Gaining an Upper Hand: How Gesture Usage During Conflict Resolution Predicts Family Cohesion During the Transition to College

The purpose of this project is to examine the frequency of hand gestures used by family triads (mother, father, and emerging adult offspring) engaging in a conflict resolution task. The hypotheses explored in this thesis expand upon previous research by Chu, Meyer, Foulkes, & Kita (2014), which suggested that the frequency of gestures individuals use may be related to their own desire to communicate clearly, while also functioning as a way to ensure that the listener understands the information they are conveying. In addition, the usage of gestures conveys to all parties the level of attention each participant has invested into the conversation. Evidence also seems to suggest that gestures are largely produced for the benefit of the listener, thus rendering gestures as a nonverbal demonstration of empathy on behalf of the speaker. In this way, hand gestures may play an important communicative role during conflict resolution. Hand gestures and other nonverbal communication may also provide a sense of validation and support between individuals, even if they do not agree. In addition, hand gestures are especially present during hostile interactions, when the users feel the need to defend and validate their own opinions. The researchers of this project hypothesize that high gestures usage may either be an indication of an especially cohesive family environment, or an especially hostile environment

Variability in the Alignment of Number and Space Across Languages and Tasks

While the domains of space and number appear to be linked in human brains and minds, their conceptualization still differs across languages and cultures. For instance, frames of reference for spatial descriptions vary according to task, context, and cultural background, and the features of the mental number line depend on formal education and writing direction. To shed more light on the influence of culture/language and task on such conceptualizations, we conducted a large-scale survey with speakers of five languages that differ in writing systems, preferences for spatial and temporal representations, and/or composition of number words. Here, we report data obtained from tasks on ordered arrangements, including numbers, letters, and written text. Comparing these data across tasks, domains, and languages indicates that, even within a single domain, representations may differ depending on task characteristics, and that the degree of cross-domain alignment varies with domains and culture

Skyler and Bliss

Hong Kong remains the backdrop to the science fiction movies of my youth. The city reminds me of my former training in the financial sector. It is a city in which I could have succeeded in finance, but as far as art goes it is a young city, and I am a young artist. A frustration emerges; much like the mould, the artist also had to develop new skills by killing off his former desires and manipulating technology. My new series entitled HONG KONG surface project shows a new direction in my artistic research in which my technique becomes ever simpler, reducing the traces of pixelation until objects appear almost as they were found and photographed. Skyler and Bliss presents tectonic plates based on satellite images of the Arctic. Working in a hot and humid Hong Kong where mushrooms grow ferociously, a city artificially refrigerated by climate control, this series provides a conceptual image of a imaginary typographic map for survival. (Laurent Segretier

Context-aware gestural interaction in the smart environments of the ubiquitous computing era

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyTechnology is becoming pervasive and the current interfaces are not adequate for the interaction with the smart environments of the ubiquitous computing era. Recently, researchers have started to address this issue introducing the concept of natural user interface, which is mainly based on gestural interactions. Many issues are still open in this emerging domain and, in particular, there is a lack of common guidelines for coherent implementation of gestural interfaces. This research investigates gestural interactions between humans and smart environments. It proposes a novel framework for the high-level organization of the context information. The framework is conceived to provide the support for a novel approach using functional gestures to reduce the gesture ambiguity and the number of gestures in taxonomies and improve the usability. In order to validate this framework, a proof-of-concept has been developed. A prototype has been developed by implementing a novel method for the view-invariant recognition of deictic and dynamic gestures. Tests have been conducted to assess the gesture recognition accuracy and the usability of the interfaces developed following the proposed framework. The results show that the method provides optimal gesture recognition from very different view-points whilst the usability tests have yielded high scores. Further investigation on the context information has been performed tackling the problem of user status. It is intended as human activity and a technique based on an innovative application of electromyography is proposed. The tests show that the proposed technique has achieved good activity recognition accuracy. The context is treated also as system status. In ubiquitous computing, the system can adopt different paradigms: wearable, environmental and pervasive. A novel paradigm, called synergistic paradigm, is presented combining the advantages of the wearable and environmental paradigms. Moreover, it augments the interaction possibilities of the user and ensures better gesture recognition accuracy than with the other paradigms

Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma in U.S. War Fiction

This dissertation addresses the need to world our literary histories of U.S. war fiction, arguing that a transnational approach to this genre remaps on an enlarged scale the ethical implications of 20th and 21st century war writing. This study turns to representations of the human body to differently apprehend the ethical struggles of war fiction, thereby rethinking psychological and nationalist models of war trauma and developing a new method of reading the literature of war. To lay the ground for this analysis, I argue that the dominance of trauma theory in critical work on U.S. war fiction privileges the authentic experience of the white, male American soldier-author, which inadequately accounts for total war\u27s impact on women, ethnic minorities, non-Americans, and non-combatants on all sides of the battle. The literary text, I contend, can restore a view to the diversity of war experiences, and my methodology provides a model for recovering these overlooked perspectives: close-reading characters’ bodily gestures. I develop this method to resituate war as relational, always involving two or more participants who in the local encounter are differently vulnerable to operations of national power. In three sections of paired chapters, this method illuminates the transnational dimensions of canonical war fiction by Ernest Hemingway and Tim O’Brien alongside fiction by authors not as fully associated with the genre: Susan O’Neill, Toni Morrison, Chang-rae Lee, and Jayne Anne Phillips. These authors represent World War I through Vietnam; yet, in order to emphasize my reorientation of trauma theory, the chapters are organized around particular stages of war trauma: the event of war, homecoming from war, and war trauma across generations. By prioritizing war\u27s embodied interactions, this study moves away from trauma theory\u27s grounding in a universal view of the singular subject toward a conception of war trauma as intersubjective and inflected by uneven material realities. In doing so, Transnational Gestures contributes a new perspective to current scholarly debates about how American literary studies can intersect postcolonial, world, and empire studies in ways that better attend to complex legacies of global violence and inequality

12.2 Traditions & Innovations

Christian Burgaud, Alistair MacLeod/Shelagh Rogers, Sophie Grenier, Robert Lepage/Pia Kleber, Claudel Huot, Carla Bertola, Frank Davey, Steve McCaffery, Karen MacCormack, Irene Guilford, Antanas Sileika, Jean-Claude Gagnon, André Marceau, Richard Martel, Monty Cantsin, Loss Pequeño Glazier, Helen Lovekin, Opal L. Nations, Eveyln Lau, bill bissett. Paul Dutton, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Gary Barwin, Steven Ross Smith, Louise Bak, Rob McLennan, Spencer Selby, Stan Rogal, John Swan, Mark Dunn, Jim Francis, Joseph Revells, Geeta Kothari, W.M. Sutherland. Cover Art: Steve Venright

Acting Objects: Staging New Materialism, Posthumanism and the Ecocritical Crisis in Contemporary Performance

I investigate the material relationship between human and nonhuman objects in performance, asking what their shifting relations reveal about our contemporary condition. Through analysis of contemporary theatre and performance and theories of new materialism, I aim to uncover the dramaturgical models that shift focus towards the agency of objects, thereby exposing alternate models of relationality. Grounded in sensual interactions generated through the performance event, these relations are equipped to develop an expanded sensibility and responsivity in the human. Additionally, I examine how these events enable experiences of the body where the body is both actor and acted upon. Furthermore, I consider the significance of these embodied experiences and a sense of solidarity with objects on feelings of anxiety that characterize the multiple senses of contemporary eco-crisis, climate, and technology. I argue that performance serves as a site in which to better understand our changing subject position, to imagine alternative human/nonhuman relationships, and to offer suggestions toward a more creative and affirmative posthuman experience