Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Living World Dynamics - Or: What Brian Eno Can Teach Us About Knowing In A Complex World, Connie Svabo

Nordes Conference Series

In questioning how we come to know the world, we have to maintain the insight that things can hang together in many ways and that the world always exceeds our modeling attempts, regardless of scale, weight and representation. Multiple orders are at play in the world and perhaps the best way to get a measure of a lively world is to move with it in performance. Modelling knowledge on endlessly unfolding and endlessly changing performance provides a way of researching the world in a lively manner: beyond static specification and blue-print simplifications. This generates a new relationship between world, knowledge …

A Matter Of Scales: Experiential Evaluation As A Caring Platform Across Scales, Lieve Custers, Oswald Devisch, Liesbeth Huybrechts

Nordes Conference Series

Densification, as a sustainable spatial development strategy, is a matter of care that takes place on multiple scales and is related to liveability in a paradoxical way. In this paper we approach this paradox related to densification as a “matter of scales” and work consciously with the tensions which arise when multiple actors act on multiple scales, such as a lack of communication and mistrust. We analyse and discuss how the participatory design approach of “experiential evaluation” supports this conscious approach by giving form to it as a caring platform around a “matter of scale” by connecting the multiple actors …

(Un)Weaving (Un)Sustainability, Sheida Amiri-Rigi, Despina Christoforidou

Nordes Conference Series

The spatio-temporal scale of design for sustainability has come full circle. What started within a technology-oriented global outlook, later evolving into a people-oriented and local view on change, now urges for a holistic, broad extent and multilevel design for sustainability. This paper enquires into the theories of social change that govern different approaches within the field, and positions the adhesion of socio-technical system innovation and transition design to classical modern theory, against an emergent design paradigm anchored in practice theory. By drawing on the literature of the field and comparing various models, a conceptual framework is suggested where "practice" serves …

Scaling Up Diversity And Inclusion: From Classroom To Municipality, Annukka Svanda, Martina Čaić, Tuuli Mattelmäki

Nordes Conference Series

This paper investigates opportunities for scaling up the diversity and inclusion of international residents at the level of municipality service offerings. The starting point is a set of small-scale service design projects actively involving municipal representatives and university students. This collaboration was part of a service design course at Aalto University addressing challenges faced by the municipality of Espoo, Finland. Through triangulation of three data sources i) precourse meetings, ii) email surveys during the course, and iii) semi-structured interviews with participating municipal representatives after the course, this paper offers insights on how smallscale service design collaborations can facilitate the scaling …

Temporal Scales Of Participation: A Rift Between Actors And Spectators, Alicia Smedberg

Nordes Conference Series

Participatory design is a future-oriented discipline, but there is an imbalance in agency between those who produce future imaginations, and those who consume them. This paper argues that we, as designers and producers of future-oriented design interventions, hold responsibilities towards third party “spectators”. The paper departs from an incident that took place two years after a Future Workshop had taken place between public sector workers and citizens in Malmö, Sweden, when a concerned third party mistook the workshop’s potential and preferred imaginations of the future for truths. In the light of Hannah Arendt’s writings on imagination the paper separates actors …

Teaching Size, Area And Scale, Ingri Strand, Eva Lutnæs

Nordes Conference Series

Gaining an understanding of scale, area and size is an important part of the subject of Art and crafts. Although this skill should be practiced, perhaps even mastered, by pupils in primary education, it is regarded as difficult to teach, due to the skill being intangible and difficult to discuss. This paper seeks to aid in overcoming these difficulties, as it gathers initial findings from ongoing interviews with teachers on their strategies for teaching this important skill. Instead of highlighting one strategy as the best, we wish to showcase a broad range of appropriate approaches to this theme. Tensions between …

Design For Noticing With Biodiversity Logbooks, Liz Edwards, Serena Pollastri, Linda Linda Linda, Robert Barratt

Nordes Conference Series

This paper introduces the use of design to improve noticing skills in order to address environmental issues at a variety of physical and temporal scales. We illustrate the application of ‘design for noticing’ through Biodiversity Logbooks – a pilot project intended to reduce ‘plant blindness’ amongst primary school children. Plant blindness is the inability to recognise, appreciate and value plants and it has far reaching social, environmental and economic implications. In this project, we designed pedagogical tools and processes to foster the skills of noticing plants in their environments, and connecting the small-scale of their individual features to large-scale systems. …

A Tale Of A Wise City: A Speculation On Entanglements Of Non-Humans And Humans In An Urban Space., Inna Zrajaeva

Nordes Conference Series

This paper proposes methods for imagining a future which includes non-human stakeholders. The particular scenario is built on the concept currently known as Smart City. This exploration proposes a speculative fiction of a future where technologies in a Smart City are serving human and non-human citizens. The final outcome is a fictional documentary that illustrates life in the city from the viewpoint of its human citizens. To develop the concept of the city one of the primary challenges was to coordinate the many different scales, from the entire city structure to the interactions between the individual citizens. To address this, …

Is Addicted Phenomenology Just Human Phenomenology?, Benji Mahaffey, Tom Seppalainen

McNair Symposium

The phenomenon of addiction precedes, by millennia, our scientific inquiries into its psychological manifestations and neural bases. We did not need psychiatrists to ‘discover’ it; we have long been aware of its dark shadow lurking in our psyches. The discernable, often troubling behaviors of addicts notwithstanding, addiction is not the kind of phenomenon one observes; addiction is experienced, from the first-person perspective. Its defining features are qualitative: a subjective loss of control, an obsession, a compulsion. The overwhelming phenomenological salience of these features—especially of “compulsion”—has led addicts, philosophers, and psychiatrists alike to imagine that addiction is a discrete (phenomenological, natural, …

Ronald E. Mcnair Scholars Program Profiles And Abstracts 2021, Mcnair Scholars Program

McNair Symposium

This is the complete event program and provides presentation abstracts and biographies of McNair scholars and their mentors.

Spray-Painting The Sistine Chapel: Aesthetic Problems In Leaf By Niggle, John Holmes

Mythcon

No work of the allegoriphobic Tolkien is more manifestly allegorical than his short story “Leaf By Niggle.” Because of the story’s unmistakably allegorical nature, when the reader encounters the four-word sentence that opens the second paragraph—“Niggle was a painter”—the initial response might justly be to read “painter” in a more generic sense to mean “artist in general.” Indeed, the best criticism of this story tends to read Niggle’s problem as an analogue of Tolkien’s problem as sub-creator of Middle-earth, primarily in writing. But because Tolkien’s rendering of Middle-earth sometimes took form in pencil sketches and watercolors as well, Niggle’s painterly …

Sterner Stuff: Sansa Stark And The System Of Gothic Fantasy, Joseph Young

Mythcon

George R.R. Martin’s characterisation of Sansa Stark is among the contentious aspects of the reception of A Song of Ice and Fire. The violence, indignities and threats heaped upon Sansa have been described as gratuitous, cited as evidence of an unusually cold-hearted writer, and marshalled as evidence by those querying the story’s feminist credibility. Sansa’s passive acceptance of such mistreatment could mark her as a character denuded of agency, which would seem either tasteless or a serious misstep by an author of stated feminist sympathies.

In an alternate reading, however, Sansa’s travails and her capacity to absorb them mark …

Faerie Reality In The Spiral Dance By Rodrigo Garcia Y Robertson, Robert Tredray

Mythcon

Garcia y Robertson's The Spiral Dance begins as a historical novel set in the time of the rebellion led by the Earl of Northumberland and the Earl of Westmoreland against Elizabeth I in 1569, told from the point of view of Anne, Countess of Northumberland. It is also an epic or heroic fantasy; besides Lady Anne, two of its main characters are a werewolf named Jock and the Blessed Virgin Mary. Their adventures carry them not only to the highlands of Scotland but to the realm of Faerie. The author's theme is that one must lose all one has before …

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me., John Rosegrant

Mythcon

In this presentation I explore why Tolkien singled out for particular appreciation the Brothers Grimm fairy tale The Juniper Tree, which Tatar (Annotated Grimm 209) has called “the most shocking of all fairy tales.” In On Fairy-Stories, Tolkien described its effect on him as follows: “The beauty and horror of The Juniper Tree…with its exquisite and tragic beginning, the abominable cannibal stew, the gruesome bones, the gay and vengeful bird-spirit coming out of a mist that rose from the tree, has remained with me since childhood; and yet always the chief flavor of that tale lingering in …

How Mythopoeic Stories Carve Space For Change, Rivera Sun

Mythcon

Mythopoeic writings have the capacity to carve out space for new visions, radical thought, and social change. Join Rivera Sun for a roundtable discussion on how this has impacted us as readers (or writers) in our own lives. We'll also explore how far these writings can push the envelope before society starts pushing back. Where are the boundaries that can't be crossed, and how can mythopoeic stories help shift those boundaries on behalf of social change? What role does perceived market demand or pushback play in how publishers either constrain or support stories that help us imagine a new world …

Q&A With Unofficial Mythsoc Historian Lee Speth, Alicia Fox-Lenz, Lee Speth

Mythcon

An attendee of Mythcon 3 and a Steward since 1979, Lee Speth has been called the Mythopoeic Society's unofficial historian. Usually "trapped" behind the Mythopoeic Society Merchandise Table at Mythcons, this year he is free to contribute to programming and regale us with stories from bygone times. Come ask Lee about the history of the Mythopoeic Society, Golfimbul, and general shenanigans.

Moderator: Alicia Fox-Lenz
Tech Mod: Megan Abrahamson.

The Personhood Of Nature In J. R. R. Tolkien’S Legendarium, Sophia Parrila

Mythcon

This paper argues that J. R. R. Tolkien’s portrayal of plants, animals, and geographical features as morally complex persons is central to the ecocentric model of environmental stewardship developed within Tolkien’s Legendarium. Tolkien’s Middle-earth writings endow non-human beings such as animals, plants, and even rivers with personhood by emphasizing their individuality, their capacity for interpersonal relationships, and their agency to make moral choices. I build on work done by critics such as Susan Jeffers (Arda Inhabited), and Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans (Ents, Elves, and Eriador) to find a practicable and inspirational environmental ethic in Tolkien’s …

Fairy Tale Retellings For The Modern World., Sarena Ulibarri, Reese Hogan, Charlotte Honigman, Wendy Nikel, Lissa Sloan

Mythcon

Fairy tales have timeless appeal for both audiences and creators, especially when they’re updated in a way that speaks to modern sensibilities or are mashed up with another genre to create something familiar yet fresh. Several authors will discuss what’s behind the impulse to retell fairy tales, as well as the challenges of transferring a traditional tale into a non-traditional setting, such as a steampunk world or a different historical setting.

Moderator: Sarena Ulibarri
Panelist: Reese Hogan
Panelist: Charlotte Honigman
Panelist: Wendy Nikel
Panelist: Lissa Sloan
Tech Mod: Joan Marie Verba.

“Long Anguish And Self-Murdering Thought”: Gollum And The Figure Of Jealousy In The Faerie Queene, Anne Acker

Mythcon

This paper argues that Gollum’s story has parallels to the story of Malbecco in The Faerie Queene, and that Gollum should be read as an exploration of jealousy and its relationship to power, represented by the Ring that Gollum covets. In Spenser’s allegory, Malbecco is cuckolded and robbed and retreats to a cave in the mountains where he is transformed into the inhuman shape of Jealousy. While The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory and should not be read as one, Smeagol’s transformation into Gollum has striking similarities to this and other strange metamorphoses of characters who …

The Speculative Worldbuilding Of Adál’S Blueprints For A Nation, Matthew David Goodwin

Mythcon

ADÁL’s Blueprints for a Nation is an art installation that displays artifacts from the conceptual nation of El Spirit Republic de Puerto Rico. This imaginal nation expresses the unique social and linguistic experience of Puerto Ricans living off the island, and its principle tool is speculative worldbuilding. This essay examines two of the speculative roots of Blueprints for a Nation. First, the essay explores “El Mapagraph,” the fictional map of the nation that is in the shape of a domino and that alludes to the common practice of mapping utopias and fantasy worlds. The work also makes clear by its …

From Malacandra To Mars: Representations Of The Red Planet In C. S. Lewis, Robert Sawyer, And Andy Weir, William Thompson

Mythcon

In his introduction to Visions of Mars: Essays on the Red Planet in Fiction and Science, Howard V. Hendrix suggests that the long-standing fascination with the red planet emerges from an unspoken anxiety around the extinction of the species. According to Hendrix, the “fascination with the Neanderthals, like our fascination with greenhouse-blasted Venus or with Martians of the Dying Planet scenario, arises from forebodings that such scenarios present ourselves and our world as viewed—both seen and dreamed—through a funhouse mirror” (Hendrix 10).

The ongoing fascination with mars has resulted in texts that treat the red planet in strikingly different ways. …

Eärendil’S Errand And “Errantry”, Janet Brennan Croft, David Bratman, David Emerson, Verlyn Flieger

Mythcon

Tolkien’s love of word play legitimizes considering the linguistic closeness of errantry, Eärendil , and errand. This leads to the points this panel will consider: Tolkien has more than once taken themes and motifs first used in a lighter story and woven them, in more serious form, into his broader legendarium; for example, The Hobbit’s Bard presages Aragorn, and its lower-case ring the centrally important Ring of the longer work. Eärendil is supposed to have been the subject of one of the great tales, but we never get it in its full form, or more comparably, in multiple forms …

The Philosophy And Theology Of Fairy-Stories: Fantasy, Escape, Recovery, And Consolation, Giovanni Costabile

Mythcon

In his seminal 1939 Andrew Lang lecture “On Fairy-Stories,” Tolkien proposed what we might term his most extensive pronouncement on his own fiction and underlying poetics, as well as an analysis of Fairy-Stories constituting a referential and authoritative statement on the matter. The importance of the subsequently published text, chiefly cited from Christopher Tolkien's posthumous edited version in The Monsters and the Critics, or, more recently, in Douglas A. Anderson's and Verlyn Flieger's critical edition, simply cannot be overstated.

In the light of such awareness, I would like to examine Tolkien's antecedents as far as his chief arguments are …

Realizing History: Tolkien And The Desire Called Marx, Robert Tally

Mythcon

In this talk, I argue that the “realization” of history is an important aim of Tolkien’s art. Tolkien’s desire to create a new mythology for England, which is well known, is in part a response to the shifting ground upon which he stood, in reaction to what Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifestohad called the “constant revolutionizing” and the “cosmopolitan character” of bourgeois society, industrial civilization, imperialism, and the rise of monopoly capital. Tolkien’s yearning for a mythic past, despite its clear nationalism and chauvinism at first, reflected a deep desire to connect his modern world with an …

Spoilers & Sequels; Bifurcated Fandoms In The Age Of Adaptation, Joseph Young, Paul Tankard, Lana Whited

Mythcon

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies launched a new era of adaptations of fantasy. The resulting adaptations—of the works of J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, George R.R. Martin, the Marvel superhero tradition and much else besides—now have fan bases often wholly separate 23 from those of their literary source texts. Rather than dwelling on what any given example gets ‘wrong’ or ‘right,’ this panel discussion will consider this bifurcation of the audience of a popular literary genre. If, as Tom Shippey suggests, fantasy deserves to be taken seriously because of its popularity, what are the ramifications of atomising the popular …

Habla Amigo Y Entra: Tolkien And The Language Of Wonder, Martha Celis-Mendoza, Guillermo Don Juan, Aline Esperanza Maza Vázquez, Jorge De La Vega

Mythcon

This panel will deal with the way in which Tolkien's works act as a threshold to approach the works of other Fantasy authors and literary traditions. It will also consider the reception of these works and how they are perceived differently when read in different languages, as well as the impact of localization.

Moderator: Martha Celis-Mendoza
Panelist: Guillermo Don Juan
Panelist: Aline Esperanza Maza Vázquez
Panelist: Jorge de la Vega
Tech Mod: Jessica Dickinson Goodman.

Other Than Him: Superman As The Alien That Made Good, Roy Schwartz

Mythcon

When discussing depictions of the alien in American popular culture—as extraterrestrial, as strange foreigner, and as both, an otherworldly Other—the most famous example is rarely considered; SUPERMAN. Introduced in 1938, this strange visitor from another planet possesses powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men but walks among us disguised as a mild-mannered human. He’s the fantastic hiding in plain sight as the most mundane, an Other beloved as familiar, a singular being of another race who’s come to symbolize the best in humanity. And not by accident. Superman was created by two Cleveland teens, Jerry Siegel and Joe …

Mythopoeia In American Gods, Danica Stojanovic

Mythcon

J. R. R. Tolkien coined the term mythopoeia as a philosophical concept referring to the process of artificially creating mythologies and belief systems of imaginary worlds. While building a fantasy world, one ought to consider the possibilities this world offers for religious explorations or examine how the existing pantheons weave their way into fiction and reality. To be more precise, what happens when gods lounge languidly among their supposed believers. This paper aims to examine mythopoetic tendencies, elements and powers in Neil Gaiman’s novels American Gods and Anansi Boys, a fictional duology whose protagonists are in constant cohort with various …

Back To Camelot: 21st-Century Reinterpretations Of The Arthurian Mythos, Jennifer Spirko, Scott Johnson, Bradley Mcilwain

Mythcon

With David Lowery's film, The Green Knight, headed for a pandemic-delayed opening this summer, the Arthurian mythos re-enters popular culture yet again. How do this and other recent retellings of the Matter of Britain connect our world with its roots? We'll consider not only the new film, but also such novels as Kingfisher, by Patricia McKillip; Once & Future, by A.R. Capetta; and Cursed, by Frank Miller and Tom Wheeler, alongside the TV series based on it. What version of Camelot and its attendant tales and heroes do today's Arthurian works present? How are they in …

Etiam Periere Ruinae: Roman Ruins, Troubled Temporality, And Hp Lovecraft's Alien Other, El Hudson

Mythcon

As Caesar, the questionable protagonist of the first-century Latin epic the Pharsalia, navigates the ruins of once-mighty Troy, the poet Lucan pauses to note that etiam periere ruinae: “even the ruins have perished.” Would that such were the case in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time, in which an antediluvian city vexes the protagonist to nightmare. Lovecraft is notorious for his ruins: Cyclopean and/or non-Euclidean, they near-invariably contain horrors from the depths of time, lying in wait for some foolish adventurer to unleash them upon the present. Sometimes these places are simply set-dressing, but in a …