Legal Disruptions. Reconciling Dissent or Dissenting Reconciliation In and Through Law?

The volume “Rancière and Law” edited by Mónica López Lerma and Julen Etxabe collects a set of approaches to think about law and legal problems via the work of Jacques Rancière. Rather than bringing together his explicit statements on law, they try to transfer his way(s) of thinking to the field of legal theory. Here special attention is drawn to Rancière’s differentiation of police, as a certain fixed order, and politics, as acts disrupting this order. Without placing law on one of these sides singularly, its ambiguous state between these opposing strands is delineated in various attempts, ranging from case studies in the history of ideas to the field of aesthetics. Thus, the volume originally sheds a light on legal problems and inner conflicts developed through a Rancièrean lens.The edited volume Rancière and Law by Mónica López Lerma and Julen Etxabe collects a set of approaches to thinking about law and legal problems via the work of Jacques Rancière. Rather than bringing together his explicit statements on law, they try to transfer his way(s) of thinking to the field of legal theory. Here special attention is drawn to Rancière’s differentiation of “police”, as a certain fixed order, and “politics”, as acts disrupting this order. Without placing law on one of these sides exclusively, instead its ambiguous state between these opposing strands is delineated in various attempts, ranging from case studies in the history of ideas to the field of aesthetics. Thus, the volume sheds an original light on legal problems and inner conflicts developed through a Rancièrean lens

Tackling the Crises (with and within Critical Theory)

Der von Penelope Deutscher und Cristina Lafont herausgegebene Sammelband Critical Theory in Critical Times. Transforming the Global Political & Economic Order ruft die Verbindung von Kritischer Theorie und Krisen in Erinnerung. Elf Beiträge prominenter Protagonist_innen Kritischer Theorie zeigen auf, dass und wie politische, ökonomische oder rechtliche Krisen Kritische Theorie notwendig machen und wie diese eine Grundlage zur Erklärung und Bekämpfung der aktuellen mehrdimensionalen Krise bereitstellen kann. Dabei wird Kritische Theorie auch einer Selbstkritik unterzogen. In mehreren Aufsätzen zeigt der Band, dass diese sich gegenüber anderen Ansätzen, wie etwa feministischer oder postkolonialer Theorie öffnen muss, um angemessene Diagnosen für und Antworten auf aktuelle Krisen darstellen zu können. Ebenso plädiert der Band dafür, an dem Kernanliegen einer materialistischen Kritik festzuhalten und diese mit „neueren“ Ansätze zu ergänzen, gleichwohl nicht durch sie zu ersetzen.The volume Critical Theory in Critical Times. Transforming the Global Political & Economic Order, edited by Penelope Deutscher and Cristina Lafont, re-emphasizes the link between critical theory and crisis. Eleven contributions by prominent scholars of critical theory show how political, economic or legal crises make critical theory necessary and how it can serve to explain and critically address the current multiple crises. In doing so, critical theory is undergoing a selfcritique. That, in order to provide accurate diagnoses and responses to current crises, critical theory has to open for different approaches, such as feminist or postcolonial theory, is one outcome of several essays in the volume. At the same time there is a plea for sticking to the core concepts of materialist critique that should not be replaced but rather complemented by these “newer” approaches

The LAB@FUTURE Project - Moving Towards the Future of E-Learning

This paper presents Lab@Future, an advanced e-learning platform that uses novel Information and Communication Technologies to support and expand laboratory teaching practices. For this purpose, Lab@Future uses real and computer-generated objects that are interfaced using mechatronic systems, augmented reality, mobile technologies and 3D multi user environments. The main aim is to develop and demonstrate technological support for practical experiments in the following focused subjects namely: Fluid Dynamics - Science subject in Germany, Geometry - Mathematics subject in Austria, History and Environmental Awareness – Arts and Humanities subjects in Greece and Slovenia. In order to pedagogically enhance the design and functional aspects of this e-learning technology, we are investigating the dialogical operationalisation of learning theories so as to leverage our understanding of teaching and learning practices in the targeted context of deployment

Playmancer project: a serious videogame as an additional therapy tool for eating and impulse control disorders

Reviews and few non-controlled studies showed the effectiveness of several specific designed computer video-games as an additional form of treatment in several areas. However, there is a lack in the literature of specially designed serious-games for treating mental disorders. Playmancer (ICT European initiative) aims to develop and assess a serious videogame that may help to treat underlying processes (e.g. lack of self-control strategies) in Eating and Impulse control disorders. Preliminary data will be shown

Acclimation in plants – the Green Hub consortium

Acclimation is the capacity to adapt to environmental changes within the lifetime of an individual. This ability allows plants to cope with the continuous variation in ambient conditions to which they are exposed as sessile organisms. Because environmental changes and extremes are becoming even more pronounced due to the current period of climate change, enhancing the efficacy of plant acclimation is a promising strategy for mitigating the consequences of global warming on crop yields. At the cellular level, the chloroplast plays a central role in many acclimation responses, acting both as a sensor of environmental change and as a target of cellular acclimation responses. In this Perspective article, we outline the activities of the Green Hub consortium funded by the German Science Foundation. The main aim of this research collaboration is to understand and strategically modify the cellular networks that mediate plant acclimation to adverse environments, employing Arabidopsis, tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) and Chlamydomonas as model organisms. These efforts will contribute to ‘smart breeding’ methods designed to create crop plants with improved acclimation properties. To this end, the model oilseed crop Camelina sativa is being used to test modulators of acclimation for their potential to enhance crop yield under adverse environmental conditions. Here we highlight the current state of research on the role of gene expression, metabolism and signalling in acclimation, with a focus on chloroplast‐related processes. In addition, further approaches to uncovering acclimation mechanisms derived from systems and computational biology, as well as adaptive laboratory evolution with photosynthetic microbes, are highlighted.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100001659Peer Reviewe

Transformations of Liberal Reason

In light current multiple crises, authoritarian movements gain new strength. Claiming that globalization and especially migration is endangering social cohesion and national sovereignty, they call for a strong state. Along the lines of those claims, they revise what Helmut Dubiel called the “cultural selfinterpretation,” meaning the understanding of the political superstructure of their community. Doing that, liberal values and concepts are re-interpreted, as can be seen with the “rule of law”. From its intrinsic value of strengthening individual claims against the state’s rule, they turn into a concept of state power, interpreting the “rule of law” as the rule of a mythical legitimized sovereign. Those re-interpretations — and legal constructs referring to them — will be analyzed in this essay. Authoritarian politics and their roots will be regarded in their contradictory relation to (neo-)liberalism as they appear as a critique at first glance. Yet, taking into account early Critical Theory and its analysis of authoritarianism, the article aims to show that those tendencies emerge from liberal ideas and ideals. Seen from this perspective the article promotes the view that rather than a pure defense of liberalism, a materialist examination of liberalism’s inner contradictions is necessary to understand and criticize authoritarianism