Search results

In this paper, we introduce feminist technoscience as an approach that will advance theory in information behavior and practice.

In this conceptual paper, we identify four common assumptions in information behavior and information practice research that limit theory development to date. Existing models and theories tend to rely on extractive logic, focus on a person-in-situation, depend on binary definitions and assume that information interaction changes people's lives for the better. This leads to extractive ways of discussing information interactions and limits our ability to fully theorize embodiment and affect in our discipline.

Feminist technoscience offers distinct ways of thinking about people, technology, bodies and power; in doing so, it responds to some perennial limitations in our research to date.

Feminist technoscience is a robust research paradigm that has not yet been fully applied in our discipline. Assumptions in information behavior and information practice research have led to models and theories that reflect a logic of extraction and are limited in their potential for characterizing both embodiment and affect. Feminist technoscience provides a way to conduct research that challenges these assumptions and addresses these limitations.

This paper argues that extractivist logic creates the environmental conditions that produce “natural” hazards and also the human conditions that produce vulnerability, which combined create disasters. Disaster Risk Creation is then built into the current global socio-economic system, as an integral component not accidental by-product.

As part of the movement to liberate disasters as discipline, practice and field of enquiry, this paper does not talk disasters per se, but rather its focus is on “extractivism” as a fundamental explanator for the anthropogenic disaster landscape that now confronts us.

Applying a gender lens to extractivism as it relates to disaster, further highlights that Disaster Risk Management rather than alleviating, creates the problems it seeks to solve, suggesting the need to liberate gender from Disaster Risk Management, and the need to liberate us all from the notion of managing disasters. Since to ‘manage’ disaster risk is to accept uncritically the structures and systems that create that risk, then if we truly want to address disasters, our focus needs to be on the extractive practices, not the disastrous outcomes.

The fundamental argument is that through privileging the notion of “disaster” we create it, bring it into existence, as something that exists in and of itself, apart from wider socio-economic structures and systems of extraction and exploitation, rather than recognising it for what it is, an outcome/end product of those wider structures and systems. Our focus on disaster is then misplaced, and perhaps what disaster studies needs to be liberated from, is itself.

While technologies are often packaged as solutions to long-standing social ills, scholars of digital economies have raised the alarm that, far from liberatory, technologies often further entrench social inequities and in fact automate structures of oppression. This literature has been revelatory but tends to replicate a methodological nationalism that erases global racial hierarchies. We argue that digital economies rely on colonial pathways and in turn serve to replicate a racialized and neocolonial world order. To make this case, we draw on W.E.B. Du Bois' writings on capitalism's historical development through colonization and the global color line. Drawing specifically on The World and Africa as a global historical framework of racism, we develop heuristics that make visible how colonial logics operated historically and continue to this day, thus embedding digital economies in this longer history of capitalism, colonialism, and racism. Applying a Du Boisian framework to the production and propagation of digital technologies shows how the development of such technology not only relies on preexisting racial colonial production pathways and the denial of racially and colonially rooted exploitation but also replicates these global structures further.

Increasing industrial agriculture and economic crisis has generated creative responses in pursuit of responsible solutions to the human and environmental cost of globalization by applying these models to promote social responsibility, help sustain livelihoods and foster biodiversity. A key issue concerns how responsible and circular businesses might provide appropriate responses to large-scale “wicked” problems. This paper aims to ask what such creativity looks like in the context of a circular economy that attempts to build closed value loops, by examining a case from the organic cotton textile industry: Appachi Eco-Logic.

This study uses an ethnographic extended-case approach to identify two phases of creative growth at Appachi Eco-Logic, examining how closing the value loop and creating circularity involved broadening the circle to include more and more actors.

This study identifies two major challenges to achieving and maintaining full circularity before concluding with a broad provocation for the study of circular economies.

The case offers insight into fundamental features of circularity, regeneration and redistribution, which can be used by managers to build responsible and sustainable closed value loops.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the concept of cultural value promoted by the Italian government between 2008 and 2018. Furthermore, it aims at setting the scope for further research and debate on the issue of cultural value in Italian cultural policy by questioning market-driven understanding of value.

In order to do so, it examines the rhetoric of Italian policymakers, with a particular focus on the people who have covered the role of Ministry for Cultural Assets and Activities over this 10-year span, and the policies they have implemented. The various nuances of the concept of valorizzazione are studied by analysing different pathways employed by the Italian government and the values underpinning them, with a particular focus on the abandonment of heritage sites.

What emerges from this research is the centrality of the economic value of culture; however, the economic impact of Italian cultural assets is always presented as a potential that has to be unlocked by implementing policies of valorizzazione, a term that has a double meaning of promotion and exploitation (Belfiore, 2006).

This paper presents an original approach to understanding the formation and promotion of cultural value at the level of governmental policy in the context of contemporary cultural policy in Italy. In particular, it evidences how the centrality of the economic value of culture has remained unscathed despite the rapid change of governments that has characterised Italian politics in the last 10 years.

Skilled, well-educated African immigrants arrive in Canada with aspirations for more opportunities and a better life, but too often end up with few employment options and precarious jobs. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the experiences of African immigrants attempting to locate suitable, well-compensated employment in Canada. More specifically, this paper reveals how long-standing information poverty frameworks from the field of information behavior are inadequate for understanding intersectional and broader socio-cultural forces influence access to information and employment precarity among African immigrants.

Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with twenty-five African immigrants in Metro Vancouver. Qualitative content analysis was used to explore participants' employment information seeking and perceptions of information availability using Britz's information poverty framework.

Participants encountered a range of difficulties when seeking information related to employment, including content, process and identity-related challenges, in alignment with Britz's framework. However, the framework did not fully encompass their information seeking experiences. Limited access to relevant information impacted participants' ability to make timely career decisions, and there was evidence of information inequity resulting from a mismatch between information provision and participants' multifaceted identities.

This research applied Britz's information poverty approaches and provided a map of participants' responses to information seeking challenges. Participants did not fit into the category of information poor as defined by Britz. The findings suggest that the discourse on information poverty would benefit from considerations of the diverse backgrounds of information seekers and the incorporation of cultural dimensions to understandings of information access, information poverty and technology use for information seeking.

The purpose of this paper is to share findings from empirically driven conceptual research into the implications for English teachers of understanding generative AI as a “tool” for writing.

The paper reports early findings from an Australian National Survey of English teachers and interrogates the notion of the AI writer as “tool” through intersectional feminist discursive-material analysis of the metaphorical entailments of the term.

Through this work, the authors have developed the concept of “coloniser tool-thinking” and juxtaposed it with First Nations and feminist understandings of “tools” and “objects” to demonstrate risks to the pursuit of social and planetary justice through understanding generative AI as a tool for English teachers and students.

Bringing together white and First Nations English researchers in dialogue, the paper contributes a unique perspective to challenge widespread and common-sense use of “tool” for generative AI services.

Personal museums provide the conceptual catalyst for liking as a research approach and inclusivity around “idiosyncratic” knowledges within information research. An adapted research paper format echoes the approach of personal museums: as a commentary on the limits of institutional shaping for the field.

Personal museums are conceptualized as spaces of knowing in-formation, ontological openings that are literally and figuratively entered into, that make a difference to human and material ways of knowing. Karen Barad's agential realism and Sianne Ngai's vernacular aesthetic categories provide the theoretical lenses through which the researcher's 2018 visit to one personal museum is revisited.

An ethnographic account of the author's visit to the Communist Consumer Museum (CCM) in Timişoara, Romania shows how its improvisational, friendly and intimate atmosphere exposes it as a space of entanglements in a quantum sense, emphasizing the inseparability of human and material realms and how knowledges are always in-formation. Such entanglements create atmospheres generative of different ways of thinking about information and knowledge.

Human expressions of liking reveal material agencies as ways of knowing and information beyond the realm of human experience and meaning. A vernacular aesthetics of liking is presented as a way to resist the marginalizing tendencies of knowledges classified as unconventional, idiosyncratic or eccentric. This approach is one way of resisting the assumptions of channel thinking that often shape how information is studied.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect a critical perspective drawing from phenomenology, especially informed by a reading of Heidegger, to enhance and extend appreciation of the need to question accounting’s meaning or delineation and how research might be undertaken into the accounting phenomenon and related areas.

To illustrate and clarify argumentation in terms of accounting mobilization and the domain of accounting research, the mainstream and strongly positivistic accounting perspective adopted in the USA is critically assessed. At the same time, the authors elaborate how much of interpretive research (including much of that labeled critical) is also lacking in terms of the perspective articulated here.

The paper stresses the case for questioning the taken-for-granted and conventional. It promotes reflexivity, cautious pragmatism, attentiveness to the value of the existing, responsibility to difference and otherness and openness to new possibilities as part of a deeper critical orientation.

The paper draws from phenomenology, especially in Heideggerian terms to open-up new conversational domain to debate accounting.