Bibliographic Record ZÁHORA, JAKUB. Mundane Self-Legitimizations of Power: Distribution of the Sensible in the Israeli Settlements in the West Bank. Prague, 2017. 277 p. Doctoral dissertation (Ph.D.) Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Political Studies. Thesis supervisor: PhDr. Ondřej Ditrych, MPhil., Ph.D. Abstract: In this doctoral thesis I am looking into mechanisms, practices and political technologies that work to depoliticize contested and potentially disturbing realities. To make sense of these processes, I am utilizing the theoretical and conceptual apparatus derived from Foucault's and Rancière's respective works. Following Rancière, I conceptualize depolitization as a "distribution of the sensible", a particular ordering of what is presented to the senses and thus made intelligible, "obvious" and "natural". Understanding such arrangements in terms of a governmental programme, I focus mostly on material and visual elements of the dispositif that promotes this depoliticizing rationality. Empirically, I am investigating the case of the Israeli so-called non-ideological settlements in the West Bank. Despite some popular misconceptions, these communities attract Israelis by offering cheap public services and housing rather than for their religious-nationalistic...

This paper presents an investigation in how a jewelry artist understands the life and death, permanence and impermanence of human, objects, and other creatures, by communicating still life in the form of jewelry. I will bring up a fact that death and impermanence have been forgotten by my peers, and use still life and contemporary jewelry to discuss it. The paper mainly talks about: my opinion upon life and death in modern society, why and how did I related them with still life paintings, how did I make my jewelry based on still life, and discusst a dilemma I met: how will jewelry be when they are on and not on people’s body.

This thesis examines transformations of human characters into trees, stones, and water sources in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The current climate crisis is partly the result of a view of nature as a passive object, or inert matter, that humans without consequences can exploit. Using primarily the ecocritical theory new materialism, this thesis is a study of how nonhuman organisms can be assumed to have agency in order to alter this view of nature. The characters in the Metamorphoses that transform have different forms of agency before and after transformation depending on the body they inhabit. With close reading of the transformations themselves and the portrayal of the characters after transformation, the thesis finds that the material reality of the body determines what a body can do. Thus, it is possible to use the Metamorphoses to do a contemporary ecocritical reading that shows how a narrative can portray nature and nonhuman organisms with as much importance as human organism. By understanding the agency of nature and find it to be an active subject instead of only an object, it can change the relationship humans have with nature to one that is less exploitative.

This project aims to challenge preconceptions of mental health and attempts to conceptually dissect the popular phrase “mental health is a luxury”. The dissection is grounded on a theoretical background related to the inefficiencies of the health care system, advocacy movements of health care rights, material culture and luxury consumption, in order to conceptualize design strategies for sociocultural change.The concept challenges the perception of mental health care as luxury through the invitation of other mental health sufferers into a collaborative co-design space that generates information about their subjective lived experiences and needs, through participatory and empathic design methods. Jewelry has been selected as a design medium that combines possibilities of self-expression, involvement in co-crafting, similarities to other devices for self-regulation and preconceptions of status. The socioeconomic issues of the accessibility of mental health care reveals inequalities related to social status, and jewelry with its historical connotation as a social status symbol is used in this project as a critical tool to portray and question the correlation between socioeconomic privilege and mental health care. The collaborative process of co-designing and translating real people’s needs into customized jewelry works as an attempt to redefine jewelry as a manifestation of human needs and to cultivate mental health sufferers’ agency and power towards their own health.

My personal history and the stories of people with similar experiences have inspired my degree project. It revolves around the feeling of belonging when moving from one place to another, adapting to the new environment (e.g. culture, language, etc.), and yet staying in between. It's about the notion of home in the time of migration.  I want to capture the ideas of places and identity transformation through materiality. The tree is very human-like living material. I bend the wood, and, while doing so, it follows my moves and adapts to changed conditions. The tension and force create the shape, and the unfolded pieces become traces of my body movements.  I see the sculptures from the jeweler´s perspective, the performative and interactive pieces invite the viewer to participate.  In my smaller-scale series of work, I continue my materials research narrowing down my investigation from the body to my hands. The pandemic situation increases my awareness of touching and longing for real contact with people. I select a group of found and given to me objects which evoke memories of people and places I have been. By wrapping them into a metallic textile I create imprinted empty space. It becomes a container which questions what is left behind when someone is gone or something is taken away.  I place the handprints and the tree rings in parallel. Both are strong identification symbols. The wood rings mark the conditions in which. the tree grows, forming a unique sign language that visually explains the whole history of the tree.  Do people´s fingerprints change when they move from one place to another?

This essay is interlaced with the exhibition Alien Beauty by Fredrik Odénius, and is to be seen as a reflection of and upon the presented works and their becoming. By focusing on the role of interpretation in various stages of the creation process the essay tries to distinguish Odénius sculptural practice as a hermeneutical activity.  By tracing one of the main strands of thought in hermeneutics, from exegesis, via Heidegger to Gadamer, interpretations treated as a means of existence, an ontological activity in its own right.  One can understand art as an act of interpretation by the way of gestaltung, to interpret a thing through matter. Another way to define art is through its institutions and the concept of the artworld. By accessing art through both these definitions simultaneously, a new idea of how a work of art operates is revealed, both as an autonomic being and as a man-made artefact. By giving primacy to the open-ended structure of creation, with curiosity and association as driving forces, it is argued for that the act of gestaltung draws a line between the inside and outside that allows a dialogue between material and creator. Through this process the material is given a possibility to make itself heard, and as the artist steps back, the bond between motif and work remains and establishes a continuity outside the human realm.

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In recent years, healthcare has been shifting toward a people-centred vision. Within the intersection connecting service design and healthcare innovation, co-design communication tools are increasingly being used to bring the voice of patients and their families into healthcare co-creation activities. Existing documented use of such tools primarily focuses on empathy and how designers derive inspiration from participants’ materials, while little draws on the actual design process and how design attributes can effectively support patients and their families in generating and expressing their dreams. From this perspective, this thesis first analyses existing tools that aim to elicit participants’ self-expression and evoke their future-oriented thinking, which strategies for designing a tool that supports individuals in expressing their dreams are identified with a particular focus on materiality and visuality. Taking a research through design approach, this thesis enters into the extremely challenging rare disease context to design a toolkit to help family caregivers of people with ALS identify and convey their dreams for life after diagnosis. Through observations of participants’ interaction during the prototyping process, this study further demonstrates that considering both the vulnerability and intelligence of patients (families) in the design of tangible toolkits effectively breaks participants’ habitual perceptions and brings them to an imaginative space towards the future. In doing so, co-design tools commonly used in service design can be better adapted to the healthcare context. Additionally, the thesis provides family caregivers’ questions, insights, and ideas about ALS healthcare services, thereby informing the future ALS healthcare innovation.

Materiality and considerations of color in medieval art have been the subject of a growing number of studies in recent years, but have tended to address architecture, monumental works of art such as mosaics, or metalworking. Scholars working on western medieval manuscripts have shown how much can be done with technical art history in this arena, but to date, the study of manuscript materials and their meanings with respect to the Byzantine world have been lacking. This dissertation resituates the understanding of Middle Byzantine (East Medieval Roman) manuscript production from the eleventh and twelfth centuries CE, employing a cross-disciplinary approach that synthesizes traditional codicological analysis with new technologies that identify precise materials and techniques. In particular, this work explores Middle Byzantine manuscript materiality along two perspectives. First, it investigates modes of manufacture, identifying materials and techniques of Middle Byzantine manuscripts themselves, especially in the Lectionary of Katherine Komnena and the Dumbarton Oaks Lectionary. Secondly, it analyzes the meanings and understandings of those materials along liturgical, monastic, and scientific-intellectual contexts in the manuscripts’ specific use in Middle Byzantine milieus. In each case, the focus is Middle Byzantine, Greek-language Gospel Lectionaries traceable to the Rite of Constantinople. These lavishly illuminated books played important roles in Christian liturgical contexts, and provide an opportunity to explore what Byzantines thought about the natural world.This study revises both the methodological approaches of earlier manuscript scholars and interpretations that assign place of production and meaning of materials as solely iconographic or stylistic problems. Byzantine manuscripts — in part due to twentieth-century historiographic traditions — have rarely been considered in terms of their material production, in contrast to their counterparts in western Medieval Europe, which have been explored with modern technology in exciting new ways in recent decades. As a result, this void in Byzantine studies provides a great opportunity for considering the specific contexts of these objects in their production and significance. As this dissertation attends to the material contexts of Byzantine Gospel Lectionaries, it analyzes the manuscripts in terms of their materials and methods of production, and consider the relationships between materials, Byzantine understandings of matter through the field of alchemy, and the production of knowledge about artmaking in Byzantium. This strategy seeks to account for both the interest in Byzantine intellectual works on the nature of matter and the manner in which knowledge about codex creation was passed on. Although this dissertation follows art historical methodologies and not those of the hard sciences, it incorporates scientific data that identifies precise pigments on manuscript pages into my study. In this work, the materials used by the manuscript makers of the studied objects are identified. This involves performing non-destructive analysis, collaborating with conservators, through close observation and the use of x-ray reflectography, which allows for the non-invasive, in situ study of manuscript materials. / Art History