Kind Of Engagement Research Articles

Comments on Jeremy Fantl's The Limitations of the Open Mind

AbstractIn this commentary on Jeremy Fantl's The Limitations of the Open Mind, I focus mainly on the book's second half and argue against Fantl's view that you should rarely engage closed-mindedly with those putting forth claims that you know are false and arguments that you know are misleading. I argue that this kind of engagement can be fruitfully exercised without problematic deception. If we are attuned to the social dimension of epistemology, and we see that false and potentially pernicious beliefs are spreading, we have good reason to engage with at least some of these believers with the aim of altering their epistemic attitudes, and to allow for more collective knowledge.

TBD

TBD is a multidisciplinary theatre event presented in Vancouver, BC, in 2015 and 2016. The project uses the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a structural anchor and guide to the audience’s sensual and emotional experience, exploring notions of death and dying, living in the present moment, avoiding distraction, and non-attachment. The first iteration involved 50 audience members, the following year that number was expanded to 100. TBD spans twenty-one days, with each audience member receiving a different kind of engagement each day, primarily in the form of audio or video podcasts or text messages delivered to their smartphones. Their phones also carried a family-location app that allowed Radix performers to locate them in public. Other events included four site-specific performances on specific days, home visits, items dropped at their doorstep, or posters placed in their neighbourhood. After an introductory day at the local cemetery’s communal hall, the audience’s experience begins with a podcast asking them to imagine that they have died and that Radix performers will be acting like their guides through the afterlife to their possible rebirth. In this sense the title offers a double meaning, the acronym suggesting both “To Be Determined” and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Many audience members expressed profound experiences over the course of the event, with equal enthusiasm shared by the performers who each had compelling stories about their interactions. The Radix Collective refers to TBD as “internal theatre” because participants framed their experiences through the unique lens of their own personal lives, without divulging what they were going through. The impact of the production varied for each audience member, depending on their point of view and willingness to engage with the work.

Freud and the Two Michelangelos

ABSTRACT The aesthetic experience of an art work, and the analytic experience, are both created in a partnership; between artist and viewer, and analyst and patient. They take the viewer of an art work, and the analytic patient, beyond their familiar ways of relating to the world. The Moses of Michelangelo made a powerful impact on Freud, but he was unable to appreciate the aesthetic experience because he could not understand it rationally. Giving up the assumption that a work of art must represent something allows a different kind of engagement with it that is more contemplative and more psychoanalytic. Freud identified with Moses as a Jewish hero preserving the word-presentations of the Law against the irrational thing-presentation of the Golden Calf. A different response to the Moses appears in a film by Michelangelo Antonioni. Without words, it shows Antonioni gazing at the statue and interacting with it emotionally. Antonioni made the film aged 92. It is the last footage he shot, and its ending shows that, as well as the statue, he is gazing at his own death.

Empathy, extremism, and epistemic autonomy

ABSTRACT Are extremists (incels, neo-nazis, and the like) characteristically answerable for their moral and political convictions? Is it necessary to offer them reasoned arguments against their views, or is it instead appropriate to bypass that kind of engagement? Discussion of these questions has centered around the putative epistemic autonomy of extremists. The parties to this discussion have assumed that epistemic autonomy is solely (or at least primarily) a matter of epistemic independence, of believing based on epistemic reasons one has assessed for oneself. Here, though, I make the case for shifting the terms of the debate. Epistemic independence is not sufficient to make one answerable for one’s beliefs. Epistemic autonomy, in the sense that matters for answerability, is also a matter of what I call epistemic receptivity. Extremists may be fiercely epistemic independent, but that commitment is characteristically paired with severe deficiencies in empathic orientation. Severe deficiencies in empathic orientation undermine extremists’ ability to adequately engage with competing evaluative perspectives, and thus compromise extremists’ epistemic autonomy. I consider how this conclusion should inform our thinking about what we owe to extremists.

Lived experience in human-building interaction (HBI): an initial framework

The emerging field of human-building interaction (HBI) has its roots in the historical trends of the development of architecture and human-computer interaction (HCI). Advancements in building information modelling (BIM), sensing, and actuation technologies as well as the commodification and miniaturisation of microprocessors over the past two decades are transforming what once were quixotic visions of a cybernetic architecture into reality. This new reality which integrates computation with architecture opens up different kinds of engagements in the ways we design, use, and inhabit our built environments. A question that follows this new reality is: how can we conceptualise human experience in such environments? Thus far, the lived human experience of such interactions has been an overlooked aspect in HBI-related research. In this article, we provide an initial experience framework for HBI underpinned by existing literature from the HCI and architecture domains on the subjective, lived-in experience of architecture and findings derived from a case study of a field-deployed HBI interface. The research objective of our framework is to outline aspects of HBI lived experiences that can be used as guiding lenses for HBI designers and practitioners who wish to design for and assess such experiences.

An embodied methodology for site-specific transpersonal research in the arts

This article proposes a methodology and theoretical foundation for practice-based transpersonal research in the arts, which involves an immersive engagement with place and matter. This kind of engagement allows the artist-researcher to move beyond their conscious mind, to let work emerge directly from the felt experience of being in an outdoor location and from the interaction of the place’s materiality with the artist’s body. The model is interdisciplinary and draws on Nagotomo’s Attunement through the Body (1992), the theoretical literature of parapsychology, somatic practice and and others’ writings on Indigenous methodologies.

Inspiration to act or just another scary vision?

Images are powerful communicators. They evoke feelings, raise awareness of important issues and sometimes spur people to act. A critical societal issue that may benefit from all these kinds of engagement is climate change. This paper presents a study of images accompanying news items on the current state of our climate as expressed in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. The items were culled from five Norwegian and five UK news sources, and the images were analysed in terms of topic and news value. Unsurprisingly, climate impact topics were common in both countries, with bush and forest fires dominating. Thus, the traditional news values of Negativity and Impact were the most important ones drawn on. More surprisingly, the Norwegian material comprised a high number of images of politicians, representing the news value of Eliteness. This topic was absent in the UK material. Pictures that may point to climate solutions, e.g. new energy sources or lifestyle matters, were only sparsely represented. Thus, the images may ensure people’s engagement with climate change through disaster scenarios, but few seem to have the potential to motivate action.

Perjanjian Nominee dalam Praktik Jual Beli Tanah

The main problem that is of concern to the author in this writing is the practice of controlling land rights through nominee agreements or better known as loan agreements. Where in this agreement foreigners who do not have the authority to own land rights in Indonesia borrow the name of an Indonesian citizen, to purchase a land/land, then Indonesian citizens authorize the foreigner to be able to do anything with the land/ the land. Arrangements for engagements are based on an open system, meaning that everyone may enter into any kind of engagement, both those that have been named and those that have not been named in the law. However, an open system is limited by three things, namely, it is not prohibited by law, it is not contrary to public order, and it is not contrary to decency. Thus it can be seen that the nominee agreement can be said to be contrary to the applicable law, because after all Foreign Citizens cannot have ownership rights to land that is in Indonesian territory. Based on the results of this study, it can be seen that the nominee agreement is based on the bad faith agreement of the parties, and this is contrary to the principle of freedom of contract by not meeting the objective requirements for the validity of an agreement as stipulated in Article 1320 of the Civil Code. Therefore, the nominee agreement is legally invalid and does not have binding legal force, meaning that the nominee agreement can also be interpreted as null and void because one of the legal terms of the agreement is not fulfilled, namely a cause (causa) that is lawful. The causa that is meant by that word is the purpose, namely what is desired by both parties by entering into the agreement. The results of the study found that nominee agreements made by foreigners with Indonesian citizens do not have binding legal force and are null and void, because they have violated laws and regulations regarding ownership of land rights in Indonesia

SPIRITUAL INTELLIGENCE: PROCESSING DIFFERENT INFORMATION OR PROCESSING INFORMATION DIFFERENTLY?

AbstractThis article introduces the concept of spiritual intelligence in terms of a natural human ability to take a different perspective on reality rather than an extraordinary ability to engage with a different/supernatural reality. From a cognitive perspective, spiritual intelligence entails a re‐balancing of the two main modes of human cognition, with a prioritization of the holistic‐intuitive mind over the conceptual one. From the psychological and phenomenological perspectives, it involves a different kind of engagement with information: slower, more participatory, less objectifying, and not focused entirely on problem solving. The article ends with a reflection on the theological implications of the proposed model and how such an account of spiritual intelligence as knowing differently might relate to theological anthropology and the theology of the spirit and the spiritual.

Unburials and Skeletal Reconstructions: Narrative as Forensics in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost

Social scientists know how crucial it is to identify the bodies of the men, women and children who have died at sea or on land, or have been buried in mass burial grounds, and how consequential it is to engage (or not) in some form of ritual, of memorialization. If some scholars have focused on locating and numbering those victims, others have used forensic science to identify the bodies so that the families can get them back, engage in mourning and continue to live. Others, still, interrogate the lost objects of the death-bound migration. This essay will focus on a novel that deals with the exhumation and identification of bones in a civil war context. In Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, Sri Lankan-born and North American-educated Anil Tissera goes back to Sri Lanka as a forensic anthropologist. She is sent by a human rights group to investigate mass burials during the Civil War and genocide of the Sri Lankan Tamils, thus returning from her diasporic abode after 15 years. In Anil's forensic search for identification, with bones being literally unearthed, what does the literary text perform for those lost or unidentified bodies that could not be accomplished otherwise? What kind of engagement does it offer? Using the angle of forensics and its Latin etymology, this essay will formulate the hypothesis that the literary text enables justice to be delivered in an open court of law (forensis). Moving beyond the stigmatization of the unritual, it will probe the fraught relationship between literature and forensics, investigating the possibility that the narrative, its staging of the unidentified body of the dead, and our relationship to it, could create a public space to be shared by all (forum).

Democratic responsibility in the digital public sphere

Democratic responsibility in the digital public sphere

Avant-Garde, Emergency, and Digital Games Discourse

What may be considered as the greatest emergency in the contemporary world is the lack of a sense of emergency; the prevailing feeling that everything is fine, that, despite ongoing crises, we live in the only acceptable system, and it is impossible to imagine any alternative to it. Mainstream digital games, by offering repetitive, standardised, and predictable forms of gameplay, by focusing on technological advancement, and by exploiting workers in large corporations, became a part of that emergency. According to Santiago Zabala, what is needed to recover the sense of emergency and to break through contemporary complacency, is an “aesthetic force,” a disruptive artistic shock. What is proposed in this article is the possibility of considering the avant-garde as an aesthetical force in the field of videogames; a force that shocks the player and demands something more than a simple contemplation. As presented by game scholars, avant- -garde videogames (through formal experimentation and political intervention) open the medium, and propose games that object to standardised, mindless repetition. Avant-garde games proclaim new ways of playing, accept diversity that opposes the stereotypical image of a player as a white, heterosexual male, and propose new kinds of engagement with the outside world. They tend to “remove the automatism of the perception” by disrupting players’ engagement and through disclosure of the system. To achieve that, avant-garde videogames break through the category of flow, problematize notions of videogame hermeneutic and interrupt the feeling of immersion.

A study on impact of conceptual and practical based learning on employability

The impact of practical learning on employability is significant. There is no age, time or effort limit to learn because it is what as a person important to survive and thrive in this world. Although learning through theory is one side of the mirror, leveraging the knowledge in real world is what matters most. As employability is the primary goal, the process of learning leading up to that is what supports the goal. To assist the above statements this study refers the teaching strategies and learning models states that learning and employability are correlated for both learners and their peers. Practical-based learning should be implemented in the current scenario. It must be started from the preparatory level to make it a habit. The main aim of education is “learning” which must not miss out from the education system as learning has a direct impact on employability. The study reveals that a variety of techniques can be implemented by peers and the participation of students in the process could be a productive way to collaborate, hence, this kind of engagement would be a superior course of action for students to learn practically and can increase the scope of employability. The relevant articles' conclusions were discussed for better understanding of perceptions, multiple learning models and their importance, and significance are acknowledged to comprehend the impact of conceptual learning on Employability. The methods such as Practical Based Learning provide students’ exposure to real-life problems that they can solve by adopting the learning methods.

Acoustethics: Careful Approaches to Recorded Sounds and Their Second Life

This article attempts to rethink some problematic ways and motivations for engaging in (field) recording and working with recorded sounds. Interweaving reflections from my long-term soundscape archiving initiative undertaken in Stockholm, with projects of others aiming at preserving cultures through sound, I reflect upon ethical challenges that emerge against the prospect of second and following lives and deaths of recordings. Does the second life of a recorded event risk replicating power relationships that the original recording was enmeshed in? What can be gained and, more importantly, lost while conceiving a second life of a recorded sound? This article intends to open up an array of such questions which, as I suggest, need to be taken into consideration already before and during the recording process. As a discursive tool that does not resolve those concerns but instead creates space for critical reflection, I propose a concept of acoustethics. In a nutshell, acoustethics, as this portmanteau of acoustics and ethics suggests, is an ethically informed approach to the world’s soundscapes. I argue that any kind of engagement with the auditory world through recording technologies requires careful consideration of multiple agencies contributing to the recorded sound. As a reflective attitude to the sonic realm, acoustethics acknowledges that any recording takes place within already existing fields of relations and simultaneously generates new links between subjects, histories, worldviews, technologies, and other forces. In other words, any recording is intrinsically field recording.

Textual thinking as evidenced through think-alouds: Designing meanings in interpreting authentic L2 web texts

Recent scholarship in multiliteracies-oriented pedagogies has advocated for greater attention to fostering ‘textual thinking’, understood as forms of literacy that consider the complexities of semiotic choices made by authors, and their underlying meanings, rhetorical purposes, and cultural contexts. This kind of engagement with texts calls upon readers to focus on form–meaning connections, and shifts the focus of reading purposes, toward reading as a form of participation in everyday literacy practices, and reading as a way of thinking critically about representation and communication. This article presents findings from an empirical study investigating the reading processes of second language (L2) French learners while interpreting an authentic multimodal web text, guided by tasks informed by multiliteracies. A prompted think-aloud methodology was used to capture learners’ dynamic meaning-making processes. Drawn from a larger group of participants ( n = 9), the current article reports on three unique cases, documenting their engagement with different semiotic modes and their evolving interpretations. The participants performed three phases of reading tasks: skimming for predictions about topic and authorship, scanning for specific details, and tracking webs of text signals. Participants saw the question prompts prior to each task phase, and again at the end of the phase, with multiple choice response options. Findings demonstrate participants’ unique sets of interpretations and processes in terms of the way they drew differently upon various domains of background knowledge, genre knowledge, and reading strategies; the way they attended to various linguistic and non-linguistic modes; and the way the tasks guided their reading. The article concludes by suggesting several concrete instructional practices for L2 literacy development, including tasks that are adaptable for a range of languages.

Let’s play something awful: a historical analysis of 14 years of threads

The Something Awful Let’s Play subforum is widely acknowledged as the birthplace of the Let’s Play (LP) media phenomenon. LPs typically involve people recording themselves playing games while providing commentary. LPs are an important media form in themselves as well as being an important antecedent to many contemporary and popular media forms such as live streaming, esports and speed-running. An examination of the Something Awful LP subforum can contribute to an understanding of the origins of LPs and the community that created them. In this paper, we report on a study of the Something Awful LP subforum and describe the kinds of engagement the community participates in the top threads, as well as looking to see if there are specific individuals responsible for guiding the subforum overall. We collected data from the thousands of public threads posted in the LP subforum, from its inception in 2007 to the end of 2020. The analysis of these postings presented in this paper draws on previous understandings of the behavioral roles, forms of engagement, and policing of practices that often occur on internet forums as part of the regulation and organization of associated online communities. Our results show that the LP subforum was not dominated by a small minority of users that dictated the community’s LP posting, recording and commentary practices, and that the content of the specific threads was much more important in determining what forms of LPs became popular.

Coming Closer to Citizens? Frustrated Dialogue on the Danish Health Authority's Facebook Page During COVID-19

As the COVID-19 pandemic began, health authorities rushed to use social media to communicate information and persuade citizens to follow guidelines. Yet a desire to “come closer to citizens” often came into conflict with the very consequences of doing so—many social media interactions were characterized by complaint, resistance, trolling or misinformation. This paper presents a case study of the Danish Health Authority's (DHA) Facebook page, focusing on the initial phase of the pandemic and on posts about face masks. Face masks were chosen as an exemplar of the many topics where scientific research was being communicated as it unfolded, and where relations between science, policy, and politics were also evolving in public. In other words, topics where what should be communicated and why was unclear and unstable. A qualitative thematic analysis of the DHA Facebook page, grounded in the practice-based knowledge of one of the authors and feedback meetings with DHA staff, unpicks what kinds of engagements between authority and citizens occurred, both explicitly and implicitly. The analysis particularly looks for dialogue—as a mode of communication implicitly promised by social media platforms, and as a well-established ingredient of trust in relationships between experts and citizens. Drawing on Grudin's definition of dialogue as “reciprocal and strange,” we argue that the DHA's Facebook policy limited such encounters, in part by practical necessity, and in part due to professional constraints on the ability to discuss entanglements between health guidelines and politics. But we also identify “strangeness” in the apparent disconnect between individual engagements and collective responses; and “reciprocity” in the sharing of affect and alternative forms of expertise. We also highlight the invisible majority of silent engagements with DHA information on the Facebook page, and ask whether the visibly frustrated dialogue that ran alongside was a price worth paying for this informational exchange. The paper also serves as an example of qualitative research situated within ongoing practice, and as such we argue for the virtue of these more local, processual forms of evidence-based science communication.

Before the Convention: The Spanish Civil War and Challenges for Research on Refugee History

Abstract This article uses the tools of comparative history to address an important aspect of the Spanish Civil War: the fact that it generated waves of both internally displaced persons and cross-border refugees. Situating the conflict within the context of inter-war Europe, and particularly historical processes of deportation, forced migration, and exile, it analyses the challenges that the crisis of the war and subsequent post-war period in Spain introduced in the realm of humanitarian protection for displaced populations, and how existing international policies largely failed to protect those displaced by the conflict. Drawing on the Spanish Civil War example, the article shows how this kind of engagement with the history of refugees can produce insights that are useful for the broader body of scholarship on refugees, even for scholars who are not historians.

Advocating for Platform Data Access: Challenges and Opportunities for Academics Seeking Policy Change

Independent researchers’ access to digital platform data is critical for our understanding of the online world; yet recent reflections have shown that data are not always readily available (Asbjørn Møller & Bechmann, 2019; Bruns, 2018; Tromble, 2021). In the face of platform power to determine data accessibility, academics can often feel powerless, but opportunities and openings can emerge for scholars to shape practice. In this article, we examine the potential for academics to engage with non-academic audiences in debates around increased data access. Adopting an autoethnographic approach, we draw on our personal experiences working with policymakers and digital platforms to offer advice for academics seeking to shape debates and advocate for change. Presenting vignettes that detail our experiences and drawing on existing scholarship on how to engage with non-academic audiences, we outline the opportunities and challenges in this kind of engagement with a view to guiding other scholars interested in engaging in this space.

EFL STUDENTS’ ENGAGEMENT DURING EMERGENCY REMOTE TEACHING: DOES TECHNOLOGY MATTER?

Amidst Covid-19, teachers, and students in many regions are forced to shift to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). This ERT context has attracted researchers to re-investigate dimensions of teaching and learning within this new situation. This paper reports an investigation on the students’ engagement during ERT in a tertiary EFL setting. Two aspects are highlighted: description of the students’ engagement and its interplay with the choice of teaching-learning platforms. Questionnaires, interviews, and artifacts were used to collect data. A combination of descriptive statistics and a thematic model of analysis were used to analyze the data. The total respondents of this study were five EFL students in the 6th-grade semester at a university in Surakarta. The researcher employed a case study methodology and use two data, primary data, and secondary data. For the primary data, the researcher used the result of interviews and questionnaires. The secondary data is additional data to get the data. The secondary data which is used is an artifact. The study revealed that all three kinds of engagement: cognitive, behavioral, and emotional, were observed in both high and low bandwidth platforms. This implies that there is another factor other than technology that plays a significant role in engaging the students to learn. Considering the cost and the infrastructure readiness, it is suggested that teachers focus on implementing the principles of good teaching instead of glorifying the use of sophisticated technology. In terms of technology use, it is recommended to choose the one that provides better accessibility and wider access for the students.