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The same computer games are played by youths all over the world, and worldwide games become matters of concern in relation to children: worries rise about addiction, violence, education, time, and economy. Yet, these concerns vary depending upon where they are situated: in families, legal contexts, industry or science. They also play out differently across countries and cultures. This situated nature of computer game concerns is generally neglected. Not in this book: It gives a detailed mosaic of the complex and multiple everyday realities of computer game concerns in relation to children, as they are variably situated throughout society and across cultures.
Based on classroom ethnography, Sorensen investigates how different forms of learning arise when different learning materials are involved.
It has been claimed that the natural sciences have abstracted for themselves a 'material world' set apart from human concerns, and social sciences, in their turn, constructed 'a world of actors devoid of things'. While a subject such as archaeology, by its very nature, takes objects into account, other disciplines, such as psychology, emphasize internal mental structures and other non-material issues. This book brings together a team of contributors from across the social sciences who have been taking 'things' more seriously to examine how people relate to objects. The contributors focus on every day objects and how these objects enter into our activities over the course of time. Using a combination of different theoretical approaches, including actor network theory, ecological psychology, cognitive linguistics and science and technology studies, the book argues against the standard notion of objects and their properties as inert and meaningless and argues for the need to understand the relations between people and objects in terms of process and change.
Based in empirical studies in Germany, the US, and Latin America, and drawing on the theories of Vygotsky among others, this volume examines how an economy characterized more and more by flexible short-term work contracts and lack of a social safety net gives rise to pedagogies - paradigms of child development - that suit its aims, and explores possible alternatives from California to the landless peasant movement of Brazil.
We have come a long way from Evans-Pritchard’s famous dictum that “there is only one method in social anthropology, the comparative method - and that is impossible.” Yet a good 40 years later, qualitative social inquiry still has an uneasy relationship with comparison. This volume sets out “thick comparison” as a means to revive “comparing” as a productive process in ethnographic work: a process that helps to revitalise the articulation work inherent in analytical ethnographies; to vary observer perspectives and point towards “blind spots;” to name and create “new things” and modes of empirical work and to give way to intensified dialogues between data analysis and theorizing. Contributors are Katrin Amelang, Stefan Beck, Kati Hannken-Illjes, Alexander Kozin, Henriette Langstrup, Jörg Niewöhner, Thomas Scheffer, Robert Schmidt, Estrid Sørensen, and Britt Ross Winthereik.
The first comprehensive study of a communicating person reveals how one inhabits and makes sense of the world with others.
What is the relevance of Luc Boltanski’s ‘pragmatic sociology of critique’ to central issues in contemporary social and political analysis? In seeking to respond to this question, this book contains critical commentaries from prominent social theorists attempting to map out the influence and broad scope of Boltanski’s oeuvre.
"This paper aims at contributing to a reflection about the legacy of Harold Garfinkel and the relations between ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA), by focusing on a common concern for both programs: the study of action as methodic (the term is used here in line with the sense of ethnomethodology), i.e. ordered, accountable, recognizable, and reproducible. Both approaches seek to describe the members' (term favored in ethnomethodology) or coparticipants' (term favored in conversation analysis) production, recognition, and reproduction of actions understood as locally situated social achievements. Within this framework, the chapter discusses two key dimensions of methodically...
This book explores how traditional institutions of education are affected by the current discourse and practices of ‘learning’; and more specifically, how the evolution towards so-called ‘learning environments’ affects the kind of gathering or association that is staged and configured within families, schools and universities. In addition, it addresses the question of how to articulate what is educational in the context of ‘making’ family, school or university, and to what extent this making is always also a public act. The aim is to approach and investigate family, school and university as educational practices, to focus on the forms of gatherings or associations that take shape...