Both/And: Critique and Discovery in the Humanities

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (2) ◽  
pp. 344-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Stanford Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Public Realm ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
Religious Other

What are the “limits of critique” in the age of trump? At a time when nationalist and proto-fascist movements are on the rise in many parts of the world? When hate-filled words and actions against the foreign, the racial or religious other, the gendered, and the differently abled are empowered to come out of the shadows and into the public realm, poisoning the atmosphere, spreading fear and despair? When corruption and greed threaten not only the foundations of democracy but also the planet on which we depend? Don't we need critique more than ever—critique of lies, of discourses and their histories, of policies and the power structures they reflect? The answer is both yes and no. Or rather, we do need critique, but we also need so much more than critique. Critique as an end in itself is not enough.

Hannah Arendt dan Etika Keduniawian

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 167
Author(s):  
Yosef Keladu Koten
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
To Come

Abstrak: Etika keduniawian Hannah Arendt muncul dari cara khasnya memikirkan dunia dan tindakan-tindakan manusia di dalamnya. Bagi Arendt, lewat berpikir, manusia mengungkapkan opini dan perhatiannya pada dunianya, apa yang terjadi di dunia. Lewat berpikir, manusia menunjukkan sebentuk tanggung jawabnya terhadap dunia dimana ia terlempar. Dengan menilai sebuah tindakan politik, manusia disetir oleh nilai-nilai moral yang berasal dari dunia itu sendiri. Penilaian yang ia berikan, pada gilirannya ada di bawah putusan orang-orang lain yang mengkonfrontasinya. Artinya, saat kita berpikir dan menilai, kita mesti sadar akan makna tindakan politis bagi dunia pada umumnya, dan kita juga mesti menyadari apa yang akan dikatakan orang lain tentangnya. Kata-kata Kunci: Etika, keduniawian, berpikir, menilai, tanggungjawab. Abstract: This paper aims at reconstructing Arendt’s ethics of worldliness from her specific way of thinking about the world and how to judge an action takes place in it. For Arendt, in thinking, we express our concern and opinion about the world and what is going on in it. It is one way of showing our responsibility for the world into which we are thrown. In judging a political action we are directed by ethical constraints to come from the world itself and the verdict of spectators. That means, when we judge we should be aware of the things that an action could bring to the public realm and what others might say about it. Keywords: Ethics, worldliness, thinking, judging, responsibility.

scholarly journals Coming up for Air: On Reading in a Global Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-21
Author(s):  
Aparna Tarc
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
Teaching Of Reading ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Public Sphere

The thought of breath grips the world as climate change, racial injustice and a global pandemic converge to suck oxygen, the lifeforce, out of the earth. The visibility of breath, its critical significance to existence, I argue, is made evident by poets. To speak of breath is to lodge ourselves between birth and death and requires sustained, meditative, attentive study to an everyday yet taken for granted practice. Like breathing, reading is also a practice that many took for granted until the pandemic. My paper will engage the affective and/or poetic dimensions of reading left out of theories of literacy that render it instrumental and divorced from the life of the reader (Freire, 1978). I will suggest that scholars of literacy, in every language, begin to engage a poetics of literacy as attending to the existential significance of language in carrying our personhood and lives. I will also argue that our diminishing capacities to read imaginatively and creatively have led to the rise of populist ideologies that infect public discourse and an increasingly anti-intellectual and depressed social sphere. Despite this decline in the practice and teaching of reading, it is reported that more than any other activity, reading sustained the lives of individuals and communities’ during a global pandemic. Teachers and scholars might take advantage of the renewed interested in reading to redeliver poetry and literary language to the public sphere to teach affective reading. Poetry harkens back to ancient practices of reading inherent in all traditions of reading. It enacts a pedagogy of breath, I argue, one that observes its significance in our capacity to exist through the exchange of air in words, an exchange of vital textual meanings we have taken for granted as we continue to infect our social and political world and earth with social hatred, toxins, and death. In this paper I engage fragments of poetry by poets of our time (last century onward) that teaches us to breathe and relearn the divine and primal stance that reading poetry attends to and demands. More than any other form, “poetry,” Ada Limon claims, “has breath built into it”. As such, reading poetry helps us to breathe when the world bears down and makes it hard for us to come up for air.

scholarly journals Some Distinctive Features of Narrative Environments

Interiority ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tricia Austin
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The Public ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
The World ◽  
Narrative Practice ◽  
Narrative Medium

This paper explores key characteristics of spatial narratives, which are called narrative environments here. Narrative environments can take the form of exhibitions, brand experiences and certain city quarters where stories are deliberately being told in, and through, the space. It is argued that narrative environments can be conceived as being located on a spectrum of narrative practice between media-based narratives and personal life narratives. While watching a screen or reading a book, you are, although often deeply emotionally immersed in a story, always physically ‘outside’ the story. By contrast, you can walk right into a narrative environment, becoming emotionally, intellectually and bodily surrounded by, and implicated in, the narrative. An experience in a narrative environment is, nonetheless, different from everyday experience, where the world, although designed, is not deliberately constituted by others intentionally to imbed and communicate specific stories. The paper proposes a theoretical framework for space as a narrative medium and offers a critical analysis of two case studies of exhibitions, one in a museum and one in the public realm, to support the positioning of narrative environments in the centre of the spectrum of narrative practice.

scholarly journals The future library in the digital age

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erald Kokalari
Keyword(s):  
World Wide Web ◽  
World Wide ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Exponential Rate ◽  
Technological Revolution ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Information Today

The technological revolution and the resulting inception of the World Wide Web have had an unprecedented effect in the ways we find, produce, and contemplate information today. Within this evolution, the public library plays a pivotal role as it finds itself in the middle of this shift, needing to effectively respond to the exponential rate at which the "digital" is growing. The public library stands as not just a symbolic institution responsible for conserving and distributing information, but also as an extension of the public realm itself. This vision goes beyond the agency of the book and looks at the library as a socio-cultural vessel that can be responsive and dynamic when seen through this new digital lens.

scholarly journals The Rise and Fall of the New Arab Public Sphere

2015 ◽  
Vol 114 (776) ◽  
pp. 331-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Critical Power ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Arab Politics ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Public Sphere

“Arab politics will be torn for many years to come between the restless, critical power of the public sphere and the determined efforts of regimes, states, and old elites to maintain their domination.” Third in a series on public spheres around the world.

Unverified Prognosis

1884 ◽  
Vol 30 (130) ◽  
pp. 223-233
Author(s):  
H. Hayes Newington
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Experience ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
The Other ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Partial Recovery ◽  
Direct Examination ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come ◽  
Insight Into

In none of the more practical aspects of insanity, with the exception perhaps of that of pathology, does the alienist stand at so much disadvantage with the other members of the medical profession as in the matter of prognosis. In diagnosis we have, as a rule, an easy task, though now and then cases arise in which it requires much thought to come to a determination whether some unhappy event is due to insanity or to crime. Again, in treatment we fairly hold our own, taking into consideration the complex nature of the organs and functions that are affected, coupled with the impossibility of direct examination and treatment of them. But in prognosis we are distinctly less sure of our footing, and it is unfortunate that this uncertainty is accompanied by a most pressing demand for accurate forecasts from the relatives of those who are placed under our charge. This pressure, no doubt, arises in chief from the necessity in nearly every case for modifying, either temporarily or for good, those circumstances, domestic, official, and pecuniary, from which the patient has been removed; but there is this further difficulty, that while in cases of general disease, other than insanity, the friends have some sort of knowledge and opinion of their own as to the probable result, gained from insight into similar cases, in insanity such clinical experience is denied them by the necessity for withdrawing patients from the observation of the public. They are thus almost entirely without guides of their own, and in consequence they come to lean more heavily on the doctor. The strain and responsibility for error thus cast on us would be intolerable were there only the two eventualities of absolute recovery and absolute loss of mind; but, fortunately, there are many stages to fill up the huge gap between these two extremes, stages of partial recovery which allow of the restoration of the patient to various degrees of liberty and usefulness in the world. It is not too much to say that the problem of the future of the patient has to be faced never less often, generally more frequently, than that of treatment.

Spivak's Planetarity and the Limits of Professional Reading

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 459-478
Author(s):  
Hayley G. Toth
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Aesthetic Education ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
The Public ◽  
Praxis I ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Professional Reading ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Ethics And Politics

This article argues that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's notion of planetarity is premised on a practice of reading. Reading for the planet involves deferring the world in order to participate in the text world and its latent re(-)production of ourselves and our world. To the extent that this ethical attention moves us toward different horizons of thinking and feeling, it may also engender political action in the public realm. Reading for Spivak is therefore an important foundation for revolutionary politics and, ultimately, the production of the planet to which we aspire as readers. I proceed to evaluate the planetary efficacy of Spivak's complementary teaching praxis. I show that the aesthetic education she provides does not enable but rather forecloses the experience of literariness and its associated ethics and politics. In response to the limits of professional reading and the worldliness of Spivak's fieldwork in India, I conclude by thinking about the value of deprofessionalization.

scholarly journals Dissolving the Public Realm? The Logics and Limits of Neo-liberalism

2004 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN CLARKE
Keyword(s):  
Public Interest ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World

This paper explores the changing fortunes of the public realm during the last two decades. It poses the problem of how we think about globalisation and neo-liberalism as forces driving these changes. It then examines how different aspects of the public realm – understood as public interest, as public services and as a collective identity – have been subjected to processes of dissolution. Different processes have combined in this dissolution – in particular, attempts to privatise and marketise public services have been interleaved with attempts to de-politicise the public realm. Tracing these processes reveals that they have not been wholly successful – encountering resistances, refusals and negotiations that mean the outcomes (so far) do not match the world imagined in neo-liberal fantasies.

scholarly journals Gender Integration in Earth Observation and Geo-information Technology Applications: Correlation and Connections

2021 ◽  
pp. 291-306
Author(s):  
Chanda Gurung Goodrich ◽  
Kamala Gurung ◽  
Menaka Hamal
Keyword(s):  
Technological Innovation ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
Earth Observation ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Gender Integration ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Technology Applications ◽  
Visualization Tools

AbstractAs technological innovation and advancement is sweeping across the world, transforming economies, countries, and societies, Earth observation (EO) and geo-information technologies (GIT) have come closer to the public realm and become exceedingly an all-encompassing part in the daily lives of people, with more uses and users. These technologies today are not just “research and visualization tools”, but they touch upon all aspects of people’s lives, bringing in advantages as well as challenges for different groups of people.

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