Narratives from YouTube: Juxtaposing stories about physical education

The aim of this paper is to explore what is performed in students’ and teachers’ actions in physical education practice in terms of “didactic irritations,” through an analysis of YouTube clips from 285 PE lessons from 27 different countries. Didactic irritations are occurrences that Rønholt describes as those demanding “didactic, pedagogical reflections and discussions, which in turn could lead to alternative thinking and understanding about teaching and learning.” Drawing on Barad’s ideas of performativity to challenge our habitual anthropocentric analytical gaze when looking at educational visual data, and using narrative construction, we also aim to give meaning to actions, relations, and experiences of the participants in the YouTube clips. To do this, we present juxtaposing narratives from teachers and students in terms of three “didactic irritations”: (a) stories from a track, (b), stories from a game, and (c), stories from a bench. The stories re-present events-of-moving in the data offering insights into embodied experiences in PE practice, making students’ as well as teachers’ actions in PE practice understandable

No Girls Allowed: Television Boys’ Clubs as Resistance to Feminism

This article analyzes the male-only spaces present in four television series, FX’s The Shield, Nip/Tuck , Rescue Me, and ABC’s Boston Legal, which each include a gendered territory as a recurring feature. I argue that these homosocially segregated environments enforce boundaries against women and shelter intense bromance relationships that foreclose romantic relationships of any kind, acting as physical incarnations of troubling retrograde sexual politics and ideologies. I also assert that the “boys’ clubs” in which these narratives take place, enabled and empowered by the aesthetic dimensions of architecture and design, help establish workplace patriarchy as commonplace, reasonable, and benign. This article reveals that in these television boys’ clubs, problematic gender ideologies are protected and celebrated, misogyny is naturalized, and patriarchal beliefs and behaviors legitimized

Infrastructural Speculations: Tactics for Designing and Interrogating Lifeworlds

This paper introduces “infrastructural speculations,” an orientation toward speculative design that considers the complex and long-lived relationships of technologies with broader systems, beyond moments of immediate invention and design. As modes of speculation are increasingly used to interrogate questions of broad societal concern, it is pertinent to develop an orientation that foregrounds the “lifeworld” of artifacts—the social, perceptual, and political environment in which they exist. While speculative designs often imply a lifeworld, infrastructural speculations place lifeworlds at the center of design concern, calling attention to the cultural, regulatory, environmental, and repair conditions that enable and surround particular future visions. By articulating connections and affinities between speculative design and infrastructure studies research, we contribute a set of design tactics for producing infrastructural speculations. These tactics help design researchers interrogate the complex and ongoing entanglements among technologies, institutions, practices, and systems of power when gauging the stakes of alternate lifeworlds

“What i see when my eyes fall out”: anticipations, intensifications, immediacies, and transitions of identity construction, affect design, and movement building in digital spaces

This thesis project explores how social media intervenes in and co-constructs spaces, affects, communities, and identities. I demonstrate how autobiography through social media constrains, expands, automates, normalizes, and surveils us as we write, post, and share ourselves into a profoundly communal existence. I argue that social media guides our experiences and understandings of gender, race, class, and (dis)ability — by incorporating queer theory, feminist autobiography, disability justice, and narrative therapy frameworks, I recall how I have storied my life and how my life has been storied for me online over the past 20 years to curate a mad auto ethnography of social media profiles. This thesis brings together multiple interdisciplinary theoretical fields and works within emergent methodologies rooted in disability justice and madness liberation to give a surrealist sense of space and emotion reflected in both the mania of insanity and the rush of social media experience. By doing so, I demonstrate and reveal how social media impacts identities and communities via new sensations characterized by anticipation, intensification, immediacy, and transition

Imagining machine vision: Four visual registers from the Chinese AI industry

Machine vision is one of the main applications of artificial intelligence. In China, the machine vision industry makes up more than a third of the national AI market, and technologies like face recognition, object tracking and automated driving play a central role in surveillance systems and social governance projects relying on the large-scale collection and processing of sensor data. Like other novel articulations of technology and society, machine vision is defined, developed and explained by different actors through the work of imagination. In this article, we draw on the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to understand how Chinese companies represent machine vision. Through a qualitative multimodal analysis of the corporate websites of leading industry players, we identify a cohesive sociotechnical imaginary of machine vision, and explain how four distinct visual registers contribute to its articulation. These four registers, which we call computational abstraction, human–machine coordination, smooth everyday, and dashboard realism, allow Chinese tech companies to articulate their global ambitions and competitiveness through narrow and opaque representations of machine vision technologies.publishedVersio

Dialogical Skirmishes

Tan was guest editor for 'And Now China?', a special print edition of the Ctrl+P journal, which critically responded to the celebratory rhetoric’s of ‘China Now’ and other celebratory markers of China's global ascent in 2008. As well as the introductory article 'Dialogical Skirmishes', Tan also interviewed Hans Ulrich Obrist