Quod Erat Demonstrandum: From Herodotus’ ethnographic journeys to cross-cultural research

A peer-reviewed book based on presentations at the XVIII Congress of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology, 2006, Isle of Spetses, Greece. (c) 2009, International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychologyhttps://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/iaccp_proceedings/1004/thumbnail.jp

Marston: Remembering Home Through Creative Practice

This practice-led research project investigates the potential for creative practice to recall and reimagine a lost home. Identifying with memory and material culture studies, the project tests how habitual body memories enable narratives of home to be imbued in artworks generated out-of-place. Taking into account the implications of nostalgia, and through a personal project, I seek to comprehend the broader effects of memory of home and place

The Affective Medium and Ideal Person in Pedagogies of 'Soft Skills' in Contemporary China

In this dissertation I explore the role of affect in practices of self-improvement in contemporary urban China. I conducted participant observation in workshops for young adults in the city of Jinan, focusing on interpersonal ‘soft’ skills, such as ‘communication,’ ‘emotional expression,’ and public speaking. These highly interactive workshops urged participants to express themselves as emotional, assertive, inspirational, and above all – autonomous – individuals. This ideal of personhood is inspired by state-promoted reforms in the education system and the rise of psychotherapy across China, highlighting new moral imperatives of self-reliance and emotional well-being in the expanding Chinese market economy. My analysis focuses on the discrepancy between participants’ ideals of self-improvement, as practiced in workshops, and their wider social engagements. While participants conceived of soft skills as capacities that could potentially be employed anywhere, they nevertheless experienced and emphasised impediments to extending their practices outside workshops. They saw their everyday social circles as prioritising hierarchical relations, social roles, and financial stability, all suppressing the ideals of individual autonomy prominent in workshops. Drawing on theories of affect, hope, and the concept of ‘heterotopia,’ I describe how workshops dislocated participants from their existing social realities to produce momentary experiences of self-overcoming. Through affectively intensive exercises, participants identified with their ideal person, imagined themselves mastering social relations, and envisioned a future society governed by the virtues of soft skills. I consider affect, in these practices, not as a means for subjects’ comprehensive self-transformations, but rather as an experience that charges individuals with ephemeral optimism amidst socioeconomic uncertainties. In contemporary market-driven China, I argue, such deployment of affect is increasingly evident in educational activities, entertainment media, and state campaigns. These practices respond to and reinforce an existing schism between the expansion of new ideals of personhood and individuals’ limited capacities to realise them

The Search for an Internationalist Aesthetics: Soviet Images of China, 1920-1935.

This dissertation examines images of China produced in early Soviet culture, focusing in particular on the mid-to-late 1920s, a period of heightened Soviet involvement in Chinese politics. It argues that China became in this period the primary testing ground for the creation of an "internationalist aesthetics": a mode of representation that might express horizontal solidarity over vertical dominance, and inscribe China into the global map envisioned by Marist-Leninist theories of revolution. Seeking to produce a new China to replace the exotic Orient, Soviet artists and writers experimented with multiple genres and media--reportage, film, theatre, biography--in their search for the correct mode for internationalist aesthetics. The struggle over how to represent the world for a revolutionary society thus coalesces, in this period, around the question of how to represent China. Such an aesthetics is inevitably interconnected with politics, and internationalist aesthetics encountered and expressed the same ambiguities as the political project of Soviet internationalism: a liberatory, anti-imperial ideology that simultaneously sought to control political and historical narratives from the world revolution's proclaimed centre in Moscow. Consequently, these disparate images are united by an insistence on the privileged position and perspective of the Soviet observer, who looks at Chinese reality with a combination of advanced modern knowledge, sympathy with oppression, and revolutionary experience that is purportedly inaccessible to other Europeans, or indeed to the Chinese themselves. This privileged perspective on China undergirds the claims of internationalist aesthetics to present a true image of the world. The search for an authoritative mode for internationalist aesthetics is hampered, however, by recurrent issues of access, mediation and translatability, and by lingering parallels between this avowedly anti-imperialist discourse and the imperial systems of knowledge production it supposedly replaces

First-Year Writers and Intermodality: A Case Study of Educational Experiences with Multimodal Composition

This case study investigates students’ experiences with multimodal composition in our current technological moment; furthermore, this dissertation reaches beyond scholarly characterizations of multimodal composition, including the multimodality myth, by emphasizing student conceptions of composing, especially ones privileging both audio and visual modes of production. The multimodality myth spreads believable half-truths and presumptions about digital composition and multimodal composition more generally, creating impossible expectations for students and teachers alike, such as writers can choose to be multimodal, multimodality is all-digital or everything non-print, or multiliteracies are either print or digital but never both/and. To redirect the myth to more progressive ends, this project argues that writers are always already intermodal, incapable of switching off or mentally separating their multimodal means of communication and, building on that knowledge, posits that multimodal composition exceeds the digital and that multiliteracies, which directly inform the use of multimodal composition in the field, resist the print/digital binary. Paying close attention to theories of crossover, transfer, and intercultural communication, this case study builds upon the arguments of Rhetoric and Composition scholars Ben McCorkle and Jason Palmeri, who model methods for remix as an analytical framework, as well as Jody Shipka, who argues that academic conversations about multimodality often exclude materiality. This project demonstrates how theories underlying multimodal composition pedagogy and application depend on restricted views of the rhetorical situation more generally, one that is defined not by singular modes of production (audio or video) but by the interplay among the varied, uneven, and perpetually converging modalities that constitute intermodality. To support this theory of intermodal composition, this dissertation draws on findings from numerous focus groups comprised of first-year-composition students, personal interviews, multimodal writing samples, and multimodal literacy narratives. Over a period of three months, the participants, who were first-year students, described their experiences with writing, production, and communication more generally in the age of social media. These transcripts were analyzed to re-contextualize existing theories of composition and pedagogical conditions for our students in a fashion that reimagines what it means to participate, compose, and advocate with multimodality in the composition classroom

A Case Study of Emergent Bilinguals Meaning-Making during Multimodal Science Lessons in a Bilingual Primary School

The learning of science presents difficulties to bi/multilingual learners (BMLs), mostly due to the demands of scientific language. However, when viewed through a contemporary language lens the language of science is multimodal and presents alternate meaning opportunities. This study attempts to address the BML's needs by reconceptualising their issue through a contemporary theoretical lens. The aim is to investigate and describe how the use of non-linguistic resources, plays a role in BML’s meaning-making in science

Aesthetics of Resistance : An investigation into the performative politics of contemporary activism – as seen in 5 events in Scandinavia and beyond

This Ph.D. submission deals with contemporary demonstration culture and political activism, seen as performance through performance. It consists of both a practical and a theoretical part. These are intertwined on various levels of the project. My submission, however, is made up of the two following parts: 1: A textual part, divided into 8 parts. Each part contains a script, an analysis and a number of commentaries. In these, 8 moments in the recent history of activism in Scandinavia and beyond, are reflected. The 8 research performances at the core of this project are reflected here as well. 2: An exhibition based on visual and sonic footage from the 8 performances, here transformed into an installation that present an aesthetic introduction to the project as a whole. The exhibition will be an attempt at re-staging the visual and sonic material as a new sense-event. The claim of ’Aesthetics of Resistance’ is that in recent examples of Direct Activism, politics are constituted by the aesthetic; as performance, form and style. This assumption is argued for by selecting 8 specific moments where this seems to be the case. These moments are chosen from 5 sequences of events, from a small incident in Gothenburg, Sweden in 2006 to the Egyptian uprising that gained global significance in 2011. The core part of the project is two sequences of confrontations between activists and authorities that both took place in Copenhagen, Denmark –The Youth House Movement 2007/08 and the large scale actions surrounding the UN Climate Summit COP15 in 2009 respectively. Central to the project is an idea of ’thinking with the senses’. In order to facilitate this, an experimental set-up was created, where a sensorial reflection could be compared with an analytical interpretation of the topic in question. This experimental set-up was constituted by the two figures: The artist/researcher and the sense-event. These two figures intertwine and in various ways stage the gap between discursive and nondiscursive thinking that lies at the core of this project. The use of performance is three-fold: A: The specific moments chosen are interpreted as performance. B: The ’thinking with the senses’ takes place as performance C: As a kind of meta-reflection, the project is performing art-research by using an artistic medium as the research tool to investigate the chosen topics. The 8 research experiments were set up as performances. These 8 performances took place at various locations in Denmark, Sweden and China in the period 2009 to 2012. The aesthetic reflection at the core of this project evolved in these senseevents. Video documentation of the performances is included here in the Appendix, but it is important to understand that neither this video documentation nor the texts in this part of my submission can give a full account of the sense-events. These accounts will per definition only be approximations. It is in this gap – or drama – between two levels of understanding this project revolves

Nuclear Storytelling: Through Literary Figurations to Nuclear Literacy

Peer reviewe