Critical Work Research Articles

Critical engagement with digital health: A socio-material analysis of physical education teachers’ digital health mind maps

Objective: This paper forms part of a DigihealthPE project in which we have been working with physical education (PE) teachers to co-create critical and embodied digital health pedagogies. As part of the project, we invited PE teachers to mind map their personal engagements with digital health technologies. We aimed to explore the potential openings and opportunities (and limitations) within these maps for critical thinking and action. Method: Data were generated during a workshop with 12 PE teachers in Scotland. Informed by new materialism, we focus on the human and non-human factors and intra-actions evident within six narrative portraits generated from teachers’ mind maps. Results: Our findings suggest that teachers were engaging complexly and extensively with digital health technologies, which we considered an opening for further critical work. Importantly, experiences of strong (negative) affect had the potential to transform engagements with digital health technologies. Conclusion: We conclude by exploring how the process of mind mapping helped us to see further opportunities for supporting teachers to engage critically with digital health technologies. We also argue that new materialist-informed critical practices in education may have transformative potential for helping teachers and pupils to engage critically with the moving body, technology and health.

Modeling of crack tip fields and fatigue crack growth in fcc crystals

Predicting the mechanical behavior of polycrystalline materials containing a crack under both monotonic and cyclic loading conditions is crucial for accurately assessing the integrity of engineering materials. This study focuses on the deformation characteristics of face-centered cubic (fcc) grains within the crack tip field and their significant role in governing the driving force for fatigue crack growth during cyclic loading. We employ a cyclic crystal plasticity finite element (CPFE) model to analyze the mechanical response of austenitic 316L stainless steel polycrystals by accounting for nonlinear kinematic hardening effects. Through CPFE simulations, we investigate the deformation fields in 316L grains at the crack tip, considering two different grain orientations under plane strain conditions. Our CPFE results under monotonic loading align consistently with previous theoretical and experimental findings, particularly in comparing CPFE-simulated and experimentally observed plastic sectors consisting of different slip traces on the specimen surface near the crack tip. Based on a critical plastic work criterion for crack advancement, cyclic CPFE simulations are used to determine the fatigue crack growth rate as a function of stress intensity factor range for the two crack tip grain orientations in stainless steel. The simulated Paris law exponent matches experimental values. Furthermore, we compare cyclic CPFE results with those from cyclic J2 plasticity finite element simulations. This study demonstrates a cyclic CPFE approach for determining crack tip fields, accounting for crystallographic effects on plastic deformation of crack tip grains. Our approach can be applied to effectively evaluate fatigue crack growth rates in fcc polycrystalline metals.

Mundane urban (im)mobilities: work, domestic, and family lives of migrant building workers in China

ABSTRACT Interdisciplinary research from China has generated a wealth of quantitative and qualitative insights into trans-, national, regional, and local migration patterns over long and short distances through attention to diverse topics, socio-economic groups, and case-study locations. Our contribution in this paper is to advance recent critical work that is directing focus from rural-to-urban “circular movements” toward more complex spatialities and temporalities. To add value to that project, we not only engage with studies of urban (im)mobilities per se but also elaborate productive new avenues from across interdisciplinary mobilities research. Specifically, we draw on feminist, materialist, and more-than-representational thinking to highlight the contingent relatedness of migrants’ daily lives across diverse work, domestic, and family times/spaces both within and beyond cities. In doing so, we show how exploration of mundane urban (im)mobilities offers new insights to challenge binary depictions of city/countryside, home/destination, movement/stasis, belonging/marginalization, and moored/unmoordness. The conclusion signposts new research opportunities.

Avoiding "metal astray": experience evaluation of virtual reality training for melting furnace operators.

The work of melting furnace operators is potentially hazardous and serious accidents do occur. Training on the monitoring and safe operation of furnaces is key to the safety of the operators and their surroundings. Virtual Reality (VR) environments can simulate safety critical work environments and provide realistic, safe and engaging ways to train on situations otherwise unavailable. To address the potential of using VR in safety training, the VR environment called VR Safe was developed. This paper presents a study of the user experience of training safety critical procedures in VR. VR Safe simulates malfunction in one of the most important systems regarding safe operation of furnaces: furnace cooling system monitoring and how to respond to cooling system failure. The evaluation included professional furnace operators, and was focused on usability of the system, user engagement and the training value as it relates to the operators' work.

Bentham, Iser, and the Necessity of Fiction

Despite the intense reception and critical discussion which Wolfgang Iser’s work on the reading process and the esthetics of reception (Rezeptionsästhetik) received throughout the 1970s and 80s in Anglo-American literary criticism, his later ambitious attempt to sketch out a “literary anthropology” with the help of a general theory of fiction was almost completely ignored outside of his immediate German context. This is especially lamentable from the perspective of law and literature approaches to legal and literary fiction since Iser’s argument for the anthropological “grounding” of fictions as acts of motivated and strategic “feigning” (fingieren) develops out of a careful analysis and assessment of Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Fiction. Iser’s discussion of Bentham does not only present a rare case of acknowledgement of Benthamian notions about fictions from the perspective of continental literary theory, it also illustrates the way in which the discussion of fiction in general may serve to foster a more robust interdisciplinary perspective in regard to legal and literary practices of storytelling and narration. 1 Since Iser’s theory of (literary) fiction has been perceived from rather different angles and with a diverging range of comprehension by Anglo-American and European audiences, respectively, the essay will first attempt to introduce and place Iser’s discussion of fiction and the imaginary within the larger disciplinary context and his overarching interest and investment in a literary anthropology. After a more general presentation of the various elements in his larger work, the paper will briefly look at the “anthropological” prospects which Iser had pursued from early on throughout his critical work, culminating in The Fictive and the Imaginary. The second half of the essay will then take a closer look at Iser’s particular interest in and detailed discussion of Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Fiction, to reveal how Iser’s own anthropological project could derive a central impulse and trajectory from his intense reading of Bentham. In particular, I am interested in how Iser interprets Bentham’s use of legal fictions to project a general theory of fiction, and how Iser then uses the concept of necessity or “need” to gradually translate and transfer Bentham’s theoretical premises to match and support his own conceptualization of the fictive, the real and the imaginary. Iser’s particular understanding of “doing fiction,” I will conclude, might be of considerable value for the interdisciplinary engagement with legal and literary fictions.

Imagining the End of Official Social Work: Thinking Beyond the Possible and Probable

Abstract This article seeks to critically engage Chris Maylea’s 2020 provocative call to end official social work by suggesting that the debate it sparked has the potential to expand the contemporary social work discourse. This article explores the complexities and potential dangers of Maylea’s radical call, particularly its susceptibility to co-option by neo-conservative agendas. Whilst the idea of calling for the end of official social work may seem absurd, the article maintains that it might serve as an intellectual tool to overcome the ‘imaginary inertia’ that arguably plagues discussions about reforming the profession. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘episteme’ and Gaston Bachelard’s ‘categories of the real’, it suggests that Maylea’s call for abolition challenges the established boundaries of what is considered possible and probable in the critical social work discourse. This might open new avenues that might otherwise remain invisible to reimagine the future of the profession. Consequently, it is posited that imagining the end of official social work may align with and expand opposing calls for reformation of the profession.

Dolimandro’s ‘Turkish Knife’: Geopolitics and Narrative Style in Mary Wroth’s Urania

Abstract This essay examines Lady Mary Wroth’s engagement with early seventeenth-century Anglo-Ottoman relations in The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania. The Urania follows a group of rulers who create an international Christian coalition in what was historically part of the Ottoman Empire. Besides Bernadette Andrea, no other critic has seriously considered the Urania’s allusions to Ottoman peoples, places, and objects. I propose that Wroth’s prose, filled with interpretive cruxes resulting from syntactical and pronominal ambiguities, resonates with England’s ambiguously identificatory relationship with the Ottoman Empire to create a geopolitically inflected narrative style. Following critical work on early modern race as a measure of ‘proximity’, I identify English desires both to identify with and differentiate themselves from the Ottoman Empire within literary and diplomatic discourses. I demonstrate how members of the Sidney-Herbert circle negotiated overlaps in English and Ottoman political, legal, religious, and racial identity markers. I then argue that these overlaps synergize with Wroth’s use of what I term syntactical and pronominal ‘severalty’ of character voices, particularly those of her narrator and characters identified with Ottoman regions. I conclude by demonstrating how Wroth experiments with her narrative style to imagine a Christian empire that surpasses Ottoman authority. In identifying a dialectic between contemporary Anglo-Ottoman relations and Wroth’s narrative style, this essay expands critical approaches to the politics of the Urania beyond more global narratological analysis.

Designing a ‘vibrant, attractive and sustainable city’: feminist approaches to beautification in Kampala, Uganda

Beauty, as an aesthetic ideal and intrinsically power-laden paradigm, is central to urban development projects. Yet there remains limited critical work that interrogates the colonial underpinnings, violent outcomes, and negotiations of beauty politics in urban beautification programs. In our article, we approach urban beautification campaigns in downtown Kampala, Uganda via an explicitly African, and Black feminist analytic of beauty. Specifically, we center the experiences of women market vendors as they navigate city greening initiatives and development plans which promise to ‘transform’ Kampala and re-brand it once again as the ‘Garden City of Africa’. We argue that pairing urban beautification and Black and African scholarship around beauty offers generative insights as it understands such spatial programs as always embodied, contested, and inseparable from intersectional power hierarchies. In turn, we take seriously and carefully examine discourses around beautification: by tracing its colonial and gendered foundations and its visceral impacts as it is internalized and renegotiated by low-income women operating in downtown markets in Kampala. As such, our focus on beauty situates beautification as a disciplining and displacing practice and as mentally and physically violent. Finally, it reveals how women try to envision their own beautiful Kampala.

Empson Here and Now?

Abstract In light of Oxford University Press issuing two volumes in The Critical Works of William Empson (Some Versions of Pastoral [1935] and The Structure of Complex Words [1951]), this essay thinks over Empson's career and major works to consider what his value may be nearly a century after his first book, with special attention to problems that Empson's Englishness may pose to readers in the United States.

Prisons, Immigration, and the Right to a Livable Life in the Anthropocene: Reading Garrett Hardin and Michel Foucault

Abstract Critical work theorizing the nature of immigration imprisonment in relation to anthropogenically influenced ecological phenomena is in its infancy. Scholars have productively made sense of the modern carceral state's expansion by locating it within the framework of race and neoliberalism, registering the collateral damage essential to Western European whiteness and a neoliberal problematic. These framings of migrant incarceration continue to effectively serve a critical function. However, this essay argues that the historical character of immigration incarceration is in the process of changing in the face of real and imagined Anthropocene impacts. Increasingly, immigration is the result of ecological collapse, and taking race and neoliberalism as primary frameworks for understanding forces subtending the carceral system has become critically restrictive. This essay develops an environmental genealogy from historical references within Michel Foucault's work on the relationship between land enclosures and rise of the prison, in order to establish a larger constellation in which to think the event of immigration incarceration today. The essay places Foucault's work in conversation with the work of prominent ecologist and white nationalist Garrett Hardin, whose concurrent pro-enclosure work on immigration and the environment inaugurated a coercive truth discourse that has come to impact not only ecological disciplines in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the environmental humanities but also current US immigration policy.

The Critique toward Uṣūl al-Fiqh Literacy of 1890–2023: An Offer for Development

Critique of uṣūl al-fiqh literacy is very crucial. The scarcity of critique can lead to the risk of intellectual stagnation and an inability to address the legal needs of a constantly changing society, simultaneously causing a lack of resonance with reconstructive ideas. The study aims: 1) to explore evidence of the scarcity of studies criticizing uṣūl al-fiqh from 1890 to 2023; 2) to explain the factors influencing the scarcity of critical works, and 3) to propose steps for the reconstruction of uṣūl al-fiqh. The data sources for this article are works collected from web publishers, digital libraries, and search engines. The data obtained was mapped and analyzed, and its trends were recorded. This study finds that during the period 1890-2023, criticism was the rarest aspect in uṣūl al-fiqh literature. The factors causing the scarcity of critique vary and complement each other, involving scholarly elements, uṣūl al-fiqh factors, and surrounding policies. Although criticism of uṣūl al-fiqh is relatively rare, it does not mean there is no space for reconstruction. Through this study, readers can understand the recent developments in uṣūl al-fiqh and assess the extent to which criticism has been undertaken while reflecting on how reconstruction can be initiated once again.

Toward an African Critical Orientation

ABSTRACT This essay proposes an African orientation to critical work. We begin by locating the need for postcolonial indigenous African bases for critical interventions in the idea of epistemic freedom articulated by African decolonial thinkers along with the postcolonial critique of Frankfurt School and Chicago circle critical theory. Next, we develop a basis for critical interventions in Bantu cosmology by drawing on Omedi Ochieng’s groundwork thesis and applied sociolinguistics. That basis, we argue, prioritizes relatedness and community wellbeing, and is therefore broader and distinct from the narrow focus on power and domination as they relate to individual subject envisioned in liberalism. We illustrate the heuristic potential of the African critical orientation for critical intercultural and critical rhetorical work by discussing the African Medical and Research Foundation’s (AMREF) Mukogodo community organizational development initiative and the #Rhodesmustfall protests of 2015–2016.

Scheduling Analysis on the Heavy Rehabilitation Construction Project of the Dr. R. Koesma Tuban Hospital Building Using the PERT Method

Project scheduling is a key factor in achieving successful implementation as planned. Constraints such as limited resources, improper reporting, and high costs often become challenges in project management. Delays in project completion are very detrimental both in terms of cost and time. Just like what happened in the Rehabilitation and Heavy Construction Project of the Outpatient and Administration Building at Dr. R. Koesma Regional General Hospital in Tuban Regency, there was a delay of 10 days in its implementation. This research aims to determine the duration of the rehabilitation of the dr. R. Koesma Hospital building in Tuban Regency using the PERT method to improve time efficiency, reduce the risk of delays, and ensure overall project success. The research method used is combining two approaches, PERT method (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) to calculate the expected duration estimation of each work, and Microsoft Project 2016 to compile a project schedule that allows identification of critical activities and work network analysis. The results of the analysis using PERT method and Microsoft Project 2016 showed that the project was estimated to be completed in 115 days, faster than the planned 133 days. The probability that the project will be completed within the planned target duration T(d) = 133 days is 99.9%. Hence, there is a high probability that the project will be completed on time.

Social Work Journals and the Disciplinary Production of Alternative Knowledge(s)

ABSTRACT Disciplinary knowledge is reflected, legitimated, and replicated in academic journals, social work knowledge reproducing mainly Western knowledge(s). Hence, there has been an increase in the calls for a stronger articulation and inclusion of critical alternatives. Using a critical social work lens, we explored whether and how social work journals reproduce alternative knowledges. We developed a novel global list of all 272 social work journals and invited journal editors to respond to a virtual, exploratory qualitative survey. Through our reflexive thematic analysis, we identified two core themes in the 31 responses – the journal editors’ attachment to dominant, white, western social work knowledge and values, and their rhetorical inclusion of alternative knowledges. Alternative knowledges were seldom constructed as subjugated voices, but rather as innovation, gaps, or international perspectives. Despite agreeing that social work journals should include of a variety of knowledges, few journals created intentional space for subordinated knowledges. A disciplining mechanism that excludes/minimizes the alternative voices, and invalidates their experience was used to avoid attention to marginalized and silenced perspectives. Such processes impoverish social work knowledge. To enrich social work knowledge, journal editors should act intentionally, collectively, and critically to identify critical alternative knowledges and facilitate their inclusion in the social work canon.

Animal Fridays in Robinson Crusoe and Its Afterlives

Robinson narrates his rescue of Friday in a way that is reminiscent of the saving of the dog ten pages before: he calls them both ‘poor creatures’ and uses non-verbal communication with Friday at first as he does with his ‘pets’: all are discussed and addressed as his ‘subjects’ and possessions, irrespective of their human or non-human bodies. In a number of Robinsonades, the blurred human-animal boundary is translated in the fact that the role of Friday is taken up by an animal, most often a pet, as is the case with Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, in which the tiger, Richard Parker, is subjugated by Pi in a manner reminiscent of imperial control. Following recent critical work on ‘Animal Crusoes’ in children’s Robinsonades as well as the increased interest in ecocritical, posthuman theories and animal studies, this article focuses on animal comparisons and characters as regards Friday in Defoe’s novel and Life of Pi. It shows that while both texts may depict the subjugation of Friday in the context of colonialism and imperialism, they also participate in the breaking down of the absolute boundaries between humans and non-humans and provide a reflection upon and reevaluation of the nature/culture dichotomy.

CRiTical Race Information Theory as Innovative Pedagogy, Act Two: Still Harder Than You Think, and It Remains a Beautiful Thing

This counterstory began with “CRiTical Race Information Theory as Innovative Pedagogy, Act One: Harder Than You Think, It's a Beautiful Thing.” In the first act, the authors introduced Critical Race information Theory (CRiT) as a rapidly developing iteration of Critical Race Theory (CRT) applied within information settings. The first act also introduced the CRiT frameworks and tenets as well as the CRiT's three-dimensional infrastructure: CRiT as pedagogy, CRiT as praxis, and CRiT as theory (including the process and nuances of theory building). In this article, the authors transition from the first act's “What is CRiT?” discussion to the second act's discussion of how to “Make it CRiT.” Whereas act one covered an approximately 15-year period, this second act moves at a more rapid pace, primarily because it covers a shorter period of time (2021–2023). In act two, the CRiT as pedagogy setting changes from the context of the pilot course launched within the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles to CRiT as pedagogy providing two offerings to Dominican University's School of Information Studies foundational course electives in its ALA-accredited curriculum. Before concluding, the second act offers inspiration and encouragement both to those who offer their critical race work as expressions of transformative, difference-making contributions and to those who aspire to develop and then offer their critical race creations.

Feedback Loops: Future Present Becomings-With Critical Qualitative Inquiry

The following texts, by three critical session leaders, provide perhaps a conclusion to the special issue articles, but more importantly, may serve as “feedback loops” for becomings-with future present critical qualitative inquiries, for more just becomings that we have not thought. We become-with a new scholar who shares the important issues of her life as a beginning researcher, and we become-with two more senior researchers who share their critical experiences along with possibilities for reconceptualizing critical work as ethical ontologies.

Problematizing Managerial Militarization: Claims to Military Logistical Expertise in the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brazil

The Brazilian Armed Forces have had a prominent role in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We take this participation as an entry point to confront traditional assumptions of studies on civil-military relations and militarization, investigating a particular claim used to justify the mobilization of the Brazilian military in health-related activities: their credentials in a managerial expertise in logistics. In doing so, we argue that there is an ongoing re-articulation in the discursive regime used to justify their expansion of roles—not one anchored on the efficiency in the use of violence associated with a “war ethos” specific to the military professional, but another, grounded on a managerial expertise to efficiently procure, manage and distribute resources across the national territory, especially in contexts of “crisis.” We claim that the historical transformation of such discourse is a particular expression of global processes that have historically vested “managerial expertise” with political authority to solve social problems in critical situations. We also contend that this managerial dimension has been largely neglected in the critique of militarization articulated in traditional and contemporary civil–military relations studies. In light of these processes, this article seeks to contribute to critical work regarding the conditions for and effects of the expansion of military roles under the regime of justification here analyzed, thereby stimulating us to rethink the assumptions upon which militarization can be problematized in the contemporary period.

Critique and Critical Social Work: a meta-theoretical perspective

It is self-evident that critique lies at the heart of Critical Social Work. Even so, more attention should be given to clarifying the meaning of this form of evaluation, particularly when it is applied in the social sciences and social professions. More precisely, it is necessary to explain the meta-theoretical conceptualisation of critique and, crucially, note its different expressions. Through gaining such clarity, the contention is that Critical Social Work sharpens its appreciation of social injustice and how to tackle it. This article describes and augments one meta-theoretical conception of critique involving a typology delineating interconnected forms of evaluation. The indelible bond between this paradigmatic outline of critique, critical theory and Critical Social Work is subsequently considered, highlighting some possibilities for social transformation. Adopting these precepts, by way of conclusion, leads to a critical cosmopolitan orientation within Critical Social Work, making it relevant to the pressing challenges of today’s world.

TAGAY MURAD'S STORY "TWILIGHT, WHEN THE HORSE RUMBLED" IN THE STUDY OF LITERARY SCHOLARS

The article analyzesthe scientific works of literary critics who considered the story "Twilight, when the horse rumbled" from the linguistic and literary side.