Green IS Research: A Modernity Perspective

Over the past two decades, the information systems community has become engaged in improving the environmental effects of information systems and technologies, which has given rise to the green IS field. Despite increasing interest, some have suggested that progress toward meaningful solutions for sustainability has been too slow. Responding to these concerns, we examine the development of green IS research using the modernity perspective to understand green IS’s evolution and to present alternative perspectives to motivate future research. From a sample of over 80 green IS papers published over a 15-year period, we identify four main patterns of modernity that are manifest in green IS research. These patterns include the importance of the individual in solving environmental problems; science as the main source of solutions; and the emergence of an artificial science approach, reliance on technology, and growth as businesses’ ultimate goals. Further, our analysis reveals that green IS research has started to demonstrate elements of a hyper-modernity perspective that emphasizes reflexivity. We argue that future green IS research should continue on this path and propose a conceptual framework inspired by hyper-modernity and centered on reflexivity that could serve as a guide for future research

The Law of the Excluded Middle:Discourse as Casualty of the Post-Truth Extremist Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic

The unprecedented World Health Organization orchestrated lockdown and public health measures in response to the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic were enacted by virtually every government worldwide. In many countries, but especially the United States, long-standing political animosities congealed into a discourse of dehumanization between liberal establishment adherents and anti-state revolutionaries. Left out from the field were the plural voices fitting neither camp. Mikhail Bakhtin’s lens of Ideologiekritik offers a diagnosis, and the symbolic destabilizing tool of the carnivalesque provides a discursive tool to soften the political polarization and depoliticized technocracy of the coronavirus pandemic state of exception. The conflagration of the global coronavirus governmental response and the often violent counter-responses warrants examining the democratic dangers of dualistic discourses. Disrupting this explosive polarization requires reintroducing plural discursive spaces which widen the conversation to include liminal and oblique perspectives via spectacle and jest—the carnival—providing a potential nonviolent path forward.</p

The Myth of Endless Accumulation: A Feminist Inquiry Into Globalization, Growth, and Social Change

This theoretical dissertation examines the concept of growth and its core assumption—that the continual accumulation of wealth is both socially wise and ecologically sustainable. The study challenges and offers alternatives to the myth of endless accumulation, suggesting new directions for leadership and social change. The central question posed in this inquiry: Can we craft a more ethical form of capitalism? To answer this question, the study examines conventional and critical globalization studies; feminist scholarship on standpoint, political economy, and power; and the Enlightenment notions of progress and modernism, drawing on a number of works, including Aristotle on the three intelligences, Thomas Aquinas on human need and value, and Karl Marx on capitalism. From this broad disciplinary and historical perspective, a compelling narrative emerges, one that describes how the idea of growth has intersected with power and privilege to create an overarching global imperative that threatens the viability of our species and planet. The closing sections explore potential responses to that threat, introducing consciousness, wisdom, and caring to our understanding of growth, and emphasizing the importance of relational practice to effect real social and institutional change. The electronic version of this dissertation is at OhioLINK ETD Center (www.ohiolink.edu/etd)

Monsters in Common: Identity and Community in Postapocalyptic Science Fiction After 9/11

In the aftermath 11 September, 2001, postapocalyptic science fiction has offered a way to make sense of the events of that day, as well as the years of social, cultural and political upheaval that have followed. In many ways, 9/11 began immediately to take on apocalyptic significance in the American national narrative, seemingly marking the end of one period and the beginning of another, entirely different one. To think of 9/11 as a kind of apocalyptic break with the past, however, does not tell the whole story. Moreover, such thinking denies key historical linkages between the American response to 9/11 and to earlier moments of crisis or catastrophe, particularly during the latter half of the twentieth century. After 9/11, conversations about security quickly turned to discussions of the concepts of identity and community--discussions that recall the social, cultural and political pressures of the 1950s and the Cold War. Within this horizon, this study explores the ways in which postapocalyptic science fiction after 9/11 examines the limits and consequences of social, cultural and political definitions of identity and community in the dominant American narrative. Looking at the close symbolic relationship between masculine identity and the figure of the hero in postapocalyptic science fiction, I argue that postapocalyptic science fiction after 9/11 represents a cultural space dedicated to imagining new ways of thinking about identity and community, predominantly by deconstructing the traditional relationship between the twinned figures of man and monster. Indeed, such a focus is also evident in postapocalyptic science fiction from the 1950s onward, such that, when considered from a historical perspective, postapocalyptic science fiction after 9/11 participates in a rich tradition of using vampires, zombies and other monsters to explore the dangers of holding too tightly to a single definition of identity, as well as to promote the value of community

Openness in Education as a Praxis: From Individual Testimonials to Collective Voices

Why is Openness in Education important, and why is it critically needed at this moment? As manifested in our guiding question, the significance of Openness in Education and its immediate necessity form the heart of this collaborative editorial piece. This rather straightforward, yet nuanced query has sparked this collective endeavour by using individual testimonies, which may also be taken as living narratives, to reveal the value of Openness in Education as a praxis. Such testimonies serve as rich, personal narratives, critical introspections, and experience-based accounts that function as sources of data. The data gleaned from these narratives points to the understanding of Openness in Education as a complex, multilayered concept intricately woven into an array of values. These range from aspects such as sharing, access, flexibility, affordability, enlightenment, barrier-removal, empowerment, care, individual agency, trust, innovation, sustainability, collaboration, co-creation, social justice, equity, transparency, inclusivity, decolonization, democratisation, participation, liberty, and respect for diversity. This editorial, as a product of collective endeavour, invites its readers to independently engage with individual narratives, fostering the creation of unique interpretations. This call stems from the distinctive character of each narrative as they voice individual researchers’ perspectives from around the globe, articulating their insights within their unique situational contexts

History\u27s Perilous Pleasures: Experiencing Antiquity in the Postwar Hollywood Epic

This dissertation focuses on the mid-20th Century historico-biblical epic—a film genre that flourished within Hollywood from 1949 to 1966 and which took as its subject the depiction of the ancient world—and reads this body of films as a mode of historical engagement. I argue that the historico-biblical epic takes the pressure of the terrifying possibility of the end of human history engendered by the atomic bomb and transmutes this into a series of dialectics, between agency and powerlessness, embodiment and transcendence, desire and punishment, imperial zenith and nadir. While antiquity seems to offer the modern world the ability to escape from the traumas of World War II, the imminence of a nuclear Armageddon, and the possibility of no future, the epic renders visible and forces an encounter with the very terrors it promises and seeks to escape. As such, it presents a portrait of an uneasy American culture struggling, and never quite succeeding, to make sense of its own position in time and history. Chapter one argues that the proliferation of atomic technologies in the postwar period engendered a profound eschatological fear in American culture, a fear reflected in the historico-biblical epic’s concern with heroic agency and impotence. This chapter draws on a wide variety of historical documents, including contemporary newspapers and magazines, the works of public intellectuals, and thinkers in the Christian press, all of whom struggled to make sense of the possibility of the end of history and whether it could (or should) be prevented through human intervention. I argue that the epic, including films such as The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), and Spartacus (1960), takes this terror and sublimates it into an ongoing narrative tension between agency and powerlessness, in which the male hero remains enmeshed in forces that exist beyond his control, his agency constantly displaced onto larger forces such as the will of God or onto a future the films seem reluctant to visually represent. Chapter two argues that the advent of widescreen, inaugurated with The Robe (1953), opened up new possibilities in the way in which the epic framed its temporal and embodied appeals and the way in which it sought to provide an escape from the terrors of modern history. Drawing on midcentury theological explorations of time, industrial and trade discussions of widescreen technology, as well as certain work on time and affect in recent film theory, I explore how the widescreen epic’s emphasis on immersion and embodied presence suggests the ability to escape modernity and experience the fulfillment offered by redemptive Christian time. Simultaneously, the genre’s emphasis on embodiment, both that of its on-screen, Christian convert heroes and the spectator sitting in the audience, draws attention to the limits of temporal transcendence. In chapter three, I shift into a discussion of the use of color in epic films such as Samson and Delilah (1949) and Quo Vadis (1951), arguing that color’s sensory address, combined with the genre’s emphasis on sexual and material excess, expresses a utopian wish to escape from the mesh of modern, linear time and escape into the perpetual present offered by sexual desire. Drawing on recent explorations undertaken in color theory and situating the films in the context of Cold War anxieties over sexuality, containment, and nuclear annihilation, I also show how the sexual excesses and deviance so conspicuously on display intertwine with the moralizing impulse of the films’ narratives, conjoining the pleasures of desire and death. Through this analysis, I demonstrate how these films expose the fractures in the not-yet-hegemonic ideology of containment. Chapter four moves into a discussion of imperial and geopolitical anxieties in later epics such as Cleopatra (1963) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964). These films provide a conflicted experience of history, one founded on a form of what I call “melancholic utopia,” a hopeful mourning for a brighter future that the films never bring to fruition. In these films, the hero’s aspirations unfold via spectacular displays of armies, vistas, and material wealth, which emerge at key points to create moments in which time is suspended and seemingly filled with vast historical potential. However, these films’ narratives, driven toward failure, suffuse these time-stopping, utopian spectacles with the despair of inevitable historical decline. These films thus provide an experience of history that holds the promise of infinite possibility in productive tension with a deferral of such potential

The Changing Faces of Chinese Canadians: Interpellation and Performance in the Deployment of the Model Minority Discourse

The history of Chinese settlement in Canada is one that closely parallels the evolution of the Canadian states own racial and immigration policies. As policy shifted from covert and overt forms of racial exclusion and discrimination, including the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 that attempted to ban immigration from China altogether, to the introduction of an official multicultural policy and a points system that admitted prospective immigrants based upon their academic and economic credentials, the portrayal of Chinese Canadians has centred on two predominant stereotypes: the Yellow Peril and the Model Minority. While it is easy to retroactively assume that the Yellow Peril discourse has been superseded by that of the Model Minority particularly in light of Canadas official multiculturalism policy, the increased economic and social capital of Chinese Canadians, and Chinas own recent economic boom this dissertation argues instead that both discourses have co-existed since the beginning of Chinese immigration to Canada, and continue to do so today. Using a combined examination of Chinese Canadian history and life writing, I argue that the Model Minority discourse is not a recent phenomenon; rather, it is an example of the complex relationship between external interpellation by mainstream Canadian society, and the agency and affective performance of Chinese immigrants and their descendants. While the Model Minority discourse has been used as a tool to maintain the Eurocentrism of mainstream Canadian society by placing Asian immigrants, including Chinese, upon a pedestal in contrast to other racialized minorities, it has also found footing in the desire of Chinese Canadian communities to be accepted and acknowledged as desirable citizens by the Canadian state and the public

The biometric imaginary: standardization and objectivity in the post-apartheid welfare state

Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references

Algorithmic Authenticity: An Overview

What makes information feel true or compelling in our contemporary digital societies? This book brings together different disciplinary understandings of "authenticity" in order to find alternative ways to approach mis- and disinformation that go beyond contemporary fact-checking and its search for the "authentic" truth. Patterned under the algorithmic flows of digital capitalism, authenticity itself is subject to variation, iteration, and outside influence. Linking cross-disciplinary research on the history and practices of algorithmic authenticity points to new research questions to understand the impact of algorithmic authenticity on social life and its role in contemporary information disorder

Intertidal

This exegesis situates my work in the intertidal zone. In Australia the intertidal zone is a site of historic, cultural, and ecological significance. It is my argument that thinking intertidally attunes us to concepts of inbetweenness and interconnection. These concepts are further articulated in relation to contemporary understandings of nature as outlined in different ways by Timothy Morton and Jane Bennett. Contemporary artists Mark Dion and Fiona Hall both draw on museological representations of nature to critique taxonomic classificatory logics — their work informs my rejection of such perspectives. Considering art and politics in the intertidal zone, where boundaries between inside and outside, nature and culture are porous and shifting informs my discussion of artistic influences of my practice including Anne Hamilton, Jonathon Jones and Fiona Foley and Janet Laurence. My process driven approach to art making, drawing on recent understandings of nature, artists exploring ecological concerns and material concerns of making has informed my immersive installations of kinetic sculpture and drawings. These aim to provide a rich sense of the interconnection between people and nature informed by the diverse materiality of the intertidal zone