Monday, July 9, 2012

The Space Between: Using Peer Theater To Transcenid Race, Class, and Gender
Venessa A. Bowers and Patrice M. Buzzanell

Interrogating Culture. Patrice M. Buzzanell
Purdue University, USA

Critical Empathy
First, critical empathy is more than relating to or understanding another, the usual way in which many approach “empathy.” In typical notions of empathic responses, a person sorts through talk, interactions, and other experiences to try to grasp what another person’s life is like.
Often, this process involves “walking in another’s shoes” or moving physically, affectively, and cognitively through the spatio-temporal environment in which others exist. Empathy can be seen as reactionary insofar as it engages the heart after knowing another person or community, but it also builds capacity to embrace others more swiftly over time and different experiences.
In these respects, empathy seeks to build shared understanding, but it also is conceptualized as a skill (e.g., Ponterotto, 2010).
In contrast, as Dr. Robyn Remke (2006) notes, critical empathy is the deeply profound
realization that one could never ever truly and deeply know the life of another, particularly another person from a different culture. As Remke (2006) conceives of critical empathy, it is both an investigative lens for uncovering deeply divisive assumptions and limitations and a stance for co-orienting, not coordinating or harmonizing, with others. The “burden” for building some kind of relationship and understanding lies in difference not attempts to locate similarities
and shared understanding.
She writes:

Critical empathy acknowledges the methodological attempt to understand another’s
experience but does not demean the subject’s experience by trying to duplicate it or
adopt it as the researcher’s own — which again, I suggest is ultimately impossible.
Additionally, critical empathy does not try to downplay or explain away the distance
between researcher and participant. Rather, the researcher uses the distance and
difference in an analytic way to help reveal and illuminate taken-for-granted forms
of oppression and constraint. The research analysis develops out of the researcher’s
relationship to her participants, informed in part by her descriptive understanding of the participant’s experience. Empathic awareness is thus present. But by sustaining
a critical distance, the researcher remains attuned to forms of oppression that might
otherwise be obscured were she to literally assume the participant’s point of reference.
(p. 101)

(4,5)

Friday, July 6, 2012

Free/Libre and Open Source Software:
Survey and Study




Introduction
Technological and socio-economic changes known as the "New Information Society/Economy" are re-introducing the notion of production, consumption and trade of goods and services without the direct or obvious involvement of money. Such "non-monetary/trans-monetary" economic activity is difficult to measure through usual monetary indicators. This project aims to remedy this situation by identifying and developing indicators of such activity through a case study of OS/FS: Open Source/Free Software.

A survey of users and developers provided the first comprehensive base of hard data on OS/FS; indicators of measurement including monetary are applied on this domain through the survey; and a unique survey of OS/F software source code measured authors' contributions and other indicators. OS/FS business models and best practices and policy/regulatory impact were assessed. While focusing on OS/FS, FLOSS has implications for measuring and modelling the New Economy as a whole.

Status: proposal accepted by the European Commission, project started on June 1, 2001 and terminates on October 31, 2002.
Report delivered to the European Comission on July 1, 2002. Final version of the report will be publicly available on November 1, 2002.
A final workshop to present FLOSS results and set the future research agenda was conducted on October 14, 2002 and summary proceedings will be included with the final report.
See also: CORDIS, TESSS
Partnership: Berlecon Research, Berlin; ProActive International, Paris
Time slot: June 2001-May 2002
Deliverables: project report, research paper(s), database(s), software applications/tools, workshop
Contact(s): Rishab Ghosh

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Software libre para una sociedad libre, Richard M. Stallman. Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman

Software libre para una sociedad libre, Richard M. Stallman

Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman.
Introduction by Lawrence Lessig. Edited by Joshua Gay
GNU Press. www.gnupress.org
Free Software Foundation. Boston, MA USA.
First printing, first edition. Copyright © 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
ISBN 1-882114-98-1. Published by the Free Software Foundation
59 Temple Place. Boston, MA T

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