Discourses We Live By: Narratives of Educational and Social Endeavour

Discourses We Live By: Narratives of Educational and Social Endeavour

Author: Hazel R. Wright

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2020-07-03

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 1783748540

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What are the influences that govern how people view their worlds? What are the embedded values and practices that underpin the ways people think and act? Discourses We Live By approaches these questions through narrative research, in a process that uses words, images, activities or artefacts to ask people – either individually or collectively within social groupings – to examine, discuss, portray or otherwise make public their place in the world, their sense of belonging to (and identity within) the physical and cultural space they inhabit. This book is a rich and multifaceted collection of twenty-eight chapters that use varied lenses to examine the discourses that shape people’s lives. The contributors are themselves from many backgrounds – different academic disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, diverse professional practices and a range of countries and cultures. They represent a broad spectrum of age, status and outlook, and variously apply their research methods – but share a common interest in people, their lives, thoughts and actions. Gathering such eclectic experiences as those of student-teachers in Kenya, a released prisoner in Denmark, academics in Colombia, a group of migrants learning English, and gambling addiction support-workers in Italy, alongside more mainstream educational themes, the book presents a fascinating array of insights. Discourses We Live By will be essential reading for adult educators and practitioners, those involved with educational and professional practice, narrative researchers, and many sociologists. It will appeal to all who want to know how narratives shape the way we live and the way we talk about our lives.


Discourses We Live by

Discourses We Live by

Author: Hazel R.. Wright

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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What are the influences that govern how people view their worlds? What are the embedded values and practices that underpin the ways people think and act? Discourses We Live By approaches these questions through narrative research, in a process that uses words, images, activities or artefacts to ask people - either individually or collectively within social groupings - to examine, discuss, portray or otherwise make public their place in the world, their sense of belonging to (and identity within) the physical and cultural space they inhabit. This book is a rich and multifaceted collection of twenty-eight chapters that use varied lenses to examine the discourses that shape people's lives. The contributors are themselves from many backgrounds - different academic disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, diverse professional practices and a range of countries and cultures. They represent a broad spectrum of age, status and outlook, and variously apply their research methods - but share a common interest in people, their lives, thoughts and actions. Gathering such eclectic experiences as those of student-teachers in Kenya, a released prisoner in Denmark, academics in Colombia, a group of migrants learning English, and gambling addiction support-workers in Italy, alongside more mainstream educational themes, the book presents a fascinating array of insights. Discourses We Live By will be essential reaoing for adult educators and practitioners, those involved with educational and professional practice, narrative researchers, and many sociologists. It will appeal to all who want to know how narratives shape the way we live and the way we talk about our lives. As with all Open Book publications, this entire book is available to read for free on the publisher's website. Printed and digital editions, together with supplementary digital material, can also be found at www.openbookpublishers.com.


Discourses, Dialogue and Diversity in Biographical Research

Discourses, Dialogue and Diversity in Biographical Research

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-05-31

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 900446591X

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This book explores how narratives are deeply embodied, engaging heart, soul, as well as mind, through varying adult learner perspectives. Biographical research is not an isolated, individual, solipsistic endeavor but shaped by larger ecological interactions – in families, schools, universities, communities, societies, and networks – that can create or destroy hope. Telling or listening to life stories celebrates complexity, messiness, and the rich potential of learning lives. The narratives in this book highlight the rapid disruption of sustainable ecologies, not only ‘natural’, physical, and biological, but also psychological, economic, relational, political, educational, cultural, and ethical. Yet, despite living in a precarious, and often frightening, liquid world, biographical research can both chronicle and illuminate how resources of hope are created in deeper, aesthetically satisfying ways. Biographical research offers insights, and even signposts, to understand and transcend the darker side of the human condition, alongside its inspirations. Discourses, Dialogue and Diversity in Biographical Research aims to generate insight into people’s fears and anxieties but also their capacity to 'keep on keeping on' and to challenge forces that would diminish their and all our humanity. It provides a sustainable approach to creating sufficient hope in individuals and communities by showing how building meaningful dialogue, grounded in social justice, can create good enough experiences of togetherness across difference. The book illuminates what amounts to an ecology of life, learning and human flourishing in a sometimes tortured, fractious, fragmented, and fragile world, yet one still offering rich resources of hope.


Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe

Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe

Author: Ladan Rahbari

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2023-05-11

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1800649266

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This volume consists of narratives of migrant academics from the Global South within academia in the Global North. The autobiographic and autoethnographic contributions to this collection aim to decolonise the discourse around academic mobility by highlighting experiences of precarity, resilience, care and solidarity in the academic margins. The authors use precarity to analyse the state of affairs in the academy, from hiring practices to ‘culturally’ accepted division of labour, systematic forms of discrimination, racialisation, and gendered hierarchies, etc. Building on precarity as a critical concept for challenging social exclusion or forming political collectives, the authors move away from conventional academic styles, instead adopting autobiography and autoethnography as methods of intersectional scholarly analysis. This approach creatively challenges the divisions between the system and the individual, the mind and the soul, the objective and the subjective, as well as science, theory, and art. This volume will be of interest not only to scholars within the field of migration studies, but also to instructors and students of sociology, postcolonial studies, gender and race studies, and critical border studies. The volume’s interdisciplinary approach also seeks to address university diversity officers, managers, key decision-makers, and other readers directly or indirectly involved in contemporary academia. The format and style of its contributions are wide-ranging (including poetry and creative prose), thus making it accessible and readable for a general audience.


Remaking Communities and Adult Learning

Remaking Communities and Adult Learning

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-05-09

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 9004518037

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What responses is adult education providing to the great global problems: climate change and the environment, populism and racism, gender inequality, social and economic inequality? The ESREA Research Network between Local and Global – Adult Learning and Communities and the authors collected here argue for socially engaged community-based research which promotes critical democracy and popular education and drives powerful research methodologies: participatory research, feminist research, ecological research activism, posthumanist research, and more. The first part of the book looks back and forwards to the contribution to adult learning and community development played by participatory research in the making and remaking of community and society. In the second part, the focus shifts to pedagogies of possibility and change, knowledge creation and the transformation of pedagogies of inclusion. The third part, on activism and change, turns its attention to the motivations for activism and their individual and collective forms of expression. The final part considers re-making and 'doing' society and community, in particular during the COVID-19 pandemic. For researchers interested in participatory and emancipatory social research, gender and biography research, or community-university research partnerships, Remaking Communities and Adult Learning presents adult learning as a site of resistance for sustainable and creative andragogic practice.


International Perspectives on Modern Developments in Early Childhood Education

International Perspectives on Modern Developments in Early Childhood Education

Author: Huertas-Abril, Cristina A.

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2020-06-26

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 1799825051

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Through different approaches like toys and play, children explore and know the rules and symbols of their communities and recreate roles and situations that reflect their sociocultural and 21st century plurilingual world. As a result, they learn how to subordinate desires to social rules, cooperate with others willingly, and engage in socially appropriate behavior. When they are evaluated together psychologically, there is a current need for action to increase the amount and quality of play provided to children. Since discrepancies are observed between urban and rural areas, as well as among different cultures, there is also a need for a research initiative where cultures can learn and take advantage of the experiences of each other. International Perspectives on Modern Developments in Early Childhood Education is an essential scholarly publication that identifies ways of intertwining key areas of early childhood education, including international approaches, intercultural education, bilingual/plurilingual education, and the role of play and toys as means for meaningful intercultural and multilingual learning. By incorporating a view of different cultures, societies, languages, and educational experiences in early childhood education, this volume provides data for international and intercultural exchange for the benefit of children. Highlighting a range of topics such as educational systems, play therapy, and games, this book is ideal for early childhood teachers, educators, academicians, researchers, professionals, psychologists, sociologists, and students.


Artistic Cartography and Design Explorations Towards the Pluriverse

Artistic Cartography and Design Explorations Towards the Pluriverse

Author: Satu Miettinen

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-19

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 1000816028

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This edited volume uses an interdisciplinary approach to art and design that not only reframes but also repositions agendas and actions to address fragmented global systems. Contributors explore the pluriverse of art and design through epistemological and methodological considerations. What kinds of sustainable ways are there for knowledge transfer, supporting plural agendas, finding novel ways for unsettling conversations, unlearning and learning and challenging power structures with marginalised groups and contexts through art and design? The main themes of the book are art and design methods, epistemologies and practices that provide critical, interdisciplinary, pluriversal and decolonial considerations. The book challenges the domination of the white logic of art and design and shifts away from the Anglo-European one-world system towards the pluriverse. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, arts-based research, and design studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis. com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.


Second Chance

Second Chance

Author: Ruth Rosengarten

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2022-08-23

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 1800643772

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In this intimate memoir, Ruth Rosengarten explores the subject of evocative objects through a series of interconnected essays. Evocative objects reflect our attitudes to our own lives and how we seek to display ourselves to ourselves. They are therefore, closely linked to our memories, and how we filter, process and reconstruct them. Rosengarten explores the themes and associations invoked by her own evocative objects, which are frequently shabby things of no material value. They are, importantly, often objects that, in their materiality, bear traces of actions, of something-having-been. Through the associative pathways that these objects have paved, she discusses her experiences with the losses she has undergone, her family’s migrations, and what it means to be a childless woman. This leads her to address the question of what will become of her storied objects and the memories attached to them when she is no longer in existence. This memoir offers an interdisciplinary approach to collecting and compiling fragments of one’s life, paying close attention to the evocative objects that embody us. In doing so, these essays explore loss, memory, childlessness, longing, family history, literature and art theory through material entities which reveal the immaterial ‘things’ at the heart of this study. This book is sure to be of interest to anyone stimulated by memory work and the relationship between humans and their possessions