Climate Lyricism

In Climate Lyricism Min Hyoung Song articulates a climate change-centered reading practice that foregrounds how climate is present in most literature. Song shows how literature, poetry, and essays by Tommy Pico, Solmaz Sharif, Frank O’Hara, Ilya Kaminsky, Claudia Rankine, Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Richard Powers, and others help us to better grapple with our everyday encounters with climate change and its disastrous effects, which are inextricably linked to the legacies of racism, colonialism, and extraction. These works employ what Song calls climate lyricism—a mode of address in which a first-person “I” speaks to a “you” about how climate change thoroughly shapes daily life. The relationship between “I” and “you” in this lyricism, Song contends, affects the ways readers comprehend the world, fostering a model of shared agency from which it can become possible to collectively and urgently respond to the catastrophe of our rapidly changing climate. In this way, climate lyricism helps to ameliorate the sense of being overwhelmed and feeling unable to do anything to combat climate change.

Yhteistoimijuus työterveysneuvottelussa

Eri toimijoiden välisen yhteistoimijuuden on todettu edesauttavan työuravaikutusten syntymistä. Työterveysneuvottelu on tärkeä työntekijän, työpaikan, työterveyshuollon yhteistyön ja kuntoutuksen yhteistyöfoorumi. Sen tavoitteena on tukea työntekijän työssä jatkamista ja työurien pidentymistä. Tässä artikkelissa tarkastellaan yhteistoimijuuden ilmenemisen tapoja sekä sen toteutumisen esteitä työterveysneuvottelussa. Tutkimus oli moniaineistoinen monitapaustutkimus. Neljäntoista tapauksen aineiston muodostivat työterveysneuvotteluun osallistuvien ennakkokysely ja neuvottelun jälkeinen haastattelu, neuvottelun videotaltiointi, neuvottelun muistio sekä kyseisen työpaikan työkyvyn tuen kirjalliset mallit. Moninäkökulmainen aineisto kerättiin neuvotteluun osallistuneelta työntekijältä, esihenkilöltä ja työterveyslääkäriltä sekä videotaltioinnin osalta kaikilta neuvotteluun osallistuneilta. Aineisto analysoitiin sisällön- ja keskustelunanalyysillä. Yhteistoimijuus ilmeni institutionaalisena, emotionaalisena, kommunikatiivisena ja supportiivisena ulottuvuutena. Institutionaalinen ulottuvuus ilmeni esimerkiksi toimijoiden roolien selkeytenä, emotionaalinen ulottuvuus kuulluksi tulemisena, kommunikatiivinen ulottuvuus yhteisenä päätöksentekona ja supportiivinen työntekijän tukemisena. Yhteistoimijuuden toteutumista estivät epäselvyys eri toimijoiden rooleista ja yhteisen näkemyksen tai yhteisen päätöksenteon puuttuminen. Kestävän työhönpaluun onnistumiseksi työntekijän toimijuutta tulisi tukea yhteistoimijuuden keinoin. Yhteistoimijuuden rakentumisen kannalta keskeistä oli tunnistaa työterveysneuvottelutilanne julkiseksi neuvotteluksi. Abstract Multi-actor shared agency at joint negotiations on the employee’s return-to-work Collaboration between workplace, health care and rehabilitation actors has been shown to contribute to the working career impact. Joint negotiations on the employee’s return-to-work solutions is one key forum for co-operation between an employee, workplace’s actors, and actors of occupational health care and rehabilitation services. The aim of this collaboration is to support job retention and to prolong working careers. This article discusses which forms of multi-actor shared agency took place and what kind of obstacles to collaboration were found in the joint negotiations on the employee’s return-to-work. The study was a multiperspective, multi-data study on multiple, altogether 14 joint negotiation, cases. Data on each case consisted of the questionnaire collected before the negotiation, the video-recorded data of the joint negotiation, three interviews after the negotiation, the negotiation memo and the workplace’s model of work ability support. The questionnaires and interviews were collected from employees, supervisors and occupational health physicians and video-recorded data was collected from all participants in the joint negotiation. The data was analyzed by a multidisciplinary research team with content and discussion analysis. Multi-actor shared agency was definable to institutional, emotional, communicative and supportive dimensions. New institutional dimension included elements of clarity of the roles of the actors. The emotional dimension included experiences of being heard and of confidentiality. The communicative dimension included elements of collaborative decision-making, and last, the supportive dimension included elements of employee’s support. The lack of clarity regarding the roles of the various actors, secondly, the lack of a shared target and collaborative decision-making prevented the realization of the multi-actor shared agency. In order to succeed in returning to work, the employee's agency should be supported by the multi-actor shared agency means. It was essential for the multi-actor shared agency to recognize that negotiations with workplace actors on return to work are held, instead of internal health care platforms, in a public platform. Keywords: agency, multi-actor shared agency, collaboration, work-related rehabilitation, joint negotiation, returning to work, vocational rehabilitation, occupational health care, multiple case study, qualitative research

Non-State Actors and Conflict Management in Proxy Wars

The influence and impact of non-state actors, particularly humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in conflict management and in contemporary proxy wars, has been at the core of several scholarly debates. Peace research scientists developed knowledge about actors and conditions influencing conflict management and peacebuilding at the global and regional level. They have demonstrated that proxy wars survived the Cold War and developed new features. In particular, non-state actors like NGOs, private foundations, and non-profit associations, slowly but firmly entered the conflict management system, providing expertise and new input. International relations scholars investigate the main drivers of global humanitarian phenomena and give empirical reflections suitable for adaptive policymaking. It is commonly agreed that conflicts should be solved, human rights violations stopped, and the most inhumane implications reduced, but questions remain about the effectiveness of intervention and the legitimacy of some actors and tools. The relevance of non-state actors and their roles in conflict management have found in the international relations and peace research an ideal place to develop theoretical and practical implications. Scholars emphasized the various types of actors involved (NGOs, local community representatives, diplomats), and the diverse techniques and approaches developed within and beyond the “traditional” track diplomacy, to conflict transformation. Starting from the assessment of the state of the literature in the current international relations and peace research theoretical debate on civil and proxy wars, those actors who manage conflicts and the methods and techniques they use are explained further. In particular, it is first sustained that nongovernmental actors are engaged in the management of proxy wars in shared agency with governmental ones. Second, conflict transformation is introduced as an interactive technique to manage proxies.

Distributed Cognition and the Experience of Presence in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission

Although research on presence in virtual environments has increased in the last few decades due to the rise of immersive technologies, it has not examined how it is achieved in distributed cognitive systems. To this end, we examine the sense of presence on the Martian landscape experienced by scientific team members in the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission (2004–2018). How this was achieved is not obvious because the sensorimotor coupling that typically underlies presence in mundane situations was absent. Nonetheless, we argue that the Three-Level model can provide a framework for exploring how presence was achieved. This account distinguishes between proto-presence, core-presence, and extended-presence, each level dependent on being able to respond effectively to affordances at a particular level of abstraction, operating at different timescales. We maintain that scientists' sense of presence on Mars involved core-presence and extended-presence rather than proto-presence. Extended-presence involved successfully establishing distal intentions (D-intentions) during strategic planning, i.e., long term conceptual goals. Core-presence involved successfully enacting proximal intentions (P-intentions) during tactical planning by carrying out specific actions on a particular target, abstracting away from sensorimotor details. This was made possible by team members “becoming the rover,” which enhanced their ability to identify relevant affordances revealed through images. We argue, however, that because Mars exploration is a collective activity involving shared agency by a distributed cognitive system, the experience of presence was a collective presence of the team through the rover.

Livestream Experiments: The Role of COVID-19, Agency, Presence, and Social Context in Facilitating Social Connectedness

Musical life became disrupted in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many musicians and venues turned to online alternatives, such as livestreaming. In this study, three livestreamed concerts were organized to examine separate, yet interconnected concepts—agency, presence, and social context—to ascertain which components of livestreamed concerts facilitate social connectedness. Hierarchical Bayesian modeling was conducted on 83 complete responses to examine the effects of the manipulations on feelings of social connectedness with the artist and the audience. Results showed that in concert 1, where half of the participants were allowed to vote for the final song to be played, this option did not result in the experience of more agency. Instead, if their preferred song was played (regardless of voting ability) participants experienced greater connectedness to the artist. In concert 2, participants who attended the concert with virtual reality headsets experienced greater feelings of physical presence, as well as greater feelings of connectedness with the artist, than those that viewed a normal YouTube livestream. In concert 3, attendance through Zoom led to greater experience of social presence, but predicted less connectedness with the artist, compared to a normal YouTube livestream. Crucially, a greater negative impact of COVID-19 (e.g., loneliness) predicted feelings of connectedness with the artist, possibly because participants fulfilled their social needs with this parasocial interaction. Examining data from all concerts suggested that physical presence was a predictor of connectedness with both the artist and the audience, while social presence only predicted connectedness with the audience. Correlational analyses revealed that reductions in loneliness and isolation were associated with feelings of shared agency, physical and social presence, and connectedness to the audience. Overall, the findings suggest that in order to reduce feelings of loneliness and increase connectedness, concert organizers and musicians could tune elements of their livestreams to facilitate feelings of physical and social presence.

The Moral Philosophy of Maria Montessori

This paper lays out the moral theory of philosopher and educator Maria Montessori (1870–1952). Based on a moral epistemology wherein moral concepts are grounded in a well-cultivated moral sense, Montessori develops a threefold account of moral life. She starts with an account of character as an ideal of individual self-perfection through concentrated attention on effortful work. She shows how respect for others grows from and supplements individual character, and she further develops a notion of social solidarity that goes beyond cooperation toward shared agency. Partly because she attends to children's ethical lives, Montessori highlights how character, respect, and solidarity all appear first as prereflective, embodied orientations of agency. Full moral virtue takes up prereflective orientations reflectively and extends them through moral concepts. Overall, Montessori's ethic improves on features similar to some in Nietzschean, Kantian, Hegelian, or Aristotelian ethical theories while situating these within a developmental and perfectionist ethics.

Co-Sounding: Fostering intersubjectivity in electronic music improvisation

Shared music improvisation constitutes a formidable vector for intersubjective connection. Improvisation is a space of non-semantic communication that allows for putting oneself at risk and requires mutual trust and listening, as well as dialogical qualities. This article investigates the intersubjective dimension of improvisation in electronic music praxis, focusing on how the electronic medium can be used to foster mediation between musicians. The article builds on a practice-based enquiry in duo format, conducted in three successive technological settings, with a methodological entanglement of aesthetic and design aims. Systematic video documentation and participant observation provide an analytical counterpoint to an immersion in the improvisatory praxis. A set of design strategies for fostering intersubjective connection in shared musicianship emerges from the research. The findings provide the basis for a dialectical consideration between musical and intersubjective aesthetics. The discussion points to the diversity of social functions of music and their respective aesthetics. Electronic instruments’ inherent plasticity allows for reconfiguring the social space of music-making, and thus opens perspectives for devising synergetic music systems that emphasise an ethos of shared agency over the production of musical objects or performances.

Students’ agency, creative reasoning, and collaboration in mathematical problem solving

This paper aims to give detailed insights of interactional aspects of students’ agency, reasoning, and collaboration, in their attempt to solve a linear function problem together. Four student pairs from a Norwegian upper secondary school suggested and explained ideas, tested it out, and evaluated their solution methods. The student–student interactions were studied by characterizing students’ individual mathematical reasoning, collaborative processes, and exercised agency. In the analysis, two interaction patterns emerged from the roles in how a student engaged or refrained from engaging in the collaborative work. Students’ engagement reveals aspects of how collaborative processes and mathematical reasoning co-exist with their agencies, through two ways of interacting: bi-directional interaction and one-directional interaction. Four student pairs illuminate how different roles in their collaboration are connected to shared agency or individual agency for merging knowledge together in shared understanding. In one-directional interactions, students engaged with different agencies as a primary agent, leading the conversation, making suggestions and explanations sometimes anchored in mathematical properties, or, as a secondary agent, listening and attempting to understand ideas are expressed by a peer. A secondary agent rarely reasoned mathematically. Both students attempted to collaborate, but rarely or never disagreed. The interactional pattern in bi-directional interactions highlights a mutual attempt to collaborate where both students were the driving forces of the problem-solving process. Students acted with similar roles where both were exercising a shared agency, building the final argument together by suggesting, accepting, listening, and negotiating mathematical properties. A critical variable for such a successful interaction was the collaborative process of repairing their shared understanding and reasoning anchored in mathematical properties of linear functions.