Low income, multi-ethnic communities in Main South/Piedmont neighborhoods of Worcester, Massachusetts are exposed to cumulative, chronic built-environment stressors, and have limited capacity to respond, magnifying their vulnerability to adverse health outcomes. “Neighborhood STRENGTH”, our community based participatory research (CBPR) project, comprised four partners: a youth center; an environmental non-profit; a community based health center; and a university. Unlike most CBPR projects that are single topic-focused, our ‘holistic’, systems-based project targeted five priorities. The three research-focused/action-oriented components were: 1) participatory monitoring of indoor and outdoor pollution; 2) learning about health needs and concerns of residents through community based listening sessions; and 3) engaging in collaborative survey work, including a household vulnerability survey and an asthma prevalence survey for schoolchildren. The two action-focused/research-informed components were: 4) tackling persistent street trash and illegal dumping strategically; and 5) educating and empowering youth to promote environmental justice. We used a coupled CBPR-capacity building approach to design, vulnerability theory to frame, and mixed methods: quantitative environmental testing and qualitative surveys. Process and outcomes yielded important lessons: vulnerability theory helps frame issues holistically; having several topic-based projects yielded useful information, but was hard to manage and articulate to the public; access to, and engagement with, the target population was very difficult and would have benefited greatly from having representative residents who were paid at the partners' table. Engagement with residents and conflict burden varied highly across components. Notwithstanding, we built enabling capacity, strengthened our understanding of vulnerability, and are able to share valuable experiential knowledge.

Regional planning may require a better understanding of multijurisdictional planning and equity within intergovernmental context. This research explores how intergovernmental context and metropolitan planning organization (MPO) activities impact rail proposals for low-income and minority communities. In two case studies, Boston and Miami, other government agencies determined the projects within MPO plans. In Boston, however, advocates leveraged agreements and federal rules to secure rail, and the MPO has developed extensive equity analyses. The cases exemplify the fiscal paradox that MPOs face—they have fiscally constrained plans but control little funding. Findings indicate the need to better relate multijurisdictional planning ambitions to intergovernmental context.

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This paper reports on a completed field study that examined the usability and effectiveness of learning objects designed for Australian and New Zealand primary and secondary schools. It focuses on student engagement by observing the ways students interacted with learning objects and by listening to what they said about them. Questions that guided the field study included the following: Could the students use the learning objects easily? Did they enjoy the experience? Did they engage with the intended learning? These questions are examined with reference to students at different levels of schooling, and examples drawn from the fieldwork illustrate that, while some learning objects achieved their potential as engaging multimedia educational resources, others fell short. The paper provides a detailed examination of two learning objects to reveal what worked and what created barriers or subverted the intended learning. In particular, it explores interest, challenge and importance as elements that contributed to engagement and socially constructed learning.

In recent years, Australian universities have been driven by a diversity of external forces, including funding cuts, massification of higher education, and changing student demographics, to reform their relationship with students and improve teaching and learning, particularly for those studying off-campus or part-time. Many universities have responded to these forces either through formal strategic plans developed top-down by executive staff or through organic developments arising from staff in a bottom-up approach. By contrast, much of Murdoch University's response has been led by a small number of staff who have middle management responsibilities and who have championed the reform of key university functions, largely in spite of current policy or accepted practice. This paper argues that the 'middle-out' strategy has both a basis in change management theory and practice, and a number of strengths, including low risk, low cost, and high sustainability. Three linked examples of middle-out change management in teaching and learning at Murdoch University are described and the outcomes analyzed to demonstrate the benefits and pitfalls of this approach.

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The Great Recession was a moment of challenge for many regions and required that leaders reflect on their economic development strategies. Given the propensity of regions to adopt ideas and strategy “fads” that then inform policy debate, we seek to understand how two very different regions with different histories framed their responses to the recession. How did they conceptualize the economic challenge in their region? What did they envision as appropriate responses to this challenge? How did these visions relate to mimetic behavior of the past, in which largely uniform visions are adopted across diverse locations? Our findings show that economic development leaders in the Buffalo and Orlando regions advocated similar high‐tech/biomedical strategies as a way to diversify their economies and make them more resilient or less vulnerable to future shocks. By conceptualizing economic diversification in such similar ways, despite substantial regional differences, this pursuit of resilience or decreased vulnerabilities through economic diversification appears highly similar to prior mimetic behaviors. We consider the implications of this finding for theories of adaptive resilience in which the focus is on economic diversification as part of resilient processes and behaviors, rather than as a fixed characteristic or end state of regions. As practiced in our case studies, diversification for the purpose of resilient outcomes differs substantially from theoretical arguments explaining adaptive resilience as both behavior and process. We caution that policy and planning visions of resilience may therefore represent yet another fad to be mimicked ad infinitum. Nevertheless, adaptive resilience as defined in the literature may still offer promise as a practical strategy—just not one that we yet observe in practice.

This paper will centre on the relationships of women to men and women to women which form the backbone of the history of the Benedictine convent of Le Murate in Florence in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Le Murate started in a quiet way with one pious woman deciding to live virtuously by herself, but under no rule, in a house on the Ponte Rubaconte in 1390, and expanded to become perhaps the largest female convent in Florence in 1515, situated on Via Ghibellina, with 200 enclosed women and their servants living under the Rule of St Benedict. I want to examine the relations between these nuns and the outside world and look at how the male government of the outside world, secular and ecclesiastical, both at an individual level and in a more collective, formal way, tried to restrain and weaken this group of females, even to the point of forbidding them to earn their own livelihood. I would like to posit that religious life on a large scale and in a large city offered opportunities for the exercise of power by women not available to those of the female sex who stayed within the structure of the family and who were, therefore, in direct competition with men at every stage. Daughters, sisters, wives, and widows were legally and socially subject to their male relatives, in varying degrees. Nuns were not, and were permitted a measure of self-government. Just how irksome, worrying, and unacceptable to men it was for women to take their own decisions will become clear later. Barred by their sex from an active life in the hierarchy of the Church, and barred by their Order from an active life in the community, nevertheless in the Renaissance these enclosed Benedictine nuns devised strategies for obtaining access to power and money unparalleled by their secular counterparts. Le Murate exerted a strong attraction on women, both the powerful and famous and the more ordinary. Due to the increasing politicization of Florentine society, it secured, in addition, the patronage of the two most important Florentine political families during the period, the Medici and the Soderini. It was this seeming capacity to mobilize support from every sector of the population, regardless of sex, social group, income, political hue, or place of origin, which enabled the convent to prosper.