Dissident Water

Published for the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, 201

Thinking Architecture with an Indian Ocean Aquapelago

This article takes up the charge of thinking architecture with one of the Indian Ocean’s central coral atoll formations, the Maldives archipelago. It is undertaken as a critique of the concept of the archipelago as deployed in architecture since the 1970’s. Architects have used the archipelago as a metaphoric metageographical concept based on a land/sea binary, to conceive of architecture as autonomous from its environments. This permits the discipline exemption from its contexts and frames its engagement with the diverse mobilities of contemporary globalization. To counter this, the article draws from a broad body of literature familiar to readers of GeoHumanities, namely island studies, urban island studies, political ecology and thinking with water to undertake a reading of the Maldives as an oceanic aquapelago, as an alternative metageographical concept for architecture in today’s globalized world

Introduction: Thinking with the Monsoon

This GeoHumanities forum arose out of three symposia convened by the European Research Council funded project, Monsoon Assemblages over a three-year period: Monsoon [+ other] Airs, held in April 2017, Monsoon [+ other] Waters in April 2018, and Monsoon [+ other] Grounds in March 2019. The ambitions of the symposia were to develop new intersectional understandings of monsoonal esthetics, agencies, epistemologies and ontologies, and to engender monsoonal ways of thinking. The papers in this Forum are an outcome of these gatherings, whose full proceedings are available on the Monsoon Assemblages website: http://monass.org/outputs/

Sedimentary logics and the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh

This paper adopts a geosocial approach to sociopolitical research by thinking with sediment as a forceful mode of terraqueous mobility driven by interactions between dynamic earth systems inflected by social processes. It demonstrates that sediment is an active and vital state of matter, with the potential to erupt into and disrupt human politics. Unpacking sediment as a form of movement challenges assumptions of the earth as a stable platform on which socio-political processes play out. The paper develops its argument through analyses of the Rohingya refugee camps in southeast Bangladesh and a char (sediment) island in the Meghna Estuary to which Bangladesh proposes to relocate the refugees. In the first situation, the sedimentary logics of anticline geology, deforestation and monsoon rains push back against political agendas directed towards constraining refugee movement. In the second, fluvial and oceanic sedimentary dynamics and the post-Holocene volatility of the monsoon throw into doubt the engineering solution proposed by Bangladesh to the political problems the refugee presence poses. Through these examples, the paper adds to literature on how states of matter inflect, exceed, undercut or in other ways interfere with matters of state through their unique, dynamic environmental properties

Planning the 2015 Chennai Floods

This paper approaches the floods of 2015 in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, as the consequence of policies, plans and procedures that, over many years, had erased monsoon water and wetness from the city and its imaginary. In order to do this, it examines a number of plans that authorized spatial development in Chennai from the early 20th century onwards. It approaches them as urban cosmograms, in which heterogeneous entities were accommodated, congealed, concealed or expelled in the description of the urban territory and the composition of the urban world. The paper undertakes this analysis in order to deepen understanding of the relations between spatial planning, capitalist urbanization and the more-than-human vitalities of the monsoon. It approaches the flood waters that rose and fell in 2015 as a cosmopolitical situation and cause for thinking, which, putting people in the presence of the monsoon and its potency in new ways, forced them to confront the precariousness of their co-existence with it and experiment with ways to re-compose the urban monsoonal world differently. This discussion draws from Stenger’s notion of cosmopolitics as a mode of collective practice that proceeds in the company of those who would otherwise be likely to be disqualified as having idiotically nothing to propose, including the more-than-human. The paper makes some critical observations about these experiments and concludes by speculating on whether planning itself might be envisaged as a more inclusive, cosmopolitical project

On the Complexity of Random Quantum Computations and the Jones Polynomial

There is a natural relationship between Jones polynomials and quantum computation. We use this relationship to show that the complexity of evaluating relative-error approximations of Jones polynomials can be used to bound the classical complexity of approximately simulating random quantum computations. We prove that random quantum computations cannot be classically simulated up to a constant total variation distance, under the assumption that (1) the Polynomial Hierarchy does not collapse and (2) the average-case complexity of relative-error approximations of the Jones polynomial matches the worst-case complexity over a constant fraction of random links. Our results provide a straightforward relationship between the approximation of Jones polynomials and the complexity of random quantum computations.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

An Investigation of the Role of Corporate Social Responsibility Features in Attracting and Retaining Employees

Research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) has grown in parallel to organizations’ adoption of the triple bottom line (economic, environmental, social) approach to performance, and stakeholders’ expectations for organizations to contribute to a greater social good (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012). As a burgeoning area of research, the CSR literature has mostly been conducted from a macro-level (organization-level) perspective aiming to answer questions about the implications of CSR for organizations and society. Micro-level (individual-level) research is comparatively less common, but is beginning to grow as well (Rupp & Mallory, 2015). While micro-level research has made significant progress toward answering some important questions, it is limited by a lack of knowledge and guiding theory of the psychological foundations of CSR that explain when and why it affects organizational stakeholders such as employees or job-seekers (Aguinis & Glavas, 2013). The CSR literature is also highly-fragmented and full of confusing parallels and inconsistencies. It is characterized by numerous conceptual definitions (Dahlsrud, 2008) and measurement tools (Morgeson, Aguinis, Waldman, & Siegel, 2013), making it challenging for researchers to agree on what actually constitutes CSR and compare results. The research presented here applies a new approach to conceptualizing and measuring CSR in hopes of overcoming the limitations mentioned above. First, a theoretical model is described that distinguishes between “CSR content” and “CSR features” and proposes four CSR features that are likely to be of relevance to stakeholders: CSR-identity alignment, CSR commitment, employee involvement in CSR, and CSR proactivity. The model also proposes attributions as the primary psychological mechanism explaining how CSR features, in combination, influence employees’ organizational commitment and job-seekers’ organizational attraction. This model was tested through two studies. The first study involved the development of a self-report measure of CSR features and the distribution of a survey to a sample of 371 employees in a variety of organizations. Results revealed that CSR features and attributions significantly predicted employees’ organizational commitment. The second study utilized an experimental methodology to examine the effects of different combinations of CSR features on organizational attractiveness. A sample of 397 students were randomly assigned to view the websites of two fictitious organizations – one that engaged in CSR and one that did not – across eight different conditions (plus a no-CSR control condition) that differed in terms of high/low combinations of three CSR features (i.e., alignment, employee involvement, and commitment). Participants were asked to play the role of job-seekers and rate the attractiveness of each organization. Results revealed that engaging in CSR significantly raised participants’ ratings of organizational attractiveness, but the CSR feature manipulations did not have an effect. Directions for future research, limitations, and implications for theory and practice are discussed

Observations on the concept of the aquapelago occasioned by researching the Maldives

In my recent work on the Maldives (Bremner, 2016), I drew on Philip Hayward’s notion of the aquapelago (Hayward 2012a, 2012b) to theorize the Maldives and to develop a new metageographical concept for architecture in today’s globalized world. In this short contribution to Shima Debates, I will highlight my observations on the the Maldives and the concept of the aquapelago occasioned by this work

A formula for the First Eigenvalue of the Dirac Operator on Compact Spin Symmetric Spaces

Let $G/K$ be a simply connected spin compact inner irreducible symmetric space, endowed with the metric induced by the Killing form of $G$ sign-changed. We give a formula for the square of the first eigenvalue of the Dirac operator in terms of a root system of $G$. As an example of application, we give the list of the first eigenvalues for the spin compact irreducible symmetric spaces endowed with a quaternion-K\"{a}hler structure