30115 research outputs found
Sort by
(Non)Life on the Line: Crisis Calls with Animals
Get PDFAnimals are telephones, Derrida muses, and sometimes the other way around. This comment, while abstract, speaks to a history of animal life that has haunted the telephone since its inception, with questions of life and nonlife hovering in the balance. Whether it is the use of pigs’ bladders for the first Chinese telephones, the moth-eaten fur of Thomas Watson’s stuffed family cat, or the frogs’ legs that Luigi Galvani exposed to electricity, the telephone has consistently mediated the divide between the categories of who and what—‘who’ referring to those considered to be above the law or protected by it, and ‘what’ to those who remain outside the law and by extension, the grasp of justice. Instead of avoiding this history of animal suffering, Derrida picks up the telephone to call upon the “question of the animal” as a conversation that can wait no longer. If, as Derrida tells us, animals are telephones and vice versa, then they demand the same attentive urgency given to the insistent clamour of an incoming call, where the consistent lack of certainty regarding who or what is on the other end always prevails. This article is about how the means, medium and materiality of the telephone is indebted to animals, how telecommunication has mediated a tenuous ‘conference call’ between technoscience, spectrality and animal vulnerability since its introduction, and how listening-as-reading becomes a way of touching upon those who normally remain unheard in times of crisis
A content analysis of school anti-bullying policies in England: signs of progress
Get PDFSchools in England are required to have an anti-bullying policy. A revised 42-item scoring scheme was used to report a content analysis of 200 anti-bullying policies. On average, school policies had 61% of items. Chi-square comparisons found an increase in policy coverage from 2008 to 2022, notably for mentioning cyber bullying and many types of bias-based bullying; but comparisons are limited by different sampling procedures. Despite good coverage in some areas, fewer than 25% of policies mentioned responsibilities of other school staff, suggested how to help the pupil(s) doing the bullying to change their behaviour, gave advice to parents about bullying, or discussed specific powers to deal with cyberbullying and out-of school bullying. For 131 schools, correlations of self-report scores on bullying victimisation and perpetration with the overall policy score were negative but very small. Ways to improve school policy coverage, and the impact they may have, are discussed
Drama, English and Digital Storytelling: Using drama to create digital stories across languages and cultures
Get PDFAs part of the international. Multilingual Critical Connections Project, students from four UK schools created digital stories about mental illness, migration, technology and views of the world. Vicky Macleroy explores the integral role of drama in the digital storytelling process, and shows how learning English has been supported and enhanced through a multilingual approach
Cryoception
Get PDFEmbodied and proximate experiences of cryospheric environments are often pitted against the more abstract realms of climate science, especially those associated with remote sensing, laboratory analysis and computational modelling. In this article I argue that knowledge of ice must be poly-perspectival and relational. Experiences from the field actively shape scientific insights and provide important contextual understandings of how the work was carried out and the ways in which measurements may have been arrived at and verified. This in turn elicits an ethical plea and methodological prompt as to how technical modes of sensing of ice could be further integrated into sociocultural assemblies especially those involving local knowledge traditions and the embodied experiences of living and working on ice
What do data rights do for workers? A critical analysis of trade union engagement with the datafied workplace
Get PDFThere has been a substantial increase in calls for so-called workers’ ‘data rights’, including amongst trade unions. Unions see them as a way of tackling some of the challenges of the datafied workplace but questions have also been asked about their relation to employment regulation and wider efforts within the labour movement. In this article we draw on a review of trade union documents along with interviews with 15 trade unions in the United Kingdom to critically engage with data rights as an avenue for protecting and advancing workers’ interests. We argue that while trade unions see possible strategic gains through the pursuit of data rights, such rights are only fully meaningful if pursued in conditions that enable wider workplace democracy. In the absence of such conditions data rights can distract from efforts to foster worker power and may even serve to legitimise what are perceived to be oppressive technologies
The Healthy Context Paradox at a National/Country-Level: Is Victimisation associated with Worse Adjustment in Countries where the Average Level of Victimisation is Lower?
Get PDFRecent research has highlighted the healthy context paradox (HCP), namely that the association between peer victimisation and psychological and social adjustment worsens in social contexts with lower average level of victimisation. Previous research has examined this phenomenon in relation to classroom- or school-level victimisation. We tested whether the HCP is applicable on a much wider scale, at national level. Besides country-level victimisation, we explored whether country-level economic inequality and social welfare protection moderate the victimisation-adjustment link. We used data from the HBSC 2013/2014 survey related to peer victimisation and five measures of health and wellbeing of 11-, 13- and 15-year-old boys and girls from 40 countries (N = 198,646) in Europe and North America, complemented with information on economic inequality (Gini index, available for 33 countries) and social protection (decommodification index, available for 25 countries). We confirmed an expected within-country correlation between higher levels of victimisation and poorer health and wellbeing for each measure and across countries; however this association had significant between-country variability. For country-level victimisation, there was evidence of a significant HCP effect for the measures of peer support and life satisfaction – but not for feeling low, health, and liking school
Memory strategies in autistic and older adults
Get PDFMemory strategies in autistic adults seem to mimic strategies at older age, as both younger autistic and older non-autistic individuals use fewer semantic features in visual memory tasks. Therefore, the current study aims to investigate whether early differences in memory strategies lead to altered age-related effects in autism, particularly whether initial difficulties in strategy use become advantageous at older age (i.e., “protective aging”). A total of 147 participants across four groups (autistic younger/older, non-autistic younger/older) completed an online assessment. This assessment included a recognition version of the Visual Patterns Test (VPT) to evaluate semantic strategy use in visual memory, the Just Noticeable Difference (JND) size task for assessing visual processing, and the Multifactorial Memory Questionnaire to evaluate subjective memory functioning and strategy use (MMQ). Unexpectedly, all groups benefited from semantic features on the VPT, although the older groups performed less accurately and slower than the younger groups. The JND Size task showed no group differences. Autistic adults rated their MMQ memory as worse than non-autistic adults, despite reporting greater strategy use. These results indicate that cognitive strategies might be more similar between younger/older and autistic/non-autistic people than previously expected, although notable discrepancies between objective and subjective measures were present. They also substantiate previously reported parallel (i.e., similar) age-related effects between autistic and non-autistic people
Public policymaking: from AI to decomputing
Get PDFAI seems to offer many benefits to public policymaking, but it can't address the tricky structural issues that impede actual change.
Position paper for the Joseph Rowntree Foundatio
Structural dynamics and the wealth of nations. Luigi Pasinetti's system of economic theory
Get PDFThe article presents Luigi Pasinetti’s theoretical system by foregrounding (i) the multiple forms of interdependence between specialised production activities, and the representations of economic structure associated with each form of interdependence (e.g., horizontal vs. vertical); (ii) the coordination requirements imposed on interdependent activities by the need to achieve systemic goals such as full employment and full utilization of production capacity; (iii) the bounded open-endedness of the proportions between activities that satisfy such requirements; (iv) the distinction between the coordination requirements imposed by economic structure and the contextual conditions that may or may not make it possible to satisfy those requirements; and hence (v) the different socio-political and institutional arrangements that may be compatible with different systemic objectives. In this light, the essay introduces a collection of articles published in Structural Change and Economic Dynamics that explores the interfaces between Pasinetti’s work and multiple lines of research in economics
Women construction workers in Nepal: Collectivities under precarious conditions
Get PDFIn this article, we explore the experiences of women construction workers in Nepal and the strategies that these workers have adopted to challenge the exploitation and inequalities they confront. We firstly argue that the experiences of women construction workers in Nepal are shaped by compulsive engagement in labor markets under conditions of informality, precarity, and gendered responsibility for social reproduction. These experiences reflect multiple intersections of gender, class, caste, and ethnicity in the arenas of the household, the workplace, trade unions, and the state. However, policy interventions related to women's participation in labor markets and inspired by the Gender Equality as Smart Economics approach, such as Nepal's post-earthquake mason training scheme targeting women construction workers, render invisible these structures of inequality, exploitation, and violence. Second, we argue that women construction workers negotiate—and in some cases challenge and change—working conditions, primarily through a variety of informal and formal collective strategies. Women construction workers' own narratives and practices, we find, bear little resemblance to the narratives promoted by the International Financial Institutions and the state, in which women workers appear as resilient, altruistic, and industrious entrepreneurial subjects seeking individual self-improvement within the neoliberal framework. They rather invoke informal and organized collectivities, negotiate, and often resist, gendered norms of behavior and at times radically re-envision the scope of trade union struggles