Journal articles on the topic 'Multi-perspectival'

Abstract This article calls attention to problematic effects of the so-called “ontological turn” that now gains ground in academic anthropology, especially the entailments of perspectival multi-naturalism. I argue that a consistent embrace of this approach challenges public anthropology at its core. The irrealist grounding of perspectival multi-naturalism encourages withdrawal from both analysis and engagement, rendering the application of anthropological knowledge dubious. In order to counter this development, I suggest a reorientation in terms of realist principles, notably those of Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism. The diverging theoretical and ethical implications of these approaches are exemplified through a discussion of threats to health and life in Java, Indonesia.

On the basis of a thorough comparative analysis of the Forum contributions to the last issue of “Narrative Inquiry” (21:2), it is possible to focus on some patterns which indicate the development of a new paradigm in this field of study and practice. These patterns lead us to understand narrative as co-constructed, dialogical, educational. ethical, multi-perspectival, relational, political, provisional, social and situational and place it in a non exclusive confrontation with other forms of meaning making within the different fields of human experience.

The purpose of this article is to propose a cubist homiletic based on the Picasso-originated art movement known as cubism. To that end, I explore the twofold question: What is cubist preaching, and why do we need it today? It is a critical inquiry into a theology and methodology of cubist preaching and its contextual rationale. In particular, I adopt cubism’s artistic-philosophical routine of transcendental deconstruction and multi-perspectival reconstruction as the key hermeneutical and literary methodology for cubist preaching. This cubist way of preaching ultimately aims for the listener to encounter the Sacred in what I call an ubi-ductive way—a neologism made by conjoining the two terms, ubiquitous and -ductive, beyond what is possible through conventional inductive and deductive preaching.

Serving as the introduction to the special issue on ‘Migrant narratives’, this article proposes a multi-perspectival and multi-stakeholder analysis of how migration is narrated in the media in the last decade. This research agenda is developed by focussing on groups of actors that are commonly studied in isolation from each other: (1) migrants, (2) media professionals such as journalists and spokespersons from humanitarian organizations, (3) governments and corporations and (4) artists and activists. We take a relational approach to recognize how media power is articulated alongside a spectrum of more top-down and more bottom-up perspectives, through specific formats, genres and styles within and against larger frameworks of governmentality. Taken together, the poetics and politics of migrant narratives demand attention respectively for how stakeholders variously aesthetically present and politically represent migration. The opportunities, challenges, problems and commitments observed among the four groups of actors also provide the means to rethink our practice and responsibilities as media and migration scholars contributing to decentring media technologies and re-humanizing migrants.

This article focuses on my recent pen and ink drawings, which are multi-panelled works on paper dealing with wars, migration and political themes. They are contextualized in relation to a long career of disruptive themes, as well as the critique and celebration of cities and places through the employment of architectonic, mechanistic and landscape imagery. They are intended to function as visual metaphors for social, cultural and historical narratives. My subject-matter and the deliberate referentiality of drawn detail and semi-recognizable objects, constructions and spaces are discussed in relation to formal issues of texture, manipulation of space and perspectival ambiguity. These relate to some of the ideas about the strategies of making and the special status and properties of drawing that I formulated in my book The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Drawing, 2010. I suggest in conclusion that my life-long commitment to the austerity and economy of drawing reflects my early training in South Africa.

The current article draws from Critical Diversity Literacy (CDL) to analyse narrative expressions of a black South African teacher’s experiences of moments of exclusion (troughs) and inclusion (crests) after twenty years of service in two predominantly white independent schools. Data was generated from one South African teacher who was prompted to reflect on crests [inclusive moments that deserve to be embraced and celebrated] and troughs [moments of exclusion that seek to assimilate/ignore diversity] in her teaching journey spanning two decades at two independent schools. Using the interpretivist paradigm, we attempt to understand the teacher’s journey which shows amongst others, that agents of exclusion with tendencies to demand compliance and subsequent assimilation, include other teachers, school leaders, learners as well as some parents. The teacher was however, provided with an opportunity to read the situation and may, depending on her agency, work to circumvent oppressive and exclusionary tendencies. Crests celebrating diversity were noted in her second school. I conclude that diversity remains multi-perspectival and therefore simultaneity should be borne in mind when dealing with inclusion in the teaching fraternity.

Abstract Several recent studies have examined how professional journalists use social media at work. However, we know little about the differences between younger and older journalists’ use of social media for newsgathering. We conducted 16 in-depth interviews comparing eight young journalists (median age = 24) with eight older journalists (median age = 50) in Norway. The younger journalists reported using multiple social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, to collect politically significant information, news observations, sources and comments. By comparison, the older journalists reported relying heavily on elite sources on Twitter. This reluctance to use a variety of social media platforms may limit older journalists’ exposure to a variety of news sources. As a result, younger journalists seem to follow a more multi-perspectival approach to social media and may be more innovative in their newsgathering. Hence, younger journalists may be exposed to more diverse types of news sources than older journalists. Together, the findings indicate a generational gap in ‘networked publics’ concerning how younger and older journalists approach newsgathering in social media.

Background: Students with Emotional Behavioral Disorder (EBD) and those with attachment issues, such as Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD), present school professionals with some of the most challenging behaviors experienced in schools. Family participation can be critical for promoting positive outcomes for children with behavioral concerns. Positive school and family partnering interactions can positively impact students behaviorally, academically, and socially. Objective: This article aims to provide an introductory framing for this special issue regarding school and family partnering interactions among students with EBD, including those with attachment issues, such as RAD. Method: Qualitative research was employed to consider this topic across included special issue articles. Conclusion: A variety of studies showcase ways of effectively attending to the experiences of students with EBD and RAD and their families. There is further much that might be gained by making use of an interdisciplinary lens for approaching this issue, such as from the perspective of education, psychotherapy, educational psychology, and family studies. This multi-perspectival approach might contribute to the life quality and success of youth with EBD and RAD and their families.

This article explores the role of ‘sounding costumes’ and body-worn technologies for choreographic composition, with real-time interactional elements (such as microphones, speakers, sensors) potentially integrated into movement and expressive behaviour. Sounding garments explore the interactions between dancer/performer, the costume and the environment in the generation and manipulation of sonic textures. Briefly discussing historical precedents of integrated composition, the article will mainly refer to sounding prototypes in DAP-Lab’s latest production, For the time being [Victory over the Sun] (2012–2014), for which I designed the wearables, highlighting new methods for building sensual wearable electro-acoustic costumes to create kinaesonic choreographies. The article analyses the multi-perspectival potentials of such conceptual garments/wearable artefacts to play a significant part in the creation process of a performance, focusing on how wearable design can influence and shape movement vocabularies through the impact of its physical material presence on the body, distinctive design aesthetics and sound-generating capabilities. Choreographically, garments and body-worn technologies act as amplifying instruments as well as sculptural constraints or conversely enablers of new movement and ways of sounding/listening that affect different kinetic and acoustic awareness (both in the performers and in the audience).

Abstract The cognitive building provides promises if its social and technical requirements are considered holistically, but these have not been consciously explored, particularly within modular construction, which offers an unexploited opportunity. This study, therefore, aims to develop a framework for the modular construction of a cognitive building as a socio-technical system to ensure effective human-technology interaction, stakeholder acceptance and engagement. The framework is examined with a mock-up project of a student smart residential building in Hong Kong, similar to a cognitive building, which adopted a modular construction technique. The case demonstrated that the framework effectively ensures multi-perspectival involvement of key stakeholders at the design and manufacturing phase to produce modular units cleanly embedded with appropriate and operable cognitive building technologies for users and facility managers before transported to the site. The study is based on a single case study; hence, there could be a little scientific rigour providing little basis for the generalisation of the results to a wider space. As buildings are technologically advancing, future studies are encouraged to look at other possible case projects that utilise modular construction principles and evaluate them by adopting this study’s STS framework or its enhanced form.

From its inception, philosophy for/with children (P4wC) has sought to promote philosophical discussion with children based on the latter’s own questions and a pedagogic method designed to encourage critical, creative, and caring thinking. Communities of inquiry can be plagued by power struggles prompted by diverse identities, however. These not always being highlighted in the literature or P4wC discourse, this article proposes a two-stage model for facilitators as part of their ethical responsibility. In the first phase, they should free themselves from assumptions and closed-mindedness. They should liberate themselves from pedagogy of fear and “banking education” in order to act freely in an educational space characterized by improvisation that cultivates participation of the children. Here, the text is based on normalizing education principles, counter-education and diasporic-education approaches in order to ensure openness and inclusiveness. In the second, they should embrace enabling-identity views and practices in order to make the community of inquiry as identity-broad and -rich as possible, recognizing and legitimizing the participants’ differences. Here, the text is based on principles such as recognizing power games as part of the community, ensuring multi-narratives human environment and enabling epistemic justice in order to ensure perspectival multiplicity, multiple identities, and the legitimization of difference characterized by pedagogy of search.

In the interest of learning from a unique and devastating disaster, this paper develops a conceptualisation of generalisation as a communicative process. Growing from the author’s experience of conducting and communicating an ethnographic case study of the community response to the Grenfell Tower disaster, a tower block fire which traumatised a West London community, and has been widely labelled an ‘unprecedented’ event, the paper considers ways of developing knowledge with wider application from this unique case. ‘Communicative generalisation’ is concerned with the significance of knowledge to epistemic communities rather than abstract universal truth. Four modes of communicative generalisation are explored. By elaborating the multi-perspectival nature of a case and its relation to its context, case studies may enrich readers’ generalised other. Case studies may address an epistemic community by problematising a taken-for-granted situation or theory. A case study can extend the situations to which it may transfer by multiplying its audiences, and thus forcing its authors to take multiple perspectives. It can also extend its meaningfulness by multiplying speakers, facilitating expressions of diverse perspectives on the case. ‘Communicative generalisation’ distributes the agency of generalisation among authors, cases and audiences. This redistribution has implications for the politics and temporality of generalisation.

Abstract The purpose of this article is to examine whether a “general approach for specific purposes”, i.e. a general approach to Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) research, is possible or even desirable. We will briefly review some of the major changes that have taken place in LSP research, and this with a view to situating the five studies that have been included in this special issue of ITL – International Journal of Applied Linguistics. The approach is based on the existing LSP literature, but rather than attempting a comprehensive overview, we will discuss only those trends that may be instrumental in forging a general research agenda for the near future. LSP research has gradually replaced texts as its main object of enquiry in favour of the complex social and discursive practices of a particular discipline. Though the areas covered in this special issue are business, legal and maritime discourse, it is equally interesting to?tices (like recreational team sports). The shift from text to practice, from terminology to communication, has necessitated a principled inter-disciplinary and multi-perspectival stance in terms of both theories and methodologies. In addition, globalisation, technology and other societal forces have affected the dynamics of professional and organisational communication. This article will argue that it is to these trends and developments that the special issue makes a significant contribution. At the same time, it is hoped that our article will open up new possibilities for applied linguistic research and will also stimulate debate on what direction LSP researchers, both experienced practitioners and newcomers, should be moving in.

Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1927) can be regarded as a post-humanist novel for several reasons. It is post-humanist in a temporal sense because it engages with the nineteenth-century humanist legacy from a twentieth-century perspective. The novel’s brazen critique of traditional bourgeois values does not simply reject humanism and its philosophy of individual autonomy. It dislodges idealist concepts of wholeness and self-perfection and replaces them with a multi-perspectival view of a continuously changing human consciousness, an open-ended process toward an ever-elusive self-awareness. 
 The protagonist of Hesse’s novel, Harry Haller, even though still heavily influenced by the humanist tradition, can no longer be viewed as a clearly defined individual personifying the Cartesian dichotomy of body and mind. On the contrary, Hesse’s novel depicts Haller’s gradual disillusionment with this idealist world view by giving a detailed account of the deconstruction of his personality – a personality that, as it turns out, does not consist of a spiritual essence but dissolves into an accumulation of acquired conventions, habits, cultural and philosophical traditions, even specific historical events and constellations. Yet Hesse’s attempt to go beyond a mere negation of humanist values implies transcending the humanist paradigm in many respects, including its form.
 This essay will focus on the novel’s subversion of the humanist tradition. It discloses how Hesse’s novel undermines universalist philosophical claims, regardless of whether they belong to the idealist or anti-idealist Nietzschean philosophy that heavily influenced both the protagonist and his author. In light of the novel’s dismantling of binary reasoning, foregrounded in the protagonist’s man-animal division, the essay challenges conventional wisdom among critics who regard Hesse’s literary works as traditionalist.

Abstract Background Developing age-friendly communities is a significant global policy issue. The WHO (2007) age-friendly cities and communities initiative has had a significant influence on the development of Ireland’s Age-Friendly Programme. With research on such programmes still at an early stage, this paper critically examines the utilisation of the WHO age-friendly planning framework in an Irish context. It explores older adults’ experience of living in two towns in an ‘age-friendly’ county and, in parallel, examines stakeholders’ perspectives on the development of the county’s age-friendly programme. This multi-perspectival approach facilitates an assessment of how the age-friendly county programme addresses older residents’ needs, and illustrates how the WHO conceptual and planning framework has worked in an Irish context. Methods The paper reports on a study which employed a mixed-method, qualitative case-study research design, using a constructivist grounded theory approach to explore the lived experience of older adults, and a case-study framework for the stakeholder perspective. Results The research identifies salient social and cultural dimensions of the day-to-day lived experience of older people which, although they impact on the age-friendliness of the places in which they live, are neglected in the WHO framework. It also identifies a unique combination of economic, political, cultural, and organisational factors which have impacted on age-friendly programme development in Ireland. Conclusion In critically analysing use of the WHO age-friendly model, the paper suggests ways in which the model can be modified to better accommodate the diverse experience of older adults not only in Ireland, but also in other geographic and cultural contexts.

In referencing the title of Chris Candlin's (2008) plenary, this paper focuses on the continuing concern to align research and practice in applied linguistics, and more particularly in language for specific purposes (LSP) and professional communication. We examine how Candlin identified practices for trading places between research and practice and for creating synergies between them – and in so doing opened up new spaces for enquiry and understanding in the field. We identify and critically examine four approaches that Candlin developed to promote the alignment of research and practice: through particular research tools and methodologies, through the investigation of professional settings and inter-domain constructs (such as quality, trust and risk), through a concern with both rigour and relevance in relation to research and training, and through a focus on ‘critical moments of interaction’ in ‘crucial sites of engagement’ (Candlin 2008). To this end, we draw on the diverse domains and trajectories of enquiry outlined in the opening plenary symposium at the 4th Asia-Pacific Language for Specific Purposes & Professional Communication Association Conference from five standpoints: in recent impact case studies of professional communication in the Hong Kong context (Cheng 2017), in a ‘multi-perspectival’ account of Candlin's enacted philosophy of teaching and learning (Moore 2017), in examining the communicative basis of expertise (Sarangi 2017) and the concept of interdiscursivity (Jones 2017), and in the extensive fieldwork and analysis of workplace talk underlying the development of resources for new migrants in New Zealand (Holmes & Riddiford 2017). In conclusion, we pay tribute to an inspirational researcher and teacher whose influence will continue to impact applied linguistics for decades to come.

This paper is an outcome of my MPhil dissertation, in which I was engaged in transformative research practice to critically look into the learning practices that I followed in my non/academic journey from my childhood education to my MPhil research period. The learning practices can be inevitable approaches to transformative learning but might not have been given a space in the educational context of Nepal. Keeping this in consideration, I, as a transformative teacher-researcher, attempt to re-conceptualize learning practices in Nepal by breaking the beliefs taken for granted that learning takes place only within the classroom guided by teachers’ pedagogical practices. In other words, I make an argument for the approaches to transformative learning apart from classroom pedagogy. In doing so, I reflect on my learning journey by responding to the guiding research question, ‘How did I adopt transformative learning practices apart from classroom pedagogy from my childhood education to MPhil research?’ For this, I engage in critical self-reflection on my learning practices using a multi-paradigmatic (interpretivism, criticalism, postmodernism) research approach and autoethnography as a research method to capture my autobiographical learning journey from childhood education to my MPhil degree. I conclude the paper by providing my transformative learning practices: learning beyond the classroom context, learning through critical reflection, learning through a disorienting dilemma, learning through writing about self and others, learning through perspectival meaning-making, and learning through envisioning by critically looking through the lens of knowledge constitutive interests and transformative theories. The theories help me in the process of analyzing, interpreting, and making meaning of my experience. Further, the theories support me to orient my arguments toward transformative education by deconstructing the taken-for-granted teaching and learning practices of teachers, practitioner-researchers, and educators in the context of Nepal

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the hidden social worlds of competent clandestine users of drugs controlled within the confines of the UK Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, which now includes NPS substances. The authors explore how and in what way socially competent drug users differ from others who are visible to the authorities as criminals by criminal justice bureaucracies and known to treatment agencies as defined problem drug users. Design/methodology/approach This qualitative research utilises a bricoleur ethnographic methodology considered as a critical, multi-perspectival, multi-theoretical and multi-methodological approach to inquiry. Findings This paper challenges addiction discourses and, drawing upon empirical evidence, argues the user of controlled drugs should not be homogenised. Using several key strategies of identity management, drug takers employ a range of risk awareness and risk neutralisation techniques to protect self-esteem, avoid social affronts and in maintaining untainted identities. The authors present illicit drug use as one activity amongst other social activities that (some) people, conventionally, pursue. The findings from this study suggest that punitive drug policy, which links drug use with addiction, crime and antisocial behaviour, is inconsistent with the experience of the participants. Research limitations/implications Due to the small sample size (n=24) employed, the possibility that findings can be generalised is rendered difficult. However, generalisation was never an objective of the research; the experiences of this hidden population are deeply subjective and generalising findings and applying them to other populations would be an unproductive endeavour. While the research attempted to recruit an equal number of males and females to this research, gendered analysis was not a primary objective of this research. However, it is acknowledged that future research would greatly benefit from such a gendered focus. Practical implications The insights from the study may be useful in helping to inform future policy discourse on issues of drug use. In particular, the insights suggest that a more nuanced perspective should be adopted. This perspective should recognise the non-deviant identities of many drug users in the contemporary era, and challenge the use of a universally stigmatising discourse and dominance of prohibition narratives. Social implications It is envisaged that this paper will contribute to knowledge on how socially competent users of controlled drugs identify and manage the risks of moral, medical and legal censure. Originality/value The evidence in this paper indicates that drug use is an activity often associated with non-deviant, productive members of the population. However, the continuing dominance of stigmatising policy discourses often leads to drug users engaging in identity concealment within the context of a deeply capitalist Western landscape.

Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) has been identified as the best way forward to contribute to mitigating climate change for enhanced agriculture productivity. The study was conducted in Asokwa Municipal in the Ashanti region of Ghana as a case study with the following objectives; to identify existing CSA practices adopted by vegetable farmers; to evaluate existing institutions and their role in facilitating the adoption of CSA practices and to establish the likely factors that may promote or inhibit adoption of CSA practices. Purposive sampling was used to select twenty-seven participants due to restrictions on COVID-19 and limited resources. The significance of this method is that participants are selected by virtue of their capacity to provide rich-textured information relevant to the phenomenon under study. Results from the field showed that the commonly adopted CSA practices were improved crop varieties, irrigation and manure management scoring 100% each followed by crop rotation (66.7%). The least adopted practices, from the highest to the lowest were agroforestry (12.5%), mulching and rain harvesting (8.3%) each and compost application with 4.2%. The key factors inhibiting the adoption of CSA consist of insufficient information, water scarcities and financial constraints. The conclusion drawn was that the Agricultural sector must become climate-smart to successfully tackle current food security and climate change challenges. Beyond doubt, it will require management and governance practices based on ecosystem approaches that involves multi-stakeholder and multi-sectoral coordination and cooperation.

Очерчивается история преобразования экранного образа – от его «латентных» форм, существовавших до изобретения киноаппарата, до новейших форм медиаискусства. В центре внимания – эффект движущегося изображения, работа взгляда и характер чувственности зрителя. Фокусируется внимание на том, как расширение возможностей визуальной коммуникации влияет на опыт смотрящего, анализируются особые типы взгляда, формирующиеся под воздействием обновления языка медиа. Авторы рассматривают переход от статичной и центрированной позиции зрителя классической картины, место которого точно определено структурой перспективного изображения, к кинозрителю, чей взгляд, как писал Жан-Люк Нанси, «встраивается» в подвижный взгляд камеры (а тело остается неподвижным), а затем – к свободно движущемуся, дрейфующему взгляду зрителя видеоарта, путешествующего в пространстве многоканальной инсталляции и виртуальной реальности. Анализируя видеопроизведения и кинематографические работы, близкие по своим выразительным возможностям к эстетике видеоарта, авторы показывают, как преображение структуры визуального образа и стратегий взгляда работают с новыми формами чувственности, характерными для текущего состояния коммуникационного общества. Обращается внимание на две тенденции кристаллизации художественной оптики видеоарта, взаимодействие которых во многом обусловливает «физиогномику» современного языка видео. Первая тенденция связана с интенсификацией переживания временности, усиления длительности как подлинной тактики видеоарта и постепенным «растворением» в длительности центрированного кадрирования и монтажно-склеивающих приемов. Другая тенденция – движение от пространственных манифестаций раннего модернизма к чувственности и тактильности образа. В зоне пересечения этих двух линий прорисовывается современная поэтика видео, действующего в художественном поле одного экрана или в пространстве полиэкранной инсталляции и виртуальной реальности. В некотором смысле это можно концептуализировать как «выталкивание» взгляда на поверхность экрана в противовес иммерсионному эффекту засасывания внутрь экранного пространства (в традиционном кино), оно напоминает о конечности познания и сочетании в нем пассивного и активного начал. В каждом разделе статьи в сфере нашего внимания оказывается один из типов децентрированного (свободного) взгляда, формируемый в поле экранных экспериментов: 1) глубинная мизансцена; 2) «пустой центр» (замедление или остановка камеры); 3) «скользящий взгляд»; 4) «дрейфующий взгляд»; 5) «расслоение» (полиэкран). Проанализировав эти пять типов децентрированного взгляда / образа, мы покажем, как в медиаискусстве может происходить «коперниканский переворот», смещающий акцент с экрана на действие взгляда, который сам становится темой произведения. A new ontology of seeing introduced by cinéma d’auteur and video art is proposed in the present paper. This ontology is associated with the transition from a centered position of subjectivity and perspectival construction of reality belonging to classical art – to a slowed-down vision and “drifting” glance introduced by new media. These slowed, layered, drifting and uncentered types of vision and continuous plans of moving image make it possible to shape a new sensitivity of “matter” in its complex variety and specificity. This is where experimental film and video art provoke and shape a new ontology of seeing. The study is focused on cinéma d’auteur (A. Tarkovsky, L. Visconti, A. Kiarostami, I. Bergman) and aesthetically and structurally related video art pieces (P. Rist, G. Hill, E.-L. Ahtila, Y. Fudong, et al.). These artists created specific ways of guiding viewer’s glance by means of moving image; exploring the aesthetic potential of camera travelling, mis-en-scène and montage; outlining the frontier of contemporary screen culture as a promising “symbolic form” of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We analyze the shift from a static and centered position of the viewer of a classical painting (whose place is determined by the structure of the image’s perspective) – to the movie spectator, whose gaze, as Jean-Luc Nancy mentioned, “gets embedded” into the moving of the camera’s point of view (while the body remains motionless); and then to the drifting glance of the viewer of video art (walking in the space of a multi-channel installation or virtual reality). We argue that the transforming structures of the moving image and strategies of the gaze tend to shape new forms of sensibility in line with the current state of the communication society, the visuality of which is characterized by the ever-increasing speed and density of information, hybrid media flux, multi-layer texture, and fragmented image. In each section of the paper, we introduce one type of decentered image/glance, which is shaped in artistic experiment: (1) deep mise-en-scène (A. Bazin); (2) “empty center” (slowed-down or motionless camera losing interest in the hero); (3) “sliding glance” (smooth camera travelling, leveling all objects in significance); (4) “drifting glance” (associative poetic montage); and (5) multi-screen compositions (stratification of the moving image). In the 20th and 21st centuries, when information is transmitted, read, and accumulated at a supernormal speed, and reading it calls for a keen gaze, a diffused, drifting view turns out to be the mode of vision with which one can see the flux, dissimilation and ambiguity lying beneath the surface (screen) of contemporaneity. And artists who use moving image to create a model of a relaxed gaze and multi-faceted seeing accept this challenge; and the relaxed, decentered, drifting and wandering glance provokes the intensity of artistic seeking.

In this article, I argue for a realist anthropology based on the recognition of mind-independent reality; pitching this premise against concerted anti-dualist tendencies in contemporary anthropological thinking. I spell out core analytical entailments of these, in my view, profoundly conflicting premises. In particular, I focus on perspectival multi-naturalism, arguing that despite adherents’ claims to reinvigorate studies of ‘ontology’, this approach instead exaggerates epistemological dimensions. When assessed from a realist stance, its ground position engenders a series of epistemic fallacies by which the ontological is, effectively, subordinated under epistemology. Advocates’ reluctance to appreciate a distinction between mind and mind-independent reality entails a profound contraction of perspective in terms of empirical and methodological scope, and, analytically, a disregard for ontological complexity and depth, thus curtailing the importance of anthropology in wider academic discourse.

SUMMARY We comment on Martin Curtice's article on expert and professional reports for the Court of Protection, which highlights the importance of ‘clear explanation’ in mental capacity assessment. We put the Court in a broader context of the Mental Capacity Act and summarise recent research and education that aims to help give clinicians working in England and Wales capacity assessment guidance that is clinically grounded, multi-perspectival and legally defensible.

AbstractThis paper investigates the nature of motivation in the context of a tertiary art and design studio through a multi-perspectival and mixed methodological study of situated text and talk. Drawing upon the analytical resources of linguistic ethnography, multimodal interaction, and functional linguistics, among others, the study finds that motivation in the studio, while perceived by the tutors in terms of the students’ willingness to complete required project work, is, on further examination, a more complex phenomenon, dynamically related to wider socio-institutional discourses and the students’ conception of their future selves. The paper concludes by reconceptualizing motivation in the art and design studio as a discursively constructed and contested phenomenon, intersubjectively realized across the trajectory of studio genres and inherently related to identity and power. The findings contribute to understandings of motivation, particularly within the context of art and design educational studies.

This study was conducted to assess the experience and causes of school dropout among public secondary (high) schools in Palestine, and to explore processes to combat this. We identify the factors and illustrate a conceptual model for student dropout from school. This involves diverse factors including family background, teachers, school’s environment, student role. This paper recommends that policies to prevent early school leaving require multi-perspectival targeting, involving individual, school, community and family. Among actions which would reduce dropout, we identify plans for eliminating illiteracy, developing a good interpersonal relationship with students, and strengthening community participation in educational programmes.

Abstract The general remit of this paper is the role of wildlife trade in pathogen spillover. Its underlying assumption is that, so far from being the exclusive domain of the life sciences, the study of pathogen spillover will be greatly enhanced by multi-perspectival approaches, including One Health and those employed here, namely, non-speciesist green criminology and critical animal studies. The paper moves from discussions of zoonosis, anthroponosis and wildlife trade to the emergence of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. The paper recommends the abolition of all wildlife trade and the reclamation of wildlife habitat and broaches discussion of the extension of legal personhood to wild animals.

Multiple theories of the same phenomenon abound in many interdisciplinary research areas, but it is often unclear how the theories relate, and there are no clear guidelines for dealing with this plurality. The history of research on spatial industrial clustering is a case in point. We identify a number of solutions to the problem of multiple theoretical accounts proposed in this literature. We label them definitional, taxonomic, integrative, and multi-perspectival. We then offer the erotetic solution as an indispensable complement to any attempt at resolving the multiple-theories problem. It accounts for theoretical plurality in terms of different explanation-seeking questions different theories aim to address. We analyse three prominent explanations in the recent history of research on spatial industrial clustering and show how the erotetic approach can contribute to foster interdisciplinary dialogue.

AbstractThis essay offers a semiotic account of the Logically Real as an emergent category of multi-perspectival experience. Such an approach is supported by phenomenological, developmental, and cognitive discourses, which conceptualize the emergence of object permanence through sensorimotor interactions. Within this frame, I argue that humanities needs a form of native empiricism – by which I mean a discourse of the real, articulated through monosemic practices that symbolize the literal – as a component of the revitalization being wrought by the digital humanities. I adopt Sartre’s concept of the analagon complemented with a notion of codon to explicate what I call the sign dominance of the image, which is explored in relation to the experience of the sign as an act of imagination. Forms of practiced monosemy concatenated around the experienced permanence of objects is offered as a viable humanist discursive strategy toward revivifying empirical methodologies.

The end of the apartheid era in South Africa inaugurated an increased mobility and accessibility to previously prohibited spaces. Although African migrant populations are still highly regulated in South Africa, their presence has also profoundly transformed the country’s present-day sociolinguistic and cultural landscape. The textual construction of the literary text in this study draws attention to the post-structuralist perspective which argues that languages are not closed entities but rather open systems utilised for expressive purposes in specific social contexts. Most significantly, recent sociolinguistic studies show that languages are no longer regarded as discrete systems in communication because they form expansive linguistic repertoires in contact spaces. Such an understanding of multilingual use facilitates communication across cultural, linguistic and national borders, thereby subverting exclusionary normative practices. The present article draws from translingual perspectives to examine communicative practices in literary discourse. A close textual analysis is adopted to identify how translingual practices make languaging a contested terrain meant to project multi-voiced and multi-perspectival discourses with transformative capacities in the context of the ‘rainbow nation’ metanarrative.

This series of papers on early anticipations of a spiritual New Age ends with Carl Jung’s version of a futural planetary-wide unus mundus rejoining person and cosmos, based on his psychoid linkage of quantum physics and consciousness, and especially on the neo-shamanic worldview emerging out of his spirit guided initiation in the more recently published Red Book. A cognitive-psychological re-evaluation of Jung’s archetypal imagination, the metaphoricity of his alchemical writings, and a comparison of Jung and Levi-Strauss on mythological thinking all support a contemporary view of Jung’s active imagination and mythic amplification as a spiritual intelligence based on a formal operations in affect, as also reflected in his use of the multi-perspectival synchronicities of the I-Ching. A reconsideration of Bourguignon on the larger relations between trance and social structure further supports the neo-shamanic nature of Jung’s Aquarian Age expectations.

“This is Rape Culture, Ladies and Gentlemen” uses the affordances offeredby multi-perspectival short fiction and thick description to re-centre attention on first-personexperience and the “taken-for-granted” complexities of everyday life that are at the heart of rape culture. It attempts to highlight the “everydayness” of rape culture which makes rape almost invisible within a normalised milieu of predatory sexual behaviour. In this, it draws on sociological theories of the practices of everyday life (Lefebvre, 1947/1991; de Certeau, 1974/1984; Felski, 1999), in which commonplace situations, mundane routines, and normal behaviours — that are usually taken for granted — are focalised. My story takes place on a college campus in North America, and involves a pivotal conversation between a homosexual man and a heterosexual woman that draws attention to the different ways in which rape is visible or invisible depending on characters’ (and readers’) positioning in relation to hegemonic social norms.

The region sometimes known as Manchuria entered 1900 as a frontier of blurred boundaries. Inter-polity borders between the Qing and Russian empires, and between both empires and Korea, had been drawn in earlier centuries, but no power center exerted full control. Multiple populations—Manchu, Korean, Han Chinese, Russian, and also Japanese for a time—lived among one another. This changed by mid-century as borders hardened under new rationalist-Westphalian states, the PRC, USSR, and DPRK. Yet, as this article argues in a revisionist, multi-perspectival account, the Manchurian frontier had a long afterlife in the politics and culture of the PRC and its avowedly modern socialist neighbors. Historical and anthropological insights at the local level reveal how ubiquitous Manchurian frontier “bandits” were supplanted by Chinese, Russian, and Korean “partisans” during the 1920s–1940s revolutionary conflicts. As guerrilla fighters drew on romanticizations of noble, masculine bandit-heroes, the socialist causes—and ultimately states—they fought for became embedded in both the Manchurian wilderness and local imagination.

The paper assesses the questions if and, if yes, how the republican conception of free statehood can and should inform a compelling understanding of a legitimate post-Westphalian political order. To answer these questions, it, first, reconstructs the foundational arguments of republican internationalists in favour of free states and, second, assesses the points of contention republican cosmopolitans raise. Third, it develops an alternative approach, a republicanism of plural polities: Based on a relational and multi-dimensional understanding of citizenship, the paper questions the strong internationalist reliance on the citizenship-state-nexus and on statehood in general, but also takes issue with cosmopolitans’ neglect of the boundedness of democratic self-determination. A republicanism of plural polities as a multi-perspectival approach to democratic institution-building in and beyond the state is open to constellations of plural polities of different forms and on different political levels while simultaneously recognising the particularity of each ‘free polity’. It thereby adds a new dimension to debates on the political forms legitimate institutions can assume under post-Westphalian conditions and opens avenues for research on inter-polity relations, on more complex constellations of self-rule and shared rule as well as of multilateral decision-making, on sovereignty and independence. The latter are exemplified by reference to the European context.

Our 2020 Educational Researcher article, “The Imperative of Social Foundations to (Urban) Education Research and Practice,” emphasizes three particular social foundations of education (SFE) subdisciplines (sociology of education, history of education, and philosophy of education) to demonstrate the strength and necessity of SFE as a multi-perspectival approach to resolving persistent education justice dilemmas. In their technical comment, Aydarova et al. (2021) insist that our article potentially facilitates “erasure of SFE’s complexity and interdisciplinarity” (p. 1). They, like us, care deeply that SFE be understood as indispensable to advancing racial justice in and beyond education research, policy, and practice. These scholars foreground the invaluable contributions of anthropology of education to oppose racism and accentuate justice-oriented education alternatives. This essay responds to the technical comment by clarifying what we find to be a fundamental misinterpretation of our argument and, ultimately, its scholarly purpose. Not only do we contend with our colleagues’ concern that our work is reductionist, we demonstrate how Aydarova et al.’s urgent call to foreground SFE’s interdisciplinary nature further underscores the central argument made in our 2020 paper.

Abstract Different hypotheses have flourished to explain the evolutionary paradox of schizophrenia. In this contribution, we sought to illustrate how, in the schizophrenia spectrum, the concept of embodiment may underpin the phylogenetic and developmental pathways linking sensorimotor processes, the origin of human language, and the construction of a basic sense of the self. In particular, according to an embodied model of language, we suggest that the reuse of basic sensorimotor loops for language, while enabling the development of fully symbolic thought, has pushed the human brain close to the threshold of a severe disruption of self-embodiment processes, which are at the core of schizophrenia psychopathology. We adopted an inter-disciplinary approach (psychopathology, neuroscience, developmental biology) within an evolutionary framework, to gain an integrated, multi-perspectival model on the origin of schizophrenia vulnerability. A maladaptive over-expression of evolutionary-developmental trajectories toward language at the expense of embodiment processes would have led to the evolutionary “trade-off” of a hyper-symbolic activity to the detriment of a disembodied self. Therefore, schizophrenia psychopathology might be the cost of long-term co-evolutive interactions between brain and language.

This history by two scholars of literature and film is a series of essays on the patterns and “tones” of French culture in the late 1920s and the 1930s. The Popular Front (1935–1938) comes in only as background, and its cultural programs (the subject of Pascal Ory's 991-page La Belle Illusion) are not discussed here. Breaking with what the authors call “standard history” or “the straight story,” this study zigzags back and forth across the years between the wars (and even later), pausing to examine selected movies, cinematic themes, canonic novels, literary careers, and the diverse political stances taken by cultural leaders. The authors' model for this anti-narrative history is Alain Resnais's film of 1974, Stavisky…, which they analyze at length, praising its multi-perspectival, ambiguous evocation of a period. Accordingly, they focus on episodes and fragments from different cultural strata, uncovering unexpected coincidences and similarities that constitute the “harmonics” of the past (as Sergei Eisenstein and Resnais put it). Their method also owes much to some Surrealists' ideas, counterbalanced by a Structuralist interest in cultural regularities. Still another model invoked throughout is the non-linear format of a newspaper, with parallel columns juxtaposing unrelated stories on a given day.

Abstract This interdisciplinary approach to the semiotics of emotion offers insights on emotion as a semantic category organising an array of feelings, thoughts and sensations into meaningful (communicable) terms. This is achieved via an exploration of the role of perspective-taking in making meanings that are felt rather than expressly articulated through words. Forming a semiotic system based on embodied experiences and their contexts, emotions, as semantic categories, are the first stage in processes of expression and communication. I lay the groundwork for an interdisciplinary semiotics of emotion in accordance with findings and stances taken in the fields of literary and cultural studies, neuroscience, and cognitive and comparative psychology. Narrative empathy (sometimes called narrative emotion), like emotion per se, stands upon processes of communication involving the interpretive capacities of feeling, cognitive processes of identification, and perspective-taking. Feeling, beginning as an interpretation of sensorial and neurologically driven values, intensifies through the cognitive-affectual interpretative processes of perspective-taking. With recursive (multi-perspectival) feeling resulting in intensifications of feeling we recognise as emotion, I define emotion as a complex recursive pattern of feeling and affect that calls attention to itself in terms that are readily identifiable with semantic categories such as love, hate, shame, sadness, and anger.

This is a piece of experimental multi-perspectival writing in which four different personae adopt different methods and intellectual relationships to writing as a means of research, by using the topics of fiction, counterfactual history and not-being. The narrative line is provided by a novelist who retells Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon. In Saramago’s novel a wayward proof-reader mischievously adds the word “not” to the historical account, creating a fictional, counterfactual history. This “bringing into being” of a fiction – of what didn’t actually happen – sets in train a series of perspectives or thought experiments by the four personae of the present text on the nature of “not-being”. They deploy methods from fictional writing and phenomenological practice informed by Saramago and Sartre, and phenomenological theory informed by Husserl and Meinong, thereby investigating the topic from four different perspectives. As a result, it is proposed that the legitimacy gap suffered by fiction-as-research may be bridged by so-called Meinongian objects, and the problem of whether such inexistent objects are facts, is less important than deciding whether they are useful. The conclusion is that artistic research methods offer techniques and a space to discuss the agency of not-being, of what-if, and of omission, through the legitimate deployment of fiction and falsehoods; and the benefits of so doing outweigh the existential discomfort that such ideas usually induce in researchers.

AbstractGender dysphoria is distress in relation to incongruence between an individual’s gender and sex assigned at birth. Gender clinics offer support for gender dysphoria, and there is a higher prevalence of autism in young people attending such clinics than in the general population. We aimed to investigate the lived experiences of autistic young people who have experienced gender dysphoria, and their parents, using a multi-perspectival IPA design. Young autistic people aged 13–17 years (n = 15), and their parents (n = 16), completed in-depth interviews about the young person’s experience of gender dysphoria. We analysed each individual transcript to generate individual themes, and for each of the dyads, developed themes which acknowledged the similarities and differences in parent–child perspectives. The first superordinate theme was coping with distress which had two subordinate themes; understanding difficult feelings and focus on alleviating distress with external support. This theme described how young people were overwhelmed by negative feelings which they came to understand as being about gender incongruence and looked to alleviate these feelings through a gender transition. The second superordinate theme was working out who I am which had two subordinate themes: the centrality of different identities and needs and thinking about gender. This theme described how young people and their parents focused on different needs; while young people more often focused on their gender-related needs, parents focused on autism-related needs. We conclude that young people and parents may have different perspectives and priorities when it comes to meeting the needs of autistic young people who experience gender dysphoria.

The starting point of the article is the statement that there is the need for self-defense, not uncommon when presenting intercultural philosophy to a wider audience, as questions of cultural incommensurability inevitably arise. In this res­pect there may be asked some questions which should be taken into consideration: Is comparative philosophy legitimate? Is intercultural philosophy valid? Is any type of global philosophy possible? Are the cultural, terminological, and perspectival differences simply too great? In order to begin to deal with these issues, the suggestion here is made that focusing on translation as such is not the best approach, insofar as translation seeks to convey philosophical content across (or trans) boundaries in a manner that often seems to imply a one-to-one correspondence of terms and furthermore that there are distances between cultures too great to be traversed. Meanwhile, it is argued that interpretation which focuses primarily on the “inter” – the space in between – and not on cultural chasms or conceptual correspondences avoids these problems and provides a framework for pluralistic, multi-point growth like a rhizome. It can be recognized that the convergence of thinking pointed out in this paper implies some remaining distance, and that this distance is something perfectly normal. In response to this problematic, G. Deleuze, F. Guat­tari, F. Wim­­mer, and R. Ames variously and diversely show, what really matters in the growth of philosophy are results. Does fostering an intercultural conversation in a way that both attends to convergent growth and respectfully preserves the very real differences do anything to grow and generate genuine philosophical content? This is the measure, incommensurability aside.

Drawing on a qualitative case study of writing practices and pedagogies in one Canadian graduate Education program, this article discusses roles and responsibilities of course instructors for teaching and supporting academic writing at the master’s level. Data were collected through individual, semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 14 graduate students and eight professors and they were analyzed thematically. The discussion is framed by the academic literacies pedagogical framework (ACLITS). The data suggest that academic writing expectations can be sources of extreme stress for graduate students. The students and instructors lacked a common language to discuss student texts. In the absence of explicit academic writing pedagogies, students and instructors sometimes turned to simplistic advice received at school. The paper also discusses pedagogical challenges associated with the teaching of disciplinary writing genres in multi-perspectival fields such as Curriculum Studies. Dans cet article, basé sur une étude de cas qualitative de pratiques et de pédagogies de rédaction menée dans un programme universitaire d’éducation de cycle supérieur dans une université canadienne, il est question des rôles et des responsabilités des instructeurs concernant l’enseignement et les travaux de rédaction universitaire de soutien au niveau de la maîtrise. Les données ont été recueillies à partir d’entrevues individuelles approfondies, semi structurées, auprès de 14 étudiants de cycle supérieur et de huit professeurs. Les entrevues ont ensuite été analysées de manière thématique. La discussion se place dans le cadre pédagogique des littéracies universitaires (ACLITS - Academic Literacies Pedagogical Framework). Les données suggèrent que les attentes en matière de travaux de rédaction universitaire peuvent être des sources de stress extrême pour les étudiants de cycle supérieur. Les étudiants et les instructeurs n’ont pas de langue commune pour discuter les textes produits par les étudiants. En l’absence de pédagogies explicites en matière de travaux de rédaction universitaire, les étudiants et les instructeurs se tournent parfois vers des avis simplistes obtenus à l’école. Cet article présente également les défis pédagogiques associés à l’enseignement des genres disciplinaires de travaux de rédaction dans des domaines qui présentent des perspectives multiples tels que les études du curriculum.

Abstract Introduction Improving the quality of healthcare has proven to be a challenging task despite longstanding efforts. Approaches to improvements that consider the strong influence of local context as well as stakeholders’ differing views on the situation are warranted. Soft systems methodology (SSM) includes contextual and multi-perspectival features. However, the way SSM has been applied and the outcomes of using SSM to stimulate productive change in healthcare have not been sufficiently investigated. Aim This scoping review aimed to examine and map the use and outcomes of SSM in healthcare settings. Method The review was based on Arksey and O’Malley’s framework. We searched six academic databases to January 2019 for peer-reviewed journal articles in English. We also reviewed reference lists of included citations. Articles were included if they were empirical studies focused on the application of SSM in a healthcare setting. Two reviewers conducted the abstract review and one reviewer conducted the full-text review and extracted data on study characteristics, ways of applying SSM and the outcomes of SSM initiatives. Study quality was assessed using Hawker’s Quality Assessment Tool. Result A total of 49 studies were included in the final review. SSM had been used in a range of healthcare settings and for a variety of problem situations. The results revealed an inconsistent use of SSM including departing from Checkland’s original vision, applying different tools and involving stakeholders idiosyncratically. The quality of included studies varied and reporting of how SSM had been applied was sometimes inadequate. SSM had most often been used to understand a problem situation and to suggest potential improvements to the situation but to a lesser extent to implement and evaluate these improvements. Conclusion SSM is flexible and applicable to a range of problem situations in healthcare settings. However, better reporting of how SSM has been applied as well as evaluation of different types of outcomes, including implementation and intervention outcomes, is needed in order to appreciate more fully the utility and contribution of SSM in healthcare.

What epistemological potential do participatory organized web documentaries offer in comparison to 'conventional' documentaries? Does a closer analysis reveal differences between different participatory approaches? And what role does the construction of complexity play in terms of emancipatory effects? These are the initial questions of my contribution which deals with an epistemology of participatory web documentaries in relation to the construction of complex knowledge worlds. It starts with a theoretical deconstruction of different notions of participation and their application in web documentaries. In doing so, the constructed frames of reference and narratives, the functioning of the developed self-designs as well as the negotiation processes of design are also examined with respect to their epistemological potential. Still, the concept of participation calls for differentiation and clarification in general and its use in individual cases; all too often the term "participation" has been used vaguely and turned into an umbrella term under which medial interactivity and participation, social and political participation, and cultural perception and recognition are conflated. It is precisely the equation of media participation with social and political participation that seems problematic here. From the perspective of a critique of dividuation inspired by Gilles Deleuze and presented for example by Michaela Ott, participation seems to make sense only if it critically reflects the passivization imposed by digital communication and the entanglement of individuals in a complex network of social, cultural, and technological references – hence also normalized, stereotypical patterns of perception and cognition. Ultimately, this requires an examination of antagonistic, polyphonic, multi-perspectival and multi-media, thus also media self-reflexive forms of expression on different levels, which must be negotiated in their interplay. In short, such enganglements require an examination of the medial construction of relational forms of complexity, which is the prerequisite for participation to have an emancipatory effect at all. The paper will fathom this theoretical context by an analysis of paradigmatically selected participatory web documentaries, examining different forms of complexity with regard to their epistemological and emancipatory potential. Thus, I will argue for a methodological shift of perspective that leads from an analysis of works to an analysis of their processuality. This – in the end, makes it necessary to recognize that it is also a question of how the various notions of participation – ranging from strategies of voice-giving realized in web-documentaries to dimensions of engaged listening – can contribute in their own respect to the development of polyphonic, multifaceted perspectives and make doing documentary a medium for negotiating positions and a means for self-empowerment of the stakeholders involved in these processes.

By the time you read this, it will be wrong. Things seemed to be moving so fast in these first days after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania earth. Each certainty is as carelessly dropped as it was once carelessly assumed. The sounds of lower Manhattan that used to serve as white noise for residents—sirens, screeches, screams—are no longer signs without a referent. Instead, they make folks stare and stop, hurry and hustle, wondering whether the noises we know so well are in fact, this time, coefficients of a new reality. At the time of writing, the events themselves are also signs without referents—there has been no direct claim of responsibility, and little proof offered by accusers since the 11th. But it has been assumed that there is a link to US foreign policy, its military and economic presence in the Arab world, and opposition to it that seeks revenge. In the intervening weeks the US media and the war planners have supplied their own narrow frameworks, making New York’s “ground zero” into the starting point for a new escalation of global violence. We want to write here about the combination of sources and sensations that came that day, and the jumble of knowledges and emotions that filled our minds. Working late the night before, Toby was awoken in the morning by one of the planes right overhead. That happens sometimes. I have long expected a crash when I’ve heard the roar of jet engines so close—but I didn’t this time. Often when that sound hits me, I get up and go for a run down by the water, just near Wall Street. Something kept me back that day. Instead, I headed for my laptop. Because I cannot rely on local media to tell me very much about the role of the US in world affairs, I was reading the British newspaper The Guardian on-line when it flashed a two-line report about the planes. I looked up at the calendar above my desk to see whether it was April 1st. Truly. Then I got off-line and turned on the TV to watch CNN. That second, the phone rang. My quasi-ex-girlfriend I’m still in love with called from the mid-West. She was due to leave that day for the Bay Area. Was I alright? We spoke for a bit. She said my cell phone was out, and indeed it was for the remainder of the day. As I hung up from her, my friend Ana rang, tearful and concerned. Her husband, Patrick, had left an hour before for work in New Jersey, and it seemed like a dangerous separation. All separations were potentially fatal that day. You wanted to know where everyone was, every minute. She told me she had been trying to contact Palestinian friends who worked and attended school near the event—their ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds made for real poignancy, as we both thought of the prejudice they would (probably) face, regardless of the eventual who/what/when/where/how of these events. We agreed to meet at Bruno’s, a bakery on La Guardia Place. For some reason I really took my time, though, before getting to Ana. I shampooed and shaved under the shower. This was a horror, and I needed to look my best, even as men and women were losing and risking their lives. I can only interpret what I did as an attempt to impose normalcy and control on the situation, on my environment. When I finally made it down there, she’d located our friends. They were safe. We stood in the street and watched the Towers. Horrified by the sight of human beings tumbling to their deaths, we turned to buy a tea/coffee—again some ludicrous normalization—but were drawn back by chilling screams from the street. Racing outside, we saw the second Tower collapse, and clutched at each other. People were streaming towards us from further downtown. We decided to be with our Palestinian friends in their apartment. When we arrived, we learnt that Mark had been four minutes away from the WTC when the first plane hit. I tried to call my daughter in London and my father in Canberra, but to no avail. I rang the mid-West, and asked my maybe-former novia to call England and Australia to report in on me. Our friend Jenine got through to relatives on the West Bank. Israeli tanks had commenced a bombardment there, right after the planes had struck New York. Family members spoke to her from under the kitchen table, where they were taking refuge from the shelling of their house. Then we gave ourselves over to television, like so many others around the world, even though these events were happening only a mile away. We wanted to hear official word, but there was just a huge absence—Bush was busy learning to read in Florida, then leading from the front in Louisiana and Nebraska. As the day wore on, we split up and regrouped, meeting folks. One guy was in the subway when smoke filled the car. Noone could breathe properly, people were screaming, and his only thought was for his dog DeNiro back in Brooklyn. From the panic of the train, he managed to call his mom on a cell to ask her to feed “DeNiro” that night, because it looked like he wouldn’t get home. A pregnant woman feared for her unborn as she fled the blasts, pushing the stroller with her baby in it as she did so. Away from these heart-rending tales from strangers, there was the fear: good grief, what horrible price would the US Government extract for this, and who would be the overt and covert agents and targets of that suffering? What blood-lust would this generate? What would be the pattern of retaliation and counter-retaliation? What would become of civil rights and cultural inclusiveness? So a jumble of emotions came forward, I assume in all of us. Anger was not there for me, just intense sorrow, shock, and fear, and the desire for intimacy. Network television appeared to offer me that, but in an ultimately unsatisfactory way. For I think I saw the end-result of reality TV that day. I have since decided to call this ‘emotionalization’—network TV’s tendency to substitute analysis of US politics and economics with a stress on feelings. Of course, powerful emotions have been engaged by this horror, and there is value in addressing that fact and letting out the pain. I certainly needed to do so. But on that day and subsequent ones, I looked to the networks, traditional sources of current-affairs knowledge, for just that—informed, multi-perspectival journalism that would allow me to make sense of my feelings, and come to a just and reasoned decision about how the US should respond. I waited in vain. No such commentary came forward. Just a lot of asinine inquiries from reporters that were identical to those they pose to basketballers after a game: Question—‘How do you feel now?’ Answer—‘God was with me today.’ For the networks were insistent on asking everyone in sight how they felt about the end of las torres gemelas. In this case, we heard the feelings of survivors, firefighters, viewers, media mavens, Republican and Democrat hacks, and vacuous Beltway state-of-the-nation pundits. But learning of the military-political economy, global inequality, and ideologies and organizations that made for our grief and loss—for that, there was no space. TV had forgotten how to do it. My principal feeling soon became one of frustration. So I headed back to where I began the day—The Guardian web site, where I was given insightful analysis of the messy factors of history, religion, economics, and politics that had created this situation. As I dealt with the tragedy of folks whose lives had been so cruelly lost, I pondered what it would take for this to stop. Or whether this was just the beginning. I knew one thing—the answers wouldn’t come from mainstream US television, no matter how full of feelings it was. And that made Toby anxious. And afraid. He still is. And so the dreams come. In one, I am suddenly furloughed from my job with an orchestra, as audience numbers tumble. I make my evening-wear way to my locker along with the other players, emptying it of bubble gum and instrument. The next night, I see a gigantic, fifty-feet high wave heading for the city beach where I’ve come to swim. Somehow I am sheltered behind a huge wall, as all the people around me die. Dripping, I turn to find myself in a media-stereotype “crack house” of the early ’90s—desperate-looking black men, endless doorways, sudden police arrival, and my earnest search for a passport that will explain away my presence. I awake in horror, to the realization that the passport was already open and stamped—racialization at work for Toby, every day and in every way, as a white man in New York City. Ana’s husband, Patrick, was at work ten miles from Manhattan when “it” happened. In the hallway, I overheard some talk about two planes crashing, but went to teach anyway in my usual morning stupor. This was just the usual chatter of disaster junkies. I didn’t hear the words, “World Trade Center” until ten thirty, at the end of the class at the college I teach at in New Jersey, across the Hudson river. A friend and colleague walked in and told me the news of the attack, to which I replied “You must be fucking joking.” He was a little offended. Students were milling haphazardly on the campus in the late summer weather, some looking panicked like me. My first thought was of some general failure of the air-traffic control system. There must be planes falling out of the sky all over the country. Then the height of the towers: how far towards our apartment in Greenwich Village would the towers fall? Neither of us worked in the financial district a mile downtown, but was Ana safe? Where on the college campus could I see what was happening? I recognized the same physical sensation I had felt the morning after Hurricane Andrew in Miami seeing at a distance the wreckage of our shattered apartment across a suburban golf course strewn with debris and flattened power lines. Now I was trapped in the suburbs again at an unbridgeable distance from my wife and friends who were witnessing the attacks first hand. Were they safe? What on earth was going on? This feeling of being cut off, my path to the familiar places of home blocked, remained for weeks my dominant experience of the disaster. In my office, phone calls to the city didn’t work. There were six voice-mail messages from my teenaged brother Alex in small-town England giving a running commentary on the attack and its aftermath that he was witnessing live on television while I dutifully taught my writing class. “Hello, Patrick, where are you? Oh my god, another plane just hit the towers. Where are you?” The web was choked: no access to newspapers online. Email worked, but no one was wasting time writing. My office window looked out over a soccer field to the still woodlands of western New Jersey: behind me to the east the disaster must be unfolding. Finally I found a website with a live stream from ABC television, which I watched flickering and stilted on the tiny screen. It had all already happened: both towers already collapsed, the Pentagon attacked, another plane shot down over Pennsylvania, unconfirmed reports said, there were other hijacked aircraft still out there unaccounted for. Manhattan was sealed off. George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, all the bridges and tunnels from New Jersey I used to mock shut down. Police actions sealed off the highways into “the city.” The city I liked to think of as the capital of the world was cut off completely from the outside, suddenly vulnerable and under siege. There was no way to get home. The phone rang abruptly and Alex, three thousand miles away, told me he had spoken to Ana earlier and she was safe. After a dozen tries, I managed to get through and spoke to her, learning that she and Toby had seen people jumping and then the second tower fall. Other friends had been even closer. Everyone was safe, we thought. I sat for another couple of hours in my office uselessly. The news was incoherent, stories contradictory, loops of the planes hitting the towers only just ready for recycling. The attacks were already being transformed into “the World Trade Center Disaster,” not yet the ahistorical singularity of the emergency “nine one one.” Stranded, I had to spend the night in New Jersey at my boss’s house, reminded again of the boundless generosity of Americans to relative strangers. In an effort to protect his young son from the as yet unfiltered images saturating cable and Internet, my friend’s TV set was turned off and we did our best to reassure. We listened surreptitiously to news bulletins on AM radio, hoping that the roads would open. Walking the dog with my friend’s wife and son we crossed a park on the ridge on which Upper Montclair sits. Ten miles away a huge column of smoke was rising from lower Manhattan, where the stunning absence of the towers was clearly visible. The summer evening was unnervingly still. We kicked a soccer ball around on the front lawn and a woman walked distracted by, shocked and pale up the tree-lined suburban street, suffering her own wordless trauma. I remembered that though most of my students were ordinary working people, Montclair is a well-off dormitory for the financial sector and high rises of Wall Street and Midtown. For the time being, this was a white-collar disaster. I slept a short night in my friend’s house, waking to hope I had dreamed it all, and took the commuter train in with shell-shocked bankers and corporate types. All men, all looking nervously across the river toward glimpses of the Manhattan skyline as the train neared Hoboken. “I can’t believe they’re making us go in,” one guy had repeated on the station platform. He had watched the attacks from his office in Midtown, “The whole thing.” Inside the train we all sat in silence. Up from the PATH train station on 9th street I came onto a carless 6th Avenue. At 14th street barricades now sealed off downtown from the rest of the world. I walked down the middle of the avenue to a newspaper stand; the Indian proprietor shrugged “No deliveries below 14th.” I had not realized that the closer to the disaster you came, the less information would be available. Except, I assumed, for the evidence of my senses. But at 8 am the Village was eerily still, few people about, nothing in the sky, including the twin towers. I walked to Houston Street, which was full of trucks and police vehicles. Tractor trailers sat carrying concrete barriers. Below Houston, each street into Soho was barricaded and manned by huddles of cops. I had walked effortlessly up into the “lockdown,” but this was the “frozen zone.” There was no going further south towards the towers. I walked the few blocks home, found my wife sleeping, and climbed into bed, still in my clothes from the day before. “Your heart is racing,” she said. I realized that I hadn’t known if I would get back, and now I never wanted to leave again; it was still only eight thirty am. Lying there, I felt the terrible wonder of a distant bystander for the first-hand witness. Ana’s face couldn’t tell me what she had seen. I felt I needed to know more, to see and understand. Even though I knew the effort was useless: I could never bridge that gap that had trapped me ten miles away, my back turned to the unfolding disaster. The television was useless: we don’t have cable, and the mast on top of the North Tower, which Ana had watched fall, had relayed all the network channels. I knew I had to go down and see the wreckage. Later I would realize how lucky I had been not to suffer from “disaster envy.” Unbelievably, in retrospect, I commuted into work the second day after the attack, dogged by the same unnerving sensation that I would not get back—to the wounded, humbled former center of the world. My students were uneasy, all talked out. I was a novelty, a New Yorker living in the Village a mile from the towers, but I was forty-eight hours late. Out of place in both places. I felt torn up, but not angry. Back in the city at night, people were eating and drinking with a vengeance, the air filled with acrid sicklysweet smoke from the burning wreckage. Eyes stang and nose ran with a bitter acrid taste. Who knows what we’re breathing in, we joked nervously. A friend’s wife had fallen out with him for refusing to wear a protective mask in the house. He shrugged a wordlessly reassuring smile. What could any of us do? I walked with Ana down to the top of West Broadway from where the towers had commanded the skyline over SoHo; downtown dense smoke blocked the view to the disaster. A crowd of onlookers pushed up against the barricades all day, some weeping, others gawping. A tall guy was filming the grieving faces with a video camera, which was somehow the worst thing of all, the first sign of the disaster tourism that was already mushrooming downtown. Across the street an Asian artist sat painting the street scene in streaky black and white; he had scrubbed out two white columns where the towers would have been. “That’s the first thing I’ve seen that’s made me feel any better,” Ana said. We thanked him, but he shrugged blankly, still in shock I supposed. On the Friday, the clampdown. I watched the Mayor and Police Chief hold a press conference in which they angrily told the stream of volunteers to “ground zero” that they weren’t needed. “We can handle this ourselves. We thank you. But we don’t need your help,” Commissioner Kerik said. After the free-for-all of the first couple of days, with its amazing spontaneities and common gestures of goodwill, the clampdown was going into effect. I decided to go down to Canal Street and see if it was true that no one was welcome anymore. So many paths through the city were blocked now. “Lock down, frozen zone, war zone, the site, combat zone, ground zero, state troopers, secured perimeter, national guard, humvees, family center”: a disturbing new vocabulary that seemed to stamp the logic of Giuliani’s sanitized and over-policed Manhattan onto the wounded hulk of the city. The Mayor had been magnificent in the heat of the crisis; Churchillian, many were saying—and indeed, Giuliani quickly appeared on the cover of Cigar Afficionado, complete with wing collar and the misquotation from Kipling, “Captain Courageous.” Churchill had not believed in peacetime politics either, and he never got over losing his empire. Now the regime of command and control over New York’s citizens and its economy was being stabilized and reimposed. The sealed-off, disfigured, and newly militarized spaces of the New York through which I have always loved to wander at all hours seemed to have been put beyond reach for the duration. And, in the new post-“9/11” post-history, the duration could last forever. The violence of the attacks seemed to have elicited a heavy-handed official reaction that sought to contain and constrict the best qualities of New York. I felt more anger at the clampdown than I did at the demolition of the towers. I knew this was unreasonable, but I feared the reaction, the spread of the racial harassment and racial profiling that I had already heard of from my students in New Jersey. This militarizing of the urban landscape seemed to negate the sprawling, freewheeling, boundless largesse and tolerance on which New York had complacently claimed a monopoly. For many the towers stood for that as well, not just as the monumental outposts of global finance that had been attacked. Could the American flag mean something different? For a few days, perhaps—on the helmets of firemen and construction workers. But not for long. On the Saturday, I found an unmanned barricade way east along Canal Street and rode my bike past throngs of Chinatown residents, by the Federal jail block where prisoners from the first World Trade Center bombing were still being held. I headed south and west towards Tribeca; below the barricades in the frozen zone, you could roam freely, the cops and soldiers assuming you belonged there. I felt uneasy, doubting my own motives for being there, feeling the blood drain from my head in the same numbing shock I’d felt every time I headed downtown towards the site. I looped towards Greenwich Avenue, passing an abandoned bank full of emergency supplies and boxes of protective masks. Crushed cars still smeared with pulverized concrete and encrusted with paperwork strewn by the blast sat on the street near the disabled telephone exchange. On one side of the avenue stood a horde of onlookers, on the other television crews, all looking two blocks south towards a colossal pile of twisted and smoking steel, seven stories high. We were told to stay off the street by long-suffering national guardsmen and women with southern accents, kids. Nothing happening, just the aftermath. The TV crews were interviewing worn-out, dust-covered volunteers and firemen who sat quietly leaning against the railings of a park filled with scraps of paper. Out on the West Side highway, a high-tech truck was offering free cellular phone calls. The six lanes by the river were full of construction machinery and military vehicles. Ambulances rolled slowly uptown, bodies inside? I locked my bike redundantly to a lamppost and crossed under the hostile gaze of plainclothes police to another media encampment. On the path by the river, two camera crews were complaining bitterly in the heat. “After five days of this I’ve had enough.” They weren’t talking about the trauma, bodies, or the wreckage, but censorship. “Any blue light special gets to roll right down there, but they see your press pass and it’s get outta here. I’ve had enough.” I fronted out the surly cops and ducked under the tape onto the path, walking onto a Pier on which we’d spent many lazy afternoons watching the river at sunset. Dust everywhere, police boats docked and waiting, a crane ominously dredging mud into a barge. I walked back past the camera operators onto the highway and walked up to an interview in process. Perfectly composed, a fire chief and his crew from some small town in upstate New York were politely declining to give details about what they’d seen at “ground zero.” The men’s faces were dust streaked, their eyes slightly dazed with the shock of a horror previously unimaginable to most Americans. They were here to help the best they could, now they’d done as much as anyone could. “It’s time for us to go home.” The chief was eloquent, almost rehearsed in his precision. It was like a Magnum press photo. But he was refusing to cooperate with the media’s obsessive emotionalism. I walked down the highway, joining construction workers, volunteers, police, and firemen in their hundreds at Chambers Street. No one paid me any attention; it was absurd. I joined several other watchers on the stairs by Stuyvesant High School, which was now the headquarters for the recovery crews. Just two or three blocks away, the huge jagged teeth of the towers’ beautiful tracery lurched out onto the highway above huge mounds of debris. The TV images of the shattered scene made sense as I placed them into what was left of a familiar Sunday afternoon geography of bike rides and walks by the river, picnics in the park lying on the grass and gazing up at the infinite solidity of the towers. Demolished. It was breathtaking. If “they” could do that, they could do anything. Across the street at tables military policeman were checking credentials of the milling volunteers and issuing the pink and orange tags that gave access to ground zero. Without warning, there was a sudden stampede running full pelt up from the disaster site, men and women in fatigues, burly construction workers, firemen in bunker gear. I ran a few yards then stopped. Other people milled around idly, ignoring the panic, smoking and talking in low voices. It was a mainly white, blue-collar scene. All these men wearing flags and carrying crowbars and flashlights. In their company, the intolerance and rage I associated with flags and construction sites was nowhere to be seen. They were dealing with a torn and twisted otherness that dwarfed machismo or bigotry. I talked to a moustachioed, pony-tailed construction worker who’d hitched a ride from the mid-west to “come and help out.” He was staying at the Y, he said, it was kind of rough. “Have you been down there?” he asked, pointing towards the wreckage. “You’re British, you weren’t in World War Two were you?” I replied in the negative. “It’s worse ’n that. I went down last night and you can’t imagine it. You don’t want to see it if you don’t have to.” Did I know any welcoming ladies? he asked. The Y was kind of tough. When I saw TV images of President Bush speaking to the recovery crews and steelworkers at “ground zero” a couple of days later, shouting through a bullhorn to chants of “USA, USA” I knew nothing had changed. New York’s suffering was subject to a second hijacking by the brokers of national unity. New York had never been America, and now its terrible human loss and its great humanity were redesignated in the name of the nation, of the coming war. The signs without a referent were being forcibly appropriated, locked into an impoverished patriotic framework, interpreted for “us” by a compliant media and an opportunistic regime eager to reign in civil liberties, to unloose its war machine and tighten its grip on the Muslim world. That day, drawn to the river again, I had watched F18 fighter jets flying patterns over Manhattan as Bush’s helicopters came in across the river. Otherwise empty of air traffic, “our” skies were being torn up by the military jets: it was somehow the worst sight yet, worse than the wreckage or the bands of disaster tourists on Canal Street, a sign of further violence yet to come. There was a carrier out there beyond New York harbor, there to protect us: the bruising, blustering city once open to all comers. That felt worst of all. In the intervening weeks, we have seen other, more unstable ways of interpreting the signs of September 11 and its aftermath. Many have circulated on the Internet, past the blockages and blockades placed on urban spaces and intellectual life. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s work was banished (at least temporarily) from the canon of avant-garde electronic music when he described the attack on las torres gemelas as akin to a work of art. If Jacques Derrida had described it as an act of deconstruction (turning technological modernity literally in on itself), or Jean Baudrillard had announced that the event was so thick with mediation it had not truly taken place, something similar would have happened to them (and still may). This is because, as Don DeLillo so eloquently put it in implicit reaction to the plaintive cry “Why do they hate us?”: “it is the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind”—whether via military action or cultural iconography. All these positions are correct, however grisly and annoying they may be. What GK Chesterton called the “flints and tiles” of nineteenth-century European urban existence were rent asunder like so many victims of high-altitude US bombing raids. As a First-World disaster, it became knowable as the first-ever US “ground zero” such precisely through the high premium immediately set on the lives of Manhattan residents and the rarefied discussion of how to commemorate the high-altitude towers. When, a few weeks later, an American Airlines plane crashed on take-off from Queens, that borough was left open to all comers. Manhattan was locked down, flown over by “friendly” bombers. In stark contrast to the open if desperate faces on the street of 11 September, people went about their business with heads bowed even lower than is customary. Contradictory deconstructions and valuations of Manhattan lives mean that September 11 will live in infamy and hyper-knowability. The vengeful United States government and population continue on their way. Local residents must ponder insurance claims, real-estate values, children’s terrors, and their own roles in something beyond their ken. New York had been forced beyond being the center of the financial world. It had become a military target, a place that was receiving as well as dispatching the slings and arrows of global fortune. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php>. Chicago Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby, "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. (2002) A Day That Will Live In … ?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]).