6,271 research outputs found

    Architects of time: Labouring on digital futures

    Get PDF
    Drawing on critical analyses of the internet inspired by Gilles Deleuze and the Marxist autonomia movement, this paper suggests a way of understanding the impact of the internet and digital culture on identity and social forms through a consideration of the relationship between controls exercised through the internet, new subjectivities constituted through its use and new labour practices enabled by it. Following Castells, we can see that the distinction between user, consumer and producer is becoming blurred and free labour is being provided by users to corporations. The relationship between digital technologies and sense of community, through their relationship to the future, is considered for its dangers and potentials. It is proposed that the internet may be a useful tool for highlighting and enabling social connections if certain dangers can be traversed. Notably, current remedies for the lack of trust on the internet are questioned with an alternative, drawing on Zygmunt Bauman and Georg Simmel, proposed which is built on community through a vision of a ‘shared network’

    Zygmunt Bauman: What it means to be included.

    Get PDF
    Although Zygmunt Bauman has written very little directly about education, his underpinning ideas\ud on the transition from solid to liquid modernity, the mechanisms of social exclusion, the Other\ud and the stranger have had a significant impact on education research. Taking his starting point\ud from a questionable secular reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s contribution to ethics, Bauman’s\ud account of social exclusion has become well respected. The social forces described by Bauman\ud are always external to the individual in Bauman’s social analysis of suffering in that it places no\ud emphasis on the culpability of other human agents as the cause of the Other’s suffering. This\ud article identifies this underemphasis on human agency as a flaw in Bauman’s analysis and evaluates\ud Bauman’s largely ignored and problematic understanding of inclusion, in which social inclusion and\ud exclusion are based on the same mechanisms and identified as two sides of the same coin central\ud for maintaining social solidarity

    Education in the interregnum: an evaluation of Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid-turn writing on education

    Get PDF
    In his liquid-turn writings, Zygmunt Bauman has come to identify liquid\ud modernity as a period of interregnum. Education has a central role to\ud play within the contemporary interregnum by opening up a new public\ud sphere for dialogue. However, the processes of liquefaction manifest\ud themselves in conditions that severely limit a person’s ability to exercise\ud their human agency. Bauman provides no indication of how the\ud educators can escape the processes that limit agency, nor does he\ud explain how educators can combat the seductive consumerism that\ud students need to overcome before they can engage in a reconstruction of\ud the public sphere

    Introduction to the political economy of the sub-prime crisis in Britain : constructing and contesting competence

    Get PDF
    It is almost always inadvisable to try to second-guess the character of a General Election campaign before it begins in earnest. Yet, even in today’s shadow-boxing phase in advance of the British General Election due to be called in 2010, a number of important campaign contours are already in evidence. It is one of the unwritten laws of British electoral politics that governments unravel – particularly those of a certain longevity – as events appear ever more to have spiralled out of their control. The task for the Brown Government in the upcoming General Election campaign is to try to convince voters that there is still life left within Labour despite its current travails with the credit crunch and British banks’ self-imposed entrapment in the subprime crisis. Claim and counter-claim are likely to pass between the Government and the opposition parties as to where the blame lies for the current disarray of the banking sector, whose model of regulation is most responsible and who is best placed to ensure a successful clean-up operation. Whoever is perceived to have come out on top in this debate is likely to stand a very good chance of winning the election

    Robots and cyborgs: to be or to have a body?

    Get PDF
    Starting with service robotics and industrial robotics, this paper aims to suggest philosophical reflections about the relationship between body and machine, between man and technology in our contemporary world. From the massive use of the cell phone to the robots which apparently “feel” and show emotions like humans do. From the wearable exoskeleton to the prototype reproducing the artificial sense of touch, technological progress explodes to the extent of embodying itself in our nakedness. Robotics, indeed, is inspired by biology in order to develop a new kind of technology affecting human life. This is a bio-robotic approach, which is fulfilled in the figure of the cyborg and consequently in the loss of human nature. Today, humans have reached the possibility to modify and create their own body following their personal desires. But what is the limit of this achievement? For this reason, we all must question ourselves whether we have or whether we are a body

    Strangers of the north: South Asians, cricket and the culture of ‘Yorkshireness’

    Get PDF
    As a county, Yorkshire is what Wagg and Russell refer to as a ‘cultural region’: an imagined space, where culture is constructed, refined and articulated by a set of discursive relationships between local populations and a whole range of cultural forms. In this context however, culture is conceived as something which belongs to, and is only accessible by, certain groups of people. Our focus in this article is on the culture of Yorkshire cricket. Historically, Yorkshire cricket has been linked with white male privilege and some studies have shown that people within Yorkshire take a degree of pride in this. Consequently, the county and its cricket club have faced frequent accusations from minority ethnic communities of inveterate and institutionalised racism. Drawing upon Bauman’s notion of ‘liquid modernity’, we argue that the processes of deregulation and individualisation championed by New Right policies have led to a divorce between power and politics, a corner stone of the old solid modern world. This in turn has led to an erosion of the state, causing individuals to navigate turbulent life projects which are consistently haunted by the spectres of fear and insecurity. Such an environment has caused cricket to be pushed further behind gated social spaces, in an attempt to maintain a semblance of ‘community’
    corecore