Unbearable Heaviness Research Articles

Reflections of nurses in the fight against COVID-19 in Hubei: a qualitative study

ObjectivesTo explore the reflections and experiences of nurses who were deployed to the frontline to combat COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. In order to gain insights that can be useful in...

Resistance through clothing styles: Iranian young women’s body representation in public spaces

ABSTRACT This qualitative research extends critical theorizing on clothing practices by exploring how young women’s clothing styles serve the function of resistance to formal hegemonic culture in Iran. Thirty young women, recruited through a snowball-sampling strategy, reported their lived experiences of wearing fashionable clothing styles in urban public spaces. Data were gathered through in-depth interviews and analyzed by way of inductive thematic analysis. Seven key themes were found: young women use clothing styles (1) to communicate new meanings and values related to their femininity; (2) to resist dominant dress codes and veiled bodies; (3) to strengthen feminine agency; (4) to express elegance and openness; (5) to create alternative public spaces; (6) to resist hegemonic body shape; and (7) and to challenge the unbearable heaviness of being the same. It was concluded that the heterogeneity in appearance and in bodily practices among Iranian young women challenges the intended homogeneity of the dominant culture. In this sense, fashionable clothing styles are tools of resistance.

Climate coloniality as atmospheric violence: From necropolitics toward planetary mutuality

This response builds with Farhana Sultana's 2022 Political Geography plenary address on “The Unbearable Heaviness of Climate Coloniality” to analyze climate coloniality as an atmospheric form of violence. Drawing on the work of Franz Fanon and Achille Mbembe, I consider how climate coloniality manifests through the logics of necropolitics, including the mutual constitution of abstraction and extraction and the propagation of fraudulent universalisms. I conclude by contemplating how the transgressive solidarity envisioned by Sultana might be cultivated through a planetary mutuality centered on the universal breath and an ethic of being-in-the-world-with-and-through-others.

The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality

The extremely uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change mean that differently-located people experience, respond to, and cope with the climate crisis and related vulnerabilities in radically different ways. The coloniality of climate seeps through everyday life across space and time, weighing down and curtailing opportunities and possibilities through global racial capitalism, colonial dispossessions, and climate debts. Decolonizing climate needs to address the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, international development, and geopolitics that contribute to the reproduction of ongoing colonialities through existing global governance structures, discursive framings, imagined solutions, and interventions. This requires addressing both epistemic violences and material outcomes. By weaving through such mediations, I offer an understanding of climate coloniality that is theorized and grounded in lived experiences.

The unbearable heaviness of being Kri: house construction and ethnolinguistic transformation in upland Laos

AbstractKri people in central Laos traditionally engage in ‘heavy’ practices, including a stipulation that houses must be relocated and the flooring discarded upon a death in the family. Such ‘heavy’ practices are considered ‘real Kri’, and they are not adhered to by those who identify as Kri Phòòngq. This article examines the adoption of more enduring housing construction among the Kri, and the dynamics of ethnic identity implied by the dilemmas raised for individuals and families who must choose between (a) maintaining the heavy life of real Kri, (b) innovating new and less heavy solutions, or (c) changing identity entirely.

Gigi Bon, the Rhinoceros, Venice, and the Unbearable Heaviness of Being.

This article analyses the oeuvre of the Venetian artist Gigi Bon whose distinctive attitude to her city and the rhinoceros inspired this special issue and the exhibition which preceded it. To enter the Studio d’Arte “Mirabilia” of Gigi Bon is to be introduced to a world of sculptures, prints, and objects of wonder in the tradition of the sixteenth-century Wünderkammer or Cabinet of Curiosities. But more than this, it is an entrée into the mind and active working studio of an artist who has a unique vision, developed over almost thirty years, of the profound links between her own identity, that of the city of Venice, and the predicament of the rhinoceros. Her artistic output, and in particular her mixed media lost-wax bronze sculptures, prints, and sizeable silken scarves incorporate elements of the precious, the rare, the fantastical, and the whimsical, and all reflect profoundly on themes of self, Venice, and the rhinoceros.

The Unbearable Heaviness of the German Constitutional Judge on the Judgment of the Second Chamber of the German Federal Constitutional Court of 5 May 2020 Concerning the European Central Bank’s PSPP Programme

The reasoning of the German Constitutional Court judges to prohibit the Bundesbank from buying Sate securities on the secondary market if the ECB does not demonstrate within three months the proportionality of its decisions under the PSPP programme is not sustainable. Instead, the judges, who demonstrate unfounded intellectual arrogance in their claim to interpret EU law, make manifest errors in applying the principle of proportionality to the delimitation of competences between the Union and the Member States. They also make methodological errors in their application of the principle of proportionality to ECB decisions, while highlighting their prejudices in the field of monetary and economic policy. This paper has been published online on https://ceridap.eu/the-unbearable-heaviness-of-the-german-constitutional-judge-on-the-judgment-of-the-second-chamber-of-the-german-federal-constitutional-court-of-5-may-2020-concerning-the-european-central-banks-pspp/ The French version is available on http://rivista.eurojus.it/wp-content/uploads/pdf/Ziller-CorteCost-tedesca-PSPP.pdf The Italian versio is available on https://www.aisdue.eu/jacques-ziller-linsopportabile-pesantezza-del-giudice-costituzionale-tedesco-2/

The unbearable heaviness of leadership: The effects of competency, negatives, and experience on women's aspirations to leadership

Competent women should aspire to leadership, but they may choose not to. We asked men and women at seven U.S. universities if competence, negatives of leadership, and experience affect their aspirations to leadership. Surprisingly, competent women with more work experience are less likely to aspire to leadership than men, while competent women with less work experience are more likely to aspire to leadership than men. The more women associate leadership with negative aspects, the less they aspire to leadership, compared with men. For both, the less competent they think they are to be leaders, the less they want to be leaders.

The unbearable heaviness of reductionism: the paradigm of the antiatherogenic diet

Reducing a complex phenomenon into a simplified description may help us to understand general issues and to make limited decisions, but can hardly allow us to accurately predict the consequences of an intervention. The case of the antiatherogenic diet is discussed. Simplified approaches, aimed at correcting single components of a diet, privileging the lipid theory over more comprehensive ones, sustained by the illusion that removing one single substance (the lowering-cholesterol mantra) would defeat cardiovascular disease, have led us to faulty results, because the interactions among components and their interconnections are not negligible. The industry’s interest in shifting the diet of millions of people in well-defined and profitable directions (lowfat, but sugar-rich for tastefulness reasons, as an example), in advance of well founded scientific evidence about benefit, has been mostly relevant. Nowadays, it is well recognized that refined and sweetened foods, not fats, are the main cause of obesity and diabetes, and that the cardiovascular risk is more dependent on the quantity of food consumed rather than the type of food. In recent years the attention of the researchers has moved from qualitative dietary studies and unnatural regimes, to quantitative diets and more naturally balanced regimes, within the concept of globally health life styles, against any reductionism.

「人工知能」にとって「認知科学」の存在の耐えられない重さ

「人工知能」にとって「認知科学」の存在の耐えられない重さ

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being: Pain and Suffering in Anorexia

In anorexia which classically shows the difficulty in adolescence to link bodily transformations and sexuality, psychic suffering is undeniable and is embodied in the body while taking into account contemporary social data. Building on some elements of the psychoanalysis of a young anorexic girl, the article attempts to break through the wall of pain and get to perceive that in an order that is no longer governed by the paternal instance, which allows the representation, the subject can no longer support a phallusized image and the body is reduced to its reality. This results in a particularly painful female transmission in the clinic of anorexia, in which the contemporary world is not innocent. Pain is not the goal for the anorexic; it shows a willingness to feel the existence of the body. She seeks this nothing through which she attempts to capture the rift in the Other. But to achieve this nothing she must feel the pain of its absence. Pain is thus a claimed effect. The article ends with a reflection on the therapeutic work with the anorexic subject, which would be to allow the dis-completeness of the discourse concerning it, to reintroduce a relationship to its own image marked with a lack and offer the conditions of its own enunciation.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Capital Taxation in France

Capital taxes in France have been strongly increased in the three decades leading to 2013 - especially in the last two years. Their current level is Himalayan. In most cases, the compounding of existing taxes exceeds the real return on capital. The effective tax rate is thus more than 100 percent, and the holder is eventually impoverished.Such taxation poses a real economic problem, especially in an open economy. Since the time dimension is essential in savings and investment decisions, the negative effects of this tax hike will be revealed slowly, but surely.

Author Reply: The Unbearable Heaviness of Feeling

The comments by Brosch and Sander, de Sousa, Frijda, Kuppens, and Parkinson admirably complement the four main articles, adding layers of complexity, but perhaps at the expense of theoretical parsimony and stringency. Their suggestions are inspiring and heuristic, but we must not forget that science is about testing concrete predictions.

The unbearable heaviness of colloids: facts, surprises, and puzzles in sedimentation

Sedimentation has played a key role in the development of colloid science. In fact, it is because of the celebrated experiments by Perrin, yielding a concrete demonstration of molecular reality and giving strong support to Einstein’s theory of Brownian motion, that colloids enter the realm of basic physics. Subsequent investigations have shown that a lot more can be learnt both from sedimentation equilibrium and from particle settling dynamics. These advances, together with new experimental approaches, will be reviewed in this paper. Yet, we shall also show that inquiring about gravity settling is far from being a closed matter: for instance, the concept of buoyancy for a settling colloidal mixture is far from being obvious. Moreover, sedimentation holds novel surprises, such as colloidal inflations and settling disasters, showing that a simple external field like gravity may induce mind-boggling, and theoretically challenging effects.

‘The unbearable heaviness of being’

Reviewing existing scholarship and drawing on our own experience of microlevel qualitative research on gender in countries in three regions of the Global South (Cambodia, the Philippines, Costa Rica and The Gambia), this article examines patterns of women’s altruistic behaviour within poor family-based households. As a quality and practice labeled as ‘feminine’, the article illuminates the motives, dimensions and dynamics that characterise this apparently enduring female trait. It also makes some tentative suggestions as to how the links between women and altruism might be more systematically examined, problematized and addressed in development, and gender and development (GAD) analysis and policy.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being in Eighteenth-Century Studies

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being in Eighteenth-Century Studies Daniel Gordon Julia V. Douthwaite and Mary Vidal , eds., The Interdisciplinary Century: Tensions and Convergences in Eighteenth-Century Art, History and Literature (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2005). Pp. xxxiv, 312. $125.00. Thomas M. Kavanagh , Dice, Cards, Wheels: A Different History of French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Pp. vii, 264. $45.00. John C. O'Neal , Changing Minds: The Shifting Perception of Culture in Eighteenth Century France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002). Pp. 273. $49.50. Jay Smith , Nobility Reimagined: The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). Pp. xiii, 307. $49.95. As a cross-section of recent scholarship, these four books make it possible to appraise not only the individual authors' arguments but also the state of academic discourse. Things do not look bright. To make clear the principles of judgment in this review, let me first explain the three qualities I am looking for in a humanistic book. 1) Style. One can dispute what constitutes an optimal style. But certain things always make a text unwieldy. Obscurity—when words are wrenched from their conventional meanings, and the reader has to guess which possible sense the author intended. Prolixity—when extremely long sentences force one, like a Latin student, to scan far ahead in order to figure out where the sentence is going. These and other writing flaws will make a text unbearable to read. 2) Coherence. The overall plan of a book must be evident to the reader. An introduction should define issues comprehensively, at a high level of abstraction that subsumes all the specifics revealed in subsequent chapters. Historians who have spent years in the archives must resist the temptation to reproduce evidence for its own sake. Literary scholars must resist the inclination to announce every clever paradox that comes to mind. Each bit of evidence, each theoretical formulation, must fit into a whole. 3) Significance. A work must not only cohere internally, it must reverberate outwardly. We live in a democratic society, and so we have a vigorous public sphere filled with intense debates about major ethical issues. Today, every thinking person is engaged by problems such as the following. Is it legitimate to use torture to draw information from suspected terrorists? Do gays have a right to marry? What is the proper relationship between Church and State? It's not self-evident that any of these questions hinge on our understanding of the eighteenth century. Specialists of the eighteenth century, then, have to work particularly hard to convince thoughtful citizens that their writing is worth the detour away from the vital problems of the present. One could argue that, aside from contemporary political issues, there are perennial scholarly ones. But all the longstanding issues in scholarship, such as "How to explain the origins of the French Revolution," once had a vital connection to contemporary problems. When an issue becomes canonized, it can quickly lose its existential point because the outside world is in flux. Scholars riveted by an old academic debate often fail to realize that the universe is no longer made up of the entities about which they are talking. Each generation of scholars working upon a classic problem must define the problem anew, must revitalize it in relationship to the present. About five years ago, I changed my primary field of study. Instead of the French Enlightenment, I now concentrate on American and European constitutional law since World War II. I remain convinced that a knowledge of earlier centuries is indispensable for understanding the present era. But I do not keep abreast of all the developments in eighteenth-century studies. Since I no longer research the eighteenth century for its own sake, I am perhaps no longer the proper person to review these books. However, it is rare to have an insider who is also an outsider—someone who has both an appreciation for eighteenth-century studies and detachment enough to recognize when the enterprise has become dubious. I hope I have not erred too far on the critical side in the following discussion, and that some readers will be tempted to cut themselves loose from...

L’objet à l’œuvre dans l’art des British Young Artists

While an artwork is never merely an object, the relationship between the two has come to define some of the historical evolutions of art, and especially that of the 20th century, going from representation to presentation. The works of the Young British Artists, at the very end of the century, have suggested a way out of both the dematerialization process inaugurated by some of their elders and the very weighty materialism of the New Sculpture of the eighties with its “truth to material” motto, by adopting a lighter approach, unencumbered with history, which does away with the unbearable heaviness of things.

Educational heterotopias and the self

This article looks at the first university-associated colleges in the United Kingdom at the turn of the nineteenth century, and at how the first women students of these colleges lived within the limits of their society, but also beyond them, in yet unrecognised ‘different social spaces’, which Foucault has described as heterotopias. In Foucault's analyses of space, heterotopias contest the real space in which we live, creating transitional spaces and sheltering subjects in crisis. In this light, the notion of heterotopia becomes instrumental in the analyses of the constitution of the female self in education at the turn of the nineteenth century. The author suggests that in the genealogical analysis of women's colleges as Foucauldian heterotopias, the effects of power were not as important as the subjective capacities that were being developed in women's attempt to resist the power that had made them what they were. Through these technologies of resistance, women began to fashion new forms of subjectivity, always oscillating between the ‘unbearable lightness and heaviness of being’, by adopting unstable positions between them.

Forum : "The Unbearable Heaviness of Lead": Comment

Forum : "The Unbearable Heaviness of Lead": Comment

Forum : "The Unbearable Heaviness of Lead": Author's Response

Forum : "The Unbearable Heaviness of Lead": Author's Response