Towards a Noncompliant Pedagogy of the Image: Reading Negentropic Bifurcatory Potentials in Video Images

The authors explore the noncompliant pedagogy of the image based on their video Autopoietic Veering: Schizo Socius of Tokyo and Vancouver (2021). It is not the kind of trendy modelized video abstract or kinetic presentation eagerly promoted by international publishers; it is a cross-cultural collaborative work intended to generate affirmative temporal ruptures of entropic habitual modes of seeing, memorizing, and thinking of human and nonhuman life in the cities of Tokyo (Japan) and Vancouver (Canada). The authors elucidate Stiegler’s (2015b) concept of a “global mnemotechnical system” that stores and produces human memories in vast digital archives and databases (tertiary retentions) through “mnemonic control” (Parisi & Goodman, 2011). The authors repurpose video images to interrupt and recontrol human perception and memories as “living engines” (Lazzarato, 2006). They foreground the philosophical work of Deleuze, Heidegger, and Virilio to rethink and revive the creative act of “critique” (Foucault, 1997) through “metamodelization” (Guattari, 1995; Manning, 2020); therefore, they plug these apparently incommensurable modes of thinking into their readings of the video’s images. They read the images as “time-images” and focus on their five dimensions that possibly activate “spiritual automation” (Deleuze, 1989), which they assess as “negentropic bifurcatory” potentials (Bradley & Kennedy, 2019).

Visual Rhetoric and the Power of Imagery: A Brief Lesson in the Rhetorical Power of Images and the Need for phronesis and krisis in the Teaching of Visual Rhetoric

Since the ancient rhetoricians, humans have awarded imagery, the visual, and the vivid an extraordinary effect on emotions and memory. Such assumptions have led to iconophobia, iconoclasm, and myths about the special power of images. The issue of the power of pictures, however, is more complicated. As all other kinds of rhetorical utterances, the visual can be both powerful and powerless depending on the circumstances. For many pictures, the rhetorical power lies not mainly in their political deliberation, but instead in their nature as demonstrative or epideictic rhetoric: a rhetoric that does not primarily advocate immediate change, but tries to increase adherence to existing view-points, attitudes and values. Even though visual rhetoric may perform a powerful address to those who are already convinced, it does not necessarily hold much power over adversaries and sceptics. This article argues that when teaching visuality and the power of imagery, educators ought to help young pupils – and the citizenry in general – not only to decode visual communication, but also to interpret and evaluate it. The first requires knowledge about rules of visual literacy, the second requires not only critical thinking, but also situational and cultural knowledge, as well as sound judgment.

Transferring Ethnopharmacological Results Back to Traditional Healers in Rural Indigenous Communities – The Ugandan Greater Mpigi Region Example

In ethnopharmacology, scientists often survey indigenous communities to identify and collect natural remedies such as medicinal plants that are yet to be investigated pharmacologically in a laboratory setting. The Nagoya Protocol provided international agreements on financial benefit sharing. However, what has yet only been poorly defined in these agreements are the non-financial benefits for local intellectual property right owners, such as traditional healers who originally provided the respective ethnomedicinal information. Unfortunately, ethnopharmacologists still rarely return to local communities. In this video article, the authors present a method for transferring results back to traditional healers in rural indigenous communities, taking the authors’ previous studies among 39 traditional healers in Uganda as an example. The authors’ approach is based on a two-day workshop, and the results are presented as original footage in the video article. The authors’ work demonstrated a successful method for ensuring bidirectional benefit and communication while fostering future scientific and community-work collaborations. The authors believe it is the moral duty of ethnopharmacologists to contribute to knowledge transfer and feedback once a study is completed. The workshop method, as an example for science outreach, might also be regarded as a valuable contribution to research on education theory and science communication.

Embodied Becoming – Student Teachers’ Reflections on Their Filmed Teaching

This study examines student teachers’ reflections on recordings of their teaching during a period of internship related to a subject didactic course in Swedish. Bodily expressions, not as frequently explored as verbal ones, are in focus. Data consists of video papers, multimedia documents, combining clips of video recordings and reflective texts on the clips. The purpose is to gain knowledge about student teachers’ reflections on and learning of bodily expressions in teaching, using video papers. The analysis of the video papers is descriptive phenomenological, searching for the meanings of the phenomenon. The findings indicate that video papers contribute to student teachers’ reflections and learning about bodily expressions in terms of how they move in front of students, what impressions their bodies convey, how they manage to make contact and how they use their voices. Video papers complement the memory image and through recordings, bodily expressions get attention and are verbalized.

Innovative Uses of Visual Technologies in Initial Teacher Education: Changing Policy to Support Practice during covid-19

In Australia, schools and faculties of education are mandated to abide by a policy requiring preservice teachers (pst s), to complete supervised professional placement (pe) in schools. The pe are drawn upon to meet the assessment criteria for degree completion. Two strategies are reported that supported individuals and education institutions to meet policy requirements while in lockdown. First, technology was used to overcome the challenge of providing pe for hundreds of pst s by supporting online learning experiences. In the second, visual technologies were used to support pst s to meet the needs of an assessment criterion. Findings indicate that innovative solutions to challenges with pe and related assessments at the university can be mobilized in a short time frame using visual technologies. Further findings indicate that, in unprecedented times, policies developed for use in different contexts can be met with innovative collaborative efforts with a focused goal that transcend seemingly insurmountable challenges.

Children’s Virtual Worlds and Friendships during the covid-19 Pandemic

From March 2020 in Australia, the covid-19 pandemic resulted in regulations for social distancing, which meant that students were homeschooled. Social distancing exponentially increased the exposure of most young children to digital technology such as touchscreens (iPads) and digital flip cameras. This study focuses on two seven-year-old children who maintain their friendship during covid-19 by imaginary performances and playing virtual games. A cultural–historical approach is used in the study to analyze the children’s experience as they connect through virtual worlds and build imaginary spaces, contributing to sustaining their relationship during challenging times. Findings indicate that the children built a collective social situation of development integrating sophisticated imaginary, real and virtual worlds. The children’s perspective – their motive orientations and intentions towards a new social situation provided new opportunities for learning in a virtual imaginary world. The combination of a real, an imaginary and a virtual world supported the children to experience a range of emotions including joyous moments, empathy and attunement as they encouraged each other to participate.

Web-Conference Lecturing: In Dialogue with Student Experiences During a Pandemic

covid-19 is an omnipresent feature of 2020, both globally and within Australia. For university students, a consequence of this has been the shift from on-campus to online delivery. Exploring these visual realities for lecturers and students, this article engages in Bakhtinian dialogism; a dialogic interaction that is born between peoples searching for meaning (Bakhtin, 1986). To do so, the authors engaged with and responded to students’ survey data whom they lecture and coordinate. Although the survey had limited responses, it enabled the authors to dialogue about received knowledge (istina) from students and contemplate this in relation to the authors’ own perspectives and experiences (pravda). Through this engagement, they suggest the importance of visually imbued emotive connectivity and dialogic relational care within web-conferencing, as well as didactic lecturing as valid forms of visual engagement.

Digital Technologies as a Panacea for Social Isolation and Loneliness among Older Adults: An Intervention Model for Flourishing and Wellbeing

This article explores whether digital communication technologies have applicability in reducing social isolation and loneliness among older adults. Issues of social isolation and loneliness among older adults are important as they are identified risk factors for mortality, disability, cognitive ability, depression and poor wellbeing. This problem is more urgent due to the Covid-19 pandemic which has required older adults to physically and socially distance from family, friends, neighbours, communities and health services. In the context of the present Covid-19 pandemic, this article is of interest to educators, social workers, community service providers, health service practitioners, gerontological scholars involved in preparing older adult communities for present and future traumatic events resulting in socially isolating experiences. The literature identified that use of technology to promote social connection and enhance wellbeing for older adults can be an effective intervention, but more information is needed as to what aspects of such interventions make them effective. This research advocates for improvement in wellbeing and social connectedness of older adults through consideration of interventions through a model for flourishing and wellbeing. The research contributes to our growing understanding of how to change the way we think, feel and act towards older adults, ageing and flourishing.

A Virtual Choir Ecology and the Zoom-machinic

covid-19 has changed the way we sing in choirs and has seen the extraordinary uptake of Zoom as a video chat platform across society. This is a reflective tale of four choirs members and their insights into how they improvised with traditional choir singing in a Zoom space. It consideres how zoom pedagogies allowed them to bridge social isolation during the pandemic. It includes the voices of the conductor; music teacher/technician; the voice of a media savvy artist choir member and finally the voice of a singing visual educator. The article embeds Deleuzoguattarian thinking. It draws on the concepts of the machinic assemblage and becoming as choir participants who embraced Zoom to facilitate song. Singing in a zoom virtual choir brings forth a burgeoning new relational way of being. To find ways to sing and imagine life and self without physical, temporal and spatial borders.

Flight, Climate Change, and Dangerous Times for Art and Pedagogy

In his last book Chaosmosis, Felix Guattari (1995, p. 129) argues that both “intellectuals and artists have got nothing to teach anyone,” and that they produce “toolkits composed of concepts, percepts and affects, which diverse publics will use at their convenience.” In this video presentation and accompanying article, the authors explore Guattari’s claim as a provocation for visual pedagogy and play with the idea that an artist might have nothing to teach anyone in relation to the idea of visual pedagogies. And, then, what happens when an artist and a teacher talk about visual pedagogies? To open up a dialogue, they employ the cliché, ‘I don’t know much about art but I know what I like’. This statement invites thoughts on the tensions between truth-telling, disciplinarity, and affect. Here the authors take the cliché a step further within the context of visual pedagogies and meaning making. They position this dialogue with the cinematic art work, Flight (2018), which aims to give the viewer a different sensation of the world, to render the familiar unfamiliar, and to let things be (Roder & Sturm, 2017), in order to think differently.