The Raven knows my name: Contemplation and practice on an off-grid island

Students often confront grief, anxiety, and despair as they learn about ecological decline and their complicity in a deleterious system. Ecological grief afflicts students even as the world requires much of them by way of action and reform. However, the middle and upper-class in modern Western societies, accustomed to comfort and consumption, often find it hard to diminish their ecological impact. This dissertation explores the following question: How do we do what we are not inclined to do even as we suffer from ecological grief? Informed by Zen tradition and practice, the author explores contemplation as a way of dealing with ecological pain. Working through Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, the suite of ruling dispositions shaped by practice, the author examines how inclinations are shaped by everyday activities. The research project involves a ten-and-a-half-month retreat on an off-grid island on the West Coast of British Columbia. Using a combination of contemplative practice, phenomenological inquiry and portraiture, the author documents the disruptions to his urban habitus, the practices related to living in a wild place, and how such practices are relevant to educators aiming to promote dispositions that cohere with a more ecologically sound way of life. Through stories and reflections from each season, the author relates experiences of living in the woods and interprets their significance to environmental education. Significant themes include: embodiment, awareness, water, askesis, time, and contemplation. The author also describes discontinuities and adjustments upon his return to the city and elaborates on their significance in relation to ecological grief and habitus. The last chapter explores the dimensions of ecological grief and suggests approaches to working with anxieties, ambivalences, and aspirations associated with the ecological decline. This study presents an analysis of the various dimensions of practice and suggests profiles of practice to help reshape existing dispositions

Unsettling professional code: relationship boundaries and ethical possibilities

My dissertation addresses ethics in social professions through a conceptual and empirical study of how professional boundaries and codes organize relationship. Central research questions include: "How might one's sense of responsibility to another person shrink under professional codes, procedures or good boundaries? Does professionalism lower the stakes of professional relationship by restricting involvement and avoiding risk?" After developing an interdisciplinary, theoretical account of professionalism and normative ethics, I bring care ethics and postmodern critique together to challenge the foundations of professional ethics. While providing important protections, professional norms and codes of ethics narrow the scope of what is "ethical" and limit ethical possibility. Emphases on "do no harm" and risk-aversion lower the stakes of professional relationship. My queer reading of ethics code discloses how professional ethics are treated as stable knowledge. I argue that professionalism ascribes the condition of being ethical rather than promoting active social processes and pragmatic ways of doing ethics. My qualitative study of professional teachers and social workers who became "parents" to youth they met in professional contexts grounds my theoretical and philosophical inquiry in experiential narrative. I describe an ethical periphery where practitioners make "positive boundary crossings" and suggest that professional ethics is a matter of deliberated action rather than identity. Mutual relations and "elastic boundaries" invite more creative and pragmatic problem solving and make ethical discourse more relevant and meaningful in everyday professional practice

Wildlife Conservation, Zoos and Animal Protection: A Strategic Analysis

The publication consists of the proceedings of a workshop, sponsored by the Gilman Foundation, and held in April of 1994 at the White Oak Conservation Center in Florida. About thirty participants were invited from zoos, animal protection groups and academic institutions to discuss concepts such as wild, captive and tame; animal well-being in the wild and in zoos; and protecting individuals versus conserving populations. In order to maximize the time engaged in discussion, several individuals were identified to prepare target articles which were distributed to all participants before the meeting. These articles form the main chapters in this book. Other participants were asked to lead off the discussion of each target article during the workshop. These comments make up the first part of the discussion following each article. The remainder of the discussion is an edited version of the audiotaped workshop.https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/ecbbg/1000/thumbnail.jp

Wildlife Conservation, Zoos and Animal Protection: A Strategic Analysis

The publication consists of the proceedings of a workshop, sponsored by the Gilman Foundation, and held in April of 1994 at the White Oak Conservation Center in Florida. About thirty participants were invited from zoos, animal protection groups and academic institutions to discuss concepts such as wild, captive and tame; animal well-being in the wild and in zoos; and protecting individuals versus conserving populations. In order to maximize the time engaged in discussion, several individuals were identified to prepare target articles which were distributed to all participants before the meeting. These articles form the main chapters in this book. Other participants were asked to lead off the discussion of each target article during the workshop. These comments make up the first part of the discussion following each article. The remainder of the discussion is an edited version of the audiotaped workshop.https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/ecbbg/1000/thumbnail.jp

Heroes gone Psycho: interrogational torture in post-9/11 Television Fiction

277 p.This dissertation analyzes the recurrent presence of ¿torturer-heroes¿ in post-9/11 television series and tries to ascertain whether these shows serve the agenda of legitimizing the use of interrogational torture that was (and probably still is) used against terrorist suspects in the War on Terror. ¿Torturer-heroes¿ are heroes who engage in torture and remain heroic because their actions serve a greater good. They often operate under the narrative framework of the Ticking Time Bomb scenario: there is a bomb about to go off and the terrorist that can stop it does not cooperate. Under this sense of urgency, torture seems either excused or justified. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Ticking Time Bomb case was often invoked as an argument for the legitimization of torture in exceptional circumstances and to justify the abuses committed by the U.S. in the War on Terror. Therefore, this dissertation contrasts political, legal, philosophical and historical discourses on interrogational torture with their fictional representations, analyzing a corpus of fourteen television series, from 24 to Homeland, that feature at least one instance of interrogational torture carried out by the ¿good guys (and girls)¿ and trying to elucidate the extent to which they disseminate or contest contemporary power discourses

Building body identities - exploring the world of female bodybuilders

This thesis explores how female bodybuilders seek to develop and maintain a viable sense of self despite being stigmatized by the gendered foundations of what Erving Goffman (1983) refers to as the 'interaction order'; the unavoidable presentational context in which identities are forged during the course of social life. Placed in the context of an overview of the historical treatment of women's bodies, and a concern with the development of bodybuilding as a specific form of body modification, the research draws upon a unique two year ethnographic study based in the South of England, complemented by interviews with twenty-six female bodybuilders, all of whom live in the U.K. By mapping these extraordinary women's lives, the research illuminates the pivotal spaces and essential lived experiences that make up the female bodybuilder. Whilst the women appear to be embarking on an 'empowering' radical body project for themselves, the consequences of their activity remains culturally ambivalent. This research exposes the 'Janus-faced' nature of female bodybuilding, exploring the ways in which the women negotiate, accommodate and resist pressures to engage in more orthodox and feminine activities and appearances

FIELD Issue 1

From https://field-journal.com/, where you can also find current issues of FIELD: ISSN 2694-0094 We are living through a singular cultural moment in which the conventional relationship between art and the social world, and between artist and viewer, is being questioned and renegotiated. FIELD responds to the remarkable proliferation of new artistic practices devoted to forms of political, social and cultural transformation. Frequently collaborative in nature, this work is being produced by artists and art collectives throughout North, South and Central America, Europe, Africa and Asia. While otherwise quite diverse, it is driven by a common desire to establish new relationships between artistic practice and other fields of knowledge production, from urbanism to environmentalism, from experimental education to participatory design. In many cases it has been inspired by, or affiliated with, new movements for social and economic justice around the globe. Throughout this field of practice we see a persistent engagement with sites of resistance and activism, and a desire to move beyond existing definitions of both art and the political. The title of this journal reflects two main concerns. First, it indicates our interest in a body of artistic production that engages the broadest possible range of social forces, actors, discursive systems and physical conditions operating at a given site. And second, it signals a concern with the questions that these projects raise about the “proper” field of art itself, as it engages with other disciplines and other modes of cultural production. How do these practices redefine our understanding of aesthetic experience? And how do they challenge preconceived notions of the “work” of art? For many in the mainstream art world this opening out is evidence of a dangerous promiscuity, which threatens to subsume the unique identity of art. As a result this work has been largely ignored by the most visible journals and publications in the field. At the same time, an often-problematic concept of “social engagement” has become increasingly fashionable among many museums and foundations in Europe and the United States. There is clearly a need for a more intelligent and nuanced analysis of this new tendency. However, it has become increasingly clear that the normative theoretical conventions and research methodologies governing contemporary art criticism are ill-equipped to address the questions raised by this work. FIELD is based on the belief that informed analysis of this practice requires the cultivation of new forms of interdisciplinary knowledge, and a willingness to challenge the received wisdom of contemporary art criticism and theory. We seek to open a dialogue among and between artists, activists, historians, curators, and critics, as well as researchers in fields such as philosophy, performance studies, urbanism, ethnography, sociology, political science, and education. To that end the journal’s editorial board will include a diverse range of scholars, artists, historians, curators, activists and researchers. It is our belief that it is only at the intersections of these disciplines that can we develop a deeper understanding of the cultural transformations unfolding around us. –Grant Kester, founder and editor, FIELDhttps://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/field_art_criticism/1000/thumbnail.jp

Citizen-Subjectivity, Experiential Evaluation, and Activist Strategies: Explaining Algerian Violence and Polish Peace under Authoritarian Rule

This project explains Polish non-violence and Algerian violence under martial law following peaceful protests against comparable material deprivation and authoritarian political exclusion. From narratives of state formation, institutional performance, and social movement evolution in postwar Poland and postcolonial Algeria a conditional model derives violent and non-violent opposition strategies from divergent practical citizenship regimes in formally similar autocratic systems. It argues that distinct regimes of citizen-subjectivity under authoritarian governance foster divergent practices of resistance and evaluations of states before and during emergency conditions that reduce activists to biological life, tempting violence. Where citizenship regimes differentiate social resources (means of protest) from state resources (means or sovereignty), affording regime opponents actual or immanent systemic subjectivity, social agitation remains non-violent despite objectively comprehensive political and social dispossession; in contrast, by subordinating social to state resources, undifferentiated citizenship regimes under martial law wholly eliminate systemic subjectivity, provoking violence. Neither the formal political regime-type nor the immediate experience of social suffering or political abjection distinguishes violent from non-violent responses to despotism; rather, violent versus non-violent protest strategies express discrepant evaluations of regime coercion, reflecting the elimination versus endurance of the citizenship regime that formed the iterated systemic subjectivity of regime opponents. Poland's worker-based citizenship regime endured fiscal crisis and martial law because it provided differentiated social resources: regime opponents had means independent of state solvency to compel policy concessions by withdrawing labor power from industries pivotal to ruling-elite incumbency. But Algeria's client-based citizenship - based on undifferentiated resources - tied activists' systemic means of compulsion to state largesse. Differentiated citizenship regimes endure state crises because citizens retain the social resources, however suspended, of systemic-subjectivity that ground their evaluations of state actions, minimizing incentives to violent pressure on ruling classes. Undifferentiated citizenship regimes perish under state bankruptcy or force, eradicating social resources and channeling the recuperation of subjectivity to anti-systemic acts. In short, Polish workers could strike and threaten the state under martial law; Algerian clients were effectively expelled from political status. In forming opposition strategies, citizens judge state policies or legitimacy, but also their status as systemic subjects. Evaluations of systemic subjectivity reflect experiences in using social resources, not merely immediate material or political conditions. The research design does not test a general theoretical model linking citizenship-subjectivity regimes to experiential evaluations of objective dehumanization, but its conceptual and causal variable analyses may complement other studies of state institutions and social agitations by promoting subject formation over abstract human universals as the key mechanism in reliable social explanation