Higher education lectures: from passive to active learning via imagery?.Active Learning in Higher Education, doi:10.1177/1469787417731198.Additional Information:• This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Active Learning AbstractAn important contemporary challenge to the large group lecture in higher education is that it encourages passive learning which is claimed to be out of sync with intellectual expectations and social needs. Attempts to change this practice have salvaged some aspects of the higher education experience for students, but they have not transformed the learning environment that is the most usual one, that is, one characterised by lectures, into an arena of active learning. This article tests recent multimedia learning propositions which claim that using certain images dislocates pedagogically harmful excesses of text, reducing cognitive overloading and exploiting under-used visual processing capacities. The experiments yielded unpredicted results which indicate that the use of certain images can also prompt students to become active co-producers of knowledge. This is not about visual aids, where images are a side-bar to a traditional lecture. This is about images as the medium through which active learning is energised. Marshall McLuhan famously remarked that 'the medium is the message'. But for this article, the message is the medium.

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Abstract. The debate on peacebuilding is deadlocked. Leading scholars of 'fourth generation' peacebuilding, who take Liberalism to task for creating what they refer to as crises in peacebuilding, have themselves been challenged by those they criticise for over-stating Liberal failure and failing themselves to produce the goods in terms of an alternative. But behind this debate, it seems that both approaches are asking the same question: how can stable, legitimate, sustainable peace be engineered? This article engages critical theory with problem-solving social sciences. It proposes that the crises in orthodox post-conflict peacebuilding are genuine, but there are approaches that might put flesh on fourth generation concepts without bringing the Liberal edifice down, shifting the debate away from ontology and ideology and returning it to the people in whose name it is held.

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This article is concerned with the potential that statebuilding interventions have to institutionalize social justice, in addition to their more immediate ‘negative’ peace mandates, and the impact this might have, both on local state legitimacy and the character of the ‘peace’ that might follow. Much recent scholarship has stressed the legitimacy of a state's behaviour in relation to conformity to global governance norms or democratic ‘best practice’. Less evident is a discussion of the extent to which post‐conflict polities are able to engender the societal legitimacy central to political stability. As long as this level of legitimacy is absent (and it is hard to generate), civil society is likely to remain distant from the state, and peace and stability may remain elusive. A solution to this may be to apply existing international legislation centred in the UN and the ILO to compel international organizations and national states to deliver basic needs security through their institutions. This has the effect of stimulating local‐level state legitimacy while simultaneously formalizing social justice and positive peacebuilding.