Soviet Minimalist Music: A Problematic Phenomenon?

Influence of Education on Social Structure of Society (on Materials of Focus Group Research and in-Depth Interviews)

Reviewed by: Transparent Designs: Personal Computing and the Politics of User-Friendliness by Michael Black Luke Fernandez (bio) Transparent Designs: Personal Computing and the Politics of User-Friendliness By Michael Black. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. Pp. 280. Michael Black begins Transparent Designs by describing Steve Jobs's design philosophy for Apple. In 1984, Jobs explained that the company aspired "to reach the point where the operating system is totally transparent. When you use a Lisa or a Macintosh. … You never interact with it; you don't know about it." Black uses this anecdote (and many others like it) to illustrate the idea of transparent design and how it is hyped. [End Page 618] For its advocates, the complexities of the computer should be erased, to the point of becoming invisible. They believe simplifying the interface creates more user-friendly experiences. Black argues that these conceptions of transparent design and user-friendliness, which emerged in the early 1980s, were hyped by corporate tech evangelists (like Jobs) as well as by tech journalists who wrote for computer magazines like BYTE. As Black suggests, resonances of this rhetoric were also manifest among academic researchers and human-computer interaction scholars. Black is suspicious of this design-talk. He suggests that transparent design conceals as much as it reveals and allows designers to hide their own intents behind the guise of user-friendly interfaces, giving the impression that the user's interests are paramount. Yet in hiding so many functional aspects of the computer, accountability is compromised, enabling designers to pursue their own invisible ends. Citing Safiya Noble, Black mentions how search engines present themselves as neutral tools. But under the cover of simple interfaces, they are being tweaked in the service of surveillance capitalism. Black proposes to lift or pull back "the veil of transparency" (pp. 25, 225, 229, 230) and usher in a new approach to design that will unmask the way technology serves to distribute power between designers and users and within society as a whole. Transparent Designs ends with a coda titled "Imagining an Unfriendly Future." At times the coda reads like a manifesto, touting the need for a more capacious and politically inflected understanding of what user-friendliness and transparency should mean. In spite of the ending, though, Transparent Designs is primarily a history. It traces the origins of transparent design and how it developed as a reaction to 1970s hobbyist computing, which preached an ethos of self-reliance and invited tinkering. Many readers may already be aware of how Apple, IBM's PC, and the counterculture jockeyed to cast themselves as antiauthoritarian while labeling their rivals as authoritarian. But "transparent design" is a novel lens through which to tell these stories. Black works in an English department, and it is interesting to see the tropes that scholars in this discipline use to make sense of interfaces. Black approvingly quotes Lori Emerson (an English professor at the University of Colorado) who talks of the interface as a "magician's cape, continually revealing … and concealing as it reveals." I suspect that it has not occurred to most technology scholars to use veils, or the irony they invoke, to make sense of their subject matter. Black makes effective use of these tropes in his history. Provocative as it is to think of transparency as something that actually conceals, I do wish that Black had spent additional time exploring more conventional usages of the term. For example, for those of us who grew up in the 1970s, it was common to run across clear plastic models of V8 engines and of human bodies, revealing rather than concealing complexity. Analogous forms of transparency are also available in open-source code repositories and the organizations that support those repos. Open-source [End Page 619] codes invite users to tinker and to consider how the code distributes power between its developer and users. These are transparent designs in a more conventional mold that actually aspire to reveal technological complexity and the politics inherent in that complexity. Black mentions open-source evangelists but does not give their conception of transparency much weight because he thinks the movement has been coopted. It is also curious that...

Chapter 10, by Byron Dueck, brings us up to date, but also shifts analytical focus from the performativity of individuals to the way relatively large group of musicians reflect on the performance (or not) of identity in British Using interview material from the What is Black British Jazz? research project, he examines a tangle in British discourse about specifically the way in which contemporary players often refute the suggestion that there is any such an entity as black British jazz. That is, they rebut the idea of homogeneous identity performed by musicians. And there is also concern not to be labelled as different or apart from British jazz, or just jazz, more generally. Dueck then sets this starting position of scepticism about black British against couple of other factors. One is the recognition that there definitely was British jazz, in the moment of the Jazz Warriors in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed, some musicians acknowledge that it still exists in the case of up-front, hybrid ensembles like Gary Crosby's Jazz Jamaica. But there is another dimension beyond the way in which musicians reflect on the performance (or not) of blackness, and that is advantage-disadvantage. In the terms we developed at the beginning of the section to attend to this topic represents move from the perfomative considered as field of creative agency to the notionally lower level of the social structural conditions under which musicians live and work. First, as Dueck shows, people in Britiain are much less likely to receive higher education, especially in music, and this is considered by many of the interviewees to be serious disadvantage. On the other hand, this could be advantageous in encouraging improvisation, experimentation and individualism, and perhaps perceived as being true to certain idea of self-taught authenticity in jazz performance. Second, it seems likely that musicians disproportionately attract white audience, in latter-day version of the exoticism which has dogged musicians since the earliest days of jazz in Britain. This is acknowledged by both white and musicians in the interviews which Dueck considers, and is often considered to be an unfair advantage, yet in this situation success may be most readily achieved by adhering to white expectations of musicians (the long history of this in British context is explored throughout this volume, beginning with Rye in Chapter 2).

This paper examines how a combination of contemporary letters and retrospective interviews can shed light on the ways in which immigrants made and continue to make sense of their migration experiences. For immigrants of the later 20th century, research tends to focus on interviews, whereas contemporary egodocuments have often been overlooked. This paper aims to contribute to a reverse trend – recently initiated by historians of British emigration Angela McCarthy and Alistair Thomson – by means of a systematic analysis of letters alongside interviews using three theoretical notions derived from oral history debates: retrospectivity, composure and collective memory. In three case-studies of Dutch immigrants who moved to New Zealand in the 1950s and early 1960s, letter and interview materials will be compared and contrasted, focusing especially on the relationship between expectations and achievements. The combination of both types of sources offers a long-term perspective that makes clear that at various stages of the life course, different and sometimes even contradicting and ambiguous perspectives existed. But the value of these sources goes beyond the letters as an account of the past and interviews as an account of the present. They also complement each other by offering insights that help understand the information in the other sources. This study concludes that an integrated and systematic analysis of both sources can offer a rich perspective on the ways in which migrants try to make sense of their experiences, leading to better understanding of often contradictory accounts in which their own expectations, plans, successes and hardships – and those of others – play changing roles. It is well possible that a similar approach can also prove to be interesting for other topics in the field of migration studies, such as integration and identity-formation.

Gender-based violence in refugee settings

This essay reports from a long-term research project<a href="http://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ijcyfs/author/submit/3?articleId=10474#_edn1">1</a> which interviewed participants in a post-war U.K. youth culture called “casuals” about all aspects of its history, especially the styles of music and fashion and its connection to British soccer spectatorship from the late 1970s to the present day. Original interview and ethnographic material from the project is presented and discussed, and situated within a context of the sociology of youth culture in general and soccer fandom in particular. The essay suggests some theoretical and methodological signposts for the future study of youth culture whilst outlining some specific aspects of the research conducted. This new work on youth culture also rethinks earlier work on rave culture and football hooligan subcultures in the light of appreciation and critique of such work in various recent youth subcultural theory debates. The research reported on here mapped the history of the “moments” of the birth of casual in the late 1970s and the coming together of the football hooligan and rave subcultures in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the later remixing, recycling and “mash up” of these moments in a present in which “pop culture” is said by some to be “addicted to its own past” (Reynolds, 2011).

This book analyses the parallel, different and related aspects of the discovery of poverty in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the role of education in the American 'war on poverty' from 1964, and in Britain from the appointment of the Plowden committee on primary schools. It examines changes in policy emphases, the relationship between research and policy, and the transatlantic interactions and silences involved. Based on archival and interview material the book offers new insights into the role of the Plowden committee in shifting attention from social class to poverty, and it discusses in both the American and British contexts the concepts and theories involved in the changing fortunes of the educational war on poverty in the 1960s and 1970s. An Educational War on Poverty represents a major contribution to the study of the recent social and educational history of Britain and the United States, and the range and depth of research, will make it an essential reference source for scholars and policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Background/Context Lesson planning is one of the most common activities required of teachers; however, since the late 1970s and early 1980s, it has not been a major focus of study, either conceptually or empirically. Although there are recent articles on the topic, much of the current work is specific to examining a particular teaching method or subject area. This essay not only examines the lesson planning process, a neglected area of study, but also puts forward a perceptual or arts-based approach to lesson planning that has not been attended to since Elliot Eisner's essays on objectives. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study The purposes of this conceptual paper are is to provide theoretical grounding for perceptual lesson planning; to analytically examine the two current, dominant approaches to creating lesson plans; and to put forward ideas that undergird a fresh approach to creating and analyzing lesson planning. Research Design This study consists of a major literature review and a related conceptual argument. We also present qualitative data (a lesson plan with attendant interview material) and preliminary findings from an ongoing study. Analytic Framework We use an original analytic framework to discuss the two dominant approaches to lesson planning, the behaviorist and constructivist modes, and to compare them to the perceptual mode. Our analytical categories consist of the following: intentions, process, product, and outcomes. By intentions we mean the aims, goals, or objectives of the lesson plan. The process refers to how the lesson plan is created and what that experience is like for the teacher. Product refers to the actual lessons that result from the planning. Outcomes refer to both the anticipated results of the lesson as well as the general kinds of student outcomes desired in the mode of lesson planning. Conclusions/Recommendations Perceptual lesson planning may be characterized as engaging teachers’ and students senses and creativity; as an artistic endeavor that is joyful in and of itself; as consisting of various stylized products; and leading toward meaningful learning for students and teachers in an environment open to elements of surprise and innovation. Lesson planning may be functional and meaningful to teachers and subsequently their students. Lesson planning could be something teachers enjoy, learn from, and appreciate. Thus, we note that focusing on the process of lesson planning is an important part of education that warrants much more attention.

Since the early 1970s adult literacy projects and classes have developed and published student writing in the UK. Early practitioners responded to the dearth of suitable learning materials and aimed to nurture hidden voices “from below” through a democratic educational process. Based on reading student written publications as well as archive and interview material the author assesses student writing and its associated pedagogy. Although student writing is shown to be closely connected to personal identity and experience, it was also channelled through specific educational and social contexts. The ways in which these books were read also reveal tensions apparent in student publishing. Some of the limitations and obstacles that it faced are discussed alongside the ways in which it has endured in an inhospitable contemporary environment. 1 I would like to thank Sheila Rowbotham for reading an early draft and the staff at Ruskin College library and archive.