The Social Politics of Breastfeeding: Norms, Situations and Policy Implications

This paper aims to explore the assumptions concerning the dynamics of human action underpinning breastfeeding promotion campaigns in the UK. Drawing on qualitative interviews with mothers, the ways in which three problematic assumptions shape both the promotion and experience of contemporary breastfeeding promotion campaigns are explored, in the light of Joas’s theorisation of action’s creativity and pragmatism. Public health efforts to establish breastfeeding as a rational standard against which good mothering can be judged, in ways which rely on a de-contextualised understanding of human action as instrumentally rational, where bodies are imagined as pliable instruments of human intentions, are explored as they play out in the experiences of women embarking on motherhood. The paper concludes that a target-driven health-promotion policy, relying on a mechanistic account of social and emotional life, is contributing to the burden of early motherhood in ways that are not conducive to infant and maternal health and attachment.

Writing the Dark Side of Travel

The travel experience filled with personal trauma; the pilgrimage through a war-torn place; the journey with those suffering: these represent the darker sides of travel. What is their allure and how are they represented? This volume takes an ethnographic and interdisciplinary approach to explore the writings and texts of dark journeys and travels. In traveling over the dead, amongst the dying, and alongside the suffering, the authors give us a tour of humanity’s violence and misery. And yet, from this dark side, there comes great beauty and poignancy in the characterization of plight; creativity in the comic, graphic, and graffiti sketches and comments on life; and the sense of profound and spiritual journeys being undertaken, recorded, and memorialized.

SPACE SHUTTLE

6 projects of creativity and social interaction running in locations of low levels of cultural activity throughout Belfast, Funded through ACNI and Big Lottery

Cognitive Adaptation to the Experience of Social and Cultural Diversity

Diversity is a defining characteristic of modern society, yet there remains considerable debate over the benefits that it brings. The authors argue that positive psychological and behavioral outcomes will be observed only when social and cultural diversity is experienced in a way that challenges stereotypical expectations and that when this precondition is met, the experience has cognitive consequences that resonate across multiple domains. A model, rooted in social categorization theory and research, outlines the preconditions and processes through which people cognitively adapt to the experience of social and cultural diversity and the resulting cross-domain benefits that this brings. Evidence is drawn from a range of literatures to support this model, including work on biculturalism, minority influence, cognitive development, stereotype threat, work group productivity, creativity, and political ideology. The authors bring together a range of differing diversity experiences and explicitly draw parallels between programs of research that have focused on both perceiving others who are multicultural and being multicultural oneself. The findings from this integrative review suggest that experiencing diversity that challenges expectations may not only encourage greater tolerance but also have benefits beyond intergroup relations to varied aspects of psychological functioning.

Re-Envisioning the Artist Hero Through Two Cole Porter Biopics

Songwriter Cole Porter is unusual in having had two biopics based on his life: Night and Day (1946) starring Cary Grant, and De-Lovely (2004), starring Kevin Kline. The differences in the treatment of the character of Cole Porter between the films are striking, and indicate a change in the way that society envisions its artists, and the very act of creativity. Night and Day was conceived partly as a showcase of Porter's songs, but also as a means of providing inspiration to soldiers returning wounded from World War II, based on Porter's recovery from a traumatic riding accident. It depicts Porter as an everyman following a trajectory of achievement, from having little to great success, which was positioned as easy to emulate. De-Lovely, on the other hand, is about the relationship between Porter and his wife Linda, and the way that his creativity was influenced by his changing relationships with various people. Drawing on the work on biopics of scholars such as G.F.Custen, together with research into the shifting ideas of how creativity operates and is popularly understood, this article uses these biopics as case studies to examine the representation of changing concepts of the artist and the act of creativity through Hollywood film. It also considers how these changing conceptions and representations connect to shifts in American society.

The Analogical Peacock Hypothesis: The Sexual Selection of Mind-Reading and Relational Cognition in Human Communication

This integrative review presents a novel hypothesis as a basis for integrating two evolutionary viewpoints on the origins of human cognition and communication, the sexual selection of human mental capacities, and the social brain hypothesis. This new account suggests that mind-reading social skills increased reproductive success and consequently became targets for sexual selection. The hypothesis proposes that human communication has three purposes: displaying mind-reading abilities, aligning and maintaining representational parity between individuals to enable displays, and the exchange of propositional information. Intelligence, creativity, language, and humor are mental fitness indicators that signal an individual’s quality to potential mates, rivals, and allies. Five features central to the proposed display mechanism unify these indicators, the relational combination of concepts, large conceptual knowledge networks, processing speed, contextualization, and receiver knowledge. Sufficient between-mind alignment of conceptual networks allows displays based upon within-mind conceptual mappings. Creative displays communicate previously unnoticed relational connections and novel conceptual combinations demonstrating an ability to read a receiver’s mind. Displays are costly signals of mate quality with costs incurred in the developmental production of the neural apparatus required to engage in complex displays and opportunity costs incurred through time spent acquiring cultural knowledge. Displays that are fast, novel, spontaneous, contextual, topical, and relevant are hard-to-fake for lower quality individuals. Successful displays result in elevated social status and increased mating options. The review addresses literatures on costly signaling, sexual selection, mental fitness indicators, and the social brain hypothesis; drawing implications for nonverbal and verbal communication.

The Paradox of Performative Immediacy: Law, Music, Improvisation

In a 1999 essay, J.M. Balkin and Sanford Levinson called for law to be considered as a performing art. Against or perhaps going further than Balkin and Levinson, this commentary claims that while engagement with performance practices in the arts, such as music, is of the utmost value to law and legal theory, we must not take for granted what it means to ‘‘perform’’. Uniting Jacques Derrida’s la Villette performance (with jazz legend, Ornette Coleman) with his writings on performativity in law, this commentary looks to the musical practice of improvisation to trouble the notion of performance as immediate and singular and to question taken for granted distinctions between text and performance, writing and music, composition and improvisation. The consequence of this refined understanding of the performative on legal theory and the actual practice of law is a reconceptualization of law as improvisation, that is, both singular and general, pre-existent and immediate, and a refocusing on the creativity that lies at the heart of law’s conservativism.

Analogies to semantic and syntactic mental labour in the Feist decision

The Supreme Court of the United States in Feist v. Rural (Feist, 1991) specified that compilations or databases, and other works, must have a minimal degree of creativity to be copyrightable. The significance and global diffusion of the decision is only matched by the difficulties it has posed for interpretation. The judgment does not specify what is to be understood by creativity, although it does give a full account of the negative of creativity, as ‘so mechanical or routine as to require no creativity whatsoever’ (Feist, 1991, p.362). The negative of creativity as highly mechanical has particularly diffused globally.

A recent interpretation has correlated ‘so mechanical’ (Feist, 1991) with an automatic mechanical procedure or computational process, using a rigorous exegesis fully to correlate the two uses of mechanical. The negative of creativity is then understood as an automatic computation and as a highly routine process. Creativity is itself is conversely understood as non-computational activity, above a certain level of routinicity (Warner, 2013).

The distinction between the negative of creativity and creativity is strongly analogous to an independently developed distinction between forms of mental labour, between semantic and syntactic labour. Semantic labour is understood as human labour motivated by considerations of meaning and syntactic labour as concerned solely with patterns. Semantic labour is distinctively human while syntactic labour can be directly humanly conducted or delegated to machine, as an automatic computational process (Warner, 2005; 2010, pp.33-41).

The value of the analogy is to greatly increase the intersubjective scope of the distinction between semantic and syntactic mental labour. The global diffusion of the standard for extreme absence of copyrightability embodied in the judgment also indicates the possibility that the distinction fully captures the current transformation in the distribution of mental labour, where syntactic tasks which were previously humanly performed are now increasingly conducted by machine.

The paper has substantive and methodological relevance to the conference themes. Substantively, it is concerned with human creativity, with rationality as not reducible to computation, and has relevance to the language myth, through its indirect endorsement of a non-computable or not mechanical semantics. These themes are supported by the underlying idea of technology as a human construction. Methodologically, it is rooted in the humanities and conducts critical thinking through exegesis and empirically tested theoretical development

References

Feist. (1991). Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Service Co., Inc. 499 U.S. 340.

Warner, J. (2005). Labor in information systems. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. 39, 2005, pp.551-573.

Warner, J. (2010). Human Information Retrieval (History and Foundations of Information Science Series). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Warner, J. (2013). Creativity for Feist. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 64, 6, 2013, pp.1173-1192.

Architecture from the dogs …

In this chapter Morrow talks of her return to Northern Ireland to 2003 and how her involvement in establishing a new school of architecture and a recent suite of interdisciplinary masters has led her to consider the relationship between the post-conflict context, architectural practice and its education. She examines the consequences of not facing the effects of conflict; the impact on societal and architectural creativity; and the potential for live project pedagogy to evolve effective models of socio-spatial rehearsals. She concludes with some strategies for schools of architecture that wish to feed and be fed by their context. This is a personalized commentary that teeters somewhere between deep-seated frustration with a blind-folded profession and sustained belief in architectural education’s potential to offer more than built solutions.

M level Inquiry Across Disciplinary Boundaries: Using Reflective Sketchbooks

Debates unfolding around the recent development of M Level programmes for teacher education are not unfamiliar to those being addressed in other professional disciplines such as business. A strong theme in our analysis is that reflective practitioners could be provided with a wider range of tools and methods to support them in their reflection. Considerable energies have been expended on e portfolios, but our experience of use of paper based reflective
sketchbooks suggests that they may have some distinct advantages over text-dominated electronic media. In fact such sketchbooks challenge typed text as the dominant route to learning and communication (Gilbert 1998), (New, 2005), (Hickman, 2007). Professionals in teacher education are currently exploring ways in which M level can be conceived in terms of professional learning. This is also important terrain in other professions. For example, best practice in business management involves constant innovation so that students do not experience a split between the research context of the business faculty and the experience of operating in the business situation. This is paralleled in education by the concern that trainees do not experience a split between the research or scholarly informed approach of university tutors, and the experience of practical teaching in school. Our research question is concerned with how a consciously developed reflective sketchbook method can generate levels of critical thought that are both postgraduate and professionally valued in the workplace. We are also interested in the contribution this form of enquiry at M Level can make in terms of life long learning.

Cultivating creative learners in higher education: Engaging students in anatomy through art

Introduction
Nursing and midwifery students often struggle to engage with bioscience modules because they lack confidence in their ability to study science (Fell et al., 2012). Consequently many have difficulty applying anatomical and physiological information, essential to providing safe and effective patient care (Rogers, 2014; Rogers and Sterling, 2012); therefore a need exists for nurse educators to explore different methods of delivery of these important topics to enhance current curricula (Johnston, 2010). Inspired by the reported success of creative methods to enhance the teaching and learning of anatomy in medical education (Noel, 2013; Finn and McLachlan, 2010), this pilot study engaged nursing students in anatomy through the art of felt. The project was underpinned by the principles of good practice in undergraduate education, staff-student engagement, cooperation among students, active learning, prompt feedback, time on task, high expectations and respect for diverse learning styles (Chickering and Gamson, 1987).

Method
Undergraduate student nurses from Queen’s University, Belfast, enrolled in the year one ‘Health and Wellbeing’ model were invited to participate in the project. Over a six week period the student volunteers worked in partnership with teaching staff to construct individual, unique, three dimensional felt models of the upper body. Students researched the agreed topic for each week in terms of anatomical structure, location, tissue composition and vascular access. Creativity was encouraged in relation to the colour and texture of materials used. The evaluation of the project was based on the four level model detailed by Kirkpatrick and Kirkpatrick (2006) and included both quantitative and qualitative analysis:• pre and post knowledge scores• self-rated confidence• student reflections on the application of learning to practice.

Results
At the end of the project students had created felt pieces reflective of their learning throughout the project and ‘memorable’ three dimensional mental maps of the human anatomy. Evaluation revealed not only acquisition of anatomical knowledge, but the wider benefits of actively engaging in creative learning with other students and faculty teaching staff.

The project has enabled nurse educators to assess the impact of innovative methods for delivery of these important topics.