Search Results (15)

In 1994, Enric Miralles published From what time is this place?, a brief text where the relationship between space and time is claimed through the form of the Igualada Cemetery Park and different conditions of time are considered. The title is presumably written after the book by Kevin Lynch What time is this place?, where the human sense of time and the relationship between the innate consciousness of time and place and the objective time of the world are addressed. Related to this concept arises the notion of the chronotope—from kronos, time, and topos, place; literally timeplace, defined by Mikhail Bakhtin as the intrinsic connectedness of spatial and temporal relationships assimilated in the artistic form. Approaching Miralles’ own words, this text examines the condition of architectural form as a chronotope in the Igualada Cemetery Park and in three of his projects to analyze, firstly, the strategies used and, secondly, the consequences of the connection of space and time in the form and in space and time themselves: the spatialization of time, temporalization of space, and temporalization of time. As a result, some reflections contribute to the contemporary debate on form in architecture as a spatiotemporal discipline: a chronotopic architecture. Full article

This paper examines discourses around the religious and social practice of taqiyya among members of the Sulaymani Isma‘ili community in Saudi Arabia. Isma‘ilism, in the context of 1200 years of anti-Shi‘a discrimination, cultivated the practice known as taqiyya (Arabic, ‘circumscription’) as a tool for self-preservation, which was then further rationalized and reinforced by the sect’s esoteric theology. Taqiyya consists of concealing religious identity, public avoidance of certain rituals, and, in some instances, claiming to be a member of the unmarked Sunni majority. Sweeping changes in Saudi society in the last several years have meant a growing ambivalence about taqiyya and its continued utility. This is significant since taqiyya for many of our interlocutors in this study is not merely a survival tactic. Instead, it is better understood as an embodied disposition cultivated against the backdrop of household privacy. This disposition intimately links everyday comportment to the esoteric cosmology of Isma‘ilism, which is the distinctive and iconic feature of the faith. Our interlocutors’ narratives demonstrated how the invocation of different spatial and temporal frameworks provides a basic heuristic by which to interpret these individuals’ accounts of taqiyya. For some of these individuals, taqiyya is an essential and timeless practice, while for others, the meaning has been reshaped by the recent socio-political reforms. Full article

Analyses of disciplines encompassing futures studies reveal a prevailing tendency to perceive time as a linear sequence of projections. However, this perspective is not applicable to the current context of social transformation in the age of globalization and digitization, such as sustainable development. Preliminary investigations into time-based design and futures studies have shown the potential of time-based paradigms for predicting reliable future scenarios and redesigning current forms of spaces, relationships, and services in response to these desired futures. In this paper, we describe a project of an Ephemeral and Temporary Space Design Laboratory, which has been a pedagogical experiment for 3 years to date in the School of Design at the Politecnico di Milano. The objective of this project is to systematically design an area of the city by reflecting on the relationship between design systems and social change, using participatory design methods such as field research and interviews with local residents to systematically redesign the urban space of the Lodi/Corvetto area in the city of Milan. This research aims to investigate the systematic influence of time factors on the spatial design of urban communities through futuristic and time/space-based design perspectives. The findings demonstrate that the utilization of time-based paradigms and tools can effectively enhance the time-based design approach, resulting in its increased integration within the design process. This integration plays a pivotal role in the construction of systems that have the capability to interact with and catalyze social transformation within the broader public and shared community. Full article

This article offers a dialogical exploration of student teachers’ reflections on notions of insideness and outsideness, the focal themes of an Erasmus+ ten-day intensive programme (IP). The arts-based, interdisciplinary IP involved 32 student participants and twelve members of staff from eight European universities hosted by the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. The data for this paper are based on the final written essays of student participants as they reflected on their understanding of outsideness and insideness at the end of the IP. The dialogic approach used in the analysis allows for a careful exploration of how the students attended to different experiences, surmised the meaning of insideness and outsideness, and used these reflections to develop their pedagogical response. The findings highlight how the participants drew on their own experiences and relationships within and beyond the IP to navigate and negotiate their pedagogical understanding. This study offers useful insights into the formation of pedagogical understanding as well as the role and responsibilities of teacher education in guiding this formative process, all the more important in times of emergencies. Full article

This essay examines Jane Austen’s occasional but potent attention to singular moments that seem to stand outside of the usual flow of time. Signaled by her use of phrases such as ‘the work of a moment’ or ‘the work of an instant’, these momentous moments gain resonance when studied against the backdrop of Austen’s nuanced attention to temporal representation in narrative and to the temporal dimensions of human experience. The essay argues that Austen’s momentous moments ultimately function as a crucial dimension of what Amit Yahav in Feeling Time designates the ‘sensibility chronotope’, a perspective that asserts primacy over chronometry and chronology. Attending to these moments in the fiction further enables us to assess Austen’s contribution to what would later become a distinctive feature of the nineteenth-century realist novel, the preoccupation with roads not taken and ‘lives unled’, as Andrew Miller argues in On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives. Full article

Problems encountered in top-down school reforms have repeatedly highlighted the significance of teachers’ agency in educational change. At the same time, temporality has been identified as a key element in teachers’ agency, with teachers’ beliefs about the future and experiences of the past shaping their agentic orientations. However, research on teachers’ future orientations is typically limited to short-term trajectories, as opposed to long-term visions of education. To address this, we draw on a futures studies perspective to give more explicit attention to teachers’ long-term visions of their work. We argue that the method of future narratives, already well-established in the field of futures studies, is a fruitful methodological framework for studying these long-term visions. In this paper, we first show that the futures studies approach is theoretically compatible with the ecological model of teacher agency. We then outline the method of future narratives to point out the possibilities it offers. Finally, we illustrate our approach with an exploratory analysis of a small set of future narratives where teachers imagine a future workday. Our analysis reveals that the narratives offer a rich view of teachers’ longer-term visions of education, including instances of reflecting on the role of education in relation to broader societal developments. Our study suggests that this novel approach can provide tools for research on teacher agency as well as practical development of teacher education, addressing long-term educational issues and policies. Full article

Cycling rhythm performance is the result of a complex interplay between active travel demand and cycling network supply. Most studies focused on bicycle flow, but little attention has been paid to cycling rhythm changes for public bicycles. Full sample data of origin–destination enables an efficient description of network-wide cycling mobility efficiency in urban public bicycle systems. In this paper, we show how the spatiotemporal characteristics of cycling speed reveal the performance of cycling rhythms. The inference method of riding speed estimation is proposed with an unknown cycling path. The significant inconsistency of docking stations in cycling rhythm was unraveled by the source–sink relationship comparison. The asymmetry of the cycling rhythm on the path is manifested as the rhythm difference among paths and bidirectional inconsistency. We found that cycling rhythm has a temporal multilayer and spatial mismatch, which shows the inflection points of the cycling rhythm where the travel behavioral preference changes and the exact road segments with different rhythms. This finding suggests that a well-designed cycling environment and occupation-residential function should be considered in active transport demand management and urban planning to help induce active travel behavior decisions. Full article

Learner-centered blended learning approaches, such as Knowledge Creation, emphasize the self-organizing characteristic of thought and action, and value the students’ autonomy and self-regulation during the engagement in collaborative learning tasks. In blended contexts, the students need to organize their learning paths within a complex environment, including multiple online and offline learning spaces. This process of self-organization during courses based on the Knowledge Creation approach is currently an overlooked topic of research. The present case study is aimed at addressing this research gap by providing an in-depth understanding of the collaborative self-organization of a group of five undergraduate students participating in an interdisciplinary media design course. The course was designed according to the Knowledge Creation approach and was carried out before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The dialogical theory of the chronotope and the theory of cultural models constitute the main theoretical tools for the research. We used qualitative methods inspired by ethnography, including participant observation, in addition to the collection and analysis of audio-visual records, stimulated recall interviews, and learning diaries completed by the students. The findings show that the group self-organization changed across different phases of the collaborative task and involved the development of specific practices of self-organization. Cultural models associated with the task contributed to determine the students’ choices related to self-organization. Full article

Focused on Nikolai Gogol’s absurdist tale, “The Nose” (1835), this article is an investigation into the concealed representation of suppressed and marginalized libertine and anti-religious discourses in nineteenth-century Russian literature. The author identifies overlooked idiomatic phraseology, forgotten specificities of the Imperial hierarchy (the Table of Ranks), and allusions to religious customs and Christian rituals that would have been apparent to Gogol’s readers and shows how some were camouflaged to escape censorship in successive drafts of the work. The research builds on the approaches to Gogol’s language, imagery and plot developed earlier by the Russian Formalists, Tartu-Moscow semioticians, and a few other scholars, who revealed the latent obscenity of Gogol’s “rhinology” and the sacrilegious meaning of the tale’s very specific chronotope. The previous scholars’ observations are substantially supplemented by original findings. An integrated analysis of these aspects in their mutual relationship is required to understand what the telling details of the story reveal about Gogol’s religious and psychological crisis of the mid-1830s and to demonstrate how he aggregated indecent Shandyism, social satire, and religious blasphemy into a single quasi-oneiric narrative. Full article

The pulsatile-release Chronotopic™ system was conceived of as a drug-containing core surrounded by a coat made of swellable/soluble hydrophilic polymers, the latter being able to provide a programmable lag phase prior to drug liberation. This system was also proposed in a colon-targeting configuration, entailing a gastroresistant film to prevent early interaction of the inner coat with gastric fluids and enabling the attainment of a lag phase matching the small intestinal transit time. Over the years, various multiple-step manufacturing processes have been tested for the fabrication of the Chronotopic™ system in both its configurations. This work focused on the evaluation of 3D printing by fused deposition modeling in view of its potential towards product personalization, on demand one-step manufacturing and efficient scale down of batches. The feasibility of each part of the Chronotopic™ system was independently investigated starting from in-house made filaments, characterizing the resulting specimens for physico-technological and performance characteristics. The printing parameters identified as suitable during the set-up phase were then used to fabricate prototypes either in a single step for the pulsatile configuration or following two different fabrication approaches for the colon-targeting one. Full article

Alexandria and Istanbul, through diverse texts and writers, meet and intersect in their attempt to reconstruct and rebuild the metropolis’s character. Our method advocates spatiotemporal events in augmented literature that enable reflection of the palimpsest of historical frames. On a higher level, what we propose in this work is the dialogic field between the two metropolises, as it could be provided by novels’ chronotopes with the aid of augmented reality. We undertake a twofold task, to reveal the awareness of the connections between places and the connection and attachment of particular spaces, by unifying two approaches. First, Ecocriticism that comprises the ways in which novels express socio-cultural frameworks of the natural environment. The second approach is based on the strong interrelations of place engagement with collective and cultural memory. The linking of both urban, spatial geometry and topology with the waterscape for both metropolises, in our proposed conceptualization of a chronotope-based augmented continuum, endeavors to provide, firstly, the dialogic relations between the two metropolises, between each metropolis and the waterscape and, secondly, between urbanscape and waterscape and the novels’ fictional frameworks. Within the framework of the augmented reality, we synthesize the writers’ fictional cities with the factual surroundings of the metropolises in order to reconstruct the fragmented natural and architectural urban views in the continuity of the urban fabric, thus ending up proposing a dynamic repository of the metropolis landscape’s natural, collective and cultural memory. Full article

Rituals are embedded in a particular time and space, and so are their objects and meanings. The ‘chronotope’ we focus on here is the occasional—partly self-chosen, partly societally forced—ritual death of Hindu widows along with their deceased husbands. Although never widely practiced, widow-burning caught the imagination of Europeans as illustrating both Hinduism’s ‘barbarity’ and its ‘high conjugal ideals’. Although satī had been outlawed since 1829, in 1987 a new case inflamed opposing sentiments. In 2002, in a passage called ‘Ritual Criticism and Widow Burning’, Ronald Grimes drew attention to it as a rite of passage that calls for normative comments and ritual criticism. Since then, in circles of ritual studies Hindu, widow-burning has occasionally been repeated as one of the ritual practices in need of condemnation. In order to put this rare practice, banned since almost 200 years ago, back into a proper time–place perspective, both its ritual details and its sociocultural contexts are revisited. Finally, we propose some case-specific factors that could serve as retrospective ritual criticism. We conclude with a plea for time–space sensitivity. Full article

This article looks at cosmopolitanism in the American film musical through the lens of the genre’s self-reflexivity. By incorporating musical numbers into its narrative, the musical mirrors the entertainment industry mise en abyme, and establishes an intrinsic link to America through the act of (cultural) performance. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope and its recent application to the genre of the musical, I read the implicitly spatial backstage/stage duality overlaying narrative and number—the musical’s dual registers—as a means of challenging representations of Americanness, nationhood, and belonging. The incongruities arising from the segmentation into dual registers, realms complying with their own rules, destabilize the narrative structure of the musical and, as such, put the semantic differences between narrative and number into critical focus. A close reading of the 1972 film Cabaret, whose narrative is set in 1931 Berlin, shows that the cosmopolitanism of the American film musical lies in this juxtaposition of non-American and American (at least connotatively) spaces and the self-reflexive interweaving of their associated registers and narrative levels. If metalepsis designates the transgression of (onto)logically separate syntactic units of film, then it also symbolically constitutes a transgression and rejection of national boundaries. In the case of Cabaret, such incongruities and transgressions eventually undermine the notion of a stable American identity, exposing the American Dream as an illusion produced by the inherent heteronormativity of the entertainment industry. The film advocates a cosmopolitan model of cultural hybridity and the plurality of identities by shedding light on the faultlines of nationalist essentialism. Full article

While cyberpunk is often described as a dystopian genre, the paper argues that it should be seen rather as a post-utopian one. The crucial difference between the two resides in the nature of the historical imagination reflected in their respective narrative and thematic conventions. While dystopia and utopia (structurally the same genre) reflect a teleological vision of history, in which the future is radically different from the present, post-utopia corresponds to what many scholars, from Fredric Jameson and Francis Fukuyama to David Bell, have diagnosed as the “end of history” or rather, the end of historical teleology. Post-utopia reflects the vision of the “broad present”, in which the future and the past bleed into, and contaminate, the experience of “now”. From its emergence in the 1980s and until today, cyberpunk has progressively succumbed to the post-utopian sensibility, as its earlier utopian/dystopian potential has been diluted by nostalgia, repetition and recycling. By analyzing the chronotope of cyberpunk, the paper argues that the genre’s articulation of time and space is inflected by the general post-utopian mood of global capitalism. The texts addressed include both novels (William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Matthew Mather’s Atopia) and movies (Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049 and Ex Machina). Full article

With reference to a hybrid ethnographic project entitled Glas Journal (2014–2016), this article invites readers to reflect on the cultural mapping of spaces we intimately inhabit. Developed with the participation of local inhabitants of Dún Laoghaire Harbour, Ireland, Glas Journal seeks to explore the maritime environment as a liminal space, whereby the character of buildings and an area’s economic implications determine our relationship to space as much as our daily spatial rhythms and feelings of safety. Deep mapping provides the methodological blueprint for Glas Journal. In order to create a heteroglossic narrative of place and belonging, I will contextualise the project with references to seminal works in the visual arts, literature, film and geography that emotionally map spaces. Chronotopes of the threshold will be used to elaborate on spatial and cultural phenomena that occur when crossings from public to private and interior to exterior take place. Touching upon questions such as “What is a space of protection?”, “Who am I in it?”, and “Who is the Other?”, this article traces forms of liquid mapping that do not strive to conquer but rather to gain insight into the inner landscapes that are reflected in outer space. Full article