A dynamic role-playing platform for simulations in legal and political education

One big challenge in deploying games-based learning, is the high cost and specialised skills associated with customised development. In this paper we present a serious games platform that offers tools that allow educators without special programming or artistic skills to dynamically create three dimensional (3D) scenes and verbal and non-verbal interaction with fully embodied conversational agents (ECAs) that can be used to simulate numerous educational scenarios. We present evaluation results based on the use of the platform to create two educational scenarios for politics and law in higher education. We conclude with a discussion of directions for the further work.

Data Visualisation Does Political Things

In this paper I advance the theory of critical communication design by exploring the politics of data, information and knowledge visualisation in three bodies of work. Data reflects power relations, special interests and ideologies that determine which data is collected, what data is used and how it is used. In a review of Max Roser’s Our World in Data, I develop the concepts of digital positivism, datawash and darkdata. Looking at the Climaps by Emaps project, I describe how knowledge visualisation can support integrated learning on complex problems and nurture relational perception. Finally, I present my own Mapping Climate Communication project and explain how I used discourse mapping to develop the concept of discursive confusion and illustrate contradictions in this politicised area. Critical approaches to information visualisation reject reductive methods in favour of more nuanced ways of presenting information that acknowledge complexity and the political dimension on issues of controversy.

Post-Political Ontologies and the Problems of Anti-Anthropocentrism: Reply to Tsouvalis

Judith Tsouvalis mounts a lively and interesting critique of the post-foundational Left’s theorisations through the marshalling of Latourian insights into the possibilities for a more grounded, pragmatic and concrete approach to political action. Tsouvalis takes Latour’s appropriation of John Dewey’s philosophical pragmatism (classically stated in the 1927 [1954] work, The Public and Its Problems) to argue that problems enable Dingpolitik – object or problem-orientated politics – through assembling concrete plural publics around matters of shared concern and contestation. She counter positions this pragmatic politics of concern, through which new communities of understanding are formed, to the abstract and ‘anthropomorphic’ critiques of the ‘post-political condition’ which offer little in the way of a constructive engagement in the collective making of a better world.