Globalization, Identity, and Youth Resistance: Kenya’s Hip Hop Parliament

The Hip Hop Parliament is a youth-initiative comprised of underground hip hop MCs and artists that began in 2007 in Nairobi, Kenya. Representing itself as a collective conscious movement that has no boundaries and is open to participants from all over the world, the Hip Hop Parliament formed to offer youth a voice and a place from which to participate in the social, political, and cultural processes of Kenya. Drawing on hip hop culture and its mythologies of struggle, resistance, reclamation, and social consciousness, the Hip Hop Parliament released a Declaration as a means to present a unified front on a number of controversial issues concerning ethnicity, gender, respect for human life, reconciliation between communities, violence, youth culture, justice, peace, the use of SHENG as one of Kenya’s “official” languages, the importance of good leadership and the responsibility to provide security, education, and health care available to all citizens regardless of economic circumstance. Given this context, in this article the authors begin to explore the following questions: What is the significance of the Hip Hop Parliament and its declaration as a movement/ culture for youth in Kenya? How does hip hop, as an artistic form, work towards the expression of a contemporary Africa

Performing the Historical Moment: Nadia Seboussi’s Hidad

AbstractThrough artist Nadia Seboussi’s three-channel video installation Hidad (2015), she bears witness and documents the struggle of Algerian women who took up arms (“Women Patriots”) during the civil war, taking the Bentalha Massacre of 1997 as the catalyst for the movement and Hidad. Hidad, which means “mourning” in Arabic, involves the remediation of an iconic press photo taken by Algerian press photographer Hocine Zaourar during the Bentalha Massacre. Remediation of press images is relatively common in contemporary art practice, but what is fascinating about Seboussi’s project is that she has firmly anchored her personal participation in a shared memory, the outcome of which, for Seboussi, was exile and emigration. Hidad involves staged “performances” of the photo to impose movement from grief to compassion. Hidad thus acts as a form of shriving of trauma, violence and silence, a memorialization process that involves reconstructing memories and chronicling historical events collectively.RésuméÀ travers son installation vidéo triptyque, Hidad (2015), Nadia Seboussi témoigne de la lutte menée par des femmes algériennes qui ont pris les armes (« femmes patriotes ») pendant la guerre civile, en appréhendant le massacre de Bentalha de 1997 comme catalyseur, à la fois pour ce mouvement et pour son installation vidéo Hidad. Hidad, qui signifie « deuil » en arabe, se réfère également à la restauration d’une photographie emblématique prise par le photographe de presse algérien Hocine Zaourar après le massacre de Bentalha. La restauration des images de presse est une pratique relativement courante dans l’art contemporain, mais ce qui est fascinant à propos du projet de Seboussi, c’est qu’elle a fermement ancré sa participation personnelle dans une mémoire partagée, laquelle a mené Seboussi à l’exil et à l’émigration. Hidad implique la mise en scène de la photographie, l’imposition d’un mouvement de la douleur vers la compassion. Hidad agit comme une forme de deuil du traumatisme, de la violence, du silence ainsi qu’un processus de commémoration qui reconstruit collectivement les souvenirs et les événements historiques

At last, young people’s voices are being heard about the future of the NHS

© 2017, The Conversation Trust (UK) Limited This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, to view a copy of the license, see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0

New Theories and Methods for Screen-Centred Interfaces: A Pilot Study

There is an urgent need to examine the ways in which screen-centred interfaces present images and encode and decode meaning, identity, and culture. This project is an interdisciplinary collaboration by four researchers at the University of Regina and builds on our work on screen-centred interfaces in our respective disciplines of cognitive psychology, literary studies, media studies, and software systems engineering. The fundamental goals of our collaborative project are to engage interdisciplinary means and perspectives to systematically develop effective methodologies to measure cognitive processes, aesthetic effects, and software and hardware efficacy of the new and developing digital media. In this project/pilot study we intend to select a series of media fragments that include poetic, visual, and language texts, as well as those that combine these features, and present them on a variety of screen-centred interfaces to explore their cognitive and aesthetic effects and features. &nbsp

Reflective Diary for Professional Development of Novice Teachers

Many starting teachers of computer science have great professional skill but often lack pedagogical training. Since providing expert mentorship directly during their lessons would be quite costly, institutions usually offer separate teacher training sessions for novice instructors. However, the reflection on teaching performed with a significant delay after the taught lesson limits the possible impact on teachers. To bridge this gap, we introduced a weekly semi-structured reflective practice to supplement the teacher training sessions at our faculty. We created a paper diary that guides the starting teachers through the process of reflection. Over the course of the semester, the diary poses questions of increasing complexity while also functioning as a reference to the topics covered in teacher training. Piloting the diary on a group of 25 novice teaching assistants resulted in overwhelmingly positive responses and provided the teacher training sessions with valuable input for discussion. The diary also turned out to be applicable in a broader context: it was appreciated and used by several experienced university teachers from multiple faculties and even some high-school teachers. The diary is freely available online, including source and print versions