Plural Modes Research Articles

Late Smith and the African's War Dance: Contested Values and Temporalities In Liberal Aesthetics

Abstract: Adam Smith's often overlooked "Of the Nature of that Imitation which Takes Place in What Are Called the Imitative Arts" (1795) reveals his innovative understanding of the overlaps and conflicts in valuation in the emerging discourses of aesthetics, moral philosophy, and political economy. Placing his praise for an African performing a war-dance in the context of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and representations of Africans (including Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative [1789]) clarifies current debates over the viability of liberal modes of valuation and cultural pluralism in a post-Enlightenment world grappling with the implications of imperialist violence, especially the Transatlantic trade in enslaved people.

Rewriting French Feminisms: Muslim Women and Intersectional Storytelling with Fatima Daas and Faïza Guène

ABSTRACT As intersectionality has burgeoned into a buzzword, it has not always retained its origins in black women’s lives and standpoints. Unfortunately, criticisms of the concept can further marginalise longstanding histories of resistance to overlapping systems of oppression. This article examines the value of an intersectional lens on transnational French-Algerian feminisms. It analyses the stories that circulate about intersectionality and feminism in France, particularly a misleading tension between, on the one hand, universalism, national identity and French feminism, and on the other, intersectionality. To ensure a situated and embodied approach, the recent works of two French writers, La petite dernière by Fatima Daas and La discrétion by Faïza Guène, guide this article’s rethinking of the epistemological bounds of (intersectional) feminism. An analysis of how the authors engage publicly with feminism, how their characters navigate sexism, racism, and Islamophobia in Paris and how the works are received, reveals a productive tension between the plural modes of resistance and agency Daas and Guène present, and dominant French feminist discourse. I argue for the value of an intersectional lens in bridging this gap and enabling the lives of Muslim women to shape the feminist project and participate in the construction of the universal.

Vibration Control of Metal Spatial Structures With Tuned Mass Dampers

additional-mass-type vibration-control devices, especially TMDs, and confirm their control performance under seismic loadings by both analytical and experimental methods. Firstly, to effectively control spatial structures that have different vibration properties than multi-story frame structures, we propose a spatially distributed MTMD method. This method is characterized by controlling plural modes with closely spaced natural frequencies based on the robust property of the MTMD against variation of natural frequencies. Next, we propose a TMD-with-initial-displacement method to improve transient response. Then, we describe a shaking table test using TMD models and compare test results and analytical results. Lastly, we describe a method of applying a Houde damper system through a real construction project; the Eye of the Yellow Sea Pedestrian Bridge.

(In)visibility, Mediated, and Sporting Perceptions: Bollywood, Biopics, and the Epistemic Turn in Mary Kom

In recent years several Hindi films have been produced that delineate the difficulties and challenges faced by Indian athletes and boxers, and highlight their sociocultural struggles in asserting their pursuit of and passion for their sport. Mary Kom (2014) is one such Hindi-language biographical sports film based on the life of the eponymous boxer Mary Kom, a film that brings to the foreground the ingrained social prejudices, gender biases and marginalization that affect the personal lives of sportswomen and play decisive roles in shaping their career trajectories. Here we contend that biopics like Mary Kom are immensely significant in delinking the dominant epistemologies, ideologies and interpretations, undermining the controlling vision and visibility, and broadening the horizons of understanding through visual representations. Biopics on sportswomen, in uncovering stories of their astounding achievements, generate alternative epistemologies and disentangle the epistemologies of sportswomen from the exclusive epistemic domain of men. The article examines Mary Kom from the standpoint of “aesthetic epistemology,” a way of producing knowledge in which visualizations are intended to convey something invisible to the spectator and heighten their epistemic awareness. Finally, the article argues that biopics like Mary Kom emphasize plural modes of knowing and recognizing the hegemonized epistemologies and ontologies of Indian sportswomen, and thereby interrogate the logocentrism of power and the governmentality of male-centered Hindi sports films.

Study on the dynamic characteristics of the suspender with additional dampers and a frequency-based multiple parameter identification method for the system

The measurement of tensile forces inside suspenders plays an important role in safety inspection and monitoring during construction and operation of large structural engineering projects, including arch bridges and suspension bridges. The frequency-based method is one of the most widely used methods for tension force measurement of such structure components, but it is affected by many factors, such as the additional damping from a damper and various boundary conditions. In this study, the equation of damped motion for a suspender-damper system is derived, a numerical solution method based on the finite difference scheme is given, and a frequency-based multiple parameter identification method is proposed based on the derivative of the system eigenvalue. The study shows that the position and damping coefficient of the damper exert an important effect on the frequency and the plural mode of the suspender-damper system. The influence mechanism is discussed in the study. The numerical examples indicate that the proposed parameter identification algorithm can identify multiple system parameters of the suspender with a high precision and the maximum error is no more than 1%. The influence of the errors in the frequencies is also discussed in this study.

States of Diffusion: Ideology, Text, Voice, and Sound in Cold War Chinas

From 1953 to 1991, speaker installations on the coasts of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan sent audio signals back and forth between the two Cold War foes. This opposed amplification and diffusion of sound continued for nearly four decades, employed thousands of “callers,” technicians, station managers, scriptwriters, and other staff, and was heard by successive generations of troops and civilians on both sides. Previous research on the use of sound for mobilization and subjectification in China during this era has focused on the authoritarian, revolutionary, or even totalitarian nature of sonic statecraft. This article, drawing on state archives, memoirs, and interviews, compares the goals, infrastructure, and voices of the two sides to suggest a broader and more transnational framework for understanding acts of sonic propaganda and control, representative not of “communist” or “free” China, but as a diffusion of the state voice into acts of listening between states. It also explores how the opposed initiatives of both sides interacted and influenced each other over years of call and response. Finally, it examines the civilian response to the broadcasts, revealing plural modes of listening, and of apprehending both oneself and one’s enemy. I offer the metaphor of “diffusion” not only to describe the process by which states and individuals positioned themselves through the transmission and reception of sonic impulses, but as a way to do social history that focuses on the multiple receptions and reverberations of an event.

Lost in the Past: Emotions, History and International Relations

Lost in the Past: Emotions, History and International Relations

Édouard Glissant’s Relation and Chaos-Monde in the Era of Covid

Édouard Glissant’s death precedes the Covid crisis by about a decade. Nevertheless, his description of global communities as highly interconnected and chaotic is eerily prescient in its portrayal of a world highly susceptible to a pandemic, and the concepts that he develops are effective in elucidating the cultural impact of such a crisis. This essay seeks to utilize ideas from the philosophy of Glissant to examine the Covid crisis, focusing on the notions of Relation and chaos-monde that he articulates in Poétique de la relation (1990) and Traité du tout-monde (1997), including his appropriation of Chaos Theory. This analysis will ponder the following questions: What are the implications of the viral spread for Glissant’s notion of Relation? Given Glissant’s account of the Internet in Poétique de la relation and Traité du tout-monde, what does he suggest about the sudden shift towards cyberspace and its consequences for relations and the Relation? What are the implications of the pandemic for the distinction that Glissant makes in La Cohée du lamentin between mondialisation (hegemonic, hierarchical standardization) and mondialité (plural modes of exchange conducive to diversity)? Finally, to what extent do Glissant’s writings present a potential means of utilizing the Relation and chaos-monde to overcome crises such as Covid?

Nature and Politics

My extended project, for which this study of Machiavelli is the beginning, is to examine early modern constitutionalism in order to understand the modes of pluralism that were advocated either intentionally or unintentionally in the construction of the idea of the political that was bequeathed to us. I will consider the thought of two major figures in this historical section of the project, namely, Niccolò Machiavelli and James Madison. The first section will be focused on Machiavelli exclusively. This section will consider Machiavelli’s work in the context of three major interpreters: J. G. A. Pocock, Anthony J. Parel, and Isaiah Berlin. The topics will be: time and the construction of the political, nature and prescriptive normativity, and the plurality of values.

Creolizing the Nation

Creolizing the Nation

Transversing Settler Colonial Capital: Indigenous Dispossession and Non-White Labour Exploitation

Drawing from Indigenous and critical race approaches, I develop the concept “transversal modes of life” to theorize the operations and effects of how settler colonial capital affects relationships of solidarity between Black peoples, Indigenous peoples, and people of colour (BIPOC). I argue that transversal modes of life contribute to: (1) better understanding and critiquing the ways that colonial-capitalist relations emerge to create an array of complex, varied, and uneven structural divisions between and among BIPOC; and (2) building a politics of action predicated on plural modes of being and becoming that transcend these processes and generate place-based relations that respect and actively support what Glen Sean Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson refer to as “grounded normativity.” Through a critical inquiry into the salmon-canning industry in early to mid-twentieth-century British Columbia, Canada, I contend that the analytical lens of transversal modes of life shows that settler colonial relations of capital are characterized by the following three features: first, although people of colour may not choose their social positioning with Indigenous peoples in the development of the settler colonial state, this does not remove our complicity in formations that continue to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their lands and waters but in fact complicates that relationship; second, capitalist development within the Canadian settler colonial context produces transversal modes of life that have developed by structurally positioning Black peoples and people of colour within processes of dispossession; and third, transversality draws attention to the dynamics between Indigenous dispossession and exploitation of non-white labour, which are always already relational.

Why are the institutional injustice and the lack of fairness omnipresent in Serbia? A pragmatic assessment of plural orders of worth

Recent results from Round 9 of the European Social Survey (ESS) indicate that Serbia differs from other European countries in terms of justice and fairness. Whereas the Serbian people?s dissatisfaction relating to unjust income distribution, unfair employment chances and political institutions may not be surprising, these findings still raise a dozen questions. Situated within contemporary discussions on normativity in sociology and survey methodology, this paper aims to reassess the moral grammar of these judgments. By endorsing tenets of pragmatic sociology and its principal aim to recognize the plural modes of valuation and criticism and reflective capacities of social actors to judge and evaluate, this paper develops around few major points. First, we underline how most major approaches to axiology remain stuck in a co-determinist framework, thereby renewing a number of dualisms. Instead, we opt for a relational approach and further present how the theoretical model of Boltanski and Thev?not enables the locating of different assessments of worth. After setting our methodological framework against the ?externalist? epistemology, we explore our key assumption that the above-mentioned high rates come as a problem of a feasible ?truce? between the domestic regime and the civic polity, ruled by proclaimed legality, representativeness and impersonal character. We trace the problem of incorporating multiple arrangements as a problem of generality, by relating these to two layers of information acquired through the ESS. One involves the analysis of the domestic polity covering the household situation in terms of organization and unveiling the specific worth given to care and protection. Another layer is derived from regression analysis which affirms that the absence of fairness in civic polity correlates with a higher degree of worth given to the domestic one, but also that the latter situation depicts a deeper ontological puzzle about making a mild transition to the assumed ?horizontality? of civic matters.

Sense and Sensibility: A Review of the Behavioral Neuroscience of Tinnitus Sound Therapy and a New Typology.

Tinnitus Sound Therapy is not a single strategy. It consists of many different sound types, targeting many different mechanisms. Therapies that use sound to cover, reduce attention to, or facilitate habituation of tinnitus are among the most common tinnitus treatment paradigms. Recent history has seen a proliferation of sound therapies, but they have each been criticized for having limited empirical support. In this review, Sound Therapy's modern history will be described, and a typology will be introduced and discussed in light of current behavioral neuroscience research. It will be argued that contributing factors to the limited evidence for the efficacy of Sound Therapy are its diversity, plural modes of action, and absence of a clear typology. Despite gaps in understanding the efficacy of sound's effects on tinnitus, there is compelling evidence for its multiple, but related, neurophysiological mechanisms. Evidence suggests that sound may reduce tinnitus through its presence, context, reaction, and potentially adaptation. This review provides insights into the neurocognitive basis of these tinnitus Sound Therapy modes. It concludes that a unifying classification is needed to secure and advance arguments in favor of Sound Therapy.

Dichotomy of Dosage Compensation along the Neo Z Chromosome of the Monarch Butterfly.

Mechanisms of sex chromosome dosage compensation (SCDC) differ strikingly among animals. In Drosophila flies, chromosome-wide transcription is doubled from the single X chromosome in hemizygous (XY) males, whereas in Caenorhabditis nematodes, expression is halved for both X copies in homozygous (XX) females [1, 2]. Unlike other female-heterogametic (WZ female and ZZ male) animals, moths and butterflies exhibit sex chromosome dosage compensation patterns typically seen only in male-heterogametic species [3]. The monarch butterfly carries a newly derived Z chromosome segment that arose from an autosomal fusion with the ancestral Z [4]. Using a highly contiguous genome assembly, we show that gene expression is balanced between sexes along the entire Z chromosome but with distinct modes of compensation on the two segments. On the ancestral Z segment, depletion of H4K16ac corresponds to nearly halving of biallelic transcription in males, a pattern convergent to nematodes. Conversely, the newly derived Z segment shows a Drosophila-like mode of compensation, with enriched H4K16ac levels corresponding to doubled monoallelic transcription in females. Our work reveals that, contrary to the expectation of co-opting regulatory mechanisms readily in place, the evolution of plural modes of dosage compensation is also possible along a single sex chromosome within a species.

On biodiplomacy: Negotiating life and plural modes of existence

This article examines the intersection of biopolitics with diplomacy and engages its dynamic re-envisioning as biodiplomacy. It revisits Michel Foucault’s peripheral attention to diplomacy and his framing of the concept in his writings on raison d’état and the government of the living. The article suggests that biodiplomacy can help us understand better the complexity of global biopolitical projects, moving us beyond governmentality and sensitizing us about the continuous negotiation of the meaning and materiality of particular ways of living vis-à-vis other ways of being. Specifically, the article addresses modes of existence peculiar to the postcolony or encompassing antithetical value systems and argues that biodiplomacy opens up a wider field of ethical and cosmopolitical possibilities by making visible the interconnected plurality of human and non-human forces.

Affective ecologies: Braiding urban worlds in Darwin, Australia

Emerging research on Anthropocene urbanism shows a commitment to human-nature centred futures and environmental justice but fails to engage with the language of race. Thinking the Anthropocene through race, however, has the potential to decolonise dominant apocalyptic narratives of climate change and provide insights into imaginaries of diverse urban futures. This paper argues that such futures run through entangled Indigenous and Ethnic minority worlds in white settler cities but are often explored separately. To entangle these worlds, I introduce and develop the concept of affective ecologies or sentient embodiments of ecological interdependency grounded in everyday urban life. The paper draws on in-depth interviews, focus groups, archival photographs as well as participatory photographs/video/films taken by racialised Indigenous peoples, ethnic minority migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in Darwin, a tropical north Australian city. I braid stories of co-becomings with this Saltwater Country prone to anthropogenic climate change by focusing on two events – Loving Country and Listening to Old Man Rock. The findings provide new insights into urban cosmopolitics that calls for articulating, reassembling and co-composing plural modes of coexistence in the Anthropocene.

Evolution in inter-firm governance along the transport biofuel value chain in Maritime Silk Road countries

We investigate how value chain governance can evolve in the transport biofuel sector beyond logistics and operations optimization, drawing on cases of eighteen manufacturers in four Belt and Road countries. We find that key motivations for vertical integration include control of strategic factors such as security of supply and gaining access to the retail market, subject to inter-institutional and intra-organizational barriers. We contribute to a theory of governance mode selection by suggesting plural governance mode offers a key strategic choice under institutional constraints. In BRI countries, plural mode could be less disruptive when integrating value chains.

O conceito de experiência e a formação para a democracia numa perspectiva Deweyana

O presente ensaio tem por escopo analisar o conceito deweyano de experiência no processo de formação de uma sociedade democrática. Para tanto, iniciamos mostrando que a filosofia da educação desenvolvida por John Dewey (1859-1952) se assentou numa teoria da experiência estruturada em torno de propósitos, fundamentos epistemológicos e métodos potenciais para proporcionar o aprimoramento das habilidades de raciocínio e do espírito crítico dos educandos. Na nossa interpretação, tais elementos são imprescindíveis para constituir uma educação democrática, pois para Dewey, a democracia não se limita a um regime de governo, mas sim é um modo de vida compartilhado e a sociedade torna-se democrática quando os diferentes grupos sociais são capazes de intercambiar experiências entre si de modo livre e plural.

A tangled web: Baltic Sea Region governance through networks

Network governance signifies a move towards plural modes of governing, where informal, flexible and adaptive collaborative structures are emphasized to govern policy complexities. These are viewed as fostering efficient and innovative governance responses. The aim of this article is to contribute to the understanding of the operative features of this system, relative to its capacity to govern BSR challenges.This article suggests that BSR network governance is ill equipped to effectively govern policy complexities from a functional perspective. Although BSR networks operating space is congruent with the problem space, their operational cooperation space is limited by internal horizontal interactions. Networks are unprepared for routinized cross-sector and cross-level cooperation, with the view to expand the problem solving capacity. Cooperation across networks, which could integrate the distributed capacities of BSR policy-making, occurs on an ad-hoc basis and is guided by temporal projects. Projects are normative responses to enable cooperation across networks.BSR network based governance accentuates temporal governance features. It represents a move towards short-termism, advancing non-permanent features, which is at odds with longer-term activities and policy objectives required by BSR challenges. BSR project proliferation decreases the transparency and expands the temporal differentiation, contributing to a desynchronization and a fragmentation in the region. The result is less transparent network governance, causing friction in relation to the stability, coherence and continuity of activities. This not only hampers the efforts to coordinate cooperation activities; it is also detrimental when attempting to govern the complex policy challenges of the region.

Assignment Of Plural Modes In Northern Rural Jordanian Arabic

Assignment Of Plural Modes In Northern Rural Jordanian Arabic