A missão jesuíta na China (sécs XVII-XVIII) como suporte de circulação do conhecimento entre a Europa e a China

The circulation of Western knowledge (in its broadest sense) can be described from various angles. Relying on an overall evidence collected in the last 20 years, I focus on the various routes (especially less well-known “viae”), the media used as carriers (printed books; periodicals; correspondence; illustrations; objects and instruments; oral contacts), and the places where these exchanges happened. Particular attention I pay to the two-sided character of this exchange and the ‘intercultural’ crossing and interaction between Western / Chinese books, illustrations, and forms / techniques of knowledge. All in all, this evidence undeniably shows the primary role of the Jesuit mission as communication route between cultures, the enormous volume of exchanged knowledge and the gigantic personal and collective involvement in this process.A circulação do conhecimento ocidental (no seu sentido mais amplo) pode ser descrita sob várias perspetivas. Baseando-me numa evidência global apurada nos últimos 20 anos, concentro-me nas várias rotas (especialmente em “viae” menos conhecidas), nos meios usados como portadores (livros, periódicos, correspondência, ilustrações, objetos e instrumentos e contactos verbais) e nos lugares onde essas trocas aconteceram. Presto particular atenção ao carácter bilateral dessa troca e ao cruzamento e interação “intercultural” entre livros, ilustrações e formas ou técnicas de conhecimento ocidentais e chineses. Em suma, esta evidência mostra claramente o papel primordial da missão jesuíta como via de comunicação entre as culturas, o enorme volume de conhecimento trocado e o gigantesco envolvimento pessoal e coletivo nesse processo

Private Ordering and Orphan Works: Our Least Worst Hope?

The political capture of copyright law by industry groups has inadvertently led to orphan works problems arising in less organized industries, such as publishing. Google Book Search (GBS) is a prime example of how private ordering can circumvent legislative inefficiencies. Digital technologies such as GBS can open up a new business model for publishers and other content industries, centered around aggregated rights holdings. However, the economic inertia that private ordering represents may pose a threat to the knowledge-oriented goals of copyright law

Metadata enrichment for digital heritage: users as co-creators

This paper espouses the concept of metadata enrichment through an expert and user-focused approach to metadata creation and management. To this end, it is argued the Web 2.0 paradigm enables users to be proactive metadata creators. As Shirky (2008, p.47) argues Web 2.0’s social tools enable “action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive”. Lagoze (2010, p. 37) advises, “the participatory nature of Web 2.0 should not be dismissed as just a popular phenomenon [or fad]”. Carletti (2016) proposes a participatory digital cultural heritage approach where Web 2.0 approaches such as crowdsourcing can be sued to enrich digital cultural objects. It is argued that “heritage crowdsourcing, community-centred projects or other forms of public participation”. On the other hand, the new collaborative approaches of Web 2.0 neither negate nor replace contemporary standards-based metadata approaches. Hence, this paper proposes a mixed metadata approach where user created metadata augments expert-created metadata and vice versa. The metadata creation process no longer remains to be the sole prerogative of the metadata expert. The Web 2.0 collaborative environment would now allow users to participate in both adding and re-using metadata. The case of expert-created (standards-based, top-down) and user-generated metadata (socially-constructed, bottom-up) approach to metadata are complementary rather than mutually-exclusive. The two approaches are often mistakenly considered as dichotomies, albeit incorrectly (Gruber, 2007; Wright, 2007) . This paper espouses the importance of enriching digital information objects with descriptions pertaining the about-ness of information objects. Such richness and diversity of description, it is argued, could chiefly be achieved by involving users in the metadata creation process. This paper presents the importance of the paradigm of metadata enriching and metadata filtering for the cultural heritage domain. Metadata enriching states that a priori metadata that is instantiated and granularly structured by metadata experts is continually enriched through socially-constructed (post-hoc) metadata, whereby users are pro-actively engaged in co-creating metadata. The principle also states that metadata that is enriched is also contextually and semantically linked and openly accessible. In addition, metadata filtering states that metadata resulting from implementing the principle of enriching should be displayed for users in line with their needs and convenience. In both enriching and filtering, users should be considered as prosumers, resulting in what is called collective metadata intelligence

'By ones and twos and tens': pedagogies of possibility for higher education

This paper concerns the relationship between teaching and political action both within and outside of formal educational institutions in the UK. The context of this relationship is the recent period following the Browne Review on the funding of higher education in England (2010). Rather than speaking directly to debates around scholar-activism, about which much has already been written (Autonomous Geographies Collective 2010; Haworth 2012; Thornton and Maiguashca 2006), I want to stretch the meanings of both teaching and activism. The purpose is to contextualise the politics of contemporary higher learning in light of the diverse histories and geographies of critical education more generally, and to think about the relationship between critical knowledge that is produced within and for the university and that which is produced in other spaces, particularly informal educational projects. My primary interest is the sorts of learning that are cultivated in projects working on principles of ‘prefigurative politics’ in the UK and internationally. My argument is that some of the knowledge which is most needed to fight for the university as a progressive social institution is being produced not within the institution’s physical and conceptual walls, but in more informal and politicised spaces of education. Being receptive to these alternative forms not only can expand scholarly thinking about how to reclaim intellectual life from the economy, but can emancipate the imagination which is required for dreaming big about the creation of higher education as and for democratic life

Manuscript contexts and the transmission of the Agnus Castus herbal in MS Sloane 3160

MS Sloane 3160 is a miscellaneous volume containing one copy of the herbal Agnus Castus in Middle English. Traditionally, editions focused on texts in isolation and did not look in detail to the rest of the material, diminishing the potential of manuscript contexts in explaining how texts flow and are received by a specific audience. If we consider these groupings of texts a collective product in which all the co-texts are part of an internal dialogue, the importance of looking at the whole volume from a collective perspective becomes paramount in understanding the final aim of the compiler, and the processes of transmission of text and/or texts. The objective of this article has been to study the arrangement of the material contained in MS Sloane 3160 as a starting point to frame future comparison with manuscripts containing the same herbal. The results point to the identification of patterns which would confirm the “anthologistic impulse” (Lerer 2000). The structure of this manuscript would contain a spectrum of the most important areas that would cover the contents of a typical vademecum of the time, including religious texts, but more studies are needed in order to be able to assess these contexts in medical miscellanies. The impact and transmission of the Agnus Castus herbal needs to be studied collectively, and assessing the manuscript contexts in which the text is naturally embedded points to the right direction in understanding all the processes therein

Climate justice, commons, and degrowth

Economic inequality reduces the political space for addressing climate change, by producing fear-based populism. Only when the safety, social status, and livelihoods of all members of society are assured will voluntary, democratic decisions be possible to reverse climate change and fairly mitigate its effects. Socio-environmental and climate justice, commoning, and decolonization are pre-conditions for participatory, responsible governance that both signals and assists the development of equitable socio-political systems. Degrowth movements, when they explicitly prioritize equity, can help to focus activism for climate justice and sustainable livelihoods. This paper overviews the theoretical grounding for these arguments, drawing from the work of ecofeminist and Indigenous writers. Indigenous (and also ecofeminist) praxis is grounded in activists' leadership for commoning and resistance to extraction, the fossil fuel economy, and commodified property rights. These movements are building a politics of decolonization, respect, solidarity, and hope rather than xenophobia and despair.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

Complex Systems: A Survey

A complex system is a system composed of many interacting parts, often called agents, which displays collective behavior that does not follow trivially from the behaviors of the individual parts. Examples include condensed matter systems, ecosystems, stock markets and economies, biological evolution, and indeed the whole of human society. Substantial progress has been made in the quantitative understanding of complex systems, particularly since the 1980s, using a combination of basic theory, much of it derived from physics, and computer simulation. The subject is a broad one, drawing on techniques and ideas from a wide range of areas. Here I give a survey of the main themes and methods of complex systems science and an annotated bibliography of resources, ranging from classic papers to recent books and reviews.Comment: 10 page

Exile, return, record : exploring historical narratives and community resistance through participatory filmmaking in 'post-conflict’ Guatemala

Following previous experiences of violence and forced displacement, ‘the returnees’ from the Guatemalan campesino community ‘Copal AA la Esperanza’ are now defending their territory against the construction of a hydroelectric dam. The returnees unexpectedly mobilized me as a Belgian historian to ‘make’ their ‘shared history’ and produce a documentary about their past and present struggle. The aim of this article is to reflect on how and why I developed a participatory, filmmaking-based methodology to tackle this challenge. I focus on filmmaking, participation and knowledge production to demonstrate the epistemological and ethical benefits of a dialogue between disciplines and methodologies as much as between academic and community practices and concepts. As such, I exemplify my visual participatory approach through its engagement with post-colonial histories and the co-creation of shared knowledge at the intersection of community and research interests. Moreover, I demonstrate how filmmaking can be developed as a grounded, visual, and narrative approach connecting media activism with ‘performative ethnography’. Combining insights from participatory action research (PAR) with Johannes Fabian’s notion of ‘performance’, I argue for ‘nonextractivist methodologies’; ‘knowing with’ instead of ‘knowing-about’. From being a side project and a matter of research ethics, participatory filmmaking turned for me into an investigative tool to explore the collective production and mobilization of historical narratives. I argue that participatory research should not be limited to communities participating in research projects; researchers can equally participate in community projects without this obstructing scientific research. In sum, participatory visual methods challenge us to reconsider the role of academics in (post-conflict) settings

Locating Memory: Introduction

An introduction to the Locating Memory section of Cultural Studies Review 20.