Productive Concept Research Articles

Conceptualising school-level responses to sexual harassment of women teachers as institutional gaslighting

This paper conceptualises the inaction of school leadership teams in response to systemic sexual harassment as institutional gaslighting, a theoretical tool to date unutilised in studies of sexual harassment in educational settings. Drawing on case studies of two women teachers who experienced sustained sexual harassment in Australian schools, and whose leadership responded with denial, minimisation and intentional mixed messaging, we argue that schools are home to and perpetuate unequal epistemic terrains, where women’s knowing is under­mined by dominant operations of the school that work to maintain structural and cultural norms. These norms, we suggest, are informed by hegemonic masculinity and feminine stereotypes of irrationality and deviance, and prevent violence against women in schools being addressed. We argue that institutional gaslighting is a productive concept to expose the epistemic injustice that delegitimates women’s knowledge of their experience and help in addressing systemic issues with responding to sexual harassment in schools.

Aesthetic Ideas and Art Interpretation in Kant’s Third Critique and Schelling’s ‘System of Transcendental Idealism’

Abstract This paper argues for a metacognitive reading of Kant’s doctrine of ‘aesthetic ideas’, according to which they enjoy the functional role of licensing a theory of art interpretation. I begin by offering a textualist reading of Kant’s doctrine of ‘aesthetic ideas’ and contest the received ‘semantic paradigm’ according to which aesthetic ideas either approximate the form or content of a rational idea. After showing the relationship between aesthetic ideas and artistic interpretation, I assess whether Kant’s theory delivers what we want from a theory of artistic interpretation. I subsequently show how Schelling’s conception of artistic production and reception in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) draws from Kant’s doctrine of ‘aesthetic ideas’. After analyzing the relationship between Kant and Schelling’s accounts of art interpretation, I evaluate which account we ought to prefer.

Developing (Pedagogical) content knowledge of constant rate of change: The case of Samantha

We present the results of a teaching experiment designed to foster a pre-service secondary teacher’s construction of a quantitative scheme for constant rate of change. Although the research participant developed a productive conception of constant rate of change as an interiorized ratio, images of chunky continuous covariation constrained her ability to reason efficiently across a variety of applied contexts. The participant constructed a scheme for constant rate of change at the reflected level of thought, which enabled her to become cognizant of its essential aspects and to appreciate its general applicability. Our results suggest that engaging in reflected abstraction is critical for supporting pre-service teachers’ construction of coherent and refined mathematical schemes.

Critical Posthumanist Literacy: Building Theory for Reading, Writing, and Living Ethically with Everyday Artificial Intelligence

AbstractLiteracy has become inextricably bound with machine processes, especially in the age of ubiquitous, consequential artificial intelligence (AI). Despite a relatively long history of AI involvement in our everyday reading and writing practices, the public availability of generative AI tools has set off a wave of heated debate—and concern—about AI's role in our lives. We argue that critical literacy theory and tools can serve as a foundation, when combined with posthumanist ideas and some technical knowledge, for understanding, teaching, and participating in our AI‐infused world. In this paper, we outline our theory of critical posthumanist literacy, which draws on posthumanist scholarship to re‐imagine critical literacy with respect to concepts of ontology, agency, ethics and justice, and pedagogy. For each concept, we build on humanist, critical perspectives to show how posthumanist scholarship can help theorize for literacy in the age of AI, especially as AI presents both lingering and new challenges to conceptions of human text production and consumption. Posthumanism provides us with alternative modes of thinking about the nature of “things” (and ourselves); with an understanding of agency as not a human possession but an accomplishment among/within many human and non‐human actors; with an expanded ethics that accounts more deeply for non‐humans; and with pedagogy that embraces ambiguity, movement, and speculation. Using these ideas to expand critical literacy practices, we offer concepts and questions for guiding literacy practice and research, with the understanding that these are no longer separable from complex computational systems.

A discussion on coloniality and global social theory

AbstractThe conversation between Ali Meghji and Manuela Boatcă focuses on how modernity/coloniality may (or may not) be a productive sociological concept in the remit of global social theory and wider political movements. Speaking from within different locations in the imperial core (England and Germany respectively), we discuss how the concept of modernity/coloniality has traveled over to our respective European contexts, and the ways it has informed our sociological approaches to matters such as inter‐imperiality, creolization, decolonization, global racisms and anti‐racisms, and historical sociology. The conversational approach is meant to tease out the multiple ways that modernity/coloniality can inform different—albeit related—aspects of sociological work, and also the varying contexts from which global social theory can be produced.

Relational Epistemologies: Friendship and Reading in Shida Bazyar’s Drei Kameradinnen

Abstract This article demonstrates that friendship is a productive concept through which to analyse the narrative voice and structure in Shida Bazyar’s Drei Kameradinnen (2021). Drawing on Max Czollek’s ‘Theatre of Integration’, I argue that the friendship between the three protagonists allows us to describe marginalized experiences without recentring the dominant German discourse. Their friendship is the source of the epistemic advantage as theorized by José Medina: by listening carefully and repeatedly to their friends’ stories, the protagonists produce knowledge about structural injustices. I argue that the novel ultimately proposes friendship as a model for reading that renders the underlying structures of narrativized marginalized experience intelligible. As an example, this article provides a close reading of one of the anecdotes in the novel. Inspired by Susan S. Lanser and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan’s ‘Narratology at the Checkpoint’, I show that Bayzar’s novel highlights how traditional narrative structures do not lend themselves to describing marginalized experiences.

Therapeutic Potential of Natural Metabolites Coupled Pyrazole and Its Bio‐Isosteres: Medicinal Perspectives and SAR Studies

AbstractNatural products have been extensively explored for their role in drug design and development to eradicate numerous types of diseases. Also, heterocycles‐based motifs are known to possess a wide range of therapeutic applications. Among them, pyrazole is a well‐exploited scaffold by researchers in the different fields of medicinal chemistry. Recently, pharmacophoric hybridization became most urged approach in which two biologically active pharmacophoric skeletons tend to fuse together in any structural portion. Hence, pyrazole and its cyclic bio‐isosteres may clubbed together to design and develop novel potent molecules against clinical disorders with least toxicity profile. In the present review, we aim to compile the numerous recent advancements in the medicinal chemistry of natural metabolites containing pyrazole and its bio‐isosteres hybrid compounds with the following objectives: (1) To summarize the recent literature reports of last six years that are focused on the biological potential of natural pyrazole and its bio‐isosteres hybrid derivatives; (2) To deliberate current developments in the medicinal aspect of natural compounds through their structural alteration by introducing pyrazole and its cyclic analogues; (3) To emphasize the complete correlation between structure activity relationship (SAR) and therapeutic response to disclose productive concepts for the generation of potential semi‐synthetic candidates.

Boulevards, Festivities, and Earthquakes: The Making of Guatemala City, 1880–1920

This article examines the socio-political and urban-cultural transformation of space in Guatemala City between 1871 and 1920, spearheaded by the rise of a new political regime known as the liberal reform period. By focusing on the social construction of the new public spaces of power, this study explores how the transformation of the capital city was one of the key instruments of the authoritarian regimes to legitimise their authority, power and new secular values in the urban space. The urban transformation redefined the use of land for capitalist development (expropriation of church properties and privatisation of communal lands), setting up new boundaries and reorganizing the capital in a new dynamic of urban segregation. It also meant the exclusion of the Indigenous population from living in the city. This study pays special attention to the role of three figures as the main protagonists and promoters of the localized urban transformations in Guatemala City during their respective reigns: Justo Rufino Barrios (1873–1885), José María Reyna Barrios (1892–1898) and Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920). Lefebvre’s conception of the social production of space is mobilized to analyze the creation of the material setting and the construction of those new spaces of power carefully planned and embedded with political meaning during the first period of modern urban growth in Guatemala City. Drawing on a variety of primary sources such as official records (Laws and Decrees, Memoirs of Public Works, Municipal records), newspapers, commercial guides, illustrated journals, city plans, postcards and photo albums, the article demonstrate how the new modern urban space was reorganized with clear political and economic interests, setting up a new process of urban segregation. The study also highlights the limitations and contradictions of the selected urban transformations, which ended abruptly with the earthquakes of 1917–18.

Rethinking (local) integration: domains of integration and their durability in Kismayo and Garowe, Somalia

Amidst the ever-expanding debates in various academic and policy fields around migrant and refugee integration and local integration, we bring these two concepts in conversation with one another. Until very recently, theories of integration have had a state-centric focus in the Global North. This article expands and complicates this literature to focus on displaced Somalis within Somalia and its borderlands living in the cities of Kismayo and Garowe using mixed qualitative and quantitative methods in five displacement settlements. Toward this end, we use the often- engaged term “domains of integration” to frame integration. In our conceptualization, however, we incorporate the concept of “local integration” as a durable solution. In brief, we see the domains of integration as a productive concept in the Somali context. However, in Somalia, where clans are interwoven into the state, which lacks resources and power, clan affiliation represents social connections domains, yet also influences the state's role in the foundational domain of rights and citizenship and makers and means (employment, housing, education, health). International donors and NGOs, as well as international capitalist urban expansion also have a large role in these processes. As such, we argue that the ten domains of integration (discussed in detail below) intersect and blur to an even greater extent than in European and North American contexts, particularly around crucial issues such as housing, land, and property; a key factor in people's decisions to remain or leave.

Exploring diversity: student's (un-)productive use of resonance in organic chemistry tasks through the lens of the coordination class theory

Resonance is a crucial concept in Organic Chemistry that enables both deriving chemical properties from molecular structures and predicting reactions by considering electron density distribution. Despite its importance for problem-solving and learning success, learners encounter various difficulties with this concept. Although prior research suggests that learners struggle to reason about resonance in problem-solving tasks, existing studies are often limited to singular contexts. Given that task approaches and reasoning are context-dependent, little is known about how learners use resonance across task contexts and which characteristics underlie productive concept use. To this end, a qualitative interview study was conducted, in which undergraduate chemistry students (N = 21), all beginners of Organic Chemistry, solved three organic case comparison tasks requiring the consideration of resonance. Through the analytical lens of the coordination class theory, we analysed the extent to which students used their representations of resonance structures, their task approaches, and the variety of resonance-related resource activation and connection in problem-solving across three different contexts. The results show that students’ use of resonance is diverse across the contexts. It can be characterized by a complex interplay of multiple factors reflecting the multifold processes when considering resonance. However, some essential characteristics of productive concept use in problem-solving (e.g., the activation of resources across different granularity levels) could be deduced. Implications for supporting learners’ use of resonance in problem-solving are discussed.

Unsettling in Norrland

This research uses film, photography and projection to analyse the changing space of Northern Sweden (Norrland). This peripheral region is one of the most rapidly reconfiguring spaces in Europe, with on-going programmes of corporate and state investment to exploit space and natural resources for settlement and extraction.
 The images are part of an archive of the moving of buildings, a common practice in the region. Buildings are moved in relation to changing environmental conditions and now urban land values and global property speculation. It is understood to be a distinct process of what David Harvey has described as “remaking capitalism’s geography”1
 Images analyse the material conditions, ideology and power in this frontier economy. The project considers an architecture of de-growth2, challenging ideas of the expanding urbanisation of Norrland. As land values and modes of occupation change, buildings are displaced from the urban centre to increase occupation density through speculative investment. This process displaces social space and previous land formations. The city of Kiruna has been entirely displaced by expanding mine workings. The practice of relocation also has the capacity to shift large-scale historic architectures, as a distinct form of caretaking.
 In this moment of new waves of investment in mining and forestry, of urbanisation of parts of the region, predicated on an underlying and largely uncontested agenda of ‘development’, the archive offers other conceptions of space and architectural production.
 The images consider the wrenching of a house from its location and moving it to another location, documenting this process of detachment. It records the re-arrangements of space between land and building. Displacement is illuminated through projections to unsettle, by superimposing architectures onto previous conditions. Keywords: Unsettling, de-growth, relocation, house-moving, displacement.
 Cover image: Robin Serjeant, “Midwinter projection inside the house.”, Degernäs, December 2021, Film stills

Implementation and Improvement of the Total Productive Maintenance Concept in an Organization

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is an infrastructure-managing methodology that leads to improvements in production efficiency, quality, and safety. It includes a set of processes, techniques, and strategies based on forecasting, maintenance, the optimized cooperation of different company departments, and the minimization of costs related to downtime or accidents caused by equipment failure. This article discusses the history, assumptions of the TPM concept, and approach to implementing Total Productive Maintenance in organizations in detail. The right ingredients required for successful TPM implementation and barriers to implementation are also reviewed. The benefits of implementing TPM in organizations are presented and supported with examples of implementations in production and non-production organizations. The article is addressed to representatives of the manufacturing industry. TPM also indicates a high potential for implementation in non-production areas, which may be interesting, for example, for the service, medical, or laboratory industries.

Beyond surface diversity: Unmasking the flaws of Multicultural education in the Afro-Colombian curriculum

In this study, I critically examine the Afro-Colombian ethno-educational curriculum, exploring its conception of multiculturality, pedagogical practice, and knowledge production. Utilizing Iterative Critical Discourse Analysis, the study investigates the 2006 “Curriculum Guidelines for Afro-Colombian Studies.” It reveals that despite its advances in addressing some of the issues of the multicultural question in Colombia, the curriculum is marred by essentialism, a celebratory approach, and Eurocentric biases that undermine the liberatory purpose of this multicultural approach to education in the country. These flaws reflect a superficial representation of Multicultural Education, perpetuating neoliberal mechanisms of domination and failing to challenge prevailing power structures adequately. This paper posits the necessity to re-envision ethno-education in light of these findings, recommending incorporating Culturally Responsive Teaching, promoting self-reflexivity in the classroom, and developing Third Spaces for a more robust and transformative approach to Multicultural Education in Colombia. The study is theoretically grounded on Critical Multicultural Education and postcolonial and governmentality studies.

Compromise and complicity: partnership and interdependence in a global challenges research collaboration

This article contributes to debates on international collaborations by examining contradictions between the decolonial turn and the UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund which imposed Global North leadership on Global South partners. Through the lenses of compromise and complicity, the article explores how collaborators strive to work together equitably within the constraints of a UK government Official Development Assistance funding scheme. Drawing on focus group discussions with members of a research team, the article traces, first, their engagement with political and institutional constraints and, second, their articulation of collaborative compromise and productive complicity. The article foregrounds the generative potential of complicity as a productive concept that can help partners to navigate the challenges of interdependence and partnership entailed in North–South, South–South, cross-sector and interdisciplinary collaboration.

China’s digital infrastructure: Networks, systems, standards

In the People’s Republic of China, the development of information infrastructures has been a cardinal component of the national modernization project for more than four decades. While most discussions of digital infrastructure in the country focus on the ‘Chinese internet,' framed by architectures of control like the Great Firewall and governmental initiatives like Internet Plus, this special issue contends that China’s digital infrastructure extends from the physical cables laid under urban streets to the ideological capture of surveillance systems, and from the smart home devices domesticated by elderly citizens to the QR codes plastered on everyday life surfaces. Through their interdisciplinary and innovative studies, this issue’s contributors push discussions of China’s digital infrastructure beyond the reduction to authoritarian control and the triumphal rhetorics of governmental imaginaries. Given the breadth of analytical scale and the variety of research methods featured in this collection, the nine contributions to this special issue are organized in three clusters, each centered around one of three key terms from infrastructure studies: networks, systems, and standards. By accounting for heterogeneous scales and relationships through which China’s digital infrastructure emerges, consolidates, and falls apart, these articles produce original knowledge about complex sociotechnical processes and develop productive concepts for future scholarship.

Laws beyond spacetime

Quantum gravity’s suggestion that spacetime may be emergent and so only exist contingently would force a radical reconception of extant analyses of laws of nature. Humeanism presupposes a spatiotemporal mosaic of particular matters of fact on which laws supervene; primitivism and dispositionalism conceive of the action of primitive laws or of dispositions as a process of ‘nomic production’ unfolding over time. We show how the Humean supervenience basis of non-modal facts and primitivist or dispositionalist accounts of nomic production can be reconceived, avoiding a reliance on fundamental spacetime. However, it is unclear that naturalistic forms of Humeanism can maintain their commitment to there being no necessary connections among distinct entities. Furthermore, non-temporal conceptions of production render this central concept more elusive than before. In fact, the challenges run so deep that the survival of the investigated analyses into the era of quantum gravity is questionable.

Deaf professionals’ perceptions of 'trust' in relationships with signed language interpreters

The concept of ‘trust’ is frequently used when discussing the working relationship between deaf signers and signed language interpreters, with interpreters often claiming that trust is a prerequisite to a successful interaction. This paper presents original data from an in-depth research project which used collaborative autoethnography to gather the experiences of seven deaf academics who work regularly with British Sign Language (BSL) interpreters, who interpret between BSL and spoken English, to analyse the concept of ‘trust’ in our working relations with BSL interpreters. We found that ‘trust’ is not a useful or productive concept for our interpersonal and professional aims. Instead, we outline multiple ways in which deaf academics can assess and evaluate interpreters’ values, competencies, and performance without relying on ‘trust’. Our findings provide an important, powerful and under-explored perspective on the working relations between deaf academics and interpreters. We suggest these findings can be applied by deaf BSL signers and interpreters in contexts beyond academia, and constitute an important contribution to the literature on interpreting.

Generic characteristics of patients’ e-consultations with general practitioners

Electronic communication between patients and general practitioners (GPs), known as e-consultations, was introduced in Denmark as a cost-effective and convenient means for patients to access their GP and receive test results as well as answers to quick questions. Research on e-consultations internationally has found that patients are generally very positive, while doctors are more hesitant. Most studies of e-consultations have involved survey or interview methodologies, while studies of their content, form or language are limited. In this study, we address this gap by proposing that genre may be a productive concept for comprehending textual aspects of e-consultations. We explore the following two questions: (1) what are the generic characteristics of the e-consultation?; and (2) do e-consultations belong to the email genre? Based on an analysis of two Danish corpora of patients’ first turns in e-consultations with their GPs, we identify an underlying move structure: subject, opening, update, problem presentation, request, argumentation, closing. We argue that the e-consultation is an example of an email genre with identifiable conventions, which are both specific to the communicative function of e-consultations and aligned with generic features of emails.

Nearly mobile: pandemic im/mobilities and lockdown strategies amongst Asian migrant professionals in England

ABSTRACT This article proposes ‘nearly mobile’ as a productive concept to illustrate the im/mobility experiences amongst Asian skilled migrants in England during a global health crisis. The concept of ‘nearly mobile’ describes how mobility practices and aspirations have been heavily restricted during national lockdowns, while still remaining fluid and relational, with both debilitating and empowering potentials. The ambiguity of ‘nearly’ offers both frustration and hope, when the desired ‘mobility as normal’ seems just out of reach. The concept of 'nearly mobile' offers two main dimensions. First, it highlights how migrants navigate through ‘shock precarities’ by safe-zoning – utilising and spatialising voluntary immobility to create unique work and living spaces based on daily assessments of risk and responsibility. Second, ‘nearly mobile’ reflects a continuous yearning for a return to normality, where forecasting and imagining become practical ways of seizing opportunities that emerge amidst crisis and uncertainty. We propose 'nearly mobile' as a productive framework for revaluing im/mobility in times of rising localism, protectionism, and the normalisation of transnational biopolitical regimes, which underpin a possible ‘new normal’ beyond the pandemic.

Student conceptions of the production of cow's milk-An exploratory interview study with 6th- and 10th-grade students.

The production of food and the associated livestock farming contribute significantly to climate change and the global loss of biodiversity, hindering the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To promote responsible consumption and production of food (SDG 12), ensuring that students understand the production of our food, the associated livestock farming, and the interrelatedness of production and consumption is essential. Thus, Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is an important tool for achieving the SDGs. To develop effective teaching and learning strategies to educate students about the production of food from livestock, it is important to identify students' existing conceptions of this topic. Thus, this study examined sixth-grade (n = 4; M Age = 12 years; SD Age = 0.7 years; 50% female) and tenth-grade students' (n = 4; M Age = 16 years; SD Age = 0 years; 50% female) conceptions of milk production, focusing on dairy farming, the milking process and techniques, and the production of cow's milk. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with students from Osnabrück (Lower Saxony) to elicit student conceptions. The evaluation of the students' conceptions was carried out using qualitative content analysis. The results largely indicated that both sixth and tenth graders had realistic conceptions of dairy farming and the milking process and techniques. However, some students also expressed romanticized conceptions of pasture grazing and calf rearing. In addition, unrealistic statements regarding the formation of milk were identified. The conceptions of the sixth and tenth graders were compared, and with a few exceptions, no significant differences were found between the two cohorts. However, the tenth graders tended to have more differentiated conceptions about milk production than the sixth graders. In conducting the analysis, it became clear that students' conceptions of the production of milk are influenced by individual primary experiences with dairy farms. Finally, based on these results, educational recommendations for the school teaching framework in the context of ESD and implications for further research are presented.