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Tillidsarbejde og tydelighed: Et studie af tillid, magt og afhængighed blandt pædagoger og forældre i danske vuggestuer
Get PDFAfhandlingen undersøger relationer og interaktioner mellem forældre og personalet i danske vuggestuer.På baggrund af et etnografisk feltarbejde blandt pædagoger og familier i fire danske vuggestuer, samt en historisk redegørelse for og analyse af vuggestuernes fremkomst og udviklingen af idealer for kulturelle omgangsformer, analyseres de logikker og rationaler om relationen mellem forældre og pædagoger, som er på spil i vuggestuernes dagligdag; hvordan disse kan forklares; samt hvilken betydning de får for interaktionerne mellem forældre og pædagoger i dagens vuggestuer i Danmark
“Hellere 1000 kram end én knytnæve”: Magtanvendelser og udviklingshæmmede på bo- og dagtilbud
Get PDFPublikationen er en lettere omarbejdet masterafhandling fra 2017. Omdrejningspunktet for denne undersøgelse er en empirisk, teoretisk og historisk undersøgelse af magtanvendelser i forhold til voksne udviklingshæmmede på botilbud. Susanne Bay Sønderbæk er uddannet socialrådgiver, og har siden 1. januar 2014 været ansat i Socialtilsyn Midt, hvor hun fører tilsyn med botilbud. Herunder hvorvidt tilbuddene overholder lovgivningen og i den pædagogiske praksis arbejder forebyggende i forhold til magtanvendelser.Lise Usinger er uddannet pædagog, og er ansat som konsulent på et dag og døgntilbud for voksne udviklingshæmmede. Lise Usingers opgave er dels at klæde de ansatte på i forhold til lovgivning, etik og arbejdsmiljø dels at gennemgå og kvalitetssikre de magtanvendelser der indberettes fra tilbuddet.“Hellere 1000 kram end én knytnæve” er udgivet i serien \u27Socialpædagogisk faglighed og voksne med psykisk/fysisk handicap\u27 (serieredaktør: Søren Langager) under forskningsprogrammet ’Inklusion og eksklusion – i samfund, institution og pædagogisk praksis’ ved Danmarks institut for Pædagogik og Uddannelse (DPU), Aarhus Universitet
Betydningen af sundhedsplejens ekstra tilrettelagte indsatser for små børn og deres forældre
Get PDFDenne rapport præsenterer resultater fra et netop afsluttet forskningsprojekt, der har haft fokus på sundhedsplejens tilrettelagte ekstra indsatser over for små børn og deres forældre. Projektet har forløbet over en periode på cirka 3 år fra 2014 til 2017, hvor børn, forældre og sundhedspleje er blevet fulgt og har deltaget med deres tid og interesse.Rapporten er baseret på et selvstændigt forskningsprojekt, der har haft fokus på en række særlige ekstra indsatser, som sundhedsplejen har udført gennem en treårig periode i Københavns Kommune, men udgør på samme tid en del af et samlet forskningsprojekt, som overordnet har fokus på betydningen af sundhedsplejens arbejde med tidlige og forebyggende indsatser
Esbjergakademiet 2017: Videnskabelig rapport på baggrund af følgeforskning
Get PDFI foråret 2017 afholdt Esbjerg kommune i samarbejde med Løkkefonden to ugers ”Drengeakademi”. Det var på den ene side et turboforløb med en række genkendeli-ge og velkendte elementer, men der var også tale om mange indslag og detaljer, der var helt specielle for ”Esbjergakademiet”. Der blev lavet aftaler med DPU om følge-forskning i form af casestudier i de to uger. Rapportens data er primært indsamlet lige før, under og lige efter selve campen og siger derfor især noget om korttidseffekter og –betydninger af forløbet. Helt overordnet kan man konkludere at Esbjergakademiet på næsten alle områder kan ses som en succes. Man nåede langt hen ad vejen alle de mål man havde sat sig på den korte bane, både når man undersøger det kvalitativt og kvantitativt. Men rapporten her peger også på en lang række opmærksomhedspunkter og faldgruber, som fremtidige akademiforløb med fordel kan tage højde for. Og så tyder meget på, at successen nok er meget mere båret af de professionelles personlige og faglige kompetencer end af konceptets konkrete indhold og metodik. Hvordan effekten bliver på den lange bane må fremtiden vise, men vi glæder os til at samarbejde med Esbjerg kommune om at finde ud af det.
Archaeological Fieldwork at Unguja Ukuu, Zanzibar, July 2017: Interim Report
No full textThis report details activities carried out during a season of archaeological fieldwork at Unguja Ukuu, Zanzibar (July 2017) as part of the Urban transitions in the Zanzibar archipelago project sponsored by the Centre for Urban Network Evolutions, Aarhus University. Field research focussed on 3 main objectives: prospecting for house deposits and excavations of occupation deposits, geoarchaeological survey, and multi-scalar sampling of environmental and archaeological contexts. The report illustrates the field research strategies and interim results
Lidar-based Obstacle Detection and Recognition for Autonomous Agricultural Vehicles
Get PDFToday, agricultural vehicles are available that can drive autonomously and follow exact route plans more precisely than human operators. Combined with advancements in precision agriculture, autonomous agricultural robots can reduce manual labor, improve workflow, and optimize yield. However, as of today, human operators are still required for monitoring the environment and acting upon potential obstacles in front of the vehicle. To eliminate this need, safety must be ensured by accurate and reliable obstacle detection and avoidance systems.In this thesis, lidar-based obstacle detection and recognition in agricultural environments has been investigated. A rotating multi-beam lidar generating 3D point clouds was used for point-wise classification of agricultural scenes, while multi-modal fusion with cameras and radar was used to increase performance and robustness. Two research perception platforms were presented and used for data acquisition. The proposed methods were all evaluated on recorded datasets that represented a wide range of realistic agricultural environments and included both static and dynamic obstacles.For 3D point cloud classification, two methods were proposed for handling density variations during feature extraction. One method outperformed a frequently used generic 3D feature descriptor, whereas the other method showed promising preliminary results using deep learning on 2D range images. For multi-modal fusion, four methods were proposed for combining lidar with color camera, thermal camera, and radar. Gradual improvements in classification accuracy were seen, as spatial, temporal, and multi-modal relationships were introduced in the models. Finally, occupancy grid mapping was used to fuse and map detections globally, and runtime obstacle detection was applied on mapped detections along the vehicle path, thus simulating an actual traversal.The proposed methods serve as a first step towards full autonomy for agricultural vehicles. The study has thus shown that recent advancements in autonomous driving can be transferred to the agricultural domain, when accurate distinctions are made between obstacles and processable vegetation. Future research in the domain has further been facilitated with the release of the multi-modal obstacle dataset, FieldSAFE
Iodine in Danish Groundwater and Drinking Water
No full textThis dissertation is a result of a three-year PhD project which was part of the GEOCENTER research project “Iodine in the hydrological cycle of Denmark: implications for human health”, jointly financed by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) and Aarhus University (AU). The study was conducted between August 2011 and July 2014 under the main supervision of Søren M. Kristiansen (AU) and Birgitte G. Hansen (GEUS). In my PhD dissertation, I address the following research objectives: 1) to map iodine concentration and speciation in drinking water and groundwater in Denmark, 2) to study the spatial patterns and to elucidate the factors governing them, and 3) to evaluate the importance of the spatial variation of drinking water iodine to the populations’ nutrition (health). To do this, I used two types of data: 1) from two sampling campaigns designed as part of this project (drinking water: 2013, groudnwater and drinking water: 2012), and 2) historical data extracted from the public nationwide geological and hydrological database, Jupiter. (two groudnwater datasets: 1933-2011 and 2011-2014). See the extended Abstract (PhD Dissertation) for further details on results, implications, and potential for further research. This PhD dissertation is paper-based type (not a monography) and it includes a Summary Chapter, followed by five manuscripts. Four of the manuscripts are now published in peer-reviewed journals, so those have been removed from the file. No other changes to the content of the PhD dissertation have been made post-submission to AU.
Global Leadership Teams and Cultural Diversity: Exploring how perceptions of culture influence the dynamics of global teams
No full textIn the 21stcentury, business engagements are becoming increasingly global, and global teams are now an established form of organising work in multinational organisations. As a result, managing cultural diversity within a global team has become an essential part of ensuring motivation, creativity, innovation and efficiency in today’s business world. Global teams are typically composed of a diversity of experiences, frames of references, competencies, information and, not least, cultural backgrounds. As such, they hold a unique potential for delivering high performance in terms of innovative and creative approaches to global management tasks; however, instead of focusing on the potentials of cultural diversity, practitioners and studies of global teams tend to approach cultural diversity as a barrier to team success. This study explores some of the barriers that cultural diversity poses but also discusses its potential to leverage high performance in a global context. Our study highlights the importance of how team leaders and team members perceive ‘culture’ as both a concept and a social practice. We take issue with a notion of culture as a relatively fixed and homogeneous set of values, norms and attitudes shared by people of national communities; it is such a notion of culture that tends to underlie understandings that highlight the irreconcilability of cultural differences. Applying a more dynamic and context-dependent approach to culture as a meaning system that people negotiate and use to interpret the world, this study explores how global leadership teams can best reap the benefits of cultural diversity in relation to specific challenging areas of intercultural team work, such as leadership style, decision making, relationship building, strategy process, and communication styles. Based on a close textual interpretation of31 semi-structured interviews with members of global leadership teams in eight Danish-owned global companies, our study identified different discourses and perceptions of culture and cultural diversity. For leaders of the global leadership teams (Danish/European) and other European team members, three understandings of cultural diversity in their global teams were prominent:1) Cultural diversity was not an issue2) Cultural diversity was acknowledged as mainly a liability. Diversities were expressed through a difference in national cultures and could typically be subsumed under a relatively fixed number of invariable and distinct characteristics. 3) Cultural diversity was an asset and expressions of culture had to be observed in the situation and could not simply be derived from prior understandings of cultural differences.A clear result of our study was that those leaders of global teams who drew on discourses of the Asian ‘Other’ adherred to the first two understandings of cultural diversity and preferred leadership styles that were either patriarchal or self-defined as ‘Scandinavian’. Whereas those leaders who drew on discourses of culture as dynamic and negotiated social practices adhered to the third understanding of cultural diversity and preferred a differentiated and analytical approach to leading their teams.We also focused on the perceptions of team members with a background in the country in which the global teams were co-located. These ‘local’ team members expressed a nuanced and multifaceted perspective on their own cultural background, the national culture of the company, and their own position within the team, which enabled them to easily navigate between essentialist perceptions of culture while maintaining a critical stance on the existing cultural hegemonies. They recognised the value of their local knowledge and language proficiency, but, for those local members in teams with a negative or essentialist view of cultural diversity, it was difficult to obtain recognition of their cultural styles and specific, non-local competences. Our study suggests that the way global team members perceive culture, based on dominant societal discourses of culture, significantly affects the understandings of roles and positions in global leadership teams. We found that discourses on culture were used to explain differences and similarities between team members, which profoundly affected the social practices and dynamics of the global team. We conclude that only global teams with team leaders who are highly aware of the multiple perspectives at play in different contexts within the team hold the capacity to be alert to cultural diversity and to demonstrate agility in leveraging differences and similarities into inclusive and dynamic team practices
Staying with the Trouble through Design: Critical-feminist Design of Intimate Technology
Get PDFThis dissertation explores staying with the trouble through design as a design theory of intimacy and intimate technology. To research and design with the subject of intimacy is to trouble and to ask for trouble, and by staying with the trouble of intimacy, to paraphrase Donna Haraway, I articulate and perform a way of designing not as a way out of trouble, but as a way of making trouble and staying with the trouble. I argue that by staying with the trouble, designers may learn to be “truly present” and respond to social, cultural and political issues of intimate technology.The methodology interweaves design research, feminist technoscience, critical theory and software studies into a critical-feminist design methodology. As a response to design and designing intimate technology I have engaged in Donna Haraway’s “Staying with the Trouble” (Donna J. Haraway 2016) and solutionism as a critique of technology development, as well as feminist theories on fantasies of “the good life” and gender and technology, and critical theories on the role of intimacy in digital culture.Within the field of interaction design research, this dissertation’s contribution can be divided into three parts: 1) an exploration of the role of intimate technologies in our everyday lives and ways of being, 2) a critical and feminist design methodology of staying with the trouble through design, and 3) design proposals that stay with the trouble of designing with intimacy.My design research has evolved through four design projects that interweave different intimate topics and technologies through varied design practices: 1. PeriodShare: an internet-connected menstrual cup. 2. Marcelle: a wearable sex toy reacting on wifi-activity. 3. Ingrid: a woman living with electromagnetic hypersensitivity. And 4. Intimate Futures: two digital personal assistants where one is pushing back on sexual harassment and the other is assisting with hormone level tracking.The main contribution of the dissertation is the design methodology staying with the trouble through design, which is an anti-solutionist approach to design that interweaves the situated, personal and political role of design. By responding to/with trouble, rather than designing solutions to problems, staying with the trouble through design aims to better understand the conflicts and responsibilities involved in complex social, cultural and political issues, in order to imagine and design still possible futures. The design methodology interweaves three practices that unfold the self-reflective, ethnographic and collaborative process of staying with the trouble through design. The first practice, the willful practice of Staying with the Wrong, is a continuous process of becoming a feminist designer and it includes actively learning to be present; question the given as given, stay with the feelings you wish would go away, continuously practice self-reflection on own positionality and using feminist humour when designing with taboos. The second practice, Curious Visiting, encourages the designer to go beyond their own positionality, by listening to stories of pleasure and pain and visiting ongoing pasts and alternatives nows. This challenges the designer’s notion of the present by interweaving fact and fiction, and it highlights that this practice is never innocent but involves risks. Lastly, the third practice Collective Imagining highlights how design by proposing future change can respond to and/or with trouble and how we collectively can engage with futures to rewrite collective imaginings and tell other possible stories within and across social and cultural contexts. Together, these three interwoven practices propose a way of staying with the trouble through design, as a feminist contribution to current critical approaches within interaction design.
Neuromagnetic investigations of mechanisms and effects of STN-DBS and medication in Parkinson\u27s disease
Get PDFParkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder cardinally marked by motor symptoms, but also sensory symptoms and several other non-motor symptoms. PD patients are typically treated with dopaminergic medication for several years. Many patients eventually experience bouts of periods where medication might not be able to effectively control symptoms as well as experience side-effects of long-term dopaminergic treatments. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an option as the next therapeutic recourse for such patients. DBS treatment essentially involves placement of stimulating electrodes in the subthalamic nucleus (STN) or the globus pallidus internum (GPi) along with an implanted pulse generator (IPG) in the sub-clavicular space. STN-DBS alleviates motor symptoms and leads to substantial improvements in quality of life for PD patients. Although DBS is known to improve several classes of symptoms, the effect mechanism of DBS is still not clear. While there is a lack of electrophysiological investigation of sensory processing and the effects of treatments in PD altogether, the electrophysiological studies of the cortical dynamics during motor tasks and at rest lack consensus.We recorded magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electromyography (EMG) from PD patients in three studies: (i) at rest, (ii) during median nerve stimulation, and (iii) while performing phasic contractions (hand gripping). The three studies focused on cortical oscillatory dynamics at rest, during somatosensory processing and during movement, respectively. The measurements were conducted in DBS-treated, untreated (DBS washout) and dopaminergic-medicated states. While both treatments (DBS and dopaminergic medication) ameliorated motor symptoms similarly in all studies, they showed differentiated effects on: (i) increased sensorimotor cortical low-gamma spectral power (31-45 Hz) (but no changes in beta power (13-30 Hz)) at rest only during DBS, (ii) somatosensory processing with higher gamma augmentation (31-45 Hz, 20-60 ms) in the dopaminergic-medicated state compared to DBS-treated and untreated states, and (iii) hand gripping with increased motor-related beta corticomuscular coherence (CMC, 13-30 Hz) during dopaminergic medication in contrast to increased gamma power (31-45 Hz) during DBS.Firstly, we infer from the three studies that DBS and dopaminergic medication employ partially different anatomo-functional pathways and functional strategies when improving PD symptoms. Secondly, we suggest that treatments act on pathological oscillatory dynamics differently at cortical and sub-cortical levels and may do so through more sophisticated mechanisms than mere suppression of the pathological spectral power in a particular band. And thirdly, we urge exploring effect mechanisms of PD treatments beyond the motor system. The effects of dopaminergic medication on early somatosensory processing has opened the door for exploring the effects of treatments and studying their mechanisms using electrophysiology, especially in higher order sensory deficits. Integration of such research findings into a holistic view on mechanisms of treatments could pave way for better disease management paradigms.