54 research outputs found

    Eating air pollution using building's façade technology

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    The research is concerned with pollution in general and air pollution in particular. Through description and analysis, the research tackles the most prominent methods and means used in order to reduce air pollution using modern technologies. It also tackles the extent of the impact of the built environment on the natural environment. Thereby, the research seeks to reduce this effect through the architectural designer’s utilization of technology systems. Thus, the general research problem is formed; showing a lack of knowledge on how to deal with the pollution problems resulting from vehicle exhaust. Further, the research tackles the studies related to the special research problem, which is the lack of knowledge of modern techniques such as (biological filters) used in the buildings, its importance in dealing with air pollution resulting from vehicle exhaust, and its impact on the local environment. The aim of the research is to study and describe architectural buildings that use such technologies and demonstrate their importance in improving local environment. This is made by forming a methodology that includes two parts; the first is represented by air pollution, its sources and cause and the second is represented by studying the technologies, indicating their types and differences and how the architectural designer used it in buildings to reduce air pollution caused by vehicle exhaust. The research reached many conclusions and recommendations

    The Practices and Positionings of a Postcolonial Counterpublic:An Analysis of Black Lives Matter in Denmark

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    Drawing on postcolonial critique to analyze the work and political purpose of activist groups on social media, this article asks the question: How do digital media communications simultaneously reinstate binary oppositions and invite rhizomatic relations? While the concept of counterpublics is helpful when it comes to understanding the voices of opposition in public discourse, it is also necessary to introduce postcolonial critique and geopolitical and historical distinctions in order to grasp the particularities of global digital activism (Brouwer and Paulesc 2017; Blaagaard 2018). This article does exactly that: Illustrating the postcolonial, hybrid, and cosmopolitan qualities of digital activism on social media platforms, the article presents a discursive analysis of Black Lives Matter Denmark (BLM-DK) as they operate on the social media platform Facebook. The group’s posts are dedicated to juridical and political struggles over discrimination and racial violence in Denmark and the United States, thus producing a counterpublic. The posts moreover introduce and connect two very different geopolitical and historical contexts, thus showing social media’s potential for creating rhizomatic relations

    The Music of Mike Westbrook

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    ABSTRACT The Music of Mike Westbrook Gary Bayley (Durham, 2013) This dissertation – the first on the life and work of Mike Westbrook – proposes that his unique conception of English modern jazz was inspired by early 1900s New Orleans culture, where live music was contemporary, culturally relevant, and had a social function. Initially intended as art for a new post-World War socialist Britain, his drawing on cultural, social, economic, and political constraints became an artistic credo. The thesis argues (following Fischlin and Heble (2004), Horn (2002), Johnson (2002), and McKay (2005)) that jazz is primarily a cultural activity, not merely a style of music. While Westbrook has claimed that he was simply attempting to combine art and entertainment like Duke Ellington, this dissertation demonstrates how, as a trained painter, his jazz process is informed by Dada and Pop Art as well as by Bertolt Brecht’s LehrstĂŒcke, lending his ensembles a social function as ‘mediating structures’ (Berger 1979). His central ‘brass band’ concept draws on English music-hall, circus and fairground, together with European cabaret, and his tendency towards theatrical performance was reinforced through his creative partnership with Kate Westbrook. The approach taken in this study is twofold: on the one hand field-work and extensive access to archival materials (much of it previously unavailable); and on the other hand cultural and historical interpretation. The thesis argues that Westbrook attempted a cultural revolution in broadening the terms of reference for jazz to construct a peculiarly English, polystylistic multi-media art. Accordingly, this dissertation locates Westbrook’s work in the larger cultural field of English contemporary artistic expression, rather than simply seeking to situate it stylistically within a narrower history of jazz

    Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene

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    This open access edited volume invites transdisciplinary scholars to re-vision science education in the era of the Anthropocene. The collection assembles the works of educators from many walks of life and areas of practice together to help reorient science education toward the problems and peculiarities associated with the geologic times many call the Anthropocene. It has become evident that science education—the way it is currently institutionalized in various forms of school science, government policy, classroom practice, educational research, and public/private research laboratories—is ill-equipped and ill-conceived to deal with the expansive and urgent contexts of the Anthropocene. Paying homage to myopic knowledge systems, rigid state education directives, and academic-professional communities intent on reproducing the same practices, knowledges, and relationships that have endangered our shared world and shared presents/presence is misdirected. This volume brings together diverse scholars to reimagine the field in times of precarity

    Internet Explorer: The Creative Administration of Digital Geography

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    This thesis is a creative response to the widespread uptake of Google Maps, Earth and Street View and their impact on the future of landscape as a cultural concept. ‘Creative administration’ is introduced as an idiosyncratic system for collecting and interpreting ideas about landscape. The artist’s virtual journeys through digital landscapes are revealed in a series of miniature paintings. Cultural geography contextualises these artworks and other artists’ responses within a broader understanding of contemporary landscape

    Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene

    Get PDF
    This open access edited volume invites transdisciplinary scholars to re-vision science education in the era of the Anthropocene. The collection assembles the works of educators from many walks of life and areas of practice together to help reorient science education toward the problems and peculiarities associated with the geologic times many call the Anthropocene. It has become evident that science education—the way it is currently institutionalized in various forms of school science, government policy, classroom practice, educational research, and public/private research laboratories—is ill-equipped and ill-conceived to deal with the expansive and urgent contexts of the Anthropocene. Paying homage to myopic knowledge systems, rigid state education directives, and academic-professional communities intent on reproducing the same practices, knowledges, and relationships that have endangered our shared world and shared presents/presence is misdirected. This volume brings together diverse scholars to reimagine the field in times of precarity

    “Why not pitch the whole enterprise at the highest level possible?”: Speculative Radicalism and the Planetary Topics

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    This dissertation problematizes the hegemony of “critique” within the humanities in general and communication studies in particular. I argue that critique in the current mode, a reading and engagement practice that valorizes suspicion and purports to unmask allegedly concealed ideologies, does not equip scholars or students with the imaginative capacity necessary to confront the problems of the Anthropocene. Drawing upon the resources of speculative realism and speculative fiction, I propose speculative radicalism as an alternative practice. Speculative radicalism is an affirmative mode of reading, engagement, and theorizing that encourages the imagining of alternative future ways of living and modes of production, proceeding stepwise from a posited point of difference, or “novum.” Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy is offered as a model of invention in the speculative radicalist mode. With the goal of elaborating how speculative radicalism operates in this context, I repurpose the rhetorical topics of invention, or topoi. I argue that to fully appreciate the Mars Trilogy, one must understand that its applicable topics are, in fact, the planetary features of Mars itself: its gravity, landforms, and more. I develop and analyze this list of the planetary topics in the context of the Trilogy. In addition, I use the planetary topics to reevaluate established critical readings of the strategy video game series Sid Meier’s Civilization, as well as Robert Zubrin’s nonfiction space advocacy monograph The Case for Mars. I conclude that a reading of these artifacts informed by the planetary topics can yield more nuanced judgements than those produced by the prevailing style of academic critique; furthermore, this conclusion points the way toward the development of a speculative radicalist mode of engagement and imagination that is capable of meeting the challenges of the Anthropocene
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