The Intergenerational Value of Natural Heritage

Even though the concept of natural heritage is well received, its meaning is usually restricted to extraordinary natural sites. This contribution argues that a broader understanding is necessary in order to fully acknowledge the intergenerational value of natural heritage. By drawing on recent insights in plant ethics, three facets of the normative meaning of the concept of natural heritage can be highlighted: It expresses the value of natural sites as part of human civilization, it lays emphasis on the uniqueness of distinct parts of nature, and it expresses the willingness of present generations to present nature as a gift to future generations in order not to restrict their ways to shape nature. In particular, the value of natural heritage is constituted by a communal experience of nature and the willingness to share that experience with upcoming generations.

The Development of Sports Fan: From Self-Identification to “Diehard”

The following insight literature review describes the process that sports fans undergo in the development of their fandom – from the individual, self-identification phase to the mass-audience, communal experience and ultimately to the “diehard fan” distinction. Sports fans begin their fandom as individual entities who find emotional satisfaction in cheering for a particular team or athlete because those teams and athletes provide an important psychological component or addition to their lives. As fans’ connections to teams and athletes grow stronger, they seek out other like-minded individuals to share their emotions and feelings, which helps reinforce these attachments Thus, the communal experience in sports is born. The communal sports fan experience can also set groups against each other for the same reasons – the “us against them” mentality. The spread of new and social media platforms provides even stronger and instantaneous relationship building and maintenance opportunities among sports fans – enabling a “virtual” communal experience. The end result of fervent sports fans’ development is to become the most committed fan – the “diehard fan”. Keywords: fans, sports, group identity, self-identity, group values, diehard fan, communal experience

Telling Students it’s O.K. to Fail, but Showing Them it Isn’t: Dissonant Paradigms of Failure in Higher Education

Educators increasingly extol failure as a necessary component of learning and growth. However, students frequently experience failure as a source of fear and anxiety that impedes risk-taking and experimentation. This essay examines the dissonance between these generative and stigmatized paradigms of failure, and it offers ideas for better negotiating this dissonance. After conceptualizing the two paradigms, I examine various factors that reinforce failure’s stigmatization. I emphasize precarious meritocracy, a neoliberal ethos driven by hypercompetitive individualism that makes success a zero-sum game, and that causes especially significant harms on students who are already socially stigmatized. Efforts to ameliorate paradigm dissonance tend to focus on changing student dispositions or lowering the stakes of failure. I instead propose wise interventions that include analyzing the systemic roots of stigmatized failure and making failure a more communal experience. I then briefly address the systemic transformations necessary to cultivate generative failure more broadly.

Telling Students it’s O.K. to Fail, but Showing Them it Isn’t: Dissonant Paradigms of Failure in Higher Education

Educators increasingly extol failure as a necessary component of learning and growth. However, students frequently experience failure as a source of fear and anxiety that impedes risk-taking and experimentation. This essay examines the dissonance between these generative and stigmatized paradigms of failure, and it offers ideas for better negotiating this dissonance. After conceptualizing the two paradigms, I examine various factors that reinforce failure’s stigmatization. I emphasize precarious meritocracy, a neoliberal ethos driven by hypercompetitive individualism that makes success a zero-sum game, and that causes especially significant harms on students who are already socially stigmatized. Efforts to ameliorate paradigm dissonance tend to focus on changing student dispositions or lowering the stakes of failure. I instead propose wise interventions that include analyzing the systemic roots of stigmatized failure and making failure a more communal experience. I then briefly address the systemic transformations necessary to cultivate generative failure more broadly.

“Death Is Not a Wedding”: The Cemetery as a Polish American Communal Experience

This chapter fills a void of study on Polish cemeteries in the United States while also following interethnic divisions within the Catholic Church. Comparing a wide array of Polish cemeteries in the United States and Poland, it highlights their role in ethnic and national affirmation and a fulfillment of religious law to bury apart. At the same time, it considers the limits of ethnic distinction as later generations experience upward mobility. Although Americans of Polish descent continued to bury in Polish grounds using linguistic and cultural symbols, their sense of integration led them to embrace broader funerary conventions and subsume distinctively Polish norms within larger Catholic and American practice.

Identifying Product Design Trends at Dutch Design Week

Trends in design manifest in many ways, from fads in form or production to themes or topics explored. These trends are often generated within the design community, but also reflect local and global culture. To identify meta-trends in contemporary design culture, we worked with nine student researchers to gather data seen during an academic trip to Dutch Design Week in 2017. The results indicated growing interest in four central themes: identity, globalization, technology, and production. From these themes, nine trends were outlined; social engagement, production consciousness, design for agency, material innovation, humanist design, humanity and technology, re-interrogating history, speculative design, and questioning the role of design practice itself. We noted a shift from narrative-driven to experiential designed objects and a change from individual expression toward communal experience. We also observed a discipline in flux as designers struggle with these large themes, objecthood, and the role of the designer.

Analyzing Gospel

This article presents an analytical paradigm that employs the repetitive musical cycle known as “the vamp” to illuminate the interrelation of form, experience, and meaning in African American gospel music, focusing on music performed by gospel choirs with soloists. I argue that, more than just a ubiquitous musical procedure, the gospel vamp functions as a ritual technology, a resource many African American Christians use to experience with their bodies what they believe in their hearts. As they perform and perceive the gospel vamp's characteristic combination of repetition and escalation, these believers coproduce sonic environments that facilitate the communal experience of a given song's textual message. Through close readings of four canonical songs from the gospel choir repertoire—Kurt Carr's “For Every Mountain,” Brenda Joyce Moore's “Perfect Praise,” Richard Smallwood's “I Will Sing Praises,” and Thomas Whitfield's “I Shall Wear a Crown”—the article examines the phenomenological implications of gospel's communal orientation, outlines the relationship between musical syntax, musical experience, formal convention, and lyrical content in this genre, and suggests that analyzing gospel offers a way of studying how many black Christians come into contact with the invisible subjects of their belief.