The Centripetal Force of Expression: Drawing Embodied Histories into Glassblowing

Getting at the tacit understandings of an artful practice is critical in coming to understand the processes of creativity. To achieve this, the researcher, specifically the ethnographer, must place herself in the position of the maker, that is she must herself, make and create. This article provides an account of arriving at the methodological imperative of in situ ethnographic research through actual ethnographic research on the relation of maker and material. From an in situ position, it theorizes the modalities of expression in practice, from problem-solving, to personal style, to the intentional drawing in of embodied histories in practice. This incorporation of varying embodied histories into a current practice is then explored as the possibility for affecting what is recognized in the field as ”new” or ”innovative”. We will see, however, that is affect is grounded more in the corporeal revealing of unexpected aspects of the material worked up.

Hallmark of Robustness in Frugal Management Techniques

To maintain continuity of education, school management was confronted with a conflicting situation of mobilizing the student learning process and simultaneously maintaining COVID-19 protocols without having the cushion of using online medium in the village. The mission was accomplished through an extraordinary education delivery system which was non-technical, cost-effective, prudent, and still efficient that would revitalize education by using the existing village resources. This case documents how Utkramit Madhya Vidyalaya achieved this unexpected goal which illustrates how frugal techniques can be effective in any management process if the vision for work remains the centripetal force in the organization.

Weighty issue

A response to Nick England’s letter “Going in circles” in which he discusses the change from teaching centrifugal force to teaching centripetal force, and the definition of weight being changed from the reaction force felt from the floor to the pull of gravity on an object.

High-intensity curvilinear movements’ relevance in semi-professional soccer: An approach from principal components analysis

Due to the high number of variables reported from tracking systems, the interest in data reduction techniques has grown. To date, principal component analysis (PCA) has been performed in soccer, but since the results depend on the variables included, a lack of objectivity continues to be of concern. The aim of this study was to highlight the variables that compose the principal components (PC) in semi-professional soccer, including all variables extracted from tracking systems. Data were collected from a semi-professional Spanish team that participated in 10 matches. From more than 250 variables, the PCA grouped a total of 19 variables in six PCs, explaining 72% of players’ external load. All variables were related to centripetal force, high intensity running, and high-intensity efforts and short efforts. Interestingly, the first PC was composed of four variables related to centripetal force. The current exploratory analysis indicated that, in addition to traditional high-intensity displacement variables, force measures should also be considered in soccer match analysis due to their effect on a player’s external load.

'A Return to the World': Diffraction and Truth-telling in Post-Cartesian IR

This paper presents an ethics premised on a post-Cartesian ontology: that what we know is how we know and vice-versa. The acknowledgment of the IR scholar’s constitutive relation to the world she seeks to describe, and of which she is a part, entails an ethics that is also a practice and an agency. I build on the notion of diffraction in Karen Barad’s quantum theory and on Foucault’s notion of parrhesia. In place of reflection, Barad offers diffraction as a nonrepresentationalist methodology which attends to the difference knowledge can make rather than the accuracy of our representations. Parrhesia is the ‘third hermeneutic’ which problematizes our relationship with the activity of knowing itself. In the pragmatist sense, we are asked not only to be of use to our communities, but to be mindful of who we are and what kind of subject we become in our inscriptions of the world. This diffractive research ethics addresses two problems in IR theory as they present in the conduct of fieldwork – the limits of reflexivity, notably the impossibility of objectively representing ourselves to ourselves, and the critique that the pragmatist concerns in the ‘doing’ of science pays insufficient attention to how power conditions knowledge production. I suggest that this ethic, which is a performance of our relation to truth, allows us to better realize the pragmatist ideal of a democratic social science by allowing us to resist the centripetal force of epistemic sovereignty.

Research on the Humanization of Teaching Management in Normal University

There are many problems in the humanized teaching management of normal universities. For example, students do not actively participate in the management and planning of their own university and career, teachers pay too much attention to traditional authority and have a sense of distance from students, the bureaucracy of the management department is serious, and management thinking is backward. The management process does not reflect the humanistic feelings, the teaching plans and teaching evaluation methods formulated by the school remain unchanged, the school’s teaching resources are unevenly distributed, and the campus culture construction lacks the humanistic spirit. In response to these current conditions, the author puts forward relevant suggestions from four aspects: students, teachers, schools, and management personnel. I hope that as a member of the school and participants in the construction of humanized teaching management, they can actively perform their own responsibilities and clarify their own positioning. In the end, it is hoped that the school’s teaching management can be people-oriented and enhance the school’s cohesion and centripetal force.