Multidisciplinary Aspects of Design. Objects, Processes, Experiences and Narratives

The book addresses the contemporary perspectives of design on a multidisciplinary through 4 key words: objects, processes, experiences, narratives. It aims at further investigating the role of the archive for the design culture reflecting on “Memory and Future” and “The Tools of Design and the Language of Representation”, and also themes that are yet at the center of the multidisciplinary debate on design. The tenets of the conference (OPEN: objects, processes, experiences and narratives) will hence also correspond to the book sections: -Objects. Design as focused on the object, on its functional and symbolic dimension, and at the same time on the object as a tool for representing cultures; -Processes. The designer’s self-reflective moment which is focused on the analysis and on the definition of processes in various contexts, spanning innovation, social engagement, reflection on emergencies or forecasting. -Experiences. Design as a theoretical and practical strategy aimed at facilitating experiential interactions among people, people and objects or environments. -Narratives. Making history, representing through different media, archiving, narrating, and exhibiting design

DIY Queer Feminist (Sub)cultural Resistance in the UK

This thesis examines the role of music, power and DIY (sub)culture involved in resistance to hegemonic discourses of gender, sexuality and feminism (re)circulated within dominant society and culture. In particular, attention is focused upon young peoples' experiences within riot gml and contemporary queer feminist music (sub )cultures situated within the fabric of social change and protest cultures of contemporary Britain. A critical interdisciplinary approach and set of qualitative methodologies were employed to understand music as collective social action that incorporated (i) oral histories of British riot gml, (ii) an auto/ethnography of DIY queer feminist (sub)culturallife, and (iii) case studies of queer and feminist amateur music-makers. I argue that music provides participants with a set of vital spatial, emotional and sonic resources to provoke radical political imaginaries, identities, communities and life-courses into being. In the context of a neo-liberal post-feminist consumer society, the creation of DIY queer feminist music (sub )culture attempts to resist the disarticulation of feminism and the dominant regulation of gender and sexual diversities. These social practices offer critical insights into the continuities of the (sub)cultural resistance of girls, young women and queers throughout modem history and demands the recognition of (sub)cultural resistance as crucial to British feminism within the wider transformations of protest and activism in contemporary society

Archaeology, the Ancient World, and the Bible: an Integrated Evangelistic Approach

Problem. Recent studies of the Seventh-day Adventist church have revealed that there are several large segments of society in the United States that are not present in the church in large numbers. Among them are groups of people who have attained high socioeconomic levels and above average educational levels. Many of the people who live in the Chestnut Hill section of the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, are in these groups. Traditional Adventist evangelistic methods have not attracted them. This project sought to develop an archaeologically based evangelistic approach that would attract people with similar characteristics. Method. A series of twenty lectures, entitled Archaeology, the Ancient World, and the Bible, was developed and held in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, a largecity setting. In addition, a pastoral move enabled the same series to be held in Mount Vernon, Ohio, a small-town setting. Participant questionnaires were completed by 348 community attendees and the responses were analyzed to determine the attendees\u27 characteristics. Results. The targeted people groups in Chestnut Hill, who have attained high socioeconomic and educational levels, indeed attended the lecture series. Responses suggested that many would not have been attracted by prophetically based meetings. In spite of having opposite demographics, many attendees in Mount Vernon were also from higher socioeconomic and educational levels. Yet, the Mount Vernon series also attracted many who were less wealthy and educated. Conclusions. Evidence from the presentation of this series in two dissimilar locations suggests that archaeologically based evangelism will attract people from a broad spectrum. However, people from the higher socioeconomic and educational levels seem to be attracted more by archaeologically based evangelism than prophetically based evangelism. Solid evangelistic programming can be produced that remains archaeologically based throughout the whole series rather than using archaeology in a few meetings— incidentally— in a prophetically based series as has been common in traditional Adventist evangelism. Archaeology can be integrated into evangelism to build confidence in the Bible, illuminate the customs and culture of biblical times, and provide examples from biblical stories that can be applied to modern-day living

Discourses on Emotions: Communities, Styles, and Selves in Early Modern Mediterranean Travel Books Three Case Studies

The present study focuses on emotion discourses in early modern travel books. It attempts a close textual, intertextual, and contextual analysis of several embedded narratives on emotions in three late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travel books: Kit?b N??ir al-D?n 'ala 'l-Qawm al-K?fir?n: Mukhta?ar Ri?lat al-Shih?b 'ila Liq?´ al-A?b?b by Andalusian traveller Ahmed bin Q?sim al-?ajar? (1570- c.1641), The Diary of Master Thomas Dallam by an English craftsman, Thomas Dallam (1575-1630), and Seyahâtnâme (The Book of Travels) by Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi (1611-1685). In these travel books, al-?ajar?, Dallam, and Evliya narrate their journeys as emotionally protean experiences. They associate emotions with the contexts of their journeys, their volition to travel, and their authorial motives to write about their journeys. They display their emotions in their dreams, humour, and other subjective experiences. Their narratives yield uncommon notions of emotions, namely the emotions of encounter. A love story between a Muslim traveller and a Catholic girl, an English craftsman's anxiety at the court of an Ottoman Sultan, a disgusting meal in a foreign land, are just a few examples of emotionally freighted situations which are unlikely to be found in any genre but a travel book. The close textual analysis aims to identify the role of the writers' cultures in shaping and regulating their discourses on emotions. The intertextual and contextual analysis of these narratives reveals that the meaning and function of these displayed emotions revolve around the traveller's community affiliation, religion, ideology, and other culture-specific discourses and practices such as Sufism, folk medicine, myths, folk traditions, natural and geographical phenomena, cultural scripts, social norms, and power relations. In a nutshell, reading the travellers' discourses on emotions means reading many cultural and historical aspects of the early modern world. To approach discourses on emotions in texts of the past, the present study draws on the theory of culture-construction of emotions. It uses three analytical notions from the fields of language, anthropology and history of emotions: 'emotional communities', 'emotional styles' and 'emotional self-fashioning'. The present study uses a theoretical framework defined by a recent wave of studies on self-narratives as sources for the history and cultural diversity of emotions in the medieval and early modern periods. Within this approach, travel writing is seen as a self-narrative, a communicative act, and a social practice. This approach to emotion discourses in Ri?la, travel journals and Seyahat genres allows us to project the transcultural and entangled history of the early modern Mediterranean, which as much it was a contested frontier between Islam and Christianity, was also a space of religious conversion and hybrid identities, the articulation of diplomacy and cultural exchange, mysticism and religious pluralism. This approach also pinpoints the diverse forms of cosmopolitanism, or rather cosmopolitanisms, in the plural

Not Trying: Reconceiving the Motherhood Mandate

Infertile and childless women think about, live with, and defend their status as mothers and as nonmothers, arguably more so than other women for whom motherhood comes about accidentally or relatively easily in accordance with a plan. Within this group of infertile and childless women are those who are otherwise socially marginalized by factors like class, race, age, marital status, and sexual identity. This dissertation asks about the ways in which marginalized infertile and childless women in America make sense of their situations given the climate of “stratified reproduction” in which the motherhood mandate excludes them or applies to them only obliquely. While other researchers focus on inequalities in access to treatment to explain why many marginalized women eschew medically assisted reproduction and adoption, I emphasize women’s resistance to these attempts at normalization. I take a critical, poststructural, feminist stance within a constructivist analytical framework to suggest that the medicalization, commodification, and bureaucratization of the most available alternative paths to motherhood create the role of the “infertile woman”—i.e., the white, middle class, heternormative, married, “desperate and damaged” cum savvy consumer. By contrast, the women who participated in this study are better described as the “ambivalent childless” (i.e., neither voluntary nor involuntary) and the “pragmatic infertile.” These women experience infertility and childlessness—two interrelated, potentially stigmatizing “roles”—in ways that belie this stereotype, reject the associated stigma in favor of an abiding, dynamic ambivalence, and re-assert themselves as fulfilled women in spite of their presumed deviance

The reception history of 2 Thessalonians with special reference to John Chrysostom, Haimo of Auxerre, and John Calvin

Taking up the concept of reception history/Rezeptionsästhetik, as described by its founder, Hans Robert Jauss, this project considers the way in which diverse contexts shape the ways in which readers of 2 Thessalonians have historically interpreted the epistle. Supplementing Jauss’ methodology with insights from theological scholars, the larger questions of biblical meaning and continuity between biblical interpreters enters the discussion. In the former case, this research discounts the bifurcated directions of historical positivism that equates biblical meaning either with historical background or authorial intent. Related to this, the research proposes the continuity between historical interpreters of 2 Thessalonians be construed in terms of historical dialogue, which constitutes the being of the work. Three historical interpreters of 2 Thessalonians from different historical periods of the Church serve as the receptive foci in this dissertation: John Chrysostom (early Church), Haimo of Auxerre (Medieval Church), and John Calvin (Reformation). Following Jauss’ Rezpetionsästhetik, these interpreters are placed in their compositional contexts and in dialogue with modern interpreters of the same epistle. By passing through the various dimensions of the letter’s otherness, the research brings to the fore potential present appropriations of meaning