N Hopwood
Biographic Data
| ID | 51852 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Hopwood |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Hopwood |
| SIGNATURE | HOPWOOD N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Technology Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2149-5834 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Developing de-encapsulated hybrid activity in a school: Making inclusion a shared responsibility
Change Laboratories are a means to support transformation in schools, grounded in Cultural-Historical-Activity Theory (CHAT). They can enable schools to become agents of social change by connecting learning to what happens outside of school, and organising schooling in collaboration with community. This is referred to as de-encapsulation or hybridity. Recent developments in Change Laboratories have seen strengthened engagement with knowledges fro…
The Barriers and Enablers to Implementing Child and Family Health Hubs for Migrant Families
Migrant women and children can face significant barriers when accessing child and family health services. Child and family health hubs (hubs) represent a potential solution to simplify pathways between maternity, child, and social care services for migrant populations. However, how these hubs operate specifically for migrants remains underexplored. Our study addresses this gap by exploring what helps and hinders the establishment and delivery of …
The Wall of Rejection Writ Large: A Creative-Relational Inquiry Into the Affective Futurity of Academic Slow Death
Grounded in affective futurity, this article examines the often-invisible forms of rejection that shape the ordinary body. In this light, rejection becomes a form of academic slow death, prompting some to imagine no futures for their lives within the academy. Rather than swallow indignation, I embrace the margins as a site of meaning-making, navigating an institution with little room to falter. Through creative-relational methodologies, I invite …
Twenty-five years of change laboratories in schools: A critical and formative review
Transformation, learning and research come together in educational action research. Change Laboratories (CLs) are a distinctive approach to action research grounded in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). CLs seek to go beyond technical change, oriented instead to systemic and ideologically driven transformation. However, there have been few reviews of CL research, none focused on education. This paper reports a review of 55 studies using …
Co-design practice in higher education: Practice theory insights into collaborative curriculum development
Higher education curricula require regular renewal. Varied expertise is needed to meet the multi-faceted challenges of curriculum development, hence the importance of collaborative approaches. Co-design is one approach to curriculum making as a relational practice, with evidence showing it can improve pedagogical quality and stakeholder involvement via a collaborative ethos that breaks through constraints of individual imagination and assumptions…
The Building Blocks for Successful Hub Implementation for Migrant and Refugee Families and Their Children in the First 2000 Days of Life
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Migrant and refugee women, families, and their children can experience significant language, cultural, and psychosocial barriers to engage with child and family services. Integrated child and family health Hubs are increasingly promoted as a potential solution to address access barriers; however, there is scant literature on how to best implement them with migrant and refugee populations. Our aim was to explore with serv…
How poetry and song can grapple with the dialectics of crisis and agency, and become tools for transformative research
Activist scholarship inspired by a cultural-historical tradition often seeks to foster agency with people facing crisis. The aim is to develop new understandings and bases for action that can help people break away from the status quo and change what is possible. Cultural-historical theory understands crisis and agency dialectically, linking both to individual and social transformation. Dialectic understandings of crisis foreground breakdown and …
Professional learning promoting agency in challenging practice contexts
This study promoted professional learning and agency through a pragmatic formative intervention. Participants sought to change professional practices in classrooms in response to critical reflection on pedagogic practices and wider social concerns. Australian researchers collaborated with teachers and teacher educators from Nepal, informed by cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). Change Laboratory methods identified a contradiction between …
Conceptualising praxis, agency and learning: A postabyssal exploration to strengthen the struggle over alternative futures
Educational researchers are increasingly striving on the edge of possibility to re-imagine and realise the future. Activist scholarship requires appropriate philosophical and theoretical bases, what Stetsenko refers to as 'dangerous' – useful in the struggle for a better world. How might praxis, agency and learning be charged with transgressive spirit? This paper considers the Theory of Practice Architectures and Transformative Activist Stance, e…
Secondary school students’ perceptions and experiences of learning science and mathematics: The case of Bhutan
Secondary students’ perceptions of learning science and mathematics have been researched internationally, but less in the global South. This study investigated Grades 9 and 10 students’ experiences of learning biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics in Bhutanese secondary schools. A mixed-methods sequential design was used. First, 524 students from 7 schools completed a survey capturing their perceptions of learning in the four subject areas.…
‘It Was That … Specialist … That Finally Listened to Us … That's Probably a Weird Answer to What You Were Expecting’: Clinician and carer perspectives on brilliant feeding care
INTRODUCTION: To extend research on positive aspects of health care, this article focusses on health care for children who tube-feed-this is because knowledge about tube-feeding for children is limited and fragmented. This is achieved by consulting with clinicians and carers who supported children who tube-feed to clarify their understandings of and experiences with brilliant feeding care. METHODS: Nine clinicians and nine carers who supported ch…
Forward anchoring in transformative agency: How parents of children with complex feeding difficulties transcend the status quo
Connective Enactment and Collective Accomplishment in Professional Practices
Working with others is key to professionalism but little attention has been given to how specific actions contribute to collective practices to secure shared ends in work. This essay considers how professionals’ actions connect with one another in distributed (multi-participant) work practices. Recently, Hopwood, Blomberg, Dahlberg and Abrant Dahlgren identified a new way of viewing how professionals in distributed practices coordinate their acti…
Agency in cultural-historical activity theory: Strengthening commitment to social transformation
Theorizing agency is crucial to intervening in social, economic, political, and environmental crises. This paper examines three approaches to agency within cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT): transformative activist stance (Stetsenko), transformative agency by double stimulation (Sannino), and relational agency (Edwards). All three uphold CHAT’s rebellious gist, where our actions are shaped by circumstances but where the possibility of tr…
Provocations and possibilities in professional practice, education, and learning
is a collaborative, multi
How is Brilliance Enacted in Professional Practices? Insights from the Theory of Practice Architectures
Brilliance has been overlooked in studies of professional work. This study aimed to understand how brilliant practices are made possible and enacted in a multidisciplinary paediatric feeding clinic, where professionals from different disciplines work together and with parents and carers of children. The existing literature has thematically described brilliance but not theorised how it is accomplished and enabled. Using video reflexive ethnographi…
Changing the World for Children with Complex Feeding Difficulties: Cultural-Historical Analyses of Transformative Agency
How to bring about positive change is a key concern in cultural-historical theory. There is an urgent imperative to address questions of transformation at the nexus of the individual and the social. One way to approach this is through the concept of agency, the means through which people go beyond coping with problems or adapting to the status quo, instead striving to make the future that ought to be a reality. This paper takes up ideas from Stet…
Shadow organizing and imitation: New foci for research
Purpose Shadow organizing refers to the emergence of parallel arrangements that sit alongside and imitate mainstream or conventional ways of organizing. It can be a response to challenges that require new ways of working without abandoning what is valuable about conventional arrangements. However, the processes through which shadow organizing is accomplished are not well understood; there is a need to go beyond traditional notions of mimicry and …
Double stimulation “in the wild”: Services for families with children at-risk
Unfolding Practices: A Sociomaterial View of Interprofessional Collaboration in Health Care
Knowledge sharing is an essential part of interprofessional practice and will be even more important in the future in regard to the opportunities and challenges in practices for delivering safe and effective healthcare. The aim of this ethnographic study was to explore how professional knowledge can be shared in an interprofessional team at a spinal cord injury rehabilitation unit. A sociomaterial perspective on practice was used to analyse the d…
Partnership practice as collaborative knowledge work: Overcoming common dilemmas through an augmented view of professional expertise
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on how partnership practices that build resilience in families work. Two broad questions are explored: first, what are the forms of expertise required in practices that effectively build resilience through partnership?; and second, how can some of the challenges practitioners experience when working in partnership be addressed? Design/methodology/approach – A theoretical approach is taken, …
A Sociomaterial Account of Partnership, Signatures and Accountability in Practice
Professional work is often heralded as undergoing radical transformation. This paper focuses on partnership between health professionals and families as a specific instance of changes aimed at delivering shared responsibility and joint knowledge work. An ethnographic study of a residential child and family health services provides the empirical basis for a detailed examination of what is signed, by whom, and with what effects. I show how signing …
Conceptualising the PhD as preparing for academic practice in geography
Simulation in Higher Education: A sociomaterial view
This article presents a sociomaterial account of simulation in higher education. Sociomaterial approaches change the ontological and epistemological bases for understanding learning and offer valuable tools for addressing important questions about relationships between university education and professional practices. Simulation has grown in many disciplines as a means to bring the two closer together. However, the theoretical underpinnings of sim…
Research design and methods of data collection and analysis: Researching students' conceptions in a multiple‐method case study
Three techniques were used in a multiple‐method case study to explore students' conceptions of geography within a qualitative framework, employing aspects of phenomenology, ethnography and grounded theory. The context of the research is briefly outlined, and then the methodological framework and nature of the data yielded are discussed in more detail. Aspects of analytical procedures are considered as are strengths and weaknesses of the research …
Conceptualising praxis, agency and learning: A postabyssal exploration to strengthen the struggle over alternative futures
Educational researchers are increasingly striving on the edge of possibility to re-imagine and realise the future. Activist scholarship requires appropriate philosophical and theoretical bases, what Stetsenko refers to as 'dangerous' – useful in the struggle for a better world. How might praxis, agency and learning be charged with transgressive spirit? This paper considers the Theory of Practice Architectures and Transformative Activist Stance, e…
Simulation in Higher Education: A sociomaterial view
This article presents a sociomaterial account of simulation in higher education. Sociomaterial approaches change the ontological and epistemological bases for understanding learning and offer valuable tools for addressing important questions about relationships between university education and professional practices. Simulation has grown in many disciplines as a means to bring the two closer together. However, the theoretical underpinnings of sim…
Changing the World for Children with Complex Feeding Difficulties: Cultural-Historical Analyses of Transformative Agency
How to bring about positive change is a key concern in cultural-historical theory. There is an urgent imperative to address questions of transformation at the nexus of the individual and the social. One way to approach this is through the concept of agency, the means through which people go beyond coping with problems or adapting to the status quo, instead striving to make the future that ought to be a reality. This paper takes up ideas from Stet…
Partnership practice as collaborative knowledge work: Overcoming common dilemmas through an augmented view of professional expertise
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on how partnership practices that build resilience in families work. Two broad questions are explored: first, what are the forms of expertise required in practices that effectively build resilience through partnership?; and second, how can some of the challenges practitioners experience when working in partnership be addressed? Design/methodology/approach – A theoretical approach is taken, …
Research design and methods of data collection and analysis: Researching students' conceptions in a multiple‐method case study
Three techniques were used in a multiple‐method case study to explore students' conceptions of geography within a qualitative framework, employing aspects of phenomenology, ethnography and grounded theory. The context of the research is briefly outlined, and then the methodological framework and nature of the data yielded are discussed in more detail. Aspects of analytical procedures are considered as are strengths and weaknesses of the research …
Research design and methods of data collection and analysis: Researching students' conceptions in a multiple‐method case study
Three techniques were used in a multiple‐method case study to explore students' conceptions of geography within a qualitative framework, employing aspects of phenomenology, ethnography and grounded theory. The context of the research is briefly outlined, and then the methodological framework and nature of the data yielded are discussed in more detail. Aspects of analytical procedures are considered as are strengths and weaknesses of the research …
A Sociomaterial Account of Partnership, Signatures and Accountability in Practice
Professional work is often heralded as undergoing radical transformation. This paper focuses on partnership between health professionals and families as a specific instance of changes aimed at delivering shared responsibility and joint knowledge work. An ethnographic study of a residential child and family health services provides the empirical basis for a detailed examination of what is signed, by whom, and with what effects. I show how signing …
Conceptualising the PhD as preparing for academic practice in geography
Simulation in Higher Education: A sociomaterial view
This article presents a sociomaterial account of simulation in higher education. Sociomaterial approaches change the ontological and epistemological bases for understanding learning and offer valuable tools for addressing important questions about relationships between university education and professional practices. Simulation has grown in many disciplines as a means to bring the two closer together. However, the theoretical underpinnings of sim…
Unfolding Practices: A Sociomaterial View of Interprofessional Collaboration in Health Care
Knowledge sharing is an essential part of interprofessional practice and will be even more important in the future in regard to the opportunities and challenges in practices for delivering safe and effective healthcare. The aim of this ethnographic study was to explore how professional knowledge can be shared in an interprofessional team at a spinal cord injury rehabilitation unit. A sociomaterial perspective on practice was used to analyse the d…
Partnership practice as collaborative knowledge work: Overcoming common dilemmas through an augmented view of professional expertise
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on how partnership practices that build resilience in families work. Two broad questions are explored: first, what are the forms of expertise required in practices that effectively build resilience through partnership?; and second, how can some of the challenges practitioners experience when working in partnership be addressed? Design/methodology/approach – A theoretical approach is taken, …
Double stimulation “in the wild”: Services for families with children at-risk
Shadow organizing and imitation: New foci for research
Purpose Shadow organizing refers to the emergence of parallel arrangements that sit alongside and imitate mainstream or conventional ways of organizing. It can be a response to challenges that require new ways of working without abandoning what is valuable about conventional arrangements. However, the processes through which shadow organizing is accomplished are not well understood; there is a need to go beyond traditional notions of mimicry and …
Provocations and possibilities in professional practice, education, and learning
is a collaborative, multi
How is Brilliance Enacted in Professional Practices? Insights from the Theory of Practice Architectures
Brilliance has been overlooked in studies of professional work. This study aimed to understand how brilliant practices are made possible and enacted in a multidisciplinary paediatric feeding clinic, where professionals from different disciplines work together and with parents and carers of children. The existing literature has thematically described brilliance but not theorised how it is accomplished and enabled. Using video reflexive ethnographi…
Changing the World for Children with Complex Feeding Difficulties: Cultural-Historical Analyses of Transformative Agency
How to bring about positive change is a key concern in cultural-historical theory. There is an urgent imperative to address questions of transformation at the nexus of the individual and the social. One way to approach this is through the concept of agency, the means through which people go beyond coping with problems or adapting to the status quo, instead striving to make the future that ought to be a reality. This paper takes up ideas from Stet…
Forward anchoring in transformative agency: How parents of children with complex feeding difficulties transcend the status quo
Connective Enactment and Collective Accomplishment in Professional Practices
Working with others is key to professionalism but little attention has been given to how specific actions contribute to collective practices to secure shared ends in work. This essay considers how professionals’ actions connect with one another in distributed (multi-participant) work practices. Recently, Hopwood, Blomberg, Dahlberg and Abrant Dahlgren identified a new way of viewing how professionals in distributed practices coordinate their acti…
Agency in cultural-historical activity theory: Strengthening commitment to social transformation
Theorizing agency is crucial to intervening in social, economic, political, and environmental crises. This paper examines three approaches to agency within cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT): transformative activist stance (Stetsenko), transformative agency by double stimulation (Sannino), and relational agency (Edwards). All three uphold CHAT’s rebellious gist, where our actions are shaped by circumstances but where the possibility of tr…
Secondary school students’ perceptions and experiences of learning science and mathematics: The case of Bhutan
Secondary students’ perceptions of learning science and mathematics have been researched internationally, but less in the global South. This study investigated Grades 9 and 10 students’ experiences of learning biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics in Bhutanese secondary schools. A mixed-methods sequential design was used. First, 524 students from 7 schools completed a survey capturing their perceptions of learning in the four subject areas.…
‘It Was That … Specialist … That Finally Listened to Us … That's Probably a Weird Answer to What You Were Expecting’: Clinician and carer perspectives on brilliant feeding care
INTRODUCTION: To extend research on positive aspects of health care, this article focusses on health care for children who tube-feed-this is because knowledge about tube-feeding for children is limited and fragmented. This is achieved by consulting with clinicians and carers who supported children who tube-feed to clarify their understandings of and experiences with brilliant feeding care. METHODS: Nine clinicians and nine carers who supported ch…
How poetry and song can grapple with the dialectics of crisis and agency, and become tools for transformative research
Activist scholarship inspired by a cultural-historical tradition often seeks to foster agency with people facing crisis. The aim is to develop new understandings and bases for action that can help people break away from the status quo and change what is possible. Cultural-historical theory understands crisis and agency dialectically, linking both to individual and social transformation. Dialectic understandings of crisis foreground breakdown and …
Professional learning promoting agency in challenging practice contexts
This study promoted professional learning and agency through a pragmatic formative intervention. Participants sought to change professional practices in classrooms in response to critical reflection on pedagogic practices and wider social concerns. Australian researchers collaborated with teachers and teacher educators from Nepal, informed by cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). Change Laboratory methods identified a contradiction between …
Conceptualising praxis, agency and learning: A postabyssal exploration to strengthen the struggle over alternative futures
Educational researchers are increasingly striving on the edge of possibility to re-imagine and realise the future. Activist scholarship requires appropriate philosophical and theoretical bases, what Stetsenko refers to as 'dangerous' – useful in the struggle for a better world. How might praxis, agency and learning be charged with transgressive spirit? This paper considers the Theory of Practice Architectures and Transformative Activist Stance, e…
Twenty-five years of change laboratories in schools: A critical and formative review
Transformation, learning and research come together in educational action research. Change Laboratories (CLs) are a distinctive approach to action research grounded in Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). CLs seek to go beyond technical change, oriented instead to systemic and ideologically driven transformation. However, there have been few reviews of CL research, none focused on education. This paper reports a review of 55 studies using …
Co-design practice in higher education: Practice theory insights into collaborative curriculum development
Higher education curricula require regular renewal. Varied expertise is needed to meet the multi-faceted challenges of curriculum development, hence the importance of collaborative approaches. Co-design is one approach to curriculum making as a relational practice, with evidence showing it can improve pedagogical quality and stakeholder involvement via a collaborative ethos that breaks through constraints of individual imagination and assumptions…
The Building Blocks for Successful Hub Implementation for Migrant and Refugee Families and Their Children in the First 2000 Days of Life
BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Migrant and refugee women, families, and their children can experience significant language, cultural, and psychosocial barriers to engage with child and family services. Integrated child and family health Hubs are increasingly promoted as a potential solution to address access barriers; however, there is scant literature on how to best implement them with migrant and refugee populations. Our aim was to explore with serv…
Developing de-encapsulated hybrid activity in a school: Making inclusion a shared responsibility
Change Laboratories are a means to support transformation in schools, grounded in Cultural-Historical-Activity Theory (CHAT). They can enable schools to become agents of social change by connecting learning to what happens outside of school, and organising schooling in collaboration with community. This is referred to as de-encapsulation or hybridity. Recent developments in Change Laboratories have seen strengthened engagement with knowledges fro…
The Barriers and Enablers to Implementing Child and Family Health Hubs for Migrant Families
Migrant women and children can face significant barriers when accessing child and family health services. Child and family health hubs (hubs) represent a potential solution to simplify pathways between maternity, child, and social care services for migrant populations. However, how these hubs operate specifically for migrants remains underexplored. Our study addresses this gap by exploring what helps and hinders the establishment and delivery of …
The Wall of Rejection Writ Large: A Creative-Relational Inquiry Into the Affective Futurity of Academic Slow Death
Grounded in affective futurity, this article examines the often-invisible forms of rejection that shape the ordinary body. In this light, rejection becomes a form of academic slow death, prompting some to imagine no futures for their lives within the academy. Rather than swallow indignation, I embrace the margins as a site of meaning-making, navigating an institution with little room to falter. Through creative-relational methodologies, I invite …
Sociology (19 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Political science (13 works) · Engineering (12 works) · Pedagogy (12 works) · Social science (11 works) · Engineering ethics (9 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Innovative Education and Learning Practices (9 works) · Social Psychology (8 works)