3,702 research outputs found

    Harmonious Living: Sustainability, Ecology, and Eco-Islam in Wales

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    This thesis is an in-depth examination of Eco-Islam in Wales. Eco-Islam refers to the conceptual intersection of Islamic principles with environmental and ecological concerns. It is not necessarily a formalised movement with a centralised structure but rather a broader concept that explores the compatibility between Islamic teachings and environmental stewardship. It emphasises the idea that Islamic values and ethics can be applied to address contemporary environmental challenges. This dissertation addresses the question of the normative influence of Islamic environmental principles and their implementation within Welsh Muslim communities and Welsh society. More generally, this thesis is embedded in the academic discourse on the normative role and agency of religions in motivating their members to engage in proenvironmental behaviour. Given the urgency of the environmental crisis facing humanity, which requires a concerted effort from all sectors of society, the research question of this thesis is particularly relevant. Furthermore, despite the growing body of literature on ecology and Islam, there has been little research on the practical implementation of Islamic teachings on nature. Therefore, whilst giving a comprehensive overview of Islamic environmental ethics based on a literature review, the thesis also provides research data on the Eco-Islam movement based on fieldwork conducted in Wales. Particular attention is paid to the social and power structures that contribute to or hinder the development of a Muslim environmental movement. The study provides practical recommendations for better cooperation between faith communities and the (still) predominantly secular environmental movement, with particular attention to the challenges faced by minority communities such as the Muslim communities in Wales

    Introduction to Psychology

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    Introduction to Psychology is a modified version of Psychology 2e - OpenStax

    Comparing the production of a formula with the development of L2 competence

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    This pilot study investigates the production of a formula with the development of L2 competence over proficiency levels of a spoken learner corpus. The results show that the formula in beginner production data is likely being recalled holistically from learners’ phonological memory rather than generated online, identifiable by virtue of its fluent production in absence of any other surface structure evidence of the formula’s syntactic properties. As learners’ L2 competence increases, the formula becomes sensitive to modifications which show structural conformity at each proficiency level. The transparency between the formula’s modification and learners’ corresponding L2 surface structure realisations suggest that it is the independent development of L2 competence which integrates the formula into compositional language, and ultimately drives the SLA process forward

    Second-Person Surveillance: Politics of User Implication in Digital Documentaries

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    This dissertation analyzes digital documentaries that utilize second-person address and roleplay to make users feel implicated in contemporary refugee crises, mass incarceration in the U.S., and state and corporate surveillances. Digital documentaries are seemingly more interactive and participatory than linear film and video documentary as they are comprised of a variety of auditory, visual, and written media, utilize networked technologies, and turn the documentary audience into a documentary user. I draw on scholarship from documentary, game, new media, and surveillance studies to analyze how second-person address in digital documentaries is configured through user positioning and direct address within the works themselves, in how organizations and creators frame their productions, and in how users and players respond in reviews, discussion forums, and Let’s Plays. I build on Michael Rothberg’s theorization of the implicated subject to explore how these digital documentaries bring the user into complicated relationality with national and international crises. Visually and experientially implying that users bear responsibility to the subjects and subject matter, these works can, on the one hand, replicate modes of liberal empathy for suffering, distant “others” and, on the other, simulate one’s own surveillant modes of observation or behavior to mirror it back to users and open up one’s offline thoughts and actions as a site of critique. This dissertation charts how second-person address shapes and limits the political potentialities of documentary projects and connects them to a lineage of direct address from educational and propaganda films, museum exhibits, and serious games. By centralizing the user’s individual experience, the interventions that second-person digital documentaries can make into social discourse change from public, institution-based education to more privatized forms of sentimental education geared toward personal edification and self-realization. Unless tied to larger initiatives or movements, I argue that digital documentaries reaffirm a neoliberal politics of individual self-regulation and governance instead of public education or collective, social intervention. Chapter one focuses on 360-degree virtual reality (VR) documentaries that utilize the feeling of presence to position users as if among refugees and as witnesses to refugee experiences in camps outside of Europe and various dwellings in European cities. My analysis of Clouds Over Sidra (Gabo Arora and Chris Milk 2015) and The Displaced (Imraan Ismail and Ben C. Solomon 2015) shows how these VR documentaries utilize observational realism to make believable and immersive their representations of already empathetic refugees. The empathetic refugee is often young, vulnerable, depoliticized and dehistoricized and is a well-known trope in other forms of humanitarian media that continues into VR documentaries. Forced to Flee (Zahra Rasool 2017), I am Rohingya (Zahra Rasool 2017), So Leben FlĂŒchtlinge in Berlin (Berliner Morgenpost 2017), and Limbo: A Virtual Experience of Waiting for Asylum (Shehani Fernando 2017) disrupt easy immersions into realistic-looking VR experiences of stereotyped representations and user identifications and, instead, can reflect back the user’s political inaction and surveillant modes of looking. Chapter two analyzes web- and social media messenger-based documentaries that position users as outsiders to U.S. mass incarceration. Users are noir-style co-investigators into the crime of the prison-industrial complex in Fremont County, Colorado in Prison Valley: The Prison Industry (David Dufresne and Philippe Brault 2009) and co-riders on a bus transporting prison inmates’ loved ones for visitations to correctional facilities in Upstate New York in A Temporary Contact (Nirit Peled and Sara Kolster 2017). Both projects construct an experience of carceral constraint for users to reinscribe seeming “outside” places, people, and experiences as within the continuation of the racialized and classed politics of state control through mass incarceration. These projects utilize interfaces that create a tension between replicating an exploitative hierarchy between non-incarcerated users and those subject to mass incarceration while also de-immersing users in these experiences to mirror back the user’s supposed distance from this mode of state regulation. Chapter three investigates a type of digital game I term dataveillance simulation games, which position users as surveillance agents in ambiguously dystopian nation-states and force users to use their own critical thinking and judgment to construct the criminality of state-sanctioned surveillance targets. Project Perfect Citizen (Bad Cop Studios 2016), Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You (Osmotic Studios 2016), and Papers, Please (Lucas Pope 2013) all create a dual empathy: players empathize with bureaucratic surveillance agents while empathizing with surveillance targets whose emails, text messages, documents, and social media profiles reveal them to be “normal” people. I argue that while these games show criminality to be a construct, they also utilize a racialized fear of the loss of one’s individual privacy to make players feel like they too could be surveillance targets. Chapter four examines personalized digital documentaries that turn users and their data into the subject matter. Do Not Track (Brett Gaylor 2015), A Week with Wanda (Joe Derry Hall 2019), Stealing Ur Feelings (Noah Levenson 2019), Alfred Premium (JoĂ«l Ronez, Pierre Corbinais, and Émilie F. Grenier 2019), How They Watch You (Nick Briz 2021), and Fairly Intelligentℱ (A.M. Darke 2021) track, monitor, and confront users with their own online behavior to reflect back a corporate surveillance that collects, analyzes, and exploits user data for profit. These digital documentaries utilize emotional fear- and humor-based appeals to persuade users that these technologies are controlling them, shaping their desires and needs, and dehumanizing them through algorithmic surveillance

    Mooring the global archive: a Japanese ship and its migrant histories

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    Martin Dusinberre follows the Yamashiro-maru steamship across Asian and Pacific waters in an innovative history of Japan's engagement with the outside world in the late-nineteenth century. His compelling in-depth analysis reconstructs the lives of some of the thousands of male and female migrants who left Japan for work in Hawai'i, Southeast Asia and Australia. These stories bring together transpacific historiographies of settler colonialism, labour history and resource extraction in new ways. Drawing on an unconventional and deeply material archive, from gravestones to government files, paintings to song, and from digitized records to the very earth itself, Dusinberre addresses key questions of method and authorial positionality in the writing of global history. This engaging investigation into archival practice asks, what is the global archive, where is it cited, and who are 'we' as we cite it? This title is also available as Open Access

    A Siamese transformer network for zero-shot ancient coin classification

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    Ancient numismatics, the study of ancient coins, has in recent years become an attractive domain for the application of computer vision and machine learning. Though rich in research problems, the predominant focus in this area to date has been on the task of attributing a coin from an image, that is of identifying its issue. This may be considered the cardinal problem in the field and it continues to challenge automatic methods. In the present paper, we address a number of limitations of previous work. Firstly, the existing methods approach the problem as a classification task. As such, they are unable to deal with classes with no or few exemplars (which would be most, given over 50,000 issues of Roman Imperial coins alone), and require retraining when exemplars of a new class become available. Hence, rather than seeking to learn a representation that distinguishes a particular class from all the others, herein we seek a representation that is overall best at distinguishing classes from one another, thus relinquishing the demand for exemplars of any specific class. This leads to our adoption of the paradigm of pairwise coin matching by issue, rather than the usual classification paradigm, and the specific solution we propose in the form of a Siamese neural network. Furthermore, while adopting deep learning, motivated by its successes in the field and its unchallenged superiority over classical computer vision approaches, we also seek to leverage the advantages that transformers have over the previously employed convolutional neural networks, and in particular their non-local attention mechanisms, which ought to be particularly useful in ancient coin analysis by associating semantically but not visually related distal elements of a coin’s design. Evaluated on a large data corpus of 14,820 images and 7605 issues, using transfer learning and only a small training set of 542 images of 24 issues, our Double Siamese ViT model is shown to surpass the state of the art by a large margin, achieving an overall accuracy of 81%. Moreover, our further investigation of the results shows that the majority of the method’s errors are unrelated to the intrinsic aspects of the algorithm itself, but are rather a consequence of unclean data, which is a problem that can be easily addressed in practice by simple pre-processing and quality checking.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

    Reframing museum epistemology for the information age: a discursive design approach to revealing complexity

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    This practice-based research inquiry examines the impact of an epistemic shift, brought about by the dawning of the information age and advances in networked communication technologies, on physical knowledge institutions - focusing on museums. The research charts adapting knowledge schemas used in museum knowledge organisation and discusses the potential for a new knowledge schema, the network, to establish a new epistemology for museums that reflects contemporary hyperlinked and networked knowledge. The research investigates the potential for networked and shared virtual reality spaces to reveal new ‘knowledge monuments’ reflecting the epistemic values of the network society and the space of flows. The central practice for this thesis focuses on two main elements. The first is applying networks and visual complexity to reveal multi-linearity and adapting perspectives in relational knowledge networks. This concept was explored through two discursive design projects, the Museum Collection Engine, which uses data visualisation, cloud data, and image recognition within an immersive projection dome to create a dynamic and searchable museum collection that returns new and interlinking constellations of museum objects and knowledge. The second discursive design project was Shared Pasts: Decoding Complexity, an AR app with a unique ‘anti-personalisation’ recommendation system designed to reveal complex narratives around historic objects and places. The second element is folksonomy and co-design in developing new community-focused archives using the community's language to build the dataset and socially tagged metadata. This was tested by developing two discursive prototypes, Women Reclaiming AI and Sanctuary Stories

    Anthropology and Enlightenment: Kant's significance in Foucault's work

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    In this thesis, I explore Michel Foucault's early and later works on Immanuel Kant. I argue that the influence of Kant on Foucault deserves further examination. The thesis is divided into three parts. In Part I, which comprises the first two chapters, I will examine relevant aspects of Foucault scholarship that deal primarily with Foucault's work on Kant. In Part II, I will examine Foucault's Introduction to Kant's Anthropology to demonstrate that Foucault's critique of modernity is incomplete without Kant. In Chapter III, I will show how Foucault's critique of modernity is rooted in Kant. In Chapter IV, I will demonstrate that, even though he inaugurated modernity, and hence may be subjected to the same criticism as modernity, nonetheless Kant, for Foucault, gives a lesson that rectifies modernity's mistake. In Part III, I will examine Foucault's later work on Kant, particularly the essay, 'What is Enlightenment?', to demonstrate how Kant enables Foucault to interrogate the present and ascertain the form of this interrogation. In Chapter V, I will show that, even though he rejects Kant's ideas of the present such as epoch and event, nonetheless Foucault appropriates Kant’s notion of 'Enlightenment' in his consideration of the present. In Chapter VI, I will argue that Kant exhibits the 'attitude of modernity', thereby assisting Foucault in determining the 'modern' form of critique. Drawing all this together, I conclude that Kant is significant for Foucault because he enables Foucault to undertake a critique of modernity and at the same time determine that to be critical is to be modern

    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
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