Criticality

"Patterns in War Dynamics. WARning 2020". In this study, complexity and network science are applied to the dynamics and development of the (International) System. This study shows that the System periodically becomes critical and produces "systemic wars". The typical dynamics that are revealed in this study are a consequence of laws of physics that apply also to the System. Systemic wars are instrumental in rebalancing the System, and in periodically producing "upgraded" international orders that allow for further growth and development. The patterns that can be observed in the war dynamics of the System, make it possible to predict these dynamics and the System's direction of development.
Data-analysis shows that the System will again become critical around 2020 (+/- two years).
This study shows that intensifying war dynamics pose an existential threat to human kind: Systemic wars will cause increasing damage and suffering and will put our climate system at (additional) risk: Fundamental change is a prerequisite for our survival.
This study was initially published in 2016. The publication "On the Thermodynamics of War and Social Evolution" (2019) provides a scientific explanation for the war dynamics that can be observed.

This is an extensive introduction to the third volume of the John, Jesus, and History Series (Atlanta: SBL Press, forthcoming in early 2016) written by Jaime Clark-Soles and Paul N. Anderson. A total of twelve volumes of collected essays are projected as the fruit of this international project, now in its 15th year at the national Society of Biblical Literature meetings.

For decades there has been a call for educators to explore new possibilities for meeting educational goals defined broadly under a number of twenty-first century competencies curricula (Dede, 2014; Voogt et al., 2013). These stress the need for students to combine critical skills development with an understanding of the processes and reach of technologies in daily life, in order to prepare them for a shifting cultural and economic landscape. In response, an extensive literature has grown up about game-based learning (Brown, 2008; de Castell, 2011; Gee, 2003; Gee and Hayes, 2011; Jenson, Taylor, de Castell, 2011; Jenson et al., 2016; Kafai, 1995; 2012; 2016; Prensky, 2001; Squire, 2004; 2011; Steinkuehler, 2006) that seeks to explore whether/how games can be used productively in education. History as a discipline lends itself particularly well to game-based learning. It is bound up in questions of interpretation, agency, and choice, considerations that gameplay and game design as processes highlight well. My research explores the uses of digital historical games in history education, and most especially in the acquisition of critical historical skills. These skills are defined as the capacity to view and engage with the constitutive parts of historical scholarship and objects: interpretation, argument, evidence, ideology, subject position, class, race, sex, etc. This thesis will present findings from two participant-based research studies that I organized and ran between 2018 and 2019. In the first, participants were tasked with playing a counterfactual historical game, Fallout 4, and talking about their experiences, as well as answering questions about history and historical understandings. The second study took the form of an interactive digital history course. In it, students, working in small groups, were tasked with creating their own historical games. Exploring both gameplay and game production answers the call issued by Kafai and Burke (2016) that researchers should view the potential for games in education holistically, rather than in either/or terms. Taken together, this thesis argues that playing and especially making historical games offers opportunities for learners to engage with epistemological concepts in history in meaningful ways that can advance their critical understanding of history as a subject.

This article surveys and synthesizes dynamic systems models of development from biology, neuroscience, and psychology in order to propose an integrated account of growth, learning, and behavior. Key to this account is the concept of self-differentiation or symmetry-breaking. I argue that development can be understood as a cascade of symmetry-breaking events brought about by the ongoing interactions of multiple, nested, nonlinear dynamic systems whose self-organizing behaviors gradually alter their own anatomical conditions.

Critical thinking has been praised as one of the most valuable dispositions university could offer to students who are pursuing a higher education. A number of theoreticians have proposed various forms of critical thinking, leading to the broadening of its definition, and the political and moral emphasis of its practice. Commenting on the current situation of hospitality management education, this paper presents the educational benefit of adopting one particular form of critical thinking, which is grounded in the educational philosophy of critical pedagogy, towards the teaching and learning of hospitality knowledge. And how such an educational experience plays a crucial role in promoting social wellbeing through the distinctive industrial landscape that the hospitality industries have forged.

Abstract
‘Student Learning Through Work Placements’ 
The core aim of this research study is to analyse the effects of experiential learning
pedagogy on students, received during work based student placements. This study
identifies and examines the perceptions held by higher education (HE) stakeholders,
regarding the effects of experiential learning work placements on students. 
My research is situated in Bourdieusian concepts, which include ‘habitus’, ‘field’, and
‘cultural reproduction’ (Bourdieu, 1977b, p72; 1986a, p60; 1977a, p487). My research
found employability is an agency in its own right. Employability had a doxa (a societally
embedded opinion) (Bourdieu, 1977b, p169) effect on my research study. Most of the
research responses were given in employability terms. The majority of research
participants clearly indicated other aspects of experiential learning, e.g. students
developing self-efficacy were a secondary consideration. Preparedness for work was
the key priority. My research found, all HE stakeholders have been influenced to
‘ideologically reproduce’ the employability agenda, in order to ‘fit in’ with the current
HE landscape (Bourdieu, 1977a, p490; Bourdieu, 1990, p53; Brady, 2012, p346). 
This research study found that Holdsworth and Quinn’s (2012, p386) ‘reproductive’ or
‘deconstructive’ concepts present in their ‘Student Volunteering’ study, were replicated
by students on unpaid experiential learning work placements, with either a ‘Third
Sector’ organisation or a statutory agency. This study also identified hitherto
undiscovered causal factors, absent in Holdsworth and Quinn’s (2012) study. These
are additional social actors, which significantly influence whether students become
‘reproductive’ or ‘deconstructive’ during experiential learning work placements.
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This research found the ‘wider society’ is an existential agency, which has a strategic
governance role representing society as a whole. The ‘wider society’ has a societal
remit to coordinate delivery of all society’s needs, which includes social care provision
and environmental management. Trained people are required to deliver this societal
remit, so the ‘wider society’ is an experiential learning higher education stakeholder.

"How do we critique contemporary creative works or speculations that claim of themselves no inherent critical function—that claim to transcend any conscious act of criticality—works that are apparently nothing more than outcomes of programmatic and commercial pressures placed upon them? The critic often excludes these seemingly uninteresting and uninspiring projects as not worthy of their critical gaze, and yet perhaps it is these very projects that most effectively reflect our post-modern and post-structuralist age. In considering the effects of artworks that are categorized as post-critical, or disinterested in the function of art as vehicles through which to mount cultural critiques, Hal Foster has poignantly observed that what we are in fact witnessing in visual culture is a radical rethinking as to what it is to be critical. In the 1990s, architects Robert Somol, Sarah Whiting, Michael Hays, and Rem Koolhaas presented the idea of a creative practice free from the dogmatic preconceptions of the preceding anti-humanist theories of the 60s, 70s and 80s. Liberated from the esoteric self-indulgencies of trans-disciplinary high theory, post-critical architecture sought to reassert its explicit disciplinary knowledge and expertise and absolve itself of any critical functioning.

The artwork of Michael Zavros and architecture of Rem Koolhaas provides a useful reflection of the affirmational practices of consumptive Capitalism that can be understood as a shibboleth of our age. This paper argues that such content is at the heart of post-critical artwork and architecture that seeks to engender the operative modes of the market system through the branding of glamorous artist and architects as consumptive objects of desire. However, the paper complexifies the widely held reductive definition of post-criticality as uniformly uncritical, suggesting that, whilst pretending to be neutral, post-critical works are in fact, by the very condition of their active claim of opposition to avant-garde critical practices, "inherently political and partisan.”  The paper concludes that the acquiescence from criticality itself therefore becomes a form of critical action and “conformist non-conformity”  that demonstrates the inherent potential to re-purpose the operative mechanisms of the neo-liberal political economy to an artist’s or architect’s own post-critical and creative ends.""

In this paper, three points are argued. The first is that Ronald Coase, best known as the forefather of transaction cost theory, foresaw many of the critical questions that proponents of the resource-based view are concerned with today. The second is that resource-based ...

The development of critical disposition, and particularly the disposition to question assertions, has long been viewed as an essential goal of education.  Its importance is expressed not only in numerous normative educational visions, but by contemporary policy documents, studies of teacher attitudes, and even popular educational literature.  Indeed, the movement to educate for higher-order, critical thinking that has developed over the past four decades views questioning as perhaps the central activity of skilled cognition.  As such, the disposition to question assertions – or what I have come to call “criticality” - transcends both the classroom and any specific academic or vocational discipline.  It is essential to all good thinking, whether such thinking concerns scientific research, workplace decision making, or the navigation of everyday life.
While there has been little conceptual analysis of criticality per se, there exists a substantial and relevant literature concerning the nature of critical disposition.  In this work, I analyze the two dominant conceptions in the literature as they relate to criticality, evaluating them with regard to both our held critical ideal of appropriate questioning, as well as a paradox that arises from the nature of the critical act itself – what I call the paradox of criticality.  I argue that both conceptions fail to justify our critical ideal and offer little insight into how we can end the iterative questioning of critical behavior without paradoxically engaging in an “acritical” act.  I propose that any understanding of criticality capable of supporting a commitment to appropriate questioning must view critical behavior as a form of judgment.
With this in mind, I incorporate Hubert Dreyfus’ theory of expertise into a phenomenological analysis of critical recognition to develop a conception of criticality that views such recognition as an act of judgment that itself relies on the embodiment of previous judgment.  I then turn to the literature on neurocognition and consciousness for empirical backing of this conception, arguing that both dual cognition and global workspace theory provide substantial justification for a commitment to it.  I conclude with a discussion of the educational ramifications of the expertise conception and the role that didactic philosophy might play in an education for criticality.

Criticality has become legitimate and prominent in the field of applied linguistics. Given the realities of our uncertain and worrying times, however, it is essential to consider (a) how criticality can move beyond the rhetoric of inclusion, social transformation, and justice, and (b) the direction(s) in which critical applied linguistics research must point. This paper conjoins criticality, identity, and ethics and proposes the construction of ethical subjectivity as a way to reorient applied linguistics research toward the public good. Drawing on Foucault's later work, I contend that the process of becoming an ethical subject, which involves both internal and external transformations, would create alternative spaces and ways of action-giving new momentum to the project of realizing the world we wish to live in together.

This dissertation considers how I, as a practitioner in international higher education (HE), can engage students in criticality, as defined by critical pedagogy (CP), despite a global trend towards the neoliberalisation of HE policy. I examine alternative purposes to neoliberal HE that consider the importance of developing criticality and the role of context and identity in its development. I conduct a piece of critical action
research (CAR) at a state university in Kazakhstan, a unique context due to its recent independence in 1991, its multi-ethnic population, and its current formation of a national identity. My central research question is: how do students voice their criticality through engagement in writing narrative reflective essays?

I begin by questioning the neoliberal conception of HE and, in particular, its claim that HE is a private good. I argue that the neoliberal conception of HE is failing by its own standards as socio-political and ethnic / gender inequities remain regardless of access to HE. Therefore, I consider HE through the perspective of CP to understand additional purposes of HE beyond neoliberal values.

Drawing from Allman, Barnett, Freire, and Kincheloe, I argue that HE should also foster critical beings who question the structures and tacit assumptions of socio-political contexts while imagining alternatives. I suggest criticality is central to fostering critical beings – where the thinker questions themselves and who they are as well as the socio-political context in which they are framed.

I conducted a CAR to engage with how I encourage students’ journeys towards developing criticality in their context: Kazakhstan. I asked thirteen students to write student self-evaluations (SSEs), which are narrative essays written and re-written four times within a three-term module. In the SSEs, students are invited to tell the story of themselves and their learning throughout the year. For this research, I analysed the first and the final drafts of the SSEs using critical discourse analysis. I also conducted interviews with the thirteen students at the beginning of the second term to explore ideas in their SSEs.

This dissertation’s originality is its contextualization within Kazakhstan’s HE system. Because my theorization of criticality focuses on the engagement with the students’ selves within their context, I question Kazakhstan as a socio-political place in terms of the performance of identity, drawing on Foucault’s theory of performativity. I attempt to understand the complexity of identities that students may bring into the classroom, such as a complex national identity in a multi-ethnic state, a historical context where ethnic minorities arrived into the geographic region as political and ethnic exiles, and a continual struggle around gender equality since independence.

The theorization of how this Kazakhstani socio-political context may impact on my students allows me to better engage with the criticality they share through their SSEs.

The CAR documents a significant development. Students who initially determined the value of their learning through marks/ grades (a hallmark of neoliberal performativity) began to reflect on their learning beyond marks through the SSE process. Students expressed an engagement with their own tacit assumptions about their contexts in their final SSEs in a way that they did not verbalize in the classroom. More individual voices developed, with some starting to imagine alternatives, while others questioned the feasibility of such alternatives within the context of Kazakhstan.

I conclude with some reservations regarding those findings. It is delicate to consider what the students’ development might have been without the SSEs. One also needs to consider whether students were simply replacing one form of teacher pleasing performance (getting good grades) with another (being self critical). However, this thesis argues that spaces can be created for practitioners that help foster student criticality within a neoliberal HE system.

Although the term “critical composition” was paradigmatically used by Nicolaus A. Huber in his text “Kritisches Komponieren” from 1972 (Huber 2000), one can argue that the early atonality and dodecaphony of the Second Viennese School — and their theorization by Adorno — laid the foundation for following generations of composers who  perceived  their  work  as  a  product  of  critical  thinking.  Following  an  Adornian  rationale, early atonal composition would be viewed as an immanently negative and aesthetically  indrawn  last  bastion  against  the  historical  tendency  of  the  material  in  Western  societies,  only  pre-conceptually  connected  to  society,  whereas  many  post-war composers turned toward analytical or politically committed forms of composition that introduced music as a means of critically reflecting on the interrelations between musical and social spheres.By outlining the emancipatory potential of John Cage’s music philosophy, I want to  counterpoint  the  conventional  notion  of  “critical  composition”  as  a  phenomenon  within the post-war avant-garde, which is deeply rooted in the European intellectual tradition of a sovereign subject. Against this background, the critical potentials of contemporary conceptions of composition “as an expanded field of artistic practice encompassing a range of different media and symbolic relationships” (Barrett 2016) can be grasped beyond the ideals of work autonomy and material progress.

Les terres rares sont un groupe de dix-sept métaux largement  utilisés  dans  les  applications  technologiques  (électronique et électricité). Alors que les terres rares sont identifiées comme  particulièrement  « 
critiques  »  par  les  pouvoirs  publics  français  et  européens  du  fait  de  leur  importance  économique et de leur vulnérabilité aux pressions géopolitiques, leur  recyclage  est  quasiment  inexistant.  Pour  expliquer  cet  état de fait, l’article mobilise une revue de la littérature sur le recyclage des terres rares et les résultats d’une enquête menée auprès  d’industriels.  Il  montre  que  la  matérialité  spécifique  des  terres  rares  rend  difficile  la  production  d’information  à  leur sujet et leur insertion dans des filières de responsabilité élargie du producteur. L’article conclut sur la signification du cas pour le programme de l’économie circulaire.

This dissertation aims to reflect on a theoretical-practical position that has become visible in the world of contemporary art over the last few years: the entry of education into 'artistic projects'. Put differently, it is a position through which education and pedagogy become, themselves, aesthetic and artistic objects produced from (or within) the discourses of contemporary art. This paradigm shift has been called educational turn and has been analyzed and discussed by several authors in the world of art and culture (art theorists and critics, artists, curators, educators). The object of study (and also the purpose) of the research is to reflect on some key concepts and specific educational-artistic practices that have shaped this educational turn and the way in which this paradigmatic reorientation has contributed, since the last decade, to a reconfiguration of 'discourses' and contemporary art 'practices'. On the other hand, this dissertation intends to explore in what sense the vocabulary proposed in the title ('participation', 'collaboration', 'confrontation' and 'creation') is fundamental for this 'turning' or 'change' to actually take place. In this way, the aim is to investigate in what way the focus on education and pedagogy in the discourse of contemporary art offers us an alternative 'production of knowledge' in relation to the more traditional modes of creation and exhibition of artistic objects or projects. Thus, this dissertation also aims to show 'how' and 'why' the presence of 'education' arises within discourses on contemporary art and which methods are defended, or which strategies should be applied, so that process of ' knowledge production' actually happens. The concepts in this dissertation are based on the cultural theorist Irit Rogoff who was essential in the development of this 'turning' theory and in the underlying understanding of the associated actions: by associating it with the 'discourses of contemporary art’, relating both with the potentiality and with the possibility of forming new discourses through a critical position she calls criticality. In order to better understand the extent to which the discourses of contemporary art adopt this critical position, this text proposes to address key concepts of educational turn in the world of contemporary art, exemplifying this 'turning' with some artistic projects (or artists) who choose education and pedagogy as an object of discursive research and practice

Le début des années 2000 a été animé par de vives discussions en théorie de l’architecture quant à l’avènement d’un tournant postcritique. Le préfixe “post” – fil rouge de ce papier – semble bien mérité : les tenants de ce mouvement envisagent un renversement de la critique. Pour échapper à ce geste tranché, ce papier met en lumière une autre contribution au débat, un recueil d’articles qui choisit de parler de “nouveau pragmatisme architectural”. Alors que le terme est ici utilisé dans son sens commun, une confusion apparait avec la philosophie américaine, d’autant que certains avaient proposé d’emprunter à celle-ci une manière moins duale de traiter du mouvement pro-pratique alors à l’œuvre. Ces tentatives cherchaient à échapper aux déboires de ces différents préfixes discriminants : il ne s’agissait plus de renoncer à toute alliance avec la philosophie, mais d’en passer une autre. Elles ont en grande partie échoué puisqu’aucune pensée alternative de l’engagement n’en a véritablement émergé ; la polarisation de part et d’autre du préfixe ‘post’ étant bien trop commode. Pour la dépasser, je mobilise ici la proposition de B. Latour lorsqu’il constate que “la critique est à bout de souffle” (2004) et qu’il envisage son renouvèlement, sans recourir toutefois aux théories critiques. À leur place, B. Latour opte pour un empirisme qu’il emprunte en partie au pragmatisme américain, et invite à “cultiver une attitude obstinément réaliste”. Suivant B. Latour dans son appel à nous méfier des préfixes, ce papier propose de considérer que “nous n’avons jamais été critiques”, afin de nous rendre attentifs aux manières dont les résistances s’organisent en pratique et en situation, plutôt que d’imposer une position de retrait qui n’a jamais été tenable pour une pra-tique aussi contingente que l’architecture.

When researching, make sure you examine a range of literature, including that which puts forward unconventional, uncomfortable or controversial ideas.  This will strengthen the criticality of your academic writing and help you produce a ‘whole picture’ of both your topic and your approach to investigation.  Here are some examples…

Die Wohnanlagen der Nachkriegszeit provozieren aufgrund ihrer Größe, ihrer sozialen Bedeutung und ihrer radikalen architektonischen Ausformulierung eine fortwährende kritische Diskussion der Fragen „Wie will man wohnen?“ und „Wie soll man wohnen?“ Die Geister scheiden sich an der Beurteilung der Dimensionen, der normativen Grundrisse und der sozialen Struktur dieser Großsiedlungen. Die Debatte scheint sich zwischen drei Lagern zu entfalten. Da sind jene, die eine direkte Kausalität zwischen Form und Nutzung vermuten und soziale Spannungen innerhalb der Wohnanlagen auf deren äußere Form zurückführen. Andere halten die Autonomie der Architektur hoch und lassen dabei mitunter die Bewohnerschaft und Sozialpolitik außen vor oder machen sie gar für das negative Image dieser Wohnform verantwortlich. Der folgende Text ist einem dritten Lager zuzurechnen: Hier wird eine komplexe Wechselwirkung zwischen Form und politischen, wirtschaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Praktiken anerkannt und in ihrer Verschränkung mit der autonomen Entwicklung der Wohnform, die ihre eigene Entstehungsgeschichte und inhärente Rationalität besitzt, betrachtet.

Ausgehend von der Fähigkeit der Architektur, sich mit ihren eigenen Werkzeugen in einem heterogenen Feld zwischen ideologischen, wirtschaftlichen und politischen Praktiken zu bewegen, werden im Folgenden Überlegungen angestellt, wie man nicht allein neuen gesellschaftlichen Anforderungen an den Wohnbaubestand gerecht werden kann, sondern auch, wie Architekten in Anbetracht der heftig diskutierten Gebäude überhaupt eine kritische und gesellschaftlich relevante Haltung einnehmen können.

How do we critique contemporary creative works or speculations that claim of themselves no inherent critical function—that claim to transcend any conscious act of criticality—works that are apparently nothing more than outcomes of programmatic and commercial pressures placed upon them? In the 1990s, architects Robert Somol, Sarah Whiting, Michael Hays, and Rem Koolhaas identified the emergence of a new kind of critical practice in Western Architecture that transcended the dogmatic and labored theoretical pursuits of the preceding anti-humanist theories of the 60s, 70s and 80s. Liberated from the esoteric self-indulgencies of trans-disciplinary high theory, post-critical architecture sought to reassert its explicit disciplinary knowledge and expertise and absolve itself of any overt critical functioning, however its critical functioning is not so easily erased, especially in the contemporary architecture of China. The paper complexifies the commonly accepted definition of post-criticality as uniformly uncritical, suggesting that, whilst pretending to be neutral, post-critical works, such as those of exemplary post-critical artist Michael Zavros, are in fact—by the very condition of their active claim of opposition to avant-garde critical practices—"inherently political and partisan.”  The paper concludes that the acquiescence from criticality itself therefore becomes a form of critical action and “conformist non-conformity”  that demonstrates the inherent potential to re-purpose the operative mechanisms of the neo-liberal political economy to an artist’s or architect’s own post-critical and creative ends. Whilst written from a Western perspective, the paper reflects on the cultural intersection of East and West that is manifest in recent counterfeit architectural projects in China. As China attempts to reconcile its own political ideologies of hierarchical Communism with the economic structures of free-market Capitalism, it facilitates the ultimate transgressive act; consuming the post-critical ruins of the West and regurgitating them anew as a new form of global criticality. Perhaps we have more to learn from China then they do from the West. In the East, there is no author, just content.

Often to be ‘critical’ is seen as pejorative - as synonymous to finding fault, and in the academic context this is also often seen as a sign of disrespect, even arrogance - hence best avoided. Yet studies and research at the graduate level and beyond are quintessentially founded upon our understanding and practice of criticality and critical thinking. This presentation unpacks the philosophical foundations upon which criticality in the social sciences is based, and offers insights into some questions - how can we be critical without being judgemental? How can a critical outlook enhance our understanding of theories? How can we best reflect our critical stance in our writing?
In addressing such complexities, the presentation will also discuss how, as much as our personal biases can have a detrimental effect on our research, when used judiciously, they can also be a fruitful and unique resource in understanding social phenomena. We look at ways in which we can develop a critical disposition as learner and educators, one that makes our engagement with learning and research not only more meaningful, but one that opens up unique avenues that lead to higher order thinking and innovation. Given the continuing preference for and predominance of quantitative research in developing countries, this presentation will also highlight how qualitative research can yield outcomes that resonate more with the major preoccupations of contemporary educational research such as empowerment, equity and the need for social justice.

China sees the world as a saturated milieu of information and images to be appropriated and redeployed to its own economic and cultural advancement.  From the reverse-engineering of Western technologies and luxury goods, the copying of canonical Western architectural styles, the copying of contemporary architectural projects, such as the near exact replication of Zaha Hadid Architects’ Wangjing SOHO shopping complex in Beijing (2011–) by the Meiquan 22nd Century (2012–) building in Chongqing, to Chinas’ more recent copying of its own cultural icons, such as the controversial theme-park mimicry of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace in Zhejiang.  China views the world simply as content to be consumed.  However, as East meets West—as Chinese Communism begins to economically and philosophically interweave with Western Capitalism—inherent cultural tensions simmer to the surface and reveal quite different understanding about the cultural value of creative works and their critical functioning. The paper therefore analyses what cultural value can be identified in the appropriation of Western aesthetic styles, art, and architecture in China, ultimately asking, what does an uncritical copy say about its copier?

In this chapter, we present a brief overview of the sociopolitical and educational context of Iran, followed by a review of the critical scholarship in the field of teaching English as a foreign language. We briefly highlight the lack of a critical literacy approach in Farsi education where critical practice mainly manifests itself in a rather exclusive focus on critical thinking as a cognitive skill. We argue that a combination of Persian cultural tradition and Islamic perspectives can shape the foundations of an alternative local approach to criticality in EFL and Farsi education and enable us to problematize current, Western, conceptualizations of critical literacy. Such foundations, we contend, serve as a prerequisite for moving towards transnational critical literacy work.