The Panopticon under the Light of Politics and Technology

This paper focuses on Foucault's concept of the Panopticon. The Panopticon since time immemorial has been used as a concept in order to control society. Since this is being used as a tool to control society, this then is considered to be a form of technology of which is being used by individuals who hold power

Counternarratives of Students with Dis/abilities in One Rural School District

This is an inquiry into the educational experience of students with dis/abilities who are excluded from the general education classroom in one rural Georgia school district. Theoretically my dissertation research builds on critical disability studies (Erevelles 2000, 2002, 2005, 2015; also Annamma 2018; Tremain 2005), critical geography (Harvey 2000; Helfenbein, Jr. 2004; Soja 1989, 2010), and curriculum studies (Maudlin 2008; Snowber 2016; Springgay & Freedman 2008; Swanson 2008). Methodologically building on counternarrative inquiry (Bell 1999; Delgado 1989; He & Ayers 2009; He & Ross 2015; He, Ross, & Seay 2015; Solórzano & Yosso 2002), art-based research (Barone & Eisner 2006; Coles 1992; also Bae-Dimitriadis 2020), and those conducting research with children with dis/abilities (Aslamazova, Yurina Kochendova & Krasnova 2016; Søndergaard & Reventlow 2019; Jenkin, Wilson, Murfitt, Clarke, Campain, & Stockman, 2015; Maxwell 2006), I explore the counternarratives of three students with significant dis/abilities, Kara, Alvin, and Derek, to counter master narratives, which devalue, dehumanize, and disenfranchise them. I propose an embodied curriculum within a beloved community (hooks, 1996) and infused with a pedagogy of heart (Freire, 1997) as a replacement to the current curriculum of exclusion and despair. Six findings have emerged from my dissertation research: (1) When conducting research with students with dis/abilities, researchers must create a safe and welcoming space in which their confidentiality is protected, and their stories are told through a comfortable medium. (2) Arts-based research transgresses traditional dissertation inquiries to tell the silenced narrative of students with dis/abilities and liberate their voice from the constraints of ableism. (3) Counternarratives empower children with dis/abilities to share valuable insights into their educational experience and speak against the master-narrative of ableism and privilege that often disenfranchises and dehumanizes them as deficient and inferior and failures. (4) Exclusion in education damages the sense of worth and belonging of students with dis/abilities, furthers their marginalization, and sabotages their potential in school and life. (5) There is a demand to engender an embodied curriculum within a beloved community and infused with a pedagogy of heart that disrupts the ableism inherent in dominant educational structures, practices, and policies for students with intellectual dis/abilities which prevent them from reaching graduation and thriving in life. (6) Instead of imprisoning the bodies and minds of students with dis/abilities, educators must work with other educational workers such as teachers, administrators, educational staff, parents, students, community workers, and policy makers to develop a culturally relevant pedagogy of caring and justice, cultivate a culturally inspiring school environment, and create hopes, dreams, and equal opportunities for students with dis/abilities and all others to reach their highest potential (Siddle-Walker, 1996)

The Immanent Contingency of Physical Laws in Leibniz’s Dynamics

This paper focuses on Leibniz’s conception of modality and its application to the issue of natural laws. The core of Leibniz’s investigation of the modality of natural laws lays in the distinction between necessary, geometrical laws on the one hand, and contingent, physical laws of nature on the other. For Leibniz, the contingency of physical laws entailed the assumption of the existence of an additional form of causality beyond mechanical or efficient ones. While geometrical truths, being necessary, do not require the use of the principle of sufficient reason, physical laws are not strictly determined by geometry and therefore are logically distinct from geometrical laws. As a consequence, the set of laws that regulate the physical laws could have been created otherwise by God. However, in addition to this, the contingency of natural laws does not consist only in the fact that God has chosen them over other possible ones. On the contrary, Leibniz understood the status of natural laws as arising from the action internal to physical substances. Hence the actuality of physical laws results from a causal power that is inherent to substances rather than being the mere consequence of the way God arranged the relations between physical objects. Focusing on three instances of Leibniz’s treatment of contingency in physics, this paper argues that, in order to account for the contingency of physical laws, Leibniz maintained that final causes, in addition to efficient and mechanical ones, must operate in physical processes and operations

Relational interpretation of the wave function and a possible way around Bell's theorem

The famous ``spooky action at a distance'' in the EPR-szenario is shown to be a local interaction, once entanglement is interpreted as a kind of ``nearest neighbor'' relation among quantum systems. Furthermore, the wave function itself is interpreted as encoding the ``nearest neighbor'' relations between a quantum system and spatial points. This interpretation becomes natural, if we view space and distance in terms of relations among spatial points. Therefore, ``position'' becomes a purely relational concept. This relational picture leads to a new perspective onto the quantum mechanical formalism, where many of the ``weird'' aspects, like the particle-wave duality, the non-locality of entanglement, or the ``mystery'' of the double-slit experiment, disappear. Furthermore, this picture cirumvents the restrictions set by Bell's inequalities, i.e., a possible (realistic) hidden variable theory based on these concepts can be local and at the same time reproduce the results of quantum mechanics.Comment: Accepted for publication in "International Journal of Theoretical Physics

A survey of χ\chi-boundedness

If a graph has bounded clique number, and sufficiently large chromatic number, what can we say about its induced subgraphs? Andr\'as Gy\'arf\'as made a number of challenging conjectures about this in the early 1980's, which have remained open until recently; but in the last few years there has been substantial progress. This is a survey of where we are now

The Network Analysis of Urban Streets: A Primal Approach

The network metaphor in the analysis of urban and territorial cases has a long tradition especially in transportation/land-use planning and economic geography. More recently, urban design has brought its contribution by means of the "space syntax" methodology. All these approaches, though under different terms like accessibility, proximity, integration,connectivity, cost or effort, focus on the idea that some places (or streets) are more important than others because they are more central. The study of centrality in complex systems,however, originated in other scientific areas, namely in structural sociology, well before its use in urban studies; moreover, as a structural property of the system, centrality has never been extensively investigated metrically in geographic networks as it has been topologically in a wide range of other relational networks like social, biological or technological. After two previous works on some structural properties of the dual and primal graph representations of urban street networks (Porta et al. cond-mat/0411241; Crucitti et al. physics/0504163), in this paper we provide an in-depth investigation of centrality in the primal approach as compared to the dual one, with a special focus on potentials for urban design.Comment: 19 page, 4 figures. Paper related to the paper "The Network Analysis of Urban Streets: A Dual Approach" cond-mat/041124

Personal and sub-personal: a defence of Dennett's early distinction

Since 1969, when Dennett introduced a distinction between personal and sub‐personal levels of explanation, many philosophers have used ‘sub‐personal’ very loosely, and Dennett himself has abandoned a view of the personal level as genuinely autonomous. I recommend a position in which Dennett's original distinction is crucial, by arguing that the phenomenon called mental causation is on view only at the properly personal level. If one retains the commit‐’ ments incurred by Dennett's early distinction, then one has a satisfactory anti‐physicalistic, anti‐dualist philosophy of mind. It neither interferes with the projects of sub‐personal psychology, nor encourages ; instrumentalism at the personal level. People lose sight of Dennett’s personal/sub-personal distinction because they free it from its philosophical moorings. A distinction that serves a philosophical purpose is typically rooted in doctrine; it cannot be lifted out of context and continue to do its work. So I shall start from Dennett’s distinction as I read it in its original context. And when I speak of ‘the distinction’, I mean to point not only towards the terms that Dennett first used to define it but also towards the philosophical setting within which its work was cut out