Contemporary Theory Research Articles

A Politics of Working-Class Culture and the Culture of Working-Class Politics: The Aesthetics and Activism of Amber Film and Photography Collective and the Berwick Street Film Collective

This paper examines how Amber Film and Photography Collective’s working-class affiliations and Berwick Street Film Collective’s middle-class makeup shaped their divergent approaches to depicting ‘working-class issues’ by drawing on the films of both collectives, alongside archival materials and oral testimonies. By engaging in a comparative reading, I highlight the breadth of Amber’s oeuvre, tracing the development of their filmmaking strategies—which included agitprop, the fusion of factual and fictional formal elements and transnational collaboration with the German DemocraticRepublic’s film production company, Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA)—to demonstrate that, contrary to criticisms levelled by contemporary theorists clustered around Screen magazine and the British Film Institute, Amber transcended the constraints of Documentary Realism by incorporating radical avant-garde aesthetics into their oppositional practice. Concomitantly, Amber’s radical filmmaking is positioned as relative to its members’ working-class solidarities, with their concern for championing working-class cultures contrasted with Berwick Street’s broader political agendas. Through foregrounding this politics/culture dialectic, the practical repercussions of Berwick Street’s middle-class representation of ‘working-class interests’ are investigated while the theoretical criteria by which avant-garde depictions of ‘working-class issues’ are evaluated are themselves assessed.

Trust in unions drives egalitarianism: Longitudinal evidence

AbstractDespite the fundamental role of unions in reducing economic inequality, social psychology still needs to incorporate the systematic study of unions concerning the contemporary theories of intergroup inequality. In this study, we do so by testing the reciprocal relationship between trust in unions and social‐dominance orientation egalitarianism (SDO‐E) over time. Using data from the Longitudinal Social Survey of Chile, which is a panel study with a representative sample of urban areas, we carried out a Random Intercept Cross‐Lagged Panel Model with four waves (2016–2019, N = 2972–2153). We controlled the main effect by sex, age, political ideology and educational level. The results show a positive relationship between SDO‐E and trust in unions within and between levels. This means that people who trust in unions also tend to have higher SDO‐E (between effect), and an intraindividual increase in trust in labour unions tends to be followed by an increase in SDO‐E (within effect). Trusting unions as an institution that promotes the hierarchy reduction between workers and employers helps increase people's SDO‐E over time. Please refer to the Supplementary Material section to find this article's Community and Social Impact Statement.

Subverting Gender Bias: "The Manly Woman" in Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love

This paper examines the representations of the white woman in cross-cultural marriage in Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love in a contemporary deconstructive theory. The paper applies Judith Butler's revolutionary theory of gender and identity constructivism and performativity to clarify how the protagonist fights the gender norms and performances by having masculinity codes as a revolting means for emancipation. The paper tends to explore how colonial hegemony can create a cultural distance which is forced against the white woman by this marriage. It investigates the sociopolitical spatial divisions through the eye of the white woman who struggles because she chooses an ethnic husband. The paper applies a feminist theoretical framework to describe the prejudice and bias that appear after this marriage. "The manly woman" is the white woman who wears masculine features to subvert and oppose the gender bias which applies to her femininity.

Civil Disobedience or Not – The Case of Road Blockades in Serbia

The aim of this paper is to answer the question whether the road blockades that took place in Serbia in November and December of 2021 could be characterized as an act of justified civil disobedience. The answer comes from the analysis of the arguably most influental and well-known conception of civil disobedience that can be found in contemporary political theory – the conception that was proposed by the American political philosopher John Rawls. I will argue in support of the thesis that the blockades were an act of justified civil disobedience because they fit the definition of civil disobedience and meet all the conditions for a justified act of civil disobedience that Rawls presented us with.

The Role of Biophysical Factors in Organ Development: Insights from Current Organoid Models.

Biophysical factors play a fundamental role in human embryonic development. Traditional in vitro models of organogenesis focused on the biochemical environment and did not consider the effects of mechanical forces on developing tissue. While most human tissue has a Young's modulus in the low kilopascal range, the standard cell culture substrate, plasma-treated polystyrene, has a Young's modulus of 3 gigapascals, making it 10,000-100,000 times stiffer than native tissues. Modern in vitro approaches attempt to recapitulate the biophysical niche of native organs and have yielded more clinically relevant models of human tissues. Since Clevers' conception of intestinal organoids in 2009, the field has expanded rapidly, generating stem-cell derived structures, which are transcriptionally similar to fetal tissues, for nearly every organ system in the human body. For this reason, we conjecture that organoids will make their first clinical impact in fetal regenerative medicine as the structures generated ex vivo will better match native fetal tissues. Moreover, autologously sourced transplanted tissues would be able to grow with the developing embryo in a dynamic, fetal environment. As organoid technologies evolve, the resultant tissues will approach the structure and function of adult human organs and may help bridge the gap between preclinical drug candidates and clinically approved therapeutics. In this review, we discuss roles of tissue stiffness, viscoelasticity, and shear forces in organ formation and disease development, suggesting that these physical parameters should be further integrated into organoid models to improve their physiological relevance and therapeutic applicability. It also points to the mechanotransductive Hippo-YAP/TAZ signaling pathway as a key player in the interplay between extracellular matrix stiffness, cellular mechanics, and biochemical pathways. We conclude by highlighting how frontiers in physics can be applied to biology, for example, how quantum entanglement may be applied to better predict spontaneous DNA mutations. In the future, contemporary physical theories may be leveraged to better understand seemingly stochastic events during organogenesis.

The Self-ish Gene: Retroactive Tropes in Richard Dawkins’s Evolutionary Logic

ABSTRACT Building on recent developments in Lacanian rhetorical criticism, this essay demonstrates how contemporary evolutionary theory posits genetic determinism without a clear definition of the gene. It makes this case through close readings of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, the landmark text of neo-Darwinian genetics. It demonstrates how Dawkins uses metaphors to substitute a single determinate agent in place of the genome’s essential complexity. Despite Dawkins’s admission that he could not define the gene, his metaphors give his “self-ish gene” a sense of unity and coherence that allows him to describe all other levels of life (organisms, species, ecosystems) as reducible to it. Dawkins’s use of metaphor leverages a broader reductionist logos, one that operates in discourses far beyond the biological. Methodologically, the essay advances the study of scientific metaphor by focusing on the formal properties of metaphor and the ways they afford logical closure.

THE PHENOMENON OF ATMOSPHERE IN ARCHITECTURE

<p class="ABSTRACT">This paper explores the phenomenon of atmosphere in architecture, highlighting its increasing relevance in contemporary theory and practice. By analyzing various perspectives, it investigates how atmosphere is experienced and created in architectural space. The research aims to deepen the understanding of this phenomenon through theoretical analyses and practical approaches, with the intention of enhancing the methodology of architectural design. The combination of theoretical and qualitative methods allows for a diverse examination of atmosphere as a key aspect in the construction of architectural quality, contributing to both the theoretical and practical fields of architecture. These studies emphasize the significance of atmosphere as an integral part of architectural experience, offering new perspectives in the study and design of spaces.</p>

Nature, significance, and the human perspective: Refusing the choice between scientism and posthumanism

This paper criticises contemporary posthumanist theories of anthropocentrism by reading an early essay by Bertrand Russell alongside work by Rosi Braidotti and Jane Bennett. It argues that, despite appearances, scientism and posthumanism share key commitments in common, such that clarifying the problems with which Russell struggles regarding nature and significance can illuminate symmetrical problems in posthumanism. Against these alternatives, the paper draws on insights from Bernard Williams, contemporary Hegelian philosophy, and J. J. Gibson’s work on animal agency to sketch a picture of what it means to take a human perspective. It is the perspective of one species among others, with a particular evolutionary history; it is also the perspective of a species that, because of certain developments in that history, knows itself as such. That opens us to forms of answerability to the world that do not touch the lives of unselfconscious animals. Some critics of the theoretical discourse on anthropocentrism have argued that taking a human perspective is morally unobjectionable. This paper goes further: it is necessary for grasping our relation to the rest of nature and so our responsibilities for it.

Lutherans and vampires, medicine and faith: an early dissertation on the bloodsucking at Medvedia (1732)

ABSTRACT One of the earliest refutations of the Visum et Repertum (1732) by Johann Flückinger was from Johann Wilhelm Nöbling, a young student of philosophy and theology at the University of Jena, who attacked the findings from a position of scientific scepticism enshrouded with Lutheran theology in his thesis Concerning the Blood-Sucking Corpses of those so-called Vampires or People-Suckers. While he is best remembered for first proposing the incubus or nightmare of sleep paralysis as being the real cause of the superstition, his major contribution was theological, concerning the relation between body and soul. And yet while Nöbling provides a rigorous, scripture-based denial of vampirism, his framework necessarily accommodates contemporary medical theory, demonstrating both the adaptation of theology to science and the extent to which pneumatology still inhered in scientific enquiry.

Leveraging multiple digital footprint datasets to predict racial, sex-based, and sexual-orientation bias across US states

Introduction & BackgroundRacial, gender, and sexual-orientation biases are pervasive throughout society. Importantly, modern digitally oriented datasets can elucidate important societal variables and potential solutions. One contemporary theory that attempts to explain these biases is parasite-stress: an evolutionary psychology hypothesis suggesting that increased infectious diseases rates increase out-group biases. We present preliminary findings that suggest that disease rates are a meaningful geospatial predictor of multiple biases. Objectives & ApproachWe explored biases using geospatial analyses throughout multiple datasets based on US participants: Project Implicit, American National Election Studies (ANES), Google Trends, and Twitter/X. We included state-based variables to compare between states and assess the most important environmental-level predictors of biases. We built generalised linear and linear mixed-effect models and general linear models. Within Project implicit (n > 3,000,000) and ANES datasets (n > 30,000), we assessed racial and sexual-orientation biases via explicit and implicit measures. For Google Trends and Twitter/X datasets, we assessed racial and sex-based biases via search and tweet-per-state scores. To analyse the biases, we included environmental-level variables, e.g., infectious disease rates (developed by Thornhill and Fincher in 2014), and individual-level variables, e.g., political orientation. Relevance to Digital FootprintsThese preliminary findings analyse everyday people’s online behaviour including volunteered surveys, searches and posts. We attempt to address the pressing societal issue of bias by leveraging modern datasets. Our primary goal is to aid policy makers by recommending cost-effective solutions that can improve several factors of the population’s quality of life. ResultsWe find that the most consistently significant predictor of racial bias is infectious disease rates. When leveraging Google Trends data including anti-women terminology, infectious disease rates and population density are consistent predictors of bias. Finally, we find preliminary results suggesting that increased levels of infectious diseases increases homophobic bias. Conclusions & ImplicationsOverall, we find that as infectious disease rates increase in a state, the level of racial and sexist bias significantly increases. Consistent with parasite-stress theory, we argue that focusing on reducing infectious disease rates in an area can have a plethora of benefits including improving physical and mental health and reducing biases that damage society.

Dampak Globalisasi Terhadap Nilai-Nilai Budaya Lokal Masyarakat Pedesaan Ambulu Jember

In the current era of globalization, many local communities throughout the world, including in rural Ambulu, Jember, are experiencing changes in values ​​and customs due to global influences. The local cultural values ​​of the Ambulu rural community are known to be very rich and diverse, but face challenges as a result of rapid globalization. This research aims to identify and analyze the impact of globalization on local cultural values ​​in the rural community of Ambulu Jember, with a focus on how these values ​​persist or change over time. This research uses a qualitative approach by applying contemporary theory from Michael Foucault to analyze the data. The focus of analysis in this research looks at how the discourse and practices of power in society change along with the introduction of global values ​​and how local communities react to these changes. The research results show that the Ambulu community experiences dualism in maintaining local cultural values. On the one hand, there are efforts by the community to maintain old customs and values, while on the other hand, several aspects of local culture have evolved or even been eroded due to the influence of globalization, such as changes in language, social rituals and kinship systems. The impact of globalization on local cultural values ​​demands more inclusive adaptation strategies and more strategic cultural preservation so that rural communities such as those in Ambulu can maintain their cultural identity while receiving the benefits of globalization.

Theatre and Communal Movement as Forms of Trauma Therapy in Gregory Burke’s Black Watch (2007)

Abstract This article explores how elements of trauma therapy can be used to interpret the play Black Watch (2007) by Gregory Burke. The introduction provides a summary of Black Watch, as well as an outline of contemporary theories regarding the connection between theatre, war, and trauma therapy. The first part focuses on how the seating arrangements, the choice of actors, and the structure of Black Watch allow the play to create an environment which resembles a therapy session. The second part concentrates on how communal movement, music, and dance are used in the play to express emotions and trauma which could not be put into words. The conclusion investigates how using some of the features of trauma treatment results in Black Watch possessing potential healing properties and insight into the topic of war.

Does financial development and economic growth matter for services export? Cross-country evidence from OECD countries

The unprecedented growth in the export of services and its accompanying economic incentives has invited discussions on service export determinants. Against this background, the present article is an attempt to test whether the contemporary theories on causal links between exports, financial development and growth hold for services export. For realizing the objective, we employed the panel cointegration technique for Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries over a period of 23 years (2000–22). Findings of both first and second generation cointegration test indicate a long run equilibrium between services export, financial development and growth. However, there are differences in the short and long association, as outcomes of panel auto autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach show financial development to be significant determinant of services export only over long run. Additionally, granger causality test suggests a feedback mechanism prevalent between services export-financial development, services export-growth and financial development-growth. The empirical evidence offered in the study elucidates the significance of continuously developing the financial markets and institutions for achieving sustained growth in export of services. The bi-directional relationship between the variables also presents an opportunity to strengthen economic growth and financial development process through policies aimed at expanding services export.

Pure Consciousness as the Ground of the Given: Or, Why There is No Perception Without Background Reception

Abstract: The thrust of the present paper is that contemporary philosophical theories of consciousness are in the grip of a distorted perspective on the nature of their subject. They are absorbed in an understanding of consciousness which overemphasizes its role in grasping intentional objects, while undervaluing its functioning as the receptive ground to whom things are given and in whom they are disclosed. I first make the distinction more precise, discerning two complementary modes of consciousness: the accusative mode and the dative mode, respectively. Taking Locke as a primary representative of the disregard for the dative mode, I proceed to show that this negligence leads to a fundamentally incomplete, and therefore ultimately incoherent, picture regarding the nature of consciousness. This is further demonstrated with regard to some contemporary philosophical theories of consciousness: higher-order monitoring theories and self-representational theories. I then move on to enquire, can the dative mode hypothesis receive support from significant trends in contemporary neuroscience? While interesting connections are drawn in relation to affective neuroscience and to spontaneous background activity, I argue that in order to do full justice to the receptive side of consciousness we must ultimately resort to the more radical concept of pure consciousness, developed primarily within Hindu and Buddhist philosophy.

‘Mrs. Don’t Care’: refusing modern Black motherhood in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

This essay examines the portrayal of modern Black motherhood in Nella Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance novel, Quicksand (1928). Writing in a cultural landscape dominated by discourses of racial uplift, scientific motherhood...

The Role of Satirical Political Platforms in Shaping Societal Political Awareness

The current study aims to uncover the reality of satirical political platforms and the role of the media in developing awareness of citizens’ political participation based on contemporary political theories from the perspective of students themselves. The results of the first question showed that the computational averages of the reality of the media’s role in developing awareness of political participation ranged from 3.67-4.28 to their high level. The results of the second question were shown: The existence of statistically significant differences attributable to the sex variable and to the interests of females and the absence of statistically significant differences depending on the macro variable and the school year. The results of question III showed that the computational averages of the responses of the study sample individuals to the paragraphs of the challenges facing the media in developing awareness of political participation ranged from one to another. (3.80-4.14) and its high level, and the most prominent sources on which the widespread satirical programmes relied as well as the Joe Shaw programme relied on mixed sources in the first place. The study showed that the study programmes took the opposing trend in their coverage of political subjects in proportion (25%), highlighting the media trends used by both Clear Jamming and Joe Shaw in their coverage of political topics is the framework of economic consequences, while Al-Suleit’s news programme focused on using the framework of political conflict. Keywords: political awareness, satirical programs, media, media misinformation.

Wynter's Time

Abstract: Taking the resurgence of critical interest in Sylvia Wynter within contemporary Black cultural theory as its starting point, this essay has two aims: to examine more closely how Wynter has been received recently within Black studies, and to then historicize that critical reception by thinking about how it relates to earlier work (the 1960s–1980s) when Wynter was beginning to develop her own protocols for a critical decolonial and aesthetic theory. Wynter's work on temporality, the cognitive subject, and theories of reading will be the main concern. Although the essay's primary archive is the long arc of Wynter's work and how those interventions have affected some recent turns within Black cultural theory, the piece will also aim to examine more closely the effects of Wynter's interventions through reviewing a number of recent monographs within the theoretical humanities (David Marriott's Whither Fanon?: Studies in the Blackness of Being , Tavia Nyong'o's Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life , Catherine Malabou's Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality , and Katherine McKittrick's Dear Science: and other Stories ) that, when read together, help to describe more clearly the contemporary epistemic atmosphere within which so many new and pathfinding readings of Wynter have been taking place.

The application of state feedback principle in turbine adjustment system with Python control library

Abstract This study investigates the utilization of the Python-Control library in contemporary control theory. The Python-Control package, comprising a collection of Python classes and functions, facilitates the comprehensive analysis and design of feedback control systems. Pole placement, a widely utilized method in the automatic control domain for control system design, is particularly emphasized. This paper explores the application of Python-Control in pole assignment, aiming to enhance control system performance. Additionally, the pole assignment method is successfully implemented in a hydro governor model, demonstrating the efficacy of the Python-Control library in practical control system applications.

Reimagining Chinese Cultural Images: Historical and Contemporary Elements in Smartphone Case Design

This paper explores the historical evolution and contemporary representation of Chinese culture in mobile phone case design. The research aims to deepen our understanding of how traditional Chinese cultural elements are represented in mobile phone case design and how contemporary factors influence these designs. Through a historical review, the research revealed the major cultural elements and design trends of different periods, as well as the influence of historical background on mobile phone case design. The study also provides a detailed analysis of the representation of Chinese cultural elements such as dragons, phoenixes, and Chinese calligraphy in mobile phone case design, along with specific case studies. In the section on contemporary elements and influences, the study discuss the impact of contemporary Chinese social, political, economic, and technological factors on mobile phone case design, as well as how globalization and market demand shape the contemporary designs. The research focus on the ongoing importance of Chinese cultural imagery in mobile phone case design, which not only preserves traditional culture but also reflects the development and global influence of modern China. The significance of this study provide understanding on cultural representation and design trends in China’s mobile phone case design, and future research is recommended to further explore the potential of Chinese cultural elements in the particular product design.

A modified Green-Naghdi fractional order model for analyzing thermoelectric MHD

PurposeWhereas, the classical Green-Naghdi Type II (GN-II) model struggles to accurately represent the thermo-mechanical behavior of thermoelectric MHD due to its inability to account for the memory effect. A new mathematical model of the GN-II theory incorporates a fractional order of heat transport to address this issue.Design/methodology/approachThe employment of the matrix exponential method, which forms the basis of the state-space approach in contemporary theory, is central to this strategy. The resulting formulation, together with the Laplace transform techniques, is applied to a variety of problems. Solutions to a thermal shock problem and to a problem of a layer media both without heat sources are obtained. Also, a problem with the distribution of heat sources is considered. The numerical technique is used to achieve the Laplace transform inversion.FindingsAccording to the numerical results and its graphs, the influences of the fractional order parameters, figure-of-merit factor, thermoelectric power and Peltier coefficient on the behavior of the field quantities are investigated in the new theory.Originality/valueThe new modeling of thermoelectric MHD has advanced significantly as a result of this work, providing a more thorough and precise tool for forecasting the behavior of these materials under a range of thermal and magnetic conditions.