Making Sense as a Cultural Practice

Making Sense as a Cultural Practice PDF Author: Jörg Rogge
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 383942531X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Book Description
In the cultural and social formations of the past, practices exist for the generation and integration of moments having and giving sense with the objective of strengthening the cultural and social cohesion. Such practices and processes have a constructive character, even if this is not always the intention of the actors themselves. As the production of sense is one of the central fields of action of cultural and political practice, the articles examine with an interdisciplinary perspective how, in different contexts, the construction of sense was organized and implemented as a cultural practice.

Making Sense of Cultural Studies

Making Sense of Cultural Studies PDF Author: Chris Barker
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761968962
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
In Chris Barker's sequel to Cultural Studies, the author addresses the strengths and weaknesses of the discipline and investigates its practical and academic boundaries. The author also clarifies its underlying themes of study.

Making Sense of Reality

Making Sense of Reality PDF Author: Tia DeNora
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1473905516
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Book Description
What is reality and how do we make sense of it in everyday life? Why do some realities seem more real than others, and what of seemingly contradictory and multiple realities? This book considers reality as we represent, perceive and experience it. It suggests that the realities we take as ‘real’ are the result of real-time, situated practices that draw on and draw together many things - technologies and objects, people, gestures, meanings and media. Examining these practices illuminates reality (or rather our sense of it) as always ‘virtually real’, that is simplified and artfully produced. This examination also shows us how the sense of reality that we make is nonetheless real in its consequences. Making Sense of Reality offers students and educators a guide to analysing social life. It develops a performance-based perspective (‘doing things with’) that highlights the ever-revised dimension of realities and links this perspective to a focus on object-relations and an ecological model of culture-in-action.

Making Sense

Making Sense PDF Author: Simon Penny
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9780262036757
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 544

Book Description
Why embodied approaches to cognition are better able to address the performative dimensions of art than the dualistic conceptions fundamental to theories of digital computing. In Making Sense, Simon Penny proposes that internalist conceptions of cognition have minimal purchase on embodied cognitive practices. Much of the cognition involved in arts practices remains invisible under such a paradigm. Penny argues that the mind-body dualism of Western humanist philosophy is inadequate for addressing performative practices. Ideas of cognition as embodied and embedded provide a basis for the development of new ways of speaking about the embodied and situated intelligences of the arts. Penny argues this perspective is particularly relevant to media arts practices. Penny takes a radically interdisciplinary approach, drawing on philosophy, biology, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, critical theory, and other fields. He argues that computationalist cognitive rhetoric, with its assumption of mind-body (and software-hardware) dualism, cannot account for the quintessentially performative qualities of arts practices. He reviews post-cognitivist paradigms including situated, distributed, embodied, and enactive, and relates these to discussions of arts and cultural practices in general. Penny emphasizes the way real time computing facilitates new modalities of dynamical, generative and interactive arts practices. He proposes that conventional aesthetics (of the plastic arts) cannot address these new forms and argues for a new "performative aesthetics." Viewing these practices from embodied, enactive, and situated perspectives allows us to recognize the embodied and performative qualities of the "intelligences of the arts."

Making Sense of Dictatorship

Making Sense of Dictatorship PDF Author: Celia Donert
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633864283
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
How did political power function in the communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe after 1945? Making Sense of Dictatorship addresses this question with a particular focus on the acquiescent behavior of the majority of the population until, at the end of the 1980s, their rejection of state socialism and its authoritarian world. The authors refer to the concept of Sinnwelt, the way in which groups and individuals made sense of the world around them. The essays focus on the dynamics of everyday life and the extent to which the relationship between citizens and the state was collaborative or antagonistic. Each chapter addresses a different aspect of life in this period, including modernization, consumption and leisure, and the everyday experiences of “ordinary people,” single mothers, or those adopting alternative lifestyles. Empirically rich and conceptually original, the essays in this volume suggest new ways to understand how people make sense of everyday life under dictatorial regimes.

Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice

Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice PDF Author: SivToveKulbrandstad Walker
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351549138
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
Employing a wide range of approaches from various disciplines, contributors to this volume explore the diverse ways in which European art and cultural practice from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries confronted, interpreted, represented and evoked the realm of the sensual. Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice investigates how the faculties of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell were made to perform in a range of guises in early modern cultural practice: as agents of indulgence and pleasure, as bearers of information on material reality, as mediators between the mind and the outer world, and even as intercessors between humans and the divine. The volume examines not only aspects of the arts of painting and sculpture but also extends into other spheres: philosophy, music and poetry, gardens, food, relics and rituals. Collectively, the essays gathered here form a survey of key debates and practices attached to the theme of the senses in Renaissance and Baroque art and cultural practice.

On Making Sense

On Making Sense PDF Author: Ernesto Javier Martínez
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804784019
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
On Making Sense juxtaposes texts produced by black, Latino, and Asian queer writers and artists to understand how knowledge is acquired and produced in contexts of racial and gender oppression. From James Baldwin's 1960s novel Another Country to Margaret Cho's turn-of-the-century stand-up comedy, these works all exhibit a preoccupation with intelligibility, or the labor of making sense of oneself and of making sense to others. In their efforts to "make sense," these writers and artists argue against merely being accepted by society on society's terms, but articulate a desire to confront epistemic injustice—an injustice that affects people in their capacity as knowers and as communities worthy of being known. The book speaks directly to critical developments in feminist and queer studies, including the growing ambivalence to antirealist theories of identity and knowledge. In so doing, it draws on decolonial and realist theory to offer a new framework to understand queer writers and artists of color as dynamic social theorists.

Making Sense of Beliefs and Values

Making Sense of Beliefs and Values PDF Author: Craig N. Shealy, PhD
Publisher: Springer Publishing Company
ISBN: 0826104533
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 712

Book Description
Social psychologists have studied beliefs and values, and related constructs such as "attitudes" and "prejudice" for decades. But as this innovative and interdisciplinary book convincingly demonstrates, the scientific examination of beliefs and values now influences research and practice across a range of disciplines. Specifically, this edited volume explores the many cutting edge implications and applications of Equilintegration or EI Theory and the Beliefs, Events, and Values Inventory (BEVI). Grounded in twenty years of research and practice, EI Theory seeks to explain the processes by which beliefs, values, and worldviews are acquired and maintained, why their alteration is resisted, and under what circumstances they are modified. Based upon EI Theory, the BEVI is a comprehensive analytic tool which examines how and why we come to see ourselves, others, and the larger world as we do as well as the influence of such processes on multiple aspects of human functioning. Edited by the developer of the EI model and BEVI method, and informed by contributions from leading U.S. and international scholars, this book features captivating research findings and pioneering practice applications. Research-focused chapters explain how the EI model and BEVI method increase our conceptual sophistication and methodological capacity across a range of areas: Culture, Development, Environment, Gender, Personality, Politics, and Religion. Practice-oriented chapters demonstrate how the BEVI is used in the real world across a range of applied domains: Assessment, Education, Forensics, Leadership, and Psychotherapy. Written in an accessible and engaging manner, this fascinating and timely volume speaks to many of the most pressing issues of our day, by illuminating why we believe what we believe, and demonstrating how our beliefs and values may be assessed, explained, and transformed in the real world. Key Features: Presents an interdisciplinary theoretical model and innovative assessment method derived from two decades of work on the etiology, maintenance, and transformation of beliefs and values Features contributions from leading scholars from the U.S. and internationally, demonstrating the many implications and applications of this cutting edge approach for research and practice Demonstrates the importance of "making sense of beliefs and values" in addressing many of the most pressing issues of our day

Sensing and Making Sense

Sensing and Making Sense PDF Author: Graziele Lautenschlaeger
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839453313
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
Through a genealogy of photosensitive elements in media devices and artworks, this book investigates three dichotomies that impoverish debates and proposals in media art: material/immaterial, organic/machinic, and theory/practice. It combines historical and analytical approaches, through new materialism, media archaeology, cultural techniques and second-order cybernetics. Known media stories are reframed from an alternative perspective, elucidating photosensitivity as a metonymy to provide guidelines to art students, artists, curators and theoreticians - especially those who are committed to critical views of scientific and technological knowledge in aesthetic experimentations.

Making Sense of Micronesia

Making Sense of Micronesia PDF Author: Francis X. Hezel
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824836610
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Why are islanders so lavishly generous with food and material possessions but so guarded with information? Why do these people, unfailingly polite for the most part, laugh openly when others embarrass themselves? What does a smile mean to an islander? What might a sudden lapse into silence signify? These questions are common in encounters with an unfamiliar Pacific Island culture. Making Sense of Micronesia is intended for westerners who find themselves in contact with Micronesians—as teachers, social workers, health-care providers, or simply as friends—and are puzzled by their island ways. It is for anyone struggling to make sense of cultural exchanges they don’t quite understand. The author focuses on the guts of island culture: the importance of the social map, the tension between the individual and social identity, the ways in which wealth and knowledge are used, the huge importance of respect, emotional expression and its restraints, island ways of handling both conflict and intimacy, the real but indirect power of women. Far from a theoretical exposition, the book begins and ends with the real-life behavior of islanders. Each section of every chapter is introduced by a vignette that illustrates the theme discussed. The book attempts to explain island behavior, as curious as it may seem to outsiders at times, against the over-riding pattern of values and attitudes that have always guided island life. Even as the author maps the cultural terrain of Micronesia, he identifies those areas where island logic and the demands of the modern world conflict: the “dilemmas of development.” In some cases, changes are being made; in others, the very features of island culture that were highly functional in the past may remain so even today. Overall, he advocates restraint—in our judgments on island practices, in our assumption that many of these are dysfunctional, and in leading the charge for “development” before understanding the broader context of the culture we are trying to convert.