Co-Creating Knowledge Online: Approaches for Community Artists

Forming peer alliances to share and build knowledge is an important aspect of community arts practice, and these co-creation processes are increasingly being mediated by the internet. This paper offers guidance for practitioners who are interested in better utilising the internet to connect, share, and make new knowledge. It argues that new approaches are required to foster the organising activities that underpin online co-creation, building from the premise that people have become increasingly networked as individuals rather than in groups (Rainie and Wellman 2012: 6), and that these new ways of connecting enable new modes of peer-to-peer production and exchange. This position advocates that practitioners move beyond situating the internet as a platform for dissemination and a tool for co-creating media, to embrace its knowledge collaboration potential.

Drawing on a design experiment I developed to promote online knowledge co-creation, this paper suggests three development phases – developing connections, developing ideas, and developing agility – to ground six methods. They are: switching and routing, engaging in small trades of ideas with networked individuals; organising, co-ordinating networked individuals and their data; beta-release, offering ‘beta’ artifacts as knowledge trades; beta-testing, trialing and modifying other peoples ‘beta’ ideas; adapting, responding to technological disruption; and, reconfiguring, embracing opportunities offered by technological disruption. These approaches position knowledge co-creation as another capability of the community artist, along with co-creating art and media.

The executive committee of the Greek Professional Association of Social Work in an age of austerity: examining its response

This paper explores the response by the Greek Association of Social Workers (SKLE) to Greece's current economic crisis. Socioeconomic conditions in Greece have deteriorated rapidly since the imposition of a Structural Adjustment Programme as a condition of the loan Troika provided to Greece to address its class-based public debt crisis. Interviews were conducted with SKLE Executive Committee members to examine SKLE's response in the context of newly raised inequalities. Research results show that SKLE recognised the negative consequences to both service users and its members. However, SKLE continues to reformulate its strategy mostly as a social partner. SKLE's previous strategy entailed amongst other things the analysis of policy proposals and participation in welfare related government committees. This strategy is no longer relevant because decision-making powers have been transferred to transnational bodies. This paper elaborates on these findings and discusses the barriers that prohibit SKLE from differentiation of its strategy. Although the research is country specific, it has implications for the broader global debate because professional associations must reformulate their strategies for better serving of both their constituents and the collective good based on the social justice mandate of the profession.

Italian Canzone d'autore and Greek Entechno tragoudi: a comparative overview

‘Canzone d’autore’ is the name that a vast community of Italian music critics, authors, per-formers, producers agreed upon in the mid-1970s, to describe the Italian singer-songwriter genre. Singer-songwriters, who had been missing from Italian popular music – with very few exceptions – until the late 1950s, had become increasingly popular after 1958, and were dubbed ‘cantautori’ in 1960. The term, which propagated to Spain, Catalonia, and Latin Amer-ica, is still in use, but ‘canzone d’autore’ superseded it as a genre label, highlighting the con-nections between authorship and artistic value, implied in the already established notion of ‘Cinéma d’auteur’ from which it was derived.

The expression ‘entechno laiko tragoudi’ (‘art-folk song’) was coined in Greece by Mikis The-odorakis in the 1950s, to describe a new music genre combining the urban-folk musical idi-om with lyrics coming from high-art poetry. Although the origins of the genre are tied to the work of composers like Theodorakis and Hatzidakis who did not perform as singers, from the 1970s onwards entechno became the privileged field of new generations of Greek singer-songwriters. Dropping ‘laiko’ (folk) from its label, entechno expanded its musical influences outside the urban-folk repertory and transformed into the more all-encompassing contempo-rary ‘art song’.

'This is a beautiful school.' 'This school is useless!' Explaining disengagement in a Greek vocational school through the examination of teacher ideologies

This multimethod case study of a Greek vocational school explored teachers’ culture (including beliefs about education, teachers’ role, and students’ nature) using the concept of Pupil Control Ideology to explain problems of disengagement and low morale among staff and students, as well as tensions in relationships. A prominent custodial culture was identified in the school using a functional/apolitical pedagogy to transmit ‘legitimate’ knowledge to students whose working-class background did not produce desired outcomes. This generated deficit views of students, teachers’ sympathy, and a seemingly caring school ethos which was, nevertheless, oppressive. Students’ failings were naturalised and vocational education misinterpreted as merely a streaming device in a system honouring academic achievement and middle-class ways. Teachers were blind to these cultural subtleties, believing they acted ‘rationally’ and altruistically. A humanistic subculture emphasising student empowerment and social transformation consisted of a minority of teachers and was rather marginalised. This disallowed meaningful dialogue and the identification of an alternative rationale for the sector, generating strong feelings of futility. Positive change in this school necessitated the deconstruction and (subsequent) reconstruction of custodial teachers’ worldview as embedded in their practice.

Charting Cartographies of Resistance: Line of Flight in Women Artists’ Narratives

In this paper I chart lines of flight in women artist’s narratives. In focusing on the complex interrelations between the social milieus of education and art, what I suggest is that they should be analysed as an assemblage where power relations and forces of desire are constantly at play in creating conditions of possibility for women to resist, imagine themselves becoming other and for new possibilities in their lives to be actualised. As a novel approach to social ontology the theory of assemblages offers an analytics of social complexity that accounts for open configurations, continuous connections and unstable hierarchies, structures and axes of difference. In reconsidering resistance as immanent in dispositifs of power and assemblages of desire, what I finally argue is that women artists’ narratives contribute to the constitution of minor knowledges and create archives of radical futurity.

Dissenting Exhibitions by Artists (1968-1998). Reframing Marxist Exhibition Legacy.

The goal of this thesis is to look at the critical and dissenting value of exhibitions through the examination of four cases studies, based on six exhibitions taking place between 1968 and 1998 in Latin and North America. The exhibitions belong to the history of modern and contemporary exhibitions and curating, a field of research and study that has only started to be written about in the last two decades. This investigation contributes to it, in its creation of new genealogies by connecting previously overlooked antecedents, or by proposing new relations within established lineages, at the intersection of a specific historiography; to address exhibitions, a tradition of artists acting as curators and an emerging history of curating. The examined exhibitions were put together by artists or artist collectives and were placed in a liminal position between artistic and curatorial practice. All the cases presented a distinct proposal in relation to art and social change, a fact that connects them, in their aims and modus operandi, to a Marxist and neo-Marxist critical and transformative legacy. The cases address the following connections: exhibition as political site (Tucumán Arde, 1968); exhibition as social space (The People’s Choice (Arroz con Mango), 1981); exhibition as encounter (Rooms with a view, We the People, Art/Artifact, 1987-88); and exhibition as an exchange situation (El Museo de la Calle, 1998-2001). Key to their analysis is the concept of dissensus, as put forward by Jacques Rancière. Within this theoretical framework, these exhibitions put into practice particular cases of dissensus in a given distribution of the sensible. All of them tried to deal with their thematic concerns by performing them as a praxis. They dissent with the way in which reality was formatted in their historical moment and challenge the exhibition medium itself opening new ways of doing and making in the exhibition field. Therefore, in this thesis the dissenting value of exhibitions is closely related to its main features as a medium, namely their temporality, heterogeneity and flexibility, which contribute to their potential for creative analysis and propositioning. In the case of these exhibitions, this capability is brought into play for institutional interrogation, for offering alternative cultural narratives and also for inspiring new imaginary realms.

Graphic design and modernisation in Greece, 1945-1970

The primary aim of this work is to give voice to the silent history of graphic design in Greece, long uncharted and undocumented in both the international forum and the local design community. This study focuses on the professional modernisation of graphic design and its role in providing the means for change in Greek society. The research is supported by interdisciplinary analysis of commercial advertisements, posters, leaflets and magazines, as well as other supporting documentation, in the historical and cultural context of Athens, Greece from 1945 to 1970. The time examined was a transitional and vociferous period in the history of Greece, one of intense and rapid economic modernisation during the post-Second World War decades from the mid-1940s to 1970. This was a time when, along with broader changes in the social, economic and political life of Greece, important developments in design education, print technology, and professional organisation marked a new age for graphic design, as a profession emerging from the broader ‘graphic arts’ field (inclusive of both technological and creative processes) and claiming autonomy over the more established fine arts sector. All four chapters deal with modernisation in relation to the assumed divisions of traditional/modern, continuity/change, centre/periphery. Main areas of investigation are: trade organisation, graphic design education, advertising and urbanisation, electricity and tourism promotion. This research offers a view of the ways the ‘modern’ and the condition of modernity were experienced in the case of Greece through certain applications of graphic design and its agents of influence: graphic designers, artists, managers, publishers, the state and private entrepreneurs. The research benefited significantly from a number of interviews with design professionals and related individuals. The present endeavour has a modest aim: to enable understanding of how and why Greek graphic design at the time came to be, and to stress the validity of the visual as a means of historical documentation.

French-greek machine translation of imperative sentences: issues in aspect and mood from a controlled language perspective

The present dissertation examines how grammatical aspect and mood are handled by machine translation (MT) systems within the scope of imperative sentences (orders, recommendations) when dealing with the language pair French-Greek (unidirectional, towards Greek). As the grammatical category of aspect is not expressed in the same way in both languages, choosing the correct aspect value when translating a verb from French to Greek can pose problems. We are interested in describing the types of errors that occur and their frequency in a corpus taken from texts pertaining to the security domain and from technical manuals, where imperative sentences are very common. In order to further delimit our research, our sample consists of sentences that comply with the general principles of simplicity and readability provided by several controlled language guidelines and aimed at higher translatability when having MT in mind. In a second phase, this study aims at discovering how modifying some of the control rules would help (or not) the MT systems better decide upon the translation of aspect and mood.