This article focuses on the blogosphere as an oppositional field where the meanings around contemporary Western women's singlehood are contested, negotiated and rewritten. In contrast to dominant narratives in which single women are pathologised, in the blogs by, for, and about single women analysed here, writers aim to refigure women's singleness as well as providing resources, support and a textual community where others can intervene and contribute to the re-valuation of single women. These blogs also function as alternative forms of (...) knowledge, seeking to (re)legitimise women's singleness and to trouble their aberrance and social liminality. Rather than only considering the form in isolation from its content, this article analyses the discourses deployed by bloggers and within blogs and how women bloggers publicly perform their very singleness as part of a personal and political strategy of re-signification. In this way, while cautious not to overestimate the democratic potentialities of the so-called blogosphere, it underscores the important cultural – and indeed political – work being undertaken by single women therein. Moreover, by demonstrating how these blogs use discursive tactics commonly associated with feminism's second-wave – women's consciousness-raising; identity politics; deploying and reiterating the famous feminist dictum: ‘the personal is political’; naming discrimination; and empathy and community-building – it argues that they are using so-called ‘new’ media for what is now problematically believed to be ‘old’ (feminist) politics. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the rising popularity of blogging in the US as a new kind of public space that has the potential to extend and deepen the way in which we interact and engage each other in political discourse. To proponents of deliberative democracy these moves are promising since they seem to point to the development of vibrant online public forums where political issues can be freely and openly debated. In this paper I evaluate this promise (...) and ask whether or not blogging is consistent with the main theoretical tenets of deliberative democracy. My argument is that, despite some shortcomings, there is significant potential for the blogosphere to develop into a meaningful deliberative community. (shrink)

Following the rise in use of online communication in electoral campaigns throughout the world, this article deals with the use of blogs by politicians in Europe. Through the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis, it analyzes blog posts written by the European Parliament incumbents running for the European Parliament elections in 2009, from four different EU states and ideological backgrounds, and at the same time the four largest political groups in the European Parliament. The purpose of the study is to (...) reveal the campaign strategy and dominant discourses through the analysis of the format, style and appeals. The findings reveal the differences in discourses between four political blogs, which result from the different use of language and appeals. (shrink)

In the past decade, several professors have advocated for the use of blogs in undergraduate courses in philosophy, arguing that blogs are beneficial for student learning, as blogs are forums for student collaboration and engagement with course material outside the classroom. In this paper I argue that blogging assignments can be beneficial for introductory-level undergraduate courses in philosophy for two reasons yet to be fully explored in the pedagogical literature. First, blogging assignments can act as low-stakes practice for (...) paper writing. Second, blogging assignments give students the freedom to explore the relevance of course content to real world problems and academic fields other than philosophy. I then provide an example of a blogging assignment from a course in applied political philosophy that, I argue, achieves both of these goals. (shrink)

EU states agreed on 23 September to implement a refugee quota system which will distribute 120,000 refugees across the EU, despite four member states – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia – voting against the proposal. Luc Bovens and Anna Bartsch write that regardless of the wider debate over whether a quota system is justified or not, it is vital that the ‘distribution key’ determining how many refugees are assigned to each state is fair. They argue that the distribution (...) key proposed by the European Commission is ill-conceived and regressive, and that a fairer system with recalculated quotas may go some way toward convincing the dissenting states to support the system. (shrink)

One of the stated aims of the “2008 Policy Plan on Asylum” by the European Commission is increased ‘responsibility sharing’ between Member States with respect to asylum seekers. Luc Bovens and Günperi Sisman assess the extent to which UNHCR outcome data reflect these aims between 2006 and 2011 – from the end of the first phase of the Common European Asylum System until the latest available data. They find that Greece, Portugal and Spain take on very low responsibility for asylum (...) seekers per capita and per unit of GDP. Eastern European states do poorly per capita, but do much better per unit of GDP. There is also an overall trend towards greater responsibility sharing for acceptances and stocks per unit of GDP. (shrink)

The paper enters into a polemical dialogue with the american theorist Jodi Dean and her attempts to critically examine the blogosphere through the prism of psychoanalysis. To this end, the text analyses whether user-generated content on the internet can produce meaningful and epistemologically sustainable “social enclaves”, informal communities and institutions, or whether it operates more as a series of recursive and increasingly meaningless quasi-messages. While attempting to consider blogging as both a constructive practice and a pathology, the text develops (...) the hypothesis that in special cases one can conceptually speak of “epistemic inflation”, a phenomenon that can manifest itself at the personal as well as the social, economic and/or political level. Furthermore, the paper briefly introduces the ideas, history and one of the key concepts of the influential british theory-fiction collective, CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit). (shrink)

This article discusses the current epistemological status of the political blogosphere, in light both of the concerns raised by Alvin Goldman in his 2008 paper ?The Social Epistemology of Blogging? and the recent drastic changes in the structure of the blogosphere. I argue that the political blogosphere replicates epistemically beneficial functions of the mainstream media for the functioning of democracy, and defend this claim from objections to the blogosphere that have been levelled by Goldman and Richard Posner. (...) I then provide an expanded defence of the political blogosphere in response to these particular objections. (shrink)

This paper examines extracts from a daughter’s blog about her father’s time in a care home in the north of England from June 2015 until his death in January 2016. Through these extracts, the author of the paper, who is also the daughter of the title, provokes key ethical issues concerning the identity, agency and voice of an elder in the context of residential care. The wider, rapidly deteriorating, political and economic climate for the care of older people is (...) briefly discussed and the paper makes reference to a feminist ethics of care, in order to both critique and celebrate women’s central place in caring for elders. The paper explores how the ethnographic process of writing about care for another can be considered a route to ethical care practice and it suggests that this blog is part of an autoethnographic analytic tradition [Anderson 2006. “Analytic Autoethnography.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35 (4): 373–395]. Finally, the paper asks questions about the ethics of blogging about and on behalf of an elder that, in this case, played a significant role in bringing not only the daughter-author but also other family members closer to the life of their father, grandfather and great-grandfather. (shrink)

Leandra Medine indicates that she wants the Man Repeller multi-author blog to ‘serve as an open forum for women to draw their own conclusions’ instead of making ‘any sort of feministic statement’. Medine renders feminism as amorphous and an individual choice but she has been widely lauded for offering a feminist engagement in fashion. Her practices and position, as I argue throughout this article, allow her to fashion feminism, including associating feminism with the man repeller style and replacing aspects of (...) second wave and rights-based feminisms with the purportedly more equitable and liberating website ethos of choice and equality feminism. Yet in replacing ‘feministic’ critiques with promises of stylish cultural change and clothing that reportedly repels men, Medine and other Man Repeller authors elide how systemic oppression functions. This ambivalent relationship to feminism, and dearth of intersectional advocacy, prompted a backlash in 2020. Critics interrogated Medine's facile statement about #BlackLivesMatter, the company's lack of diversity and the unsuccessful restructuring of the blog. As a means of analysing Man Repeller, I employ textual analysis, feminist and queer literature and media theory. I define fashioning feminism as a collaborative and ongoing process of producing feminist positions and thinking, including the negation of certain forms of feminism. I assert that attending to the fashioning of feminism can foreground central and developing feminist theories; the appeal, unstylishness and effacement of feminism; and the connection between style and politics. This includes readers’ interrogations of Man Repeller's politics, which are occurring along with contemporary examinations of racism. Since fashioning feminism is a collaborative and ongoing process of producing feminist positions and thought, engaging with its concepts and debates can further the critical study of feminism, nurture feminist conversations and advocate for social change. (shrink)

This article examines the linguistic construction of textual messages in the use of blogs and Twitter in the Nigerian 2007 electoral cycle comprising the April 2007 general elections and rerun elections in April, May, and August 2009. A qualitative approach of discourse analysis is used to present a variety of discursive acts that blogging and microblogging afford social media users during the electoral cycle. The data are culled from 245 blog posts and 923 tweets. The thesis of the study (...) is that citizens’ access to social media electronically empowers the electorates to be actively involved in democratic governance. Electronic empowerment is a direct result of access to social media (and mobile telephony) by more citizens who constitute the electorates. This encourages more public discussions about politics and makes the democratic process more dynamic than in the pre—social media era. An analysis of the data shows that there is a dialectical relationship between social media discourse and the process of political empowerment. (shrink)

As the latest tool for disseminated information and editorial comment shaping public opinion, blogging is quickly gaining popularity, prominence, and power. One major controversy for the new medium of circulating news and commentary is to what extent or even whether blogs should have codes of ethics. We examined 30 politically-oriented weblogs. Of these, only a few had a code of ethics, stated or implied. Little cohesion existed between the codes of ethics, but a few themes emerged. Qualitative analysis of (...) the codes of ethics shows that what bloggers valued most included accuracy, credibility, and etiquette. We further provide evidence to support the prevailing thought that, while appearing to be "ethical" seems important to bloggers, blogging ethics and credibility are difficult to operationalize. (shrink)

Introduction. Innovationism in various areas of society has changed both the natural and social environment. The change speed in the new infor- mation and communication field is the reason for many questions related to studying the problems of society and the machine, finding out the place of artificial intelligence in social relations. These pro- cesses stimulated the philosophical research, the subject of which was man, modern technologies, scenarios for the development of society, socio- cultural and political-legal forms of its (...) organization. Since the 90s of the twentieth century in the West and later in Russia, a transhumanistic concept has been formed, which connects man, society and technology in a special way. Representatives of transhumanism study the technical develop- ments of human immortality and build models of the perfect man, pursuing as a goal, his deliver- ance from suffering and disease. Transhumanistic perspectives actualize the need for a thorough, constructive and critical assessment of the possible advantages and risks of technological development, and its impact on the political and legal structure. In this regard, the ability to see and isolate the features of this process and subsequent reflection is fundamentally important. The purpose of the article is to consider political and legal transformations in the context of the interaction of modern technologies and soci- ety through the prism of transhumanistic perspec- tives, to identify possible directions of philosophical reflection of political and legal modes of modernity. Methods. To achieve the research goal, general scientific methods of cognition were used: analysis and synthesis, induction, deduction, comparison, abstraction. The article also applied institutional- functional and system-structural approaches, the method of interpretation and content analysis. The analysis of public opinion and special labeling of artificial intelligence was carried out with the help of appealing to network content (social networks, blogs, and forums). Communication channels reproduce messages mentioning modern technolo- gies from the point of view of the philistine world- view based on stereotypes broadcast in society and the influence of popular culture. Content analysis revealed the relevance of the spectrum of labeling, relative to artificial intelligence systems, includ- ing the verbs “create”, “destroy”, “help”, “enslave”. Regarding the sphere of labor, law and politics, the positions differ, from outright alarmism to utopian images of social well-being. Scientific novelty of the study. The article analyzes the prospects of considering the phenom- enon of social transformations, the forms of their representation through political and legal views as exemplified by transhumanism. Results. The author attempts to give a comprehen- sive description of social changes in the field of public administration, legal regulation, legal per- sonality and legal responsibility, social equality of participants in legal relations through the specific refraction of these social phenomena in transhu- manistic ideas. The spectrum of the main problems in the sphere of interests of the transhumanistic worldview is listed. Conclusion. Turning to modernization strategies on the example of transhumanism is a natural and necessary need in the political and legal sphere, in particular. In the course of the analysis, a wide range of problems were identified that actualize the social and axiological and anthropological optics of the research. Diverse forms of transhumanistic political trends act as manifestations of socio-legal reflection on the intensification of innovation- ism, which is capable of radically changing human nature. (shrink)

Hindi commercial cinema appears distinctive in its assemblage of earthly law and divine justice or political theology. Historically, Hindi cinema’s mothers have embodied a postcolonial melancholia of the (in)adequacy of law to justice. This blog piece seeks to explain a shift in the relationship between law and justice in recent Hindi films through a rumination on the disappearing melancholic mother.

An archive of Mark Sharlow's two blogs, "The Unfinishable Scroll" and "Religion: the Next Version." Covers Sharlow's views on metaphysics, epistemology, mind, science, religion, and politics. Includes topics and ideas not found in his papers.

Indexicality, the ability of language to evoke the context in which it usually occurs, is a concept commonly drawn upon in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. This article applies the framework of orders of indexicality to political discourse about a controversial topic in Pittsburgh, United States, the construction of bike lanes. A concordance analysis of the term bike lanes in news media, blogs and online news comments helps to explain the variation in the indexical meanings of bike lanes between those (...) who oppose and those who support bike lanes. We argue that the orders of indexicality approach helps explain how groups with different interests can reinforce or challenge the possible discursive associations of a loaded political term. (shrink)

A deliberative model of politics has recently been criticized for not being very well equipped to conceptualize public spheres in world society. A first critique is that this model assumes a conception of public spheres that is too idealistic, because it presupposes counterfactual conditions of communication in public discourse that do not meet empirical real word conditions. Secondly, it assumes an antiquated notion of a shared “we” of political actors. Because of this it does not take into consideration the (...) “digital turn” and the ego-centering and depersonalizing effects of social media like Facebook, twitter, and blogs, which have led to a rapid decline of the public sphere. And a third critique states that the deliberative model ignores the fact that politics, and especially protests and revolutions, are not seminar-like debates but spontaneous, chaotic and sometimes violent expressions. So it is not just unreceptive for the “digital space” but also for gathering and protesting in real public places surrounded by military troops. I will argue that all of these critiques fall short. A deliberative model of politics allows us to address the tension between the ideal and the real, the “old media” and the so-called digitalization of public spheres as well as peaceful discourse and violent uprisings. Especially the concept of communicative power, a notion also used by Hannah Arendt, reveals the potential for future participation in digital spaces and public places. (shrink)

Mahon O’Brien on the right sort of question to ask about Heidegger’s philosophy and politics.

Trans people often prioritize self-identification and self-determination when it comes to gender. We think people have a right to tell us who they are, rather than to be told who they are. But what does this really mean? And what should we do when someone self-identifies in bad faith--such as when the Club Q mass shooter (briefly) identified as nonbinary? I discuss these questions in a short blog post.

Lors des dernières élections de mars 2008, le parti au pouvoir a perdu sa majorité des deux tiers pour la première fois depuis 1969. Ce phénomène qualifié de « tsunami politique » selon les critères locaux a été attribué entre autres à la montée des nouveaux médias. Ceci, ajouté à la libéralisation de l'espace démocratique dans le pays, s'est traduit par la prolifération de blogs politiques et de portails d'informations parallèles, et par l'usage des nouvelles technologies dans la campagne électorale (...) de l'opposition. Cela devrait avoir des implications significatives dans les prochaines élections alors que la Malaysia accueillera quatre millions de nouveaux électeurs. Une grande partie de cet électorat est non seulement jeune mais également urbain, plus exigeant et critique par rapport aux médias traditionnels et aux anciennes modes politiques.In the last elections of March 2008, the ruling party lost its two-thirds majority for the first time since 1969. This phenomenon called "political tsunami" by local standards was awarded among others the rise of new media. This, coupled with the liberalization of the democratic space in the country, has resulted in the proliferation of political blogs and news portals parallel, and the use of new technologies in the election campaign of the opposition. This would have significant implications in the next elections while Malaysia will host four million new voters. A large part of the electorate is not only young but also urban, more demanding and critical of traditional media and the old political ways. (shrink)

This paper presents a study of gatekeeping in the U.S. political blog “Daily Kos.” Open online collectives like Daily Kos use relational mechanisms, such as gatekeeping, to manage organizational boundaries and filter the contributions of participants. However, neither prior theories of gatekeeping nor the existing analyses of open online collectives account for the character or implications of gatekeeping in the Daily Kos community. Using qualitative evidence as well as statistical analysis of a large sample of comment threads on the (...) site from 2008, I argue that gatekeeping on Daily Kos takes centralized and decentralized forms, and that both modes depend critically on relational boundary work among site participants. Centralized gatekeeping proceeds through actions by high-status members of the community. Decentralized gatekeeping, by contrast, consists of more numerous and small-scale interactions between community members, who filter and moderate each other’s participation. Both forms of gatekeeping enhance the ability of site leaders and incumbent community members to regulate access to privileges and agenda-setting responsibilities on the site. These findings imply that the egalitarian ethos of open online collectives exists in tension with the mechanisms through which participation and status inequalities emerge among participants. How collectives engaged in mobilization and discursive production resolve this tension will shape the long-term impact of online participation and blogs on the political and public spheres. (shrink)

In this short piece, I acknowledge that there are two main hypotheses regarding the origin of Sars-Cov2: the zoonotic jump hypothesis defended by the scientific establishment, and the lab leak hypothesis defended by a minority of scientists. Despite the new evidence supporting the zoonotic jump hypothesis, I contend that the minority’s view still seems more reasonable to accept at this time than the majority’s view regarding the origin of the virus. I will try to justify the plausibility of the minority’s (...) hypothesis by deductive reasoning first and then by inductive reasoning appealing to the notion of Inference to the Best Explanation (aka, I2BE). (shrink)

Costs, blogs, and rationing. In 1985 I was invited to take part in an Office of Technology Assessment project on the impact new technologies would have on the future of Medicare. The study concluded that those technologies would cause great problems, inexorably driving up costs. Some limits would, sooner or later, have to be set on Medicare spending. I was immediately hooked by that problem, wrote a book about it, and have followed it ever since. Yet even though the problem (...) of rising Medicare costs was identified nearly twenty-five years ago, not much was done about it, and it became politically hazardous even to talk about it. Now it has become an immediate issue, but the rhetoric of urgency and the cost .. (shrink)

Although no scholarly consensus exists on the issue, the claim that a substantive reconfiguration of the Internet has occurred in the beginning of the 2000s has settled firmly in public common sense. The label tentatively chosen for the new turn in the medium’s evolution is Web 2.0. The developments constituting this turn have been contemplated from different perspectives in technical and business publications (O’Reilly 2005), in treatises on convergence or participatory culture (Jenkins 2006; Jenkins et al. 2009), and could be (...) usefully interrogated by means of political economy concepts such as the social factory and free labor (Terranova 2004). Marked, or rather symbolically constructed, by these discursive pickets lies a field of practice that the members of the participatory culture, the produsers (Bruns 2008) of open journalism, blogs, social networking sites and other characteristic Web 2.0 applications inhabit and animate with their everyday thought, decision making and action. This paper undertakes a theoretical exploration of the user practices emerging and consolidating around the new technological and organizational models making up Web 2.0. It is informed by a qualitative study of bloggers and Facebook users conducted through focus group methodology, although the concrete empirical data are not presented here. Rather, the analysis employs the concept of technologies of the self by Foucault (1988) as a heuristic device in order to situate Web 2.0 use, first, in a long history of culturally evolved forms of self-constitution and, second, in a complex matrix of relationships with other types of technologies, namely, those of production, sign systems and power. This conceptual choice, we argue, furnishes a study of Web 2.0 use, which holds in balance its liberatory potential and its susceptibility to new forms of domination, rationalization and commodification. (shrink)

Political activism via the internet raises two problems : the split between cyberspace and the street and the dissemination and solitude of cyberspace. Electronic resistance can now overcome both difficulties, if only locally and temporarily. First, thanks to the use of cell phones, it is now based on technologies capable of “looping” the digital nets, where information circulates, with the urban space. Second, thanks to the syndication of contents, it is now capable of linking, of generating commons, without in (...) the least diminishing the autonomy nor the singularity of the sites, blogs and subjectivities at work. The “media” perfectly deserve their name here, between the intimacy of the blog and the extimacy of the street. (shrink)

Lawyers write, blog and are otherwise producers of words; they structure public life through legal discourse and integrate all issues that reinforce legal reasoning. Even if one is inclined not to justify the power of their words in the context of a democratic theory, one is hardly able to challenge its public acceptance. But semiotic analyses harden the question whether these emperors wear nothing but robes. That attitude intensifies where medicine becomes increasingly relevant for legal discourse, as becomes clear where (...) for instance US political viewpoints bring bioethical issues to the Courts. One major theme in today’s medicine pertains to identity in its psychological, philosophical and social dimensions. Identity thus becomes a groundbreaking semiotic issue in law and medicine; both discourses are particular important to the otherness of the other. A US criminal law case interests here (Harrington v. State of Iowa, 2003; cited as: 659N.W.2d 509). The case is decided with “information about what the person has stored in his brain”. A chain of signs is involved: from “brain-function” to “brain-storage” via “brain-scan” to “brain-fingerprint”, for which the case became famous. A long series of signs and meanings belong here to intertwined discourses. Central is a particular sign in each discourse: “brain” means brain scan, and “fingerprint” means law! The two display trading mechanisms, which determine the otherness of the other and the self! The chain of signs in the Harrington case shows inter-disciplinarity in law and inter-discursivity among law and medicine. The trading itself underlines the semiotic dimensions in cyberspace, in particular the semiotics of the virtual (Hayles, Kurzweil) and their effects on legal discourse. (shrink)

In a recent blog post, Joshua Clover rightly notices the swift emergence of a new panoply of “genres of the quarantine.”1 It should not come as a surprise that one of them centers on Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, asking whether or not it is still appropriate to describe the situation that we are currently experiencing. Neither should it come as a surprise that, in virtually all of the contributions that make use of the concept of biopolitics to address the (...) current coronavirus pandemic, the same bunch of rather vague ideas are mentioned over and over again, while other—no doubt more interesting—Foucauldian insights tend to be ignored. In what follows, I discuss two of these insights, and I conclude with some methodological remarks on the issue of what it may mean to “respond” to the current “crisis.”. (shrink)

Political representatives with excessive authority and a lack of deliberation and co-legislation with their electors, provoke protests that desire to have influence over the State. Traditional mass media (television, radio, newspapers and cinema) and the Web 1.0 (lists of e-mails and non-interactive websites) created distance among them because they reduced the electorate to fewer recipients. But the new media from the Web 2.0 (Blogs, Facebook, Wikis, and in particular the Micro-Bloggins and Twitter) pretend to improve old limitations. Likewise, the (...) first supposed we had a democracy and so we searched for information online, on the other hand, the new gives information and demands democracy. The idea exposed on this article is how the new Web 2.0 seeks to exceed the limits of traditional participation and to dissolve, more than surpassing, citizen’s frontiers of political activity on the Web. (shrink)

This research explores the spread of unreliable information on Facebook during the 2017 French presidential campaign. By analyzing information-sharing behavior on 252 Facebook pages, our study highlights the wide variety of information sources shared by several political communities, notably news published by partisan websites or activist blogs. Our results demonstrate that political parties – particularly, those on the extreme ends of the political spectrum – tend to re-share a large amount of information reflecting the same ideological positions (...) as their own. This trend is amplified by a phenomenon of endo-citation, that is, a “circular circulation” of information between Facebook pages within the same political community. Our results focus on the information practices of the far-right, tracing a clear over-representation of sources that are unreliable or likely to relay disinformation. We argue that this circular transmission of information creates an “unreliable information bubble” that characterizes far-right information-sharing behavior. (shrink)

An introduction of the ethics of belief and application to current political debates, with the observation that people of all political persuasions have beliefs that are not based on strong evidence. -/- Also posted on Cardiff's "Open for Debate" blog.

What does it mean to be a scientist working today; specifically, a scientist whose subject matter is human life? Scientists often overstate their claim to certainty, sorting the world into categorical distinctions that obstruct rather than clarify its complexities. In this book Daniel Nettle urges the reader to unpick such distinctions--biological versus social sciences, mind versus body, and nature versus nurture--and look instead for the for puzzles and anomalies, the points of connection and overlap. These essays, converted from often humorous, (...) sometimes autobiographical blog posts, form an extended meditation on the possibilities and frustrations of the life scientific. Pragmatically arguing from the intersection between social and biological sciences, Nettle reappraises the virtues of policy initiatives such as Universal Basic Income and income redistribution, highlighting the traps researchers and politicians are liable to encounter. This provocative, intelligent and self-critical volume is a testament to the possibilities of interdisciplinary study--whose virtues Nettle stridently defends--drawing from and having implications for a wide cross-section of academic inquiry. This will appeal to anybody curious about the implications of social and biological sciences for increasingly topical political concerns. It comes particularly recommended to Sciences and Social Sciences students and to scholars seeking to extend the scope of their field in collaboration with other disciplines. (shrink)

In the Summer of 2020, a couple of months after the start of the Covid-19 crisis, the Franciscan Study Center at Tilburg University and the Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure University started a new partnership called Franciscan Connections. The aim of this new international Franciscan blog was to connect, communicate, and convey the best of Franciscan learning in the twenty-first century. We decided that we wanted to make contemporary and applied Franciscan scholarship available to a wider world of scholars, educated (...) professionals, and communities of practice and to make a new generation of readers aware of the contribution that Franciscan scholarship can make on contemporary issues in politics, society, ethics, and church. Now, almost two years and 200 blog posts later, we notice an increasing involvement from people around the world that seem to really appreciate this new platform as a means for establishing all kinds of Franciscan-inspired connections. Grafted on a way of life inspired by a vision of equality and justice, the Franciscan ethos displays a wealth of values and virtues that are conducive to moral goodness and concern for the common good. As a gift of the Highest Good, Franciscan goodness becomes both a social good and a personal virtue. It is inextricably bound to other social goods like charity, poverty, and peace, which, unsurprisingly, are personal virtues as well. They are also evangelical goods and virtues. Their evangelical rootedness and interconnectedness should therefore be borne in mind, when the Franciscan way of life is to be presented as a primary example of "the good life.". (shrink)

The confrontations of stakeholder visions about agriculture and food production has become a focal point in the public sphere, coinciding with a diversification of agrifood models. This study analyzes the debates stemming from the coexistence of these models, particularly during the initial term of neoliberal-centrist Emmanuel Macron’s presidency in France. Employing collective monitoring from 2017 to 2021, a corpus of 958 online news and blog articles was compiled. Using a computational analysis, we reveal the framings and controversies emerging from this (...) media discourse. The macro-structuring of discourse on model coexistence revolves around scientific, economic and political framings. Coexistence is a complex of debates based on specific frames associated with specific arenas and actor configurations: growth of organic agriculture, transformations of agrifood systems, sciences of production and impacts, livestock and meat diet controversies, agroecological innovations, CAP reform criticism, discourse of peasant agriculture and State-Profession _co-gestion_. Employing global sentiment analysis and focusing on salient controversies, namely EGAlim law, pesticide regulations, and agribashing, we show the shift from conciliation to a hardening of debates. Finally, we discuss the causes and consequences of this trend. The political will to support the transition of agriculture remains influenced by the _co-gestion_ system, an inherited configuration of decision-makers instrumental in the agricultural modernization. As a consequence, significant agricultural challenges, particularly highlighted in the scientific macro-frame, persist unresolved. This lock-in of the agrifood system is based on defensive strategies that challenge the democratic debate about food and agricultural practices. (shrink)

A PICTURE MAY BE WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS-- BUT A FEW CHOICE WORDS CAN SPEAK VOLUMES! _ If Ignorance Is Bliss, Why Aren't More People Happy? Bottled Water Is for Suckers Clones Are People Too At Least the War on the Environment Is Going Well Don't Believe Everything You Think The Revolution Will Be Tweeted _ Long before blogs, tweets, and sound bites, people were telling the world how they felt in brief, blunt bursts of information plastered on the backs (...) of their cars. Whether they're political or religious, passionate or proud, controversial or corny, these brightly colored, boldly lettered mini manifestos are declarations of who we are, where we stand, and what we'd rather be doing. But as bestselling author and noted philosopher Jack Bowen reveals, there's much more to the pop-culture phenomenon of bumper stickers than rolling one-liners and drive-by propaganda--no less, in fact, than a wise, funny, poignant, contentious, and truthful discourse on the human condition. _ Mixing pop culture with the ideas of historically prominent philosophers and scientists, If You Can Read This exposes the deeper wisdom couched behind these slogans--or, as need be, exposes where they have gone wrong. If you brake for big ideas, now's the time. _. (shrink)

Globalization, in its earlier stages, was expected to erode national and ethnic identities. In contrast, ethnicity and ethnic affiliations persisted, growing socially and politically. This paper examines the role of the globalizing new communications technologies on this process, focusing on Diasporas. The study of trans-state networks based on ethnic solidarity, connections and affinities in the framework of social and political science is quite recent. Following a clarification of the distinction between classical and modern Diasporas we analyse a particular case (...) study, that of the Jewish Diaspora. This diaspora was an early adopter of computer-based communications and the Internet for a wide range of purposes. Early events are described including the diffusion of the Internet to Israel, the planning of a Global Jewish Information Network, Israel 2020 macro scenarios for Israel and the Jewish People and the decision on Jewish Peoplehood through communication technologies. A survey of historical systems follows by a description of the Jewish population and the wide variety of Jewish Web based activities today. These include the Institutional landscape; Jewish media — press, radio, video and blogs; the impact on Jewish religious observance; Jewish genealogy; Online dating; Social networks; Jewish education; Online learning; Jewish Studies and Digital Humanities; Jewish memory. Judaica Europeana supports the activities previously described by aggregating and facilitating the access and the re-use of Jewish digital culture. Europeana is the leading global digital library for cultural heritage as well as a lively eco-system for relevant stakeholders. (shrink)

Today, DIY -- do-it-yourself -- describes more than self-taught carpentry. Social media enables DIY citizens to organize and protest in new ways and to repurpose corporate content in order to offer political counternarratives. This book examines the usefulness and limits of DIY citizenship, exploring the diverse forms of political participation and "critical making" that have emerged in recent years. The authors and artists in this collection describe DIY citizens whose activities range from activist fan blogging and video (...) production to knitting and the creation of community gardens. Contributors examine DIY activism, describing new modes of civic engagement that include Harry Potter fan activism and the activities of the Yes Men. They consider DIY making in learning, culture, hacking, and the arts, including do-it-yourself media production and collaborative documentary making. They discuss DIY and design and how citizens can unlock the black box of technological infrastructures to engage and innovate open and participatory critical making. And they explore DIY and media, describing activists' efforts to remake and reimagine media and the public sphere. As these chapters make clear, DIY is characterized by its emphasis on "doing" and making rather than passive consumption. DIY citizens assume active roles as interventionists, makers, hackers, modders, and tinkerers, in pursuit of new forms of engaged and participatory democracy. _Contributors_Mike Ananny, Chris Atton, Alexandra Bal, Megan Boler, Catherine Burwell, Red Chidgey, Andrew Clement, Negin Dahya, Suzanne de Castell, Carl DiSalvo, Kevin Driscoll, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Joseph Ferenbok, Stephanie Fisher, Miki Foster, Stephen Gilbert, Henry Jenkins, Jennifer Jenson, Yasmin B. Kafai, Ann Light, Steve Mann, Joel McKim, Brenda McPhail, Owen McSwiney, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Graham Meikle, Emily Rose Michaud, Kate Milberry, Michael Murphy, Jason Nolan, Kate Orton-Johnson, Kylie A. Peppler, David J. Phillips, Karen Pollock, Matt Ratto, Ian Reilly, Rosa Reitsamer, Mandy Rose, Daniela K. Rosner, Yukari Seko, Karen Louise Smith, Lana Swartz, Alex Tichine, Jennette Weber, Elke Zobl. (shrink)

There is a deep cultural anxiety around public expressions of maternalism and the application of maternal values to society as a whole. Julie Stephens examines why postmaternal thinking has become so influential in recent decades and why there has been a growing unease with maternal forms of subjectivity and maternalist perspectives. In moving beyond policy definitions, which emphasize the priority given to women's claims as employees over their political claims as mothers, Stephens details an elaborate process of cultural forgetting (...) that has accompanied this repudiation of the maternal. Reclaiming an alternative feminist position through an investigation of oral history, life narratives, Web blogs, and other rich and varied sources, Stephens confronts the core claims of postmaternal thought and challenges dominant representations of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. Deploying the interpretive framework of memory studies, she examines the political structures of forgetting surrounding the maternal and the weakening of nurture and care in the public domain. She views the promotion of an illusory, self-sufficient individualism as a form of social unmothering that is profoundly connected to this ethos. In rejecting both traditional maternalism and the new postmaternalism, Stephens challenges prevailing paradigms and makes way for an alternative feminist maternalism centering on a politics of care. (shrink)

Drawing from a long history of feminist writing grounded in personal reflection and informal dialogue between feminist thinkers, Cobb and Godden-Rasul present an email-based conversation with Jess Lishak, the outgoing Women’s Officer at the University of Manchester Students’ Union. The conversation draws on Cobb and Godden-Rasul’s experience as feminist academics engaged in critical institutional practice through such initiatives as editing the Inherently Human blog, organising the Inspirational Women of Law exhibition, and participating in university working groups on campus-based harassment and (...) violence. In asking Lishak to reflect on her journey to feminism and her experiences of activism, the conversation ranges over such issues as personal influences and experiences, strategies for securing institutional support, encouraging student engagement with feminism, and campaigning tactics. The conversation developed out of a “Campus Feminisms” event in March 2016, which explored the rise of exciting new grassroots single-issue campaigns and political mobilisations by students in higher education, and was organised by Cobb and Godden-Rasul at Newcastle University, UK. Undergraduate and postgraduate students shared their personal struggles and achievements in bringing feminist ideas and campaigns to their university campuses. Lucy Morgan, the Gender Equality Officer at Newcastle University Students’ Union, offered inspiring reflections on her efforts to reinvigorate the ‘F’ word, in the face of simultaneous student apathy and backlash. Many of these campus-based mobilisations have demanded better institutional responses to sexual violence against women. At around the same time, Cobb was beginning a new role as the co-chair of the University of Manchester’s first Task & Finish Group on Sexual Violence and Harassment on Campus. This followed Universities UK’s decision to create a taskforce to consider options for improving institutional responses to student safety. In the process, Cobb crossed paths with Lishak, who had been appointed a member of the UUK Taskforce in light of her path-breaking students’ union work addressing violence against women. Since Lishak was an exemplar of this new feminist wave in higher education, one that was still inadequately understood by feminist academics despite often working side-by-side within the same institutions, the authors embarked on this conversation in order to better understand the relationship between academic and student feminist activism on campus. As Lishak makes clear in her own reflections, there is nothing inevitable about the synergies between these movements, but there is potentially a great deal that could be achieved through their closer engagement. (shrink)

In this article I provide a Spinozist perspective on popular power. It is written as a blog post for a popular audience, and draws on my book, Potentia: Hobbes and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics (OUP: 2020).

This article describes the covert seeding by political parties of forums and blogs hosted by one of the leading Slovak daily newspapers, and the techniques developed by journalists, administrators, bloggers and discussants to defend these ‘public spheres’ against perceived colonisation by professional political communicators acting under false identities. We follow a trajectory of accusatory forms and registers—a collective inquiry which gathered and evaluated evidence to support public accusations. The episode demonstrates the vulnerability of the sociotechnical systems used by (...) the media to host e-participation as well as their capacities for self-regulation. It shows how citizens, journalists and party political communicators are engaged in complex boundary struggles for the appropriation and regulation of these new spaces of sociability in order to qualify the forms of knowledge that emerge there, agree conventions for the expression of disquiet and negotiate practically enforcable definitions distinguishing political marketing from free public debate. (shrink)

Big Data enhances the possibilities for storing personal data extracted from social media and web search on an unprecedented scale. This paper draws on the political economy of information which explains why the online industry fails to self-regulate, resulting in increasingly insidious web-tracking technologies. Content analysis of historical blogs and request for comments on HTTP cookies published by the Internet Engineering Task Force illustrates how cookie technology was introduced in the mid-1990s, amid stark warnings about increased system vulnerabilities and (...) deceptive personal data extractions. In conclusion, online users today are left with few alternatives but to enter into unconscionable contracts about the extraction of their personal data when using the Internet for private purposes. (shrink)

For the modern-day jihadist, the digital self-portrait or, more specifically, battlefield selfie is a popular tool for identity building. Similarly to the selfies taken by non-violent practitioners of self-capture culture, the jihadist selfie represents an alternative to the Cartesian formulation of a unitary and indivisible self. Rather, it is a product of social relations and performative actions, constituted in dialogue with others through very specific socio-cultural frameworks and expectations. However, unlike its non-violent Doppelganger, the expectations of this dialogue are centred (...) around a larger political agenda which actively seeks to reformat collective memories of imperial Islamic conquests and co-opt religion as a way to impose a moral order on its violence. Importantly, the battlefield selfie allows the jihadist easily to traverse the boundaries between two seemingly opposing belief systems. Although there exists a wealth of scholarship of self-capture culture, image sharing sites and micro-celebritism, their pervasive influence and practice on battlefield is understudied. This article draws from the personal histories of key Islamic extremists who were both lionized and demonized as a result of their battlefield micro-influencer practices. Today, however, the same individuals can achieve internet fame by participating in self-capture culture – posting selfies, videos or blogging. In other words, never before has a soldier’s public communication been so personal yet collective. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:'I am cringe, but I am free':A Reparative Reading of Assuming the Ecosexual PositionVanesa Raditz (bio) and Jess Martinez (bio)Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, Jennie Klein, and Linda Montano. Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover. University of Minnesota Press, 2021. ISBN 9781452965796.INTRODUCTIONEcosexual: Eco from the ancient Greek oikos; sexual from Latin, sexuales 1. a person who finds nature romantic, sensual, erotic, or sexy, which can include humans or (...) not. 2. A new sexual identity (self-identified). 3. A person who takes the Earth as their lover. 4. A term used in dating advertisements. 5. An environmental activist strategy. 6. A grassroots movement. 7. A person who has a more expanded concept of what sex and orgasm are beyond mainstream definitions. 8. A person who imagines sex as an ecology that extends beyond the physical body.Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth As Lover (Sprinkle and Stephens 2021, 2)What does it mean to take the Earth as a lover? How does it change our experiences of pleasure in our bodies to give attention to the eroticism of air in our lungs, mud on our skin, or water in our throats? How would it shape our ethical commitments to these elements that we depend upon for life if we were to reconnect with them as pleasurable extensions of our own bodies? These questions are at the heart of the decades-long research-creation performance-art collaboration between Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens that has built an international "ecosexual" identity and movement, a tale that they document in their new book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover. Part travelog, part relationship memoir, part how-to guide, Assuming the Ecosexual Position chronicles [End Page 105] the emergence and evolution of their ecosex concept and community through a playful recounting of over a decade of productions: performative weddings to the earth, moon, lakes, rocks and beyond; theatrical two-women sexecology performances that culminate in explicit sex in piles of earth; ecosex walking tours; workshops; public sex clinics; documentary films; and so much more.Woven throughout are philosophical reflections on the entanglements between bodies, land, sex, eroticism, and love, many of which emerge from ecofeminist thought, pollinated with the post-porn, sex-positive, queer feminism of the 80s and 90s. In introducing their philosophical inspirations, they name Greta Gaard's classic piece on queering ecofeminism (18) which stimulated a body of work describing the ways that patriarchal systems of power simultaneously oppress women, the erotic, and nature (1997). Drawing upon Sprinkle's background in porn and post-porn modernist theater, Stephens' background as a queer artist with a doctorate in Performance Studies, their mutual interest in sex education, and their love for the redwoods of Santa Cruz, the pair crafted ecosexuality as a particular lens for expanding queer ecofeminist inquiry into the power of sexual liberation for ecological liberation, which they do through the creative methodologies of performance. The performance art practice that they develop has significant inspiration from the Fluxus art movement, which resisted the authority of museums to define the meaning or value of art, and encouraged the active practice and production of art throughout life.Among the inspirations they list in the introduction to Assuming the Ecosexual Position, Donna Haraway and Kim TallBear stand out. Donna Haraway's presence is felt throughout the book—as a colleague of Stephens at UC Santa Cruz, as a friend at their Wedding to the Earth, as a collaborator in the documentary Water Makes Us Wet, and ultimately, as a posthuman philosopher (Haraway 2000) who has inspired Stephens and Sprinkle to "see ecosex as a conceptual art practice and a way of thinking beyond individual identity, and even beyond human beings, to envision a larger system—an ecology of relationships" (8). The authors also express the influence of their evolving relationship with Kim TallBear, with whom Beth studied while pursuing her PhD, and who has encouraged the pair to leverage this posthuman and new materialist consciousness towards decolonial politics (TallBear 2015). They cite one of TallBear's blog posts on ecosexuality, where she encourages ecosexuals to use a critical eye towards "New Age" appropriation of Native American ceremonies... (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to identify and categorize frequent patterns describing interactions between users in social networks. We analyze a social network with relationships between users that evolve in time already identified. In our research, we discover patterns based on frequent interactions between groups of users. The patterns are described by the characteristics of these interactions, such as their reciprocity, or the relative difference between estimations of global influences of the users participating in the discussions. The modification of (...) the apriori algorithms is applied as one of the methods for pattern identification. The analyzed social network is built using the data set containing data from the Polish blog website salon24, which concerns mostly socio-political issues. (shrink)

Postnational, or after or more than national, is a world that connects the international with the local. Technollaboration, is how creative digital communities use technology to improve methods and environments for collaboration. Postbiotanical, after or more than biotanical, represents the future of human-centric collectives around farming and urban living and sustainability. Village, is ambiguous and raises the question how large is local, and how does a village-centric view impact the way we treat each other? Art traditionally functions as an environment (...) for philosophical and creative activity that works to secure its borders from intruding dictatorial ethics, ideology, politics or dogma that might sully its aim to maintain its open arduous exploration of the clash between image and meaning, icon and significance, or perception and identity in reference to culture and history. Integrating technology into this discourse introduces a milieu of associations, expectations and conclusions about how technological innovation, practices and products should be steered, which can also influence what we both make and teach. The web has since evolved into a pervasively instantaneous space for more involved forms of communication (Google hangout), content sharing (SVN), publishing (blogs), community building (messageboards, Facebook), creative performance (Isadora) and more. Now creative interactive initiatives are not limited to merely making a statement or triggering a semiotic synapse, but rather can have a social impact, enacting, mobilizing and serving as a resource for the public. Telematic Art that includes the activities surrounding Digital Communities and their behaviour, does not merely provide an environment to discuss social issues, but embodies social interaction in ways in which new forms of collective expression can be realized. The development of telematics tools is empowering for the public while serving as a medium that influences how individuals interact. Between DIY/DIWO models, open source hardware, software, and creation initiatives, practivist initiatives, creative hacking ideologies, immersion, and web-based communication tools to localize the international collaborative workshop, I believe our formats for education and exchange are becoming more collective and empowering, and with the inclusion of digital social collaboration initiatives seen in myriad examples of Telematic Art, there exists the potential to motivate a mindset desiring new shifts in perception and making with the goals of serving the global community in significant and direct ways. (shrink)

How social media and DIY communities have enabled new forms of political participation that emphasize doing and making rather than passive consumption. Today, DIY—do-it-yourself—describes more than self-taught carpentry. Social media enables DIY citizens to organize and protest in new ways and to repurpose corporate content in order to offer political counternarratives. This book examines the usefulness and limits of DIY citizenship, exploring the diverse forms of political participation and “critical making” that have emerged in recent years. The (...) authors and artists in this collection describe DIY citizens whose activities range from activist fan blogging and video production to knitting and the creation of community gardens. Contributors examine DIY activism, describing new modes of civic engagement that include Harry Potter fan activism and the activities of the Yes Men. They consider DIY making in learning, culture, hacking, and the arts, including do-it-yourself media production and collaborative documentary making. They discuss DIY and design and how citizens can unlock the black box of technological infrastructures to engage and innovate open and participatory critical making. And they explore DIY and media, describing activists' efforts to remake and reimagine media and the public sphere. As these chapters make clear, DIY is characterized by its emphasis on “doing” and making rather than passive consumption. DIY citizens assume active roles as interventionists, makers, hackers, modders, and tinkerers, in pursuit of new forms of engaged and participatory democracy. Contributors Mike Ananny, Chris Atton, Alexandra Bal, Megan Boler, Catherine Burwell, Red Chidgey, Andrew Clement, Negin Dahya, Suzanne de Castell, Carl DiSalvo, Kevin Driscoll, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Joseph Ferenbok, Stephanie Fisher, Miki Foster, Stephen Gilbert, Henry Jenkins, Jennifer Jenson, Yasmin B. Kafai, Ann Light, Steve Mann, Joel McKim, Brenda McPhail, Owen McSwiney, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Graham Meikle, Emily Rose Michaud, Kate Milberry, Michael Murphy, Jason Nolan, Kate Orton-Johnson, Kylie A. Peppler, David J. Phillips, Karen Pollock, Matt Ratto, Ian Reilly, Rosa Reitsamer, Mandy Rose, Daniela K. Rosner, Yukari Seko, Karen Louise Smith, Lana Swartz, Alex Tichine, Jennette Weber, Elke Zobl. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 242—252. Introduction The following two works were produced by visual artist Jonas Staal and writer Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei during a visit as artists in residence at The Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa during the summer of 2010. Both works were produced in situ and comprised in both cases a public intervention conceived by Staal and a textual work conceived by Van Gerven Oei. It was their aim, in both cases, to produce complementary works that could (...) be read “through each other,” in which the movement of artistic construction would be imitated by textual deconstruction and vice versa. Both works deal with the way in which capital, apartheid, and monumentality are interwoven in South-African society. The Missing Link addresses a monument for democracy, erected on the premises of a private corporation running both an amusement park and the Apartheid Museum franchise. The textual intervention accompanying this public intervention investigates the limits of the inclusiveness of the anti-discrimination section in the South-African constitution, itself a monumental work of democracy. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth deals with the history and eventual dissolution of a monumental square, commemorating the Soweto Uprising, in one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The history accompanying this public dismemberment of memory is equally fragmented, which is expressed by the many voices recounting uncertain and perhaps even irrelevant “facts” about the genius loci, the way in which the memorial space has actually entered into the memory of the inhabitants surrounding it. Next to their individual practices, Staal and Van Gerven Oei have worked together on a number of projects ever since 2007, including several art residencies. Their work involves an investigation of the different interfaces between art, politics, and public space in media ranging from theater and public interventions, to video installations and (co-authored) textual works. The Missing Link Missing Link (1) Missing Link (2) Missing Link (3) Intervention on the monument entitled The Seven Pillars of the Constitution , part of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Seven Pillars represent the constitutional values propagated in South Africa since the abolition of the apartheid regime. The monument and museum were built by the Gold Reef Resorts corporation, which is also responsible for the theme park and casino next to it. By placing the word “capitalism” on the wall surrounding the museum, the capitalist system and the constant social divisions that it implies are interpreted as sophistic continuations of apartheid politics. Through the capitalist system, apartheid is still operational within South African society. Whereas during the apartheid regime, the separation clearly ran along race divisions, in the current, “democratic” system, the same actual separation is sustained without it being an explicit element of the foundations of the country, i.e. the constitution. This intervention foregrounds the constant role of capitalism is both periods. At the same time the intervention acknowledges that contemporary Western artisthood is a mirror of the privileges that are offered by the capitalist system, and the type of artist that it produces. The intervention initiates a critical discourse concerning the capitalist system situated within the disaster of capitalism itself, in other words: through the desire to break with the presumption that art would be able to operate outside the capitalist system and to confirm that art—and the artist himself—is in fact modeled on this system. The public intervention by Staal was supplemented by a textual intervention by Van Gerven Oei: a proposition to alter the seventeenth amendment of the South African constitution. Even though the anti-discrimination legislation in South-Africa is one of the most stringent and inclusive in the world, one factor—wealth—remains outside its scope, thus continuing the schisms along racial lines produced during the apartheid regime: §9.3. The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language, birth, and wealth. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth Intervention concerning the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The monument comprises a park on which different are placed recalling an important protest the black population against the former apartheid regime. In 1976, from a school adjacent to the park, they started a massive protest against the introduction of Afrikaans in the school curriculum. The police reacted violently, and shot several hundreds of students. The construction of the June 16 Memorial Acre was started in 2005, and from the start was the paragon of corruption. Coordinated by local politicians, some family members of the protest leader from 1976 gained control of the realization of the monument, outside the regulation through external institutions. The available budget of 41 million rand (at that time well over 5 million euro) was largely embezzled. In the meantime, the monument has become fully dilapidated and defaced. The park has become overgrown with weeds and covered in a layer of dirt, and the local population is slowly plundering the square to use the material for the construction and decoration of their own houses. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth develops the dynamics already existent around the June 16 Memorial Acre. Without obtaining official permission in advance, several local inhabitants were hired to break down the monument, sort the materials, and offer it to the neighborhood. Thus, the redistribution of wealth after the fall of the apartheid regime is finally taking place, albeit from the mere remains of the capital that was once invested in the community. The words “monument” and “for free” are spray-painted on the stacks of material, both in English and Zulu, as these are locally the most common languages. Van Gerven Oei supplemented Staal’s public intervention with an account of the history of the monument based on a series of interviews. The account clarifies how the different interests within the protest 1976 are reflected in the exceeding decay of the park, and how in the end those interests were represented by the June 16 Memorial Acre. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 1: Removing stones Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 3: Pulling down statues Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 4: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 5: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 6 The next day A Fragmentary History of the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth, Formerly Known as the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei The following text, based on interviews and online research aims to provide parts of a history of the park in front of Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. The idea for the transformation of the park into a memorial site has its source in the events of June 16, 1976: the start of the the student uprising in Soweto. The development of the park was started in the early 1980s, and the actual transformation into a memorial site, the June 16 Memorial Acre, was initiated in 2005. Over the last few years, several monumental additions have been made to the park: A marble monument with three pillars was revealed on June 16, 2006. A sculpture of a book and several billboards on June 16, 2008. A sculpture of student leader Tsietsi Mashinini on June 16, 2010. The park was transformed into the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth on August 3, 2010. According to the entry “Youth Struggle” on the website South African History Online, the Bantu Education Act was introduced in 1953 . In 1954 , Dr Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs, stated: “What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd.” According to the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, the Afrikaans Medium Decree was issued in 1974 , forcing all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50-50 mix as languages of instruction. The Regional Director of Bantu Education (Northern Transvaal Region), J.G. Erasmus, told Circuit Inspectors and Principals of Schools that from January 1, 1975 , Afrikaans had to be used for mathematics, arithmetic, and social studies from standard five (7th grade). English would be the medium for general science and practical subjects. Indigenous languages would be used for religion instruction, music, and physical culture. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on April 30, 1976 , students from the Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike, refusing to go to school. Their example was followed by other schools in Soweto. A student from Morris Isaacson High School, Toboho “Tsietsi” Mashinini, proposed a meeting on June 13, 1976 to discuss further action. According to Weizmann Hamilton’s article “The Soweto Uprising 1976,” which appeared in the September 1986 edition of Inqaba Ya Basebenzi (Fortress of the Revolution), on June 13, 1976 , the South African Students’ Movement called a meeting at the Donaldson Community Center in Orlando. 300-400 Students representing 55 schools decided to hold a mass demonstration on June 16. According to Brian Mokhele, member of the Joint Community Safety Forum, Dr Edelstein was the first victim of the Soweto uprising and killed the day before the march on June 15, 1976 . Edelstein was an administrator at the pass office in Jabavu and gave golf courses to the local community. Edelstein was put in a garbage bin and pierced by pickaxes. The garbage bin was left at the very spot of the murder for many years. A few years ago, a child was beheaded at the same spot, and the basketball court next to it has been abandoned since. According to Marcus Neustetter, founder of the Trinity Session, this story is untrue. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on June 16 , Tsietsi Mashinini led students from Morris Isaacson High School to join up with others who walked from Naledi High School. A crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 eventually ended up near Orlando High School. According to Raymond Marlowe, a local photographer, Tsietsi Mashinini was heading the march. According to the entry “Hector Pieterson” on Wikipedia, Dr Edelstein died on June 16, 1976 , stoned to death by mob and left with a sign around his neck proclaiming “Beware Afrikaaners.” The first child to die that day was called Hastings Ndlovu. According to Pat Motsiri, Orlando West is claiming struggle heritage through the Hector Pieterson Museum, while Hector Pieterson was from Jabavu. According to Pat Motsiri, his generation effectively struggled between 1980 and 1991, forcing the release of Nelson Mandela and negotiations with the apartheid regime while the 1976-generation was safely in exile. Nevertheless, this has not been recognized in any monument. After the abolition of apartheid, the generation from 1976 returned from exile, occupied important government and ANC positions, creating an abundance of 1976 memorials and refusing to acknowledge that this was only possible because of the younger generation’s struggle. He calls this a generational conflict. According to Archibald Dlamini, the park officer responsible for the Memorial Acre, he started working for the municipality in 1978. In 1981/82 , Isaac Makhele from Pimville, who used to work in the cemetery business, was the first developer of the park. It used to be just a normal park until City Parks decided to develop the Memorial Acre in 2006. In 2007 the work was stopped by the community. According to Brian Mokhele, he left the country in 1989 after he participated in the riots of 1986. But when he returned in 1999 he found that nothing had changed. He says that they were promised to be protected by the Constitution, but that reality is different. The police uses fear to suppress them so that they don’t come out to talk openly. He has been arrested twice, both times harassed and tortured by the police, but in the end always released without indictment. He says that this is their way to threaten communities to back off from politics. According to Moses, who is sitting outside rolling a joint, Brian knows everything. He tells Brian to tell me everything he knows. According to Brian Mokhele, Tsietsi Mashinini was possibly murdered in 1990 during his exile in New York. Two weeks before he was supposed to return to South Africa, his papers in order, he was found dead under mysterious circumstances. His coffin was sealed when he was buried. According to Pat Motsiri, he came up with the idea for the Memorial Acre in 2003 . He submitted the documents for the proposal to the council, which sidelined him as soon as the budget came out in 2005 . According to Brian Mokhele, there was on estimation R 41,000,000 spent to redesign the park and turn it into the Memorial Acre. The millions were divided by Amos Masondo, the mayor of Soweto, the local councilor Bongani D. Zondi, and the director of the city of Johannesburg, Pat Lephunya. They were dividing the money between several contractors: Tsietsi Mashinini’s brothers were involved in the development of the park, they got the tender to do the green areas, the landscaping. Construction was done by other companies, some did the paving, the toilets, etc. EMBA, a private company appointed by the municipality was in control of the money flow, but the money was quickly gone. According to Raymond Marlowe, the contractor bought a BMW with the money. According to Archibald Dlamini, the Mashinini brothers got the tender, so the space would look more like the other places around in Soweto. It was agreed that after they were done, they would return the property to the municipality. They did whatever they could do. According to Mafaisa, a member of the Jabavu business community, he was one of the contractors for the landscaping and the pavement under Mpho Mashinini, one of the brothers. He says that I should contact Mavi for information on Mpho. According to Poi Stuurman, a local youth worker, Mafaisa is one of the guys who ran away with the money. According to Mavi, Mpho Mashinini was never a contractor. The contracts were organized by Sbu Butelezi, the former head of the Gauteng Department for Public Works. The June 16 Foundation and the Mashinini brothers will be the beneficiaries of the park when it is finished. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks did not accept the Memorial Acre because it was not finished. The rest of the year, the unfinished park is not maintained, as should have happened. This was done deliberately so that in the end they can just clean the whole thing up and have a reason to redo the whole park. According to Brian Mokhele, the Mashinini brothers now work for the government. People that manipulate for money purposes always come from the government’s side. Because the park was left unfinished, the people from the neighborhood are taking away the stones to decorate their own homes with. According to Archibald Dlamini, because City Parks doesn’t accept responsibility of the park, he officially has nothing the guard, except for his cottage, which is municipal property. The thieves come at night and destroy the park, but he cannot do anything because he is sleeping. According to the website of the Thanda Foundation on June 16, 2006 a bronze statue of Hector Pieterson, the first child to die in the 1976 protests, made by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane was unveiled in the Maponya Mall in Soweto. The statue is sculpted after the famous image shot by Sam Nzima of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying the dead body of the boy. The sculpture was sponsored by the Thanda Foundation, founded by the Swedish entrepreneur Dan Olofsson and South-African entrepreneur Matthews Phosa. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, the Memorial Acre and Artwork were unveiled in 2006. According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre was still under development on July 24, 2006. According to Archibald Dlamini, City Parks only cleans up the park once a year just before the June 16 celebrations. Everybody is waiting for the Mashinini brothers to finish their job. The last time he talked with them was in 2007 . According to a sign on the school grounds of the Morris Isaacson High School, the June 16 Trail will be finished in 2008 . According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre contains another monument erected in Tsietsi’s honor. The monument was created as part of the Sunday Times Heritage Public Art program. Its physical form resembles a giant book which symbolizes the crisis in education experienced in 1976. On the face of the book is the map of the route taken by the students from Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu to Phefeni Junior Secondary in Orlando West (currently the site of the Hector Pieterson Museum), while the back cover of the ‘book’ is inscribed with a tribute to Tsietsi Mashinini. The monument was revealed on June 16, 2008 . According to Marcus Neustetter, the billboards on the Memorial Acre were part of a school project realized in 2008. Following several workshops, the students from different high schools along the June 16 Trail were invited to work with artists on the billboards, while the neighborhood community was invited to watch the process during the festivities on June 15 and 16, 2008 . The billboards were supposed to be removed because of construction works on the Memorial Acre, which never ended up happening. According to Brian Mokhele, the former toilet facilities were converted into a house for the park officer. This park officer has been working for city parks for more than 12-15 years, but does nothing here, because the park, including the new toilet buildings, is not finished. The government is now moving around looking for people to take this job because they stopped it. They confronted everybody who was going in and chased them away. According to John, in 2009 , some girls, around 16 or 17 years old, were raped by four men who had been drinking in a local shebeen. When the bar quit they said that they would go home by car, but instead raped the girls on the Memorial Acre nearby. This happened in the unfinished toilets, because the doors couldn’t be closed. According to Brian Mokhele, there used to be some fences around the park because of the construction work that was eventually stopped, but these were also stolen. According to Archibald Dlamini, people from the neighborhood started about two and a half years ago, and the last piece was stolen near the end of 2009 . Sometimes he would catch someone with a roll of fence, and then use it for his own cottage. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, a statue of Tsietsi Mashinini by Johannes Pokhela was revealed on June 16, 2010 , “Youth Day.” According to Shirley Makutoane, deputy principal of Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini, funded by the June 16 Foundation, has temporarily been placed within the school perimeter. The statue will be moved to the Memorial Acre when it will be finished, in 2011 . According to Brian Mokhele, beside the June 16 Foundation, there is also a June 16 Memorial Acre Foundation. Both foundations are quarreling about the money involved in the Memorial Acre project. Nobody knows who’s involved in them. According to Marcus Neustetter, the June 16 Foundation consists of people that were part of 1976 protest movement, local government officials, representatives of the Hector Pieterson Museum, and the council. According to students from the Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini is on the school ground because on the Memorial Acre it would be vandalized by youths from White City, an adjacent neighborhood. Accorcing to Brian Mokhele, the statue of Tsietsi should eventually be mounted on the Memorial Acre. It is wrong that the statue is in the school at the moment, because it is not a public school. He wants the statues to depict the massiveness of the force that was coming into Soweto after the protests. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks, City of Jo’burg, City Lights, and SAPS are making some sort of plan to take the plan back. They want to remove the trees from the Memorial Acre, and redesign the Memorial Acre into a relaxing park, without political content. They want to depoliticize the square. In doing so,they will have their own employment and not use local workforces. According to Brian Mokhele, the community wants to remove the monuments, amphitheater, and sculptures from the Memorial Acre because they do not resemble anything. The sculptures should be depicting the truth of what happened, because the Memorial Acre is a political heritage site. He wants to involve the people that actually participated in the struggle to make the monument so that everyone can enjoy it and get a better understanding of the struggle heritage. Therefore, he proposes collective ideology in which everyone has a say. This would prevent future vandalization of the monument. According to Pat Motsiri, the sculptures must depict the event around June 16, 1976. Like the story of Dr Edelstein, who was pierced by pickaxes, forced into a garbage bin and burned alive. According to Jonas Staal, the Memorial Acre should be destroyed, its elements stacked on pallets, thus forming the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth . According to Mafaisa, his men can do the work quickly. He has about twenty men working under him. (shrink)

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared during 2015 in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer and at his blog site. It discusses the seminal year 1965, when so many of our current social, cultural, and political problems and our difficulties in the Church began to take shape. It discusses the nature of the “new direction” that became evident that year, how crucial trends took shape, and how the developments of (...) that year led to others in the short or long run. (shrink)

Since the start of the new millennium in the UK, a range of new feminist activities – national networks, issue-specific campaigns, local groups, festivals, magazines and blogs – have been formed by a new constituency of mostly younger women and men. These new feminist activities, which we term ‘third-wave’ feminism, have emerged in a ‘post-feminist’ context, in which feminism is considered dead or unnecessary, and where younger feminists, if represented at all, are often dismissed as insufficiently political. Representations of (...) North American third-wave feminism are brought into play in these criticisms of the UK third wave, and insufficient attention has been paid to the distinctiveness of the UK contexts. Drawing on data from a survey of 1265 people involved in post-2000 forms of feminism and semi-structured interviews with thirty feminist activists, the article sketches out the contours of the contemporary feminist movement and its activists, activism and priorities. It attends to differences and similarities between second and third waves, and situates contemporary UK feminism in its distinctive UK context. Arguing that feminism is both alive and relevant for significant numbers of people in the UK today, the article interrogates younger feminists’ reluctance to use the term ‘third-wave feminism’ to describe themselves, attributing this reluctance to ambivalent and cynical representations of the third wave in academic literature and the popular media. (shrink)