Military Politics and Democratic Transition: Combining Rationality, Culture, and Structure

Rationality, culture, and structure provide useful insights into military politics by stressing self-centered motivations, norms, and large impersonal forces, respectively. The armed forces can transform popular uprisings into democratic transitions, or, alternatively, uphold the status quo. Furthermore, officers can allow nascent democratic experiments to consolidate, or they can resurrect authoritarianism. Whatever they choose to do, multiple material and ideational factors will inform their agency, and by extension, the political dynamics unfolding in transitional times.

Addressing the Socio-Spatial Challenges of Innovative Learning Environments for Practicum: Harmonics for Transitional Times

A shift to Innovative Learning Environments (ILEs) in New Zealand schools is a current Ministry of Education strategic direction challenging how we as teacher educators prepare candidate teachers (student teachers or trainee teachers) to teach in these emerging environments. Candidate teachers in our primary teaching degree increasingly are placed in ILEs on practicum as these develop in schools in our geographic area. Our students report anecdotally that teaching in ILEs poses them steep and novel challenges around how they plan, teach, assess, manage students and learning, as well as work collaboratively with associate teachers and, increasingly, other colleagues. With our current programme underpinned by a more conventional image of teaching and learning, and schools transitioning between conventional and arguably more innovative, bespoke environments, we wondered how our students navigated the novel pedagogical and physical configurations they encountered in ILEs on practicum. We conducted focus group interviews with our candidate teachers and recent graduates who had completed one or more practicum in an innovative learning environment (as defined by the practicum school). We explored participants’ perceptions of the particular demands ILEs created for them. Utilising Lefebvre’s (The production of space. Trans. Blackwell, Cambridge, MA, 1991) socio-spatial trialectic and Monahan’s (Built pedagogies & technology practices: designing for participatory learning. Palo Alto, CA, 2000) notion of “built pedagogy” in this chapter we identify key socio-spatial entanglements, or harmonics, that emerge from our analysis and explore how these inform how we might better prepare our candidate teachers in these transitional times.

On transforming transition design

We are living in transitional times. Much has been under debate on the need to change and to cope with societal transitions, less emphasis, however, is devoted on how to do so. Therefore, one of the primary questions in Transition Design is how to design for sustainable transitions? The current work aims to evaluate ‘transition design studies’ by analysing and evaluating the current available practice of transition design in order to contribute to the field in two ways: first, by maturing through evaluation, and second, by identifying points of further research. Our findings show that three phases can be distinguished within transition design processes: Design research to understand past, present, and to envision the future; Designing interventions to create the right thing, at the right place, at the right time, and Design practice for transition that accumulate the design interventions in order to drive societal transitions.

Divine Provision and the “Preternatural Imagination” of Edward Burne-Jones in the Mosaics of “The American Church” in Rome

This essay examines the multiplicity of ways the building and decoration of the American church of St. Paul’s Within-the-Walls in Rome signaled the dawning of a “new age,” politically and spiritually, as the first Protestant church constructed within the city of Rome, initiated immediately after the city was freed from papal rule in 1870. The mosaics, designed by Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones and completed with the help of his assistant Thomas Rooke in the decades that follow, present Christ, and the Church in particular, as sources of divine sustenance and verdant life in the barren wilderness of this world. But it is the splendor of their design and the material magnificence of the mosaics themselves that create the first powerful and most lasting impact. Viewed through the lens of what P. T. Forsyth described as the “preternatural imagination” of Burne-Jones, these mosaics are distinctly contemporary works deeply rooted in religious and artistic tradition that address the transitional times for which they were made.

Critical Phenomenology: Borderline Between Grey, Opaque and Non-Transparent Zones – Permanent Transitional Times

In what follows, I will point to theorisations of diagramatic modular models of the human, social and cultural practices that relate to antagonistic and certainly turbulent processing of production and reproduction, political economy, real life, and forms of life in the field of contemporary non-transparent or gray sociality. My main thesis is that the transition has not been completed and that we are now in the midst of transition changes throughout the world – that contemporary media and art fictionalizes or defictionalizes our human condition. My intent in this article is to point to the modular complexity of contemporary phenomena in relation to the criteria of the politics of time (dialectic historicisation) and politics of space (geographic difference). In relation to every contemporaneity that has occurred or is occurring at different times and in different places, contemporary art and culture required different conceptualisations of ‘modernisation’ and different conceptualisations of a critical response to the transition of global/local practices from the margins of society to its hegemonic centre, both internationally and locally. In an epistemological/methodological sense I intend to develop critical phenomenology. Critical phenomenology is a project of the politicization/radicalization of conservative phenomenological thinking. Article received: June 5, 2017; Article accepted: June 12, 2017; Published online: October 15, 2017; Original scholarly paperHow to cite this article: Šuvaković, Miško. "Critical Phenomenology: Borderline Between Grey, Opaque and Non-Transparent Zones – Permanent Transitional Times." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 14 (2017): 13-31. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i14.203