Search results

This chapter describes sociological research on the material and spatial dimensions of everyday family life in the United States, with a specific emphasis on how children’s agency is manifest in the display and use of childhood and parenthood objects in home spaces. Children’s agency is framed as a juxtaposition of individual control and cultural and structural constraint, but also as it positions children in relation to adults, home spaces in relation to not-home spaces, and families in relation to other social realms such as the marketplace, schools, and the digital world. Three research topics are featured, all of which stem from the author’s projects spanning the last decade. These include parenting roles as shown in the taking and managing of digital and physical family photographs, children’s use of technology as a way to tell the story of parent–child connectedness in families separated into two homes, and young adults’ use of objects and spaces to signify role transition into adulthood. The central themes emerging from this research are supported by a theoretical foundation that combines Corsaro’s (2012) interpretive reproduction of childhood alongside Anderson, Moore, and Suski’s (2016) call for material mindfulness in sociological investigations of the home.

In the 1950s, a combination of technological and scientific advancement, political competition, and changes in popular opinion about spaceflight generated public policy in favor of an aggressive space program. This and that of 1960s moved forward with a Moon landing and the necessary budgets. Space exploration reached equilibrium in the 1970s, sustained through to the present. The twenty-first-century progresses signals that support for human space exploration is waning and may even begin declining in the coming years. This chapter reviews this history and analyzes five rationales suggested in support of continued human spaceflight: discovery and understanding, national defense, economic competitiveness, human destiny, and geopolitics.

Storytelling helps clarify the concealed or less visible elements of reality in its authentic context. Story analysis read between the lines of written or oral narratives to obtain richer understanding of an event. However, storytelling practice is a double-edge sword. Skilled storytellers may employ the power of storytelling to reframe an event in a favorable or undesirable way.

In contemporary business world, corporations broadly employ expert authors who proficiently apply storytelling practices in corporate public documents. Accordingly, corporate public documents declare desirable corporate image and promising reflection of business activities hence the corporate attracts more stockholders and obtains extra resources.

In current business world, corporates that do not appropriately employ storytelling would fail to take the opportunity to brainwash stockholders, hence suffer from competitive disadvantage.

This case study analyses Sears Holdings Corporation public report to explore how its business activities are revealed to public stakeholders. This study also proposes hypotheses of the consequences of ineffective storytelling.

This chapter will consider curriculum making in lower secondary education in Ireland. Building on the concept of curriculum as a social practice involving multiple actors across different contexts and involving intersecting domains of influence from the supra, to the nano, we characterizethe landscape of lower secondary education in Ireland as an “assemblage” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2003). An assemblage is any number of elements that are engaged in a process of arranging, organising, fitting together and a process of knowledge making. We discuss the emerging properties that have begun to evolve through the inter-connections of the assemblage as they engage in the process of reform by structuring the findings through the lens of how the semiotic, material and social flows worked simultaneously to open up or close down the process. Curriculum ideology, concepts, language and communication are examples of the semiotic flow. The material flow is the content of the domains, such as the actors, the physical structures, documents and artefacts. Relationships, pedagogy, and collaborative practice are involved in the social flow of the assemblage. The research underpinning this chapter mapped the agency of the actors in their capacity to make curriculum as these three flows worked simultaneously during a process of assemblage wide curriculum reform of lower secondary education in Ireland. The analysis and discussion gives rise to a number of insights into processes of curriculum making and into the complexities of system-wide reform.