Gay men in the performing arts: performing sexualities within 'gay-friendly' work contexts

Building on emerging research on ‘gay-friendly’ organisations, this article examines if and how work contexts understood and experienced as ‘gay-friendly’ can be characterised as exhibiting a serious breakdown in heteronormativity. Taking the performing arts as a research setting, one that is often stereotyped as ‘gay-friendly’, and drawing on in-depth interview data with 20 gay male performers in the UK, this article examines how everyday activities and encounters involving drama school educators, casters and peers are informed by heteronormative standards of gay male sexuality. One concern is that heteronormative constructions of gay male sexualities constrain participants’ access to work; suggesting limits to the abilities and roles gay men possess and are able to play. Another concern is that when gay male sexualities become normalised in performing work contexts, they reinforce organisational heteronormativity and the heterosexual/homosexual binary upon which it relies. This study contributes towards theorising ‘gay-friendly’ places of work as heteronormative

Akin House Curriculum Development and Living History Programming

This unit plan is comprised of a variety of inquiry-based lessons that explore the culture and way of life of the Native Americans who occupied New England. After studying the Akin house documents, materials, and narratives, I chose to focus my unit on the land and the people who came before the Akin family so that students will learn the long-view of our rich New England history

Rethinking communication in innovation processes: creating space for change in complex systems

Abstract: In innovation studies, communication received explicit attention in the context of studies on the adoption and diffusion of innovation that dominated the field in the 1940-1970 period. Since then, our theoretical understanding of both innovation and communication has changed markedly. However, a systematic rethinking of the role of communication in innovation processes is largely lacking. This article reconceptualises the role of everyday communication and communicative intervention in innovation processes, and discusses practical implications. It is argued that we need to broaden our perspective on the types of (communicatively supported) intermediation that an innovation process includes and requires. Keywords: innovation, communication, discursive space, intermediaries, everyday tal

Draw like a builder, build like a writer. And the crack is in the detail

As the inevitable building by numbers ensues, London’s Thames Gateway becomes one of many playgrounds for bar charting enthusiasts. Houses measured by the thousands and little clues as to where it is, that ghost in the machine, what they are, the structures of everyday contemporary life, and who's life it is anyway. Fernand Braudel, Georges Perec, Jorge Luis Borges, amongst others, are employed to examine just how Wittgensteins radiators find their ways into Barratts South East catalogue. They supply the container for Dickensian content with Sinclairesque detail, while late Jan Turnovski's epic lunacy will help to once and for all allay widespread popular fears that Wittgenstein 1 and 2 may add up to one-and-a-half, simple as that. Never has the ideal of treating technology involved with building as an intellectual discipline been further removed from any notion of genius, loci or otherwise; housing policy housing, building policy building. Against the backdrop of mass housing and landmark buildings with little space or time for anything in between, five years of studio work with diploma students at the University of Greenwich, Vienna University of Technology and University Innsbruck, concerned themselves with the structural narrative of the Thames Gateway. This paper, as well as the projects presented through it, is a premature attempt at anchoring buildings on the words they are built on, technology on the sentence structure of its description, assembly instructions written in the most specific of dialects. It describes techniques, suggesting an architecture read backwards, sideways, horizontal and in parallel, free associative sequence, thus discussing issues of site, context, detail and conceptual adhesion. It also poses questions: concerning locality, history, ritual, conceptualisation and intellectual detachment. Above all, in view of the sheer relentlessness of commercially driven urban expansion, questions of soul and character, of design sustainability in terms of creating space to accommodate viable structures social, cultural, narrative. Allowing history to continue, creating place worth telling tales about

Tangible user interfaces : past, present and future directions

In the last two decades, Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have emerged as a new interface type that interlinks the digital and physical worlds. Drawing upon users' knowledge and skills of interaction with the real non-digital world, TUIs show a potential to enhance the way in which people interact with and leverage digital information. However, TUI research is still in its infancy and extensive research is required in or- der to fully understand the implications of tangible user interfaces, to develop technologies that further bridge the digital and the physical, and to guide TUI design with empirical knowledge. This paper examines the existing body of work on Tangible User In- terfaces. We start by sketching the history of tangible user interfaces, examining the intellectual origins of this field. We then present TUIs in a broader context, survey application domains, and review frame- works and taxonomies. We also discuss conceptual foundations of TUIs including perspectives from cognitive sciences, phycology, and philoso- phy. Methods and technologies for designing, building, and evaluating TUIs are also addressed. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limita- tions of TUIs and chart directions for future research

Breaking the rules: Summer camping experiences and the lives of Ontario children growing up with polio in the 1940s and 1950s

This chapter presents an analysis from a critical disability studies history framework developed for a research project. It discusses how the research was conducted using an oral history method and how the analysis was produced. Oral history narratives of individuals living with polio are viewed as the most appropriate and important way to learn about and understand the meaning of polio for Canadians during the time period of 1927–1957. The chapter provides a historical backdrop to describe the development of some Ontario Society for Crippled Children (OSCC) camps, the philosophic basis for the camps, and the intended goals of the camping program. It deconstructs the philosophy of the OSCC, and presents some overarching themes. Each of the themes illustrates an aspect of the ableist dominant view of disability in relation to understandings of disabled children's lives at that time. The chapter introduces the counter narratives of the participants who attended these camps and their everyday lived experiences

Gay men in the performing arts: performing sexualities within 'gay-friendly' work contexts

Building on emerging research on ‘gay-friendly’ organisations, this article examines if and how work contexts understood and experienced as ‘gay-friendly’ can be characterised as exhibiting a serious breakdown in heteronormativity. Taking the performing arts as a research setting, one that is often stereotyped as ‘gay-friendly’, and drawing on in-depth interview data with 20 gay male performers in the UK, this article examines how everyday activities and encounters involving drama school educators, casters and peers are informed by heteronormative standards of gay male sexuality. One concern is that heteronormative constructions of gay male sexualities constrain participants’ access to work; suggesting limits to the abilities and roles gay men possess and are able to play. Another concern is that when gay male sexualities become normalised in performing work contexts, they reinforce organisational heteronormativity and the heterosexual/homosexual binary upon which it relies. This study contributes towards theorising ‘gay-friendly’ places of work as heteronormative