Life In Motion Research Articles

Gonzalez, Francisco J. (2024): Human Life in Motion. Heidegger’s Unpublished Seminars on Aristotle as Preserved by Helene Weiss, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Gonzalez, Francisco J. (2024): Human Life in Motion. Heidegger’s Unpublished Seminars on Aristotle as Preserved by Helene Weiss, Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Life in Motion: Mobility and Identity among Russian Migrants in the South Caucasus

The South Caucasus has emerged as a prominent destination for migrants from Russia following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The essay highlights both the complex and heterogeneous nature of current migration from Russia to the South Caucasus and the challenges inherent in categorizing and grouping diverse migrant communities. Describing the identity of migrants, we focus on the actual moment of moving from Russia to Armenia or Georgia, living in these countries, and the panorama of staying, returning, or leaving for a third place. Many people from the current wave of migration are engaged in remote work, primarily in the IT sector, and have a relatively high income compared to the host community.This trend to seek temporary residence in countries with milder climates and lower living costs, combined with remote work opportunities, is shared by lifestyle migrants, winter tourists, digital nomads, and Russians who fled in 2022. Looking at such new types of migration, researchers have criticized the privilege and inequality of this lifestyle, as well as their weak involvement in the local agenda. However, it is noteworthy that these communities of migrants are characterized by practices of mutual assistance and a commitment to ecological values, which in turn foster attention to the local environment. The essay describes volunteer practices and explores the concept of disengagement from civic life inherent in lifestyle migration or nomadism. Text in English

Life in motion

Life in motion

How to be Critical of Security Today? Life in Motion, Untimeliness and the Critique of End-Thinking

Abstract This article starts from the observation of intense political mobilisations of existential endings. One of the defining challenges for critical engagements with such mobilisations remains how to take war, environmental degradation and pandemics seriously without making existential end-times the conditions that define the present. The article proposes to move beyond critical knowledge that makes security contingent and engage with the conception of life inscribed in the mobilisations of existential endings. It puts forward a concept of life that emphasises continuous movement rather than defining it from the perspective of its inevitable end in death. This point of view challenges traditional existential notions of life and death, highlighting instead the dynamic and transformative nature of life itself.

Urban Taxi Slogans: The People's Arts

Urban Taxi Slogans: The People's Arts

Migration and Listening: Political Life in Motion

Boundaries, thresholds, and limits characterise both political geography and the politics of voice and listening. The effect of hearing yourself speak, as Derrida noted, is foundational for sovereignty, self-identity, and relations to others. In this conversation, we explore experiences of border crossings and passing across limits through migration and movement alongside corresponding encounters with Deep Listening. Alarcón reflects on her experience of migration from Colombia to the UK and how this also involves ‘speaking and travelling in-between different languages’. McKeon draws on experience of ‘losing’ his accent, the voice’s marker of political identity. For both of us, Deep Listening has become an essential resource to forgo the desires of returning ‘home’ or arrival with their visa privileges and passports of legitimised status. Migration and movement are instead embraced for their potential to constitute another practice of centring and of balance without fixed and immovable boundaries. We aim to articulate this politics of listening and voice not through conventions of debate and polemics, defending ideological territories, but through exchange in dialogue, in what passes in the movement between us.

Нарратив в научном познании: кинематографический метод Н.И. Жинкина

The intellectual heritage of the Russian philosopher and psychologist N.I. Zhinkin, turns out to be strikingly consonant with modern scientific research, in which scientists and philosophers are trying to identify the origins of possible syntheses and correlations in a wide variety of interdisciplinary interactions. The structure of modern science is changing, new forms of teamwork of scientists (collabo­rations) are being formed, requiring not only new methodological strategies in the study of applied problems, but also taking into account the scientific inter­ests of the participants. Interdisciplinary interactions do not develop on their own, but require mutual intellectual and existential efforts. And this means that the ways of expressing knowledge for each other must be adjusted. Thus, a form comes into the scientific consciousness, which was previously practically not taken into account in the communication of natural scientists: narrative. Under these conditions, Zhinkin’s unique historical experience acquires special signifi­cance, to which science and art, phenomenology and psychology, life and knowl­edge are connected in a special way. The unifying principle in this experience of Zhinkin was, paradoxically, the cinema, in which the scientist saw the key to expanding cognitive aspirations and enriching the cognitive abilities of a per­son. Cinematography is not just a new art form, but it is a special technical form of the embodiment of the age-old aspirations of a person who is trying to express (repeat, reproduce) life in motion, to make “the former present”. Zhinkin (fol­lowing his teacher G.G. Shpet) substantiates this idea of art as a special kind of cognition in the report Issues on Building a Scientific and Artistic Script, which was discussed on November 19, 1945 at the Moscow House of Cinema at the Section of the Scientific and Educational Film.

No common cause? The spaces of urban collective identity

ABSTRACT Working from Michael Sorkin’s expansive notions of public space, the article considers the ways in which figurations of the “we” emerge from the structures of mutual witnessing and the coordination of heterogeneities that operationalize multiple publics. Focusing on a relay amongst the Tanah Tinggi district of Jakarta and the estates of Hackney and East London, the problematics and volatilities of such a “we” are explored, particularly against the backdrop of pandemic conditions. Instead of regarding such collective identity to be a matter of settlement, the relays considered offer an opportunity to further conceptualize collective life in motion, as something continuously worked out as the very terrain of the public.

Still Life in Motion: The Origins and Development of Chaekgeori Painting

Still Life in Motion: The Origins and Development of Chaekgeori Painting

A Life in Motion: Exploring Auto/Biographical Exchanges by ‘Walking With’ Nelson Sullivan

In this article, we combine a number of related elements – YouTube films, autobiographical methods, diaries, letters, and walking – to explore the sociological value of the films of Nelson Sullivan (1948–1989). Sullivan was a film maker who documented New York, and elsewhere, in the mid-late 1980s; however, the films are ‘vlogger style’ and offer richly detailed, relational, and dialogical accounts of the ever-changing figurations between Nelson and a cast of other characters. Here we aim to walk sociologically with Nelson. We explain of how we analysed Nelson’s films before considering the implications of repositioning ‘vlogs’ as something of a hybrid between letters and diaries. We then explore walking as an autobiographical act a little further. Finally, we conclude by considering the implications of Nelson’s work for past, present, and future sociological practice which uses YouTube videos and vlogs, by emphasising the importance of the ‘dialogic exchange’.

André Bazin's Film Theory: Art, Science, Religion

Always keen on the spectators’ freedom of interpretation, André Bazin’s film theory not only asks the famous question “What is cinema?,” but it also explores what is a human. By underlining the importance of personalist ethics, Angela Dalle Vacche is the first film specialist to identify Bazin’s “anti-anthropocentric” ambition of the cinema in favor of a more compassionate society. Influenced by the personalist philosophy of his mentor, Emmanuel Mounier, Bazin argued that the cinema is a mind-machine that interrogates its audiences on how humankind can engage in an egalitarian fashion towards other humans. According to Bazin, cinema’s ethical interrogation places human spirituality or empathy on top of creativity and logic. Notwithstanding Bazin’s emphasis on ethics, his film theory is rich with metaphors from art and science. The French film critic’s metaphorical writing lyrically frames encounters between literary texts and filmmaking styles, while it illuminates the analogy between the élan vital of biology and cinema’s lifelike ontology. A brilliant analyst of many kinds of films from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, ranging from fiction to documentary, from animation to the avant-garde, Bazin felt that the abstractions of editing were as important as the camera’s fluidity of motion. Furthermore, he disliked films based on a thesis or on an a priori stance that would rule out the risks and surprises of life in motion. Neither a mystic nor an animist, Bazin was a dissident Catholic and a cultural activist without membership of a specific political party. Eager to dialogue with all kinds of communities, Bazin always disliked institutionalized religions based on dogmas.

THE INFLUENCE OF SCHOPENHAUER’S AND NIETZSCHE’S PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHTS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION AND EDUCATIONAL PESSIMISM

This paper gives a particular overview of reflections on education by two renowned philosophers of West European culture, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. What links their philosophy of education is the inclination towards the more complete shaping of a man. Nietzsche is a great supporter of Schopenhauer's understanding of philosophy as a philosophy of life. However, while Schopenhauer remained imprisoned in the world of pessimism, Nietzsche overcame the pessimistic view of the world with the image of a creative artist who consistently sets his life in motion, while enjoying his art of living. The thing they have in common is extreme individualism – the understanding of philosophy as the liberation of inner life. Arthur Schopenhauer perceived a man as a being of will that succumbs to laws of nature and the lower levels of humanity – will and passion. Friedrich Nietzsche saw a man as a being of will for power, emphasizing the power of the urgent and irrational one. Schopenhauer gave the pessimistic view of a man who is under the power of an unquenchable lust for life, whereas Nietzsche gave a nihilistic view of the world, in which he advocated demolishing ​​and putting an end to the old values. In Nietzsche's opinion, a nihilist is someone who sees everything as pointless and futile. Arthur Schopenhauer had a significant influence, not only on Friedrich Nietzsche but also on some other great men of his time, who mostly did not support his philosophy in its entirety. Understanding the world in Schopenhauer's way came to life at the end of the 19th century and later, primarily because of Friedrich Nietzsche. This was an era in which social sciences finally began to develop separately, but at the same time complement each other. Due to this interaction, it was possible for Schopenhauer, and through him also for Nietzsche, to have such a significant influence on the European spiritual life.

Life in Motion: Nomadic Cart Culture and Cart Burials of the Golden Horde (A Case Study from Bolshoi Tsaryn I, Kalmykia)

Life in Motion: Nomadic Cart Culture and Cart Burials of the Golden Horde (A Case Study from Bolshoi Tsaryn I, Kalmykia)

Shadows, Screens, Bodies, and Light

Considering how American publications wrote about x-ray, still, and photochemical motion pictures as shadows reveals a discursive bridge among the three varieties from the performance practice of ombromanie (shadowgraphy). This process produced shadows of performing bodies where the bodies were accompanied by the impression created by the interaction of the bodies and the light source. That organization of bodies and technology, as complex as a body and a fluoroscope or as low-tech as hands, a candle, and a screen, can help historians contextualize popular narratives of early cinema that suggested audiences believed that motion pictures were real enough to jump offscreen. The resulting images drag the profilmic event and the peculiarities of the medium into a cultural understanding of cinema’s potential to both represent and display life in motion.

A Mural in Sethmacher Square: Tensions Between Heritage and Public Space

The case of the city of Valparaiso, as a world heritage site, has called for a growing interest in tourism and a debate between its protection and participation in public spaces. In this article, we analyze the scope of protecting a material heritage in tension with the dynamic nature of urban culture and the use of public space from an ethnomethodology perspective. The focus of the study is a mural that emerged as an expression of urban culture in La Matriz neighborhood. From the point of view of patrimonial politics its relevance is questioned in relation to the urban space. The result is that while declaring heritage centers promotes economic improvement for disadvantaged neighborhoods, social life in motion is repressed by the protection of an infrastructure that seeks to freeze a past.

Restless Dickens: A Victorian Life in Motion, 1872–1927

Abstract By comparing John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens (1872–1874) with subsequent amateur forms of biographical activity in the period 1872–1927, this essay aims to challenge lingering conceptualizations of the material properties of Victorian biography as smooth and standardized. I argue that the parity of practice revealed between Forster’s biography and the various composite forms of biographical narrative that came in its wake, such as Grangerizations and photography collections, throws into question the supposed unity of Forster’s original text. It shows the ways in which his Dickens was always an unstable and metamorphosing figure, tracing an alternative genealogy for the subsequent forms of memorialization that push these biographical qualities further. It demonstrates continuities of preoccupation and practice in biographical activity 1872–1927, producing a narrative of Victorian and Modernist biography that emphasizes connection rather than rupture. Examining these composite forms of biographical narrative also reveals the proto-cinematic way in which they juxtapose and sequence similar but marginally different Dickenses, in order to create the sense of a figure temporally, physically and mentally in motion. From Forster’s text onwards, Dickens is thus produced materially as well as verbally as a ‘restless’ subject, continually poised between stasis and movement. The recurring biographical use of montage, collage and compilation in order to put the subject in motion suggests a previously unconsidered dimension to the ancestry of cinema. It also works to extend our understanding of the media available to Victorian biography.

The Horror of the Real: Filmic Form, The Century, and Fritz Lang's M

It is not surprising that film became the dominant art form of the twentieth century. The promise of a medium that could capture life in motion proved exciting, though soon after its conception, debates cropped up pitting the merits of realism against those of expressionism. Should a medium predicated on recording life adopt expressionistic sensibilities? Writing on the burgeoning cinema, Walter Benjamin seemed to imply that film carried with it a distinctly political responsibility to show life as it really is. In attempting to rethink this argument, I argue for the political potential of an expressionistic cinema, as understood by considering the theoretical underpinnings of Alain Badiou’s The Century (2008) when read in relation to Fritz Lang’s M (1931)—a film that embodies Badiou’s musings on the twentieth century’s aesthetic ideals and violent tendencies. Badiou writes that “the torment of contemporary art” is that it is situated at a crossroads between “romantic pathos, on the one hand, and a nihilistic iconoclasm” on the other: a knowing admission that the Real can never be truly represented, and an oppositional desire to convey it anyways. M knowingly exposes these aesthetic contradictions at the heart of the filmic medium by leaning into its own artificiality, and, in doing so, it prophetically exposes the thinking behind a growingly fascist German state in the 1930s. By the end of my paper, I arrive at the conclusion that the violence found in both twentieth century aesthetics and politics came about as the result of a similarly idealistic principle.

Slaven Bertoša, Barban i mletački Loredani: život u pokretu, ljudi i događaji, Zagreb, 2016.

In February of 2016 a book by a historian and university professor Slaven Bertoša, PhD, Barban i mletački Loredani: život u pokretu, ljudi i događaji (Barban and the Venetian Loredan family: life in motion, people and events) was published by Katedra Čakavskog sabora in Pazin and University of Juraj Dobrila in Pula as publishers and State Archives in Pazin and Municipality of Barban as co-publishers. Central theme of the monograph is the area of the fief of Barban and Rakalj during the Venetian administration, from the 16th century to 1797, and later in the 19th century. This edition on 319 pages definitely merits attention of the scholarly public due to thorough approach to archival sources and also factualistic aspect of the author’s research. The book contains fourteen chapters and a number of supplements as well as about ninety photographs complementing the textual part. Although the author published a number of books and works analyzing historical themes, this is the first one to deal with the regions of Barban and Rakalj. It is the result of the author’s research in the State Archives in Venice, State Archives in Pazin and Archives of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb where abundant archival documents were preserved dealing with the themes of research. Prof Slaven Bertoša, PhD, is one of the leading representatives of the Istrian and Croatian historiography of the Modern Period.

Facilitators in ambivalence

ABSTRACTThis is part of a larger ethnographical study concerning how school development in a local educational context sets cultural and social life in motion. The main data in this article consists of semi-structural interviews with teachers (facilitators) who have the responsibility of carrying out a project about formative assessment in upper secondary schools in the south of Sweden. The focus of the study is how the teachers make meaning of their position as facilitators and leaders, how they handle their fellow teachers’ criticism and resistance, how power transforms professional and human relationships, and how complex and weakly articulated power results in conflicting and ambivalent possibilities for action. From our perspective, the resistance the facilitators meet, although the project makes use of a concept that has proved to be successful, reveals an ambivalent structure where the facilitators have to face contradictory demands from different stakeholders.

Factors influencing childhood cancer patients to participate in a combined physical and psychosocial intervention program: Quality of Life in Motion.

For a multi-center randomized trial investigating the effects of a 12-week physical and psychosocial intervention program for children with cancer, we invited 174 patients (8-18 years old) on treatment or within 1 year after treatment; about 40% participated. Reasons for non-participation were investigated. Eligible patients received written and verbal information about the study. Those declining to participate were asked to complete questionnaires concerning: reasons for non-participation, daily physical activity, health-related quality of life (HrQoL), and behavioral problems. Participants completed the same questionnaires at baseline (excluding 'reasons for non-participation'). Of 174 eligible patients, 106 did not participate; of these, 61 (57.5%) completed the one-time survey. The main reasons for non-participation as reported by the parents were 'too time consuming' and 'participation is too demanding for my child', while children most frequently reported 'too time consuming' and 'already frequently engaged in sports'. No differences between participants and non-participants were found for age, HrQoL, parental-reported behavior problems, sport participation, school type, BMI, and perceived health. A greater distance from home to hospital resulted in reduced participation (β: -0.02; p = 0.01). Non-participants rated their fitness level higher (p = 0.03). Participating children (11-18 years old) reported more behavioral problems (p = 0.02), in particular internalizing problems (p = 0.06). Participation of childhood cancer patients in an intensive physical and psychosocial intervention program seems related to the burden of the intervention and the travel distance from home to hospital. In general, non-participants rated their fitness level higher compared with participants. Patients with more (internalizing) behavioral problems seem more likely to participate in the study.