The Human Condition.
TL;DR: In some religious traditions, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness.
Abstract: Human beings are described by many spiritual traditions as ‘blind’ or ‘asleep’ or ‘in a dream.’ These terms refers to the limited attenuated state of consciousness of most human beings caught up in patterns of conditioned thought, feeling and perception, which prevent the development of our latent, higher spiritual possibilities. In the words of Idries Shah: “Man, like a sleepwalker who suddenly ‘comes to’ on some lonely road has in general no correct idea as to his origins or his destiny.” In some religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness. Other traditions use similar metaphors to describe the spiritual condition of humanity:
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TL;DR: A focus on citizenship suggests reframing professional development based on the participation in public life of people as citizens of their society as part of a more systemic and societal approach to occupational therapy.
Abstract: Background/aims: This article aims to discuss client-centred practice, the current dominant approach within occupational therapy, in relation to participatory citizenship. Occupational therapists work within structures and policies that set boundaries on their engagement with clients, while working with complex, multidimensional social realities. Methods: The authors present a critical discussion shaped by their research, including a survey, discussions at workshops at international conferences, and critical engagement with the literature on occupational therapy, occupation, and citizenship. Conclusion: A focus on citizenship suggests reframing professional development based on the participation in public life of people as citizens of their society. While occupational therapists often refer to clients in the context of communities, groups, families, and wider society, the term client-centred practice typically represents a particular view of the individual and may sometimes be too limited in appli...
52 citations
27 Sep 2015
TL;DR: In this article, the concept of models of judgment is proposed as a meta-theoretical approach to the philosophical rhetoric of jurisprudence, which provides a unique perspective on the rhetorical commitments undergirding prominent judicial theories.
Abstract: This project responds to a need for new theoretical tools for understanding law as a site for the intersection of rhetoric and philosophy. In advancing the concept of “models of judgment” as a meta-theoretical approach to the philosophical rhetoric of jurisprudence, I argue that it provides a unique perspective on the rhetorical commitments undergirding prominent judicial theories. Paragons of good judgment crafted by Richard Posner, Martha Nussbaum, and Cass Sunstein are examined, foregrounding their rhetorical character and function.
52 citations
Dissertation•
29 Nov 2019
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors of the paper "In Between Labels and In Between Languages, Memories and Spaces: Reflection on contemporary processes of identity constructions, both individual and collective, which are crisscrossed by experiences of migration inscribed within the Mediterranean space, which I consider in its heterogeneity".
Abstract: This dissertation aims to put forward a thorough reflection on contemporary processes of identity constructions, both individual and collective, which are criss-crossed by experiences of migration inscribed within the Mediterranean space, which I consider in its heterogeneity. Through two specific case studies, approached from a comparative and gender perspective, I look at subjects who understand themselves as tied to (physical and symbolic) experiences of displacement claim fluid subjectivities. The works by Najat El Hachmi (Beni Sidel, 1979) and Dalila Kerchouche (Bias, 1973) present different factual dimensions and textual fabrics and are of a polyphonic nature. Because they pay attention to the multi-layered consequences that enfold from population movements, their nuanced considerations represent a precious guideline of sorts in understanding the syncretic fabric that shapes our world. I use the literary texts produced by these two authors of Maghrebi origin who grew up in Europe in order to filter my analyses, for I believe that the attentive regard that literature enables is of great value when it comes to problematizing rigid understandings of identity. Both El Hachmi and Kerchouche inherited an experience of migration, initiated by their fathers, that led them to embody and undertake different interstitial positions in Catalonia and France, where they respectively live. In their works, they dwell on all these “inbetween” positions that they, as writers, and the characters that they portray occupy. To do so, they use autobiographical essays first and, later on, fiction in order to delve into inherited cultural traditions, to contest clear-cut identity labels, and to explore the languages and experiences that have shaped their subjectivities. I thus read these texts as the tools that the authors use to enter into a dialogical relationship with their European societies, societies that, I argue, perceive them as an immigrant (in El Hachmi’s case) and as a harki (in the case of Kerchouche). As such, I critically consider El Hachmi’s and Kerchouche’s works as literary products and also as political artefacts that bespeak the authors’s agency. The thesis is divided into two sections, “In Between Labels” and “In Between Languages, Memories and Spaces” –each containing two chapters–, which account for the different elements playing a part in the construction of their individual and collective identities –a concept, that of identity, that I approach using epistemological cues borrowed from several disciplines, mainly those of postcolonial studies and the decolonial school, as I explain in the Introduction. In Catalonia and in France, El Hachmi and Kerchouche, and their characters, are encouraged to identify themselves as part of the societal tissue of these spaces. However, their belonging is hampered by the fact that they are perceived through the aforementioned “labels” of immigrant and harki, categorizations that place them in the terrain of alterity. At the same time, the familial communities of the authors and their characters want them to understand themselves in connection with their Maghrebi origins, which are differently nuanced in each of the cases. El Hachmi and Kerchouche have found in the literary space a mode of dwelling and a felicitous way to conflate the languages, cultural traditions and memories with which they interact. They use the written page to inscribe the imaginaries that conform them, which have to do with experiences that are traversed by manifold silences –connected with the Franco-Algerian war and its aftermath, in the context epitomised by Kerchouche. In such gestures of inscription the authors not only create ties of belonging within the communities they identify with but also put forward historical rewritings and countermemories that aim at contesting the hegemonic historical discourses that, in Europe, disavow the subjects conceived as immigrants or harkis. Ultimately, the intricate works by El Hachmi and Kerchouche studied in this thesis, whose rich intertextuality I put in dialogue with the theorizations of authors such as Gloria Anzaldua, Homi K. Bhabha or Helene Cixous, galvanize us to understand subjectivities as hybrid and fluid; always in process of translation, always “wounded” and hence open to the incorporation of enriching difference.
52 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that post-politicisation does not imply the disappearance of politics, rather it involves the reordering of the modalities of politics (contentious or otherwise) and of the possibilities of the political with far-reaching consequences for the modality of egalitarian and emancipatory urban change.
Abstract: This contribution offers a critical engagement with the Critical Commentary paper of Beveridge and Koch (2017) entitled ‘The postpolitical trap? Reflections on politics, agency and the city’. I argue that post-politicisation as a particular form of de-politicisation does not imply the disappearance of politics. On the contrary, it involves the re-ordering of the modalities of politics (contentious or otherwise) and of the possibilities of the political with far-reaching consequences for the modalities of egalitarian and emancipatory urban change. I explore the key contours of the post-politicisation argument and develop the thesis that ‘the political’ can never be foreclosed fully.
51 citations
Cites background from "The Human Condition."
...Nonetheless, the elite’s post-politicising trajectory – see Crouch (2004) or Brown (2015) for in-depth analysis – is, of necessity, bound to fail, as such attempts at suturing the political field and rendering mute the voices of those who disagree repress precisely what the political as a space of appearance is all about....
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...(Arendt, 1958: 218–219) It is ironic that the authors of ‘The postpolitical trap?’...
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...(Arendt, 1958: 178) The polis, properly speaking, is not the citystate in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together ....
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors develop new readings of Lear's Radical Hope and von Trier's Melancholia from a "public things" perspective and argue that new narrations of democratic maturation are needed to counter recent efforts to infantilize the democratic need for public things.
Abstract: What if democracy postulates not just a demos and the other things on which democratic theory these days focuses (constitutions, clear territorial boundaries, proper procedures, commitment to formal or substantive equality) but also public things, shared common things, over which to argue, around which to gather? Such things require communal attention, public commitment, and collective maintenance. And they return the favor by lending to us some of their objectivity: that is to say, interacting with public things grants to democratic subjects some of those things’ durability and resilience. This insight is drawn from D. W. Winnicott’s object-relations theory in which the idea of a “holding environment” is key. This essay, develops new readings of Lear’s Radical Hope and von Trier’s Melancholia from a “public things” perspective and argues that new narrations of democratic maturation are needed to counter recent efforts to infantilize the democratic need for public things. Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt are drawn upon as well in this analysis of the complex politics of collaboration and privatization in the context of the theft of native lands and the catastrophe of climate change.
51 citations
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Book•
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27 Mar 2015
TL;DR: In this article, a series of meditations on life, ground, weather, walking, imagination and what it means to be human are presented, with a focus on the life of lines.
Abstract: To live, every being must put out a line, and in life these lines tangle with one another. This book is a study of the life of lines. Following on from Tim Ingold's groundbreaking work Lines: A Brief History, it offers a wholly original series of meditations on life, ground, weather, walking, imagination and what it means to be human.
In the first part, Ingold argues that a world of life is woven from knots, and not built from blocks as commonly thought. He shows how the principle of knotting underwrites both the way things join with one another, in walls, buildings and bodies, and the composition of the ground and the knowledge we find there.
In the second part, Ingold argues that to study living lines, we must also study the weather. To complement a linealogy that asks what is common to walking, weaving, observing, singing, storytelling and writing, he develops a meteorology that seeks the common denominator of breath, time, mood, sound, memory, colour and the sky. This denominator is the atmosphere.
In the third part, Ingold carries the line into the domain of human life. He shows that for life to continue, the things we do must be framed within the lives we undergo. In continually answering to one another, these lives enact a principle of correspondence that is fundamentally social.
This compelling volume brings our thinking about the material world refreshingly back to life. While anchored in anthropology, the book ranges widely over an interdisciplinary terrain that includes philosophy, geography, sociology, art and architecture.
410 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the fact that gender equality and women empowerment have been eviscerated of conceptual and political bite compromises their use as the primary frame through which to demand rights and justice.
Abstract: The language of ‘gender equality’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ was mobilised by feminists in the 1980s and 1990s as a way of getting women’s rights onto the international development agenda. Their efforts can be declared a resounding success. The international development industry has fully embraced these terms. From international NGOs to donor governments to multilateral agencies the language of gender equality and women’s empowerment is a pervasive presence and takes pride of place among their major development priorities. And yet, this article argues, the fact that these terms have been eviscerated of conceptual and political bite compromises their use as the primary frame through which to demand rights and justice. Critically examining the trajectories of these terms in development, the article suggests that if the promise of the post-2015 agenda is to deliver on gender justice, new frames are needed, which can connect with and contribute to a broader movement for global justice.
271 citations
TL;DR: A network simulation model used to study a possible relationship between echo chambers and the viral spread of misinformation finds an “echo chamber effect”: the presence of an opinion and network polarized cluster of nodes in a network contributes to the diffusion of complex contagions.
Abstract: The viral spread of digital misinformation has become so severe that the World Economic Forum considers it among the main threats to human society This spread have been suggested to be related to the similarly problematized phenomenon of “echo chambers”, but the causal nature of this relationship has proven difficult to disentangle due to the connected nature of social media, whose causality is characterized by complexity, non-linearity and emergence This paper uses a network simulation model to study a possible relationship between echo chambers and the viral spread of misinformation It finds an “echo chamber effect”: the presence of an opinion and network polarized cluster of nodes in a network contributes to the diffusion of complex contagions, and there is a synergetic effect between opinion and network polarization on the virality of misinformation The echo chambers effect likely comes from that they form the initial bandwagon for diffusion These findings have implication for the study of the media logic of new social media
223 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors proposed a mediation model to explain the relationship between CEO humility and firm performance and found that when a more humble CEO leads a firm, its top management team is more likely to collaborate, share information, jointly make decisions, and possess a shared vision.
215 citations
TL;DR: The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology and medicine is examined, focusing on the realization that individual therapies targeted at single pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affecting bacterial evolution far beyond bodies.
Abstract: Beginning in the 1940s, mass production of antibiotics involved the industrialscale growth of microorganisms to harvest their metabolic products. Unfortunately, the use of antibiotics selects for resistance at answering scale. The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology and medicine is examined, focusing on the realization that individual therapies targeted at single pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affecting bacterial evolution far beyond bodies. In turning to biological manifestations of antibiotic use, sciences fathom material outcomes of their own previous concepts. Archival work with stored soil and clinical samples produces a record described here as ‘the biology of history’: the physical registration of human history in bacterial life. This account thus foregrounds the importance of understanding both the materiality of history and the historicity of matter in theories and concepts of life today.
204 citations