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ERA is a digital repository of original research produced at The University of Edinburgh. The archive contains documents written by, or affiliated with, academic authors, or units, based at Edinburgh that have sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by the Library, but which are not controlled by commercial publishers. Holdings include full-text digital doctoral theses, masters dissertations, project reports, briefing papers and out-of-print materials.

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Education access policy in Malaysia's education blueprint: a phenomenological study of equitable quality in public preschools
(The University of Edinburgh. College of Humamities and Social Sciences, 2026-04-30) Ismail, Hazhari; McNair, Lynn; Smith, William; Ministry of Higher Education, Malaysia
This study explored the policy engagement of Malaysia’s National Education Blueprint 2013-2025 (Blueprint), focusing on the lived experiences of teachers in public preschools. The study aimed to uncover how teachers interpret and implement the Blueprint, particularly in promoting equitable quality education within Malaysia’s preschool education context. Adopting a hermeneutic phenomenological methodology, the study utilised semi-structured interviews and reflective journaling with twelve preschool teachers in Kuala Lumpur. This methodology enabled a thorough exploration of the interplay between policy texts, institutional power and teachers’ backgrounds. Data were analysed through Interpretative Phenomenology Analysis (IPA), revealing systemic tensions between policy intent and classroom realities. Through IPA, six superordinate themes emerged: systemic barriers, negotiated agency, and moral-emotional dimensions were evident in policy interpretation; and operational challenges, praxis in adaptation, and identity-ethics were presented in policy implementation. The study critiques bureaucratic performativity and resource disparities that undermine equitable access, advocating for policy clarity, participatory teacher involvement, equitable resource allocation, and collaborative governance. By theorising teacher agency through Bourdieu’s framework and hermeneutic phenomenology, the research repositions teachers as co-constructors of policy knowledge, urging responsive reforms that reconcile systemic constraints with localised innovation. Furthermore, the study emphasises the critical role of government agencies in supporting teachers through clear guidelines and resources. It also underscores the importance of enhancing policy clarity and communication to ensure that teachers can effectively implement the Blueprint. By centering teachers' voices and experiences, the study provides valuable insights into the complexities of educational policy implementation and offers practical recommendations for improvement. Finally, the study contributes to the understanding of how educational policy was interpreted and enacted in diverse cultural and socioeconomic contexts. It highlights the need for the Blueprint (and any policy) that is adaptable to local realities and responsive for all children. The findings have implications for policymakers, teachers, and researchers, offering recommendations for enhancing equitable quality education in Malaysia.
Innofusion or Diffusation? The Nature of Technological Development in Robotics
(Research Centre for Social Science / University of Edinburgh, 1988) Fleck, James
In this paper, it is argued that the process of "innofusion" - that is, the collapsing together of innovation and diffusion - is of fundamental importance in the development of process innovations such as industrial robotics. With innofusion, important, even radical, innovations can evolve in the context of use, during the implementation process. Innofusion is characteristic of a certain type of technology - configurational technologies - which are distinct from system technologies, in that they lack an overall system level dynamic. Configurational technologies are particularly subject to influence by contingencies, and particularly dependent for their development upon the role played by users. The structure of knowledge associated with technological innovation is examined to identify the role of different agents in the technological innovation process. In these terms, innofusion can be characterised as an experimental learning process which crucially involves a range of agents across an industrial sector, and across several organisations. Consequently, policies aimed at encouraging industry sector learning effects may be the most appropriate for facilitating innofusion.
Opening the Black Box and Closing It Behind You: On Microsociology in the Social Analysis of Technology
(Research Centre for Social Science / University of Edinburgh, 1988) Williams, Robin; Russell, Stewart
This paper explores the problems in developing an analysis of technology that gives attention to both the complex detail of technological activity and broader social and economic influences. It examines the work of a group who have applied perspectives from the sociology of scientific knowledge to develop a claimed 'new sociology of technology'. The starting point of their analysis of technological development is the action and interaction between technologists and other individuals and groups directly involved. Criticisms of this 'micro-sociological' approach include the drawing of undue parallels between scientific and technological activities, and the extrapolation from micro-level activities eg of technological communities to analyse phenomena at a broader societal level. Empirical work from this group is contrasted with studies that start from analysis of the structural context and move towards the fine detail of development. Case-studies by the authors in the field of energy technology, the regulation of technological hazards and industrial process technologies are used to highlight the need for developed theories of broad social processes including the role of the state, its relationship with social interests and of class relationships in production Some elements of a theoretical model are outlined that could yield an integrated explanation of influences at a structural level as well as a detailed local level.
Eco-ethical composition: contemporary experimental landscape poetry in the UK
(2026-04-30) Du, Fan; Farrier, David; Thomson, Alex
Situated within the field of ecocriticism and, more broadly, the environmental humanities, this thesis explores the practice of eco-ethics in experimental landscape poetry through the work of Harriet Tarlo, Peter Larkin, Maggie O’Sullivan and Anthony Vahni Capildeo. The practice of eco-ethics, as a creative and critical mode of knowing through being in the environment, takes a different form in each poet’s work. Yet they all actively deconstruct dominant ideologies that reinforce environmental and social violence in the modern world, while reconstituting relationships between humans and nature through poetic innovation, close attention and sustained dialogue. Correspondingly, this thesis engages attentively and dialogically with the work of these four poets, presenting an open constellation of contemporary poetry that re-enacts an eco-ethical mode of knowing and being in the world, as embodied in what I term “experimental landscape poetry”. Inspired by The Ground Aslant, edited by Harriet Tarlo, this term extends Tarlo’s grouping of “radical landscape poetry” by including poets not featured in the anthology and introducing new ways in which contemporary poetry engages with the environment. More specifically, by incorporating the work of Maggie O’Sullivan and Anthony Vahni Capildeo into this discussion of ecopoetics and eco-ethics, I highlight poetry that navigates multiple media and narratives, shifting the focus from optical and local perceptions of landscape to a trans-heuristic and trans-locational imagining of the earth, while maintaining an emphasis on the physical and phenomenal realms. This thesis comprises four chapters, each examining one poet through textual analysis that interweaves literary and cultural studies, with a focus on innovative poetics, landscape phenomenology, feminist materialism and postcolonialism. By connecting and comparing the work of four poets within an interdisciplinary framework, I highlight the diversity of experimental landscape poetry and its potential to constitute, communicate and enact an inclusive and contextual eco-ethics amid ongoing ecological and social transitions. Chapter One examines Harriet Tarlo’s poetry and her collaboration with painter Judith Tucker, tracing their practice of eco-ethics from the outside field to the page-space and gallery exhibition. Responding to the changing environments at each stage of their work, the artists develop distinct methods—such as walking with others, open-form composition and innovative presentation—that enact an open, dialogical mode of artmaking and placemaking. Chapter Two examines Peter Larkin’s poetry, which engages with the materiality of trees and landscapes shaped by both natural processes and anthropogenic interventions. Centring on his poetics of “scarcity”, I argue that his work contemplates the inseverable yet delicate bond between humans and nature. Chapter Three explores Maggie O’Sullivan’s poetry as a practice of weaving kinship among earthly beings, presenting both landscape and the page as sites of mutual constitution and transformation between human and nonhuman, verbal and nonverbal actors. The final chapter explores Anthony Vahni Capildeo’s poetry, linking contemporary ecopoetics, rooted in post-war Anglo-American traditions, with postcolonial Caribbean thought, particularly Glissant’s “poetics of relation” and Brathwaite’s “tidalectics”. Drawing on Capildeo’s status as an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago to the UK, I highlight their re-enactment of movements and relations among diverse subjects, landscapes and narratives, reintegrating “othered” forms of life—such as the animal, the foreign and the mad—into the presentation and discussion of the environment.
‘Micro’ Versus ‘Macro' Sociologies of Science and Technology
(Research Centre for Social Science / University of Edinburgh, 1988) MacKenzie, Donald
'Micro' sociology involves a focus on observable, day-to-day, face-to-face interaction; 'macro' sociology involves relationships one might call 'historical' rather than day-to-day, and spatially 'spread out. This paper discuss the relationship between the two as perspectives on the sociology of science and technology. It is argued that to see them as opposed is to miss a central aspect of the development of science, mathematics and technology. The shift, always potentially problematic, from the local (and thus from the terrain of 'microsociology') to the non-local is at the heart of what these are as human endeavours. So a satisfactory approach to understanding them must be both 'micro' and 'macro'. Though traditional 'macrosociology' is typically defended as being more relevant politically than 'microsociology', the former is insufficiently puzzled by the phenomenon of structural power. The concerns of the latter have potentially great relevance to an understanding of power, for example in an investigation of how scientific or technical change is made 'available' for explicit management, by capitalists, democratic representatives, or whoever. These abstract arguments are fleshed out by a discussion of one particular example: the construction of nuclear missile accuracy figures.