Radical cities have historically been hotbeds of transformative paradigms, political changes, activism, and social movements, and have given rise to visionary ideas, utopian projects, revolutionary ideologies, and debates. These cities have served as incubators for innovative ideas, idealistic projects, revolutionary philosophies, and lively debates. The streets, squares, and public spaces of radical cities have been the backdrop for protests, uprisings, and social movements that have had both local and global significance. This research project aims to explore and reimagine radical cities (...) and urban activism using a variety of visual and collaborative pedagogical approaches. This project will study and categorize these cities through comparative case studies from different regions, including North America, and Latin America, and beyond, in order to better understand and interpret pivotal societal transitions. (shrink)

Conceptions of evil have changed dramatically over time, and though humans continue to commit acts of cruelty against one another, today we possess a clearer, more moral way of analyzing them. In _Narrating Evil_, María Pía Lara explores what has changed in our understanding of evil, why the transformation matters, and how we can learn from this specific historical development. Drawing on Immanuel Kant's and Hannah Arendt's ideas about reflective judgment, Lara argues that narrative plays a key role in helping (...) societies acknowledge their pasts. Particular stories haunt our consciousness and lead to a kind of examination and dialogue that shape notions of morality. A powerful description of a crime can act as a filter, helping us to draw conclusions about what constitutes a moral wrong, and public debates over these narratives allow us to construct a more accurate picture of historical truth, leading to a better understanding of why such actions are possible. In building her argument, Lara considers Greek tragedies, Shakespeare's depictions of evil, Joseph Conrad's literary metaphors, and movies that portray human cruelty. Turning to such philosophers and writers as Jürgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and Ariel Dorfman, Lara defines a reflexive relationship between an event, the narrative of the event, and the public reception of the narrative, and she proves that the stories of perpetrators and sufferers are always intertwined. The process of disclosure, debate, and the public fashioning of collective judgment are vital methods through which we make sense not only of new forms of cruelty but of past crimes as well. _Narrating Evil_ describes the steps of this process and why they are a crucial part of our attempt to build a different, more just world. (shrink)

Without denying the importance of the postmodernist approach to the narrative form and rhetorical strategies of historiography, the author, one of Germany's ...

Poor health is not inherently a part of Black Americans’ bodies; poor health is not in our DNA. But as Linda Villarosa says in Under the Skin “something about being Black has led to the documented poor health of Black Americans.”1 Like many other scholars of Black health have said, Villarosa proposes, and evidence supports, that “the something is racism.”2 Villarosa attributes Black people’s generally inferior health outcomes in areas like pregnancy and birth, pain care, and cardiology to racism and (...) not a lack of social resources such as money, education, and access to healthcare. Although not always explicitly stated in her text, the stories Villarosa uses to illustrate racism’s effects on health also demonstrate racism’s influence on who has access to the social resources that are needed to maintain health and treat illnesses. Villarosa is right that more education and more income cannot de facto give Black people better health. At the same time, we cannot ignore that although racism is the force, education, money, housing, and access to healthcare are the means by which racism adversely affects health. Education and other social goods only fail to confer better health to Black people because racism serves as a roadblock. (shrink)

Now in its third edition, _Narration and Knowledge_ is a classic work exploring the nature of historical knowledge and its reliance on narrative. Analytical philosopher Arthur C. Danto introduces the concept of "narrative sentences," in which an event is described with reference to later events and discusses why such sentences cannot be understood until the later event happens. Danto compares narrative and scientific explanation and explores the legitimacy of historical laws. He also argues that history is an autonomous and humanist (...) discipline incapable of being reduced to scientific descriptions. Lydia Goehr's new introduction illustrates Danto's main arguments by questioning her very role, first, as an introducer of a book that has not yet been read by readers and, second, as an interpreter of a book written forty years ago. Frank Ankersmit's conclusion revisits the initial impact of the publication of _Narration and Knowledge_ and considers its enduring legacy. (shrink)

It is widely held in theories of narrative that all works of literary narrative fiction include a narrator who fictionally tells the story. However, it is also granted that the personal qualities of a narrator may be more or less radically effaced. Recently, philosophers and film theorists have debated whether movies similarly involve implicit audio-visual narrators. Those who answer affirmatively allow that these cinematic narrators will be radically effaced. Their opponents deny that audio-visual narrators figure in the ontology of movies (...) at all, and many have argued that the ‘effaced’ literary narrator is an illusion as well. In this paper, I attempt to sort out the central issues that arise in these debates, defending the existence of effaced narrators in both literature and film. (shrink)

The primary narrative problem of the analyst is, then, not how to tell a normative chronological life history; rather, it is how to tell the several histories of each analysis. From this vantage point, the event with which to start the model analytic narration is not the first occasion of thought—Freud's wish-fulfilling hallucination of the absent breast; instead, one should start from a narrative account of the psychoanalyst's retelling of something told by an analysand and the analysand's response to (...) that narrative transformation. In the narration of this moment of dialogue lies the structure of the analytic past, present, and future. It is from this beginning that the accounts of early infantile development are constructed. Those traditional developmental accounts, over which analysts labored so hard, may now be seen in a new light: less as positivistic sets of factual findings about mental development and more as hermeneutically filled-in narrative structures. The narrative structures that have been adopted control the telling of the events of the analysis, including the many tellings and retellings of the analysand's life history. The time is always present. The event is always an outgoing dialogue. Roy Schafer is clinical professor of psychology and psychiatry at Cornell University Medical College, adjunct professor of psychology at New York University, and a supervising and training analyst at Columbia University's Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. He is the author of A New Language for Psychoanalysis, Language and Insight, and Narrative Actions in Psychoanalysis: Narratives of Space and Narratives of Time. (shrink)

In “Movies, Narrative and Emotion” there is an attempt to suggest the ways in which a certain form of narrative organization, to which we can call “erotetic narration,” This can be co-ordinated with the emotional address of the motion picture in terms of what can be called “criterial prefocusing.” On this view, the primary way in which the emotions are engaged is character-directed, the protagonist’s goals providing grounds which generate the narrative questions that the movie goes on to answer.

In this study, David Bordwell offers the first comprehensive account of how movies use fundamental principles of narrative representation, unique features of ...

Legal probabilism is the view that juridical fact-finding should be modeled using Bayesian methods. One of the alternatives to it is the narration view, according to which instead we should conceptualize the process in terms of competing narrations of what happened. The goal of this paper is to develop a reconciliatory account, on which the narration view is construed from the Bayesian perspective within the framework of formal Bayesian epistemology.

Résumé La théorie ricœurienne de la triple mimèsis est susceptible de recevoir deux lectures différentes et exclusives l'une de l'autre. Soit l'on considère, en vertu du « caractère majeur de l'action d'être dès toujours symboliquement médiatisée », que notre praxis est ontologiquement structurée selon des schémas narratifs — mais cette conception essentialiste de l'action minore le rôle configurant de la mise en intrigue et affaiblit d'autant la thèse de Temps et Récit concernant la « force d'innovation de la composition poétique (...) » ; soit on considère l'action comme inanalysable en amont de la représentation narrative, qui seule est en mesure de définir sa sémantique, sa symbolique et sa temporalité. En privilégiant la seconde interprétation, nous tâchons de démontrer ici que l'oeuvre poétique n'a pas qu'une fonction de re figuration et fait plus que de suggérer au lecteur de « change[r] son agir » : l'action n'est humaine et n'est possible que d'être médiatisée par une voix narrative, toute narration créant sa propre référence mais aucune ne donnant accès à un univers référentiel préexistant qui serait ontologiquement signifiant. (shrink)

Résumé La théorie ricœurienne de la triple mimèsis est susceptible de recevoir deux lectures différentes et exclusives l'une de l'autre. Soit l'on considère, en vertu du « caractère majeur de l'action d'être dès toujours symboliquement médiatisée », que notre praxis est ontologiquement structurée selon des schémas narratifs — mais cette conception essentialiste de l'action minore le rôle configurant de la mise en intrigue et affaiblit d'autant la thèse de Temps et Récit concernant la « force d'innovation de la composition poétique (...) » ; soit on considère l'action comme inanalysable en amont de la représentation narrative, qui seule est en mesure de définir sa sémantique, sa symbolique et sa temporalité. En privilégiant la seconde interprétation, nous tâchons de démontrer ici que l'oeuvre poétique n'a pas qu'une fonction de re figuration et fait plus que de suggérer au lecteur de « change[r] son agir » : l'action n'est humaine et n'est possible que d'être médiatisée par une voix narrative, toute narration créant sa propre référence mais aucune ne donnant accès à un univers référentiel préexistant qui serait ontologiquement signifiant. (shrink)

Résumé La théorie ricœurienne de la triple mimèsis est susceptible de recevoir deux lectures différentes et exclusives l'une de l'autre. Soit l'on considère, en vertu du « caractère majeur de l'action d'être dès toujours symboliquement médiatisée », que notre praxis est ontologiquement structurée selon des schémas narratifs — mais cette conception essentialiste de l'action minore le rôle configurant de la mise en intrigue et affaiblit d'autant la thèse de Temps et Récit concernant la « force d'innovation de la composition poétique (...) » ; soit on considère l'action comme inanalysable en amont de la représentation narrative, qui seule est en mesure de définir sa sémantique, sa symbolique et sa temporalité. En privilégiant la seconde interprétation, nous tâchons de démontrer ici que l'oeuvre poétique n'a pas qu'une fonction de re figuration et fait plus que de suggérer au lecteur de « change[r] son agir » : l'action n'est humaine et n'est possible que d'être médiatisée par une voix narrative, toute narration créant sa propre référence mais aucune ne donnant accès à un univers référentiel préexistant qui serait ontologiquement signifiant. (shrink)

This essay engages the work of Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero and her concept of the narratable self. Her relational humanism, rooted in our exposure to others, offers an ontology of uniqueness whose critique of abstraction, masculinism, and identity politics still resonates today where the meaning of a unique “you” is negotiated in embodied exchanges that may offer care or wounds. Cavarero develops an altruistic ethics that cultivates this humanism. I argue that her work should be extended to better capture (...) the political purchase of the narratable self that interacts dynamically and often ambiguously with the “we” of collective politics. Putting her work into conversation with the nineteenth‐century abolitionist and women's rights advocate Sojourner Truth, I suggest that Cavarero's work illuminates Truth as a philosopher of the narratable self. Moreover, Truth's work extends Cavarero's concerns with exposure that may do violence or offer care by making explicit the challenges of narration in the context of inequality, especially in terms of race and class. Exposure as an ontological and phenomenological condition then needs to take account of a broader publicity of textual, individual, and collective exposure to others to develop the critical, ethical, and political purchase it offers. (shrink)

Historical narration is a system of mental operations defining the field of historical consciousness. It is poetic in that it is the performance of creative activity by the human mind in the process of historical thinking. The purpose of historical narration is to make sense of the experience of time in order to orient practical life in the course of time. Three elements distinguish an historical narration from other forms of narration: an historical narration is (...) tied to the medium of memory; it organizes the three dimensions of time in a concept of continuity; and it establishes the identity of its authors and listeners. In order to develop the concepts of continuity and the stability of identity, an historical narration must fulfill four functions: affirmation, regularity, negation, and transformation. Four types of historical narration correspond to these four functions: traditional, exemplary, critical, and genetical. There is a natural progression through these four types of narration, with critical narration serving as a catalyst. The four types are present in all historical texts, one dominating, the others secondary. Modern historical studies are unique in being informed by theoretically and methodologically organized empirical research. The articulation of theories in history means a progress in reasoning. This affects the role of the concept of continuity of time, which is no longer a given and has become a subject of discussion. (shrink)

Now in its third edition, _Narration and Knowledge_ is a classic work exploring the nature of historical knowledge and its reliance on narrative. Analytical philosopher Arthur C. Danto introduces the concept of "narrative sentences," in which an event is described with reference to later events and discusses why such sentences cannot be understood until the later event happens. Danto compares narrative and scientific explanation and explores the legitimacy of historical laws. He also argues that history is an autonomous and humanist (...) discipline incapable of being reduced to scientific descriptions. Lydia Goehr's new introduction illustrates Danto's main arguments by questioning her very role, first, as an introducer of a book that has not yet been read by readers and, second, as an interpreter of a book written forty years ago. Frank Ankersmit's conclusion revisits the initial impact of the publication of _Narration and Knowledge_ and considers its enduring legacy. (shrink)

After the Turks met with Islam, their interest in religious texts continued in both scientific and literary fields. Many people who came to Anatolian lands brought with them the culture, literature and customs of the geography they lived in before and brought an understanding that we can conceptualize as Anatolian Irfān. One of those who served this purpose is undoubtedly Mawlānā. Mawlânâ, who influenced the geog-raphy he lived in with both conversation and letters especially poetry, used many texts that he (...) thought belonged to the Prophet as hadith in his works. In this article, the hadith texts that Mawlānā used by way of quotation or reference -both fully and partially- in his work called Divān-i Kabīr were examined. While the sources and soundness of the narrations included in the quotation method are mentioned in the study, the results of Takhrīj information of the hadiths cited with inreference are reflected. Mawlânâ’s hadith usage method was evaluated specific to an ghazal, that he fictionalized with Quranic verses and hadiths, the consequences obtained were analyzed and the narrations are classified contextually. The extent to which the author’s connection with Sufism is effective in the choice of narration has been analyzed around the results obtained. (shrink)

The Movimiento Autonomo de Mujeres in Nicaragua - birthed in part from the Sandinista Revolution of the 1980s - represents one of the largest, most diverse, and most autonomous women's movements in all of Latin America. While it's true that scholars across a wide range of disciplines have written invariably about this social movement what remains missing from this body of work is scholarship aimed at understanding, specifically, the psychology of resistance; in other words, what are the psychological mechanisms and (...) methodologies that emerge from the margins that determine the kind of social action that revolutionizes societies? Investigating the psychosocial processes behind resistance is critical to understanding a commitment to justice and the development of subjectivity necessary for enacting the political activity required for social transformation. Psychology, in particular, as author Shelly Grabe argues, is positioned to engage in a systematic exploration of the links between social and political conditions that determine how, why, and under what circumstances resistance emerges. Narrating a Psychology of Resistance documents the first-hand accounts of the Nicaraguan women's Movimiento: a coordinated mobilization of women that has weathered unremitting power differentials characterized by patriarchy and capitalism. In this collection of testimonios, Grabe gives voice to these extraordinary women and closely examines how psychological processes that emerge in response to sociopolitical oppression can lead to gendered justice and the revolutionizing of societies at large. ". (shrink)

The Sufyānī narration, which is also referred in some studies carried out today, is mentioned in the early Shiite and Sunnī sources. The anticipated savior perception of the period has an important place in understanding the Sufyānī narrations in the emergence process of which political and sectarian events were effective. Narrations stating that the Mahdī named Muḥammad, one of the descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad (pbuh), would appear in the end of times and establish justice by bringing order to (...) the world where oppression, injustice and inequity have spread, were effective in the political and social life after the Prophet (pbuh). The emergence of the Sufyānī narrations, whose intellectual infrastructure was constituted by the expected Mahdī perception that is effective in the society, was the result of the political conflicts of the period. The death of Muʻāwiya ibn Yazīd (d. 64/684), the third Caliph of the Umayyad State, without leaving a crown behind caused a political crisis. The cousin of the Muʻāwiya II, Marwān bin al-Ḥakam, the experienced politician who turned this moment of crisis into an opportunity and who was from the same dynasty but from a different family, took over the administration and thus the sultanate continued. Although the reign continued from the sons of Umayyad, the administration passed from sons of Sufyān to the sons of Marwān, who were from the same dynasty. This situation caused discomfort in Sufyānīs. Thus, Muʻāwiya II's brother Khālid ibn Yazīd, whose right of administration was seized from him, with the intention of gaining his lost reputation in the society and turning the pessimism towards his family into hope and desire, has been claimed to spread the savior Sufyānī narrations expected from the sons of Sufyān, parallel to the Mahdī narrations expected from the sons of Alī, which was influential in the society. Thus, the Sufyānī came to be expected like the expected Mahdī, who was influential in society and exploited by the Shiite sects in their own belief systems. The rebellions carried out by the sons of Sufyān against the administration in the 2nd century hijrī and afterwards were conceived as the appearance of the Sufyānī expected by the society and the person who led the rebellion was described as Sufyānī. The most important of these rebellions is the revolt of ʻAlī ibn Abdullah ibn Khālid nicknamed Abū ʻAmayṭar, formed by the coalition of sons of ʻAlī and sons of Sufyān who descend from the sons of Umayya. Abū ʻAmayṭar, who is considered to be the Sufyānī and some sections of whose life constitute a source for many narrations on the Sufyānī, declared his caliphate during the period of Abbasī Caliph al-Amīn (d. 198/813) and called for allegiance to himself. The announcement of his caliphate was considered by his supporters as the expected savior. The period of Abū ʻAmayṭar and the sayings about him are extremely important in terms of presenting the expected savior perception in the society, the Sufyānī understanding and the date of his emergence. Sections from Abū ʻAmayṭar's life reflected in the narrations about the Sufyānī in many Shiite and Sunnī sources. In this article, it is tried to examine the emergence of the Sufyānī narrations, its development and particularly its transformation within the Shiite sect, in a detailed manner and especially based on political and sectarian events of the early period. (shrink)

Scholars have mostly analyzed information from mental health practitioners, attorneys, and institutions to critique mental health practices in the War on Terror. These sources offer limited insights into the suffering of detainees. Detainee accounts provide novel information based on their experiences at Guantánamo. Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary is the only text from a current detainee that provides a first-person account of his interrogations and interactions with health professionals. Despite being advertised as a diary, however, it has undergone redaction from (...) American government officials. This article examines Slahi’s account of his interrogations and representations of mental health at Guantánamo and considers its role within the narrative function of the nation. At stake is the right of detainees to narrate, scholars to critique medical practices in the War on Terror, and the nation’s attempts to control its narration. (shrink)

In this article, I consider several different ways of unpacking the metaphor of self-authorship, asking what an author might be and how authorship thus understood might be related to personal autonomy. First, I consider authors as makers or creators in a generic sense. Next, I consider authors as a particular sort of creator (the creator of a text), and, finally, authors as an interpretive construct implied by a text. Ultimately, I argue that we both construct ourselves as authors and take (...) responsibility for our self-constructs through narrative self-interpretation. Importantly, however, narrative self-interpretation is not simply a process of individual self-narration. Given the limitations placed on the autobiographical perspective by our temporal and subjective locations and the intersection of any one person's story with the stories of others, I argue that both autonomy and autobiography are best understood as relational. (shrink)

: This essay explores some themes in use of a relativized Kantian a priori in the work of Thomas Kuhn and Michael Friedman. It teases out some shared and some divergent beliefs and attitudes in these two philosophers by comparing their characteristic questions and problems to the questions and problems that seem most appropriately to attend to an adequate understanding of games and their histories. It argues for a way forward within a relativized Kantian framework that is suggested but not (...) argued for in Friedman (2001): philosophers of science should move from a concern with unreason as meaninglessness to a concern with unreason as argumentative coercion. It ends with a few suggestions regarding a place for philosophy in the history of reason. (shrink)

The account of the conversation between King Janaka and the Ṛṣi Pañcaśikha on the fate of the individual after death is one of the philosophical texts that are included in the Mokṣadharmaparvan of the Mahābhārata. There are different scholarly views on the history and composition of the text as well as the philosophical teachings propagated by Pañcaśikha. In contrast to earlier studies this paper not only analyzes the whole text, but also pays attention to the narrative framework in which the (...) philosophical discourse is embedded. In the text Bhīṣma functions as an external narrator, who relates and interprets the conversation as well as characterizes the protagonists and thereby influences the ways in which text is received by the audience. It is argued that it is important to deal with the interplay between the narrative and the philosophical discourse that is narrated, when analysing the philosophical positions that are either refuted or accepted in the text. 12.211–12 is not only a philosophical text, but also a tale about philosophical discourse in general and about how Sāṃkhya philosophy is taught to a non-expert audience. Seen from this perspective the text is significant for the way in which philosophical terms and issues are dealt with in the epic and adjacent non-expert texts, such as the Purāṇas. (shrink)

What political problem can autobiography solve? This article examines the politics of Frederick Douglass’s antebellum personal narratives: his 1845 slave narrative, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and his 1855 autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, written at the opposite ends of Douglass’s transition from the abolitionist politics of William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips to Douglass’s defense of political action and the Constitution as anti-slavery. Placing the two texts alongside Douglass’s distinction “to narrate wrongs” (...) and “denouncing them,” I argue that Douglass writes My Bondage and My Freedom as a mode of denunciation: an autobiographical critique of injustice that balances analysis of collective oppression with advocacy for communal emancipation. Whereas to narrate wrongs encouraged readers to judge Douglass’s story alongside popular criteria of justice, to denounce wrongs is to implicate readers within the structures that create antebellum subjects on and off the plantation, by revealing the coercions and conditionings of society that make not simply slaves but slaveowners, sympathizers, and abolitionists. This article claims that autobiography is a distinct genre of political theory, one that challenges present relations between the individual and the collective by representing not simply its author but an expanded view of “the people.”. (shrink)

It is about analyzing the connection between just memory, narration and art, using an approach that mixes philosophy and visual arts. We will start from the perspective of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur on fair memory, presented in his work Memory, History, Oblivion (2000), according to which there is an institutionalized ideologization of memory in which narrations are silenced or distorted by the so-called official history. In the process of recovering fair memory, these narratives need to be heard, recognized (...) and valued, deconstructing abusive mechanisms that silence them with the aim of producing oblivion or that manipulate them involve distorting the facts to benefit hegemonic discourses. Next, we will discuss how the myth of Brazilian racial democracy is an example of institutionalized ideologization of memory, considering mainly the reflections of Brazilian philosophy Sueli Carneiro in Device of raciality (2023). Finally, we will show how Elian Almeida's pictorial counter-narratives, especially the Vogue series (2020), work to strengthen and disseminate unofficial narratives about Brazil that have been suffocated by official history. (shrink)

The English translation of Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere converges with the revival of the "political culture concept" in the social sciences. Surprisingly, Habermas's account of the Western bourgeois public sphere has much in common with the original political culture concept associated with Parsonian modernization theory in the 1950s and 1960s. In both cases, the concept of political culture is used in a way that is neither political nor cultural. Explaining this peculiarity is the central problem addressed (...) in this article and its companion piece, which appeared in Sociological Theory, volume 3, number 2 (1995). I hypothesize that this is the case because the concept itself is embedded in an historically constituted political culture (here called a conceptual network)-a structured web of conceptual relationships that combine into Anglo-American citizenship theory. The method of an historical sociology of concept formation is used to analyze historically and empirically the internal constraints and dynamics of this conceptual network. The method draws from new work in cultural history and sociology, social studies, and network, narrative, and institutional analysis. This research yields three empirical findings: this conceptual network has a narrative structure, here called the Anglo-American citizenship story; this narrative is grafted onto an epistemology of social naturalism; and these elements combine in a metanarrative that continues to constrain empirical research in political sociology. (shrink)

We propose that emotion psychology would significantly gain from including narrative(s) and the conversational negotiation of appropriateness. Using the example of anger, we argue that narrators need to construct plausible narratives of emotional events to achieve validating responses by listeners. We argue first that narrators attempt to demonstrate that the appraisal conditions for their emotion are given so that the emotion fits the narrated events. Second, we argue that this in turn explains why narratives of specific emotions exhibit specific forms. (...) Third, we argue that coping with emotional experiences is helped by narrating such that the fittingness of emotions is demonstrated. We conclude that narrative plays an important role for identifying, processing, communicating, and eliciting emotions. (shrink)

Self-narrative is often, perhaps primarily, a tool of self- constitution, not of truth representation. We explore this theme with reference to our own recent qualitative interviews of substance-dependent agents. Narrative self- constitution, the process of realizing a valued narrative projection of oneself, depends on one’s narrative tracking truth to a certain extent. Therefore, insofar as narratives are successfully realized, they have a claim to being true, although a certain amount of self-deception typically comes along for the ride. We suggest that, (...) because agents typically value certain outcomes more highly than truth for truth’s sake, it makes sense to narrate in ways that aren’t strictly true if that helps ensure highly valued outcomes do come true. Walker (2012) outlines three ways of defending the truth of past-directed narratives, but the role of future-directed narratives in realizing highly valued truths provides her a fourth way. (shrink)

This article analyzes narratives about living with HIV/ AIDS amid stigma, using the notion of “fragile stories” to further detail the linguistic practices through which people narrate experiences in danger of not being told. The article is based on fieldwork in 2008 in Durban, South Africa with a Zulu gospel choir in which all group members are living with HIV/AIDS. Close analysis of recorded narratives demonstrates how institutional story frameworks and the normative performance of gender helped storytellers to breach boundaries (...) drawn by stigma. The article consolidates research on narrative tellability and fragile stories, verbal art, and stigma. The article has implications for research amid stigma, advocating linguistic analysis of narrative to emphasize the relationship between stories told and life events involving stigmatization. (shrink)

In this paper, three racialized social work educators unsettle our settled colonial silences as acts of self-decolonization and as a way of responding to the call to action by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Hailing from the uneven manifestations of global capitalism and coloniality in Morocco, Vietnam, and Ethiopia, we draw on various critical theories to interrogate our unique entanglements with the imperial project of entwined settler colonialism and white supremacy. We narrate our embodied coloniality and how the (...) virulent materiality of global processes of displacement and dispossession plays out in each of our personal stories, everyday encounters, and practices as educators. With the aim of teaching for social justice by modeling, we share the processes of unsettling our colonial settlerhood and puncturing our racialized innocence. Each story addresses three themes: contact and colonial relations with Indigenous peoples of Canada, complicity in global coloniality, and responsibility in responding to the TRC call to action. The first story provides a broad outline of our struggles with the Indigenous/Settler binary created to perpetuate the various forms of displacement and dispossession in settler colonialism. The second story probes the complexities in the Settler category by engaging difference-making as a central technology of dispossession. The third story probes the complexities in the Indigenous category through interrogating the perils and promises of recognition and reconciliation in the context of global hierarchies of nation-states and global Indigenous resistance. We conclude bymoving beyond our divergent trajectories and offering shared critical remarks on the human rights framework, the nation-state framework, and the coloniality of social work. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine how an organization narratively constructs its prototypical disabled employee. Data comprise public narratives of the Government of India, the country’s largest employer of disabled persons. Narratives during 2008–2016 were considered as this timespan witnessed the design of inclusive legislation that emphasized defining disabled persons and their entitlements. Findings indicate that the label of “disadvantage” was consistently used to portray the target employee. Alongside other narrative material suggesting, for example that the target employee was someone who (...) required employment assistance, this label was supplied to external audiences to convert them into potential partners. This supply of narrative material further reinforced the portrayal of the target employee. Consistent use of this expansive label subsumed changing definitions of who is a disabled person, allowed for aggregations with diverse disadvantaged collectives, and accommodated changes in employment entitlements and ecosystem partners, thereby allowing the reading of change in stable narratives. The contributions of this paper lie in highlighting how the consistent use of an expansive label can cast narrative stability and change as complementary, and in suggesting that narrating a prototypical employee entails shaping the setting outside the employing organization toward employee categorization. (shrink)

This book demonstrates instead the writers' use of irony and allegory in struggling against the deceitfulness of their own texts.

Climate change is a threat to food system stability, with small islands particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events. In Puerto Rico, a diminished agricultural sector and resulting food import dependence have been implicated in reduced diet quality, rural impoverishment, and periodic food insecurity during natural disasters. In contrast, smallholder farmers in Puerto Rico serve as cultural emblems of self-sufficient food production, providing fresh foods to local communities in an informal economy and leveraging traditional knowledge systems to manage varying ecological and (...) climatic constraints. The current mixed methods study sought to document this expertise and employed a questionnaire and narrative interviewing in a purposeful sample of 30 smallholder farmers after Hurricane María to identify experiences in post-disaster food access and agricultural recovery and reveal underlying socioecological knowledge that may contribute to a more climate resilient food system in Puerto Rico. Although the hurricane resulted in significant damages, farmers contributed to post-disaster food access by sharing a variety of surviving fruits, vegetables, and root crops among community members. Practices such as crop diversification, seed banking, and soil conservation were identified as climate resilient farm management strategies, and smallholder farmer networks were discussed as a promising solution to amass resources and bolster agricultural productivity. These recommendations were shared in a narrative highlighting socioecological identity, self-sufficiency, community and cultural heritage, and collaborative agency as integral to agricultural resilience. Efforts to promote climate resilience in Puerto Rico must leverage smallholder farmers’ socioecological expertise to reclaim a more equitable, sustainable, and community-owned food system. (shrink)

This paper reports on a manual monitoring of online representations of LGBT persons in the Republic of Cyprus for the period April 2015–February 2016. The article contextualizes the prevalence of “hate speech” in online Greek Cypriot comments against LGBT individuals, and, more generally, against non-heterosexuals. Adopting a Foucauldian position vis-à-vis the social and discursive construction of sexuality, we outline, first, the socio-historical context with a focus on LGBT rights in the Republic of Cyprus and the nationalistic project construing sexualities. We (...) then examine the different levels of discursive discrimination practices, providing a snapshot of the types of “hate speech” referring to this topic typically found in such an environment. The focus is on identification of the frames used to construct LGBT identities, and their perception.We use in our title the word subject as defined by post-modernists and by Butler in particular : subject refers to “a socially produced ‘agent’ and ‘deliberator’ whose agency and thought is made possible by a language that precedes that ‘I’. In this sense the ‘I’ is produced through power ”. This paper focuses on the socially produced definition of the LGBT community in the context under study. We thus address the way in which sexuality is constructed within a compulsory and hegemonic heterosexuality and heteronormativity. We analyze our data i.e. comments focused on the LGBT community, with corpus linguistic tools as well as through a qualitative examination of the identified frames. Our analysis confirms an interface between nationalism and compulsory hegemonic heteronormativity in the Republic as well as the influence of the Orthodox Church and its beliefs. (shrink)

Resumen: El etiquetamiento escinde la vida común entre aquellas dignas de ser vividas y las inmeritorias de cualquier consideración sensible, en tanto culpables y condenadas al eterno retorno del pronóstico y la repetición criminal. Este hecho exige repensar la vida humana, a través de otros marcos perceptuales, que desactiven progresivamente los efectos inmunizantes de la estigmatización de aquellas existencias “peligrosas” y, en consecuencia, “indeseables” e “intolerables” para la comunidad. Esta composición tiene como urdimbre teórica los planteamientos del paradigma inmunitario, el (...) etiquetamiento criminal y la crítica como apropiación de la vida humana. Entre las conclusiones que arroja esta reflexión se encuentra que la narración de la existencia constituye una reacción frente a la estigmatización, y, en consecuencia, una inversión del lenguaje inmunitario, en tanto libera al sujeto del devenir monstruoso contenido en la etiqueta criminal, revelando así una humanidad no vista, ni oída, todavía.: Labelling separates the common life between those worthy of being lived and the others of any sensitive consideration, both guilty and condemned to the eternal return of the prognosis and criminal repetition. This fact requires rethinking the human, through other perceptual frameworks progressively deactivating the immunizing effects of stigmatization of those “dangerous” lives and, consequently, “undesirable” and “intolerable” for the community. This article is based on the immune paradigm, criminal labelling, and criticism as appropriation of human life. Among the conclusions that this reflection throws is that the narration of existence constitutes a reaction against stigmatization, and, consequently, an inversion of the immune language, while freeing the subject from the monstrous becoming contained in the criminal label, thus revealing a humanity not seen or heard yet. (shrink)

This response has two parts: a reply to Nigel Biggar's specific criticisms of my exegesis and an appeal for attention to more fundamental theological issues. Biggar generally disregards the narrative and epistolary contexts of the verses he cites and introduces anachronistic conceptual distinctions. Beyond specific exegetical disagreements, his argument fails to address the broader christological, ecclesiological, and eschatological warrants for Christians to embody Jesus' way of peace. The moral vocation of the people of God is grounded in the story of (...) Jesus Christ. It is this story that makes just war theologically problematical. (shrink)

This response has two parts: a reply to Nigel Biggar's specific criticisms of my exegesis and an appeal for attention to more fundamental theological issues. Biggar generally disregards the narrative and epistolary contexts of the verses he cites and introduces anachronistic conceptual distinctions. Beyond specific exegetical disagreements, his argument fails to address the broader christological, ecclesiological, and eschatological warrants for Christians to embody Jesus' way of peace. The moral vocation of the people of God is grounded in the story of (...) Jesus Christ. It is this story that makes just war theologically problematical. (shrink)

Although there has long been a division in studies of consciousness between a focus on neuronal processes or conversely an emphasis on the ruminations of a conscious self, the long-standing split between mechanism and meaning within the brain was mirrored by a split without, between information as a technical term and the meanings that messages are commonly thought to convey. How to heal this breach has posed formidable problems to researchers. Working through the history of cybernetics, one of the historical (...) sites where Claude Shannon’s information theory quickly became received doctrine, we argue that the cybernetic program as it developed through second-order cybernetics and autopoietic theory remains incomplete. In this article, we return to fundamental questions about pattern and noise, context and meaning, to forge connections between consciousness, narrative and media. The thrust of our project is to reintroduce context and narrative as crucial factors in the processes of meaning-making. The project proceeds along two fronts: advancing a theoretical framework within which context plays its properly central role; and demonstrating the importance of context by analyzing two fictions, Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice and Joseph McElroy’s Plus, in which context has been deformed by being wrenched away from normal human environments, with radical consequences for processes of meaning-making. (shrink)

RésuméNotre propos est de réunir quelques réflexions de Pascal Quignard sur le récit afin d’en dégager les coordonnées ou les prémisses d’une théorie narrative chez cet écrivain qui, n’étant pas un théoricien, est sans doute quelqu’un qui fait œuvre de pensée. Notre hypothèse est que, situées dans le cadre d’une épistémologie naturaliste et d’un récit anthropogénétique au sein duquel la prédation joue un rôle majeur, en particulier celui de condition de possibilité de la narration, les spéculations de Quignard s’élaborent (...) sur fond de la théorie sémio-narrative laquelle subit ainsi une reformulation. Nous soutenons que la réinterprétation quignardienne fait partie des théories, comme celles de Petitot et de Thom, qui proposent une solution morphogénétique au problème de la conversion (de la substance sémique en forme narrative) tel qu’il se présente chez Greimas. Au sein de cette convergence avec le structuralisme naturaliste et morphodynamique, la spécificité de Quignard réside dans la configuration de la conversion comme capture. Cette figure dynamique devient alors un opérateur de narrativité différent des modèles logiques (carré sémiotique) ou topologiques (catastrophes) qui formalisent rationnellement la conversion. Elle est au cœur de la pensée de l’écrivain sur le phénomène narratif. (shrink)

While aestheticians have devoted substantial attention to the possibility of acquiring knowledge from fiction, little of this attention has been directed at the acquisition of factual information. The neglect traces, I believe, to the assumption that the task of aesthetics is to explain the special cognitive value of fiction. While the value of many works of nonfiction may be measured, in part, by their ability to transmit information, most works of fiction do not have this aim, and so many conclude (...) that the transmission of information is irrelevant to their value. I am skeptical of these claims. I doubt that there is any value, cognitive or otherwise, special to all and only works of fiction. Thus I see no reason to neglect the capacity to convey factual information—specifically, propositional knowledge about real individuals and events—when assessing the value of particular works. In this paper I consider the value of learning about history from a particular work of fiction, Gore Vidal’s Lincoln: A Novel. Drawing on recent work in cognitive psychology, I argue that narrative devices used by Vidal can enhance our ability to learn and retain factual information, despite also increasing the possibility that we will form false beliefs, and that acquiring propositional knowledge from fiction, far from being a process we can take for granted, constitutes a difficult achievement. (shrink)