Call for Abstracts (for Publication): "Visual Narratives, Aesthetics, and Decoloniality: Imagery and the Construction of the Other"

Mappæmundi is pleased to announce a call for papers for a collective publication on 

"Visual Narratives, Aesthetics, and Decoloniality: Imagery and the Construction of the Other"

Please find all the details below.

We invite contribution proposals for the edited volume Visual Narratives, Aesthetics, and Decoloniality: Imagery and the Construction of the Other. The book aims to critically examine the persistent influence of colonialism in shaping modern subjectivities, tracing its historical roots in the formation of Western modernity and interrogating its continued implications in contemporary contexts. It positions media and visual narratives as central discursive spaces where colonial legacies are both perpetuated and, potentially, contested. This volume conceptualizes and critically interrogates aesthetics as a foundational condition that establishes a visual lexicon integral to Western modernity. The aesthetic framework not only shapes the development of visual narratives but also plays a crucial role in the construction and perpetuation of varied subjectivities.

In particular, we focus on the critical analysis of the role of visual narratives within the framework of epistemological colonialism. Visual narratives have been central in defining, reinforcing, and legitimizing colonial ideologies by shaping perceptions and controlling representations of colonized peoples and cultures. These visual narratives have played a fundamental role in constructing colonial time and space, which were systematically controlled by Western epistemologies. This volume positions itself as a counterpoint to this colonial legacy, offering critical perspectives that challenge and re/deconstruct the visual lexicon of Western modernity. Through this lens, the book seeks to uncover pathways for alternative visual expressions that resist colonial frameworks and promote inclusive, decolonized understandings of identity and, more broadly, cultural production.

The arts, the media, and communication are powerful forces that can either perpetuate or challenge colonial legacies. Addressing and dismantling these legacies is essential for the creation of just, inclusive, and equitable societies - i.e., societies that value, embrace and benefit from the diversity of reason. From a decolonial lens, the book seeks not only to question the validity of established forms of knowledge but also to question the very criteria by which knowledge is defined. The objective is to contribute to critical discourses on potential pathways forward by amplifying cultural voices marginalized within the colonial matrix of power.  To this aim, we invite contributions that engage with scholarship in diaspora studies, subaltern and postcolonial studies, critical race studies, decolonial aesthetics, visual culture, and visual practices, with a particular emphasis on non-hegemonic epistemologies.

When bringing together these critical issues and perspectives, the book shall offer a comprehensive and interconnected framework for understanding postcolonial experiences in the 21st century. It will explore the role of aesthetics in shaping modern subjectivities, tracing the roots of domination in multiple paths toward modernity. This book intends to serve as an essential resource for scholars, researchers, activists, and the general public, encouraging deeper engagement with colonial histories that continue to shape contemporary life.

We especially encourage contributions from scholars, artists, and practitioners from the Global South that:

• Engage in theoretical discussions on aesthetics and visual narratives from a decolonial perspective.
• Combine theoretical frameworks with analyses that directly engage with visual arts, such as photography and other forms of artistic expression.
• Discuss case studies that examine individual works of art, archives, photojournalistic projects, or other forms of visual narratives.
• Explore media as a space for resisting and challenging colonial legacies.
• Offer comprehensive analyses of how media and art contribute to the perpetuation or disruption of colonial ideologies.
• Provide practical strategies and share lived experiences that contest colonial-rooted narratives.
• Critique prevailing ideologies within the discursive spaces of media and art production and consumption.

Submission Details

The volume Visual Narratives, Aesthetics, and Decoloniality: Imagery and the Construction of the Other will be part of the Mappæmundi series published by Ventura Edizioni. It will be edited by Dr. Tomás Cajueiro (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) and Dr. Estevão Bosco (American College of the Mediterranean and the Latin American Social Science Faculty). The final publication will be exclusively in English. However, abstracts may be submitted in Portuguese, English, Spanish, or Italian. Once a proposal is accepted, authors will be responsible for translating their final chapters into English. Chapters should range from 20,000 to 40,000 characters, including spaces, and must incorporate visual materials to support the analysis of visual works. 

Proposals must be submitted to tomaskju AT gmail.com by April 4, 2025.

Theoretical and Textual Articles

Chapters may integrate theoretical insights with practical interventions or focus solely on theoretical exploration. Contributions can draw on real experiences from individuals, communities, and organizations. Potential research methods include literature reviews, case studies, comparative analyses, discourse analyses, and analyses of photographs and visual works. Abstracts should have a maximum of 5,000 characters, including references. Chapters should fall between 35,000 and 40,000 characters.

Visual narratives

For contributions focusing on the analysis of visual content, the textual component must range from 10,000 to 15,000 characters. The abstract, while limited to a maximum of 5.000 words, should also include an overview of the visual material being analyzed.

Important Dates 

Abstract Submission Deadline: April 4, 2025
Notification of Proposal Acceptance: May 11, 2025
Full Chapter Submission Deadline: September 11, 2025 
For more info: tomaskju AT gmail.com
--
Departamento de Filosofia, Comunicação e Informação
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra
3004-530 Coimbra, Portugal ... (and my source).

Consultation: Community Mental Health Services [ UK Parliament ]

Source: Health and Social Care Committee, House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA

'Community Mental Health Services

Inquiry

The Committee is undertaking an inquiry into community mental health services. The inquiry will examine what good looks like from the perspective of service users and their families/carers. The Committee would like the inquiry to shine a light on case studies of innovative practice and high-quality care across the country, and to undertake meaningful and impactful engagement with people accessing these services. 

The inquiry will consider how service users’ wider health and social needs can be addressed, including in employment and housing, and to understand what policy interventions are required to improve how these needs are met. As part of this inquiry, the Committee also wants to assess to what extent the Community Mental Health Framework is driving improvements in the delivery of more integrated, person-centred care. 

This inquiry is focussing on adults with severe mental health needs in particular, which includes but is not limited to people with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and severe depression. The Committee recognises the scale of the challenge in children and young people’s mental health, and plans to do further work in this area in due course, building on its predecessor Committee’s 2021 inquiry. 

In line with the general practice of select committees, the Health and Social Care Committee is not able to take up individual cases or complaints. If you would like political support or advice you may wish to contact your local Member of Parliament.

This inquiry is currently accepting evidence

The committee wants to hear your views. We welcome submissions from anyone with answers to the questions in the call for evidence. You can submit evidence until Tuesday 4 February 2025.' 

Read the call for evidence before submitting:

https://committees.parliament.uk/work/8755/community-mental-health-services/

btw: A game in 4 moves*

INDIVIDUAL

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES              

humanistic ------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL   

|

GROUP

btw - by the way: "Are you working?" 'THE WORK ETHIC' MENTAL STATE MENTAL ILLNESS MOTIVATION MINDSET-ATTITUDE LIFELONG LEARNING	Economic activity Demographics Productivity PHYSICAL HEALTH PHYSICAL ILLNESS dis-ABILITY 'Plumbus oscillans?' EDUCATION - re-TRAINING
Social trends Social attitudes Social capital 'Living wage' 'Cost of Living' Social contract Social justice	Welfare spending, inc. Sickness-Incapacity Political: angst,bias,debate .. Policy^: incentives, action BACK TO WORK - btw

*Or 5 - [ ( sciences, intra- interpersonal, sociology, political ) spiritual ]?

^Fitness for purpose?

Master Philosophy in Biology and Medicine (for Sept 1, 2025)

The Master Philosophy in Biology and Medicine at Bordeaux is looking for interested candidates for the next academic year (starting September 1, 2025).

This program (presented here: www.philinbiomed.org/teaching) is aimed at philosophy students who have a strong interest in working with scientists, or scientists who have a strong interest in working with philosophers, especially - but not exclusively - in the fields of cancer, immunology, microbiota, systems biology, nutrition, neuroscience and aging. Students will have the opportunity to be involved in research in scientific labs and to be integrated into a very dynamic international community of philosophers and scientists.

Please keep in mind that the Master's program is exceptionally inexpensive but very competitive (as we only recruit 5 students per year). The program is 100% in English.

A letter of motivation, CV, and a writing sample (~10 pages) concerning a relevant topic should be sent to mael.lemoine AT u-bordeaux.fr by March 24, 2025. Late applications may be accepted but will not be eligible for regular consideration.

Shortlisted candidates will be offered Zoom interviews during the month after the deadline.

Candidates will be informed of their acceptance by May 28th 2025 at the latest.

Interested students can contact us from now on or at their earliest convenience, using the following address: mael.lemoine AT u-bordeaux.fr.

Thanks for forwarding this information to anyone you think might be interested, and thanks again to those who have already done so!

Best wishes,

Fridolin GROSS
fridolin.gross AT u-bordeaux.fr
Maître de conférences (associate professor)
Laboratoire IMMUNOCONCEPT
Bâtiment Bordeaux Biologie Santé
2, Rue Dr Hoffmann Martinot

https://www.u-bordeaux.fr

My source:
Philos-L "The Liverpool List" is run by the Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/philosophy/philos-l/ Messages to the list are archived at http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/philos-l.html.

Follow the list on Twitter @PhilosL. Follow the Department of Philosophy @LiverpoolPhilos 

Living document - "Semantic Web: Past, Present, and Future"

Dear Semantic Web community

As the year ends, the question remains: How will the Semantic Web look in 2025?

Together with Katja Hose, Maria-Esther Vidal, Gerd Groener, and Petr Škoda, we contributed this year an article titled "Semantic Web: Past, Present, and Future", see

https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/TGDK.2.1.3 to the new Diamond Open Access journal on Transactions on Graph Data and Knowledge (TGDK, https://tgdk.org/). This primer has been a living document for 13 years; see the link for details!

As many of us cannot resist checking emails over the break, I ask you to consider the question:
What is our future in 2025?

Many "classical" Semantic Web researchers have witnessed the rise of Linked Open Data, Freebase being bought by Google (largely seen as a big win), and the beginning and success of the Knowledge Graph era. Many of us have moved on to or added topics like graph representation learning, graph neural networks, language models, etc., to our research portfolio. So, how much of the classical topics are left? How much will come back? Should we work more on knowledge graph embeddings obeying OWL axioms? Shall we have federated queries not only over multiple data sources but also include hybrid queries using similarities in graph embeddings?

In the current 2024 version of the primer, we include the latest W3C standards developed by the Semantic Web community. But we also explain the journey from the famous Linked Data principles via Knowledge Graphs to the hot topic of machine learning on graphs!

*The article linked above is an invitation to contribute. Contact me if you are interested!* 

It will be updated from time to time. We like to receive your feedback, and perhaps you would like to contribute to a future version.

Best wishes and happy holidays,

Ansgar

PS: For 2025, there is a plan to update the German version of the article in an introductory textbook on artificial intelligence. It will add Shallow Graph Embeddings, Graph Neural Networks, and the interplay of Knowledge Graphs and Language Models. Once ready, I plan to ping this back to the English version.

My source:

Ansgar Scherp
From:mail AT ansgarscherp.net
To:semantic-web AT w3.org

4.3   3-12

'Domain Ontologies represent knowledge specific to a particular domain [48, 109]. Domain ontologies are used as external sources of background knowledge [48]. They can be built on foundational ontologies [110] or core ontologies [131], which provide precise structuring to the domain ontology and thus improve interoperability between different domain ontologies. Domain ontologies can be simple such as the FOAF ontology or the event ontology mentioned above, or very complex and extensive, having been developed by domain experts, such as the SNOMED medical ontology.' ...

3-13

'Foundational Ontologies have a very wide scope and can be reused in a wide variety of modeling scenarios [24]. They are therefore used for reference purposes [109] and aim to model the most general and generic concepts and relations that can be used to describe almost any aspect of our world [24, 109], such as objects and events. An example is the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) [24]. Such basic ontologies have a rich axiomatization that is important at the developmental stage of ontologies. They help ontology engineers to have a formal and internally consistent conceptualization of the world, which can be modeled and checked for consistency. For the use of foundational ontologies in a concrete application, i.e., during the runtime of an application, the rich axiomatization can often be removed and replaced by a more lightweight version of the foundational ontology.
 In contrast, domain ontologies are built specifically to allow automatic reasoning at runtime. Therefore, when designing and developing ontologies, completeness and complexity on the one hand must always be balanced with the efficiency of reasoning mechanisms on the other. In order to represent structured knowledge, such as the scenario depicted in Figure 1, interconnected ontologies are needed, which are spanned in a network over the Internet. For this purpose, the ontologies used must match and be aligned with each other.'

Health - See also 4.2 (A post in 2025 ...re. SKOS?).

Moving Online Symposium: 30th Jan 2025 - Coventry University, UK

In recent years, there has been increased attention paid to the ownership of dance. There has been important work done in the area of dance and copyright¹ as well as the examination of the way ownership is managed via social norms through the ‘commons’² and as a form of ‘gift’.³  The increased circulation of dance online through archives, video platforms and social media sites has led to multiple debates about the copying and re-embodiment of dances,⁴ reigniting important conversations about appropriation, acknowledgment and credit.⁵ At the same time, there has been a flourishing of work on dance and performance ontology. For example, long-standing debates about the ephemerality of dance and performance have been reframed through discussions about the ‘post-ephemeral’⁶and materiality.⁷ There have also been new perspectives offered on questions about the nature of dances and the way in which they exist.^8,9

The Moving Online symposium explores how these two areas intersect in the context of online dance and performance. The event builds on and shares the findings from Moving Online: Ontology and Ownership of Internet Dance (the project and event is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/W01002X/1]).

The register for this event please complete this form. The draft schedule is available here.

The event is free to attend. We are offering limited number of £150 bursaries to support travel and participation by freelance artists. More information is available here. Deadline for applications 8th January 2025.

The symposium is taking place in-person at Coventry University. We plan to live stream some of the panels. If you would like to join the live stream, please select this option on the registration form.

For more information about Moving Online please see here and follow the project on X: @MovingOnlineCU and/or Instagram: @movingonlinecu

Please contact Hetty Blades with any questions: hetty.blades AT coventry.ac.uk

For notes and references please see here

Previously: 'dance' : 'movement' : 'ownership'

My source: 

Philos-L "The Liverpool List" is run by the Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/philosophy/philos-l/ Messages to the list are archived at http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/philos-l.html. Follow the list on Twitter @PhilosL.

Follow the Department of Philosophy @LiverpoolPhilos 

Praying ... for PEACE

INDIVIDUAL

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES              

humanistic ------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL   

|

GROUP

PRAY	PREY
PRAY	PREY

Young Carers Choir - 'Love is Enough'

'Young carers face many challenges throughout the year and Christmas can be an especially tough time.

When their friends are having fun, young carers’ responsibilities don’t stop. That’s why we’re delighted Sir Ed Davey and the Bath Philharmonia’s Young Carers Choir have come together to record for a wonderful Christmas song – Love is Enough. 

The song, in support of young carers through Carers Trust and the Bath Philharmonia, has been written by young carers and shines a light on their lives.' 

continued ...