Exploring Art Student Teachers’ Fictions of Teaching: Strategies for Teacher Educators

Using portions of my research involving three art student teachers, I provide suggestions for strategies to examine preservice art student teachers’ fictions about teaching (art). First, I begin by briefly introducing my three participants and listing my research methods. Next, I describe three of the most common teaching fictions I found through analyzation of the data. I discuss the productive usefulness, as well as a few procedures, of employing visual culture as a catalyst for unfolding student teachers’ (un)conscious pedagogical fictions. Then, I describe how creating illustrations of the self as art teacher can further help explore fictions of teaching. Lastly, I end by discussing how important it is to have a supportive space to talk and theorize with student teachers about their continuous processes of identity (re)formation and to work through the anxieties of the profession of teaching art

Imaginative Resistance and Modal Knowledge

Readers of fictions sometimes resist taking certain kinds of claims to be true according to those fictions, even when they appear explicitly or follow from applying ordinary principles of interpretation. This "imaginative resistance" is often taken to be significant for a range of philosophical projects outside aesthetics, including giving us evidence about what is possible and what is impossible, as well as the limits of conceivability, or readers' normative commitments. I will argue that this phenomenon cannot do the theoretical work that has been asked of it. Resistance to taking things to be fictional is often best explained by unfamiliarity with kinds of fictions than any representational, normative, or cognitive limits. With training and experience, any understandable proposition can be made fictional and be taken to be fictional by readers. This requires a new understanding both of imaginative resistance, and what it might be able to tell us about topics like conceivability or the bounds of possibility

Review of Angela Carter and Decadence: Critical Fictions/Fictional Critiques by Maggie Tonkin

Review of Angela Carter and Decadence: Critical Fictions/Fictional Critiques by Maggie Tonki

Reading Speculative Futures in a Post-Truth World

Faced with the threat of a “post-truth” world and a widening chasm of exchange between climate change deniers and environmentalists, I argue that future-orientated literary and media speculative fictions—which I term “speculative futures”—offer a means of building lines of communication across social and political divisions. This thought piece on “The Environmental Humanities in a Post-Truth World” mediates upon the potentiality of speculative futures as theory, social bridge-building, and pedagogical tool. Speculative fictions (especially those that address environmental justice, and anti-colonial and feminist politics) use storytelling and future imaginaries to challenge political falsehoods and imagine more ecological, de-colonized futures

Legal Fictions and the Essence of Robots: Thoughts on Essentialism and Pragmatism in the Regulation of Robotics

The purpose of this paper is to offer some critical remarks on the so-called pragmatist approach to the regulation of robotics. To this end, the article mainly reviews the work of Jack Balkin and Joanna Bryson, who have taken up such ap- proach with interestingly similar outcomes. Moreover, special attention will be paid to the discussion concerning the legal fiction of ‘electronic personality’. This will help shed light on the opposition between essentialist and pragmatist methodologies. After a brief introduction (1.), in 2. I introduce the main points of the methodological debate which opposes pragmatism and essentialism in the regulation of robotics and I examine how legal fictions are framed from a pragmatist, functional perspective. Since this approach entails a neat separation of ontological analysis and legal rea- soning, in 3. I discuss whether considerations on robots’ essence are actually put into brackets when the pragmatist approach is endorsed. Finally, in 4. I address the problem of the social valence of legal fictions in order to suggest a possible limit of the pragmatist approach. My conclusion (5.) is that in the specific case of regulating robotics it may be very difficult to separate ontological considerations from legal reasoning—and vice versa—both on an epistemological and social level. This calls for great caution in the recourse to anthropomorphic legal fictions

Fictions et non-fictions de traversées : la position du témoin

International audienceFictions et non-fictions de traversées : la position du témoin Version initiale de : Mazauric, Catherine (2012), « Fictions et non-fictions de traversées : la position du témoin », in Passages et naufrages migrants. Les fictions du détroit, A. P. Coutinho, J. Domingues de Almeida, M. F. Outeirinho (dir.), Paris, L'Harmattan, p. 59-77. ISBN : 978-2-296-56936-2

Serial fiction, the End?

Andrew McGonigal presents some interesting data concerning truth in serial fictions.1 Such data has been taken by McGonigal, Cameron and Caplan to motivate some form of contextualism or relativism. I argue, however, that many of these approaches are problematic, and that all are under-motivated as the data can be explained in a standard invariantist semantic framework given some independently plausible principles