Science, performance and transformation: performance for a ‘scientific’ age?

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media on 30/09/2014, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14794713.2014.946282 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.The ‘two cultures’ of science and the arts/humanities are often considered at odds, but digital technology, and the broader implications of digital culture, provides a model for more productive forms of exchange and hybridity. This article applies theories of intercultural theatre practice to performance that works across this cultural divide to explore the types of interaction that take place. Following a historical discussion of the science/art divide, a three-fold model is proposed and explored through case studies including Djerassi and Laszlo's 2003 NO, Eduardo Kac's 1999 Genesis, Reckless Sleepers' 1996/2006 Schrödinger's Box, and John Barrow's 2002 Infinities. It is argued that science operates through the creation of mathematical models of aspects of the physical world, whilst art similarly constructs different kinds of models for understanding the social/cultural and occasionally physical world. Digital technology expands the modelling possibilities both directly, through simulation, virtual reality and integration into ‘live’ activities of augmented and intermedia performance, and through the transformative nature of digital culture

Young Adults’ Conceptions of the Sacred in Finland Today

Peer reviewe

Why Did Memetics Fail? Comparative Case Study

Although the theory of memetics appeared highly promising at the beginning, it is no longer considered a scientific theory among contemporary evolutionary scholars. This study aims to compare the genealogy of memetics with the historically more successful gene-culture coevolution theory. This comparison is made in order to determine the constraints that emerged during the internal development of the memetics theory that could bias memeticists to work on the ontology of meme units as opposed to hypotheses testing, which was adopted by the gene-culture scholars. I trace this problem back to the diachronic development of memetics to its origin in the gene-centered anti-group-selectionist argument of George C. Williams and Richard Dawkins. The strict adoption of this argument predisposed memeticists with the a priori idea that there is no evolution without discrete units of selection, which in turn, made them dependent on the principal separation of biological and memetic fitness. This separation thus prevented memeticists from accepting an adaptationist view of culture which, on the contrary, allowed gene-culture theorists to attract more scientists to test the hypotheses, creating the historical success of the gene-culture coevolution theory

How 'dynasty' became a modern global concept : intellectual histories of sovereignty and property

The modern concept of ‘dynasty’ is a politically-motivated modern intellectual invention. For many advocates of a strong sovereign nation-state across the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in France, Germany, and Japan, the concept helped in visualizing the nation-state as a primordial entity sealed by the continuity of birth and blood, indeed by the perpetuity of sovereignty. Hegel’s references to ‘dynasty’, read with Marx’s critique, further show how ‘dynasty’ encoded the intersection of sovereignty and big property, indeed the coming into self-consciousness of their mutual identification-in-difference in the age of capitalism. Imaginaries about ‘dynasty’ also connected national sovereignty with patriarchal authority. European colonialism helped globalize the concept in the non-European world; British India offers an exemplar of ensuing debates. The globalization of the abstraction of ‘dynasty’ was ultimately bound to the globalization of capitalist-colonial infrastructures of production, circulation, violence, and exploitation. Simultaneously, colonized actors, like Indian peasant/‘tribal’ populations, brought to play alternate precolonial Indian-origin concepts of collective regality, expressed through terms like ‘rajavamshi’ and ‘Kshatriya’. These concepts nourished new forms of democracy in modern India. Global intellectual histories can thus expand political thought today by provincializing and deconstructing Eurocentric political vocabularies and by recuperating subaltern models of collective and polyarchic power.PostprintPeer reviewe

Familie und Schule: zwei Orte der Erziehung.

B

Minimalist C/case

This article discusses A-licensing and case from a minimalist perspective, pursuing the idea that argument NPs cyclically enter a number of A-relations, rather than just a single one, resulting in event-licensing, case-licensing and phi-licensing. While argument case commonly reflects Voice/v-relations, canonical A-movement is driven by higher elements, either in the C-T system or in a superordinate v-system (in ECM constructions). In addition, there is a distinction to be drawn between the triggering of A-movement, by for example C, and the licensing of the landing site, by for instance T, C-probing leading to tucking-in into Spec-T. Much of the evidence presented comes from quirky case constructions in Icelandic and from ECM and raising constructions in Icelandic and English. It is argued that T in ECM constructions inherits phi-licensing from the matrix v, regardless of the case properties of v