Growing up in Technoculture: The ontological and perceptual significance of media in the lives of infants and toddlers

It is well documented that young children understand media differently to older children and adults, yet despite years of debate surrounding the psycho-social impact that media may have on children and youth, very little remains known about how they intercede into infants’ and toddlers’ lived experiences. We cannot assume that media have no significance in the lives of infants and toddlers simply because they may not understand the content. The particularities of very young children’s experiences of, engagement with and understanding of media cannot be expected to necessarily relate solely, or even primarily, to the media content. As an alternative this thesis focuses on the relations between very young children and media in terms of their material and corporeal effects and in this respect how media interfaces, as part of infants’ and toddlers’ environments literally mediate very young children’s possibilities for perception and action within 21st century media saturated environments. By focusing on children from birth to three years of age and their contingent material, physical environments, this thesis presents a chronology of child-technology relations as mediated relations which is necessary to understand the effect of media (conventionally understood) on their lived experience. In adopting an interdisciplinary ecological approach which relies on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology (1962), Donald W. Winnicott’s psychoanalysis (1957, 1960) and Don Ihde’s post-phenomenology (1995), this thesis revolves around four central concepts: embodiment, transitional objects, holding spaces and both James Gibson’s (1982) and Donald Norman’s (1990) affordances to offer a complex understanding of the significance of media as material objects in the lives of infants and toddlers. In doing so, it argues that media effect infants and toddlers in ways that are specific to the media themselves, the particular time and place in which they emerge and are used, and to babies’ and toddlers’ situatedness and capacity to act within the world

Double Blind

This thesis examines the context surrounding my sculptural practice. In it, I explore sculpture’s inherent engagement with bodies in space as fertile ground for addressing contemporary experiences of embodiment related to our engagement with various materialities. I ask: How do we attend to or conceive of the spaces we inhabit? What is our understanding of connectivity today? How do objects “speak” in ways images cannot

Backwards is the way forward: feedback in the cortical hierarchy predicts the expected future

Clark offers a powerful description of the brain as a prediction machine, which offers progress on two distinct levels. First, on an abstract conceptual level, it provides a unifying framework for perception, action, and cognition (including subdivisions such as attention, expectation, and imagination). Second, hierarchical prediction offers progress on a concrete descriptive level for testing and constraining conceptual elements and mechanisms of predictive coding models (estimation of predictions, prediction errors, and internal models)

Populism and security in political speechmaking : the 2008 US Presidential Campaign

The issue of security has been a prominent feature of the US political landscape since the attacks of 9/11. Not surprisingly, then, issues of security, trust and credibility were raised throughout the 2008 US election presidential campaign. In the latter stages of his presidency, George W. Bush had been engaged in portraying his two terms as a successful period as national protector, keeping the US safe from further terrorist attack.Both the policy and the rhetorical strategies of the Bush administration coalesced around an emphasis on 'homeland security'. As well as producing a dominant way of asserting political legitimacy, this put in place an administrative framework within which elected legislators had to situate themselves, including the candidates for the 2008 presidential election

A Psychological Ethnographic Study of the Christian Orthodox Understanding of Evil Eye and Its Effects on Individuals’ Mental Health and Development of Personhood in the Contemporary Greek Region of Corfu Island

The research presented in this thesis widens the scope of ethnographic approach to ‘the evil eye’ and its effects on individuals’ understandings of self and ‘others’ in contemporary Corfu, Greece. What makes this study authoritative and unique is that the island of Corfu is a region which was not historically under the Ottoman rule or any Islamic influence; in addition, the thesis examines the phenomenon of the evil eye from the perspective of Eastern Christian Orthodox teachings and tradition, which addresses a lacuna in the existing literature. The study proposes that different social groups, such as lay people, mental health professionals, clergymen and folk healers, experience the phenomenon differently but not because of their different socioeconomic backgrounds, as suggested by the current literature. This research confirms that the evil eye is experienced differently based on the individual’s trans-historical and trans-generational heritage, and further suggests that the evil eye is not purely triggered by envy, admiration or jealousy, but in fact is a phenomenon related to the individual’s shame and existential anxiety of ‘being’ seen by the others’ ‘I’. The analysis of the present study departs from the traditional view of the evil eye by arguing that the phenomenon offers insight into human existence and its tripartite elements: soul, mind and body. Following an ethnographic methodology anthropologically informed, the researcher is influenced by psychological/psychoanalytic anthropology, and this is the school of thought from which he chiefly draws his interpretations. Finally the present study proposes that the evil eye in Christian Orthodox tradition has been experienced differently according not only to the individual’s behaviours but also their linguistic expression of the phenomenon. This study enriches the literature by revealing that the evil eye is related to the reflected self as it is perceived by the sufferer and the caster through the others’ mirror eye, which in turn defines the self

The poetics of immanence and experience: Robert Lowell, James Wright, Richard Hugo, Jorie Graham

This thesis defines the poetics of a strand within contemporary American poetry, generally described as “mainstream” by literary critics that I define as “the poetics of immanence and experience”. I delineate the genealogy of this poetics from the late 1950s to the end of the 1990s, focusing on four poets who, I contend, best represent “the situation of poetry” in each of the decades during this period. Each of these poets will be shown to sustain and extend this vibrant, and according to literary scholarship, still dominant tradition in American poetry. Robert Lowell, James Wright, Richard Hugo and Jorie Graham are analyzed in the literary context of a particular decade as the most representative poet of this strand of poetry. Defining and tracing a stable poetic model within the vast poetic, aesthetic and cultural input and output in America during the second half of the twentieth century, contributes to a better understanding of American culture as susceptible to generating experiential types of poetry. Drawing from Altieri’s concept of immanence, I define the poem as immanent when it reveals a presence/immanence of a human consciousness as an individuated and particularized agent/protagonist who narrates his/her personal story in a primarily causal, narrative language generated by the structures of the depicted story. The result is the realistic illusion that the poem captures the experience as “it happened”, which is then only transferred to the poem-world from the Object-world. Altieri’s idea about the general turn in American poetry towards the Wordsworthian Order of Nature and my argument about experience as value-generating principles for the poets, are manifested in Lowell’s photographically “objective” surface descriptions and narrations, Wright’s transcendental moments inspired by numinous nature, Hugo’s projections of the human self upon the Object-towns and Graham’s experiential frames of reference filled with the meditations and speculations of her discursive voice

To Affinity and Beyond: Interactive Digital Humans as a Human Computer Interface

The field of human computer interaction is increasingly exploring the use of more natural, human-like user interfaces to build intelligent agents to aid in everyday life. This is coupled with a move to people using ever more realistic avatars to represent themselves in their digital lives. As the ability to produce emotionally engaging digital human representations is only just now becoming technically possible, there is little research into how to approach such tasks. This is due to both technical complexity and operational implementation cost. This is now changing as we are at a nexus point with new approaches, faster graphics processing and enabling new technologies in machine learning and computer vision becoming available. I articulate the issues required for such digital humans to be considered successfully located on the other side of the phenomenon known as the Uncanny Valley. My results show that a complex mix of perceived and contextual aspects affect the sense making on digital humans and highlights previously undocumented effects of interactivity on the affinity. Users are willing to accept digital humans as a new form of user interface and they react to them emotionally in previously unanticipated ways. My research shows that it is possible to build an effective interactive digital human that crosses the Uncanny Valley. I directly explore what is required to build a visually realistic digital human as a primary research question and I explore if such a realistic face provides sufficient benefit to justify the challenges involved in building it. I conducted a Delphi study to inform the research approaches and then produced a complex digital human character based on these insights. This interactive and realistic digital human avatar represents a major technical undertaking involving multiple teams around the world. Finally, I explored a framework for examining the ethical implications and signpost future research areas