Dual Forms on Supermanifolds and Cartan Calculus

The complex of "stable forms" on supermanifolds is studied. Stable forms on $M$ are represented by certain Lagrangians of "copaths" (formal systems of equations, which may or may not specify actual surfaces) on $M\times\mathbb R^D$. Changes of $D$ give rise to stability isomorphisms. The Cartan--de Rham complex made of stable forms extends both in positive and negative degree and its positive half is isomorphic to the complex of forms defined as Lagrangians of paths. Considering the negative half is necessary, in particular, for homotopy invariance. We introduce analogs of exterior multiplication by covectors and of contraction with vectors. We find (anti)commutation relations for them. An analog of Cartan's homotopy identity is proved. Before stabilization it contains some "stability operator" $\sigma$.Comment: 21 pages, LaTeX, uses package diagrams.sty (= diagrams.tex) by Paul Taylor, available at ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/macros/generic/diagrams/taylor/ (or at any_mirror_of_CTAN/tex-archive/macros/generic/diagrams/taylor/

Social Categories are Natural Kinds, not Objective Types (and Why it Matters Politically)

There is growing support for the view that social categories like men and women refer to “objective types” (Haslanger 2000, 2006, 2012; Alcoff 2005). An objective type is a similarity class for which the axis of similarity is an objective rather than nominal or fictional property. Such types are independently real and causally relevant, yet their unity does not derive from an essential property. Given this tandem of features, it is not surprising why empirically-minded researchers interested in fighting oppression and marginalization have found this ontological category so attractive: objective types have the ontological credentials to secure the reality (and thus political representation) of social categories, and yet they do not impose exclusionary essences that also naturalize and legitimize social inequalities. This essay argues that, from the perspective of these political goals of fighting oppression and marginalization, the category of objective types is in fact a Trojan horse; it looks like a gift, but it ends up creating trouble. I argue that objective type classifications often lack empirical adequacy, and as a result they lack political adequacy. I also provide, and in reference to the normative goals described above, several arguments for preferring a social ontology of natural kinds with historical essences

13th: Ava Duvernay’s Stark Exploration of the Mass Incarceration Crisis Facing Black Men

This film review of 13th is featured in the journal Tapestries: Interwoven voices of local and global identities, volume 6

Bankruptcy in the Administrative State

A national interacting metasystem of national education and fostering developed in the Finnish speaking region Tornedalen in northern Sweden from the late 19th century to the 1950s. It was not formally agreed as a deliberate education system, but was more of a tacit understanding of a common nationalistic goal within different educational institutions such as primary schools, the residential industrial schools [arbetsstugor], the folk high-schools and the different forms of explicit military education. The aim was to help the poor region economically, to spread the Swedish language and culture in the area, to break the isolation of the region through education and to integrate this geopolitically sensitive border region into the nation. The integrative phase of Swedish nationalism was a common denominator. Leading persons in the educational and fostering activities were many times the same persons. There was a consensus over party lines about the need of acculturation and assimilation of the Tornedalians. The school, the nation and the family was regarded as central concepts in the fostering of the minority into Swedish citizens. By regarding the educations in Tornealen as a metasystem of ideological influences you get an imagination of the ideological power single educations gets when interconnected as a system