Lessons Learned
Farm Labor Issues in Central California, Viewed Across Disciplines: An Up-Close, In-depth Look at an Old Issue With New Lenses View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Renate Funke
This paper examines the complex dynamics emerging in a farm labor campaign observed on California’s Central Coast over three years. Reporting on a case study that brought into play methods for evaluating social change and shifting power relationships, the author elucidates both local and global perspectives, drawing on epistemologies from the global north and south, engaging underrepresented populations in participatory action research and assessing her findings through depth-psychological and eco-psychological lenses. By expanding the scope of community psychology, this exploration of new directions in the humanities hopes to contribute to a better understanding of the bio-politics around immigration and their perduring colonial legacies and, ultimately, point to new ways of meaning-making among polarized populations in search of common ground in the twenty-first century.
A Model for Understanding the Nature of Knowledge Creation through Arts Research: Embodied, Embedded, Enacted and Extended View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lynda Zwinger, Ellen McMahon
Ideas of what constitutes research, and in turn knowledge creation, in the R1 university are based on the accepted Computational Theory of Mind. In this model, cognition is understood through the lenses of information processing, computer science, and symbolic representation. In recent years, a radically different model of the mind has been emerging from the cognitive sciences. This new perspective, referred to as the Enactive View, sees the mind as embodied and embedded in the dynamic interactions of sensing, moving, living organisms and their environments. This idea that cognition is distributed throughout the body, is central to Eastern philosophy and supported by recent neuroscientific studies that indicate that the bi-directional interactions between brain and the rest of the body may be necessary for any conscious experience to arise. Grounded in the work of the late Chilean neuroscientist Francisco Varela, and philosopher Evan Thompson (The Embodied Mind), we see visual and literary art as implicating, involving, and changing our mind-bodies, and thus, our view of the world as well as our potential activities within it. Neuroscience teaches us that “imagination is a neurological reality that can impact our brains and bodies in ways that matter for our wellbeing," (Tor Wager). In refutation of the all too-prevalent political and even academic views of creation and consumption of art as “boutique” luxuries , our intervention in academic and political discourse about the arts insists that art matters in an enactive, embodied, socially engaged way.
Youth Collaborative Cellphilming: A New Approach in Humanities Education View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hiroko Hara
This paper discusses participatory filmmaking with cellphones as an arts-based pedagogy. This novel educational practice is to cultivate young people’s critical and creative thinking skills and raise their awareness of diversity through art-making. Many people participated in the Black Lives Matter movement not only in the United States but in other countries including France, Japan, and the United Kingdom recently. Incorporating diversity in education is very much needed at this critical moment. This study makes practical and theoretical contributions to education as well as arts. Practically, this research illustrates how to practice collaborative cellphilming online as an arts-based approach, which can inform similar praxis implementation in various school settings. Theoretically, this study furthers our understanding of the “social space” captured by cellphone cameras and the “geometrical space” emerging from screening a cellphilm. A group of twelve university students in Kumamoto, Japan and the researcher started collaborating online for cellphilming in June 2021, and a film was completed in January 2022. Pierre Bourdieu’s “social space” and “geometrical space” were applied and a combination of open-ended surveys and interviews was conducted to evaluate the impact of making and showing a cellphilm on the student filmmakers and the audience. It has become clear that collaborative cellphilming encourages the students to become critical and creative knowledge producers, and the created film invites the viewers to examine what is taken for granted from a different perspective. Hence, this new arts-based educational approach is effective for tackling social justice issues and promoting diversity.
English Language, Multiculturalism, and Diaspora as Contemporary Realities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ramona L. Ceciu
My paper examines the dynamics of English language at a global level with reference to multiculturalism, diaspora, and new media. The constraints of time and space, the distances between cultures, between languages, people and traditions, have reduced enabling new circumstances of communication and varied relationship networks. In such contexts, I argue that English language mediates between local and distant cultures, between diversity and the universal need for human interaction, contributing to new forms of dialogue and new meanings, as well as different identities. The study provides an analysis regarding the use of English language, its role and some of its applications in the context of multiculturalism, multilingualism and diaspora cultures. It also presents an illustration of language use in relation to identity and other issues pertaining to Indian diasporic writings and communication in multicultural and global contexts.
Statistical Literacy - Humanistic Education for the Future: Quantitative Rhetoric View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Milo Schield
The qualitative/conceptual reasoning used in the humanities is being pushed aside by the quantitative/observable reasoning used in the social sciences. Statistical comparisons seem as immutable as basic arithmetic, but social statistics are numbers in context. Most social statistics are subject to context in the same way that ideas involving the human condition are. For example, the UK National Health Service found that among COVID cases, the vaccinated were more likely to die than the unvaccinated. But after taking into account age, the comparison reversed: the unvaccinated were more likely to die. Statistical literacy teaches students to focus on what was – and was not – taken into account. Statistical Literacy is critical thinking about everyday statistics as evidence in arguments: how statistics are constructed and manipulated. Students are taught how to think hypothetically about how things may have been defined, counted, measured, compared and presented. Statistical literacy doesn't require computer software; it uses ordinary English to distinguish association from causation and to describe and compare conditional probabilities. Instead of algebra, it uses basic arithmetic and weighted averages. It has less than a 30% overlap with traditional introductory statistics. Half of those taking statistical literacy said it did more to develop their critical thinking than any other course they had taken. This paper summarizes the highlights of Statistical Literacy (Math1300) as a mathematics course satisfying a general education requirement at the University of New Mexico. Educators in the humanities are encouraged to promote the adoption of statistical literacy for their students.
Aesthemetry: Methods of Theorizing and Quantifying Beauty in Poetry View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nolan Dannels
Is there a way to theorize and quantify the aesthetic appeal of a poem to its audience, or is each reader's response too subjective and variable to be mapped out? In this paper, I argue that it is possible to describe the elements of a poem that contribute to readerly perceptions of beauty, such that we may achieve a greater understanding of the patterns that lend themselves well to poetry, aesthetically speaking. The paradigm that thus follows may then be applied not just to a given individual's personal palate and literary biases but to the respective aesthetic tastes of entire demographics of people as well, no matter how similar or disparate. Through this application of aesthemetry—a new term for the literary study and metric of reader perception—we may employ surveys of readers' aesthetic responses to poetry and explore their data, among other research methods, in order to discover aspects of texts that appeal to their audience and the reasons for their resonance with readers, both individually and communally. Upon this discovery, we may utilize mathematical tools to model and quantify the interactions between various relevant features of poems as they contribute to their perceived beauty. Using psychological studies that have contributed their own methods of aesthetic research, in addition to a novel application of mathematical concepts and operations, I argue that we can map out readers' responses to poetry by developing a theory of aesthemetry, thereby contributing a new direction for a science of the humanities and critical cultural studies.
