Please login to be able to save your searches and receive alerts for new content matching your search criteria.
The Centre for Human Rights and Climate Change Research is a non-governmental not-for-profit organization located in Nigeria and established on the 15th of December, 2010. The Centre was founded to advance and promote understanding of human rights, climate change, sustainable development, drug abuse, international affairs and shape related policies through education, research, policy advocacy and organizing and facilitating local, national, regional and international fora; and to be a global think tank serving as a resource and reference centre for international, regional and national decision/policymakers and programmers while also opening up space for every man, woman, girl and boy to contribute their views to international, regional and national issues bordering on human rights, climate change, sustainable development, drug policies and international affairs and to be a platform for justice.
This chapter suggests a story making framework for reflexive resistance to the performative university. The performative university is defined as a capitalization of space and time. This capitalization is caught using Foucault’s notion of the dispositive. Story making is developed from Hannah Arendt’s work in combination with fragments from the works of Benjamin, Butler, Bakhtin and Sandoval. We argue that a story maker is grounded in concrete socio-material relations and she cannot be located in fixed positions but moves through both academic and societal landscapes in order to change them. The story maker is a framework for developing reflexive resistance to the performative university. Two kinds of reflexive practices are developed. The first kind corresponds to thinking and is a reflexive relationship to oneself. These practices are targeted toward setting people free from the torture and torment of the performative university and exploring and activating the loving, creative, passionate, artful and uncontrollable elements of their research activities. The second kind of reflexive resistance corresponds to action and refers to the activism that emerges when we come together for a cause larger than itself. This kind of story making practice transcends institutional, organizational and regional boundaries and mobilizes affordances across fixed time lines and spaces.
Classically, visual attention is assumed to be influenced by visual properties of objects, e.g. as assessed in visual search tasks. However, recent experimental evidence suggests that visual attention is also guided by action-related properties of objects ("affordances"),1,2 e.g. the handle of a cup affords grasping the cup; therefore attention is drawn towards the handle. In a first step towards modelling this interaction between attention and action, we implemented the Selective Attention for Action model (SAAM). The design of SAAM is based on the Selective Attention for Identification model (SAIM).3 For instance, we also followed a soft-constraint satisfaction approach in a connectionist framework. However, SAAM's selection process is guided by locations within objects suitable for grasping them whereas SAIM selects objects based on their visual properties. In order to implement SAAM's selection mechanism two sets of constraints were implemented. The first set of constraints took into account the anatomy of the hand, e.g. maximal possible distances between fingers. The second set of constraints (geometrical constraints) considered suitable contact points on objects by using simple edge detectors. We demonstrate here that SAAM can successfully mimic human behaviour by comparing simulated contact points with experimental data.