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Åsa Mäkitalo

University of Gothenburg, Department of Education, Communication and Learning, Faculty Member

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Åsa Mäkitalo is Professor of Education and co-director of LinCS. From 2010-2016, she is also head of the University of Gothenburg LETStudio. LETStudio mobilise expertise from a broad range of disciplinary fields and professional knowledge domains. LETStudio research focus on how learning, knowing and agency are intertwined with technologies, how emerging knowledge practices are generated and how established expertise and forms of participation are challenged.

Mäkitalo specialises in research on institutional communication from a sociocultural and dialogical perspective. Her empirical work range from studies in schools to higher education and work settings and concern:
· Technologies and the transformation of expertise
· The social organisation of learning and knowing
· Remembering as an institutional practice
· Social, moral and cognitive accountability
· Forms of participation and co-production of knowledge

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Papers by Åsa Mäkitalo

Accounting Practices as Situated Knowing: Dilemmas and Dynamics in Institutional Categorization

Discourse Studies, 2003

This article analyses the dynamics of the use of institutional categories in institutional encoun... more This article analyses the dynamics of the use of institutional categories in institutional encounters. The focus is on documenting how categories are invoked to index what is relevant to situated knowing in interactional sequences where there is a need to bridge the gap between action and expectation. This general problem has been studied in the context of interactions between job applicants and vocational guidance officers in a public employment agency. Institutional categories are inference-rich, and they work as flexible tools that allow participants to recontextualize and negotiate the issues at stake. In this sense, categories serve as constitutive tools that can be crafted to fit into a broad range of circumstances. However, in order to produce a relevant account, participants’ ways of reasoning need to fit into the institutionally specific traditions of argumentation and the practical outcomes which need to be produced. In this sense, the focus on accounting practices is illu...

A state-of-the-art review of direct observation tools for assessing competency in person-centred care

International Journal of Nursing Studies, Sep 1, 2020

The Record as a Formative Tool

Qualitative Social Work, Dec 1, 2005

Encounters between citizens and institutions are characterized by communicative activities where ... more Encounters between citizens and institutions are characterized by communicative activities where questions and answers are crucial elements. This kind of information eliciting constitutes a necessary part of institutional work in order to efficiently process the case, but it also has normative dimensions. In this study the use of the record in institutional conversations was analysed. The empirical material consists of 30 vocational guidance conversations at a public employment office between institutional actors and long-term unemployed applicants. In these conversations two versions of the applicant were addressed: the person and the record. It is argued that the way the institutional record is introduced and how the two versions are handled in the conversation has important pedagogical implications in the work of transforming the social position of the citizen.

Young activists

Routledge eBooks, Jun 22, 2022

Nordic Childhoods in the Digital Age: Insights into contemporary research on communication, learning and education

Routledge, 2021

Att navigera i komplexa frågor: introduktion av digitala metoder i gymnasieskolan

Holding multiple perspectives in a dialogical space: Mapping and negotiating controversial issues in an upper secondary school setting

The Swedish grade conference: A dialogical study of face-to-face delivery of summative assessment in higher education

Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 2018

Learning across Contexts in the Knowledge Society

Developments within the “knowledge society,” especially those resulting from technological innova... more Developments within the “knowledge society,” especially those resulting from technological innovation, have intensified an interest in the relationship between different contexts and multiple sites of learning across what is often termed as formal, non-formal and informal learning environments. The aim of this book is to trace learning and experience across multiple sites and contexts as a means to generate new knowledge about the borders and edges of different practices and the boundary crossings these entail in the learning lives of young people in times of dynamic societal, environmental, economic, and technological change. The empirical research discussed in this book has grown out of a Nordic network of researchers. The research initiatives in the Nordic countries tend to avoid the more spectacular debates over the future of the educational institutions that tend to dominate and obscure discussions on education in the knowledge society, and which look to models of informal learning, whether in the “learning communities” of workplaces and families or in the new socio-technical spaces of the Internet, as a source of alternative educational strategies. Rather, Nordic researchers more modestly ask whether it is possible to envisage new models of teaching and learning which take seriously both the responsibility to social justice and social wellbeing, which, at least rhetorically, underpinned a commitment to mass education of the 20th century, as well as to the radical challenges to traditional educational models offered by the new socio-technical spaces and practices of the 21st century.

Nordic Childhoods in the Digital Age

Routledge eBooks, Jun 22, 2022

Socioscientific issues via controversy mapping: bringing actor-network theory into the science classroom with digital technology

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2018

Artefacts Mediating Practices across Time and Space: Sociocultural Studies of Material Conditions for Learning and Remembering

The theme of this symposium is to explore the material conditions of learning and remembering fro... more The theme of this symposium is to explore the material conditions of learning and remembering from a sociocultural perspective. We do this in four different empirical contexts. Learning and remembering are understood as meaning-making processes that are dependent on and co-constituted by mediating tools that enable practices to extend across time and space. Our interests are precisely in what ways the “tools” people employ in these studies mediate activities of learning and remembering, and how they contribute to the organization of collective forms of knowing. We also address how we analyze the specific material features of tools that co-determine the unfolding of the activities. Overall focus and issues addressed The overall focus of this symposium is to explore the material conditions of learning and remembering from a sociocultural perspective. It is nowadays not uncommon to think of learning and remembering in terms of sociomaterially entangled and distributed practices, but th...

Designs for Experimentation and Inquiry

Arbetslöshet eller utbildning. Om rekrytering av arbetslösa till komvux

Co-designing technologies in the context of hypertension care: Negotiating participation and technology use in design meetings

Informatics for Health and Social Care, 2016

Research Interest: In this article, we take an interest in the new kind of relation that has been... more Research Interest: In this article, we take an interest in the new kind of relation that has been claimed to be urgently required between health services and patients. Co-production of health services implies fundamental changes in the ways medical care is organized and delivered. Usually, technologies are put forth as potential solutions to problems that might occur when establishing such new relations. The aim of this study is to scrutinize how different perspectives were brought into the discussions as the concrete design and use of a mobile phone application were introduced, and how participants anticipated and negotiated their own participation in the design project. This article reports results from an explorative study of a co-design project in hypertension care wherein health professionals and patients were invited to co-design some features of the application they were later to use. The study shows that new practices of self-treatment are not likely to take place without the cooperation of patients, since they are to provide the observational data necessary for the professionals&amp;amp;#39; work. The negotiations are needed to balance patients&amp;amp;#39; concerns of being monitored by technology and their needs of being in control of their everyday lives and activities.

The interactive work of narrative elicitation in person‐centred care: Analysis of phone conversations between health care professionals and patients with common mental disorders

Health Expectations

INTRODUCTION Narratives play a central part in person-centred care (PCC) as a communicative means... more INTRODUCTION Narratives play a central part in person-centred care (PCC) as a communicative means of attending to patients' experiences. The present study sets out to explore what activities are performed and what challenges participants face in the interactive process of narrative elicitation, carried through in patient-professional communication in a remote intervention based on PCC. METHODS Data were gathered from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in a Swedish city where health care professionals (HCPs) conducted remote PCC for patients on sick leave due to common mental disorders. A sample of eleven audio-recorded phone conversations between HCPs and patients enroled in the RCT were collected and subjected to conversation analysis. RESULTS Three interactive patterns in narrative elicitation were identified: Completed narrative sequences driven by the patient, question-driven narrative sequences guided by the HCP, and narrative sequences driven as a collaborative project between the patient and the HCP. In the question-driven narrative sequences, communication was problematic for both participants and they did not accomplish a narrative. In the other two patterns, narratives were accomplished but through various collaborative processes. CONCLUSION This study provides insight into what challenges narrative elicitation may bring in the context of a remote PCC intervention and what interactive work patients and HCP need to engage in. Importantly, it also highlights tensions in the ethics of PCC and its operationalization, if the pursuit of a narrative is not properly balanced against the respect for patients' integrity and personal preferences. Our findings also show that narrative elicitation may represent an interactive process in PCC in which illness narratives are jointly produced, negotiated and transformed. PATIENT OR PUBLIC CONTRIBUTION Stakeholders, including patient representatives, were involved in the design of the main study (the RCT). They have been involved in discussions on research questions and dissemination throughout the study period. They have not been involved in conducting the present study.

Analysing social work interaction: premises and approaches

Analysing Social Work Communication, 2013

"This book provides a detailed review and illustration of the contribution of discourse appr... more "This book provides a detailed review and illustration of the contribution of discourse approaches and studies on professional interaction to social work. Concentrating on how social workers carry out their work in everyday organisational encounters with service users and colleagues, each chapter uses case studies analysing real-life social work interactions to explore a concept that has relevance both in discursive studies and in social work. The book thus demonstrates what detailed discursive studies on interaction can add to professional social work theories and discussions. Chapters on categorisation, accountability, boundary work, narrative, advice-giving, resistance, delicacy and reported speech, review the literature and discuss how the concept has been developed and how it can be applied to social work."

Pursuing trust in child protection meetings: familiarisation and informality

Discourses of Trust, 2013

Trust (or more often lack of trust) is a key concept in child protection and the subject of much ... more Trust (or more often lack of trust) is a key concept in child protection and the subject of much discussion in the social work literature. A distinction by Giddens (1990) between personal and systemic trust is often made (Pithouse et al. 2012). The two are of course linked, as Jessen (2010, p. 304) notes: People entrust their need for care, welfare or social rights to the custody of the public professions, and they expect them to be trustworthy as guardians of the public good.

Approaching writing and learning as interdependent processes

Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 2019

On the notion of agency in studies of interaction and learning

Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 2016

Accounting Practices as Situated Knowing: Dilemmas and Dynamics in Institutional Categorization

Discourse Studies, 2003

This article analyses the dynamics of the use of institutional categories in institutional encoun... more This article analyses the dynamics of the use of institutional categories in institutional encounters. The focus is on documenting how categories are invoked to index what is relevant to situated knowing in interactional sequences where there is a need to bridge the gap between action and expectation. This general problem has been studied in the context of interactions between job applicants and vocational guidance officers in a public employment agency. Institutional categories are inference-rich, and they work as flexible tools that allow participants to recontextualize and negotiate the issues at stake. In this sense, categories serve as constitutive tools that can be crafted to fit into a broad range of circumstances. However, in order to produce a relevant account, participants’ ways of reasoning need to fit into the institutionally specific traditions of argumentation and the practical outcomes which need to be produced. In this sense, the focus on accounting practices is illu...

A state-of-the-art review of direct observation tools for assessing competency in person-centred care

International Journal of Nursing Studies, Sep 1, 2020

The Record as a Formative Tool

Qualitative Social Work, Dec 1, 2005

Encounters between citizens and institutions are characterized by communicative activities where ... more Encounters between citizens and institutions are characterized by communicative activities where questions and answers are crucial elements. This kind of information eliciting constitutes a necessary part of institutional work in order to efficiently process the case, but it also has normative dimensions. In this study the use of the record in institutional conversations was analysed. The empirical material consists of 30 vocational guidance conversations at a public employment office between institutional actors and long-term unemployed applicants. In these conversations two versions of the applicant were addressed: the person and the record. It is argued that the way the institutional record is introduced and how the two versions are handled in the conversation has important pedagogical implications in the work of transforming the social position of the citizen.

Young activists

Routledge eBooks, Jun 22, 2022

Nordic Childhoods in the Digital Age: Insights into contemporary research on communication, learning and education

Routledge, 2021

Att navigera i komplexa frågor: introduktion av digitala metoder i gymnasieskolan

Holding multiple perspectives in a dialogical space: Mapping and negotiating controversial issues in an upper secondary school setting

The Swedish grade conference: A dialogical study of face-to-face delivery of summative assessment in higher education

Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 2018

Learning across Contexts in the Knowledge Society

Developments within the “knowledge society,” especially those resulting from technological innova... more Developments within the “knowledge society,” especially those resulting from technological innovation, have intensified an interest in the relationship between different contexts and multiple sites of learning across what is often termed as formal, non-formal and informal learning environments. The aim of this book is to trace learning and experience across multiple sites and contexts as a means to generate new knowledge about the borders and edges of different practices and the boundary crossings these entail in the learning lives of young people in times of dynamic societal, environmental, economic, and technological change. The empirical research discussed in this book has grown out of a Nordic network of researchers. The research initiatives in the Nordic countries tend to avoid the more spectacular debates over the future of the educational institutions that tend to dominate and obscure discussions on education in the knowledge society, and which look to models of informal learning, whether in the “learning communities” of workplaces and families or in the new socio-technical spaces of the Internet, as a source of alternative educational strategies. Rather, Nordic researchers more modestly ask whether it is possible to envisage new models of teaching and learning which take seriously both the responsibility to social justice and social wellbeing, which, at least rhetorically, underpinned a commitment to mass education of the 20th century, as well as to the radical challenges to traditional educational models offered by the new socio-technical spaces and practices of the 21st century.

Nordic Childhoods in the Digital Age

Routledge eBooks, Jun 22, 2022

Socioscientific issues via controversy mapping: bringing actor-network theory into the science classroom with digital technology

Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2018

Artefacts Mediating Practices across Time and Space: Sociocultural Studies of Material Conditions for Learning and Remembering

The theme of this symposium is to explore the material conditions of learning and remembering fro... more The theme of this symposium is to explore the material conditions of learning and remembering from a sociocultural perspective. We do this in four different empirical contexts. Learning and remembering are understood as meaning-making processes that are dependent on and co-constituted by mediating tools that enable practices to extend across time and space. Our interests are precisely in what ways the “tools” people employ in these studies mediate activities of learning and remembering, and how they contribute to the organization of collective forms of knowing. We also address how we analyze the specific material features of tools that co-determine the unfolding of the activities. Overall focus and issues addressed The overall focus of this symposium is to explore the material conditions of learning and remembering from a sociocultural perspective. It is nowadays not uncommon to think of learning and remembering in terms of sociomaterially entangled and distributed practices, but th...

Designs for Experimentation and Inquiry

Arbetslöshet eller utbildning. Om rekrytering av arbetslösa till komvux

Co-designing technologies in the context of hypertension care: Negotiating participation and technology use in design meetings

Informatics for Health and Social Care, 2016

Research Interest: In this article, we take an interest in the new kind of relation that has been... more Research Interest: In this article, we take an interest in the new kind of relation that has been claimed to be urgently required between health services and patients. Co-production of health services implies fundamental changes in the ways medical care is organized and delivered. Usually, technologies are put forth as potential solutions to problems that might occur when establishing such new relations. The aim of this study is to scrutinize how different perspectives were brought into the discussions as the concrete design and use of a mobile phone application were introduced, and how participants anticipated and negotiated their own participation in the design project. This article reports results from an explorative study of a co-design project in hypertension care wherein health professionals and patients were invited to co-design some features of the application they were later to use. The study shows that new practices of self-treatment are not likely to take place without the cooperation of patients, since they are to provide the observational data necessary for the professionals&amp;amp;#39; work. The negotiations are needed to balance patients&amp;amp;#39; concerns of being monitored by technology and their needs of being in control of their everyday lives and activities.

The interactive work of narrative elicitation in person‐centred care: Analysis of phone conversations between health care professionals and patients with common mental disorders

Health Expectations

INTRODUCTION Narratives play a central part in person-centred care (PCC) as a communicative means... more INTRODUCTION Narratives play a central part in person-centred care (PCC) as a communicative means of attending to patients' experiences. The present study sets out to explore what activities are performed and what challenges participants face in the interactive process of narrative elicitation, carried through in patient-professional communication in a remote intervention based on PCC. METHODS Data were gathered from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in a Swedish city where health care professionals (HCPs) conducted remote PCC for patients on sick leave due to common mental disorders. A sample of eleven audio-recorded phone conversations between HCPs and patients enroled in the RCT were collected and subjected to conversation analysis. RESULTS Three interactive patterns in narrative elicitation were identified: Completed narrative sequences driven by the patient, question-driven narrative sequences guided by the HCP, and narrative sequences driven as a collaborative project between the patient and the HCP. In the question-driven narrative sequences, communication was problematic for both participants and they did not accomplish a narrative. In the other two patterns, narratives were accomplished but through various collaborative processes. CONCLUSION This study provides insight into what challenges narrative elicitation may bring in the context of a remote PCC intervention and what interactive work patients and HCP need to engage in. Importantly, it also highlights tensions in the ethics of PCC and its operationalization, if the pursuit of a narrative is not properly balanced against the respect for patients' integrity and personal preferences. Our findings also show that narrative elicitation may represent an interactive process in PCC in which illness narratives are jointly produced, negotiated and transformed. PATIENT OR PUBLIC CONTRIBUTION Stakeholders, including patient representatives, were involved in the design of the main study (the RCT). They have been involved in discussions on research questions and dissemination throughout the study period. They have not been involved in conducting the present study.

Analysing social work interaction: premises and approaches

Analysing Social Work Communication, 2013

"This book provides a detailed review and illustration of the contribution of discourse appr... more "This book provides a detailed review and illustration of the contribution of discourse approaches and studies on professional interaction to social work. Concentrating on how social workers carry out their work in everyday organisational encounters with service users and colleagues, each chapter uses case studies analysing real-life social work interactions to explore a concept that has relevance both in discursive studies and in social work. The book thus demonstrates what detailed discursive studies on interaction can add to professional social work theories and discussions. Chapters on categorisation, accountability, boundary work, narrative, advice-giving, resistance, delicacy and reported speech, review the literature and discuss how the concept has been developed and how it can be applied to social work."

Pursuing trust in child protection meetings: familiarisation and informality

Discourses of Trust, 2013

Trust (or more often lack of trust) is a key concept in child protection and the subject of much ... more Trust (or more often lack of trust) is a key concept in child protection and the subject of much discussion in the social work literature. A distinction by Giddens (1990) between personal and systemic trust is often made (Pithouse et al. 2012). The two are of course linked, as Jessen (2010, p. 304) notes: People entrust their need for care, welfare or social rights to the custody of the public professions, and they expect them to be trustworthy as guardians of the public good.

Approaching writing and learning as interdependent processes

Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 2019

On the notion of agency in studies of interaction and learning

Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 2016

Designs For Experimentation and Inquiry: Approaching Learning and Knowing in Digital Transformation

by Todd Nicewonger, Åsa Mäkitalo, and Mark J Elam

Studies of digitally mediated learning, knowing, and expertise have been at the core of many rese... more Studies of digitally mediated learning, knowing, and expertise have been at the core of many research endeavors in recent years. Central to this effort are investigations focusing on gaining concrete insights into how the trans-disciplinary affordances of digital media are reconfiguring the established worlds of research, education, professional practice, and everyday life. While we generally seem to quite easily engage with and adapt to the media ecologies of our time, new digital tools and methods and the co-evolution of socio-cultural practices is also opening the way for new collaborative arrangements and cooperative efforts where, for example, patients become partners in their own care and treatment; ordinary citizens are mobilized in basic research; visitors participate in co-designing their museum experience; and students produce advanced visualizations of technoscientific controversies. In the face of such novel arrangements, researchers are increasingly being asked to both investigate and design new worlds of digital inquiry. So, while researchers are exploring how digital technologies are entangled in practices and processes of learning, their own methodological and analytical practices are being transformed by the very same digital innovations they are studying. One could say our research activities are contributing to envisioning and designing new worlds of experimentation and inquiry. This seminar accordingly aims to contribute to theoretical and methodological issues of studying and intervening in practices of learning and knowing in transformation. We seek to do this by drawing on generic or specific features of our trans-disciplinary studies of digital engagements across different kinds of practices and socio-technical configurations. The kind of studies we have in mind work in close collaboration with the people studied and their communities, i.e. projects are arranged through co-design. Or they reach across both disciplinary and professional boundaries and collaborate around the production as well as analysis of data. Relevant studies may also adopt the digital tools and methods they explore and incorporate them into their analytical approaches.

Designs for Experimentation and Inquiry (eds.)

by Todd Nicewonger and Åsa Mäkitalo

Designs for Experimentation and Inquiry (eds.), 2019

Designs for Experimentation and Inquiry examines how digital media is reconfiguring the establish... more Designs for Experimentation and Inquiry examines how digital media is reconfiguring the established worlds of research, education and professional practice. It reflects on the theoretical, methodological and ethical issues shaping contemporary engagements with digital learning and offers insights for both analysing and intervening in digital learning practices.

This insightful volume fills a gap in the current literature by bringing together experiences from Sociocultural Studies of Learning, Science and Technology Studies, and Design Studies. Each chapter is an innovative case study, examining a different aspect of digital media’s role in research, education and professional practice by exploring topics such as:

Learning practices and digitalized dialogue
Digital design experiments
Digitally mediated collaborations
Ethical digital inquiry and design
Expertly researched and written, this book is a unique resource for scholars, researchers and professionals working in the fields of digital design, applied technology and the learning sciences.