103 research outputs found

    The Embodied Rhetoric of Cognitive Labour

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    This dissertation traces the roots of neoliberal selfhood to the rationalist ontology of modernity in the 1600s. The historical tension between materialism and immaterialism is expressed in the historicisation of work into Fordism and post-Fordism where embodied factory toil is apparently replaced by immaterial work, recalling Descartes’ mind-body split. If post-Fordist work addresses the Marxist critique of alienation in its emphasis on entrepreneurial inner selves, it does not explain the post-Fordist preoccupation to efficiently “Taylorise” the body through obsessive productivity. I argue that the factory prevails in the entrepreneur’s adoption of factory efficiency as a learnt behaviour from the Fordist era to enable perpetual self-fashioning, creating a productively pliant body to aid in self-discovery – an embodied rhetoric of cognitive labour. This follows the rationalist tenet of a rational mind ordering the causal body. Descartes and Marx converge as both the cogito and the commodity-form are retroactively rediscovered as essence. Both the cogito and the commodity-form are arrived at while the body is doubted, and the production process is mystified respectively. The entrepreneurial goal is the achievement of selfhood that is financially verifiable. Neoliberalism is capitalism’s version of humanism, allowing for self-actualisation, but rationalised by market forces. Rationalism, negating contingent, embodied contexts, remade reality in negative terms that is measurable. The fallible body, in the face of the mind, became a site of deficiency to be transcended, recalling Original Sin. This state of deficiency provided the scarcity paradigm that justified endless capitalist growth. In the scarcity paradigm, the neoliberal individual must overcome indebtedness – student loans, housing mortgages – to achieve a redemptive financialised oneness. However, indebtedness in anarchist societies did not carry guilt but was instrumental in creating lasting bonds, notes David Graeber. Debt as transgression has not only created entrepreneurship under punitive market forces, it corresponds to negative freedom – reinterpreted by Eva Illouz as negative relationships – the freedom from bonds. This also has consequences for the environment as ecomodernism views modernity unbonded from nature which needs technocratic reordering to solve climate change. My project examines the material consequences of the Cartesian cogito and a way out of growthism through care economies

    Joe Pawsey and the Founding of Australian Radio Astronomy

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    This open access book is a biography of Joseph L. Pawsey. It examines not only his life but the birth and growth of the field of radio astronomy and the state of science itself in twentieth century Australia. The book explains how an isolated continent with limited resources grew to be one of the leaders in the study of radio astronomy and the design of instruments to do so. Pawsey made a name for himself in the international astronomy community within a decade after WWII and coined the term radio astronomy. His most valuable talent was his ability to recruit and support bright young scientists who became the technical and methodological innovators of the era, building new telescopes from the Mills Cross and Chris (Christiansen) Cross to the Parkes radio telescope. The development of aperture synthesis and the controversy surrounding the cosmological interpretation of the first major survey which resulted in the Sydney research group's disagreements with Nobel laureate Martin Ryle play major roles in this story. This book also shows the connections among prominent astronomers like Oort, Minkowski, Baade, Struve, famous scientists in the UK such as J.A. Ratcliffe, Edward Appleton and Henry Tizard, and the engineers and physicists in Australia who helped develop the field of radio astronomy. Pawsey was appointed the second Director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (Green Bank, West Virginia) in October 1961; he died in Sydney at the age of 54 in late November 1962. Upper level students, scientists and historians will find the information, much of it from primary sources, relevant to any study of Joseph L. Pawsey or radio astronomy. This is an open access book

    Muslimah: Decolonising and Re-Presenting Contemporary British Cinematic Representation of Black Muslim Women

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    Much discussion has surrounded the notion of decolonisation¹, particularly in the context of education, which calls for a widening of study texts to include creators and writers of colour. Organisations such as The Black Curriculum Project (Stennett, 2019) seek to broaden representation of the racialised other within education (Arday and Mirza, 2018); meanwhile in media and the creative industries, the reproduction of ‘reactive tropes’ at the hands of ‘industry lore’ is also being challenged (Saha, 2018). Alongside these discussions, particularly in the creative industries, are explorations into how far the reverberations of a previously colonised world manifest themselves in our creation, understanding and absorption of art (Lorde, 2018). With these questions in mind, this thesis postulates a dearth of Black Muslim women in British narrative cinema, theorising alongside cultural and critical race scholarship, to interpret culturally dominant representations of the ‘other’ on screen. It merges issues of both seeing and showing with regards to representation, and posits the value of conscious spaces in which to rehearse an interrogated, theoretical undoing of long-established colonial ideologies (Young, 1996, pp.183-184), conversing with the notion of decolonisation in the process. In the spirit of Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives (2019) in literature and Fairview (Drury, 2018) in theatre, this study rehearses a decolonised approach to (screen)writing, theorising the conscious undoing of colonial gaze when representing the Black Muslim woman on screen

    The Politics of Intermediality: Late Modernist Circulations of the Event

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    This dissertation examines late modernist, intermedial representations of events, considering art as an event and how art depicts and circulates events. Through cross-media close readings and interdisciplinary theories and methods derived from media studies, music and sound studies, intermedial theory, feminist theory, critical race theory, and literary theory, I study multimedia opera, civilian bombardments during the Spanish Civil War, the 1943 Harlem riot, and the atomic bombing of Japan in order to evaluate media practices from a range of cultural and historical contexts. Employing eventalization, my research illuminates intersections of media, gender, race, nation, and sexuality. Some of the artists I engage with include Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, Virginia Woolf, Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, Ann Petry, Mina Loy, John Hersey, Shda Shinoe, and Nagai Takashi. The four chapters comprising this project take up fluctuating interactions among sonic, verbal, and visual mediations that were produced between 1927 and 1949, juxtaposing various newer media (photojournalism, radio, and others) with works of art (poetry, fiction, and painting). Stein and Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts, transposed first into a staged opera and then as a radio broadcast, highlights how its many remediations offer formal innovation while reinforcing historical inequities. Picasso and Woolf's collage-like responses to war in Spain demonstrate hypermediacy and immediacy—remediation's twinned impulses—with each artist treating public and private divisions (as materials and as politics) differently. In their depictions of state violence against Black Americans, Hughes, Lawrence, and Petry draw differently on sonic, visual, and verbal modes. Hughes and Petry's fictional rioters publicly express dissatisfaction and challenge the containment strategies used during the actual riot. My concluding chapter also considers how intermediality resists containment, tracing the disparate availability of media in North America and Japan. Simultaneously empty and excessive, these atomic media reveal the ways knowledge and power produce nuclear subjects. My findings reveal that late modernism offers a particularly resonant set of texts and contexts from which to evaluate literature as a medium. Moreover, literature's porous borders enable multiple movements and engagements. The eventalization of these circulations reveal the political stakes and uses of intermediality

    Coordination And Conflict In The Global Apparel Value Chain

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    The interdisciplinary paradigm of global value chains gives us a baseline understanding of how the $1.3 trillion apparel market is organized. Brands are believed to be largely responsible for industry organization. While there are many case studies of industries like apparel or electronics, they are rarely carried out with an ethnographic sensibility that digs into the interactions of conflict, coordination, and execution. My dissertation takes us inside apparel factories, buying agencies, and textile mills in India. I use organizational theory, economic sociology, and social psychology to gain an intimate understanding of how fashionable objects are anticipated, designed, sourced, planned, constructed, and tested. The chief substantive contribution of the work is the integration of multiple levels of analysis, from the transnational coordination of forecasting down to the micro analysis of assembly lines. Additional findings, like the existence of brokerage networks that mediate design from the global semi-periphery, counter 125 years of academic and political skepticism. At the brand level, again in contrast to existing evidence, I find that differences between luxury and discount brands extend throughout dozens of decisions and quality parameters. Different assessments are partially explained by occupational positioning. Our self-presentations are cut from global cloth

    Frameworks, models, and case studies

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    This thesis focuses on models of conceptual change in science and philosophy. In particular, I developed a new bootstrapping methodology for studying conceptual change, centered around the formalization of several popular models of conceptual change and the collective assessment of their improved formal versions via nine evaluative dimensions. Among the models of conceptual change treated in the thesis are Carnap’s explication, Lakatos’ concept-stretching, Toulmin’s conceptual populations, Waismann’s open texture, Mark Wilson’s patches and facades, Sneed’s structuralism, and Paul Thagard’s conceptual revolutions. In order to analyze and compare the conception of conceptual change provided by these different models, I rely on several historical reconstructions of episodes of scientific conceptual change. The historical episodes of scientific change that figure in this work include the emergence of the morphological concept of fish in biological taxonomies, the development of scientific conceptions of temperature, the Church-Turing thesis and related axiomatizations of effective calculability, the history of the concept of polyhedron in 17th and 18th century mathematics, Hamilton’s invention of the quaternions, the history of the pre-abstract group concepts in 18th and 19th century mathematics, the expansion of Newtonian mechanics to viscous fluids forces phenomena, and the chemical revolution. I will also present five different formal and informal improvements of four specific models of conceptual change. I will first present two different improvements of Carnapian explication, a formal and an informal one. My informal improvement of Carnapian explication will consist of a more fine-grained version of the procedure that adds an intermediate, third step to the two steps of Carnapian explication. I will show how this novel three-step version of explication is more suitable than its traditional two-step relative to handle complex cases of explications. My second, formal improvement of Carnapian explication will be a full explication of the concept of explication itself within the theory of conceptual spaces. By virtue of this formal improvement, the whole procedure of explication together with its application procedures and its pragmatic desiderata will be reconceptualized as a precise procedure involving topological and geometrical constraints inside the theory of conceptual spaces. My third improved model of conceptual change will consist of a formal explication of Darwinian models of conceptual change that will make vast use of Godfrey-Smith’s population-based Darwinism for targeting explicitly mathematical conceptual change. My fourth improvement will be dedicated instead to Wilson’s indeterminate model of conceptual change. I will show how Wilson’s very informal framework can be explicated within a modified version of the structuralist model-theoretic reconstructions of scientific theories. Finally, the fifth improved model of conceptual change will be a belief-revision-like logical framework that reconstructs Thagard’s model of conceptual revolution as specific revision and contraction operations that work on conceptual structures. At the end of this work, a general conception of conceptual change in science and philosophy emerges, thanks to the combined action of the three layers of my methodology. This conception takes conceptual change to be a multi-faceted phenomenon centered around the dynamics of groups of concepts. According to this conception, concepts are best reconstructed as plastic and inter-subjective entities equipped with a non-trivial internal structure and subject to a certain degree of localized holism. Furthermore, conceptual dynamics can be judged from a weakly normative perspective, bound to be dependent on shared values and goals. Conceptual change is then best understood, according to this conception, as a ubiquitous phenomenon underlying all of our intellectual activities, from science to ordinary linguistic practices. As such, conceptual change does not pose any particular problem to value-laden notions of scientific progress, objectivity, and realism. At the same time, this conception prompts all our concept-driven intellectual activities, including philosophical and metaphilosophical reflections, to take into serious consideration the phenomenon of conceptual change. An important consequence of this conception, and of the analysis that generated it, is in fact that an adequate understanding of the dynamics of philosophical concepts is a prerequisite for analytic philosophy to develop a realistic and non-idealized depiction of itself and its activities

    A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events:From the Great Exhibition to London 2012

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    A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events explores the traces of London’s most significant modern ‘mega events’. Though only open for a few weeks or months, mega events permanently and disruptively reshape their host cities and societies: they demolish and rebuild whole districts, they draw in materials and participants from around the globe and their organisers self-consciously seek to leave a ‘legacy’ that will endure for decades or more. With London as his case study, Jonathan Gardner argues that these spectacles must be seen as long-lived and persistent, rather than simply a transient or short-term phenomena. Using a novel methodology drawn from the subfield of contemporary archaeology – the archaeology of the recent past and present-day – a broad range of comparative studies are used to explore the long-term history of each event. These include the contents and building materials of the Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace and their extraordinary ‘afterlife’ at Sydenham, South London; how the Festival of Britain’s South Bank Exhibition employed displays of ancient history to construct a new post-war British identity; and how London 2012, as the latest of London’s mega events, dealt with competing visions of the past as archaeology, waste and ‘heritage’ in creating a vision of the future. This book offers significant new directions for the study of mega events in its comparison of how three mega events changed London over three centuries. Drawing on a broad range of theoretical and methodological frameworks and a rich array of sources, it demonstrates the great potential of contemporary archaeology for understanding contemporary urban phenomena

    The Joint Arctic Weather Stations

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    This is the first systematic account of the Joint Arctic Weather Stations (JAWS), a collaborative science program between Canada and the United States that created a distinctive state presence in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago from 1946-1972. These five meteorological stations, constructed at Eureka, Resolute, Isachsen, Mould Bay, and Alert, became remote hubs for science and sovereignty, revealing the possibilities and limits of modernity in the High Arctic. Drawing on extensive archival evidence, unpublished personal memoirs, and interviews with former JAWS personnel, this book systematically analyzes the diplomatic, scientific, social, environmental, and civil-military dimensions of this binational program. From the corridors of power in Washington and Ottawa to everyday life at the small outposts, The Joint Arctic Weather Stations explores delicate statecraft, changing scientific practices, as well as the distinctive station cultures that emerged as humans coped with isolation in polar environments

    Re-invigorating ubuntu through water: A human right to water under the Namibian Constitution

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    This book argues for the existence of a court enforceable human right to water that is implied from the right to life in Article 6 of the Namibian Constitution. The book builds this argument by using tools of constitutional interpretation and with the aid of comparative materials. As such, the African value of ubuntu is invoked. Ubuntu – which is legally developed through its four key principles of community, interdependence, dignity and solidarity – is anchored in a novel approach to Namibian constitutional interpretation that is conceptualised as ‘re-invigorative constitutionalism’. The book advances the ‘AQuA’ (adequacy – quality – accessibility) content of water and articulates the correlative duties within the context of the respect – protect – fulfil trilogy, which are duties imposed upon the Namibian state as the primary duty bearer for a right to water. These duties include irreducible essential content duties that are argued to be immediate when compared to general obligations. In giving substance to duties that flow from a right to water, international law interpretative resources are also relied upon, including General Comment No 15 by the United Nations Committee on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, the African Commission’s Principles and Guidelines on Social and Economic Rights, and the World Health Organisation’s Drinking-water Quality Guidelines. Moreover, the book addresses various justiciability concerns that may arise, arguing that Namibian courts are institutionally competent and legitimate in enforcing right to water claims through the application of the bounded deliberation model. Additionally, because the Principles of State Policy in Article 95 of the Namibian Constitution are rendered court unenforceable by Article 101, the argument is made that this does not undermine the claim that a right to water, anchored in the right to life, can be enforced through the courts.illustrato
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