Vibrant Materials Research Articles

Using Nobel Prize case-based learning in Medical Immunology to cultivate critical thinking dispositions for medical undergraduates

BackgroundCritical thinking has been regarded as an essential skill for college students, which is especially imperative for medical students to possess the ability to have in-depth insight into complex clinical situations. Medical Immunology is an overarching principle connecting multiple medical subjects, which emphasizes that immunity is both beneficial and harmful to the host, thus putting higher demands on students’ critical thinking. The utilization of Nobel Prize stories has been cited as a thematic framework for classroom teaching of other courses, showing numerous educational benefits. Therefore, this study rejuvenated a case-based teaching approach by creating and introducing a vibrant material library centered on numerous iconic Nobel Prize cases in Medical Immunology and evaluating its effects on the critical thinking of medical students.MethodsA total of 70 second-year medical undergraduates from the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine were divided into a control group and an experimental group of 35 cases each. Throughout the semester, the control received the traditional teaching method, and the experimental group adopted case-based teaching based on the Nobel prize-centered material library. The process of teaching design and practice was described using “Antitoxin and immunoserum therapy” as a classical example. A unified assessment of the critical thinking dispositions of participants was conducted at the beginning and end of the semester using the Critical Thinking Disposition Inventory-Chinese Version (CTDI-CV).ResultsIntra-group longitudinal comparisons and inter-group parallel evaluations indicated that, compared with the conventional teaching approach, Nobel Prize case-based learning induced a statistically significant increase in the overall score of the CTDI-CV, as well as the scores within the subdimensions of truth-seeking, analyticity, and maturity in judgment (p < 0.05). Pearson correlation analysis further indicated a positive correlation between the total score of the CTDI-CV and the final grade (p < 0.05), which emphasized the crucial role of critical thinking dispositions in academic achievement.ConclusionThe case-based classroom teaching centered on Nobel Prize cases for Medical Immunology can effectively improve the critical thinking dispositions of medical undergraduates, which contributes to cultivating high-level medical and healthcare talents with excellent comprehensive quality in the new era.

Tattoos as multimodal semiotic assemblages

Abstract Drawing on interviews with, and images from, a selection of female participants, we develop the notion of semiotic assemblages to examine tattoos as mobile semiotic material for embodied meaning-making, with multi-located trajectories linking the tattooed bodies to different spatial networks. In turn, we draw on the social semiotic approach to multimodality by looking at assemblages of tattoos as vibrant material, pregnant with thing-power which, while re-making the bodies of individual tattoo owners, simultaneously shapes and semiotically remediates physical and affective (e.g. emotional and memorial) objects and feelings. We illustrate how corporeal materials and activities, and the incorporeal conceptual, perceptual and affective senses and feelings are remediated across boundaries of language, geography, semiotic modes, media, and chains of mediation to make meaning. We end with a suggestion that multimodal analysis of semiotic assemblages needs to take a multiscalar approach to account for mobilities, movements and flow, and the continuities and disconnections in forms and meanings the dynamics of the connectedness produce across different scales.

الظواهر الفانتازية في النص المسرحي - قراءة موضوعاتية في نص "من النافذة" لـ "ملحة عبد الله"

This reading undertakes the observation and analysis of fantasy manifestations in the play "From the Window" by Mulha Abdullah, representing a rich and renewed artistic experience in this field. It serves as fertile material for study and research, opening up historical dimensions, human legacies, and diverse cognitive discourses. The style reflects a conscious awareness that portrays reality and unreality as a vibrant material, embodying the external visualization of imaginary worlds, inner embedded feelings, desires, and dreams. The engagement of the audience, breaking expectations, and the use of unreality to expose thought and human phenomena are evident. The reading aims to examine this theatrical product, exploring language, description, character features, temporal and spatial formation, scenery, music, and costumes. It scrutinizes how these elements adhere to the creation of fantasy, regulating the fusion of the expected and unexpected through the dialectics of simplification, exaggeration, and blending reality with dream and symbol. This mechanism can converge with ancient narratives in creating an individual crisis and personal salvation, revealing influential ideologies on the writer and subsequently on the text. The study unveils the level of manifestation of implications and reservations, leading to perspectives on reception and the aesthetics of symbolic dimension in the text. The study demonstrates the effectiveness of thematic reading in the applied context on the written play. This research idea can contribute to applied studies on Saudi theatre.

Objects, Matter, and Assemblage: Orientalism and Awe in Robert de Clari’s Constantinople

ABSTRACT This article proposes to read Robert de Clari’s account of Constantinople through the lenses of vibrant materiality, orientalism and the ethics and affects of colonial pursuit. Why was his account so different from Geoffroy de Villehardouin’s? Why was he so focused on objects, on materials, and marvels? If we position his text, one of the first vernacular prose histories in French, in its relation to romance, to broader narratives of empire and the “Saracen” other, and in regard to the politics of colonial logic, we see that his version of events reflects broader logics and legacies of the Crusades and their attempts to colonize, rationalize, and interpret the “Other” through orientalist, racist, and marvelous lenses. Clari’s account justifies the sacking of a sister empire—a Christian empire—due to the wealth of the relics conquered and the affective power therein, thus rationalizing the imagined end of Christendom at the borders of Byzantium. Clari thus uses the affective power of relics to imagine a united Christendom, united against a foreign, pagan/“Saracen” other, and to participate in the prophesy that, vaticinium ex eventu, Constantinople was always marked for conquest by the “French” and never for truce with the “Saracens.”

Stocks and flows: Material culture and consumption behaviour in early modern Venice (c. 1650–1800)

AbstractThis paper examines the evolution of consumption practices in Venice in the long eighteenth century through the combined use of post‐mortem inventories and household budgets. Although Italy experienced a period of relative decline between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, our findings suggest that Venetian households enjoyed a rich and vibrant material culture that was fully comparable with those of the most advanced European urban economies. However, although new products, practices, and fashions were adopted by Venetian society, the architecture of consumption did not undergo sudden and extreme changes; rather, consumption was gradually refined, following the path that it had begun during the Renaissance. We therefore argue that the Venetian economy did not experience a consumer revolution but, instead, consumer evolution. Moreover, this study shows that sophisticated consumption practices were not exclusive to the more dynamic economies of the continent but were widespread even in those regions that were victims of the Little Divergence. We thus suggest that the relationship between consumption development and economic development was not necessarily causal and that the diffusion of new consumption practices throughout society was a necessary, but insufficient, prerequisite for economic take‐off.

9New Materialisms

AbstractThe works reviewed in this year’s essay on New Materialisms raise queries about first-wave New Materialism and signal what some critics refer to as second-phase Neo-materialism. The ‘Neo’ or New Materialisms of 2022 increasingly commingle the rhetorical and the material and address the Western-centric focus of previous New Materialisms. The works reviewed here, including Rosi Braidotti’s ‘The Virtual as Affirmative Praxis: A Neo-Materialist Approach’, Anne Elvey’s Reading with Earth: Contributions of the New Materialism to an Ecological Feminist Hermeneutics, Nina Lykke’s Vibrant Death: A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning, and Clayton Crockett’s Energy and Change a New Materialist Cosmotheology, engage new intersections between New Materialist theory and decoloniality, making deliberate gestures to integrate the idea of vibrant materiality and Indigenous cultures. This review essay is divided into five parts: 1. Introduction; 2. Neo-Materialism; 3. Literary Studies; 4. Theology; 5. Postcolonialism/Decoloniality. The essay concludes that New Materialism may indeed be on the brink of a second phase, especially if decolonial New Materialism continues to be explored.

Arresting Actors: A Sámi Drum and its Complex Relations

ABSTRACT The article centres around a well-known artefact in Sámi history, the more than 300-year-old drum that once belonged to Poala Ánde/Anders Poulsen, that has recently been returned to Sápmi after a long restitution process. Sámi drums were deemed sorcerers’ devices and routinely confiscated and destroyed during seventeenth century Danish autocracy; their users prosecuted and sometimes executed. In the early 1690s, the drum was seized and sent to Copenhagen and the Royal Danish Art Chamber, whereas the owner was killed in custody while awaiting the judicial decision. The case involves one of very few preserved Sámi drums accompanied by a contemporaneous indigenous voice conveyed in the trial document. Paradoxically, at the same time as Sámi drums were confiscated and, in many cases, destroyed, some were embarking on journeys as attractive collectors’ items. Today, Sámi drums are frequently “arrested” in museum exhibitions as “shamanistic devices”, often echoing old tools and tropes of othering. The article argues that there is a tendency to translate actors like Poala Ánde/Anders Poulsen and the drum into categories that immobilise them, and which prevent historical configurations to enter the narrative. It also contends that discussions about what the figures on the drumhead represent have dominated the reception and steered attention away from individual aspects of the drum and its vibrant materiality. In line with the biographical approach of the exhibition Ruoktot ­– The Return of the Sámi Drums by the Sámi Museum in Kárášjohka, I explore the entangled agency of the drum to help consider material aspects and concurrent meanings.

Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering in Sophocles’ Philoctetes

On some accounts, Sophocles’ Philoctetes is most notable for what it lacks: alone among the extant Attic tragedies, there are no women in the dramatis personae; alone among the extant plays of Sophocles, no characters die; and the chorus plays a relatively diminished role, adhering most closely to Aristotle’s injunction in the Poetics that a chorus should take on the role of an actor. But when viewed through the lens of ecocritical feminism and vibrant materialism, notably the work of Donna Haraway, Mel Chen, Jane Bennett, and Anna Tsing, the play’s landscape, the island of Lemnos, comes to life; and it teems with feminine energies as well as compromised and complicated animacies, while the chorus serves as an empathic focalizer and world-builder. This paper argues that in addition to animating the island’s material ecosystem, Sophocles conjures Lemnos’ mythic ecosystem, most notably the tale of the notorious, murderous, and malodorous Lemnian Women. All of these elements cohere to characterize Philoctetes as an abject, sterile menstruator. Furthermore, the chorus’s brief, strange Hymn to Gaia encapsulates the play’s tension between a masculine, heroic, teleological narrative and the feminine, primordial, bestial world of Lemnos. These dynamics are further considered through the lens of fifth-century Athenian colonization, the story of the indigenous Lemnian Pelasgians, and a colonial reading of the Odyssey’s Cyclopeia. Finally, the paper explores the close, mutually constitutive relationship between text, landscape, and body via the popularity, in later antiquity, of pharmacological applications of Lemnian Earth, used to treat, among other ailments, snakebites and menstruation.

Mobility and Identity in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Mobility and Identity in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema ed. by Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes

Reviewed by: Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema ed. by Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes Micah Mckay Fornoff, Carolyn and Gisela Heffes, eds. Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema. State U of New York Press, 2021. xiii + 361 pp. ISBN 978-1-4384-8404-4. What can the consummately human medium of film—movies are, of course, made by and for human beings—tell us about the needs, perspectives, and realities of nonhuman beings? And what can film do to interrogate its own seemingly inherent anthropocentrism? These are two of the fundamental questions addressed in Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes's edited volume Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema, the first book to bring to bear the preoccupations of ecocriticism, new materialism, and posthumanism on the study of Latin American film and an essential contribution to the burgeoning field of environmentally-minded Latin American cultural studies. To name just one other recent example, Lucy Bollington and Paul Merchant's edited volume Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (2020) shares with Pushing Past the Human the desire to show how Latin American cultural texts can help us see beyond the notion of the human in order to better understand our place in the larger web of life. But, as Fornoff and Heffes put it in the introduction to their volume, this emerging critical enterprise highlights the fact that the epistemological move "beyond the human" does not mean leaving the human or human concerns behind; rather, it "warn[s] against losing sight of the human altogether" and "dramatiz[es] the inextricability of planetary care and social justice" (12). The productive tension between human and nonhuman concerns, social justice and planetary care, is one of the elements that gives Pushing Past the Human a sense of coherence and a sense of urgency in the context of ongoing and ever-accelerating environmental crises that are exacting heavy ecological and social tolls. Pushing Past the Human gathers together fifteen essays (including the introduction) written by scholars whose institutional homes are largely found in universities in the Unites States and Europe. Fornoff and Heffes's introduction makes a clear and concise argument for cinema's unique ability to allow viewers to consider the world beyond anthropocentric perspectives through technological innovations and filmmaking techniques that disrupt human timescales and represent ecological relationships that are difficult for the human sensorium to fully grasp. What is more, Fornoff and Heffes make a compelling case for the ability of Latin American cinema in particular to intervene in the theoretical and political debates of ecocriticism and posthumanism due to the region's history of colonialism, its experience of extractive capitalism, and the various modes of decolonial, and posthumanist thought that those experiences have given rise to (they engage, for instance, with Macarena Gómez-Barris's notion of "submerged perspectives" and Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's distillation of Indigenous people's experiences of the end of the world). In addition to providing a solid theoretical grounding for the volume, the introduction offers useful information about the development of ecocinema in Latin America and the wide array of film festivals that showcase it. The volume's other fourteen essays are divided into three thematic sections that address questions of cinematic genre, the staging of human/nonhuman difference, and [End Page 162] indigeneity. The first of these, "Genre Beyond the Human," features essays on the road movie, disaster films, documentary, and slow cinema. By paying close attention to the conventions of each of these genres (and the ways the films each author studies push against those conventions), these chapters offer valuable insights on, for example, the damages wrought by extractivism in the Brazilian Amazon (Patrícia Vieira) and the way cinematic depictions of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake are paradigmatic examples of Anthropocene cultural texts because they stage the interaction between deep time and human history in a way that complicates clear distinctions between "natural" and "human-made" catastrophes (Fornoff). The five chapters in "Encountering Difference," the volume's second section, engage with portrayals of animals raised for slaughter, the vibrant materiality of objects in film animation, lush rural landscapes...

Moomins and Complicity with Matter: Tove Jansson’s Moominpappa at Sea as an Intervention in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things by Jane Bennett

Abstract As humans we are constantly engaging not only with other humans but with plants, animals, and matter. This article examines the way we view our engagement with the materiality of the world around us, by looking at the work of philosopher Jane Bennet on vibrant materiality and author Tove Jansson. Bennet presents an argument that matter can be analysed as active and vibrant. While Western philosophers are used to viewing matter as passive and dead, seeing it as active makes space for different engagement with matter. One of the ways we can start engaging with matter, once we stop thinking of it as passive and dead, is through the lens of ethics. Jansson in her children’s book Moominpappa at Sea shows a possibility for looking at the material world through this ethical lens. This article will put these works in conversation by reading both as philosophical works that have nuanced engagement with the topic of how we can be in community with the things that surround us. Jansson’s work provides a helpful addition to Vibrant Matter by showing how we are inextricably entangled in harm, and providing a possible way to live with this reality.

Heat treatment induced structural, optical, electrical and surface topographical characteristics of CdSe:Zn films: Functionality as absorber layer

With contemplation of gargantuan light-harvesting capability and cost-effectiveness, the cadmoselite (CdSe) is a vibrant material for photon absorption whose optical response and electrical behaviour could be tailored via Zinc doping. The heat treatment (HT) is indispensable step to modify and align physical characteristics of absorber films for targeted solar cell applications. Present communication unravels properties of thermally evaporated absorber CdSe:Zn 5% films those are heat treated at 423 K, 523 K and 623 K. Structural characteristics unveil formation of polycrystalline films with (111) dominant reflection whose intensity and corresponding crystallite size are enriched from 31 nm to 41 nm with HT. Optical characteristics lay bare enhancement in visible photon absorption and electrical characteristics unveil linear I–V relationship with uplift in conductivity with HT up to 523 K. PL spectra exhibit two bands with highly intense near band edge emission at ∼685 nm whose intensity is enriched with HT. Three dimensional surface topographical micrographs demonstrate spike like grain structures for as-deposited films which modified into hillock grain structures for HT CdSe:Zn films.

The Precarious Pedagogy of Art Working the Museum’s Ruins

The inflecting intensity of artworks will be characterized as an affirmative critique of the archival objectives of the museum in the article that follows. It will be argued that the nuanced, vibrant materiality of art, the pedagogy that constitutes its aesthetic experience, enables ways of working out of the limits of the museum’s archival aspirations and determinations. By inflecting such definite archival objectives indefinitely, the evocative potentiality of art intensifies museum experiences as matters of thinking with and through precarity. A precarious museum affects differentiated ways of being and thinking with artworks inside and the world outside of its galleries and exhibitions as a coconstituted ecosystem. Considering the indeterminate condition of our times, such experiences with and through art in the museum are constitutive in generating immanent pedagogical potentialities for art education research and practice.

Wuthigrai Siriphon: Highlighting tradition

The innovative output of Wuthigrai Siriphon draws on his Thai heritage and extensive knowledge and practical experience of regional textile craft techniques. But whilst his work often references historical forms and colour palettes, his studio textiles are far from staid, exhibiting a modernist sensibility frequently verging on the spectacular. Securely pigeonholing such a creative practitioner is always problematic, but any attempt at categorization is made even more difficult so once the viewer acknowledges the layered nature of South East Asian textile practice. This is a region where traditional understandings of fabric and colour still compete with modernist perspectives on design, material selection and colour application and rural craft weavers continue to make a living alongside industrial factories. Wuthigrai and his ouvre is a product of this complex and vibrant material culture, highlighting tradition whilst retaining its contemporary relevance.

High-temperature superconductor of sodalite-like clathrate hafnium hexahydride

Hafnium hydrogen compounds have recently become the vibrant materials for structural prediction at high pressure, from their high potential candidate for high-temperature superconductors. In this work, we predict hbox {HfH}_{6} by exploiting the evolutionary searching. A high-pressure phase adopts a sodalite-like clathrate structure, showing the body-centered cubic structure with a space group of Imbar{3}m. The first-principles calculations have been used, including the zero-point energy, to investigate the probable structures up to 600 GPa, and find that the Imbar{3}m structure is thermodynamically and dynamically stable. This remarkable result of the Imbar{3}m structure shows the van Hove singularity at the Fermi level by determining the density of states. We calculate a superconducting transition temperature (T_{c}) using Allen-Dynes equation and demonstrated that it exhibits superconductivity under high pressure with relatively high-T_{c} of 132 K.

Theorizing Born Digital Objects: Museums and Contemporary Materialities

This paper explores the characteristics of born digital objects and how their materiality is framed and transformed in the musealization process. It draws on vibrant materialism and web archiving, framing born digital objects as assemblages and proposing a distinction between these and reborn digital objects, i.e. their collected counterparts. The paper relates this new framing of digital objects to established museological frameworks, such as analyses of the musealization process through the lenses of semiotics and research on authenticity in relation to digital reproductions, in order to unpick the ontological and epistemological transformation this contemporary form of heritage undergoes in entering the museum.

O T H E R V I S U A L : Onto the Audiovisual Cooking

This paper inquiries about the kitchen as space of vibrant materiality for representation and agency for art, design and architecture practices. On meeting the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic, it is not incidental that the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial curated by Mariana Pestana under the theme “Empathy Revisited: designs for more than one” has chosen the kitchen as a means to create spaces of discourses, exchange and collective reflection. Taking into account Jeffrey and Shaowen Bardzell’s view of “What Is ‘Critical’ about Critical Design?” (2013), this paper surveys the biennial’s programme “The Critical Cooking Show” which presents a digital programme of films, lectures and performances that reimagine the kitchen as a space central to design thinking and production. Deepening our sensibilities as to how criticality occupies design practices, we have to further understand the expanded space of the kitchen and what it really offers to expand the space of design. From the triangulation kitchen, design and process, evidence is searched for bridging process between the fields of kitchen and design following Buchanan’s theory of rethinking placements over categories by way of signs, things, actions and thoughts. Kitchen and design are thus understood as liberal arts disciplines seeking to privilege a placement-based approach to projectual practice where observations on the speculative allow reflections of the self and modes of action. Pallasmaa’s conception of an architecture of the senses, for whom the role of the body is understood as the locus of perception, thought and consciousness, helps explore and convoke the space of kitchen visited by artists and designers throughout recent history, as a means to establish relations between theories, processes, and projectual methodologies in kitchen and design. The reading of the space finds its translation through diverse processes applied by these creators leading to an understanding of a kitchen milieu: process as context. From the interpretation of the empirical work it is suggested that kitchen multiplies design (k x d). It implies that the context of kitchen multiplies the space of the discipline of design, becoming, in Buchanan’s term, a “quasi-subject matter of design thinking”. If so, kitchen as other placements may offer, or are open to receive and edify, an expanded view of the discipline of design. Deepening our sensibilities as to how criticality occupies design practices, we have to further understand the expanded space of the kitchen and what it really offers to expand the space of design. From the triangulation kitchen, design and process, evidence is searched for bridging process between the fields of kitchen and design following Buchanan’s theory of rethinking placements over categories by way of signs, things, actions and thoughts. Kitchen and design are thus understood as liberal arts disciplines seeking to privilege a placement-based approach to projectual practice where observations on the speculative allow reflections of the self and modes of action. Pallasmaa’s conception of an architecture of the senses, for whom the role of the body is understood as the locus of perception, thought and consciousness, helps explore and convoke the space of kitchen visited by artists and designers throughout recent history, as a means to establish relations between theories, processes, and projectual methodologies in kitchen and design. The reading of the space finds its translation through diverse processes applied by these creators leading to an understanding of a kitchen milieu: process as context. From the interpretation of the empirical work it is suggested that kitchen multiplies design (k x d). It implies that the context of kitchen multiplies the space of the discipline of design, becoming, in Buchanan’s term, a “quasi-subject matter of design thinking”. If so, kitchen as other placements may offer, or are open to receive and edify, an expanded view of the discipline of design.

Canvasing the Body

Focusing on our interactions with visual art as posthuman performance, this piece explores how Jane Bennett’s “vibrant materiality” moves us into a radical relationality with art and processes of grief. Performance studies’ enduring plumb into the deep ecology of body-page-body-stage makes us particularly equipped to see what else we might know of being in semantic-somatic multimatter knowing.

Conceptualizing histories of multispecies entanglements: Ancient pathogen genomics and the case of Borrelia recurrentis

This article explores the conceptual and cultural implications of using pathogen ancient DNA (aDNA) collected in archaeological contexts to understand the past. More specifically, it examines ancient pathogen genomics as a way of conceptualizing multispecies entanglements. The analysis focuses on the 2018 sequencing of Borrelia recurrentis bacteria retrieved from a medieval graveyard in Oslo, Norway. B. recurrentis is associated with louse-borne relapsing fever (LBRF), known to have killed several million people in Europe during the past millennium, and it is still encountered in parts of East Africa. The article demonstrates that while aDNA research often foregrounds multispecies entanglements, its epistemic tools cannot easily address the ontological blurriness of pathogens and their embeddedness in vibrant material processes. The article draws on feminist posthumanities work on microbes and materiality to highlight conceptual openings that a theorization of ancient pathogens could engender.

Around the Broken Chair: Locationality, Visuality and the Vibrancy of Diplomatic Objects

Summary The Broken Chair, a colossal sculpture positioned in the Place de Nations outside the main entrance to the Palais de Nations — the UN Office at Geneva — provides a site and a micro-geography of diplomacy. This essay examines this transgressive gift to the UN, challenging customary norms of gift-giving, and its energetic use by liminal diplomatic subjects pursuing diverse causes. It explores the social life and agential competences of this diplomatic object, its ability to recontextualise ‘the square of nations’ and to affect and empower those connected to it. Overall, it surveys its vibrant materiality that supports alternative diplomatic presence and possibility.