1,147 research outputs found
Eye-movements of Vocal Performers Across Experience Levels
Expertise, such as music expertise, is commonly studied through an analysis of eye-movements. Experts typically have fewer fixations, longer saccade amplitudes, and thus greater perceptual spans when reading music than non-experts. Most musical expertise literature is focused on instrumentalists and sight-reading. The current study aimed to extend the research to include vocalists and to see if there are still expertise effects when both experts and non-experts are familiar with the piece of music. Participants were recruited to sing a piece from their choir once when they had first started learning the piece and again right before their concert. They were separated into three expertise groups based on their responses to the Vocal Experience Questionnaire. There was a significant interaction between test type (pre-test/post-test) and experience level Low/Medium/High) on fixations. The Low Level group had a marginally significant decrease in fixations between sessions. There were no other significant main effects or interactions. These results are contrary to the literature, and thus there are some methodological adjustments that could be made in the future to get more representative results, including using a different piece of music, adjusting the Vocal Experience Questionnaire questions, and increasing the participant size. Through the marginally significant decrease in fixations for the low experience group, one can conclude that practice helps close the gap between non-experts and experts. Ways this research could be expanded include focusing on the âmasteryâ versus âexpertiseâ hypothesis, conducting a psychophysics experiment instead of a cognitive one, and including eye-voice span in the analysis
Building a New Utøya : re-placing the Oslo bombsite â counterfactual resilience at post-terrorist sites
Resilience strategies aim to build âresilienceâ before disasters strike; utilizing preemptive techniques to predict emergencies and prepare systems to manage their consequences. But what can we learn about resilience from responses to disasters that have already happened? This article draws on fieldwork at postterrorist sites in Norway: the Oslo Government Quarter and Utøya island. While resilience policy develops plans for infrastructural recovery after the next disaster, the curators of postterrorist sites rebuild and reclaim existing disaster space. They apply a retrospective framing of recovery. The article explores this work and questions its absence from policy understandings of resilience
Survivor trees and memorial groves : vegetal commemoration of victims of terrorism in Europe and the United States
In commemorations of human lives lost in terrorism, European and American memorials increasingly appeal to the aesthetics of ânatureâ to symbolise societal regrowth. This article interrogates the ironic and ontological registers involved in commemorating human life through vegetal symbols, paying particular attention to the World Trade Center site in Manhattan. Memorials traditionally conceive of human life as distinct from material and living ecologies, rarely commemorating the deaths of non-humans. As such, the use of trees and vegetal landscaping to represent and memorialise the dead human involves a complex and ironic ontological relationship. Post disaster place-making through vegetal symbolism equates vegetal and human being, on one level, but it also ironically emphasises the fundamental gulf between them. Survivors and visitors are confronted with regenerating vegetal life which evokes idealised ecological conceptions of networked human and non-human lives. But we do not live or die in the same way as a plant, so vegetal symbolism simultaneously invokes human alienation from the natural world. The aesthetic registers of the survivor trees bring a complex, unresolved and ironic reflection on human mortality to memorial landscapes
The geography of pre-criminal space : epidemiological imaginations of radicalisation risk in the UK prevent strategy, 2007-2017
This article explores geographical and epistemological shifts in the deployment of the UK Prevent strategy, 2007â2017. Counter-radicalisation policies of the Labour governments (2006â2010) focused heavily upon resilience-building activities in residential communities. They borrowed from historical models of crime prevention and public health to imagine radicalisation risk as an epidemiological concern in areas showing a 2% or higher demography of Muslims. However, this racialised and localised imagination of pre-criminal space was replaced after the election of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010. Residential communities were then de-emphasised as sites of risk, transmission and pre-criminal intervention. The Prevent Duty now deploys counter-radicalisation through national networks of education and health-care provision. Localised models of crime prevention (and their statistical, crime prevention epistemologies) have been de-emphasised in favour of big data inflected epistemologies of inductive, population-wide âsafeguardingâ. Through the biopolitical discourse of âsafeguarding vulnerable adultsâ, the Prevent Duty has radically reconstituted the epidemiological imagination of pre-criminal space, imagining that all bodies are potentially vulnerable to infection by radicalisers and thus warrant surveillance
Counter-terrorism and the counterfactual : producing the âradicalisationâ discourse and the UK PREVENT Strategy
This article interrogates the production of the âradicalisationâ discourse which underpins efforts to govern âterrorismâ pre-emptively through the UK's PREVENT strategy. British counter-terrorism currently relies upon the invention of âradicalisationâ and related knowledge about transitions to âterrorismâ to undertake governance of communities rendered suspicious. The article argues that such conceptions make terrorism knowable and governable through conceptions of risk. Radicalisation knowledge provides a counterfactual to terrorismâenabling governmental intervention in its supposed production. It makes the future actionable. However, while the deployment of âradicalisationâ functions to make terrorism pre-emptively governable and knowable, it also renders PREVENT unstable by simultaneously presenting âvulnerability indicatorsâ for radicalisation as threats to the wider collectiveâthese conducts are framed as both âat riskâ and âriskyâ, both vulnerable and dangerous. This instability speaks to ad hoc production of the radicalisation discourse by scholarly and policy-making communities for the governance of terrorism through radicalisation knowledge. This article analyses the production of the radicalisation discourse to explore its performance as a form of risk governance within British counter-terrorism
Forgetting ISIS : enmity, drive and repetition in security discourse
This paper explores the reconstitution and repetition of threat imaginaries in security discourse, with particular focus on the War on Terror era. Upon vanquishing the enemy (whether an individual militant or militant group) no tangible increase in âsecurityâ is claimed by securitising actors. Instead, the security apparatus turns away and reconstructs the figuration of insecurity elsewhere. Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS replace each other as signifiers for the most profound threat to international order. The article positions this compulsive refiguration of enemies within an aversion to attaining a state of âsecurityâ. The paper uses psychoanalytic concepts of drive and jouissance to argue that security imaginaries play out fantasies of insecurity to suture the symbiotic relationship between subjectivity and power. If enmity was permanently ended or victory attained, society would need to confront the continued experience of âlackâ (ontological insecurity) â something promised to disappear upon the resolution of hostilities. The fantasy of interpellation would collapse at this point. The article contributes to Critical Security Studies by explicitly addressing the repetitive constitution of terrorist threats. It goes beyond constructivist understandings of othering to explain why the resolution of insecurity is disavowed and why enmity is continually restage
Algorithmic autoimmunity in the NHS : radicalisation and the clinic
This article explores the extension of counter-radicalisation practice into the National Health Service (NHS). In the 2011 reformulation of the UK Prevent strategy, the NHS became a key sector for the identification and suppression of âradicalisationâ. Optometrists, dentists, doctors and nurses have been incorporated into counter-terrorism and trained to report signs of radicalisation in patients and staff. This article explores how calculative modalities associated with big data and digital analytics have been translated into the non-digital realm. The surveillance of the whole of the population through the NHS indicates a dramatic policy shift away from linear profiling of those âsuspect communitiesâ previously considered vulnerable to radicalisation. Fixed indicators of radicalisation and risk profiles no longer reduce the sample size for surveillance by distinguishing between risky and non-risky bodies. Instead, the UK government chose the NHS as a pre-eminent site for counter-terrorism because of the large amount of contact it has with the public. The UK government is developing a novel counter-terrorism policy in the NHS around large-N surveillance and inductive calculation, which demonstrates a translation of algorithmic modalities and calculative regimes. This article argues that this translation produces an autoimmune moment in British security discourse whereby the distinction between suspicious and non-suspicious bodies has collapsed. It explores the training provided to NHS staff, arguing that fixed profiles no longer guide surveillance: rather, surveillance inductively produces the terrorist profile
Affecting Terrorism: Laughter, lamentation, and detestation as drives to terrorism knowledge
The contemporary fascination with terrorism in Anglo-American popular culture, political discourse, news reportage, and beyond is boundless and well documented. In this article, we explore contemporary productions of terrorism as the outcome of three drives to knowledge: laugher, lamentation, and detestation. Drawing on a range of social and cultural practicesâincluding jokes, street art, film, memorial projects, elite rhetoric, and abuse scandalsâwe make two arguments. First, that humor, grief, and hatred underpin and saturate the contemporary desire to know terrorism. And, second, thatâalthough these drives function in multiple and ambiguous waysâthey serve to institute a distance between the subject and object of terrorism knowledge, not least by encouraging us to laugh at those punished for terrorism, mourn for those lost in attacks, and direct our hatred toward those responsible. This analysis not only opens fresh insight into the workings of terrorism discourse in the post-9/11 period, it also points to connections between contemporary âcriticalâ work on terrorism and debate on the role of emotions and affect in international politics more broadly
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