7,034 research outputs found

    Undergraduate Catalog of Studies, 2023-2024

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    Mobile heritage practices. Implications for scholarly research, user experience design, and evaluation methods using mobile apps.

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    Mobile heritage apps have become one of the most popular means for audience engagement and curation of museum collections and heritage contexts. This raises practical and ethical questions for both researchers and practitioners, such as: what kind of audience engagement can be built using mobile apps? what are the current approaches? how can audience engagement with these experience be evaluated? how can those experiences be made more resilient, and in turn sustainable? In this thesis I explore experience design scholarships together with personal professional insights to analyse digital heritage practices with a view to accelerating thinking about and critique of mobile apps in particular. As a result, the chapters that follow here look at the evolution of digital heritage practices, examining the cultural, societal, and technological contexts in which mobile heritage apps are developed by the creative media industry, the academic institutions, and how these forces are shaping the user experience design methods. Drawing from studies in digital (critical) heritage, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and design thinking, this thesis provides a critical analysis of the development and use of mobile practices for the heritage. Furthermore, through an empirical and embedded approach to research, the thesis also presents auto-ethnographic case studies in order to show evidence that mobile experiences conceptualised by more organic design approaches, can result in more resilient and sustainable heritage practices. By doing so, this thesis encourages a renewed understanding of the pivotal role of these practices in the broader sociocultural, political and environmental changes.AHRC REAC

    DEVELOPING COMPETENCE FOR INNOVATION IN KNOWLEDGE PRACTICE: an exploration of the sustainability science-policy interface

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    This thesis is motivated by institutional claims for a “new type of knowledge” in the sustainability science-policy interface. It thus explores the thinking and practice of experts in the field about professional competencies necessary to induce required innovations in their knowledge practice. The thesis proposes a novel conceptual framework, synthesising (1) five key features informing claimed innovations in knowledge practice of science-policy sustainability ‘boundary organisations’, (2) a set of ten differentiating individual competencies deemed critical to induce such type of innovations and (3) required approaches to effective development of such competencies. In doing so, this thesis suggests an operative framework to engage with a competence-based approach in response to the need for innovations in knowledge practice within boundary organisations. Under the conceptual framework above, the thesis engages in an empirical work exploring the thinking and praxis of experts in the field, around three key questions: (1) How do practitioners in the field perceive the need for and the pertinence of such type of innovations, (2) How do they relate to the notion of individual competence and the need for different types of competencies to induce innovations in their own knowledge practice and (3) How can professionals working in the science-policy interface most effectively learn and develop such new set of competences, given their specific organisational / institutional contexts? Methodologically, this thesis engaged a combined set of empirical research instruments, mostly including semi-structured interviews with professionals operating in the sustainability sciencepolicy interface, three focus-groups in The Netherlands, Portugal and the UK, with actors operating within the remit of sustainability boundary organizations, and participatory observation within the European Environment Agency. Outcomes of this research indicate that, while the need for a new type of knowledge is clearly acknowledged by practitioners in ‘boundary organisations’, notions associated with required innovations in knowledge practice – such as co-creation, systems thinking, transdisciplinarity, reflexivity and action-orientated knowledge – are still subject to ambiguity and controversy within the institutional context they operate. As practitioners struggle to engage the notion of individual competence in this debate, the type of competencies deemed critical to induce required innovations in their knowledge practice resonates with their own experience. Experts in boundary organisations identify though a lack of institutional frameworks to support their efforts to generate innovations in knowledge practice. While this research synthetises and presents existing examples of learning programmes and approaches to help develop such type of competencies, practitioners in the field manifest scepticism on the extent to which such learning approaches are feasible in their given institutional settings

    An examination of the verbal behaviour of intergroup discrimination

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    This thesis examined relationships between psychological flexibility, psychological inflexibility, prejudicial attitudes, and dehumanization across three cross-sectional studies with an additional proposed experimental study. Psychological flexibility refers to mindful attention to the present moment, willing acceptance of private experiences, and engaging in behaviours congruent with one’s freely chosen values. Inflexibility, on the other hand, indicates a tendency to suppress unwanted thoughts and emotions, entanglement with one’s thoughts, and rigid behavioural patterns. Study 1 found limited correlations between inflexibility and sexism, racism, homonegativity, and dehumanization. Study 2 demonstrated more consistent positive associations between inflexibility and prejudice. And Study 3 controlled for right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, finding inflexibility predicted hostile sexism and racism beyond these factors. While showing some relationships, particularly with sexism and racism, psychological inflexibility did not consistently correlate with varied prejudices across studies. The proposed randomized controlled trial aims to evaluate an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy intervention to reduce sexism through enhanced psychological flexibility. Overall, findings provide mixed support for the utility of flexibility-based skills in addressing complex societal prejudices. Research should continue examining flexibility integrated with socio-cultural approaches to promote equity

    Southern Adventist University Undergraduate Catalog 2023-2024

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    Southern Adventist University\u27s undergraduate catalog for the academic year 2023-2024.https://knowledge.e.southern.edu/undergrad_catalog/1123/thumbnail.jp

    The Beginning of Wisdom: Imagining fear in French Romanesque portal sculpture, c.1080-1140

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    This thesis examines the role of fear in the design and function of Romanesque portal sculptures c.1090-1140 to understand how representations of the majestas Domini, Last Judgment and Hell were intended to guide their audiences towards an emotional state of terror and wonder that would lead to wisdom. It focuses on a small collection of important sites in Burgundy and the regions of Aveyron and Tarn-et-Garonne in south-western France to examine the development of monumental sculpture as a means of conveying and formulating theological concepts to lay and monastic audiences. Through an analysis of their iconography and composition in relation to exegetical and literary interpretations of divine majesty, judgment and eternal damnation, it offers new perspectives on pre-Scholastic art and thought, and contributes to current scholarship on affective devotion and emotional response in the context of Romanesque and Gothic sculpture. The new imagery created for the medium of portal sculpture is contextualised within the iconographic traditions which developed from Late Antiquity and continued to evolve over the early Middle Ages. The role of emotions, particularly fear, in the devotional cultures of the early twelfth century also presents new insights into the nature of visuality and spiritual sight in the Middle Ages. Portal sculptures were designed to prompt their audiences to develop the fearful attitude shared by the prophets, and which would remain even after the Last Judgment. Representations of response and the replication of divinely-created images encouraged those viewing the sculpture to imagine them as if they were real to participate in the visionary experience of the prophets or terror of the resurrected dead at the Last Judgment

    Deep Learning Techniques for Electroencephalography Analysis

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    In this thesis we design deep learning techniques for training deep neural networks on electroencephalography (EEG) data and in particular on two problems, namely EEG-based motor imagery decoding and EEG-based affect recognition, addressing challenges associated with them. Regarding the problem of motor imagery (MI) decoding, we first consider the various kinds of domain shifts in the EEG signals, caused by inter-individual differences (e.g. brain anatomy, personality and cognitive profile). These domain shifts render multi-subject training a challenging task and impede robust cross-subject generalization. We build a two-stage model ensemble architecture and propose two objectives to train it, combining the strengths of curriculum learning and collaborative training. Our subject-independent experiments on the large datasets of Physionet and OpenBMI, verify the effectiveness of our approach. Next, we explore the utilization of the spatial covariance of EEG signals through alignment techniques, with the goal of learning domain-invariant representations. We introduce a Riemannian framework that concurrently performs covariance-based signal alignment and data augmentation, while training a convolutional neural network (CNN) on EEG time-series. Experiments on the BCI IV-2a dataset show that our method performs superiorly over traditional alignment, by inducing regularization to the weights of the CNN. We also study the problem of EEG-based affect recognition, inspired by works suggesting that emotions can be expressed in relative terms, i.e. through ordinal comparisons between different affective state levels. We propose treating data samples in a pairwise manner to infer the ordinal relation between their corresponding affective state labels, as an auxiliary training objective. We incorporate our objective in a deep network architecture which we jointly train on the tasks of sample-wise classification and pairwise ordinal ranking. We evaluate our method on the affective datasets of DEAP and SEED and obtain performance improvements over deep networks trained without the additional ranking objective

    From abuse to trust and back again

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    Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies

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    Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants. The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the institutionalised responses in agrarian settings, highlighting what exclusions and inclusions result. It explores how different people — in relation to class and other co-constituted axes of social difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, age and occupation — are affected by climate change, as well as the climate adaptation and mitigation responses being implemented in rural areas. The book in turn explores how climate change – and the responses to it - affect processes of social differentiation, trajectories of accumulation and in turn agrarian politics. Finally, the book examines what strategies are required to confront climate change, and the underlying political-economic dynamics that cause it, reflecting on what this means for agrarian struggles across the world. The 26 chapters in this volume explore how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world and, in particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change. Through a huge variety of case studies alongside more conceptual chapters, the book makes the often-missing connection between climate change and critical agrarian studies. The book argues that making the connection between climate and agrarian justice is crucial

    1st Design Factory Global Network Research Conference ‘Designing the Future’ 5-6 October 2022

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    DFGN.R 2022 -Designing the Future - is the first research conference organised by the Design Factory Global Network. The open event offers the opportunity for all like-minded educators, designers and researchers to share their insights and inspire others on education, methods, practices and ecosystems of co-creation and innovation. The DFGN.R conference is a two-day event hosted on-site in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. The conference is organized alongside International Design Factory Week 2022, the annual gathering of DFGN members. This year's conference is organized in collaboration with Aalto University from Helsinki Finland and hosted by the NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences
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