Brian Cook
Biographic Data
| ID | 3700893 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Brian Cook |
| GIVEN NAMES | Brian |
| FAMILY NAME | Cook |
| SIGNATURE | COOK B |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5618-1395 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 144 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Unsure and underinsured
Climate change and development within floodplains are expanding flood risk zones and increasing the number of households that are underinsured. Although flood insurance is core to disaster preparedness, how flood-prone households navigate flood insurance decisions remains poorly understood. This study explores how households make decisions about flood insurance coverage within contexts shaped by engagement, renewal cycles, rezoning, and insurer p…
Community Engagement for Disaster Risk Reduction (CEDRR)
Community-engaged research (CER) in disaster risk reduction requires novel approaches that move beyond raising awareness and instead employ methods that support and measure actual impacts on household risk reduction. This study introduces Community Engagement for Disaster Risk Reduction (CEDRR), a longitudinal CE-MMR approach that involves an initial dialogic engagement with a 6-month follow-up to examine how participants learned about risk, adop…
A Hero's Journey to Systemic Change
Experts in rural development and agrarian change wield considerable influence over programme design and delivery, directing resources and shaping trajectories towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet the pathways through which such expertise develops remain under‐examined. This study examines the journey to expertise among experts in Southeast Asia through the lens of Joseph Campbell's monomyth, the Hero's Journey. Drawing on semi‐st…
Becoming agricultural extensionists
Retaining and attracting youth to agriculture is crucial for food security. Agricultural extension, which diffuses knowledge and technologies to improve production and incomes, can drive sustainable farming in agriculture-dependent economies. In Cambodia and other Southeast Asian nations, a youth bulge and increased access to higher education are producing more agricultural graduates skilled for diverse roles, including extension. However, little…
Systemic wisdom and complex strategic competition
Strategic competition is a reoccurring phrase in the foreign policy and national security community to describe the current relationship between the United States and China. However, strategic competition and the goals of such a competition are rarely defined. A clear definition of strategic competition is necessary to grasp its implications for the United States and the world. This is even more important as the strategic competition between the …
Testing the effect of ecolabels on the environmental impact of food purchases in worksite cafeterias
The study was pre-registered prospectively on ISRCTN ( https://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN10268258 ; 06/01/2022)
The Dual Employment Destinations for Rural Cambodians
This paper applies the dual labour market migration concept to Cambodia and Thailand. We examine the migration patterns of 9066 individuals from 2507 households in rural Northwest Cambodia, distinguishing between internal migration within Cambodia and international migration to Thailand. We find that individuals from households with fewer resources, such as education, income, and land ownership, tend to migrate to Thailand, while those with more …
From Theatre to Transformation
The arts are envisioned as able to help address the longstanding ‘implementation gap’ between research and realisation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For SDG2 (Zero Hunger), Forum Theatre offers a participatory alternative to top‐down interventions, yet its impacts have not been evaluated using rigorous, mixed‐methods that are attentive to both quantitative and qualitative data, to spillover effects, or to diffusion over time. This …
Bridging extreme climate risks, financial precarity, and adaptation gaps
The intensification of extreme climate events is no longer a distant threat but is a pressing, global reality for smallholders. This study unpacks the complex interconnections among extreme climate events, perceived risks, and financial constraints to adaptation by integrating multi-source evidence – from historical climate trends and downscaled climate projections from 25 General Circulation Models to household census data from 996 smallholder h…
Settlement, inequality and wellbeing
Agricultural extension institutions in rural Cambodia
Smallholder decision-making and its misalignment with sustainable development goal 2 (Zero Hunger)
The success of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) depends on alignment between global aims and local decision-making. Presently missing are analyses that explain how local decision-making determines efforts to prompt transformational change. Specific to SDG2 (i.e., Zero Hunger), disregard for local decision-making manifests an endemic misrepresentation of agricultural extension as a means for achieving increased ‘production and/or productiv…
Team photo-diaries
The prolonged border closures associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have inspired novel approaches in field-based research. In this paper, we review methodological and collaborative practice reflections on the use of a team photo-diary activity generated by research associates working with smallholder farmers in Northwest Cambodia. Team photo-diaries were introduced as a training tool to encourage reflexivity among Cambodian early career research…
Normative learning generates behaviour change
Drowning is a risk governance issue of global significance. The majority of coastal drownings occur at unpatrolled beaches. Interventions designed to influence public behaviours are measured in terms of ‘awareness raised’ and ‘intentions to act’ rather than actual ‘behaviours adopted’. As a result, up-scaling impacts defaults to the dubious assumption that the communication of information can raise societal-scale awareness that will result in soc…
The spillover effects from participatory research
Participatory research has been shown to affect change in participants, but limited attention has been paid to impact pathways beyond traditional research subjects. This critical gap in the literature is addressed by analysing the impacts of a community engagement for disaster risk reduction case study on its research assistants. The findings demonstrate that undertaking participatory research affects research assistants, changing their risk redu…
The Expanded Exercise Addiction Inventory (EAI-3)
Exercise addiction (EA) refers to excessive exercise, lack of control, and health risks. The Exercise Addiction Inventory (EAI) is one of the most widely used tools in its assessment. However, the cross-cultural psychometric properties of the EAI could be improved because it misses three pathological patterns, including guilt, exercise despite injury, and experienced harm. Therefore, the present study tested the psychometric properties of the exp…
Adaptation constraints and prospects for future research priorities in lowland rice-based farming systems
Sustainable agricultural development not only addresses global food insecurity but may also alleviate poverty by enriching the lives of millions of smallholder farmers. Improving the sustainability and profitability of agriculture where smallholders are dominant creates profound impacts because small landholding farmers produce approximately 70–80% of the global food. The need for a thorough understanding of the factors affecting farmers’ adoptio…
Engaging beachgoers for drowning prevention
Despite reduced drowning incidence at lifeguard patrolled beaches, 71 drowning fatalities occurred on Australian beaches last year (2021–2022). Prevailing drowning prevention practices on beaches include patrolling lifeguards positioning safety flags in less hazardous locations and encouraging beachgoers to swim between them. Such methods represent a ‘deficit based’ approach to community engagement, in which experts determine acceptable behaviour…
Retracted
Nutrition labels and ecolabels can support consumers to make healthier and more sustainable choices, and the former is now widespread. But there is no information on the impact of ecolabels in the presence of nutrition labels. The aims of this study were primarily to examine whether (1) ecolabels are effective at promoting sustainable purchasing behaviour if presented alongside nutrition labels; (2) and secondarily, whether nutrition labels are e…
Unravelled Homes
This article explores the contours of modernization in the unmaking and remaking of homes among evicted and resettled families in highrise housing. We examine the trajectories of forced eviction by drawing upon interviews with 17 individuals from nine evicted families who have transitioned from living in informal settlements to highrise social housing (rusunawa) in Jakarta. Drawing on two strands of literature-'developmental idealism and the fami…
The power of connection
A dynamic social norm messaging intervention to reduce meat consumption
Perceptions of social norms around eating behavior can influence food choices. Communicating information about how others are changing their eating behavior over time (dynamic descriptive social norms) may motivate individuals to change their own food selection and consumption. Following a four-week baseline period, 22 in-store restaurants of a major retail chain across the UK were randomized to display a dynamic descriptive social norm message i…
Testing the effectiveness of ecolabels to reduce the environmental impact of food purchases in worksite cafeterias
1. Introduction Meeting global climate targets will require a marked reduction in environmental impacts caused by dietary patterns (Willett et al., 2019), with several UK supermarkets setting targets to halve the environmental impact of customers' food shopping by 2030 (Lee, 2021). The environmental impacts of different types of foods are highly variable, and variation in impact is also seen for a given food. For example, there is a 50-fold varia…
The Effects of Environmental Sustainability Labels on Selection, Purchase, and Consumption of Food and Drink Products
This review assessed the effects of environmental labels on consumers’ demand for more sustainable food products. Six electronic databases were searched for experimental studies of ecolabels and food choices. We followed standard Cochrane methods and results were synthesized using vote counting. Fifty-six studies ( N = 42,768 participants, 76 interventions) were included. Outcomes comprised selection ( n = 14), purchase ( n = 40) and consumption …
Humanising agricultural extension
Agricultural extension is booming. This interest is critical in the context of numerous pressing issues linked to agrarian change and rural development. Because of its importance, extension has attracted significant critique for its persistent exclusion of social and political factors. In this light, the history of extension can be thought of as a paradigm composed of approaches aimed at increasing agricultural production through the transfer of …
Geographies of the Anthropocene
Television Food Advertising to Children
Objectives. We compared television food advertising to children in several countries. Methods. We undertook a collaboration among 13 research groups in Australia, Asia, Western Europe, and North and South America. Each group recorded programming for 2 weekdays and 2 weekend days between 6:00 and 22:00, for the 3 channels most watched by children, between October 2007 and March 2008. We classified food advertisements as core (nutrient dense, low i…
The persistence of ‘normal’ catchment management despite the participatory turn
Presented as a panacea for the problems of environmental management, ‘participation’ conceals competing frames of meaning. ‘Ladders of participation’ explain insufficiently why public engagement is often limited to consultation, even within so-called higher level partnerships. To explain how participation is shaped to produce more or less symmetric exchanges in processes of deliberation, this article distinguishes between (1) discourses/practices…
Fulfilling the promise of participation by not resuscitating the deficit model
Environmental Hazards
Living with disasters
This paper explores how social networks and bonds within and across organisations shape disaster operations and strategies. Local government disaster training exercises serve as a window through which to view these relations, and 'social capital' is used as an analytic for making sense of the human relations at the core of disaster management operations. These elements help to expose and substantiate the often intangible relations that compose th…
Active learning through online quizzes
Active learning is increasingly promoted within institutions of higher education to assist students develop higher order thinking and link knowledge to meaning. In this paper, the authors evaluate the use of weekly online quizzes based on prescribed preparatory material as a tool to incentivize preparatory reading in order to enable and encourage active learning. The study is based on mixed data sources, including three years of student-evaluatio…
Unravelled Homes
This article explores the contours of modernization in the unmaking and remaking of homes among evicted and resettled families in highrise housing. We examine the trajectories of forced eviction by drawing upon interviews with 17 individuals from nine evicted families who have transitioned from living in informal settlements to highrise social housing (rusunawa) in Jakarta. Drawing on two strands of literature-'developmental idealism and the fami…
A dynamic social norm messaging intervention to reduce meat consumption
Perceptions of social norms around eating behavior can influence food choices. Communicating information about how others are changing their eating behavior over time (dynamic descriptive social norms) may motivate individuals to change their own food selection and consumption. Following a four-week baseline period, 22 in-store restaurants of a major retail chain across the UK were randomized to display a dynamic descriptive social norm message i…
Contested riverscapes in Jakarta
This paper investigates the ways that intersecting desires to control flooding, evict informal settlements and build a modern global city play out in Jakarta. We explore resistance to eviction in two riverbank settlements: in one case playing by the formal rules led to a legal win but a loss of livelihood; the more successful case was self-organized and involved multiple tactics including partial self-demolition, media engagement and a re-brandin…
Co-Producing (a Fearful) Anthropocene
The Anthropocene is not amenable to the senses but, like many modern concepts, must be made visible. We explore the 'Great Acceleration' imagery as an immutable mobile to explore how this human-made geological epoch is constituted through the aggregation of disparate elements of extreme complexity. Our analysis explores how disparate issues such as 'telephone use' and 'coastal zone biogeochemistry' can be associated and enrolled into the same arg…
Interrogating participatory catchment organisations
Catchment management in the developed world is undergoing a fundamental reconfiguration in which top-down governance is being challenged by local organisations promoting collaborative decisionmaking. Local, participation-based organisations are emerging as mediators of relations between governments and publics. These organisations, defined here as participatory catchment organisations (PCOs), are emergent at a time when developed world catchment …
Re-casting experience and risk along rocky coasts
This study invites readers to experience risk on Australia's hazardous rocky coasts with the rock fishing community. In the paper, we offer an understanding of risk that is relational, a process that emerges within human-environment interactions in a dynamic coastal space that is constantly changing. Exploring the in situ and ongoing sensory attunement of the fishers, we contend, expands upon the quantitative understandings that tend to be deploy…
Using Vignettes to Tap Into Moral Reasoning in Public Health Policy
In this article, we describe a process for designing and applying vignettes in public health policy research and practice. We developed this methodology for a study on moral reasoning underpinning policy debate on food advertising to children. Using vignettes prompted policy actors who were relatively entrenched in particular ways of speaking professionally about a controversial and ethically challenging issue to converse in a more authentic and …
Retracted
Nutrition labels and ecolabels can support consumers to make healthier and more sustainable choices, and the former is now widespread. But there is no information on the impact of ecolabels in the presence of nutrition labels. The aims of this study were primarily to examine whether (1) ecolabels are effective at promoting sustainable purchasing behaviour if presented alongside nutrition labels; (2) and secondarily, whether nutrition labels are e…
Testing the effectiveness of ecolabels to reduce the environmental impact of food purchases in worksite cafeterias
1. Introduction Meeting global climate targets will require a marked reduction in environmental impacts caused by dietary patterns (Willett et al., 2019), with several UK supermarkets setting targets to halve the environmental impact of customers' food shopping by 2030 (Lee, 2021). The environmental impacts of different types of foods are highly variable, and variation in impact is also seen for a given food. For example, there is a 50-fold varia…
Policy options for healthier retail food environments in city-regions
Smallholder decision-making and its misalignment with sustainable development goal 2 (Zero Hunger)
The success of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) depends on alignment between global aims and local decision-making. Presently missing are analyses that explain how local decision-making determines efforts to prompt transformational change. Specific to SDG2 (i.e., Zero Hunger), disregard for local decision-making manifests an endemic misrepresentation of agricultural extension as a means for achieving increased ‘production and/or productiv…
An introduction to the healthy corner store intervention model in Canada
The Dual Employment Destinations for Rural Cambodians
This paper applies the dual labour market migration concept to Cambodia and Thailand. We examine the migration patterns of 9066 individuals from 2507 households in rural Northwest Cambodia, distinguishing between internal migration within Cambodia and international migration to Thailand. We find that individuals from households with fewer resources, such as education, income, and land ownership, tend to migrate to Thailand, while those with more …
Settlement, inequality and wellbeing
Agricultural extension institutions in rural Cambodia
The impact of peer-review on undergraduate grades when students decide whether to participate
Feedback is at the heart of debates over student satisfaction and academic workload, an issue likely to increase in importance as the tertiary sector responds to the funding crisis sparked by the Covid-19 pandemic. In this light, the development of approaches to improve feedback is essential for teaching and learning, with many approaches involving some form of peer-review. Almost universally, peer-review is shown to be beneficial for participant…
Suicide at a distance
Knowledge of suicide is made through violent epistemologies that sever self-destruction from space, time, and place. As an inherently incomprehensible issue, efforts to make sense of suicide through abstraction have the paradoxical effect of inhibiting understanding. This paper argues that the incoherences characteristic of suicide are not an obstacle for knowing, but rather a cause to accept knowledge that is partial and indirect. Thinking with …
Communities of knowledge
This paper traces the integration of a particular set of knowledge claims into flood management in Bangladesh following the instigation and collapse of the Flood Action Plan. Using the work of Goodbred and Kuehl (1998) as an entry point and partially in response to Nicholls and Goodbred's (2004) call for integrated assessments to improve understanding and management, we explore the incorporation of sedimentation and subsidence knowledge claims in…
The Role of Exercise Dependence for the Relationship between Exercise Behavior and Eating Pathology
Our study examined the potential mediating or moderating effect of exercise dependence on the exercise-eating pathology relationship. Female university students ( N = 330) completed Internet-based self-report measures of exercise behavior, exercise dependence, and eating pathology. Exercise dependence served as a mediator for the relationship between exercise and eating pathology. This unidirectional causal model suggests that an individual's pat…
A multilevel examination of exercise intention and behavior during pregnancy
Water, risk and vulnerability in Bangladesh
(2010). Water, risk and vulnerability in Bangladesh: Twenty years since the FAP. Environmental Hazards: Vol. 9, Bangladesh's Flood Action Plan at twenty: Legacy of a megaproject, pp. 3-7
Communities of knowledge
This paper traces the integration of a particular set of knowledge claims into flood management in Bangladesh following the instigation and collapse of the Flood Action Plan. Using the work of Goodbred and Kuehl (1998) as an entry point and partially in response to Nicholls and Goodbred's (2004) call for integrated assessments to improve understanding and management, we explore the incorporation of sedimentation and subsidence knowledge claims in…
Television Food Advertising to Children
Objectives. We compared television food advertising to children in several countries. Methods. We undertook a collaboration among 13 research groups in Australia, Asia, Western Europe, and North and South America. Each group recorded programming for 2 weekdays and 2 weekend days between 6:00 and 22:00, for the 3 channels most watched by children, between October 2007 and March 2008. We classified food advertisements as core (nutrient dense, low i…
Flood Knowledge and Management in Bangladesh
The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss the relationship between government publications and academic studies of flood management in Bangladesh. The paper reviews these literatures while also emphasizing the assumptions, objectives and national issues that have influenced modern flood management. This approach aims to engage with the evolving knowledges used to inform and to criticize flood management in one of the most flood-prone nat…
Environmental Hazards
Eating disorder-specific health-related quality of life and exercise in college females
The persistence of ‘normal’ catchment management despite the participatory turn
Presented as a panacea for the problems of environmental management, ‘participation’ conceals competing frames of meaning. ‘Ladders of participation’ explain insufficiently why public engagement is often limited to consultation, even within so-called higher level partnerships. To explain how participation is shaped to produce more or less symmetric exchanges in processes of deliberation, this article distinguishes between (1) discourses/practices…
Interrogating participatory catchment organisations
Catchment management in the developed world is undergoing a fundamental reconfiguration in which top-down governance is being challenged by local organisations promoting collaborative decisionmaking. Local, participation-based organisations are emerging as mediators of relations between governments and publics. These organisations, defined here as participatory catchment organisations (PCOs), are emergent at a time when developed world catchment …
Using Vignettes to Tap Into Moral Reasoning in Public Health Policy
In this article, we describe a process for designing and applying vignettes in public health policy research and practice. We developed this methodology for a study on moral reasoning underpinning policy debate on food advertising to children. Using vignettes prompted policy actors who were relatively entrenched in particular ways of speaking professionally about a controversial and ethically challenging issue to converse in a more authentic and …
New Public Governance
Suicide at a distance
Knowledge of suicide is made through violent epistemologies that sever self-destruction from space, time, and place. As an inherently incomprehensible issue, efforts to make sense of suicide through abstraction have the paradoxical effect of inhibiting understanding. This paper argues that the incoherences characteristic of suicide are not an obstacle for knowing, but rather a cause to accept knowledge that is partial and indirect. Thinking with …
Geographies of the Anthropocene
Co-Producing (a Fearful) Anthropocene
The Anthropocene is not amenable to the senses but, like many modern concepts, must be made visible. We explore the 'Great Acceleration' imagery as an immutable mobile to explore how this human-made geological epoch is constituted through the aggregation of disparate elements of extreme complexity. Our analysis explores how disparate issues such as 'telephone use' and 'coastal zone biogeochemistry' can be associated and enrolled into the same arg…
An evaluation of the impact of a restrictive retail food environment intervention in a rural community pharmacy setting
This study was among the first to examine the impact of a restrictive retail food environment intervention, and found a non-significant decline in CSD sales at the community level. It is the first study to examine a retail food environment intervention in a community pharmacy. Pharmacies may have an important role to play in creating healthy retail food environments
Competing paradigms of flood management in the Scottish/English borderlands
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore how flood management practitioners rationalise the emergence of sustainable flood management. Key to this analysis are differences rooted in assumptions over what flood management is and should do. Design/methodology/approach – The popularity of natural flood management offers a case with which to explore how a dominant framing persists and how individuals at the government-public interface negoti…
Active learning through online quizzes
Active learning is increasingly promoted within institutions of higher education to assist students develop higher order thinking and link knowledge to meaning. In this paper, the authors evaluate the use of weekly online quizzes based on prescribed preparatory material as a tool to incentivize preparatory reading in order to enable and encourage active learning. The study is based on mixed data sources, including three years of student-evaluatio…
Policy options for healthier retail food environments in city-regions
The Psychometric Properties of the Smartphone Application-Based Addiction Scale (Sabas)
The goal of the study was to validate the English version of the Smartphone Application-Based Addiction Scale (SABAS; Csibi et al. 2016), which is a short and easy-to-use tool for screening the risk of smartphone application-based addiction. Another aim was to identify the most frequently used smartphone applications and their perceived importance by the participants. Data were collected online from 240 English-speaking volunteers, aged 18 to 69 …
Inspiration or Thinspiration
Primary and Secondary Exercise Dependence in a Sample of Cyclists
An introduction to the healthy corner store intervention model in Canada
Textual Homelands
In this article, I re-examine the three runes used within the manuscript text of Beowulf to argue that the runes are purposeful additions to the text that interact with and enrich the reader’s experience of the narrative. The runes mark passages in which the poem considers the nature of the literary and its relationship to an amorphous mythic Germanic past. Readers encountering Beowulf in the context of Cotton Vitellius A XV become implicit parti…
Entrepreneurialism and health-promoting retail food environments in Canadian city-regions
The retail sector is a dynamic and challenging component of contemporary food systems with an important influence on population health and nutrition. Global consensus is clear that policy and environmental changes in retail food environments are essential to promote healthier diets and reduce the burden of obesity and non-communicable diseases. In this article, we explore entrepreneurialism as a form of social change-making within retail food env…
Medicine (25 works) · Political science (25 works) · Geography (22 works) · Psychology (21 works) · Business (20 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Economics (17 works) · Disaster Management and Resilience (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Public relations (12 works)