Contemporary Entanglements Research Articles

Global governance of education: The historical and contemporary entanglements of UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank

Global governance of education: The historical and contemporary entanglements of UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank

Worldly Politics and Divine Institutions: Contemporary Entanglements of Faith and Government. By Nahshon Perez

Worldly Politics and Divine Institutions: Contemporary Entanglements of Faith and Government. By Nahshon Perez

“Little wars with the police”: Aesthetic arsenals and intellects of insult

This paper describes the contemporary entanglement of “fuck the police” (FTP) and “all cops are bastards” (ACAB), locating each as examples of a growing rejection of an immiserating police power. We argue that these confrontational phrases emerge from the policed classes as relatively precise political diagnoses of a police power that is elementally concerned with the fabrication of capital’s social, racial, economic, and aesthetic order(s). In our view, the anti-police vitality communicated in these and other crude, combative, and dismissive symbolic confrontations with police is part of the necessary conditions for the revolutionary pursuit of a livable future.

Toward work’s new futures: Editors’ Introduction to Technology and the Future of Work special issue

Abstract This special issue is based in the belief that theoretically informed, methodologically diverse, and sociotechnically inspired research is our best approach for understanding contemporary entanglements between the technological and social aspects of work, and for grappling with what that means for our futures. In this Editors’ Introduction to JCMC’s Technology and the Future of Work special issue, we synthesize emergent themes across the eleven papers included and reflect on productive analytic lenses for anticipating how technologies may shape social and work practices, and vice versa. We identify four themes woven across the papers—visibility, relationships, boundaries, and power—and explicate some of the ways that social, technical, temporal, and communicative dimensions of work emerge across a variety of work contexts. Together, these papers highlight the creative, sense-making, and collaborative dynamics of the technologically infused workplace while acknowledging the amorphous nature of work and place, past, present and future.

Liquid Wardrobes and Sensing: A Phenomenological Approach to Digital Perfume Communities

Abstract The fact that perfumes have been regarded as enhancing one’s appearance opens up questions about knowing and wearing fragrances. The connections between fragrances and fashion are being reviewed first according to the notion of embodiment as applied to the understanding of clothing fashion (Entwistle 2000, 2015); then, the lens of “mediatization”, as applied by Rocamora (2017) to grasp the contemporary entanglement of fashion and digital media, further serves to turn to digital perfume communities. These constitute an essential resource to the extent that they share experiences while producing data about wearing and collecting fragrances. By tracing the recent insurgence of perfume criticism and by mapping certain techniques of entering into relation with fragrances through community members’ perfume reviews as well, the study argues that their idiosyncratic and often artistic language is countering the impersonal language of perfume advertising; ultimately, the study suggests unravelling perfume consumption patterns via an aesthetics of attention.

Contested rural landscapes: contemporary entanglements of tourism and farming

The longstanding synergy between rural tourism and farming is under threat from agricultural intensification. Tourism interests in many parts of the world may find themselves facing the negative consequences of long-term shifts in farming practices, particularly the proliferation of intensive livestock operations or factory farms which accompanies the continuing rise in global meat consumption. This study from Herefordshire and Shropshire, in the UK, explores the complex relations surrounding the rapidly multiplying planning applications for intensive poultry units over the last ten years. Concerns that the poultry industry will harm local tourism trade are often raised, yet are denied by the farmer applicants and ignored by planning officers. There is little previous research about how tourists respond to intensive livestock operations and whether visitor economies could gradually experience harm from the cumulative environmental and other impacts. Drawing on survey, documentary, observational and interview data this research found increasing awareness among rural visitors and tourism businesses about negative experiential and economic impacts. Asymmetric power relations and dominant agricultural rationalities have held sway and suppressed tourism voices within a weak policy and planning context. The research recommends adjustments to planning processes to address the slow violence the development of industrial farming practices brings.

Spurious Satanists and Christian Cults

This article explores the historical and contemporary entanglements of race, religion and media as it plays out through a four-part documentary series about deviant, dangerous and criminal Christian group Electus Per Deus, who were responsible for a spate of murders known collectively as the Krugersdorp Killings. Headed by a self-proclaimed powerful ex-Satanist witch, who was actively involved in on-going spiritual warfare, the group’s primary religious activity was to help educate about and assist with escape from the ‘Occult’ in general and Satanism in particular. A curious element of Electus Per Deus’ modus operandi was that the group’s members often masqueraded as Satanists, in order to advance their cause and secure the legitimacy of their claims. The community in which they were positioned vehemently rejected the Christian status of the group despite members claims to the contrary. This article argues that within the historical and contemporary political economies of race, religion and media, White Afrikaans Christian communities, such as those featured in Devilsdorp were inordinately favoured through the policies and practices of the apartheid regime and more recently the Afrikaner capture of commercial media. This re­ligious and racial privilege is reproduced by the series and serves as a reminder of the importance of intersectional, contextually informed approaches to the study of religious diversity, deviance, and danger.

(Re)Considering Pedagogy – Entangled Ontology in a Complex Age: Abstraction Pedagogy and the Critical Pedagogical Importance of Art Education for Other Discipline Areas

AbstractThis article argues that a UK education system is required such that it specifically recognises the particular dynamic, co‐constructive nature of complex and rapid contemporary entanglements (both human and non‐human) and how they inform the epistemic and ontological development of students. This article draws from posthumanist theory and uses the concept of ‘lifeworld’ to cast new light on the lived‐experiences of contemporary children to inform pedagogy. It is part of a doctoral research into the wider pedagogical value of the teaching and assessment of processes of abstraction deployed in art practice.

Rethinking Assistive Technologies: Users, Environments, Digital Media, and App-Practices of Hearing

Against the backdrop of an aging world population increasingly affected by a diverse range of abilities and disabilities as well as the rise of ubiquitous computing and digital app cultures, this paper questions how mobile technologies mediate between heterogeneous environments and sensing beings. To approach the current technological manufacturing of the senses, two lines of thought are of importance: First, there is a need to critically reflect upon the concept of assistive technologies (AT) as artifacts providing tangible solutions for a specific disability. Second, the conventional distinction between user and environment requires a differentiated consideration. This contribution will first review James Gibson’s concept of “affordances” and modify this approach by introducing theories and methods of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Then, we present two case studies where we explore the relations between recent “assistive” app technologies and human sensory perception. As hearing and seeing are key in this regard, we concentrate on two specific media technologies: ReSound LINX2, a hearing aid which allows for direct connect (via Bluetooth) with iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, and Camassia, an IOS app for sonic wayfinding for blind people. We emphasize the significance of dis-/abling practices for manufacturing novel forms of hearing and seeing and drawing on sources like promotional materials by manufacturers, ads, or user testimonials and reviews. Our analysis is interested in the reciprocal relationships between users and their socio-technical and media environments. By and large, this contribution will provide crucial insights into the contemporary entanglement of algorithm-driven technologies, daily practices, and sensing subjects: the production of techno-sensory arrangements.

The Sahara as a\xa0Bridge, Not a\xa0Barrier: An Essay and Book Review on Recent Transregional Perspectives

In the course of the spatial turn, long-established regional subdivisions of the world have been deconstructed, and area studies are increasingly opening up for transregional research. One (re)emerging research field is Trans-Saharan Studies, which considers historical and contemporary entanglements between the Maghreb, the Sahara and the Sahel (with further connections far beyond). Against this background, Steffen Wippel’s essay reviews six recently published works that can be assigned to trans-Saharan research: two comprehensive textbooks and a catalogue written in French, two edited volumes that tackle entangled trans-Saharan and trans-Mediterranean migration flows and a study of an enclosed, yet widely interconnected inner-Saharan place and population group.

Whole world within reach: Google Earth VR

Google Earth VR (GEVR), released in 2017, claims to put the whole world within reach using virtual reality (VR). Relying on sensors that track a user’s position and gestures in actual space, GEVR suggests that users can experience its virtual Earth in the same way that they experience the real one: as a world they actively embody rather than a representation they examine from the outside. While GEVR conjures a dematerialized world, it also interrogates how what counts as a material world may always be suspended between embodied, technical, and aesthetic mediations. If ‘the whole world’ – which exceeds individual perception – can only be conceived through aesthetic logics, what do the particular aesthetics of GEVR tell us about the way our world is imaged and imagined today? What are the implications of the way it stages ‘worlding’ as a provisional, dimensional coordination? What does the disorienting experience it offers suggest about contemporary entanglements of perception and representation, body and world, the individual here-and-now and a global everywhere-at-once?

Hunting and Giving or Working and Selling? Contemporary Entanglements of Innu Economy and Cosmology

Hunting and Giving or Working and Selling? Contemporary Entanglements of Innu Economy and Cosmology

Translating religion and development: Emerging perspectives from critical ethnographies of faith-based organizations

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a remarkable surge of interest among both policy makers and academics on religion and its engagements with development. Within this context, ‘religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs)’ or ‘faith-based organizations’ (FBOs) have garnered considerable attention. Early attempts to understand FBOs often took the form of typological mapping exercises, the cumulative effect of which has been the construction of a field of ‘RNGOs’ that can be analysed as distinct from—and possibly put into the service of—the work of purportedly secular development actors. However, such typologies imply problematic distinctions between over-determined imaginations of separate spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘development’. In this article, we innovatively extend the potential of ethnographic approaches highlighting aspects of ‘brokerage’ and ‘translation’ to FBOs and identify new, productive tensions of convergent analysis. These, we argue, provide original possibilities of comparison and meta-analysis to explore contemporary entanglements of religion and development.This article was written as part of a broader research project on Religion and NGOs in Asia. We are grateful to the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs at the Henry Luce Foundation for their generous support of this research. We would also like to thank Philip Fountain and other members of the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute for stimulating conversations that have informed our thinking in this article, and the anonymous reviewers for PIDS who have helped us to improve on earlier drafts.

Religion in the Age of Development

Religion has been profoundly reconfigured in the age of development. Over the past half century, we can trace broad transformations in the understandings and experiences of religion across traditions in communities in many parts of the world. In this paper, we delineate some of the specific ways in which ‘religion’ and ‘development’ interact and mutually inform each other with reference to case studies from Buddhist Thailand and Muslim Indonesia. These non-Christian cases from traditions outside contexts of major western nations provide windows on a complex, global history that considerably complicates what have come to be established narratives privileging the agency of major institutional players in the United States and the United Kingdom. In this way we seek to move discussions toward more conceptual and comparative reflections that can facilitate better understandings of the implications of contemporary entanglements of religion and development.

Assembling geographies of diplomacy under neoliberalism

There is an enormous gap in our understanding of the state's role in the construction of international markets. Specifically, diplomacy's position in the contemporary entanglement of state and markets has been overlooked. Increasingly, diplomacy's on‐going adaptation to support neoliberalism has led to diplomats operating in a “twilight world” between diplomacy and business. Using assemblage thinking, we investigate the codings, capacities and tendencies emerging in the social spaces of diplomatic possibility in this “twilight world”. Drawing on comprehensive empirical materials on the UK–India diplomatic relationship, we show how the material and expressive components of the UK Foreign Office assemblage are being deployed to champion state goals in global markets. We illustrate the ways in which diplomacy struggles in the name of the state's international competitiveness. In particular, we argue that these social spaces of possibility are structured by both diplomatic and business calculations that have the capacity to create new and unpredictable courses that render both an uncertainty and fuzziness to the agential interactions between assemblages.

The Life of a Gunshot: Space, Sound and The Political Contours of Acoustic Gunshot Detection

This article examines the implications of acoustic gunshot detection systems for the role of sound and nonhuman agencies in Surveillance Studies and their relationship to broader modes of power. This is done by examining the role of a ShotSpotter Flex Incident Report in the case of DeOnté Rawlings, a 14-year old black child shot and killed by an off-duty police officer in Washington, D.C. Through this case, this article traces the diagrams of power that imbricate this surveillance system within structural racism. In focusing on the material particularities of acoustical surveillance systems, like ShotSpotter Flex, this work also reconsiders the role of the visual in surveillance systems and Surveillance Studies. This article argues that these new configurations of sound and nonhuman agency offer a particular value to understanding the contemporary entanglement of surveillant mediums and broader regimes of power.

Learning how to see and feel: Alfred Lichtwark and his concept of artistic and aesthetic education

Focusing on Lichtwark’s concept of museology, this article shows what role he envisaged for art in public life at a time when the rise of mass consumption and popular culture created new lifestyles. Lichtwark’s concept of artistic and aesthetic education did not only extend to museums and classrooms but also to dilettantism as a basis for educating taste and developing an appreciation of the arts that would have a positive economic impact. The article looks at the contemporary entanglements and different contexts of Lichtwark’s ideas and relates them to recent approaches to cultural learning. Generally speaking, it argues that concepts of cultural learning are a bundle of entangled threads that connect and concern not only the sphere of art but also contradictory values and norms, economic production, and the emergence of new important status groups such as consumers.

Infrastructural intelligence: Contemporary entanglements between neuroscience and AI.

In this chapter, I reflect on contemporary entanglements between artificial intelligence and the neurosciences by tracing the development of Google's recent DeepMind algorithms back to their roots in neuroscientific studies of episodic memory and imagination. Google promotes a new form of "infrastructural intelligence," which excels by constantly reassessing its cognitive architecture in exchange with a cloud of data that surrounds it, and exhibits putatively human capacities such as intuition. I argue that such (re)alignments of biological and artificial intelligence have been enabled by a paradigmatic infrastructuralization of the brain in contemporary neuroscience. This infrastructuralization is based in methodologies that epistemically liken the brain to complex systems of an entirely different scale (i.e., global logistics) and has given rise to diverse research efforts that target the neuronal infrastructures of higher cognitive functions such as empathy and creativity. What is at stake in this process is no less than the shape of brains to come and a revised understanding of the intelligent and creative social subject.

Placing Borders in Development

ABSTRACTDevelopment is inextricably related to the state-centred cartography of world spaces defined by borders, both in its historical trajectory and contemporary entanglements. Yet the multiplicity of channels and directions characterising their articulation are scarcely explored. This article contributes to this emerging field of enquiry. It delineates the essential traits of the borders and development nexus by establishing a systematic dialogue between the fields of Border Studies and Development Studies, a dialogue framed by concerns with scalar politics. More specifically, the paper places borders in development in two ways. First, it places borders in Development Studies: it identifies borders as a useful analytical vantage point that lay at the intersection between state- and non-state centred geographies of development. Second, it places Border Studies in development: focusing on the tension between borders and bordering processes, it interrogates economic growth- and poverty-related policies. Three contributions to the study of development arising from placing borders in development in this way are highlighted. The paper also expands the emerging field of enquiry concerned with the relation between borders and development, by considering development policies not yet been examined through the prism of borders, and by emphasising the hierarchical and yet unpredictable nature of the borders and development articulation. At its broadest, the discussion dis-entangles the multiplicity of scales and directions in which borders, bordering and the development process intersect. It is at this scalar intersection that the force of development, and the potentials for engaging, opposing, avoiding, or subverting it, lay.

The conscripted metaphor

Abstract This article explores the relationship between the language of the State and its influence, either seen or unseen, on the language of the writer. The article builds on the claims made by authors such as Edward Said and Albert Jay Nock who posited that the State, in effect, monopolizes cultural and educational institutions, as well as digital mediums, to such an extent that the poet/critic trained or educated inside this State system is compromised at the level of the metaphor, and in the writer’s ability to pursue disinterestedly any real and meaningful criticism of the State. In support of this thesis, the article analyses several historical and contemporary entanglements between Iraq and the west, with an emphasis on critical literature, State demagoguery and higher education.