2,222 research outputs found

    Researching animal research: What the humanities and social sciences can contribute to laboratory animal science and welfare

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    Every year around 80 million scientific procedures are carried out on animals globally. These experiments have the potential to generate new understandings of biology and clinical treatments. They also give rise to ongoing societal debate.This book demonstrates how the humanities and social sciences can contribute to understanding what is created through animal procedures - including constitutional forms of research governance, different institutional cultures of care, the professional careers of scientists and veterinarians, collaborations with patients and publics, and research animals, specially bred for experiments or surplus to requirements.Developing the idea of the animal research nexus, this book explores how connections and disconnections are made between these different elements, how these have reshaped each other historically, and how they configure the current practice and policy of UK animal research

    Understanding the complexities of supporting children’s career aspirations and preparedness for the changing world of work

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    Aspiring to and preparing for a career is becoming an increasingly complex activity for children and adolescents. A young person entering the job market is now more likely to experience multiple career transitions. Recent technological advances are making many routine and some non-routine jobs more susceptible to automation, as well as changing the skill and task requirements within occupations. These changing career conditions are raising complexities for those who support children’s and adolescents’ career aspirations and preparedness. Career theories and interventions incorporating person-occupation matching approaches may increasingly encounter problems as it may become more difficult to explore rapidly evolving occupational requirements with young people and achieve good-fitting or sustained matches between their career aspirations/choices and future job opportunities. Possible mismatches could mean that more young people experience unemployment and/or various opportunity costs from pursuing or failing to adequately prepare for careers affected by automation. To contribute to an enhanced understanding of these problems, this thesis investigated the complexities of supporting children’s and adolescents’ career aspirations and preparedness for the changing world of work. To understand different aspects of the problem, this thesis reports three consecutive and interrelated studies carried out using a mixed methods design. These studies were conducted to address the following overarching research question: what are the complexities of supporting children’s career aspirations and preparedness for automation and job change? The research studies were informed by Social Cognitive Career Theory. First, to estimate the automation-related career risks different groups of school students may encounter over the coming decades, an analysis was conducted using large-scale survey data covering primary and secondary school students’ career aspirations and probability statistics on job automation. Study results revealed that adolescents, male students, lower-income groups, and students’ parental occupation were associated with a greater likelihood of aspiring to an occupation at higher risk of automation. While the results from Study One highlighted possible automation-related risks for school children and different subgroups, these risks are potentially nuanced, affecting some higher status and non-routine occupations as well as routine roles. Due to this emerging complexity, it was important to review how recent career aspiration interventions have approached the changing career conditions to critically evaluate a range of possible approaches to the problem. The second study comprised of a systematic review of career aspiration intervention studies involving children (aged 5-18) to gain insights and identify gaps in how recent intervention approaches have/have not addressed job change. Review findings showed that the interventions often focused on select demographic groups and job sectors, with STEM occupations, females, and adolescents targeted more frequently. It was also shown that the intervention objectives and learning content largely did not address changes within occupations or job markets. Because of the limited approaches to addressing job change identified in Study Two, along with the automation-related career risks estimated in Study One, there was reason to explore how a contemporary career education provision could address automation and job change with children. Considering the context-specific complexities involved in supporting children’s preparedness for automation and job change, it was important to examine the perspectives of stakeholders who contribute to children’s career education to reveal possible conceptual issues and the practical opportunities and challenges they encounter. Focusing on the Scottish career education system, a case study was conducted using a thematic analysis of career documentation, a focus group, and interviews with career policymakers, practitioners, and a sample of primary and secondary schoolteachers. Findings revealed that the career education stakeholders conceptualised automation as creating new occupations rather than resulting in the mass displacement of jobs. However, despite recognising that specific job types were becoming more susceptible to automation and that different groups of children tend to aspire to certain types of occupations, stakeholders did not infer that automation may contribute to differential career impacts across groups. Several practical challenges were raised by stakeholders, including managing some children’s anxiety due to future career uncertainty. Consistent with insights from Study Two, Study Three findings showed stakeholders focused on general career skills and adaptability without also exploring the reasons and principles underlying automation and job change. Fostering this meta understanding of job change could aid young people in their career preparedness and decision making by enabling them to discern likely changes to occupations and job markets. After synthesising findings from the three studies, recommendations for advancing career theory and practice were provided. A key contribution of this research was highlighting potential limitations of aspiration-occupation matching theories and interventions by identifying automation-related career risks and supplementary approaches to address the nuanced changes within occupations and job markets. In sum, this thesis revealed how automation and job change may serve as both an environmental barrier and a potential source of inspiration for children as they pursue and prepare for their future careers

    Derogatory, Racist, and Discriminatory Speech (DRDS) in Video Gaming

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    Video games have been examined for their effects on cognition, learning, health, and physiological arousal, yet research on social dynamics within video gaming is limited. Studies have documented the presence of derogation, racism, and discrimination in this anonymous medium. However, gamers‟ firsthand experiences are typically examined qualitatively. Thus, this study aimed to establish a quantitative baseline for the frequency of derogatory, racist, and discriminatory speech (DRDS) in gaming. DRDS frequency, sexual harassment, and hate speech measures were administered to 150 individuals from online forums and social media groups. Descriptive and inferential analyses were used to gauge which factors affected DRDS rates. Sex, intergroup and fast-paced game types, time played with others, and identity portrayal showed positive correlations with DRDS. Results indicate an array of complex social and developmental factors contribute to experiencing, perceiving, and personally using DRDS. Implications include psychosocial health impacts similar to everyday harassment, with women being at a higher risk and age as a contributing factor

    Measuring the Impact of China’s Digital Heritage: Developing Multidimensional Impact Indicators for Digital Museum Resources

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    This research investigates how to best assess the impact of China’s digital heritage and focuses on digital museum resources. It is motivated by the need for tools to help governing bodies and heritage organisations assess the impact of digital heritage resources. The research sits at the intersection of Chinese cultural heritage, digital heritage, and impact assessment (IA) studies, which forms the theoretical framework of the thesis. Informed by the Balanced Value Impact (BVI) Model, this thesis addresses the following questions: 1. How do Western heritage discourses and Chinese culture shape ‘cultural heritage’ and the museum digital ecosystem in modern China? 2. Which indicators demonstrate the multidimensional impacts of digital museum resources in China? How should the BVI Model be adapted to fit the Chinese cultural landscape? 3. How do different stakeholders perceive these impact indicators? What are the implications for impact indicator development and application? This research applies a mixed-method approach, combining desk research, survey, and interview with both public audiences and museum professionals. The research findings identify 18 impact indicators, covering economic, social, innovation and operational dimensions. Notably, the perceived usefulness and importance of different impact indicators vary among and between public participants and museum professionals. The study finds the BVI Model helpful in guiding the indicator development process, particularly in laying a solid foundation to inform decision-making. The Strategic Perspectives and Value Lenses provide a structure to organise various indicators and keep them focused on the impact objectives. However, the findings also suggest that the Value Lenses are merely signifiers; their signified meanings change with cultural contexts and should be examined when the Model is applied in a different cultural setting. This research addresses the absence of digital resource IA in China’s heritage sector. It contributes to the field of IA for digital heritage within and beyond the Chinese context by challenging the current target-setting culture in performance evaluation. Moreover, the research ratifies the utility of the BVI Model while modifying it to fit China’s unique cultural setting. This thesis as a whole demonstrates the value of using multidimensional impact indicators for evidence-based decision-making and better museum practices in the digital domain

    Protecting Privacy in Indian Schools: Regulating AI-based Technologies' Design, Development and Deployment

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    Education is one of the priority areas for the Indian government, where Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are touted to bring digital transformation. Several Indian states have also started deploying facial recognition-enabled CCTV cameras, emotion recognition technologies, fingerprint scanners, and Radio frequency identification tags in their schools to provide personalised recommendations, ensure student security, and predict the drop-out rate of students but also provide 360-degree information of a student. Further, Integrating Aadhaar (digital identity card that works on biometric data) across AI technologies and learning and management systems (LMS) renders schools a ‘panopticon’. Certain technologies or systems like Aadhaar, CCTV cameras, GPS Systems, RFID tags, and learning management systems are used primarily for continuous data collection, storage, and retention purposes. Though they cannot be termed AI technologies per se, they are fundamental for designing and developing AI systems like facial, fingerprint, and emotion recognition technologies. The large amount of student data collected speedily through the former technologies is used to create an algorithm for the latter-stated AI systems. Once algorithms are processed using machine learning (ML) techniques, they learn correlations between multiple datasets predicting each student’s identity, decisions, grades, learning growth, tendency to drop out, and other behavioural characteristics. Such autonomous and repetitive collection, processing, storage, and retention of student data without effective data protection legislation endangers student privacy. The algorithmic predictions by AI technologies are an avatar of the data fed into the system. An AI technology is as good as the person collecting the data, processing it for a relevant and valuable output, and regularly evaluating the inputs going inside an AI model. An AI model can produce inaccurate predictions if the person overlooks any relevant data. However, the state, school administrations and parents’ belief in AI technologies as a panacea to student security and educational development overlooks the context in which ‘data practices’ are conducted. A right to privacy in an AI age is inextricably connected to data practices where data gets ‘cooked’. Thus, data protection legislation operating without understanding and regulating such data practices will remain ineffective in safeguarding privacy. The thesis undergoes interdisciplinary research that enables a better understanding of the interplay of data practices of AI technologies with social practices of an Indian school, which the present Indian data protection legislation overlooks, endangering students’ privacy from designing and developing to deploying stages of an AI model. The thesis recommends the Indian legislature frame better legislation equipped for the AI/ML age and the Indian judiciary on evaluating the legality and reasonability of designing, developing, and deploying such technologies in schools

    Conversations on Empathy

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    In the aftermath of a global pandemic, amidst new and ongoing wars, genocide, inequality, and staggering ecological collapse, some in the public and political arena have argued that we are in desperate need of greater empathy — be this with our neighbours, refugees, war victims, the vulnerable or disappearing animal and plant species. This interdisciplinary volume asks the crucial questions: How does a better understanding of empathy contribute, if at all, to our understanding of others? How is it implicated in the ways we perceive, understand and constitute others as subjects? Conversations on Empathy examines how empathy might be enacted and experienced either as a way to highlight forms of otherness or, instead, to overcome what might otherwise appear to be irreducible differences. It explores the ways in which empathy enables us to understand, imagine and create sameness and otherness in our everyday intersubjective encounters focusing on a varied range of "radical others" – others who are perceived as being dramatically different from oneself. With a focus on the importance of empathy to understand difference, the book contends that the role of empathy is critical, now more than ever, for thinking about local and global challenges of interconnectedness, care and justice

    Fictocritical Cyberfeminism: A Paralogical Model for Post-Internet Communication

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    This dissertation positions the understudied and experimental writing practice of fictocriticism as an analog for the convergent and indeterminate nature of “post-Internet” communication as well a cyberfeminist technology for interfering and in-tervening in metanarratives of technoscience and technocapitalism that structure contemporary media. Significant theoretical valences are established between twen-tieth century literary works of fictocriticism and the hybrid and ephemeral modes of writing endemic to emergent, twenty-first century forms of networked communica-tion such as social media. Through a critical theoretical understanding of paralogy, or that countercultural logic of deploying language outside legitimate discourses, in-volving various tactics of multivocity, mimesis and metagraphy, fictocriticism is ex-plored as a self-referencing linguistic machine which exists intentionally to occupy those liminal territories “somewhere in among/between criticism, autobiography and fiction” (Hunter qtd. in Kerr 1996). Additionally, as a writing practice that orig-inated in Canada and yet remains marginal to national and international literary scholarship, this dissertation elevates the origins and ongoing relevance of fictocriti-cism by mapping its shared aims and concerns onto proximal discourses of post-structuralism, cyberfeminism, network ecology, media art, the avant-garde, glitch feminism, and radical self-authorship in online environments. Theorized in such a matrix, I argue that fictocriticism represents a capacious framework for writing and reading media that embodies the self-reflexive politics of second-order cybernetic theory while disrupting the rhetoric of technoscientific and neoliberal economic forc-es with speech acts of calculated incoherence. Additionally, through the inclusion of my own fictocritical writing as works of research-creation that interpolate the more traditional chapters and subchapters, I theorize and demonstrate praxis of this dis-tinctively indeterminate form of criticism to empirically and meaningfully juxtapose different modes of knowing and speaking about entangled matters of language, bod-ies, and technologies. In its conclusion, this dissertation contends that the “creative paranoia” engendered by fictocritical cyberfeminism in both print and digital media environments offers a pathway towards a more paralogical media literacy that can transform the terms and expectations of our future media ecology

    Understanding Agreement and Disagreement in Listeners’ Perceived Emotion in Live Music Performance

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    Emotion perception of music is subjective and time dependent. Most computational music emotion recognition (MER) systems overlook time- and listener-dependent factors by averaging emotion judgments across listeners. In this work, we investigate the influence of music, setting (live vs lab vs online), and individual factors on music emotion perception over time. In an initial study, we explore changes in perceived music emotions among audience members during live classical music performances. Fifteen audience members used a mobile application to annotate time-varying emotion judgments based on the valence-arousal model. Inter-rater reliability analyses indicate that consistency in emotion judgments varies significantly across rehearsal segments, with systematic disagreements in certain segments. In a follow-up study, we examine listeners' reasons for their ratings in segments with high and low agreement. We relate these reasons to acoustic features and individual differences. Twenty-one listeners annotated perceived emotions while watching a recorded video of the live performance. They then reflected on their judgments and provided explanations retrospectively. Disagreements were attributed to listeners attending to different musical features or being uncertain about the expressed emotions. Emotion judgments were significantly associated with personality traits, gender, cultural background, and music preference. Thematic analysis of explanations revealed cognitive processes underlying music emotion perception, highlighting attributes less frequently discussed in MER studies, such as instrumentation, arrangement, musical structure, and multimodal factors related to performer expression. Exploratory models incorporating these semantic features and individual factors were developed to predict perceived music emotion over time. Regression analyses confirmed the significance of listener-informed semantic features as independent variables, with individual factors acting as moderators between loudness, pitch range, and arousal. In our final study, we analyzed the effects of individual differences on music emotion perception among 128 participants with diverse backgrounds. Participants annotated perceived emotions for 51 piano performances of different compositions from the Western canon, spanning various era. Linear mixed effects models revealed significant variations in valence and arousal ratings, as well as the frequency of emotion ratings, with regard to several individual factors: music sophistication, music preferences, personality traits, and mood states. Additionally, participants' ratings of arousal, valence, and emotional agreement were significantly associated to the historical time periods of the examined clips. This research highlights the complexity of music emotion perception, revealing it to be a dynamic, individual and context-dependent process. It paves the way for the development of more individually nuanced, time-based models in music psychology, opening up new avenues for personalised music emotion recognition and recommendation, music emotion-driven generation and therapeutic applications

    Modernising European Legal Education (MELE) : Innovative Strategies to Address Urgent Cross-Cutting Challenges

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    This open access book presents innovative strategies to address cross-cutting topics and foster transversal competences. The modernization of European legal education presents a compelling challenge that calls for enhanced interdisciplinary collaboration among academic disciplines and innovative teaching methods. The volume introduces venues towards education innovation and engages with complex and emerging topics such as datafication, climate change, gender, and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. The insights presented not only emphasize the importance of preserving traditional approaches to legal disciplines and passing them on to future generations, but also underscore the need to critically reassess and revolutionize existing structures. As our societies become more diverse and our understanding of legitimacy, justice, and values undergoes transformations, it is imperative to reconsider the role of traditional values while exploring promising alternative approaches
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