Search

This conceptual article theorises the tensioned interplay between digitalization, datafication and automation and subjectness in education by asking what intensifying datafication and automation means for teacher--student relationships and how we understand and approach education. Theoretically, the paper draws on Buber's ideas of the dialogical I--Thou and objectified I--It as the key forms of human relationships. The core argument is that increasing datafication and automation steers the teacher--student relationship towards an objectified I--It relationship instead of the dialogical I--Thou relationship, which Buber (and others such as Biesta, another main influencer of the present paper) saw as the ideal. Literature-informed examples of various forms of educational datafication and automation are provided to support and concretise the arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the author's collaborative environment for networked music performance, Ambiguous Devices (developed with Paul Stapleton), as a case study for illustrating a shift in thinking from a transactional to a relational understanding of networked encounters. It draws on Gill's notions of relational interfaces and Buber's understanding of dialogic relations as a way of understanding ways that people might communicate with others at a distance. It looks at an embodied theory of interaction that relates to intersubjective and intercorporeal ways of knowing the other and then looks at ways that these relationships can be facilitated over spatially separate sites of interaction such as those found in networked performance scenarios. Finally, it puts forward a notion of relational encounters as a way thinking about these kinds of affective interactions at a distance and discusses the designed properties of Ambiguous Devices that support and facilitate this kind of interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Neue Politische Literatur is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Taking as a starting point William Blake's indictment of the enslaving powers of militarism, the article looks at different conceptions of mastery, chiefly in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, also referring to Blake's poetry and the literary figures of Hamlet and Robinson Crusoe. Nietzsche's critique of slave morality and Heidegger's analysis of the metaphysics of the will to power reveal a number of contradictions inherent in the concept of mastery, including the disavowal of bodily vulnerabilities and ecological interdependences. What Heidegger sees as the modern project of "absolute humanisation" is thus read alongside the posthumanist critique of human domination, including domination over nature, in the work of Claire Colebrook, Timothy Morton and Jean-Luc Nancy, among others. Such constructions of mastery tend to also erase their dependence on the exploitation of labour, including the toil of the slaves and women. What posthumanist critique appears to aim at is a shift from the rationality of pure reason to the relationality of earthly cohabitation, which calls for a relinquishing of mastery for an openness to uncertainty and vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organisations working on conservation and community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) projects with communities have sometimes damaged the wellbeing of those communities. The social and political dynamics between organisations funding or implementing projects and the communities in which they work might be a factor causing this damage. This review paper explores the literature for evidence of and methods for evaluating impacts on community wellbeing from social relations in conservation and natural resource management projects. We found 101 papers addressing social connections in the human wellbeing-conservation nexus, acknowledging the damage done by colonising project relations and detailing proposals for or examples of more equitable relationality, and also evaluations of social equity in conservation/CBNRM work. However, we found few explicit evaluations of how the social, economic, and political relations of projects impact the wellbeing of participating communities. We call on researchers to address this gap, especially those working in evaluating project outcomes. To advance this agenda, we present literature that sheds light on what more equitable project relations look like, and how project relationality might be evaluated. We finish with ideas for how organisations can diagnose internal relationality problems likely to affect project outcomes, and how to transform those. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Journal of Canadian Studies is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This introduction, and the special issue on 'Contesting social responsibilities of business: Experiences in context' it frames, addresses the neglected question of the experience of contestation in the terrain of the social responsibilities of business. It re-conceptualises the social responsibilities of business by advancing research grounded in a relational perspective, exploring and highlighting different forms of contestation of these social responsibilities, and centring the role of context by focusing especially on contestation in overlooked geographical settings and sites of marginalisation. Contextualising contestation in this way centres silenced and/or ignored voices, generates meaningful theory, and offers an innovative critical lens on business–society relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional authentic assessment tasks are frequently tied to future work and enmeshed in neoliberal and capitalist visions of education. We advocate an alternative approach where authenticity signifies meaningful learning outside the confines of the classroom to promote deep learning that ‘sticks’. We proffer an understanding of assessment as pedagogy, where pedagogy is an ontological endeavour that shapes not only what students know but how they understand themselves and their place in the world. We highlight creative assessments as a form of authentic pedagogy that eschews instrumentalism in three ways: highlighting opportunities for connection and community; reorienting students towards a more vulnerable conception of learning that is open to uncertainty; and eliciting wonder and joy via invitations to see the world anew. We argue creative assessments promote deeply authentic learning that can be transformative for students and educator-co-learners alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I discuss the interplay between the formal and informal mobility rules regulating migration, asylum, and reception regimes in Italy. Engaging with the blurred grounds generated by mobility rules in practice, I argue that the (ir)regular functioning of bureaucracies of asylum and its gray zones created systemic injustice, while also accidentally fostering what I call a "relational mycelium" and support networks between the migrant and non-migrant population. The contribution dialogues with my former experience as reception worker and later as researcher with that of a group of Gambian asylum seekers to understand how subjectivities, goals, hopes, and desires were invested and reshaped through the asylum system, and by the relational networks developed in reception facilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite signifying a negative self-appraisal, shame has traditionally been thought by philosophers to entail the presence of self-respect in the individual. On this account, shame is occasioned by one's failure to live up to certain self-standards—in displaying less worth than one thought one had—and this moves one to hide or otherwise inhibit oneself in an effort to protect one's self-worth. In this paper, I argue against the notion that only self-respecting individuals can experience shame. Contrary to the idea that shame presupposes the presence of self-worth, I contend that shame merely requires that one have the desire, rather than the expectation, that one is worthy. Furthermore, I suggest that the desire for concealment fueled by shame is not an inherently self-protective mechanism but can alternatively be understood as an effort to safeguard one's connection with others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Doctrine of Signatures (DoS) figures prominently in both contemporary and historic herbal traditions across a diversity of cultures. DoS—conceptualized beyond its conventional interpretation as "like cures like", which relies solely on plant morphology—can be viewed as a type of ecosemiotic communication system. This nuanced form of interspecies communication relies on the presence of "signatures", or signs, corresponding to the therapeutic quality of different plants based on their morphology but also their aroma, taste, texture, and even their context in the landscape. Despite its widespread contemporary dismissal by mainstream science as overly simplistic, childlike, primitive, and generally of limited value, we suggest that the recognition of "signatures" in plants may be considered as a form of communication between humans and plants. Drawing upon Indigenous thought, ecosemiotic theory, and lyric philosophy, we posit that understanding "signatures" metaphorically, as a reflection of the "shape of the world", offers insights into the interconnectedness of all life forms—a profound affirmation of relational coherence between humans and the more-than-human. We advocate for another perspective on DoS: one which holds potential towards reorienting and restoring our relationships in the vibrant world of the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the prominence of subterranean settings and imagery within crime fiction, this article critically examines the genre's representation of the subterranean. Influenced by scholarly work on the subterranean, I focus on the writing of one prominent crime novelist, Ian Rankin, and his Edinburgh-set John Rebus detective novels. From a relational standpoint, two issues are focused on: subterranean place (namely the attachment of meaning to the subterranean, the power relations that run through the subterranean, and the underground's connections to the aboveground) and subterranean time (notably the role of the subterranean in shaping the relationship between the past and the present). Traversing Edinburgh's basements and graves, as well as hell and the underworld, I demonstrate that Rankin uses subterranean place and time to accentuate some of the hidden harms, inequalities and injustices of urban life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many psychologists working in schools acknowledge how their work contributes to the reproduction and mitigation of societal injustices. While professionals engaged in education systems and classrooms may hope to achieve the latter, disciplinary conventions can compete with best intentions. In response, psychologists working in schools have recently been encouraged to realize anti-oppressive schooling by practicing what is referred to as critical school psychology. Although potentially new for school psychology, critical work bridging education and psychology has been available for some time in North America and internationally. To encourage the use of psychology in support of justice and in resistance to oppression, we review some of this work and invite those interested to consider psychosocial justice as an ethical orientation to enmeshed theory∼practice. The purposeful engagement of critically informed work from outside traditional divisional silos will not eradicate every problem facing schools today, but such action will, at the least, provide concerned practitioners options for collaborative knowledge-making and more preferred ways of working. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the potential of TikTok videos as a method of relational engagement for Indigenous artists. The concept of relationality is the foundation of Indigenous artistic practices, through which Indigenous art is representative of an ongoing process of knowledge sharing and connection rather than a final product. Within this process, art is given meaning through the extensive relationships that inform its stories and symbolism such as the artist's connections, ancestral knowledges, and both Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences. The ways that Indigenous artists share their art on platforms such as TikTok play a key role in the Indigenous art process. Using data produced through content analysis of three TikTok videos, this article highlights the various ways that Indigenous artists use TikTok videos and its functions as a means of sharing knowledge, locating their identities, and maintaining extensive relationalities with themselves, community, Country, and ancestors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on settler colonial grammar of place , the colonial practice of naming and renaming Native land through mapmaking processes that historically deny, erase, and homogenize Indigenous communities, this essay argues that Indigenous Oaxacans disrupt settler colonial renaming of land by engaging in their community's collective understanding of pertenencia mutua (mutual belonging)—an Indigenous Oaxacan relational consciousness of belonging across Abya Yala ("the Americas") that allows them to recognize their role as Indigenous visitors on Native land and as Native to Abya Yala. Theorizing through pertenencia mutua offers a deep understanding of Indigenous efforts to (re)build communities in their struggle against settler colonial violence, including through naming practices and grammar of place. Using semistructured interviews, oral histories, and social media content, I analyze how Indigenous Oaxacan young adults engage on the ground and on social media to unsettle colonially named places by placing their identity and their own communities in relational existence. Such unsettlings call for the retheorization of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intersubjectivity has long fascinated thinkers who have challenged the notion of the unitary subject. Its alternative, the intersubjective self, is permeable and reciprocal, open to and shaped by the others. Questions of intersubjectivity have become increasingly urgent as a result of the rise of social media which metaphorically brings users together as a shared mind. This article probes questions of relationality and the narratable nature of human self (cf Cavarero in Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Routledge , London, 2000; Butler in Giving an Account of Oneself Fordham. University Press, New York, 2005) in a work of fiction that compares the relationalities created by social media and the subjective experience: Patricia Lockwood's novel, No One Is Talking About This (2021). The very opacity of the novel probes the question of what (inter)subjectivity might mean in the age of social media. More broadly, the article seeks to test the relevance of feminist theories of relational and narrative self within the context of the novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report on legal geography explores everyday law and how law is discussed as lived, performed and re-created in mundane life. Everyday law means a legal pluralism that also includes informal parts of law, such as customs, norms, and alternative legal systems. It also refers to the manifestations, performances, contestations, and constitution of the law in mundane places. Focusing on ordinariness opens paths for thinking the normalized and taken-for-granted aspects of the law. Everyday law is mostly experienced at micro-scale—related to our bodies, homes, and neighborhoods. This report concentrates on these, with the focus on subjectivity, relationality, and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this review, we use legal scholarship to explore the way that the law constructs and maintains discourses on both water rights and water relationality. Water rights and water relationality can be constructed as opposite ends of a spectrum of legal modalities for defining and regulating the human/water relationship. However, when considered through the lens of law, rights and relationality can also be seen as intertwined. The legal instruments that create individual rights to take and use water situate those rights within frameworks that regulate the relationship between humans (both collectively and individually) and between humans and the water ecosystem. We begin with an identification and exploration of three water rights discourses in legal scholarship: water as a private right (to take and use), the human right to water, and the rights of rivers. We then consider emerging legal scholarship on the more complex reality of water relationality, focusing on the role of law in water commoning, Indigenous laws, and environmental restorative justice. In doing so, we identify points of intersection between these discourses as mediated through law. We also identify critiques of both water rights and water relationality discourses in law and the ways in which they shape our ability to respond to water crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay discusses the problem of opacity and the claims for transparency in Automated Decision Making (ADM). Firstly, I recall some aspects of the concept of transparency that appear particularly relevant in this context, with particular reference to its eminently relational and contextual character. Secondly, I analyze the relationship between transparency and accountability, and some ethically relevant limitations to which transparency mechanisms are subject. Finally, I critically discuss some recent proposals to complement transparency mechanisms with inclusive deliberative processes involving all actors affected by decisions. I identify some difficulties that these proposals face: in particular, the processes of social acceleration and the conflictual character of the contemporary public sphere pose a serious challenge to deliberative proposals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I advocate for advancing Critical Discourse Studies of Popular Culture by integrating perspectives from Cultural Studies, particularly their emphasis on examining how popular culture shapes social reality. The proposed research enterprise focuses on the construction of Germanness using two examples from Greek popular culture discourse during the debt crisis: an infotainment website article and a TV sketch comedy. The analysis reveals that the dominant discourses – previously framing news coverage of the Southern European debt crisis – are recycled. However, as these discourses shift from news media to entertainment, they become naturalized and trivialized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops the narratological approach to well-being research through the novel use of literary theory. It is the first article to explore the role of narrative genre in how unaccompanied refugee and migrant youth expressed their life projects and experiences of confronting the challenges and opportunities of the migration and asylum regime. It argues that narrative is important to understanding their life projects and well-being needs, as well as to how they understand themselves in relation to society and how likely they are to interact (or not) with support structures. Five main narrative genres are discussed that were encountered in mixed-methods ethnographic fieldwork with over 100 individuals in England and Italy: (1) tragedy, (2) comedy, (3) epic, (4) confession, and (5) fantasy. The article interrogates the value of "truth" in these narratives and concludes that storytelling is fundamentally linked to the sense of ontological security, which is vital to the youths' subjective well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims at remapping the relationship between Global North and Global South spatial politics in relation to the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, in the Ugandan post-conflict setting. Our analysis of 'localization' draws on understandings of space as a 'cartography of power' (Massey), relational approaches and three categories of space, namely representations of space, spatial practices and representational place-space. We argue that representational agentic spaces offer openings for subverting gendered and racialized dichotomies, as it is in these dynamic hybrid place-spaces where agency is generated through shared values of care and community across global-local WPS worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, four basic concepts in geography are discussed. The concepts that are the subject of the study are space, place, landscape, and region. The concepts have been examined and defined in a relational way with each other. In other words, the concepts are not analyzed in isolation from each other. These concepts have an important place in almost all sub-disciplines of geography. In particular, space and place are the two most important concepts that form the basis of the geographical perspective. In the geographical discipline, phenomena are handled and analyzed with the dimensions of space and place. In addition to space and place, the concepts of landscape and region are two other important ones in geography. Although not seen as important as space and place, these concepts have an important place in some sub-disciplines. Landscape has an important place in cultural geography, rural geography, and urban geography. In fact, landscape was the dominant concept in the classical cultural geography paradigm. The concept of region also has a wide range of uses in geography and was the main paradigm of the geographical discipline in the first half of the 20th century. In addition, the concept of region is addressed with different phenomena within political geography, geopolitics, economic geography and environmental geography. Throughout the study, it is aimed at reaching robust analysis and synthesis by addressing these four basic concepts in a relational manner from different perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural landscapes have been reshaped globally to drive unsustainable increases in profit and production. This is contributing significantly to the degradation of planetary systems and the vulnerability of food systems. The discourse coalition that has formed around the storyline of regenerative agriculture (RA) promises to address these issues by transforming food production and repairing ecosystems. The coalition has diverse contributors that interpret RA differently. This diversity will be difficult to retain as RA moves toward discursive structuration and institutionalization. There is a risk that discursive institutionalization might be achieved by shedding the more transformative RA discourses. This paper examines a volunteer-led co-operative, the Institute of Ecological Agriculture (IEA), as a case study on how accreditation systems might be designed to expand RA's discourse coalition and increase the capacity of those discourses advocating transformation to institutionalize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on poetic production in South Africa to theorize connection as a dominant motif in contemporary poetry. In South Africa, poets compensate for the lack of state or market support for the arts through community organizations and collaborations. Under lockdowns, in-person events like open mics were replaced by digital programmes hosted on corporate-owned public platforms like Facebook Live, as artists sought to transmute social capital into material support. Performance poetry, in particular, exploded in popularity, offering comfort and connection amidst isolation. With the turn to the digital, spaces for community formation increasingly reflect the neoliberal logic of the network. The South African literary organization Hear My Voice raised a "Poetry Relief Fund" to pay honoraria for weekly poetry performances on Facebook Live. At the same time, poet and playwright Siphokazi Jonas reconceived her politically urgent poem-play #WeAreDyingHere as an international call to arms, reaching new audiences around the world. These events, alongside international festivals like Zukiswa Wanner's Afrolit Sans Frontières, created new possibilities for understanding connection within the creative economy. But what kind of community is instantiated through those platforms? Who, specifically, is supported, and under which terms? And how does poetry itself mediate those relationships? I analyse both individual poems and the media platforms in which they are embedded to argue that, if relationality and networks represent two different models of sociality, connection offers a paradigm that acknowledges the ascendance of network modes of production without acceding to their logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international community's sobering track record of sustainably reducing the number of armed conflicts worldwide, as well as the increasing involvement of non-human complexities in times of climate crisis suggest that current approaches to foster peace are too narrow and inflexible. So far, demands and calls for more flexible and adaptive peace practice made by policy-makers and researchers have not led to a related paradigm shift. In order to contribute to such a change of practice, this article advances a speculative analytical attempt that seeks to conceptually uncover new modes of engaging with the world for the purpose of peace. It builds on Baruch Spinoza's materialism and describes peace as intimately interrelated with the issue of political community. Following Spinoza, the article reconsiders the imaginary of political community as something that is constantly being rearticulated by a contingent complexity of human and non-human actors, and thus transcends the geographic scope of its formal borders as well as its epistemic scope across power hierarchies. Finally, the article introduces the human–non-human multitude as political subject that is able to detect and interpret the constituents of a political community, and therefore to maintain and sustain peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on an exploration of social workers' perspectives on the social policy and agency processes that shape their experiences of working in child protection services. A qualitative constructivist grounded theory methodology was employed, and 17 qualified social workers and managers were recruited. Social workers described working within an oppressive system, balancing unrealistic demands placed on them, and struggling to restore balance and hope. They shared how this filtered into the work they do with families and the role that relationality and peer support has in surviving the work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coal mining in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, evokes not only struggles on the control of land but also conflicts between different notions of land. Based on ethnographic research in a mining area, I describe a relational attached notion of land which is subdued by a detached, monetary-based understanding in the course of increased mining. In negotiations on the compensation of land with representatives of the mining companies, members of the village elite, which are entangled in patronage networks with the companies, ignore the various notions of land by other villagers and sideline those who are critical. With my article, I contribute to the ontological dimension of environmental conflicts with insights from Southeast Asia thereby giving a diversified picture of the struggles on access and the lacking acknowledgement of different notions of land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine and critique adaptive management (AM) practices for protected areas (PAs), in pursuit of practices that can account for more-than-human relations. Engaging with empirical research from Australian PAs, we reflect on the formation of PAs as "exceptional places" where Nature is implicitly/explicitly to be controlled. We find that AM practices harness the spatial and temporal characteristics of the PAs to deliberatively construct a static and timeless scene, creating a particular vision of Nature. This metaphoric vision is captured "like a postcard." It reinforces and justifies static protectionism as Nature conservation, arraigning a series of material objects that are meant to assist with maintaining that image: that "reality." Using sentipensar as an exemplar, we explore and highlight relational and everchanging human-nonhuman engagements to contest the ontological dimensions of a static Nature and ideas of control and power associated with the binaries of Nature and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fertility preservation incorporates relational and temporal dynamics that have both experimental and conservative dimensions in people's thinking about their reproductive futures, parenthood, and family building. In this article, we discuss video blog (vlog) narratives of people who have publicly documented their experience of preserving their gametes (eggs or sperm). The aim of the study is to examine how people, who are experiencing the prospect of fertility decline or disruption, frame their decision-making about gamete preservation and what this means for their future family building. As such, we organise the data around three demographic groups according to health, career and relationship status, and gender transition. To analyse the vlogs we use composite narratives, a method whereby researchers synthesise data to construct stories based on people's lived experiences, without attributing events or details to particular people. Using this method, we draw on two conceptual tools from the sociology of personal life; relationality and temporal scripts, to highlight how vloggers discuss fertility preservation in relation to time and their experiences to real and imagined others, in making decisions about their reproductive futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines aspects of the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and religion, challenging Western Christian perspectives that warn against playing God and ascribing human and God-like characteristics to AI. Instead of a theistic emphasis, East Asian religious perspectives emphasize concern for the potential implications of AI on communities and relationships. This article argues for the inclusion of perspectives from Chinese and Korean traditions in the growing discourse on AI and religion to adequately address the potential social impacts of AI technologies. First, we describe some of the questions and concerns being posed regarding AI and consider how certain normative interpretations of Western Christianity may influence some of these issues. Second, we discuss the contributions of Asian philosophies and religious traditions, which emphasize relationality and fluidity, to provide alternative approaches to AI. Third, we outline the discussion of AI from Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist traditions, which see the cosmos as an interwoven whole and both humans and the cosmos as evolving. Lastly, we introduce the example of digital resurrection (e.g., deadbots) and consider how the philosophical and theological Korean concept of Jeong might refocus our understanding of the potential impacts of this AI technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions of actual and imagined relationality are still a gap in small town research. The paper closes this gap by focusing on the imagined relations and relational imaginaries of two small towns, Zeitz and Lauchhammer, in eastern Germany. Such imaginaries are considered as discursive constructs and are effective in multiple dimensions (e.g. flows of people, capital and infrastructures) and on multiple scales (e.g. local, regional, national). As such, they decisively shape the identity and actual development paths of places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]