Research as Relational Agency: Expert Ethnographers and the Cultural Force of Technologies

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss how iPads offer innovative opportunities for early literacy learning but also present challenges for teachers and children. We lent iPads to a Children's Centre nursery (3-to 4-year-olds), a primary school reception class (4-to 5-year-olds) and a Special School (7-to 13-year-olds), discussed their potential uses with staff in pre-and post-interviews and observed how they were integrated into practice over a two-month period. We found variability in the ways iPads were used across the settings, but a commonality was that well-planned; iPad-based literacy activities stimulated children's motivation and concentration. They also offered rich opportunities for communication, collaborative interaction, independent learning, and for children to achieve high levels of accomplishment. In some cases, this led teachers favourably to re-evaluate the children's literacy competence, and enabled children to construct positive images of themselves in the literacy classroom. Practitioners particularly valued the opportunities iPads afforded to deliver curriculum guidelines in new ways, and to familiarise all students with touch-screen technologies.

How “at home” is an ethnographer at home? Territories of knowledge and the making of ethnographic understanding

“…These "snapshots" freeze some moments of the overall processual and shifting engagement with the field, the actors I met and the practices I observed. As many forms of textualization, they enable the analysis (see Ricoeur, 1973) while partially obscuring the emergency properties of building common knowledge and workingas any ethnographer ultimately doesacross the boundaries of practices (see Edwards, 2011Edwards, , 2017Hasse, 2017).…”

Monstrous hybridity of social information technologies: Through the lens of photorealism and non-photorealism in archaeological visualization

“…Drawing on the theorization of hybrid agency, admittedly in a limited sense and only on a small part of it, this study analyses archaeological three-dimensional visualizations as hybrid social information technologies with programmes of conveying information on things (here, archaeological) in particular ways. Having their own cultural force (Hasse 2017), they become runaway objects (Engestr€ om 2008(Engestr€ om , 2009 that are difficult to control. It shows how dominant programmes and their anti-programmes differ among specific types of hybrids and how these differences can have a direct, both real and imagined, impact on information work in archaeology and beyond.…”

“…This anxiety is not very different from the anxiety of other subject experts and information professionals when they struggle with the legitimacy of their expert position (Schultze 2000) and criticize the general population of ignorance and lack of adequate competences. As much as the failure to tame the beast can be attributed to the uncontrollability of non-experts, it can also be attributed to the cultural force (Hasse 2017) of visualization technology to impose a programme of its own on the cyborg. In contrast, the proponents of lifelike visualizations see a need for visually evocative representations of archaeological entities, and archaeology itself to be about opening a window to the past.…”

“…Building on the work of Haraway (1991) on monsters and cyborgs and by looking at the photo-realism versus non-photorealism debate in archaeology, this article delves into the question of why certain social information technologies are sometimes experienced as monsters. It shows how these cyborgs are driven by different programmes of action, and how our anxiety about a cyborg enforcing its (potentially problematic) programme without accommodating other (preferred) programmes can lead us to see it as a monstera runaway object (Engestr€ om 2008), following Giddens (2002) notion of runaway world, with its own uncontrollable cultural force (Hasse 2017). A close look at the perceived monstrosities of social information technologies, helps us understand how people conceptualize information, technologies, and other people and their role in information interactions as they unfold as a part of information activities (Huvila 2013) in all human pursuits.…”