Genealogical Project Research Articles

Ultimul Foucault

The present article proposes to highlight the valences of the last Foucault, engaging him with a punctual and punctuated approach found in/through an accumulation of immediate arguments – from the last interview, to the last Foucault, as equivalent to the last man (Fukuyama) or to the reading (by overlapping) of the last Foucault and the last words of Socrates (from Foucault's lecture, February 15, 1984). The last [Foucault] is endowed – here – by/with a plus meaning: last approaches the act of being the last, but it also retains what remained decisive and definitive, launching, as a creative-decisive formula, the act and the temptation of thinking, by clearly redefining the object of thought. The last Foucault does not have a synonymous meaning, nor can it integrate in the series of possible finite-final extensions (with notes of differentiation in relation to the final Foucault or to the appellative of late Foucault). Last remains – here – an open research phase/stage, started in the early 1980s, as new experiments/experiences felt both at the external level of sociability, but also through the attempt of self-transformation, both part of a genealogical project applied to themes, practices and modes of governance of the self and the others.

Семейная история и семейная память в России 2020-х годов

The author explores how chronicle and memoirs, history and memory reconstruct the past, while simultaneously influencing each other, using the methodological division of commemorative resources. The empirical basis of the study is the data of surveys conducted by the scientific group of the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the fall of 2020 and spring of 2022. The sociological data help the author to clarify how today, in the postmemory era, the private and family memory of our compatriots responds to the state historical discourse and to what extent family history acts as a means of reconstructing the national past. With the growing interest of Russians in their own identity and their inclusion in digital communication, the popularity of genealogical projects is increasing, with the help of which not only family memory, but also national history, is reconstructed, and the perception of the past is changing. Information about family history is the most important source of information about national history. Emotionally and meaningfully rich stories from eyewitnesses increase the historical interest of their children and grandchildren. History as a resource of identity turns post-memory carriers — close relatives, civil society, and bureaucracy — into creators of memory, and therefore history makers. One of the most striking examples of genealogical mnemonic, which became possible due to the post-memorial commemoration, as well as the digitalization of archival information about the war period, is the Immortal Regiment project, which symbolically connects national history and family memory. With the help of digitized archival data and virtual genealogy projects, many Russians are successfully reconstructing family history, especially when unknown circumstances of family history are felt as a “premonition” of family memory. The “incompleteness” of stories of a significant part of Russian families, primarily about the 1930—1950 time period, gives rise to a demand for historical authenticity, but the perception of the past through the circumstances of the lives of relatives makes such perception less “white-or-black”, calling for a balanced and “understanding” assessment of history, whatever it may be.

Three Rival Versions of Education: An Update to The Abolition of Man

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis draws attention to a particular English textbook, exposes the philosophy behind it, warns of the consequences for moral and political life, and reminds us of an alternative. This article updates The Abolition of Man. Following Lewis’s pattern, I begin by drawing attention to the content and pedagogy of an unidentified Christian school English program. Using Alasdair MacIntyre’s framework, I argue that the philosophy behind it can be traced to the contemporary encyclopaedic projects of Rawls and Kohlberg and the genealogical projects of Foucault and Gee, which have produced a dichotomy between justice and virtue and a problem of authority with significant consequences. The two projects converge making each internally inconsistent. Tradition provides a way out, but an encounter with these other projects should lead tradition to find its own language and resources for progress in areas like diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging; learning disabilities; and the classical canon.

Queer Performativities in Pakistan

The essay that follows is part of a larger queer genealogy project that aims to fashion “the theoretical organization and methodological perspective of genealogy” into a tool for understanding how the discursive practices and processes of state and religion (which hinge on conceptions of majority/minority) have turned notions of sexuality and sexual categories (heterosexual, gay, lesbian, transgender), as well as all other “minority” positionalities including religious and sectarian ones (Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Shia, Sunni, Ahmedi), into performative objects of study, analysis, and disciplinary control in the postcolonial, modern Muslim state of Pakistan. A similarly twinning effect occurs via neo-imperial mechanisms mobilized in the so-called liberatory promises marshalled on behalf of formerly colonized queer-identified subjects. To cast a “queer eye” on the dominant landscape of citizenship within Pakistan, then, is to address not only the growing body of work by queer-identified creators, but also to develop a reading practice that allows for an “interrogation of … the limits of a politics of visibility and representation” conferred on unequal citizens of various nation-states. Reading “queerly”, I will, in this essay, situate three exemplary performatives of gendered and sexual citizenship within global circuits of power including social media platforms, reflecting on what constitutes not just Pakistani, but also Pakistani-diasporic identity and its cross-racial, sexual, and feminist transnational promise.

‘They silenced our voices’; a genealogy of the linguistic othering of the Kurds in Iran

Since the turn of the twentieth century, the Kurds in Iran have faced various forms of linguistic exclusion. As part of a genealogical project, this article aims to track the lineages of this exclusion. The linguistic exclusions are inscribed in a field of discursivity, which, tracking one of its lineages, turns our attention to the orientalist interventions. The article discusses two complementary projects: the authentication of the Persian language and the othering of the Kurdish language. These projects were made possible by the hegemony of territorial and linguistic discourses over orientalist studies in Iran. Orientalists proposed a periodization of Iranian languages, dividing them into old, middle, and modern eras, with Persian represented as the sole language that has ever existed throughout history, based on their decoding of ancient manuscripts. Meanwhile, the Kurdish language was completely marginalized, and Persian was represented as the essence of all Iranian languages and, consequently, as the language of all Iranians. As a result, an ontological and epistemic horizon emerged, on which all subsequent instances of othering of the Kurds became possible. Finally, the article also examines the ways in which the Kurds have resisted the linguistic exclusions.

Sustaining Significance of Confessional Form: Taking Foucault to Attitudinal Research

This paper offers a conceptual reconstruction and empirical case study of an often-eclipsed concept of Michel Foucault’s genealogical project, confession. Departing from Foucault’s dictum that his core research interest rests in the experience of the subject, I argue that, without a detailed understanding of diverse modalities of the confessional form, various subjectivation processes and epistemological procedures could not be fully grasped. In the first part, I systematise Foucault’s incoherent confessional account against the backdrop of his entangled genealogies of modern man and the human sciences. Subsequently, I introduce a case study of a quantitative attitudinal survey based on face-to-face interviews to test Foucault’s model of confession in present-day circumstances and demonstrate its sustaining analytical significance by disclosing the cognitive technique of coding behaviour. Thus far, governmentality studies have confronted positivistic methods in social sciences to display their objectifying functions. In contrast, I use the technique of coding behaviour to immerse into these scientific practices. Such a perspective delivers a fine-grained exposure of epistemological strategies in social sciences that are enabled by the appropriation of the confessional model and that constitute subjective identities on an individual and mass scale.

John Guillory, Meet Kwasi Wiredu: A 1990s Guide to the Future English Department

Abstract This article pairs the arguments of Cultural Capital with those of Ghanaian decolonial philosopher Kwasi Wiredu. Writing around the same time as Guillory, Wiredu proposes a distinctive mode of decolonization, one focused on concepts rather than syllabi or curricula. In Wiredu's argument, decolonization ought to be a genealogical project, disentangling African thought from colonial impositions. The goal is not simple opposition but the chance to enable located concepts’ and traditions’ mutual interrogation, so that a “decolonized” thinker is one who can make an informed choice as to what analytic lenses or worldviews can or should be defended. Even as literary studies continues to open up possible texts and traditions for study, the bottom has fallen out of a hiring market organized around periodizing categories and national literatures. Turning back to Wiredu and Guillory together might not only help us think more clearly about the politics of literary study but also construct a version of the field based on concepts rather than national-historical fields.

Question answering with deep neural networks for semi-structured heterogeneous genealogical knowledge graphs

With the rising popularity of user-generated genealogical family trees, new genealogical information systems have been developed. State-of-the-art natural question answering algorithms use deep neural network (DNN) architecture based on self-attention networks. However, some of these models use sequence-based inputs and are not suitable to work with graph-based structure, while graph-based DNN models rely on high levels of comprehensiveness of knowledge graphs that is nonexistent in the genealogical domain. Moreover, these supervised DNN models require training datasets that are absent in the genealogical domain. This study proposes an end-to-end approach for question answering using genealogical family trees by: (1) representing genealogical data as knowledge graphs, (2) converting them to texts, (3) combining them with unstructured texts, and (4) training a transformer-based question answering model. To evaluate the need for a dedicated approach, a comparison between the fine-tuned model (Uncle-BERT) trained on the auto-generated genealogical dataset and state-of-the-art question-answering models was performed. The findings indicate that there are significant differences between answering genealogical questions and open-domain questions. Moreover, the proposed methodology reduces complexity while increasing accuracy and may have practical implications for genealogical research and real-world projects, making genealogical data accessible to experts as well as the general public.

Melioristic genealogies and Indigenous philosophies

AbstractAccording to Mary Midgley, philosophy is like plumbing: like the invisible entrails of an elaborate plumbing system, philosophical ideas respond to basic needs that are fundamental to human life. Melioristic projects in philosophy attempt to fix or reroute this plumbing. An obstacle to melioristic projects is that the sheer familiarity of the underlying philosophical ideas renders the plumbing invisible. Philosophical genealogies aim to overcome this by looking at the origins of our current concepts. We discuss philosophical concepts developed in Indigenous cultures as a source of inspiration for melioristic genealogy. Examining the philosophical concepts of these communities is useful because it gives us a better idea of the range of ethical, political, and metaphysical approaches that exist in the world. Members of western societies do not get a clear view of this range, in part because living in large groups presents its own constraints and challenges, which limit philosophical options. We argue that features of Indigenous philosophies, such as egalitarianism and care for one's natural environment, are not inevitable byproducts of Native material conditions and lifestyles, but that they are deliberate forms of conceptual engineering. We propose that comparative philosophy is an integral part of the genealogical project.

The Effect of Sex Hormone Deficiency on the Incidence of Rotator Cuff Repair

The purpose of the present study was to analyze the association between sex hormone deficiency and rotator cuff repair (RCR) with use of data from a large United States insurance database. A retrospective analysis of insured subjects from the Truven Health MarketScan database was conducted, collecting data for RCR cases as well as controls matched for age, sex, and years in the database. Multivariable logistic regression models adjusted for matching variables were utilized to compare RCR status with estrogen deficiency status and testosterone deficiency status. These associations were confirmed with use of data from the Veterans Genealogy Project database, with which the relative risk of RCR was estimated for patients with and without sex hormone deficiency. The odds of RCR for female patients with estrogen deficiency were 48% higher (odds ratio, 1.48; 95% confidence interval, 1.44 to 1.51; p < 0.001) than for those without estrogen deficiency. The odds of RCR for males with testosterone deficiency were 89% higher (odds ratio, 1.89; 95% confidence interval, 1.82 to 1.96; p < 0.001) than for those without testosterone deficiency. Within the Veterans Genealogy Project database, the relative risk of estrogen deficiency among RCR patients was 2.58 (95% confidence interval, 2.15 to 3.06; p < 0.001) and the relative risk of testosterone deficiency was 3.05 (95% confidence interval, 2.67 to 3.47; p < 0.001). Sex hormone deficiency was significantly associated with RCR. Future prospective studies will be necessary to understand the pathophysiology of rotator cuff disease as it relates to sex hormones. Prognostic Level IV. See Instructions for Authors for a complete description of levels of evidence.

Racial Passing off the Record: A Journey in Reconnection and Navigating Shifting Identities

Anyone of African descent or with African ancestry who engages in a genealogy project soon learns that the U.S. Census is a helpful yet frustrating tool. In 2016, equipped with my history degree and an online ancestry search engine, I searched for my great-grandfather Leroy in census records after I saw a picture of him as a young man at work in Philadelphia. This image would have been unremarkable had it not been for the fact that my African American ancestor was so light skinned that he seemed to blend in with his co-workers at Kramer’s Fruit and Vegetables. I thought there had to be a story behind this. Classified as, “Mu”, for mulatto in most of his records, Leroy became “Black” on the census in 1930. My first thought was to question whether this categorization changed for other folks like him. My research led me to my master’s thesis “From ‘Mulatto’ to ‘Negro’: How Fears of ‘Passing’ Changed the 1930 United States Census”. Through this research, I also became closer to my father’s family. This piece will take you through this journey of discovery and my frustrations along the way.

ALIS: A novel metric in lineage-independent evaluation of scholars

Evaluative bibliometrics often attempts to explore various methods to measure individual scholarly influence. Scholarly independence (SI) is a unique indicator that can be used to understand and assess the research performances of individual scholars. The SI is a rare quality that most funding agencies and universities seek during funding decisions or hiring processes. We propose author lineage independent score (ALIS), a unique model to measure SI of a scholar by using his or her academic genealogy tree as the underlying graph structure. The analysis is performed on real data of 100 authors, collected from the Web of Science (WoS) and the Mathematics Genealogy Project. The analysis is further validated on a larger scale, on a simulated sample of 10,000 authors. The simulation exercise is the proof-of-concept for scalability of the metric and the proposed optimisation model. ALIS exploits genealogical relationships between scholars and their mentors and collaborating communities and constructs an influence scoring model based on the Genealogy tree structure of the respective scholars. The implications from the theoretical model are found to be profound in tracing known and recursive citation patterns among peers. The genealogy tree is used to investigate the advisor–advisee relationship and lays the foundation for defining metrics used to calculate the various indicators such as non-genealogy citations (NGCs), non-community citations (NCCs) and other citation quotient (OCQ). As these indicators/parameters are novel and thus not readily accessible, algorithms are written to compute these indicator values for the scholars under study.

The Conspiracy of the Good: Proclus’ Theodicy qua Political Theological Paradigm

ABSTRACT Giorgio Agamben, Dotan Leshem and Adam Kotsko have sought Christian origins of neoliberal governance. By developing a genealogical project, they have overlooked the theodicy of the Neoplatonist Proclus, which provides a more robust analogy to the neoliberal order than any Christian system. My paper develops Proclus’ theodicy as a political theological paradigm, with special attention to the divine engineering of vice by the gods in his system. In so doing, I advocate for an investigation based on analogy, rather than genealogy, and also open to a realist metaphysics. I argue that Proclus’ theodicy openly exhibits four key features of neoliberalism emphasized by Agamben, Leshem and Kotsko (governmentality, glory, expansion and demonization) and that it does so without the need for any suspicious readings of the texts or their reception. In conclusion, by closely examining an influential Hellenic Neoplatonist, I shed light on the unacknowledged polytheistic dimensions of the neoliberal world.

Entering the Archive: “Il faut défendre la société” and Michel Foucault’s Critical Archeological Inquiry into the History and Method of Genealogy

ABSTRACT In “Il faut défendre la société”, Foucault attempted to historicize and criticize Nietzsche’s equating of the social with struggle. In order to do so, Foucault produced a descriptive discursive history of his genealogical project by deploying the method of the critical archaeology. Foucault realized thereinafter that his archaeological exposition of the genealogical discourse in fact laid bare a close historical and conceptual bond between genealogy and modern racial discourses. In the first lectures, Foucault, unearthed the genealogical discourse hidden in the literature written by the nobility as they attempted to resist the centralisation of royal power. In the latter part of his lectures, he described a discursive interplay between genealogy-as-struggle and the biopolitical practices of the modern state. As such, he gave a tentatively description how the modern state inherited and extensively applied the notion of struggle in its biopolitical control on its populations. The immoral and historical consequences of this affinity, resulting in the biopolitics of genocide, warranted Foucault to distance himself from Nietzsche’s concept, which in effect resulted in rethinking the social within the framework of gouvernmentalité, in which struggle was a modality rather than the prime mover of society.

Gm-index: a new mentorship index for researchers

Advisor–advisee relationships in academic genealogy offer opportunities to understand the contribution of a mentor in shaping the research community. In this paper, we adapt the bibliometric g-index to study the mentorship role of a researcher. We call the new index $$g_m$$-index. It has some important differences from the mentorship h-index or the $$h_m$$-index. We compute the values of the $$h_m$$ and $$g_m$$ indices for researchers indexed in the Mathematics Genealogy Project and the Academic Family Tree. We observe for the majority of researchers, these index values are zero, but in non-zero cases, sometimes, the $$g_m$$-index can be significantly higher than the $$h_m$$-index. Moreover, the $$g_m$$-index decays less rapidly to zero than the $$h_m$$-index. It appears the $$g_m$$-index can be used to discriminate between researchers with the same $$h_m$$-index. We study how these mentorship indices are correlated with other indicators of academic success, and how they are correlated across generations of researchers.

On possibilising genealogy

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that the vindicatory/unmasking distinction has so far prevented scholars from grasping a third dimension of genealogical inquiry, one I call possibilising. This dimension has passed unnoticed even though it constitutes a crucial aspect of Foucault’s genealogical project starting from 1978 on. By focusing attention on it, I hope to provide a definitive rebuttal of one of the main criticisms that has been raised against (unmasking) genealogy in general, and Foucauldian genealogy in particular, namely the idea that Foucault’s genealogical project lacks normative grounding and is therefore ultimately incapable of telling us why we should resist and fight against the mechanisms of power it nevertheless reveals in an empirically insightful way. This conclusion, I argue, is mistaken because it conceives of Foucauldian genealogy exclusively as an unmasking or problematising method, whereas I claim that Foucault’s genealogical project possesses a possibilising dimension that provides his work with sui generis normative force.

Network-based indices of individual and collective advising impacts in mathematics

Advising and mentoring Ph.D. students is an increasingly important aspect of the academic profession. We define and interpret a family of metrics (collectively referred to as “a-indices”) that can potentially be applied to “ranking academic advisors” using the academic genealogical records of scientists, with the emphasis on taking into account not only the number of students advised by an individual, but also subsequent academic advising records of those students. We also define and calculate the extensions of the proposed indices that account for student co-advising (referred to as “adjusted a-indices”). In addition, we extend some of the proposed metrics to ranking universities and countries with respect to their “collective” advising impacts, as well as track the evolution of these metrics over the past several decades. To illustrate the proposed metrics, we consider the social network of over 200,000 mathematicians (as of July 2018) constructed using the Mathematics Genealogy Project data.

Chamorro Roots Genealogy Project: Technological Milestones

With the advent of technology, the Chamorro Roots Genealogy Project has evolved from a personal family project into a CHamoru peoples’ project with a database containing over 344,000 names and globally accessible over the internet. The technological presence is not only for CHamoru-specific genealogists. Its accessibility is also important for an ever-growing CHamoru diaspora population of over 147,798 in the United States, where the majority of the CHamoru population now resides. In this paper, I will discuss some of the Project’s history, technological tools to network, communicate, and collaborate on the Project’s data. This includes the publication of the transcribed 1920 and 1930 Census of Guam with observational comments. The essay concludes with a brief observation of methods, use and results of social media as a key collaborating mechanism that is the genesis for further developing a comprehensive index of CHamoru family clan names and a first name-nickname dictionary. The global accessibility of these resources produced from this Project will continue to add to the availability of CHamoru genealogy resources locally and abroad. More importantly, perhaps it will provide a key data-mining resource for scholars to review and interpret data that will enable another aspect to the knowledge-base of CHamoru history from a genealogical lens.

VII — Genealogy, Epistemology and Worldmaking

AbstractWe suffer from genealogical anxiety when we worry that the contingent origins of our representations, once revealed, will somehow undermine or cast doubt on those representations. Is such anxiety ever rational? Many have apparently thought so, from pre-Socratic critics of Greek theology to contemporary evolutionary debunkers of morality. One strategy for vindicating critical genealogies is to see them as undermining the epistemic standing of our representations—the justification of our beliefs, the aptness of our concepts, and so on. I argue that this strategy is not as promising as it might first seem. Instead, I suggest that critical genealogies can wield a sort of meta-epistemic power; in so far as we wish to resist the genealogical critic, we are under pressure to see ourselves as the beneficiaries of a certain kind of good luck: what I call genealogical luck. But there is also a resolutely non-epistemic way of understanding the power of critical genealogies, one that is essential, I argue, for understanding the genealogical projects of various theorists, including Nietzsche and Catharine MacKinnon. For critical genealogies can reveal what it is that our representations do—and what we, in turn, might do with them.

Projekty genealogiczne Fundacji Kultury i Dziedzictwa Ormian Polskich

Genealogical Projects of the Foundation of Culture and Heritage of Polish ArmeniansThe Foundation of the Culture and Heritage of Polish Armenians located in Warsaw collects both original and copied birth certificate registries dated at the times from 17th to 20th centuries and coming from Armenian Catholic parishes. The Foundation catalogues and translates them from Kipchak, Armenian and Latin into Polish. Additionally, it collects information on grave inscriptions and photographs. All data is being stored electronically and published online. It serves the purpose of compiling genealogical trees of Armenian families living in Poland (over 5000 people in 9 generations) and creating an online biographical dictionary of Polish Armenians (WikiOrmianie, over 1200 biograms).