Wednesday

 

Cultural Anchors

 

In the context of a Spain increasingly threatened by rural depopulation, the traditional village bar emerges as a form of public infrastructure, a concept developed by sociologist Javier Rueda in his essay Utopías de barra de bar, where he argues for a Law of Rural Public Houses that would treat these spaces with the same relevance as libraries, pharmacies or health centres, recognising them as vital social hubs, cultural archives and emotional shelters; rather than seeing the bar merely as a place for drinking, Rueda reframes it as a communal device, a facilitator of daily life and democratic dialogue, particularly in towns where banks, shops and even post offices have disappeared, leaving the bar as the last heartbeat of civic life, a place where the local rhythm is orchestrated, strangers are integrated, and loneliness is alleviated through informal support systems, thus, local councils offering accommodation in exchange for running a bar represent a viable policy model, countering economic disinterest with social regeneration, while also opening a space for inclusion and care, especially for women, migrants and LGTBI communities, often sidelined in traditional rural narratives; Rueda warns that although alcoholism and patriarchal dynamics exist, they are not inherent to the bar but reflect wider societal issues, and that, paradoxically, the communal nature of the bar offers more containment and oversight than isolated domestic consumption; in contrast, the urban bar has become a sanitised zone of consumption, stripped of its spontaneity and social fluidity, subordinated to capitalist efficiency and uniformity, therefore, saving the village bar is not an exercise in nostalgia but a call to reclaim collective life, proposing it as a democratic platform where imaginable futures are brewed over shared time and conversation

Happiness without Fetishes

The key idea: “happiness” is not a monolithic psychological state but a constellation of co-equal domains whose balance enables full and just lives. To reduce well-being to income, utility, or demand reveals more a methodological bias than a humanist understanding of development. Against this narrowing, the capability–functionings framework (Sen) and the architecture of Gross National Happiness (nine domains) reposition public policy in the arena where value truly takes shape: health, education, time, community, culture, governance, living standards, environment, and psychological well-being. Their strength is not utopian but pragmatic: to guide comparative decisions, eliminate suboptimal options, and maximise real freedoms to be and do what people value. This ecology of ends has a dual valence. Intrinsic: living without violence, learning with meaning, cultivating bonds and safeguarding the biosphere are valuable in themselves. Instrumental: domains mutually reinforce each other (e.g., quality education improves health, civic agency, and productivity; vibrant communities reduce conflict and transaction costs). The programmatic consequence is clear: composite metrics and public deliberation must govern — not “correlates” of self-reported satisfaction, easily manipulated or blind to unequal conversion of resources into capabilities. Success, not utopia, demands “joined-up” policies: values in curricula, school-based mindfulness, infrastructures of care, social time, and environmental custodianship, all assessed by cost-effectiveness and their impact on substantive freedoms. The outcome is not another index replacing judgement, but a framework to civilise the economy, reconciling prosperity with dignity and ecological limits. 

A Grammar of Less

In urban and ecological contexts burdened by accumulation, subtraction operates not as destruction but as a method of clarity, a deliberate stripping away that reveals rather than removes. In The Natural, this grammar takes a quiet but insistent form: a geometric trench carved into a forest does not aim to harm but to disclose—the fragility of the soil, the tension between organic continuity and human incision. Here, the act of cutting is not final but propositional; it opens a space where both natural and constructed layers become visible at once. The forest is not backdrop but actor, and the subtraction becomes a form of listening, a way to make palpable what is usually absorbed into landscape. In a world saturated with additions—layers of concrete, signage, digital noise—removal becomes resistance, a sparse but potent vocabulary that foregrounds what is usually hidden. The intervention doesn’t scream; it whispers with precision, allowing the terrain to speak through its own wounds. Subtraction, in this sense, is not an aesthetic gesture but an epistemological one: it uncovers the logic of place, the stratigraphy of time and use, offering a temporary pause from the city’s relentless layering. Rather than impose meaning, it releases latent significance already embedded in the site. In The Natural, art becomes a scalpel of attention, cutting not to sever but to expose, inviting us to reconsider the surface as a threshold rather than a boundary.

A Nonlinear and Phenomenographic Approach

 

University learning unfolds as a nonlinear, dynamic, and often erratic process, challenging conventional epistemological models that assume linear progression and stable cognition, and instead demanding new frameworks capable of capturing its fluid and transformative nature, such as the notion of liminality and the ontoepistemological perspective proposed in this thesis, which reconceptualizes the learning space not as a passive transition but as an active zone of ontological and epistemic transformation where students encounter threshold concepts—critical ideas that restructure understanding and identity—within a liminal space that is inherently unstable, oscillatory, and charged with affective and cognitive turbulence, as evidenced by phenomena such as ontological obstacles, cognitive regression, and hybrid transformations, which resist clear categorization and instead suggest recursive and unpredictable learning trajectories, further articulated through a phenomenographic methodology that in two phases explores how both students and teachers perceive and navigate these conceptual thresholds, drawing on interviews, reflective journals, and observational data to identify not only twelve first-order threshold concepts in educational research but also four meta-concepts—the meaning of educational research, EMIC/ETIC duality, the role of subjectivity, and paradigm awareness—that function as second-order thresholds, reshaping the learner’s epistemic stance and ontological positioning, thereby advancing a vision of higher education as a transformative space where knowledge is not merely acquired but inhabited, negotiated, and reconfigured through situated, embodied, and relational practices that acknowledge the epistemologies of the South, feminist knowledge frameworks, and the cognitive specificities of each learner, offering thus a redefinition of academic formation as a complex journey through ambiguity, breakdown, and reconstitution

Nowadays

Our work consists of active series spanning urbanism, art, science, and humanities, exploring liminal spaces and creating sensitivity layers through the accumulation of experiences. Each discipline interweaves with its context, generating dynamic encounters that challenge permanence and perception. In architecture, projects like the Trole Building in Madrid stand out for transforming industrial structures into adaptable workspaces that dialogue with their surroundings. In the field of installation art, series such as YELLOW BAG use a simple everyday object to mark transitions and presence across urban settings like Madrid and Lagos. From the perspective of science and technology, projects like Psicología Ambiental Hoy delve into human interaction with space through perception and memory, analyzing how environments shape behavior. In film, the COPOS series comprises over 500 videos documenting urban interventions, exploring the idea of an unstable archive. For performance, works like DOBLE CARA investigate duality and perception through choreographic movements and installations. Finally, in the humanities, CAPA (Council of Applied Art and Philosophy) integrates theory and practice, proposing new hermeneutic frameworks to redefine authorship and cultural production. Projects are often situated at the intersection of urban space and social dynamics, using subtle interventions to shift perceptions. Works like Spanish Bar capture the fading essence of traditional community hubs, transforming familiar locations into contexts for reflection on cultural shifts. In the ongoing series TWINS, the city becomes a fragmented reality of mirrored elements and contrasts, creating a dialogue between symmetry and rupture across urban landscapes. The textile-based project Re(T)exHile, presented at the IV Lagos Biennial, explores sustainability and memory through fabric, addressing the dualities of preservation and transformation. In Conversation Installation, ephemeral dialogues become the core medium, turning the spoken word into an art form that evolves with each participant’s input, challenging the traditional stability of exhibitions. Across these projects, the aim is to use art as a lens for rethinking presence, identity, and transformation. Each piece—whether through sculpture, performance, film, or architecture—becomes a tool for examining the boundaries between permanence and impermanence, creating a dialogue between context, action, and memory.

ALL WRITING IS REWRITING

 

Writing, in its deepest academic incarnation, is not a solitary or spontaneous act but rather a dialogic engagement with prior thought, a practice that Tara Brabazon, in her exploration of Joseph Harris’s Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts, frames as both a method and a mindset; to write is to rewrite, not only in terms of editing one's own drafts but in weaving, transforming, and reframing the inherited voices and arguments of others; this is no mechanical citation exercise but a conscious act of interpretation, where meaning is not transferred intact from one scholar to another but emerges through contextual friction, creative critique, and intellectual generosity; Brabazon's emphasis on the collective and historical nature of research calls attention to the legacy of ideas and the responsibility we assume when engaging with them—not as ventriloquists parroting earlier scholarship, but as active participants in an evolving discourse; her metaphor of writing as a cover song underscores this beautifully: a powerful rewriting pays homage while generating difference, echoing yet innovating; through rewriting, academic writers both show their lineage and assert their novelty, enacting what she terms a “social practice of writing”; interpretation, then, becomes a mode of respectful resistance, where we represent others fairly before critiquing them, where paraphrasing is not appropriation but positioning, and referencing is not just avoidance of plagiarism, but an act of scholarly integrity; crucially, Brabazon argues that digital culture has accelerated textual movement but eroded interpretive depth, replacing information literacy with the illusion of it—cut, paste, post; thus, genuine rewriting requires slowness, reflection, and a set of critical questions: what is the argument? what do they think they're doing? why now, and for whom? by engaging with these queries, we reclaim rewriting as interpretation with intent, a rigorous and ethical foundation for all scholarly contribution.