The art interactive installation 'Scanlines' was realised at the conference 'Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Practice & Theory Conference'.
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This text draws on a recent work experience at the WEEE recycling centre in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, during which I wrote a series of auto-ethnographic texts. Through a performative of framing recycling work, I attempt to gain insight into the way we relate to the electronic waste we produce. I apply media-archaeological concepts to some of the work experiences I wrote about and address my findings in ecological terms.
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Media Do Not Exist: Performativity and Mediating Conjunctures by Jean-Marc Larrue and Marcello Vitali-Rosati offers a radically new approach to the phenomenon of mediation, proposing a new understanding that challenges the very notion of medium. It begins with a historical overview of recent developments in Western thought on mediation, especially since the mid 80s and the emergence of the disciplines of media archaeology and intermediality. While these developments are inseparable from the advent of digital technology, they have a long history. The authors trace the roots of this thought back to the dawn of philosophy. Humans interact with their environment – which includes other humans – not through media, but rather through a series of continually evolving mediations, which Larrue and Vitali-Rosati call ‘mediating conjunctures’. This observation leads them to the paradoxical argument that ‘media do not exist’. Existing theories of mediation processes remain largely influenced by a traditional understanding of media as relatively stable entities. Media Do Not Exist demonstrates the limits of this conception. The dynamics relating to mediation are the product not of a single medium, but rather of a series of mediating conjunctures. They are created by ceaselessly shifting events and interactions, blending the human and the non-human, energy, and matter.
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International education is a relatively new field and until recently, there was no formal education to prepare practitioners. This means that people working in international education are a colourful and diverse group, coming from a wide range of disciplines, which definitely adds to the attraction of the field. I call international education a field rather than a discipline since it is composed of a variety of established disciplines, such as languages, educational sciences, psychology, business, anthropology, history and even, in my case, classical archaeology. For this lecture, I have chosen to return to my original discipline and discuss global learning as the stages of an archaeological excavation. Cutting though the subsequent layers represents a history of international education but also my own professional history. By digging deeper down, layer after layer, I hope to uncover the essence of global learning in order to make its benefits available for all our students. This lecture consists of four sections. In the first section, I want to go back to the time when archaeology was a new discipline and see what we can learn from the research conducted at that time. In the second section I will reveal the layers of internationalisation and global learning until we come to the layer that we are currently exploring. In the third section, I will look at some of the factors and trends that will have an impact on global learning in the years to come. This shows that circumstances are quite different from when the excavation started and that global education is therefore dynamic. Finally, I will discuss what research the Research Group Global Learning will conduct, how and with whom, in the coming years.
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At this moment, no method is available to objectively estimate the temperature to which skeletal remains have been exposed during a fire. Estimating this temperature can provide crucial information in a legal investigation. Exposure of bone to heat results in observable and measurable changes, including a change in colour. To determine the exposure temperature of experimental bone samples, heat related changes in colour were systemically studied by means of image analysis. In total 1138 samples of fresh human long bone diaphysis and epiphysis, varying in size, were subjected to heat ranging from room temperature to 900 °C for various durations and in different media. The samples were scanned with a calibrated flatbed scanner and photographed with a Digital Single Lens Reflex camera. Red, Green, Blue values and Lightness, A-, and B-coordinates were collected for statistical analysis. Cluster analysis showed that discriminating thresholds for Lightness and B-coordinate could be defined and used to construct a model of decision rules. This model enables the user to differentiate between seven different temperature clusters with relatively high precision and accuracy. The proposed decision model provides an objective, robust and non-destructive method for estimating the exposure temperature of heated bone samples.
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Anthropology is traditionally broken into several subfields, physical/biological anthropology, social/cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeology, and sometimes also applied anthropology. Anthropology of the environment, or environmental anthropology, is a specialization within the field of anthropology that studies current and historic human-environment interactions. Although the terms environmental anthropology and ecological anthropology are often used interchangeably, environmental anthropology is considered by some to be the applied dimension of ecological anthropology, which encompasses the broad topics of primate ecology, paleoecology, cultural ecology, ethnoecology, historical ecology, political ecology, spiritual ecology, and human behavioral and evolutionary ecology. However, according to Townsend (2009: 104), “ecological anthropology will refer to one particular type of research in environmental anthropology—field studies that describe a single ecosystem including a human population and frequently deal with a small population of only a few hundred people such as a village or neighborhood.” Kottak states that the new ecological anthropology mirrors more general changes in the discipline: the shift from research focusing on a single community or unique culture “to recognizing pervasive linkages and concomitant flows of people, technology, images, and information, and to acknowledging the impact of differential power and status in the postmodern world on local entities. In the new ecological anthropology, everything is on a larger scale” (Kottak 1999:25). Environmental anthropology, like all other anthropological subdisciplines, addresses both the similarities and differences between human cultures; but unlike other subdisciplines (or more in line with applied anthropology), it has an end goal—it seeks to find solutions to environmental damage. While in our first volume (Shoreman-Ouimet and Kopnina 2011) we criticized Kottak’s anthropocentric bias prioritizing environmental anthropology's role as a supporter of primarily people's (and particularly indigenous) interests rather than ecological evidence. In his newer 2 publication, Kottak (2010:579) states: “Today’s ecological anthropology, aka environmental anthropology, attempts not only to understand but also to find solutions to environmental problems.” And because this is a global cause with all cultures, peoples, creeds, and nationalities at stake, the contributors to this volume demonstrate that the future of environmental anthropology may be more focused on finding the universals that underlie human differences and understanding how these universals can best be put to use to end environmental damage. This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in "Environmental Anthropology: Future Directions" on 7/18/13 available online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203403341 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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What is the ‘raison d’être’ of auditing? Does auditing only exist by the grace of the legislator? Or does auditing fulfill other needs in contemporary society? For many companies, auditing has been made mandatory. This is possibly one of the reasons why researchers to date have given limited attention regarding the drivers for the demand for audit. Auditing (seen as a social control mechanism) is part of an organizational order in society. Therefore, it is essential to reflect on the (changing) demands of society. As a lack of insight why society demands an audit, accommodates the risk of not meeting the needs and expectations of society, the added value of auditing may be called into question. This dissertation deals with the question: what are drivers for the demand for audit for Dutch SME companies which are not mandatory required to have their financial statements audited.
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Person-centered care interventions can improve the quality of life and decrease behavioral problems of people with dementia. Although not convincingly proven, person-centered care interventions may benefit the caregivers as well. This study aims to gain insight into how working with the Veder Contact Method (VCM) – a new person-centered care method – influences the job satisfaction of caregivers.
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In this paper we explore the influence of the physical and social environment (the design space) son the formation of shared understanding in multidisciplinary design teams. We concentrate on the creative design meeting as a microenvironment for studying processes of design communication. Our applied research context entails the design of mixed physical–digital interactive systems supporting design meetings. Informed by theories of embodiment that have recently gained interest in cognitive science, we focus on the role of interactive “traces,” representational artifacts both created and used by participants as scaffolds for creating shared understanding. Our research through design approach resulted in two prototypes that form two concrete proposals of how the environment may scaffold shared understanding in design meetings. In several user studies we observed users working with our systems in natural contexts. Our analysis reveals how an ensemble of ongoing social as well as physical interactions, scaffolded by the interactive environment, grounds the formation of shared understanding in teams. We discuss implications for designing collaborative tools and for design communication theory in general.
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Digital surveillance technologies using artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as computer vision and facial recognition are becoming cheaper and easier to integrate into governance practices worldwide. Morocco serves as an example of how such technologies are becoming key tools of governance in authoritarian contexts. Based on qualitative fieldwork including semi-structured interviews, observation, and extensive desk reviews, this chapter focusses on the role played by AI-enhanced technology in urban surveillance and the control of migration between the Moroccan–Spanish borders. Two cross-cutting issues emerge: first, while international donors provide funding for urban and border surveillance projects, their role in enforcing transparency mechanisms in their implementation remains limited; second, Morocco’s existing legal framework hinders any kind of public oversight. Video surveillance is treated as the sole prerogative of the security apparatus, and so far public actors have avoided to engage directly with the topic. The lack of institutional oversight and public debate on the matter raise serious concerns on the extent to which the deployment of such technologies affects citizens’ rights. AI-enhanced surveillance is thus an intrinsically transnational challenge in which private interests of economic gain and public interests of national security collide with citizens’ human rights across the Global North/Global South divide.
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