Annual report 2014 / African Studies Centre

ASC – Publicaties niet-programma gebonde

Hey Google: How can we build critical media literacy?

The year 2020 spotlighted problematic media coverage of the global coronavirus pandemic. Conflicting narratives of the origin of the “China virus” (Campbell & Park, 2020), the silenced journalistic freedoms (Davidson, 2020), and the impact on communities of color (Williams, 2021) created mass confusion during the global pandemic. To help address our understanding of media, teaching civic online reasoning (Wineburg & McGrew, 2017) and critical media literacy are two potential points of emphasis. Building critical media literacy helps resist the echo chamber effect of social media and cable news, which results in polarization and difficult mediation between parties (Bexley & Tchailoro, 2013). In order for social justice to thrive within a community, building critical media literacy is a necessity. Since the 2000s, smart devices have taken over our lives and our homes. In addition to smartphones growing at a rapid pace from 1.02 billion users in 2012 to 3.8 billion users in 2021 (O’Dey, 2020), the use of smart assistants such as Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Apple’s Siri have increased. The increased connectivity of these devices creates an opportunity to augment critical media literacy. When used intentionally, these smart devices can help us learn how to make critical decisions for our day to day lives. In this field project a chatbot will be designed based on the curriculum by the Stanford History Education Group (Wineburg & McGrew, 2019; Wineburg et al., 2020) on civic online reasoning. A chatbot is a programmed conversation with a computer standing in for a live human being. Chatbots can be accessed interactively and asynchronously by students through smart devices using voice or text

Comm-entary, Spring 2019 - Full Issue

In this issue: We Are the Crystal Gems: Themes of Identity in Steven Universe by Hannah Baum A Media Analysis of ‘Nikes’ by Frank Ocean by Emily Bourne Street Art: A Crime or a Movement by Taylor Chieffalo Sorry (Not Sorry): Who Carries the Weight of Digital Public Shaming? by Eva Ford Directed Versus Reflective Gestures by Jordan Kafka How a Generation is Changing a Century-Long Stigma by Kristiana Osbourne David Koresh: Irreverently Divine by Kieran Reardon It’s Like, A Highlighter: A focus on responses to the ‘Focalizer Like’ by Matthew Santangelo #Aerie Man: An Analysis by Grace Smith Living on the Fringe: Examining How the Internet Has Enabled the Growth of the Serial Killer Fringe Fandom by Sriyaa Shah The Ethics of Documentary Photography in a Digital Age by Grace Smit

A rhizomatic edge-ucation : 'searching for the ideal school' through school tourism and performative autoethnographic-we

Alys-we searched for that oxymoron of the ‘Ideal School’.Performing School Tourism In over 180 schools in 21 countries,Unpicking the binary in education away from alternative or mainstream,Embodying places that are ‘educating differently’ Towards a queering...Rhizomatically dancing with those ‘gems’ of my edge-ucation.This thesis uses performing School Tourism to share stories that weave the complexities of the multiplicities of Alys, as the assemblage/ethnography (Wyatt & Gale, 2013) or my autoethnographic-we (Spry, 2016) searching for the ‘Ideal School’ around the world. The voices explored of the Alys-we are: Alys the UK state school teacher, Alys educating differently, Alys and Steiner, Alys the future parent, Alys the PhD student/ theorist, Alys the School Tourist, Alys the Performer, Alys the Van-Dweller, Alys the edge-dweller and the Queering of ‘Bad-Alys’. This thesis has developed performing School Tourism as an embodied approach, a feeling journey, that connects the ‘School Tourist’ rhizomatically (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980/87) with the more-than-human world of ways of ‘educating differently’. By accepting that their ‘Ideal School’ does not exist, these multiple-voices of Alys-we intra-act (Barad, 2007) to subvert the dominant discourse of education through uncovering ‘gems’ in these varied places around the world, thereby gaining a deeper understanding of the edge-ucation. This thesis concludes that current understandings of ‘school/schooling’ are not the future of learning but that sharing these ‘gems’ have potentiality (Munoz, 2009), through the ripple effect from performing School Tourism, to lead not to the ‘Ideal School’ but to changes within the current world and, on a more global scale, for new understandings of the ‘Earth-we’ as a 'utopian performative of hope' (Spry, 2016)

How Adult EFL Teachers Can Effectively Utilize Duolingo in Their Curriculum

The proliferation of cell phones and application technology has changed the way individuals access learning. It’s also opened up a space for profit-driven companies to be included in educational options. This project focuses on Mobile-Assisted Language Learning applications, in particular Duolingo, and how they can best be used by Language teachers, especially English teachers of adults in non-immersive environments, to use Duolingo as a supplement to their teaching. The literature shows that these applications can be helpful, but need traditional support to be most effective. The question the literature brings to mind is how teachers can best use these apps. This project consists of a website for adult EFL teachers to use as a reference, as well as a podcast which includes adult language learner and teacher input on using Duolingo in their learning and teaching

The Los Seis de Boulder Sculpture Project: A Case Study of Socially Engaged Archivist/Artist Collaboration at the University of Colorado Boulder

As academic institutions and archivists around the nation grapple with the question of how to address existing monuments to racist histories at their institutions, how can archivists support the creation of new monuments on college and university campuses that reflect suppressed or oppressed histories of people of color? This case study explores the Los Seis de Boulder Sculpture Project, a socially engaged art project at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), in which archivists in the CU Boulder Libraries\u27 Archives supported and collaborated with a student artist and community members to create a public monument commemorating the deaths of six Chicano Movement activists and students in car bombs in May 1974. This study explores how such archivist/artist collaborations can be rooted in the social justice responsibilities of archivists and outlines the practical steps that the collaborators followed to create and sustain their work together and, ultimately, the long-term placement of the monument on campus. It also discusses the mutual, positive benefits that both the Archives and the artist received by working with one another and offers considerations and lessons learned for other archivist/artist collaborators who wish to work together on similar projects at public institutions

Columbia Chronicle (11/04/2013)

Student newspaper from November 4, 2013 entitled The Columbia Chronicle. This issue is 44 pages and is listed as Volume 49, Number 10. Cover story: In with the new: Kim\u27s era begins Editor-in-Chief: Lindsey Woodshttps://digitalcommons.colum.edu/cadc_chronicle/1890/thumbnail.jp

Between the Plough and the Pick

"Between the Plough and the Pick deepens our understanding of informal, artisanal and small-scale mining, popularly known as ASM. The book engages with wider scholarly conceptualisations of contemporary global social, agrarian and political changes, whilst underlining the roles that local social‑political-historical contexts play in shaping mineral extractive processes and practices. It shows that the people who are engaged in these mining practices are often the poorest and most exploited labourers—erstwhile peasants caught in the vortex of global change, who perform the most insecure and dangerous tasks. Although these people are located at the margins of mainstream economic life, they collectively produce enormous amounts of diverse material commodities and find a livelihood (and often a pathway out of oppressive poverty). The contributions to this book bring these people to the forefront of debates on resource politics. The contributors are international scholars and practitioners who explore the complexities in the histories, in labour and production practices, the forces driving such mining, the creative agency and capacities of these miners, as well as the human and environmental costs of ASM. They show how these informal, artisanal and small‑scale miners are inextricably engaged with, or bound to, global commodity values, are intimately involved in the production of new extractive territories and rural economies, and how their labour reshapes agrarian communities and landscapes of resource access and control. This book drives home the understanding that, collectively, this social and economic milieu redefines our conceptualisation of resource politics, mineral‑dependent livelihoods, extractive geographies of resources and commodities, and their multiple meanings.

Impact of violent video game realism on the self-concept of aggressiveness assessed with explicit and implicit measures

We compared the standard 2D representation of a recent violent computer game to its 3D representation realized by shutter-goggles in a lab experiment. Assuming that the higher degree of realism of media violence would impact stronger on players in a pretest–posttest design, we analyzed the influence of violent video game exposure on implicit and explicit measures of aggressiveness. According to an explicit questionnaire on aggressiveness, participants reported having becoming more peaceful, whereas an Implicit Association Test on aggressiveness (Agg-IAT) indicated that the association between self and aggressive behavior became stronger after violence exposure, confirming the unique utility of Agg-IATs in media research. The 3D visualization mode, however, did not further strengthen this association, and a mediation model of increases in aggressiveness by participants’ flow experiences was not supported. When inspecting flow experiences, an interaction effect between gender and visualization mode was evident: Male participants were more likely to have flow experiences in the high-realism (3D) format, whereas female participants were more likely to experience flow in the standard (2D) mode. We discuss the findings in the context of automatic information processing in aggression, and we contend possible changes in automatic behavioral precursors due to media influence

Non-western rendition of ambient rhetoric of Khajuraho monuments.

This dissertation develops an ambient rhetoric: a living practice that is more disclosive than communicative, more entangled than intersectional, and more subtle than explicit and evidential. Rather than exploring the symbology, iconography, texture, and artistic integrity of Khajuraho monuments, I claim that Khajuraho monuments aim at convincing visitors with their persuadability and affectability inherent in their material bases, architectural panels, fractal design, allegorical cast, aura of attunement, and the environment in which the monument complex is nestled. Khajuraho groups of monuments in Central India, matchless in their monumentality, dynamic in their adjustment to the shifting socio-politico-cultural landscape in the world, fantastic in their amenability to entanglement, and susceptible to their intra-action with cutting-edge digital tools and technology, have proved to be a vibrant hub for those who—constrained by the deficit model of rhetoric as a logic of supplementation and also by the exploitative and extractive model of rhetoric that valorises human-centric rhetorical approach to persuasive assemblage—venture into exploring the holistic version of the rhetoric predicated on the principle of a third term. The monument complex’s persuadability rests not just on its symbology but on its enduring sandstone that lays the material basis for the construction of its majestic architecture, splendid sculpture, stunning superstructure, gorgeous ground plan, fractal design, strategic placement of the artifacts, the upward projection of the superstructure exposed to the four elements, the lapidary locale of the monuments nestled in an environment that escapes any intelligent guess as to when, how, and why it participates in revealing the monument complex’s rhetoricity