7,288 research outputs found

    With the Participatory Consumer Audience in mind: exploring and developing professional brand identity designers reflexive practice

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    This PhD reflects upon first-hand unidirectional and passive consumer audience experience approaches prevalent in professional UK brand identity design. It explores: How brand identity designers might move towards an improved reflexive practice in the design of consumer audience experiences. This practice-led research focuses on the ideas generation stage of their design process. An ongoing constructivist audience paradigm shift signals that when thinking about and using their positionality in relation to their consumer audience experiences, designers need reflexive practice to support critical reflection of themselves, their biases and assumptions. This research uncovered a lack of relevant theory regarding reflexive practice specific to the context of brand identity design. This insufficiency throws into doubt designers' relational, participatory and equitable approaches in their working practices and their abilities to address market imperatives, including client requirements connected to the ongoing audience paradigm shift. Aligned with John Dewey's ethical pragmatism and drawing from Creswell, Tashakkori and Teddlie, my study adopts a mixed methods methodology. Alongside established qualitative and quantitative methods, this includes my practice via design visualisations, as discussed by Drucker, and builds upon Carl DiSalvo's approach of practice used to do inquiry and design as a method of inquiry. My practice enabled me to critically reflect, evaluate and construct reflexive practice knowledge, including the development of reflexive practice communications, to advance understanding of and improve other designers' reflexive practice, and to communicate my process of reflexive design practice research. Thirty UK-based professional brand identity designers participated in this research: nineteen participants in Phase One, a questionnaire, and six in Phase Two semi-structured interviews. Phase One and Two findings identified a gap in that designers are not employing a reflexive design practice and lack the resources to do so. Seeking to improve these shortcomings, eighteen initial reflexive design practice principles were explored and tested in Phase Three, a workshop involving five design participants. Results showed that the principles facilitated participants to advance prior thinking and engage in a reflexive design practice. Further reflections and insights from the same five Phase Three participants uncovered a need to refine and reduce the principles and communicate them in a guide. Eight revised overarching and eighteen sub-principles in a prototype guide were explored in Phase Four in applied practice by three brand identity designers involved in Phase Three. Results corroborated workshop findings and provided further recommendations. Contributions of this research are three-fold. First, offering an advanced understanding of professional brand identity designers' reflexive practice and process knowledge. Second, it produced a reflexive design guide with eight overarching and eighteen sub-reflexive design principles and corresponding digital app, thereby offering a preliminary new design practice method. This method offers a way to improve designers' thinking about and operation of their relational positionality, participatory consumer audience experience approaches, and reflexive design practice actions. Third, it provides a contribution to knowledge via its methodology, which integrates design visualisation practice into a mixed methods approach

    Sensing Collectives: Aesthetic and Political Practices Intertwined

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    Are aesthetics and politics really two different things? The book takes a new look at how they intertwine, by turning from theory to practice. Case studies trace how sensory experiences are created and how collective interests are shaped. They investigate how aesthetics and politics are entangled, both in building and disrupting collective orders, in governance and innovation. This ranges from populist rallies and artistic activism over alternative lifestyles and consumer culture to corporate PR and governmental policies. Authors are academics and artists. The result is a new mapping of the intermingling and co-constitution of aesthetics and politics in engagements with collective orders

    Interdisciplinarity in the Scholarly Life Cycle

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    This open access book illustrates how interdisciplinary research develops over the lifetime of a scholar: not in a single project, but as an attitude that trickles down, or spirals up, into research. This book presents how interdisciplinary work has inspired shifts in how the contributors read, value concepts, critically combine methods, cope with knowledge hierarchies, write in style, and collaborate. Drawing on extensive examples from the humanities and social sciences, the editors and chapter authors show how they started, tried to open up, dealt with inconsistencies, had to adapt, and ultimately learned and grew as researchers. The book offers valuable insights into the conditions and complexities present for interdisciplinary research to be successful in an academic setting. This is an open access book

    Vitalism and Its Legacy in Twentieth Century Life Sciences and Philosophy

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    This Open Access book combines philosophical and historical analysis of various forms of alternatives to mechanism and mechanistic explanation, focusing on the 19th century to the present. It addresses vitalism, organicism and responses to materialism and its relevance to current biological science. In doing so, it promotes dialogue and discussion about the historical and philosophical importance of vitalism and other non-mechanistic conceptions of life. It points towards the integration of genomic science into the broader history of biology. It details a broad engagement with a variety of nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first century vitalisms and conceptions of life. In addition, it discusses important threads in the history of concepts in the United States and Europe, including charting new reception histories in eastern and south-eastern Europe. While vitalism, organicism and similar epistemologies are often the concern of specialists in the history and philosophy of biology and of historians of ideas, the range of the contributions as well as the geographical and temporal scope of the volume allows for it to appeal to the historian of science and the historian of biology generally

    Spirit and Healing in Africa

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    There is a great need for healing in Africa. This need is in itself no different elsewhere in the world, but it is greatly determined by the involvement of religious communities and traditions. Faith communities and religious institutions play a major role in assisting African believers to find health, healing and completeness in everyday life

    TRANSEUNTIS MUNDI, A NOMADIC ARTISTIC PRACTICE

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    In this practice-led Ph.D. research, I investigate how an artistic practice can respond to the migration phenomena performed by human beings across the planet over millennia ¬– what I refer to as the millennial global human journey. Based on the idea of mobility, I chose to frame this research in the articulation of concepts deriving from the prefix trans: transculture, transhumance and transmediality. This research contributes to studies in art composition by developing the processes and concept of transmedial composition, mainly contributing to the field of New Media Art. This investigation resulted in the work Transeuntis Mundi (TM) Project – a nomadic artistic practice that encompasses: the TM Derive and manual, the TM Archive, the TM VR work Derive 01 and two forms for its notation. Transeuntis mundi (TM), from the Latin language, means the ‘passersby of the world’ and metaphorically personify in this work the millennial migrants and their global journeys. Based on proposals from the Realism art movement and the walking-based methodologies of Walkscapes and Dérive, the TM Derive was created as a nomadic methodology of composition in response to the ideas of migration and ancestry. It is framed by the minimal stories ¬– the form of narrative of this work, captured from field recordings with 3D technology of everyday life worldwide. This material formed the TM Archive, presented in the TM VR work. The TM VR work Transeuntis Mundi Derive 01 is an immersive and interactive performative experience for virtual reality, that artistically brings together stories, sounds, images, people, and places worldwide, ¬as a metaphor of the millennial global human migration. This work happens as a VR application using 3D technology with 360º image and ambisonic sound, in order to promote an engaged experience through the immersion and interactivity of the participant. This thesis presents and contextualizes these creations: the scope, references, concepts, origin, collaborations, methodology, technologies, and results of this work. It is informed and accompanied by reflexive and critical writing, including an articulation with references of works across different artistic media and fields.UNIRIO Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeir

    Loss of a sense of aliveness, bodily unhomeliness and radical estrangement: A phenomenological inquiry into service users’ experiences of psychiatric medication use in the treatment of early psychosis

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    Quantitative research drawing on the disease-centred model of psychiatric drug action dominates research on psychiatric medication, while little is known about service users’ subjective, embodied experiences of taking psychiatric medication. This research explored service users’ felt, embodied and relational experiences of psychiatric medication use in the treatment of early psychosis using a multimodal, longitudinal research design. A more in-depth understanding of what it is like and what it means to take psychiatric medication from service users’ idiographic perspectives is needed to improve the clinical care and support service users receive and better understand the treatment choices they make. Ten participants between the age of 18 and 30 years were recruited from London-based NHS Early Intervention in Psychosis services and participated in in-depth idiographic interviews. Eight participants took part in a follow-up interview between six and nine months later. Visual methods were used to explore the verbal as well as the pre-reflective, embodied aspects of participants’ medication experiences. The data was analysed using a combination of interpretative phenomenological analysis and framework analysis. While taking psychiatric medication, participants reported the loss of a sense of aliveness, feelings of radical estrangement from themselves, the world and other people and a sense of being suspended in a liminal, time-locked dimension in which they felt unable to transition from past experiences of psychosis to future recovery. The findings of this study highlight the highly distressing and adverse iatrogenic effects of psychiatric medication use, including medication-induced coporealisation, disembodiment, estrangement and a loss of belonging. More holistic, human rights-based, recovery-oriented and body-centred ways of treating psychosis are needed

    Digital Literacy Education in Welsh Primary and Secondary Schools from the 1960s to the Present

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    Digital technologies are imbued with ideologies that impact culture and society. These technologies are ubiquitous, pervasive, and central to how people communicate, consume information, and orchestrate their lives. Therefore, for people to fully understand the impact and influence of these technologies on their lives and engage with them and the digital environment in a critically informed way - digital literacy is an absolute and necessary requirement. However, we are not seeing digital literacy as standard. This study assesses: (1) Whether students are being sufficiently educated about how digital technologies use and affect them in a social, cultural, and ethical capacity; (2) Whether the programme content of digital literacy education (DLE) is primarily driven by neo-liberal economically driven government policies; and (3) How much influence private neo-liberal capitalistic enterprises have in determining the educational agenda of DLE? Qualitative data was collected via three focus group interviews and twenty-six semi-structured interviews which explored students, educational professionals, and government officials’ views of DLE in Wales. The data was thematically coded using critical discourse analysis, and analysed using theories developed in Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 publication One-Dimensional Man. The results indicated that DLE educational policy has broadened to include knowledge that extends beyond the teaching of purely mechanistic skills. However, a variety of factors were identified that impede their implementation. Additionally, it is argued that students’ mechanistic digital skills have been declining since the introduction of touch screen technologies into primary and secondary schools. Findings also indicated that educators main DLE focus was on preparing students for employment purposes, and the influence private neo-liberal capitalistic enterprises have in determining not only the educational agenda of DLE, but education in general is profound, and has accelerated exponentially since the COVID-19 imposed lockdowns

    Agency and Organisation: The Dialectics of Nature and Life

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    In recent decades, there have been major theoretical changes within evolutionary biology. In this dissertation, I critically reconstruct these developments through philosophy to assess how it may inform these debates. The overall aim is to show the mutual relevance between current trends in biology and the dialectical approach to nature. I argue that the repetition of the neglected tradition of organicism is anticipated both by a dialectical tradition within science and by Hegel’s philosophy – and that these theories may together inform the ongoing shift within evolutionary biology called the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES). I stage the discussion by outlining the tenets and history of the modern synthesis (MS) and the alternative: the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES). It takes us into topics such as autonomy, organisation, reduction, and autopoiesis. Based on these discussions, I make the case that the most promising alternative to the MS is the so-called organisational approach formulated within theoretical biology and apply dialectics to strengthen this claim. In my view, they share a fundamental premise: Biology must surpass the physical worldview and adopt a more complex model to comprehend life as an ongoing regeneration of organisation and an expression of self-determination. To bring out the philosophical stakes of this shift, I take on Hegel’s writings on nature, life, and purposiveness and relate them to contemporary thinkers. The main contribution of this work lies not in a particularly novel reading of any of the theories I examine but in bringing them together – both within philosophy and biology and between them – and systematically mapping how philosophy and the humanities should deal with the natural sciences. The new kind of naturalism suggested here, which places life at its core, also calls for another scientific ideal which strives for unification without subsumption or eradication of differences
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