6,418 research outputs found

    Undergraduate Catalog of Studies, 2023-2024

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    Undergraduate Catalog of Studies, 2023-2024

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    An End, Once and for All: Mass Effect 3, Video Game Controversies, and the Fight for Player Agency

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    Since the success of the player-led Mass Effect 3 ending controversy, player-led video game controversies have become mainstream sites of industrial and ideological contention between developers, players, and the culture itself. This dissertation focuses on the history of the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy, the game’s specific textual qualities that encouraged player protest, and the negotiations between players and developers in online spaces that persuaded developers to alter the game’s ending based on player demands. Using the Mass Effect 3 as its primary object, this dissertation argues this controversy—as well as subsequent player-led video game controversies—was not simply the result of dissatisfaction with a single plot point or representation in the text or video game community, but the complex negotiation of creative differences between players and developers over the production and control of video game texts and culture. Video games and their controversies are rooted in the medium\u27s intrinsic qualities of interactivity, choice, labor and the need for shared production between developers and players to progress and produce a video game text, which encourages the development of a sense of agency and ownership over the text for both groups. This dissertation argues that video games are not just texts that developers create and that players play, but rather texts produced through the co-creative production practice that Axel Bruns has defined as “produsage”—texts where producers act in dual roles as users while users to also act as producers—that allow players a creative stake in the outcome of a video game text, encourages a sense of agency and ownership, and collapses traditional boundaries between developers and players. Video game controversies naturally arise when players perceive a loss of agency and control over the video game text and attempt to reclaim control over ownership of the text through controversy

    Undergraduate Catalog of Studies, 2022-2023

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    Plant Ontology, The Amazonian Yachag and the Artist in Trance

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    The commonalities that plants, shamans and artists share may not be evident at first glance, nevertheless, if we search for uncomfortable entanglements and difficult questions, we may find that for centuries the voice with which plants speak has been the Amazonian yachag and the chamana or healer. Furthermore, who has invariably accompanied different plateaus along humanity’s convoluted becomings, has been what I have called the artist in trance. This artist is a concoction born from Walter Benjamin’s notion of ecstatic trance and Nietzche’s tragic artist. In this research I have investigated the being of plants or plant ontology and how they may be others who we may learn from in order to relate to Earth in a better way. The artist-yachag or artist philosopher as we may call her, is the one who bridges disparate conocimientos or knowledge, those of plants and those of shamans and translates them into our own words and worlds. What for? To learn to inhabit this planet in a softermood, in a weak mood as Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala would say, stemming from other visions and other perspectives. The interconnectivity that plants generate, as well as the idea of them being a world in themselves allied with the yachag or shaman and the artist, may lead humanity towards the understanding of a world to come. Applyingand expanding the notion first posited by Levi-Strauss and then contested by Viveiros de Castro that the relation between nature and culture is one of“metonymic contiguity rather than metaphoric resemblance”, I argue that the same kind of contiguity exists between plants,the Amazonian yachag and the artist in trance. The trope ofmetonymic contiguity serves to connect in a continuum these three entities one after the other in a nature-culture effervescent symbiosis. ‍https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1047/thumbnail.jp

    Leading for Equity: Understanding the influences, realities, resistance, and beliefs around tracking and acceleration in suburban school districts

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    Inequity and marginalization exist within educational structures, policies, and practices. As such, practitioners, like district-level leaders need a clearer understanding of the barriers and their role in making meaning and shaping progress to overcome the disconnect between their beliefs, data, and meaningful and sustainable action. This study sought to understand regional efforts and influences of district leaders around issues of academic tracking and acceleration. As a result of a desire for transformation, this qualitative research study closely examined high-level district leaders by analyzing how they view academic tracking and acceleration within their organizations, how they address issues of equity within acceleration and course tracking systems, and how they navigate what they say gets in the way of de-tracking efforts. The study focused on the following three research questions: What are the realities and beliefs of district leaders around issues of tracking and acceleration? How do district leaders address tracking and acceleration within their middle and high schools? and How does regional influences and pressure impact decision-making and change efforts? Twelve district leaders consisting of Superintendents of Schools and Assistant Superintendents / Directors of Curriculum & Instruction from six suburban school districts within one region of New York State participated in the study. Data were collected using semi-structured, joint, and focus group interviews, participant observations, and artifacts / historical document reviews. The data was informed by a conceptual framework that combined the tracking reform framework of Oakes (1992), the equity-focused change framework for school leadership by Radd, Generett, Gooden, and Theoharis (2021), and Theoharis and Scanlan’s (2015) practices for socially just leadership. Both inductive and deductive coding were utilized to generate categories and themes for the qualitative data as part of the analysis. For the supplemental, yet very limited, quantitative/descriptive data used within this study, proportional representation and disproportionality were the primary concepts used for analysis. Additionally, pivot tables and 100% stacked bar charts were used to represent the descriptive data. Results of this study revealed that regionally there are many oppressive patterns that are allowed to exist within the suburban districts / schools. Moreover, the study’s findings indicated that the leaders all have good intentions, but little is done to disrupt tracking within the districts / schools. The study suggests that district leaders need to employ collective efforts and strategies, all of which require educators to actively work together to influence, change, and counteract pressures that create inequity within academic tracking and acceleration programs, to eliminate barriers and ensure access for all students

    Schooling of refugee youth and its effect on their identity = ナンミン セイショウネン ノ ガッコウ キョウイク ト アイデンティティ ケイセイ

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    PDF/A formatsAccess: via World Wide Web東京外国語大学大学院総合国際学研究科博士 (学術) 論文 (2023年1月)Author's thesis (Ph.D)--Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2023博甲第341号Bibliography: p. 251-330東京外国語大学 (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies)博士 (学術

    Bad Blood: A Critical Inquiry into UK Blood Donor Activism

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    Since 1983, men who have sex with men have been prohibited from donating blood in the UK on the basis of purportedly elevated rates of HIV and other transfusion transmissible infections. This policy of deferral, known to many as the ‘gay blood ban’, has persisted in some form ever since and has been the subject of protest by individuals or groups termed blood donor activists. Utilising an array of theory from across science and technology studies (STS) and queer studies – situated at the nexus of a burgeoning queer STS – this thesis is a critical inquiry into UK blood donor activism. Drawing on archival research and 31 semi-structured interviews with blood donor activists in the UK as well as representatives of patient groups and the UK blood services, this research seeks to understand and critically interrogate the aims, motivations, and implications of the work of blood donor activists. This thesis argues, first, that blood donor activism in the UK is motivated both by an opposition to blood donor deferral criteria as a technology of homophobia and a contingent framing of blood donation as an altruistic act, which marks out blood donors as good and happy citizens (an affective economy into which queer men seek inclusion). This thesis goes on to argue, however, that blood donor activism is a deeply homonormative political form with a politics that tends to centre ‘respectable’ (e.g. monogamous) gay men at the expense of other figures of risk, like sex workers or promiscuous queers. These politics, this thesis contends, are a product not merely of activist agencies but the epistemic (hetero)norms of the biomedical context within which lay activists seek to raise their credibility. This thesis suggests, therefore, that blood donor activism operates in pursuit of Pyrrhic victories governed by chilling structures that demand we seek alternative routes of political investment

    Tom Preece Oral History Interview

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    https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/raymond-college/1159/thumbnail.jp

    Metaverse. Old urban issues in new virtual cities

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    Recent years have seen the arise of some early attempts to build virtual cities, utopias or affective dystopias in an embodied Internet, which in some respects appear to be the ultimate expression of the neoliberal city paradigma (even if virtual). Although there is an extensive disciplinary literature on the relationship between planning and virtual or augmented reality linked mainly to the gaming industry, this often avoids design and value issues. The observation of some of these early experiences - Decentraland, Minecraft, Liberland Metaverse, to name a few - poses important questions and problems that are gradually becoming inescapable for designers and urban planners, and allows us to make some partial considerations on the risks and potentialities of these early virtual cities
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