Unravelling social constructionism

Social constructionist research is an area of rapidly expanding influence that has brought together theorists from a range of different disciplines. At the same time, however, it has fuelled the development of a new set of divisions. There would appear to be an increasing uneasiness about the implications of a thoroughgoing constructionism, with some regarding it as both theoretically parasitic and politically paralysing. In this paper I review these debates and clarify some of the issues involved. My main argument is that social constructionism is not best understood as a unitary paradigm and that one very important difference is between what Edwards (1997) calls its ontological and epistemic forms. I argue that an appreciation of this distinction not only exhausts many of the disputes that currently divide the constructionist community, but also takes away from the apparent radicalism of much of this work

Male and Female Visions of Mediation

Also PCMA Working Paper #2.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51102/1/334.pd

Children’s participation in school grounds developments: creating a place for education that promotes children’s social inclusion

Abstract This paper advances the idea that ‘education for the social inclusion of children’ is similar but different to ‘inclusive education’ as it has come to be understood and used by some authors and UK government documents. ‘Inclusive education’ tends to carry an inward emphasis on the participation of children in the education system (with discussions on school culture, transitions, truancy, exclusion rates, underachievement, and school leaving age). In contrast, education for the promotion of children’s social inclusion requires an outward emphasis on children's participation in 'mainstream' society while they are still children. The latter emphasis is seen to be lacking in educational policy discourse in Scotland though a recent shift in policy towards education for active citizenship is noted. Examples are provided to show how many policy statements enact a limitation on the scope for education to promote children’s social inclusion by emphasising children’s deficits as social actors and focussing on the ‘condition’ of social exclusion. The paper draws on an empirical study of children’s participation in changing school grounds in Scotland. The analysis shows how the enclosure of learning in books, classrooms and normative curricula was challenged. Learning from school grounds developments was constructed relationally and spatially but the scope of what was to be learned was often delineated by adults. The paper closes with a discussion of how education that promotes the social inclusion of children will benefit from seeing both children and adults as current though partial citizens and utilising socio-spatial opportunities for the generation of uncertain curricula through their shared and/or differentiated participation

Gender differences in conversation topics, 1922–1990

Gender differences in conversation topics were first systematically studied in 1922 by Henry Moore, who theorized that the gender differences in topic choice he observed in a field observation study would persist over time, as they were manifestations of men's and women's “original natures.” In this paper, I report a 1990 replication of Moore's study, in which similar but smaller gender differences in topic choice are found. In order to explore further the apparent trend toward smaller gender differences, reports of quantitative observation studies conducted between 1922 and 1990 are examined. Other explanations besides change over time—such as variations in conversation setting and audience, target populations, and researcher's intentions—may account for the decline in gender differences in topic choice. Social influences are seen more clearly in the discourse about gender differences in conversation than in gender differences in conversation topics themselves.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45599/1/11199_2004_Article_BF00289744.pd

Oh Comrade, What Times those Were! History, Capital Punishment and the Urban Square.

From the perspective of traditional Western histories of the urban realm, public squares have been seen to represent a privileged site of urban containment expressive of a community's highest values of individual freedom, social inclusion and cultural refinement. But such views can be misleading. For what is omitted from the scope of these conventional historical visions and their ideal and conforming subjects of public spatial discourse, is an entire array of other and darker narratives that equally speak of personal choice, collective participation and cultural value. Capital punishment reflects such an example, a practice that once comprised an integral part of the political, social and cultural landscape of a Western city's squares and streets. Drawing from Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish and its implications on how we might begin to re-read the history of the urban square, the following seeks to explore those practices and modes of rationality that underpinned the once public spectacle of executions and torture as a vital condition of urban life. In particular, this discussion will question the assumptions of an historical tradition that continues to reduce our understanding of the city and its open spaces of public appearance and action to an idealistic and illusory reality of the urban realm and its narrow framing of collective conduct, necessity and significance

Dynamic cerebral autoregulation reproducibility is affected by physiological variability

Parameters describing dynamic cerebral autoregulation (DCA) have limited reproducibility. In an international, multi-center study, we evaluated the influence of multiple analytical methods on the reproducibility of DCA. Fourteen participating centers analyzed repeated measurements from 75 healthy subjects, consisting of 5 min of spontaneous fluctuations in blood pressure and cerebral blood flow velocity signals, based on their usual methods of analysis. DCA methods were grouped into three broad categories, depending on output types: (1) transfer function analysis (TFA); (2) autoregulation index (ARI); and (3) correlation coefficient. Only TFA gain in the low frequency (LF) band showed good reproducibility in approximately half of the estimates of gain, defined as an intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of > 0.6. None of the other DCA metrics had good reproducibility. For TFA-like and ARI-like methods, ICCs were lower than values obtained with surrogate data (p less than 0.05). For TFA-like methods, ICCs were lower for the very LF band (gain 0.38 ± 0.057, phase 0.17 ± 0.13) than for LF band (gain 0.59 ± 0.078, phase 0.39 ± 0.11, p ? 0.001 for both gain and phase). For ARI-like methods, the mean ICC was 0.30 ± 0.12 and for the correlation methods 0.24 ± 0.23. Based on comparisons with ICC estimates obtained from surrogate data, we conclude that physiological variability or non-stationarity is likely to be the main reason for the poor reproducibility of DCA parameters. Copyright © 2019 Sanders, Elting, Panerai, Aries, Bor-Seng-Shu, Caicedo, Chacon, Gommer, Van Huffel, Jara, Kostoglou, Mahdi, Marmarelis, Mitsis, Müller, Nikolic, Nogueira, Payne, Puppo, Shin, Simpson, Tarumi, Yelicich, Zhang and Claassen