The Dialectical Object: John Heartfield 1915 - 1933

In 1933, after the election of the National Socialists in Germany, John Heartfield fled Berlin for Prague, leaving behind the significant intervention in contemporary cultural and social discourses that his photomontages for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung comprised. While this body of work, produced from 1930, has been understood as Heartfield's master work, it has also often been understood as straightforward "popular front" propaganda and the accomplished embodiment of the "dialectical" method that were significant aspects of the cultural policy of the official left. There have been few attempts to work through the formally innovative aspects of Heartfield's particular "dialectical" method, and more broadly speaking, little critical consideration of the complex engagement of social realism that characterizes the A-I Z photomontages. Taking as a point of departure Heartfield's presence in institutional and scholarly discourses, and adopting an approach that is thematic rather than chronologically exhaustive, this dissertation investigates his collaborative engagements of performance, theatrical production, film, and the newly-emergent "photo book" to argue for a more nuanced treatment of the A-I Z photomontages than has been the case. Critical writing focused on the decade between Heartfield's Berlin Dadaist affiliations and his work for the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung has been conspicuously absent, and his work with film and theater have not been considered in relation to his photomontage practice of the later 1920s. Drawing on the theorizations of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze regarding subjectivity and aesthetic engagement, the formation of cultural collectives, and processes of meaning production, this dissertation will argue that Heartfield's involvement in specifically performative cultural formations is central to understanding the advanced photomontage practice he developed, even as this orientation also rendered his intervention in the modes and institutions of cultural production incomprehensible to the various historical paradigms, left and otherwise, of modern art. In my conclusion, I draw Heartfield back into the present to consider the import and resonance of his interventions for contemporary interests and practices. Bringing recent theorizations of the public sphere in relationship to investigations of subversive subjectivities and models of meaning production formed around the "event," my dissertation argues for an expanded notion of aesthetic reception, critical realism, and "political" art

Supervision and culture: Meetings at thresholds

Counsellors are required to engage in supervision in order to reflect on, reflexively review, and extend their practice. Supervision, then, might be understood as a partnership in which the focus of practitioners and supervisors is on ethical and effective practice with all clients. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, there has recently been interest in the implications for supervision of cultural difference, particularly in terms of the Treaty of Waitangi as a practice metaphor, and when non-Māori practitioners counsel Māori clients. This article offers an account of a qualitative investigation by a group of counsellors/supervisors into their experiences of supervision as cultural partnership. Based on interviews and then using writing-as-research, the article explores the playing out of supervision’s contribution to practitioners’ effective and ethical practice in the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand, showing a range of possible accounts and strategies and discussing their effects. Employing the metaphor of threshold, the article includes a series of reflections and considerations for supervision practice when attention is drawn to difference

eDNAPlus: A unifying modelling framework for DNA-based biodiversity monitoring

DNA-based biodiversity surveys involve collecting physical samples from survey sites and assaying the contents in the laboratory to detect species via their diagnostic DNA sequences. DNA-based surveys are increasingly being adopted for biodiversity monitoring. The most commonly employed method is metabarcoding, which combines PCR with high-throughput DNA sequencing to amplify and then read `DNA barcode' sequences. This process generates count data indicating the number of times each DNA barcode was read. However, DNA-based data are noisy and error-prone, with several sources of variation. In this paper, we present a unifying modelling framework for DNA-based data allowing for all key sources of variation and error in the data-generating process. The model can estimate within-species biomass changes across sites and link those changes to environmental covariates, while accounting for species and sites correlation. Inference is performed using MCMC, where we employ Gibbs or Metropolis-Hastings updates with Laplace approximations. We also implement a re-parameterisation scheme, appropriate for crossed-effects models, leading to improved mixing, and an adaptive approach for updating latent variables, reducing computation time. We discuss study design and present theoretical and simulation results to guide decisions on replication at different stages and on the use of quality control methods. We demonstrate the new framework on a dataset of Malaise-trap samples. We quantify the effects of elevation and distance-to-road on each species, infer species correlations, and produce maps identifying areas of high biodiversity, which can be used to rank areas by conservation value. We estimate the level of noise between sites and within sample replicates, and the probabilities of error at the PCR stage, which are close to zero for most species considered, validating the employed laboratory processing.Comment: The paper is 35 pages long and it has 8 figure

Supervision and Culture Meetings at Thresholds

Abstract Counsellors are required to engage in supervision in order to reflect on, reflexively review, and extend their practice. Supervision, then, might be understood as a partnership in which the focus of practitioners and supervisors is on ethical and effective practice with all clients. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, there has recently been interest in the implications for supervision of cultural difference, particularly in terms of the Treaty of Waitangi as a practice metaphor, and when non-Mäori practitioners counsel Mäori clients. This article offers an account of a qualitative investigation by a group of counsellors/supervisors into their experiences of supervision as cultural partnership. Based on interviews and then using writing-as-research, the article explores the playing out of supervision's contribution to practitioners' effective and ethical practice in the context of Aotearoa/New Zealand, showing a range of possible accounts and strategies and discussing their effects. Employing the metaphor of threshold, the article includes a series of reflections and considerations for supervision practice when attention is drawn to difference

Comparing different early warning systems: Results from a horse race competition among members of the Macro-prudential Research Network

Over the recent decades researchers in academia and central banks have developed early warning systems (EWS) designed to warn policy makers of potential future economic and financial crises. These EWS are based on diverse approaches and empirical models. In this paper we compare the performance of nine distinct models for predicting banking crises resulting from the work of the Macroprudential Research Network (MaRs) initiated by the European System of Central Banks. In order to ensure comparability, all models use the same database of crises created by MaRs and comparable sets of potential early warning indicators. We evaluate the models’ relative usefulness by comparing the ratios of false alarms and missed crises and discuss implications for pratical use and future research. We find that multivariate models, in their many appearances, have great potential added value over simple signalling models. One of the main policy recommendations coming from this exercise is that policy makers can benefit from taking a broad methodological approach when they develop models to set macro-prudential instruments

Comparing different early warning systems: Results from a horse race competition among members of the Macro-prudential Research Network

Over the recent decades researchers in academia and central banks have developed early warning systems (EWS) designed to warn policy makers of potential future economic and financial crises. These EWS are based on diverse approaches and empirical models. In this paper we compare the performance of nine distinct models for predicting banking crises resulting from the work of the Macroprudential Research Network (MaRs) initiated by the European System of Central Banks. In order to ensure comparability, all models use the same database of crises created by MaRs and comparable sets of potential early warning indicators. We evaluate the models’ relative usefulness by comparing the ratios of false alarms and missed crises and discuss implications for pratical use and future research. We find that multivariate models, in their many appearances, have great potential added value over simple signalling models. One of the main policy recommendations coming from this exercise is that policy makers can benefit from taking a broad methodological approach when they develop models to set macro-prudential instruments

Comparing different early warning systems: Results from a horse race competition among members of the Macro-prudential Research Network

Over the recent decades researchers in academia and central banks have developed early warning systems (EWS) designed to warn policy makers of potential future economic and financial crises. These EWS are based on diverse approaches and empirical models. In this paper we compare the performance of nine distinct models for predicting banking crises resulting from the work of the Macroprudential Research Network (MaRs) initiated by the European System of Central Banks. In order to ensure comparability, all models use the same database of crises created by MaRs and comparable sets of potential early warning indicators. We evaluate the models’ relative usefulness by comparing the ratios of false alarms and missed crises and discuss implications for pratical use and future research. We find that multivariate models, in their many appearances, have great potential added value over simple signalling models. One of the main policy recommendations coming from this exercise is that policy makers can benefit from taking a broad methodological approach when they develop models to set macro-prudential instruments