scholarly journals Drawing Out by Drawing Into: Representation and Partnership in a Design-Science Collaboration

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 294
Author(s):  
Pablo Schyfter

“Synthetic Aesthetics” was a two-year experimental, interdisciplinary project that supported six partnerships between synthetic biologists and artists and designers. Each group sought to accomplish two tasks: build an interdisciplinary partnership and construct a joint representation. In this article, I explore the relationship between partnering and representing in one of the six partnerships: a collaboration between an architect and a synthetic biologist. I describe David Benjamin and Fernan Federici’s work on the self-organization and structural growth of xylem cells, and their pursuit of graphical and mathematical representations of so-called biological “logic.” I analyze the case study using two frameworks in unison. The first, from research in STS, explains representation as a social accomplishment with ontological consequences. The second, by pragmatist John Dewey, describes representation as drawing out and drawing into: selecting and extracting out of the world, and molding and installing into human artifice. I study Benjamin and Federici’s work as two acts of drawing out by drawing into: constructing and representing “logic” by forming a partnership to do so; and building a partnership by jointly forming a commitment to the existence of that “logic.” Doing so also involved ontological labor: making biological “logic” and rendering cells intelligible as products of rational mechanisms (as logical cells). Thus, representing and partnering are mutually enabling, mutually dependent and capable of ontological accomplishments. The lesson is useful to STS, a field increasingly concerned with art and design as topics of study and potential partners in work.

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (8) ◽  
pp. 857-872 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Sissons ◽  
Katy Jones

This paper examines changes in local economic development policy which occurred between 2010 and 2015, with a focus on the relationship between industrial strategy and skills policy. Under the Coalition Government, Local Enterprise Partnerships were established and tasked with facilitating local growth, and to do so many identified a set of (potential) growth sectors for industrial strategy to support. These sectors tended to be drawn from a relatively narrow range of industries which therefore often excluded a large proportion of the local economy. An important focus of the support for growth sectors for many has been through an ambition to influence the local skills system. Skills policy more broadly has been an important dimension of devolution, and a number of City Deals have included elements of skills policy. Echoing previous national policy however, the focus of local concerns with skills under devolution has been framed largely with reference to skills gaps and shortages. While specific skills gaps and shortages can be identified, this paper questions whether this default position is reflected widely, and as such, if a narrow focus on skills supply is a sufficient approach. It is argued that to support local growth across a broad base, greater attention needs to be paid to stimulating employer demand for skills through better integrating industrial and innovation policy with skills policymaking across a wider section of the local economy. To support these arguments we present a case study of the Sheffield City Deal.


Author(s):  
Reiko Shindo

This chapter explains how the research on language in the context of migrant activism can advance one's understanding of belonging, of what it means to be a legitimate member of a community. To do so, it broadly sketches the relationship between language and community and discusses how the focus on linguistic interactions between citizens and noncitizens offers a productive yet unexplored site of investigation in migration studies. The relationship between language and community has a dual nature. Language solidifies the boundary of community, and separates citizens inside the community from foreigners outside. And yet, it can also obscure the line between the two, exposing fluidity of belonging, and in doing so, imagining community as a dissolving entity. The chapter then provides the specific context in which migrant activism takes place in Japan, and explains how the Japanese case study is helpful for examining citizenship and belonging in relation to language.


Hipertext.net ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 105-114
Author(s):  
Roger Soler i Martí ◽  
Mariona Ferrer-Fons ◽  
Ludovic Terren

The lockdown imposed in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak as well as the resulting surge in the use of digital technologies and social media for activism or social life all represent a unique opportunity to study the relationship between online and offline activism. To do so, we focus on the Barcelona branch of Fridays For Future, the recent and global youth climate movement that expanded through social networks and organised several large-scale global protests. Based on data from Fridays For Future-Barcelona’s Twitter account, the analysis looks at and compares the level of activity and interactions during normal times and during the lockdown. The results suggest a close and mutually-reinforcing relationship between offline and online activism, with peaks of Twitter activity and interactions usually revolving around offline protest actions. They also show that the lockdown period was characterised by an increase in the number of tweets but a decrease in the number of interactions and thus in the repercussion of the movement on social networks.


Author(s):  
Andrea Cameron

This case study reports on the information literacy component of a pilot first-yearexperience course, U1X, at Concordia University. Based on the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, the information literacy component of U1X was designed to encourage self-direction. Through exploring the university’s larger research mission, the module aimed to shift the emphasis from “how to do research correctly” to viewing research as a personal endeavour in which the researcher cultivates the skills necessary to make a meaningful contribution. It encouraged students to reflect on what they could contribute and the skills they would need to do so. The design of this module aligned with the U1X syllabus, which included as learning outcomes that students gain an understanding “of the University’s research mission at its highest level” and “of the relationship between research and citizenship.” The module took a similarly “big picture” approach, while also looking at students’ personal development through reflection. This paper will explore the challenges and opportunities of this approach.    


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Tapscott

Abstract The twenty-first century is marked by the rise of new forms of authoritarianism, many of which are characterized by the ‘paradox of restraint', in which reforms compliant with the rule of law are used to unshackle the ruler's arbitrary power. Despite a proliferation of scholarly studies on this topic, we still have limited understanding of how national-level authoritarian power reaches ordinary citizens in these contexts. This article identifies the performance of militarized masculinities as an understudied mechanism that does so. It offers two main contributions: first, it highlights how performances of militarized masculinities enact the paradox of restraint through gendered idioms, thereby magnifying the ambiguities of modern authoritarianism and diffusing them at a local level. Second, it recasts the conceptual utility of militarized masculinities, showing that the concept's inherent tensions between ordered discipline and unaccountable violence produce and project authoritarian power, giving militarized masculinities special potency as a mode of social discipline in these contexts. The article draws on feminist International Relations, employing grounded ethnographic research to illustrate how national-level power circulates locally. To do so, it first illustrates the relationship between the paradox of restraint and militarized masculinities using the cases of Putin's Russia and Duterte's Philippines. It then turns to an in-depth case study of a local dispute between soldiers and civilians in Museveni's Uganda to trace how gendered local encounters facilitate the transmission of national-level authoritarian power into the lives of ordinary people.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 119-137
Author(s):  
Kwasu Tembo

The hypothesis that there is an inextricable link between comic book superheroes and suffering would, to anyone with a cursory knowledge of superhero characters found in DC, Marvel, Image, Wildstorm and other houses, and their histories, ostensibly seem valid. This validity depends on which character one is applying said hypothesis to; the psychological and physical suffering of a Batman being more acceptable as such than that of a Plastic Man, for example. However, using DC Comics character Superman as a case study, this paper explores the inextricable link between Otherness, power, and suffering within the remit of the character's mythos. In order to do so, this paper refers to psychoanalytic concepts elaborated by Sigmund Freud in his text Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1922) as a way of demonstrating that despite the character's conventional appraisal as a positivist humanistic symbol of pure altruism, an insuperable, unimpeachable symbol of selflessness and good morality, there is in fact a fundamental link between Superman's 'tridentity' of selves (Clark Kent/Kal-El/Superman), the character's own suffering, and human suffering on a terrestrial scale, as represented within the numerous realities of the DC Comics Multiverse.


Leonardo ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Dolores A. Steinman ◽  
Peter W. Coppin ◽  
David A. Steinman

More than a decade ago, our previous Leonardo contribution described our goal of establishing a basis for scientific exploration of blood flow dynamics closely intertwined with the visual arts. Here we present a case study of new collaborative art-science exploration. We show how paradigms we co-developed for visually abstracting cerebral aneurysm blood flows were extrapolated to sonification and bi-modal representations, and how a close interdisciplinary partnership was effected by guiding engineering students versed in the arts and artists adept with digital technology towards the final outcomes being more than the sum of their parts.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wycliff Edwin Tusiime ◽  
Monica Johannesen ◽  
Gréta Björk Guðmundsdóttir

This case study explores how teacher educators use digital technologies in teaching Art and Design (A&D) in a developing country. It uses semi-structured interviews and non-participant observations to gather qualitative data from teacher educators at two teacher training institutions in central Uganda. To understand the actual use of technologies by teacher educators in the A&D classroom, analysis of the data employed concepts from van Dijk’s resources and appropriation theory (RAT) and Mishra and Koehler’s TPACK framework. The findings indicate that low digital competence among teacher educators and insufficient access to appropriate hardware, software and the Internet means that A&D teacher educators in Uganda only occasionally use digital technologies in the classroom. Instead, teacher educators use non-professional software such as Microsoft Office to teach Art and Design subjects. The findings further confirm teacher educators’ limited awareness of the relationship between technology, pedagogy and content knowledge in the Art and Design classroom. Insufficient access to adequate digital resources, skills and knowledge explains the low creative use of digital technologies in teaching A&D lessons.


Slavic Review ◽  
1969 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-220
Author(s):  
James T. Flynn

It is easy to ignore the career of Vasilii Nazarevich Karazin, and, indeed, most treatments of imperial Russia do so. When Karazin is mentioned, he is usually described as a rather ridiculous figure, the putative “Marquis Posa“ of Alexander I who had a spectacularly short public career, or simply as that “harebrained Ukrainian.“ Yet Karazin is hardly unknown; he is almost universally credited with being the founder of Kharkov University and is the subject of a number of works that picture him as an able, active public figure. The purpose of the present paper, however, is not to argue Karazin's importance or to decide whether or not he was “harebrained” but to explore his role in the foundation of Kharkov University as a useful case study of the relationship between the autocracy and the gentry in the early nineteenth century.


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