2,268 research outputs found

    Repositioning the graphic designer as researcher

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    In academic terms, the discipline of graphic design is relatively young. Consequently the position of the discipline within academic territory, and the role of the designer, continue to be debated. In part, these debates have been a product of attempts to define and defend the discipline’s borders from within, in order to establish a sense of the role of graphic design and the graphic designer as commensurate with other disciplines both within and beyond art and design. In recent years graphic designers have variously been defined as ‘authors’, ‘producers’ and ‘readers’, yet none of these definitions seem to have provided any kind of productive or lasting impact within the academy. This paper suggests that rather than continue to seek territorial definitions and positions from within, it could be more productive to look beyond the confines of the discipline. Gaining a broader, interdisciplinary perspective on, and understanding of, qualitative research methods from other disciplines may enable the graphic designer to more fully position his or her practice within the wider academy. Such a perspective could help facilitate the repositioning and redefinition of the graphic designer as ‘researcher’ - a move that would be productive in relation to the future development of postgraduate research within the discipline

    Organizing health inequalities?:Employee driven innovation and the transformation of care

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    This paper responds to calls for new approaches to understanding and intervening in health inequalities and in particular for attention to the processes and relations that mediate structural inequality and everyday outcomes. Our contribution focuses on the part that healthcare organizations play in this. We draw on organizational sociology, which theorizes that whilst organizational structures, cultures and practices may appear neutral - and rely for their legitimacy on this - they may, in fact, operate in the interests of some social groups and less in the interests of others. This proposition is worked through new empirical research on employee driven innovation in the UK National Health Service. In both our case studies, front-line staff working with some of the most vulnerable citizens had identified the organization of care as both part of the problem and – potentially – part of the solution. In tracing their efforts to change the organization of care, we learn more about what it might take to mobilise resources in support of those whose lives are most affected by health inequalities

    Interview with Alison Frank, September 25, 2009

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    Interview Themes: How Frank chooses research topics (00:50) Aspects of her training as a historian Frank found useful (07:00) Books that have inspired and informed Frank's work (11:11) On the role of area studies for scholarship on East-Central Europe (14:00) "Internationalizing" the history of East-Central Europe (19:30) Advice to young historians/scholars working on the region (22:11)Interview with Alison Frank, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. Interview conducted in Ithaca, NY on September 25, 2009. Professor Frank is the author of a number of articles and an excellent book on the oil industry in the Habsburg Monarchy entitled Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia. She is now working on a project on the coastline of Austria-Hungary.1_9lz5ekh

    Introduction: The Politics of Resilience and Recovery in Mental Health Care

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    The articles included in this special issue engage these themes across a number of national settings, institutional spaces, and empirical sites, from universities to mental health commissions, to national policy in an international context. They focus, especially, on Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom, where recent and significant changes in mental health governance have relied heavily on the notions of recovery and resilience, often to questionable effect. They deal, as we have said, with some of the most central themes in social justice studies. As a collection, the articles help us think through some of the pressing political questions about social justice that have arisen with the adoption of the mantras of resilience and recovery in mental health governance

    Negotiating the Culture of Resistance: A Critical Assessment of Protest Politics

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    Both for those within the movement and the public at large, the anti-globalization movement has become increasingly defined by large-scale protests such as those opposing the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in Quebec City. Such events successfully render visible the strength of the movement, expose an emerging global elite, politicize neoliberal restructuring, and capture the media and public's attention. Yet the privileging of large-scale protest for advancing anti-globalist politics is increasingly being questioned both by those involved in the movement and by the Left in general.Peer reviewe

    Portrait of Alison Dolling, author and historian, Adelaide, 1978 [picture] /

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    Title devised by cataloguer from accompanying information.; "Dolling, Alison. Writes under Mary Broughton, Hazel de Berg collection. From Adelaide Festival, South Australia"--Compactus card.; Condition: Scratched.; Also available in an electronic version via the Internet at: http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn4764650; Conversation with Alison Dolling (Mary Broughton); located at; National Library of Australia Oral History collection ORAL TRC1/1067

    Automation, algorithms, and politics| bots and political influence: a sociotechnical investigation of social network capital

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    This study explains how bots interact with human users and influence conversational networks on Twitter. We analyze a high-stakes political environment, the UK general election of May 2015, asking human volunteers to tweet from purpose-made Twitter accounts—half of which had bots attached—during three events: the last Prime Minister’s Question Time before Parliament was dissolved (#PMQs), the first leadership interviews of the campaign (#BattleForNumber10), and the BBC Question Time broadcast of the same evening (#BBCQT). Based on previous work, our expectation was that our intervention would make a significant difference to the evolving network, but we found that the bots we used had very little effect on the conversation network at all. There are economic, social, and temporal factors that impact how a user of bots can influence political conversations. Future research needs to account for these forms of capital when assessing the impact of bots on political discussions

    Innovating for a cause: the work and learning required to create a new approach to healthcare for homeless people

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    Innovation occupies a pivotal place in our understanding of knowledge-based economies, and this is raising questions about sources of innovation, how it originates, and the role played by employees, work practices and learning. This paper explores these issues through case study research into a new approach to providing healthcare for homeless people in England, and by bringing together conceptual insights from the employee-driven innovation literature, and more broadly from social and practice-based learning theory and organisational theory. Applying these perspectives to our case enables illumination of the innovation as a process – not an event – and as an ongoing set of organisational practices that transcend their origins. Through our analysis we argue that the notion of ‘a cause’ is helpful in elucidating the impetus and the commitment to making the innovation happen (and go on happening). Our findings are presented under three themes: ‘establishing a cause’, ‘organising for innovation’, and ‘innovative capability in practice’. Building on these, we have identified five key inter-related dimensions which help conceptualise the work and learning that it took to create and (re-)enact the innovation and that we suggest may have relevance for understanding and characterising other employee-led innovations in and perhaps beyond healthcare

    Translating employee-driven innovation in healthcare: bricolage and the mobilization of scarce resources

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    With top-down models of innovation failing to address the entrenched problems of healthcare, policy-makers have proposed that staff working on the frontline might be better placed to innovate solutions. Drawing on a study of employee-driven innovation in UK public healthcare, the authors explore the process through which staff innovate without the resources that support policy implementation, showing how the translation of ideas from problematization to practice is underpinned by ‘bricolage’—the appropriation and repurposing of resources ‘at hand’.</p
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