What can caring for, and being cared for by, a garden teach us about aging well? This article is a narrative exploration of care, aging, and wellbeing in later life through conversations with an ...older woman and her garden in Toronto, Canada during the months of the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus is on the interconnectedness of care across generations and species. Moving away from conventional generational scripts, the article expands notions of care and aging with an intersectional, feminist and decolonial approach to relationality across time and space.
The article uses interviews, photovoice-inspired sessions, and autoethnography, to look at aging and wellbeing as relational and more-than-human relationality. It extends the ethics of care beyond traditional boundaries, embracing perspectives that challenge normative assumptions of gender, age, and interspecies relations.
The article aims to contribute to the current debates around colonial research logics, though a critical feminist understanding of relationality and embodied learning. It emphasizes the importance of connecting across generations, seeing land as a way to restore human and more-than-human relations while prefiguring a more care-full present.
•Caring for and being cared for by a garden can teach us about aging otherwise.•Learning from other-than-humans requires learning to know their animacy.•Autoethnography can be a relational entry point to engage with other-than-human.•Feminist living/researching is a methodological valuing of process over outcome.
The current COVID‐19 pandemic has created a global context likely to increase eating disorder (ED) risk and symptoms, decrease factors that protect against EDs, and exacerbate barriers to care. Three ...pathways exist by which this pandemic may exacerbate ED risk. One, the disruptions to daily routines and constraints to outdoor activities may increase weight and shape concerns, and negatively impact eating, exercise, and sleeping patterns, which may in turn increase ED risk and symptoms. Relatedly, the pandemic and accompanying social restrictions may deprive individuals of social support and adaptive coping strategies, thereby potentially elevating ED risk and symptoms by removing protective factors. Two, increased exposure to ED‐specific or anxiety‐provoking media, as well as increased reliance on video conferencing, may increase ED risk and symptoms. Three, fears of contagion may increase ED symptoms specifically related to health concerns, or by the pursuit of restrictive diets focused on increasing immunity. In addition, elevated rates of stress and negative affect due to the pandemic and social isolation may also contribute to increasing risk. Evaluating and assessing these factors are key to better understanding the impact of the pandemic on ED risk and recovery and to inform resource dissemination and targets.
A gravity matching algorithm is a crucial component of a vehicle's underwater navigation system. This article studies the improvement in the out-of-domain matching reliability and positioning ...accuracy of underwater navigation. To achieve these goals, a novel cyclic boundary semisquare-domain researching (CBSR) method is proposed. Two times the inertial error is first employed to span an initial small-square domain and find an initial optimal matching position, which results in controlling the matching efficiency. If this optimal position is located on the domain boundary, the cyclic boundary semisquare domain rematching mechanism is triggered. The cyclic boundary semisquare domain is iteratively generated to perform repositioning and obtain a better matching position until it falls into the interior of the matching domain. The final optimal matching position is used to calibrate the sensor's parameters and aid the navigation of the underwater vehicle. Experimental results prove that the proposed CBSR method has outstanding positioning capacity for underwater gravity matching navigation, and higher matching reliability and lower mismatching probability of the vehicle's out-of-domain positioning. For excellent and good suitable tracks, the number of out-of-domain mismatches of the CBSR method, compared with TERCOM, are reduced by 97.73% and 86.05%, respectively, while the out-of-domain average matching accuracies are all less than one grid resolution and are improved by 85.23% and 81.07%, indicating the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed CBSR model for improving the matching reliability and positioning accuracy of out-of-domain underwater navigation.
Seeking Eccentricity Espinosa, Adelina Sánchez; Méndez de la Brena, Dresda Emma
Sociología y tecnociencia,
2021, Letnik:
11, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This Sociology and Technoscience monograph extends conversations and uses of eccentricity as a methodological tool for doing research within the field of feminist and gender studies. The search for ...eccentricity responds to the editors’ interest in reflecting on and engaging with different methodological approaches which help deviate from canonical established patterns of research onto unusual and provocative ways of doing research differently. In this collection we have gathered contributions dealing with the analysis of technologies of gender, sexuality and bodies to propose new ways to defocus, dislocate or blur the split between subjects and objects of study. In sum, with this monograph we intend to contribute to gender approaches to science by exploring "eccentrically" the ways feminist and gender scholars think and research otherwise.
Feminist modes of knowledge and doing research have traditionally been excluded from academic discourses or denied the merits of their own specificity due to the constitution of the notion of “women” as a sexual differentiated subject. “Women”, as epistemological subject, has been trapped between the unrepresented or unrepresentable due to the articulation of what Michel Foucault calls “technologies of sex” - that is, mechanisms, apparatuses and discourses (legal, pedagogical, medical, demographic, religious or economic) that regulate sexuality. Following the Foucaultian concept, Teresa De Lauretis (1987) coins the concept of “technologies of gender” to move away from the idea of gender as sexual difference towards its comprehension as a political tool instead. Technologies are hence understood as inseparable from their sociocultural milieus and the semiotic apparatuses which produce women and men, assigning an identity and a position to each individual within the social group.
Government policies and investments in photovoltaic (PV) research and development (R&D) have contributed to the rapid development of a PV industry through technology push in most countries over the ...past decade. It is worth investigating the effectiveness of investment-drive R&D policies at a global level, particularly how they work in reducing the costs of PV technologies. This study constructs a learning curve model to assess the performance of PV R&D policies in China, Germany, the United States and Japan. Market information—for example, PV module production, PV installation and PV technology improvement—is utilised to analyse how these policies take effect. The results show that PV R&D investments are efficient in decreasing the production costs of PV modules, which positively affects the development of PV module markets. However, weak PV technology conditions (including conversion efficiency, reliability) and low PV electricity penetration levels have resulted in surpluses in PV module markets, as well as PV electricity curtailment around the world. It is suggested that future R&D policies should contribute more to improving conversion efficiencies (the structure of technology push power) and grid integration technologies (demand pull power) for PV systems.
•A learning curve model is constructed to assess the performances of PV R&D policies.•Market information is utilised to help analyse how these policies make effects.•A comparative analysis between PV cost reduction and technology improvement is done.•Further PV R&D policy scheme is presented based on the comparative analysis.
Conservation researchers are aware of the need to work with social sciences to manage human-wildlife interactions for better conservation outcomes, but extending natural science research approaches ...to a social science domain can compromise data quality and validity. As part of the interdisciplinary exchange between the natural and social sciences, this review contrasts structured questionnaire-based surveys with qualitative approaches to collecting social data, and clarifies contexts in which particular qualitative methods might be more effective when investigating human behaviour in conservation research. Although well-designed questionnaire-based surveys may be useful for population-level generalizations, complementary use of qualitative approaches can significantly enhance understanding of research context, underpinning formulation of representative sampling frames and pertinent research questions, and permitting greater accuracy in interpretation and analysis of data. Good qualitative data are necessary to an accurate understanding of categories, processes, relationships and perceptions, particularly critical in a cross-cultural context, significantly strengthening the internal validity of subsequent structured work. Furthermore, stand-alone qualitative research can also constitute a valuable and valid approach to matters critical to conservation research and to designing successful conservation initiatives, which cannot be effectively researched in any other way.
A growing body of work exploring transnational interaction has brought to light the importance of awareness of multilingualism in research contexts, yet little consideration has been given to ...researchers working in a later learned language (LX) or the process of investigating linguistically diverse communities. This research takes place within a multilingual social space, a transnational Spanish language group in London, against the backdrop of a globalized and mobile world. The work explores the complexities of conducting research in a multilingual, international, and transient context where sharing all language varieties and/or cultures with participants may not be practical, possible, or even preferable. The data, collected by myself (a participant-researcher), includes recordings of informal social conversations, ethnographic observations, and interviews with key participants. Their analysis highlights linguistic adaptation to facilitate transnational understanding, demonstrates the value of interviews in a common LX, and considers how language ideologies and norms affect transcription of multiple language varieties. The paper argues that utilizing an ethnographic lens, particularly when working in an LX, allows for a deeper understanding of localized multilingual interaction through closeness to the participants and advocates a slow, detailed approach to data analysis.
Young children in many parts of the world are spending more time in formal education and care settings. As children have the right to be heard on matters that affect them, their views about the early ...childhood environments they inhabit, need to be included in the process of placemaking. Early childhood environments have the potential to shape a child’s identity, sense of belonging and inclusion. This research sought children’s ideas about their early childhood setting, with the view to informing the design of a new inclusive centre. Researching with children aged three-to-five, from a low socio-economic ethnically diverse suburb, multi-modal data were generated in three phases: child-led photo-taking tours; photo elicited interviews; and interview elicited drawing. Findings showed a preference for the outdoors, along with places for hiding, safety, cleanliness and authentic rather than ‘fake’ resources.
PDF
