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Early research into Agile approaches explored particular practices or quantified improvements in code production. Less well researched is how Agile teams are managed. The project manager (PM) role is traditionally one of “command and control” but Agile methods require a more facilitative approach. How this changing role plays out in practice is not yet clearly understood. The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into how adopting Agile techniques shape the working practices of PMs and critically reflect on some of the tensions that arise.

An ethnographic approach was used to surface a richer understanding of the issues and tensions faced by PMs as Agile methods are introduced. Ethnographic fiction conveys the story to a wider audience.

Agile approaches shift responsibility and spread expert knowledge seeming to undermine the traditional PM function. However, the findings here show various scenarios that allow PMs to wrest control and become more of a “gate-keeper”. Ethnographic fiction communicates a sense of the PMs frustration with the conflict between the need to control and the desire for teams to take more responsibility.

Stories provide insight and communicate the experiential feel behind issues faced by PMs adopting Agile to surface useful knowledge. The objective is not how to measure knowledge, but how to recognize it. These reflections are valuable to fellow researchers as well as practitioners and contribute to the growing literature on Agile project management.

This chapter examines the everyday experiences of short women, focusing on the problems they face and the coping strategies used to navigate being short in a heightist society. Further, this chapter views height as a stigmatized identity, which both negatively and positively impacts short women.

Sixteen qualitative interviews were conducted with women 5′2″ and under.

Using the literature on stress, and coping models laid out by social psychologists, this chapter elucidates the unique place of short women in American society.

While there has been a wealth of literature on how short stature impacts men, research on how short stature impacts women has been scant.

The author’s story of a familial connection on the move was part of the research process of an ethnographic project about a demolished ex-industrial village. Growing up in the 1970s, the author’s fatherless childhood was silently lived out in its spatial geography. The author’s proximate, unknown father was a potent figure that the author would glimpse in the street spaces but was never allowed to acknowledge. Twentieth century accounts of working-class life have little to say on the personal stories of families where ‘father’ was rarely present (Steedman, 1986). Here the author offers a daughter’s emotional geography of fatherlessness. To sketch a socio-cultural backcloth to the personal subplot, the author draws on scholarship about fatherhood, fatherlessness and lone motherhood as a way to discuss men’s involvement in fathering in relation to the author’s own experience of living without a father in a paternalistic company village. Turning to the author’s return in 2015 as a researcher, the author uses autoethnography to explore the personal familial subplot bubbling underneath the main project. The author charts how the methodologies used held affordances which offered a process of coming to terms with the inter-connections of spatial and familial absence and loss: the loss of author’s home-village where memories of an absent father were played out and the revelation of the loss of an already absent father through a DNA test. In this way, it traces the shifting movements of a familial (dis)-connection through memories, photographs and mobile research encounters against the backcloth of the absent spaces of an ex-industrial community.

Using data from a feminist discourse analysis of comments on Facebook news articles, this research outlines backlash and regulatory practices directed towards youth activists Greta Thunberg, X González and Malala Yousafzai. A conceptual framework of semiotic violence highlights how these comments function to silence, delegitimise, vilify and punish sociopolitically active girls who challenge the status quo. The first mode of semiotic violence works to symbolically annihilate girl activists by silencing or rendering their political contributions invisible. The most obvious manifestation of this is instructing girls to shut up and go away. Additionally, their activism is ignored by refusals to acknowledge it as appropriate through suggestions they focus on gender-normative activities, such as domestic chores, playing with dolls and finding boyfriends. Undermining girls’ agency by describing them as puppets, mouthpieces, script readers, pawns and tools is also common. Here, girls’ contributions are rendered invisible through implications that they are being brainwashed and manipulated. The second mode of semiotic violence reinforces ideologies that girls are not politically competent and punishes them for being outspoken. This includes explicitly discrediting girls’ knowledge and abilities. Regulating their emotionality is also prevalent. This is consistent with Liberal political theory which justified women’s exclusion from public life by associating men with reason and women with emotion. Finally, insults degrade them for transgressing into a space demarcated as an adult and masculine realm. The semiotic violence directed towards these ‘girl power’ figures highlights that many people do not believe girls have the right to assert their sociopolitical opinion.

Using an exploratory multi-case study approach, we examined student perceptions of leadership through analysis of introductory discussion board forums in online undergraduate and graduate leadership courses to formulate leadership student personas. A review of related literature reveals that leadership’s broad application results in a vast array of interests and motivations related to pursuit of a leadership degree. To that end, development of student personas provides leadership program administrators and faculty with a better understanding of their needs and characteristics. In this application paper, we will share qualitative data compiled from four online leadership courses. Our preliminary findings identified data-driven personas that showcase how leadership students with varying backgrounds and aspirations envision knowing our leadership students, as well as recommending future research that can help advance the field of leadership education.

THE College of Librarianship is best considered on its own terms, as an institution unique in the history and present pattern of British library education, but its significance and probable future development can best be assessed if two external factors are kept in mind.