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Resisting extractive uses of the archive in Colombian experimental non-fiction
Get PDFIn the first two decades of the 21st century, a cluster of Colombian filmmakers developed a distinctive body of work engaging with the country’s histories of violence through critical documentary and experimental devices. A nuanced use of appropriated footage is a recurrent feature in these works, signalling their engagement with historical events through mediated representation and a ‘suspicion of the archive’ (Suárez 2020, 542). This paper identifies distinct patterns in the filmmakers’ relationship to the materiality of archive materials, focusing on selected works by Camilo Restrepo, Laura Huertas Millán, and Juan Soto. It argues that the remediation of digital found footage, personal and private archives enacts reflexive and distancing strategies in order to obstruct extractivist uses of images. In their choice and use of appropriated and archival moving images, filmmakers grapple with their own social and geographic positionality in ambiguous ways. 
Haunted Archives: Presence and Absence in the Audio-visual Record of Conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina
Get PDFThis paper examines the potential consequences of the loss of raw rushes of historical events on collective memory. It examines two sets of rushes from 21 August 1993 that survived against the odds, of the arrival of the first humanitarian aid convoy in the besieged enclave of east Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina. These rushes were compared with edited accounts and examined for elements that, in the words of Dai Vaughan, could generate “meanings oblique, peripheral or even antagonistic to the text as understood.”
According to a well-worn maxim, “journalism is the first rough draft of history”. This is certainly true for audio-visual media: typically, archives preserve edited, “finished” films, and rushes often get lost from the record. This highlights a sometimes overlooked form of exclusion from the archive: the selection of footage in the editing room. In commercial news archives economic pressures determine which footage will be digitised, and a diminishing pool of well-known images tend to be re-used in a “feedback loop of historical footage”.
Examining the rushes of the aid convoy to Mostar reveals how much the news coverage is coloured by the media spectacle accompanying the convoy. The clear emphasis on the humanitarian aspects of the story downplays the political stakes of the warring parties, and incongruous jokes to the camera provide unexpected glimpses of the pressures and the privileges of the international journalists and aid workers producing the images. These are insights that could only have been gleaned from the raw rushes of the situation, and are an indication of the kind of insights into comparable events that may have been “narrativised” out of the historical record, and lost on the cutting room floor. 
A Phenomenological Approach to the Bayesian Grue Problem
Get PDFIt is a common intuition in scientific practice that positive instances confirm. This confirmation, at least purely based on syntactic considerations, is what Nelson Goodman’s ‘Grue Problem’, and more generally the ‘New Riddle’ of Induction, attempt to defeat. One treatment of the Grue Problem has been made along Bayesian lines, wherein the riddle reduces to a question of probability assignments. In this paper, I consider this so-called Bayesian Grue Problem and evaluate how one might proffer a solution to this problem utilizing what I call a phenomenological approach. I argue that this approach to the problem can be successful on the Bayesian framework
What Makes Thoughts about Specific Things?
Get PDFSome thoughts have ‘objects’—things those thoughts are about. Answers to questions about the relation between thoughts and their objects often appeal to a distinction between singular and general thoughts. Singular thoughts are supposed to have somehow more particular or specific objects, general thoughts less so. I argue that no such distinction exists, and that though one could be constructed this would not be philosophically useful. §1 surveys views on the nature of the singular/general distinction. §2 lists three problems with this distinction. Consideration of these problems leads to a finer-grained distinction between singular and general concepts in §3, and I motivate this with examples and methods of argument from literature in §4. In the last section I consider a possible objection. I argue that though there is a sense in which it is technically correct, it does not achieve anything philosophically useful
Holding church, academy and society together: Joanna Leidenhag in conversation with David Fergusson
Get PDFThe editorial board of Theology in Scotland wishes to mark an exceptional contribution of one of the founders of the journal, Rev Prof David Fergusson. After many years of ministry and work in Scotland, Prof Fergusson recently took up the post of Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, which also brought about his retirement from the editorial board. In this interview with Dr Joanna Leidenhag he shares a little of his own theological journey as well as insights into Scottish theology
Virtual assurance: Reflecting on the ‘confident prayer of the Church’ through online worship
Get PDFThe author addresses two constant questions in Roman Catholic sacramental theology against the background of the broadcasting of online Mass, especially during the restrictions imposed on in-person attendance to inhibit the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. These are: what constitutes sacramental communion in the Roman Catholic Church and what is the role of the priest in celebrating the Eucharist? Looking at the first of those questions, he briefly examines the recent work of Katherine G. Schmidt and her use of the sacramental theology of Louis-Marie Chauvet, which addresses both the idea and the experience of presence and absence in the celebration of the Eucharist. The author concludes that, while her work raises some important issues that need to be addressed, she does not entirely represent Chauvet’s thinking, and the fullest understanding of sacramental communion in the Roman Catholic tradition will always include the physical. It is in addressing the second question, that of the responsibility of the priest in celebrating the Mass with an online congregation, that the author believes a more satisfactory answer can be found as to the sacramental ‘value’ of virtual worship. Employing the ideas of authority, authenticity, and assurance, as they relate to the ordained ministry, he maintains that it is crucial the ‘confident prayer of the Church’ be visible and accessible
Theology and the arts: The Corona crisis
Get PDFSeeking to offer more than just words of comfort in the face of suffering, this paper proposes three additional ways forward for theological reflection during the COVID-19 pandemic: (1) a rediscovery of the language of lament, drawing on the vocabularies of protest movements and the Psalms; (2) a theological critique of the pandemic built on reckoning with the reality of our finitude and the relationship between humanity and the earth; and (3) a re-imagination of the future employing the power of the arts and the imagination for this prophetic task
“Nevile Davidson: A Life to be Lived” by Andrew G. Ralston
No full textReview of Andrew G. Ralston, Nevile Davidson: A Life to be Lived (Eugene, Or.: Wipf and Stock, 2019), pp. xv + 205, ISBN 978-1532687808. £17.0
Metalinguistic Negotiation and its Limits
Get PDFThis paper defends the idea that disputes which do not feature conflicts in literally-expressed contents could express genuine disagreement. Using the model of metalinguistic negotiation and Stalnakerian common ground, the paper argues that many such disputes are driven by the conversational parties’ disagreements in the meaning of expressions. The disputants convey and settle their disagreement pragmatically, negotiating the meanings of terms under controversy by using instead of mentioning the terms. The paper further examines how the disputants collect cues from the conversation to become aware of the metalinguistic nature of their dispute and explains why such an account is compatible with semantic externalism, by clarifying the scope and limits of metalinguistic negotiation