This article looks at the relationship between logistical power and the assemblages of sites that constitute modern states. Rather than treating states as centralizing institutions and singular sites of power, we treat them as multi-sited. They gain power by using logistical methods of problem solving, using infrastructures to enforce and depersonalize relations of domination and limit the autonomy of elites. But states necessarily solve diverse problems by different means in multiple locations. So, educating children is not continuous with governing colonies (...) even though both are necessary to nineteenth-century states. For this reason, states use logistical means of coordination to link sites, and they make the power of the state seem unitary even though the exercise of state power is not. (shrink)

This paper takes the form of a ‘performative’ dialogue, a recounting of scenes, which alternate, in the mode of a cinematic montage, with academic analysis of the interfaces between boxing, art, and space. In his book Body and Soul: Notebooks on an Apprentice Boxer, sociologist Loïc Wacquant mixes three genres: analytic sociology, depictive ethnography, and short story. He argues that he used this unorthodox methodology ‘to make the reader simultaneously feel and understand how boxers are “gripped” by their craft and (...) viscerally tied to it’. Similarly, in this paper, the overlapping voices of its two authors engage in both performative, creative and intellectual ways with the critiques and social rituals surrounding boxing, ultimately finding that an understanding of boxing as an epistemological encounter gives rise to interesting ways to think through the relationships between art and urban space itself. The paper ranges widely over each author’s personal experience of boxing, analyses of specific artworks both ancient and modern, and an analysis of the psychogeography of urban space, and in particular, Johannesburg. The form of the paper, as it incorporates narrative experience and analytic mode, can be seen as a text that re-enacts the ‘performance’ of boxing and art-making in which the traditional opposition between the two is integrated, if not suspended. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Bitcoin emerged as an alternative monetary system that could circumvent political and financial authorities. A practice in libertarian prefigurative politics, Bitcoin demonstrates the capacity for online subgroups to creatively appropriate internet-based technologies to enact alternative futures. Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology clarifies this capacity and outlines the significance of agency in technical action. As technology mediates many social relations, it has a significant role in the reproduction of social power. Technological agency (...) is therefore a crucial site of resistance in which users can form alternative, democratic rationalizations of technology. Yet are such instances of agency intrinsically democratic? In analysing this aspect of Feenberg’s theory, this article argues that Bitcoin represents a ‘popular rationalization’ of technology – a creative appropriation of technology that empowers some groups while lacking the ethical justification necessary to be considered democratic. (shrink)

Section 1 of this thesis investigates one issue in meta-ethics, namely, the nature of moral judgments. What are moral judgments? What does it mean by "wrong" when we assert "Killing is wrong?" Neo-sentimentalism is a meta-ethical theory which holds that the judgment that killing wrong is the judgment that it is appropriate to have a particular negative emotion towards the action. In other words, to judge that murder is wrong is to judge that we have a right reason for having (...) a negative emotion towards the behavior. In the framework of neo-sentimentalism, the concepts of wrongness consist of negative emotions. If the moral judgment is the judgment that it is appropriate to have a negative emotion towards the action, and the concept of wrongness contains a negative emotion, then the following question is what emotions are. In section 2, I endorse the bodily attitudinal theory of emotions, a view which holds that a conscious physiological reaction which induces behavior disposition and the change of facial expression and internal organs is necessary for having an emotion. This section also articulates and replies to three major objections towards the bodily attitudinal theory of emotion. (shrink)

In recent years, the vast increase in information flows has made it possible to instantly connect location-dependent information with physical spaces. These technologies have provided new forms of the representation of space as much as new forms of perception through tools and techniques used in land surveying, remote sensing, etc. From a critical point of view, pervasive computing, location-based applications, or, in other words, “locative media” provide an interesting framework to understand how these technologies relate to our understanding of space (...) and place. Concretely, we want to examine how the uses of locative media in social-oriented artworks interact with people's sense of place. This article therefore discusses contemporary theories on space related to media and technology with a specific focus on the conceptualization of the notion of place. It also relates these theories to the study of different locative media artworks: Canal Accessible, Bio Mapping, Disappearing Places, and Coffee Deposits. We contend that locative media artworks act upon distinctive ways to understand the mediation of technology in current place-making practices. (shrink)

In this paper we address a frontier topic in the humanities, namely how the cultural and natural construction that we call landscape affects well-being and health. Following an updated review of evidence-based literature in the fields of medicine, psychology, and architecture, we propose a new theoretical framework called “processual landscape,” which is able to explain both the health-landscape and the medical agency-structure binomial pairs. We provide a twofold analysis of landscape, from both the cultural and naturalist points of view: in (...) order to take into account its relationship with health, the definition of landscape as a cultural product needs to be broadened through naturalization, grounding it in the scientific domain. Landscape cannot be distinguished from the ecological environment. For this reason, we naturalize the idea of landscape through the notion of affordance and Gibson’s ecological psychology. In doing so, we stress the role of agency in the theory of perception and the health-landscape relationship. Since it is the result of continuous and co-creational interaction between the cultural agent, the biological agent and the affordances offered to the landscape perceiver, the processual landscape is, in our opinion, the most comprehensive framework for explaining the health-landscape relationship. The consequences of our framework are not only theoretical, but ethical also: insofar as health is greatly affected by landscape, this construction represents something more than just part of our heritage or a place to be preserved for the aesthetic pleasure it provides. Rather, we can talk about the right to landscape as something intrinsically linked to the well-being of present and future generations. (shrink)

The mobile phone has become part of our everyday lives with astonishing speed. Over four billion people now have access to mobile phones, and this number keeps increasing. Mobile media technologies shape how we communicate with each other, and relate to the world. This raises questions about their influence on identity. Medium-specific properties and user-practices challenge the idea that we understand ourselves through stories. It is proposed that the notion of play sheds new light on how technologies shape identities. The (...) mobile phone mediates identities on four play levels: we play on the mobile, with the mobile, through the mobile, and at the same time we are played by the mobile. Mobile media bring new freedom of movement. Yet at the same time they constrict us. In this dialectic we become moving circles. (shrink)

Often understood as synonymous with “oral history” in Indigenous title and rights cases in Canada, “oral tradition” as theorized by Jan Vansina is complexly imbricated in the European genealogy of “scientific history” and the archival science of Diplomatics with roots in the development of property law and memory from the time of Justinian. Focusing on Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia, which resulted in the first declaration of Aboriginal title in Canada, this paper will discuss Tsilhqot’in law in the context of (...) the court’s deployment of Vansina’s theory and its genealogy, and conclude that “oral tradition” functions as a legal fiction enabling the court to remain in the familiar archive of its own historiography while claiming to listen to the Elders. (shrink)

This article investigates the embodied identities of Hong Kong gay men in two different `sites of desire', namely London and Hong Kong. In London, Hong Kong gay men have constantly encountered the intertwining relationships between race and sexuality in the constellation of the Western construction of body/desire/masculinity. By contrast, Hong Kong gay men in Hong Kong tend to place more emphasis on issues of family and culture. The main site of struggle for Hong Kong gay men in Hong Kong is (...) the family-oriented and community-based environment. They adopt not a confrontational politics in a constitutional sense but rather derive tactics of microscopic resistance against societal and familial domination. By comparing 34 Hong Kong gay men living in London and Hong Kong, I argue the divergent constructions of being gay in these two contexts. Through the `voices' of these gay men, I criticize the `Western' construction of identity/the body and offer new insights into the discussion of gay identities. (shrink)

This article explores the carnal dimensions of existence through ethnographic research in a mixed martial arts club. Mixed martial arts (MMA) is an emergent sport where competitors in a ring or cage utilize strikes (punches, kicks, elbows and knees) as well as submission techniques to defeat opponents. Through data gathered from in-depth interviews with MMA practitioners and participant observation in an MMA club, I elucidate the social processes that are integral to the production of an MMA fighter habitus. I examine (...) how body techniques are learned and become attached to the identity of mixed martial arts fighters. Using Crossley’s concept of reflexive body techniques, I examine how MMA fighters engage in body callusing through use of reflexive body techniques thereby allowing them to withstand the rigors of the sport. (shrink)

This article seeks to lay out an analysis of Giorgio Agamben’s central claims with regard to the formation of a theory of citationality. By juxtaposing Walter Benjamin’s theory of citations alongside his more recent, critical engagements with the Western theological tradition, Agamben sets himself the goal of redefining ethics along Levinasian lines in order to arrive at a respect for the face of ‘whatever’ being before us, the true source towards which all citations point.

Within capitalist modernity, `children' and `culture' were ideologically positioned as `sacred' in opposition to the `profane' sphere of commerce and industry. In the last quarter of the 20th century, this romantic construction of childhood as a time of enchantment was appropriated by the `children's culture industry' and re-inscribed as a marketing strategy. Capitalist childhood was reconstituted as a time of consumption. In invoking the myth of the `sacred child', however, capital also elicits ambivalence about the `profanity' of commercial intrusion into (...) the domain of childhood. Similarly, the narratives of `good' versus `evil' through which children's culture is organized can be deployed in opposition to the conditions under which global capital produces children's consumer goods. While the cultural tension surrounding the commercialization of childhood has diminished as money itself takes on the aura of the `sacred', the residual power of romantic mythology creates potential for critical engagement on the terrain of capitalist childhood. (shrink)

The Problem of Application investigates the multiple viewpoints in defining a critical aesthetic in applied arts practice. Amongst organisations, participants, and facilitators there are varying wants and needs in any creative project with an educational agenda. The product of arts based health initiatives often seek to inform and educate, whereby an aesthetic standard may seem contrary to this participatory approach. This research maintains that an aesthetic approach is a lively portion of the collaborative dialogue, which requires interrogation and consideration for (...) a successful outcome. Through the analysis of a participatory arts project completed in West Africa addressing youth issues and HIV/AIDS, The Problem of Application seeks to uncover the multiple facets surrounding the defining of aesthetics in applied practice. The project entitled Youth Visions: Transforming our Futures Together worked with students aged 17–21 to develop an outdoor mural and a live performance inspired by the traditions of local festivals. With an anthropological approach to aesthetic criticism, Youth Visions revealed the multiple layers that define our focus of appreciation. (shrink)

Most academic publications refer to Parkour as a subversive and embodied tactic that challenges hegemonic discourses of discipline and control. Architecture becomes the playful ground where new ways to move take form. These approaches rarely address the material and embodied relations that occur in these practices and remain on the discursive plane of cultural signifiers. A theory of movement between bodies as the founding aspect of Parkour unfolds alternative concepts of body, space, time and movement beyond the discursive. Movement becomes (...) the leitmotif for a re-conceptualization of the relations between subjects and objects and abandons their division. With the example of Parkour, I will challenge anthropocentric approaches toward embodiment and instead foreground open-ended shifting configurations of places and their relation to movement. Parkour re-shapes rigid concepts of places and their human encounter through movement. Through its encounter with obstacles Parkour activates the silent potential for movement located in the relation between bodies and thus reaches beyond material boundaries (e.g., a wall). As a deterritorializing practice, I will use Parkour to re-consider the relations between different bodies such as architectural configurations, subjects and their urban ecologies to develop a relational model for movement to shape our everyday encounters with matter. (shrink)

It is generally acknowledged that much contemporary education takes place within a dominant audit culture, in which accountability becomes a powerful driver of educational practices. In this culture, both pupils and teachers risk being configured as a means to an assessment and target-driven end: pupils are schooled within a particular paradigm of education. The article discusses some ethical issues raised by such schooling, particularly the tensions arising for teachers, and by implication, teacher educators who prepare and support teachers for work (...) in situations where vocational aims and beliefs may be in conflict with instrumental aims. The article offers De Certeau's concept of la perruque to suggest an opening to playful engagement for human ends in education, as a way of contending with and managing the tensions generated. I use the concept to recover an idea of solidarity for teacher educators and teachers to enable ethical teaching in difficult times. (shrink)

It is time to challenge the issue of pleasure associated with the core of medical practice. Its importance is made clear through its opposite: unhappiness—something which affects doctors in a rather worrying way. The paper aims to provide a discussion on pleasure on reliable grounds. Plato’s conception of techne is a convenient model that offers insights into the unique practice of medicine, which embraces in a single purposive action several heterogeneous dimensions. In Aristotle’s Ethics, pleasure appears to play a central (...) role for action’s assessment and intensification. Pleasure is also tightly associated with the Kantian faculty of reflective judgment, which operates at the heart of clinical reasoning. Indeed, practicing medicine means to deal with the particular and the manifold, requiring clinical judgment, but also relying on embodied habitus . With Bourdieu’s notion of habitus , pleasure is the mark of a happy practice, which presupposes a deep involvement in one’s field. Throughout our inquiry, the question of pleasure comes to offer a critical reappraisal of real medical practice and leads to consider ethics more as a component of techne than as a separate realm of concern. (shrink)

This study addresses the question of the nature of indigenous people's connection to the land, and the implications of this for articulating these connections in legal arenas where questions of Aboriginal title and land claims are at issue. The idea of 'place' is developed, based in a phenomenology of dwelling which takes profound attachments to home places as shaping and being shaped by ontological orientation and social organization. In this theory of the 'senses of place', the author emphasizes the relationships (...) between meaning and power experienced and embodied in place, and the social systems of property and territory that forms indigenous land tenure systems. To explore this theoretical notion of senses of place, the study develops a detailed ethnography of a Coast Salish Aboriginal community on southeast Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. Through this ethnography of dwelling, the ways in which places become richly imbued with meanings and how they shape social organization and generate social action are examined. Narratives with Coast Salish community members, set in a broad context of discussing land claims, provide context for understanding senses of place imbued with ancestors, myth, spirit, power, language, history, property, territory and boundaries. The author concludes in arguing that by attending to a theorized understanding of highly local senses of place, nuanced conceptions of indigenous relationships to land which appreciate indigenous relations to land in their own terms can be articulated. (shrink)

This paper offers a close analysis of the usage of the term circulus to refer to groups of Romans gathered together for various reasons. I identify such groupings as primarily non-elite in character and suggest that examination of their representation in our sources offers insight into popular sociability and communication at Rome. While circuli and the related figure of the circulator are often associated with what is considered to be a debased popular culture, they can also be seen as part (...) of a more general culture of popular sociability which is politically threatening to a Roman governing class that desired to monopolize and control speech and communication and in whose interest it was to channel popular political participation into the official political institutions of the city. This paper also looks at some of the strategies developed by Roman elites to maintain, in response to such unauthorized activity, their moral, intellectual, and political hegemony over the rest of the population. (shrink)

Foucault's work has had a profound impact on the medical humanities over the last decade or so. However, most work to date has focused on Foucault's earlier writings rather than his later contributions on the self and governmentality. This article assesses the significance of the concept of governmentality for critical scholarship in the medical humanities, particularly in creating ethical awareness in the field of health care. It examines the context for Foucault's later work, and contributions arising from scholarship building on (...) this work. The governmentality literature, it is argued, raises novel questions about the ways we have come to think about health care in late modern societies. However, there are some limitations with this body of work which have not been fully acknowledged by scholars. The article discusses some of these limitations and offers some suggestions for a fruitful way forward. (shrink)

Continental philosophies of science tend to exemplify holistic themes connecting order and contingency, questions and answers, writers and readers, speakers and hearers. Such philosophies of science also tend to feature a fundamental emphasis on the historical and cultural situatedness of discourse as significant; relevance of mutual attunement of speaker and hearer; necessity of pre-linguistic cognition based in human engagement with a common socio-cultural historical world; role of narrative and metaphor as explanatory; sustained emphasis on understanding questioning; truth seen as horizonal, (...) aletheic, or perspectival; and a tolerance for paradoxical and complex forms of expression. Continental philosophy of science is thus more comprehensive than philosophy of science in the analytic tradition, including (and as analytic philosophy of science does not tend to include) perspectives on the history of science as well as the social and practical dimensions of scientific discovery. Where analytic philosophy is about reducing or, indeed, eliminating the perennial problems of philosophy, Continental philosophy is all about thinking and that will mean, as both Heidegger and Nietzsche emphasize, making such problems more not less problematic. (shrink)

This paper examines the discursive construction of collective identity in several feminist organizations, as a way of shedding new light on the debate over essentializing or totalizing terms in contemporary feminist/postmodernist theory. We argue that while this debate is about language, it has remained largely untouched by the insights of a discursive approach. The latter as we take it up here treats language as irremediably strategic or interested. In contrast, the feminist argument over essentializing terms appears to hold to a (...) correspondence version of language, a position which limits the debate in fatal ways. Part 1 reviews the argument that terms such as women, feminist and feminist identity are essentializing discourses which dominate by silencing difference. Part 2 then considers the way one such concept – feminist identity – is actually constructed and used in the routine talk of members of feminist organizations. In Part 3 we draw out the implications of a discursive approach to such terms for the feminist/postmodernist debate. (shrink)

This essay attempts to think through the impact of what we call our "transitional age" on organizational life, specifically on organizational regulation, and thus on organizational moral life. It provides notes towards a reconceptualization of organizational moral life that may be helpful to all students and practitioners of organization and business ethics who would want to make sense of the often significant contextuality, unpredictability, and undecidability of contemporary organizational life.

Experiences of embodied remembering are familiar and diverse. We settle bodily into familiar chairs or find our way easily round familiar rooms. We inhabit our own kitchens or cars or workspaces effectively and comfortably, and feel disrupted when our habitual and accustomed objects or technologies change or break or are not available. Hearing a particular song can viscerally bring back either one conversation long ago, or just the urge to dance. Some people explicitly use their bodies to record, store, or (...) cue memories. Others can move skilfully, without stopping to think, in complex and changing environments thanks to the cumulative expertise accrued in their history of fighting fires, or dancing, or playing hockey. The forms of memory involved in these cases may be distinct, operating at different timescales and levels, and by way of different mechanisms and media, but they often cooperate in the many contexts of our practices of remembering. (shrink)

Draws from Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory to explore the concept of selfhood. This original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including immigrants, exiles, (...) and inhabitants of borderlands. Ortega’s project forges new directions not only in Latina feminist thinking on such issues as borders, mestizaje, marginality, resistance, and identity politics, but also connects this analysis to the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and to such concepts as being-in-the-world, authenticity, and intersubjectivity. The pairing of the personal and the political in Ortega’s work is illustrative of the primacy of lived experience in the development of theoretical understandings of who we are. In addition to bringing to light central metaphysical issues regarding the temporality and continuity of the self, Ortega models a practice of philosophy that draws from work in other disciplines and that recognizes the important contributions of Latina feminists and other theorists of color to philosophical pursuits. Mariana Ortega is Professor of Philosophy at John Carroll University and coeditor (with Linda Martín Alcoff) of Constructing the Nation: A Race and Nationalism Reader, also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

By utilizing words, photographs, and motion pictures, this multimodal and multisited project traces a rhizomatic genealogy of Russian Cosmism—a nineteenth century political theology promoting a universal human program for overcoming death, resurrecting ancestors, and traveling through the cosmos—throughout post-Soviet techno-utopian projects and imaginaries. I illustrate how Cosmist techno-utopian, futurist, and other-than-human discourse exist as Weberian “elective affinities” within diverse ecologies of the imagination, transmitting a variety of philosophies and political programs throughout trans-temporal, yet philosophically bounded, communities. With a particular focus (...) on the United States and Ukraine, and taking an apophatic analytical position, I dissect how different groups of philosophers, technologists, and publics interact(ed) with Cosmism, as well as how seemingly disparate communities (re)shape and deterritorialize Cosmist political theology in an attempt to legitimize their constructed political imaginaries. (shrink)

This project explores the political economy, logic, strategies, agents, values, and ethical implications of this latest iteration of modern capitalism, and it seeks to delineate what surveillance capitalism is and what its consequences are for human dignity and worth. Using technologies of which they are ignorant, surveillance capitalists interfere with our ability to become ourselves individually and collectively. Without consent, they invade privacy, impede moral autonomy, harm democracy, and muddle care. Surveillance capitalists also violate a number of foundational ethical principles, (...) failing the standards of Kant, Mill, and Aristotle. I sketch out a broad alternative to surveillance capitalism, one where our media systems are built on decentered understandings of a care-based democracy. Reinvigorating both the press and collective self-government, the caring digital citizen has less need for surveillance, requiring good faith understanding and the moral autonomy to pursue excellence. (shrink)

This article draws attention to the production and circulation of genetic knowledge among three constituencies—laboratory researchers, clinicians, and health advocates— all of whom have a stake in research on a heritable connective tissue condition known as Marfan syndrome. National and international conferences provide a context that brings members of these groups together. Such meetings are performance settings, which include the display of visual images depicting various aspects of Marfan syndrome and of the bodies and lived experience of those who have (...) it. The article examines how these images are interpreted, appropriated, and exchanged and how their circulation is both grounded in local knowledge and the grounds for transformative translocal practice. (shrink)

Philosophically engaged fiction often employs ideas in ways that reflect the exploitation-exploration dilemma in developmental psychology: by exploiting well articulated theories by enacting their conflicts, or by exploring the uncertainties of puzzling ontologies or moral complexities. We can see this in action in many works, but some novels of ideas seek to defy such categorization, with lessons for readers and writers. This paper analyzes two recent works – The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018) and Elizabeth McKenzie’s The Portable Veblen (2016) (...) – to show how they deal with related concerns and settings through very different approaches. While Powers offers an enactment, its complexity seeks to evade the book becoming a simple polemic. McKenzie’s protagonist explores her muddled identity, philosophy and much else while flirting with the enactment of ideas when she does not comprehend. (shrink)

Bringing together a genealogy of authors, concepts, and aesthetic case studies, this article aims to contribute to the discussion on ordinary aesthetics by focusing on the tensions that are intrinsic to walking as a fundamental embodied action in everyday urban life. These tensions concern the movement of walking itself and its relation to one’s surroundings, but it also concerns a certain complementarity between home (familiarity) and wandering. Experiencing space and thresholds that disrupt one’s relationship with home and the everyday can (...) be understood as part of a modern “anti-home” tendency that lies at the core of several artistic and aesthetic practices. On the other hand, the study of walking and its relationship with the ordinary has also been enhanced and complexified by the mediation of images and technologies of reproduction. Approaching the paradoxes and ambiguities of everydayness from the perspective of walking allows us to better understand the ordinary as an in-between concept composed of evidence and mystery, familiarity and strangeness. Walking itself, as an ordinary element of life, is an unstable stabilisation, an unconsciousness that may become awareness, an immersive action that knows interruptions, a way of repeating paths that can also lead to detours and discoveries. (shrink)

The purpose of grant peer review is to identify the most excellent and promising research projects. However, sociologists of science and STS scholars have shown that peer review tends to promote solid low-risk projects at the expense of more original and innovative projects that often come with higher risk. It has also been shown that the review process is affected by significant measures of chance. Against this background, the aim of this study is to theorize the notions of academic judgment (...) and agonistic chance, and to present and analyze situations in which expert reviewers are faced with the challenge of trying to decide which grant proposals to select when there is strong disagreement. The empirical analysis is based on ethnographic observations of ten panel groups at the Swedish Research Council in the areas of natural and engineering sciences. By focusing on disagreement, the study provides a more in-depth understanding of how agonistic chance creeps into the peer review process and becomes part of the consensus that is created. (shrink)

Most political philosophers are reluctant to treat cultural rights as basic. Instead, the predominant view is that cultural interests are only important derivatively, in virtue of their contribution to some other interest. In this chapter I argue that political philosophers ought to follow international human rights norms regarding the importance of culture. Not only do international human rights courts and committees come to the right conclusion about the significance of culture, but, as importantly, they come to this conclusion because they (...) think about what cultural rights protect inthe right way. Contemporary political philosophers prefer to treat cultural rights as derivative in part because they tend to treat culture as a “resource” or a “good,” but this is a mistake. Cultural rights are better understood as protecting and promoting an activity. Respecting and promoting cultural participation is a constitutive element of showing respect for human dignity because, like free expression, political participation, and freedom of conscience, cultural participation is something persons do as part of making a life for themselves. (shrink)

This chapter explores the personal and professional obstacles faced by Humanities and Social Science scholars contemplating pre-publication of their scholarly work in an on-line network. Borrowing a theoretical framework from the radical educational theorist Ivan Illich, it also develops the idea that pre-publication networks offer higher education a bottom-up, decentralized alternative to business-modeled e-learning. If learners would only embrace this more anarchical medium, appreciating writing for pre-publication as a process of open-ended discovery rather than product delivery, then the prospect of (...) deinstitutionalizing e-learning could become an exciting new reality. The chapter’s methodology is a combination of normative-theoretical analysis and small sample (n=2) case study based on the author’s personal and professional experiences. While the generalizability (or external validity) of the conclusions is limited, the author hopes to motivate further inquiry into the connection between on-line pre-publication and e-learning. (shrink)

Adolescents have gradually become a vital group of interacting with social media recommendation algorithms. Although numerous studies have been conducted to investigate negative reactions that the dark side of recommendation algorithms brings to social media users, little is known about the resistance intention and behavior based on their agency in the daily process of encountering algorithms. Focusing on the concept of algorithm resistance, this study used a two-path model to investigate the algorithmic resistance of rural Chinese adolescents in their daily (...) use of short video apps. The findings revealed that the perceived threat to freedom, algorithmic literacy, and peer influence were positively associated with the resistance willingness and intention; while the independent psychology on algorithmic recommendations significantly weakened resistance willingness and intention. Furthermore, this study verified the mediating role of resistance willingness and intention between the above independent variables and resistance behavior. Additionally, the positive impact of resistance willingness on resistance intention was confirmed. In conclusion, this study offers a comprehensive approach to further understanding adolescents’ algorithmic resistance awareness and behavior by combining psychological factors, personal competency, and interpersonal influences, as well as two types of resistance reactions. (shrink)

Anarchism is by far the least broadly understood ideology and the least studied academically. Though highly influential, both historically and in terms of recent social movements, anarchism is regularly dismissed. Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach is a welcome addition to this growing field, which is widely debated but poorly understood. Occupying a distinctive position in the study of anarchist ideology, this volume, authored by a handpicked group of established and rising scholars, investigates how anarchists often seek to sharpen their message and (...) struggle to determine what ideas and actions are central to their identity. Moving beyond defining anarchism as simply an ideology or political theory, this book examines the meanings of its key concepts, which have been divided into three categories: Core, Adjacent, and Peripheral concepts. Each chapter focuses on one important concept, shows how anarchists have understood the concept, and highlights its relationships to other concepts. Although anarchism is often thought of as a political topic, the interdisciplinary nature of Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach makes it of interest to students and scholars across the social sciences, liberal arts, and the humanities. (shrink)

This article explores yet another paradox – aside from the privacy paradox – related to the datafication of media: citizens trust least the media they use most It investigates the role that daily life plays in shaping the trust that citizens place in datafied media. The study reveals five sets of heuristics guiding the trust assessments of citizens: characteristics of media organisations, old media standards, context of use and purpose, experiences of datafication and understandings of datafication. The article discusses the (...) use of these heuristics and the value that everyday life holds in assessing trust in datafied media. It concludes that, guided by a partial ‘structure of perception’ and enticed into trusting datafied media in the context of their daily lives, citizens may be highly concerned by the datafication of media but use them nevertheless. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Within the field of Human Resource Management (HRM), it is assumed that people management practices, including teamworking and cultural initiatives, enable knowledge sharing because they encourage employees to work collaboratively. Perhaps less well understood are occasions when such efforts fail to deliver knowledge sharing arrangements. Here we employ the critical realist concept of emergence to situate the introduction of people management practices in support of knowledge sharing, to examine how such efforts create the emergent properties to either share or (...) not to share knowledge. Then we refine the critical realist concept of communicative reflexivity to explain why employees decide to engage or withdraw from collaborative work. By focusing on reflexivity as not just an ‘internal dialogue’ but also as an ‘external conversation’ we demonstrate why the situated circumstances of work interactions is a significant form of mediation between social contexts and practice in support (or not) of knowledge sharing. (shrink)

Images share a common feature with all phenomena of imagination, since they make us aware of what is not present or what is fictional and not existent at all. From this perspective, the philosophical approach of Kendall Lewis Walton—born in 1939 and active since the 1960s at the University of Michigan—is perhaps one of the most notable contributions to image theory. Walton is an authoritative figure within the tradition of analytical aesthetics. His contributions have had a considerable influence on a (...) broad range of topics, such as the role of categories in the understanding of the arts (Walton, “Categories of Art”. Philosophical Review, 79(3): 334–367, 1970), the ambiguous nature of emotions in the experience of fictional stories (Walton, “Fearing Fictions”. The Journal of Philosophy, 75(1): 5–25, 1978), the transparency of photographic images compared to other depictions (Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Noûs, 18(1): 67–72, 1984) and, above all, the development of a general theory of fiction as imaginative activity. His 1990 book Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts collects and re-elaborates articles Walton published on the subject since the 1970s. Though he does not attempt to give a definitive answer for what imagination is, Walton thoroughly investigates its role in all cases of representational works, describing depictions as a specific case of “make-believe” activity: images, in short, are specific props of a visual and perceptual “make-believe” game. (shrink)

Proceedings of PhiloWeb 2012, workshop at WWW 2012, on the philosophy of the Web.

This article analyses the aesthetics of silent political resistance by focusing on refugees’ silent political action. The starting point for the analysis is Jacques Rancière’s philosophy and his theorisation of the aesthetics of politics. The article enquires into the aesthetic meaning of silent refugee activism and interprets how refugees’ silent acts of resistance can constitute aesthetically effective resistance to what can be called the ‘speech system’ of statist, representative democracy. The article analyses silence as a political tactic and interprets the (...) emancipatory meaning of silent politics for refugees. It argues that refugees’ silent acts of political resistance can powerfully affect aesthetic, political subversion in prevailing legal-political contexts. (shrink)

Michel De Certeau’s scholars have rarely explored the pedagogical potential of the French thinker’s thought. This paper aims at reconstructing the question of the teaching practice in De Certeau’s works and, building on such reconstruction, it proposes a possible ‘heterological’ comprehension of teaching. Moving from an early writing dealing specifically with the teacher’s identity, the paper shows how the famous dyad of strategies and tactics exposed in The practice of everyday life can be usefully applied to teaching and studying and (...) helps further elaborate the question of teaching. From this analysis, the teacher will emerge as the owner of a strategic knowledge that, if he wants to teach, needs to be altered by the uncanny and tactical presence of the student. Teaching will finally be shown as the practice of alteration of knowledge operated by the other of such knowledge, namely, the student. In such alteration of knowledge lies the potential of a heterological comprehension of teaching. (shrink)

The Snowden revelations in 2013 redrew the lines of debate surrounding surveillance, exposing the extent of state surveillance across multiple nations and triggering legislative reform in many. In the UK, this was in the form of the Investigatory Powers Act. As a contribution to understanding resistance to expanding state surveillance activities, this article reveals the intertwining of diverse interests and voices which speak in opposition to UK state surveillance. Through a computational topic modelling-based mixed methods analysis of the submissions made (...) to the draft Investigatory Powers Bill consultation, the article demonstrates the diversity and intersection of discourses within different actor groups, including civil society and the technology industry. We demonstrate that encryption is a key issue for these groups, and is additionally conflated with a human rights discourse. This serves to unite seemingly disparate interests by imbuing encryption with a responsibility for the protection of human rights, but also threatens to legitimate corporate interests and distract from their own data-driven activities of surveillance capitalism. (shrink)

We live in an era that normalized absurdism and abnormality. From successive devastating economic and environmental havoc, the world is now before a pandemic with a lethal footprint throughout the planet. The pandemonium became global. This paper situates the current COVID-19 pandemic within the context of an endless multi-plethora of devastating sagas pushing humanity into an unimaginable great regression. In doing so, the paper examines, how such pandemic reflects the very colors of an intentional epistemological blindness that frames Eurocentric reasoning, (...) which crippled the political economy of global capitalism deepening and accelerating a never-ending and non-stop crisis that started in 2008. The paper explores also the social construction of the current pandemic and argues for alternatives ways to think and to do education and curriculum theory alternatively to challenge Modern Western Eurocentric reasoning. In doing so, advances itinerant curriculum theory as a just approach, a just alter-curriculum ‘theory now’, one that respects the world’s pluri-epistemological diversity, and aims to walk way from utopias framed within the borders determined by coloniality towards an anti-decolonial climax, and ‘heretopia’. (shrink)

This article unpacks the notion of ‘carrying’ as an embodied set of influences that bear upon our research practices and journeys. It is widely recognised that we acquire and carry a body of books as intellectual companionship. It is not however readily acknowledged how we as researchers carry sounds, aesthetics, traumas and obsessions, which stay with us and take time to appear before us, as methodological projects within our grasp. Researchers are carriers embarked on exchanges in a double sense. Firstly, (...) we are embodied and affected by our life trajectories. There is a temporality to our research which is entwined with the very knots of our lives. Secondly, we are carriers through the specific ways in which we activate our research materials and relationships. In this article, the two elements of carrying are underlined as being intimately related. (shrink)

In this contribution, the author contends that the way in which Pieter Lemmens interprets the transcendental of technology, particularly through the work of Bernard Stiegler, is only one of the possible ways of understanding the transcendental of technology. His thesis is that there are many other transcendentals of technology besides technology itself. The task of a philosophy of technology beyond the empirical turn could precisely consist in exploring these multiple transcendentals of technology, along with their multiple relations. In the first (...) section, the author considers and criticizes the “empirical transcendentality” that characterizes most of the current philosophical approaches to technology, in particular when it comes to ethical issues. In the second section, he proposes to include Lemmens’ perspective in a more general theory about the transcendentals of technology. The transcendentals of technology include social symbolic forms, culture, language, media, and many other dimensions that philosophy of technology has not systematically explored yet. (shrink)