Changing teacher education in Sweden: Using meta-ethnographic analysis to understand and describe policymaking and educational changes

This article derives from policy ethnographic research on teacher-education change in Sweden concerning the development of a unified profession with a common professional-knowledge base. This was a social democratic government policy for teacher education from the 1950s up until 2007, when the newly elected right wing government turned away from unification and toward re-traditionalisation. Based on a meta-ethnographic analysis of the policy ethnographies the article illustrates resistance toward unification and raises critical questions concerning the intellectual foundations and integrity of reform processes. Attempts are also made to locate the disclosures in relation to international research

Conferencing otherwise: a feminist new materialist writing experiment

This paper attempts to reconfigure hegemonic framings of ‘the academic conference’ and thereby offer a means to (re-)encounter the spatial, temporal and affective forces that conferences generate, differently. We are a geographically dispersed but multiply entangled group of academic researchers united by theoretical fault lines within our work that seek to ask what if (Haraway, 2016) and what else (Manning, 2016). This ‘what if’ and ‘what else’ thinking has manifested in experimental and subversive doings otherwise at a series of academic conferences. The storying practices presented in this paper were made possible by the vital materialism (Bennett, 2010) of a shared google.doc. It was within this virtual environment that we attempted to weave diffractive accounts of what conferencing otherwise produces. This writing experiment offers a series of speculative provocations and counter-provocations to ask what else does conferencing make possible. This article is an invitation to the reader to plunge in and wallow (Taylor, 2016) within the speculative accounts which ensue and to contemplate the possibilities of breaking free from sedimented ways of neoliberal conferencing

Doing time and motion diffractively: Academic life everywhere and all the time

This article offers a diffractive methodological intervention into workplace studies of academic life. In its engagement of a playful, performative research and writing practice the article speaks back to technocratic organisational and sociological workplace ‘time and motion’ studies which centre on the human and rational, and presume a linear teleology of cause and effect. As a counterpoint, we deploy posthumanist new materialist research practices which refuse human-centric approaches and aim to give matter its due. As a means to analyse what comes out of our joint workspaces photo project we produce two ‘passes’ through data – two diffractive experiments which destabilise what normally counts as ‘findings’ and their academic presentation. The article deploys the motif of ‘starting somewhere else’ to signal both our intention to keep data animated, alive and interactive, and to utilise visual and written modes of seriality as enabling constraints which produce a more generative focus on the mundane, emergent, unforeseen, and happenstance in studies of daily working life

Mitigating Case Mix Factors by Choice of Glycemic Control Performance Measure Threshold

OBJECTIVE—Performance measures are tools for assessing quality of care but may be influenced by patient factors. We investigated how currently endorsed performance measures for glycemic control in diabetes may be influenced by case mix composition. We assessed differences in A1C performance measure threshold attainment by case mix factors for A1C >9% and examined how lowering the threshold to A1C >8% or >7% changed these differences

From seafood waste to active seafood packaging: An emerging opportunity of the circular economy

Sustainable development is an overarching objective that requires an interdisciplinary approach in order to address the societal challenge concerning climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials. In this context, valorization of abundant and available bio-wastes with high potential to manufacture value-added products is the first step to close the loop between waste and consumption in line with the main goal of the circular economy. In the last years, many research works have been published in the literature regarding novel food packaging. However, most of them are focused on packaging composition (scientific aspects) and some of them on the packaging manufacture (technological aspects), but very few studies are concerned about the influence of bringing novel food packaging systems into the market on environmental, social and economic issues. In this regard, this review intends to fill this gap, considering the potential of developing food packaging from food processing waste in order to create business for food industries, being aware of the food quality demanded by consumers and the environmental care demanded by institutions and society

Anointed or appointed? Father–daughter succession within the family business

With the focus on events and outcomes shaping most of the existing family business research on intra-family succession, the subtleties of the incumbent-successor relationship and the dynamic nature of succession as a process of becoming is somewhat neglected. In particular, we have limited understanding of how successor identities are constructed as legitimate between incumbent and successor during father-daughter succession. This article addresses this gap in understanding by exploring how the daughter successor engages in identity work with the father incumbent during the process of succession and the role of father-daughter gendered relations in shaping her successor identity. Using a two-stage research design strategy, we draw upon empirical evidence derived from 14 individual and joint semi-structured interviews to present a narrative analysis of five father-daughter dyads. In so doing, we unveil how the daughter’s successor identity was co-constructed as legitimate and how father-daughter gendered relations influenced this process. Although daughters rely on certain father-daughter relations (preparation, endorsement and osmotic credibility) for legitimacy, they also need to develop independently from their father in order to heighten their own visibility and establish credibility

The Doing and Undoing of the “Autistic Child”: Cutting Together and Apart Interview-based Empirical Materials

This article discusses how posthuman and new materialist theories afford us opportunities to rethink the production of the “autistic child,” drawing on a qualitative research project on parenthood in the context of childhood disability in Italy. We will put some Baradian’s key concepts (intra-action, agential cut and cutting together-apart) to work in glancing at the complexities we keep encountering when a mother, Arianna, describes her relationship with her daughter Laura. The aim of this article is twofold: first, to methodologically re-turn the production of the “autistic child,” and second, to rethink and unsettle the dichotomies that constitute some children as “disabled human beings,” abnormal, and undesirable