Air Gondwana and the teaching of negotiation skills: Imagination in design and imagination in learning

The skill of negotiation is a skill that is crucial for lawyers to master. It is a skill which is now taught explicitly alongside the substantive law and a number of Australian law schools including that at the Queensland University of Technology. Methods of teaching the skill may vary but a traditional approach involves some form of instruction followed by a role play. This paper examines the author’s imaginative use of technology to create an engaging and challenging learning environment in which students will themselves be required to exercise and imagination in development of their skills

Embodiment and embodied design

Picture this. A preverbal infant straddles the center of a seesaw. She gently tilts her weight back and forth from one side to the other, sensing as each side tips downward and then back up again. This child cannot articulate her observations in simple words, let alone in scientific jargon. Can she learn anything from this experience? If so, what is she learning, and what role might such learning play in her future interactions in the world? Of course, this is a nonverbal bodily experience, and any learning that occurs must be bodily, physical learning. But does this nonverbal bodily experience have anything to do with the sort of learning that takes place in schools - learning verbal and abstract concepts? In this chapter, we argue that the body has everything to do with learning, even learning of abstract concepts. Take mathematics, for example. Mathematical practice is thought to be about producing and manipulating arbitrary symbolic inscriptions that bear abstract, universal truisms untainted by human corporeality. Mathematics is thought to epitomize our species’ collective historical achievement of transcending and, perhaps, escaping the mundane, material condition of having a body governed by haphazard terrestrial circumstance. Surely mathematics is disembodied

Making sense of digitally remediated touch in virtual reality experiences

Touch, often called the ‘first sense’, is fundamental to how we experience and know ourselves, others and the world. Increasingly, touch is being brought into the digital landscape. This paper explores this shifting landscape to understand the ways in which touch is re-mediated in the context of virtual reality. With attention to the sensoriality and sociality of touch, it asks what ‘counts’ as touch in VR, how is touch experienced and how is it incorporated into meaning making. We present and discuss findings from a multimodal and multisensory study of 16 participants interacting in two VR experiences to describe: the participants’ material encounters with the virtual through a focus on touch practices, expectations and norms; the ways in which participants made meaning of (and with) virtual touch through their dynamic selection and orchestration of the range of semiotic and experiential resources available; and how these virtual touch experiences translated into discourses of touch in VR to emphasize continuities and change between the past, present and futures. The paper comments on the methodological challenges of researching touch in the emergent landscape of VR and asks how multimodality might engage newly with touch, perhaps the most under-rated and neglected of modes and senses, and its digital remediation

Popular geopolitics ‘beyond the screen’: Bringing Modern Warfare to the city

Bos, D. (2020). Popular geopolitics ‘beyond the screen’: Bringing Modern Warfare to the city. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 39(1), 94-113. Copyright © 2020 (Copyright Holder). Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.Popular culture – in this case military-themed videogames – has been argued to mould and shape popular understandings of the geopolitics of the ‘war on terror’. To date, most attention has been focused on the geopolitical representations of a ‘final’ popular cultural text or object. Less attention has been paid to how popular understandings of geopolitics and military violence have been constructed and commodified prior to, and ‘beyond the screen’. Empirically, the paper examines the marketing campaign of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Through the use of experiential marketing, I show how the game’s launch night incorporated spectacular displays, performances and consumer interactions to sell the pleasures of virtual war by drawing on geopolitical fears of terrorism and military violence within major Western cities. Firstly, I demonstrate how marketing engaged with and transformed urban spaces extending the popular geopolitics of virtual war. Secondly, the paper reveals how experiential marketing targeted and encouraged connections with and between attendees’ bodies. Thirdly, I demonstrate how such events promote geopolitical encounters which extend beyond the temporal and the spatial confines of the marketing event itself. Ultimately, the paper reveals how urban fears surrounding the global ‘war on terror’ were employed to sell the pleasures and geopolitics of virtual war

A critical geopolitics of RAF recruitment

PhD ThesisThis PhD thesis investigates the geopolitics of Royal Air Force (RAF) recruitment practices. Set at the interface between military and civilian life, RAF recruitment represents an important site from which particular imaginations of the military are consumed, enacted and performed. Drawing primarily on critical geopolitical theory and military geography, along with more-than-representational approaches to popular culture, the thesis uncovers how RAF recruitment necessitates an understanding of, and participation within, certain military-political narratives and imaginaries. It shows that these imaginaries – variously associated with the role, utility and legitimacy of state-sanctioned military violence – are powerful in their ability to affect popular understandings of the military, and to affect certain bodily and material engagements within the immediate spaces of recruitment. Furthermore, with a specific focus on the RAF, it demonstrates how certain ideas around the role and utility of military airpower are represented, enacted and performed. The thesis approaches the geopolitics of RAF recruitment in three ways. Firstly, focussing on the representative tenets of recruitment, the thesis examines both the historical and contemporary design of recruiting texts, images and documents. Using a socio-historical analysis of recruiting images, and drawing upon interviews with the military and corporate producers of recruitment, it demonstrates how recruitment emerges from particular structures, knowledges and experiences. Secondly, focussing on the visualities of military public-relations, the thesis demonstrates how large-scale public and private events, such as military airshows, provide spaces in which military-political narratives and imaginaries are enacted in and through regimes of seeing and sighting. Based on ethnographic research at military airshows, the thesis works to uncover the ways in which techniques of vision at spectacular events tie the potential recruit into particular imaginations of military legitimacy, efficacy, heritage and power. Thirdly, the thesis examines how the more mundane, quotidian sites of RAF recruitment are powerful in their ability to affect bodily predispositions and material engagements. Focussing on RAF recruiting games, military fitness regimes and the material, ephemeral nature of the airshow in particular, the thesis provides an insight into why the material and bodily cultures of militarism matter, and how they work persuasively to entrain particular imaginations of military life and culture. x The thesis raises important questions about the presence of military narratives and imaginaries in the public, civilian sphere, and in popular culture in particular. Set at the interface between military and civilian life, RAF recruitment demonstrates how popular geopolitical discourses of the military sometimes work not only to script imaginations of military violence, but to affect, mark and alter civilian lives and futures.ESR

Playing with the future: social irrealism and the politics of aesthetics

In this paper we wish to explore the political possibilities of video games. Numerous scholars now take seriously the place of popular culture in the remaking of our geographies, but video games still lag behind. For us, this tendency reflects a general response to them as imaginary spaces that are separate from everyday life and 'real' politics. It is this disconnect between abstraction and lived experience that we complicate by defining play as an event of what Brian Massumi calls lived abstraction. We wish to short-circuit the barriers that prevent the aesthetic resonating with the political and argue that through their enactment, video games can animate fantastical futures that require the player to make, and reflect upon, profound ethical decisions that can be antagonistic to prevailing political imaginations. We refer to this as social irrealism to demonstrate that reality can be understood through the impossible and the imagined

Queering sex machines : the re-articulation of non-normative sexualities and technosexual bodies

From the simple electronic vibrator to the complex assemblages of cybersex, sex and technology have always intersected. The dynamic relations between sexuality and technology are constantly changing along with the ways in which human beings achieve psychological and bodily pleasure through these devices. Sex machine, a term that denotes an automated device that can assist human in the pursuits of sex, has been broadly defined as therapeutic and pleasure machines in the West. Large numbers of sex machines have been documented in Europe and America starting from the nineteenth century, and were widely produced and utilized by medical practitioners, sex toy makers and individuals throughout history. This research focuses on three kinds of sex machines that have been produced and represented visually in recent years: fucking-machines, teledildonics and humanoid sex machines. By using the poststructuralist approach of combining the material and symbolic dimensions in the analysis, the thesis aims at investigating the cultural significance of sex machines by studying how they are identified, represented and produced as cultural text/artefact in the Euro-American subcultural sexual context. Through a queer reading of sex machines, the project will explore how sex machines re-configure the way we understand body, gender, sexuality and technology in the human pursuit of pleasure and desire