scholarly journals Reckoning with COVID, Racial Violence, and the Perilous Pursuit of Transparency

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Torin Monahan
Keyword(s):  
Racial Violence ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Surveillance Systems ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
The Public ◽  
Critical Scholarship ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
White Supremacists ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
The Many

This essay reflects on the many upheavals of the past year and their implications for critical scholarship on surveillance. The COVID-19 pandemic, anti-science policies, radicalized white supremacists, police killings of people of color, and the resurgence of the racial justice movement all inflect surveillance practices in the contemporary moment. In particular, today’s polarized political landscape makes it difficult to condemn surveillance in the service of the public good, but irrespective of one’s goals or intentions, the embrace of transparency carries its own risks. Transparency, and scientific vision more broadly, is an extension of the Enlightenment and subsequent scientific revolution, which from the start sought to advance knowledge and consolidate white power through the violent subjugation of nature, women, and racial minorities. One fundamental risk of valorizing transparency is that doing so occludes the ways that relations of domination are indelibly encoded into surveillance systems and practices. Given this, I argue that the project of decolonizing surveillance inquiry should now be our primary focus as a field.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
American History ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
Public Life ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
The Public ◽  
Historical Significance ◽  
The Many

The Conclusion ties together the book’s main arguments about Crispus Attucks’s place in American history and memory. We do not know enough about his experiences, associations, or motives before or during the Boston Massacre to conclude with certainty that Attucks should be considered a hero and patriot. But his presence in that mob on March 5, 1770, embodies the diversity of colonial America and the active participation of workers and people of color in the public life of the Revolutionary era. The strong likelihood that Attucks was a former slave who claimed his own freedom and carved out a life for himself in the colonial Atlantic world adds to his story’s historical significance. The lived realities of Crispus Attucks and the many other men and women like him must be a part of Americans’ understanding of the nation’s founding generations.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 250-252
Author(s):  
Jim Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Systemic Racism ◽  
The Public ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The People ◽  
Immigrant Policies

This chapter cites the statement of rebellion drafted by a group of revolutionaries in the late eighteenth century. It highlights the need to address the Declaration of Interdependence following the severe challenges that the United States face today. The chapter asserts that we are far more interdependent than we are independent, and our lives are all deeply interconnected within a web of both obvious and not-so-obvious threads. It evaluates how education inequities, mass criminalization, anti-immigrant policies, and other racial justice issues do not just harm those who attend the underresourced schools, suffer the effects of overpolicing, and face the prospect of being deported. The chapter recognizes that addressing those issues does not just help the people of color who have the burden of systemic racism lifted off them, but also everyone is in a position to benefit when communities of color are able to live higher-quality lives and the rot of injustice is purged from the public systems.

THE MORALISATION OF PREDICTIVITY IN THE AGE OF DATA-DRIVEN SURVEILLANCE

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sun-ha Hong
Keyword(s):  
Emerging Technologies ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Surveillance Systems ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Many ◽  
Machine Readable

This paper argues that emerging technologies of datafication are intensifying a moralisation of predictivity. On one hand, this describes the growing pressure to quantify and predict every kind of social problem. Reluctance to adopt emerging technologies of surveillance is construed as abdication of a moral responsibility via negligence to inevitable progress. On the other hand, it describes the corresponding demand that human subjects learn to live in more predictable and machine-readable ways, adapting to the flaws and ambiguities of imperfect technosystems. This argument echoes that of Joseph Weizenbaum (1976), a pioneer of early AI research and the inventor of the ELIZA chatbot: that well in advance of machines fully made in our image, it is the human subjects that are asked to render themselves more compatible and legible to those machines. Drawing from a book-length research project into the public presentation of surveillance technologies, I show how messy data, arbitrary classifications, and other uncertainties become fabricated into the status of reliable predictions. Specifically, the bulk of the presentation will examine the rapid expansion of counter-terrorist surveillance systems in 2010’s America. All in all, the moralisation of predictivity helps suture the many imperfections of data-driven surveillance, and provide justificatory cover for their breakneck expansion across the boundaries of public and private. They perpetuate the normative expectation that what can be predicted must be, and what needs to be predicted surely can be. In the process, spaces for human discretion, informal norms, and sensitivity to human circumstance are being squeezed out.

“A Swarm of Laughter!” On Kierkegaard’s Conception of Enthusiasm and Its Comedic Remedy, an Enlightenment Inheritance

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carson Seabourn Webb
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Many

AbstractToday the term “enthusiasm” signifies little more than innocuous excitement. During the Enlightenment, however, the term was abuzz with pejorative innuendos of sub-humanity, the many nuances of which were debated in the public sphere. Its significance was more sting than substance, however, and by the middle of the nineteenth century Kierkegaard could complain that the category of enthusiasm had become hopelessly unclear. Despite this, based on The Book on Adler and on three texts in which Kierkegaard uses Socrates as a prototype of enthusiasm, I argue that Kierkegaard’s concept of enthusiasm places him in the lineage of earlier Enlightenment writers, such as Lessing, Shaftesbury, and Kant, whose conceptions and critiques of enthusiasm Kierkegaard was familiar with. By putting Kierkegaard’s use of the comic in The Book on Adler into conversation with Shaftesbury’s and Kant’s comedic remedies for enthusiasm, the extent to which Kierkegaard is an inheritor of and detractor from this tradition becomes evident

Too much policing: Why calls are made to defund the police

2021 ◽  
pp. 146247452110456
Author(s):  
Jennifer E. Cobbina-Dungy ◽  
Delores Jones-Brown
Keyword(s):  
Police Training ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Physical Force ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Us ◽  
Continued Use ◽  
Primary Focus

The repeat use of fatal force against unarmed people of color has driven global protests against police violence and fueled criticism of policing as a mechanism for public safety. In the US, calls to abolish, transform, or reform policing have reemerged with a primary focus on the elimination of structural racism. In this essay, we contend that a two-tier policing problem exists. The first is the continued use of policing to enforce racial dominance through policing practices labeled as “proactive”. The second is contemporary “warrior-style” police training that normalizes the expectation of unquestioned compliance with police directives and authorizes police to use physical force in its absence. This dangerous combination results in over-policing the public generally and Black members of the public specifically. Select incidents are provided to support these claims. We conclude by expressing support for the call to reallocate portions of policing budgets toward other government and community-based structures that function to enhance the ability of people to survive and thrive rather than operate as mechanisms of pre-adjudication punishment and state-sanctioned coercion.

Hoe verlicht waren de genootschappen? - De achttiende-eeuwse sociabiliteit in recent historisch onderzoek

2014 ◽  
Vol 127 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-209
Author(s):  
Jordy Geerlings
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Conventions ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Important Object ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Many ◽  
Traditional Understanding

The many forms of sociability that flourished during the eighteenth century have long been viewed as vehicles of the Enlightenment. Not only were societies, clubs, and lodges permeated by a spirit of egalitarianism, secularism, and religious tolerance, they were also essential factors in the dissemination of knowledge and new ideas. Additionally, sociability has been associated with the rise of the public sphere and civil society, as various societies provided important platforms for the new bourgeois public to discuss and address the issues of the day. However, recent research has challenged these views. Historians are increasingly finding that many societies were permeable to a variety of worldviews and practices, not all of which can be meaningfully associated with the Enlightenment. New insights also suggest the importance of local restrictions and social conventions influencing many societies, further complicating the traditional understanding of the progressive, enlightened nature of sociability during this period. At the same time, sociability remains an important object of research in its own right, as well as an indispensible window onto an ever increasing variety of historical phenomena. This article explores the ways in which recent research has transformed our understanding of sociability and its place in the Enlightenment.

The Two Percent Solution: Eugenic Jurisprudence and the Socialization of American Law, 1900–1930

1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Willrich
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Novel Technology ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
American Law ◽  
Survival And Reproduction ◽  
White Supremacists ◽  
Vain Attempt ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
The Many

In early twentieth-century America, the novel technology called “eugenics”—a potent hybrid of biological science, statistical method, and cultural assumptions—won a diverse following of academics, animal breeders, social workers, criminologists, psychiatrists, institutional superintendents, philanthropists, and activists spanning the political spectrum from socialists to white supremacists. Although heirs to the Enlightenment pursuits of science, reason, and a rationally organized state, eugenicists rejected the Enlightenment's egalitarian strain, insisting that hereditary endowment determined social structure. Fusing Darwin's theory of evolution and Mendel's discoveries in plant heredity, eugenicists claimed to find distinct genetic roots for the many problems of personality and society that alarmed their contemporaries: from “feeble-mindedness” and “psychopathy” to “delinquency” and “hypersexuality.” Within the bright lines of a eugenic worldview, the poverty and crime that pervaded an avowedly meritocratic urban-industrial democracy were comprehended as the offspring of hereditary “mental defects,” racial “mongrelization,” and sentimental charitable efforts that, in a vain attempt to reform deviant individuals, had only assured their survival and reproduction.

WHAT WAS THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK? A RESPONSE

2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 537-544 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID D. HALL
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Book History ◽  
History Of The Book ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Many ◽  
History Of Journalism

The history of the book is everywhere, so widely diffused that it merits comparison with the famously elusive Scarlet Pimpernel, whose pursuers sought him without success. Like that figure, book history passes among us in disguise, reluctant to reveal its presence even as it gains ever-greater recognition. In some quarters, it lurks within the domain of bibliography, a field of scholarship dedicated to describing the histories of printed texts and, in the service of this enterprise, concerned with the details of book-making. Elsewhere, book history installs itself within descriptions of libraries and education, sharing, with the first of these, a concern for how old books were accumulated and classified and, with the second, for the many ramifications of literacy and the fashioning of schoolbooks. Together with the history of journalism it studies how news was disseminated and ponders the significance of periodicals, be these newspapers or magazines. Political history has been another convenient site of disguise in the wake of efforts to connect the public sphere and concepts of nation with the emergence of print culture. And, of course, book history has enjoyed a long and fruitful kinship with literary history, a relationship freshly energized in recent decades as literary historians turned to describing the rise and remaking of a canon and to emphasizing the mediations that all texts undergo—the “sociology of texts,” to borrow a phrase made famous by D. F. McKenzie. To this list we can add the version of intellectual history that reconstructs the reading of a person or group and employs this data to generalize about the coming of the Enlightenment and similar formations.

“All in a Garden Green”: Shakespeare's Staging of Garden Imagery

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-252
Author(s):  
Deborah Solomon
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Audience Interaction ◽  
The Many ◽  
Green World

This essay draws attention to the surprising lack of scholarship on the staging of garden scenes in Shakespeare's oeuvre. In particular, it explores how garden scenes promote collaborative acts of audience agency and present new renditions of the familiar early modern contrast between the public and the private. Too often the mention of Shakespeare's gardens calls to mind literal rather than literary interpretations: the work of garden enthusiasts like Henry Ellacombe, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, and Caroline Spurgeon, who present their copious gatherings of plant and flower references as proof that Shakespeare was a garden lover, or the many “Shakespeare Gardens” around the world, bringing to life such lists of plant references. This essay instead seeks to locate Shakespeare's garden imagery within a literary tradition more complex than these literalizations of Shakespeare's “flowers” would suggest. To stage a garden during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries signified much more than a personal affinity for the green world; it served as a way of engaging time-honored literary comparisons between poetic forms, methods of audience interaction, and types of media. Through its metaphoric evocation of the commonplace tradition, in which flowers double as textual cuttings to be picked, revised, judged, and displayed, the staged garden offered a way to dramatize the tensions produced by creative practices involving collaborative composition and audience agency.

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