Powered Wheelchair Users’ Experiences of Urban Mobility: Researching Access and Disablement through Mobile Methodologies and Digital Technologies

Ph. D. ThesisInaccessible environments and transportation exclude disabled people from full participation in society. Accessibility is affected by a wide range of socio-material factors, including the interaction between the environment and mobility devices. Yet to date, little research has investigated powered wheelchair users’ experiences of mobility, or how their knowledge might inform policymakers or service providers. In this thesis, I have worked with powered wheelchair users to document their experiences of mobility and explore how these might be conveyed to other people. An observational go-along method was used, travelling with thirteen participants as they captured their experiences using ‘JourneyCam’, a bespoke smartphone video and data collection tool. The data were used as prompts in semi-structured interviews following each journey. Two further participants were interviewed without first using JourneyCam. Finally, through a series of group workshops, nine participants explored how their collective experiences and knowledge might be used to create more accessible environments. Powered wheelchair users accumulate situated knowledge which they use to navigate disabling barriers, but this knowledge is gained through significant personal labour and experiences of psycho-emotional disablism. Participants highlighted a wide range of socio-material enablers and disablers to their mobility, including barriers associated with poorly implemented ‘accessibility’ features. However, their efforts to convey their knowledge to service providers were met with indifference, and funnelled through individualised complaints processes. In response participants sought more effective modes of engagement that might bring about systemic change, in line with their commitment to social model principles of confronting structural disablement. I conclude that not only could powered wheelchair users’ situated knowledge be a valuable resource for service providers and policymakers, but it is also a form of collective resistance to ableist societal practices. The social model of disability remains relevant for disabled people’s efforts to counter disablement, serving as an ‘oppositional device’ that fosters shared resistance.EPSR

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

Alternative timelines: Counterfactuals as an approach to design pedagogy

Counterfactual histories modify the outcome of a historical event and then extrapolate an alternative version of history. In literature, imaginaries based on a counterfactual history can offer thought-provoking insights on contemporary life:   It’s America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some 20 years earlier the United States lost a war and is now occupied jointly by Nazi Germany and Japan. (Dick, 1992)   The Man in the High Castle describes the consequences of one popular starting point for counterfactual histories, Germany winning World War II. Historians tend to focus on military "decision points" at which events could have taken another path (Bernstein, 2000), or they imagine the absence of powerful individuals to speculate on how things might have been different. Since history is “often written by the victors, it tends to ‘crush the unfulfilled potential of the past’, as Walter Benjamin so aptly put it. By giving a voice to the ‘losers’ of history, the counterfactual approach allows for a reversal of perspectives” (Deluermoz & Singaravélou, 2021). A counterfactual approach offers much potential as a methodology for practice-based design research and pedagogy – designers typically design for the world as it is rather than as it could be (Dunne & Raby, 2013). Design happens within entrenched systems whose foundations in many cases were laid centuries ago. Systems of economy, infrastructure and popular culture inform and constrain design methods, motivations and approaches to the evaluation of designed artefacts. Technological advances are applied via these rules, facilitating the iterative development of products and providing a neat lineage from the past and, more importantly, into the future (Auger et al, 2017). This version of design is increasingly being revealed as fundamentally flawed – highly successful in placating shareholders, it is not fit for purpose where ethical or environmental issues are concerned.   Counterfactuals provide an almost surreptitious method of combining design theory with practice. Through a rigorous analysis of history, the designer identifies key elements that are problematic when viewed through a contemporary lens. The approach can expose dominant structures of power and the influence these have on design culture and metrics: for example, the influence of legacy systems and how they limit the imagination and reveal the hidden or unexpected historical events that influenced the timeline. In A New Scottish Enlightenment, Mohammed J. Ali proposes a different outcome to the 1979 Scottish independence referendum (Debatty, 2014). A “yes” vote leads to the creation of a new Scottish government, whose ultimate goal is the delivery of energy independence and a future free from fossil fuels. The project was exhibited shortly before the 2014 referendum. This starting point (a yes or no vote) resonates because it vividly presents a life that could have been. It makes us think about the power of our vote and the potential implications of a “bad choice”. The second aspect that gives the project wider relevance is the agenda used to drive extrapolation from its fictional starting point – a simple paradigm shift on energy generation and distribution. By defining energy independence as a national goal, it becomes possible to outline the ways this might happen. Important earlier examples of a counterfactual approach to design include Pohflepp and Chambers (Auger, 2012; Dunne & Raby, 2013).   Here is a rough summary of a counterfactual design methodology:   1.      The approach begins with the choice of subject – what is to be designed and the creation of a detailed and diverse timeline of its history. 2.      The identification of key moments that have led to the state of things; in particular the elements that could be critiqued from alternative value systems. 3.      The creation of a counterfactual timeline based on numerous possibilities – this is the key difference in method between historiography and design. The approach facilitates the creation of new value systems, motivations, rules and constraints that can be applied in practice. 4.      The design of things along the new timeline; it can be furnished at key moments with artefacts informed by the alternative rules.   A recent Master’s project at the École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay followed this brief. Themes included rethinking approaches to aging based on the elimination of the royalist doctrines of 18th century France; a counterfactual history of agriculture with the tool acting as intermediary between the person working and their environment; and the archive – an examination of the modalities for a deployment of queer, feminist and trans-feminist archive design forms in everyday life. With its focus on underrepresented groups and unrealised possibilities, this last concept resonates with a broader discourse about decolonising design. What alternative value systems and approaches to design might have emerged if 20th-century design history had not been defined by the works of Morris, Dreyfus, Bel Geddes, Gropius, Rams, Starck, Ives, Dyson, and the rest?   Taking up Benjamin’s point about “the unfulfilled potential of the past”, the most vital use of counterfactuals in design is to allow different voices to emerge that were drowned out by dominant or “standard” narrative(s). Recognising alternative histories can open up valuable future paths and create space for new possibilities and imaginaries to flourish. Works Cited   Auger, James (2012). Why Robot? Speculative design, the domestication of technology and the considered future. PhD thesis, Royal College of Art, London.   Auger, James, Hanna, Julian and Encinas, Enrique (2017). Reconstrained Design. Nordes, Oslo, 2-4 June 2017. ISSN 1604-9705.   Bernstein, R. B. (2000). Review of Ferguson, Niall, ed., Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. H-Law, H-Net Reviews. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=3721   Chambers, James (2010). Artificial Defence Mechanisms. https://jameschambers.co.uk/artificial-defense-mechanisms   Debatty, Régine (2014). A New Scottish Enlightenment. We Make Money Not Art. https://we-make-money-not-art.com/a_new_scottish_enlightenment/   Deluermoz, Quentin & Pierre Singaravélou (2021). A Past of Possibilities: A History of What Could Have Been. Yale University Press.   Dick, Phillip K. (1992). The Man in the High Castle. Vintage.   Dunne, Anthony & Fiona Raby (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press.   Pohflepp, Sascha (2009). The Golden Institute. http://cargocollective.com/saschapohflepp/Work/The-Golden-Institut

Praxitopia : How shopping makes a street vibrant

During recent decades, shopping’s geographical manifestations have altered radically and the presumed ‘death’ of town centre retailing has become a public concern. The social, cultural, and economic backgrounds of this decentralisation of retail and its effects on city life have been studied comprehensively. However, to date, few studies have examined the changing dynamics of non-mainstream shopping geographies, particularly local shopping streets. How shopping is enacted in such places, and shopping’s part in shaping them, has been largely overlooked. Aspiring to fulfil this knowledge gap, this dissertation examines shopping activities on Södergatan, a local shopping street in a stigmatized ‘super-diverse’ district of Helsingborg, Sweden known as Söder, and contributes to the literature on shopping geographies by drawing on a sociocultural perspective.The study draws on practice theory and focuses on shopping as the main unit. The analysis is built on a sensitivity to the interrelationships existing between social practices and place, emerging from the epistemic positioning resulting from the identification of 'modes of practices'. In order to grasp the enmeshed character of shopping, which is complicated by cultural, spatial, temporal, material, and sensorial layers, video ethnography was employed as the primary research collection method, in combination with go-along interviews, observation and mental-mapping.The research reveals five major modes of shopping practice which jointly represent a typology for understanding shopping in terms of being enacted in the street; i.e. convenience shopping, social shopping, on-the-side shopping, alternative shopping, and budget shopping. This thesis also shows that the bundling of these modes of shopping shapes the street into a vibrant part of the city by interrelating with the shopping street’s sensomaterial and spatiotemporal dimensions in complex and multifaceted directions. Consequently, the local shopping street is conceptualized as a praxitopia, a place co-constituted through social practices

Michel Foucault, Social Policy and 'Limit-Experience'

This thesis considers whether the discipline of social policy can validly use the patterns and intentions implicit in Foucault's critique of modernity to develop a new qualitative approach to social theory. He examined the conditions under which various regimes of social and political practice came into being; how they are maintained and the particular manner of their transformation. There are two specific emphases that establish the pattern of my overall inquiry. The first involves a reflection on the troubled and ineffectual place of normative social theory within contemporary social policy discourse. The second is a reconsideration of Foucault's oeuvre in relation to new social theory building within social policy. Both of these concerns offer an opportunity to reflect on the place of social theory within a discursive world that 'appears' cosmopolitan and diverse. Foucault famously declared that the point of philosophical activity involved the endeavour to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently - to examine the functioning of our ideas as 'limit-experiences'. He coined this phrase 'limit-experience' to outline his critique of the 'forms of rationalizations' that comprise the present practice of politics within modernity. He thought the decisive question was how apparently 'universal, necessary, and obligatory discourses about political and social knowledge shapes that which ought more properly to be regarded as 'singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints'. The former injunctive and 'magisterial' arguments that supported initial patterns of welfare state rhetoric are no longer persuasive. There has been a 'sea-change' in contemporary social ideas - from a welfare state to a welfare society - one that is breath-taking in its hegemonic compass. That world is increasingly depicted as a postmodern social world where there is little apparent respect for, let alone reliance on, the grand metaphors and social themes of classic social policy. This reconsideration of Foucault's ideas from a social policy perspective will not necessarily yield a new compelling normative rhetoric but it will provide an opportunity to think differently about the taken-for-granted nature of so much social policy theorizing. His portrayal of how we might 'think differently' about the multitude of practices involved in the rationalizations and subjectifications of 'limit-experiences' provides an opportunity to reflect on the patterning and practices that construct the current discourses of welfare and social policy. We do need to think differently or at least to see if it is possible to do so. Imagining difference, strategizing for it, and welcoming it, mark us out as constantly restless - a personal style that Foucault embraced with some gusto

Esa 12th Conference: Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination: Abstract Book

Esa 12th Conference: Differences, Inequalities and Sociological Imagination: Abstract Boo