Proceedings of the International Workshop “Re-Thinking Technology in Museums: towards a new understanding of people’s experience in museums"

Proceedings of the International Workshop “Re-Thinking Technology in Museums: towards a new understanding of people’s experience in museums

Digital engagement with medieval collections: designing and evaluating the Tears of Our Lady prototype for the Burrell Collection

Medieval Christian artefacts were inherently interactive, engaging both the body and the mind. The prevalent practice of museums, however, to present medieval artefacts as decontextualised works of art engenders an often-irreconcilable distance between viewer and viewed not just physically, through glass vitrines, ropes, and demarcated pathways, but above all, intellectually and emotionally. By bringing together the latest research into the materiality of late medieval art and devotion (c.1250-1550), museology, and digital cultural heritage studies, this thesis investigates how digital technologies may be used to bridge that distance, and foster, instead, enhanced public engagement with medieval devotional artefacts beyond the formal, aesthetic qualities that normative curatorial practices tend to stress. In so doing, this interdisciplinary research investigates the following three research questions: • How are digital technologies currently used in the interpretation of late medieval Christian collections in public display settings? • How can the original reception and use of late medieval Christian objects inform their digital interpretation today? • What is the impact of digital interpretation of late medieval Christian objects on visitors’ experience and engagement? To answer these questions, this thesis adopted qualitative research methods with a practice-based approach. Carried out as an Applied Research Collaborative Studentship (ARCS, 2017-22) in collaboration with The Burrell Collection, Glasgow, this practice-based project saw the design, development, and evaluation of the Tears of Our Lady prototype, a digital interpretation devised specially for this project. Based on a digitally augmented replica of The Lamentation of Jesus Christ (ID Number 1.24), a fifteenth-century alabaster relief panel from the Burrell, the Tears of Our Lady prototype was used to explore how the interactive (intellectual, somatic, emotive, and imaginative) engagements medieval devotional objects would have engendered in the past may be used to support digital engagement with them in the present

Composing Institutions and Institutionalising Composers: Value and Discipline in Contemporary English University Composition

ACADEMICS IN the field of composition are under numerous pressures and influences. This thesis is based on extensive interviews with composer-academics and examines the field of university composition as the intersection of art worlds, an academic discipline, and an organisationally managed form or work. In-so-doing, it theorises the particular ways in which the field is formed, maintained, and reformed by social and organisational pressures. This particularly concerns the theorisation of conflict and looks at how contradictions between different pressures have the potential to change the practices of composer-academics. Two key themes are placed at the centre of this theorisation: the value of authenticity and the discipline of rationalisation. The former attributes legitimacy to composers whose work is seen as autonomous and the latter extends the managerialism of the university organisation through the key rationalising technic of grammatisation. Throughout, these two ideas are in play, at every juncture setting up a tension between freedom and control. The first part lays out the field by considering its composition and ways in which it may usefully be categorised. Part Two examines the practices of research (composing) and teaching and looks at how the university organisation interacts with these. With organisational rationalism taken as the constant, the ideal typical institutions laid out suggest an affinity for certain forms of experimental composition and a banking approach to teaching. The final part flips this, taking the ideal type of autonomy as the constant and theorising what a university that is not in conflict with this fundamental artistic (and academic) ideal could look like in the form of the ‘Liminal University’

Actor & Avatar: A Scientific and Artistic Catalog

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

Art from Home to School: Towards a Critical Art Education Curriculum Framework in Postcolonial and Globalisation Contexts for Primary School Level in Uganda

Art from Home to School is an investigation, which examined various aspects to transform the school curriculum, restore a stronger sense of historical cultural awareness; promote tolerance and cultural diversity through art education at primary school level in Uganda. Art from Home to School argues against censored cultural heritage; earmarked as indigenous art and mother tongue use in primary schools of Uganda. It provides an inquiry into colonial and postcolonial educational policies that promote a Euro centered school curriculum that stresses rote learning, encourages school violence through corporal punishment and ultimately that may result in physical abuse, along with dropping out of school. Further, Art from Home to School attends to other antagonisms in the society and school where the student persists; which cause socioeconomic inequalities and exploitation by reason of globalisation in education. It builds its knowledge base on Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed to transform teaching and learning focused on social change. In it, ethnographic research was used to review art works produced by students as resistance to previously silenced voices and obtained results were used to plan a hypothetical critical curriculum of art education suggesting a captured vision of decolonising reforms

Gratitude in Healthcare: an interdisciplinary inquiry

The expression and reception of gratitude is a significant dimension of interpersonal communication in care-giving relationships. Although there is a growing body of evidence that practising gratitude has health and wellbeing benefits for the giver and receiver, gratitude as a social emotion made in interaction has received comparatively little research attention. To address this gap, this thesis draws on a portfolio of qualitative methods to explore the ways in which gratitude is constituted in care provision in personal, professional, and public discourse. This research is informed by a discursive psychology approach in which gratitude is analysed, not as a morally virtuous character trait, but as a purposeful, performative social action that is mutually co-constructed in interaction.I investigate gratitude through studies that approach it on a meta, meso, macro, and micro level. Key intellectual traditions that underpin research literature on gratitude in healthcare are explored through a metanarrative review. Six underlying metanarratives were identified: social capital; gifts; care ethics; benefits of gratitude; staff wellbeing; and gratitude as an indicator of quality of care. At the meso (institutional) level, a narrative analysis of an archive of letters between patients treated for tuberculosis and hospital almoners positions gratitude as participating in a Maussian gift-exchange ritual in which communal ties are created and consolidated.At the macro (societal) level, a discursive analysis of tweets of gratitude to the National Health Service at the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic shows that attitudes to gratitude were dynamic in response to events, with growing unease about deflecting attention from risk reduction for those working in the health and social care sectors. A follow-up analysis of the clap-for-carers movement implicates gratitude in embodied, symbolic, and imagined performances in debates about care justice. At the micro (interpersonal) level, an analysis of gratitude encounters broadcast in the BBC documentary series, Hospital, uses pragmatics and conversation analysis to argue that gratitude is an emotion made in talk, with the uptake of gratitude opportunities influencing the course of conversational sequencing. The findings challenge the oftenmade distinction between task-oriented and relational conversation in healthcare.Moral economics are paradigmatic in the philosophical conceptualisation of gratitude. My research shows that, although balance-sheet reciprocity characterised the institutional culture of the voluntary hospital, it is hardly ever a feature ofinterpersonal gratitude encounters. Instead, gratitude is accomplished as shared moments of humanity through negotiated encounters infused with affect. Gratitude should never be instrumentalised as compensating for unsafe, inadequatelyrenumerated work. Neither should its potential to enhance healthcare encounters be underestimated. Attention to gratitude can participate in culture change by affirming modes of acting, emoting, relating, expressing, and connecting that intersect with care justice.This thesis speaks to gratitude as a culturally salient indicator of what people express as worthy of appreciation. It calls for these expressions to be more closely attended to, not only as useful feedback that can inform change, but also because gratitude is a resource on which we can draw to enhance and enrich healthcare as a communal, collaborative, cooperative endeavour

Assessment for Inclusion in Higher Education

Bringing together international authors to examine how diversity and inclusion impact assessment in higher education, this book provides educators with the knowledge and understanding required to transform practices so that they are more equitable and inclusive of diverse learners. Assessment drives learning and determines who succeeds. Assessment for Inclusion in Higher Education is written to ensure that no student is unfairly or unnecessarily disadvantaged by the design or delivery of assessment. The chapters are structured according to three themes: 1) macro contexts of assessment for inclusion: societal and cultural perspectives; 2) meso contexts of assessment for inclusion: institutional and community perspectives; and 3) micro contexts of assessment for inclusion: educators, students and interpersonal perspectives. These three levels are used to identify new ways of mobilising the sector towards assessment for inclusion in a systematic and scholarly way. This book is essential reading for those in higher education who design and deliver assessment, as well as researchers and postgraduate students exploring assessment, equity and inclusive pedagogy