Conceptual Shift Research Articles

Towards a trans inclusive practice: thinking difference differently

Within the UK a polarised and politicised discourse exists that attempts to pitch transgender identities in opposition to discourses on sexual orientations. This suggests that interventions assisting clients in their understanding of one, would be detrimental on exploration of the other i.e., to be affirming of gender identity is to cause conversion of sexuality and vice versa. This paper attempts to address some of the problems with this oppositional critique and solve some of the practical problems that the theorist and/or clinician may encounter while attempting to help their clients within the realm of psychological therapies. It does so through Deleuzian ontologies of difference, coupled with Bhaskarian critical realism. We aim to present a (re)consideration of the biopsychosocial model of Health. The recent publication of the International Classification of Diseases 11th Edition and its reclassification of trans aetiology as a Disorder of Sexual Development has presented a conceptual shift from gender dysphoria towards a gender incongruence model (WHO 2022). The aim of this article therefore is to develop practice by enhancing the conceptual toolbox of the clinician and therapist working with Gender Sex and Relationship Diversities (GSRD). Thereby enabling them to better approach a wider diversity of clients safely.

Human-computer intra-action: a relational approach to digital media and technologies

The growing pervasiveness of digital technologies has exposed the entanglements of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with its surrounding context, from the immediate vicinity of interfaces to global issues. While often providing solutions to societal issues, interactive technologies also many times contribute to them. They impact and are impacted by the world, in a process of continuous mutual influence and co-constitution that raises important implications not only to user experience, effectiveness and efficiency, but also to ethics, social responsibility and environmental health. In this article, I draw on the new materialism notion of intra-action to propose a conceptual shift to a relational approach for HCI, which I refer to as Human-Computer Intra-Action (HCIA), capable of capturing from the outset the inherent relationships with the world that inform the design of interactive technology. To that end, I propose the notion of relationalities to reflect the synergies and antagonisms around those relationships, and discuss emerging notions of spatiality and temporality by considering the increasing hybridity of socio-technical engagements both in space (local vs. remote) and in time (immediate vs. stretched). Based on that, I propose a preliminary method for mapping intra-actions associated to interactive technologies, envisaged as a starting point to a relational take on their design process.

Sport coaching as intra-action: an agential realist diffraction

ABSTRACT Coaching science is a thriving sport science with a history of overlapping topical, methodological, and conceptual shifts drawing from humanist and poststructural lenses. Recently, a deeper engagement with the possibilities of inquiring through a posthumanist lens has been proposed, opening ontological passageways for coaching scholars to think and do coaching science differently. In efforts to expand upon recent posthumanist experiments in coaching science, the purpose of the present paper lies in situating sport coaching as intra-action using Barad’s (2007) agential realist ontology and diffractive methodology. Ontological shifts from learning to becoming and reflection to diffraction are proposed, setting the stage for moving inquiry in coaching science from the coach to coaching intra-action. By situating sport coaching in agential realist rhythms, coaching scholars can promote creativity, expand horizons for what coaching science can do, and multiply who/what is included in coaching intra-action.

Denver’s Quest: Exploring Horror and Complex Subjectivity in Beloved

Abstract Since its publication in 1987, Beloved has achieved critical acclaim, popularity, and status as one of Toni Morrison’s most iconic and accomplished novels. Based on the true story of Margret Garner, Beloved engages questions of being, agency, hauntings, and monstrosity while providing a visualization of the lasting aftereffects of slavery. As such, it has been the center of critical scholarship across many disciplines, including religion. However, the treatment in religious discourse has largely ignored the importance of the novel as representative of and engaged with the horror genre. This article argues that when read as a text of horror, Beloved aids in understanding Black religion as what Anthony Pinn has called a quest for complex subjectivity. Pinn’s theory understands terror as a dimension of life that shapes the look of Black religion. Here, I offer a conceptual shift—exemplified through an exploration of Beloved, particularly the character Denver—where terror is clarified as a vital component of horror. This article cautions against the conflation of terror and horror as equivalent terms. After reviewing their distinguishing characteristics, I ultimately situate horror as the more useful analytic descriptor for understanding the impetus and development of Black religion. By examining Denver’s complex subjectivity in Beloved, horror’s capaciousness as a genre, emotive response, and cultural phenomenon will unearth new dimensions of how we perceive Black religion.

The Course Patterns and Diagnostic Shifts of Patients With Schizoaffective Disorder: A Retrospective Cohort Study.

Since its introduction, schizoaffective disorder (SAD) has been one of the most controversial diagnoses in psychiatry, both clinically and nosologically. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), SAD diagnostic criteria were changed, and instead of a cross-sectional diagnosis, a longitudinal approach covering the life course of the illness was adopted. In this study, the meaning of this conceptual shift in the diagnosis of SAD in clinical practice is investigated throughout the course of the illness for patients with SAD. Sixty-two inpatients diagnosed with SAD according to DSM-5 diagnostic criteria are included in this study. The course of the illness from its onset to the present is investigated retrospectively. The disease duration is 18.3 ± 9.1 years. The most common diagnoses in the first hospitalization are bipolar disorder (manic episodes) and psychotic disorder, not otherwise specified. Furthermore, the time that elapsed between the first psychiatric application of the patients and the diagnosis of SAD is 9.5 ± 7.3 years. Further, when the course of the illness is grouped according to the predominance of affective and psychotic disorders, recurrent affective disorders are observed most frequently (29.3%), followed by mixed-episode disorders and a shift from affective disorders to psychotic disorders (22.4%). It is found that SAD has a heterogeneous course, and affective disorder diagnoses are more dominant during the course of the illness. The clinical relevance of the longitudinal emphasis on the total duration of the illness in the DSM-5 is also demonstrated. The affective and psychotic dichotomy, based on Kraepelin, has failed to elucidate the course of the disease in clinical practice. Therefore, clinicians should meticulously evaluate the entire course of the illness for SAD and avoid conclusive judgments over a single episode.

Practising in physical education: A study of a teacher's experiences and role enactment

Teachers are designers and an essential act of the profession is the crafting of learning experiences to meet specific purposes. In this study, we follow a Norwegian physical education (PE) teacher in the design and teaching of a unit informed by a pedagogical model called the practising model (PM). Two research questions guided the study: (1) How does a teacher experience conducting a teaching unit informed by the PM? (2) How does the teacher's role enactment develop throughout the teaching unit? Qualitative data were gathered from workshops, observations from PE sessions in a 10th-grade class, and interviews with the teacher and his students. By applying the joint action in didactics framework, we discuss three key findings: (1) a rough start – feelings of chaos and inadequacy, (2) a shift in the teacher's role enactment, and (3) closing in on the students’ practising. The study concludes that applying the PM framework challenged the usual PE practice of this class. Too many different learning trajectories and didactic sub-milieus, a reconceptualisation of roles and teaching strategies, and epistemological breaches and task overload challenged the teacher considerably. The turning point for the teacher emerged as a conceptual shift, leaving behind the role of an organiser, and instead pursuing the role of a close, curious, and questioning teacher, drawing on different teaching styles to meet students’ needs. Modelling new pedagogical reforms and establishing adequate pedagogical tact certainly requires practising the practice, allowing new roles, expectations, requirements, and strategies to settle as the new normal.

Improvement-Focused Causal Recourse (ICR)

Algorithmic recourse recommendations inform stakeholders of how to act to revert unfavorable decisions. However, existing methods may recommend actions that lead to acceptance (i.e., revert the model's decision) but do not lead to improvement (i.e., may not revert the underlying real-world state). To recommend such actions is to recommend fooling the predictor. We introduce a novel method, Improvement-Focused Causal Recourse (ICR), which involves a conceptual shift: Firstly, we require ICR recommendations to guide toward improvement. Secondly, we do not tailor the recommendations to be accepted by a specific predictor. Instead, we leverage causal knowledge to design decision systems that predict accurately pre- and post-recourse, such that improvement guarantees translate into acceptance guarantees. Curiously, optimal pre-recourse classifiers are robust to ICR actions and thus suitable post-recourse. In semi-synthetic experiments, we demonstrate that given correct causal knowledge ICR, in contrast to existing approaches, guides toward both acceptance and improvement.

For a Postmodernist Writing in Anthropology

James Clifford’s Partial Truths is an introduction to an anthropological collection of essays, perceived as illustrative of a historical and theoretical movement, of a conceptual shift, consisting in a sharp separation of form from content to its utmost degree, the fetishizing of form. (Carstea 2021: 52) Ethnography, a hybrid activity, thus appears mainly as writing, as collecting. Viewed most broadly, perhaps, it is a mode of travel, a way of understanding and getting around in a diverse world that, since the sixteenth century, has been cartographically unified. I will argue, in concurrence with the postmodernist tenets of anthropology, put forth by James Clifford, that ethnographic knowledge could not be the property of a single discourse or discipline: the condition of off-centredness in a world of distinct meaning systems, a state of being in culture while looking at a culture, permeates postmodernist writing. Thus, to an important degree, the truth recorded is a truth provoked by ethnography, as Clifford acknowledges. The fictional, fashioned self is invariably associated with its culture and its language, namely its coded modes of expression. The subjectiveness he finds is “not an epiphany of identity freely chosen, but a cultural artefact,” (Greenblatt 2008: 257) because the self manoeuvres within possibilities and constraints offered by an institutionalised assortment of collective codes and practices. I will conclude that ethnographic truths cannot be other than inherently partial and incomplete, a fact which justifies and substantiates the experimental, artisanal quality tied to the work of writing, of cultural accounts. Textualization engenders meaning by way of a circuitous movement which insulates and subsequently adds context to an event or fact in its engulfing reality. Ethnography is the interpretation of cultures.

Cultural-Historical Jurisprudence: Institutes and Concepts

The topic of the article concerns the evolution of jurisprudence in the definitions of the language of sociocultural of its historical time. Among the factors of changes in legal analytics and the style of argumentation, the key place is occupied by the category-concept of concept. Concepts express basic ideas concerning the mental and cognitive foundations of the development of law and the science of law. As part of the approaches to the study of law and the science of law, a special place is occupied by cultural and historical jurisprudence, analytical the toolkit of which is designed to identify, describe, and explain conceptual and institutional shifts and transitions in the development of legal systems. Each historical epoch of the evolution of law and the science of law exists and defines itself within the framework of its legal and psychological picture of the world, its basic concepts, and the normative grammar of proper or improper law and order. The language of socioculture, constituting simultaneously the plan of expression of the conceptual picture of the world and the plan of content of its actual meanings and meanings, not only reflects the legal reality, but also shapes it. Each historical epoch speaks the language of its socio-culture, which is analytically and practically reflected both in the composition and definitions of legal science and in the legal constructions of the existing legal order.

"From desh to desh ": The Family Firm as Trans-Local Household in the Nineteenth-Century Western Indian Ocean

Abstract: Using a micro-historical method, this article reconceptualizes the family firm as a trans-local extended household. The family firm plays a central role in the historiography of long-distance trade in the Indian Ocean. Yet it remains a largely under-theorized concept. The conceptual shift that this article proposes enables the significant analytical incorporation of a broader cast of historical actors, including marital and "networked" kin. From this expanded viewpoint, the family firm emerges as a node in overlapping networks of capital—financial, social, and symbolic—and as a site of intersecting intimate and economic transactions. The article also explores the historical transformations—economic, legal, and social—that reverberated across the western Indian Ocean in the late nineteenth century. Eschewing a static institutional model, it argues that any analysis of the family firm must attend to the dynamic and complex shifts in household relationships that were wrought by such transformations.

From Outreach to Inreach [President’s Message

At my university, University of California, Irvine (UCI), we have started talking about “inreach” as a companion to the established notion of “outreach.” This small change in narrative has led to a surprisingly powerful set of changes in how we operate as an academic unit. As part of this “President’s Message,” I am including a recent article, coauthored with Marvin Maldonado, the director for inreach, equity, and student retention at the Samueli School of Engineering at UCI, to illustrate what this conceptual shift entails on a college campus. The short version is that outreach is focused outside of the organization in order to recruit, inspire, and educate surrounding communities, while inreach focuses on supporting people inside of the organization.

The representations of freedom in The Sun newspaper between 2019 and 2021: A corpus-based study

Abstract Existing studies have highlighted the close link between language and society (Fairclough, 1992) and demonstrated the impact of Covid-19 on language (Mahlberg and Brookes, 2021). There are no studies to date that have examined the changing representations and conceptual shifts of freedom in the pre-pandemic and post-pandemic years, which are expected to be affected by government policies on Covid-19. The present study aims to fill this gap. Specifically, the objective is to examine the conceptual evolution of freedom in the years 2019 and 2021 and to interpret it in the light of socio-historical issues derived from the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. The study is a corpus-based investigation undertaken on The Sun Corpus (TS), i.e. a self-compiled corpus including newspaper articles published in the UK during the years 2019 and 2021. Media including newspapers are, indeed, influential discourses that shape the public view of particular events, current issues, and play “an important role in framing how people understand and respond to” contextual happenings (Brookes and Baker, 2021, p. 1; see Baker et al. 2013). The analysis reveals that there is a shift in the use of the word freedom, which is depicted as an enjoyable experience in 2019 and seen in a negative shade in 2021. These results support the social conceptualization of language and reveal aspects that are of particular concern in Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1992), aiming to examine how socio-historical aspects frame the linguistic representations of social issues like the Covid-19 disease.

WHO International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Chinese Medicine: Use in Context, Creatively

WHO International Standard Terminologies on Traditional Chinese Medicine: Use in Context, Creatively

Shifting school environment policies: A Deleuzian problematisation of universal rights in Norwegian education

The learning environment of students is a fundamental part of school life, both socially and academically. The ambition to create a school serving the best interests of all children is explored by analysing key concepts encompassing students’ right to a healthy school environment, and examining how this discourse has unfolded over five decades in Norway. A conceptual analysis concerning the school environment, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, is proposed and introduced as ‘regulative vector concepts’. The article examines key changes regarding students’ school environment, shifting from work environment to learning environment. As one consequence of the conceptual shifts, the individual rights of students have been ensured, such as through recent amendments in regulation. These concepts are understood as potential answers to already existing problems that policy and regulation attempt to encompass by producing new concepts, new policy and regulation.

Thought and language: association of groupmindedness with young English-speaking children’s production of pronouns

Shared intentionality theory posits that at age 3, children expand their conception of plural agency to include 3- or more-person groups. We sought to determine whether this conceptual shift is detectable in children’s pronoun use. We report the results of a series of Bayesian hierarchical generative models fitted to 479 English-speaking children’s first-person plural, first-person singular, second-person, third-person plural, and third-person singular pronouns. As a proportion of pronouns, children used more first-person plural pronouns, only, after 3;0 compared to before. Additionally, children used more 1pp. pronouns when their mothers used more 1pp. pronouns. As a proportion of total utterances, all pronoun classes were used more often as children aged. These findings suggest that a shift in children’s social conceptualizations at age 3 is reflected in their use of 1pp. pronouns.

"Rater training" re-imagined for work-based assessment in medical education.

In this perspective, the authors critically examine "rater training" as it has been conceptualized and used in medical education. By "rater training," they mean the educational events intended to improve rater performance and contributions during assessment events. Historically, rater training programs have focused on modifying faculty behaviours to achieve psychometric ideals (e.g., reliability, inter-rater reliability, accuracy). The authors argue these ideals may now be poorly aligned with contemporary research informing work-based assessment, introducing a compatibility threat, with no clear direction on how to proceed. To address this issue, the authors provide a brief historical review of "rater training" and provide an analysis of the literature examining the effectiveness of rater training programs. They focus mainly on what has served to define effectiveness or improvements. They then draw on philosophical and conceptual shifts in assessment to demonstrate why the function, effectiveness aims, and structure of rater training requires reimagining. These include shifting competencies for assessors, viewing assessment as a complex cognitive task enacted in a social context, evolving views on biases, and reprioritizing which validity evidence should be most sought in medical education. The authors aim to advance the discussion on rater training by challenging implicit incompatibility issues and stimulating ways to overcome them. They propose that "rater training" (a moniker they suggest be reserved for strong psychometric aims) be augmented with "assessor readiness" programs that link to contemporary assessment science and enact the principle of compatibility between that science and ways of engaging with advances in real-world faculty-learner contexts.

Multiple sensor theory in airway mechanosensory units

Two conventional doctrines govern airway mechanosensory interpretation: One-Sensor Theory (OST) and Line-Labeled Theory (LLT). In OST, one afferent fiber connects to a single sensor. In LLT, a different type of sensor sends signals via its specific line to a particular brain region to evoke its reflex. Thus, airway slowly adapting receptors (SARs) inhibit breathing and rapidly adapting receptors (RARs) stimulate breathing. However, recent studies show many different mechanosensors connect to a single afferent fiber (Multiple-Sensor Theory, MST). That is, SARs and RARs may send different types of information through the same afferent pathway, indicating different information has been integrated at the sensory unit level. Thus, a sensory unit is not merely a transducer (textbook concept), but also a processor. MST is a conceptual shift. Data generated over last eight decades under OST require re-interpretation.

From ‘left-behind’ to ‘stay-put’ fatherhood: situating male stayers’ socio-structural positionality in transnationalism

ABSTRACT Given the feminised labour migration in Southeast and South Asian countries, there is a growing body of literature discussing the phenomenon of left-behind fatherhood, with a particular focus on intra-family dynamics (gender reconfiguration) in transnational families. Yet little is known about how left-behind fatherhood is broached in other migratory contexts. To make empirical and theoretical contributions to the contextuality of stayers’ fatherhood, this article draws on an ethnographic study of male stayers in Fuqing, a major transnational migrant-labour-sending area in China. Applying the concept of positionality and situated transnationalism, this article addresses these fathers’ challenges and practices when coping with their parental role. This study argues that the lack of job opportunities (in rural China), culture of migration (in Fuqing), overseas immigration policies (on clandestine migration), and neoliberal Chinese fatherhood discourses, contribute to their unique parenting dilemmas and strategies when compared to their Southeast and South Asian counterparts. This paper advocates for a conceptual shift from ‘left-behind’ to ‘stay-put’ fatherhood, which highlights the complexity of male stayers’ socio-spatial im/mobilities and extends the understanding of left-behind fatherhood beyond intra-family dynamics. It suggests gender reconfiguration associated with men’s stay-put status should be read in the light of its embeddedness in transnational socio-structural contexts.

The Lausanne Hospitality Model: a model integrating hospitality into supportive care

PurposeCancer care is undergoing a conceptual shift with the introduction of the principles of patient-centered care to support patients’ individual needs. These needs include those related to hospitality during cancer treatments. This paper aims to provide an extension of the supportive care framework by bringing in the hospitality approach inspired by the hotel industry.MethodThe “Lausanne Hospitality Model,” integrating hospitality into supportive care, was developed through an iterative process, combining expertise in supportive care and health services research, communication, and the hotel industry.ResultsThis conceptual paper integrates hospitality and service sciences into the supportive care framework. The “Lausanne Hospitality Model” offers new insights into the notions of cancer journey, patient experience, services, and practices that may be involved when facilitating hospitality. While most concepts used in the model are based on prior research, they have not been combined previously. The model highlights the place of hospitality in the patient’s experience within cancer services and, by extension, its role in professional practice.ConclusionPractices involved in the delivery of cancer care need to reinforce the importance attributed to hospitality services, as they impact patients’ experiences. By integrating the hospitality perspective into healthcare delivery and supportive care, this paper addresses previously theoretically overlooked aspects that impact patients’ experiences during cancer care.

Rethinking international intervention through coeval engagement: Non-formal youth education and the politics of improvement

AbstractAfter important critiques highlighted that studies of peacebuilding and statebuilding tend to bypass people living the consequences of intervention, scholars moved to include local experiences and subjects into knowledge production. This article builds upon these efforts by identifying and then furthering their common goal of coeval engagement. Coeval engagement implies encountering interlocutors as contemporaneous subjects of international politics and centring their experiences as a base for knowledge production. While the urgency and ongoing failures of coeval engagement are widely discussed, I focus on a thus far unconsidered possibility: that coeval engagement is impossible within the conceptual confines of intervention itself. The article delineates two defining parameters of intervention thinking that limit ongoing efforts at coeval engagement: predefined fields of visibility and the local-international binary. As an alternative, it proposes seeing intervention as part of a wider politics of improvement. This conceptual shift leads to unexpected empirical sites and continues challenging intervention’s constitutive binaries. The potential of this reorientation is demonstrated by showing how a common tool of ‘soft’ statebuliding – non-formal youth education – functions within the politics of youth (un)employment in Serbia.