Ways of Being, Seen and Unseen: Concepts, Practices, and the Emergence of Trans Ways of Life

Ways of Being, Seen and Unseen: Concepts, Practices, and the Emergence of Trans Ways of Lif

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)

Disrupting dangerous illusions in international education: performativity, subjectivity, and agency in English language courses for overseas students (ELICOS)

This study investigated the illusory nature of international education by focusing on English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS). As a business model, ELICOS is designed to recruit from a niche market – international students with low English language proficiency. The purpose of this study was to interrogate the performativity of ELICOS in order to map the damage and dysfunction in the business model while seeking and sowing seeds of hope for more empowering alternatives. Performativity was utilised as an operationalising concept to address three research questions: (1) the external and internal historical influences on ELICOS; (2) how selected teachers have experienced the ELICOS system; and (3) how ELICOS students (as international students) have been constructed. These questions were framed to investigate the functioning of ELICOS as project, product and process, drawing on three sources of data: the scholarly literature; teachers’ accounts in interviews with me, and my own experience. A postmodernist conceptual framework underlaid the approach to analysing the knowledge economy, neoliberalism, internationalisation, performativity, subjectivity and agency. The methodology included genealogical analysis, thematic analysis, rhetorical analysis, and auto-ethnographic analysis to interrogate the data. These analyses revealed many instances of dissonance, discontinuity and disconnection, giving rise to psychological, linguistic, pedagogical and ethical concerns. The underlying purpose of addressing the illusory nature of international education and ELICOS has been to generate new theoretical, methodological and pedagogical understandings. For example, the issue of acculturation can be considered as a potential risk to both education and business. As well, a new vision of pedagogical, linguistic and ethical challenges was articulated as international students as consumers were identified as bilingual/plurilingual learners within a monolingual oriented system. This study can provide insights for revising the present business model to become more ethical, equitable and sustainable for institutions, to make ELICOS more transparent for students and teachers, to provide teachers with a way to make more sense of their teaching practice, and to provide insights for policy-makers

Blackness as a question of freedom: racial blackness in South African emancipatory thought

This dissertation, using the theoretical framework of Afropessimism, discusses how Blackness is an ethico-political structure, in which the slave's natal alienation and social death establishes the resilient forms of Black (non)being. This project centrally argues against locating a theory of the production of Blackness in the socio-political relations of colonial subjugation, and instead proposes that Blackness is a structure, an ‘abstract code', that must be understood as deriving from racial slavery. This thought enterprise is explored in relation to South African histories of slavery to re-claim the concept of “social death” as inaugurating the structure of Blackness in Southern Africa. By suggesting how it is the absolute negation of the Black slave that creates the conditions for the possibility of the political, ethical, and civil subject – indeed, the very possibility of the Human, this study presents a discussion on how Black studies requires both a temporal and geographical reconstruction in understanding – firstly by extending much further ‘back' than the moment of South African colonialism, and secondly, by expanding the geographies of Blackness beyond European colonial rule. Furthermore, this study explores and exposes the limits of several major South African forms of political and philosophical thought and campaigns for Black emancipation: feminism, liberalism, Marxism, and Black Consciousness. An exploration which serves to highlight how the existing historiography of South Africa has disarticulated the conceptual significance of racial slavery to the making of Blackness in a way that locates it specifically in social death, with all its implications for Black (non)being. While recognizing that the political structure of Blackness precedes or cannot be located in the mechanics of South African colonial settlements, this dissertation exposes the limits and failures of a civil politics of Blackness in both national liberation and ‘progressive' struggles

The family and ambiguity : the politics of alternative conceptions of self and society.

In this work I argue on the one hand that the modern family of the west deserves criticism for its role in the persistence of unmet need, of hurtful and unnecessary inequality, and of a harmful management, denial and denigration of difference. On the other hand, I also argue that the modern family deserves some defending, both for its role in creating us as people for whom the legitimacy of our order can be an issue, and because it is a locus of much that people experience as worthwhile. I am concerned in this work not only with the ambiguity of the modern family, but also with the general problem posed by ambiguity and affirmation. I approach this issue from the point of view on an ontology of discordance. By this view, each way of constructing a self (and so any possible way of forming society) necessarily involves exclusion and loss, and perhaps means denial and denigration as well. I do not think, however, that this fact is necessarily any cause for pessimism, as there are still grounds on which to defend social order as an achievement. In particular the fact of discordance calls on us to create forms of order which acknowledge their own impositional quality. This means that we must create greater institutional space for unmanaged difference. Along these lines, I affirm the importance, in modern conditions, of maintaining a category of family, but by this term I mean only a relation whereby child care and household are accorded some distance from the state and from the public realm. The point is that we should avoid detailing what constitutes a family and instead provide vastly increased across the board support for multiple forms of householding. In particular we need to support all the individuals who care for and protect children. My conclusion is that under modern conditions this kind of minimalist defense of family best serves the causes of equality for women, space for difference, and the end of the imposition of social class

Complex adaptive systems based data integration : theory and applications

Data Definition Languages (DDLs) have been created and used to represent data in programming languages and in database dictionaries. This representation includes descriptions in the form of data fields and relations in the form of a hierarchy, with the common exception of relational databases where relations are flat. Network computing created an environment that enables relatively easy and inexpensive exchange of data. What followed was the creation of new DDLs claiming better support for automatic data integration. It is uncertain from the literature if any real progress has been made toward achieving an ideal state or limit condition of automatic data integration. This research asserts that difficulties in accomplishing integration are indicative of socio-cultural systems in general and are caused by some measurable attributes common in DDLs. This research’s main contributions are: (1) a theory of data integration requirements to fully support automatic data integration from autonomous heterogeneous data sources; (2) the identification of measurable related abstract attributes (Variety, Tension, and Entropy); (3) the development of tools to measure them. The research uses a multi-theoretic lens to define and articulate these attributes and their measurements. The proposed theory is founded on the Law of Requisite Variety, Information Theory, Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) theory, Sowa’s Meaning Preservation framework and Zipf distributions of words and meanings. Using the theory, the attributes, and their measures, this research proposes a framework for objectively evaluating the suitability of any data definition language with respect to degrees of automatic data integration. This research uses thirteen data structures constructed with various DDLs from the 1960\u27s to date. No DDL examined (and therefore no DDL similar to those examined) is designed to satisfy the law of requisite variety. No DDL examined is designed to support CAS evolutionary processes that could result in fully automated integration of heterogeneous data sources. There is no significant difference in measures of Variety, Tension, and Entropy among DDLs investigated in this research. A direction to overcome the common limitations discovered in this research is suggested and tested by proposing GlossoMote, a theoretical mathematically sound description language that satisfies the data integration theory requirements. The DDL, named GlossoMote, is not merely a new syntax, it is a drastic departure from existing DDL constructs. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated with a small scale experiment and evaluated using the proposed assessment framework and other means. The promising results require additional research to evaluate GlossoMote’s approach commercial use potential