Search results

Virtual Reality (VR) emerged as a technology when Ivan Sutherland created the ‘Sword of Damocles’, the first visual display enabling users to be immerse themselves in a 3‐dimensional environment (Sutherland 1968). This virtual 3‐dimensional visual display profoundly changes the relationship between the user and the computer. With this virtual interface, the user is placed inside the computer‐generated environment. This concept has revolutionized information displays. For the first time, the user interacts with a spatial display. The virtual display is engineered to fit how we, as humans, perceive things intuitively. Humans are spatial beings and virtual interfaces evolved from the desire to make machines more human‐like (Furness 1986). The paradigm shift in information displays lies in the inclusiveness of the virtual interface. The multi‐sensory display of VR amplifies the perceptions and experiences of the user (Bricken 1991).

Nurses working in acute mental-health services are vulnerable to occupational stress. One stressor identified is the challenging behaviour of some service users (Jenkins and Elliott, 2004). The purpose of this paper is to discuss the discourses drawn on by nurses to understand challenging behaviour and talk about its management.

Nurses working on acute and psychiatric intensive care unit (PICU) wards were interviewed, and data were analysed using discourse analysis.

Biomedical and systemic discourses were found to be dominant. Alternative psychosocial and emotional discourses were drawn on by some participants but marginalised by the dominant biomedical construction of challenging behaviour.

Existing studies have not considered how discourses socially construct challenging behaviour and its management in inpatient mental-health services.

This chapter details how local racial contexts and educators’ readings of those contexts shape actions they took in sponsoring Black students. Sponsorship was understood as the process in which agents provide, stymie, and/or enhance access to valued resources. The author utilized data collected during a yearlong ethnography of two high schools – one urban and the other suburban – both within a metropolitan Midwestern city. Findings from the study highlighted that teachers’ involvement in sponsorship was shaped by how they understood local racial disparities and contrasting views of equality. First, teachers noted residential segregation patterns as evidence of past and present manifestations of systemic racism that disadvantaged Black students. Second, they relied on their knowledge of racialized educational disparities to shape equitable actions. Third, teachers employed a restrictive equality approach to argue that access to high-performing schools was enough for some Black students in order to neglect modifying assignments. The need exists for researchers to examine complexities of sponsorship and how racism (re)shapes actions sponsors take toward fostering Black student academic success. Additionally, it is important for teachers to deepen their understanding of systemic racism and its manifestations within particular localities.

Julia Rose Sutherland highlights the heart of her feminist practice as an indigenous artist: Feminism for everyone and feminism every day. From detailing her mixed media usage to collaborative project dynamics, Sutherland reemphasizes the urgent need to continue to highlight and address ongoing settler violence forced upon the land, women, and communities. By keeping histories and the work of knowledge keepers close to her individual work and pieces created with others, Sutherland demonstrates the complex and layered steps vital for navigating patriarchal institutions and questioning multiple systems of oppression through art in order for everyone to be “heard in their entirety.”

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate how inequality – in the way ethnography as a research tool itself is used – underwrites many of the methodological tensions in the recently published and widely-debated On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman.

The author conducts an in-depth, critical analysis of On the Run as an epistemological case to visualize methodological and moral challenges that burden ethnographic practice at large.

The author opens dialogue on undercover ethnography, the overreach of institutional review boards, privilege in the use of ethnography as a research tool, “Othering” and the exoticization of the underclass, and the boundary shift from observer to participant roles with deep immersion. The author unpacks these areas of contention toward the construction of a potential alternative combining public sociology with what is called a sociology of compassion.

While the book provides an intimate, rich account of the experience of law among the underclass, the author demonstrates that it constitutes an epistemological case ideal for examining how the issues of pre-fieldwork preparation, positionality and deep immersion are conceived – and problematized – in mainstream ethnographic practice.

Gabrielle Civil, a Black feminist performance artist and professor, discusses developing and teaching her “Pleasure Syllabus,” a three-lecture module for a mandatory first-year undergraduate writing course. Grounded in Black feminism, especially adrienne maree brown's call for “pleasure activism” and Audre Lorde's embrace of the erotic, this syllabus aimed to consider and activate embodied knowledge. Contemplating pleasure (“what does and does not feel good”) also became a way to confront rape culture. With this module, Civil hoped to intervene in the rampant sexual violence happening on college campuses. She acknowledges the challenges of negotiating trauma and gender-based violence in the classroom. (Teaching about desire, sexuality, violation, and consent on Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic was especially tough.) She shares specific strategies that supported her pedagogy and offers some suggestions for curricular planning while emphasizing that no one-size-fits-all approach exists to trauma-informed teaching. Her curriculum included visual art, music, graphics, and movement exercises along with critical/creative writing. Civil includes her actual “Pleasure Syllabus” and her module's signature assignment.

Computer based accounting information systems (AIS) have been a major force behind the current wave of corporate downsizing and reengineering (Deloitte & Touche LLP, 1996). While greater economy and competitiveness is typically associated with these changes, conventional AIS literature usually eschews a counter‐hypothesis: that this new technology may also degrade both the quality and quantity of work, and therefore people’s working lives. The advent of Accounting, Management, and Information Technologies in 1991, with an espoused aim of “critically analyzing the relationships among our information systems designs, the qualities of our social and economic life, and our practices of management and control” (Boland and O’Leary, 1991, p. 2) presents a major opportunity to redress this deficiency. This paper reviews the journal’s inaugural issue and ancillary literature to assess its likely contribution. This literature is found to lack a sufficient appreciation of the social and historical context of AIS developments and thus compromises the new journal’s ability to achieve its espoused aims. The paper calls for a better understanding of the upheavals currently under way in the accounting workplace and ways in which AIS technology (and ethnographers) may compound these instabilities. A different kind of ethnographic research is called for: one capable of recognizing the dysfunctionalities of AIS‐induced downsizing and restructuring, and more politically and socially self‐aware of AIS agency in social and technological change.