799 research outputs found
Social media, protest cultures and political subjectivities of the Arab spring
This article draws on phenomenological perspectives to present a case against resisting the objectification of cultures of protest and dissent. The generative, self-organizing properties of protest cultures, especially as mobilized through social media, are frequently argued to elude both authoritarian political structures and academic discourse, leading to new political subjectivities or âimaginariesâ. Stemming from a normative commitment not to over-determine such nascent subjectivities, this view has taken on a heightened resonance in relation to the recent popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. The article argues that this view is based on an invalid assumption that authentic political subjectivities and cultures naturally emerge from an absence of constraint, whether political, journalistic or academic. The valorisation of amorphousness in protest cultures and social media enables affective and political projection, but overlooks politics in its institutional, professional and procedural forms
Forum 2: The migrant climate: resilience, adaptation and the ontopolitics of mobility in the Anthropocene
While modernist or âtop-downâ, âcommand-and-controlâ approaches to climate and migration worked at the surface or ontic level of the redistribution of entities in time and space, resilience approaches call for a different approach to mobility (for an extensive discussion of resilience as a distinctive governance regime see, for example, Grove, 2018; Chandler, 2014). These discourses construct mobilities that are more transformative, in fact, ones that question traditional liberal modernist notions of time and space and of entities with fixed essences. These mobilities do not concern moving entities in space but rethinking mobility in relation to space. Mobility then becomes more a matter of changing the understandings and practices relating to spaces and entities than of moving things from one place to another. Becoming âmobileâ thus would apply to the development of capabilities or âresponse-abilitiesâ (Haraway, 2016: 2) to sense, adapt, recompose, repurpose and reimagine problems and possibilities; taking responses to crises beyond the static and binary conceptions of mobility and space epitomised by The Clash lyrics in the epigraph
Lepton flavor conserving Z -> l^+ l^-$ decays in the general two Higgs doublet model
We calculate the new physics effects to the branching ratios of the lepton
flavor conserving decays Z -> l^+ l^- in the framework of the general two Higgs
Doublet model. We predict the upper limits for the couplings
|\bar{\xi}^{D}_{N,\mu\tau}| and |\bar{\xi}^{D}_{N,\tau\tau}| as 3\times 10^2
GeV and 1\times 10^2 GeV, respectively.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure
Architects of time: Labouring on digital futures
Drawing on critical analyses of the internet inspired by Gilles Deleuze and the Marxist autonomia movement, this paper suggests a way of understanding the impact of the internet and digital culture on identity and social forms through a consideration of the relationship between controls exercised through the internet, new subjectivities constituted through its use and new labour practices enabled by it. Following Castells, we can see that the distinction between user, consumer and producer is becoming blurred and free labour is being provided by users to corporations. The relationship between digital technologies and sense of community, through their relationship to the future, is considered for its dangers and potentials. It is proposed that the internet may be a useful tool for highlighting and enabling social connections if certain dangers can be traversed. Notably, current remedies for the lack of trust on the internet are questioned with an alternative, drawing on Zygmunt Bauman and Georg Simmel, proposed which is built on community through a vision of a âshared networkâ
Weak magnetic dipole moments in two-Higgs-doublet models
We investigate the effects of the new scalars in a two-Higgs-doublet model on
the weak magnetic dipole moments of the fermions at the peak.
Proportionality of the Yukawa couplings to the fermion masses, and to
, makes such effects more important for the third family, and
potentially relevant. For the lepton, the new diagrams are suppressed by
, or by powers of , but may still
be comparable to the SM electroweak contributions. In contrast, we find that
the new contributions for the bottom quark may be much larger than the SM
electroweak contributions. These new effects may even compete with the gluonic
contribution, if the extra scalars are light and is large. We also
comment on the problem of the gauge dependence of the vertex, arising when the
is off mass shell. We compute the contributions from the new scalars to the
magnetic dipole moments for top-quark production at the NLC, and for bottom and
production at LEP2. In the case of the top, we find that the SM
electroweak and gluonic contributions to the vertex are
comparable. The new contributions may be of the same order of magnitude as the
standard-model ones, but not much larger.Comment: 17 pages, LaTex, 8 figures available upon reques
The grit in the oyster: using energy biographies to question socio-technical imaginaries of âsmartnessâ
It has been argued that responsible research and innovation (RRI) requires critique of the âworldsâ implicated in the future imaginaries associated with new technologies. Qualitative social science research can aid deliberation on imaginaries by exploring the meanings of technologies within everyday practices, as demonstrated by Yolande Strengersâ work on imaginaries of âsmartnessâ. In this paper, we show how a novel combination of narrative interviews and multimodal methods can help explore future imaginaries of smartness through the lens of biographical experiences of socio-technical changes in domestic energy use. In particular, this approach can open up a critical space around socio-technical imaginaries by exploring the investments that individuals have in different forms of engagement with the world. The paper works with a psychosocial conceptual framework that draws on theoretical resources from science and technology studies to explain how valued forms of subjectivity may be conceptualised as emerging out of the âfrictionâ of engagement with the world. Using this framework, we show how biographical narratives of engagement with technologies from the Energy Biographies project can extend into critical deliberation on future imaginaries. The paper demonstrates the value of âthickâ data relating to the affective dimensions of subjective experience for RRI
Training the homo cellularis: attention and the mobile phone
Drawing on literature from philosophy of technology, mobile media studies, performer training as well as practice-based research, this article examines the use of mobile phones in performer training, through the notion of pharmakon and in relation to questions of attention. It reviews the work of other performer training practitioners who use mobile phones and examines underlying assumptions with regard to the nature of attention and the use of space. Although the aim of this article is neither to advocate nor apologise for mobile phone use, it argues that the mobile phone may invite a rethinking of the way attention is exercised and understood within performer training. By discussing an exercise developed by the author within a university-based theatre training context, this article argues that an âattentionâdistractionâ dichotomy in terms of the traineeâs attending capacity is no longer an adequate explanatory framework. It therefore suggests that attention should be approached as a multi-modal and synthesising process
Creating âautomatic subjectsâ: corporate wellness and self-tracking
The use of self-tracking (ST) devices has increased dramatically in recent years with enthusiasm from the public as well as public health, healthcare providers and workplaces seeking to instigate behaviour change in populations. Analysis of the ontological principles informing the design and implementation of the Apple Watch and corporate wellness (CW) programmes using ST technologies will suggest that their primary focus is on the capture and control of attention rather than material health outcomes. Health, wellness and happiness have been conflated with productivity which is now deemed to be dependent on the harnessing of libidinal energy as well as physical energy. In this context ST technologies and related CW interventions, have been informed by âemotional designâ, neuroscientific and behavioural principles which target the âpre subjectiveâ consciousness of individuals through manipulating their habits and neurological functioning. The paper draws on the work of Bernard Stiegler to suggest framing ST as âindustrial temporal objectsâ, which capture and âshort circuitâ attention. It will be proposed that a central aim is to âaccumulate the consciousnessesâ of subjects consistent with the methods of a contemporary âattention economyâ. This new logic of accumulation informs the behaviour change strategies of designers of ST devices, and CW initiatives, taking the form of âpsychotechnologiesâ which attempt to reconstruct active subjects as automatic and reactive ânodesâ as part of managed networks
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