scholarly journals Invisible Conflicts: The Challenges of Design on a Planetary Scale

2021 ◽  
pp. 8-17
Author(s):  
Bani Brusadin ◽  
Laura Benítez Valero

The experience of the interconnected planet is the experience of an artificial totality, the result of the accelerated intersection of different invisible realms, topologies and layers that compete with one another following the irregular logics of rival interests, incompatible designs, non-human life form habits and rhythms, forms of resistance, errors, collateral effects and accidents. This issue of Temes de Disseny presents case studies and research practices that address the need to focus on these frictions from a variety of different perspectives in order to detect new forms of power and hidden inequalities as well as to envision unprecedented opportunities for intervention and counter-design.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Duiveman

Abstract Cities are turning to urban living labs and research consortia to co-create knowledge that can better enable them to address pervasive policy problems. Collaborations within such practices help researchers, officials and local stakeholders find new ways of dealing with urban issues and developing new relations with one another. Interestingly, success in the latter is often closely related to accomplishing the former. Besides of analysing this phenomenon in terms of learning—as is common—this paper also delves into the power dynamics involved in collaborative knowledge development. This perspective contributes to a better understanding of how puzzling and powering are simultaneously involved in making research relevant to policy-making. By presenting two collaborative research consortia in the Netherlands, we demonstrate how developing knowledge involves both re-structuring problems and the urban practices involved in governing such problems. Collaborative research practices are predominantly concerned with learning as long as restructuring the problem leads to research findings that are meaningful to all actors. Power becomes manifest when one actor insists on restructuring (often reproducing) problems in a manner judged unacceptable by others. Analysis of two case studies will show how the familiar three faces of power express themselves in collaborative knowledge development. It is recommended that these new practices also require methods for better orchestrating power besides a methodology for successful structuring learning through collaborative research practices.


2021 ◽  
Vol 331 ◽  
pp. 04010
Author(s):  
Fakira Mohan Nahak

Odisha is a natural disaster prone state. Its geographical location contributes a lot for the disasters. The eastern Indian state has a 480 Kilometre long coastline. The Bay of Bengal which is the house of cyclonic storms is the major contributor for the calamities in the state. From time immemorial till today Odisha has been facing hundreds of calamities in the form of cyclones, floods and famines. It is a regular phenomenon that in the period of September to December every year Odisha faces varieties of cyclones. These affect human life, properties and agriculture to the maximum extent. After the super cyclone of 1999 the government became sensitive so also the media. In these two decades Odisha media has played a vital role in creating awareness about the disasters and helped people in displacement and rehabilitation. In recent pasts media helped the Government in reaching the “Zero Casualty” target. The role of media not only limited to this, even post-disasters it followed the condition of people and their lives. The researcher takes some case studies of different disasters and their handling by media. Also tries to find out the people’s perception about media in disaster preparedness and management.


Ramus ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 75-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Purves

ἕρϰος Ἀχαιῶν: ἔμψυχον τεῖχος τῶν Ἑλλήνων.Bulwark of the Achaeans: living wall of the Greeks.Schol. D. Il. 6.5 (on Ajax)Now, still breathing, he is simply matter…Simone Weil, ‘The Iliad or the Poem of Force’ The two quotations at the start of this paper, one from the D scholion on the Iliad and the other from Simone Weil's famous essay on force, both make of the Homeric warrior a kind of ‘breathing material’. Two references, then, to the liveliness of objects, but each meaning very different things. For the scholiast places man on the same side as materiality, as if humans and things can equally be infused with life and can exist in a sort of continuum, but Weil argues that a human who is reduced to mere matter, even if he is a still a thing that breathes, is as good as nothing. Unlike the scholiast, Weil's interpretation is predicated on a strong belief in the duality of body and soul in the structure of human life, and since objects do not have souls they are, for her, essentially dead. Throughout her essay, Weil visits again and again the materiality of Homeric man and his propensity to turn, under the crushing power of force, into what she calls alternately a ‘thing’, ‘inert matter’, ‘stone’, and even ‘nothingness’. But for the D scholiast, the comparison of Ajax to stone does not subjugate him or turn him into a ‘mere’ or ‘inert’ object. On the contrary, the gloss ἔμψυχον τεῖχος speaks instead to the lively and permeable boundary between human and nonhuman in early Greek epic, one that suggests that objects can have their own life form, their own energy, vitality, and even creativity.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Kate Farran ◽  
Priya Silverstein ◽  
Aminath A. Ameen ◽  
Iliana Misheva ◽  
Camilla Gilmore

Open research is best described as “an umbrella term used to refer to the concepts of openness, transparency, rigor, reproducibility, replicability, and accumulation of knowledge” (Crüwell et al., 2019, p. 3). Although a lot of open research practices have commonly been discussed under the term “open science”, open research applies to all disciplines. If the concept of open research is new to you, it might be difficult for you to determine how you can apply open research practices to your research. The aim of this document is to provide resources and examples of open research practices that are relevant to your discipline. The document lists case studies of open research per discipline, and resources per discipline (organised as: general, open methods, open data, open output and open education).


2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 218-228
Author(s):  
Alin Chintraruck

Water management is a complex and multifarious issue that joins together a wide range of different problems and approaches. Since water is essential to human life, governments must make efforts to ensure that everyone receives the water necessary but, at the same time, they have to wrestle with the fact that water is a scarce resource that must be priced for consumption under conditions of constantly increasing demand from cities, industry, agriculture and tourism. Examination of three case studies, Australia, Singapore and Japan, indicates that contemporary water management issue may be considered in a number of categories and analysis has taken place on four such categories. These are global climate change, disaster mitigation, political and legal modernization and allocation of water resources. The case studies inform the discussion of water management practices and prospects for Thailand and it is shown that the country is progressing towards the examples represented by the more developed and advanced countries insofar as it is ever possible to import a water management solution into the very specific geographical, hydrological, social, political and cultural conditions in effect in a specific location.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Maraden Parlindungan Silalahi

<p>Postmodernism fundamentally supersedes the ideas of modern ages that base their perspective on rationality and objectivity into postmodern thought that aimed at improving awareness of the reality in human life. It is aimed at improving  social or cultural conditions or circumstances and to build the forms of awareness about realities that occur in human life in all spheres of life. This conception ultimately awakens Edward Said to a social phenomenon associated with the Western (colonialist) and Eastern (orientalist). Through his writing entitled Orientalism, Edward Said links Western responses and worldviews (Orient) which are always based on the nature of preconceived and stereotyped. In this paper, the author will firstly reveal the thoughts of postmodernism and then associate them with the concept of Orientalism. At the end of this paper, the authors will conduct case studies on two texts that are considered to reflect the issues of orientalism.</p><p><em> </em></p><strong><em>Keywords:</em></strong><em> postmodernism, orientalism, Edward Said</em>


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Affiefa Liyaqat

Environment plays a very significant role in human civilization. Human beings have close relations with the biosphere in which they live. The whole environment and ecology consisting of earth, air, water, plants and animals provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for sustaining human life. The last few centuries have been dominated by human beings, and are referred to by some scholars as ‘anthropocene’, or a period of human domination over the planet. This domination has impacted the planet, leading to the rapid depletion of wildlife and their habitat. In the last few decades, growing human populations and their consumption levels, accompanied by greater need for water, electricity, metal, food, housing and other luxury items has led to the quick erosion of other species. This loss of species has been guesstimated by various scholars at anywhere between one per hour to one per day. Although human beings are considered the most intelligent life form on earth, they are responsible for most of the damage done to planet earth. Developing countries as well as developed countries alike are all suffering from environmental pollution. Therefore, today environmental problems have been the object of discussion everywhere from village to parliament.


Author(s):  
Enam Al-Wer

This article provides a critical overview of the application of sociolinguistic principles, methods, and analysis to Arabic data with reference to research conducted over the past three decades or so in various Arabic-speaking societies. It focuses on linguistic variation and change, the major concerns of (variationist) sociolinguistics. The article begins with an outline of the relationship between traditional dialectology and sociolinguistics, the ways dialectological data are incorporated into sociolinguistic analysis, and the benefits of maintaining the link between the two disciplines. Then an outline is presented of the basic principles of the variationist paradigm, which are intricately bound up with sociolinguistic methodology and theory; where relevant, research practices in studies on Arabic are cited. The article then critically reviews the “diglossia” model as an approach to analyzing variation in Arabic. Finally, an alternative and up-to-date model of analysis is given, with case studies from recent research used as illustration.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-250
Author(s):  
Matthias Wunsch

Philosophical anthropology offers two ways of structuring the concept of person, either by locating the essence of man in his being a person or by providing a bio- philosophy of personhood. Building on the work of Helmuth Plessner, this essay aims at conciliating both structurings. It argues for the thesis that personhood is the life-form of man and discusses the main structural features of human life-form.


Author(s):  
Kristin K. DeKam

Quine, in his article "In Praise of the Observational Sentence," claims to establish naturalized epistemology and the work of science as a realist mapping of the world. Invoking Rorty's criticisms of foundationalism from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, this paper analyzes Quine's observational sentence by discussing the unresolved issue of justification. It discusses whether a causal explanation can be a justified true belief and adequate "grounding" of knowledge. I suggest that the criticisms of Quine bypass similarities between Rorty's position and Quine's. Such polemic positions - characteristic of the postmodern/modern debate - imply a false dichotomy. These criticisms of justification and grounding are best understood as a means to argue for eclectic viewpoints of human understanding. I conclude that Wittgenstein's idea of "human life form," or world-picture, provides further context for insisting upon interdisciplinary dialogue in lieu of an assumed hierarchy of specialized sciences.


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