Visual Imagination Research Articles

A generative adversarial model of intrusive imagery in the human brain.

The mechanisms underlying the subjective experiences of mental disorders remain poorly understood. This is partly due to long-standing over-emphasis on behavioral and physiological symptoms and a de-emphasis of the patient's subjective experiences when searching for treatments. Here, we provide a new perspective on the subjective experience of mental disorders based on findings in neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI). Specifically, we propose the subjective experience that occurs in visual imagination depends on mechanisms similar to generative adversarial networks that have recently been developed in AI. The basic idea is that a generator network fabricates a prediction of the world, and a discriminator network determines whether it is likely real or not. Given that similar adversarial interactions occur in the two major visual pathways of perception in people, we explored whether we could leverage this AI-inspired approach to better understand the intrusive imagery experiences of patients suffering from mental illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and acute stress disorder. In our model, a nonconscious visual pathway generates predictions of the environment that influence the parallel but interacting conscious pathway. We propose that in some patients, an imbalance in these adversarial interactions leads to an overrepresentation of disturbing content relative to current reality, and results in debilitating flashbacks. By situating the subjective experience of intrusive visual imagery in the adversarial interaction of these visual pathways, we propose testable hypotheses on novel mechanisms and clinical applications for controlling and possibly preventing symptoms resulting from intrusive imagery.

Guest Editorial: Ecological knowledge co‐production and the contested imaginaries of development in Southeast Asia

Guest Editorial: Ecological knowledge co‐production and the contested imaginaries of development in Southeast Asia

“An Exhibit as Will Astonish the Civilized World”: Seeking Separate Statehood for Indian Territory at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition

AbstractChickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Muscogee, and Seminole citizens employed the Indian Territory exhibits at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition to advance the separate statehood movement. Increasingly shut out of the formal political realm, they adopted creative measures to exert their political will, including participating in the world’s fair. Employing insights from settler-colonial theory and public history, this paper argues that the politics of display expanded the agency of a group marginalized from political representation. The U.S. government, pressured by the territory’s growing population of non-Native settlers, had begun planning for statehood, passing the 1898 Curtis Act to force allotment and dissolve the Five Tribes’ governments by 1906. To protect their land and sovereignty, a cohort of Native citizens pursued statehood for Indian Territory separate from Oklahoma Territory. Although joint statehood won out, separate statehood advocates succeeded in creating exhibits that centered on the survival of Native nations. They also articulated an Indigenous conception of citizenship, developing an imaginative vision for a future in which self-determination and U.S. citizenship could converge in a Native state. This represented a novel contribution to ongoing debates over how to integrate remaining western territories into the United States and how to incorporate diverse peoples within the citizenry.

Re-encoding Glamour from Ghana to England: Illustrated Magazines, Gender Norms and Black Identities through the Lens of James Barnor (1950s–1980s)

How have gender and racial norms conveyed by illustrated magazines—whose circulation exploded in Africa in the 1960s—affected photographers’ local practices? And how, in turn, have they themselves generated this gendered visual order? This article aims to shed light on this two-fold question by proposing a diachronic analysis of the influence of models of femininity transmitted by the illustrated press on the visual imagination of a Ghanaian photographer—as seen in his photographs taken between the 1950s and the 1980s. It explores the links between the publications of the pan-African magazine Drum (the most widely circulated magazine in English-speaking Africa at the time) and its translation into the art of portraiture as practiced by James Barnor (1929-), a photographer with a transnational career, between Ghana and England. Because his professional and personal career path tracked the evolution of these gendered norms, James Barnor became both the repository and the instigator of an idealized vision of “the” African woman.By means of an intersectional focus, the issues of gender norms and of racial biases are examined in parallel to better understand how the photographer appropriated throughout his career the shifting codes of a “female glamour” reinvented for Africa during the post-independence period. While numerous studies have examined the modalities of this codification, in the present paper they are addressed through an in-depth exploration of the photographer's archives, now held in Paris, and combined with an analysis of early issues of Drum. The aim is to juxtapose images intended for publication, i.e. public, with private images in order to consider how the standards of fashion photography infused Barnor’s practices which lie at the crossroad of different social worlds. The corpus composed of portraits of young women is also informed by numerous interviews with the photographer and some of his models, which provide behind-the-scenes insights relative to the published images by exploring their political and social contexts.We first look at Drum’s editorial strategy from its launch in South Africa to its expansion throughout West Africa. While the magazine initially borrowed from white Western references such as Life, it gradually became, to some extent, a showcase for black pride on the continent and in the global diaspora. Then, we study Barnor’s early studio practice as already acutely aware of the codes of femininity enacted by the magazine: this is shown through his “recycling” of the poses and the composition of the images. During the ten years he spent in England, from 1959 to 1969, his collaboration with Drum gave rise to a gallery of portraits of anonymous young women, who became ordinary icons for an ideal African femininity in the context of the diaspora. Finally, in the 1970s, Barnor’s return to Ghana saw the reuse of these codes inherited from the globalized fashion industry combined with the emerging iconography produced by African-American models as a means to create social documentary. In this way, he contributed to an aesthetic of blackness that was constructed within a transnational framework.

The Application of Traditional Chinese Cultural Elements in Fantasy Costume Drama - A Case Study of “Love Between Fairy and Devil”

The spread of Chinese TV dramas cannot be separated from the strong underpinnings of Chinese stories. Strengthening the multifaceted presentation of traditional culture is an indispensable element in creating quality TV dramas with culture, connotation and Chinese characteristics. With a unique oriental narrative and a unique oriental romantic audio-visual language, the fantasy ancient idol drama “Love Between Fairy and Devil” restores a beautiful oriental fantasy world, which helps to reshape the audience’s visual imagination of Chinese classical mythology, conveys the unique charm of Chinese traditional culture to the audience, and promotes the further “going out” of traditional culture.

Diversity of Visual Imaginary of Mental Board in Shogi

Diversity of Visual Imaginary of Mental Board in Shogi

"A larger vision": William Blake, Phoebe Anna Traquair, and the Visual Imagination in EBB's Sonnets from the Portuguese

"A larger vision":William Blake, Phoebe Anna Traquair, and the Visual Imagination in EBB's Sonnets from the Portuguese Clare Broome Saunders (bio) In the 1888 essay "English Poetesses," Oscar Wilde considers that the chief qualities of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's1 work is its "sincerity and strength" and hails EBB as "an imperishable glory to our literature."2 He praises particularly the sociopolitical and cultural function of her poetry, which, as Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor suggest, is "especially notable in an author himself known as an apostle of aestheticism."3 However, Wilde also considers EBB's ambitious and visionary poetic ideal, which he cannot find in work by her contemporaries, such as Christina Rossetti, "the very delightful artist in poetry" (p. 81). The poetics of force and energy that he finds in EBB's work make her "unapproachable" by her peers: "Beyond it and above it are higher and more sunlit heights of song, a larger vision, and an ampler air, a music at once more passionate and more profound, a creative energy that is born of the spirit, a winged rapture that is born of the soul, a force and fervour of mere utterance that has all the wonder of the prophet, and not a little of the consecration of the priest" (p. 81). Four years later, when the Edinburgh-based artist Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852–1936) embarked on an ambitious and intricate project to illustrate EBB's Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), which she would eventually complete in January 1897, she focuses precisely on this visual excess of EBB's poetic imagination.4 Born Phoebe Anna Moss in Dublin, Traquair was inspired by childhood visits to the medieval manuscripts housed at Trinity College, particularly to see the Book of Kells, to pursue a career in art. This led to her introduction to her future husband, the Scottish paleontologist Dr. Ramsay Heatley Traquair, who was seeking an illustrator for his research papers; the two married and moved to Edinburgh in 1874, and Traquair illustrated her husband's papers for the next thirty years.5 However, Traquair's main artistic inspiration came from [End Page 521] literature: fascinated by the interaction between the poetic and the visual imagination, she forged a career as an illustrator and illuminator, grounded in her early experience of medieval manuscripts. In 1887, Traquair wrote to John Ruskin for advice on medieval illumination, sparking several months of correspondence during which Ruskin loaned her several thirteenth-century manuscripts from his library for studying and copying, which Traquair returned with copies, along with original works of her own and discussions of poets like Walt Whitman (Cumming, pp. 18–19). Traquair's long artistic career saw her move to work on large-scale murals, embroidery, and enamel jewelry as well as book illustration, and she became one of the first women elected to the Royal Scottish Academy in 1920. Throughout all her work, her main creative purpose was to celebrate the potential of the human mind and spirit: she was drawn to authors such as Dante in whose work she saw the ideal synaesthetic combination of the visual, poetic, and musical. From the 1890s, Traquair was increasingly inspired by the work of D. G. Rossetti, whose The House of Life was, for her, "a modern counterpart to Dante's La Vita Nuova" (Cumming, p. 41). Like Rossetti, she valued William Blake's poetry and art as inspirational, using his illustrations repeatedly as sources for her illuminations and murals (Cumming, p. 34).6 Blake appears alongside John the Baptist, Tennyson, Lord Lister, and Louis Pasteur in her final mural scheme, commissioned for the Manners Chapel, All Saints Church, Thorney Hill in 1920; as Traquair wrote to her sister Amelia, the portraits she included were of those who "sing the Te Deum, tho' they don't often know it." To her, the "Te Deum" meant "every beautiful and every fine thing" (Cumming, p. 90). Traquair's illustrations for Sonnets from the Portuguese expose striking connections between Blake's work and EBB's sonnet sequence, illuminating the ways in which EBB develops and refines Blake's celebration of excess and the visual imagination. There are many obvious connections between the...

Introduction: Poetry and the Victorian Visual Imagination

Introduction:Poetry and the Victorian Visual Imagination Jill R. Ehnenn (bio) and Heather Bozant Witcher (bio) What might it mean to "see" poetry of the nineteenth century? Certainly, it might mean an act of generic visibility: reorienting conceptions of the Victorian age as equivalent to the rise of the novel to reconsider the centrality of poetry (an act of scholarly recovery that has been in process for at least the past decade). It might also gesture toward the visual possibilities of poetic language—the transportive effects of the imagination—and the interrelation of media, sensory modes (words, ideas, tastes, sounds, sights, spectacles), and the embodied experience that Victorian poetry is uniquely primed to explore. And, of course, it also conjures up the optical technologies that allowed for mechanical "seeing"—photographic and engraved images, the magic lantern, kaleidoscope, stereoscope, and others—alongside the so-called Golden Age of illustration, a moment in which literature—and particularly poetry and periodicals—is richly illustrated to join word and image. What might such thinking about the visual vis-à-vis Victorian poetry bring to the discipline of Victorian studies—indeed, English studies in general—especially now? Since the 1990s, the field of Victorian studies has emphasized the impact of visual culture on historical and literary contexts. As Kate Flint asserts in her The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000), the visual is a dominant mode of the Victorian period. Jonathan Crary questioned subjectivity by foregrounding the role of the nineteenth-century observer in his Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990). By tracing optical devices as "sites of both knowledge and power that operate directly on the body of the individual," Crary used optical experience and visual culture to reconsider what we mean by realism in the nineteenth century.1 Jonathan Potter furthers Crary's argument, showcasing the continual negotiation of Victorian subjectivities by focusing on the mediation of perceptual experience in his Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2018). Yet, these conversations about individual subjectivities and the intersections between the visual and verbal environs have largely explored genres other than poetry. This special issue, therefore, centers on the affordances of poetry as a [End Page 429] site of visual imagination. How might looking at the intersections of the Victorian visual imagination and the field of nineteenth-century poetry provide new insights into continued conversations surrounding both poetics and visual culture? What, then, might it mean to "look" differently at Victorian poetry? In the essays that follow, the contributors offer unique methodologies, case studies, and discussions about how new ways of looking provoke affective representations of others and one's own identity. But perhaps more broadly, these new considerations of poetry and the visual imagination offer disruptions to the so-called natural or normal order. When thinking specifically of the possibilities of Victorian poetry, Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow both point to the genre's experimental and social nature.2 This experimentalism is extended with what Margaret Stetz terms "genre crossing" in her argument of genre at the fin de siècle, that in the 1890s, "everyone—reviewers, bookbuyers, other publishers, and authors—[were encouraged] to think beyond the law of genre and to experiment with writing that crossed boundaries."3 Even earlier, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for instance, famously argued for a new poetic form when writing Aurora Leigh: not only an amalgamation of verse forms but "one that would adapt established styles to contemporary needs."4 Victorian poetry, therefore, is marked by its experimental nature and its publicly oriented focus on "contemporary needs." Indeed, one might argue that this public focus is further solidified with poetry's natural integration with visual culture and its situation within lived experience and sociality. Looking inward and outward, prompted by new modalities (and new combinations) in the visual and written arts, the Victorians, it seems, were natural disrupters. And what better time to be reconsidering the possibilities of disruption than in 2022, following a pandemic, an ongoing climate crisis, and the global rise of authoritarianism leading to the January 6 uprising, its aftermath, and the repeal of Roe v. Wade? In the Oxford English Dictionary, "disrupt," as a verb, is defined...

Poetry and the Visual Dynamics of Race in the West Indian Readers

Poetry and the Visual Dynamics of Race in the West Indian Readers Casie Legette (bio) This essay takes as its object of study the West Indian Readers, a set of Caribbean schoolbooks first published in the 1920s and reprinted throughout the twentieth century. Though these texts may seem an unlikely choice for an analysis of poetry and the Victorian visual imagination, I argue that both Victorian poetry and Victorian visual culture are on full display in these twentieth-century school readers, which are constructed of pieces—poetic and visual—of imperial Victoriana. The West Indian Readers were the first school readers from the Scottish textbook powerhouse Thomas Nelson & Sons to incorporate Caribbean content, the first to be designed with Caribbean students in mind. Nonetheless, these schoolbooks were still deeply British in their orientation, and the vast majority of the selections of poetry are by British authors, many Victorian. The West Indian Readers include a variety of visual material: simple line drawings, full-color illustrations, and black-and-white photography. The elaborate, full-page colored illustrations tend to be linked to British literature: paintings of Robinson Crusoe, scenes from Shakespeare. Poems by the Victorian poets Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Kingsley are accompanied by full-color images of white children at play. The photographic images are quite different; they depict people of color at work. Black and Brown Caribbean laborers—sometimes children—are shown harvesting sugarcane, husking coconuts, transporting goods.1 These very different types of illustrations set up a powerful opposition in the West Indian Readers, between Caribbean people of color, who are represented almost exclusively in the act of manual, agricultural labor, and white British children, who are instead represented at leisure. Despite the attempts by the editor, J. O. Cutteridge, to make the West Indian Readers speak to Caribbean children's needs, these textbooks nonetheless contribute to the long tradition of colonial education, in which colonial textbooks instruct their readers in the superiority of Britishness and whiteness.2 This article examines how [End Page 583] the combination of poems and images in these books ties poetry to images of whiteness and disrupts the ability of Brown and Black Caribbean children to imagine themselves occupying these illustrated, poetic spaces. The poems I examine are for and about children, but the illustrations make clear just which children the poems are for. Of course, despite the ways these textbooks, and the ones before them, sought to associate poetry with whiteness and Britishness, generations of Caribbean readers and writers of color did make spaces for themselves in the worlds of poetry and the imagination, responding to—and rewriting—the British poetic canon with a fascinating and compelling canon of their own. Here, I analyze editor J. O. Cutteridge's imperial project in the West Indian Readers, while also remembering the range of ways that actual Caribbean students might have responded, including by reimagining, resisting, or simply ignoring the kind of education these schoolbooks propounded. In relying on British poetry to reinforce white supremacy, the West Indian Readers continue the project of the many colonial textbooks that came before them. These books were preceded by the Nelson publisher's hugely popular Royal Readers. The Royal Readers had long been used for education throughout the British Empire, in the Caribbean, in Canada, and in Australia and New Zealand. Though they were constructed with British students in mind (as a look at the content makes clear), they were read—and memorized—by students in very different geographical, and colonial, contexts. The most exploitative version of this encounter was probably in the Caribbean, where children were required to memorize and recite poems like Wordsworth's "Daffodils," about a plant they had never seen. Many twentieth-century Caribbean authors—Lorna Goodison, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Kamau Brathwaite—represent or respond to scenes of colonial instruction in nineteenth-century British poetry; this experience of colonial education is sometimes called "the daffodil gap."3 Though the prose sections of the West Indian Readers were much more likely to feature Caribbean plants than British ones, when it comes to the poetry, the problem of primarily British content remained. The Royal Readers were composed for white British students...

In memoriam: Claudio Rapezzi

Claudio Rapezzi passed away at the age of 71, leaving abruptly all his patients, friends, colleagues, and pupils. Rapezzi ‘was first and foremost a clinician who always put the patient first and could always be counted on to appropriately frame new discoveries’, as Frederick Ruberg wrote. He gave a substantial contribution to the advance in medical knowledge thanks to his unique qualities of curiosity, culture, and imaginative vision in each of the many fields his work touched: from the never-ending love for electrocardiography, manifested from his first publication1 up to its novel applications in cardiomyopathies, to the legacy he has left in cardiac amyloidosis with the ‘many ideas that we take for granted now, bone tracer cardiac imaging, tafamidis and so much more’, as Sharmila Dorbala has written, to the last Editorial on sex differences in this disease.2 Amyloid transthyretin cardiomyopathy (ATTR-CM) is emerging as an important cause of morbidity and mortality and a widely underdiagnosed disorder. One of the reasons for the recent interest on ATTR-CM is the availability of an algorithm for the non-invasive diagnosis of this condition. Indeed, the combination of an intense cardiac uptake of bone tracers and the absence of a monoclonal protein allows us to diagnose ATTR-CM without the need for the demonstration of amyloid deposits on tissue samples from the heart or an extracardiac site.1 In detail, cardiac uptake must be as intense as that of the sternum and ribs (Perugini Grade 2), or more intense than the sternum and ribs (Perugini Grade 3).3 The Perugini grading system is named after Enrica Perugini, the first author of a seminal paper published in 2005 by the research group from Bologna coordinated by Claudio Rapezzi.3 It was thus Prof. Rapezzi who introduced this very simple grading system and understood its relevance for the differential diagnosis between light-chain and ATTR-CM. Indeed, an international collaboration led by Rapezzi and the group of the National Amyloidosis Centre in London established in 2016 that ‘the combined findings of grade 2 or 3 myocardial radiotracer uptake on bone scintigraphy and the absence of a monoclonal protein in serum or urine had a specificity and positive predictive value for cardiac ATTR amyloidosis of 100%’,4 thus introducing the concept of a non-invasive diagnosis of ATTR-CM that is now adopted worldwide.5 Every diagnosis of ATTR-CM made without the need of a tissue biopsy is then an ideal tribute to the vision of Rapezzi. In the same years, the Phase 3 Safety and Efficacy of Tafamidis in Patients with Transthyretin Cardiomyopathy (ATTR-ACT) trial was evaluating the TTR stabilizer tafamidis in patients with ATTR-CM. The results of this trial, presented by Rapezzi during the 2018 European Society of Cardiology meeting in Munich, opened a new therapeutic avenue for patients with ATTR-CM from all over the world.6 Tafamidis still remains the only approved treatment for ATTR-CM, either variant or wild-type, with a demonstrated survival benefit confirmed even in a long-term extension study.7 Rapezzi also contributed greatly to spread the knowledge on ATTR-CM through multiple initiatives, ranging from a position statement of the European Society of Cardiology on the diagnosis and management of amyloid CM8 to other consensus documents,9–12 to talks and educational activities in many congresses, and the formation of many young clinicians and fellows, many of whom established new outpatient clinics devoted to amyloid CM.

Professionalisation and the spectacle of nature: Understanding changes in the visual imaginaries of private protected area organisations in Australia

Imaginaries of protected areas as state-based fortresses have been challenged by expansion of the global nature conservation estate on non-government lands, notably in contexts such as Australia where neoliberal reform has been strong. Little is known about the implications of this change for the meanings, purposes and practices of nature conservation. Images are central to public understandings of nature conservation. We thus investigate the visual communication of environmental non-government organisations (ENGOs) involved in private protected areas in Australia, with particular focus on Bush Heritage Australia (BHA). We employ a three-part design encompassing quantitative and qualitative methods to study the visual imaginaries underlying nature conservation in BHA's magazines and the web homepages of it and four other ENGOs over 2004–2020. We find that visual imaginaries changed across time, as ENGOs went through an organisational process of professionalisation comprising three dynamics: legitimising, marketising, and differentiating. An imaginary of dedicated Western volunteer groups protecting scenic wilderness was replaced by the spectacle of uplifting and intimate individual encounters with native nature. Amenable to working within rather than transforming dominant political-economic structures, the new imaginary empowers professional ENGOs and their partners as primary carers of nature. It advertises a mediated access to spectacular nature that promises positive emotions and redemption for environmental wrongs to financial supporters of ENGOs. These findings reveal the role of non-government actors under neoliberal conditions in the use of visual representations to shift the meanings, purposes and practices of nature conservation.

Digital Video Effect. The Foundation of the Visual Imaginary in Italian Television in the 1980s

Digital Video Effect. The Foundation of the Visual Imaginary in Italian Television in the 1980s

Poza głosem. Postać Fenelli w świetle wystawień warszawskich z 1831 roku

The article is an attempt to describe an operatic figure deprived of a voice. Following the views of Thrasybulos G. Georgiades, who believes that an operatic character differs from a literary or a dramatic one in that it constitutes a kind of symbiosis between person and sound, the author tries to characterise a mute character. She analyses the Warsaw stagings of Daniel Auber’s opera Masaniello ou La muette de Portici from 1831. Additionally, by activating the visual imagination and relying on iconographic and book sources (including Mimika [Facial expression] by Wojciech Bogusławski), the author reconstructs the character of Fenella in the interpretation of Antonina Palczewska in order to be able to investigate how this character functioned on stage. Such a procedure allowed for an in-depth analysis of the operatic figure devoid of a voice and created by means of a combination of facial expressions and gestures. The study also takes into account the circumstances and problems related to the performance of this opera during the November Uprising.

The Bridge and Narrativization of Vision: Ambrose Bierce and Vladimir Nabokov

The article contains a comparative study of the visual poetics observed in the literary texts of American writer Ambrose Bierce and Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov. In particular, the study focuses on Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and Nabokov’s three short stories “Details of a Sunset”, “Aurelian”, and “Perfection”, in all three of which a number of narrative tools, images, and motifs borrowed from Bierce’s text can be found. The representation of the bridge and the narrativization of mystical insight are regarded as the principal features of the correlative imagery systems. These features are analyzed in order to discover Bierce’s and Nabokov’s understandings of the artist, visual imagination, and the freedom of will.

Kreativ bearbeiding av en modell gjennom transformasjon og narrativ skriving på mellomtrinnet

The article explores how 11-12 year-old pupils in linguistically diverse science classrooms utilize creative visual imaginations and mental models in meaning-making processes about life-cycles in a Bottlegarden. The students wrote narratives while imagining being inside a model (the Bottle-garden). Such transformations allow students to relate personal experiences to abstract scientific processes. Four student-texts are analyzed qualitatively. The tool for analysis is inspired by frameworks of creativity and meaning-making. The narratives revealed variation in the students´ experience with language and text, interests and attitudes. The findings indicate that writing-tasks giving students the opportunity to express themselves in imagined worlds in a scientific context, activates the students´ bodily experiences and emotions. This encourages meaning-making in different layers. The approach also represents a potential for formative assessment.

Educational Leadership as Accompaniment: From Managing to Cultivating Youth Activism

Background/Context: Youth activism, the broad-based leadership among young people who seek to challenge and build alternatives to oppressive social systems, has spread across the nation and globe. Yet youth activism is often hemmed in at school gates, particularly by school leaders charged with maintaining efficient school environments. Focus of Study: This article explores the roles and responsibilities of educational leaders committed to justice and asks: What does it mean to lead schools in times of (re)surgent youth activism? Research Design: To address this urgent question, we conducted an interdisciplinary review of youth participation in social movements that spans the fields of civic engagement, learning sciences, and social movement studies. Findings: We argue that youth activism offers profound sites of consequential learning, generative insights for organizational redesign, and imaginative visions for school and societal transformation. Based on these contributions, we offer the notion of educational leadership as accompaniment: a participatory praxis of leadership reflection and action that foregrounds an ethic of listening, attends to dominant forms of exclusion, and stands in solidarity with youth and their struggles for a more dignified and just world. Conclusions/Recommendations: Leadership as accompaniment challenges the deeply rooted managerial imperative in school administration scholarship and deepens opportunities for realizing existing leadership principles, such as those evident in the Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL). We conclude by discussing the social and material risks impacting those who exercise leadership as accompaniment, and consider what responsibilities such risks demand of education researchers.

Visions of Artificial Intelligence and Robots in Science Fiction: a computational analysis.

Driven by the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) and anthropomorphic robotic systems, the various possibilities and risks of such technologies have become a topic of urgent discussion. Although science fiction (SF) works are often cited as references for visions of future developments, this framework of discourse may not be appropriate for serious discussions owing to technical inaccuracies resulting from its reliance on entertainment media. However, these science fiction works could help researchers understand how people might react to new AI and robotic systems. Hence, classifying depictions of artificial intelligence in science fiction may be expected to help researchers to communicate more clearly by identifying science fiction elements to which their works may be similar or dissimilar. In this study, we analyzed depictions of artificial intelligence in SF together with expert critics and writers. First, 115 AI systems described in SF were selected based on three criteria, including diversity of intelligence, social aspects, and extension of human intelligence. Nine elements representing their characteristics were analyzed using clustering and principal component analysis. The results suggest the prevalence of four distinctive categories, including human-like characters, intelligent machines, helpers such as vehicles and equipment, and infrastructure, which may be mapped to a two-dimensional space with axes representing intelligence and humanity. This research contributes to the public relations of AI and robotic technologies by analyzing shared imaginative visions of AI in society based on SF works.

Brain-Computer Interfaces: Investigating the Transition from Visually Evoked to Purely Imagined Steady-State Potentials.

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) based on Steady State Visually Evoked Potentials (SSVEPs) have proven effective and provide significant accuracy and information-transfer rates. This family of strategies, however, requires external devices that provide the frequency stimuli required by the technique. This limits the scenarios in which they can be applied, especially when compared to other BCI approaches. In this work, we have investigated the possibility of obtaining frequency responses in the EEG output based on the pure visual imagination of SSVEP-eliciting stimuli. Our results show that not only that EEG signals present frequency-specific peaks related to the frequency the user is focusing on, but also that promising classification accuracy can be achieved, paving the way for a robust and reliable visual imagery BCI modality. Clinical relevance-Brain computer interfaces play a fundamental role in enhancing the quality of life of patients with severe motor impairments. Strategies based on purely imagined stimuli, like the one presented here, are particularly impacting, especially in the most severe cases.

Introduction: Romanticism and Vision

ABSTRACT This special issue foregrounds new scholarship on Romanticism and vision. From its origins as a keyword for the visionary imagination, “vision” has in recent decades become an important lens for thinking about the embodied sense of sight and the aims and objectives of looking. The essays collected here contribute to the current work of reassessing Romantic approaches to and concerns over vision by exploring the tension between word and image, shifting paradigms in the theatrical and visual arts, and the social and political stakes of viewing, from the formation of the gaze, to sympathetic viewership, to the construction of bodily and racial difference.

Emotional Intelligence Not Only Can Make Us Feel Negative, but Can Provide Cognitive Resources to Regulate It Effectively: An fMRI Study.

Neuroscientists have formulated the model of emotional intelligence (EI) based on brain imaging findings of individual differences in EI. The main objective of our study was to operationalize the advantage of high EI individuals in emotional information processing and regulation both at behavioral and neural levels of investigation. We used a self-report measure and a cognitive reappraisal task to demonstrate the role of EI in emotional perception and regulation. Participants saw pictures with negative or neutral captions and shifted (reappraised) from negative context to neutral while we registered brain activation. Behavioral results showed that higher EI participants reported more unpleasant emotions. The Utilization of emotions scores negatively correlated with the valence ratings and the subjective difficulty of reappraisal. In the negative condition, we found activation in hippocampus (HC), parahippocampal gyrus, cingulate cortex, insula and superior temporal lobe. In the neutral context, we found elevated activation in vision-related areas and HC. During reappraisal (negative-neutral) condition, we found activation in the medial frontal gyrus, temporal areas, vision-related regions and in cingulate gyrus. We conclude that higher EI is associated with intensive affective experiences even if emotions are unpleasant. Strong skills in utilizing emotions enable one not to repress negative feelings but to use them as source of information. High EI individuals use effective cognitive processes such as directing attention to relevant details; have advantages in allocation of cognitive resources, in conceptualization of emotional scenes and in building emotional memories; they use visual cues, imagination and executive functions to regulate negative emotions effectively.