Affective Movement in Robotic Art: Alternatives to the ‘Interiority Paradigm’ in Social Robotics

This papercritically evaluates how emotional and intentional movement is conceptualisedand deployed in social robotics and provides an alternative by analysingcontemporary robotic artworks that deal with affective human-robot interaction(HRI). Within HRI, movement as a way of communicating emotions and intent hasbecome a topic of increased interest, which has made social robotics turn totheatre and dance due to the expertise of these fields in expressive movement.This paper will argue that social robotics’ way of using performative methodswith regards to emotional movement is, nonetheless, limited and carries certainchallenges.  These challenges aregrounded on the claim that social robotics participates in what the authorcalls an ‘interiority paradigm’. That is, movement is understood to be theexpression of inner, pre-determined states. The 'interiority paradigm' poses several challenges to the development of emotional movement, with regards to unaddressed human androbotic imaginaries, an emphasis in legibility and familiarity, and arestrictive interior/exterior binary that limits the role of movement in anaffective connection. As an example of how robotscould be imagined beyond this interiority paradigm, the author proposes to turnto contemporary robotic art.Robotic art’s view on affective movement as a matter of evocationand of performative co-creation might inspire the development of robots thatmove beyond the requirement of being mere copies of a human interiority.  While the intersection between robotics andthe performing arts is a fruitful field of research, the author argues in thispaper that the way in which movement is currently being developed throughperformative methods has certain shortcomings, and that the perspective of roboticart on affective movement might open up a more interesting area of explorationfor social robotics, as well as expose those aspects of theatre and dance thathave being unaddressed in robotics. 

Caliber and Chain Conditions in Soft Topologies

In this paper, we contribute to the growing literature on soft topology. Its theoretical underpinning merges point-set or classical topology with the characteristics of soft sets (a model for the representation of uncertain knowledge initiated in 1999). We introduce two types of axioms that generalize suitable concepts of soft separability. They are respectively concerned with calibers and chain conditions. We investigate explicit procedures for the construction of non-trivial soft topological spaces that satisfy these new axioms. Then we explore the role of cardinality in their study, and the relationships among these and other properties. Our results bring to light a fruitful field for future research in soft topology.

Guidelines for Deciphering Cultures

In order to go beyond an oversimplified—even erroneous—interpretation of intercultural situations, the approach developed in this book offers a new avenue to uncover the cultural logics underpinning social intercourse. This chapter expounds on the methodological aspects of our comparative and interpretative approach. It provides readers with practical guidelines to apply this method to new management situations and/or cultural areas. Firstly, it presents the specificities of empirical surveys: how to conduct interviews so as to gather fruitful field data. Secondly, it provides a set of steps and criteria enabling to gradually decipher the universe of meaning of a culture. The seven criteria—Redundancy, Strangeness, Embarrassment, Self-evidence, Opposition, Coherence, Horizontality—are illustrated by examples taken from fieldwork done in France, the USA, Cameroon, and Tunisia. Finally, beyond these isolated examples, the chapter provides an illustrative demonstration of the way the method can be applied to a given management situation.

Revisiting Language, Ethnicity, and Identity in the Former Yugoslavia

This special edition on the language issues in the former Yugoslav space (AWPEL 2.1) provides some new perspectives and approaches to the study of the interplay of language, ethnicity and identity among the peoples of the former Yugoslavia. When I first began focusing on this topic in the early 1990s, the sociolinguistic and ethnographic linguistic literature on the peoples and languages of this multi-ethnic space seemed to be in its infancy. This volume reveals that the case of the former Yugoslavia has proven to be a fruitful field for scholarship in these areas of linguistic inquiry. It is pleasing to see here how younger researchers approach the complex issues arising from the breakup of Yugoslavia and the disintegration of the joint language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian. [...]

Simpósio Nacional de Diagnóstico de Enfermagem: building a knowledge field for Nursing

ABSTRACT Objective: to recount the story of the Simpósio Nacional de Diagnóstico de Enfermagem (National Nursing Diagnosis Symposium), from 1991 to 2018, describing the official themes and main recommendations; and reflect on the construction, in this process, of a specific field of knowledge for Nursing. Results: the manuscript became a historical study, using official documents resulting from the thirteen Symposiums conducted in the period from 1991 to 2018 as the primary source of empirical data. The outcomes were divided into two stages, from 1991 to 1992, when the event was linked to Interest Groups in Nursing Diagnosis; and from 1996 to 2018, when ABEn Nacional took over the organization and execution of the event. Final considerations: the socialization and exchange of knowledge about systematization of care, Nursing Process and nursing terminologies, themes focused on SINADEn, contributed decisively to the construction of a fruitful field of knowledge for Nursing.

Nietzsche’s Approach on History and The Great Gatsby’s Historiographical Performance

For Nietzsche, history creates the dull illusion of past. The constructed nature of the historiography that narrates the past through the perspective of the present drains the vital energy of the past and transforms it into a carcass. For the cure, Nietzsche suggests incorporating the artistic approach into the practice of historiography. He explains that art has the opposite effect of history in terms of vitality. In his consideration, if history transforms into a pure piece of art than it would involve and be able to transmit the vital energy of past. The artistic approach to historiography would recreate the sensation of the past hence the representation would sustain the vital energy. Nietzsche’s suggestion towards the artistic execution of historiography provides a fruitful field to discuss the historiographical performance of the diegetic historical film. Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby’s (2013) will be analyzed through in the presentation with such perspective.

Halloween and the Limits of Cinematic Meaning

The article reads John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) from the perspective of the (im)possibilities of cinematic meaning. The horror film seems to be an especially fruitful field for such studies, since its aestheticpsychological mechanism usually aims at destroying the kind of spectatorial position necessary, at least according to semiotic and postsemiotic theory, for the generation and reading of meaningful signs. Placing the film in the theoretical context of such scholars as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Kaja Silverman, Steven Shaviro and Todd McGowan, I attempt to analyse the ways the film disables the production of semiotic meaning and rewrites some of the well-established concepts of film theory. I call into play Barthes’s concept of the punctum, McGowan’s cinema of intersection, Lacan’s later theory of the sinthome, Silverman’s post-Lacanian ideas about the cinematic gaze and the spaces of spectatorship, and Shaviro’s provocative insights about affective cinema so as to indicate how a film may prove its quality precisely at the points where it does not make sense

Introducing the Corpus of Dutch English

Data collection is now underway for a new corpus of ‘Dutch English’ within the broad scope of World Englishes. This news is often met with suspicion from ELT practitioners, SLA researchers and the average person on the street, Dutch and English L1s alike. How could aDunglish-style interlanguage arising from ‘imperfect learning’ be cast as legitimate regional variation? Yet this has been a fruitful field for many decades across Asia and Africa, and researchers in Europe are starting to follow suit (see e.g. Erling, 2004; Erling & Bartlett, 2006 for the case of Germany). With English being used for intra-national purposes on the continent all the more frequently, especially in higher education, it is not hard to find examples of regionally flavoured English being more appropriate than any native ‘norm’.

Culture-Bound Collocations in Bestsellers: A Study of Their Translations from English into Turkish

This paper discusses the treatment of culture-bound collocations in translations of three recent English bestsellers into Turkish. The findings are categorized as per the nature of the example and translation strategy, and they are further discussed within the framework of domestication and foreignizing. Factors that may affect translators, such as context, the demands of publishers in Turkey and the genre of the novels – bestsellers – and the relations between best-sellerization, popular fiction, and translation are also discussed. The conclusion includes reflections concerning the consistency in the choices of translators, the least preferred strategies and eleven factors that may affect the translators of bestsellers. It is argued that the fact that the source language is English and the source books are bestsellers have affected the choices of the translators. In conclusion, some suggestions in reference to the translation of bestsellers are made and it is emphasized that not only translations of classical literature, but also of popular fiction constitute a fruitful field of study for translation scholars.