Search results

In this chapter, we explore to what extent storylines about the internet and social media are absent or marginal in The Archers. In particular, we examine these storylines to better understand how the inhabitants of Ambridge interact online and how their online activities intersect with their real-world experiences. We compare what happens in The Archers with the moral panic that often characterises narratives of technology use and find a striking contrast that we argue supports a broader way of understanding and characterising practices of online safety and security. We analysed four social media-related Archers’ storylines from the last 24 months. Our analysis shows that The Archers storylines enable us to look at human–computer interaction in relief so that instead of only looking at how people use technology we can also see the context in which it is used and the usually unseen support structures. The Archers narratives also provide a rich picture of how the fixed space of the physical world interacts with virtual space. In the broader context, the social media storylines provide us with an understanding of how connecting, care receiving and care giving take place in both fixed space and virtual space, and how these co-connected relationships of care receiving and care giving contribute to a form of security more expansive than technologically enabled data protection.

Drawing on a view of children's and teachers’ identities as stories to live by, the authors use one field text, taken from a year-long narrative inquiry, to show how children's and teachers’ stories to live by interact with milieu and subject matter in classroom curriculum making. Tensions around negotiating a curriculum of lives are identified as children's stories bump against teachers’ stories. Three children's stories to live by are represented through a set of images in found poetry. We return to the curriculum-making moment with wonders about each child's evolving stories to live by in relation with the particular subject matter. We outline four methodological dilemmas and ethical dilemmas encountered in studying multiple participants’ experiences nested within social, cultural and institutional narratives.

This chapter describes the scenario technique used for the integrative methodological approach (IMA) of the German global change project GLOWA Elbe. It is outlined how regional scenarios are systematically derived to analyze water use conflicts and their resolution in the context of global change for the German Elbe river basin. Through the combination of frameworks of development and policy strategies a consistent set of developmental scenarios can be generated that makes it possible to examine the regional impact of policy strategies under conditions of different future global change development paths. The scenario analysis of the framework of development starts on the global level with qualitative IPCC storylines, translates them to the regional level, and quantifies their regional effects by means of modeling and statistical estimation methods. The policy strategies are derived in close cooperation with regional stakeholders.

Images had long conveyed politics through forms as varied as private paintings and public coins. If images are storytelling vectors (Fusari, 2017), visual artefacts were intended to re/shape human perception of current events and, consequently, their states of ‘being in the world’ (Heidegger, 2001); this is the reason why the visual quality of communication might be hard to disjoin from that of ‘performativity’ (Cartier-Bresson, 2018).

The polysemic (Barthes, 1977), if not fully open (Eco, 1989), quality of visual semiotics complicates identification of any framework of reference and adds to the need for practical and sensible research in digital communication (Fusari, in press).

Since the first US Presidential debate televised in 1968, a new interest surged towards the understanding and production of visual communication of politics. Increasingly so, images (both still and moving ones) have affected, if not thoroughly shaped, understanding of all recent political affairs, particularly so from the 1992's Gulf War onward (Baudrillard, 1995; Kellner, 1992).

The 2012 Invisible Children (IC)'s campaign is here assessed as the milestone marking the potential for global impact acquired by socio-political visual-centred storytelling.

The intertwining of the digital with the visual has yet to be precisely arranged for socio-political storytelling; also, storytelling as a format and approach has increasingly gained relevance, adding new concerns to issues of veracity.

In response, this chapter advances the notion of ‘storyline’ in conjunction with that of ‘storytelling’: the resulting taxonomy aims to review specific notions of truth- and trust-fulness from a visual-centred perspective.

The chapter thus explores the requirements for communicating and understanding visual storytelling on digital media; by doing so, it addresses the extent to which ‘visual storytelling’ might be a notion fit for the job of disseminating today's digital cultures.

Eventually, the chapter will question how to design visually centred communication formats and, in turn, engage these as storytelling of socio-political issues for digital platforms.

As teacher educators, we know that preservice teachers come into teaching with idealistic visions of both teaching and their own identity as a teacher. Students’ sense that they are or could be teachers is an important aspect of their decision to become teachers. If who they become as teachers must emerge from who they are as people, teacher educators ought to be interested in how students position themselves in their role and identity as teachers when they enter teacher education programs. This paper explores what preservice teachers’ initial applications to teacher education programs reveal about how preservice teachers position themselves as teachers.

This chapter asks, how do the decisions made by Ambridge women compare to the rest of the UK when faced with an unexpected positive pregnancy test, and will explore the decisions made by four Ambridge women when faced with the question of their own pregnancies. It will firstly present the UK context of pregnancy and family composition and go on to examine four case studies of unplanned pregnancy, the decision-making process encountered and its outcomes in BBC Radio 4’s The Archers.

Processual approaches to entrepreneurship have increasingly captured researchers’ interest. One such approach that tries to understand entrepreneurs in real time by looking with them, not at them, has been termed withness (Shotter, 2006). But how does one design a study that captures this experience of living in the flow? In this methodological reflection, we propose using the metaphor of warp and weft to think of grounded theory research designs that seek to approximate withness. To this end, we also reflect on our experience studying the unfolding processes in international new ventures and highlight the usefulness of multiple data collection instruments, notably diaries and interviews.

Women roared into the Ambridge Cricket Team in March 2017. Their debut was initiated by a shortage of male players and a belief that the team was at risk, rather than an inherent desire to include women in the game. The approach of the women very much reflected the sentiments of the Helen Reddy ‘I am Woman’ song of the 1970s, ‘I am woman, hear me roar in numbers too big to ignore’, which became an anthem for empowerment of women in that generation. This chapter describes the context of cricket and sport in England and a synopsis of the 2017 storyline surrounding the Ambridge Cricket Team. A comparison of the storyline with the wider context shows the experience in Ambridge is similar to other places in England and elsewhere.