Productive Tension Research Articles

Carving out space for co-creation in implementation of evidence-based mental health interventions

Abstract Background Mental health is identified as a pressing public health priority for European countries challenged by societal changes. The ADVANCE project aims to strengthen our understanding of mental health promotion and prevention in seven countries in Europe. In Denmark, the research project sets out to understand how WHO’s stress management intervention Self Help Plus can be embedded within social and integration programmes for adults who have experienced migration. Methods We are using a common methodology across the 7 country projects oriented by co-creation with end users and relevant stakeholders to initially develop implementation scenarios and stigma reduction strategies. We will present findings from this process and reflect on the tension and potential of the co-creation methodology in the implementation of evidence-based mental health interventions. Results In the first project phase of problem analysis and co-creation, the project’s society advisory group discussed 10 tailored intervention scenarios. Then, a Delphi survey and two rounds of scenario-based workshops with additional involvement of 16 end users/actors resulted in a final implementation scenario and stigma reduction strategies. We identified and reflected on questions around ownership of the project, boundaries of the proposed intervention, alignment of expectations, and intervention sustainability within the parameters of the ADVANCE project. Conclusions Even when interventions are pre-selected in response to funding calls, co-creation can facilitate the development of acceptable and sustainable implementation strategies. However, meaningful co-creation requires time, flexibility, and negotiation, which is not always guaranteed. Key messages • Co-creation creates productive tension and potential for the implementation of ADVANCE. • Space for co-creation was negotiated with collaborators to ensure meaningful engagement.

Sylvia Wynter's Decolonial Philosophy: How Being Human Needs an Origin Story

AbstractIn this article, Ingrid Andersson discusses the decolonial philosophy of Sylvia Wynter, with a special focus on addressing her concepts of the hybrid human and origin stories. Andersson shows how Wynter's philosophizing about the being of being human is premised on an entanglement of nature and culture that is on par with the posthuman understanding of the ontological inseparability of matter and discourse. She goes on to interrogate some productive tensions between Wynter's decolonial philosophy and posthumanism by pointing out how Wynter's hybrid human formulates an understanding of human nature that is different in itself and not solely in relation to other nonhuman entities. In the final part of the article, she proposes how we, with Wynter, can devise a pedagogical approach that seeks to counteract harmful taxonomizing practices.

Beer farmers: cultivating an agribusiness atmosphere and consuming agrarian myth

ABSTRACT Agribusinesses invest in harnessing the goodwill affiliated with US agrarianism and farm iconography, hoping publics transfer the goodwill they attach to farming onto corporations. To make apparent agribusiness’s rhetorical strategies, we analyze “For the Farmers,” a 2021–2022 John Deere and Anheuser-Busch collaborative campaign to raise money for the nonprofit Farm Rescue. We theorize how productive tensions—farmers as thriving vs. farmers as needy and farms as human spaces vs. farms as machine spaces—mobilize the contradictions of agribusiness mythmaking in the twenty-first century. Our analysis of this campaign’s beer packaging and promotional video offers scholars who are invested in food rhetoric and agricultural communication an invitation to notice how agribusiness atmospheres both host contradiction about imagined pasts and recenter white masculinity to evoke a secure future based on trust of industrial-scale farming and the hydrocarbon economy. By theorizing how rhetorical affect aligns drinking beer with rescuing farmers, we offer a model of critiquing agribusiness’s reliance on myths to promote their brands.

Teaching and Generative AI: Pedagogical Possibilities and Productive Tensions

"Teaching and Generative AI: Pedagogical Possibilities and Productive Tensions," edited by Beth Buyserie and Travis N. Thurston, is a timely and essential addition to the ongoing dialogue about AI's role in education. This book thoroughly examines the opportunities and challenges that AI technologies bring to both traditional and online classroom environments. This comprehensive volume delves into the multifaceted impact of AI on educational practices, offering insights into how these technologies can enhance learning experiences and pedagogical strategies. The editors, Buyserie and Thurston, have curated a collection of essays and studies that highlight the transformative potential of AI in personalizing learning, automating administrative tasks, and providing real-time feedback to students.

Busybodies and Quietists, Yesterday and Today: Discovering Debates about Phronēsis in Nicomachean Ethics 6.8

Abstract Nicomachean Ethics 6.8 has been interpreted in a variety of ways. One dispute involves Aristotle’s remarks about the relationship of phronēsis to politics: does Aristotle claim that phronēsis is foremost applicable to an individual’s private life, to the political realm, or to some combination of the two? Two features of this dispute make it worthy of closer attention. First, the conflict of interpretations has not been documented as such. Second, I argue this contemporary conflict is a repetition of an ancient conflict about phronēsis that was being waged in 5th/4th century Athens. Phronēsis was a contested term alongside two related terms, apragmosynē (quietism) and polypragmosynē (meddlesomeness), and the construction of lines 1141b23–1142a12 enters into this historical debate to create a productive tension between two rival views. Aristotle heightens the tension between views represented by quietists and busybodies for his own purposes. In section 1, I surface the neglected historical frame of Nicomachean Ethics 6.8. In section 2, I turn to the contemporary conflict of interpretations, showing how it repeats the historical frame in many ways, and I provide a basic taxonomy of the views typically offered. In section 3, I bring the two debates – historical and contemporary – together and offer my own view of what Aristotle is up to in the passage. I argue that centering the historical frame in this passage highlights Aristotle’s use of Isocratean-style phronēsis, while also transforming the concept by connecting it to a series of questions that go beyond Isocrates’ view, thus preparing for a later exploration of the best forms of human living.

Values and value in patient and public involvement: moving beyond methods

Patient and public involvement (PPI) in research has evolved over recent years, yet it often remains an 'optional extra' and, in some cases, tokenistic. Discussions are often focused on processes and methods, and are yet to make PPI the norm; we argue that the conversation needs to change to one of 'value': a culture of common values and principles across all types of research. Taking a reflexive, personalised approach, we reflect on how our team's experiences as patients, healthcare professionals and academics have changed over time and shaped what we value, our involvement in research and the way we involve people in research. We illustrate, through our work together, the productive tensions we experience, our efforts to resolve these through analytic conversations and our ethic of responsibility to each other. Moving forward, embracing reflexivity and supporting relationships can help PPI to become integral to research; a value as opposed to a method.

Productive Tensions of Corporate Pride Partnerships: Towards a Relational Ethics of Constitutive Impurity

AbstractBased on a qualitative study of Copenhagen 2021 WorldPride, this article explores collaboration between the local organiser and its corporate partners, focusing on the tensions involved in this collaboration, which emerge from and uphold relations between the extremes of unethical pinkwashing, on the one hand, and ethical purity, on the other. Here, pinkwashing is understood as a looming risk, and purity as an unrealizable ideal. As such, corporate sponsorships of Pride are conceptualized as inherently impure—and productive because of their very impurity rather than despite it. Analytically, we identify and explore three productive tensions where the first involves emergent normativities for what constitutes good, right, or proper corporate engagement in Pride, the second revolves around queer(ed) practices and products that open normativities, and the third centres on the role of internal LGBTI+ employee-driven networks whose activism pushes organisations to become further involved in Pride, developing aspirational solidarity. Reading across literatures on corporate activism and queer organisation, we introduce Alexis Shotwell’s notion of constitutive impurity to suggest that the potential for ethical corporate Pride partnerships arises when accepting the risk of pinkwashing rather than seeking to overcome it.

Confrontation or Dialogue? Productive Tensions between Decolonial and Intercultural Scholarship

Confrontation or Dialogue? Productive Tensions between Decolonial and Intercultural Scholarship

Productive Tensions and Their Results

ABSTRACT This article explores the tension – in both positive and negative senses – of an aquarium’s internal and external equity work. The article parses out this tension, especially reflecting on where the equity work lives, where it gets messy, and who is doing the work. It centers on the tensions around positionality for a woman of color initially without, then later with, authority in a predominantly white organization by offering accounts of those tensions through her own lived experiences. Through her stories, the author considers questions such as: Who can rock the institutional boat without worrying about their job? What are the capacities really needed to balance internal and external equity efforts? Where are the lines between being a representative of a group and being tokenized? What is the emotional burden of having to justify your lived experience? The author discusses the direct results of these natural tensions and the impacts they have on historically excluded communities engaging with and working for cultural institutions.

Robotics in place and the places of robotics: productive tensions across human geography and human–robot interaction

Robotics in place and the places of robotics: productive tensions across human geography and human–robot interaction

Limits and Thresholds

Abstract of Keynote Presentation: ‘Between Excess and Austerity’, IDEA Conference, Sydney, August 8–11, 2003. Abstract: Before we can approach the tension between austerity and excess – or any other productive tension in a design practice – we must first enter the metaphysical space of ‘interior’ itself. The notion of interior is always defined by at least three ‘working parts’: inside, outside, and (most important yet least noticed) the threshold setting one off from the other. Properly speaking, this threshold is neither outside nor inside; rather, in setting the limit between them, it partakes of both. Like the skin of a body or the cladding of a building, indeed like any surface, the threshold comes into contact with what lies on both sides of it, linking the two environments in the act of separating them. ‘A surface separates from out and belongs no less to one than to the other’ (Don DeLillo). The threshold is an ontological anomaly, a space outside of space, existing only in its vanishing. In theory, a threshold, as with any line in geometrical definition, has extension but no dimension. It is literally zero degrees thick. The function of the threshold, therefore, is not to be wide but to be crossed. Every limit is also its own negation. Drawing the limit-line is coeval with the possibility, the suggestion, we might even say the demand that the line be crossed. Once established, boundaries ‘ask for’ breaching – traditionally, a task for heroes. This crossing is no simple matter, though we may blithely perform it dozens or even hundreds of times a day. What is involved here? What relationships of time and space, of consciousness and identity, of necessity and freedom, are created by the move from outside to in, and back again? In this paper, I approach the thought of limits (and maybe the limits of thought) by takingthe interior back to its moment of geometric inception, its philosophical ground zero: the drawing of lines and circles. Once inside, but only then, we may begin to ask what it is we seek in this crossing over, this transgression, of the threshold. Is it comfort? Security? Control? Or perhaps something deeper, and more challenging: the act of thinking itself.

Kafka in Motion

Franz Kafka, intrigued by the possibility of representing movement in a still medium, made several drawings of galloping horses. This essay examines these drawings in the context of contemporaneous attempts to capture dynamic motion in visual media. Around 1900, artists and scientists experimented with various painting styles and photographic techniques to depict the movement of human and animal bodies in highbrow art, popular entertainment, and to advance the science of sport. Kafka’s short literary work “Wunsch, Indianer zu werden” represents a related attempt to depict the movement of a horse and rider. This essay draws a parallel between the destabilizing effects of Kafka’s visual and literary representations of a horse in motion, which reveal the productive tensions that arise from representing movement in each medium.

Compassionate noticing and stopping the action: Bringing intentionally emergent teaching into leadership education.

Emergent-based practices of leadership development (such as intentional emergence (IE), case-in-point, or group relations) rely a great deal on stopping the action in order to publicly notice group behaviors and patterns and connect what is happening authentically to conscious actions and ideas (such as course content, readings, theories, etc.). However, when a facilitator or participant practices stopping the action and calling out these behaviors, there is a danger that they will go beyond productive tension into a level that causes casualties. This article explores the foundational need for compassion and purpose when using the common tools of heat and noticing in intentionally emergent spaces.

Gaming [the] Systems: Critical Analysis through Tabletop Roleplaying Games in Humanities Classrooms

In its very designation, “role play” contains a productive tension: the expectations bound up in roles and the liberating potentiality of play. It comes as no surprise, then, that role play has found expression in the worlds of business, therapy, education, and even the military. Table-top games exist as our culture’s most familiar form of role play but among its least theorized. In this paper, I examine the rich potential of table-top role-playing games in humanities classrooms as a means to fuel cultural critique, critical analysis, class discussion, and self-reflection. My paper lays out a theoretical structure for analyzing games as multi-dimensional texts and a practical guide for bringing them into the classroom. In particular, I look at two free-to-access and permissively concise game systems which can easily fit into an open week of coursework. The games, “Lasers and Feelings” and “The Deep Forest,” depart from the cultural expectations of “Dungeons & Dragons” to rethink, adapt, and challenge our understanding of issues ranging from the formulation of the rational, Western subject to the politics of post-colonialism. I supplement conventional process-oriented pedagogy with Ian Bogost’s “Persuasive Games” and C. Thai Nguyen’s “Games: Agency as Art,” to establish a robust groundwork for students to analyze and critique how game design decisions make arguments about the world. Furthermore, in playing the games in the classroom and debriefing afterwards, students identify their internal systems that reflect and inform their own assumptions about the world.

From Distance to Difference: Knowledge and Error in Leopardi

ABSTRACT Leopardi’s philosophical questions are often approached in straightforwardly ontological terms, thus detracting from the distinctiveness of his theoretical struggle. This article argues instead that Leopardi’s adherence to empirical reasoning and eighteenth-century French epistemology generates a productive tension in their development at an ontological level. Although certain concepts (illusion, pain, matter) show an ontological aspect early on, Leopardi continues to approach them from an epistemological perspective throughout his life. To explore this tension, the article examines Leopardi’s engagement with the notion of error: from errore as distance, an epistemological mistake to be rectified by reason, to errare as difference, the ontological condition to which all living beings are destined. Paying attention to how Leopardi thinks, the article also aims to shed light on the function ascribed to poetry in ‘La ginestra’, in which he resorts to an epistemological corrective in order to move from subjective perception to ontological evidence.

Out of Time: Ekphrasis, Narration, and Temporal Experience in Twelfth-Century Romances of Antiquity

This article considers the affective and conceptual work demanded in sophisticated moments of ekphrasis that abound in twelfth-century Old French romances, with particular attention to Alexandre de Paris's Roman d'Alexandre (1180s) and to two of the trio of romans d'antiquité, composed in French at the court of Henry II in England: the Roman de Thebes (c. 1150) and Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie (1165). Of concern is the description of mechanical artefacts or tents that are depicted with representations of temporal progression, in the light of Virgil, Aeneid 8, and Homer, Iliad 18, available to twelfth-century Latins via Baebius's abbreviated Latin epitome. Narrative time stops for these ekphrastic moments which describe the pictorial representation of time. Henri Bergson's concept of duration (durée) and Boethius's representation of human and divine time in Consolation of Philosophy, 4 are used to think through the productive tension between time as forward movement, as represented through narration, and time as juxtaposed stasis, by which events all happen simultaneously, as represented through pictorial representation. Beyond that, the cosmic implications of these temporal questions bring out the relationship between twelfth-century literary ekphrasis and the medieval reception of the cosmogony of Plato's Timaeus. Particular attention is paid to the marvellous tents of Adrastus in the Thebes and of Alexander the Great in the Alexandre; to the chariot of Amphiaraus in the Thebes with its depiction of Ovidian myth and Macrobian cosmos; and to the astonishing cosmogrammatical automaton in the Troie's Chamber of Beauties. Ekphrases of artefacts representing time and the world clearly resonated with medieval audiences; rather than being superfluous to the action, they appear as fundamental to the composition and performance of historical narrative in French romance.

Networked feminism in a digital age—mobilizing vulnerability and reconfiguring feminist politics in digital activism

AbstractIn what ways can we understand the productive tensions and complexities of digital feminist activism? This paper explores the increase of networked feminism, which focuses attention on digital activism and its relation to transformative social change. It suggests that we need a better understanding of how digital feminist activism might be changing the shape of transnational feminist resistance and praxis, and how feminist politics are created and enacted in digitally mediated environments. These result in new forms of feminist consciousness built on affective and embodied engagements. The paper explores the complex and ambivalent role of affective politics and embodied ethics to explore conditions of vulnerability. Using illustrative, global cases to show the nuances across digital activism, the paper contributes to understanding the complexities and differential effects of online environments, the mediation of feminist politics through digital knowledge cultures and the possibilities, challenges, and productive tensions that lie in the ever‐increasing use of digital environments.

The effect of psychological factors on pain outcomes: lessons learned for the next generation of research.

Big data and machine learning techniques offer opportunities to investigate the effects of psychological factors on pain outcomes. Nevertheless, these advances can only deliver when the quality of the data is high and the underpinning causal assumptions are considered. We argue that there is room for improvement and identify some challenges in the evidence base concerning the effect of psychological factors on the development and maintenance of chronic pain. As a starting point, 3 basic tenets of causality are taken: (1) cause and effect differ from each other, (2) the cause precedes the effect within reasonable time, and (3) alternative explanations are ruled out. Building on these tenets, potential problems and some lessons learned are provided that the next generation of research should take into account. In particular, there is a need to be more explicit and transparent about causal assumptions in research. This will lead to better research designs, more appropriate statistical analyses, and constructive discussions and productive tensions that improve our science.

Cyborg farmers: Embodied understandings of precision agriculture

AbstractPrecision agriculture is often seen as disembodied and placeless, promised to either bring about a fourth agricultural revolution or as the start of dystopian rural futures, where farmers and their knowledge will be replaced by machines. A growing body of literature shows more nuanced ways of working with precision agriculture. This illustrates the need to investigate how, and under which conditions, precision agriculture is integrated and internalised by farmers. Based on 25 in‐depth interviews with male Dutch crop farmers, contractors, researchers, and ag‐tech developers, we develop the concept of the cyborg farmer, who embodies the use of precision technology while maintaining an intimate relationship with agro‐ecological context. This approach challenges the mind–body dichotomy in that the cognitive is not understood as primary, as emotions and the materiality of the body are taken seriously. This perspective emphasises the importance of embodied knowledge in how farmers interpret precision agriculture data. Our findings highlight the productive tension between data‐driven elements of precision agriculture and the embodied and intuitive understanding of agro‐ecological context. This productive tension consists of the successful integration of different forms of knowledge by the cyborg farmer, where embodied sense‐making and precision agriculture data are integrated into the formation of useable knowledge. The cyborg farmer maintains farmer agency and resists the dominance of algorithmic rationality over other forms of knowledge .

Community and citizen science in schools: nested inquiries, productive tensions, and the role of communities

Community and citizen science in schools: nested inquiries, productive tensions, and the role of communities