7,987 research outputs found

    La Forma del cáncer: Socialización y representación visual de la enfermedad en Instagram

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    Social media platforms like Instagram are a source of information and support for cancer patients. On this platform, millions of images shared by patients, organisations and the general public give shape to the social imagination of one of the most feared illnesses around the world. This thesis proposes a method to identify and obtain images of cancer from Instagram, a social media that in 2022 remains nearly inaccessible to research. Through a transdisciplinary lens, it combines the sociology of everyday life, visual sociology and methodologies from social media analysis to discover visual patterns in the images and find alternative discourses. The results show the variety of visual resources that patients use to communicate their illness and support the construction of their identity. They also show how Instagram’s economy of affection favours the publication of positive images, aligned with the discourse of survivorship, while they hamper the expression of other experiences. It concludes with the proposal for a new regime in the communication of cancer, based on the concept of socialisation.Las redes sociales visuales como Instagram son una fuente de información y apoyo para pacientes de cáncer. En esta red, millones de imágenes compartidas por pacientes, organizaciones y por el público general configuran la imaginación social de una de las enfermedades más temidas en todo el mundo. Esta tesis plantea una metodología para extraer y estudiar imágenes de esta red, prácticamente inaccesible para la investigación en 2022, y para su codificación. A través de un enfoque transdisciplinar, combina la sociología de la vida cotidiana, la sociología visual y las metodologías del análisis de redes sociales para descubrir patrones visuales en las imágenes de cáncer e identificar discursos alternativos. Los resultados muestran la variedad de recursos visuales que utilizan los pacientes de cáncer para comunicar su enfermedad y apoyar un proceso de construcción de la identidad. Muestran también cómo la economía afectiva de esta plataforma favorece la publicación de imágenes positivas y alineadas con el discurso de la supervivencia, mientras que supone un reto para visibilizar otras experiencias. Concluye con la propuesta de un nuevo modelo de comunicación sobre cáncer, basado en el concepto de la socialización.Departamento de Sociología y Trabajo SocialDoctorado en Investigación Transdisciplinar en Educació

    The opinions of science and mathematics teachers about beliefs, practices, and implementation of meaningful learning in Israel. A case study of Arab middle school(s)

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    Wydział Studiów EdukacyjnychWiele badań pokazuje, że przekonania nauczycieli dotyczące nauczania i uczenia się silnie oddziałują na ich praktykę zawodową. Celem tej pracy było zbadanie przekonań i praktyk nauczycieli przedmiotów ścisłych i matematyki w arabskich szkołach średnich w Izraelu w obliczy wdrażania nowej reformy edukacyjnej w tym kraju, silnie osadzonej na koncepcji meaningful learning. Zgodnie z tą koncepcją, uczniowie powinni być aktywni i zaangażowani w proces rozwiązywania problemów, którego rdzeniem jest szeroko ujmowany dialog pomiędzy uczestnikami procesu uczenia się. W badaniach wykorzystano strategię badań jakościowych. Prowadzono obserwacje w klasie, częściowo ustrukturyzowane wywiady oraz analizy dokumentów (m.in. planów lekcji, testów, arkuszy roboczych) i notatek terenowych. Uczestnikami badania było dwudziestu nauczycieli z trzech szkół średnich w społeczeństwie arabskim. Uzyskane dane pozwoliły zarysować obraz przekonań tych nauczycieli na temat meaningful learning oraz zidentyfikować sytuacje, które nauczyciele postrzegają jako realizację tej koncepcji. Praca kończy się rekomendacjami dotyczącymi dalszych etapów wdrażania reformy edukacji w Izraelu.The introduction of a new reform potentially challenges teachers’ beliefs and practices about teaching. This case study explores these challenges in the context of a new reform in Israel, where major educational reform has been undertaken. A considerable body of research, alternatively, advocates that teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning affect their teaching practices and many aspects of their professional work. These beliefs and practices influence many factors on the contextual and teacher levels. Thus, this study aimed to investigate and understand Arab middle school science and mathematics teachers’ beliefs, practices, and implementation of meaningful learning in Israel. The resulting data served to construct a background picture regarding teachers’ beliefs on meaningful learning, classroom practices, and identifying situations that teachers perceived as the implementation of meaningful learning. The study found also that curricular demands, teacher perceptions of their students, pressures of time, assessment, crowded classrooms, lack of resources, workload, and inadequate teacher understanding of the components of meaningful learning inhibited student- centered instruction. Thus, along with the reformation of teachers, there should also be a reformation in the context of the learning atmosphere and infrastructures in tune with the new reform’s intentions

    Undoing borders, building the commons: the solidarity politics of the No Evictions Network in Glasgow

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    This thesis is about the spatial politics of migrant solidarities. Drawing on a scholaractivist approach, it engages with the struggles of the No Evictions Network in Glasgow. The Network emerged through the convergence of heterogeneous trajectories of activism and migrant advocacy in the city to challenge the eviction of over 300 asylum seekers by Serco, a multinational company that held a billionaire contract from the Home Office to accommodate asylum seekers in Glasgow and other areas across the UK. Bringing literature on Black Geographies to the analysis of the border regimes, the thesis positions migrant struggles in relation to black counter cartographies of struggle. Centring questions of race, it reframes current work on migration and solidarity through a nuanced engagement with black and feminist theories, making important interventions. On the one hand, engaging with the role that neoliberal companies like Serco develop within the political economies of the border and the production of migrants’ ‘premature death’ (Gilmore, 2007), the thesis addresses the Network’s politics as struggles against racial capitalism (Robinson, 1983). A focus on racial capitalism unpacks the articulations of racism, capitalism, or patriarchy underlying the struggles against borders, throwing light on the importance of building transversal alliances. The coming together of migrant collectives, housing struggles, and neighbours in the Network was an example of such alliances. Nevertheless, the political experiences of the Network illustrate how the crafting of solidarities and the negotiation of heterogeneous political cultures unfolds as a contentious process, crisscrossed by racialized, classed, and gendered borders (Featherstone, 2012). In this regard, special attention is drawn to the negotiation of power asymmetries and the tensions between strategies of ‘direct support’ and ‘political campaigning’ throughout the Network’s campaigns. The argument explores how migrant agencies performed powerful strategies of mutual support, collective empowerment, and healing, challenging racialized and gendered notions of the political and activist cultures. Building upon these experiences, the concept of ‘political reproduction’ underscores how social reproductive politics not only enable migrants’ survival across the deadly geographies of racial capitalism, but they are the means to build capacity of political struggle, linking to broader black and brown politics. Overall, the thesis explores how ‘undoing borders’ is an ongoing learning process that demands centring questions of antiracism and migrant agency when tackling the intertwining oppressions coming to the fore through place-based struggles (hooks, 2013; Mohanty, 2003)

    Designs of Blackness

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    Across more than two centuries Afro-America has created a huge and dazzling variety of literary self-expression. Designs of Blackness provides less a narrative literary history than, precisely, a series of mappings—each literary-critical and comparative while at the same time offering cultural and historical context. This carefully re-edited version of the 1998 publication opens with an estimation of earliest African American voice in the names of Phillis Wheatley and her contemporaries. It then takes up the huge span of autobiography from Frederick Douglass through to Maya Angelou. "Harlem on My Mind," which follows, sets out the literary contours of America’s premier black city. Womanism, Alice Walker’s presiding term, is given full due in an analysis of fiction from Harriet E. Wilson to Toni Morrison. Richard Wright is approached not as some regulation "realist" but as a more inward, at times near-surreal, author. Decadology has its risks but the 1940s has rarely been approached as a unique era of war and peace and especially in African American texts. Beat Generation work usually adheres to Ginsberg and Kerouac, but black Beat writing invites its own chapter in the names of Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman. The 1960s has long become a mythic change-decade, and in few greater respects than as a black theatre both of the stage and politics. In Leon Forrest African America had a figure of the postmodern turn: his work is explored in its own right and for how it takes its place in the context of other reflexive black fiction. "African American Fictions of Passing" unpacks the whole deceptive trope of "race" in writing from Williams Wells Brown through to Charles Johnson. The two newly added chapters pursue African American literary achievement into the Obama-Trump century, fiction from Octavia Butler to Darryl Pinkney, poetry from Rita Dove to Kevin Young

    Sensing Collectives: Aesthetic and Political Practices Intertwined

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    Are aesthetics and politics really two different things? The book takes a new look at how they intertwine, by turning from theory to practice. Case studies trace how sensory experiences are created and how collective interests are shaped. They investigate how aesthetics and politics are entangled, both in building and disrupting collective orders, in governance and innovation. This ranges from populist rallies and artistic activism over alternative lifestyles and consumer culture to corporate PR and governmental policies. Authors are academics and artists. The result is a new mapping of the intermingling and co-constitution of aesthetics and politics in engagements with collective orders

    Epistemic Thought Experiments and Intuitions

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    This work investigates intuitions' nature, demonstrating how philosophers can best use them in epistemology. First, the author considers several paradigmatic thought experiments in epistemology that depict the appeal to intuition. He then argues that the nature of thought experiment-generated intuitions is not best explained by an a priori Platonism. Second, the book instead develops and argues for a thin conception of epistemic intuitions. The account maintains that intuition is neither a priori nor a posteriori but multi-dimensional. It is an intentional but non-propositional mental state that is also non-conceptual and non-phenomenal in nature. Moreover, this state is individuated by its progenitor, namely, the relevant thought experiment. Third, the author provides an argument for the evidential status of intuitions based on the correct account of the nature of epistemic intuition. The suggestion is the fitting-ness approach: intuition alone has no epistemic status. Rather, intuition has evidentiary value as long as it fits well with other pieces into a whole, namely, the pertinent thought experiment. Finally, the book addresses the key challenges raised by supporters of anti-centrality, according to which philosophers do not regard intuition as central evidence in philosophy. To that end, the author responds to them, showing that they fail to affect the account of intuition developed in this book. This text appeals to students and researchers working in epistemology

    “Not the story you want, I’m sure”: Mental health recovery and the narratives of people from marginalised communities

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    Background: The dominant narrative in mental health policy and practice has shifted in the 21st century from one of chronic ill health or incurability to an orientation towards recovery. A recovery-based approach is now the most frequently used in services in the Global North, and its relevance has also been explored in Global South settings. Despite the ubiquity of the recovery approach, people experiencing poverty, homelessness, intersecting oppressions (based for example on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or ability), and other forms of social marginalisation remain under-represented within recovery-oriented research. More inclusive research has been called for to ensure that knowledge of recovery processes is not based solely on the experiences of the relatively well-resourced. Personal narratives of recovery from mental distress have played a central role in the establishment of the recovery approach within mental health policy and practice. Originating in survivor/service-user movements, the use of ‘recovery narratives’ has now become widespread for diverse purposes, including staff training to improve service delivery and increase empathy, public health campaigns to challenge stigma, online interventions to increase access to self-care resources, and as a distinctive feature of peer support. Research suggests that recovery-focused narratives can have benefits and also risks for narrators and recipients. At the same time, the elicitation of such narratives by healthcare researchers, educators and practitioners has been problematised by survivor-researchers and other critical theorists, as a co-option of lived experience for neoliberal purposes. Following a systematic review of empirical research studies undertaken on characteristics of recovery narratives (presented in Chapter 4), a need for empirical research on the narratives of people from socially marginalised groups was identified. What kinds of stories might we/they be telling, and what are their experiences of telling their stories? What do their experiences tell us about the use of stories within a recovery approach? Aim: Drawing on a body of critical scholarship, my aim is to conduct an empirical inquiry into (i) characteristics of recovery stories told by people from socially marginalised groups, and (ii) their experiences of telling their stories in formal and everyday settings. Method: I undertook a critical narrative inquiry based on the stories of 77 people from marginalised groups, collected in the context of a wider study. This comprised narratives from people with lived experience of mental distress who additionally met one or more of the following criteria: (i) had experiences of psychosis; (ii) were from Black, Asian and other minoritised ethnic communities; (iii) are under-served by services (operationalised as lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer + communities (LGBTQ+) or people identified as having multiple and complex needs); or (iv) had peer support roles. Two-part interviews were conducted (18 conducted by me). Part A consisted of an open-ended question designed to elicit a narrative, and part B was a semi-structured interview inviting participants to reflect on their experiences of telling their recovery stories in different contexts. Following Riessman’s analytical approach, I undertook three forms of analysis: a structural narrative analysis of Part A across the dataset (informed by a preliminary conceptual framework developed in Chapter 4); a thematic analysis of Part B where participants additionally reflected on telling their stories; and an in-depth performative narrative analysis of two accounts (parts A and B) from people with multiple and complex needs. Findings: In a structural analysis of Part A, the recovery narratives told by people from marginalised groups were found to be diverse and multidimensional. Most (97%) could be characterised by the nine dimensions described in the preliminary conceptual framework (Genre; Positioning; Emotional Tone; Relationship with Recovery; Trajectory; Turning Points; Narrative Sequence; Protagonists; and Use of Metaphors). Each dimension of the framework contained a number of different types. These were expanded as a result of the structural analysis to contain more types: for example, a ‘cyclical’ type of trajectory was added), and a more comprehensive typology of recovery narratives was produced. Two narratives were found to be ‘outliers’, in that their structure, form and content could not adequately be described by the majority of existing dimensions and types. These served as exemplars of the framework’s limitations. In a thematic analysis of Part B, my overarching finding was that power differentials between narrators and recipients could be seen as the key factor affecting participants’ experiences of telling their recovery stories in formal and everyday settings. Four themes describing the possibilities and problems raised by telling their stories were identified: (i) ‘Challenging the status quo’; (ii) ‘Risky consequences’; (iii) ‘Producing acceptable stories’ and (iv) ‘Untellable stories’. In a performative analysis of two narratives of people with multiple and complex needs (Parts A and B), I found two contrasting ways of responding to the invitation to tell a recovery story: a ‘narrative of personal lack’ and a ‘narrative of resistance’. I demonstrate how the genre of ‘recovery narrative’, with its focus on transformation at the level of personal identity, may function to occlude social and structural causes of distress, and reinforce ideas of personal responsibility for ongoing distress in the face of unchanging living conditions. Conclusion: The recovery narratives of people from socially marginalised groups are diverse and multidimensional. Told in some contexts, they may hold power to challenge the status quo. However, telling stories of lived experience and recovery is risky, and there may be pressure on narrators to produce ‘acceptable’ stories, or to omit or de-emphasise experiences which challenge dominant cultural narratives. A recovery-based approach to the use of lived experience narratives in research and practice may be contributing towards an over-emphasis on individualist approaches to the reduction of distress. This over-emphasis can be seen to reflect what has been identified as a global trend towards the ‘instrumental’ use of personal narratives for utilitarian purposes based on market values. Attention to power differentials and structural as well as agentic factors is vital to ensure that the use of narratives in research and practice does not contribute towards a decontextualised, reductionist form of recovery which pays insufficient attention to the economic, institutional and political injustices that people experiencing mental distress may systematically endure. A sensitive and socially just use of lived experience narratives will remain alert to a variety of power dimensions present within the contexts in which they are shared and hear

    Interdisciplinarity in the Scholarly Life Cycle

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    This open access book illustrates how interdisciplinary research develops over the lifetime of a scholar: not in a single project, but as an attitude that trickles down, or spirals up, into research. This book presents how interdisciplinary work has inspired shifts in how the contributors read, value concepts, critically combine methods, cope with knowledge hierarchies, write in style, and collaborate. Drawing on extensive examples from the humanities and social sciences, the editors and chapter authors show how they started, tried to open up, dealt with inconsistencies, had to adapt, and ultimately learned and grew as researchers. The book offers valuable insights into the conditions and complexities present for interdisciplinary research to be successful in an academic setting. This is an open access book
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