When the Canon Backfires: Deconstructing the Centrality of Hannah Arendt to Human Rights Critical Theory

Hannah Arendt\u27s name and ideas are pervasive in Human Rights critical theory. In fact, Arendt is one of the few scholars we can confidently situate within the Human Rights canon in 2017. Contemporary re-readings of The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism tend to appropriate Arendtian ideas in the attempt to create a theoretical basis for universal rights. Nevertheless, Arendt wrote a defense of racial segregation in the American South, and held personal views that contradict most contemporary notions of social justice. In this paper, I take a deconstructive approach to the reactionary assumptions about humanity and justice that Arendt and her disciples inherit and perpetuate from a longstanding liberal tradition. I then analyze the ways Arendtian rhetoric advances reactionary premises resembling those of the American alt-right, arguing that Arendt\u27s political theory provides a precarious intellectual foundation for any social justice project. In addition to reading Arendt\u27s own texts closely, I also consider more recent interlocutors in Human Rights -- such as Ayten Gündoğdu and Giorgio Agamben -- who appropriate Arendt\u27s theory to advance a universalist project of human rights

Armed and Dangerous: The Ascendance of the National Rifle Association

My project, Armed and Dangerous: The Ascendance of the National Rifle Association focuses on the history of the National Rifle Association (NRA). I attempt to chart the NRA’s progression from a fairly apolitical organization into the vitriolic, single issue lobbying/business group that it has been since 1977. My first chapter provides an overview of the NRA in its contemporary iteration. My second chapter will focus on the social and cultural myths that have allowed the NRA to prosper in the face of harsh criticism. In this chapter, I also try to identify the ontological roots of the gun rights argument and I will also specifically examine the racialist thought regarding black and Native Americans that informs the current NRA position. My final chapter will examine whom the National Rifle Association actually represents: big businesses, gun owners, or something in-between. I utilize myriad newspaper articles, public addresses, general historical sources, and sources with theoretical frameworks useful in analyzing this organization (Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson and Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot) while conducting my research. I intend for this project to contribute in providing a better understanding of the cultural identities and beliefs that have allowed this organization to monopolize the Second Amendment. My research has illuminated that facts are not important to how the NRA is conducted, both publicly and privately. Instead, it capitalizes off of latent cultural and nationalistic identities, beliefs that appear to invoke more visceral reactions than facts. I believe that by analyzing the National Rifle Association and its constituency through Anderson’s lens of imagined communities, the mysterious success of the National Rifle Association will become demystified

An analysis of the development of home exchange organizations

Dit onderzoek draagt bij aan een beter begrip van het fenomeen woningruil, hierbij is gelet op de historische ontwikkeling van de woningruil, bemiddelingsprocessen, lidmaatschap profielen en de rol van media. Het internet heeft voor een interactiever proces gezorgd en vergemakkelijkt woningruil kernels die, door de manier waarop ze georganiseerd zijn, een zekere mate van zelf-organisatie toestaan. Processen van specialisatie en differentiatie veranderen het ‘Woningruil bemiddelings landschap’

Investigation of mixed element hybrid grid-based CFD methods for rotorcraft flow analysis

Accurate first-principles flow prediction is essential to the design and development of rotorcraft, and while current numerical analysis tools can, in theory, model the complete flow field, in practice the accuracy of these tools is limited by various inherent numerical deficiencies. An approach that combines the first-principles physical modeling capability of CFD schemes with the vortex preservation capabilities of Lagrangian vortex methods has been developed recently that controls the numerical diffusion of the rotor wake in a grid-based solver by employing a vorticity-velocity, rather than primitive variable, formulation. Coupling strategies, including variable exchange protocols are evaluated using several unstructured, structured, and Cartesian-grid Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS)/Euler CFD solvers. Results obtained with the hybrid grid-based solvers illustrate the capability of this hybrid method to resolve vortex-dominated flow fields with lower cell counts than pure RANS/Euler methods

Special issue on DISC 2010

This special issue of Distributed Computing is based on papers that originally appeared as extended abstracts in the Proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC2010), held in Cambridge, Massachusetts on August 13–15, 2010. The papers for the Special Issue were chosen by the Program Committee from the 32 regular papers presented at the Symposium, based on their quality and representation of the spectrum of topics encompassed by the Symposium. In addition to being reviewed, in preliminary form, by the Program Committee, the full papers submitted for the Special Issue were refereed according to the standard practices of Distributed Computing (due to time constrains, some papers could not appear in this volume). We thank the Members of the Editorial Board for their work in editing this issue, and the referees and the authors of these papers for their respective contributions

Coarse grain modeling of spall failure in molecular crystals: role of intra-molecular degrees of freedom

We use a recently developed thermodynamically accurate mesodynamical method (Strachan and Holian 2005 Phys. Rev. Lett. 94 014301) where groups of atoms are represented by mesoparticles to characterize the shock compression and dynamical failure (spall) of a model molecular crystal. We characterize how the temperature rise caused by the shockwave depends on the specific heat of the degrees of freedom (DoFs) internal to the mesoparticles (Cint) and the strength of the coupling between the internal DoFs and the mesoparticles. We find that the temperature of the shocked material decreases with increasing Cint and decreasing coupling and quantify these effects. Our simulations also show that the threshold for plastic deformation (the Hugoniot elastic limit) depends on the properties of the internal DoFs while the threshold for failure is very insensitive to them. These results have implications on the results of all-atom MD simulations, whose classical nature leads to a significant overestimation of the specific heat of molecular materials

Ante-Autobiography and the Archive of Childhood

This essay examines the concept of children’s autobiography via several autobiographical extracts written by the author as a child. Although only a small proportion of people will compose and publish a full-length autobiography, almost everyone will, inadvertently, produce an archive of the self, made from public records and private documents. Here, such works are seen as providing access to writing both about and by children. The essay explores the ethics and poetics of children’s writing via the key debates in life writing; in particular, the dynamic relationship between adults and children, both as distinct stages of life and dual parts of one autobiographical identity. The term “ante-autobiography” is coined to refer to these texts which come before or instead of a full-length narrative. They are not read as less than or inadequate versions of autobiography, but rather as transgressive and challenging to chronological notions of the genre

Viewpoint: Evaluating the impact of malaria control efforts on mortality in sub-Saharan Africa

OBJECTIVE To describe an approach for evaluating the impact of malaria control efforts on malaria-associated mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, where disease-specific mortality trends usually cannot be measured directly and most malaria deaths occur among young children. METHODS Methods for evaluating changes in malaria-associated mortality are examined; advantages and disadvantages are presented. RESULTS All methods require a plausibility argument - i.e., an assumption that mortality reductions can be attributed to programmatic efforts if improvements are found in steps of the causal pathway between intervention scale-up and mortality trends. As different methods provide complementary information, they can be used together. We recommend following trends in the coverage of malaria control interventions, other factors influencing childhood mortality, malaria-associated morbidity (especially anaemia), and all-cause childhood mortality. This approach reflects decreases in malaria's direct and indirect mortality burden and can be examined in nearly all countries. Adding other information can strengthen the plausibility argument: trends in indicators of malaria transmission, information from demographic surveillance systems and sentinel sites where malaria diagnostics are systematically used, and verbal autopsies linked to representative household surveys. Health facility data on malaria deaths have well-recognized limitations; however, in specific circumstances, they could produce reliable trends. Model-based predictions can help describe changes in malaria-specific burden and assist with program management and advocacy. CONCLUSIONS Despite challenges, efforts to reduce malaria-associated mortality in Africa can be evaluated with trends in malaria intervention coverage and all-cause childhood mortality. Where there are resources and interest, complementary data on malaria morbidity and malaria-specific mortality could be added