Outlines. Critical Practice Studies

A Place to be Together:

Victoria Restler, Wendy Luttrell, David Chapin — Mon, 10 May 2021 00:00:00 +0200

This article describes our transmethodological practice and the affective space of making and making sense of visual research in community. We purposefully embrace complexity and richness in visual data analysis, rather than seeking to reductively avoid doubt and uncertainty. To do this, we bring multiple ways of seeing together into a collaborative, poly-vocal construction. Our ‘studio’ is designed to be a safe space for risk and creativity. We are at different levels of experience and confidence, but we all learn from each other. Seeing collaboratively depends on translating our ways of reading visual material “out of our heads” and “into our shared space.” In the sense that we love what we are doing, we revel at opening ourselves to new possibilities. In-Progress: Victoria Restler Narrates a Collaborative Seeing Studio Session. Wendy Luttrell leads us into collaging as both metaphor and tools of Collaborative Seeing. We end with a brief reflection.

On studying peoples’ participation across contemporary timespaces:

Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, Giulia Messina Dahlberg — Mon, 10 May 2021 00:00:00 +0200

This paper presents critical reflections regarding entangled relationships between access, communication and inclusion and illustrates how these play out across multiple analytical scales, ranging from interactional data analysis to engagement with policy data. The study draws on our ethnographic fieldwork from two large projects where roughly 45 18-50+ year-old people have been shadowed across settings. The study aims to illuminate dimensions of analyst’s participation in terms of the flow of the everyday lives of people they track within and across physical-online spaces and within and across education, workplaces, cultural settings, homes, leisure-time, governmental agencies, health services, social media, etc. Such a stance acknowledges the mobile yet situated, partial and limited nature of contemporary existence and that of knowledge generation within the research enterprise.

By engaging with what we call a “second wave of southern perspectives” (SWaSP), the access that scholars have and the identity-positionings of people they track can be understood in terms of (non)support i.e. (non)affordances of different settings for human beings’ possibilities to engage in social practices. In addition to bringing into dialogue different theoretical clusters within a SWaSP framing, the study goes beyond essentialized ways of understanding methodologies or single project reporting, and attempts to shed light on the chained entanglements, intersections and enactments of policy and practice, artefacts and humans, including the ways in which such relationships seldom present themselves in an intuitive manner for the analyst (or project participants).

A SWaSP framing is attended to as dimensions of doing multiple-scale ethnography, in terms of being positioned as scholars who are mobile across contemporary physical-online spaces, are reflexive about their mobile gaze and who follow individuals, tools and inscriptions as they emerge across online/physical/private/institutional spaces. Where someone is, how and when people meet, what such meetings offer in terms of positionality, opportunities, meaning-making and learning, are riddled with continua and disruptions that not only create analytical and methodological dissonance in mainstream scholarship but, more significantly, emerge as challenges for scientific enquiry by taking onboard the very theoretical and methodological implications of such continua and disruptions.

Researching Young People’s Sexualized Digital Practices Involving Imagery:

Penille Kærsmose Bøegh Rasmussen — Mon, 10 May 2021 00:00:00 +0200

Young people constitute and negotiate their gendered identities and belonging, as well as their romantic and erotic relationships, through sexualized digital practices involving imagery. Most of these practices are unproblematic, but sometimes they take forms that are more abusive and lead to (particularly) girls being visually exposed online. Such practices are commonly referred to as sexting or revenge pornography and have been subject to much discussion in research, in the media and among practitioners. These discussions, however, sometimes fail to acknowledge the diversity, volatility and ambiguity of the practices. This article discusses whether the approaches used in research on young people’s sexualized digital practices involving imagery are sufficiently refined and sensitive in order to grasp comprehensive complexity and messy constitutions of such practices. Based on analyses of the studies’ conceptualizations, perspectives and methods, I suggest that future research production might benefit from a more transgressive and flexible approach that learns from the full array of approaches in the previous studies and takes the instability and multiplicity of young people’s practices into account. Such an approach should entail an openness towards ambiguous conceptualizations, a more processual perspective that includes both individual, social and technological aspects and the use of multiple explorative methods across on- and offline spaces.

From the abstract to the concrete and beyond:

Liubov Vetoshkina, Sami Paavola — Mon, 10 May 2021 00:00:00 +0200

Methodological procedures are frequently described using ideal-typical sequences and relatively linear phases, often covering the whole research process. We aim to uncover the long-term process of construction of a conceptual framework of a study as constituted by cycles using the method of ascending from the abstract to the concrete (AAC) as a starting point. Empirical research often requires the introduction of intermediate concepts between general theory and data. In this paper we follow how a specific intermediate concept – the intermediary object – was constructed and interpreted in two research cases: 1. the use of building information modelling (BIM) in collaboration between designers, architects and engineers in construction projects; 2. the craft of historical wooden boat building in Russia and Finland. Using ‘manuscript archaeology’ we follow the construction of a conceptual framework by analysing the development of the key texts and documents in these cases. In both cases the process contained multiple ‘episodes’– relatively independent and complete parts of research process, constructed around specific tangible products (like a conference paper or a draft of an article), but forming a sequence when taken together. Each episode contained own cycle of movement from the abstract to the concrete, and the whole research process constituted a relatively autonomous but interconnected network of methodological cycles, where concepts emerged based on conceptualizations from previous episodes. This shows how transmethodological processes of constructing a conceptual framework for a specific study through multiple methodological cycles often develop across a long period, with both vertical movements between theory and data, and horizontal movements between theoretical conceptualizations.

The Making of Wellbeing Measurement:

Venka Simovska, Catriona O'Toole — Mon, 10 May 2021 00:00:00 +0200

In this paper, we propose a ‘study protocol’ for researching the becomings of the Danish national wellbeing survey for schools. We engage with the idea of a published research protocol that originates from positivist research paradigms and medical research in particular. Within these paradigms, protocol serves the purpose of ensuring the objectivity and replicability of the research in question, and provides a sense of security to the researcher in terms of the quality of the research design. In contrast, with ideas of transmethodology in mind, we suggest a protocol that endeavours to support researchers to engage with ambiguity, uncertainty and singularity in research while still being attentive to quality. We suggest a protocol that helps de-stabilize the concept of wellbeing in schools and looks at how wellbeing as an object of measurement is (re)configured, who the human and non-human actors involved are, and what effects their assembling produces. These questions require research practices that acknowledge the complexities of the human condition and the richness of the social and material world. Instead of suggesting a “paradigm shift”, we are inspired by Patti Lather, who argues for a proliferation of paradigms, where proliferation refers to forming a pattern of interference. In other words, proliferation calls for reflection on the inconsistencies, confusion, disorganization of the research process, and both our need and caution to position ourselves epistemologically and ontologically. The protocol we suggest deploys diverse, sometimes complementary, sometimes contrasting methods, analytical strategies or theoretical perspectives in order to explore the problem at hand and engage with the ironies, tensions and uncertainties inherent to research.

What can we learn from a peer review?

Jesper Stilling Olesen — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0200

The quality assurance of research articles is based on a widespread reliance on peer review, which has gradually become black boxed, as the way to do it. By opening the black box, it turns out that this form of quality assurance varies a great deal. This article looks at the comments offered by peer reviewers and treats them as an important but overlooked element of the methodological circle and science production. Based on an auto-ethnographical study of one manuscript that undergoes peer reviewing in three different journals the article examines how the review comments affect the author and hence promote/inhibit the becoming of a research article. The article offers a transmethodological look at peer review by employing concepts from actor-network theory. This allows for a theoretical move from notions of single authorship to notions of writing as a performance of relations between heterogeneous actors. The analysis aims to identify the connections that are established between the manuscript and other actors such as scientific standards for good research, journals’ aim and scope, universities’ requirements for staff publication, peer reviewer’s personal academic interests etc. which all become part of a peer review network. In conclusion, the article suggests acknowledging the relational and co-productive aspect of peer reviewing as an important part of quality assurance of scientific knowledge.

Transformative expectations in research on environmental and sustainability education

Monica Carlsson — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0200

While education in general is seen as a crucial means for creating social change and transformation, environmental and sustainability education (ESE) is especially subject to transformative expectations in tackling escalating societal problems such as the lack of sustainable development. This article explores how ESE research addresses transformative expectations and justifies the knowledge it produces and its methods. It first explores examples of this within three different categories focusing on: transformative teaching in higher education, systemic transformative change in higher education institutions, and transformative change agency formation in community settings. Thereafter follows a discussion of the interfaces between the examples when it comes to their ontological, epistemological and methodological stances. The analysis illustrates different ways of conceptualizing transformative expectations, drawing on terms such as ‘rethinking’, ‘revitalizing’, ‘disrupting’, ‘reframing’ and ‘transgressing’. It furthermore highlights two different foundations for methodological justifications in ESE research addressing transformative expectations: working for change within existing social frameworks (adaptation), or seeking improvement by transgressing norms (disruption). It is pointing out that such methodological justifications are likely to differ in terms of how they address change depending on whether the research is conducted within or outside formal education settings.

Transmethodology:

Dorte Kousholt, Iram Khawaja — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0200

The special issue deals with entanglements, borders, and bridges between ideas, concepts, and spheres often considered separate and distinct elements in research processes that are frequently represented as well-ordered and linear. Under the heading transmethodology, our aim has been to make space for and bring to light the often messy, non-linear, and complex research processes that form our methodologies.