Broken World Research Articles

Infrastructure Development and Donation Culture in the Gaza Strip

ABSTRACTInfrastructure consists of interlinked and nested sociotechnical systems, the construction, maintenance, and repair of which requires considerable ongoing outlays of material resources, technical know‐how and throughput, and political will. Building upon “broken world” approaches, this research uses qualitative methods to study infrastructure development, breakdown, and repair through the lens of a particular collaborative humanitarian initiative involving the public health sector in the Gaza Strip. Findings from this research suggest that a lack of donation ethics combined with policies that privilege “service over stuff” enable and exacerbate key infrastructural breakdowns, perpetuate maladaptive behaviors, inhibit meaningful development, and reinforce dominant harmful regimes. The paper concludes by arguing for increased critical and ethical awareness of donation culture and its consequences, a reconsideration of development policies that limit funding support to services rather than material and infrastructure supports, and an emphasis on building local capacity for maintenance and repair work.

EdTech in a Broken World: Breaking and Repairing in Argentinian and German Schools

EdTech in a Broken World: Breaking and Repairing in Argentinian and German Schools

Advocating for Family Well-being in a Transforming and Broken World: A Practical and Eco-Theological assessment

This paper presents an intervention aimed at enhancing family well-being through eco-theology. Through a comprehensive approach, including a literature review, survey, interviews, and pastoral or biblical counseling, this study examines intricate connections between religion, nature, society, church, and the family, particularly in light of urgent ecological concerns. The social ills of our society are real-life situations that impact the eco-system. While eco-theology emphasizes sustainability, ethical concerns, and environmental stewardship, it also recognizes the threats posed by father absence, gender-based violence (GBV), and moral and ethical quandaries, especially within the family context. Eco-theology, as a form of constructive theology, delves into these relationships within the framework of God's design, grounded in the Being of the triune God. However, contemporary societal perspectives often depict families as marred by abuse, brokenness, divorce, and violence, deviating from the divine intent. The disruption of family life reverberates through society, violating fundamental social morals and community values. In the context of South Africa, significant changes in family composition contribute to numerous broken relationships. Practical theology contends that the Bible serves as the foundation for Christian living within the realms of family, church, and community (2 Tim 3:16), emphasizing God's care and concern for families. Pastoral care, a division of practical theology, addresses prevalent social issues such as father absence, GBV, and moral and values quandaries. Therefore, an intervention is crucial for addressing these social issues and providing training, equipping, empowering, resources, and support to families. Through a series of discussions and inquiries focused on parenting, family well-being, values, and relationships, this intervention aims to foster a deeper understanding and implementation of strategies to address these pressing issues prevalent within South African families.

Software Maintenance as Materialization of Common Knowledge

While development of software always implicitly takes place in contexts of inherited entanglements and legacies, its maintenance deals explicitly with what is already present. Software maintenance locates itself in media res, in the middle of things. Maintaining software typically involves intervening in the material archive of source code, documentation, and software tools. Doing so successfully requires relevant situated knowledge of how the software at hand already hangs together, and how to effectively put this knowledge to use. This knowledge builds on first-hand experience, acquired in practice over shared lifetimes of people and code. For code to continue to endure over time, ongoing articulation of its entanglements is externalized and materialized across contributing programmers and software development tools, each themselves vulnerable and in need of maintenance. This paper analyzes how this process of externalizing and materializing knowledge is negotiated. We conclude that the common knowledge which suspends the string figure of software in time and in a broken world (Jackson 2014) is always a locally hybrid assemblage which carries this knowledge forward. Hence, to maintain software well is to add on to its legacy.

‘When the house burns down’: displacement, precariousness and inhabitation

ABSTRACT Displacement and precarity are two conditions that define our broken world. Acknowledging that any rhetoric of fixity, sustainability, and progress is insufficient and that the only choice is to learn to live with the fragments, the paper reflects on displacement beyond its common form of non-livability and the absence of a future. Offering some diffractions across the spatial narratives of three different territories where we worked – Iquitos in Peru, Bar Elias-Tell Serhoun in Lebanon, and Hlaingtharyar in Yangon – and mobilising the critical work of Berlant, Tsing and Agamben, this paper reframes displacement as the unfinished possibility of inhabiting, a tenacious struggle to resist the violent subtraction of future, space and possibilities, therefore contributing to the wider reflection on the challenge of inhabiting the uninhabitable urban conditions of the present.

Maintenance, Care, and Repair of a Communal Architecture in Trouble: The Disassembling

Maintenance, Care, and Repair of a Communal Architecture in Trouble: The Disassembling

In Repair: The Reparative as Theoretical Mode and Structure of Feeling in Times of Crisis. An Outline.

Abstract: This essay argues that during the past two decades, a significant theoretical shift has taken place in the humanities and social sciences, one that is expressive of a more general change in cultural sensibility. A new mode of theorizing and a novel structure of feeling have emerged: the reparative. Repair, at heart, can be characterized as a “broken world thinking” (Jackson), combining a focus on pain and possibility, destruction and creativity. Consisting of a set of strategies whereby subjects salvage possibilities and sustenance from the world, repair emerges expressly in the face of the crises that mark the present moment.

Ethics in Business

One intricate and perhaps, divisive task in philosophy is that of gauging growth in societies. The complexity stems from the reality that everyone seems to possess a template for growth, and so people are wont to use different yardsticks for its measurement. For the technically inclined, the index is science; in civil circles, the measure is perhaps, that of political evolution; and in religious spheres, it is increase in membership/physical structures. Ironically, all the advances arising thereof have been marred and sometimes eclipsed by torrid upheavals: violent overthrow of governments and wars; financial meltdowns; scourge of pandemics; prospects of nuclear combat; religious bigotry; chaotic climate, etc., that make life precarious. Human civilization is on the brink of self-destruct. “Ethics in Business” reimagines the interconnectivity of all spheres of human life, and proposes that the opportunity to redeem our broken world is tied to reengineering the values of trust and loyalty.

Welfare service centers: Maintenance, repair, and care at the analog interfaces of the digital welfare state

Many public administrations advocate digital services that allow for the deployment of algorithmic automation and the use of artificial intelligence. This shift has been discussed as the expansion of the digital welfare state. However, numerous citizens remain excluded from digital services provided by the state. In this context, welfare service centers have emerged as important interfaces of the digital welfare state. These service centers undergird many of the operations of digitalization as a large-scale, societal infrastructure project. In this article, we elaborate the specific characteristics of welfare service centers in Sweden, relying theoretically on interface theory and broken world thinking. Methodologically, we rely on ethnographic methods including in-depth interviews and observations. The article ultimately argues that the digital welfare state continues to be based on material inequalities and exclusions.

Morning in This Broken World

Morning in This Broken World

Book Overview. Repair: Sustainable Design Futures

Repair, a humble act born of necessity, has become in the 21st century an expression of artistic and discursive resistance to humankind’s unmaking of our societies and our environment. As a concrete practice, it serves to bring us together, to re-engage with materiality, and to invite us as consumers back to understanding the contexts of makers and making. As a metaphor and speculative meta-concept, it gives us an alternative and holistic way to attend to and face systemic social and environmental breakdown. To expand upon our respec­tive approaches to repair in concept and practice, we issued a call for reflections on repair thinking and practices in the realm of art and design, resulting in the volume Repair: Sustainable Design Futures (Routledge, 2023), edited by us. This essay provides an overview of the book, highlighting the voices and artwork of the inter­national, interdisciplinary group of authors included in the volume, speaking to multiple forms of brokenness and repair as entry points for sparking novel insights into how we might attend to our broken social and physical worlds. As a constel­lation of reflections on repair thinking and practices, the essays included in the book offer reparative responses to fractured systems, relationships, cities, architecture, and objects. Together they posit repair thinking as a way of addressing and nurturing our broken world.

Pacing Strategy of 800 m and 1500 m Freestyle Swimming Finals in the World Championships According to the Performance in Males and Females of Different Age Groups

Pacing strategy refers to the distribution of effort and speed throughout the race to achieve optimal performance. This study aims to understand whether the choice of pacing strategy in swimming depends on the length of competitions and how sex, age, and performance level influence this strategy. Participants were the finalists of the 800 m and 1500 m freestyle events at the elite and junior world championships in 2022–2023. Race outcomes and pacing parameters were compared between the two distances and across different groups of swimmers. Swimmers in both distances did not break world records. Pacing strategy generally followed a U-shape with significant differences in the frequency and duration of speed changes between the two distances. The 800 m exhibited more frequent changes in acceleration, while the 1500 m events generally followed a more consistent time-series pattern. There were differences in pacing strategies between males and females and between junior and elite swimmers. Swimmers closer to world records showed more consistent pacing patterns compared to those farther from records. This study suggests that pacing strategies are influenced by race distance, sex, age, and performance level. The research highlights the complex interplay between physiological and psychological factors that shape a swimmer’s decision-making during a race.

As we were: the First World War; tales from a broken world, week-by-week. Four volumes

As we were: the First World War; tales from a broken world, week-by-week. Four volumes

Writing against the abyss: An exergue

“Archive”, from the Greek word arkheion, signals a place of commencement and commandment (Derrida, 1995a). Dig deep enough into the etymology of “archive” and there is water (Crowcroft, 2022). This creative-critical essay takes a speculative approach to understanding my late mother’s literary archives, which are locked in storage overseas. Derrida would say that as guardian of the archive, my purpose is curation. This essay serves as an exergue to that exercise, by setting the stage and establishing a prearchival lexicon through citation (Derrida, 1995a). Through writing memory, speculation and theory, scaffolded by narrative threads of bodies and loss, this essay languages the relationship between mother and daughter and archive. It adopts the form of a braided essay (Miller, 2013; Miller & Paola, 2004; Walker, 2017) titrating between narrative threads and critical theory to “see what is displaced” (Eades, 2015, p. 31), allowing for fragmentation that reflects broken bodies in a broken world (Walker, 2017), abjection (Kristeva, 1982) and ugliness (Ellis, 2018), the formation of cellular writing or écriture cellulaire (an extension of Eades’s écriture matière), and prepositioning trauma (Rendle-Short, 2021). Hope becomes a matter of survival, of writing around, against and through, in wave after wave, in order to leave no space for the abyss (Cixous, 1991).

Heart Sutra by Yan Lianke

Reviewed by: Heart Sutra by Yan Lianke Elaine Margolin YAN LIANKE Heart Sutra Trans. Carlos Rojas. New York. Grove Press. 2023. 416 pages. DESPITE HIS GENTLE demeanor and mournful eyes that speak to the horrific suffering he endured as a child growing up in a rural province in the shadow of Mao's madness, one resists thinking of sixty-fouryear-old Yan Lianke as a dissident, despite his defiant novels, many of which are banned on the mainland. Lianke feels like his own breed of patriot; his heart is infused with a strong love for the Chinese people. He finds it tragic that so many of his countrymen have lives devoid of dignity or purpose. He once wrote, "The reality of China is so outrageous that it defies belief and renders realism inert." He has developed his own writing style called "mythorealism," which abandons any shred of loyalty to external truths for the darker reality that lurks beneath them. In novels like Lenin's Kisses (2012) and Hard Like Water (2021), his prose explodes into bursts of imaginative power that seem almost Felliniesque. Lianke's inspiration for his new work, Heart Sutra, is explained to us in his afterword. It happened when he experienced a moment of rare tranquility visiting a Buddhist temple. "The sun shone copper yellow," Lianke writes, "the music was like warm oil, and the monks all had calm, simple smiles and natural, relaxed expressions." Lianke wonders if religious life, which he had never given much thought to, has something precious he could grab hold of. His novel about the Religious Training Institute in Beijing begins with a smidgen of optimism but soon drowns in satire. The school welcomes students from all walks of life. There are Buddhists, Daoists, Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims. It is run by Professor Dong, who is on the take from people who remain lurking in the shadows. He drives around in a fancy car that speaks to his mysteriously accumulated wealth. He tries to seduce one of the Buddhist disciples, Yahui, who is already in love with a Daoist named Mingzheng, who is rumored to have an important father he is vaguely aware of. The curriculum makes a mockery of spiritual pursuit. All students are required to take a course called "On the Relationship between Religion and Political Leaders." The students are asked in writing if they believe the Communist Party directs everything. If they answer no, they are summoned for questioning. Professor Dong holds bizarre tug-of-war competitions between the religious groups that, instead of fostering harmony, puts them at odds with one another. As the semester progresses, Yahui and Mingzheng flirt with the notion of abandoning religious life and marrying, but they are torn between their faith and more earthly desires. Both are driven to acts of self-mutilation in an attempt to get control of their competing impulses. They seem distraught by a broken world. As does Yan Lianke, whose storyline degrades into bouts of depravity that mystify us. His satirical ruminations run far afield, and we find our emotional connection to his text wavering. In one of many extended passages, Yahui seems to be speaking simultaneously to the gods of every faith, while castigating herself for the sins she has committed. Everyone seems involved in deceptions of one kind or another. Lianke seems inconsolably distressed by the state of Chinese society. He mostly holds our attention by sheer force of will and cunning, but at times we long for the more traditionally grounded voice that resonates throughout some of his earlier works. [End Page 61] Elaine Margolin Merrick, New York Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community

The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community

Taking care of myself in a different and broken world: self-care practices of adolescents on dialysis

ABSTRACT Purpose Being on dialysis is a traumatic situation particularly during adolescence. Therefore, adolescents must have self-care support according to their special needs. The goal of this study was to describe the adolescents´ self-care practices when they are on dialysis. This paper reports only the adolescents´ selfcare practices based on the health care team guidelines but adjusted to their beliefs and habits. Methods The methodology of the study was interpretive phenomenology. In-depth interviews were conducted with 15 adolescents; Smith´s IPA procedure was used for data analysis. Results Being on dialysis meant to the adolescents living in a different and broken world. Self-care practices included: 1) coexisting with the dialysis slavery or being attached to a machine day or night, 2) struggling with the maddening thirst experience, 3) Deciding what, when and how much food to eat, 4) taking care of an alien that helps to survive, 5) taking the medicines when feeling in need of them. Conclusion The adolescents tried to care for themselves adjusting their care activities to the health team´s recommendations. However, they also adjusted those practices to their beliefs and habits, which allows them to live with dialysis in a less traumatic way.

Gandhi’s Compassionate Cosmopolitan Ethics and Global Poverty

In the post-Rawlsian world many liberal cosmopolitan philosopher and theorists have been trying to argue that love, emotion, sentiments and empathy are needed to ensure justice in this broken world. Some of them like Martha Nussbaum, Graham Long etc. have attempted to theorise on Emotion and sentiments within cosmopolitan traditions. I argue that empathy, love and sentiments are European ideas and sometimes become problematic for the reason that they do not get out of the problems of “binaries”----primarily the binary of the self and others. In my view, liberal cosmopolitans have failed to understand the ontological and metaphysical significance of the non-duality which was central to the Gandhi’s understanding of cosmopolitanism. In Gandhi’s theory of cosmology there is no difference between the self and other, they are not placed in tension with each other rather they complement each other and are essentially interdependent. This article humbly attempts to explore the possibilities of an alternative conception of cosmopolitanism based on universal morality through Gandhi’s idea of non-violence and compassion. It probes into the possibility of universal morality of Ahimsa (non- violence) and Karuna (compassion) and argues that it is not plausible to think of it without any metaphysical supposition that we all have the same Atman. It also examines and criticizes the Western notion of cosmopolitan morality based on human fellowship without any metaphysical principle. Unlike moral cosmopolitanism, compassionate cosmopolitanism does not focus primarily on the duty rather it goes deeply into understanding the human nature and virtue--what kind of person we are and how we feel about other fellow human? It enquires into the kind of emotional attachment exists or required between fellow humans.

Finding Children of Compost Symbionts

This project explores the use of simple craft techniques as resistance, and is a response to Haraway's call for "collaborative and divergent story-making practice" in her Camille Stories: Children of Compost (2016). I use compost as a figuration that articulates life in the damaged world. Living is composting. This project seeks to inspire curious and open thinking, and to build a "dialogical bridge between knowledge systems” (Rose, 2020). Through the agency of my Children of Compost Symbionts (an organism living in symbiosis with another), this project aims to engage the public in constructive public discourse in order to find hope, care and empathy in the broken world. The symbionts appropriate traditional handcrafted toys, like dolls and bears, and work in the way that psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called "transitional objects" (Levy, 2021) work for children: they carry our anxieties, rage, love, and most secret thoughts, and live the life on our behalf. These whimsical symbionts inspire the public to tell their own stories of remediation and repair, encourage the public to create new perspectives and approaches, and engage with a multiplicity of otherness ethically.

Stewarding the Documental Afterlives of Refugee Tech Initiatives

When tech initiatives end, the artifacts they leave behind continue to impact stakeholders. Following an orientation toward broken world thinking, our study introduces the concept of documental afterlives to refer to the range of fates to which these digital artifacts have fallen. In this paper, we systematically review the 118 websites listed in a publicly available database of refugee tech initiatives in Germany as they appear today. We identify that documental afterlives of these projects fall into categories of being broken, unattended, and memorialized. Given the value and impact of these artifacts, we argue that an ethical response to these afterlives requires that we attend to them through stewardship, centering the notion of care and drawing from archival practices. On an empirical level, this paper contributes an updated understanding of how the traces of our initiatives appear long after many of them have ended. Conceptually, our notion of documental afterlives calls on us to attend to the artifacts that we leave behind, recognizing their continued entanglement in social relationships.