Simone Belli

A collaboratively derived environmental research agenda for Galápagos

Galapagos is one of the most pristine archipelagos in the world and its conservation relies upon research and sensible management. In recent decades both the interest in, and the needs of, the islands have increased, yet the funds and capacity for necessary research have remained limited. It has become, therefore, increasingly important to identify areas of priority research to assist decision-making in Galapagos conservation. This study identified 50 questions considered priorities for future research and management. The exercise involved the collaboration of policy makers, practitioners and researchers from more than 30 different organisations. Initially, 360 people were consulted to generate 781 questions. An established process of preworkshop voting and three rounds to reduce and reword the questions, followed by a two-day workshop, was used to produce the final 50 questions. The most common issues raised by this list of questions were human population growth, climate change and the impact of invasive alien species. These results have already been used by a range of organisations and politicians and are expected to provide the basis for future research on the islands so that its sustainability may be enhanced.

‘Often it is because of who is doing it.’ The production of a youth subculture’s image through talk

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a transactional approach to how the image of a subculture is co-produced through talk in the context of a face-to-face social encounter. A single-case micro-analysis of a talk about the squatting movement in Spain is developed. During the talk an interaction occurs between university students, one of whom is a squatter. Inspired by Goffman’s work on the presentation of the self in everyday life, we examined how co-participants engaged in the following: (1) the production of a working definition of squatting and squatters, (2) the critical examination of such definition, and (3) the repair of squatting and squatters’ image when it is spoiled. The analysed social encounter is regarded as an example of ‘mixed contact’ between members and non-members of youth (political) subculture. The discussion stresses the techniques of information control deployed by the subculturalist to manage the public image of squatters while performing dramaturgical loyalty to her membership groups. A transactional understanding of youth subculture is proposed.

Managing Negative Emotions in Online Collaborative Learning. A multimodal approach to solving technical difficulties

The purpose of this paper is to identify how participants manage technical difficulties during online collaborative learning. We analyze the participation framework in a corpus composed of 30 hours of online collaborative learning among students of an Andean university, their professor, and international experts. The internet-based IT platform used was ZOOM. We present a multimodal interaction of verbal and body language in collaborative activity for the analysis of moment-by-moment evolving social interaction. Also using conversation analysis, we focus on the ways in which participants interact with their words and their non-lexical expression. Thanks to this methodology, we describe the moment-by-moment interactional work performed in collaborative activity. We have observed how technical difficulties generate social unrest and negative emotions shared among participants. In many cases, these difficulties generate conflicts between participants. We describe how negative emotions are shown in mixed contexts, and how users solved these during online collaborative learning. This study contributes to previous knowledge on the importance of multimodal interaction in displaying engagement and organizing courses of action in meeting settings by analyzing the multimodal construction of one specific situation, that is, a conflict caused by technical issues and managed between users.

Narratives of trust: sharing knowledge as a second-order emotion

Abstract Our aim is to examine why trust can be considered a second-order emotion and how the way in which trust plays out differently in aesthetic and ordinary contexts can provide another mode of investigating second-order emotions. Our thesis is developed in three sections and a conclusion. In the first section, we perform an example analysis to show why narratives are important for our emotions. In the second section, we examine how trust can be considered a second-order emotion and establish criteria for identifying it as a second-order emotion. In the third section, we present one of the aims of trust, i.e. sharing knowledge between agents, when a testimony-giver shares knowledge in an epistemic trust process with others. We show how the relationship construction between persons thanks to trust, a second-order emotion that represents emotional ties between agents to achieve a first-order emotion.

When Technology Draws Society: Distributed Trust in Horizontal Infrastructure

The authors present a research based in Spain and carried out between 2011 and 2014 on the social organizations and affective processes involved in social movements. Using extracts from narrative interviews, they explore how participants in social protests cross attachment and technology in order to develop trusting relationships. The way they propose to analyse the issue of trust in social organizations is to examine the discursive construction of the links between the attachment of actors and the use of different technologies. The narrative was recorded in an event that was organised in the city of Madrid in 2014. The analysis is organised in three parts. The first step is to introduce the first approach to constructing the horizontal infrastructure. In the second step, the authors show how good practice stimulates social organizations to create the perfect environment to distribute trust. In the last step, they present technology and society zigzagging together to achieve a common purpose. They consider technology as a marker of the emergence of new forms of cooperation and innovation constructed by shared trust among the actors involved in social organizations. They introduce a specific device, where expert knowledge contributes to the very definition and shaping of the trust within social organizations.

Etnografia cognitiva delle interazioni mediche. Medici e infermieri prendono decisioni

The debate on medical decision-making needs naturalistic studies such as the cognitive ethnography we present here. This paper claims the needs to move from the taken for granted theory of mind to an empirical level. Following recent microsociological and cognitive science studies, we understand knowledge as the product of interaction within a working medical team. Thus, we propose a distributed and embodied cognition approach to expert knowledge. We offer examples of Activity Recurrent Episodes or ARE as our minimal unit of analysis and analyze them in medical narratives in detail. We claim that qualitative analysis helps us explain how decisionmaking really works. Finally, we pinpoint at the invisibility of the patient, which is part of the medical setting but is clearly objectified in the communicative relationships that link the doctors and nurses.

Narratives from call shop users: Emotional performance of velocity

In recent years, the debate on emotions has been influenced by postconstructionist research, particularly the use of performativity as a key concept. According to Judith Butler (1993, 1997) the construction of emotions is a process open to constant change and redefinition. The final result of emotionlanguage “natural” development is what is known as technoscience. New ways of naming emotions have emerged within technoscience. In our research on the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) by cyber-café and call shop users, we came to understand how these technologies are significant in those users’ daily life. The emphasis will be on analyzing emotions related to the use of ICT in the aforementioned settings. Using the concept of performance (Butler, 1990), we will explore how narratives create a need for particular emotions, which did not exist before they were performed. To understand this performance, we use an ad hoc tool called Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) as it is used by the Manchester School. Analysis has revealed the existence of a membership category in which velocity is salient as performance. This ‘velocity’ seems to follow the evolution of technoscience in the social sciences. We will observe velocity in the context created by two concepts, Donna Haraway’s (1990) cyborg and Alessandro Baricco’s (2007) mutant.