1,720,982 research outputs found
“A kind of symphony”: new nature in Jeff VanderMeer’s southern reach trilogy
No full textMagister Artium - MAThe Anthropocene is the proposed name for a new geological epoch that has come about due to significant human changes to climate and environment. In response to the Anthropocene crisis, this thesis proposes a re-evaluation of the agency of non-human interlocuters – ultimately questioning the place of humans in the natural world. This viewpoint is explored through an examination of the New Weird, a literary genre that blends elements of transgressive horror and speculative fiction, often with an environmental lens. A close reading of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy reveals an attempt to challenge the conventional boundaries between human and non-human, which is predominantly achieved through an invocation of the ecological uncanny – a blurring of ontological, epistemological, and ethical boundary lines between humans and the environment. The Southern Reach novels present an environment where the fixed laws of nature proposed by reductive science begin to unravel. Therefore, VanderMeer – through elements of the genre of contemporary fantasy and science fiction known as the New Weird – casts doubt on the separation of humans and nature. The critique of the human/nature binary is something that is explored extensively by continental philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as feminist scholars like Stacy Alaimo, Rosi Braidotti, Donna J. Haraway, and Elizabeth A. Povinelli, who can all broadly be termed as ‘new materialist’ thinkers – owing to their insistence on cultivating new modes of thinking about human and non-human relations. It is through the combination of various new materialist theories and New Weird fiction that I am able to formulate an argument for a less anthropocentric reading of the Anthropocene; an interpretation that draws no distinction between nature and the human, and which allows for different forms of existence that exceed the human
An octo-aesthetic figuration for learning in times of crisis
Full text linkThis theoretical paper mobilises a multi-modal figuration – octo-aesthetics – to argue for a transversal approach to HE (higher education) pedagogies appropriate to times of uncertainty. Using the eight independently thinking arms of the octopus as a guide, I deploy eight interrelated conceptual thinking aids to outline the relevance of an ethico-aesthetic paradigm to HE in times of individual, social, and environmental crisis. Deployed as speculative thinking aids, these octo- aesthetic figurations – schizoanalysis, bewilderment, shimmer, ecosophy, ecologicity, holobiont, trans-corporeality, and geontology – reclaim ‘vision’ and ‘objectivity’ from the disembodied all- knowing gaze of ‘Man’ and queer the central, and often unquestioned positions of privilege accorded to this viewpoint in humanist education systems. Calling into question anthropocentric binary/separatist humanist logics and assumptions of objective mastery, octo-aesthetic figurations reveal the onto-ethical outlines of a transversally situated learning modality that defies objectifying majoritarian modes of thinking/learning that are no longer appropriate to pedagogies in times of ecological calamity
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Toward a Speculative Pedagogy
No full textIn resistance to capitalist logics of speculation, this article argues for audacious pedagogies of speculative fabulation. The kinds of pedagogical endeavours that times of uncertainty call for are by no means straightforward, calling as I argue along with Elizabeth de Freitas (2020) writing in this issue, for more venturesome approaches informed by speculative posthuman inquiries and exploratory new materialisms. The Anthropocene or Capitalocene are terms that capture equivocal nature of the crisis-riven present. Laden with contradiction and destruction, these descriptors also embody strange afterlives. Beyond problematic present/futures produced by humans only for themselves lie intimate and uncanny sympoiesis, world-buildings and meaningmakings with non-human others and more than human processes. In accounting for these as well as for the already entangled material conditions of our time, pedagogy needs to pay attention to the slippery nature of cognition itself; a task to which the genre of science-fiction or speculative fabulation (SF) is primed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Donna J. Haraway’s ecofeminism revisited: Critical new materialist pedagogies for Anthropocenic crisis times
Full text linkBy bringing feminist science studies scholar Donna J. Haraway’s A manifesto for cyborgs (1985) and Situated knowledges (1988) in line with contemporary critical new materialist thought (see Colman & Van der Tuin, 2024; Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2012; Geerts, 2022), this critical pedagogical and philosophical think piece tackles the problematic of Anthropocenic disruptions of the planetary biosphere for critical pedagogies and higher education (also see Carstens, 2016). It additionally encourages its readers to think through their own pedagogical conceptions and praxes by means of irruptive (Geerts & Carstens, 2024; Koro-Ljungberg, 2015) selfreflection- stimulating questions. Our situated – and thus limited and open-ended – response to this all-encompassing Anthropocenic crisis is rooted in a rethinking of Harawayan cyborgian and situated knowledges and the critical pedagogical lessons drawn from the latter. Rereading Haraway’s work through contemporary critical new materialist and related scholarship reveals that it already contained an ecofeminist onto-epistemological shift toward more-than-human agency and relationality. This shift has major consequences for all things critical pedagogical and educational, as our pedagogical thinking-doings are deeply embedded in today’s crisis-ridden lifeworld. This rereading exercise furthermore underlines the necessity of an updated critical new materialist pedagogical praxis for learning and teaching, inspired by Harawayan ecofeminism, that takes the entanglements between human, dehumanised, and more-than-human actors seriously
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