25 research outputs found

    Mournings and Uncertainties

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    This project makes available a language by which mourning can be expressed and explored as an epistemic concern and as an urgent matter to rethink politics in relation to difference. Through a situated, multidirectional investigation of its sensory, political, aesthetic, and psychoanalytic distributions, I claim that mourning—as the perceiving of alterity in relation to perceived ‘loss’—produces a political subject exposed to uncertainty and the possibilities of community and ‘moaning’. I propose ‘moaning’ as a mode of perceptual uncertain knowledge production. Engaging with Fred Moten’s (2003) conceptualisation of ‘black mo’nin’’ in relation to postmortem photographs of Emmett Till, a black teenager who was lynched in 1955, I examine the socio-political stakes of moaning. Following Moten’s attention to aesthetics as a political and epistemic concern, I formulate two modes of aesthetic perception: ‘moaning aesthetics’ as uncertain re-distributing perceiving of sights and sounds open to new political possibilities; and ‘hegemonic aesthetics’ as a closed, self-affirming cycle between hearing and seeing that disappears politics. I then ask: How, under conditions of political disappearance, might politics be regained by way of perception? Through re/analyses of and re/encounterings with the postmortem photographs of Emmett Till in relation to ‘lynching photographs’ of Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, Isaac McGhie, Lige Daniels, William Brown, Laura Nelson, Will James, Richard Dillon, August Goodman, Jesse Washington, Thomas Shipp, Abram Smith, George Meadows, Garfield Burley, Curtis Brown, Lee Hall, Bennie Simmons, Will Moore, Clyde Johnson, Leonard Woods, John Richards, Rubin Stacy, W.C. or R.C. Williams, and four unidentified persons, and ‘memento mori photographs’ from James Van Der Zee’s The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978) and the Thanatos Archive, I advance that moaning is critical for ‘dis-appearing’—as in appearing new political subjectivities and possibilities from a condition of having been disappeared—and that perceiving political unknown, uncertain possibilities is politically vital

    Mapping the Contact Zone: A Case Study of an Integrated Chinese and Canadian Literacy Curriculum in a Secondary Transnational Education Program in China

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    This case study using ethnographic tools was conducted in an Ontario transnational education (TNE) program in China where Ontario secondary school curricula were integrated with the Chinese national curricula. Curricula are seen by TNE researchers as key to successful TNE programs (e.g., Hughes & Urasa, 1997). However, little is known about how literacy-related curricula are exported across borders and what happens with them in local contexts. The study investigated how literacy was conceived and practiced at the various levels of curriculum at the elite secondary school (Pseudonym: SCS), namely, intended, implemented, lived, hidden, and null curriculum. The theoretical tools of the study included: multiliteracies, curriculum ideologies, theories on internationalizing curriculum, and various levels of curriculum. Sources of data included the documents that underpinned the school’s intended curriculum, interviews of Chinese and Ontario policy makers to obtain information about the local/global factors affecting decision-making, interviews with Chinese and Canadian instructors about implementing literacy curricula in a cross-border context, observations of 84 periods of their English and Mandarin literacy-related classes, and interviews with students and the eliciting of their multimodal artifacts to illuminate the scope of their learning experiences and how local and global discourses limited and/or expanded their literacy and “identity options” (Cummins, 2001, p. 17). Findings concern the ways in which various local and global curriculum discourses interacted and competed with one another to create a contradictory social space at the school, for instance, educational entrepreneurship, neoliberal impacts, Canadian and Chinese ministries of education, and their inherited educational philosophies. This unique space of local/global nexus enabled new forms of literacy and fluid identities as is shown in students’ assignments and multimodal artifacts, but it also restricted the transnational education students’ opportunities of developing certain literacies. The study recommends curricula that expand students’ literacy and identity options in globalized schooling contexts through the implementation of critically oriented cosmopolitan literacy education that has the potential to legitimate educators’ and students’ agentive roles and enhance policy makers’, educators’, and students’ cosmopolitan sensibilities. The study enriches the existent understanding of the situatedness and complexity of literacy-related curriculum issues in TNE communities

    Technology Made Legible: A Cultural Study of Software as a Form of Writing in the Theories and Practices of Software Engineering

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    My dissertation proposes an analytical framework for the cultural understanding of the group of technologies commonly referred to as 'new' or 'digital'. I aim at dispelling what the philosopher Bernard Stiegler calls the 'deep opacity' that still surrounds new technologies, and that constitutes one of the main obstacles in their conceptualization today. I argue that such a critical intervention is essential if we are to take new technologies seriously, and if we are to engage with them on both the cultural and the political level. I understand new technologies as technologies based on software. I therefore suggest that a complex understanding of technologies, and of their role in contemporary culture and society, requires, as a preliminary step, an investigation of how software works. This involves going beyond studying the intertwined processes of its production, reception and consumption - processes that typically constitute the focus of media and cultural studies. Instead, I propose a way of accessing the ever present but allegedly invisible codes and languages that constitute software. I thus reformulate the problem of understanding software-based technologies as a problem of making software legible. I build my analysis on the concept of software advanced by Software Engineering, a technical discipline born in the late 1960s that defines software development as an advanced writing technique and software as a text. This conception of software enables me to analyse it through a number of reading strategies. I draw on the philosophical framework of deconstruction as formulated by Jacques Derrida in order to identify the conceptual structures underlying software and hence 'demystify' the opacity of new technologies. Ultimately, I argue that a deconstructive reading of software enables us to recognize the constitutive, if unacknowledged, role of technology in the formation of both the human and academic knowledge. This reading leads to a self-reflexive interrogation of the media and cultural studies' approach to technology and enhances our capacity to engage with new technologies without separating our cultural understanding from our political practices

    The significance of silence. Long gaps attenuate the preference for ‘yes’ responses in conversation.

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    In conversation, negative responses to invitations, requests, offers and the like more often occur with a delay – conversation analysts talk of them as dispreferred. Here we examine the contrastive cognitive load ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses make, either when given relatively fast (300 ms) or delayed (1000 ms). Participants heard minidialogues, with turns extracted from a spoken corpus, while having their EEG recorded. We find that a fast ‘no’ evokes an N400-effect relative to a fast ‘yes’, however this contrast is not present for delayed responses. This shows that an immediate response is expected to be positive – but this expectation disappears as the response time lengthens because now in ordinary conversation the probability of a ‘no’ has increased. Additionally, however, 'No' responses elicit a late frontal positivity both when they are fast and when they are delayed. Thus, regardless of the latency of response, a ‘no’ response is associated with a late positivity, since a negative response is always dispreferred and may require an account. Together these results show that negative responses to social actions exact a higher cognitive load, but especially when least expected, as an immediate response

    Proceedings of The Multi-Agent Logics, Languages, and Organisations Federated Workshops (MALLOW 2010)

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    http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-627/allproceedings.pdfInternational audienceMALLOW-2010 is a third edition of a series initiated in 2007 in Durham, and pursued in 2009 in Turin. The objective, as initially stated, is to "provide a venue where: the cost of participation was minimum; participants were able to attend various workshops, so fostering collaboration and cross-fertilization; there was a friendly atmosphere and plenty of time for networking, by maximizing the time participants spent together"

    Mantras of the Metropole: Geo-televisuality and Contemporary Indian Cinema

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    This doctoral work scrutinizes recent popular Indian cinemas (largely Hindi cinema) in the light of three epochal changes in the sub-continental situation since the early nineties: the opening out of the economy, the political rise of the Hindu right, and the inauguration of a new transnational electronic media universe. It is argued here that contemporary Indian films should not be read in terms of a continuing, agonistic conflict between polarities like 'modern' selves and 'traditional' moorings. Instead, the thesis demonstrates how, in popular Indian films of our times, an agrarian paternalistic ideology of Brahminism, or its founding myths can actually enter into assemblages of cinematic spectacle and affect with metropolitan lifestyles, managerial codas of the 'free market', individualism, consumer desire, and neo-liberal imperatives of polity and government. This involves a social transmission of 'cinema effects' across the larger media space, and symbiotic exchanges between long standing epic-mythological attributes of Indian popular cinema and visual idioms of MTV, consumer advertising, the travel film, gadgetry, and images of technology. A discussion of a new age 'cinematic' in the present Indian context thus has to be informed by a general theory of contemporary planetary 'informatics.' The latter however is not a superstructural reflection of economic transformations; it is part of an overall capitalistic production of social life that is happening on a global scale in our times. This dissertation attempts to make two important contributions to the field: it opens out the Eurocentric domain of traditional film studies and suggests ways in which studies of Indian films can enrich a global understanding of the cinematic; it also offers a possible explanation as to how, in the present age, a neo-Hindu patriarchal notion of Dharma (duty, religion) can actually bolster, instead of impeding, a techno-managerial-financial schema of globalization in India

    The Value of Technics: An Ontogenetic Approach to Money, Markets, and Networks

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    This thesis investigates the impact of the digitalization of monetary and financial flows on the political-economic sphere in order to provide a novel perspective on the relations between economic and technological forces at the present global juncture. In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis and with the rise of the cryptoeconomy, an increasing number of scholars have highlighted the immanence of market logic to cultural and social life. At the same time, speculative practices have emerged that attempt to challenge the political economy through financial experiments. This dissertation complements these approaches by stressing the need to pair the critical study of finance with scholarship in the philosophy of technology that emphasizes the value immanent to technics and technology – i.e. the normative and genetic role of ubiquitous algorithmic networks in the organization of markets and socius. In order to explore these events, I propose an interdisciplinary theoretical framework informed largely by Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation and technics and the contemporary literature on the ontology of computation, supported by insights drawn from the history of finance and economic theory. This novel framework will provide the means to investigate the ontogenetic processes at work in the techno-cultural ecosystem following the digitalization of monetary and financial flows. Through an exploration of the fleeting materiality and multifaceted character of digital fiat money, the social power of algorithmic financial logic, and the new possibilities offered by the invention of the Bitcoin protocol, this research aims to challenge some of the bedrocks of the economic orthodoxy – economic and monetary value, liquidity, market rationality – in order to move beyond the overarching narrative of capitalism as a monolithic system. The thesis instead foregrounds the techno-historical contingencies that have led to the contemporary power formation. Furthermore, it argues that the ontogenetic character of algorithmic technology ushers in novel possibilities for the speculative engineering of alternative networks of value creation and distribution that have the potential to reverse the current balance of power
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