1,748 research outputs found

    Transformative learning relationships and the adult educator’s countertransference: a Jungian arts-based duoethnography

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    Transformative learning theory developed from Jack Mezirow’s 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 Mezirow’s 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 Jung’s 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 ‘one sidedness’ within transformative learning theory, that overlooks the educator’s subjective and intersubjective experience in favour of the learner’s 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

    Feminisms in Movement: Theories and Practices from the Americas

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    Feminist movements from the Americas provide some of the most innovative, visible, and all-encompassing forms of organizing and resistance. With their diverse backgrounds, these movements address sexism, sexualized violence, misogyny, racism, homo- and transphobia, coloniality, extractivism, climate crisis, and neoliberal capitalist exploitation as well as the interrelations of these systems. Fighting interlocking axes of oppression, feminists from the Americas represent, practice, and theorize a truly "intersectional" politics. Feminisms in Movement: Theories and Practices from the Americas brings together a wide variety of perspectives and formats, spanning from the realms of arts and activism to academia. Black and decolonial feminist voices and queer/cuir perspectives, ecofeminist approaches and indigenous women's mobilizations inspire future feminist practices and inform social and cohabitation projects. With contributions from Rita Laura Segato, Mara Viveros Vigoya, Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso, and interviews with Anielle Franco (Brazilian activist and minister) and with the Chilean feminist collective LASTESIS

    Information actors beyond modernity and coloniality in times of climate change:A comparative design ethnography on the making of monitors for sustainable futures in Curaçao and Amsterdam, between 2019-2022

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    In his dissertation, Mr. Goilo developed a cutting-edge theoretical framework for an Anthropology of Information. This study compares information in the context of modernity in Amsterdam and coloniality in Curaçao through the making process of monitors and develops five ways to understand how information can act towards sustainable futures. The research also discusses how the two contexts, that is modernity and coloniality, have been in informational symbiosis for centuries which is producing negative informational side effects within the age of the Anthropocene. By exploring the modernity-coloniality symbiosis of information, the author explains how scholars, policymakers, and data-analysts can act through historical and structural roots of contemporary global inequities related to the production and distribution of information. Ultimately, the five theses propose conditions towards the collective production of knowledge towards a more sustainable planet

    Planetary Hinterlands:Extraction, Abandonment and Care

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    This open access book considers the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. In straddling these categories, the concept of the hinterland foregrounds the human and more-than-human lively processes and forms of care that go on even in sites defined by capitalist extraction and political abandonment. Bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, the book rethinks hinterland materialities, affectivities, and ecologies across places and cultural imaginations, Global North and South, urban and rural, and land and water

    Current and Future Challenges in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

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    Knowledge Representation and Reasoning is a central, longstanding, and active area of Artificial Intelligence. Over the years it has evolved significantly; more recently it has been challenged and complemented by research in areas such as machine learning and reasoning under uncertainty. In July 2022 a Dagstuhl Perspectives workshop was held on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. The goal of the workshop was to describe the state of the art in the field, including its relation with other areas, its shortcomings and strengths, together with recommendations for future progress. We developed this manifesto based on the presentations, panels, working groups, and discussions that took place at the Dagstuhl Workshop. It is a declaration of our views on Knowledge Representation: its origins, goals, milestones, and current foci; its relation to other disciplines, especially to Artificial Intelligence; and on its challenges, along with key priorities for the next decade

    Mapping the Focal Points of WordPress: A Software and Critical Code Analysis

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    Programming languages or code can be examined through numerous analytical lenses. This project is a critical analysis of WordPress, a prevalent web content management system, applying four modes of inquiry. The project draws on theoretical perspectives and areas of study in media, software, platforms, code, language, and power structures. The applied research is based on Critical Code Studies, an interdisciplinary field of study that holds the potential as a theoretical lens and methodological toolkit to understand computational code beyond its function. The project begins with a critical code analysis of WordPress, examining its origins and source code and mapping selected vulnerabilities. An examination of the influence of digital and computational thinking follows this. The work also explores the intersection of code patching and vulnerability management and how code shapes our sense of control, trust, and empathy, ultimately arguing that a rhetorical-cultural lens can be used to better understand code\u27s controlling influence. Recurring themes throughout these analyses and observations are the connections to power and vulnerability in WordPress\u27 code and how cultural, processual, rhetorical, and ethical implications can be expressed through its code, creating a particular worldview. Code\u27s emergent properties help illustrate how human values and practices (e.g., empathy, aesthetics, language, and trust) become encoded in software design and how people perceive the software through its worldview. These connected analyses reveal cultural, processual, and vulnerability focal points and the influence these entanglements have concerning WordPress as code, software, and platform. WordPress is a complex sociotechnical platform worthy of further study, as is the interdisciplinary merging of theoretical perspectives and disciplines to critically examine code. Ultimately, this project helps further enrich the field by introducing focal points in code, examining sociocultural phenomena within the code, and offering techniques to apply critical code methods

    Hypo-Cathexis and Impotence in the Facilitating Environment of the Anthropocene: Towards Digital Humanities

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    This thesis is an attempt to understand why there does not seem to be enough will to take proper action in light of the information we have about the destructive effects of the Anthropocene, in particular: climate change and the destruction of biodiversity. It is an attempt to follow the injunctions of French philosopher Bernard Stiegler to re-examine and re-evaluate knowledge in terms of the primary role of technics in human experience, and to preliminarily situate the digital humanities within such a project. In this paper, I investigate Sigmund Freud\u27s concepts of cathexis, decathexis, and hyper-cathexis as psychic mechanisms whereby action is made possible by symbolizing unconscious phenomena. I introduce my own concept of hypo-cathexis to account for the de-symbolization and inaction taking place in the Anthropocene. I then put these ideas in conversation with Donald Winnicott, for whom all psychic health or illness is dependent on a certain relationship to the technical object understood as a transitional object. For him, symbolization is also the key to active participation on life, but symbolization relies on a process of idealization and temporalization made possible by the facilitating environment structured by the transitional object and the devoted love of a caretaker. I follow these concepts with questions about how (if all cathexis, decathexis, hyper-cathexis, and hypo-cathexis depends on the socio-technical facilitating environment) these faculties might be affected by a milieu that is becoming more and more digital. Without settling these questions, I try to open up a dialogue about how the nature of digital technology is making symbolization, idealization, and thus conscious will impossible in the Anthropocene

    Caribbean cultural heritage and the nation:Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao in a regional context

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    Centuries of intense migrations have deeply impacted expressions of cultural heritage on the ABC islands: Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. This volume queries how cultural heritage on these Dutch Caribbean islands relates to the work of nation building and nation-branding. How does the imagining of a shared political “we” relates to images deliberately produced to market these islands to a world of capital? The contributing authors in this volume address this leading question in their essays that describe and analyze the expressions of the ABC islands. In doing so they compare and contrast nation building and branding on the ABC islands to those taking place in the wider Caribbean. The expressions of cultural heritage discussed range from the importance of sports, music, literature and visual arts to those related to the political economy of tourism, the work of museums, the activism surrounding the question of reparations, and the politics and policies affecting the Caribbean Diasporas in the North Atlantic. This volume adds to the understanding of the dynamics of nation, culture and economy in the Caribbean

    Dionysus against the Crucified: Nietzsche, Sovereignty, and the Power of Nihilism

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    Is international law nihilistic? Being produced from nihilism and driven by it? And are even we nihilistic – we Critical scholars who stand beyond the end of history? Not a break from the past but a continuation? That is the gambit of this thesis: to explore the nihilistic inner life of international law, through the root and stem of its creation and development, right up until the contemporary movement towards Critical approaches to the discipline. Through the embracing scope of nihilism, I argue that each of these turns and evolutions can be tracked back to a single logic. The first Volume of this thesis is dedicated to the theorisation of nihilism and how it could be existentially connected to international law. Using the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, I link nihilism to what I term the ‘civilising psychosis’: a process (or sickness) by which the production of the human and the state is co-constitutive. Through this bond, it becomes possible to argue that the structures of nihilism, and the civilising psychosis, frame and condition the development of legal concepts. In Volume II, I take the civilising psychosis and apply it to the creation of the European global order of sovereign states. Here I suggest that transformations within sovereignty doctrine have been devices of managing and rearticulating the civilising psychosis. Applying literary techniques, this Volume takes the form of a ‘A play in three acts’. Within it, I follow the civilising psychosis, first, in the domestic generation of sovereignty, through to the use of sovereignty in 19th century imperialism, before bringing the civilising excesses of this latter period into confrontation with Critical scholarship. Through the violence of this encounter, I intend to begat recognition and disorientation. Rather than marking a departure from the civilising psychosis, such scholarships could be its most visceral manifestation
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