Toward An Eco-Egalitarian University

This article argues for a political transformation and reorganization of the university so that it is capable of challenging the hierarchy of power in a neoliberal society. Faculty democracy, administrative accountability to faculty, and the education of students to become critical, thinking citizens would be a major part of this reorganization. This article first appeared in The Contemporary Condition: http://contemporarycondition.blogspot.com/2014/07/toward-eco-egalitarian-university.htm

Suffering, Justice, and the Politics of Becoming

Also CSST Working Paper #113.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51304/1/540.pd

The Practice of Spiritual Direction, rev. and updated ed.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Liebert

Locus of Control, Knowledge of Ethics, and Perceived Ethicality as Influenced by an Authority Figure

The present study investigated the relationship between a subject\u27s locus of control, knowledge of psychological ethical research principles, and perceived ethicality of a psychological research proposal as influenced by an authority figure. Subjects were asked to judge the ethicality of a research proposal, which half were led to believe had been previously deemed unethical by an authority figure. No mention was made of the authority figure\u27s viewpoint to the other subjects. The major finding was that the variability in ratings in ethicality of the research proposal tended to diminished from the no mention to the rejection manipulation in those of all levels of knowledge of ethics and in those of relatively external locus of control, while those of relatively internal locus of control showed virtually no change in the variability of their ratings of ethicality between the no mention and rejection categories. Some suggestions were made for future research in this area

Freedom, Teleodynamism, Creativity

After presenting a critique of both negative and positive freedom this essay pursues the relation between creativity and freedom, drawing upon Foucault, Deleuze and Nietzsche to do so.  Once you have understood Nietzsche’s reading of a culturally infused nest of drives in a self, the task becomes easier.  A drive is not merely a force pushing forward; it is also a simple mode of perception and intention that pushes forward and enters into creative relations with other drives when activated by an event.  You can also understand more sharply how the Foucauldian tactics of the self work.  We can now carry this insight into the Deleuzian territory of micropolitics and collective action by reviewing his work on flashbacks and “the powers of the false.” If a flashback in film pulls us back to a bifurcation point where two paths were possible and one was taken, the powers of the false refer to the subliminal role the path not taken can play in the formation of creative action.  As you pursue these themes you see that neither old, organic notions of belonging to the world nor do negative notions of detachment as such do the work needed.  Deleuze’s notion of freedom carries us to the idea of cultivating “belief” in a world of periodic punctuations.  The latter are essential to creativity and incompatible with organic belonging.  They are also indispensable supports of a positive politics today

The galaxy counts-in-cells distribution from the SDSS

We determine the galaxy counts-in-cells distribution from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) for 3D spherical cells in redshift space as well as for 2D projected cells. We find that cosmic variance in the SDSS causes the counts-in-cells distributions in different quadrants to differ from each other by up to 20%. We also find that within this cosmic variance, the overall galaxy counts-in-cells distribution agrees with both the gravitational quasi-equilibrium distribution and the negative binomial distribution. We also find that brighter galaxies are more strongly clustered than if they were randomly selected from a larger complete sample that includes galaxies of all luminosities. The results suggest that bright galaxies could be in dark matter haloes separated by less than ~10 Mpc/h.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. Revised version with referee suggestions and corrected typo

Educational research journals: a partial view from the UK

This paper is about educational research journals in general and the British Educational Research Journal in particular. In this paper, we discuss some of the aims of educational research journals and several the challenges facing them; we also identify various ways in which journals could consider doing things differently. Two issues are of particular significance. The first is about the accessibility of educational research in an era of rapid technological change and the rise of Open Access publication models. The second is to do with the mission of education journals in relation to long-standing and pervasive educational inequalities