This article explores various analytical issues involved in conceptualizing the interrelationships of gender, class, race and ethnicity and other social divisions. It compares the debate on these issues that took place in Britain in the 1980s and around the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism. It examines issues such as the relative helpfulness of additive or mutually constitutive models of intersectional social divisions; the different analytical levels at which social divisions need to be studied, their ontological base and their relations to each other. The final section of the article attempts critically to assess a specific intersectional methodological approach for engaging in aid and human rights work in the South.

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Intersectionality and Feminist Politics

STS research has devoted relatively little attention to the promotion and reception of science and technology by non-scientific actors and institutions. One consequence is that the relationship of science and technology to political power has tended to remain undertheorized. This article aims to fill that gap by introducing the concept of “sociotechnical imaginaries.” Through a comparative examination of the development and regulation of nuclear power in the US and South Korea, the article demonstrates the analytic potential of the imaginaries concept. Although nuclear power and nationhood have long been imagined together in both countries, the nature of those imaginations has remained strikingly different. In the US, the state’s central move was to present itself as a responsible regulator of a potentially runaway technology that demands effective “containment.” In South Korea, the dominant imaginary was of “atoms for development” which the state not only imported but incorporated into its scientific, technological and political practices. In turn, these disparate imaginaries have underwritten very different responses to a variety of nuclear shocks and challenges, such as Three Mile Island (TMI), Chernobyl, and the spread of the anti-nuclear movement.

Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear Power in the United States and South Korea

In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a recursive publica public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place.Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.

/pdf/two-bits-the-cultural-significance-of-free-software-37vdzpopw4.pdf

Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software

https://www.degrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/In-defense-of-degrowth.pdf

In defence of degrowth

L'exercise du pouvoir dans les etats africains depuis l'lndependance—generalisee ici sous le terme de “post-colonisation”—a ete marque par un penchant pour les ceremonies et par un esprit d'apparat plus surprenant quand Ton considere le caractere et combien illusoire sont des grands travaux realises par ces etats. De plus, le pouvoir est applique a un degre de violence et de pure exploitation dont l'on trouve les antecedents dans les precedents resgimes coloniaux. Le peuple reagit par la voie de l'indecence qui s'exprime dans des festivites obscenes. La question generate est de comprendre la raison pour laquelle ce pouvoir, en depit de ses limites evidentes, a semble-t-il autant de portee. Et plus precisement, pourquoi la population joue-t-elle apparemment le jeu de son gouvernement? Comment peut-elle a la fois se moquer des simagrees de ses gouvernants et toutefois prendre part a leur celebration? L'argumentation soutenue ici, d'apres les faits tires principalement du Cameroon et du Togo, explique que, si l'on centre l'analyse sur les precedes detailles et les rituels de cette concertation, il devient clair qu'il se produit une intimite, un lien presque familial, dans la relation entre gouvernants et gouvernes, ce qui desarme emcacement les deux camps et met le jeu du pouvoir en representation.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0001972000057909

Provisional notes on the postcolony

"[T]he most original, ambitious, and reflective attempt to think through the liberating mediation of history, society, external and internal nature once again as praxis". -- Ju rgen Habermas, "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity" "Castoriadis's "The Imaginary Institution of Society" is a work of great power and originality. As a work of social theory, I would argue that it belongs in a class with the writings of Habermas and Arendt". -- Jay Bernstein, University of Essex This is one of the most original and important works of contemporary European thought. First published in France in 1975, it is the major theoretical work of one of the foremost thinkers in Europe today. Castoriadis offers a brilliant and far-reaching analysis of the unique character of the social-historical world and its relations to the individual, to language, and to nature. He argues that most traditional conceptions of society and history overlook the essential feature of the social-historical world, namely that this world is not articulated once and for all but is in each case the creation of the society concerned. In emphasizing the element of creativity, Castoriadis opens the way for rethinking political theory and practice in terms of the autonomous and explicit self-institution of society.

The Imaginary Institution of Society

L'institution imaginaire de la société

La institución imaginaria de la sociedad

These ten essays by Castoriadis, one of Europe's foremost social and political thinkers, include his latest contributions to philosophy, politics, social thought, aesthetics, and the philosophy of science The author examines the 'co-birth' of philosophy and politics to show how the Greeks' questioning of ideas and institutions gave rise to the 'project of autonomy' The 'end of philosophy' proclaimed by Postmodernism, he warns, would mean the end of this project That end is now hastened by the lethal expansion of technoscience, the waning of political and social conflict, and the resignation of intellectuals who blindly defend Western culture as it is or who merely 'deconstruct' it as it has been

Philosophy, politics, autonomy

Contents PART I PART II PART III PART IV Appendix

Cornelius Castoriadis

Papers

The Imaginary Institution of Society

L'institution imaginaire de la société

La institución imaginaria de la sociedad

Philosophy, politics, autonomy

World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination