In her book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning Karen Barad asserts that knowledge making is not a mediated activity. Although I am persuaded, a recent conversation about my (ongoing) doctoral research prompted my companion to counter, “But your data suggest otherwise.” In my study about the emergence of professional knowing in paediatric… Read more →
I have been re-reading Erving Goffman lately, and thoroughly enjoying the experience. But it seems to me that while what he calls ‘Total institutions’ may be different in degree from other institutions they are not in kind. I was reminded of this most forcibly while travelling through an airport recently (clutching my copy of Asylums, 1961). I empathised with the… Read more →
In a recent chapter myself and three of my doctoral students decided to discuss our different sociomaterial approaches to doing our ethnographies of professional practice and learning. We found ourselves really grappling with thorny issues of how to trace the material and social entanglements of the settings that we were enacting without (1) killing the tangles or (2) getting bogged… Read more →
One project we are enjoying now in ProPEL is looking at professionals’ use of social media. And one of the first things we ran into in this fascinating cyberscape were the new codes of online professionalism: regulations governing what professionals can and cannot do in social media. Professionalism is one of those hot topics that never seems to lose its… Read more →
Materials – things that matter – are often missing from accounts of educational processes such as learning. Materials tend to be ignored as part of the backdrop for human action, dismissed in a preoccupation with consciousness and cognition, or assumed to be subordinate to human intention and design. This sort of treatment still tends to privilege human beings, as though… Read more →