The module aims to enhance your understanding of how mobility and immigration have shaped identities in Italy in recent decades. You will develop a detailed knowledge of Italy’s history as a former colonial power and explore the impact of postcoloniality on national cultures. These questions will be explored in relation to Italy’s identity as a destination country in global migratory flows through an analysis of four contemporary novels. The topics discussed will include the impact of displacement on subjectivity; the problematic notion of home; the memory of Italy’s colonial past; and motherhood and migration. The analysis of the texts will be informed by theories of personal, cultural, and national identity construction and students will develop an awareness of how terms such as transnationalism, postcolonialism, hybridity and multiculturalism can be applied to the Italian case.

https://www.mathematical-modelling.science/index.php/lectures/warwick-2020-2021

Welcome to the Research Methods in Clinical Education Module.

This module aims to ensure that you have a critical understanding of research methodology appropriate to clinical education, including qualitative, quantitative, multi-/mixed methods and ethical considerations.

You will need to draw on knowledge and skills from past modules, especially learning theories and your understanding of effective learning environments.

Photography is ubiquitous. Advertising, the internet and social media depend upon it. With this come worries about image-manipulation and so-called “fake news.” Prior to the worries provoked by digital imaging, photography was generally taken to be a reliable source of knowledge about the world: assuming that images have not been digitally manipulated or misleadingly staged, we have reason to believe what we see in forensic, scientific and medical photographs, if not advertising or propaganda—certainly by comparison to what we see in hand-made images. We rely on crime scene photographs for a reason. Call this photography’s (relative) “epistemic advantage:” It depends on the intuition that machine-generated images are free from certain kinds of unreliability (selective attention, false beliefs, etc) that human beings suffer from. 

But photography is also taken to be aesthetically rewarding: it is widely collected and exhibited in museums, and we appreciate different photographer’s styles or oeuvres for different reasons—not least because different photographers and different schools of photography depict the world in very different ways, focusing on different subject matters, and stressing some features of the scene while suppressing others. We appreciate art in general for these kinds of reasons, and photography is no different in this regard. Call this photography’s “aesthetic capacity.” But note that such capacities are precisely what photography’s “epistemic advantage” depends on bypassing—by providing an ostensibly objective, or “belief-independent” recording of the world.  

So it looks as if the reasoning, and underlying intuitions, behind attributing epistemic and aesthetic capacities to photography conflict. If so, both cannot be true and one will need to be surrendered. This has generated debate between “orthodox” and “new theorists” of photography over the past decade. Orthodox theorists foreground photography’s epistemic capacities; new theorists stress its aesthetic capacities. Spoiler: I’m a new theorist, of sorts. One reason for being a new theorist is that it enables us to take the intentions, beliefs and other mental states of photographers seriously, and this opens up the possibility of using photography for various artistic, ethical and political purposes—in addition to its well documented scientific, medical and forensic uses—some of which we will look at on this course. The challenge for new theorists will be how to account in turn for photography’s epistemic capacities in manner consistent their claims for its aesthetic capacities.

MA class: Topics in Mind and Language

 Joint Action and Other Minds (Wednesday 10-12, S!) 141)

Over the past decade or so there has been increasing interest, in both philosophy and psychology, in the claim that we should appeal to various forms of social interaction in explaining our knowledge of other minds, and capacity to ascribe mental states to others. This is often presented as an alternative to what is referred to as the dominant approach to such knowledge, usually identified as ‘theory-theory’. Such claims are made under a variety of headings: the ‘social interaction’ approach, the ‘intersubjectivity approach’, the ‘second person approach’, the ‘collective intentionality’ approach and more.  A multitude of claims are made under these various headings, from a multitude of different perspectives, both about the kind of social interaction we should be appealing to, and about how exactly this or that interaction provides an alternative to the ‘dominant approach’. The aim of the MA class will be to make progress with mapping out this difficult terrain, relating such claims to each other, focusing in particular on the explanations of Joint Action. After some preparatory work, we will be looking at work done under that heading in some of the WMA projects, (The Sense of Commitment, Joint Practical Knowledge, The Second Person and Only Connect) and looking at work by, among others, Steve Butterfill, John Michael, Johannes Roessler, Guy Longworth, Tom Crowther, Naomi Eilan and others. Anyone with an interest in these issues very welcome.

SO118:Life of Media: Past, Present and Future

When people think about media these days, the internet and social media immediately spring to mind. But of course, these are only the latest developments in a long history of humans communicating to ever larger numbers, about a wider variety things, over greater expanses of space and time. This module surveys that history from a sociological perspective, looking at how people respond to the form and the content of media representations through the lens of sociological theory and empirical research. The module starts with the early theories of mass media and their impact on people’s lives. Step by step, the module introduces key developments in the history of media research. Ultimately, we arrive at the role of social media in society. We consider how the highly distributed and democratised nature of the internet and social media is transforming society and people’s lives on an evolving basis. The module asks you to consider your own experience of media and to critical interrogate its role in society from a sociological perspective.