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This paper examines the Confucian concept of learning, or xue ([character omitted]), from the perspective of ecological humanism. Through a comparative interpretation, this paper attempts to disclose the significance of Confucian xue conceived as a practice of aesthetic appreciation and creativity, emphasizing in particular its function within an eco-centric worldview. The author reviews the relevant concepts of ecological humanism as expressed in the ideas of John Dewey and Thomas Alexander, then applies these as a theoretical framework for interpreting xue and its related concepts and practices as they appear in the Confucian text the Lunyu ([characters omitted] ). It is argued that xue is a process of developing and expressing virtuosity and artistry in the "arts of life," and that its practice was understood as a direct participation in the creative development of nature. The significance of such a concept of learning for contemporary educational philosophy is discussed in conclusion.

Thermal cameras have shown to have utility in secondary school classrooms and undergraduate courses. In this paper, the author argues for their potential in the primary school classroom and presents a range of activities that can be undertaken with thermal cameras (or supplied images). With limited access in mind, the activities in this paper have been designed to be practiced in 'demonstration mode' with only one thermal camera or even by using a bank of existing photographs made available to teachers and students. Activities can be modified for individual use or for use in small groups if students have one-to-one access to the cameras.

The composer, author, and teacher, John Cage, was exercised by our 'inability' to truly listen when approaching sound. In exploring the influences on Cage's avant-garde style, specifically the spiritual discipline found in both Zen Buddhism and Chance operations, this paper attempts to distinguish his philosophy (and use) of "silence" and "chance" as an aesthetic pedagogy. In accordance with Dewey's aesthetic theory and Shusterman's Somaesthetics, resolving the inability to listen is aesthetically conceived as somatic 'attuning' to the occurrence of chance sounds in the ambience of the world. By maintaining Cage's spiritually informed approach as a compositional framework, this paper highlights how his philosophy of silence is pedagogically illustrative of the "active" engagement we can have with the world. This approach is most apparent in Cage's "4'33"," where the 'musicalizing' of everyday sounds erodes the boundaries between art and life, creating a continuity with the world. Somewhat problematically, Cage attempted to make this possible by channelling experience into a state of immersion, unifying art and life by 'letting go' of subjectivity. But as is shown by the Fluxus artists who were inspired by Cage's teachings, the possibility for negotiating Cage's terms brings with it an opportunity to theoretically reflect on the educational processes that underpin Cage's approach to sound.

This paper seeks to introduce a meaning-making process called 'sensuous abstraction' as one approach to aesthetic experience in line with Dewey's philosophy. Dewey highlights aesthetic experience as the best form of experience that integrates emotional and intellectual qualities to foster deep learning and insights. Building on contemporary research on sensation, affect, and human brain, this paper identifies two distinct modes of human understanding: the linguistic/conceptual system and the sensuous-imaginative system. The former, often associated with abstraction and intellectual thinking, is heavily emphasized in traditional schooling, but the latter, integral to human cognition, is sadly neglected and overlooked. While situational meaning offers a way to bridge the two systems, it often falls short of leading to aesthetic experience. In response, sensuous abstraction can promote a process of meaning making that becomes more general than sensation but never as general as linguistic categories while maintaining its sensory wholeness as aesthetic experience demands. Using a classical artwork as an example, this paper concludes sensuous abstraction can be adopted as one approach for educators to create learning experiences by integrating sensory experience and generalizations and abstractions that lead to aesthetic experience.

This paper examines the interplay of creativity, education, and the expressive arts. We begin by presenting a narrative literature review focusing on the use of artistic tools to promote creativity, self-expressiveness, and meaningful aspects of emotional and social learning. This review reveals strong connections between the different components of this interplay, and a special attention is given to the use of arts to promoting creativity and meaningful learning. We then propose the Empowering Creative Education Model (ECEM), which aims to provide a practical framework for employing artistic tools in each of the model's four developmental circles: I, Us, Educational and Community. Each of the four circles includes unique aspects of personal development.

Art is a powerful tool for conveying scientific discovery. Despite the perceived gap between art and science, as highlighted by CP Snow and others, examples of art communicating science can be found in the ancient world, the Renaissance and contemporary data visualization, demonstrating an enduring and historic connection. However, much of science relies on visual elements, excluding those with blindness, low vision and diverse needs, resulting in their low representation in STEM discourse. This paper introduces a novel science and art collaboration in the form of an exhibition program exploring the concepts of Immunology and Biomedicine to blind and vision-impaired audiences, capitalizing on the lived experience of a legally blind artist. Employing multisensory design, art and co-creation methodologies, it transcends traditional vision-based science communication, showcasing the potential for multisensory art to bridge the gap at the intersection of science and inclusion., (© 2024 The Authors. Immunology & Cell Biology published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Immunology, Inc.)

Human trafficking can have multiple adverse effects on a victim's mental and physical health. The study explored how a small UK community arts project was experienced by individuals post-trafficking and the impact it had on well-being. Community-based participatory research was employed to increase understanding the experiences of six female participants taking part in a community arts project. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Themes of Authentic Care, Building Confidence, and Creative Expression were developed. Findings suggest the community arts organization played a vital role in supporting women to build trust and social connections, as well as to feel valued. Artistic activities helped participants express individuality, had therapeutic benefits, and provided motivation, routine, and space from worries. The role of community arts organizations is important in supporting individuals in the context of limited post-trafficking services., (© 2023 The Authors. Journal of Community Psychology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

This paper explores children's understandings of Acknowledgement to Country practices and Aboriginal knowledges. Guided by the relational lenses of respect, responsibility and reciprocity, we conducted focus groups with children across five Australian early education centres. We found that Acknowledgement practices were evident through recitation of their Acknowledgement to Country, engaging with artefacts, and/or discussion of artworks. Secondly, children demonstrated emerging understandings about place names, the symbolic use of flags for places and people, and Australian plants and animals. Thirdly, Aboriginal cultures as living cultures were evident in temporal discussions about people and culture. Finally, imaginative play implied efforts to make sense of Aboriginal concepts and language. Across the study, children were active in experimenting with ideas in their own meaning making. Acknowledgement to Country was not a moment in the day; rather, it was embedded throughout the day through routines, storytelling, play and creative activities, all designed to foster learning.

Dealing with conflicts seems to be a great challenge in society today. But not only in society. Higher education displays an air of resoluteness with certainty and security that disguises the conflicts and the fear of conflicts in a substantial number of subjects. If not in a state of denial, higher education avoids taking up conflicts over issues, for learning. The detailed investigation of Tagore's pedagogical writings, with a focus on the importance of conflicts in education, reveals a genuine embrace of conflicts for education. Conflicts are natural and necessary for the development and change of both the individual and society and the start of a 'creative imagination' to solve the problems we face in life. Contradictions in conflicts are not incompatible incongruities that are irreconcilable and mutually exclusive, but to the contrary, in need of each other. Contradictions do not represent different worlds but are substantial parts of one world: together they form a unity. Conflicting forces are necessary to create harmony. Creativity, imagination, love, art, and critical encounters are key elements in Tagore's practical education aimed at finding similarities among people instead of emphasizing differences. Relations between people over the Identity of people. In other words, we need conflicts to become creative and imaginative human beings. The paper continues discussing conceptual and practical issues that seem necessary to get the teaching of conflicts in education off the ground. On the conceptual level, in particular our dealing with uncertainty and fear, the valuation of conflict and the need for uncertainty-researching education. On a practical level, I propose a certain teaching model, a supportive curriculum, a way of choosing genuine conflicts for education and finally, I argue for specific support and education of teachers, acknowledging the vital role teachers play in delivering the education that we need.

Brazilian writer Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914-1977) was born in a rural community and spent most of her life in a slum. Despite this, her literary work achieved remarkable editorial success, having its value recognized by critics and academic circles. This paper analyzes Carolina Maria de Jesus's autobiographical narratives in the light of John Dewey's aesthetic theory, with the purpose of investigating the factors responsible for the development of her aesthetic sensitivity -- intellectual and emotional dispositions favorable to involvement with artistic practices. The results suggest that Carolina Maria de Jesus's literary skills, which express not only individual but also collective yearnings, resulted from the incentive she received to think about things that do not exist and from her relationship with people who favored the formation of a personality open to varied experiences. Such results are presented as requirements for a democratic and humanist education that aims at the flowering of aesthetic sensitivity and encourages educators and students to believe in their creative potential.

Learning around artificial intelligence (AI)-powered technologies that attends to power is an urgent and widely felt priority among the learning sciences and CS ed broadly. Popular approaches to AI education focus on technical skills, with far less theoretical and practical work around critical and justice-centered AI learning. Adding to this literature, we discuss tool design and observed interactions in Drag vs AI workshops, where participants use hands-on makeup art as a medium for fooling, subverting, and refusing facial recognition. Our broader analysis asks how participants make sense of the technical and political aspects of AI, as they interact with AI through the Drag vs AI workshops' modes of aesthetic transformation, tinkering, and resistance. In this paper, we focus on participants' embodied algorithmic tinkering with AI and affordances for justice-centered computing education. Our analysis highlights how tinkering and play modes of interaction with AI materials can promote critical and agentive learning.

The development of new approaches to digital art is based on improving a variety of technologies. The main goal of this paper is to identify the gamification of digital art through the promotion of speculative design and interactive experiences. To achieve this goal, theoretical and practical methods were used in the research. A survey determined approaches the designers used to improve their skills. Most respondents (28%) prefer reading books and watching video blogs on their own while 22% of designers took professional courses. Therefore, mechanisms that promote respondents' involvement in selecting professional courses for designers have been described. Cognitive assessment of the skills acquired after completing the course showed significant advantages compared to those observed at the start of the experiment. This was confirmed by the Cohen coefficient. The hierarchy analysis method also contributed to the identification of program elements that are most important for the development of professional skills while not relying exclusively on the data from respondents. The value of the presented work lies in the possibility to improve the skills of gamification in the field of design with the help of the developed mechanisms, the effectiveness of which has been confirmed in practice.

Given that societies across the globe are increasingly multicultural and multilingual, the notion of communicative competence grounded in constricting definitions of national cultures and languages reflects neither our instructional realities nor the sociolinguistic reality of the languages and cultures we teach. To foster students' development of second language (L2) competence grounded in an awareness of the symbolic construction of language and culture as well as "tolerance for ambiguity" (Kramsch, 2006), students must create with L2, rather than just reproduce what they have learned. After briefly outlining changing conceptions of language competency, this paper first describes how public uses of language and images through signs and graffiti make up a given place's linguistic landscape (LL), defines an evolving concept, and illustrates how it can be effectively used in L2 instruction. Then it highlights how a variety of LL-based activities help language learners become cognizant of their own sociolinguistic contexts and provides concrete examples from intermediate to advanced-level classes in two distinctly different German programs. The different approaches encourage students to combine LL-based activities with visual, literary, and film analysis to develop symbolic competencies that prepare them to negotiate unpredictable and diverse cultural norms.

This paper addresses the current debates, anxieties, and perceptions around the idea of scholarly artistic research within doctoral studies, internationally and in South Africa. A common point of contention, both in South Africa and in the international arena, is the reluctance within institutional structures and external bodies to accept artmaking as research and the creative production or artifact as a legitimate component of the research output. Creative practice is permissible at the doctoral level of study but usually research or new knowledge that emerges from such practice is evaluated and analyzed through the lens of textual research. The unwillingness to qualify practice as autonomous research is coupled with its awkward positioning in the humanities as a kind of study secondary to and distinct from that associated with scientific research methodology. This discussion engages with policies, developments, debates, and discourse around practice-based doctoral study in South African and globally, with the hope of presenting a comprehensive overview of the current state of doctoral level artistic research. Moreover, in drawing on international discourse and precedents the study proposes some guidelines, parameters and methodological approaches that can contribute to the understanding and development of doctoral artistic research in South Africa.

This paper investigates research quality criteria in the Creative Arts (CA). The CA has been introduced into the higher education and research sector over the last three decades. It is thus a relatively new research field and there is little empirical knowledge on how outputs in this field should be evaluated. Our study applies a mixed-method approach to assess the relevance of quality criteria used in performance-based research funding systems (PRFSs) in 10 countries. The results of a qualitative analysis of interviews with artists-academics (N = 67) and Joint Correspondence Analysis show that when art is evaluated in the context of academic research, both the traditional indicators of artistic quality as well as the cognitive and research-related aspects of the arts are believed to be significant. The JCA analysis also showed that the majority of our respondents found both extrinsic quality criteria (related to reputation and prestige) and intrinsic criteria (related to cognition and development) relevant.

This paper will explore the dichotomy of direction and stimulus through a reflection on arts-based methods used in a research study into post-industrial communities in South Wales and consider whether in participatory processes, a catalyst for artistic creativity could become construed as researcher-led control over the activities. Through an examination of the methods and outcomes of the project, which employed a range of qualitative methods with an artistic and creative basis, I reflect on the positives and negatives of such an approach and also consider how my positionality affected my epistemological stance. Ultimately, I conclude that the complex storying of participatory activities and the issues of power and identity involving both researcher and participants inevitably means that the research 'dance' blurs the distinction between participation and direction.

"Gendernaut. Queering the Future" is a project influenced by queer theories, transfeminist activism and science fiction. It reflects on the potential of various strategies related to accessibility, distribution, socialization and playful reinterpretation of feminist and queer archives. The creation of archives, software programming, audiovisual production, performing performances or developing games all serve as artistic strategies aimed at invigorating archives. They share a clear intent to enhance accessibility to archives that document the memories of feminist and gender and sexuality dissident communities. Through transmedia and performative experiences, we envision the archive as a living, interactive space, devoid of heteropatriarchal codes, inhabited by multiple bodies and subjectivities linking past, present and future to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study leverages visual design processes to construct a conceptual representation of domestic spaces. Drawing upon personal growth experiences, this work aims to foster reflection on family culture and elicit a fresh perspective on representations of family and home. The design manifests as a 3D installation piece, integrating geometric and organic forms in a novel synthesis of visual communication design. Mixed technique methodologies underscore the artwork's versatility, capturing the complexity and breadth of home as a concept. The creation process incorporated data from environmental conditions, relevant academic literature, and visual art influences. Analysis centered on the clarity of the theme, the symbolic form of the work, and the creative techniques employed, revealing an in-depth exploration of graphic design, interface design, and illustration principles. This study highlights housing as an elemental component of human life, serving as the nexus for sustenance, shelter, and travel. The artwork--an assembly of acrylic panels shaped into simple, uncluttered forms and decorated with paper-cut patterns--translates this concept into a tangible visual reality. It reflects the influential role of visual arts and graphic design in societal narratives. Light within the artwork, symbolizing warmth, creates a space imbued with love, joy, music, and laughter. The piece thus encapsulates a shared understanding of home, underlining the capacity of visual design to create universally resonant yet individually unique experiences. In conclusion, this work underscores the educational and societal significance of visual design, encouraging further exploration into home-themed art and its capacity to bolster societal stability and unity. It advances understanding of the aesthetics of home - its shape, color, and the interplay between Chinese paper-cut patterns and the home concept. This exploration reinforces the need for continued investigation into the potential of visual design to articulate and shape fundamental human spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a paradigm shift in work culture in the contemporary art sector due to digital transition and the introduction of AI. New ways of working with AI and digital software are embedded and normalized in everyday Chinese artistic practices. This work includes new forms of creativity and efficiency, yet, simultaneously includes new types of digital labour. This paper conceptualizes this as "digital art work," which draws attention to the often-overlooked aspects of artists' work, particularly their everyday artistic practices that increasingly include digital software and AI. What is the role and position of the artist in an environment where digital software and AI are becoming more central in artistic creation? How do artists creatively (mis)use AI? What does this paradigm shift in work culture mean for the future of the artist's role and the future of the contemporary art sector? This paper draws on 48 semi-structured interviews with visual artists and arts professionals, including painters, sculptors, mixedmedia, and internet artists as well as contemporary art gallery owners, museum project directors, curators, and culture policymakers living and working in China during 2023. The findings show how Chinese artists are mastering AI and opening up new spaces for creativity and how the contemporary art sector in China has already transitioned to a new "digital way" in artistic creation. These findings can help to create policy around AI globally and provide solutions for the sustainability of the artist profession and the future of the contemporary art sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comic inpainting is essential for language localization and adapting comics into animations, involving the removal of speech boxes, textboxes, and sound effects while maintaining artistic integrity. This paper introduces an automated approach leveraging the Manga inpainting method by Xie et al., adapted for western comics like Tex Willer. Tex Willer comics, known for their fusion of Italian art and American Western imagery, pose unique challenges due to their distinct styles. Customized Manga Restoration and Structural Line Extraction codes are employed, along with automated mask generation using deep CNN-based speech balloon detection and segmentation. Our contributions include the development of a precise model tailored to Tex Willer Comics, resulting in visually coherent inpainting results. The paper follows a structured format, covering State-of-the-Art, methodology, results, and conclusions, aiming to streamline the process of western comic inpainting for professionals in the comics and animation industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fung Ming Chip (馮明秋, b. 1951) is a contemporary artist based in Hong Kong who practices shufa (書法, lit. "the way of writing"). Traditionally, shufa is the art of writing Chinese characters with a brush on paper or silk; it is deeply connected to the arts of poetry and painting. However, the theories of making and viewing that undergird traditional shufa, as well as the stakes of its contemporary practice, remain largely unknown to Western audiences. This essay is a response to Fung's latest solo exhibition, entitled NumberS Series. It considers how Fung Ming Chip's latest works have moved beyond traditional shufa practice and language itself to examine the relationship between art and time. Unlike previous critical works that contextualize Fung's art with respect to Euro–North American art and art history, this article uses Fung's writings and early Chinese theories of aesthetics and ontology to establish that his art works in a distinctly non-Western manner that has its own relevance and perspective for a contemporary, global audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital health technologies (DHTs) at the intersection of health, medical informatics, and business aim to enhance patient care through personalised digital approaches. Ensuring the efficacy and reliability of these innovations demands rigorous clinical validation. A PubMed literature review (January 2006 to July 2023) identified 1250 papers, highlighting growing academic interest. A focused narrative review (January 2018 to July 2023) delved into challenges, highlighting issues such as diverse regulatory landscapes, adoption issues in complex healthcare systems, and a plethora of evaluation frameworks lacking pragmatic guidance. Existing frameworks often omit crucial criteria, neglect empirical evidence, and clinical effectiveness is rarely included as a criterion for DHT quality. The paper underscores the urgency of addressing challenges in accreditation, adoption, business models, and integration to safeguard the quality, efficacy, and safety of DHTs. A pivotal illustration of collaborative efforts to address these challenges is exemplified by the Digital Health Validation Center, dedicated to generating clinical evidence of innovative healthcare technologies and facilitating seamless technology transfer. In conclusion, it is necessary to harmonise evaluation approaches and frameworks, improve regulatory clarity, and commit to collaboration to integrate rigorous clinical validation and empirical evidence throughout the DHT life cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although visual arts pedagogies are considered central within early childhood education programs, teacher self-efficacy has a direct impact on the quality and delivery of visual arts curricula. Until recently, the visual arts self-efficacy, pedagogical knowledge, and practice of in-service early childhood teachers have remained largely unexplored. The authors of this paper present a qualitative, iterative re-analysis of their three PhD studies which broadly focussed on early childhood visual arts praxis and specifically examined the visual arts beliefs and pedagogy of early childhood teachers in Australia and New Zealand. A thematic analysis of the intersecting self-efficacy findings raised in the three studies identifies the powerful influence of self-efficacy on teaching practice in the visual arts domain and offers new understandings about visual arts self-efficacy amongst early childhood teachers. The combined findings reveal several factors that restrain or enhance teachers' visual arts self-efficacy across time, including the impact of childhood experiences, pre-service training and epistemological beliefs. The paper also identifies several enabling conditions that appear to support teachers to develop and maintain positive visual arts self-efficacy beliefs, including practical engagement with materials, sustained professional learning, relational trust and intentional leadership. These enabling conditions offer practical strategies and research recommendations in service of positive visual arts self-efficacy to enhance quality visual arts teaching in early childhood contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - Art forms such as music and drama are among some recognised tools used by educators. This has sparked interest in how art can be used in education, making it a fertile field for educational research. However, there is a missing connection in how drawing can be used as a tool for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students to learn about literature. Methodology - This paper will incorporate an Arts-Based Research (ABR) method to determine how visual art, particularly drawing, can be used as a tool to advance EFL students' understanding of a selected literary text, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" (2015) This qualitative study, viewed through the lens of Richard Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (CTML), involved 10 EFL participants and revealed strategies for integrating drawing that are absent in traditional approaches. Additionally, Hameed's (2022) elements of art, Yenawine's (2014) Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), and Showalter's (2003) concepts of literature learning will be included to ground the framework of the intervention. Findings - This study can be regarded as a method to liberate traditional teaching practices into contemporary approaches, serving as a tool to merge cultural knowledge while improving confidence, higher-order thinking skills, and expression. It also allows educators to be flexible and provoke more reflection and participation. The data discusses three main strategies in exploring how integrating drawing can help EFL students learn about literature: mining to trigger thoughts, engaging with the senses, and giving permission to wonder. Visual art allows individuals to create their responses by exploring new ideas and representing emotions, confirming plans, and comprehending the deeper level of literary texts. Significance - The study will offer insight and work as an alternate strategy for educators and learners alike to utilise visual art as a tool in teaching and learning literature. The findings will also ease the alarming condition where literature teaching and learning are stereotyped as daunting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interest in art school histories and the archives that support them has grown over the past decade, yet institutional recordkeeping practices and collecting, where they exist, do not tend to capture the kind of records that are most useful for research into art school pedagogies or their relationship with contemporary art discourse. This article gives an archive studies perspective on the Fine Art Critical Practice (FACP) Archive, a collaborative project to collect archival sources documenting the history of the FACP degree programme at the University of Brighton, UK, to be held at the University of Brighton Design Archives and activated through involvement of the FACP community of staff and students. It considers the records of interest to that community may lie in the context of an art school archive within an institution. It goes on to consider the example of a body of papers received from a former member of FACP staff, Mick Hartney, reflecting on some of the questions raised by this mode of collecting in terms of archival arrangement and knowledge production for the project's future phases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Students' choice and their placement into various areas of specialization in their third year (300-level) of study in the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Benin, Nigeria and what informs such choice and placement. Oftentimes, most students, before this level may not have any area of specialization in mind but the course advisers are to counsel them regarding their areas of strength and interest. Sometimes, the Department uses its discretion to place some student. The objective of this paper is to carve out certain criteria to be taken into consideration in placing students into their various areas of specialization. Pedagogic and survey research designs were used in which case questions were served to respondents in order to elicit responses and at the end, it was found out that majority of the students preferred study areas that attracts immediate and attractive monetary rewards like Graphics and Painting. This research examines students' attitudinal disposition towards areas of specialization from 2016/2017 to 2020/2021 academic sessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using recycled materials to create beautiful artworks has become a bulging trend especially in modern times. Many Nigerian artists now rely on this medium to create award winning art works that also provide them regular income in the process. This paper focuses on the meaning of recycling and analysis of its relevance to modern art. It emphasizes the degree of value its usage has added to the enhancement and acceptance of indigenous art works in Nigeria. In addition, it enables the researcher to enumerate the economic benefits of adopting recycled materials for the creation of artworks by the indigenous artists, government, and the society in general. It further suggests ways of improving on its usage. Finally, the paper suggests ways of ameliorating government's efforts in making waste recycling business more lucrative especially to artists who use them as their medium of creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of women in Nazi Germany and ways the policy and propaganda implemented and enacted both plans an policies to transform women into the mothers of the nation. The paper will focus on the ways propaganda posters were used in order to engage public opinion, using the power of visual arts into manipulating public opinion that the body of a woman should be devoted to the Reich, (re-)producing the pure-blooded German and support the creation of a new empire. The posters supported and acted as a direct reminder of the policies set by Nazi regime, and their ideology on family planning, racial purity and gender roles. The propaganda machine that produced them borrowed symbols from religious works of the Renaissance connecting the "ideal mother" to images of Holy Mary, in a twisted connection between religion and social engineering. The presentation will discuss about the ways Nazi Germany elaborated the role of women, the (ab)use of their body and the ideal depiction of it according to the regime, the distortion of iconic renaissance paintings along with the ways that religion and public policy have been weaved in order to manipulate and re-educate an entire nation will be parts of the presentation in order to highlight this interesting part of history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pictorialism emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as a global aesthetic movement that argued for photography's artistic status on par with other plastic arts more powerfully than ever. Archives from South Asia demonstrate the movement's thriving life in the subcontinent with Calcutta emerging as a centre and its bilingual amateur photographer-writers as major participants simultaneously engaging in globally circulating specialist discourses on pictorialism and popular discussions of their practice aimed at public pedagogy. By looking into Bangla periodical press this paper investigates how Bengali pictorialists used popular Bangla magazines in the early twentieth century to establish their distinct voice regarding what counted as artistic photography as they engaged with a non-specialist mass readership. Mass-circulated Bangla articles were not vernacular translations of knowledge and practices produced in metropolitan locations and disseminated in transregional languages like English. Vernacular was an extension of Bengali amateur photographers' participation in global photography, as they remained grounded in their historical specificity. These amateur photographers were bilingual intellectuals who wrote in English for a global public and in Bangla for a Bangla-reading publics and refraining from translating culture as they moved across languages. Indeed, articulations in vernacular didn't mean a venularization of practice; they indicate plurality of belonging and affiliation that crafted the pictorialist aesthetic of the Bengali amateurs. By unpacking this intellectual history, this paper decenters the Euro-US-centric history of pictorialism towards writing an interconnected history of the artistic movement, while also complicating the category of modern Indian art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karen Sames was born and raised in Milwaukee, WI. From an early age, she was surrounded by art. An experience with occupational therapy during the third grade jumpstarted her journey connecting art to occupation. Karen believes that art is a necessary part of life and credits much of her own personal success with art to her friends and family for their inspiration and to the instructors at the Eagan Art House in Minnesota. Her piece "Cherry Blossoms," a pastel on paper, is based on a photograph taken by her son, who is currently living in Japan, and graces the cover of the Spring 2024 edition of The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy (OJOT). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The brief life of the Accademia del Cimento (1657-1667), the first known society with a purely experimental programme, 1 is entangled with the most surprising advancements in the history of scientific instruments of that century, from the telescope to the microscope, the thermometer to the barometer, the hygrometer to the pendulum as a time-regulator, and more. The making of instruments at the Florentine court shows the interaction of princely, scholarly and artisanal actors. This paper explores this collaboration and shows how the supposed "invisibility' of artisans depended on their proximity to the academicians and princes, who mainly communicated verbally with them, directly or through middlemen. The visibility of artisans increases proportionally to their physical distance from the Court. In this essay I unveil the identity of the artisans of the Cimento and, finally, attempt to attribute five instruments (some lost and others still extant) to specific makers, shedding light also on relations between the artisan and his patron.