Trans* inclusivity in fashion retail: Disrupting the gender binary with queer perspectives

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-34
Author(s):  
Charlotte Carbone
Keyword(s):  
End User ◽  
Secondary Research ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Gender Expression ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Gender Binary ◽  
Trans People ◽  
Fashion Retail ◽  
Home Studio ◽  
The Individual

This study is about gender-inclusive fashion retail, with a focus on trans* inclusivity. It is based on primary and secondary research of trans* issues in fashion. This research resulted in an inclusive pop-up shop that eliminated the reinforcement of the gender binary present in conventional fashion retail. Primary research consisted of semi-structured shop-and-talk interviews with end users and industry experts. All end-user interviews were conducted in Toronto in a minimum of two different fashion retail stores, such as one department store and one gendered store. The expert interviews were conducted in a context that matched the individual, such a designer’s home studio. Secondary research used a blended framework of queer, intersectional and post-capitalist theories to analyse trans* discrimination, unisex fashion and transness in popular culture. Key themes derived from these areas were cultural variance of gender expression, lack of accurate trans* representation and superficial queer initiatives. Fashion is based on the socially constructed gender binary, which excludes trans* people and cisgender (cis) people who are gender non-conforming in dress. The heteronormative and cis-normative beauty standards of fashion shame those who do not follow them. The current trans* representation in fashion is minimal and problematic. Real trans* people and narratives are not broadcasted by mainstream media; however, tokenized trans* celebrities and cis people acting as trans* mouthpieces are. This research questions how services and environments of fashion retail can be redesigned to be gender inclusive, by normalizing disruptive gender expression and increasing trans* visibility. This research is important because of the empowerment, validation and safety that queer and trans* people deserve when in public spaces.

scholarly journals The impact of end-userś participation (cancer patients) during the optimization process

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽  
Author(s):  
S Houwaart
Keyword(s):  
End Users ◽  
Public Health Care ◽  
Optimization Process ◽  
Patient Organization ◽  
End User ◽  
The Public ◽  
Patient Organizations ◽  
Crucial Information ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Impact

Abstract End-user (e.g. patients or the public) testing of information material is becoming more common in the German public health care system. However, including the end-user (in this case patients) in an optimisation process and thus enabling a close collaboration while developing PIMs is still rare. This is surprising, given the fact that patients provide the exact perspective one is trying to address. Within the isPO project, a patient organization is included as a legal project partner to act as the patient representative and provide the patient's perspective. As such, the patient organization was included in the PHR approach as part of the PIM-optimisation team. During the optimisation process, the patients gave practical insights into the procedures of diagnosing and treating different types of cancer as well as into the patient's changing priorities and challenges at different time points. This was crucial information for the envisioned application of the individual PIMs and their hierarchical overview. Moreover, the developed PIM-checklist enabled the patients to give detailed feedback to the PIMs. With their experience of being in the exact situation in which the PIMs will be applied, their recommendations, especially on the wording and layout of the materials, have been a valuable contribution to the PIM optimisation process. In this part of the seminar, we will take a closer look at the following skill building aspects: What is gained from including patients as end-users in the development and optimization of PIM?How can we reach patients to contribute to a PIM optimization process? Which requirements and prerequisites do patients have to provide to successfully work on an optimisation team?How to compromise and weigh opinions when different ideas occur? Altogether, this part will construct a structured path of productive patient involvement and help to overcome uncertainties regarding a collaboration with patient organizations.

scholarly journals Society as Cause and Cure: The Norms of Transgender Social Medicine

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ketil Slagstad
Keyword(s):  
Social Medicine ◽  
Social Aspects ◽  
Political Role ◽  
Therapeutic Regime ◽  
Trans People ◽  
The Social ◽  
In Trans ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Oral History Interviews

AbstractThis article analyzes how trans health was negotiated on the margins of psychiatry from the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this period, a new model of medical transition was established for trans people in Norway. Psychiatrists and other medical doctors as well as psychologists and social workers with a special interest and training in social medicine created a new diagnostic and therapeutic regime in which the social aspects of transitioning took center stage. The article situates this regime in a long Norwegian tradition of social medicine, including the important political role of social medicine in the creation of the postwar welfare state and its scope of addressing and changing the societal structures involved in disease. By using archival material, medical records and oral history interviews with former patients and health professionals, I demonstrate how social aspects not only underpinned diagnostic evaluations but were an integral component of the entire therapeutic regime. Sex reassignment became an integrative way of imagining and practicing psychiatry as social medicine. The article specifically unpacks the social element of these diagnostic and therapeutic approaches in trans medicine. Because the locus of intervention and treatment remained the individual, an approach with subversive potential ended up reproducing the norms that caused illness in the first place: “the social” became a conformist tool to help the patient integrate, adjust to and transform the pathology-producing forces of society.

Digital technologies and the violent surveillance of nonbinary gender

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jama Shelton ◽  
Kel Kroehle ◽  
Emilie K. Clark ◽  
Kristie Seelman ◽  
SJ Dodd
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Predictive Policing ◽  
Root Cause ◽  
Gender Binary ◽  
Power And Control ◽  
Trans People ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Control

The enforcement of the gender binary is a root cause of gender-based violence (GBV) for trans people. Disrupting GBV requires that we ensure that ‘gender’ is not presumed synonymous with White cisgender womanhood. Transfeminists suggest that attaining gender equity requires confronting all forms of oppression that police people and their bodies, including White supremacy, colonialism and capitalism (Silva and Ornat, 2016; Simpkins, 2016). Part of this project, we argue, includes confronting the structures of GBV embedded within digital technologies that are increasingly part of our everyday lives. Informed by transfeminist theory (Koyama, 2003; Stryker and Bettcher, 2016; Simpkins, 2016; Weerawardhana, 2018), we interrogate the ways in which digital technologies naturalise and reinforce GBV against bodies marked as divergent. We examine the subtler ways that digital technology can fortify binary gender as a mechanism of power and control. We highlight how gendered forms of data violence cannot be disentangled from digital technologies that surveil, police or punish on the basis of race, nationhood and citizenship, particularly in relation to predictive policing practices. We conclude with recommendations to guide technological development to reduce the violence enacted upon trans people and those whose gender presentations transgress society’s normative criteria for what constitutes a compliant (read: appropriately gendered) citizen.<br /><br />Key messages<br /><ul><li>Violence against trans people is inherently gender-based.</li><br /><li>A root cause of gender-based violence against trans people is the strict reinforcement of the gender binary.</li><br /><li>Digital technology and predictive policing can fortify binary gender as a mechanism of power and control.</li><br /><li>Designers of digital technologies and the policymakers regulating surveillance capitalism must interrogate the ways in which their work upholds the gender binary and gender-based violence against trans people.</li></ul>

scholarly journals State-of-Knowledge and Guidance in EURAD Knowledge Management (Work Packages 11 State-of-Knowledge & 12 Guidance)

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 249-250
Author(s):  
Astrid Göbel ◽  
Tobias Knuuti ◽  
Carola Franzen ◽  
Dinara Abbasova ◽  
Thuro Arnold ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Research Programme ◽  
Level Of Detail ◽  
Transfer Of Knowledge ◽  
End User ◽  
Member States ◽  
National Programmes ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Editorial Procedures

Abstract. EURAD, the European Joint Programme on Radioactive Waste Management (RWM), is the European Research Programme on RWM, aimed at supporting member states with the implementation of their national programmes. It brings together over 100 organisations from different backgrounds and countries, which work together in RD&amp;D projects, Strategic Studies and Knowledge Management (KM). The importance of KM is recognised by EURAD and reflected in a number of activities. One essential activity is the capture of the current State-of-Knowledge in the field of RWM and its transfer to the implementation of the different national programmes. This is done by different types of Knowledge Documents that are made available through a dedicated IT tool (e.g. a Wiki). The development of the individual EURAD KM documents is performed by recognised experts. These experts will share their view on the most relevant knowledge on a specific topic, highlighting safety functions and operational aspects. Additionally, signposting to pre-existing documents is performed (State-of-the-Art Documents, Scientific Papers, etc.). The hierarchy of the works for the KM documents (Theme Overview, Domain Insight, State-of-Knowledge, Guidance) is closely linked to the generic EURAD Roadmap/GBS (Goals Breakdown Structure). It provides a hierarchical structure that facilitates definition, organisation and communication of topics. All of this allows knowledge to be captured and presented with the level of detail that is required by the end-user, from a broad overview down to an increasing level of detail (pyramid of knowledge). To ensure the quality and consistency of the documents with the overall EURAD KM approach, quality assurance and editorial procedures are applied. Collection of end-user feedback will aid the optimisation and further development of the KM activities. To facilitate the transfer of knowledge, the EURAD KM programme goes beyond documents and strives to facilitate exchange between people and signpost to other resources, such as Training and Mobility activities (also organised by EURAD Work Package 13 Training &amp; Mobility) or Communities of Practice. All these activities will contribute to a useful and end-user-friendly EURAD KM programme that is designed to be operational well beyond the runtime of EURAD-1. This presentation will provide further insight into the approaches, status of work and an outlook on future activities that will support member states with the implementation of their national programmes.

Pose and HIV/AIDS

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 615-624
Author(s):  
Laura Stamm
Keyword(s):  
Women Of Color ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Trans People ◽  
Aids Crisis ◽  
Trans Women ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Living With Hiv ◽  
Hiv Aids

Abstract This article examines how the television series Pose (2018–) represents queer and trans people of color living with HIV/AIDS at the height of the crisis in 1987. While the series portrays an important part of transgender history, it also positions the AIDS crisis as something that is done and part of America's past. Despite the fact that rates of HIV infection remain at epidemic rates for trans women of color, Pose, like many other mainstream media representations, suggests that the AIDS crisis ended in 1995. The series brings trans women of color's experiences to a record number of viewers, but that representation comes with a certain cost—the cost of historicization.

Anti-Foundational Knowledge Management

2011 ◽  
pp. 3143-3152
Author(s):  
Tom Butler
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Sociology Of Knowledge ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Short Article ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Individual Knowledge ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Role Of It

Under the influence of Enlightenment epistemological thought, the social sciences have exhibited a distinct tendency to prefer deterministic1 explanations of social phenomena. In the sociology of knowledge, for example, “foundational” researchers seek to arrive at objective knowledge of social phenomena through the application of “social scientific methodolog[ies] based on the eternal truths of human nature, purged of historical and cultural prejudices” and which also ignore the subjective intrusions of social actors (Hekman, 1986, p. 5). This article argues that “foundationalist” perspectives heavily influence theory and praxis in knowledge management. “Foundationalist” thinking is particularly evident in the posited role of IT in creating, capturing, and diffusing knowledge in social and organisational contexts. In order to address what many would consider to be a deficiency in such thinking, a constructivist “antifoundationalist” perspective is presented that considers socially constructed knowledge as being simultaneously “situated” and “distributed” and which recognizes its role in shaping social action within “communities-of-practice.” In ontological terms, the constructivist “antifoundational” paradigm posits that realities are constructed from multiple, intangible mental constructions that are socially and experientially based, local and specific in nature, and which are dependent on their form and content on the individual persons or groups holding the constructions (see Guba & Lincoln, 1994; Bruner, 1990). One of the central assumptions of this paradigm is that there exist multiple realities with differences among them that cannot be resolved through rational processes or increased data. Insights drawn from this short article are addressed to academics and practitioners in order to illustrate the considerable difficulties inherent in representing individual knowledge and of the viability of isolating, capturing, and managing knowledge in organisational contexts with or without the use of IT.

Gender issues

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Harding
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Gender Issues ◽  
Reproductive Organs ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Biological Sex ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Cultural Construct ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Gender System

Contemporary studies commonly stress the belief that, even if sex is biologically determined, gender by contrast is a social and cultural construct (Sofaer and Sørensen, 2012). Even biological sex entails varying degrees of male and female attributes in terms of chromosomes and DNA if not in terms of reproductive organs, so that, contrary to the bipolar model of sex, contemporary studies of gender tend to think in terms of a spectrum that includes composite gender or a third gender that is neither male nor female in what Arnold (2006: 155) described as ‘a suprabinary gender system’. In the case of the Byzantine eunuchs or the Indian hijra cited by Croucher (2012: 174–5), these could be regarded as socially constructed, and it is not here suggested that such categories existed in Iron Age Britain or Europe. It is important, however, to be clear that conventional western sexual stereotypes and conceptions of gender roles in child-rearing, food production, and warfare, for example, need not have pertained in non-classical societies in antiquity. Gender issues in the study of funerary archaeology have gained a prominence in the last twenty years not simply as a result of theoretical considerations but also because of more intensive interest in osteological research, as a result of which there has been a greater recognition of the fact that identifying sex may involve evaluation of a spectrum of criteria rather than simple bipolar options. Though pelvic bones remain crucial to assessing sex, the skull and other major bones can also be indicative, and not infrequently the evidence remains equivocal, even where the skeleton is reasonably well preserved. Accordingly, some of the skeletons from the eastern Yorkshire cemeteries were deemed to show ‘contra’ indications, that is male and female characteristics in equal measure, in a gradation of assessment that also included ‘definite’, ‘probable’, and ‘possible’ identifications (Stead, 1991). Furthermore, though sex is biologically determined, osteology may be affected by cultural factors such as the degree of physical exercise that the individual habitually engages in, so that the criteria observed by the osteologist may suggest a physique normally associated with the opposite sex.

Defining the Individual

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niall Sharples
Keyword(s):  
Iron Age ◽  
Soil Layer ◽  
Human Remains ◽  
Human Bone ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Left Femur ◽  
Southern England ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Individual

During the 1985 excavation at Maiden Castle (Sharples 1991a), a large grain storage pit cut into the back of the rampart of the Early Iron Age hillfort was excavated. About half way down the fill of that pit the left femur of a mature adult was exposed. This bone was lying in a relatively sterile soil layer and it was not marked by any special finds or careful constructions; in many respects it could easily be dismissed as a discovery with little significance. Fifty years ago such bones would have been regarded as accidental losses, simply rubbish conveniently disposed of in a handy receptacle. It could be an indication that excarnation was the general means of disposal and that this occurred close to or actually inside settlements, but it might also indicate the accidental disturbance of human remains in graves located at the hillfort. In recent years we have come to understand that these deposits are much more significant. A number of archaeologists (Whimster 1981; C. Wilson 1981; Cunliffe 1992) came to realize that the presence of human remains on Iron Age settlements was a distinct cultural tradition characteristic of central southern England. The work of J. D. Hill (1995b) has enhanced our understanding of this phenomenon by emphasizing that the deposition of human remains is part of a complex suite of actions which involves the arrangement of different categories of material in carefully placed deposits. The process of deposition was clearly intimately involved in the definition of social relationships in the Iron Age of central southern England. It is difficult to imagine that if we, as archaeologists, could immediately recognize a human bone, our ancient pit diggers could not. The placement of this bone was a deliberate act, and the location of this deposit was carefully chosen. Hill (1995b) has shown that these pit deposits were carefully structured. Human remains are normally found in layers that are largely sterile, but a pit chosen for the deposition of human bone will normally have fills containing other carefully selected deposits. These mark the pit as a bank of socially constructed material.

E-Tagging in Context

2010 ◽  
pp. 158-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather D. Pfeiffer ◽  
Emma L. Tonkin
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Knowledge Representation ◽  
Representation Theory ◽  
Multidisciplinary Approach ◽  
Community Networks ◽  
Social Tagging ◽  
Open Domain ◽  
Individual Object ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Individual

This chapter examines social tagging as annotation; first from the perspective of classification research; and second from the perspective of knowledge representation and knowledge management. Using the context meta-model of the annotation, the authors demonstrate that the model is adequately represented in existing knowledge representation theory; specifically, from the perspective of socially constructed meaning in community networks. Furthermore, the set of tagging representations (that is, triadic networks of the individual, object, and annotation) are explored throughout the knowledge representation domain. In contrast to many commentators, the authors of this chapter conclude that social tagging may effectively be explored via a multidisciplinary approach linking knowledge representation and classifi- cation research and creating an open domain network.

Web Accessibility Assessment Through Multi-Agent Support for Visually Impaired Users

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (03) ◽  
pp. 2050005
Author(s):  
Rafaela Mazalu ◽  
Alejandra Cechich
Keyword(s):  
Web Sites ◽  
Intelligent Agents ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Web Accessibility ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Assessment Tools ◽  
End User ◽  
Complex Procedure ◽  
Multi Agent ◽  
The Individual

In general, users who access Web sites do not necessarily have the same abilities in terms of cognitive, sensory and physical conditions. An accessible Web site is one whose content can be used by as many users as possible; and to improve accessibility, the use of evaluation tools has been incorporated among other resources. However, from the point of view of the end user, the evaluation obtained by most of these tools does not fit to the individual needs and abilities of the users. On the other hand, there is a greater understanding of the need to automate the support to reach higher levels of accessibility. Promoting this type of support on both the developer and the end-user sides is a complex procedure that can be done by incorporating intelligent features, such as the collaborative participation of intelligent agents. In this paper, we introduce a multi-agent system based on visually impaired user’s profiles to improve Web Accessibility assessment. The proposal is validated through a proof of concept, by contrasting results against 10 wide-known assessment tools. Our results show that evaluations are more focused, and therefore, unnecessary assessments are avoided improving efficiency.

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