Search results

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the role of local communities in responding to crises and disasters. The paper highlights that most communities have their own mechanisms of dealing with uncertainties and dangers produced by disasters. The paper acknowledges that most disaster response and disaster risk reduction (DDR) organisations advocate to work with local communities and most seek to build the capacity of these communities.

The authors draw on a series of case studies gathered together with their experience over the past decade of working with both local communities that have been affected by disasters and international organisations involved in DDR and humanitarian responses.

This paper concludes that whilst international institutions continue to make attempts at building the capacity of local communities they need to seek to work collaboratively with local communities. International institutions must ultimately learn from them and build their own capacity for developing context specific and effective DDR strategies and disaster responses.

This paper offers local case studies that give a rare insight into some of the ways local communities deal with disasters and view international responses to disasters and conflicts. This paper demonstrates the role of local communities in building the capacity of international institutions for DDR.

Man has been seeking an ideal existence for a very long time. In this existence, justice, love, and peace are no longer words, but actual experiences. How ever, with the American preemptive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the subsequent prisoner abuse, such an existence seems to be farther and farther away from reality. The purpose of this work is to stop this dangerous trend by promoting justice, love, and peace through a change of the paradigm that is inconsistent with justice, love, and peace. The strong paradigm that created the strong nation like the U.S. and the strong man like George W. Bush have been the culprit, rather than the contributor, of the above three universal ideals. Thus, rather than justice, love, and peace, the strong paradigm resulted in in justice, hatred, and violence. In order to remove these three and related evils, what the world needs in the beginning of the third millenium is the weak paradigm. Through the acceptance of the latter paradigm, the golden mean or middle paradigm can be formulated, which is a synergy of the weak and the strong paradigm. In order to understand properly the meaning of these paradigms, however, some digression appears necessary.

This chapter discusses the relationships between researchers and parent participants in a project that aimed to empower parents to support their children's informal mathematics learning. The Everyday Maths project used a parent-centred approach to empower parents in supporting their children's maths learning at home, through a series of workshops that took place in primary schools. In particular, we focus on relational issues between us (as researchers), parents, and schools – specifically, the way in which those relationships enabled both researchers and participants to develop new ways of thinking about their roles and positions, as well as develop their understanding about mathematics and about research. Relational agency (Edwards, 2010, 2017a) is used to understand the way in which these relationships played out. We also consider the way in which schools, as hosts of the project, impacted on this thinking. We reflect on schools' positions in the dynamics: they welcomed and supported our project, but as the project evolved, we questioned the way that schools positioned parents in relation to supporting children's learning, and encouraged parents to rethink their role. The potential for such disruption of relationships will be considered from an ethical stance. As researchers, we explore the ways in which we came to recognise each other's perspectives and develop a set of common understandings that were fundamental to our methodological approaches in this study.

Over the course of a two-year project, we set out to investigate the mathematics in children's everyday lives. We recognised the fact that this was a challenging project and that gaining access to children's personal lives would take time and some careful research design. A particular challenge centred on the difficulty of ensuring that our participants shared our understanding of ‘mathematics in everyday life’ and were happy and confident in sharing examples with us. In this chapter, we describe the way that we gradually increased the depth of our understanding of children's experience of mathematics outside of school through a series of studies with groups of primary school children. A structured diary study, and parental survey, allowed us to start a conversation with our participants about the kinds of activities we were interested in. A photo elicitation study then encouraged participants to cross the home-school boundary and share representations of their lives outside of school. These studies enabled us to develop enough of a shared language to carry out small group interviews with children and explore the mathematical thinking and learning in their out-of-school lives.