Curating media learning: Towards a porous expertise

This article combines research results from a range of projects with two consistent themes. Firstly, we explore the potential for curation to offer a productive metaphor for the convergence of digital media learning across and between home / lifeworld and formal educational / systemworld spaces – or between the public and private spheres. Secondly, we draw conclusions from these projects to argue that the acceptance of transmedia literacy practices as a site for rich educational work – in media education and related areas – can only succeed if matched by a convergence of a more porous educator–student expertise

Democracy, emancipation and widening participation in the UK: changing the ‘distribution of the sensible’

The broad concern of this paper is how the relationship between education, democracy and emancipation might be conceived. This theme is explored through examining the contribution of a Rancierian conception of emancipation and democracy to rethinking widening participation in higher education. Following Ranciere, it is argued that taking equality as a starting point in higher education, rather than as a goal to be achieved through education, disrupts a prevailing logic of education as necessarily providing a pathway to emancipation. From this view the pedagogic practices of explication and mastery, which Ranciere argues work to separate academic reason and practical reason, need no longer be understood as the only way to be academic. It is proposed that this ‘redistribution of the sensible’ enables higher education to be conceived in ways other than available in ongoing educational debates and enables a move beyond an assimilation/recognition binary. Instead, widening participation can be understood as a space for opening up to experience, transformation and change for both academics and students. From this view, democracy is enacted in the here and now, rather than a goal for the future, and practice can be understood as a site for change

Practice-based film education for children: teaching and learning for creativity, citizenship and participation

Practice-oriented film education aimed at children has been hailed for various reasons: at a personal level, as a means of providing tools for self-expression, for developing creativity and communication skills. And at a social level, it is argued that children must now become competent producers, in addition to critical consumers, of audiovisual content so they can take part in the global public sphere that is arguably emerging. This chapter discusses how the challenges posed by introducing children to filmmaking (i.e. digital video) are being met at three civil associations in Mexico: La Matatena AC, which seeks to enrich the children’s lives by means of the aesthetic experience filmmaking can bring them. Comunicaciòn Comunitaria, concerned with the impact filmmaking can have on the community, preserving cultural memory and enabling participation. And Juguemos a Grabar, with a focus on urban regeneration through the cultural industries

The aesthetics of memory: ruins, visibility and witnessing

In this article I present the findings of my research regarding the transformation of the meaning of ex-­‐detention and extermination sites in Chile. In the context of the increasing cost of land and the ‘urban cleansing’ associated with global processes of neo-­‐ liberalization, I reflect in particular upon the dynamics of visibility and erasure that accompany the life of these recent ruins, and the various politics of their memorialization. From a critical phenomenological perspective I argue that ruins of sites of violence have the capacity to interrupt, transgress and even contradict narratives about them; furthermore, I discuss the relation between affect, ethics and aesthetics so as to raise questions about the possibility of witnessing and the challenges of memorialization

Why is there no queer international theory?

Over the last decade, Queer Studies have become Global Queer Studies, generating significant insights into key international political processes. Yet, the transformation from Queer to Global Queer has left the discipline of International Relations largely unaffected, which begs the question: if Queer Studies has gone global, why has the discipline of International Relations not gone somewhat queer? Or, to put it in Martin Wight’s provocative terms, why is there no Queer International Theory? This article claims that the presumed non-existence of Queer International Theory is an effect of how the discipline of International Relations combines homologization, figuration, and gentrification to code various types of theory as failures in order to manage the conduct of international theorizing in all its forms. This means there are generalizable lessons to be drawn from how the discipline categorizes Queer International Theory out of existence to bring a specific understanding of International Relations into existence

Enheduanna – A Manifesto of Falling: first demonstration of a live brain-computer cinema performance with multi-brain BCI interaction for one performer and two audience members

The new commercial-grade Electroencephalography (EEG)-based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have led to a phenomenal development of applications across health, entertainment and the arts, while an increasing interest in multi-brain interaction has emerged. In the arts, there is already a number of works that involve the interaction of more than one participants with the use of EEG-based BCIs. However, the field of live brain-computer cinema and mixed-media performances is rather new, compared to installations and music performances that involve multi-brain BCIs. In this context, we present the particular challenges involved. We discuss Enheduanna – A Manifesto of Falling, the first demonstration of a live brain-computer cinema performance that enables the real-time brain-activity interaction of one performer and two audience members; and we take a cognitive perspective on the implementation of a new passive multi-brain EEG-based BCI system to realise our creative concept. This article also presents the preliminary results and future work

Towards a Critique of Educative Violence: Walter Benjamin and ‘Second Education’

Although modern systems of mass education are typically defined in their opposition to violence, it has been argued that it is only through an insistent and critical focus upon violence that radical thought can be sustained. This article seeks to take up this challenge in relation to Walter Benjamin’s lesser-known writings on education. Benjamin retained throughout his life a deep suspicion about academic institutions and about the pedagogic, social and economic violence implicated in the idea of cultural transmission. He nonetheless remained committed to the possibility of another kind of revolutionary potential inherent to true education and, when he comes to speak of this in his Critique of Violence, it is remarkable that he describes it as manifesting an educative violence. This article argues that Benjamin’s philosophy works toward a critique of educative violence that results in a distinction between a ‘first’ and ‘second’ kind of education and asks whether destruction might have a positive role to play within pedagogical theories in contrast to current valorisations of creativity and productivity

Virtual teleportation of a theatre audience onto the stage: VR as an assistive technology

For more than a decade, virtual reality (VR) has been employed to enrich and heighten media experiences. Despite the recognized potential and promise of VR, and ample investment, it has yet to fully transform or replace existing screen-based experiences (e.g. film or gaming). This research forms a part of a larger project to shift VR applications beyond otherwise apparent areas of screen-based media, in order to enhance audience access and propinquity to a live performance. This study is being conducted in the field of theatre, a dramatic medium in which audience are traditionally static and where an individual’s seating position determines their perceptual experience (distance, angle, lights, obstructed vs clear view). This paper introduces the broader project and its experimentation with VR as an assistive technology. The project seeks to utilize VR as a means of converting an otherwise static experience to provide collective moments of visual teleportation, onto stage, into props and on actors. VR offers a non-invasive means of introducing variance in viewer proximity or position relative to performance. This paper reports on the early development and use of a three-dimensional theatre prototyping in order to explore the technical requirements for application to a VR theatre experience

Comrades and Curators

This article shares the findings of a visual literacy project with museum curators and film educators. The research explores the mediation of social history and politics, the interplay of personal and professional curation and the role of reflexive visual literacy in understanding mediated identities. The project connected three museums around Comrades, the Bill Douglas film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs. First, this article explores the relationship between Comrades as a film text, the curation of the director’s collection of magic lanterns and other optical artifacts, the situating of a lanternist as pivotal to the representation of social history in the film and the different curations of this social history in the museums in Exeter, Tolpuddle and Dorchester. Second, it shares the findings of a visual literacy fieldwork intervention, where films were used by the three museum curators and a film academics’ network to ‘map’ their mediated identities and curational practices with a particular focus on personal and professional transformations