Art as Contemplative Place, with reference to Isamu Noguchi's sited works.

The term contemplative place, a new concept that forms the core of this research is defined as "space where a meaningful sense of calm can be experienced." Contemplative place situates itself as a category of place. M. Auge defines place as that which is "relational, historical and/or concerned with identity" (1995). For the artwork to be meaningful, it needs to be expressive and significant through its response to its physical, cultural, historical and/or social identity. With reference to Isamu Noguchi's sited works, three projects are seen as representatively defining his career. They are The UNESCO Garden in France - Noguchi's early attempt at using the landscape as an art form; the California Scenario in the USA -a corporate park where Noguchi successfully creates a meaningful sense of place; and the Domon Ken Museum of Photography in Japan -a simple reductive approach that addresses its context on several levels. Through the analysis and contextual isation of Noguchi's works, I begin to explore the strategic processes and principles that he used to make his works contemplative places. In my practice, I review and test evolving processes that incorporate the notions of place as well as my practice of meditation. Three case studies of past and current works are presented, each with a summary of analysis and a completed (or anticipated) experience. Then, through post-reflective thoughts, I begin to consolidate my own strategic processes and principles, and study how they have evolved and in some instances been influenced by Noguchi. As a final chapter, an evaluation addresses the similarities and differences between Noguchi's works and mine in achieving contemplative place. The intention of this research is that the term contemplative place can be understood and evolve over time with future research. The strategic processes and principles used by Noguchi and those newly developed through my own practice could prove as useful examples to inspire new frontiers for creating contemplative places as art forms

Killing Matters: Canadian War Remembrance and the Ghosts of Ortona

This dissertation combines critical discourse analysis with person-centred ethnography to examine the dissonant relationships between Canadian war veterans' narratives and the national discourse of Canadian war remembrance. The dissertation analyses Canadian war remembrance as a ritualized discourse (named Remembrance) that is produced in commemorative rituals, symbols, poetry, monuments, pilgrimages, artwork, history-writing, political speeches, government documents, media reports, and the design of the Canadian War Museum. This Remembrance discourse foregrounds and valorizes the suffering of soldiers and makes the soldier's act of dying the central issue of war. In doing so, Remembrance suppresses the significance of the soldier's act of killing and attributes this orientational framework to veterans themselves, as if it is consistent with their experiences. The dissertation problematizes this Remembrance framing of war through an analysis of WWII veterans' narratives drawn from ethnographic fieldwork that was conducted in western Canada with 23 veterans of the WWII battle of Ortona, Italy. The fieldwork consisted of life-story interviews that focused on veterans' combat experiences, supplemented by archival research and a study of the Ortona Christmas reconciliation dinner with former enemy soldiers. Through psychoanalytically-informed discourse analysis, the narratives are interpreted in terms of hidden meanings and trauma signals associated with the issue of killing. The analysis shows that many of these veterans were strongly affected by killing even when they did not know if they had killed and even though most of them tried to suppress their dissonant affects. In sum, these Ortona veterans' narratives constitute dissonant acts of remembrance that unsettle the limited moral frame within which Canadians imagine war

Governance, power and resilience in planning for urban density in Mumbai

This research investigates three intersecting policy arenas relating to urban density to gain insights into urban governance in Mumbai. The policy arenas each comprise debates prominently framed around urban density: the 2014-2034 Development Plan for Greater Mumbai (high-density nodes); the Eastern Waterfront redevelopment project (decongesting Mumbai); and Slum Redevelopment and Rehabilitation policies (overcrowding). Specifically, the research investigates how stakeholders engage in - and seek to influence – each of these policy arenas, and what implication that has for their own resilience and that of the city as a social-ecological urban system (SEuS). Engaging with literatures on social-ecological resilience and urban governance, this research adopts a ‘governance for resilience’ frame to explore how actors and knowledges come together to debate and shape policy outcomes, and what practices emerge to shape the governance landscape. The empirical data gives evidence to the idea that planning for urban density in Mumbai is neither a benign nor rational policy manoeuvre, but it polarises stakeholders and places emphasis on divisions between opposing interests, public, private and civic. Investigating the way in which urban density is framed and debated within policy arenas sheds light on the ways in which urban density is politicized and governed by mediations, contestations, tactics, and evolutions within the panarchy of governance. Elaborating these reveals the polarisations in the governance landscapes around urban density in Mumbai and informs how power plays out in governing for resilience. The research reveals that fragmentations in formal governance are overcome by experimentation and innovation at the grassroots. It argues that, even when remembrance (top-down inertia) dominates, active revolt (bottom-up self-organisation, experimentation, and protest) plays a role in building the resources for resilience. Lastly, it shows how - through the actions of international players, internationally dominant discourses, political influences and the power of the State (remembrance) - the city itself is rendered powerless to govern its future. Thus, this research identifies characteristics of governance that support (or hinder) resilience at multiple scales, providing an indication of what 'governance for resilience' may look like. In addition, it provides a perspective on how planners and political scientists might understand and engage with resilience, for the mutual benefit of both areas of scholarship

St. Louis Currents: The Bi-State Region after a Century of Planning

This collection of essays by leading scholars examines urban issues facing the St. Louis region in the 2010 era, which is 100 years after the first city plan in the US in 1907

Modelling sustainable ecotourism development on the Coromandel Peninsula in Aotearoa / New Zealand; a holistic systems approach based on the idea of chaos and complexity in a human-activity system

This thesis studies ecotourism in the context of sustainable tourism development. The research is based on the premise that ecotourism and sustainable development can be expressed as operational theoretical concepts and as fields of empirical inquiry. Positioned in the realm of applied qualitative research in the social sciences, the study’s leitmotiv is that sustainable ecotourism development can be represented from an integrative perspective by designing a conceptual system model. The field work consists of an empirical inquiry placed in the Coromandel Peninsula in New Zealand/Aotearoa. By employing a regional case study to test the hypotheses of the thesis, the research attains an insight in the operationalisation of ecotourism and sustainable ecotourism development. It further produces new knowledge regarding the theorisation and conceptualisation of ecotourism and sustainable tourism development. Two main goals drive the study. The first is the exploration of the ontological, epistemological and ideological matrix of a holistic and systemic research perspective. The second goal is the examination of the methodological and practical utility of conceptual system modelling as a research approach. The adopted strategy allows for causal, correlative and teleological interpretations of the spatio-temporal physical and mental phenomena encountered. With reference to critical realism the modelling process is recognised as an abstraction of ‘actual reality’ as opposed to ‘real reality’. Critical realism as an ontology accounts for the different ‘situated knowledges’ and worldviews that are present in the Coromandel Peninsula. The model itself reflects the researcher’s perception of an ‘empirical reality’, which is depicted at three resolution levels. Progressively coupling the different scales, the model design focuses on: (1) The configuration and behavioural patterns of the system as a whole; (2) the attributes of nested subsystems and their influences on each other as well as on the whole system; (3) the properties of individual system constituents, the processes and relationships linking these elements, and their effects on subsets of the system as well as on the system as a whole. Structural and process analyses, as well as an aetiological account of the system’s variables, do justice to the experienced complexity. At each resolution level the research outcome entails two simultaneously developed models. Both show the characteristics of open, complex and adaptive human-activity systems. While the first model reflects the status quo of sustainable ecotourism development in the Coromandel Peninsula, the second one represents an idealised archetype that can be used as a grid for further improvements. Neither model offers a fait accompli. Having identified ecotourism and sustainable tourism development as subjective and dynamic problem areas, answers exist within a continuum of differential interpretations, satisfying changing interests, needs and expectations. Solutions are thus of a suggestive and tentative nature. On a theoretical level, the study utilises ideas derived from ‘general system theory’ and the ‘chaoplexity paradigm’. Conceptually, it expands the philosophical notion of methodological holism into a pluralistic approach. Methodological triangulation is employed to compensate for the anticipated shortcomings of individual methods. In a pragmatic sense ecotourism and sustainable tourism development are viewed as anthropogenic phenomena that emerge at the interface between humans and the natural environment. Human agency is interpreted as the fulcrum of the system’s evolution, which operates in both the mental and physical dimension. Assuming that humans possess ‘free will’, and that rational and irrational as well as emotive and intuitive behaviour are inherent faculties of our nature, the system’s dynamics can not be sufficiently described via linear causalities. Non-linear relations, and a complex combination of multivariate and contingent causation, are interpreted predominantly as a result of human encounter and interaction. Answers to what should be ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in ecotourism practice are based on the adoption of a pluralistic moral stance. This approach allows for competitive as well as cooperative elements as inherent human character traits that drive decision-making processes. Based on the findings, the thesis concludes with a flexible template of systemic indices that can evaluate the environmental performance and development of ecotourism. It is argued that utilising the suggested set of complex indicators in conjunction bears the potential to enhance sustainable ecotourism development. The template’s adaptability to specific situational contexts is viewed as a prerequisite to cater for changing demands and expectations of individuals, local communities and regions

Друга міжнародна конференція зі сталого майбутнього: екологічні, технологічні, соціальні та економічні питання (ICSF 2021). Кривий Ріг, Україна, 19-21 травня 2021 року

Second International Conference on Sustainable Futures: Environmental, Technological, Social and Economic Matters (ICSF 2021). Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, May 19-21, 2021.Друга міжнародна конференція зі сталого майбутнього: екологічні, технологічні, соціальні та економічні питання (ICSF 2021). Кривий Ріг, Україна, 19-21 травня 2021 року

32nd Midwest/Midsouth Estate Planning Institute

Materials from the 32nd Midwest/Midsouth Estate Planning Institute held by UK/CLE in July 2005

The role of culture in organisational and individual personnel selection decisions

The present consensus in the literature is that the traditional personnel selection paradigm is flawed and as a consequence, it has not readily been adopted into practice (Cascio & Aguinis, 2oo8). This disparity between research and practice has particularly been attributed to researchers' lack of awareness of the complex variables impacting organisational decision-making processes (Herriot & Anderson; 1997; Hodgkinson & Payne, 1998); the conceptualisation of scientific selection along a continuum based strictly on criterion validity indices (Hough & Oswald 2000; Borman, Hanson & Hedge, 1997) and a lack of clarity on the role of culture in selection research (Ryan, McFarland, Baron & Page, 1999; Moscoso & Salgado, 2004). In an attempt to identify the impact of these variables on personnel selection decisions, this thesis examines the landscape of what is generally viewed as scientific personnel selection by taking the discussion to a setting that is atypical of those normally represented in the selection research literature. The current scheme of research utilises samples from Jamaica to examine the role of culture in individual and organisational selection decisions. In so doing, studies throughout this thesis aim to challenge the assumption of universality espoused by the traditional psychometric paradigm in the measurement and understanding of personnel selection outcomes. Through a series of 6 studies quantitative, qualitative and experimental methods were adopted to determine the influence of cultural, internal and external factors on organisational decisions to utilise criterion-based selection techniques, applicant's decisions to pursue a job and selector decisions in a simulated managerial task. Findings revealed: a) Jamaica's colonial history, workermanager relationships and worker expectations influenced perceived personnel challenges, selection decisions and the likelihood of Jamaican organisations using criterion-based selection techniques; b) the cultural history necessitated a fit-based approached to selection and preference for techniques such as structured interviews, references and application forms; c) as represented by a multidimensional perceptual map, factors influencing Jamaican selection decisions are most similar to countries characterised by moderate power distance and masculinity indices (Australia and Canada) and most divergent to cultures characterised by extremely low individualism, high power distances and high long-term orientation (Taiwan and China); d) job and organisational factors influencing applicants' decisions to apply varied across cultures and applicant performing ability. Compared to UK graduates, higher-performing Jamaican applicants were more confident when applying to jobs emphasising performance although they preferred applying to jobs emphasising fit; e) for higher-performing Jamaican applicants, overall perceptions of structured interviews mediated the attractiveness of pay in their decision to pursue a job; f) framing and information order may mediate the process and outcomes of decisions rather than act as predictors of choices in and of themselves; and g) Jamaican selectors make attributions about a candidate's suitability based on perceptions of both functional and psychosocial consequences. Fit-based factors are given priority as fit with the organisation and team is cognitively weighted as better indicators of effective performance. Findings from all six studies emphasise the role of culture in individual and organisational personnel selection decisions and indicate 'scientific' personnel selection is more fit-based and culturally determined than previously suggested. It is therefore proposed that the dominant paradigm of personnel selection be reconceptualised from a psychometric emphasis to an attitudinal-cognitivebehavioural theoretical perspective which takes into account the impact of cultural and social variables on selection decisions. The implications of this alternate approach are discussed in relation to organisational, selector and applicant selection decisions and tackling future selection research agenda