scholarly journals Not a political statement: Psychoanalytic notes on the measures to fight the pandemic and the responses to them

Author(s):  
Liana Giorgi
Keyword(s):  
GSA Today ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 4-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley C. Finney ◽  
Lucy E. Edwards

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 94-102
Author(s):  
Kelly Alexander

On March 1, 2018, the Swiss government enacted a ban against boiling live lobsters to death. This article explores the significance of that ban: Is it a political statement, a symbolic gesture, or both? In asking those questions, the author seeks to understand what kind of food politics are at play when a country bans a cooking technique. Drawing upon such seemingly disparate works as David Foster Wallace's landmark essay “Consider the Lobster,” the author's own ethnographic fieldwork in an haute cuisine restaurant in Europe, and the teachings of the French existentialist philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, this article argues that regulations over how we kill the animals that will become our food are ripe for reconsideration.


2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Lompe ◽  
Cezary Wicher

In the hazy anthropocene era, which M. Chaberski (2019) understood as a serious epistemological crisis, even wider than the climate crisis, visuality plays a very important role -it becomes a vector for visibility and invisibility of discursive and non-discursive practices. The spirit of new materialism has developed a number of concepts, which emphasized non-linguistic ways of shaping meanings and interpretations of reality, and at the same time appreciated non-humans agencies. The article is constructed around the thesis “visual is material,” because in the end every representation refers to the materials, on which our world is build. We can treat this thesis as a political statement, following J. Ranciere observations, that the thought is material (2007). We would like to analyze the significance of materiality by taking a look at media art practices. We can sink into the thicket of connections between materials and track the journey of things, not focusing on the final effect (manufactured item), but rather on manufacturing process (Ingold 2019; Deleuze, Guattari 2015).


Author(s):  
Stefanie Van de Peer

This chapter discusses a controversial icon of women in Tunisia, Selma Baccar, Tunisia’s first lady of filmmaking, an instigator and a fiercely independent woman still celebrated for her films and politics. Her first film Fatma 75 (1975) carried an intricately political statement of feminist defiance. The film looks at the time of independence and the subsequent struggle for women to gain their rights under the first president, Habib Bourguiba. Tunisia was a land of fictions, and even though Baccar roots her films in the reality of everyday life, most of them are essay films, due to restrictions put on the filmmaker by the Tunisian censor. Baccar, an intellectual artist, identifies strongly with her heroine and places her in a detailed historical context in order to analyse and critique Tunisian attitudes. She looks at past revolutions and women’s issues and in doing so, has served as women’s national memory. Her importance as documenter of the past has become central to 2011’s so-called ‘Jasmine Revolution’, as she now sits on the Assemblée constituante (Constitution Assembly) composed of elected members who are making an attempt at re-writing the Tunisian constitution.


Author(s):  
E. Dawn Hall

This chapter is a close reading of Wendy and Lucy, a film loosely based on the depictions of disaster victims and the perceived governmental failing to provide and protect those affected by Hurricane Katrina. It is Reichardt’s political statement about being homeless and female in America. Highlighting distribution details, the chapter explores the necessity of a micro-budget that dictate and contribute to many independent filmmakers’ aesthetics. The chapter discusses her use of “slow cinema,” ecofeminism, and the rejection of a capitalistic and patriarchal “American Dream.” Reichardt highlights the overlooked or marginalized in America: women, the working classes, and the poverty stricken. Influenced by the Italian Neorealists of the 1940s, the film addresses current issues of poverty juxtaposed with consumerism in America. Finally building on work of Anita Harris and Sherry Ortner’s analysis of lower class women’s representation in independent film, the chapter situates Wendy and Lucy in relation to post-feminist and third wave feminist concerns.


Author(s):  
Peter Wothers

In 1896, Henri Becquerel (1852–1908) had discovered, by chance, the phenomenon of radioactivity, after he found that uranium salts left on top of covered photographic plates produced an image on the plates when they were later developed. Soon afterwards, thorium was also found to be radioactive. In 1898 Marie Curie (née Sklodovska) realized that certain minerals were more ‘radioactive’ (a term she first introduced) than could be rationalized by the amount of uranium or thorium that they contained. She guessed that they might contain trace amounts of an even more radioactive element, and during the long purification process, she eventually realized that two such elements were present. The naming of the first of these, discovered in July 1898, is described by her daughter Eve Curie in her biography of her mother: . . . ‘You will have to name it,’ Pierre said to his young wife, in the same tone as if it were a question of choosing a name for little Irène [their first daughter]. The one-time Mlle Sklodovska reflected in silence for a moment. Then, her heart turning toward her own country which had been erased from the map of the world, she wondered vaguely if the scientific event would be published in Russia, Germany and Austria—the oppressor countries—and answered timidly: ‘Could we call it “polonium”?’ . . . Marie Curie named the element after her homeland, Poland, but the country did not exist as a separate entity at that time, and her choice was something of a political statement. The second element discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie was found to be millions of times more radioactive than uranium. This element they called ‘radium’ because of its intense radioactivity. Over three and a half years later, when they finally isolated a tenth of a gram of purified radium salts from tonnes of pitchblende ore, the Curies were delighted to find that the substance was spontaneously luminous. After the discovery that uranium and thorium were radioactive, in September 1899, Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) made a further discovery: ‘In addition to this ordinary radiation, I have found that thorium compounds continuously emit radio-active particles of some kind, which retain their radio-active powers for several minutes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dawn Wheatley ◽  
Eirik Vatnoey

This study of tweets ( n = 2247) explores discussions about a pro-choice blocklist (@Repeal_Shield) used during the 2018 Irish abortion referendum campaign, capturing conflicting interpretations of engagement and political participation. Although qualitative Twitter studies bring methodological challenges, deep readings were needed to analyse arguments in favour and against the blocklist, and to consider what we can learn about users’ expectations of Twitter. Through deductive and inductive coding, opposing perspectives emerge on whether such lists are useful, democratic or regressive, but both sides share normative aspirations for Twitter to serve as a space for healthy debate, even if there is clear tension in how that is best achieved. Blocklists are traditionally cited as a harassment solution, facilitating participation from otherwise-excluded counterpublics. However, @Repeal_Shield demonstrates how this affordance has evolved towards omitting broad spectrums of undesired content, while using blocklists – and being listed – can be a bold political statement in itself.


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