What’s On Shopping & Spas.

I am looking forward to visiting, this coming week, the University of Cork, where I will be giving a lecture entitled ‘ “The Butcher of England”, a Renaissance man: John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester and the Yorkist discovery of humanist eloquence’. I do not seem to be able to get away from Tiptoft, Constable of England, Lieutenant of Ireland, notorious for both his bloodthirsty nature and his status as ‘a Renaissance Prince’. I am hoping to do something new in this talk, tailored to my hosts: I am going to attempt to combine codicological discussion with an overview of changes in Latin style in fifteenth-century England.  The purpose of this post is to provide those who are planning to attend  (and those who, though absent, can conjure up a concept of what the evening will be like) with a sneak preview. I have produced a few pages comprising some of the texts to which I will refer (it is a Word document) — close reading of them beforehand is not essential, and to avoid disappointment, I should emphasise that there will be brief discussion of them. Those who do look at them will, I suspect, not find it hard quickly to grasp the line of argument of the paper.

For those who are less interested in the niceties of Latin epistolography, the lecture will also provide — the gods of Powerpoint willing — some visual stimulation. The argument will be underpinned by discussion of my research into the library of John Tiptoft. It was a collection which, in the middle of the twentieth century, was lamented as being nearly completed lost. We can now identify over thirty manuscripts from the collection, and for those who are interested, they can view the present list on this website.

I hope that these resources provide some intellectual nourishment — not that a whole meal, more an amuse-bouche for this coming week.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the LearnTrends 2009 Online Conference, but I heard great things about it. Fortunately, I ran across a video archive of the conference, thanks to a blog post by George Siemens. (LearnTrends was sponsored by Jay Cross, Tony Karrer, and George Siemens.)

Check out the video archive.

There are tons of other details about the conference here, and you can get more info about LearnTrends on these social networks:

• Twitter
• Delicious
• Facebook
• LinkedIn

Enjoy!

The MIT Venture Capital & Private Equity Club presents the 12th annual MIT Venture Capital Conference. From the conference website: “Against the background of a quickly changing economic environment, the 2009 conference will illuminate the critical trends and opportunities available in this ‘Brave New World.’ How have dramatic shifts in the political and financial worlds changed the venture capital and entrepreneurial landscape? If this is the time to start or fund a venture, where are the best opportunities in healthcare, energy, digital media, internet and mobile? How are venture capital funds adapting given the challenges in exit markets and LP relationships? Can the VC model work in emerging and social markets?” Keynote speakers include Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Greycroft managing director Alan Patricof. Full agenda and registration information here.

* You can listen to a segment of the Slavoj Žižek essay on contemporary apocalypticism that will appear in our upcoming issue of Polygraph here. (via Verso)

* The headline reads, Cigar-Shaped “Mothership” Plunges Argentinian Town Into A Blackout.

* 15 Toys Not to Buy Your Child This Christmas. Of course, science proves you shouldn’t buy anyone gifts at all. (Both links via Neil.)

* Is the public option now too watered-down to fight for? Matt Yglesias and Steve Benen join Josh Marshall in thinking this over. I feel exactly how I did on Monday: the point is to pass anything so it can be improved without a filibuster.

* North Carolina in the news! Kay Hagan is the Senate’s 17th wealthiest senator (via), while Blue Cross/Blue Shield of North Carolina has gotten itself in big trouble for improper issue advocacy against the public option.

* Other politics quick hits: HIV travel ban finally lifted. The national GOP has money problems. They’re talking about a war tax. Despite what you may hear in the press, Obama is pretty good at this whole international diplomacy thing. And Dubai is collapsing; couldn’t have happened to a nicer country.

* The New York Times “100 Notable Books of 2009″ list is already out.

* ‘Are Fake Academic Conferences the New Nigerian Prince Scam?’

* Little-used geek measurements.

Sheppey (distance)
I have to include Douglas Adams’ co-creation (with John Lloyd) here — It’s from The Meaning of Liff, their dictionary of things there aren’t any words for yet. All the words in the dictionary are British place names (the Isle of Sheppey is off the Kent coast). One sheppey is the closest distance at which sheep are still picturesque, and is about seven-eighths of a mile.

* Thor, a Marvel comics character I’m still pretty sure has to be an elaborate joke, will redefine what a superhero movie can be.

* Black Friday LEGO nostalgia.

* Ah, that explains it: that badly timed Dollhouse ARG turns out to be the work of overzealous fans.

* Paging George Michael Bluth. (via)

Gilbane Group, the Cambridge, MA-based analyst and consulting firm focused on enterprise content management challenges, will hold its sixth annual conference in Boston, December 1-3. The conference will cover everything from Microsoft Sharepoint to XBRL, and from mobile search to Google Wave.

Complete conference program and registration info is at www.gilbaneboston.com. It is possible to save $200 on the conference registration fee by using the discount code: Xconomy.

This conference will bring together the fields of transportation and emergency management to discuss evacuation planning to accommodate the needs of all people before, during and after a major disaster. Conference topics include addressing the challenges faced by special needs populations during disasters and improvements in evacuation planning and modeling. The conference will take place February 3 – 5, 2010 in New Orleans and online registration is available. For more information about emergency preparedness as it relates to people with disabilities read Effective Emergency Management: Making Improvements for Communities and People with Disabilities.

National Evacuation Conference
(author unknown)
Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:56:12 GMT

Yup, so in order to secure a room near the 2010 SBL Annual Meeting site in Atlanta without having to pay the high costs of the official hotels, I’ve booked a room two blocks away at the Hilton.

The top right is the Hilton, The center left is the Hyatt

But hey, at least I waited till I got home to do it and didn’t do it in New Orleans (like I considered)…   Anyway, the early bird catches the less expensive room.

I’m attending the AsiaFit Fitness Conference in Bangkok this weekend and after Day 1, I am super ecstatic. Unlike the many many, many finance conferences I had been to, I actually feel like I am HERE and I’m ready to be involved, ask questions because I really care, meet people because we all share the same interests, and be fully engaged and really learn and THINK about some of the new ideas, opinions, methodologies, and techniques from different teachers. It has been a wonderful venue of exchange and sharing and I cannot wait for Day 2.

A round-up of Day 1:
…early morning yoga session with YogaFit instructor Ansley, who was so lovely and awesome and I want to bring her back to Asia
…CRUNCH Buff Yoga with their nat’l yoga director Jess. It was such an interesting integrating of light weights and vinyasa flow yoga. Jess was engaging and so funny in class and I can see him coming up with even more ways of making yoga for the everyONE
…CRUNCH Disco Yoga with Taj to 70s ABBA, Aretha and MJ!! I had so much fun sweating and moving my bootie to the rythms and then spoke to Taj who is also a life coach and I also want to bring her back out to Asia for workshops and retreats
…A workshop in bringing external power from inner peace with Simon, who has probably the most insane range of stomach muscle movements I have ever seen but is one heck of a strong yogi. With his help, I think I am one medium-sized step closer to getting handstand from prasarita!

Jon Pratt, Dan Brown and I had the opportunity to travel to New Orleans to the recent meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. About three thousand representatives of the diverse evangelical movement gather annually to present papers and discuss theology and practice. This year’s theme was on ethics, so a number of papers focused on broad ethical issues confronting believers. Denny Burke, for example, gave a good paper on why we should reject Brian McLaren’s view of homosexuality.

Other papers covered theological and biblical topics. Having recently gone done the Colorado River with Answers in Genesis, I was interested in the Creation Study group. I was unable to attend the whole of the sessions as it overlapped with a paper which I gave, but the one paper I heard was by Paul Seely arguing for a local flood rather than a worldwide flood as the Bible clearly indicates.  I am truly amazed at the number of professing evangelicals that reject the biblical record in favor of science and yet still claim belief in inerrancy. Evangelicals finesse this rejection by carefully constructed arguments designed to obfuscate (intentionally or otherwise) their implicit denial of inerrancy, and doubtless many simply have not considered the issues. It appears that the debate is beginning to polarize some sections of the evangelical movement.

Dan, Jon, and I also had the opportunity to see and experience some of New Orleans. We stayed just off Canal Street which is adjacent to the French Quarter, home to interesting architecture, great restaurants and the infamous Bourbon Street. We made the mistake of walking on part of Bourbon Street after dark one night. After quickly departing from that avenue of iniquity and returning to safer (from the standpoint of Christian sanctification) areas, we returned to our hotel. We had great fellowship with other colleagues from Detroit Baptist Seminary, Northland International University, Calvary Baptist Seminary, Faith Baptist Bible College, and Northwestern College, just to name a few.

A thought occurred to me regarding Bourbon Street and the inner city of New Orleans—just how would such an area be evangelized? It would be hard enough just to be there without vexing your soul as did Lot when he went to Sodom. Certainly no man could or should storm these citadels of Satan alone, for the presentation of sin would challenge the sanctification of the most godly. Yet the inner cities desperately need the light of the gospel. For what it’s worth, in light of my recent series on alcohol, I am considering writing a piece on drinking in moderation and Bourbon Street. The unofficial motto of New Orleans is laissez les bons temps rouler, “let the good times roll.” The last thing New Orleans wants is for people to drink in moderation! Bourbon Street, though actually named for the French royal family at the founding of New Orleans, is a double entendre if ever there was one! It is infamous for bars, strip clubs, and worse. The alcohol flows freely and open liquor can be carried on the street! The bars boast such concoctions as “The Hand Grenade,” supposedly the drink with the most alcohol in one glass. No thought for moderation in New Orleans! I may write other thoughts on the trip in the days ahead.

Yesterday, I attended the first event of the recently formed Special Interest Group (SIG), Engaging Students Through In-Class Technology (ESTICT) at the University of Leicester.  The aim of the event was to share best practice in the use of in-class technology, with a particular focus on the pedagogic uses of Electronic Voting Systems (EVS).

At the University of Bath, we have been running our institutional pilot of Audience Response Systems (ARS) [project website] since the beginning of the 2008/2009, so this event provided a fantastic opportunity to meet with other colleagues from HE and FE institutions from around the UK to get their thoughts on EVS/ARS, the functionality of the software and hardware, the pedagogy that should drive its use… and everything else.

An active pre-event discussion of EVS has taken place on the Ning community website earlier in the week, so I headed to Leicester rather excited about the event ahead. A lovely curry on the previous evening with Dr Steve Draper (from the University of Glasgow) and Dr Jo Badge (from the University of Leicester, and a fellow steering group member) at Shimla Pinks did little to stem my enthusiasm!

With the event aimed at those both those with experience of EVS who wish to share their best practice and those with an interest in the technology that would like to know more, the steering group was delighted that delegates ranges from Learning Technologist in e-Learning teams, to practitioners who used the technology within their teaching. Importantly, it gave a more rounded feel to some of the conversations that emerged over the course of the day.

The event was keynoted by Dr Steve Draper, a Senior University Teacher from the University of Glasgow and a long time user of such technologies, who spoke on Ways to improve learning with EVS: some deep procedures for teachers, and what software features matter for these [talk website]. With the focus on the learning design, and moving people away from simply ‘pushing buttons’, Steve challenged attendees by giving a brief tour of a variety of approaches that could be considered when writing EVS-type questions. In particular, he spoke about the nature of Assertion Reason questions (I have reviewed this approach elsewhere in this blog), Mazur’s approaches to peer instruction, learner authored questions, promoting enquiry based learning using EVS and the nature of contingent teaching. This made me think quite carefully about practice within my own institution where I have not yet, as the Project Lead, considered how colleagues may have developed their practice of using EVS since the project was launched. Indeed, have they at all? This is something I hope to explore in the coming month, in part through leading on the Enhancing feedback in the classroom using ARS online course that is due to run during semester 2.

Following a short break, Mark Goodwin, a Teaching Fellow within the GENIE CETL at the University of Leicester, spoke on Teaching bioethics using electronic voting technologies. This talk gave a more practitioner focus to proceedings, as Mark worked through his ideas about generating ethics-related debates through using EVS in his teaching. He was keen to stress a difference between student interaction and engagement in lecturers, and later in day, highlighting the (sometimes forgotten) difference between engagement and learning in lectures.

Mark Russell, a National Teaching Fellow and Principal Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire delivered a rather inspiring talk entitled Tracking student progress with EVS: Should we know our students?. During a slightly shortened presentation, Mark gave an insight into just some of the approaches and techniques that he employs within his own teaching to really engage with students, and those that we all might wish to consider. For example,

• Learner Centrered Environments (Bradsford – “How People Learn”)
• Developing independent and Social Learning (Mentkowski. LtL)
• Engaging students at their current level of understanding (Ramsden)
• Staff-student contact (7P’s Chickering & Gamson)
• Maximising students awareness of own misconceptions (Biggs)
• Self-regulation (REAP)

During a presentation of some of his reaching, I liked Mark’s idea, related to EVS question design, about framing questions differently, so that practitioners are testing the same concept from number of different angles and ‘ways in’, which in turn lead to the suggestion that this would identify an misconceptions that the students had. Related to this, he correlated students answers to questions so that if they voted X on question 1 (correct answer), followed by Y on question 2 (incorrect answer – logically they should have got this question correct as it followed from question 1), he wanted to know why.

After a delicious Thanksgiving carvery lunch, the delegates headed back to the main room and split into group for the workshop part of the day which focussed on an Exploration of the pedagogical models which can be used for EVS. Facilitated by two/three steering group members, each group explored the questions,

• What have you done with EVS that has worked well? Why did you do it? What happened as a result?
• What might be required to move from individual innovation to embedded practice?

After a slightly quiet start, the groups quick became animated with a number of conversations revolving with delegates agreeing that a clear focus for the use of EVS should be on the pedagogical model underpinning its use, rather than it being viewed as a magic bullet. A further key comment from my group was that responses and feedback to questions asked are absolutely key to the structure of a lecture – practitioners show that they care about the results generated, and be prepared to alter the session is the results so demand.

The event concluded by delegates discussing the future direction of the ESTICT community, and what form the next event might take. In particular, delegates were keen to see the EVS focus retained for the time being at least. It really does serve quite a niche… but one that we all wished to continue learning more about with a view to developing both individual and departmental practice.

The next event is planned for March/April 2010 and details about this will appear in due course. In the meantime, do head along to to the ESTICT Ning community website, and join in the conversation!

Alternative Culture

ALTERNATIVE CULTURE NOW: THE POLITICS OF CULTURE AT THE PRESENT CONJUNCTURE

Call for Proposals:

‘Alternative Culture Now: The Politics of Culture at the Present Conjuncture’
Conference and Event
Budapest, Hungary
April 8-10, 2010

Proposal Deadline: January 25, 2010

How do things stand with respect to the fate of the alternative? Branded and normativized, incorporated into a whole ensemble of mainstream discourses, and no longer the threat it once posed to capitalist and communist states alike, the political and social force of the alternative seems to have faded away. And yet the dream of the alternative continues to inspire political and social movements, artists, theorists, and all kinds of creative practices. How might we begin to situate and think alternativity as a global phenomenon at this precise conjuncture in world history? What is alternative about culture today? And what might or can it become?

The alternative, of course, has always been phraseable in the singular and the plural. On the one hand, it is a phenomenon locked into local configurations, a multi-polar and non-totalizable practice of myriad deviation. Here, its ambit can be that of a family drama or workplace, a national concatenation, or the homogenizing logic of a dominant cultural medium or genre. The dreams it holds in reserve are vitally minor: the fissuring of a regime with a joke or dissidence, the freedom mobilized in small, almost imperceptible defections or reversals. The production of the alternative is in this sense the aggregate, spontaneous effort of innumerable cultural agents to resist every species of stasis and capture, every grammar and vernacular, every gestural hierarchy and total system.

At the same time, this molecular vision of the alternative, of a plurality of fissions and margins, has always been accompanied by attempts to think what it is in the tendency of a moment which suppresses cultural possibilities on a global level. This is a dream of a communication or inter-mediation between margins, a system of deviances which comprehensively address the conditions which negatively hypostatize the life of the virtual. Global patriarchy, violent state expansionisms, the inhibiting logics of capital, and the globalization of the English language can be envisioned as transnational, systematized normativities that threaten cultural specificity or possibility in a way that is never exhausted by its expression on the register of the local. Is there, in this sense, only one alternative: an alternative to which there is no alternative? This notion of a single alternative-a universal difference necessary to shelter the future lives of difference–immediately sets into motion its own paradoxical dialectics of alternativity, itself appearing to erase the thing it promises. How do we escape this vortex, or at least make its impasses productive?

Is one alternative more important than another? Can alternatives be exhausted or rendered obsolete? What kind of method could we develop to test the valences of alternatives? Can or should alternative culture polemically charge the space of its own marginality, or would this degenerate into an infinite sectarianism?

We understand “alternative culture” to include diverse forms of cultural expression and activity, which are connected by their shared goal of creating just, humane, and equitable human relations by means of their opposition to existing cultural, social, and political forms.

This conference encourages contributions from scholars, educators, artists, cultural workers, policy makers, journalists, and others involved in alternative culture and international cultural policies. We are especially interested in contributions addressing alternative culture in Central/Eastern Europe and countries/regions of the former Soviet Union.

Areas of inquiry for submissions may include, but are not limited to, the following general topics in relation to the politics of alternative culture today:

Aesthetics – Collectivity – post-Communist Culture – Creativity – Cultural Studies – Eastern Europe – Geography -Globalization – Higher Education – Media – Memory/Nostalgia – Music – New Media – ex-Socialist History – ex-Soviet Urban Spaces – Visual Culture

The “Alternative Culture Now: The Politics of Culture at the Present Conjuncture” conference will take place at the OSA Archivum in Budapest, Hungary, April 8-10, 2010. It is organized and sponsored by the International Alternative Culture Center, with the support of the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology (Central European University) and the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies (University of Alberta). The conference format will be diverse, including paper presentations, panels, round-table exchanges, artistic performances, and exhibitions. We encourage individual and collaborative paper and panel proposals from across the disciplines and from artists and community members.

Paper Submissions should include: (1) contact information; (2) a 300-500 word abstract; and (3) a one page curriculum vitae or a brief bio.

Panel Proposals should include: (1) a cover sheet with contact information for chair and each panelist; (2) a one-page rationale explaining the relevance of the panel to the theme of the conference; (3) a 300 word abstract for each proposed paper; and (4) a one page curriculum vitae for each presenter.

Please submit individual paper proposals or full panel proposals via e-mail attachment by January 25, 2010 to 
alternativeculturenow@gmail.com with the subject line “Alternative Culture Now.” Attachments should be in .doc or .rtf formats. Submissions should be one document (i.e. include all required information in one attached document).

Website: http://www.alternativeculture.org

Conference Organizing Team: Sarah Blacker (University of Alberta, Canada), Jessie Labov (Ohio State, USA), Andrew Pendakis (University of Bonn, Germany), Justin Sully (McMaster University, Canada), Imre Szeman (University of Alberta, Canada), Maria Whiteman (University of Alberta, Canada), and Olga Zaslavskaya (OSA, Hungary)

Sarah Blacker
Department of English and Film Studies
3-5 Humanities Centre
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
T6G 2E5

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

3020866    การประชุมระหว่างภาควิชาเกี่ยวกับโรคมะเร็ง    Interdepartmental Oncology Conferences

อภิปรายปัญหาจากผู้ป่วยโรคมะเร็งในการประชุมระหว่างแผนกวิชา ในด้านวินิจฉัยทางคลินิกและห้องปฏิบัติการรวมทั้งการวางแผนการรักษาด้วยวิธีต่างๆ

(Discuss problems of oncology patients in the interdepartmental oncology conferences regarding clinical and laboratory diagnostic including multimodality approach to cancer management.)

(3020866 จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย)

3020888    การประชุมระหว่างภาควิชาเกี่ยวกับโรคติดเชื้อ    Interdepartment Infectious Conferences

เสนอและอภิปรายปัญหาผู้ป่วยโรคติดเชื้อหรือบทความเกี่ยวกับโรคติดเชื้อ

(Presentation and discussion problems infectious patients of articles about infection diseases.)

(3020888 จุฬาลงกรณ์มหาวิทยาลัย)

On Dec. 10–11, the HKU Department of Philosophy will host what I anticipate will be a very interesting international conference on comparative philosophy: “Happiness East & West.” Details are here.

The conference organizer is my colleague Timothy O’Leary. Much thanks to Timothy for planning the event and to the Louis Cha Fund, the HKU Faculty of Arts, and the HKU School of Humanities for their sponsorship.

“Happiness East & West” will be the first in a projected series of conferences at HKU on themes in comparative philosophy. I’m hoping that these conferences will be held biennially.

My own contribution to the “Happiness” conference is called “Wandering the Way: A Eudaimonistic Approach to the Zhuangzi.” A précis is

Wandering the Way:

A Eudaimonistic Approach to the Zhuangzi

Précis

One common conception of happiness is that it lies in the experience of pleasure. Another is a eudaimonistic conception of happiness as a state of well-being or flourishing. As a rule, the Zhuāngzǐ 莊子 disvalues happiness in the sense of pleasure. Numerous passages in the anthology valorize a state of affective equanimity or harmony and treat emotions as unwanted disturbances, whether negative emotions such as sadness and grief or positive ones such as joy and happiness. Intriguingly, however, one Zhuāngzǐ passage (HY 21/24–38) depicts such equanimity as a component of an activity it calls “letting the heart wander in the beginning of things,” which it in turn characterizes as “ultimate happiness.” Arguably, then, the passage presents a conception of happiness in the second sense, as a state or activity akin in some way to eudaimonia.

Eudaimonia in Greek thought is a general label for the final end of life, an intrinsically good state or activity constitutive of the good life. Many Greek thinkers tie eudaimonia to moral virtue (arete), such that a unified understanding of what is morally right, integrated with the motivation to do it, is either sufficient for eudaimonia or an essential component of it. In these two respects, the Greek conception of eudaimonia is alien to the Zhuāngzǐ. The arguments in “Discourse on Evening Things Out” (齊物論) and “Autumn Waters” (秋水), among other important texts, suggest that Zhuangist writers would reject the idea that human life has any fixed purpose or end, and they would surely deny that morality plays a central role in the best sort of life. Still, throughout the Zhuāngzǐ we do find a concern with living well, typically expressed through normative descriptions of the ideal or good life. Numerous passages depict ideal human types, such as the sage (聖人), the “ultimate human” (至人), or the “genuine human” (真人); advocate preserving one’s “genuineness” (真); or portray and commend the exercise of dé 德 (power, virtuosity). In this respect, eudaimonistic ideals are clearly prominent in the Zhuāngzǐ. These ideals seem distinctive in emphasizing the manner in which one lives, rather than the content of one’s activities. Though the two issues are not entirely distinct, we might say that the Zhuāngzǐ is concerned primarily with how we do whatever we do, rather than what it is we do. The Zhuangist approach thus sidesteps thorny normative questions about the content of eudaimonia that beset familiar positions in the Western tradition, such as Aristotle’s. It also skirts normative issues that trouble Ruist and Mohist positions in the Chinese tradition.

This paper develops a Zhuangist account of the ideal or good life on which its defining feature is the exercise of “virtuosity” or “power” (dé 德) in a general mode of activity called “wandering” or “roaming” (yóu 遊). “Wandering” comprises several key elements. One is cognitive understanding of the dào 道 (way), or the order and patterns of the cosmos. This includes recognition of the incomprehensible vastness and duration of the cosmos, the continual transformation of everything in it, the contingency and causal dependence of each thing on others, and accordingly the contingency and heterogeneity of value. Another element is affective equanimity concerning the contingent, transitory circumstances of one’s life. Such equanimity is partly the product of a third element, cognitive and affective identification with the whole of nature and the process of change. These three elements each contribute to a fourth, the ability to adapt fluidly and efficaciously to changing conditions, such that one can spontaneously find the most efficient path in selecting among and performing activities. Zhuangist writers apparently regard this ideal of cognitively aware, affectively calm, adaptive activity as a generalization or extension of features characteristic of the performance of skills. Such “wandering,” I propose, represents a distinctive view of agency on which the mode of immediate, responsive, efficacious action epitomized by skills is considered the highest exercise of human capacities.

Zhuāngzǐ passages suggest several potential justifications for this view of the good life. Purportedly, such “wandering” reflects a correct understanding of the natural world and the conditions of human life. It promotes psychophysical well-being while facilitating practical success. Moreover, it constitutes the fullest exercise of our most distinctively human features, namely our capacities for cognitive understanding, aesthetic and affective appreciation, and intelligent, responsive agency. The paper argues that these grounds tell against characterizing Zhuangist thought as a “virtue ethic,” despite its eudaimonistic aspects. For the Zhuāngzǐ, the good life—a life of dé (virtuosity)—is distinguished by the agent’s cognitive and affective grasp of the dào (way), or the order and patterns of the cosmos, and her efficacious, harmonious interaction with it. Thus dé, the Zhuangist analogue of virtue, is not normatively basic. It is understood through its relation to dào, a source of normativity conceptually independent of human flourishing. Indeed, we might say that for the Zhuāngzǐ, human dé just is the capacity for resiliently and skillfully living one’s life in harmony with the dào.

“EUNIS 2010 is the 16^th Congress in a series of conferences within the framework of the European University Information Systems organisation (EUNIS).
EUNIS Congresses are international events that attract a large audience from Higher Education Institutions (HEI). It is a chance for international specialists, users, researchers, decision–makers and academic teachers from all over Europe to share their experience. Moreover, it is a very good event to present and publish the latest results of research, investigations and deployment concerning Information Technology in HEIs.

This edition of the annual EUNIS Congress, hosted by the University of Warsaw, will take place on 23-25 June 2010 in Warsaw, the capital of Poland.”

Important dates:

’til then… Keep a sharp eye on it!

Health

HEALTH, EMBODIMENT AND VISUAL CULTURE: ENGAGING PUBLICS AND PEDAGOGIES

CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Conference: “Health, Embodiment, and Visual Culture: Engaging Publics and Pedagogies”

November 19-20, 2010
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Conference Co-Chairs:
Sarah Brophy, Associate Professor, Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University
Janice Hladki, Associate Professor, School of the Arts, McMaster University

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: January 15, 2010

CONFERENCE DESCRIPTION:
This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore how visual cultural practices image and imagine unruly bodies and, in so doing, respond to Patricia Zimmermann’s call for “radical media democracies that animate contentious public spheres” (2000, p. xx). Our aim is to explore how health, disability, and the body are theorized, materialized, and politicized in forms of visual culture including photography, video art, graphic memoir, film, body art and performance, and digital media. Accordingly, we invite proposals for individual papers and roundtables that consider how contemporary visual culture makes bodies political in ways that matter for the future of democracy. Proposals may draw on fields such as: visual culture, critical theory, disability studies, health studies, science studies, autobiography studies, indigenous studies, feminisms, queer studies, and globalization/transnationalism.

CONFERENCE EVENTS:
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
*Rebecca Belmore,* internationally recognized Anishinabekwe artist, Vancouver (exhibitions of her performance, video, installation, and sculpture include: Venice Biennale, Sydney Biennale, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts);
*Lisa Cartwright,* Professor of Communication and Science Studies and Affiliated Faculty in Gender Studies, Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego (/Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture/; /Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child/)
*Robert McRuer,* Professor and Deputy Chair, Department of English, George Washington University, Washington, DC (/Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability/; /The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities/);
*Ato Quayson,* Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto (/Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation/; /Relocating Postcolonialism/).

The conference will also feature /Scrapes: Unruly Embodiments in Video Art,/ an exhibition curated by Sarah Brophy and Janice Hladki, at the McMaster Museum of Art.

POSSIBLE THEMATICS:

1. Technologies
– medical technologies (e.g. medical imaging, drug therapies, prosthetics and other devices) and their implications for embodiment, subjectivity, community, kinship, and politics
– corporeality and the senses as sites/forms of knowledge-making
– biopolitics and surveillance
– the relationship between “old” and “new” technologies
– how technologies mediate social spaces of embodiment and interaction
– interrogations of the human and posthuman in medicine, science, and art

2. Cultural Production
– cultural pedagogy; the production of knowledge in sites of cultural production (e.g. galleries, festivals, classrooms, online, etc.)
– counter-publics (e.g. disability culture)
– indigenous modes of cultural production
– diasporic/transnational issues and practices
– new representational modes (e.g. digital arts, graphic memoir)
– documentary practices
– “doing politics in art” (Bennett)

3. Disability
– medical, scientific, and cultural discourses of disability
– performing and witnessing embodied difference
– interrogations of impairment
– genetics, reproduction, eugenics
– dis-ease and disorder
– “ability trouble” (McRuer)
– “radical crip images” (McRuer)

4. Affect
– explorations of “ugly feelings” (Ngai), “aesthetic nervousness” (Quayson), “moral spectatorship” (Cartwright), “empathic vision” (Bennett), and “seeing for” (Bal)
– relationships to medicalization, regulation, and surveillance
– affect as generative/productive in relation to concepts of ethical spectatorship and witnessing
– relationships between corporeality and theorizations of nature as dynamic and agentic (Barad, Grosz, Haraway)
– can we/should we move beyond the theories that posit /negative/ affect as a prime site for ethics?
– affect and global politics: representations of global mobilities, violence, war, terrorism

HOW TO SUBMIT A PROPOSAL:
We kindly invite submissions from scholars, artists, health professionals, community members, and activists in all areas and disciplines. Concurrent sessions will be 90 minutes in length. Proposals for the following formats will be considered:
1) Individual papers: 15 minutes in length
2) Roundtables: 4-5 participants, including a designated moderator and a plan for facilitated discussion of ideas
All submissions will be peer-reviewed.

Individual paper submissions should include:
1) affiliation and contact information
2) a biographical note of up to 200 words
3) paper title and a 300-500 word abstract; the description of the paper’s content should be as specific as possible and indicate relevance to one or more of the conference thematics.
4) Details of audiovisual needs (e.g. DVD, LCD projection, and/or VH S). Note that participants will need to bring their own laptops.

Roundtable submissions should include:
1) affiliation and contact information for each participant
2) a biographical note of up to 200 words for each participant
3) roundtable title and a 500 word proposal. The proposal should both indicate the relevance of the roundtable to one or more of the conference thematics and outline the organization of the proposed discussion.
4) details of audiovisual needs (e.g. DVD, LCD projection, and/or VHS). Note that participants will need to bring their own laptops.

All submissions should be sent via email attachment to
viscult@mcmaster.ca <mailto:viscult@mcmaster.ca> by January 15, 2010.
Please use the subject line “Proposal for Health, Embodiment, and Visual Culture.” Attachments should be in .doc or .rtf formats.

If electronic submission is not possible, please mail or fax proposals to arrive by January 15, 2010.
Address: Sarah Brophy & Janice Hladki: Health, Embodiment, and Visual Culture Conference
c/o Department of English & Cultural Studies
Chester New Hall 321
McMaster University
1280 Main Street West
Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4L9
Fax: 905-777-8316

ACCESSIBILITY:
Presenters are encouraged to explore ways to make physical, sensory, and intellectual access a fundamental part of their presentation. Suggestions include: large print (18 point font) copies of handouts, large-print copies of paper or panel outlines, and/or audio descriptions of any film or video clips and images. Presenters are also encouraged to consider open or closed captioning of films and video clips.

POST-CONFERENCE PUBLICATION PLANS:
Papers from the conference will be considered for a special issue of /The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies/.

CONFERENCE SPONSORSHIP:
Sponsored by the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario (John Douglas Taylor Fund).

Sarah Brophy
Associate Professor
Department of English and Cultural Studies
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
L8S 4L9
brophys@mcmaster.ca

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Video conferencing

• beam speakers in from anywhere on the planet;
• attendees can participate, real-time, interactively, from anywhere on the planet;
• conferencing can occur over a number of venues concurrently;
• pre-conference speaker profiles;
• live feeds from speakers uploaded across the web;
• virtual service and product displays;
• enticing excerpts of past conferences/speakers and venue;
• fast links to web based and electronic resources in real time;
• virtual field trips;
• give participants a virtual presence;
• live input from corresponding concurrent conferences across the globe;

Last week, I attended the annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society.  Some of you may immediately think of guys wearing wool jackets with leather patches on the elbows, horn-rimmed glasses, uncombed hair, pocket protectors, and really long gray beards with stuff from last night’s meal stuck in them.  (OK, maybe there were a few guys there like that.)

You may also think of stuffy rooms filled with men droning on and on about some seemingly un-important, nuanced observation that only they can understand.  And then you wonder, “Why would anyone want to attend?”

Good question.

While such things occur at times in academic conferences, there are also far more instances of men and women pouring their hearts, souls, and minds into rigorous study of God’s Word and history and culture in order to increase our understanding and worship of the Almighty.  They are eagerly pursuing new discoveries, and doing their best to articulate them in winsome, attractive, and challenging ways.  Attending those sessions is a joy and a treat.  They stretch me intellectually, and help me grow.

But even more important than all of that are the interactions with old friends, and a few new ones, over coffee, or a lunch, or a dinner.  It is meeting face-to-face with the ones writing the papers, and in the trenches of academia and ministry, working these things out in greater detail for ourselves, the good and joy of the people we serve, and the glory and exaltation of God, his Son, and the Gospel by the power of the Spirit.

A friend of mine recently quoted Fred Sanders’ observations this way, said (of course) a bit better than I:

The real showpiece of professorial old media, however, has to be the academic conference. They are almost too easy to mock. Once a year most academics travel to a major city for a multi-day extravaganza of meeting others who work in their field. Armies of tweed-clad experts converge and confer with each other. The heart of these conferences is “giving a paper,” an event in which one professor stands in front of a roomful of other professors reading aloud a drastically shortened version of a scholarly article. Meanwhile, dozens of other professors are doing the same in dozens of other rooms to thousands of other listeners who had to decide which paper to hear and which ones to skip.

Considered simply as information exchange, it would be hard to invent a less efficient system. If ever a system needed to be re-imagined in light of new technology, it is the academic conference. Sitting in a conference room listening to somebody read a paper, all scholars must have had the question occur to them, Why wasn’t this paper just e-mailed to me? Why did I have to fly to this city and stay in a hotel for three days to hear this research presented orally? . . .

But then Sanders turns a bit more serious, noting a paradox at play:

Here at academic old media’s weakest point, the bloated academic conference, we can see the thing that can never be replaced by new media: the human contact of scholars meeting each other. You can look around you in a paper presentation and see who else made the same decision you did, to attend this particular paper out of all the options being offered in this exact time slot. The third time you see the same person shuffling into a room you are shuffling into, it begins to dawn on you that here is a person who is interested in what you are interested in, and a scholarly friendship forms. The academic conference is a dreadfully inefficient way of exchanging information, but it is a place where you can take the name you’ve been reading books by for years and attach things to it like a face, a voice, and mannerisms. It is remarkable how much more intelligently you can read a dry scholarly book after hearing the author present some of the ideas in person.

On this day of thanksgiving, I am thankful for the opportunity from God to attend such a conference last week, filled with a plethora of helpful interactions that I am still processing.

Further, I am thankful to the people in my life who made it possible.

Thank you – Susan, Colton, Isabella, Ezra, and Nehemiah – for doing without a husband and daddy for a week, with no complaining.

And thank you – leaders and people of Calvary Community Church – for sending me, and learning to appreciate that it is good for your pastor to get away and be sharpened, for his own soul, and for the continuing care of your souls as well.

Friday morning will see Darcy and I braving the stage prior to the opening of the annual English Teachers’ Association conference ‘Hit Refresh‘.

Why?

Because for this ETA conference, for the first time, the conference is going web 2.0 – we’re stepping up the interaction, participation, and networking by providing some seriously cool online spaces for teachers to wet their toes in, and hopefully also dive right in to!  So, we’ll be getting up (in our awesome Twitter t-shirts ) to show the folks at the conference how to get involved in communicating with others, and how to use the backchannel.

What is a ‘backchannel’?

You know when you’re sitting, watching a keynote or presentation, and if you know the person in the next seat you might make the odd remark in their ear?  Well, a backchannel is like doing this on a mass scale – it’s like having a silent ‘channel’ on in the background for anyone who wants to make comments or ask questions that the rest of the audience can see, and if they want, silently respond to.

It’s like passing notes for grown-ups.  Ones that you know the teacher can read too if they so choose (so you can be critical, but must also be polite!)

From wikipedia:

The term “backchannel” generally refers to online conversation about the topic or the speaker

…it is the practice of using networked computers to maintain a real-time online conversation alongside live spoken remarks.

What are we using?

The most effective way of paticipating in a live backchannel during the conference is to join Twitter, and post short 140-character messages called ‘tweets’.  Anyone who ‘follows’ you can see your comment or question – and some people might also respond.

Do I have to have a lot of followers for this to work?

(or ‘yikes! but I’m not that famous yet!’)

If you are new to Twitter, never fear.  If you tag your tweet with the ‘hashtag‘ ETAConf09, then the comment that you tweet will also be seen by anyone who has searched for that tag – not just the people who follow you.  This means that even if you have NO FOLLOWERS, you can add to the backchannel discussion, and people can tweet responses to you.  Here is an example:

Wow! I thought Kelli and Darcy did a great job explaining the backchannel! #ETAConf09

To which another user might reply:

Does anyone know where I can find the video they showed at the start? #ETAConf09

You see the potential here?  And it’s easy!

What’s this I hear about a conference ‘Ning’?

‘Ning’ is the cute name that the people over at Ning.com made up to describe their online site that is used for NetworkING.  It’s a very easy site to use, and a great way to introduce yourself to online learning if you haven’t already.

ETA members (all of you – whether you are physically at the conference or not) can join the ETA conference Ning and add comments and questions there too.  Darcy and I will be monitoring the Ning as well, and it is another place that a kind of backchannel will likely spring up.  It’s probably less likely that this will happen during the sessions though.  I imagine a lot of people will be logging into our Ning on Friday and Saturday night, and for awhile after the conference, to send comments to friends, colleagues and presenters, and to share ideas and resources.

For the most effective participation in a LIVE backchannel, I seriously recommend you use Twitter.

Any questions?

If you have any questions, you can post them here as a comment, or ask them on Twitter.  You can find and follow me at http://twitter.com/kmcg2375, or Darcy at http://twitter.com/Darcy1968

See you in the Twitterverse!