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Academic literature and news media on young people’s activism predominantly champions young people who align with liberal or progressive values, evident most recently in the youth-led climate strikes around the world. Research is often undertaken by scholars who see their work as advocacy for children and young people, countering deficit-based depictions of politically disengaged or ill-informed youth. Yet, this scholarship rarely includes young people whose forms of political activism align with conservative, right-wing, or even alt-right politics. Such ‘selective advocacy’ reinforces a limited picture of the who and what of young people’s political participation. In this chapter, I explore what it might mean for the field of youth studies to provide a more complex picture of young people’s activism and the necessary discomfort that emerges when the desire to advocate for young research participants conflicts with a researcher’s own political and moral concerns. Through a feminist post-structural frame, I examine media and public discourses surrounding instances of young people’s activism in conservative, right-wing, and alt-right spaces. I present the case of a conservative protest organised by a group of university students and targeting a drag queen hosted children’s story time at a library in Brisbane, Australia. This case highlights the importance of maintaining ‘epistemic uncertainty’ when it comes to the complexity of youth and activism. If we are to provide a fuller picture of youth activism, I argue that it is important not to overlook less ‘comfortable’ forms that do not neatly align with the progressive advocacy that dominates the field of youth studies.

There is growing interest around the world in more effectively linking public payments to the provision of public goods from agriculture. However, published evidence syntheses suggest mixed, weak or uncertain evidence for many agri-environment scheme options. To inform any future “public money for public goods” based policy, further synthesis work is needed to assess the evidence-base for the full range of interventions currently funded under agri-environment schemes. Further empirical research and trials should then focus on interventions for which there is mixed or limited evidence. Furthermore, to ensure the data collected is comparable and can be synthesised effectively, it is necessary to reach agreement on essential variables and methods that can be prioritised by those conducting research and monitoring. Future policy could then prioritise public money for the public goods that can most reliably be delivered, offering better value for taxpayers and improving the provision of ecosystem services from agricultural landscapes.

The Bologna Process (BP) remains a key international framework for guiding higher education development in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) until 2030. This chapter traces integrative curriculum ideas in the BP post-2020 and explains why they are symbolic policies. Prior research into curricula in the BP does not explicitly refer to integrative curriculum ideas and does not explore them in the post-2020 context. 2020 marked the deadline for the achievement of a fully functioning EHEA and for setting up new priorities for 2030. This study is informed by the theoretical ideas of soft governance and symbolic policies in the Open Method of Coordination. This chapter addresses the aforementioned gap in the scholarship by relying on a thematic analysis of the first EHEA communique that set the agenda for the post-2020 period – Rome Ministerial Communique (2020) with its three annexes. The findings highlight the following main areas of the integrative curriculum agenda as symbolic policies after 2020: student-centeredness, research-based learning, and the interconnectedness between learning and wider society. This analysis is significant for our understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the international policy rhetoric about the integrative curriculum which, in turn, defines the effectiveness of the implementation of these ideas in practice.

A quick search of the headlines of major newspapers reveals a treasure trove of technology procurement gone wrong. While the private sector seems to adopt and implement new technology seamlessly and quickly to deliver for customers, the government struggles to accomplish technology purchases and integrations with the same ease. As governments in the United States are looking to retain their current workforce and attract the next generation of workers, the technological capabilities and ethos of governments will be paramount. With nearly every industry being transformed by technology and Generation T being the first generation to have an ingrained “technology first” mindset, the ability of governments to attract these workers depends, in large part, on the ability to transform their government technology culture, policies, and practices.

In this chapter, the authors examine the administrative branch and observe two key components at the root of most technology failures: poor organizational structure in the bureaucracy and the lack of an empowered Chief Information/Technology Officer. Building upon case studies from Massachusetts and California, this chapter looks at the factors related to failure or success to understand the technology procurement culture. The chapter concludes by presenting four key “best practice” principles of public policy and administration that can be implemented by almost any governmental entity to improve their acquisition and implementation of technology.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate undergraduate student perceptions about the application of immersive technologies for enhancing the student learning experience. This study assesses the viewpoints of students from varying multidisciplinary backgrounds about whether immersive technologies can enhance their learning experience and increase their level of engagement in the context of higher educational delivery.

The research used a case study methodology adopting a questionnaire-based research mixed methods approach. In total, 83 participants completed the questionnaire. The purpose of the research was to evaluate and interpret students’ perspectives at higher educational level about the use of immersive technologies towards enhancing their learning experience. There was also a focus on remote educational delivery due to the legacy of COVID-19.

The findings suggest that there is still more empirical work to be undertaken regarding the application of immersive technologies in higher education. The study revealed that there are immersive benefits though preference for face-to-face teaching remains popular. The negative connotations associated with immersive technology use in higher education, (e.g. virtual reality), such as cost of equipment and motion sickness, substantiates the themes identified in the academic literature.

The study explores a diversity of immersive technologies and their application in higher education (HE) contexts. Findings indicate that although there are acknowledged pedagogical benefits of immersive technology use in HE prevalent barriers remain that require further empirical research if immersive technology use is to be universally used in the sector.

This preliminary study aims to examine the use of a co-designed immersive virtual reality intervention programme in improving access to health care for people with intellectual disability.

A co-production approach was used to design a virtual reality intervention in collaboration with people with intellectual disability, their families and carers. A mixed-method single sample pre-test-post-test design examined using a virtual reality intervention simulating health-care environments to improve access of attending health-care appointments. Qualitative feedback was used to understand participants’ experience and opinions of using the digital technology.

The study found that the intervention did help people access health-care appointment and reduced their fear. Improvements were also found in quality-of-life post intervention. Positive feedback was provided from participants on using digital technologies indicating the novelty of the approach and potential further applications.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study which has used virtual reality to support people with intellectual disability access health care.

School violence can cause or exacerbate individual and collective trauma. Trauma-informed school approaches offer schools and educators guidance for how to respond. In this chapter, we provide an overview of trauma-informed school approaches and their contributions to healing individual and collective trauma. We begin this chapter by addressing the complex intersection of disability and trauma, and the unique implications of school-based violence for students with disabilities and their teachers. We then define trauma-informed care, describe current short- and long-term trauma-informed school approaches, and explain the aims of these approaches at individual and collective levels. Next, we locate trauma-informed responses to school violence in a context of systemic trauma and share considerations for disrupting the systemic conditions that perpetuate trauma and school violence. We discuss critiques of the trauma-informed care movement and conclude with recommendations for scholars pursuing research in this area.

This paper aims to demonstrate how skills taxonomies can be used in combination with machine learning to integrate diverse online datasets and reveal skills gaps. The purpose of this study is then to show how the skills gaps revealed by the integrated datasets can be used to achieve better labour market alignment, keep educational offerings up to date and assist graduates to communicate the value of their qualifications.

Using the ESCO taxonomy and natural language processing, this study captures skills data from three types of online data (job ads, course descriptions and resumes), allowing us to compare demand for skills and supply of skills for three different occupations.

This study illustrates three practical applications for the integrated data, showing how they can be used to help workers who are disrupted by technology to identify alternative career pathways, assist educators to identify gaps in their course offerings and support students to communicate the value of their training to employers.

This study builds upon existing applications of machine learning (detecting skills from a single dataset) by using the skills taxonomy to integrate three datasets. This study shows how these complementary, big datasets can be integrated to support greater alignment between the needs and offerings of educators, employers and job seekers.