Algorithmic paranoia and the convivial alternative

In a time of big data, thinking about how we are seen and how that affects our lives means changing our idea about who does the seeing. Data produced by machines is most often 'seen' by other machines; the eye is in question is algorithmic. Algorithmic seeing does not produce a computational panopticon but a mechanism of prediction. The authority of its predictions rests on a slippage of the scientific method in to the world of data. Data science inherits some of the problems of science, especially the disembodied 'view from above', and adds new ones of its own. As its core methods like machine learning are based on seeing correlations not understanding causation, it reproduces the prejudices of its input. Rising in to the apparatuses of governance, it reinforces the problematic sides of 'seeing like a state' and links to the recursive production of paranoia. It forces us to ask the question 'what counts as rational seeing?'. Answering this from a position of feminist empiricism reveals different possibilities latent in seeing with machines. Grounded in the idea of conviviality, machine learning may reveal forgotten non-market patterns and enable free and critical learning. It is proposed that a programme to challenge the production of irrational preemption is also a search for the possibility of algorithmic conviviality

Story in health and social care

This paper offers a brief consideration of how narrative, in the form of people‟s own stories, potentially figures in health and social care provision as part of the impulse towards patient-centred care. The rise of the epistemological legitimacy of patients‟ stories is sketched here. The paper draws upon relevant literature and original writing to consider the ways in which stories can mislead as well as illuminate the process of making individual treatment care plans

Emotions and Digital Well-being. The rationalistic bias of social media design in online deliberations

In this chapter we argue that emotions are mediated in an incomplete way in online social media because of the heavy reliance on textual messages which fosters a rationalistic bias and an inclination towards less nuanced emotional expressions. This incompleteness can happen either by obscuring emotions, showing less than the original intensity, misinterpreting emotions, or eliciting emotions without feedback and context. Online interactions and deliberations tend to contribute rather than overcome stalemates and informational bubbles, partially due to prevalence of anti-social emotions. It is tempting to see emotions as being the cause of the problem of online verbal aggression and bullying. However, we argue that social media are actually designed in a predominantly rationalistic way, because of the reliance on text-based communication, thereby filtering out social emotions and leaving space for easily expressed antisocial emotions. Based on research on emotions that sees these as key ingredients to moral interaction and deliberation, as well as on research on text-based versus non-verbal communication, we propose a richer understanding of emotions, requiring different designs of online deliberation platforms. We propose that such designs should move from text-centred designs and should find ways to incorporate the complete expression of the full range of human emotions so that these can play a constructive role in online deliberations

Growing Environmental Activists: Developing Environmental Agency and Engagement Through Children’s Fiction.

We explore how story has the potential to encourage environmental engagement and a sense of agency provided that critical discussion takes place. We illuminate this with reference to the philosophies of John Macmurray on personal agency and social relations; of John Dewey on the primacy of experience for philosophy; and of Paul Ricoeur on hermeneutics, dialogue, dialectics and narrative. We view the use of fiction for environmental understanding as hermeneutic, a form of conceptualising place which interprets experience and perception. The four writers for young people discussed are Ernest Thompson Seton, Kenneth Grahame, Michelle Paver and Philip Pullman. We develop the concept of critical dialogue, and link this to Crick's demand for active democratic citizenship. We illustrate the educational potential for environmental discussions based on literature leading to deeper understanding of place and environment, encouraging the belief in young people that they can be and become agents for change. We develop from Zimbardo the key concept of heroic resister to encourage young people to overcome peer pressure. We conclude with a call to develop a greater awareness of the potential of fiction for learning, and for writers to produce more focused stories engaging with environmental responsibility and activism

Open education and critical pedagogy

This paper argues for a revaluation of the potential of open education to support more critical forms of pedagogy. Section I examines contemporary discourses around open education, offering a commentary on the perception of openness as both a disruptive force in education, and a potential solution to contemporary challenges. Section II examines the implications of the lack of consensus around what it means to be open, focusing on the example of commercial and proprietary claims to openness commonly known as ‘openwashing’. Section III uses Raymond’s influential essay on open source software ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ as a framework for thinking through these issues, and about alternative power structures in open education. In Section IV an explicit link is drawn between more equal or democratic power structures and the possibility for developing pedagogies which are critical and reflexive, providing examples which show how certain interpretations of openness can raise opportunities to support critical approaches to pedagogy

Who is really in charge of contemporary education? People and technologies in, against and beyond the neoliberal university

This article reflects on the position of people in, against and beyond information and communication technologies. Firstly, using Jandrić and Kuzmanić’s work on digital postcolonialism, Raymond Williams's work on residual and emergent cultures, and Deleuze and Guattari's insights into the dynamics between territorialization, de-territorialization and re-territorialization, it develops a theoretical framework for inquiry into the hybrid identity of the contemporary university. Then, through critical discourse analysis (CDA), the article moves on to analyse the ways in which technology discourse resides in the dominating ideology of technological determinism and co-opts with neoliberal agendas by omitting humans from explicit mention in UK policy documents. It shows that true counter-hegemonic practice against dominating social practices is possible only through reinvigorating the central position of human beings in regards to information and communication technologies. Within the developed theoretical framework, it seeks openings to intervene subversively into current relationships between technologies, people, and (higher) education, and to identify opportunities for building a non-determinist identity of the contemporary university that reaches beyond the single-minded logic of techno-scientific development. In the process, it situates Paulo Freire's insights into critical pedagogy in the context of the network society, and places the relationships between human beings, language and information and communication technologies amongst central questions of today's (higher) education and society at large

Revolution from above in English schools: neoliberalism, the democratic commons and education

The ideas of the New Left and the recently emerged alter-globalisation movements are marginal within current policy debates concerning the English education system. Here I seek to demonstrate the interconnections between the New Left and the alter-globalisation movement and suggest that these ideas contain a powerful corrective to the increasingly authoritarian present. The next part of the article considers the development of neoliberalism both in a theoretical context and since the arrival of the new Conservative–Liberal government in the UK. Here I outline the rapid transformation of English schools under the academies programme and look at how it has been explicitly linked to ideas of ‘moral collapse’ evident in the popular discourse of ‘Broken Britain’. Especially significant in this respect has been the labelling of comprehensive schools as ‘failures’ and the explicit imposition of more authoritarian understandings of pedagogy. I seek to explore both the rapidity of this transformation in the context of the dissatisfaction with the idea of comprehensive schools shown by the political Right and the Third Way’s reworking of socialism. Finally I briefly consider more progressive alternatives for schools and education by returning to the idea of the democratic commons. In this respect, the cultural Left needs to explore more radical alternatives beyond the defence of comprehensive schooling which sounds both nostalgic and misplaced within our global times

Social representations of diagnosis in the consultation

Observations of physiotherapy consultations and qualitative interviews with patients were conducted to explore the clinical explanation for sciatic pain. We report three themes which illustrate the contested and negotiated order of the clinical explanation: anchoring, resistance and normalisation. We show using the theory of social representations how the social order in the physiotherapy consultation is maintained, contested and rearticulated. We highlight the importance of agency in patients’ ability to resist the clinical explanation and in turn shape the clinical discourse within the consultation. Social representations offer insights into how the world is viewed by different individuals, in our case physiotherapists and patients with sciatic pain symptoms. The negotiation about the diagnosis reveals the malleable and socially constructed nature of pain and the meaning making process underpinning it. The study has implications for understanding inequalities in the consultation and the key ingredients of consensus

Ontological transparency, (in)visibility, and hidden curricula:Critical pedagogy and contentious edtech

AbstractThe steady migration of higher education online has accelerated in the wake of Covid-19. The implications of this migration on critical praxis—the theory-in-practice of pedagogy—deserve further scrutiny. This paper explores how teacher and student-led educational technology research and development can help rethink online critical praxis. The paper is based on a recent research project at the University of Edinburgh that speculatively explored the potential for automation in teaching, which generated insights into current and future pedagogical practice among both teachers and students. From this project emerged a series of pedagogical positions that were centred around visions of the future of teaching in response to automation: the pedagogical potential of visibility and invisibility online, transparency, and interrogating the hidden curricula of both higher education and educational technology itself. Through the surfacing of these pedagogical positions, this paper explores how critical pedagogy can be built into the broader teacher function and begins to identify the institutional structures that could potentially impede or accelerate that process.</jats:p