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 Apr 2015
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present an autoethnographic study of an 18-month "co-created" social marketing project that sought to reduce risky drinking in two deprived neighbourhoods.
Abstract: Social marketing is a technique for behavioural change that has been around since the 1960s, when prominent academics argued that the tools and techniques of marketing could be used for social as well as commercial ends. More recently, the orthodox approach to social marketing - based on the marketing management paradigm - has been challenged and new approaches are emerging. One such development has been characterised loosely as ‘co creation’, which in a social marketing context is understood to mean behavioural change interventions that are developed collaboratively with the target audience, rather than by remote experts.
I present here an autoethnographic study of an 18-month ‘co-created’ social marketing project that sought to reduce risky drinking in two deprived neighbourhoods. Locating myself epistemologically within the post structural approach articulated by critical sociologists (e.g. Laurel Richardson and Norman Denzin), I have written two analytical stories about the project based upon field notes, project documents, emails and recollections. One story is akin to a thick description, the second organised around four emergent themes: negative space, legitimacy, resistance and performativity.
Drawing upon literature from participatory research, international development and activist scholarship, I present a contribution in three parts. First, a detailed ethical and epistemological critique of social marketing’s claims to legitimacy as a methodology of social change; second, the development and theoretical justification of autoethnographic writing as a method for analysing participatory and action research projects; and finally, an exploration of the relationship between identity (internally cultivated and externally imposed), social inequality and social activism via evocative writing as “the very possibility of change” (Cixous, 1976, p. 879).
34 citations
Cites background from "The Human Condition."
...…reach critical consciousness through action and reflection, a concept familiar throughout the action research literature (Davis, 2004; Kemmis and McTaggart, 2005) and beyond (Arendt, 1958; 1998); which is thought to transform an individual’s experience of the world (Diaz-Greenberg and Nevin, 2003)....
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that ICTs do not promote the democratization of disaster response as much as they put at its disposal new tools for establishing order and security in crisis zones by facilitating the trans...
Abstract: Crisis mapping is a new modality of participatory humanitarian action in which global publics are mobilized to trace digital maps of disaster-stricken sites and to classify, verify, and plot on maps Big Data produced by disaster-affected people. This article untangles the political rationalities behind this emergent form of digital humanitarianism by looking at two platforms that shape the self-organizing crowds in which crisis mapping is grounded: MicroMappers, a microtasking platform for processing messages from disaster zones, and the Missing Maps Project, which traces maps of disaster-prone areas in poor countries. While looking at the increasingly prominent interplay between device-based participation and technologies of advanced liberal governance in humanitarianism, I make two interrelated claims. First, I argue that ICTs do not promote the democratization of disaster response as much as they put at its disposal new tools for establishing order and security in crisis zones by facilitating the trans...
34 citations
Cites background from "The Human Condition."
...…theorized as a new modality of publics—one that conforms neither to republican models in which virtuous public life is set apart from private and daily concerns nor to deliberative models that restrict public participation to a rational exchange of arguments (Arendt, 1998 [1958]; Habermas, 1991)....
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...…response and action, which lies at the root of the destructive but also of the democratic force that an interconnected group of people may yield (Arendt, 1998[1958]), MicroMappers responds not just by isolating engaged individuals from one another and by lowering the bar for meaningful action…...
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TL;DR: In this article, a knowledge-based approach is applied to study the role of circular economy for sustainable development, and an analysis of publications from practice-oriented circular economy advocates is deployed to evaluate them.
Abstract: This paper applies a knowledge-based approach to study the role of circular economy (CE) for sustainable development. An analysis of publications from practice-oriented CE advocates is deployed to ...
33 citations
TL;DR: This paper explored the relationship between environment and education after the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of philosophy of education in a new key developed by Michael Peters and the Philosop...
Abstract: This paper explores relationships between environment and education after the Covid-19 pandemic through the lens of philosophy of education in a new key developed by Michael Peters and the Philosop...
33 citations
31 Mar 2017
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the philosophical connotations of the notion of emancipation and propose an alternative understanding of the form of emancipation achieved by the French Revolution under the name of equaliberty.
Abstract: In light of an increasing embrace of the notion of ‘emancipation’ by various theoretical and
political perspectives in recent years, this thesis aims to scrutinise the philosophical
connotations of the concept itself. It therefore returns to Karl Marx’s distinction between
political and human emancipation, developed in his text ‘On the Jewish Question’, with the aim of
excavating its theoretical stakes. The core argument of the first part is that Marx draws a line of
demarcation between citizenship as the modern form of political, bourgeois emancipation realised by
the American and French Revolutions, and human emancipation as necessitating a different kind of
revolution that would allow for the constitution of a new type of social bond between the
individual and the social. Marx’s formulation of the need for human emancipation is grounded in his
critique of political emancipation, which he regards as failing to recognise the dialectical
constitution of its social bond by both political and economic relations. The bourgeois social bond
moreover makes ‘man’ exist as an individualised being who can only relate to his or her political
existence and dependency on others in a mediated and abstract way. The second part turns to the
post-Marxist critiques of ‘On the Jewish Question’, starting in the late 1970s with Claude Lefort,
which coincide with a broader re-evaluation of the revolutionary legacy in France. It specifically
interrogates Etienne Balibar’s alternative understanding of the form of emancipation achieved by
the French Revolution under the name of ‘equaliberty’, with which he defends the struggle for
citizenship as the unsurpassable horizon of a contemporary politics of emancipation. The aim is
here to develop a deeper understanding of Balibar’s criticism of Marx’s dividing line, which allows the French thinker's contribution to 'thinking emancipation after Marx' to be disentangled from his decision to distance himself from the Marxian approach.
33 citations
References
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Book•
[...]
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