Paul H. Mason

Visual data in applied qualitative research: lessons from experience

Image-based research is well developed within visual anthropology and visual ethnography, but it is little used outside of these disciplines. This article discusses an innovative research project which sought to use the outputs of a community development arts project as a source of visual data for the evaluation of an area-based health initiative. The use of such material in applied research required the development of a method unique to the project, and the aims, process and outcomes are discussed. In particular, the article details the difficulties encountered and the attempts made to overcome such challenges. It ends by suggesting there is scope for the development and application of the method, if it is developed within key guiding principles.

A systems approach to animal communication

Why animal communication displays are so complex and how they have evolved are active foci of research with a long and rich history. Progress towards an evolutionary analysis of signal complexity, however, has been constrained by a lack of hypotheses to explain similarities and/or differences in signalling systems across taxa. To address this, we advocate incorporating a systems approach into studies of animal communication—an approach that includes comprehensive experimental designs and data collection in combination with the implementation of systems concepts and tools. A systems approach evaluates overall display architecture, including how components interact to alter function, and how function varies in different states of the system. We provide a brief overview of the current state of the field, including a focus on select studies that highlight the dynamic nature of animal signalling. We then introduce core concepts from systems biology (redundancy, degeneracy, pluripotentiality, and modularity) and discuss their relationships with system properties (e.g. robustness, flexibility, evolvability). We translate systems concepts into an animal communication framework and accentuate their utility through a case study. Finally, we demonstrate how consideration of the system-level organization of animal communication poses new practical research questions that will aid our understanding of how and why animal displays are so complex.

Epigenomics and the concept of degeneracy in biological systems

Researchers in the field of epigenomics are developing more nuanced understandings of biological complexity, and exploring the multiple pathways that lead to phenotypic expression. The concept of degeneracy—referring to the multiple pathways that a system recruits to achieve functional plasticity—is an important conceptual accompaniment to the growing body of knowledge in epigenomics. Distinct from degradation, redundancy and dilapidation; degeneracy refers to the plasticity of traits whose function overlaps in some environments, but diverges in others. While a redundant system is composed of repeated identical elements performing the same function, a degenerate system is composed of different elements performing similar or overlapping functions. Here, we describe the degenerate structure of gene regulatory systems from the basic genetic code to flexible epigenomic modifications, and discuss how these structural features have contributed to organism complexity, robustness, plasticity and evolvability.

Apprenticeship as method: embodied learning in ethnographic practice

Apprenticeship, the process of developing from novice to proficiency under the guidance of a skilled expert, varies across cultures and among different skilled communities, but for many communities of practice, apprenticeship offers an ideal ethnographic point of entry. For certain kinds of anthropological fieldwork, such as studies of bodily arts, apprenticeship may offer an essential research method. In this article, three anthropologists discuss their experiences using apprenticeship in fieldwork and consider the practical and theoretical issues of apprenticeship as a site of ethnographic inquiry. As a channel for achieving social inclusion, apprenticeship offers anthropologists opportunities to navigate and chart interpersonal power, access to emic types of knowledge, first-hand experience of the pedagogical milieu, and avenues to acquire cultural proficiency. Because apprenticeship itself includes mechanisms to socialize emerging skill, such as disciplining the generation of variation that is inherent in each individual’s rediscovery or reinvention of skill, apprenticeship encourages our subjects to collaborate with us by allowing them to critique the ethnographer’s performance and provide feedback in familiar, locally-meaningful ways.

SOCIAL, HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF TUBERCULOSIS.

Tuberculosis (TB) researchers and clinicians, by virtue of the social disease they study, are drawn into an engagement with ways of understanding illness that extend beyond the strictly biomedical model. Primers on social science concepts directly relevant to TB, however, are lacking. The particularities of TB disease mean that certain social science concepts are more relevant than others. Concepts such as structural violence can seem complicated and off-putting. Other concepts, such as gender, can seem so familiar that they are left relatively unexplored. An intimate familiarity with the social dimensions of disease is valuable, particularly for infectious diseases, because the social model is an important complement to the biomedical model. This review article offers an important introduction to a selection of concepts directly relevant to TB from health sociology, medical anthropology and social cognitive theory. The article has pedagogical utility and also serves as a useful refresher for those researchers already engaged in this genre of work. The conceptual tools of health sociology, medical anthropology and social cognitive theory offer insightful ways to examine the social, historical and cultural dimensions of public health. By recognizing cultural experience as a central force shaping human interactions with the world, TB researchers and clinicians develop a more nuanced consideration of how health, illness and medical treatment are understood, interpreted and confronted.

Sociocultural dimensions of tuberculosis: an overview of key concepts.

Biomedical innovations are unlikely to provide effective and ethical tuberculosis (TB) control measures without complementary social science research. However, a strong interest in interdisciplinary work is often undermined by differences in language and concepts specific to each disciplinary approach. Accordingly, biological and social scientists need to learn how to communicate with each other. This article will outline key concepts relating to TB from medical anthropology and health sociology. Distilling these concepts in an introductory framework is intended to make this material accessible to researchers in laboratory, clinical and fieldwork settings, as well as to encourage more social scientists to engage with TB research among target groups critical for successful programmatic interventions. For pedagogical purposes, the relevant concepts are grouped into three categories: 1) structures and settings, which includes overarching themes such as syndemics, local biologies, medicalisation, structural violence and surveillance; 2) practices and processes, encompassing gender, stigma, taboo, and victim blaming; and 3) experience and enculturation, which includes illness narratives, biographical disruption and dynamic nominalism. By helping to navigate this literature, we hope to foster more cross-disciplinary conversations between qualitative and quantitative researchers. TB, a quintessential social disease, will be controlled more effectively using a multistranded research approach.

Music, Dance and the Total Art Work: Choreomusicology in Theory and Practice.

Euro-American performance arts are exceptional among the world’s cultures in that music and dance are separable and constitute independent disciplines. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a distinct consciousness emerged that demonstrated an awareness of the varying and protean relationships that music and dance can share. While some artists were keen to develop their particular medium to its fullest potential, others were keen to group expressive mediums together into new wholes. These explorations were accompanied by a rapid but uneven expansion in audio, visual and audio-visual technology. As artistic practices evolved and technology developed, a range of possibilities were explored and the discipline of choreomusicology finally emerged. Choreomusicology is the study of the relationship between sound and movement within any performance genre. As a pedagogical tool, this article discusses key developments in the history of choreomusical theory and practice with a sympathetic selection of material using the words of artists and theoreticians. The evolving relationship between music and dance in any performance tradition is a socially situated process shaped by a range of historically constituted practices. The current discussion situates the artistic legacy inherited by contemporary Euro-American artists within a historical and cultural context.

Ethics and Epistemology in Big Data Research

Biomedical innovation and translation are increasingly emphasizing research using “big data.” The hope is that big data methods will both speed up research and make its results more applicable to “real-world” patients and health services. While big data research has been embraced by scientists, politicians, industry, and the public, numerous ethical, organizational, and technical/methodological concerns have also been raised. With respect to technical and methodological concerns, there is a view that these will be resolved through sophisticated information technologies, predictive algorithms, and data analysis techniques. While such advances will likely go some way towards resolving technical and methodological issues, we believe that the epistemological issues raised by big data research have important ethical implications and raise questions about the very possibility of big data research achieving its goals.

Ethics and Epistemology of Big Data

In this Symposium on the Ethics and Epistemology of Big Data, we present four perspectives on the ways in which the rapid growth in size of research databanks—i.e. their shift into the realm of “big data”—has changed their moral, socio-political, and epistemic status. While there is clearly something different about “big data” databanks, we encourage readers to place the arguments presented in this Symposium in the context of longstanding debates about the ethics, politics, and epistemology of biobank, database, genetic, and epidemiological research.

Tuberculosis and gender in the Asia‐Pacific region

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 227