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Awakening from the sleep-walking society: crisis, detachment and the real in prepper awakening narratives
Get PDFThoroughly saturated by ordinary crisis, routinized emergency and the normalization of apocalypticism, late-modern society is nevertheless depicted as sleep-walking into crisis; a further, overlapping crisis of the ‘real.’ This paper explores the potential of prepper awakening narratives – the moment preppers ‘wake up’ to the reality of crisis – to contribute to explorations of detachment
and denial in the Anthropocene. These narratives, part of the wider repertoire of prepper storycrafting, provide justification for the prepper’s transition to an anticipatory subjectivity, emotionally
and sensually attuned to crisis and motivated to prepare. Extending existing conceptualizations of awakening, I argue that prepper awakenings are defined by the uncanny realization of distance from
an ideal state of security. To illustrate, I consider narratives of bodily vulnerability, insecurity at home and abandonment in public places, which express shock at the failure of relationality implicit
to the safety fictions of these spaces. In this reckoning with the ‘autonomous’ modern self the agential and aware prepper emerges, but this does not in itself lead to a renewed moment of
politics or production of revolutionary consciousness. Instead, the horrifying real’ is recrafted as a vital space of self-reliance and resourcefulness, a place to reflect on endurance beyond this world ending
Impact of video-mediated online social presence and observance on cognitive performance
Get PDFThe onset of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has shifted most of the world toward remote working and education. As the world continues to embrace remote virtual communication in the post-COVID-19 era, it is crucial to investigate the impacts of online social copresence on cognitive performance. The present study investigated how the online videoconference presence of a virtual companion affects participants performance on cognitive relational-reasoning tasks. The companion was either present and attentive to the participant, present but nonattentive, or absent. We manipulated the agency of a virtual companion, who was either a real human, an avatar controlled by a human, or an artificial intelligence (AI)-controlled agent. We hypothesized that the mere presence of a virtual companion, and the observance of participants’ performance, would influence participants’ performance. The results were broadly in line with our hypothesis that a mere presence of a virtual companion improved cognitive performance irrespective of their agency. However, the direction of the results did not support our prediction. We did not find a systematic impact of observance on cognitive performance, not supporting our second hypothesis. Participants performed best overall with an AI-controlled agent, next best with an avatar and worst with a real-human companion. We also observed that participants performed more accurately when a virtual companion was present but nonattentive, and faster when a virtual companion observed the participants, compared to when the participants performed alone. We conclude that online videoconference presence with a virtual companion, regardless of observance, temporarily enhances cognitive performance, and discuss the implications of these findings
Introduction: opposites, intersections, turns, and other imaginative possibilites
No full textBook synopsis: This book argues that feminist aesthetics as practices of adult education can inform our responses to gendered, racial, class and ecological injustices. It illustrates the critical, creative, and provocative pedagogical theorising, research, and engagement work of feminist adult educators and researchers who work in diverse community, institutional, and social movement contexts across North America and Europe. This book captures the complexity, diversity, energy, and imagination of those who theorise, decolonise, facilitate, investigate, visualize, story, and create within the politics of gender (in)justice and radical change
Humor styles as markers of personality facets: an examination of the personality structural foundation of humor
No full textAlthough numerous studies have explored the association of humor with personality, research has not yet considered conceptual similarities and differences across a breadth of humor styles that may point to shared personality trait foundations. We examined ways in which different humor styles, proposed in four popular inventories, map to the Big-Five circumplex framework using methodology proposed by Woods and Anderson (2016). Survey findings (N = 404) indicate that over 75% of humor styles tap primarily into Extraversion or Agreeableness, highlighting predictable primary loadings for positive and negative humor styles across scales. We note interesting patterns of clustering in the circumplex space across all humor scales, and contextualize these findings in light of extant research
Local linear graphon estimation using covariates
Get PDFWe consider local linear estimation of the graphon function which determines probabilities of pairwise edges between nodes within an unlabeled network. Real world networks are typically characterized by
node heterogeneity with different nodes exhibiting different degrees of interaction. Existing approaches to graphon estimation are limited to local constant approximations, and are not designed to estimate
heterogeneity across the full network. In this paper, we show how continuous node covariates can be employed to estimate heterogeneity in the network via a local linear graphon estimator. We derive the bias
and variance of an oracle based local linear graphon estimator and thus obtain the mean integrated squared error optimal bandwidth rule. We also provide a plug-in bandwidth selection procedure, making local linear estimation for unlabeled networks practically feasible. Finite sample performance is investigated in a simulation study. We apply our method to a school friendship network and an email network to illustrate the advantages offered by our approach over existing methods
Re-membering assembly
No full textBook synopsis: A collection of incisive investigations into the ways that 21st-century British theatre works with - and through - crisis. It pays particular attention to the way in which writers and practitioners consider the ethical and social challenges of crisis.
Anchored in an interdisciplinary approach that draws from sociology, cultural theory, feminism, performance and philosophy, the book brings multi-faceted ideas into dialogue with the diverse aesthetics, practices and themes of a range of theatrical work produced in Britain since 2005
Language and identity: past concerns, future directions
Get PDF“Identity” as an operating variable and/or explanatory concept continues to pervade sociolinguistic scholarship. This article reflects on and discusses the continuing dominance of post-structural and social constructionist accounts of identity and debates whether recent work has led to an “unrestrained embracing of speaker agency” (Bell 2017: 592) with a comparative neglect of social structure, or whether this work is contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between local meaning-making practices and macro-socio(linguistic) processes, and thereby challenging extant binaries in sociolinguistics, in particular: the treatment of stability versus fluidity, agency versus structure and the traditional dichotomy between micro- and macro-sociolinguistics. Reflecting on historical developments and recent trends, it outlines the significant contribution of theoretical models and empirical studies to sociolinguistics, whilst noting obvious gaps, e.g. insufficient studies of the Global South. It is argued that recent work is contributing to a sociolinguistics which foregrounds and problematises the concept of “context” and the contingency of difference and belonging. The paper also argues that recent identity scholarship opens up opportunities for cross-disciplinary projects, drawing on the combined expertise of sociolinguistics, cognitive sociologists and psycholinguists to explain inter alia such phenomena as fluidity and variation in speaker/community attitudes and practices
Analysing objects to tailor Environmental Preventive Conservation
Get PDFThis work explores the potential of analyzing individual objects to improve their preventive
conservation. Previously, environmental recommendations have been based on an average or worst
response of material groups. Cultural heritage objects are extremely variable and within a group such
as archaeological iron a very wide range of responses are shown. Characterizing a single object’s
response allows its environment to be tailored to its requirements and can enable significant resource
and carbon footprint savings. Three main approaches are considered with a material explored in
detail including preventive conservation ramifications. Composition analysis is investigated through
the stability of limestones. The critical concentrations of soluble salts causing surface deterioration
in one environment has been explored. A more rapid method of analyzing clays in acid insoluble
fractions from drillings and undertaking that analysis non-invasively has been developed. Measuring
deterioration rates is explored through oxygen consumption analyses of archaeological iron. The
distributions of previously published data are explored and the changes in rates examined. A scheme
for parchment based on shrinkage temperatures and observations is presented for the first time and
its use illustrated with a newly acquired letter. The type of work required to produce these schemes
is explored with leathe
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