AN ENACTIVE APPROACH TO TECHNOLOGICALLY MEDIATED LEARNING THROUGH PLAY

This thesis investigated the application of enactive principles to the design of classroom technolo- gies for young children’s learning through play. This study identified the attributes of an enactive pedagogy, in order to develop a design framework to accommodate enactive learning processes. From an enactive perspective, the learner is defined as an autonomous agent, capable of adapta- tion via the recursive consumption of self generated meaning within the constraints of a social and material world. Adaptation is the parallel development of mind and body that occurs through inter- action, which renders knowledge contingent on the environment from which it emerged. Parallel development means that action and perception in learning are as critical as thinking. An enactive approach to design therefore aspires to make the physical and social interaction with technology meaningful to the learning objective, rather than an aside to cognitive tasks. The design framework considered in detail the necessary affordances in terms of interaction, activity and context. In a further interpretation of enactive principles, this thesis recognised play and pretence as vehicles for designing and evaluating enactive learning and the embodied use of technology. In answering the research question, the interpreted framework was applied as a novel approach to designing and analysing children’s engagement with technology for learning, and worked towards a paradigm where interaction is part of the learning experience. The aspiration for the framework was to inform the design of interaction modalities to allow users’ to exercise the inherent mechanisms they have for making sense of the world. However, before making the claim to support enactive learning processes, there was a question as to whether technologically mediated realities were suitable environments to apply this framework. Given the emphasis on the physical world and action, it was the intention of the research and design activities to explore whether digital artefacts and spaces were an impoverished reality for enactive learning; or if digital objects and spaces could afford sufficient ’reality’ to be referents in social play behaviours. The project embedded in this research was tasked with creating deployable technologies that could be used in the classroom. Consequently, this framework was applied in practice, whereby the design practice and deployed technologies served as pragmatic tools to investigate the potential for interactive technologies in children’s physical, social and cognitive learning. To understand the context, underpin the design framework, and evaluate the impact of any techno- logical interventions in school life, the design practice was informed by ethnographic methodologies. The design process responded to cascading findings from phased research activities. The initial fieldwork located meaning making activities within the classroom, with a view to to re-appropriating situated and familiar practices. In the next stage of the design practice, this formative analysis determined the objectives of the participatory sessions, which in turn contributed to the creation of technologies suitable for an inquiry of enactive learning. The final technologies used standard school equipment with bespoke software, enabling children to engage with real time compositing and tracking applications installed in the classrooms’ role play spaces. The evaluation of the play space technologies in the wild revealed under certain conditions, there was evidence of embodied presence in the children’s social, physical and affective behaviour - illustrating how mediated realities can extend physical spaces. These findings suggest that the attention to meaningful interaction, a presence in the environment as a result of an active role, and a social presence - as outlined in the design framework - can lead to the emergence of observable enactive learning processes. As the design framework was applied, these principles could be examined and revised. Two notable examples of revisions to the design framework, in light of the applied practice, related to: (1) a key affordance for meaningful action to emerge required opportunities for direct and immediate engagement; and (2) a situated awareness of the self and other inhabitants in the mediated space required support across the spectrum of social interaction. The application of the design framework enabled this investigation to move beyond a theoretical discourse

Feminist Methodologies

This open access book gives insights into feminist methodologies in theory and practice. By foregrounding the experiential and embodied nature of doing feminist research, this book offers valuable tools for feminist research as a continuous praxis. Emerging from a rich collective learning process, the collection offers in-depth reflections on how feminists shape research questions, understand positionality, share research results beyond academe and produce feminist intersectional knowledges. This book reveals how the authors navigate theory and practice, candidly exploring the difficulty of producing knowledge on the edge of academia and activism. From different points of view, places and disciplinary positions, artistic and creative experiments and collaborations, the book provides a multi-layered analysis. This book will be a valuable resource and asset to early career researchers and interdisciplinary feminist students who can learn more about the doing of feminist research from realistic, accessible, and practical methodological tools and knowledge

Embodied female authorship in early modern English literature

Although early modern scholars often believe the female body to hinder women's authorship, my dissertation, Embodied Female Authorship in Early Modern English Literature, argues that the female body enables authorship. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, authorship and its related terms, "author" and "authority," were never static. Such malleability resonated with early modern perceptions of the female body as inherently shifty, a troubling notion to patriarchal ideologies that desired authority over women. Constituting male authorship through the female body was a way to stabilize masculine authority. Men became authors while women remained passive texts. My project, however, disrupts this patriarchal narrative of authorship. Drawing upon scholarship by Jeffrey Masten, Wendy Wall, and Margaret Ezell that rethinks early modern authorship as gendered, collaborative, and social, I shift focus away from the physical production of texts to consider authorship in terms of the generation of narratives--textual, historical, political, and theological. I examine common tropes of the female body (maternal body, female martyr, wife's corpse, and female ghost) to restore "author" as a verb rather than a noun. Doing so historicizes female authorship as integral to gender, political, and religious hierarchies. Covering a wide generic breadth of texts ranging from the early Reformation to the Restoration (1546-1664), my project provides nuanced close-readings of women's and men's writing to illuminate the ubiquitous nature of embodied female authorship throughout early modern culture. My first chapter uses the metaphor of the pregnant male wit who labors to birth literary creations to re-read representations of the maternal body as producers of theological narratives in midwife manuals, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Dorothy Leigh's The Mother's Blessing. Subsequent chapters reveal how the female martyr grounds religio-political narratives of Protestant Reformation in England; how the wife's corpse offers narratives of chastity to correct those of sexual infidelity; and how the female ghost in Lucy Hutchinson's Memoirs of Colonel John Hutchinson yields a restorative, spiritual narrative in the face of the Restoration. By locating authors in unsuspecting places, I imagine a more inclusive early modern authorship that bestows agency upon those subjects who most seem to lack such authority. My project proves that we must look to the female body to understand the full history of authorship

Feminist Methodologies

This open access book gives insights into feminist methodologies in theory and practice. By foregrounding the experiential and embodied nature of doing feminist research, this book offers valuable tools for feminist research as a continuous praxis. Emerging from a rich collective learning process, the collection offers in-depth reflections on how feminists shape research questions, understand positionality, share research results beyond academe and produce feminist intersectional knowledges. This book reveals how the authors navigate theory and practice, candidly exploring the difficulty of producing knowledge on the edge of academia and activism. From different points of view, places and disciplinary positions, artistic and creative experiments and collaborations, the book provides a multi-layered analysis. This book will be a valuable resource and asset to early career researchers and interdisciplinary feminist students who can learn more about the doing of feminist research from realistic, accessible, and practical methodological tools and knowledge

Theatre, Performance and Digital Tools: Modelling New Modes of Political Engagement

This dissertation investigates how theatre and performance artists use new media tools to facilitate political engagement. The chapters cover a diverse range of performancesfrom interventions in video games to mobile phone walking tours to theatre productions that use social media. In contrast to the dominant narrative of intermedial theatre and performance studies, when analyzing these examples I consider intermediality as a political rather than solely aesthetic mode. By explicitly connecting intermedial approaches to political performanceand acknowledging how these two concepts are already always conjoinedthis dissertation works to expand how we might think about intermediality as a lens that covers digital practices as both form and content. I also consider the value, challenges and dangers of asking spectators to interact with performers and digital tools in order to model new modes of political engagement, and question how various artistic choices impact the ways that audiences are activated through these new technologies. As the examples range in form, content and location, this dissertation traverses numerous intermedial modes and political topicsa multitude of approaches that challenge any singular or simple understanding of how intermediality functions in contemporary theatre and performance. Although there is wariness about overstating the role of new media in creating concrete political change, examples such as the Occupy movement reveal how political discourse is now intricately linked to the digital. In this dissertation, rather than simply reinforcing cyberutopian or cyberpessismistic views regarding the political impact of digital communication, I investigate socio-political contexts and analyze the motivations and receptions of specific projects. I consider a number of questions, including: How are new media performances influenced by the potentially democratizing nature of digital interactions? How do performances integrate with digital media to investigate the ways we connector fail to connectas publics? How does performance also address exclusions related to the digital? Who is the we in the intersubjective relations produced by intermedial performance

The power of ideas : the state-sector relationship in policy and practice.

This thesis explores the relationship between the state and the voluntary sector as expressed within national documents and individual actor accounts. It is a response to the tendency within existing studies to cast voluntary sector organisations as passive in their context, responding to ideas from the central state rather than playing an active role in how and why particular ideas take hold. By first considering how the voluntary sector emerged as an object of policy, this thesis moves on to explore how both national texts and individual actors within organisations discursively present the role of the voluntary sector, the role of the state, and the relationship between the two. In order to explore this topic, this study uses a discursive methodology to consider the ideas within national documents and narratives of actors from Local Infrastructure Organisations (LIOs). This study drew on discursive approaches, such as discourse analysis, and sought to consider how and why ideas were constructed and used within different texts. This thesis contributes to knowledge in a number of ways. First, within the study of national policy documents, this thesis proposes an approach to bridging empirical studies of the societal and the micro levels of analysis, drawing on concepts of institutional logics and institutional message to demonstrate how national documents construct and convey institutional identity-cues for voluntary sector organisations. Second, within the study of the narrative of LIO actors, this study makes a series of contributions relating to the way we conceptualise what is happening at the organisational field level, linking the shifts in ideas at the societal level with the actor accounts of the implications of, and responses, to these shifting institutional logics. Third, the discursive analysis of actor accounts enables a consideration of the ways in which LIO actors are engaging in forms of identity work in order to align with, and distance from, voluntary sector identity-cues presented within national documents. These contributions are significant, particularly in light of debates surrounding the deepening austerity agenda, and associated cuts to services across communities in England. Such cuts have, at times, been presented within a narrative of the voluntary sector emerging to 'fill the gaps' and it is therefore important to start to understand how voluntary sector actors might be responding to such cues. This study therefore has implications for both sectors but also beneficiaries of both state and voluntary sector services, as it illuminates the way in which ideas are developing, and the way in which these ideas are reworked by actors at the local level

Greenwor(l)ds

Greenwor(l)ds rewrites the literary history of Canada from a feminist ecological perspective through a series of essays that examine the lives and work of nine women poets. Using insights from fields of knowledge as disparate as history and biology, physics and philosophy, psychoanalysis and communications studies, these essays reflect the transdisciplinary character of women's studies generally and feminist ecocriticism in particular