Doing and mediating critique Austin, Jonathan Luke; Bellanova, Rocco; Kaufmann, Mareile
Security dialogue,
02/2019, Letnik:
50, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
What does it mean to study security from a critical perspective? This question continues to haunt critical security studies. Conversations about normative stances, political engagement, and the role ...of critique are mainstays of the discipline. This article argues that these conversations tend to revolve around a too disembodied image of research, where the everyday practice of researchers is sidelined. But researchers do do research: they work materially, socially, and cognitively. They mediate between various feedback loops or fields of critique. In doing so, they actively build and exercise critique. Recognizing that fact, this article resists growing suggestions to abandon critique by, first, returning to the practice of critique through the notion of companionship. This permits us to reinvigorate our attention to the objects, persons, and phenomena through which critique gains inspiration and purpose, and that literally accompany our relationship to critique. Second, we explore what happens when our companions disagree, when critique faces controversies and (a) symmetries. Here, we support research designs of tracing credibility and establishing symmetries in order to move away from critique as denouncing positions we disagree with. Third, we discuss the relation between companionship, critique, reflexivity, and style. Here, the rhetorical practices of critical inquiry are laid out, and possibilities for its articulation in different and less silencing voices are proposed.
Loneliness and a lack of socialization can have a deteriorating effect on life experience and health. Unfortunately, loneliness is an experience often felt by older people, and interspecies ...companionship can provide valuable and daily interaction that is positive for well-being. In the place of another human, a dog may inhabit a role as a provider of emotional support. In Judith Butler’s sense of performative identity, there is a becoming of that which we do. Using an approach of working with (rather than on) people, this informs sensitive and sympathetic methodologies for an analysis of the significance and benefit of interspecies companionship for older people in the initial stages of my artistic research project, Dogs and the Elderly. Made with participants of the Alzheimer’s Society’s “Memory Cafés” in Nottingham and Lincolnshire (UK), the project demonstrates how interspecies companionship can be valuable for supporting the emotional health and wellbeing of older people. This illustrated photo and text article discusses how the project’s older humans and their dogs inhabit a togetherness within supportive interspecies relationships in various ways, and how this contributes to their lived experience. It explores the stories of a group of people, living with or supporting others with early-stage Alzheimer’s, who speak to companionship with their dogs to articulate the significance of the relationship from their perspective.
...Lockdown in Italy, after COVID-19 outbreak, increased isolation of women during childbirth...Restrictions aimed at pandemic containment caused the reduction of companionship in hospital...The ...resolution issued by Tuscany Region helped preserve labour and childbirth companionship.
Although childbirth services were accessible after COVID-19 outbreak, the measures taken by the Italian Government for contagion containment required some restrictions on the presence of trusted persons for mothers, forcing them to isolation during hospitalization. To preserve companionship, the Regional Health Authority of Tuscany issued a resolution providing partners with the possibility to be present during labour and childbirth for non-asymptomatic women.
In this study, we: 1) analyse the impact of pandemic on companionship in terms of significant reduction of the possibility for women to be accompanied by a trusted person during labour and childbirth; and 2) ascertain if the regional resolution issued was effective in containing the reduction of companionship.
We performed an interrupted time series analysis to measure the variation of the possibility for women to be accompanied by a trusted person during labour and childbirth, in response to formalization of lock-down due to COVID-19 outbreak and the introduction of the regional resolution aimed at contrasting negative effects on companionship.
The ITS analysis showed that there was a significant decrease in the women-reported experience of companionship in the month of the formalization of lock-down, namely March 2020, followed by a slight increase in the upcoming months. A trend reversal was observed after May 2020, when the regional resolution was fully operational.
Perceiving another person as responsive to one’s needs is inherent to the formation of attachment bonds and is the foundation for safe-haven and secure-base processes. Two studies examined whether ...such processes also apply to interactions with robots. In both studies, participants had one-at-a-time sessions, in which they disclosed a personal event to a non-humanoid robot that responded either responsively or unresponsively across two modalities (gestures, text). Study 1 showed that a robot’s responsiveness increased perceptions of its appealing traits, approach behaviors towards the robot, and the willingness to use it as a companion in stressful situations. Study 2 found that in addition to producing similar reactions in a different context, interacting with a responsive robot improved self-perceptions during a subsequent stress-generating task. These findings suggest that humans not only utilize responsiveness cues to ascribe social intentions to robots, but can actually use them as a source of consolation and security.
•We examined whether robot responsiveness affects human perceptions and behavior.•A responsive robot elicited approach behavior and desire to use it under stress.•Humans perceived a responsive robot as more competent, sociable, and responsive.•Perceived responsiveness, in turn, improved self-perceptions during a stressful task.•Humans may ascribe social intentions to robots and use them as a source of security.
The social companionship (SC) feature in conversational agents (CAs) enables the emotional bond and consumer relationships. The heightened interest in SC with CAs led to exponential growth in ...publications scattered across disciplines with fragmented findings, thus limiting holistic understanding of the domain and warrants a macroscopic view of the domain to guide future research directions. The present study fills the research void by offering a comprehensive literature review entailing science performance and intellectual structure mapping. The comprehensive review revealed the research domain's major theories, constructs, and thematic structure. Thematic and content analysis of intellectual structure resulted in a conceptual framework encompassing antecedents, mediators, moderators, and consequences of SC with CAs. The study discusses future research directions guiding practitioners and academicians in designing efficient and ethical AI companions.
•Systematic literature review on social companionship with conversational agents•The study presents science mapping and intellectual structure mapping.•Social companionship with conversational agents consists of five main research streams.•Findings reveal potential future research avenues.
Individuals increasingly rely on healthcare virtual support communities (HVSCs) for social support and companionship. While research provides interesting insights into the drivers of informational ...support in knowledge-sharing virtual communities, there is limited research on the antecedents of emotional support provision and companionship activities in HVSCs. The unique characteristics of HVSCs also justify the need to reexamine members' voluntary provisions of help in such communities. This paper develops a model that examines the relationships between the structural, relational, and cognitive dimensions of social capital and the provision of informational and emotional support, and engagement in companionship activities in HVSCs. The model is tested based on data generated through an automated method that classifies and analyzes user-generated text in three healthcare virtual support communities (breast, prostate, and colorectal cancer). The results show that all three dimensions of social capital impact the provision of emotional support; both structural and relational capital facilitate engagement in companionship activities; and only cognitive capital enables the provision of informational support. Research and practical implications on the need to facilitate informational and emotional support provision and companionship activities in healthcare virtual support communities are discussed.
In this paper, we investigate whether social support exchanged in an online healthcare community benefits patients’ mental health. We propose a nonhomogeneous Partially Observed Markov Decision ...Process (POMDP) model to examine the latent health outcomes for online health community members. The transition between different health states is modeled as a probability function that incorporates different forms of social support that patients exchange via discussion board posts. We find that patients benefit from learning from others and that their participation in the online community helps them to improve their health and to better engage in their disease self-management process. Our results also reveal differences in the influence of various forms of social support exchanged on the evolution of patients’ health conditions. We find evidence that informational support is the most prevalent type in the online healthcare community. Nevertheless, emotional support plays the most significant role in helping patients move to a healthier state. Overall, the influence of social support is found to vary depending on patients’ health conditions. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed POMDP model can provide accurate predictions for patients’ health states and can be used to recover missing or unavailable information on patients’ health conditions.
Physical and emotional intimacy between humans and robots may become commonplace over the next decades, as technology improves at a rapid rate. This development provides new questions pertaining to ...how people perceive robots designed for different kinds of intimacy, both as companions and potentially as competitors. We performed a randomized experiment where participants read of either a robot that could only perform sexual acts, or only engage in non-sexual platonic love relationships. The results of the current study show that females have less positive views of robots, and especially of sex robots, compared to men. Contrary to the expectation rooted in evolutionary psychology, females expected to feel more jealousy if their partner got a sex robot, rather than a platonic love robot. The results further suggests that people project their own feelings about robots onto their partner, erroneously expecting their partner to react as they would to the thought of ones' partner having a robot.
Background
In recent years, robots have been considered a new tech industry that can be used to solve the shortage in human resources in the field of health care. Also, animal-assisted therapy has ...been used to provide assistance, companionship, and interaction among the elderly and has been shown to have a positive impact on their emotional and psychological well-being. Both pets and robots can provide dynamic communication and positive interaction patterns. However, preferences for middle-aged and older adults in this regard are not clear.
Objective
This study explored the degree of acceptance of robots and pets as partners in later life and to determine the needs and preferences of elderly individuals related to companion robots.
Methods
A total of 273 middle-aged and older adults aged ≥45 years and living in the community were invited to answer a structured questionnaire after watching a companion robot video. Sociodemographic data, physical health status and activities, experience with technology, eHealth literacy, and acceptance and attitude toward robots and pets were recorded and analyzed using multinomial logistic regression analysis.
Results
Age, level of education, type of dwelling, occupation, retirement status, number of comorbidities, experience with pets, experience using apps, and eHealth literacy were significantly associated with acceptance of robots and pets. Middle-aged and older women preferred robots with an animal-like appearance, while men preferred robots that resembled a human adult. In terms of robot functions, participants preferred a companion robot with dancing, singing, storytelling, or news-reporting functions. Participants’ marital status and whether or not they lived alone affected their preference of functions in the companion robot.
Conclusions
Findings from this study inform the development of social robots with regard to their appearance and functions to address loneliness in later life in fast-aging societies.
PDF
