Realist evaluation and Q Methodology are established approaches in social science. However, integration of Q methodology within a realist evaluation is scarce. This paper attempts to illustrate how Q methodology can support a realist evaluation. The paper attempts to capture the philosophical compatibility of the two approaches creating an argument for Q’s integration within realist evaluation. Through the case study selected the iterative methodological process is presented, capturing a snapshot of the findings from the evaluation. This illuminates how Q met (...) the philosophical aims of a realist evaluation to make sense of how and why and under what circumstances a programme or intervention works. It is argued that Q methodology is entirely suitable for capturing the three key stages in a realist evaluation of developing, testing, and refining programme theory. It is intended that this paper can contribute to inspire other realist evaluators and methodologists to make use of Q as a tool in their evaluation. (shrink)

This chapter will discuss a profound and fundamental interrelationship between mind, body and technology in terms of what it means to be ‘human’, or, what ‘being’ human might mean. One historical, yet enduring, theory of the human subject is René Descartes’s philosophy of the mind distinct from the body – this is termed ‘Cartesian dualism’. Whilst this is a classical, if outmoded, model of conceiving of a philosophy of the subject, it also provides a useful conceptual framework through which to (...) critique, and arrive at, a different concept of how the terms ‘mind’ and ‘body’ might operate. For example, the mind/body binary distinction can be interrogated and deconstructed to accommodate the role of technology as having an ontologically embedded position within the very definition of ‘humanity’. Indeed, ‘anthropogenesis’ – the very becoming of humanity – might instead incorporate the role of technological prosthesis to any mind/body dualism in defining the ‘human subject’. We will propose that this ‘dualism’ should be reconsidered for a fundamentally entangled mind-body-technology ‘trialism’ in the emergence of a distinct human being. However, at the same time, this interconnected relationship is also the object of power and control. (shrink)

The paper explores the concept of ‘deconstruction’ and its implications in contemporary fashion. Since its early popularization, in the 1960s, philosophical deconstruction has traversed different soils, from literature to cinema, from architecture to all areas of design. The possibility of a fertile dialogue between deconstruction and diverse domains of human creation is ensured by the asystematic and transversal character of deconstruction itself, which does not belong to a sole specific discipline, and neither can be conceived as a body of specialistic (...) knowledge. When, in the early 1980s, a new generation of independent thinking designers made its appearance on the fashion scenario, it seemed to incarnate a sort of ‘distress’ in comparison to the fashion of the times. Influenced by the minimalism of their own art and culture, designers Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake and, later in the decade, the Belgian Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester and Dries Van Noten pioneered what can legitimately be considered a fashion revolution. By the practicing of deconstructions, such designers have disinterred the mechanics of the dress structure and, with them, the mechanisms of fascinations that haunt fashion. The disruptive force of their works resided not only in their undoing the structure of a specific garment, in renouncing to finish, in working through subtractions or displacements, but also, and above all, in rethinking the function and the meaning of the garment itself. With this, they inaugurated a fertile reflection questioning the relationship between the body and the garment, as well as the concept of ‘body’ itself. Just like Derrida’s deconstruction, the creation of a piece via deconstruction implicitly raises questions about our assumptions regarding fashion, showing that there is no objective standpoint, outside history, from which ideas, old concepts, as well as their manifestations, can be dismantled, repeated or reinterpreted. This constant dialogue with the past is precisely what allows designers practicing deconstruction to point to new landscapes. Key Words: Deconstruction, Derrida, distress, mode destroy, mechanisms of fascination, body, consumer culture, history. (shrink)

: The paper explores the concept of ‘trace’ and its relevance in contemporary fashion from a theoretical and curatorial perspective. Starting from the reflection on the ‘trace’, outlined by Jacques Derrida, the present contribution analyses the crucial role that such a concept plays today, in the work of designers, fashion theorists and curators. Individuating the ‘traces’ that a garment bears, listening to the narratives embedded in it, discloses in fact the possibility of drawing a constellation of references, both conceptual and (...) historical. As masterfully exemplified by the reconstructive and deconstructive practices pursued, among the others, by Hussein Chalayan, Maison Martin Margiela, Rei Kawakubo, Robert Cary-Williams, there is no objective standpoint, outside history, from which ideas, old concepts, as well as their manifestations, can be dismantled, repeated or reinterpreted. Engaged in a design as well in a semantic challenge, the pieces of these designers stem from the consciousness that any creation as well as any critical fashion is always already a situated practice. At the same time, ‘curating’, today more than ever, means listening, interpreting and plotting. As emblematically stated by Hussein Chalayan during a lecture given in 2002 : “The garment is a ghost of all the multiple lives it may have had. Nothing is shiny and new; everything has a history […] The design is a wish or a curse that casts the garment and its wearer into a time warp through historical periods, like a sudden tumble through the sediment of an archeological dig”. (shrink)

Edited Interview with Jeremy Millar and Alec Finlay. Meta-newspaper publication edited by curator Lars Sture and Anne-Marie Creamer commissioned and published by the Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum Norway. Contributions by Adam Chodzko, Bob and Roberta Smith, Tania Kovats, Julie Verhoeven, Alex Hartley.

The recurring motif of water is particularly symbolic in the wandering journeys of Kurt Schwitters, Ludwig Wittgenstein and W.G Sebald. The terraqueous landscape of the west coast of Norway was attractive to Wittgenstein who lived in a hytte overlooking Lake Eidsvatnet in Skjolden at the inner end of the Sognefjord between 1913 and 1951, where the combination of natural beauty and remoteness were conducive to his rigorous intellect. Kurt Schwitters spent much of his time in the 1930s living and working (...) on his Merz in a primitive woodshed on the island of Hjertøya near Molde, also on the west coast of Norway not too far from Wittgenstein’s retreat in Skjolden. The narrative of Schwitters’ journeys in Norway between Moldefjord, Djupvatnet and Oslofjord in the 1930s and his time living and working in Elterwater in the English Lake District until his death in 1948 form much of the thinking behind the premise for the exhibition Unrecounted . This brought together for the first time, a number of photographs of the landscapes in Norway, the English Lake District, and Suffolk where Wittgenstein, Schwitters and Sebald walked, contemplated, inhabited and thought through. Much of these landscapes are defined through their proximity to water; indeed it is arguably the very essence of the relationship between land and water that has helped form much of contemporary cultural history exemplified through Wittgenstein’s work on logic and language, Schwitters’ avantgarde concrete poetry, performance, and transformative art or W.G Sebald’s wonderfully exquisite description of the lost city of Dunwich, literally and metaphorically ruined and drowned in the North Sea and mythologised in our imagination. Robert Macfarlane wrote a short essay for the Unrecounted exhibition , and he asks two questions that I would like to reframe for this paper: firstly, what do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else? And secondly, what does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself? (shrink)

In Unrecounted Moreton re-examines the work of the artist Kurt Schwitters, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and writer W.G Sebald, each of whom made major breakthroughs in their field. Moreton's visual practice imaginatively reinvents the way major thinkers have studied nature, incorporating native landscapes to express their complex thinking and personalities. In this exhibition Moreton's work on these three significant thinkers are brought together for the first time. His beautiful photographic re-evocations come about through his practice of walking in the footsteps of (...) the thinkers and imagining each of their relationships to the original landscapes of Suffolk , Norway and the Lake District . Unrecounted is the first solo exhibition in Solent Showcase. To celebrate this exhibition, a publication with a newly commissioned essay by the acclaimed and award winning British writer,literary critic and Fellow of Emmanuel College Cambridge, Robert Macfarlane will be published and be available from the gallery. (shrink)

Edward Thomas’s long and solitary walks allowed him to fill notebooks with acute observations of the changing landscape near to, and far beyond his home in Hampshire in the early part of the twentieth century. Arguably, these landscapes both consoled and sustained him, emotionally and intellectually. My own walks have attempted to uncover, obliquely, the complex relationship between landscape and thought. That places remind us of other times, of other experiences – of a ‘sustained out-of-placeness’ as creative condition – is (...) a thread that ties and unties much of my photographic work. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur is a philosopher who wrote three volumes on the theme of time and narrative, highlighting the capacity of storytelling to touch and reconfigure people’s lives (temporarily). His work suggests that narrative has the capacity not simply to re-present events but to provide rich contexts of experience wherein ideas can be explored and, to some extent, lived-through. This paper will argue for the value of applying such ideas to the reading and development of Illustration within an educational context, encouraging (...) individuals (particularly within the art school sector) to enhance existing aspirations for their discipline that include making sense of the world, exploring the referential function of illustration, and the potential of narrative to re-structure life experiences. This paper will argue that by foregrounding philosophical thinking within the curriculum of Illustration, the work of writers such as Paul Ricoeur can assist in highlighting a range of methodologies that are currently embedded (implicitly) within its histories, and everyday thoughts and actions. It can begin the process of making these existent practices explicit, re-conceiving them as strategic methodologies for the undergraduate practitioner to explore in the present day. A conscious retrieval of philosophical thinking, such as this, allows individual approaches to be retrieved as elements of a wider discipline, one where practitioners consciously adopt or acknowledge an attitude or position within their field of expertise. Whether Illustration is recognized as a place of business, education and/or social commentary, philosophical thinking can assist in developing a sense of common ground within this diverse system of communication. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur is a philosopher who wrote three volumes entitled Time and Narrative, highlighting the capacity of story-telling to touch and reconfigure people’s lives (temporarily). His work suggests that narrative has the capacity not simply to re-present events but to provide rich contexts of experience wherein ideas can be explored and, to some extent, lived-through. This chapter will argue for the value of applying such ideas to the reading and development of graphic novels within an educational context, encouraging students to (...) develop aspirations for their practice that include making sense of the world, exploring its referential function, its claims on truth, the re-structuring of experience and - as an aspect of this - the poetic potential of the gutter. Quoting Aristotle, Ricoeur argues that drawing resemblances to and from the world can enhance people’s understanding of it, ‘bringing together terms that at first seem “distant” ... suddenly “close.”’1 Through the application of such understandings, this chapter suggests that graphic novelists might see their function in terms of providing ‘semantic pertinence,’ unifying miscellaneous elements in order to secure deep understandings. The chapter will explain the themes of mimetic and metaphoric value, arguing for a re- examination of the space between - as well as the content within - the frame of the graphic novel. The work of illustrator Tom Gauld will be used as an example of this poetic potential, leading to the question: is the metaphoric potential of graphic novels in the hands of the art worker or audience? (shrink)

The relationship between the non-physical mind and the physical brain has “over the centuries filled philosophers with frustration, desperation, almost panic” (Humphrey, 1992). Nevertheless, the majority of contemporary philosophers and scientists reject dualistic notions of the mind (e.g. Crick, 1979; Dennett, 1978), and neuroscientific findings continue to challenge the existence of a non-material mind that transcends the physiology of the brain (e.g. Libet et al., 1983; Soon et al., 2008; Fried et al., 2011). However, given the widely held religious, spiritual (...) and paranormal beliefs that exist in society (Harris Poll, 2009), implicit dualistic beliefs appear common amongst the population more generally. Whilst the mind/body problem might be considered a ‘philosophical’ one, our implicit beliefs about the issue can profoundly influence our behaviour. It is of course too simplistic to characterise the debate dichotomously as monism vs dualism, and this study uses Q methodology to explore a more complex set of beliefs about the materialistic/non-materialistic nature of the universe. College and university students were asked to indicate their level of agreement/disagreement with twenty seven statements, reflecting a continuum from Cartesian dualism at one end to mechanistic materialism at the other. Three distinct accounts emerged, which can be characterised as: irreducibly complex dualism, interactive dualism and explainable materialism. (shrink)