Challenging Misinformation: Exploring Limits and Approaches

The manipulation of information and the dissemination of “fake news” are practices that trace back to the early records of human history. Significant changes in the technological environment enabling ubiquity, immediacy and considerable anonymity, have facilitated the spreading of misinformation in unforeseen ways, raising concerns around people’s (mis)perception of social issues worldwide. As a wicked problem, limiting the harm caused by misinformation goes beyond technical solutions, requiring also regulatory and behavioural changes. This workshop proposes to unpack the challenge at hand by bringing together diverse perspectives to the problem. Based on participatory design principles, it will challenge participants to critically reflect the limits of existing socio-technical approaches and co-create scenarios in which digital platforms support misinformation resilience

The Importance of Communication, Collaboration and Co-production

Building resilient responses to nexus shocks requires effective communication and collaboration across sectors and stakeholders, yet this is not always achieved. The Nexus Shocks project examined how communication and collaboration could be enhanced, adopting a co-production methodology with policy, practitioner and scientific communities. This chapter discusses the barriers and challenges to communication and collaboration on specific nexus shocks, such as heatwaves and flooding, and identifies pathways to strengthen responses. Co-production provides a constructive way to deliver more salient decision-making processes which incorporate the needs of those affected in managing and responding to nexus shocks

Accountability

The term “accountability” implies the duty to act in a responsible way and to be accountable to others for one’s actions, in order to maintain effective and logical links between planning, deciding, action, and verification. The term is complex and chameleonic (Sinclair 1995; Mulgan 2000), and it evokes at the same time: a principle, a duty, a behavior, a system, a process, and a series of operating tools. The term – particularly familiar in Western societies – comes, in a theoretical sense, from political science studies and should be considered a fundamental cornerstone of democratic systems (Shah 2010; Borowiak 2011). In any case, it represents the need to convey how financial and nonfinancial resources are used, the correctness of those who operate in a management capacity, the adequacy and conformity of actions taken compared to preexisting objectives, and the results reached over time. This is achieved by highlighting organization policies, laws, and political, social, cultural, and environmental requirements in which the entity – whether public or private – operates, in order to contextualize any evaluation of results and objectives, plans and behavior

Agency, learning and knowledge work: Epistemic dilemmas in professional practices

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017. The nature of professional work is changing. In particular, relationships between professionals and the people work are being reforged in more complex formations. Partnership approaches to services for families with young children are among the historically new work practices that are part of a broader shift towards coproduction. Working in partnership with parents places a particular set of demands on practitioners, including engaging in distinctive forms of relational work and developing new kinds of expertise. Less well understood is what such changes mean in terms of the ways professionals in such settings need to develop and exercise agency as a regular, but nonroutine, part of their work. This chapter draws on an ethnographic study of a parent education service in Sydney (Australia), casting light on agentic responses to a series of epistemic dilemmas that professionals encounter in practice. Adopting a cultural-historical approach, it works with concepts of the object, activity, motive, and practice in dialectic relation with one another. Analysis focuses on handover between professionals as an artefact of practice in which professionals do knowledge work, inflecting ‘Where to?’ questions with agentic and epistemic considerations of ‘How do we get there?’ The account provided here enriches cultural-historical understandings of agency in the context of professional work, offering an expanded description of responses to epistemic dilemmas in practice