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Nonhuman Narratives in World Literature: An Introduction
Full text linkdetermination in considerable parts (both urban and rural) of India a wide berth. The eventua
Encountering the Non-Human with Narrative Form:J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals
Full text linkcriminalization, harassment, and oppression of women who fail to bear male offspring withi
Connecting the Dots: From the Mythical East to the “Real Asia”
Full text linkMagellan opened a new connecting link among Europe, Asia, and America, paving the way for the formation of a global world. But it was also a point of arrival of a long process that went back to antiquity. For many centuries, Europe and Asia had a fragmentary and distorted image of each other. In Europe, confusing notions of “East,” “Asia,” or “India” crossed antiquity and the Middle Ages and mixed fabulous tales with real data about what was beyond the Persian Empire or, later, the Muslim world. The information circulated mainly through land trade routes. In the fifteenth century, Iberian geopolitics determined a new approach: to reach Asia directly by sea. It was the Portuguese who successfully achieved this goal, sailing eastward around Africa and reaching not Marco Polo’s mysterious “Cathay” but the real maritime Asia, putting a wide range of goods, trade routes, peoples, cultures, and civilizations within their range. In 1521, Magellan crossed an unknown ocean and reached Asia by sailing westward. The final dot of a secular process was finally connected. As the Italian Francesco Carletti noticed later, “We never heard of anyone sailing around the world in the ancient times as we do today, thanks to the value and virtue of the two crowns of Castile and Portugal [...]: one, sailing east, allows us to reach China and Japan; through the other, to the west, we reach the Philippine Islands [...] With these two ways, the two Crowns have drawn a circle around the world.
Love is a Molecular Island
Full text linkWhen clarifying Spinoza’s concept of affect, Deleuze declares, “Hope as such or love as such represents nothing, strictly nothing.” In this paper, I approach the question of love by taking a detour of nonhuman affinity. First, I present this paper as an experimental becoming that weaves through heterogeneous lines of thinking and creating. Second, explicating the Deleuzian-Guattarian notion of “abstract machine” alongside Isabelle Stengers’s figure of “inappropriable unknown,” I argue for viewing the cosmos and art as interconnected abstract machines that foster novel realities and communities. Third, I weave planetary thinking with an interdisciplinary approach to propose a “planetary art machine of Cosmos,” where art and science render invisible life forces visible. The discussions on abstract machines, attosecond physics, quantum theory, and Paul Klee’s art reveal porous boundaries between humans, nature, and the cosmos. Fourth, I take magnetotactic bacteria (MTB) as a model of molecular creativity and follow some interconnected pathways of holobiont magnetotaxis in consortia to illustrate Gaia politics of evolution or living together. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s concept of transduction and Vladimir Vernadsky’s notion of life as cosmic energy transformers, I redefine magnetotaxis as a cosmopolitical process. Concluding with an archipelagic framework, I reimagine theory as generative and aligned with the molecular processes of life, offering new possibilities for coexistence and resistance within a planetary noösphere
A Verdant Reading: On the Agency of the Nonhuman Landscape in Apocalypse Now (1979)
No full textlack of sensitization, and fanatic adherence to tradition allow the illegal practice of prenatal se
Teaching Documentary Filmmaking as Social Advocacy: The Case of the Yangon Film School
Full text linkThis is a descriptive case study of Yangon Film School (Yangon, Myanmar) in a setting of protracted civil conflict that has persisted since 1968. It examined the school’s approach in the teaching of documentary filmmaking and analyzed key aspects of the school’s operations. Findings show that the documentary filmmaking taught in the school was informed by social advocacy. This was fostered through the students’ participation in films commissioned to the school by civil society organizations and the practice of participatory filmmaking. The school stood out in the Myanmar setting for its dual character as a training center and a production company, and for its goal of offering film education at par with international standards. Students were held to an international standard of documentary filmmaking by a faculty of reputable filmmakers, mostly Europeans. Applicants to the program were screened along principles of gender inclusivity and ethnic diversity while academic qualification was less emphasized. The school has trained a considerable number of young Myanmar documentary filmmakers, many of them women. A constant challenge the school faced was inadequate funding. With an eye on sustainability, it was envisioned that students would eventually take over instructional and management functions to reduce the school’s dependence on foreign resources
Transforming the Public Transport Sector in the Philippines through Service Contracts: A Program Evaluation Study
Full text linkWe evaluate two schemes of service contracting (SC) program implemented for the first time in the Philippines: gross-cost and net-cost. Using an automatic vehicle location (AVL) dataset generated using a mobile application, we examine the supply and performance of jeepney, a form of paratransit, on 20 routes during the pandemic. Ten of these routes are under gross-cost, and the other ten are under net-cost. Our evaluation suggests that gross-cost SC has resulted in more kilometer-run travelled, more arrivals at the stop, shorter headway duration, which are indicative of increased supply, compared to net-cost. However, we obtain mixed results for metrics associated with performance (headway regularity, dwell time and route compliance) for gross- and net- cost. We recommend that for SC to maximize its impact and raise performance, the government should set standards on metrics associated with fleet management and enforce strict compliance. Since SC is typically applied for the management of formal public transport, our work represents a novel contribution on the application of SC on the management of paratransit in the Global South
Impact of Extreme Rainfall Days on the Welfare of Households in the Formal and Informal Sectors
No full textWe differentiate the impact of extreme weather shocks on the welfare of the formal and informal sectors by utilizing nationally representative household survey data from the Philippines. We deviated from the typical measure of extreme tails of normalized rainfall values using normal distribution and instead used a novel measure of extreme rainfall from satellite-derived data. We estimate the vulnerability of households using an endogenous switching regression model to account for the heterogeneity in the decision to be in either sector. We find evidence that households’ welfare is adversely affected by extreme rainfall days, but the negative impact is bigger on the welfare of the formal sector. Households in the formal sector have higher incomes and thus have more to lose. However, the adverse impact on informal households may be irreversible given their weak capability to recover and their limited ability to smooth out consumption even during years considered normal. The negative effects of experiencing extreme rainfall three years ago linger. Thus, vulnerable households in the formal sector can potentially slide down to poverty, and those in the informal sector go deeper into poverty when hit by extreme weather events
Exact Evaluation and Resummation of the Divergent Expansion for the Heisenberg-Euler Lagrangian
No full textWe devise a novel resummation prescription based on the method of finite-part integration [Galapon EA. 2017 Proc. R. Soc A 473, 20160567. (doi:10.1098/rspa.2016.0567)] to perform a constrained extrapolation of the divergent weak-field perturbative expansion for the Heisenberg-Euler Lagrangian to the non-perturbative strong magnetic and electric field regimes. In the latter case, the prescription allowed us to reconstruct the non-perturbative imaginary part from a finite collection of the real expansion coefficients. We also demonstrate the utility of the various equivalent representations of Hadamard\u27s finite part in deriving the exact closed form for the Heisenberg-Euler Lagrangian from the non-perturbative integral representation