According to a recent manifesto titled Manifest Nederlands op School, the secondary school subject Dutch Language and Literature is incoherent, unchallenging and unscientific. In order to solve this problem, the school subject should strive to reach levels of conscious language proficiency (‘bewuste taalvaardigheid’), for example by drawing on insights from the related academic discipline. By doing so, the school subject and the discipline of Dutch Language and Literature (‘neerlandistiek’) could engage in a perspective of cooperation. There have been several proposals for ways of achieving both a more conscious level of language proficiency as well as the subsequent state of cooperation. One such proposal argues that scientific insights fostered from classical rhetoric could well be used to achieve conscious writing proficiency (Jansen 2016). However, empirical evidence to support this claim is lacking. Therefore, in this exploratory study, we investigated Jansen’s assertion by looking at the effect lessons based on classical rhetoric have on secondary school pupil’s use of tropes, such as irony or antithesis. We judged the quality of their tropes and additionally, we looked at whether or not pupils could use them consciously. Results support Jansen’s claim and reveal that classical rhetoric can indeed be used to achieve greater conscious proficiency in writing.
DOCUMENT
Failure is a popular topic of research. It has long been a source of study in fields such as sociology and anthropology, science and technology studies, privacy and surveillance, cultural, feminist and media studies, art, theatre, film, and political science. When things go awry, breakdown, or rupture they lead to valuable insights into the mundane mechanisms of social worlds. Yet, while failure is a familiar topic of research, failure in and as a tactic of research is far less visible, valued, and explored.In this book the authors reflect upon the role of creative interventions as a critical mode for methods, research techniques, fieldwork, and knowledge transmission or impact. Here, failure is considered a productive part of engaging with and in the field. It is about acknowledging the ‘mess’ of the social and how we need methods, modes of attunement, and knowledge translation that address this complexity in nuanced ways. In this collection, interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners share their practices, insights, and challenges around rethinking failure beyond normalized tropes. What does failure mean? What does it do? What does putting failure under the microscope do to our assumptions around ontology and epistemologies? How can it be deployed to challenge norms in a time of great uncertainty, crisis, and anxiety? And what are some of the ways resilience and failure are interrelated?
MULTIFILE
Even though more than seventy-five years have passed since the end of WWII, its prominence in entertainment media productions along with the global emergence of memorial markers have contributed to its omnipresence in people’s minds. Nevertheless, the perception of this historical event is still far from reaching consensus as nations tend to interpret and remember episodes in accordance with their perspective, thus adding up to the complexity of WWII and of Holocaust memories. With this in mind, this article describes the idiosyncrasies of Portugal’s recent tribute and remembrance strategies for the victims of WWII. The country’s neutral status, along with a set of cultural and historical specifics, has led to the dissemination of tropes leading to the idea of Portugal as an inherently tolerant and mild-mannered nation. A perception that is often fostered by resorting to monuments, museums, tourism and leisure activities. Despite evidence provided, mostly, by recent academic studies and documentary films, these tropes continue to fuel Portuguese popular imagination and are still prevalent in some recently established WWII memory places.
DOCUMENT
In: Frank Gadinger, Martina Kopf, Ayşem Mert, and Christopher Smith (eds.). Political Storytelling: From Fact to Fiction (Global Dialogues 12) This essay presents a summary of important perspectives concerning the distinction between what counts as truth or fiction. As a source of inspiration, it starts with two examples found in literature – the first a classical Spanish novel and the second a collection of stories written by the leader of a social movement in Mexico. These two examples of the conflictive relations between truth and fiction, authenticity and imagination serve as a source of inspiration for the rest of this article, which shows that this issue has been a subject of intense debate in philosophy and in the philosophy of science and still presents a challenge in the 21st century. The essay states that absolute, objective truth is a myth. It describes that what counts as ‘truth’ in a particular era, is, among other things, the result of power relations. It suggests productive ways to deal with this problem in modern society, through deliberative, emancipatory processes of reflexivity (Weick 1999), participatory research and dialogue, facilitating innovation and generation of new solutions.
LINK
This is not a catalogue of finished work. This is also not a report of our collaboration on climate imaginaries. Instead, this zine offers a peek into an ongoing collaboration between artists, designers and researchers who have jointly turned their attention to the rising ocean. In riso-printed* collages, designers Carlo De Gaetano, Andy Dockett and Mariana Fernández Mora formulate their visual responses to the questions, insights and experiments we encounter on our journey. Previous research has shown that before people can accept, let alone create, the change necessary for the climate crisis, they need to first be able to imagine life in a changing climate. How can one facilitate imagination between generations and across species, geographies and materialities? Or liberate the imagination from recurring tropes that suggest climate change is of the future, elsewhere, affecting others, when so many people worldwide already live its devastating impact? These questions lie at the heart of our programme Climate Imaginaries at Sea. With the generous support of the NWA-arts route, CoECI and ARIAS, we will continue our work through artistic research studios that address global South, material and interspecies perspectives on climate change*, striving to make waves.
MULTIFILE
Book review of: J. Stanley (2024). Erasing History. How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, Atria/One Signal Publishers, New York, 256 pp.
MULTIFILE
Playful Mapping is the result of many years of joint enterprise in which we, as authors, devel-oped a close intellectual collaboration. As a book, it emerged towards the end of the ERC project Charting the Digital that ran from 2011-2016, and during a still-ongoing Erasmus+ project; Go Go Gozo. Over this five year period, members of the Playful Mapping Collective got to know each other as colleagues and friends, participating regularly in diverse academic and social activities, such as conference panels and workshops.1 The authorship of this book therefore reflects an interesting collaborative experiment, enrolling researchers who have been working together in an active way over the past half-decade. This preface explains the genealogy of the emerging and open collaboration through which we developed ideas
DOCUMENT
Natalie Bookchin’s work is synonymous with the Video Vortex network and the rise of YouTube. Whereas we got to know each other’s work in the turbulent net.art late nineties years, this particular story started with a DVD I got from Natalie, containing The Trip (2008), a video collection of early YouTube fragments, which Natalie reassembled into an imaginary travel around the globe, shot during car trips on all continents. What has always defined Natalie Bookchin’s work is her ability to recreate unity out of dispersed fragments. We, as users, may feel lost and desperate, but the artist gives us hope again that we can overcome distraction and senseless multi-tasking by creating an all-together new meta narrative that is human—again. This is database cinema as you always imagined it, overcoming the isolation of the individualized voice-as-image while paying respect to the unique status that each of us has.
MULTIFILE
