Whose Context Is It Anyway?

(Excerpt) Music shapes the worshiping assembly week by week The liturgy we sing becomes both praise and proclamation in the mouths of the gathered congregation. So how are we to know what it is we should sing? Our worship books are now filled with music from around the globe, from perspectives not even known to most of us just a generation ago. Is that music part of our local expression, and if not, how are we to make it so? This address will outline a process, responsive contextualization, which invites a local assembly to enter into the process of engagement with worship materials from a variety of cultures and contexts

Postmodernism and criminological thought : ‘Whose science? Whose knowledge?’

The way we think about crime and the way that society responds to it are imbued with values that can determine what is considered important and what gets attention. Sometimes values that are claimed may not be the values expressed in practice, as we see in the multiple and confusing discourses about victims and offenders, punishment and protection, rights and responsibilities. The collection of writings in this book considers values in crime theory, criminal justice and research practice, uncovering the many different 'sides' – to echo Howard Becker's famous phrase – that criminologists, policy makers and researchers take. This specific chapter focuses on postmodernism and the challenge of taking sides

Whose Troy? Whose Rome? Whose Europe? Three Medieval Londons and the London of Derek Walcott’s 'Omeros'

What does it mean that so many medievalists, especially in the United States and in Canada, study the European middle ages without being from or of Europe? What does it mean if we specify, further, those who don’t come from the United States or Canada either, but from areas of the world that experienced western European empire, as most of the globe did, as a systematic political and psychological subordination to Europe? I take the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott’s depiction of late twentieth-century London in his long narrative poem Omeros as a way to pose the question of what Europe might look like from the other side of the relationship of domination, that is, to define Walcott’s Europe. Walcott’s London repudiates Europe, and with it what he calls History, exactly the kind of history made by the European epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante in the form of the world-destinies they constructed for Europe in the cities of Troy and Rome, and made by their would-be successor London. But he does so with difficulty: the Troy of Homer and Virgil has long sought to seduce him into rendering his own island into its terms, elegiac and nostalgic. He seeks instead a poetry of the local, the small, the unvarnished, and the present tense. In doing so, he constructs a point of view that exposes the presumption and the brutality that sits inside medieval texts offered to the reader as celebrations of London and the history it contributes to making; but his perspective also brings out of the same texts their half-conscious efforts, repressed in the name of History, to speak for the local, the small, the unvarnished, and the present, on behalf of the desire for human adequacy to self, sociality, and community without war. Roughly speaking, desire, or history, shows up in the view from Walcott’s St. Lucia in the face of the History for which Europe is a metonym. Medieval texts read from outside the European frame are liable to be different from those read from within that frame; we need medieval readings from underneath and outside the European matrix that can put Europe in question, though it may be that History, and the project of a dominating Europe, remains too seductive to renounce

Whose Honey, Whose Hive: Rhetorical Agency in the Colony Collapse Disorder

U.S. beekeepers used distinct, important narratives to define Colony Collapse Disorder, a crisis that continues to kill a third of U.S. honey bees each year and threatens $15 billion of crops. My analysis of personal interviews with U.S. beekeepers including Dave Hackenberg, former president of the American Honey Producers Association, find beekeepers supply more pragmatic and emplaced narratives than those supplied by scientists and media: rather than define the crisis as pathogenic or a crime-narrative “whodunnit” with singular solutions, beekeepers define it in terms of economics and interactive “field” conditions such as pesticides, watersheds, bee genetics and foraging. Citing the work of Peterson, Lamberti and Schell, I advance the argument that defining “farmer’s narratives” helps better define food-related environmental crises

“Whose Utopia?” Kimsooja & Bottari Utopia

This thesis will explore the progressive evolution of utopia and utopianism in order to answer the question: “Whose utopia? in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and its disproportionate impact on people who were already marginalized, disadvantaged, and discriminated against. I will first review the writings of Sir Thomas More, Ernst Bloch, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Owkui Enwezor, and Jose Estaban Muñoz tracing the progressive evolution of utopian ideals. I will then introduce and survey the artist, Kimsooja’s oeuvre in relation to salient features from my review of utopia\u27s progression, and gradually revealing her aesthetics of making as revealing utopian hope and creating what I have named “Bottari utopia” based on the metaphoric extension of her artistic vocabulary. As chronicled in her numerous performances and videos, her concern is for persons not included, outcast, enduring violence... Bottari utopia bundles all: persons, places, things and time, in time, and is particularly inspiring, uplifting, and instructional today, as we (the world) find ourselves navigating isolation, and displacement, and face the fragility of life and uncertain future caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. I will then turn my attention to artist-activists and their import in transforming society for a better future, whether digital, virtual, or real

Whose Honey, Whose Hive?: Genre and Rhetorical Agency in the U.S. Colony Collapse Disorder

This dissertation analyzes the rhetoric surrounding the environmental crisis of the honey bee Colony Collapse Disorder, commonly known as CCD. Since 2007, the United States has lost on average a third of its honey bee colonies each year to CCD. The crisis has potentially serious environmental consequences. Without honey bee pollination services, over $14 billion worth of crops in the United States alone are in jeopardy. Drawing on environmental rhetoric, genre theory, and agricultural rhetorics, I offer a rhetorical analysis and genre analysis of the narratives surrounding CCD from select popular press newspaper articles, documentaries, nonfiction works, and personal interviews with beekeepers that cover the span of the early years of the U.S. crisis from 2007 to 2011. I argue that specific narratives of CCD offered by stakeholders such as scientists, reporters, beekeepers, policymakers, and environmentalists both constrained and invited deliberation about the synergistic causes of the crisis. One narrative I examine in detail in Chapter Two is the nesting genre of the “crime mystery” of CCD in news stories that often reduced consideration of the causes of CCD to a warring search for a pathogenic solution. This focus on a “smoking gun” for CCD focused the public’s attention on scientists seeking a single solution instead of considering multi-factoral causes. The genre also reduced consideration of the multiple roles stakeholders played in the crisis. In contrast, beekeepers’ protests, insights and perspectives (Chapters Three and Four) and the trope “listening to bees” popular in nonfiction media (Chapter Five) expanded consideration of systemic economic and cultural causes for the crisis, and allowed bees and beekeepers to emerge as informative agents. This project considers, too, how American beekeepers have approached CCD in largely individualistic terms in contrast to French beekeepers who have collectively organized in large groups to protest their sense that CCD was caused by the sale of a pesticide by the Bayer Corporation. I apply rhetorical and genre analysis to representations of CCD in popular media and beekeepers’ discourse. I cite stakeholders such as scientists, researchers, journalists, beekeepers, and protestors. This dissertation contributes to scholarship in environmental rhetoric and environmental communication that analyzes the narratives and causes of environmental crises. This project evaluates the solutions and challenges that varied stakeholders have posed, specifically through analyzing the shaping and impact of their narratives. Ultimately, the concluding chapter argues for the trope of “listening to bees,” the idea that bees are a critical indicator species whose behavior informs how we should approach and potentially solve this crisis

A Description Logic Framework for Commonsense Conceptual Combination Integrating Typicality, Probabilities and Cognitive Heuristics

We propose a nonmonotonic Description Logic of typicality able to account for the phenomenon of concept combination of prototypical concepts. The proposed logic relies on the logic of typicality ALC TR, whose semantics is based on the notion of rational closure, as well as on the distributed semantics of probabilistic Description Logics, and is equipped with a cognitive heuristic used by humans for concept composition. We first extend the logic of typicality ALC TR by typicality inclusions whose intuitive meaning is that "there is probability p about the fact that typical Cs are Ds". As in the distributed semantics, we define different scenarios containing only some typicality inclusions, each one having a suitable probability. We then focus on those scenarios whose probabilities belong to a given and fixed range, and we exploit such scenarios in order to ascribe typical properties to a concept C obtained as the combination of two prototypical concepts. We also show that reasoning in the proposed Description Logic is EXPTIME-complete as for the underlying ALC.Comment: 39 pages, 3 figure

What risks in whose risk society?

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University.The thesis discusses the mediating role of socioeconomic factors in risk debates through an examination of the decontamination and demolition of Fulham Power Station in 1983-1984. The power station was built between the wars by and for the people of Fulham. Located on the Thames in the neighbourhood of Sands End, it generated electricity and provided employment until 1978, when it was sold to a property development company. During the decontamination, a quantity of asbestos was released into the environment. A protest group was formed to secure better standards of work at the site. The group never had more than a dozen active members. All the members were middle-class. At the time of the decontamination and demolition, Sands End was a poor neighbourhood. A majority of the local population faced many 'social' as well as environmental hazards. Amongst these were sub-standard housing, unemployment, under-employment, low wages, inadequate work and educational skills and crime. The thesis discusses whether the neighbourhood's socioeconomic problems had any bearing on the character and dynamics of the power station debate. It suggests that the social geography and economic status of Sands End had two major effects on the debate. Firstly, gentrification provided the neighbourhood with a (small) middle-class constituency receptive to issues of environmental risk, such as the long-term health implications of airborne asbestos dust. Secondly, the neighbourhood's pressing social and economic problems mitigated against a wider involvement in the campaign. Most residents were too preoccupied with meeting their social and economic needs to become actively involved. The thesis also suggests that the population's experience of Fulham Power Station as a source of 'convenient' electrical power, employment and civic pride may have made it difficult for those native to Sands End to accept the activists' construction of the power station as a source of danger.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC