After Method: Mess in Social Science Research
... In doing this, the chapter begins by contextualising the development of digitalisation in PES and how theories of care are represented in practice across the PES landscape. This brief introduction is followed by setting the scene at the point of care delivery, considering it as a Deleuzian assemblage and analysing the relations of human and non-human interactions, inspired by actor-network theory (ANT) and science and technology studies (STS) (Callon, 1986;Deleuze and Guattari, 1987;Law, 2004;Latour, 2005). Using these perspectives, data in the form of detailed literature and case reviews tracing the rise (and fall) of PES digital technologies is combined with focus group responses to a pilot assessment of a new digital technology. ...
... The cyborg, being a hybrid of human and non-human that challenges the 'natural order' and taken-for-granted social hierarchies (Haraway, 1991), presents an opportunity to draw out and consider how digital technologies are shaping, and will continue to shape, the landscape of social welfare provision. For this exploration of digital PES, the study takes inspiration from ANT, STS (Callon, 1986;Law, 2004;Latour, 2005) and the Deleuzian tradition of assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987;Deleuze, 1994) to trace the material relationality of particular incidents and practices of care between caseworkers, unemployed people and the technologies adopted by PES. Taking this approach aims to expose the hidden and complex elements, or 'black box' (Latour, 1999), of the technology and of this particular assemblage; where each component is considered as having equal status and influence across the relationship of human and non-human actors and actants (Law, 2004;Latour, 2005). ...
... For this exploration of digital PES, the study takes inspiration from ANT, STS (Callon, 1986;Law, 2004;Latour, 2005) and the Deleuzian tradition of assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987;Deleuze, 1994) to trace the material relationality of particular incidents and practices of care between caseworkers, unemployed people and the technologies adopted by PES. Taking this approach aims to expose the hidden and complex elements, or 'black box' (Latour, 1999), of the technology and of this particular assemblage; where each component is considered as having equal status and influence across the relationship of human and non-human actors and actants (Law, 2004;Latour, 2005). ...
... Ethnography is traditionally a technique deployed in closed identifiable communities (Geertz, 1973), but this new response to grand challenges and emerging phenomena is influenced by Ingold's call to 'encounter the world' and write 'about the people' (Ingold, 2011;2014). In this, we follow the considerable body of work that repurposes ethnography for how we live now entangled in complex administrative systems and statistics (Latour, 1988;Strathern, 1999;Mol, 2002;Law, 2004;Holmes and Marcus, 2008;Maurer, 2016;Knox and Nafus, 2018). ...
... This study is based on an understanding of learning and development as situated in a sociomaterial practice (Ahn & Nyström, 2020;Braidotti, 2013;Gherardi, 2017), where the boundary between users and material artifacts is constituted in a mutual process where one element (the human) cannot be separated from the other (the artifact) (Law, 2004). Such an ontological position implies that the analytical gaze is turned towards the ways in which material objects get meaning, and in fact they exist, in their entanglements with humans in space and time (Fenwick et al., 2015;Messina Dahlberg, 2023). ...
This study investigates how vocational education and training prepares students for future professions characterized by technological advancements and demands for sustainability and innovation. Specifically, it examines simulator-based learning in the Natural Resource Program at three upper secondary schools in Sweden. Using a sociomaterial perspective, the study aims to investigate the strategies used by the participants (both students and teachers) in a simulated activity to make sense of the task at hand when dealing with different kinds of situations and activities therein, and in what ways these may be conducive to the development of vocational knowledge. An ethnographic approach is used, employing various methodological tools to create rich datasets, including observations, video recordings, and fieldnotes. The focus is on teachers’ feedback, students’ questions, and task handling during simulation-based training. The analysis explores the relationships between these environments and how feedback and assessment practices affect students’ task performance. When dealing with simulation-based learning in the context of this study, the instructional processes seem to involve, rather than handling specific high-stakes and risky situations, the design of activities that aim at volume training. These activities are entangled with the training sessions included in the simulators but also with other practices and environments. We argue that the instructional work of the vocational teacher deals with making sense of how such entanglements work and are conducive to learning on the one hand, but also to making choices that imply unravelling such entanglements and keeping the worlds apart to put them back together again.
... (2004, p. 143) This holds true for AI-powered tools used in research. Moreover, method is also creative because it re-works, re-bundles and re-crafts realities and creates new versions of the world (Law, 2004). Therefore, method does not provide clarity about or simply describe something that is out there but reconstructs the object or phenomenon it attempts to describe (le Grange, 2007). ...
The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) in higher education presents challenges for how the sector should think about research, curriculum work, and pedagogy. In this article, the authors performed a thought experiment to explore concepts and ideas, rather than asserting definitive conclusions, through a diffractive reading of vignettes we produced on AI's introduction into higher education in the domains of research, curriculum, and pedagogy. In preparation, each author independently wrote vignettes on the application of AI in the three domains. We did not access or read each other's vignettes before the diffractive reading, which comprised two phases. First, we constructed diffractive patterns by invigorating lines of connection between/among our three vignettes. Second, we each generated lines of connection between the two vignettes, not our own, on an aspect we had excluded in our own vignettes. Through a diffractive reading exercise, we generated new insights, resulting in a richer understanding of the complex intra-actions between human and non-human actors in higher education. By interrogating AI as a transformative enabler rather than a mere technological advancement, we uncover entanglements of AI with research, curriculum work, and pedagogy. Our diffractive methodology highlights the performativity of AI and the imperative of reconfiguring higher education to embrace complexity, relationality, and ethical response-ability. The article contributes to AI vis-à-vis higher education by providing a posthumanist critique of the affordances of AI, challenging the neoliberal and instrumentalist paradigms that dominate current higher education practices. Additionally, it provides practical insights into the ethical and ecological implications of the application of AI in higher education contexts.
... Different traditions call these relations differently, using metaphors such as network, rhizome, assemblage or meshwork (Law & Singleton, 2013, p. 490). I do not stick to one tradition but build on a general assumption about the relations: Heterogenous human and non-human elements relate to each other without the need to form a coherent whole (Allen, 2011;Müller, 2015), and relations are processual, which means that relations are always in the state of connecting and becoming connected (Law, 2004). ...
... These insights offer a starting point for developing innovative approaches that encourage reflexive engagement with biosocial research practices in cohort studies. STS has a long tradition of reflecting upon what its methods do in the social worlds they study (Law 2004). Conducting ethnographic research creates interference with the studied contexts and opens up spaces for life scientists to reflect upon their practices (Müller and Kenney 2014;Rossmann and Samaras 2024). ...
Air pollution exposure and its health effects are a central concern of environmental epigenetic research with birth cohorts. This article explores why researchers have turned to the placenta as a research object to study the dynamic interactions between in utero exposure to air pollution and future child health. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies, particularly the bio-object concept, this article analyses the transformation of the placenta into a technologically manipulated postgenomic bio-object through scientific discourse and practice. Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at an institute of epidemiology and public health in Spain, we analyse how researchers deal with the tension between the placenta’s promises for epigenetic research and the practical research realities in postgenomic sciences. First, researchers discursively call upon the placenta as a suitable research object that embodies air pollution exposure and becomes entangled with and responds to this exposure via epigenetic changes. Studying the placenta promises to elucidate the temporally dynamic and environmentally embedded process of disease development as one of postgenomics’ core epistemic concerns. Second, in practice, however, accessing and preparing the postpartum placenta for epigenetic analysis defies its promise as a postgenomic bio-object. The constraints of research with birth cohorts, such as only having access to the postpartum placenta at birth, limit what researchers can know about the dynamic process of disease development. Third, we show how researchers deal with these limitations by assembling additional data in and around this organ to recontextualise the epigenetic analysis performed in the postpartum placenta and revive its postgenomic character. We conclude by discussing how ethnographies of epistemic practices provide entry points to collaboratively reflect upon the theoretical and methodological opportunities and challenges in birth cohort research to study biosocial dynamics. We suggest avenues for using qualitative social science perspectives for future biosocial research and collaboration between the social and life sciences.
... While the details above help contextualize the emergence of impact finance in Finland, further elaboration is necessary to understand its societal and political meaning. In providing this in our article, we use a socio-technical 'theory-methods package' based on actor-network theory to analyse the formation of Finnish impact finance agencement through diverse qualitative field data (Callon, 2021;Law, 2004;Silvast and Virtanen, 2023). To follow this analytical strategy, we conducted fieldwork during 2017, a point at which impact finance had recently garnered significant interest in Finnish policy circles. ...
In recent years, impact finance has sought to integrate financial rationales, actors, and novel policy instruments and impact assessment practices into policy frameworks. Initially developed in the Anglo-American liberal welfare regime, the influence of impact finance practices has expanded also into the Nordics. This article examines the development of Finnish impact finance, as spearheaded by the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra in the late 2010s. Drawing on field observations in stakeholder gatherings, we employ the concepts of ‘agencement’ and ‘agencing’ to analyse both specific socio-technical devices such as impact bonds as well as the co-constitutive, broader efforts of ‘re-agencing’ Finnish public policy. A detailed analysis of these dynamics underscores the contemporary influence of financialization in shaping social investment from a social democratic framing towards social neoliberalism. Consequently, the study contributes to ongoing discussions on impact finance and the transformations of social investment rationales while also providing conceptual tools for further research in the field.
... To conceptualize the necessity of more systemic and longer-term support, we use Law's (2004) hinterland metaphor. Law uses it to demonstrate how standardized practices stabilize certain lines of scientific practice by routinization, making them more inert to change (ibid: 33). ...
Troubling diagnoses have been made about academic research cultures regarding their capacity to address social and environmental problems, challenging scholars in science and technology studies (STS) and related fields to consider the meanings of relevance, respective practices, and enabling conditions. This paper asks about practices by which research is aligned with reflections on the relevance of knowledge production, resulting in re-orientations in research (such as new questions or adjustments in methods and approaches) This paper pays particular attention to how researchers re-orient their research towards doing relevance in longer-term biographical processes and to how they contribute to creating respective hinterlands, i.e., conditions that bolster up these very practices as a more routinized, self-evident part of research. Through an iterative process of analyzing empirical material and an interdisciplinary literature review, we develop a typology of four practice areas (relating, re-valuing, situating, and synthesizing) that is actionable for researchers who wish to strengthen relevance in their work, both individually and in their wider fields and communities. We contribute to “transformation knowledge,” focusing on facilitating change towards doing relevance in academia and providing a vantage point to see opportunities for such change by combining a biographical perspective with the hinterlands metaphor. We conclude that academic institutions and research fields could build capacity for doing relevance more systematically by strategically growing a hinterland, for example, by building related competencies and infrastructures.
... Tomando fragmentos de um percurso histórico como linha de costura para organização da escrita, bem como diálogos com pensadoras/es de diferentes territórios geopolíticos, procuramos refletir acerca dos impactos desse projeto no Brasil e seus desdobramentos no campo da saúde mental. Tal proposição é fruto da pesquisa de mestrado nomeada "Travessias Desnorteadoras: Ensaios Decoloniais e suas Tessituras dos Estudos da Bruxaria e da Loucura" defendida no Programa de Psicologia Social da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), inspirada também no percurso da primeira autora no campo da saúde mental e nos desafios que ele nos exige (Ramos, 2021).A ideia de costurar esse diálogo encontra ressonâncias na proposição da pesquisa como um fazer artesanal (Quadros, 2015) na qual as afetações das pesquisadoras compõem-se em um fazer vivo e encorpado, desdobrando-se também na perspectiva metodológica que nos apresenta essa feitura como um patchwork (Law, 2004), onde diversas texturas reúnem-se em composição.Segundo Quadros (2015), a artesania na pesquisa envolve caminhar entre impasses, incertezas e possibilidades.E é nelas que apostamos para rever uma história hegemônica, ainda que com muitos desafios que também nos atravessam enquanto mulheres pesquisadoras.Para a autora supracitada: "Trata-se de descrever o percurso com suas tensões e arranjos, o labirinto e as saídas possíveis nesse encontro entre o pesquisador e seu campo" (Quadros, 2015(Quadros, , p. 1182.Nossa metodologia articula-se também com a interseccionalidade como uma importante ferramenta analítica, entendendo-a como "uma conceituação do problema que busca capturar as consequências estruturais e dinâmicas da interação entre dois ou mais eixos da subordinação" (Crenshaw, 2002, p. 177). O tema em questão nos move em nossas práticas e puxa fios em nossa trajetória que ora tecemos nessa escrita. ...
O artigo tem como objetivo discutir a exclusão social como efeito do projeto colonial branco eurocêntrico e patriarcal , bem como seus desdobramentos no campo da saúde mental. Perguntamo-nos qual a implicação da psicologia nesse cenário, uma vez que apostamos numa discussão crítica e numa escrita encarnada e situada, tendo como proposição metodológica uma construção artesanal de pesquisa (Quadros, 2015), costurando retalhos da história que formam essa tessitura no cenário das exclusões e preconceitos ainda atuais neste campo estudado. Assim, tomando o percurso histórico como linha de costura para organização dessa escrita, bem como de diálogos com pensadoras e pensadores decoloniais, procuramos discutir os impactos desse projeto colonial, higienista e eugenista no campo da saúde mental e suas múltiplas implicações nos marcadores sociais da diferença. Por fim, em tempos de retrocesso de políticas públicas nesse segmento, consideramos crucial o resgate dessa trajetória tanto para a contextualização de nossas práticas na saúde mental quanto para a evidência dessas desigualdades instauradas por um projeto excludente.
... Breve desarrollo del proceso metodológico Para analizar la relación entre problematización de la vida, escolaridad y producción de saberes, diseñamos una metodología que involucra elementos de la etnografía colaborativa (Katzer-Molina, 2019, p. 49) y la producción audiovisual como método creativo (Taylor, 2013). Este ensamblaje de métodos (Law, 2004;Law y Urry, 2005) permite aproximarnos a las multiplicidades y singularidades de las vivencias cotidianas de los y las estudiantes en las escuelas, 5 además de habilitar espacios de construcción, producción y circulación del conocimiento (Grinberg y Abalsamo, 2016) a partir de la problematización de la vida cotidiana. Este enfoque metodológico se caracteriza porque, en el proceso de producción de datos, permite articular la sensibilidad y el trabajo colaborativo de los individuos (Katzer-Molina, 2019) en contextos particulares y situados. ...
Este artículo analiza la relación entre problematización de la vida, escolaridad y producción de saberes en una escuela secundaria en contextos de pobreza urbana del partido de San Martín, provincia de Buenos Aires. La hipótesis que proponemos trabajar es que frente a los discursos de odio que suelen circular y recaer sobre los territorios, los y las estudiantes del nivel secundario discuten y cuestionan la “mala fama” que se asigna a la escuela, al barrio y a los individuos. Al mismo tiempo que sienten bronca, indignación, impotencia y tristeza debido a que esos discursos refuerzan e intensifican la exclusión social y educativa, ellos y ellas también producen sueños y narran sus deseos desafiando los estereotipos que se les establecen. Para ello, se presentan resultados de investigación producto de la realización de talleres colaborativos entre estudiantes y docentes de una escuela del nivel secundario de gestión estatal emplazada en un barrio con altas condiciones de pobreza y la Universidad Nacional de San Martín durante el 2022. En ese marco, se produjo un corto audiovisual denominado "Miradas Incómodas", en el cual se describen los procesos estigmatizantes y prejuiciosos que suelen circular y reproducirse a través de los medios de comunicación, a la vez que expresa la forma en que la escuela se constituye en un espacio donde hay palabra, construyen saberes y pueden pensar posibles futuros otros.
Over the past few decades, policymakers worldwide have increasingly emphasised the importance of education. This policy focus has led researchers to scrutinise the processes through which educational rules and regulations are adopted and the outcomes these changes produce. As a result, the scope of education policy research has expanded significantly to address these developments. However, education policy research is often considered a ‘messy hinterland’ because most current methods prioritise clarity and precision. Consequently, there have been calls to revisit and refine these methodologies. Q methodology responds to this call by facilitating access to the multiple realities that exist within educational contexts. This chapter demonstrates the utility of Q methodology through two case studies. The first study investigates the perceptions of administrators and faculty regarding the implementation of a quality assurance process in a College of Education, highlighting the macro–micro gaps in policy implementation. The second study examines the phenomenon of cancel culture in Arab higher education, analysing the views of academics on its causes and effects. These examples illustrate how Q methodology can bridge the gap between policy and practice, providing insights for the formation and implementation of education policy and capturing the multiple realities inherent in educational settings.
Psychiatric and psychological research has confirmed that less than 1% of the research on eating disorders is focused on males. However, for the first time, the occurrence of eating disorders is reportedly growing faster among the male population. Nevertheless, men still are more likely to stay undiagnosed. This paper bridges this gap and offers an analysis of male eating disorders (MEDs) and particularly drawing from a feminist technoscience perspective, it examines how male eating disorders are made up in clinical practices and encounters. Specifically, in this paper, I investigate the different ways by which male eating disorders emerge as a situated matter of concern and object of clinical care. In other words, I explore the ‘making present’ of the male and maleness in the clinical practices treating eating disorders in the Australian healthcare system. Based on the data from 25 semi‐structured, qualitative interviews with clinicians, the paper draws out how care in relation to eating disorders is organised and, specifically, how the enactment of a female/male binary mobilised in clinicians' accounts of clinical practices may act to constrain care. Finally, I demonstrate how care practices could attend to male eating disorders differently in a more sensitive and intersectional way.
This chapter examines the “statements of purpose” featured on Vietnamese university websites within the context of higher education. It approaches these digital texts as more than mere functional documents, instead proposing an intellectual framework for analyzing the contexts and settings that shape them. By treating online texts and websites as purposeful digital artifacts—designed to inform, engage, and support social interaction—the study views Vietnamese university websites as embodiments of the country’s higher education policy, social standing, and institutional autonomy. In doing so, it situates these sites as discursive assemblages that highlight the role and status of higher education within Vietnamese society.
This article explores the roles of digital platforms, protesters and protest organisers in mobilising and coordinating prodemocratic protests in Belarus in summer 2020. Following the actors in the network of the Belarusian protests of August 2020, and drawing on Latour’s actor–network theory, I examine protest-related practices and types of agency in these protests by engaging with the opinions and reflections of protesters, activists, politicians and moderators of the leading Telegram channels who participated in the protests. I argue that these Belarusian protests produced multiple agencies and transformed Telegram into a mediator with agency rather than merely a tool in the hands of protesters.
W niniejszym artykule staram się odnieść diagnozę mówiącą, że żyjemy w kulturze inflacji informacyjnej do praktyk rozwijania, badania i uczenia teorii kultury. Te ostatnie, same w sobie złożone i wymagające wiele czasu i uwagi na zrozumienie, zderzają się w naszym życiu z zalewem informacji z wszelkich innych źródeł. W rezultacie zajmowanie się nimi w jakiejkolwiek formie staje się gigantycznym wyzwaniem metodologicznym, jak i szerzej egzystencjalnym. Jako pewną formę poradzenia sobie z tą sytuacją proponuję, aby na potrzeby niektórych z sytuacji, w których teorie kultury się pojawiają, wyodrębnić z każdej z nich zasadniczą metaforę lub mikrotechnikę. Argumentuję bowiem, że każda teoria kultury, bazując na pewnym wyjściowym metaforyzowaniu rzeczywistości kulturowej, zmienia nasz sposób jej postrzegania. Dlatego właśnie mówię w tym kontekście o „mikrotechnikach”, podkreślając ten sprawczy wymiar. Większa część artykułu została poświęcona na dokonanie przeglądu wybranych metafor/mikrotechnik, które znajdują się w rdzeniu najważniejszych czy też najbardziej rozpowszechnionych teorii kultury.
This unique book investigates the real-world complexities, challenges, and mistakes that are often encountered when researching religion, values, and culture. Featuring the reflections of researchers from across the social sciences and humanities, it offers vivid accounts of designing and executing both small-scale and much larger projects. Some chapters describe in detail the process and rationale behind methodological decisions, including challenges, adaptations, and revisions. Others reveal how things went wrong in the research process, even past the point of recovery, and what was learned. There is reflection on wider conceptual, theoretical, and ethical debates about ‘religion’ and what they mean in practice. In acknowledging the messiness of researching religion, the volume seeks to humanize and improve it. The honest reflections it contains will help researchers avoid some common mistakes and messes, and face others openly without losing heart.
This book explores the pervasive anticipation of catastrophe in contemporary society, examining how temporal expectations shape personal and collective experiences and influence our perspectives and responses.
A Time of Disastrous Anticipations highlights the role of anticipation in shaping societal narratives, exploring strategies for redefining responses to catastrophic imaginaries. Through a combination of theoretical insights with practical examples, it offers a comprehensive view of anticipation’s impact in contemporary society. The vista of disastrous anticipations reveals that catastrophe is not so much a matter out of place, but primarily a matter out of time.
Targeted at scholars, students, and professionals in sociology, disaster studies, and public policy, this book is also valuable for policymakers and practitioners interested in understanding the societal dimension of disaster anticipation.
I lead an art-research project at the crossroads of art and North American anthropology, where clay, a medium for creative practices, also becomes an object of knowledge. This material can be used to foster questions and considerations about our perceptual frameworks, our ways of learning, our sensory knowledge, and our relationships with other living beings, as in the research presented here, with macaques. The art-research project Primatoscopy-01 is subdivided into four distinct phases, which began with the search for comparative elements between related perceptual environments. The experiments begin with a system in which blocks of clay are scattered in enclosures at equal distances from each other and far from any equipment used in captivity conditions. This arrangement aims to delimit certain characteristics of nonhuman primates (physical strength, hierarchization, grasping, movement, etc.), but also to maximize the relationship between individuals and clay. The initial phase, although decisive, proved disappointing, leading to a complete realignment of my expectations: Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) carry the herpes B virus (Herpesvirus simiae), which hinders access to artifacts after they've been handled. The virus has become a constraint of the experimental protocol, as it limits my involvement in the enclosures after each phase, requires the use of Virkon® clay (a virucide, bactericide, and fungicide), and forces me to isolate the artifacts until their firing. As an archaeologist, I methodically recorded the state of the enclosures and attempted to reconstruct the activities based on the material traces, seeking to make sense of these behavioral artifacts. The results looked disastrous straight away: clay was scattered among the food and excrement; there were few marks in the clay and the blocks had hardly been handled. The primates seemed disturbed by these physical “intrusions” in their enclosure. The later phases (2 to 4) were characterized by a diversification of stimuli by introducing more “enticing” clay forms in the enclosures. The use of traditional forms, mainly Edo- and Heian-influenced vases and teabowls, as food containers, was particularly effective in tempting the macaques to handle them. A more significant understanding of behavioral patterns only emerged at the end of phase 2, revealing a separation of primate activities according to the functional divisions of their enclosures: captive macaques do not play where they eat. Analysis of the evidence has revealed a recurring pattern: the primates tended to break up the clay once it was dry, using its materiality to draw lines on the ground. The multitude of tangled lines was astonishing, because they were constant and repetitive. It seemed to be the main interest suggested to them by the clay's malleability. I have divided the lines into two categories: the lines of transportation (linear, simple, and intermittent) and the lines of persistence (localized, superimposed, and demonstrating a back-and-forth movement). The persistence lines are compared with nesting diagrams drawn by primatologists, evoking links between cognition, environment, and cultural construction. These relationships are first evident through the fusiform gyrus, a cerebral structure shared by all primates, which ensures the recognition of the contours of the environment and faces, while opening the way to alternative analogies with ancient writing systems. These reveal the continuity between the macrocosm in which we evolve and the microcosm of our inner representations, accepting our animal condition as well as the role of the imagination in the performativity of human worlds and their impact on all living things.
The perceived importance and difficulty of accounting for algorithms in health systems continues to inform scholarship and practice across diverse fields. While accountability is often framed as a normative good, less clear is exactly what kind of normative work accountability is expected to do, and how it is expected to do it. Drawing on contributions from science and technology studies, and especially sociomaterial perspectives on governance, in this article I review how algorithmic accountability has been conceptualized in the academic and grey literature. I introduce five normative logics characterizing discussions of algorithmic accountability: (1) accountability as verification, (2) accountability as participation, (3) accountability as social licence, (4) accountability as fiduciary duty, and (5) accountability as compliance. I critically engage with the styles of valuation these are predicated upon, including how each configures the algorithm as an object of reference, and discuss the implications of this approach for understanding how health-related worlds are created and sustained, and how they might be otherwise.
In this article, we propose to rethink some of the ethnographic images widely used in critical sociolinguistic studies to refer to and make sense of the fieldwork pace. We do so by bringing into dialogue our two ethnographic research experiences within grassroots initiatives, arguing that the nature of these research sites and the political interweaving that ethnographers might experience there call for a re-consideration of the epistemology that underlies the more usual understanding of fieldwork within critical sociolinguistics. In this vein, we revisit key moments of our research processes (field entrance and exit, data gathering and the dissemination of results), and suggest alternative re-readings of them. In doing so, we wish to engage and contribute to a discussion on the possibilities of re-situating the ethnographic sociolinguistic gaze towards less investigated sites, and ultimately to suggest a broader critical horizon.
Expanding the important body of work that addresses child development’s limitations and responding to the ecological crisis that threatens the future of life on Earth, this article proposes a living feminist postdevelopmental lexicon. The lexicon introduces 26 concepts that together challenge the theory/practice divide, disrupt Cartesian modes of subjectivity, reorient taken-for-granted ideas as problematic in early education, open up early education to inquiries that respond to the political and ethical questions of our milieu, and generate conditions for creative, inventive, thoughtful, and ethical projects. The paper invites readers to engage with and creatively add to the lexicon, making it an emerging and living tool for responding to the current ecological crisis.
This paper explores what everyday digital assemblages of care do to the spatio-temporal experience of claiming asylum under political landscapes characterised by hostile governance affects. Drawing upon one year of participatory ethnographic fieldwork, this paper reimagines a wide range of smartphone practices – playing online games, using YouTube Kids or making WhatsApp chats – as assemblages of care which disrupt what it feels like to live within the UK's asylum application system. This paper presents these forms of care as practices of (re)mediation , highlighting the potentiality that digitally mediated care has in sustaining affirmative forms of living alongside, within, and under hostility. Sketching out three relations of flourishing – countering isolating urban infrastructure, becoming as a form of selfhood, and shifting cosmopolitan imaginaries – the paper sets out an account of affirmative living that emerges in an everyday posthuman assemblage between the human and smartphone. Where the intended consequences of hostile affects are disrupted (even where unremarkable, ephemeral, fleeting, or mundane), I suggest we are confronted with an updated reading of political theory – of various attempts to categorise forms of Othered life as bare, unliveable or unvalued – that must take seriously novel forms of digital flourishing.
This “Forum” considers attitudes towards theories and theoretical knowledge among ethnologists and anthropologists. Answering questions from the forum organisers, its participants discuss the need for a common “grand theory” that would unite the entire anthropological community, the tense relationship between theory and description, the causes, manifestations and effects of theory fatigue — and also the need for it, its shortage — and overproduction. The most promising theoretical concepts are noted in the responses (in particular, different opinions are given on the post-anthropocentric vector in humanitarian studies). The authors discuss the extent to which the “vitality” of theories depends on external and internal factors, share their personal experience and strategies for dealing with theories: their selection, combination, transformation and production. The responses of the participants reveal significant differences in approaches to understanding the essence and functions of theory in anthropology. In part, these differences are due to the different understanding of the subject of anthropology by the participants (as the history of the emergence of culture and society — or of their functioning). An important issue of the “Forum” is the (im)possibility of theory’s becoming a space for common conversation in anthropology. Hopes for the realization of this possibility are associated with overcoming the subject-object paradigm, and the obstacle to it is the generative model of theorising, which prescribes not working with existing concepts, but generating new ones.
Sexual harassment experienced during ethnographic fieldwork plays an important role in power dynamics both in the research field and in the academic domain, but is marginalized in academic discourse. This article argues that experiences of sexual harassment during fieldwork should be considered as potentially relevant data and analyzed as such, going against the convention of the ‘malestream’ academic reference frame. The article demonstrates the possible relevance of such data, building on empirical fieldwork on the role law plays in social interactions in diverse public space, and connects to discussions on sexual harassment, embodied ethnography and academic positionality.
Drawing on qualitative interview data and document analysis, this article traces the making of interoperability between databases as a policy response to Europe's crisis‐laden management of migration. It argues that, rather than adhering to a singular logic, the policy enacts several modes of ordering through which actors employ distinct meanings and rationales, deal with challenges and complexities, and evoke continuity and/or disruption in the digital bordering of migration. Specifically, four ordering patterns are identified: interoperability as a technological project, as database (re‐)administration, as legal configuration and as political vision. Each mode assembles and performs the interoperability policy differently, uses modes of expression, proposes certain problems and interventions and also engenders forms of othering. Therefore, this article examines interoperability in the border regime as an example of how the digitization of borders and migration is driven by multiple—and partially conflicting—rationales and ordering intentions.
Taking as a point of departure the role that the category of frailty increasingly plays in the classification, sorting and management of ageing populations in contemporary societies, this paper examines how the onset of Covid-19—as a disease posing the most risk to older adults—affected scientific knowledge production on frailty. Drawing on a theoretically driven network mapping of scientific literature on frailty before and after the pandemic, the paper traces emergent shifts in the evolution of two key discourses of frailty, namely that of the accumulation of deficits and the phenotype, respectively. Our analysis identifies an increased enrolment of frailty as a clinical, prognostic category post-Covid, underpinned by the deficit accumulation model and its key instrument, the frailty index. In parallel, we observe the continuation of laboratory and experimental research on frailty, as aligned with the phenotype approach. We note that in comparison to before Covid, this shift seems to be taking place across a more diversified scientific terrain, with the field of geriatrics playing a central, mediating role between distinct-yet-relational articulations of frailty—those tied to the clinic on one end, and the lab on the other.
Zusammenfassung
Am Beispiel der Videoberatung in der Sozialen Arbeit zeigt der Beitrag, wie wichtig es ist, neuartige Phänomene im Kontext der Digitalisierung theoretisch zu reflektieren. Theorien und Konzepte prägen den Blick auf die Welt, unabhängig davon, ob es sich um die Anwendung wissenschaftlicher Theorien, um die Propagierung ideologischer Vorstellungen oder um die unbewusste Reproduktion von Alltagsplausibilitäten handelt. Liegen keine, zu wenige oder zu viele Daten vor, bieten Theorien und Konzepte Orientierung. Damit beeinflussen sie persönliche und organisationale Entscheidungen, bei denen es um die Nutzung neuer Technologien geht. Die praktische Frage danach, welche Bedeutung Videoberatung in der Sozialen Arbeit spielen soll, ist demnach immer auch eine theoretische Frage, und es empfiehlt sich, für ihre Bearbeitung wissenschaftliche Theorien zu nutzen. Um die Praxisrelevanz theoretischer Reflexion zu demonstrieren, diskutiert der Text Videoberatung aus der Sicht fünf verschiedener theoretischer und konzeptioneller Perspektiven. Lebensweltorientierung, Sozialwirtschaft und Governance-Theorie bevorzugen mehr Videoberatung, eine systemtheoretische Perspektive wirbt für Ergebnisoffenheit, und eine Perspektive in der Tradition der kritischen Theorie präferiert die Nichtnutzung.
Conservation–tourism partnerships are often promoted as win–win solutions to the twin problems of underfunded conservation and unsustainable development. Critics on the other hand have warned about the tendency toward win–lose outcomes, when nature is reduced to a tourism commodity. This article intervenes in this debate by contributing to a scholarship in Science and Technology Studies on ontological multiplicity. We present an ethnographic case study of a nature park in South Africa that analyzes its partnership and its outcomes as emerging from situated and messy political dynamics. Our findings demonstrate the ontological politics taking place in the interactions between two enacted versions of the park: a tourism version and a conservation version. We show how in some cases one version comes to matter over the other and also how the outcomes of these ontological politics are not total. In doing so, our analysis furthers the study of ontological multiplicity of natural places by going beyond the mapping of multiplicity, to also explicitly consider power relations. Focusing on the work of coordination, we challenge both win–win and win–lose accounts of conservation–tourism partnerships, revealing possibilities for doing partnerships otherwise. We also make the argument for expanding these possibilities through a move toward “response-able” tourism.
The main specific topics addressed in this chapter include (1) the difference between aggregated data and per-person metrical data; (2) the unavoidable presence of intentionality in either kind of data; (3) problems of addressing the dynamics of intentionality with already aggregated data; (4) the futility of some debates about the category, “symbolic interaction”; (5) the unavoidable utilities of abstraction when modeling per-person actions and outcome; (6) the impacts of both habituations and institutional forms in social processes; (7) contrasting models of explanation in wake of, first, Newtonian mechanics, then Hume’s demonstration of an inevitable perceptual gap, followed by the failure of Kant’s proposed bridging solution as the relevance of the Newtonian model became increasingly restricted; and (8) the powers of stochastic models relative both to welters of contingency and uncertainty in social processes and to Kant’s categorical imperative.
This chapter focuses on the methodological and conceptual innovations we bring from feminist new materialist writing and how we ‘plug in’ these ideas to help us think about sport and sport organizations in productive ways. Through our diffractive methodology, we are committed to understanding ‘which differences matter, how they matter, and for whom’. Through our empirical focus on roller derby and AFL, and the women who play these sports, we demonstrate the ways in which different sport assemblages emerge and the affects of gender (in)equity. This chapter also provides detail of the data generated through the project, giving context to the methods used and the temporal, spatial and embodied entanglements of the process. Data for this project were collected from 2017 to 2024, a time of seemingly great progress for women in sport, yet a time in which a global pandemic halted all sport, and especially impacted women’s sport. The extended temporality of the project has allowed us the time and space to think, to read, to write and to engage in various ways, trying out ideas along the way.
The construction of artificial microorganisms often relies on the transfer of genomes from donor to acceptor cells. This synthetic biology approach has been considerably fostered by the J. Craig Venter Institute but apparently depends on the use of microorganisms, which are very closely related. One reason for this limitation of the “creative potential” of “classical” transformation is the requirement for adequate “fitting” of newly synthesized polypeptide components, directed by the donor genome, to interacting counterparts encoded by the pre-existing acceptor genome. Transformation was introduced in 1928 by Frederick Griffith in the course of the demonstration of the instability of pneumococci and their conversion from rough, non-pathogenic into smooth, virulent variants. Subsequently, this method turned out to be critical for the identification of DNA as the sole matter of inheritance. Importantly, the initial experimental design (1.0) also considered the inheritance of both structural (e.g., plasma membranes) and cybernetic information (e.g., metabolite fluxes), which, in cooperation, determine topological and cellular heredity, as well as fusion and blending of bacterial cells. In contrast, subsequent experimental designs (1.X) were focused on the use of whole-cell homogenates and, thereafter, of soluble and water-clear fractions deprived of all information and macromolecules other than those directing protein synthesis, including outer-membrane vesicles, bacterial prions, lipopolysaccharides, lipoproteins, cytoskeletal elements, and complexes thereof. Identification of the reasons for this narrowing may be helpful in understanding the potential of transformation for the creation of novel microorganisms.
This article employs ideas from the ontological turn and Actor-Network Theory to examine peer support groups for children of parents with mental illness. Analysing video recordings of group sessions, the article reveals that ‘how’ peer support is enacted do not solely depend on the children and group facilitators. Non-human actors and the body play a crucial role in shaping peer support communities, producing diverse outcomes depending on the assemblage they are part of. The article shows how decentring the child can provide new insights relevant to our understanding of children and peer support.
Now in its third edition, this Handbook is essential for students and researchers in Strategic Management and Organizational Theory and Behaviour. The Strategy as Practice approach moves away from the disembodied and asocial study of firm assets, technologies and practices, towards the study of strategizing as an activity. Strategy is understood as something people do rather than something a firm has. This perspective explores how strategizing contributes to an organizations' daily operations at all levels. Through detailed empirical studies of the everyday activities and practice of people engaged in strategizing, the Handbook investigates who strategists are, what strategists do, how they do it, and what the consequences of their actions are. Featuring new authors and additional or fundamentally updated and revised chapters, this edition provides a state-of-the-art overview of recent reflections and works in this rapidly growing stream of strategic management, whilst also presenting a research agenda for the next decade.
In this paper we interrogate how the resonances of a localized sonic
ecology call forth a multiplicity of contingent emotions that might
be used to negotiate spaces of the modern city. We listen, therefore,
for how sound impacts bodies in space, how it mediates the
connections between people and place through affect and emotion,
and how it reveals things that are not available to the other
senses. We argue that while all sonic ecologies are resonant, some
are consonant and experienced as being in the right place, whereas
others are dissonant and result in a feeling of being out of place. We
draw upon interdisciplinary work in urban geography, sound studies
and interpretive consumer research to explicate issues
involved in engaging emotionally with the sonic ecology of place.
In our specific case, the place of interest is Bourbon Street in the
Vieux Carré, New Orleans; a place steeped in music and sound,
often depicted as exciting and unique, but sometimes with an
undercurrent of danger.
The article is based on the materials of the field research conducted in Krasnodar krai in the summer–autumn of 2023, as well as on the analysis of articles and projects devoted to the substantiation of spatial forms and borders of Russian urban agglomerations. The Krasnodar urban agglomeration was chosen for several reasons: (a) the intensive growth of the population of Krasnodar, (b) the “cross-border” nature of the urban agglomeration, which includes the territories of two subjects of Russian Federation—Krasnodar krai and the Republic of Adygea, divided in the Krasnodar area by a natural boundary—the Kuban River, and (с) the obvious mismatch between the large cells of administrative/municipal governance of the territories included in the urban agglomeration and the small-cell structure of the space of everyday life. The authors aim to identify the principles underlying the delineation of Krasnodar’s area of influence, to understand the mechanisms of determining the external and internal borders of the urban agglomeration, and the semantics of the graphic images constructed with their help. Attention is focused on maps as an universal tool for fixing and reproducing significant aspects of the surrounding reality. Different types of cartographic products are considered: city plans, administrative maps and territorial development schemes, analytical maps presented in scientific articles and atlases, maps based on Earth remote sensing data, folk and mental maps that project non-spatial relations into space. All maps and images are considered as a product of intellectual activity, a visual representation of knowledge/perceptions of the mapped territory. The authors conclude that the current practice of producing and representing the Krasnodar urban agglomeration borders, despite scientific justifications and technical calculations, is not so much a representation of the area of Krasnodar’s influence on the surrounding territories as a way to resolve the contradiction between the habit of thinking of urban development in terms of growth and the difficulty of practical implementation of this strategy.
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