3,175 research outputs found
Transformative learning relationships and the adult educatorâs countertransference: a Jungian arts-based duoethnography
Transformative learning theory developed from Jack Mezirowâs seminal work on perspective transformation, is a predominant paradigm within adult education scholarship. Recent developments include Jungian perspectives in transformative learning that challenge the dominance of Mezirowâs rational conceptualisation and the exclusion of non-rational and unconscious aspects of learning. Whilst Jungian contributors elevate the role of the unconscious in transformative learning theory, scant attention is paid to the unconscious dynamics between educator and adult learner set within an intersubjective matrix. What is absent is any mention that feelings stirred up in the process of transformative learning might belong within a reciprocal relationship. Jung, who is arguably the pioneer of countertransference, offers a definite point of view about the importance of the subjective responses of the analyst and his/her ability to be influenced and impacted by the client. If the analyst is to transform others, then the analyst needs to be transformed. This relationship of mutual transformation is reconceptualised as a transformative learning relationship. A transformative learning relationship provides an intersubjective frame for exploring countertransferences and the emotional experience of the adult educator. The devised research method of collaborative imaginative engagement is an innovative post-Jungian extension of Jungâs method of active imagination, that involves two adult educators making and working with images of countertransference. The findings are presented as an arts-based duoethnographic portrayal of a co- individuation process between two adult educators. This duoethnographic process of co-individuation prototypes transformative reciprocity within the educator/learner relationship. This research addresses the imbalance or âone sidednessâ within transformative learning theory, that overlooks the educatorâs subjective and intersubjective experience in favour of the learnerâs experience. In doing so, the research contributes a more holistic and collaborative understanding of transformative learning that shows how both learner and educator can be inextricably bound together through a process of mutual transformation
Self-supervised learning for transferable representations
Machine learning has undeniably achieved remarkable advances thanks to large labelled datasets and supervised learning. However, this progress is constrained by the labour-intensive annotation process. It is not feasible to generate extensive labelled datasets for every problem we aim to address. Consequently, there has been a notable shift in recent times toward approaches that solely leverage raw data. Among these, self-supervised learning has emerged as a particularly powerful approach, offering scalability to massive datasets and showcasing considerable potential for effective knowledge transfer. This thesis investigates self-supervised representation learning with a strong focus on computer vision applications. We provide a comprehensive survey of self-supervised methods across various modalities, introducing a taxonomy that categorises them into four distinct families while also highlighting practical considerations for real-world implementation. Our focus thenceforth is on the computer vision modality, where we perform a comprehensive benchmark evaluation of state-of-the-art self supervised models against many diverse downstream transfer tasks. Our findings reveal that self-supervised models often outperform supervised learning across a spectrum of tasks, albeit with correlations weakening as tasks transition beyond classification, particularly for datasets with distribution shifts. Digging deeper, we investigate the influence of data augmentation on the transferability of contrastive learners, uncovering a trade-off between spatial and appearance-based invariances that generalise to real-world transformations. This begins to explain the differing empirical performances achieved by self-supervised learners on different downstream tasks, and it showcases the advantages of specialised representations produced with tailored augmentation. Finally, we introduce a novel self-supervised pre-training algorithm for object detection, aligning pre-training with downstream architecture and objectives, leading to reduced localisation errors and improved label efficiency. In conclusion, this thesis contributes a comprehensive understanding of self-supervised representation learning and its role in enabling effective transfer across computer vision tasks
Cultures of Citizenship in the Twenty-First Century: Literary and Cultural Perspectives on a Legal Concept
In the early twenty-first century, the concept of citizenship is more contested than ever. As refugees set out to cross the Mediterranean, European nation-states refer to "cultural integrity" and "immigrant inassimilability," revealing citizenship to be much more than a legal concept. The contributors to this volume take an interdisciplinary approach to considering how cultures of citizenship are being envisioned and interrogated in literary and cultural (con)texts. Through this framework, they attend to the tension between the citizen and its spectral others - a tension determined by how a country defines difference at a given moment
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum
Fictocritical Cyberfeminism: A Paralogical Model for Post-Internet Communication
This dissertation positions the understudied and experimental writing practice of fictocriticism as an analog for the convergent and indeterminate nature of âpost-Internetâ communication as well a cyberfeminist technology for interfering and in-tervening in metanarratives of technoscience and technocapitalism that structure contemporary media. Significant theoretical valences are established between twen-tieth century literary works of fictocriticism and the hybrid and ephemeral modes of writing endemic to emergent, twenty-first century forms of networked communica-tion such as social media. Through a critical theoretical understanding of paralogy, or that countercultural logic of deploying language outside legitimate discourses, in-volving various tactics of multivocity, mimesis and metagraphy, fictocriticism is ex-plored as a self-referencing linguistic machine which exists intentionally to occupy those liminal territories âsomewhere in among/between criticism, autobiography and fictionâ (Hunter qtd. in Kerr 1996). Additionally, as a writing practice that orig-inated in Canada and yet remains marginal to national and international literary scholarship, this dissertation elevates the origins and ongoing relevance of fictocriti-cism by mapping its shared aims and concerns onto proximal discourses of post-structuralism, cyberfeminism, network ecology, media art, the avant-garde, glitch feminism, and radical self-authorship in online environments. Theorized in such a matrix, I argue that fictocriticism represents a capacious framework for writing and reading media that embodies the self-reflexive politics of second-order cybernetic theory while disrupting the rhetoric of technoscientific and neoliberal economic forc-es with speech acts of calculated incoherence. Additionally, through the inclusion of my own fictocritical writing as works of research-creation that interpolate the more traditional chapters and subchapters, I theorize and demonstrate praxis of this dis-tinctively indeterminate form of criticism to empirically and meaningfully juxtapose different modes of knowing and speaking about entangled matters of language, bod-ies, and technologies. In its conclusion, this dissertation contends that the âcreative paranoiaâ engendered by fictocritical cyberfeminism in both print and digital media environments offers a pathway towards a more paralogical media literacy that can transform the terms and expectations of our future media ecology
Untying the Mother Tongue
Untying the Mother Tongue explores what it might mean today to speak of someoneâs attachment to a particular, primary language. Traditional conceptions of mother tongue are often seen as an expression of the ideology of a European nation-state. Yet, current celebrations of multilingualism reflect the recent demands of global capitalism, raising other challenges. The contributions from international scholars on literature, philosophy, and culture, analyze and problematize the concept of âmother tongueâ, rethinking affective and cognitive attachments to language while deconstructing its metaphysical, capitalist, and colonialist presuppositions
Collective agency:From philosophical and logical perspectives
People inhabit a vast and intricate social network nowadays. In addition to our own decisions and actions, we confront those of various groups every day. Collective decisions and actions are more complex and bewildering compared to those made by individuals. As members of a collective, we contribute to its decisions, but our contributions may not always align with the outcome. We may also find ourselves excluded from certain groups and passively subjected to their influences without being aware of the source. We are used to being in overlapping groups and may switch identities, supporting or opposing the claims of particular groups. But rarely do we pause to think: What do we talk about when we talk about groups and their decisions?At the heart of this dissertation is the question of collective agency, i.e., in what sense can we treat a group as a rational agent capable of its action. There are two perspectives we take: a philosophical and logical one. The philosophical perspective mainly discusses the ontological and epistemological issues related to collective agency, sorts out the relevant philosophical history, and argues that the combination of a relational view of collective agency and a dispositional view of collective intentionality provides a rational and realistic account. The logical perspective is associated with formal theories of groups, it disregards the psychological content involved in the philosophical perspective, establishes a logical system that is sufficiently formal and objective, and axiomatizes the nature of a collective
Amazonian Vision: Representations of Women Artists in Victorian Fiction
Title from PDF of title page, viewed June 14, 2023Dissertation advisors: Jennifer Phegley and Linda MitchellVitaIncludes bibliographical references (pages 320-337)Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Department of English Language and Literature. Department of History. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2023This dissertation examines representations of women artistsâwriters, musicians, painters, and photographersâin nineteenth-century British novels and poetry written by Charlotte BrontĂ«, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Anne BrontĂ«, Dinah Craik, Charlotte Yonge, and Amy Levy. It analyzes how their heroines wield literal and metaphorical vision to navigate the male gaze and male surveillance of the Victorian art world. These authors utilize the symbiotic relationship between vision and art to contest binary societal definitions that insisted men were creative and women imitative.
This study is arranged by forms of vision adopted by the characters addressed in each chapter. Chapter one examines how the heroines of Charlotte BrontĂ«âs Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Barrett Browningâs Aurora Leigh exercise âspiritual vision,â which facilitates Miltonic artistic agency as they author autobiographies following the blinding of their (male) romantic counterparts. Chapter two examines George Eliotâs use of contrasting characters in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda to show how Eliotâs women must step outside of the frame as art objects and wield âmoral visionâ to realize her vision of the artist as an instrument of human sympathy. Chapter three examines the âAmazonian visionâ adopted by women painters in Anne BrontĂ«âs The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Dinah Craikâs Olive, and Charlotte Yongeâs The Pillars of the House; they forge entry into the historically male-dominated visual art world and achieve financial self-sufficiency by selling their work. Finally, chapter four examines how adopting âmetropolitan visionâ empowers the speaker of Amy Levyâs âA London Plane-Treeâ poems and the Lorimer sisters in her novel The Romance of a Shop, respectively, as a poet and as professional photographers.
This work utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to synthesize discussion of the novels with historical sourcesâprimarily art histories, biographies, the authorsâ diaries and letters, and nineteenth-century periodical press articles. It finds that, in consideration of historical circumstances, the women authors under discussion exercised progressive vision of their own. This vision was surprisingly radical in its early manifestations but often reliant on spiritualization and abstraction; over time, in fiction as in history, women artistsâ presence in the art world gained immediacy and strength.Spiritual vision: the miltonic artist in Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh -- Moral vision: sympathy, vanity, and art in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda -- Amazonian vision: painterly success in The tenant of Wildfell Hall, Olive, and The pillars of the house -- Metropolitan vision: London-inspired art in Amy Levy's "A London plane-tree" poems and The romance of a sho
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