Extending Influences
Utilizing a Graphic Novel, Instructional Design and Community of Practice: A Framework for a Cultural, Place-based Educational Resource
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Patsy Iwasaki
Literature, instructional design and educational practice were integrated to create a relevant place-based educational resource engaging interdisciplinary approaches and perspectives. This study examines how an original graphic novel about a 19th century labor advocate was utilized to inform, give insight and promulgate heritage, culture, and resilience. Since the 18th century, workers from Asia and Europe were recruited for the numerous sugarcane plantations along the Hāmākua Coast of Hawai‘i island. However, the once thriving region has been affected by the demise of the sugar industry, highway infrastructure, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Historically, the community practiced resiliency when it built a memorial in 1994 to honor the legacy of Katsu Goto as a labor champion, not a victim of racism and oppression when he was lynched in 1889 for his advocacy of plantation laborers. Using an online instructional resource created from the results of another study, a community of 40 educators utilized the graphic novel in their curriculum with copies provided by a grant. Motivational and instructional models served as frameworks to guide the study’s learning design process. The qualitative and quantitative findings, field notes and communication provided data triangulation. After analysis and interpretation were completed, the results significantly confirmed that the instructional resource and the community of educators had a positive, educational impact upon students. This study contributed to sustaining the heritage, culture and resilience of the region and beyond. It has significant potential to influence the broad possibilities of innovative, interdisciplinary forms of knowledge, research, and collaboration in humanities education.
Modalities of Verbo-visual Representations of Symbolism of Nature View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Visnja Bandalo
This paper illuminates the interconnections between the theory of literature and the field of visuality expressed through iconographic figurations, reflecting creative resilience and bio-sustainability in modern times in a global comparative context. It is an analytical paper whose objectives are to interpret ecocritically epistemic constants and variables, as well as expressive modes, with the scope of conceptualizing underscoring poetic devices which present themselves as recurrent patterns and emblems of the symbology of the natural world. The paper innovatively introduces with linguistic means the eco-humanism in the visual domain in a diachronic light, with a particular focus on contemporaneity. It distinguishes therefore between artistic categories of fiction, autofiction and faction both of literary and visual character from a perspective of form and genre studies. Furthermore, this formal kaleidoscope showing an ecological worldview is methodologically articulated through concomitant literary and figurative representations in illustrated or pictorial books and other graphic eco-narratives, or video essays and installation art from the sphere of new media. It includes ways of cultural mediation such as a component of eco-mindfulness in art-critical writings and exhibitions as a part of museal configurations. Besides natural landscapes as a staple art motif and object of eco-themed publicism especially in regard to a surplus literary sense, urban architectural designs as nowadays rhizomatic soundscapes are also detailed, bringing to the fore crucial and unexplored interdisciplinary aspects. Features of such ekphrastic thinking consisting of inventional character and cognitive dimension are outlined with a scientific approach relatable to the natural sciences.
Terror in the Capitalocene: Green Transition in K. S. Robinson and A. Malm View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Egidijus Mardosas
How do we imagine a transition from the Capitalocene, our current era of fossil fuel capital induced climate breakdown, to a more ecologically sustainable and a more just society? What forces, institutions, agents and their interactions constitute this social imaginary of transition? How does contemporary political climate (or climatic politics) shape our perceptions of desirable and/or possible courses of transition? Employing the notion of “social imaginary” - describing the dimension of the social world through which our shared collective life is represented, and which underlies various institutions into a coherent-yet-contradictory social whole – I analyse how the imaginary of social transition is constituted in the works American science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson and Swedish social theorist Andreas Malm. The notion of social imaginary allows to analyse works from different areas – in this case, science-fiction literature and social theory - as different representations or variations of shared imaginary. How do contemporary social contradictions shape this imaginary? Focusing on K. S. Robinson’s novel The Ministry for the Future (2020) and Andreas Malm provocative book How to Blow-up a Pipeline (2021), I observe how a new and disturbing element intrudes in our social imaginary of transition, namely eco-terrorism. Without idealising it, both authors approach it as inevitably arising from contemporary contradictions and attempt to deal with it constructively in their accounts of green transition. Eco-terrorism therefore functions as a social symptom of the times, and I ask how it shapes the social imaginary represented in the works of the two authors.
