Zoekresultaten

Healing environment: A review of the impact of physical environmental factors on users

In recent years, the effects of the physical environment on the healing process and well-being have proved to be increasingly relevant for patients and their families (PF) as well as for healthcare staff. The discussions focus on traditional and institutionally designed healthcare facilities (HCF) relative to the actual well-being of patients as an indicator of their health and recovery. This review investigates and structures the scientific research on an evidence-based healthcare design for PF and staff outcomes. Evidence-based design has become the theoretical concept for what are called healing environments. The results show the effects on PF and staff from the perspective of various aspects and dimensions of the physical environmental factors of HFC. A total of 798 papers were identified that fitted the inclusion criteria for this study. Of these, 65 articles were selected for review: fewer than 50% of these papers were classified with a high level of evidence, and 86% were included in the group of PF outcomes. This study demonstrates that evidence of staff outcomes is scarce and insufficiently substantiated. With the development of a more customer-oriented management approach to HCF, the implications of this review are relevant to the design and construction of HCF. Some design features to consider in future design and construction of HCF are single-patient rooms, identical rooms, and lighting. For future research, the main challenge will be to explore and specify staff needs and to integrate those needs into the built environment of HCF.

Towards DAOs of difference

With this article, I explore the connections between blockchain technology, coloniality, and decolonial practices. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s thought on the interdependent systems of colonialism, capitalism, and knowledge, as well as more recent work on the coloniality of digital technologies, I argue that blockchain-based systems reproduce certain dynamics at work in historical colonialism. Additionally, Wynter’s decolonial propositions provide a generative framework to understand countercultural practices with. Inspired by Wynter, Patricia de Vries explores the notion of “plot work as artistic praxis” to ask how artistic work, implicated as it is in capitalist logics, can create space for relating dierently in the context of the exploitations of those dominant logics. I apply this notion to examine how Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) in the countercultural blockchain space might contribute to this praxis.

Concrete U(dys)topia in Bethlehem: a city of two tales (online version)

The aim of this article is to deconstruct the utopian character of Israel by analysing the case of Rachel's Tomb in Bethlehem. In this illustration of how cultural heritage became dominated by Israel's utopia, this article proposes to create an inspirational alternative. Therefore, two tales of Bethlehem will be juxtaposed. Participatory observation and interviews were conducted in order to examine the context of Rachel's Tomb as well as the family of Claire Anastas. On this platform, different groups of people were invited to discuss complex political issues within the context of alternative tourism. By using Arendt's concept of the ‘agora’ and Habermas' theoretical framework, the lifeworld situation of the Palestinians has been addressed seriously. This creates the necessary condition in order to create hope in a highly politically unstable situation, such as the occupation and colonisation of the Palestinian territories. A critical value-laden perspective supports a stronger concept of communicative action in controversial areas. This concept functions as a structured approach to find an escape from the utopian supremacy of the Israeli ideology. It is an inclusive attempt to create room for a plural dialogue between all the lifeworlds of this region, Palestinians and Israelis.

Plotting on the blockchain. On the possibility of care among widespread logics of extraction

Blockchains draw everything they touch into a market logic. Is resistance possible?Activist and artistic engagements with blockchain technology point to (at least) threedifferent sets of tactics that aim to subvert this affordance of the technology. The firstis part of an accellerationist logic: riding the waves of capital until capitalism finallycrashes, funding alternative values with whatever profit was accrued while it lasted.The second are part of prefigurative politics: building alternative blockchain systems,often in the form of decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, that perform adifferent kind of politics and social organization, for example cooperativism or self-organized art funding. Then, there are those that explore how blockchain’s logics canbe subverted to make space for different ways of relating in non-financial and more-than-human ways. In this short essay I would like to focus on this third tactic, and toexplore what it might mean, I've been inspired by Patricia de Vries’ take on “plot workas an artistic praxis” (2022) that builds on decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter describedas “the plot system” that represented small, imperfect corners of relative self-deter-mination within the larger context of colonial plantations (Wynter 1971, 96). De Vriesasks how artistic work, implicated as it is in institutional and capitalist logics, can per-form plot work to create space for relating outside of those logics. But before I adressthis question, it is important to understand what Wynter understands as the logic ofthe plantation.

Tourism as a tool for colonisation, segregation, displacement and dispossession : The case of East Jerusalem, Palestine

Occupation, colonisation, and apartheid tourism in Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine.

The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem has classified Israel as an ‘apartheid regime’ for the first time in its history of documenting human rights violations in occupied Palestine, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. The primary goal of this conceptual paper is to investigate Israel's exploitation of Palestinian tourism and international complicity by focusing on critical examples of international companies and businesses that contribute to the business of Israeli colonisation by confusing tourists and exploiting a lack of knowledge. The study finds that Israel abides by the concept of apartheid in international law, which involves inhumane acts carried out by one racial group to create and retain dominance over any other racial group of people and systematically oppress them.