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Drawing on ethnography, this study investigates the treatment of blind and visually impaired people (BVIP) in the workplace adopting a sociomaterial framework based on acoustemology. This approach concerns the process of knowing with and through sound. In line with interest in multimodality within organization studies, acoustemology recognizes the auditory as a way to access systems of meanings, negotiations, co-constructions, discrimination and culture within organizations. Considering visual impairment as a culture, this research explores the way in which sound and sonic technologies act as relational (both social and material) channels through which BVIP conduct themselves in the workplace, interact with sighted co-workers, gain recognition and produce and reproduce a system of meanings. Through acoustemology, this study contributes to the issue of organizational inclusion of people with disability proposing dis-continuity, a concept that helps explore inclusion as a practice that involves alternative epistemologies and brings about changes in organizational culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To explore issues of safety and security at school the research reported here investigated the way a sense of security was created in school, how security was linked to different locations and situations, and the influences that acted on pupils' sense of security. Pupils in year 1 in Sweden took photographs associated with insecurity and security, and these were used as starting points for small-group discussions. Analysis makes use of Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) theoretical concepts including assemblage, affect, rhizome and desire. This article provides an insight into the vulnerability of little bodies, in which materiality and thing-power played a large part. Security was created in assemblages, in the interplay between locations, things and pupils. It varied between different points in time and also increased or decreased depending on the risks the pupils dared expose themselves to. Happiness, freedom, self-assertiveness, status, and self-preservation were examples of desires arising in the assemblage and influencing the sense of security. The article provides examples of how the sense of security may be affected and follows a molecular rhizome of understanding the appearance of emotions of security in school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a socio-materialist perspective, this study analyses connections between cultural contexts, the social situatedness of learning experiences and the material artefacts in rural Chilean schools. Our focus on different dimensions of design foregrounds the ways materials and places may act together with other elements to influence human thinking, learning and action. Results show that all the schools in the study met minimal standards on physical variables (temperature, air quality, lighting, noise and safety), and that in recent times, school designs emphasise a participatory design process, which includes community consultation, and where cultural and natural aspects of the surroundings are taken into account and prioritised. Given the richness of the natural landscape and culture observed in rural areas, this paper offers original insights into the ways that educators can explore the natural environment and indigenous culture to promote meaningful situated learning and empower students in rural schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transparency in teamwork and across team members' status is one of the main challenges in remote work, and using online collaborative whiteboards (OCW) is a potential solution for more transparent teamwork. We explore the experience of transparency of three design teams who used an OCW called Miro in remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our aim was to gain in-depth understanding on what constitutes transparency in this teamwork context. We conducted a qualitative interview study with 11 participants who are user experience and service designers, and who actively use Miro in their daily work. We adopted sociomateriality as our research lens and thematically analysed the data, finding that transparency at work is a dynamic experience ranging between positive and negative. Rather than being merely users' or organisations' choices or the result of the tool affordances, the experience of transparency at work is an outcome of sociomaterial entanglements between the user, tool, and organisation. Furthermore, the occupational and organisational factors not only affect the experience of transparency, but they also actively constitute it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The advent of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the art world has led to the emergence of a unique aesthetic sensibility, ‘crypto-aesthetics.’ This nascent phenomenon is marked by the amalgamation of digital and traditional art forms, the exploration of decentralisation and blockchain themes, and an emphasis on scarcity and digital ownership. This article proposes to examine the crypto-aesthetic phenomenon of NFT art through the lens of New Materialism, in particular the key concepts of two major New Materialist thinkers, namely Karen Barad and Jane Benett. Our application of New Materialism elucidates crypto-aesthetics as a distinct occurrence stemming from the interplay of object-reality, agency and networks, sociomateriality, and cultural and historical contexts. Utilising the New Materialism perspective to investigate crypto-aesthetics sheds light on the intricate relationships, processes, and consequences shaping the art market vis-à-vis NFTs and digital art. By acknowledging the agency of matter and the entwined nature of human and non-human entities, a more holistic comprehension of crypto-aesthetics’ transformative potential for artistic expression, value generation, and cultural dynamics can be attained. Our theoretical framework offers a novel lens through which to explore and understand the burgeoning world of NFT art and its crypto-aesthetic tendencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the research on communication visibility has typically focused on how visibility is enacted among employees who are familiar with the networks, practices and technologies of the organization, this study focuses on the experiences of newcomers. Additionally, while technology use around newcomers has typically been approached in parallel with face-to-face communication, our study concentrates on fully remote organizational entry. Qualitative interview and survey data among 24 newcomers revealed that the dimensions of visibility – the sociomaterial context, actors’ actions and observers’ actions – play a role in uncertainty and impression management during the entry process, while simultaneously reflecting to visibility management. The findings contribute to a model theorizing the relationship between visibility, uncertainty, impression management and sociomateriality during remote organizational entry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PhD candidates, like all students, learn through engaging with feedback. However, there is limited understanding of how feedback strategies support doctoral candidates. This qualitative framework synthesis of 86 papers analysed rich qualitative data about feedback within PhD supervision. Our synthesis, informed by sociomateriality and a dialogic, sense-making view of feedback, underscores the critical role that feedback plays in doctoral supervision. Supervisors, through their engagement or disengagement with feedback, controlled candidates' access to tacit and explicit standards. The ephemeral and generative nature of verbal feedback dialogues contrasted with concrete textual comments. While many supervisors aimed for candidates to become less reliant on feedback over time, this did not necessarily translate to practice. Our findings suggest that balancing power dynamics might be achieved through focussing on feedback materials and practices rather than supervisor-candidate relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grounded in a paradox perspective, this article investigates the tensions of fluid informal organizing and, using a practice theory lens, explains how micro-level communicative practices deal with those tensions. Through interview and observational data, the study illustrates how tensions of integration/separation, inclusion/exclusion, and autonomy/control intersect with organizational efforts to maintain a public recreation space and are dealt with via social, material, and performative practices of worth signaling, consensus by validation, and social/material nudging. Findings add to theory on organizing tensions by moving beyond discursive and strategic responses to tension, which often focus on altering the meaning of tensions or rely upon conventional organizing elements, to emphasize how materiality and mundane practices are consequential for theory building on tension response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trading on peer-to-peer tourist accommodation platforms requires a sufficient level of trust between individual consumers and service providers. This is often achieved by using mutual consumer–provider evaluations, which are perceived as a trustworthy resource for information about upcoming stays. A variety of mechanisms and metrics are used to facilitate trust building on platforms; however, trust itself is being established by the platform's users. This study investigates the case of Airbnb to show how arrangements of sociomaterial metrics and mechanisms are embedded in trust building. Findings from a virtual ethnographic study of the platform's users show how trust building is performed through these arrangements. Based on organizational theories of trust and sociomateriality, the study suggests that establishing both attitudes of trust and distrust on peer-to-peer platforms are equally important. When the sociomaterial arrangement fails, trust may deteriorate outside of the platform organization's control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Screencast feedback has advantages over written feedback for supporting engagement and enactment, yet the potential of peer screencast feedback remains underexplored. This study took a small-scale (N = 8), in-depth, triangulated, qualitative approach to addressing this gap, adopting a socio-material lens to investigate the use of dialogic peer screencast feedback over an emergency remote semester. Screencast peer feedback was found to enhance depth, enabling expansion of written comments, focusing on 'global' aspects in screencasts and 'local' aspects in text. Using the feedback providers' camera helped learners manage and process emotional impacts of feedback, encouraging uptake and supporting the development of a caring feedback community sustained through ongoing technology-mediated enactment-oriented dialogues. The results reveal various social and material factors 'entangled' with the emergence of agency and engagement in the feedback practices. The findings have significant implications for those teaching in online, hybrid, and blended conditions in the wake of the pandemic and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we critically discuss the impact of policy documents on the construction of national narratives on the provision of support for cultural-linguistic diversity in education systems in two European countries. The analysis focuses upon a selection of national policy documents that deal with the planning and provision of HLE since the 1990s. We take critical pedagogy and sociomateriality as theoretical lenses to investigate educational policies on HLE. Thus, this study critically traces the ways in which language ideologies are enmeshed with legislative, political and educational discourses by following an inductive and retroductive process, wherein key-concepts, themes and critical configurations of HLE are mapped, compared, re-assembled and discussed in terms of a complex system. The analysis shows that the (non-)provision of HLE shapes the educational space and the value references and world views that prevail and are (re)produced in it. Emerging deficit perspectives, linguistic assimilation and marginalisation processes limit the path towards more inclusive and equitable educational institutions and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the terminology of border infrastructures as a way to enrich a multi-perspectival approach to territorial bordering processes that takes seriously their stratifying and racialising dynamics. Building on the analysis of migrant informal dwellings, or ghettos, which are increasingly constructed as naturalised 'black spaces' in the Mediterranean, the paper's contribution is twofold. First, it calls for more situated research into the multiple networks, connections and agencies involved in bordering processes, which often comprise complex interactions across 'formal' and 'informal', 'human' and 'more-than-human' boundaries. Second, it proposes to foreground the socio-materiality of borders-as-infrastructures by analysing how these actively reproduce a logic of separation in both a political and an ecological sense. The article pushes forward a more immersive understanding and methodology that is able to unearth the stratifying, racialising dimensions of contemporary borderwork across and within the confines of nation-state territoriality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As people, particularly those ageing and living with disabilities, struggle with how care is enacted, integrated care has gained policy purchase in the United Kingdom. Despite integration's apparent popularity, its contribution to improved care for people has been questioned, exposing uncertainties about its associated benefits. Nonetheless, over decades a remarkably consistent approach to integrated care has advanced partnerships between the NHS and local government. Accordingly, in 2014 the Scottish Government mandated Health and Social Care Integration (HSCI) via the Scottish Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Act. Emerging from an interorganisational ethnography of the implementation of a Health and Social Care Partnership in 2016, in a place I call 'Kintra', I interrogated what happened when NHS Kintra and Kintra Council endeavoured to implement HSCI according to the precepts of 'the Act'. Immersed in the everyday arrangements in the spaces of governance, I attended to how these policy actors worked to both (re)configure and held things together behind care frontiers, and away from the bodywork of direct care. I charted their efforts to comply with regulations, plan, and build governance apparatuses through documents. In following documents, I show the ways in which HSCI was materialised through documentation. I reveal how, in the mundane mattering of document manufacturing, possibilities for (re)forming the carescape emerged. I deploy a posthuman practice stance to show not only the way in which 'papery' partnerships between the NHS and local government 'enact' care, but also how they make worlds through a sociomaterial politics of anticipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing interest in the complexity of socio-materiality-making activities in educational and everyday settings. Indeed, maker-centered learning is considered as a socio-materially embodied process in which artifacts and social and emotional dimensions are interconnected. The making process is also found in everyday life when children engage in specific applications – like Minecraft, where they perform activities in a virtual environment. Starting from analyzing some episodes recorded with a child aged seven, this paper aims to better understand the maker process in a virtual setting with implications for digital literacy and sustainable development education. A socio-material approach is privileged to analyze the data collected. Specifically, we will explore the maker activity as a socio-materially embodied process. The research question will be answered with the support of a case study of one child playing Minecraft. Thinking-aloud modality, observation, notes, and pictures are collected. Then, the verbatim from the semi-structured interview is collected in the same session. The entire session is audio-recorded. The three dimensions that emerged are: Resources to make digital objects; Digital Objects became Social Objects; Making digital objects became ground for literacy. From this analysis, we can retrace digital literacy in the Minecraft maker activity and some final considerations for teaching in STEM. In conclusion, students' informal activity in a Minecraft setting could become a potential green environment to ground digital literacy. However, this process needs to be scaffolded and amplified with an enriched level of abstract process, critical, and inquiry attitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the material complexity and relational emergence of 'teaching'. Reporting on a video-based ethnographic study of an upper secondary classroom in Norway, the paper centres on the following research questions: Which material-discursive practices 'matter' in upper secondary teaching situations, and how are participants' bodies shaping and being shaped by these practices? The paper combines sociomaterial practice theory with the agential realist concepts of material-discursivity and apparatus to trace the spatial and bodily enactment of a teaching situation. In the first part of the paper, I identify two material-discursive practices: the practice of tasks and the practice of friendship. Second, I examine the two practices' material intertwinement, proposing that they entangle and coarticulate a larger material arrangement termed the teaching apparatus that regulates the possibilities and limitations for 'doing' in the classroom. The paper offers a perspective on teaching that increases our awareness of its interconnectedness and unpredictability, allowing for a more fine-grained understanding of the embodied liveliness and material complexity of everyday teaching encounters. Finally, I propose that thinking with a spatially, bodily and relationally produced teaching apparatus offers an affirmative and agential approach to discussing educational quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AI-enabled smart objects have rapidly become everyday commodities and do not only change the ways in which we consume but also the ethics that guide our consumption. Emerging sociomaterial perspectives viewing consumers and smart objects as assemblages have been employed to study relational aspects of consumption, as well as consumer experience in the digital reality. This article argues that consumer ethics could and should be viewed as emergent properties of such consumption assemblages. Drawing on exemplars ranging from wearables to autonomous robots, this article illustrates the potential of this perspective and outlines fruitful directions for future research on questions of consumer agency and self-determination in the face of AI and the fluidity of consumer ethics in a world of updatable smart objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates candidates' journey to being selected as a volunteer for the Rio2016 Games. Drawing on Actor–Network Theory, the research tracked the sociomaterial practices undertaken by candidates to become volunteers and sought to identify the actors that participate in these practices and the role the latter played in facilitating a positive (or negative) experience. A postmodern ethnography provided the basis to critically analyse candidates' experiences in applying for a volunteer role at the Games. Data were collected via internet sites, email communications, a volunteer Facebook page, interviews with volunteers (N = 17) and official Rio 2016 documents. The journey to volunteering at Rio 2016 comprised sociomaterial practices that impacted the volunteer candidate's progression (or lack thereof) through the journey to volunteering. These were qualifying as a candidate, Waiting for 'Godot', Being rejected and Getting the 'passport' to the Games. This research presents a practice-based conceptualisation of volunteer candidates' journey to selection. The findings demonstrate the centrality of sociomaterial practices in volunteer recruitment and the importance of an effective human and non-human interface. Flexible approaches to volunteer recruitment and selection that consider the diversity of interactions of actors involved can be profitably deployed to facilitate a good candidate experience and minimise the stress, tension and communication issues that potential volunteers face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the care environment of secure youth homes run by the Swedish National Board of Institutional Care, where youths up to 21 years old are placed according to law due to extensive care needs or sentences. Purpose: This study examined staff members' experiences of the institutional care environment within secure youth homes. Methods: Data were collected through three focus group discussions with 17 staff members at two secure youth homes. Subsequently, a thematic analysis was conducted. Results: The analysis indicated two main themes: risk management and damage control in a restricted environment and compensating and reconstructing ordinariness--trying to make the best of it; each theme had three subthemes. The care environment seems to be experienced by staff as characterized by conflicting demands, thus constituting a gap between needs and what is possible to achieve--a balancing act that constitutes a constant struggle. Conclusions: The staff members' constant struggle could be interpreted as conflicting moral and instrumental demands; they know what the youths need, but the environment of the secure youth homes demands the decorous behaviour of sociomaterial control practices-- rather than care practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maintenance and repair of bikes - material interventions - are essential to sustain cycling practices. In this paper we explore the role of (bi)cycle self-repair workshops (Bike Kitchens) and the practices they enable to maintain cycling practices. We connect a sociomaterial understanding of assisted self-repair to Bike Kitchens' role in transformational mobility change. Empirically, we utilize our own experiences in organizing and running a small Bicycle Kitchen in Sweden in conjunctions with observations and interviews, drawing on theories of social practice, the sociology of materiality and repair studies. We develop the position that through deliberate engagement with the cycle as an entity, assisted self-repair practices provide flexible means of representing the transformative potential of cycling materialities. This has implications for the meanings attached to the cycle, cycling, repair and other associated practices. We argue that Bike Kitchens may engender epistemic practices useful to develop human-centered visions for re-imagining mobility and sociomaterial relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been an increasing move worldwide in education policy towards standardization in combination with a global trust in digital quantification and calculation. These policies cause frictions in early childhood education (ECE). Hence, this paper examines the way standards 'work' in ECE. The empirical study draws on the ideas of Actor-Network Theory to recount and examine the highly material processes of calculation and representation, in which standards become enacted and act in practice. The data was drawn from extensive interviews with early childhood teachers in the Netherlands as well as additional 'object interviews'. The analysis describes how a particular standard becomes enacted as an assemblage, which both invites and compels teachers and managers to engage in particular educational practices. Foregrounding standards and highlighting the way professionals work with, through or around them, enables educational professionals to (re)consider the doings of standards and creates a space to imagine how practices – and policies that shape these practices – might be assembled differently. We advance the argument that it is important for professionals to critically analyse their professional practices in light of increasing datafication. Enhancing sociomaterial sensibilities of teachers might support them to offset persuasive powers of sociomaterial policy assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Homeless' people are usually considered as citizens without property. The absence of ownership, especially in terms of housing, co-creates the very idea of homelessness in current societies. Despite this fact, 'homeless' citizens negotiate and experience their property, things, or the shelter in which they dwell. This paper sheds light on how this property is negotiated and experienced and how it influences home-making. It does so by drawing on long-term ethnographic research in the city of Pilsen, a second-order city in Czechia. Based on the intra-urban comparison of informal dwelling in two abandoned buildings – a former railway station tower and an allotment cottage – the paper conceptualize the unspotted home and argues that it arises from the assemblage of socio-materiality, meanings, and various dimensions of politics, where the politics of home-ownership has an important position. While informal ownership here is related to power asymmetry within home-making, paradoxically, it also brings about more complex informal citizenship and the potential for political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has examined the sociomaterial contexts that shape journalistic practice within and beyond the newsroom, considering relationships between humans, and between humans and (non)physical artifacts like desks, computers, or software. While much of that research has focused on the use and role of technology, recent research also suggests an affective dimension of materiality like the sense of stability provided by physical news spaces. The newsroom as a material and lived place and place of power relations can greatly shape journalists' work practices and identity. However, the relevance of the newsroom as a physical place for journalistic practice has so far been taken for granted. This study investigates the role of the newsroom as a physical, material place for journalistic practice and how it contributes to journalists' sense of belonging and identity. Drawing on interviews with 18 Austrian journalists, we find that newsrooms as sociomaterial places facilitate proximity and serendipity which is perceived as relevant for creative and effective work, as well as a visible manifestation of in-group belonging. As such this study contributes to a better understanding of the meaning and relevance of newsrooms as material places for journalistic work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article delivers new insights regarding the importance of continuous professional development (CPD) for practitioners designing and implementing public sector accounting (PSA) reforms. Public sector accounting education (PSAE) in universities has been the subject of many studies and its relevance is well recognized. By emphasizing the continuous professional development of public sector accountants, this article adds a new perspective to the debate on PSAE. The authors focus on PSA reforms in emerging economies, where the agenda is often driven by international financial institutions promoting IPSAS. Applying a socio-material perspective, the authors demonstrate that the technical aspects of reforms require human capacity development. This means conducting a preliminary evaluation of the CPD capabilities before drafting the agenda for any PSA reform. Education undisputedly plays a central role in IPSAS-based PSA reforms. Using a socio-materiality perspective, the authors highlight a misalignment between human and technical aspects when implementing these reforms. Their analysis of past reforms in emerging economies suggests that the educational development of public sector accountants does not receive the same level of attention as the technical advancements set out to be achieved. By introducing a conceptual distinction between initial and continuous accounting education, the authors emphasize the relevance of continuous professional development when conceptualizing PSA reforms. They conclude that a successful accounting change requires a co-ordinated and integrated approach on developing human and technological capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, individuals in precarious circumstances navigate numerous programs to supplement their food access. These programs operate in relation to stigmatizing discourses about poverty and food insecurity. This paper explores the sociomaterial meanings of food assistance, including SNAP, food pantries, and nonprofit food distribution. Using qualitative methods, we introduce the notion of entangled shame. This concept describes how discourses about poverty, material agencies, and (in)visibility collide to produce shame. Last, we identify methods of challenging and alleviating entangled shame. Results illuminate possibilities for centering dignity in food assistance programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analysed how students' mobile phones and Snapchat are adapted to and participate in the classroom. Insights from the actor network theory were used to discuss the interconnections between students, mobile phones, Snapchat, desks, and plenary teaching. We applied video analysis to examine the minute details of unfolding sociomaterial practices. The data, which was produced in a Finnish upper secondary school in 2015–2016, is a composition of ethnographic classroom video material and screen-capture video recordings from students' smartphones. In this study, we asked how the presence of mobile phones and Snapchat become possible in the relatively restricted pedagogical space of plenary teaching. The analysis yielded two important findings. First, students use effort to adapt Snapchat to the demands of the ongoing plenary teaching. Second, the analysis demonstrates the flexibility of the mobile phone–Snapchat entanglement that plays a crucial role in its adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores responses to the California Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) to challenge post-political and governmentality perspectives on environmental management. I chart how SGMA reconfigured sociomaterial orderings in the Central Valley region, enacting a liminal moment for groundwater culture, between a historically entrenched libertarianism and an emergent communitarianism. Local organizations functioned as boundary organizations, re-shaping groundwater assemblages by negotiating boundaries between authority and marginalized communities. I argue that the structures and institutions typically critiqued in post-political and de-political theorising can be more fruitfully conceptualized as part of sociomaterial assemblages within which there lies potential for transformative groundwater politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By contrast, the imagined future for a circular economy of mattresses is presented as a closed system where products are designed to be easy to disassemble and use only recyclable materials, and where all materials from both manufacturing waste and end-of-life products are recycled. I begin by briefly describing the relationship between circular economy metaphors and the measurement approaches that inform circular economy policy internationally, and by providing a snapshot of the current state of circular economy policy rhetoric and target-setting in Australia. In Australia, circular economy policy initiatives and measurement approaches are still at an early stage and are mainly found in waste policy and associated targets and reporting metrics. I Editors' note: i This commentary is part of a series initially presented at the Waste/Economies/Ecology hybrid international symposium at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia in February 2023. [Extracted from the article]

This editorial reflects on an intervention at this year's International Federation of Theatre Research conference by Ghanaian trans artist and activist Va-Bene Elikem K. Fiatsi (aka crazinisT artisT). I read this performance as an enactment of the entanglement of the current state-sanctioned and extra-legal campaign of homophobic and transphobic violence in Ghana in the necro-politics of our planetary poly-crisis. Theatre's capacity to capture and embody such sociomaterial entanglements runs through all of the articles in this open issue, which tackle subjects as various as rehearsal studies, flamenco performance, Beckett's deconstruction of identity, the politics of Victorian burlesque, militarised masculinity in contemporary Russia, camp robots, and labour struggles in recent Zimbabwean theatre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the concept of 'mediation' to account for the sociomateriality involved in the rehearsal of a new play. Drawing on ideas from the 'New Sociology of Art' that has its origins in Science and Technology Studies, we show how the sociomateriality of the rehearsal is an essential part of the process of theatre-making. It means giving to materials, bodies and matters in the rehearsal room a crucial role in the process of developing and refining a scene. Using ethnographic research methods, with particular emphasis on excerpts from video recordings, we analyse specific activities that take place in the rehearsal room to give a less anthropocentric and a more nuanced reading of the processes that contribute to the creation of a scene. Analysing the dynamics of entanglements in work practices of performance-making, we reveal the material base of the easily overlooked professional processes that constitute the craft of theatre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a form of assessment, examinations are designed to determine whether students have met learning outcomes. However, students with disabilities report avoiding examinations, selecting units of study where the assessments align with their strengths. To ensure examinations do not contribute to the systematic exclusion of students with disabilities, it is important to explore their experiences. In this paper, we use a sociomaterial frame to analyse how examination arrangements construct inclusion in examinations. Interviews with 40 students were conducted across two universities. Inclusion or exclusion was variably constituted for students through emergent combinations of social and material arrangements. Covid-19 pandemic related social distancing related changes such as shifting examinations online, using technology, increasing time limits and moving to open-book examinations contributed to increased inclusion for most students, who were able to use familiar equipment in spaces they had adapted to their own needs. Staff acceptance and implementation of access requirements and assessment flexibility also contributed. While the attitudes and actions of staff involved in examinations can facilitate inclusion, reducing the need for adjustments through assessment design is important. This requires consideration of how time, technology, equipment and materials contribute to inclusion or exclusion, which may have benefits for many students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early childhood education (ECE) sector has been subjected to increased governance, which has manifested in an increased focus on monitoring and steering the daily life of preschools. It is well documented that instruments of governance change teachers' priorities and practices. Changes are not always in line with the aims of the governing instrument. Empirical studies concerning governance in children's everyday lives have been rarer. Understanding the mechanisms of governance in the everyday lives of teachers and children requires theoretical tools which allow researchers to notice heterogeneous and situational elements that play a role in the act of governance. We explore governance in the contexts of ECE in two countries, Finland and Australia, with the help of ethnographic data and the concept of 'assemblage'. We propose an ontological foundation for governance research in ECE. We argue that taking socio-materiality as an ontological foundation of the research inquiry helps to see how the density of the socio-material elements of the situation may intensify the possibility of governing instruments interrupting meaningful interaction between children and adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information technology (IT) and space are sociomaterial dimensions of organizations that Human Resource Management (HRM) often take for granted, discounting how workers enact them in practice. With digital technologies rapidly changing the spaces of work, this paper proposes a framework for HRM to appreciate the role of the lived, affective experience of IT-enabled (physical and virtual) hybrid workspaces. We integrate the information systems (IS) literature on sociomaterial practices and insights on organizational space to suggest implications for HRM practice and pathways for future research on how virtual and physical spaces are related and lived in the emergence of new hybrid workplaces and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the market discourses of technological disruption, higher education institutions have routinely been positioned in deficit models and of anachronistic approaches to teaching at odds with the types of educational futures being presented by commercial organisations. Predominantly, automation technologies in the form of artificial intelligence are being promoted as the future of teaching. In this paper, on the other hand, we explore the prospects for using non-artificial intelligence automated agents in teaching and its impact on the teacher function at the University of Edinburgh. Through engagement with teachers, staff and students at the university, this research has identified use cases for bots, in what spaces they would be situated, and how they would supplement the teacher function. This paper argues that a community-driven approach combined with a sociomaterial conceptualisation can generate a shift from market discourses and to collaborative development of educational technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important contribution to the field of communication is François Cooren's critique of the assumption that the social and the material are entangled because this assumption reproduces the divide it claims to reject. Rather, Cooren proposes that the social and the material are properties, or (im-)properties, of one another because their relational differences bring organizations into existence. Cooren's three conclusions on this matter argue that the sociomateriality of an organization is a relational ontology. In this article, I problematize those three conclusions and suggest Maurice Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh as an alternative to overcome the problematics of each conclusion. Conclusion 1 lacks a conceptual groundwork explaining where social and material matter comes from, and I suggest flesh as the element to categorize matter. Conclusion 2 denigrates human existence to a matter of degree. I reframe this through the notion of alterity. Conclusion 3 suggests that relations and relata are the same yet theoretical support for that proposition is missing. As such, I offer the missing theoretical support through Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh. Taken together, Merleau-Ponty's ontology of flesh provides one coherent system and better affirms each of Cooren's conclusions of what a relational/communicative ontology of organization consists of. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how local, social and cultural knowledges were disrupted by global flows of human and non-human things in an international private Middle Eastern school. The study examined how the interplay of local and globally transient knowledges recursively influenced the sociomaterial actions of teachers in classroom learning. Critical ethnography was employed over three years using participant observation and interviews analysed from a critical orientation. The study's findings confirm that educational global flows must not be taken as neutral and that their use is recontextualised within a local–global nexus. These findings are significant in our current global world of cultural unrest and dynamic and morphing local–national–global relations, and document social relations of learning in an early childhood context, not previously given much attention in globalisation and education research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutions are increasingly redesigning academic learning spaces with the aim of enhancing learning outcomes. Existing research into this phenomenon has shown promise regarding how these new spaces are being designed and used; however, there has been much less effort towards developing a language for analysing the emergent learning activity within these spaces. In other words, it has been under-theorised. This paper responds to this gap by proposing three analytical framings and grounding each in vignettes illustrative of how they might be applied: (1) space-time-feedback as an assemblage for emergent interest-driven student activity; (2) embodiment-material as an assemblage for emergent public sensemaking; and (3) proximity-material-time as an assemblage for emergent collaborative benchmarking through group awareness and ambient feedback. Although not an exhaustive list, the three analytical framings serve as a starting point for investigations of emergent activity within future learning spaces from a sociomaterial perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass school closures and restricted mobility during the Covid-19 pandemic have intensified matters of technology, teaching, and participation in schools. In response to this situation, this paper examines how attendance practices work during school closure and screen-saturated pandemic isolation at a Swedish upper secondary school. The aim is to empirically and theoretically explore school closure attendance by focusing on the sets of strategies and enactments that make school 'attendable' when being 'in the right place at the right time' becomes ambiguous. A relational materialist methodology is deployed with online interviews with six teachers during the first pandemic wave in 2020. The analysis traces empirical events that enact different school closure attendance devices: the video roll call, attendance performance, and 'click like' in the Microsoft Team-feed. The article highlights how attendance monitoring shifts and how attendance acts upon teaching, and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent sociomaterialist, materialist and post-human theorizing which foregrounds the importance of objects and bodies, ideas of consciousness and intentionality are seen as potentially tainted either with Cartesian mind-body splits or with subjectivities that are too discursively constructed. At the same time, new theories of affect as something pre-personal and corporeal further marginalize the notion of human agency. But could the pendulum have swung too far in outlawing the human in favour of the pre-human and post-human? How can sociomaterial theories be reconciled with educators' ongoing commitment to give their pupils voice and identify effective pedagogies for teaching digital media? This paper analyses data from a study of online multimodal writing practices in a London primary school to expand current theorizing about agency. It proposes the idea of a phenomenologically-inspired circuit of (sociomaterial) agency as a way to bring back the 'human' and incorporate the middle ranges of agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the key challenges in work-integrated learning (WIL) courses is how to account for learning that takes place away from campus, where the work space, daily routines and emergent actions within an organisation shape the possibilities for student learning. What do students do on placement to open the possibilities of working and learning in temporary sites of work? Using a practice-based approach, this paper outlines an ethnographic study of learning on placement. The paper draws on Gherardi's ([2019]. How to Conduct a Practice-Based Study: Problems and Methods. 2nd ed. Cheltnham: Edward Elgar Publishing) work on learning and knowing in practice to demonstrate how students learn to participate in situated practices to accomplish work tasks. It employs a rock-climbing metaphor to illuminate what students do in order to continue on with work when they encounter something surprising, make an error or have a question. The findings suggest student learning relies on the sociomaterial practices that produce and are produced by each unique workplace situation. The paper shows how learning on placement comprises the identification and use of distinct 'handhold' activities performed through simultaneous processes of knowing, doing and inventing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engagement with theories and theoretical frameworks in the planning and conduct of research about library instruction, in conjunction with the existing evidence base, can help researchers develop coherent conceptual models to justify the research approach and importance of the research produced. This column describes some of the limitations of common evaluation approaches that lack explicit theoretical framing and provides definitions of concepts that allow practitioners and researchers alike to explore and understand the complexities of educational encounters. Using an illustrative study with a theoretical framework applying sociomaterialism and related theories, this article presents arguments for in-depth explorations of informatics education through qualitative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a rethinking of a fundamental area of higher education research and practice: the concept of belonging. Extending the considerable international research attending to belonging, we suggest that normative narratives often contain a number of omissions. Such omissions include a consideration of the experiences of those students who may not wish to, or who cannot, belong, as well as a questioning of the very boundaries of belonging. Crucially, our reconceptualisation occurs within the context of the post-Covid-19 times in which we now live. Such times have seen a rapid move to emergency remote teaching, and, we suggest, offer an opening in which belonging can no longer be taken-for-granted as uniform and, as located within fixed times and spaces. Engaging generative concepts from the work of Massey, and Braidotti, and drawing upon Adam's notion of timescapes, we propose a reframing of belonging as situated, relational and processual. Within this lens, belonging can be understood as a sociomaterial practice that shifts within, across and beyond online and face to face timespaces. At the end of this article, we examine the implications of such a reframing for educators seeking to develop belonging, and we also offer suggestions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability of citizens to establish the credibility of information and information sources through critical assessment is often emphasized as essential for the upholding of a democratic society and for people's health and safety. Drawing on material-discursive conceptualizations, the article asks, how does critical assessment of information and information sources play out as it is folded into a networked information infrastructure in which different types of information are mediated and shaped by the same algorithms and flattened into the same interfaces? The empirical material comprises dyadic interviews with 61 adolescents. The interviews were analysed using an interpretative approach focusing on the construction of action and meaning. The analysis foregrounds trust and agency as two dimensions. This way normative assumptions become visible as stereotypes, sometimes positioned as ideals towards which to strive, other times as deterrent examples: the non-evaluator, the naïve evaluator, the skeptical evaluator and the confident evaluator. The created stereotypes help to comprehend different understandings of critical assessment of information and how these can bring about different actions. The article argues that critical assessment of information as an element in media and information literacy must be understood not just in relation to how it is used to assess the credibility of information, but also regarding how it is performatively enrolled in the shaping of knowledge and in the creation of ignorance and doubt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital technologies are increasingly used in many areas of sport, exercise and health, including in schools. In this article, I engage with sociomaterial theory, and particularly concepts drawn from feminist new materialism, to address the question of how health and physical education (HPE) teachers in the context of the Australian education system are engaging with digital technologies. A set of six case studies were developed from interviews with a diverse range of Australian HPE teachers to identify how they use digital technologies in their classes. This in-depth approach configured a detailed overview of the contexts in which the teachers were using digital technologies, highlighting the complexity of teachers' feelings about and embodied experiences of digitised HPE pedagogies. These case studies demonstrate the interplay of materiality, spatiality, affective forces, relational connections and agential capacities in the teachers' accounts of their digitised HPE practices and experiences. They identify the role played by the colleagues, students and parents with whom the teachers engaged, the socioeconomic attributes and policy settings of the school in which they were working, and the geographical region in which the school was located. In short, the case studies highlight not only the more-than-human elements of these assemblages, but the more-than-digital elements, demonstrating that the incorporation of digital technologies into pedagogical practices – and how they come to matter – always takes place in a broader sociomaterial environment of human and nonhuman relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educators, parents, and policymakers agree on the need to assess children's learning to inform literacy teaching practices but are often divided about how best to gauge literacy development. In ensuing debates, school data walls have become pedagogically and spatially contested sites. We think of data walls as -scapes and scopic regimes that have sociomaterial force and that coalesce as complex assemblages worth interrogating. On that basis, our aim is to consider two kinds of data wall by drawing from a three year study of literacy teaching practices in government schools in one Australian state and sharing insights with resonance in similar education systems. Analysis shows that the first, more common data wall mapped and privileged quantitative data about, and summative testing results for, children and functioned primarily as an accountability tool. The second data wall added layers of qualitative data and formative assessment and facilitated valuable professional learning and development in support of children's learning outcomes. Our findings are significant because they reveal how data walls foster integrative approaches to literacy assessment that cut through the debate. Findings also furnish theoretical insights about how data walls are powerful assemblages, enable sound educational outcomes, but require ongoing attention to their sociomaterial effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feedback remains a fundamental and challenging aspect of higher education policy and practice. Increasingly research has sought to understand how to more effectively develop students' feedback literacy in order to improve individuals' engagement with assessment feedback. To date, work within this area has been underpinned by cognitive and affective conceptions of feedback literacy, and feedback is commonly conceptualised as a binary, dialogic, relationship between feedback giver and recipient, within a humanist perspective. Drawing upon a rich literature that foregrounds the value of social, materialist, and posthuman perspectives in order to look again at educational contexts and practices, this article explores a wider re-conceptualisation of feedback literacy and of learning and teaching interactions. Moving forward from both a transmission-focused depiction of feedback, and a student as proactive recipient conception, I suggest that students' engagement with feedback is a sociomaterial practice, and that students' agency is complicated by factors that exist beyond a human to human interaction. As such, this article offers a new and alternative viewpoint that deviates from mainstream discussions of feedback literacy, and ends with a consideration of what a sociomaterial perspective can offer researchers and practitioners in order to progress work within this key area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the challenges and emergent nature of learning during undergraduate internships. Much scholarly inquiry on the latter focuses on internship experiences within traditional professional domains such as medicine, teacher education, and other fields. There is less knowledge about undergraduate interns entering more fluid and recent work sectors such as Public Relations and Communication. In this study, a sociomaterial perspective guided the interest in the situated and emergent nature of learning as an intern in such tool-saturated environments. Specifically, we examined how interns learn to participate in such activities, and how they encounter and appropriate sociomaterial resources used for coordinating and performing work practices. Using a case study method, we examined internship experiences of penultimate undergraduates in communication studies (N = 38). From semi-structured interviews, strategies such as scaffolding, networking and negotiating with colleagues, and technological tools as contingent means for coping with workplace challenges were reported during the initial stage of their internship. By making visible knowledge strategies undergraduates interns employ for learning at the workplace, we call to attention the role of and access to technologies, significant others, and workplace culture in the development of professional learning in such dynamic professional settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study brings empathy to the centre of literacy practice by investigating children's augmented storying as it was related to empathetic encounters across the human and more-than-human worlds. The study applies sociomaterial theorising that defines empathy as relational and emergent across human–material–spatial–temporal assemblages. The empirical study was situated in a Finnish primary school in which children used an augmented story-crafting tool (MyAR Julle) to explore their local environment and to create and share their stories. The findings show how empathy emerged situationally across the children, other human beings, materials, technology and the natural world. The empathetic encounters of the children's narratives were more than romantic or smooth encounters, instead competing and in tension with one another, calling moral reasoning and agency. The study shows the potential of sociomaterial theorising to change the way we think about children's encounters with the world, using empathy as a framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Platforms are fulfilling functions previously considered within the jurisdictions of media outlets, such as news distribution, advertising, or editorial judgment. This article proposes strengthening the vocabulary of scholarship on news organizations and platforms by taking material agency seriously. It animates sociomateriality as a suitable conceptual framework to dissect human and nonhuman agency in editorial judgment and presents future research with ontological paths for considering their relationship. When platforms are accused of bias or partisanship, this pinpoints the importance of perceptions of who is in charge of editorial judgment. This article suggests that by utilizing a sociomateriality framework to disentangle the interplay of the human and the algorithmic, editorial judgment surfaces as a seminal similarity between media and platforms. The ancillary concept of commensurability serves as an analytical heuristic to render such comparisons possible. This is illustrated by two exemplifications of the sociomateriality framework: The cases of Facebook Trending Topics, and of Twitter Moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While much existing work on digital storytelling with young people has focused prominently upon presenting their own personal narratives and viewpoints, relatively little attention has been given to learning that could arise from digital adaptations by young children of existing and well-known stories. This article reports work exploring learning activities through a case study involving three pupils (aged 8, 10 and 12) and their teachers engaged over a 6-month period in digitally retelling a fairy tale from a printed storybook. In addition to considering the role of the printed text and the learning opportunities arising from its digital retelling, discussion focuses on how the findings cohere with more recently developing theoretical perspectives on learning that in addition to the social take into account the role of the material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]