14,410 research outputs found
Cultivating Knowledge: Development, Dissemblance, and Discursive Contradictions among the Diola of Guinea-Bissau
Author's final manuscript.Development practitioners are eager to âlearn from farmersâ in their efforts to address Africaâs 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 knowledgeâwhether 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
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
"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 âfailuresâ of suspense: mysteries whose solutions are obvious, stories that are âspoiledâ 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 audiencesâ conditional and unstated knowledge of what is true, and of what will probably happen narratively in the future. I term this conditional feeling âprecarious knowing.â
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 ânovels with a secret, that each made their secrets known early in the narrative, and so invited their readers to make serial, conditional inferences. Wilkie Collinsâ "No Name" offers multiple alternatives to what seems to be known, while Mary Elizabeth Braddonâs "Lady Audleyâs 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 CBSâs 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 âspoiler cultureâ in the context of the economic metaphors that pervade contemporary discussions of serial media; metaphors like narrative âpayoff,â being âinvested in,â and âcheating.â By examining an instance of critical disappointment in a television program that failed to meet early expectations â namely, the Showtime spy drama "Homeland" â 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 projectâs 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 â the English/Irish boy band One Direction â can in fact be read productively as a process of collective serial narrative-writing, grounded in the inferences that fans make about the bandâs 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
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Moral Luck in Medical Ethics and Practical Politics
Typically we maintain two incompatible standards towards right action and good character, and the tension between these polarities creates the paradox of moral luck. In practice we regard actions as right or wrong, and character as good or bad, partly according to what happens as a result of the agent's decision. Yet we also think that people should not be held responsible for matters beyond their control.
This split underpins Kant's assertion that only the good will is securely good, that its goodness is impervious to outcome ill-luck. Some commentators, such as Martha Nussbaum and to some extent Bernard Williams, think that this simply writes off the paradox. Williams asserts that the paradox is insoluble, and that its inescapability threatens the notion of agent responsibility. In contrast Thomas Nagel argues that agents' most cherished projects may be indeed be subject to luck, but that does not mean that their deepest motivations are moral. This, I suggest, is one of several means whereby we might limit the effect of the paradox without denying that the tension exists. But I also argue that it is wrong to accuse Kant of ignoring the paradox.
Ethical consequentialists, on the other hand, appear to have no problem with moral luck, because the paradox depends on a dichotomy between the outside world and the locus of moral worth in the individual agent. But this turns out not to be true. The problem of moral luck is not some strange Kantian fixation, but a general dilemma: a variant on what
Nagel terms "the problem of excess objectivity" which cuts across all of ethics and metaphysics.
Retaining a broadly Kantian notion of agent-responsibility, but limiting what agents are responsible for, requires us to delineate the realm of ethics more narrowly than has been done by those who believe that the rational and/or prudential are coterminous with the ethical. This strategy for minimising the paradox's impact is explored in two areas from medical ethics, the allocation of scarce medical resources and informed consent, and two from public policy, secrecy and nuclear deterrence. Throughout, the analysis seeks to test Nagel's maxim that the best we can hope for is to act in such a manner that we would not have to revise our opinion of how we should have acted once the consequences of our actions become apparent
You Can\u27t Handle the Truth! Trial Juries and Credibility
Every now and again, we get a look, usually no more than a glimpse, at how the justice system really works. What we seeâbefore the sanitizing curtain is drawn abruptly downâis 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
Every now and again, we get a look, usually no more than a glimpse, at how the justice system really works. What we seeâbefore the sanitizing curtain is drawn abruptly downâis 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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