Ursula Le Guin’s Speculative Anthropology: Thick Description, Historicity and Science Fiction

This article argues that Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction is a form of ‘speculative anthropology’ that reconciles thick description and historicity. Like Clifford Geertz’s ethnographic writings, Le Guin’s science fiction utilises thick description to place the reader within unfamiliar social worlds rendered with extraordinary phenomenological fluency. At the same time, by incorporating social antagonisms, cultural contestation, and historical contingency, Le Guin never allows thick description to neutralise historicity. Rather, by combining the two and exploring their interplay, Le Guin establishes a critical relation between her imagined worlds and the reader’s own historical moment. This enables her to both counter Fredric Jameson’s influential criticism of her work – the charge of ‘world reduction’ – and point to ungrasped utopian possibilities within the present. Le Guin’s speculative anthropology thus combines the strengths while overcoming some of the limitations of both Geertz’s thick-descriptive method and Jameson’s theory of the science fiction genre.

PREDICTION OF STOCK RETURNS MAY BE FALLACIOUS: A STOCHASTIC CONFIRMATION OF MALKIEL’S ASSERTION ON DARTBOARD INVESTMENTS

Several studies on portfolio construction reveal that sensible strategies essentially yield the same results as their nonsensical inverted counterparts; moreover, random portfolios managed by Malkiel’s dart-throwing monkey would outperform the cap-weighted benchmark index. Forecasting the future development of stock returns is an important aspect of portfolio assessment. Similar to the ostensible arbitrariness of portfolio selection methods, it is shown that there is no substantial difference between the performances of “best” and “trivial” forecasts - even under euphemistic model assumptions on the underlying price dynamics. A certain significance of a predictor is found only in the following special case: the best linear unbiased forecast is used, the planning horizon is small, and a critical relation is not satisfied.

The Anthropocene Islands agenda

We respond to the generous and constructive commentaries on our article, ‘Anthropocene Islands: There Are Only Islands After the End of the World’. In particular, we engage and think with the contributions as part of the process of forming a critical research agenda using the initial article as a springboard or platform for discussion – rather than as a set of research conclusions or a polemical statement. The contributions, to our minds, work in critical relation to the field and develop it in significant ways.

The Nation as Family

This chapter examines mother-child love linked to love for the nation within two Japanese plays. In Rio Kishida’s Thread Hell (1984), a pre–World War II silk factory represents the Japanese Empire, where a mother and her daughter are manipulated by the nation. However, they eventually challenge this symbolic realm that forces women to sustain the national lineage through their reproductive function. In Hideki Noda’s MIWA (2015), a homosexual transvestite’s relationship with his mother in the postwar period is depicted. As resistance to heteronormative ideas about family, and the nation as its extension, he commits matricide, but this leads to his melancholia as he cannot fully give up his desire to belong to a “normal” family and nation. These plays explore the ways individuals develop a critical relation to the nation by reconfiguring their love for their mother.

Adding an International Student’s Voice to the Pandemic Discourse as Thinkers, not Subjects

As of this writing, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on international higher education is continuously being documented, drawing enough, if not too much, attention towards international students. However, the voices of international students remain muted such that much of what has been said about their experience do not directly come from them but from those who claim to speak on their behalf. In this essay, I attempt to add an international student voice to the pandemic discourse by shifting attention to international students not as subjects but as thinkers and co-producers of knowledge in their own right, in hope of also contributing to the broader conversation about ethics and responsibility surrounding international education and international student mobility research and practice. I do so by sharing my own reflections on the crisis and its critical relation to power, stillness and humanness.

Dynamics and Pretransitional Effects in C60 Fullerene Nanoparticles and Liquid Crystalline Dodecylcyanobiphenyl (12CB) Hybrid System

The report shows the strong impact of fullerene C60 nanoparticles on phase transitions and complex dynamics of rod-like liquid crystal dodecylcyanobiphenyl (12CB), within the limit of small concentrations. Studies were carried out using broadband dielectric spectroscopy (BDS) via the analysis of temperature dependences of the dielectric constant, the maximum of the primary loss curve, and relaxation times. They revealed a strong impact of nanoparticles, leading to a ~20% change of dielectric constant even at x = 0.05% of C60 fullerene. The application of the derivative-based and distortion-sensitive analysis showed that pretransitional effects dominate in the isotropic liquid phase up to 65 K above the clearing temperature and in the whole Smectic A mesophase. The impact of nanoparticles on the pretransitional anomaly appearance is notable for the smectic–solid phase transition. The fragility-based analysis of relaxation times revealed the universal pattern of its temperature changes, associated with scaling via the “mixed” (“activated” and “critical”) relation. Phase behavior and dynamics of tested systems are discussed within the extended Landau–de Gennes–Ginzburg mesoscopic approach.

Kant’s Conception of Theodicy and his Argument from Metaphysical Evil against it

A series of attempts have been made to determine Kant’s exact position towards theodicy, and to understand whether it is a direct consequence of his critical philosophy or, rather, whether it is merely linked to some inner development within his critical philosophy. However, I argue that the question of Kant’s critical relation to theodicy has been misunderstood; and that in fact, Kant redefines the essence of the theodicean question anew. After introducing some major aspects of Kant‘s new conception of theodicy, I show how understanding this conception is necessary for correctly analysing his specific arguments against theodicy. I demonstrate this point by examining Kant’s second argument against theodicy, in which he tackles the Leibnizian problem of ‘metaphysical evil’, and show why, in light of the above, interpretations thus far have failed to capture the essence of Kant’s claim in this regard.

Homogenization of the boundary value problem for the poisson equation with rapidly oscillating nonlinear boundary conditions: space dimension n ≥ 3, critical case

The homogenization of the Poisson equation in a bounded domain with rapidly oscillating boundary conditions specied on a part of the domain boundary is studied. A Neumann boundary condition alternates with an ε-periodically distributed nonlinear Robin condition involving the coefficient ε-β, where β ∈ R. The diameter of the boundary portions with a nonlinear Robin condition is of order O(εα), α > 1. A critical relation between the parameters α and β is considered

Judith Butler and Communication Studies

Judith Butler is one of the most important contemporary critical theorists. Best known for her influential concept of gender as performance and her critique of the idea of natural binary sexual difference, Butler also develops a critical perspective on wider issues arising from the idea that “being is doing,” insisting on the many alternate possibilities of lives that can always be “done” differently. In this context Butler develops a complex account of what it is to be a subject and revises some basic philosophical assumptions regarding how to think about moral deliberation. Butler displaces the assumption that the human subject is responsible only on the condition of being autonomous in order to reconceptualize subjects as beings thrown into a world of interdependency and cohabitation. Butler characterizes us as part of “precarious life,” beings whose exposure to desire, loss, and grief is constitutive of our existence, but who nonetheless find agency within a critical relation to constituting social norms and through building more generous public worlds. It is helpful to understand the rich engagement that Butler’s work has with the philosophical perspectives in the background of these ideas, from the Hegelian criticism of abstract universalism to genealogy, deconstruction, queer and feminist theory, speech act theory, and the psychoanalytic account of subject formation, as well as the interlocutors who have become increasingly important in Butler’s recent work, including Levinas, Benjamin, and Arendt. These engagements ground a distinctive ethical and political approach that Butler brings to bear on contemporary and urgent questions, central to which is how alterity is engaged with. With a focus on how lives become “intelligible” as those of the kinds of beings that are recognized and find protection in law, Butler contributes rich insights into contemporary political phenomena. In particular, she describes how only certain lives appear as valuable in public discourses, while others lives and deaths become a matter of indifference, tracking the role of images and rhetoric in enforcing such differences. In demonstrating how state violence is bound up with this differentiation between “grievable and ungrievable lives,” Butler draws out a complex account of the relationship between violence, law, and justice. There are clear continuities between Butler’s earliest and latest work in the exploration of these issues, based in her methodological commitments to practices of critique and genealogy.

Inhabiting leftovers

The question of the cultural and physical articulation of interior and exterior is far from recent. If modern Western philosophy had identified time with interiority and the spirit, leaving space in a secondary position as the realm of mutability and imperfection, almost two hundred years later this dichotomy continues to evolve. Still, as Sloterdijk recalls, we are immersed in the ‘World Interior of Capital’, which emerges as a hypertrophic system of immunity against the erratic and unreliable exterior. With regard to architecture, this division between interior and exterior has run parallel to the relation between public and private, city and home, façade and interior architecture. However during and after the so-called spatial turn, architecture as a discipline has experienced how one of its main and almost exclusive instruments has become a transversal element shared and studied from diverse fields and perspectives. Thus, a worth exploring theoretical gap is open within the critical relation between space and architecture, and more specifically within the cultural and spatial readings of the inside and the outside. This research paper aims at exploring the contemporary understanding of the leftover, which forms the counterpart to hegemonic spatiality, in order to suggest a transfer from the formal dichotomy interior/exterior to a multidimensional comprehension of space, following the philosophical notion of negativity. This contemporary fascination with leftovers is manifest in the work of several authors and artists, such as Slavoj Žižek’s interest in Gould and Lewontin’s ‘spandrels’, the Chapuisat Brothers’ Intra Muros, or Gregor Schneider’s Haus u r. However, these reflections also appeared almost forty years ago when the architect Steven Peterson coined the term ‘negative space’ to designate the hybrid realm in between geometrical constraints and the neutral transparency of modern space. This unmapped, but suggestive lineage suggest a transfer from the formal dichotomy interior/exterior to a multidimensional comprehension of space.