Ethics, politics and embodied imagination in crafting scientific knowledge

This article explores ‘research-as-craft’ as a sensitizing concept for disclosing the presence of ethics and politics, as well as embodiment and imagination, in the doing and representation of scientific activity. Routinely unnoticed, marginalized or suppressed in methodology sections of articles and methodology textbooks, research-as-craft gestures towards messy, tacit, uncertain, yet rarely thematized, practices that are central to getting science done. To acknowledge and address the significance of research-as-craft in knowledge production, we show how it relates to three forms of reflexivity – constitutive, epistemic and disruptive. Through this we demonstrate the craftiness that is required when struggling with the indeterminacy that is endemic to the production and communication of scientific knowledge. By showing how empirical situations require imaginative interpretation by embodied researchers, we argue that our conception of research-as-craft facilitates appreciation of scientific inquiry as an indexical activity that involves the crafted object and the researcher in an ethico-political process of co-constituting knowledge

‘Don’t use “the weak word”’: Women brewers, identities and gendered territories of embodied work

Focusing on an unresearched group of women brewers, and drawing conceptually on embodiment and identity work, this article explores worker corporealities within the gendered landscape of microbreweries and deepens understanding of the body/work/gender nexus in the context of brewer’s work. In doing so, it challenges the marginalisation of female worker bodies in scholarly work on male-dominated occupations. Drawing on interview and observation data collected in the UK in 2015, verbal narratives of women brewers’ experiences of their working lives are utilised to provide insights into how their gendered bodily practices constitute resources for constructing a distinctive ‘brewster’ identity. Women brewers engage in identity work, on both individual and collective levels, through the material and symbolic framing of their embodied and gendered working selves; navigating their physical working environments; downplaying gender to emphasise physical competence; and foregrounding gender in relation to non-physical aspects to accentuate difference and collective contribution

How can Respectfulness in Medical Professionals be Increased? A Complex but Important Question.

Respectfulness is demanded of doctors and predicts more positive patient health-related outcomes but research is scarce on ways to promote it. This study explores two ways to conceptualize unconditional respect from medical students, defined as respect paid to people on the basis of their humanity, in order to inform strategies to increase it. Unconditional respect conceptualized as an attitude suggests that unconditional respect and conditional respect are additive, whereas unconditional respect conceptualized as a personality trait suggests that people who are high on unconditional respect afford equal respect to all humans regardless of their merits. One-hundred and eighty one medical students completed an unconditional respect measure then read a description of a respect-worthy or a non-respect-worthy man and indicated their respect towards him. The study found a main effect for unconditional respect and a main effect for target respect-worthiness but no interaction between the two when respect paid to the target was assessed, supporting the attitude-based conceptualization. This suggests that unconditional respect can be increased through relevant interventions aimed at increasing the relative salience to doctors of the human worth of individuals. Interventions to increase unconditional respect are discussed

First Measurement of the Hubble Constant from a Dark Standard Siren using the Dark Energy Survey Galaxies and the LIGO/Virgo Binary-Black-hole Merger GW170814

We present a multi-messenger measurement of the Hubble constant H 0 using the binary–black-hole merger GW170814 as a standard siren, combined with a photometric redshift catalog from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). The luminosity distance is obtained from the gravitational wave signal detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)/Virgo Collaboration (LVC) on 2017 August 14, and the redshift information is provided by the DES Year 3 data. Black hole mergers such as GW170814 are expected to lack bright electromagnetic emission to uniquely identify their host galaxies and build an object-by-object Hubble diagram. However, they are suitable for a statistical measurement, provided that a galaxy catalog of adequate depth and redshift completion is available. Here we present the first Hubble parameter measurement using a black hole merger. Our analysis results in ${H}_{0}={75}_{-32}^{+40}\,\mathrm{km}\,{{\rm{s}}}^{-1}\,{\mathrm{Mpc}}^{-1}$, which is consistent with both SN Ia and cosmic microwave background measurements of the Hubble constant. The quoted 68% credible region comprises 60% of the uniform prior range [20, 140] km s−1 Mpc−1, and it depends on the assumed prior range. If we take a broader prior of [10, 220] km s−1 Mpc−1, we find {H}_{0 {78}_{-24}^{+96}\,\mathrm{km}\,{{\rm{s}}}^{-1}\,{\mathrm{Mpc}}^{-1} (57% of the prior range). Although a weak constraint on the Hubble constant from a single event is expected using the dark siren method, a multifold increase in the LVC event rate is anticipated in the coming years and combinations of many sirens will lead to improved constraints on H 0

Job loss and its aftermath among managers and professionals: Wounded, fragmented and flexible

Based on longitudinal fieldwork with unemployed managers and professionals in their 50s, the article examines the meaning of job loss to these people and charts their subsequent efforts to restore their lives. The article identifies core similarities in their experiences and discerns different narrative strategies through which they have tried to make sense of their dismissal and sustain their selfhood. For all, job loss was a considerable trauma leading to a fragmentation of identity; this was compounded by subsequent rejection and perceived discrimination. Few were able to resume their earlier careers; the majority had to adjust their expectations downwards and opt for either virtual deskilling in less well paid and less demanding jobs or for an assortment of part-time, casual and voluntary work. Best ‘adapted’ (and least fragmented) were those who were prepared to forsake hopes of a return to highpowered jobs and display flexibility, resourcefulness and opportunism in adapting to their reduced circumstances

Fatherhood and family shame: masculinity, welfare and the workhouse in late nineteenth century England

In this chapter, stories of shame, anger and resistance are used to explore the tensions surrounding domestic authority and masculinity in families which struggled for survival in the face of poverty. The interdependent relationships of support and care in such families challenged two touchstones of adult masculinity: the role of provider for dependents and the position of head of household. Multiple sources of income and support for poor families could undermine a husband and father's position while the vital work of a wife in managing scarce resources further blurred questions of domestic authority. The wider context of working-class demands for employment rights and the suffrage demonstrated a desire to resolve these tensions as the labour movement focussed on measures which would enable men to successfully assert these two roles. The dominant model of family life of clear, hierarchical distinctions between the place of men, women and children for both respectable working-class families and middle-class philanthropists thus sat uncomfortably with the day-to-day exigencies of life for the poor. It is in the encounters between those in need and the many sources of welfare to which they resorted that these domestic and political tensions became visible. The Poor Laws were directly aimed at disciplining the poor through the pauperisation of men who were forced to turn to its provision to keep their families alive, explicitly removing rights to family life and citizenship, challenging men's domestic authority and social standing. Thus it is not surprising that the Poor Law was widely hated by the working classes, and formed the focus of day-to-day acts of resistance and wider political action which became more intense by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the long-term results was to be the shaping of benefits around the model of friendly societies which supported dominant ideals of family authority rather than challenging and undermining men's positions as husbands and fathers