Knowing-with-snow in an outdoor kindergarten

This article highlights how reciprocal relationships between children and the environment can contribute to exploring understanding of children’s learning in the outdoor environment. We draw on data from a kindergarten in the northern part of Norway, where we have carried out fieldwork three hours a week from October to mid-May. During this period, the outdoor area was covered with snow of varying qualities. Snow and weather conditions are included as elements in a relational understanding, in which the environment is understood as open and dynamic – an interaction between past and present, between geography, materiality, people and the ‘more-than-human’. The learner and the environment are understood as an indivisible process, where different elements exercise a reciprocal influence on each other. Using Ingold’s concept of correspondence, we explore how children learn by being within and with the world. The article is a contribution to creating a nuanced understanding of children’s learning and the educator’s role within an outdoor environment in kindergarten practice.

On Reflexivity in Ethnographic Practice and Knowledge Production

Deployed as much during fieldwork as in writing, reflexivity is itself positioned, its saliency as an epistemological device having transformed over time and space. Re-tracing its initial absence, subsequent rise in popularity and eventual routinization in academia, we position ourselves against reflexivity’s near-total displacement today by a narrow and increasingly prevalent understanding of positionality. We argue for a return to a broader and more relational understanding of reflexivity, proposing a methodological program to achieve and maintain its critical, ethical and political edge. Our aim is to engage in conversation about the value of reflexivity as an iterative and collaborative ethnographic endeavour with potential to produce more relational and engaged knowledge about increasingly overbearing field-sites in the Arab region and beyond.

Penerapan model pembelajaran kooperatif tipe tpss untuk meningkatkan pemahaman relasional peserta didik kelas XI IPA di SMA Nasional Malang

Relational understanding is conceptual understanding that focuses on the interrelationships between concepts. The initial research conducted in the class of XI-Grade/Natural Sciences of the SMA Nasional Malang showed that students still had a low relational understanding. The results of observation of learning activities also show that learning activities do not support the relational understanding of students. Classroom action research was carried out to provide a solution to the problem by applying the TPSS type of the cooperative learning model. There are two cycles in this study, each of which consists of planning, implementation, observation, and reflection. Indicators that the research is successful are: (1) in the last cycle test, the four indicators that have been determined of the students’ relational understanding appear; and (2) the application by the observer of the TPSS type of the cooperative learning model is given the value, at least, “Good”. This study was declared successful after the second cycle. The steps of the TPSS type of the cooperative learning model are: (1) Think; (2) Pair; (3) Square; and (4) Share. Pemahaman relasional adalah pemahaman konseptual yang berfokus pada keterkaitan antar konsep. Penelitian awal yang dilaksanakan pada kelas XI IPA 1 SMA Nasional Malang menunjukkan bahwa peserta didik masih memiliki pemahaman relasional yang rendah. Hasil observasi kegiatan pembelajaran juga menunjukkan bahwa kegiatan pembelajaran belum mendukung pemahaman relasional peserta didik. Penelitian tindakan kelas dilaksanakan untuk memberikan solusi dari masalah tersebut dengan menerapkan model pembelajaran kooperatif tipe TPSS. Terdapat dua siklus dalam penelitian ini yang masing-masing terdiri atas perencanaan, pelaksanaan, pengamatan, dan refleksi. Indikator keberhasilan dalam penelitian ini yaitu: (1) hasil tes akhir siklus peserta didik dapat memenuhi empat indikator pemahaman relasional yang telah ditentukan; dan (2) keterlaksanaan model pembelajaran kooperatif tipe TPSS berdasarkan hasil observasi aktivitas guru dan peserta didik oleh observer memperoleh nilai dengan kategori minimal “Baik”. Penelitian ini dinyatakan berhasil setelah dilakukan siklus kedua. Langkah-langkah model pembelajaran kooperatif tipe TPSS adalah: (1) Think; (2) Pair; (3) Square; dan (4) Share.

Becoming frail: A more than human exploration

‘Frailty’ is increasingly used as a clinical term to refer and respond to a particular bodily presentation, with numerous scores and measures to support its clinical determination. While these tools are typically quantitative in nature and based primarily on physical capacity, qualitative research has revealed that frailty is also associated with a range of social, economic and environmental factors. Here, we progress the understanding of frailty in older people via a new materialist synthesis of recent qualitative studies of frailty and ageing. We replace a conception of frailty as a bodily attribute with a relational understanding of a ‘frailty assemblage’. Within this more-than-human assemblage, materialities establish the on-going ‘becoming’ of the frail body. What clinicians refer to as ‘frailty’ is one becoming among many, produced during the daily activities and interactions of older people. Acknowledging the complexity of these more-than-human becomings is essential to make sense of frailty, and how to support and enhance the lives of frail older people.

Sex Roles and the Erasure of Women from Conversations About Gender Oppression: The Case of #BoysDanceToo

In 2019, the #BoysDanceToo movement reacted in anger to controversial, misogynistic remarks made on Good Morning America. These reactions highlighted the challenges faced by men and boys in dance. Yet, previous studies have documented significant advantages for men in dance. In an analysis of the discourse used in online posts related to the #BoysDanceToo movement, I find that these broader structural gender inequalities are generally not examined. Responses also do not interrogate the antifemininity that fuels the stigma against boys and men who dance. Analysis suggests that this is due to an overreliance on the language of sex roles—which can mask the oppression of women (as a group) by men (as a group)—and the neglect of a relational understanding of gender. As a result, women are largely erased from a conversation about gender oppression.

Extractivism and Territorial Dispossession in Rural Colombia: A Decolonial Commitment to Campesinas’ Politics of Place

Linked to extractive practices, territorial dispossession can be traced back to the colonisation of Abya Yala. From a decolonial commitment, this article complicates notions of dispossession and extractivism as merely emerging from war in Colombia and focuses on their presence in Campesinas territories. Based on the conceptualisations of the coloniality of power and coloniality of gender, I narrate how territorial dispossession and extractivism are felt in women’s ‘body-lands’ through foreign tourism/conservation development and new export crops in two rural veredas in the Colombian Andes and in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta where I conducted participatory visual projects in 2016. From a relational understanding of place, I also demonstrate the ways that the rural population is resisting and negotiating within these processes. Ultimately, I make a call for feminist scholars to politically commit to the dismantling of the coloniality of gender, and to the resistances to territorial dispossession and extractivism (epistemic and economic) that rural women are leading in place in the Global South.

In Defence of an Unalienated Politic: a Critical Appraisal of the ‘No Outsiders’ Protests

The trope of the repressive Muslim, obstinately attached to their regressive world views, recalcitrant antagoniser of modernity, has become a thoroughly familiar drama. Redundant spectacles abound: events often highly mediatised, substantiated by conservativism and liberalism alike, deployed as justification for policing, surveillance and invasion. The 2019 protests against the ‘No Outsiders’ LGBT lessons held in Birmingham, England are one such spectacle. Foregoing the dominant portrayal of the protests as an event of Muslim homophobia, I instead examine the social processes that render the event exceptional in the British imaginary and the statecraft it subsequently enables. First, the protests’ production as a spectacular event is analysed through the historical conditions of Europe’s self-constitution through Islam-as-Threat. It is through liberalism’s amnesiac frame, one that erases its imperial and racist culpability, that the sexual exceptionalism that undergirds the spectacle of the protests can be understood. Second, reading the protests ‘sideways’, I argue, reveals how the displacement of homophobia onto Muslims continues liberalism’s tradition of situating its Others as oppositional to its purported gendered and sexual freedoms. In this context, sex education as deradicalisation of Muslim pupils becomes normalised, even as British liberalism disavows racism. Thirdly, the inclusion of queer Muslims as the authentic voice emerging from the cross-sections of queer and Muslim identity is critiqued as a ‘non-performativity’. Rather than offering a relational understanding of queer, Muslim and queer Muslim vulnerabilities, this inclusion elides an intersectional analysis of British homonationalism. I conclude by arguing for ‘an unalienated politics’ that is vigilant to co-optation, refusing to treat queerness as an exceptional site of injury. As such, how can we imagine the ‘queer’ in queer Muslim as a political position that refuses to capitulate to the hierarchisation of the human?