Developing Dialogue: Room 1
13 September - 13:25PM-16:00PM (Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon)
Featured In Flux - Actor-network Theory, Poetry, and Critical Making: Constructing Poetic Visualizations Across Modalities View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kelsey Dufresne
The fluidity of literature, especially in relation to time, readers, and understanding, aligns with Actor-network Theory (ANT), which posits a greater focus on all facets of a network of associations, including non-human actants, and can assist in encouraging students to consider broader relationships written into the poem, as well as those manifested by the relationship/s between the reader, writer, speaker and poem itself. In exploring this argument, I studied "Morning Glories” by Mary Oliver (1994) to address how can we study and learn from a poem by prioritizing ANT? Thus, by employing critical making to construct a video and visual portrayals of the poetic elements and networks, we are able to see how they are constantly in flux, moving and evolving, and specific to any specific reader of a poem. As such, ANT may lead students to also ask what is the very page saying and what is it saying to the speaker and to me? How are these different? In doing so, this work contributes to the growing field of digital and experiential learning and falling at the nexus of theory and praxis for poetry pedagogy and digital humanities.
Featured Cropping the Composition: Exposing How an Interrelationship Between Environmental Toxicity and Economic Insecurity Determines the Mental Health Help-seeking Experiences of Pre-Adolescent Black American Boys View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christopher Ashley Burkett
Black American boys encounter an intricately woven set of obstructions when seeking help for their mental health concerns in public school settings. The researcher argues that these barriers are rooted in infrastructural inequalities, institutional disparities, and historical oppression. Specifically, he asserts that the obstacles are centered around the symbiotic interaction between environmental toxicity and economic insecurity. The digital image or photograph has become an inextricable part of our lives. We use this tool incessantly to communicate with each other on a daily basis. Moreover, the dominant manner in which children and youth engage with one another is through photographs (e.g. social media platforms and texting). This researcher contends that the picture will be instrumental in how individuals heal from and cope with the inadvertently adverse economic, environmental, and emotional outcomes from their experiences with this most recent shared worldwide health catastrophe. This arduous process requires the implementation of interventions that are innovative, least restrictive, and sensitive to combat the compounded issues emerging from an unforeseen tragedy. This researcher proposes using photo-based methods of qualitative inquiry to evoke more emotive explanations that will help in comprehending and mending these hindrances to the mental health (help-seeking) experiences (MHHSE) of pre-adolescent Black American boys. Specifically, this form of examination serves as a culturally empathic or anti-oppressive manner to highlight their unique mental health narratives.
Black and White World: Making Meaning in 2020 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Russell Prather
My paper, about two paintings in the pop-up exhibition from a series called “Black and White World,” concerns the visual construction of meaning during a period of multiple crises: the global pandemic of course, but also the culminating year of the Trump administration and the social polarization and conflict it precipitated and intensified. In states of crisis, thinking tends toward the existential and reductive. This is a primal response perhaps, but also one amplified by our technologically sophisticated, digitally networked reality—in social, news, and other media. My paintings reflect on this rather desperate state of affairs, which persists to the present day. Emphatically three-dimensional, and viewable from both sides when hung from the ceiling, the paintings are of Plates 1 and 4 from the original set of 10 ink blots published by Hermann Rorschach in 1921. The blots were used originally to elicit visual associations from patients that might reveal something about the “deeper" state of their psychology. By reversing the figure of the blot on the white recto, and black verso, these images draw attention not just to human subjectivity and the act of constructing meaning, but also to ways this activity can be constrained and diminished—in this case within two (geometrically identical) figure-ground relationships: one white-on-black, the other black-on-white. Like our current cultural moment perhaps, there may be interpretive choices available here, but they are stark, with little nuance or complications, no colors—not even any grey areas.
Faint, Uncertain, Shimmering: The Magic of Image in Pandemic Days
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paulo Morais-Alexandre, Vanda Maria dos Santos Nascimento
The aim of this study is to analyze a very coherent nucleus of photographs by Nuno Matos, where the common denominators pass through the body of the freed woman or the subject, who hides/shows in a work of "chiaroscuro”, or rather, in an evocative dimness, which appeals to the memory of desire, whose reconstruction is merely pointed out. Additionally, this paper shows a reflection of Nuno Matos influences on pandemic days, where the photographer explores shadows and light on the image perception of the woman's body.
