From the Editors - Diverse People, Diverse Approaches

We are proud to announce Praxis’ second volume as a peer-reviewed journal. Our call for articles addressing diversity in the writing center fielded a record number of submissions. We thank all of the authors who submitted careful, insightful, creative and challenging work. We also want to thank our external review board and our editorial team as well as the administrative staff at the Undergraduate Writing Center. Andrea Saathoff, who led Praxis into peerreview status last year and continues to work behind the scenes, deserves a special “Thank you.” This journal, like the writing-center scholarship and pedagogy it supports, exists because of the committed, collaborative work of a broad community of writers and educators. To our authors, reviewers, editors, readers and supporters—Thank you.University Writing Cente

Experimental Analysis of Spatial Sound for Storytelling in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality leverages our cognitive and perceptual abilities to provide immersive experiences that recreate both the visual and aural elements of real spaces with a high degree of realism making it a suitable delivery platform for conveying narratives through games and films. Spatial sound is useful in enhancing immersion and presence of the user in a virtual world. This audio design allows the game designer to place audio cues that appropriately match with the visual cues in a virtual game environment. These localized audio cues placed in a story based game environment also help to evoke an emotional response from the user and construct the narrative of the game by capturing the user’s attention towards the guiding action events in the game. Our work currently involves a thorough literature study on the significance of debating the usefulness of spatial sound. Our future work involves conducting a user study for analyzing the same i.e., understanding how spatial sound improves user performance and user experience in a virtual game environment. Furthermore, with the help of the relevant subjective and objective inferences that will be collected from the user study conducted on four different evaluation models, our work will also analyze and establish the potential of spatial sound as a powerful storytelling tool in a virtual game environment

Jet of Blood VR: First Playable Demo

A VR staging of Anonin Artaud’s 1925 surrealist play, Jet of Blood. The project experiments with virtual reality as a means to reimagine performance and frame the player, the audience, as actor. Ideas from Artaud’s philosophy such as the Theatre of Cruelty are incorporated along with spatial storytelling and game design. The project also seeks to expand accessibility to deaf and hard of hearing audiences through use of particle and text effects to visually express audio and sound

Interactivity: New Rules of Engagement for the Humanities

This journal is a result of our frustration with 21st century humanities scholarship and dissemination. The term “digital” humanities has gained a certain cache and indeed, bringing technology into humanities research was, and still is, an important hurdle to overcome. However, humanities conversations on the topic have stalled and can’t seem to move beyond defining digital humanities. We believe that much of this stagnation is due to the emphasis on a superficial understanding of technology as a mode of delivery rather than as a mode of inquiry. Digital media and tools do allow for better and faster ways of doing traditional humanities things like scholarship and education. However, the failure of the digital humanities movement to look beyond media transformation and towards new modes of inquiry, blocks the humanities from evolving. The stubborn insistence on clinging to traditional forms of humanities scholarship at the expense of innovation is holding the field back. If, as McLuhan hypothesizes, the “medium is the message,” then why is the humanities still so doggedly focused on the content? We envision this journal as a forum to generate new ideas and ways of thinking about the humanities

Jet of Blood

A virtual production of Antonin Artaud’s 1925 play, Jet of Blood

Promoting Unity Through Propaganda: How the British Government Utilized Posters During the Second World War

Comprised of four separate countries, the United Kingdom is a state unlike any other. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have distinct identities, which has been a cause for discord throughout British history. However, during the Second World War the Ministry of Information, under the guidance of the Conservative government and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, launched a poster-based propaganda campaign aimed towards unifying the UK under a common national self-identity. By emphasizing shared qualities such as resilience, pragmatism, humor, patriotism and even the concept of unity itself, the Ministry of Information fostered a sense of national self-identity with the goal of winning the war and implementing new policies afterwards

SOMNIUM VR Demo

Driven by a desire to overcome challenges from COVID-19 and to explore theatre in a new direction, the fall production of SOMNIUM at the Rochester Institute of Technology took on a completely new concept. Instead of a more traditional, physical theatre piece as it was originally envisioned, the SOMNIUM RIT Team decided to leap into the unknown, and explore a unique blend of devised theatre, film, and 3D game design. This demo allowed audiences to view a short trailer of the production and speak with members of the design team

Community as a source of health in three racial/ethnic communities in Oregon: a qualitative study

BACKGROUND: A 2011 report by the Oregon Health Authority and the Department of Human Services documented disparities in its Latino and American Indian populations on multiple individual-level health indicators. However, research is lacking on the social contexts in which Latinos and American Indians in Oregon live and how these environments influence the health of communities as a whole. To help fill this gap, this study sought to contextualize the social environments that influence the health of Latinos and American Indian residents in three Oregon communities. METHODS: Guided by an ecological framework, we conducted one-time semi-structured qualitative interviews with 26 study participants to identify the prominent health-related issues in the communities and to examine the factors that study participants perceived as enabling or inhibiting healthy lifestyles of community residents. We used a grounded theory approach to perform content and thematic analyses of the data. RESULTS: Study participants identified preventable chronic conditions, such as diabetes, obesity, and hypertension, as the most pressing health concerns in their communities. Results showed that traditional and cultural activities and strong family and community cohesion were viewed as facilitators of good community health. Poverty, safety concerns, insufficient community resources, and discrimination were perceived as barriers to community health. Three themes emerged from the thematic analyses: social connectedness is integral to health; trauma has an ongoing negative impact on health; and invisibility of residents in the community underlies poor health. CONCLUSIONS: This study’s findings provide insight to the social contexts which operate in the lives of some Latinos and American Indians in Oregon. While participants identified community-level factors as important to health, they focused more on the social connections of individuals to each other and the relationships that residents have with their communities at-large. Our findings may also help to explain how the intra- and inter-personal levels, the community/institutional level, and the macro level/public policy contexts can serve to influence health in these communities. For example, trauma and invisibility are not routinely examined in community health assessment and improvement planning activities; nonetheless, these factors appear to be at play affecting the health of residents.Keywords: American Indian, Latino, Migrant and seasonal farmworkers, Trauma, Community healt