Development

"African scholarly research is relatively invisible globally because, even though research production on the continent is growing in absolute terms, it is falling in comparative terms. In addition, traditional metrics of visibility, such as the Impact Factor, fail to make legible all African scholarly production. And many African universities also do not take a strategic approach to scholarly communication to broaden the reach of their scholars’ work.

To address this challenge, the Scholarly Communication in Africa Programme (SCAP) was established to help raise the visibility of African scholarship by mapping current research and communication practices in Southern African universities and by recommending and piloting technical and administrative innovations based on open access dissemination principles. To do this, SCAP conducted extensive research in four faculties at the Universities of Botswana, Cape Town, Mauritius and Namibia.

In the University of Botswana’s Faculty of Humanities, SCAP found that scholars:
• carry heavy teaching and administrative loads which hinder their research productivity
• remain unconvinced by open access dissemination
• find it easier to collaborate with scholars in the global North than in the rest of Africa
• rarely communicate their research with government
• engage in small, locally-based research projects that are either unfunded or funded by their universities
• produce outputs that are often interpretive, derivative or applied due, in part, to institutional rewards structures and funding challenges
• do not utilize social media technologies to disseminate their work or seek new collaborative opportunities.

All of these factors impact UB’s research in/visibility at a time when scholarly communication is going through dramatic technical, legal, social and ethical changes.

“Scholarly Communication at the University of Botswana” shares the results of SCAP’s research and advocacy efforts at UB’s Faculty of Humanities. It not only analyses the faculty’s scholarly communication ecosystem, but illuminates the opportunities available for raising the visibility of its scholarship. It concludes with a series of recommendations that would enhance the communicative and developmental potential of the university’s research as a whole.

This study will be of interest for scholars of African higher education, academically linked civil society organizations, educationally affiliated government personnel and university researchers and managers."

"By means of a qualitative approach I bring insights on the relationship older people (60+) have with mobile communication in a low income district of Lima (Peru). The case study I conducted in September 2013 included interviews and one focus group with 20 inhabitants of San Juan de Miraflores district. The user / non-user dichotomous classification turned out to be too narrow in this context.
While some participants reported a common, bidirectional use of the device, restrictions and discontinuities played a role.
Some described an asymmetric use of the mobile phone, as they used it exclusively for receiving calls, while never making outgoing calls. Others described discontinuities in ownership, which was the case when their mobile was stolen and the y could not replace it immediately. My initial hypothesis is that such restrictions are related to income, skills and age. "

"This paper proposes a model of dialectical development of the society, created by the dialectical schemes and formulas based on a binary notation (dialectic model of East and West, the political economy model, and others).
Предлагаются модели диалектического развития общества, созданные с помощью диалектических схем и формул на основе двоичного счисления (модели диалектики Востока и Запада, политэкономические модели, и другие)."

This manuscript is the first to consider the emergence of spirituality as a topic in Canadian social work scholarship and practice. A broad overview is provided of three time periods, beginning with the origins of the profession and ending with present-day considerations. These three periods are ones in which spirituality had/has strong influence in shaping practice, research and pedagogical discourses. First, we emphasize the overwhelming significance of spirituality to the early history of social work, prior to its emergence as a secular, professional discipline taught in university contexts. Second, we examine how spirituality continued to have a place within the writings of several major social work scholars in Canada, up to 1970 at which point spirituality seems to fade from scholarly social work literature. Third, spirituality re-emerged as a Canadian topic for research in the 1990s - at the beginning of the third millennium the spirituality and social work literature has emphasized three major themes: social justice work and community organizing; social work pedagogy; and social work practice. Finally, we briefly consider barriers to, and prospects for, the continued emergence of spiritually infused social work research and practice in Canada.

"“Everything is now for sale, even those areas of life, such as social services and natural resources, that were once considered the common heritage of humanity.” (Marlow & Clarke, 2002, p. 2).

Water, the source of all forms of life on our planet, is increasingly being added to this outlet of privatised commons, trading off long-term sustainability and equal access for private profits. This paper will argue that the current worldwide neoliberal climate of deregulation, privatisation and commodification of water is in fact a process of accumulation by dispossession, and consequently, that market environmentalism is not capable of satisfying the needs of current and future generations, while sustainably preserving the environment."

This paper explores the political factors that determine the price of loans offered to borrowing countries by multilateral development banks (MDBs). The reasons why MDBs set their prices at a given level and why those prices might vary from one MDB to another has received scant attention in academia, even though inexpensive loan costs are the primary reason countries borrow from MDBs. The paper explores these issues in three MDBs, each with a different composition of shareholding countries—the World Bank (controlled by wealthy non-borrowing countries), the Inter-American Development Bank (more evenly balanced between non-borrowing and borrowing countries) and the Andean Development Corporation (controlled by borrowing countries). Evidence indicates that MDB shareholder composition has a major impact on loan prices, in sometimes unexpected ways. While the backing of wealthy countries allows the World Bank and IADB to raise resources on capital markets more cheaply than the CAF, the interests of those same non-borrowing countries in using MDB net income make loan costs significantly higher at those MDBs—especially the World Bank—than they would be otherwise. These results provide support to an institutionalist approach in focusing on the importance of shareholding and voting rules to better understand MDB activities.