Organizing Compassionate Communication: Pragmatic Fieldwork with Nonprofits and Homeless Young Adults

abstract: In an effort to understand and improve interactions between homeless young adults and the nonprofit organizations that serve them, I engaged in a long-term, qualitative, participatory action project. My project involved input from homeless young adults, nonprofit organizations, volunteers/staff, and communication scholarship. While taking a community-engaged, participatory, and qualitative approach, I focused on the interactions between youth and the organizations. Particularly, I drew on homeless young adult experiences to inform services and illuminate compassion within the context of the nonprofit organizations. In the end, this project extends the individual model of compassion to include presence, identifies potential ruptures in the process of compassion, and models compassionate dynamics in organizations. It also articulates a method I call pragmatic fieldwork, a qualitative and pragmatic approach to participatory action research. Each of these outcomes speaks to varied community interests, from theoretically nuancing scholarly models of compassion to informing policy in the interest of more effectively and compassionately serving homeless youth.Dissertation/ThesisPh.D. Communication 201

A Well Place to Be: The Intersection of Canadian School-Based Mental Health Policy with Student and Teacher Resiliency

This policy analysis identifies and critiques dominant narratives in the school-based mental health (SBMH) movement in Canada, with an eye to the ideas and resources being mobilized. The policy narratives were identified as SBMH problems and solutions, represented by the websites and links to other resources of the ministries and departments of education in Canada. There are three areas under-represented in the policy narratives that deserve more nuanced attention in SBMH initiatives; these are (a) to work with educators to develop communities of practice on school mental health around the notion of resiliency, (b) to consider the structural and material factors that affect people’s ability to be resilient at school, and (c) to extend the current focus on promoting student wellness to include teacher wellness. We ground these recommendations by contrasting the policy narratives with the story of our work with educators on a website about resiliency through the lenses of positive psychological health and a sociomaterial perspective on resources. We suggest that a sociomaterial approach to SBMH initiatives, using conceptual tools from implementation science and workplace psychological health, may help both students and teachers develop resiliency

Practising caring : a diffractive inquiry

My doctoral thesis is a speculative, personal, and affective inquiry into practising caring in organisations and organising. Caring – as a verb or doing – is an underexplored phenomenon within organisation studies. I investigate how caring is experienced and theorised processually, by exploring the dynamic effects of difference in a health and social care context during a period of unprecedented change to healthcare strategy, leadership, and delivery. My study is oriented around two interrelated curiosities – how might I travel with diffractive inquiry as a research logic, and what might be discerned differently about practising and theorising caring from an ontologically processual stance? As I move beyond methods and methodology, my research logic is informed by an understanding of classical pragmatism as a philosophy of experience, and feminist technoscience expressions of diffraction as ethical practising of mattering. What is novel is fidelity to experience as a stimulus for learning and consequential action, and the always ethical nature of our entanglements as we become with. Drawing on feminist technoscience, classical pragmatism, care ethics, and caring theory, I explore how an ethos of caring as response-able practising – attuning, inquiring, and coattending to the entangled flourishing of ourselves, others, and our worldings – is experienced in everyday encounters. My argument is that in theorising and practising caring, we need different vocabulary and language: generative, performative, and rooted in everyday experience as it is experienced. My contributions comprise an invitation to look more closely at how caring – as a social dynamic – is continuously unfolding in the day-to-day of organisational life Secondly, I propose a vocabulary of caring, which conveys the ongoingness of care in practice. My third contribution is to suggest that ‘ethos’ – rather than ‘ethics’ – conveys how caring unfolds in practice. A further contribution is in showing how ontological inquiries may generate insights that epistemological studies miss or discount; as well as foregrounding entangled and co-creative relations between researcher, participants, ideas, and situations, and the ethical mattering of crafting doctoral output. A final contribution is experimentation with diffraction as inquiry logic, as a way of surfacing seemingly inconsequential and yet catalytic differences in day-to-day organising, relating, and doing.My doctoral thesis is a speculative, personal, and affective inquiry into practising caring in organisations and organising. Caring – as a verb or doing – is an underexplored phenomenon within organisation studies. I investigate how caring is experienced and theorised processually, by exploring the dynamic effects of difference in a health and social care context during a period of unprecedented change to healthcare strategy, leadership, and delivery. My study is oriented around two interrelated curiosities – how might I travel with diffractive inquiry as a research logic, and what might be discerned differently about practising and theorising caring from an ontologically processual stance? As I move beyond methods and methodology, my research logic is informed by an understanding of classical pragmatism as a philosophy of experience, and feminist technoscience expressions of diffraction as ethical practising of mattering. What is novel is fidelity to experience as a stimulus for learning and consequential action, and the always ethical nature of our entanglements as we become with. Drawing on feminist technoscience, classical pragmatism, care ethics, and caring theory, I explore how an ethos of caring as response-able practising – attuning, inquiring, and coattending to the entangled flourishing of ourselves, others, and our worldings – is experienced in everyday encounters. My argument is that in theorising and practising caring, we need different vocabulary and language: generative, performative, and rooted in everyday experience as it is experienced. My contributions comprise an invitation to look more closely at how caring – as a social dynamic – is continuously unfolding in the day-to-day of organisational life Secondly, I propose a vocabulary of caring, which conveys the ongoingness of care in practice. My third contribution is to suggest that ‘ethos’ – rather than ‘ethics’ – conveys how caring unfolds in practice. A further contribution is in showing how ontological inquiries may generate insights that epistemological studies miss or discount; as well as foregrounding entangled and co-creative relations between researcher, participants, ideas, and situations, and the ethical mattering of crafting doctoral output. A final contribution is experimentation with diffraction as inquiry logic, as a way of surfacing seemingly inconsequential and yet catalytic differences in day-to-day organising, relating, and doing

Unthought, or, A contribution to leadership scholarship from a Chinese perspective – based on François Jullien’s work : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Management at Massey University, Albany campus, New Zealand

This theoretical thesis is based on the work of French philosopher François Jullien. The thesis considers issues and challenges in existing leadership scholarship as an outcome of the Western cultural lens. Jullien’s work investigates Western and Chinese thinking traditions and recognises that the emergence of a cultural scholarship is heavily influenced by the ways the sensory world is categorised. The categorisation of reality on the basis of ‘being’ influences aspects of the sensory world a scholar is attentive to and created conditions for the emergence of Western scholarship. The Chinese ideographical language categorised the world on the basis of motion and produced a scholarship that is attentive to silent motions in the sensory world and not identifiable “being” and studies the propensity of things and not identity. By taking a Chinese perspective to reinvestigate Western thinking and vice versa, Jullien’s work makes a contribution by uncovering how separate cultural traditions contribute to each other by revealing insights that are unavailable from only one cultural scholarship (Jullien, 2014, 2015). Jullien calls the knowledge that emerges from between cultural thoughts unthought. This thesis aims to address the question of How can François Jullien’s work contribute to contemporary leadership studies? Following Jullien’s approach, I investigate leadership through a Chinese lens provided by Jullien’s work and uncover unthought in existing leadership scholarship by revealing insights about leadership from a Chinese perspective. This insight adds to leadership knowledge and provides alternative ways of approaching leadership through silent tendencies behind the emergence of identifiable aspects of leadership

Exploring the complexity of policy enactment through stories: A sociomaterial informed study.

This qualitative research study explores the meaning(s) Aboriginal education leads and school board administrators give to the Ontario First Nations, Métis and Inuit (FNMI) Policy Framework (hereafter referred to as the Framework) and how these meaning(s) are negotiated, storied, and enacted to produce particular processes, outcomes, and effects within the context of Aboriginal education in Ontario. The principles of Critical Narrative Research (CNR) combined with the sensibilities of Actor Network Theory (ANT) are drawn on to foreground the policy actors involved in the implementation of the Framework. Recruitment of research participants took place across both public and Catholic school boards in Ontario, Canada. Qualitative narrative methods were employed to collect data from 13 Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal education leads and school board administrators who are or were previously involved in initiatives aimed at meeting the primary objectives outlined in the Framework. Analysis of data reveals some inconsistency between the values espoused at the Ministry level and what becomes enacted across provincial school boards. Participants identified a number of factors that influenced the extent to which their individual school board delivered programs, services, and supports to build the capacity of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students and staff. Depending on how these factors intersected with one another, the resulting actions produced both productive and destructive effects, sometimes concurrently. An interrogation of discourses around educational achievement is made prominent throughout this study, demonstrating how knowledge and learning is generated through the process and effects of social and material forces coming together

The teaching apparatus : Understanding the material entanglement of practices in the upper secondary classroom

Utdanning er en levende prosess som består av hverdagslige undervisningssituasjoner og deres romlige og kroppslige sammenhenger. Materialiteten i pedagogisk praksis blir i økende grad adressert i forskning. Imidlertid er empiriske beretninger om hvordan materielle praksiser oppstår i faktiske klasseromsundervisningssituasjoner sjeldne. Derfor tar denne doktorgradsavhandlingen sikte på å forstå ‘undervisningens’ materielle kompleksiteten gjennom å undersøke hvordan den oppstår som et relasjonelt og kollektivt forhandlet fenomen i et norsk videregående klasserom. For å undersøke dette bruker avhandlingen et sosiomateriell rammeverk og et videobasert etnografisk forskningsdesign. I tråd med rammeverket plasseres det analytiske fokuset på den diskursive rollen som materielle relasjoner og prosesser spiller i pedagogiske møter. Bruken av videoopptak i kombinasjon med en etnografisk tilnærming støtter prosjektets empiriske utforskning av hvilke materiell-diskursive praksiser som har betydningsfulle konsekvenser i undervisning. Oppgaven består av tre artikler og en kappe. Mens artiklene følger tett de kroppslige og romlige prosessene i videregående klasserom, fokuserer hver artikkel på et spesifikt sett av materielle relasjoner i undervisningssituasjonene. Den første artikkelen handler om forskningspraksisen og de etiske relasjonene i feltet. Ved å trekke på relasjonell etikk og tidligere konseptualiseringer av kontinuerlig samtykkepraksis, utforsker artikkelen hvilke måter forskeren kan tilnærme seg informert samtykke som en situert og relasjonelt konstituert prosess. Artikkelen bruker empiriske eksempler fra feltarbeidet for å diskutere prinsippet om informert samtykke som et refleksivt og etisk verktøy som kan brukes gjennom hele forskningsprosessen, inkludert i fasene før, underveis, og etter feltarbeidet. Artikkelen argumenterer for at ‘eksplisitt og implisitt (re)forhandlet samtykke og dissens’ er en måte for forskere å kalibrere sin etiske respons med en relasjonell og prosessuell forståelse av kvalitativ forskning. Den andre artikkelen undersøker hvordan romlige og kroppslige prosesser kan forståes som å produsere ‘undervisning’ som et fenomen. Artikkelen bruker begrepene affekt, orientering og justeringer (‘alignment’) for å undersøke hvordan klassens handlinger etablerer klasserommets ‘romlige politikk’. Diskusjonen belyser hvordan spesifikke orienteringer fikk betydning (‘came to matter’), gjennom å gi retning til elevenes oppmerksomhet og responser, og ble etablert som legitime måter å ‘gjøre skole’ på. Et tilbakevendende mønster i dette klasserommet var elevenes praksis med å orientere seg mot hver situasjons regler, grenser og muligheter. Artikkelen hevder derfor at praksisen med å ‘tilpasse seg den lokale konfigurasjonen av response-ability’ var en kroppslig og romlig prosess som formet ‘undervisning’ som fenomen. Den tredje artikkelen undersøker hvilke materiell-diskursive praksiser som har betydning (‘matter’) i videregående undervisningssituasjoner og hvordan deltakernes kropper ble formet og formet av disse praksisene. Artikkelen kombinerer et posthumant sosiomateriell praksisbegrep med de agentisk realistiske begrepene material-diskursivitet og apparatus for å skape en relasjonell redegjørelse for hvordan flere praksiser oppstår og samarbeider. De empiriske eksemplene viser hvordan to distinkte praksiser fremtrer fra det analytiske arbeidet: ‘Oppgavepraksisen’ og ‘vennskapspraksisen’. Artikkelens hovedargument er at disse to praksisenes gjensidige forviklinger fører til at de virker sammen som en større materielt og relasjonelt arrangement, kalt ‘undervisningsapparatusset’. Konseptet bidrar med et nytt perspektiv på undervisning. Ved å rette oppmerksomheten mot det sammenvevde og uforutsigbare prosessene i klasserommet, tillater dette konseptet en finmasket forståelse av undervisningen og dens relasjonelle kvaliteter. Samlet sett viser denne studiens funn hvordan flere materiell-diskursive praksiser er involvert i å produsere fenomenet undervisning, inkludert oppgaver-, vennskap, og forskningspraksiser. Avhandlingens argumenter styrker eksisterende forskning på undervisning som komplekst relasjonelt og kontekstuelt fenomen. Avhandlingens konseptualisering av undervisning som et apparatus legger vekt på at kropper, rom og praksiser inngår som aktive deler i dens materiell-diskursive produksjon. Avslutningsvis hevdes det at denne artikulasjonen tillater en alternativ, ikke-instrumentell tilnærming til å vurdere undervisningens kvaliteter.Education is a living process that consists of everyday teaching situations and their spatial and bodily interrelationships. The materiality of educational practice is increasingly addressed in research. However, empirical accounts of how material practices emerge in actual classroom teaching situations are rare. Therefore, this PhD thesis aims to understand the material complexity of ‘teaching’ by investigating how it arises as a relationally and collectively negotiated phenomenon in a Norwegian upper secondary classroom. The thesis employs a sociomaterial framework and a video-based ethnographic research design to address this aim. In line with this framework, the analytical focus is on the discursive role played by material relations in educational encounters. The use of video recordings in combination with an ethnographic approach supported the empirical exploration of which material-discursive practices ‘matter’ in teaching situations. The thesis consists of three articles and an extended abstract. While the articles provide close tracings of the bodily and spatial processes in the upper secondary classroom, each focuses on a distinct set of material relations and practices in the teaching situations. The first article concerns the research practice and its ethical, in-field relationships. By drawing on relational ethics and previous conceptualisation of continuous consent practices, the article explores how we can approach informed consent as a situated and relationally constituted process. The article uses empirical examples from the ethnographic fieldwork to discuss the principle of informed consent as a reflexive and ethical tool that can be used throughout the inquiry, including its pre-fieldwork, fieldwork and post-fieldwork phases. The article argues that ‘explicitly and implicitly (re)negotiated consent and dissent’ is one way for researchers to align their ethical responsiveness with a relational and processual understanding of qualitative research. The second article examines how spatial and bodily processes produce ‘teaching’ as a phenomenon. The article uses the concepts of affect, orientation and alignment to investigate how the class enacts the spatial politics of the upper secondary classroom. The discussion illuminates how specific orientations came to ‘matter’ as legitimate ways of ‘doing school’ through the direction of attention and alignment of responses. A recurrent pattern of this classroom was the students’ practice of orientating towards each situation’s boundaries, rules and allowances. The article contends that the practice of ‘aligning with the local configuration of response-abilities’ was a bodily and spatial process that shaped the phenomenon of teaching. The third article investigates which material-discursive practices ‘mattered’ in the upper secondary teaching situations and how participants’ bodies were shaping and being shaped by these practices. The article combines a posthuman sociomaterial concept of practice with the agential realist concepts of material-discursivity and apparatus to create a relational account of how multiple practices emerge and co-operate. The empirical examples show how two distinct practices emerged from the analytical work: ‘the practice of tasks’ and ‘the practice of friendship’. The article’s main argument is that these two practices’ mutual entanglement co-perform a larger sociomaterial arrangement, termed ‘the teaching apparatus’. The concept of a teaching apparatus offers a new perspective on teaching. By drawing attention to the classroom’s inter-connectedness and unpredictability, the conceptualisation of a teaching apparatus allows for a more fine-grained understanding of teaching and its relational qualities. Overall, this study's findings show how multiple material-discursive practices are involved in producing the phenomenon of teaching, including the practices of tasks and friendship, as well as the practices of research. The thesis’ arguments strengthen existing research accounts of teaching as a complex relational and contextually embedded phenomenon. The thesis conceptualises a teaching apparatus that emphasise bodies, spaces and practices as active parts of its material-discursive production. In conclusion, it is argued that this articulation offers an alternative, affirmative and non-instrumental approach to considering the qualities of teaching.Doktorgradsavhandlin

Materiality and discourse: toward a relational understanding of marginalizing onto-epistemologies in the ivory tower

2016 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.Using epistemological and ontological lenses, this communicative study interrogates the experiences of the graduate community within the communication studies discipline. Specifically, and building on feminist methodologies and intersectional approaches, I seek to identify experiences of graduate students of color that call out and illuminate everyday discourses of silencing, erasure of difference, and disciplining. Additionally, I hope to identify not only these discourses, but also the ways in which corporeality and materiality become alongside these. One goal of this work is to encourage increased critical discussion around discursive theoretical and methodological approaches to scholarship within and beyond communication studies. A second, broader goal is to problematize and expand understanding(s) regarding how fragmented Western epistemological and ontological conceptual frameworks might actually "emulsify" and "curdle" to constitute complex somatic-semiotic matrices of domination (Hill-Collins, 2000) and emancipation within the academy

Theorising the design-reality gap in ICTD: matters of care in mobile learning for Kenyan community health workers

This thesis examines the sociomaterial relations of “design practice” in order to advance new perspectives on success and failure in Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD). I conduct an ethnographic case study of an academic research intervention and update the widely-cited theory of design-reality gaps (Heeks, 2002). Using methods from classic actor-network theory and post-structural material-semiotic tools, the analysis: 1) disentangles the entwined sociomaterial practices around design, production, and use of technology; and 2) integrates these insights into more elaborate conceptualisations of gaps, sustainability, scalability, and project failure. In doing so, my study answers the research question: What are the sociomaterial relations of “design practice” in a globally-distributed, multi-stakeholder, and technologicallymediated ICTD project for poverty alleviation? My research narrative describes how an array of humans and non-humans participated as designers in a transnational, interdisciplinary Participatory Action Research project to train Kenyan health workers using mobile phones. At least six different patterns of sociomaterial relations operated through a given set of people and things, enacting the material-discursive apparatuses (Barad, 1998) of educational research, healthcare, the market, the state, and the local community. I assert that in this Participatory Action Research project for mobile learning, the design-reality gap was not so much a matter of geographic or socio-cultural divides, but was instead constituted as fluid space (Mol, 2002) separating the educational researchers’ designerly practices from the multiplicity of ways in which health workers, mobile phones, and other actors lived in relation to one another. I conclude that these ontological politics enacted design as an empirical matter of care – an affective and morally-charged sociomaterial practice with an ethico-political commitment to the marginalised (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011). I therefore present a conceptual model of success and failure in participatory ICTD projects that explicitly incorporates the affective and material dimensions of care, and conceptualises social justice – not solely in terms of universal claims or global standards – but as embodied, sociomaterial enactments

Innovating for a cause:the work and learning required to create a new approach to healthcare for homeless people

Innovation occupies a pivotal place in our understanding of knowledge-based economies, and this is raising questions about sources of innovation, how it originates, and the role played by employees, work practices and learning. This paper explores these issues through case study research into a new approach to providing healthcare for homeless people in England, and by bringing together conceptual insights from the employee-driven innovation literature, and more broadly from social and practice-based learning theory and organisational theory. Applying these perspectives to our case enables illumination of the innovation as a process – not an event – and as an ongoing set of organisational practices that transcend their origins. Through our analysis we argue that the notion of ‘a cause’ is helpful in elucidating the impetus and the commitment to making the innovation happen (and go on happening). Our findings are presented under three themes: ‘establishing a cause’, ‘organising for innovation’, and ‘innovative capability in practice’. Building on these, we have identified five key inter-related dimensions which help conceptualise the work and learning that it took to create and (re-)enact the innovation and that we suggest may have relevance for understanding and characterising other employee-led innovations in and perhaps beyond healthcare

The professional learning of academics in higher education: a sociomaterial perspective

Introduction For academics in UK Higher Education (HE), professional learning (PL) is a complex endeavour involving a multitude of (in)formal learning encounters. However, these PL encounters are at risk as academics prioritised conflicting knowledge domains and negotiate various social and material engagements that can enable or encumber these encounters. This thesis reports on research that attempts to illuminate these sociomaterial entanglements using Actor-Network Theory and Non-Representational Theory as a theoretical framework. Methods A transformative mixed method case study of a single UK university using content analysis, questionnaire, interview and photovoice methods were undertaken. Twelve academic staff, with module leader responsibilities, were selected from the academic staff questionnaire (n:182) to be interviewed and photograph their PL experiences. Unique to sociomaterial investigation was the photovoice method, enabling the participants to become empowered as co-researchers. Results The analysis of the data suggests that academics tend to be strategic in prioritising conflicting knowledge domains. In the case of knowledge not related to their subject discipline, academics will often fast-track information from a "knowledgeable other". Furthermore, academics will construct "surrogate" or "transient" spaces in which to seek refuge from the various disruptions and interruptions generated by their institution. Academics will use these spaces for uninterrupted learning or work and as a means for promoting self-care. Discussion The study identified four interrelated spatial properties (transient, affective, controlled and immersive), which provides an explanation why some spaces were more conducive to PL than other spaces. Furthermore, space is composed of multiple and interconnected spatial configurations that coalesce into a single spatial configuration, which I call coalescent space. The study also proposes a number of future research directions involving the PL of early career academics and academics on sessional contract