Search Results (473)

Persistent structural inequalities continue to limit equitable access to, and success within, South African higher education, particularly for students from historically marginalised and under-resourced schooling backgrounds. Extended Curriculum Programmes (ECPs) were introduced as a national policy response to these disparities, yet they remain frequently misconceived as remedial rather than transformative pathways. This conceptual paper examines ECPs as catalysts for equity, resilience, and sustainable graduate development in South African higher education. Adopting a qualitative, reflective-practitioner approach grounded in constructivist and transformative learning theory, and informed by document and policy analysis, the paper synthesises literature on epistemic access, social justice, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) with the authors’ own teaching experience within an ECP in the built environment discipline. The analysis shows that when curricula are made responsive, contextually grounded, and asset-based rather than deficit-oriented, ECPs cultivate academic confidence, epistemic access, and a durable sense of belonging among students who might otherwise be excluded from mainstream higher education. The paper argues that embedding ESD and UDL principles within ECP pedagogy strengthens their transformative and sustainability-oriented potential, converting formal access into meaningful participation and long-term graduate resilience. It concludes with recommendations for lecturer development, curriculum design, and institutional policy that reposition ECPs as core, rather than peripheral, mechanisms of transformation in higher education. Full article

The convergence of decoloniality, artificial intelligence (AI), and university classroom practice has emerged as a pressing concern in African higher education. While decolonial movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and #FeesMustFall have reignited debates regarding epistemic justice within African universities, the rapid mainstreaming of generative AI has introduced new inquiries concerning whose knowledge is valued, which languages are acknowledged, and whose pedagogies are perpetuated through machine learning systems. This systematic review maps the trends in studies that engage with decoloniality, AI, and university classrooms, focusing specifically on African universities and African scholarship from 2010 to 2025. Adhering to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 guidelines, the review examined Scopus, Web of Science, African Journals Online, Sabinet, ERIC, and Google Scholar, supplemented by citation chasing. A total of twenty-five studies of varying types and peer-review status met the inclusion criteria. The findings indicate a marked acceleration in scholarly output following 2020, the emergence of three dominant thematic clusters (epistemic injustice and curriculum, algorithmic coloniality and data extractivism, and pedagogical adaptation of generative AI), and a significant concentration of research in South Africa, alongside emerging Pan-African scholarship on African-language AI. The review concludes that African scholarship is formulating a coherent decolonial AI research agenda; however, the scarcity of empirical evidence from classroom settings, the marginalisation of African languages within AI corpora, and uneven regional representation hinder the advancement of the field. Implications are discussed for institutional policy, curriculum design, and future research directions. Full article

Psychedelic decriminalization has moved from the margins of drug-policy discourse to a mainstream public health and equity conversation. This community survey reveals that people with psychedelic experience who live in areas that have decriminalized psychedelics report greater benefits of psychedelic decriminalization than adverse outcomes. In decriminalized zones, most (84.0%) participants (N = 163) reported feeling improvements in one of the following areas because of decriminalization: legal risks, social acceptance, substance availability, substance safety, diversity of available products, and overall substance quality. Only 5.5% of participants reported worsened conditions in any category. Most (74.8%) participants also reported decriminalization-related improvements related to psychedelic therapy, such as social acceptance, availability, legal risks, safety, and diversity of services available. Notably, no participant reported that legal risk had worsened. Post decriminalization, most (72.4%) participants reported improvements in life conditions including stress and anxiety, worry, depressive symptoms, physical health, addiction, family relationships, other relationships, connection to community, working conditions, and financial status. Only 8.6% of participants reported declines in any category regarding psychedelic therapy or life conditions (2.5%). Although our methodology precludes attributions of causality, this initial study may inspire research with more sophisticated methodologies. Full article

This article examines how gender shapes the framing, governance and lived experience of women’s health within a national health system, and what this reveals about translating gender equality commitments into social policy practice. Using a convergent mixed-methods design, the study combines analysis of national policy documents and parliamentary debates in Portugal (2014–2024) with interviews with key actors (n = 13) and an exploratory national survey of women (n = 268). Across policy and political arenas, women’s health is widely recognised within gender equality and rights-based discourse, yet remains weakly consolidated within mainstream health governance. Reproductive framings dominate, while life-course dimensions such as menopause, women’s mental health and health literacy are under-articulated and weakly operationalised. Actor perspectives emphasise prevention, health literacy, communication and continuity of care, pointing to diffuse ownership and limited accountability. Survey respondents’ accounts both reproduce and extend dominant framings, highlighting mental health, information needs, access barriers and the importance of accessible and trustworthy health information. Reported care experiences reveal a pattern of “respect without responsiveness”, where positive interpersonal treatment coexists with organisational and communicative shortcomings. The article conceptualises this as a governance paradox of recognition without consolidation and shows how policy silences shape not only what becomes actionable within gendered health systems but also the informational conditions that support informed engagement with health and care. The findings have implications for designing life-course-oriented, communication-sensitive and accountability-anchored approaches to women’s health governance. Full article

The quality and safety supervision of agricultural products at the grassroots level has long faced the triple superposition dilemma of small-sample sampling, multi-source evidence conflict, and risk chain evolution. Although existing data-driven models have considerable accuracy, they are difficult to leverage for intervention decisions, and the simple serial connection of traditional Bayesian networks and evidence theory cannot respond to dynamic scenarios. Aiming at this research gap, this paper constructs a dynamic risk assessment model, CIBE-DR, that deeply couples Bayesian networks with evidential reasoning. It contains three core innovations. First, the structure learning method of the causally identifiable Bayesian network embeds a graded do-calculus identifiability score covering both back-door and front-door criteria into the BDeu scoring function and combines this reward with an expert-prior divergence penalty that breaks Markov equivalence so as to realize the transition from relevance modeling to intervention decision modeling. Second, the conflict-aware adaptive evidence synthesis rule orthogonally decomposes multi-source conflict into an epistemic component and an ontological component, which are modeled respectively by Tsallis belief entropy and abductive inference over a discrete twenty-seven-point heterogeneity hypothesis space and are then fused under a reparameterized Dempster–Yager interpolation in which the two endpoints recover the two named rules under a single consistent interpretation. Third, the bidirectional closed-loop coupling mechanism between BN and ER realizes the mutual calibration between the conditional probability table and the evidence credibility prior under a Lyapunov monotone descent argument with the explicit Lipschitz bound $L_{\theta }$ ≤ 0.028 < 1, endowing the model with time-varying self-correction ability. Based on experiments on 156,847 sampling samples from counties and townships in East China, Central China, and Southwest China from 2021 to 2024, the proposed method achieved the best value in six of the seven evaluation indicators, with a minority recall of 0.864 ± 0.014, an intervention effect estimation error of 0.063 ± 0.005, and a dynamic response delay of 2.8 ± 0.3 days, significantly ahead of eleven mainstream baselines under the McNemar test on classification ($p$ < 0.001) and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test on intervention-effect estimation ($p$ < 0.001). The only indicator on which CIBE-DR does not lead is overall accuracy, which is 0.002 lower than that of Transformer; this difference does not reach statistical significance under the McNemar test ($p$ = 0.32) and does not weaken the value of grassroots supervision in the strong-imbalance scenario where the positive rate is only 1.04%. The robustness advantage of the model is particularly prominent in the scenarios of sparse data, adversarial perturbation, and prior-graph incompleteness, and the intervention-effect estimates were additionally validated against two post-2022 policy interventions with absolute deviations of 1.4 and 1.2 percentage points respectively. These results verify the product gain and grassroots deployability of the three mechanisms. Full article

Gender-based violence may be considered a failure or absence of care across the interpersonal, symbolic, and structural levels. Feminist scholars have called for closer attention to an ethic of care as one vital pathway to shared solidarity for social justice and relations of non-violence. Works from Black, Indigenous, queer and disability writers and activists have similarly illustrated the transformative potential of collective care for building community and ending systems of oppression. In this paper, we draw on this critical literature to argue for framing collective care as both a practice and a long-term objective in work to prevent gender-based violence. To illustrate this framing, we share empirical data from two Australian studies: one with young people using social media to prevent gender-based violence, and one with prevention practitioners who work with men and boys. Our findings are organised around four central themes: care as collaboration; transformative care; a politic of care; and collective care in structural change. These findings represent patterns in practice, political approach, and imagined futures among our research participants that we suggest are reflective of ongoing commitments to empathy, compassion, and accountability. These patterns are substantively distinct from much mainstream programmatic and policy approaches to gender-based violence prevention, which often reproduce individualistic frames and are constrained by funding and governance models. We argue that violence prevention is fundamentally a shared project of collective care: supporting one another to recognise, interrogate, and challenge the gendered norms and structures that perpetuate gender-based violence. This work is inescapably relational, political, personal, and motivated by a shared sense of caring for each other. Full article

Insects are fundamental to ecosystem functioning and human welfare, yet their multifaceted contributions to ecological services, food security, rural livelihoods, and cultural heritage remain insufficiently represented in mainstream scientific research and policy. Despite growing global recognition of insect decline and the potential of entomophagy to address food system challenges, integrated evidence linking global ecological knowledge with community-level indigenous practices is lacking, particularly in sub-Saharan African contexts. A narrative bibliometric review was conducted through systematic searches of Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed databases, supplemented by FAO, IPBES, and MDPI Insects repositories. Searches were conducted between January 2024 and May 2026 using keyword combinations spanning entomophagy, ecosystem services, insect decline, indigenous knowledge and edible insects in Africa. Four thematic dimensions are synthesised: (1) ecological services, (2) nutritional value and food security, (3) economic contribution and livelihoods, and (4) socio-cultural and ethnomedicinal significance. The Venda region of Limpopo Province emerges as a compelling case study of how insect–human relationships intersect with biodiversity conservation, food security, and rural development. Actions include integrating indigenous knowledge with scientific research, strengthening sustainable community-based insect harvesting practices, and incorporating edible insects into South Africa’s food, nutrition, and biodiversity policies in alignment with global sustainability and biodiversity goals. Full article

This paper examines mainstream platform moderation as it encounters contemporary pagan religious practice in Europe and reads what it finds as a symptom of a wider condition: the algorithm functions less as a neutral tool than as a productive instrument of an extractive political economy whose characteristic operation is the appropriation, classification, and revenue-conditioned filtering of human expression. Minority religious traditions are structurally exposed within it: too small to constitute an accommodated market, too polysemic for classifiers trained on majority devotional and Anglo-American extremism corpora, and too fragmented to extract policy concessions. Empirically, the paper draws on netnography of pagan online communities across Europe, informal conversations with 97 practitioners across nine European jurisdictions, and a corpus of 247 takedown notices and appeal exchanges (2019–2025). Three recurrent rationale-clusters—devotional content classified as occult, as extremism-adjacent, and as unsafe activity—are read as predictable outputs of the system’s cost structure rather than as ordinary classifier errors. Two concepts are proposed. Algorithmic sacredness names the transfer of gate-keeping functions previously held by ecclesiastical, state, and editorial actors, routed through Bourdieu’s meta-capital as extended to platforms. Algorithmic pluralism names a programmatic direction toward infrastructures whose governance is not capital’s. Full article

Integrated conservation has become a mainstream principle for protecting traditional village heritage. However, regional-scale conservation research still has notable deficiencies: the heterogeneous quality of traditional villages’ heritage is often overlooked, and systematic exploration of the spatial associations of heritage remains insufficient. Taking Huizhou traditional villages as the research object, this study first identified the spatial agglomeration characteristics of village heritage resources, quantitatively analysed the intensity of heritage spatial association, and revealed the core driving factors of inter-village heritage correlation. The results indicated significant spatial heterogeneity in the heritage value of Huizhou traditional villages. Their heritage distribution exhibited three typical spatial association types—high-high (H-H) clustering, low-high (L-H) clustering, and high-low (H-L) clustering—presenting marked network-based spatial correlation characteristics. This study further clarified the distinct influences of natural, social, and economic factors on heritage spatial association. Among these, social conditions—particularly those reflecting linguistic attributes and accessibility, as measured by the distance to the central city—played a pivotal role in shaping the spatial association of Huizhou’s traditional village heritage. Economic factors contributed only to a limited extent. The research findings provide a scientific basis for formulating targeted policies for the concentrated and contiguous conservation of traditional villages. Additionally, the results can support the collaborative and efficient utilisation of regional heritage resources and facilitate the sustainable inheritance and innovative development of traditional village cultural heritage. Full article

Cyber wargaming serves as a core tool for simulating cyber confrontations and supporting operational decision verification. Existing multi-agent methods face issues such as the absence of cross-level mechanisms and poor adaptability to dynamic environments when applied to cyber wargaming. To address these challenges, we innovatively propose HC-MARL, a general hierarchical cascaded multi-agent reinforcement learning architecture tailored for cyber wargaming. Within this architecture, agents are modeled as hierarchical cascaded units to achieve structural decoupling and preserve scalability in both horizontal and vertical dimensions. Specifically, we devise a cross-level bidirectional information passing and intrusion alert sharing mechanism to accommodate cross-level command characteristics; design a Transformer-based message transformation function that fuses variable-length observation vectors from lower-level agents into fixed-length vectors, adapting to dynamic changes in agent structures and numbers; and design a policy function that integrates neural networks with empirical knowledge, incorporating an intrusion-alert-based action mask to enhance threat response efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed HC-MARL framework is a novel general hierarchical collaborative multi-agent architecture for cyber wargaming. To validate the effectiveness of our framework, we instantiate two-layer and three-layer agent clusters and conduct experiments in the CybORG CC4 environment. The results demonstrate that our architecture can effectively accommodate cross-level information transfer and dynamic changes in agents in cyber wargaming scenarios. Furthermore, incorporating intrusion-alert-based action masking into the policy function significantly improves defensive performance. Compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, the average reward improves by approximately 12.3%, and compared with mainstream methods such as Singh et al., the average reward improves by approximately 27.5%. Full article

Global stocktakes reveal that studies on natural hazards triggering technological accidents (Natech) in the context of climate change are limited in Southeast Asia, which is characterized by rapid industrial growth and high exposure to extreme weather. This study assesses the status of Natech hazards, including their consideration in national climate change adaptation policies, and translation to local stakeholders for disaster risk reduction using a case study in Malaysia. A qualitative approach was deployed, combining document analysis and semi-structured interviews in the case study area. The findings reveal that all 11 countries in Southeast Asia are susceptible to Natech hazards; however, only Malaysia, Timor-Leste (East Timor), and Vietnam mention them explicitly in their respective National Communications to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), while Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand reference them indirectly. The results of the interviews (n = 35) in IKS Kuala Selangor, Malaysia, indicate that, despite 30% of stakeholders having been directly affected by floods, fewer than 10% are prepared for Natech hazards. Potential policy entry points for mainstreaming Natech hazards include linking them to regulations on Environmental Impact Assessments and building codes for new projects, plans for climate proofing existing structures, and means for capacity enhancement. Full article

Through textual analysis of 15 English-language articles by seven predominantly U.S.-based sex worker journalists published between 2014 and 2025 across 11 online platforms, this article examines how sex worker journalists aim to influence public opinion around anti-porn policy. Sex workers report on legislation such as the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), age-verification laws, the Stop Internet Sexual Exploitation Act (SISEA), and the Survivors of Human Trafficking Fight Back Act, maintaining that these laws cause harm to sex workers. In the process, they challenge sex work stigma perpetuated by the mainstream media and stake alternative validity claims. They also construct sex worker expertise based on their lived experience in the sex trades through new modes of address and by citing sex workers alongside other progressive organizers. This, furthermore, supports coalition building between the sex workers’ rights movement and other movements for social justice. Full article

Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) have emerged as a prominent and rapidly expanding strategic approach for addressing climate change, biodiversity loss, and socio-ecological resilience in cities, especially within European sustainability agendas where NBS are embedded in EU policy frameworks. Nevertheless, their practical implementation remains uneven across the globe, with relatively strong mainstreaming in Europe but more fragmented uptake in other regions. These disparities stem from a gap between policy-oriented NBS discourse and its translation into design and spatial practice. This study investigates how governance-related NBS research can be more effectively translated into landscape architecture and design practice. It integrates insights from narrative literature reviews, project-based experiences, and international conference sessions. We argue that effective NBS implementation requires alignment with landscape architecture (systems-multi-scale planning, design, site-specific ecological materialization and aesthetic mediation) and governance integration. Through comparative analysis of Global North and South contexts, we identify differences in institutional capacity, socio-cultural perception of nature, and knowledge systems that shape NBS implementation. We propose a multi-scale, co-creative framework connecting environmental knowledge, governance interface, and design practice. The findings demonstrate that NBS cannot succeed solely as a science and policy approach; instead, they must be spatially translated through culturally responsive and ecologically informed landscape design processes and maintenance. Full article

The distributed policy gradient (PG) method has become a mainstream technique for finding optimal policies in multi-agent reinforcement learning. However, global convergence guarantees, which are the most basic measures of theoretical convergence performance, are rarely used in existing distributed policy gradient methods. Moreover, the convergence behaviors of existing methods are sensitive to the selection of learning rates, which leads to limited convergence speeds. To tackle this challenge, we present a new distributed adaptive softmax policy gradient algorithm called DASPG by incorporating Adam-type updates and variance reductions into a vanilla distributed policy gradient method. Moreover, we establish global convergence guarantees for DASPG, i.e., an $ϵ$-optimal policy can be found with a sample complexity of $\tilde{O}({ϵ}^{-4.5})$, which is on par with leading centralized PG methods in terms of sample efficiency. Finally, we present experimental results to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm. Full article

This study investigates physical education (PE) teachers’ perceptions of including students with physical disabilities in mainstream PE settings (i.e., general education environments serving both typically developing students and those with disabilities) in Saudi Arabia. A qualitative research design was adopted to examine the current perspectives of PE teachers, addressing context-specific interpretations of inclusion and the conditions that influence its implementation in mainstream schools. Data were collected using individual semi-structured interviews conducted with PE teachers (n = 8) in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The interview protocol consisted of 18 open-ended questions distributed across five domains: (1) teachers’ perceptions and professional preparedness, (2) institutional policies, facilities, and curriculum adaptations, (3) experiences with students with PD and peer interactions, (4) parental and socio-cultural influences on inclusive PE, and (5) teachers’ recommendations for strengthening inclusive PE. Thematic analysis of the individual semi-structured interviews suggests that Saudi Arabian PE teachers generally support inclusive education and acknowledge its benefits for students with disabilities, particularly in fostering social participation and equitable access to learning. Importantly, these outcomes do not appear to be substantially influenced by teacher sex; rather, they seem to be systemic features of the broader Saudi Arabian educational environment. The present study contributes to the growing literature on inclusive physical education by examining the current perspective of physical educators and identifying how professional training, awareness of inclusive policies, and school-level conditions influence their capacity to implement inclusive PE practices. Full article