Ethical infrastructure: Halal and the ecology of askesis in Muslim Russia

This article explores the ecology of late-modern askesis through the concept of ‘ethical infrastructure’: the array of goods, locales, technologies, procedures, and sundry pieces of equipment upon which the possibility of ethicists’ striving is premised. By looking at the ethnographic case of halal living among Muslim pietists in post-Soviet Tatarstan (Russia), I advance a framework that highlights the ‘profane’, often unassuming or religiously unmarked, yet essential material scaffolding constituting the ‘material conditions of possibility’ for pious life in the lifeworld of late modernity. Halalness is conceptualised not as an inherent quality of a clearly defined set of things, but as a (sometimes complicated) relationship between humans, ethical intentionality, and infrastructurally organised habitats. Pointing beyond the case of halal, this article syncretises theories of self-cultivation, material religion, ethical consumption, and infrastructure to address current lacunas and explore fresh theoretical and methodological ground. This ‘ethical infrastructure’ framework enables us to conceptualise the embeddedness of contemporary ethicists in complex environments and the process by which processes of inner self-fashioning change and are changed by material worlds.

Reassembled, Slightly Askew: Immersive Storytelling Through Sound

Reassembled, Slightly Askew (RSA) is an audio theatre work which takes the audience through the visceral and embodied experience of Shannon Yee (Sickels) as she lives through a catastrophic brain infection and surgery, and eventually (as the title indicates) reassembles herself, and familiarizes herself with her acquired brain injury. Audience members experience RSA lying in hospital beds, wearing eyemasks and headphones. Sonically you, as audience member, are situated within the body of Shannon. Your focus is directed to the corporeal experience as told through sound and spoken text, providing a first-person perspective on the experience of acquiring an invisible disability. The project broke new methodological ground for the interdisciplinary artistic team, requiring a high level of collaboration and interweaving of the artists’ respective expertise: writing, directing, choreography, sound design and dramaturgy. Throughout the process of exploration and making, a seamless relay happened naturally as to which art form was leading in the discoveries and decisions. In this dossier, the artists replicate this relay to share insights from their own perspective in the creation of the project and its particular challenges in developing a highly visceral and corporeal experience through sound.

Dziga Vertov’s Cinema as a Language of Temporal Reflection

Introduction. The article is devoted to the general theoretical analysis of Dziga Vertov’s cinema as a language of temporal reflection. According to essential hypothesis of this research Vertov’s work expresses the feature of the temporal regime of the culture of Soviet modernity.Methodology and sources. The author uses the terms “temporal reflection” and “time regime of culture” guided by the A. Assmann’s work “Is Time Out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime”. The article is rethinking these concepts and point out as a methodological ground for the analysis of non-fiction cinematography.Results and discussion. As a result of the analysis of both Vertov’s films and texts and theoretical works devoted to the study of his work, it is argued that Vertov’s non-fiction films could be considered as a symbolic language of temporal reflection. Particular attention is paid to Vertov’s both theoretical works and manifestos, and at the technical level – to the cinematographic techniques and means of expression of time. The temporal regime of modernity according to the Assmann includes features such as the turning point of time, the fiction of a new beginning, creative destruction, the emergence of the concept of “historical” and the acceleration of time. The analysis of the film “Man with a Movie Camera” (1929) given in the article demonstrates that Vertov’s work expresses these features. This conclusion is also confirmed by a number of theoretical positions in Vertov’s works, some of which are presented in the article.Conclusion. Based on the analysis, it is concluded that Vertov’s cinematic experiments are inventing a new language for comprehending time of history and culture. This language functions on account of the mechanical reduction of reality and the synthesis of the resulting images-perceptions based on the principle of ideological and poetic advisability.

What Does It Take to Be a Social Agent?

The aim of this paper is to present a philosophically inspired list of minimal requirements for social agency that may serve as a guideline for social robotics. Such a list does not aim at detailing the cognitive processes behind sociality but at providing an implementation-free characterization of the capacities and skills associated with sociality. We employ the notion of intentional stance as a methodological ground to study intentional agency and extend it into a social stance that takes into account social features of behavior. We discuss the basic requirements of sociality and different ways to understand them, and suggest some potential benefits of understanding them in an instrumentalist way in the context of social robotics.

Legal Impact Theory in the Context of an Integrative Approach to Understanding Law

The theory of legal impact from the perspective of an integrative approach to understanding law, is a progressive theoretical and methodological toolkit with a high potential of heuristically mastering of various legal phenomena. This theory understood within the framework of an integrative approach, allows us to consider its legal nature, content and essence as fully and thoroughly as possible, which creates favorable conditions for achieving the criteria of scientific research, such as: comprehensiveness, objectivity, and historicism. It is the integrative approach that makes it possible to fully realize such a fundamental principle of scientific research as unity in diversity, to study the nature of the legal impact comprehensively and deeply, as a complex socio-legal phenomenon, determined by various factors of public life. The methodological ground of the examination depends on the utilization of different general logical procedures and techniques for logical information, just as specific logical strategies – recorded legitimate, formal-lawful, relative lawful and interpretative. Results showed that law isn't reducible to the arrangement of lawful standards, it is a lot more extensive and progressively various, which is related with its source, bearer and vehicle - a man, with his intentionally solid willed nature and passionate mental motivations.

Agon literacki w świetle rycerskiego modelu kultury

This essay – actually a scientific article included in the frame composition – is devoted to the innovative interpretation of literary agon in terms of the knight ethos on the background of Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence”, additionally enriched with references to Aeschylus’ and Eurypide’s “duel” in the Frogs by Aristophanes. On theoretical and methodological ground, the main research path is associated with an additional interpretation of Harold Bloom’s idea of intervals.

Smell in Eighteenth-Century England

In England during the period between the 1670s and the 1820s a transformation took place in how smell and the senses were viewed. This book traces that transformation. The role of smell in creating medical and scientific knowledge came under intense scrutiny and the equation of smell with disease was actively questioned. Yet a new interest in smell’s emotive and idiosyncratic dimensions offered odours a new power in the sociable spaces of eighteenth-century England. Using a wide range of sources from diaries, letters, and sanitary records to satirical prints, consumer objects, and magazines, William Tullett traces how individuals and communities perceived the smells around them. From paint and perfume to onions and farts, this book highlights the smells that were good for eighteenth-century writers to think with. In doing so, the study challenges a popular, influential, and often cited narrative. Smell in Eighteenth-Century England is not a tale of the medicalization and deodorization of English olfactory culture. Instead, the book demonstrates that it was a new recognition of smell’s asocial-sociability, its capacity to create atmospheres of uncomfortable intimacy, that transformed the relationship between the senses and society. To trace this shift, the book also breaks new methodological ground. Smell in Eighteenth-Century England makes the case for new ways of thinking about the history of the senses, experience, and the body. Understanding the way past peoples perceived their world involves tracing processes of habituation, sensitization, and attention. These processes help explain which odours entered the archive and why they did so. They force us to recognise that the past was, for those who lived there, not just a place of unmitigated stench

Glasgow’s Reply to Haslanger, Jeffers, and Spencer

In Chapter 4, Joshua Glasgow argued that race in the ordinary sense is defined in such a way that race cannot be a social construction and is not a biological reality. That chapter concluded with the claim that either race is not real, or if it is, it is real in a very basic way that is not captured by social or biological facts. In this chapter, Glasgow develops his view by responding to Haslanger, Jeffers, and Spencer. After first clearing up some misconceptions about racial anti-realism, Glasgow explains how his argument against constructionism applies to Haslanger’s and Jeffers’s specific constructionist theories. He then explores how Spencer’s view is exposed to a mismatch objection and further argues that it faces additional problems of accounting for some central kinds of communication. This chapter also includes an Appendix that explores how a wide methodological ground is shared among the theories presented in this book.

Making a Difference for Whom?

Scholarship on victim advocacy—working with victims of violence—has received little attention outside issues of burnout and vicarious trauma. Conceptually, few studies examine the complex relationship between social identities of workers and clients even though these identities frame all interactions, both consciously and unconsciously. Methodologically, the majority of studies rely upon quantitative data collection. My research breaks new conceptual and methodological ground by using autoethnography to examine the subtle ways racial privilege and oppression frame the relationships workers and clients hold with one another. This work blends the experiential with the critical through problematizing the author's complicity in replicating structures of racial power while working with a client in crisis. The study concludes by calling for a critical examination of social identities in advocacy work.