Poststructuralism and Its Discontents

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Ardoin
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Real World ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
English Studies ◽  
Central Values ◽  
Potential Value ◽  
Queer People ◽  
Fiction Writers

Deconstruction and poststructuralism have profoundly shaped popular and academic thought, while also drawing both popular and academic resistance, and doing so (strangely) consistently over decades. In particular, deconstruction and poststructuralism (and their synecdoche—the capital-T “Theory”) are viewed as sources of existential peril to English studies, where their impact has been indelibly tied to a canon expansion that takes seriously—and particularly—the contributions of women, people of color, queer people, and others. Detractors often reduce poststructuralism to its -ism—making of it a stagnant force of destabilizing chaos or a hopelessly unproductive and apolitical form of theoretical play. Dogmatic enthusiasts often become similarly reductive. Thinkers like Barbara Johnson and fiction writers like Percival Everett exemplify and advocate for a brand of deconstructive self-critique in which we: avoid allowing our enthusiasm or opinions to harden into any -ism (even when the enthusiasm is for, say, undecidability); embrace (in fact, seek) opportunities of confrontation with ignorance in our own thought; and recognize the potential value of upheaval in our real-world practices. Such self-critique is far from an existential peril to central values of English studies; it is, in fact, something not unlike the “critical thinking” valued and marketed by the Humanities.

scholarly journals Change the Narrative

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 24-38
Author(s):  
Tynan Drake
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
Real World ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Empathic Understanding ◽  
Young Adult Novel ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Personal Level

In post-apocalyptic fiction, the concept of empathy often is depicted as a weakness that the characters cannot afford if they hope to survive. This depiction leads to harmful perceptions on the value of empathy and its ability to avert apocalyptic catastrophes. By examining David Clement-Davies young adult novel The Sight through theories of narrative empathy and through James Berger’s theories of post-apocalyptic representation, this essay argues that by representing empathic understanding, fiction writers have the power to influence positive changes in real world situations. By representing the need to teach empathy for all people, regardless of their differences, and the harm a lack of empathy can cause on both a personal level and on a large societal scale, this novel encourages future generations to seek peaceful and empathic solutions instead of repeating the cataclysmic mistakes of their forebearers.

scholarly journals Assessment of Undergraduates’ Real-World Outcomes of Critical Thinking in Everyday Situations

2017 ◽  
Vol 120 (4) ◽  
pp. 707-720 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda R. Franco ◽  
Patrício S. Costa ◽  
Heather A. Butler ◽  
Leandro S. Almeida
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Life Events ◽  
Real World ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Negative Life Events ◽  
Self Report ◽  
First Year Students ◽  
Portuguese Version ◽  
Original Proposal ◽  
The Impact

Critical thinking is a kind of “good” thinking that integrates a set of cognitive skills and dispositions to use those skills with knowledge to increase the chances of success in academic settings, job market, and daily life. The impact of critical thinking on life events, in face of everyday decisions and challenges, is still unclear, and further research is needed. In this exploratory study, a sample of 230 first-year students of a Bachelor’s Degree or a Master’s Degree in Portugal completed an experimental Portuguese version of the Real-World Outcomes, a self-report inventory measuring everyday negative life events that are mediated by a lack of critical thinking. Based on exploratory factor analysis results and theoretical premises, changes were made to the Portuguese version of the inventory that was administered, and items were aggregated into six dimensions, creating a new version that is more familiar to Portuguese young adults in college. This original proposal of the inventory presents six types of negative life events resulting from a lack of critical thinking: health neglect, mismanagement, slackness, poor impulse control, academic negligence, and rashness. Both limitations and future potentialities of this version are presented.

Alternatives to Coming Out Discourses

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuzhen Huang
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Queer Of Color Critique ◽  
Queer People ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Queer Of Color

The discourse of coming out has historically served as an effective vehicle to build and sustain the LGBTQ movement in the United States. It has also been utilized as an empowering resource that enables queer people to establish a queer identity organized around self-awareness and self-expression. However, queer of color critique and transnational queer theory argue that the prevalent discourse of coming out is built on a particular kind of queer experience and geography, which is usually from the standpoint of White, middle-class men of urban U.S. citizenship and is rarely derived from the experience of queer people of color and non-Western queer subjects. Taking an intersectional perspective, Snorton interrogates the racialization of the closet and proposes a sexual politics of ignorance—opposed to the disclosure imperative in coming out discourse—as a tactic of ungovernability. Centering the experience of Russian American immigrants who are queer-identified, Fisher proposes a fluid and productive relationship between the “closeted” and the “out” sexuality that resists any fixed categorization. Focusing on the masking tactic deployed by local queer activists, Martin theorizes the model of xianshen, a local identity politics in Taiwan that questions the very conditions of visibility in dominant coming out discourse. As a decolonial response to the transnational circulation of coming out discourse, Chou delineates a “coming home” approach that emphasizes familial piety and harmony by reining in and concealing queer desires. Being cautious against the nationalist impulse in Chou’s works, Huang and Brouwer propose a “coming with” model to capture the struggles among Chinese queers to disidentify with the family institution. These alternative paradigms serve as epistemic tools that aim to revise understanding of queer resistance and queer relationality and help people to go beyond the imagination of coming out for a livable queer future.

Branded Beautiful

2019 ◽  
pp. 151-165
Author(s):  
Lia T. Bascomb
Keyword(s):  
Coming Out ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
White Men ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Down Low ◽  
Queer People ◽  
The World ◽  
Cultural Amnesia ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
The U.S

This chapter investigates how white homonormative narratives perform tyrannous acts that distort understandings of queerness for people of color. As white queerness romanticizes and celebrates “coming out”—becoming the universal marker of liberation—these fascinations forge a space where other, discrete ways of being in the world appear anachronistic, backwards, or rare. McCune re-opens the case of “white men on the Down Low (DL),” if you will—to elucidate how the larger discourse of the queer triumphant, or queer progress, activates an erasure of all queers (white included) who do not fit the mold of the “out and proud” gay subject. This elision constructs a cultural amnesia around other ways of knowing sexuality outside of coming out—which enables a mis-remembering of a white queer past and present, devoid of discretion. Secondly, these constructions of a white queer past sanitize white queerness and enable a discourse that not only impacts how white queers perpetually privilege progress narratives, but potentially demonizes or distorts queers of color who perform often more illegible enactments of queerness. Bringing back the film Brokeback Mountain as a shape-shifting cultural text—globalizing an understanding of the foregone closet—the chapter forces an interracial non-romance between discretion in whiteface and blackface. Brokeback Mountain and other resonant texts perform a popular queer historiography, which misreads or under-reads the broader histories and social realities of queer people within and outside of the U.S.

scholarly journals On properties of cyberattacks and their nuances

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jassim Happa ◽  
Michael Goldsmith
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Resource Constraints ◽  
Security Analysts ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Real ◽  
Potential Value ◽  
Real World Applications ◽  
The Future ◽  
Attack Models

Purpose Several attack models attempt to describe behaviours of attacks with the intent to understand and combat them better. However, all models are to some degree incomplete. They may lack insight about minor variations about attacks that are observed in the real world (but are not described in the model). This may lead to similar attacks being classified as the same type of attack, or in some cases the same instance of attack. The appropriate solution would be to modify the model or replace it entirely. However, doing so may be undesirable as the model may work well for most cases or time and resource constraints may factor in as well. This paper aims to explore the potential value of adding information about attacks and attackers to existing models. Design/methodology/approach This paper investigates used cases of minor variations in attacks and how it may and may not be appropriate to communicate subtle differences in existing attack models through the use of annotations. In particular, the authors investigate commonalities across a range of existing models and identify where and how annotations may be helpful. Findings The authors propose that nuances (of attack properties) can be appended as annotations to existing attack models. Using annotations appropriately should enable analysts and researchers to express subtle but important variations in attacks that may not fit the model currently being used. Research limitations/implications This work only demonstrated a few simple, generic examples. In the future, the authors intend to investigate how this annotation approach can be extended further. Particularly, they intend to explore how annotations can be created computationally; the authors wish to obtain feedback from security analysts through interviews, identify where potential biases may arise and identify other real-world applications. Originality/value The value of this paper is that the authors demonstrate how annotations may help analysts communicate and ask better questions during identification of unknown aspects of attacks faster,e.g. as a means of storing mental notes in a structured manner, especially while facing zero-day attacks when information is incomplete.

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