合成生物学赋能：从学科发展到产业转化

合成生物学通过引入工程科学“自下而上”认识生命体系的理念,在生命科学研究中采用“设计—构建—测试—学习”迭代的研究范式,并在基因组和系统生物学的基础上,构建工程化的新生命体系,为生命科学提供了“从创造到理解”的新途径,不仅颠覆了从整体到局部的“格物致知—还原论”的传统研究策略,还开启了理解生命本质的“建物致知”新文化。同时,合成生物学将生物技术由“模拟自然过程”和“遗传工程改造”上升至“定量理性设计”和“标准化构建测试”的高度,推动生物工程和代谢工程朝着对标生命过程的高效率、普适性的工程化“重编程”,甚至是“从头构建”的新高度,以实现“建物致用”的目标。文章梳理了合成生物学近年来在生命科学基础研究中“建物致知”方面的重要进展,列举了其在化工、医药、食品、环境等应用领域中“建物致用”的具体案例,展现了合成生物学对人类社会全面发展正在发挥的重大影响,强调了为确保合成生物学的健康、快速发展,构建会聚生态系统与治理体系的重要性。     

The ontological politics of evidence and policy enablement

Ontological politics has received increasing attention within education policy studies, particularly as a support for the notion of policy enactment. While policy enactment offers serious challenges to traditional approaches toward policy implementation, this paper takes up ontological politics as a concept that extends beyond implementation and holds consequences for policy formation as well. Analysing the different uses of evidence in recent policy documents from Aotearoa New Zealand, this paper argues that an ontological politics of evidence grounds policies in ways that define what can and cannot be enacted, what this paper terms policy enablement. The analyses illustrate an ontological politics of evidence that excludes non-experts in the first instance, and that sanitises the critical elements of enactment in the second. Both analyses highlight the ways policy enablement emerges from ontological politics and offers a supplement to policy enactment. Following these analyses, the paper offers some provisional thoughts on the relationship between enablement and enactment as an approach that attends to context as a constitutive element of policy-making.     

Adapting the boundaries in primary physical education: an account of my learning,my educational influence and improved practice

In this paper I explore how I have come to theorise my work as a critical emancipatory practice as a lecturer in primary physical education (PE). I give an account of what I understand to be the epistemological foundations and practices of practitioner research and my potential educational influence in my own and other practitioner-researchers’ learning. I explain how I have generated my living educational theory of practice and discuss the changes in my learning from a propositional approach towards a dynamic epistemology of practice that is grounded in inclusional and dialogical ways of knowing. Within my paper I position myself as a professional educator and researcher, and share the exciting and transformational experiences of teaching and learning in evolving action research cycles of practice. I view my learning to date as an active act, working with the novice teachers I support to offer improvement and change in our future practice. I celebrate my reconceptualised view of education as a learner from within my practice and explain my move from knowledge transfer to knowledge co-creation. I make an original contribution to educational knowledge by explaining how I try to inspire others to research their practice and contribute to a new scholarship of educational enquiry.     

Digital sketching. Aesthetic practices and technological entanglements

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ways aesthetic practices and emerging digital technologies are entangled in the practices of industrial designers. Despite the increased interest in the socio-materiality of aesthetic practices, the conception of the materiality and historicity of digital artefacts remains an open issue. It is suggested that the concept of operational form provides an integrative perspective on the technical development and practical enactment of digital technologies. Drawing on an ethnographic case study on the appropriation of a digital sketching application, it is shown how the aesthetic practices and qualities of the digital technologies are reflexively coupled. The study points to the fact that digital technologies are inherently reductive in that they have to abstract from the particularities and richness of concrete aesthetic practices.