The afterlives of the lively commodity: Life-worlds, death-worlds, rotting-worlds

2020 ◽  
pp. 0308518X2094441
Author(s):  
Kathryn Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
A Site ◽  
Bodily Condition

This article engages with Rosemary-Claire Collard and Jessica Dempsey’s theory of lively commodities in a discussion of cows raised for dairy exchanged in farmed-animal auctions. Taking their theorization of the lively commodity as a starting point to better understand the commodification of nonhuman life, I propose an extension of this work that attends to a continuum of commodity forms understood through the life and death of the cow. Cows raised for dairy move through the auction yard as a site of capitalist exchange as lively, soon-to-be-dead, and once-living commodities, their value determined by the stage of their life-course and their bodily condition. As such, the auction can be understood as a landscape of life-worlds, where the cow’s liveliness determines her value; and death-worlds and rotting-worlds, where the afterlives of the lively commodity are extracted as capital. Ultimately, the article calls for an upending of the commodification of nonhuman life and a new imaginary of the kinds of life-worlds that are possible beyond logics of capital.

Sacha Levy’s unorthodox kindness: Holby City’s medicine and pedagogy

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Ferguson ◽  
Carolann North
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Availability ◽  
The Self ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Pedagogical Development ◽  
Television Media ◽  
A Site ◽  
Medical Drama ◽  
Religious Spirituality

Holby City (1999–present) is a stalwart of British television media. Since its conception in 1999, the show has continued to attract contemporary audiences who tune in to passively, and passionately, experience turbulent battles between life and death. However, the locus of interest is not on the patients within Holby’s wings, but rather the staff themselves; it is their emotional, psychological and pedagogical development which spurs the plot forward and grips viewer attention. Through the use of medical pedagogy, Holby City becomes a drama of perpetual Bildungsromane, where relationships between peers, mentors and mentees are under consistent pressure. Furthermore, this pedagogy does not merely ensure Holby City’s series continuation but becomes a site of transformation, challenging preconceived ideologies of toxic masculinity. This is never more apparent than in the character of Sacha Levy (Bob Barrett), whose emotional availability, vulnerability and religious spirituality directly challenge concepts of the self-destructive ‘burnt-out’ male medic. This article explores the character of Sacha Levy in Holby City, demonstrating how the show’s writers engage actively in research to directly confront stereotypes of toxic masculinity and Jewish underrepresentation in the contemporary medical drama.

scholarly journals Actualizing hope and joy in K-12 curricula through Daisaku Ikeda’s human education

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-34
Author(s):  
Nai-Cheng Kuo ◽  
◽  
Amy Wood ◽  
Kyra Williams ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
School Districts ◽  
Lesson Design ◽  
Global Citizens ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Local Contexts ◽  
Human Education ◽  
Children's Stories ◽  
K 12 ◽  
Teachers Perspectives

Abstract Purpose: Our study aims to create a framework grounded in Daisaku Ikeda’s philosophy of education for educators and researchers to implement and evaluate human education in the classroom. Research Methodology: We first synthesized the eighteen chapters by scholars involved in Ikeda studies, published in the book entitled: Hope and Joy in Education: Engaging Daisaku Ikeda across Curriculum and Context to discover the main themes in Ikeda’s human education. Based on these themes, we selected six children’s stories developed by Ikeda to design lessons. We then conducted surveys with ten K-12 teachers across disciplines and school districts to explore their perspectives toward humanity and their feedback on our lesson design. Results: Our finding indicates that creating hope and joy in education is inseparable from human revolution, value creation, happiness, the greater self, global citizens, as well as life and death. In addition, the participant’s responses to the survey questions help educators and researchers understand what K-12 teachers look for in order to implement lessons on humanity more efficiently and effectively. Limitations: By no means would we consider our lesson design exemplary or applicable in all different contexts. Instead, we consider these lessons a starting point to continue exploring a better way to teach humanity in school. Contribution: Seeing examples of lesson plans on humanity and learning from K-12 teachers’ perspectives provide an aspect for educators and researchers to use, extend, or expand the present study to bring hope and joy to students in their local contexts.

scholarly journals Human Machines Petrified: Play's Mineral Mechanics and Les statues meurent aussi

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-196
Author(s):  
Olga Beloborodova ◽  
Pim Verhulst
Keyword(s):  
Human Subjects ◽  
The Body ◽  
French Translation ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Mechanical Devices ◽  
Sentient Beings

Play is usually regarded as the starting point of Beckett's late theatre, introducing a radically new approach to the body and language that set a benchmark for subsequent plays such as Not I, That Time and Footfalls. Building on Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days, Play dehumanizes its characters by means of the audiovisual technologies that Beckett was experimenting with at the time. In this process, his human subjects are increasingly reduced to mechanical devices or mouthpieces for the conveyance of speech, instead of represented as recognizable and sentient beings of flesh and blood. The nonhuman aspect of Play is enhanced by its foregrounding of Beckett's long-standing fascination with the mineral, with the characters' faces being ‘so lost to age and aspect as to seem almost part of the urns’. Whereas, separately, the influence of radio, television and cinema on Play has received some critical attention, and James Knowlson, Claire Lozier, Mark Nixon, Jean-Michel Rabaté and Conor Carville, among others, have noted Beckett's fascination with the sculptural arts and the inorganic, this paper aims to merge those two strands by discussing the docufilm Les statues meurent aussi (1953) as a potential but overlooked source of inspiration. By combining the technological and the sculptural in Play, Beckett stages a ‘mineral mechanics’ verging closely on the nonhuman without being fully dehumanized, as characters continue to laugh and hiccup, barely retaining a trace of their humanity. This oscillation from the human to the nonhuman and vice versa is clearly traceable in the genesis of the text, as well as its French translation (Comédie). The result, Play's iconic stage image, is marked by the familiar Beckettian trope of in-betweenness: between life and death, between the organic and the mineral, between the natural and the technological.

Rendezvous on the High Plateau

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Öhrström
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Sea Level ◽  
World War ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
High Plateau ◽  
The North ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The North Sea ◽  
National Flag ◽  
The Hill

The two men in white anoraks were slowly approaching, skiing in the bitter cold over the Hardangervidda mountain plateau in the winter of 1943. Were they friends or foes? This was a matter of life and death for the six young men watching the only other living beings in sight for miles of snow-clad wilderness. Their pace was slow, the men were thin and didn’t look too well, just as if they might well have spent 130 days of the winter of 1942–43 hidden in a rudimentary hut on the mountain, surviving on moss and poached reindeer. It had to be them. The group’s leader, Joachim Rønneberg, decided to make contact. This story is first a tragedy and then a success, and it does not begin on the Hardangervidda but in Scotland where Britain’s ski capital, the small town of Aviemore in the Cairngorms National Park, is going to be our starting point for several dangerous journeys across the North Sea. A few years ago we drove up the main mountain road, eventually leading to the Cairn Gorm peak itself, 4,084 feet (1,245 metres) above sea level, and passed the park’s visitors’ centre located in pretty surroundings by a small lake. We glimpsed something flapping in the wind that did look a bit like the Union Jack, an unlikely occurrence in the highlands. We turned around and took the path up the hill, and soon discovered that what we first mistook for the British ensign, because of its colours, was in fact the Norwegian national flag. In 1468, when the Norwegians gave away their last Scottish possessions to King James III in Edinburgh, the Norwegian flag had not even been invented, so we were a wee bit curious as to why it was flying here, in the heart of the Cairngorms. But of course, mountains, snow, and skiing—what could be more Norwegian? And this simplistic reasoning is actually closer to the answer than we might have thought, as a commemorative sign told us that on this spot were the lodgings of the famous Kompani Linge during World War II.

DIY Dying

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Askanius
Keyword(s):  
State Repression ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Video Sharing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Visual Evidence ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Moment ◽  
A Site

This article examines video activism in a context where ubiquitous camera technologies and online video sharing platforms are radically changing the media landscape in which demonstrations and political activism operates. The author discusses a number of YouTube videos documenting and narrating the recurring, anti-capitalist demonstrations in Europe in the past decade. With the death of Ian Tomlinson in London during the 2009 G20 protests as an empirical starting point, the author raises questions of how video documentation of this event links up with previous protest events by juxtaposing representations of ‘the moment of death’ (Zelizer, 2004, 2010) of protesters in the past. This article suggests that these videos work as (1) an archive of action and activist memory, (2) a site of commemoration in a online shrine for grieving, and (3) a space to provide and negotiate visual evidence of police violence and state repression. The author offers a re-articulation of the longstanding debate on visual evidence, action, and testimony in video activism. The results are suggestive of how vernacular commemorative genres of mourning and paying tribute to victims of police violence are fused with the online practices of bearing witness and producing visual evidence in new creative modes of using video for change.

Memorialization and Religion in America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam M. Ware
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
New Age ◽  
Community Identity ◽  
Emotional Expressions ◽  
Mass Trauma ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Trauma Memory ◽  
A Site ◽  
Memorial Sites ◽  
Present Life

Monuments, memorials, and museums mark America’s landscape and define both the purpose of spaces and the actors who inhabit them. From the earliest colonial encounters to the new age of mass trauma, memory and its cultural accretions have conferred meaning and denied agency at the intersections of economics, politics, culture, and religious habit. Inasmuch as battlefield memorial sites and statues to fallen soldiers generate community identity through demands for consensus memories and prescribed reactions, national memorials also reflect the diversity, contestedness, and political derivation of those consensuses and those memories. Memorials form physical sites for cultural rupture and ritual redress. Memorialization ritualizes behaviors, standardizes emotional expressions, and regulates the terms on which Americans orient themselves relative to one another. Whether staging mock funerals for an English king or leaving flowers and notes at a site where forty-nine young people lost their lives, death forms a key experience responsible for memorial motivation, but celebrations of independence and victory also produce parades, festivals, and active memorial traditions. In the flows of past and present, life and death, preservation and change, and sanctity and secularism, memorial objects, processes, and behaviors mark and are marked by the historic developments in American religious and civil life.

scholarly journals TMJ Dysfunction and Systemic Correlation

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luca Fiorillo ◽  
Giuseppe Musumeci
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Mixed Dentition ◽  
Dental Occlusion ◽  
Sports Performance ◽  
Muscular System ◽  
Medical Field ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Different Levels

In recent years it has been conclusively shown how the position of the mouth in relation to the body affects the way of walking and standing. In particular, occlusion, the relationship between skull and jaw, swallowing and convergence of the eyes are in neuro-muscular relationship with the control and maintenance system of posture, integrating at different levels. This manuscript aims to be a summary of all the oral, occlusal and articular dysfunctions of TMJ with systemic and postural–muscular repercussions. Recent articles found in the literature that are taken into consideration and briefly analyzed represent an important starting point for these correlations, which are still unclear in the medical field. Posturology, occlusal and oral influences on posture, spine and muscular system are still much debated today. In the literature, there are articles concerning sports performance and dental occlusion or even the postural characteristics of adolescents or children in deciduous and mixed dentition. The temporomandibular joint, as the only joint of the skull, could therefore represent a site to pay particular attention to, and in some cases an ATM dysfunction could be a clue for the diagnosis of systemic pathologies, or it could be the repercussion.

The Architecture of Shakespearean Comedy

2018 ◽  
pp. 341-357
Author(s):  
Anne M. Myers
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Domestic Architecture ◽  
Marriage Plot ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
And Performance ◽  
A Site

This essay argues that Shakespearean comedies evoke and confound associations between female interiority and domestic space. Drawing on The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, The Comedy of Errors, and The Taming of the Shrew, I show how characters expect access to domestic space to reveal incontrovertible truths about female bodies and minds. These assumptions, however, are foiled, as architecture is more often associated with confusion and obfuscation than with the acquisition of knowledge. Moreover, Shakespeare presents the domestic scene as a scene, a site for the mastery and performance of roles, rather than the expression of genuine human desires. In this way, the presentation of domestic architecture undercuts the conventions of the comic marriage plot. At the same time, though, these plays reveal that within the strictures of a particular social world, the successful domestic performance is a matter of life and death.

scholarly journals Towards an Aboriginal Knowledge Place: Cultural Practices as a Pathway to Wellness in the Context of a Tertiary Hospital

2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alasdair Vance ◽  
Janet McGaw ◽  
Jo Winther ◽  
Moira Rayner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Tertiary Hospital ◽  
Traditional Healers ◽  
Cultural Safety ◽  
Care Practice ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Major Teaching Hospital ◽  
Major Teaching ◽  
A Site

<p>The Indigenous community in Australia is beset by extraordinary disadvantage, with health outcomes that are substantially worse than those of non-Indigenous citizens. This issue has consequently been the subject of voluminous health research that has given rise to a range of affirmative action policies progressively implemented over the past decade. Statistics, however, remain dire. This paper argues that new models of research practice and policy are required that are inclusive of Indigenous ways of knowing, doing, and being. It proposes a new framework to promote wellness in urban hospitals for Aboriginal young people and their families modelled on equal, 2-way dialogue between Western and Indigenous ways of doing health. Cultural safety is an essential starting point, but a range of other practices is proposed including oversight by a board of Elders, inclusion of traditional healers in treatment teams, and “space, place, and base” within the hospital building and its grounds so that it can be used as a site for culturally engaged Indigenous outpatient care. Practice approaches that embed culture into assessment, formulation, and treatment are being trialled by the authors of this paper, three of whom have Aboriginal heritage. Together the authors are working toward building an Aboriginal Knowledge Place within the major teaching hospital where they work.</p>

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