Whose names count? Jacques Rancière on Alfredo Jaar’s Rwanda Project

This article focuses on Jacques Rancière’s reflections on Alfredo Jaar’s The Rwanda Project in the context of wider discussions of the politics of naming the dead. Against the claim that his reflections reveal a depoliticizing, universalist commitment to naming all the dead, it contends that foregrounding the relation between naming and counting in this discussion shows Rancière’s focus to be the policing and politics of naming. In an original argument, it focuses specifically on how, for Rancière, in this context, individualized proper names function politically and dissensually. To do so it explores (i) Rancière’s analysis of the role of the mainstream media during the Rwandan genocide in perpetuating the police order (or order of grievability) which divided nameable individuals from anonymous masses, thereby constituting living and dead Rwandans as of little or no account, and (ii) his account of how Jaar’s art is able to disrupt the ‘partition of the sensible’ underpinning this count. The article concludes by considering how Rancière’s ideas about the relationship between naming and counting and between politics and police serve as a useful supplement to and extension of existing discussions of grievability

Public crises, public futures

This article begins to map out a novel approach to analyzing contemporary contexts of public crisis, relationships between them and possibilities that these scenes hold out for politics. The article illustrates and analyses a small selection of examples of these kinds of contemporary scenes and calls for greater attention to be given to the conditions and consequences of different forms and practices of public and political mediation. In offering a three-fold typology to delineate differences between ‘abject’, ‘audience’ and ‘agentic’ publics the article begins to draw out how political and public futures may be seen as being bound up with how the potentialities, capacities and qualities that publics are imagined to have and resourced to perform. Public action and future publics are therefore analysed here in relation to different versions of contemporary crisis and the political concerns and publics these crises work to articulate, foreground and imaginatively and practically support

Bisphenol A and the risk of cardiometabolic disorders: a systematic review with meta-analysis of the epidemiological evidence.

Published onlineResearch Support, Non-U.S. Gov'tBisphenol A (BPA) is suspected to be associated with several chronic metabolic diseases. The aim of the present study was to review the epidemiological literature on the relation between BPA exposure and the risk of cardiometabolic disorders. PubMed and Embase databases were searched up to August 2014 by two independent investigators using standardized subject terms. We included observational studies (cohort, case-control and cross-sectional studies) carried out in children or adults, measuring urinary BPA (uBPA), including at least 100 participants and published in English. The health outcomes of interest were diabetes, hyperglycemia, measures of anthropometry, cardiovascular disease (CVD) and hypertension. Data were extracted and meta-analyzed when feasible, using a random-effects model. Thirty-three studies with sample size ranging from 239 to 4811 met the inclusion criteria, including five with a prospective design. Twelve studies reported on diabetes or hyperglycemia, 16 on anthropometry, 6 on CVD and 3 on hypertension. Evidence for a positive association between uBPA concentrations and diabetes, overweight, obesity, elevated waist circumference (WC), CVD and hypertension was found in 7/8, 2/7, 6/7, 5/5, 4/5 and 2/3 of the cross-sectional studies, respectively. We were able to conduct outcome-specific meta-analyses including 12 studies. When comparing the highest vs. the lowest uBPA concentrations, the pooled ORs were 1.47 (95% CI: 1.21-1.80) for diabetes, 1.21 (95% CI: 0.98-1.50) for overweight, 1.67 (95% CI: 1.41-1.98) for obesity, 1.48 (95% CI: 1.25-1.76) for elevated WC, and 1.41 (95% CI: 1.12-1.79) for hypertension. Moreover, among the five prospective studies, 3 reported significant findings, relating BPA exposure to incident diabetes, incident coronary artery disease, and weight gain. To conclude, there is evidence from the large body of cross-sectional studies that individuals with higher uBPA concentrations are more likely to suffer from diabetes, general/abdominal obesity and hypertension than those with lower uBPA concentrations. Given the potential importance for public health, prospective cohort studies with proper adjustment for dietary characteristics and identification of critical windows of exposure are urgently needed to further improve knowledge about potential causal links between BPA exposure and the development of chronic disease.This study was funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council, Australia (NHMRC grant APP1022923). Support for FR was provided by a postdoctoral grant from CORDDIM (field of major interest of the Île-de-France Regional Council “Cardiovascular/Obesity/Kidney/Diabetes”), the French Endocrine Disruptor Research Programme (PNRPE grant) and the Scientific Mobility Program of the Embassy of France in Australia (2014). JGL is supported by National Heart Foundation of Australia/NHMRC postgraduate scholarship [586739] and the Cardiac Society of Australia and New Zealand. This work was supported in part by the Victorian Government’s OIS Program

Financial phantasmagoria: corporate image-work in times of crisis

Our purpose in this article is to relate the real movements in the economy during 2008 to the ?image-work? of financial institutions. Over the period January?December 2008 we collected 241 separate advertisements from 61 financial institutions published in the Financial Times. Reading across the ensemble of advertisements for themes and evocative images provides an impression of the financial imaginaries created by these organizations as the global financial crisis unfolded. In using the term ?phantasmagoria? we move beyond its colloquial sense of a set of strange images designed to dazzle towards the more technical connotation used by Ranci�re (2004) who suggested that words and images can offer a trace of an overall determining set-up if they are torn from their obviousness so they become phantasmagoric figures. The key phantasmagoric figure we identify here is that of the financial institution as timeless, immortal and unchanging; a coherent and autonomous entity amongst other actors. This notion of uniqueness belies the commonality of thinking which precipitated the global financial crisis as well as the limited capacity for control of financial institutions in relation to market events. It also functions as a powerful naturalizing force, making it hard to question certain aspects of the recent period of ?capitalism in crisis?

Digital realities & virtual ideals: Portraiture, idealism and the clash of subjectivities in the post-digital era

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Taylor and Francis in Photography and Culture on 26/02/2019, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2019.1565290 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.All portraits play host to a number of antithetical tensions, such as ‘private’ and ‘public’, ‘real’ and ‘ideal’, without which they would be reduced to a type of unassuming identification of subjects. Whereas in premodern times the artist was subject to the demands of the commissioner, after modernism the representational desires of the sitter began to clash with the creative intentions of the artist. Prior to the introduction of digital formats, this clash of subjectivities manifests itself in photography during the production of the work, the shooting of a portrait. Digital photography and post-production editing have expanded the methods for idealising external appearance; a desire stimulated by the recent technological acceleration of production and circulation of more ‘manipulated’ portraits than ever. In what ways, therefore, does the introduction of digital post-production editing and composite images affect this double-clash in portraiture, between the real and ideal, and the desires of the sitter against the intentions of the artist? Moreover, how does the evolution of self-portraiture in the ‘selfie’ affect the epistemological character of the genre? As such, is conceptual and aesthetic subservience a matter of technological possibility or creative determination

Cities in fiction: Perambulations with John Berger

This paper explores selected novels by John Berger in which cities play a central role. These cities are places, partially real and partially imagined, where memory, hope, and despair intersect. My reading of the novels enables me to trace important themes in recent discourses on the nature of contemporary capitalism, including notions of resistance and universality. I also show how Berger?s work points to a writing that can break free from the curious capacity of capitalism to absorb and feed of its critique

The dawn of the dead : (improbable) art after aI-zombie apocalypse

In recent years there has been growing interest in artificial neural networks (ANNs) which are quickly becoming the primary device for machine learning. Used for finding patterns in large data sets, ANNs were also recently employed in many artistic contexts: as tools for artists, semi-independent creators of content, and even as invisible "critics" which / who predict our aesthetic preferences. The aim of this paper is to speculate about the disruptive effect of these ‘alien agencies’ on the (modernist) aesthetic regime of art centred around the notion of autonomy. The author examines how neural networks and connectionist epistemologies may potentially affect the most common ways of producing, circulating, and valorising art. He claims that the possibility of automatizing creativity and art criticism may lead to the emergence of a new aesthetic regime based on forms of dynamic, distributed and probabilistic governance