University of Warwick Press: Journals
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Saving the Mother of Brazil: Indigenous Peoples and Active Citizenship amid COVID-19
No full textThis article draws on the literature of public health in Latin America and Brazil to examine the role of health in the indigenous’ pursuit of their acquired rights, and their attempts to shape the terms of, and decisions in official health assistance amid COVID-19 (Chalhoub, 1996; Cueto and Palmer, 2015; Sowell, 2015; Westphal et al., 2007; Hochman, 2011; Gibson, 2019). Through the analysis of newspaper articles, reports from indigenous organizations, legislative decisions, constitutional and health rights, this paper seeks to answer the following question: how do the strategies indigenous peoples have developed to pressure the Brazilian government into fulfilling its constitutional responsibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate their exercise of active citizenship and contribution to the strengthening of democracy?
Knowledge politics around water, development and ecosystem services in Ecuador: creative encounters and resistances
Get PDFA vast amount of literature has investigated the conflicts between different ways of conceiving development in Latin America. Particular attention has been paid to power differentials among knowledge systems when it comes to decision-making, values and practices over water resources. The Ecosystem Services framework or Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) are often analysed as examples of technical and scientific tools typically produced by multilateral organizations, cooperation agencies and international experts. They are presented as discourses competing with environmental and water justice claims, or local and traditional knowledge, although they can sometimes support them and/or try to incorporate them. The question that arises is whether such incorporation depoliticises local understandings of sustainability and development. This paper aims to examine both the synergies and tensions among different forms of knowledge around development through one empirical case study in the Ecuadorian highlands. It focuses on the efforts of the Kayambi indigenous communities to create, negotiate and scale-up a water conservation funding scheme based on reciprocity and solidarity values. This contribution highlights the creative engagement of diverse actors in designing, cocreating and diffusing a diversity of perspectives on development. It challenges the frontiers between technoscientific and grassroots knowledge by paying attention to the situated practices of different actors. It argues that the coproduction of water and development knowledge between various actors is the result of negotiating worldviews possibly in tension and moving beyond traditional resistance
The spaces in between: Constitutive moments and taypi in Latin America
Get PDFIn recent years, the Latin American left has achieved important electoral and social successes. Meanwhile, far-right movements across the continent have also come back from the brink, transformed from fringe political phenomena to powerful political vehicles capable of dictating political discourse and policies. In his article Harnessing the Storm: Constitutive moments and taypi in Latin America, Angus McNelly (2022) proposes to search for and to create openings for different futures and political alternatives out of the contradictions of capitalism on a regional scale with a focus on transformative movements. Connecting to McNelly’s reading of Rivera and Zavaleta, I put forward the concept of taypi by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. Taypi is the centre of a woven pattern, which she uses as a metaphor for a site of friction in between ch’ixi spaces and societies. Taypi allows us to interrogate both the creative as well as destructive potential that results from lo abigarrado and ch’ixi formations in Latin America – including authoritarian and far-right tendencies as part of the constitutive moments. I argue that focussing on taypi—regardless of the scope we seek to analyse—draws attention to the organisation that takes place on the ground in both its productive and destructive potential. I conclude that seeking constitutive moments, ch’ixi spaces and taypi across Latin America makes for a fruitful research agenda
Digital learning experience of engineering students in the pandemic: The perspective of graduate teaching assistants
Get PDFDuring the unprecedented world crisis of COVID-19, traditional offline courses were forced to be delivered online. Most students struggled with this change of delivery approach due to difficulties in accessing online resources, overwhelming and independent work, communication and concentration, isolation and longlines issues in online learning. Therefore, providing a positive digital learning experience for students was an important concern in UK Higher Education. Graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) are an indispensable part of the teaching community at the University of Warwick to deliver modules and facilitate WMG engineering students’ learning. Owing to the dual identity of student and teaching staff, doctoral researchers have a unique perspective in investigating students\u27 digital learning experiences. As students, doctoral researchers empathise with the affective impact and physical constraints of online learning that hinder the student experience and learning. And as tutors, doctoral researchers recognise the pedagogical strategies that the digital tools enable, such as peer learning or reflection. This paper provides a reflective evaluation of how effective digital tools, and their uses are supporting the constructive alignment of learning while benefiting the student experience, such as Vevox, Padlet, and Microsoft Teams. In sharing a reflexive account of experiences with digital tools for learning and teaching, guidance is provided on how students’ digital learning experiences can be improved
Setting up the Superb-Vision Network: Establishing a “dispersed learning community”
Get PDFAs universities gradually re-open to face-to-face teaching, innovative approaches that encourage engagement and stimulation in the “new normal” have been readily welcomed. The Superb-Vision Network (SVN) was a response to such a call: a series of student-led workshops to support doctoral students in enhancing their supervision experience. This article is a reflection on the process of setting up the network. We will explain the decisions and actions taken and explore several critical incidents which demonstrate what collaboration between those with dissimilar perspectives and backgrounds can look like in practice. Considerations around sustainability, inclusivity, and safety posed additional challenges that vastly shaped our thinking and plans, allowing us to find balance in our social and educational outcomes. Informed by the notion of “distributed” learning (Lea & Nicolle, 2013) and “dispersed” pedagogic system (Boud & Lee, 2005), this article advocates facilitating a “dispersed” learning community for doctoral students with an emphasis on peer learning (Boud & Cohen, 2014). We hope that this interesting case study will motivate and inspire others to use opportunities, however small, to add value to their community. 
Post-Urban Life in the Italian Alps during a Pandemic: New paradigm or ephemeral phenomenon?
No full textIn the twentieth century, depopulation in the Italian Alps was the result of the vision of a mountain world as isolated and of the persistence of stereotypes such as that of the \u27poor mountain dweller\u27. At the same time, mountains were exploited by cities in order to be transformed into a place of leisure for mass tourism. Consequently, the agro-pastoral activities related to this world were neglected as a symbol of backwardness. However, over the past decade, the Alps have been affected by return migrations. The interest in rural world comes from the redefinition of the urban-rural gap and the leaving behind of the urbanism paradigm. Although this phenomenon is not new to social scientists, with the onset of COVID-19 it is assuming unexpected dimensions and accelerated developments. Images of escape from cities, when lockdown was announced in Italy on February 2020, clearly demonstrate that new visions of rural territories were emerging in the Western World. This article aims to inquire about the contemporary perception of the Italian Alps and their rediscovery during these pandemic times, to ask ourselves about the nature of this rediscovery, to what extent the representations are affected by a nostalgic attitude and how they can contribute, if well managed, to the development of a new post-urban living model
On Censoring of Ted Talk
Get PDFDo I or do I not have the right to tell my story?
This is the question I asked at my 2020 talk on Creativity in Protesting Islamic Fundamentalism at TedX Warwick’s Creativity within Crisis event. Ironically, my talk on the censorship of ex-Muslims was itself censored by TedX, first by its refusal to publish the talk due to ‘political content’ and then by publishing after public pressure but without any slides – and the addition of a trigger warning: ‘Some viewers may find elements of this talk to be distressing or objectionable.
A Creature Without a Cave: Abstraction and (Mis)Appropriation of the Wendigo Myth in Contemporary North American Horror
No full textThis article analyses prominent examples of the Wendigo myth in modern North American horror media and the implications of misappropriation by non-Indigenous creators for non-Indigenous audiences. This article’s cross-media analysis covers television, film and game media; Teen Wolf (2011–17), Supernatural (2005–20), Bruce Wemple’s The Retreat (2020) and SuperMassive Games’ Until Dawn (2015). This analysis will trace the process of these media, made by non-Indigenous white creators, removing the Wendigo’s indigeneity and placing it within fictional settings as an antagonist. I have named this observation of the Wendigo the ‘Caveless Creature’ phenomenon. The paper concludes that employing the Wendigo as a caveless creature is a common practice within horror as it easily creates a villain for white protagonists to defeat repeatedly. This construction is problematic in the horror genre as it presents an Indigenous antagonist that poses a threat to white culture for its otherness and indigeneity – while at the same time, misappropriating, discarding and demonising the Indigenous culture the myth comes from, at whim. Although this article is specifically observing the Wendigo, I argue that it is one of many caveless creatures, and the treatment of them by creators of non-Indigenous horror genre should be analysed in the future
Sapienziale: Forme e usi della sentenza nella poesia contemporanea
No full textThe aim of this study is twofold: on the one hand, it purports to develop a model to investigate universal or generic propositions (e.g., theses, maxims, proverbs, aphorisms) and their effects in poetry; on the other, it applies such model to four poetry collections by Cristina Annino, Milo De Angelis, Marco Giovenale, and Guido Mazzoni. The analysis, guided by the criteria and parameters established by the model, has allowed to discover in what textual forms and pragmatic functions the aforementioned authors express contents worth of memic transmissibility, as well as related effects of authority, necessity, wisdom, intuition, collective relevance. Mazzoni’s reliance on theses, for instance, has been interpreted as an attempt to gain an objective knowledge of the world, differently from Annino’s more subjective aphorisms or De Angelis’ utterances, which are rooted in the here-and-now and yet capable of transcending themselves by virtue of their archetypal relevance. The model proposed has also enabled to shed light on less prototypical forms, such as Annino’s creative manipulation of proverbs and Giovenale’s parodic redeployment of stereotypes. The article concludes by suggesting paths for future research in which the model could be profitably applied.
Il presente studio si pone due obiettivi principali: da un lato, quello di sviluppare un modello per lo studio delle proposizioni universali o comunque a carattere generale (per es. tesi, massime, proverbi, aforismi) e dei loro effetti in poesia; dall’altro, quello di applicare tale modello a quattro libri recenti di altrettanti autori: Cristina Annino, Milo De Angelis, Marco Giovenale e Guido Mazzoni. L’analisi, guidata da criteri e parametri indicati dal modello, ha permesso di comprendere in quali forme testuali e funzioni pragmatiche questi autori esprimono contenuti degni di una trasmissibilità memica, nonché le annesse sensazioni di autorità, necessità, saggezza, intuizione, rilevanza collettiva. Si è per esempio ricondotto l’uso della tesi in Mazzoni al tentativo di raggiungere una conoscenza oggettiva del mondo, diversamente dalle forme più soggettive dell’aforisma in Annino o degli enunciati deangelisiani, situati nel qui-e-ora ma capaci di trascendersi grazie alla loro portata archetipica. Il modello proposto ha inoltre consentito di far luce su forme-limite, come il reimpiego creativo del proverbio in Annino e l\u27uso parodico degli stereotipi in Giovenale. L’articolo si conclude suggerendo ulteriori studi nei quali l\u27uso di questo modello potrebbe rivelarsi proficuo.
English title: Full of Wisdom: Forms and Uses of Maxims in Contemporary Italian Poetr
Governance in "Murky Waters": the Political Fields of Water Extractivism in Honduras
Get PDFProfound changes in public administration after the presidential elections in Honduras (2013) resulted in a re-structuring and regrouping of public institutions and autonomous entities for the relevant legislative period (2014-2018). These adjustments, thought as a “new public-private co-management” – aimed to “…tangible impacts not only within the administration but also within communities and scattered settlements which, in turn, are expected to be both, beneficiaries as well as participants in innovative sectorial and public policies programs.” The governments’ goal was to carry out a National Plan for Water and Sanitation (PLANASA, Plan Nacional de Agua y Saneamiento) together with a still pending financial sector policy for the WASH sector (CONASA, 2013b, c, 2014). Both politics established different mechanisms and instruments as well as strategic guidelines according to the Framework Law for Water and Sanitation (2003, FLWS, Ley Marco de Agua Potable y Saneamiento). New secretaries and institutional entities generated adjoined existing ones in their technical and administrative mandate