15 research outputs found
BNAIC 2008:Proceedings of BNAIC 2008, the twentieth Belgian-Dutch Artificial Intelligence Conference
Convincing Canberra: How foreign states seek to achieve their foreign policy objectives with the Australian Government
This thesis shows how United States, Israel and Indonesia seek to influence Australian foreign policy by various forms of lobbying. The research indicates this is achieved in large measure through encouraging sympathetic identification, status and financial inducements directed to an Australian power clique. These processes are assisted by indicators of \u27deep state\u27 activity and a degree of inattention to politics by segments of Australian society. The study proposes different models of deep states depending on the degree of global power
Gurus and Media: Sound, image, machine, text and the digital
Gurus and Media is the first book dedicated to media and mediation in domains of public guruship and devotion. Illuminating the mediatisation of guruship and the guru-isation of media, it bridges the gap between scholarship on gurus and the disciplines of media and visual culture studies. It investigates guru iconographies in and across various time periods and also the distinctive ways in which diverse gurus engage with and inhabit different forms of media: statuary, games, print publications, photographs, portraiture, films, machines, social media, bodies, words, graffiti, dolls, sound, verse, tombs and more.
The book’s interdisciplinary chapters advance, both conceptually and ethnographically, our understanding of the function of media in the dramatic production of guruship, and reflect on the corporate branding of gurus and on mediated guruship as a series of aesthetic traps for the captivation of devotees and others. They show how different media can further enliven the complex plurality of guruship, for instance in instantiating notions of ‘absent-present’ guruship and demonstrating the mutual mediation of gurus, caste and Hindutva.
Throughout, the book foregrounds contested visions of the guru in the development of devotional publics and pluriform guruship across time and space. Thinking through the guru’s many media entanglements in a single place, the book contributes new insights to the study of South Asian religions and to the study of mediation more broadly
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Mutability, mobility, worlding: appropriate infrastructure and urban sociotechnical change in Ahmedabad, Gujarat
This thesis investigates the relationship between urban infrastructure and sociotechnical change. Drawing on 10 months of field research in the city of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, the study provides an account of relations between infrastructural undertakings and their contexts, and how these shape subsequent patterns of continuity and change. This connection, I argue, is particularly apparent in the urban milieu, where planners have to contend with existing infrastructure as part of the built environment. Supplementing this interpretive account, the study draws on post-war writings on appropriate technology, working to update and evaluate the utility of ‘appropriateness’ as a criterion for evaluating infrastructure projects, particularly those implemented in an urban or postcolonial setting.
Identifying infrastructure as a slippery, opaque, and often invisible research subject—something exceeding representational writing and the single, clearly-bounded field site—the study adopts a research methodology inspired by practices of flânerie, deploying observational techniques, practices of urban walking, and performative modes of writing to trace the configuration of specific infrastructure projects and processes of urban change. Drawing on recent work on infrastructure from anthropology, STS, urban geography, and policy studies, the study mobilises a range of concepts to further illuminate the status of objects and events encountered in the city, and situating them in relation to broader processes of change and transformation.
In developing this account, and moving from description to theory, the thesis addresses three sets of relational dynamics—mutability, mobility, and worlding. The first of these dynamics looks at the mutability of a given system or artefact, its capacity for adaptive modification, or, conversely, its resistance to change. The second addresses how infrastructures are transferred from one setting to another, paying attention to the pressures of new or unforeseen contexts of use. The third examines how understandings of context are enacted through the ‘worlding’ of infrastructure and urban technology—exploring situations where different actors’ worldings compete or exist in tension with one another.
As observed in Ahmedabad, a postcolonial ‘mega-city’ and home to a new, emerging urban middle class, these dynamics complicate the relationship between infrastructure and its contexts—interactions shaped by crosscutting obdurate and fluid materialities (‘mutability’), enmeshed in global circuits of transport and exchange (‘mobility’), and materialising various forms of identity and affiliation (‘worlding’). Mobilising ‘appropriateness’ as a norm and evaluative criteria, and reflecting on the likely characteristics of ‘appropriate infrastructure’, is, I conclude, an effective way to foreground these neglected dimensions, and, in doing so, contribute to future work on urban transformations and infrastructural change
A Holmes and Doyle Bibliography, Volume 5: Periodical Articles--Secondary References, Alphabetical Listing
This bibliography is a work in progress. It attempts to update Ronald B. De Waal’s comprehensive bibliography, The Universal Sherlock Holmes, but does not claim to be exhaustive in content. New works are continually discovered and added to this bibliography. Readers and researchers are invited to suggest additional content. Volume 5 includes "passing" or "secondary" references, i.e. those entries that are passing in nature or contain very brief information or content
Teacher roles during amusement park visits – insights from observations, interviews and questionnaires
Amusement parks offer rich possibilities for physics learning, through observations and experiments that illustrate important physical principles and often involve the whole body. Amusement parks are also among the most popular school excursions, but very often the learning possibilities are underused. In this work we have studied different teacher roles and discuss how universities, parks or event managers can encourage and support teachers and schools in their efforts to make amusement park visits true learning experiences for their students
A Holmes and Doyle Bibliography, Volume 6: Periodical Articles, Subject Listing, By De Waal Category
This bibliography is a work in progress. It attempts to update Ronald B. De Waal’s comprehensive bibliography, The Universal Sherlock Holmes, but does not claim to be exhaustive in content. New works are continually discovered and added to this bibliography. Readers and researchers are invited to suggest additional content. Volume 6 presents the periodical literature arranged by subject categories (as originally devised for the De Waal bibliography and slightly modified here)