Waste management training manual for primary schools
By Reagan Kandole, Executive Director of ECOaction
ECOaction and its partners (Sustainable Futures in Africa Network, Kampala City Council Authority, Makerere University, Design hub Kampala and the US Embassy) aim to promote and sustain proper solid waste management practices and environmental awareness within schools and communities in Kampala, Uganda. The team aims to teach educators and learners how reducing, reusing and recycling solid waste can make a difference to their school, community, and the environment.
ECOaction has the skills and resources to support this development of this knowledge and practice in schools. In 2019-2020, they worked with Environment and Sanitation clubs in primary schools across Kampala City, on the “Clean Air” project that aimed to help schools to achieve proper waste management. ECOaction and partners collaborated with a group of experts to develop a “tool kit” or teaching and learning manual for waste management and recycling in primary schools.
A curriculum specialist from Makerere University, Dr Leah Sikoyo, and Dr Mia Perry from the University of Glasgow have co-developed the manual with ECOaction community artists, and a local designer. The objective of this manual is to build upon ECOaction’s efforts to sensitize school children on environmental awareness. In particular, the resource relates to proper waste management, through hands-on practical activities relating to reusing and recycling everyday waste to generate useful products for various activities within the school and surrounding communities. The practices described contribute to a clean environment and sustainable livelihoods. The manual introduces the justifications, principles and practices of proper waste management and demonstrates how these can be integrated into the primary school curriculum through relevant themes and topics.
Two flexible and adaptable school projects are suggested in the manual through step-by-step instructions; curriculum thematic connections; and visual illustrations and examples. Finally, each activity is linked to out-of-school and community practices for the broader learning and development in family and community contexts. The extended team strongly believes that this manual provides a unique and powerful resource to schools at this time, and aims to increase the reach and impact of this resource as well as build upon it to develop other resources for educational use.
Pluriversal Literacies: Affect and Relationality in Vulnerable Times
By Vanessa Duclos, Research Manager, Sustainable Futures in Africa
Dr Mia Perry, SFA Co-Director, has just published (April 6th) a brilliant paper* entitled: “Pluriversal Literacies: Affect and Relationality in Vulnerable Times” in International Literacy Association – Reading Research Quarterly. This is a timely publication amid the current COVID19 crisis worldwide.
Abstract
Through a consideration of literacies in theory and international policy, this article pushes at the edges of existing frameworks of functional and sociocultural literacies. In critique of existing policy directives, the author explores an approach to literacy that engages in the affective and posthuman relationality of human and environment and in the plurality of literacies globally that are overshadowed in prevailing models of literacy education. The author was motivated by a commitment to literacy education responsive to a world that is unsustainable in its current practices, to a world that faces increasing fragmentation and vulnerability (socially and ecologically) while certain types of expertise, technologies, and global infrastructures continue to proliferate. As a mainstay of education and a tool of social change, literacies are inseparable from policy and practices of sustainability, equity, and development. Pluriversality is a concept emerging from decolonial theory that provides a counternarrative to contemporary Northern assumptions of the universal. Building on a history of ideas around pluriversality gives sociopolitical and ecological momentum to affect and relationality in literacy studies. The author challenges normative constructions of literacy education as Eurocentric and neocolonial, effectively supporting a pedagogy that normalizes certain practices and people and, by extension, sustains inequity and environmental degradation. Through interwoven research projects, the author highlights the contentious aspects of functional and sociocultural approaches to literacy and the possibilities of moving beyond them. In doing so, the author describes and demonstrates the practical and political implications of affect theory and relationality in literacies education in a plural anthropocenic world.
” It is a paper that I have been working on for over a year and our very own Dr Alex Okot is quoted, EcoAction is featured and the Sustainable Future in Africa Network acknowledged throughout for the immense influence this network has had on my work in literacies “ – Dr Mia Perry
* Mia Perry. 2020. Pluriversal Literacies: Affect and Relationality in Vulnerable Times. International Literacy Association – Reading Research Quarterly. 0(0). pp 1-17 | doi:10.1002/rrq.312
A Critical Resource for Ethical International Partnerships
A Critical Resource for Ethical International Partnerships
When we start a new project with partners in a different context, it is never truly a “new start.” Historically it has been experts from the Global North who have studied and interpreted the South. This means that international research partnerships are inevitably imbued with power relations and possibly the assumption that it is northern knowledge that will lead transformations of in the South. Without a clear recognition of that context, it is inevitable that existing inequities, injustices, and imbalances of knowledge and power, will continue to pervade our work.
We designed this resource to help make explicit the practices and dynamics that underpin partnerships, to support the development of more equitable working relations.
Transforming International Development
By Dr Mia Perry and Dr Deepa Pullanikkatil
A great article written by our Co-Directors and entitled “Transforming international development” was recently published in the Impact publication (IMPACT Volume 2019, Numero 1 – February).
This piece was produced by Science Impact to help the SFA network communicate the objectives and work of the project in a more easily understandable and accessible language to a wider audience of stakeholders, enabling widespread dissemination.
You can access it by following this link:
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/sil/impact/2019/00002019/00000001/art00010#
** The article can be downloaded in a pdf format.
ABSTRACT
THE SUSTAINABLE FUTURES IN AFRICA (SFA) NETWORK The Sustainable Futures in Africa (SFA) Network is an interdisciplinary collective that brings together researchers, educators, and communities of practice that acknowledge the situated and complex nature of practices and conceptions of sustainability. The Network aims to build understanding, research, and practice in socio-ecological sustainability in Africa. Specifically, the Network includes the participation of researchers (from geography and earth sciences, community and adult education, applied social arts, health sciences, and engineering); third-sector organisations (working with environmental and social sustainability, with arts and cultural practice, and with community engagement in African contexts); and community stake-holders (living and working in areas of focus). Participants currently span the Uganda, Botswana, Nigeria, Malawi, and the UK, and the reach of the network continues to expand. THE NETWORK’S AIMS ARE: To address the relationship between social, cultural, and ecological factors in sustainability in Africa through interdisciplinary research initiatives To discover opportunities in the disparities between ontologies of the global north and the global south inherent in international collaborations and global endeavours To shape and support new opportunities for impact and inquiry that address locally-articulated, socio-ecological challenges The Network’s current infrastructure includes a website (https://sustainablefuturesinafrica.com/) and social media platforms; a growing base of research, funding to support knowledge sharing and capacity strengthening (ESRC, EPSRC & SFC); and a core group of scholars, practitioners, and support staff who are providing the leadership and administration of this initiative.
Dr Mia Perry | TedX Interview
Dr Mia Perry, SFA Co-Director, is interviewed at TedX Glasgow about the Sustainable Futures in Africa Network.
At TedX Glasgow the SFA Network brought a snapshot of its work to the event; this includes a public poll which questioned the approach that we take on research sustainability, engaging with the binary choice of ‘Giving v.s. changing your own practice?’ In this interview, Mia discusses the SFA’s work on collaboration across knowledge systems, exemplifying our work as ‘a community member working with an academic’. As SFA is a network focusing on ‘methodologies’, Mia shares how it is important to be able to share what that means in ‘real life terms’ which is at the heart of TedX – world changing ideas made accessible; she described the event as giving her a sense of ‘enthusiasm, motivation, passion and integrity’.
“More and more we realize that if we made good decisions about sustainability here in Glasgow, our colleagues in Africa would have half as many problems to deal with.”
Unpacking the Imaginary in Literacies of Globality
by Dr Mia Perry
As global mobility and communications proliferate, ever-increasing exchanges and influences occur across cultures, geographies, politics, and positions. This paper addresses the practice of literacy education in this context, and in particular the nature of engagement across difference and the role of the imaginary in literacies of globality. Grounded in a theorisation of difference and the imaginary in spaces of learning and inquiry, the paper proposes a methodological framework for working across difference that acknowledges and engages with the inevitable but enigmatic resource of often conflicting imaginaries in literacy practices.
Read Here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01596306.2018.1515064
Reference: Perry, M. (2018) Unpacking the imaginary in literacies of globality. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education,(doi:10.1080/01596306.2018.1515064)
North-South Research Partnerships Must Break Old Patterns For Real Change
By Dr Mia Perry and Dr Deepa Pullanikkatil
Since the 1940s major world powers like the US, the UK and the United Nations have made moves to spread their scientific, economic, industrial, and human rights progress to countries and regions that are seen as less developed, vulnerable or deprived in one way or another.
And yet from where we stand as individual researchers, with funding and passion to share, we see an unsettling and consistent characteristic of this development history. The global north has experienced a gradual increase of economic strength and environmental protection, through jobs, career development, cheap goods and services.
Meanwhile, the global south has undergone a sustained degradation of autonomy, fertile land, food security and cultural literacies. All this has occurred through an imposition of foreign ideas, materials, ideologies and knowledge systems. That’s why we’re trying to do things differently.
Read a recent publication by Sustainable Futures in Africa’s Co-Directors Dr Mia Perry and Deepa Pullanikkatil in The Conversation on why beating poverty needs partnerships and collaboration – not just money …
Beating Poverty Needs Partnerships and Collaboration – Not Just Money
Nigeria recently surpassed India to become the country with the highest number of people living in extreme poverty: 87 million. Nigeria is oil rich and boasts Africa’s fastest growing economy. Yet six of its people fall into extreme poverty every minute.
Read a recent publication by Sustainable Futures in Africa’s Coordinators Dr Mia Perry and Deepa Pullanikkatil in The Conversation on why beating poverty needs partnerships and collaboration – not just money …
Aid is all very well but fair exchange and self awareness may matter more
by Dr Mia Perry
If you have £10 in your pocket and you want to do some good for the world, what is the best way to spend the money? Is it more helpful to donate to an international charity, or pay steep prices for local produce over cheaper, often more accessible products, that have been imported from Africa?
I ask myself this question frequently. My work takes me to places far removed from my home to ‘help,’ to ‘develop,’ to ‘solve problems.’ What makes me think that my good intentions, my money, my version of developed/sustainable/happy have any relevance to communities in Malawi or Uganda? How can I make choices at home that create a positive impact?
In the name of “development” and “aid” billions of pounds have been spent from the Global North on challenges materialising in the Global South: from poverty to environmental protection, from gender equality to health. Countless academics, development workers, and administrators have focused on innovation, intervention, programmes and practices on supporting development in the “developing world”.
In the name of #Development #GCRF @SF_Africa https://t.co/mjDU1uvtz1
— Molly Gilmour (@MVGilmour) April 12, 2018
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The Sustainable Futures in Africa Network (sustainablefuturesglobal.org), a consortium I lead,
is a collective of researchers, educators, development workers, and communities that spans the UK (primarily the University of Glasgow) and countries across Africa (Malawi, Uganda, Botswana, and Nigeria in particular).
We work across diverse areas of expertise, sectors, and geographies to address the social, cultural, and ecological aspects of sustainable development. Together, we focus on questions about how to rethink the development research status quo for more positive future outcomes.
The flow of aid money and resources, coupled with increasing global morality and mobility is broadening pipelines between the Global North and South, yet there is an unsettling current to development trends.
In reality, the Global North (albeit an ever-decreasing section of the Global North) becomes ever more powerful and prosperous, and more resilient to climate change; while the Global South addresses an ever-decreasing area of fertile land, a growing population of people living in poverty, and an increasing threat of food security. For all of our good intentions and promises of funding and expertise, global inequalities and development challenges persist – in many areas increase.
The Sustainable Futures in Africa Network has grown out of questioning this type of development and development-related research.
The Sustainable Futures in Africa Network has grown out of questioning this type of development and development-related research. We are convinced that there are fundamental oversights in the practices, processes and natures of collaborations.
Unless we make decisive changes to the ways we collaborate, across the vastly different settings of our homes, cultures, and disciplines then substantial resources will continue to be spent at a rapid pace; but the trajectory of change and development in the world will remain consistent with that of the past 50 years. The north gets richer, the south gets poorer. Why would we expect anything different if we continue as normal?
Global challenges relating to poverty and environmental sustainability in the Global South require engagement with multiple disciplines, knowledge, and stakeholders.
The challenge goes beyond working across science, society, and culture. It encompasses working across very different perspectives and lived experiences.
We cannot genuinely support positive change or sustainability without ways to communicate and collaborate across these differences. As we do so, we find that no one alone has the solution, no one knows ‘best,’ but together we discover directions and possibilities that make sense (and often surprise) all involved.
As I give, donate, or purchase to create positive change, I am making a difference to others and also to myself. I am accountable for the giving, but also for the impact of the giving. I am mindful of the consequences of my donation or contribution; conscious that I do not want to contribute to the same systems of global inequality that I am trying to alleviate.
So, I choose to spend my £10... in exchange for a product or cause that I am engaged with and understand. This might look like a fair-trade purchase from a market in my neighbourhood instead of a cheaper version at the large chain supermarket, or choosing to purchase a locally produced or second-hand shirt rather than the cheaper new one from a brand-name company who source labour and materials from resource-poor countries such as Bangladesh. Positive influence in the world must be based on fair exchange and self-awareness, not simply good intention or aid.
For More Information:
https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/mia-perry-aid-is-all-very-well-but-fair-exchange-and-self-awareness-may-matter-more-1-4718285
