Making Visible the Invisible Power of Community

Outlines the need to strengthen the organic infrastructure and culture of rural communities in development work to allow for adaptations that preserve connectedness and enhance social health. Explains Wildflower's methods and tools, with case studies

Mirroring the videos of Anonymous:cloud activism, living networks, and political mimesis

Mirrors describe the multiplication of data across a network. In this article, I examine the politics of mirroring as practiced on videos by the hacktivist network Anonymous. Mirrors are designed to retain visibility on social media platforms and motivate viewers towards activism. They emerge from a particular social structure and propagate a specific symbolic system. Furthermore, mirrors are not exact replicas nor postmodern representations. Rather, mirroring maps a contestation over visibility that entangles both cloud activists and platform firms

Mirroring and beyond: coupled dynamics as a generalized framework for modelling social interactions

When people observe one another, behavioural alignment can be detected at many levels, from the physical to the mental. Likewise, when people process the same highly complex stimulus sequences, such as films and stories, alignment is detected in the elicited brain activity. In early sensory areas, shared neural patterns are coupled to the low-level properties of the stimulus (shape, motion, volume, etc.), while in high-order brain areas, shared neural patterns are coupled to high-levels aspects of the stimulus, such as meaning. Successful social interactions require such alignments (both behavioural and neural), as communication cannot occur without shared understanding. However, we need to go beyond simple, symmetric (mirror) alignment once we start interacting. Interactions are dynamic processes, which involve continuous mutual adaptation, development of complementary behaviour and division of labour such as leader-follower roles. Here, we argue that interacting individuals are dynamically coupled rather than simply aligned. This broader framework for understanding interactions can encompass both processes by which behaviour and brain activity mirror each other (neural alignment), and situations in which behaviour and brain activity in one participant are coupled (but not mirrored) to the dynamics in the other participant. To apply these more sophisticated accounts of social interactions to the study of the underlying neural processes we need to develop new experimental paradigms and novel methods of data analysis

Self-Organising in Blockchain Infrastructures: Generativity through Shifting Objectives and Forking

Given the ubiquity of digital technologies, and increased use of autonomous algorithms, it is likely that many of today’s social and organizational processes will one day include autonomous elements. The Bitcoin blockchain is likely the first case of an increasingly generative and autonomous way of organizing, and the specific properties of blockchain infrastructures—distribution of control, openness to manipulation, and generativity of the underlying source code—make it an ideal case to study patterns of self-organizing. This paper investigates the phenomenon of self-organizing through a study of forking in the Bitcoin blockchain infrastructure between 2010 and 2016. It adds to the emerging body of research on digital infrastructures, and particularly blockchain infrastructures, by conceptualizing forking as a pattern of self-organizing in blockchain infrastructures that specifically involves the underlying infrastructure, the scale of code changes, individual objectives, and collective adoption, whether specific or general. Thus, this paper demonstrates how forking in blockchain infrastructures mediates between divergent organizing objectives and existing capabilities, on the one hand, and generates self-organizing on the other hand. In this paper, we further contextualize our findings in extant work on digital infrastructures, offer a guide for designers of blockchain infrastructures, and propose the concept of “generative mirroring” as a pattern through which blockchain infrastructures and organizing adaptively coevolve

Consciousness and Society: Societal Aspects and Implications of Transpersonal Psychology

Although transpersonal psychologies of self realization emphasize individual development, earlier shamanic traditions also showed a central societal aspect and group based consciousness. Indeed, many have understood the transpersonal movement as developing towards an abstract globalized neo-shamanism. That altered states of consciousness, whether as integrative realizations of the numinous or as dissociative “hypnoid” states, could be felt and shared collectively was a familiar concept to the first generation of sociologists, who saw all consciousness as social and dialogic in form. Durkheim, in particular, foresaw a globalized spirituality of the future, his “cult of man,” in which modern individuation would progress to the point where all we would have in common for the collective representations of spiritual awareness would be our shared sense of human beingness. This view foreshadowed De Chardin, and is presented explicitly or implicitly in Jung, Gurdjieff, Heidegger, Maslow, and Almaas. The implications of a societal, collective face of transpersonalism for a future planetary spirituality are pursued in terms of both a global ecological consciousness and the potential transpersonal significance of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence)

Homo Mimeticus

Genealogy of one of the most ancient and influential concepts in western thought: Mimesis Imitation is, perhaps more than ever, constitutive of human originality. Many things have changed since the emergence of an original species called Homo sapiens, but in the digital age humans remain mimetic creatures: from the development of consciousness to education, aesthetics to politics, mirror neurons to brain plasticity, digital simulations to emotional contagion, (new) fascist insurrections to viral contagion, we are unconsciously formed, deformed, and transformed by the all too human tendency to imitate—for both good and ill. Crossing disciplines as diverse as philosophy, aesthetics, and politics, Homo Mimeticus proposes a new theory of one of the most influential concepts in western thought (mimesis) to confront some of the hypermimetic challenges of the present and future. Written in an accessible yet rigorous style, Homo Mimeticus appeals to both a specialized and general readership. It can be used in courses of modern and contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, literary criticism/theory, media studies, and new mimetic studies. Ebook available in Open Access. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content)

The Psycho-neurology of Embodiment with Examples from Authentic Movement and Laban Movement Analysis

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Helen Payne, 'The Psycho-neurology of Embodiment with Examples from Authentic Movement and Laban Movement Analysis', American Journal of Dance Therapy, June 2017. Under embargo. Embargo end date: 7 June 2018. The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s10465-017-9256-2.There is widespread agreement that thought is embodied cognition and that our earliest learning is implicit, through the body, and nonverbal expression. This article advances the proposition that the integration of thought and emotion is felt through the body. Embodiment and embodied simulation (ES) (Gallese in Neuropsychoanalysis 13(2):196–200, 2011) represent controversial topics in both the philosophy of mind (Clark in Being there: Putting brain, body, and world together again, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998) and cognitive neuroscience (Gallagher in Cognitive Syst Res 34–35:35–43, 2015a; Gallagher in Conscious Cogn 36:452–465, 2015b; Gallese & Sinigaglia in J Conscious Stud 18(7–8):117–143, 2011a; Gallese in Philos Trans R Soc B 369(1644):20130177, 2014). As a result of advances in these areas of research, there is a need to re-conceptualize our understanding of the mechanisms and processes involved in dance movement psychotherapy. Could ES be applied to the psychology of movement? This article attempts to apply this theory of embodiment to the practice of Authentic Movement (AM) and Laban Movement Analysis. The theory of ES is proposed as one possible explanation of how the witness in AM comes to know her inner experience in the presence of a mover, which may lead to an “offering” to that mover from the witness’ conscious body (Adler in Offering from the conscious body: The discipline of Authentic Movement, Inner Traditions, Rochester, VT, 2002). Furthermore, there is an examination of how ES connects to the task of movement observation and how meaning is arrived at from the various movement patterns observed.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio