Images for change: community development, community arts and photography

This article explores how community development objectives can be achieved through critical photographic practice. It summarizes the literature relating to community arts practice and its potential for social regeneration. Photography is then located within this context and explored as a critical practice, with particular attention being given to photo-elicitation, photo-novella and photovoice methods. The literature is discussed and analysed to explore how far critical photographic practice can meet the objectives of community development

Is the Viable System Model of organization inimical to the concept of human freedom?

This paper examines the sensitivity of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model of organization to the concept of human freedom. The paper notes the many critics who have suggested that the Viable System Model is inimical to human freedom and their especial reference to its application to the social economy of Chile in the early 1970s. Drawing on the work of philosophers, a conceptual analysis of freedom is provided that suggests a complex ordinary language usage of the term. At least three determinants of freedom, that are logically independent of one another, are identified as being of relevance to its ordinary usage. The paper finds that these determinants are implicitly addressed and acknowledged within Beer’s own writings, but that they are ignored by the critics of the Viable System Model and that this makes for a lack of clarity and precision in the debate. The paper also applies a further criterion, formulated in political philosophy, to judge whether the leadership of the government that applied the Viable System Model to the Chilean social economy was itself hostile to political freedom or democracy. This application of the criterion suggests that they were not

The Self in Research and Other Matters: A Study of Doctoral Students' Conceptions

This study uses metaphor analysis to examine doctoral students’ conceptions obtained from their responses to an on-line survey. The conceptions examined were the conception of self in research, the conception of the PhD, the conception of knowledge, and the conception of the outcomes of research. The conceptions found were allocated to the categories of ‘organic’, ‘spatial’, explorative’ and ‘constructive’, the same categories as were used in a previous study of the students’ conceptions of research. A number of interesting relationships were found and are discussed, including the relationship of the conceptions to each other and to the demographic data obtained in the survey. Some tentative conclusions are discussed and some speculation indulged in

Transcript of My Father\u27s Fish Company

This story is an excerpt from a longer interview that was collected as part of the Launching through the Surf: The Dory Fleet of Pacific City project. In this story, Rod Hogevoll recounts why his father, Jack Hogevoll, decided to move to Pacific City and establish a fish-buying business. Rod also describes his work in the fish market that was eventually named the Kiwanda Fish Company

Conformal de Rham Hodge theory and operators generalising the Q-curvature

We look at several problems in even dimensional conformal geometry based around the de Rham complex. A leading and motivating problem is to find a conformally invariant replacement for the usual de Rham harmonics. An obviously related problem is to find, for each order of differential form bundle, a ``gauge'' operator which completes the exterior derivative to a system which is both elliptically coercive and conformally invariant. Treating these issues involves constructing a family of new operators which, on the one hand, generalise Branson's celebrated Q-curvature and, on the other hand, compose with the exterior derivative and its formal adjoint to give operators on differential forms which generalise the critical conformal power of the Laplacian of Graham-Jenne-Mason-Sparling. We prove here that, like the critical conformal Laplacians, these conformally invariant operators are not strongly invariant. The construction draws heavily on the ambient metric of Fefferman-Graham and its relationship to the conformal tractor connection and exploring this relationship will be a central theme of the lectures.Comment: 30 pages. Instructional lecture