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Expressing our truth, expressing our care: A collective reflection on humanizing the social work classroom
Get PDFThe social work classroom calls us to consider topics of societal and personal relevance, including identity, oppression, and trauma. Which qualities and actions enable this process to challenge us and also affirm our and others’ humanity? This question guides the following reflection by nine social work master’s students and one faculty member. We narrate experiences that have shaped our understanding of and approach to transformative, humanizing interactions. Our narratives interweave experiences from the field, personal life, and the educational process. We relate our stories to social work education and pedagogical concepts, including safe and brave spaces and transformative learning
Formal Constraints and Creativity: Connecting Game Jams, Dogma ’95, the Demo Scene, OuBaPo, and Renga poets
Get PDFIn a fast-paced world of ever-changing trends, connecting historical roots by linking new movements to existing traditions can be a challenge. Similarly to how Mary Flanagan’s book “Critical Play” situates and contextualizes play in history, we propose and start similar work on game jams. While we don’t have as much room for self-expression in a paper, we focus on two main contributions. The first is to link existing definitions of game jamming and creativity. Secondly, we show how game jams build upon existing traditions of co-creation—sharing and confronting ideas with peers by using formal constraints to fuel creativity and direct the process. To this end, we examine four historic movements—the Danish film movement Dogma ’95, creators of audio visual programs from the demo scene, OuBaPo a group of French comic book writers, and the Japanese renga poets—and relate them to game jams
Blueprints: towards teaching fashion with care
No full textPractice contribution to the publication Practicing Solidarity by Artez Press
From cultural intermediaries to platform adaptors: the transformation of music planning and artist acquisition in the Chinese music industry
Get PDFDrawing from interviews with staff who sign and work with musicians and songwriters in the Chinese music industry, this article adopts the concepts of ‘cultural intermediary’ and ‘platform adaptor’ to trace a series of transformations since the post-1978 market reforms up to the present day. We argue that significant artistic and cultural shifts have occurred as the creative practices of music planners at record companies are superseded by content operators more narrowly focused on constructing content at digital platforms and adapting songs to short video platforms. The article locates the affordances of new media within a broader context of change and continuity in the Sinophone popular music world, contributing new knowledge about the work of music industry personnel involved in artist acquisition and repertoire development, adding to scholarship on an important yet under researched period in the history of the Chinese music industries
AI Unveiled Personalities: Profiling Optimistic and Pessimistic Attitudes in Hindi Dataset using Transformer-based Models
Get PDFBoth optimism and pessimism are intricately intertwined with an individual's inherent personality traits and people of all personality types can exhibit a wide range of attitudes and behaviours, including levels of optimism and pessimism. This paper undertakes a comprehensive analysis of optimistic and pessimistic tendencies present within Hindi textual data, employing transformer-based models. The research represents a pioneering effort to define and establish an interaction between the personality and attitude chakras within the realm of human psychology. Introducing an innovative "Chakra" system to illustrate complex interrelationships within human psychology, this work aligns the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality traits with optimistic and pessimistic attitudes, enriching our understanding of emotional projection in text. The study employs meticulously fine-tuned transformer models—specifically mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, IndicBERT, mDeBERTa and a novel stacked mDeBERTa —trained on the novel Hindi dataset ‘मनोभाव’ (pronounced as Manobhav). Remarkably, the proposed Stacked mDeBERTa model outperforms others, recording an accuracy of 0.7785 along with elevated precision, recall, and F1 score values. Notably, its ROC AUC score of 0.7226 underlines its robustness in distinguishing between positive and negative emotional attitudes. The comparative analysis highlights the superiority of the Stacked mDeBERTa model in effectively capturing emotional attitudes in Hindi text
The Securitisation of the Refugee Crisis and Attitudes Towards Refugees.
No full textThe securitisation of the refugee crisis and societal attitudes towards refugees in Greece and the UK are critically examined in this chapter, by highlighting their interconnected yet distinct challenges. Since 2015, Europe has experienced an escalating migration crisis which has been aggravated by the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine and natural/human-made disasters. While empathy towards refugees has been seen by both Greece and the UK, their national responses have been different. Political agendas, economic constraints, as well as rising xenophobia have contributed to that. Additionally, the mismanagement of the crisis by the European Union fuelled the nationalist rhetoric, with far-right politics exploiting the situation to create division within communities. Moreover, social services and social workers in both countries have limited resources and insufficient government support which makes the integration and welfare support of refugees more difficult. This chapter is advocating for a human rights-centred integration policy which is established with the help of the expertise of social work. This would ensure a unified approach which will improve the societal cohesion, the fair distribution of refugees and asylum seekers, as well as strengthening security across Europe. Finally, by using the experiences of Greece and the UK, this chapter explores potential lessons and insights that can be learned from other countries that are managing similar challenges. Some important takeaways that can be found useful are the balancing between security concerns and humanitarian responsibilities, fighting xenophobia, ensuring sufficient resources for integration, as well as, promoting societal awareness. This chapter’s focal point is the establishment of strategies that can transform and create a more cohesive, effective and non-discriminatory refugee policies with global implications
Space invading: Expanded spatial practices
Get PDFIt is a gift to write this article as an opening piece to a twentieth anniversary Special Issue for the book Space Invaders (2004), with twenty pieces in the collection, initiated with generosity by Jo Littler and Anamik Saha, two of the co-editors of the European Journal of Cultural Studies, following a conference on Re-Visiting Space Invaders in 2022. The article offers an expanded spatial practice, with space invaders as a mode of analysis as well as space invading as a methodological research process. The discussion locates space invading as a verb, as a practice of co-existence, as well as an innovative intervention in different contexts; drawing on a large body of creative, critical, collaborative projects. In this piece I (1) return to a key research scene, Westminster, London in the contemporary political context; (2) reflect on how the remit of the book has been extended internationally, building towards an expanded methodological spatial practice of space invaders; and (3) I close by introducing how this collection on Re-Visiting Space Invaders extends issues and questions far beyond the original scope of the book
Lived experiences of deaf parents: insights into pride, community, bilingualism, and barriers
Get PDFIntroduction: Becoming a parent is a deeply personal process that changes the dynamics of one’s social and psychological worlds. Parenthood also exists within the context of cultural and, for those who give birth, medical backgrounds. Little is known about how those who identify as deaf experience navigating resources, medical and educational professionals, and support systems in parenthood.
Methods: This study investigates the lived experiences of N = 37 deaf parents using reflexive thematic analysis.
Results: Four primary themes were constructed from the data. The first was that many deaf parents felt a clear sense of pride and confidence in themselves and in their children. It was also obvious that deaf parents benefitted from the support of their family, friends, and their communities. A third theme was the importance and sometimes the challenges of navigating children’s bimodal bilingualism. Finally, deaf parents faced some common barriers: limited access to information and support, experiences of prejudice and discrimination, and the added stress and effort required to advocate for themselves and their children.
Discussion: Overall, this study offers important insight into the experiences of deaf parents, shedding new light on the ways in which deaf parents access information and professionals related to child development, and on their experiences of parenthood overall
Investigating Sense of Belonging in Higher Education: A Multi-dimensional and multi-layered Approach
No full textThrough multidimensional and multi-layered perspectives, this introductory chapter explores what constitutes sense of belonging in higher education and why it matters. It examines how students’ sense of belonging is shaped by their individual characteristics, circumstances, and social positions while analysing how cultural capital and institutional habitus influence their feelings of self-identification, recognition, and acceptance. The discussion reveals how students’ sense of belonging contributes to collective social capital, providing a theoretical foundation for understanding persistent educational inequalities in contemporary higher education, particularly for non-traditional and disadvantaged students. The chapter then introduces key themes emerging from diverse case studies, drawing on contributors’ varied positionalities and student-led perspectives to examine how multiple aspects of identity, including ethnicity, gender, social class, age, sexuality, and body size intersect with institutional structures. It concludes by highlighting the collection’s contribution to the field
Evaluation of poetic creativity: Predictors and the role of expertise—A multilevel approach
Get PDFPoetry is one of the most creative expressions of language, but how we evaluate the creativity of a poem is not properly characterized. The present study investigated the role of various subjective qualities – clarity, aesthetic appeal, felt valence, arousal, and surprise – in predicting the creativity judgment of English poems. Participants (N=129) were presented with a broad range of English poems; they rated each poem on six characteristics: clarity, aesthetic appeal, felt valence, felt arousal, surprise and overall creativity. Linear multilevel analysis showed that aesthetic appeal was the strongest predictor of poetic creativity, followed by surprise and felt valence. Multilevel mediation analysis indicated significant mediation by surprise and felt valence on the relationship between aesthetic appeal and creativity at both within and between-participant levels. Further, expertise in English literature was found to significantly moderate the effects of all three predictors on the evaluation of creativity. The study simultaneously captured the surprise-evoking line(s).
Using the semantic distance computing approach, we have shown the objective validation of the subjectively chosen line(s) of surprise. Altogether, our findings suggest a parsimonious model of evaluation of creativity of poems and its interaction with expertise