Rendezvous: a collaboration between art, research and communities

The Remediating the social book includes full proceedings of the conference in Edinburgh, 2012, including full texts of essays and full colour artist's pages with documentation of works commissioned for the Remediating the social exhibitio

What’s in a Face? Psychophysiological applications of neuroscience for diagnostics and therapies

The idea that the utility of research should be secondary to understanding its subject delays the extraction of potential value. A parallel translational approach to research was applied whereby discovering new findings and testing their validity was performed in parallel. Research about the face was selected for translation as it provided the complexity, diversity, and fidelity necessary for multiple data-driven hypothesis exploration while remaining key to social interaction. For example, emotional contagion, the tendency for an individual to catch someone else’s emotion has been linked to facial contagion: an automatic reaction whereby facial muscles adopt the expression of any emotional face. Based on the reported exaggerated emotional reactions of patients with upper involvement in Motor Neuron Disease (MND) compared to lower involvement, an experiment was devised to make the difference through comparisons of facial contagion responses with recorded Electromyography (EMG) responses (chapter 3). As these patients were expected to have generally weak responses, it became necessary to increase the sensitivity of acquired signals to elucidate differences between subtypes. An adaptive filtering technique for signal processing was developed based on modelling methods and tested with support vector machines (chapter 2). The therapeutic intervention (chapter 4) consisted of a series of experiments seeking to induce emotional contagion of happiness by presenting images of smiling faces through smartphones. This was also gamified in an experiment at the Science Museum in London to test whether the effect could be found over the short term. Lastly, I parametrised faces from a large population of Tibetan residents and predicted haematological and electrocardiographic measures with machine learning methods as a way of screening for cardiovascular disease through photographs of the face (chapter 5). The results were analysed in relation to the field of cognitive neuroscience and the implications for a parallel translational and high-dimensional approach were discussed

Post truth, justice, and the feminine way: an examination of justice and female agency in mainstream American conspiracy films from the 1970s to present with the aim of developing politically forceful narratives

The American conspiracy film is at a crossroads where, if it continues to apply 20th century paradigms and moral expectations onto 21st century narratives, the genre stands to lose its political force and relevance -- subsumed by a proliferating conspiracy culture. This thesis draws on the relationship between conspiracy film and conspiracy history to identify a steady loss of political force from the 1970s into the 21st century as justice evolves from public-facing to private-facing, culminating in the genre’s present ‘lame duck’ period. This paradigm of depleting political force does not apply to female-led conspiracy narratives, for whom strides in women's liberation off-screen translate to augmented female agency on-screen, leading to greater senses of justice and political force as they progress into the 21st century. My catalogue of over 100 data points indexing the patterns, motifs, characters, and characteristics of American conspiracy films over the last 50 years led directly to my original contributions of knowledge: my three-phased classification of justice in the genre and creation of discourse dedicated specifically to female conspiracy protagonists, along with the multitude of new terms introduced to analyse, qualify, and augment the political force of conspiracy films (i.e.: ‘tradition 1 and 2 narratives’, ‘privatisation of the antagonist’, ‘corruption of the protagonist’, ‘utility of the team’, etc.) By utilising a dual methodology of critical film analysis (contextualised amidst contemporaneous socio/historical/political events) this thesis examines what happened in the conspiracy genre, whilst employing practice as research through a hauntological lens in order to question, investigate, and propose: what next? In doing so, three core elements of the conspiracy narrative (the Protagonist, Behemoth, and Mechanisms for Justice) are updated and fortified against solipsism and cynicism with practical techniques to employ; for when truth cannot be trusted, it is justice that will ignite conspiracy narratives’ political force

(In)formal perceptions and arguments on tourism governance multifaceted concept

A brief exploratory approach to (in)formal perceptions and arguments on tourism governance multifaceted concep

You Can\u27t Get There from Here: Movement SF and the Picaresque

This dissertation examines the crisis of authenticity in postmodern culture and argues that contemporary science fiction, specifically the subgenre of Movement SF, has evolved a unique answer to this crisis by adopting, perhaps spontaneously, the picaresque narrative structure. Postmodern fiction has a tenuous relationship with the issue of authenticity, such that the average postmodern subject is utterly without true authenticity at all, alternately victim to the socioeconomic conditions of his or her culture and to the elision of the self as a result of the homogenizing effects of advertising, television, etc. Postmodern SF also carries this bleak perception of the possibility of agency; William Gibson\u27s Sprawl and Bridge trilogies are rife with negations of human agency at the metaphorical hands of various aspects and incarnations of what Fredric Jameson terms the technological sublime. This dissertation puts forth the argument that a group of post-Eighties SF texts all participate in a spontaneous revival of the picaresque mode, using the picaresque journey and related motifs to re-authenticate subjects whose identity and agency are being erased by powerful social and economic forces exterior to and normally imperceptible by the individual. This dissertation is organized around three loosely connected parts. Part 1 attempts to define Movement SF by separating the various, often confusing marketing labels (such as cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, etc.) and extracting a cluster of core characteristics that have shaped the genre since its inception in the early 80s. Part 1 further examines how these core characteristics (or premises) of Movement SF provide fertile ground for picaresque narrative strategies. Part 2 describes in detail the picaresque as it appears in Movement SF, examining worldbuilding strategies, the persistence and evolution of tropes and motifs common to the traditional picaresque, and the generation of new tropes and motifs unique to Movement picaresques. Part 3 examines the spatial tactics used in Movement picaresque narratives to enable picaresque marginality in totalized, globalized environments. Furthermore, Part 3 examines the use of psychological plurality as an internal tactic to escape closed environments

Bowdoin Orient v.137, no.1-25 (2007-2008)

https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinorient-2000s/1008/thumbnail.jp