Papers

Nature Geoscience - Human exploration of the Solar System began on the Moon during the space race of the mid-twentieth century. To facilitate documentation and study of the human influence on the...

Imagination in critical literacy research is usually referred to as a taken for granted concept that is seldom theorised, leaving the assumptions unchecked that everyone has a shared understanding of imagination. This paper aims to challenge critical literacy researchers to rethink the relationship between criticality and imagination and its implication for a critical writing pedagogy. It aims to synthesise the imagination and criticality in the context of critical literacy, both theoretically and empirically and in doing so to illustrate what form a critical writing pedagogy that foregrounds the critical imagination might take.,This argument is illustrated through analysing two sets of data that contain embodied enactments of contested gender issues across different modes and genres. Data from student teachers’ embodied enactments of contested gender issues and from their writing on these issues were analysed thematically.,A crucial aspect of the critical imagination entails creating pedagogical spaces that mobilise affect and empathy alongside criticality. Embodied literacy work across different modes and genres can play a significant role in facilitating the critical imagination by enabling students to enact, perform and immerse themselves in different discourses, ultimately generating new insights and ways of seeing.,Data was drawn from a relatively small sample of 30 assignments in the context of teacher education in South Africa. More empirical research needs to be conducted across a wider range of contexts.,The paper provides a theoretical framework and practical ideas for implementing a critical writing pedagogy that foregrounds the critical imagination and thus could be used in both teacher education contexts and school literacy classrooms.,This paper challenges critical literacy researchers to rethink the relationship between criticality and imagination and its implication for a critical writing pedagogy.

Many challenges posed by the current Anthropocene epoch require fundamental transformations to humanity's relationships with the rest of the planet. Achieving such transformations requires that humanity improve its understanding of the current situation and enhance its ability to imagine pathways toward alternative, preferable futures. We review advances in addressing these challenges that employ systematic and structured thinking about multiple possible futures (futures-thinking). Over seven decades, especially the past two, approaches to futures-thinking have helped people from diverse backgrounds reach a common understanding of important issues, underlying causes, and pathways toward optimistic futures. A recent focus has been the stimulation of imagination to produce new options. The roles of futures-thinking in breaking unhelpful social addictions and in conflict resolution are key emerging topics. We summarize cognitive, cultural, and institutional constraints on the societal uptake of futures-thinking, concluding that none are insurmountable once understood.

Environmental agents such as pesticides, weedicides and herbicides (collectively referred to as pesticides) are associated with the onset and pathogen…

Urban mobility is facing an increased long-term uncertainty and complexity generated by accelerated technological development. These challenges require radical advancement in planning processes and methods, which could enable breaking out of path dependencies and unlocking alternative, sustainable futures. In order to provide a landscape overview of foresight-focused methods used in the domain of urban mobility, we conduct a systematic literature review. An analytical framework for review is based on planning knowledge taxonomy, including dialectic between knowing how/what and knowing to what end and doing. Such framework formulation is aiming to assess methodological capacity for widening system boundary and holism (object-focus) as well as integration and imagination (process-focus). Results show that the overall trend of methodological development is emphasizing development in object or process-focus domain, but rarely both. In addition to this assessment, we conclude that methodological development should further reflect the moral and democratic dimension concerning public deliberation. Such development should aim to create spaces for shared discussion, reflection, and formation of alternative futures, while allowing spaces for agonistic contestation and conflicting opinions through radical, experimental, and experiential approaches.

Nature Water - The concept that planting trees will help mitigate climate change by storing CO2 is too simplistic, ignoring the large effect that plants have on the water cycle. Careful restoration...

Developmental perspectives represent an underutilized area of animal personality research, in spite of their obvious importance in biology. Animals that undergo metamorphosis are particularly neglected and represent a unique in situ experimental opportunity to study how personality differences are associated with physiological, morphological, or ecological traits over development.

A group of neurons in the hypothalamus has a critical inhibitory effect on the retention of memory.

Orientation towards the common good is considered as a building block of social cohesion and has been shown to benefit both social communities and the…

Physical laws—such as the laws of motion, gravity, electromagnetism, and thermodynamics—codify the general behavior of varied macroscopic natural s...

New research suggests artificial intelligence can match the top 1% of human thinkers on a standard test for creativity.

Nature Energy - Established climate mitigation scenarios assume continued economic growth in all countries, and reconcile this with the Paris targets by betting on speculative technological change....

Degrowth lacks a theory of how the state can finance ambitious social-ecological policies and public provisioning systems while maintaining macroecono…

This contribution to the Futures Triangle special edition aims to open dialogue with the reader about what lies ahead for the Futures Triangle method and Future...

DiVA portal is a finding tool for research publications and student theses written at the following 50 universities and research institutions.

Many feedback loops significantly increase warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. However, not all of these feedbacks are fully accounted for in climate models. Thus, associated mitigation pathways could fail to sufficiently limit temperatures. A targeted expansion of research and an accelerated reduction of emissions are needed to minimize risks.

A severe bottleneck that brought human ancestors close to extinction occurred between about 930 and 813 thousand years ago.

Low honesty-humility is a broad indicator of the common core of dark personality traits. The toxic career model explains how dark personalities succes…

The digitization of the Broadband Society is generating a profound debate on access to users’ browsing and personal data. An axis of controversy is the case of mobile telephony. Many people suspect that smartphones record users’ conversations …

Graeme S. Cumming ¹, David H. M. Cumming ², Charles L. Redman ³, Scale Mismatches in Social-Ecological Systems, Ecology and Society, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Jun 2006)

Nature Sustainability - As an alternative to monetary estimates, this study expresses the costs of climate change in terms of numbers of people left outside the ‘human climate niche’,...

This article argues that Russian intelligence has achieved recent success in influencing democratic elections and referenda by combining the traditional Human Intelligence (HUMINT) discipline of ma...

Moving towards a circular economy (CE) has become one of the main strategic initiatives on a global scale in the search for sustainable economic syste…