The power of living knowledge: re-imagining horizontal knowledge

© 2019, © 2019 Australian Teacher Education Association. Educationalists tend to imagine school curricula organised solely around academic, formal knowledge or horizontal discourse. Yet, despite curricula organised around vertical discourses such as science, geography and mathematics, the working classes, the poor and minority ethnically groups achieve less well in education than the middle classes. The paper aims to re-think horizontal knowledge by paying attention to it as place-based, sensory, embodied, indigenous and historically developed forms of knowing in order: 1) to broaden debates about school knowledge; 2) to support teachers to recognise and legitimate forms of knowing beyond those prescribed by academic curricular and 3) to re-imagine it as living knowledge that has value. To illuminate what might be powerful in horizontal knowledge Gilbert Simondon’s genetic ontology and his concepts of pre-individuation, persons are not fixed for all time, and transindividual, a uniquely collective form of knowing, are introduced. The paper argues that by re-thinking horizontal knowledge young people can be imagined as having multiple ways of being and education can support them to become more; more than social class, more than poverty, more than an exam failure and more than an individual, fixed for all time

Posthuman co-production: becoming response-able with what matters

Purpose: This paper introduces the concept of posthuman co-production. It explores how processual and relational onto-epistemologies inform an artful, response-able (Barad 2007) feminist new materialist praxis that decentres the human and re-centres matter. Design/methodology/approach: Posthuman co-production gives prominence to crafting “dartaphacts” (Renold, 2018); creative research artefacts, carrying “what matters” and enacting change that can be mapped across time and multiple “problem spaces” (Lury, 2020), as an expansive, post-qualitative praxis of slow, co-production. Findings: The paper stories this praxis across three “fugal figurations” providing glimpses into the post-qualitative journeys of assembled dartaphacts in the policy and practice field of relationships and sexuality education (RSE) in Wales. Each fugue hints at the polytical, resourceful and living potential of dartaphacts in the making and their mattering over a period of six years. Collectively, they chart a rhizomatic journey that re-configures co-production as a response-able, becoming-with what matters. Originality/value: As more-than-human forces for change, dartaphacts continue to surface “the cries of what matters” (Stengers 2019) for children and young people well beyond the periods of funded research and engagement, giving new meaning to the sustainability and material legacies of research impact

Pain Research Forum: application of scientific social media frameworks in neuroscience

Background: Social media has the potential to accelerate the pace of biomedical research through online collaboration, discussions, and faster sharing of information. Focused web-based scientific social collaboratories such as the Alzheimer Research Forum have been successful in engaging scientists in open discussions of the latest research and identifying gaps in knowledge. However, until recently, tools to rapidly create such communities and provide high-bandwidth information exchange between collaboratories in related fields did not exist. Methods: We have addressed this need by constructing a reusable framework to build online biomedical communities, based on Drupal, an open-source content management system. The framework incorporates elements of Semantic Web technology combined with social media. Here we present, as an exemplar of a web community built on our framework, the Pain Research Forum (PRF) (http://painresearchforum.org). PRF is a community of chronic pain researchers, established with the goal of fostering collaboration and communication among pain researchers. Results: Launched in 2011, PRF has over 1300 registered members with permission to submit content. It currently hosts over 150 topical news articles on research; more than 30 active or archived forum discussions and journal club features; a webinar series; an editor-curated weekly updated listing of relevant papers; and several other resources for the pain research community. All content is licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons license; the software is freely available. The framework was reused to develop other sites, notably the Multiple Sclerosis Discovery Forum (http://msdiscovery.org) and StemBook (http://stembook.org). Discussion: Web-based collaboratories are a crucial integrative tool supporting rapid information transmission and translation in several important research areas. In this article, we discuss the success factors, lessons learned, and ongoing challenges in using PRF as a driving force to develop tools for online collaboration in neuroscience. We also indicate ways these tools can be applied to other areas and uses

Light, Connectivity, and Place: Young People Living in a Post Industrial Town

This article reports on a study of how young people in a post-industrial UK town reflect on their sense of health, place, and identity. Drawing on fifty-six qualitative interviews with 14-15 year olds, we explore how young people negotiate public space and how public lighting and darkness affect interactions with their surroundings. The young people provide an insight into how dark places ignite strong feelings of anxiety and danger, deeply fuelled by the environment itself together with rumours, lived knowledge of the locale, and symbolic boundaries shaping identities of belonging and exclusion in a context of structural inequality. Young people’s understandings of place are configured and energised by multiple sources, such as personal experiences and social locations, material landscapes, and powerful discourses – historical and contemporary – conveyed via stories, cautionary tales, and stigmatising media representations. We describe how the young people organised a public campaign to, among other things, install streetlights in a dark location. Their activism demonstrates how street-lighting, or its absence, is both emblematic of the importance of connectivity and place in their lives, and a manifestation of material (political) abandonment and (class) devaluation

Subjectivity, affect and place: Thinking with Deleuze and Guattari’s body without organs to explore a young teen girl’s becomings in a post-industrial locale.

This article explores how subjectivities are affectively tied to the histories of space, place and time through ethnographic research on young people’s everyday lives in a semi-rural post-industrial locale. Drawing on a longitudinal case study of one teenage girl’s inventive practices, we capture moments in time that we arrange as ‘enunciating assemblages’ (Guattari, 2006) to explore how conscious and unconscious affective relations repeat and rupture sedimented gendered histories of place. We experiment with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the full and empty Body without Organs to trace the ‘ontological intensities’ of how, when and where newness and change become possible. We argue that making visible young people’s nascent becomings by focusing on what young people already do and imagine, we can potentially support young people pursuing new horizons without losing the very sense of place that makes them feel both safe and alive

Re-imaging Bernstein's restricted codes

While accepting that the concept of restricted code has a troubled history that resulted in Bernstein being associated with deficit models of working-class life, it is argued that the concept should be re-imagined rather than abandoned. Bernstein’s early work refers to restricted code as a form of condensed, shorthand established through familiarity that was not tied to class per se. In Volume 2 of Class, Codes and Control social class was an independent variable in the research designs and coding only that which could be explicitly spoken, produced working class groups as inferior in comparison to middle class groups: Bernstein’s disquiet can be sensed in many places across his work where he explicitly renounced a deficit model. Methodological and theoretical work on embodied knowledge is used here to explicate the more-than, codeable features of restricted codes. An illustration from studies in ex-coalmining, working-class communities is used to explore what is missed in conventional approaches to data coding. Other studies in ex-mining communities reveal the intergenerational transmission of rich resources that were vital for community survival. Re-imagining restricted codes as relational assemblages recognises the value of the dynamic, creative and intergenerational features of localised, embodied knowledge

Learning the price of poverty across the UK

© 2017, © The Author(s) 2017. In 2016, the British Educational Research Association (BERA) Commission on Poverty and Policy Advocacy brought together several academics from across the four jurisdictions of the UK already engaged in work on poverty, education and schooling. The aim of this BERA Commission was to build a network of research-active practitioners across the UK and, internationally, to engage in knowledge building about poverty and multiple factors of deprivation as these find expression in education and schooling. The Commission also aimed to facilitate counter discourses to be voiced and articulated in contrast to the dominant pathologising discourses of poor people and their education. The Commission therefore addressed the question: what can research tell us about the ways that different devolved policy contexts impact on the learning and well-being of young people living in poverty? This article describes the methodology used by the Commission to bring together researchers, policymakers, practitioners and children and young people to learn about the price of poverty in education and to reflect on the implications for policy. In so doing, the article addresses some challenges, opportunities and outcomes in terms of knowledge production, as well as implications for critical scholarship, with a focus on poverty and education

Association of Genetic Markers with CSF Oligoclonal Bands in Multiple Sclerosis Patients

Objective:to explore the association between genetic markers and Oligoclonal Bands (OCB) in the Cerebro Spinal Fluid (CSF) of Italian Multiple Sclerosis patients.Methods:We genotyped 1115 Italian patients for HLA-DRB1*15 and HLA-A*02. In a subset of 925 patients we tested association with 52 non-HLA SNPs associated with MS susceptibility and we calculated a weighted Genetic Risk Score. Finally, we performed a Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) with OCB status on a subset of 562 patients. The best associated SNPs of the Italian GWAS were replicated in silico in Scandinavian and Belgian populations, and meta-analyzed.Results:HLA-DRB1*15 is associated with OCB+: p = 0.03, Odds Ratio (OR) = 1.6, 95% Confidence Limits (CL) = 1.1-2.4. None of the 52 non-HLA MS susceptibility loci was associated with OCB, except one SNP (rs2546890) near IL12B gene (OR: 1.45; 1.09-1.92). The weighted Genetic Risk Score mean was significantly (p = 0.0008) higher in OCB+ (7.668) than in OCB- (7.412) patients. After meta-analysis on the three datasets (Italian, Scandinavian and Belgian) for the best associated signals resulted from the Italian GWAS, the strongest signal was a SNP (rs9320598) on chromosome 6q (p = 9.4×10-7) outside the HLA region (65 Mb).Discussion:genetic factors predispose to the development of OCB