Now showing items 1-5 of 5

    • Team Dynamics and Learning Opportunities in Social Science Research Teams

      McGinn, Michelle K.; Niemczyk, Ewelina K. (University of Alberta. Faculty of Education., 2020)
      Although the contemporary research environment encourages knowledge generation through research collaboration rather than individualized projects, limited scholarly attention has been devoted to the practice of collaboration within research teams. This paper presents a qualitative analysis of team dynamics and learning opportunities within four social science research teams. The findings reveal similarities and differences in leadership style and interaction approaches that affected how research was undertaken and the possibilities for team members to learn from each other. The snapshots provide models for other research teams that extend situated learning theories and the existing research base about collaboration, research teams, and research leadership.
    • False polarization: debiasing as applied social epistemology

      Kenyon, Tim (Springer, 2014-03-10)
      False polarization (FP) is an interpersonal bias on judgement, the effect of which is to lead people in contexts of disagreement to overestimate the differences between their respective views. I propose to treat FP as a problem of applied social epistemology—a barrier to reliable belief-formation in certain social domains—and to ask how best one may debias for FP. This inquiry leads more generally into questions about effective debiasing strategies; on this front, considerable empirical evidence suggests that intuitively attractive strategies for debiasing are not very effective, while more effective strategies are neither intuitive nor likely to be easily implemented. The supports for more effective debiasing seem either to be inherently social and cooperative, or at least to presuppose social efforts to create physical or decision making infrastructure for mitigating bias. The upshot, I argue, is that becoming a less biased epistemic agent is a thoroughly socialized project.
    • Socially Inclusive Parenting Leaves and Parental Benefit Entitlements: Rethinking Care and Work Binaries

      Doucet, Andrea (Cogitatio Press, 2021)
      How can parental leave design be more socially inclusive? Should all parents be entitled to parental benefits or only those parents who are eligible based on a particular level of labour market participation? To think through questions of social inclusion in parental leave policy design, particularly issues related to entitlements to benefits, I make three arguments. First, aiming to extend Dobrotić and Blum’s work on entitlements to parental benefits, I argue that ‘mixed systems’ that include both citizenship‐based and employment‐based benefits are just and socially inclusive approaches to parental leaves and citizenship. Second, to build a robust conceptual scaffolding for a ‘mixed’ benefits approach, I argue that that we need to attend to the histories and relationalities of the concepts and conceptual narratives that implicitly or explicitly inform parental leave policies and scholarship. Third, and more broadly, I argue that a metanarrative of care and work binaries underpins most scholarship and public and policy discourses on care work and paid work and on social policies, including parental leave policies. In this article, I outline revisioned conceptual narratives of care and work relationalities, arguing that they can begin to chip away at this metanarrative and that this kind of un‐thinking and rethinking can help us to envi‐ sion parental leave beyond employment policy—as care and work policy. Specifically, I focus on conceptual narratives that combine (1) care and work intra‐connections, (2) ethics of care and justice, and (3) ‘social care,’ ‘caring with,’ transforma‐ tive social protection, and social citizenship. Methodologically and epistemologically, this article is guided by my reading of Margaret Somers’ genealogical and relational approach to concepts, conceptual narratives, and metanarratives, and it is written in a Global North socio‐economic context marked by the COVID‐19 pandemic and 21st century neoliberalism.
    • Understanding social connections in communities: how to use social network analysis. Guidelines document

      Vasseur, Liette; Morris, S.; Verville, A. (Coastal Communities Challenges Community-University Research Alliance project, 2014)
      Coastal communities have been known to be highly vulnerable to climate change, especially due to sea level rise and extreme events such as storm surges which lead to flooding and accelerated coastal erosion. Most of these communities however are ill equipped to understand the issues and find solutions or strategies to adapt to these changes. In the context of resilience, there is a need for these communities to integrate concepts of social-ecological systems and governance to move forward for a more sustainable territorial development. The main challenge for most of them is to acquire the tools to be able to move forward.
    • KAIRON PROJECT : assessing the role of expressive arts in community-based breast cancer support systems in the Niagara Region

      Nancy, Cook (2010-01-29)
      Research Report Written for the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation.