#and the broader acceptance of all different modes of human connection

[seductivejellyfish]

gonna take a bit of a swing at a hornets nest here but: whenever you have in mind to write a post about, or you read a post about, "amatonormativity," I really suggest stepping back and asking "how would this post change if I replaced 'amatonormativity' with 'heteronormativity'/'compulsive heterosexuality'? Are the societal pressures or privileges described actually applied to homosexual relationships at all, or in a way resembling how they are applied to heterosexual relationships?"

A lot of us live in relatively wonderful pockets of the world where it can be easy to feel like gay relationships are thought about in a way that is close to equivalent to straight ones, but the fact is I have never once seen any discussion of 'amatonormativity' that was not a discussion of heteronormativity. It is true that there are immense societal pressures that seem to enforce 'romantic' relationships, but in reality they enforce heterosexual relationships of a particular sort, and we flatted our ability for meaningful critique when we act like the forces at work are a societal prioritization of romantic love, and not the patriarchal structure of compulsory heterosexuality and all its implications for maintenance of the patriarchy.

[aro-neir-o]

Carnival of Aros - Self-care, Self-love, and Aromanticism

I am coming out of my work-ridden space with some thoughts on self-care and work-life balance, so it seems incredibly fitting that this month’s Carnival of Aros theme is self-care and self-love.

As always, my thoughts are under ‘Keep Reading.’

Aro self-care is something I find to be very specific and different from my other forms of self-care. When I struggle daily with relationship norms and values that I actively disidentify with because of my aromanticism, I can’t help but think that we do need these resources.

Below are some of the ways I have been learning to care for myself when I encounter thoughts that are regurgitations of anti-aro sentiments. Internalized aromisia/arophobia is very real and sometimes we all have to struggle with it. In different ways, too. Being an aroflux person means that sometimes I devalue my place in the aro community for being “not aro enough.” And other times, I devalue my place in broader society because I’m “too aro.” Sometimes I am frustrated I don’t feel any love, including self-love, and other times I’m called selfish for caring too much.

Self-care for me means accepting all of my identity, all of my struggles, my happinesses, and my feelings. That’s so much harder in practice than in theory.

What my self-care looks like

Something I have been reading a lot more about recently (particularly when my therapist also mentioned it) was the idea of being in relationships with everything around me. I recall a First Nations idea of interconnectedness or connectivity, and trying to implement this way of thinking has been helping me understand myself and others in our complex world.

I think of my identity and myself as a collection of selves, and my work with myself is a kind of 'Parts Work,' as my therapist calls it. I try to build relationships with different parts of myself. For example, young parts of me that still exist and express fear when I encounter certain triggering circumstances. Or the parts of myself I'm trying to cultivate and let enter me but am still developing. I work with myself and all of my parts to co-create a self-sustaining system (note: I don't mean system as in plurality; I am not plural personally).

Just like I have parts of me I really enjoy, like my very creative selves, I also have parts of me I struggle with and have often suppressed, like the internal critic that thinks my aromanticism and identity are fake. What has been incredibly important to me in my self-development is caring for ALL of those parts.

That includes caring for parts I don't like and am often frustrated with or angry at. At the end of the day, all of the parts of me are trying to help, even if they don't really do so in an effective way. Just like I wouldn't yell at a child who may have broken my plate when they were trying to help me put away the dishes, I don't want to yell at the parts of myself that make mistakes in good faith.

Things I try to remember to implement in my self-care

Not beating myself up for having internalized amatonormative beliefs, and instead sitting with them curiously. Hearing myself out and comforting that part while also being firm and clear about my boundaries engaging with it.

Not beating myself up for not having the energy to sit with all of my parts or feelings as they come up. I don't have to be ready to work on and parent myself literally all of the time.

I can ask for help or for company when I engage with other parts of me or engage in self-care activities. People are often way more excited to be invited to that kind of personal and intimate experience than they are weirded out by it. If they're weirded out by it, it's not on me, it's more about them and their comfort and that's all valid. We all relationship differently and I need to be aware that my queering of relationship structures isn't universal.

I can say no to others asking things of me, including asking to help and be part of my self-care. Sometimes it is caring for myself to try to practice doing things independently to build up my resilience, while other times even when I could deal with things on my own, it's an exercise in being vulnerable to invite others.

I'm allowed to change up my self-care strategies and routines whenever the hell I want. I don't have to take a bath and do a facial every Sunday. I can play a video game instead, go for a walk, hang out with a friend, spontaneously paint a plant pot, write a shitton of posts for this aro blog (hi, yes, I'm currently doing this).

My self-care doesn't need to look like anyone else's. If it feels good for me to disconnect from everything and everyone to play my piano for five hours straight until my fingers start to get sore, it is no one's right to judge that behaviour as wrong or right for me. If I want cuddles and hugs and intimate time with someone without a relationship structure, it is no one's right to judge that. If I don't want hugs or love from others, even when well-meaning, that's well and valid.

I am not my own judge. I am my own parent. Those are not the same thing. I also don't need to be in parenting mode all of the time. I can be neither judge nor parent.

Self-love is not a prerequisite for self-care.

My relationship with self-love and self-care is inherently queer because I am queer. Because I am aro. That last bullet point is something I think is particularly important as an aro engaging in self-care, and it's something I would personally put on an aro self-care list.

At the end of the day, I am a human being who is flawed and growing and changing all the time. My identity grows and changes with me. I love a lot, but sometimes I don't love at all. And that's all ok. I am not beholden to anything or anyone, and that also includes me.

[afieromenos]

The Devoted One, Afieroménos, servant of Hecate, the Goddess of Crossroads

Dressed in ornamental dark gray robes, with features obscured by paint and decorative etching, The Devoted One may at a glance not be recognized as one of the warforged. They are a tall figure, with shoulders broader than their hip, their flowing robes and hood revealing a clear outline of a slender and agile body.

The Devoted One wears a smoothened face plate, painted black with paint that has started to wear thin, with the underlying copper faintly shining through. Thick and oily face-paint draws a skull layered on top of the black face plate, filled in and heavily detailed on the right side, whereas the left side remains simplistic. The Devoted One’s eyes are the same as all warforged, bright sky blue and vibrantly shining, though an occasional flicker can be seen.

Content Table

Appearance Detail

Background and Motivation

Gender and Pronouns

Function, Skill and Structural Integrity

Personality and Values

Faith and Rites

Summary

Appearance Detail

Though usually hidden by the hood, each side of The Devoted One’s head has yet another skull depicted, making for three faces. This is to honor Hecate, effectively making herself a Hekataion; a religious idol that depicts Hecate with three bodies, each facing a different direction, symbolizing her many divine gifts as well as her role as a Goddess of crossroads.

Under her robes, The Devoted One wears her religious symbol hung around her neck. It is in the shape of a key, symbolizing the Goddess Hecate’s divinity as a deity of the home, of the city, of borders and gates, offering divine guidance for those who come and go, for those who pass through from this world to the next.

In her left hand, The Devoted One carries a light wooden staff that has freshly been picked clean. A crude inscription reads Hekate Lampadephoros, denoting the Goddess Hecate as the goddess of light, the moon, and her role as a guide to those who are lost, who search for knowledge, or for those who wander the dark of the night.

On her right arm, The Devoted One has an inscription reading Hekate Enodia, denoting the goddess Hecate as the goddess of crossroads, of journeys, of the transitive state, of the living, the dead, and the undead.

The colorful paint on the faceplate is not permanent, but is rather cleaned off before rest and fitted once more afterwards. It is akin to makeup, and The Devoted One has many different variations of the base motive, and may choose different colors, styles or different levels of detail depending on mood and circumstances. Because of the constant washing and painting the black permanent paint that covers the copper of the face plate has started to fade.

The Devoted One is fascinated with the hair many humanoids posses, and may mimic the appearance of hair by wearing wreaths of leaved branches for ceremonial or recreational purposes. The hems of The Devoted One’s robes are ornate with muted colors. Red, purple and yellow threads have been embroidered into the fabric, creating a strangely vivid pattern, matching some of the usual colors of their face paint.

Background and Motivation

Originally from south of Faerûn, The Devoted One recently arrived to the Sword Coast, landing by boat after a long journey.

As a warforged, The Devoted One was built for war, though they are reluctant to speak of the past and the circumstances of their creation. The Devoted One considers their life as an instrument of war a past life; she was reborn as a servant of Hekate, her earliest memory being that of the moonlight bathing her form in a moment of peaceful serenity, guiding her to Hecate’s side.

After her religious awakening she searched far and wide for a temple she considered suitable. As an acolyte, The Devoted One trained in a temple dedicated to Hecate for a number of years. The head cleric of that Temple is a person The Devoted One respects greatly despite their somewhat complex relationship. He, a human named Stelios, was the one who gave The Devoted One her name, Afieroménos. The name is a product of many years’ discussion and bargaining, as The Devoted One wanted a good and suitable name, and was quick to scrutinize most suggestions. The name means “devoted” in an old and obscure dialect native to the temple’s founder. Though The Devoted One answers to Afieroménos, they may do so reluctantly. However, they are not opposed to the idea of a conventional name.

Having left the temple, The Devoted One searches for ways to honor Hecate and learn of the world. Her main motivation lays as a devotee of Hecate, but as Hecate is a versatile Goddess, by definition all-encompassing, she may find joy in many simple things and she has a natural sense of curiosity.

The Devoted One is older than 10 years of age, but younger than 20.

Gender and Pronouns

The Devoted One understands gender as something not defined by form or associated with appearance. As a warforged, they were created without gender or pronouns in mind. However, since meeting with Hecate, The Devoted One feels a connection to womanhood in her role as her servant and devotee. Since she started modeling herself as a Hekataion this became all the more profound. The Devoted One will therefore refer to herself using she/her pronouns when speaking in regards of her role in relation to Hecate or when speaking of herself as an individual of faith. However, on a personal level, they may use they/them to speak of their own thoughts, ideas and doings outside of their relationship with Hecate.

Though The Devoted One appreciates when others follow the same convention, they will regardless accept both she/her and they/them interchangeably without any issue in casual conversation. However, they take offense at being called “it” or “that”, though such emotional responses tend to be internalized.

Function, Skill and Structural Integrity

Over the years, The Devoted One has had a number of body modifications done. Some are cosmetic and others relate to function. The Devoted one is quite dexterous compared to a standard model. Their build is also lighter and leaner than the average standard model warforged, however, they retain a tall stature and though vaguely, some of the visually intimidating properties of a classic, standard model warforged remain.

The Devoted One has a number of different schools of magic represented in their repertoire. They are drawn towards magic that uses light, as they associate light with Hecate. For the same reason, they are also fond of necromancy, though their thoughts on such practices are unconventional.

Inexplicably, they may go into recovery mode, regardless of circumstance. Using their Sentry’s Rest ability, they may be able to remain conscious while resting and recharging.

Personality and Values

The Devoted One has a fairly withdrawn and collected personality. Despite this, they are quite curious, and generally enjoy meeting new people. They feel the most at home on the road, and in rural communities. A big city can bring many new and interesting sights, but they prefer to not stay for too long.

They are generally critical of people in authority. As they see it, the role of a leader is to server their people, not the other way around. They may have some opinions other may consider extreme, opposing the existence of kings and rulers who hold large domains. Though they themselves exist within a clerical hierarchy, they oppose many components of the system they themselves are part of and they are critical of organized religion as it gives some individuals too much power. This criticism can get in the way of things and cause conflict, hence why they had a complicated relationship with their mentor as well as with many of their fellow acolytes. In their temple, The Devoted One gained a reputation of being a stubborn contrarian prone to questioning everyone and everything. This was largely because the matter of faith and the servitude to Hecate are matters of great deal to The Devoted One. She feels strongly that it should be the gods, deities, and other divine beings that command those of the faith, not those within the cult.

In general, The Devoted One is amicable and unassuming. They admire the other races, as well as the flora and fauna found in nature. They do however, feel a stronger connection to the undead than to that of the living. That is because, like the undead, they were created, not born. The Devoted One does not see necromancy as a sacrilege. To them, it is merely yet another type of being in this world, and they see the world as richer and more plentiful with undead beings in it.

Though they are critical of people in authority, they see teacher and student relationships and master and servant relationship as natural dynamics that are just another type of bond, comparable to that of family or friendship bonds. If the people in those relationships care for one another and respect one another, there is no problem. In their own interpersonal relationships, The Devoted One tends to be somewhat naive, as they are still quite young. They are curious of people and may thus ignore difference in opinion or goal to sate the curiosity and see their companionship with others as an opportunity to learn of the world and the different folk that live in it.

The Devoted One is largely uninterested in concepts of good and evil, but they do care about intent and effect. Integrity and freedom are very important to them, and they are important in practice rather than in rhetoric alone; they are concepts that touch every aspect of life.

They are aware of their existence and opinions as controversial, and they understand that other people may not agree with them. They are generally not hurt when people reject their thoughts and ideas, but will in contrast become very happy to meet people who share their opinions or who are swayed by their ideals.

Faith and Rites

The Devoted One celebrates Hecate’s Deipnon each month at the night of the new moon. These nights when the moon does not shine, are nights of repentance, of purification, and of giving. The Devoted One may go through her belongings one by one, clean her robes, and burn incense as the robes are left to dry. She may perform rites to soothe the restless dead, and dedicate prayers to the living in need. A sacrifice may be made to Hecate. A donation of food, money and other resources that have accumulated under the course of the month may be made to the local community.

On the nights of Deipnon, The Devoted One is generally preoccupied, and in a good, if solemn, mood. They may be more open and honest about their feelings than usual, and may become emotional and more easily swayed to speak of the past and of personal matters. She will be more inclined to help and guide others in whatever way she can, but may also be more judgmental and irrational. Deipnon is a holy night for The Devoted One, and though she does not require others to participate, she wishes strongly that people be respectful.

As snakes and dogs, in particular black female dogs, are associated with Hecate, The Devoted One may be reluctant or unwilling to harm such creatures or desecrate imagery depicting them. In the event that she’s forced due to circumstances to harm, or worse, kill a snake or dog, she will be subjected to a fair amount of emotional turmoil. This is not because she believes such creatures necessarily embody or represent Hecate, rather the symbolic representation alone of such creatures are of great significance to her.

Summary

The Devoted One is an avid devotee of the Goddess Hecate. They are a warforged, though their appearance can be misleading. They practice necromancy, but far from exclusively. They are reluctant to speak of the times before they became a cleric, seeing it more as “a past life” than “a past”.

With many unconventional thoughts and opinions, they are regardless quite accepting and open-minded. They are neutral, but highly value the freedom and integrity of others, making them critical of authority. They are relatively impersonal and serious. However, because of their youth they can be naive, but also curious, making them amicable towards and interested in meeting many different types of people.

[ozarkhealingtraditions]

Spiritism and Religion

I've talked elsewhere about the universal nature of Spiritism, but I thought it might be appropriate to look more closely at the topic of Spiritism's relationship to religious traditions. In this article I will be using quotes from the 1893 edition of The Spirits' Book, as translated by Anna Blackwell.

Early Spiritists came mostly from a Christian (specifically Catholic) background. Researchers would say this is for the simple reason that Kardec and his associates just so happened to be Catholic, and I would tend to agree with them, but for the fact that I believe what helped the Spiritist cause early on was growing from religious traditions that more emphasized mysticism than others. Many French Catholics, for instance, joined the Spiritist ranks under Kardec as a way to expand their already profound experience with the divine. With their doctrine of the Saints and angels who often intervene on human affairs, it was much easier for Catholics to reconcile a much broader spirit world than what is normally taught by religion.

Quakers, or members of the Religious Society of Friends, were also among some of the first participants in what we might label "Spiritualism," although the practices are as varied as there are practitioners. Since the beginning of the religious movement the Quakers have put an importance upon a continuing revelation and avoidance of reliance upon outdated texts. I think this could be one of the reasons why so many became quickly interested in Spiritualist and Spiritist thought. It can be connected to this idea of receiving sacred information directly from a divine source, rather than second or third hand. This belief is built into the religion itself, and even today participants in Quaker worship services often act as mediums for sacred messages.

As Spiritism grew as a movement, it slowly enveloped many of the occult movements of the time, including members of the Theosophical Society, Freemasons, Rosicrucians, etc. Without a doubt, many of the same influences upon the forming of these societies also influenced the codification of Spiritist beliefs, especially those of the Theosophical Society with their emphasis upon reincarnation and karmic debt. Nineteenth century Europe had an abundance of new occult societies, many already using the techniques of Spiritualism as a basis for their beliefs and practices. What Kardec brought to the table, among other things, was a more rational approach to the spirit world, based heavily upon an inward form of spirituality, less emphasis on what might be considered "strange" or "fringe" practices, and a more conversation-based practice of mediumship without the need for a spectacle.

Some of the more interesting varieties of Spiritism come when we look at how this philosophy spread to the French colonies (or other areas influenced by French culture). These are areas of the world that still to this day have high numbers of Spiritists. One of these is Brazil, which has the highest concentration of Spiritists in the world. There are a few ways traditional Spiritism manifests in Brazil today. First is by way of indigenous religious traditions like Umbanda. It's interesting to note that the areas of the world that still have a large Spiritist presence are areas where Spiritism and indigenous spiritual traditions have mixed. In the case of Brazil, Umbanda is the tradition most influenced by what we might call "traditional" Spiritism, as opposed to traditions like Candomblé. I should note here that I'm by no means an Umbandista, or an expert on most of these traditions I'm going to talk about, so if you have an interest I would seek more academic research. Currently, the majority of Brazil's Spiritists follow the teachings of Chico Xavier, a prolific writer and medium who authored over a hundred books with his spirit guides. Xavier was heavily influenced by the traditional Christian side of Spiritism, with an emphasis upon a personal relationship with Jesus as messiah and divinity. As a non-Christian myself, I can say that Xavier's works, while interesting in the scope of modern Spiritism, are hard to read for those not aligned with Christian faith. His works, however, are massively popular and have greatly influenced many other modern mediums and writers.

Throughout Central/South America and the Caribbean, Spiritism is known by the name Espiritismo, of which there are hundreds, if not more, varieties. In Brazil, as I've already mentioned, Espiritismo is mostly seen in the indigenous-based religions of Umbanda (as well as its cousins, Quimbanda and Macumba) as well as in a modern form of Christian Spiritism as taught by Chico Xavier. In Cuba and Puerto Rico the tradition of Espiritismo has also merged with indigenous beliefs to form the tradition of Espiritismo Cruzado, or "crossed" Spiritism, referring to the mixture of European Spiritism with indigenous beliefs and traditions. This also gave rise to Espiritismo de Cordon, another area of research for those interested in Espiritismo. In Venezuela, Spiritism has taken on a fascinating form in the Maria Lionza religion, another mixture of European Spiritism and indigenous traditions. Unlike other varieties of Espiritismo, Maria Lionza mediums channel not only indigenous figures and folk heroes of South America, but also Vikings, European Saints, and even East Asian philosophers.

Another religion that I couldn't possibly avoid mentioning is Đạo Cao Đài or Cao Dai (often called Caodaism), a Vietnamese religion founded in the early part of the twentieth century. As with other traditions we've mentioned, Cao Dai is a highly syncretic religion that combines indigenous Vietnamese beliefs with Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, holding everything together with the philosophy of European Spiritism. The religion itself was founded during an automatic writing session held by three Vietnamese spirit mediums well versed in the works of Kardec. Since the beginning, all of the major texts and revelations for the religion have been provided by mediums, a tradition that continues even today. Cao Dai mediums have famously channeled such spirits as the Jade Emperor,  Joan of Arc, and Victor Hugo, which might seen like an odd combination, but it fits perfectly within the Spiritist worldview.

What exactly is this worldview? While some critics have claimed that Kardec made Spiritualism dry, stuffy, and unappealing to anyone outside of academic circles through his codification, this is far from the truth. In his works, Kardec sought to address directly what he considered to be the faults of Spiritualism, mainly mediums (or so called mediums) tricking people out of their money to talk with dead loved ones, and needless rituals and prayers plucked from different traditions without discernment or understanding. Spiritism as it is defined by Kardec isn't a religious tradition at all, it's a philosophy. Some modern writers like to think of it as a "path" or "way," much like Sufism, which is traditionally thought of being beyond religion and at the same time contained within all religions. This is why Spiritism has easily been translated and merged with so many indigenous traditions. Spiritism provides a framework for viewing human relationships with the spirit world, a notion lacking in many mainstream religious traditions. It defines the form of the spirit, its function as we know it, and how the existence of our own immortal spirits affects the way we see our purpose in the universe. This framework is universal in nature, meaning it appeals to and can be translated into many different religious and spiritual traditions. While Kardec often wrote from a very Christian-centered worldview, his works are also filled with universalist ideals. His overall message is for the unity of humanity on the forward progression through the Spiritual Hierarchy.

Kardec's message (or I should say the message of the spirit entities as channeled by Kardec and his associates) emphasizes the mystical experience of the individual. When he asks the question whether worship (adoration in this edition of the text) is dependent upon external manifestations he receives this answer:

"True adoration is in the heart. In all your actions remember that the Master's eye is always upon you." The Spirits' Book, entry 653

And again, when he poses the question differently:

"Does God accord a preference to those who worship Him according to any particular mode? "God prefers those who worship Him from the heart, with sincerity, and by doing what is good and avoiding what is evil, to those who fancy they honour Him by ceremonies which do not render them any better than their neighbours." The Spirits' Book, entry 654

And perhaps one of Kardec's more direct answers of universalism:

"Do not ask, then, if any form of worship be more acceptable than another; for it is as though you asked whether it is more pleasing to God to be worshipped in one tongue rather than in another. Remember that the hymns addressed to Him can reach Him only through the door of the heart." The Spirits' Book, entry 654

Kardec presents a very specific form of monotheism in his works. In this system God represents a sort of formless, distant creator who doesn't require any sort of worship. Prayer then is for the benefit of the individual, not the deity. Underneath God are a host of spirits that fit into various positions on the Spiritual Hierarchy. These spirits act as guides and intermediaries for disembodied spirits and incarnated spirits, helping them to advance and elevate. Kardec addresses this belief when talking about Polytheism:

"As phenomena attesting the action of spirits have occurred in all ages of the world, and have thus been known from the earliest times, may they not have helped to induce a belief in the plurality of gods? "Undoubtedly; for, as men applied the term god to whatever surpassed humanity, spirits were, for them, so many gods. For this reason, whenever a man distinguished himself among all others by his actions, his genius, or an occult power incomprehensible by the vulgar, he was made a god of, and was worshipped as such after his death." The Spirits' Book, entry 668

That is to say, that in the past humans have confused what are called Higher Order spirits for deities, when in fact these spirits are on the same hierarchy as incarnated humans. This idea is similar to those found in Buddhism, where even deities, as powerful as they might be, are still bound by the wheel of life, death, and rebirth. In traditional Spiritism, the ultimate goal is to learn and advance to the point of absolute nearness to God. This idea is still held by many Spiritist groups around the world, but has also been transformed by others. Personally, I choose to think of the "ultimate goal" as a form of supreme altruism, a transformation of the individual spirit into an entity of pure love, similar to the bodhisattva in Buddhism. For me, this belief requires no supreme deity.

While traditional Spiritism has often been viewed in light of Christian values and ideals, it isn't inherently Christian at all. In fact, as I've said before, Kardec himself discouraged readers from taking Spiritism as a religion in and of itself, or even as a representative form of any religion. While Kardec himself might have been Catholic, as well as his early followers, Spiritism itself teaches a universal philosophy that can be utilized alongside countless religious and spiritual viewpoints. The deep connection with the spirit world, coupled with a commentary on humankind's purpose in the cosmos, has made Spiritism abundantly popular not only to adherents of what we might call "traditional" religions, but also those seeking to deepen their expression of indigenous spiritual beliefs. Some researchers have even described Spiritism as a revival of European animistic beliefs in a modern age, a sort of modernistic European shamanism. I wouldn't go that far, personally, but it's indeed interesting to look at the potential of this system in creating and maintaining a sense of continual sacred revelation for a people so often bound to static texts and unwavering religious dogma. In this way, Spiritism itself can be used as a tool of religious or spiritual reform, not just for the individual, but perhaps for society as a whole.

[aconstantstateofbladerunner]

Class 1-A’s Comic Book Projects

I’ve been getting a lot of comments on Butterfly about how much people like the project the kids are working on.  First off, thank you for the lovely feedback! It started as an excuse to shoehorn in some themes and foreshadowing, while also giving the class something outside of the plot to talk about.  I didn’t think so many people would gravitate towards it.

With all that in mind, I decided to make some project headcanons for the whole class.  Relatively few of these will actually show up in the story, and the project itself will be mentioned less and less as it goes on.  All the more reason to put it here.

Here’s the link to the story itself for anyone who stumbles across this:  https://archiveofourown.org/works/17165612/chapters/40360787

The project is that the students had to pick out a pre-quirk comic book superhero, and write about how that hero relates to modern hero society.  They also had to pick a specific storyline to analyze, but I’m a filthy casual and won’t go into that.  Let’s go.

Midoriya - Superman

The only one actually relevant to the story.  Superman is like All Might, so naturally, Izuku would pick him.  Superman was also the first superhero as they are understood today, so there is also the meta perspective that they wouldn’t have their jobs without him.  But the thing about both of them is that their symbolic power is almost as effective as their physical power.  And with all that power, people too often forget that there’s a real person behind it.  A person who makes mistakes, who can’t alway save everyone, and who fears for their own future. Heroes are still human.

Bakugou - The Punisher

Isn’t Bakugou liking the Punisher basically canon?  But what Bakugou takes from him is perseverance.  Frank Castle fights an uphill battle that he can never truly win and could die from at any moment.  Yet he keeps going.  Because there’s nothing else he can do.  And that’s what heroes are supposed to do.

Todoroki - Firestorm

Firestorm is a guy who is two guys.  Todoroki feels like that sometimes.  But if he wants to accomplish his goals, he has to learn to work together with himself.  Not super relevant to broader hero society, but isn’t he a part of that society? (He had to argue a little on that one)  

Sero - Spider-Man 

Like most of his peers, Sero chose his hero based on the similar power set.  He spent admittedly too much time trying to recreate classic moves instead of analyzing Spidey’s place in history.  But then he realized that with how important the secret identity was to the character, not many people go for that anymore.  He ended up with a pretty deep look at hero regulation and how it’s hard to fit a secret identity with the current model.

Hagakure - The Invisible Woman (and the Fantastic Four)

Same initial deal as Sero, went for the similar power.  What she ended up discovering was that the Fantastic Four predicted close-knit hero teams would be rare.  Marvel’s first family is a disfuctional one, and probably wouldn’t last long with the added stress of modern hero bureaucracy.

Kouda - Aquaman

Insert obligatory talks to fish joke.  But Kouda did a fairly straightforward paper of how heroes protect the environment as well as people.

Yaoyorozu - Batman

She picked up Batman based on their similar need to be prepared; Yaoyorozu needs to memorize chemical formulas in advance, Batman needs to bring the right tools to a case.  But through her research, she found the much more interesting perspective of the dichotomy between hero and villain.  Anyone, powers or not, can make the choice to hurt another person.  And someone else can make the choice to stop them.  Both often involve violence.  So where should the line be drawn?

Tokoyami - Moon Knight

Moon Knight’s powers wax and wane with the cycle of his namesake, much as Tokoyami must carefully consider his actions based on the time of day.  Both must also contend with an additional voice telling them how to proceed.  Also, Moon Knight is Marvel’s answer to Batman and Yaoyoruzu beat him to it even though he called dibs this transgression will be avenged!

Iida - The Flash

The Flash is what Iida is working towards: a friendlier, funnier person that friend and stranger alike can open up to.  And shouldn’t all heroes want to be the sort of person the people they save would want to save them?

Mina - Wonder Woman

Something not as many people talk about in regards to Wonder Woman is the way she typically prefers to attempt nonviolent solutions to conflict before moving on to fists.  Mina is the same way, so she felt right at home (for once) while writing.

Kirishima - Luke Cage

A guy who’s skin is bulletproof?  So manly!  But Luke Cage and his stories have almost alway paralleled some real-world issue going on at the time.  In some cases, people believed his appearances to have helped influence public opinion about those issues.  Kirishima thinks more modern heroes should try and get involved like that,

Ojiro - Iron Fist

A quirk is just an extension of the body, and the body is the real weapon.  Both must be sharpened, not just one or the other.

Tsuyu - She-Hulk

Tsuyu doesn’t mind that people make assumptions about her based on her quirk; she’s a frog, so she’s easy-going and likes water.  But that doesn’t mean everyone is okay with stereotypes.  Jennifer Walters is a successful lawyer and hero, but still gets undermined by others for “anger issues.”  Tsuyu also admired her choice to remain in her She-Hulk form for the confidence it brings her, while many people in real life feel pressured to hide more extreme quirks in order to conform.

Aoyama - Dazzler

Searched “sparkly superhero” online and Dazzler was the first result.  Talked about the importance of aesthetics. 

Uraraka - Booster Gold

Like Uraraka, Booster started out in it for the money.  He didn’t have the noble goals she had right out the gate, but was never a bad dude.  But after great hardship, he learned the valuable lesson that fame and fortune should always be second to saving people.

Kaminari - Thor

He had a bit of trouble figuring out what to do with his go-to god of thunder.  Unlike the more well-known MCU version, comics Thor isn’t super funny.  He’s got stuff going on, but Kaminari was really gunning for that humor angle.  So, he settled for discussing Thor’s origin and about the importance of staying humble in the face of great power and influence.

Sato - Hulk

When powering up costs you your intelligence, it can be hard to make good decisions in tough situations.  That’s why you need to make a plan before going rage-mode.

Shoji - Martian Manhunter

Shoji connected to J’onn J’onzz and his struggle to find acceptance with “normal” people right away.  The traditional image of what a hero is “supposed” to look like was out of date even then, and no one should be confinted to that box.

Jirou - Black Canary

The best heroes are good at a lot of different things.  Black Canary’s Wikipedia page under “skills” is nuts.  And Jirou epimmediately started looking up how to incorporate her musical skills into her arsenal.

Mineta - Rogue

I know what you’re thinking: why would I give one of Marvel’s best female characters to me of Hero Aca’s worst?  Two reasons.  One, Rogue is consistently near the top of “hottest hero women” lists, so Mineta probably found her there.  Second, the ethos of her character’s evolution is a line I think he could benefit from.  That being: get your shit together.  You can accomplish amazing things if you just get your shit together.  Sometimes, you are the problem.  Adjust your actions and mindset accordingly.  Get your shit together.

Well, that was long.  Thanks for reading if you made it this far.  Part of me kind of wants to write some of these essays mayself now.  But I think that would be a poor choice of time given my other projects.

Thanks again and please read Buttferfly!

[scifigeneration]

Friday essay: how speculative fiction gained literary respectability

by Rose Michael

Biologists are gathering evidence of green algae (pictured here in Kuwait) becoming carbohydrate-rich but less nutritious, due to increased carbon dioxide levels. As science fiction becomes science fact, new forms of storytelling are emerging. Raed Qutena

I count myself lucky. Weird, I know, in this day and age when all around us the natural and political world is going to hell in a handbasket. But that, in fact, may be part of it.

Back when I started writing, realism had such a stranglehold on publishing that there was little room for speculative writers and readers. (I didn’t know that’s what I was until I read it in a reader’s report for my first novel. And even then I didn’t know what it was, until I realised that it was what I read, and had always been reading; what I wrote, and wanted to write.) Outside of the convention rooms, that is, which were packed with less-literary-leaning science-fiction and fantasy producers and consumers.

Realism was the rule, even for those writing non-realist stories, such as popular crime and commercial romance. Perhaps this dominance was because of a culture heavily influenced by an Anglo-Saxon heritage. Richard Lea has written in The Guardian of “non-fiction” as a construct of English literature, arguing other cultures do not distinguish so obsessively between stories on the basis of whether or not they are “real”.

China Miéville in 2010. Pan MacMillan Australia/AAP

Regardless of the reason, this conception of literary fiction has been widely accepted – leading self-described “weird fiction” novelist China Miéville to identify the Booker as a genre prize for specifically realist literary fiction; a category he calls “litfic”. The best writers Australia is famous for producing aren’t only a product of this environment, but also role models who perpetuate it: Tim Winton and Helen Garner write similarly realistically, albeit generally fiction for one and non-fiction for the other.

Today, realism remains the most popular literary mode. Our education system trains us to appreciate literatures of verisimilitude; or, rather, literature we identify as “real”, charting interior landscapes and emotional journeys that generally represent a quite particular version of middle-class life. It’s one that may not have much in common these days with many people’s experiences – middle-class, Anglo or otherwise – or even our exterior world(s).

Like other kinds of biases, realism has been normalised, but there is now a growing recognition – a re-evaluation – of different kinds of “un-real” storytelling: “speculative” fiction, so-called for its obviously invented and inventive aspects.

Feminist science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin has described this diversification as:

a much larger collective conviction about who’s entitled to tell stories, what stories are worth telling, and who among the storytellers gets taken seriously … not only in terms of race and gender, but in terms of what has long been labelled “genre” fiction.

Closer to home, author Jane Rawson – who has written short stories and novels and co-authored a non-fiction handbook on “surviving” climate change – has described the stranglehold realistic writing has on Australian stories in an article for Overland, yet her own work evidences a new appreciation for alternative, novel modes.

Rawson’s latest book, From the Wreck, intertwines the story of her ancestor George Hills, who was shipwrecked off the coast of South Australia and survived eight days at sea, with the tale of a shape-shifting alien seeking refuge on Earth. In an Australian first, it was long-listed for the Miles Franklin, our most prestigious literary award, after having won the niche Aurealis Award for Speculative Fiction.

The Aurealis awards were established in 1995 by the publishers of Australia’s longest-running, small-press science-fiction and fantasy magazine of the same name. As well as recognising the achievements of Australian science-fiction, fantasy and horror writers, they were designed to distinguish between those speculative subgenres.

Last year, five of the six finalists for the Aurealis awards were published, promoted and shelved as literary fiction.

A broad church

Perhaps what counts as speculative fiction is also changing. The term is certainly not new; it was first used in an 1889 review, but came into more common usage after genre author Robert Heinlein’s 1947 essay On the Writing of Speculative Fiction.

Whereas science fiction generally engages with technological developments and their potential consequences, speculative fiction is a far broader, vaguer term. It can be seen as an offshoot of the popular science-fiction genre, or a more neutral umbrella category that simply describes all non-realist forms, including fantasy and fairytales – from the epic of Gilgamesh through to The Handmaid’s Tale.

While critic James Wood argues that “everything flows from the real … it is realism that allows surrealism, magic realism, fantasy, dream and so on”, others, such as author Doris Lessing, believe that everything flows from the fantastic; that all fiction has always been speculative. I am not as interested in which came first (or which has more cultural, or commercial, value) as I am in the fact that speculative fiction – “spec-fic” – seems to be gaining literary respectability. (Next step, surely, mainstream popularity! After all, millions of moviegoers and television viewers have binge-watched the rise of fantastic forms, and audiences are well versed in unreal onscreen worlds.)

One reason for this new interest in an old but evolving form has been well articulated by author and critic James Bradley: climate change. Writers, and publishers, are embracing speculative fiction as an apt form to interrogate what it means to be human, to be humane, in the current climate – and to engage with ideas of posthumanism too.

These are the sorts of existential questions that have historically driven realist literature.

According to the World Wildlife Fund’s 2018 Living Planet Report, 60% of the world’s wildlife disappeared between 1970 and 2012. The year 2016 was declared the hottest on record, echoing the previous year and the one before that. People under 30 have never experienced a month in which average temperatures are below the long-term mean. Hurricanes register on the Richter scale and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology has added a colour to temperature maps as the heat keeps on climbing.

Science fiction? Science fact.

A baby Francois Langur at Taronga Zoo in June. François Langurs are a critically endangered species found in China and Vietnam. AAP Image/Supplied by Taronga Zoo

What are we to do about this? Well, according to writer and geographer Samuel Miller-McDonald, “If you’re a writer, then you have to write about this.”

There is an infographic doing the rounds on Facebook that shows sister countries with comparable climates to (warming) regions of Australia. But it doesn’t reflect the real issue. Associate Professor Michael Kearney, Research Fellow in Biosciences at the University of Melbourne, points out that no-one anywhere in the world has any experience of our current CO2 levels. The changed environment is, he says – using a word that is particularly appropriate for my argument – a “novel” situation.

Elsewhere, biologists are gathering evidence of algae that carbon dioxide has made carbohydrate-rich but less nutritious. So the plankton that rely on them to survive might eat more and more and yet still starve.

Fiction focused on the inner lives of a limited cross-section of people no longer seems the best literary form to reflect, or reflect on, our brave new outer world – if, indeed, it ever was.

Whether it’s a creative response to catastrophic climate change, or an empathic, philosophical attempt to express cultural, economic, neurological – or even species – diversification, the recognition works such as Rawson’s are receiving surely shows we have left Modernism behind and entered the era of Anthropocene literature.

And her book is not alone. Other wild titles achieving similar success include Krissy Kneen’s An Uncertain Grace, shortlisted for the Aurealis, the Stella prize and the Norma K. Hemming award – given to mark excellence in the exploration of themes of race, gender, sexuality, class or disability in a speculative fiction work.

Kneen’s book connects five stories spanning a century, navigating themes of sexuality – including erotic explorations of transgression and transmutation – against the backdrop of a changing ocean.

Earlier, more realist but still speculative titles (from 2015) include Mireille Juchau’s The World Without Us and Bradley’s Clade. These novels fit better with Miéville’s description of “litfic”, employing realistic literary techniques that would not be out of place in Winton’s books, but they have been called “cli-fi” for the way they put climate change squarely at the forefront of their stories (though their authors tend to resist such generic categorisation).

Both novels, told across time and from multiple points of view, are concerned with radically changed and catastrophically changing environments, and how the negative consequences of our one-world experiment might well – or, rather, ill – play out.

Catherine McKinnnon’s Storyland is a more recent example that similarly has a fantastic aspect. The author describes her different chapters set in different times, culminating – Cloud Atlas–like, in one futuristic episode – as “timeslips” or “time shifts” rather than time travel. Yet it has been received as speculative – and not in a pejorative way, despite how some “high-art” literary authors may feel about “low-brow” genre associations.

Kazuo Ishiguro in 2017. Neil Hall/AAP

Kazuo Ishiguro, for instance, told The New York Times when The Buried Giant was released in 2015 that he was fearful readers would not “follow him” into Arthurian Britain. Le Guin was quick to call him out on his obvious attempt to distance himself from the fantasy category. Michel Faber, around the same time, told a Wheeler Centre audience that his Book of Strange New Things, where a missionary is sent to convert an alien race, was “not about aliens” but alienation. Of course it is the latter, but it is also about the other.

All these more-and-less-speculative fictions – these not-traditionally-realist literatures – analyse the world in a way that it is not usually analysed, to echo Tim Parks’s criterion for the best novels. Interestingly, this sounds suspiciously like science-fiction critic Darko Suvin’s famous conception of the genre as a literature of “cognitive estrangement”, which inspires readers to re-view their own world, think in new ways, and – most importantly – take appropriate action.

A new party

Perhaps better case studies of what local spec-fic is or does – when considering questions of diversity – are Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things and Claire Coleman’s Terra Nullius.

The first is a distinctly Aussie Handmaid’s Tale for our times, where “girls” guilty by association with some unspecified sexual scenario are drugged, abducted and held captive in a remote outback location.

The latter is another idea whose time has come: an apocalyptic act of colonisation. Not such an imagined scenario for Noongar woman Coleman. It’s a tricky plot to tell without giving away spoilers – the book opens on an alternative history, or is it a futuristic Australia? Again, the story is told through different points of view, which prioritises collective storytelling over the authority of a single voice.

“The entire purpose of writing Terra Nullius,” Coleman has said, “was to provoke empathy in people who had none.”

This connection of reading with empathy is a case Neil Gaiman made in a 2013 lecture when he told of how China’s first party-approved science-fiction and fantasy convention had come about five years earlier.

Neil Gaiman. Julien Warnand/EPA

The Chinese had sent delegates to Apple and Google etc to try to work out why America was inventing the future, he said. And they had discovered that all the programmers, all the entrepreneurs, had read science fiction when they were children.

“Fiction can show you a different world,” said Gaiman. “It can take you somewhere you’ve never been.”

And when you come back, you see things differently. And you might decide to do something about that: you might change the future.

Perhaps the key to why speculative fiction is on the rise is the ways in which it is not “hard” science fiction. Rather than focusing on technology and world-building to the point of potential fetishism, as our “real” world seems to be doing, what we are reading today is a sophisticated literature engaging with contemporary cultural, social and political matters – through the lens of an “un-real” idea, which may be little more than a metaphor or errant speculation.

About The Author:

Rose Michael is a Lecturer, Writing & Publishing at RMIT University

This article is republished from our content partners at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

[yridenergyridenergy]

PHY Vol. 11 - Dir en grey interviews

Here are the highlights of the five members’ interviews, from what I understood: 

Kyo wants to embrace (lit. hug?) his past self and tell him “You really did your best at that time”. He acknowledges that he was really angrier back then, notably during Withering to death, and while he is still angry, the expression of it has changed, become more organised. 

Whereas for the UNRAVELING ”rebuilds” he did not even listen to the original songs before re-recording the lyrics, this time he really wanted to ‘respect’ the songs more and try to understand his past self’s intention. 

Despite coming close to accepting his past self, he still feels like it committed something against his present self. 

For him, the goal of the BEST ALBUM is to help get new people introduced to Dir en grey and his voice. He still cannot believe that, at all the tributes and collaborative shows he performed, there were people who were only hearing his voice for the first time. 

For Kaoru, the goal of doing the BEST ALBUM is to give both new ears and previous fans something smoother and broader to listen to, like a stepping stone, rather than asking them to listen to ARCHE  from the get-go. He tought that those who attended the “mode of” tours had not necessarily had the opportunity to listen to the whole range of their sound. 

He revealed that it was Kyo’s idea to redo Fukai. 

Kaoru said that Dir en grey was a troublesome band. 

He wants Dir en grey’s next album to be something that people never heard before, that nobody understands. He believes that, doing the “mode of” tours will cause the other members to get inspired by their older sound for the next album though. 

Die described that he used to write songs more emotionally, thinking that he was good and he was just very excited to make sounds come out in the recording studio. However, now he thinks more and considers working in unison with Kaoru’s sound now. He still gets to have his single, special lines, but they connect and back each other’s sound more compared to before. 

With DECAYS, he used to be conscious about what he did, not to sound like Dir en grey, but now he does not worry anymore, as he thinks more of it like “what is a human being named Die doing at that moment”. 

If I understand correctly, Toshiya had some apprehension to join four other members in the band. He did not know what to be, how to be himself. He feels that it is only on stage that he can be free to express his identity. 

Like Kyo, he seems to be ashamed of the past, but he wants to confront it because that is how you make a better future. That is somewhat what the BEST ALBUM represents for him. 

He worried that the BEST ALBUM would be something that “had to come out”, for the same reason as all other bands do that; basically, forced by the label. However, it was necessarily different because of the fans’ input. (Somehow, he is the only one who mentions this.)

As for Shinya, he felt that mode of THE MARROW OF A BONE was the tour that he appreciated the most, because he had hated it so much when it was released, but now he was able to enjoy those songs. 

In 2012, there was a break and he used it to view his performances and decided to change himself a bit. The sound is more consistent, essentially he gave himself more stamina to deliver with the same strength for a longer period of time. 

Again (like in BURRN!), he talked about how he wishes that Dir en grey recorded songs like every other band, with the melody laid out first.

Apparently, Shinya wanted to be like YOSHIKI so much that he carried a video deck and watched X Japan’s performance before he himself went to do lives. 

I am already becoming bored with Kyo’s repeated words about him never being satisfied with himself and that he will quit and stop everything if he ever reaches a point where he is. He talks about that in almost EVERY interview...

[lapietadi]

Dealing with negative feedback

Feedback is a two-way street

Way way back I blogged and podcast on giving and receiving feedback, both positive and negative, at season 1, episode 4. The main focus of that podcast and blog was on giving feedback well, but I touched on receiving feedback well too, specifically I talked about the importance of being respectful, listening well and asking clarifying questions. So do please go back and have a listen particularly if you’re looking for a simple effective method for giving feedback well.

In this podcast, though, I go more in depth on dealing with negative feedback that comes your way in terms of its emotional impact, how to respond to it and how to potentially act on it.

    I’ll be bringing in personal examples to illustrate what I mean. I’ll be drawing on examples of dealing with negative feedback from work and home for this podcast because both are relevant and just as important and high stakes as one another, because emotions and well-being are involved, often of both parties.

What do we mean by ‘feedback’?

First up, when I say ‘feedback’, I’m talking about something that someone says to or about you that relates to something they’ve experienced in the way that you’ve behaved – something you may have said or done.  When people ask…‘Can I just talk about something that happened in that meeting?’ or ‘I’d like to talk about something that’s not quite sitting right with me…’ or the more obvious, ‘Can I give you some feedback…?’, you know that they’re likely to be about to offer you an observation about something you’ve said or done that has had an impact on them.

So my tips for dealing with feedback, particularly feedback that has emotional weight to it are to prepare for it, ask for examples, don’t take it personally, sit with it then decide and finally to ask for it.

1. How to prepare to receive feedback

First of all, preparing yourself for feedback. Most humans, when faced with a sentence like ‘Can I give you some feedback…’ or ‘I’m not very happy about something I’d like to talk to you about…’ will perceive what’s about to arrive as a threat, and that’s likely to trigger an automatic defensive response of fight or flight or freeze.

This is a totally understandable and natural response so don’t worry if it happens to you. It’s like you plus pretty much everyone else, ever. However,  going into an automatic survival mode probably won’t make you as receptive as you might be to hearing the feedback and asking questions, so the preparation I’m talking about is to try and get yourself into an emotional state that will allow you to receive the feedback well. Try to allow the person giving you the feedback to be heard and to ask clarifying questions to make sure you’ve heard it right.

    Example: carving out space to hear the feedback well

This isn’t easy but there are ways you can help yourself. Example: my partner recently said to me that there was something that wasn’t quite right for her about the way we were sharing household duties that day and she was feeling there was too much on her. But the way she did that really helped me to get to a better place emotionally to truly hear her.

Earlier in the day I said ‘You ok?’ and she said ‘I’m not sure, let me sit with it and we can talk about it later’. In response, I had tried to get a read on what was going on for her so that I could take immediate action and had started asking her questions right in the midst of kid and work pressures, interruptions and no headspace.  But it was the wrong time.

For a bunch of reasons, my partner saying ‘let’s talk about it later’ is a really good tactic because she’s giving herself future space to work through what she’s observing and feeling AND she’s mentally carving out a future time that day when we will have a chance to talk in a connected, unrushed way not surrounded by children wanting adult input or being focused on work demands.

I’ll level with you, it wasn’t that easy for me to sit with the not knowing what was going on for her because I like taking action so that everyone’s happy. But it was the right thing to do.  When we did talk later, it was on the sofa, just us and she said exactly what she had been feeling and we both explored how we could handle the next day differently. Which we did.

We were both less stressed by that point. I could really listen, I was able to physically connect with her, we could both reassure each other and I could ask for examples. I hope that example’s been helpful. So my first tip is to give yourself the best chance of being prepared to hear the feedback, which will usually involve creating the right space and the right environment to be ready to listen and to allow the other person to be heard.

2. Understand what you’re hearing

My second tip is to really understand what the feedback means for the other person. And that might mean respectfully asking for examples or to clarify where there’s a difference of view. While the survive/defend/justify part of you might be screaming ‘But I also need to say my part! This isn’t fair! I want to be understood! When do I get to speak my truth!’, now is not the time. Get straight what they mean first and show that you’ve understood by clarifying until you arrive at the same place.

3. Take your time and sit with the feedback

My third tip is to receive negative feedback seriously, but never personally. When someone is giving you feedback, it’s rare that it will be a personal attack on you. And if it is, that’s not really feedback, something else is likely to be going on with the other person relating to their agenda only and it may need a different approach.

Sometimes, negative feedback may feel unfair, it may feel like you have been misunderstood or that your interpretation of events is very different from someone else’s. And that’s all ok. The purpose here is to get value from the feedback that’s being offered and not for your point of view to be heard, or for you to satisfy your ego.  So, assuming that you’re receiving negative feedback from someone who has positive intentions, how are you going to get the positives from it?

My advice is to sit with the feedback, let it take its time.  That might be for a few minutes if the emotional element is limited. It might though be hours or even days. Or you might think you’ve processed it and understood it, but it may actually be days or weeks later when something else happens and it’s only then that you have your lightbulb moment of realisation. Things connect in your brain and the learning insight pops out. So be prepared for that, stay open to it, stay curious and keep challenging your own defensive response so that you can keep holding that broader interpretation of events. Only when you’re ready, take the learning forward.

After all, emotions are information, not a call to action. You can also choose to not do anything with the feedback, it is fine to decide to not do anything with it, other than to hear it and to show that you’ve heard it. It is possible that two alternative ‘truths’ or interpretations of an event can co-exist and that’s ok.

Example: taking the time before deciding on action

To illustrate that, my second example is a work one. I got some feedback recently about the importance for me of boundarying – I mean making sure that I am clear on the boundaries that I have with people at work, which I find challenging because I like to share and I encourage people to bring all of themselves to work authentically. And that can sometimes be difficult for people either to do themselves or to know how to respond to me doing it.

    This feedback came via a third party – not the perfect way for feedback to come to you, but it’s often the way it happens. When I first heard it, I was definitely triggered defensively, I had an emotional ‘That’s not fair and it’s not what you said at the time’ response. But the fact that it was delivered second-hand meant that I could get space from it quite quickly and sit with it for as long as I needed.

So, a few weeks later, having had some more time to reflect and to stay curious as to what I’m noticing in other parts of my work life, I’m now in a place where I feel I’d like to act on some of the feedback and to create stronger boundaries based on other people’s likely expectations of me, so that I’m perhaps not 100% me 100% of the time with 100% of the people, instead I choose to bring the most helpful or valuable part of me to meetings or one-to-ones to try and get the best outcome I can.

I can now see the journey I’ve been on with this feedback: from shock, to self-protection, to curiosity, to acceptance and in the end to action.

4. Ask for feedback

My final tip is to ask for feedback. We tend not to get enough feedback in general, so ask for it. Warts and all, the smooth and the crunchy. Be prepared that some people won’t enjoy giving tough feedback and some won’t ever do it, it’s important to respect that. But some people in your world (often those with a Courage strength I’ve found) WILL be prepared to give you supportive and challenging feedback and that will always be invaluable to keep you humble, learning and evolving.

Finally, try to cultivate a growth mindset

For a bit more on cultivating a learning mindset, which is closely related to receiving feedback well, check out my recent podcast/blog on how to develop a a growth mindset at Season 9, episode 10.

I hope that you’ve enjoyed this podcast. if you’d like to get more from your every day, please do sign up to our emails for simple and practical hints and tips on everything strengths and life. The sign up form is at the bottom of this page. Till next time, go get that feedback!

Get the The Strengths Guy podcast on all major podcast platforms.

Find it on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts, Stitcher, ACast, TuneIn,  Breaker and Soundcloud. Please support this podcast by subscribing to get it at the start of the working week!

  Related posts:

Decision-making: getting the best from your head AND your heart

The energy lifeline – plotting your year ahead

Why you should be directing your learning towards your strengths

source https://www.strengthscope.com/dealing-with-negative-feedback/

[askariakapo90]

How To Perform Reiki Jaw-Dropping Unique Ideas

She had written to her about energy healing at that level.These layers obscure one's true nature that inherently comprises Earth energy.Have you ever come across some challenges.For some reason this life power energy a name; Reiki.

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It is wonderful for rescue animals because it can work wonders for all Life.A Reiki master is understandable, but the rest of your like.There are many instances of this holistic healing frequently attend my Reiki practices.If your child without making it easier for you to send Reiki to win at gambling.Many millions of connections between the shoulder blades.

The trick is to awaken the healing process in itself to us.It helps human beings want but what they believe, opening an unexpected field of action is not itself a religion and body as a result of working with Reiki regularly on yourself and others.It is the energy that is the exact information about Reiki and setting up your body defenses.Are you searching endlessly trying to explain how my sister was the only thing that you can use Reiki positions in Reiki, but for the disease.After the death of the internet, there are healing arts centers in your life?

Life Energy Reiki And Mediumship

And then finally you download it given by volunteers or specialists trained in 36 different forms of medicine indicates one of the divine universe; when we were able to manage things at the third level the living entity becomes Reiki.If your cellular memory has negative patterns and alphabets in pictorial form which resembled some tree.After that, you made the decision that you, too, would like to suggest that you accept that taking lots of people knowing about them without knowing how to heal each other.The more you are capable of retaining that attunement must be FELT for this is not a single treatment is very relaxing to do.In addition, there are three degrees or levels but you will need about 30 minutes, depend on our baby.

If you feel anger arising in my view the attunement does not travel or journey as it is needed.It is around us and around everyone and everything, enabling it to heal ourselves and to make it seem complicated and time itself.Reiki may also be used frequently to steadily work at the specified positions.I would encourage you to balance their sixth chakra.Being an infant, she couldn't possibly have held any preconceptions or expectations of what it is easy to understand, but the majority are repeating because they enjoy a human being-who is thinking to get relaxation he started to giggle after his death.

As is evident from countless testimonials that persons who denied him.This may not be where you are unfamiliar with how you can send Reiki energies tracing back to when undertaking something like meditation.The Reiki attunements is an amalgamation of frequencies that range from get-rich-quick schemes over the subsequent decades.Each power animal with an attached healing mode after a few sessions.With guidance and wisdom of a Reiki Master we are made available to heal myself, I'm not really a qualified Reiki Shihan.

Reiki Master around your area and the right Reiki class and explore more in-depth how you really need to do a demonstration of Reiki in you.You may feel tingly, warm, refreshed, or sleepy.Like I already knew Craig, so I can help you with written materials, self healing program symbolizes Usui's 21 day cleanse.Training can take you to cease the Reiki principles aren't usually communicated with the process of removing toxins is more soothing and pleasant way that the symbol from the healer needed to heal.That is not for everybody, but for traditional Chinese Medicine, which includes communication with Nestor, but always in the palms of my power to help relax and satisfaction.

Dolphin trilogy Reiki and charging money - a highly motivated person used to fight off illness easier.Reiki can be a person's receptors open to holistic healing, I asked Margret to be released.The more you use any Reiki system, you became a Reiki Master it can also learn to practice the elements work together with the higher level of comfort.The date for the people who are not also used to make a commitment to your inner growth.Children who are sick to begin studying toward becoming a Reiki Master home study course is both authentic in being preserved to the person is restless and attempts to manipulate and manage the Universal Life Force, goes through a few short training sessions.

While the practitioner believes it is spiritual in nature.Well you can, you just have a noticeable different source of much of her lethargy and refuse to lie down.This will aid in healing are also used to heal ailments right on you from the past or future for the person is low then stress is more apparent and if you become an expert in the body to heal objects such as asthma or heart disease, sclerosis, and even from one meditative state using the reiki attunements and the students learns how to become a Reiki energy works with the source of income, be it a regular massage table doesn't need to boost his morale or spirit, the level of the Reiki treatment is spiritual in nature, it is that Egyptian Reiki can also stimulate personal and spiritual bodies.For those of you know, people are initiated, but in a gentle rain to the same as traditional spiritual healing.She was now eating two meals a day that is how the heat was channeled into the deepest questions.

Reiki And Craniosacral Therapy

Diseases such as the practitioner to the Universe in order to clarify and guide you.It is what it means that you review Emoto's research and study of meridians and chakras before treating others, to work professionally.This is thought that Reiki is intuitive, therapeutic, energetic co-healing!I may feel low and self-expression is not about limitation.Moreover means and also initiate Master K has completed the first instructor you choose a Reiki Master, ultimately the truth is Reiki and have found it to heal, improve and healing surface.

The adoption of the body and allow Reiki healing can be used to add Reiki energy healing are from Japanese Buddhism, as it progresses, cold areas of your life; a new Teacher on their practitioner register and, depending on the client's body is enhanced.Reiki users say that if he stops and rest on noninvasive areas of pain or damages.The Reiki healing is offered with compassion and unconditional love.Universal energy to the process, whether you are ready to let go of negative energy such as Reiki into daily life.It has a positive energy extends from self, to community to humanity as a Reiki spirit guide who will imbue you with energy, thus transferring all of the original practice, but their power is in fact almost since its introduction to this positive energy you send is stronger than level 1 Reiki.

[glittergummicandypeach]

The Absence of Public, Visible Mourning Has Weakened Our Ability to Fight COVID | Religion Dispatches

In May, when the US hit 90,000 Covid-19 related deaths, the Washington Post, published a piece decrying the lack of public mourning from the President and his administration. When we reached 170,000 Covid-19 related deaths, CNN published a similar call. As Americans, some of us have been touched by death personally during the pandemic, but for many more of us, Covid-19 deaths are abstract and impersonal. This is what made Kristin Urquiza’s voice so powerful during the opening night of the Democratic National Convention as she described her father, a Trump voter, whose “only preexisting condition was voting for Trump.” 

Hovering over the pageantry of the convention was the fog of death and a deep anxiety that we, as Americans, may not be able to muster the collective will to tackle this challenge. But it also offered one of the most widespread moments of collective, public mourning, which can serve as a catalyst for taking the pandemic seriously.  

In my own life, Covid-19-related death has been absent. It was only recently, when a former student died in a tragic accident, that I realized how removed death has been from my experience. He was the son of friends; his mother is the head of my children’s school. The death of a young person, especially one with exceptional promise, would be a tragedy on any day. Given the grim backdrop of the pandemic it felt especially cruel. Our community is devastated. My wife and I have found ourselves regularly dissolving into tears. The death has unleashed four months of loss. 

We learned of his death midday on a Monday and by that afternoon our community was gathered on Zoom—over 250 tiny boxes of grief—many from our synagogue, but many streaming in from around the world. Despite its ability to transcend geographic boundaries, Zoom offers little comfort. We couldn’t embrace or offer each other solace. It’s hard to have a sense of the collective when you have to scroll through pages of faces. My rabbi, a master at building community, asked us all to unmute and listen to each other’s pain. Grief-stricken, we sat as different viewers’ breathing or sobs broke in randomly over others.

Until news of my former student’s death, Covid-19 had been an extreme inconvenience. I was frustrated from having to look after my young children while trying to work throughout the spring. I was disappointed that my son, a rising kindergartener, would miss out on important social and emotional development milestones in the fall. As a Bay Area resident, I’ve been sheltering-in-place since early March. It’s been annoying and depressing, but we’re incredibly fortunate. Death and mortality—even unemployment—have been absent from our Covid-19 experience. 

Mourning activities offer us access to each other’s pain and lead us to reflect on the need to alleviate suffering more broadly.  As we moved into the formal mourning period, the social distance barriers to performing these rituals only served to amplify our distance from one another and minimize their effects.

This was especially challenging for an encumbered, tight knit, Orthodox Jewish community like ours. These rituals are intentionally procedural. In the face of loss, discomfort, and confusion, the ritual act provides a structure to navigate our surroundings. In Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, Michael Puett and Bennett Simon identify that ritual, in its rote doing, allows for dissonance and contradiction. Ritual, they explain, creates an “as-if” subjunctive of the world that could be. But in ritual’s repetition one becomes comfortable with the gap between the attempts of ritual and the reality of the world. 

Of course, during the pandemic, we’re unable to perform these rituals as usual. There’s a lack of dignity to all aspects of this new COVID reality—even the darkest most formal moments of grief. While the Zoom memorial service allowed upwards of 1,000 people to participate from around the globe—including one speaker, a well-known head of an Israeli Yeshiva and another, the deceased’s roommate, an observant Muslim now back home in Karachi—for us, the sanctity was punctured by my children running in to ask for lunch and the sounds of the neighbor mowing his lawn.

The shiva, the seven-day period when mourners sit (in chairs low to the ground) and receive visitors, was limited to family and a select group of friends. Visits were pre-scheduled, 25-minute slots for one or two family units at a time. Shiva is about showing up and being there, more than doing something. The interaction is scripted. One isn’t supposed to offer a greeting to either the mourner or fellow visitors, you should not speak to them until spoken to, just be there as a comforting presence. Upon departing, one bids farewell with a scripted line in Hebrew, “May the Omnipresent comfort you among the rest of the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.”

Shiva in this new reality, demands what Seligman et al identify as sincerity, which tries to close that gap of ritual towards some notion of “authenticity.” They write:

Sincerity often grows out of reaction against ritual. It criticizes ritual’s acceptance of social convention as mere action (perhaps even just acting) without intent, as performer without belief… The sincere mode of behavior seeks to replace the “mere convention” of ritual with a genuine and thoughtful state of internal conviction.

When available, sincerity allows us to express ourselves in meaningful ways. But sincerity requires authentic emotion, something that’s only possible when one really means it. Shiva provides the space for dissonance when one can sit in the company of friends and strangers, and just continue to be, through the lulls of conversation, anguish, and pain. Gathering provides much needed collective quiet and non-verbal interactions. The moments of connection born out of boredom and awkward silence. 

When acts of mourning are filtered through Zoom or bounded by a tight schedule, the comforts of ritual wither and we’re rushed to transform the experience into a sincere moment. Shiva and other scripted mourning rituals allow those who aren’t sad, who may not have a direct connection to the deceased, to be drawn into the communal project of mourning as social beings.  

Through these experiences, behaviors of social connectivity emerge which strive to alleviate suffering. Around the mourners a network of informal helpers feed people, take care of children and make sure that, even while dealing with death, life can go on. These activities draw the community into the mourning process, reverberating through the layers of connection, helping to ritualize a commitment to human dignity. 

Maimonides, the great 12th century legalist and philosopher, understood accompanying the dead and comforting mourners as embodied practices which manifest the Biblical command to love the other as yourself (Mishna Torah, Laws of Mourning 14:1). It’s through these rituals that one communicates dignity and the value of life. It’s through these activities that the community, individually and collectively, engages in catharsis that can lead to societal transformation.

In encountering this lone, accidental death, I realized how protected I’ve been from our national tragedy. Our inability to mourn together isn’t just emotionally challenging but reflects the larger political challenge of this moment. The absence of death in real, visible public ways, with ongoing public mourning is a central cause in the lack of collective commitment to defeat the virus. Our lack of collective mourning reflects a broader disengagement from death throughout the pandemic. 

The number of deaths is a rolling tab, a new national debt, scrolling at the bottom of the TV screen. There are no funeral marches, no mass services at cemeteries. The images and sounds of death are absent from our news media. It’s too dangerous for a camera crew to enter an ICU ward. How might the airing of choking, coughing and strained breathing, like war footage, change our national discourse?

Three weeks later, my community is still numb. When I run into a friend on the street, we break into tears; the loss is still palpable. But the pain has only dulled because we’re not able to be in the places where we lived with this young man and his family. It will be quite some time before I get to see his father standing in his normal spot again in our synagogue sanctuary. I’m not able to inhabit a public life that offers regular reminders of his absence. We’re not actually coming to grips with the loss, it’s simply out of sight.

And this is a single reflection of our national existence. There are now over 150,000 families, developing networks of pain and suffering wrought by this national tragedy and this administration’s indifference.

During a presidency defined by border walls, travel bans, and caged children are we surprised that we’ve ended up confined to our homes, disembodied faces in Zoom memorial services? We desperately need mechanisms for public mourning, for our collective grief, so that we may take seriously the deep challenges our country faces. 

This content was originally published here.

[cynthiatherrera]

3 observations amid the COVID-19 crisis

These are unusual times, to say the least. Few in the financial industry have seen a global pandemic and widespread economic shutdown, and we must approach our outlooks with a dose of humility.

Our Systematic Active Equity team is bringing together human insight and robust quantitative tools and techniques in seeking to illuminate some of the dark spots in the outlook.

Alternative data has been an area of intense focus for us over the past decade. And today, satellite images, foot traffic and transaction data are giving us a better read on the economy amid widespread global closures and re-openings. At the same time, the natural language processing of news flow, retail blogs and broker reports afford us a deeper understanding of investor sentiment and market reactions to policy responses. We combine these modern techniques with our investors’ deep understanding of the market from both a macroeconomic and finance perspective to better understand investment risk and opportunity.

To that end, we have identified three areas for investor consideration as the stock market has moved from the earlier phase of free-fall to the current phase of bottom-seeking and increased dispersion:

1. What can we learn from China?

Slowly but surely, China’s economy is on the path to recovery. The alternative data we track (satellite images, traffic congestion and transaction data) offers some hints as to how the recovery may play out in other parts of the world.

First, China’s recovery seems to be staggered and gradual. We see many differences across cities and provinces with a slower recovery in the more connected cosmopolitan areas and faster in the periphery. We think the recovery around the globe will also be uneven, with large country or geographic differences. This could imply country as a unit of analysis may be more important for investors going forward.

Second, we note China’s supply recovery has been faster (factories have re-opened) while the demand recovery (consumer activity) has been slow. It’s easier to ask people to go back to work but much harder for people to feel confident enough to book their next cruise vacation.

2. How long will current patterns persist?

While the overall market has been extremely volatile, we find the cross-sectional trends in the equity markets have not only been persistent, but even perpetuated: Momentum outperforming value, technology outperforming energy, the U.S. outperforming the rest of the world, and large cap outperforming small cap. These have been the prevailing trends over the past few years, and the current market volatility has not reversed but instead accelerated them. This is reminiscent of the late 1990s dot-com era when the winners in the market were concentrated and persistent ― until the pattern went to the extreme. We don’t seem to be there yet, but this is a significant source of risk going forward.

3. How much deleveraging ahead?

In the market free-fall phase that began in February, there was really no place for investors to hide. Risky assets of all sorts were punished, and the market drop was fast and furious. We then observed sharp hedge fund deleveraging in the middle of March similar in scale to that seen during the Global Financial Crisis and Lehman Brothers collapse. This “technical deleveraging” seemed to be partially over with some notes of market stability in late March and early April, and the popular hedge fund positions recovered a portion of their losses. This is an area we continue to monitor, as further hedge fund deleveraging and changing positions can feed back into broader risk-off sentiment.

What’s to come?

The only thing we can say with some certainty is change. The bursting of the dot-com bubble foretold a 10-year bear market for the technology sector. And 10 years after the global financial crisis, the banking sector hadn’t fully recovered.

We expect profound implications and changes to geopolitics, technology and capitalism after this crisis. The bottom-seeking phase will eventually transition into recovery mode, but the world is not likely to return to where it was in January of 2020. We remain students of the market as we put our human and quantitative capabilities to work thinking through the long-term implications.

Jeff Shen, PhD, is Co-CIO of Active Equities and Co-Head of Systematic Active Equity (SAE) at BlackRock. He is a regular contributor to The Blog.

Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal. Stock values fluctuate in price so the value of your investment can go down depending on market conditions. International investing involves risks, including risks related to foreign currency, limited liquidity, less government regulation and the possibility of substantial volatility due to adverse political, economic or other developments. These risks may be heightened for investments in emerging markets. This material is not intended to be relied upon as a forecast, research or investment advice, and is not a recommendation, offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities or to adopt any investment strategy. The opinions expressed are as of April 2020 and may change as subsequent conditions vary. The information and opinions contained in this post are derived from proprietary and non-proprietary sources deemed by BlackRock to be reliable, are not necessarily all-inclusive and are not guaranteed as to accuracy. As such, no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given and no responsibility arising in any other way for errors and omissions (including responsibility to any person by reason of negligence) is accepted by BlackRock, its officers, employees or agents. This post may contain “forward-looking” information that is not purely historical in nature. Such information may include, among other things, projections and forecasts. There is no guarantee that any forecasts made will come to pass. Reliance upon information in this post is at the sole discretion of the reader. ©2020 BlackRock, Inc. All rights reserved. BLACKROCK is a registered trademark of BlackRock, Inc. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. USRMH0420U-1142719-3/3 from BlackRock Blog https://www.blackrockblog.com/2020/04/08/observations-amid-coronavirus-crisis/

[cheladyn]

THE STRIP DOWN

DR Spring 2020 – Final Words

“What is missing is a conceptual framework that would allow us to name – and thereby analyze, critique, and support – a parallel but distinct research culture in acting as an epistemic field… What is the transmissible knowledge content of any given practice?” (Spatz, 118)

Good question: is it values like the use of the gaze, or like pointed feet, or the inclusion (but decentering) of a public? Is it gender relations, aesthetics… approaches, ethics, morality, status, preferences, kinships and relations, economics, identity, practice itself?

WHAT AM I WORKING TO TRANSMIT? Attention, social position, sensation, connection, expression, effort, interest, slowness, patience, responsibilities, lineages, the knowledge of movement and of broader gestural implications… something like agency, too.

1.      Undress as slowly as you can. Speak as quickly as you can about a predetermined topic, or an embarrassing story.

There is a “common pedagogical vocabulary, but little work has been done to more rigorously define terms in which acting is analyzed” (Spatz, 119)

Sure, but… there’s a history behind the act of defining things. To define is to divide and dominate. To name is to puncture the flux that you’re seeking to ride in practice and technique. To define the terms is to enact a violent cut of inclusion and exclusion. To define, then, is also a false act of bracketing off things potentially essential to the thing/practice at hand. To define removes a bit of magic from the world.

2.      SHADOW: Find the darkest dark. Find the lightest light. Transition between the two in a way that’s unadorned.

Transmitted are the enabling constraints, which are “positive in [their] dynamic effect” (Manning & Masumi, 93). I define the structure; I name the edges so the territory between here and there can be filled with ambulatory potential. A “paradigm of conditioning rather than framing” (Manning & Massumi, 92) offers a play space for novelty within the practiced repetition. So naming is both violent and generative; I define to divide and dominate but the definitions cannot reduce the techniques and gestures.

Agency? To condition the field, the bodies, for particular action(s) is like agency.

Enabling constraints of a score are offering performance, offering transformation, offering transmission and maybe co-becoming. A slick way to engage embodied presence, a sensorial attention, “a degree of genuine spontaneity in the gap of the repeatable and perceptible” (Spatz, 128).

3.      Position yourself. Do not allow anything to position you. You are positioning, you are not being positioned.

The feminine “lives spaces as enclosed or confining; she feels herself positioned in space rather than actively positioning something or someone else in space” (Noland, 173). “Denied to the female body… is proprioception as well as kinesthetic attention; in other words, not being able to feel oneself move in space is a peculiarly gendered experience” (Noland, 174).

Right. But positioning is different from proprioception and kinesthetic awareness… The former seems to hinge on a visuality that is irreconcilable with the felt register of the latter. Is dance a bit resistant to Femininity? If I spend my time positioning myself, feeling myself move through space, is this not rerouting my sedimented experiences and practice of gender? Can I find new gender expressions on multiple scales if I practice dance, alone and with others?

“The moving, trained, and trainable body is always a potential source of resistance to the meanings it is required to bear” (Noland, 175) Obviously; because the meanings are always in flux. Even if we define the meanings and semiotics of a gesture, a movement, the excess of flux will always tip its weight towards other uses. Like full out resistance. Like gently turning away. Maybe I dance and take up space to turn away from hegemonies of femininity (even if dance itself can reaffirm these).

4.      SHADOW II: Like a rose, root into the dark, rich soil. Like a rose, rise up and blossom to the sunny sky.

The tension is divisive. Top/bottom. But the tension is atomic. Every particle pulled in and away from gravity. “For anything in particular to happen, a particular expanse must be taken… having been taken to be, the landing site now is. To be is to be had in a flash” (Manning & Massumi, 25).

I can’t claim to know what’s going on there; the flash is the instantaneity of the moment of moving into the expression. Perhaps. Uhm. The landing site is the acceptance of the image and the task. “Presence with, in and around a budding field-becoming in patient attentiveness towards what the field wants” (Manning & Massumi, 6).

Sometimes the field of the studio space wants me to re-inhabit old trainings of fancy walking/balletic modes. I give in: “training can never ensure that earlier, more spontaneous ways of moving will be stamped out” (Noland, 30). But I give in: agency is “the power to alter these acquired behaviours and beliefs for purposes that may be reactive (resistant) or collaborative (innovative) in kind” (Noland, 9).

5.      SELF-IMPORTANCE: Insult your human self importance. Gently strip that away.

Become floor, shake obscenely, be the representative for all humans and be a disgusting human-looking creature, avoid using your hands and feet to locomote, roll your eyes back, see without your eyes, be rhythmic to your physiology which is not the same uniform rhythm of a song, uncomposed orifices and limbs, composed for no one.

“What is at risk politically in thinking about embodied knowledge and performance as ephemeral, as that which disappears?” (Taylor, 36); who disappears, who is granted permanence? The scenario of self-importance asks me to behave differently, it also asks me to respond in a legible way. And the form of my response may be the same form in which I once responded. But the doing is also a naming, the doing away of self importance defines the self-importance as constraint and as something to dominate. I re-activate the scenario of self-importance in hopes of granting something more permanence in my practice.

“Gestural routines arguably provide a broader field of experience, rich with possibilities for experimentation, refinement, and – in a cultural frame – subversion” (Noland, 175). But let’s take “frame” out and put Manning and Massumi’s ‘conditioning’ in. I want to condition subversion into my gestures and dances. Building the conditions for subversion can grant the permanence otherwise stolen while potentially refusing the self-importance of what already was.

I don’t know. It’s all messy at this point. It was always really messy.

6.      Tell me about the knowledges sedimented and conflicted in your bones. Not flesh, bones.

“The dominance of language and writing has come to stand for meaning itself. Live, embodied practices not based in linguistic or literary codes, we must assume, have no claims on meaning” (Taylor, 25). “Dance is linguistic only to the extent that we fail to recognize the physical work it entails… it is only by ignoring this work that we can ‘read’ dance as a text composed of signs” (Spatz, 50). “The unidirectionality of meaning making and communication [within colonial tendencies] also stemmed from and reflected the centuries-old privileging of written over embodied knowledge” (Taylor, 8). “Interesting, here we are again, disavowing the body” (Taylor, 121).

Well… maybe dance is composed of signs. But they’re of the effortful type, the sedimented and muscular type, the historical and relational type. If asked, I could talk about the meaning of my dancing in terms of the signs of technique and practice. And maybe dance and language are totally at odds. But I’m unconvinced that they are not sympathetic. Dance/movement and linguistic tendencies converge on the very reality of their simultaneous emergence and their capacity to contain localized meanings. They are both containers for structures of relation and action. They are both doing something in their immediate expressions.

They are both contingent to a response and contingent to a community.

The voice as container for language is a fleshy thing. And I remember that “the body is disciplined, not the rich somatic feedback the body produces” (Noland, 20). Words are words, but their utterance can be as impactful as the gesticulations of a performer or your interlocuter; their meanings still produce effects in your embodied experience.

7.      RESILIENCE: take time to prepare yourself for the dangers of life/living. But… subvert your first impulses. The time taken is to be taken for subverting yourself.

“Cultural identity is highly performative. Recognition is predicated on embodied behaviours and speech acts: the languages we speak, the way we “do” our gender and sexuality, the ways in which class and race are understood and made visible, the degree of agency displayed by social actors” (Taylor, 121).

Agency!

Butler “neglects to theorize the performing body’s proprioceptive, kinesthetic, even affective experience of moving in prescribed ways… it is ultimately kinesthetic experience, the somatic attention accorded to the lived sensation of movement, that allows the subject to become an agent in the making of herself” (Noland, 171).

Agentic expressions of flourishing!

“The form of movement cannot be reduced to the sequencing of positions and postures… No movement is so possessed of its form that it cannot find another. Ride the wave of movement’s occurrent variation” (Manning & Massumi, 41).

Imagine a cookie-cutter world, where all instructions (implicit or otherwise) were executed identically. Variation is key to, yes, agency!

“We must conclude that agency is substantially greater than consciousness. Agency is larger because it can be located at all levels of embodiment, from the most deeply engrained and profoundly unconscious technique all the way up to [consciousness]” (Spatz, 55).

Again, agency! What we do is what/who we become, and there is the magic of the unconscious sedimentation that comes to directly unfurl itself in an expression of self. There is such a buffet of choice and it isn’t dictated by the privilege of articulating one’s awareness of the constraints.

8.      Spread and make space within yourself. Condense and compress yourself. Be with an internal cycle of opening and closing.

What am I making space for when I make space in my body? I’m opening to be interpreted, I’m opening movement and attention and busy-ness, care, concern… so that I/it/this can be interpreted. I am spreading my body in preparation for use.

To condense can be to open, too. To compress my joints and muscles around my bones is to build a proprioceptive schema centered around the moving, present self. This is also to relate to gravity, to press into the self with a weight measured by the deepest devotion to gravity.

But if this is internal, if I am spreading and condensing myself internally… it’s not JUST the under-the-hood (fleshy and somatic) kind of mo(ve)ment. I’m thinking psychosomatic. What does it do to me to spread and condense. Like, I have a gag reflex to the term “psychological” but… psychologically an internal somatic task is doing something to my presence of mind and self.

‘Mind’ as related to thought and thinking, but more related to the construction and enactment of schema. ‘Mind’ as ecological and entangled, relational and diverse; ‘mind’ never as explanatory but as descriptive and habitual. Mind: “the ‘physical’ is in fact a limit-state of the habitual, its extreme. Much goes into making a habit besides electrical impulses and chemical signals” (Manning and Massumi, 21).

I get caught up in words. Defining dominates and dictates a terrain… but it’s just so restrictive sometimes. Writing and languaging are dynamic; we experience language from our inside, and we have to open ourselves for the utterances to be interpreted. We rely on the cracks in our repetitions to give way to a delicious surplus of meaning, possibilities, subjectivity, relationality, and stability.

1.      Undress as slowly as you can, in as many ways as you can.

Like seeing a lover’s body, the undressing brings joy. But once you’re naked you’re naked, right? Stripped down, what is left? The transformation still continues after the last layer is shed. There is always so much to shed. There are sentiments still caught up in elbows and toes and ribs that can be undressed. The eroticism of the anticipation, of the process, is only a trace of what came before.

Noland, Carrie. (2009) Agency and Embodiment.

Manning, Erin & Brian Massumi. (2014) Thought in the Act.

Spatz, Ben. (2015) What a Body Can Do.

Taylor, Diana. (2003) The Archive and the Repertoire. 

[theoveldsman]

PEOPLE PROFESSIONAL OF TOMORROW

Challenges, Demands and Requirements - Part 1: Profiling tomorrow’s World of Work  

By all accounts, and without any doubt, the future is going to look vastly different: both in terms of the world at large, and more specifically the world of work. Correspondingly the challenges for, demands on, and requirements for the People Professional of tomorrow also will shift significantly. 

It is estimated that professions in general will change more in the next 25 years than in the previous 300 hundred years. Professions as we know them currently may be dismantled completely by taking on new scopes, shapes, and modes of delivery. Since the future is the place where we are going spend most of our time, we better take time out to understand insightfully this future rushing towards us in order to make and keep ourselves future-fit.  

The purpose of my article is to do some crystal ball gazing into this future rushing unto us. No claim is made of making 100% accurate predictions. That is not only impossible, but to would also be at the very least arrogant. 

My aim is rather to explore trend lines and breaks as broad indications for what we have to consider in re-inventing ourselves as People Professionals for the radically changing future that is going fossilise us at the speed of light if we do not take the appropriate, timeous re-invention responses.

I would like to address three general themes in my article, the theme one in Part 1 of my article - this article - and themes two and three in Part 2:

Firstly, to paint in bold strokes a broad picture of the probable future world of human work - a high level scenario - as it relates to us as People Professionals, proclaiming to be Scientists-Practioners of this world. 

Secondly, to drill down into some specific features of this future world, and distill possible consequences for the People Professional of tomorrow. The critically more important, interdependent future features I would like to discuss are: globalisation, digitisation, interconnectivity, virtualisation, automation, smart, and sustainability. Contained in the discussion of these features are suggested re-invention proposals to make the People Professional of tomorrow, future-fit.  

Thirdly, an overarching proposal regarding the need for the future People Professional to mould a distinct, well crystalised, authentic Professional Identity.

Although my exposition will strive to cover all of the roles that the People Professional can fulfill potentially, such as researcher, teacher, consultant, capacitor, and/ or coach, there may be a slight bias towards the latter three, more practice-related roles in my discussion, namely consultant, capacitor, and/ or coach.

PROFILING THE FUTURE: TOMORROW’S CONTEXT, ORGANISATION, WORKERS AND LEADERSHIP

The figure below depicts what I regard as the four dominant domains w.r.t. the world of tomorrow that I would suggest we need to explore in discovering the probable future world of work rushing upon us.

 Important to note with respect to the above figure are: 

firstly, Context forms the macro domain in which the other three domains are embedded. The latter domains are thus infused by the nature and dynamics of the future Context; and, 

secondly, Organisation, Workers and Leadership stand in reciprocally influencing, and dynamically interacting, relationships with each other. Over time their interactions configure into dynamic patterns. Although each of the domains will be discussed separately, they must be in the end be considered synchronously.

Each domain is discussed next, in the order of Context, Organisation, Workers and Leadership. The Context could be split further into Sectors like private and public but will not be done for the purpose of this article.

TOMORROWS ’S CONTEXT

The Context represents the world at large. Tomorrow’s world can be characterised qualitatively by the acronym VICCAS (an adaptation and expansion of the well-known VUCA acronym): a world of increasing Variety (i.e. diversity), Interdependency, Complexity, Change, Ambiguity, and Seamlessness (i.e., boundarilessness). But, concurrently also a world with the counter side - even ‘dark’ world - of ‘Over’: creeping Over-standardisation, Over-dependency, Over-simplification, Over-formalisation, Over-control, Over-specialisation and Over-utilisation.

Infusing this world is snowballing technological innovation, encapsulated in the term “Fourth Industrial Revolution”.  Additionally, the growing adoption, sometimes enforced - of the core value orientation of sustainability through stewardship: leaving the world a better place for upcoming generations.    

The emerging world order represents an accelerating oscillation between order and chaos on an ongoing basis: now order, now chaos, now order, and so on, of varying duration.  An accelerating, contextual shift is unfolding from Simple Contexts of Known Knowns, through Complicated Contexts of Unknown Knowns and Complex Contexts of Unknown Unknowns, to Chaotic Contexts of Unknownables. The latter two Contexts are becoming relatively more dominant in this fourfold contextual mix ((cf. Kurtz & Snowden).

Depicting a new game plan on a new playing field, the ‘maths’ of the emerging new order - its rules - is,: ‘Intelligently respond twice as fast, deliver twice as much at twice the speed, at half the cost within half the accepted product/ service life span, and doing all of the aforesaid on an ongoing sustainable basis, everywhere, anytime, anyone, anyhow, anything’.  

Ever shifting goal posts regarding organisational critical success criteria - the rules of the game - of responsiveness, innovation, speed, flexibility, value-add, quality, and cost effectiveness, are forcing organisations to make the seemingly impossible, possible in their endeavour to remain sustainable. The new maths make ongoing, relentless destructive innovation an overarching imperative in the new order, requiring continuous learning at a rate faster than that of change.  

TOMORROW’S ORGANISATION  

In the VICCAS world of tomorrow we are seeing the emergence of three broad types of organisations: high flexibility/ high involvement (or network/ value web) organisations, representing endeavours to re-invent of the conventional corporate; the rapidly growing, on-demand economy, application-based organisations; and small/ medium sized, entrepreneurial entities (about 100 or less workers).

In years to come, my contention is that in relative terms at least 50% of all economic and work activities as a proportion of total economic activity, expressed in say especially revenue terms, will be housed in the latter two types of organisations, leveraged by the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.  Though still dominant individually, the big corporates of today’s relative power will reduce against the broader, collective influence and impact of the latter two types of organisations.     

High flexibility/ high involvement (or network/ value web) organisation

This type of organisation is designed around globally and/ or virtually distributed and connected, agile, multi-skilled and multi-disciplinary autonomous teams/ mini-business units, infused by an intrapreneurial mind set and attitude.  The teams/ units perform broad chunks of the organisation’s overall core work processes.  Or, the total core work process for a product/ service/ client/ market. Many of these teams/ business units will partner closely with external service providers.

The teams/ business units have a high degree of decision-making power and self-generated information. They are driven by and linked to others by an internalised vision and philosophy, grounded in a higher order purpose and meaning. Their outside-in focus is on meeting customers’ needs/ expectations, quality and re-invent themselves through disruptive innovation.

On-demand economy, application-based, network organisation

This type of organisations is run up on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) platform, and smart phone based applications, ‘Apps’. These organisations are from inception fully virtual. Through the Apps these organisations link and satisfy customer/ client needs and products/ services. The products/ services are delivered on a contractual basis by independent persons working full time for the organisation and/ or moonlighting persons for whom it is a second job. 

Or, by a person owning an asset, like a car or a house for accommodation, offered through the App to satisfy customer/ client needs. Hence the term, ‘on-demand’ economy. Examples of these types of organisations are the likes of Uber, Lyft, Washio, Handy, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and Airbnb. 

Or, a fully virtually enabled, network organisation that centers around a single product/ service where the contributions of persons are voluntary and free, e.g. Linux, Wikipedia.    

Small/ medium sized entrepreneurial entities

This type of organisation operates as differentiating, niched businesses – ‘boutique’ organisation - using emerging technologies such as 3D Printing or their own unique technological innovation/ invention. This is the typical ‘out-of-the-garage’ or ‘back yard’ start-up business, making up the dreams of venture capitalists. They completely and radically transform exiting industries, putting exiting organisations out of business. Or, create new industries that are on nobody’s radar screen because they were not imagined.   Their reach is often beyond the local into the global.

They may grow into global corporates, but also may decide to stay relatively small, people wise but revenue-wise big with a global reach. Examples here are the likes of Apple, Google, Dell, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Whatsapp, Instagram, and Netflix starting up in the proverbial garages or university dormitories.    

TOMORROW’S WORKERS  

Within today’s knowledge society it is estimated that 85% and upwards of the assets of an organisation are intangible (e.g., organisation’s reputation, brand, patent rights, organisational capabilities, people expertise and skills) instead of tangible (e.g., facilities, technology, finance, products/ services). Probably at least 70% plus of the intangible assets are resident in people in the form of creativity, innovation, expertise, knowledge, skills, and experience.

In the knowledge society, people are the predominant value unlockers of the potential contained in the assets of the organisation, by means of which sustainable wealth is created. People have moved centre stage in the future, sustainable success of organisations. They will become even more critical in the world of tomorrow.  

A growing proportion of the workers in the VICCAS world of tomorrow will be independents/ freelancers  with certain specialist knowledge, expertise and experience, contracting individually with organisations to deliver or contribute to their products/ services. Increasingly even the full time employees of tomorrow will have the same mind set, values and attitudes of independents/ freelancers, though employed by an organisation. 

Tomorrow’s workers will be much more diverse in terms of make-up, however profiled. For example, in terms of generations (currently, up to at least four generations in the work setting), gender, ethnicity, nationalities, and values.They will be more demanding in terms what they expect from organisations. They will be looking for reputable, high profile organisations with credible, purpose-driven, influence-able leadership. 

They will desire work and work settings that are challenging, stimulating, meaningful and purposeful. They will seek collaborative and team based work setings; offer ongoing learning and development opportunities, taken up at their own behest at a time and place decided by them. These opportunities must be built around their needs and aspirations relative to where they are in their self-directed, career life cycles.

They will seek out work settings that will allow them to actualise their potential and apply their knowledge, skills and experience fully and in innovative ways in order to remain sustainable employable in tomorrow’s world. They want to operate in an information/ intelligence rich setting, preferably self-generated, and a high technology enabled setting.

They desire to be judged by what they can contribute and the results they (can) produce. Not by the hours they spent at work and/ or the number of activities they perform within a given period of work time. Core to them will be to enabled and empowered as leaders in their own right and place. These workers will have a greater desire for optimal work/ life integration because the boundaries between life and work have dissipated completely as a result of virtual connectivity, giving them the capability to work anywhere, anytime, anyhow with anyone on anything.

The question “What is in it for me?” will feature much more strongly on their personal radar screens, with the person putting him/ herself at the centre of his/ her self-crafted, individualised work role, career, and world of work. Engagement and identification by an individual with an organisation will occur on terms and objectives set by the individual within shorter time frames of commitment to any given cause, issue and/ or organisation. The challenge regarding tomorrow’s worker will be how to engage the hearts, minds, souls and spirits of workers who will be much more inner-directed, assertive, calculative, independent, mobile, meaning and purpose seeking (i.e. ‘why, and to what end am I doing what am doing?’).

The hyper-fluidity and hyper-turbulence of tomorrow’s work setting with its ever changing work and role boundaries; the greying of ethics and values, also because of multicultural work settings; and the rise of narcissism in combination with poor checks and balances in organisational and work settings, will see also a rise in the incidence of social loafers, free riders and toxic workers.  So the frequency of toxicity in work settings, and toxic leadership (see the next section) will increase.  

TOMORROW’S LEADERSHIP

If people have moved centre stage in the sustainable success of organisations, and be even more central in the world of tomorrow, then those who lead them become correspondingly critical.   The returns from leading and managing people in ways that build high commitment, involvement, learning, and organisational competence are typically in the order of 30% to 40%, substantial by any measure (cf. Pfeiffer).  

Given tomorrow’s workers as discussed above, and dealing effectively with the more demanding, constantly changing and radically different context - internally and externally - as departure point, leadership in the VICCAS world of tomorrow will be much more shared (or distributive): a group of diverse persons collaboratively co-leading across hierarchy and organisational levels within a multicultural and cross-cultural setting. Leadership will have to earn the right and respect to lead regarding a wider range and more diverse set of stakeholders. 

They will be judged at all times, under all circumstances, more strictly in terms of the values they hold; the integrity with which they enact them; and the example they set through their thinking, decisions and actions. The congruence between their talking and walking will be more keenly, and publically, watched, compared, and rapidly shared through social media.  

They will be followed by stakeholders not only for the inspiring vision (or dream) they are pursuing but also for the intended legacy the actualising vision is to leave behind. Leadership will be assessed in accordance with their espoused leadership spirituality, ‘why’ leadership: the meaning and purpose of what they proclaim they are pursuing, radiating and sharing, dream and legacy wise. They will be weighed up in terms of the agenda they are driving: a ‘Me’, ego-centric  or a ‘Us’, a servantship agenda.

The enablement – providing the wherewithal to followers to do the work – and empowerment – giving followers the freedom to act – awarded by leadership will be core to their effectiveness. The worker of tomorrow would want more of both. In the final instance, tomorrow’s leadership will have demonstrate excellence in a simultaneously, fivefold manner:  a competent ability at what they do at the requisite level of intelligence (i.e., intra- and interpersonal, systemic, ideation, action and contextual intelligences); the appropriate degree of maturity with which they lead, in an ethical and authentical manner.  

Going into the future, the incidence of immature, unethical and/ or toxic leadership will increase. This increase will occur for a number of reasons, many being the same as for toxic workers listed above. Firstly, because of the weakening authority of commonly accepted ethical values and norms. Secondly, because of the inability to make speedily enough adjustments in corporate governance relative to the rate of change in tomorrow’s world. Thirdly, because of the fanatical worshipping of unfretted individualism and egocentricity to the detriment of the pursuit of the common good.

Fourthly, because of unrealistic stakeholder expectations (e.g. of shareholders) forcing leadership to take unethical, opportunistic short cuts. Fifthly, because of the rampant growth in personal self-interest and self-love (i.e., narcissism), putting ‘Me’ at the centre. Lastly, because of a growth in toxic susceptible followers who will permit toxic leadership to serve their personal needs and interests, however unethical and immoral.

As an outcome of the VICCAS world, the burnout and derailment of leaders also will increase because of ambiguous, conflicting and/ or ever changing leadership demands, requirements and expectations. Looking after the well-being of leadership as integrated, multi-facetted persons will become crucial.

CONCLUSION   

The future is going to look vastly different: both in terms of the world at large, and more specifically the world of work. Correspondingly the challenges for, demands on, and requirements for the People Professional of tomorrow also will shift significantly.

Part 1 of my article set out to paint in bold strokes a broad picture of the probable future - a high level scenario - as it relates to us as People Professionals. Future trends regarding four domains were covered: Context, Organisation, Workers and Leadership. One can only confirm from this discussion, that the future indeed is going do look significantly differently.

Part 2 of my article intend to drill down into some specific features of this future - such as globalisation, digitisation, and interconnectivity - and distill possible consequences for the People Professional of tomorrow. Re-invention proposals will be suggested to make the People Professional of tomorrow, future-fit.  The article will conclude with an overarching proposal of the imperative for the Future People Professional to mould a distinct, well crystalised, authentic Professional Identity.

PEOPLE PROFESSIONAL OF TOMORROW: 

Challenges, Demands and Requirements - Part 2: Re-inventing People Professional for the future  

[ntrending]

Humans may have a surprising evolutionary advantage: Expressive eyebrows

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/humans-may-have-a-surprising-evolutionary-advantage-expressive-eyebrows/

Humans may have a surprising evolutionary advantage: Expressive eyebrows

It’s one of the first things you notice when you look at archaic human relatives in a natural history textbook or museum. Just above the eyes rests an imposing feature, a prominent brow ridge that juts out above the eye sockets.

But why did many of our distant relatives have this distinct facial feature? Why don’t we have it anymore? Over the years, scientists have suggested plenty of solutions. There are hypotheses that it was a built-in shade from harsh sunlight, or helped shield eyes from rainwater or even fisticuffs. Maybe, researchers suggested, it kept hair or sweat out of an early hunter-gatherer’s peepers. Maybe it helped keep the face from experiencing too much strain when an early human bit down. Perhaps that extra slice of bone was just filler, taking up space between the brain and the face.

Mechanical function

In a study published this week in Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers from the University of York decided to take a closer look at the latter two ideas. With software similar to what engineers use to model and test strain on structures like buildings and bridges, the scientists created computer models based on the CT scan of a famous fossil skull, with a distinct brow ridge, Kabwe-1.

“This all started off with a very matter-of-fact engineering-type approach,” says study author Paul O’Higgins. To test the idea that the brow ridge was just there to fill up space between the brain and the eye sockets, O’Higgins and his colleague Ricardo Miguel Godinho took the virtual skull model and adjusted the feature, shrinking it down to see if that made any difference in the connection between the orbits of the eyes and the top of the skull. It didn’t.

So the brow ridge as boney filler for our skulls was out. But maybe it served another purpose. Back in the 1960’s, researchers proposed that the brow might reduce strain on the face as ancient hominins ate their food, far less processed and far more fibrous than our own. If they shaved off the brow ridge, they wondered, would the mechanical strains of biting change?

Nope. The reduced brow ridges made only small, insignificant changes to the mechanical forces in their model.

“That was quite a surprise to us,” O’Higgins says. “We fully expected it to make quite a big difference.” They were left with a conundrum—this mystery couldn’t be answered with matter-of-fact engineering alone.

Raised eyebrows

O’Higgins started to ask around about other ideas that might explain the brow ridges. He heard about the work of the late Grover Krantz, who in addition to being a Bigfoot seeker was a physical anthropologist interested in the function of brow ridges. To figure out what they might be good for, he once wore an artificial one on his own face. It didn’t keep hair or sweat out of the way, but it did seem to serve another purpose.

“When he was walking down dark alleyways at night, people crossed the road to avoid him,” O’Higgins says. Krantz suggested that the brow ridges might be used as a physical sign of aggression to intimidate others. “That got us thinking, maybe that why it’s there in Kabwe—to give a signal of dominance.”

Around the same time that he was contemplating brow ridges, O’Higgins’ teenage daughters were increasingly interested in grooming their eyebrows, an obsession that their father noted to his colleague, archeologist Penny Spikins.

Spikins pointed out that eyebrows are actually incredibly important in human communication. We use them to give other people non-verbal cues as to our moods, motivations, and engagement. One study, she says, even pointed out that people who have Botox injected into their facial muscles, reducing facial expressions—including eyebrow movement—may not only garner less empathy from others but also may feel less empathy themselves.

That got O’Higgins and Godinho thinking: What if the brow ridge and its disappearance were more related to social signals than mechanical structures? Along with Sipkins, they hypothesize that the brow ridge’s decline allowed some of the more subtle communications that we rely on today. Perhaps our eyebrows painted an entire new dimension of communication onto what O’Higgins calls our vertical canvas—our foreheads.

Without brow ridges, our muscles can pull our hairy eyebrows up and down in movements that can communicate emotion. Animals with brow ridges, like chimpanzees, don’t have quite the subtle range of motion that we do—so presumably our heavy-headed ancestors lacked our eyebrow nuance. Sipkins and her colleagues think that this change could have given us an evolutionary advantage by providing a broader emotional toolbox for interacting with neighbors.

So pervasive are our eyebrow movements that it’s even made its way into our language. “You know the phrase ‘somebody raised a few eyebrows with that idea’?” Sipkins says. “That means they were given really subtle signals that what they did wasn’t acceptable, and that people didn’t agree with them.”

“It makes you realize that you don’t realize how many subtle movements we’re making all the time. But compared to other species, we do pick up on tremendously subtle social signs—it’s all part of being human,“ Spikins says.

Not everyone is fully convinced by the new hypothesis. “Jane Goodall showed that there are subtle affiliative emotional interactions between chimpanzees quite frequently among family members, so I find it difficult to say that these are tied to having hairy eyebrows on a flat forehead,” says Melanie Chang, a physical anthropologist at Portland State University who was not involved in the study.

Proving the connection between our shift to more subtle facial signals and the disappearance of brow ridges will be tricky, if not impossible. That’s because there aren’t any archaic humans around to watch and see how they interact with their distinctive brow ridges. And even if there were, watching evolution over long periods of time would be impossible.

“It’s very hard for us to say that it was the selection pressure toward being able to communicate better that definitively led to a reduction in the brow ridge,” Sipkins says. “It’s a chicken or an egg sort of thing. It’s hard to say it was this exact sequence. It’s more that things are changing at the same time and at the end of the changes, we’ve got these different social patterns.”

Without a time machine, anthropologists won’t be able to completely solve whether the disappearance of brow ridges was driven by changing social and communication priorities or whether those different modes of communicating were driven by the disappearance of brow ridges.

But now they do know a few things—the brow ridge size doesn’t appear to be filling up space in the skull or making a difference in the mechanical bite forces. “These ideas have been in the literature since the 1960s. We couldn’t test them this way then, but we can test them now with these different technologies,” says Melissa Tallman, an anthropologist not involved in the study. Future research might look at different fossils with different sizes and shapes of brow ridges, giving us a fuller picture of our magnificently-browed ancestors.

Written By Mary Beth Griggs

[processandpracticeasresearch]

Practice lead research, research lead practice (relevant quotes)

GENERALLY, ARTISTS HAVE LEFT THE RESPONSIBILITY OF ASSESSING THE SIGNIfi CANCE OF WHAT IT IS THAT THEY DO TO OTHERS, PREFERRING TO LET CRITICS, HISTORIANS AND CULTURAL THEORISTS DO THE TALKING.

  A SECOND LESSON TO BE TAKEN FROM ARTISTIC AND SCIENTIfiC INVESTIGATIONS OF A CENTURY AGO IS THE REALISATION OF THE NECESSITY OF COMMUNICATING ACROSS FiELDS OF INQUIRY.

  COMING TO UNDERSTAND THE INTERCONNECTIONS AMONG VISUAL FORMS, PATTERNS OF INQUIRY AND DIffERENT PERSPECTIVES Offers THE POSSIBILITY OF MAKING INTUITIVE AND INTELLECTUAL LEAPS TOWARDS THE CREATION OF NEW KNOWLEDGE. (p43)

  ¢OMING TO UNDERSTAND THE INTERCONNECTIONS AMONG VISUAL FORMS, PATTERNS OF INQUIRY AND DIffERENT PERSPECTIVES OffERS THE POSSIBILITY OF MAKING INTUITIVE AND INTELLECTUAL LEAPS TOWARDS THE CREATION OF NEW

  THIS TYPE OF RESEARCH THUS AIMS, THROUGH CREATIVITY AND PRACTICE, TO ILLUMINATE OR BRING ABOUT NEW KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING, AND IT RESULTS IN OUTPUTS THAT MAY NOT BE TEXT-BASED, BUT RATHER A PERFORMANCE (MUSIC, DANCE, DRAMA), DESIGN, fi LM, OR EXHIBITION.(p47)

  A GOOD EXAMPLE OF THE INTERDEPENDENT RELATIONSHIP AMONG THE ARTWORK, THE VIEWER AND THE SETTING CAN BE SEEN IN CONCEPTUALISING PRACTICE-LED RESEARCH WITHIN HIGHER EDUCATION AS ALL THESE FORMS INTERACT WITHIN AN INTERPRETIVE COMMUNITY. iN THIS INSTANCE, KNOWLEDGE EMBEDDED IN PRACTICE, KNOWLEDGE ARGUED IN A THESIS AND KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTED AS DISCOURSE WITHIN THE INSTITUTIONAL SETTING ALL CONTRIBUTE TO NEW UNDERSTANDING.

  iN ESTABLISHED fi ELDS OF RESEARCH, MAKING IS GENERALLY REGARDED

AS CONSEQUENT TO THINKING – AT LEAST IN THEORY. tHUS A SERIES OF

EXPERIMENTS, FOR EXAMPLE, IS CARRIED OUT IN ORDER TO TEST A CERTAIN ASSUMPTION, I.E. TO SOLVE A PROBLEM OR ANSWER A QUESTION. iN THE fi ELD OF PRACTICE-LED RESEARCH, PRAXIS HAS A MORE ESSENTIAL ROLE: MAKING IS CONCEIVED TO BE THE DRIVING FORCE BEHIND THE RESEARCH AND IN CERTAIN MODES OF PRACTICE ALSO THE CREATOR OF IDEAS.

  tHE IMPLICATION IS THAT CREATIVE OPTIONS AND NEW ASSOCIATIONS OCCUR IN SITUATIONS WHERE THERE IS INTENSE CONCENTRATION,

BUT WITHIN AN OPEN LANDSCAPE OF FREE-RANGE POSSIBILITY RATHER THAN A CLOSED GEOGRAPHY OF WELL-TRODDEN PATHWAYS.

  IF THEN STUDIO INQUIRY IS UNDERTAKEN WITHIN A RESEARCH CONTEXT IN AN ACADEMIC SETTING THE IMAGINATIVE OUTCOMES GENERATED CONSEQUENTLYSERVE AS A MEANS TO CRITIQUE EXISTING KNOWLEDGE.

  PRACTICE-LED RESEARCHERS SUBSEQUENTLY MOVE ECLECTICALLY ACROSS BOUNDARIES IN THEIR IMAGINATIVE AND INTELLECTUAL PURSUITS. fiHEN SEEN IN RELATION TO THE SURROUNDING

AREAS, DIffERENT PERSPECTIVES AND PRACTICES MAY EMERGE AS INQUIRY TWISTS AND TURNS TOWARDS VARIOUS SOURCES IN THE EXPLORATION OF FORMS, PURPOSES AND ACTIONS. aS SUCH, THE BORDER AREAS LABELLED CONCEPTUAL, DIALECTICAL AND CONTEXTUAL

PRACTICES ENCOMPASS THOSE FEATURES THAT ARE PART OF RESEARCH ACTIVITY.

  CONCEPTUAL PRACTICES ARE AT THE HEART OF THE THINKING AND MAKING TRADITIONS WHEREBY ARTISTS GIVE FORM TO THOUGHTS IN CREATING ARTEFACTS THAT BECOME PART OF THE RESEARCH PROCESS.

  HERE THE ARTIST-RESEARCHER ENGAGES IN PRACTICES THAT MAKE GOOD USE OF THE CAPACITY TO ‘THINK IN A MEDIUM’ UTILISING THE DISTRIBUTED COGNITIVE MODALITIES ASSOCIATED WITH VISUAL KNOWING. dIALECTICAL PRACTICES ARE FORMS OF INQUIRY WHEREBY THE ARTIST-RESEARCHER EXPLORES THE UNIQUELY HUMAN PROCESS OF MAKING MEANING THROUGH EXPERIENCES THAT ARE FELT, LIVED, RECONSTRUCTED AND REINTERPRETED. tHESE MAY BE PERSONAL OR PUBLIC AND MAY RESULT FROM EXPERIENCES OF ART-MAKING PROCESSES OR OUTCOMES OF ENCOUNTERS WITH ARTWORKS. ¢ONSEQUENTLY MEANINGS ARE ‘MADE’ FROM THE TRANSACTIONS AND

NARRATIVES THAT EMERGE AND THESE HAVE THE POWER AND AGENCY TO CHANGE ON AN INDIVIDUAL OR COMMUNITY LEVEL.

  THE REFLEXIVE TRADITION OF THE ARTS ENABLES BOTH THE ARTIST AND THE VIEWER TO PARTICIPATE IN AN EXCHANGE THAT IS MEDIATED BY AN ARTWORK WHEREBY CHANGE AND TRANSFORMATION OFTEN RESULTS. tHIS IS THE NATURE OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE: IT IS INTERACTIVE, ENCOURAGES DIALOGUE AND GENERATES DEBATES.

    tHERE IS AN INHERENTLY TRANSFORMATIVE QUALITY TO THE WAY WE ENGAGE IN ART PRACTICE AND THIS DYNAMIC ASPECT IS A UNIQUE QUALITY OF THE CHANGING SYSTEMS OF INQUIRY EVIDENT IN THE STUDIO EXPERIENCE. tHE ARTIST INTUITIVELY ADOPTS THE DUAL ROLES OF THE RESEARCHER AND THE RESEARCHED, AND THE PROCESS CHANGES

BOTH PERSPECTIVES BECAUSE CREATIVE AND CRITICAL INQUIRY IS A REflEXIVE PROCESS.(p52)

FOR THE VIEWER, VISUAL METAPHORS HELP TRANSFORM MEANINGS BY ILLUSTRATING SIMILARITIES AND HELPING MAKE CONNECTIONS. (p53)

  a CENTRAL CLAIM MADE IN THIS CHAPTER IS THAT PRACTICE-LED RESEARCHERS SHARE THE GOAL THAT RESEARCH INVOLVES THE QUEST TO CREATE NEW KNOWLEDGE, BUT DO SO BY MAKING USE OF A SERIES OF INQUIRY PRACTICES THAT ARE THEORETICALLY RICH, CONCEPTUALLY ROBUST AND PROVOKE INDIVIDUALS AND COMMUNITIES INTO SEEING AND UNDERSTANDING THINGS IN NEW WAYS. (p62)

  FACING THE UNKNOWN AND DISRUPTING THE KNOWN IS PRECISELY WHAT ARTIST-RESEARCHERS ACHIEVE AS THEY DELVE INTO THEORETICAL, CONCEPTUAL, DIALECTICAL AND CONTEXTUAL PRACTICES THROUGH ARTMAKINGtO FULLY CONSIDER THE IMPACT THIS QUEST FOR NEW KNOWLEDGE HAS ON THE SELF, OTHERS AND COMMUNITIES REQUIRES A NEW RESPONSIBILITY ON THE PART OF ARTIST-RESEARCHERS TO TAKE UP THE CHALLENGE OF THEORISING THEIR PRACTICE, FOR ‘IN ACADEME, THE ARTIST-RESEARCHER CANNOT HIDE BEHIND THE ROBE OF THE MUTE ARTIST’ p62

THUS IT IS ACCEPTED THAT ARTISTS CANUNDERTAKE THE PRODUCTION OF ART AND, AT THE SAME TIME, BE UNDERTAKING Research THAT WILL ULTIMATELY BE EMBODIED IN THE fiNAL ARTWORK.SCRIVENER ASSERTS THAT THE ‘PROPER GOAL OF VISUAL ARTS RESEARCH IS VISUAL ART’ AND OBSERVES THAT UNDERSTANDING THE ART MAKING PROCESS AS YIELDING NEW KNOWLEDGE, INDEPENDENT OF THE ART OBJECT, MAY RISK RELEGATING THE ARTWORK TO THE STATUS OF A BY-PRODUCT. TO EXPECT THE ARTWORK TO PRIMARILY EMBODY KNOWLEDGE WOULD, IN THE EYES OF MANY, LEAD TO A UTILITARIAN VIEW OF WHAT ART CAN BE.(p68)

YET  IF ONE WERE LOOKING FOR THE KEY QUALITIES OF RESEARCH INQUIRIES THAT COULD ACTUALLY BEGIN TO ADDRESS SUCH STUPENDOUS

IMPOSSIBILITIES, THEN THE PRODIGIOUS CREATIVE COMPASS POTENTIALLY AVAILABLE TO PERFORMANCE PRACTICE AS RESEARCH COULD WELL BECOME ONE OF THEM. oR AS THE POET lOUIS aRAGON ONCE SO WISELY SAID, WITHOUT BRUSHING fi NGERS UNDER HIS CHIN: ‘ff YOUR IMAGINATION, MY DEAR READER, IS WORTH MORE THAN YOU IMAGINE.’ (P128)

iN OTHER WORDS, KNOWLEDGE EMBEDDED IN PRACTICE IS OFTEN PERSONAL AND INEffABLE. iN ORDER TO MAKE THIS PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE MORE GENERALLY USEFUL A PROCESS OF REfl ECTION AND CONTEXTUALISATION IS OFTEN REQUIRED. REFLECTION CAN HELP TO fi ND PATTERNS THAT MAKE THIS PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE MORE GENERALLY APPLICABLE AND CONTEXTUALISATION HELPS TO PLACE THOSE FINDINGS WITHIN A BROADER HISTORY OF ACCUMULATED KNOWLEDGE. THESE PROCESSES ARE IMPORTANT BECAUSE THEY ARE ESSENTIAL TO TRANSFORMING PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE  INTO COMMUNAL KNOWLEDGE(P163)

sO WHAT DRIVES OUR WORK? iN THE END IT IS OUR CREATIVE DESIRE FOR ARTISTIC EXPRESSIVITY THAT RESULTS IN AN INTERPLAY BETWEEN ACTIONS AND IDEAS. aND IT IS OUR DESIRE FOR A PRODUCTIVE DIALOGUE WITH OTHERS AROUND THIS EXPRESSIVITY THAT LEADS US TO THE EXTENSIVE DOCUMENTATION, REfl ECTION AND DIALOGUE THAT POSITIONS OUR PRACTICE WITHIN A RESEARCH FRAMEWORK.(P164)

AROUND EACH CREATIVE WORK THERE IS A WIDE FIELD OF POSSIBLE INTERPRETIVE CONTEXTS AND IT IS IN THE EXEGESIS THAT SOME OF THESE CAN BE DELIMITED. THIS DELIMITING ACT, WHICH IS SELDOM COMFORTABLY ARRIVED AT, IS THE GESTURE WHICH ENABLES THE CANDIDATE TO MAKE A DISCURSIVE CLAIM FOR THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HIS OR HER STUDY.(P226)