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Plant Communitas: Linum - Flax/Linen Crossings [curator]
No full text‘Plant Communitas’ highlights the aliveness and presence of the plant kingdom, attuning specifically to flax and linen
Something on the Front of a Building
No full textThe British duo John Wood and Paul Harrison has placed one or two things, diagonally and horizontally, on the façade of Kestner Gesellschaft as well as in the park of the old St. Nikolai cemetery, creating a humorous tabula rasa of the everyday.
For the exhibition the new neon installation Words on the Front of a Building (2023) will be presented on the façade of the Kestner Gesellschaft and in front of the building in the park of the old St.-Nikolai cemetery the sculptures 10 Signs for a Park (2022) will be shown for the first time in Germany.
The public sculptures are in direct visual relation to each other and show the duo Wood and Harrison's ongoing interest in the performance of the human body in the overwhelming universe of things, boredom and poetry of everyday life, as well as the tragedy of metaphysical being, while at the same time questioning the identity of the site of the building
The biblical flood myth revisited: representations of flood and deluge in climate fiction
Get PDFIn this thesis, I demonstrate how the biblical flood myth is revisited in narrative framings of flood-related catastrophe in the climate novel. Despite the number of works that explore environmental concerns in relation to flooding, there has been a gap in research on the use of the biblical flood myth in climate novels that use floods as metaphorical and material indicators of climate change. I examine how the biblical flood myth is used in climate novels to explore existential questions around human ontology and ethics in a time of environmental uncertainty, and by doing so show how myth plays an important role in the way ecological calamity is imagined and experienced.
Myths, I argue, reflect historical processes and change over time as the cultures that maintain them change. Therefore, the first part of the thesis revisits reworkings of the biblical flood in novels that contribute to the development of climate fiction and form part of its prehistory, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) in Chapter One, and D.H Lawrence's The Rainbow (1915) in Chapter Two. I explore the entangled historiographical and mythical elements of these novels from an ecocritical perspective.
The second part of the thesis explores the biblical flood myth in the climate novel. In Chapter Three, I discuss George Turner's The Sea and Summer ( 1987) as one of the first novels to address the potential future impacts of the historical trajectory of fossil fuelled industrialisation as critiqued by Eliot and Lawrence. I explore the ways in which it offers an apocalyptic vision of environmental collapse via deluge.
In Chapter Four, I examine how floods are used as a metaphor for ecological loss and grief in Barbara Kingsolver' s Flight Behaviour (2012) and Mireille Juchau' s The World Without Us (2015).
In Chapter Five, I explore environmental futurity in James Bradley's Clade (2015) and Lydia Millet's A Children's Bible (2020) through the metaphorical structure of rebirth and renewal acquired from the biblical flood narrative. Finally, the conclusion evaluates the ways in which the biblical flood myth contributes to environmentalist political imaginations
A real American wife, a Japanese object: puppetry and the Orient in Minghella’s 'Madam Butterfly'
No full textIn Anthony Minghella’s celebrated 2005 production of Madam Butterfly, three men
manipulate the small, fragile body of Sorrow (Butterfly/Cio-Cio-San’s child) and, in a dream
sequence, Cio-Cio-San herself. Both characters are Japanese or part-Japanese, and are portrayed by
puppets, with American characters all portrayed by human beings. The puppets were built and
originally manipulated by the British puppetry company Blind Summit, which drew partly on the
traditional Japanese form of bunraku.
What to make of the racial dynamics of the piece when principal Japanese characters are played by
white actors? How does this interact with Puccini’s text, itself a European vision of Japan? Are the
puppeteers “playing” Sorrow or is Sorrow played by the puppet? How might notions of the agency
of the puppet lead to a diffusion of responsibility? How do we read Japanese American identity into
the features of a puppet child sculpted by Nick Barnes, a British man? When Cio-Cio-San returns in
the guise of a puppet, looking both radically and racially different to her human form, how does this
shape our understanding of character and identity?
At the core of these questions is the following line of inquiry this paper will trace: How does this
production use puppetry to represent the racialized Other, and how might this subvert, reinforce,
or make visible Orientalist views of the East within the source text
Blending cultures: the intersection of A.I., VR, and intercultural identity in techno-choreography
No full textThis practice-based research aims to investigate the potential of using artificial intelligence (A.I.) and virtual reality (VR) to enhance choreographic practice and explore the concept of ‘hybrid cultural identity’ through professionally trained dancing bodies, by incorporating cultural objects such as chopsticks, fans, gaoqiao and silks. The hypotheses are that cultural objects as instruments could influence the generation of movement consequences and that VR and ChatGPT could help choreographers generate new movement vocabularies, patterns and structures in the process of techno-choreography.
As an intercultural artist with touring and working experiences in China, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada, Belgium, and Malaysia, I argue for ‘identity as a dynamic concept’, as Cantle points out in the study of interculturalism. It should not be solely labelled by race or skin colour, especially for choreographers and dancers (2020: n.p.). Artists' identities are formed according to the hybridity of their inner world, which is built up by training, dancing experience, learning different cultures and techniques, and the outer world, which is the environments they engage with.
The use of VR and ChatGPT, along with the incorporation of cultural objects, enables me to create immersive and interactive environments that can inspire new choreographic ideas. Additionally, ChatGPT is utilised as a tool to generate new movement patterns and narrative structures that can be incorporated into the choreography. The outcome of the research is the generation of interactive performance frameworks that enable embodiments of cultural objects and dancing bodies in digital performance. This study contributes not only to aspects of choreography and dance research in the contemporary global and intercultural contexts in which I have worked but also to cultural studies and computer science studies that engage body-worn technologies or develop human-computer interfaces
Constructing a history of wildfires in Ireland using digitised newspaper archives
No full textThe importance of developing more detailed historical records of climate related hazards has been increasingly recognised in recent years. These new histories of hazard events can be used to provide an improved baseline knowledge to contextualise contemporary climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. This presentation outlines ongoing research to construct a new historical record of wildfires on the island of Ireland using the digitised archives of 13 newspapers covering the period from 1738 to 2020. Wildfires represent an understudied hazard in Ireland where research and policy have tended to focus on more prominent hazards such as flooding. While data collection and analysis remains ongoing, this research reveals that Irish newspapers have provided extensive reporting on wildfire hazards, covering both wildfire events in numerous countries around the world as well as those that took place in Ireland. This presentation will present initial results illustrating the frequency and distribution of wildfire events in Ireland through time, as well as their impacts and responses to them by local communities and other actors. The presentation will also reflect on the challenges and opportunities of using digitised newspaper archives as a data source for developing knowledge on hazards and disasters in the past
Autism community research priorities: the potential of future research to benefit autistics
Get PDFDespite the enormous amounts of money spent on autism research, there has been little focus to date on what members of the autistic community believe should be prioritised by autism researchers. Our systematic review of the literature identified three published studies that had developed wide-ranging autism research priority sets. We undertook an in-depth analysis of these priorities sets to determine whether research focused on each priority had the potential to benefit the well-being of and/or emancipate autistic individuals. For this purpose, we used published ‘inclusive research’ criteria. We also compared the three sets of autism research priorities in the context of autistic well-being and emancipation. Our findings demonstrated substantial differences between the priorities in the studies in terms of whether they might benefit and/or be emancipatory for autistic people. Autistic people were a small minority of participants in studies where participant numbers had been recorded. There has yet to be a study focused solely on understanding the autism research priorities of autistic adults
Networked learning in a postdigital-biodigital age
No full textNetworked Learning (NL) has developed predominantly in university settings, yet much of the research across decades has implicit links with broader global concepts, such as bioinformation, biodigitalism, postdigitalism, critical posthumanism and viral modernity. In this chapter, we explore these implicit connections as an important, less recognized part of NL. We surface some postdigital-biodigital challenges in NL by revisiting relevant histories, concepts, and definitions and noticing where there are connections, particularly when NL and Postdigital Science and Education have developed in the same Zeitgeist. Despite diverse histories, these areas of research have resulted in different, yet often overlapping theories, approaches, and ethos. After examining a number of cross-cutting areas of interest, we ask why a focus towards postdigital-biodigital challenges in NL is worthwhile, and indeed, why now? We perceive NL to implicitly hold a long history of deep and successful engagement with postdigital-biodigital challenges in theory and through the concept of convergence. Convergence is an important and sustained concept in NL that can break down perceived barriers to developing cross-cutting research in the areas discussed throughout this chapter. It is therefore timely to bring to light explicit bioinformational connections, to help focus our research efforts on NL in a postdigital-biodigital age
The individual under international criminal law (Pt 1)
No full textIn the first of a two-part series, Simon Parsons charts the development of individual liability for international crimes. Prior to 1945, there was little evidence that crimes against peace and crimes against humanity had crystallised as international crimes as part of customary international law.
The Nuremberg trials laid the foundations of modern international criminal law based on individual criminal responsibility
