What Lies Beneath

Our ability to dismantle white supremacy is compromised by the fact that we do not fully appreciate what, precisely, white supremacy is. In this chapter, I suggest understanding white supremacy as an epistemological system—an epistemic frame that serves as the foundation for how we understand and interact with the world. The difficulty in dismantling an epistemological system lies in its resilience—a system’s capacity to resist change to its underlying structure while, at the same time, offering the appearance of large-scale reform. Using white supremacy as a case study, here I explore what features enable this resilience. An analysis of white supremacy that presents it as more than a tool of social and political oppression, but as an epistemic system that makes this oppression possible, allows us to better understand, and eventually overthrow, such systems.

Animating Management

This chapter studies how the management theory of digital animation studios like Pixar Animation has been influenced by the paradigms that premise their unpredictable algorithmic animations. This epistemic frame leads Pixar to represent creativity as the unpredictable product of carefully controlled conditions and parameters. This collapse of technology, animation, and management science helps to sculpt Pixar’s own corporate image as both an animation studio and a technology company. These findings nuance existing accounts of post-Fordist labor in creative industries.

Triangulating the Atlantic: Blanco White, Arriaza, and the London Debate over “Spain”

Challenging the epic nationalist academic framework built around tropes of national origins, colonial emancipation, and independence, this study looks at the early articulation of alternate definitions of Hispanicity and of Spain’s wrestling role within its cultural and economic colonial network. At stake here is the instability between Spain as a signifier and its plural signifieds: through the many issues of “el Español,” José Blanco White sought to resignify “lo español” ie Spanishness as a plural Transatlantic network of cultural connections through the image of a decentralized confederation, a full enfranchisement of criollos, and a questioning of colonial logics which included a refutation of slavery and of peninsular preeminence. Poet and propagandist Juan Bautista Arriaza, by contrast, mobilized a series of tropes (metaphors, allegories, hyperboles) which signified Spain as uniquely peninsular, and redefined Creole agency as subaltern and peripheral, thus reinstating a Eurocentric colonial agenda at a time when the metropolitan Bourbon state had been entirely overwhelmed. The theoretical shift of a postnational Transatlantic Studies with its emphasis on circulation and transit – its inherent challenge of the national epistemic frame – recasts this debate no in nationalist terms but historically within the new network of neocolonial cultural and commercial flows where London had become a prominent metropolis.

The Learning Space in Tutoring

Following the relational turn that has been observed in the areas of therapy and medical care (cf. Dinis 2010), a similar trend is beginning to develop in education. One didactic manifestation is in academic tutoring, and can be considered as a prototype of personalized education, which is founded on interactivity, dialogicality, and languaging. In our text, we focus on the phenomenon of interactivity and, predominantly, languaging as the substrate for the emergence of a special domain. Here, the learning space is defined as “a cognitive situation where a learner attunes in his/her own epistemic change.” We observe that a learning space occurs as a teacher/tutor engages with aspects of the student’s/tutee’s epistemic frame by questioning, commenting on, or perspectivizing the utterances of the student. It follows that a learning space can be necessary but not sufficient for effective learning. As we show, some research into tutoring excessively idealizes it as an effective teaching tool. In the course of our brief scrutiny we find that success of the learning process also draws on factors like: being prepared being good at hearing and using hints being willing to improvise a learning trajectory allowing some degree of interdependence with the tutor using many kinds of first-order activity

Neurohermeneutics A Transdisciplinary Approach to Literature

Summary In the epistemic frame of the biocultural turn and of the neuroaesthetics, we have developed neurohermeneutics as an approach to literature that aims at contributing to the current debate about the linkage between literary, cognitive and neuroscientific studies, focusing on the relationship between mindbrain processes mirrored in the formal features of the text and the strategies activated by the author in a text in order to guide the reader in imagining, emotionally feeling and cognitively getting meanings out of the literary experience. The aim of the neurohermeneutical approach is to grasp and describe phenomenologically the mirroring process between the two extremes of the literary experience, i.e. the writer’s creative process as it is mirrored in the formal features of the literary work and the reader’s imaginative reconfiguration of the text, and what they share in common. The reader revives the mental imaginative processes of the author by creating his/her unrepeatable individual experiences of the text and subjectively redesigning it in an endless loop of features that trigger the imagination and its creative potential both while writing and by reading literature.

A Framework for Computational Thinking Dispositions in Mathematics Education

This theoretical article describes a framework to conceptualize computational thinking (CT) dispositions—tolerance for ambiguity, persistence, and collaboration—and facilitate integration of CT in mathematics learning. CT offers a powerful epistemic frame that, by foregrounding core dispositions and practices useful in computer science, helps students understand mathematical concepts as outward oriented. The article conceptualizes the characteristics of CT dispositions through a review of relevant literature and examples from a study that explored secondary mathematics teachers' engagement with CT. Discussion of the CT framework highlights the complementary relationship between CT and mathematical thinking, the relevance of mathematics to 21st-century professions, and the merit of CT to support learners in experiencing these connections.