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Short Essay (short + essay)
Selected AbstractsShort essay on the life and scientific activities of Yakov Zalmanovich Tsypkin (1919,1997)INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ADAPTIVE CONTROL AND SIGNAL PROCESSING, Issue 2 2001Boris Kogan First page of article [source] 'Religiöse Nachwehen' in Schnitzler's AnatolGERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 2 2001Graham Jackman Taking as its starting-point the middle scene of Schnitzler's Anatol, entitled ,Denksteine', this short essay sees in specific expressions used in the same scene evidence for a residual?,if subliminal?,authority exerted by moral imperatives derived from the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In a diluted, secularised form these shape Anatol's notion of ,love' and account for the impulse repeatedly to vow ,ewige Liebe', not-withstanding his own inclinations and past practice. The resultant inner division in Anatol between ,Intellekt' and ,Bedu¨rfnis' is seen in relation to Nietzsche's reference to ,religiöse Nachwehen' (in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches) as one form of the ,nihilism' of the period, as diagnosed by Nietzsche. [source] John Dewey and the savage mind: Uniting anthropological, psychological, and pedagogical thought, 1894,1902JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES, Issue 4 2008Thomas D. Fallace In 1902 influential American philosopher John Dewey wrote a short essay on anthropolo-gists'view of the savage mind, arguing that it had had been unfairly dismissed as inchoate and incapable, when in fact the savage had much to teach scholars about the "present mind." The ideas presented in Dewey's essay were not only theoretical; they also served as the basis for his entire curriculum his famous laboratory school at the University of Chicago. Thus, the author argues that Dewey's pedagogical thought informed his anthropological thought, and vice versa. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] From Shallow to Deep: Toward a Thorough Cultural Analysis of School Achievement PatternsANTHROPOLOGY & EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2008Mica Pollock What do anthropologists of education do? Many observers think that we provide quick glosses on what various "cultures",typically racialized, ethnic, and national-origin groups,"do" in schools. Hervé Varenne and I each name an alternative form of analysis that we think should be central to the subfield. Varenne argues that anthropologists of education should expand analysis of teaching and learning beyond (American) schools and classrooms and examine everyday life in various places as containing countless moments of teaching and learning that are worth understanding. Varenne reminds us that teaching and learning occur nonstop in everyday life, not just in classrooms. "Education" is about far more than what we typically call "achievement," which usually translates into grades, graduation, or test scores.1 This long-standing way of thinking anthropologically about "education" is essential to exploding simplistic notions of what, when, how, and from whom people "learn." In my essay, I contend that U.S. anthropologists of education also need to analyze thoroughly how U.S. school achievement patterns take shape in real time. I argue that it is our particular responsibility to counteract "shallow" analyses of "culture" in schools, which purport to explain "achievement gaps" by making quick claims about how parents and children from various racial, ethnic, national-origin, or class groups react to schools. Such shallow analyses dangerously oversimplify the social processes, interactions, and practices that create disparate outcomes for children. Shallow cultural analyses are common in both journalism and popular discourse,and in schools of education as well (see Ladson-Billings 2006 for a related critique). They are explanatory claims that name a group as having a "cultural" set of behaviors and then name that "cultural" behavior as the cause of the group's school achievement outcomes. (E.g., some argue that "group x"[e.g., "Asians"] employs a "group x behavior"[e.g., "push their children"] that causes "high" or "low" achievement.) Such claims allow people to explain achievement outcomes too simply as the production of parents and children without ever actually examining the real-life experiences of specific parents and children in specific opportunity contexts. Going deeper requires pressing for actual, accurate information about the everyday interactions among real-life parents, children, and other actors that add up to school achievement patterns (graduation rates, dropout rates, skill-test scores, suspension lists, and the like). When anthropologists of education say that we study culture, we mean that we are studying the organization of people's everyday interactions in concrete contexts. Shallow analyses of "culture" that purport to describe only how a "group's" parents train its children blame a reduced set of actors, behaviors, and processes for educational outcomes, and they include a reduced set of actors and actions in a reduced set of projects for educational improvement. Anthropologists of education should make clear that we examine children's experiences both in context and in appropriate detail; we study interactional processes that other observers might describe too quickly or with insufficient information.2 I think that if anthropologists of education explicitly, publicly, and colloquially name what counts as deep, thorough cultural analysis of American school achievement patterns, we will make ourselves far better prepared to respond to harmfully shallow claims made by journalists, colleagues, and educators alike. We will also support other stakeholders in children's lives (including teachers and teacher educators) to think more thoroughly about which actions, by whom, and in what situations produce children's achievement. This short essay suggests four key ways that anthropologists of education can, do, and should get "deep" in analyzing American achievement patterns. I invite colleagues to edit and extend this list in future editions of AEQ. [source] Globalization and African Ethnoscapes: contrasting Nigerien Hausa and Nigerian Igbo migratory orders in the U.S.CITY & SOCIETY, Issue 1 2004RACHEL R. REYNOLDS This short essay, which is a preface to two full length articles by Reynolds and by Youngstedt, also in this volume, highlights important contrasts between two African migratory orders in cities in the United States, especially by examining economic conditions under which the two communities use global information technologies as tools of community cohesion and formation in diaspora. The central contrast is that Nigerien Hausa experiences rest at the margins of the formal economy or at their engagement within informal economies, while Nigerian Igbo peoples' experiences as brain drain professionals means that they are by nature of their migratory order integrated into the hegemonic core of global capital. Ultimately, our ethnographically-based evidence poses two queries: how does space-time compression operate differentially in the creation of new "global" communities, and secondly, how are significant groups of global actors emerging as the various strands of globalizing economies take new root within and across old ethnic and national and religious imaginaries of community? [source] Teaching and Learning Guide for: Memoryscape: How Audio Walks Can Deepen Our Sense of Place by Integrating Art, Oral History and Cultural GeographyGEOGRAPHY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2008Toby Butler Author's Introduction This article is concerned with the history and practice of creating sound walks or ,memoryscapes': outdoor trails that use recorded sound and spoken memory played on a personal stereo or mobile media to experience places in new ways. It is now possible to cheaply and easily create this and other kinds of located media experience. The development of multi-sensory-located media (,locedia') presents some exciting opportunities for those concerned with place, local history, cultural geography and oral history. This article uses work from several different disciplines (music, sound art, oral history and cultural geography) as a starting point to exploring some early and recent examples of locedia practice. It also suggests how it might give us a more sophisticated, real, embodied and nuanced experience of places that the written word just can not deliver. Yet, there are considerable challenges in producing and experiencing such work. Academics used to writing must learn to work in sound and view or image; they must navigate difficult issues of privacy, consider the power relations of the outsider's ,gaze' and make decisions about the representation of places in work that local people may try and have strong feelings about. Creating such work is an active, multi-sensory and profoundly challenging experience that can offer students the chance to master multi-media skills as well as apply theoretical understandings of the histories and geographies of place. Author Recommends 1.,Perks, R., and Thomson, A. (2006). The oral history reader, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. This is a wonderful collection of significant writing concerned with oral history. Part IV, Making Histories features much of interest, including a thought-provoking paper on the challenges of authoring in sound rather than print by Charles Hardy III, and a moving interview with Graeme Miller, the artist who created the Linked walk mentioned in the memoryscape article. These only feature in the second edition. 2.,Cresswell, T. (2004). Place: a short introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. A refreshingly clear and well-written guide to the different theoretical takes on what makes places , a good starting point for further reading. 3.,Carlyle, A. (ed.). (2008). Autumn leaves: sound and the environment in artistic practice. Paris, France: Double Entendre. This is a collection of short essays and examples of located sonic media art; it includes interviews with practitioners and includes Hildegard Westekamp's Soundwalking, a practical guide to leading students on a mute walk. Lots of thought provoking, applied reading material for students here. 4.,Blunt, A., et al. (eds) (2003). Cultural geography in practice. London: Arnold. A great book for undergraduate and postgraduate students , concepts explained and lots of examples of actually doing cultural geography. The chapter on mapping worlds by David Pinder is particularly useful in this context. 5.,Pinder, D. (2001). Ghostly footsteps: voices, memories and walks in the city. Ecumene 8 (1), pp. 1,19. This article is a thoughtful analysis of a Janet Cardiff sound walk in Whitechapel, East London. Online Materials http://www.memoryscape.org.uk This is my project website, which features two online trails, Dockers which explores Greenwich and the memories of the London Docks that are archived in the Museum of London, and Drifting which is a rather strange experiment-combining physical geography and oral history along the Thames at Hampton Court, but still makes for an interesting trail. Audio, maps and trails can be downloaded for free, so students with phones or iPods can try the trails if you are within reach of Surrey or London. The site features an online version, with sound-accompanying photographs of the location. http://www.portsofcall.org.uk This website has three more trails here, this time of the communities surrounding the Royal Docks in East London. The scenery here is very dramatic and anyone interested in the regeneration of East London and its impact on local communities will find these trails interesting. Like Dockers, the walks feature a lot of rare archive interviews. This project involved a great deal of community interaction and participation as I experimented with trying to get people involved with the trail-making process. The site uses Google maps for online delivery. http://www.soundwalk.com This New York-based firm creates exceptionally high-quality soundwalks, and they are well worth the money. They started by producing trails for different districts of New York (I recommend the Bronx Graffiti trail) and have recently made trails for other cities, like Paris and Varanassi in India. http://www.mscapers.com This website is run by Hewlett Packard, which has a long history of research and development in located media applications. They currently give free licence to use their mscape software which is a relatively easy to learn way of creating global positioning system-triggered content. The big problem is that you have to have a pricey phone or personal digital assistant to run the software, which makes group work prohibitively expensive. But equipment prices are coming down and with the new generations of mobile phones developers believe that the time when the player technology is ubiquitous might be near. And if you ask nicely HP will lend out sets of equipment for teaching or events , fantastic if you are working within reach of Bristol. See also http://www.createascape.org.uk/ which has advice and examples of how mscape software has been used for teaching children. Sample Syllabus public geography: making memoryscapes This course unit could be adapted to different disciplines, or offered as a multidisciplinary unit to students from different disciplines. It gives students a grounding in several multi-media techniques and may require support/tuition from technical staff. 1.,Introduction What is a located mediascape, now and in the future? Use examples from resources above. 2.,Cultural geographies of site-specific art and sound Theories of place; experiments in mapping and site-specific performance. 3.,Walk activity: Westergard Hildekamp , sound walk, or one of the trails mentioned above The best way , and perhaps the only way , to really appreciate located media is to try one in the location they have been designed to be experienced. I would strongly advise any teaching in this field to include outdoor, on-site experiences. Even if you are out of reach of a mediascape experience, taking students on a sound walk can happen anywhere. See Autumn Leaves reference above. 4.,Researching local history An introduction to discovering historical information about places could be held at a local archive and a talk given by the archivist. 5.,Creating located multimedia using Google maps/Google earth A practical exercise-based session going through the basics of navigating Google maps, creating points and routes, and how to link pictures and sound files. 6.,Recording sound and oral history interviews A practical introduction to the techniques of qualitative interviewing and sound recording. There are lots of useful online guides to oral history recording, for example, an online oral history primer http://www.nebraskahistory.org/lib-arch/research/audiovis/oral_history/index.htm; a more in depth guide to various aspects of oral history http://www.baylor.edu/oral%5fhistory/index.php?id=23566 or this simple oral history toolkit, with useful links to project in the North of England http://www.oralhistorynortheast.info/toolkit/chapter1.htm 7.,Sound editing skills Practical editing techniques including working with clips, editing sound and creating multi-track recordings. The freeware software Audacity is simple to use and there are a lot of online tutorials that cover the basics, for example, http://www.wikieducator.org/user:brentsimpson/collections/audacity_workshop 8.,Web page design and Google maps How to create a basic web page (placing pictures, text, hyperlinks, buttons) using design software (e.g. Dreamweaver). How to embed a Google map and add information points and routes. There is a great deal of online tutorials for web design, specific to the software you wish to use and Google maps can be used and embedded on websites free for non-profit use. http://maps.google.com/ 9,and 10. Individual or group project work (staff available for technical support) 11.,Presentations/reflection on practice Focus Questions 1What can sound tell us about the geographies of places? 2When you walk through a landscape, what traces of the past can be sensed? Now think about which elements of the past have been obliterated? Whose past has been silenced? Why? How could it be put back? 3Think of a personal or family story that is significant to you. In your imagination, locate the memory at a specific place. Tell a fellow student that story, and describe that place. Does it matter where it happened? How has thinking about that place made you feel? 4What happens when you present a memory of the past or a located vision of the future in a present landscape? How is this different to, say, writing about it in a book? 5Consider the area of this campus, or the streets immediately surrounding this building. Imagine this place in one of the following periods (each group picks one): ,,10,000 years ago ,,500 years ago ,,100 years ago ,,40 years ago ,,last Thursday ,,50 years time What sounds, voices, stories or images could help convey your interpretation of this place at that time? What would the visitor hear or see today at different points on a trail? Sketch out an outline map of a located media trail, and annotate with what you hear/see/sense at different places. Project Idea small group project: creating a located mediascape Each small group must create a located media experience, reflecting an aspect of the history/geography/culture of an area of their choosing, using the knowledge that they have acquired over the course of the semester. The experience may be as creative and imaginative as you wish, and may explore the past, present or future , or elements of each. Each group must: ,,identify an area of interest ,,research an aspect of the area of the groups choosing; this may involve visiting local archives, libraries, discussing the idea with local people, physically exploring the area ,,take photographs, video or decide on imagery (if necessary) ,,record sound, conduct interviews or script and record narration ,,design a route or matrix of media points The final project must be presented on a website, may embed Google maps, and a presentation created to allow the class to experience the mediascape (either in the classroom or on location, if convenient). The website should include a brief theoretical and methodological explanation of the basis of their interpretation. If the group cannot be supported with tuition and support in basic website design or using Google mapping with sound and imagery, a paper map with locations and a CD containing sound files/images might be submitted instead. For examples of web projects created by masters degree students of cultural geography at Royal Holloway (not all sound based) see http://www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/MA/web-projects.html [source] Re-engaging the Intersections of Media, Politics and Cities , Introduction to a DebateINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 1 2009SCOTT RODGERS Within contemporary social theory and social science, urban and media studies are seen as zones of speciality, with distinctive theoretical traditions and substantive concerns. This introduction situates the four short essays making up this Debates and Developments section in relation to a recent interdisciplinary workshop held in June 2008 at The Open University in Milton Keynes, UK, where participants were encouraged to experiment with and rework the longstanding conceptual differences and disciplinary policing that so often sets apart media and urban studies. The essays showcased here focus on the theoretical approaches urban scholars might bring to bear on studies of how cities and media come together around matters of politics. Résumé Dans le cadre de la théorie sociale contemporaine et des sciences sociales, les études urbaines et relatives aux médias sont considérées comme des domaines de spécialité assortis de traditions théoriques et de préoccupations majeures distinctes. Cette introduction situe les quatre courtes contributions aux ,Débats et développements' par rapport à un récent séminaire interdisciplinaire qui s'est tenu en juin 2008 à l'Open University de Milton Keynes, en Angleterre. Les participants y étaient invités àéprouver et remanier les divergences conceptuelles persistantes et l'ordre disciplinaire qui, si souvent, séparent études urbaines et études sur les médias. Les textes présentés ici portent principalement sur les approches théoriques que la recherche urbaine pourrait mettre en oeuvre pour étudier comment villes et médias se rejoignent autour de sujets de politique. [source] | ||||||||||