Neural Geographies draws together recent feminist and deconstructive theories, early Freudian neurology and contemporary connectionist theories of cognition. In this original work, Elizabeth A. Wilson explores the convergence between Derrida, Freud and recent cognitive theory to pursue two important issues: the nature of cognition and neurology, and the politics of feminist and critical interventions into contemporary scientific psychology. This book seeks to reorient the usual presumptions of critical studies of the sciences by addressing the divisions between the static and the (...) changeable; the natural and the political; the neuro-cognitive and the cultural that have been traditional to both scientific and critical accounts of neurology and cognition. (shrink)

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This two-part article summarizes the major arguments of Lynne Huffer’s 2010 book, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. The second part of the piece is a dialogue between Huffer and feminist theorist Elizabeth Wilson about the implications of the book’s arguments about rethinking queer theory, interiority, psychic life, lived experience and received understandings of Michel Foucault’s work.

This study employs a pretest-posttest experimental design to extend recent research pertaining to the effects of teaching business ethics material. Results on a variety of perceptual and attitudinal measures are compared across three groups of students — one which discussed the ethicality of brief business situations (the business scenario discussion approach), one which was given a more philosophically oriented lecture (the philosophical lecture approach), and a third group which received no specific lecture or discussion pertaining to business ethics. Results showed (...) some significant differences across the three groups and demonstrated that for a single lecture, the method used to teach ethics can differentially impact ethical attitudes and perceptions. Various demographic and background variables did not moderate the relationship between the teaching method and the dependent variables, but the sex of the student was strongly associated with the ethical attitude and perception measures. (shrink)

This paper makes an argument for greater consideration of negativity in queer engagements with biological or natural systems. Focusing on one particular paper by Karen Barad – “Nature’s Queer Performativity ” – I argue that this work tends to under-read the negativity and confusion that queer entails, and so it renders nature, and the politics we might extract from it, more palatable than perhaps they should be. What interests me is that Barad’s argument about nature’s queer performativity begins and ends (...) with sodomy. While it has been a highly cathected site of analysis for some early and influential work in queer theory, sodomy has been little discussed in feminist and queer science studies where Barad’s work has been so influential. I argue that sodomy spoils any identitarian queer politics that attempt to depathologize or reaffirm the natural world. (shrink)

Ruth Leys raises a number of important questions about the conceptual and empirical underpinnings of the affect theories that have emerged in the critical humanities, sciences, and social sciences in the last decade. There are a variety of frameworks for thinking about what constitutes the affective realm , and there are different preferences for how such frameworks could be deployed. We would like to engage with just one part of that debate: the contributions of Silvan Tomkins's affect theory. We take (...) issue with Leys's formulation that Tomkins's work along with that of Brian Massumi, William Connolly, and Paul Ekman form a group of like-minded theorists. We do not believe this represents an accurate account of the conceptual and empirical commitments of these various authors. By bundling their work together, Leys misses much of what is compellingly critical in each of these writers, and she overlooks what is most invigorating in the debates amongst them. In addition, the specificities of Tomkins's work have been badly served in Leys's essay. In four volumes stretching from 1962 to 1992 Tomkins laid out a complex and captivating theory of the human affect system, in which mechanisms of neurological feedback, social scripts, and facial behavior coassemble as affective events. Our response to Leys's essay is motivated by a wish to see more detailed engagements with this theory—the distinctiveness of which we believe has yet to be fully explored in this new affective turn. (shrink)

: This introduction highlights the place of "interest" in Isabelle Stengers's essay "Another Look: Relearning to Laugh" and considers its importance for feminist analyses of the sciences. Claiming that the positive affects have been underemployed in feminist philosophy of science, it is argued that Stengers's essay shows how criticism in the sciences can be reanimated through interest, excitement, and laughter.

This introduction highlights the place of "interest" in Isabelle Stengers's essay "Another Look: Relearning to Laugh" and considers its importance for feminist analyses of the sciences. Claiming that the positive affects have been underemployed in feminist philosophy of science, it is argued that Stengers's essay shows how criticism in the sciences can be re-animated through interest, excitement, and laughter.

In December 1984 Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson, two founding members of Feminist Review, published an article assessing contemporary British feminism and its relationship to the left and to class struggle. They suggested that the women's movement in general, and socialist-feminism in particular, had lost its former political sharpness. The academic focus of socialist-feminism has proved more interested in theorizing the ideological basis of sexual difference than the economic contradictions of capitalism. Meanwhile the conditions of working-class and black women have (...) been deteriorating. In this situation, they argue, feminists can only serve the general interests of women through alliance with working-class movements and class struggle. Weir and Wilson represent a minority position within the British Communist Party, which argues that ‘feminism’ is now being used by sections of the left, in particular the dominant ‘Eurocommunist’ left in the CP, to justify their moves to the right, with an accompanying attack on traditional forms of trade union militancy. Beatrix Campbell, who is aligned to the dominant position within the CP, has been one target of Weir and Wilson's criticisms. In several articles from 1978 onwards, and in her book Wigan Pier Revisited, Beatrix Campbell has presented a very different analysis of women and the labour movement. She has criticized the trade union movement as a ‘men's movement’, in the sense that it has always represented the interests of men at the expense of women. And she has described the current split within the CP as one extending throughout the left between the politics of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’: traditional labour movement politics as against the politics of those who have rethought their socialism to take into account the analysis and importance of popular social movements – in particular feminism, the peace and anti-racist movements. In reply to this debate, Anne Phillips has argued that while women's position today must be analysed in the context of the capitalist crisis, it is not reducible to the dichotomy ‘class politics’ versus ‘popular alliance’. Michèle Barrett, in another reply to Weir and Wilson, has argued that they have presented a reductionist and economistic approach to women's oppression, which caricatures rather than clarifies much of the work in which socialist-feminists have been engaged. To air these differences between socialist-feminists over the question of feminism and class politics, and to see their implications for the women's movement and the left, Feminist Review has decided to bring together the main protagonists of this debate for a fuller, more open discussion. For this discussion Feminist Review drew up a number of questions which were put to the participants by Clara Connolly and Lynne Segal. They cover the recent background to socialist-feminist politics, the relationship of feminism to Marxism, the role of feminists in le ft political parties and the labour movement, the issue of racism and the prospects for the immediate future. The discussion was lengthy and what follows is an edited version of the transcript. (shrink)

Within the Australian university context, research has uncovered increasing levels of psychological distress, in the form of stress, anxiety and depression. Higher rates of psychological distress have been reported in undergraduate students specifically enrolled in creative arts programs. Despite these increasing levels of psychological distress, university students are reluctant to engage with mental health and wellbeing supports. To explore ways to meet the mental health and wellbeing needs of creative arts university students, the Creative Arts and Music Therapy Research Unit (...) at The University of Melbourne commenced a project exploring the benefits and pitfalls of a brief creative arts therapies approach for students attending a campus based wellbeing clinic. This exploratory research study formed the art therapy component of this much broader research endeavor. Creative arts students in this research study were invited to participate in a single session art therapy encounter that involved the visual exploration of the miracle question, asking students to visually depict “what the problem looks like and how it will look when the problem is resolved or you feel like you can cope with it better?” The descriptive findings of this exploratory research study revealed how the combination of art therapy used within a single session framework was able to afford students a novel means to externalize problems, leading students to forming a less internalized view of the self. (shrink)

This introduction highlights the place of “interest” in Isabelle Stengers's essay “Another Look: Relearning to Laugh” and considers its importance for feminist analyses of the sciences. Claiming that the positive affects have been underemployed in feminist philosophy of science, it is argued that Stengers's essay shows how criticism in the sciences can be re-animated through interest, excitement, and laughter.

The rise of a bohemian subculture in the early 19th century drew on the Romantic beliefs in genius on the one hand and erotic passion on the other. Romantic love was a tragic, often forbidden passion and thus could include the most transgressive form: homosexuality. In the German bohemias of Munich and Berlin at the turn of the century, however, the influence of psychoanalysis as a radical new theory of human desire influenced the `erotic revolution' of the period; this moved (...) bohemian love from an understanding of desire as a fatal passion to a celebration of it as a liberating and ecstatic force, albeit with sometimes disastrous consequences. The migration of psychoanalysis to the American bohemia of Greenwich Village inaugurated a further change as popularized versions of Freudian theory advocated the importance of sexual fulfilment in life, yet also became normative and prescriptive. The ironic conclusion drawn is that `bohemian love' has become the norm in a consumer society, yet shorn of its subversive and transgressive elements. (shrink)

This introduction highlights the place of “interest” in Isabelle Stengers's essay “Another Look: Relearning to Laugh” and considers its importance for feminist analyses of the sciences. Claiming that the positive affects have been underemployed in feminist philosophy of science, it is argued that Stengers's essay shows how criticism in the sciences can be re-animated through interest, excitement, and laughter.