Communicating knowledge: How & why UK researchers publish & disseminate their findings
"The motivations that lead researchers to publish in different formats – particularly in scholarly journals – differ significantly across disciplines. Researchers in the sciences are more likely to see publication in a learned journal as a ‘natural’ means of communication with their desired audience, while their colleagues in engineering, the humanities and the social sciences are more likely to see it as meeting essentially external requirements for research assessment and career advancement.
In these latter disciplines, therefore, the rise of journals is more closely associated with an environment where there is increasing emphasis on measuring, assessing, and evaluating research, its outputs and impact."
(HEFCE on behalf of JISC, UK, 2009)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Practice vs praxis: modelling practitioner-based research
"Praxis, for me, involves the critical and inextricable meld of theory and practice. Thus practitioner-based research is concerned with processes for theorising practice ... In moving creatively into our practice we are fundamentally concerned to develop new knowledge, to challenge old beliefs and to speculate on the 'what ifs' of our concepts and processes. For the arts practitioner, this new knowledge is made in the context of and challenge to the history, theory and practices of the relevant field. The research function for developing and extending knowledge is judged on the outcome of the research, which synthesises, extends or analyses the problematics of the discipline. It is important to realise that this creative work resembles pure and applied research in any field. As Richard Dunn says; 'a work of art or design is embedded in or deforms the theory and practice of the discipline' (1994:8)."
(Robyn Anne Stewart, 2003, USQ ePrints)
1). Stewart, Robyn Anne (2003) Practice vs praxis: modelling practitioner-based research. In: 2002 International Society for Education through Art (InSEA) World Congress, 19-24 Aug 2002, New York, USA.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Open-ended play environments enable rich learning experiences
"Children learn about themselves, others and the world they live in through play. Outdoor environments for play and learning can provide rich experiences for children who seek fantasy and adventure and are innately curious about nature. Children's environments, particularly school and neighbourhood playgrounds, parks and gardens, have the potential to facilitate learning through social, emotional, cognitive and creative opportunities. Unfortunately, in America, the play and learning potential for many outdoor play spaces is underdeveloped."
(Lauri Macmillan Johnson)
Fig.1 The Adventure Playground, 160 University Avenue, Berkeley, California is an example of an open-ended play environment.
Fig.2 commercially available play environments often work to regulate engagement according to social norms.
[3] Johnson, L. M. (2004). American Playgrounds and Schoolyards - A Time for Change. In School of Landscape Architecture. Tempe, AZ, The University of Arizona Press.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Regulation Through Discourses/Practices
"The prison operates through the production of norms to divide the population into prisoners and non-prisoners. Since the goal of the prison is to return prisoners to the status of non-prisoners, there must be a criterion, one carefully and comprehensively elaborated, to recognise the non-prisoner, the prisoner, and the developmental stages in the change from the one to the other. There must also be a detailed regimen to effectuate the change. There must finally be a method or system of keeping track of the change in each prisoner. Foucault borrows from Bentham the term Panopticon (one who sees all) to denote the entire apparatus of defining the norm, disciplining the negative term, observing the change from the negative to the positive and studying the whole process so that it can be perfected. But there is a difference. For Bentham the Panopticon was an artifice that deflected the criminal's mind from the irrationality of transgression to the rationality of the norm. It imposed social authority on the prisoner in a constant, total manner. The prisoner's actions could be monitored by guards at any time but without his ever knowing it. The prisoner would, in Rousseau's phrase, be forced to be free. With no escape or reprieve from the Panoptical eye, the prisoner would accept the authority of the norm with its rational system of pleasures and pains. For Foucault the task is to see the system as an imposition of a structure of domination, not as a rational, humanist intention.As we know, the Panopticon, evaluated on the standards of liberal and Benthamite theory, is a failure. Foucault's aim is to grasp the workings of the Panopticon outside the liberal framework: if it does not reform prisoners, what does it do? What are the effects of the social text of the prison, of Panoptical discourse? His argument is that the prison, in the context of a liberal capitalist society that celebrates the anarchy of the marketplace, the chaos of free monads pursuing infinite wants, the rationality of the unhindered subject - the prison in this world imposes the technology of power, the "micropolitics" of the norm. In capitalist society, regulation takes the form of discourses/practices that produce and reproduce the norm. The school, the asylum, the factory, the barracks to greater or lesser degrees and with considerable variation all imitate the Panopticon (see figures overleaf). In modern society power is imposed not by the personal presence and brute force of a caste of nobles as it was in earlier times but by the systematic scribblings in discourses, by the continual monitoring of daily life, adjusting and readjusting ad in finitum the norm of individuality. Modern society may be read as a discourse in which nominal freedom of action is canceled by the ubiquitous look of the other. It may be interpreted semiologically as a field of signs in which the metadiscourse of the Panopticon is reimposed everywhere, even in places in which it is not installed. We may suggest that the free individual requires a repressed other, a sort of external super-ego, an absent father if only to guarantee his or her freedom."
(Mark Poster pp.90-91)
Poster, Mark. 1990 The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. ISBN: 0745603262
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The Constellations ProjectSHARE
Moulding consumers through socio-technical devices
"[A]irlines attempt to mould their consumers, to form them into 'ideal' users, into individuals who exhibit 'preferred' forms of passenger behaviour. [...A]irlines want [...] passengers to remain mostly seated; they want passengers to obey requests from crew and to appear calm. Accordingly, carriers deploy a range of socio-technical devices to discipline passengers--security checks, passports, metal detectors, x-ray machines, overhead lighted signs and instructions from the flight crew[.]"
(Tia DeNora, Cambridge University Press)
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The Constellations ProjectSHARE
