The Earth, our home planet, was “born” some 4.5 billion years ago. Vol-canic and hot, the planet was rotating and cooling. In volcanic eruptions, gases such as CO2, CO, NOx and water vapour were released. Additionally, some atmospheric components including water (vapour) came from the Earth’s bombardment by meteors and comets. After a solid surface was formed whose temperature cooled down…
Dark Botany activates the material and sensorial wonder of plants—their energy, their mysterious allure, their capacities and skills, their independent might. In this Wunderkammer of critical plant studies essays and plant+artworks, the herbarium emerges as a site of multiple materialities and reflexive forms of counter-narrative. Herbaria specimens come alive as assemblages, telling truths a…
Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is a multidisciplinary research field that integrates disciplines such as engineering, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and more1. Collaboration between different disciplines is necessary to achieve goals (such as developing robotic systems for human-aware navigation), but can be com-plicated as each discipline has a different jargon, uses different methods, and …
The idea behind this book has a long history. It was inspired less by my academic work than by my family life and side jobs. It is the result of living in and moving between urban and rural neighborhoods as a child, teenager, and student. Growing up in the 1980s, my family lived in inner-city Munich; like most families there, we lived in a small apartment. Gentrification has a much longer histo…
My empirical research for this book began in 2016 with funding from the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. This faculty grant supported an experimental pilot of my methods and ways of recording them, which formed the basis for the meth-ods that feature in this book. This early work was undertaken at a community service provider in west Sydney. This …
This book takes as its object of investigation an array of traumatic heritage sites and spaces of memory, including museums, former detention camps, and sites of commemoration, in Europe, Argentina, and Colombia, to investigate how various traumatic pasts can be preserved and transmitted through space, and which kind of actions might be taken both to improve knowledge of the past and to serve a…
There is also certainly a very specific market, of those who are addressed in the marketing of sensory education tools, with a rather limited inclusivity entailed in many of the workshops, books and programs I found, whether through targeted groups or representation in advertisement. As I delve into throughout the book, sensory education is often seen as an antidote to dig-ital maximalism, wh…
For a long time, the simplicity of the Physio logus stories impeded any serious attempt to understand its function. They evoke the fables of Aesop and other “sto-ries with a moral” that are often read to children. Such stories seem to have didactic but otherwise no real intellectual value and little historical significance or influence. The editor of the facsimile of the Physio logus in Ber…
The haunts of my youth have vanished, in two senses — they rest under layers of mental debris, accumulated along life’s way, and under the lava that flowed from the flanks of Mount Helgafell, “Holy Mountain,” in Iceland’s Westman Islands in 1973. These facts evoke in me both pure curiosity and a poignant sense of loss. Where is my home? As have so many ot…