Don’t throw rocks from the side-lines: A sociomaterial exploration of organizational blogs as boundary objects

Purpose Social media such as blogs are being widely used in organizations in order to undertake internal communication and share knowledge, rendering them important boundary objects. A root metaphor of the boundary object domain is the notion of relatively static and inert objects spanning similarly static boundaries. A strong sociomaterial perspective allows the immisciblity of object and boundary to be challenged, since a key tenet of this perspective is the ongoing and mutually-constituted performance of the material and social. Design/methodology/approach The aim of our research is to draw upon sociomateriality to explore the operation of social media platforms as intra-organizational boundary objects. Given the novel perspective of this study and its social constructivist ontology, we adopt an exploratory, interpretivist research design. This is operationalized as a case study of the use of an organizational blog by a major UK government department over an extended period. A novel aspect of the study is our use of data released under a Freedom of Information request. Findings We present three exemplar instances of how the blog and organizational boundaries were performed in the situated practice of the case study organization. We draw on literature on boundary objects, blogs and sociomateriality in order to provide a theoretical explication of the mutually-constituted performance of the blog and organizational boundaries. We also invoke the notion of ‘extended chains of intra-action’ to theorise changes in the wider organization. Originality/value Adoption of a sociomaterial lens provides a highly novel perspective of boundary objects and organizational boundaries. The study highlights the indeterminate and dynamic nature of boundary objects and boundaries, with both being in an intra-active state of becoming, challenging conventional conceptions. The study demonstrates that specific material-discursive practices arising from the situated practice of the blog at the respective boundaries were performative, reconfiguring the blog and boundaries and being generative of further changes in the organization

Visual Event Cueing in Linked Spatiotemporal Data

abstract: The media disperses a large amount of information daily pertaining to political events social movements, and societal conflicts. Media pertaining to these topics, no matter the format of publication used, are framed a particular way. Framing is used not for just guiding audiences to desired beliefs, but also to fuel societal change or legitimize/delegitimize social movements. For this reason, tools that can help to clarify when changes in social discourse occur and identify their causes are of great use. This thesis presents a visual analytics framework that allows for the exploration and visualization of changes that occur in social climate with respect to space and time. Focusing on the links between data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) and a streaming RSS news data set, users can be cued into interesting events enabling them to form and explore hypothesis. This visual analytics framework also focuses on improving intervention detection, allowing users to hypothesize about correlations between events and happiness levels, and supports collaborative analysis.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Computer Science 201

Defense, Disrespect, and #Deadly: A Qualitative Exploration of Precursors to Youth Violence Informed Through Hospital-Based Violence Prevention Program Follow Up

Success of youth violence intervention and prevention effects, particularly for gun violence, will be enhanced when efforts are appropriately informed by the antecedents and context of violence. Youth violence is guided by social and cultural norms that are shifting with the rise of technology. Bullying, gang violence, and self-directed violence is increasingly found to occur in the online space influencing peer groups across contexts. Through focus groups with youth at risk for violence and victimization, this study finds three themes emerge as common precursors to violence: defense of self or others, disrespect of self or family occurring in traditional community-based interactions, and threats or disrespect occurring through social media platforms. Youth violence prevention programs should consider how using social cognitive intervention framework could build knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed for violence intervention and prevention informed by precursors to violence found in this analysis

Seeing and unseeing Prevent’s racialized borders

This article provides a re-theorization of the Prevent strategy as racialized bordering. It explores how knowledge regarding the racist logics of British counter-terrorism are supressed through structures of white ignorance and how International Relations scholarship is implicated in this tendency to ‘whitewash’ Prevent’s racism. Building on the use of science fiction in International Relations, the article uses China Miéville’s novel The City and the City to undertake the analysis. Miéville evokes a world where the cities of Ul Qoma and Besźel occupy the same physical space but are distinct sovereign jurisdictions. Citizens are disciplined to ‘see’ their city and ‘unsee’ the other city to produce borders between the two. The themes of coding signifiers of difference and seeing/unseeing as bordering practices are used to explore how Prevent racializes Muslims as outsiders to a white Britain in need of defending. Muslim difference is hypervisibilized or seen as potentially threatening and coded as part of racialized symptoms which constitute radicalization and extremism. This article shows how the racial bordering of Prevent sustains violence perpetrated by white supremacists, which is subsequently ‘unseen’ through the case of Thomas Mair

Breastfeeding Discourse on Social Media

Using feminist theory, this study focuses on discourse around breastfeeding on Twitter. Using a mixed-methods approach, I first examine the use of the hashtag #breastfeeding on Twitter to identify the networks driving the discourse. The discourse analysis was completed to explore how feminist principles and mothers’ agency were represented in tweets related to breastfeeding. The results, based on (N = 2,818) tweets, show that discourses are seen as breastfeeding as “natural” and “primary,” bottle feeding as second best, sexualization versus the natural functions of the breast, breastfeeding as a provocative act, mothering as a public or private nexus, breastfeeding related product placement, breastfeeding as protection for baby or mother, support and education for breastfeeding, breastfeeding as it pertains to insurance, and intersectionality. Also, the network analysis found that the discourse was driven primarily by non-profits and health organizations

Debunking in a World of Tribes

Recently a simple military exercise on the Internet was perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the US. Social media aggregate people around common interests eliciting a collective framing of narratives and worldviews. However, the wide availability of user-provided content and the direct path between producers and consumers of information often foster confusion about causations, encouraging mistrust, rumors, and even conspiracy thinking. In order to contrast such a trend attempts to \textit{debunk} are often undertaken. Here, we examine the effectiveness of debunking through a quantitative analysis of 54 million users over a time span of five years (Jan 2010, Dec 2014). In particular, we compare how users interact with proven (scientific) and unsubstantiated (conspiracy-like) information on Facebook in the US. Our findings confirm the existence of echo chambers where users interact primarily with either conspiracy-like or scientific pages. Both groups interact similarly with the information within their echo chamber. We examine 47,780 debunking posts and find that attempts at debunking are largely ineffective. For one, only a small fraction of usual consumers of unsubstantiated information interact with the posts. Furthermore, we show that those few are often the most committed conspiracy users and rather than internalizing debunking information, they often react to it negatively. Indeed, after interacting with debunking posts, users retain, or even increase, their engagement within the conspiracy echo chamber

Clinicians Experience Using the Family as a Unit of Treatment for Black HIV-Positive Men Who Have Sex with Men

The present study examines the experiences of five licensed clinicians as they attempted to integrate the family as a unit of treatment into the treatment of Black HIV-positive men who have sex with men (BHPMSM). A single 90-minute focus group study using an interpretive phenomenological approach (IPA) was conducted with five clinicians from diverse backgrounds. The results of the study show that clinicians attempting to integrate the family into the treatment of BHPMSM shared common experiences in the areas of building community through encouraging client self-determination, navigating religion, navigating HIV stigma, feelings of incompetence, and feelings of gratification after successful integration of the family into treatment. These five main themes were further nuanced by the Black and queer identities of BHPMSM and the gender of their family members. Overall, the results show that the family does play an essential role in the treatment of BHPMSM. Further results are discussed in association with existing research, as well as family systems theory and implications for future research are offered