University of Warwick Press: Journals
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Designing and evaluating the Supervision workshop series – embracing overlapping and contradictory views
Get PDFThis reflective piece focuses on the workshops of the Superb-Vision Network: a series of student-led workshops to support doctoral students’ learning of their supervision experiences. As a continuation account of the writing in the previous volume of this journal, this piece introduces how the development and evaluation of the workshops has been informed by the principles of educational design research (McKenney & Reeves, 2018) throughout. As a co-created work between three authors, who acted as facilitators and participant in the workshop, this writing discusses how the multiple evaluation/reflection cycles break down facilitator-participant barriers and contribute to methodological inclusion in terms of improving the future workshops. This writing recognises various challenges in incorporating various feedback when evaluating the workshops and centralises inclusivity when facilitating innovation, such as how to embrace participants’ contradictory views and critical feedback. In the spirit of educational design research, the other goal of this piece is to balance the need to develop a quality ‘product’ whilst simultaneously formulating broader design principles to contribute to ‘scientific understanding’, benefiting the development and evaluation of other peer-based learning initiatives
Corals, Geo-Sociality, and Anthropocene Dwelling
No full textForeboding reports of the Australian Great Barrier Reef’s peril signal not only a fraught politics but the site’s significance as a potent global environmental imaginary and Anthropocene signifier. In this paper I draw on the site’s ecological emergency and consider what humans could learn from coral life through its evolved fluid-dynamic and planetary relationships. Corals, I argue, offer novel insight into more-than-human ontologies, revealing constitutively solid-fluid ways of being responsive to planetary flux and churn. The research responds to increased interest with multi-disciplinary more-than-human investigation of the ways in which human and nonhuman are inextricably connected, as well as work taking Anthropocene ideas as a generative epistemological and ontological opening.
Drawing on fieldwork in Cairns and on the Great Barrier Reef itself, I use embodied methods to trace encounters both above and below the water. The properties of water and fluidity lead me to contemplate further qualities that liquid and ocean phenomena bring to understanding planetary sociality, revealing a dimensionality and relationality beyond surface and fixed readings. Paradoxically, whilst corals and the Great Barrier Reef are commonly framed as needing our protection, they demonstrate enduring structural resilience and tenacity. Such qualities are highly relevant in contemplating strategies responsive to Anthropocene instability and flux.
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Environmental Humanities & Transdisciplinary Research: In conversation with Justin Westgate [31:32
Il sangue e il corallo: La scrittura ecologica di Antonella Anedda
No full textNata fin dall’origine come resoconto della relazione esistenziale tra il soggetto e il mondo, la poesia di Anedda ha accentuato nell’ultimo periodo la dimensione ‘ecologica’, ovvero la costruzione di un sistema in cui elementi naturali, piante, oggetti, esseri umani, animali, regno minerale e inorganico, trovano nella pagina una loro misura di scambio e trasformazione continua. Il contributo focalizza la costellazione testuale ibrida degli ultimi anni (Historiae 2018, Geografie 2021, Poesia come ossigeno 2021, Le piante di Darwin e i topi di Leopardi 2022) rilevando caratteri formali e strutture enunciative proprie di una visione ecologica della storia e della poesia stessa. In particolare, si osservano la pluralizzazione e l’ibridazione delle scritture, le scelte linguistiche e retoriche e la loro teorizzazione in termini di sostenibilità, il meccanismo associativo dell’interferenza che traduce il tempo in spazio, laddove nei segni del visibile si può cogliere l’incessante processo di mutamento e metamorfosi che caratterizza la storia delle specie sul pianeta.
Blood and Coral. The Ecological Writing of Antonella Anedda
Although initially conceived as an account of the existential relationship between the subject and the world, Anedda’s poetry has recently accentuated the \u27ecological\u27 dimension, that is, the construction of a system in which natural elements, plants, objects, human beings, animals, mineral kingdom, and inorganic engage in continuous exchanges and transformations. The contribution focuses on the hybrid textual constellation of recent years (Historiae 2018, Geographies 2021, Poetry as Oxygen 2021, Darwin’s Plants and Leopards\u27 Mice 2022) acknowledging formal characters and enunciative structures proper to an ecological vision of history and of poetry itself. Particular attention is paid to the phenomenon of pluralization and hybridization of writing, linguistic and rhetorical choices as well as their theorization in terms of sustainability, and the associative mechanism of interference translating time into space, where one can grasp the incessant process of change and metamorphosis that characterizes the history of the species on the planet
“When Everything was Forest”: Aikanã Histories and Environmental Destruction in Southern Amazonia
Get PDFThis article explores how the Aikanã, speakers of an isolate language, who live in the south-eastern Amazon, in the Brazilian State of Rondônia, make sense of the drastic transformations brought about by the colonisation of this region. Through an analysis of Aikanã narratives and life histories, the article highlights how Aikanã social memory gives meaning to experiences of contact, land loss and environmental destruction. It will contemplate the temporal markers, i.e. periodisations that occur in narratives and life histories and that delineate Aikanã historicity. These temporal markers refer predominantly to an experienced past between the beginning of the 20th century and the present, from a distant period of displacement from their traditional territory and the severe loss of human lives to the transformation of the forest into pastures for cattle and soy. In this vein, temporal markers are also anchored in space, unveiling sentiments of nostalgia and ecological grief for a past fertility of social life, interconnected with the fertility of the more-than-human world of the lost forest. Exploring Aikanã narrativity and its operation in the construction of social memory, the article aims to contribute to contemporary debates on Amazonian historicities, as well as to the theoretical and political role of Amazonian socialities in face of the current environmental crisis.
Book Review: A New Indigenous University in the Rainforest in Colombia (2020). Studio Lacaton & Vassal and ETH D-ARCH
Get PDFA new indigenous university in the Colombian forest is the title of this work, published in 2020 by Studio Lacaton & Vassal and ETH D-ARCH. The book presents extensive visual documentation and a textual chronicle of the project to build an indigenous university in Putumayo. The publication recounts the beginnings of the project, the participants and provides reflections on the encounters. One of the main contributions in the book is made by the artist Ursula Biemann, from Devenir Universidad. She was the one who made the various contacts possible, after having made an expedition in the Colombian Amazon and having met and got to know the Inga culture. The book also presents the visions and proposals on the essential characteristics of the Inga University, which allows the construction of a first conceptual basis for the project. This document is the result of a collaboration agreement between the Polytechnic University of Zurich, Switzerland (ETH), the Department of Architecture and the Pontificia Javeriana University, Colombia with representatives of the Inga community of Putumayo
Creating a third cultural space: What role does intercultural communication play in PGR teaching?
Get PDFAs an internationalised space, the University of Warwick has over 9500 international students and more than 40% international academic staff. Thus, intercultural encounters are ubiquitous on campus, including teaching spaces. Among all the international student groups, the Chinese student community emerges as one of the largest at Warwick. This offers a unique teaching experience for those who are involved in teaching this group at Warwick. Therefore, in this reflective piece, we draw on our own cultural experiences as Chinese PGRs teaching Chinese PGTs in a UK-based university, with the aim to reflect on the different cultural values underlying our teaching practices influenced by both Chinese and British education cultures. We also reflect on Chinese students’ learning behaviours based on our observations and how those are formed and negotiated by us as Chinese teachers/students in a multicultural communication space at Warwick. We propose the adoption of the concept of third culture teaching, a teaching practice that goes beyond either Chinese education culture or British education culture. In particular, we use two examples to discuss the relevance of intercultural considerations in PGRs’ teaching practices, one targeting the perceptions of student-teacher relationships in supervision and the other on the concept of classroom engagement. With this discussion, we make suggestions for the intercultural-related areas for PGRs to ponder upon and prepare for better teaching practices encompassing a wide range of learning needs
Placing ChatGPT in the Context of Disruptive Technology in Academic Publishing
No full textChatGPT is an AI-based text generating tool which was released at the end of 2022. The tool is significantly better than previous AIs at generating written outputs which appear to have been written by a human including academic research articles. Within academic research there has been considerable interest in whether the tool can be used to write scholarly content, and what the consequences of this would be. Despite the increased quality of output ChatGPT still suffers from many of the flaws which plague other AI tools such as bias, inaccurate training materials and its use leads to concerns around plagiarism and research integrity. This article centres the viewpoint of an academic librarian to discuss ChatGPT in the context of other technologies which have been disruptive. An argument is made that the tool is simply one in a series of transformational developments in scholarly communications, which have all been, eventually, successfully assimilated.
Funder Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Francis Crick Institute which receives its core funding from Cancer Research UK (CC0103), the UK Medical Research Council (CC0103), and the Wellcome Trust (CC0103).
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ChatGPT, Reviewers from Hell & Linguistic Challenges: In Conversation with Beth Montague-Hellen [27:24
Reflections on AI in Humanities: Amplifying marginalized voices of women
No full textAs artificial intelligence (AI) continues advancing rapidly, there is growing potential for its application in the humanities to uncover new insights and perspectives from the historical archives. However, it is also important to consider how AI tools themselves may unintentionally perpetuate existing biases if not developed conscientiously. This critical reflection reflects on the opportunities and challenges of utilising AI to amplify marginalised voices that have been traditionally excluded or underrepresented in mainstream historical narratives, with a focus on women. Through natural language processing and computer vision techniques, AI shows promise in automating the analysis of large volumes of text, image, and multimedia sources to bring to the surface female narratives previously overlooked due to limitations of manual research methods. However, issues such as training data bias, problematic stereotypes learned from legacy sources, and a lack of diversity among AI researchers threaten to replicate the very inequities they are seeking to overcome if not addressed proactively. Collaborative frameworks and design principles centred on representation, accountability and community oversight are needed. By critically examining its social responsibilities and impacts, this reflection argues that AI possesses great potential in the service of feminist and intersectional scholarship when guided appropriately. It calls for continued multidisciplinary dialogue to help ensure technologies amplify marginalised voices rather than risk their further marginalisation
Amazonia as Territory: Poder & Potencia in Pará
Get PDFThis paper considers the dialectic of territorialization at play between the Brazilian state and traditional peoples (ribeirinhos) in Amazonia through Nick Clare, Victoria Habermehl, and Liz Mason-Deese’s (2018) theorization of poder and potencia. The interplay between poder and potencia becomes evident throughout the modern history of Brazilian development initiatives, interventions by capital, and social movements organized by traditional peoples. Territories of poder and potenica in the Brazilian Amazon draw from this history of dialectic territorializations which finds contemporary form in knowledge discourses and resource politics. The poder of the Brazilian state and extractive corporations utilizes both overwhelming scale and personal confrontations to facilitate resource requisitions. The potencia promised by traditional territories—reciprocal socioecologies connected to Amazonian ecosystems—suggests power derived from overlapping territorialities between humans and nonhumans. Through interviews and counter-mapping with the São Francisco community, we demonstrate that the place-based lifeways (“modo de vida”) of the community also sustain prefigurative potential for a territory that exceeds the logics of the state and capital