Franklin Humanities Institute

ABSTRACT: The theoretical turn to object ontologies in the social sciences and the humanities brings puppetry work related to illness, disability and health to the forefront of artistic practice-as-research, disability studies and the medical/health humanities. Articulating chronic illness and disability through the tools and practice of puppetry animation can help form complex embodiment, where the person is empowered to value their embodiment as a site of knowledge. Puppetry pedagogy can train the bodies of medical students and clinicians to develop the capacity for embodied attunement and may decolonize both the knowledge of the body and medical education by reunifying mind, body and imagination. By training to perceive materials both physically and poetically, puppetry allows silenced bodies and histories to speak.

The distinctness of each person's life and experience is an important consideration in dominant accounts of how democratic institutions should distribute basic rights and liberties. Drawing on recent social movements, philosophers like Iris Marion Young, Miranda Fricker, and Axel Honneth have nonetheless drawn attention to the distinctive claims and challenges that plurality and difference entrain in democratic societies by analysing how the dominant discourses on rights and justice tend to elide, obscure, or reify the lived experiences of individuals belonging to disadvantaged and oppressed groups. In this essay, I offer an independent justification for why we should take such lived experiences seriously. I show how the lived experiences of disadvantaged and oppressed individuals can be a resource for deep and meaningful social change. I propose a distinctive kind of social change in which the disadvantaged and oppressed themselves drive the process of transformation whereby they change the oppressive frames of difference relating to their race, class, sex, or ability. I call this kind 'organic social change'. I also show that organic social change is distinctively important in that the disadvantaged and oppressed get to enact an empowering mode of cooperation that harnesses their singularities when they are the ones driving the process of their own and one another's transformations.

I examine two distinctive feelings that I find in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Luce Irigaray—specifically Nietzsche’s pathos of distance and Irigaray’s wisdom of love.  I show that the pathos of distance and the way of love signify feelings that are triggered in us by those who embody and express their difference in a way that must often transcend our understanding.  In such encounters, it is by virtue of the exceptional manner in which a person embodies or expresses their difference, I argue, that they can wield a deeply transformative impact on others, albeit such that the latter (the people they affect or transform) awaken to the powers and possibilities within their own lives and thus become what they are rather than merely becoming like others.

This ethnographic research on embodied hip hop pedagogies bridges the fields of dance studies, hip hop, and education. This dissertation sheds light on the transgressive possibilities of embodied hip hop pedagogies, a curricular and pedagogical model I developed, which resists traditional Western teaching and learning systems by placing students’ realities at the center and capitalizing on the multidisciplinary, kinesthetic, and engaged nature of hip hop culture.

In this dissertation, I perform choreographic readings of Western pedagogical and institutional spaces such as missionary buildings or classrooms and participate in action research in schools in the Inland Empire. I am particularly interested in the tensions between hip hop and Western hegemonic epistemologies. My analysis focuses on how bodies navigate their agency in these Western institutional spaces and how they resist and challenge such spaces through movement and hip hop.

This research introduces the concepts of choreography of the classroom and critical moving and reinterprets the concept of the otherwise through a new valance (otherwise cypher, call-and-response and knowledge otherwise). The overall aim of this dissertation is to improve the current Eurocentric and disembodied culture of education through hip hop and movement. Embodied hip hop pedagogies can help future scholars, educators, and community leaders connect with students through popular culture and non-static teaching and learning. By placing hip hop—an African diasporic and once marginalized culture— and movement at the center of the curriculum, this research helps legitimize non-dominant knowledges, challenges the Cartesian mind and body split, and revalidates people’ s identities, narratives, and bodies.

Western education can sometimes clash with who we are, what we know, and how we move. By always expecting students to sit quietly and face their teacher at the front of the classroom, the school system detaches those students' bodies from their cultural identities thus enacting the Cartesian mind and body split. Such a split has become even more obvious during the closure of schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic and classes going online. A focus on embodiment would help students and teachers connect with their cultures and diverse communities and, therefore, empower them. In this presentation, I challenge the cultural disconnection and disembodiment found in K-12 and higher education classrooms in the U.S. I use hip hop and movement in the classroom and argue that moving critically helps teachers and students engage in culturally sustaining pedagogies and empowers them. I examine my concept of critical moving and reflect on my embodied hip hop pedagogies-based curriculum taught in an underserved region of Southern California. My research advocates for more embodied and culturally relevant pedagogies for the urban youth by implementing curricular activities that juxtapose social-justice, critical thinking, and performance. I contributed to the development of a unique curriculum and pedagogy, which are based on the five elements of hip hop (DJing, Emceeing, Breakdancing, Graffiti Writing, and Knowledge) and Universal Learning Design, and therefore speaks to diverse learners. I have developed and taught culturally inclusive curricula and courses based on embodied hip hop pedagogies and the theories of Paolo Freire, bell hooks, and other educational theorists who have promoted the ideals of equality and inclusion through their work.

M e e ience a a ee e fo mance lo e , hen dance , led me o e ea ch hi-ho in de h a a doc o al candida e in he US. Since m fi e e ience i h hi-ho ee e fo mance in Pa i-bo h a a o i /ob e e and la e a a dance /c emembe-I e al a been fa cina ed b he f ic ion be een hi-ho c l e and We e n in i ional ace and oli ic. The e en ion a e ome hing I decided o e amine f he d ing m e ea ch on embodied hi-ho edagogie The fi 1

Open digital badges are statements of trust used to vouch that people are who they say they are, and have the qualities they claim to have. Proponents argue that the full potential of badges will be realized when they circulate as credentials. Research on badges suggests that open badges need to be valued by college admissions and employers if they are to be valued by earners. Yet, while the technical standards exist in the open badge infrastructure (OBI) to support badges as a medium of exchange, only a small percentage of badge earners are displaying and sharing them. This chapter explores the complex design challenge of building collective belief to increase their perceived value, focusing on two approaches: credential markets and reputation economy. The fi rst section discusses the limited research on the circulation and acceptance (i.e. perceived value) of badges. The second section examines alternative currencies and how they scale. The third section discusses credentials and credential markets. The fourth section explores ways to build collective belief in badges. The fi nal section discusses how badges can be scaled as reputation and the importance of metadata to this task.

The Cyber-Infrastructure for Billions of Electronic Records (CI-BER) project is a collaborative big data management project based on the integration of heterogeneous datasets and multi-source historical and digital collections, including a place-based citizen-led crowdsourcing case study of the Southside neighborhood in Asheville, North Carolina. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) agencies. A test-bed collection containing nearly 100 million files and 50TB of data was developed, with content representing electronic Federal Government records from 150 federal agencies. The CI-BER project advances the state of the art in generalizable and extensible ultra-highly scalable data management architectures, potentially enabling robust technical preservation of, and access to, electronic records and digital data in the context of emerging national scale cyber-environments. A first-generation open source collaborative mapping environment prototype is currently being developed to support novel " citizen-led crowdsourcing " possibilities for archival material.

This chapter describes the history and context of digital badges in education. Open digital badges have emerged from the new culture of learning made possible by the connected and pervasive digital systems of the 21 st century. These same highly social systems also present us with a new culture of reputation, influencing how we build identities online that others find credible and meaningful. Digital badge systems have pushed designers to think in innovative ways about pedagogy and assessment, and also enjoin us to think carefully about what it means to build reputations online that are grounded in verified, quality judgments.