Ethical Encounter Research Articles

Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History, by David Martin-Jones

True empathy is not a total understanding of the other, the gait of one in the satisfied knowledge of a walk in the other’s shoes, but an encounter with empathy’s own limits, the impossibility of access to the other’s experiences and histories, an act of hesitation at the edge of an irreducible abyssal distance. What David Martin-Jones does in his bold and brilliant Cinema Against Doublethink is to extend this Levinasian insight to a perspective on world history and the lost pasts of the Global South. By analysing films where “cinematic depictions of the past are aesthetically structured like ethical encounters with others” (2), Martin-Jones diagnoses and exposes a trend in world cinema (what he calls a “world of cinemas”) to decentre Eurocentric and colonialist historical narratives through forcing an encounter with histories that do not fit the singular narrative decreed by colonial modernity. This is framed by Martin-Jones through the Orwellian notion of doublethink as the spinning of a political narrative of the past at odds with the facts.

Re-enactment and Traumatic Memory: Cinematic Ethics in The Act of Killing and S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine

Abstract The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer, 2012) and its companion piece, The Look of Silence (2014), are powerful works of cinematic ethics. The former is a ‘perpetrator documentary’ that invites killers to make movie re-enactments of their crimes, the latter a case of ‘ethical witnessing’ in which a victim’s descendant questions his brother’s killer. In what follows, I explore The Act of Killing’s use of stylised re-enactments, using various movie genres as distancing and mediating devices, which enable the perpetrators to approach and expose their traumatic acts of violence. I contrast this with Rithy Panh’s perpetrator/witness documentary, S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003), focusing on the mass killings perpetrated by the Pol Pot regime (1975–1979), which uses both visual representations and a more direct, bodily performative mode of re-enactment, to represent and communicate traumatic memory. Both films examine a range of moral emotions, solicited through interview sequences and different modes of cinematic re-enactment. These strategies enable the perpetrators to expose their traumatic violence and, in some cases, acknowledge the suffering of their victims, but also allow the perpetrators to be questioned and held to account, staging an ethical encounter wherein the social recognition of traumatic memory of political violence might become possible.

Review: David Martin Jones, Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History

Review: David Martin Jones, Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History

Cinema against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History, David Martin-Jones (2019)

Review of: Cinema against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History, David Martin-Jones (2019) London and New York: Routledge, 258 pp., ISBN 978-1-13890-795-9, pbk, £27.99

Friendly moods

This exploration is a journeying toward ethical encounters with others in unfamiliar locales. It attends to friendship, close association with non-relatives, and a nexus of themes that arise amidst the COVID-19 global health crisis: quarantine life, networks of belonging and human connections, and new forms of research and productivity. The piece’s ruminative thinking draws on what the author discovers at a personal level in Madrid, Spain, pursuing a knowledge of what is to be gained—produced—by not moving, but from dwelling indoors. Not a travelogue underpinned by tourist optimism, this postcard essay is a travel story of a philosophy of life through friendship and a caring commitment to strangers. This approach allows for coping through and understanding the most important problem of our time, the COVID-19 pandemic.

David Martin-Jones, Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History

David Martin-Jones commences his ambitious and impressive new book, Cinema Against Doublethink, with a clever but confusing analogy, combining the famous thought experiment concerning Schrödinger’s cat with an imaginary installation of conceptual art. He imagines an art exhibition where world history is like a pair of shoes, or a cat, in a box, where the spectator does not know whether the shoes, or the cat, are there or not; guerrilla filmmakers ‘of a world of cinemas’ (p. xiv) break into the gallery one night and start projecting films through the box, showing that world history is not singular but multiple, screening historical stories of colonialist oppression and political resistance that would otherwise have been lost to the past. Although hard to visualize, Martin-Jones’s playful analogy is intended to convey the central idea behind his book, namely that philosophical film studies needs to focus on stories concerning the ‘lost pasts’...

Failing to Perform Citizenship: Daily Narratives About Stockholm’s ‘vulnerable EU citizens’

The question of mobile Roma beggars in Europe has been analysed in terms of securitization, racialization, and deportability. These people have been hailed as ‘abject’ or ‘failed’ citizens, the problem of race being made largely invisible. In the Swedish context, the category of race does not emerge in overt form, and Swedes generally imagine themselves to be an egalitarian and just society. However, in Stockholm, in 2015, the unprecedented visibility of rough sleeping EU-migrants turned daily chance meetings tasks into ‘ethical encounters’. Using the concept of enacting citizenship and the Narrative Policy Framework, this article analyses day-to-day narratives about ‘vulnerable EU citizens’ constructed by the media and experts in the winter of 2015 in Stockholm. Most press narratives would silence the voices of migrants, framing them as passive victims, their problem being defined in terms of extreme temperature, thus making cold weather the principle villain. With regard to acts of citizenship, the paper analyses expert opinions on the migrants’ performance. Their stories and discourse reveal the image of a ‘vulnerable EU citizen’: one of a passive, begging, distressingly visible individual who is failing to perform citizenship. This shortcoming is regarded here as contributing to the justification of a wider policy framework in which the migrants’ claims are seen as unfounded and undeserved, while their attitude is viewed as unappreciative, although they would allegedly not be racialized as a group.

Levinas and the political problem of original peace

By prioritizing the ethical encounter with the Other over politics, Levinas appears to relegate political concerns to a secondary status. Not only does politics appear to be less important than the face-to-face, it even appears to be morally compromised. Nevertheless, Levinas insists that politics are necessary for a moral society. This paper attempts to navigate this tension between morality and politics by exploring Levinas’s account of original peace as opposed to competing accounts of original violence in Hobbes and Derrida. This original peace not only serves as a foundation of the political order, but also provides the context in which to understand Levinas’s famous account of the third. The introduction of the third party appears to problematize the self-other account and opens an aporia in the ethical relation. Far from being a necessary evil, politics instead appears as a necessary good to both remain true to the ethical imperative of the face-to-face and solve the problem introduced by the third party. It is by recognizing that the political is already implicated in the face-to-face relation that Levinas seeks to bridge the gap between peace with the Other and peace within a political society.

David Martin-Jones (2018)Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History

David Martin-Jones (2018)<i>Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History</i>

Allocation of the "Already" Limited Medical Resources Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic, an Iterative Ethical Encounter Including Suggested Solutions From a Real Life Encounter.

The shortage of healthcare providers is well-documented in low-income countries (LIC) prior to COVID-19, due to various causes including the migration to developed countries, scarcity of supplies, poor healthcare infrastructure, limited ICU facilities, and lack of access to guidelines and protocols. One of the important hitches in LIC is the insufficient testing capacity that precluded accurate assessment of disease burden and subsequently resource allocations. Trying to adhere to the principles of bioethics including respect to others, beneficence, and justice should be applied on the ground in the particular setting of the LIC. Solutions should be tailored to the tangible needs and possibility of implementation in real life in the face of the “already” limited resources by making use of simple, yet plausible, measures. Implementing guidelines and frameworks that were set to work in the better-resourced nations is a call for futility. The adoption of novel solutions to overcome the unique challenges in the LIC is exigent. These include the use of automated screening algorithms and virtual video clinics. Moreover, integrating electronic intensive care unit (e-ICU) software may allow for remote monitoring of multiple patients simultaneously. Telemedicine could help in getting consultations worldwide. It can also enhance healthcare workers' knowledge and introduce new skills through teleconferences, e-workshops, and free webinars. Healthcare workers can be remotely trained to enhance their skills. Agencies, such as the WHO, should develop comprehensive programs to tackle different health issues in LIC in collaboration with major institutions and experts around the world.

Marginalia as narratives of ordinary lives: Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s Down to This

This article examines Canadian author Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall’s 2004 memoir Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown through the notions of marginalia and the ordinary in order to question dichotomic representations of homelessness. It explores how the author moves beyond binaries, interrogating the dichotomy ordinary/out of the ordinary lives by narrating his ethical encounter with the other (Butler, 2004). The text is written as a journal where Bishop-Stall describes his personal journey through homelessness; and more importantly, it gives a voice to the other down-and-out people in notorious Toronto’s Tent City. The characters’ unreliable and fragmented storytelling uncovers the lives of the faceless others. I contend that in Down to This individuals’ life stories are connected to realities which question binaries through the re/mapping of ordinary experiences and affects; they disintegrate the opposition materiality vs abstraction, or as I argue, exclusion vs inclusion (out of the ordinary/ordinary). Down to These bridges the private details of the residents’ life stories, and the public perception of the problem of homelessness, illustrating how everyday moments of precarity intersect with wider political issues. In the process, the narrative also questions the binary attitudes of exclusion (disfranchisement) and inclusion (privilege). This literary strategy gives the constellation of stories a profound illuminating vision of the human condition. I show my point by drawing on the of marginalia (Kistner 2014), and by analysing the characters’ narratives of precariousness through the notions of editing and affective assemblage (Gerlach, 2015; Hamilakis, 2017).

World Cinema between the rock of the unknowable and the hard place of the as yet unknown

ABSTRACT Hypotheses that instigated the possibility of destabilising and de-westernising film theory have inspired a critical framework for analysing World Cinema that demands new and evolving understandings of its construction and fluidity, particularly in relation to its lost pasts and possible futures. Referencing several key works in this field and responding to David Martin-Jones’s Cinema Against Doublethink: Ethical Encounters with the Lost Pasts of World History (2019) in particular, this article questions what is unknowable and as yet unknown about World Cinema. Following Derrida, it argues that the answers lie in how World Cinema gains meaning(s) through the process of différance (difference and deferral of meaning), particularly through genre. Deploying and dismantling genre theory in case studies of Wind River (Sheridan 2017), Chung Hing sam la/Chungking Express (Wong 1994), Faa yeung nin wa/In The Mood for Love (Wong 2000), Moonlight (Jenkins 2016) and Widows (McQueen 2018), the article targets the logjam of ethical hesitancy in approaching World Cinema and, holding that impurities in western cinema constitute trace evidence of new paradigms happening elsewhere in World Cinema, posits empathy and its deferral as essential to an understanding of the dynamics of the cinemas of the world.

MORAL COMMODITIES AND THE PRACTICE OF FREEDOM

AbstractThis essay explores an increasingly popular genre of organized group travel in white mainline and emerging evangelical US Christianity I call “journeys to the margins”: trips centered on learning from marginalized persons for the traveler’s ethical formation. Drawing on ethnographic research with one case study, “Come and See Tours” to Israel/Palestine, I interrogate how the commodified form of these trips shape possibilities for ethical subjectivation. First, I demonstrate ways in which journeys to the margins market ethical transformation to American Christian consumers in the form of packaged moral narratives. Second, I focus on the paradoxical nature of journeys to the margins as simultaneously packaged commodities and ethical encounters. Finally, I use reformulations of freedom emerging from the anthropology of ethics to argue that possibilities for ethical subjectivation occur in moments when tour ideals come into tension with lived realities.

The ethics and politics of migration research

In this response, we caution against making ‘irregular migrants’ the object of investigation. Instead, we suggest that a focus on encounters, rather than on becoming, offers a more productive and ethical approach. By considering the relationality of affective and ethical encounters, we can identify not only how migrants become subject to particular state categories, but also how these encounters shape people’s ways of knowing the state and each other. This knowledge is situated, embodied, and—most importantly—offers the possibility for political action and change.

An Institutional Repository in a Developing Country: security and Ethical Encounters at the Bindura University of Science Education, Zimbabwe

The article explores the recent experiences encountered by the Bindura University of Science Education (BUSE) Library, Zimbabwe in the daily operations of its institutional repository (IR) with emphasis on security and ethical issues. It examines the present scenario in the management of the IR. BUSE Library set up an IR to archive and enable access to the university’s scholarly research output. The account profiles the recent challenges encountered by the library as it manages its institutional repository. There are legal and ethical issues undermining the security and ethical use of the BUSE IR, for example, cyber threats and unauthorised access. The poor performance of the network firewall has exposed the IR server to cyber-attacks. The ethical challenges relate to plagiarism and predatory publishers who prey on researchers whose work is hosted on the IR. The article recommends measures to enhance security and overcome challenges in the management of the IR.

Literacy in the post-truth era: The significance of affect and the ethical encounter

Education has a responsibility to respond to the threat of deteriorating democracies. The post-truth era is marked by an erosion of trust in public institutions and extreme polarisation. This paper begins with an examination of the ways by which current literacy and media literacy education is not simply outmoded, but also limited by a grounding in neoliberal conceptions of rationality and individualism. Offering a counterpoint to the status quo, and foregrounding the significance of affect, I work with Levinas’s conception of ethics (1979, 1989) to illustrate the tensions between affective reactionism and non-intentional affectivity, enjoyment and its disruption as a premise for intersubjectivity, and contrasting manifestations of anger. I conclude the paper with a proposal for literacy education that comprises intentional focus on relationality, responsibility, and affect.

Ethical encounters in the archives

This article discusses archival sources and biographical history in the context of the history of modern esotericism. Presenting a case study and archival material of a Finnish writer Aarni Kouta (1884-1924) the article asks, what are the ethical challenges of studying individuals and their intimate sources in the context of esotericism. The starting point is in the forgotten figures of esoteric history, and thus the article reflects how our understanding of history and more precisely on the history of esotericism changes when we look at those whose history has not been presented before. I will argue that we need to be much more sensitive to the differences in the past when doing interpretations concerning individuals, and we have to be ethically aware of our position as interpreters. This means careful working with historical source materials, but also sensitivity to both the long traditions of esotericism and to the multiple contexts of particular historical moments.

Una subjetividad infinita: hacia una comprensión teleológica de la conciencia desde la fenomenología levinasiana

El presente artículo ofrece una interpretación teleológica de la vida consciente y se basa, sobre todo, en la postura fenomenológica de Emmanuel Levinas. Sin embargo, es preciso tener en mente que la fenomenología husserliana está siempre presente como sustrato de ésta. Por ello, a partir de una lectura en que ambas perspectivas se complementan, trazaré un esquema en el que la totalidad de la conciencia se realiza como teleológica y explicaré el papel preponderante que cumple la síntesis en los procesos de constitución para desarrollar los elementos de la ética levinasiana que culminan en una lectura teleológica de la vida consciente. Así, la infinitudcon la que Levinas describe el encuentro ético deja de ser sólo una instancia de corte éticoontológico para describir un momento teleológico.

Open Access Institutional Repository (OA/IR) Security and Ethical Encounters

The article probes security and ethical issues encountered by the library of the Bindura University of Science Education (BUSE), Zimbabwe, in the daily operations of its institutional repository (IR). The digital era has resulted in innovative scholarly publishing and communication models that are transforming the teaching, learning, and research landscape on a global scale. The study employed a qualitative approach to generate descriptive data on security and ethical challenges experienced at the BUSE library. Research data were collected through document analysis of existing library reports, reports from the library’s information and communication technology (ICT) staff, and focus group discussions. The research population was drawn from library ICT staff and librarians. The researchers used a case study design to explore the research problem. The BUSE library established an IR for the purposes of archiving and enabling open access to its scholarly output. The study revealed that there were legal and ethical issues undermining the security and ethical use of the BUSE IR, particularly cyber threats and unauthorised access. The study makes recommendations on how to overcome the challenges in order to enhance the security of the IR.&#x0D;

History and the Lesser Death

History and the Lesser Death