Search results

This chapter frames the educational journey of an Iskwew, or Cree woman who has navigated the different spaces of settler education, sometimes reluctantly and sometimes eagerly. The author engages the usage of her Cree Nisgaa Methodological Framework that is framed by protocol, mamatowisin, or engaging inner mindfulness, and reciprocity. The author makes and holds space for readers to journey with her, offering an opportunity to bear witness to the experiences of First Nation (Indigenous) education, from her positionality as a Cree woman. The author engages, embodies, and enacts ethical relationality throughout the chapter as it is her pedagogical hope that this chapter contributes to a collective space where Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships can be forged with respect, relevance, relationality, and reciprocity on behalf of students everywhere.

Here we provide a short reflection on the persistent theme of relationality in reproductive studies which allows us to draw out further insights from each of the chapters.

In this chapter, I suggest that institutional guidelines and principles for conducting ethical research within Indigenous and cross-cultural contexts (see for example, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Guidelines for Ethical Research in Indigenous Studies, 2012) may not, in themselves be enough to promote the ethical practices nor lead to innovative outcomes if the fundamental premises of Western research in Indigenous contexts remain the same. Alternatively, valuing and applying Indigenous conceptions of Being, relationality and knowing when engaging with Indigenous participants and also, within actual procedures of research may lead to greater ethical know-how and a deeper understanding of how Indigenous modes of knowledge production can extend the frontiers of knowledge to solve real world problems. Such possibilities are predicated on recognising the limitations of our own epistemologies and ontologies and addressing the question of how we might refigure the role and positioning of ‘outsider’ researchers in ways that imbed, more self-reflexive and culturally appropriate modes of engagement and the application of Indigenous notions of Being, knowing and doing into research procedures to enhance the impact and benefits of research both within and beyond Indigenous communities.

Purpose – This paper considers the role of relationality as an interpretive strategy in the workplace, asking how one group of low-wage workers interpret their jobs in the service economy.

Methodology – Qualitative interviews with 25 female retail workers.

Findings – I argue that these retail workers use a relational ethic to interpret various aspects of their work. Relationality colors workers’ understanding of their job responsibilities, their own accounts of self-development in the workplace, and their strategies for resolving conflict on the shop floor.

Practical implications – These findings are particularly relevant for current labor union activities, and thus I conclude by discussing the implications of this relational ethic for attempts to organize workers in the retail sector. Workers who prioritize relationships ahead of material gains in the workplace may be particularly uncomfortable with more confrontational styles of labor organization.

Originality/Value of paper – Economic sociologists increasingly stress relational aspects of the economy, such as the role of networks in enabling market transactions; the significance of social ties in shaping economic exchange, and the importance of economic activity in constituting relationships themselves. This paper builds on that framework by arguing that workers also use a relational ethic to interpret their activity within the workforce itself.

Since the establishment of ecocriticism, the traditional Western dualistic categories of spaces and places have become objects of increasing pluralistic refigurations in light of the challenges posed by current environmental crises. More and more scholars have discussed how rooted dichotomies, including country/city and nature/culture, should be reconsidered for better acknowledging the sense of connectedness occurring between humans and the surrounding nonhuman world. Consequences of this approach in literary and cultural studies have been pivotal: new environmentally oriented hermeneutic practices have developed, which allow for reevaluating phenomena linked to old-fashioned understandings of the natural world. Among them, the pastoral, traditionally conceived as the contrast between the rural and the urban, has been reexamined by ecocritics through new concepts, starting from the “post-pastoral” (Gifford, 1999). By stressing the investigation of the relationship between the human and the environment in pastoral representations, the post-pastoral has become a favorable tool (Gifford, 2006) for enhancing ethical considerations in response to the challenges posed by the Anthropocene.

This transdisciplinary chapter is also inspired by “geocriticism,” which reflects on how literary narratives influence spatial practices in the real, material world. Specifically, this chapter discusses how the neologism “cittagna” – blending the Italian terms città (city) and campagna (country) – which first appeared in Stefano Benni's novel Prendiluna (2017), allows critics to reflect on the development of similar combinatory processes in contemporary urban spaces. When considering this process in parallel with the notion of post-pastoral, “cittagna,” becomes a useful concept for observing how, in current cityscapes, the emergence of new spaces and places negotiates the conventional country/city split, while highlighting the sense of intertwining between the two terms. Hence, attention is placed on how two possible examples of rising “cittagnas” – roof gardens and off-leash dog parks – can be read as evidence of the increasing attentiveness toward issues of human-nonhuman relationality in today's urbanism, which becomes a hope on the horizon for facing current environmental concerns.

This chapter offers a selective review of the emerging Indigenous Pacific educational research from 2000 to 2018. The Pacific region is home to many and various cultural groups, and this review is an opportunity to celebrate the consequent diversity of thought about education. Common threads are used to weave this diversity into a set of coherent regional patterns. Such threads include the regional value to educational research of local metaphor, and an emphasis on relationality or the state of being related as a cornerstone of education, both in research and as practice. The relationship between indigenous educational thought and formal education in indigenous contexts is also addressed. The review pays attention to educational research centered in home islands and that which focuses on the education of those from Pacific Islands in settler societies since connections across the ocean are strong. Because of the recent history of the region, developments are fast paced and ongoing, and this chapter concludes with a sketch of research at the frontier. Set within the context of an area study, the chapter concludes by suggesting what challenges the region has to offer in terms of re-thinking the field of international and comparative education.

The chapter accounts for the process of becoming of a changed practice within the area of disability care in the Municipality of Aalborg in Denmark.

Across a period of a few months in the fall of 2015, a group of employees across the organization and an action researcher from Aalborg University (the author) met and formed a research-practice group, and across this period a revised model for cooperation emerged that – upon realization – would reconfigure the intra-play of all relevant areas of the organization involved in disability care. The model included the grasping of disability as dis/ability and thereby the model opened the possibility for reworking the binary of ability/disability to the benefit of restorying the citizen’s ability in the practices of changing the disability care.