Les affordances de certaines formes technolangagières interrogent le rapport à la matérialité des énoncés tels qu’ils apparaissent dans les environnements numériques. C’est le cas de ce que nous appelons les « publications fantômes » sur Facebook. Énoncés translucides qui n’existent que pour l’utilisateur tant qu’il n’a pas cliqué sur le bouton « publier ». Cet article proposera une définition des publications fantômes s’appuyant sur une typologie diachronique réunie à partir d’un micro-corpus constitué depuis leur apparition sur le site en 2015. (...) Cette typologie nous permettra de considérer l’augmentation des affordances et leur utilisation stratégique par Facebook. (shrink)

Abstract:Held at Landscape, Language, and the Sublime symposium and creative gathering in Devon, England on Solstice 2016, We Weave and Heft by the River was an all-night, socially-engaged event that explored ways to grieve the current loss of non-human species and ecological habitats. We Weave and Heft by the River considered how inheritors of the colonial legacy may have a compromised ability to grieve due to transformations tied to agriculture and colonization. We considered the social nature of grief, the possibility (...) of grieving with non-humans, and the importance of grief in unraveling colonial practices of time and space. (shrink)

La particularité du sentiment est que, alors qu'il est une impression d'ordre affectif, constituée de perceptions de plaisir et de douleur, il est amené à représenter autre chose que l'état purement subjectif de l'âme. Tout le problème est de déterminer à quel point le sentiment constitue un mode de connaissance irréductible.

Looks at the lives of three young Palestinian fighters caught up in the second Palestinian Intifada and examines the recent history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the cross-generational differences and divisions in religious, ...

Grotius is now widely acknowledged as an important figure in early modern contractual and consensual theories of political authority and legitimacy. However, as his thoughts on these debates are disseminated throughout his works rather than systematically ordained, it remains difficult to assess what, if anything, constitutes his distinctive mark. In the present paper, I will argue that his works contain a combination of two conceptual elements that have come to constitute a salient characteristic of early modern contract and consent theories: (...) first, a strong obligation to keep one’s promises, and second, an account of perfect promises as transferrals of rights. In the political sphere, this means that citizens who have promised their obedience to the authorities are obligated to keep faith, which provides a solid foundation for political obligations. In addition, their promise implies that authorities receive the right to rule over them, which accounts for the legitimacy of these authorities’ power. (shrink)

Cet article se propose d’examiner les espaces de production et d’activités artisanales dans le monde mycénien. On s’intéresse aux structures fixes – telles que les fours artisanaux – et aux dépôts d’outils, d’objets semi‑finis ou de matériaux bruts découverts en contexte de l’Helladique Récent. Alors que certaines activités artisanales, comme le travail de l’ivoire, se concentrent sur des sites palatiaux tels que Mycènes et Thèbes à l’HR III B, la production céramique est attestée par la découverte de fours dans différents (...) habitats, tout au long de l’HR. Les espaces de travail étaient bien intégrés à l’habitat mycénien, même là où des activités métallurgiques sont attestées, comme à Tirynthe. Les équipements artisanaux demeurent toutefois le plus souvent incomplets en Grèce mycénienne. Cette observation conduit à se pencher sur le caractère et la spécificité des ateliers identifiés. (shrink)

This paper aims to queer evidence‐based practice by troubling the concepts of evidence, knowledge and mental illness. The evidence‐based narrative that emerged within biomedicine has dominated health care. The biomedical notion of ‘evidence’ has been critiqued extensively and is seen as exclusive and limiting, and even though the social constructionist paradigm attempts to challenge the authority of biomedicine to legitimate what constitutes acceptable evidence or knowledge for those experiencing mental illness, biomedical notions of evidence appear to remain relatively intact. Queer (...) theory offers theoretical tools to disrupt biomedical norms and challenges biomedical normativity to indicate how marginalisation occurs when normative truths about mental health classify those who differ from the norm as ‘ill’ or ‘disordered’. Queer theory's emphasis on normativity serves the political aim to subvert marginalisation and bring about radical social and material change. Reference will be made to mental health subjects within each discourse by indicating how the body acts as a vehicle for knowing. Deleuzian notions of the rhizome are used as metaphor to suggest a relational approach to knowledge that does away with either/or positions in either biomedical, or queer knowledge to arrive at a both/and position where the biomedical, constructionist and queer are interrelated and entangled in needing the other for their own evolution. However, queer does not ask for assimilation but celebrates difference by remaining outside to disrupt that which is easily overlooked, assumed to be natural or represented as the norm. The task of queer knowledge is to do justice to the lives lived in the name of evidence‐based practice and demands that we consider the relations of power where knowledge is produced. This pursuit creates different knowledge spaces where we identify new intersections that allow for socially just understandings of knowing or evidence to emerge. (shrink)

La « figure vitruvienne », héritée du traité De architectura de Vitruve, et les variations auxquelles elle donne lieu dans les arts à la Renaissance révèlent une grande diversité de formes et un remaniement du canon antique. En s’appuyant sur une méthode historique et conceptuelle, l’article entend mettre à jour les enjeux esthétiques suscités par la représentation du corps humain dans les arts, en tenant compte de la diversité des voies empruntées par les artistes de la Renaissance, influencés qui plus (...) est par la tentation de la mathématisation, la physiognomonie et la recherche de l’expressivité. (shrink)

En prenant appui sur l’histoire de la plus importante organisation mondiale d’écrivains, PEN International, et sur plusieurs trajectoires et mobilisations d’écrivains ou collectifs indiens contemporains (le Indian Cultural Forum, Karthika Naïr, Perumal Murugan), cet article s’interroge sur certaines modalités de l’activisme en littérature, entendu à la fois comme activisme à travers la littérature, et comme activisme au service de celle-ci. En Inde, particulièrement, l’écrivain(e) partage une communauté de vulnérabilité avec toutes les autres voix et minorités menacées ou liquidées. L’activisme, c’est (...) s’assurer que ce qui est mineur, minoré ou oublié continue d’être vu, entendu, reconnu ; c’est continuer à raconter d’ autres histoires, à creuser leur multiplicité et leur équivocité ; c’est enregistrer les mots, les noms et les réalités apparemment superflues des mondes vulnérables qui nous entourent. (shrink)

L’article décrit l’attente des familles exilées hébergées dans des hôtels. De quoi est fait le quotidien en attendant les papiers pour chacun des membres de la famille, un CDI, un logement? Nous proposons de porter notre attention sur les relations entre le temps vécu et la vie matérielle, autrement dit l’espace, les objets, l’argent, les papiers administratifs, les petits boulots, les échanges concrets, lesquels sont trop souvent évacués des recherches sociologiques sur l’exil.Parce que l’espace d’hébergement donne un relief particulier à (...) l’attente, nous proposons de saisir ces temporalités sociales comme configurations particulières des relations entre l’espace et le temps. L’enquête ethnographique menée dans quatre hôtels situés dans l’Oise et en Île-de-France souligne combien l’attente revêt une réalité toute matérielle. Les familles vivent entre l’impossibilité de s’installer en France – au sens du droit commun de « prendre domicile » – et le temps qui creuse leur présence, accumule les relations et les expériences. Une forme de paradoxe entre précarité du statut et épaisseur du temps vécu. (shrink)

This paper brings to light an unexplored aspect of Hobbes’s argument that political authority rests upon subjects’ consent. Consent enacts a transfer of subjects’ right of nature to the sovereign, yet she already possesses a natural right to everything. What moral difference, then, does this make to her possession of power, and how? In my reading, the difference lies in the rise of new obligations befalling the sovereign by means of an indirect mechanism: That many individuals, hoping for safety, transfer (...) their right of nature to the sovereign triggers an obligation for her to accept the role of a ruler and perform the duties attached to it, for the sake of the peace enjoined by the laws of nature. This reading should also confirm the possibility of a consensual foundation for the Hobbesian right to punish and shed new light on Hobbes’s notion of tacit consent. (shrink)

Telle qu’elle se décline dans la théorie de la pitié du livre IV de l’Émile, la philosophie morale de Rousseau réconcilie deux traditions : les morales dites de l’amour-propre et celles du sentiment moral. La présence de l’imagination, dans la morale dite égoïste, mêle le sentiment moral à l’intérêt et donc à l’amour-propre. A contrario, ne pas recourir à l’imagination dans les morales du sentiment moral doit permettre d’éviter cette perversion. L’originalité de la philosophie morale de Rousseau est de concilier (...) le recours à l’imagination, qui seule permet la mise en place de rapports affectifs entre soi-même et autrui, et l’existence d’un sentiment moral véritable non teinté d’égoïsme. (shrink)

L ’habitat de Krisa, fouillé en 1935‑36, a livré d’importants vestiges de l’âge du Bronze. Le réexamen du site et du mobilier a pour but de revoir l’accessibilité de l’éperon rocheux, de redater les dépôts céramiques découverts dans les bâtiments et les tombes au sein de l’habitat, ainsi que de mettre à jour nos connaissances sur le corpus céramique. On démontre, entre autres, que la porte ouverte dans le mur de fortification se trouve plus à l’Est que l’emplacement indiqué jusqu’alors. (...) De plus, la phase HR I de l’habitat était plus importante que ce qui avait été supposé, alors que la phase HR II A demeure difficile à identifier. Par ailleurs, on souligne la présence récurrente de vases à boire et vaisselle de table dans le corpus céramique mycénienne. Enfin, on soutient que la majeure partie des céramiques à peinture mate et mycénienne examinées a certainement été produite régionalement. (shrink)

Au sortir de cet entretien avec Gauz, Laëtitia Ajanohun nous propose une légende inspirée de ces légendes orales pleinement réécrites qui essaiment dans tout le roman de Gauz, Camarade Papa, qui minent le discours colonial et donnent voix aux oubliés de l’Histoire.

Participants were required to switch among randomly ordered tasks, and instructional cues were used to indicate which task to execute. In Experiments 1 and 2, the participants indicated their readiness for the task switch before they received the target stimulus; thus, each trial was associated with two primary dependent measures: (1) readiness time and (2) target reaction time. Slow readiness responses and instructions emphasizing high readiness were paradoxically accompanied by slow target reaction time. Moreover, the effect of task switching on (...) readiness time was an order of magnitude smaller then the (objectively estimated) duration required for task preparation (Experiment 3). The results strongly suggest that participants have little conscious awareness of their preparedness and challenge commonly accepted assumptions concerning the role of consciousness in cognitive control. (shrink)

It is generally stated that diaeresis after the first metron, obligatory in recitative dimeters, is not the rule in catalectic dimeters, or paroemiacs. An examination of the material, however, yields the following results. The paroemiacs of Tyrtaeus' consistendy observe metron-diaeresis. Out of a total of 348 recitative paroemiacs in the Attic dramatists, only 34 disregard metron-diaeresis altogether. A further 75 overlap metron-diaeresis by one short syllable . Apparently, the practice with regard to metron-diaeresis is fundamentally the same in paroemiacs as (...) in full dimeters, only the licences are a little more frequent. The poets occasionally take advantage of the interruption in the movement produced by the catalectic colon in order to break away still farther from regular anapaestic rhythm. Aristophanes, in particular, rather likes to round off an anapaestic period with a rattling, and often abusive, polysyllable: Vesp. 326. (shrink)

If self-interested behavior conflicts with the collective welfare, rules of cooperation are often installed to prevent egoistic behavior. We hypothesized that installing such rules may instigate personal moral norms of cooperation, but that they fail in doing so when installed by a leader who is self-interested rather than self-sacrificing. Three studies confirmed this and also showed that, consequently, only self-sacrificing leaders were able to install rules that increase cooperation without the need for a perfectly operating monitoring system.

Dans le chamanisme occidental, riche de multiples cosmologies syncrétiques, hybrides et multiculturelles, l’apprenti construit sa propre cosmologie par une succession d’interprétations de ses expériences cognitives et perceptuelles qui le constituent en tant que « chamane ». Les stages, initiations et diverses expériences tendent à la fabrication de ce corps chamanique capable de se mettre en contact et d’interagir, dans une relation volontaire et maîtrisée avec les autres mondes, qu’ils soient vécus comme extérieurs ou intérieurs à soi, mondes autres, parallèles ou (...) faisant partie d’une intériorité élargie. Cet article propose une anthropologie des ressentis et des images intérieures associée à une analyse des techniques du corps dans le champ des études sur le chamanisme. (shrink)

La lecture que Ernst Cassirer fait de Jean-Jacques Rousseau au début des années 1930 est intéressante, car elle met en exergue différents mécanismes interprétatifs, plus ou moins reconnus par l’auteur. D’un côté, Cassirer entend retrouver l’œuvre de Rousseau, par-delà les interprétations divergentes de son temps : il revendique une lecture neutre. De l’autre, sa pensée, de fait, est déterminée par sa formation philosophique personnelle, assimilée au néokantisme de l’école de Marbourg, et surtout par le contexte politique de son temps.

Prenant acte de la disqualification du sentiment religieux à la fin du xvii e siècle, sous l’impulsion à la fois, de la querelle du pur amour et de la critique philosophique des sentiments, cet article remonte en deçà de cette époque pour examiner le corpus de la littérature spirituelle du xvi e siècle et du début du xvii e siècle. Cette littérature mystique interroge le rôle et la valeur des affects au sein d’un itinéraire spirituel et permet de réévaluer la (...) question d’une spécificité des émotions religieuses par rapport aux émotions naturelles. Nous montrerons que l’affectivité religieuse n’est pas tant caractérisée par un apport de sentiments nouveaux que par une conversion de valeur des sentiments naturellement éprouvés. (shrink)

Cette contribution présente l’analyse de douze bilans d’apprentissage émanant de quatre dispositifs différents de formation initiale et continue d’enseignant·es du primaire, du secondaire et de mentor·es de Suisse romande. Le cadrage théorique prend appui sur une approche historico-culturelle dans laquelle le langage sous forme écrite, met en évidence les indices que les sujets donnent à voir dans les textes réflexifs rédigés en formations initiale ou continue concernant leurs apprentissages. Les contenus mobilisés dans les textes, les systèmes de régulations proposés, les (...) postures et les positionnements revêtus dans les prises en charge énonciatives mises en exergue dans les résultats, éclairent les questions suivantes : En quoi l'écriture de textes réflexifs participe-t-elle au développement professionnel? Quelles dimensions des processus de formation cette écriture donne-t-elle à voir? Quels sont les contenus sur lesquels portent ces écrits sous forme de bilans d'apprentissage? (shrink)

Formulating how biomimicry relates to nature has been crucial to ‘deepening’ its theory. Currently, an autopoietic model of nature dominates the literature. However, advances in the natural and human sciences have demonstrated that autopoiesis does not adequately explain complex, dynamic, responsive, and situated systems. This article draws on Beth Dempster’s (1998) characterisation of ecosystems as sympoietic, that is as homeorhetic, evolutionary, distributively controlled, unpredictable, and adaptive, and on Donna Jeanne Haraway’s (2016) critique that entities do not pre-exist their relationships. We (...) argue that using sympoietic processes of becoming as our model, measure, and mentor impacts biomimicry’s practice and relation to sustainability. Taking John Todd’s Living Machines as a case study, we explicate how sympoiesis unfurls autopoiesis. By integrating advances in the natural and human sciences into the philosophy of biomimicry, we address the limitations of the autopoietic model and provide a more comprehensive and adequate model of ‘nature.’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface Within the current context in the United States, we tend to think of “choice” as the leading slogan of the liberal movement to expand women’s reproductive rights, particularly the right to elective abortion. But choice depends on context: on what is available, what is mandated, what is prohibited or discouraged, and what has not yet been imagined. This issue of Feminist Studies expands our thinking about available and (...) potential choices, both individual and social. The issue opens with Stephanie Yingyi Wang’s ethnographic study of companionate marriage in China, in which she describes cooperative marriage partnerships that look heterosexual and appear to fulfill traditional familial expectations, but that facilitate same-sex liaisons and so create new family structures. Other essays in this issue describe the kinds of choices available to those who seek nontraditional or less conventional family and erotic bonds. Leila J. Rupp discusses the “queer dilemmas of desire” that perplex undergraduate queer women in US colleges, and Sonny Nordmarken opens possibilities for new trans epistemologies that disrupt and produce new gender practices, claiming that queer instability provides “infinite possibilities” for individual and social change. More traditional choices and families take differing shapes in other historical and cultural contexts. Carla Pascoe Leahy compares the levels of maternal satisfaction felt by three historical cohorts of Australian women: those of the immediate post-World War II generation, the later generation of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the current generation. Miriam Kienle examines how two designers, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, decided to explore alternatives to big data by sending each other weekly postcards that quantified their lives according to “small/slow data” points. Other essays and poems emphasize constraint rather than choice about the kinds of identities that take shape within current social structures. Bettina Judd ponders the effects on herself and others of her own rage at racial injustice and of the stereotype of raging black women perpetuated by a society that has chosen not to 8Preface deal with its endemic racism. Similarly, Vivyan Adair’s memoir on the stigmata of growing up in poverty exposes the limitations of individual choice in the context of violence, a theme echoed in the poems by Elisabeth Blair, which dramatize her experiences in an abusive institution for troubled teens. Trysh Travis reviews four books published in 2017 that together, but differently, tackle the difficult situations of the “drug-using woman” and her recovery. Marilyn Strathern and Jade S. Sasser review Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway’s edited volume Making Kin, Not Population : Reconceiving Generations, with responses from multiple authors featured in the book. Finally, a short story by Mary Anna Evans and poetry by Hannah Baker Saltmarsh and Abigail G. H. Manzella voice other individual dilemmas related to choice. We end the issue with a News and Views piece by Sonja Thomas that offers more context on the recent Women’s Wall protest in Kerala, India. In “When Tongzhi Marry: Experiments of Cooperative Marriage between Lalas and Gay Men in Urban China,” Stephanie Yingyi Wang frames cooperative marriage in mainland China between gay men and lalas (same-sex loving women), or tonghzi marriage, as an experiment in queer kinship. Such marriages appear to fulfill traditional roles on the surface, providing women and men who desire same-sex relationships a sanctioned institution—marriage—within which to fulfill these desires. According to Wang, these relational strategies are shaped simultaneously by China’s heteronormative policies and by the global circulation of gay rights narratives, “transforming the heteronormative family institution from within.” In this ethnography, Wang describes relationships as varied as those in which married partners are mutually supportive close friends who confide in one another about their same-sex relationships, to others in which subjects suffered from differing expectations between the partners, sometimes with gay husbands expecting deferential behavior from their lala wives, or between the couples and their parents and in-laws. Wang suggests applying a “decolonizing feminist methodology” to go beyond dichotomies of public/private, local/global, and success/failure and thus to better understand tongzhi marriage and critical queer subjectivities at this global juncture. Wang’s article is a co-winner of the 2018 Feminist Studies Award for the... (shrink)

The effect of arousal safety has been analyzed on purchase intention, then attitude towards the advertisement and attitude towards the brand have been incorporated as intervening variables between the relationships. The interaction effect of self-monitoring and message arguments have also been taken in to consideration for better understanding of the consumer’s response. The data has been gathered from 206 respondents by using purposive sampling method. The research instrument was comprised of summated rating/additive scale and semantic differential scaling. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (...) has been applied after the application of preliminary tests on the data. Structure Equation Modeling and moderation and mediation analysis have also been applied to test the hypotheses. Arousal safety in the advertisements shape consumers response and it proved to be a fully mediated model. Self-monitoring also probes the relationship. Message arguments haven’t had any affect as moderator, hence can be used as a focal predictor. The study is a starting point for future research to provide a coherent methodology for capturing the necessary data, processing the underlying information and evaluating the effects of arousal safety in advertisements. The study extends the field of advertising in the direction of arousal safety effects. In comparison to previous research, empirical evidence on the arousal safety in television advertising and purchase intention in relation with moderating and mediating variables is provided. (shrink)

We address the way verb-based and rule-content knowledge are combined in understanding institutional deontics. Study 1 showed that the institutional regulations used in our studies were readily categorised into one of two content groups: rights or duties. Participants perceived rights as benefiting the addressees identified by the rule, whereas they perceived duties as benefiting the collective that imposed the rule. Studies 2, 3, and 4 showed that rule content had clear effects on perceptions of violations and relevance of cases for (...) explaining the rule, even when controlling for deontic verb, phrasing of the action permitted by a right, or the formality of the deontic verb. These effects are incompatible with a simple pragmatic disambiguation approach to pragmatic modulation, as they often induce permissibility judgments that contradict the core semantic meanings of the deontic verbs. Other ways of reconciling verb meaning with rule content should be considered in a fuller the.. (shrink)

The regression model is generally utilized in several fields of study because of its applications. Regression is an extremely incredible approach; it builds up a connection between dependent and independent variables. We have addressed a powerful computational model by utilizing dengue information joined with fuzzy multiple linear regression. Information is accumulated on dengue fever through the survey. This paper is centered on the comparison of the crisp method with fuzzy multiple linear regression, and then, the utilization of a fuzzy multiple (...) regression method is explained after the comparison. We have used multiple regression and then converted the said technique into three fuzzy cases. The effectiveness of the fuzzy multiple regression model is measured by numerical computation and comparison of both techniques. 2020 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 30C45; 30C50; 30C80; Secondary 11B65, 47B38. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to develop an understanding of the historical retrospective of the concept of myth and the process of semantic transformation of this term in historical retrospect, as well as to study the features of the combination of different mythological and neo-mythological layers in modern literature. The article investigated myth and mythological discourse in literary studies, formed the basic definitions of myth at different historical stages of social development, studied the foundations of neo-myth and its (...) artistic realization in the literary plane. On the basis of modern Kazakh prose, the plot, composition, motif, and imagery schemes built on the use of mythological and neo-mythological discourses were considered. Emphasis was placed on possible mythological sources and the question of what myth can give to literature was discussed. (shrink)

Background There is a need for clearer guidance for pharmacists regarding their responsibilities when selling complementary medicines. A recently published ethical framework provides guidance regarding the specific responsibilities that pharmacists need to meet in order to fulfil their professional obligations and make a positive contribution to health outcomes when selling complementary medicines. Objective Evaluate the acceptability and feasibility of a new ethical framework for the sale of complementary medicines in community pharmacy. Methods Australian community pharmacists were invited to participate in (...) online focus groups and interviews. Participants were recruited via multiple methods, including social media and the professional networks of pharmacy groups. Participants were provided the ethical framework prior to the discussion. Discussions were transcribed verbatim and analysed using thematic analysis. Results Seventeen community pharmacists participated in the study. There was good representation among participants in terms of gender, years of practice, pharmacy location and script volume. Participants differed in how proactive they were in relation to selling and providing advice on complementary medicines, how they interpreted evidence in relation to complementary medicines, and how they navigated their practice within the retail environment of community pharmacy. The majority of participants found the framework was acceptable for practice and was feasible for implementation with targeted support. Participants identified two important areas for targeted support in implementing the framework: improved access to evidence-based information resources on complementary medicines and independent evidence-based education and training on complementary medicine for pharmacists and pharmacy support staff. Conclusion The ethical framework addresses an important gap in providing specific professional guidance to pharmacists when selling complementary medicines. The results of the study suggest that the framework may be acceptable to community pharmacists and be feasible to implement with targeted support. (shrink)

In this article, I will investigate the ways in which Ambient Intelligence, the technological paradigm of the near future proposed by the European Union and the electronics multinational Philips, will affect the ways in which individuals construct and express their identities. The Ambient Intelligence vision predicts a world in which technologies will deliver personalized services in a proactive (rather than a responsive or interactive) fashion. I argue that this brings about a change in the way we interact with these technologies, (...) which in turn has an effect on the way we construct and express identities in relation to such technologies. In a world of Ambient Intelligence, I will argue in this article, technological artifacts may come to function as ‘reference collectivities’, comparable to human reference groups. Due to their proactivity, their level of autonomy and self-reliance and our personalized interactions with them, these technologies will come to function as ‘others’, rather than as ‘quasi-others’. (shrink)

In this article, I will investigate the ways in which Ambient Intelligence, the technological paradigm of the near future proposed by the European Union and the electronics multinational Philips, will affect the ways in which individuals construct and express their identities. The Ambient Intelligence vision predicts a world in which technologies will deliver personalized services in a proactive fashion. I argue that this brings about a change in the way we interact with these technologies, which in turn has an effect (...) on the way we construct and express identities in relation to such technologies. In a world of Ambient Intelligence, I will argue in this article, technological artifacts may come to function as ‘reference collectivities’, comparable to human reference groups. Due to their proactivity, their level of autonomy and self-reliance and our personalized interactions with them, these technologies will come to function as ‘others’, rather than as ‘quasi-others’. (shrink)

In this article, I will investigate the ways in which Ambient Intelligence, the technological paradigm of the near future proposed by the European Union and the electronics multinational Philips, will affect the ways in which individuals construct and express their identities. The Ambient Intelligence vision predicts a world in which technologies will deliver personalized services in a proactive (rather than a responsive or interactive) fashion. I argue that this brings about a change in the way we interact with these technologies, (...) which in turn has an effect on the way we construct and express identities in relation to such technologies. In a world of Ambient Intelligence, I will argue in this article, technological artifacts may come to function as ‘reference collectivities’, comparable to human reference groups. Due to their proactivity, their level of autonomy and self-reliance and our personalized interactions with them, these technologies will come to function as ‘others’, rather than as ‘quasi-others’. (shrink)

The tripartite division of peoples described in chapter 7 of book VII of Aristotle’s Politics identifies natural-born Greeks as the only people capable of free and well-ordered living in the polis. Ought we to infer from this passage that the underlying asymmetry between Greeks and non-Greeks somehow corresponds to the distinction, found in book I, between those who are masters by nature and those who are slaves by nature? The aim of this paper is to show that this claim is (...) not only not self-evident, but that it runs counter to Aristotle’s non-providential finalism, which is incompatible with the notion that nature could favor one people to the detriment of all others. In other words, the Greek people is not the rightful heir of the order of the world to the extent that their natural superiority in the political realm is quite accidental. (shrink)

In Caribbean literature, being gazed upon is often part of a larger design of imperial governance, conquest and appropriation, where surveillance is constant and omnipresent, particularly in texts that centre on life on the plantation or are set within the colonial house itself. In his first novel Witchbroom, Trinidadian writer Lawrence Scott presents a family saga through the eyes of the family’s last surviving member, Lavren, a hermaphrodite, trickster-narrator who travels through time to write down the record of his/herstory. To (...) tell his/her ‘Carnival Tales’, the narrator sets the scene in the houses of Kairi, in which the turret room features prominently. The room’s shape, location and the vantage point it offers to its privileged entrants allows them to have eyes on everything that goes on on the family estate and to record events accordingly. But the turret room also serves as a place of gendered confinement and seclusion replete with blind spots that the trickster-narrator–or, perhaps, the implied author?–will expose through his/her own supervisory gaze. As such, this contribution proposes to analyse the turret room as a complex and somewhat paradoxical site where scopic power serves at once to hide and reveal, and as a space that concomitantly functions as a ‘heterotopia of deviation’. By focusing on the carnivalesque, metafictional dimensions of the novel more particularly, the article will ultimately seek to examine iterations of authorial control and reader manipulation as literary reassessments of panopticism. (shrink)