Reber believes he has simplified Chalmers's "hard problem" of consciousness by arguing that subjectivity is an inherent feature of biological forms. His argument rests on the related notions of continuity of mind and gradual accretion of capacities across evolutionary time. These notions need to be defended, not just asserted. Because Reber minimizes the differences in mental faculties among species across evolutionary time, it becomes easier to assert, and perhaps believe, that sentience is already present in early biological forms. The more explicit we are about the differences among these mental faculties and the differences across species, the less persuasive is Reber's claim of the mental unity of species. The further claim that mental faculties develop gradually across evolutionary time is not empirically justified. How sentience can be "inherent" in biological forms is still not an "easy problem."
In the Flesh deeply engages postmodern and new materialist feminist thought in close readings of three significant poets—Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid—writing in the early years of Rome's Augustan Principate. In their poems, they represent the flesh-and-blood body in both its integrity and vulnerability, as an index of social position along intersecting axes of sex, gender, status, and class. Erika Zimmermann Damer underscores the fluid, dynamic, and contingent nature of identities in Roman elegy, in response to a period of rapid legal, political, and social change.Recognizing this power of material flesh to shape elegiac poetry, she asserts, grants figures at the margins of this poetic discourse—mistresses, rivals, enslaved characters, overlooked members of households—their own identities, even when they do not speak. She demonstrates how the three poets create a prominent aesthetic of corporeal abjection and imperfection, associating the body as much with blood, wounds, and corporeal disintegration as with elegance, refinement, and sensuality. ; https://scholarship.richmond.edu/bookshelf/1341/thumbnail.jpg
Platform journalism in the global North is caught within a fragile political economy of emotion and attention, defined, on the one hand, by the proliferation of user-generated, affective news and, on the other, by the risk of fake news and a technocratic commitment to verification. While the field of Journalism Studies has already engaged in rich debates on how to rethink the truth conditions of user-generated content (UGC) in platform journalism, we argue that it has missed out on the ethico-political function of UGC as testimonials of lives-at-risk. If we wish to recognize and act on UGC as techno-social practices of witnessing human pain and death, we propose, then we need to push further the conceptual and analytical boundaries of the field. In this paper, we do this by introducing a view of UGC as flesh witnessing, that is as embodied and mobile testimonies of vulnerable others that, enabled by smartphones, enter global news environments as appeals to attention and action. Drawing on examples from the Syrian conflict, we provide an analysis of the narrative strategies through which flesh witnessing acquires truth-telling authority and we reflect on what is gained and lost in the process. western story-telling, we conclude, strategically co-opts the affective dimension of flesh witnessing – its focus on child innocence, heroic martyrdom or the data aesthetics of destruction – and selectively minimizes its urgency by downplaying or effacing the bodies of non-western witnesses. This preoccupation with verification should not be subject to geopolitical formulations and needs to be combined with an explicit acknowledgement of the embodied voices of conflict as testimonies of the flesh whose often mortal vulnerability is, in fact, the very condition of possibility upon which western broadcasting rests.
Thousands of women and children are trafficked every day. Girls are mostly fall prey to the prostitution rackets and land in the brothels or end-up being sex slaves. The study attempts to look at the extent, causes, manifestation and the interventions made on trafficking of children at Mandsour district at Madhya Pradesh in India. Total 59 cases were taken for the study. The method of content analysis has been adopted for the research work. The study reveals that rescued girls are found mostly between the age group of one to eight year old. Kidnapped minor girls are being administered steroid drugs to hasten their physical growth for early initiation into the flesh trade in the camp of Banchra tribe people. Now government and social workers are taking initiative to reform and rehabilitate the Banchra tribe women.
In this paper we discuss the positions of Christian leaders about "managing" the sexuality of young people, as contextualized by the sexual politics of the state. These reflections are a result of an ethnographic study, conducted through archival work, participant observation, and interviews with 47 religious leaders in Recife. The analysis shows the space of religion as a disciplinary site, operating through transcendent reasoning ("responsibility"). The person is expected to incorporate such reasoning, and thus, make the appropriate differentiations between "right" and "wrong". AIDS and adolescent pregnancy appear as a result of "temptations of the erotic flesh". Through the perspective of human rights and health, the article deconstructs the idea of the "flesh" as dominated by "temptation" and an "essential force", which leads the person to stray/sin/"risk"; resituating sexuality as a positive instance for subjects (of rights), and a condition for social fertility.
Abstract: The Middle East is in chaos. Having been described as monstrous, the Islamic State (ISIL) has been defeated only to come back as a chronic guerrilla style insurgency and the shadow of further conflicts that are still looming in the region. The following article takes up this situation through the concept of the biopolitical monster as the common body of resistance and struggle, exploring the liberatory aspects of this concept in terms of organization and political autonomy, and argues that ISIL has more in common with the State-form than with the monstrous. Discussing the colonial and neo-colonial aspects of the situation, the case of Kurdish Northern Syria will be presented in contrast to the ISIL. It continues to argue for a social monstrous flesh as the performative body of contemporary protest movements, tracing back the rhizomatic etymologies of monster to Aristotle and early Islamic philosophers, drawing inspirations mainly from the tradition of immanent thought and its contemporary thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and Negri.
Several critical and constructive purposes fill this article. The broad overarching aim, vital for a balanced understanding of the relationship between cyberspace and embodiment, is to challenge what most shackles human-social research, viz., philosophical rational-dualism and scientific positivism. Secondly, it specifically spurns the alleged war between desire and technology as an abstract polarization and ideological artefact. Within the everyday lifeworld, contrariwise, flesh and metal coil together comfortably around postmodern love. Beyond sheer criticism, the article presents sketches of commonplace fleshy phenomena which go missing because of mainstream social science's narrow, prejudicial positivism. Females and males, as part of the politics of everyday romance and Eros, blush in each other's presence, kiss one another, trade hickeys and caress. Vivid narratives, generated by existential, phenomenological, and hermeneutic methods, portray those sensual-sexual experiences, depict the dynamic power of cyberspace, and sketch a vignette of bionic embodiment. This article, to clarify cogently what authorizes its divergent standpoint on embodiment, also expresses its underlying deconstructive nerves: the trenchantly nuanced analyses of Nietzsche on nihilism, and Heidegger's views on death and the essence of technology. It also articulates its constructive concepts, , i.e., Merleau-Ponty's "lived body" and Levinas' "carnal intersubjectivity."
Despite cogent critiques and limited successes, community-based management (CBM) remains central to policies for natural resource management and service delivery. Various approaches have been suggested to strengthen CBM by 'working with the grain' of existing social arrangements and relationships. For advocates, such approaches ensure that management arrangements are rooted in local realities and are therefore more likely to be effective. Implementing this approach is, however, methodologically, empirically, and operationally challenging. In this paper, we centre these challenges through a study of community-managed water in rural Ethiopia, Malawi, and Uganda. We examine water management arrangements by undertaking an in-depth social survey of 150 communities in the three countries. We also undertake yearlong studies in 12 communities in Malawi and Uganda involving 30 diary keepers. This focus on the local is complemented by country-level political economy analyses and district-level sustainability assessments. Our multi-country extensive-intensive research design uncovers the flesh and bones of CBM, and provides explanations for our findings. In Ethiopia, water management arrangements are more likely to be fleshed out – fully formed committees often working in conjunction with other institutions. In Malawi and Uganda, water management arrangements tend to be skeleton crews of key individuals. The position we adopt is located between advocacy and critique. We recognise the potential of working with the grain. We also recognise the considerable challenges of operationalising this approach without reducing it to another standardised checklist or toolbox. In an attempt to reconcile this tension, we identify practical entry points and sketch out requirements for a more socially informed, reflexive, and effective approach to working with the grain. Whether this can be operationalised within the logics of mainstream development, and whether it can 'save' the CBM model, remain open questions.
In education, the proliferation of a mind/body dualism leaves the pedagogy of the body undertheorized, and its impact on education disregarded. While there is not an absence of research on the body within the field of education, what exists is limited in scope. Little has been written about the connections between teachers' bodies, pedagogy, and politics at the level of secondary education. This research specifically focuses on teachers who are visibly other, critically conscious of their bodies, and find power in their difference. The purpose of this study is to make meaning of the stories, experiences, and potential of teachers who refuse to assimilate their embodied otherness through critical, phenomenological methodologies. The findings reflect my in-depth interviews with 8 public school educators from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I used a three-interview series protocol to examine the process of developing a critical and political consciousness situated in embodied otherness, accessing a power that is personal, and analyzing the impact of embodied otherness on classroom pedagogy. Data showed that through implicit and explicit messages about bodies, education plays a significant role in enforcing normativity as well as providing access to alternative narratives, both of which have lasting impacts. Data also provided a vision for an embodied pedagogy that is relational, transparent, and student-centered. Embodied pedagogy frameworks expressed by participants included centering access as an anchor point, an emphasis on student agency, recognizing the importance of modeling authenticity, and shifting from 'power over' to 'power with.' This study has implications for the knowledge and methods valued in educational settings. It highlights the need for theories of identity development that are situated in educational contexts, as well as for the development of frameworks in formal education which foreground access and embodiment.
While there is growing research on online politics in China some political uses of the Internet have tended to be overlooked. The focus of this article is on an emerging phenomenon in Chinese cyberspace, the human flesh search engine (HFSE), a term first used by the Chinese media to refer to the practice of online searching for people or 'human hunting'. While existing examinations have focused on breaches of individual privacy by these so-called online 'vigilantes' this study focuses on the ability of HFSE to reveal norm transgressions by public officials and lead to their removal. In order to give readers a comprehensive overview of what an HFSE is, the first section of this article provides basic information about it. In the second part, 20 well-documented HFSE examples are listed to show their varying aims and then HFSEs which focus on local governments and officials are shown to highlight the political dimensions of HFSE. In the third section, four case studies of government/official-focused HFSE are explored in detail to show political HFSEs' internal processes and underlying mechanisms.
This article examines Dominic Mitchell's drama In the Flesh as a metaphor for contemporary lesbian and gay politics, which in recent years has followed a reformist agenda on the basis that lesbians and gay men are, what Andrew Sullivan (1996) has called "virtually normal" However, it has been suggested by some Queer theorists that being seen as 'virtually normal' is not unproblematic as it is predicated on a politics of toleration. Read as a metaphor for contemporary lesbian and gay politics, In the Flesh presents a warning of the uncritical acceptance of discourses of sexual progress.
Diversas protestas sociales han tenido un papel disruptivo en la segunda década de este siglo, con formas que han puesto a prueba nuestra comprensión previa de los movimientos sociales. Algunas de ellas forjaron tipos poco convencionales de estructuras de movilización, como los llamados square movements. El último libro de Cristina Flesher Fominaya, publicado por Oxford University Press, realiza una revisión teórica amplia de lo que han supuestos estos movimientos a partir de su caso más significativo: el 15-M. Se trata de un libro ambicioso, empezando por su estructura organizada en cinco partes: democracia y 15-M; de la protesta a la ocupación; de la ocupación al movimiento; del 15-M a Podemos; y un capítulo final de conclusiones.
International audience ; The present article discusses Michel Foucault' s analyses of power, resistance and subjectivity developed in the second half of the 1970s. For this purpose, we will take into account the different forms in which his work is presented (lectures, essays, articles, books etc.) and a set of archival documents (unpublished manuscripts) from the Fonds Foucault, recently acquired by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. On the one hand, the article will explore the ethical and political attitude leading Foucault to develop new and complex analysis of power, mainly through his relation to the question of freedom and through his use of the concepts of "governmentality" and "critique". On the other hand, it will explore unpublished manuscripts on the question of the "spiritual direction" and the "government of souls" in the age of Reforms. These texts demonstrate Foucault's progressive interest, in the mid-1970s, in the political and moral history of Christianity. At the heart of complex genealogies that go back to Christian modern theology, he found a new way of thinking the relation to the self as a possibility of both conflict and freedom. ; O presente artigo busca discutir as análises de Michel Foucault sobre poder, resistência e subjetividade, desenvolvidas na segunda metade dos anos 1970. Para isso, nós tomaremos em consideração as diferentes formas a partir das quais ele divulgou seu trabalho (aulas, conferências, artigos, livros, etc.) e um conjunto de documentos de arquivo (manuscritos inéditos) do Fonds Foucault, adquirido recentemente pela Bibliothèque nationale de France. Primeiramente, o artigo analisará a atitude ética e política que leva Foucault a desenvolver uma nova e complexa análise do poder, sobretudo por meio da sua relação com a questão da liberdade e do seu uso dos conceitos de "governamentalidade" e de "crítica". Em seguida, nós exploraremos manuscritos inéditos sobre a questão da "direção de consciência" e do "governo das almas" na era das reformas. Esses textos mostram seu interesse progressivo, no meio dos anos 1970, pela história moral e política do cristianismo. Demonstraremos, in fine, que é no seio de genealogias complexas que remontam à teologia cristã que Foucault encontra uma nova maneira de pensar a relação a si mesmo como uma possibilidade aberta de conflito e de liberdade.
International audience ; The present article discusses Michel Foucault' s analyses of power, resistance and subjectivity developed in the second half of the 1970s. For this purpose, we will take into account the different forms in which his work is presented (lectures, essays, articles, books etc.) and a set of archival documents (unpublished manuscripts) from the Fonds Foucault, recently acquired by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. On the one hand, the article will explore the ethical and political attitude leading Foucault to develop new and complex analysis of power, mainly through his relation to the question of freedom and through his use of the concepts of "governmentality" and "critique". On the other hand, it will explore unpublished manuscripts on the question of the "spiritual direction" and the "government of souls" in the age of Reforms. These texts demonstrate Foucault's progressive interest, in the mid-1970s, in the political and moral history of Christianity. At the heart of complex genealogies that go back to Christian modern theology, he found a new way of thinking the relation to the self as a possibility of both conflict and freedom. ; O presente artigo busca discutir as análises de Michel Foucault sobre poder, resistência e subjetividade, desenvolvidas na segunda metade dos anos 1970. Para isso, nós tomaremos em consideração as diferentes formas a partir das quais ele divulgou seu trabalho (aulas, conferências, artigos, livros, etc.) e um conjunto de documentos de arquivo (manuscritos inéditos) do Fonds Foucault, adquirido recentemente pela Bibliothèque nationale de France. Primeiramente, o artigo analisará a atitude ética e política que leva Foucault a desenvolver uma nova e complexa análise do poder, sobretudo por meio da sua relação com a questão da liberdade e do seu uso dos conceitos de "governamentalidade" e de "crítica". Em seguida, nós exploraremos manuscritos inéditos sobre a questão da "direção de consciência" e do "governo das almas" na era das reformas. Esses textos mostram seu interesse progressivo, no meio dos anos 1970, pela história moral e política do cristianismo. Demonstraremos, in fine, que é no seio de genealogias complexas que remontam à teologia cristã que Foucault encontra uma nova maneira de pensar a relação a si mesmo como uma possibilidade aberta de conflito e de liberdade.
