Examining the connections between geontologic and interrelational theories of place counter-mapping practices offers important methodological and pedagogic lessons in environmental sustainability e...

Forensics is proposed as a means to understand, trace, and recompile data and computational activities. It has a securitocratic dimension and one that is being developed as a means of opening processes, events and systems into a more public state. This article proposes an analysis of forces at play in the circulation of a ‘screener’ of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight and associated files, to suggest that forensic approaches used to control flows of data may be repurposed for dis­semination. The (...) article maps a brief history of digital forensics and sets out some of its political entailments, indicating further lines of enquiry regarding the inter-relation of technosocial powers constituted in the interactions between forensics and coun­ter-measures. The article proposes that the posthumanities are partially constituted by a renewed relationship between questions of culture, subjectivity, knowledge and the technical. Some propositions for the technical as grounds for cultural politics are made. (shrink)

In the creation of maps, scientific knowledge related to mathematics and physics combines with knowledge specific to graphic or artistic disciplines. Since all maps are artifacts whose aesthetic qualities convey information that simultaneously engages the fields of ontology, epistemology, and politics, they are objects of undeniable interest for philosophical inquiry. Following what has been termed “the cartographic turn in social sciences”, The Art of Mapping Between Land and Mind delves into two intertwining issues. On one side, it examines how (...) the aesthetic properties of maps convey cognitive, cultural, and political meanings. On the other, it explores the role of visual arts in reflecting on cartographic thought, shaping both its methods and motivations. The volume is divided into four sections. Embracing the point of view of both the philosopher and the geographer, the first one sheds light on the relationship between epistemology and cartography (Kukla; Costantini; Tanney). The second addresses mapmaking as an art form (Tanca; Haugdal) or, conversely, considers maps from the perspective of their aesthetic properties (Török; Ogundiwin; Elhaik). The third focuses on the digital condition of today’s cartography (Tschochohei; Quaranta; Keller). Finally, the last section includes two contributions that represent attempts to guide cartography toward its future (Bosca; Ianniello). Opening this issue, a special essay by Elizabeth Povinelli offers a generous précis of her upcoming book. (shrink)

Background: Ethical care in maternity is fundamental to providing care that both prevents harm and does good, and yet, there is growing acknowledgement that disrespect and abuse routinely occur in this context, which indicates that current ethical frameworks are not adequate. Care ethics offers an alternative to the traditional biomedical ethical principles. Research aim: The aim of the study was to determine whether a correlation exists between midwifery-led care and care ethics as an important first step in an action research (...) project. Research design: Template analysis was chosen for this part of the action research. Template analysis is a design that tests theory against empirical data, which requires pre-set codes. Participants and context: A priori codes that represent midwifery-led care were generated by a stakeholder consultative group of nine childbearing women using nominal group technique, collected in Perth, Western Australia. The a priori codes were applied to a predesigned template with four domains of care ethics. Ethical considerations: Ethics approval was granted by the Edith Cowan University research ethics committee REMS no. 2019-00296-Buchanan. Findings: The participants generated eight a priori codes representing ethical midwifery care, such as: 1.1 Relationship with Midwife; 1.2 Woman-centred care; 2.1 Trust women’s bodies and abilities; 2.2. Protect normal physiological birth; 3.1. Information provision; 3.2. Respect autonomy; 4.1. Birth culture of fear (midwifery-led care counter-cultural) and 4.2. Recognition of rite of passage. The a priori codes were mapped to the care ethics template. The template analysis found that midwifery-led care does indeed demonstrate care ethics. Discussion: Care ethics takes into consideration what principle-based bioethics have previously overlooked: relationship, context and power. Conclusion: Midwifery-led care has been determined in this study to demonstrate care ethics, which suggest that further research is defensible with the view that it could be incorporated into the ethical codes and conduct for the midwifery profession. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Caring for Landscapes of Justice in Perilous Settler EnvironmentsMishuana Goemanindians are the "singing remnants" or "graffiti," in the words of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson ("i am graffiti"). The forms this graffiti takes, our inscriptions on the landscape, are as numerous as our Nations, abundant as our ancestors who loved, lived, and passed down knowledge of our lands and histories. "You are the result of the love of thousands," writes Linda (...) Hogan, who beseeches us to listen to the environment surrounding us (159). Deborah Miranda (Coastal Esselen and Chumash) reminds us that we are also the result of violent histories, in her tribal memoir Bad Indians, a book that relishes the tales of her ancestors who resist and act out to survive. This harm, genocide, and settler mapping of worlds also must be attuned to in our surroundings and in "our bodies [that are] bridges over which our descendants cross, spanning unimaginable landscapes of loss" (Miranda 74). Visual cartographic mapping has been part and parcel of the erasure of California Indians, relegated to the small, contained, and past temporal space of a romanticized mission.This paper centers on the NDN Collective's work and the photography of Cara Romero's project Tongvaland and the works of Gabrielino Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame. The setting of these projects is in the sprawling landscape of Los Angeles, or the homelands of the Gabrielino Tongva people, who call it Tovaangar. I will examine the anti-colonial aesthetics and care practices mapped out in the work rather than presenting a "true" Indigenous map or alternative map. Mapping a history of the landscape by creating a "new" narrative or "true" narrative is not enough. As Maori scholar Linda Tuhwi Smith states, "[w]e believe that history is also about justice, that understanding history will enlighten our decisions about the future. Wrong. History is also about power. In fact, history is mostly about power. … [A] thousand accounts of the truth will not alter the fact that indigenous peoples are still marginal [End Page 50] and do not possess the power to transform history into justice" (34). The Gabrielino Tongva, who comprise an estimated 2,300 people, do not possess the population power and cannot access the form of voting or democracy to make the changes needed just by telling their truth. Across California, people know about the raw deal, the embezzlement, the genocide, and the so-called lost treaties. In fact, under Eisenhower, recompense was paid out in small amounts to Tongva families of the dispossessed. Instead, to continue with the words of Smith, "[i]t is also about reconciling and reprioritizing what is really important about the past with what is important about the present" (111). What Romero and the NDN Collective—made up of numerous tribal leaders, scholars, and other artists—did was relay and prioritize how they wanted to be seen in their homelands. These billboards invite us in, in a gift of sharing, or what tribal cultural leader Craig Torres related to me as a spirit of Maxxa, a sharing, gifting, or swapping of knowledge. Dorame's beautiful and critical installations in public art spaces reflect Maxxa—they invite the viewers to think through land from her curious arrangements. As artists, part of their practice is not that of a Western version of a tortured genius but instead is energized by pulling in community and creating a collective practice. They undo settler space together and with us. The cartographic practices of these California Indians' creative arts exemplify communities of care that must be considered when we think through the unmapping of settler terrains. This question requires an approach of radical care. As Hi'ilei Hobart and Tamara Kneese make clear, the notion of care is "inseparable from systemic inequalities and power systems" (Hobart and Kneese 1).The work of the NDN Collective and Dorame counters a settler-based, commercial map of Los Angeles. Indigenous people, relegated by the settler state as expendable and erasable graffiti, confront capitalist and state ordinances at various scales. Rather than understand this as a subjugated positionality, I posit that graffiti is the critique necessary and valuable to understanding interlocking structures of oppression. In the following words of Leanne... (shrink)

Condorcet's classical Enlightenment statement of human progress became an essential element of nineteenth- and twentieth-century consciousness, but by the millennium grand narratives had fallen victim to a disillusioned cultural climate. Now Steven Pinker, like Condorcet drawing on a wide range of contemporary “knowledges,” has reasserted a sweeping narrative of human progress in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Mapping a spectacular long-term decline in person-on-person violence and reduction in deaths due to war, Pinker celebrates (...) the spread of a cultural pattern of self-restraint, sensitivity to human suffering, and recent regard for human rights, due to the modern state and gentle commerce capitalism.For Pinker the human condition has gotten steadily better, the decline of violence is an accomplishment we can savor and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible. Why then are so many so negative about modernity? Citing the psychology of temporal proximity to horrific events and the bad-news predilection of the media, Pinker ignores the specifically modern and less directly brutal institutionalized forms of violence as well as the profound ambivalence of progress. He decisively demonstrates the drop in certain kinds of violence, but his account becomes strangely ideological, recapitulating key Cold-War themes—the individual against totalitarianism, the Enlightenment against the counter-Enlightenment, rationalism and freedom against murderous utopianism—distorting his study in the name of gentle commerce, Marxism, and anti-Communism. (shrink)

Edward Said was the quintessential intellectual of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Commonly celebrated as the founding figure of postcolonialism, his critical oeuvre spans varied terrain. The very strength of his critique lies in these diverse tributaries of thought. Crossing borders and boundaries incessantly, Said’s intellectual project celebrates the culture of resistance while opposing doctrinaire rhetoric. The paper tries to journey along the multifarious “margins” of discourses that crop up in Said. “In-between” spaces have to be investigated for (...) their radical potential, while daring to “transgress” has its own dangers. Said unmasks the unholy nexus between knowledge and power in the mapping of the “Orient” that abetted the colonial enterprise. His contrapuntal readings of literary texts reveal the ubiquitous presence of imperial empire. Consequently, voices from the margins spur counter narratives and “writing back” in the postcolonial condition. Intellectuals in exile tend to be “marginal” and this location helps in looking at the two or even three sides of an issue. Questions of identity, selfhood, nationality, politics, memory, history, representation, geography, homeland, anxieties of influence are dealt with in the paper. The intertwining of the personal and the political occurs in Said. “Memory” is the only hope for resuscitating a “lost world” and battling the accompanying sense of “loss” and “despair” infused in both individuals and communities alike. The paper tries to address how “border crossing” and the “coalescing of margins” create an interdisciplinary breadth in Said, which resist categorization. The “centre/margin” binary is problematized by acknowledging the presence of “many voices,” “polyphony” being a favourite concept of Said. Music gave to him metaphors for human emancipation, while “transgression” was vital. His acknowledgement and assimilation of fellow critics is also mentioned. Beyond enunciating insider-outsider distinctions, Said tried to cultivate knowledge as a bridge between different interests and locations. (shrink)

Representing a new generation of theorists reaffirming the radical dimensions of art, Gail Day launches a bold critique of late twentieth-century art theory and its often reductive analysis of cultural objects. Exploring core debates in discourses on art, from the New Left to theories of "critical postmodernism" and beyond, Day counters the belief that recent tendencies in art fail to be adequately critical. She also challenges the political inertia that results from these conclusions. Day organizes her defense around critics (...) who have engaged substantively with emancipatory thought and social process: T. J. Clark, Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Hal Foster, among others. She maps the tension between radical dialectics and left nihilism and assesses the interpretation and internalization of negation in art theory. Chapters confront the claim that exchange and equivalence have subsumed the use value of cultural objects—and with it critical distance— and interrogate the proposition of completed nihilism and the metropolis put forward in the politics of Italian operaismo. Day covers the debates on symbol and allegory waged within the context of 1980s art and their relation to the writings of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man. She also examines common conceptions of mediation, totality, negation, and the politics of anticipation. A necessary unsettling of received wisdoms, _Dialectical Passions_ recasts emancipatory reflection in aesthetics, art, and architecture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Perspectives on Bioethics*Pat Milmoe McCarrick (bio) and Martina Darragh (bio)The literature of feminist bioethics has flourished in the last decade. Women’s health care, women’s role both as patient and health care professional, the many new reproductive technologies, the exclusion of women as research subjects, as well as the broader topic of feminist contributions to ethical theory itself, have all become topics of interest for feminist bioethical writers.Although feminism (...) is anything but a monolithic enterprise, Karen Lebacqz’ essay on feminism in the new, revised Encyclopedia of Bioethics (II A, 1995) says that “all feminists agree that women are oppressed and this oppression is wrong.” Rosemarie Tong refines this statement to include variations of feminism: “... feminist theory is not one, but many theories or perspectives and... each feminist theory or perspective attempts to describe women’s oppression, to explain its causes and consequences, and to prescribe strategies for women’s liberation” (VII, Tong 1989). She describes different feminist views in Feminine and Feminist Ethics (II A, 1993), labelling them liberal, Marxist, radical, psychoanalytic, socialist, existentialist, and postmodern. Alison Jaggar critiques these different forms of feminism in Feminist Politics and Human Nature, and Susan Sherwin applies these perspectives to the field of bioethics in No Longer Patient: Feminist Ethics and Health Care.One of the central activities in current feminist bioethics is a revisitation of ethical theory itself. There is a distinction between “feminine” and “feminist” ethics in this field (II A, Tong 1993). “A feminine approach to ethics consists of observations of how the traditional approaches to ethics fail to fit the moral experiences and intuitions of women. In contrast, a feminist approach to ethics applies a specifically political perspective and offers suggestions of how ethics must be revised if it is to get at the patterns of dominance and oppression as they affect women” (IV, Sherwin 1992). Carol Gilligan’s two books, In a Different Voice and Mapping the Moral Domain, Nel Noddings’s Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, and Virginia Held’s Feminist Morality: [End Page 85] Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics can be thought of as feminine critiques of contemporary ethics.Gilligan’s notion of the “ethics of care” has served as a point of departure for a discussion of a type of relational ethics that focuses on concrete experiences, pairs emotions with reason, and balances justice with care. This “ethics of care” has been both celebrated and criticized. The concept of “care” in ethics dates back to the “cura” tradition of care in ancient Rome and was further developed by philosophers Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger and psychologists Rollo May and Erik Erikson. Nursing theorists have built on this tradition both in theory and in practice (II A, Reich, Care, Encyclopedia of Bioethics, 1995). “Care” often is discussed in opposition to the liberal notion of “justice” (III, Sterba, Justice, Encyclopedia of Bioethics, 1995).Gilligan’s theory was developed to provide a counter model to Lawrence Kohlberg’s six steps in the development of a human moral nature: (1) acting to avoid punishment, (2) acting to promote reciprocity, (3) conforming to get approbation, (4) respecting authority to maintain social order, (5) acting freely if others are not harmed, and (6) following self-legislated, self-imposed, universal principles of justice, reciprocity, and respect for the dignity of humans as individuals. In contrast, Gilligan holds that the moral self is an individual working with other individuals to identify mutually agreeable solutions to thorny human relations problems. Gilligan called Kohlberg’s the male moral point of view as an ethics of justice and hers the female moral view as an ethics of care. Her levels are (1) inward-directed care, (2) other-directed care subjugating personal wants and needs to others (eventually leading to anger), (3) a philosophy of care that balances egoism and altruism, recognizing the women’s connection to others and theirs to her.According to Jocelyn Downie and Susan Sherwin (IV, 1993), oppression, as used by feminists, is understood as an interlocking series of restrictions and barriers that reduce the options available to members of a group defined by morally insignificant characteristics, here gender. The literature itself can be... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Is Beauty an Archaic Spirit in Education?Howard Cannatella (bio)O! Father and mother, if buds are nip'd and blossoms blown away, and if the tender plants are strip'd of their joy in the spring day, by sorrow and care's dismay, how shall the summer arise in joy, or the summer fruit appear?William Blake, "The School Boy"1This article discusses the unfashionable and taboo idea that beauty matters. A sign of the (...) esteem in which beauty is held can be gauged by the fact that so few articles significantly address any conception of beauty in education. Yet outside a purely educational regime, matters are treated somewhat differently albeit confusedly. In contrast to a virtual silence on this issue, a defense of beauty is modestly made in this article—one that claims that education is considerably ineffective without beauty and would be a poorer and unjust system of practice if beauty were merely seen as an irrelevance, a distraction from the serious stuff of management practice. What is broadly pursued is an attempt to portray an educational praxis that involves the suggestion that an active being in the world is someone who shows themselves to be in some exhortation of its beauty. An attempt is made to map out a few of the reasons why the sense of beauty is an important condition of being, a position few educationalists, so the arguments go in this article, can choose to take lightly. In what can be seen at times as a rather tasteless, aggressive, and doctrinaire educational climate, an education that is culturally alive and buzzing with the sounds, smells, images, rhythms, freedoms, play, knowledge, and rationalities that accompany and are inseparable from social and individual existence at intimate levels of being can revitalize teaching practice in more sensitive and magical ways. By exploring some of the reasons why we should not desensitize ourselves to beauty in education, it is possible to counter-argue for a greater retention and conviction of this experience. My supposition is that beauty as a poetic force should be regarded [End Page 94] as one of the defining characteristics central to pedagogic practice. In making this claim I draw upon a few of Charles Dickens's and William Wordsworth's ideas in support of the importance of beauty in education.IEnjoyment is not a psychological state among others, the affective tonality of empiricist psychology, but the very pulsation of the I.Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity2If it is the case that beauty is nothing other than the proper releasing of the human spirit, the grasping of delights, something fundamental to the capacity of our minds and body—"the form under which the intellect prefers to study the world"3 —then, we may wonder, why is current educational practice preoccupied with things of arguably less importance? The thought that "beauty is the basic impulse underlying education"4 —or as Carritt5 puts it, beauty instigates that which is morally worth cultivating, a recognition of something universally valid for humanity—strikes a certain agreement between Emerson, Scarry, and Carritt: namely, that beauty matters educationally. Indeed, Freud6 surmised that civilization could not survive without it, and Plato remarked that education "ought to end in the love of the fine and beautiful."7 Although these remarks may seem platitudinous, they may still nevertheless arouse within us a feeling that beauty is something quite immense, faithful, and necessary. With these ideas in mind, the aim here is to explain how certain aspects of beauty can be important for transcending some of the dystopia affecting educational practices together with some of the reasons why the intimacy of beauty is good for us. When the delicateness of beauty appears to be losing its appeal, it is perhaps no coincidence that a major reason why some students are disenchanted with education is because they fail to see the beauty in it. If beauty in society is losing its grip, what harshness or sadness will result?Let us begin with the obvious observation that a pluralist conception of beauty is a fact of life. If there are different perspectives of beauty, then, as Wittgenstein8 remarked, we... (shrink)

What is the relationship between place and cultural production? How do we account for the interaction between the domain of spatiality and that of artistic expression? In particular, how might we conceptualize the connections between space and literature? Here, I attempt to map the principal ways in which the central thematic issues we associate with literary expression are related to questions about space and place. By elucidating these matters, I hope to arrive at a rationale for an approach to (...) setting out the links between symbolic expression and spatiality. Literature is envisaged here as one specific type of cultural expression, and the suggestion is that much of what applies to literature can be taken as... (shrink)

A genealogical excavation of the pre transpersonal movement uncovers a hitherto unrecognized process of hybridity and syncretism occurring in the 1960s U.S. counter culture. The presence of hybridity in the movement's prehistory has serious repercussions for current maps in transpersonalism (and religious enactments in general). It is argued here that current transpersonal theories have built themselves on an unexamined foundation of magic, sorcery, and cosmological hybridization. Ken Wilber's neoperennialist cosmos will be construed as an assimilationist strain of hybridity. Jorge (...) Ferrer's more culture-friendly postulate of an "Ocean with Many Shores" suggests a kind of cosmological multiculturalism. However, what appear to be fixities in his cosmology lend themselves to critical reevaluation of this aspect of his revision of transpersonal psychology. (shrink)

Social transmission is at the core of cultural evolutionary theory. It occurs when a demonstrator uses mental representations to produce some public displays which in turn allow a learner to acquire similar mental representations. Although cultural evolutionists do not dispute this view of social transmission, they typically abstract away from the multistep nature of the process when they speak of cultural variants at large, thereby referring both to variation and evolutionary change in mental representations as well as (...) in their corresponding public displays. This conflation suggests that differentiating each step of the transmission process is redundant. In this paper, I examine different forms of interplay between the multistep nature of social transmission and the metric spaces used by cultural evolutionists to measure cultural variation and to model cultural change. I offer a conceptual analysis of what assumptions seem to be at work when cultural evolutionists conflate the complex causal sequence of social transmission as a single space of variation in which populations evolve. To this aim, I use the framework of variation spaces, a formal framework commonly used in evolutionary biology, and I develop two theoretical concepts, ‘technique’ and ‘technical space’, for addressing cases where the complexity of social transmission defies the handy assumption of a single variation space for cultural change. (shrink)

This study examined the metaphorical expressions of death in Chinese quadrisyllabic idioms. Specifically, the research investigated the cultural connotations and implications conveyed through death-related idioms by analyzing metaphorical examples. Adopting the ‘Great Chain of Being’ framework (Lakoff and Turner, 1989), a total of 579 death-related idioms with metaphorical and euphemistic meanings were classified and examined. These idioms were further categorized based on the gender of the deceased as well as the initial metaphors and expressions employed. Our research findings highlight (...) cultural parallels evident in death-related idiomatic expressions. Both English and Chinese languages employ metaphors like “DEATH IS SLEEP” and “DEATH IS DEPARTURE.” These pervasive metaphors can be attributed to shared aspects of the human experience. Meanwhile, our findings also revealed a strong intertwining of metaphors and culture within death-related idioms, such that the metaphor “TO DIE IS TO FALL” is frequently used in Mandarin but is not as common in English. The metaphorical mapping mechanisms employed in these idioms reflect the Chinese way of projecting thoughts onto objects and highlight the unique features of the Chinese language. Chinese culture places great emphasis on social classes, relationships, and hierarchical structures. These notions are not only reflected in social etiquette and how one handles interactions, but are also evident in euphemisms and idioms associated with death. (shrink)

Drawing on rich cross-cultural perspectives from Pakistan, Israel, Canada, the US and the UK, the authors challenge readers to envision new ways of thinking for education: ways which draw on imagination, the arts and the collective ...

With no precise boundaries, always on the move and too complex to be defined by space and time, is it possible to map the human subject? This book attempts to do just this, exploring the places of the subject in contemporary culture. The editors approach this subject from four main aspects--its construction, sexuality, limits and politics--using a wide ranging review of literature on subjectivity across the social and human sciences. The first part of the book establishes the idea that the (...) subject is constructed through detailed histories of the subject. The second part shows that sexuality cannot be assumed to be natural through the contributors' research on the place of sexuality in subjectivity and subjectivity in sexuality. The essays in the third part take issue with the idea of a singular, self-contained identity. Power relations and the effects of power are consistent themes throughout the book and the final section deals explicitly with relations of power, whether organized around gender, race, class or other kinds of difference. Contributors: Steve Pile, Nigel Thrift, Miles Ogborn, Carolyn Steedman, David Matless, David Sibley, David Bell, Julia Cream, Vic Seidler, Hester Parr, Chris Philo, Marcus Doel, Paul Rodaway, Nigel Rapport, Stephen Frosh, Valerie Walkerdine, Gillian Rose and Michael Keith. (shrink)

A collection of lectures presented during the 1960s explores the roots of the American counter-cultural movement.

This article restores the peculiar ethical-cultural cartography from the philosophical fragments of Ancient Greek Cynicism. Namely, the fragments of Anthistenes, Diogenes of Sinope, Crates, Dio Chrysostom as well as of the ancient historians of philosophy are mainly analyzed and interpreted. The methods of comparative analysis as well of rational resto-ration are applied in this article. The authors of the article concentrate on the main characteristics of the above mentioned cartography, that is, the contradiction between maps of nature and civili-zation. (...) The article comes to the conclusion that the basis of this contradiction is the concept of the main value as well as virtue in the above mentioned cynicism, namely, natural radical temperance. According to ancient cynics, this virtue is absolutely incompatible with pleasure-driven civilization, as the latter annihilates the former. Therefore, cynics interpreted the whole territory of the world known at that time as divided between maps of nature and civilization that never overlap or even intersect. Moreover, according to ancient cynics, the territory covered by maps of civilization is considerably smaller than that enframed by the maps of nature. Moreover, the areas of nature are continuously being diminished, as civilization resolutely goes ahead. In such a situation that threatens survival of human nature the only possible way out is a return to the natural value of radical temperance. After cynics, the only effective strategy of achieving that challenging goal is askesis as excercises of temperance dedicated both to body and spirit. The authors of the article also give a certain SWOT analysis of the above mentioned cartography in the context of contemporary society. According to them, such a cartography possesses both strong and weak points. The main weak point is the contradiction itself between maps of culture and civilization. As a matter of fact, civilization does not annihilate the possibility of natural temperance, whereas a human being, according to his/her nature, is a creator of culture and civilization. On the other hand, the main positive aspect is an emphasis on virtue of temperance, which is actual, significant and relevant in any epoch, culture and civilization, and which is pretty much forgotten nowadays. (shrink)

This article explores the so-called `postsecular' turn from two different but intersecting angles. The first part of the argument offers a reasoned cartography of the postsecular discourses, both in general and within feminist theory. The former includes the impact of extremism on all monotheistic religions in a global context of neo-conservative politics and perpetual war. The context of international violence has dire consequences for the social space, which is increasingly militarized, but also for academic debates, which become more and more (...) restricted in scope and freedom. The article then shifts to mapping the intersection between feminism and the postsecular condition. The main argument is that the postsecular turn challenges European feminism because it makes manifest the notion that agency, or political subjectivity, can be conveyed through and supported by religious piety, and may even involve significant amounts of spirituality. This statement also implies that political agency need not be critical in the negative sense of oppositional and thus may not be aimed solely or primarily at the production of counter-subjectivities. Subjectivity is rather a process ontology of auto-poiesis or self-styling, which involves complex and continuous negotiations with dominant norms and values, and hence also multiple forms of accountability. The double challenge of linking subjectivity to religious agency, and disengaging both from oppositional consciousness and critique defined as negativity, is one of the main issues this article wants to address. In the conclusion the article raises the issue of the affirmative power of critical theory and the kind of ethical values it may be able to engender. (shrink)

Discussions of the evidential import of religious experiences have tended to focus on the intra-cultural variety: that is, experiences the content of which accord with the religious/cultural background of the experiencer (eg. someone raised in a Buddhist culture might experience the oneness of all, whereas someone from a Christian background might have a vision of Jesus). But what of counter-cultural experiences? That is, experiences which fall outside of the individual's religious/cultural background? Little attention has been (...) paid to these, though such experiences are far from unheard of in the case study literature. In this paper I explore some preliminary questions surrounding the evidential import of counter-cultural religious experiences. (shrink)

The cultural red king effect occurs when discriminatory bargaining practices emerge because of a disparity in learning speed between members of a minority and a majority. This effect has been shown to occur in some Nash Demand Game models and has been proposed as a tool for shedding light on the origins of sexist and racist discrimination in academic collaborations. This paper argues that none of the three main strategies used in the literature to support the epistemic value of (...) these models—structural similarity, empirical confirmation, and how-possibly explanations—provides strong support for this modeling practice in its present form. (shrink)

In this article, we offer a new conceptualization of intellectuals as carriers of cultural trauma through a case study of the Aum Affair, a series of crimes and terrorist attacks committed by the Japanese new religious movement Aum Shinrikyō. In understanding the performative roles intellectuals play in trauma construction, we offer a new dichotomy between “authoritative intellectuals,” who draw on their privileged parcours and status to impose a distinct trauma narrative, and “dialogical intellectuals,” who engage with local actors dialogically (...) to produce polyphonic and open-ended trauma narratives. We identify three dimensions of dialogical intellectual action: firstly, the intellectuals may be involved in dialogue with local participants; secondly, the intellectual products themselves may be dialogical in content; and thirdly, there might be a concerted effort on the part of the intellectuals to record and to disseminate dialogue between local participants. In the context of the Aum Affair, we analyze the works of Murakami Haruki and Mori Tatsuya as dialogical intellectuals while they sought, with the help of local actors’ experiences, to challenge and to alter the orthodox trauma narrative of Aum Shinrikyō as exclusively a social evil external to Japanese society and an enemy to be excluded from it. Towards the end of the article, we discuss the broader significance of this case study and suggest that in light of recent societal and technological developments, the role and scope of dialogical intellectuals as carriers of trauma are changing and possibly expanding. (shrink)

What do Mesoamerica, Greece, Byzantium, Island, Chad, Ethiopia, India, Tibet, China and Japan have in common? Like many other cultures of the world, they share a particular form of cultural heritage: ancient handwritten documents. In 2007, scholars from some 20 countries around the world gathered at the University of Copenhagen for a workshop on manuscripts to compare notes. This event led to the publication of this volume, which brings together 16 articles on philological, cultural, and material aspects of (...) manuscripts in search for a common ground across disciplines and cultures. (shrink)

Time–space synesthetes report that they experience the months of the year as having a spatial layout. In Study 1, we characterize the phenomenology of calendar sequences produced by synesthetes and non-synesthetes, and show a conservative estimate of time–space synesthesia at 2.2% of the population. We demonstrate that synesthetes most commonly experience the months in a circular path, while non-synesthetes default to linear rows or rectangles. Study 2 compared synesthetes’ and non-synesthetes’ ability to memorize a novel spatial calendar, and revealed better (...) performance in synesthetes. The capacity to learn mappings between arbitrary spatial forms and temporal sequences is present in all individuals, and time–space synesthetes’ enhanced visuo-spatial memory abilities may underlie their creation of idiosyncratic spatial calendar forms. (shrink)

Volunteers play an indispensable role in several major events and activities. The purpose of this study is to review studies on volunteer motivation from 2000 to 2021 and to discover the development trends in this field. The Web of Science Core Collection is the main literature data resource, from which 162 papers on volunteer motivation published in the SSCI were selected. Using two visualization analysis tools, CiteSpace and VOSviewer, this study conducts bibliometric analysis and systematic review from multiple dimensions, identifying (...) the authors, countries, institutions, and journals with high productivity in this field. Additionally, we explored highly cited papers, authors, and journals in this field. This study aims to find the research hotspots and theoretical basis through co-occurrence analysis and cluster analysis of keywords and explore the evolution through the time zone map drawn with CiteSpace. Moreover, we focus on the influence of Chinese and Western cultures on volunteer motivation. It was found that Chinese volunteers were more affected by collectivism, whereas American volunteers were more affected by individualism. The conclusion of this study constructs a clear framework for research on volunteer motivation, which provides researchers with a deeper and thorough understanding of the connotation of volunteer motivation, providing guidance and support for future research in this field. (shrink)

Adorno, Radical Negativity, and Cultural Critique presents the concept of utopia as a necessary corrective to the cynical ethos of our time. Kathleen League explores this fascinating philosophical concept through discussions of works by such diverse figures as Jacques Derrida, Richard Wolin, Pierre Bourdieu, the Sex Pistols, and Oscar Wilde. This gripping journey through an often neglected philosophy will interest those who want to know more about Adorno, radical social change, and utopia.

T. M. Scanlon’s contractualism attempts to give an account of right and wrong in terms of the moral code that could not be reasonably rejected. Reasonable rejectability is then a function of what kind of consequences the general adoption of different moral codes has for different individuals. It has been shown that moral codes should be compared at a lower than 100% level of social acceptance. This leads to the counter-culture challenge. The problem is that the cultural background (...) of the individuals who have not internalized the majority code affects the consequences of the codes and furthermore there does not seem to be a non-arbitrary way of choosing the minority cultures. This chapter first surveys and critically evaluates different responses to this challenge. It then outlines a version of ‘Real World Contractualism’, which offers the best response to the counter-culture challenge. (shrink)

In an era where bad film stars become reactionary politicians, political films which are equally bad may be something we will just have to live with. So after the Nicaraguan occupation of Smallville in Red Dawn, Ricky goes to Vietnam in Rambo. This box office hit of the summer appears to confirm all the claims of leftist criticism regarding the ideology of Reaganism. Above all, it represents the revisionist history of the Vietnam War, won on the battlefield but lost by (...) politicians who capitulated to the totalitarian pawns of Moscow, who in turn continue to imprison and torture unnumbered POWs, the ten lost tribes of the far right. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Collective Violence, Sacrifice, and Conflict Resolution in the Works of Paul Claudel Christopher G. Flood University ofSurrey, England Claudel's career as a writer spanned almost seventy years, from the 1880s to the 1950s. The publication of his collected works now runs to twenty-nine large volumes, excluding his correspondence and diaries, so a brief overview of any particular dimension of his writing must necessarily be reductive. On the other hand, (...) Claudel's work lends itself particularly well to discussion in terms of the relationship between violence, sacrifice and religion. In a valuable study published more than twenty years ago under the title, Claudel et l'usurpateur, Jacques Petit drew attention to the recurrence in Claudel's plays, and in many of his non- fictional writings, of a narrative structure hinging on acts of usurpation and counter-usurpation. There is a pattern of conflictual rivalry, domination and coercion, whereby acts of aggression are ultimately legitimized, or in some sense excused, in the light of a positive outcome, providential necessity and/or reconciliation between usurper and victim. Claudel's world is indeed "a world of violence," as Petit puts it (79, ch. title).1 It is also a world ofreligion: after his return to the Catholic Church in 1890, all of Claudel's major dramatic works intermesh the process of usurpation with themes deriving from his religious beliefs, and the same is true of many of his non-fictional writings. My aim is not to reinvent the wheel by going back over all of the terrain mapped out by Petit. Nor do I intend to rework Petit's empirical model wholesale in the light of René Girard's anthropological model of mimetic desire and sacrificial violence, although there are obvious areas of convergence between them. However, I shall draw implicitly on both, in order to Translations throughout this paper are my own. 160Christopher G. Flood argue that the notion of sacrifice, which is central to the resolution of rivalries in Claudel's major plays, is transformed into an idiosyncratic conception of international conflict resolution in various non-fictional writings which emerge from his forty years of experience in his parallel career as a profes sional diplomat.2 1 shall start with a schematic discussion of certain features of the plays. The first point relates to Claudel's assumptions concerning the mechanisms involved in the outbreak of individual or collective violence. It needs to be emphasized that in his plays the path towards violence is always opened by a withdrawal or weakening of temporal and/or spiritual authority. This allows the crystallization, and the direct expression, of latent rivalries which eventually lead to an explosion of aggression. The causes of the violence invariably center on the fact that one individual or group is in possession of an object which is coveted by another individual or group. The question of whether Claudel himself appears to recognize a mimetic element in this pattern of behavior would be too complex, and too fraught with imponderables, to discuss here, but there are some indications that he does so. Whatever the case, in the absence of authority, rivalry and jealousy engender verbal, and usually physical conflict, culminating in usurpation of the desired object. Thus, for example, in Tête d'or, the elderly Emperor of the unnamed kingdom has neither the authority nor the resolution to defend his kingdom against external invasion, or against the man who saves the kingdom only to usurp the throne and murder the Emperor himself.3 Similarly, in the second version of La Ville, neither Besme, the positivistic scientist and plutocrat who has created the godless City, nor his brother Lambert, the former politician, has the will to maintain or defend the society against the tensions emerging within it. Thus, the City dissolves first into immobility, then revolution. Or again, in the family drama of La Jeune Fille Violaine (second version), the obsessional rage andjealousy ofMara towards her elder sister, Violaine, explodes into coercion, slander, and horrific violence when their father absents himself from the farm for an indefinite period, leaving Violaine to marry Jacques Hury: the fact that Hury loves Violaine, but does not love Mara, makes the latter all the... (shrink)

In recent years, the study of musical cultures has gained popularity as a curricular intervention for increasing cultural diversity in school music curricula. Informed by Michel Foucault’s analytics of power-as-effects, this paper examines some of the underlying epistemic premises of the notion of musical culture as it operates in music curricula. Additionally, it considers how this construct’s discursive effects align with or contradict its presumed contribution to cultural inclusivity. I use the International Baccalaureate high school music curriculum as (...) my exemplar because of the key role that the notion of musical culture plays in this increasingly popular curriculum. First, I contextualize the notion of musical culture socio-historically, pointing to this construct’s Euro-Americentrism. Second, I argue that musical culture leans toward musical formalism. Third, I examine musical culture’s presumed distinctiveness, indicating discursive connections to a nineteenth-century, Euro-American conceptualization of cultures as fixed and discrete. Fourth, I examine musical culture’s presumed comparability, suggesting that the construct indirectly embraces Euro-American high art music as its frame of reference for analyzing all cultures. Based on this analysis, I suggest approaching the study of musical cultures relationally to render visible the dynamics of power and privilege that shape them. Finally, I consider the potential of abandoning the notion of musical culture altogether in favor of approaches that eschew establishing cultural boundaries. (shrink)