Technology in Social Work Education: Are We Practising What We Preach?

Research on the use of technology in social work education is underdeveloped and neither well designed nor comprehensive. Assertions about its effectiveness are premature. More critical analyses and rigorous research needs to be conducted on the use of technology in social work education to determine what kind of technology works best with what kind of student and what kind of course. This article presents and evaluates the existing research on the use of technology in social work education. An appendix at the end of the article summarizes the studies in this review, illustrating the type of technology, research design, study limitations, courses offered and conclusions of the researchers

Ways of making: producing artworks in the studio in response to experiential walking

This thesis includes a body of paintings, drawings and assembled objects that have been made in response to the Crossing England walks (2014 - 2018). This body of work is entitled The English Diagrams (2018). The research draws upon the varied perspectives of Fine Art, Performance Studies and Cultural Geographies, to examine the relationship between the activities of walking as art, and making in the studio. Drawing from experiential phenomenology, I set out a model for rigorous, reflexive, creative practice and map the looping affiliations between the embodied world of the walked landscape, the subjective terrain of the practitioner, and the fabrication of paintings, drawings and assemblage within the studio. This interdisciplinary study takes a neo-vitalist approach, tracking a series of walks on a single route across England. Artist and terrain are explored as integrated, the boundaries between them fluid or porous, Autobiographical story, personal mythology, and sediments of collective memory interred within the earth are drawn out by the sensory, somatic rhythms of walking, and through selection of specific materials found along the way. Through studying bodily, psychical and material fluxes and flows within the studio, the thesis considers optimal conditions for flow in practice, and scrutinizes interrelations between the space of the studio and the body/mind of the practitioner, during the production of drawings, paintings and assemblage. It explores how the fields, gaps, lines and folds of the landscape can be translated into a bricolage of visual and painterly languages that is as heterogeneous as the terrain it refers to. The research shows how a sustained and looping threefold process of walking, reflective writing and making can lead not just to new ways of fabricating, but of surveying and plotting human experience. This renewed, unified sensibility, is subsequently conveyed back outside to the landscape during new walks, offering altered perceptions and new readings of the landscape. This is a study with potential to be of interest for creative practitioners from a variety of disciplines, and to theorists and scholars of artistic process

Utopic horizons: cinematic geographies of travel and migration

Theoretically grounded in debates surrounding the production of space and mobility in contemporary cultural discourse, this thesis examines the role of film in these deterritorialised landscapes of theory and practice, in particular the shift from place-based geographies of travel and film to those of 'utopic' displacement. Focussed primarily on examples from contemporary European film, the thesis also considers the broader geo- historical contexts underpinning travel and filmic practices: for example, cinema's nascent links with the democratisation of travel and the construction of a touristic 'mobile virtual gaze' . In so far as these and other examples of 'travel film' can be said to discursively centre the 'voyager-voyeur' in geographies of home and placement, they invoke an 'Ulyssean gaze' of mythic circularity against which the utopic deterritorialisations of migrancy and transnational space are counterposed. It is these utopic horizons of travel - cinematic mobilities that pose dialectical challenges to hegemonic cartographies of place and space which this thesis sets out to explore. Mapping the utopic gaze in early and 'classic' (e)migrant films, I examine the extent to which the frontiers and horizons of utopic travel, predicated in these examples of spatio-temporal distance, could be said to have collapsed in a spatial conflation of presence and absence. In this analysis ellipses in space and time have increasingly displaced the representational spaces of the journey. Looking at a range of examples from contemporary film, I examine the dialectic between a displaced imaginary of utopic hope and the material non-places of transit, refuge and waiting which dominate these cinematic geographies; dialectic which maps affective spaces of stasis and transition. In the deterritorialised landscapes of postmodernity I argue that it is the agential and embodied mobilities of movement-in-itself - psychogeographic, oblique confrontations with hegemonic space - that constitutes the fullest realisation of the utopic. Far from valorising undialectical tropes of the 'open road' or of the rhizomatic, homeless 'nomad', these peripatetic, embodied mobilities are the product of a dialectic of stasis and transition in which the conflict between abstract and lived spaces of mobility is brought to the fore

The mobile life of food and drink packaging

PhD ThesisPackaging is a largely neglected object of enquiry in Human Geography and, indeed, the social sciences more broadly. Yet it forms a crucial element of almost all food systems and without such mundane objects these food systems would fail or function very differently. In turn, food systems, which rely on the continuous flow of packaging and food, are vital for enabling our increasingly mobile lives. This thesis thus investigates the multiple mobilities associated with food and drink packaging. The study forms part of a wider ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences and is structured in two parts. The first part concentrates primarily on how packaging shapes the movement of food. The second part focuses more on the ways in which packaged food shapes the mobilities of humans. However, both these aspects of packaging’s mobile life are not viewed as separate but rather as entangled and mutually dependent on each other. Throughout the thesis attention is paid to how packaging helps standardise the repetitive and anticipated mobilities of food and humans. It is, in other words, examined as an immutable mobile that ensures the smooth flows of food and people. Thus, in the first part of the thesis it is shown how packaging ensures the smooth flows associated with highly automated, industrialised and safe packaged food production and distribution. It also opens up the mobilities of packaging to elaborate upon the similarly regular and anticipated flows of packaging as raw materials. In the second part of the thesis attention is directed towards the patterns of human mobility that packaged food permits. However, while emphasis is placed on the role of packaging in standardising and stabilising interrelated food and human mobilities across Euclidean spaces, the thesis also begins to interrogate the topological complexities and molecular mobilities of packaging. While packaging can certainly be seen to permit the smooth and relatively unproblematic flows of food and people it may also, and from another theoretical perspective, be viewed as a fluid and vibrant technology. These topologically complex movements of packaging are explored in cases that show its fluid articulation as a barrier which has profound implications for the regulated mobilities of food. The vibrancy of packaging is also examined through its importance for mobile practices and its capacity to affect travellers

Cyborg Music: A Future Musicotechnographic Aesthetic

This dissertation-assemblage is a rhizo-text of a rhizo-enquiry. It is part musicoethnography and part philosophical analysis. It looks at the work(ing practices) of four contemporary musickers. It situates a rhizo-analysis of their work, as described in four vignette studies, in discussions of, inter alia, rhizo-aesthetics, cyborgs, and boundaries in Entangled Network Space. It includes a speculative consideration of what might happen to music and musicking in the future, especially in the light of current trends in the expansion of technicity in their methods of composition, production, and distribution. It draws particularly on the philosophical writings of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze (particularly in association with Félix Guattari), Bernard Stiegler, Bruno Latour, Manuel DeLanda, Christopher Vitale, and Ian Hodder

Cities and Wetlands

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. From New Orleans to New York, from London to Paris to Venice, many of the world’s great cities were built on wetlands and swamps. Cities and Wetlands is the first book to explore the literary and cultural histories of these cities and their relationships to their environments and buried histories. Developing a ground-breaking new mode of psychoanalytic ecology and surveying a wide range of major cities in North America and Europe, ecocritic and activist Rod Giblett shows how the wetland origins of these cities haunt their later literature and culture and might prompt us to reconsider the relationship between human culture and the environment. Cities covered include: Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Hamburg, London, New Orleans, New York, Paris, St. Petersburg, Toronto, Venice and Washington

Empire and Environment

Empire and Environment argues that histories of imperialism, colonialism, militarism, and global capitalism are integral to understanding environmental violence in the transpacific region. The collection draws its rationale from the imbrication of imperialism and global environmental crisis, but its inspiration from the ecological work of activists, artists, and intellectuals across the transpacific region. Taking a postcolonial, ecocritical approach to confronting ecological ruin in an age of ecological crises and environmental catastrophes on a global scale, the collection demonstrates how Asian North American, Asian diasporic, and Indigenous Pacific Island cultural expressions critique a de-historicized sense of place, attachment, and belonging. In addition to its thirteen chapters from scholars who span the Pacific, each part of this volume begins with a poem by Craig Santos Perez. The volume also features a foreword by Macarena Gómez-Barris and an afterword by Priscilla Wald

Interconnected In-Between: On the dynamics of abjection, animism, temporality and location in nomadic art practice

This practice based PhD research is conducted through my installations One Hundred Ten Thousand (2011-12), Rituals to Mutations (2013) and Blackballing (2013). It is a journey from the sites of propagation marginalised villages in the outskirts of Beijing and a forgotten Buddhist temple in Chongqing, Central China - through the production processes to exhibitions in global venues. This research examines the potentiality of nomadism as a political position. This specific agency provides a unique setting through which this inquiry makes a contribution to the field of contemporary art in the contexts of globalisation, nomadic subjectivity, new materialism and the posthuman/postanthropocentric condition, and to visual language. It argues for a more ethical and material relationship with others, human and non-human. I examine how transformative, intersubjective relations, nomadic politics, extensive lived experience, local knowledge and different levels of collaboration might be addressed by my artworks and how these processes might be encountered by the viewer. I explore how the use of these different fluid connections in my work might transform our sense of ourselves and our relationship with others, human or not. As a process of rereading and reconstituting, starting from specific cultural details like those of Chinese village graveyards, and interconnecting spatial, historical, sociopolitical and metaphysical reconfiguration, the research project examines the possibilities of merging them with emergent, unexpected bodies of knowledge and systems of interdependence. Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytical notion of abjection is a frame of reference through which I develop methodological tools. In this research, I situate this psychoanalytical, Eurocentric and rather limited notion in more anthropological and extended fields of relationships, especially in relation to notions such as ‘becoming’ (Gilles Deleuze) and animism (Anselm Franke), and to local knowledge and nomadic discourses (Rosi Braidotti). I do this in order to examine how oppositional relations between the Self and the Other and dualistic concepts might be transformed. I evaluate my research in dialogic relation to other artists’ works, via reflexive conversations alongside theoretical propositions and in relation to my political nomadic position as a researcher and practitioner. This research leads to a re-evaluation of how concepts of abjection and resistance might be rethought in art practice. By integrating processes of abjection with Deleuzian ‘becoming’, my artworks explore how transformative processes of, for example, material(ities), rituals or pollution, might be engendered in systems of relations in which oppositional relations between subjects and objects (human and non-human) are destabilised and operate inclusively

Video Conferencing: Infrastructures, Practices, Aesthetics

The COVID-19 pandemic has reorganized existing methods of exchange, turning comparatively marginal technologies into the new normal. Multipoint videoconferencing in particular has become a favored means for web-based forms of remote communication and collaboration without physical copresence. Taking the recent mainstreaming of videoconferencing as its point of departure, this anthology examines the complex mediality of this new form of social interaction. Connecting theoretical reflection with material case studies, the contributors question practices, politics and aesthetics of videoconferencing and the specific meanings it acquires in different historical, cultural and social contexts