Personal Artifact Ecologies in the Context of Mobile Knowledge Workers

Recent work suggests that technological devices and their use cannot be understood in isolation, and must be viewed as part of an artifact ecology. With the proliferation of information and communication technologies (ICTs), studying artifact ecologies is essential in order to design new technologies with effective affordances. This paper extends the discourse on artifact ecologies by examining how such ecologies are constructed in the context of mobile knowledge work, as sociotechnical arrangements that consist of technological, contextual, and interpretive layers. Findings highlight the diversity of ICTs that are adopted to support mobile work practices, and effects of individual preferences and contextual factors (norms of collaboration, spatial mobility, and organizational constraints)

Digital assemblages, information infrastructures, and mobile knowledge work

We theorize mobile knowledge workers’ uses of digital and material resources in support of their working practices. We do so to advance current conceptualizations of both “information infrastructures” and “digital assemblages” as elements of contemporary knowledge work. We focus on mobile knowledge workers as they are (increasingly) self-employed (e.g., as freelancers, entrepreneurs, temporary workers, and contractors), competing for work, and collaborating with others: one likely future of work that we can study empirically. To pursue their work, mobile knowledge workers draw together collections of commodity digital technologies or digital assemblages (e.g., laptops, phones, public WiFi, cloud storage, and apps), relying on a reservoir of knowledge about new and emergent means to navigate this professional terrain. We find that digital assemblages are created and repurposed by workers in their infrastructuring practices and in response to mobility demands and technological environments. In their constitution, they are generative to both collaborative and organizational goals. Building from this, we theorize that digital assemblages, as individuated forms of information infrastructure, sustain stability and internal cohesion even as they allow for openness and generativity

Early childhood teachers’ conceptualization of learning in three different educational public school settings

In this era of high stakes testing and accountability, how and what children learn in the early childhood classroom depends ultimately upon what their teachers make available to them (Goldstein, 2008; Lipsky, 1980). What teachers bring to children is thought to be associated with their beliefs about learning, and beliefs have been found to impact teacher behaviors i.e. classroom management, instruction, pedagogical methods, planning, and the students’ educational experience (Banu, 2014; Wiebe-Berry, 2006; Gutiervez, 1994; Brophy & Good, 1974; Avgitidou et al 2013). This study explored the links between a teacher’s conceptualizations of learning and her classroom practices and interactions with children. This was an ethnographic case study built with grounded theory as a way of interpreting and analyzing data. Three public-school settings located in central Texas were chosen as research sites—a public elementary school, a public charter school, and a Head Start. The participants were four prekindergarten teachers located in central Texas. Teachers’ conceptualizations of learning, the learner, and the role of the teacher were extricably intertwined and influenced the types of learning experiences teachers provided to children and the nature of the interactions in the classroom. Teachers’ conceptualizations of learning was influenced by their workplace environment and influenced the way in which they responded to the various ecologies present in their educational setting.Curriculum and Instructio

Niche Construction and the Study of Culture Change in Anthropology: Challenges and Prospects

Many North American anthropologists remain deeply suspicious of attempts to theorize the evolution of culture, given the legacy in our discipline of nineteenth-century stagist theories of cultural evolution that were shaped by scientific racism. In the late twentieth-century, some theorists tried to escape this legacy by using formal models drawn from neo-Darwinian population biology to reconceptualize cultural evolutionary processes, but these more recent approaches have been found unsatisfactory for reasons of their own. For example, gene-culture coevolution and dual inheritance theory have limited appeal to many contemporary cultural anthropologists because these theories rely on definitions of culture, and assumptions about human individuals and social groups, that many cultural anthropologists no longer find persuasive. Niche construction, by contrast, appears more promising as a framework for connecting cultural change with biological and ecological change. Nevertheless, the innovative features of niche construction coexist uneasily alongside the same problematic features that limit the usefulness of gene-culture coevolution and dual inheritance theory in cultural anthropology. This article discusses anthropological concerns about niche construction theory, but also suggests ways in which some of them might be reduced if niche construction theory were to incorporate insights from developmental systems theory and actor network theory

Towards the Paperless Office : Ecology of artifacts at work

Stepping one step closer to the paperless office by looking into existing technologies. Looking at the whole ecology of digital artifacts of users. Only by understanding how people use paper, how they relate to their digital ecology of artifacts, and what makes them adopt new products can we hope to get one step closer to the paperless office. There has been an extreme growth in mobile devices the last couple of year, and there have been a couple of new platforms emerging in the mobile ecology. This spark in multiple devices at the office leads to new ways of looking at how the existing ecology of digital artifacts can support some of the affordances of paper. The new emerging platforms transform the concept of compatibility in the mobile ecology. Because of this the earlier thought on what the limitation of the existing technologies are not that relevant any more. The problem seem to lie more in the way people deal with context and labeling and how this leads to consumers use of digital artifacts in a sequential manner

Documenting multiple temporalities

Purpose: This article explores the varied ways that individuals create and use calendars, planners, and other cognitive artifacts to document the multiple temporalities that make up their everyday lives. It reveals the hidden documentary time work required to synchronize, coordinate, or entrain their activities to those of others. Design/methodology/approach: We interviewed 47 Canadian participants in their homes, workplaces, or other locations, and photographed their documents. We analyzed qualitatively; first thematically to identify mentions of times, and then relationally to reveal how documentary time work was situated within participants’ broader contexts. Findings: Participants’ documents revealed a wide variety of temporalities, some embedded in the templates they used, and others added by document creators and users. Participants’ documentary time work involved creating and using a variety of tools and strategies to reconcile and manage multiple temporalities and indexical time concepts that held multiple meanings. Their work employed both standard “off the shelf” and individualized “do-it-yourself” approaches. Originality: This article combines several concepts of invisible work (document work, time work, articulation work) to show both how individuals engage in documentary time work and how that work is situated within broader social and temporal contexts and standards

The Multispecies Metropolis: Anthropological Ruminations on Bestial Urbanism

Human-animal co-habitation is a fact of urban existence, yet animals are illegible in the contemporary American city. As climate change, development, and other planetary forces disturb the more-than-human dynamics of cities, often gravely, anthropological pedagogy must go beyond rehearsing urbanicity as a strictly human quality. This article ruminates on an interdisciplinary experiment in teaching the animal city through a local project in design anthropology that coupled ethnographic fieldwork and speculative design. By empirically studying how the built environment unevenly mediates human and animal livelihoods and relations, students uncovered the possibilities of alternative architectures for nonhumans and curated them in a public design exhibition. Through research-based action, this course cultivated a body of dispositions in students that did not just expose the city’s animals but oriented them to the pursuit of multispecies justice—an ethico-aesthetic praxis that I style as “bestial urbanism.”&nbsp