Starting from Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence and Shusterman’s Somaesthetics. Ethics, Politics, and the Art of Living

Hilma af Klint and the Need for Historical Revision

Chapter Five - Biographical Dictionaries: Dewey Class 703

The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice. Andrew Irving. Chicago: Hau Books, 2017. 264 pp.

In post-war contexts, attention is given to women’s participation and barriers to their participation in formal processes (for example, peace talks, economic initiatives, and elections). Yet, women have engaged in various activities to exercise collective and individual agency to impact political participation. This article examines how Tamil women’s political participation in post-war Sri Lanka exists along a continuum, from formal participation within state structures and party politics to informal community participation. Scholarship about Tamil women’s political participation is framed within discourses of “militants,” “ex-combatants,” “political mothers,” or “victims.” Using narrative interviews, we argue that – based on their awareness of unequal gendered power relations, structures, and norms impacting their lives in post-war Sri Lanka – Tamil women in Mannar exercise agency to challenge these constraints and promote a broader transformative political arena. Some women attempt to expand the agency of others and to promote a collective voice through which women can be better represented in politics. Drawing on feminist international relations and gender and development knowledge, this study demonstrates how political agency is constituted within informal arenas, disrupting masculinist assumptions about who is considered a political actor and what counts as political agency by examining the spectrum of political participation in post-war contexts.

The article explores the potential of digital technologies as a tool for developing students’ critical thinking and media literacy in the context of the digitalization of Ukraine’s educational space. The relevance of the study is substantiated by the challenges of information overload, the spread of disinformation, and hybrid threats, which require higher education students to possess analytical thinking skills, source verification, the ability to detect manipulation, and adherence to ethical norms in the digital environment. The methodological basis combines an analysis of recent Ukrainian academic publications (2024–2025), national digital transformation strategies. The author proposes a three-tier model CT–CT–ML (Digital Technologies — Critical Thinking — Media Literacy), which includes the levels of educational design, didactic tools, and a culture of safety. The educational design level involves integrating critical thinking and media literacy modules into professional disciplines, implementing microqualifications in fact-checking, ethics, and safety, applying blended learning, and aligning programs with national strategies. The didactic level includes the use of LMS platforms (Moodle, Google Classroom), artificial intelligence tools for analyzing arguments and detecting logical fallacies, infographics for data visualization, and social networks as educational communication channels. The safety culture level incorporates cybersecurity protocols, AI literacy, media ethics, and practices of media forensics and OSINT. A correspondence matrix “tool — outcome — assessment” operationalizes the model’s goals and ensures transparency in evaluating learning outcomes through a unified 0-4 scale (validity of sources, logic of conclusions, contextualization, ethics and safety, reflection and transfer). The model demonstrates adaptability across various educational programs: for humanities, the focus is on discourse analysis, debate, and media creativity; for STEM fields, on critical analysis of data, ethical implications of algorithms, and responsible technology design. The findings provide a framework for modernizing educational programs, improving instructional efficiency, and developing students’ meta-competencies essential for professional and civic self-realization in the digital society.

The core suggestion of this article is that we make best sense of the concepts of power, legitimacy, and responsibility within a framework of international society. However, to do so effectively we need also to think about international society in a distinctive way. This concept thus becomes the key framing device of the discussion and in this way the article takes further the author’s recent attempts to contribute to a revision of English School theory. This framework is illustrated by, and applied to, the specific case of China’s rise. It is exactly the material rise of China that is believed now to render suspect assumptions about the continuing normative stability of international society. For those reasons, any putative normative accommodation between China and international society represents a particularly fascinating case study of the theoretical problem in general. Accordingly, and in the light of its historical background, China faces a major paradox. Seemingly, the prerequisite for to exercise greater influence on the norms of international society is yet further assimilation into them: in order to become a respected norm maker, China must first be seen to be fully integrated as an appropriate norm taker. This is the nub of the dilemma, as is widely perceived in the literature. To be in a position to influence the norms of international society, must seemingly firstly resolve any lingering ambiguities about its membership. In short, should the debates about China’s status be understood as an expression of the of norms (where China is assessed relative to some universal standard of responsibility), or are they better viewed as the deployment of the norms of in such a way as to impact its social distribution to China’s disadvantage (by imposing the self-interested standards of the liberal states)? The heart of this debate about China’s responsibility can then be seen as one, less about the roles that actually plays at the moment (within an already existing framework of normative expectations), and instead more about the kinds of putative qualities that need to be displayed (within a revised normative framework) to fit for undertaking specified future roles. What insight does an international society approach bring to this much-debated topic? Building on the work already undertaken by Chinese scholars in this field, the article demonstrates that the general theoretical issue concerns the relative potency of the of norms versus the norms of power. Specifically in relation to China, the question is then about whether international society’s norms are constraining China’s power, or whether we should expect to see these norms transformed in proportion to China’s new international roles. Neither the of norms nor the norms of power, however, is likely to issue in any pure and absolute form: international society is a much more variegated normative terrain than either of these two perfect outcomes would suggest. Instead we will undoubtedly face the messy middle ground. The paradox is that the more successfully does China pass the first test of ‘responsibility’ as presently conceived, and thereby alleviate concerns about its ambivalent membership, seemingly the less leeway remains to act as any source of normative transformation. This leaves an unresolved tension in China’s relationship with international society, insofar as its socialization within current norms as presently configured might be corrosive of its social in the interim, and hence undermine its effectiveness as a norm maker in the future. The teasing question remains nonetheless exactly how that society’s operative norms evolve, and whether they do so as part of some relatively autonomous process of development, or mostly in reflection of the normative preferences of the most powerful states. This problem palpably emerges during any period of power transition: how is China to become fully compliant with an ‘alien’ normative structure, without thereby losing any scope to press for its future modification? What must be stressed at this point is that there is a profound confusion in any suggestion that the trajectory of international norms follows slavishly from shifts in the distribution of power, as if the latter were entirely devoid of all normative content. To the extent that the latter includes – as assuredly must - a measure of social power, then international norms are already a fundamental part of it, not something set wholly apart. The notion that there is any straightforward causal relationship between the two is, for this reason, highly disingenuous and logically deeply flawed. Accordingly, becomes readily apparent that and legitimacy are not to be thought of as two wholly separate things: we should not conceive of power, on the one hand, as radically distinct from legitimacy, on the other. Instead, legitimacy is constitutive of social power. Once this association is understood, becomes evident that is not merely a material phenomenon. At the same time, is not only that any powerful state or group of states is incapable of imposing its entire set of normative preferences upon international society but, in an even more deep-seated way, international society is unlikely ever to demonstrate the requisite degree of consistency and homogeneity that any such portrayal would seem to assume. In such a contested space, all powerful actors have to earn their varying degrees of respect and legitimacy, and are unable to command at will. This very unruliness underscores the pluralistic character of international society and paradoxically makes the business of its practices of legitimacy all the more serious and arduous: is the reason also why legitimacy matters so much, rather than any reason to dismiss as irrelevant. The core puzzle then is to make sense of that fundamental tension between what international society enacts as an expression of a basic consensus amongst most of its members, and what otherwise enacts in response mostly to its dominant players. In turn, this conception is specifically revealing because suggests that finding space for China within its normative structure is not some unusual or exceptional event, but is rather a routine characteristic of the behaviour of international society. Continuous mutual adaptation and contestation within its diverse membership is how the norms of international society evolve and, to this extent, there is no static it that China seeks to join and to modify: both are remade in the same continuous process.

The spiritual and cultural transformations in Ukraine necessitate a renewal of the contemporary educational content. This renewal must be grounded in the development of competencies essential for shaping an individual capable of lifelong learning, fundamentally altering stereotypes, critical thinking, setting ambitious goals and achieving them, proposing creative projects, demonstrating teamwork skills, and communicating in a multicultural environment. In line with these objectives, educational priorities are shifting, emphasizing the cultivation of a creative and responsible individual. This individual should be concerned with developing their abilities, aspiring to acquire a broad spectrum of competencies for their practical application, thereby enabling them to transform their own lives and the country as a whole. The Law of Ukraine "On Higher Education" clearly defines the purpose of education as fulfilling a social mandate to ensure the comprehensive development of an individual. Given the ongoing renewal of educational content and the search for new approaches to fostering creative and responsible personalities, we consider it imperative to explore and elucidate the role of innovative technologies in enhancing the media competence of future teachers in the current environment. To address the defined research objectives, the following methods were employed: comparative analysis of scientific and pedagogical literature and legislative documents to ascertain the level of development of the identified problem; classification, observation, concretization, and generalization to refine the methodological and theoretical framework and core concepts of the study; synthesis to explore avenues for identifying criteria and levels of professional growth in future educators; and pedagogical observation, systematization, and generalization of scientific and theoretical material. The Internet has significantly altered the relationship between the private and public spheres of human life. Individuals, communicating with the world through computers, experience both isolation and individualization. Simultaneously, virtual reality provides young people with opportunities to collaborate with a wide range of individuals, exchange ideas, and be influenced by online trends. Unlike previous generations, whose access to information was largely passive, contemporary youth actively interact with information, share personal data, and receive immediate feedback. This process plays a crucial role in the lives of young people, fostering an understanding of concepts such as status, respect, and trust. It also provides valuable experience in social interaction, facilitating quicker socialization than what might be achieved solely within the family unit. Information competence in a teacher encompasses the ability to think technologically, alongside possessing analytical, project-based, prognostic, and reflective skills in acquiring and utilizing information within pedagogical activities. This implies that information competence serves as an integral component of a teacher's overall informational and technological culture. It performs integrative functions, acting as a link between general pedagogical and specialized knowledge and skills. A teacher's information competence empowers them to cultivate in students the skills of independent information retrieval, analysis, and selection, as well as the ability to collect, transform, store, and transmit information. This capability fosters the development of skills for working with information embedded within academic disciplines, the broader educational domain, and the surrounding environment. In Council of Europe documents, "media education" is defined as instruction aimed at developing media competence. This competence is understood as a critical and thoughtful attitude towards media, fostering responsible citizens capable of expressing their own opinions based on acquired information. Media education, as an active process of personal development, self-education, and self-improvement through mass communication materials, evolves across several key areas. These include media education for future educators in universities and professional development centers, for students in higher education institutions, within extracurricular education centers and entertainment venues, and through distance, independent, and continuous learning. The development of media competence is a complex process grounded in three primary educational focuses: knowledge of media culture fundamentals; knowledge, acquired skills, and abilities in media criticism, encompassing the development of critical thinking in the audience and individual communication skills; and the ability to engage in media creation, including independently producing media tasks. In our view, the implementation of each of these areas necessitates extensive engagement with diverse internet resources. Specifically, these include electronic libraries, virtual museums, educational institution websites, social networks, online versions of educational television channels, and YouTube channels. An electronic library is a specialized information system that facilitates the storage and utilization of various collections of electronic documents (text, graphics, audio, video) via global data transmission networks, offering end-users the choice of a convenient format. The defined objectives serve a threefold function: educational, developmental, and nurturing. The issue of information security is strategically vital for contemporary Ukraine. Therefore, fostering media and information literacy among citizens, including future educators, represents a new direction of activity. To operate effectively within the information space, future educators must acquire a set of crucial competencies. These competencies will enable them to locate new information, critically evaluate it, create contemporary information, and disseminate it through various channels. Possessing these competencies directly enhances media and information literacy. In conclusion, this study allows us to draw the following inferences: the utilization of information technologies contributes significantly to the development of media competence in future educators within modern higher education institutions. Their application is appropriate both during in-class sessions and for organizing independent work with Internet resources. The effectiveness of employing information technologies is ensured by proprietary computer programs, specially designed training programs, and the extensive use of the World Wide Web. Ultimately, harnessing the potential of information technologies holds considerable promise and warrants extensive development.

Digital media arts and critical media education: an alchemy of creative literacy practices

Reviewed by: Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, and: Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660–1800 Peter Earle Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts, eds. Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1996). Pp. 273. $37.50 cloth. James Walvin. Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660–1800 (New York: New York University Press, 1997). Pp. 219. $45.00 cloth. Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century is a promising title, but this book of essays does not really satisfy that promise and one wonders just how and why the editors decided to put it together. The book starts with two essays by Roy Porter, one summarizing the eighteenth-century luxury debate and the other reviewing the consumer revolution and the commercialization of leisure. As one would expect, this is competently done and, although he says nothing very new, it is obviously useful to be reminded that the eighteenth century developed “a faith that the pursuit of pleasure would advance the general good” and that in turn the entrepreneurs of the day were eager to develop new and profitable ways for people to pursue pleasure. One would expect the remaining essays to develop the themes surveyed by Porter by examining the various pleasures available to the men and women of the eighteenth century. This in fact is what we get in the next two essays by Simon Varey and Marie Mulvey Roberts, who examine in turn the pleasures of the table and the strange proliferation of clubs, although Varey’s essay is rather too thin to provide a satisfactory meal and Roberts spends too much time in listing real and imaginary clubs and too little in explaining why people were so fond of them, beyond the rather obvious point that the pleasure principle common to all of them was conviviality. The rest of the essays seem too specialized and remote from the general theme to belong to the book. The best of these is Carolyn D. Williams’s essay on the “luxury of doing good,” which analyzes the relationship between charity and the development of ideas about sensibility, sympathy, and the pleasures of benevolence, her themes being well illustrated by a case-study of the Royal Humane Society, which was founded in 1774 to promote the rescue and resuscitation of people, mainly from drowning. Vivien Jones then uses the concept of the “resisting reader” to suggest that female readers of conduct-books, far from being molded or repressed by them, got pleasure from the fact that they stimulated the very desires they sought to repress. This is an interesting thesis, though obviously one that is virtually impossible to establish. The book ends with three very detailed pieces of musical, aesthetic, and literary criticism by Derek Alsop, E. J. Clery, and Susan Manning. These are interesting enough, especially Alsop’s critical examination of the pleasures given by Handel and the Italian opera in the years 1711–28, but seem too dependent on specialist knowledge of contemporary literature and music and the contemporary critical debate to be easily accessible to the general reader envisaged by the tone and content of the introductory chapters. Fruits of Empire is also about pleasure or rather the astonishing global impact of the simple pleasures of the British people, their love of sweet tea and, to a lesser extent, sweet coffee and chocolate and the addiction of the male half of the population to tobacco. James Walvin examines each of these exotic imports in turn, discussing their cultural functions in their native habitats and then showing how, tentatively at first, and in the face of medical and social criticism, they were adopted and their original functions modified until they had become a fundamental part of British domestic consumption. No one could possibly have predicted in the sixteenth century that British taste would change in such ways but the fact that it did, combined with the development of [End Page 154] imperialism, naval power and the worldwide search of merchants for profit was to transform the face of the globe. Clearing land for the tropical staples completely changed the appearance and flora of many parts of the world, while that accidental European...

Response Linda H. Peterson (bio) How did Victorian poets and their poetry engage in contemporary debates about pressing social, religious, and political questions? The 2012 conference theme, “Networks,” encouraged poetry specialists to consider the periodical and publishing contexts that featured verse commentary on contemporary issues; the social networks that led poets to develop—or reject—positions taken by fellow writers; and the literary transformations that occurred as verse moved among poets, between continents, and from one publishing venue to another. This emphasis on poetry as embedded in history and, even more, as attempting to alter the course of history signals a notable shift in scholarly attitudes over the past fifty years. When the original editors of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals set their criteria for inclusion, they omitted poetry—a decision they believed “readily defensible.” Partly, the defense was practical, citing the sheer quantity of periodical verse they would need to index (over 7,000 items). Mostly, it was evaluative: “To have included verse would have added an enormous number of worthless items to Part A [the title index] and a large number of obscure authors to be identified and then described in Part B [the author index]” (Houghton, Introduction xvi).1 This editorial decision, as Linda K. Hughes has noted, presumed a predominance of sentimental verse in newspapers and magazines and an “association of poetry with ‘filler’” (92). It failed to account for major poems first published in periodicals and for the significance of occasional verse in which poets engaged the questions of their day. Even more, it presumed that prose, however well or poorly written, was the medium for contending with serious social and political issues, whereas poetry was for expressing feelings or offering secondary commentary. All three papers in this cluster take a different view of poetry and political engagement. Alison Chapman’s “Poetry, Network, Nation” [End Page 309] demonstrates how British and American expatriate poets in Italy used periodical verse to endorse Italian Unification (Risorgimento). Concentrating on three women—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Isa Blagden, and Theodosia Garrow Trollope—who “placed themselves at the center of nation making,” Chapman argues that they “predicated their writing identities on a political poetics that . . . circulated by a complex European and transatlantic print and manuscript culture” (275). What the Wellesley editors might have deemed “filler” verse in The Tuscan Athenaeum—Garrow’s “Aurora Rugiadosa: Lines on Gibson’s recently finished statue of Aurora” (1848)—Chapman reads not just as praise of Gibson’s “forward-moving statue” but, more importantly, as a contribution to Italian political revolution. In ekphrastically (re)creating a “feminized angel of the Second Coming” (282), Garrow used poetry to trumpet the cause and link herself with other liberal, pro-Risorgimento artists. Gibson’s sculpture and Garrow’s “Aurora Rugiadosa” became, in turn, sources for Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, an iconic woman poet expressing her own literary and political agency. While we may today remember only Aurora Leigh (1856), the verse novel that crowns Barrett Browning’s career, Chapman recovers the culture of print, sociability, and politics of which it is a part and thereby enriches our understanding of the literary networks through which women poets worked for political change. Kirstie Blair’s “Transatlantic Tractarians” takes up a different issue in a transnational exchange: the state of High Church Anglicanism in Britain and North America. Oxford Movement writers felt themselves beleaguered at home, disillusioned with the state of the English Church, yet hopeful about possibilities across the Atlantic. In the British Critic of 1839, Newman lamented: “the rest of the Church, either caring nothing for us, or accounting it a point of charity to wish us dead, and the State intruding its well-meant but unamiable blandishments, it is pleasant to look across the western wave, and discern a friendly star breathing peace and shedding benison” (312). Poet-priests of the American Episcopal Church responded to such transatlantic appeals by expressing “honour [to] their nursing mother” but also by asserting the vitality of their native church “in all the vigour of youth, adapting itself to a fresh state of society” (Coxe, Christian Ballads viii). Thus, while American poets learned from their British counterparts, they also produced new...

This project explores the appropriation of images of political upheaval in contemporary art, with a particular focus on artists who painstakingly draw from photographs. It is a project informed by contemporary debates on the convoluted temporality and performativity of the image, the aesthetic and affective dimensions of political subjectification, and forms of political agency. The drawings of artists including Andrea Bowers, Fernando Bryce and Olivia Plender, discussed here, elaborate a piecemeal, meticulously-drawn iconography of protest. Photographs and documents of emancipatory political struggle from different periods and places are reworked by hand, in acts of salvage. Something like an affective atmosphere is limned in scenes and artefacts that may not have lost their capacity to move but nonetheless seem remote today, the collective political desire and will they evoke overwhelmed by the disconcerting vicissitudes of sociopolitical circumstance. In light of the long and complex histories of art’s engagement with the political, and the many and various modes of reciprocity devised along the way, what does it mean to be preoccupied with images of political action? To ask as much is to begin to address the complex ways in which such images intersect with and shape processes of political identification and affiliation, the emergence of collective subjectivity and the desire for political agency. Moreover, it is to speculate upon how these processes take place in a negotiation with the often obscure histories of collective action, and how such histories inform renewed efforts of political imagination. What attachments or detachment are played out in these drawings? What choreographies of binding and unbinding are traced in these lines?

Paul Heyer is to be commended for producing a very informative book on Harold Innis’ history of communications. It pulls together the communications elements in Innis’ wide-ranging works, and presents the result in an account that an otherwise uninformed reader can digest. The book is unique. Donald Creighton's biography of Innis is about the man, primarily, and only secondarily about his contribution to economic history (Creighton, 1957). Indeed, it is more about Creighton's own interpretation of Canadian history than about much that Innis had to say. My own intellectual biography of Innis (Neill, 1972) is a labored presentation that fails in at least one respect in which Heyer has not failed so badly. Heyer's Harold Innis is a neat, readable presentation of something Innis had to say. Of course, Heyer has been limited by his commission. In a contribution to a series of books on “Key Thinkers in Critical Media Studies,” Innis’ broad interest in many aspects of economic activity and his obsessive concern with the state of economics itself had to be relegated, more or less, to comments in passing. Still, it is Heyer who notes that Innis’ book of essays, Political economy in the modern state (Innis, 1946) “is pivotal” in his thought, though not given much attention by his interpreters, among whom I must include myself.

The chapter investigates a new kind of YouTube phenomenon, the extended dialogue podcast, by combining three transdisciplinary approaches: (1) an intermedial analysis, (2) a media-historical analysis, and (3) a communication-theoretical analysis. The objects of study are the YouTube shows The Joe Rogan Experience and Hur kan vi? (a Swedish version of Rogan’s show). The shows air live on YouTube, which means that they are inherently multimodal, combining sound, moving images, occasional expositions of websites, and the viewers’ written commentaries. The shows are characterized by a strong emphasis on dialogue between the hosts and the invited guests, and by an extended duration, sometimes spanning over three hours of talk. Both shows are politically controversial, since the intention behind them is to challenge political correctness and self-censorship in mainstream media and public discourse. In order to understand the shows as digital objects, the chapter analyzes their specific mix of medialities and modalities. To understand them as historical phenomena, the chapter investigates how the shows relate to earlier media types, focusing on orality and its relation to literacy. And, finally, to understand the shows as political agents, their role in contemporary debates on media, power, and knowledge is the target of analysis.

This article explores the phenomenon of spectacle in the lead up and immediate aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Through the spread of misinformation, the appropriation of cultural iconography, and the willing engagement of mainstream media to perpetuate partisan and polarizing information, the proliferation of populist rhetoric, polarizing views, and vitriolic opinions spread. Revisiting the world of critical theorist Guy Debord, this article argues that the proliferation of citizen-drive spectacle is unique in its origination and perpetuation, and a direct result of an increasingly polarized and distrustful public spending an increasing amount of time in homophilous networks where contrarian views are few and far between. We apply the frame of spreadable media to explore how citizen expression online initiated, sustained, and expanded the media spectacle that pervaded the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The conclusion of this work argues that media literacies, as a popular response mechanism to help cultivate more critical consumers of media, must be repositioned to respond to an era of partisanship and distrust. We present a set of considerations for repositioning the literacies to focus on critique and creation of media in support of a common good, and that can respond meaningfully in an era of spreadability, connectivity, and spectacle.

The self-contained designation ‘nation-state’ as a discrete field of knowledge and its use as an analytical framework to study architectural history requires critical revision. This paper suggests that instead of exclusively focusing on the nation-state as the geopolitical and temporal limit of historical subjects, we may examine new concepts, such as ‘boundary’ and ‘flows’. These two concepts provide new perspectives on the developments, negotiations, and conflicts in identity politics that have shaped architecture and urban spaces, but do not adhere to the normative ideologies and structures of the nation-state or of nationalism. Defining ‘boundary’ and ‘flow’ can also shed new light on how we imagine relationships between the nation, self, cities, and architecture. This essay focuses on the contemporary debate over the abandoned Indian house of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, one of the founders of Pakistan and its first governor-general, and discusses how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness to enable, obstruct, accumulate, and control flows. Jinnah left his house when he moved to the newly created Pakistan, but he never ceased to believe that one day he would return to it and his hometown, which now stands in a ‘foreign’ country. South Court, as his house is popularly known, sparked new controversy when Hindu nationalists demanded to demolish it. As the debate over South Court still unfolds, it provokes an effort to revisit the normative relationship between self and identity as they emerge on a personal and transnational scale.