Dramaturgy

The image of the dramaturg resembling a stuffy librarian, as opposed to the largely intuitive process of theatre making, belongs to the past. Contemporary theatre performances not only tell a story, but constantly reflect on the world in which that story takes place and is shown. As a result, dramaturgy has become part of the artistic process. Thus everybody involved in a theatre production is concerned with dramaturgical thinking, i.e. how to relate to material, process, audience and society. The dramaturg crosses borders between theory and practice, between theatre makers, performance and audience. Dramaturgy. An Introduction provides a broad overview of the concept of dramaturgy and the profession of the dramaturg. It is intended for students and teachers of theatre and performance studies, but also for directors, scenographers, actors and for all lovers of theatre.

Border Anxieties

Chapter 5 focuses on EU citizens’ border anxieties and vernacular narratives of ontological (in)security; it argues that such narratives offer insights into the everyday politics of desire for border security predicated upon fantasies of control. Analysis of group discussions centres on how citizens conceptualized ‘the border’, what they understood by ‘tougher’ borders, and why they found bordering practices—including walling—appealing as a policy paradigm for responding to migration in the contemporary EU context. The discussion engages critically with interdisciplinary debates about psycho-social approaches to bordering and the politics of ‘ontological security’. Work orientated by the dominant Laing–Giddens paradigm offers a conceptualization of the relationship between macro-level and micro-level bordering practices, notions of home and belonging, and the illusion of the bounded nation-state as the origin of a pure and stable identity, but it presumes that ‘more bordering’ equates to ‘greater security’. By contrast, Brown’s (2010) psychoanalytical approach to walling offers tools for understanding the counter-intuitive process whereby excessive bordering practices may result from and further stimulate the repression of anxieties, which leads to an obsessive drive that produces the very dangers it seeks to negate. But while Brown’s view helps in part to address the puzzle posed by the contemporary EU context, it ultimately leaves no possibility of escape, no potential for change, and no recognition of actually existing alternatives to ever more bordered states and lives, and yet these counter-narratives are also rendered visible by a vernacular approach to European border security.

Seepage in Objects: a Primer

A critique of ontology which introduces seepage, the process of properties revealing themselves from the matrix forms of an object. What follows is the observation that these properties have their own system of relations, placed in the context of a culture of objects which engages a revealing process. An argument is presented for considering organization as the principle which allows for seepage, understood as an inherently informative and intuitive process where the organization of objects reveals some property and consequently makes us less uncertain about the object. Objects are deposited to be a continual process where the properties represented by the organization of its constituent parts change as they seep beyond its matrix. An object cannot inform us of all of its properties immediately, rather we acquaint ourselves with them as they are brought forth and become enframed as part of how we understand said object.

Demystifying intuition as the main decision system used by farmers.

Over the decades, many researchers have explored the concept of intuition as a decision-making process. However, most of this research does not quantify the important aspects of intuition, making it difficult to fully understand its nature and improve the intuitive process, enabling an efficient method of decision-making. The research described here, through a review of the relevant literature, demystifies intuition as a decision system by isolating the important intuition determining variables and relating them to quantitative intuition research. As most farm decisions are made through intuition, farmers, consultants, researchers and students of farm management will find the review useful, stimulating efforts for improving decision-making skills in farmers. The literature search covered all journals and recent decades and includes articles that consider the variables to be targeted in improving intuitive skill. This provides a basis for thinking about intuition and its improvement within the farming world. It was found from the literature that most of the logical areas that should influence decisions do in fact do so and should be targeted in improving intuition. One of the most important improvement processes is a farmer's self-criticism skills through using a decision diary in conjunction with reflection and consultation leading to improved decisions. This must be in conjunction with understanding, and learning about, the many other variables also impacting on intuitive skill.

Microbial Brazil nut effect

The Brazil nut effect (BNE) is a counter-intuitive process of segregation of a large object inside a vibrated granular medium (GM), which has been studied widely by subjecting GMs to...

“I wish he would explain his explanation”

Pound occasionally provided explications of his Cantos and of his general view of them, rationalizing what was more like an intuitive process. This chapter surveys his general statements on the poem and explications of single passages. His comments are compared with Wallace Stevens’s extensive explications to his correspondents, revealing the different approaches to explication of the two poets. Both finally believed that explanations were superfluous. For Stevens it was the reader’s response that counted, whatever the intention of the poet, while Pound believed he was writing for insiders who had taken the trouble to follow his instructions and reading lists and shared his attitudes.

Eye Tracking of Quantifier Formats

When people are given quantified information (e.g., ‘there is a 60% chance of rain’), the format of quantifiers (i.e., numerical: ‘a 60% chance’ vs. verbal: ‘it is likely’) might affect their decisions. Previous studies with indirect cues of judgements and decisions (e.g., response times, decision outcomes) give inconsistent findings that could support either a more intuitive process for verbal than numerical quantifiers or a greater focus on the context (e.g., rain) for verbal than numerical quantifiers. We used two pre-registered eye-tracking experiments (n1 = 148, n2 = 133) to investigate decision-making processes with verbal and numerical quantifiers. Participants evaluated multiple verbally or numerically quantified nutrition labels (Experiment 1) and weather forecasts (Experiment 2) with different context valence (positive or negative), and quantities (low, medium, or high in Experiment 1 and possible, likely, or very likely in Experiment 2) presented in a fully within-subjects design. Participants looked longer at verbal than numerical quantifiers, and longer at the contextual information with verbal quantifiers. Quantifier format also affected judgements and decisions: in Experiment 1, participants judged positive labels to be better in the verbal compared to the equivalent numerical condition (and vice versa for negative labels). In Experiment 2, participants decided on rain protection more for a verbal forecast of rain than the equivalent numerical forecast. The results fit the explanation that verbal quantifiers put more focus on the informational context than do numerical quantifiers, rather than prompting more intuitive decisions.

Split-Second Trustworthiness Detection From Faces in an Economic Game

Economic interactions often imply to gauge the trustworthiness of others. Recent studies showed that when making trust decisions in economic games, people have some accuracy in detecting trustworthiness from the facial features of unknown partners. Here we provide evidence that this face-based trustworthiness detection is a fast and intuitive process by testing its performance at split-second levels of exposure. Participants played a Trust game, in which they made decisions whether to trust another player based on their picture. In two studies, we manipulated the exposure time of the picture. We observed that trustworthiness detection remained better than chance for exposure times as short as 100 ms, although it disappeared with an exposure time of 33 ms. We discuss implications for ongoing debates on the use of facial inferences for social and economic decisions.

Adventure playgrounds and me: bringing the past into the auto-ethnographic present

This is a personal study aimed at exploring why adventure playgrounds (APGs) have had such a fascination for the author for over 40 years. It weaves a critical and narrative ethnography with an affect-based auto-ethnography, resulting in various voices (author as researcher, narrator, participant) and approaches. The research involved an immersion in the author’s own history with APGs aided by a process of mutual recollection via email with five participants who shared that history; (re)visiting APGs in London, Copenhagen and Berlin; and a process of observation and reflection. This performative and auto-ethnographical approach aims to contribute something new to articulating the significance of APGs. Four themes emerged from this iterative and intuitive process: the mindful audacity of APGs, APGs as places of drama and unspoken narratives, APGs as spaces that are alive in many ways, and the hope that arises from this process of sensemaking. The interplay between these themes offers a socio-cultural view of APGs as symbolic places of heterodoxic and cultural possibility, at odds with a developmental and progressive view of children’s lives.