Search Results (31)

Co-authored by a French humanitarian anthropologist and a South Sudanese refugee and environmental activist, both writers situated across the Global North and South, this article argues that artistic practices in displacement operate as infrastructures of survival, whose conditions of existence are both enabled and constrained by external actors. Drawing on a case study of Tongogara Refugee Settlement, it argues that the arts—and, more broadly, knowledge production—constitute key survival mechanisms across psychological, psychosocial, and identity-related dimensions. This article further shows that artistic practices in displacement are not only autonomous expressions of resilience but also mediated cultural forms whose visibility and meaning are co-produced through humanitarian, institutional, and epistemic regimes—including the regimes of academic writing itself. First, we examine art’s three interrelated survival dimensions: psychological (personal coherence amid uncertainty and symbolic mobility), psychosocial (collective bonding and mutual support), and identity (cultural representation, memory, heritage, and self-definition in displacement). Second, we examine how these functions are shaped by interactions with external actors—including humanitarian organizations, donors, cultural platforms, and academic institutions—that may increase visibility while favoring curated representation over sustained artistic development, reflecting broader donor-driven logics of accountability. Third, drawing on reflexive notes from the co-authorship process, we show how academic narration can reproduce these asymmetries, thereby positioning co-creation as both an ethical practice and an epistemic condition of equitable knowledge production. Drawing on humanitarian anthropology, aesthetics, and decolonial epistemologies, we argue that processes of symbolic and cultural reconstruction remain structurally under-institutionalized, circulating across humanitarian, developmental, and epistemic regimes without being fully claimed by any of them. Rather than offering normative prescriptions, the article traces how co-production itself becomes a site where these asymmetries are reproduced and made visible. Full article

Generative artificial intelligence in higher education refers here to the use of computational systems that produce text, code, explanations, feedback-like responses, images, and other outputs from user prompts in university learning, coursework, assessment, and student study practices. This entry focuses on how students use generative AI while studying, preparing assignments, seeking explanations, revising work, programming, brainstorming, or responding to assessment tasks. It defines such use as a situated educational practice shaped by disciplinary expectations, assessment design, AI literacy, study habits, and academic integrity norms. From this perspective, the same AI-supported action may be acceptable as learning support in one course, ambiguous in another, and inappropriate when it conceals authorship, fabricates evidence, or substitutes for independent academic performance. Full article

This essay examines the painting known as Portrait of Elizaveta Iakovleva, which has long been attributed to Kazimir Malevich, using close analysis of the painting materials and techniques, as well as newly discovered archival evidence. It reconstructs part of the work’s provenance, places it within Malevich’s late Leningrad circle, and explores Maria Dzhagupova’s and Elizaveta Iakovleva’s roles in relation to the artist. By comparing the portrait with Malevich’s late portraits and works by Dzhagupova, the study revisits authorship and sitter identity. It argues for a more nuanced understanding of the complex exchanges between Malevich and his students and situates the work more precisely within his late portrait practice and artistic milieu of the 1930s. Full article

This article examines the ethical and aesthetic stakes of cultural borrowing in fashion through the case of Yves Saint Laurent’s sustained engagement with Moroccan visual and material traditions. Drawing on postcolonial theory, fashion studies, and aesthetic philosophy and supported by visual analysis and qualitative research, this study interrogates the tension between cultural appreciation and appropriation that structures Saint Laurent’s legacy. His designs amplified global visibility for Moroccan craftsmanship, yet this visibility was mediated through Western systems of authorship that privileged the couturier while obscuring the cultural, spiritual, and artisanal labor underpinning the motifs he reinterpreted. Saint Laurent’s own positionality, born within the colonial milieu of French Algeria, further complicates this dynamic, enabling both cultural intimacy and the exercise of hierarchical distance from the traditions he transformed for Parisian haute couture. This discussion also requires acknowledging that Moroccan cultural heritage, shaped by the intertwined influences of Amazigh, Arab, Islamic, and Jewish traditions, embodies religious meanings that extend beyond the purely aesthetic. By considering the religious, symbolic, and communal values embedded within Moroccan aesthetic forms, this article foregrounds the ethical dilemmas that arise when culturally and spiritually situated practices are reframed within Western fashion. This study ultimately contends that acts of borrowing can serve both as homage and erasure, suggesting that the relationship between appropriation and appreciation is better understood as a flexible spectrum rather than a rigid binary. Full article

This article investigates how women’s relative absence from medieval textual archives can be reconsidered through the study of visual and material culture. Focusing on Mongol and Yuan China and read in relation to The Travels of Marco Polo, it argues that women’s artistic production functioned as a form of embedded counter-archive that preserves traces of participation obscured in narrative sources. Drawing on Black feminist epistemology as a heuristic framework and employing critical fabulation and poetic inquiry as analytical methods, the study interprets silence as a meaningful historical trace rather than a void, and considers silence not as absence but as a structured condition of archival production. Four case studies—Guan Daosheng’s literati bamboo painting, the handscroll tradition associated with Lady Su Hui, imperial phoenix embroidery, and Silk Road textile fragments—demonstrate distinct modes through which women’s presence becomes materially legible: mediated visibility, formal containment, infrastructural anonymity, and circulatory displacement. These “quiet arts” reveal how women’s labour and creativity persisted within and alongside patriarchal inscriptional systems even when textual attribution receded. In dialogue with the shadow silhouettes of contemporary artist Kara Walker, the article further situates these premodern archives within a broader visual language of absence and recovery. Rather than reconstructing lost biographies, it proposes a transdisciplinary method—integrating art history, feminist theory, theology, and poetic inquiry—for reading material culture as a site where historical silence becomes structurally legible. It proposes a transdisciplinary approach that expands art historical methods for interpreting gender, authorship, and archival silence in medieval visual culture. Full article

This article introduces Memetic/Metaphorical Digital Twins (MDTs) as a novel extension of Digital Twin typologies by twinning conceptual schemes, complementing Industrial, Human, and Cognitive Digital Twins. MDTs embed cultural, organizational, and semiotic knowledge into digital frameworks, enabling the recombination and evolution of knowledge structures across disciplines. Drawing on Schlaile’s economic perspectives and Mavromatidis’s architectural lens of entropy and constructal thermodynamics, this study demonstrates how MDTs can address systemic challenges in communication, knowledge transfer, and design. A Digital Community Platform, under development for supporting decentralized Personal Knowledge Management Systems (PKMS), provides the operational foundation, integrating iterative KM cycles to support knowledge co-creation. Its logic and logistics substitute the traditional document paradigm with a memetic approach by utilizing memes as replicable, adaptive knowledge units, thereby mimicking biological evolution and ecosystem resilience in digital platform environments. It aims to offer distributed, decentralized, bottom-up, affordable, knowledge-worker-centric applications prioritizing personalization, mobility, generativity, and entropy reduction; its mission is to serve a knowledge-co-creating community characterized by highly diverse individual Abilities, Contexts, Means, and Ends (ACME) facing increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous futures (VUCA). A Boundary Object Taxonomy to Omnify Memetic Storytelling (BOTTOMS) is proposed to further structure atomic units of meaning—such as memes, mythemes, narratemes, and reputemes—into a unified framework for authorship and dissemination. The article situates MDTs within a design science research paradigm, outlines current implementation progress, and identifies future developments, including AI-supported curation, personalized metrics, and expanded boundary objects. Together, these contributions position MDTs as a universal framework for adaptive, transdisciplinary knowledge co-creation. Full article

This practice-led research examines how virtual production represents a circular return to scenographic practice, reactivating integrated modes of spatial authorship that have long underpinned screen storytelling but were obscured by industrial fragmentation. Drawing on a single-day intensive workshop at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School (AFTRS), the study analyses how spatial authorship emerged through embodied, collaborative engagement with an LED volume environment. Grounded in scenographic theory and concepts of distributed cognition and situated authorship, the article reframes virtual production as a condition that renders pre-digital, collaborative modes of making visible within contemporary screen production. The LED volume functions simultaneously as scenic environment, lighting instrument, and compositional partner, requiring participants to negotiate space, light, movement, and camera as a unified spatial event. Analysis identifies how scenographic understanding emerged through virtual scouting, world-responsive storytelling, physical-digital integration, and embodied realisation. The findings extend production design theory by challenging ocular-centric models of mise-en-scène and positioning scenographic integration as screen practice—an epistemic mode of enacting through collective, materially grounded spatial experimentation. While situated within an educational context, the study points to broader implications for how spatial authorship and collective practice are understood in contemporary screen production. Full article

Surrealism persistently resisted its own historicization, defining itself not as a literary or artistic movement but as an activity of the mind aimed at total liberation. This essay re-examines surrealism’s internal contradictions: its rejection of literature alongside its dependence on literary institutions; its commitment to psychic freedom alongside political orthodoxy; and its hostility to authorship alongside the production of canonical works. Drawing on manifestos, journals, performance practices, and postwar critical reception, the essay situates surrealism at the fault line between modernism, Dada, and later poststructuralist theory. It argues that surrealism’s most enduring legacy lies less in its aesthetic products than in its reconfiguration of cultural authority among artist, artwork, and reader, a redistribution that continues to shape contemporary literary, media, and performance studies. Full article

This paper examines the role of generative AI in contemporary craft ecologies, with a focus on Italy’s artisanal and design ecosystems. Rather than framing AI as a threat to heritage or merely a tool for efficiency, we propose that AI can be a collaborator within hybrid intelligences that extend craftsmanship, rather than replace it. Drawing on posthumanist and more-than-human design perspectives, we conceptualize hybrid intelligence as a relational infrastructure for co-design among humans, materials, and computational systems. Through a literature review and ten expert interviews with designers, artisans, curators, engineers, and scholars, we identify tensions around authorship, authenticity, standardization, ethics, craft heritage, and data cultures. Speculative scenarios project hesitant futures, balancing risks of homogenization with opportunities for resilience. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it proposes a conceptual map of hybrid intelligence for craft and heritage contexts. Second, it offers situated insights into Italian craft imaginaries based on expert perspectives. Third, it demonstrates a methodological approach that combines thematic analysis with speculative futuring. Full article

This paper explores how collective resilience is built and sustained through situated, relational, and reparative approaches to design within conditions of deep spatial inequality. Focusing on Johannesburg’s Slovo Park settlement and the long-standing 15 year collaboration between the Slovo Park Community Development Forum (SPCDF) and 1to1—Agency of Engagement, it examines how participatory tool-making—centred on two keystone tools, the Blue File (a community-held, cloud-based knowledge repository) and the Timeline Tool (a multi-workshop planning and accountability device)—supports iteration, voice change, leadership transitions, and decision-making “with the map in hand.” Grounded in Southern urbanist theory and spatial justice scholarship, the paper re-politicises resilience as ongoing negotiation, repair, and shared authorship. It details how a map-based pointing practice translated situated knowledges into spatial choices; how the Blue File preserved continuity and evidence through leadership turnover; and how the Timeline Tool embedded care and transparency. Alongside benefits, the paper surfaces key tensions—expectation management, idea overload, triage and prioritisation, and legitimacy during leadership changes—and shows the concrete decision protocols used to move from many inputs to buildable design options. It concludes with ethical reflections for practitioners working in postcolonial/post-apartheid contexts and offers transferable lessons for allied urban conditions. Full article

This article utilizes canonical interpretation to reassess Paul’s eulogy in Ephesians 1:3–14 by situating it within the Bible’s overarching narrative of placemaking—from Genesis to Revelation. Rejecting purely historical-grammatical approaches, the study treats the Protestant canon as a unified literary and theological whole with both divine and human authorship. Drawing on intertextual methods, especially the work of NT Wright and David Larsen, the author frames Paul’s eulogy as a theological “mini narrative” nested within the grand canonical mission: God’s purpose to create and dwell with His family in a holy place (God’s house as God’s home with His family in God’s homeland). The article argues that this placial mission undergirds themes of election, redemption, sonship, administration, and land inheritance within the eulogy, connecting creation’s foundation with eschatological summation in Christ. The analysis incorporates spatial theory and narratology to illuminate Paul’s understanding of the world as contested territory where the church advances God’s mission. In doing so, it reveals the eulogy as a densely intertextual and theologically coherent passage that situates believers within God’s cosmic, administrative plan for new creation and divine habitation. The implication for resurrection and new creation, based on this grand canonical mission and on God’s all-encompassing master plan, is asserted as part of this unified plan. Full article

This study investigates how differing national research governance models impact academic performance by comparing European Research Council (ERC) grant winners in the social sciences and humanities from France and the Netherlands. Situated within the broader context of centralized versus decentralized research systems, the analysis aims to understand how these structures shape publication trends, thematic diversity, and collaboration patterns. Drawing on Scopus and SciVal data covering 9996 publications by 305 ERC winners between 2019 and 2023, we employed a multi-method approach, including latent Dirichlet allocation for topic modeling, compound annual growth rate analysis, and co-authorship network analysis. The results show that neuroscience, climate change, and psychology are dominant domains, with language and linguistics particularly prevalent in France and law and political science in the Netherlands. French ERC winners are more likely to be affiliated with national or sectoral institutions, whereas in the Netherlands, elite universities dominate. Collaboration emerged as a key success factor, with an average of four co-authors per publication and network analyses revealing central figures who bridge topical clusters. International collaborations were consistently linked with higher visibility, while single-authored publications showed limited impact. These findings suggest that institutional context and collaborative practices significantly shape research performance in both countries. Full article

Dvora Baron’s “Ogmat Nefesh” exemplifies the complexities of early 20th-century Jewish multilingualism, offering distinct Hebrew and Yiddish versions of the story to explore intersections of gender, ideology, and identity. This paper draws on theoretical frameworks from Harshav’s concept of the “language of power”, Miron’s notion of “amphibianism”, Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory, and Brenner’s “lingering bilingualism” to examine how Baron’s bilingual authorship shapes her narrative strategies and critiques systemic inequities. Through close readings of key passages, it analyzes how her linguistic choices influence character portrayal, narrative tone, and thematic emphasis across the two versions. Situating “Ogmat Nefesh” within the historical contexts of Eastern European and Palestinian Jewish communities, the study also considers Baron’s engagement with Zionist and diasporic frameworks and her feminist critique of patriarchal structures. Finally, Baron’s personal experiences of exile and literary seclusion further illuminate the interplay between individual circumstances and cultural production in her work. By engaging with secondary scholarship and feminist perspectives, this study highlights Baron’s contributions to early 20th-century feminist writing and her enduring relevance to debates on multilingualism and cultural identity in Jewish literature. Full article

Graffiti’s dual existence as both public art and illicit practice has generated sustained legal, cultural, and aesthetic debates. This article examines the role of anonymity in shaping how graffiti is recognized, regulated, and interpreted within both legal frameworks and artworld aesthetics. Focusing on the legal battle over 5Pointz, a prominent New York graffiti site that was whitewashed in 2013 and demolished in 2014, I analyze how the Cohen v. G&M Realty L.P. case reveals a structural tension between graffiti’s collective ethos and the legal system’s emphasis on identifiable authorship. Drawing upon legal studies, urban cultural theory, and aesthetics, this article explores how the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) mediated the legal recognition of graffiti, often privileging curated, institutionally sanctioned works while rendering anonymous street art legally vulnerable. I further synthesize scholarly perspectives on 5Pointz to highlight how legal discourse constructs and delimits the status of graffiti within public spaces. Ultimately, I argue that anonymity functions not simply as an absence of authorship but as an aesthetic and political mode of experiencing the object, one that challenges traditional frameworks of artistic attribution and cultural legitimacy. By interrogating the legal and ideological forces that shape graffiti’s recognition, this article situates anonymity as a central, yet often overlooked, feature of graffiti’s critical and aesthetic power. Full article

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) in high-risk training simulations represents a significant advance in preparing professionals for critical situations. This study presents an exhaustive bibliometric review of the scientific literature published between 2015 and 2025, analyzing the trends, impact, and evolution of these technologies in various high-risk fields. The methodology employed included systematic searches in databases, such as Web of Science and Scopus, using keywords related to AI, VR, and high-risk simulation. Here, 700 articles were analyzed, applying co-citation analysis and scientific mapping techniques. The results reveal an exponential growth in publications on this topic, with an average annual increase of 5.54%. The following main thematic clusters were identified: emergency medicine, aviation, nuclear industry, and disaster response. The co-authorship analysis showed strong international collaboration, with the United States, China, and Germany standing out as leaders in research. This study provides a comprehensive view of the current state of research, identifying the main areas, gaps, and opportunities in the application of AI and VR in high-risk training. Full article