International student subjectivities: biographical investments for liquid times

The international student as an object of study has typically been understood through the frame of cultural identity, mapped back to notions of fixed, static notions of cultural difference. In contrast, this study seeks to understand how the practice of international study has emerged as an increasingly popular ‘biographical solution’ (Beck 1992, Bauman 2002) in order to pursue imagined career trajectories in a globalised and competitive world. Informed by recent studies of middle class strategy in Asia (Pinches, 1999) and the transnational Chinese diaspora (Ong 1999, Ang 2001) that challenge essentialist accounts of timeless Asian values and East-West binaries, the paper analyses interview data collected from ‘Asian’ international students attending preparatory programs at an Australian university. Specifically, the paper discusses the disciplinary formation of the ‘international student’ – the take-up of self-Orientalizing discourses (Ong, 1999), and engagement in practices of auto-ethnography (Pratt, 1998). In addition, the paper explores students’ critiques of, and resistances to Orientalist discourses, and pragmatic willingness to submit to local demands to further their longer term goals. Preparatory programs emerge not so much as life-changing locations but rather necessary transit lounges, for the acquisition of cultural distinctions along their life routes

Imagination of the Heart: New Understandings in Preaching

Reviewed Book: Wilson, Paul Scott. Imagination of the Heart: New Understandings in Preaching. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1988

Realizing Catholicism: Faith, Learning, and the Future

Father Ong gives a insightful talk on the relation of the Church\u27s Tradition in comparison to the ideas of Romanticism, the mentality of change in America, the development of technology, and the importance of the past to guide the way into the future. Father Ong highlights these ideas to better explain the essence of the term Catholic in that it is related and encompassed throughout the whole of scholarship.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/uscc_marianist_award/1000/thumbnail.jp

The Prodigal Illegal: Christian Love and Immigration Reform

Despite the impasse around immigration reform, most everyone believes the United States’ immigration system is broken. And most agree that the key issue is what to do with the eleven million or so undocumented persons currently residing in the United States. As a Christian immigration law teacher, I have been interested in the debate among the churches as to what such reform should look like. In this Article, I use Professor Jeffrie Murphy’s conception of agapic love as a lens through which to examine reform proposals. I then evaluate the two positions Christian churches have seemed to embrace—permanent legal status on the one hand, full citizenship on the other—from both a gospel and legal perspective. To aid my analysis from the Christian perspective, I turn to Dr. Timothy Keller’s interpretation of the Parable of the Prodigal Son; from the legal perspective, I examine the lived experiences of those subject to our current deportation laws. I argue that a thick conception of agapic, neighborly love requires embracing a pathway to citizenship as the only available reform option. This Article explores what agapic love might look like in the context of formulating immigration policy regarding the undocumented. Despite what appear to be the strict borders of law that create categories of immigrant status and belonging, the Christian tradition of sacrificial love suggests a willingness to promote equality and reject ubordination— in a sense, to set captives free

Alien Registration- Mannette, Luke (Portland, Cumberland County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/21362/thumbnail.jp

Anthropology for sale

This introduction to the Anthropology for Sale special issue makes a case for renewed attention to the selling and salescraft in anthropology. Rather than presume to know in advance what kinds of ethics and interests underpin the moment of sale the contributors to this Special Issue ask how sales work allows people to perform themselves as moral actors. In this introduction we situate the moment of sale as a moment of possibility charged with play, charisma, spin and seduction, reflect on the language and rhetoric of selling, consider the presence of kinship, gender, class, caste in the marketplace, and emphasise the precariousness of selling in contexts of global economic uncertainty

Image Hijacking: Adversarial Images can Control Generative Models at Runtime

Are foundation models secure from malicious actors? In this work, we focus on the image input to a vision-language model (VLM). We discover image hijacks, adversarial images that control generative models at runtime. We introduce Behavior Matching, a general method for creating image hijacks, and we use it to explore three types of attacks. Specific string attacks generate arbitrary output of the adversary's choosing. Leak context attacks leak information from the context window into the output. Jailbreak attacks circumvent a model's safety training. We study these attacks against LLaVA-2, a state-of-the-art VLM based on CLIP and LLaMA-2, and find that all our attack types have above a 90\% success rate. Moreover, our attacks are automated and require only small image perturbations. These findings raise serious concerns about the security of foundation models. If image hijacks are as difficult to defend against as adversarial examples in CIFAR-10, then it might be many years before a solution is found -- if it even exists.Comment: Code is available at https://github.com/euanong/image-hijack

The Ramist Style of John Udall: Audience and Pictorial Logic in Puritan Sermon and Controversy

With Wilbur Samuel Howell's Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (1956), Walter J. Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (1958) helped establish the common contemporary view that Ramism impoverished logic and rhetoric as arts of communication.1 For example, scholars agree that Ramism neglected audience accomodation; denied truth as an object of rhetoric by reserving it to logic; rejected persuasion about probabilities; and relegated rhetoric to ornamentation.2 Like Richard Hooker in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (I.vi.4), these scholars criticize Ramist logic as simplistic. Their objections identify the consequences of Ramus' visual analogy of logic and rhetoric to "surfaces," which are "apprehended by sight" and divorced from "voice and hearing" (Ong 1958:280)