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Democratizing Measurement

Works discussed in the presentation “Democratizing the Democratization of Measurement: From the Three Estates of Expertise to the Encounter of Values”, presented August 5, 2024 to the Society for the Study of Measurement, meeting at UC Berkeley.Continue readingDemocratizing Measurement

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The next step

So, it’s taken a bit with the start of the year, but I’m a doctoral student again. Thank you McGill Sociology! This year’s incoming cohort is perhaps the Department’s largest ever, with 11 new Ph.D. students, as well as 6 new M.A. students. It’s a great group that has bonded remarkably well. I feel very…Continue readingThe next step

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Research projects and time constraints

So, it’s been an unexpectedly (and unintentionally) long time since my last post. I’ve been working on my M.A. thesis project, which I had intended to document in this blog. I wanted to update where things stand. This site sets out a larger research program, to identify the dimensions that describe our ideologies of childhood.…Continue readingResearch projects and time constraints

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Methods: a first stab

The idea is to take a great gob of texts that talk about children and process them in such a way as to extract how they talk about children, the different ways the texts characterize children, and to see if there’s a way to organize those different characterizations. Doing this is called defining the “latent…Continue readingMethods: a first stab

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What is ‘child well-being’?

One of the literatures where children are routinely discussed is the literature of the sociology of the family. Many studies in that field offer evidence about impacts on children in assessing family arrangements, processes, and events. But what evidence is chosen, and what is not, speaks to the images of children prevalent in that field.…Continue readingWhat is ‘child well-being’?

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A programmatic statement

This past summer I had the honour of being asked to contribute a reflection on Loris Malaguzzi’s “Your Image of the Child: Where Teaching Begins” to a special section in the North American Reggio Emilia Association’s journal Innovations in Early Education: The International Reggio Emilia Exchange. Malaguzzi argued vociferously for a very definite ‘image of…Continue readingA programmatic statement