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Thinking with the renegade
Get PDFIn this article I bring into focus some renegade sources that have largely been overlooked, as the renegade has consistently been presented as a figure of the sixteenth and seventeenth, rather than fourteenth and fifteenth, centuries. In my reading, the renegade traces resistance, mimicry, and ambiguity in the interplay between imperial regimes , pointing to occluded histories of sameness and ambivalence of identity . This chimes with recent work by Marcel Elias on pre-modern Orientalism which emphasizes the complications of identity beyond an ‘us/them’ dichotomy. Such thinking embraces moments of assimilation and ambiguity in colonial and proto-colonial encounters, as well as acknowledging points of similarity and sameness between subjects in these encounters
Digital surveillance
Get PDFExisting scholarship on digital surveillance may offer relevant insights for empirically-oriented political communication research, given that much contemporary political communication occurs on digital platforms and services designed to facilitate surveillance. This encyclopaedia entry provides a concise overview of key concepts from surveillance studies, including disciplinary, corporate, and participatory surveillance, and examines the role of digital surveillance among actors involved in the political communication process
From offline to online stigma resistance: identity construction in narratives of infertile Muslim women
Get PDFThis paper is the first to address the impact of gendered, cultural and religious discourses on an under-researched subaltern group of infertile Muslim women bloggers. Taking a small story and case study approach, the analysis focuses on interactivity and positioning (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008, Georgakopoulou, 2008) in one woman’s stories as she works hard to address normative expectations and dominant discourses which abound in Muslim societies. The paper highlights the stigmatisation and isolation women face, not only in the physical world, but sometimes in the online world too. We argue that Weblogs provide a unique and unexplored space where discourses of gender, sexual, and other identities are resisted and challenged. Simultaneously Weblogs can serve as both supportive and exclusionary sites in which bloggers’ rights and duties become regulated. The study opens a window into the world of infertile Muslim women and has important implications for relevant healthcare and policy making
Living together
No full textBook synopsis: What would a Butlerian Marxism look like? Marxist criticisms of Butler range from careful comparisons of forms to the total dismissal of an unpolitical, merely cultural anarchy. None of these criticisms, however, focuses on what seems to most closely unite these two projects: the universal abolition of the universal. While Marxist communism is focused on the abolition of value and property, Butler is consistently concerned throughout their corpus with the abolition of the subject as the universal form of social relations, an abolition staged by way of a relational ontology and ethics. Their methodologies for achieving abolition, however, vary hugely. While Butler sees the performativity of subjects and power as an opportunity for differential assembly, Marxists are primarily concerned with the working class as a revolutionary vanguard that withdraws its labor from production.
Judith Butler and Marxism explores the possibility of a Butlerian Marxism, understood as abolitionist performativity, differential vulnerability, and generalized practices of care. The essays in this volume attempt to actualize the antagonistic persistence of social particulars, pursuing the abolition of the domination and violence that pervade society with increasing brutality. The three sections of this volume are structured according to three pivotal political concepts in Butler’s corpus: performativity, vulnerability, and care. Each essay contributes to a possible mutual development of Butler’s and Marxism’s concern with assembly, interdependence, and refusal, forming a revolutionary politics of care.
This is the first book to fully study the contentious link between the vastly influential projects of Judith Butler and Marxism
Life satisfaction and tax preferences in transition economies
Get PDFIn this work, we adopt the recent perspective that higher quality of life enhances individuals' civic engagement, making them more committed to societal well-being and more willing to contribute to improving the social and institutional environment. Specifically, focusing on transition economies, we examine the role of life satisfaction in shaping individuals' willingness to pay higher taxes to support public goods such as education, healthcare, aid for those in need, and efforts to combat climate change. Using data from the Life in Transition Survey, we find that individuals with greater life satisfaction are more inclined to contribute towards a range of public and common goods. These findings are robust across various sensitivity analyses and sample specifications. Our results underscore the significance of life satisfaction in fostering civic engagement and enhancing contributions to societal well-being
Perceived hand size and perceived hand weight
Get PDFThe dimensions of objects and our body parts influence our perception of the weight of objects in our surroundings. It has been recently described a dramatic underestimation of the perceived weight of the hand. However, little is known on how perceived size informs the perceived weight of our own body parts. Here we investigated the effects of embodying an enlarged and a shrunken hand on perceived hand weight. We manipulated hand size using a visual-tactile illusion with magnifying and minifying mirrors. We then measured perceived hand weight using a psychophysical matching task in which participants estimate if a weight hanged on their wrist feels heavier or lighter than the experienced weight of their hand. Our results indicated that participants tended to underestimate the weight of their hand more when embodying a smaller hand, and less so when embodying a larger hand. That is, the perceived size of the hand plays a role in shaping its perceived weight. Importantly, our results revealed that the perception of the weight of body parts is processed differently from the perception of object weight, demonstrating resistance to the size-weight illusion. We suggest a model based on constant density to elucidate the influence of hand size in determining hand weight
Is users rating becoming overpowering? The risks of inappropriate use of digital feedback
No full textDigital technologies have made it easy to generate feedback on the performance of products and services. They have contributed significantly to reducing the information asymmetries between producers and consumers, between suppliers and users of public goods, and between politicians and citizens. It seems that Web 2.0 has enhanced the effectiveness of the "voice" evoked by Albert Hirschman in the 1970s. But they can also provide an illicit form of workers assessment which users often provide without being aware of. Is there a risk that the feedback provided and the connected
rating may become too invasive, so much as to constitute a threat to the confidentiality of individual data? We distinguish between three types of feedback: 1) bottom-up feedback, occurring when many persons evaluate and comment on the performance of organizations; 2) the transversal one, which happens when a series of individuals exchange comments, appreciations and reciprocal evaluations; 3) the top-down one, when organizations assign a rating to individuals. This tripartition may be useful
to design policies for control over data, individual behaviour and workers’ protection, mitigating current and potential risks
Review of Binding Media by Élika Ortega
Get PDFUltimately, Binding Media left me with one conclusion and one unresolved question. The conclusion is that Ortega’s terminology—“binding media”—is a useful phrase that should enter the critical lexicon. It gives us the means through which to consider these hybrid media forms, not as just paratextual objects, but as core parts of distributed books. It would be good to see this descriptive project expanded on a global scale, beyond just the Americas
Sheltering from crisis: living the Third Century in Roman Syria
No full textWhat does it mean to live through times of crisis? Can urban landscapes be used to understand the third century crisis on a human scale? Looking particularly at the transformations of houses in the urban environments of Syria at sites such as Zeugma and Dura-Europos, this chapter uses archaeological evidence to examine the lived experience of the third century crisis. Dwelling on the ephemeral and ordinary as a means of accessing the lives of those whose stories are occluded by more spectacular historical crises, and drawing on lessons about dispossession, displacement, and domicide from contemporary disasters, this chapter asks what happens when we are more attentive to the slow violence that occurs, generally unremarked, in the background of the historical narratives that frame our chronologies and approaches
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