Autonomous Subject Research Articles

“I Flip, Therefore I Am”: Smartphone Detoxing as a Practice of Sovereignty

Abstract This article theorizes smartphone detoxing as a practice of sovereignty. The article begins by arguing that the smartphone enables the exercise of psychopolitical control, a new mode of neoliberal governmentality under which individuals are governed through the algorithmic modification of behavior. Against this background, smartphone detoxing can be seen as a practice of sovereignty in the sense that it aims to recover the subject's autonomy and rationality—qualities that are lost as humans become smartphone addicts. Ironically, however, smartphone detoxing is also a neoliberal practice in the sense that it plays on an ethos of self-care and cultivates market-oriented notions of freedom. As such, the article contends that the detoxing subject is a post-smartphone subject that performs political subjectivity by negotiating the tension between sovereignty and neoliberalism. To explore how smartphone detoxing performs political subjectivity in practice, the article analyses the testimonies of four influencers who share their detoxing journeys on YouTube. The analysis finds that detoxers recover sovereignty by rediscovering the Self, reconnecting with Others, and reclaiming time, and that they—through these very practices—also strive for the neoliberal virtues of wellness, authenticity and productivity.

Drone Form and Techno-Futurities

Abstract: What does it mean for humanity to inhabit a techno-planetary system in which it is not central? This essay will address a facet of this question by exploring the aesthetics of drone warfare. The drone features in my reading as a metonym for a techno-human continuum in which the human as an autonomous subject with interiority and capacity for ethical action appears as eminently dispensable. Aesthetic forms not only are informed by but also shape a mode of perception by means of which we apprehend the world. What happens to such apprehension when both the mode of perception and subjecthood defy human-centered assumptions about aesthetic form? How does one novelize the scalar complexity of distributed vision beyond the human? When decisions about life and death are ceded to a machinic vision, do questions of moral agency and responsibility recede into a posthuman realm or do they gain even more urgency? The essay pivots around questions such as these.

Opportunities and challenges of a dynamic consent-based application: personalized options for personal health data sharing and utilization

BackgroundThe principles of dynamic consent are based on the idea of safeguarding the autonomy of individuals by providing them with personalized options to choose from regarding the sharing and utilization of personal health data. To facilitate the widespread introduction of dynamic consent concepts in practice, individuals must perceive these procedures as useful and easy to use. This study examines the user experience of a dynamic consent-based application, in particular focusing on personalized options, and explores whether this approach may be useful in terms of ensuring the autonomy of data subjects in personal health data usage.MethodsThis study investigated the user experience of MyHealthHub, a dynamic consent-based application, among adults aged 18 years or older living in South Korea. Eight tasks exploring the primary aspects of dynamic consent principles–including providing consent, monitoring consent history, and managing personalized options were provided to participants. Feedback on the experiences of testing MyHealthHub was gathered via multiple-choice and open-ended questionnaire items.ResultsA total of 30 participants provided dynamic consent through the MyHealthHub application. Most participants successfully completed all the provided tasks without assistance and regarded the personalized options favourably. Concerns about the security and reliability of the digital-based consent system were raised, in contrast to positive responses elicited in other aspects, such as perceived usefulness and ease of use.ConclusionsDynamic consent is an ethically advantageous approach for the sharing and utilization of personal health data. Personalized options have the potential to serve as pragmatic safeguards for the autonomy of individuals in the sharing and utilization of personal health data. Incorporating the principles of dynamic consent into real-world scenarios requires remaining issues, such as the need for powerful authentication mechanisms that bolster privacy and security, to be addressed. This would enhance the trustworthiness of dynamic consent-based applications while preserving their ethical advantages.

Enhancing Critical Thinking and Learning Autonomy Through the Integration of Catur Pramana Approach in Natural and Social Sciences Interactive Learning Materials

This research investigates the influence of integrating interactive teaching materials based on Catur pramana principles on elementary school students' critical thinking and learning autonomy in Natural and Social Sciences (IPAS). This study employed interactive learning material, critical thinking, learning autonomy, and catur pramana theories. Employing a Quasi-Experimental design with a post-test-only control group design, two Grade IV classes were selected using a statistical matching technique. Data were collected through pre- and post-tests measuring critical thinking abilities and questionnaires assessing learning autonomy. The test and questionnaire showed that the experimental group had better critical thinking and learning autonomy than the control group. Besides, the quantitative analysis using descriptive statistics and MANOVA also revealed significant effects of integrating Catur pramana-oriented interactive teaching materials on students' critical thinking and learning autonomy in IPAS subjects. This study concludes that implementing interactive teaching materials effectively improves elementary students' critical thinking and learning autonomy. The findings suggest that integrating these materials presents a promising approach to enhancing elementary school students' critical thinking and learning autonomy.

Knowledge Production in the “Arab-Majority” World and Unlearning in the Field

This paper presents and autoethnographically analyzes three key sites in which the author—a Lebanese “Arabo-Muslim man”—failed to interpellate the lifeworlds of Lebanese “Arabo-Muslim” female participants during a research project in Lebanon: the public-private divide, gender, and the autonomous subject. Specifically, the article identifies key forces that produce this failure, including education, presence in the Westernized university, Westernized secularization, social class, family background, and urbanity, all situated within the larger structures of modernity/coloniality. Doing this, the article grates against the assumption that researchers who share a “race,” citizenship, language, or ethnicity and who are “from” the Arab region are de facto well placed to pursue decolonial knowledge production alongside the region and its dwellers. The article consequently posits the possibility of unlearning and relearning—disrupting this failure—through immersive embodied listening fieldwork within the material space of the Arab world, undoing the formation of an alienated, fractured, Westernized self. Moving beyond the cognitive and theoretical to the material, experiential, and embodied, the article accordingly underlines reflexive listening fieldwork's potential as a generative site (among others) from which alternative knowledges of/with/on the global South(s) can emerge.

Robust Fuzzy Quasi-SMC-Based Steering Control of Autonomous Vehicle Subject to Parametric Uncertainties and Disturbances

Robust Fuzzy Quasi-SMC-Based Steering Control of Autonomous Vehicle Subject to Parametric Uncertainties and Disturbances

Exercising legal personhood: wives in contractual litigation over moveable property in nineteenth-century New Zealand

In October 1884, New Zealand followed legislative reform taking place across the common law world that addressed married women’s legal position by passing its version of the Married Women’s Property Act. The Acts, both in New Zealand and in other common law jurisdictions, recognised wives as autonomous legal subjects by mitigating the inhibiting doctrine of coverture that had restricted married women’s ability to own or control property, or act as legal persons. However, wives’ presence in contractual litigation involving moveable property in the colonial courts of New Zealand prior to the reforms shows that, despite coverture, wives enacted degrees of legal personhood through several intricate legal mechanisms. The Married Women’s Property Act 1884 had no significant impact on the economic activity of wives. Furthermore, women’s social, legal, and economic position in relation to moveable property remained as diverse and legally complicated as it did prior to the Act.

Two Central Meanings of Subjectivity and Their Application in the Political Context of Modern Ukraine

This paper examines the fundamental meanings of the concepts of “subject” and “subjectivity” in Western political philosophy, aiming to place them within the context of modern Ukraine. The discourses on Ukraine-as-a-subject are examined in relation to the two contradictory senses of subjectivity: (a) autonomous, selfpossessing, and (b) dependent, belonging subject. As the idea of an autonomous subject in Western political thought is closely related to colonial ideology and practice, this concept should be replaced with the notion of the historical, dependent subject, which is shaped by the political regime it belongs to. Consequently, the paper argues that the sense of a belonging subject (b) better reflects the actual practices of subjection, because it captures the factor of belonging to the community and presupposes the ethical, normative impact of the political collective on its subjects. Aristotle’s first systematic use of the word subject (to hupokeimenon) is based on the verb “to belong” (hupokeimai), from which the Latin civis (citizen) is also derived. Accordingly, the true ‘autonomy’ of the subject lies in the ability to choose one’s ‘belonging’ and to participate in a political community that reinterprets and changes one’s own intellectual tradition. In this case, the historicity of the subject does not mean a fateful and singular History, but rather a multiplicity of stories that give meaning and value to their subjects. The only way to partake in the act of subjectivation is through self-regulated education, which molds the social subject within the community. In the case of Ukraine, this primarily means that political power should be locally generated through civil institutions and groups that play a normative role in society. Only when education and political organization become a res publica can subjectivation be a liberating practice, as envisioned by the theorists of the Enlightenment.

The Hegelian Master–Slave Dialectic in History and Class Consciousness

Abstract The central axis of the article is the argument that History and Class Consciousness adopts from the Hegelian dialectics not only the category of totality but also the master–slave dialectic, although it never refers explicitly to the latter. Hence, in this article, we aim to detect the subtle influence that the Hegelian master–slave dialectic exerts on History and Class Consciousness and, more specifically, on the constitution of the Lukacsian concepts of reification, praxis, working class-bourgeoisie interaction, working-class self-consciousness, autonomous subject. Our approach to the Hegelian master–slave dialectic is mostly – but not only – based on its philosophical–anthropological interpretation by A. Kojeve. Kojeve’s interpretation, by attributing a crucial role to labour in the mastery–slavery dialectic, focuses on that aspect of the Hegelian dialectic which, in our estimation, was determining for HCC. In addition, our approach to the Hegelian master–slave dialectic is based on some occasional references Lukacs has to it in Young Hegel as well as on his interpretation latent in History and Class Consciousness.

Dependency denial in crisis: Revisiting feminist critiques of dualism

Social theories – from classical accounts to more recent relational theories to feminist and postcolonial approaches – have characterized modernity as an age of proliferating dependency relationships, which, however, enable autonomy as a central value of this very modernity. This tension at the heart of modernity has led societies to deny these dependencies. Recently, crisis dynamics have precipitated abrupt realizations of dependencies on phenomena that are invisibilized, inferiorized and devalued in modern societies. The respective ‘other of reason’ on which autonomous subjectivity depends – including nature, reproduction and the body – increasingly makes itself felt. The underlying logic of dependency denial can be illuminated by revisiting the feminist critique of dualism that offers three ways to overcome dualist thought: dialectics, entanglement and tension. The article discusses these three options in order to develop a normative compass facilitating a critical perspective on dependency denial and its failure in light of current crises.

“Green peppers, tomatoes, and lemons, disunite!”: Feminist solidarity in times of wars

AbstractThis article focuses on female bodies co‐laboring across the racial lines and academic‐activist divides to explore both the potentials and constraints of feminist solidarity in the hyper‐masculine and ultra‐nationalist normative order of the global war on terror. Anthropological studies have deconstructed phantasmatic narratives of the global war on terror by disclosing its racialized and classed structure. However, what remains understudied is how racialized female bodies are subjected to the biopower and necropower of this war. This ethnography concentrates on the feminist solidarity between Özlem Yasak and Serra Hakyemez, the coauthors of this article, which stretches over 13 years and moves between the colony and the metropole and the Global South and Global North. It examines how a Turkish academic and a Kurdish activist (both lower middle‐class women) forge, cultivate, and repair their comradeship as they move from an immigration office to their family house to neoliberal universities. Based on what we call the Other‐graphy as a new feminist method, this article argues that the global war on terror expands its reach as the humanitarian and neoliberal regimes of power recruit activists and academics to the fantasy of autonomous subjectivity posited against their possible political solidarity.

The Gift of Intelligence and the Sacramentality of Real Presence: Overcoming the Dataist Metaphysics of Modern Cognitivism

AbstractIn the last twenty‐five years scientific research on embodied cognition and related discussions in the philosophy of technology and science have led to two groundbreaking insights: 1. Perceptions, memories, meanings, and volitions are neither located in the brain nor reducible to intentional acts of ‘autonomous subjects’. 2. Human intelligence is always embedded in an embodied, simultaneously natural and artificial environment that is charged with meaning. These insights are compatible with holistic, relational concepts of embodied intelligence in the tradition of sapiential thinkers like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas of Cusa, and related sacramental ontologies. The modern break with this tradition was inspired by the dataist metaphysics of the ‘Gutenberg revolution’ and culminated in the thesis that human cognition is a kind of pattern extraction or the upshot of the synthesis of elementary sensory data. By contrast, the fact that the business of pattern‐extraction has become replaceable by the work of ‘artificial intelligences’ calls two things to mind: First, the late‐modern confusion of human with ‘artificial intelligence’ is the upshot of a reductionist metaphysics that provoked an unhealthy assimilation of human cognition to the way machines work. Second, in order to strengthen what distinguishes human intelligence from ‘artificial intelligences’, we need to recover the premodern unity of being, truth, beauty and the good, starting from a holistic, trinitarian anthropology. As the most recent research on Human Computer Interaction (HCI) shows, this requires a revision of our modern, instrumental attitude toward technical artifacts which emerged in the Age of the Reformation. Seen from this angle, the recovery of the sacramental ontology of premodernity has become a matter of urgency not primarily in terms of theological developments but in terms of the very innovations that provoked its modern ‘disenchantment’.

‘We are here to put the past behind us’: violence and welfare governmentality in Finnish family law

ABSTRACT Family justice occupies a complex space where public social (welfare) law intersects with private family law. These two legal domains bring distinct perspectives on subjects, rights, responsibilities, and entitlements. This article draws on interview data and previous research to examine welfare governmentality in family law, particularly in Finland and more broadly in the Nordic welfare states. Using intimate partner violence (IPV) as the lens of analysis, the article studies family law’s exclusionary structures that render particular forms of loss resulting from the relationship non-addressable. The rationales embedded in law, as evident through welfare governmentality, significantly impact the production of specific types of vulnerable, autonomous, gendered, and relational subjects. Moreover, these rationales shape our understanding of the law’s operations, categories, truth claims, knowledge development, and regulatory practices. Notably, family law-as-knowledge falls short in recognising violence and the subsequent losses suffered by victims within the contexts of financial settlements and child custody and access. This failure can be attributed to conceptual distinctions within family law, an overriding focus on the child’s interests, and the law’s national orientation.

Path-Following Control with Obstacle Avoidance of Autonomous Surface Vehicles Subject to Actuator Faults

Path-Following Control with Obstacle Avoidance of Autonomous Surface Vehicles Subject to Actuator Faults

Analysis of the payment discipline of trade-licence holders regarding social insurance contributions in the Slovak Republic

Abstract Guarantee of autonomy and stability of economic subjects from the government can be considered an important gauge of state security. Due to the financial, migration and energy crisis, we can observe a notable increase of social problems, which gives more importance to the policy for social security of the population. In this article we address the ongoing problem of an excessively high number of debts owed to the Slovak Social Insurance Agency in recent years. The social security system for trade-licence holders, its financing and the method of enforcement are briefly characterised. The development of the payment/non-payment of taxes and levies to the Social Insurance Agency is tracked against the background of legislative changes. In the conclusion, the ineffectiveness of selected legal provisions and processes of exacting taxes and social security contributions is evaluated in terms of their impact on the financial disciplines of trade-licence holders in the Slovak Republic. Severity of the deficit in money collected on social insurance poses a threat in several areas, such as providing social security to all citizens in some required quality as guaranteed by the government, or sustainability of the public finance which poses a risk for the whole economic security of the country.

党建引领“三治结合”背景下的城市民族社区共治实践研究

The governance model of “three governance combination” guilded under Party Building is an important part of the co-governance practice of urban ethnic communities in the new era, and it is also a new requirement for building a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation. Taking Ala Yi Ethnic Group Street in Kunming as an example, this paper investigates and analyzes the practice path, effectiveness, deficiencies and countermeasures of the governance model of “three governance combination” in urban ethnic communities, aiming to clarify the main relationship and practical contents of the “three governance combination” governance model in urban ethnic communities, and provide theoretical and practical support for improving the governance level of urban ethnic communities. The research shows that under the “three governance combination” grassroots governance model in urban ethnic communities, the three relationships should be nested with each other, and its specific practice should be centered on the guidance of party building, while strengthening the cultivation of autonomous subjects, improving the legal guarantee system, strengthening the role of moral governance and education, and improving the coordination mechanism of multiple co-governance, so as to stimulate the endogenous impetus of the community and to realize the joint governance of urban ethnic community affairs.

Design and Implementation of a Career Planning Program at Chonnam National University Medical School

Chonnam National University Medical School has designed and implemented two career planning programs: a three-phase curriculum-based program and a longitudinal non-curricular program over the course of 6 academic years. The three phases of the curriculum-based career planning program are self-assessment, career exploration, and field experience. The non-curricular career counseling program operates through a faculty advisor system, with each faculty member guiding a group of students from each academic year, and students in each year forming a mentor-mentee relationship. The non-curricular career exploration program consists of a student research support program, an international practice program in basic and clinical medicine, and a specialty exploration fair. A survey conducted among 38 graduates (54.3%) working as interns at Chonnam National University Hospital revealed that graduates preferred autonomous elective subjects within the curriculum-based program. They also responded positively to the faculty advisor system, through which they maintained close relationships. A focus group interview with three interns indicated that subjects providing direct experience in fields of interest and courses that students could choose freely were helpful in career decisions. Through follow-up research, it is necessary to design and operate a systematic career planning program based on an analysis of the needs of graduates taking part in a residency training program after selecting a medical specialty.

Gap analysis between trainees' subjective competencies and the competencies expected by instructors in urology: A need assessment survey in Japan.

According to the rapid progress in surgical techniques, a growing number of procedures should be learned during postgraduate training periods. This study aimed to clarify the current situation regarding urological surgical training and identify the perception gap between trainees' competency and the competency expected by instructors in Japan. Regarding the 40 urological surgical procedures selected via the Delphi method, we collected data on previous caseloads, current subjective autonomy, and confidence for future skill acquisition from trainees (<15 post-graduate years [PGY]), and the competencies when trainees became attending doctors expected by instructors (>15 PGY), according to a 5-point Likert scale. In total, 174 urologists in Hokkaido Prefecture, Japan were enrolled in this study. The response rate was 96% (165/174). In a large proportion of the procedures, caseloads grew with accumulation of years of clinical practice. However, trainees had limited caseloads of robotic and reconstructive surgeries even after 15 PGY. Trainees showed low subjective competencies at present and low confidence for future skill acquisition in several procedures, such as open cystectomy, ureteroureterostomy, and ureterocystostomy, while instructors expected trainees to be able to perform these procedures independently when they became attending doctors. Trainees showed low subjective competencies and low confidence for future skill acquisition in several open and reconstructive procedures, while instructors considered that these procedures should be independently performable by attending doctors. We believe that knowledge of these perception gaps is helpful to develop a practical training program.

Foucault, Kant, and Antiquity

Michel Foucault’s return to classical antiquity at the end of his career coincides with a turn away from institutional critique and a return to Kant. This is no coincidence. Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s “Anthropology” (1961) completely anticipates his approach to ancient subject formations, which reflects Kant’s theory of the liberal, self-enterprising, and enlightened subject as this is outlined in Foucault’s “What Is Enlightenment?” (1984) and elsewhere. Foucault’s final studies surface isolated, private, and autonomous subjects who are at once premodern, proto-Christian, and uncannily modern. Fashioned by ascetic and aesthetic models of self-care, they testify to “a genealogy of the modern subject.”

Exploring the desires to become academics: Reflections of academic women in Chinese non‐elite public universities

AbstractThis study explores the dynamic journey of women as they become academics in non‐elite Chinese public universities. It focuses on their aspirations and the evolving subjectivity that accompanies this process. Ten participants from the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) fields, aged 28–57, were interviewed; the transcripts were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Adopting a Butlerian perspective, our findings identify two distinct subjectivities that shape Chinese women's decision to become academics: autonomous subjectivity driven by intrinsic desire and strategic subjectivity driven by instrumental desire. We argue that becoming an academic is a complex process influenced by regulatory power, including market forces, institutional and societal constraints, and gender norms, which shape the context in which the desire is pursued. It is essential to view this decision not only from the individual's perspective but also from the larger context within which it is made. This study contributes to the literature on gender equality in academia by interrogating the complexities of the decision‐making processes for Chinese women pursuing academic careers in non‐elite Chinese universities.