Search results

This paper engages multidisciplinary perspectives on truth, authority, expertise and belief to unpack and better understand the underlying epistemology and implications of the ACRL Frame “authority is constructed and contextual.”

Following an overview of the issues confronting us in a “post-truth world,” the paper reviews critiques of the ACRL Frame “authority is constructed and contextual” and examines the related concepts of truth, authority, expertise and belief from multidisciplinary perspectives.

While the Frame acknowledges the limitations and biases of current scholarly publishing and implicitly supports social justice, it runs the danger of promoting relativism and is ambiguous regarding the relationships between expertise and authority. The critical concepts of truth and belief are conspicuously absent. Engaging a critical discussion and understanding of these concepts is a valuable contribution to information literacy.

This paper offers an important and accessible analysis of the frame “authority is constructed and contextual” and its underlying concepts. It moves beyond the library literature to include multidisciplinary perspectives and will require the engagement of the wider library community to promote discussion of the underlying epistemology and links between the construction of authority and truth, expertise and belief. In particular, the discussion of the construction of belief and the difference between judgments of fact and judgments of value offers important additions to the library literature.

The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into how management accountants can become relevant business partners out of respect for existing locally developed accounts of economic performance for decision-making.

The paper is based on qualitative semi-structured interviews with local business actors, in this case, families from seven financially successful Danish dairy farms. The casework and the analysis have been informed by pragmatic constructivism.

The local business actors do not use the official accounting system for ongoing cost-management-related decision-making. Instead, they use several epistemic methods that include locally developed decision models, experiences, rules of thumb and intuition. The farmers use these vernacular accountings to compensate for the cost management illusion that the formal accounting system tends to create. What the study suggests is that when management accountants engage as business partners, they are likely to enter a space where accounting is already present.

This paper argues that local business actors practice epistemic methods where they develop and use vernacular accountings to support their managerial practice, also in the absence of a professional management accountant. These vernacular accountings may lead the local actors into an illusion because the vernacular accountings do not necessarily have an inherent economic logic and theoretical reliability. The role of the management accountant in such a setting is hence to understand, support and advance local epistemic methods. Becoming a business partner requires a combination of management accounting analytical skills and a sense of empathy and sensitivity regarding what is already at play and how this can become an object of discussion without violating the values of the other.

First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.

It is critical for those who are engaged in the work of resisting the movement of academically restrictive policy to understand that it is a deliberate act on the part of conservatives to outlaw critical race theory (CRT) specifically, because it is a theoretical mechanism for discrediting the rhetorical foundations of their policy movement. The knee-jerk institutional courses of action to now defund initiatives and curriculum related equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) represent what has always been a deeply rooted investment in white supremacy on the part of the institutions (Baldwin, 2021; Patel, 2021; Squire, 2021).

The author explores and defines the CRT tenets of interest convergence (Bell, 1980) and whiteness as property (Harris, 1993) in relation to EI (Fricker, 2007; Dotson, 2011) as frameworks for examining three EGOs in the region where these policies have become most dominant. All three are critical tools of analysis for understanding the stake the White conservative political elite have in EGOs, and the magnitude of EI these policies represent, and stand endorse in their rhetoric. Definitions of EI often rely on the work of Amanda Fricker’s (2013) text on the subject, but this paper is invested in the expansions of this theorization for speaking to the nature of the injustice that EGOs represent as a matter of historical trend, with grave implications for futures marked by continued oppression. Whiteness as property and interest convergence are points for explicating the dialectic and material aspects of issues of race and equity in this country; namely, how knowledge processes inherent to higher education sound even more alarms as EGOs become commonplace for college campuses.

To support the arguments laid out, the author provides a historical review of the settler-colonial foundations of higher education as an american institution. This is meant to provide contour to the image of postsecondary education that exists today. In accordance with this paper’s allegiance to CRT, many of the texts would be considered revisionist history (Delgado and Stefancic, 2023), which stray from dominant narratives of american comfort and speak more accurately to the experiences of minoritized populations. The author then applies the same analysis to the sociopolitical contexts of EGOs, and to policy language itself. Each section is closed with an explanation of its connection to tenets of CRT and EI so as to provide a thread to follow into the subsequent discussion section.

In the first presentation of the early writings of this work, the author was lucky enough to be in community with Barbara Applebaum at the annual meeting for the American Educational Studies Association and engage in discourse surrounding EI and CRT applications to EGOs. In conversations surrounding the will in the willful ignorance that is exemplified in the movement of EGOs, the author had shared with Dr Applebaum the early thinking on how that will was the same force that brought together converging interests, which have continually forecasted interest divergence. This is commonly referred to as “political backlash.” The author had said something along the lines of: “if we follow the interest convergence, we can get in front of the subsequent political moves to turn the clocks on what was once celebrates progress.” This conversation planted the seed for what is the thesis of this paper. Interest convergence and divergence happen at the will of white populations because of the american truth of whiteness as property. In the context of higher education, this means that because educational pursuit has largely been white property, it has served as an arena for white populations to converge and diverge their interests with those of the minoritized. For example, the policies that drained federal funding for higher education in the 1970s were passed on the tails of a Civil Rights Movement that shook the very foundation of this country and expanded access to postsecondary education for racially minoritized groups (Berret, 2015).

Ensuring that this social construction is a matter of status quo has largely been the work of postsecondary institutions, and EGOs represent the most recent attempt at epistemically imposed inferiority. Explicit attention to the fact of higher education’s complicity and overall investment in the socialization of oppression is necessary to engage in transformative practice that resists anachronism. If higher education researchers and practitioners do not recognize the stake in both the presence and resistance to EGOs, there would likely be acts of resistance that will belie an act of interest convergence – and later divergence – on the part of the state.

The evolving dynamics of the labour market make graduates’ future employability an important issue for higher education (HE) institutions, prompting universities to complement the conventional graduate skills approach with a wider focus on graduate forms of capital that may enhance their sense of employability. This study, adopting a capital perspective, explores whether and how teachers in HE, when acknowledged as knowledgeable trustworthy actors, may affect graduates’ employability. It investigates how they can mobilise undergraduate cultural capital through socialisation, and shape their pre-professional identity, paving the way for university-to-work transition.

To test the hypothesised model, a self-report online questionnaire was administered to a sample of 616 undergraduates attending different Italian universities. Multiple mediating models were tested using the SEM framework.

Results supported the tested model and showed that trust in knowledgeable HE teachers was associated with undergraduates’ perceived employability both directly and through both mediators (i.e. academic socialisation and identification with future professionality).

This research explores a capital conceptualisation of graduate employability, identifying possible processes for implementing graduates’ capital across their academic experience and providing initial evidence of their interplay and contribution to transition into the labour market.

These findings provide empirical support to possible forms of capital that HE institutions may fulfil to enhance their undergraduate employability throughout their academic career, which serves as a liminal space allowing undergraduates to begin building a tentative professional identity.

This study investigates how communication is used by a Swedish public authority to legitimate the responsibilization of preparedness, i.e. how the state encourages individual citizens to take more responsibility for their security.

A multimodal discursive approach drawing on multimodal narrative analysis of video clips and multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) is used to examine how the responsibilization of preparedness is legitimated in video material published on Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency's (MSB’s) YouTube channel.

The study finds that the responsibilization of preparedness is legitimated through an ongoing but evolving normalization of threat. The findings also show how responsibilization is legitimated in moralizing terms of individual contribution to society, which may indicate a return from neo-liberal values to more traditional Swedish collectivist values.

The study shows how communication around preparedness and responsibilization is discursively constructed and legitimated through multimodal features, while previous research has mainly focused on verbal or written communication.

This study aims to examine how teacher candidates (TCs) in Türkiye and the USA navigate their intercultural communication skills in a telecollaboration project.

Forty-eight TCs participated (26 in Türkiye and 22 in the USA) in the study. TCs discussed critical issues in multicultural education on an online learning platform for six weeks. Their discussions were analyzed using content and discourse analysis.

The findings indicated that TCs approached the telecollaborative space as a translingual contact zone and positioned themselves and their interlocutors in the discourse by using the personal pronouns; I, we, you and they. When they positioned themselves using we (people in Türkiye/USA), they spoke on behalf of everyone included in the scope of we. Their interlocutors responded to these positionings either by accepting this positioning and responding with a parallel positioning or by engaging in translingual negotiation strategies to revise the scope of we and sharing some differences/nuances in beliefs and practices in their community.

When TCs talk about their culture and community in a singular manner using we, they frame them as the same across every member in that community. When they ask questions to each other using you, the framing of the questions prime the respondents to sometimes relay their own specific experiences as the norm or consider experiences from different points of view through translingual negotiation strategies. A singular approach to culture(s) may affect the marginalized communities the most because they are lost in this representation, and their experiences and voices are not integrated in the narratives or integrated with stereotypical representation.

Teachers and teacher educators should first pay attention to their language choices, especially use of pronouns, which may communicate inclusion or exclusion in intercultural conversations. Next, they should prepare their students to adopt and practice language choices that communicate respect for cultural diversity and are inclusive of marginalized populations.

Speakers’ pronoun use includes identity construction in discourse by drawing borders around and between communities and cultures with generalization and particularity, and by patrolling those borders to decide who is included and excluded. As a response, interlocutors use pronouns either to acknowledge those borders and respond with corresponding ones from their own context or negotiate alternative representations or further investigate for particularity or complexity. In short, pronouns could lead the direction of intercultural conversations toward criticality and complexity or otherwise, and might be reasons where there are breakdowns in communication or to fix those breakdowns.

This study shows that translingual negotiation strategies have explanatory power to examine how speakers from different language backgrounds negotiate second and third order positionings in the telecollaborative space.

Previous research has demonstrated that social-relational factors are instrumental to employee voice. An essential aspect of this relates to notions of respect or disrespect. Although nurses commonly report experiencing professional disrespect in their interaction with doctors, earlier studies have focused on how the professional status hierarchy and power imbalance between doctors and nurses hinder speaking up without considering the role of professional disrespect. Addressing this gap, we explore how professional disrespect in the doctor–nurse relationship in surgical teams influences the willingness of nurses to voice legitimate concerns about threats to patient safety.

Fifty-seven semi-structured interviews with nurses drawn from a range of specialities, ranks and surgical teams in three hospitals in a West African Country. In addition, two interviews with senior representatives from the National Registered Nurses and Midwifery Association (NRNMA) of the country were undertaken and analysed thematically with the aid of NVivo.

Disrespect is expressed in doctors’ condescending attitude towards nurses and under-valuing their contribution to care. This leads to safety concerns raised by nurses being ignored, downplayed or dismissed, with deleterious consequences for patient safety. Feeling disrespected further motivates nurses to consciously disguise silence amidst speech and engage in punitive silence aimed at making clinical practice difficult for doctors.

We draw attention to the detrimental effect of professional disrespect on patient safety in surgical environments. We contribute to employee voice and silence by showing how professional disrespect affects voice independently of hierarchy and conceptualise the notion of punitive silence.

The paper addresses the issue of change in Wikidata ontology by exposing the role of the socio-epistemic processes that take place inside the infrastructure. The subject of the study was the process of extending the Wikidata ontology with a new property as an example of the interplay between the social and technical components of the Wikidata infrastructure.

In this study, an interpretative approach to the evolution of the Wikidata ontology was used. The interpretation framework was a process-centric approach to changes in the Wikidata ontology. The extension of the Wikidata ontology with a new property was considered a socio-epistemic process where multiple agents interact for epistemic purposes. The decomposition of this process into three stages (initiation, knowledge work and closure) allowed us to reveal the role of the institutional structure of Wikidata in the evolution of its ontology.

This study has shown that the modification of the Wikidata ontology is an institutionalized process where community-accepted regulations and practices must be applied. These regulations come from the institutional structure of the Wikidata community, which sets the normative patterns for both the process and social roles and responsibilities of the involved agents.

The results of this study enhance our understanding of the evolution of the collaboratively developed Wikidata ontology by exposing the role of socio-epistemic processes, division of labor and normative patterns.