Boundary Objects Revisited: A Comparative Analysis of World Making in Avant-Garde Fashion Design and Animal Husbandry

Drawing on Susan Leigh Star’s conceptualization of boundary objects as a corpus of actions through which an imaginary context for doing social work emerges, this article examines how two seemingly disparate sites of cultural production can be comparatively brought into conversation with one another. These sites include specific expert communities where actors within the fields of fashion design and livestock husbandry both evaluate and theorize new social possibilities. By attending to how these practices unfold through an experimental rendering of expertise this article employs the notion of a boundary object to comparatively analyzing the speculative practices of these two sites.     

Struggling for Legitimacy: Trajectories of Membership and Naturalization in the Sorting Out of Engineering Students

Situated learning theory proposed the notion of legitimate peripheral participation as central to newcomers’ trajectories toward membership in communities of practice. Left underdeveloped were questions of how legitimacy is conferred or denied. Leigh Star’s work suggests ways of addressing these questions by considering how identifications of participants are made on the basis of classification systems. This article examines how classification of “calculus-readiness,” tied to an identification of engineering with mathematics, shapes the activity of students, staff, and faculty involved in a diversity program at a U.S. college of engineering, and is used to organize trajectories for students in the program.     

Design Imaginaries: Knowledge Transformation and Innovation in Experimental Architecture

This article tracks the work of a group of architectural researchers and treats their experimental practices as vantages for analyzing the social production and transformation of architectural knowledge. This requires first examining the role of so-called design imaginaries, or modes of prototyping and analysis, which these researchers draw on to explore wider theoretical questions, as well as to test varying theories and hypotheses. It also includes examining how seemingly contradictory design concepts figure into their creative work, which we argue hold theoretical resonance with Gregory Bateson’s ideas on Learning III and Yrjö Engeström’s notion of expansive learning.     

Data witnessing: attending to injustice with data in Amnesty International’s Decoders project

ABSTRACT

The concept of witnessing has been used to explore the construction of evidence and experience in settings of law, religion, atrocity, media, history and science. Recent research has examined how digital technologies may multiply the involvement of remote, non-present and unanticipated actors in the witnessing of events. This paper examines what digital data practices at Amnesty International’s Decoders initiative can add to the understanding of witnessing. It introduces the notion of ‘data witnessing’ with reference to four projects on (i) witnessing historical abuses with structured data from digitised documents; (ii) witnessing the destruction of villages with satellite imagery and machine learning; (iii) witnessing environmental injustice with company reports and photographs; and (iv) witnessing online abuse through the classification of Twitter data. These projects illustrate the configuration of experimental apparatuses for witnessing injustices with data. In contrast to accounts which emphasise the presence of an individual human witness at the scene, Amnesty’s data practices are conspicuously collective and distributed, rendering the systemic scale of injustices at a distance, across space and time. Such practices may contribute to research on both (new) media witnessing and data politics, suggesting ways in which care, concern and solidarity may be constructed, structured, extended and delimited by means of digital data.     

Howard Caygill on resistance: ecce homo

Howard Caygill’s On Resistance (2013) is changing the landscape of how the concept of resistance is understood. In his book, he theorises a concept of resistance rooted in the Kantian aporia of judgement, in the Hegelian notion of Force, in Clausewitz’s idea of resistance as a capacity and in the Nietzschean notion of affirmation. He employs these against philosophies of dialectic and resolution. I trace these themes back through some of his earlier work, to reveal the tensions that persist in his own thinking, and which underpin the puzzles, the aporias, that are central to his notion of resistance. I argue that in his earlier work a notion of (Hegelian) philosophical education receives more generous treatment. By retrieving this notion of learning and locating it within On Resistance, we can get closer not only to the relationship between actuality, possibility and necessity, that are so important to Caygill’s notion of resistance, but also to the philosophical character of the man Caygill: ecce homo.     

Navigating a new life: Syrian refugees and their smartphones in Vienna

ABSTRACT

Networked technologies are a key tool for today’s refugees; not only on the move but also upon arrival in their new surroundings. Where mobile Internet access is affordable and infrastructures are stable, as in Europe’s metropoles, refugees can use smartphones to cope with everyday challenges. The paper presents findings from a qualitative interview study with Syrian refugees who recently settled in Vienna, Austria. The study implemented a three-fold methodology, combining face-to-face interviews, WhatsApp chats, and participant research. Results are presented from a localized appropriation notion (the act of making use of local specific media environment when drawing a media technology into one’s life) identifying practices in the contexts of: place-making and geographical orientation; information access and self-help; language learning and translation; and ‘doing family’. Hence, refugees are both emotionally attached to and technically dependent on their devices. The article concludes that smartphones hold an untapped potential for integration processes.     

Situated (un-)learning in software design: a deconstructive approach

Constructive technology assessment aims at anticipating societal impacts of technological innovations and suggests incorporating reflexivity and social learning into technology development. Social learning involves fostering the ability of diverse social actors to cultivate sociotechnical critical skills, thus allowing technological and social change to be governed with consideration for social values and diverging interests. Based on this demand, our paper presents a discourse-theoretical, interventionist approach to software design introducing deconstruction and (un-)learning as reflective practices to guide development processes. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s focus on power relations in technoscience culture, our approach—called ‘deconstructive design’—traces how structures such as in/formal hierarchies and discursive hegemonies affect the development processes and design decisions of teams or communities of practices. The underlying deconstructivist methodology refers to practice-based concepts of situated learning. Thus, it locates a potential for value-based intervention at the micro/meso-level of everyday work practices.     

Challenging a culture of racial equivalence

We live at a time when our understandings and conceptualizations of ‘racism’ are often highly imprecise, broad, and used to describe a wide range of racialized phenomena. In this article, I raise some important questions about how the term racism is used and understood in contemporary British society by drawing on some recent cases of alleged racism in football and politics, many of which have been played out via new media technologies. A broader understanding of racism, through the use of the term ‘racialization’, has been helpful in articulating a more nuanced and complex understanding of racial incidents, especially of people's (often ambivalent) beliefs and behaviours. However, the growing emphasis upon ‘racialization’ has led to a conceptualization of racism which increasingly involves multiple perpetrators, victims, and practices without enough consideration of how and why particular interactions and practices constitute racism as such. The trend toward a growing culture of racial equivalence is worrying, as it denudes the idea of racism of its historical basis, severity and power. These frequent and commonplace assertions of racism in the public sphere paradoxically end up trivializing and homogenizing quite different forms of racialized interactions. I conclude that we need to retain the term ‘racism’, but we need to differentiate more clearly between ‘racism’ (as an historical and structured system of domination) from the broader notion of ‘racialization’.     

Beyond bureaucracy and entrepreneurialism: Examining the multiple discursive codes informing the work,careers and subjectivities of management graduates

This paper examines how discursive codes and demands associated with ‘bureaucratic and entrepreneurial regimes’ of work and career organization shape the work, careers and subjectivities of management graduates. The study is based on an analysis of 30 narratives of management professionals who graduated from an Austrian business school in the early 1970s or 2000s. Its insights suggest that variegated discursive codes manifest in the graduates’ articulated professional practices and subjectivities, thereby challenging established assumptions regarding the organization of work and careers. While the practices and subjectivities of the 1970s graduates are often informed by codes and demands ascribed to ‘entrepreneurialism’, those of the 2000s graduates are infused with several codes commonly portrayed as ‘bureaucratic’.     

Computing brains: learning algorithms and neurocomputation in the smart city

ABSTRACT

This article examines IBM’s ‘Smarter Education’ program, part of its wider ‘Smarter Cities’ agenda, focusing specifically on its learning analytics applications (based on machine learning algorithms) and cognitive computing developments for education (which take inspiration from neuroscience for the design of brain-like neural networks algorithms and neurocomputational devices). The article conceptualizes the relationship between learning algorithms, neuroscience, and the new learning spaces of the city by combining the notion of programmable ‘code/space’ with ideas about the ‘social life of the brain’ to suggest that new kinds of ‘brain/code/spaces’ are being developed where the environment itself is imagined to possess brain-like functions of learning and ‘human qualities’ of cognition performed by algorithmic processes. IBM’s ambitions for education constitute a sociotechnical imaginary of a ‘cognitive classroom’ where the practices associated with data analytics and cognitive computing in the smart city are being translated into the neuropedagogic brain/code/spaces of the school, with significant consequences for how learners are to be addressed and acted upon. The IBM imaginary of Smarter Education is one significant instantiation of emerging smart cities that are to be governed by neurocomputational processes modelled on neuroscientific insights into the brain’s plasticity for learning, and part of a ‘neurofuture’ in-the-making where nonconscious algorithmic ‘computing brains’ embedded in urban space are intended to interact with human cognition and brain functioning.     

Practising family history: ‘identity’ as a category of social practice

Research on family history argues it performs the task of anchoring a sense of ‘self’ through tracing ancestral connection and cultural belonging, seeing it as a form of storied ‘identity‐work’. This paper draws on a small‐scale qualitative study to think further on the identity‐work of family history. Using practice theory, and a disaggregated notion of ‘identity’, it explores how the storying of family histories relates to genealogy as a leisure hobby, a form of historical research, and an information‐processing activity; and examines the social organization of that narrativity, where various practical engagements render certain kinds of genealogical information more, or less, ‘storyable’. Key features of ‘identity‐work’ in family history, such as the construction of genealogy as a personal journey of discovery and identification with particular ancestors, emerge as a consequence of the procedures of family history, organized as a set of practical tasks. The paper explores ‘identity‐work’ as a consequence of people's engagement in specific social practices which provide an internal logic to their actions, with various components of ‘identity’ emerging as categories of practice shaped within, and for, use. Focusing on ‘identity’ as something produced when we are engaged in doing other things, the paper examines how the practical organization of ‘doing other things’ helps produce ‘identity’ in particular ways.     

Teaching Critical Reflection: A Tool for Transformative Learning in Social Work?

In an Australian Bachelor of Social Work degree, critical reflection is a process explicitly taught in a fourth year subject to students who have returned from their first field placement experience in agencies delivering social work programmes. The purpose of teaching critical reflection is to enable social work students to become autonomous and critical thinkers who can reflect on society, the role of social work and social work practices. The way critical reflection is taught in this fourth year social work unit relates closely to the aims of transformative learning. Transformative learning aims to assist students to become autonomous thinkers. Specifically, the critical reflection process taught in this subject aims to assist students to recognise their own and other people's frames of reference, to identify the dominant discourses circulating in making sense of their experience, to problematise their taken-for -granted ‘lived experience’, to reconceptualise identity categories, disrupt assumed causal relations and to reflect on how power relations are operating. Critical reflection often draws on many theoretical frameworks to enable the recognition of current modes of thinking and doing. In this paper, we will draw primarily on how post-structural theories, specifically Foucault's theorising, disrupt several taken-for-granted concepts in social work.     

Girls being Rey: ethical cultural consumption,families and popular feminism

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that consumers of popular culture engage in practices of ‘ethical cultural consumption’, whereby the consumption of cultural texts is imagined as having the potential to ‘do good’ both individually and socio-politically. The paper explores data from an online questionnaire and drawing activity with girls aged 5–10 and their parents on the experience of costume playing as Rey from the contemporary Star Wars trilogy. Imagined as a ‘girl who can do anything’, Rey represents a new kind of popular feminist hero and role model for girls, enabling a degree of critique of normative gendered role models for children. ‘Being Rey’ also represents a deterministic project through which parents aim to cultivate the ‘right’ kind of girls, seeking to instil the resilience to ‘cope’ with unknown futures. More than a purely individual project, we argue that parents invest in an individualized idea of doing ‘good’ through consumption, drawing on a notion of the consumer as a political actor with the power to affect social change. Investigating the project of participating in and consuming culture ‘ethically’ allows for an exploration of what it means to ‘be political’ and ‘do good’ as a consumer in neoliberalism.     

‘What shall I pack in my suitcase?’: the role of work-integrated learning in sustaining social work students’ professional identity

Interest in the reflective practitioner as a model of a ‘good professional’ has increased in several professional fields and is also valued within social work education as a key aspiration to address the uncertainties and challenges encountered in contemporary working environments. Reflecting on their own professional identity, as well as theories, values, and devices used in professional practice, can help practitioners deal with complex work demands and help students be better equipped to transition from university to work. Work-integrated learning (WIL) provides students with an opportunity to integrate academic learning with ‘real-world’ experiences to develop both valuable self-monitoring and professional self-constructive ability. This paper presents a case study in social work higher education in which WIL class-based teaching was combined with the use of reflective journals to explore the role of WIL in developing reflective practices for professional identity formation. 21 reflective journals by social work students are analysed. The findings suggest that teaching practices based on WIL enable professional identity formation by developing reflective practices, and that different learning conditions sustain specific dimensions of professional identity, i.e. professional expertise, membership to a professional community and sense of professional self.     

Changing perspectives on the child at risk at the end of the nineteenth century. The Belgian Maritime Hospital Roger de Grimberghe (1884–1914) as a space of inclusion and exclusion

In this historical‐geographical approach to the Belgian Maritime Hospital Roger de Grimberghe space is introduced as a conceptual tool to deconstruct the notion of the child at risk. The starting point for the creation of the maritime hospitals lay in the immediate relationship between the idea of improving children’s welfare with healthy sea air and concern about declining public health at the end of the nineteenth century, together with a need for the moral reclamation of the nation. Within this context particular attention focused on ‘the child at risk’, the ‘abnormal child’ and the ‘mentally retarded child’. This research shows how the maritime hospital can be considered a battlefield on which two different discursive practices about children at risk (the political and the medical) clashed. Both practices and perspectives are characterized by mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.     

Whither practice-near research in the modernization programme? Policy blunders in children's services

In this article, we lament the effects of practice-distant research and associated policy initiatives on contemporary children's services in England. In the last decade, as a result of high profile inquiries into non-accidental child deaths, statutory children's social care services in the UK have been subject to a wide-reaching ‘modernization’ programme. We studied decision-making in the high blame environment of local authority children's services. Our research sought to examine the relationship between performance management and the impact of anticipated blame within the decision-making practices of those providing, supervising and managing these services. We show that systems and technologies can be developed which both assist the users in their daily work and achieve desired organizational goals, but without an ethnographically informed, practice-near approach, unsafe work regimes and practices can ensue.     

Subjectivation,agency and the schooling of raced and dis/abled asylum-seeking children in the Italian context

Abstract

This paper intends to address the challenges that the Italian education system is facing in terms of policies and practices relating to dis/abled asylum-seeking and refugee children, in order to make sense of the politics of daily life inside schools and the network of social services for forced migrants, and to pay renewed attention to the notion of ‘social and educational integration’. The starting point of this paper is the idea that the current model of schooling for asylum-seeking and refugee children is implicated in the making of particular sorts of ‘subjects’, as well as the creation of educational and social exclusions and inequalities. Schools, refugee organisations as well as the work of educators and social workers can be important sites of ‘counter-politics’. Borrowing from the theoretical tools offered by Dis/Ability Critical Race Studies (Dis/Crit) framework and engaging with Judith Butler’s understanding of processes of subjectivation, the paper explores how asylum-seeking and refugee students can be rendered subjects outside the educational endeavour, or indeed outside studenthood. Data from an ongoing constructivist grounded theory doctoral research project, interviews with asylum-seeking children and with professionals working in different refugee services in Rome, are offered to substantiate the argument presented in this paper.     

Training research-minded social workers: experience from Estonia*

ABSTRACT

Social work education in its modern sense started to develop after Estonia regained independence from the collapsing Soviet Union. The aim of this article is to introduce good practices of teaching research-mindedness, this being one of the main principles in teaching social workers-to-be in the University of Tartu in Estonia. We have been inspired by the academic tradition of university teaching in general, the new international definition of social work and, not least, the realisation of social workers in practice of not being able to apply academic knowledge to everyday social work practices. This article revisits the term research-mindedness and examines how it has been integrated into the university level teaching process. Our purpose is to discuss the methods students of bachelor’s and master’s programmes can learn to ‘translate’ social issues into research questions, critically appraise the findings and ‘translate’ them back as new research evidence for social work practice.     

Performative identity regulation in rehabilitative home care work: an analysis of how experts’ embodied mediation of the managerial ideology ‘activates’ new frontline identities

ABSTRACT

This article explores how therapists when introduced as new so-called frontline ‘experts’ in home care work, become both discursive and embodied mediators for the managerial ideology of rehabilitation, and how their presence regulates the care aides’ subjectivities at work. We show how the managerial discourse of rehabilitation mobilizes the care aides to transform their identity from traditional nurturing to rehabilitation, as a result of promoting the latter as more professional. While the traditional managers/nurses promote the identity transfer through more classic discursive regulation at a distance from ‘the office’, the therapists do so through what we label performative regulation. Performative regulation is exercised by the therapists performing the desired role at the frontline and thus embodies the ideal and transfers it by embodied practices, not directives. With this notion of performative regulation, the article emphasizes the material, physical, embodied and performative dimensions of professional identity regulation.     

Preparing for ICT enhanced practice learning opportunities in 2010—a speculative view

This paper presents a speculative view of the roles that a practice teacher, student and university may undertake during a practice learning opportunity in the year 2010, based upon predicted advances in information and communication technology (ICT). The article explores the likelihood of such a scenario becoming a reality by examining very briefly current developments in the area of wireless mobile devices and infrastructure. The paper presents an argument drawing on the author’s own experiences that passive acceptance or ignorance through apprehension of ICT developments should not prevent the examination and planning of how this medium may be utilised in the arena of social work in the future. This paper acts as a scenario‐planning device, presenting for discussion some of the issues that may need to be explored if ICT is to become positively integrated into the field of social work education.