In the spring of 2002 Israeli flags began to appear in loyalist communities in Northern Ireland. The appearance of these flags was in one respect explained as a response to the increased prevalence of Palestinian flags in nationalist neighbourhoods. However, the appearance and continued display of the Israeli flag can be seen to extend beyond a "wholly relational" dynamic to encompass the connotations this flag has come to possess for those who fly it in regard to the contemporary political situation within Northern Ireland and events on the international stage in the context of the United States' post-September 11 "War on Terror." At the same time, the flying of the Israeli flag in Northern Ireland provides a graphic demonstration of the increased prevalence of political symbolism in the post-Troubles era and the way in which groups in Northern Ireland have sought to reference and draw upon similar conflict situations for their own agendas.

No abstract

No abstract

Murals have figured as a prominent feature of the visual environment of Northern Ireland since the early twentieth century, developing, during the Troubles, into one of the bestknown examples of political art in the world. This article examines the position occupied by these murals in the period (since 1994) of the peace process. It focuses on the multi-governmentagency Re-imaging Communities programme (launched in 2006) and its attempt to intervene in the visual environment and steer the Northern Ireland muralscape away from expressions of sectarianism towards more 'positive' themes. The aims and achievements of this programme (to date) are assessed, along with the issues the programme and related initiatives raise with regard to the governance of the visual environment. The article moves on to examine a further means by which murals have been repositioned in the period since 1994 -the attempt to present them as tourist attractions -and closes by discussing the issues raised for remembering the Troubles by these interventions in and attempts to reconfigure Northern Ireland's murals.

This article reports on an undergraduate software engineering project in which, over a period of two years, four student teams from different cohorts developed a note-taking app for four academic clients at the students' own university. We investigated how projects involving internal clients can give students the benefits of engaging in real software development while also giving them experience of a student-staff collaboration that has its own benefits for students, academics, and the university more broadly. As the university involved is a Sino-Foreign university located in China, where most students are Chinese and most teaching staff are not, this 'student as co-producer' approach interacts with another feature of the project: cultural distance. Based on analysis of notes, reports, interviews, and focus groups, we recommend that students should be provided with communicative strategies for dealing with academics as clients; universities should develop policies on ownership of student-staff collaborations; and projects should include a formalised handover process. This article can serve as guidance for educators considering a 'students as co-producers' approach for software development projects.