Locating sovereignty in the auto-ethnographic-political poetics of daily existence in two amazonian films

The theme of daily life is a common one in the Brazilian Video in the Villages (Vídeo nas aldeias) filmic archive. I analyze the diversity of cinematic treatments of and approaches to the theme of daily life in an Indigenous village by comparing, contrasting, and examining how two films construct, embody, and experience communal life through culturally specific methods of inquiry. In particular, I explore concepts of time, the senses, creativity, and the relations between the individual and the collectivity as all of the above are cinematically rendered in the intimacy, the performance, and the ritual of daily life. Specifically, I look at how these two VNA productions, Shomõtsi (2001) and Kiarãsã Tõ Sâty, The Agouti’s Peanut (2005), repoliticize the everyday through sovereign practices. I discuss these cinematic works as they relate to imperfect media (Salazar & Cordova, 2008), decolonial pedagogies, and the “cosmological embeddedness of the everyday” (Overing & Passes, 2000, p. 298).peer-reviewe

From good vs evil to rational vs emotional : a discussion of binaries of knowledge and thought

This paper is a response to a graduate seminar entitled “Postcolonialism, Globalization, and Education.” Using postcolonial and feminist theory, I discuss connections between demographic binaries (male/female, black/white) and epistemological binaries (rational/emotional, objective/subjective). I argue that ingrained binary thinking privileges a particular epistemology, namely one that is Western, patriarchal, and based on rationality and logic, over other ways of thinking and knowing, thus invalidating other knowledges, such as those based on feeling, emoting, and sensing. In rejecting these ways of knowing, we move away from caring, compassion and empathy—all necessary tools for dismantling ills such as racism and sexism. Accessing and validating these alternative ways of knowing might contribute to making our society, our schools, and ourselves more whole, more equal, and more human.peer-reviewe

The impact of article processing charges on libraries and what is being done to help

Following significant growth in gold open access publishing, Katie Shamash looks at the available APC data and picks out some key insights. APCs are now an increasingly significant portion of institutions’ overall spend, with the quickly narrowing gap between gold open access APCs and those of hybrid journals representing an additional concern. Moreover, the administrative difficulties that can lead to underreporting of APC expenditure demonstrate the importance of opening up the data and promoting a fully transparent marketplace

Spatial subgoal learning in the mouse: behavioral and computational mechanisms

Here we aim to better understand how animals navigate structured environments. The prevailing wisdom is that they can select among two distinct approaches: querying a mental map of the environment or repeating previously successful trajectories to a goal. However, this dichotomy has been built around data from rodents trained to solve mazes, and it is unclear how it applies to more naturalistic scenarios such as self-motivated navigation in open environments with obstacles. In this project, we leveraged instinctive escape behavior in mice to investigate how rodents use a period of exploration to learn about goals and obstacles in an unfamiliar environment. In our most basic assay, mice explore an environment with a shelter and an obstacle for 5-20 minutes and then we present threat stimuli to trigger escapes to shelter. After 5-10 minutes of exploration, mice took inefficient paths to the shelter, often nearly running into the obstacle and then relying on visual and tactile cues to avoid it. Within twenty minutes, however, they spontaneously developed an efficient subgoal strategy, escaping directly to the obstacle edge before heading to the shelter. Mice escaped in this manner even if the obstacle was removed, suggesting that they had memorized a mental map of subgoals. Unlike typical models of map-based planning, however, we found that investigating the obstacle was not important for updating the map. Instead, learning resembled trajectory repetition: mice had to execute `practice runs' toward an obstacle edge in order to memorize subgoals. To test this hypothesis directly, we developed a closed-loop neural manipulation, interrupting spontaneous practice runs by stimulating premotor cortex. This manipulation successfully prevented subgoal learning, whereas several control manipulations did not. We modelled these results using a panel of reinforcement learning approaches and found that mice behavior is best matched by systems that explore in a non-uniform manner and possess a high-level spatial representation of regions in the arena. We conclude that mice use practice runs to learn useful subgoals and integrate them into a hierarchical cognitive map of their surroundings. These results broaden our understanding of the cognitive toolkit that mammals use to acquire spatial knowledge

A decolonising approach to genre cinema studies

This paper examines the pedagogical and decolonial possibilities of teaching genre cinema through non-Western perspectives. As a sessional instructor teaching across multiple institutions in Vancouver, Canada, I elaborate on how I have taught genre cinema as a decolonial and pedagogical project. Through course design that recognises the way that the evolution of film theory in general, and genre theory in particular, has been encoded in Euro-Western-centrism and analysis, my teaching practice brings into conversation other knowledges and approaches to film-making and film studies that have often been excluded from film studies pedagogy. My pedagogical project is to decolonise film studies, including genre theory, as exemplified in such courses as: Re-Visioning Genre Theory, a fourth-year course at Emily Carr University of Art and Design; Genre Cinema: From Classical Hollywood to Global Contemporary, a third-year course at the University of British Columbia; and Refiguring Futurisms, a fourth-year film seminar at the University of British Columbia. Some of the questions explored in my research and teaching practice consider how genre cinema is adopted and subverted in contemporary non-Western films. In this paper, I use Latin American decolonial theory to focus on Brazilian cinema as an exemplar of non-Western and decolonial approaches to genre theory

Protocol to Study Spatial Subgoal Learning Using Escape Behavior in Mice

Rodent spatial navigation is a key model system for studying mammalian cognition and its neural mechanisms. Of particular interest is how animals memorize the structure of their environments and compute multi-step routes to a goal. Previous work on multi-step spatial reasoning has generally involved placing rodents at the start of a maze until they learn to navigate to a reward without making wrong turns. It thus remains poorly understood how animals rapidly learn about the structure of naturalistic open environments with goals and obstacles. Here we present an assay in which mice spontaneously memorize two-step routes in an environment with a shelter and an obstacle. We allow the mice to explore this environment for 20 min, and then we remove the obstacle. We then present auditory threat stimuli, causing the mouse to escape to the shelter. Finally, we record each escape route and measure whether it targets the shelter directly (a 'homing-vector' escape) or instead targets the location where the obstacle edge was formerly located (an 'edge-vector' escape). Since the obstacle is no longer there, these obstacle-edge-directed escape routes provide evidence that the mouse has memorized a subgoal location, i.e., a waypoint targeted in order to efficiently get to the shelter in the presence of an obstacle. By taking advantage of instinctive escape responses, this assay probes a multi-step spatial memory that is learned in a single session without pretraining. The subgoal learning phenomenon it generates can be useful not only for researchers working on navigation and instinctive behavior, but also for neuroscientists studying the neural basis of multi-step spatial reasoning