Making Sense of Citizen Diplomats: The People of Duluth, Minnesota, as International Actors

2001 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-150 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Making Sense ◽  
The People

scholarly journals Exploring, modelling, and simulating the Feeling of Comfort in residential settings

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
German Molina
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Personal Factors ◽  
Building Science ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Research And Practice ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The People ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind

<p><b>The fact that comfort is a subjective state of the mind is widely accepted by engineers, architects and building scientists. Despite this, capturing all the complexity, subjectivity and richness of this construct in models that are useful in building science contexts is far from straightforward. By prioritizing usability, building science has produced models of comfort (e.g., acoustic, visual and thermal) that overly simplify this concept to something nearly objective that can be directly associated with people’s physiology and measurable and quantifiable environmental factors. This is a contradiction because, even if comfort is supposed to be subjective, most of the complexity of “the subject” is avoided by focusing on physiology; and, even if comfort is supposed to reside in the mind, the cognitive processes that characterize the mind are disregarded. This research partially mitigates this contradiction by exploring people’s non-physical personal factors and cognition within the context of their comfort and by proposing a way in which they can be incorporated into building science research and practice. This research refers to these elements together—i.e., people’s non-physical personal factors and cognition—as “the mind”.</b></p> <p>This research proposes a new qualitative model of the Feeling of Comfort that embraces “the mind”. This model was developed from the results of a first study in which 18 people—from Chile and New Zealand—were asked to describe “a home with good daylight” and “a warm home” in their own words. These results were then replicated in a second study in which another group of 24 people—also from Chile and New Zealand—described “a home with good acoustic performance”, “a home with good air quality” and “a pleasantly cool home”. The Feeling of Comfort model not only was capable of making sense of the new data (gathered in this second study) but also proved to be simple enough to be useful in the context of comfort research and practice. For instance, it guided the development of a quantitative Feeling of Comfort model and also of a prototype building simulation tool that embraces “the mind” and thus can potentially estimate people’s Feeling of Comfort.</p> <p>This research concludes that embracing “the mind” is not only possible but necessary. The reason for this is that “the mind” plays a significant role in the development of people’s comfort. Thus, theories and models of comfort that ignore it fail to represent properly the concept of comfort held by the people for whom buildings are designed. However, incorporating “the mind” into building science’s research and practice implies embracing tools, research methods and conceptual frameworks that have historically not been used by such a discipline. Specifically, it concludes that building science should normalize a more holistic view of comfort and perform more exploratory and qualitative research.</p>

scholarly journals Exploring, modelling, and simulating the Feeling of Comfort in residential settings

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
German Molina
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Personal Factors ◽  
Building Science ◽  
Holistic View ◽  
Research And Practice ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The People ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Mind

<p><b>The fact that comfort is a subjective state of the mind is widely accepted by engineers, architects and building scientists. Despite this, capturing all the complexity, subjectivity and richness of this construct in models that are useful in building science contexts is far from straightforward. By prioritizing usability, building science has produced models of comfort (e.g., acoustic, visual and thermal) that overly simplify this concept to something nearly objective that can be directly associated with people’s physiology and measurable and quantifiable environmental factors. This is a contradiction because, even if comfort is supposed to be subjective, most of the complexity of “the subject” is avoided by focusing on physiology; and, even if comfort is supposed to reside in the mind, the cognitive processes that characterize the mind are disregarded. This research partially mitigates this contradiction by exploring people’s non-physical personal factors and cognition within the context of their comfort and by proposing a way in which they can be incorporated into building science research and practice. This research refers to these elements together—i.e., people’s non-physical personal factors and cognition—as “the mind”.</b></p> <p>This research proposes a new qualitative model of the Feeling of Comfort that embraces “the mind”. This model was developed from the results of a first study in which 18 people—from Chile and New Zealand—were asked to describe “a home with good daylight” and “a warm home” in their own words. These results were then replicated in a second study in which another group of 24 people—also from Chile and New Zealand—described “a home with good acoustic performance”, “a home with good air quality” and “a pleasantly cool home”. The Feeling of Comfort model not only was capable of making sense of the new data (gathered in this second study) but also proved to be simple enough to be useful in the context of comfort research and practice. For instance, it guided the development of a quantitative Feeling of Comfort model and also of a prototype building simulation tool that embraces “the mind” and thus can potentially estimate people’s Feeling of Comfort.</p> <p>This research concludes that embracing “the mind” is not only possible but necessary. The reason for this is that “the mind” plays a significant role in the development of people’s comfort. Thus, theories and models of comfort that ignore it fail to represent properly the concept of comfort held by the people for whom buildings are designed. However, incorporating “the mind” into building science’s research and practice implies embracing tools, research methods and conceptual frameworks that have historically not been used by such a discipline. Specifically, it concludes that building science should normalize a more holistic view of comfort and perform more exploratory and qualitative research.</p>

Litigating Illiteracy: The Media, the Law, and The People of the State of New York v. Adelbert Ward

1995 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Kemple
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Access To Justice ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The People ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Mercy Killing ◽  
Values And Beliefs ◽  
The Media ◽  
Personal Community

AbstractMaking sense of the problems which illiterate people face in gaining access to justice puts the foundations of both the ethnography of law and the modern justice system itself into question. The essay explores this thesis with reference to the case of an elderly dairy farmer whose arrest for the mercy killing of his ailing brother attracted intense local and national attention. Documents from the trial which deal with the construction and use of evidence, confession, and testimony, along with schematic representations of the personal, community, and media responses to the case as depicted in the award-winning documentary Brother's Keeper (1992), render visible the textual conventions of a litigious society along with its non-literate and even ritual cultural context. The most troubling issue raised by the case involves a crisis in the bureaucratic organization and expert professionalization of modern litigation when it attempts to address the rights and competencies of relatively illiterate people who appear unable to articulate the values and beliefs of any cultural community at all.

Making Sense of War: An Autobiographical Account of a Vietnam War Correspondent

1989 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 327-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bob M. Gassaway
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Organizational Factors ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The People ◽  
War Correspondents ◽  
The Vietnam War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Retrospective Examination

This article presents and discusses the author's experiences as an Associated Press reporter covering the Vietnam War in the 1960s. The author presents vignettes of some of the people and events that made the greatest impressions on him, along with brief analyses of these stories. Following this he provides a retrospective examination of broader issues related to news coverage, including the emotional makeup of war correspondents, the role of journalists in creating news, and some organizational factors that influence the way news is reported.

scholarly journals Review: Making sense of Bad English

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-92
Author(s):  
Alexander Padilla
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
Negative Answer ◽  
Standard English ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The People ◽  
Specific Objective ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Common ◽  
Different Parts

To recognize what is or what is not the good use of English, language scientist have disposed the official term “Standard English”. If so, what does this term really means? and what were the conditions and bounds where this term was created? and in consequence, who are the people that really speak on this strict way? This book discusses through an anthropological and linguistic way the term “Good English”. Thus, in general words the author will discuss: How can somebody know whether his use of English is good or bad? What are the causes of such distinction (good/bad) in real practices using this language? Moreover, the specific objective beyond the common negative answer about the not standardized English, this book will offer an explanation from the social, cultural and historical facts about the meaning of being an English user in different parts of the world.

scholarly journals The ecology of linking technologies: toward a non-instrumental look at new technological repertoires

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rocío Gómez
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Social Life ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Mobile Telephone ◽  
Doctoral Thesis ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social

The article examines one of the analytical fronts dealt with in the doctoral thesis “Making Sense in the Contemporary City: Young People and New Technological Repertoires”. The paper focuses on the follow-up and examination of the framework of technological relationships between human and non-human agents. The study allowed us to advance in the comprehension of the new technological repertoires (mobile telephone, chat, Internet) not as isolated instruments which are added to the social life of the subjects, but as technological mediations for the construction of social links, that is, as linking machines. The people do not relate with discrete and individualized technologies but with authentic technological settings in which both convergent and divergent relationships are generated.  We denominate this conjunction of technologies as the ecology of technologies. It proposes eight technological techno-mediation linking systems which are useful for analyzing the variations of the techno-linking settings of the urban young people, that is, the variation of ways in which young people operate different technologies to build and strengthen their social links.. It questions some of the frequently simplifying conceptions regarding “the young user of new technologies”.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard Sasges
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
Popular Resistance ◽  
Ethnic Chinese ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The People ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Global And Local

Indochina’s alcohol monopoly was financially unproductive and politically disastrous. Making sense of this seemingly senseless policy requires placing the monopoly in both global and local contexts. Global contexts include advances in microbiology, the consolidation of the distilling industry, and the spread of new fiscal and administrative technologies. Local contexts include Indochina’s complex physical and human geographies, the contested and incomplete nature of French rule, the dominant position of ethnic Chinese in the Indochinese economy, and widespread popular resistance to the monopoly. As a result, Indochina’s alcohol regime simultaneously transcends and confirms its colonial setting: made possible by developments in industry and government worldwide, at the same time the alcohol regime was indelibly marked by the people and spaces of Indochina and by the authoritarian and racist nature of colonial rule.

Making sense of experience

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-49
Author(s):  
Bridget Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Professional Development ◽  
Drug Treatment ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The People ◽  
Development Processes ◽  
Drug Problems ◽  
Drug Studies

Society's response to alcohol and drug problems must continually evolve. The author expresses optimism about evaluation's ability to guide change from the ground up through developing a culture of ongoing learning. It is argued that the alcohol and other drug treatment sector has a particular need for empowering professional development processes. The article describes the background to and personal experience of a new unit within a Graduate Diploma in Alcohol and Other Drug Studies course. This article is an edited version of a paper presented on 7 September 2007 at the conference of the Australasian Evaluation Society, ‘Doing Evaluation Better’, Melbourne. Bridget Roberts introduced the presentation by acknowledging the people of the Kulin nation, specifically the Wurundjeri (the first people to occupy the Melbourne area and the custodians of this land), including their elders past and present.

Making sense of ‘maker’: Work, identity, and affect in the maker movement

2020 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2096483
Author(s):  
Steve Marotta
Keyword(s):  
Corporate Culture ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Maker Movement ◽  
Work Identity ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Work Related ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The People ◽  
The Maker Movement

This paper investigates the affective dimensions of entrepreneurial and creative work with the goal of making sense of the emergent collective identity of ‘maker.’ Relying on qualitative research in Detroit, MI, and Portland, OR, with small, entrepreneurial craft producers affiliated with the ‘maker movement,’ I forward two broad suppositions. First, as a work-related identity, ‘maker’ is emergent from a collective frustration with globalization and corporate/professional work. From the perspective of affective labor, the suggestion is that this negative association with globalized forms of work might be productive of a politically oppositional subjectivity. Second, as an identity term ‘maker’ is vague and oftentimes rejected by the people it ostensibly describes, and as such, the politics of ‘maker’ are not oriented toward collective political action. Why does ‘maker’ appear coherent as a response to globalization and corporate culture, but incoherent as a form of solidarity or collective identity? The paper utilizes affect theory to make sense of this contradiction, finding that the ambiguity and negation of ‘maker’ help shape a non-rigid form of belonging that allows makers to express various dissatisfactions (e.g. of globalization) while maintaining feelings of autonomy and avoiding overtly political positions. Lastly, I contend that ‘making’ is an adjustment to the turbulence of capitalism rather than a confrontation against it and is best understood in terms of the sense of mooring and purpose it provides for those within its milieu.

scholarly journals Conspiracy theories and pandemic management in Africa: critical reflections on contexts, contradictions and challenges

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 38-59
Author(s):  
Adeolu Oluwaseyi Oyekan ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Health Issue ◽  
The Political ◽  
Trust Building ◽  
Conspiracy Theories ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The World

The coronavirus pandemic, though primarily a health issue, has had significant social, economic and political implications across the world. There are reasons to believe that some of the changes occurring are likely to be permanent even in a post-pandemic world, and there are even suggestions that the world may be entering a phase in which pandemics become recurrent. Making sense of all that the pandemic has brought has by no means been easy, even for scientists who have had to review and revise their claims as new discoveries about the virus are made. One of the fallouts of the pandemic has been a proliferation of conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus, as well as efforts to contain it. Summed up, these theories of various shades allege that certain powerful forces are behind the pandemic, in pursuit of some narrow ends that range from the political to the religious. In this paper, I analyse conspiracy theories and the motivations behind them. Situating conspiracy theories within the pandemic, I argue that they are best understood not within the framework of a single theory but by an understanding of how diverse motivations generate different, even contradictory conspiratorial accounts. I argue that whereas conspiracy theories have become a feature of modern society, and have been amplified in the age of technology, they have low credibility value in explaining the pandemic, while having significant implications. I also argue that if left unchecked, conspiracy theories have the capacity to further undermine governments’ capacity to respond to big crises in Africa in the future. I conclude that conspiracy theories are best managed in a pandemic through consistent, transparent engagement rooted in trust-building between the people and governments, especially in Africa.

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