Reconfiguring Early Childhood Education and Care

Part 1: IS/IT Implementation and AppropriationInternational audienceExisting studies of IT within early childhood education and care settings are scant, and those that do exist traditionally utilise a Cartesian worldview where humans and IT are separate self-sufficient entities with properties. In this worldview, change is attributed to either the technological or the human entity, leading to limited, either techno-centric or human-centred accounts of IT implementation and use. We reframe the activities in an early childhood organisation as a process of appropriation, and utilise a sociomaterial theory of technology appropriation alternative to the Cartesian worldview. We contribute a rich account of the changes that occur to the practices, the educators, and the technology itself during the appropriation process and demonstrate the theory’s usefulness as an analytical tool for providing a deeper understanding of how early childhood educators appropriate a new technology into their practices in a sociomaterial, non-dualistic way

The role of digital technologies in supporting quality improvement in Australian early childhood education and care settings

This national study explored the role of digital technologies in early childhood education and care settings and whether they could contribute to quality improvement as reported by educators and assessors of quality in Australia. In this paper, data from Stage 2 of the Quality Improvement Research Project were used, which comprised 60 Quality Improvement Plans from educators linked with 60 Assessment and Rating reports from the assessors who visited early childhood centres as part of the administration of the National Quality Standards by each of Australia’s State and Territory jurisdictions. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, U. (1995).Developmental ecology through space and time: A future perspective. In P. Moen, G.H. Elder, Jr., & K. Lüscher (Eds.), Examining lives in context: Perspectives on the ecologyof human development (pp. 619 – 647). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/10176-018; Bronfenbrenner & Ceci, Bronfenbrenner and Ceci, Psychological Review 101:568 – 586, 1994) was adopted to facilitate a systemic and dynamic view on the use of digital technologies in these 60 ECEC settings. References (e.g. comments/ suggestions/ examples) made by the educators about the implementation of digital technologies were counted and thematically analysed. Results revealed the strong role new technologies (e.g. documentation and management platforms, tablets, apps, etc.) play in the majority of ECEC settings and especially in relation to three of the seven Quality Areas: Educational programme and practice (Quality Area 1); Collaborative partnerships with families and communities (Quality Area 6) and Governance and leadership (Quality Area 7). Future directions for research are suggested and implications for embracing a more holistic, integrated and broad view on the use of digital technologies are discussed

Doing Ethnography in Teams: A Case Study of Asymmetries in Collaborative Research

This uniquely in-depth book offers a blow-by-blow account of the sometimes problematic dynamics of conducting collaborative fieldwork in ethnography. Tracing the interplay between co-researchers at various points of contact in both professional and personal relations, the analysis draws out the asymmetries which can develop among team members nominally working towards the same ends. It details the often complex dialogues that evolve in an attempt to navigate conflicting interests, such as team members resistances to particular methodological `recipes or research protocols. The authors show that such debates can create an open forum to negotiate new practices. A key element of this publication is that it goes beyond an analysis of more traditional power relations in research teams comprising members at different academic pay grades. As well as drawing attention to gender-related dynamics in research collaborations, the authors use themselves as an exemplar to demonstrate how differences in age, experience, knowledge, professional skills and background can be exploited to generate positive outcomes constituting much more than the apparent sum of their parts. In doing so, the authors reveal the delightful, surprising and yet challenging aspects of research collaboration that are often absent from the qualitative literature

Performing Continuity of/in Smart Infrastructure : Exploring Entanglements of Infrastructure and Actions

Nearly everything we do in contemporary organizations and societies builds on some form of infrastructure. Our reliance on infrastructures underscores the importance of the continuity of these infrastructures. However, the infrastructures are inherently unreliable and unpredictable and achieve veneers of permanence and stability only through constant and ongoing efforts. In their functioning, they become established through complex and uncertain processes that involve a number of actors and factors. Consequently, understanding those processes is a key concern for organizations that are responsible for these infrastructures. Traditionally, the literature on the business continuity of organizational functions has emphasized the importance of planning and management approaches. Practitioners and academics have brought forth frameworks to aid organizations in planning and managing their continuity-related issues. The frameworks offer universally applicable processes and procedures that organizations should follow to improve their continuity. However, these frameworks tell little about continuity itself. Organizations rarely function as they document or as management describes organizational work. As such, the complex and uncertain processes of continuity cannot be directly inferred from the documents or from the managerial descriptions of work. If we wish to enact meaningful changes to those complex and uncertain processes through which infrastructure continuity becomes established, we need to understand how those processes unfold in practice. This dissertation focuses on infrastructure continuity in a smart infrastructure context. Smart infrastructures are traditional infrastructures that have been extended with digital technologies. In this research, infrastructure continuity is approached from the perspective of technicians working in the smart infrastructure context. The technicians’ work in these contexts is constitutively entangled with information systems and the technologies that form the infrastructures. As such, the smart infrastructures form an intriguing and fruitful yet rather unexplored context for information systems research. Theoretically, this research builds on sociomaterial theorizing and especially on Karen Barad’s agential realism. The purpose of this dissertation is to increase understanding on how the continuity of smart infrastructure becomes performed. This purpose is explored through six research articles that form the foundations of this dissertation. Methodologically, this research builds on conceptual and empirical research approaches. The conceptual research focuses on developing and clarifying business continuity- and sociomateriality-related concepts and approaches through argumentation and a literature review. The empirical research builds on a qualitative research approach and, more specifically, on ethnographic research. As is typical for ethnographic research, the empirical material was collected from a single organization that was studied extensively over a several-month participant observation. Reflecting the purpose of the study, the ethnography was conducted in a centralized operations center of a smart infrastructure (smart power grid) where technicians work with information systems and technologies. This dissertation contributes to the literature on infrastructure continuity and on sociomateriality. The primary contribution to the infrastructure continuity literature is a performative conceptualization of the infrastructure continuity. This conceptualization suggests that business continuity is not an attribute of any single measure but is an outcome of a joint accomplishment of sociomaterial networks of agencies that becomes established through recurrent actions. As such, the findings of this research challenge some of the taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in the literature but also extend the earlier literature. In addition, this dissertation extends discussions on sociomaterial agency. In the light of the findings, when agency is situated in the context of a smart infrastructure, agency becomes historic, polycentric, dynamic, and discontinuous.Lähes kaikki mitä me teemme nyky-yhteiskunnassa nojaa infrastruktuureihin. Voimmekin sanoa elävämme keskellä infrastruktuurien verkostoa. Riippuvaisuutemme infrastruktuureista korostaa niiden toiminnan jatkuvuuden tärkeyttä. Nämä infrastruktuurit ovat kuitenkin perustaltaan epäluotettavia ja arvaamattomia. Niiden toimivuus syntyy monimutkaisten ja epävarmojen prosessien kautta, jotka sisältävät moninaisia toimijoita ja tekijöitä. Näiden prosessien ymmärtäminen on keskeistä organisaatioille, jotka vastaavat näistä infrastruktuureista. Perinteisesti kirjallisuudessa, joka keskittyy toiminnan jatkuvuuteen (eng. business continuity), on korostettu suunnitelmien ja hallinnoinnin merkitystä. Suunnitteluun ja hallinnointiin on kehitetty useita johtamisen viitekehyksiä. Ne tarjoavat universaaleiksi tarkoitettuja määrämuotoisia prosesseja ja menettelytapoja, joita organisaatioiden tulisi noudattaa. Nämä viitekehykset kertovat kuitenkin hyvin vähän siitä mitä tai miten toiminnan jatkuvuus itsessään käytännössä ilmenee. Organisaatiot harvoin toimivat kuten dokumentoivat tai kuten organisaatioiden johto kuvailee toimintaa, joten näistä ei voida suoraan päätellä organisaation toimintaa. Kuitenkin jos haluamme toteuttaa merkityksellisiä muutoksia niihin monimutkaisiin ja epävarmoihin prosesseihin, joiden kautta toiminnan jatkuvuus syntyy, meidän tulee ymmärtää paremmin näitä prosesseja käytännössä. Tässä tietojärjestelmätieteisiin sijoittuvassa väitöskirjassa keskitytään toiminnan jatkuvuuteen älykkäiden infrastruktuurien (eng. smart infrastructure) kontekstissa. Älykkäillä infrastruktuureilla tarkoitetaan tässä tutkimuksessa perinteisiä infrastruktuureja, kuten sähköverkkoja, vedenjakelua, ja tieverkostoa, jotka ovat digitalisoitu. Aihetta lähestytään erityisesti infrastruktuurin parissa toimivien teknikoiden työn kautta. Teknikoiden työ näissä ympäristöissä on nivoutunut kiinteästi yhteen tietojärjestelmien ja teknologioiden kanssa, jotka muodostavat infrastruktuurin. Älykkäät infrastruktuurit muodostavatkin näin erityisesti tietojärjestelmätieteiden tutkimukselle kiinnostavan, mutta vähän tutkitun kontekstin. Tutkimus pohjautuu teoreettisesti sosiomateriaalisuuteen ja nojaa erityisesti Karen Baradin filosofiseen ja teoreettiseen viitekehykseen toimijarealismista (eng. agential realism). Tutkimuksen tavoite on tuottaa ymmärrystä siitä, miten infrastruktuurien jatkuvuus toteutuu käytännössä. Tätä tavoitetta on tässä väitöskirjassa tutkittu kuuden vertaisarvioidun artikkelin kautta. Menetelmällisesti tutkimuksessa on nojattu sekä konseptuaaliseen että empiiriseen tutkimukseen. Konseptuaalinen tutkimus keskittyy toiminnan jatkuvuuden ja sosiomateriaalisuuden käsitteiden ja lähestymistapojen kehittämiseen sekä selventämiseen argumentoinnin ja kirjallisuuskatsauksen avulla. Empiirinen tutkimuspohjautuu laadulliseen tutkimusotteeseen ja nojaa etnografiseen tutkimusmenetelmään. Kuten etnografiselle tutkimusmenetelmälle on luonnollista, aineisto pohjautuu pääosin osallistuvaan havainnointiin yhdessä organisaatiossa, jota on tutkittu intensiivisesti. Heijastaen tutkimuksen tavoitetta ja ongelmanasettelua, etnografinen tutkimus suoritettiin älykkään infrastruktuurin (sähköverkon) keskitetyssä valvomossa, jossa teknikoiden työtä tietojärjestelmien ja teknologioiden parissa seurattiin useiden kuukausien ajan. Tutkimuksen tulokset osallistuvat infrastruktuurien toiminnan jatkuvuuden ja sosiomaterialisuuden keskusteluihin. Tutkimuksen keskeisin tulos toiminnan jatkuvuuden tutkimukseen on toiminnan jatkuvuuden konseptualisointi suoritettuna toimintana. Tämän konseptualisoinnin mukaan toiminnan jatkuvuus ei ole jonkin menetelmän ominaisuus vaan jatkuvuus tuotetaan yhteisesti sosiomateriaalisessa toimijoiden verkossa toistuvien tekojen kautta. Tutkimuksen tulokset siis haastavat mutta myös edistävät aiempaa kirjallisuutta toiminnan jatkuvuudesta. Lisäksi, tutkimuksen tulokset edistävät keskusteluita toimijuuden sosiomateriaalisuudesta. Tulosten valossa, kun toimijuutta tarkastellaan infrastruktuurikontekstissa, on toimijuus historiallinen, polysentrinen, dynaaminen ja yllätyksellinen.Siirretty Doriast

Socio-material reading of belonging: mobile children and mobile devices in school spaces

Despite national incentives and additional resourcing, large numbers of children from traditionally mobile families (specifically Gypsies and Travellers) do not engage with school in Scotland beyond the age of eleven. Community discourse suggests that the schools’ curriculum and social and cultural practices exclude them. By employing digital, visual research methods through a case-study approach this thesis explores what happens when children from Gypsy/Traveller families combine with digital media to make sense of their experiences of school. Two theoretical perspectives are connected––new materialism and dialogism––to investigate what effects are produced between children and digital media within schools’ social, material and pedagogic spaces. Analysis centres on both the children’s and the researchers’ interpretations. Fieldwork was structured through a series of three school-based interventions. These ran over two terms in 2018 and 2019. They involved nine children aged 8 to 11 years based in two primary schools in Scotland—one inner city, one rural. Each child participant had been ascribed Gypsy/Traveller ethnicity on the schools’ data records. The children’s families ranged from ‘settled’ (living permanently on local authority Traveller sites or houses) and semi-nomadic (travelling seasonally for work and cultural commitments). The study found that bringing the Gypsy/Traveller child together with digital media offered a powerful way of unlocking and surfacing the children’s lived experience of school. Through a series of critical and creative digital activities some children were able to perform aspects of their identities strongly in relation to their culture and some demonstrated how they experienced discomfort when school practices were in tension with this culture. However, the study also found that children could generate a sense of belonging through a wide range of people, things and events within the school environment and that, for most, a state of belonging was never fixed but constantly negotiated in different realms. The combination of child and media (here termed child/media spaces) offered distinct characteristics which, appeared to be necessary to the children’s generation of their own spaces of belonging. Here/there spaces, provisional space and shared space offered an accessible language. In each, the child and the media were able to play out different experiences, emotions and identities, particularly in response to the unequal power relations that the children encountered. The study suggests that the child/media space is part physical and part mental, combining elements of each, and similar to Soja’s Third Space, it can also be fluid, allowing children to move between elements of the material, the imagined and the symbolic (1996). The study proposes the need for new understandings of how digital media can contribute to combat exclusionary practices in schools for the children of Gypsy/Travellers and from other marginalised families. It suggests that belonging is a fluid construct that can be produced in multiple ways through the child/media spaces described in the study. This has positive implications and opens up possibilities for new thinking about the inclusion in schools of Gypsy/Traveller children

Trajectories of Belonging: Literacies and Intersectionality in the Mobile Phone and Home Building Practices of Syrian Refugees in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

This dissertation responds to Syrian nationals’ stories of displacement and settlement. Within these accounts, people contend with forced migration through language, personal networks, and technology. A sociomaterial theory of literacy recognizes the way in which these interviewees sought safety and belonging while accessing concrete systems in order to achieve material effects such as mobility and shelter. This dissertation’s case studies pertaining to mobile devices and refugee homes contribute to an infrastructural understanding of literacies as semiotic, social, affective, and material practices bearing an affordant and epistemically generative relation to physical infrastructures. The project’s interviewees used 2G communication infrastructures while travelling from Syria to Iraq and generated political readings of the powerful actors curating these infrastructures. These literate practices were motivated by dynamic emotional investments, which I read through the concept of belonging, a process of felt affiliation to people, places, and identities. By viewing belonging in terms of trajectories, I aim to suggest the rise and fall of emotional connection amid processual time and shifts in location. Expressions of belonging revealed that the overwhelming majority of the project’s interview participants identify as Kurds, and that they anticipated feeling at home in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). They were generally welcomed, yet a combination of factors tended to introduce vicissitudes into this feeling of belonging, including tensions between the refugee and host communities. The interviews gathered here suggest that many Kurdish-identifying interviewees experienced nuanced intersectional vulnerabilities co-constituted not only by Kurdish identity but also by language and dialect, social class, gender expression, Syrian origin, and documentary status. Situated intersectionality offers a framework for engaging non-Western categories of belonging and a social justice-oriented logic for articulating historical and political contexts with qualitative findings. Most importantly, it leads here to the disruption of mono-categorical claims about the community under discussion, including the Turkish state’s frequent justification of military aggression in the region through the reduction of all Kurds to the figure of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorist. In this way, this dissertation cultivates an orientation of transnational solidarity with the Kurdish-identifying Syrian asylum seekers living in the KRI

Socioecological learning at Lakshmi Ashram : with an emergent methodology of ethical intercultural research

Following the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2014), reviews identified a continuing lack of place-based and socioecological learning in culturally diverse contexts. It was suggested that local contexts, divergent cultural voices and alternative pedagogies could provide creative responses to current challenges to planetary wellbeing. This research focuses on one such instance of an alternative educational approach in a girls’ school in India, asking the questions, “What is the experience of community/place pedagogy at this school?” and “What is it to be and become in this intercultural space?” Taking an ethnographic approach in a different culture required particular attention to an ethical intercultural research practice. The emerging theoretical field of postqualitative inquiry, with its relational and processual ontology, offered such a practice. The onto-epistemological insights offered by Karen Barad and Gilles Deleuze, and then considered in the light of India’s own ancient Vedic philosophy, provided an ethical way forward. The research takes the shape of an “unravelling” ethnographic inhabitation of a girls boarding school located in the Lesser (but still very high) Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand. Run along the lines of Gandhian thinking on education, Lakshmi Ashram concerns itself with the development of head, hands and heart, activating that development with service in the wider community towards socio-economic and environmental justice. I am interested in the experience of place pedagogy and intercultural space in what presents as a socioecological learning community, porous and responsive to the surrounding environment, villages and region. This intimate research aims to contribute to more culturally inclusive educational imaginaries in a global landscape of initiatives to support planetary wellbeing. It contributes to the field as an instance of an educational community that is socioecological in attending to care of self and others, visitors, communities and the environment. It proposes literacies of affect and ethical intercultural (research) practice, to support the work of other researchers in other educational spaces and times. Accounting for the everyday intimacies of pedagogy in this one place, this thesis aims to provide an impetus for thinking differently about education: at the everyday level of enacting pedagogy in diverse cultural contexts, and in a wider landscape of developing humans able to think-otherwise in meeting the world

B/order work: recomposing relations in the seamful carescapes of health and social care integration in Scotland

As people, ageing and living with disabilities, struggle with how care is enacted through their lives, integrated care has gained policy purchase in many places, especially in the United Kingdom. Accordingly, there have been various (re)forms of care configurations instigated, in particular, promoting partnership and service redesign. Despite integrations apparent popularity, its contribution to improved service delivery and outcomes for people has been questioned, exposing ongoing uncertainties about what it entails and its associated benefits. Nonetheless, over decades, a remarkably consistent approach to integrated care has advanced collaboration as a solution. Equally, any (re)configurations emerge through wider infrastructures of care, in what might be regarded as dis-integrated care, as complex carescapes attempt to hold and aporias remain. In 2014, the Scottish Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Act mandated Health and Social Care Integration (HSCI), as a means to mend fraying carescapes; a flagship policy epitomising public service reform in Scotland, in which normative aspirations of collaboration are central. What then are the accomplishments of this ambitious legislation? From the vantage point of 2021, HSCI has been assessed as slow and insubstantial, but this is not the complete picture. Narratives about failing to meet expectations obscure more complicated histories of cooperation and discord, successes and failures, and unintended consequences. Yet given collaborative ubiquity, if partnerships are contested how then are they practiced? To answer this question, I embarked on an interorganisational ethnography of the enactment of a Health and Social Care Partnership (HSCP), which went ‘live’ on April 1st, 2016; in a place I call ‘Kintra’. I interrogate what happened when several managers (from the NHS and Council) endeavoured to implement HSCI according to the precepts of the Act; working to both (re)configure and hold things together behind care frontiers; away from the bodywork of direct care, immersed in everyday arrangements in the spaces of governance and operations. I chart their efforts to comply with regulations, plan, and build governance apparatuses through documents. I explore through coalescent objects how distributed forms of governance, entwined in policy implementation, were subsequently both sustained, and challenged. I observed for seven months actors struggling to (re)configure care services embedded in a collaborative approach, as well as establish the legitimacy of the HSCP; exemplified through the fabrication of what was understood as a 'must-do' commissioning plan. In tracing documents, I show the ways in which HSCI was simultaneously materialised and constituted through documentation. I reveal how, in the mundane mattering of document manufacturing, possibilities for (re)forming the carescape emerged. By delving into inconspicuous, ‘seamful’ b/order work that both sustained distinctions between the NHS and Council and enabled b/order crossings, I expose how actors were knotted, and how this shaped efforts to recompose the contours of the carescape. While ‘Kintra’s story might be familiar, situated in concerns that may resonate across Scotland; I reveal how collaboration-as-practice is tangled in differing organisational practices, emerging from quotidian intra-actions in meeting rooms, offices, car parks and kitchenettes. I deploy a posthuman practice stance to show not only the way in which public administration ‘does’ care, but it’s world-making through a sociomaterial politics of anticipation. I was told legislation was the only way to make HSCI in ‘Kintra’ happen, nevertheless, there was resistance to limit the breadth and depth of integrating. Consequently, I show how the (re)organising of b/orders was an always-ongoing act of maintenance and repair of a (dis)integrating carescape; as I learnt at the end of my fieldwork, ‘it’s ‘Kintra, ‘it’s aye been!

Making in the making

During the last two decades, we have witnessed the spreading of shared spaces of work and production in different urban contexts, attracting attention from both policymakers and scholars in economic geography and urban studies. In particular, Fablabs are considered open workshops for grassroots innovation, which is enabled by the availability of shared digital fabrication machines and by the possibility to share knowledge with peers and work together on a project, either in person or online. People attending Fablabs are usually called Makers and, according to the discourse surrounding them, they are deemed the harbingers of a democratisation of production and part of a broader transformation of urban economies and work in the era of digital capitalism. The book is the result of a PhD research on Makers and Fablabs in Turin, mainly based on an ethnographic observation conducted at Fablab Torino. It offers an original theoretical framework inspired by the recent strand of post-structuralist economic geography, together with a reliance on ontological tenets coming from Actor-Network Theory and Science and Technology Studies. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, the study is therefore of interest for scholars in different social sciences who study the reconfiguration of work and production in cities and digitally mediated economic transformations. The analysis unpacks the enactment of Making as a new form of work and production through three different conceptual foci – knowledge, materiality, and work. Notably, the inquiry looks at how Fablab Torino and the urban ‘Maker scene’ in Turin are performatively enacted through the entanglement between economic theories on the phenomenon with specific socio-technical arrangements aiming at making those economic theories true. The geographical relevance of the phenomenon is identified not in some static spatial configuration but, on the one hand, in the heterogeneous and emergent spatialities that emerge from individual practices of Making and, on the other, in the sociomaterial practices of organising that bring into being economic organisations such as Fablabs