The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between the physical environment and children’s play and actions. We want to find out how the environment affects children’s behavior and whether it goes in harmony with the preschool teachers thoughts and educational purposes or not. Furthermore, the aim is to investigate how the children act in the environment and if and how objects affect children’s play and interaction in a certain direction. In order to do this, we observed children’s free play in two different rooms at a preschool on three different occasions. To document our observations we used field notes. We supplemented the observations with three interviews with professional preschool teachers. This was done in order to capture the preschool teacher’s views of the environment versus the children’s behavior in it. In our analysis of our empirical data, we used Bruno Latour’s actor network theory. This study is based on children's actions, but also on educators' perspectives. We want to point out that the purpose is not to show right or wrong, but rather to highlight the educational environment from different perspectives while focusing on inclusion and participation. The result indicates that the environment and materials affect children’s play to a greater extent than expected. The teacher’s communicated a clear educational idea about the “home room” in the interviews. While dressing gowns and roleplay had a central place in the “homeroom”, it was harder to identify an educational idea in the larger common room. On the other hand, the observations indicated that the building toys had a relatively high force of attraction with the children in the larger room.When it came to inclusion, the educators talked about inclusion based on the availability of different materials but also that the available material connects to children’s interests or not. Emphasis was also put on assistive devices to support children with special needs, such as linguistic difficulties.

Air traffic networks are essential to today’s global society. They are the fastest means of transporting physical goods and people and are a major contributor to the globalisation of the world’s economy. This increasing reliance requires these networks to have high resilience; however, previous events show that they can be susceptible to natural hazards. We assess two strategies to improve the resilience of air traffic networks and show an adaptive reconfiguration strategy is superior to a permanent re-routing solution. We find that, if traffic networks have fixed air routes, the geographical location of airports leaves them vulnerable to spatial hazard.

abstract: This dissertation focuses on creating a pluralistic approach to understanding and measuring interdisciplinarity at various scales to further the study of the evolution of knowledge and innovation. Interdisciplinarity is considered an important research component and is closely linked to higher rates of innovation. If the goal is to create more innovative research, we must understand how interdisciplinarity operates. I begin by examining interdisciplinarity with a small scope, the research university. This study uses metadata to create co-authorship networks and examine how a change in university policies to increase interdisciplinarity can be successful. The New American University Initiative (NAUI) at Arizona State University (ASU) set forth the goal of making ASU a world hub for interdisciplinary research. This kind of interdisciplinarity is produced from a deliberate, engineered, reorganization of the individuals within the university and the knowledge they contain. By using a set of social network analysis measurements, I created an algorithm to measure the changes to the co-authorship networks that resulted from increased university support for interdisciplinary research. The second case study increases the scope of interdisciplinarity from individual universities to a single scientific discourse, the Anthropocene. The idea of the Anthropocene began as an idea about the need for a new geological epoch and underwent unsupervised interdisciplinary expansion due to climate change integrating itself into the core of the discourse. In contrast to the NAUI which was specifically engineered to increase interdisciplinarity, the I use keyword co-occurrence networks to measure how the Anthropocene discourse increases its interdisciplinarity through unsupervised expansion after climate change becomes a core keyword within the network and behaves as an anchor point for new disciplines to connect and join the discourse. The scope of interdisciplinarity increases again with the final case study about the field of evolutionary medicine. Evolutionary medicine is a case of engineered interdisciplinary integration between evolutionary biology and medicine. The primary goal of evolutionary medicine is to better understand "why we get sick" through the lens of evolutionary biology. This makes it an excellent candidate to understand large-scale interdisciplinarity. I show through multiple type of networks and metadata analyses that evolutionary medicine successfully integrates the concepts of evolutionary biology into medicine. By increasing our knowledge of interdisciplinarity at various scales and how it behaves in different initial conditions, we are better able to understand the elusive nature of innovation. Interdisciplinary can mean different things depending on how its defined. I show that a pluralistic approach to defining and measuring interdisciplinarity is not only appropriate but necessary if our goal is to increase interdisciplinarity, the frequency of innovations, and our understanding of the evolution of knowledge. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Biology 2019

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The problematization of waste surplus informed numerous decisions on local, national and international levels. However, the waste pollution problem is far from being solved. This paper attempts to explore an alternative way of organizing waste using the Actor-Network Theory, which argues for equality between humans and nonhumans. We are taking this approach and recognising the role of waste as an essential actor in the decision-making process around waste management. Based on a case study of a second-hand shop, so-called Överskottet, where wasted materials are being transported and processed by people with special needs. We showcased how these alternative ways can be implemented. This shop is part of a collaboration between the Waste Management Department and the Social Services Department of Gotland’s municipality, namely, Region Gotland. This collaboration is a perfect example of the connection between the material and the social. In our study, we are analysing connections between waste and humans on different levels (i.e. municipality departments, humans and wasted materials) and show how these connections create a collaborative network that has both social and environmental impact. We account for factors that strengthen and factors that weaken, thus destabilising the collaboration network. Finally, we highlighted how these collaborations require adapting the existing policies surrounding waste management.

During the first half of the 20th century, lake lowering was a common practice for agricultural drainage in Sweden. Although this phenomenon led to drastic changes in the Swedish landscape, it has been remarkably understudied. Furthermore, previous research on lake lowering, and on the adjacent subject of hydropower, has mostly taken a social constructivist approach. In contrast, the aim of this study was to generate a posthumanist, symmetric account of a lake lowering project, where the non-human actants involved in the network were seen to act. This in order to better understand the driving forces and power relations emerging in a large technical project. The study took the form of an actor-network analysis of the lowering of Lake Tämnaren in the south-east of Sweden. The analysis consists of a chronological account of the project between the years 1923-1967. During the years predating 1950, investigations into both material and social matters were carried out by two engineers who became spokespersons of the many collectives of actants affected by the lake lowering. In the years between 1950-1953 when the project was carried out, the spokespersons’ accounts of reality were challenged, with varying results. After the works had been completed, the question of maintaining a suitable water level in the lake remained controversial and concerned managing the newly built dam. In brief, the conclusions of the study highlight the role of material agency in transporting and changing power between actants in a network. Forms of material agency were for example: the lake flooding, the hardness of soil, or the floodgates of a dam remaining open.

Disruptions due to either natural or anthropogenic hazards significantly impact the operation of critical infrastructure networks because they may instigate network-level cascade (i.e., systemic) risks. Therefore, quantifying and enhancing the resilience of such complex dynamically evolving networks ensure minimizing the possibility and consequences of systemic risks. Focusing only on robustness, as one of the key resilience attributes, and on transportation networks, key critical infrastructure, the current study develops a hybrid complex network theoretic-genetic algorithms analysis approach. To demonstrate the developed approach, the robustness of a city transportation network is quantified by integrating complex network theoretic topology measures with a dynamic flow redistribution model. The network robustness is subsequently investigated under different operational measures and the corresponding absorptive capacity thresholds are quantified. Finally, the robustness of the network under different failure scenarios is evaluated using genetic algorithms coupled with k-means clustering to classify the different network components. The hybrid approach developed in the current study is expected to facilitate optimizing potential systemic risk mitigation strategies for critical infrastructure networks under disruptive events. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

The technology of Building Information Modelling (BIM) is being introduced to the Architectural, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. This industry is generally perceived as being fragmented, having low productivity and with a low rate of innovation. BIM is presented as new paradigm within this industry, enabling inter-organisational collaboration, overall increasing quality while simultaneously lowering costs. But widespread BIM implementation has not yet taken place. In order to increase adoption, public client organisations have been argued to be the actors needed to initiate and drive the implementation of BIM. However, the client perspective of such implementation initiatives has not been the main focus of earlier research. In this licentiate thesis the BIM implementation process conducted by the largest infrastructure client in Sweden is analysed. This organisation implements BIM both to benefit their own organisation but also to increase productivity and innovation within the whole infrastructure branch of the AEC-industry. With the purpose of increasing the understanding of technology driven change processes at public client organisations, the BIM implementation at this organisation is analysed as an empirical example.  The case study is analysed by a theoretical framework taking inspiration from Actor-Network theory and Sociology of Translation. Based on this analysis the translation process, where key actors are identified and enrolled into using BIM are described. The analysis reveals a complex network of actors linked to the implementation in question. Instead of a single BIM concept, several different and sometimes conflicting interpretations of BIM are simultaneously being translated. This licentiate thesis problematizes the role of client organisations in initiating change within a network of actors. The main ways of enrolling actors into using BIM have in the studied case been the development of new demand documents. This strategy has however been problematic as the new demands for BIM have not been accepted as intended within many construction projects. Instead, the results of this thesis argue for the importance of client organisations as negotiators, not only needed to establish demand for a new innovation. / Tekniken Byggands Informations Modellering (BIM) introduceras just nu i byggbranschen. Denna bransch beskrivs ofta som varande fragmenterad med låg produktivitet samt bristande innovationskraft. BIM beskrivs som ett nytt paradigm för denna bransch, möjliggörande interorganisatoriskt sammarbete, ökad kvalitet och samtidigt minskande kostnader. Däremot har BIM ännu inte anammats på bred front. För att öka implementeringstakten har statliga beställarorganisationer beskrivits som de aktörer som behövs för att initiera och driva implementeringen av BIM. Dock har tidigare forskning inte fokuserat på beställarperspektivet kring sådana initiativ. I denna licentiatavhandling presenteras en fallstudie av BIM implementeringen på den största infrastrukturbeställaren i Sverige. Denna organisation implementerar BIM både för att gynna den egna organisationen men också för att öka produktiviteten och innovationstakten i intrastrukturbranschen som helhet. Med syfte att öka förståelsen kring beställarrollen i förhållande till teknikdrivna förändringsprocesser studeras denna förändringsprocess som ett empiriskt exempel. Denna fallstudie analyseras utifrån ett teoretiskt ramverk med inspiration tagen från Actor-Network Theory och Sociology of Translation. Utifrån denna analys beskrivs översättningsprocesser där nyckelaktörer identifieras och försöks knytas till att använda BIM. Analysen visar på ett komplext nätverk av aktörer kopplat till implementeringen i fråga. Istället för ett enskilt BIM koncept hittas ett flertal samtidiga, och stundtals motsägelsefulla tolkningar av BIM som alla samtidigt översätts i organisationen. Denna licentiatavhandling problematiserar beställarrollen i relation till initiering av förändring inom ett aktörsnätverk. Det huvudsakliga sättet genom vilket aktörer knyts till att använda BIM har i det studerade fallet varit genom utveckling av nya kravdokument. Denna strategi har däremot varit problematisk då dessa krav inte accepterats som tänk inom ett flertal byggprojekt. Istället visar resultatet av denna studie på vikten av beställarorganisationer som varande förhandlare, inte endast viktiga för att upprätta efterfrågan för en ny innovation. / <p>QC 20170614</p>

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