Black History: Implicit Bias, Dishonest Scholarship and Colonial Propaganda

This article is a result of researching the work Akala presented at the Oxford Student’s Union for Black History month. It is part of a series which comes from the researching of one section at a time using the online video as a knowledge resource to structure a self directed curriculum.  This methodology is one which has been developed in order to facilitate independent learning especially in informal contexts of the lives of people like myself.

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Friedrich August von Hayek_result

Widening Participation in the Neoliberal University

This is an extended version of an article I wrote for an assessment in the MSc I am doing at Queen Margaret University.  As a part of Public Sociology, I chose to write about the conflicted messaging of the university in terms of administration, bureaucracy and policy. Whilst many people in the educational sector act with values consonant to equating education to human development and as a public good essential for a society to function, the administrative structures seem captured by market driven, profit oriented values delivered increasingly by multinational companies. Read more…

Sustainability Lessons From The Global South with Shahid Khan

These lessons are gleaned from Shahid Khan, someone who has worked in human development and sustainability for many years in lots of different contexts.  His work is especially revealing in terms of the subtleties and structural understandings which need to be acted on in order for collective challenges to be met like climate breakdown.  Many of the answers which the world needs are to be found in the Global South in the ancient tried and tested means of, for example, creating ice in deserts. Read more…

Failure of Leadership Case Study: The Donkeys and For the Sake of Example

This is an article which explores catastrophic failures of leadership and error in the history of the armed forces.  I draw together verbatim quotations from Alan Clark’s book ‘The Donkeys’, and Anthony Babington’s ‘Capital Courts Martial 1914-18, The Truth’.  Alan Clark was a British Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) and Anthony Babington was a former circuit judge. Whilst these esteemed critiques were authored into military history, they offer vital understandings and insights into the failures we are seeing in civilian life. Read more…