Content Neutrality: A Defense

To date, both the United States federal government and twenty-one individual states have passed Religious Freedom Restoration Acts that aim to protect religious persons from having their sincere beliefs substantially burdened by governmental interests. RFRAs accomplish this by offering a three-pronged exemption test for religious objectors that is satisfied only when (1) an objector has a sincere belief that is being substantially burdened; (2) the government has a very good reason (e.g., health or safety) to interfere; and (3) there is a reasonable alternative to serve the compelling interest. Legal balancing tests like those found in RFRA are content neutral insofar as they sideline the belief-content of conscientious objections as irrelevant when determining the permissibility of granting legal accommodations. However, some theorists worry that this legal picture may be backward: perhaps balancing tests should be content non-neutral given the usual features of conscientious objections. For example, Yossi Nehushtan contends that, contrary to their typical codification, religious conscience beliefs seem undeserving of special legal accommodations because they possess uniquely strong empirical and theoretical ties to intolerance. Thus, the illiberally intolerant content of these conscientious objections might actually give the state a reason to refuse to grant legal exemptions. In this paper, I offer a cursory defense of content neutrality with respect to balancing tests like those found in RFRA. To begin, I outline Nehushtan’s argument for content non-neutrality. The cornerstone of his argument is that illiberal intolerance is intolerable such that conscientious objections that are based upon illiberally intolerant values provide the state with strong, normally prevailing reason not to grant an exemption. I argue that, even when the illiberally intolerant content of one’s conscience constitutes a weighty and relevant factor in determining the permissibility of granting a legal exemption, there remain significant problems. It is difficult, for example, to determine which views are illiberally intolerant and difficult to say whether illiberally intolerant views can effectively serve as the principled demarcating line in balancing tests. To conclude, I offer several cursory arguments in favor of adopting content-neutral approaches without necessarily making a comprehensive case. By drawing on the work of Amy Sepinwall, Nadia Sawicki, and Nathan Chapman, I show that content-neutral approaches can help to safeguard robust protections for conscience by permitting atypical exercises of conscience, protect minority thoughts and practices from being coercively supplanted by majoritarian understandings of morality, appropriately maintain the skepticism and humility that we owe each other as compatriots in a pluralistic society, and allow the kind of justifiable civil disobedience that has an important place in political history among other things

Religious Conscientious Objections and Insulation from Evidence

Religion is often singled out for special legal treatment in Western societies - which raises an important question: what, if anything, is special about religious conscience beliefs that warrants such special legal treatment? In this paper, I will offer an answer to this specialness question by investigating the relationship between religious conscientious objections and their insulation from relevant evidence. I will begin my analysis by looking at Brian Leiter’s arguments that religious beliefs are insulated from evidence and not worthy of special legal treatment as a result. I will argue that he fails to show that religious conscience beliefs are both in principle responsive to empirical evidence and in practice typically more insulated from this evidence than secular conscience beliefs. If I am right about this, then Leiter fails to answer the “central puzzle” of his recent book and fails to sufficiently distinguish the religious conscience from the secular conscience. Second, I will look at whether or not it is plausible to understand the religious conscience as insulated from other forms of evidence. Following the research of social-psychologist Jonathan Haidt, I will argue that, typically, both forms of conscience seem to be similarly insulated from moral argumentation. I will also show that, while it seems as though the religious conscience usually draws from a larger set of moral values when compared to the secular conscience, this should make no legal difference overall. To conclude, I will explain that the arguments in this paper can be understood as evidence in support of an egalitarian response to religion’s specialness

Good night, sleep tight (remix)

Good Night, Sleep Tight is an interactive virtual reality performance created by theatre and digital arts company ZU-UK. It was previewed at Gerry’s Kitchen in July 2017. Combining VR and binaural technologies, participants are put to bed and transported to a dreamscape composed of childhood imagery and aerial cityscapes. This artistic position remixes the audience’s experience and the artistic processes of Good Night, Sleep Tight to proffer a critical engagement with the aesthetics of VR. Theories pertaining to VR and theatre are emerging but not yet fully established. The discourse between technologists and artists is key to understanding how VR is a new artistic medium requiring a language not solely redolent of gaming or theatre. The format of this article reflects ZU-UK’s contention that VR experiences are best designed as collaborations between artists and audiences who construct an imaginary world through interactive media. The seven scenes below concentrate on different aspects of the rehearsal process and the final performance from the perspectives of the ZU-UK directors, VR technologists, and participants. Interspersed throughout the article are fragments from the Good Night, Sleep Tight script and a description of the piece from the reader’s perspective, who acts as ZU-UK’s imaginary audience member

What is a Real Document, Anyway?

Documents, those materials that are reproducible and ostensibly ‘non-live’, are ubiquitous in the everyday to the degree that the experiencing and recording of life has become a tangled process. What follows the other – the act or its record? The many projects and writings that have emerged in recent years concerning the role documentation practices play in performance processes has resulted in a vital critique of how the live medium is not antithetical to but is indeed imbricated with archivalism. The Real time live performances unfold in can be understood as a temporal manifold that exists in records, the animate bodies of the performers, and in the memories of the audience. Documentation is now a fundamental part of our contemporary experience, leading some commentators to claim that “we are all archivists now”. If this is true then what dramaturgies can be constructed to embrace this aspect of the Real? What would a performance based on the practices and principles of archiving look like? In this paper I will consider the potential documents generated from performance have for engendering spectators to participate in a networked dialogue that stretches beyond any one event. I posit that such a practice would present a challenge to the authority of mediated events deemed of historical significance (however this judgement is determined) by placing documentation practices within a fictive framework, thereby demonstrating the level of artifice that is present in our perception of Reality

Crisis Acting in The Destroyed Room

The internet immerses us in waves of traumatic information, leaving us desperately crawling through media wreckage to make sense of the world. We are left alienated from a reality that never settles into a cohesive narrative. Media wreckage in my argumentation denotes the fragmentation of reality occasioned by the digital acting as the dominant epistemological source of the real in the twenty-first century. The atomisation of reality into the porous realm of the digital has spawned conspiratorial internet sub-cultures dedicated to immersing us all in a state of perpetual crisis. Conspiracy theories like crisis acting are thriving in this milieu. This theory was popularised by the host of InfoWars Alex Jones who argued high school shootings are events staged by the government. This article appropriates the term 'crisis acting' from the alt-right political lexicon to analyse how the experience of living in media wreckage is performed on the intermedial stage of The Destroyed Room (Vanishing Point 2016). The performance is a semi-improvised conversation between three actors who debate the morality of watching videos depicting Islamic State executions, the Islamist terrorist attacks in Paris, the refugee crisis and scenes of natural disasters. Terror, social media and climate breakdown constitute the three pieces of media wreckage that are staged The Destroyed Room. It is argued that constructing narratives of reality with media wreckage turns us all into crisis actors who cannot imagine ways of performing in the world as political agents outside of digital spaces

Brief report: self-compassion, physical health and the mediating role of health-promoting behaviours

To test the hypothesis that self-compassion predicts better physical health and that this is partially mediated through health-promoting behaviours, 147 adults completed self-report measures of self-compassion, health-promoting behaviours and physical health. Self-compassion and health-promoting behaviours were negatively associated with physical symptom scores. Self-compassion was positively associated with health-promoting behaviours. A bootstrapped mediation model confirmed a significant direct effect of self-compassion on physical health through health-promoting behaviours (R(2) = 0.13, b = -8.98, p = 0.015), which was partially mediated through health-promoting behaviours (R(2) = 0.06, b = -3.16, 95 per cent confidence interval [-6.78, -0.86]). Findings underscore the potential health-promoting benefits of self-compassion.non

Brechtian Alienation in Videogames

Immersion is constantly being broken in video games via the intrusion of mechanics and features that cause no end of distraction, breaking the player’s engagement in both the game’s narrative and in the gameplay. Yet these breaks are an integral part of games, whether through loading, saving or any other mechanical system that detracts from the playing the core game. These aren’t analysed as thoroughly as they could be in current game academia. However Bertolt Brecht’s “Verfremdungseffekt”, or distancing effect, provides a much needed foundation in the analysis of these sections within games that provoke a feeling of alienation

The“specialness” Of Religious Conscience: An Egalitarian Response

Religion is often singled out for special legal treatment in Western societies. This is certainly true in the United States where religion enjoys a special place in the First Amendment to the Constitution via the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses. Through Free Exercise guarantees, for example, the Supreme Court held in Wisconsin v. Yoder that Amish children were entitled to an exemption from compulsory school attendance laws after the eighth grade, emphasizing that this was a uniquely religious exemption that did not apply to everyone. Moreover, those conscientiously objecting to contemporary vaccination laws may find themselves with varying protections depending on which US state they live in. For example, if both an Atheist and a Christian conscientiously object to the mandatory vaccine laws in New York, a legal exemption may be granted to the Christian but not the Atheist under New York’s current legal framework. These cases and many like it raise an important question: what, if anything, is “special” about religious conscience beliefs that justifies their special legal treatment? In this dissertation, I argue that, because religious and nonreligious conscience beliefs are sufficiently similar in nature, there is no reason to treat them differently before the law. In this way, I offer an Egalitarian Response to the question about religion’s legal specialness. In the first chapter, I introduce a few historical discussions concerning religion’s specialness. In the second chapter, I develop and defend a broad account of ‘conscience’ against competing notions in order to navigate questions concerning the comparative features of religious and nonreligious conscience more effectively. In the third and fourth chapters, I analyze several possibly demarcating features of religious conscience beliefs taken to be legally relevant by theorists in the field. At the end of these chapters I conclude that, when compared to the nonreligious conscience, the religious conscience fails to possess sufficiently differentiating features so that comparative special legal treatment is warranted. In the fifth and final chapter, I field lurking objections to the Egalitarian Response

Regenerating the live: the archive as the genesis of a performance practice

Live performance lacks the durability of art practices such as photography, film and painting, and so definitions of ‘live’ acts have traditionally been formulated in terms of ‘transience’ and ‘disappearance’. In this context the archive and archival documents are often described as the antithesis of performance’s ontology. An archive’s primary function is to preserve material for future, undetermined uses, whereas a live event is temporary and cannot endure as ‘itself’ outside of the temporal-spatial zone it unfolds in before an audience. Yet archival documents are intimately imbricated in the creation of live acts. This can be seen in all performance practices, from written plays in the dramatic theatre, to the assemblage of materials used in devised performance, to the ways sites are framed as sources of historical knowledge in performance reenactments. By examining the role documents play in performance practice I argue that archival materials have the potential to act as the genesis for live acts. The archive’s generative function makes performance a potential method of historical research, where documents can help engender an interactive reciprocity between spectators and the past. The archival mode of performance practice I advocate in this thesis requires spectators to become participants inside the performance sphere, just as historians participate in the writing of historical discourses in the archive. There are several practice-as-research components to my project. These include the Audience as Document events and two workshops. The primary practice-as-research event is a participatory site-specific performance Voices from the Village. The Olympic Village in Stratford, East London, is framed as a type of authoritative historical document that works as a meta-narrative of London’s past. The Olympic Legacy anchors the memories of East London’s residents to a time they are encouraged to re-live in their everyday lives. At the centre of contemporary urban regeneration projects is a firm conviction that the future can be built in the here-andnow. Participants are guided through the Village and by two tour guides who attempt to inculcate them into the Legacy Project – a new type of citizenry based upon the neoliberal hegemony. In the third part participants explore what would happen if the neighbouring Hackney Wick estate was ‘regenerated’ in the future. My practice 4 examines how documents in performance can act as interlocutors between a site’s past(s) and a participant’s ‘live’ experience. The enduring form of digital documents creates a manifold afterlife for performance on the Web, which is the home of an evolving network of people who connect to each other through their re-interpretation of the Olympic Legacy. I am arguing that the life of a performance does not end over a fixed duration, but is instead a dialogic process with a multitude of access points

Trans-Participation in the Infosphere

The real world, as we experience it today, is intimately connected with technological mediation. Drawing on theories of post-humanism, onlife, the infosphere, and audience participation, this paper addresses how the cultural, social and political beliefs of participants in immersive theatre can be trans-ed. The relationality inherent in the term trans- refers to the complex web of connections participants navigated and created in the performances Operation Black Antler by Blast Theory and Hydrocracker and One Day, Maybe by dreamthinkspeak. The dramaturgies in both pieces were experienced as a network of bodies, times, historical and national narratives. In this paper I will explore how trans- offers a strategy of performative political discourse where (sexual, gender, racial, etc.) identities become dramaturgically fluid and unfixed, and if such a mode of participation can effectuate a form of dialectic that is contingent on participating in acts of empathy rather than of conflict. A corollary to this process can be found in Luciano Floridi’s conceptualisation of contemporary technological environment, which he terms the infosphere (2014). The production and dissemination of media acts as the diffuse infrastructure of the infosphere and replicates our presence across platforms and communication networks. The compulsion to connect with realities and experiences outside of our everyday life allows us to stretch our real self and play identities as a means of establishing empathetic relations with histories, ideas and people; this is the core principle of trans-participation. I contend that audience participation in the context of the infosphere and onlife – where the digital and the real worlds become a seamless experience – complicate rhetorically crude conceptions of post-truth and fake news by allowing people to play identities drawn from media