Student experiences of disability social networks, in and around higher education
"For many young people social networks such as Facebook are an essential part of their student experience. Other web-based, interactive services like Wikipedia and YouTube are also an important facet of everyday student life. New technologies have always been scrutinized for their capacity to support education and, as social technologies become more pervasive, universities are under increasing pressure to appropriate them for teaching and learning. However, the educational impact of applying these Web 2.0 technologies is uncertain.
Using a Foucauldian perspective, my qualitative study explores the networked experiences of disabled students to examine how dis/ability difference is ascribed and negotiated within social networks. Data comprises 34 internet-enabled interviews with 18 participants from three English universities. Interviews incorporate the internet to expand opportunities for discussion, observation and analysis. Mobile broadband, a remote desktop viewer and screen capture have been flexibly applied together to ensure an accessible interview situation and recognise students' preferences and circumstances. Data is analysed using discourse analysis, with an attention to context framed by activity theory.
Disabled students' networked experiences are found to be complex and diverse. For a proportion, the network shifts the boundaries of disability, creating non-disabled subjectivities. For these students, the network represents the opportunity to mobilise new ways of being, building social capital and mitigating impairment.
Other participants experience the network as punitive and disabling. Disability is socio-technically ascribed by the social networking site and the networked public. Each inducts norms that constitute disability as a visible, deviant and deficit identity. In the highly normative conditions of the network, where every action is open to scrutiny, impairment is subjected to an unequal gaze that produces disabled subjectivities. For some students with unseen impairments, a social experience of disability is inducted for the first time.
As a result, students deploy diverse strategies to retain control and resist deviant status. Self-surveillance, self-discipline and self-advocacy are evoked, each involving numerous social, cognitive and technological tactics for self-determination, including disconnection. I conclude that networks function both as Technologies of the Self and as Technologies of Power. For some disabled students, the network supports 'normal' status. For others, it must be resisted as a form of social domination.
Importantly, in each instance, the network propels students towards disciplinary techniques that mask diversity, rendering disability and the possibility of disability invisible. Consequently, disability is both produced and suppressed by the network."
(Sarah Lewthwaite, Slewth Press)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Pedestrian Rhetoric and Scaffolding for Meaning
"naked city's fragments are linked by arrows, but fragments which are linked to each other are in different orientations and do not have any logical or straightforward relation to each other. the fragments do not include all of paris and the distance of the gaps between fragments do not illustrate the real distance between fragments. the arrows, while facilitating the egress of our imaginary psychogeographical wanderer, also seems to put spatial distance between the fragments, creating the gap, which is like what Michel de Certeau (chapter on Walking in the City - The Practice of Everyday Life) describes as a procedure of 'Asyndeton', or 'opening gaps in the spatial continuum' and 'retaining only selected parts of it that amount almost to relics'."
(无认屋)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Video in the City: Possibilities for Transformation in the Urban Space
"This thesis is an attempt at looking at the ways video can create a change in the city. The specific use of video by communities and activists is what is meant by video as opposed to its other uses. In this thesis video is not ascribed an emancipatory role per se, rather its potentials will be explored though its practice.
In order to understand the significance of different uses of video in the city, first the visual terrain of the city video is acting in will be explored around the concepts of spectacle and surveillance. After that the relation of the visual technologies of photography and cinema with the modern city will be analysed. Although these two are not taken as predecessors of video, some of their uses resemble to that of video's.
Video is a technology that is used in different contexts. In the scope of this thesis, video art, video activism and participatory uses of video will be dealt with in detail. Video is also defined as a tactic using de Certeau's terminology.
Process and practice are important in studying video's uses, so this thesis will also be informed by different practices of three different video groups. Karahaber in Ankara, PTTL in Brussels and Spectacle in London have developed different practices that are defined by their local conditions as well as aspirations of the group members. No matter how locally defined and specific they are, these practices can be assembled together under certain topics. Documenting, reconstruction, monitoring the monitors, having a voice, encounter(s) and transformation are such topics defined in this thesis.
The main argument of the thesis is that video is a tool that is capable of creating local narratives that can bring about the differential space Henri Lefebvre has situated against the abstract space of capitalism. The former will not emerge with an overnight collapse of the latter, but rather will infiltrate through the cracks left open. Video is one medium that can create more cracks."
(B. Siynem Ezgi Sarıtaş)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Folksonomies: Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata
"Although a folksonomy is not a controlled vocabulary, and certainly does have limitations, there are important strengths that are important to understanding the appeal and utility of such systems.
Browsing vs. Finding
The first is serendipity. While the controlled vocabulary issues discussed above may hamper findability, browsing the system and its interlinked related tag sets is wonderful for finding things unexpectedly in a general area. In researching this paper, exploring the bookmarks tagged with 'folksonomy' on Delicious, there were many recent resources from a wide variety of authors and sites that I likely would never have been exposed to.
There is a fundamental difference in the activities of browsing to find interesting content, as opposed to direct searching to find relevant documents in a query. It is similar to the difference between exploring a problem space to formulate questions, as opposed to actually looking for answers to specifically formulated questions. Information seeking behavior varies based on context. While one could evaluate a folksonomy in a system like Delicious or Flickr by using specific queries from users, and then evaluating which documents tagged with keywords they choose are relevant to the query, that would ignore the broader set of browsing activities that the system seems to be stronger in. Measuring the utility of that aspect would likely require qualitative research in the form of interviews or ethnographic study of users, and is an area of further study. It would also require comparisons not to search based information retrieval systems, but to browsing activities using other categorization and classification schemes."
(Adam Mathes, December 2004)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
classifying according to context and relation
"Warburg always moved the books and re-classified them according to his personal assumptions and spontaneous ideas, for the significance of every book depended on its context within the library, its neighbourhood on the shelf. In this respect, the entire library was moving most of the time during its setting up in Hamburg."
(Mathias Bruhn)
[Warburg's impulses follow the logic of the hypertext - where multiple intersecting sequences are able to reside.]
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
