A toolkit to implement graduate attributes in geography curricula

This article uses findings from a project on engagement with graduate outcomes across higher education institutions in New Zealand to produce a toolkit for implementing graduate attributes in geography curricula. Key facets include strong leadership; academic developers to facilitate conversations about graduate attributes and teaching towards them; ownership of the process by the teachers; the development of a contextualized set of graduate attributes for the geography degree; curriculum mapping to promote alignment between graduate attributes, learning outcomes and assessment tasks; incorporating high-impact educational experiences and signature pedagogies to foster graduate attributes; the use of evaluative data to inform continual enhancements; and allowing at least five years for curriculum renewal to occur.     

After Structure Planning: The New Sub-regional Planning in England

The reformed planning system introduced in England in 2004 weakens the position of counties and unitary authorities. Regional bodies and central government have a larger say on the future shape of localities under these arrangements. In particular sub-regional strategies have a much bigger role within the new Regional Spatial Strategies. This paper examines the prospects for the influence of this new tier of planning, based on government guidance about sub-regional planning and on the evidence on emerging practice, particularly in the southern regions of England. The balance of influence of different actors is changing, both between government tiers and in wider governance relations. The prospects for integrated action in spatial terms are changing, as are the relationships to implementation.     

'Safe space' as counter‐space: women, environmental illness and 'corporeal chaos'

Women constitute a disproportionate 80 percent of people diagnosed with environmental illness (EI), a contentious condition in which patients react adversely to everyday chemicals in the environment at levels politically conceived to be 'safe'. Whilst the diverse range of somatic symptoms constitutes a biomedical anomaly, in this paper I present an alternative means of conceiving environmentally ill bodies. Women (and environmental health practitioners at the Environmental Health Centre, Nova Scotia) have begun to view their bodies as complex systems that have been nudged into a state of 'corporeal chaos', in which minute quantities of chemicals trigger disproportionate somatic symptoms. This chaos extends into 'corporeal space'[ Moss and Dyck (1999a) ] as the diagnosis of environmental illness is experienced simultaneously through both material and discursive bodies. This diagnosis also carries with it a means to mitigate corporeal chaos through a series of body‐ and environment‐based modifications that replace risky bodies with 'safe space'. As a discursive construct, safe space is associated with an absence of chemicals, and in order to mitigate chaos, should ideally be stable, predictable, controllable and communicative. I finalise this paper with some examples of body modifications and illustrate how safe space materialises in the home environment .