bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Freedom and Limits
Authors: Lachs John
Published: September 2014

This collection of articles by American philosopher, John Lachs, includes Lachs's discussions of philosophy of mind, medical ethics, his theories of mediation and choice-inclusive facts, and his recent espousal of anti-perfectionism and stoic pragmatism. Lachs acknowledges the complex tension that arises in celebrating human individuality, intelligence, and creativity while being mindful of the real conditions that curb our endeavors. Meaningful and enriching living are not thereby sacrificed but rather contextualized. As a result, Lachs celebrates moments of immediacy even as he recognizes the comforts and costs associated with material and moral advance. Each of the five parts of the volume highlights a dominant theme in Lachs's philosophy, and each is organized chronologically to map the development of specific arguments and ideas across the years.
Philosophical Pluralism
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Animated by attention to diverse desires and ways of viewing the world, Lachs recommends that philosophy departments be as pluralistic as they can be. An appreciation for the variety of philosophical schools of thought, made manifest through the study of its history, provides one ground for pluralism. Another is the fact that philosophy has a scope, ambition, and uncertainty unique among disciplines. Pluralism should play a role in keeping philosophy vital and relevant.
Drugs: The Fallacy of Avoidable Consequences
Authors: Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs takes up the question of whether we should or should not use drugs, especially with respect to its effect on consciousness. He is critical of those who recommend drug use without due attention to likely consequences, especially to the extent that drug use and experimentation aim to escape reality or to promote a putative expansion of the mind.
Loving Life
Authors: Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs argues that we should love life as long as there is something worth loving. There is plenty that is worth loving, from the joys of childhood to the pleasures of the body (the organ of our activities) and the comforts afforded by technology. That we love rather than merely like life is evident by the delight we take in its activities; we throw ourselves into life with boundless enthusiasm, never getting enough of it. Lachs nevertheless cautions against wanting life at any price, for the price is sometimes simply too high.
Pragmatism and Death
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Responding to objections that pragmatism is inadequate in helping us face death, Lachs emphasizes the unique satisfactions that come with the different stages of the life cycle (enthusiasm in youth, achievement in adulthood, peace in old age). Those who believe we can and should defeat death—a belief attributed to pragmatism (erroneously, if the pragmatist is a stoic)—are insufficiently attentive to consequences and to the values made possible by our unavoidable finitude. Lachs advises that “if life is satisfactory, we should avoid death for as long as we can.” Death is not a matter of indifference to the pragmatist, but neither is it an absolute foe to one who recognizes achievement in the context of limits.
Both Better Off and Better
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Arguing that we should be attentive to be conditions of material and moral advance, Lachs identifies three areas of improvement—our understanding of the human body, the development of technology, and the spread of democratic values and practices—that have increased the range of our choices and so our opportunities for intelligent control of events. Telecommunication and pervasive commerce have provided a “mechanized imagination” that has increased our contact with diverse others, rendering us more knowledgeable about and sympathetic to their needs. Material prosperity has increased the magnitude, the reach, and the possible institutional support for widespread benevolence.
Mayhem
Authors: Miller Steven
Published: September 2014

This chapter explores the ways in which it might be necessary, in order to understand the phenomenon of war in general but especially the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, to unlink war from the act of killing and death. This is not to disavow that people die in wars. On the contrary, it suggests that, even when the death toll is massive, killing is the least that happens and that the traditional, if not ideological, connection between war and death functions to disavow the range of violence that stops short of killing the enemy, that deprives him of a proper death, or that does not cease to violate his body, his home, or his culture after his death.
Introduction
Authors: Vahanian Noëlle
Published: September 2014

This introductory chapter defines and situates secular theology as a theology both of and after the Death of God, and as a theology of language after the postmodern linguistic turn. Faith becomes a lever of intervention, a rebellious no! to living in resignation, on the one hand, and to waiting for salvation, on the other. A chapter by chapter outline of the book provides a panoptic synopsis of the work as a whole, as it introduces the reader to a desiring-speaking-being who’s desire to no end, like poetry, exposes language as a technique and indifference as an apriori of thinking. Theological thinking is thus envisioned as the rebellious expression of love for the here and now against an anthropocentric and phallogocentric worldview.
Madness and Civilization
Authors: Vahanian Noëlle
Published: September 2014

Derrida, in “Cogito and the History of Madness,” offers an important reading of Descartes’s First Meditation as a counter to Foucault’s own reading of the same text in his Madness and Civilization. Accordingly, hyperbolic doubt inscribes madness not outside of reason and as its opposite, but instead, as the condition of reason. As soon as Descartes lets go of the hyperbolic doubt, his thinking no longer rebels against the institutional ideas and logic of his age and education. He succumbs to the order of things. What if the very manifestation of subjectivity was, more than one side of a necessary polarity (order/disorder), as order-itself, therefore mad? Erasmus, in his Praise of Folly, mocks clerics and learned men for the folly of their perfected systems and rigid dogma, and celebrates the folly of faith as being that much more sensible than the folly of reason alone. Still, this chapter proposes to re-cast and reverse the traditional dichotomies madness/sanity, disorder/order, abnormal/normal, unreason/reason, immoral/moral, illusion/reality in order to formulate a propaedeutic for rebelling against the longstanding bias of Western thought to equate any desire to put the order of things in question with childish immaturity, unreason, artistic license, or plainly with madness.
Two Ways to Believe
Authors: Vahanian Noëlle
Published: September 2014

This chapter distinguishes between two ways to believe in an age of relativism and postmodernism. The first form smacks of fideism, and it is without any other cause besides that of naï self-fulfillment. Part of the cult of the self, its expression is “think positive” and its content is self-entitlement. It is an uncomplicated form of belief that has great currency in a consumer-oriented society. A prime example can been seen in the movie Polar Express. The apologue of this major production was that any dream will come true so long as one believes that it will. Hence, this form of belief is also relativistic. The second form of belief is properly postmodern in that its aim is to view the real in the imaginary. The movie Finding Neverland exemplifies this form of belief. Based on the life of J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, the movie conflates real life events with imaginary storylines to take the heroine to Neverland or to her death. In this way, the imagination provokes and sustains the distanciation between the subject and her fantasy and brings the real of facticity to the fore by way of an imaginary trope.
The Humanities and Public Life
Authors: Jewett Hilary
Published: September 2014

This book tests the proposition that the humanities can, and at their best do, represent a commitment to ethical reading. And that this commitment, and the training and discipline of close reading that underlie it, represent something that the humanities need to bring to other fields: to professional training and to public life. What leverage does reading, of the attentive sort practiced in the interpretive humanities, give you on life? Does such reading represent or produce an ethics? The question was posed for many in the humanities by the “Torture Memos” released by the Justice Department a few years ago, presenting arguments that justified the use of torture by the U.S. government with the most twisted, ingenious, perverse, and unethical interpretation of legal texts. No one trained in the rigorous analysis of poetry could possibly engage in such bad-faith interpretation without professional conscience intervening to say: This is not possible. Teaching the humanities appears to many to be an increasingly disempowered profession—and status—within American culture. Yet training in the ability to read critically the messages with which society, politics, and culture bombard us may be more necessary than ever in a world in which the manipulation of minds and hearts is more and more what running the world is all about.
The Ethics of Reading
Authors: Larmore Charles
Published: September 2014

This chapter analyzes the ways in which reading might be said to implicate ethical relations. It argues that practice of reading can only have an ethical character and that there can be such a thing as an ethics of reading only if our relation as readers to texts is ultimately, if not directly, a relation to another person. The text must be understood to be the expression of its author’s intention. Moreover, if misreading the text consists in failing to grasp what the text itself says, then what the text says, and in this sense its meaning, must be defined by the author’s intention. The chapter also discusses how the notion of author’s intention should be conceived.
On Humanities and Human Rights
Authors: Kahn Paul W.
Published: September 2014

This chapter offers a skeptical view of human rights law as a universal consensus grounded in sympathy for the pain of others and agreement to prevent it. The political imagination values not only sympathy but sacrifice, and that promotes violence. It argues that the humanities can provide something that the law and social science cannot: the act of interpretation as itself an act of creation. The making of an interpretation—which can only be answered by another interpretation, in a potentially endless conversation—needs to be judged not only on its product but on how it is carried out. A belief in human dignity must be based not in sympathy for the suffering of others but in the shared mystery of human creativity.
Responses and Discussion
Authors: Jewett Hilary
Published: September 2014

This chapter presents responses to the discussions in Chapters 8 and 9. Among these is the argument that the meaning of self-authorship is a claim to the dignity of individuals; and a defense and a critique of the humanities, and a proposal for creative dialogue between social sciences and humanistic thinking.
Ovidian Baptism in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene
Authors: Britton Dennis Austin
Published: September 2014

Chapter 2 argues that Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene is unable to imagine that a Saracen knight like Pyrochles can “renounce [his] miscreaunce” because of emergent early modern concepts of unalterable racial difference, difference that Reformation baptism could not erase. The Nymph’s well episode at the beginning of Book 2 has long been read as registering sixteenth-century theological controversies about baptism, but this chapter explores why Spenser uses Ovid to intervene in theological debates. Spenser uses Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which characters retain a portion of their premetamorphosis identities, to suggest that no mode of transformation—be it through romance, baptism, or allegory—can erase all aspects of originary identity. Moreover, the very concept of transformation cannot be reconciled with the epic’s intention to fashion a racially pure and religiously stable Protestant national identity.
The Babylon Complex
Authors: Runions Erin
Published: September 2014

Following allusions to Babylon in secular and religious discourse in the decade after 9.11, this book explores the complicated influence of the Bible on U.S. political thought. Babylon is a surprisingly multivalent symbol in U.S. culture and politics. This composite biblical figure—taken from interpretive traditions about Babylon, Babel, and the Whore of Babylon—is variously used to celebrate diversity and also to condemn it, to sell sexuality and to regulate it, to worry about homogeneous tyrannical imperialism and to galvanize the “war on terror” and the war in Iraq. Babylon becomes so much a site of admiration and an object of vilification that the United States can be said to have a Babylon complex. This book shows that the Babylon complex contends with anxieties about the loss of political sovereignty in economic globalization, while encouraging the very market forces that undermine sovereignty. Shifting and contradictory allusions to Babylon reveal a theopolitically motivated biopolitics that tries to balance the drive for U.S. dominance with the countervailing moral ideals and forms of political subjectivity that further economic globalization and control the distribution of wealth. The centering and decentering impulses of Babylon and Babel give the composite figure the biblical authority to manage this tension and sustain U.S. empire. The book interrogates the interpretive moves by which the Bible gains its political authority and proposes instead other modes of reading that take the figure of Babylon as a catalyst for a detranscendentalized, queer, sublime, radically democratic polity.
The Torn Body
Authors: Rapp Jennifer R.
Published: September 2014

The uncarved, living animal analogy is developed in this chapter in terms of the dissolution, decay, and destruction to which bodies (animal, human, and textual) are subject, a direction of interpretation that focuses upon the gaps and fissures of the Phaedrus. This chapter presents the most explicit and extensive examination of how forgetting—in Rapp's terms, “ordinary forms of oblivion”—constitute the contours and powers of the dialogue. She considers forgetting in three aspects: forgetting as philosophical play, as philosophic source, and as a structural feature of the text. Through this examination she argues for the non-teleological character of Plato's view in the dialogue, suggesting further that a straight reading of the text as endorsing a metaphysical ideal of divine aspiration (in which the philosophic soul becomes “like god”) falls short. Rather, Plato re-casts the ideal within the this-worldly terms (and forms) of discourse through which the soul can be forged.
Transitional Justice versus Substantive Revolution
Authors: Cornell Drucilla
Published: September 2014

The introduction reviews different theories of transitional justice and argues that the South African revolution should not be considered through the spectrum of transitional justice, but should instead be understood as a substantive revolution. This revolution should further be put in the context of the national liberation struggles that have taken place over the last half century in Africa.
Living Customary Law and the Law
Authors: Cornell Drucilla
Published: September 2014

This chapter reviews the court cases of all levels of the court system in South Africa as they grappled with the decision of the Valoyi Tribe to appoint a woman as hosi. The supreme court of South Africa held that the Valoyi tribe were not following their own law when they appointed a woman as chief through their own royal authorities. The rural women submitted a brief arguing that the living customary law has only one mandate: to do justice, and that the mandate of justice changes over time. Therefore the Valoyi Tribe was following the living customary law, and there was no change in their law in order to allow a woman to be chief. The constitutional court held that there was such a change, but that it was the kind of change demanded by the constitutional protection of gender equality. The case however is not just about gender equality, but also about the very nature of what the living customary is as law, and how this other view of law challenges modern Anglo-American and European views of law.
The Argument
Authors: Abbas Sadia
Published: September 2014

This introductory chapter sets out the book’s main themes. The book focuses on the concept of new “Islam,”—a name, a discursive site, a flexible and simultaneously constrained signifier, indeed a geopolitical agon, in and around which some of the most pressing aporias of modernity, enlightenment, liberalism, and Reformation are worked out. This Islam draws upon a colonial history of the reorganization of religion, even repeats it in the former metropolises of Empire but works also to erase that colonial genealogy. As a conceptual object it exists most powerfully in the circuits of the Western academy, where it is increasingly a crucial node in the current academic debates invested in reimagining secularism.
The Echo Chamber of Freedom
Authors: Abbas Sadia
Published: September 2014

This chapter discusses how the notions of the subject, individualism, freedom, agency, change, and history have come to cluster around the figure of the Muslim woman for whom the metonym is increasingly the veil. It considers how the Muslim woman is conceived in the fiction of John Le Carre, the theory of Alain Badiou, the scholarship on the veil in France by Joan Scott, and in the work of Saba Mahmood.
Theologies of Love
Authors: Abbas Sadia
Published: September 2014

This chapter examines the work of Nadeem Aslam. Aslam almost compulsively engages the divisions within Cold War Islam and is attentive to their swirled and ruptured (post)colonial histories. The crisis engendered by imperial-theological geopolitics is present in every one of his novels, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), and The Wasted Vigil (2008). In Aslam’s novels baroque is a form of exacerbation and of hyper-aestheticism. It is a principle of lateness, of repetition, and of rereading. Cold War histories, devotional aesthetics, literary forms are infolded, inverted, revealed to be caught in a cycle of seemingly inescapable yet endlessly torqued iteration.
Łąki selernicowe (związek Cnidion dubii Bal.-Tul. 1966) w Polsce [Meadow communities of Cnidion dubii Bal.-Tul. 1966 alliance in Poland]
Authors: Zauski Tomasz
Published: September 2014

The paper contains a characterization of the alliance Cnidion dubii Bal.-Tul. 1966 and of the association Violo-Cnidietum dubii Walther in Tx. 1954, belonging to it, both of which so far unreported from Poland. The syntaxonomy of those units has been based on analytic-synthetical phytosociological studies with the use of numerical classification and ordination methods, mainly of the TWINSPAN program. To demonstrate the distinct character of the units under study from Poland, the alliance Cnidion dubii has been analysed in comparison with the alliances Molinion caeruleae and Alopecurion pratensis. The identify of the association has been established by analysing Polish and European materials. New criteria have been proposed for the diagnosis of the associations of the alliance Cnidion dubii in Central Europe. The rank of some diagnostic species of the association and of the alliance has been verified. The nomenclature of the units has been based on the principles of the Code of phytosociological nomenclature. The association Violo-Cnidietum dubii from the area of Poland has been characterized syntaxonomically, synchorologically and synecologically. Three subassociations have been described: Violo-Cnidietum dubii Walther in Tx. 1954 typicum, V.-C.d. stellarietosum palustris T. Załuski subass. nova, V.-C.d. galietosum veris T. Załuski subass. nova, including eight variants. At the same time, the distinct character of communities with Cnidium dubium and Molinia caerulea has been demonstrated, and they have been classified with Molinietum caeruleae W. Koch 1926 cnidietosum dubii T. Załuski subass. nova.
Shape effect on mixing and age distributions in service reservoirs
Authors: Zhang Jun‐Mei , Lee Heow Pueh , Khoo Boo Cheong , Peng Kai Qi , Zhong Liang , Kang Chang‐Wei , Ba Te
Published: September 2014

Service reservoirs operate better with completed mixed flow to ensure uniform distributed disinfectant. In this article, the shape effect on mixing and age distributions of a service reservoir was investigated computationally by analyzing three service reservoirs that have commonly designed shapes (rectangle, square, and circle). With the use of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method coupled with dynamic meshes, realistic dynamic flow in the service reservoir was simulated with affordable computational cost. The water age distributions were predicted in detail by solving the age equation. Among the three investigated service reservoirs, the rectangular service reservoir had the smallest region of aged water in size and lowest volume‐averaged age values. This is reasonable because the outlet is located opposite to the inlet in this study, and the fluid mixes better along the jet trajectory by virtue of jet‐spreading and turbulent eddies. Therefore, a rectangular service reservoir is the best design among the three tanks investigated. The effects of thermal stratification, inlet–outlet layout, turnover, and height‐over‐diameter (H/D) ratio on mixing and age distributions are not fully covered in this work. The current approach, however, can still be employed to incorporate and evaluate each or combined mentioned effect(s) to arrive at the optimal reservoir design.
Occurrence and consequences of increased bromide in drinking water sources
Authors: McTigue Nancy E. , Cornwell David A. , Graf Katherine , Brown Richard
Published: September 2014

Elevated concentrations of brominated disinfection by‐products (DBPs) have been reported recently by some drinking water utilities. Some of these occurrences have been correlated with upstream discharges of bromide‐containing wastes from coal‐fired power utilities, discharges of hydraulic fracturing wastewater, and other industrial sources. This article discusses this problem in terms of the chemistry of DBP formation when bromide is present, regulatory changes that have resulted in the increased use of bromide by industries, and the number of water utilities potentially affected by these discharges. The authors investigated this problem through a review of published and unpublished sources and through interviews with utility personnel and state regulators.
Intercellular Cooperation and Competition in Brain Cancers: Lessons FromDrosophilaand Human Studies
Authors: Waghmare Indrayani , Roebke Austin , Minata Mutsuko , Kango-Singh Madhuri , Nakano Ichiro
Published: September 2014

Glioblastoma (GBM) is a primary brain cancer with an extremely poor prognosis. GBM tumors contain heterogeneous cellular components, including a small subpopulation of tumor cells termed glioma stem cells (GSCs). GSCs are characterized as chemotherapy- and radiotherapy-resistant cells with prominent tumorigenic ability. Studies in Drosophila cancer models demonstrated that interclonal cooperation and signaling from apoptotic clones provokes aggressive growth of neighboring tumorigenic clones, via compensatory proliferation or apoptosis induced proliferation. Mechanistically, these aggressive tumors depend on activation of Jun-N-terminal kinase (upstream of c-JUN), and Drosophila Wnt (Wg) in the apoptotic clones. Consistent with these nonmammalian studies, data from several mammalian studies have shown that c-JUN and Wnt are hyperactivated in aggressive tumors (including GBM). However, it remains elusive whether compensatory proliferation is an evolutionarily conserved mechanism in cancers. In the present report, we summarize recent studies in Drosophila models and mammalian models (e.g., xenografts of human cancer cells into small animals) to elucidate the intercellular interactions between the apoptosis-prone cancer cells (e.g., non-GSCs) and the hyperproliferative cancer cells (e.g., GSCs). These evolving investigations will yield insights about molecular signaling interactions in the context of post-therapeutic phenotypic changes in human cancers. Furthermore, these studies are likely to revise our understanding of the genetic changes and post-therapeutic cell-cell interactions, which is a vital area of cancer biology with wide applications to many cancer types in humans.
A Case for Crowd Sourcing in Stem Cell Research
Authors: Dekkers Olaf M. , Mummery Christine L. , Rabelink Ton J.
Published: September 2014

Thousands of patients and placebo-treated controls have been included in many clinical trials of stem cell therapy over the last decade or so, but often the study groups have been small. Their scientific value may therefore be limited and their ethical justification questionable. Would “crowd sourcing” for data sharing be a means of increasing the collective value of clinical trials? Here, we make a case for open access of all data emerging from stem cell studies (trials but also observational studies) independent of whether they are investigator-initiated or commercially driven.
Advanced kidney carcinoma: decision paths and therapeutic perspectives
Authors: Da Prat Valentina , Testa Isabella , Procopio Giuseppe
Published: September 2014

Treatment of kidney cancer represents an open challenge for scientists and clinicians. In fact,renal tumours are resistant to virtually all of the currently available chemotherapeutics, beingonly partially sensitive to immunological agents. During the last decade, knowledge of geneticbasis of cancer has grown considerably. This has lead to an authentic revolution in the clinicalmanagement of renal tumours: the introduction of targeted therapies. Novel agents addressangiogenic signalling pathways through inhibition of the vascular endothelial growth factor(VEGF) or the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR). However, there is still no greatevidence favouring one drug over the others. This underlines the need for decision-making toolsin renal cell cancer treatment, in order to rationalise the choice of appropriate targeted agentsand to enable individualised clinical management. This is a brief overview on the state of theart of the treatment of metastatic renal tumour.
Imperial Technoscience
Authors: Prasad Amit
Published: September 2014

A study of science and technology practices that shows how even emergent aspects of research and development remain entangled with established hierarchies.

In the last four decades, during which magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has emerged as a cutting-edge medical technology and a cultural icon, technoscientific imaginaries and practices have undergone a profound change across the globe. Shifting transnational geography of tecchnoscientific innovations is making commonly deployed Euro/West-centric divides such as west versus non-west or “innovating north” versus “non-innovating south” increasingly untenable—the world is indeed becoming flatter. Nevertheless, such dualist divides, which are intimately tied to other dualist categories that have been used to describe scientific knowledge and practice, continue to undergird analyses and imaginaries of transnational technoscience. Imperial Technoscience puts into broad relief the ambivalent and contradictory folding of Euro/west-centrism with emergent features of technoscience. It argues, Euro/West-centric historicism, and resulting over-determinations, not only hide the vibrant, albeit hierarchical, transnational histories of technoscience, but also tell us little about shifting geography of technoscientific innovations. The book utilizes a deconstructive-empirical approach to explore “entangled” histories of MRI across disciplines (physics, chemistry, medicine, etc.), institutions (university, hospitals, industry, etc.), and nations (United States, Britain, and India). Entangled histories of MRI, it shows, better explain emergence and consolidation of particular technoscientific trajectories and shifts in transnational geography of science and technology (e.g. centers and peripheries).
A Metaphysics of Psychopathology
Authors: Zachar Peter
Published: September 2014

An exploration of what it means to think about psychiatric disorders as “real,” “true,” and “objective” and the implications for classification and diagnosis.

In psychiatry, few question the legitimacy of asking whether a given psychiatric disorder is real; similarly, in psychology, scholars debate the reality of such theoretical entities as general intelligence, superegos, and personality traits. And yet in both disciplines, little thought is given to what is meant by the rather abstract philosophical concept of “real.” Indeed, certain psychiatric disorders have passed from real to imaginary (as in the case of multiple personality disorder) and from imaginary to real (as in the case of post-traumatic stress disorder). In this book, Peter Zachar considers such terms as “real” and “reality”—invoked in psychiatry but often obscure and remote from their instances—as abstract philosophical concepts. He then examines the implications of his approach for psychiatric classification and psychopathology.

Proposing what he calls a scientifically inspired pragmatism, Zachar considers such topics as the essentialist bias, diagnostic literalism, and the concepts of natural kind and social construct. Turning explicitly to psychiatric topics, he proposes a new model for the domain of psychiatric disorders, the imperfect community model, which avoids both relativism and essentialism. He uses this model to understand such recent controversies as the attempt to eliminate narcissistic personality disorder from the DSM-5. Returning to such concepts as real, true, and objective, Zachar argues that not only should we use these metaphysical concepts to think philosophically about other concepts, we should think philosophically about them.
FORMakademisk med støtte fra Norges forskningsråd
Authors: Reitan Janne Beate
Published: September 2014

Det var med stor glede redaksjonen mottok meldingen fra Norges forskningsråd om at FORMakademisk var innvilget produksjonsstøtte for Open-Access-tidsskrift for 2011. Det er første gang forskningsrådet gir publiseringsstøtte til nettbaserte tidsskrift, og vi ser på dette som en stor anerkjennelse for FORMakademisk.
Minicities in suburbia – A model for urban sustainability?
Authors: Røe Per Gunnar , Saglie Inger-Lise
Published: September 2014

In the 1970s it was argued that suburban centres in the US had developed into “minicities”, offering a wide range of possibilities for consumption, cultural events and a sense of the urban. In this article we explore to which extent this description of minicities may be valid in two cases in the suburban hinterland of Oslo. We further discuss whether the “urbanization” of these suburban centres may contribute to a more sustainable urban development, with respect to everyday travel. We conclude that the growth of these minicities may reduce car travel, either because of their excellent public transport connection to the (big) city centre and other nodes in the increasingly decentralized urban region, or because they may serve as a substitute for the city centre. However, an empirical investigation of the role of minicities must be based on a deeper understanding of the social and cultural processes that guide the everyday life of today’s sub­urbanites.
Kunst og håndverk – fag eller tverrfaglig felt?
Authors: Sømoe Kjetil
Published: September 2014

Opprettelsen av skolefaget forming, og senere kunst og håndverk, blir gjerne beskrevet som en sammenslåing av håndverksfagene sløyd, håndarbeid og tegning. I artikkelen bruker jeg faghistorien og ulike beskrivelser av kontroversen som har eksistert i forming/kunst og håndverk til å vise at kunst og håndverk best kan beskrives som et tverrfaglig felt snarere enn et fag i vitenskapsfaglig betydning. Gjennom to nasjonale spørreundersøkelser, Skolefags­undersøkelsen 2009 og Skolefagsundersøkelsen 2011, er lærernes fagpraksis og faglige prioriteringer i ungdomsskole og barneskole kartlagt. Funnene viser at faget praktiseres svært ulikt, og at særlig høyt utdannede lærere i ungdomsskolen er spesialiserte innen en eller flere tradisjoner og materialområder innenfor skolefaget kunst og håndverk. Artikkelen vil synliggjøre de ulike tradisjonene som inngår i skolefaget på et formelt nivå, og foreslår en viss grad av spesialisering innenfor fagområdet i lærerutdanningen. Spesialiserte fagmiljøer i lærerutdanningen foreslås for at utviklingen av innhold og metoder i grunnskolens praksis som kan inngå i det tverrfaglige feltet kunst og håndverk skal bli mer målrettet og kvalitetsorientert.
Proceedings from the Nordcode Seminar - Participation and Dialogue
Authors: Nielsen Liv Merete , Vihma Susann , Gulden Tore , Berg Arild
Published: September 2014

This issue of FORMakademisk is the result of a cooperative effort involving the Nordcode research network, the Department of Product Design at Akershus University College and the FORMakademisk. It builds on the Participation and Dialogue seminar, held in May 2010, which was supported by Nordforsk, The Norwegian Research Council and Kjeller Science Park.
Kampen om skoleanlegget - historikken bak baseskolene
Authors: Vinje Erlend
Published: September 2014

I løpet av de siste årene har vi sett eksempler på harde kamper om arkitekturen til nye skoleanlegg. Jeg lar i denne artikkelen fire sentrale stemmer i denne debatten komme til ordet. De fire stemmene tilhører tidligere utdannings- og forskningsminister Kristin Clemet, leder i Norsk Lektorlag Gro Elisabeth Paulsen, avdelingsdirektør i Utdanningsetaten Harald Øvland og hovedverneombud i Oslo-skolen Knut Myhrer. Disse stemmene vil belyse blant annet: hvem som ønsket baseskolene velkommen, hvorfor baseskolene ble ønsket velkommen, hvem som opponerte mot baseskolene og hvorfor det ble opponert mot baseskolene. Kvartetten vil også belyse i hvilken grad Kunnskapsløftet kan sies å legitimere baseskolene og i hvilken grad lærerne har vært med på utformingen av de nye skoleanleggene.
Formgiving, design og håndverk. Fra Reform 94 til Kunnskapsløftet
Authors: Aakre Bjørn Magne
Published: September 2014

Denne artikkelen handler om fagområdene formgiving, design og håndverk i norsk videregående opplæring, med særlig fokus på de endringer som ble gjennomført med Kunnskapsløftet i 2006. Det tas utgangspunkt i Formgivingsfag som ble innført i 1994 som en kombinert studieretning med felles grunnopplæring, der en del førte fram til studie­kompetanse, og de fleste håndverksfagene fram til fagbrev. Med Kunnskapsløftet ble disse skilt fra hverandre: Formgivingsfag ble videreført som programfag innenfor Studie­spesialiserende utdanningsprogram. Håndverksfagene ble videreført i et nytt yrkesfaglig utdanningsprogram med betegnelse Design og håndverk. Hvor dyptgripende ble endringene i struktur og innhold, og hvordan har elever og lærere erfart disse endringene i praksis? Spørsmålene søkes besvart med støtte i to kvantitative undersøkelser, en før og en etter innføring av Kunnskapsløftet. Undersøkelsen tyder på at innholdet i de to programmene forble nokså like med hensyn til innhold, arbeids- og vurderingsformer, spesielt i grunnopplæringen. Begge programmene domineres fortsatt av jenter, og design oppfattes å være det sentrale i begge utdanningene.
Flid, nytte og kvalitet - danningsideal ved Den Kvinnelege Industriskule frå 1875 til 1960
Authors: Kvellestad Randi Veiteberg
Published: September 2014

Denne artikkelen tek utgangspunkt i jubileumsutstillinga Ferdighet, form fortelling ved Avdeling for estetiske fag, Høgskolen i Oslo. Utdanningsinstitusjonen feira 135-års jubileum i 2010 med ma. ei utstilling av studentarbeid frå ulike epokar. Første del av artikkelen presenterer utstillinga. Deretter går eg inn i institusjonen sin første periode frå 1875 til 1960 og ser på danningsideal som etablerte seg i dette tidsrommet. Ideala er knytt til flid, nytte og kvalitet. Danningsideala er identifiserte ma. av Jorunn Spord-Borgen og Karen Brænne. Danningsideala møter vi igjen i vår tid. Artikkelen avsluttar med drøfting av danningsideala der eg trekkjer inn fleire teoretikarar som har fokus på fagdidaktikk og danning.
The Unheimliche Approach in the Making of Interiors
Authors: Deckers Karel
Published: September 2014

‘The (Re)Creative Workings of Existential Anguish in Interior Architecture’ aims to understand, and potentially incorporate, the unheimliche into interior-architectural design teaching. My inquiry addresses a paradoxical and disquieting force inside interiors that does not intimidate, but rather stimulates, the growth of imagination and creativity through design. How can one define the limits of one’s own certainties and how to overcome them even if they cause existential anguish? I will argue that existential anguish in interiors emerges in the tension between a particular belonging to existing affiliations and the fresh unfamiliarity of unexpected encounters. My inquiry complements prevailing values and norms in interior architecture as preset by society (identity, commodities, light, sight, and so on). Interior-architectural unheimlichkeit may engage in a disruptive design approach that triggers and allows the growth of other values, such as empathy, in interior architecture. The unheimliche may specify a small yet existential part of interior architecture as a discipline. How can existential anguish become a (re)creative agency in design teaching? It can be argued that a series of pedagogic experiments entitled ‘Onheimelijk Studios’, as collectively organized with and by student co-researchers at the St Lucas School of Architecture, Belgium, contributes to the research of existential anguish through the designing and making of interiors.
Arkitekturundervisning og restaurasjonstenkning
Authors: Fauske Laila Belinda
Published: September 2014

I perioden 2005-2007 publiserte redaksjonen i fagtids­skriftet FORM en artikkelserie om arkitektur og arkitekturundervisning. Publiseringen sammenfalt i tid med innføringen av Kunnskapsløftet hvor arkitektur fikk en styrket posisjon innenfor faget Kunst og håndverk. I denne artikkelen relateres artikkelserien i FORM til et kunst­historisk perspektiv på arkitektur. Videre argumenteres det for at serien kan knyttes opp mot et større skolepolitiske hele. Dette i form av en restaurasjons­tenkning hvor det å styrke faglig kunnskap, illustrert ved et tradisjonelt pensum der bruk av begrep som moral og disiplin står sentralt. Redaksjonen i FORM tillegges i denne artikkelen rollen som en aktør innenfor fagfeltet, som hadde mulighet til å øve innflytelse på fagets praksis etter ny læreplan.
Vad är tillräckligt mjukt? – kulturell socialisering och lärande i skolans slöjdpraktik
Authors: Illum Bent , Johansson Marléne
Published: September 2014

Utgångspunkten i denna artikel är empiriskt förankrade exempel från den svenska grundskolans slöjdundervisning, årskurs 5. Studien är relaterad till ”Komolärprojektet” (Kommunikation och lärande i slöjdpraktiker) som är finansierat genom det svenska Vetenskaps­rådet. Som hjälpmedel för att skildra hur kulturell socialisering och lärande i skolans slöjdpraktik kan formuleras använder vi oss av videoinspelade klassrums­observa­t­ioner. Fokus för analysarbetet är klassrumskommunikationen å den ena sidan och elevernas interaktion med material och redskap å den andra. Slöjd är ett påtagligt kommunikativt ämne på flera vis. Elever bygger upp en egen erfarenhetsvärld när de själva får erfarenheter av hur ”tillräckligt mjuk” känns genom att se, känna och uppleva med kroppen. Lärande­situationerna ger tillgång till tidigare erfarenheter, både egna och andras. Under social interaktion, tillsammans med redskap och material, återskapas och nyskapas ett kollektivt minne. Slöjdkunnandet förvärvas i interaktion med omvärlden, tanke och handling byggs in i upplevelserna.
Making and the sense it makes
Authors: Tin Mikkel B.
Published: September 2014

Making is ubiquitous, and it is as ancient asculture. In fact, making is the practical dimension of culture. It transformsmatter, and it articulates meaning. Making has a cognitive dimension; it makes sense. But this sense is not ordinary discursive knowledge – making yields another kind of knowledge, often referred to as ‘tacit’ because it seems to gowithout saying. Now, if it is tacit how can we speak about it, and whatis its role in making?
Editorial. Permanent funding for FORMakademisk
Authors: Reitan Janne Beate
Published: September 2014

FORMakademisk is the only scientific journal in the Nordic countries that publishes articles in both design and design education. The modern education requirement for research-based teaching also applies to higher education in design and design education, which is the primary field of research published in the journal FORMakademisk. As a relatively young field of research, a great deal of research in design and design education is published as articles rather than monographs. The journal plays an important role as a source of research-based teaching and education, and the articles are used as part of the curricula at several institutions. The purpose of FORMakademisk is to build and strengthen design and design education as a research field of its own, to enhance existing design research fields, and to strengthen design education as a field in itself.Encouragement To maintain a permanent operation of FORMakademisk it is necessary to enter into long-term economic agreements with institutions that use the journal to publish or reference literature. We therefore wish to make a statement about the long-term support to FORMakademisk with these institutions as soon as possible. We encourage all our authors, peer reviewers, readers and especially the members of the editorial board to ask their institutions to provide financial resources and long-term agreements to support FORMakademisk when a letter is being sent to institutions as soon as possible.
Contemporary large-scale international design competitions1 in China. A case study of Baietan, Guangzhou
Authors: Liang Zheng , Mäntysalo Raine
Published: September 2014

The importance of contemporary design competitions has been increasingly recognized in fast-growing China in the course of World Trade Organization (WTO) integration and globalization. However, scientific and systematic analysis is rare on how international design competitions are introduced, and how they interact and transplant in the Chinese context. The well-known Chinese-Western culture gap and complicated social and political background make this topic more challenging. Herein, the authors focus on how the international design competitions were “translated” into both international and local perspectives with a compara­tive analysis on development of international design competitions between the Chinese and the Finnish model. To fully exemplify the design-completion procedure and the different roles of Chinese stakeholders and their perspectives on design competitions, the authors study the Baietan case, which was chosen due to its specific relationship with the city’s strategic plan, its representativeness in using international design competitions in connection to large-scale urban projects in China and its public access to the relevant documentation. The preliminary findings suggest that Chinese-style design competitions, acting as ‘designed trading zones’, with less-defined competition rules compared to the Finnish model, may foster the settings of local transformation in adopting international urban planning and design knowledge. However, an integrated approach is required to address subsequent implementation.
Competing in Architecture. Crowdsourcing as a Research Tool
Authors: Newton Clare , Backhouse Sarah
Published: September 2014

Architectural competitions are powerful strategies for generating visual ideas for new futures. Academic research generates new knowledge based on rigorous investigations of informed propositions. This paper describes an unusual merging of a research process with a competition process using crowdsourcing to leverage knowledge. The Australian Research Council (ARC) is the pre-eminent funding body of academic research for universities across Australia. In 2010 a multidisciplinary academic team, with twelve industry partners including six education departments, successfully sought ARC research funding.  The application proposed an unprecedented strategy to include an open Ideas Competition in the middle year of a three-year research program as a form of crowdsourcing to leverage knowledge between academia and industry. The research project, entitled Future Proofing Schools, was focused on Australia’s relocatable school buildings.
Book review. Ann-Hege Lorvik Waterhouse: In the material world: Perspectives and practices in kindergarten art activities
Authors: Frisch Nina Scott
Published: September 2014

In the review of Ann-Hege Lorvik Waterhouse’s book I materialenes verden; perspektiver og praksiser i barnehagens kunstneriske virksomhet (In the material world: Perspectives and practices in kindergarten art activities),  Frisch states that despite the fact that the author is in some ways critical of the impact Reggio Emilia has had on Norwegian kindergartens, in her opinion, the book's content rests on the shoulders of the exploratory child-centred educational philosophy. The book offers great, relevant images related to new reflective concrete ideas, and it has a beautiful layout. Waterhouse points out her core argument several places in the text: a good kindergarten teacher is a creative kindergarten teacher – and the book reviewer adds, a good kindergarten teacher is a reading, reflecting kindergarten teacher.
Noen tanker om ”doctorateness”
Authors: Dunin-Woyseth Halina , Nielsen Liv Merete
Published: September 2014

Dette nummeret av FORMakademisk er i hovedsak viet ett aspekt ved profesjonaliseringen av dr.gradsstudier innen design og designdidaktikk i Norge, med vekt på dr.gradsutdanningen ved Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i Oslo (AHO). Det er et aspekt som, sammen med andre, konstituerer det som i nyere forskningsdidaktisk litteratur kalles ”doctorateness”.
Alternative theoretical and methodological approaches for exploring higher education in Art and Crafts
Authors: Gulliksen Marte Sørebø
Published: September 2014

This article presents and discusses approaches for exploring higher education in Art and Crafts. The concepts exploring versus research and the different foci in an insider perspective versus an outsider perspective introduces the theme. An insider perspective is said to be a useful starting point for inquiry, referring to Frayling’s trichotomy research into, research on and research through from 1993. The field of higher education in Art and Crafts education is shortly presented as comprising two main areas of knowledge: knowledge of education, and knowledge about the different subject areas within Art and Crafts. Both theory and practice are a part of these areas of knowledge. As higher education in Art and Crafts is a making profession, the most prominent challenge when exploring this today is thus said to be to develop research based knowledge on Education in Art and Crafts as a making discipline.  Two keywords are deemed to be useful in approaching this theme: Mode 2 knowledge production and transdisciplinarity. The article concludes with describing specific ways of doing this today from within the context of application. Two examples of large research projects in Scandinavia are presented as examples of such projects.