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This reflective study, which explored how students learn in an online setting, involved an initial sample of 588 students who have taken the Health Education for Teachers course from fall 2013 to spring 2018 at Teachers College. A survey featuring open-ended questions were administered by email to the students, among whom 57 returned their questionnaires in June 2019. Of these participants, six agreed to be interviewed face to face or via Skype. The semi-structured interviews were conducted in July and August 2019, but when necessary, follow-up questions were asked in September and October that year. Professor Katherine Roberts, the instructor of the course, was also interviewed. The results showed that the students did not consider online discussions or email correspondence as interactions and desired more human exchanges. They decided on an online course for convenience and flexibility, but had they been given a choice, more of them would have opted for face-to-face settings. The themes emerging from the interview data were the necessity of flexibility and convenience rather than choice, the belief that flexibility is not beneficial to studying, and the difficulty of having a social presence. In recounting their learning experiences, the most memorable moments recalled by the students were places they have been to and people with whom they interacted. The interview with Professor Roberts revealed the difficulty of evaluating student progress in an online context and the importance of technical support from the institution. This research explored the validity of online communities, illuminated the significance of phatic communication, raised questions about educational costs, and identified the need for technical assistance from institutions. The findings suggested that instead of building an online community, which can rarely exist, educators should incorporate local community participation into educational programs. Finally, when institutions want to offer online courses, they should do so for pedagogical reasons and not solely for income. Educators need to continue exploring learning possibilities in both online and face-to-face avenues.

Artist Tzu-Ning Wu’s work involves 3D animation to demonstrate virtual identities, virtual cities, and virtual natures in the cyber space. Her new art project in 2018, Metaverse, delves into post-human, self-incubating and self-fashioning technologies to correspond with the theme of “+REALITies Incubation”. (Exhibition Catalogue)

The pursuit of antiquity was important for scholarly artists in constructing their knowledge of history and cultural identity in late Imperial China. Following various publications by Bi Yuan 畢沅 (1730-1797), Wu Yi 武億 (1745-1799) and Qian Daxin 錢大昕 (1728-1804) in the 18th century, the study and collecting of rubbings of Northern Wei stone inscriptions and steles was popular. Such spread of interest in jinshi, inscriptions on metal and stone, also formed a base for studying seal carving, epigraphy and archaic painting. While traditional antiquarians would cherish inscriptions which enabled them to correct mistakes in the transmitted historical texts and the Classics, however, much of the antiquarian activity was adapted to mere literary exercise or connoisseurship, for instance, to supplying materials which could provide models for seal-carving and calligraphy. Examples could be seen in the calligraphy works and seal carvings of the Xiling bajia 西泠八家 (Eight Masters of Xiling, i.e. Hangzhou), also known as Zhe School of Calligraphy and Carving. Their keen interest in seeking inspiration from steles for their artistic presentations has been recorded in their writing and painting. In addition, the way the scholar-collector of the 19th and early 20th centuries mounted the rubbings, seals, inscriptions, paintings, letters and textual evidence studies into one album shows a changing ideology: rubbings were not only for scholarly study in classical learning, but were regarded as part of the art form and were appreciated on various social occasions. The antiquarian movement ultimately served as a tool for re-writing art historiography in modern China. This paper aims to address the phenomenon and formation of the jinshi painting that dominated in late Imperial and early modern China. Through case studies of three important jinshi societies in Shanghai, I will investigate in what way literary taste from the southern region gradually replaced imperial patronage which was in decline after the Qianlong emperor’s reign, and how the shift of the cultural centre from Beijing to the southern regions from the mid-19th century onwards became a reflection of changing power and identity for cultural leaders and their perspectives in history and the history of objects.

Taking its starting point from a critical dialogue with feminist and postcolonial theory, this dissertation explores processes of othering in a feminist adult educational institution, Women’s Room, in Sweden. Women’s Room is a women-only school and half of the student body has a migrant background. The project is an ethnographic study consisting of nine months of participant observations and interviews, with special attention to courses for migrant women. The active involvement of two groups of women – migrant students and feminist teachers – in processes of negotiation, resistance and reproduction of boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are at the centre of the analysis. While special attention is given to educational practices at the institution, these are also explored within the broader contexts of the Swedish gender discourse on nationhood and belonging as well as the changes taking place within the Swedish welfare state. Using the concept of intersectionality, the dissertation demonstrates how categories of difference are interwoven and intermeshed in processes of boundary making. Different social categories, such as racialized class locations and racialized gender/sexuality, are articulated in different forms of racism. The study identifies racism in the interrelations of power structures and demonstrates that gendered and sexualized racism is embedded in discourses and practices of gender equality and the welfare state in Sweden. Although my results highlight gendered and sexualized racist practices and discourses in feminist teaching and identify how these contribute to boundaries of difference and belonging, my research also illuminates complexities within the two groups of women in my study. Migrant students disidentify with the category of ‘them’ and challenge the stigmatized representation of migrants in society. Teachers present a fractured ‘we’, who criticize the boundaries of difference while also (re)constructing the migrant students as Others in the educational processes. I, the researcher, also participated in the othering process. Taken together this supports the fragmentary and contradictory nature of subject formations and identities. This dissertation aims at furthering scholarship and activism in feminist methodology, feminist teaching practices and theorizing difference. I make the process of conducting feminist research transparent and discuss the dilemma of closeness and distance in writing a feminist research product. With my analysis of the roles of feminist teaching in the processes of othering, I wish the reader to (re)consider how difference can be theorized in feminist scholarship and how boundaries of difference can be resisted in feminist teaching.