Crying the Wrong Tears: Floral Tributes and Aesthetic Judgement

I am for the art of hearts, funeral hearts or sweetheart hearts, full of nougat...... I am for the art of slightly rotten funeral flowers...... (Claes Oldenburg) Material practices concerning death and bereavement are changing. As Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey argue, what used to be ˜confined within cemetery walls'- the laying of wreaths and flowers - can be seen increasingly to ˜spill out into public space. Occasioned usually by 'bad' deaths, floral tributes and shrines form an ever more established element in the popular repertoire of emotional expressiveness around traumatic loss. Jack Santino suggests that the spontaneous shrine constitutes something of a global phenomenon: as images of disaster sites are beamed around the world so too are the practices of vernacular commemoration. Events mediated by global communications technologies such as the Oklahoma City bombing, the death of Princess Diana, the events of September 11th are seen then as responsible in part for the spread of the localised action of placing flowers at the scene of road traffic accidents, murders, drownings and other violent deaths.

The student evaluation of teaching: its failure as a research program, and as an administrative guide

This paper points up the methodological inadequacy of the "student evaluation of teaching" as a research program. We do this by reference to three, interrelated arguments. The first is that the student evaluation of teaching cannot claim to capture the wisdom of a crowd because, as a research program, it fails to meet Surowiecki's conditions for the existence and articulation of the wisdom of a crowd. The second argument extends the first, by stating: (a) the "student evaluation of teaching" research program fails to provide the methodological controls needed to differentiate cause from effect, or put differently (b) the methodological underpinnings of this research program is tantamount to the misapplication of a closed-system paradigm to an open social system. The third argument has two parts. These are that this research program is predicated on: (a) a false analogy between the workings of a business and a university, and therefore (b) on a mischaracterization of the student-professor relationship. These three arguments, these three failures, suggest that the "student evaluation of teaching" research program is methodologically ill-conceived and incoherent, and therefore cannot, with any credulity, serve as a guide to the administration and governance of a university.Student evaluation of teaching, validity, biases, fallacies

The essence of hate and love

This chapter updates and extends ideas advanced by Royzman, McCauley, and Rozin in The Psychology of Hate. In particular, it builds on the work of Shand, who argued that hate and love are not themselves emotions but the occasions of experiencing many different emotions, depending on what is happening to the one hated or loved. The first section reviews four ways of getting to the meaning of hate. The second section stipulates a definition of identification and provides examples of the power of positive and negative identification in human affairs. The third section reviews ideas about what it means to essentialize a category. The fourth section explores positive and negative essence as perceived in human individuals and groups. The concluding section points to research directions implied by the stipulated conceptions of hate and love, ending with an overview of how these conceptions relate to fusion theory, intergroup emotions, and dehumanization. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved

The haunting of gay subjectivity: the cases of Oscar Wilde and John Marsden

The author seeks to address how notions of gay criminality are intricately connected in a nexus of history, cultural memory and the practices of naming and figuring, through which the past prevails to haunt the present. On the right hand side is an image of Oscar Wilde as he was sketched in court during his first (defamation) trial in London in 1895. On the left hand side is an image of a man named John Marsden — a photograph taken at the time of his 1999 defamation case in Sydney. His name does not accompany the image. Rather, by way of a substitute, the caption ‘The trial of an Australian Oscar Wilde’ dominates the cover. Both men are captured in profile; a perspective that Bertillon standardised as beneficial for archive purposes and one that is also used for ‘mugshots’. The juxtaposition of these two images invites judgment. The singularity of Wilde and his crimes is erased by the invocation of his name in relation to another man, John Marsden. The images perform an affiliation and confirmation

Fractured: a Self-Portrait

This statement is on my thesis exhibition Fractured: A Self-Portrait delves into its motivations, influences, content, and form. The video installations are self-portraits that investigate my experiences with anxiety, exhibit the progression of my emotional and physical state during an anxiety attack, and explore emotional triggers. Divided into chapters, this thesis statement includes a discussion of these aspects as well as of processes, mediums, and the final layout in the Gallery

Dynamics of Quality Perception in a Social Network: A Cellular Automaton Based Model in Aesthetics Services

AbstractAn attempt was carried out to simulate interactions between customers and providers, and understand the rationality of a social network using a cellular automata model. A longitudinal research study was conducted, based on a dyadic perspective in aesthetics clinics, approaching clients and service providers. The evolution of opinions regarding the associated service quality was then modeled with a cellular automaton. Based on an existing and valid scale of service quality, six semi-structured interviews with clients and service providers were carried out. The indicators were then refined and two quantitative surveys were performed, with a time interval of four months. A cellular automaton rule was then searched for that could simulate the network rationality between the two surveys. The proposed cellular automaton model achieved an accuracy of 73.80%, a higher value than the ones typically found in linear regression models of the service quality literature. The simulation allowed to understand which behaviours adopted by providers and customers generate an improved perception of service quality. The simulation also identified dissatisfied individuals in the social network and the way they influence the network. These findings may help managers to control employees' conducts and the service performance

Regulating the 1918-19 Pandemic: Flu, Stoicism and the Northcliffe Press

Social historians have argued that the reason the 1918-19 ‘Spanish' influenza left so few traces in public memory is that it was ‘overshadowed' by the First World War, hence its historiographical characterisation as the ‘forgotten' pandemic. This paper argues that such an approach tends to overlook the crucial role played by wartime propaganda. Instead, I put emotion words, emotives and metaphors at the heart of my analysis in an attempt to understand the interplay between propaganda and biopolitical discourses that aimed to regulate civilian responses to the pandemic. Drawing on the letters of Wilfred Owen, the diaries of the cultural historian Caroline Playne and the reporting in the Northcliffe press, I argue that the stoicism exhibited by Owen and amplified in the columns of The Times and the Daily Mail is best viewed as a performance, an emotional style that reflected the politicisation of ‘dread' in war as an emotion with the potential to undermine civilian morale. This was especially the case during the final year of the conflict when war-weariness set in, leading to the stricter policing of negative emotions. As a protean disease that could present as alternately benign and plague-like, the Spanish flu both drew on these discourses and subverted them, disrupting medical efforts to use the dread of foreign pathogens as an instrument of biopower. The result was that, as dread increasingly became attached to influenza, it destabilised medical attempts to regulate the civilian response to the pandemic, undermining Owen's and the Northcliffe press's emotives of stoicis

Reverberations and Post-War Trauma: the Sustained Aftermath of Aerial Strikes on Lebanon in 2006

This paper explores sound at the intersection between urban environments and conflict, specifically extracted from a particular case of aerial bombardment that occurred during the 2006 war on Lebanon. To formulate an argument on the long-lasting and traumatic sonic repercussions during military operations; sound studies and architectural environments would coalesce to unearth the unseen, yet extremely sensed assaults during this war. Here, I look at Reverberations as the product of both sound and the built surrounding, where it operates as a method to read the subtle, extended yet affective impacts of contemporary military conflict. I therefore argue that the initial impact’s sound is rather bypassed, and the auditory focus shifted on its tail as a sonic phenomenon that is amplified and channelled by the urban morphology. This research relies on multiple analytical, theoretical, and practical resources spanning from spectrograms to sonic mapping. Those means serve to illustrate the behaviour of sound during conflict in a compressed urban environment. Paired with its cognitive and visceral responses, this method offers greater accounts on the victims that weren’t directly targeted by aerial assaults