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The purpose of this study is to analyze the first major federal education policy, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and the most recent federal policy, the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, through a Black critical theory (BlackCrit) lens to understand better how these educational policies have served as antiblack projects. Furthermore, this study locates examples of educational Freedom Dreams in the past and present to imagine new possibilities in Black education.

By analyzing education policy documents and history through BlackCrit methods, the authors expose how education policy is inherently an antiblack project. Freedom Dreams catalyze possibilities for future education.

The data confirms that while these policies purport equity and accountability in education, they, in practice, exacerbate antiblackness through inequitably mandated standardized testing, distributed funding and policed schooling.

This paper applies BlackCrit analysis of education policy to reimagine Black educational possibilities.

The research discussed in this paper aims to study the impact of video footages on the academic performance of students. Video footages are usually inserted into video lectures — in addition to the verbal narration of any examples by the teachers — to explain and simplify concepts. Similarly, in conventional classrooms, teachers verbally narrate examples to clarify concepts — but, in this case, students have to rely on their imagination and previous exposure to similar situations to develop an understanding of the concepts.

A two-phase experiment was designed to compare these two teaching methods. A sample of 70 participants was drawn from non-psychology students in the Virtual University of Pakistan; and two groups, Group A and Group B, each with 35 participants, were formed through random assignment of the students. In the first phase of the experiment, members of Group A were taught through a 24-minute video lecture on psychology, which had four chunks of video footage in it. After the lecture, the students' academic learning was measured through a multiple-choice test with 27 items, which was developed by incorporating an equal number of questions on three levels of Bloom's taxonomy (viz. understanding, comprehension and application). The item levels were decided after agreement by three examiners who had at least three years of experience of developing such questions. In the second phase, a lecture with similar content was taught to Group B. The only difference was in the mode of delivery: in this case, the content was conveyed verbally and no video footages were used. The same test of students' learning was employed to get the scores of Group B. In addition, a qualitative study, involving data gathered through participants' feedback on the performance of the learning facilitators and weaknesses in both teaching modes was collected in order to explore the participants' perceptions and experiences of the phenomenon being studied. The results indicated that the two groups were significantly different in terms of academic achievement. The mean values suggested that those who were taught through video footages showed a higher level of academic learning than those who received a traditional verbal narration lecture. In addition, the students reported that the video footages and examples facilitated their learning, and helped them to remain focused and motivated in class. The findings have broad implications for teachers, content developers, academic policy-makers and producers involved in the production of academic content.

This study used a visual research approach to investigate how small business (SB) entrepreneurs in Nigeria, a low-income country, perceive digital transformation (DT). The study aims to improve and broaden the understanding of DT by uncovering its metaphors. Making metaphorical sense of DT will increase its knowledge among populations who are unfamiliar with digital technology concepts, as well as communicating and collaborating with them to develop future research and strategies on the subject of DT. This study is significant because scholars have paid little attention to social imaginations of DT depicted through metaphors, more so when considered from a worldview of SBs in low-income countries.

The uniqueness of the research objective motivated the use of social theory to frame the research approach, and picture-elicitation techniques to drive data collection through in-depth interviews with 17 SB entrepreneurs and business owners in Nigeria. Data were analyzed using a content analysis procedure known as metaphor analysis.

The study revealed three metaphors of DT: a drama, a war and a pregnant elephant. A triangulation of the metaphors with English lexicon, extant literature and interview excerpts supported the war and drama perceptions of DT but opposed “DT as a pregnant elephant.”

It argued that the social perception of DT can improve the sustainable, purposeful and successful execution of DT strategies for SB DT. As a result, this study pushes the boundaries of DT, particularly for SB entrepreneurs in low-income countries.

Metaphors pervade our daily lives, not only in our language and communications, but also in how we think and act; as such, they can play an important role in understanding and implementing DT, a concept that has received little attention in the SB settings.

This is one of the first empirical studies to figuratively explain DT and its implications for literature and practice in SB entrepreneurship and information systems domains.

This paper aims to propose that a Jesuit education can create leaders who can respond responsibly to modern challenges. It is observed that there remains a lacuna in education due to various reasons that fail to penetrate the hearts and minds of students who come only to earn their degrees. Today’s education fails to give students experiences whereby they can understand the poor and the oppressed. Here, the Jesuit education system offers a road map of how a bridge can be built, which can tie up the two ends of rigorous academic and social concern.

The emic observation was employed to corroborate the claim. The researcher is a Jesuit himself who has personal experience of the culture of Jesuit education and does research in the seminal field. The co-author is a Jesuit-run business school professor who knows Jesuit ethos, tradition and their apostolic thrust.

Frequently students join the educational institute, with their minds fixed on which school could provide them with a passport for better jobs with better pay and perks. Resentment is seen in their attitude when something is talked about the responsibility of taking care of the people at the margins of society. Social involvement and responsibility are seen as work done only by a social worker and activist. Also, it is witnessed that tokenism is considered as sufficient work done by the privileged classes. Against this backdrop, Jesuit education has various policies and protocols to ensure that those who graduate from their schools become leaders with a blend of human values, academic excellence and social conscience.

The underpinning conclusions are to introduce the unique characteristics of the “Jesuit education system”, which gives fresh impetus to renewal, innovation and re-imagination that our academics or industry require during this change of epoch that we experience today, after COVID-19.

Few people living in informal settlements in the Global South spontaneously claim that they are “resilient” or “adapting” to disaster risk or climate change. Surely, they often overcome multiple challenges, including natural hazards exacerbated by climate change. Yet their actions are increasingly examined through the framework of resilience, a notion developed in the North, and increasingly adopted in the South. To what extent eliminate’ do these initiatives correspond to the concepts that scholars and authorities place under the resilience framework?

Three longitudinal case studies in Yumbo, Salgar and San Andrés (Colombia) serve to investigate narratives of disaster risks and responses to them. Methods include narrative analysis from policy and project documents, presentations, five workshops, six focus groups and 24 interviews.

The discourse adopted by most international scholars and local authorities differs greatly from that used by citizens to explain risk and masks the politics involved in disaster reduction and the search for social justice. Besides, narratives of social change, aspirations and social status are increasingly masked in disaster risk explanations. Tensions are also concealed, including those regarding the winners and losers of interventions and the responsibilities for disaster risk reduction.

Our findings confirm previous results that have shown that the resilience framework contributes to “depoliticize” the analysis of risk and serves to mask and dilute the responsibility of political and economic elites in disaster risk creation. But they also show that resilience fails to explain the type of socioeconomic change that is required to reduce vulnerabilities in Latin America.

The twofold aim of this theory-building article is to raise questions about the ability of queer cinema to transform market culture and ideologies around gender and sexuality. First, the authors examine how the very capitalization of queer signifiers may compromise the dominant order from within. Second, the authors address how brands possibly can draw on these signifiers to project authenticity.

Through visual methods of film criticism and the semiotic analysis of three films (Moonlight, Call Me By Your Name and Portrait of a Lady on Fire), the authors outline some profound narrative tensions addressed by movie makers seeking to give an authentic voice to queer lives.

Brands can tap into these narrative attempts at “seeing the invisible” to signify authenticity. False sublation, i.e. the “catch-22” of commodifying the queer imaginaries one seeks to represent, follows from a Marcusean analysis.

In more practical terms, “seeing the invisible” is proposed as a cultural branding technique. To be felicitous, one has to circumvent three narrative traditions: pathologization, rationalization and trivialization.

In contrast to Marcuse's pessimist view emphasizing its affirmative aspects, the authors conclude that such commodification in the long term may have transformative effects on the dominant ideology. This is because even if something is banished to the realm of imagination, e.g. through aesthetic semblance, it can still be enacted in real life.

The “academic revolution” that has taken place over the past 50-60 years has brought about many opportunities, but also challenges, in the lives of academics. The “publish or perish” phenomenon can be seen as one manifestation of the heated competition among universities for talent and resources. The resulting increase in publications, the decrease in the time academics have to read them, together with editors’ call for more originality, innovation, and meaning in submitted manuscripts lead to two questions. What techniques can help researchers and PhD students to effectively and efficiently navigate through large bodies of literature? What tools and techniques can be used to enhance the foundations for theorising? The purpose of this paper is to answer these two interrelated questions.

The abstracts of 410 peer-reviewed journal articles connected to ethics in (international) marketing research are explored with software tools. The freely available VOSviewer software is used to visualise the specified body of literature. NVivo is employed to go deeper and explore specific themes identified through VOSviewer.

A total of 17 clusters were identified, representing the major themes in the selected body of literature. Additionally, a number of research avenues and research questions are presented.

The analysis is based on the information provided in abstracts. Future research may wish to extend the analysis to full articles.

The paper contributes by demonstrating how software tools such as VOSviewer and NVivo can be used to explore large bodies of literature and to experiment with research ideas to enhance the foundations for theorising.

This chapter explores sex work and compares legal regimes in two case study contexts of Scotland and New Zealand. It highlights parallels in policy norms and approaches towards women in sex work and women who use drugs, including stigmatisation and punishment of ‘deviant’ women or alternatively, approaches that seek to ‘rescue’ women and which frames them as victims. Different policy approaches and regulatory regimes are discussed but the chapter argues that without attention to social justice issues, the structural drivers of women’s engagement in sex work will continue to be overlooked. Participation in policy processes by those with lived experience is emphasised, both to ensure better understanding of sex work by policymakers, and also in recognition of the citizenship, voice and agency of sex workers.

The purpose of this study is to propose an innovative and efficient process in urban policy-making that combines a divergent and creative method with a convergent and strategic one. At the same time, the purpose is also to propose a useful innovation to enforce the usability of both methods. On the one hand, mission-oriented policies run the risk of being overly focused on the present and of not being able to develop preparedness in organization. On the other hand, scenario development has the reverse problem it often does not point out how to use scenario narratives to inform and devise short-term strategic actions.

The paper proposes an innovative methodological approach, the mission-oriented scenarios, which hybridizes Mazzucato's mission-oriented public policy framework with Jim Dator's Manoa school four futures method. The proposed methodological innovation emerges from a urban foresight academic-led project carried out in the context of the Metropolitan City of Turin, Italy, where a first application of the mission-oriented scenarios was tested on six different focal issues (from reindustrialization to cultural policies) and the scenario narratives were used as sources for the grounding of 12 missions and 48 strategic actions towards 2030.

Mission-oriented scenarios can contribute to the generation of more sustainable and inclusive urban public policies. This methodological proposal is based on an original mix of knowledge exchange procedures borrowed from methodological approaches with different backgrounds: the mission-oriented and the archetypal scenarios. Their conjunction could support the formulation of ambitious yet pragmatic policies, giving a plurality of actors the opportunity to act and establish fruitful and lasting partnerships.

The paper reconstructs one of the first urban foresight projects carried out in a major Italian city by two prestigious universities and exposes a methodological innovation resulting from reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of the project, which opens the door to the development of a new scenario technique.

The production of the ‘good life’ or the ‘less bad-life’ (Berlant, 2007, 2011), especially among generations of the Marcos dictatorship and the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue revolutions (henceforth, EDSA revolutions) in the Philippines, is animated by the ‘mobility imperative’ (Farrugia, 2016). The mobility imperative includes processes that encourage or demand mobility (Farrugia, 2016) for individuals and institutions. It figures in various ‘systems of practice’ (Levitt, 1998, 2001) among families in migrant-sending communities, government and corporations that magnify how migration is the ticket to better life (McKay, 2012) or its glorification as a heroic act (de los Reyes, 2013, 2014). Among the generations of the Martial Law and the EDSA revolutions, therefore, the ‘good life’ is hinged upon departure as professionals (e.g. nurses and engineers), workers in elementary occupations (e.g. construction and domestic workers) or mail-order brides or pen pals. Put simply, the good life in these generations is a function of remittances.

This chapter examines how the contemporary generation of young people construct the ‘good life’ in differential and new terms (de los Reyes, 2023; McKay & Brady, 2005) from previous generations. Using interviews and vision boards of left-behind children (15–18 years old), it argues that left-behind children critically appraise the ‘mobility imperative’. The chapter shows that there is a growing imagination of alternatives to the migration-induced good life among left-behind children, and therefore, they gradually refuse the ‘mobility imperative’. For them, the aspired good life consists of potentially being employees or entrepreneurs in their own villages and living a life with their own families (de los Reyes, 2019, 2020).