Jewish Studies in the Digital Age

The digitisation boom of the last two decades, and the rapid advancement of digital tools to analyse data in myriad ways, have opened up new avenues for humanities research. This volume discusses how the so-called digital turn has affected the field of Jewish Studies, explores the current state of the art and probes how digital developments can be harnessed to address the specific questions, challenges and problems in the field

Student, text, world : literacy and the expansion of pedagogical space

Using Foucault’s notion of a dispositif or social apparatus, this thesis charts the pedagogical relations established in contemporary literacy discourse in terms of a space of visibility and a form of sayability, and analyses them as operating within power-knowledge. It furthers this analysis by conceptualising the space of literacy as a normative heterotopia and as a recent mutation of bio-power, the government of the developing body. Such analysis problematises the discourse of literacy, from the term’s systematic indefiniteness to its real effectivity in producing subjects, spaces and disciplinary techniques. Literacy combines and interrelates a nineteenth-century establishment and a twentieth-century rearrangement of pedagogical space. The national language, the developing child, as well as the world of demands and national progress: all emerge as part of the nineteenth-century educational state, forming a set of disciplinary procedures, a structure of perception and a desire to recognise and utilise language development. Literacy discourse appropriates these knowledges and multiplies the sites in which they operate. It articulates the recognition and enablement of non-standard literacies with the governmental project of intensifying and directing the powers of a population. The pedagogical relations operationalised in literacy discourse project a continuous disciplinary power over a general social space. Thus, literacy has become both a common and much theorised social concern, and a term which structures lives, spaces, discourse and power.Beginning with a close analysis of a recent education policy document, this thesis looks at the deployment of literacy as a way of organising experience through discourse and as a means of modulating the relations between three historically constituted terms: the student, the text, and the world. Schooling and literacy thus insert themselves into a machinery of social production and into the production of everyday concerns and processes. Consequently, literacy enters into our most material and non-linguistic moments through a teleological arrangement of time and space, a pedagogisation which is at the same time a textualisation of existence

Jewish Studies in the Digital Age

The digitisation boom of the last two decades, and the rapid advancement of digital tools to analyse data in myriad ways, have opened up new avenues for humanities research. This volume discusses how the so-called digital turn has affected the field of Jewish Studies, explores the current state of the art and probes how digital developments can be harnessed to address the specific questions, challenges and problems in the field

Exploration of New Approaches to Expressing Cycling Experience

The overall question that occupies my work is the ways of using data visualisation, and complementing methods, in accessing the untold London cycling stories that fall in the gaps between the bars on a chart as well as striving to complement existing active travel methodologies and examine assumptions that accompany them. Munzner [219] describes the role of data visualization as helping "...when there is a need to augment human capabilities.". Human memory is fallible and selective [21], while quantitative data alone is reductionist. This work aims to help scaffold the fallible and augment the missing. It does that by examining combinations of methodologies for eliciting and capturing cycling experiences that are more encompassing and aim to tease out overlooked aspects of active travel. Data consists of datum (points) and, in my work, visualization is a prism for conducting, relating, focusing, and amplifying information they contain. I used maps to capture points of contact between the cyclist and their environment and interviews to capture refractions that are the result of that interaction. I did this by conducting three observational studies, the first two being linked paper studies. The first study was an open-ended study exploring the interaction of cyclists with maps, sketching, and expression. The study was conducted in person and the recruitment was conducted by convenience sampling. The second study built on the first and absorbed the vocabulary that was extracted using thematic analysis of the interviews. The study used base maps, augmentation, tokenisation sketching, and interviews. The third study was an in-depth, targeted inspection of minority female cycling. Gender, racial and socioeconomic inequalities in active travel are well documented [176][206]. Recent macro-studies [124] [125] of gender and active travel show the widespread inequality and highlight the existing disparity in the cycling uptake by women and ethnic minorities in countries with a low cycling modal share, like London. Hence, the study was contrived to illuminate mobility and the role of visualization in uncovering hidden powers and unseen realities of female ethnic minority cyclists. By focusing on the specific sub-group, Muslim and BAME women cyclists, it aims to get away from dominant voices and representations and reach the invisible. I used a mixed-method approach that combined ethnographic elements like participant observation with sensor technology tracking, and interactive visualization affording data-led but holistic and multilayered insights. Methods used in this work were effective in eliciting reflection and insights that are not captured by more traditional means. Hence, the contribution of this work is in the methods I am presenting, the analysis of different forms of visual cues for communication of the cycling experience and insights into the experience itself. This empirical work presents a new framing for considering the way cyclists use their environment and what this environment needs to offer. The last project is also giving a voice to the growing and vibrant cycling undercurrent of ethnic minority women in active travel as well as engaging the citizens-action groups that are supporting mobility (r)evolution

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!