Suchergebnisse

The Spanish colonial past permeates the institutions of higher education, configuring the contents and forms of disciplinary knowledge production that constitute it, as is the case of social work. In this article, we visit different scenarios where colonial memories are disputed in the context of the commemorations of 12 October (also called 'Hispanic Day' or 'Race Day') in Barcelona. Although multiple articulations of anti-racist movements, such as those related to Black Lives Matter, question the material and semiotics that sustain structural racism, colonial cultural layers are still predominant in the Spanish state. Analysis shows how colonial logics nest in social work practice by: first, contributing to the definition of subject positions – such as 'migrant' – as problematic and needy of integration policies and intervention; and, second, making structural racism invisible through the avoidance of radical analysis and action regarding the cultural layers that sustain and perpetuate institutional racism.

Covers -- Editorial advisory board -- Bordering, exclusions and necropolitics -- Borders and margins: debates on intersectionality for critical research -- Recollection-as-method in social welfare practice: dirty work, shame and resistance -- Life, death, ethnography: epistemologies and methods of the quasi-event -- Gather in my name, my skin, my everything… ("Gather in myName": Maya Angelou, 1974) -- Location as method -- Dislocations, dis-possessions: more movements of the people

Purpose
Contemporary governmentality combines biopolitical and necropolitical logics to establish social, political and physical borders that classify and stratify populations using symbolic and material marks as, for example, nationality, gender, ethnicity, race, sexuality, social class and/or disability. The social sciences have been prolific in the analysis of alterities and, in turn, implicated in the epistemologies and knowledge practices that underpin and sustain the multiplication of frontiers that define essential differences between populations. The purpose of this paper is to develop a strategy that analyze and subvert the logic of bordering inherent in the bio/necropolitical gaze. In different ways, this paper examines operations of delimitation and differentiation that contribute to monolithic definitions of subject and subjectivity.


Design/methodology/approach
The authors question border construction processes in terms of their static, homogenizing and exclusionary effects.


Findings
Instead of hierarchical stratification of populations, the papers in this special issue explore the possibilities of relationship and the conditions of such relationships. Who do we relate to? On which terms and conditions? With what purpose? In which ethical and political manner?


Originality/value
A critical understanding of the asymmetry in research practices makes visible how the researcher is legitimized to produce a representation of those researched, an interpretation of their words and actions without feedback or contribution to the specific context where the research has been carried out. Deconstructive and relational perspectives are put forward as critical strands that can set the basis of different approaches to research and social practice.

Los procesos de producción de conocimiento constituyen un elemento central en el engranaje de las formas de gubernamentalidad de las sociedades contemporáneas. En este contexto, las ciencias sociales son progresivamente incorporadas a estrategias de gestión poblacional desde una homogenización del pensamiento que opera a partir de criterios unificados de productividad académica. La pregunta sobre la vigencia de la investigación e intervención crítica nos sirve de guía para abordar las miradas, formas de hacer y relaciones que pueden caracterizar lo que denominamos el ejercicio de la investigacción crítica. Una exploración que sirve como marco de discusión a los artículos que se presentan dentro del actual número de Universitas Psychologica ; The processes of knowledge production are a central element in the mechanisms of governmentality of contemporary societies. In this context, the social sciences are progressively incorporated into population management strategies producing an homogenization of thought that operates from unified academic productivity criteria. The question of the validity of critical research and intervention guides us to address the perspectives, ways of doing and relationships that can characterize what we call the exercise of critical research-action. An exploration that serves as a framework for discussion of the articles that appear in the current issue of Universitas Psychologica.

The processes of knowledge production are a central element in the mechanisms of governmentality of contemporary societies. In this context, the social sciences are progressively incorporated into population management strategies producing an homogenization of thought that operates from unified academic productivity criteria. The question of the validity of critical research and intervention guides us to address the perspectives, ways of doing and relationships that can characterize what we call the exercise of critical research-action. An exploration that serves as a framework for discussion of the articles that appear in the current issue of Universitas Psychologica. ; Los procesos de producción de conocimiento constituyen un elemento central en el engranaje de las formas de gubernamentalidad de las sociedades contemporáneas. En este contexto, las ciencias sociales son progresivamente incorporadas a estrategias de gestión poblacional desde una homogenización del pensamiento que opera a partir de criterios unificados de productividad académica. La pregunta sobre la vigencia de la investigación e intervención crítica nos sirve de guía para abordar las miradas, formas de hacer y relaciones que pueden caracterizar lo que denominamos el ejercicio de la investigacción crítica. Una exploración que sirve como marco de discusión a los artículos que se presentan dentro del actual número de Universitas Psychologica

With the advent of social networks and the rise of mobile technologies, users have become ubiquitous sensors capable of monitoring various real-world events in a crowd-sourced manner. Location-based social networks have proven to be faster than traditional media channels in reporting and geo-locating breaking news, i.e. Osama Bin Laden's death was first confirmed on Twitter even before the announcement from the communication department at the White House. However, the deluge of user-generated data on these networks requires intelligent systems capable of identifying and characterizing such events in a comprehensive manner. The data mining community coined the term, event detection , to refer to the task of uncovering emerging patterns in data streams . Nonetheless, most data mining techniques do not reproduce the underlying data generation process, hampering to self-adapt in fast-changing scenarios. Because of this, we propose a probabilistic machine learning approach to event detection which explicitly models the data generation process and enables reasoning about the discovered events. With the aim to set forth the differences between both approaches, we present two techniques for the problem of event detection in Twitter : a data mining technique called Tweet-SCAN and a machine learning technique called Warble. We assess and compare both techniques in a dataset of tweets geo-located in the city of Barcelona during its annual festivities. Last but not least, we present the algorithmic changes and data processing frameworks to scale up the proposed techniques to big data workloads. ; This work is partially supported by Obra Social "la Caixa", by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under contract (TIN2015-65316), by the Severo Ochoa Program (SEV2015-0493), by SGR programs of the Catalan Government (2014-SGR-1051, 2014-SGR-118), Collectiveware (TIN2015-66863-C2-1-R) and BSC/UPC NVIDIA GPU Center of Excellence.We would also like to thank the reviewers for their constructive feedback. ; Peer Reviewed ; Postprint (author's final draft)

With the advent of social networks and the rise of mobile technologies, users have become ubiquitous sensors capable of monitoring various real-world events in a crowd-sourced manner. Location-based social networks have proven to be faster than traditional media channels in reporting and geo-locating breaking news, i.e. Osama Bin Laden's death was first confirmed on Twitter even before the announcement from the communication department at the White House. However, the deluge of user-generated data on these networks requires intelligent systems capable of identifying and characterizing such events in a comprehensive manner. The data mining community coined the term, event detection , to refer to the task of uncovering emerging patterns in data streams . Nonetheless, most data mining techniques do not reproduce the underlying data generation process, hampering to self-adapt in fast-changing scenarios. Because of this, we propose a probabilistic machine learning approach to event detection which explicitly models the data generation process and enables reasoning about the discovered events. With the aim to set forth the differences between both approaches, we present two techniques for the problem of event detection in Twitter : a data mining technique called Tweet-SCAN and a machine learning technique called Warble. We assess and compare both techniques in a dataset of tweets geo-located in the city of Barcelona during its annual festivities. Last but not least, we present the algorithmic changes and data processing frameworks to scale up the proposed techniques to big data workloads. ; This work is partially supported by Obra Social "la Caixa", by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under contract (TIN2015-65316), by the Severo Ochoa Program (SEV2015-0493), by SGR programs of the Catalan Government (2014-SGR-1051, 2014-SGR-118), Collectiveware (TIN2015-66863-C2-1-R) and BSC/UPC NVIDIA GPU Center of Excellence.We would also like to thank the reviewers for their constructive feedback. ; Peer Reviewed ...

The geographical identification of content in Social Networks have enabled to bridge the gap between online social platforms and the physical world. Although vast amounts of data in such networks are due to breaking news or global occurrences, local events witnessed by users in situ are also present in these streams and of great importance for many city entities. Nowadays, unsupervised machine learning techniques, such as Tweet-SCAN, are able to retrospectively detect these local events from tweets. However, these approaches have limited abilities to reason about unseen observations in a principled way due to the lack of a proper probabilistic foundation. Probabilistic models have also been proposed for the task, but their event identification capabilities are far from those of Tweet-SCAN. In this paper, we identify two key factors which, when combined, boost the accuracy of such models. As a first key factor, we notice that the large amount of meaningless social data requires explicitly modeling non-event observations.Therefore, we propose to incorporate a background model that captures spatio-temporal fluctuations of non-event tweets. As a second key factor, we observe that the shortness of tweets hampers the application of traditional topic models. Thus, we integrate event detection and topic modeling, assigning topic proportions to events instead of assigning them to individual tweets. As a result, we propose Warble, a new probabilistic model and learning scheme for retrospective event detection that incorporates these two key factors. We evaluate Warble in a data set of tweets located in Barcelona during its festivities. The empirical results show that the model outperforms other state-of-the-art techniques in detecting various types of events while relying on a principled probabilistic framework that enables to reason under uncertainty. ; This work is partially supported by Obra Social "la Caixa", by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under contract (TIN2015-65316), by the Severo Ochoa Program (SEV2015-0493), by SGR programs of the Catalan Government (2014-SGR-1051, 2014-SGR-118), Collectiveware (TIN2015-66863-C2-1-R) and BSC/UPC NVIDIA GPU Center of Excellence.We would also like to thank the reviewers for their constructive feedback. ; Peer Reviewed ; Postprint (author's final draft)

Twitter has become one of the most popular Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) that bridges physical and virtual worlds. Tweets, 140-character-long messages, are aimed to give answer to the What's happening? question. Occurrences and events in the real life (such as political protests, music concerts, natural disasters or terrorist acts) are usually reported through geo-located tweets by users on site. Uncovering event-related tweets from the rest is a challenging problem that necessarily requires exploiting different tweet features. With that in mind, we propose Tweet-SCAN, a novel event discovery technique based on the popular density-based clustering algorithm called DBSCAN. Tweet-SCAN takes into account four main features from a tweet, namely content, time, location and user to group together event-related tweets. The proposed technique models textual content through a probabilistic topic model called Hierarchical Dirichlet Process and introduces Jensen–Shannon distance for the task of neighborhood identification in the textual dimension. As a matter of fact, we show Tweet-SCAN performance in two real data sets of geo-located tweets posted during Barcelona local festivities in 2014 and 2015, for which some of the events were identified by domain experts beforehand. Through these tagged data sets, we are able to assess Tweet-SCAN capabilities to discover events, justify using a textual component and highlight the effects of several parameters. ; Peer Reviewed ; Postprint (author's final draft)

Twitter has become one of the most popular Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) that bridges physical and virtual worlds. Tweets, 140-character-long messages, are aimed to give answer to the What's happening? question. Occurrences and events in the real life (such as political protests, music concerts, natural disasters or terrorist acts) are usually reported through geo-located tweets by users on site. Uncovering event-related tweets from the rest is a challenging problem that necessarily requires exploiting different tweet features. With that in mind, we propose Tweet-SCAN, a novel event discovery technique based on the popular density-based clustering algorithm called DBSCAN. Tweet-SCAN takes into account four main features from a tweet, namely content, time, location and user to group together event-related tweets. The proposed technique models textual content through a probabilistic topic model called Hierarchical Dirichlet Process and introduces Jensen–Shannon distance for the task of neighborhood identification in the textual dimension. As a matter of fact, we show Tweet-SCAN performance in two real data sets of geo-located tweets posted during Barcelona local festivities in 2014 and 2015, for which some of the events were identified by domain experts beforehand. Through these tagged data sets, we are able to assess Tweet-SCAN capabilities to discover events, justify using a textual component and highlight the effects of several parameters. ; Peer Reviewed ; Postprint (author's final draft)

In diesem Aufsatz stellen wir unsere ethnografischen Forschungserfahrungen mit dem "technoaktivistischen" Workshop "Riereta" in Barcelona dar, der sich der Entwicklung und Implementation von freier Software und Informationstechnologien als Angeboten für politische Projekte und Aktivist(inn)enkollektive der Stadt gewidmet hat. Von diesen Erfahrungen ausgehend werden wir eine Reihe von methodologischen aber auch epistemologisch-politischen Fragen beantworten: Welche methodischen Werkzeuge, die die semiotisch-materiale Dimension erfahrbar machen, können eingesetzt werden? Wie soll Technik/Technologie in unser Forschungshandeln eingeführt werden? Wie lässt sich eine Methode entwickeln, die mit den Wünschen und Lebensweisen der Teilnehmenden übereinstimmt? Oder: Wie können die vielfältigen dissonanten Stimmen, die jedes ethnografische und praktisch-kreative Verstehen ausmachen, dargestellt werden? Diese Fragen lassen sich aus unserer Perspektive in der Frage danach zusammenfassen, wie aus der Sozialforschung und der ethnografischen Praxis Formen technopolitischen Engagements entstehen können. Dazu gliedern wir den Aufsatz entlang folgender drei Achsen: (1) Beziehung zwischen den Forschungssubjekten und -objekten, die sich von einer eher vagen partizipativen Perspektive des Ko-Forschens hin zu einer epistemischen und im engeren Sinne wissenschaftlichen Ausdrucksperspektive veränderte; 2) die verwendete Methodik, die einer performativen und virtuellen Ethnografie nahestand und sich auf technische Werkzeuge wie TikiWikis (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikiWiki) stützte; sowie (3) die Produkte des Forschungsprozesses, also kollektives und situiertes Verstehen über den Technoaktivismus. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs070317 ; In this article we report on an ethnographic research experience on Riereta, a techno-activist workshop located in Barcelona, where free software and other technologies are developed and put at the disposal of other political projects and activist collectives. Through our research experience, we answer some ...

In diesem Aufsatz stellen wir unsere ethnografischen Forschungserfahrungen mit dem "technoaktivistischen" Workshop "Riereta" in Barcelona dar, der sich der Entwicklung und Implementation von freier Software und Informationstechnologien als Angeboten für politische Projekte und Aktivist(inn)enkollektive der Stadt gewidmet hat. Von diesen Erfahrungen ausgehend werden wir eine Reihe von methodologischen aber auch epistemologisch-politischen Fragen beantworten: Welche methodischen Werkzeuge, die die semiotisch-materiale Dimension erfahrbar machen, können eingesetzt werden? Wie soll Technik/Technologie in unser Forschungshandeln eingeführt werden? Wie lässt sich eine Methode entwickeln, die mit den Wünschen und Lebensweisen der Teilnehmenden übereinstimmt? Oder: Wie können die vielfältigen dissonanten Stimmen, die jedes ethnografische und praktisch-kreative Verstehen ausmachen, dargestellt werden? Diese Fragen lassen sich aus unserer Perspektive in der Frage danach zusammenfassen, wie aus der Sozialforschung und der ethnografischen Praxis Formen technopolitischen Engagements entstehen können. Dazu gliedern wir den Aufsatz entlang folgender drei Achsen: (1) Beziehung zwischen den Forschungssubjekten und -objekten, die sich von einer eher vagen partizipativen Perspektive des Ko-Forschens hin zu einer epistemischen und im engeren Sinne wissenschaftlichen Ausdrucksperspektive veränderte; 2) die verwendete Methodik, die einer performativen und virtuellen Ethnografie nahestand und sich auf technische Werkzeuge wie TikiWikis (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikiWiki) stützte; sowie (3) die Produkte des Forschungsprozesses, also kollektives und situiertes Verstehen über den Technoaktivismus.