Loughborough University Library: Open Journals
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The Parallax Gap
Full text linkIn post-conflict Northern Ireland, the artist Willie Doherty has been active in showing how the memory trace of the Troubles lingers on as a spectral presence. Doherty’s work has been influential to a number of visual artists working in response to this context, whose work can be characterized by a heightened sense of in-betweenness and representational, spatial, or temporal instability (Long, 2019). Such work is concerned with an oscillation between the past and the present in order to convey the sense of an uncertain future. Although filmic, photographic, and sculptural works have been deployed by such artists to harness these conditions of uncertainty, it is the medium of drawing that remains relatively under-explored as a way of showing how the specters of violent pasts remain in this fragile context.
This paper is an examination in the use of drawing to show the spectral presence that continues to haunt spaces marred by histories of violence in Northern Ireland’s post-conflict context. The study is underpinned by theories that relate to haunting, but also to psychoanalysis, as read through Slavoj Žižek’s theory of the Parallax Gap. Theoretical concerns are applied to the filmic techniques of the artist Willie Doherty (2007), and to Richard Hamilton’s painting Trainsition IIII (1954). The resultant drawing and textual analysis responds to the spectral-turn in post-conflict art in Northern Ireland, making a case for drawing as a practice of haunting
Review: Smith, C. (2020), Progressive Studio Pedagogy: Examples from Architecture and Allied Design Fields. London and New York: Routledge.
Full text linkN/A (this is a book review
Mapping current research and future directions of Design Literacy with systematic quantitative literature review (SQLR)
Full text linkDesign literacy is an emerging research field that is gaining attention among scholars today. Credit goes to the growing acceptance of design thinking in various disciplines beyond design. Design literacy develops natural abilities in everyone to solve real-world, wicked problems by supporting the cognitive development of concrete (making things) and iconic (making meanings) modes of cognition. The author argues for embedding design literacy in every educational level, particularly across disciplines in higher education. To gain insight into the state of scholarly discourse around design literacy in educational contexts, a systematic quantitative literature review (SQLR) was conducted using 12 databases to map its research direction and define its characteristics. The SQLR revealed several findings. First, the foundations of design literacy are grounded in general education and design education. Second, publications were meagre but well represented by the secondary and higher education level. Finally, two thematic directions were observed - design literacy for making things is the situated practice in secondary education while design literacy for making meanings is for higher education. This SQLR serves as a benchmark review and a starting point to initiate scholarly discourse on design literacy as it aims to contribute to the advancement of research in the field
Drawing and Memory Loss
Full text linkWhile drawing has become a more common tool in art therapies for patients suffering debilitating diseases, it is not commonly seen as a means of tracing cognitive and memory deterioration in dementia patients. In this paper I examine the role of drawing documenting the experiences of two artists with Alzheimer’s disease. Although the patients have different proficiencies, the act of drawing allows them to express their thoughts and emotions, recording their physical and mental decline and inexorable memory loss. Discussing ethical issues around the use of artworks made by people suffering from dementia, I note the importance of giving individuals opportunities to document their life with Alzheimer’s disease. In the act of making images they are able to communicate and share something of their world and be comforted that they continue to share experiences with those around them, even as their faculties falter and fail
In The Blink Of An Eye
Full text linkThe following analysis examines my drawing practice in creating the work Drowning in My Living Room. A Self-Portrait (2020), focusing specifically on a particular emotive state I reached in the process of embodied mark-making. This condition, recognised as the ‘gap’, illuminates the underlying concept of the ‘act’ of drawing as a process of ‘loss’. According to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), the artist experiences loss in the instant between the thought or image in the ‘mind’s eye’ and the split second the pencil or stylus touches the piece of paper or screen. ‘The genesis of the present’ (Newman 1994, 219) – that is the instant act of drawing as the origin of thinking – takes place within this Augenblick or blink-of-an-eye (Derrida 1993, 48); that momentary space or gap spawning interconnections between ‘the now and the non-now, of perception and non-perception’ (Derrida 2010, 73). Derrida deemed drawing to be an act of memory; that is, at the point of contact the image is already lost into the past (Derrida 1993, 68). The un-drawn space has no present but is simultaneously the future and the past; in other words, is a trait or trace. However, I build upon Derrida’s argument and propose that it is at this moment of blindness/loss there also exists the site of possibility, invention and originality, of wonder and astonishment. The Augenblick becomes an ecstatic temporal moment (Pasanen 2006, 221) . It is within this un-filled space that the potential of creating a cosmopoietic worlding is found. In the work, Drowning in My Living Room. A Self-Portrait, the door (half open or half closed?) becomes an analogy for Derrida’s Augenblick, which, like the door ajar, is a threshold between a serendipitous moment and the sense of the irreclaimable – of loss
Faces of informed research: Enabling research collaboration
Full text linkThis paper presents the Faces of Informed Research, an information literacy (IL) framework that aims to enhance researchers’ capacity to participate productively in collaborative interdisciplinary partnerships. Universities and funding bodies increasingly require collaborative approaches to research initiatives. Beneficial for advancing shared research interests, collaboration often requires overcoming significant variation in disciplinary approaches, including how researchers use information to conduct research, to transition unfamiliar researchers into working relationships. A conceptual development process was undertaken to expand on the Seven Faces of Informed Learning to further adapt the framework to collaborative and interdisciplinary research contexts. Embodying critical components of working together, Informed Research especially supports researchers’ collective enablement and enactment of different experiences of using information. Drawing from the pedagogic model Informed Learning Design, an ‘informing narrative' illustrates how the recognition of variations in information experience may be used to enrich researchers’ collaborative capacity. Future investigation will focus on the role of Informed Research in relationship to 1) research training in higher education, 2) group collaboration ‘efficacy,’ 3) research, research management and research collaboration leadership, and 4) the importance of information experiences for successful research, collaboration, and writing
Between Instrument and Art Form
Full text linkThe somewhat self-evident idea of drawing as an active medium is, in many ways, foreign to its historical application in architecture. Architectural drawing maintains a uniquely precarious position between its instrumentality in the process of building and its perception as a minor art form. The result is an uncomfortable double negative whereby the creative potential of architectural drawing is absent from both of these descriptions as an instrument or an art form. This loss, as a form of absence in architectural drawing’s creative potential, is examined in this essay. It traces the arguments for architectural drawing in the two seminal essays: ‘Translations from drawing to building’ (1986) by the architectural historian Robin Evans, and ‘Lines of work: On diagrams and drawings’ (2000) by the architectural philosopher Andrew Benjamin. Comparing Evans’s and Benjamin’s analyses of Pliny the Elder’s account of the origin of painting, it is revealed that loss is a requirement to free architectural drawing from its seconded position to realisable buildings. Embracing loss enables architectural drawing to be perceived as an incomplete, insoluble medium capable of perpetual change. And, rather than operating as a medium that falsely claims to define the spatial experience of buildings, architectural drawing is argued to instead contribute as an active element to an economy of creative mediums exploring expanded ideas of spatial practice. 
Breaking down bias
Full text linkWhat is bias? A review of the library literature reveals no attempts to define the concept. Nor does it reveal systematic attempts to develop interventions that teach the identification and evaluation of bias. Current pedagogical approaches (checklists and bias charts) tend to assume a self-evident definition that categorises bias as unquestioningly bad and disqualifying. Current approaches, however, fail to recognise the cognitive complexity of decoding bias within a source. A decoding process includes identifying the type of bias, determining an objective baseline, recognising biased features, and analysing bias’s impact. Based on work done from several fields—argumentation theory, media bias, media literacy, and history education—this paper proposes an operational definition of bias and a practical framework for conceptualising a process to identify and evaluate bias. This paper will explore the limitations of this framework, as well as existing source evaluation paradigms. If librarians want to prepare individuals to participate in a post-truth society, where disinformation weaponises bias by appealing to emotions and beliefs rather than facts, an inclusive and nuanced conception of bias is a necessary component of library instruction
Information literacy and the body in the Kente-weaving landscape
Full text linkThis article reports on the relationship between becoming information literate and the body in the Kente-weaving landscape. A mixed approach of incorporative ethnographic participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 24 participants through their roles as either master weaver, junior weaver or novice weaver at the Bonwire Kente Centre. Thematic analysis through an embodied-practice approach to information literacy (IL) frames the analysis of this study. The findings show that the body facilitates IL or knowing by understanding and making meaning of the cues afforded it from interaction and participation in the Kente-weaving practices. The body facilitates or enables IL through identifying and understanding cues in an information landscape
