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The rapid expansion of online education compels debate over what accessible higher education should be, how it should be delivered, and whom it should serve. While geographers remain relatively marginal to this debate, they have engaged the question of the neoliberal university, where online education is sometimes characterized as another instantiation of the neoliberal turn. This paper draws geographies of education scholarship into productive conversation with online teaching and learning, critical pedagogy, and public geographies literatures to argue that geographers can reframe the debate over online education and reposition it as a productive space of critical dialogue, inquiry, and encounter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biodiversity informatics (BDI) is a science focused on biodiversity data management, and BDI courses cast students’ attention to matters related to the physical environment, global change, translating data collections across multiple sciences, and also to the translation needed to bring BDI findings from the scholarly community to the public. Even as students learn about science communication in BDI courses, they struggle to translate their studies into their own identities and lives. Based on an examination of student talk in a course on BDI and Science Communication, this research illustrates how students linguistically frame science and their science identity. The data show that obstacles barring the taking up of a science identity are plentiful, and that those barriers often relate to issues of identity and language. Interventions for addressing this translational problem, the disruptions to sharing scientific information, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This autoethnography offers an account of my experience with mental illness and provides an analysis of the performative aspects of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD is a genetic disorder triggered by environmental stressors involving a chemical imbalance in the brain. The resulting biologically altered state leaves individuals to steer themselves among and between “appropriate” performance and secret rituals. Analyzing my own communication practices through a performance lens highlights the importance of image management for people struggling with disability. In telling my own story, this article provides readers an in-depth look at OCD as a traumatic brain disorder whose sufferers rely on communicative performance to maintain their public and private identities, and as a disease that impedes social life for its sufferers. Implications of this account for those struggling with mental disability and for practitioners aiming to help them are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The authors draw upon survey evidence of expert conceptualisations of the value of public knowledge in environmental decisionmaking. In the context of local air quality management in particular, they consider how experts understand the potential benefits of technological citizenship, and what status they accord to lay knowledge relative to their own roles. Evidence suggests a continuing expert-deficit model of lay knowledge, with suspicions that the public misunderstand environmental issues. Although the need for public ‘buy-in’ to the solutions to problems such as air pollution is supported, this does not translate to a more proactive engagement of lay knowledge in the assessment of such issues. Experts seem to be personally challenged by such notions. The authors discuss the need for a cultural shift in expert understanding of the value of lay knowledge, supported by a move away from an oversimplification of the need for, and value of, public participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]