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This article contributes to the sociology of education and technology by providing a cultural analysis of scepticism towards new technologies in school, using reactions to the telepresence robot 'AV1' as its case. AV1 is designed to connect 'homebound' students with their 'school-based' teachers and classmates. Despite its idealistic purpose, the robot has been met with significant scepticism by Norwegian school workers. To understand why, the article proposes the novel concepts of 'educational purity' and 'technological danger' to highlight the shared beliefs that underlie school workers' concerns. We find that school workers see AV1 as threatening key ideals of schools being pedagogically oriented, physically copresent and bounded institutions -- all concerns that reflect widespread ideas about how technologies tend to (not) function within educational contexts. In highlighting these symbolic tensions between new technologies and schools, the article sets a course for future studies into the cultural sociology of education and technology.

'Homebound' children are unable to attend school for illness-related reasons. To lessen their predicament, schools have begun experimenting with 'telepresence robots' that can enable remote participation. While promising, we know little about the use of telepresence robots in practice. To begin to redress this, we draw on 159 semi-structured interviews to explore the experiences of 37 child users of the robot 'AV1' in Norwegian schools. The children's experiences varied, with some benefitting greatly and others not getting any benefit from using the robot. To explain these variations, we reconstruct the robot's "critical component structure" -- that is, the assembly of sociomaterial elements that determines whether and how the robot works in practice. We also explore the benefits of using the robot when these critical components align. In so doing, we provide in-depth knowledge about the potential and prerequisites of using telepresence robots in schools -- to the benefit of users, producers and scholars of telepresence technology.

This article advances domestication theory by developing the concept of multi-site domestication. Whereas domestication theory traditionally focuses on the 'taming' of technologies at a single site (most often, the household), the concept of multi-site domestication captures how technologies often require different taming processes across multiple institutional settings. In this article, we apply the concept to understand the multi-site domestication of AV1: a communication solution for children who are homebound because of chronic illness or disabilities, which creates a communicative bridge from an app on the homebound student's phone/tablet and to a 'telepresence robot' that is placed physically in the classroom, where it is meant to function as the homebound student's proxy. Using data from a larger qualitative study of the implementation of AV1 in Norway, the article shows how the 'traditional' domestication processes of appropriation, objectification, incorporation, and conversion play out and are complicated when domestication occurs across settings with different and at times opposing norms, rules, values, and logics. In charting these multi-site dynamics, the article updates domestication theory for an age of increasingly intertwined technologies, thus helping future studies to look beyond single sites and appreciate more complex taming processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we aim to contribute to current discussions about ethical conduct in qualitative research practice. We provide examples of how ethics is a recurring issue throughout a research process and not just an issue to safeguard procedurally. The examples on which we build our argument are based on three research projects from two countries, namely, Norway and Denmark, focusing on three different groups, namely, the elderly, parents, and children. Through our analyses of these ethical dilemmas, we aim to provide reflections on dilemmas encountered in three different qualitative research projects at three different stages, specifically before, during, and after data collection. We thus provide a way for researchers to frame their work with ethical dilemmas as a continuous process beyond the checklist. Furthermore, we frame complex ethical dilemmas as something not to avoid but as a continuous part of a fruitful analytical process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Loneliness is represented in UK policy as a public health problem with consequences in terms of individual suffering, population burden and service use. However, loneliness is historically and culturally produced; manifestations of loneliness and social isolation also require social and cultural analysis. We explored meanings of loneliness and social isolation in the UK 2020-2022 and considered what the solutions of telepresence technologies reveal about the problems they are used to address. Through qualitative methods we traced the introduction and use of two telepresence technologies and representations of these, and other technologies, in policy and UK media. Our dataset comprises interviews, fieldnotes, policy documents, grey literature and newspaper articles. We found loneliness was represented as a problem of individual human connection and of collective participation in social life, with technology understood as having the potential to enhance and inhibit connections and participation. Technologically-mediated connections were frequently perceived as inferior to in-person contact, particularly in light of the enforced social isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that addressing loneliness requires attending to other, related, health and social problems and introducing technological solutions requires integration into the complex social and organisational dynamics that shape technology adoption. We conclude that loneliness is primarily understood as a painful lack of co-presence, no longer regarded as simply a subjective experience, but as a social and policy problem demanding resolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern welfare agencies are increasingly offering clients digital tools in their service delivery. Since young people are prolific users of digital technology, this trend should be to their advantage. However, the quantitative study presented in this article investigates how citizens under the age of 30 use public digital services, compared to those over 30. The study found that clients were less active than older clients in using a digital plan while receiving support from the government. Accordingly, they may be less able to receive help from public agencies when it is offered digitally. Yet, the choices made by caseworkers in how they prioritized clients for more personal support may have reduced the risk of this disadvantage [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text material analysed in this article consists of 20 teddy-diaries that circulated between the families of 6-year-old children in Beijing, China and in Oslo, Norway. The circulation process makes teddy-diaries highly normatively saturated domestic stories from families with 6-year-old children. A quantitative analysis of these texts inspired by Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) developed by Harvey Sacks (1972) reveals what is deemed significant relations for children in each culture. By identifying actions and contexts that are described as relevant and appropriate for these significant relations, the researcher can also achieve a better understanding of how these relations are constructed as socializing relations in the everyday lives of children. The article finds that the learning styles and positioning of the child in everyday lives is participatory, play and peer oriented in Norway and instructional, encouraging and progress oriented in China. (Contains 6 tables.)

Schools are central in sustaining and extending values in society and therefore in shaping future society. While the global trend of education digitalization, commonly is presented as a depoliticized project of improvement, this paper seeks to uncover the values of the digital school as expressed in the strategy for the digitalization of the Norwegian education system. Inspired by Bacchi's'WPR approach, the findings reveal that digitalization involves establishing a problem and a solution through discourses or narratives of education, working life, and the future.Given this problem representation and sociotechnical imaginary of the future, the school's main goal becomes to provide digitally competent future citizen-workers. The educational ideal of The Nordic model, and ideas of humanism and solidarity are not emphasized. Hence, the digital school reflects a neoliberal economy rather than values traditionally associated with the welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how different Norwegian families display family and parenthood ideals in one of the most gender-equal countries in the world. Empirically, the article is based on an ethnographic material in the shape of so-called 'travel diaries'. The diaries are written by Norwegian school children and their parents with the purpose of describing how everyday family life unfolds. The diaries are analysed within a discursive framework and by the use of analytical concepts like display, performativity, text circulation, repetition, habit etc. We discuss how gendered family display are spatially and temporally organized. We argue that normative standards and cultural codes for what seems to be a 'good family life' are created and maintained by a kind of social circulation, and that the family is a place where gender relations confirm existing welfare state policy. Gender equality and reciprocity are central values doing parenthood, and further the family is a transmission-belt between private and public gendered subject positions. By displaying family in a text-correspondence, this article also reveals how mothers participate in the construction of modern fatherhood as an intimate caregiver. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we demonstrate how the cultural conceptions of a team of five researchers from different cultural and national backgrounds can be used as a source of knowledge during a collective, self-reflexive analytical process. While collectively analysing texts describing daily life produced by first-grade children and their parents in China, Norway, South Africa and the United States, the research team engaged in a collectively negotiated analytical process, which we refer to as an 'analytic negotiating method'. The strength of this process rests on the ability to examine critically the boundaries between the researcher's contextual conceptions and conceptions derived from the texts. Engaging in this kind of negotiated analytical process contributes to scholarship by working towards a level of self-reflexivity that makes the link between empirical data and researcher interpretation more transparent and produces a sensitivity to context that allows insights into the conceptions of childhood that operate cross-culturally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1990s witnessed the replacement of psychological perspectives seeing children as ‘becomings’ to a view of them as ‘beings’. This is challenged by the Foucauldian concept of governmentality understood as technologies of self-making actors capable of monitoring and controlling their own behaviour. This concept is central in the present study of so-called teddy-diaries, which are texts written by first graders and their parents and circulated among other families as part of the Norwegian school curriculum. A key finding of the analyses is that these circulated and displayed texts represent technologies for governing families – especially in reinforcing expectations about how ‘normal’ childhood and family life should be lived. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article reports research on young people's conceptualisations of love and romance through a gender perspective. The data are stories written by 12-year-old girls and boys in Norway who were asked to fantasise about their future love life. Their narratives are explored through discourse analysis and semiotics and analysed within a sociological framework. The article has two major aims. The first is to contribute to the methodology of collecting essays written by young people to gain knowledge of their conceptions of adult life. The second aim is to offer new findings on the specific subject of romantic love in contemporary society, by describing how to do love in young people's fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text material analysed in this article consists of 20 teddy-diaries that circulated between the families of 6-year-old children in Beijing, China and in Oslo, Norway. The circulation process makes teddy-diaries highly normatively saturated domestic stories from families with 6-year-old children. A quantitative analysis of these texts inspired by Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) developed by Harvey Sacks (1972) reveals what is deemed significant relations for children in each culture. By identifying actions and contexts that are described as relevant and appropriate for these significant relations, the researcher can also achieve a better understanding of how these relations are constructed as socializing relations in the everyday lives of children. The article finds that the learning styles and positioning of the child in everyday lives is participatory, play and peer oriented in Norway and instructional, encouraging and progress oriented in China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Introduction: Most research on loneliness comes from the health sciences, statistically seeking to measure the health-related effects of feeling alone or isolated. There is a need to expand on this understanding and explore loneliness as a more complex social phenomenon. In this article, we present a qualitative design for studying the intersection between loneliness, technology and culture. Conceptualising this as the cultural dialectic between loneliness and technology, we aim to unpack the reciprocal ways by which understandings of loneliness shape technology, while technologies also affect society's understandings of loneliness. In elucidating this dialectic, we aim to develop new knowledge and a novel theoretical framework for understanding loneliness and its technological solutions, which, in turn, can enable better solutions to contemporary problems of loneliness., Methods and Analysis: We will adopt a qualitative approach that combines interviews, participant observation and textual analysis to explore loneliness and its technological solutions from the perspectives of policy-makers, producers, professionals and users in Norway and the UK. The data will be analysed through an analytical framework combining insights from discourse theory and philosophical debates on presence, which will allow us to capture and rethink fundamental assumptions about loneliness and technology. Outcomes will be revised understandings of loneliness, relevant to researchers, entrepreneurs, policy-makers, clinicians, educators and the broader public., Ethics and Dissemination: The project has been evaluated and approved by the data protection officer at Oslo Metropolitan University and by the Norwegian Social Science Data Services. Additional ethical approval for data collection in the UK has been provided by the University of Oxford Interdivisional Research Ethics Committee. Informed consent will be obtained from all participants. Findings will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, international conference presentations and lay media., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2021. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.)