Applied Research, Diffractive Methodology, and the Research-Assemblage: Challenges and Opportunities

This article offers a critical assessment of the challenges for policy- and practice-oriented social research of ‘diffractive methodology’ (DM): a post-representational approach to data analysis gaining interest among social researchers. Diffractive analyses read data from empirical research alongside other materials – including researchers’ perspectives, memories, experiences, and emotions – to provide novel insights on events. While this analytical approach acknowledges the situatedness of all research data, it raises issues concerning the applicability of findings for policy or practice. In addition, it does not elucidate in what ways and to what extent the diffractions employed during analysis have influenced the findings. To explore these questions, we diffract DM itself, by reading it alongside a DeleuzoGuattarian analysis of research-as-assemblage. This supplies a richer understanding of the entanglements between research and its subject-matter, and suggests how diffractive analysis may be used in conjunction with other methods in practice- and policy-oriented research.

Preschool Children’s Reasoning about Sound from an Inferential-Representational Approach

The purpose of this article is to present an analysis to identify the reasoning processes and representations that preschool students develop about sound based on the inferential-representational approach. Participants were 18 preschool students between the ages of four and five attending three rural schools located in the Sierra Norte of Puebla, Mexico. Data were obtained through a 14 question semi-structured interview. From children’s answers to the formulated questions, an inferential analysis method was applied to identify intentionality, representation elements, sign-material expressions, representations, inferences, and coordination rules in students’ constructions. The results show that children build a basic set of epistemic tools to give meaning to their interpretations and can use them as surrogate reasoning to make inferences. This research constitutes the first approximation toward the understanding of preschool children’s reasoning forms with an inferential-representational approach and constitutes a new approach that puts forward new referents to analyze students of different ages. We consider that the described results and analysis have implications on science education at this educational level.

The Representational Theory of Measurement

This chapter introduces the representational theory of measurement as the relevant formal framework for a metaphysics of quantities. After presenting key elements of the representational approach, axioms for different measurement structures are presented and their representation and uniqueness theorems are compared. Particular attention is given to Hölder’s theorem, which in the first instance describes conditions for quantitativeness for additive extensive structures, but which can be generalized to more abstract structures. The last section discusses the relationship between uniqueness, the hierarchy of scales, and the measurement-theoretic notion of meaningfulness. This chapter provides the basis for Chapter 6, which makes use of more abstract results in measurement theory.

Understanding Communities’ Disaffection to Participate in Tourism in Protected Areas: A Social Representational Approach

This manuscript uses a social-representational approach that allows for including social interactions, history and cultural background to explain and cluster resident attitudes to tourism in protected areas in developing countries. Based on the published evidence on the failure of community-based tourism programmes and projects that aim to achieve community engagement and benefits, and on scholars attributing those failures to the lack of consideration given to the perceptions and ambitions of the communities, that in turn are split into different groups that perceive tourism dissimilarly, we propose a pathway to encouraging community engagement and participation. Field work carried out throughout the settlements neighbouring the National Park of La Langue de Barbarie in northern Senegal allowed to identify three group profiles: The largest minority are reluctant to accept any type of tourism at all, a second minority actively supports another type of community-based tourism, more locally centred, and a third group consists of those mainly wanting to escape their unwanted existence and migrate. We conclude that, to achieve successful sustainable tourism development, interventions should capacitate the group that supports tourism to lead initiatives, seduce the reluctant ones, energise those who seek to migrate and negotiate with the external tourist agents to achieve more equitable tourism development in which locals actively participate.

Venom: A Desiring Machine

This paper focuses on the protagonist in Venom (2018). The debate is based on the double character of Eddie-Venom and traces the Deleuzean desire of this folded identity. How Eddie’s dark desires are suppressed and united by Venom, a symbiote? Schizoanalysis, a counter-method of psychoanalysis, assumes a dual identity for dealing with the rational space surrounding us. Psychoanalysis however, establishes a family-based representational system. For Deleuze and Guattari, free associations during schizophrenic life are to be preferred instead of the representational approach in psychoanalysis. schizo-esthetics, a network of desiring machines, is the liberty of the subject to remain in the world non-hierarchically and the abandonment of the order of symbols.

The role of measurement in theorising about the world

The procedure of establishing a measure of an attribute consists of the assignment of numbers to objects whose attributes show some variability according to rules. These rules are chosen so that the assigned numbers contain some ‘information’ about the differing variants of the attribute. In the article, we discuss a heuristic, a scaling, and a representational approach. Within the heuristic approach, rules can be based on a verbal argument heuristically linking the variability in the attribute to differences in the measurements. In this case, the specific information that is represented by the measurements is very hard to determine due to the lack of a formal model. Within the scaling approach, a formal model is used to derive rules for the assignment of numbers to the variants of the attribute. From a scaling model, conclusions about the specific information assumed to be represented in the measurements can be derived. Both approaches depend on the assumption that there is something to measure, namely that the attribute that is going to be measured exists in a realm different from the numerical one. Within the representational approach, one tries to clarify what conditions must be met by an attribute to be considered measurable so that relations between the measurements can be interpreted as reflecting relations between the variants of the attribute. By specifying the conditions an attribute must meet to be measurable at all, measurement theory opens an alternative way to rules and thus to measurements. Following this approach, it is no longer necessary only to assume that there is some measurable attribute, but one can find out whether this indeed is the case. Moreover, the interdependence of the definition of an attribute and its measurability, as well as the role theory plays in defining certain attributes, can be clarified.