1,720,986 research outputs found
Vital materialism and political theory: reanimating nature, reconstituting colonization?
Get PDFIn Western thought, the concept of nature has a long history in relation to the question of what or who counts as the subject of politics. This thesis works in the relatively recent body of work that engages the possibility of ‘re-vitalizing’ nature; challenging the legitimacy of mechanistic conceptions of nature with the aim of offering the possibility of consciously different behaviour in relation to the more-than-human world. I engage with Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, and Jane Bennett, in their thinking on the agency or ‘subjectivity’ of the extra-human world, nonhumans, and matter itself. While each author offers an analysis of the shortcomings of current political givens, and each proposes alternative but demonstrably associated ways of conceptually, ethically, and practically relating with nonhumans, this thesis asks: when thinking about taking nature into political account, in what ways are we at risk of forgetting the history and politics that excluded, obscured, or collapsed peoples into ‘nature’, as the very operation of bringing the modern subject of politics into being? In a resonance that will gain meaning as my text proceeds, colonization (of lands and bodies), the subject, and nature can be seen to form a triad for thought. My question, specifically, is to ask if, and how, the political-ecological history of colonization is omitted in the recent ontological impetus to think an animate nature.Graduat
Origins and openings: modernity, time, and finitude in Hobbes' political science
Get PDFThis thesis examines the politics of foundations in modern political thought through a reading and immanent critique of Hobbes’s Leviathan. I argue that his thought exemplifies a specifically modern problem of foundations insofar as he must establish political and scientific foundations on the basis of precisely the impossibility of foundation. Hobbes’s account of political founding and the establishment of scientific foundations is first and foremost a response to a condition of finitude in which foundations are no longer given or available but nevertheless demanded. While it appears that Hobbes describes the finitude of ‘Man’ and natural bodies and derives his political theory from these, in fact for Hobbes these no longer provide given foundations for political thought, but must themselves be posited in acts of political and epistemological projection. Hobbes’s politics of foundations therefore demands that we fabricate political and scientific foundations for ourselves and act as if they are not incalculable postulations but calculable necessities. I call this the problem of projection, in which political knowledge is possible only because we make it and posit it ourselves. Through a reading of the role of the metaphor of making in Hobbes’s account of political origins and sovereignty, I argue that this reading of Hobbes’s politics of origins as the institution of foundations in the face of the impossibility of foundation exposes finitude as a groundlessness to which there is no necessary political response. It does not necessarily demand the production of foundations through the institution of sovereignty. Hobbes’s Leviathan therefore provides a site in which we might begin to ask more precise empirical and theoretical questions about the transformative possibilities in the modern politics of foundations.Graduat
Securing the human: A critique of human security and The Responsibility to Protect
No full textThis thesis examines the discourse on human security, in particular the 2001 report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect. I contend that the human of human security is deeply indebted to an account of the modern subject that is also responsible for producing the model of the citizen/state relationship to which human security is conceived of as a response. Human security reaffirms the appropriateness of the sovereign state while at the same time re-conceiving sovereignty as responsibility and empowering certain international actors to intervene in sovereign states should they fail to act responsibly. Like the citizen, the ostensibly universal category of the human is produced through the exclusion or dehumanization of some ways of being human and some human beings. However, I also consider the ways in which human security works to humanize its subjects, producing the kinds of humans that can be secured
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Spectres of development: corrupted dreams of a chronically emerging Latin American giant
No full textLatin America has been envisioned, time and again, as home to the semi-civilized. Or so (post)colonial imaginaries continue to impress upon us in developmental renderings of a New World that has yet to take off. Neither backward (in the ways of a ‘dark continent’) or advanced (as guaranteed by the status of a ‘first world’), its giants are, at best, chronically emerging. This in-between position is acutely exemplified by the Brazilian dilemma of an interminable modernization, responsibilized for curing all of our ills. The most wide-ranging projects of development are mobilized within this context, but the closer that we get to their distinct materializations, the more that they appear to us as mirages of what ought to be rather than what is, measured against the incorruptible standards of a modernity realized somewhere ‘out there’. In this study, I look to everyday dynamics in Brazil’s aspiring world-city, Rio de Janeiro, that compose the fields and subjects on which development projects operate, in turn revealing and obscuring ‘successes’, ‘failures’, and ultimately, assorted desires and expectations that (mis)lead a politics of transformation in the peripheries of the modern world. In Part III, I elaborate this history of the present as a way to reorient such grand narratives of arrested development, corruption, and other ‘third world’ problems, by drawing on a range of sites of sociability that nurture particular kinds of relations between (dis)obedient subjects and their governing institutions. To this end, I reconceive the terms of debate for thinking about places of an allegedly incomplete or corrupted modernity, in Part II, where I largely reframe the problems that a developmental ethos appropriates for itself, which situates the third world as the constitutive outside of idealized ways of living. By investigating the predominant developmental archetypes of the last century of Brazil’s promised take-offs, in Part I, I set up the pathways to decondition and recondition how we think about the limits and possibilities of a peripheral politics of transformation. In these ways, I conclude that the standards of political judgement that follow from such idealized ways of living neutralize contentions and negotiations over how we want to live, here and now, making way for confused desires, expectations, and responsibilities more in line with (inter)nationalist paradigms and prescriptions than the politics of everyday life in out of the way [email protected]
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe 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
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