenda by critically examining perceptions and experiences of coastal blue space among residents of a disadvantaged, predominantly African American community who report limited engagement with their local coastal blue space, despite beachgoing being considered mainstream by a previous generation. Drawing on focus group data and sensitized to a range of theoretical perspectives aligned with race, space, and social class, we advance theoretical and empirical knowledge pertaining to blue space engagement. In doing so, we demonstrate the need for more critically informed, theoretically appropriate research in this area, which connects individual stories of the sea to the wider historical, social, and political settings in which relationships with blue space are framed and (re)produced.

Retrofit is a rising area of concern for Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars of infrastructure. This paper sits at the junction between applied and theoretical approaches by using STS to support interventions in urban infrastructure systems and expand STS critique of retrofit. It discusses findings from a multidisciplinary project piloting retrofit possibilities to positively impact the way water, energy, and food resources were consumed in a London housing estate. Through qualitative research, we found that residents were making social and material interventions in infrastructure systems to manage the way resources were consumed at home, driven by a commonly held motivation to avoid wastefulness. We then mapped the social and material factors that helped or hindered these individual ambitions and used them to inform our codesign process. We found it helpful to think of the residents as an infrastructural community; a group of residents that share a material connection that can help mobilize collective action on shared consumption. We suggest this concept is useful for interventions and critiques of infrastructure retrofit, particularly in cities in the Global North where retrofit programs aim to rescale national systems to neighborhood levels. The concept highlights the possibilities for participation that emerge from bottom-up retrofit.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to present an assessment of the sustainability content of the Nigerian engineering curriculum in universities.Design/methodology/approachContent analysis is used to generate and analyse data from three engineering documents, namely, the Benchmark Minimum Academic Standards for Engineering Programmes in Nigeria and the engineering handbooks of two Nigerian higher education institutions.FindingsThe Nigerian engineering curriculum is revealed to have a low sustainability content, with environmental concepts being the most cited themes and social topics as the least stated issues.Research limitations/implicationsThe sustainability assessment approach adopted in the study is constrained by the question of what constitutes a sustainability syllabus. Expert-derived sustainability themes used in the study are unavoidably incomplete and may limit the conduct of an exhaustive sustainability content assessment.Practical implicationsBased on the research outcome, the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria and other stakeholders can consider ways to adequately incorporate sustainability themes in the Nigerian engineering curriculum.Originality/valueThe research is an effort to determine the presence of sustainability issues in the Nigerian engineering education, which has hitherto been scarcely documented. This study provides a baseline and a rationale for sustainability education interventions in the Nigerian engineering curriculum. It also presents a methodology for analysing sustainability content in university curriculum and contributes to the continuing sustainability education discourse, especially in relation to sub-Saharan Africa.

AbstractUnderstanding water demand and consumers' capacity for change is essential in underpinning water demand management and water efficiency programmes. This paper presents the outcomes of a qualitative study, which used discussion groups relating to water infrastructure with environmentally aware citizens in five London boroughs in the Lower Lea River Basin. The results showed a subtle interaction between users, water and technology. Users are generally unaware of their own water consumption. Individual perceptions of changes in water behaviour are constrained by habit and lack of knowledge about what changes can be made and how. Knowledge of environmental information was described as the inspiration behind making any changes. The paper concludes that access to information about water resources, infrastructure and conservation measures should be enhanced because although information sources are abundant, participants claimed they were inaccessible without considerable effort. Finally, an emphasis should also be put on helping the public form a more substantial part in environmental decisions.