Interdisciplinary Gerontology in Higher Education: A Case Study From Soup to Nuts

Through the lens of a multi-year joint project initiated by faculty in Social Work and Digital Arts at Lehman College, the City University of New York's senior college in the Bronx, NY, this paper provides a guide on how to initiate, implement and evaluate interdisciplinary collaborations in gerontology. The paper also suggests ways to ensure that these collaborations can support tenure and promotion processes, funding initiatives, and pedagogical enhancements. The paper focuses on how to make use of campus resources, including departmental Chairs, research offices, and campus-wide committees to identify appropriate collaborators and funding sources; how to nurture productive interdisciplinary relationships, such as clarifying disciplinary expectations and participants' professional needs; and how to maximize return on the effort for tenure and promotion, such as producing publishable content, identifying appropriate opportunities for interdisciplinary publishing and presenting, advocating for interdisciplinary collaborations, and developing interdisciplinary syllabi, an example of evidence-based high-impact pedagogy.

Egyptian Facebook satire: a post-Spring carnivalesque

The Arab Spring offered Egyptians a brief opportunity for political freedom of expression; it also offered many creative youths a chance to experiment with their newfound digital talents. However, this was soon followed by a state crackdown on public forms of dissent; subsequently, creative expression had to find other platforms and modalities to continue its practices of playful dissent. Through Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984) theory of Carnivalesque, this paper examines how Egyptian youths managed to create alternate spaces, other than the highly scrutinised political square, to challenge officialdom and generate their own folk culture through laughter and creative digital arts. This research is based on interviews conducted with administrators and fans of Facebook pages that offer satirical content in the form of memes and remix videos. Fans of these pages mostly belong to the 1980s and 1990s generations, but they also include younger adults whose formative years were those of the Arab Spring. This study argues that, like Bakhtin’s carnival, laughter and everyday comedy was a means by which creative artists could continue to express their opinions and indirect dissent amid intensifying state surveillance. These spaces, therefore, constituted third spaces away from polarised politics, where fans could playfully discuss the comedy away from the heat of events. They were spaces where youths could exercise control over the objects of laughter and challenge established institutions. Like the carnival, youths exercised Carnival practices of both reversal and renewal to craft a new folk culture of their own that did not have to abide by the rules of patronising politics.

The ARt of Inequality: A Youth Social Justice Exhibition in Augmented Reality

The substantive development in the role of augmented reality (AR) technologies in public spaces provides new opportunities for digital arts and arts activism as a means of increasing awareness of critical social issues. However, because of the digital divide and dominant narratives in the museum, there is an existing racial and socioeconomic gap in (digital) art, activism education, and museum curation. In this paper we present a curriculum that aims to empower high-school-aged youth from minoritized backgrounds through art activism in museum spaces via the development and exhibition of augmented reality art pieces that address social justice issues relevant to youth interests and experiences.

17. Electro Arts, a Tool of Interactive Digital Education: A Case Study

This research analyses the impact of the Elektro Arts Festival on the attending audience, based on the responses offered by 98 respondents, highlighting the socio-demographic characteristics of the participants, the interest in computer art and realising an evaluation of the event’s quality by emphasizing preferences and customs of cultural consumption and identifying the communication and advertising channels preferred by the audience. The organizers of the future editions of the event obtained the necessary feedback on the interest manifested in digital arts as well as on the satisfaction and the preferences of the audience. The Elektro Arts Festival is considered an innovative environment propitious to IT-mediated artistic expression, and the newly organized editions have been linked to the research in the field of computer-based numerical technologies.

Applying Digital Arts Experience to Strengthen the Organizational Culture in Higher Education During the Pandemic

During the COVID-19, schools were faced with changes in organizational culture under the digital education model. It is a new challenge facing higher education universities to promote cultural competitiveness, enhancing the confidence of educators in organizational culture, and communicating the cultural atmosphere to educators through digital technology. This concept paper mainly emphasizes the introduction of Digital Arts experience into organizational culture, thereby enhancing the appeal of the university organizational culture. This requires the university to combine both ideology and technology, highly advocating the organization's core concept through the global digital trend during the pandemic. This concept paper provides a new perspective of change for constructing organizational culture in universities facing education and digital challenges during the pandemic. The Digital Arts experience will be an essential part of the global university organization culture after COVID-19.

Art Therapy in the Digital World: An Integrative Review of Current Practice and Future Directions

BackgroundPsychotherapy interventions increasingly utilize digital technologies to improve access to therapy and its acceptability. Opportunities that digital technology potentially creates for art therapy reach beyond increased access to include new possibilities of adaptation and extension of therapy tool box. Given growing interest in practice and research in this area, it is important to investigate how art therapists engage with digital technology or how (and whether) practice might be safely adapted to include new potential modes of delivery and new arts media.MethodsAn integrative review of peer-reviewed literature on the use of digital technology in art therapy was conducted. The methodology used is particularly well suited for early stage exploratory inquiries, allowing for close examination of papers from a variety of methodological paradigms. Only studies that presented empirical outcomes were included in the formal analysis.FindingsOver 400 records were screened and 12 studies were included in the synthesis, pertaining to both the use of digital technology for remote delivery and as a medium for art making. Included studies, adopting predominantly qualitative and mixed methods, are grouped according to their focus on: art therapists’ views and experiences, online/distance art therapy, and the use of digital arts media. Recurring themes are discussed, including potential benefits and risks of incorporating digital technology in sessions with clients, concerns relating to ethics, resistance toward digital arts media, technological limitations and implications for therapeutic relationship and therapy process. Propositions for best practice and technological innovations that could make some of the challenges redundant are also reviewed. Future directions in research are indicated and cautious openness is recommended in both research and practice.ConclusionThe review documents growing research illustrating increased use of digital technology by art therapists for both online delivery and digital art making. Potentially immense opportunities that technology brings for art therapy should be considered alongside limitations and challenges of clinical, pragmatic and ethical nature. The review aims to invite conversations and further research to explore ways in which technology could increase relevance and reach of art therapy without compromising clients’ safety and key principles of the profession.

Promoting the Empowerment of Young Saudi Women through digital art Events in Light of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s 2030

This study aimed to investigate the notion of empowerment of young Saudi women to in digital arts activities in light of the development strategy within the framework of the Kingdom’s 2030 Vision. It investigated building a digital art system that attracts young women’s minds and skills in support of the digital transformation process in the art field to increase the sustainability of specific job opportunities as well as the percentage of women’s participation in governmental and private sectors. The study employed the survey and Delphi methods, and two rounds of questionnaires were conducted as part of the data collection process. The results of this study tend to indicate that young Saudi women can be empowered through the use of digital art, and increasing their efficiency through education while allowing time for the training process.

A Call to Otherness: Inscribing Digital Vernaculars into the Art Institution

In the mid-2010s, a number of renowned museums and galleries across the world held retrospective exhibitions positioning digital arts within western art history. While inscribing some techno-aesthetic forms and behaviours into the contemporary arts institution, these exhibitions nevertheless cemented the exclusion of others. By examining the role and shortcomings of curatorial practices in this process, this article seeks to frame curating as an art of inclusion able to carve institutional and epistemic space for otherness. In doing so, I argue for the relevance of devices for noticing, defined as a range of tactics that enable the apprehension of digital vernaculars – everyday, ‘lower’ expressions of digital media culture – within institutional sites and discourses. Through these tactics, curators may provoke under-represented cultural actors, forms and behaviours into recognition, reverse the violence of institutional occlusion, and fertilize art histories.