Heterotopic and Neo-Victorian Affinities: Introducing the Special Issue on Neo-Victorian Heterotopias

The introduction to this special issue on Neo-Victorian Heterotopias investigates the affinitiesbetween the spaces designated by Michel Foucault’s ambivalent and protean concept of ‘heterotopia’and the similarly equivocal, shifting, and adaptable cultural phenomenon of ‘neo-Victorianism’.In both cases, cultural spaces and/or artefacts prove deeply intertwined with chronicity, at oncejuxtaposing and blending different temporal moments, past and present. Socially produced sitesof distinct emplacement are exposed not just as culturally and historically contingent constructs,but simultaneously enable forms of resistance to the prevailing ideologies that call them into being.The fertile exercise of considering heterotopias and neo-Victorianism in conjunction opens up newexplorations of the Long Nineteenth Century and its impact on today’s cultural imaginary, memoryand identity politics, contestations of systemic historical iniquities, and engagements with forms ofdifference, non-normativity, and Otherness

Escaping Depressions in LRTS Based on Incremental Refinement of Encoded Quad-Trees

In the context of robot navigation, game AI, and so on, real-time search is extensively used to undertake motion planning. Though it satisfies the requirement of quick response to users’ commands and environmental changes, learning real-time search (LRTS) suffers from the heuristic depressions where agents behave irrationally. There have introduced several effective solutions, such as state abstractions. This paper combines LRTS and encoded quad-tree abstraction which represent the search space in multiresolutions. When exploring the environments, agents are enabled to locally repair the quad-tree models and incrementally refine the spatial cognition. By virtue of the idea of state aggregation and heuristic generalization, our EQ LRTS (encoded quad-tree based LRTS) possesses the ability of quickly escaping from heuristic depressions with less state revisitations. Experiments and analysis show that (a) our encoding principle for quad-trees is a much more memory-efficient method than other data structures expressing quad-trees, (b) EQ LRTS differs a lot in several characteristics from classical PR LRTS which represent the space and refine the paths hierarchically, and (c) EQ LRTS substantially reduces the planning amount and curtails heuristic updates compared with LRTS on uniform cells

Children with Hearing Disabilities during the Pandemic: Challenges and Perspectives of Inclusion

The COVID-19 has dramatically increased the inequalities of the opportunities to education and health services of the children with disabilities. The data collected from international agencies between 2020 and 2021 demonstrate the danger of further rising the risk of exclusion of children with disabilities especially in developing countries. The marginalization of people with sensory disabilities during the Pandemic have further expanded compared to the pre- COVID situation. The article aims to investigate the barriers that children with hearing disabilities have encountered in accessing socio-educational and rehabilitation services and reflect on the importance of social support flexibly from different local actors. In this perspective, the Center of Attention for Communication, Hearing and Language of the Central American University Jos\ue9 Sime\uf3n Ca\uf1as of El Salvador provides educational and rehabilitation service aimed to children with hearing disabilities transforming their methodologies and practices. Based on this analysis, perspectives of action and research will be envisaged to plan the future starting from the lessons learned

The Political Red Queen

In ‘The law of selection in the public economy as compared to the market economy’, Professor Francesco Forte (1982) – contemporary doyen of the Scienza delle finanze tradition – extended an invitation to consider the public economy by means of evolutionary principles of selection. Not many replied to Professor Forte’s invitation. This article is a delayed response to the invitation. Through a parallel with a metaphor from Lewis Carroll, it proposes the Political Red Queen hypothesis: politicians work to stay in power by weakening the evolutionary pressure under which they would otherwise naturally operate. A Political Red Queen exerts effort – runs, in the language of Carroll’s original Red Queen metaphor – to make policy, promulgate laws, supply public and merit goods, and so on with the prime objective to survive by reducing the uncertainty linked to maintaining a political role. A Political Red Queen thus works to weaken ‘natural’ political selection. The Political Red Queen hypothesis is shown to hold, mutatis mutandis, for both democratic and non-democratic political environments. It can be viewed as incorporating a positive public choice nexus between politics-as-exchange and politics-as-power

Carlos Saldanha's Cinematic Reinvention of Rio as an Aspiring Global City

Accepted for publication. This is envisaged for May-June 2010Accepted for publication. This is envisaged for May-June 2010Accepted for publication. This is envisaged for May-June 2010This article analyzes Rio de Janeiro’s bravura reinvention as an aspiring global city by examining Carlos Saldanha’s 2011 “Rio,” conceived during the city’s, and Brazil’s, economic euphoria, and when animations were benefiting from major technological advances in production and distribution. The blockbuster shares redeployments of Rio’s negative image with other media campaigns in the run-up to the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics. Its seemingly simplistic plot represents global issues and references the urban imagery developed by the US Good Neighbor Policy’s mass tourism and media initiatives (1930s–1940s), particularly Disney’s animations and Freeland’s “Flying Down to Rio.” Saldanha’s ambivalent affective geography may foster tourism, but also reinstates the policy’s North-South asymmetries against the grain of landmark challenges of power hierarchies by emerging BRICS countries and the G20. The movie’s infelicities amidst the inherently laudable inclusion of a social plot, correlating with Global South urban geopolitics, are assessed

Videogames’ Specific Forms of Immersion into the Past, Present, and Future: Experiencing Progress in American McGee’s Alice (2000) and Alice: Madness Returns (2011)

Cet article propose d’analyser deux adaptations vidéoludiques des Alice de Lewis Carroll, afin d’interroger à nouveaux frais les “pratiques immersives” qui, bien que privées de la “réflexivité” habituellement associée au néo-victorien, constituent une part importante des victorianas contemporaines (Boehm-Schnitker et Gruss, 7 et 2, ma traduction). American McGee’s Alice (2000) et Alice: Madness Returns (2011) sont des jeux vidéo, et proposent par conséquent plusieurs types de modalités immersives : grâce à leur univers à la fois narratif, visuel, et interactif, ces deux adaptations offrent à leur large public des perspectives multiples sur les textes de Carroll et sur leur contexte victorien. Par bien des aspects, ces adaptations aux allures gothiques font du passé victorien “l’autre du présent” (Gutleben et Kohlke, ma traduction), en célébrant explicitement les notions de progrès et de changement. Tout d’abord, ces jeux nous plongent dans une progression narrative téléologique, nous invitant à résoudre les traumatismes d’Alice mais aussi plus largement à adopter une perspective progressiste, dans laquelle le passé victorien apparaît comme un univers sombre et où le présent se dessine, par contraste, comme une source d’améliorations. En outre, les notions de progrès et de changement productif sous-tendent non seulement la structure narrative du jeu mais aussi son univers visuel, dont la qualité résolument immersive est célébrée et est clairement associée à des innovations technologiques de pointe : dans American McGee’s Alice en particulier, la qualité des animations, spectaculaires pour l’époque, est mise en avant grâce à une série de contrastes explicites avec des technologies visuelles du XIXe siècle. Cependant, la structure linéaire, téléologique et progressiste des jeux est perturbée par une troisième modalité immersive, qui fait la spécificité médiatique de ces adaptations. En effet, pour avancer dans l’univers narratif et visuel des jeux Alice, le joueur doit se confronter à des séquences de gameplay qui donnent rarement lieu à une progression linéaire : tandis que le joueur essaye, échoue, recommence, et ne cesse d’expérimenter encore et encore avec l’univers interactif du jeu, son expérience du progrès devient participative, et se trouve ainsi constamment malmenée par ses propres efforts de progression.By examining two videogame adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, this article seeks to look further into the “immersive practices” which, though deprived of the “self-reflexivity” traditionally associated with neo-Victorianism, constitute an important part of contemporary Victoriana (Boehm-Schnitker and Gruss 7 and 2). As videogames, American McGee’s Alice and Alice: Madness Returns offer various forms of immersion—narrative, visual, and interactive—allowing their broad audience to adopt multiple perspectives on Carroll’s texts and on their Victorian context. In many ways, these Gothic-looking adaptations depict the past as “other-than the present” (Gutleben and Kohlke 12, original emphasis), steadily celebrating progress and change. Their gripping forward-driving narratives invite users to resolve Alice’s traumas, but also more generally to adopt a progressive perspective in which the Victorian is associated with a dark state of things, highlighting or inspiring contemporary improvements. These tales of progress and productive change are accompanied by a celebration of the technological innovations which allowed for the player’s intense visual immersion: in American McGee’s Alice in particular, the spectacular use of cutting-edge computer-generated imagery is often emphasized, especially through a contrast with Victorian visual technologies. But simultaneously, the games’ linear tales of narrative and technological progress are perturbed by the very interactivity that defines their medium: the player’s progression in the games’ plots and spectacles always depends upon the completion of gameplay challenges which, however, are rarely overcome in the first attempt; thus, as the player goes through cycles of failure, repetition, and experimentation, her experience becomes one of participatory and disrupted progression

Exploring thematic influences on theme park visitors’ satisfaction: an empirical study on Disneyland China

This study aims to explore thematic influences on theme park visitors’ satisfaction through user-generated data. To this end, we first used an unsupervised machine learning method, structural topic modelling, and analyzed 112,000 reviews post by visitors to Shanghai Disney Resort from June 16, 2016 to March 4, 2022. Our findings are of great significance for reflecting consumer behaviour through user-generated data. Specifically, we find that visitors’ satisfaction is highly related to service in the theme park and their playing feeling, and early tourists pay more attention to the experience of specific playing items while later tourists focus on the overall playing experience. In addition, an empirical study is conducted by treating the ratings associated with each review as dependent variable and each topic represented by comments as independent variables, which shows that the relationship between the customer reviews and ratings by tourists becomes less pronounced over time. In other words, as time goes, customers review can reflect their subjective feelings or experience, but the rating is not. We discover the “dynamics” of user-generated data over time and gain a better understanding of the aspects and concerns of visitors’ satisfaction over time. The findings of the study contribute to the literature on tourism, service, and consumer behavior while also providing valuable practical implications

The analogue strikes back: Star Wars, star authenticity, and cinematic anachronism

As if responding to the widespread condemnation of George Lucas's 'CGI-heavy' prequel Star Wars trilogy, J.J Abrams’s 2015 'reboot' The Force Awakens displays an extreme reliance upon star presence and authentic practical effects, to an extent that produces significant textual effects at a variety of levels. We here show how the film is premised upon and preoccupied with the authentic and authenticating presence of the main stars of the first wave of Star Wars productions (1977-83). However, on this outing we also expand what traditionally counts as a star 'actor' beyond the likes of Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford courtesy of actor-network theory and recent 'media archaeology' trends. Indeed, Abrams proclaimed that his Star Wars film would hark back to a more 'authentic' aesthetic, by employing Panavision cameras and vintage Kodak stock, among other things, to capture images of the legacy stars, and other practical and animatronic effects. Consideration of these non-human 'actors' here helps us to re-perceive the role of 'zombie media' forms that move into composition with human stars to enhance the marketing and enjoyment of an authentic Star Wars experience