A lot of things need to be repaired and a lot of relationships are in need of a knowledgeable mending. Can we start to talk/write about them?' This invitationsent by one of the authors to the othersled us, as feminist women in academia, to join together in an experimental writing about the effects of COVID-19 on daily social practices and on potential (and innovative) ways for repairing work in different fields of social organization. By diffractively intertwining our embodied experiences of becoming together-with Others, we foreground a multiplicity of repair (care) practices COVID-19 is making visible. Echoing one another, we take a stand and say that we need to prevent the future from becoming the past. We are not going back to the past; our society has already changed and there is a need to cope with innovation and repairing practices that do not reproduce the past.
In this paper, we present a close reading of work in ubicomp of applications for older people. Starting from three lines of enquiry defined in the inaugural issue of this journal, we discuss how ubicomp research has presented the relationship between technologies and older users. We base our reasoning on a review of papers published in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (1997Computing ( -2014. The lines of enquiry refer to paradigms (functional vs. sociotechnical), users (stereotype and involvement), and contexts (indoor and/or outdoor). These themes address the presentation of SUITCASE project (SUstainable Integrated & Territorial CAre SErvices). This is a two-year research on care services for older citizens within the smart home construct. We develop an initial framework that not only provides a cohesive view of technologies for older people, but also serves as a salient guideline for reflective design which extends beyond the target population. This framework may also address future design projects, funding schemes, and editorial policies.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe how organizational members became storywriters of an important process of organizational change. Writing became a practice designed to create a space, a time and a methodology with which to author the process of change and create a learning context. The written stories produced both the subjectivity of practical authors and reflexively created the con/text for their reproduction.
Design/methodology/approach
A storywriting workshop inspired by a processual and participatory practice-based approach to learning and knowing was held in a research organization undergoing privatization. For six months, 31 organizational members, divided into two groups, participated in writing one story per week for six weeks. The written story had to refer to a fact that had occurred in the previous week, thus prompting reflection on the ongoing organizational life and giving a situated meaning to the change process.
Findings
Storywriting is first and foremost a social practice of wayfinding, that is of knowing as one goes. Writing proved to be an effective practice that involved the authors, their narratives and the audiences in a shared experience where all these practice elements became connected and through their connection acquired agency.
Originality/value
Narrative knowledge has been studied mainly in storytelling, while storywriting by organizational members has received less attention. This paper explores storywriting both as a situated, relational and material practice and as the process that produces narratives which can be considered for their content and their style.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.