Rise To New Modes Research Articles

Review: The Restless Dead: Necrowriting & Disappropriation, by Cristina Rivera Garza

Review: <i>The Restless Dead: Necrowriting &amp; Disappropriation</i>, by Cristina Rivera Garza

Armchair Undergrounds: Jules Verne and Subterranean Tourism

ABSTRACTThis article analyses ways in which questions of nineteenth-century tourism manifest themselves in certain of Jules Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires. In particular, it discusses several tensions within the form of these novels: (1) within developing practices of tourism encompassed by John Urry’s concept of the ‘tourist gaze’ and a contrary set of practices we might term by analogy the ‘engineer’s gaze’; (2) between standard sites of tourist itineraries and those hidden from the light of day; (3) the alternation of the latter tourism between two modes: the armchair tourism offered by Verne’s novels and other fictional and nonfictional works of the period and their perilous exploration by privileged individuals. The article uses Verne’s fiction to unpack these three tensions in order to get at what is at stake in the rise of new modes of tourism during the nineteenth century. The article concludes by considering implications for the rise in what we might term ‘dark’ Victorianism at the end of the twentieth century.

&lt;b&gt;Implicated in the Indicator Game? An Experimental Debate&lt;/b&gt;

The rise of new modes evaluating academic work has substantially changed institutions and cultures of knowledge production. This has been reflected and criticized in the literature in STS and beyond. For STS scholars, these debates (should) however have an even more specific dimension. Many of us are experts on aspects of these changes. But at the same time, we too are part of the processes we are analyzing, and often criticizing. To put it slightly provocatively, often we cannot avoid playing the very same game that we scrutinize. This creates tensions that many of us reflect on, and it certainly has created many implicit and explicit normative stances on how to deal with them. Yet it seems that so far there has been little room in our field to reflect on and exchange this particular kind of experience-based knowledge. There are many different ways to engage with the dynamics of evaluation, measurement and competition in contemporary academia, or to play what we refer to colloquially here as the “indicator game.” With this debate, we would like to give room to the expression and discussion of some of these ways. This text is the introduction and prompt to an experimental debate. We discuss the state of the academic discussion on the impact of indicator-based evaluation on academic organization, epistemic work and identities. We use insights from these debates to raise questions for how STS and STSers themselves deal with the indicator game. In conclusion, we summarize our contributors’ arguments and propose the concept of “evaluative inquiry” as a new way of representing the quality of STS work in evaluative contexts.

Book review: Gregorutti, G., &amp; Delgado, J. E. (Eds.). (2015). Private universities in Latin America: Research and innovation in the knowledge economy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Established on a Napoleonic, professional training mission, universities in Latin America have not centered their activities in conducting research. This statement applies to traditional public universities, though Latin America’s leading universities boast some research tradition. Contemporary worldwide trends such as the increased economic value of knowledge, the demand of private firms to develop research and innovation, the multiplication of accountability stages, and the rise of new modes of academic activity have led public and private universities in Latin America to increase their research footprint. In most cases, public universities have driven this push. Private universities, rather than developing comprehensive research portfolios, tend to cover niches of research that are usually funded by international agencies or other non-governmental organizations. Thus, Private universities in Latin America: Research and innovation in the knowledge economy is mainly about outliers, what we might call the research underdogs of higher education (HE), and how they have grown due to or despite public policy.

Heterologies of revolutionary action: On historical consciousness and the sacred in Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley

This article considers a fundamental aspect of literary modernity: the emergence of new forms of historical consciousness that have attended the rise of new modes of discourse since the 1920s. It focuses on Mahfouz’s novel Awlād hāratinā [1959; 1967; 2006; Children of the Alley] – not on its well-known notorious and complex history of reception, but specifically on the form of historical consciousness presented in and through the narrative, a type of narrative phenomenology of the experience of time, in particular sacred time, in the popular imagination. This narrative phenomenology outlines a new type of “knowledge” when it comes to mass movements and the struggle of the masses for power, not to be found in official histories: “as if the masses could dream of a full stomach but never of exercising power”, as Foucault has succinctly put it (“Revolutionary Action” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice [Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977] 219). This insight ultimately draws on questions of amāra as explained briefly in the Introduction by Caroline Rooney. While the novel engages its own immediate historical context of the 1952 revolution, effectively offering an anatomy of its failures, and placing it in a particular conception of historical process, it anticipates in many ways the recent momentous People’s Revolution of 25 January 2011.

LONGING FOR AUTHENTICITY

There is no reason to expect that the twenty-first century will not see the rise of new modes of religiosity, which will demand new styles of analysis and new categories of thought.

The Sickness of an Information SocietyR. H. Tawney and the post-industrialcondition

R. H. Tawney is frequently cited as one of the most distinguished social theorists ofthe twentieth century, and his position in the British school of ethical, democraticsocialism is assured. This paper revisits that contribution for the so-called post-industrial age. It emphasizes Tawney’s roots in philosophical idealism and Christiansocialism, demonstrating how these systems underpinned his famous critiques ofinequality and the acquisitive society. His deontological morality anticipates keyideas of John Rawls, leading similarly to a robust social egalitarianism. The moralbasis of Tawney’s left-liberal politics explains its durability and thus its relevance forthe Great Information Society Debate. Tawney would have rejected many of thepropositions associated with the information society thesis, including the allegedlyaxial role of information itself. While recognizing the importance of information andknowledge in democracy, he would not have supported transformationist rhetoricon behalf of an electronic information polity. Tawney’s essentialist socialism may bevulnerable to some of the better documented post-industrial trends, notably themove from goods to services. However, his work supplies useful resources for criticalperspectives on the technocratic social structure and on the exaggerated economicrole of teleworkers, inter alia. As regards the last in Daniel Bell’s triad of polity,social structure and culture, some might lament the anchorage of Tawney’s progressivepolitics in a particularist metaphysics, specifically Christianity. Yet the return ofreligious modes seems now as certain as the rise of new modes of information andcommunication. The Christian socialist values that inspired Tawney’s ideal of socialdemocracy, especially an expansive vision of brotherhood or ‘fellowship’, couldtherefore be appropriated for a modern normative theory of the information society.

The Political Economy and the Natural Monopoly of the Postal Service: the Swedish case

The postal service is a neglected business in academic historiography. Today’s postal service confronts two challenges: information technology and deregulation. This study deals mostly with deregulatory issues in a historical perspective. Comparisons between different periods in Swedish postal history in regard to competition, cross-subsidisation and bases for a natural monopoly is presented, and also the long-term development of mail volume. It will be argued that there has been quite different attitudes towards competition; that different forms of cross-subsidisation has existed; that the postal service has been a natural monopoly, but for reasons related to change; that mail composition has been transformed from correspondence to mass mail; and that mail volume has increased despite the rise of new modes of communication.