Theoretical Project Research Articles

Diagrama, arquitetura e autonomia

To what extent can design practice inform a new aesthetic agenda in architecture? Does the rationality inherent to the design process trigger the emergence of symbolic content? If architecture is an autonomous disciplinary field, to what realm does this autonomy belong - to the built work, to the project, or to the moment of creation? This article discusses the role of the diagrams and the diagrammatic process in Peter Eisenman’s theoretical work. It is argued that, because Eisenman formulates his diagrammatic project on the frontiers of semiotics, phenomenology, cognition, and philosophy, his approach to the diagram represents autonomous aesthetic design architecture. The diagrammatic process, singularized in a strategy of opening up the design process, engenders a disciplinary and political purpose. The terms under which diagram and diagrammatic process carry through this disciplinary agenda are here problematized by the confrontation of his discourse on the diagram with his formal experiments. The assumption is that, with Eisenman, the specificity of the diagram, neither merely confined to the employment of new technologies nor to the structuralist discourse of postmodernist architecture, breaks down the critical and political project of modernity. Although semiology and theoretical appropriation of the iconic diagram have become a reference in postmodern architecture1, deeper understanding of Eisenman’s diagrammatic theoretical project has exposed conceptual shifts in the status of what is usually understood as a diagram, shifts that are now widespread in the technological cutting edge in contemporary architecture. With emphasis on the phenomenology of the diagram, we attempt to understand the aesthetic sense of this reorientation in designing with diagrams by the architect Peter Eisenman. Research into the aesthetic role of the diagram ultimately seeks the relationship between a diagrammatic expression that singles out the modernity of the 20th century and the establishment of a cultural autonomy formulated within the architecture.

THE CHALLENGE OF TECHNOLOGY AND ONLINE BIDDING STRATEGY

ABSTRACT The importance of online auctions for sellers and buyers demands a great deal of attention on the topics of buyers’ bidding strategies and users’ perceived challenge of technology innovation. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the bidders who use different bidding strategies perceive online auction mechanisms differently.We provide a theoretical framework with several testable propositions that hope to shed light on the technology innovation literature and provide relevant strategy implications. First, we introduce several popular bidding strategies used by bidders on online auction websites such as eBay and the underlying mechanism of eBay auction. We then review the literature of paradox of technology. Finally, we propose a research framework and related research propositions. Furthermore, we discuss the insights from our theoretical project for academic and managerial audiences.

Construções do pensamento feminista latino-americano

Discutir sobre um projeto teórico feminista a partir da América Latina requer que se exponha uma série de discussões que envolvem tanto considerações pós-colonialistas como pós-estruturalistas. Destarte, este artigo procura mirar-se sobre a teorização produzida a partir do "Terceiro Mundo", de um país (ou um conjunto de países) do Sul global, o que abriria potencial espaço para a interlocução com a produção no campo mainstream do conhecimento político, como também com as várias perspectivas inclusas no que se pode designar como uma "teoria política feminista" ocidental.

Suggestions for a research framework for South Africa: how can we learn from web information seeking/searching studies?

The growing interest in web informotion seeking/seorching studies, ond their importance for web site design. search engines, intranets, portals, etc. warrants. a research agenda for web information seeking/searching studies in South Africa. A research framework directs research projects and should include: the rationale for and purpose of a study. descriptive information, links to related studies and traditional information retrieval, links to research paradigms and theoretical models, research methodology and methods, rationale for analysing the data, actual statistical analysis, interpretation and findings. and explicit reference to the practical impact of and need for further research. It should build on the importance of research in a particular context, and acknowledge the existing body of research literature. Suggestions are offered for practical and theoretical research projects relevant to the South African context. Although we can benefit from isolated projects, a research agenda, as suggested, may add greater impetus to our research efforts and understanding of the phenomenon under investigation.

Leadership Development: A Case of a Russian Business School

This paper explores the practical technologies of leadership development based on self-involvement mechanisms. In drawing on relevant theoretical literature and previous research projects, the paper identifies the challenges of self renewable leadership development. Further, following a single case study approach, the author investigates three practical tools implemented in a Russian business school. The study reveals that the self-involvement mechanism for leadership development is based on individual and organizational tension. The organizational design for such creative tension on an individual and organizational level includes voluntary participation in a leadership development program, self-determination of goals and responsibility for results, transparency and long-term rules. The paper defines four different stages of leader development: desires, beginners, creators and experienced. The author shows the benefits and risks of implemented leadership development tools based on individual intrinsic motives. The paper provides practical guidelines for leadership development allowing for sustained knowledge creation, retention and innovation. The tools could be applied in other organizations.

Toward a De-Colonial Common Sense

Toward a De-Colonial Common Sense The Darker Side of Western Modernity, by Walter D. Mignolo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. 458 pages. $94.95 hardback, $27.95 paperback.Since 1970s, Latin Americanists such as Enrique Dussel, Anibal Quijano, and Walter Mignolo have articulated de-colonial theory as a response to historical crises resulting from project of Western modernity in global South. Contributing to cultural theory and to concept of coloniality-the negative underside and constitutive component of modernity-de-colonial thinkers attempt to recuperate and reassert power of subjugated knowledges that continue to resist and struggle against modernity's onslaught of destructive effects (e.g., capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, globalization, neoliberalism, racism, classism, etc). By continuing to developing themes present in his related work, Walter D. Mignolo's The Darker Side of Western Modernity oudines a theoretical de-colonial project by mapping out historical provenances of contemporary global social, cultural, political, and economic problems and contradictions (read: afterlives of dependency and neocolonialism), providing frameworks and connections to comprehend and productively move beyond constraints of present toward a radical future through what he terms de-linking, or decolonization (122-23).Mignolo provides different avenues, or options, for thinking through de-coloniality as an antithetical method fundamentally opposed to Western modernity. In doing so, The Darker Side of Western Modernity implores us to take into consideration once inhabited subjugated knowledges such as those of indigenous and marginalized subgroups that continue to exist in Americas long after initial brutality of colonial contact and incorporation of Latin America into world system. In taking seriously resistance efforts of indigenous peoples of Americas and around world by following their intellectual and cosmological insights, Mignolo indicates that Western modernity and its underlying structure, the colonial matrix of power, will be problematized, disputed, and ultimately dismantled through sustained epistemic disobedience by assertion and preservation of those of that necessarily go against reigning forms and institutions of modernity (143-44). These ways of knowing express themselves in many forms, such as body politics, geopolitics, and, following philosopher Enrique Dussel, through an ethics of liberation that posits a radical mode of thinking that challenges and disavows central philosophies, values, and worldviews composing Western modernity as dominant planetary logic.1 Calling for an alternative to coloniality, Mignolo proposes that we reject Western universalisms that reflect and reproduce Eurocentrism in favor of what he calls pluriversality, that is, a new common logic advancing border thinking: a global social solidarity and cultural identification beyond ethnic and regional boundaries (293-94).Composing a part of his larger theoretical system, Mignolo lays bare his chief problematic in The Darker Side through an interrogation of globally shared capitalist economy that, following Anibal Quijano, is described as the colonial matrix of power. This matrix is at once created and controlled by Western imperial countries and disrupted by non-Western nation-states such as China, Russia, some Islamic countries, India, and select South American countries.2 Describing colonial matrix of power as dependent, obscured, and constitutive component of Western modernity represented by Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, England, and United States, Mignolo prompts us to begin thinking about this colonial matrix as being principal terrain responsible for current and future reconfiguration of economics, consciousness, and cognition (xvii). The concept of colonial matrix allows Mignolo to theoretically understand shifting, destruction, and syncretism of pre-Columbian modes of thought and of living that, while different from those implied in project of Western modernity, maintain validity and persist within present neoliberal moment. …

Susan Sontag — zapomniana matka?

The article discusses new and republished translations of Susan Sontag’s work, recently launched by the Karakter publishing house: Regarding the Pan of Others, On Photography, and Against Interpretation and Other Essays. The article focuses on the elements of Sontag’s thought that make her a forgotten mother of feminist and gender theoreticians, as well as such influential critics as Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. The article points out to continuations of Sontag’s thought in contemporary theoretical and social projects, and to the pertinence of her critical observations on theories based on metaphysics of presence: psychoanalysis, Marxism, or hermeneutics. The article also touches upon history of war photography and related war journalism, and upon the ambivalent quality of imaging of the misery of war. It also present historical and cultural circumstances of the development of Sontag’s thought in the intellectual milieu of New York in the 1960s. The discussion recapitulates the main statements of Sontag’s essays, relating them to a wider theoretical context, which is aimed at a reappraisal of the forgotten intelectual in the history of literature.

Voices Project: Technological Innovations in Social Inclusion of People with Visual Impairment

This article aims to analyze how technological innovations are contributing to inclusion of people with disabilities in society and at work, from the study of social innovations, assistive technology and digital inclusion presented in a case study on the Voices Project. The project, developed in partnership with the Association of Parents and Friends of the Blind and the Federal Technological University of Parana, in the years 2008/2009, made a computer course for people with visual impairments. The theoretical survey and project data confirmed that social innovations really are essential tools for digital inclusion of people with disabilities contributing thus to their inclusion in the workplace.

How We Model Educational Embodiment: Practical Considerations and a Theoretical Proposal

In his essay, “Neuroscience, Education, and a Radical Embodiment Model of Mind and Cognition,” Clarence Joldersma aims to “develop a model that more adequately situates the conversation about neuroscience’s possible contribution to educational practice, including the idea of interventions.” The radical embodiment model Joldersma develops here is a speculative yet well-balanced account, substantially informed by the broader theoretical project of embodiment in recent cognitive science. Radical embodied cognition’s avowedly non-representational stance — that perception is fundamentally goal-directed action and learning occurs outside of the head, in the space between brains, bodies, and lifeworld — unfolds educational possibilities in a way that previous computationalist theories never did. As a result, constructive dialogue between neuroscientists and educators seems much more plausible.

The Live Education of an Architect: John Hejduk and Oxford Brookes Year One Live Projects

AbstractThis paper explores a proposal for a new form of ‘architectural agency’ as a means to undertake live projects in education. This has been tested by the authors in a programme of live projects named OB1 LIVE begun in 2008. These projects are commissioned by community-based clients and created by year one students at Oxford Brookes School of Architecture. Live projects are often understood as ‘building’ projects happening outside the studio, as if in opposition to design studio projects. OB1 LIVE seeks to take theoretical ideas into the city and bring the real world into the studio.The paper tests and extends pedagogic theories raised by John Hejduk's, Education of an Architect and explores the realisation of his theoretical projects into built works by reflecting on Writing the City, his student-built project in Stockholm in 1998. Live projects expose the social, cultural and political processes of both design and construction. We outline our pedagogical strategy to use live projects to situate the...

Ann Jurecic’s Illness as Narrative

Illness as Narrative makes its case more by demonstration than by theorized argument, and that case is quite specific. Jurecic writes that “accounts of illness have become central to the literary branch of medical humanities” (2). She eloquently and concisely describes the medical humanities interest in illness narratives as: “how narratives about suffering sustain individuals and communities ... how autobiographical illness narratives reclaim patients’ voices ... how literary, popular, and medical narratives report and construct the experience of illness...”(3). Then comes the focus of Jurecic’s argument: “Such an approach to personal narrative is, however, out of step with mainstream literary criticism, which has not, by and large, recognized the significance of the work performed by such texts” (3). Illness as Narrative seeks to fill the “gap between the pragmatic work done by medical humanities in professional schools and the theoretical projects of scholars in the academy” (3). Before proceeding to details of how Jurecic understands this gap, two points of disclosure are necessary. First, Jurecic is book review editor of Literature and Medicine, of which I am a Contributing Editor, and over the last years she has commissioned the reviews I have written in that journal. Second, I am one of those whom Jurecic cites to exemplify the medical humanities stance, along with Howard Brody, Rita Charon, Thomas Couser, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Arthur Kleinman, and David Morris, among others. Situated as I am on one side of the gap between “pragmatic work” and “theoretical projects,” I am not sure whether I underestimate this gap, not seeing it as a problem, or overestimate it, treating certain literary critics as Others. Who feels affected or constrained by this gap, with what effects on their work, is an open question. Jurecic argues that “mainstream literary criticism” is dominated by “practices that are based in what Paul Ricoeur called the hermeneutics of suspicion” (3, original emphases), but with a twist. Ricoeur’s original formulation balanced “the willingness to suspect” with “the willingness to listen” (3). Citing literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jurecic asserts that suspicion has displaced listening. “For scholars trained in such habits of reading, the idea of trusting a narrative to provide access to the experience of another person indicates a naive understanding of how such texts function” (3). J Med Humanit (2013) 34:77–79 DOI 10.1007/s10912-012-9181-9

Using ecosystem CO2 measurements to estimate the timing and magnitude of greenhouse gas mitigation potential of forest bioenergy

AbstractForest bioenergy opportunities may be hindered by a long greenhouse gas (GHG) payback time. Estimating this payback time requires the quantification of forest‐atmosphere carbon exchanges, usually through process‐based simulation models. Such models are prone to large uncertainties, especially over long‐term carbon fluxes from dead organic matter pools. We propose the use of whole ecosystem field‐measured CO2 exchanges obtained from eddy covariance flux towers to assess the GHG mitigation potential of forest biomass projects as a way to implicitly integrate all field‐level CO2 fluxes and the inter‐annual variability in these fluxes. As an example, we perform the evaluation of a theoretical bioenergy project that uses tree stems as bioenergy feedstock and include multi‐year measurements of net ecosystem exchange (NEE) from forest harvest chronosequences in the boreal forest of Canada to estimate the time dynamics of ecosystem CO2 exchanges following harvesting. Results from this approach are consistent with previous results using process‐based models and suggest a multi‐decadal payback time for our project. The time for atmospheric carbon debt repayment of bioenergy projects is highly dependent on ecosystem‐level CO2 exchanges. The use of empirical NEE measurements may provide a direct evaluation of, or at least constraints on, the GHG mitigation potential of forest bioenergy projects.

Castoriadis in dialogue

This special issue is devoted to critical engagement with the thought of Greek-French thinker Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997). Co-founder (with Claude Lefort) of the Socialisme ou Barbarie collective and journal, Castoriadis was a political activist, psychoanalyst, philosopher, political and social thinker, and economist. Despite the richness and originality of his thought, his work remained on the margins of scholarly debate for a long period (at least in the Anglophone arena). This is now slowly changing and is evident, for example, in the continuing posthumous publication of his French seminars (e.g. Castoriadis, 2004, 2008, 2011b), the recent translations of his work into English (Castoriadis, 2010, 2011a) and the emergent—and burgeoning—reception of his work through monographs and comparative studies (Adams, 2011; Klooger, 2009; Mouzakitis, 2008; Poirier, 2011; Smith, 2010; Tovar, in press). Central to Castoriadis’s trajectory was the project of autonomy as the mutual interplay of philosophy and politics. Through the problematization and questioning of received thought—a key aspect of autonomy—the space for debate and conflict were kept open. In the spirit of Castoriadis, the contributions to this special issue seek to open up his work by pushing against the almost inevitable tendency to closure. They do so in two ways: first, in interrogating and extending key aspects of his theoretical project that have hitherto received less attention in the secondary literature; and, second, by bringing his thought into dialogue with other thinkers, with whom he systematically engaged during his lifetime. Born to a Greek family in Constantinople, Castoriadis spent his adult life in Paris where he emigrated with a French scholarship in 1945. During the post-war period he

Aristotle, Saussure, Kress on speech and writing: Language as paradigm for the semiotic?

Aristotle famously defined writing in a way that made it dependent on speech; and Saussure, in mapping out a place for language as part of a new field of ‘semiology’, has been seen as continuing this so-called ‘logocentric’ bias in Western thinking about signs. Kress, by contrast, in defining a new field of ‘social’ semiotics, emphasizes the differing materiality of speech and writing ‘as modes with related yet importantly distinct affordances’. This paper will use Saussure’s many-sided questioning of language, to show that Kress’s theoretical and descriptive project within Social Semiotics still needs something like Saussure’s model of linguistic meaning, and to suggest that a clearer theorization of language has positive implications for our understanding of other semiotic modes.

Palladio and the Water-oriented Scenography of Venice

Andrea Palladio’s Venetian churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and Il Redentore overlook the Bay of San Marco and its tributaries, the Grand Canal and the Giudecca Canal. In Palladio and the Water-oriented Scenography of Venice, Daniel Savoy examines the churches from their surrounding waterways, explaining them as centerpieces in an elaborate program of urban scenography that must be seen as a work of collective civic authorship. Through close topographical and contextual analysis, he shows that Palladio and his patrons oriented the churches to be seen from the perspective of the waterways approaching and transversing the city while evoking the visual experience and cosmological associations of theater. The scheme accords with Palladio’s theoretical project but also builds on Venetian conventions of aquatic urbanism and symbolic geography, implicating the architect in a centuries-old tradition in which the mythical image of Venice was projected through the city’s spectacular waterfront architecture.

Afterword

This afterword deals with the scientific and social status of the concepts of complexity, materialism, and difference in relation to the process of subject formation. It pays special attention to the historical context of advanced capitalism and the extent to which it has altered our understanding of notions and practices of embodiment and interrelationality. It discusses issues of biopower on the one hand and new forms of vital politics on the other, in relation to the political and theoretical project of sexual difference.

Carl Schmitt and the clash of civilizations: the missing context

Scholarship on Carl Schmitt tends either to contextualize obsessively his Weimar-era work to convict or exonerate vis-à-vis fascism, or effectively decontextualize it in the service of buttressing contemporary political theoretical projects. While both approaches have produced interesting work, this paper argues that both have missed key elements. An important and hitherto largely unexamined context for Schmitt's enduring series of interwar writings was the widespread European concern over the threat posed to Western civilization by Bolshevism. This is shown by analysing Schmitt's texts from the period both internally, and comparatively with other influential contemporary writers, who also predicted a European–Bolshevik ‘clash of civilizations’ as the conceptual order of future politics.

Learning from urban revolt

This paper brings into conversation two texts that were written 40 years apart—Society of the Spectacle in 1967 and The Coming Insurrection in 2007—and yet share great lines of continuity. Both texts are situated within their economic, cultural and political conjunctures in order to ground their theoretical contributions. The paper emphasizes the important influence that urban rebellions in Watts and the Parisian banlieues had upon both texts, and in so doing, highlights the over-looked debt these theoretical projects owe to marginalized and racialized populations in struggle. Henri Lefebvre's theory of autogestion is developed as a mediator between the two books, and as a way to engage their theories through the eyes of a more obviously spatial and Marxist thinker. The argument expands upon the spatial perspective central to both texts, while highlighting the urban implications of both their conjunctural analyses of capitalism and the territorial nature of the adequate forms of resistance that Debord and The Invisible Committee propose in the form of workers' councils and metropolitan communes. These two works provide a foundation for a heretical Marxist tradition that both remains loyal to something we can continue to call Marxism, even as it departs from and extends this tradition in new and exciting directions by way of what Debord calls detournement. The paper concludes with an examination of Frantz Fanon's writings on spontaneity and the relevance of the discussion for contemporary political praxis.

Institutional Racist Melancholia: A Structural Understanding of Grief and Power in Schooling

In this article, Sabina Vaught undertakes the theoretical and analytical project of conceptually integrating Whiteness as property, a key structural framework of Critical Race Theory (CRT), and melancholia, a framework originally emerging from psychoanalysis. Specifically, Vaught engages Whiteness as property as an analytic tool to examine data from a larger ethnographic study of juvenile prison and schooling. She suggests that the psychoanalytic framework of melancholia enriches and complicates this analysis and proposes a theoretical move toward understanding structural affective processes in the scholarly effort to map schooling, race, and power. Throughout, Vaught illustrates the significance and utility of such an approach through multifaceted data-driven analyses.

Greening EU Studies: An Academic Manifesto

This article responds to Ian Manners' challenge to scholars of EU studies to engage with a broader range of theoretical perspectives and projects than is conventional. Specifically, it investigates the benefits of such an epistemological shift as that called for by Manners, critiquing the condition of the mainstream in EU studies—which is still somewhat unreflexively defined by dominant norms of IR scholarship despite the development of the field into a multi-disciplinary form of area studies—and arguing for an engagement with ecological thought and theory. To do this, the article proceeds in three stages. First, I set out why I think the call for a greater range of critical perspectives in EU studies is useful, focusing on the epistemological challenges and benefits involved in taking such a step. Second, I set out the core ideas of political theories of ecology. Finally, I suggest specific benefits for EU studies of incorporating such an ecological approach.