News and Updates

The latest edition of NERC's Planet Earth magazine contained a breathless feature on a partnership between M&S and NERC to create "a more sustainable global food system".  You can read all about this here. Carmel McQuaid, who sounds as if she...

Rumour has it that WEEC is looking for an outfit in the UK to host a forthcoming conference – only organisations with the requisite quotient of gullibility and desperation need apply. I'm reminded of what Richard Ingrams said when Mrs Thatcher...

I started off the week noting that I was in thrall to the astonishing John Lilburne.  Another hero, albeit of a very different kind, is Henry Wilt.  Now, it's difficult being in the Fens and not to think of Wilt, that...

I think that PhD development courses have to be tricky things to structure for a number of reasons; foremost, perhaps, is the wide-ranging experiences that participants bring: from the novice setting out, for example, to someone well through the research and...

In commenting on my post on Monday, Alan Red reminded me of my pragmatic approach to issues of research, and of something I'd written in 1999 for Educational Studies: Environmental Education: Arguing the case for multiple approaches This paper develops existing arguments...

Wednesday in Cambridge began with a focus on epistemology in the capable hands of Leif Östman.  Most gratifyingly, he began in the 1600s with the scientific revolution when nature as object and humans as subject first emerged and we conceptualised the mind. There...

A good evening in the Fens, I thought, as ECER's first PhD conference began last night in Cambridge with a thoughtful and probing introduction by Marcia McKenzie who was on splendid form despite having to cross both Canada and the Atlantic to get here.  I...

I read an article in last week's Economist with ever-growing gloom.  Titled, Title to come, it concerned the continuing lack of property rights across Africa.  I can hardly bear to re-read it to summarise it here. There's a lack of rights in...

Here's John Blewitt on the imperfections in the new higher education Bill working its way through parliament.  He argues that if universities are going to be successful in "shaping any sustainable economic alternatives to the neoliberal consensus which drives the climate crisis, then...

These reasons are those of the Green group in the EU Parliament, not mine.   You can read them here. This is their shot across the bows of the EU Commission which recently submitted to the EU standing committee on plants,...