Exploring the Lived Theology of Small Missional Communities: Uncovering Charismatic Practices and Beliefs to Enable Sustained Engagement in Social Action

This thesis explores the lived theology of Small Missional Communities focusing on how they have developed practices and beliefs to help sustain their engagement in social action. These small groups of Christians are seeking to be both a worshipping Christian community and engage in social action in their local area and have been strongly influenced by the Emerging Missional Church, charismatic evangelicalism and what I have called the Evangelical Turn to Social Action. Using a practical theology approach through a qualitative study of four Small Missional Communities this research reveals the way that these communities have developed practices to discern and experience God in the world to enable a more sustained engagement in social action retaining the Charismatic Evangelical emphasis on experience and encounter with God. The key shift made by these Small Missional Communities is theological; a change in understanding of where and how God acts. Through developing new practices and understandings the communities have moved from an intensive focus on God acting in the gathered worship service to an extensive focus on God acting in the world. These practices and understandings are described as ‘moving the location of belonging’, a change in the understanding of the relationship between God’s action and human action, and developing practices of seeing and experiencing God in the world. The thesis then explores the insights and challenges both for Small Missional Communities and for the traditions which have influenced SMCs concluding that greater attention needs to be paid to the Charismatic Evangelical background of such groups, whose practices continue to shape the communities, and how practices are already developing which help to tackle some of the challenges facing Small Missional Communities

Subverting the racist lens: Frederick Douglass, humanity and the power of the photographic Image

Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, the civil rights advocate and the great rhetorician, has been the focus of much academic research. Only more recently is Douglass work on aesthetics beginning to receive its due, and even then its philosophical scope is rarely appreciated. Douglass’ aesthetic interest was notably not so much in art itself, but in understanding aesthetic presentation as an epistemological and psychological aspect of the human condition and thereby as a social and political tool. He was fascinated by the power of images, and took particular interest in the emerging technologies of photography. He often returned to the themes of art, pictures and aesthetic perception in his speeches. He saw himself, also after the end of slavery, as first and foremost a human rights advocate, and he suggests that his work and thoughts as a public intellectual always in some way related to this end. In this regard, his interest in the power of photographic images to impact the human soul was a lifelong concern. His reflections accordingly center on the psychological and political potentials of images and the relationship between art, culture, and human dignity. In this chapter we discuss Douglass views and practical use of photography and other forms of imagery, and tease out his view about their transformational potential particularly in respect to combating racist attitudes. We propose that his views and actions suggest that he intuitively if not explicitly anticipated many later philosophical, pragmatist and ecological insights regarding the generative habits of mind and affordance perception : I.e. that we perceive the world through our values and habitual ways of engaging with it and thus that our perception is active and creative, not passive and objective. Our understanding of the world is simultaneously shaped by and shaping our perceptions. Douglass saw that in a racist and bigoted society this means that change through facts and rational arguments will be hard. A distorted lens distorts - and accordingly re-produces and perceives its own distortion. His interest in aesthetics is intimately connected to this conundrum of knowledge and change, perception and action. To some extent precisely due to his understanding of how stereotypical categories and dominant relations work on our minds, he sees a radical transformational potential in certain art and imagery. We see in his work a profound understanding of the value-laden and action-oriented nature of perception and what we today call the perception of affordances (that is, what our environment permits/invites us to do). Douglass is particularly interested in the social environment and the social affordances of how we perceive other humans, and he thinks that photographs can impact on the human intellect in a transformative manner. In terms of the very process of aesthetic perception his views interestingly cohere and supplement a recent theory about the conditions and consequences of being an aesthetic beholder. The main idea being that artworks typically invite an asymmetric engagement where one can behold them without being the object of reciprocal attention. This might allow for a kind of vulnerability and openness that holds transformational potentials not typically available in more strategic and goal-directed modes of perception. As mentioned, Douglass main interest is in social change and specifically in combating racist social structures and negative stereotypes of black people. He is fascinated by the potential of photography in particular as a means of correcting fallacious stereotypes, as it allows a more direct and less distorted image of the individuality and multidimensionality of black people. We end with a discussion of how, given this interpretation of aesthetic perception, we can understand the specific imagery used by Douglass himself. How he tried to use aesthetic modes to subvert and change the racist habitus in the individual and collective mind of his society. We suggest that Frederick Douglass, the human rights activist, had a sophisticated philosophy of aesthetics, mind, epistemology and particularly of the transformative and political power of images. His works in many ways anticipate and sometimes go beyond later scholars in these and other fields such as psychology & critical theory. Overall, we propose that our world could benefit from revisiting Douglass’ art and thought

Multiagent Bidirectionally-Coordinated Nets: Emergence of Human-level Coordination in Learning to Play StarCraft Combat Games

Many artificial intelligence (AI) applications often require multiple intelligent agents to work in a collaborative effort. Efficient learning for intra-agent communication and coordination is an indispensable step towards general AI. In this paper, we take StarCraft combat game as a case study, where the task is to coordinate multiple agents as a team to defeat their enemies. To maintain a scalable yet effective communication protocol, we introduce a Multiagent Bidirectionally-Coordinated Network (BiCNet ['bIknet]) with a vectorised extension of actor-critic formulation. We show that BiCNet can handle different types of combats with arbitrary numbers of AI agents for both sides. Our analysis demonstrates that without any supervisions such as human demonstrations or labelled data, BiCNet could learn various types of advanced coordination strategies that have been commonly used by experienced game players. In our experiments, we evaluate our approach against multiple baselines under different scenarios; it shows state-of-the-art performance, and possesses potential values for large-scale real-world applications.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures. Previously as title: "Multiagent Bidirectionally-Coordinated Nets for Learning to Play StarCraft Combat Games", Mar 201

The Links Between Collective Bargaining and Equaliy

Working paper by Adelle Blackett and Colleen Sheppard, prepared for the ILO, analyzes the links between collective bargaining and equaliy at international level and addresses the efforts to monitor and regulate the right of association and collective bargaining

Human Rights Through the ATS After Kiobel: Partial Extraterritoriality, Misconceptions, and Elusive and Problematic Judicially-Created Criteria

The purpose of this study has been to examine what approach and experience pedagogues at pre-schools, with a limited amount of nationalities, have regarding cultural promoting work in pre-schools. The concept ”cultural promoting” mainly regards the children's cultural backgrounds. The first question formulation focussed on the what the concepts ”cultural promoting” and ”cultural diversity” meant to the pedagogues. The second question focussed on the interpretation and knowledge of what the syllabus says about cultural promoting work.Earlier research has shown that there exists an insecurity among the pedagogues regarding how they should work in a culturally promoting way, however, Swedish research in this area is very limited. The method used in this study has been qualitative interviews and a total of six pedagogues from four different pre-schools have been interviewed. The result gave a varied view regarding what can be looked upon as cultural promoting work. All the pedagogues agreed that working with other native languages than Swedish was considered cultural promoting. The knowledge about the contents of the syllabus varied greatly among the pedagogues.The conclusion shows a positive attitude among the pedagogues towards cultural promoting work, however, they were insecure about how to shape, develop and perform the actual work, which can be linked back to their amount of knowledge about the syllabus

Breaking out from the straitjacket: an appreciation of the art of teaching in a business classroom within a scientifically-based teaching environment

Teachers might develop a wonderful feeling that many young people have understood a lesson and have not just enjoyed the experience but done so in a way that has created some 'thing' special for all of those involved ('thing' is highlighted in this instance as it is a tangible event taking place and not any attempt to represent it). Some teachers describe this as a buzz; in other words, like nature itself, as something education. The paper argues that scientific enframing not only puts a straitjacket on teachers within the UK, it also makes it difficult for them to develop and appreciate the 'art of teaching'. unquestionably unique that justifies their commitment to their teaching and their students. No matter how much we know about botany and genes, every flower is unique and blooms because it blooms. As Angelus Silesius indicates within his poetry "The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms, It pays no attention to itself, ask not whether it is seen." (Heidegger,1991) The United Kingdom education system has existed under the hammer of transformation, with a National Curriculum (1988), a rigorous inspection regime (Woodward, 2001) and countless changes in curriculum and associated assessments (QCA, 2004), as well as a substantive apparatus that makes many assumptions about how teachers should operate within the classroom. The primary concern of this paper is to question how the 'scientific framing' of teaching through competences and other measures of accountability has influenced the work of teachers within the context of business

Simple yet efficient real-time pose-based action recognition

Recognizing human actions is a core challenge for autonomous systems as they directly share the same space with humans. Systems must be able to recognize and assess human actions in real-time. In order to train corresponding data-driven algorithms, a significant amount of annotated training data is required. We demonstrated a pipeline to detect humans, estimate their pose, track them over time and recognize their actions in real-time with standard monocular camera sensors. For action recognition, we encode the human pose into a new data format called Encoded Human Pose Image (EHPI) that can then be classified using standard methods from the computer vision community. With this simple procedure we achieve competitive state-of-the-art performance in pose-based action detection and can ensure real-time performance. In addition, we show a use case in the context of autonomous driving to demonstrate how such a system can be trained to recognize human actions using simulation data.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC) 2019. Code will be available soon at https://github.com/noboevbo/ehpi_action_recognitio

Museums as disseminators of niche knowledge: Universality in accessibility for all

Accessibility has faced several challenges within audiovisual translation Studies and gained great opportunities for its establishment as a methodologically and theoretically well-founded discipline. Initially conceived as a set of services and practices that provides access to audiovisual media content for persons with sensory impairment, today accessibility can be viewed as a concept involving more and more universality thanks to its contribution to the dissemination of audiovisual products on the topic of marginalisation. Against this theoretical backdrop, accessibility is scrutinised from the perspective of aesthetics of migration and minorities within the field of the visual arts in museum settings. These aesthetic narrative forms act as modalities that encourage the diffusion of ‘niche’ knowledge, where processes of translation and interpretation provide access to all knowledge as counter discourse. Within this framework, the ways in which language is used can be considered the beginning of a type of local grammar in English as lingua franca for interlingual translation and subtitling, both of which ensure access to knowledge for all citizens as a human rights principle and regardless of cultural and social differences. Accessibility is thus gaining momentum as an agent for the democratisation and transparency of information against media discourse distortions and oversimplifications