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Naming Places (for J. B.)
No full textEssay about artist Jyll Bradley as art of publication accompanying thirty year survey exhibition
Beyond Traditional Classifiers: Evaluating Large Language Models for Robust Hate Speech Detection
Get PDFHate speech detection remains a significant challenge due to the nuanced and context-dependent nature of hateful language. Traditional classifiers, trained on specialized corpora, often struggle to accurately identify subtle or manipulated hate speech. This paper explores the potential of utilizing large language models (LLMs) to address these limitations. By leveraging their extensive training on diverse texts, LLMs demonstrate a superior ability to understand context, which is crucial for effective hate speech detection. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of various LLMs on both binary and multi-label hate speech datasets to assess their performance. Our findings aim to clarify the extent to which LLMs can enhance hate speech classification accuracy, particularly in complex and challenging cases
Materiality as a Creative Practice of Musical Instruments: Makers’ Perspectives
No full textThis article and video essay discusses how contemporary artists might directly address some of the philosophical and political challenges of a material approach to instrumentality through creative practice. To do this, I present and discuss the practical approaches taken by musicians who create and collaborate with instruments as a central part of their work. I focus on the work of two musicians: Khabat Abas—an experimental and transgressive cellist, whose quasi-autobiographical approach to instrument design allows her to stage unheard social and geographical narratives as sonic interventions; and Sam Underwood—a sound artist and designer of acoustic and mechanical instruments who creates new sonic interfaces for both musicians and audiences. In examining their creative practice both as and with musical instruments, I examine how these artists navigate the agential and material aspects of the instruments and systems they create, in parallel with the conceptual ideas that they bring to and derive from such systems. In so doing, I consider material semiotic approaches (such as ANT) not as ‘flat’ ontologies but, after Campbell, as part of a variegated approach that can account for ‘political and ideological forms’ in improvisation and indeterminacy (2021: 416). Campbell suggests that ‘the constitution of problems must be understood as a creative and critical procedure’ (ibid: 420): here I highlight how this is possible through the practical approaches of artists whose work can be considered a philosophical as well as a practical/pragmatic response to the materials with which they are engaged. While Campbell argues for plurality of method, I consider this a heterogeneity that is re-articulated across moments of performance, composition, and instrument construction, therefore describing these creative practices as ones that can be described as ‘overcoming the possible limits of the improvisation-posthumanities conjunction’ (Campbell, 2021: 421)
Participatory Monitoring: Foregrounding Sustenance Practices as a New Environmental Public
Get PDFThis essay explores the relationship between extraction activities and the subsistence economies they impact to advocate for the emergence of a new political category—what Lesley Green refers to as environmental public. With a Chilean copper mine as a case study, this essay recognizes sustenance practices (such as farming, herding, and fishing) as material witnesses that register environmental change in and around extraction sites. With a recent update to national legislation—to comply with the Escazú Agreement—it is possible to posit sustenance practices as essential for the now mandatory participatory monitoring of environmental change within these sites. This could center these sustenance practices and bring them forward from the fringes of economic development. Reviewing environmental impact assessment reports as records of landscape transactions, and conducting fieldwork around the mines’ operational landscapes, reveals how the copper industry neglects to register the relational damage done by extractive activities. With an upcoming project phase to extend the copper mine’s operations, this essay considers how spatial disciplines might learn from and assist in supporting monitoring activities for this new environmental public
Photogrammetric Race-Making in the MetaHuman Creator
Get PDFWhile the dominant aspiration for human beauty on social media is smoothness and symmetry, the benchmark for quality in digital humans is texture and irregularity. Within the visual economy of hyperreal videogames, imperfection imparts character to artificial beings, enhancing their capacity to engage, influence, and entertain. Requiring more resources to model, visual character can now be blended from databases of diverse facial features, skin tones, and hair textures captured from photogrammetric scans of real humans. Predominantly white makers of digital human tools such as Epic Games’ MetaHuman Creator promote their ‘diverse series of presets’ as empowering equitable character creation. Scholars of post-race call out these practices as diversity surfing, which casts race as a cosmetic rather than political category, producing compliant digital humans who stand in for Black and creators of colour. Building on this scholarship, this chapter analyses how tools such as MetaHuman Creator abstract racial diversity as mathematical fact derived from databases of photogrammetric human scans. The MetaHuman Creator implements a data-based and asset-driven approach to race-making. As an imaging technology, MetaHuman marginalises minority representations, treating them as optional, fragmented, and peripheral to a default model of techno-physiological functioning. As a computational synthesis of race, MetaHuman dissolves racial concepts within the latent space of statistical compression. Beyond these post-racial logics, the MetaHuman Creator undermines the basis for diversity politics, by framing diversity as a priori to racial concepts and classifications
Pre-service teachers' perceptions on outdoor play: A study of Türkiye, England, and Australia
No full textThis study explores pre-service early childhood education teachers’ perceptions of outdoor play across Türkiye, England, and Australia, focusing on issues such as culture, curriculum and teacher training. Using a qualitative instrumental case study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 participants, five from each country, and the documents of three countries’ teacher training programmes were analyzed. The findings indicate that outdoor play is universally recognized as essential for children’s physical, cognitive, and socio-emotional development. Turkish pre-service teachers regard outdoor play as a tool for energy release and emotional
development but note that practical implementation is limited due to infrastructural and cultural barriers. English participants emphasize outdoor play’s structured and educational aspects, particularly its role in language development and problem-solving. Australian pre-service teachers view outdoor play as a natural and intrinsic part of childhood, fostering confidence, self-esteem, and a connection to nature. The study highlights the influence of cultural and environmental factors on outdoor play practices, with shared concerns regarding parental hesitations and weather conditions. While all three countries’ curricula support outdoor play, participants identified gaps in teacher training programs, particularly in practical outdoor experiences. The findings underscore the need to integrate more experiential learning opportunities into teacher education programs, enabling future educators to effectively implement outdoor play and enhance its role in fostering holistic child development
Scripted Heritage in Improvised Spaces—Tamil School Plays as Mnemonic Socialisation and Placemaking in Diaspora
Get PDFOn makeshift stages across London, students from a Tamil Saturday school reenact myths and stories from Sri Lanka. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research across the city, I show how these school plays move difficult and painful cultural memories from the edge of visibility into the public realm. Performed at the Museum of London, Trafalgar Square, temples and the Houses of Parliament, they expand where Tamil cultural heritage belongs. The plays reveal how memories suppressed in Sri Lanka find new public articulations in the UK. The article considers the difficulties of sharing memories of violence with children as an aesthetic and pedagogical problem (Daniel 1996, Jeganathan 2020). As expressions of postmemory in migration, school plays offer oblique forms of remembering violent pasts remotely. Through carefully worded scripts devised by their parents, the plays provide a reflective and embodied process by which children become custodians of their cultural heritage, transforming intergenerational memories of collective trauma into meaningful lessons that enable young people to act in this world
Louise Arimatsu and Christine Chinkin, Gendered Peace Through International Law, Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2024, 312 pp, hb £65.00
Get PDFCharacter Strengths Afforded by Arts Engagement During Adolescence: The Development and Validation of the Creative Artistic Activities Strengths Affordances Scale (CAASA scale)
Get PDFResearch into the impact of arts engagement on young people, particularly with regard to their well-being, is seeing ever-growing interest. However, it has been argued that methodological limitations, particularly a shortage of reliable measurement tools, may be undermining progress in this research area. Character strengths are established in the literature as a collection of positive traits—displayed through thoughts, feelings, and behavior—that are related to positive development and enhanced mental well-being outcomes. Motivated by the possibility that character strengths that are exercised during arts activities may, at least in-part, account for the positive well-being outcomes that have been associated with such activities, this article outlines the development and evaluation of a novel self-report questionnaire. Specifically, following exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis on data collected from two separate samples of young people, we present a final 15-item scale for measuring patterns of character strengths exercised during arts activities. Our scale, which comprises self-belief, social competence and curiosity and exploration, as key groups of strengths exercised during arts engagement shows reliability, convergent validity, and evidence of relative independence from trait-level measurements. Following presentation of the scale’s development and validation, the current article discusses key ways in which the scale can be beneficial in both research and practice: from helping to clarify the precise mechanisms by which arts engagement promotes adolescent development and well-being, to supporting arts educators and practitioners that have an interest in leveraging arts engagement in this way