Foucault, Borges, heterotopia: producing knowledge in other spaces

Arguably the most famous heterotopia that appears in Foucault’s work is the Chinese encyclopedia, which originates in the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges. Drawing on this citation of Borges, this article examines Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia as it relates to order and knowledge production. Frequently, heterotopias are understood as sites of resistance. This article argues that shifting the focus from resistance to order and knowledge production reveals how heterotopias make the spatiality of order legible. By juxtaposing and combining many spaces in one site, heterotopias problematize received knowledge by destabilizing the ground on which knowledge is built. Yet heterotopias always remain connected to the dominant order; thus as heterotopias clash with dominant orders, they simultaneously produce new ways of knowing. This article first explores the tensions between Foucault’s two definitions of heterotopias before connecting these definitions to Foucault’s distinctly spatial understanding of knowledge as emerging from a clash of forces. Finally, the paper ends by returning to the relationship between Foucault, Borges, and heterotopias

Walking and the Reinvention of Space

Through the figure of the walker, this thesis considers the relationship between rhetoric and space, where rhetoric is understood as embodied, performative action and space is considered both as a material artifact and an ideological production. While it is a basic tenet of rhetoric that it always occurs in a given location, only recently have scholars of rhetoric begun to privilege space both as a theoretical lens and as part of everyday rhetorical practice. By positioning the walker as an embodied rhetorical agent in two spaces typical of everyday life in capitalist societies--suburban Iowa Street in Lawrence, Kansas, and a nature park built upon an inoperative coal mine in Newcastle England--this thesis attends to space as it both constrains and enables agency in different spatial milieus

What can Coronation Street tell us about politics?

What can the ‘everyday’ tell us about politics and political ideology? Here, Robert Topinka suggests that soap operas have much to tell us about the importance of the ‘ordinary’ to our understanding of politics

Improving Language Skills Through Digital Storytelling For Primary Students

The guiding question addressed in this project is how can we improve language skills through digital storytelling for primary students? The main idea of this capstone is to address the changes that are occurring in classrooms today and how students can gain confidence in the reading and writing process. Throughout this project capstone, there are multiple examples of how young children can benefit from extending literacy elements through the process of digital storytelling using technology tools. The research for this capstone is based on early childhood psychology and aspects of how incorporating digital storytelling into the classroom can benefit children from a young age. The purpose of this capstone project is a year-long professional development workshop that breaks down the ways educators can incorporate technology elements into their classrooms and help their students become more confident in reading while encouraging 21st-century skills through creativity, independence, and leadership

Politically incorrect participatory media: racist nationalism on r/ImGoingToHellForThis

This article examines how racism and nationalism flourish in participatory media spaces by analyzing user comments and images posted on the reddit community r/ImGoingToHellForThis in the week following widespread news coverage of the photograph of Alan Kurdi, a Syrian boy whose dead body was photographed on a beach in Turkey. The community is dominated by racist nationalist discourse that combines textual commentary with photographs and other visual media that have been remediated into offensive visual jokes, which “cloak” the racism. Through an in-depth study of user-submitted comments and visual jokes, this article argues that the “cloaks” that obscure online racism can be at once highly obvious and highly effective. Rather than unmasking obscured racist online ideologies, scholars must also examine how racism flourishes while hiding in plain sight by tracing how racist discourses assemble in participatory media communities

Introduction

Wstęp do książki "Changes in social awareness on both sides of the border Poland - the Czech Republic : sociological reflections"

Unexpected features of branched flow through high-mobility two-dimensional electron gases

GaAs-based two-dimensional electron gases (2DEGs) show a wealth of remarkable electronic states, and serve as the basis for fast transistors, research on electrons in nanostructures, and prototypes of quantum-computing schemes. All these uses depend on the extremely low levels of disorder in GaAs 2DEGs, with low-temperature mean free paths ranging from microns to hundreds of microns. Here we study how disorder affects the spatial structure of electron transport by imaging electron flow in three different GaAs/AlGaAs 2DEGs, whose mobilities range over an order of magnitude. As expected, electrons flow along narrow branches that we find remain straight over a distance roughly proportional to the mean free path. We also observe two unanticipated phenomena in high-mobility samples. In our highest-mobility sample we observe an almost complete absence of sharp impurity or defect scattering, indicated by the complete suppression of quantum coherent interference fringes. Also, branched flow through the chaotic potential of a high-mobility sample remains stable to significant changes to the initial conditions of injected electrons.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl