1,883 research outputs found

    UMSL Bulletin 2023-2024

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    The 2023-2024 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1088/thumbnail.jp

    Multidisciplinary perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the law

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    This open access book presents an interdisciplinary, multi-authored, edited collection of chapters on Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and the Law. AI technology has come to play a central role in the modern data economy. Through a combination of increased computing power, the growing availability of data and the advancement of algorithms, AI has now become an umbrella term for some of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of this age. The importance of AI stems from both the opportunities that it offers and the challenges that it entails. While AI applications hold the promise of economic growth and efficiency gains, they also create significant risks and uncertainty. The potential and perils of AI have thus come to dominate modern discussions of technology and ethics – and although AI was initially allowed to largely develop without guidelines or rules, few would deny that the law is set to play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. As the debate over AI is far from over, the need for rigorous analysis has never been greater. This book thus brings together contributors from different fields and backgrounds to explore how the law might provide answers to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI. An outcome of the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law and its interdisciplinary working group on Law and Artificial Intelligence, it includes contributions by leading scholars in the fields of technology, ethics and the law.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    UMSL Bulletin 2022-2023

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    The 2022-2023 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1087/thumbnail.jp

    The Texture of Everyday Life: Carceral Realism and Abolitionist Speculation

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    Exploring the ways in which prisons shape the subjectivity of free-world thinkers, and the ways that subjectivity is expressed in literary texts, this dissertation develops the concept of carceral realism: a cognitive and literary mode that represents prisons and police as the only possible response to social disorder. As this dissertation illustrates, this form of consciousness is experienced as racial paranoia, and it is expressed literary texts, which reflect and help to reify it. Through this process of cultural reification, carceral realism increasingly insists on itself as the only possible mode of thinking. As I argue, however, carceral realism actually stands in a dialectical relationship to abolitionist speculation, or, the active imagining of a world without prisons and police and/or the conditions necessary to actualize such a world. In much the same way that carceral realism embeds itself in realist literary forms, abolitionist speculation plays a constitutive role in the utopian literary tradition. In order to elaborate these concepts, this dissertation begins with a meta-consideration of how cultural productions by incarcerated people are typically framed. Building upon the work of scholars and incarcerated authors’ own interventions in questions of consciousness, authorship, textual production, and study, this chapter contrasts that typical frame with a method of abolitionist reading. Chapter two applies this methodology to Edward Bunker’s 1977 novel The Animal Factory and Claudia Rankine’s 2010 poem Citizen in order to develop the concept of carceral realism and demonstrate how it has developed from the 1970s to the present. In order to lay out the historical foundations of the modern prison, chapter three looks back to the late 18th century and situates the emergence of the penitentiary within debates regarding race, citizenship, and state power. Returning to the 1970s, chapter four investigates the role universities have played in the formation of carceral realism and the complex relationship Chicanos and Asian Americans have to prisons and police by analogizing the institutionalization of prison literary study to the formation of ethnic studies. Chapter five draws this project to a conclusion by developing the concept of abolitionist speculation, or the active imagining of a world without prisons or the police and/or the conditions necessary to realize such a world, which I identify as both a constitutive generic feature of utopian literature and something that exceeds literature altogether. In doing so, this dissertation establishes an ongoing historical relationship between social reproduction of prisons and literary forms that cuts across time, geography, race, gender, and genre

    Jews in East Norse Literature

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    This book explores the portrayal of Jews and Judaism in medieval Danish and Swedish literary and visual culture. Drawing on over 100 manuscripts and incunabula as well as runic inscriptions and religious art, the author describes the various, often contradictory, images ranging from antisemitism and anti-Judaism to the elevation of Jews as morally exemplary figures. It includes new editions of 54 East Norse texts with English translations

    Between nation and empire: How the state matters in global health

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    The role of the state has been underplayed in scholarship on global health. Taking a historical view, this paper argues that state institutions, practices and ideologies have in fact been crucial to the realization of contemporary global health governance and to its predecessor regimes. Drawing on state theory, work on governmentality, and Third World Approaches to International Law, it traces the origins of the ‘health state’ in late colonial developmentalism, which held out the prospect of conditional independence for the subjects of European empires. Progress in health was also a key goal for nationalist governments in the global south, one which they sought to realize autonomously as part of a New International Economic Order. The defeat of that challenge to the dominance of the global north in the 1980s led to the rise of ‘global governance’ in health. Far from rendering the state redundant, the latter was realized through the co-option and disciplining of institutions at national level. To that extent, the current order has an unmistakably imperial character, one which undercuts its declared cosmopolitan aspirations, as evidenced in the approach to vaccine distribution and travel bans during the COVID-19 pandemic

    Grand narrative and the Islamic State: investigating propaganda, education and narrative in Dabiq

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    The emergence of the Islamic State (IS) Caliphate in 2014 in Iraq and Syria brought with it a profound challenge to Western visions of the political order of the Middle East. The group’s system of belief and understanding of religious knowledge confronted long-held and Western -backed grand narratives emphasising the primacy of secularism and liberalism to social and political reality. This thesis is concerned with interrogating the dominant themes of the grand narrative of the Islamic State militant group, focussing on their online magazine propaganda series Dabiq. It analyses these texts using thematic coding analysis. Using the work of philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, specifically his text The Postmodern Condition, this thesis applies the theory of grand narrative to understand the reasons why once-dominant Western grand narratives have collapsed. This has led to an incredulity toward universal or liberal grand narratives, resulting in a retreat that has allowed powerful anti-modern forces such as IS to take advantage and institute their own narrative and systems of knowledge. The thesis begins with an introduction that maps out its motivation, structure and goals. Chapter One conveys the substance of Lyotard’s work and the nature of the areas of enquiry. Chapter Two presents the issues of ideology and imaginaries (Western and Islamic) and the importance of education to grand narrative. Chapter Three illustrates the history and influence of Western and non-Western colonialism in shaping the state of grand narrative in the 19th and 20th centuries. Chapter Four outlines the West’s relationship to the Enlightenment and how this shaped Western attitudes to grand narratives of knowledge and education, while also examining the challenge offered to this by Islamic educational forces. Chapter Five explicates this comparison further between Western and Islamic forms of learning, while Chapter Six discusses methodology and thematic coding, and Chapter Seven discusses the analysis of the themes of Dabiq. This thesis concludes that the three dominant themes of the grand narratives found in Dabiq are: 1) the importance of the Caliphate to unleashing individual and collective transformation; 2) jihadist activism and 3) the prophetic methodology as the system of knowledge within the Caliphate. By analysing these themes we can understand how the grand narratives of IS are not truly educational but propagandistic in nature. This thesis argues that a genuinely liberal grand narrative offers the truest challenge to that of IS, but that this requires a deep and authentic commitment to the values of liberalism that Western political forces have often failed to realise

    Security and Privacy of Resource Constrained Devices

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    The thesis aims to present a comprehensive and holistic overview on cybersecurity and privacy & data protection aspects related to IoT resource-constrained devices. Chapter 1 introduces the current technical landscape by providing a working definition and architecture taxonomy of ‘Internet of Things’ and ‘resource-constrained devices’, coupled with a threat landscape where each specific attack is linked to a layer of the taxonomy. Chapter 2 lays down the theoretical foundations for an interdisciplinary approach and a unified, holistic vision of cybersecurity, safety and privacy justified by the ‘IoT revolution’ through the so-called infraethical perspective. Chapter 3 investigates whether and to what extent the fast-evolving European cybersecurity regulatory framework addresses the security challenges brought about by the IoT by allocating legal responsibilities to the right parties. Chapters 4 and 5 focus, on the other hand, on ‘privacy’ understood by proxy as to include EU data protection. In particular, Chapter 4 addresses three legal challenges brought about by the ubiquitous IoT data and metadata processing to EU privacy and data protection legal frameworks i.e., the ePrivacy Directive and the GDPR. Chapter 5 casts light on the risk management tool enshrined in EU data protection law, that is, Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) and proposes an original DPIA methodology for connected devices, building on the CNIL (French data protection authority) model

    The Memory of Meanings : The Images of Jewish-Catholic Relations in Interwar Lublin in Oral Histories

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    This work explores narratives of Jewish-Catholic relations in interwar Lublin, as recalled by its Jewish and Catholic inhabitants by the end of their lives. Thus, it concerns both memory and intergroup relations and seeks to understand the attitudes towards the religious Other. The main body of sources for this qualitative study is a collection of oral histories from the Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Centre in Lublin, which were analyzed thematically focusing on the memory of everyday interactions between Jews and Catholics. Particular attention is paid to the link between memory and identity. The analysis of the narratives draws extensively from theories regarding intergroup contact (Gordon Allport’s intergroup contact theory later developed by i.a. Linda R. Tropp and Thomas Pettigrew), the relation between personal agency versus social structures (Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic sequence), as well as the theory of communication based on context (Dorota Kuncewicz et al.). The latter, combined with an adaptation of Erwin Panoffsky’s iconology, provides an insight into the meaning of the stories – how the religious Other is perceived, why it could be so, and what consequences it has on intergroup relations decades after the recalled events took place. The findings are grouped into two analytical parts of the dissertation: one dedicated to identity, and another concentrating on relations, which are described on three levels – spatial, interpersonal and interreligious. On the one hand, the study indicates sensitive points in intergroup relations such as the role of social class and gender relations, which can be used to strengthen existing intergroup separation. On the other hand, it points to instances of overcoming separation and segregation through affective ties, especially of friendship, common socio-economic background, education and personal values. It points to (inter)religious literacy fortifying prejudice. The main finding, however, is the fundamental difference in perceiving the same past by the minority and the majority group, which has dire consequences for the relationship between these two groups until today. The study suggests the need for further research on how this memory gap can be addressed to find constructive ways of producing inclusive collective memory in both groups, recognizing the experience of the Other
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