Sterling Brown’s Laughter Out of Hell

2021 ◽  
pp. 156-186
Author(s):  
Rachel Trousdale

Brown’s sense of humor provides guiding principles for real-world action while making the Black tradition of private anti-racist laughter public. Brown examines the violence of traditional superiority humor in poems like “Sam Smiley,” in which Black laughter is silenced by lynching. Rather than simply rejecting such humor, Brown gives readers alternatives: his anti-hierarchical approach in the “Slim Greer” poems inverts Bergson’s logic, making humor a precondition for empathy. The partial resemblance we see between ourselves and the object of laughter can teach us to recognize our commonality even with our enemies. For Brown, the ethical underpinnings of art lie in artists’ awareness of contingency, complexity, and the subjectivities of unlike others. Empathic humor turns laughter from a zero-sum game to a game everyone can win by rejecting not just racism but hierarchical thinking as a whole. Brown shows how empathic laughter can reframe our knowledge of other people and upend the way we systematize that knowledge.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jing Fan

UNSTRUCTURED Smartphone-based contact tracing is proven to be effective in epidemic containment. To maintain its utilization meanwhile ensure the protection of personal privacy, different countries came up with different practices, new exploratory solutions may come into real-world practice soon as well.


Author(s):  
Kaori Kashimura ◽  
Takafumi Kawasaki Jr. ◽  
Nozomi Ikeya ◽  
Dave Randall

This chapter provides an ethnography of a complex scenario involving the construction of a power plant and, in so doing, tries to show the importance of a practice-based approach to the problem of technical and organizational change. The chapter reports on fieldwork conducted in a highly complex and tightly coupled environment: power plant construction. The ethnography describes work practices on three different sites and describes and analyses their interlocking dependencies, showing the difficulties encountered at each location and the way in which the delays that result cascade through the different sites. It goes on to describe some technological solutions that are associated with augmented reality and that are being designed in response to the insights gained from the fieldwork. The chapter also reflects more generally on the relationship between fieldwork and design in real-world contexts.


AKSEN ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-31
Author(s):  
Andrey Caesar Effendi ◽  
LMF Purwanto

The use of digital technology today can be said to be inseparable in our daily lives. Digital technology isslowly changing the way we communicate with others and the environment. Socialization that is usuallyface-to-face in the real world now can be done to not having to meet face-to-face in cyberspace. Thisliterature review aims to see a change in the way of obtaining data that is growing, with the use of digitaltechnology in ethnographic methods. The method used in this paper is to use descriptive qualitativeresearch methods by analyzing the existing literature. So it can be concluded that the use of digitalethnography in the architectural programming process can be a new way of searching for data at thearchitectural programming stage.


mBio ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfredo G. Torres ◽  
Maria Elena Bottazzi ◽  
Floyd L. Wormley

The way that diversity, equity, and inclusion impact scientific careers varies for everyone, but it is evident that institutions providing an environment where being different or having differences creates a sense of being welcomed, supported, and valued are beneficial to the scientific community at large. In this commentary, three short stories from Texas-based microbiologists are used to depict (i) the importance of bringing the guiding principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion within their professional roles, (ii) the need to apply and translate those principles to support and enable successful scientific careers among peers and trainees, and (iii) the impact of effective science communication to increase the understanding of microbial environments among the community at large.


spontaneously invented a name for the creature derived from the most prominent features of its anatomy: kamdopardalis [the normal Greek word for ‘giraffe*]. (10.27.1-4) It is worth spending a little time analysing what is going on in this passage. The first point to note is that an essential piece of information, the creature’s name, is not divulged until the last possible moment, after the description is completed. The information contained in the description itself is not imparted directly by the narrator to the reader. Instead it is chan­ nelled through the perceptions of the onlooking crowd. They have never seen a giraffe before, and the withholding of its name from the reader re-enacts their inability to put a word to what they see. From their point of view the creature is novel and alien: this is conveyed partly by the naive wonderment of the description, and partly by their attempts to control the new phenomenon by fitting it into familiar categories. Hence the comparisons with leopards, camels, lions, swans, ostriches, eyeliner and ships. Eventually they assert conceptual mastery over visual experience by coining a new word to name the animal, derived from the naively observed fea­ tures of its anatomy. However, their neologism is given in Greek (kamdopardalis), although elsewhere Heliodoros is scrupulously naturalistic in observing that Ethiopians speak Ethiopian. The reader is thus made to watch the giraffe from, as it were, inside the skull of a member of the Ethiopian crowd. The narration does not objectively describe what they saw but subjectively re­ enacts their ignorance, their perceptions and processes of thought. This mode of presentation, involving the suppression of an omniscient narrator in direct communication with the reader, has the effect that the reader is made to engage with the material with the same immediacy as the fictional audience within the frame of the story: it becomes, in imagination, as real for him as it is for them. But there is a double game going on, since the reader, as a real person in the real world, differs from the fictional audience inside the novel precisely in that he does know what a giraffe is. This assumption is implicit in the way the description is structured. If Heliodoros* primary aim had been to describe a giraffe for the benefit of an ignorant reader, he would surely have begun with the animal’s name, not withheld it. So for the reader the encounter


Author(s):  
Takeshi Miyazaki ◽  
Hideki Watanabe ◽  
Emiko Furukawa ◽  
Masako Nezu ◽  
Shigeki Ohono ◽  
...  

This chapter analyzed how Japanese teachers' qualifications and abilities, as well as educational policies, have been promoted since the postwar period to the present day and summarized these results. There are discrepancies between the needs of students' families and the real world and the ideas and contents required by the Course of Study. Teachers have tried to play a positive role in bridging the gap and in merging the reality and the ideals. In order to bridge the “difference” faced by school sites, it is necessary to start by examining the contents of the reforms required from the bottom and reforms required from the top. As an initiative from below, in most elementary schools in Japan, groups of teachers have voluntarily gathered, and “Jugyo-Kenkyu” have been conducted for many years to analyze the challenges of their own school's students as a team. Although Jugyo-Kenkyu has achieved some positive results, the way to measure the effectiveness of the research is still an issue.


Author(s):  
Gary Smith

Humans have invaluable real-world knowledge because we have accumulated a lifetime of experiences that help us recognize, understand, and anticipate. Computers do not have real-world experiences to guide them, so they must rely on statistical patterns in their digital data base—which may be helpful, but is certainly fallible. We use emotions as well as logic to construct concepts that help us understand what we see and hear. When we see a dog, we may visualize other dogs, think about the similarities and differences between dogs and cats, or expect the dog to chase after a cat we see nearby. We may remember a childhood pet or recall past encounters with dogs. Remembering that dogs are friendly and loyal, we might smile and want to pet the dog or throw a stick for the dog to fetch. Remembering once being scared by an aggressive dog, we might pull back to a safe distance. A computer does none of this. For a computer, there is no meaningful difference between dog, tiger, and XyB3c, other than the fact that they use different symbols. A computer can count the number of times the word dog is used in a story and retrieve facts about dogs (such as how many legs they have), but computers do not understand words the way humans do, and will not respond to the word dog the way humans do. The lack of real world knowledge is often revealed in software that attempts to interpret words and images. Language translation software programs are designed to convert sentences written or spoken in one language into equivalent sentences in another language. In the 1950s, a Georgetown–IBM team demonstrated the machine translation of 60 sentences from Russian to English using a 250-word vocabulary and six grammatical rules. The lead scientist predicted that, with a larger vocabulary and more rules, translation programs would be perfected in three to five years. Little did he know! He had far too much faith in computers. It has now been more than 60 years and, while translation software is impressive, it is far from perfect. The stumbling blocks are instructive. Humans translate passages by thinking about the content—what the author means—and then expressing that content in another language.


Author(s):  
Kara Dawson ◽  
Swapna Kumar

In this chapter the authors share the guiding principles for professional practice dissertations developed and studied within their online EdD in Educational Technology at the University of Florida. While these guiding principles were developed approximately four years before the call for chapters for this book was released, they align nicely with at least three pertinent themes that frame this book (i.e. the importance of addressing critical problems of practice, applying research rigor involving real theory and inquiry and demonstrating impact of research). The authors make explicit connections between their guiding principles and these themes and provide examples of how the themes have played out in dissertations completed in their program. The authors then provide implications for others seeking to structure (or restructure) the way dissertations are conceptualized in their professional practice problems.


2018 ◽  
Vol 165 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-115
Author(s):  
Fiona Butcher

The following article provides an overview of the research psychology capabilities within MOD's Defence Science Technology Laboratory (Dstl). An explanation is provided of the role of Dstl psychologists and the way they work to deliver impacting applied scientific research to address 'real world' defence and security challenges. Three short case studies are provided to illustrate the range of work they delivered.


Author(s):  
Bruce F. Chorpita ◽  
Jeanne Miranda ◽  
Adam Bernstein

In recent years, clinical psychology has made significant contributions to mental health policy through its increasing focus on the notion of evidence-based practice and an empirical approach to clinical decision-making. These developments have not been without challenges, however. Most notable are issues with the acceptability of treatment design among practitioners and the difficulty of implementing and sustaining high-quality practices in real-world contexts. Two specific barriers central to these challenges are discussed, namely, the highly specialized architecture of most research-based mental health treatments and the unavailability of a dedicated supervisory and training infrastructure. Solutions are proposed that suggest the need to rethink both the way treatments are packaged and the way they are supported in real-world practice.


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