String Figure Research Articles

Software Maintenance as Materialization of Common Knowledge

While development of software always implicitly takes place in contexts of inherited entanglements and legacies, its maintenance deals explicitly with what is already present. Software maintenance locates itself in media res, in the middle of things. Maintaining software typically involves intervening in the material archive of source code, documentation, and software tools. Doing so successfully requires relevant situated knowledge of how the software at hand already hangs together, and how to effectively put this knowledge to use. This knowledge builds on first-hand experience, acquired in practice over shared lifetimes of people and code. For code to continue to endure over time, ongoing articulation of its entanglements is externalized and materialized across contributing programmers and software development tools, each themselves vulnerable and in need of maintenance. This paper analyzes how this process of externalizing and materializing knowledge is negotiated. We conclude that the common knowledge which suspends the string figure of software in time and in a broken world (Jackson 2014) is always a locally hybrid assemblage which carries this knowledge forward. Hence, to maintain software well is to add on to its legacy.

First as waste, then as feral: The garbological imaginary of Korean stories for decolonizing a wasted world

Overwhelming waste is one of the most compelling issues that contemporary environmental and sustainability education (ESE) should address. Understanding waste as an embodiment and offspring of ongoing colonial relations in the Capitalocene, I explore how ESE could perform a string figure with a wasted world by decolonizing more-than-human relationships. The intersections and tensions between colonialism, waste, and ESE are investigated, with a focus on the de/colonization of waste and child. Then, I integrate them with Korean stories in which wasted beings unsettle dumping colonialism and renew their entanglements with a more-than-human world. From their interpretation emerges a polysemous metaphor of waste-child as ambivalent figures and relations of a ruined world. The metamorphosis of waste-child suggests an imaginary praxis of becoming waste and feral, affirming ambiguity and liminality. I propose the futurity of ESE joining in the intertwinement of planetary legacy and colonial debris by multispecies critters for their un/common decolonization.

Challenging ‘the elephant in the room’: the becomings of pornography education in Swedish secondary school

ABSTRACT This study was conducted among a group of Swedish teachers and a class of 14–15-year-old students and explored pornography education as part of secondary school sexuality education. Data were generated using mixed methods including teacher-researcher meetings, participant observation in class, student interviews, and teacher evaluation meetings, and were documented in the form of audio-recordings and notes. Donna Haraway’s work on string figuring was used to trace the threads constituting pornography education. A four-threaded string figure materialised how Swedish schools’ gender equality stance could provide a sound foundation for engaging with pornographic material. However, a gender-neutral approach to teaching frustrated these aims. The figure also foregrounded how normative societal debate makes it troublesome to acknowledge other than negative perspectives in teaching, problematised the engagement of students and a focus on pornography. Finally, the figure showed a discrepancy between the curriculum’s overall aim and the goals of subject-specific syllabi, making it troublesome to link the topic of pornography to specific school subjects. In summary, pornography education came into being as a complex figure in relation to adolescent sexuality and the school’s mission to provide a form of sexuality education that both problematises gendered sexual scripts and dominant norms with regards to pornography.

"Through the digits, through the fingers": Variations on the string figure as imaginary digital medium.

This article considers artistic engagements with string figure performance and collection as 'imaginary' articulations of digital media. As an object of anthropological inquiry, the string figure emerges in 1888 with a short paper by Franz Boas. Encouraged by more mainstream publications by Caroline Furness Jansen (2008) and Kathleen Haddon (1930), over the course of the 20th century the string figure would become a model through which largely western writers and artists have explored both the anxieties and dreams of ideal, embodied and networked communication technologies. The present article explores, specifically, the collecting projects and films of Harry Smith in the 1960s and 1970s; the video-performance piece of 1974, titled String Games: Improvisations for Inter-City Video, by the interdisciplinary artist Vera Frenkel; and the string figure exhibit at David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California. Through a media-archeological lens, the history of string figure fascination takes shape as a repository of dreams about (digital) communication, which, it is additionally suggested in a final section, might yet allow for the expansion and enlargement of conceptions of both digitality and media.

Fictocritical improv for a new author paradigm, or How to render the messiness of string figure research

This paper explores the complexity of collaborative authorship in the humanities, proposing the string figure as a dexterous model with which to map connections amongst a broad network of contributors. Drawing on the recent work of Donna Haraway, in addition to post-structuralist thinkers like Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, string figures (eg cat’s cradle) are rendered as adequately supple and striated to the diagramming of creative synergy. To this end the authors deploy fictocritical and experimental writing techniques, as well as images, probing the complexities of joint composition. Their text takes on the shape of a string game passed back and forth across a motley crew of agents and actors.

Cielo y juegos de hilo. Representación de la temporalidad cíclica entre los pilagá del Pilcomayo

Los pilagá del Gran Chaco estiman el transcurso de los ciclos temporales considerando varios indicadores, algunos de los cuales son observados en el cielo. Estos objetos celestes, y los períodos que ponderan con ellos, fueron tradicionalmente representados y animados mediante juegos de hilo, que ejecutan dibujos por medio de cordeles. En este artículo se analizarán las relaciones que se establecen entre dos de estos juegos y los objetos celestes implicados. Nos referimos, por un lado, al dedicado a la luna (awóroyk), asociado con la idea de mes, que incluye tres figuras formadas de manera sucesiva: dosolqa qonaqa, dos cucharas; Awóroyk dasócisegem, Luna cae de espaldas; y finalmente Awóroik yalemakaciriñí, Luna boca abajo. Por otro lado, el juego de hilo dedicado a dos asterismos relacionados con la idea de ciclo anual que se forman también uno tras otro: Dapici?, las Pléyades, y waqciriñi (estrellas)Yarayna?di, el Cinto de Orión. La manera en la que los pilagá entendían tradicionalmente esos objetos nos condujo a indagar sobre la forma de ritmar el tiempo. Esto último, a su vez, se asocia con la renovación anual de la naturaleza y el ciclo vital de las personas. En síntesis, los ciclos y juegos de hilo se corresponden con determinados ritmos temporales que están íntimamente ligados con el devenir periódico, con la renovación y, en última instancia, con la fertilidad y la reproducción social y material de los pilagá.

Knot diagrams on a punctured sphere as a model of string figures

A string figure is topologically a trivial knot lying on an imaginary plane orthogonal to the fingers with some crossings. The fingers prevent cancellation of these crossings. As a mathematical model of string figure, we consider a knot diagram on the [Formula: see text]-plane in [Formula: see text]-space missing some straight lines parallel to the [Formula: see text]-axis. These straight lines correspond to fingers. We study minimal number of crossings of these knot diagrams under Reidemeister moves missing these lines.

Aesthetics, string figures, and the politics of the visible in science and education

This paper positions Aesthetics, specifically the politics of Aesthetics, as a frame for approaching traditionally conservative subfields of education, such as science education. Drawing primarily from Jacques Rancière’s work on Aesthetics and Politics, and Donna Haraway’s work with String Figures (SF), we outline the political stakes of engaging, transforming, and ‘playing-with’ the aesthetic dimensions of what science education (and education more broadly) might look like. In the first part of the article, we highlight the political potentiality of a turn toward aesthetics in (science) education, which includes a discussion of theory that supports this shift. We aim to, in part, disrupt the current distribution of the sensible to more deeply, and visibly, entangle science education with multi-species justice and a politics of equality writ large. In the second part of this article, we present our own string figure, an example of what we mean by a radical aesthetic shift in terms of what it allows students to see as visible, possible, and sensible in the world through science and education. We weave a string figure/SF story about our bee companions, who are/have been deeply affected by the Anthropocene, while simultaneously world-making in the Chthulucene. In concluding, we revisit our primary goal which is to open up new forms of political engagement in science education toward the goal of multi-species justice.

Tracing Transit (in)Tensions Between Settler Colonized ECE Contact Zones

Tracing the curiosity of children, educators, and researchers at a childcare centre in Melbourne, Australia and Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, we wonder how we might connect digitally across continents while thinking with place-specific encounters and tensions. In this article we share stories and unexpected (in)tensions that arise during a FaceTiming inquiry to invite questions that unsettle sedimented notions of who and what belongs inthe colonized places in which our settler educator practices take place. Provoked by Donna Haraway’s SF string figure method and situating our work within a common worlds framework, we seek new ways of connecting and transiting between our respective contact zones. In this article, we follow and pull at unsettling threads with the giving and receiving of two puppets, Bunjil and Waa, as they travel from their home in the Australian settler contact zone to the hands of those in the Canadian settler contact zone. These practices trace how these woven threads presence transit (in)tensions continue to stretch our thinking and modes of participating in our attempts at becoming accountable within the common worlds and our stories. How might this messy work make visible our accountabilities and inheritances in places of ongoing settler colonialism?

Kindred Spirits: Learning to Love Nature the Posthuman Way

Abstract In times of ecological crisis Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) becomes more and more important. However, ESD mostly understands nature as a resource that must be catered to for securing the survival of mankind. This article criticises the anthropocentric foundation of ESD. Therefore, the article first introduces the concept of ‘making kin’ by Donna Haraway enriched with a critical discussion of subjectivity and agency by Judith Butler. Making kin describes a process that understands entities besides human beings as equal partners in action and symmetrical parts in networks of agents. Instead of understanding human subjects as the only nodes of power, Haraway grasps the social world as a string figure in which different knots are equally important for acting, living and dying together. Second, the article offers a re-reading of Bernhard Heinrich Blasche's text Naturbildung, focusing on the process of making kin implicitly sketched out in this text. The German text from the 18th century is evaluated with regard to its understanding of nature and interconnectedness of life-forms. I argue that Blasche's understanding of the human situatedness in an environment can be read as a predecessor to posthumanist understandings of nature, culture and agency. Finally, the paper connects the different threads and argues for a posthumanist understanding of love. Instead of love for the world, affectionate love in the world is not limited to human entities. A general understanding of love as the foundational principle of awareness, interconnectedness and situatedness is introduced that can enrich the discussion of pedagogical love.

Life and death of an egg hunter: proposal for a reinterpretation of a Rapa Nui (Easter Island) string figure chant

Life and death of an egg hunter: proposal for a reinterpretation of a Rapa Nui (Easter Island) string figure chant

Techniques to Promote Reflective Practice and Empowered Learning.

Health care environments are fraught with fast-paced critical demands and ethical dilemmas requiring decisive nursing actions. Nurse educators must prepare nursing students to practice skills, behaviors, and attitudes needed to meet the challenges of health care demands. Evidence-based, innovative, multimodal techniques with novice and seasoned nurses were incorporated into a baccalaureate (BSN) completion program (RN to-BSN) to deepen learning, complex skill building, reflective practice, teamwork, and compassion toward the experiences of others. Principles of popular education for engaged teaching-learning were applied. Nursing students experience equitable access to content through co-constructing knowledge with four creative techniques. Four creative techniques include poem reading aloud to facilitate connectedness; mindfulness to cultivate self-awareness; string figure activities to demonstrate indigenous knowledge and teamwork; and cartooning difficult subject matter. Nursing school curricula can promote a milieu for developing organizational skills to manage simultaneous priorities, practice reflectively, and develop empathy and the authenticity that effective nursing requires. [J Nurs Educ. 2018;57(2):115-120.].

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna J. Haraway

Donna J. Haraway, Staying with Trouble: Making Kin in Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 296 pp.If you have read any anthropology in past few years, you'll have learned that live in Anthropocene, an epoch wherein humans have been primary determinants of transformation upon earth. We have burned through fossil fuels, destroyed ecosystems, and charted a course for uninhabitable climate change, while exponentially increasing our numbers. And now, a global ecological disaster is upon us. Donna Haraway denies none of these facts, but is impatient with what she sees as two dominant responses to this calamitous future: a comic faith in technofixes...[that] technology will somehow come to rescue of its naughty but very clever children; and a position that the game is over, it's too late, there's no sense trying to make anything better (3). It is against these two views that she proposes attempt to stay with trouble, that is, face situation head on with recognition that we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations,...we become-with each other or not at all (4). Based on idea of becoming-with other humans, but more importantly with non-human others, Haraway traces a possible reconfiguring of way exist on this planet in present, leading to an imaginable future that narrowly avoids our currently impending ruin. Along way, she is guided by framing motif SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, Speculative Feminism, Science Fact, So Far (2). The book can be split into three parts: first (and by far largest) part, Chapters 1-4, introduces new theory in hefty, circuitous, and poetic ways; part two, Chapters 5-7, explores examples of different kinds of becoming-with and exercises theory on ground; finally, Chapter 8 takes a turn into Science Fiction (or Speculative Fabulation), writing a narrative history of next 400 years in a world that has (in present day) chosen to stay with trouble and avert tragedy.Chapter 1, Playing String Figures With Companion Species, continues Haraway's premise in The Companion Species Manifesto (2003), this time focusing on our becoming-with species-animal, insect, and bacterial. Expanding her Cyborgian interrogation-why should our bodies end at skin(1991:178)-she challenges posthuman, now incorporating much more than humanity and technoscience. We are post-posthuman in our engagement with our companion species. We are compost (com-post): ontological ly heterogenous partners becom[ing] who and what they are in material-semiotic worlding (13). Haraway also introduces her first major SF motif here-String Figures. String figure games such as Cat's Cradle or Navajo Coyotes Running Opposite Ways require what Haraway calls response-ability, meaning that partners must take turns accepting and relinquishing responsibility for a successful finished product. It is this type of ability must extend to our companion species. This chapter also implies how book should be read. Terms like compost and response-ability serve as cues to readers that book itself is a game, but one they have a responsibility to play along with. In tradition of Haraway's writing, book introduces many new terms and uses them throughout. Like numerous characters (and nicknames) in a Tolstoy novel, readers must pay careful attention to new vocabulary, lest they miss brief definition tucked in middle of a paragraph in a middle chapter, after word has already appeared several times over.Chapter 2, Tentacular Thinking, asks us to reimagine our current paradigm through connections have with other species. To think like tentacles is to take up life lived along lines (32) rather than at points or spheres; in other words, thinking through connections, not connected. As a part of book's game, Haraway's circuitous and interwoven literary style forces readers into thinking tentacularly, which turns us away from concept of bounded individualism-the crux of Haraway's rejection of label Anthropocene. …

Learners’ Experiences and Knowledge in Indigenous Activities: Opportunities for the Mathematics Classrooms

Learners bring a variety of experiences and knowledge to mathematics classrooms. These experiences and knowledge are shaped by and contributed by, among others, socio-cultural environments and in which they live and interact with other members of the community. This paper reflects on their experiences on an indigenous game called Malepa (String Figure Gates). First, the game is mathematically analysed to reveal the various mathematical concepts that are embedded in it and then followed by a demonstration of String Figure Gate Two by a number of learners. These demonstrations are analysed to determine how this knowledge can be used to enhance the teaching and learning of related mathematical concepts.

Jeux de ficelle

Souvent evoquee dans les termes d’un « jeu de ficelle », la pratique qui consiste a realiser des figures a partir d’une boucle de ficelle — par des operations effectuees a l’aide des doigts, voire des dents, des poignets ou des pieds — a ete documentee depuis la fin du xixe siecle dans diverses societes. Plusieurs corpus de jeux de ficelle ont notamment ete collectes en Oceanie et en Amerique dans les premieres decennies du xxe siecle, sur la base d’une description des modalites de construction des differentes figures de ficelle observees (Rivers & Haddon ; etc.). Une nouvelle methode d’analyse a ete plus recemment elaboree par l’auteur, a partir de l’articulation de differents outils conceptuels (issus de l’ethnomathematique et de l’ethnolinguistique), de maniere a mettre au jour a la fois des traits invariants et des traits distinctifs dans les processus de creation des figures de ficelle, tant au sein de chacun des corpus culturels, que d’un corpus a un autre. Cette methode est illustree ici a travers la comparaison de deux corpus de jeux de ficelle provenant de deux societes culturellement contrastees : les Trobriandais de Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinee et les Guarani-Nandeva du Chaco. Si ces deux corpus presentent de grandes similitudes de structure, ils se differencient tres nettement dans les schemes operatoires qui les caracterisent. Ce n’est pas dans la facon de creer de nouvelles figures a partir de configurations connues que les deux ensembles se distinguent, mais bien plutot dans le choix de privilegier certaines operations.

Anthropology and the Cultural Study of Science

This essay explores how the distinctively anthropological concept of culture provides uniquely valuable insights into the workings of science in its cultural context. Recent efforts by anthropologists to dislodge the traditional notion of culture as a homogenous, stable whole have opened up a variety of ways of imagining culture that place power differentials, flux, and contradiction at its center. Including attention to a wide variety of social domains outside the laboratory, attending to the ways nonscientists actively engage with scientific knowledge, and focusing on the complex interactions that flow both into and out of research laboratories are ways the activities of both scientists and nonscientists can be situated in the heterogeneous matrtx of culture. Three images—the citadel, the rhizome, and the string figure—allow us to picture the discontinuous ways science both permeates and is permeated by cultural life.

Zande String Figures

ZANDE string figures are called akandago and they are said to be a very old Mbomu game (Ambomu nana tu e). Those recorded in this article were recorded by me over forty years ago among the Azande of the Sudan. It is almost as long ago since I taught them to my old friend the late Professor R. M. Dawkins who, like Haddon, was a string figure enthusiast. We had intended writing a joint article on them and it was to this end that Professor Dawkins typed out some directions and comments and made some sketches for twelve figures. It was my fault that our paper never appeared. I put Professor Dawkins' contribution on one side under pressure of other work, and there it has remained for many years. The notes made by Dawkins and his sketches, where he made them, have been incorporated in the present account. He followed the terminology of Rivers and Haddon.

THE EARLIEST (?) DESCRIPTION OF A STRING FIGURE

American AnthropologistVolume 47, Issue 3 p. 461-462 Free Access THE EARLIEST (?) DESCRIPTION OF A STRING FIGURE LAWRENCE G. MILLER, LAWRENCE G. MILLERSearch for more papers by this author LAWRENCE G. MILLER, LAWRENCE G. MILLERSearch for more papers by this author First published: July‐September 1945 https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1945.47.3.02a00190Citations: 3AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume47, Issue3July‐September 1945Pages 461-462 RelatedInformation

85. "The Candles" String Figure in Somerset.

85. "The Candles" String Figure in Somerset.