Three Dialogues

This thesis offers a new model for classifying theatre works themed around digital technologies: a text-based genre called posthuman drama. Primarily a creative writing project, the thesis consists of a new play, "Machina", as well as a critical essay that positions the play as an exemplar of this new genre. Since the early 1980s, western society has experienced a monumental shift in how human beings perceive, identify, and communicate with each other. The rise of the internet and global satellite systems have ushered in what many have described as a “digital age,” where ubiquitous communication technologies have challenged both how we interpret reality and other humans. Out of these developments has emerged the growing discourse of posthumanism – a reconfiguring of the relationship between humans and intelligent machines – and my critical essay applies posthuman concepts to contemporary drama texts, drawing on the work of N. Katherine Hayles, Thomas Carlson, Stefan Herbrechter, and Cary Wolfe. While the impact of digital technologies on theatre practice has created a large volume of scholarship in recent years, the focus has overwhelmingly tended towards digital spectacle over theme or content. To redress this imbalance, I identify three contemporary plays that construct digitally-integrated subjects – posthuman subjects – via the “technology” of dramatic form, as case studies of a larger movement in western playwriting: "The Sugar Syndrome" by Lucy Prebble (UK 2003), "I Love You, Bro" by Adam J. A. Cass (Australia 2007), and "Dead Man’s Cell Phone" by Sarah Ruhl (USA 2007). In each of these examples, human and nonhuman agents are constructed as being “essentially similar” to each other, and intelligent machines form an imperative feature of the plot. I argue these plays offer a model for classifying digitally-themed theatre works beyond the realm of spectacle. The thesis concludes with my own posthuman play – "Machina" – which tells the story of a man who uploads his consciousness into a digital ether, killing his body in the process. By constructing identity along cybernetic lines, "Machina" seeks to explore the inherent conflict between a liberal humanist value system and a posthuman, digital world.

Trinitarian perspectives on pastoral care and counseling are discussed much more fully in Pembroke, N., Renewing Pastoral Practice: Trinitarian Perspectives on Pastoral Care and Counseling (Ashgate, 2006) Abstract A central feature of the life of the Trinity is contrast without conflict: God is Three and God is One. This dynamic has a spatial reference. The Three draw close to each other in the intimacy of love, but they also give each other space to be. This dynamic is a necessary condition for mature relationships on the human level. It is argued that effective pastoral counseling involves both moving in close through empathy and acceptance, and creating appropriate distance through a process that Martin Buber refers to as confirmation. Confirmation involves wrestling with the other person to help her or him actualize her or his God-given moral and spiritual potential.

This essay reflects on an 8 month sabbatical journey in various parts of the world (Uganda, South Africa, Brazil, the Netherlands, Prague, Berlin). It particularly explores the practices of deep listening, cultivating a faculty of seeing and aliveness.

Lebenswelt: aesthetics and philosophy of experience, 2014

Discourse & Society, 2011

Meetings are increasingly seen as sites where organizing and strategic change takes place, but the role of specific discursive strategies and related linguistic-pragmatic and argumentative devices, employed by meeting chairs, is little understood. The purpose of this paper is to address the range of behaviours of chairs in business organizations by comparing strategies employed by the same CEO in two key meeting genres: regular management team meetings and 'away-days'. While drawing on research from organization studies on the role of leadership in meetings and studies of language in the workplace from (socio)linguistics and discourse studies, we abductively identified five salient discursive strategies which meeting chairs employ in driving decision-making: (1) Encouraging; (2) Directing; Modulating; (4) Re/committing; and (5) Bonding. We investigate the leadership styles of the CEO in both meeting genres via a multi-level approach using empirical data drawn from meetings of a single management team in a multinational defence corporation. Our key findings are, firstly, that the chair of the meetings (and leading manager) influences the outcome of the meetings in both negative and positive ways, through the choice of discursive strategies. Secondly, it becomes apparent that the specific context and related meeting genre mediate participation and the ability of the chair to control interactions within the team. Thirdly, a more hierarchical authoritative or a more interpersonal egalitarian leadership style can be identified via specific combinations of these five discursive strategies. The paper concludes that the egalitarian leadership style increases the likelihood of achieving a durable consensus. Several related avenues for research are outlined.

Lebenswelt, 2013

A discussion of The Drama of Ideas by Martin Puchner.

2008

The research described in this thesis reports on a 10-month quantitative/qualitative classroom-based study, carried out at a Japanese university, investigating the potential of authentic materials to develop learners’ communicative competence. It was hypothesised that the ‘richer’ input provided by authentic materials, combined with appropriate awareness-raising activities, would be better able to develop a range of communicative competencies in learners (linguistic, pragmalinguistic, sociopragmatic, strategic and discourse competences). Ninety-two 2nd year English major students, of similar proficiency levels, were assigned to either a control or experimental group for the period of the trial. The control group received input from two textbooks commonly used in Japanese universities, while the experimental group received input from authentic materials (films, documentaries, ‘reality shows’, TV comedies, web-based sources, home-produced video of native speakers, songs, novels and newspaper articles), designed to allow students to ‘notice’ features of the discourse which could help them develop some aspect of their communicative competence. The hypothesis was tested with a batch of eight pre/post- course measures, designed to tap into different aspects of learners’ communicative competence or language skills: a) Listening; b) Pronunciation; c) ‘C’-Test; d) Grammar; e) Vocabulary; f) Discourse completion task (DCT); g) IELTS oral interview; h) Student- student role-play. These were supported with qualitative results from learners’ diaries, case-study interviews with subjects from both groups and transcripts of classroom interaction. 2 Univariate analysis of the pre/post-course tests, using ANCOVA, indicated statistically significant differences between the two treatment groups, with the experimental group out-performing the control group in five of the eight communicative competence measures. The qualitative results of the trial helped to account for these differences in performance, suggesting that the authentic materials, and their associated tasks, allowed learners to notice a wider range of discourse features than those generally available in textbook input. They also indicated a clear preference in the experimental group for authentic materials over textbooks, suggesting that learners found them more interesting, varied and challenging, and better able to meet their perceived future language needs. Finally, the qualitative results demonstrated that, for learners, social goals often override instructional goals in the classroom, suggesting that classroom-based research benefits from both an emic and etic perspective in order to fully account for results.

SPECTRA, 2019

During the ASPECT Conference in April 2017, SPECTRA met with Michael J. Shapiro to discuss his work as a writer, the social sciences, and the inspiration he draws from aesthetic theory, cinema, and the everyday. Mike is a Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Among his most recent books are Cinematic Geopolitics (2009), The Time of the City: Politics, philosophy and genre (2010), Studies in Trans-disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn (2012), War Crimes: Atrocity, and Justice (2015), Politics and Time: Documenting the Event (2016), and The Political Sublime (2018). The keynote address for the ASPECT conference included a piece from this latest work, and can be accessed on YouTube: “When the Earth Moves: Towards a Political Sublime.”