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‘Unlearning this Desire to Vanish\u27: Rape, Illness, and the Politics of Testimony in Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s I Choose Elena and Amy Berkowitz’s Tender Points
No full textIn recent years, life writing by survivors of sexual violence has attempted to contest the stigma of shame traditionally attached to women’s testimony. Among these authors, disabled and chronically ill survivors find themselves doubly marginalized by the patriarchal discourses prevalent in culture and medical spaces. For this reason, in their writing, they vindicate political and ethical approaches to their condition, based on emphasizing their bodily experience against the silencing of culture and institutions. This essay looks at Lucia Osborne Crowley’s I Choose Elena (2019) and Amy Berkowitz’s Tender Points (2015) as two examples of memoirs exploring the intersections between sexual trauma and chronic illnesses like endometriosis and fibromyalgia, as well as the possibilities for writing to contest stigma and move towards an ethical audience, inside and outside medical spaces. In their memoirs, these authors expose the physical, socioeconomic, and institutional boundaries that they encounter while vindicating political and engaged ways to live in their bodies
Virginia Newhall Rademacher, Derivative Lives. Biofiction, Uncertainty, and Speculative Risk in Contemporary Spanish Narrative
No full textWith a very original title, which is indebted to economics studies as explained at the time, Virginia Rademacher groups together eleven titles of Spanish novels published in the 21st century which have in common their belonging to the category of ‘biofiction’. The book uses a methodology that is also original, as the subtitle states, in which three very different concepts, belonging to equally distant worlds, are employed. These three concepts are biofiction, the essential one, ‘uncertainty’ and ‘speculative risk’. The combination of them creates an interdisciplinary approach to a universe that is in principle literary but that extends its roots and consequences far beyond, to game theory and economic analysis. Undoubtedly, such a thoughtful title sums up very well what the reader will find in its 200+ pages
A Portrait of My Father
No full textThis work of life writing aims to piece together my late father, Muhammad Iftikhar Butt, who passed away on 20 of September 1996, in Lahore, Pakistan, when I was a teenager. A loss of a parent is a great tragedy and an emotional trauma, but this tragedy and trauma are deeper when the child has not mourned the loss but has erased it from its memory. By pondering father-daughter relationships in patriarchal cultures and gender dynamics in nuclear families, I re-member the forgotten bits of the past not only to mourn my father after more than two decades but also to commemorate the extraordinary phases of his fatherhood. Since my father has left behind no traces of his past life, the only way to bring him back to life is through my words – written words. With the help of shards and scraps of memory – some vivid, some fading – I seek to put the fragments of his life together to understand him long after his death due to my inability to understand him in his life. Indeed, I finally manage to re-collect him and see him as a person rather than a parent
Using role-playing games in virtual exchanges: Global experiences in intercultural and multidisciplinary approaches to learning about environmental sustainability
No full textThe United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) require intercultural collaboration to ensure that the progress made so far becomes permanent and continues to progress towards inclusion and a just approach for all people. This means our learners need intercultural skills and competencies for interacting globally. This research examines how the use of role-playing games in virtual exchange projects can provide global learning experiences on controversial environmental sustainability projects. These games simulate the complexity of multi-stakeholder decisions that are frequently problematic for implementing environmental sustainability projects. From fall 2020 to spring 2022, 267 college students from three continents (North and South America, and Europe) comprising 27 global virtual teams played game simulations as a virtual exchange activity. Results showed that students can engage effectively to reach an agreement as role-playing stakeholders for these conflictual projects (Adj R2 = .498, Chi Square = 4.683, sig. = .003). In addition, meetings among the students held a couple weeks before the game were important in preparing them for the role-playing simulation. Language and cultural barriers proved no impediment for students communicating in a non-native language. Well-timed “nudging” and scaffolding support as well as early intercultural competence self-awareness training by the instructors underpinned these positive learning experiences and outcomes in the games
Social justice pedagogy: International perspectives on Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) through a World Café engagement
No full textThe promotion of social justice pedagogy in Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) courses and virtual exchange (VE) programs has gained traction in the last decade, as opportunities for faculty and students to participate as equal partners in the internationalization of the curriculum have grown. This practice report highlights the processes and outcomes of critical engagement through an interactive World Café workshop at the 2023 IVEC conference in São Paulo, Brazil. The participants were a group of 45 international faculty and COIL coordinators from various higher education institutions. Nancy Fraser’s (2008; 2009) normative framework related to social justice was used to facilitate a critical discussion related to the economic, cultural, and political dimensions of their COIL courses in supporting participatory parity. Key trends, questions, and recommendations for enhancing social justice pedagogy were identified. These findings may provide a springboard to engage colleagues in further dialogue that could promote awareness around social justice pedagogy and participatory parity through COIL
Interwoven Threads: Sympathetic Knowledge in George Eliot and Spinoza
No full textBefore achieving success as a novelist, George Eliot spent several years translating Spinoza’s Ethics. Previous scholarship on Spinoza and Eliot has generally assumed that Eliot’s novels are wholly influenced by Spinoza, or that they can even be read as ‘translations’ of Spinoza. In this article, I instead argue that Eliot’s shift from Spinoza translation to novel-writing reflects an initial repudiation of, followed by a contention with, unresolved problems in Spinoza’s social philosophy as regards the role of sympathy, fellow-feeling, and the knowledge of others as distinct and different beings. I also explore how Eliot’s own views develop between the early novel Adam Bede and the later Middlemarch to argue against a reading of ‘sympathy’ in Eliot as something wholly consistent or uniform. Her efforts to fashion a post-Spinozan art of sympathy in Adam Bede, in which a morality of fellow-feeling is emphasised and explored in narratives of love and self-renunciation, resulted in internal problems concerning the reliability of the imagination and the power of societal relations to condition how this fellow-feeling is experienced. The later Eliot draws on a conceptual imagery of ‘threads’ of relationality and a ‘fabric’ of opinion in Middlemarch to emphasise the integration of thinking and feeling, and the role of beneficent action, in a manner consistent with aspects of Spinoza’s social philosophy. I show that Eliot here makes useful progress through and beyond lacunae in the Ethics, contributing to a wider set of debates about sympathy, difference, ethics, and epiphanies through the concept of sympathetic knowledge
Organised Spinozism in the Netherlands (1897–2022): Growth, Flourishing, Decay and Revival
No full textThis paper gives an outline of the history of organised Spinozism in the Netherlands, divided into three periods. In 1897 the Vereniging het Spinozahuis (VHS) was established. On the one hand, it wanted to preserve the physical and spiritual heritage of Spinoza, being an essential part of Dutch identity, and on the other hand, it strived for the propagation of Spinozism, which might fill the void left by the end of Christianity. This double aim precluded the transformation of the VHS into an international society to disseminate Spinozism. To that end the Societas Spinozana was established in 1920. It had to contribute to the solution of the spiritual crisis created by the WWI which had divided humanity. By the time of National-Socialism and during the post-war reconstruction period, in which philosophies incompatible with Spinozism dominated, the VHS successfully returned to the initial aim of preserving Spinoza’s heritage, but in the 1970s Spinozism once more became a viable alternative to traditional religion
Benjamin and Spinoza on Time and History: Some Reading Paths
No full textOnly recently have philosophical historiography and Benjaminian studies turned their attention to the relationship between Benjamin and Spinoza’s philosophy, with its possible links of affinity (and distance), regarding the conception of time and history. Here we would like to follow some reading paths recently proposed by various interpreters, of particular interest around Benjamin’s reflections on For the Critique of Violence (1920) and the Theological-Political Fragment (1921-22). From such an analysis emerges the figure of a different conception of historical temporality in the two philosophers, which circumvents, in different ways, both the unilinear, “Oedipal” and Platonic-Christian conception of time and the cyclical and recursive conception of the Stoic matrix, both of which are at the basis of the central western vision of historicity
Can Resonance Help to Analyze a Large Corpus of French Broadcast Homilies?
No full textThe concept of resonance proposed by Hartmut Rosa offers a relational and bidirectional perspective, providing a valuable lens to address certain limitations of the concept of agency in theology. Specifically, it avoids emphasizing a stark opposition between human and divine agency. In this paper, we aimed to explore how preachers articulate a resonant relationship solely through the verbs they employ. Building on Anne Agersnap and Kirstine Helboe Johansen’s research on a corpus of Danish sermons, we conducted a distant reading of a substantial corpus comprising 2900 French broadcasted homilies. We applied a statistical approach to analyze the verbs present in this corpus, aiming to characterize the type of relationships that emerge from them. By applying a similar process to other types of biblical and secular texts, we were able to compare the relational dynamics that distinguish each corpus. This approach enhances our understanding of the literary genre of these homilies and situates their theological style within broader contexts
From Consternation to Conventionality? Initial Insights from Research on Preachers’ Reactions to Political Events or: October 7th 2023 in German Sermons
No full textIn the broad field of discourse on the topic of political preaching, which is outlined at the beginning, this article takes a reductive approach and asks how preachers in Germany deal with Hamas\u27 attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 in their sermons. The essay offers initial insights into an empirical project that collected sermons from major German cities and examined them with regard to the aforementioned question. It posits the thesis that three phases can be distinguished: A first phase of speechlessness and consternation is followed by a second phase in which preachers integrate the events theologically. In the third phase, October 7 becomes a motif or an allusion. The first conclusions for political preaching and its liturgical environment are derived from this observation