Farinaz Fassa

A Sociological Contribution to Understanding the Use of Robots in Schools: The Thymio Robot

The Thymio II robot was designed to be used by teachers in their classrooms for a wide range of activities and at all levels of the curriculum, from very young children to the end of high school. Although the educationally oriented design of this innovative robot was successful and made it possible to distribute more than 800 Thymio robots in schools with a large majority in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, it was not sufficient to significantly raise the number of teachers using robot technology in their teaching after three years of commercialization. After an introduction and a first section on the design of this educational robot, this paper presents some results of a sociological analysis of the benefits and blockages identified by teachers in using robots, or not, with their pupils.

Upgrade Your Robot Competition, Make a Festival! [Competitions]

Keywords: [mobots] ; educational robotics ; robots competitions ; NCCR Robotics Reference EPFL-ARTICLE-188462doi:10.1109/MRA.2013.2272203 Record created on 2013-09-12, modified on 2017-05-12

The Gendering of Excellence Through Quality Criteria: The case of the Swiss National Science Foundation Professorships in Switzerland

The Swiss National Science Foundation Professorships Programme is presented as a programme that aims to promote outstanding young scholars to professorial positions. Academic excellence is presented as the main selection criterion. The emphasis put on the research portfolio and on the age of the candidates means that the beneficiaries of these professorships put forward an image of excellence that is more embedded in data-based sciences, than in the humanities and social sciences, thus strengthening the domination of a sector of scientific activity essentially occupied by men over the sector that has opened up more widely to women. This paper aims to deconstruct the criteria of academic excellence as they appear in this programme, and to show that what seem to be quality criteria are inspired by a specific model. These biases tend to undermine the gender equality aims of the programme.

Excellence and gender

Purpose – Discussing the Swiss case, the purpose of this paper is to examine how gender equality policies deal with the present requirements for scholars to be considered “excellent”. It aims to pinpoint the lines of tension or coherence between excellence, meritocracy and gender politics. Design/methodology/approach – In order to specify the norms of academic careers and their different renditions, the author draws on two studies (at local and national levels) to illustrate where the changes and resistances are taking place. Findings – The translations of a number of demands of feminist movements into the policies set up to favour equality between the sexes may combine to challenge the norms of academia as a gendered realm. Nevertheless, without strong pressure from feminists at local level and the conduct of research pursuing the enterprise of deconstructing norms, top-down policies may prove less “corrective” than affirmative action. This pressure is not only useful to build gender equality in science ...

Gender Studies: A ‘Cheeky Knowledge’ Renormalised?

Our contribution investigates the institutionalisation process of gender studies in a Swiss French-speaking university, with a particular focus on its articulation with local social demands. The new academic governance has transformed the debates around such studies in a way that might have been expected to benefit gender studies, whose interdisciplinarity was initially seen as an undeniable advantage. Nevertheless, comparison with the changes that have occurred over the past 25 years in another interdisciplinary field of knowledge, area studies, suggests that the social resistances and new scientific objects offered by women’s/gender studies or area studies tend to be diluted under the joint influence of new social demands, fragmentation and globalisation, paving the way for new (?) academic disciplinary definitions that bring back to normal the ‘cheeky knowledge’ built by these studies.