NUI Maynooth Eprint Archive
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Soil, Soul & Society in the Educational Encounter
No full textThe study sets out a vision of education that is rooted in the importance of
connection, existentially, ecologically and in terms of community. The work
opens with a critique of what I refer to as product-orientated education which I
suggest is no longer sufficient for current times and context. I argue that such
a view of education is problematic and especially in a wider economic culture
that valorises growth, autonomy and freedom.
The thesis is interested in developing an additional view of education that is
based on encounter which is orientated to soil, soul and society. The intention
is to discover what are the implications for the teacher, student and education
itself, when connection with these three dimensions become the focus of the
educational task. In doing so I pay attention to emancipation, homonomy and
sufficiency, the experiences of arrival, liminality and harvest, in relation to
education.
Alongside the philosophical envisioning of education, I weave a range of
narrative materials, the central one being concerned with a personal education
experience which serves to illuminate much of the theoretical discussion.
However, the importance of story has broader implications for the study in
terms of my research methodology. Vocative text, narratives from both formal
and informal educational contexts are incorporated throughout as a way of
breaking into, or opening up, the phenomenological terrain of education which
seeks reconnection with soil, soul and society
Adaptive Chaotic Maps in Cryptography Applications
No full textChaotic cryptography is a promising area for the safe and fast transmission, processing, and storage of data. However, many developed chaos-based cryptographic primitives do not meet the size and composition of the keyspace and computational complexity. Another common problem of such algorithms is dynamic degradation caused by computer simulation with finite data representation and rounding of results of arithmetic operations. The known approaches to solving these problems are not universal, and it is difficult to extend them to many chaotic systems. This chapter describes discrete maps with adaptive symmetry, making it possible to overcome several disadvantages of existing chaos-based cryptographic algorithms simultaneously. The property of adaptive symmetry allows stretching, compressing, and rotating the phase space of such maps without significantly changing the bifurcation properties. Therefore, the synthesis of one-way piecewise functions based on adaptive maps with different symmetry coefficients supposes flexible control of the keyspace size and avoidance of dynamic degradation due to the embedded technique of perturbing the chaotic trajectory
Marxist Approaches to the Study of Political Participation
No full textThis article discusses the contributions of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and later Marxists to
understanding political participation. It argues that Marxism is fundamentally historical, so
that rather than assuming a fixed and general institutional situation across states and periods
the Marxist contribution can best be expressed as empirical questions about popular
participation in specific contexts. The expectation is one of popular attempts to assert
participation in decision-making, with institutional forms shaped by the outcome of such
struggles between social movements from below and the agency of the powerful. This
argument is illustrated with examples from the struggle for democracy in Europe since the
19th century, the changing nature of political participation in postcolonial India, “the world’s
largest democracy”, and popular politics in the age of austerity
“Sí Teanga na Muintire a Shlánós an Mhuintir”: Ó Cadhain, Rhetoric, and Immanence
No full textWhen are tropes merely tropes, and when and how can they be understood as "literal"? This chapter examines the rhetoric and writings of the Irish-language Writer, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, for whom cré (clay) was both a rhetorical/artistic trope and an immanent force within human society
Thematic Section: Economic Nationalisms in a World on Fire
No full textIn a time when many national governments are rhetorically, if not practically, turning away from global collaboration and emphasizing economic nationalisms, understood here as a plurality of historically and politically contextualized policies, the authors in this thematic issue explore the possible contributions of comparative ethnographic analyses of economic nationalisms to interdisciplinary, transnational analyses. In this introduction to the thematic section, the editors note the turn to economic nationalisms in the current context of global crises, review the literature on economic nationalisms, and illustrate the strong political and historical variations in economic nationalisms within even the same nation, using India as an example. The three ethnographic articles in this thematic section are discussed in relation to each other. They offer examples from Turkey, Italy, Guatemala and the U.S., with a shared focus on economic nationalisms and the reliance on the labor of transnational migrants displaced by war, land grabs, and climate change even as those vital contributors to national economies are denied cultural and national citizenship – an irony rendered all the more visible during the COVID-19 pandemic
Climate change policy processes and pastoralism in the Horn of Africa: Old wine in new bottles?
No full textThere is a growing body of knowledge on the effects of climatic and other forms
of dynamic change on pastoralism in the Horn of Africa. But less is known about
what influences how policy-‐makers respond to these changes. Policies are
shaped by a certain set of discourses and narratives, as well as by political
interests. To understand how this works, we can use an environmental policy
narrative approach. This seeks to identify and unpack how particular discourses
are ‘framed’ within policy, what forms of knowledge count, and whose
understandings and interests are legitimat
Brief Report on Reviews of Athena Swan - 7 March 2022
No full textThe objective of the Advance HE Athena Swan Charter Framework is to support higher
education institutions, academic departments, and professional units in impactful and
sustainable gender equality work and to build capacity for evidence-based equality work.
MU was the first Irish institution to apply under the expanded version of the Athena Swan
charter that includes Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences disciplines as well as Science,
Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine. It also incorporates intersectionality,
taking into account the numerous factors that can overlap with gender inequality, including
the intersections between gender, race and ethnicity. The underrepresentation of men
where relevant, is also considered
Sorting the City
No full textFor many Dubliners, the river Liffey forms a significant
division, between quality to the south and poverty to the
north. For many years, and until early in 2019, a billboard
advertising a popular drink on the bridge that took trains
across Lower Gardiner Street asked Dubliners passing
beneath whether they were a ‘North Cider or South
Cider?’ In 2015, convalescent beds at Mount Carmel
community hospital in south Dublin were empty because
“of a reluctance of northside patients to cross the Liffey”.
In fact, the hospital was five kilometres south of the
city and at some distance from public transportation,
little bother to car-owning folk but an expensive hurdle
for others. Provision in the south and hardship in the
north; these differences are the result of the way
the territory of the city is marked out and managed.
There is nothing casual about the social geography
of Dublin. It has always been inherently political
Producing Humans: An Anthropology of Social and Cognitive Robots
No full textIn this thesis, I ask how the human is produced in robotics research,
focussing specifically on the work that is done to create humanoid robots
that exhibit social and intelligent behaviour. Robots, like other technologies,
are often presented as the result of the systematic application of progressive
scientific knowledge over time, and thus emerging as inevitable, ahistorical,
and a-territorial entities. However, as we shall see, the robot’s existence as a
recognisable whole, as well as the various ways in which researchers
attempt to shape, animate and imbue it ‘human-like’ qualities, is in fact the
result of specific events, in specific geographical and cultural locations.
Through an ethnographic investigation of the sites in which robotics
research takes place, I describe and analyse how, in robotics research,
robotics researchers are reflecting, reproducing, producing, and sometimes
challenging, core assumptions about what it means to be human.
The dissertation draws on three and a half years of ethnographic
research across a number of robotics research laboratories and field sites in
Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States between April 2016 and
December 2019. It also includes an investigation of the sites where robotics
knowledge is disseminated and evaluated, such as conferences and field test
sites. Through a combination of participant and non-participant observation,
interviews, and textual analysis, I explore how the robot reveals
assumptions about the human, revealing both individual, localised
engineering cultures, as well as wider Euro-American imaginaries.
In this dissertation, I build on existing ethnographies of laboratory
work and technological production, which investigate scientific laboratories
as cultural sites. I also contribute to contemporary debates in anthropology
and posthumanist theory, which question the foundational assumptions of
humanism. While contemporary scholarship has attempted to move beyond
the nature/culture binary by articulating a multitude of reconfigurations and
boundary negotiations, I argue that this is done by neglecting the body.
In order to address this gap, I bring together two complementary
conceptual devices. First, I employ the embodiment philosophy of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (2012; 1968) particularly his emphasis on the body as a site
of knowing the world. Second, I use the core anthropological concept of the
‘fetish’ as elaborated by William Pietz (1985). By interrogating the robot as
‘fetish’, I elaborate how the robot is simultaneously a territorialised,
historicised, personalised, and reified object. This facilitates an exploration
of the disparate, and often contradictory nature, of the relations between
people and objects.
In my thesis, I find many boundary reconfigurations and dissolutions
between the human and the robot. However, deviating from the relational
ontology dominant in the anthropology of technology, I discover an
enduring asymmetry between the human and the robot, with the living body
emerging as a durable category that cannot be reasoned away. Thus, my
thesis questions how the existing literature might obscure important
questions about the category of the human by focusing disproportionately
on the blurring and/or blurred nature of human/non-human boundaries.
Ultimately, I argue for a collaborative and emergent configuration of the
human, and its relationship with the world, that is at once both relational
and embodied.
This dissertation is structured as follows. An initial introductory
chapter is followed by a chapter documenting the literature review and
conceptual framework. This is followed by four chapters that correspond to
the four aspects of the fetish in Pietz’s model: Historicisation,
Territorialisation, Reification and Personalisation. These chapters alternate
between scholarly sources and ethnographic data. In Historicisation, using
existing scholarship, I trace the history of the robot object, including the
continuities and discontinuities that led to its creation, as well as the futures
that are implicated in its identity. This is followed by the Territorialisation
chapter, in which ethnographic data is used to interrogate the robot’s
materiality, as well as the spaces in which it is built, modified, and tested.
The next chapter, Reification, considers the robot as a valuable object
according to institutions and the productive and ideological systems of
Euro-American imaginaries. This chapter integrates ethnographic detail
with existing scholarship to focus on contrasts between the dominant image
of imminent super-human intelligence and the human interventions and
social relationships necessary to produce the illusion of robot autonomy.
Finally, the chapter Personalisation brings ethnographic attention to the
intensely personal way that the robot-as-fetish is experienced in an
encounter with an embodied person, understood through the lens of
Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment philosophy. In the final chapter, I draw
together the various strands to articulate how understanding the robot as a
fetish, underscored by Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment phenomenology, can
provide useful resources for developing an alternative understanding of the
human in anthropology without dissolving it all together
‘Why? And how?’ Translating queer theologies of sex education
No full textThis paper engages with two overarching questions: why is engaging with queer theologies potentially valuable for sex education, and how can we carry out this kind of work without rendering sex education an expression of queer theological commitment? In responding to the first of these questions, I argue that working with queer theologies can offer sex education researchers another way of thinking about, and with, theology – one that resists positioning theology as inevitably heteronormative through its attention to the body, embraces the multiple possibilities of queer subjecthood, and attends to the importance of context in understanding how heteronormativity is both reproduced and resisted. Following this, I turn to the second question animating this paper, suggesting that if we are to avoid sex education sliding into an inevitable expression of queer theological commitment, what is needed is a methodology for the translation for sex education research, in which queer theologies can ‘meet’ with sex education without at the same time ‘merging’ with it. I demonstrate how this might be enacted through the symbol of the ‘Abrahamic threesome’, a queer symbolic device of my own design