Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB)
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Negotiating Gendered Identities in Primary School
No full textThis open access book explores young children’s lives in their later years at primary school, from their own point of view. It focuses on how girls and boys experience life in their informal peer group and explores the dynamics of friendships and social hierarchies, identities and how time is spent outside of lessons, including the use of social media. The author interrogates how children make meanings: who they think they are, what it means to be a girl or a boy, and what forms of femininity and masculinity are most dominant. Findings are based on interviews conducted at a middle-class state school and a fee-paying preparatory school on the outskirts of London. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of primary education, schooling and gender, as well as primary school teachers both in the UK and internationally
Zivilgesellschaftliche Nachhaltigkeitsinitiativen in der Schweiz
No full textZivile Initiativen leisten durch das Experimentieren mit sozialen Innovationen einen wichtigen Beitrag zur nachhaltigen Entwicklung. Die Beiträger*innen erkunden die transformative Kraft solcher Nachhaltigkeitsinitiativen in der Schweiz und geben Einblick in alltägliche Schwierigkeiten und Herausforderungen – von der Generierung finanzieller Mittel bis zur Überwindung institutioneller Hürden. Die gesammelten Erkenntnisse und Anregungen bieten nicht nur wertvolle Lösungshinweise für konkrete Probleme, sondern dienen auch als inspirierende Vision für alle, die sich für eine nachhaltige und zukunftsfähige Gesellschaft einsetzen
Unlocking the Treasury
No full textIn recent years, the renewed interest in traditional Chinese elementary educational material has led to an increased use of these texts as teaching materials in Chinese schools, as well as popular literature and in academic research. Unlocking the Treasury: Elementary Learning for Boys in Qing China seeks to address the existing gap in Western scholarship regarding pre-modern Chinese primary education, its theories, and textbooks. With a focus on the Qing dynasty textbook, Treasury of Elementary Learning (Youxue qionglin 幼學瓊林), this volume is the first major study of the Treasury in English and reveals a rich tradition of education through close and critical readings of the text.
Unlocking the Treasury grounds its study of primary education in the intellectual history of the period. Using the concept of interpretive communities, Katherine Ngo explores the impact of socio-political influences and differences in Qing schools of thought, including the school of principle, the school of heart-mind, and practical learning. As such, this volume examines the Treasury through three critical readings of the text: as a handbook for practical learning, a child-oriented reading of the school of heart-mind, and the instrumental perspective of education as examination training.
Ngo reframes the curricular content, skills, learning approaches, and teaching strategies of Chinese pre-modern elementary education with the goal of facilitating a broader transcultural dialogue in contemporary education. Far from the notion of traditional Chinese elementary education being monolithic and “rote learning,” Unlocking the Treasury reveals that elementary learning in the Qing dynasty offered a sophisticated and complex educational agenda with diverse learning goals of examination, preparation, moral development, and textual scholarship training that were shaped by intellectual trends of the time. An engaging text for scholars of Qing China and historians of education alike, Katherine Ngo’s Unlocking the Treasury is essential to understanding the philosophical, historical, literary, and psychological dimensions of education and educational theory in the Qing era
Experimenting with the New European Bauhaus Values and Principles in Urban Transformation
No full textThis open access book offers valuable insights into experimenting with New European Bauhaus values and principles in urban transformation, drawing on contributions from key players such as local activists, action researchers, municipalities, developers and artists. It highlights lessons learned from the lighthouse project “Desire - Designing the Irresistible Circular Society", weaving a narrative of transformative change. The book emphasizes innovative strategies, citizen engagement, and transdisciplinary approaches in shaping urban environments. The journey begins with an in-depth exploration of the Desire project, providing a nuanced understanding of the broader context of its experiments and research activities. This foundation leads to an examination of diverse approaches to achieving sustainable, inclusive, and aesthetically enriching urban transformations. Readers are guided through the complexities of urban change, gaining a holistic understanding of how urban transformation and an irresistible circular society can be cultivated and sustained within the dynamic landscape of European cities. Additionally, the book presents findings from an EU lighthouse project, showcasing how urban transformation sites evolve by integrating lessons that could inform future policy, research, and further advancements within the New European Bauhaus initiative
User Experience + Artificial Intelligence
No full textThis open access book addresses the thriving trend of embedding artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities in products and services reaching the lay public, focusing on the user experience (UX) they prompt from a designerly perspective. It offers a UX evaluation method designed explicitly for AI-infused systems to answer one of the core problems affecting the relationship and interactions people have with such artefacts. The work investigates how people perceive and make sense of systems integrating AI capabilities, trying to understand how their meaning and significance can affect the experience of such products and what design challenges may arise. Given the fundamental premise that current UX methods cannot address AI-infused artefacts, it introduces the results of Meet-AI, a research project exploring specific ways to tackle these problems. The book then presents a comprehensive analysis of current UX methods, and a literature review focused on detecting possible gaps and the most suitable qualities to describe AI-infused systems, and summarizes the findings from all previous investigations into a UX evaluation scale: AIXE (AI user eXperience Evaluation). The book also portrays how the tool has been validated and expanded to become a more comprehensive method. It further describes how the scale has been applied to a comparative study of domestic smart speakers, and introduces a reversed interpretation of the outcomes, framing them as heuristics to inform the early phases of the design process and paving the way for future experimentations in the meta-design dimension
Negotiating Non-Motherhood
No full textThis open access edited volume focuses on the representations, perceptions, and experiences of women who do not have children against the backdrop of traditional gender norms, pronatalist policies, and patriarchal structures. While involuntary and voluntary childlessness have typically been treated separately and studied within different disciplines in most previous scholarship, contributing authors explore non-motherhood beyond the involuntary/voluntary divide and consider a wide range of conceptualizations of women who do not become mothers. The editors bring together a variety of perspectives from different national contexts and disciplines, including family studies, gender studies, literary and cultural studies, sociology, and film studies to explore non-motherhood. The book focuses on how women who choose or experience non-motherhood are negotiated, felt, represented, and received
Desconsuelos de los dichosos para que reconozcan los peligros de serlo y sepan prevenirlos
No full textThis volume offers an unpublished text by Francisco de Quevedo titled Desconsuelos de los dichosos, which harshly criticizes the Count-Duke of Olivares from a neo-Stoic perspective influenced by Seneca. The work, structured as a dialogue between Sense and Reason, warns about the dangers of pride and the inevitable fall of the powerful who ignore divine power. It was dedicated to Don Fadrique de Toledo in August 1633, in Villanueva de los Infantes, where Quevedo wrote other critical works, such as Execración contra los judíos and De los remedios de cualquiera fortuna, the latter thematically complementing Desconsuelos de los fortunateosThis edition includes an introductory study that analyzes the manuscript, confirms Quevedo's authorship and details the relationship of the work with other texts by the author, in addition to a critical apparatus that facilitates the understanding of the text. This writing stands out for its political significance and reflects Quevedo's confrontation with Olivares, a conflict that eventually led the writer to the San Marcos prison where, in the end, he die
Chapter 3 Embodying Trauma
No full textCultural Heritage and Mobility from a Multisensory Perspective bridges the gap between cultural heritage and mobility studies through the employment of theoretical and methodological multisensory perspectives. An interdisciplinary volume covering a broad range of empirical cases, this book focuses on the engagement with cultural heritage in the context of mobility. The book presents a grassroots perspective of individual heritage performances by mobile and moving actors, analyzing them with close attention to their embodied aspects: bodily experiences, sensory impressions, and the affect and emotions they evoke. As a result, the collection of case studies presented covers empirical, theoretical, and methodological accounts of the embodiment of heritage in the context of mobility on macro, meso, and micro levels, exploring heritage change and mobility from a multisensory perspective. Cultural Heritage and Mobility from a Multisensory Perspective is primarily targeted at scholars, students and practitioners working within and at the intersection of the fields of cultural heritage and mobility. It will also be of interest to those engaged in the study of tourism, migration and integration studies. Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 13, 14 and Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license
Chapter 7 Discussion
No full textWhat is it about social interaction at the workplace that spurs interactional competence development? This book explores the answers to this question by analyzing the development of interactional competence by two Vietnamese hotel staff members, one novice and one experienced, as they interact with international guests in English in Vietnam. Using ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA) in a longitudinal design, Nguyen and Malabarba trace the learners’ observable changes in interactional practices in guest-escorting walks over time. In doing so, they uncover the interaction-endogenous impetuses that may have led to these changes and address three fundamental questions in second language acquisition research: what is learned, how it is learned, and why it is learned. In seven chapters, the book offers an illuminating discussion of how competence has been conceptualized in EMCA and a rich analysis of how individuals’ changes in interactional conduct take place locally and longitudinally. With an in-depth discussion of theoretical issues as well as a fine-grained empirical analysis, this book appeals to researchers, students, and practitioners interested in social perspectives on second language learning, longitudinal EMCA, the development of interactional competence at the workplace, and guest-host interaction in hospitality. Chapter 7 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license
Precarity Activism
No full textActivist networks throughout Europe developed the concept of precarity at the turn of the 21st century. Retail chain employees, freelancers, cultural workers, caregivers and university adjuncts alike, including those labeled natives or migrants, identified and organized themselves under the umbrella notion of precarity. This ethnography tells the story of precarity activism as it originated and evolved in Southern Europe, tracing its theoretical and linguistic legacy. Highlighting the currency of precarity-inspired proposals for social change, this empirically detailed appraisal recapitulates activist debates over the prospects of flexible labor markets entangled with questions of gender and citizenship. The book’s analysis offers insight into how precarity activism’s visionary notions of sustainable futures speak directly to the tensions of the platform economy.
This genealogy of a grassroots political concept will be of use for postgraduate students and scholars interested in anthropology, cultural studies, geography, sociology and political theory. It will appeal to interdisciplinary fields engaging processes of collective action, knowledge production and the so-called subaltern populations, such as social movements studies, gender studies, critical race and migration studies, dis/ability studies and labor studies. This book will further attract those concerned with changes in production, reproduction and mobility under platform capitalism as it further consolidates precarity as the new normal.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license