scholarly journals Wellbeing and Worldbuilding: The Science Fiction of Wellbeing Measurement

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Walton

Wellbeing has evolved into a fragmented, contextual, and multi-dimensional construct, underpinned by numerous measurement methodologies at many different scales. To explore wellbeing through science fiction and fantasy (SFF), we don’t just need SFF about health and happiness. We also need SFF about measurement: SFF that explores surveillance, data infrastructures, the political economy of personal data, ‘the metric gaze,’ social analytics, and the social life of metrics. This chapter explores just a few linkages between wellbeing, measurement, and SFF, mainly emphasising dystopian fiction. Has SFF struggled to imagine wellbeing policy — or any holistic stance on the myriad factors that inform the happiness and flourishing of populations — except where the interested party is some sinister elite? How might SFF's narratives of distant planets and more-than-human intelligences help us to formulate a more inclusive understanding of the wellbeing of the many morally weighty beings and worlds that inhabit this planet?

2009 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 31-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain Pirie

AbstractThe digitisation of academic journals has created the technical possibility that research can be made available to any interested party free of charge. This possibility has been undermined by the proprietary control that commercial publishers exercise over the majority of this material. The control of commercial publishers over publicly-funded research has been criticised by charitable bodies, politicians and academics themselves. While the existing critical literature on academic publishers has considerable value, it fails to link questions of control within the journal-industry to the wider restructuring of economic and social relations that has taken place over the last three decades. This article seeks to complement this literature by highlighting how broader profitability pressures and the subsequent attempts by state-managers to expand the social space for capitalist accumulation have structured the development of the journal-industry.


Inner Asia ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-171
Author(s):  
Hildegard Diemberger

AbstractIn this paper I follow the social life of the Tibetan books belonging to the Younghusband-Waddell collection. I show how books as literary artefacts can transform from ritual objects into loot, into commodities and into academic treasures and how books can have agency over people, creating networks and shaping identities. Exploring connections between books and people, I look at colonial collecting, Orientalist scholarship and imperial visions from an unusual perspective in which the social life and cultural biography of people and things intertwine and mutually define each other. By following the trajectory of these literary artefacts, I show how their traces left in letters, minutes and acquisition documents give insight into the functioning of academic institutions and their relationship to imperial governing structures and individual aspirations. In particular, I outline the lives of a group of scholars who were involved with this collection in different capacities and whose deeds are unevenly known. This adds a new perspective to the study of this period, which has so far been largely focused on the deeds of key individuals and the political and military setting in which they operated. Finally, I show how the books of this collection have continued to exercise their attraction and moral pressure on twenty-first-century scholars, both Tibetan and international, linking them through digital technology and cyberspace.


Author(s):  
Micheál L. Collins ◽  
Mary P. Murphy

The political economy of Irish work and welfare has dramatically changed over recent decades. Since the 1980s, Ireland has experienced two periods of high unemployment followed by two periods of full employment. Alongside this, we see considerable shifts in both the sectoral composition of the workforce and in the institutional architecture underpinning the labour market. Focusing on the last decade, this chapter contextualizes the Irish labour market in the Irish growth model, highlighting issues including occupational upgrading, low pay, gender composition, and migration. The chapter then explores links between this employment structure and Ireland’s changing welfare regime. It considers recent institutional changes, as the welfare regime shifted to a work-first form of activation, and the long-term sustainability of the social protection system. The chapter concludes by highlighting what we see as the core challenges for the political economy of work and welfare in Ireland.


2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (45) ◽  
pp. 99
Author(s):  
Thiago Vargas

Retomando uma leitura política e social da Carta a d’Alembert proposta por Bento Prado Jr. e Luiz Roberto Salinas Fortes, este artigo busca estender e desdobrar algumas importantes implicações desta tradição de leitura: investigar uma reflexão econômica e os desenvolvimentos de uma economia política associada aos espetáculos, conforme apresentada na Carta. Afinal, contestando uma específica concepção de espetáculo defendida pelos enciclopedistas, Rousseau, sublinhando o caráter político presente nos debates sobre a atividade teatral, incessantemente se atenta para o contexto social e econômico no qual uma peça se insere. Neste contexto, considerando-se ainda a oposição que a Carta apresenta contra etnocentrismo dos philosophes, pretendemos analisar como então é desenvolvida uma crítica à ociosidade – ou uma apologia ao trabalho – que tem em vista fortalecer os argumentos dirigidos contra o teatro parisiense. Exploraremos, portanto, os aspectos de economia política que compõem a argumentação de Rousseau ao longo do texto. [Resuming a political and social reading on the Letter to d’Alembert proposed by Bento Prado Jr. and Luiz Roberto Salinas Fortes, this paper aims to further important consequences carried out by this tradition: to analyze an economic reflection and the developments of political economy thoughts associated with the theatre, as presented in Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert. Challenging a specific conception of spectacles advocated by the encyclopedists, Rousseau, highlighting the political character present in the discussions on the theatrical activity, draws attention to the social context in which a play takes place. In this context, and considering the opposition that the Letter presents against the philosophes’ ethnocentrism, we aim to analyze how a critique of idleness – or a praise of labor – is developed, with a view to strengthen the arguments pointed against the Parisian theatre. Most of all, we will seek to highlight the political and economic aspects that make up Rousseau’s arguments.]


Harmoni ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-240
Author(s):  
M. Alie Humaedi

The relationship between Islam and Christianity in various regions is often confronted with situations caused by external factors. They no longer debate the theological aspect, but are based on the political economy and social culture aspects. In the Dieng village, the economic resources are mostly dominated by Christians as early Christianized product as the process of Kiai Sadrach's chronicle. Economic mastery was not originally as the main trigger of the conflict. However, as the political map post 1965, in which many Muslims affiliated to the Indonesian Communist Party convert to Christianity, the relationship between Islam and Christianity is heating up. The question of the dominance of political economic resources of Christians is questionable. This research to explore the socio cultural and religious impact of the conversion of PKI to Christian in rural Dieng and Slamet Pekalongan and Banjarnegara. This qualitative research data was extracted by in-depth interviews, observations and supported by data from Dutch archives, National Archives and Christian Synod of Salatiga. Research has found the conversion of the PKI to Christianity has sparked hostility and deepened the social relations of Muslims and Christians in Kasimpar, Petungkriono and Karangkobar. The culprit widened by involving the network of Wonopringgo Islamic Boarding. It is often seen that existing conflicts are no longer latent, but lead to a form of manifest conflict that decomposes in the practice of social life.


Author(s):  
Beatriz Contreras Tasso

This article seeks to examine the ethico-anthropological dimension at the root of the ricœurian idea of justice, which is developed quite explicitly in Oneself as Another and then picked up in his last work The Course of Recognition. Our hypothesis is that the ricœurian analysis of justice implies an essential relationship between knowledge of oneself and recognition, which is marked by an inherent tension that both links and opposes these two moments in an irreducible dialectic. However, this dialectic runs the risk of disguising a founding sense of justice in the social life of man, both on an interpersonal level and on the political level, which reinforces the institution of justice at the juridical level. So, to begin with, we will try to show how that ethical sense of the just shows itself on the basis of the anthropological analysis of the capacities of the capable man, which reinforces the original correlation between knowledge of oneself and recognition; then we will attempt to relate the fundamental contributions of the hermeneutics of the self to Ricœur’s notion of justice.


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