Morty pode morrer liberdade radical, morte programada e subjetividade algorítmica na animação Rick and Morty como ficção especulativa

In this paper I argue for a novel philosophical methodology, fiction writing. Much has been made, in philosophy, of the relationship between fiction and thought experiments, but this literature focuses predominantly on completed pieces of fiction: Fully fledged and polished published pieces. In this paper I focus on how the process of writing fiction, especially speculative fiction such as science fiction and fantasy, not just the outcomes of this process, can be viewed as a distinctive philosophical methodology. This will be bound up in arguing for two claims: (1) The process of writing short speculative fiction is essentially a process of argumentation. (2) The distinctive benefit of writing fiction as opposed to writing analytic philosophy is that the starting points need not be justified. These two claims -- which may seem like they are in tension with each other -- will each serve to justify two overall conclusions about the writing of fiction -- the very process whereby short stories or novels are created. The first is that this process is a legitimate philosophical methodology, sharing many relevant features with traditional analytical argument building and conceptual analysis. The second is that it is distinctive philosophical methodology, in that it can provide us with insights that would not be gained via other means.


 Влада Вячеславовна Баранова – к. и. н., доцент департамента социологии, НИУ ВШЭ, Санкт-Петербург, Россия. Электронная почта: vbaranova@hse.ru
 Кирилл Александрович Маслинский – научный сотрудник Лаборатории социологии образования и науки, НИУ ВШЭ, Санкт-Петербург, Россия. Электронная почта: kmaslinsky@hse.ru
 Школы в больших городах дифференцируются по уровню престижа, качества образования и квалификации учителей. В статье анализируется один из механизмов, который приводит к неравномерному распределению квалифицированных учителей по школам – ​стратегии педагогов при выборе места работы. Мы предполагаем, что стратегии поиска работы в значительной степени зависят от квалификации и профессиональных достижений учителя. Это исследование выполнено на материале интервью с учителями (N=49), работающими в школах различного статуса (общеобразовательных, с углубленным изучением какого-либо предмета, гимназиях) в двух районах Санкт-Петербурга. Мы рассматриваем выбор школы при первоначальном трудоустройстве и при смене места работы. Анализ интервью показал, что на рынке труда учителей сосуществуют разные модели трудоустройства, сближающие его и с рынком квалифицированного, и с рынком неквалифицированного труда. В рамках «аутсайдерской» стратегии школы рассматриваются как организации-потенциальные наниматели, тогда как «инсайдерская» перспектива ориентирована на коллектив, к которому учитель стремится присоединиться. В сегменте престижных школ учителя при выборе места работы обращают внимание прежде всего на условия труда, в то время как в непрестижных – на географическое расположение. Для рынка труда педагогов характерны инбридинг (наем выпускников школы на работу в ней), трудоустройство в школу, где обучаются дети, коллективный переход учителей на новое место работы. Наряду с результатами исследования обсуждаются выводы для образовательной политики в области обеспечения равных образовательных возможностей. Мы предполагаем, что паттерны поиска и смены места работы среди учителей могут быть механизмом привлечения квалифицированных учителей в менее престижные школы.

Chronic pain is presented as an internal experience that lasts and, when inscribed in the psychic economy, brings great subjective implications for the subjects who suffer from it. Given the specificities raised by this phenomenon, this research aimed to investigate the relationships between subject and social bond that are woven from and in the field of pain. We start from the observation that, in these cases, it is often possible to observe a marked social isolation, which indicates a precarious investment by the subject in his family, affective and professional life. Usually, these withdrawals are exclusively attributed to the effects of painful experiences, known to cause an impoverishment of object investments, which makes the subject fixated on his own suffering. However, isolation, silence, petrification, and lack of appeal to the Other, linked to chronic pain, cannot completely obfuscate the participation of pain in the subject's entanglements in the social bond. Thus, this study addressed how the subject's relationship with his pain participates in his ways of relating to others. This research adopted the psychoanalytic method. A case study was built from an interview with a woman who suffered from chronic pain, who was named Fatima. Following the trail marked by the triad − social bond, subject, and pain − it was possible to trace the frieze of Fatima's life: full of experiences and narratives that go far beyond the descriptions of bodily suffering. The presentation and construction of the case raised as a main problem a paradoxical condition in the face of the bond and in the face of pain, with complex dynamics that escape the usual frameworks. This condition, which was apprehended as the subject's permanence in a peculiar passage zone, was qualified as a state of liminality. From this concept, which comes from the field of anthropology, we extract relevant elements for the discussion of the case, which were worked from the psychoanalytic theory. Among them are: the experiences of loss; the transient condition; pain as an element that is present in this in-between place; the indeterminacy that arises from the unfamiliar, the anguish, the trauma and the jouissance; and the types of impasses that can occur during passages, especially their chronification. Thus, it was possible to substantiate the central hypothesis that the paradoxical condition before the tie found in this case can be understood as a chronicle of a passing state, in which the subject inhabits in a prolonged way what should be an indeterminate and transitory moment in his existence. This state was marked by decentering, pain and indeterminacy, which imply a disruption of the bond, but not only. Chronification was shown to be related to a difficulty in working through the losses and to a depotentialization of the negative and experiences of indeterminacy, in which ruptures are unable to operate in transformation or new connections. The disruptive force contained in these experiences is necessary for the subject to be able to move and complete his passage: from the vertigo of pain, back to desire and life.

Our lives cannot be separated from the existence of humor. Humor developed into several theories. This research aims to describe and classify Tekotok animated humor based on Aaker and Bagdonas' theory. There are 4 styles of humor in Tekotok animation, namely the standup, sweetheart, the magnet, and the sniper humor styles. The dominant humor style still uses the Stand-Up humor style. The function of humor is to relieve tension, as a ritual, as social control, and as a social bond. This research used descriptive-qualitative methods. The rest is additional data such as documents and others. The theory used is content analysis theory. Data collection was carried out using random purposive sampling. Sampling was carried out in accordance with the requirements, that the research object must contain the phenomenon of social issues.

Attack on Titan, a Japanese manga and anime series by Hajime Isayama, depicts a dystopian world where humanity battles man-eating giants known as Titans. While the show revolves, initially, around three pre-teens, particularly Eren Jaeger as the central protagonist, the plot progresses to explore darker themes of trauma, war, the conflict between humanity and individualism, and genocide. This paper explores Gabi Braun as the gendered reflection of Eren Jaeger, focusing on their similar character arcs and eventual ideological transformations. Introduced halfway through the show from an opposing perspective, Gabi shares significant parallels with Eren, going through deep-seated personal trauma through violence that eventually becomes a catalyst for their characteristic evolution, which begins and ends in opposing values. The analysis intends to examine how Gabi’s complicated youth and gender act as Eren’s narrative counterpart. Eren indirectly represents a hyper-masculine personification of hatred and blind vengeance. Defying norms and challenging traditional gendered representations, Gabi embodies unrelenting steadfastness and aggression not typically ascribed to female fictional characters. Utilising Judith Butler’s Gender Performativity and Sigmund Freud’s concept of Thanatos (Death Drive), this study explores and critiques both these characters’ mirrored journey from naivety to hatred or the realisation of futility in revenge. The paper highlights Gabi’s indirect portrayal as a vessel to critique Eren’s transformation to bargain for absolute freedom at the cost of his moral consciousness. This comparison provides a nuanced perspective into their characters and a commentary on the dehumanising effects of ideological fanaticism and the possibilities of redemption beyond the cycle of hate.

Cet ensemble d'articles fait part de recherches ethnographiques concernant l'etat actuel des comportements sociaux des quartiers pauvres des Etats-Unis. Les AA. debattent et critiquent vivement le point de vue de L. Wacquant et defendent l'objectivite et la validite de leurs recherches respectives

Joint music making is an integral component of many social and cultural rituals. One compelling explanation for the prevalence of joint music making is that it has the capacity to enable social groups to develop and maintain social bonds, indexed by a more cooperative social group. While a growing body of literature supports this theory, what remains unknown is whether this social bonding capacity of joint music making can transcend salient intergroup boundaries and foster more positive intergroup relations. My central hypothesis integrates social identity theory and embodied social cognition with respect to joint music making. Specifically, I hypothesize that joint music making will generate a collective identity and promote cooperation across intergroup boundaries. This dissertation consists of three research studies. Study 1 assessed the impact of joint music making on social categorization and cooperation in a minimal groups context established in a laboratory environment. Results demonstrated that joint music making fostered a collective identity and promoted cooperation across minimal intergroup boundaries. Studies 2 and 3 were field studies that considered the ecological validity of the impact of joint music making in elementary school children. Study 2 assessed the impact of joint music making on cooperation in a group of elementary school children with diverse ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. Results demonstrated that children who engaged in joint music making demonstrated more cooperative behaviours than children who engaged in group art or competitive games. Study 3 assessed the impact of joint music making on social categorization in a situation involving indirect contact between groups. This was investigated in the context of a cultural education program involving singing administered in a uni-cultural private school. Qualitative and quantitative data suggest that singing foreign songs encouraged the adoption of a collective identity across intergroup boundaries (i.e., a shared common humanity); however, no changes were found in behavioural intentions towards foreign children. Together, these research studies provide preliminary evidence that joint music making can promote a collective identity and cooperative behaviours across intergroup boundaries. This dissertation contributes to the theoretical understanding of joint music making and its potential applicability to improve intergroup relations.

Joint music making is an integral component of many social and cultural rituals. One compelling explanation for the prevalence of joint music making is that it has the capacity to enable social groups to develop and maintain social bonds, indexed by a more cooperative social group. While a growing body of literature supports this theory, what remains unknown is whether this social bonding capacity of joint music making can transcend salient intergroup boundaries and foster more positive intergroup relations. My central hypothesis integrates social identity theory and embodied social cognition with respect to joint music making. Specifically, I hypothesize that joint music making will generate a collective identity and promote cooperation across intergroup boundaries. This dissertation consists of three research studies. Study 1 assessed the impact of joint music making on social categorization and cooperation in a minimal groups context established in a laboratory environment. Results demonstrated that joint music making fostered a collective identity and promoted cooperation across minimal intergroup boundaries. Studies 2 and 3 were field studies that considered the ecological validity of the impact of joint music making in elementary school children. Study 2 assessed the impact of joint music making on cooperation in a group of elementary school children with diverse ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. Results demonstrated that children who engaged in joint music making demonstrated more cooperative behaviours than children who engaged in group art or competitive games. Study 3 assessed the impact of joint music making on social categorization in a situation involving indirect contact between groups. This was investigated in the context of a cultural education program involving singing administered in a uni-cultural private school. Qualitative and quantitative data suggest that singing foreign songs encouraged the adoption of a collective identity across intergroup boundaries (i.e., a shared common humanity); however, no changes were found in behavioural intentions towards foreign children. Together, these research studies provide preliminary evidence that joint music making can promote a collective identity and cooperative behaviours across intergroup boundaries. This dissertation contributes to the theoretical understanding of joint music making and its potential applicability to improve intergroup relations.

Love, Death + Robots (2019‒2022), a Netflix animated series adapted from several short stories by contemporary speculative fiction authors, interrogates the question of “what comes after us?” Two of the short films in the series— “Three Robots” and “When the Yogurt Took Over”—offer humorous answers to this question, and engage a visual experience where the images of human and robot are as recognisable as Self and Other as they are misrecognised as these, a point that is drawn from the work of Laura Mulvey on the impact of the projected images of cinema on the audience. The misrecognition and insertion of the audience experience into the worlds of speculative fiction that are projected on the screen rely on establishing an environment that is as familiar as it is strange, so that one feels simultaneously at ease because the projected world is like the real, and aware that the projected world is an unfamiliar or alien world. The same is true of the characters, both human and nonhuman, within these projected worlds. Drawing on posthuman, film and absurdist theories, this article shows how “Three Robots” and “When the Yogurt Took Over” represent the cyborg and nonhuman sentient Other as agential within a dystopian landscape. It is through their eyes that we, as audience, recognise (and misrecognise) the absurdity of human existence in retrospect, thereby allowing the speculative to encounter the real as farce.

Instead of the disembodied abstraction that is typically the norm, I begin and end by remarking on my own embodiment as a white female scholar of popular culture reflecting on comics studies by reviewing four books written by white male scholars, all of whom make significant contributions in theorizing comics form. Queer theory teaches us to question the naturalization of norms, so while I observe that all four are male-authored texts that focus mostly on male characters, creators, and audiences, I do not assume bodies neatly match up with genders and sexualities. Instead, guided by queer of color critique, I emphasize each book’s contributions in theorizing heroism and comics form while asking whether and how they engage, illuminate, limit, or even refuse analysis of intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and nation as intertwining social constructions. Three are studies of male superheroes. The fourth, Bart Beaty’s Twelve-Cent Archie, explores a world organized around a male character who is the antithesis of a hero: Archie is “a young man to whom things happen; he is not someone who makes things happen” (16). Overall, I am struck by the significance of gender (especially masculinities), sexuality (especially heterosexuality), race (especially whiteness), and nation (especially the United States) for the objects, creators, collaborations, audiences, and industries under discussion. On the other hand, imagining female, feminist, and queer readers and readings of comics is largely foreclosed, while maleness and masculinities are often reified and underexplored as historical constructs, even in work that makes significant contributions.One of my guiding premises is that queer studies and especially queer of color critique have much to offer comics studies. As Siobhan Somerville (2014, 203) explains, queer since the 1980s functions both “as an umbrella term that refers to a range of sexual identities that are ‘not straight’” and as an analytic that “calls into question the stability of any such categories of identity based on sexual orientation,” thereby exposing the latter as constructions that “establish and police the line between the ‘normal’ and the ‘abnormal.’” In addition to this guiding premise, I build on queer of color analysis modeled by scholars such as Roderick Ferguson, José Esteban Muñoz, and Fatima El-Tayeb, all of whom examine gender, race, sexuality, and nation as intertwining social constructions. Ferguson (2004, 149n1) defines queer of color critique as “a heterogeneous enterprise made up of women of color feminism, materialist analysis, poststructuralist theory, and queer critique” that interrogates such “social formations as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class, with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices.” Ramzi Fawaz (2016, 32) further theorizes the post–World War II “superhero as a distinctly queer figure of twentieth-century popular culture” by approaching “popular fantasy and its political effects” from the perspective of queer theory, which “is a body of knowledge that concerns itself with the ways queer or non-normative figures generate alternative desires, bring into view unexpected objects of passionate attachment, and facilitate the production of novel forms of kinship and affiliation.” Although none of the books I discuss here draws much or at all on queer theory, all take up comics form in ways that both illuminate and swerve away from queer figures, alternative desires, unexpected objects of passionate attachment, and nonnormative social and sexual relations. The figure of the “little boy” as privileged subject and imagined reader and scenes of intergenerational transmission of comics among fathers, sons, and brothers also recur, suggesting that masculinities and relationships among men are central to almost all of these comics as well as the communities and networks that transmit their meanings.The story of Captain Marvel and his alter ego Billy Batson, Brian Cremins tells us, “starts with a kid and his books” (3)—namely an editor and writer for Fawcett Publications, Bill Parker, who as a boy read about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and later invented Captain Marvel. But Cremins focuses especially on cartoonist and critic C. C. Beck and writer Otto Binder as cocreators of “one of the best-selling characters of the 1940s” (8). By recovering Beck’s theories of comics form in fanzines, letters, and other archival sources, Cremins does valuable work situating Beck as a figure “like [Will] Eisner” whose “body of work remains one of the great achievements in twentieth-century comics in the United States” (9). Cremins also explores Binder’s career as a pulp science fiction writer and his invention of the animal character Mr. Tawny as his autobiographical surrogate. Here Cremins’s remarks on the importance of fantasy and on animals as expressions of “a shadow self, one hidden from the world” (51–52) suggest that animals can function as queer figures, as in Jack Halberstam’s (2011) work on animated animals. In a discussion of how Billy Batson’s black valet, Steamboat, remains fixed in place while Billy’s movement and mastery of spaces signal his heroism, Cremins also denaturalizes racial categories and explicitly names white supremacy as a problem. He foregrounds as exemplary the story of Steamboat’s removal after objections from New York City junior high school students in the local Youthbuilders program. “If the form is as flexible and promising” as Eisner and Beck believed, Cremins argues, then it also “offers the means and opportunity” (103) to subvert racial stereotypes. Drawing on work in literature, psychology, and memory studies as well as fanzines, he examines relationships among the “medium of comics, the lure of nostalgia, and the art of memory” (4).Cremins concentrates especially on Billy as “a fiction of lost innocence, a marker of the idealized notions of boyhood and masculinity in America in the 1940s” (56). He assumes the comic targeted boy readers (and, during World War II, soldiers) who found appealing the story’s fantasy of “sheltered innocence” (75). Cremins also analyzes the comic as an extension of the boys’ adventure genre, which goes back to the nineteenth-century dime novel, when white boy adventurers, often accompanied by a subordinate person of color, explored exotic, often racialized spaces far from home (see Saxton 1991 and Streeby 2002). While boys and masculinity are the main focus of this study, Cremins dedicates it to his grandmother and cites cartoonist Trina Robbins’s memories of her “childhood discovery” of Captain Marvel, Billy, and most significantly Captain Marvel’s sister Mary as a “pretty major inspiration” for her own career (quoted on 13). Cremins’s brief mention of fanzines publishing photos of children in Mary Marvel costumes made me wonder about girl fans, as did Beck’s remark in a footnote about how much his daughter and granddaughter enjoyed the series. At the end, Cremins analyzes a 1981 photograph of himself, surrounded by other “white middle-class boys” (148) and wearing a Shazam! T-shirt with an image from the Captain Marvel–inspired Saturday morning cartoon. With no memory of its origins, he speculates about the significance of wearing a T-shirt “with a character created for children in the 1940s” and concludes “the weight of nostalgia is literal,” for the boys had “inherited a nostalgia for the popular heroes of the generations that preceded us” (149) even though the author did not read the original comics until much later.In Paul Young’s monograph on Miller’s Daredevil, on the other hand, the author centers his own responses as a twelve-year-old boy and teenage fan, which he, unlike Cremins, remembers very vividly, even describing his study as a “masochistic project” and an “exorcism” (18, 20). Starting with the question, “Why did Miller’s Daredevil blow my twelve-year-old mind?” (5), Young admits he still fears that writing a book will not “purge” either “the images or the rotating feelings of attraction and apprehension they inspire” (9). As “wretched” as he finds Miller’s gender politics especially, he is “still haunted by what those images showed me and what they meant to me beyond what they depicted” (10). In a dialogue between Young as a boy and his older self, he explores the “hold” the comic exerted on his imagination in order to “shed some light” on Miller’s success “and what that success meant for the discourse of superhero comics past, present, and future” (10). Throughout, Young frequently refers to his past as a minister’s son growing up in small-town southern Iowa, foregrounding his and his brother’s responses to comics, which continue today in their biweekly podcast, To the Batpoles! Along the way, Young also shows how Miller helped lead the creators’ rights movement and contributed to the “mainstreaming of superhero comic books beyond their traditional market of children and lifelong fans” through “grim, violent, and/or erotic ‘adult’ content and successful Hollywood franchises” (5). Miller did so, Young suggests, through a range of formal strategies, including breaking with 1940s superhero conventions of reverence for life and modeling “looser, cartoonier drawing styles and non-Code-approved violence” (210). Young contends that Miller used subtlety, irony, and complexity to muddy the good/evil binary of previous superhero comics and raise thought-provoking questions about the relationship between justice and the law. In each chapter, Young credits Miller with achieving a self-consciousness and formal complexity that expose “the act of creating comics” (72) and the conventions of the genre.Although Young incorporates insights from feminist film theory and at times addresses masculinity as a construct, I found myself a resisting reader when he moved from a particular, embodied, twelve-year-old, white-heterosexual-male “me” to a universalizing scholarly “we.” Toward the end, Young alludes to Miller’s saying, of 300’s Spartans and vigilante superheroes such as Batman, that maybe “cultures need guys like that”; Young further clarifies, “I do mean guys—the reckless male narcissists who can’t or won’t make subtle distinctions between good and evil—to do the dirty work of ‘preserving civilization as we know it’” (227). Clearly Young is criticizing the problem of reckless male narcissism and paternalistic investments in defending a racialized “civilization,” but when he says Miller “lets us sit with that ugly possibility” and “squirm at our own enjoyment and/or disgust” (227), I feel the force of my own disidentification, as Muñoz (1999) put it. Although many female readers undoubtedly enjoy Miller’s work, I am not part of the “us” who receives enjoyment, even if ambivalently mixed with disgust, from comics that explore whether white male narcissism is necessary or desirable to “civilization.” I suspect that gender, sexuality, race, and nation shape such enjoyment in ways that also merit analysis and that considering their intersections in the field of superhero comics might teach us something about the construction of masculinities and imagined relationships among men.Scott Bukatman also mentions his past as a young reader, but unlike Young he only started intensively reading Mike Mignola’s Hellboy as a Stanford professor with research funds available to purchase new Dark Horse oversize library editions of the comics, which originally debuted in 1993. Bukatman insists he was not “returned to the world of my childhood,” however, which he observes “isn’t a place I especially want to revisit anyway” (6). Although he includes a chapter on convergences of technique and materiality in children’s books and comics, he does not single out the figure of the boy reader, instead emphasizing how color can “provide a space apart that absorbs a reader” and “provides an antidote to pedantry” (99), enabling a “nonlinear mode of reading” (100). Bukatman suggests that Hellboy deviates from many other superhero comics in making its forensic detective protagonist “our surrogate” rather than “a figure of identification,” such that “our interest is deflected or dispersed into the world itself” (198). Bukatman also emphasizes Mignola’s “handmade ethos” (109) and “increasingly non-naturalistic” art, with its “refreshing attention to—and pushing of—the formal properties of the medium of comics” (9). Arguing that Mignola’s art is not strongly shaped by a realism primarily indebted to cinema and television (9), Bukatman turns to a variety of media, “children’s books especially, but also sculpture, pulp fiction, cinema, graphic design, painting, and medieval manuscripts” to “understand effects or possibilities in the medium of comics and to find vocabularies that will help articulate what it is that comics do” (10).For readers seeking to explore queer possibilities in this beautifully illustrated volume, Bukatman’s emphasis on Hellboy as “a comic steeped in the heretofore taboo genre of supernatural horror” (47) might be one place to start, since horror and the gothic are privileged genres in queer studies. The connections to Lovecraftian weird fiction and the occult detective could also open up questions about sexuality, gender, race, and nation, as could Bukatman’s comparison of Hellboy to James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking, who is “able to cross between civilization and destiny, retaining the morals of white culture while avoiding its decadence” (74). Hellboy’s resistance to following his destiny might be understood as a queer deviation: “Resisting one’s destiny is hard and lonely work—those horns can grow back” (77). Mignola’s fondness for “nonchronological stories and his use of nonlinear narrational devices” (181) might also be illuminated by recent work on queer time by Elizabeth Freeman, Halberstam, and others. Gender and sexuality are rarely the explicit focus, though openings pop up here and there, such as a footnote where Mignola explains that he felt he needed more female characters but “couldn’t draw” them since he was “terrible at drawing women” (227). Elsewhere, Mignola says he was surprised to discover that many of Hellboy’s fans are women and girls; it would be interesting to know more about audiences and to test the hypothesis that Mignola’s focus on nonnaturalistic elements that work in ways other than through identification may enable female and queer affiliations and pleasures.While the three books above focus on superheroes, Beaty’s Twelve-Cent Archie explores “one of the most lowbrow examples of a particularly lowbrow art form” (3): “nostalgic” and “completely out of fashion” Archie, whose comics sold millions of copies a month in the 1960s and early 1970s (4). Although Archie superhero comics were briefly introduced, they lasted only sixteen issues collectively. Beaty calls this a failed “experiment” (195) since “an action hero” is something Archie is not, for Archie is “a comic about nothing” (192). But Beaty argues that, far from being a defect, this everydayness was one of the comic’s great virtues: Archie was “the quintessential everyman—the typical American teen” (17) and Archie comics played with “the possibilities of everyday life in middle America, taken to certain logical or narrative extremes” (20). Beaty claims the greatness of Archie comics was inseparable from their nonliterary qualities as well as their attention to the quotidian. For instance, artist Harry Lucey was “one of the great masters of comic-book storytelling through body language” (21), known for “the amazing pliability of his characters and variety of their poses” (13), which supports Beaty’s claim that body language is another way comics are closer to the visual arts than to literature. Contending that “scholars have focused nearly exclusively on those works that can be most easily reconciled within the traditions of literary greatness . . . or those of contemporary cultural politics,” Beaty charges that such “cultural cherry-picking” leaves “enormous gaps in both the history and cultural analysis of comics” by excluding “the genuinely popular” (5) in the form of “children’s comics and humor comics.” These comics, he suggests, were “replete” with “self-referential formal play”: they included “wordless comics, metareferential comics, and avant-garde and abstract visual tendencies” (6). Thus Beaty hopes to right “the scholarly wrongs done to Archie” by “addressing the works as both typical and exceptional” during Lucey’s 1961–69 tenure as lead artist (6), works in which Beaty discovered “a level of complexity and interest that was totally unexpected.” The comics’ form—“their lack of continuity, their brevity, and their independent functioning within a larger narrative system”—contributed to that complexity, and Beaty especially praises “the efficacy and cogency of the interrelated short-story comics form as a significant alternative to graphic novels self-consciously modeled on literary parameters” (8). Indeed, one of the many pleasures of reading Twelve-Cent Archie is its exemplification of what we might call such a queer nonlinearity. Like the comics he studies, Beaty’s book is nonlinear and can be read in any order, while each of his chapters is “like every Archie story,” which can “exist independently of the rest” (7).Beaty addresses these comics’ queer potential most explicitly in his remarks on Jughead, who he suggests is asexual but whose “disdain for women” is often “read as a suggestion of queerness” (64). Beaty rejects such a reading since he finds no evidence that Jughead desires Archie and understands the couple instead as an “asexual male pairing” (65). If, however, we conceive of queerness not (only) as an identity but (also) as an analytic that denaturalizes socially and historically constructed identities, then a queer reading of Jughead’s asexuality is certainly possible. Instead, Beaty emphasizes how the male creators of Archie comics centered an asymmetrical on Archie, and thereby creating a that was for a male reader” so much so that is a between the success of Archie comics and the of of and He observes that is of and and are for color and and a range of male body while is only one female body At the he Archie comics were popular with a young female and speculates that the of and in that that Archie comics were a of female Beaty could enjoy and their since theories of reading” teach us that do not what they read while white were within stories created by Beaty the of characters in Archie comics, which the social of the rights Indeed, in the 1960s was a of white and where all could be on his own in Beaty observes that was for a white kid growing up in a of in the a of his own only Although Beaty the of in Archie comics, he their He the book by remarking on his enjoyment in his own who is the Beaty was when he read his the world of as I used to do” about female and the of Archie comics made me on my own reading I was in in Iowa, a that was then mostly though home to a significant of and that is about of where Young I as a Archie and comics after from around the then around the to read them my was Archie from to thereby the of Archie comics and in I was reading them at the of their I to they were so with the color, the art, and the I of their could them with could them up and them even when a and most of all their and could purchase them at the and many other in my to and I my to them for me at the they were and that might do it even though I had three brothers also for things and my had a hard time I moved on to and and had mostly lost interest in Archie by my As a twelve-year-old, I enjoyed the Shazam! television that preceded the Saturday morning animated on Cremins’s mostly lead was a often in and I was also to a Shazam! the superhero in the body of a female I Archie comics were and for a America that but like Beaty I Lucey’s art, and the meant were to the which me even though I like either As a white I as did but did not with was and I was by how were the for some weird which I would later as white a I was to the and alternative that included women in The and after through the of a local that sold and comics to By the time I to I had in with the independent comics that both in the local the from the in and in my of especially and which up science fiction, and all in one I especially the and since Lucey’s Archie comics were a major on my Archie In and about comics with a white man from one of my He with me how in a place he was as a by the male bodies and queer in the superhero comics I so I with this in order to suggest are still many possibilities for and queer figures, alternative desires, unexpected objects of passionate attachment, and queer and nonnormative affiliations and kinship even in comics created by white men and mostly at a white male in about form and heroism in comics studies are still many questions to about intersections of sexuality, gender, race, and Streeby is professor of studies and and of the at the of books World and American and the of of and the of through and of Streeby an on reading comics as fiction in and and is for with Ramzi Fawaz and

In recent decades, climate change has generated not only deep social and political concern, but also a vast repertoire of cultural narratives that attempt to represent it, warn of its consequences, and, on occasion, imagine possible solutions. Within this framework, what journalist Dan Bloom popularized as cli-fi (short for climate fiction) in The Guardian newspaper (Glass, 2013) has become established as a literary and audiovisual subgenre that places the climate crisis at the center of its stories. Its emergence dates back to the late 20th century, with canonical works of English language literature such as Margaret Atwood’s dystopias (The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985; Oryx and Crake, 2003) or the speculative fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson (Mars Trilogy, 1992–1996), and also finds resonance in Japanese animation with titles such as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki, where ecological disaster takes on both a mythical and political character. Since its origins, therefore, cli-fi has been configured as a transnational narrative territory that, beyond denunciation, seeks to influence the collective consciousness through possible worlds where the climate ceases to be a backdrop and becomes an active agent in the story.

This study examines the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISK), a terrorist organization operating primarily in Central Asia, with a particular focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. As a regional affiliate of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS Central), which was militarily defeated in 2019, ISK continues to orchestrate lethal attacks across Central Asia and beyond, osing an ongoing security threat. It perceives multiple entities, including the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and Western powers, as adversaries. While ISK inherits the ideological framework of ISIS Central, it has strategically diverged by adopting a guerrilla warfare approach. This research aims to analyse the distinctions between ISIS Central and ISK, specifically in terms of their objectives and operational strategies. The central hypothesis posits that ISK’s tactical and ideological deviations stem from contemporary geopolitical conditions and its unique organizational dynamics. Methodologically, this study employs qualitative research, drawing upon secondary sources to examine ISK’s evolution. In addition, it employs a case scenario methodology to assess the evolving threat posed by the ISK to Central Asia and beyond. The findings indicate that Wilayat Khorasan represents the most extreme manifestation of Islamic jihadism and is widely regarded as the most dangerous ISIS affiliate in the present era.

ABSTRACTWhy do Indonesian Muslims join Islamist extremist groups? This article explores four pathways to entry into Indonesian militant groups: study sessions, local conflict, kinship, and schools. It argues that within all four of these pathways, social bonds and relationships are the common thread in encouraging entry as well as in fostering commitment. Specifically, these relationships contribute to the formation and eventual consolidation of one’s identity as a member of the jihadi group through regular participation in activities, attending meetings, narrowing the circle of friends to those within the group, and participating in increasingly risky and possibly violent activities together. Drawing on original fieldwork including 49 interviews with current and former members of Jemaah Islamiyah, Mujahidin KOMPAK, Darul Islam, Mujahidin Tanah Runtuh, Indonesia’s pro-ISIS network, and other jihadist groups as well as 57 depositions and court documents, this article explores the development and evolution of these pathways and how relational ties play a role in each.

Recently, scholars have revived the Aristotelian notion of civic or political friendship and recast it to address the problem of solidarity between strangers. Nonetheless, the transposition of friendship to the public sphere remains awkward, since it is still conceived as a pre-eminently private and personal bond. This chapter builds on Adam Smith’s rich account of public friendship, one that does not associate friendship solely with the private realm. However, Smith’s approach has limitations because his intensely sociocentric perspective naturalizes and forecloses a political critique of domination. The chapter argues that a strong notion of political friendship, appropriate for critical sociology, must not only emphasize the overcoming of indifference and its replacement by sympathy, but must also reveal and contest the social basis of domination.

Au Etats-Unis, les immigres Philippins resistent a differentes formes de discrimination a travers l'affirmation de certaines specificites culturelles. Par exemple, la chastete des femmes avant le mariage est presentee comme une resistance au modele de la societe dominante blanche americaine, mais ceci se fait au prix de l'autonomie des femmes et renforce le pouvoir patriarcal dans ces communautes