Secularism, Religion, and the State in a Time of Global Crisis: Theoretical Reflections on the Work of Abdullahi An-Na\u27im

This Essay presents a primarily theoretical examination of critical aspects of Abdullahi An-Na’im’s body of work. Drawing on my earlier work, the essay describes the current historical moment as one of “crisis globalization,” a normative condition characterized by the rise of authoritarianism and erosion of democracy across the globe, a backlash against religious and other kinds of minorities, as well as by a general sense of existential uncertainty stemming from the impact of climate change, terrorism, and our vulnerability to pandemics like Covid-19. I argue that An-Na’im’s work speaks especially powerfully to several aspects of this new condition. An-Na’im’s theorization and reconceptualization of the relationship between the secular and the religious, and his elaboration on the role of state and society in mediating that relationship, help us think through and grasp the rise of authoritarianism and religious majoritarianism. They also illuminate a path and template for countering these trends, as elaborated in An-Na’im’s articulation of the necessity and challenge of endowing the relationship of the state and religion, and a corresponding idea of the secular, with cultural legitimacy. In the Essay, I also examine these ideas with reference to recent developments in India, the distinct character of whose experience with secularism seems increasingly under threat

The Madness of Jodh Singh: Patriotism and Paranoia in the Ghadar Archives

My paper focuses on Jodh Singh, a marginal figure in the archives of the Ghadar Party, who was arrested for High Treason against the United States for his role in the “Hindu Conspiracy” plots aimed at the British government of India. Incarcerated in a California prison, Singh was moved to a sanatarium on displaying symptoms of insanity. Through a close reading of a web of archival documents and scholarly reflections—at the center of which lies the report of a commission appointed to inquire into his mental condition—I examine the account of the madness of Jodh Singh as a statement about patriotism and paranoia. In engagement with the work of Foucault, Guha, and scholars of the Ghadar movement, I describe how the record of Singh’s experiences indicts the juridical-legal-medical framework of American society as operating on a distinction between legtimate and illegitimate madness. I also examine how Jodh Singh points to the glimmers of a critique of the self-image of the Ghadar Party as a revolutionary movement committed to egalitarian principles. I conclude with a reflection on what Jodh Singh might tell us about the relationship between madness, political aspiration, and the yearning for solidarity

MeditAid:a wearable adaptive neurofeedback-based system for training mindfulness state

A recent interest in interaction design is towards the development of novel technologies emphasizing the value of mindfulness, monitoring, awareness, and self-regulation for both health and wellbeing. Whereas existing systems have focused mostly on relaxation and awareness of feelings, there has been little exploration on tools supporting the self-regulation of attention during mindfulness sitting meditation. This paper describes the design and initial evaluation of MeditAid, a wearable system integrating electroencephalography (EEG) technology with an adaptive aural entrainment for real time training of mindfulness state. The system identifies different meditative states and provides feedback to support users in deepening their meditation. We report on a study with 16 meditators about the perceived strengths and limitations of the MeditAid system. We demonstrate the benefits of binaural feedback in deepening meditative states, particularly for novice meditators

The Case for “Unfair Methods of Competition” Rulemaking

A key feature of antitrust today is that the law is developed entirely through adjudication. Evidence suggests that this exclusive reliance on adjudication has failed to deliver a predictable, efficient, or participatory antitrust regime. Antitrust litigation and enforcement are protracted and expensive, requiring extensive discovery and costly expert analysis. In theory, this approach facilitates nuanced and factspecific analysis of liability and well-tailored remedies. But in practice, the exclusive reliance on case-by-case adjudication has yielded a system of enforcement that generates ambiguity, drains resources, privileges incumbents, and deprives individuals and firms of any real opportunity to participate in the process of creating substantive antitrust rules. It is difficult to quantify this harm. This Essay argues that rulemaking under § 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act should supplement antitrust adjudication, and that this institutional shift would lower enforcement costs, reduce ambiguity, and facilitate greater democratic participation. We build on existing scholarship to debunk the view that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) does not have competition rulemaking authority pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act conferring Chevron deference, and trace legislative history to underscore how Congress designed the FTC to play a unique institutional role. We close by outlining an initial set of factors that should weigh in favor of rulemaking: when there is significant learning from past enforcement and when private litigation would be unlikely. Finally, we pose questions in the context of the FTC’s recent hearings to prompt further discussion on where this unused tool would be most usefu

Using Cross-Loss Influence Functions to Explain Deep Network Representations

As machine learning is increasingly deployed in the real world, it is ever more vital that we understand the decision-criteria of the models we train. Recently, researchers have shown that influence functions, a statistical measure of sample impact, may be extended to approximate the effects of training samples on classification accuracy for deep neural networks. However, prior work only applies to supervised learning setups where training and testing share an objective function. Despite the rise in unsupervised learning, self-supervised learning, and model pre-training, there are currently no suitable technologies for estimating influence of deep networks that do not train and test on the same objective. To overcome this limitation, we provide the first theoretical and empirical demonstration that influence functions can be extended to handle mismatched training and testing settings. Our result enables us to compute the influence of unsupervised and self-supervised training examples with respect to a supervised test objective. We demonstrate this technique on a synthetic dataset as well as two Skip-gram language model examples to examine cluster membership and sources of unwanted bias

A Conversation

A conversation about an essay on future South Asia in Seminar 632, April 201

A Conversation

A conversation about an essay on future South Asia in Seminar 632, April 201

Identifying suicide and self-harm research priorities in North West England: a Delphi study

Background: Understanding and effectively managing self-harm and suicide requires collaborative research between stakeholders focused on shared priorities. Aims: To develop a consensus about suicide and self-harm research priorities in the North-West of England using the Delphi method. Method: Items for the Delphi survey were generated through group discussions at a workshop with 88 stakeholders and subsequent thematic analysis of key themes. Forty-four participants who were experts-by-experience, researchers, and clinicians based within health services including third sector organisations completed the Delphi survey. Results: A three-round survey reached consensus on 55 research priority items identifying key priorities in each of the following groups: offenders, children and young people, self-harm in community settings, and crisis care in the community. Limitation: The pool of delegates at the workshop and subsequent self-selection into the Delphi may have introduced bias into the study. Conclusion: The current paper highlights specific actionable priorities were identified in four areas that can be used to inform research efforts and future policy and practice, based on shared areas of perceived importance and concern. Future work is needed to confirm the significance of these priority areas, including the use of evidence synthesis approaches to ascertain the extent to which these priorities have already been investigated and where gaps in understanding remain