Repositório Aberto
Repositório Institucional da Universidade Aberta
Entradas recentes
The mountain knows who you are: visual storytelling through autoethnography
Publication . Šnajberková, Jaroslava; Bidarra, José; Tavares, Mirian
This paper discusses the concept of autoethnography used in doctoral research on digital media arts, based on long-term photographic fieldwork in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia. The paper argues that photographic practice and scientific inquiry are forms of knowledge production embedded in landscape and interconnected lived experiences. The mountain landscape is considered a living being by local communities. Places called ‘ezuamas’ function as interwoven realities that preserve memory and are sources of ancestral teaching. Human activity exists in a network connecting people with the environment and spiritual forces. Similarly, various roles, from photographer and artist to researcher, converge in the figure of the author, and ultimately motherhood fundamentally influences the course and outcome of the research. The paper also suggests possible resonances between analogue photographic processes and digital logic. Interviews with local participants revealed parallel perspectives in which technologies may be understood as manifestations of pre-existing cosmological principles. The project was divided into two phases, fieldwork and post-production. The narrative component combines analogue black-and-white photography and digital colour audiovisual material with autobiographical notes written during stays in the region between 2019 and 2022, with subsequent analytical reflections during data processing between 2022 and 2026.
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts: ARTECH 2025: media art cultures, communities & territories
Publication . Olivero, Lucas Fabian; Simão, Emília; Sá, Alberto; Marcos, Adérito; Fernandes-Marcos
It is the book of proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts (ARTECH 2025) - Media Art Cultures, Communities & Territories, held at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal, on 26-28 November 2025.
This book contains all the works presented in the conference (published by ACM and in Zenobo), as well as the forewords from the organising committees.
“Lifting the Roof” with democracy-as-becoming: the potential of aesthetic and embodied learning for innovating governance in educational institutions a pattern approach
Publication . Spahn, Lea; Weber, Susanne Maria; Jääskeläinen, Pauliina; Mpamhanga, Karen; Neves, Claudia; Oganisjana, Karine; Oliver
Contemporary societies face interrelated crises that strain democratic institutions, social cohesion, and ecological conditions. This article approaches governance as a relational, processual practice that can be reconfigured in and through aesthetic and embodied approaches. Drawing on qualitative material generated in the three-year Horizon Europe/UKRI project Transforming
Education for Democracy through Aesthetic and Embodied Learning, Responsive Pedagogy and Democracy-as-becoming, the analysis revisits case studies with a focus on aesthetic and embodied learning in adult, professional, and organizational learning settings to ask what patterns of governance innovation towards democracy-as-becoming become visible when democratic learning is enacted as embodied, situated practice. Empirically, the study draws on data generated through case trials in six European countries with a participatory action research design and unfolds five patterns with analytic vignettes that illuminate repeating moments, processes and situations of embodied governance.
Conceptually, the article is informed by an epistemic shift towards commoning, framing governance as embedded in concrete practices of possibility rather than bounded procedures. A pattern-oriented re-reading identifies recurring situations in which governance shifts are enacted through power-sharing, transforming dialogue, relational well-being, and holistic learning. These shifts appear as changes in individual stance, collective practice, and institutional culture,
including processes of unlearning hierarchy and reworking institutionalized power relations. By articulating “promising patterns” grounded in situated educational practice, the article links democratic renewal to common(ing) activities and collective imagination in education.
Climate action needs more than policy: the moral and spiritual foundations of sustainable change
Publication . Pinto, Tiago; Vidal, Diogo Guedes
Global climate governance has, over the past three decades, produced an impressive architecture of commitments: international accords, national emissions targets, carbon markets, green subsidies, and public information campaigns. The underlying assumption across most of these instruments is broadly rationalist, that individuals and organisations will act sustainably when given appropriate incentives, information, and regulation. And yet the evidence is unambiguous: environmental awareness has never been higher, while aggregate emissions trajectories have consistently fallen short of what is required.
A common vocabulary, an unchanged grammar: SDG adoption and epistemic justice in european higher education
Publication . Veiga, Ivo; Vidal, Diogo Guedes; Rollo, Maria Fernanda; Alves, Fátima; Ralão, Joana; Catellani, Andrea
As the 2030 target date for the United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development approaches, universities face an increasingly visible tension between rhetorical commitment to sustainability and the more demanding requirements of structural transformation. While existing scholarship has examined governance frameworks, institutional strategies, and curriculum reform, comparatively less attention has been paid to the epistemic assumptions embedded in indicator-driven sustainability agendas and to the ways managerial university governance may constrain more transformative forms of engagement. Pursuing three interconnected objectives, this study examines how the SDGs are perceived and integrated across teaching, research, and governance; explores the structural and epistemic barriers identified by respondents; and considers levels of support for more critical and justice-oriented approaches to sustainability in higher education. Drawing on a cross-sectional survey of 54 academics recruited through transnational COST Action networks, the study combines descriptive statistics with thematic analysis of open-ended responses. Given the network-based sample, the findings are exploratory. They suggest that institutional engagement with the SDGs is often uneven,selective, and shaped by existing organisational logics. A substantial majority of respondents favour critical reformulation of the SDGs rather than unreflective compliance, pointing to a persistent tension between technocratic approaches to sustainability and broader concerns with epistemic justice. The findings also indicate that more meaningful sustainability in higher education may require stronger recognition of Indigenous, local, and intergenerational knowledge, as well as greater institutional capacity for critical, plural, and reflexive engagement beyond metric alignment.