Open Access Journals at Aalborg University
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Weeping out Loud:: Embodiment in the Contemporary Lament Learning Process
Get PDFLamenting is a bodily experience, a means of expressing grief or sorrow, involving the shedding of tears and crying while singing. It stands as a deeply communal expression of grief and other profound emotions. This tradition is global and has been found in different parts of the world, from rural China (McLaren 2008) to Bangladesh (Wilce 2009) and from Ireland (McLaughlin 2019) to Greece (Caraveli-Chaves 1980). While some variation exists across traditions, a common thread worldwide is that laments have predominantly been oral traditions among women (McLaren 2008, 2). In this article, we look at the learning process of lamenting in contemporary Finland from a bodily and experiential perspective using somatics and somaesthetics as our framework
The Evolution of The Dream: Representations of The American Dream in Two Films from the 21st Century
Get PDFThis paper debates the current state of the American Dream, once central to the identity of the United States, based on contemporary representations of the Dream that have taken root in the 21st century. These arguments are founded in the cultural analyses of Muccino’s The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) and Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), due to their diametrically opposing representations of the concept. Through these analyses, I find that the Dream has evolved from a debate on whether it could be real, to a debate on whether it should be pursued in the first place.This paper debates the current state of the American Dream, once central to the identity of the United States, based on contemporary representations of the Dream that have taken root in the 21st century. These arguments are founded in the cultural analyses of Muccino’s The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) and Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), due to their diametrically opposing representations of the concept. Through these analyses, I find that the Dream has evolved from a debate on whether it could be real, to a debate on whether it should be pursued in the first place
On Academic Filmmaking as a “Messy” Methodology
Get PDFHow would you make a documentary, stranded in your house, in the middle of a global pandemic? What happens to your project, and what happens to the filmmaker-researcher?
On the eve of the global Covid-19 pandemic, I returned from Melbourne to Istanbul to begin filming the documentary which is the practical side of my Ph.D. project on the filmmaking methodologies of contemporary female filmmakers from Turkey. When the outbreak of the pandemic locked the world inside their houses, I turned my house into a studio and started using things I found in the house as my equipment, such as the projector, phones, and books as tripods. My friend turned into a cinematographer, and we learned how to use a 4K video recorder from YouTube tutorials. We filmed the live interviews with the female filmmakers that took place over Skype. The film ended up reflecting the experience of making a film under the pandemic conditions. In this article, I will attempt to think through my filmmaking process and understand “mess” as an experimental approach that works even in an academic context
A Filmmaking Research Continuum: The Articulation of Creative Practice Research
Get PDFExploring aspects of the development of filmmaking research within the Academy over past decades, this article focuses on creative practice-based methods and the establishment of filmmaking as a legitimate research endeavour. It delves into the nuances of filmmaking research methodologies, specifically the rearticulation and repositioning of research practices to encompass both the work of filmmaking production and further filmmaking engagement with its reception. The importance of research statements in elucidating scholarly contributions made by films and other screen works, like scripts and video essays, is emphasised, alongside discussions of peer-review processes and the role of creative practice research journals in fostering critical dialogue within the filmmaking research community. Despite ongoing tensions between academic and industry requirements, the article argues for the progress of filmmaking research as a distinctive discipline with distinct methodologies, highlighting the need for continual refinement in quality assessment metrics to reflect the evolving nature of the field.
 
Attempting an Ontology of Participatory Film
Get PDFIn this video-essay, participatory filmmaker, Paul Cooke, and social anthropologist, Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, discuss in detail images from two activist-focussed, participatory video projects Cooke has run with young people in South Africa and Lebanon. They ask whether participatory film can communicate their creators’ activist intentions to audiences often far removed from the original context of production. They challenge themselves to answer this question by deliberately juxtaposing their respective disciplines’ distinct philosophical approaches to ontology.
Bazin’s foundational discussion of the ontology of the photographic image (as a universally relatable ‘essence’ encapsulated in the image) is juxtaposed with anthropology’s ‘ontological turn’ (a radical cultural-relativist focus on people and contextually situated meaning). The video-essay reflects on whether the young participant filmmakers’ aesthetic choices generate images which speak for themselves or, alternatively, whether the transfigurations these images undergo through different registers of representation and curation – as the films move from community showcasing event to international film festival or academic setting – change their originally-intended meanings. In identifying tensions between proximity and distance, intimacy and exploitation, the potentials and limitations of mediating local activists’ voices to remote audiences through film is left up to the spectator for final arbitration
Academic Filmmaking in the New Humanities. Video Essays. Introduction to the Special Issue
Get PDFThe article provides an introduction to the second of a pair of special issues devoted to academic filmmaking, which contains ten video essays and prose guiding texts. The article describes the variety of filmmaking practice in the academy, and some of the venues where examples of the practice are published or exhibited. It gestures at the multiple origins of academic filmmaking with special reference to the tradition of the essay film, and finds a key reflexive moment in Eric S. Faden’s (prose) “Manifesto for Critical Media” (2008), which articulated the challenge of using “image, voice, pacing, text, sound, music, montage, rhythm” to create scholarly audiovisual work. The introduction goes on to set out the aims for the special issues, and to describe the contents of the video essays and some of the features, concerns or approaches shared between and across those contents. The video essays derive from fields including videographic criticism, anthropology, experimental cinema, and participatory and activist filmmaking
Why do virtuous individuals accept and promote unethical institutions?
Get PDFThis article defines ethical blindness when considering why otherwise virtuous individuals accept unethical institutional practices. It occurs when individuals possessing organisational power over others promote their self-interests to inhibit or deny promoting the common good. Systems science provides a solution for ethical blindness. It explains why living things possess distributed decision-making to maintain a self-governing existence. Checks and balances are introduced to avoid dysfunctional "group think" or intellectual colonisation. Several Australian case studies are presented. A solution that also improves the wellbeing of all citizens by reducing inequality creates a compelling incentive for politicians to act
Web Conferencing: The Technical and Social Challenges
Get PDFSociety, people, and institutions have reaped the benefits of technologies that allow online meetings and collaboration in real-time ¬¬¬¬- often known as web conferencing technologies. Most of the benefits of these technologies were observed during the COVID-19 pandemic, where efforts to prevent the spread of the virus introduced mass social distancing. In higher education, web conferencing benefits a growing number of students across the world. It enables synchronous online learning, where learning takes place in real time, with communication technologies that permit live audio, video, and text transmission. Extant research suggests that the interplay of technical and social challenges within synchronous online learning, before the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, has not been comprehensively investigated. Additionally, there is a need for thorough studies on the effects of prolonged virtual interactions on individuals, teams, and organizations, stemming from the features of web conferencing technologies. This paper reports ongoing research aimed at exploring the technical and social challenges that affect the success of web conferencing in synchronous online learning. The research investigates the experiences of students and teachers who use these technologies for learning and teaching, and the challenges they face. The work uses theories of technology acceptance and the psychology of user behaviours. The research aims to advance knowledge and offer valuable information to educators and learners. It seeks to enhance the effectiveness of teaching and learning processes using web conferencing technologies, ensuring that they successfully achieve their intended outcomes. The results of this study, in the long-term, will also inform the development of better and improved interventions, practices and strategies for web conferencing, that can be applied in educational and even commercial contexts. The paper also discusses an exploratory study that was conducted to explore the effects of webcam usage on learner engagement in training and tutorial sessions among higher education students. The exploratory study showed that the webcam, even though rarely used in most sessions, had an impact on learner engagement, and can be explored further. Additionally, the technical and social aspects in these online sessions are complex and need more examination
Traversing Situations and Contexts in Networked Learning: The Role of Situated Readiness in Business Education
Get PDFTo meet the goals of business education and develop responsible business leaders, educators need to design networked learning environments that nurture and leverage connections. This includes connecting students to each other, their teachers, to industry and to the community. This paper aims to understand factors that support or inhibit students’ participation in networked learning in a business education context. Productive participation in learning networks is essential if students are to connect meaningfully with people and resources in ways that support their learning and experience. As the physical and digital learning environments students engage in often include complex configurations of tools, tasks, and epistemic resources, they require the skills and dispositions to effectively transition between these environments. Using a situated readiness framework by Hachmann and Dohn (2018), this study presents an analysis of focus group data from business students in higher education to identify ways in which students’ level of readiness impacts on their ability to participate effectively in learning networks. Students in the present study highlighted a range of challenges they faced when attempting to traverse between face-to-face and online learning environments. However, our study also revealed numerous other situations or contexts that business students needed to traverse as part of their networked learning experience. These were grouped into five overarching categories: domain; space and configuration; format, structure and resources; people or groups; and purpose and responsibility. Overlayed onto the situated readiness framework, these categories can be used by other researchers to gain a more nuanced understanding of how students navigate the complexities of networked learning environments. Future research conducted across a range of learning contexts would allow the categories to be refined and built upon. The study also identified skills and dispositions that contributed to students' level of readiness to navigate situations and contexts within networked learning environments, and some preliminary design considerations based on the findings. To support business students in higher education on their journey to becoming responsible business leaders, it is imperative that they are able to participate productively in complex networked learning environments. As educators, this requires us to understand their level of readiness to do so and equip them with the skills and dispositions they need to participate effectively
Everyday datafication and higher education: Student agency, trust and resignation
Get PDFDatafication—the transformation of human life into quantifiable digital data—raises important questions for student agency in higher education. Student agency is central to learning and engagement within university, and the development of agentic selves in students forms a core purpose of higher education. Data-driven practices such as learning analytics promise to support the development of student agency in the context of learning, while at the same time introducing new information and power asymmetries into the relationship between students and the university. Critical research on datafication, meanwhile, has highlighted the threats to student agency posed by data-driven analytics practices that reinforce structural inequalities and depend on the surveillance of student behaviours and bodies. This paper explores student agency in relation to datafication through a discussion of the findings of ethnographic research with university students in Scotland. Drawing on literature from the field of critical data studies that focuses on people’s everyday experiences of datafication, the paper will highlight how students understand, feel about and respond to datafication in their everyday lives, and what this means for their relationship with the university. Students draw on a range of everyday data literacies developed through their experiences of datafied platforms and academic knowledge to make sense of university data practices. They employ diverse tactics for coping with datafication, including minimizing perceived risks by taking measures to protect their privacy and disconnecting from certain platforms. They tend to trust the university with their data, but this trust is conditional and closely related to their overall perception of the university. Above all, perhaps, students are resigned to datafication within and beyond the university. Thus, while students demonstrate agency with respect to datafication in a range of ways, data relations between the university and students are fundamentally top-down, reflecting wider societal dynamics whereby people routinely give up their data in exchange for access to digital services, with little ability to opt out or control what happens to it. Universities, it will be argued, have the potential to introduce participatory forms of data governance that reframe these relations, thus supporting the development of student agency over datafication within and beyond the university