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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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
Cites background from "The Human Condition."
...The disappearance of media intermediation seems not to have, as was believed, fostered a space for direct meetings in a sort of online Habermasian public sphere, but rather to have implied that the “world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them” [6] (p....
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...But despite early optimism about this ostensibly decentralized and democratic meetingplace, the online world seems less and less like a common “table” that “gathers us together” [6] (p....
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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
Cites background from "The Human Condition."
...Drawing on the communal power perspective (Arendt, 1958), we propose that humble CEOs do not stress power over other TMT members but, instead, have power to pursue goals for collective interest with the TMTs....
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...In this sense, humble CEOs exercise power in a way that diverts from an interpersonal power perspective (Sturm & Antonakis, 2015) and complies with a communal power perspective (Arendt, 1958)....
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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
References
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors study local sustainability initiatives from two scholarly perspectives: the perspective of sociotechnical innovation, which relates to the capacity of bottom-up initiatives to contribute to the development of socio-technical alternatives; and the context of civic engagement, relating to the ability of citizens to organize themselves in order to pursue community goals.
Abstract: Local sustainability initiatives are studied from two scholarly perspectives: the perspective of sociotechnical innovation, which relates to the capacity of bottom-up initiatives to contribute to the development of sociotechnical alternatives; and the perspective of civic engagement which relates to the capacity of citizens to organize themselves in order to pursue community goals. This paper argues that taking both these perspectives into account overcomes the problem of being too instrumental or the problem of neglecting the role of technology and innovation in local initiatives. The perspective of sociotechnical innovation presents different types of innovation pursued by local initiatives: the creation of new technology, the application of existing technology and the development of social innovation. Furthermore, innovations might diffuse over wider society by: replication, scaling up, and translation. In turn, civic engagement may take the shape of: the strengthening of social capital, the formation of social movements, and the substitution of functions and services. The insights from literature are illustrated and qualified by applying them in the context of concrete local initiatives. Finally, local initiatives will be portrayed as social contexts that are successful in gathering actors with different motivations and world views and that may contribute to the democratization of innovation.
54 citations
TL;DR: The authors apply agonistic theories of democracy to critique the embracing of dialogic communication in public relations theory, which elevate the value of permanent contest, dissensus and performance in vibrant public spaces which expose and test the legitimacy of those who hold power and privilege.
Abstract: This is a conceptual article that seeks to apply agonistic theories of democracy to critique the embracing of dialogic communication in public relations theory. Several strands of scholarship, despite their vastly different starting points and epistemological assumptions, have converged on advancing dialogic forms of communication as representing the best normative theories for shifting practice towards what might be considered civic, democracy-friendly norms. As a consequence, theorising has emphasised compromise and consensus which pressurises practitioners to adopt ostensibly non-partisan styles of communication. In contrast, agonistic democratic theory elevates the value of permanent contest, dissensus and performance in vibrant public spaces which expose and test the legitimacy of those who hold power and privilege. However, the disputes in other academic fields between advocates of deliberative and agonistic approaches have up to now been largely absent in the public relations literature. This artic...
54 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors introduce the concept of lived citizenship as an interface where the territorially-bound public administration and the plurality of spatial attachments characteristic to transnational living may meet.
Abstract: Participatory policies seeking to foster active citizenship continue to be dominated by a territorial imagination. Yet, the world where people identify and perform as citizens is spatially multifarious. This article engages with the tension between territorially grounded perceptions and relational modes of practicing political agency. Studying empirically the Finnish child and youth policies, we address jointly the participatory obligations that municipalities strive to fulfill, and the spatial attachments that children and young people establish in their lived worlds. To this end, we introduce the concept of lived citizenship as an interface where the territorially-bound public administration and the plurality of spatial attachments characteristic to transnational living may meet. We conclude by proposing a re-grounding of lived citizenship in both topological and topographical terms as an improvement in theoretical understanding of mundane political agency and as a step towards more proficient participa...
54 citations
TL;DR: The idea of a public sphere has long been central to discussion of political communication and its present condition is the topic of this essay as mentioned in this paper, and debates about the public sphere have been shaped by the b
Abstract: The idea of a public sphere has long been central to discussion of political communication Its present condition is the topic of this essay Debate about the public sphere has been shaped by the b
54 citations
Dissertation•
13 May 2017
TL;DR: In this paper, a socio-psychological study of Greek European identity within the context of the Greek debt/Eurozone crisis is presented, which is based on Social Representations Theory and Social Identity Theory (SIT).
Abstract: This thesis consists of a socio-psychological study of Greek European identity within the context of the Greek debt/Eurozone crisis. Drawing insights from Social Representations Theory (SRT) and Social Identity Theory (SIT), it approaches the question of identity in a dual manner, as are presentation and a psychological experience. The motivation of the research is enacted through the questioning of whether economic crises can provoke crises of collective identities. Its contribution is both theoretical and empirical. The thesis argues that although the term ‘identity crisis’ is a frequently used one, especially in conditions of post-modernity, an analytical elucidation of the varied destabilising dynamics behind potential ‘identity crises’ is unclear within existing literature. Furthermore, it is postulated that as useful and enlightening a social psychological approach may be for the study of identities, and although SIT’s focus on identity threats as destabilising for group self-esteem can help us understand identity dynamics, the discipline still lacks a more systematic analytical framework of identity destabilisations. The thesis develops an elaborate typology and conceptualisation of identity destabilisations and operationalises it for the study of Greek European identity through a triangulated single case study research design, combining a variety of data sources, such as historiographical data, media texts, expert and elite interviews, and interviews with non-expert citizens. The typology includes the destabilisations of identity conflict,identity devaluation, identity overvaluation and identity deficit. The results of the study indicate that the public discourse of the debt/Eurozone crisis has been abundant in representations of all such identity destabilisations. The interviews with Greek experts and elites, called in this study ‘ideational leaders’, and with non-expert citizens, designate that the most prevalent forms of identity destabilisation, both at the level of representation and of psychological experience in Greek society are those of identity conflict and identity devaluation. The results show a distinct public preoccupation with ideas, such as national self-reflection and collective responsibility. The representations made by expert and non-expert citizens approximate each other quite closely, while comparisons across the data sources and across time bring to the fore continuities of narratives and identity representations, which are explained within SRT’s assumption of anchoring as a return to previously established knowledge for the comprehension of new phenomena, as well as within the constraints faced by discursive actors in their attempts to construct new realities. It is concluded that a new narrative is necessitated for Greek European identity.
53 citations