Mike Ball

Bio: Mike Ball is an academic researcher from Staffordshire University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Meditation & Ethnomethodology. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 10 publications receiving 112 citations.

Ethnomethodology and the visual : practices of looking, visualization, and embodied action

Abstract: The chapter considers the relevance of ethnomethodology for visual studies through an examination of selected studies. Ethnomethodology’s distinctive contribution to visual studies arises from its unremitting concern to analyse the specific details of social practices as they are enacted in situ. The essential observability of the details of these practices is the point of departure for ethnomethodology’s interest in how ordinary practices are produced and recognized by members of society. The chapter examines how ethnomethodological research studies address the visual dimension. Its orientation is broadly historical and methodological. We stress the role of technical developments that have facilitated the recording of the visual specifics of social practices. The impact of Goodwin’s enormously productive notion of ‘professional vision’ is traced. Our chapter shows the continuing relevance of ethnomethodological studies of the visual in light of current empirical and theoretical preoccupations with materiality and embodiment.

Images, language and numbers in company reports: a study of documents that are occasioned by a legal requirement for financial disclosure

Abstract: The substantive area of this article is Annual Company Reports. These comprise documents that are in the public domain. For our purposes, they are an example of what is termed in the methodological literature ‘unobtrusive methods’. Company Reports are assembled from numerical, textual and visual content. This article examines certain developments within Annual Company Reports; namely, the increasing extension beyond the legal requirement for numerical financial disclosure. An extension that often includes upbeat textual descriptions of the organization, and expansion into the domain of visual representations, images and graphs. The article considers aspects of the analytical and accountable status of the visual and textual discretionary additions within Company Reports. It also addresses certain practical implications of designing Company Reports for a non-homogenous audience.

Working with images in daily life and police practice: an assessment of the documentary tradition

Abstract: There is a growing body of literature within the humanities and social sciences that is directly critical of the documentary tradition’s treatment and use of still and moving images as realistic data. The documentary tradition claims that it is possible to visually document social scenes with cameras. Postmodernism, poststructuralism, critical theory and related traditions argue that still and moving images amount to representations, their critique of realism. As instruments, cameras are open to a variety of uses ranging from the scientific to the artistic in orientation. Such uses of cameras comprise representational work. Following Garfinkel, this article suggests that the documentary method of sense making is employed in numerous practical situations.This article commences with an overview of the documentary tradition and then offers a brief case study of certain of these principles in operation within the practical work of the police and road users on public highways. Public highways and traffic flows...

Documenting Acts of Cruelty: The Practice of Violent Criminals Making Visual Records of Their Crimes

Abstract: The substantive focus of this article is a small collection of image-based case studies of significant criminal acts of interpersonal cruelty that are now in the public domain. In all instances those engaged in criminal acts of violence record and document aspects of their own behavior. The case studies range from military personnel and terrorists to examples from popular culture. Self-created images have the potential to serve as evidence of criminal behavior. For the viewing public recorded images are attributed with a “commonsense” evidential documentary potential. The article looks at the documentary method and the rationale behind recorded images serving evidential purposes.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Abstract: Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature brings to light the deep sense of crisis within the profession of academic philosophy which is similar to the paralyzing pluralism in contemporary theology and the inveterate indeterminacy of literary criticism. Richard Rorty's provocative and profound meditations impel philosophers to examine the problematic status of their discipline— only to discover that modern European philosophy has come to an end. Rorty strikes a deathblow to modern European philosophy by telling a story about the emergence, development and decline of its primary props: the correspondence theory of truth, the notion of privileged representations and the idea of a self-reflective transcendental subject. Rorty's fascinating tale—his-story —is regulated by three fundamental shifts which he delineates in detail and promotes in principle: the move toward anti-realism or conventionalism in ontology, the move toward the demythologizing of the Myth of the Given or anti-foundationalism in epistemology, and the move toward detranscendentalizing the subject or dismissing the mind as a sphere of inquiry. The chief importance of Rorty's book is that it brings together in an original and intelligible narrative the major insights of the patriarchs of postmodern American philosophy—W. V. Quine, Wilfred Sellars, and Nelson Goodman— and persuasively presents the radical consequences of their views for contemporary philosophy. Rorty credits Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Dewey for having "brought us into a period of 'revolutionary' philosophy" by undermining the prevailing Cartesian and Kantian paradigms and advancing new conceptions of philosophy. And these monumental figures surely inspire Rorty. Yet, Rorty's philosophical debts—the actual sources of his particular anti-Cartesian and antiKantian arguments—are Quine's holism, Sellars' anti-foundationalism, and Goodman's pluralism. In short, despite his adamant attack on analytical philosophy—the last stage of modern European philosophy—Rorty feels most comfortable with the analytical form of philosophical argumentation (shunned by Wittgenstein and Heidegger). From the disparate figures of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey, Rorty gets a historicist directive: to eschew the quest for certainty and the search for foundations.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Abstract: 13 EADERS of Mr. Bertrand Russell's philosophical £v works know that one of his pupils before the outbreak of the war, an Austrian, Mr. Ludwig Wittgenstein, caused him to change his views in some important particulars. Curiosity can now be satisfied. The “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus “which Mr. Ogden has included in his new library of philosophy is a remarkable and strikingly original work. It is published in German and English in parallel pages. It is difficult to appreciate the reason for this, seeing that the author is evidently familiar with our language and has himself carefully revised the proofs of the translation. Also we should have liked to have the Tractatus without Mr. Russell's Introduction, not, we hasten to add, on account of any fault or shortcoming in that introduction, which is highly appreciative and in part a defence of himself, in part explanatory of the author, but for the reason that good wine needs no bush and that Mr. Russell's bush has the unfortunate effect of dulling the palate instead of whetting the appetite. In his penultimate sentence Mr. Russell says; “To have constructed a theory of logic which is not at any point obviously wrong is to have achieved a work of extraordinary difficulty and importance.” We agree, but how uninspiring when compared with Mr. Wittgenstein's own statement of aim: “What can be said at all can be said clearly, and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. By Ludwig Wittgenstein. (International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method.) Pp. 189. (London: Kegan Paul and Co., Ltd.; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., Inc., 1922.) 10s. 6d. net.

Regarding the Pain of Others

Abstract: Continuous casting process for the production of hollow ingot using an improved direct chill casting equipment having a molding system comprising a hollow mold and a movable platform, wherein at least one core and a pipe for introducing outer air are provided, said core being made from a refractory material unwettable with a molten metal and having a convergent taper at the side and an air runner for introducing outer air, which is packed with an air-permeable material, at the bottom, and said pipe for introducing outer air extending upwards from the air runner and passing through the core. The continuous casting process comprises continuously pouring a molten metal into a space surrounded with the hollow mold and the core of the above equipment; cooling the molten metal only at the side wall of the hollow mold without cooling at the side of the core; thereby solidifying the molten metal to form an ingot having a hollow, wherein the interface of the frozen metal and the liquid metal is present at the position around the core; and continuously lowering the ingot thus formed while introducing spontaneously outer air into the hollow part via the pipe for introducing outer air and the air runner of the core.

Truth and Power

Abstract: Reference EPFL-ARTICLE-223260View record in Web of Science Record created on 2016-11-21, modified on 2016-11-21