scholarly journals Imagining Citizens as More than Data Subjects

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisca Grommé ◽  
Evelyn Ruppert
Keyword(s):  
Collaborative Design ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Official Statistics ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Academic Researchers ◽  
Design Workshop ◽  
Ethnographic Narratives ◽  
Opening Up

The article presents a methodography of a collaborative design workshop conducted with national and international statisticians. The workshop was part of an ethnographic research project on innovation in European official statistics. It aimed to bring academic researchers and statisticians together to collaborate on the design of app prototypes that imagine citizens as co-producers of official statistics rather than only data subjects. However, the objective was not to settle on an end product but to see if relations to citizens could be re-imagined. Through a methodography composed of two ethnographic narratives, we analyse whether and how a collaborative design workshop brought about imaginings of citizens as co-producers. To retrospectively analyse the workshop, we draw on feminist and material-semiotic takes on ‘friction’ as characteristic of collaboration. ‘Friction’, we suggest, can enlarge the repertoire of collaborative speculative practice beyond notions of rupture or consensus. Finally, we suggest that this analysis demonstrates the potential of methodography for opening up and reflecting on method in STS through eliciting the possibilities of collaboration.

Re-theorising the pre-adolescent child in School Age Care

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-130
Author(s):  
Bruce Hurst
Keyword(s):  
Care Setting ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
School Age ◽  
Older Children ◽  
Australian School ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Children's Play ◽  
Adolescent Child ◽  
Distinct Category ◽  
Insight Into

School Age Care is a setting that is little researched and the research that has been conducted has not often sought the perspectives of older children. This article describes a participatory and ethnographic research project that sought a deeper insight into older children’s experiences of an Australian School Age Care setting, seeking their views about how to successfully program for other children their age. Older children in School Age Care are commonly spoken of as rebellious, bored, disruptive and unsuited to School Age Care. The Foucauldian theories underpinning the research challenged the normative developmental discourses that circulate School Age Care. The research shows that older children have access to these developmental and maturational discourses. The participants actively engaged with language, architecture and resources in the School Age Care setting to actively construct themselves as a more mature, distinct category of child. The findings suggest that School Age Care practitioners should be aware of how developmental discourses are both enacted by children and reinforced through programming design and consider the impacts of segregating routines and practices on children’s play and leisure. While this research does not ‘solve’ the question of older children in School Age Care, it unsettles dominant understandings, therefore inviting practitioners to imagine new programming approaches that might improve School Age Care for older children.

Encountering Space, Places and Memories in Australian Landscapes

2007 ◽  
Vol 124 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-176
Author(s):  
Francesca Veronesi ◽  
Petra Gemeinboeck
Keyword(s):  
National Park ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Sound Installation ◽  
Spatial Exploration ◽  
Spontaneous Exploration ◽  
Relational Qualities ◽  
Location Sensing ◽  
Opening Up

Mapping Footprints: Lost Geographies in Australian Landscapes is a research project in development that explores the relational qualities of places and contemporary perceptions of geography. It reflects on new mapping technologies that have the capacity to reinstate relations between subjects and places via a spatial exploration that engages with inventive and specific uses of location sensing technologies informed by physical and cultural contexts. The Elvina rock engravings in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park are the site of a location-sensitive sound installation in which we integrate the specificities of landscape with a navigational medium. A sonic map is overlayed over the physical terrain, opening up the site as a place embedded with memories, creating the potential for spontaneous exploration and new understandings of place. The ‘map’ in Mapping Footprints is composed from the geographical narration of the cartographers’ exploration across Indigenous mediascapes.

A Computational Model of Collaborative Creativity

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 68-87 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amit Banerjee ◽  
Juan C. Quiroz ◽  
Sushil J. Louis
Keyword(s):  
Computational Model ◽  
Collaborative Design ◽  
Design Solution ◽  
Design Problems ◽  
Design Studies ◽  
Fitness Evaluation ◽  
Interactive Genetic Algorithms ◽  
Social Creativity ◽  
Opening Up

The role of collaboration in the realm of social creativity has been the focus of cutting edge research in design studies. In this paper, the authors investigate the role of collaboration in the process of creative design and propose a computational model of creativity based on the newly proposed meta-design approach. Meta-design is a unique participatory approach to design that deals with opening up of design solution spaces, and is aimed at creating a viable social platform for collaborative design. A meta-design-based collaborative approach to the design process may achieve ET-creativity by expanding the conceptual space of design beyond what would have been possible by individual, non-collaborative design. The model has been implemented using interactive genetic algorithms, which casts the design problem as an optimization problem and uses a set of collaborative users for subjective fitness evaluation. The design problems investigated include the collaborative design of architectural floorplans and editorial design of brochures.

scholarly journals Sensing global tourism numbers with millions of publicly shared online photographs

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 471-477 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tobias Preis ◽  
Federico Botta ◽  
Helen Susannah Moat
Keyword(s):  
Low Cost ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
Official Statistics ◽  
Online Data ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Photo Sharing ◽  
Global Tourism ◽  
Global Travel ◽  
Opening Up

In our increasingly connected world, individuals produce continuous streams of data through their constant interactions with the Internet. This data is opening up opportunities to measure human behaviour that was previously time consuming or expensive to capture. Here, we explore whether data from online photographs can be used to estimate travel statistics on a global scale. We draw on the locations attached to 69 million publicly shared photographs to infer the global travel patterns of almost half a million users of the photo-sharing platform Flickr. We find that our photo-based estimates of tourist arrival statistics for the G7 countries Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States correlate with the corresponding official statistics released by those countries. Our results highlight the potential for vast volumes of online data to inform the generation of timely, low-cost indicators of the state of society. We discuss practical considerations that remain before this methodology could be used in the production of official statistics.

Multiple temporalities of knowing in academic research

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Smith
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Functional Relationship ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Academic Knowledge ◽  
Academic Researchers ◽  
Crisis Of Modernity ◽  
The Relationship

Based on ethnographic research at five Czech universities from 2011 to 2013, this article explores how academics make sense of and claims to three qualitatively distinct temporal regimes in which their activities as knowledge producers are inscribed: disciplinary time, career time and project time. This conceptual framework, a modification of Shinn’s distinction between disciplinary, transitory and transversal knowledge-production regimes, seeks to replace images of competition and succession between regimes with images of their recombination and intersection. It enables an interpretation of the empirical findings beyond the indigenous complaint that excessive speed is compromising the quality of knowledge production. The relationship between projects, careers and disciplines emerges from the study as problematic rather than synergistic. In this respect the paper does not contradict the claim by critical theorists that we are witnessing the disintegration of what used to be a functional relationship between the multiple temporalities of academic knowledge production based on standardized career scripts, nor the related claim that this may reflect a deeper crisis of modernity as a predictive regime for the production of futures. It proposes, however, that transversal projects can still be mediators of ‘disciplinary respiration’ insofar as their timeframes are available for variable calibration commensurate with the increasingly heteronomous ways of knowing and knowledge routines that academic researchers practise.

scholarly journals Reinventing Linguistic Ethnographic Fieldwork During the COVID-19 Pandemic

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-122
Author(s):  
Noémi Fazakas ◽  
Blanka Barabás
Keyword(s):  
Participatory Research ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Digital Ethnography ◽  
Virtual Ethnography ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Linguistic Research ◽  
Research Site ◽  
Linguistic Ethnography ◽  
Non Local

Abstract Our paper discusses the methodological implications of an ethnographic linguistic research project in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Starting from pertinent definitions of linguistic ethnography and interpretations of the field, we offer a demonstration of the process in which this particular participatory research project was faced with the fact that the field became unavailable and inaccessible for the non-local participants. We argue that moving the research online in this case does not mean a shift to “virtual ethnography” (Hine) or “digital ethnography” (Varis), but provides an example for the research site as an emerging construct which adds to the complexities of ethnographic research.

scholarly journals The positioning of English as a key skill in the labour market of Marseille’s Tourist Office

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
ADAM WILSON
Keyword(s):  
Labour Market ◽  
English Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
International Tourism ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Tourist Destination ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Tourism Professionals ◽  
The City ◽  
Tourist Office

Marseille is reinventing itself as an urban tourist destination. The aim of this paper is to explore the effects that the resulting intensification of international tourism may have on the city, its population and its labour market. Drawing on previous research, language is shown to be a powerful lens through which to explore such phenomena. Therefore, an ethnographic research project was undertaken in Marseille’s Tourist Office, focussing on language use in encounters between international tourists and tourist advisers. The analyses of these data presented here show that English facilitates communication between these parties and thus becomes an indispensable resource for those working at the Tourist Office. It is thus shown how the English language is a key skill in the Tourist Office’s labour market and acts as a discriminatory factor in the recruitment of tourism professionals. In conclusion, some of the potential wider social repercussions are discussed.

scholarly journals Common Worlding Pedagogies: Opening Up to Learning with Worlds

2021 ◽  
pp. 74-88
Author(s):  
Affrica Taylor ◽  
Tatiana Zakharova ◽  
Maureen Cullen
Keyword(s):  
Early Childhood ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Pedagogical Approach ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Early Childhood Research ◽  
Guiding Principles ◽  
Opening Up ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Do So

Common worlding is a collective pedagogical approach. It is also a deliberate move to open up education to worlds beyond narrow human preoccupations and concerns and beyond its standard framing as an exclusively social practice. In this article, we identify some of the guiding principles that underpin this approach and explain how they work out in practice. We do so by offering a selection of illustrative vignettes drawn from the Walking with Wildlife in Wild Weather Times early childhood research project in Canberra, Australia, and from the Witnessing the Ruins of Progress early childhood research collaboratory in Ontario, Canada.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document