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AI ethics are not enough: Public relations, social justice and artificial intelligence
No full textThis chapter explores PR’s contribution to society and to social justice in respect of one of the most important debates of our time, the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in everyday life. AI is now interwoven with promotional culture in several ways. First, AI technologies are the speed and power behind digital advertising, which in turn funds the largest digital media platforms. Second, certain categories of AI have become popular tools for generating creative content – from images, animation and video to creative and promotional content. Third, the global technology (tech) sector is a leading spender on promotional activity. For all these reasons, AI and automation has become a subject of ethical concern for promotional professions. However, the rapid and far-reaching transformations wrought by AI underpin our argument that ethics are not enough. Presenting a conceptual map, we suggest that public relations can attend to social justice concerns by adapting its normative roles of contextual intelligence, ‘ethical counsel’ and boundary spanning, thus contributing to a fully functioning society
Expressivity in Rhetoric
No full textRhetoric names the study and practice of public speech and argument. Expressivity is central to rhetoric’s concerns because its focus is on performed argument aimed at influencing an audience’s judgement. Both cognitive and affective dimensions of speech are commonly deployed to dispose an audience intellectually and emotionally to a specific issue. That makes the distinction between expressive and non-expressive elements ambiguous and, by consequence, controversial, particularly as a medium of persuasion in civic discourse. This chapter explores the place of expressivity in rhetorical enquiry. It traces evolving attitudes towards expressive speech and its impact on audiences, from rhetoric’s ancient origins as advice on effective oratory through to modern scepticism concerning human passions. It highlights the enduring appeal of rhetorical analysis for interpreting expressivity and examines contrasting rhetorical approaches to the example of contemporary populism
Intellectual Monopoly and Income Inequality in the United States, 1948–2021: A Long-Run Analysis
Full text linkProponents of intellectual property claim that it fosters innovation and benefits companies and workers by increasing long-run growth. A growing body of literature challenges these claims by arguing that the cumulative nature of intellectual monopoly amplifies asymmetries between winners and losers. Intellectual monopolies pose disadvantages for countries, firms, consumers, and workers who struggle to maintain a leading position. Using data at the aggregate level from 1948 to 2021 in the United States, this article estimates the long-run effects of proprietary knowledge accumulation on income shares and tests the hypothesis that intellectual monopoly amplifies income inequality. The empirical evidence shows that companies in the United States transferred to wages a significant share of their profits from intellectual property. But these transfers have widened income inequality by benefiting the top 10 and top 25 percent, to the detriment of lower income brackets. Intellectual property alone can explain 23 percent of the increase in the income share of the top 10 percent in the 1948–2021 period
George Eliot and the Classics
No full textThis chapter examines the work which laid the foundation for Eliot’s recognition as a classicist, her responses to Greek and Latin literature in her journalism and early fiction and her depiction of classical education. It surveys the ways in which Eliot gained access to classical learning, responses to her novels by classical scholars, and her representations of classical education in her fiction, particularly in The Mill on the Floss. It explores how Eliot drew on Greek comedy and tragedy in realist fiction. Her allusions to Aeschylus and Sophocles in Scenes from Clerical Life, Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss prepared readers to understand Eliot’s claim that the lives of obscure people in the nineteenth century were significant and worthy of literary representation
Surface Imaginaries
No full text'Surface Imaginaries' is an essay written by Bethany Rigby that examines how prospects of microbial extra terrestrial mining challenge engrained imaginations of future space colonisation.
This essay was published as part of an e-flux series titled "Off Earth". Editors Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Marija Marić.
Contributors Bethany Rigby, Ana María Gómez López, Fred Scharmen, Megan Eardley, Rory Rowan, Thandi Loewenson
Off Earth series description: "Alongside ambitious promises of infinite resources, techno-utopian visions of futuristic space settlements, and neo-colonial ambitions of outer-planetary land grabs, space—and the Moon in particular—has become the latest resource frontier. It has also emerged as a field for the political renegotiation of human life beyond Earth, from the conditions of human labor to the racialized and gendered histories of bodily standards.
Editorial: Artificial intelligence: cultural policy, management, education, and research
Full text linkTimes of great change offer significant opportunities for research as often hidden practices and assumptions are uncovered by the fracturing impacts of new challenges. Structural weaknesses become more pronounced, demands for innovation increasingly desperate, threats are crystalised and new opportunities are pursued in plain sight. Applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI), broadly conceived, have recently and increasingly driven such change in the Creative and Cultural Industries
Developing a culturally responsive pedagogy: making the national curriculum more inclusive and relevant to pupils' lives and identities
Full text linkContribution to a collection of recommendations for change by Black researchers and practitioners
Strategically Ambiguous and Deniable: Paramilitary Violence and Psychological Warfare in the 1990s
No full textThe security network mobilised during the conflict with the PKK in the late 1980s and 1990s reveals a complex and intertwined system of formal and informal, official and unofficial, and legal and illegal units. The chapter examines how the simultaneous centred/de-centred and overt/covert nature of this paramilitary network, along with its strategic ambiguity and deniability, played a crucial role in the psychological warfare of the 1990s. In addition to the structure of the paramilitary network, its brutal, arbitrary, and unpredictable violence further exacerbated the repression in the region. Paramilitary violence manifested not only as overt physical violence but also as more insidious forms of psychological violence, effectively blurring reality and instilling chaos, uncertainty, fear, and paranoia among the Kurdish population. This chapter argues that the Turkish state utilised paramilitary groups not only for the convenience of plausible deniability but also for other strategic reasons. The plausible and implausible deniability of paramilitary violence served different functions for diverse audiences. The official denial of violence, clear as daylight, reinforced sovereign violence, stripping the Kurds of their epistemic and testimonial agency while simultaneously designating them as deserving of violence and unworthy of attention. For the wider Turkish society, this official denial along with the celebration of perpetrators created complicit, actively ignorant, and complacent subjectivities
Readdressing Addiction Stigma: Making Space for Being in the World Differently
Full text linkIn this chapter, the author develops thinking from their monograph, Injecting Bodies in More-than-Human Worlds. They take up an understanding of stigma as relational and explore the ways that people who use drugs are prevented from living full lives: not through their drug use but through these toxic connections. Exploring three such events of ‘blocked becoming’, the chapter conceptualises stigma as a life-limiting socio-material process. Where a narrow understanding of stigma as socially produced has led scholars and activists to look to science and ‘matter’ as a way out, this research highlights the limits of such an approach. Posing the medical category of addiction as a problem rather than a solution to stigma, the author considers how people who use drugs think of and inhabit their drug use as an alternative way of being, refusing pathology. It is by better attuning to and responding to these modes that destigmatisation can take place
Performing Currency: Money Art in America
No full textHow has American “money art” responded to new developments in financialized capitalism? Why do bills and coins continue to feature prominently in American art, given the turn toward cashless transactions? This chapter first contextualizes these questions, by considering prominent historical themes in American money art. Then, it focuses on how works from the past three decades by Dread Scott, Martha Rosler, and Pope.L explore the relationship between money and everyday performance. These works position coins and bills as objects that continue to organize people’s actions, behaviors, and beliefs, even though their roles in society are changing. Within financialized capitalism, people’s embodied habits of handling money reveal a tacit faith in currency as a trusted store of value – even as crisis-ridden financial systems upend commonsense faith in money. Scott, Rosler, and Pope.L, among other artists, inaugurate an approach to money art that I term “performing currency”: choreographing action around coins and bills as a way to contemplate how rapidly changing financial conditions clash with long-standing embodied habits of handling money