ORCID Profile
0000-0001-5826-8534
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UNSW Sydney
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Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 30-05-2019
Abstract: This article introduces a technique for doing mixed-methods research which I term the methods braiding technique. Contributing to established techniques for mixing methods across and within the quantitative and qualitative spectra, methods braiding incorporates arts-based research considerations. This aims to assist the growing number of researchers seeking to incorporate creative methods into their projects and add to established integrative, iterative, and synergistic approaches with insights from arts-based research. The methods braiding technique offers three main strengths. First, it assists researchers with cultivating reflexivity through periodic process reviews. Second, methods braiding helps researchers engage with the potentially ergent conceptual foundations of mixed-methods projects by framing ‘mixing’ as a braiding process, this technique emphasises the synergistic integration of methods, analysis, and interpretation. Finally, and especially valuable for projects using arts-based methods, this technique centralises the crafting of multiple research outputs throughout the duration of a project. The use of this technique is illustrated via an ex le of a project in which a sociological fiction novel is constructed.
Publisher: Queensland University of Technology
Date: 25-08-2023
DOI: 10.5204/MCJ.2976
Abstract: Introduction The concept of ‘wellbeing’ is typically thought of in human-centric ways, referring to the affective feelings and bodily sensations that people may have which inform their sense of health, safety, and connection. However, as our everyday lives, identities, relationships, and embodiments become digitised and datafied, ‘wellbeing’ has taken on new practices and meanings. The use of digital technologies such as mobile and wearable devices, social media platforms, and networks of information mediate our interactions with others, as well as the ways we conceptualise what it means to be human, including where the body begins and ends. In turn, digital health technologies and ‘wellness’ cultures such as those promoted on social media sites such as Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook have also shaped our understanding of ‘wellness’ and ‘wellbeing’, their parameters, and how they ought to be practiced and felt (Baker Lupton Digital Health Lupton et al.). For millennia, aspects of human bodies have been documented and materialised in a variety of ways to help people understand states of health and illness: including relationships to the environments in which they lived. Indigenous and other non-Western cosmologies have long emphasised the kinds of vibrancies and distributed agencies that are part of reciprocal more-than-human ‘manifestings’ of kinships, and have called for all people to adopt the role of stewards of the ecosystem (Bawaka Country et al. Hernández et al. Kimmerer Rots Todd Tynan). In Western cultures, ideas of the human body that reach back to ancient times adopt a perspective that viewed the continuous flows of forces (the four humours) in conjunction with the elements of air, wind, earth, and fire inside and outside the body as contributing to states of health or ill health. It was believed that good health was maintained by ensuring a balance between these factors, including acknowledgement of the role played by climactic, ecological, and celestial conditions (Hartnell Lagay). A more-than-human approach is beginning to be re-introduced into Western cultures through political activism and academic thinking about the harms to the planet caused by human actions, including global warming and climate crises, loss of habitats and ecological bio ersity, increased incidence of extreme weather events such as bushfires, floods, and cyclones, and emerging novel pathogens affecting the health not only of humans but of other living things (Lewis Lupton Covid Societies Lupton Internet of Animals Neimanis et al.). Contemporary Western more-than-human philosophers argue for the importance of acknowledging our kinship with other living and non-living things as a way of repositioning ourselves within the cosmos and working towards better health and wellbeing for the planet (Abram Braidotti Plumwood). As these approaches emphasise, health, wellbeing, and kinship are always imbricated within material-social assemblages of humans and non-digital things which are constantly changing, and thereby generating emergent rather than fixed capacities (Lupton "Human-Centric" Lupton et al.). In this article, we describe our More-than-Human Wellbeing exhibition. To date, new media, Internet, and communication studies have not devoted as much attention to more-than-human theory. It is this more-than-digital and more-than-human approach to health information and wellbeing that marks out our research program as particularly distinctive. Our research focusses on the many and varied digital and non-digital forms that information about health and bodies takes. We are interested in health data as they are made and form part of the objects and activities of people’s everyday lives and aim to expand the human-centric approach offered in digital health by positioning human health and embodiment as always imbricated within more-than-human ecosystems. We acknowledge that all environments (natural and human-built) are intertwined with humans, and that to a greater or lesser extent, all are configured with and through the often exploitative and extractive practices and ideologies of those living in late modern societies in which people are positioned as superior to and autonomous from other living things. Together with more-than-human scholarship, we take inspiration from work in which arts-based, multisensory, and museum curation methods are employed to draw attention to the intertwining of people and ecologies (Endt-Jones Howes). Our exhibition was planned as a research translation and engagement project, communicating several of our studies’ findings in arts-based media (Lupton "Embodying"). In what follows, we outline the concepts leading to the creation of our exhibits and describe how these pieces materialise and extend more-than-human concepts of wellbeing and care. Five of the exhibits we created for this exhibition are discussed. They all draw on our research findings across a range of studies, together with more-than-human theory and medical history (Lupton "More-Than-Human"). We describe how we used these pieces to materialise more-than-human concepts of health, wellbeing, and kinship in ways that we hoped would provoke critical thought, affective responses, and open capacities for action for contributing to both human and nonhuman flourishing. The background, thinking, and modes of making leading to the creation of ‘Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities’, ‘Smartphone Fungi’, ‘Hand of Signs’, ‘Silken Anatomies’, and ‘Talking/Flowers’ are explained below. Bodily Curios Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Deborah Lupton. Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities. Reclaimed timber, found objects, resin 3D prints. 2023. Fig. 1: Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities. Fig. 2: Detail from Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities. The objects we have placed in Cabinet of Human/Digital/Data Curiosities (figs. 1 and 2) mix together such things from the past as prosthetic human eyeballs and teeth used in medicine and dentistry in earlier eras. This collection of found and manufactured objects, both old and new, draws on the concept of the ‘cabinet of curiosities’, also known as cabinets of wonder, which first became popular in the sixteenth century. Artefacts were assembled together for viewing in a room or a display case. The items were chosen for being notable in some way by the curator, including objects from natural history, antiquities, and religious relics, as well as works of art. These collections, purchased, curated, and assembled by members of the nobility or the wealthy as a marker of refinement, knowledge, or social status, were the precursor of museums (Endt-Jones). We see digital devices such as mobile phones as one of a multitude of ways that operate to document and preserve elements of human embodiment – indeed, as contemporary ‘cabinets of curiosities’. Our cabinet also refers to the tradition of medical museums, which display preserved human organs, body parts, and tissue in glass bottles for pedagogical purposes. Under this model of health, specimens of both ‘ideal’ health and also ‘ill’ health – abnormalities in the flesh – were documented as a means of categorising wellbeing. Museums such as these would often treat diseased and disabled bodies as oddities and artefacts of ‘curiosity’. In this work, we reimagine and wind back this way of thinking, through displaying and drawing attention and curiosity towards signs of the body and the everyday. We are showing that wellbeing is more than a process of categorisation, comparison, or measurement of ‘ideal’ or ‘abnormal’ it is in the traces we leave behind us when we return to the earth. Our information data are human remains, moving as endless constellations of the interior and exterior of the body (Lupton Data Selves). In this artwork, both reclaimed wood and 3D-printed resin were used as a synergy between the natural and synthetic. Taking our cue from the manner of display of these items in medical museums, we have added our own curios, including 3D-printed body organs sprouting fungi (fig. 2), as a way of demonstrating the entanglements between humans and the fungal kingdom. Interspersed among these relics of human bodies is a discarded mobile phone with its screen badly shattered. It is displayed as a more recent antiquated object for making images and collecting, storing, and displaying information and images about human bodies, which itself is subject to disastrous events despite its original high-tech veneer of glossy impermeability. Technologies are more-than-flesh as human-made simulacra of body parts. Our wellbeing is sensed and made sense of through bodies’ entanglements of human and nonhuman. These curios both materialise traces of our bodies and wellbeing and extend our bodies into the physical spaces we inhabit and through which we move. Reading the Traces and Signs Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Deborah Lupton. Smartphone Fungi. Recycled European oak, 3D printed resin, CNC carved plywood. 2023 Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor and Deborah Lupton. Hand of Signs. Laser-etched walnut and plywood. 2023. Fig. 3: Smartphone Fungi. / Fig. 4: Detail from Smartphone Fungi. Wellbeing is also a process of mark-making, realised through the reciprocal impressions we leave on each other and the world around us. In Smart Phone Fungi (figs. 3 and 4) we capture the idea of ‘recording’ that takes place between people, technologies, and the natural world. It was inspired by a huge tree which members of our team noticed on a bush walk in the Blue Mountains, near Sydney, Australia. Growing from this tree were fungi of similar size and shape to the smartphone that was used to capture the image. In our interpretation, a piece of reclaimed timber was used to represent the tree, itself marked by its human use, and fungal shapes replicating those on the tree were produced using computer numerical controlled (CNC) carving. The central timber post is covered with human and more-than-human traces, such as old tool marks, weather damage, and wood borer holes. Alongside these traces, the CNC-carved fungi forms add a conspicuously digital layer of human intervention. Fig. 5: Hand of Signs. In Hand of Signs (fig. 5), we extend this idea of both organic and digital data traces as something that can be ‘read’ or interpreted. Inspired by the practice of palmistry, this work re-interprets line reading, the historical wooden anatomical model, and human body scanning as ways of reading for signs of wellbeing in past and future. Palm readers interpret people’s character, health, longevity, and other aspects of their lives through the creases and traces of development, wear, and deteriorations in the skin of our hands (Chinn). Life leaves its traces on our palms. The piece also refers to the newer tradition of digitising human bodies (Lupton Quantified Self Lupton et al.), employing scanning and data visualising technologies, which uses spatial GPS data to deduce patterns of human activity. For both palmistry and in more contemporary monitoring technologies, one’s wellbeing can be deduced through the map: the lines of the palm and the errant traces collected by satellites and sensors. To reflect this relation between mapping and palmistry, our updated anatomical model references both the contours of 3D geospatial data and of the human palm. However, this piece looks to represent more layers of data beyond those captured by GPS data. By using reclaimed wood to construct this human hand model, we are again making an analogy between the marks of growth and life that timber displays and those that the human body bears and develops as people move through more-than-worlds throughout their lifespans. The piece also seeks to draw attention to the various ‘signs’ that have been used across centuries to interpret the current and future health and wellbeing of humans (once markings on or morphologies of the body, now often the digitised visualisations of the internal operations and physical movements of the body that are generated by digital health technologies), superimposing older and newer modes of corporeal knowledge. Layers of Mediation Megan Rose. Silken Anatomies. Digital print on satin and yoryu silk chiffon. 2023. Ash Watson. Talking/Flowers. Collage and digital inkjet on paper. 2023. Fig. 6: Detail from Silken Anatomies. The ways that we come to sense and understand wellbeing are also mediated through the reproductive interplay of natural and technological elements. Silken Anatomies (fig. 6) was inspired by anatomical prints from the Renaissance showing details of the interiors of human bodies and organs together with living things and objects from the natural world. These webs of interconnectivity were thought to be key to wellbeing and health. Produced at scale through metal engraving and woodblock printing, these natural history and compendia took on major importance as part of these educational resources (Kemp Swan). In an effort to extend the reach of artefacts beyond their tangible presence, libraries globally have sought to create open access digital scans of historic medical and botanical illustrations. The images reconfigured in Silken Anatomies were downloaded from the Wellcome Trust’s online archive and have been reimagined through digital enhancement and sublimation dye techniques. Referencing shrouds, the yoryu silk panels enfold exhibition visitors, who were able to touch and pass through the silks, causing them to billow in response to human movement. We bring together an animal-made material (crafted by silkworms) with more-than-human images featuring both humans and other living creatures. The vibrancies of these beautifully engraved and coloured anatomical images are given a new life and a new feel, both affectively and sensuously, through this piece. We can both see and touch these more-than-human illustrations that speak to us of the early modern natural science visualisations that underpin contemporary digital images of the human body and the more-than-human world. The vibrancies of these beautifully engraved and coloured anatomical plates are given a new life and a new feel, both affectively and sensuously. The digital is returned to the tangible. Fig. 7: Detail from Talking/Flowers. Even in increasingly digitised healthcare environments, paper and other printed materials remain central documents in the landscape of health and wellbeing. Zines are small-scale, DIY, and typically handcrafted publications, which are often made to express creators’ thoughts and feelings about health and wellbeing (Lupton "Health Zines" Watson and Bennett). Talking/Flowers (fig. 7), a zine of visual and textual work, explores the materialities of health information and healthcare encounters by creatively layering a erse range of materials: clippings from MRI scans, digitally warped and recoloured images from medical infographics, and found poetry made from research publications. In this way, the zine remixes and reconstitutes key documents of authority in health institutions which continue to take primacy as evidence. While vital in the pipeline of diagnosis and treatment, such documents can become black boxes of meaning, and serve to distance health professionals from consumers and consumers from agentic understandings of their own health. These evidentiary materials are brought together here with other imagery, textures, and recollections of personal experience the pages also feature leaves, flowers, fungi, and oceanic tones. Oceans, pools, rivers, lakes, and other coastal forms or waterways offer all-consuming sensory spaces in which people can find calm, balance, buoyancy, and connection with the wider world. Aqua tides, purple eddies, and misshapen pearls flow through the pages as the golden thread of the zine’s aesthetic theme. Also featured are three original poems. The first and third poems, ‘talking to a doctor’ and ‘talking to other people’, explore moments of relational vulnerability. The second poem, ‘untitled’, is a found poem made from the conclusions of sociologist Talcott Parsons’s 1975 article on the sick role reconsidered. In each of these poems, information and communication jar the encounters and more-than-human metaphors hold space for complex feelings. The cover similarly merges imagery from botanical and historical medical illustrations with a silver shell, evoking the morphological dimensions that connect the more-than-human. Exhibition visitors were able to turn the pages of the original copy of the zine, and were invited to take a printed copy away with them. Conclusion More-than-Human Wellbeing is an exhibition which aims to expand the horizons of how we understand wellbeing and our entanglements with the world. Our exhibition was designed to draw on our research into the more-than-human dimensions of health and wellbeing in the context of an increasingly digitised and datafied world. We wanted to attune visitors to the relational connections and multisensory ways of knowing that develop with and through people’s encounters and entanglements with creatures, things, and spaces. We sought to demonstrate that in this digital age, in which digital devices and software are often considered the most accurate and insightful ways to monitor and measure health and wellbeing, multisensory and affective engagements with elements of the natural environment remain crucial to understanding our bodies and health. Through engagements with our artworks, we hoped that new capacities for visitors’ learning and thinking about the relational and distributed dimensions of more-than-human wellbeing would be opened. While traditionally thought of as human-centered, we explore human health and wellbeing as interconnected with both the natural and technological. We used materials from the natural world – timber, paper materials, and silk fabric – in our artworks to capture both the multigenerational traces and entanglements between humans and plant matter. Recent works of natural and cultural history have drawn attention to the mysterious and important worlds of the fungi kingdom and its role in supporting and living symbiotically with other life on earth, including humans as well as plants (Sheldrake Tsing). We also made sure to acknowledge this third kingdom of living things in our artworks. We combined these images and materials from nature with digitised modes of printing and fabrication to highlight the intersections of the digital with the non-digital in representations and sensory feelings of health and wellbeing. We disrupt and make strange signs of traditional human-centric medicine through reconfigurations, bricolage, and re-imaginations of more-than-human wellbeing. As humans we are interconnected with the natural world, and the signs of these meetings can be traced and read. Through our artistic creations, we hope to re-orient people towards this more open way of thinking about wellbeing. Working with arts practices and creative data visualisations, both digital and analogue, we bring to the fore the role that more-than-human agents play in mediating and making these convivial more-than-digital connections. Acknowledgments This research was funded by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (CE200100005) and a Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture collaboration grant. UNSW Library provided financial and curatorial support for the mounting of the exhibition. References Abram, David. "Wild Ethics and Participatory Science: Thinking between the Body and the Breathing Earth." Planet. Volume 1. Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations. Eds. Gavin van Horn et al. Center for Humans & Nature Press, 2021. 50-62. Baker, Stephanie Alice. Wellness Culture: How the Wellness Movement Has Been Used to Empower, Profit and Misinform. Emerald Group, 2022. Bawaka Country, et al. "Working with and Learning from Country: Decentring Human Author-Ity." cultural geographies 22.2 (2015): 269-283. DOI: 10.1177/1474474014539248. Braidotti, Rosi. "'We' Are in This Together, But We Are Not One and the Same." Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 17 (2020): 465-469. DOI: 10.1007/s11673-020-10017-8. Chinn, Sarah E. Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence. Continuum, 2000. Endt-Jones, Marion. "Cultivating ‘Response-Ability’: Curating Coral in Recent Exhibitions." Journal of Curatorial Studies 9 (2020): 182-205. DOI: 10.1386/jcs_00020_1. Hartnell, Jack. Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages. Profile Books, 2018. Hernández, K.J., et al. "The Creatures Collective: Manifestings." Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4.3 (2020): 838-863. DOI: 10.1177/2514848620938316. Howes, David. "Introduction to Sensory Museology." The Senses and Society 9.3 (2014): 259-267. DOI: 10.2752/174589314X14023847039917. Kemp, Martin. "Style and Non-Style in Anatomical Illustration: From Renaissance Humanism to Henry Gray." Journal of Anatomy 216.2 (2010): 192-208. DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7580.2009.01181.x. Kimmerer, Robin. "Restoration and Reciprocity: The Contributions of Traditional Ecological Knowledge." Human Dimensions of Ecological Restoration: Integrating Science, Nature, and Culture. Eds. Dave Egan et al. Springer, 2011. 257-276. Lagay, Faith. "The Legacy of Humoral Medicine." AMA Journal of Ethics 4.7 (2002): 206-208. Lewis, Bradley. "Planetary Health Humanities—Responding to Covid Times." Journal of Medical Humanities 42.1 (2021): 3-16. DOI: 10.1007/s10912-020-09670-2. Lupton, Deborah. Covid Societies: Theorising the Coronavirus Crisis. Routledge, 2022. ———. Data Selves: More-than-Human Perspectives. Polity Press, 2019. ———. Digital Health: Critical and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. Routledge, 2017. ———. "Embodying Social Science Research – the Exhibition as a Form of Multi-Sensory Research Communication." LSE Impact of the Social Sciences, 2023. blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2023/07/12/embodying-social-science-research-the-exhibition-as-a-form-of-multi-sensory-research-communication/ . ———. "From Human-Centric Digital Health to Digital One Health: Crucial New Directions for Mutual Flourishing." Digital Health 8 (2022). DOI: 10.1177/20552076221129103. ———. "Health Zines: Hand-Made and Heart-Felt." Routledge Handbook of Health and Media. Eds. Lester Friedman and Therese Jones. Routledge, 2022. 65-76. ———. The Internet of Animals: Human-Animals Relationships in the Digital Age. Polity Press, 2023. ———. "The More-than-Human Wellbeing Exhibition." dlupton.com/ . ———. The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking. Polity Press, 2016. Lupton, Deborah, et al. "Digitized and Datafied Embodiment: A More-than-Human Approach." Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism. Eds. Stefan Herbrechter et al. Springer International Publishing, 2022. 1-23. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-42681-1_65-1. Neimanis, Astrida, et al. "Four Problems, Four Directions for Environmental Humanities: Toward Critical Posthumanities for the Anthropocene." Ethics & the Environment 20.1 (2015): 67-97. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 2002. Rots, Aike P. Shinto, Nature and Ideology in Contemporary Japan: Making Sacred Forests. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Random House, 2020. Swan, Claudia. "Illustrated Natural History." Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Susan Dackerman. Harvard Art Museums, 2011. 186-191. Todd, Zoe. "An Indigenous Feminist's Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism." Journal of Historical Sociology 29.1 (2016): 4-22. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton UP, 2015. Tynan, Lauren. "What Is Relationality? Indigenous Knowledges, Practices and Responsibilities with Kin." cultural geographies 28.4 (2021): 597-610. DOI: 10.1177/14744740211029287. Watson, Ash, and Andy Bennett. "The Felt Value of Reading Zines." American Journal of Cultural Sociology 9.2 (2021): 115-149. DOi: 10.1057/s41290-020-00108-9.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2022
DOI: 10.1177/16094069221078376
Abstract: Restrictions on physical movements and in-person encounters during the COVID-19 crisis confronted many qualitative researchers with challenges in conducting and completing projects requiring face-to-face fieldwork. An exploration of engaging in what we term ‘agile research’ in such circumstances can offer novel methodological insights for researching the social world. In this article, we discuss the changes we made to our ethnographic fieldwork in response to the introduction of a national lockdown to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus. The ‘Living with Personal Data’ project, based in Sydney, Australia, and designed well before the advent of COVID-19, explores a erse range of people’s feelings, practices and understandings concerning home-based digital devices and the personal digital data generated with their use. Using a video ethnography ‘home tour’ and an elicitation technique involving hand-drawn maps of people’s homes, digital devices and the personal data generated with and through these devices, this approach was designed to elicit the sensory, affective and relational elements of people’s digital device and personal data use at home. The fieldwork had just commenced when stay-at-home and physical distancing orders were suddenly introduced. Our article builds on and extends a growing body of literature on conducting fieldwork in the difficult conditions of the extended COVID-19 crisis by detailing our experiences of very quickly converting an ethnographic study that was planned to be in-person to a remote approach. We describe the adaptations we made to the project using video-call software and discuss the limits and opportunities presented by this significant modification.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 26-07-2021
DOI: 10.1177/13548565211030848
Abstract: Major changes to home life and work practices globally have been brought about by the COVID-19 crisis. Periods of strict restrictions placed on people’s movements outside their homes, aimed at curbing the spread of the novel coronavirus, have meant that the home was requisitioned as a primary site for work for many people. In this article, we draw on case studies from an ethnographic project that explored how people living in Sydney use digital technologies in the home setting. Our fieldwork commenced in early 2020, just prior to the national COVID lockdown period in Australia, and continued throughout the lockdown and the months following. As a result, we were able to document people’s experiences of transitioning to working from home during the first year of the pandemic. In this article, we adopt a sociomaterial approach together with domestication theory to analyse the complexities of the changed COVID home in the context of digitised working arrangements. We surface and theorise the tensions and leaky boundaries between workplaces and family/domestic life that are brought about by, through and beyond the digital. By addressing the sociomaterial choreographies and modalities of presence involved, we attempt to capture the processes through which the COVID digital home assemblage is continuously configured and the more or less simultaneous presence and absence of people in both domestic and work domains.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2023
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 18-01-2022
Abstract: The value of fiction for public sociology and within qualitative research is well established. However, questions about process remain. Drawing from three contemporary projects – a novel, a series of short stories, and a collection of micro-fiction – this article focuses methodological attention on how sociological imagination may be crafted in and with fiction. In particular I discuss the poetics and aesthetic form of a story: the language, mode of storytelling and voice(s) with which a story is told and the imagery and sensory qualities which bring a story-world to life. By bringing conceptual considerations together with practical concerns, this article aims to extend the considerable body of work on the value of fiction for the production and dissemination of social research.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 12-09-2020
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-07-2020
Abstract: Blended learning and flipped classroom models are increasingly encouraged in higher education, where notions of flexibility and technological development inform institutional systems and strategies. This article presents results from an Australian study on redesigning and delivering an introductory sociology course using a combination of such models. Four central elements of the redesign are highlighted: overall course format use of mini-lectures face-to-face activities and our assessment model. We present analysis of students’ and instructors’ understandings and experiences of the redesign over three course iterations to offer insight into the unfolding and responsive dynamics involved in implementing blended and flipped models. We aim to contribute to the ongoing implementation of similar models in the context of changing institutional environments and expectations, as well as to broader projects for pedagogical enrichment in sociology.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 23-05-2022
DOI: 10.1177/10778004221097049
Abstract: In this article, we present ideas about developing innovative methods for the sociology of futures. Our approach brings together the literature on sociotechnical imaginaries and the sociology of futures with vital materialism theories and research-creation methods. We draw on our research-creation materials from a series of online workshops. The workshops involved the use of creative writing prompts with participants across a erse range of age groups and locations. The article ends with some reflections on the implications of our approach for researching the futures of emerging digital technologies and the methodological and theoretical development of the sociology of futures.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 21-06-2016
Abstract: This article presents a creative direction for public sociology: novel writing. Narrativity is embedded within much contemporary sociological work, and sociologists and novelists share a number of complementary approaches for understanding and interpreting the social world. This article argues that novel writing presents sociologists with a process and medium through which they can expand their work for a more public, engaging, affective, and panoramic sociology. Here, the historical development of sociological thought is considered as well as the recent progress of public sociology. Three key strengths of sociological novels are presented: promoting public sociology and interlocutor engagement transforming knowledge exchange from mimetic to sympractic communication and addressing issues of scope. Two recent sociological novels are discussed: Blue by Patricia Leavy and On The Cusp by David Buckingham, both published in 2015. Finally, two linked aspects for (thinking about) writing sociological fiction are explored: the concept of glocality and the methodology of ethnography. Employing creative mediums such as novels as public sociology may cultivate a wider, affective public engagement with significant academic ideas such as the sociological imagination. Sociological novels work to bring the local and global into dialogue, and may help achieve the scope and panoramic depth that sociology requires.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-03-2023
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 14-07-2020
Abstract: As the number of digital technologies expands, entering more domains of everyday life, people’s activities, bodies and preferences are rendered into constantly changing flows of digitised information. The interdisciplinary field of critical data studies has emerged in response. In this article, we outline the design and development of methods employed in our new project ‘Living with Personal Data’ as a move towards expanding the knowledge base and methodological approaches of critical data studies. Our approach takes up more-than-human theoretical perspectives and research-creation methods to elicit the affective and multisensory contexts of people’s feelings, practices and imaginaries concerning their digital data. We describe a set of workshops established to experiment with some new methods we have devised for our project’s fieldwork. The article ends with some reflections on what these theories and methods can offer for a reimagined digital data studies that can acknowledge and surface more-than-human dimensions.
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 15-10-2020
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to report on the findings from the Digital Privacy Story Completion Project, which investigated Australian participants' understandings of and responses to digital privacy scenarios using a novel method and theoretical approach. The story completion method was brought together with De Certeau's concept of tactics and more-than-human theoretical perspectives. Participants were presented with four story stems on an online platform. Each story stem introduced a fictional character confronted with a digital privacy dilemma. Participants were asked to complete the stories by typing in open text boxes, responding to the prompts “How does the character feel? What does she/he do? What happens next?”. A total of 29 participants completed the stories, resulting in a corpus of 116 narratives for a theory-driven thematic analysis. The stories vividly demonstrate the ways in which tactics are entangled with relational connections and affective intensities. They highlight the micropolitical dimensions of human–nonhuman affordances when people are responding to third-party use of their personal information. The stories identified the tactics used and boundaries that are drawn in people's sense-making concerning how they define appropriate and inappropriate use of their data. This paper demonstrates the value and insights of creatively attending to personal data privacy issues in ways that decentre the autonomous tactical and agential in idual and instead consider the more-than-human relationality of privacy. The peer review history for this article is available at: ublon/10.1108/OIR-05-2020-0174
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-10-2021
Abstract: Significant restrictions on movement outside the home due to the global COVID-19 pandemic have intensified the importance of everyday digital technologies for communicating remotely with intimate others. In this article, we draw on findings from a home-based video ethnography project in Sydney to identify the ways that digital devices and software served to support and enhance intimacy and sociality in this period of crisis and isolation. Digital communication technologies had an increased presence in people’s domestic lives during lockdown. For many people, video calling software had become especially important, allowing them to achieve greater closeness and connection with their friends and family in enacting both everyday routines and special events. These findings surface the digital and non-digital materialities of sociality and intimacy, and the capacities opened by people’s improvisation with the affordances of home-based communication technologies at a time of extended physical isolation.
No related grants have been discovered for Ash Watson.