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Inga Ulnicane New technologies are usually developed with the best intentions in mind. However, as history shows this does not prevent from afterwards using them in problematic ways. For example, internet was initially associated with hopes that it will foster openness and democracy around the world but later became used as a tool of surveillance […]
The post Interdisciplinary collaborations for responsible research and innovation appeared first on Europe of Knowledge.

A new study finds that passing the US Citizenship Test as a high school graduation requirement does nothing to improve youth voter turnout. But the impetus was never to improve voter participation.
The post Students’ Lack of Basic Knowledge of US History and Civics Remains a National Embarrassment appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Peter Burke— Since the 1990s, a new kind of history has been flourishing: the history of knowledge—or better, the history of different kinds of knowledge, knowledges in the plural. Turning... READ MORE
The post Writing a History of Ignorance appeared first on Yale University Press.

Call for Papers for a Volume of the Yearbook of Knowledge and Society. Deadline: May 1, 2024

In commenting on this post comparing the post-Great Influenza and post-Covid period, Mr. Kopits asserts: …the US did not have a central bank at the time, which led to considerably greater volatility than we see today. To the best of my knowledge, the Fed came into existence December 23, 1913. I'm reminded of:

 Troll is a fairly entertaining movie (but that is not what this post is about)To repeat something I have said before, if,  as it has often been claimed, philosophy begins with Socrates then it also begins with its particular antagonism, its particular anti-philosophy in the sophist and sophistry. It seems to me that if one wanted to read the history of philosophy in this way, with a founding event and founding antagonism, then one might want to consider who is our anti-philosopher today, who is the contemporary equivalent of the sophist? The answer would seem to have to be the troll. This is my preamble to what is now becoming an ongoing discussion of Florida's vanguard fight against knowledge and reason; or more to the point, destruction of knowledge and truth in order to preserve whiteness.  As it was revealed recently, the new curriculum of black history in Florida teaches middle schoolers that "slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit." There is so much to unpack about this claim, as they say in grad school. First, there is the assumption that the people captured from Africa had no skills, no knowledge, no history, nothing but their bodies and skin. Such a claim not only follows from the mythology of a Dark Continent, outside of civilization and history, it confuses an effect from a cause. The people who became slaves were stripped of their knowledge, culture, and social relations. What Orlando Patterson calls a social death was also the reduction of a person to pure labor power, to a capacity to work and nothing else, an animate tool, as Aristotle put it. Second, as the architects of this change doubled down on this claim, since that is what trolls do, providing a list of individuals who gained "valuable job skills" during their "unpaid internship" on a plantation, they provided a list of mostly false claims, listing individuals who were never enslaved, or, in the case of Booker T. Washington, learned literacy and other skills after their emancipation. This "feel good" story about slavery is, like so many feel good stories about history, just not true. Of course there might be a case, or even a few, of people who learned a valuable skill during slavery--it could have happened. That does not defend the claim, or, more importantly does not defend its inclusion in a curriculum. It is, I would argue, an example of exception trolling, in which an isolated case or incident is used to obscure or confuse a general or structural tendency. Focusing on these isolated or unique cases, which often appeal to an anecdotal way of thinking that is predominant in our culture, is used to obscure what is generally the case. I would argue that part of gaining knowledge, part of thinking, is understanding the difference between an exception and a rule. Once, when I was in sixth grade, I think, I had the job of feeding the school's snake, a python or boa constrictor. I dropped the live rat in the tank with the snake, watched the snake coil and strike, and saw the rat bite the snake in the eye, blood spurting everywhere, eventually killing it. (This is probably why feeding live animals to snakes is no longer recommended. Not only is it cruel; It is also potential risky). This happened, I saw it with my own eyes, but I would still say that snakes kill and eat rats, and not the other way around. Exceptions exist as do rules, and the former does not negate the latter. Exception trolling is a persistent strategy of trolling, in which exceptions are made to obscure or conceal rules.I should say, as something of an aside, that this exception trolling has one of its conditions the transformation of all knowledge into discrete bits of information, facts, that can be found, cited and circulated independent of context, conditions, and larger implications. Joseph Vogl's book Capitalism and Ressentiment does an interesting job of charting the history of the current regime of contextless and thoughtless information, but that is for another time. (I just finished a review of that book.) In this reduction of all knowledge to isolated facts and bits of information any discussion of meaning or significance of this or that fact, its place within history or a system of values is impossible. As the clip below makes clear, anyone arguing against the claim that slaves learned skills is either an idiot or lying. Meaning, significance, and importance disappear in the absolute binary of facts. One exception is all that it takes to disprove any claim about systemic discrimination, exploitation, or marginalization. This is why the exception troll has a well stocked set of links and tabs of these exceptions, "reverse racism," false claims of sexual harassment,  happy slaves, etc., It is not facts and logic, as is often claimed, but the logic of the (singular and isolated) fact. This raises the question, what goal does this trolling serve? I think that trolling has to be understood as not just a failure to think, to distinguish exceptions from rules, but as itself the articulation of its own logic. In other words, trolling must be read symptomatically. It is necessary to see what is being said in what is not being said, or what is not being said by being said. In some sense these remarks about the virtues of slavery, and, if you watch the clip above, the holocaust could be understood as the culmination of "negative solidarity." Even the slave, the denizen of the concentration camp, cannot complain, they are gaining valuable job training, they just have to make themselves useful and everything will turn out fine. There is nothing to criticize, nothing to complain about. (I see culmination because I cannot imagine something worse than someone saying "slavery was not that bad, they were gaining job skills," but what I can imagine and what monstrosities history can produce are two different things). As such it also can be considered the culmination of "right workerism." Work is the ultimate meaning and justification of existence, those who do not work not only do not eat, but do not have a right to exist. The arguments about slavery and the holocaust are not just horrible distortions of a horrible past, they are alibis for a darker future. One in which the worst possible jobs, or unpaid internships, are seen as building valuable skills, or, if there are no skills involved, developing a solid work ethic. Anyone who praises slavery is preparing for you to become a slave. 

The ability to manipulate and generate images with new technologies presents various challenges to traditional media reporting and also scholarly communication. However, as Joshua Habgood-Coote discusses the history of fake images shows, rather than heralding a mass breakdown in trust, technological innovations have fed into ongoing social problems around the production of knowledge. We seem … Continued

Balibar print from All Grim Prints An ongoing albeit sporadic project of mine is trying to understand the systematic nature underlying the conjunctural interventions of Etienne Balibar. This semester this investigation dovetailed with a reexamination of his writings on race for a seminar on Race, Class, and Gender. With respect to the latter it seems that there are two elements that are central to Balibar's thinking of race. First, as I have already stressed in a previous post, racism has to be understood as an entire way of thinking, a mode of thought, and not, as is often the case a bias or stereotype, an aberration in thought. As Balibar writes in "Racism and Universalism, ""I think that racism is a genuine mode of thought, that is to say, a mode of connecting not only words with objects, but more profoundly words with images, in order to create concepts. Therefore to overcome racism in one's personal experience or in collective experience is not simply a matter of abandoning prejudices or opening one's eyes to reality with the possible help of science; it has to do with changing one's mode of thinking, something much more difficult." As a mode of thought racism not only defines a particular way of thinking, but one that is indexed to the immediate demands of living. When Balibar writes that racism combines misrecognition with a "will to know,' a violent desire for immediate knowledge of social relations," I understand that violent desire to have something to do with the fundamental questions of social life, who should I trust? who should I fear? who can I desire? etc. Racism promises an answer to all of these questions, one that is immediately legible, written on the body and skin. Racism is as much a way of thinking and a way of living. This is why all challenges to it threaten not just what counts as knowledge, but also what counts as politics, as collectivity, even if the collectivity in question is not divided or demarcated by race. "As feminism has progressively started to demonstrate, the issue with sexism is not, or not merely, to resist male chauvinism or to struggle against male domination: it is to have the male community destroyed from the inside. Similarly, the issue with racism, in the long run and in everyday situations, is to destroy the racist community from within, a community which is both institutional and spontaneous, based on collective privileges (many of them—but not all—imaginary) and the individual desire for knowledge."The connection between a mode of thinking and a mode of living, the order and connection of ideas and the order and connection of things, is a profoundly Spinozist. As André Tosel argues, Spinoza's thought has as its center not a hierarchy between praxis, poiesis, and theoria, as in classical thought, but their mutual implication, a way of thinking is a way of living and producing. As Tosel writes, While the ancient tradition interrogates the nature proper to humanity from the triplet poiesis, praxis, theoria, supposed to represent the hierarchy of distinctly human kinds of life, Spinoza recomposes poiesis, praxis, theoria in the unity of the same form of life. Every form of life, every bios is a specific unity of poiesis, of praxis, and theoria. Or rather, in each kind of life, in each individual body, there is a relation to other bodies in nature (poiesis), and to other bodies of the same human essence (praxis), corresponding to a modality of the existence of the mind or spirit of knowledge (theoria). (That is from Du Materialisme de Spinoza, and I still have plans to work out how Balibar and Tosel arrive at their understandings of race and citizen from Spinoza). For his part, and as I have argued before, Balibar draws a great deal of support for his thought on race from his reading of the dual foundations of the city in Proposition Thirty Seven of Part Four of the Ethics. Here is a long passage on that point from The Politics of Transindividuality. (pg. 92-93 of that book). "While Spinoza's dual foundations of the city cannot be immediately connected to base and superstructure, economics and politics, it does, however, prove useful for understanding politics, the state. Its constitutive ambiguity is not that of the tension between economics and politics, but within political belonging and individuation itself. The state, especially the modern state, which has inherited the ideal of the citizen, of a universal dimension, is always split between nation and state, between an imagined identity and a legal or institutional unity. The imagined identity, 'what makes a people a people,' crosses the same terrain as Spinoza's ingenium, in other words every nation, every nationality, is formed by an organization of the aspects that constitute collective and individual identity. Language and memory play a central role in the formation of nations. In the attempt to constitute a people, to generate a fictive identity, the nation intersects with race as the quintessential fictive ethnicity. Race and nation constantly traverse each other: modern racist organizations consider themselves to be first and foremost national organizations, protecting the purity of the nation, and the national unit and belonging is impossible without the fantasy of a common language and heritage. However, the nation is not synonymous with the state, the modern state, the state that begins with the democratic revolutions, also have an irreducible universalistic dimension, an ideal of the citizen that is not tied to national belonging. Balibar goes so far as to see this division, a division not between bourgeois man and political citizen, but between nation and state, as constitutive of modern political conflict. As Balibar writes, For my part, I consider the demarcation between democratic and liberal policies and conservative or reactionary policies today to depend essentially (if not exclusively) on attitudes towards ethnic discriminations and differences of nationality on whether pride of place is given to national belonging or emancipatory goals (the rights of man or citizen). The dual foundation constitutes two different subjects, two different transindividual individuations. The first is that of homo nationalis, the human individual defined not just through his or her specific language, but most of all, through shared customs, habits and memories. The second is the citizen defined by an open transindividual process, by rights and obligations, which exist only as a collective project that is by definition universal. These individuations coexist, constituting the conflictual basis for different individuations and different politics. National belonging, national identity, especially as it is connected to shared language, history and memory, comes close to racial identity and race, which it can never fully extricate itself from. For Balibar, race is not just a matter of a fictive unity, as a definition of belonging, but is also integral to the manner in which modern democratic societies deal with, or represent, the persistence of hierarchy and division. Hierarchy and division are always a scandal to a society organized according to the citizen, to an individuation of the citizen. There is thus also a proximity of race to class; class can always be racialized, not in the sense that it is ascribed to different races, but becomes attached to a rigid and permanent division in society. The division of mental and manual labour is inseparable from a division of society into 'mind men' and 'body men,' with all of the expected ambiguous connections to animality. Race reinscribes social divisions on divisions of the body, making social hierarchies justified and visible at the same time. Race (and the racialization of class difference) resolves the incomplete nature of the democratic revolution; it is the revival of anthropological difference in societies that have declared such differences to be null and void. As much as race plays a fundamental role as an alibi, explaining the persistence of inequality in a society that claims to be otherwise, it also plays an important role in the social imaginary, a term that is justified in terms of the Spinozist idea of the imaginary. Race is an inadequate idea of social belonging and social division. Racism is an imaginary, an inadequate idea in the full Spinozist sense of the term, it is both immediate, combining affect and imagination and fails to comprehend its causes. It offers an immediate understanding of society, a transparent account of the social divisions and conflicts mapped onto the most superficial signs of bodily or cultural difference."It seems to me that two conclusions follow from thinking about racism as an articulation of thinking and living, of knowledge and politics. First, such politics should not shy a way from the radical nature of what is at stake. Anti-racism is not just a challenge to a few lingering prejudices or biases, but to a whole way of thinking, a way of thinking that is integral to our society. (this is too long to go into here, but I am thinking also of Sylvia Wynter's "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom" and the connection she makes between knowledge and politics, between what can be known and lived). Second, this way of thinking is also a way of living. Which is to say that the reactionaries that have perceived in anti-racism an assault on their way of living, as in the case of Florida, they are right. It benefits no one to pretend that such is not the case. Although I do think that there is work to be done on this issue, to imagine what a post-racial society would look like beyond the image of integration (which was always integration to a community defined by racial exclusion). Lastly, such a society would also entail not just a transformation of race, but of national belonging, and with it, in a longer point that I cannot make now, the class basis of modern society. 

Seeing Nope at the Bridgton Twin Drive In Movie critics, even amateur ones, love puns, love working the title into their reviews in some sort of play on words. So it takes a certain amount of confidence to call a film "Nope". It just invites too many titles for negative reviews, say "Nope to nope" and so on. In the case of Peele that confidence is earned. It is the third movie by a director who is developing his own vision in an era where such things as vision or style, even directors as auteurs, are increasingly obsolete. The title of Nope recalls the title of Peele's first film, Get Out  which was an homage to Eddie Murphy's bit about how a haunted house movie would never work with a black family, they would Get Out at the first warning.  Just as Get Out was about a man, Chris who ignored all the warnings and did not "get out" until it was almost too late, Nope is a film about about saying yes, about going towards the horror rather than away from it. It seems to me that any attempt to understand the film has to begin with that, why do the characters not just say "nope" and walk away. That question seems central to the film.Nope is about  OJ or Otis Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya.) and Emerald "Em" Haywood (Keke Palmer) who, at the beginning of the film, inherit Haywood Hollywood Horses a horse ranch that trains and supplies horses for films, television, and commercials when their father is mysteriously struck and killed by nickel falling from the sky. Metal objects falling from the sky is the first hint that things are amiss in their little valley, but it is not the beginning of the Haywood family problems. Their family business, as the trailer below indicates, has been in Hollywood since before there was a Hollywood. Their great great great grandfather was the unidentified jockey in Muybridge's famous footage of a horse galloping.  It is a secret legacy, one obscured by the official history which remembers Muybridge but forgets the jockey. The Haywood's have no official claim to any real legacy, OJ and Em still have to work for every job.. He handles the horses and she handles the people, he is the craftsman and she is the salesperson. However, when a horse almost injures an actor on the set of a commercial all of their skills are quickly replaced with a CGI prop horse. What does a legacy, a connection to the past mean in an industry, and in a country, that is constantly retelling its story, reinventing itself. What do skills mean in an economy that is constantly deskilling, replacing knowledge with technology?
This same question burdens the Haywood's neighbor, Ricky "Jupe" Park (Steven Yeun) a former child star who now runs a wild west show capitalizing on his role as "Kid Sheriff". Jupe was also the star of a short lived but popular show called Gordy's Home that ended after one season when its chimpanzee star went on a rampage on set and killed and mutilated several of its cast members. Jupe works with one version of the past, a western theme park, one myth, but hidden behind his office is a museum to the tragic history of the show which might be a more lucrative attraction. A Dutch couple once paid thousands just to sleep in the museum.Television, or memories of television, play a central part in all of Peele's films from the commercial for the United Negro College Fun that pops up in Get Out to "Hands Across America" that underlies Us.  This is because Peele understands that our memories, collective and individual, are made as much by what happens on screens than in the so-called real world.  Peele's three films, Get Out, Us, and Nope, can be placed in a progression in terms of these video memories. In the first, Get Out, we hear the United Negro College Funds' slogan, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" in a commercial in the background just as Chris is about to have his mind wasted; in Us the image of hands across America is Adelaide/Red's primary memory and the structure of the tethered's revolution; and in Nope Jupe's traumatic memory of Gordy proves to be central to the whole film. Peele weaves together the audience's and characters memories of old commercials, media events, and cheesy sitcoms because these things make up our world as much as the clouds and desert of the valley. OJ, Em, and Jupe are all linked by the way that they deal with a legacy, with a past. In the case of OJ and Em this legacy was recorded but never credited, no one knows the name of the jockey in the famous pictures that created cinema, they are in some sense erased from history. They need to create their reputation anew, selling their business and their skills to clients without a legacy to claim. Jupe on the other hand seems tied to a traumatic past that he can neither escape nor entirely live off of. His niche fame or infamy does not provide enough to live on, but it is what people remember.

Jordan Peele posted the opening credits to his fictional show within the film on this twitter pageWhen what appears to be an alien spaceship appears in the valley OJ, Em, and Jupe all see it as an opportunity to change their condition. Em and OJ decide to photograph the alien spaceship, to get proof of alien life so incontrovertible that it cannot be contested. Proof of alien life will pay off enough to save the ranch and set them up for life. As they are trying to capture the elusive craft on film it turns out that Jupe has already started to profit off of the visitors, incorporating them into his wild west show. He has been buying horses from OJ and offering them to the alien ship. Jupe makes his offerings in front of a paying audience, exchanging the alien's mysterious desire for horses for a spectacle of an otherworldly being. It appears to be a fair trade, horses for a glimpse at the ship, but how can one understand what an alien understands or wants? Nope approaches this question by way of another question, how can we know what a non-human animal understands or wants? Understanding how we would communicate with alien minds is answered by asking how do we communicate with minds that are already other, with animals.This question is approached from two angles. First, there is the traumatic event of Jupe's past, the day that a seemingly trained chimpanzee was startled by a balloon popping and went on a rampage, killing and mutilating the cast. Jupe hid under the table and was not only spared in the rampage, but Gordy the Chimp was even about to give him his trademark fist bump before he was shot and killed. From his survival Jupe thinks he understands something about human animal communication, and thus, by proxy, how to communicate with aliens, give them what they want in exchange for something you want. In this case horses for a show. Second, there is OJ who does not presume to understand what horses want, but works from the premise that the first thing you need to understand about animals, and thus aliens, is that you do not see or understand how they do. A horse sees things differently, and to tame the horse, to work with it safely on a set, you have to understand that. To this basic principle OJ adds a second caveat he learned from his father, that some animals don't want to be tamed, a warning that OJ applies specifically to predators. As he argues you cannot tame a predator, the best you can do is collaborate with it, entering into an uneasy partnership. SPOILER ALERT: It turns out that the alien spacecraft is not a space craft at all but an alien monster. It is not sucking people and horses up to probe them or capture them for an alien zoo, but sucking them up to eat them. It is a predator. This is why it was not satisfied with the offer of a horse when it could gobble up the whole audience. It cannot be bargained with, but it can be appeased. OJ figures out that the only way to avoid the alien is to avoid looking at it--to not appear to be a threat. Incidentally this, and not the fist bump, may have been what actually saved Jupe when Gordy went on a rampage. Hiding under the table he avoided making eye contact with Gordy.  Gordy did not spare him because they were friends, but because he did not look Gordy in the eye.OJ's strategy to photograph the alien creature without looking at it is a strategy that ties together the two themes of the film. First, and most immediately what could be considered the problem of different minds. In order to understand a different creature you have to understand how it sees things differently. A balloon is just a balloon to us, but a different creature might see it as a threat (or as potential food). Second, the difference between legacy and history is the difference of seeing. A legacy unseen, or unidentified is not a legacy at all. The characters of Nope have all been cast out from the spectacle, Jupe is former child star, OJ and Em have a connection with Hollywood history that was never recognized, even Angel, the tech support staff who helps OJ and Em instal their cameras, has been discarded in a way, it turns out his girlfriend  broke up with him when she got cast in a show on the CW. Hollywood, the spectacle eats people and spits them out, not unlike the way a space monster eats people and spits out the undigestible bits of metal like coins and keys. The spectacle of Hollywood doesn't need to hunt its prey. They are all desperate to get their legacy back, to get back into the spectacle, to capture what Em refers to as the Oprah shot, the money shot. However, the spectacle is a monster, it eats people and spits them out. To look at it is to be drawn in, to be eaten up. The only way to capture the spectacle, to get a picture of the creature, is ultimately not to look at it. Years ago I remember reading that Jordan Peele planned to make five films about social issues. The first was Get Out which is generally recognized to be about race, the second was Us, which I argue can be about class. I am not sure if Nope can be said to be about something in the same way in which the horror is an allegory for some social issue, but at the same time its story of how people cast out by Hollywood, not a part of its official history, trying to avoid being literally eaten alive by a spectacle. No wonder Peele considers it his most personal film. Peele has managed to somehow create a spectacle, this is his most blockbuster film, without being sucked into its maw. 

By Himmat Zoubi. In recent decades, critical intellectual trends have achieved significant breakthroughs in analyzing the relationship between power and knowledge, as well as in analyzing the dynamics between dominant and marginalized groups. These trends have led to profound debates about the production of history, emphasizing the need to consider the identity of the producers of history, the perspectives of those recording history, methods of reconstructing the past, ways of framing the present, the selection and availability of sources, and techniques of historical revision.

In this Philological Conversation, Dilip M. Menon dwells on the questions of how to think concepts and theorize from the Global South and on writing history beyond the Eurocentric, colonial, nationalist, and terrestrial. We discuss the political and epistemic implications and consequences of such urgent tasks. Dilip M. Menon speaks about his affinities with Edward Said, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Walter Benjamin, among others, and refects on the themes of coloniality of knowledge, postcoloniality, decoloniality, oceanic history, and the idea of paracoloniality. A conversation with Mahmoud Al-Zayed.

Several schools in London, England, are offering summer literacy lessons that are open only to black students to "accelerate progress in reading and writing whilst also developing the children's knowledge of black history and culture." They are not offering a similar program for white students even though educational achievement is lower for whites from a…

Tony Cordesman was the dean of American Middle East military analysts, a significant achievement given the region's extensive warfare history. His work was essential for anyone writing on Middle East security affairs, offering profound knowledge and insight into modern diplomatic and military questions.
The post Anthony Cordesman: A Remembrance appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

What is the dominant academic narrative about Myanmar, 75 years on from its full independence? Has the tendency to obsess with politics and related developments created an incomplete, impoverished and patchy corpus of knowledge about the country? In this inaugural post marking 'Myanmar @ 75', Michael W. Charney offers a 'planetary reading' of the history of Myanmar. … Continued

The beginning of the new school year in many countries of the former Soviet Union, including in Russia, is celebrated on September 1st and is known as "Knowledge Day". This year, September 1st will be unique as the new educational amendments enter into force in Russia and Russia-controlled territories. These amendments introduce controversial changes to the educational process, which raise serious concerns about children's rights and freedoms. These changes include new unified textbooks on history, the legalisation of children's forced labour, and the continuation of "Conversations about the important" lessons with an enhanced militaristic element.