Higher education has the potential to act as ecosystem catalysts, connecting with the places our institutions which they are a part of, for learning-based changes with wicked (sustainability) challenges. This, however, calls for reorienting and rethinking of the higher educational narratives and subsequent practices towards more ecological and relational ones. In this study, a pilot aimed to connect a course at The Hague University of Applied Sciences (The Netherlands) to an industrial park next to the university which is undergoing transition towards a sustainable living space. The pilot, which ran from September 2020 to February 2021, included 17 students from 9 nationalities and 12 different bachelor programmes, and was designed according to the concepts of an ‘ecology of learning’. In this semester long course, called Mission Impact, students reflected every five-weeks, to capture their learning experiences using a combination of arts-based and narrative reflection methods. Two questions guided the analysis: (1) what are the key design characteristics of an ecological approach to higher education that connects to sustainability transformations (in times of COVID-19) and (2) what does this type of education asks from to learners. The reflective artefacts were analysed using Narratives of T-Mapping and juxtaposed with autoethnographic insights maintained by the first author for triangulation. Preliminary results of this pilot include the structure in chaos, space for transformation, openness for emerging futures & action confidence as components of such an ecological education that connects to and co-creates sustainability transformations.
This article offers the first substantial survey of the Middle Dutch satire Dit es de Frenesie since the work of C.P. Serrure in the mid nineteenth century. It contests much of the conventional wisdom surrounding De Frenesie, challenging the poem's usual classification as an early boerde or fabliau. Instead it is argued that the text is an experimental work, which blends together elements of several satiric traditions without committing itself to any one. The implications of this maneuver and others within the text are considered, revealing the poem's clear sympathy with the newly educated and articulate laity. De Frenesie itself is appended in both the original Middle Dutch and an English verse translation.
The moment of casting is a crucial one in any media production. Casting the ‘right’ person shapes the narrative as much as the way in which the final product might be received by critics and audiences. For this article, casting—as the moment in which gender is hypervisible in its complex intersectional entanglement with class, race and sexuality—will be our gateway to exploring the dynamics of discussion of gender conventions and how we, as feminist scholars, might manoeuvre. To do so, we will test and triangulate three different forms of ethnographically inspired inquiry: 1) ‘collaborative autoethnography,’ to discuss male-to-female gender-bending comedies from the 1980s and 1990s, 2) ‘netnography’ of online discussions about the (potential) recasting of gendered legacy roles from Doctor Who to Mary Poppins, and 3) textual media analysis of content focusing on the casting of cisgender actors for transgender roles. Exploring the affordances and challenges of these three methods underlines the duty of care that is essential to feminist audience research. Moving across personal and anonymous, ‘real’ and ‘virtual,’ popular and professional discussion highlights how gender has been used and continues to be instrumentalised in lived audience experience and in audience research.
