Young Adult Early Childhood Home Visitors’ Perceptions of FAN (Facilitating Attuned Interactions) and Its Potential Protection to Burnout

ABSTRACT YOUNG ADULT EARLY CHILDHOOD HOME VISITORS’ PERCEPTIONS OF FAN (FACILITATING ATTUNED INTERACTIONS) AND ITS POTENTIAL PROTECTION TO BURNOUT FEBRUARY 2019 LEE MACKINNON, B.A., WILLIAMS COLLEGE Ed.M., HARVARD UNIVERSITY Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Claire E. Hamilton This qualitative study investigated the experience of young adult early childhood home visitors in the training and implementation of a family engagement tool, Facilitating Attuned Interactions (FAN) (Gilkerson, 2015). Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the case study explored how 5 home visitors, who were under 30 years of age, viewed their training and use of FAN in three components of their work: reflection, family engagement, and supervision. In-depth interviews with the home visitors were the primary method of data collection with review of reflection tools and interviews with 3 supervisors serving to contextualize the data. A major finding was that FAN provided a shared language and structure that helped participants feel confident, build reflective capacity, and forge connections to families, supervisors and peers. Participant descriptions of their experience with FAN included elements corresponding to protective factors to burnout including increased confidence, self-calming techniques, bounded relationships with clients, social connection, and reflective supervision. Additional findings included the importance of peer to peer support in the learning and implementation of FAN and the importance of meeting high performance standards that led to home visitor feelings of competence and confidence. Findings indicated that early in their learning process, some home visitors felt incorporating the tool added to job stress. Only after trying FAN with families, participating in scaffolding experiences with supervisors, and completing 10 self-reflection/learning tools over 8 months did they identify the value of FAN language and structure to their work. Training home visitors in this approachmay be especially relevant for young and/or inexperienced staff who rely on the FAN structures and prompts to conduct difficult conversations, maintain professional boundaries, utilize self-calming techniques, and reflect on their own reactions as well as those of their clients. As the field recognizes the need to keep a consistent and competent workforce to provide continuous and effective work with families, training home visitors in FAN is an intervention worthy of consideration. Helping early childhood home visitors to integrate FAN into their practice may be one way to help them be more attuned and reflective, and ultimately more satisfied with their work

Mineralogy: A Digital Account

This article examines the digital media revolution as a revolution reliant upon a sustained legacy of colonial violence in regions such as the Congo, the locale of this study. Contemporary production is foreshadowed by the industrial genocide of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries visited upon the Congo by Belgium. In an era defined by globally distributed trade networks, colonialism is equally distributed and mercurial – its complex supply chains obfuscating responsibility toward either the environment or its human inhabitants. The paper looks at the minerals required for latter day digital devices which have become the latest iteration of conflict in the region. Minerals are traced through a number of modern technologies including matches, atomic clocks and mobile devices, all of which evoke alchemical transformation and spectacle. We trace the legacy of colonial violence through smartphones, as the contemporary epitome of technical supremacy – highlighting their qualities of immediacy, mobility and making the remote proximate, especially by bringing remotely sourced geological elements into everyday use. Moving away from our own techno-romantic affiliation with such commodities, the article highlights the fact that focus on effect often further obfuscates the causal factors and consequences of resource extraction in commodity production. Even as we summon stories of global trade with our fingertips on mobile, networked devices, we are implicated in these cycles of violence

Investigations for Ergonomic Presentation of AIS Symbols for ECDIS

Empirical investigations were carried out in a research project for the German Federal Ministry of Transport, Building, and Housing to evaluate the presentation of AIS target information on ECDIS. The investigations were performed at three international simulation centres. The features, colour and fillingjsize of AIS symbols, as well as the influence of the ECDIS display category on the detection of AIS targets were the main issues of the investigations. Results show that blue (5-52 colour token RE5BL) is the most suitable colour of the tested colours for the presentation of AIS targets under all ambient light conditions on the tested IHO S-52 colour tables

Exponents of the localization lengths in the bipartite Anderson model with off-diagonal disorder

We investigate the scaling properties of the two-dimensional (2D) Anderson model of localization with purely off-diagonal disorder (random hopping). In particular, we show that for small energies the infinite-size localization lengths as computed from transfer-matrix methods together with finite-size scaling diverge with a power-law behavior. The corresponding exponents seem to depend on the strength and the type of disorder chosen.Comment: 6 pages, 8 EPS-figures, requires phbauth.cl

Love, Games and Gamification: Gambling and Gaming as Techniques of Modern Romantic Love

A number of authors claim that Western European modern romantic love has been ‘gamified’ by digital apps and platforms, resulting in a ludic market logic that is increasingly compulsive and even addictive. This paper will suggest that modern romantic love was, in fact, predicated on games, particularly games of chance and competition. These games are seen to provide a number of functions, including homosocial bonding, the vindication of personal responsibility, and bringing about the probability of the improbable. The paper examines changing attitudes to chance at several key historical moments in Western Europe, changes which we can discern in romantic codification, as well as in the modern economy. We trace these tendencies to digital corporations, where gathered behavioural data accelerates the capacity to economize and determine futures

Toward a Materialist Photography: The Body of Work

This article moves toward a materialist photography in response to a recent photographic exhibition by Giles Duley. Duley's work is made under the auspices of a ‘humanitarian project’, a notion problematised by its display in the context of the art gallery, and by the photograph as the final product in a process that is also the property of the photographer. I use this work as a starting point for moving photographic discourse beyond consideration of the final image and author to explore the materiality of the photographic apparatus and its event. Key to this task is the work of Ariella Azoulay (2015) and Judith Butler (2010) who have approached photography as, respectively, an event and as extended materiality. It also borrows on some definitions of matter and materiality from Karen Barad (2012). Barad moves the question of materiality into a field of political interaction, taking account of all participatory elements

Love Machines and the Tinder-Bot Bildungsroman

Over the past few decades, it has often been said that we no longer have an addressee for our political demands. But that’s not true. We have each other. What we can no longer get from the state, the party, the union, the boss, we ask for from one another. And we provide. Lacan famously defined love as giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it. But love is more than a YouTube link or a URL. This beautiful negative flip of what is commonly considered the most positive force in the universe helps us begin to see love’s fullness and endless bounty, as based in emptiness and lack—in mutual loss. Love’s joy is not to be found in fulfillment, but in recognition: even though I can never return what was taken away from you, I may be the only person alive who knows what it is. I don’t have what it is you’re missing, but knowing its shape already makes a world where you can live without it. Lee Mackinnon contributed to this co-edited book by eflux Journal, on the topic of love, care, intimacy, warmth affection

Love's Algorithm: The Perfect Parts for my Machine

A chapter exploring the evolution of romantic love in literary and digital computational contexts

Repeat After Me: The Automatic Labours of Love

This essay considers love as a symbol represented by the heart, which is also the organ first used to define the term automatic. Love’s value as a symbol will be linked to certain forms of automation that indicate the dematerialisation of love’s labour and its qualities as a form of life. Key here is the understanding that love’s labours are most often associated with the figure of woman and in understanding automaticity as dispensing with causality. We explore forms of automation characteristic of nineteenth century industrialization, through examples of speaking automata, romantic literature and labour. In the first instance, automata are seen to represent those with least power in Western societies, whose ventriloquized presence indicated a propensity for imitation and repetition. These automata can be seen to evince the magical absorption and disappearance of actual bodies and materials into systems of automation. Thereby, as Esther Leslie and Helen Hester have put it respectively, automated devices appear more animate than their operators or the bodies that they eventually replace (Leslie 2002; Hester 2016). For Marx, it was this quality of liveliness that characterised the commodity, being a repository for living labour that was associated with the vigorous, animate qualities of love (Marx 1990, 302). While according to Max Weber (2009), love’s animation functions as the “real”, vital force and promise that propels workers to accept the rational banality and routine of industrial working life. In this respect, love is an essential part of capital’s calculation and subjection to systems of automation. In claiming that isolating the body of woman was capitalism’s greatest invention, Leopoldina Fortunati (1995) suggests that “free” emotional and domestic labour underpin the project of capitalist productivity. The body of woman itself becomes a machine for reproducing labour powers: a site where production and reproduction find their most “natural” expression. Distinguishing labour from work in accordance with post- Fordist feminist writing (Weeks 2007; Federici 2012, 20), we recall Silvia Federici’s claim that in order to remember what love is, we must first define work. Paper in a special co-edited edition of Journal of Aesthetics and Culture: The Techniques and Aesthetics of Love in the Age of Big Dat