25 research outputs found
Heterotopia in Networked Learning: Beyond the Shadow Side of Participation in Learning Communities
As it has evolved, networked learning (NL) has come to emphasise the importance of the collaborative learning aspects and possibilities of online learning. The importance assumed for 'collaboration based' forms of participation within NL has almost become ubiquitous and is frequently seen as an unquestionable good aspect - a utopian view of participation which does not acknowledge the 'shadow side' of participation in learning. In the paper we examine some of the darker sides of collaborative participation which in its extreme manifestations can be experienced as normative and, we suggest, a form of tyranny of the dominant and which instead of having a liberating effect, reinforces a form of oppression and control. We argue this is most likely to be the case in the absence of reflexivity and understanding of different ways and approaches to participation. We go on to suggest an alternative and potentially more productive perspective which, after Foucault, is a heterotopian one. A perspective that acknowledges and assumes disruption and which disturbs our customary notion of ourselves. Participation in heterotopian spaces is disturbing and ambiguous, but it offers a space in which to imagine, to desire and act differently
âNo one is trash, no one is garbage, no one is cancelledâ:the cultural politics of trauma, recovery and rage in RuPaulâs Drag Race
Historically, Drag Race has mobilised stories about homophobia, family violence, racism and femmephobia that produce drag as a technology of recovery: a means of rising above trauma, in line with media scholarship on the centrality of personal trauma narratives in reality TV. Queer scholars have argued that this imperative to tell positive stories silences more melancholic, ânegativeâ voices; of the tension between the need to speak of âdamageâ, and a ârelated and contrary desire to affirm queer existenceâ. Seen as the embodiment of the histrionic, dramatic drag queen villainess and dubbed âthe whistle-blower of the seasonâ, Season 10 queen The Vixen subverted familiar trauma narratives, engendering an opening up around narratives of trauma, racism and transmisogyny. This paper examines The Vixenâs absence and her re-emergence on social media, reading her viral tweet declaring âno-one is cancelledâ as a provocation that unsettles dominant accounts of mental health, survival and trauma. I argue that in speaking up for the âtrash, garbage and cancelledâ subject, The Vixen speaks to Heather Loveâs call for a queer politics that consider injury as something that might be âlived with, not necessarily fixedâ. In this sense, her flawed star persona resonates with a mad scholarship that constituting a productive mad and queer politics of vulnerability
Madness decolonized?: Madness as transnational identity in Gail Hornsteinâs Agnesâs Jacket
The US psychologist Gail Hornsteinâs monograph Agnesâs Jacket: A Psychologistâs Search for the Meanings of Madness (2009) is an important intervention in the identity politics of the mad movement. Hornstein offers a resignified vision of mad identity that embroiders the central trope of an âanti-colonialâ struggle to reclaim the experiential world âcolonizedâ by psychiatry. A series of literal and figurative appeals make recourse to the inner world and (corresponding) cultural world of the mad, as well as to the ethno-symbolic cultural materials of dormant nationhood. This rhetoric is augmented by a model in which the mad comprise a diaspora without an origin, coalescing into a single transnational community. The mad are also depicted as persons displaced from their metaphorical homeland, the âinnerâ world âcolonizedâ by the psychiatric regime. There are a number of difficulties with Hornsteinâs rhetoric, however. Her âethnicity-and-rightsâ response to the oppression of the mad is symptomatic of Western parochialism, while her proposed transmutation of putative psychopathology from limit upon identity to parameter of successful identity is open to contestation. Moreover, unless one accepts Hornsteinâs porous vision of mad identity, her self-ascribed insider status in relation to the mad community may present a problematic âre-colonizationâ of mad experience
In whose interest? Exploring care ethics within transformative learning
This article brings attention to a seemingly pervasive and underlying assumption in critical management education that transformative learning is a good thing. We explore this assumption through a series of narratives examining the ethics of educators overtly seeking to enable transformative learning with owner-managers in order to impact on their businesses. The focus on owner-managers is of significance in terms of transformative learning because of the centrality of the owner-manager to the delicate ecosystem that is the small and medium business. The article makes salient relational care in critical
management education and the need for educators to engage in a moral dialogue regarding the relational impact of transformative learning in pedagogic designs. Such dialogue necessitates addressing in whose interest is transformative learning being sought, along with the orientation and framing of such learning
Digital culture clash: âmassiveâ education in the E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC
While education has been both open and online, the sizeable enrolment numbers
associated with massive open online courses (MOOCs) are somewhat unprecedented.
In order to gauge the significance of education at scale, this article analyses
specific examples of massive participation derived from E-learning and
Digital Cultures, a MOOC from the University of Edinburgh in partnership with
Coursera. Student-created content, user statistics, and survey data are illustrated
to examine the experiences and repercussions of engaging with educational
activity where participants number in the tens of thousands. This activity is
shown to mirror established instructionist or constructivist approaches to pedagogy.
However, rather than working with âmassiveness,â these positions are suggested
to oppose large participant numbers. Concluding remarks propose an
irreducible diversity of participation, rather than a generalised categorisation of
âstudent,â and call for future considerations of the MOOC to move beyond individualism
and self-interest
Unspeakable Bodies: Erasure, Embodiment and the Pro-ana Community.
In this article, I explore the extent to which the `virtual community' has been imagined as coming into being through acts of erasure that create unmarked citizens. In contrast, `pro-ana' websites that celebrate eating disorders aim to create a community in which a sense of collectivity is constituted precisely through the body, specifically the anorexic body. By encouraging members to speak out, these communities aim to subvert the economy of difference through which the anorexic body is always positioned as `other', as the body that `has' difference. I argue that the public outcry surrounding pro-ana communities represents an appeal to censorship as a means by which, as Kristeva argues, outsiders might be `ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable' in order to reinstate the notion of consensus through the suppression of some forms of difference
Role of emotion in online learning and knowledge production
http://www.education.ed.ac.uk/ice3/papers/ferredayhodgson.htm