How people with diabetes integrate self-monitoring of blood glucose into their self-management strategies

Background The benefit of self-monitoring of blood glucose by patients has been questioned, and UK policy is generally not to support this, although it is identified that there may be unidentified subgroups of people who would benefit from being supported to self-monitor. The purpose of this paper is to explore the self-management approaches of people with diabetes, and how self-testing of blood glucose contributes to self-management strategies. Methods This qualitative study of patients’ experiences drew data from contributors to online discussion boards for people living with diabetes. The principles of qualitative content analysis were used on posts from a sample of four Internet discussion boards. Results Contributors described how they were using self-testing within their self-management strategies. Most saw it as a way of actively maintaining control of their condition. The amount of testing carried varied over time; more testing was done in the early days, when people were still learning how to stay in control of their diabetes. Some people had experienced a lack of support for self-testing from healthcare professionals, or had been expected to change their self-management to fit national policy changes. This was seen as unhelpful, demotivating, stressful, and harmful to the doctor–patient relationship. Conclusions The Internet is a valuable source of information about peoples’ self-management behaviours. Patients who are using, or who wish to use, self-testing as part of their self-management strategy are one of the subgroups for whom self testing is beneficial and who should be supported to do so

Feminist/ Spin-ster/ Amazon: Mary Daly

During doctoral programs, many scholars have experiences with texts that disrupt, that interrupt, that somehow open up unforeseen ways of being, thinking, feeling, and knowing. In this article, we provide short contributions from a wide swath of scholars who explore the many ways reading can change everything, electrifying us with possibilities of what might be thinkable now, and terrifying us because ideas and knowledge that we’d held dear all of a sudden feel tenuous and fragile. In short, reading rocks our worlds and, as a result, shapes the kind of inquiry we do

Edu-crafting a cacophonous ecology: posthumanist research practices for education

This chapter provides a theoretical and practical introduction to posthumanism to explore the challenges and opportunities it offers in reshaping how educational research is defined, approached and gets done. The chapter sketches the emergence of posthumanism in relation to the humanist legacy, maps how posthumanism reworks subjectivity, relationally and ethics, and produces new understandings of ontology and epistemology. The chapter considers the implications of posthumanism for educational research methodologies and draws on a recent example to illuminate how posthumanist research practices recast the empirical. The chapter proposes the practice of edu-crafting as a practical approach to doing posthumanist educational research

What can bodies do? En/gendering body-space choreographies of stillness, movement and flow in post-16 pedagogic encounters

Bodies do inventive, dynamic and productive work in classrooms. This paper argues that bodies are vital players in pedagogic encounters, informing how gender identities are shaped, how power operates, and how pedagogies are enacted. It uses a range of theoretical resources - on space (Massey 2005), corporeal geography (McCormack 2013), material feminism (Barad, 2007) - to develop an interdisciplinary analysis of body-space choreographies in Sixth Form College spaces. Empirically, the paper is grounded in six close-up 'material moments' of stillness, movement and flow, which indicate that pedagogic encounters are conditioned by routine bodily enactments which happen at speed and often go unnoticed but which do important pedagogic work

Rethinking the empirical in higher education: post-qualitative inquiry as a less comfortable social science

In recent years ‘post-qualitative new empiricist’ research has been gaining ground. Such work questions the humanist ontological and epistemological orientation of much mainstream qualitative inquiry and insists on the need to take into account the more-and-other-than-human. Post-qualitative research draws on an eclectic range of theories as a means to reformulate the methodological assumptions on which humanist research rests. In doing so, it problematizes key aspects of the research process – the objects of inquiry, methods used to produce ‘data’, what ‘data’ is, coding as a practice of meaning-making, and the formal conventions of academic article writing for journal publication. Given the relative unfamiliarity of post-qualitative inquiry, this article provides an introduction to its methodological and theoretical terrain. The article has three aims: first, to provide an overview of post-qualitative new empiricisms and outline its five key foci; second, to put to work three theoretical approaches – Jane Bennett’s ‘thing-power’, Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology and Karen Barad’s agential realism – via a specific example, as a means to formulate some empirical starting points for post-qualitative work in higher education; and third, to assess the promise of post-qualitative inquiry in rethinking the empirical more broadly. Keyword - Post-qualitative; empirical; methodology; thing-power; object-oriented ontology; agential realis

Flipping Methodology: Or, errancy in the meanwhile and the need to remove doors

This article ponders two questions: What does “postqualitative” mean to you? Why do you think the “postqualitative” movement is important to the field of qualitative inquiry? In response, it poses a method/ology of errancy—a flipping methodology—that locates postqualitative research as an ethico-onto-epistemological political project of opening theory-practice spaces for differential matterings. Postqualitative flipping is not an individual undertaking, it is an ecology of practices, a resonation across bodies, a navigating of movement for a politics of change, in which even barely perceptible shifts possibilize new modes of thinking and unthinking, doing and undoing.</p