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Design and development of mediated participation for environmental governance transformation

For environmental governance to be more effective and transformative, it needs to enhance the presence of experimental and innovative approaches for participation. This enhancement requires a transformation of environmental governance, as too often the (public) participation process is set up as a formal obligation in the development of a proposed intervention. This article, in search of alternatives, and in support of this transformation elaborates on spaces where participatory and deliberative governance processes have been deployed. Experiences with two mediated participation methodologies – community art and visual problem appraisal – allow a demonstration of their potential, relevance and attractiveness. Additionally, the article analyzes the challenges that result from the nature of these arts-based methodologies, from the confrontational aspects of voices overlooked in conventional approaches, and from the need to rethink professionals’ competences. Considering current environmental urgencies, mediated participation and social imaginaries still demonstrate capacities to open new avenues for action and reflection.

Feature Papers "Age-Friendly Cities & Communities: State of the Art and Future Perspectives"

The “Age-Friendly Cities & Communities: States of the Art and Future Perspectives”publication presents contemporary, innovative, and insightful narratives, debates, and frameworks based on an international collection of papers from scholars spanning the fields of gerontology, social sciences, architecture, computer science, and gerontechnology. This extensive collection of papers aims to move the narrative and debates forward in this interdisciplinary field of age-friendly cities and communities. CC BY-NC-ND Book CC BY Chapters © 2021 by the authors Original book at: https://doi.org/10.3390/books978-3-0365-1226-6 (This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue Feature Papers "Age-Friendly Cities & Communities: State of the Art and Future Perspectives" that was published in IJERPH)

Immersive Tourism - State of the Art of Immersive Tourism Realities through XR Technology.

Whitepaper about Immersive Technologies in Tourism and state of the art application cases and best practices within the field of museums, art, destination marketing, virtual events and much more.

Research in social work on coping and migration

This article focuses on religious and non religious coping strategies of migrants of the first, second and third generation Muslims of rural Moroccan background in the Netherlands. In this study it was found that in dealing with stressful events and difficult emotions, the younger generations make still use of the religious coping strategies of the first generation but combine them with more active problem-solving behaviour and a less deferring, more collaborative religious coping style towards God.

Artful Empiricism and Improvising with the Unforeseen

Arts-based environmental education (AEE) denotes an emerging field of pedagogy wherein facilitated art practice intersects with and informs learning about our natural and cultural environments. In it, artmaking is appreciated as a form of coming to knowledge, of making meaning, in its own right, on par with other approaches such as inquiry-based learning in the science classroom. In this article, the author, himself a practitioner, foregrounds two different orientations in learning about nature through art that he considers both as being expressive of AEE. The first one, here called “artful empiricism”, is more established and has its footings in “the Goethean approach”. Participants investigate natural phenomena through direct observation and experience of the world. This is then complemented by intuitive perception. Yet, for the most part, they are absorbed in what Dewey would call a receptive sense of “undergoing”. Aesthetic sensibility is foregrounded, encouraging participants to fine-tune their senses in order to perceive the phenomenon in nature with “fresh eyes”. The second orientation is hardly articulated as an epistemology yet. Here it is called “improvising with emerging properties” and it features an element of working with unforeseen properties that emerge in and through an artmaking process that thematises natural phenomena. It is intrinsically open-ended and an active “acting upon” the world takes centre stage. Through artmaking, participants explore the relationships between themselves and their environs. In his discussion, the author analyses these approaches as two modalities both expressive of a Deweyan cycle of alternating between a receptive undergoing of and active acting upon the world, in different phases of a reflective experience.

Rural Community Art and the External Artist Practitioner