1,133 research outputs found

    “Big Tales of Indians Ahead:” The Reproduction of Settler Colonial Discourse in the American West

    Get PDF
    “Big Tales of Indians Ahead” traces the reproduction of settler colonial discourses—sentiments narrated by a settler society about themselves and about the Native American societies that predated them—from the period of colonial history of the seventeenth century to the present day in the twenty-first century. This study argues that the anti-Indian rhetoric that could be found in early colonial EuroAmerican writings, particularly Indian captivity narratives, were reproduced by subsequent settler societies throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the form of settler narratives from the overland trail migrations and various forms of popular culture. In the twentieth century these discourses, heavily influenced by past settler discourses, reached wider audiences through new forms of popular culture—particularly Western genre films and mass-produced works of fiction aimed at younger audiences. Finally, this dissertation tracks the ways in which these discourses are still reproduced and present in contemporary popular culture media and political identities in the American West. From Mary Rowlandson’s Indian captivity narrative of the late-seventeenth century to the overland trail settler narratives of the Oregon Trail and the wildly-popular Western films of the mid-twentieth century, Native Americans had consistently been tied to reductive and derogatory depictions in American collective cultural discourses that has tied stereotypes of so-called “Indians” to inherently-racial traits such as savagery, depravity, and violence. This study not only shows that these assertions from a settler population, and their descendants, has been falsely (and thus unfairly) attributed to racialized notions of “Indianness,” but also provides a clear and consistent historical timeline that tracks these depictions across centuries and various forms of settler discourses

    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

    Get PDF
    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

    Plant Ontology, The Amazonian Yachag and the Artist in Trance

    Get PDF
    The commonalities that plants, shamans and artists share may not be evident at first glance, nevertheless, if we search for uncomfortable entanglements and difficult questions, we may find that for centuries the voice with which plants speak has been the Amazonian yachag and the chamana or healer. Furthermore, who has invariably accompanied different plateaus along humanity’s convoluted becomings, has been what I have called the artist in trance. This artist is a concoction born from Walter Benjamin’s notion of ecstatic trance and Nietzche’s tragic artist. In this research I have investigated the being of plants or plant ontology and how they may be others who we may learn from in order to relate to Earth in a better way. The artist-yachag or artist philosopher as we may call her, is the one who bridges disparate conocimientos or knowledge, those of plants and those of shamans and translates them into our own words and worlds. What for? To learn to inhabit this planet in a softermood, in a weak mood as Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala would say, stemming from other visions and other perspectives. The interconnectivity that plants generate, as well as the idea of them being a world in themselves allied with the yachag or shaman and the artist, may lead humanity towards the understanding of a world to come. Applyingand expanding the notion first posited by Levi-Strauss and then contested by Viveiros de Castro that the relation between nature and culture is one of“metonymic contiguity rather than metaphoric resemblance”, I argue that the same kind of contiguity exists between plants,the Amazonian yachag and the artist in trance. The trope ofmetonymic contiguity serves to connect in a continuum these three entities one after the other in a nature-culture effervescent symbiosis. ‍https://digitalmaine.com/academic/1047/thumbnail.jp

    A War of Words: The Forms and Functions of Voice-Over in the American World War II Film — An Interdisciplinary Analysis

    Full text link
    Aside from being American World War II films, what else do the following films have in common? The Big Red One; Hacksaw Ridge; Harts War; Mister Roberts; Stalag 17; and The Thin Red Line — all have voice-over in them. These, and hundreds of other war films have voice-overs that are sometimes the thoughts of a fearful soldier; the wry observations of a participant-observer; or the declarations of all-knowing authoritative figures. There are voice-overs blasted out through a ships PA system; as the reading of a heart-breaking letter; or as the words of a dead comrade, heard again in the mind of a haunted soldier. This thesis questions why is voice-over such a recurring phenomenon in these films? Why is it conveyed in so many different forms? What are the terms for those different forms? What are their narrative functions? A core component of this thesis is a new taxonomy of the six distinct forms of voice-over: acousmatic, audioemic, epistolary, objective, omniscient, and subjective. However, the project is more than a structuralist taxonomy that merely serves to identify, and define those forms. It is also a close examination of their narrative functions beyond the unimaginative trope that voice-over in war films is simply a convenient storytelling device. Through interdisciplinarity — combined with a realist framework — I probe the correlations between: the conditions, codification, and suppression of speech within the U.S. military, and the manifestations of that experience through the cinematic device, and genre convention of voice-over. In addition, I present a radically new interpretation of the voice-overs in The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998) as being both a choric meta-memorial to James Jones; and a Greek tragedy — with its replication of the stagecraft of Aeschylus, in its use of the cosmic frame, and the inclusion of a collective character, which I have named ‘The Chorus of Unknown Soldiers’. The overall result is a more logical, and nuanced explanation of the forms, functions, and prevalent use of voice-over in the American World War II film

    Subversive Semantics in Political and Cultural Discourse: The Production of Popular Knowledge

    Get PDF
    The large-scale use of semantic transfer and inversion as rhetorical tactics is particularly prevalent in right-wing discourses and populist "alternative knowledge" production. The contributors to this volume analyze processes of re-semanticizing received meanings, effectually re-coding those meanings. They investigate to what extent rhetorical maneuvers serve to establish new and powerful belief systems beyond rational and democratic control. In addition to the contemporary rightwing and conspiracy narratives, the contributions examine the discursive fields around conceptions of human nature and the deep past, population politics, gender conceptions, use of land, identity politics, nationhood, and cultural heritage

    Data ethics : building trust : how digital technologies can serve humanity

    Get PDF
    Data is the magic word of the 21st century. As oil in the 20th century and electricity in the 19th century: For citizens, data means support in daily life in almost all activities, from watch to laptop, from kitchen to car, from mobile phone to politics. For business and politics, data means power, dominance, winning the race. Data can be used for good and bad, for services and hacking, for medicine and arms race. How can we build trust in this complex and ambiguous data world? How can digital technologies serve humanity? The 45 articles in this book represent a broad range of ethical reflections and recommendations in eight sections: a) Values, Trust and Law, b) AI, Robots and Humans, c) Health and Neuroscience, d) Religions for Digital Justice, e) Farming, Business, Finance, f) Security, War, Peace, g) Data Governance, Geopolitics, h) Media, Education, Communication. The authors and institutions come from all continents. The book serves as reading material for teachers, students, policy makers, politicians, business, hospitals, NGOs and religious organisations alike. It is an invitation for dialogue, debate and building trust! The book is a continuation of the volume “Cyber Ethics 4.0” published in 2018 by the same editors

    Behavior quantification as the missing link between fields: Tools for digital psychiatry and their role in the future of neurobiology

    Full text link
    The great behavioral heterogeneity observed between individuals with the same psychiatric disorder and even within one individual over time complicates both clinical practice and biomedical research. However, modern technologies are an exciting opportunity to improve behavioral characterization. Existing psychiatry methods that are qualitative or unscalable, such as patient surveys or clinical interviews, can now be collected at a greater capacity and analyzed to produce new quantitative measures. Furthermore, recent capabilities for continuous collection of passive sensor streams, such as phone GPS or smartwatch accelerometer, open avenues of novel questioning that were previously entirely unrealistic. Their temporally dense nature enables a cohesive study of real-time neural and behavioral signals. To develop comprehensive neurobiological models of psychiatric disease, it will be critical to first develop strong methods for behavioral quantification. There is huge potential in what can theoretically be captured by current technologies, but this in itself presents a large computational challenge -- one that will necessitate new data processing tools, new machine learning techniques, and ultimately a shift in how interdisciplinary work is conducted. In my thesis, I detail research projects that take different perspectives on digital psychiatry, subsequently tying ideas together with a concluding discussion on the future of the field. I also provide software infrastructure where relevant, with extensive documentation. Major contributions include scientific arguments and proof of concept results for daily free-form audio journals as an underappreciated psychiatry research datatype, as well as novel stability theorems and pilot empirical success for a proposed multi-area recurrent neural network architecture.Comment: PhD thesis cop

    The whole of Germany it should be? Changing conceptions of ‘Germany’ 1780-1871

    Get PDF
    Denne oppgaven tar for seg ulike forestillinger om hva ‘Tyskland’ var, eller burde vĂŠre, i perioden ca. 1780-1871 (og senere). De tyske politiske forholdene endret seg enormt i denne perioden, fra det desentraliserte og fragmenterte tysk-romerske riket til det forente og industrialiserte Tyskland under prĂžyssisk ledelse. Jeg skal derfor undersĂžke hva ‘Tyskland’ betĂžd for enkelte fremtredende tyske intellektuelle i denne perioden. For Ă„ avgrense oppgaven, vil jeg fokusere pĂ„ tre hovedbegreper i tekstene jeg undersĂžker: territorium, nasjon, og politisk forfatning. Min hypotese er at disse konseptuelle endringene fulgte et slags «dialektisk» mĂžnster: for 1700-tallets tenkere var ‘Tyskland’ et geografisk eller lingvistisk begrep, ikke et politisk et. Dette endret seg i kjĂžlvannet av koalisjonskrigene med Frankrike: yngre, intellektuelle deler av den tyske middelklassen tok til seg nye idĂ©er og ideologier som liberalisme, konstitusjonalisme og nasjonalisme. Dette fĂžrte til konflikt med den tyske, konservative eliten, som Ăžnsket Ă„ opprettholde politisk absolutisme og motvirke moderne, «revolusjonĂŠre» krefter. I denne perioden (1815-48) ser vi derfor en «politisering» av konseptet ‘Tyskland’. Dette nĂ„dde et hĂžydepunkt i 1848, da det revolusjonĂŠre Frankfurtparlamentet forgjeves forsĂžkte Ă„ forene Tyskland til et liberalt, konstitusjonelt monarki. ‘Tyskland’ som stat var ferdigdefinert, og vi finner fra nĂ„ av tanken om at denne (potensielle) staten skulle ekspandere og annektere ikke-tysk territorium i Sentral-Europa. Denne forestillingen om et ekspansivt ‘Tyskland’ ble beholdt etter den mislykkede 1848- revolusjonen. Forestillingen om et liberalt Tyskland ble derimot avvist etter 1848: innflytelsesrike prĂžyssiske historikere forestilte seg et prĂžyssisk-ledet Tyskland, og deres konservative politiske overbevisninger er derfor tydelig markerte i tekstene deres.Historie mastergradsoppgaveHIS350MAHF-HISMAHF-LÆH

    LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volume

    Get PDF
    LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volum
    • 

    corecore