Strikingly, theorizing about digital technologies has led us to recognize many habitual subjects of research as figures against fields that are also worthy of study. Communication, for example, becomes visible only against the field of silence. Silence is critically important for the construction of reality – and the social construction of reality has a complement, the also necessary contemplative construction of reality. Silence is so sensitive and fragile that an inability to achieve it, or to get rid of it, or (...) to correct the wrong kind of silence often provides early indicators of individual, group, communal, and society-wide stresses from information technologies. Indeed, we might treat difficulties with silence as miners treated canaries in coal mines, as early warning signals. The story has already been told that nightingales in London now have to sing so loudly in order to be heard above the ambient noise that the birds are in danger of breaking the noise ordinance law. Surely something has gone awry if nightingales break the law when they sing. Finding ways to protect silence as an arena of personal and social choice is a particularly poignant, evocative, and instructive ethical and policy horizon at this frontier moment for the human species. This article introduces the theory of the contemplative construction of reality, explores what the study of silence tells us about reality construction processes, and outlines a research agenda. (shrink)

This article theorizes and exemplifies reconceptualized teaching practices, both in early childhood education 1 and in a couple of programs within the new Swedish Teacher Education . 2 These programs are tightly knit to the last 12 years of reconceptualized early childhood education practices in and around Stockholm, built on deconstructive, co‐constructive, and re‐constructive principles, inspired by poststructural and feminist poststructural theories. The aim is foremost to work towards a dissolution and/or transgression of the modernist theory‐practice binary that dominates ECE (...) and teacher education practices, where theory is meant to be applied to practice. Student teachers, as well as pre‐school teachers, use what I have conceptualized as deconstructive talks, as a possibility of making visible the dominant discourses of childhood, identity, learning, play, and gender in the performed and documented teaching practices. In teacher education, students’ narratives are also deconstructed. The aim is to transgress teaching‐as‐usual; i.e. dominant and normative ways of thinking and acting in teaching and learning situations. I will suggest an ethics of ‘resistance’, affirmation and becoming, inspired by Derridean deconstructionist thinking, as a professional attitude and reflexive mode for teachers, teacher students and teacher educators. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to analyse the incrimination of ontology and ontological manifestations in reason, articulated speech and social order and argue that such an incrimination, which is characteristic of traditional philosophy, can be explained as a phenomenon of onto-theology. Then I demonstrate that the ideas of Levinas - and to some degree the Derridean response to them - suffer from residues of onto-theology to the extent that they preserve and promote the assumption that ontology is essentially violent. (...) I claim that the Levinasian priority of ethics over ontology and the Derridean treatment of the opposition ‘ethics vs ontology’ rest on an epochal understanding of being. Such an understanding arrests time and echoes old religious doctrines that traditional philosophy preserved in a secular form and handed down to contemporary philosophical thinking. By charging Levinasian and Derridean ideas with onto-theology, I unveil what I consider to be one of the last dogmas of Occidental thought, i.e. the assumption that self-interest and violence are somehow endemic in the human condition. I suggest that we overcome this assumption, if we truly wish to view the I-Thou relation Other-wise. Key Words: Derrida • ethics • evil • Fall • Hegel • Heidegger • I-Thou • Kant • Kierkegaard • Levinas • ontology • onto-theology. (shrink)

T h i s article examines the ethical implications of the desirefor disembodiment situated in the texts and technologies of cyberspace. The article is divided into 2 parts. The first traces the conceptual history of dualism, demonstrating its exclusive cultural politics and investigating the socio-political consequences of encoding this metaphysical information in contemporary media technology. The second part examines the material conditions of new communication technology, arguing that the issue of access reduplicates in practice the exclusivity of dualism. The article (...) concludes by investigating the ethical implications of employing dualistic metaphysics as a legitimizing narrative of media technology and cyberculture. (shrink)

Social robotics aims at designing robots capable of joint interaction with humans. On a conceptual level, sufficient mutual understanding is usually said to be a necessary condition for joint interaction. Against this background, the following questions remain open: in which sense is it legitimate to speak of human–robot joint interaction? What exactly does it mean to speak of humans and robots sufficiently understanding each other to account for human–robot joint interaction? Is such joint interaction effectively possible by reference, e.g., to (...) the mere ascription or simulation of understanding? To answer these questions, we first discuss technical approaches which aim at the implementation of certain aspects of human–human communication and interaction in social robots in order to make robots accessible and understandable to humans and, hence, human–robot joint interaction possible. Second, we examine the human tendency to anthropomorphize in this context, with a view to human understanding of and joint interaction with social robots. Third, we analyze the most prominent concepts of mutual understanding and their implications for human–robot joint interaction. We conclude that it is—at least for the time being—not legitimate to speak of human–robot joint interaction, which has relevant implications both morally and ethically. (shrink)

This article theorizes and exemplifies reconceptualized teaching practices, both in early childhood education (ECE) and in a couple of programs within the new Swedish Teacher Education (since 2001). These programs are tightly knit to the last 12 years of reconceptualized early childhood education practices in and around Stockholm, built on deconstructive, co‐constructive, and re‐constructive principles, inspired by poststructural and feminist poststructural theories. The aim is foremost to work towards a dissolution and/or transgression of the modernist theory‐practice binary that dominates ECE (...) and teacher education practices, where theory is meant to be applied to practice. Student teachers, as well as pre‐school teachers, use what I have conceptualized as deconstructive talks, as a possibility of making visible the dominant discourses of childhood, identity, learning, play, and gender in the performed and documented teaching practices. In teacher education, students’ narratives are also deconstructed. The aim is to transgress teaching‐as‐usual; i.e. dominant and normative ways of thinking and acting in teaching and learning situations. I will suggest an ethics of ‘resistance’, affirmation and becoming, inspired by Derridean deconstructionist thinking, as a professional attitude and reflexive mode for teachers, teacher students and teacher educators. (shrink)