Structuring social relationships: Music-making and group identity

This thesis is about groups and their boundaries: how we bond with some people, but are separated from others who do not belong. It is also about social interaction - the building-blocks of this group identity. In particular, I investigate music’s role in our social landscape. Making music together is a powerful way of establishing and structuring these relationships; I argue that it can bring people together, but can also reinforce the divisions between them. First, I present a new synthesis, drawing on relevant literature about our capacity for sociality, analyses of social interaction, and a history of the research on social groups. I outline a helpful framework by which to understand different forms of social engagement, depending on the nature of the interaction goal; I also clarify the concepts of interdependence and categorisation as distinct processes in group formation. Following this, I suggest that when our interaction is primarily affiliative, or relational, in goal (with little or no external goal focus), then it brings people together via relationships of interdependence; when we aim to communicate something more precisely (i.e. we have an external goal), then the need to maintain our common ground might instead form the basis for social division via categorisation. Second, I report an initial empirical project which tests some of these predictions. My experiments show that music-making enhances affiliation, especially when there is no external goal focus. Adding a goal contributes to social division - affiliation on the basis of common team membership - but only when the interaction task was a success. When it was not successful, or caused embarrassment for those involved, participants instead seem to distance themselves from any associated group identity. This experimental work is supported by video analyses, in which I show different patterns of behaviour in interaction with and without an external goal. This thesis is an important starting point in understanding the nature both of social groups and of music. It highlights the potential for music-making to structure our social world through either affiliation or division

An Enactivist Model of Improvisational Dance

An Enactivist Model of Improvisational Danc

Participatory media and collaborative facilitation : developing tools for aligning values to practice in organizations

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2009."September 2009." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 201-206).The advantages of participation, collaboration, and iteration shape the functionality of media tools like blogs, social networks, and user-created media sharing sites. At first glance, these tools should easily align with the stated values of many community and youth development organizations perched on edge of the digital divide in both the U.S. and abroad. The most critical growing disparity, thus, is not only access to these tools but also their integration into local programs that aim to empower individuals and build collective power. By adapting Edgar Schein's model of organizational culture, the author built a new methodology to investigate if facilitating the use of participatory media tools can also include a reflective realignment of program and curricular actions to core individual beliefs and organizational values. Through reflective analysis of the author's own practice, this thesis documents the evolution of a facilitation strategy to use participatory media training as a point of entry into community organizations. It argues that through collaborative and iterative reflection, an outside facilitator can: (1) foster individual voice and participation, (2) create critical moments to articulate and decipher an organization's culture, and (3) challenge, and therefore transform, how an organization learns and adapts. To develop this framework, this thesis relies on two core cases in Lawrence, MA and Bangalore, India, focusing on critical moments on a narrative timeline and analysis of like patterns of action.(cont.) The outcome of this investigation is a discussion of how and why community practitioners should add this new dimension to their facilitation, to not only spark media storytelling and member activism but also to improve an organization's internal practices.by Danielle Marie Martin.M.C.P

NOTIFICATION !!!

All the content of this special edition is retrieved from the conference proceedings published by the European Scientific Institute, ESI. http://eujournal.org/index.php/esj/pages/view/books The European Scientific Journal, ESJ, after approval from the publisher re publishes the papers in a Special edition

NOTIFICATION !!!

All the content of this special edition is retrieved from the conference proceedings published by the European Scientific Institute, ESI. http://eujournal.org/index.php/esj/pages/view/books The European Scientific Journal, ESJ, after approval from the publisher re publishes the papers in a Special edition