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This introductory chapter opens up with the notion of ‘technologies of trauma’ and the appropriation of trauma as a cultural form in modernity aided by technologies of vision and sound. Trauma in modernity has been intimately welded with witnessing and testimony, illuminating an inter-relationship with technologies which simulates our senses and affect, with its capacities to re-present past events through present consciousness, and its ability to produce a moral economy in their own right. Humanity's reliance on technologies to narrate and circulate trauma as a cultural form of exchange and transaction articulates a moment of transcendence in which media as cultural artefacts reconfigure trauma as a cultural form. The notion of second-hand witnessing and the simulation of trauma as a shared and popular genre unleashes trauma as a resonant genre bound with technologies which renew human bonds. Equally it can be reduced to fiction or give way to compassion fatigue. In historically tracing the movement of technologies of trauma as a cultural form over time from televisual witnessing to its aesthetic or perverse renditions in the digital age, the chapter discerns trauma's machinic bind and its enactment as a cultural artefact couched within the sensorium of affect and ethics. The development of mass technological forms over time, from print to the digital age, also concerns the rise of trauma as a cultural form in terms of witnessing, testimony, memorializing, mourning and commemoration. Within these configurations the traumatized human figure is submerged through time as one equally enacted and abstracted through the formats of technology and consumption.

Given that preschool children with disabilities exhibit three times the rate of challenging behavior as compared to their typically developing peers, and that exhibiting challenging behavior in the preschool years is associated with later academic failure and social rejection, researchers and teachers alike recognize the need to support children with disabilities who use such behavior in the preschool years. This chapter presents how one preschool special education teacher, in accordance with her teaching philosophy, employed a performance-based pedagogy as a positive behavioral approach to working with one child with special needs who used challenging behavior. Through the presentation of a series of vignettes, this teacher’s reflections illuminate how a performance pedagogy relying on the principles of theater improvisation allowed both teacher and student to step outside traditional challenging behavior patterns and scripts. These vignettes and reflections are offered to practitioners and researchers interested in developing holistic and humanistic practices that teachers can use to support children to co-create an expanded behavioral repertoire, thereby increasing their opportunities for both social and academic success.

An autoethnographic account is given in order to depict the building of the author's musical subjectivity through the specific modes of cross-generational and peer-to-peer interaction involving material and emotional investments, discursive constraints, and transgressions. The event of discovering the “sound of silence” is brought in contrast to the more encoded experiences of classical music, especially operatic. Emotionally charged musical events and rituals are revisited (narrated) together with accounts of transgressing the boundaries of inherited musical environments and learned patterns of musical appreciation.

Possible reasons for using kites to kill gazelles are comprehensively reviewed in this article. Even though they are now well inventoried and documented, desert kites are still not well understood, as exemplified by the recurrent controversies about their function and dating. According to the dominant view, kites were hunting structures used to drive and to mass kill large herds of wild ungulates, particularly gazelles. Although kites were intensively used during the Early Bronze Age, some of them could have been built and used before that. Beyond these issues, the cultural and socioeconomic aspects of the kites phenomenon are even less understood, and therefore, we focus on changing reasons for the long-lasting use of kites as hunting devices. We contend that the reasons why they were used during the period of utilization for hunting gazelles changed, in most cases, in response to socioeconomic development. It is hypothesized, for example, that, as a result of urban development, kites may have been increasingly (but not exclusively) used to kill gazelles to trade their products with urban communities and farmers, even though they had other uses as well which are also considered. The main hypothesis presented in this article enables diverse opinions about the types of uses and reasons for utilizing desert kites to be reconciled, including in particular varied reasons given in the literature about why they were used for killing gazelles.

When we take a top-down approach to understanding issues surrounding ROV implementation, we can employ the metaphor either literally or as a form of abstraction hierarchy (Rasmussen, 1986). Literally, the military's necessity for moment-to-moment information mandates a suite of context-specific technological capabilities for sensor and effector systems. This suite includes but is not limited to systems in outer space (such as geo-synchronized orbiting platforms), high altitude atmospheric systems (such as Global Hawk) and other craft which operate less than hundreds of feet from earth down to almost ground level itself.