Narrative and Belonging: The Politics of Ambiguity, The Jewish State, and the Thought of Edward Said and Hannah Arendt

At the core of this thesis, I examine the difficulties of giving an account of oneself in modern associational life. By integrating the theory and political activism of both Edward Said and Hannah Arendt, I follow the Zionist response to European antisemitism and the Palestinian responses to Jewish settler colonialism. Both parties struggle against their ambiguous presence within local and regional hegemonic social taxonomy, and within the world order. Contemporarily, this struggle takes place in the protracted conflict between Israeli and local Arab groups, which has been managed through violence and objectification, as opposed to allowing the dynamism and reconfiguration of political subjectivities. In their later writings, Arendt and Said respond to the violence and resentment that arises from the form of the nation-state by prescribing, and arguably practicing, an understanding of politics where the “other” is constitutive of the “self.” By seeing this relation of alternity as the contemporary heir to diasporic Judaism and Jewish cosmopolitanism, I argue that this project holds the historical traction to reinvigorate the future beyond static and growing violence and dispossession

Understanding ACT-R - an Outsider's Perspective

The ACT-R theory of cognition developed by John Anderson and colleagues endeavors to explain how humans recall chunks of information and how they solve problems. ACT-R also serves as a theoretical basis for "cognitive tutors", i.e., automatic tutoring systems that help students learn mathematics, computer programming, and other subjects. The official ACT-R definition is distributed across a large body of literature spanning many articles and monographs, and hence it is difficult for an "outsider" to learn the most important aspects of the theory. This paper aims to provide a tutorial to the core components of the ACT-R theory

Slavery and Justice: What Brown University has Taught Me about Public History

In the post today, I want to add to that debate by discussing Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. John recently turned me on to this, and while I still haven’t read the whole report (available in pdf), I’m really impressed by what I’ve read so far. For those of you who are not familiar with the report, I highly recommend it - it is very insightful. The Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice report documents Brown University’s public struggle with its historic foundations which, are tied inextricably to the economics of slavery and the slave trade. The committee’s report seeks to reconcile with Brown’s historic past and find where the present lives in the past. [excerpt