Academic Speech Therapy: a provocation, using performative autoethnography

Two of my brothers had speech therapy. My eldest brother had a pronounced stammer throughout his childhood and now, even as an adult, when emotions get the better of him. My younger brother gets away with an occasional stutter. One of the problems with contemporary Universities is that educationalists, and by this, I mean the whole class of teaching and support staff, academics and managers, have forgotten how to speak. This also means we have forgotten how to speak about education. I thought I had escaped this particular affliction because I used to speak very quickly, and fluently, using all the vocabulary at my ‘Institutional’ disposal, vocabulary that my undergraduate degree had grafted onto my speech, that allowed my family to comment on the change in who I had become. My academic accent grew broad and thick, the more I specialized, the more I reproduced my knowledge in writing. This became the fast-paced disciplinary classification task of research, pedagogy, of a particular managerial kind that allows insider references of increasing subtlety, that constitutes acculturated habitus and distinction. Hence cultural capital is embodied (Bourdieu, 1986, p.17) and constitutes invisible pedagogies (Bernstein, 2003, p.201) whose currency is a learnt language of long sentences, multi-syllabic words and complex grammar; supported by references and evidence. Plus, a certain attitude

What is rhythm in relation to photography?

This article elaborates a theory of rhythm in relation to photography and, in particular, argues for the importance of rhythm in the theorization of photographic temporality. The approach taken breaks with a number of significant strands in contemporary photography theory, namely, Aristotelian-influenced modes of formalist criticism, dualistic formulations of representation and definitions of photographic temporality based on its difference to cinema. Through an interrogation of definitions of rhythm, the article examines, first, a formalist heritage from Aristotle to Lessing and evident in Greenberg that assumes a naturalistic definition of rhythm based on linearity, regularity and anthropomorphic essentialism. The second strand is described through Frye's anticipation of a different rhythm, lyricism, that problematically compounds the subject as an entity defined in a dualistic paradigm. Against this background the article elaborates the possibilities inherent in Deleuze's notion of crystal time a rhythm of energetic intensity not dependent on linear temporality or subjectivism as a further, more credible, theorization of rhythmic temporality-as-texture

Mixed Forms in Visual Culture, Mary Anne Francis (2021)

This is a complex textbook addressing key examples of mixed form over the last 500 years in Western European and Anglo-American cultures. With 80 colour illustrations, it is extremely well referenced in historical and contemporary sources, yet of distinctly different parts, including two wholly visual chapters. This is a standard Bloomsbury hardback, with the paperback version published in June 2023 at considerably reduced cost. The economies of aesthetic forms, early publishing circulation, is one facet of the book’s narrative, and the contrast between mixed forms exclusively for the wealthy and popular mixed forms, is central to the book’s dramatic, and hence performative, structure. We are taken to some of the earliest European curatorial and authorial contexts in which mixed forms, whether opulent object collections or folded paper publications, constituted both a material type and a conceptual category for aristocrat and manual worker respectively. The narrative style features a broad vocabulary, inter-related arguments with cross-chapter questioning that is difficult to precis or gloss. Is there some operational logic to this type of a book? If my interpretation is valid that this project’s distinctiveness aligns visual practices with forms of material production and with modes of reading and writing employing multidisciplinary operational concepts, then this might best be understood if represented in a table. The ‘table’ therefore also stands in as a publishing convention, for a detachable, general overview of what any narrative cannot achieve in sufficient detail: a comprehensive summary. The table below (see Table 1) is a formal feature and type of paratext, which here represents a visual and conceptual overview of the book from which the review is drawn

Reading writing breathing

This article addresses how breath is intra-active with reading and writing. The two meditation methods I used for concentrating on and writing the breath-experience were ‘attention on the breath’as taught within a Korean Seon (Zen) tradition, and writing this experience as ‘meditative enquiry’ [Stephens, T. 2021. ‘A Meditative Enquiry into Presence: Unmaking the Autoethnographic Self.’ Journal of Writing in Creative Practice 14 (2): 161–178]. Two ‘texts’ gradually converge into an intertwined experience of reading both academic and literary writing, blurring distinctions between them. Various theories are drawn from that un-do dualistic frameworks of epistemology assumed in reading academic texts. This raises questions for the embodied cognitive humanities, post-qualitative methodologies, and in autoethnographic and phenomenological writing as well as for creative writers. The article draws from cultural, philosophical, and literary studies, recent breath studies, and from the field of embodiment, to contextualise the ‘creative academic writing’ excerpts; leading to an unavoidable conclusion: this type of ‘new writing’ is not new but, rather, contiguous with practices of embodiment. Yet, how can a written fabrication of breathing be read, and does stylistic innovation present insurmountable problems for the academic validation of creative academic writing

The determinants of foreign direct investment in the Middle East North Africa region

– The purpose of this paper is to test the determinants of foreign direct investment (FDI) into countries of the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region. – The research is based on an econometric model that includes factors that potentially drive FDI flows into countries in the MENA region. – Energy endowments have a negative impact on FDI flows into a country. GDP per capita, openness to trade and oil prices have a positive impact on FDI inflows, while aggregate measures of environmental risk are not a differentiating factor among countries in the region. – This paper demonstrates that the “Dutch disease” concept applies to FDI in resource rich countries in the MENA region. Countries with large amounts of oil and gas have are more likely to have policies and institutions that inhibit FDI. Countries that value the spillover effects from FDI need to reconsider legislative and institutional hurdles that remain. © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limite

Photographic Non-Self

Non-self has unsurprisingly featured very little in explanatory material-object-based contemporary art history. Buddhist nonself has contributed to subjectivity research (Albahari, 2006, Siderits, 2011, 2015) but non-self in photography is, perhaps appropriately, absent. This chapter will explore how the experience of non-self might differ from but overlap with emptiness in the ‘history of art’ specifically ‘photography theory and practice’. My research in experiential non-self (Stephens, 2018, 2019, 2021a, 2021b) wrestles with the complexities of non-representation when articulating embodied affect, of childhood racial discrimination, for instance. Yet, embodied autobiographical non-self is an impossible category. This is a subjugated knowledge that disrupts self-hood, undermines historical artefacts -leaving us with no birth of photography- and ruptures socio-cultural identity. Can a contemporary secular Buddhist non-self function as liberatory? Photographic non-self might render ‘writing on/and photography’ disastrous, when indelibly marked by the failures of representation