Financial Capabilities in Indian Country

If offered an opportunity to save money via a formal financial education program, will young people participate in the programming and open a savings account? That was the key research question motivating this pilot study, which was implemented among youth aged 11 to 15 years who self-identified as American Indian. This pilot study was conducted in partnership with a local financial institution, a middle school (Grades 6, 7, and 8), and an Indian education program. It investigated the uptake of savings accounts as tools for youth development and financial inclusion among American Indians in Sand Springs, Oklahoma. Two staff members from the local bank presented a financial education program and hands-on learning experience about the importance of saving and the process of opening a savings account. The goal of the program was to increase awareness among American Indian middle-school students about the importance of saving and investing. The program sought to provide one step toward moving individuals from financial stress to financial independence. Preprogram questionnaires were utilized to gain a better understanding of the participants’ habits and existing knowledge about the importance of saving, investing, and preparing for college. Postprogram questionnaires were utilized to find out what students learned and whether they opened savings accounts. Data were collected on savings account uptake 1 month, 4 months, and approximately 12 months after program participation. Results show that, 1 month after the program, 32% of participants had opened a savings account with the bank. Four months after the program was delivered, all 19 participants still had their accounts open. Approximately 12 months after the program, 17 participants still had active savings accounts open and four had added money to their savings accounts. Only two withdrew all funds from their accounts. These results sharpen understanding about the relationship between formal banking services and American Indian youth. The findings are used to identify leverage points at which action can be taken to support early financial education and financial capability with middle-school-level students

Afterword: Kindling the Programmatic Production of Critical and Outsider Legal Scholarship, 1996-2016

This afterword to a conference-based symposium represents not only an inter-generational reflection on LatCrit theory @ XX, but also an aspirational reminder of our foundational propositions and values as we look and venture ahead. Beginning with an introduction to the foundational theoretical principles of LatCrit knowledge production - as embodied principally by LatCrit values and the related functions, guidelines, and postulates - we discuss in detail and depth how these theoretical principles underpin the various projects in the LatCrit portfolio and provide a historical sketch of the development of these projects as programmatic knowledge production. In particular, we aim through this account to sketch and explain our collective efforts to produce shared knowledge progressively as a foundation for community-building and collaborative action. This process happens in part through some of LatCrit\u27s projects, and oftentimes in the form of published legal scholarship from the mid-1990s onward. As we show below, this combination of academic events with formal publications to advance the development of outsider and critical theories, communities, and networks has become during the past two decades a consistent and continuing methodology of LatCrit knowledge production and academic activism. Finally, to conclude this Afterword, we consider briefly how LatCrit values and aspirations-notably collective self-sustainability and solidarity across difference-can provide a purchase for praxis, community building, and knowledge production even in a world where the prima facie givens of the twenty-first century have grown more uncertain, if not hostile, to justice-centric enterprises. We hope, with these thoughts, to support the ongoing work of scholars and activists everywhere struggling for equal justice for all as we begin to engage a third decade of theory, community, and praxis

Feeling, Knowledge, Self-Preservation: Audre Lorde’s Oppositional Agency and Some Implications for Ethics

Throughout her work, Audre Lorde maintains that her self-preservation in the face of oppression depends on acting from the recognition and valorization of her feelings as a deep source of knowledge. This claim, taken as a portrayal of agency, poses challenges to standard positions in ethics, epistemology, and moral psychology. This article examines the oppositional agency articulated by Lorde’s thought, locating feeling, poetry, and the power she calls “the erotic” within her avowed project of self-preservation. It then explores the implications of taking seriously Lorde’s account, particularly for theorists examining ethics and epistemology under nonideal social conditions. For situations of sexual intimacy, for example, Lorde’s account unsettles prevailing assumptions about the role of consent in responsibility between sexual partners. I argue that obligations to solicit consent and respect refusal are not sufficient to acknowledge the value of agency in intimate encounters when agency is oppositional in the way Lorde describes

Between emancipation and domination: Habermasian reflections on the empowerment and disempowerment of the human subject

Habermas’s ‘linguistic turn’ can be regarded as a systematic attempt to locate the normative foundations of critical theory in the rational foundations of language. This endeavour is motivated by the insight that any theoretical framework that is committed to the emancipation of the human condition needs to identify the normative grounds on which both its critique of social domination and its pursuit of social liberation can be justified. Just as Habermas’s firm belief in the possibility of human emancipation manifests itself in the concept of the ‘ideal speech situation’, his radical critique of human domination cannot be separated from the concept of ‘systematically distorted communication’. Although the significance of these two concepts for Habermas’s communication-theoretic approach to the social has been widely recognised and extensively debated in the literature, their overall importance for a critical theory of human empowerment and disempowerment has hardly been explored in a satisfying manner. Drawing upon Habermas’s communication-theoretic conception of human coexistence, this paper makes a case for the view that a comprehensive critical theory of society needs to account for both the emancipatory and the repressive potentials of language if it seeks to do justice to both the empowering and the disempowering potentials of the subject

Between Contingency and Necessity of Human Action. Are We Free in our Choices?

The point of departure of this paper is the characterization of human action as contingent or necessary (obligatory). The key question concerns the place for choice in the human action, i.e. are we free in our choices? Thus, the aim of this paper is to search for the answer to the question concerning human freedom and free will. In searching for the answer to this controversial question, consideration is focused on the cognitive structure of human beings. The research refers to Roman Ingarden’s conception of the human being as a relatively isolated system of a higher order, contained in a compound hierarchical structure. In this way, the argumentation for the place of free will is supported by the structure of the human being, and joins both the ontological and the epistemic aspects. In consequence, methodologically they are treated as a primary to inquiries into the theory of action on one side, and into the biological approach of cognitive science on the other

Towards formal models and languages for verifiable Multi-Robot Systems

Incorrect operations of a Multi-Robot System (MRS) may not only lead to unsatisfactory results, but can also cause economic losses and threats to safety. These threats may not always be apparent, since they may arise as unforeseen consequences of the interactions between elements of the system. This call for tools and techniques that can help in providing guarantees about MRSs behaviour. We think that, whenever possible, these guarantees should be backed up by formal proofs to complement traditional approaches based on testing and simulation. We believe that tailored linguistic support to specify MRSs is a major step towards this goal. In particular, reducing the gap between typical features of an MRS and the level of abstraction of the linguistic primitives would simplify both the specification of these systems and the verification of their properties. In this work, we review different agent-oriented languages and their features; we then consider a selection of case studies of interest and implement them useing the surveyed languages. We also evaluate and compare effectiveness of the proposed solution, considering, in particular, easiness of expressing non-trivial behaviour.Comment: Changed formattin

Apperceptive patterning: Artefaction, extensional beliefs and cognitive scaffolding

In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog)

Modern Moral Conscience

This article challenges the individualism and neutrality of modern moral conscience. It looks to the history of the concept to excavate an older tradition that takes conscience to be social and morally responsive, while arguing that dominant contemporary justifications of conscience in terms of integrity are inadequate without reintroducing these social and moral traits. This prompts a rethinking of the nature and value of conscience: first, by demonstrating that a morally-responsive conscience is neither a contradiction in terms nor a political absurdity; second, by suggesting how a morally-responsive conscience can be informed by the social world without being a mere proxy for social power or moribund tradition