Suchergebnisse

In this autoethnography, I focus on listening as an act that encourages a process of being rooted in a multicultural identity. Listening across languages, cultures, and places helps reveal commonalities that might have otherwise remained unexamined. I hope this short paper motivates others to unpack the ways that seemingly disparate forces may help influence media consumption in everyday life.

Having brought my editorship to an end just before the CSSH fiftieth birthday—having, you might say, just stepped out of the maelstrom—it might be worthwhile to seize the occasion to analyze, in tranquility, what at the time was just too intense, too difficult but also too deeply satisfying an experience to put into words. Without a doubt, being editor of CSSH was the most gratifying job I ever had, but why? How to bottle the maelstrom?

Taking suggestion from the case of Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells, this essay is profoundly interested in the possibilities for new, and alternative, forms of life and being. What forms of sociality and the communal are available for us if we estrange ourselves from the life of our species? And how might these practices of estrangement—queering—actually allow for a new ethical landscape? The essay explores the politics of science in relation to race and sex in historical context. Fantasies about the plasticity of life in speculative thought must consider the histories of social and scientific racism and eugenics. The essay considers two scientific speculators, H. G. Wells and Julian Huxley, whose works demonstrate risks that we must be mindful of in embracing an ontology of life. There are ramifications of self-directed scientific modification of the biological, as Wells's and Huxley's ideas include advanced ideas of the plasticity of life but also the theory and practice of eugenics. The essay still argues for the importance of the utopian, of dreams that reach to new paradigms, that search out the ineffable moments of life that confound us.

Classic perfect being theologians take 'being perfect' (or some careful variant thereof) to be conceptually necessary and sufficient for being God. I argue that this claim is false because being perfect is not conceptually necessary for being God. I rest my case on a simple thought experiment inspired by an alternative I developed to perfect being theology that I call "functional theology." My findings, if correct, are a boon for theists since if it should turn out that there is no perfect being, there could still be a God.

This book starts by posing a question: what does "Being European" mean? In order to answer this, the book first analyses the fundamental characteristics of the EU: it has been constructed step by step, nothing is imposed on its members, decisions are taken collectively and it has a unique multilevel legal system. Then, the book analyses the biggest problems of our time: migrants, terrorism and populism, and not only finds where the limits of the EU's areas of competence lie, but also identifies the real action taken to combat those problems. As a third issue, the book analyses how the EU managed the economic crisis and shows how, from a global perspective, it has been the epitome of solidarity and the preservation of the welfare state. The three chapters demonstrate that a lot of manipulation or ignorance underlie criticism of the EU. The last chapter gives a definitive answer to the initial question on the basis of the previous analysis: no new changes are needed, but the present system has to be strengthened. In order to achieve this goal, we need to focus on our common culture, which has been shaped over the centuries, and our common identity. The Berlin Declaration of 2007 is our best reference point: democracy, freedom, the rule of law, human rights and solidarity are the elements that define our European identity, a unique approach in the world that must be defended and developed: in this respect, the EU is a pillar for the future of humanity.

International Women's Day acknowledges and celebrates the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. Check it Out! will showcase some wonderful and diverse experiences of being female, and we want you to help us celebrate and share in the conversation.

This article critiques the shift towards valorizing indigeneity in western thought and contemporary practice. This shift in approach to indigenous ways of knowing and being, historically derided under conditions of colonialism, is a reflection of the 'ontological turn' in anthropology. Rather than indigenous peoples simply having an inferior or different understanding of the world to a modernist one, the 'ontological turn' suggests their importance is that they constitute different worlds, and that they 'world' in a performatively different way. The radical promise is that a different world already exists in potentia and that access to this alternative world is a question of ontology - of being differently: being in being rather than thinking, acting and 'worlding' as if we were transcendent or 'possessive' subjects. We argue that ontopolitical arguments for the superiority of indigenous ways of being should not be seen as radical or emancipatory resistances to modernist or colonial epistemological and ontological legacies but instead as a new form of neoliberal governmentality, cynically manipulating critical, postcolonial and ecological sensibilities for its own ends. Rather than 'provincialising' dominant western hegemonic practices, discourses of 'indigeneity' are functioning to extend them, instituting new forms of governing through calls for adaptation and resilience.