Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

Be(coming) the Change You Want to See in the World: Social Justice Teacher Education as Affective Craft

This dissertation begins from the difficulty faced by the field of social justice teacher education (SJTE) in setting itself apart from other aspects of teacher education. SJTE’s history of internal and external evidence pressures has distracted the field from reckoning with ‘social justice’ as a moving horizon and not a static outcome against which it can be found effective. If ‘social justice’ cannot be the outcome holding SJTE together and apart from other kinds of teacher education, how does SJTE work? To answer this question, I use Deleuzo-Guattarian and affect theories to position SJTE as an assemblage: an ever-becoming whole composed of the relations among its non-sovereign yet affecting/affected components. In the first analytical chapter, I assemble what SJTE is, does and wants by analyzing 58 field-defining texts. Regardless of what SJTE may say about itself, the field is characterized by an affective capacity to inhabit irresolvable tensions; this capacity expresses assemblage becoming and, therefore, an incremental conception of social change. The second and third analytical chapters analyze the SJTE-assemblage at the level of everyday life. Through multi-sensory fieldwork at education conferences and experimental conversations with practitioners, I tracked moments of intensity bordering on rupture. These were frequently events unthinkable among ‘equity experts’ yet recalling familiar forms of student resistance. In the second chapter, I investigate what happens at these thresholds where SJTE threatens to come apart. In the third chapter, I assemble an emergent theory of resistance that challenges prevailing conceptions of SJTE practice ‘gone wrong.’ My findings reveal the implicit ways in which SJTE reckons with ‘social justice’ as a moving horizon. Although SJTE tends toward political and conceptual rigidity, I identified its enacted and unspoken flexibility in how e.g., race or sexuality can emerge otherwise in everyday life. This capacity of openness to the surprises of social difference or difference-to-come is a pivotal yet unnamed contribution of the field that is expressed in its craft. I conclude by envisioning how SJTE might explicitly attend to depth – the sovereign political will of teachers as agents of social change – and surface: what is affective, implicit and pre-personal

Broken Theory

Broken Theory is a jettisoned collection of fragmentary writing, collected and collaged by new media artist, writer, musician, and theorist Alan Sondheim. Folding theoretical musings, text experiments, and personal confessions into a single textual flow, it examines the somatic foundations of philosophical theory and theorizing, discussing their relationships to the writer and body, and to the phenomenology of failure and fragility of philosophy’s production. Writing remains writing, undercuts and corrects itself, is always superseded, always produced within an untoward and bespoke silo – not as an inconceivable last word, but instead a broken contribution to philosophical thinking. The book is based on fragmentation and collapse, displacing annihilation and wandering towards a form of “roiling” within which the text teeters on the verge of disintegration. In other words, the writing develops momentary scaffoldings – writing shored up by the very mechanisms that threaten its disappearance. Broken Theory is prefaced by a text from Maria Damon and followed by an extensive interview with art historian Ryan Whyte

Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

Music for a King

Originally published in 1972. Music for a King tries to study the affinities in form and matter between the versified translation of the Psalms and George Herbert's lyrics. Coburn Freer reads Herbert's poetry by way of the metrical psalms that precede it, proposing a reading that could be applied to more poems than are discussed here. Rather than multiply examples needlessly, this book stresses a few central poems as models or representatives. This reading of Herbert recognizes the historical dimension of his poems, but the author does not make that dimension the only significant one in the determination of poetic meaning or value

An edition of the English texts in British Library MS Sloane 3285, Practical medicine, Sussex dialect and the London Associations of a fifteenth century book

This thesis is an edition of the English texts in British Library MS Sloane 3285, an important fifteenth century medical collection, hitherto unpublished. After an introductory preface, the thesis consists of five chapters, followed by the text, notes and a glossary. Non English items are presented in appendices. Chapter 1 offers a description of the book’s make-up, and gives an account of its place within the Sloane collection. This chapter includes a paleographical discussion of various hands in the manuscript. Chapter 2 discusses the language of the different hands. Chapter 3 places the contents of texts in relation to medieval medical practice and theory. This chapter also offers an outline of the various traditions that lie behind these texts. Chapter 4 discusses the medieval provenance of the manuscript and relates it to its intellectual milieu. Chapter 5 outlines the editorial practice of the edition. An edition of the texts then follows, edited on conservative principles as outlined in chapter 5. The intention of this thesis is to reconstruct the mental landscape that informed the creation of this remarkable medieval artefact

Ontogeny Recapitulates Savagery: The Evolution of G. Stanley Hall's Adolescent

Thesis (PhD) - Indiana University, School of Education, 2006In 1904 G. Stanley Hall published his seminal work Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. The dissertation has two primary concerns: first, it seeks to reexamine the scientific arguments found in Adolescence, locating their sources and demonstrating that the foundation of Hall's arguments were deeply embedded in nineteenth-century thought; second, the dissertation suggests that Hall's science, while faulty, offers a useful critique of pedagogical reform in the Progressive Era. Chapters 1-3 investigate the scientific arguments of Adolescence, exploring Hall's debt to a wide range of nineteenth-century disciplines, including biology, anthropometry, sociology, anthropology, criminology, psychology, and psychiatry. The focus throughout is on Hall's use of the theories of recapitulation and evolution to ally adolescence with other groups thought to inhabit "lower" levels on the evolutionary scale: "primitives" and "savage," as well as criminals, lunatics, and sexual deviants. Chapters 4-5 look at the influence that Hall's ideas had on educational institutions, notably the child study movement and on the junior high school. In both cases, Hall's ideas were influential, but to varying degrees. It is ironic that the first institution designed to educate adolescents largely forgot about the man who helped make their efforts possible. If Adolescence had only limited impact on junior high school reform, then it is important for historians to examine the rift between ideas about adolescents and the implementation of practical reforms that sought to educate them. That is the primary concern in the dissertation's conclusion

Visualizing the invisible with the human body

Physiognomy and ekphrasis are two of the most important modes of description in antiquity and represent the necessary precursors of scientific description. The primary way of divining the characteristics and fate of an individual, whether inborn or acquired, was to observe the patient’s external characteristics and behaviour. This volume focuses initially on two types of descriptive literature in Mesopotamia: physiognomic omens and what we might call ekphrastic description. These modalities are traced through ancient India, Ugaritic and the Hebrew Bible, before arriving at the physiognomic features of famous historical figures such as Themistocles, Socrates or Augustus in the Graeco-Roman world, where physiognomic discussions become intertwined with typological analyses of human characters. The Arabic compendial culture absorbed and remade these different physiognomic and ekphrastic traditions, incorporating both Mesopotamian links between physiognomy and medicine and the interest in characterological ‘types’ that had emerged in the Hellenistic period.This volume offer the first wide-ranging picture of these modalities of description in antiquity