Humanities Scholars Research Articles

Narrating Human Rights in Africa by Eleni Coundouriotis

Reviewed by: Narrating Human Rights in Africa by Eleni Coundouriotis Bonny Ibhawoh (bio) Eleni Coundouriotis, Narrating Human Rights in Africa (Routledge, 2020), ISBN 9780367194666, 206 pages. Eleni Coundouriotis’s book is founded on an undeniable premise first espoused by Edward Said: “Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain, and circulate them.”1 Because facts of abuse do not speak for themselves, we must rely on human rights narratives that testify to violations as the evidentiary foundations for redress and protection. The challenge of protecting and promoting human rights can only be met when the voices of victims and their interlocutors are heard, understood, and acted upon. Narratives of rights are the foundations upon which academics theorize, activists mobilize, and the state intervenes to protect human rights. This is why Coundouriotis’ focus on human rights narratives in this book marks an important contribution to human rights scholarship. The main contribution of this book is the centering of narrative in our understanding of human rights. Human rights scholars have not paid enough attention to the place of narrative in defining, contesting, and promoting human rights norms. Enough attention has also not been given to examining how narratives shape the protection of human rights and redress mechanisms for victims of abuse. We often take for granted the stories and testimonies of violations upon which human rights meanings and principles are founded. Narrating Human Rights seeks to bridge this gap by exploring how narratives affirm the values of social justice and human rights while at the same time creating new categories of thought that challenge human rights dogma. The author does this by examining human rights from the perspective of writers from the African continent and situating key theoretical concepts in African perspectives, undercutting the stereotypes of victimhood and voicelessness. The book takes as its starting point the imperative of challenging a methodology that positions narrative as peripheral rather than central to human rights scholarship. [End Page 865] Instead of positioning literary texts as illustrative of points already theorized elsewhere, Coundouriotis argues that “we must foreground the literature to show the concepts it offers, the ideas and responses stemming from complex historical circumstances in Africa and expressed by African writers.”2 Narrative in this context is a means of engaging with historical events, giving a complex account of how truth and reality are entangled. It portrays and mobilizes historical actors, reinscribing them into human rights discourses from which they have been omitted or their voices silenced. The book offers a useful schematization of human rights narrative. The author delineates three types of employment for human rights in literary narrative plots, each presenting a different construction of the heroic. The first type is the moral crusade, which is temporarily thwarted but holds a strong promise of future fulfillment. The second is the witness of a journalist or rapporteur who tells of unassimilable abuse and brutality and positions himself as a redeemer witness striving to create a vision of hope. The third is the collective story of a democratization movement which constructs a heroic and determined people whose efforts, though falling short, must be sustained. Common to all three human rights plots is that they convey teleological moral progress. They emphasize what the story moves toward and the kind of closure it proposes, despite the setbacks that are part of the historical account of events. The author takes up the key challenges to the narration of human rights in which the contribution of African writers is important. The objective is to show how African voices and perspectives shape how we think about human rights and how they have influenced their meanings. The perspective on human rights narration offered in this book is hybrid, engaged with both history and actual events. This is evident in the sustained readings of several topics offered in the chapters. Chapters examine the figure of the child soldier in relation to the history of conflict and state-building in Africa; the tension between flight and stasis in refugee and migrant; the challenge of testifying about rape in war; and narratives that evoke the disappeared in the context of resistance to state oppression...

The Great Guide: What David Hume can teach us about Being Human and Living Well by Julian Baggini

Reviewed by: The Great Guide: What David Hume can teach us about Being Human and Living Well by Julian Baggini Lorraine L. Besser Julian Baggini. The Great Guide: What David Hume can teach us about Being Human and Living Well. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 328. Electronic ISBN 9780691211206, $47.00. In this book, Baggini explores Hume’s life and philosophy in an effort to decipher what contemporary, non-academic, audiences might take away from it about what it means to be human and to live well. This is a daunting project for a couple of reasons. First, in comparison with other major figures in the history of philosophy such as Aristotle, Hume does not himself give much direct guidance on these topics. His writings purport to present analyses of human nature, the influences on it, and the ways in which people tend to respond to each other. The degree to which Hume intended these analyses to inform normative proposals is a question of debate amongst Hume scholars, yet most would agree that Hume’s mission falls short of presenting a “great guide,” making Baggini’s project a difficult one, of piecing together claims about how to live and about human nature that are found throughout Hume’s works. Second, Hume’s opus contains a range of works, some more philosophical than others, and some where Hume’s aims and ambitions are unclear. This diversity presents challenges to the project of finding common threads between them, again making Baggini’s project a difficult one. Yet Baggini approaches this project not as a philosopher, but as a traveler. His interest is not in developing arguments or taking a stand on interpretive debates, but in observing Hume’s works along with his life. From the observer’s perspective, we learn about how to live by looking at the lives we find valuable, and it is clear from the [End Page 311] outset that Baggini finds much value in the ways in which Hume lived. He opens his work by noting the disparity between Hume’s reputation within academic philosophy and outside of it; in one respect, we can read Baggini’s work itself as an effort to bring to Hume the attention outside of academics that he so clearly deserves. Baggini does this by approaching Hume as a “harmonious whole” in which his actions and words come together; as “a person whose philosophy touches every aspect of how he lived and who he was” (4). We could debate the attribution of this harmony, and explore its validity as a claim that holds both within Hume’s writings and between his life and his writings, but this would be to adopt the internal perspective of a philosopher. As philosophers, we are drawn to the examination of ideas from the internal perspective; as interpreters of Hume in particular, we try to get inside his ideas and evaluate them from within the context they appear. When it comes to appreciating Baggini’s work, however, this approach will not get us very far. Rather, to appreciate the Great Guide, we have to approach it, along with Baggini, as travelers into Hume’s life, as casual readers interested in Hume qua an intellectual living within social circles of a particular era, whose writings can deliver insight into how he lived. When we do this, we get unique and unparalleled advice about how to live, rooted in the fallibility of human nature and appreciation of the engagement and comfort found within social living. Hume’s life was not ideal, and Hume himself was far from perfect. Yet he lived well lived well by not taking himself too seriously, by recognizing the prejudices in himself and in others, by treating reason as fallible, and most importantly, by enjoying the company of others. Baggini appropriately highlights the pressing need for this kind of approach to life within today’s society: If ever there were a time in recent history to turn to Hume, now is surely it. The enthusiasts are on the rise, in the form of strongman political populists who assert the will of the people as though it were absolute and absolutely infallible. In more settled times...

Discursive Quads: New Kinds of Lexical Co‐occurrence Data With Linguistic Concept Modelling

AbstractThis paper introduces linguistic concept modelling, a new computational approach to humanities‐driven analysis of meaning in large text collections, and presents illustrative examples of the approach applied to over one billion words of printed Early Modern English contained in Early English Books Online (Text Creation Partnership edition). Linguistic concept modelling methods and innovations are described in detail, and justified as a unique, new, powerful means for studying meaning in texts in relation to individual lexical items, sets of lexical items and entire text collections. Linguistic concept modelling is compared to established approaches of distributional semantics and topic modelling, to show how linguistic concept modelling overcomes the limitations of those approaches to support humanities research. Examples demonstrate how our approach can be used to explore and analyse semantic, pragmatic and discursive meaning in texts, highlighting the novel observations that our approach affords, and its benefits for humanities scholars.

Networking early modern Irish women

AbstractOver the last decade, network analysis has developed as an approach within digital humanities as a wider array of tools has become available to humanities scholars, and these approaches are now beginning to make an impact on the disciplines of history and English. This article presents an overview of different ways of approaching network analysis. It assesses recent projects to see how they accounted for gender in their datasets and what can be learnt about early modern women from these projects. It then looks at how projects in Ireland are engaging with network analysis, discussing the approaches used by RECIRC and introducing MACMORRIS's analysis of the Dictionary of Irish biography (D.I.B.) and the Bardic Poetry Database (B.P.D.), looking at how the latter is attempting to overcome the unconscious gender bias inherent in the D.I.B.'s selection of early modern lives from the period between 1541 and 1660. Finally, it points to some of the wider issues we as scholars face when engaging with this methodology, such as access to the required training and collaboration, arguing that while these are not unique challenges to the study of gender history in Ireland, they are important debates that can enhance scholarship in the field.

Paradigm shifts for a planetary emergency: Towards an anthropocenography for urban coastal research at False Bay, Cape Town, South Africa

Reflecting on a recent three-decade review of the social-ecological sciences of False Bay in Cape Town that was co-authored by 32 South African based scientists, this essay draws on current Anthropocene scholarship in the environmental humanities and social sciences to suggest four approaches to strengthening transdisciplinarity engagement between social and natural sciences. First, the material flows between the fields categorised as ‘nature’ and ‘society’ is suggested as an alternative empirical base for integrative transdisciplinary research, building on emergent transdisciplinary fields including industrial ecology, biogeochemical sciences, circular economics and critical zone scholarship. Second, a humanities-informed conversation in South African scholarship invites discussion as to whether and how the conceptual categories of nature and society remain empirically useful, given the evidence in Anthropocene stratigraphy that human living is terra-forming. Third, humanities scholarship is vital for the scholarly assessment of historical and contemporary data sets and scientific publications. Fourth, the theorisation of ‘social systems’, ‘the human’, ‘society’, and ‘ecosystem services’ in the social-ecological approaches represented in the review, create a barrier for social scientists to take up invitations to transdisciplinary research partnerships. The above concerns, taken together, frame an alternative approach to transdisciplinary research that is tentatively suggested as an ‘anthropocenography’: a research paradigm based on material flows in the Anthropocene. Significance: Innovations in transdisciplinary research that attend to material flows are evident in multiple emerging fields that address the Anthropocene, including biogeosciences, industrial ecology, urban metabolism, circular economies, and critical zone sciences. Responding to a 30-year review of the sciences of False Bay, I argue that these new research fields, which encompass earth sciences, biosciences and applied sciences, offer generative linkages to emerging scholarship in environmental social sciences and humanities that also attend to material flows. Linking social and natural sciences via material flows is therefore suggested as a generative approach to transdisciplinarity.

MA-EM: A neurocognitive model for understanding mixed and ambiguous emotions and morality

ABSTRACT Understanding emotions and moral intentions of other people is integral to being human. Humanities scholars have long recognized the complex and ambiguous nature of emotions and morality. People are rarely ‘just’ happy, or sad. Neither are they ‘just’ good or bad people. Despite this, most knowledge about the psychological and neural basis of emotions and moral understanding comes from experiments investigating unidimensional and non-ambiguous emotions and morality. The goal of this paper is twofold. First I want to point out why mixed and ambiguous emotions and morality are a promising research topic for cognitive neuroscientists. Observing or experiencing mixed or ambiguous emotions and morality tends to have a strong impact on humans. This impact is clearly visible in narratives and fiction, and I will argue that narratives make an excellent stimulus to study the effects of emotional and moral ambiguity. Second, I will sketch a model to help guide research in this promising corner of human cognition.

Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences. Justin Grimmer, Margaret E. Roberts, and Brandon M. Stewart

In the past decade, text-as-data methods have rapidly gained popularity among social scientists and researchers in the digital humanities, business, and government alike. It is becoming increasingly feasible to mine valuable information from documents as a consequence of abundant data, novel techniques, and declining computational costs. However, this plethora of new statistical models and computational tools have to be adapted if they are to address issues in the social sciences. Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences is a guide to using tools for text as data to make predictions about present and future human behavior. It aims to inform social science research, offer guidance for scholars in the digital humanities, provide practical solutions to problems in industry, and ultimately address governance issues. Besides making substantial contributions to the social sciences, this book also has important implications for the advancement of the digital humanities.

A poetics of planetary water: The blue humanities after John Gillis

The blue humanities in the early 2020s appears on the cusp of transformation. What has over the past 20 years or so been primarily scholarship about oceans and transoceanic travel has begun to take stock of other kinds of planetary water, including the water in human bodies, glacial ice, and water vapor. This article returns to the influence of one of the sub-discipline’s important early figures, the late historian John Gillis. Thinking about Gillis’s scholarship, his legacy, and recent work that has emerged recently in dialogue with it, this article charts new courses for blue humanities scholars in coming years.

The Analysis of Aceh Law and Its Relevancy on National Law from Human Right Perspective

Islamization took place before the era of colonialization in Indonesia. Based on Law Number 22 of 1999, the local government has the authority to conduct some policies and consider the demands of the majority of individuals, for instance, bind them by implementing some Sharia laws, to find the better policy for all groups of people, and do not neglect the demands of the minority. Aceh is one of the provinces which is implementing Sharia law in form of Qanun Jinayat or Aceh regional law. Even though Aceh has the right to establish Sharia law, they have to be integrated into our national law. Up until now, the implementation of the Aceh law led to big attention from the international community, especially from human right activist and scholars. It is still a fruitful discussion among scholars and politicians in Indonesia. In this paper, the author discusses the analysis regarding the relation of Canon Law or Qanun with national law as well as the explanation of the Memorandum of Understanding between the Indonesia government and with Free Aceh Movement (GAM). It results that Qanun is not following Indonesia Law from a human rights perspective.

The Case for Scholarly Editions

This article wish to make a case for scholarly digital editions (SDE’s). SDE’s can help to put the computational humanities into the center of humanistic scholarship. Large scaled projects pave the way for easy access to historical documents, but small, curated digital editions, strenuously enriched by philologists, will be the key player in the process of integrating computational humanities into traditional scholarship; first and foremost because this material is clean, reliable, and flexible, secondly, thorough markup leaves it open to comprehensive, fine-grained, hermeneutically complex explorations.

Animals and Human Society in Asia: Historical, Cultural and Ethical Perspectives

Animals and Human Society in Asia: Historical, Cultural and Ethical Perspectives

Response

Response Elizabeth Carolyn Miller (bio) Let me begin by expressing gratitude to the editors of Victorian Studies for dedicating this review forum to Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (2021) and for the invitation to reflect on my project in response to and in dialogue with these three reviews. I also want to express my thanks to the reviewers for the time they have spent with my book and its arguments. As a scholar I have learned and benefited from the work of these three critics, and it is a privilege now to be in the position to respond to their responses to my work. Written scholarship is at its most interactive in forums such as this, and from 2020 to 2022, interaction has been a resource in short supply, so I am all the more grateful for the exchange.1 Extraction Ecologies is a study of the rise of industrial extraction and of the ways in which the industrialization of underground resource extraction interacted with literary form and genres from the 1830s to the 1930s. This is the book's particular contribution, but the book is also, more broadly, a prehistory of the literature and culture of climate change and the Anthropocene, one that is intended to explore the roles of language and culture, of genre and discourse, in extenuating and, sometimes, mitigating the environmental degradations of extractive industry and imperial extractivism. How can humanities scholarship possibly intervene in environmental catastrophes of such long duration and awful extent? Contemplating such scales and degrees in the course of writing this book has certainly led me to a perspective of critical humility, which Extraction Ecologies expresses in part by establishing limits on what it attempts to achieve. And yet, in my view—and I presume most readers [End Page 450] of this forum will agree—humanities scholarship can and does work slowly and collaboratively to influence and change language and thought. In terms of this broader goal, Extraction Ecologies is one contribution among many: a book written at the precipice of a new era, feeling and thinking its way toward a new understanding of the modern world, in dialogue with other writers and critics in the environmental humanities. Even should the worst catastrophes be averted in the era to come—and I remain hopeful that they will, despite mounting evidence to the contrary—it is evident that we are living through a moment of acute social and environmental change. Much suffering is already happening; much is yet to come. A beast of some manner of roughness is slouching toward Bethlehem, and whether that roughness translates to two degrees or five degrees Celsius is yet to be determined. Critics witnessing the dawn of this base new world are perhaps inevitably drawn to reconsider the past that birthed this rough beast—including its literary histories. Narrative and discourse are, of course, central to the culture that has produced and been produced by the long exhaustion, to use my term from the book. Such a realization raises questions about the work of criticism: Have we been asking the wrong questions of literature? Has literary criticism been too apt to treat texts as immune from environmental concerns? Has it participated in the pernicious conceptual opposition between humans and nature that many environmental thinkers see at the root of modern ecological crises? Reading texts differently is surely no protection from wildfires, hurricanes, and wet-bulb temperatures, but the way we read texts is a symptom of and a guide for patterns of thought and perception, and it is remarkable, in this moment, to work one's way through a portion of the literary archive and to realize how little of the environmental knowledge of this archive has been reckoned with by critics at all. My book seeks to explore the epistemological and representational dimensions of extractivism, a term that I define in two ways: as, to use my book's words, a "complex of cultural, discursive, economic, environmental, and ideological factors related to the extraction of underground resources on a large, industrial scale" (6), and as, to use Naomi Klein's words, a "resource-depleting model," a "nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the...

Digital Moravians

ABSTRACT This Forum includes seven articles by scholars working in the field of Moravian Studies reflecting on their work with “Digital Moravians,” either in their scholarship or in the classroom. The articles cover everything from the nature the archivist’s work in a digital age (Paul Peucker), to the painstaking work of georectification and historic sound reproduction (Mark Sciuchetti and Sarah Eyerly, respectively), to new forms of scholarly editions of archival materials as open and public facing scholarship announced on social media (Martin Prell), to the use of digital manuscripts to invite history undergraduates behind the curtain to actively participate in the work of the historian (Jared Burkholder). Additional articles consider the challenges of digital humanities work for the growing ranks of precarious scholars who lack institutional support for the types of collaborative work required (Gregory Specter) and the innovative technical digital humanities scholarship possible when a scholar is backed by an institution committed to supporting and showcasing digital scholarship and pedagogy (Katherine Faull at Bucknell University). These articles will provide inspiration to scholars working in—or wanting to explore—archives-based digital historical scholarship and pedagogy, whatever their subfield.

Gravity's pull: The identity-related motives and outcomes of hiring stars

Strategic human capital scholarship, alongside a wealth of evidence from the popular press, suggests that star employees can influence an organization's socially constructed identity. However, an overarching conceptual framework that explains these shifts has yet to emerge. In this paper, we draw upon Hatch and Schultz's (2002) theory of identity change to discuss how organizational identity-change related motives – defined as decision makers' interest in spurring changes to socially constructed, internal perceptions of their organization's central and distinctive features – act in concert with considerations of value creation and capture to influence the hiring of different identity-aspirant stars (i.e., stars that embody a desired future organizational identity). Given that stars represent catalysts for identity change that have agency and become part of the social fabric of an organization, we then explain how the mechanisms by which stars' attempts to gain or retain status – coupled with organization members' willingness to emulate their behaviors – can affect internal-oriented organizational identity change. This paper advances consideration of social-psychological factors alongside economic views of stars and offers implications for the literatures on strategic human capital and organizational identity.

Unearthing Phosphate in the Pacific Pastoral

Much humanities scholarship has focused “on the question of power and its origins,” write Zachary Caple and Gregory Cushman in a recent article on the cultures of phosphorus, “yet very little work has been done on the nature of fertility.” Just as critical theory has emphasized production over reproduction, as materialist feminists point out, fertility has been relatively overlooked in the study of narrative, despite the concept’s usefulness for analyzing the gendered and environmental forces that drive or disrupt narrative temporalities, from the lifecycle to the seasons.1 Since writers from Oceania—the island regions spanning the Pacific Ocean—have long contended with colonial myths of island fertility as well as co-existing discourses of “depopulation,” the Oceanic archive offers a unique opportunity to critically center fertility in humanities scholarship.2 Writers from this region, proclaiming that “Gauguin is dead!”, have rejected Edenic narratives of bountiful islands and sexually available women, showing how these myths have legitimized exploitation and dispossession (see for example Teaiwa, “The ‘Polynesian’ Body”; Figiel; Taouma; Marata Tamaira). Attentive to colonialism’s anti-reproductive effects, Oceanic writers have also registered disruptions to natural cycles as these are felt on the “frontiers” of women’s bodies—from Atu Emberson-Bain’s analysis of the embodied effects of plantation agriculture, mining, and overfishing in Fiji, to Katerina Teaiwa’s creative ethnography of the gendered impact of phosphate mining in Banaba, through to Kathy Jetn̅il-Kijiner’s poeticization of the literal forms of infertility created by nuclear radiation in the Marshall Islands.3 At the same time, as Sia Figiel’s work also demonstrates in the Samoan context, Indigenous understandings of fertility as a relation rather than a resource situate reproduction within shared human and extra-human worlds, working against the extractive logics encoded into European genres such as the romance and the pastoral.4

Introduction

This forum engages with the role of exactitude in humanities scholarship. Tracing a history of fascination with this epistemic virtue, the contributions to this forum on the “promises of exactitude” explore practices and potentials of exactitude across disciplines as well as novel, innovative fields of research in the humanities and arts. Contributions include discussions of the impact of early psychoanalysis on the epistemology of the humanities, pioneering digital humanists in the historical discipline, early instances of artistic research, and a look at the environmental humanities of today against the background of the emerging discipline of forestry in the first half of the nineteenth century. What all the articles have in common is a critical stance regarding the promises of exactitude. They critically explore both methodological potentials and interdisciplinary aspirations of these four new fields of humanities research and analyze the notions of exactitude in situated practice. Ultimately, these essays shed light on the promises of innovation and societal relevance across the humanities and shift attention to issues of responsibility and accountability in the history of the humanities.

Bad Realism

Bad Realism

Review: Oil Spaces: Exploring the Global Petroleumscape

Review: <i>Oil Spaces: Exploring the Global Petroleumscape</i>

Rethinking the Urban Landscape

Abstract An enduring intellectual and perceptual rift divides the city from the natural world both in scholarship and in the public imagination. In the past three decades, humanities scholars working with social and natural scientists have begun to challenge assumptions about the relations between cities and nature by investigating the complex interactions of cultural and natural systems, exploring how they are inextricably woven together into what is being called the urban landscape. The shift that we are now witnessing in the framing of humanities scholarship on cities and nature offers a vital opportunity for us to develop a broader and more inclusive approach to teaching and conducting research in architectural history as well as urban and environmental studies. The roundtable Rethinking the Urban Landscape, featuring contributions by James Michael Buckley, Theresa A. Cunningham, Liyang Ding, Matthew Gandy, Labib Hossain, Sara Jacobs, Mingqian Liu, Robert Z. Melnick, Laila Seewang, Maria C. Taylor, Helena Vilela Santos, and Alexander Wood, seeks to promote a more complex understanding of how scholars conceptualize cities and nature while expanding opportunities for collaborative thinking across the humanities and sciences.

In This Issue

In Brief| September 01 2022 In This Issue Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2022) 81 (3): 266–267. https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2022.81.3.266 Connected Content Errata: The Genius of Bureaucracy: SOM’s Hajj Terminal and Geiger Berger Associates’ Form-Finding Software Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation In This Issue. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 September 2022; 81 (3): 266–267. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2022.81.3.266 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search An enduring intellectual and perceptual rift divides the city from the natural world both in scholarship and in the public imagination. In the past three decades, humanities scholars working with social and natural scientists have begun to challenge assumptions about the relations between cities and nature by investigating the complex interactions of cultural and natural systems, exploring how they are inextricably woven together into what is being called the urban landscape. The shift that we are now witnessing in the framing of humanities scholarship on cities and nature offers a vital opportunity for us to develop a broader and more inclusive approach to teaching and conducting research in architectural history as well as urban and environmental studies. The roundtable Rethinking the Urban Landscape, featuring contributions by James Michael Buckley, Theresa A. Cunningham, Liyang Ding, Matthew Gandy, Labib Hossain, Sara Jacobs, Mingqian Liu, Robert Z. Melnick, Laila Seewang, Maria C.... View Original Article You do not currently have access to this content.