Correspondence and other papers regarding the award ceremony, including the date
This paper revisits the Groundnut Scheme, a postwar colonial development project in East Africa infamous for its catastrophic failure. It examines the plans made by British state managers and the Scheme’s planners at both the United Africa Company and the Overseas Food Corporation to transform African colonial subjects into stabilized wage-labourers. The paper seeks to understand this social transformation in the context of the contradictory nature of capitalist social relations. This is achieved by using Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation: the separation of the worker from their means of subsistence. The paper focuses on two aspects of this process. Firstly, the creation of remote villages for the Scheme’s workers, physically separating them from traditional support structures. Secondly, the creation of a new gendered division of labour that would have transformed the homelife of the Scheme’s workers.
This chapter considers how dominant political, economic and linguistic hierarchies affect the dynamics of knowledge exchange. The first key theme demonstrates the influence of language on knowledge. It indicates how multiple languages facilitated the earliest transmission of learning, and then how a select few languages became dominant across geographical borders and began to shape learning, knowledge systems and dissemination. The second theme discusses the impact of neoliberalism and the market economy on knowledge systems. It explores how the commodification of Higher Education has led to competition between institutions and how this, in turn, has prompted standardisation in the neoliberal global north. It then identifies the issue that institutions who wish to compete in the global market of Higher Education face: whether to adopt a set of existing standards born out of a neoliberal perspective, or to develop new systems that align with values, ways of learning and knowledge building that thrive in settin…
Inclusive curriculum development in Higher Education is increasingly witnessing the development of institutional inclusive curriculum frameworks and toolkits. This short paper introduces one such framework recently developed at a modern university in the South East of England. The IDEAS model (Inclusive learning and teaching, Digital inclusion, Employability learning, assessment for learning, Sustainability mindset) involves a range of distinctive features in both design and scope, and was likewise co-created by colleagues working in the educational development and access and participation domains of academic practice. In a discussion structured by the stages of a traditional quest narrative, the paper relates the genesis, development and early implementation of the IDEAS model and draws attention to some of its distinctive emphases as well as its points of correspondence with wider sectoral initiatives on inclusive curriculum development.
To effectively mitigate climate change, a crucial focus area is enhancing energy efficiency in firms and industries. This objective becomes even more imperative in light of the recent escalation in energy prices caused by the Russo-Ukrainian war. Given the limited financial resources of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), facilitating their access to finance becomes a potential avenue for reducing carbon emissions. Based on our knowledge, this is the first study that analyses the potential impact of energy efficiency on access to finance for SMEs in the UK. We consider a dataset of 2855 UK firms from 2015 to 2021 collected from the Longitudinal Small Business Survey. We find that energy efficient companies and firms that show energy saving behaviours are facing fewer credit constraints. These results are robust if we control for several company characteristics, including age, size, turnover, industry, location, and legal status.