Epistemic Anxieties Research Articles

On the Value of Informal Communication in Archaeological Data Work

Abstract Archaeological data simultaneously serve as formal documentary evidence that supports and legitimizes chains of analytical inference and as communicative media that bind together scholarly activities distributed across time, place, and social circumstance. This contributes to a sense of “epistemic anxiety,” whereby archaeologists require that data be objective and decisive to support computational analysis but also intuitively understand data to be subjective and situated based on their own experiences as participants in an archaeological community of practice. In this article, I present observations of and elicitations about archaeological practices relating to the constitution and transformation of data in three cases in order to articulate this tension and document how archaeologists cope with it. I found that archaeologists rely on a wide variety of situated representations of archaeological experiences – which are either not recorded at all or occupy entirely separate and unpublished data streams – to make sense of more formal records. This undervalued information is crucial for ensuring that relatively local, bounded, and private collaborative ties may be extended beyond the scope of a project and, therefore, should be given more attention as we continue to develop open data infrastructures.

African storytellers and their philosopher relatives

Literary conversations on African philosophy and literature often mirror two sides of the same epistemic dilemma in African intellectual history. On the one hand, questions emerge in negotiating the ontology or being of African philosophy or literature with regard to its substantive value. On the other hand, are epistemic anxieties on legitimation of stories told about Africa or in Africa often couched as residual epistemology to the Western intellectual gaze. The short review herein wades into these challenges and questions, showing how Jeanne-Marie Jackson, in an intriguing work delineates new perspectives that unmasks historical mis-presentations of the African novel while forging a new direction.

How epistemic anxiety and curiosity link perceived value and intended efforts in the language classroom

AbstractLanguage learner anxiety—and emotions in general—has constantly attracted academic attention in the second language acquisition (SLA) field for almost 40 years (Plonsky et al., 2022). However, within the context of the foreign language classroom, epistemic emotions remain understudied, despite their demonstrated effects on performance (D'Mello et al., 2014) and learners’ cognitive processes (Muis et al., 2018a). Epistemic emotions are academic emotions that “relate to knowledge-generating qualities of cognitive tasks and activities” (Pekrun et al., 2017, p. 1268). Their object focus lies in the generation of knowledge (Vogl et al., 2019a) and therefore are prominent during learning activities in academic settings. Recent research in SLA shows that epistemic emotions play a considerable role in instructed language learning (Fraschini, 2023; Nakamura et al., 2022). This current study analyses how two common epistemic emotions—epistemic anxiety and curiosity—mediate the link between a learner's perceived value and intended effort. Empirical data was collected using a tailor-designed survey administered to learners of Korean as a foreign language enrolled in a hybrid university course. Results show that epistemic anxiety and curiosity are independent of each other and coexist during language learning tasks. Furthermore, both epistemic emotions significantly correlate to a learner's perceived value of language learning, with opposite effects. While learners with a higher perceived value tend to be more curious, they also appear less anxious. These results are further discussed considering teachers’ and learners’ characteristics and in relation to theoretical and pedagogical implications for the language classroom.

Trad nationalist a/effects

Trad nationalist a/effects

Mirroring the Enthusiasm and Plight of a Neophyte in Philosophy

Of all the professions one can think of, perhaps, none is as interesting and at the same time as frightening to a beginner of it as philosophy is to a beginner. 'Philosophy' is a word so much used and cherished by many but so often misunderstood because many would like to define it from different points of view. The big questions have always been: What is philosophy? Who is a philosopher? What does it mean to philosophize? The unanswered questions in philosophy, when will they be answered? These are the kinds of puzzles a beginner in philosophy will likely face. This work is expository, analytic, and critical in its methodology. Its main objective is to present the dual nature of Philosophy as an area of study and to encourage neophytes in the area to be conscious of this since it has implications for an effective understanding of the discipline. In terms of procedure, first, there will be an attempt to define philosophy and discuss its nature, history, and core areas. Secondly, some mistaken claims regarding Philosophy shall be highlighted and clarified. Thirdly, and finally, the various ways in which Philosophy is both fascinating or enticing, and demanding or challenging, shall be discussed and evaluated, with some recommendations on how best to approach the study of philosophy to minimize the epistemic anxieties of upstarts in the field.

Epistemic anxiety and epistemic risk

In this paper, I provide an account of epistemic anxiety as an emotional response to epistemic risk: the risk of believing in error. The motivation for this account is threefold. First, it makes epistemic anxiety a species of anxiety, thus rendering psychologically respectable a notion that has heretofore been taken seriously only by epistemologists. Second, it illuminates the relationship between anxiety and risk. It is standard in psychology to conceive of anxiety as a response to risk, but psychologists – very reasonably – have little to say about risk itself, as opposed to risk judgement. In this paper, I specify what risk must be like to be the kind of thing to which anxiety can be a response. Third, my account improves on extant accounts of epistemic anxiety in the literature. It is more fleshed out than Jennifer Nagel’s (2010a), which is largely agnostic about the nature of epistemic anxiety, focusing instead on what work it does in our epistemic lives. In offering an account of epistemic anxiety as an emotion, my account explains how it is able to do the epistemological work to which Nagel puts it. My account is also more plausible than Juliette Vazard’s (2018, 2021), on which epistemic anxiety is an emotional response to potential threat to one’s practical interests. Vazard’s account cannot distinguish epistemic anxiety from anxiety in general, and also fails to capture all instances of what we want to call epistemic anxiety. My account does better on both counts.

Data Legacies, Epistemic Anxieties, and Digital Imaginaries in Archaeology

Archaeology operates in an increasingly data-mediated world in which data drive knowledge and actions about people and things. Famously, data has been characterized as “the new oil”, underpinning modern economies and at the root of many technological transformations in society at large, even assuming a near-religious power over thought and action. As the call for this Special Issue recognizes, archaeological research is socially and historically situated and consequently influenced by these same broader developments. In archaeology, as in the wider world, data is the foundation for knowledge, but its capacity is rarely reflected upon. This paper offers just such a reflection: a meditation on the nature of archaeological digital data and the challenges for its (re)use. It asks what we understand by data: its etymology and comprehension, its exceptionality and mutability, its constructs and infrastructures, and its origins and consequences. The concept of the archaeological data imaginary is introduced to better understand approaches to the collection and use of archaeological data, and a case study examines how knowledge is mediated and remediated through the data embedded in grey literature. Appreciating the volatility and unpredictability of digital data is key in understanding its potential for use and reuse in the creation of archaeological knowledge.

Race-making, religion and rights in the post-colony: unmasking the pathogen in assembling a Hindu nation

AbstractThis paper intervenes in critical socio-legal/post-colonial scholarship on human rights directed at how religion is constitutive of race and shapes who and what is regarded as ‘human’ and entitled to rights. It focuses on the Indian post-colony and legal persecution of the Tablighi Jamaat, a global, quietest Islamic movement, by the Hindu Right government during the Covid pandemic. It analyses how religion structures race in Hindu nationalist discourse to transform the Muslim into a perpetual outsider and an existential and epistemic threat to the Hindu nation and rights of the Hindu racial majority. The discussion connects to the epistemic anxiety generated by the alternative worldviews presented by this racialised ‘Other’ that shape legal consciousness and rights interventions globally. In complicating how anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia are integral to the transnational histories of race and race-making, the analysis triggers a rethinking of human rights interventions and the epistemological closures they enact.

Is epistemic anxiety an intellectual virtue?

In this paper, I discuss the ways in which epistemic anxiety promotes well-being, specifically by examining the positive contributions that feelings of epistemic anxiety make toward intellectually virtuous inquiry. While the prospects for connecting the concept of epistemic anxiety to the two most prominent accounts of intellectual virtue, i.e., “virtue-reliabilism” and “virtue-responsibilism”, are promising, I primarily focus on whether the capacity for epistemic anxiety counts as an intellectual virtue in the reliabilist sense. As I argue, there is a close yet unexplored connection between feelings of epistemic anxiety and the form of inference commonly known as “Inference to the Best Explanation” (IBE). Specifically, I argue that both the recognition that some fact requires an explanation—a necessary first step in applying IBE—and the subsequent motivation to employ IBE are typically facilitated by feelings of epistemic anxiety. So, provided IBE is truth-conducive the capacity for epistemic anxiety should count as an intellectual virtue in the reliabilist sense. After outlining my main argument, I address the challenge that the capacity for epistemic anxiety has the potential to be misleading. To respond to this challenge, I discuss how our recognition that a fact requires an explanation must in part be a species of practical knowledge, rather than theoretical knowledge. For the agent to skillfully distinguish between facts that require an explanation and facts that do not, she must develop the virtuous disposition to feel the appropriate amount of epistemic anxiety. Despite the many negative aspects associated with anxiety, as I conclude, being disposed to feel the appropriate amount of epistemic anxiety is ultimately good for us.

Passive elementary student's constructed epistemic emotions and patterns of participation during small group scientific modeling

AbstractIn this qualitative case study, we purposively selected a passive student in elementary science class from a small group and examined what factors contributed to her socially and momentarily construction of epistemic emotions. We used various data such as emotion diaries, transcripts of the video recordings, postlesson interviews, and field notes to document her involvement in the six lessons of the scientific modeling of the human respiratory system. Our analysis revealed that she constructed the epistemic emotions of frustration, anxiety, and joy. Her nonparticipation and constructed epistemic frustration in Lesson 1 were because of her unfamiliarity with the task and her perception that her ideas will be rejected by others. Due to her lack of previous knowledge, that desire to engage in the small group argumentative discussions was affected by her perception that her ideas would be rejected. With slightly increased familiarity and a sense of acceptance in Lessons 2 and 3, she displayed passive participation and constructed epistemic anxiety because she was not certain whether her opinions were scientifically correct or not. With the uncertainty of her ideas, she was not able to develop a personal motivational drive to engage in effortful participation. Finally, she exhibited active participation and constructed epistemic joy in Lessons 5 and 6 when she became familiar with scientific argumentation and scientific modeling, in addition to her developed sense of full acceptance. These results indicated the intertwined relations of affective, cognitive, and social aspects of learning on student's participation and construction of epistemic emotions.

(Un)reasonable doubt as affective experience: obsessive–compulsive disorder, epistemic anxiety and the feeling of uncertainty

How does doubt come about? What are the mechanisms responsible for our inclinations to reassess propositions and collect further evidence to support or reject them? In this paper, I approach this question by focusing on what might be considered a distorting mirror of unreasonable doubt, namely the pathological doubt of patients with obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Individuals with OCD exhibit a form of persistent doubting, indecisiveness, and over-cautiousness at pathological levels (Rasmussen and Eisen in Psychiatr Clin 15(4):743–758, 1992; Reed in Obsessional experience and compulsive behaviour: a cognitive-structural approach, Academic Press, Cambridge, 1985; Tolin et al. in Cogn Ther Res 27(6):657–669, 2003). I argue that the failure in OCD is of an affective nature, involving both excessive epistemic anxiety and hyperactive feelings of uncertainty. I further argue that our adaptive disposition to inquire about the right matters—that is, about propositions which are both epistemically risky and imply harmful possibilities—might depend on these affective mechanisms.

Roundtable on Visuality, Race and Nationhood in Italy

This Roundtable on Visuality, Race and Nationhood in Italy brings together scholars from the arts, humanities and social sciences to discuss historical constructions of Italian whiteness and national identity in relation to the current xenophobic discourse on race and migration, stressing their rootedness in as yet unchallenged modern notions of scientific racism. Building on postcolonial historian and anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler’s definition of the colonial archive as a ‘site of knowledge production’ and a ‘repository of codified beliefs’ in Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009: 97), the discussants conceive the archive as a multi-layered, collective repository of aspiration, dominance, desire, self-aggrandizement and fear through which the development of society’s self-image can be revealed but also – through a systematic and critical approach to the (visual) archive of coloniality – contested. Based on the analysis of visual cultures (photographs, news footage, advertisements, propaganda, fiction film, etc.) the Roundtable addresses and connects wide-ranging issues such as: the gaze from above and below in colonial-era ethnographic film; the depiction of migration in the Far Right’s rhetoric; representations of fears and fetishisms towards Others in Federico Fellini’s work; and the exploitation of the colonial past in the Italy–Libya Bilateral Agreements on migration. The Roundtable was organized in response to the surge in xenophobic violence sparked by the Italian Parliamentary elections of March 2018 and to mark the publication of Gaia Giuliani’s monograph Race, Nation, and Gender in Modern Italy: Intersectional Representations in Visual Culture (2018).

Anxieties about knowing in the context of work discussion: questions of difference

ABSTRACTThe authors address why issues of difference in identity may be difficult to explore in the context of Work Discussion Seminars. Consideration is given to the importance of finding ways of reflecting on the phenomena of difference which makes use of a psychoanalytic frame of reference. Attention is also paid to the heightened levels of anxiety that are generated when thinking about diverse identities and an illustrative vignette is given by way of example. It is proposed that a specific form of anxiety, named here as epistemic anxiety, may be evoked by learning that threatens existential security and a stable sense of identity. The authors suggest that epistemic anxiety is especially relevant for understanding why issues of ethnicity and difference may not always be adequately examined in Work Discussion Seminars.

Is There a Right to Untranslatability? Asylum, Evidence and the Listening State*

This article focuses on Refugee Status Determination (RSD) procedures, in order to understand the relationships among language, translation / interpreting, evidentiary assessment, and what we call the ‘listening state’. Legal systems have only recently begun to consider whether adjudicative processes ought to take place in multiple languages concurrently, or whether the ideal procedure is to monolingualize evidence first, and then assess it accordingly. Because of this ambivalence, asylum applicants are often left in the ‘zone of uncertainty’ between monolingualism and multilingualism. Their experiences and testimonies become subject to an ‘epistemic anxiety’ only infrequently seen in other areas of adjudication. We therefore ask whether asylum applicants ought to enjoy a ‘right to untranslatability’, taking account of the State's responsibility to cooperate actively with them or whether the burden ought to remain with the applicant to achieve credibility in the language of the respective jurisdiction, through interpretation and translation.

The Eyes of Radio Free Europe: Regimes of Visibility in the Cold War Archives

This article investigates on the basis of letters to Radio Free Europe how the ersatz coupling of sensory data streams impacted the political imagination before and after 1989. While reconstructing the medial configuration of a clandestine information flow and reflecting on the micro-powers involved, the article follows the case through its own archival visibility, thus capturing the very tension between seeing and hiding. Going both “along the archival grain” to capture the epistemic anxieties of governance, and “against the archival grain” to retrieve from the hermetic tectonic of archival layers the story of a Cold War trickster, offers a better understanding of the epistemic limits of the Cold War archives and thus to map and transgress them.

“To Talk of Many Things”: Chaotic Empathy and Anxieties of Victorian Taxidermy in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

“To Talk of Many Things”: Chaotic Empathy and Anxieties of Victorian Taxidermy in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Lin Young (bio) The eponymous heroine of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) traverses a mad dreamscape, one in which playing cards are employed as gardeners, flamingos serve as croquet mallets, and white rabbits wear waistcoats. For the Victorian Alice, the fantastical absurdity of Wonderland lies in the notion that the capacity for consciousness, identity, and employment extends from human to animal to object. At precisely the same time that Carroll was dreaming up these categorically confused characters, the world of Victorian taxidermy was undergoing a series of crucial changes that saw seemingly straightforward animal bodies designed for the natural history display evolve into charming and charismatic anthropomorphic creatures. When placed in the larger context of the Victorian preoccupation with natural history and the rise of anthropomorphic taxidermy as a popular entertainment, Carroll’s representation of a tangled hierarchy of consciousness can be understood as a subversion of the nineteenth century’s appetite for a categorical and governable natural world that must, in some way, address the ever-shifting role of the human within that world. This paper will argue that the modes of being as understood by the Victorians—namely, those of human, animal, and object—exist in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as products of an imagined process of assembly and disassembly. By exploring three distinct representations of “assembled” identity in the text—the human-object, the animal-object, and the human-animal— I will demonstrate that Carroll extends the capacity to be rendered down into parts (and, by extension, to be reassembled into alternative shapes) to all three imagined categories of being, removing the delineating lines between human, animal, and object in such a way that the individual features of each particular group become interchangeable with those of other groups. The result of this is twofold: first, it enables us to read the epistemic anxieties inherent in the display and organization of the Victorian natural history museum into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, particularly as they are reflected in the evolution of taxidermy from a purely categorical, instructional tool that insists on the separation of identities, into the realm of anthropomorphism, which imagines a kind of blended identity. Second, by engaging with these anxieties and extending the capacity for objecthood to all categories of being, [End Page 47] Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland can be situated as a key text in the evolution of the Victorian it-narrative and its increasing concern for the faculty of empathy, allowing for a kind of “object identity” to exist without the structures of human ownership.1 This paper thus identifies Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a vital intersection between two evolving modes of Victorian observation—the human observation of the animal-object and the imagined reversal of that gaze in the animal-object’s observation of the human. In understanding Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a product of these two prototypical Victorian approaches to increasingly tenuous hierarchies among human, animal, and object, we must read Wonderland as both the result and the embodiment of an extended rearrangement and reconfiguration of the catalogue of life in the nineteenth century. Critics have long noted that Lewis Carroll had some interest in natural history, and particularly so during Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’s period of production: he was a regular museum-goer, and his diary records his desire to “borrow a Natural History to help in illustrating Alice’s Adventures” (Diaries 193), though the potential influence of taxidermy on his work has thus far been overlooked. Arguably this influence began in 1851, when he was said to have attended the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, London. The Great Exhibition is particularly notable for introducing the Victorian public to the anthropomorphic taxidermy of Hermann Ploucquet, whose animal tableaux involving “frogs having a shave, kittens serving tea, and a marten acting as a schoolmaster” (Morris 4–5) were immensely popular with the Victorian public; the Illustrated London News published illustrations of them, and Queen Victoria herself wrote of them in her diary (8). It seems only logical to assume that...

How Archaeological Evidence Bites Back

Archaeological data are shadowy in a number of senses. They are notoriously incomplete and fragmentary, and the sedimented layers of interpretive scaffolding on which archaeologists rely to constitute these data as evidence carry the risk that they will recognize only those data that conform to expectation. These epistemic anxieties further suggest that, once recovered, there is little prospect for putting “legacy” data to work in new ways. And yet the “data imprints” of past lives are a rich evidential resource; archaeologists successfully mine old data sets for new insights that redirect inquiry, often calling into question assumptions embedded in the scaffolding that made their recovery possible in the first place. I characterize three strategies by which archaeologists address the challenges posed by legacy data: secondary retrieval and recontextualization of primary data, and the use old data in experimental simulations of the cultural past under study. By these means, archaeologists establish evidential claims of varying degrees of credibility, not by securing empirical bedrock but through a process of continuously building and rebuilding provisional empirical foundations.

Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work by Noah Heringman

588 BOOK REVIEWS after Enclosure to the dispossession of land from its inhabitants in Jamaica, among other sites in the Global South that Rob Nixon analyzes in his re­ cent Slow Violence and the Environmentalism ofthe Poor. And, towards the end of the book she connects nineteenth-century Northamptonshire to con­ temporary Detroit, with its predicament ofan urban abandonment that be­ speaks an administrative attitude of population disposability. This last sta­ tion in a global itinerary ofconnected histories is for Guyer a homecoming, insofar as she acknowledges in her coda that it is a beginning: both the birthplace of the book as a critical project and the place where she herself and generations of family members were born. Guyer movingly inscribes herself in a legacy of homelessness-at-home that makes Clare her—and, as she argues, our—contemporary, his writings texts to read our contempor­ aneity with. In another sense, in reading with John Clare, Guyer performs “reading with” as an act of doubling companionship or fellowship. What kind of doubling does she perform, and what does this doubling reveal? At the be­ ginning of this review, I compared the power of her writing to a subtle, soft-laser light that illuminates with precision and surety. In the coda, Guyer uses the term “flickering” to describe passages in and around Clare as these flicker and reflect contemporary scenes and passages in what Walter Benjamin calls a “constellation” capable anachronically of opening up re­ pressed, forgotten, minor histories. In the elegance and economy of this book, Guyer reflects the specifically minimalist economy of Clare’s writing itself, illuminating its uncanny power of abstraction. Like a few other writ­ ers of Romanticism whose texts stage conversations between the literary and the philosophical in a minimalist vein (Holderlin, Dickinson, and Buchner come to mind), Clare’s abstraction itselfgives a theoretical power that illuminates in flickers the dotted lines that organize particulars. In re­ sponding to the power of this poetry, and reading with John Clare, Guyer exercises a vigilance that maintains a warm and light touch of critical care. It is this attitude that, I suggest, makes her plea for and performance of close reading one precisely of careful reading. Emily Sun Barnard College/National Tsing Hua University Noah Heringman. Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 369. $110. The Romantic age is, as John Keats writes, an age of emergent disciplinarity : “Every department ofknowledge we see excellent and calculated toSiR , 55 (Winter 2016) BOOK REVIEWS 589 wards a great whole. . . . An extensive knowledge is needful to thinking people, it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening specula­ tion, to ease the Burden of the Mystery. ” This burden can be ascribed to alternative temporal narratives that blasted open a reassuring 6000-year theological story via Orientalist William Jones (ageless Hindu chronolo­ gies), geologist James Hutton (“no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end”; Theory of the Earth, 1788), or Byron’s geopolitical cycles (Childe Harold, 3:1630—38), the Shelleys, Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, etc. Reassur­ ance remains, however, wholly anticipatory, and hence anxious. Disciplin­ ary “ease” never quite manifests itself without the “heat and the fever” of epistemic anxiety, before devolving into interdisciplinarity in the Human­ ities. Recent attempts to recenter this disciplinary drift via consilience, in­ tegration, and other science-biased quests for a new order, oppose, in turn, a pre- and post-disciplinary Disorder of Things (see the Eighteenth Century Studies Special Issue, edited by Adriana Craciun and Luisa Cale [45, no. 1, 20111). Noah Heringman’s Sciences ofAntiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work intervenes in this problematic historiography of discipline (de)formation. Heringman’s wide-ranging and deeply re­ searched book is interested in uncovering the unruliness of predisciplinarity , in particular the interaction between natural history and antiquarian­ ism as “sciences of antiquity” respectively dedicated to making sense of nature and culture. An unproblematic division between nature and culture is undone over the course ofthis highly readable book by showing the mu­ tual dependence of each on the other. Ethnography, for instance, connects natural history and antiquarianism when “knowledge workers” (Hering­ man’s...

The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in OrderKateEichhorn. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013.

Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order Kate Eichhorn. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2013.The specific focus of Eichhorn's volume is centrality of the archive and practices of archiving in the activism, cultural production, and scholarship of feminists born during and after the rise of the second wave movement with an emphasis on only affect but also order(3). It is the ordering process that enables access not just to the documents, but also, for Eichhorn, the potential for agency in the constraining social context shaped by neo-liberalism (7). In effect, the archive can be used to re-inform the present by de-centering the normative understanding of the past and allowing other interpretations of evidence to develop and emerge, by essentially queering the questions addressed to the archive.The book is comprised of six sections: the introduction, four separate chapters, and the conclusion. While her work incorporates such anticipated theorists as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, she also draws on the work of Ann Cvetkovich, Judith Halberstarn, and the scholar/practitioner Jenna Freedman, whom she discusses in depth. concept of an archival turn is adopted from Ann Laura Stoler's work Along the Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009). In Chapter One, The 'Scrap Heap' Reconsidered: Selected Archives of Feminist Archiving, the author presents a partial history of archiving, beginning with what she identifies as the decline of the first wave of activism. From her perspective, this context of decline allows the collectors to orient their practice in defiance of the idealization of political progress for feminists. It also pulls the archivist into consideration of the as it matters in the present, which then exceeds a merely preservationist objective in maintaining the resources (31). It enables the possibility of the emergence of archivist as activist.In the next three chapters, Eichhorn presents three case studies of feminist documents and self-published materials as special collections in university libraries across North America (15). Chapter Two, Archival Regeneration: Zine Collections at the Sallie Bingham Center of Duke University, explores the transformation of the audience in the donation by Sarah Dyer of 2050 self-produced zines to a formal academic institution. Her description of the inter-generational proximities which become possible in a archive support her contention that collection itself may advance storytelling that in itself can lead to a reframing of women's history.Chapter Three, Redefining a Movement: Riot Grrrl at Fales Library and Special Collection of New York University continues the exploration of the relationship between the collector, the archive, and the shaping of story. …

What Is a Digital Author? The Faulknerian Author Function in Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme

This article examines Jean-Luc Godard's Film Socialisme (2010) through its references to the fiction of William Faulkner. This article contends that Film Socialisme's distinctive method of allusion serves a poetic function, beckoning our attention to how language, representations, and ideas recirculate, and what this means to us—or should mean to us—in a world pervaded by digital technology and intellectual property regimes. Godard's references to the fiction of William Faulkner serve as a case study, not only because they offer a rich illustration of how Godard reworks his source material, but also because the filmmaker has consistently gestured to the work of Faulkner throughout his career, from his first feature-length film to his most recent. This article finds that the film's circuitous and prolific method of allusion functions both as a means to critique commonly held notions of authorship, and to point out the absurdity of copyright laws, or as they are known in France, droits d'auteur. Further, Film Socialisme's use of Light in August in points to an epistemic anxiety regarding the limits of language and narrative to faithfully represent lived experience, and in turn, the world.