In this critical review article, Isaac and Platenkamp present the case that tourism is not isolated from the world's dramatic situations in which humanity is at stake. Their argument principally centers on the devastating historical and contemporary conflict in Palestine and its relations with tourism. In this article, Isaac and Platenkamp maintain that (in relation to current happenings in Palestine) ethical and moral argumentation would be beside the point, and might even be a "cynical" exercise. They suggest that the conflict there is imbued with many kinds of normative argumentation. It is their view that positions need to be taken with regard to "Palestine," as in all extreme circumstances, where at the same time respect for the other positions becomes crucial. In this critical review article, therefore, Arendt's idea of "agora" will be introduced, in order to create a space where these "respectful positions" can be taken in a public arena and in order to contribute to a possible peaceful development. To Isaac and Platenkamp, tourism could enable this sort of "peaceful development" and could promote or help empower conditions where violence would be excluded, and where different sorts of "argumentation" could be generated and heard about these so-called "controversial spaces." In these respects, they maintain that tourism is a challenging field, because it has (itself) many faces-and they argue that such scenarios for "tourism" indeed could apply/should be applied for many controversial other spaces like Nepal and Burma (for instance) where (as in Palestine) the original population has no say in any economic development, such as that of tourism. But Isaac and Platenkamp recognize that (even in Burma) resistance against injustice can never be destroyed. Their own principal focus remains targeted upon Palestine, though. There, tourism is known to have "an incredibly high potential," despite the fact that (in their view) a strong and powerful "Israeli self" indeed controls the "humiliated Palestinian other." Thus, to our two reviewers in the Netherlands, therefore, tourism seems to be a communicative activity that might enable the implementation of Arendt's idea of and about "the agora." Isaac and Platenkamp suggest that there is no violence in the agora, itself, because only the force of argumentation rules. there.
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Through artistic interventions into the computational backbone of maternity services, the artists behind the Body Recovery Unit explore data production and its usages in healthcare governance. Taking their artwork The National Catalogue Of Savings Opportunities. Maternity, Volume 1: London (2017) as a case study, they explore how artists working with ‘live’ computational culture might draw from critical theory, Science and Technology Studies as well as feminist strategies within arts-led enquiry. This paper examines the mechanisms through which maternal bodies are rendered visible or invisible to managerial scrutiny, by exploring the interlocking elements of commissioning structures, nationwide information standards and databases in tandem with everyday maternity healthcare practices on the wards in the UK. The work provides a new context to understand how re-prioritisation of ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ births, breastfeeding, skin-to-skin contact, age of conception and other factors are gaining momentum in sync with cost-reduction initiatives, funding cuts and privatisation of healthcare services.
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In this paper we analyze the effects if two countries, with different settings on the labor market, open their capital markets. To do this we follow the ideas of New Institutional Economics in combination with a new model of economic growth. We will use a Leontief production function, where we derive the distribution of income by using an approach stemming from conflict theory, to highlight some new insights into the question whether an open world capital market enhances the overall welfare. First of all, using conflict theory, we will pay some attention to the micro-economic foundation of a Harrod-Domar model. At least we want to analyze what will happen if for e.g.: China opens the capital market to the EU zone, where the institutions in both regions are very different. We will show that this will always lead a race to the bottom from the view of workers in the former developed region.
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The project Decolonising Education: from Teachers to Leading Learners (DETeLL) aims to develop a multi-site approach for interventions towards inclusion and decolonisation in order to change the hierarchical nature of higher education in the Netherlands. DETeLL identifies the model of the ‘traditional teacher’ as embodying the structural exclusions and discriminations built into the classroom and proposes the figure of a ‘Leading Learner’ as a first step towards a radical change in the educational system. In collaboration with the education departments in the Theatre and Dance Academy at ArtEZ, the post-doc will build up a research and teaching programme that engages with students and teachers in the faculty to create a prototype of an inclusive and diverse educational practice. RELEVANCE: Education should be the critical space in which changes occur in order to shape best possible futures. In DETeLL’s acceptation, decolonisation refers to a complete change in the way of thinking and behaving. It does not refer only to the urgency of dealing with historical colonial legacies embedded in society, but also to the subversion of the deeply oppressive colonial culture that (also unconsciously) regulates public and private living, whether this is related to gender, race, class or sexuality issues. RESULTS: 1) Create a theory and practice-based scientific base-line of decolonisation and art education; 2) Provide a definition of ‘Artist educator as Leading Learner’ following a practice- based methodology of intervention; 3) Design and Pilot a new teaching programme for theatre education at ArtEZ to be then upscaled to all educational departments in a follow-up project); 4) Produce a strong interdisciplinary and international output plan: 3 academic publications, 2 conferences, 4 expert group workshops. NETWORK: ArtEZ; University of Amsterdam (UvA); Ghent University; UCHRI; Hildesheim University; Cape Town University. The partners will serve as steering committee through planned expert group meetings.
