Point Of Departure Research Articles

Música e psicanálise: uma abordagem para os processos criativos e suas dimensões inconscientes

This paper presents an approach for songwriting from a Lacanian psychoanalysis’ perspec-tive based on an ongoing master's degree research. The departure point is related the rele-vance of the unconscious processes already highlighted in musical cognition research. The research establishes a conversation between these two fields – psychoanalysis and cognition – to, subsequently, address methods and theories that enable a deeper understanding of the different relevant issues on creative process in songwriting. Introducing a brief literature re-view and proposing the use of methods such as memorial and genetic criticism. Finally, we present the initial steps towards a methodology for approaching the creative process in music with psychoanalytic orientation, based on the analysis of drafts and personal reports in free association.

Where was 1821?

The aim of this special issue of Historein is to offer a new and fresh perspective on the 1821 Greek Revolution by drawing on the insights that the spatial turn has brought to the study of the Age of Revolutions. Our point of departure was that although the revolution took place in time and space, it is questions of temporality and of situating the revolution in a temporal context that have mainly preoccupied historians. This can hardly be said about space. In fact, as we argue, the spatial categories that historians have used have had a “natural” and self-evident character that required little or no probing. We wanted to interrogate this character, and what we consider as a lacuna in our understanding of the revolution. Thus, the aim of the introduction is threefold. The first part briefly discusses the historiography on space, and the ways in which this has been used in the study of Age of Revolutions. It also explains why the revolution provides a rich setting to think through space and pose questions about spatiality. The second part introduces the articles that comprise the issue. In this part, we also attempt to bring the contributions together by showing that they can be seen as falling into three very broad categories depending on the type of space they feature (space as place, space as territory, and space as an imagined category). The last part considers other possibilities, other vistas of research, where a “spatial” perspective can take us, if we want to better understand the 1821 Revolution.

Exploring Movement in Creative Dance: Introducing ‘Dancemblage’ in Physical Education Teacher Education

Materialities play a crucial role in both the educational practice of physical education (PE), and in physical education teacher education (PETE). This article explores how, often unnoticed, materialities, human as well as non-human, play part in movement exploration in creative dance in PETE. The methodological point of departure is a pedagogical unit in creative dance enacted as part of an optional dance course in a Swedish PETE program where movement exploration was studied. In the unit, students and a teacher collaboratively explored movement and movement assignments, including the use of materialities. In order to understand how materialities ‘co-act’ in movement exploration during class, this article provides a post-anthropocentric and Deleuzian approach. The concept dancemblage is introduced both as a way to analyse materiality and as something to work with in pedagogical practice. Moreover, the article suggests that by recognising dancemblages in creative dance teaching, teachers can be given a tool to further learn about learners’ explorations and to become open to divergent understandings about what it means to participate in creative dance.

The Syntax of Prominence

The standard view on discourse pronoun resolution is that determining the antecedents of discourse pronouns is typically a function of extralinguistic reasoning. In contrast, Stojnić (2021) argues that pronoun resolution is a function of linguistic facts. In this article we offer what we take to be a friendly amendment to the technical aspects of Stojnić’s proposal. Our point of departure will be with our idea that prominence is not determined by the position of the candidate antecedent within a stack, but rather by its position within standard syntactic tree structures, extended to include discourse-level trees. Our proposal leans on the notion of p-scope, a proof-theoretic accessibility relation among tree nodes which we develop in Ludlow and Živanović (2022), and the notion of closeness built on standard accounts of syntactic locality. The key idea is that a pronoun’s antecedent resolves to its closest p-scoper; specifically, p-scope determines the potential antecedents, and the closeness relation orders these by prominence. Coherence relations, which we provisionally represent as syntactic heads, can be then seen as affecting accessibility and prominence indirectly, in virtue of their position in traditional LF tree structures.

Using in vitro data to derive acceptable exposure levels: A case study on PBDE developmental neurotoxicity

BackgroundCurrent acceptable chemical exposure levels (e.g., tolerable daily intake) are mainly based on animal experiments, which are costly, time-consuming, considered non-ethical by many, and may poorly predict adverse outcomes in humans. ObjectiveTo evaluate a method using human in vitro data and biological modeling to calculate an acceptable exposure level through a case study on 2,2′,4,4′-tetrabromodiphenyl ether (BDE-47) developmental neurotoxicity (DNT). MethodsWe reviewed the literature on in vitro assays studying BDE-47-induced DNT. Using the most sensitive endpoint, we derived a point of departure using a mass-balance in vitro disposition model and benchmark dose modeling for a 5% response (BMC05) in cells. We subsequently used a pharmacokinetic model of gestation and lactation to estimate administered equivalent doses leading to four different metrics of child brain concentration (i.e., average prenatal, average postnatal, average overall, and maximum concentration) equal to the point of departure. The administered equivalent doses were translated into tolerable daily intakes using uncertainty factors. Finally, we calculated biomonitoring equivalents for maternal serum and compared them to published epidemiological studies of DNT. ResultsWe calculated a BMC05 of 164 μg/kg of cells for BDE-47 induced alteration of differentiation in neural progenitor cells. We estimated administered equivalent doses of 0.925–3.767 μg/kg/day in mothers, and tolerable daily intakes of 0.009–0.038 μg/kg/day (composite uncertainty factor: 100). The lowest derived biomonitoring equivalent was 19.75 ng/g lipids, which was consistent with reported median (0.9–23 ng/g lipids) and geometric mean (7.02–26.9 ng/g lipids) maternal serum concentrations from epidemiological studies. ConclusionThis case study supports using in vitro data and biological modeling as a viable alternative to animal testing to derive acceptable exposure levels.

Vaccine Hesitancy and Susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 Misinformation in Japanese Youth: The Contribution of Personality Traits and National Identity.

During the pandemic, the Japanese government drew upon the cultural concept of jishuku, or personal self-constraint, requesting that individuals accept responsibility for their behaviors and consider minimizing the potential negative impact on others. While the jishuku approach to pandemic management rests upon the established and persuasive influence of cultural norms, variability in adherence can be expected according to age. This article documents an investigation into factors impacting vaccine hesitancy and susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 misinformation among Japanese youth. The point of departure is the belief that attitudes and behaviors, such as those underpinning the jishuku approach to pandemic management, arise from within a relational framework. Therefore, developmental characteristics, such as personality traits, and in-group affinity attachments, such as facets of national identity, can be expected to function as predictors of health attitudes and behaviors. The tested structural model of hypothesized interactions accounted for 14% of the observed variance in vaccine hesitancy and 20% in susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 misinformation. With the inclusion of gender, political ideology, and trust in government SARS-CoV-2 response as control variables, the respecified model increased the amount of variance observed in vaccine hesitancy to 30% and to 25% in susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 misinformation. The outcomes are discussed in relation to the communication of coherent public health discourse relative to personality traits and facets of national identity.

The peace/violence nexus: Fundamental, multiple, contingent

This paper finds its point of departure in Murad Idris’s argument about peace being a fundamentally violent ideal marked by an overarching logic of constitutive aggression. It responds to this categorical statement by reconstructing four distinct variants of the peace/violence nexus, each of which involves a different type of violence, performed by a different type of agent, with a different demeanor, at different times and intervals, and in relation to a different conception of peace. There is not one peace/violence nexus but at least four. What is more, a detailed examination of these peace/violence nexuses puts into doubt their fundamental nature, if by fundamental is meant intrinsic and inescapable. It draws attention to the contingency of their becoming a social and political reality, and thereby confirms that the imbrication of peace and violence may at least theoretically—and temporarily—be avoided.

Chair Architectonics

Chair design is one of the most demanding and most challenging tasks for designers, to which creative efforts of numerous architects have been continuously linked. Since the beginning of the twentieth century the intensity of these efforts has not diminished. By creating an ideal microcosm around an essential everyday object, architects also express their understanding of space and time. A chair, like architecture, occupies a position in space that it also defines. The paper analyses three groups of chairs characteristic of the 20th century, different in terms of typology and morphology. Their architectonics are marked by a specific functional, formal and constructive idea, by concrete production possibilities and by technological procedures in the working of individual materials. Notably, reclining chairs, cantilever chairs with steel tube constructions and office chairs. The model of analysis put forward could also serve as a point of departure for future more extensive research into the same, or different, typological and morphological design. Three Croatian chair models are placed in the context of the pertaining design.

Application of AHP and geospatial technologies to assess ecotourism suitability: A case study of Saint Martin's Island in Bangladesh

The study uses the Geographical Information System (GIS) to identify and assess the potentially eco-friendly, sustainable tourist locations on Saint Martin’s Island, Bangladesh. Key informant interview (KII) and the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) have been used to establish a resource inventory and to set a number of sustainable tourism requirements. The suitability map for eco-friendly sustainable tourism was subsequently developed, based on the respective weights deriving from the linear combination of criteria and factors. From the analysis report, it was revealed that the areas of suitable, moderately suitable, less suitable and not suitable were 30%, 32%, 10% and 28% respectively. In this study, attempts were made to specify the degree of ecotourism suitability in the investigated area. The outcome might be useful for the development of resilient policy to design ecotourism. Similarly, this analysis can be used as a guideline for assessing eco-friendly sustainable tourism in other regions. It may also act as a point of departure for potentially more nuanced research.

‘To Live a Peaceful Life’: African American Defectors in the German Democratic Republic

Abstract In this article I follow the paths of six African Americans who defected from the US Army stationed in West Germany in the early 1950s and applied for political asylum in the German Democratic Republic. Their reasons for moving to and staying in East Germany are my point of departure, in order to gain an understanding of how they made sense of the Cold War divide based on their experiences of racism. The perceptions of the six African Americans are contrasted with the reactions of the Stasi, illustrating how those working to defend the policies and politics of the governing Socialist Unity Party of Germany located race and racism in their conceptualization of political asylum. The article then focuses on the lives of the six defectors in East Germany over a period of roughly four decades. I argue that questions of race/racism were closely linked to questions of (violated) intimacy and settledness, both for the African American defectors and for the Stasi. Zooming in on the intimate allows me to reconfigure the broader context, providing a glimpse into how race and racism shaped the Cold War geography as well as how this geography changed in light of decolonization.

Utilizing integrated testing strategy (ITSv1) defined approach and read across to predict skin sensitization of cannabidiol

Cannabidiol (CBD) is increasingly being used as an ingredient in cosmetics, but to date no pre-clinical studies have been published to address the skin sensitization end point. This case study investigated its skin sensitization potential for use in a face cream application at 0.3 % using Next Generation Risk Assessment (NGRA) framework. Based on chemical structure and in-silico prediction using Derek Nexus, CBD was predicted to be weak sensitizer with a resorcinol alert moiety. In vitro testing was conducted confirming it to be sensitizer, but the New Approach Methodologies (NAM) data could not provide sufficient confidence to determine a point of departure (PoD). Integrated testing strategy (ITS)v1 Defined Approach (DA), adopted in OECD Guideline No. 497, was used for skin sensitization potency categorization. However, ITSv1 DA alone is not used for further refinement of the potency prediction based on EC3 (the estimated concentration that produces a stimulation index of 3 in murine local lymph node assay) values. Therefore, the application of read-across using Derek Nexus derived a PoD derived from the LLNA EC3 of 42 %. This led to a favorable NGRA conclusion and to support use of CBD at 0.3 % in face cream application.

Prospects

The latest IPCC report which is named ‘The Synthesis Report , Climate Change 2023’ was released on 20 March 2023 to inform the 2023 Global Stocktake under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The report finds that ‘there is more than 50% chance that global temperature rise will reach or surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius between 2021 and 2040 across studied scenarios, and under a high-emissions pathway, specifically, the world may hit this threshold even sooner, between 2018 and 2037.’ These findings again emphasise the growing pressures and challenges that deltas are confronting in their path towards future development. It is evident that the global imperative for deltas to adapt has reached an unprecedented level, but at the same time the question arises if adaptation is enough. Especially considering the scope of societal challenges that need to be the point of departure for sustainable spatial transformation in general. Aren't they of such a fundamental nature that we need to reconsider our urban system as a whole and aim for transformation instead of adaptation? Looking more closely to the societal challenges we can organise them according to their environmental and socio-economic drivers. The environmental drivers are the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis. The socio-economic drivers are ongoing urbanisation, the energy transition, and the new economy.

Navigating “Race” at Tahiti: Polynesian and European Encounters

AbstractIn this article I analyze stories about the negotiation of European racialization ideologies in the Society Islands (Tahiti and its Islands) in the late eighteenth century. My focus is the disjunctures between European understandings of their encounters at Tahiti, and what Pacific scholars have come to understand of Polynesian understandings of themselves and various foreigners in that early period. In doing so, I draw out the ways sexuality and gender mediated, enabled, and were also constituted through such racialization processes in their cultural and historical specificity. A key point of departure for this analysis is that the embodiment of race is a negotiated social process. The comparative historical case study I offer up here follows current scholarly moves in seeking out the insights to be gained by tracking racialization as a contingent process, as open rather than closed, as variegated rather than singular, and as imperfectly and only tenuously wrought through ideologies that may be profoundly unanticipated from the vantage point of modernist logics of essentialism and foundationalism. The resulting analysis aims to create space for critically revisiting the ways in which racial normativities and racialized embodiment operate, and how they work, and fail to work, to promote naturalized racist hierarchies of privilege and subordination.

China’s Road towards Decarbonization: Unrealistic Promise or a Credible Commitment?

This article argues that in low- and middle-income countries, market forces alone are structurally inadequate to spark the rapid development of renewable energy resources and initiate the replacement of obsolete technologies with cleaner technologies. Using the theoretical perspective of new structural economics as a point of departure, the examination of system-level constraints to the transformation of renewable energy reveals that active state participation in the energy sector can, on the one hand, play a key role in limiting fossil fuel consumption and, on the other, accelerate the development of renewable energy technologies. Analysis of the structural characteristics that underlie the gradual deceleration of fossil fuel extraction and the acceleration of renewable energy deployment suggests that China has laid the necessary prerequisites to reconcile policy objectives of promoting energy transformation and ensuring long-term economic growth.

Where were you when Facebook went out? Experiences of involuntary disconnection from social media

This paper presents findings from an online questionnaire that collected experiences from the Facebook outage on October 4th, 2021, an event that affected approximately three billion users around the globe. The purpose of the study is to contribute to recent discussions digital disconnection and digital wellbeing by using an extraordinary event of involuntary disconnection as point of departure. Our research questions were: Where were people when the services shut down, what did they think and what did they do? What correlations can be found between usage/attitudes to social media and the experiences of the outage? How can the outage of October 4th be understood as a snapshot of our cultural condition? The questionnaire was distributed to 463 Swedish university students and 191 responses were received. Our analysis shows how the involuntary disconnection caused by the outage was an event that highlights the ambivalence of digital life. It also points to some correlations between general social media use and attitudes, and the experiences and activities during the outage. The paper ends with a discussion on the implications that these findings may have for further research into digital disconnection.

LGBITQ+ INCLUSIVITY IN GERIATRIC CARE IN NORWAY: ATTITUDES AND PRACTICES AMONG HEALTH CARE PERSONNEL

Abstract Person-centered care is the dominating care philosophical framework being used in geriatric care services in Norway today, as a point of departure for good practice. It implies that all care-receivers should be met from an empathic and individual perspective- and an increased focus on basic psychological needs. To be positively confirmed in relation to ones′ identities and to feel included in communities are central parts of this (Kitwood 1997). But is this also the case for older LGBTIQ+-adults? And which competence and knowledge on LGBTIQ+-adults′ life course experiences and aging conditions exist amongst health care staff working in long-term care facilities, home care services and day care activities? This paper is based on results from the interview study “Queer perspectives on geriatric care in Norway”, investigating experiences of person-centered care and inclusive practices from two perspectives; non-heterosexual care receivers and care providers in the Oslo-area. The analyzed material consists of: 1) interviews with 11 LGBQ-people between 61- 78 years old about their experiences with health care services over the life course 2) 3 focus groups and 2 individual interviews with health care staff working in a range of health and care services targeting 65+ adults. A majority of the interviewees had received training on LGBTIQ+-inclusive health care. The paper will mainly present results from the second study. What are leaders′ attitudes and knowledge regarding active work with gender and sexual diversity and equal access to care, and which experiences do they have from implementing LGBTIQ-awareness in policy and care practices?

THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS REGARDING STEAM EDUCATION AT PRESCHOOL AGE

This article supports and promotes the introduction of STEAM education in preschool education and its advantages. Modern education is not a renunciation of the valuable heritage of the past, but a restructuring of its relationship with the future, a 180 degree turn of its point of departure. STEAM education is a challenge of the modern, technological world. Unlike the classical lessons in the traditional system of education where the teacher teaches the students, STEAM is an active, applied and constructivist method of "learning by doing". The children, regardless of their age, should be encouraged to think deeply, so that they have the chance to become innovators and leaders who can solve the most pressing challenges facing our future. STEM and STEAM projects put the foundations of an openness to concepts that would normally come across a lot later and much more theoretical. Postmodern education is adapting day by day the needs of tomorrow's future adults, the key to success being knowing how to adapt and how to use what you have learned, for continuous change and development.

“No Future to Be Had”: Journeying toward Death in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Abstract This article examines Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) by focusing on the way that the novel’s protagonist, Milkman Dead, rejects various traditional Euro-American formulations of “progress.” I argue that Milkman’s actions uncover a legacy of loss associated with African American culture and, relatedly, buried narratives of African American history. I take a cue from dance scholar Ann Cooper Albright’s attentiveness to what she terms “the cultural hegemony of the vertical” (37) in considering Milkman’s embodied resistance to existing paradigms of progress. By positing a vertical conceptualization of racial uplift ideology, the Dead family ancestry, and the journeys North and South between Michigan and Virginia in Song of Solomon, I demonstrate how Milkman’s very corporeality comes to signify the importance of African American cultural preservation and moving “counter-to” in re-visioning liberatory, counter-hegemonic routes of progress. My reading unfolds from a critical moment in chapter 2 of Song of Solomon; in this scene, the Dead family journeys northward in Milkman’s father’s Packard toward the wealthy white neighborhoods of Honoré, meanwhile Milkman demonstrates a remarkable preoccupation with what lies behind him. Situating Milkman’s embodied opposition to the journey’s progress as a point of departure, I examine how Morrison disrupts various paradigms of progress throughout Song of Solomon.

Dreaming of an Indigenised Australia

ABSTRACT This article offers a critical engagement with Billy Griffiths’s award-winning book Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia as a departure point towards uncovering and examining a significant tradition of Australian cultural reflection and interpretation it terms, following Anthony Moran, indigenising settler nationalism. Tracing the genealogy of the indigenising settler-nationalist tendencies that shape Deep Time Dreaming, and to which the text itself contributes, the article situates Griffiths’s contribution as a recent and notable exemplar of a longstanding historiographical tradition that responds to the continuing crisis of settler-national belonging and legitimacy by attempting to incorporate the historical depth of Indigenous occupation into its own national, nationalising narrative, and so to indigenise the settler nation itself. The tradition is not Griffiths’s alone. When read in the context of a broader indigenising settler-nationalist tradition, Griffiths’s approach is revealed as neither unusually problematic nor uniquely complicit in the dynamics the article draws attention to. On the contrary, the genealogical reading of Griffiths’s work I offer here is important precisely to the extent that it facilitates an understanding of the underlying tendencies towards settler indigenisation that continue to condition Australian settler-national/ist historiography, and culture at large.

The Case of Dorin Tudoran. The Poetry of Exile and the Exile of Poetry

This essay traces the evolution of Dorin Tudoran's poetics, the mutations from one volume to another, starting from the hypothesis that the theme of exile is defining for all the poet’s work. I have tried to capture the stages of this exile, its points of departure and expression, Dorin Tudoran's relationship with the political system, and, above all, the causes that generated an inversion in the natural order: Tudoran’s entire work seems to be the product of a biographical event that, from a diachronic point of view, marks only the author's last volume. How poetry prefigured biography in the case of Dorin Tudoran calls for a conceptualization of “exile” beyond its basic meaning, that of crossing (willingly or unwillingly) geographical boundaries.