6,406 research outputs found

    BECOMEBECOME - A TRANSDISCIPLINARY METHODOLOGY BASED ON INFORMATION ABOUT THE OBSERVER

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    ABSTRACT Andrea T. R. Traldi BECOMEBECOME A Transdisciplinary Methodology Based on Information about the Observer The present research dissertation has been developed with the intention to provide practical strategies and discover new intellectual operations which can be used to generate Transdisciplinary insight. For this reason, this thesis creates access to new knowledge at different scales. Firstly, as it pertains to the scale of new knowledge generated by those who attend Becomebecome events. The open-source nature of the Becomebecome methodology makes it possible for participants in Becomebecome workshops, training programmes and residencies to generate new insight about the specific project they are working on, which then reinforce and expand the foundational principles of the theoretical background. Secondly, as it pertains to the scale of the Becomebecome framework, which remains independent of location and moment in time. The method proposed to access Transdisciplinary knowledge constitutes new knowledge in itself because the sequence of activities, described as physical and mental procedures and listed as essential criteria, have never been found organised 6 in such a specific order before. It is indeed the order in time, i.e. the sequence of the ideas and activities proposed, which allows one to transform Disciplinary knowledge via a new Transdisciplinary frame of reference. Lastly, new knowledge about Transdisciplinarity as a field of study is created as a consequence of the heretofore listed two processes. The first part of the thesis is designated ‘Becomebecome Theory’ and focuses on the theoretical background and the intellectual operations necessary to support the creation of new Transdisciplinary knowledge. The second part of the thesis is designated ‘Becomebecome Practice’ and provides practical examples of the application of such operations. Crucially, the theoretical model described as the foundation for the Becomebecome methodology (Becomebecome Theory) is process-based and constantly checked against the insight generated through Becomebecome Practice. To this effect, ‘information about the observer’ is proposed as a key notion which binds together Transdisciplinary resources from several studies in the hard sciences and humanities. It is a concept that enables understanding about why and how information that is generated through Becomebecome Practice is considered of paramount importance for establishing the reference parameters necessary to access Transdisciplinary insight which is meaningful to a specific project, a specific person, or a specific moment in time

    A Cross-cultural Comparative Study of Dark Triad and Five-Factor Personality Models in Relation to Prejudice and Aggression

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    When examining socially malevolent outcomes in the form of prejudice and aggression, previous research on the Dark Triad and five-factor personality models has failed to consider potential cross-cultural differences. A deeper understanding of cross-cultural variations is necessary because these factors represent important social problems and risks. Prior investigation has so far only established preliminary relationships between the Dark Triad and the Big Five model and these outlined associations influence prejudice and aggression. Accordingly, this thesis consisted of two phases. The first examined interrelationships between Dark Triad traits (psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism) and Big Five personality dimensions (extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness) in UK and Russian samples. The second used the results from the initial phase to inform the baseline of a predictive model, which was extended. Both phases used cross-sectional designs, correlation-based methods of analysis (e.g., confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modelling with mediation, path analysis and invariance analysis), and large samples, comprising a range of backgrounds and ages. The analysis identified the strongest and weakest relationships between personality traits and prejudice and aggression. This research made an original contribution to existing literature by identifying novel relationships

    Hunting Wildlife in the Tropics and Subtropics

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    The hunting of wild animals for their meat has been a crucial activity in the evolution of humans. It continues to be an essential source of food and a generator of income for millions of Indigenous and rural communities worldwide. Conservationists rightly fear that excessive hunting of many animal species will cause their demise, as has already happened throughout the Anthropocene. Many species of large mammals and birds have been decimated or annihilated due to overhunting by humans. If such pressures continue, many other species will meet the same fate. Equally, if the use of wildlife resources is to continue by those who depend on it, sustainable practices must be implemented. These communities need to remain or become custodians of the wildlife resources within their lands, for their own well-being as well as for biodiversity in general. This title is also available via Open Access on Cambridge Core

    A Cornish palimpsest : Peter Lanyon and the construction of a new landscape, 1938-1964

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    The thesis examines the emergence of Peter Lanyon as one of the few truly innovative British landscape painters this century. In the Introduction I discuss the problematic nature of landscape art and consider the significance of Lanyon's discovery that direct description and linear perspective can be replaced with allusive representational elements by fusing the emotional and imaginative life of the artist with the physical activity of painting. Chapter One concentrates on the period 1936-8 when Lanyon was taught by Borlase Smart, a key figure in the St Ives art colony between the wars. Chapter Two examines the influence of Adrian Stokes and the links between Lanyon's painting and the theories developed in books such as Colour and Form and The Quattro Cento. Chapter Three analyses the period 1940-45 when Lanyon was directly influenced by the constructivism of Nicholson, Hepworth and Gabo. I look closely at their approaches to abstraction and assess Lanyon's relative position to them. The importance of Neo-Romanticism and the status of St Ives as a perceived avant-garde community is also addressed. In Chapter Four I discuss how Lanyon resolved to achieve a new orientation in his art on his return from wartime service with the RAF by synthesising constructivism, and traditional landscape. The Generation and Surfacing Series demonstrate his preoccupation with a sense of place, a fascination with the relationships between the human body and landscape and his struggle to find a technique and style that was entirely his own. His sense of existential insideness is discussed in Chapter Five through an examination of the work derived from Portreath, St. Just and Porthleven - key places in Lanyon's psychological attachment to the landscape of West Penwith. In Chapter Six I examine Lanyon's attachment to myths and archetypal forms, tracing the influence of Bergson's vitalist philosophy as well as his use of Celtic and classical motifs. Chapter Seven is a discussion of the malaise evident in Lanyon's work by 1955 and the impact of American Abstract Expressionism at the Tate Gallery a year later. In the summer of 1959 Lanyon joined the Cornish Gliding Club and Chapter Eight looks at how this necessitated a dynamic, expanded conception of the landscape and a re-thinking of relations within the picture field. The ability to dissolve boundaries encouraged him to break down distinctions between painting and construction so that abstract sculptural elements were now assembled into independent works of art. Finally, Chapter Nine assesses Lanyon's overall position in relation to his early influences and to St Ives art as a whole, his response to new directions in art coming out of London and NewYork in the early 1960s and the importance of travel as a stimulus for further realignment in his artistic and topographical horizons. His pictorial inventiveness and vitality remained unabated at the time of his death and would undoubtedly have continued to be enriched by travel abroad and contact with new movements in modem art on both sides of the Atlanti

    The withdrawal of being and the discursive creation of the modern subject - an examination of the movement form being to non-being through a consideration of Heideggerean and Arsitotelian notions of being

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    This work considers what it means to 'be' human and seeks to show that it is in the activity of 'being' human that our individual identity lies, because this is the activity that determines what we are and what we will become. Aristotle asked the fundamental metaphysical question, "is a human being idle by nature?" and concluded, from his realisations concerning the dynamic nature of reality, that he is not. Accordingly, the metaphysical vision of 'beinghuman' that Aristotle articulated, which is considered and applied in this work, in contrast to the static notions of being presented by Heidegger and Christian scholasticism, presents an understanding of man as a potentially dynamic and internally active being, capable of maintaining himself by bein~ attuned to reality and thereby contemplating God. It seems most timely to explore Aristotle's understanding of 'being-human' because much postmodern thought seems to be concerned with locating the 'self, or explicating its disappearance in terms of an emancipation from form, or as the exposure of some form of illusion that has kept us all living the lie of selfhood. However, the 'absent' postmodern self finds a place in Aristotle's metaphysical vision, because not only did Aristotle recognise the significance of actively 'being' human, he also recognised that through deprivation and incapacity some forms of being can go out of existence or become something else. And it appears that our postmodern form of unconscious existence constitutes such an altered form, determined according to a deprivation of actively 'being', i.e., by 'non-being.' The determining movement of 'non-being', which emerges from the ontological gap created by failing to 'be', is considered throughout this work, particularly with regard to developments in language and technology, because it is through our single-minded engagement in external productive activities, which are incidental to 'being-human', that we have avoided the inner contemplative activity that inheres in human 'thinghood'

    Locating Truth in the Search for Certainty: A Comparison of Foundationalism in Irenaeus’ Second-Century Writings and in Twenty-First-Century Evangelicalism

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    With a vast library of literature written on Irenaeus of Lyons, this thesis seeks to offer particular insights regarding prominent secondary literature on the bishop and his legacy in modern evangelicalism. This essay finds that key literature positioned as introductions to Irenaeus do not integrate key sources which are necessary to establish the second-century context of his writings. Instead they rely on Irenaeus’ own account of his context, and a skewed, fourth-century, Eusebian generalisation of earliest Christianity. The mistake of deliberating ideas without analysis of those being targeted is echoed in evangelicalism and, in particular, evangelical appropriations of Irenaeus’ material. This essay also finds that language of the ‘obviousness’ of one’s ideology and claims to ‘common sense’ reduces non-Irenaean and non-evangelical ideologies from the level of ideas to the level of moral integrity. If this reduction is rushed, authors place their literature less in a genre of academic investigation on the level of ideas and closer to a rhetorical exhortation which aims to elevate certainty in the current self. This paper concludes that to engage in a discussion on the merit of ideas, in both Irenaeus studies and in evangelical appropriations of Irenaeus, critical empathy with non-Irenaean material or non-evangelical material must be demonstrated, respectively. Among secondary contributions, this paper seeks to incorporate a heightened esteem for Irenaeus’ other extant piece, Demonstration; includes a diagram and associated analysis of the bishop’s truth verification network not before illustrated; and includes the beginnings of a critique of the viewpoints that (a) fundamentalistic evangelicalism and its key tenets (like biblical inerrantism) existed from earliest Christianity, but also (b) that fundamentalistic evangelicalism began with Enlightenment thinking. Instead, this essay attempts to show that the foundationalism which is key to fundamentalistic evangelicalism existed in similar but not identical forms to those in the second century

    The Rhetoric of Citizenship, Slavery, and Immigration: Fashioning a Language for Belonging in English Literature

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    With the rise of transnational migration, political factions ration the status of citizen against global diasporas, positioning citizenship as the primary space to assert opposition to hybrid forms of identity and multiculturalism. Simultaneously, however, contradictory ideals of inclusion compete using the same language, leading to confusions of citizenship rhetoric. This rhetoric—the vocabulary used to talk about citizenship, including in government legislation, in print and digital channels, and in everyday public life—obscures citizenship's deep normative divides, while exaggerating the nationalistic character of political membership. Located at the intersection of literary and citizenship studies, my dissertation constellates the literary text with issues of state governmentality and rhetorics of belonging in order to examine citizenship rhetoric from a literary perspective that is attentive to its affective and imaginary registers. Instead of citizenship as a form of rootedness, I foster a methodological approach that centres the role of movement—and in particular, the drive for authority over movement—in the imagining and practice of citizenship, in turn revealing the migratory and diasporic threads that underwrite modernity. While postcolonial and ethnicity studies have unravelled the complexity of national and ethnic belonging, my dissertation complements this existing scholarship by converging on citizenship rhetoric as a discursive formation shaped and altered by literature. I trace literature's role in configuring citizenship with sustained focus on Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative, Frances Burney's The Wanderer, Mary Shelley's travelogues and Frankenstein, Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, and Brian Friel's Translations. While historically rooted, this project is forward looking and considers how eighteenth and nineteenth century imaginings of the citizen still inform contemporary political practices

    All Excellence is God\u27s Excellence: Examining the Fractal Nature of Biblical Wisdom for Decision-making in Complex Environments

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    This study analyzed decision-making techniques in complex environments to discover and examine fractal patterns within biblical wisdom. Employing a constructivist grounded theory approach, interviews of organizational leaders from various occupational verticals such as business leaders, pastors, missionaries, politicians, coaches, teachers, military, and law enforcement were conducted to discern their decision-making principles and methods. The significance of this research is its immense application potential. From the broader context of one’s worldview, the search for meaning, purpose, and success in one’s life journey is fundamental to the human psyche. Within motivated leaders, there is consistently a desire to do well—ultimately, to be excellent in one’s personal journey. However, a person’s destination is not determined by their desire but by their path and that path is greatly determined by the choices they make. The greatest influence one can have in impacting their destiny and achieving future success is through sound decision-making. The term and act that describes sound perspective, assessment, and decision-making is wisdom. God is the Source of wisdom. Wisdom executed consistently over time is excellence. Therefore, it could be declared that all excellence must be God’s excellence. This study explored the components of wisdom and how they correlate and attain superlative results in the decision-making process within challenging environments. The desired fruit of the study ascertained that these components can be constructed and extrapolated through the grounded theory process to produce concepts and principles for executing wise judgment in one’s life journey all to the glory of God

    Making Sense of Ayahuasca Non-Sense: A critical study of UK groups consuming a psychoactive plant mixture and their struggle to find religious meaning

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    How we make sense of ourselves, and the cosmos is an ongoing concern, guided by the people we meet, environments we exist within, and plants we consume. Having spent over a year observing forty-nine participants within three UK-based ayahuasca churches, it is clear that the psychoactive 'brew' ayahuasca creates intense changes to how individuals think about themselves and the world they live in. At the heart of the ayahuasca experience are non-sensical hallucinations and visions, which often exist outside of perceptual understanding, leaving individuals feeling lost in an unknowable universe. As we will come to see, making sense of non-sensical ayahuasca experiences requires individuals to negotiate multiple 'common-sense' views of reality. Taking a view that mind is something that happens within life, this ethnographic study uses participant observation, interviews, conversations, personal diaries, and my experiences as an ayahuasca tourist to detail how making sense of reality is also an act of making oneself. In so doing, I argue that ayahuasca hallucinations and visions function as a source of ongoing mental innovation, facilitating preferred views of reality throughout these psychoactive churches. Critically, we will see how frequent ayahuasca consumption engenders in-depth beliefs in the supernatural, and in particular, devotion to the goddess Ayahuasca, who functions as the unchallengeable road to knowing oneself and reality. Acting as an otherworldly guide, the immaterial goddess Ayahuasca plays a key part in how individuals convert non-sensical experiences into sense, while providing practical advice for how to achieve salvation. Problematically though, positioning the universe and oneself as predominantly supernatural tends to erode beliefs in the physical world, leaving these churches with incoherent views of reality, and at the periphery of everyday social life. As such, church doctrines seem increasingly unable to cope with life outside of their groups, and thus, tactically stigmatise competing views of reality as sinful and individuals espousing such heresies as under the control of malevolent demonic beings. Not surprisingly, this binary belief in a good and evil cosmos is a powerful regulatory force dictating what reality is within these churches, and who church members can claim to be
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