Wildlife in the Digital Anthropocene: Examining human-animal relations through surveillance technologies

Digital surveillance technologies enable a range of publics to observe the private lives of wild animals. Publics can now encounter wildlife from their smartphones, home computers, and other digital devices. These technologies generate public-wildlife relations that produce digital intimacy, but also summon wildlife into relations of care, commodification, and control. Via three case studies, this paper examines the biopolitical implications of such technologically mediated human-animal relations, which are becoming increasingly common and complex in the Digital Anthropocene. Each of our case studies involves a different biopolitical rationale deployed by a scientific-managerial regime: (1) clampdown (wild boar); (2) care (golden eagle); and (3) control (moose). Each of these modalities of biopower, however, is entangled with the other, inaugurating complex relations between publics, scientists, and wildlife. We show how digital technologies can predetermine certain representations of wildlife by encouraging particular gazes, which can have negative repercussions for public-wildlife relations in both digital and offline spaces. However, there remains work to be done to understand the positive public-wildlife relations inaugurated by digital mediation. Here, departing from much extant literature on digital human-animal relations, we highlight some of these positive potentials, notably: voice, immediacy, and agency.

Dangerous and (In)Vulnerable

The chapter investigates how The Weeknd’s aestheticization of sex, drug use, and violence contributes to positioning him as a credible outsider within the pop mainstream. Presenting analyses of three of his music videos—Pretty (2013), Heartless (2019), and Blinding Lights (2020)—the chapter revolves around two questions that emerge from this part of his oeuvre. First, in what ways do graphic displays of violence shape a representation of masculinity that panders to a broad cultural fascination with violent men? Then, how does The Weeknd’s embrace of vulnerability simultaneously place his masculinity at risk and affirm it? In an attempt to provide answers to such questions, the chapter addresses issues pertaining to the cultural disarmament of women; how notions of place frame performances of gender; the anti-hero trope of masculinity; the gendered, sexual, and racialized connotations of dance; and the blurred boundaries between pop artists’ public personae and private lives.

CREATIVITY AS NEOLIBERAL SELF-GOVERNANCE

The purpose of this article is to analyze the problem of non-professional creativity in contemporary self-help literature. Creativity, an element of work organization in the post-Fordist era, has been the subject of many critical analyses. I focus on creativity as it appears in everyday life, with the support of an examination of self-help handbooks that refer to far-east traditions, at the same time being critical of the Western lifestyle. Self-help literature is viewed here as a tool aiding the neoliberal governmentality of society. I am most of all interested in how contemporary discourse on non-professional creativity promotes technologies of autonomy aimed at the production of responsible and self-sufficient individuals. I argue that creativity is today a key mechanism of governance. It is not limited to the professional sphere but is playing an increasing role in our private lives. It is used to produce more elusive and flexible forms of self-governance than more openly repressive forms of power (based on top-down order and control).

Życie codzienne podczas pandemii Covid-19 w perspektywie współczesnej polskiej prasy

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected the professional and private lives of most societies around the world. At that time, traditional media began to play an important role as an intermediary in contact with the outside world. This article is a kind of calendar of events that took place during the successive waves of the coronavirus pandemic in Poland, and were noticed, recorded and analyzed by reporters of the contemporary Polish press. The main research method used by the author is a press analysis of materials obtained mainly from weekly magazines (Polityka, Newsweek, Do Rzeczy) and the daily Gazeta Wyborcza.

State Bastardisation And Terrorism In Nigeria: A Discourse

This paper seeks to unearth and analyse the variables which promote and sustain primordial groups’ identities and their linkages to the emergence and sustenance of terrorist groups in Nigeria. Grounded in the pluralist theory of sovereignty, the study adopts historical research design. It relies solely on data from secondary sources, which are presented qualitatively, and the finding is analysed using content analysis techniques. The study reveals that the promotion of primordial identities above national identity for political advantage by the political elites leads to state bastardisation in Nigeria. Besides, it identifies the apostolical promotion of some neoliberal values without corresponding citizenship education, as responsible for the emergence of Boko Haram and other such groups that challenge the sovereignty and legitimacy of the Nigerian state. It also questions the continuous promotion of religion in the public domain in a secular state and concludes that genuine integration policy is an urgent imperative. The study recommends that ethno-religious politics be buried; religion should be returned to the private lives of the citizenry. Besides, citizenship education and societal development should be prioritised in order to strengthen the state, and weaken the capacity of primordial groups to challenge the Nigerian State with violent outbursts.

Prerequisites for the effective fight against hate crimes

Hate crimes poison societies by threatening individual rights, human dignity and equality. They effect private lives, or even victims’ life and limb. Due to their ripple effect, they terrify whole communities, reinforce tensions between social groups, ultimately jeopardising peaceful coexistence. No society is immune from the signs of hatred, but whether they get tamed or whether prejudices are deepened, depends on the social measures that are applied vis-à-vis the phenomenon. The state’s reaction creates norms and will informs society about the current acceptable standards. European expectations help forming these. Standards developed by the European Court of Human Rights include the obligations to ensure that hate against social groups as a motivation is considered an aggravating circumstance or leads to penalty enhancement. States must also ensure that national investigation authorities show special vigilance to explore and unmask the bias motives behind hate crimes. Such European expectations still leave a wide room of manoeuvre to respond to hate crimes efficiently and dissuasively. But irrespectively of the national codification method, for legal provisions to reach the desired outcome, certain social preconditions must be met. For hate crime laws or provisions to work, states must reach a certain level of maturity from the viewpoint of democracy, fundamental rights in general and the rule of law, where guaranteeing judicial independence is an absolute minimum.

Eyes Everywhere: Ecological Migration and State Surveillance in the Age of Iron Man

In today’s society, migrants/citizens are monitored and exploited. A comprehension of the complexity of surveillance and resistance to it is crucial to guarantee a more democratic community. Disciplinary societies (in the Foucauldian context) have moved beyond the panopticon’s ecologies. Today’s monitoring is reterritorialized. Surveillance, enabled by digitalization, can adapt to any room today, but with the constant change in spaces, simply monitoring human actions would be inadequate. It is necessary to monitor both behavior and geographical place. Surveillance is also increasingly being marketed. Products are now being sold on the basis of people’s private lives. This dual aspect of surveillance connected to “safety” and “company” is well suited to the neo-liberal agenda. But monitoring also needs the supervised to participate. The States and MNCs are in a challenging situation if and when the monitored resist surveillance. Efforts are still being made by the state and its technology to properly monitor ecological migrations. This study claims that it is ecological and migration surveillance that makes Iron Man a strong avenger. Yet there are several cases in which his surveillance is inefficient through the cinematic narrative. For those already oppressed and who resist surveillance, the study would investigate these moments as flashes of optimism. This study also attempts to enunciate some of the aspects derived from works by theoreticians like Gary Marx and David Lyon. With the collective will of surveillance, unethical monitoring of ecologies and migrations imposed on us, it can be resisted to a good extent.

House as Autobiography: An Architectural (Mis)Translation of My Kitchen

<p><b>This research unravels and reconstructs the all-enveloping, surreal-slowness of my kitchen during Level-4 lockdown; through the intimate familiarity of the line, and the tactility of paper. In a time and place defined by the assimilation of our public and private lives, physical boundaries that ordinarily served to separate and structure, were dissolved. Within this physically smaller world, the kitchen felt relatively larger. </b></p> <p>Architecture and the kitchen (and equally, food and cooking) have long since existed within one another, both physically (in space) and etymologically. Isodore de Seville postulated that architecture first emerged in the dining hall, where the first building was made for eating. Equally, cooking and eating rely on a more-or-less solid and spatial framework.</p> <p>Within the “pseudo-fastness” of the architectural industry, drawing is a comparatively slow and contemplative practice, cultivating an attention to detail, and embodying the capacity to enhance social and historic values. Equally, the generative capacity of drawing makes it uniquely capable of creating something new, from something else. </p> <p>Just as lockdown was a recluse from the pace of everyday life, drawing is a recluse from the pace of normative architectural practice. The outcome of the research is a series of autobiographic houses, equally symptoms of the introspective experience of lockdown, and the introspective practice of drawing. </p> <p>By exploiting the subtle parallels that transcend architectural practice, language, and the kitchen (and cooking); this research makes a sensitive proposition for a design practice deeply implicated by the composition of temporal and spatial conditions from which it is conceived.</p>

Samoświadomość metakognitywna w kształceniu sprawności pisania na studiach neofilologicznych. Na przykładzie italianistyki Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego

The paper presents the results of a survey conducted in the academic year 2018/2019 among students of Italian Studies at the University of Wroclaw on metacognitive self-consciousness concerning Italian writing proficiency. The questions concerned the students' practice of written forms of expression in their private lives; the contribution (actual or anticipated) of writing proficiency in their current and future professional career; and the evaluation of the teaching of writing proficiency within the university curriculum of Italian Studies. The study was qualitative and conducted from an emic perspective, involving students in metacognitive reflection. The results of the study indicate limited metacognitive self-consciousness on the part of the students of Italian Studies, who are not, however, devoid of any criticism of the practical Italian language course curriculum.