Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Finding And Organizing Tolkien’S Invented Languages, Eileen Marie Moore

Mythcon

The Appendices to The Lord of the Rings run the gamut from royal lineages and back stories of the Kings and Stewards of Gondor and Rohan and of Dúrin’s folk (Appendix A), Hobbit family trees (Appendix C) and a general overview of the races and peoples of Middleearth (Appendix F), to the chronology of the great events of the Second and Third Ages (Appendix B); from the Shire Calendar (Appendix D) and a detailed explication of how to pronounce the Elvish languages as well as their representation by the letters of the Tengwar and runes of the Cirth (Appendix E), …

The Fantastic Short Story, Vicki Ronn

Mythcon

This roundtable will include a short presentation on the fantasy short story; its roots in myth, fables and fairy tales; its growth from the twentieth century to the present day; and a personal top ten list. Attendees will share their personal favorite stories and virtual and print sources to find more stories, as well as answer or discuss questions related to the genre. Some questions will include: Favorite mythopoeic short story and why? Who are some great editors or collections? Where did you discover your favorite story? Who are important authors, both past and present? Where do you see the …

A Saga Re-Written: The Character Of Odin And J.R.R. Tolkien's Addition Of Eucatastrophe In "The New Lay Of The Volsungs.", Matthew Gidney

Mythcon

In this paper, adapted from the second chapter of my Master’s thesis, I will argue that Tolkien was not interested in mimicking Norse mythology nor endorsing the Nordic worldview, but rather re-writing Norse mythology in accord with its true light. This concept of “true light” is drawn from a letter by Tolkien to his son Michael in which he laments the corruption of “that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light” (Carpenter, Letters 56). Tolkien had an Augustinian conception of evil, believing that good is primary, …

Writing Against The Grain: T. Kingfisher's Feminist Mythopoeic Fantasy, Robin Anne Reid

Mythcon

In "On Fairy-stories," J. R. R. Tolkien defined and defended the genre of fantasy by quoting and then explicating his poem, "Mythopoeia." Tolkien's theory of mythopoeic literature can be applied to his own fiction, but, increasingly, scholars are applying it to other texts including superhero films and contemporary fantasy novels (Holdier, Kane). In this presentation, I argue that three of Kingfisher's series, the Clocktaur War, Saint of Steel, and Paladin, set in and around Anuket City, fit some of the characteristics of mythopoeic fantasy identified by Tolkien while swerving notably from others. Thus, Kingfisher's fantasy is similar to work by …

Adam’S Task: Naming And Subcreation In Good Omens, Janet Brennan Croft

Mythcon

Names are, in one sense, the outward indication of a power negotiation. The namer, the one who bestows a new name or uses an already-given name, reveals, through the choice of name they give or use, their relationship to that which they name. The act may indicate a more or less equal relationship; it may be an attempt to exert power over someone or something by imposing a name on it or by using a name that will influence those who hear it; or it may be a signal of submission and subordination, using a name to flatter or …

The Keystone Or The Cornerstone? A Rejoinder To Verlyn Flieger On The Alleged “Conflicting Sides” Of Tolkien’S Singular Self, Donald Williams

Mythcon

In “The Arch and the Keystone,” Mythlore 38:1 (Fall/Winter 2019), 5-17, Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger argues that the conflicts and contradictions she sees in Tolkien’s essays and fiction do not call for harmonization but rather should be embraced for what they are: “two opposing and conflicting sides of one person, whose contention makes him who he is as well as what he is, the keystone that creates the arch” of The Lord of the Rings out of the friction of the two sides (16). Unfortunately, the alleged contradictions, e.g. between the despair of the Beowulf essay and the hope for …

(Un)Fair(Ly) Unknown: New And Neglected Arthurian Television Programming, Carl B. Sell, Richard Fahey, Michael Torregrossa, Rachael K. Warmington

Mythcon

The Arthurian tradition abounds with Fair Unknowns, characters whose identity and true worth is revealed only slowly over the course of an adventure. In this session, we’d like to adopt the motif to look at new and neglected television series that make interesting use of the legend and deserve more recognition by scholars.

Moderator: Carl B. Sell
Panelist: Michael Torregrossa
Panelist: Richard Fahey
Panelist: Rachael K. Warmington
Tech Mod: Tim Lenz

'Her Enchanted Hair': Rossetti, 'Lady Lilith,' And The Victorian Fascination With Hair As Influences On Tolkien, Kathryn Colvin

Mythcon

The Victorian poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti appears upon first glance to be an unlikely inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium: though both were medievalists, Tolkien’s reputation for chaste prose contrasts sharply with Rossetti’s famously “fleshly” work. However, a close reading of both—setting Rossetti’s poetry, particularly “Lady Lilith” and its accompanying painting, alongside Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and posthumously published material from The Silmarillion and The History of Middle-earth—reveals a compelling and previously unexplored connection between the Victorian cultural mythology of magic hair (as epitomized by the “hair-mad” Rossetti) and Tolkien’s detailed and often supernatural portrayals of …

Cities And Strongholds Of Middle-Earth, Part 1, Cami Agan, Birgitte Breemerkamp, Nicholas Birns, Marie Bretagnolle, Robin Anne Reid

Mythcon

The Cities and Strongholds of Middle-earth panels bring together seven of the chapters to appear in the upcoming volume of the same name from MythPress. The volume explores the habitations of Middle-earth across the ages, as well as the cultures responsible for those built structures. Presenters will briefly explain their chapters in order to leave plenty of room for discussion.

Moderator: Cami Agan
Panelist: Nicholas Birns
Panelist: Birgitte Breemerkamp
Panelist: Marie Bretagnolle
Panelist: Robin A. Reid
Tech Mod: Tim Lenz

Philology And The Lived Imagination: Vico, Collingwood, And Tolkien, Reno Lauro

Mythcon

This paper endeavors to uniquely address a question proposed by Tom Shippey in a guest editorial for Mallorn issue 45. “[R.G.] Collingwood and Tolkien were both Fellows of Pembroke College for nearly a decade till 1934, when Collingwood took up a Chair at C.S. Lewis’s college, Magdalen. Did the three of them ever talk about, agree about, disagree about the subject of folktales, on which Collingwood was working and publicly lecturing in the 1930s?” (Shippey 4). In order to answer Shippey’s question, I suggest that ‘folktales’ may not be the only or best way into this investigation. While we know …

Q&A With Mythopoeic Award Winners, Dennis Wise, James Gifford, Theodora Goss, Yoon Ha Lee

Mythcon

Q&A with Mythopoeic Award Winners (Roundtable) Steward of Mythopoeic Awards Dennis Wise will lead conversation and Q&A with some of last year’s Mythopoeic Society Award winners: James Gifford, Theodora Goss, and Yoon Ha Lee.

Tech Mod: Cait Rottler

Pivot 2021 Editorial Dismantling/ Reassembling Tools For Alternative Futures, Renata Marques Leitão, Jananda Lima, Tieni Meninato

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

The Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group of the Design Research Society (DRS) and the Public Visualization Lab of OCAD University invited designers, scholars, artists, and changemakers for two days of intercultural conversations about decoloniality and societal transformation. Pivot 2021 aimed to identify tools and practices of dismantling and reassembling that could favour ways of reshaping human presence on Earth and concrete cases of alternative future-making from all around the world.

Fem DiàLeg: Feminist Participatory Thinking Space, Gabriela Masfarré Pintó, Mercè Rua Fargues

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Fem Dilàleg, which means ‘we dialogue’ in Catalan, is an initiative that started in 2019 and aims to develop the territory of dialogue as a design space and social practice, contributing to the dialogic learning practice present in many cultural traditions. Fem Diàleg’s proposition is to articulate the question of knowledge-creation praxis by triangulating: the feminist epistemologies of situated knowledge, art as a relational practice and dialogue as a shared and embodied reflexivity. Since its inception in 2019 Fem Diàleg has organized nine gatherings with over 250 participants and more than 22 invited artists and guests. In this short paper …

Design Fuel For The Neoliberal Fire, Becky Nasadowski

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

University graphic design education and professional design organizations in the United States have generally avoided critical conversations regarding the field’s emphasis on professionalization and entrepreneurialism. In this paper, I will discuss two related neoliberal nodes that have persisted and particularly intensified over the past decade: one, design’s insistence on the social as a marketable passion project that escapes history and socio-political relations, and two, design’s fixation on an entrepreneurial mindset that subsumes all leisure time into labor time. I will articulate the ways design education and professional design organizations in the United States have been ideologically complicit in these efforts …

Biodiversity Logbooks For An Environmental Pedagogy Of Care, Serena Pollastri, Liz Edwards

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Over the past century, botanists and educators have observed a sharp decrease in people’s ability to notice and identify plants in their environment, especially among urban populations in the West. This phenomenon has often been referred to as “Plant Blindness” or “Plant Awareness Disparity”, and is caused by a combination of factors - some of which are related to reduced opportunities for engagement with nature and the increase in the use of digital technology. As progressive disconnection from the environment starts from an early age, early years and primary education play a crucial role in determining people’s connection or disconnection …

Reflecting On Decoloniality And Justice In Latin American Seed System Transformations, Juan Garzon

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Over the last 20 years, Latin American ‘seed guardian networks’ have become increasingly influential in seed system transformations. This is a recent chapter in the decades old transition of seeds from deeply rooted commons to a global commodity, which constantly favours capitalist industrialism over all other ways of being. The emergence and consolidation of these networks is tied to the intensification of neoliberal reforms that undermine Indigenous, Afro-Latino, peasant, agroecological and organic agricultural practices. As part of this process, outliers connect in distributed networks to fight for the inclusion of their practices and visions, exerting pressure on hegemonic actors to …

Making Sense/Zines: Reflecting On Positionality, Lizette Reitsma

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

We have to be conscious about our own situatedness in the ecologies for and with which we design, but also invite for critical reviewing it. In order to do so, to become conscious and to critically review, I believe something needs to trigger and intervene. This paper is a personal account of sense-making and tool shaping, to support critical reflecting on my own positionality. I introduce my two tools: Graphical Peeling and Sensing/Zining, which rely both on ‘layouting’ to provide space for reflection. I am not a graphical designer, rather this way of working seems to help unbalance my very …

Dancing With The Troubles Of Ai, Maria Alejandra Luján Escalante, Luke Moffat, Lizzie Harrison, Vivienne Kuh

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

We are 4 creative ethic-ticians, working in the areas of design, fashion, arts and philosophy, making tools and spaces to inspire, drive, support and assess innovation responsive to societal and planetary crises, which we call ethics through design. We created this ritual to make time to be in our bodies, along with a team that includes musicians, performance artists, aikido masters, HIT trainers, sci-fi enthusiasts, and street dancers, to develop a transdisciplinary choreography. Together we have made a ritual to embrace the magical, illogical, delightful and laughable. We rehearsed with our bodies, protocols for anticipating, noticing, and addressing ethical tensions, …

Communities Of Practice: Doing Design Differently, Kate Mcentee

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

This paper reflects on the role of communities of practice in building and supporting critical alternatives to conventional, Dominant Design (Akama, 2021; Rosner, 2018). Dominant Design refers to design practices cultivated within our industrialised, imperialist, patriarchal, capitalist modernity. Discourses and practices addressing this include decolonising design, stemming from modernity/coloniality critique and Indigenous knowledge systems, and anti-oppressive frameworks for design, based in anti- racism and Black feminist scholarship. These discourses at the margins of the dominant discourse and practice recognise the need for critical alternatives to design practices (Abdulla et al., 2019; Costanza-Chock 2018; Mignolo 2007; Schultz et al., 2018). This …

Redesigning Money As A Tool For Self-Management In Cultural Production, Rodrigo Freese Gonzatto, Frederick Van Amstel, Pedro Henrique Jatobá

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Money is a crucial mediation for organizing in capitalist societies. Those who lack money cannot easily organize and raise collective consciousness. A naive form of consciousness may reject money to prevent greed and envy. Nevertheless, a critical state of consciousness should perceive money as a tool that can be redesigned to encourage different feelings that can ballast anti-capitalist transactions. This research describes Colaborativa@PE, a collective who designed digital social currencies to nurture solidarity bonds in several cultural production collectives spread through Brazil. These collectives embarked on an inquiry that led them to experiment with solidarity economy and self-management. The need …

Solidarity As A Principle For Antisystemic Design Processes: Two Cases Of Alliance With Social Struggles In Brazil, Bibiana Oliveira Serpa, Sâmia Batista E Silva

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

In this essay we reflect on the possibility of politicizing participatory design processes by defending the notion of solidarity in Paulo Freires’s thought. We present a critique of empathy as a relational practice in design, considering it to be an anti-dialogical practice that reifies subjects in design processes focused on developing capitalist commodities. As a counterpoint, we defend solidarity as a dialogical ethical principle and practice that is founded on consciousness and the invilieng and transformation of given reality (of oppression). To support our argument, we present two experiences where we live solidarity-in-praxis while promoting design engagements in Brazil. The …

Prefigurative Politics And Design, Alix Gerber

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

It is difficult to imagine what life might be like without capitalism, patriarchy, and modernism, yet these systems did not always exist: they were built. As professional designers who want to work towards something different, what can we do? Some have turned to prefigurative politics for a path forward. Prefiguration is a political strategy of working towards social transformation by “building the new world in the shell of the old”. For example: solidarity economies prefigure an economy based in cooperation rather than competition through shared ownership of production; and transformative justice initiatives prefigure a world without police by finding new …

Towards A Political Design Through Feminist Waysof Movement-Making, Bibiana Oliveira Serpa

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

From the understanding that design is a complex force of political and cultural expression, I argue that in the design field we need to be with and learn from social movements, advancing collaboration between erudite and popular practices of creating and shaping worlds. In this freely reflection I present some thoughts from my experience as an educator-militant in a political organization of the Brazilian feminist movement. From this background, I seek to reimagine knowing-doings in design by means of principles systematized in feminist practices within social movements. Through these principles, I aim to reflect on possibilities for a design that …

Being Co-Conspirators, Mudita Pasari, Prachi Joshi

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

We live in a multidimensional pluralist world, where colonial, structuralist and industrial approaches of moulding a mind need to be questioned. Perhaps our modern educational system needs to forgo moulding a student and instead insist on developing the potential of a learner. India has long had the traditional approach of rearing a mind which is not bogged down by generalised standards. Despite this legacy, popularised design education here, is a borrowed version from ideologies of the West. The authors of this paper questioned their adopted roles as design facilitators, and conducted a social experiment to decentralise ownership of material and …

I Hate Creativity, Patricia Kovic

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

We love creativity. Everybody loves creativity and everybody wants a “Culture of Creativity.” However, there is strong evidence that we do not even like creativity, especially under stressful conditions. Creativity thrives in conditions of uncertainty, vagueness of purpose and psychological discomfiture — conditions that can be unbearable when added to the current anxieties of a shrinking academic landscape, the pandemic, let alone wicked problems like the climate crisis. We are terrified in these traumatic circumstances, so we shrink away from creativity toward the safety of what is known, understood and proven. As a result, Proxy Creativity emerges — one that …

An Abundance Of Tools: Attention And Care With Theory, Kate Mcentee

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

This paper argues for the value of sustained exploration of theoretical work and practices from diverse perspectives on the margins of dominant systems, such as radical Black and feminist thought; Indigenous research scholars; queer theorists; modernity/coloniality scholars from the Global South; and critical design practitioners speaking from situated place. Reading, engaging, and extending this work assists with recognising common ways in which we and those around us think, work, and relate to others which accommodate dominant, oppressive systems. This includes recognising ingrained white saviorism, compulsion for efficiency, linear and task-oriented collaboration and deep-seated regard for institutional recognition. Beyond recognition, there …

Scyborg Designer: The Ghost In The Machine, Clara Meliande

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

In a world on the verge of collapse, it becomes critical to rethink the education of designers, usually trained to reproduce and maintain the capitalist machine. Here, Advocating for a political praxis that avoids universality and understands itself as situated and located, I bring La Paperson’s concept of scyborg to think about how design academia can reflect and become a practice of decoloniality. As someone that collects scraps, components that no longer present value for the system, the scyborg can appropriate and reorganize them, acting like a virus in the system. By creating a mess in the apparatus using its …

Practicing Place-Based Responsibility, Jean Chisholm, Laura Kozak

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Urgent steps are needed to slow and cease ecologically, culturally and socially destructive systems and redistribute power to those with place-based knowledge and sensitivity to contextual conditions. Place-Based Responsibility enacts this practice by coalescing knowledge holders with long histories of participation in this work – those living and working in ways that express care for place. Together, we ask what are our responsibilities, reciprocities and commitments to land? How can we as individuals and as collectives take up the responsibility of contributing to the places where we are? Within Emily Carr University, a group of faculty, students, and community members …

Visual Exploration Of Identity As A Critical Tool To Disrupt Traditional Canons In Design Pedagogy, Gaby Hernández

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

This contribution discusses results from the implementation of undergraduate and graduate-level projects applied in traditional design studio settings to explore the visualization of identity. Since 2014, the author—a Central American woman of color teaching in public universities in Texas and Florida—has developed multiple hands-on class activities that focus on self-expression, self-awareness, memory, and positionality. In the undergraduate level, these activities start with the introduction of concepts and terminology from traditional design canons (i.e. principles from modernism, the Bauhaus, and other (mostly) Western European Avant Garde movements). Once students gain an understanding of these canonical principles, they embark in a self-discovery …

Wild Worlding Wunderkammer Workshop, Verena Kuni

Pluriversal Design Conference Series

Inspired by the carrier bag theory of fiction let us look for alternate ways to do our work. We do this by worlding: by attuning to and melting into the subject(s) of our research; gathering and gaining situated knowledges, interwoven with multiple threads of imagination and desire. But then gathering and gaining is based on collecting: data, objects, subjects, situations, relations; submitted into an order of things, shifted into storages, from time to time put on display. Imagination and desire are stripped off in this process and stored separately, if at all. That’s why we need a different mind-set, a …