14,410 research outputs found

    Anna Komnene: A Woman of Power Without a Crown

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    Cultivating Knowledge: Development, Dissemblance, and Discursive Contradictions among the Diola of Guinea-Bissau

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    Author's final manuscript.Development practitioners are eager to “learn from farmers” in their efforts to address Africa’s deteriorating agricultural output. But many agrarian groups, such as Diola wet rice cultivators of Guinea-Bissau, have well-established norms that regulate the circulation of knowledge—whether about agriculture, household economy, or day-to-day activities. By exploring how Diola manage information about the natural and supranatural world and exercise evasion and restraint in quotidian interaction, this article problematizes the assumptions that knowledge is an extractable resource; that more knowledge is better; and that democratized knowledge leads to progress. It considers how the Diola tendency to circumscribe information both challenges external development objectives and contours the ways Diola themselves confront their declining economic conditions

    Beyond Strauss, lies, and the war in Iraq: Hannah Arendt's critique of neoconservatism

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    What are we to make of the neoconservative challenge to traditional international thought? Should we content ourselves, as many have done, to return to classical realism in response? Rather than offer another realist assessment of neoconservative foreign policy this article turns to Hannah Arendt. In a very different language, Arendt articulated a critique of the dangers of moralism in the political realm that avoids realist cynicism. She is also better placed to challenge the neoconservative vision of international affairs, ideological conviction, and their relationship to democratic society. Reading Arendt against Leo Strauss suggests that the fundamental problem with neoconservative ideology concerns its understanding of the place of philosophy in the public realm, the relationship between political thought and practice, ideas and action. She suggests why neoconservatives may be experts at selling wars but seem less adept at winning them

    Mind the Gaps: Serial Media Forms and the Affective Work of Audiences

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    "Mind the Gaps: Serial Media Forms and the Affective Work of Audiences" develops a theory of serial form as a collectively generated audience construct. This project draws upon serial narratives from nineteenth-century British sensation novels to contemporary television and fan practices, emphasizing the interdisciplinary and transhistorical nature of serial form. It engages specifically with serial narratives that might be considered “failures” of suspense: mysteries whose solutions are obvious, stories that are “spoiled” ahead of time, and fan practices that emphasize repetition. I argue that seriality is produced and maintained, not only through the strategic withholding and deferral of knowledge, but also through audiences’ conditional and unstated knowledge of what is true, and of what will probably happen narratively in the future. I term this conditional feeling “precarious knowing.” Each chapter engages with a different type of serial text, from either the nineteenth century or the present, in order to develop the construct of precarious knowing in four different contexts. Chapter One reads two nineteenth-century British sensation novels, known as “novels with a secret, that each made their secrets known early in the narrative, and so invited their readers to make serial, conditional inferences. Wilkie Collins’ "No Name" offers multiple alternatives to what seems to be known, while Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s "Lady Audley’s Secret" refuses to explicitly articulate what is known. Together, these novels suggest how inference-making, in addition to suspense, can sustain serial engagement. Chapter Two turns to contemporary television crime procedurals, specifically CBS’s Sherlock Holmes adaptation "Elementary." This chapter applies the type of inference-making described in the first chapter to the process of developing attachments to serial characters, particularly in repetitive genres. Chapter Three looks at contemporary television programs and “spoiler culture” in the context of the economic metaphors that pervade contemporary discussions of serial media; metaphors like narrative “payoff,” being “invested in,” and “cheating.” By examining an instance of critical disappointment in a television program that failed to meet early expectations – namely, the Showtime spy drama "Homeland" – this chapter discusses the centrality of economic metaphors, which imagine a fair exchange of audience time and attention for information, to popular definitions of serial form and spoiler etiquette. Lastly, Chapter Four demonstrates how this project’s account of serial form can offer an expanded understanding of what constitutes serial media. This chapter argues specifically that fan practices surrounding what seems to be a non-serial, non-fictional object – the English/Irish boy band One Direction – can in fact be read productively as a process of collective serial narrative-writing, grounded in the inferences that fans make about the band’s members.PHDEnglish Language & LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163167/1/amecklen_1.pd

    Case Notes

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    You Can\u27t Handle the Truth! Trial Juries and Credibility

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    Every now and again, we get a look, usually no more than a glimpse, at how the justice system really works. What we see—before the sanitizing curtain is drawn abruptly down—is a process full of human fallibility and error, sometimes noble, more often unfair, rarely evil but frequently unequal. The central question, vital to our adjudicative model, is: How well can we expect a jury to determine credibility through the ordinary adversary processes of live testimony and vigorous impeachment? The answer, from all I have been able to see is: not very well

    You Can\u27t Handle the Truth! Trial Juries and Credibility

    Get PDF
    Every now and again, we get a look, usually no more than a glimpse, at how the justice system really works. What we see—before the sanitizing curtain is drawn abruptly down—is a process full of human fallibility and error, sometimes noble, more often unfair, rarely evil but frequently unequal. The central question, vital to our adjudicative model, is: How well can we expect a jury to determine credibility through the ordinary adversary processes of live testimony and vigorous impeachment? The answer, from all I have been able to see is: not very well
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