105 research outputs found

    Justice and Meaningful Work

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    This thesis argues the widespread promotion of meaningful work can be an important part of a liberal theory of justice that takes nonperfectionism seriously. I begin with a conceptual argument and defend what I call the ‘contributive view’ of meaningful work, which characterizes work as meaningful when it is complex enough to be person-engaging for the worker and involves them in the contributive aspects of the work process. I then turn to the normative argument and claim that undertaking meaningful work so regarded is a social basis of self-respect, for two reasons. First, because it’s connected through reciprocity to the political idea of society as a system of social cooperation, and second, because it relates to personhood and can thereby act as a shared end that brings persons together into a social union of social unions. With this done, I move to consider the institutions necessary to bring about the widespread provision of meaningful work. What is needed is the overcoming of the detailed horizontal division of labour and some parts of the vertical division of labour, and I outline several economic policies that might go towards bringing this about. Turning to political economy, I argue that while the widespread promotion of meaningful work is incompatible with welfare-state capitalism, it is compatible with markets, and could be brought about in either a property-owning democracy or market socialism

    The mad manifesto

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    The “mad manifesto” project is a multidisciplinary mediated investigation into the circumstances by which mad (mentally ill, neurodivergent) or disabled (disclosed, undisclosed) students faced far more precarious circumstances with inadequate support models while attending North American universities during the pandemic teaching era (2020-2023). Using a combination of “emergency remote teaching” archival materials such as national student datasets, universal design for learning (UDL) training models, digital classroom teaching experiments, university budgetary releases, educational technology coursewares, and lived experience expertise, this dissertation carefully retells the story of “accessibility” as it transpired in disabling classroom containers trapped within intentionally underprepared crisis superstructures. Using rhetorical models derived from critical disability studies, mad studies, social work practice, and health humanities, it then suggests radically collaborative UDL teaching practices that may better pre-empt the dynamic needs of dis/abled students whose needs remain direly underserviced. The manifesto leaves the reader with discrete calls to action that foster more critical performances of intersectionally inclusive UDL classrooms for North American mad students, which it calls “mad-positive” facilitation techniques: 1. Seek to untie the bond that regards the digital divide and access as synonyms. 2. UDL practice requires an environment shift that prioritizes change potential. 3. Advocate against the usage of UDL as a for-all keystone of accessibility. 4. Refuse or reduce the use of technologies whose primary mandate is dataveillance. 5. Remind students and allies that university space is a non-neutral affective container. 6. Operationalize the tracking of student suicides on your home campus. 7. Seek out physical & affectual ways that your campus is harming social capital potential. 8. Revise policies and practices that are ability-adjacent imaginings of access. 9. Eliminate sanist and neuroscientific languaging from how you speak about students. 10. Vigilantly interrogate how “normal” and “belong” are socially constructed. 11. Treat lived experience expertise as a gift, not a resource to mine and to spend. 12. Create non-psychiatric routes of receiving accommodation requests in your classroom. 13. Seek out uncomfortable stories of mad exclusion and consider carceral logic’s role in it. 14. Center madness in inclusive methodologies designed to explicitly resist carceral logics. 15. Create counteraffectual classrooms that anticipate and interrupt kairotic spatial power. 16. Strive to refuse comfort and immediate intelligibility as mandatory classroom presences. 17. Create pathways that empower cozy space understandings of classroom practice. 18. Vector students wherever possible as dynamic ability constellations in assessment

    DefaultVR: the AI Expansion. An application of artificial intelligence in competitive gaming and virtual reality.

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    This works presents the development of DefaultVR: The AI Expansion, an expansion of the first degree thesis DefaultVR, a virtual reality tactical shooter online game. In particular, this expansion aims to include an artificial agent, called Eve, capable of learning to play in the virtual reality world through reinforcement learning techniques. The agent learns to navigate the game environment, make decisions based on pseudo-visual information, and optimize its actions to maximize rewards. The development utilizes a deep reinforcement learning framework with the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm included with Units’s ML-Agents. Extensive experiments were conducted to evaluate the agent’s performance, comparing it against itself and human players. The results demonstrate the agent’s ability to adapt and improve over time, achieving competitive gameplay skills comparable to both new and experienced human VR players. The training process involved iterative optimization and analysis of various hyperparameters, observations’ and actions’ spaces, and training configurations. The successful development of the artificial agent has significant implications for the field of gaming AI, showcasing its potential for creating engaging and challenging gameplay experiences. The research contributes to the broader understanding of reinforcement learning techniques and their application in training intelligent agents for real-world tasks

    The co-evolution of networked terrorism and information technology

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    This thesis describes for the first time the mechanism by which high-performing terrorist networks leverage new iterations of information technology and the two interact in a mutually propulsive manner. Using process tracing as its methodology and complexity theory as its ontology, it identifies both terrorism and information technology as complex adaptive systems, a key characteristic of whose make-up is that they co-evolve in pursuit of augmented performance. It identifies this co-evolutionary mechanism as a classic information system that computes the additional scale with which the new technology imbues its terrorist partner, in other words, the force multiplier effect it enables. The thesis tests the mechanism’s theoretical application rigorously in three case studies spanning a period of more than a quarter of a century: Hezbollah and its migration from terrestrial to satellite broadcasting, Al Qaeda and its leveraging of the internet, and Islamic State and its rapid adoption of social media. It employs the NATO Allied Joint Doctrine for Intelligence Procedures estimative probability standard to link its assessment of causal inference directly to the data. Following the logic of complexity theory, it contends that a more twenty-first century interpretation of the key insight of RAND researchers in 1972 would be not that ‘terrorism evolves’ but that it co-evolves, and that co-evolution too is arguably the first logical explanation of the much-vaunted ‘symbiotic relationship’ between terrorists and the media that has been at the heart of the sub-discipline of terrorism studies for 50 years. It maintains that an understanding of terrorism based on co-evolution belatedly explains the newness of much-debated ‘new terrorism’. Looking forward, it follows the trajectory of terrorism driven by information technology and examines the degree to which the gradual symbiosis between biological and digital information, and the acknowledgment of human beings as reprogrammable information systems, is transforming the threat landscape

    Actor & Avatar: A Scientific and Artistic Catalog

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    What kind of relationship do we have with artificial beings (avatars, puppets, robots, etc.)? What does it mean to mirror ourselves in them, to perform them or to play trial identity games with them? Actor & Avatar addresses these questions from artistic and scholarly angles. Contributions on the making of "technical others" and philosophical reflections on artificial alterity are flanked by neuroscientific studies on different ways of perceiving living persons and artificial counterparts. The contributors have achieved a successful artistic-scientific collaboration with extensive visual material

    Persona Play in Videogame Livestreaming: An Ethnography of Performance on Twitch

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    Twitch.tv (‘Twitch’) is a livestreaming platform known for the live broadcasting (‘streaming’) of videogame-related content. It is also the most popular livestreaming platform in most countries. Drawing upon over one thousand hours of ethnographic observation across twenty-one Twitch channels, and six months of part-time streaming, this thesis investigates how streaming persona is constructed and performed on Twitch. Streaming persona, the thesis posits, is to be differentiated from more straightforward readings of streamer identity as performance. This thesis instead shows that streaming persona is constructed and performed collectively by both human and nonhuman actors in a Twitch stream. It does this by intervening in five core areas of interdisciplinary concern. The first of these explores new ways of understanding perceptions of authenticity that are constructed and denied as a result of streamer decisions, including an analysis of ways that gendered streamer performances affect perceptions of authenticity. Secondly, this thesis presents a new perspective on the conflicting and negotiated agencies of different stream actors during a stream, including games and the Twitch platform as nonhuman actors. The third core area of interest extends existing scholarship on moderation and governance by investigating boundary-work as a playful activity performed by multiple stream actors, including focused examinations of boundary-work associated with game-centric practices, such as spoiling content, and toxic behaviours. Fourthly, this thesis presents a highly novel exploration of how time on Twitch is arranged and experienced differently by different stream actors and the associated temporal politics of the platform. And fifthly, it intervenes in existing research on both games and Twitch by examining (digital) games as stream actors that perform alongside the streamer, spectators, and platform, thereby presenting new ways to understand games, game play, and why streaming and spectating game play are compelling activities. The concept of streaming persona allows for an exploration of how social identities are constructed and performed through and with the Twitch platform and its users. As such, it provides novel insights into the sociality, culture, politics, and economics of Twitch

    Creating Chaos Online

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    Unmasks the disinformation propagated by Russian trolling in public discours

    Risk- and Protective Factors for Violent Extremist Intentions

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    Progress within the field of radicalisation is evident. Yet while research increasingly adopts a quantitative approach to studying radicalisation processes, there is no sound empirical evidence base on the risk and protective factors for violent extremism and much research is not fit for practice. Day-to-day risk assessment and management of individuals deemed to be a potential risk to national security forms a core component of counter-terrorism. Each phase of counter-terrorism risk assessment and management requires state-of-the-art science for the identification of putative risk and protective factors, and to understand how such factors are functionally linked to violent extremism. This thesis provides a unique contribution to these research endeavours in several important ways. First, in order to explain why individuals radicalise, we have to turn our focus towards those risk factors and underlying mechanisms, which explain why and how certain individuals come to develop extremist propensities. Thus, this thesis’ main aim is to study risk and protective factors for the development of violent extremist propensities. Second, terrorism studies is over-reliant on secondary data. By conducting two unique large-scale nationally representative general population surveys, this thesis contributes towards establishing a robust empirical knowledge base. These are one of the first such surveys conducted within the field of violent extremism research. Third, radicalisation trajectories and engagement in violent extremism are characterised by complex constellations of risk as well as protective factors. Risk factors for one risk specification may not equally apply to others and the conditional and contextual nature of various factors need to be taken into consideration, which necessitates more complex analyses of patterns of relationships. This thesis draws on a range of structural equation models, conditional mediation models and interaction analyses, which allow for a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms and complex configurations of various risk and protective factors. The analytical designs embedded throughout this thesis are some of the first to test such interactions in an empirical manner. Fourth, this thesis uses an integrative framework which examines not just risk but also protective factors for violent extremism and draws on a wide range of validated theories from different disciplines to strengthen the explanation of relationships between factors. By utilising models with several risk/protective factors, this thesis overcomes some of the 'problem of specificity', as it delivers plausible answers as to why the vast majority of individuals, who are experiencing particular conditions or grievances do not develop violent extremist intentions. Such research designs may be able to identify those factors that can inform prevention and intervention programs. Fifth, radicalisation is a complex and multifaceted process with diverse pathways and outcomes to it. This inherent complexity renders radicalisation, as a construct, difficult to operationalise. A key part of conducting quantitative research is the development of adequate and validated instruments. Thus, by developing and validating psychometrically sound instruments, this thesis contributes towards rigorous quantitative research on violent extremism. This thesis addresses these issues through a number of novel research designs. First, I conduct a systematic review and synthesise the existing evidence on quantitative risk and protective factors for different radicalisation outcomes. However, several gaps as well as conceptual and methodological issues are identified, which are addressed in the following chapters. Second, I conduct a German nationally representative survey on violent extremism, and I apply structural equation modeling to employ a conceptually integrated approach to studying the individual and environmental-level determinants of differential vulnerability to extremism. The findings demonstrate the profound effect of person-environment reciprocity and, thereby, highlight key individual, developmental and social mechanisms involved in the development of extremist propensities. Increasingly, we are witnessing a seeming convergence between belief in conspiracy theories and ideological extremes. However, there is a dearth of empirical research on the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and violent extremism. Therefore, third, this thesis conducts a unique quantitative analysis on this relationship and the findings highlight the contingent effects of risk and protective factors, which are defined as ‘interactive’ or ‘buffering’ protective factors. This has major implications in regard to prevention strategies of ‘at-risk’ populations. Fourth, based on a large-scale UK nationally representative survey, I develop and validate a novel psychometric tool to measure individuals’ misogynistic attitudes. Fifth, recent incidents have demonstrated that misogynistic beliefs can lead to acts of mass violence. This thesis provides the first survey-based study on the relationship between misogyny and violent extremism by examining the underlying mechanisms and contingent effects linking misogyny to (extremist) violence. Collectively, the dissertation’s results demonstrate that multiple factors likely contribute to individual pathways into violent extremism. No single risk or protective factor exists that can explain its genesis. This has significant implications for practice and policy. Preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) programs must take account of the constellation of multiple factors that interact with (and sometimes enable or disable one another) rather than solely focusing upon single risk factors. These findings stress the need to implement evidenced based prevention and interventions programs, which have to address these risk factors early on, before they properly take hold and become so deeply ingrained that they are almost intractable. Therefore, increased focus of P/CVE interventions should be put on the indirect, long-term and life-course oriented protective factors

    Designing Games to Collect Human-Subject Data

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    Applied games align the 'fun' of gameplay with real-world outcomes to achieve social good. For data collection outcomes (e.g. where games are used for experiments or citizen science) various templates and taxonomies for design have been proposed to achieve this alignment. However, existing approaches assume it is always possible to evaluate (and validate) collected data against either 'ground truth' or intersubjective consensus. On the contrary, a significant proportion of human-subjects research is concerned with datums that cannot be validated in this way, such as latent traits and beliefs (e.g. ice cream preference, which cannot be 'validated' against a correct value). Despite extensive knowledge from the social science methodological literature, we do not have comparable templates or taxonomies that can help to design and analyse data collection games for these kinds of data: we cannot yet turn experiments into 'elicitation games'. This thesis develops a theoretical model for such `elicitation games', using language elicitation as a case study. Elicitation games must satisfy requirements of validity and motivation. First, I survey validity threats characteristic of the use of games in experiments. Second, I construct a grounded theory of speech motivation to understand what motivates data-providing behaviours in applied games. Integrating these, I theoretically justify a generalised model of data elicitation in games: Intrinsic Elicitation. Finally, to identify which validity threats are of primary importance within this model, I run a series of controlled experiments comparing accuracy rates using a novel elicitation game for eliciting adjective order. This thesis contributes a framework for integrating game design and social science experimental concerns and how they may influence each other for the design and analysis of elicitation games. I find that games incentive rational players to misalign data to experimental outcomes. This can be solved by novel game designs that follow Intrinsic Elicitation
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