scholarly journals “It ain’t a compliment”: Feminist data visualisation and digital street harassment advocacy

Author(s):  
Bianca Fileborn ◽  
Verity Trott

In an era of datafication, data visualisation is playing an increasing role in civic meaning-making processes. However, the conventions of data visualisation have been criticised for their reductiveness and rhetoric of neutrality and there have been recent efforts to develop feminist principles for designing data visualisations that are compatible with feminist epistemologies. In this article, we aim to examine how data visualisation is used in feminist activism and by feminist activists. Drawing on the example of digital street harassment activism, we analyse how street harassment is visualised in and through a selection of prominent activist social media accounts. We consider the platform affordances utilised by activists, and how these are harnessed in making street harassment ‘knowable'. Moreover, we critically interrogate which and whose experiences are ‘knowable’ via digital techniques, and what remains obscured and silenced. In analysing digital feminist activists’ practices, we argue that what constitutes ‘data visualisation’ itself must be situated within feminist epistemologies and praxis that centre lived experience as the starting point for knowledge production. Such an approach challenges and disrupts normative constructions of what constitutes data visualisation. Our findings demonstrate how feminist activists are adopting ‘traditional’ practices of speaking out and consciousness-raising to the digital sphere in the creation of a range of visualisations that represent the issue of street harassment. We consider the efficacy of these visualisations for achieving their intended purpose and how they might translate to policy and government responses, if this is indeed their goal. Further, we document a tension between feminist epistemologies and the prevailing logic of datafication or dataism and note how in an attempt to unite the two, some digital feminist activism has contributed to reproducing existing power structures, raising concerning implications at the policy level.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Wilson Minshall

Interstice: Flexure is the thesis exhibition of Wilson Minshall. This exhibition is comprised of three interspersed bodies of work: a series of masking tape weavings and objects containing image transfers of publicly-sourced documents tracing Wilson's previously erased Tsalagi ancestors, 2 looping stop-motion video projections extending this archival material through sample-based ambient sound collages titled Breakage I and II, and a selection of indirect paintings and drawings from memory titled Shifters. Minshall accumulates information from historically sourced archives such as census and tribal roll records as well as her own recorded memories and physical traces, materially alters and renders the samples in parts, and pulls forth a decentralized network of traces from the shrapnel. Her approaches towards organization (or constellation) begin with queering gridded and binary structures and expand outwards through varying processes of locality. The only common starting point in her work being the practice of drawing from memory (whether literally or figuratively), these interwoven bodies of work visually remix institutionally and personally mediated accounts of identity through drawing, painting, photography, weaving, installation, sculpture, sound and video. In doing so, she takes the stance that excavating or refiguring overlooked pieces of lived experience across time, space and media allows for a nonbinary navigation of history and identity which doesn't privilege surface level stereotypes. This accumulative intermedia approach functions as a way of emphasizing peripheral, intersectional relations and critiquing the compulsive presence of oppressive social quantifications which are rooted in settler colonialism and patriarchy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 205979912110120
Author(s):  
Gemma Ahearne

Feminist epistemologies place value on disrupting dominant ways of knowing. Personal experience and struggle can serve as transformative sites of meaning-making. I have lived experience of sex work and of organised crime. In 2018, I endured two crown court trials, both as the wife of the defendant, and as a victim. This article will interrogate the complexities of occupying such liminal spaces and the role of emotion as a way of knowing.


2020 ◽  
pp. 123-150
Author(s):  
Julia Saviello

Smell and taste – of the five senses these are the two most strongly stimulated by smoking tobacco. The article presents an in-depth analysis of the reflection of both these forms of sensory perception in textual and visual sources concerning the early consumption of the herb. In a first step, tobacco’s changing reception, first as medicine and then as stimulant, is traced through the years of its increasing distribution in Europe, starting in the middle of the 16th century. As this overview reveals, at that time the still little known substance gave rise to new forms of sense perception. Following recent studies on smell and gustation, which have stressed the need to take into account the interactions between these senses, the article probes the manifold stimulation of the senses by tobacco with reference to allegorical representations and genre scenes addressing the five senses. The smoking of tobacco was thematized in both of these art forms as a means of visualizing either smell or taste. Yet, these depictions show no indication of any deliberate engagement with the exchange of sense data between mouth and nose. The question posed at the end of this paper is whether this holds true also for early smoker’s still lifes. In the so-called toebakjes or rookertjes, a subgenre of stilllife painting that, like tobacco, was still a novelty at the beginning of the 17th century, various smoking paraphernalia – such as rolled or cut tobacco, pipes and tins – are arrayed with various kinds of foods and drinks. Finally, the article addresses a selection of such smoker’s still lifes, using the toebakje by Pieter Claesz., probably the first of its kind, as a starting point and the work by Georg Flegel as a comparative example. Through their selection of objects, both offer a complex image of how tobacco engages different senses.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 784-795
Author(s):  
Krisnna M.A. Alves ◽  
Fábio José Bonfim Cardoso ◽  
Kathia M. Honorio ◽  
Fábio A. de Molfetta

Background:: Leishmaniosis is a neglected tropical disease and glyceraldehyde 3- phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH) is a key enzyme in the design of new drugs to fight this disease. Objective:: The present study aimed to evaluate potential inhibitors of GAPDH enzyme found in Leishmania mexicana (L. mexicana). Methods: A search for novel antileishmanial molecules was carried out based on similarities from the pharmacophoric point of view related to the binding site of the crystallographic enzyme using the ZINCPharmer server. The molecules selected in this screening were subjected to molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulations. Results:: Consensual analysis of the docking energy values was performed, resulting in the selection of ten compounds. These ligand-receptor complexes were visually inspected in order to analyze the main interactions and subjected to toxicophoric evaluation, culminating in the selection of three compounds, which were subsequently submitted to molecular dynamics simulations. The docking results showed that the selected compounds interacted with GAPDH from L. mexicana, especially by hydrogen bonds with Cys166, Arg249, His194, Thr167, and Thr226. From the results obtained from molecular dynamics, it was observed that one of the loop regions, corresponding to the residues 195-222, can be related to the fitting of the substrate at the binding site, assisting in the positioning and the molecular recognition via residues responsible for the catalytic activity. Conclusion:: he use of molecular modeling techniques enabled the identification of promising compounds as inhibitors of the GAPDH enzyme from L. mexicana, and the results obtained here can serve as a starting point to design new and more effective compounds than those currently available.


2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Cowley

To view language as a cultural tool challenges much of what claims to be linguistic science while opening up a new people-centred linguistics. On this view, how we speak, think and act depends on, not just brains (or minds), but also cultural traditions. Yet, Everett is conservative: like others trained in distributional analysis, he reifies ‘words’. Though rejecting inner languages and grammatical universals, he ascribes mental reality to a lexicon. Reliant as he is on transcriptions, he takes the cognitivist view that brains represent word-forms. By contrast, in radical embodied cognitive theory, bodily dynamics themselves act as cues to meaning. Linguistic exostructures resemble tools that constrain how people concert acting-perceiving bodies. The result is unending renewal of verbal structures: like artefacts and institutions, they function to sustain a species-specific cultural ecology. As Ross (2007) argues, ecological extensions make human cognition hypersocial. When we link verbal patterns with lived experience, we communicate and cognise by fitting action/perception to cultural practices that anchor human meaning making.


2013 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 329-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan O. Drinkwater

Roman elegy is well known for its reversal of traditional Roman gender roles: women are presented in positions of power, chiefly but not exclusively erotic, that bear little or no relation to women's lived experience in the first centuryb.c.e. Yet the way elegy presents the beloved in a position of power over her lover, as Sharon James has observed, ‘retains standard Roman social and power structures, thus suggesting an inescapable inequity even within a private love affair: rather than sharing goals and desires, lover and beloved are placed in a gendered opposition … Hence resistant reading by thedominais an anticipated and integral part of the genre’. James's remark is indeed correct for each of the instances in which thedomina, or female beloved, speaks directly. When she does so, as James also shows, she speaks at cross-purposes with her lover, following a script that is designed ‘to destabilize him’ in an attempt to keep his interest. Yet what has not been noticed is that when the beloved is instead male, the situation is quite different. Tibullus' Marathus in poem 1.8, our sole example of a male elegiac beloved-turned-speaker, is the exception that proves the fundamental rule of gender inequity. Marathus, that is, when given the opportunity to speak, does in fact share the aims of a male lover, albeit in pursuit of his ownpuella. When the gendered opposition so integral to elegy is erased, the beloved no longer protests against the strictures of the genre; when both are male, lover and beloved alike are entitled to speak as elegiac lovers.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 504-510
Author(s):  
Gunjan M. Sanjeev ◽  
Richard Teare

Purpose The paper aims to profile the theme issue of Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes titled “How is the need for innovation being addressed by the Indian hospitality industry?” with reference to the experiences of the theme editor, contributors from the industry and academia and the theme issue outcomes. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses structured questions to enable the theme editor to reflect on the rationale for their theme issue question, the starting-point, the selection of the writing team and material and the editorial process. Findings It highlights recent innovations that have taken place in the Indian hospitality industry especially in the areas of customer service, cost competitiveness, culinary management, revenue management and technology. Practical implications As hotel sector investment in India intensifies, this theme issue will be of interest to hoteliers, policy makers, analysts and others interested in the role that innovation can play in helping to facilitate differentiation between competing hotel products and services. Originality/value There is limited literature available on industry innovations in the Indian context. All the papers in this theme issue were written after several cycles of interaction between academics and practitioners and so they incorporate real–time, relevant and contemporary data.


Author(s):  
Clare Murphy

Because of feminist activism, what were once considered incompatible entities, women and sport, have come to be united within the social fabric of the 21st century. Recent generations of women are the first to experience sport as a commonplace reality that is largely taken for granted. After initial exclusion from the first and second wave feminist agendas, many activists now recognize sport as a vehicle for the advancement of women. The female athlete has been described by some academics as a type of “stealth feminist” who can support key feminist causes without arousing a knee-jerk social response. Although female sport participation and the status of female athletes have improved significantly, the impact this has had in the lived experience of women remains to be understood. This research project seeks to conduct focus groups with female athletes to better understand their relationship with the topic of feminism and to explore the impact sport participation has had within their lives. Deeper comprehension and documentation of sport from the perspective of female participants may not only serve to help guide sport policy and programing, but may also serve to foster a united, feminist consciousness that is capable of expanding the possibilities for female athletes and for women more broadly. 


Author(s):  
Nora V. Demleitner

Prosecutorial decisions play an important, and sometimes a decisive, role in a defendant’s ultimate sentence. They begin with the selection of charges and may end with a recommendation on clemency or expungement of a criminal conviction. The influence of prosecutors over the sentence, therefore, is far more extensive than that of any other official. The charging decision sets the starting point for the sentence range. The prosecution tends to control entry into diversion programs that may spare an offender a criminal record after complying with a set of requirements. Plea bargains, which have become more frequent even in Europe’s civil law countries, usually focus on the type and scope of the criminal justice sentence. Mandatory minimum sentences, mandatory aggravators, and stacked charges provide prosecutors with overwhelming bargaining power, causing many defendants to waive their right to a trial. Judges tend to follow the parties’ agreements and impose the recommended sentence. In many states prosecutors routinely weigh in on parole decisions and determine whether to proceed against defendants for supervision violations. Even in clemency decisions, they frequently submit a recommendation.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Claire Wiewauters ◽  
Kathleen Emmery

In dit artikel nemen we als focus de kwetsbare positie van het kind in de context rondom PAS (Parental Alienation Syndrome). We vertrekken vanuit een postmoderne visie op de werkelijkheid waarbij de betekenisgeving binnen een relationeel kader een belangrijke plaats inneemt. Ook de ontwikkelingsleeftijd van kinderen vergt onze aandacht. We toetsen ons conceptueel kader aan een analyse van 60 chatgesprekken van kinderen en jongeren met de hulplijn Awel over de scheiding van hun ouders en het leven in een samengesteld gezin. We formuleren een aantal concrete voorstellen die ervoor moeten zorgen dat de ontwikkeling en het welzijn van kinderen en jongeren zoveel mogelijk gewaarborgd blijft wanneer contactbreuk bij en na scheiding optreedt. Hiermee bieden we een antwoord op de draaglast en het isolement van kinderen. We houden een pleidooi om het actorschap van kinderen te verhogen. We pleiten voor meer samenwerking tussen de betrokkenen bij welzijn en justitie. Abstract :  This article focuses on the vulnerable position of the child in the context of PAS (Parental Alienation Syndrome).  Our starting point is a postmodern vision on reality in which meaning making plays an important role in relations.  We also pay attention to the developmental age of children. We test our conceptual framework with an analysis of 60 chat conversations of children and youngsters with the online service of the Flemish Child Helpline (‘Awel’) about the divorce of their parents and life in a newly composed family. We formulate several specific suggestions to make sure that the development and well‐being of children and youngsters is guaranteed as much as possible when contact is broken during and after the divorce. With this we offer a response to the burden and isolation of children. We make a plea to strengthen the agency of children and for more cooperation between the welfare work and legal actors that are involved.


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