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1. Contemporary Forms of Social Justice Activism in Architecture

   Roudbari, Shawhin ; Gjata, Joris ; Rowe, Matthew ( January 2020 , Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture)

   The goal of this paper is to share a sociological framework for understanding social justice activism with the intention of improving efficacy of architects’ efforts in addressing contentious social issues. The paper draws on recent sociological scholarship on professions and social movements, which give us new ways of thinking about our agency in affecting social change within and beyond the profession. The paper presents emerging themes based on participant observation and unstructured interviews conducted over the past two years, focused on contemporary activism in architecture. We highlight how professionals use their material resources (design expertise and practice) and their symbolic resources (status in socio-economic, political, and cultural systems) in different forms of contentious political engagement. We offer a sociological framework for distinguishing between ways architects use their work and status in their efforts to achieve social and professional change. The analysis offered in this paper is intended to offer politically-engaged architects (professionals, educators, and students) a framework to assist in their efforts toward shaping equity and justice outcomes for the field and for society.
2. Redesigning the Trading Zone between Systematics and Conservation: Insights from Malagasy mouse lemur classifications, 1982 to present

   https://doi.org/10.3897/biss.4.59234  

   Franz, Nico ; Sterner, Beckett ; Upham, Nathan ; Cortés Hernández, Kevin ( October 2020 , Biodiversity Information Science and Standards)

   Translating information between the domains of systematics and conservation requires novel information management designs. Such designs should improve interactions across the trading zone between the domains, herein understood as the model according to which knowledge and uncertainty are productively translated in both directions (cf. Collins et al. 2019). Two commonly held attitudes stand in the way of designing a well-functioning systematics-to-conservation trading zone. On one side, there are calls to unify the knowledge signal produced by systematics, underpinned by the argument that such unification is a necessary precondition for conservation policy to be reliably expressed and enacted (e.g., Garnett et al. 2020). As a matter of legal scholarship, the argument for systematic unity by legislative necessity is principally false (Weiss 2003, MacNeil 2009, Chromá 2011), but perhaps effective enough as a strategy to win over audiences unsure about robust law-making practices in light of variable and uncertain knowledge. On the other side, there is an attitude that conservation cannot ever restrict the academic freedom of systematics as a scientific discipline (e.g., Raposo et al. 2017). This otherwise sound argument misses the mark in the context of designing a productive trading zone with conservation. The central interactional challenge is not whethermore »the systematic knowledge can vary at a given time and/or evolve over time, but whether these signal dynamics are tractable in ways that actors can translate into robust maxims for conservation. Redesigning the trading zone should rest on the (historically validated) projection that systematics will continue to attract generations of inspired, productive researchers and broad-based societal support, frequently leading to protracted conflicts and dramatic shifts in how practioners in the field organize and identify organismal lineages subject to conservation. This confident outlook for systematics' future, in turn, should refocus the challenge of designing the trading zone as one of building better information services to model the concurrent conflicts and longer-term evolution of systematic knowledge. It would seem unreasonable to expect the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List Index to develop better data science models for the dynamics of systematic knowledge (cf. Hoffmann et al. 2011) than are operational in the most reputable information systems designed and used by domain experts (Burgin et al. 2018). The reasonable challenge from conservation to systematics is not to stop being a science but to be a better data science. In this paper, we will review advances in biodiversity data science in relation to representing and reasoning over changes in systematic knowledge with computational logic, i.e., modeling systematic intelligence (Franz et al. 2016). We stress-test this approach with a use case where rapid systematic signal change and high stakes for conservation action intersect, i.e., the Malagasy mouse lemurs ( Microcebus É. Geoffroy, 1834 sec. Schüßler et al. 2020), where the number of recognized species-level concepts has risen from 2 to 25 in the span of 38 years (1982–2020). As much as scientifically defensible, we extend our modeling approach to the level of individual published occurrence records, where the inability to do so sometimes reflects substandard practice but more importantly reveals systemic inadequacies in biodiversity data science or informational modeling. In the absence of shared, sound theoretical foundations to assess taxonomic congruence or incongruence across treatments, and in the absence of biodiversity data platforms capable of propagating logic-enabled, scalable occurrence-to-concept identification events to produce alternative and succeeding distribution maps, there is no robust way to provide a knowledge signal from systematics to conservation that is both consistent in its syntax and acccurate in its semantics, in the sense of accurately reflecting the variation and uncertainty that exists across multiple systematic perspectives. Translating this diagnosis into new designs for the trading zone is only one "half" of the solution, i.e., a technical advancement that then would need to be socially endorsed and incentivized by systematic and conservation communities motivated to elevate their collaborative interactions and trade robustly in inherently variable and uncertain information.« less
3. Emotions in engineering education: Preliminary results from a scoping review

   Lönngren, Johanna ; Bellocchi, Alberto ; Bøgelund, Pia ; Direito, Inês ; Huff, James ; Mohd-Yusof, Khairiyah ; Murzi, Homero ; Tormey, Roland ( December 2021 , Proceedings of the Research in Engineering Education Symposium & Australasian Association for Engineering Education Conference)

   CONTEXT There is today a broad consensus that emotions influence all forms of teaching and learning, and scholarship on Emotions in Engineering Education (EEE) is an emerging and rapidly growing field. However, this nascent research is currently very dispersed and not well consolidated. There is also a lack of knowledge about the state of the art, strengths, and limitations of the existing literature in the field, gaps, and future avenues for research. PURPOSE We have conducted a scoping review of EEE research, aiming to provide a first overview of the EEE scholarship landscape. We report here on preliminary findings related to (1) the status of the field, (2) geographical representation of authors, and (3) emerging hot spots and blind spots in terms of research approaches, contexts, and topics. METHODS The scoping review is part of a larger, systematic review of the EEE literature. Using an inclusive search strategy, we retrieved 2,175 items mentioning emotions and engineering education, including common synonyms. Through abstract screening and full text sifting, we identified 184 items that significantly focus on engineering education and emotion. From these items, we extracted and synthesized basic quantitative and qualitative information on publication outlets, author origins, keywords, research approaches, andmore »research contexts. PRELIMINARY RESULTS Surprised by the large number of EEE publications, we found that EEE is a rapidly expanding, but internationally dispersed field. Preliminary results also suggest a dominance of research on higher education, often exploring students’ academic emotions or emotional competences. Research on emotional intelligence and anxiety is particularly common while studies focusing on cultural and sociological aspects of EEE are largely absent. CONCLUSIONS The EEE literature is expanding exponentially. However, the field is not well consolidated, and many blind spots remain to be explored in terms of research approaches, contexts, and foci. To accelerate the development of the field, we invite current and prospective EEE researchers to join our emerging, international community of EEE researchers.« less
4. Trust in Social Relations

   https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-082120-082850  

   Schilke, Oliver ; Reimann, Martin ; Cook, Karen S. ( July 2021 , Annual Review of Sociology)

   Trust is key to understanding the dynamics of social relations, to the extent that it is often viewed as the glue that holds society together. We review the mounting sociological literature to help answer what trust is and where it comes from. To this end, we identify two research streams—on particularized trust and generalized trust, respectively—and propose an integrative framework that bridges these lines of research while also enhancing conceptual precision. This framework provides the springboard for identifying several important avenues for future research, including new investigations into the radius of trust, the intermediate form of categorical trust, and the interrelationships between different forms of trust. This article also calls for more scholarship focusing on the consequences (versus antecedents) of trust, addressing more fully the trustee side of the relation, and employing new empirical methods. Such novel approaches will ensure that trust research will continue to provide important insights into the functioning of modern society in the years to come. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 47 is July 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
5. What is educational entrepreneurship? Strategic action, temporality, and the expansion of US higher education

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-021-09443-3  

   Kindel, Alexander T. ; Stevens, Mitchell L. ( April 2021 , Theory and Society)

   The massive expansion of US higher education after World War II is a sociological puzzle: a spectacular feat of state capacity-building in a highly federated polity. Prior scholarship names academic leaders as key drivers of this expansion, yet the conditions for the possibility and fate of their activity remain under-specified. We fill this gap by theorizing what Randall Collins first callededucational entrepreneurshipas a special kind of strategic action in the US polity. We argue that the cultural authority and organizational centrality of universities in the US national context combine with historical contingency to episodically produce conditions under which academic credentials can be made viable solutions to social problems. We put our theorization to the test by revisiting and extending a paradigmatic case: the expansion of engineering education at Stanford University between 1945 and 1969. Invoking several contemporaneous and subsequent cases, we demonstrate the promise of theorizing educational expansion as an outcome of strategic action by specifically located actors over time.