Showing papers on "Sensibility published in 2017"

The affective, cultural and psychic life of postfeminism: A postfeminist sensibility 10 years on:

Abstract: This paper revisits the notion of ‘postfeminism’ ten years after its formulation in critical terms as a sensibility characterising cultural life. The paper has two broad aims: first to reflect upon postfeminism as a critical term – as part of the lexicon of feminist scholarship - and secondly to discuss the current features of postfeminism as a sensibility. The first part of the paper discusses the extraordinary uptake of the term, and considers its continuing relevance in a changed context marked by deeply contradictory trends including the resurgence of interest in feminism, alongside the spectacular visibility of misogyny, racism, homophobia and nationalism. I document a growing attention to the specificities of postfeminism, including attempts to map its temporal phases, its relevance to place, and intersectional developments of the term. The second part of the paper examines the contours of the contemporary postfeminist sensibility. I argue that postfeminism has tightened its hold upon contemporary life and become hegemonic. Compared with a decade ago it is much more difficult to recognise as a novel and distinctive sensibility, as it instantiates a common sense that operates as a kind of gendered neoliberalism. It has both spread out and intensified across contemporary culture and is becoming increasingly dependent upon a psychological register built around cultivating the ‘right’ kinds of dispositions for surviving in neoliberal society: confidence, resilience, and positive mental attitude. Together these affective, cultural and psychic features of postfeminism exert a powerful regulatory force.

Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes

Abstract: The three reviews of my book are both generous and insightful. What they all recognise are the powerful feelings that underpin Miseducation along with what I hope is an intellectual sensibility and...

A Postfeminist Sensibility at Work

Abstract: Postfeminism remains a relatively unexplored concept for scholars in the area of gender and organizations. In this article we first provide theoretical perspectives on postfeminism and elaborate a critical approach to it. Postfeminism is seen as a concept, rather than an identification, that can assist in understanding the patterning of gender in the modern workplace. The second part of the article illustrates different discursive moves that we observed in our own research exploring how sexism is repudiated and how gender fatigue is enacted. This meta-theme is supported by four discursive moves: first, gender inequalities are routinely allocated to the past or, secondly, to other countries or contexts; third, women are seen as the advantaged sex; and fourth, the status quo is accepted as just how workplaces are. The article thereby makes a contribution to understanding the patterning of a postfeminist sensibility both theoretically and empirically in the work context.

Fieldwork in Political Theory : Five Arguments for an Ethnographic Sensibility

Abstract: This article makes a positive case for an ethnographic sensibility in political theory. Drawing on published ethnographies and original fieldwork, it argues that an ethnographic sensibility can contribute to normative reflection in five distinct ways. It can help uncover the nature of situated normative demands (epistemic argument); diagnose obstacles encountered when responding to these demands (diagnostic argument); evaluate practices and institutions against a given set of values (evaluative argument); probe, question and refine our understanding of values (valuational argument); and uncover underlying social ontologies (ontological argument). The contribution of ethnography to normative theory is distinguished from that of other forms of empirical research, and the dangers of perspectival absorption, bias and particularism are addressed.

A critical review of postfeminist sensibility

Abstract: This paper critically reviews how feminist academic psychologists, social scientists and media scholars have developed Rosalind Gill’s (2007a) generative construct ‘postfeminist sensibility’. We describe the key themes of postfeminist sensibility, a non-coherent set of ideas about femininity, embodiment and empowerment circulating across a range of media. Ideas that inform women’s sense of self, making postfeminist sensibility an important object for psychological study. We then consider research that drew on postfeminist sensibility, focusing on new sexual subjectivities, which developed analysis of agency, empowerment, and the possibilities and limitations in taking up new subjectivities associated with postfeminism, as well as who could take up these subjectivities. We show how such work identified complexities and contradictions in postfeminist sensibility and offer suggestions for how this work might be further developed, particularly by intersectionality-informed research. In the final section, we address contemporary debates surrounding postfeminism. We consider challenges and counter arguments to postfeminist sensibility as a useful term for describing contemporary patterns of sense making on gender, making the case for continuing research on postfeminist sensibility in the areas of digital cultures, a transformative imperative that includes the mind as well as the body, transnational postfeminism, and new forms of feminist activism. We conclude that such work would benefit from considering the ways that different technologies mediate the ideas and practices associated with postfeminist sensibility.

Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities

Abstract: In Cents and Sensibility, an eminent literary critic and a leading economist make the case that the humanities-especially the study of literature-offer economists ways to make their models more realistic, their predictions more accurate, and their policies more effective and just. Arguing that Adam Smith's heirs include Austen, Chekhov, and Tolstoy as much as Keynes and Friedman, Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro trace the connection between Adam Smith's great classic, The Wealth of Nations, and his less celebrated book on ethics, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The authors contend that a few decades later, Jane Austen invented her groundbreaking method of novelistic narration in order to give life to the empathy that Smith believed essential to humanity. More than anyone, the great writers can offer economists something they need-a richer appreciation of behavior, ethics, culture, and narrative. Original, provocative, and inspiring, Cents and Sensibility demonstrates the benefits of a dialogue between economics and the humanities and also shows how looking at real-world problems can revitalize the study of literature itself. Featuring a new preface, this book brings economics back to its place in the human conversation.

The Proletarianization of Sensibility

Abstract: What happened to Marcel Duchamp between 1912—Nude Descending a Staircase—and 1917—Fountain? And why should it matter to us? Between 1912 and 1917, Duchamp was increasingly concerned with the question of reproducibility that, starting with photography and chronophotography, leads to Frederick Taylor—that is to say, to the readymade. The readymade is born from the serialized production for mass markets, which open up a new question of proletarianization in a new age. In my book Symbolic Misery, I tried to show that at the time of Henry Ford and Edward Bernays, the development of the culture industries led to a proletarianization of the sensibility of the consumer through the apparatuses for the canalization and reproduction of perception. Bernays, who was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, invented the basics of marketing by organizing the captivation of the consumers’ attention, and thus of the libidinal energy that marketing must seek to redirect from the consumers’ primordial

Comparison with an Ethnographic Sensibility

Abstract: © American Political Science Association, 2017 doi:10.1017/S1049096516002286 ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Poetic Observation: What Designers Make of What They See

Abstract: What does it mean to bring a design sensibility to looking, noticing, and learning about people, places, and things in the world? This essay is about the importance of ensuring that design teams make time and space for designers to explore, to see, and otherwise sense the world in their own way, without the limitation of adhering strictly to some formal process or plan of ‘research’. It begins to explore answers to the question: What is their own way?

Understanding Cultural Taste: Sensation, Skill and Sensibility

Abstract: Understanding Cultural Taste updates and critiques established theoretical and empirical accounts of cultural taste. It takes account of the role of cultural industries and cultural policies in shaping cultural tastes and of the contemporary technologies through which cultural goods are produced, circulated and consumed. It weaves together a story of taste as bound up with sensation, skill and sensibility. Taking a historical and theoretical perspective which complicates an understanding of taste as either a matter of personal preference or a simple weapon in social struggles, the book argues that taste remains a significant and complex concept in the sociology of culture, media and cultural studies, cultural policy studies and in their applied sub-disciplines. Such disciplines have come to appreciate and accept the relation between taste and individual and group identities but have been less attentive to other social and political dimensions of this important component of cultural life

Conducting Ethnography with a Sensibility for Practice

Abstract: This article addresses the problem of adhering to ontology consistent with theories of social practice while conducting ethnographic research with focus on immersion and openness. As a partial solution to this contradiction, I formulate an outline of a ‘sensibility for practice’, a filtering and sense-making device to be used as a fieldwork tool. I believe this goes a long way towards producing a processual and experience-near account of sociopolitical life while remaining true to the theoretical commitments of practice theories. The sensibility for practice consists of four main principles derived from the theories of social practice and that enable us to hold those theories lightly: focus on what people actually do (and the materials they ‘converse’ with); focus on everydayness; focus on the work of assembling, structuring and ordering; and focus on reflexivity. For each of the principles, I identify three specific ‘loci of attention’ that can serve as sensitising concepts during fieldwork. Sensibility for practice represents a narrowed-down approach to ethnographic research that is able to accommodate various strands of practice studies, including the interpretivist, ‘wholist’ as well as associationist stream.

Aesthetic Rationality in Organizations: Toward Developing a Sensibility for Sustainibility

Abstract: This article explains the coexistence and interaction of aesthetic experience and moral value systems of decision makers in organizations. For this purpose, we develop the concept of “aesthetic rationality,” which is described as a type of value-oriented rationality that serves to encourage sustainable behavior in organizations, and to complete the commonly held, “instrumentally rational” view of organizations. We show that organizations regularly exhibit not only an instrumental rationality but also an “aesthetic rationality,” which is manifested in their products and processes. We describe aesthetics, its underlying moral values, its evolutionary roots, and its links to virtue ethics as a basis for defining the concept of aesthetic rationality. We examine its links with human resources, organizational design, and other organizational elements. We examine these implications, identify how an aesthetic-driven ethic provides a potential for sustainable behavior in organizations, and suggest new directions for organizational research.

The Social is the Unconscious of the Unconscious of Psychoanalysis

Abstract: Does being a psychoanalyst imply that one should hold a particular political sensibility? This article aims to approach this question in the aftermath of Donald Trump having become the president of...

Why Faith Makes Sense: On Graham Ward’s Unbelievable

Abstract: Ward’s recent volume on the entwining of belief and perception, while not being an explicitly theological monograph, nonetheless evinces a subtle texture that displays his continuing fidelity to certain aspects of Radical Orthodoxy’s vision. (Ward, Graham 2013. Unbelievable: Why We Believe and Why We Don’t. London and New York: I. B. Tauris; ISBN: 971780767352) This can be seen in its interdisciplinary focus and its rejection of dualistic philosophies (including the supposed divisions between the sacred and the secular, nature and grace, transcendence and immanence, visibility and invisibility). He argues for the ultimate ‘fittingness’ between mind and world, thereby rejecting any representationalist account of this relation. Viewing the practices of belief within a re-telling of evolutionary history and phenomenological accounts of perception, Ward seeks to show the pervasiveness of dispositional beliefs within all worldly interactions. Consequentially, ‘belief’ cannot therefore be relegated to an epiphenomenal or lesser form of knowing, since all seeing is a seeing-as, with the result being that it is imbued with the valences of affect and valuation. Religious faith then is simply a deepening of the logic that is already present within ordinary modes of finite engagement, and therefore should not be seen as an ‘unnatural’ intervention within the realm of human culture. Overall then, this work can be summarized as an apologetic for the rationality of belief in our ‘secularized’ societies, and furthermore, for the constitutive role of belief and faith for sensibility as such.

The Provocative Fifteenth Century

Abstract: This double issue of Exemplaria suggests that fifteenth-century literary culture in England promoted a sensibility of provocation, where not only authors but also scribes, translators, readers, rec...

Quintilian on “grammatical homonymy”: The linguistic sensibility of a Roman lawyer

Abstract: Abstract After defining grammatical (as opposed to lexical) homonymy as concerning either inflection or the conflict between different parts of speech, attention is paid to those contexts in which Varro and Quintilian dealt with processes falling under that concept. The paper remarks on the acute distinction Quintilian seems to make between lexical and grammatical homonymy by dealing with the former in relation to rhetoric and the latter within the grammatical chapters of book I. The similarity of Quintilian’s approach to homonymy is then shown with the use Apollonius Dyscolus would later make of the term synemptosis as a morphological coincidence of word forms. The parallel doctrine and terminology in later Latin traditions is also considered.

Nothing More Than Feelings?: Affect Theory Reads the Age of Sensibility

Abstract: Scholars have turned recently to affect as a way to better understand human agency. This essay identifies key similarities in the preoccupations of affect theorists and writers of the age of sensibility, while considering both the usefulness of affect theory for the literary critic, and the political consequences of adopting the underlying assumptions of affect studies as a guide for critical practice. Recent theory offers a promising tool for interpreting the scenes of affective excess that punctuate literary and visual works in the eighteenth century, works governed by a representational mode that assumes heightened affect is significant in itself. Affect theorists focus on the emotional energies in interpersonal encounters, moving past interest in mere sociability to celebrate the power of raw affectual states to be transformative in themselves. The implication is that some emancipatory potential resides in the stimulation of the sensory-perceptual apparatus. Yet this potential cannot be articulated clearly, neither by affect theorists nor by writers of sensibility—for it's an article of faith in both camps that these limit intensities generate a profound knowing that is ineffable. The paper asks, finally, whether the underlying assumptions of current theory—as with the ideals of the age of sensibility that came before—are perhaps at best hopeful, and at worst naive, perhaps no less conservative than progressive, and in the end prone to ridicule.

I feel my wrist buzz. Smartbody and performative sensibility in Fitbit devices

Abstract: This article discusses the concepts of performative sensibility and smartbody. The central thesis is that performative sensibility highlights the instrumental nature of sensations in which objects act on the world. We show how the prescriptions of this new sensibility associated with wearables affect the body and perform a subjectivity that we propose to call a smartbody. They were analyzed one hundred testimonials from the oldest thread with the greatest number of comments in the Fitbit user community forum. Quantitative tools and Actor-network theory were used as a guide to assemble and analyze the corpus. The preliminary findings show that Fitbit users demonstrate particular changings in body care. Extreme behaviors, physical limits defined by system goals and quantification habits without carrying the device are some of the examples found. These findings appear to indicate that the performative sensibility of wearables mobilizes new bodies performatic patterns and practices oriented by data.

The Male Mentor Figure In Women's Fiction, 1778-1801

Abstract: This dissertation follows the development of the mentor figure from Frances Burney’s Evelina published in 1778 to Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda in 1801. The mentor becomes a key figure for exploring women’s revolutionary ideas on female education and women’s roles in society. My dissertation contributes to discussions on mentoring, development of the Gothic mode, and debates over sensibility and sentimental fiction. It considers how the female mentee paradoxically both desires and criticizes her male mentor and his authority. Each author under discussion employed the mentor figure in a way that addressed their contemporary society’s issues and prejudices toward the treatment of women and the power of sensibility. Much of this treatment was traced to a conversation of reforming female education from an accomplishment-based pedagogy to a moral, intellectual-based instruction that was more masculine in nature (emphasizing a balance between sensibility and reason). Frequently, the mentor provides general comments and recommendations about love to his female pupil, who is entering into the marriage market, but his advice often turns out to be wrong or misplaced since it does not fit the actual situation. He is a good spiritual guide but a poor romantic advisor. I assert that the mentor figure’s usual lack of romantic sentiment and his pupil’s ability to surpass him in matters of the heart reveal a tendency to subvert male authority. Throughout this discussion, questions related to gender arise. Women’s desire for their own agency and control over both their minds and bodies underpin much of women’s eighteenth-century fiction. My dissertation explores these complex relationships between male mentors and their female pupils.

Transformative learning through creative life writing

Abstract: This engaging book brings a psychodynamic sensibility to our understanding of transformative learning. Its author, Celia Hunt, convened a Master’s programme at Sussex University titled Creative Wri...

Intercultural Sensibility in Online Teaching and Learning Processes.

Abstract: Attention to cultural diversity is a necessity for online higher education in management. Beamer (2004) postulated the Model of Intercultural Sensitivity to conceptualize the intercultural competence dimensions that can develop. The Complementary, Intercultural Learning Model (Beamer, 2016) emphasizes the importance that students are able to encode and decode the differences in messages emitted by people of various cultures. The aim of this research is to analyze the verbalization of intercultural content of online students participation and their learning products for an online masters in human resources direction. The content of participation and the learning products of 108 participants based on the system of categories proposed by the Model of Intercultural Sensitivity and enriched by Intercultural Learning Model has been analyzed. The most frequent category found is adaptation, so cultural difference is the state in which the experience of another culture yields perception and encourages behavior appropriate to that culture.

Objects into Persons: The Way to Social Aesthetics

Abstract: This essay traces the steps to social aesthetics. It begins by affirming the central place of sense experience for aesthetics and its refinement in the perceptual acuity of a developed sensibility. This leads to associating aesthetic appreciation with such perceptual experience. Rejecting the identification of disinterestedness with such appreciation, the present paper proposes the full participatory involvement in the experience of appreciation as expressed by the concept of aesthetic engagement. This describes the appreciative situation as an aesthetic field in which the perceptual, creative, focusing, and activating factors are in reciprocal interaction. It characterizes not only appreciation in the arts but occurs as well in appreciating natural, built, and social environments. Aesthetic engagement in social aesthetics is exemplified by the gaze in the experience of four well-known paintings I shall consider. Following these a series of related ideas are developed that lead to the concept of a social aesthetics. Finally, the essay returns to the paintings for an enhanced understanding of social aesthetics.

Bio-aesthetics: The Evolution of Sensibility through Nature

Abstract: 1] This paper gathers a few points developed in my recent book, The Indispensable Excess of the Aesthetic: Evolution of Sensibility in Nature, where I explore the processes that involve aisthesis from their most primal manifestations to their more complex. I propose the concept of bio-aesthetics as the study of all forms of sensibility in living beings, and that, given the fact that it is a function of our corporeal condition, the required starting point is the evolutionary paradigm. Another crucial tool for understanding how different types of creatures value, understand, react, and relate to their environment is provided by the recent field of bio-semiotics, the study of the dynamics of signification in different forms of life. What becomes particularly salient is the role of female discernment and evaluation through mate selection and, consequently, in the future configuration of the species, a phenomenon that can be denoted as phylo-genetic poetics.

Oedipa's Unsentimental Journey: Preempted Pathos in The Crying of Lot 49

Abstract: Reconsidering Thomas Pynchon’s quintessential paranoid text through the bifocal lens of contemporary criticism’s turn to affect and contemporary fiction’s so-called new sincerity, this essay reads The Crying of Lot 49 as a lamentation of sentimentality in its postmodern moment—a moment defined by its supposed waning of affect. Locating the pathos of Pynchon’s novel in precisely this suppression of feeling, this sentimental reading not only fills the bleeding heart-shaped hole in the current body of Lot 49 scholarship, but also reframes post-postmodernism’s project as a natural extension of the postmodernist sensibility rather than a deliberate refutation of it.

Herder. Physiology and philosophical anthropology

Abstract: In eighteenth-century Germany, a new field of philosophical anthropology emerged, signaling a profound reconfiguration of what, originally, in the Renaissance, was primarily a medical and anatomical discipline. This paper focuses on Herder's contribution to this development and investigates its medical and physiological context. Set in the context of the long history of anthropology, Herder's philosophy can be seen as a response to recent discoveries in medicine and physiology. The major impulse came from Albrecht von Haller's new distinction between the irritability of muscle and the sensibility of nerves, that he first presented in the 1740s and 1750s. Haller's limitation (and close association) of sensation and thought to particular bodily structures challenged major philosophical and theological dogmas insofar as it raised new questions about the existence of an immaterial soul and its ability to cause what the mind perceives as a voluntary motion. It blurred the traditional division of labours, the one ascribing the physician the task of investigating the body and leaving the study of the soul to the philosopher and the theologian. The chapter will explore how Herder makes creative use of Haller's concept of irritability, in particular, as a way of demonstrating a neo-Aristotelian account of the soul as pervading and informing the entire body. It would be insufficient to view Enlightenment philosophical anthropology as merely a reformatory movement internal to philosophy. A glance at the disciplinary history of anthropology reveals, on the contrary, that it was a response on behalf of philosophy to changes affecting philosophy from the outside. More specifically, it was an attempt on behalf of philosophy to 1 I would like to thank Nigel DeSouza and Anik Waldow for their precious editorial and stylistic help with this article, for sharing their own work on these matters with me, and for the fruitful philosophical discussions. And thanks to Fred Beiser for his l comments on a previous draft of this paper, on Herder's materialism. 2 Dedicated to my former colleague at the university Paris 8 Saint-Denis Pierre Penisson. In memoriam.

Romantic poetry: The I altered

Abstract: The humanitarianism of the dissenting tradition makes women poets sympathetic to distress and victimization. If women tended to see differently from men, it was axiomatic in the eighteenth century that they felt differently too. In the culture of sensibility it was relatively easy for women to assert their superiority by the very act of writing. The poetry of sensibility is at base a literature of psychological exploration, and it is the foundation on which Romanticism was reared. Charlotte Smith made a virtual career out of self-pity. She rises from it in her novels, but it is the obsession of her poetry and, to judge by her letters, of her life. The two features of women's poetry have been examining, an investment in quotidian tones and details and a portrayal of alienated sensibility. Contrary to what one might conventionally expect, in poetry at least, the unhappy ending is the norm of women writers of the Romantic period.

How Not to Improve the Estate: Lopping & Cropping Jane Austen

Abstract: This essay reads Quirk Classics’ monstrous mash-ups, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters , as deliberately excessive and unnatural alterations that speak to a preoccupation with improvement that is both thematized within Austen’s own work and symptomatic of Austenmania’s broader project of renovating the literary landscape that is Jane Austen’s estate. While the mash-up enterprise is, no doubt, an exercise in making Austen’s novels worse, the essay frames the Quirk travesties in terms of Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” asking whether it is possible that these imprudent “improvements” might actually be good because they are bad. Insofar as the enhanced editions make manifest the Camp sensibility that has long been latent in Austen’s prose, they tease promising critical insight; however, the increasingly derivative mash-ups ultimately fail in their campiness precisely where Austen succeeds: for hers remains a secret of style.