The potential of feminist technoscience for advancing research in information practice

Towards a vernacular aesthetics of liking for information studies

Purpose

Personal museums provide the conceptual catalyst for liking as a research approach and inclusivity around “idiosyncratic” knowledges within information research. An adapted research paper format echoes the approach of personal museums: as a commentary on the limits of institutional shaping for the field.

Design/methodology/approach

Personal museums are conceptualized as spaces of knowing in-formation, ontological openings that are literally and figuratively entered into, that make a difference to human and material ways of knowing. Karen Barad's agential realism and Sianne Ngai's vernacular aesthetic categories provide the theoretical lenses through which the researcher's 2018 visit to one personal museum is revisited.

Findings

An ethnographic account of the author's visit to the Communist Consumer Museum (CCM) in Timişoara, Romania shows how its improvisational, friendly and intimate atmosphere exposes it as a space of entanglements in a quantum sense, emphasizing the inseparability of human and material realms and how knowledges are always in-formation. Such entanglements create atmospheres generative of different ways of thinking about information and knowledge.

Originality/value

Human expressions of liking reveal material agencies as ways of knowing and information beyond the realm of human experience and meaning. A vernacular aesthetics of liking is presented as a way to resist the marginalizing tendencies of knowledges classified as unconventional, idiosyncratic or eccentric. This approach is one way of resisting the assumptions of channel thinking that often shape how information is studied.

A systematic review of information practices research

Purpose

This systematic literature review aims to elaborate the research progress of information practices to help other researchers attain a more holistic and comprehensive understanding of the field.

Design/methodology/approach

Following a systematic review protocol, 123 research articles from nine academic databases were included in the analysis.

Findings

Four separate results can be outlined. First, practice theory, social constructionist theory and activity theory are often used as the theoretical basis for the study of information practices. Second, people will engage in specific information practice activities in different external and internal contexts. The external contexts include social and needs contexts. The internal contexts include information source horizons, user's affection and user's cognition. Third, the existing information practice models can be divided into static and dynamic types. These models mainly reflected activities and influencing factors of information practices. Fourth, qualitative methods were the most used in information practice research.

Research limitations/implications

The field of information practices is a vast, expanding research field. This research will focus only on a specific section, namely concepts, activities, contexts and models. Researchers could contribute to exploring the concepts, components and mechanisms of information practices by combining theories from various disciplines, such as sociology and behavioral science.

Originality/value

This is the first study to reveal the general picture of information practices. It also elaborates the characteristics of people's information practices and shows the potential development direction for future research.

Searching for a Definition of Information Literacy as a Socially Cohesive Component of Community: A Complementarity of Experts and Student Approach

Information literacy can be seen as a fundamental prerequisite for a sustainable complex information society. As a lack of information literacy, information poverty represents a significant social and educational issue. Information literacy and information poverty will be the new dividing lines of a complex world, as the “rich north and poor south” metaphor became in the 20th century. A careful study of discourses in information literacy allows for effective educational and social policies aimed at its development. The aim of this study is to present an analysis of different approaches and discourses to define the concept of information literacy based on a review of papers from Web of Science. The study identifies four important directions of definitions or new grasps of information literacy, with an emphasis on social justice, the analysis of social and technological change, and a demand for higher quality information literacy education. Based on this analysis, the discourses present in the responses of undergraduate information studies and library science students (n = 132) collected between 2019 and 2022 are studied. The qualitative study shows that these underlying discourses are present in the students’ responses but, at the same time, offer specific perspectives on their fulfilment.

Pets and people: information experience of multispecies families

Purpose

This paper introduces more-than-human perspective in information behaviour and information experience studies. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to understandings of the concept of multispecies families by exploring their significant dimensions related to information phenomena involving multiple contexts, situations, spaces, actors, species, and activities.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on previous research in human information behaviour and human-animal studies, our ideas around information experience of multispecies families are developed conceptually. The paper builds both on previous empirical findings about human information behaviour and the new domain of information experience.

Findings

The paper proposes a holistic approach both to information phenomena in everyday living with companion animals including embodied, affective, cognitive, social, digital, and objectual information that shapes pet care and management practices, and to the context of study, including work, domestic, and leisure aspects of multispecies family.

Originality/value

This study broadens our understanding of information phenomena in multispecies families, and so contributes to the field of information experience. It also provides insights for animal welfare scientists to help them understand the information behaviour of humans who are responsible for keeping and caring for animals.