Unexpected Encounters


Book Description

It was a marked contrast from serving as a padre in the Canadian Army to being posted to Change Islands in the North Atlantic. My new mode of transportation couldn’t be more different from an army jeep—a thirty-eight-foot sea-faring vessel. The M.V. Messenger was to be my ocean home, but it would have been my coffin were it not for my faithful Samoyed dog, Sabre. Taking the “Good News” to the remote communities of Northern Newfoundland wasn’t without risks. Navigating through the ice floe, walking over the frozen bay, or flying with the bush pilots had its challenges. But one did not count the cost when on a divine mission. My calling was to minister to the families of fishermen and loggers nestled in the coves and bays. It was far different from my ministry in a suburban church in Metro Toronto, where the storms were of a different nature. Victor Frankel, a psychiatrist and survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, affirmed that a person’s greatest search is for meaning. I have shown that life’s greatest and most difficult experiences can be overcome by trust in God’s faithful promises found in scripture. Is that a place where you might begin your search?




Strange Encounters


Book Description

Examining the relationship between strangers, embodiment and community, Strange Encounters challenges the assumptions that the stranger is simply anybody we do not recognize and instead proposes that he or she is socially constructued as somebody we already know. Using feminist and postcolonial theory this book examines the impact of multiculturalism and globalization on embodiment and community whilst considering the ethical and political implication of its critique for post-colonial feminism. A diverse range of texts are analyzed which produce the figure of 'the stranger', showing that it has alternatively been expelled as the origin of danger - such as in neighbourhood watch, or celebrated as the origin of difference - as in multiculturalism. The author argues that both of these standpoints are problematic as they involve 'stranger fetishism'; they assume that the stranger 'has a life of its own'.




Cultural Encounters as Intervention Practices


Book Description

Setting up cultural encounters is a widespread intervention strategy employed to diffuse conflicts and manage difficulties related to diversity. These organised cultural encounters bring together people of different backgrounds in order to promote peaceful coexistence and inclusion. These transformative aims relate to the participants but are often also expected to spill over into the society, community or context addressed by the encounter. As a category, ‘Organised Cultural Encounters’ draws together a variety of activities and events such as multicultural festivals, dialogue initiatives, diversity training and inclusion projects – activities that are generally not considered to be of the same kind. Most of the existing literature on these types of encounters is instrumental and has an overall emphasis on evaluations in terms of outcome or success rate. This book goes beyond evaluations, and the contributors pose and debate theoretical and methodological questions and analyse the practices and performativities of particular encounters. Taken together, it makes an important contribution to the theorisation and analysis of intercultural relations and negotiations. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies.




Encountering Palestine


Book Description

Encountering Palestine: Un/making Spaces of Colonial Violence, edited by Mark Griffiths and Mikko Joronen, sits at the intersection of cultural and political geographies and offers innovative reflections on power, colonialism, and anti-colonialism in contemporary Palestine and Israel. Organized around the theme of encountering and focusing on the ways violence and struggle are un/made in the encounter between the colonizer and colonized, the essays focus on power relations as they manifest in cultural practices and everyday lives in anti/colonial Palestine. Covering numerous sites in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel, Encountering Palestine addresses a range of empirical topics—from marriage and queer aesthetics to policing, demolition, armament failure, and violence. The contributors utilize diverse theoretical frameworks, such as hyperreality, settler capitalism, intimate biopolitics, and politics of vulnerability, to help us better understand the cultural making and unmaking of colonial and anti-colonial space in Palestine. Encountering Palestine asks us to rethink how colonialism and power operate in Palestine, the ways Palestinians struggle, and the lifeways that constantly encounter, un/make, and counter the spaces of colonial violence.




Pedagogical Encounters


Book Description

Pedagogical Encounters demonstrates how learning spaces that are ethical, responsive, and transformable can enable students and teachers to open toward new ways of being in the world. Through collective biography, ethnography, and arts-based research, the authors - educators with experience in diverse settings - generate rich descriptions of classroom practices, and elaborate and clarify new theoretical concepts through their discussion in relation to specific sites of teaching and learning.




Surprise Encounters


Book Description

A champion of the arts, sciences, and conservation, particularly in his home state of New Jersey, Scott McVay, named "the Money-Man for Inspirations" by the New York Times, cites the stubborn challenges and great joys of a lifetime working in grantmaking and philanthropy.




Spiritual Encounters with Unusual Light Phenomena


Book Description

This book is a study of unusual light phenomena, based on almost 400 unpublished accounts of modern-day encounters with strange lights collected over a period of thirty years, held at the University of Wales, Lampeter. It is an original and perennially topical book that goes beyond existing studies of unusual light phenomena - such as lights encountered during angelic experiences, near-death experiences, 'after death communications' - in a number of ways. It shows, for example, that experiences of unusual, spiritual, religious and paranormal lights are cross-cultural, trans-historical, and are reported widely in the present day: but not necessarily experienced when near to death. It also demonstrates that these experiences share to a remarkable degree a 'common core', showing by drawing on a large number of vivid, unpublished and dramatic testimonies that unusual lights typically manifest at times of crisis, and are overwhelmingly benign and loving, producing 'turning-points' in the lives of experients and typically setting them in new spiritual and creative directions.




B|X Fantasy Roleplay


Book Description

BX Fantasy Roleplay is the ultimate B/X emulator. Based on the 1981 B/X rules, edited by Tom Moldvay, Dave Cook, and Steve Marsh, this booklet consolidates the Basic and Expert Sets into one, easy-to-use booklet. So buy a backpack, light a torch, steady your steed, and wield the BXFRP rules for an action-pack, exciting evening of fun and adventure, old-school style.




Urban Encounters


Book Description

Public art is on the urban agenda. Given recent claims about the importance of creativity to urban prosperity, opportunities for installing or performing art in the city have multiplied. As cities strive to appear culturally dynamic, the stakes of artistic production rise higher than ever. Exploring the interaction between art and the public in Canadian cities, Urban Encounters features writing by artists, architects, curators, anthropologists, geographers, and urban studies specialists. They show how people and places affect the structure and content of public artworks, what kinds of urban spaces and socialities are generated through art, and how to investigate and interpret encounters between art and its viewers in the city. Discussing a variety of art forms, including mobile cinemas, street improvisation, audiovisual investigations, and assembled objects, the contributors treat public artworks not just as aesthetic installations, but as agents that participate in the social and cultural evolution of cities. Using original, hands-on approaches, Urban Encounters reveals how art in the urban public space generates encounters that can transform both the city itself and the ways that people relate to it. Contributors include Alison Bain (York University), Robert Bean (NSCAD University), Lawrence Bird (architect, artist), Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (University of Victoria), Brenden Harvey (Dalhousie University), Wes Johnston (artist, curator), Léola Le Blanc (media artist), Brian Lilley (Dalhousie University), Barbara Lounder (NSCAD University), Mary Elizabeth Luka (York University), Sebastian Matthias (HafenCityUniversity), Christof Migone (Western University), Ellen Moffat (media artist), Kim Morgan (NSCAD University), Solomon Nagler (NSCAD University), Martha Radice (Dalhousie University), Nicole Rallis (McMaster University), Susanne Shawyer (Elon University), Shannon Turner (Aarhus University), Laurent Vernet (INRS Urbanisation Culture Société), and Nick Wees (University of Victoria).




Augmented Reality Art


Book Description

This is the third edition of the first ever book to explore the exciting field of augmented reality art and its enabling technologies. The new edition has been thoroughly revised and updated, with 9 new chapters included. As well as investigating augmented reality as a novel artistic medium, the book covers cultural, social, spatial and cognitive facets of augmented reality art. It has been written by a virtual team of 33 researchers and artists from 11 countries who are pioneering in the new form of art, and contains numerous colour illustrations showing both classic and recent augmented reality artworks. Intended as a starting point for exploring this new fascinating area of research and creative practice, it will be essential reading not only for artists, researchers and technology developers, but also for students (graduates and undergraduates) and all those interested in emerging augmented reality technology and its current and future applications in art.