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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Dissertation•
01 Jan 2018
TL;DR: In this article, a Cartesian-Newtonian model of space is used to express the tension between the discontinuous, distributed, and networked locales of infrastructure and design strategies that isolate form and perceptual effects.
Abstract: Infrastructures multiply our connections, mediate our lives, and amplify the range of our effects. To the extent that these bi-directional effects are remote or asynchronous, experienced partially, indirectly, or not at all, I term them strange relations. Infrastructure can be interpreted as both corrosive to public space and constitutive of it. We are involved in broad and changing senses of the public. What is a designer to make of this context? Strange relations are a crucial indicator of tensions between the discontinuous, distributed, and networked locales of infrastructure, and design strategies that reflect a Cartesian-Newtonian model of space and isolate form and perceptual effects. How can the strange relations mediated by infrastructure be drawn into projections of
34 citations
01 Jan 2018
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that sustainable development on the local, national, and global level is not possible without acknowledging the inter-sectoral character of adult education, which requires an adequate place in contemporary policy creation as well as the attention of experts in adult education and sustainability, in order to provide solid and just conditions for achieving the agreed upon goals.
Abstract: The adoption of the SDGs in 2015 was welcome as the truly global agenda that should meet the challenges related to people and the planet and ensure sustainable peace and prosperity. For the first time, lifelong learning is adequately incorporated and elaborated as an important part of SDG4. On the other hand, adult education is not even mentioned, except as a peripheral addition to the indicator providing the number of people that should acquire new skills, and in the literacy target. This paper argues the thesis that lifelong learning is adopted as the frame, concept, and learning philosophy, but adult education, within the field of practice and as an inherent part of the implementation of this concept, is highly neglected. The fact that adult education has also “disappeared” from other major international documents and programs influences not only the achievements of the educational goals, but jeopardizes the implementation of all other SDGs. A various aspects of the relations between adult education and sustainable development are analyzed in this paper. The argument is that sustainable development on the local, national, and global level is not possible without acknowledging the intersectoral character of adult education. That requires an adequate place in contemporary policy creation as well as the attention of experts in adult education and sustainability, in order to provide solid and just conditions for achieving the agreed upon goals. V. Orlović Lovren (&) K. Popović Department for Andragogy, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, Čika Ljubina 18-20, 11070 Belgrade, Serbia e-mail: violeta.orlovic@f.bg.ac.rs K. Popović e-mail: katarina.popovic@outlook.com © Springer International Publishing AG 2018 W. Leal Filho et al. (eds.), Handbook of Lifelong Learning for Sustainable Development, World Sustainability Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63534-7_1 1
34 citations
TL;DR: Performing objectifying tasks led participants to objectify themselves in terms of both decreased self-attribution of human mental states and increased self-perception of being instrument-like, which mediated the relationship between performing an objectifying activity and the participants' decreased belief in personal free will.
Abstract: The current work aimed to extend the burgeoning literature on working objectification by investigating the effects of particular job activities on self-perception. By integrating relevant theoretical reflections with recent empirical evidence, we expected that performing objectifying (i.e., repetitive, fragmented, and other-directed) tasks would affect participants' self-objectification and, in turn, their belief in personal free will. In three studies, we consistently found that performing a manual (Study 1 and Study 2) or a computer (Study 3) objectifying task (vs. a non-objectifying task and vs. the baseline condition) led participants to objectify themselves in terms of both decreased self-attribution of human mental states (Study 1 and Study 3) and increased self-perception of being instrument-like (Study 2 and Study 3). Crucially, this increased self-objectification mediated the relationship between performing an objectifying activity and the participants' decreased belief in personal free will. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are considered.
34 citations
Cites background from "The Human Condition."
...On the other hand, a number of theoretical analyses (e.g., Arendt, 1958; Blauner, 1964; Fromm, 1941; Hackman & Oldham, 1976) considered them to be detrimental conditions that undermine workers’ identity and humanity....
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...Consistent with these reflections, Arendt (1958) argued that the industrial system has contributed to the victory of the animal laborans – a passive entity whose agency and autonomy are neglected –over thehomo faber – an activeworkerwhohas the ability to take initiative and think autonomously....
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02 Oct 2018
TL;DR: This article explored the changing role played by the idea of freedom in the fiction of Colson Whitehead, arguing that his distinctive engagement with temporality lies at the heart of the vision of freedom offered by his fiction.
Abstract: This essay explores the changing role played by the idea of freedom in the fiction of Colson Whitehead. I begin by outlining some of the significations of ‘freedom’ within American culture before and during the period of neoliberal hegemony, placing particular emphasis on trends in the word’s provenance for African Americans between the civil rights era and the time in which Whitehead is writing. I then undertake an extended comparison between Whitehead’s novels Apex Hides the Hurt (2006) and The Underground Railroad (2016). I argue that in Apex—published against the background of the Bush doctrine and the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—Whitehead treats freedom ironically. The novel both pursues and treats critically a postmodern aesthetics that envisages symbolic action on language as the primary ground of politics. The Underground Railroad, by contrast, inhabits an African American literary genre—the novel of slavery—that is strongly wedded to discourses of bondage and freedom. This novel, arriving a decade after Apex, shows Whitehead responding to changes in American society and culture—particularly the advent of Black Lives Matter and a growing public awareness of the implications of mass incarceration policies for African Americans—that seem to call for a more sincere reckoning with the notion of freedom. I conclude with a discussion of time in Whitehead, arguing that his distinctive engagement with temporality lies at the heart of the vision of freedom after neoliberalism offered by his fiction.
34 citations
Cites background from "The Human Condition."
...On the religious side, as conveyed most memorably in the rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘were two powerful and compelling stories of the move from slavery to freedom,’ the Old Testament journey of the children of Israel to the Promised Land and the New Testament story of Christ’s spiritual deliverance of man from sin (16).2 The more secular uses of ‘freedom’ by black activists and thinkers drew on a wide range of sources, from postwar liberal pluralism to radical Marxism to the thought of Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon....
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...The human condition, with its echoes of Hannah Arendt (1958), seems by contrast to point to a role for struggle specifically in the realm of political action....
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References
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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