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A game for all seasons: lessons and learnings from the JRC’s Scenario Exploration System
Get PDFThe European Commission Joint Research Centre’s (JRC) Scenario Exploration System (SES) is a foresight gaming system developed to facilitate the application of futures thinking to policy-making. It was originally geared at engaging EU policy-makers with scenarios in a facilitated process with a low learning curve. Specifically, the SES was designed to help participants, in less than three hours, to engage in systemic thinking with a long-term perspective and to explore alternative futures on specific issues and themes. When applied in various contexts, the SES proved to have a broader range of applications, which led to communities of practice emerging around the tool. Successful responses to various requests to apply the tool beyond its original focus demonstrated the versatility of the SES. Specifically we discovered its ability to accommodate a large array of scenarios to discuss a very diverse range of issues. The experience accumulated through several adaptations of the SES allows the analysis of the various strengths and weaknesses of the tool as a platform for futures thinking and sharing more broadly the know-how for the creation and application of new versions. Ultimately this article seeks to contribute a series of design suggestions for futures practitioners seeking to develop a playful mode of interaction with scenarios, or those seeking to repurpose the original SES system for use in their own project
Reflections on digestions and other corporealities in artists’ books
Get PDFWith an avid attention to the valuing of embodiment and a championing of the re-emergence of the body as site for discussions of knowledge and knowing, this essay shares aspects of my practice that engage a performative, 11 haptic, situated engagement with the body through the artist’s book. The motivation for the creation of my bookworks was an interest in manifesting situated knowing and embodied ways of becoming. Engaging form, materiality, and bodily history, my artists’ books explore the processes and metaphors of digestion and in one example, mindfulness practice. In libraries and collections with links to health, my artists’ books can be experienced in teaching and research contexts to examine the body, health, illness and wellbeing. This essay focuses on my books which communicate embodied knowledge in several ways: through phenomenological writing to give expression to my irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and how it impacts on my teaching practice in Reflection on Digestion; through bodily material of Entrail Troyen; through the image of the digestive system in On Innards, Reflection on Digestion, and Entrail Troyen, particularly the concertina form emulating the undulations of the intestines; and through images of found objects that resemble the bowels in Huwawa in the Everyday
Common Ground
Get PDFCommon Ground was a solo exhibition, hosted by Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London, a highly regarded independent gallery with an international profile. The exhibition featured a selection of wall and floor works exploring a conflation of the precious or revered with the overlooked or discarded, questioning how our ideas about taste are inherited. The works explore themes of consumption and waste, through the aesthetic elevation of ordinary objects and industrial landscapes such as weeds, transportation pallets and spoil tips: high value porcelain cheek by jowl with blue and white depictions of common plants and waste sites
Coping with authoritarianism in international relocation: a case of cross-cultural adjustment research in context - Cuba
Get PDFPurpose
As the rate of growth in trade of developing and developed economies converges, international business is increasingly taking place in a growing assortment of political and ideological contexts with variable levels of tolerance for plural dissidence. This can create substantial challenges and risks for cross cultural adjustment and increases the potential for assignment failure. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of an authoritarian regime on the process of adjustment amongst expatriate sojourners and draw out lessons for future research and policies for relocation in similar authoritarian contexts.
Approach
This was a qualitative research study over three years making use of participant observation methods as a result of researcher immersion in the local context.
Findings
This study finds that ‘culture’ is an insufficient category for explaining difficulties in cross cultural adjustment and demonstrates that adjustment difficulties under authoritarianism are heightened in the proximate sociocultural context, with geo-political and ideological dynamics creating more challenging conditions of life. Increased levels of social control act to heighten psychological vulnerability amongst sojourners, resulting in coping behaviours that seek a greater degree of psychological alleviation and companionship through more resource-intensive supportive networks and a tendency towards enclavism, thus inhibiting sociocultural adjustment to the host society.
Research implications
Research needs to recognise more fully the diverse nature of contexts in cross-cultural adjustment. Future research should explore different types of contexts and assess what sort of challenges may arise in relation to the process of psychological and sociocultural adjustment and the adjustive resources required to overcome them.
Practical implications
The paper contributes to the understanding of the psychological and sociocultural challenges of international relocation in an authoritarian context and serves as valuable insight for relocation planning in similar conditions, which are an ever increasing feature of international business.
Originality/value
This paper gives a unique insight into international relocation in Cuba and draws out the areas of concern for cross-cultural adjustment under authoritarian conditions. It serves as an example of how context-based research can inform cross-cultural theory and practice within an evolving landscape of doing business globally
Interactive narrative design for geographically dispersed points of interest
No full textIn 2020, the RheijnLand.Xperiences project will connect eight museums along the Dutch-German border region by a continuation network using a story-driven application for mobile devices for an audience between the ages of 14 and 25. The goal of the project is to motivate users to visit other museums in the network. While experiences and stories are individually tailored for each museum, an overarching narrative and experience structure is also designed to establish connections between them. This structure relies heavily on the contemporary narrative and location-based gaming concepts and practices to compensate for the environmental and thematic diversity of each museum. To enrich the overall experience of visiting multiple museums in the network, the design also relies upon shared and regional characteristics. In this chapter, the authors summarize their conceptual approach, findings of the analysis of the distribution of the museums in the region, core elements of the “universal” narrative and experience design, and early results of the development
Resilience as interdependence: learning from the care ethics of subsistence practices
Get PDFThis chapter aims to introduce care and social reproduction to our undertsandings of resilience, the significance of which is that it necessitates a shift away from seeing resilience as something concerned with ‘self-sufficiency’ to one that involves ethical interdependence. By introducing some of the background of feminist work on care, the chapter seeks to highlight the ways that resilient practices require a commitment to social reproduction and mutual interdependency, taking examples of subsistence practices as a point of departure. Traditional subsistence practices are a special point of interest here as they counter the idea that self-sufficiency takes place at the level of the household. The examples presented in this chapter thus aim to illustrate some of the collective and reciprocal dimensions of subsistence practices and highlight that, in producing resilience at a local level, they do so in ways that redistribute resources to counteract socio-economic vulnerability, rather than exacerbating it. Yet significantly, while they each illustrate different forms of social and ecological solidarity, they risk remaining politically ambiguous in how they do so. The chapter begins by introducing feminist perspectives on care and social reproduction, before discussing some of the ethical implications and contradictions when taking place in market economies. The chapter then proceeds by looking at examples of non-market, rural subsistence practices to elaborate this form of resilience as interdependence; an interdependence that holds ethical potential but remains politically ambiguous
Urban texts: art, visual culture, place and the city
No full textThis book will bring together a range of research which reflects the importance of the urban on concepts of contemporary space and experience. Chapters will draw on: guerilla gardening, the politics of nearness, new urbanism, street photography, the rise of megacities, urban ecology, moving image and painting in addressing issues of the city and its enduring focus for a wide range of disciplines.
Contributors include: Tim Edensor, Gil Doran, Anne Minton, Paul O’Neill, Catherine Elwes, and Neil Leach
EMPIRE’S NEW CLOTHES: after the "peaceful violence" of neoliberal coloniality
Get PDFThis article considers neoliberalism through the "peaceful violence" of its social spaces that are stratified and ordered around raciality whilst abjuring the explicit presence of racialised power. Many dominant analyses of neoliberalism in the social science have figured racial injustices as ideological fossils to be swept away by a fundamentally neutral political economy that has shaped all human activity according to market principles. As such, racial injustices are understood as material deviations from conditions of economic power on the one hand, and cultural deviations in hegemonic common sense on the other. Against the grain of these approaches, I argue that racialised power is better understood as a productive technology fundamental to the structuring of our worlds, their neoliberal organisation just one iteration of ongoing coloniality. Contrary to popular analysis and this account of neoliberalism, contemporary racialised violence and nationalist discourse are, therefore, not only consistent with the power of neoliberal classes but also result from weaknesses in their hegemonic power
Legendary artists and the clothes they wore
No full textWhether it’s Cecil Beaton’s flamboyant, classically tailored suits, Frida Kahlo’s love of bright color, or Cindy Sherman’s penchant for minimalism, an artist’s attire often reflects the creative and spiritual essence of his or her work. In Legendary Artists and the Clothes They Wore, fashion authority Terry Newman presents more than forty fully illustrated profiles of masters whose enduring art bears an idiosyncratic stamp—and whose unique way of dress does the same through a signature look, hairstyle, or accessory—and explores the relationship between the two in detail.
In that context, this colorful volume also examines the nonlinear sensibility that has always been the name of the game in what is considered modern style. It examines the dialogue between art and fashion as well as noteworthy artist and designer relationships, such as Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian Collection, primary-colored shift dresses inspired by the painter’s work, and Louis Vuitton’s numerous groundbreaking collaborations with major artists, a concept initiated by designer Marc Jacobs that not only has launched some of the fashion industry’s most successful bags, made the art of contemporary masters available to the world at large, and been copied widely ever since.
Numerous compelling features—anecdotes about the artists and their work; portraits of the artists in their studios; archival photographs; select pairings of fine art and runway imagery; quotations by artists, art critics, and designers—make this a rich, engaging study for fashion and art lovers alike
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