“Chains Weigh Heavy”: Body Mapping Embodied Experiences Of Anxiety,
2023
Black Dog Institute, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
“Chains Weigh Heavy”: Body Mapping Embodied Experiences Of Anxiety, Priya Vaughan Dr, Anna Tewson, Patricia Morgan Dr, Katherine M. Boydell Professor
The Qualitative Report
Anxiety has both cognitive and somatic dimensions as is ubiquitous at a population level. We report on an arts-based research workshop gathering data on embodied experiences of anxiety and non-anxiety. We developed an innovative short body mapping workshop to collect data and undertook thematic analysis to analyse textual and visual data. 35 body maps were produced. “Tightness,” “pain,” and “heaviness” were the most frequently expressed embodied sensations of anxiety. By contrast, when not feeling anxious, participants’ bodies primarily felt “energetic,” “ordered,” and “open.” Anxiety was most frequently felt in the stomach, head and heart. 35 Participants mostly used an abstracted, …
Dissertation Chapters Underway: 10,000 Shards, Or Opening And Activating Depth: Handicraft, Value, And The Work Of Art (Shards 00000-00001), Christopher Southward,
2023
Binghamton University--SUNY
Dissertation Chapters Underway: 10,000 Shards, Or Opening And Activating Depth: Handicraft, Value, And The Work Of Art (Shards 00000-00001), Christopher Southward, Christopher Southward
Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship
Dissertation Chapters Underway: 10,000 Shards, Or Opening and Activating Depth: Handicraft, Value, and the Work of Art (Shards 00000-00001), Christopher Southward
Stand-Up Comedy Visualized,
2023
CUNY Graduate Center
Stand-Up Comedy Visualized, Berna Yenidogan
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Stand-up comedy has become an increasingly popular form of comedy in the recent years and comedians reach audiences beyond the halls they are performing through streaming services, podcasts and social media. While comedic performances are typically judged by how 'funny' they are, which could be proxied by the frequency and intensity of laughs through the performance, comedians also explore untapped social issues and provoke conversation, especially in this age where interaction with artists goes beyond their act. It is easy to see commonalities in the topics addressed in comedians’ work such as relationships, race and politics.This project provides an interactive …
Amazon Web Services, The Lacanian Unconscious, And Digital Life,
2023
University of North Texas
Amazon Web Services, The Lacanian Unconscious, And Digital Life, Marshall N. Armintor
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
In late 2011, ex-Amazon developer Steve Yegge’s rant about his former company described Amazon’s rapid transformation from an online bookstore to a web-services entity with a ruthlessly unified platform, all guided by the idea that the company’s effort to streamline its internal efficiency could be monetized, and the resultant software products sold through Amazon Web Services. The media consumerism that fed Amazon’s early years funded a surveilling behemoth, one that everyone feared Microsoft would become. As such, AWS has become a manifestation of the internet’s Lacanian unconscious (even providing the services and hosting for Reddit), structured around the optimization of …
Purloined Significance: How Recidivism Algorithms Capture, Transform, And Automate Our Intersubjective Unconscious As Data,
2023
SUNY University at Buffalo
Purloined Significance: How Recidivism Algorithms Capture, Transform, And Automate Our Intersubjective Unconscious As Data, Macy Mcdonald
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Ever since ProPublica published their groundbreaking analysis of Northpointe’s Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions Core Risk and Needs Assessment software (COMPAS) in 2016, this web-based decision support system (DSS) has spawned a wide range of critiques and charges of racial bias. COMPAS provides a full suite of decision support applications to the US prison-industrial complex, including algorithmically derived recidivism predictions that increasingly guide parole decisions. The larger conversation surrounding COMPAS raises the question of how we analyze powerful, and yet opaque, data assemblages. In this article, I model an allegorical analysis of data assemblages. I argue the skills …
Community Despite Connection: Resisting The Digital Logics Of Optimization And Failure,
2023
Brown University
Community Despite Connection: Resisting The Digital Logics Of Optimization And Failure, Irina Kalinka
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
If a certain brand of aspirational tech-utopian discourse is to be believed, those privileged enough to be plugged into digital information technology are living through a golden age of connection. Platforms claim to facilitate sharing and partaking, bring people together, and bestow upon them new and improved spaces to gather and build communities. While reality differs decidedly from such idealized conceptions, it is nonetheless crucial to ask what kind of guiding vision is being instituted through such representational efforts: namely, the figure of community made operational and optimizable. This project will reject such idealized visions of coherent communities drawn together …
The Social Sinthome,
2023
Pomona College
The Social Sinthome, Ryan Engley
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Much of the critical discourse on social media misidentifies its problematic features as bugs, or problems to solve. Supposed solutions to these problems tend to focus on individual actions. We should delete the apps, own our own data, never click on recommended videos, and realize that we are the product. But if predatory algorithms succeed by individuating people—selling people “choice” and “options” as it harvests user data—then an entire online ecosystem arranged through the logic of that design can neither be meaningfully challenged nor effectively understood at the level of the individual alone. Transformative action addressing social media can only …
Everybody Wants To Be A Fascist Online: Psychoanalysis And The Digital Architecture Of Fascism,
2023
Goldsmiths College, University of London
Everybody Wants To Be A Fascist Online: Psychoanalysis And The Digital Architecture Of Fascism, Anthony Faramelli, Imogen Piper
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Félix Guattari and Franco Berardi have both argued that media ecologies and psychic ecologies are intimately intertwined and as such, any exploration of the collective unconscious must engage with how the mind is formed with and through media. This understanding of networks of interdependence necessitates an exploration of how platformization has impacted users” collective psyche. Drawing from psychosocial theory, psychoanalysis and the work of Félix Guattari, this article analizes the micropolitics of desire of digital platforms, with an explicit focus on how algorithmic structures amplify extreme Right content, allowing fascisms to metastasis throughout digital spaces. It will first examine the …
“There Is No Pandemic”: On Memes, Algorithms And Other Interpassive Forms Of Right-Wing Disbelief,
2023
Colorado College
“There Is No Pandemic”: On Memes, Algorithms And Other Interpassive Forms Of Right-Wing Disbelief, Scott Krzych
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
This essay examines several prominent memes that have circulated on Right-wing social media during the Covid-19 pandemic. The memes coordinate what I describe as a mode of interpassive humor, which positions those who “believe” in the crisis as naïve dupes, infantilizing those subjects who have fallen prey to the idea that they should take the pandemic seriously, and thereby delegating fearfulness to the other so that reactionary Covid-19 denialists may continue with their lives unaffected. The essay thereby seeks to draw suggestive lines of affiliation between studies of digital memes, evolutionary mimetics, and psychoanalytic theory, pointing to the algorithmic …
“Love Thy Social Media!”: Hysteria And The Interpassive Subject,
2023
Sheffield Hallam University
“Love Thy Social Media!”: Hysteria And The Interpassive Subject, Jack Black
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
According to the 2020 docudrama, The Social Dilemma, our very addiction to “social media” has, today, become encapsulated in the tensions between its facilitation as a mode of interpersonal communication and as an insidious conduit for machine learning, surveillance capitalism and manipulation. Amidst a variety of interviewees – many of whom are former employees of social media companies – the documentary finishes on a unanimous conclusion: something must change. By using the docudrama as a pertinent example of our “social media malaise,” and while remaining aware of the problems and unethical practices encompassing international digital/social media companies, this paper …
Lacan And The Algorithm,
2023
Simon Fraser University
Lacan And The Algorithm, Clint Burnham
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Exploring the development of algorithms in Lacanian theory, specifically the "R schema" in the 1950s, I argue that psychoanalysis, read through contemporary debates about the "algorithmic cult" of Netflix and other avatars of popular culture, can be said to reveal the inhuman, machinic essence of subjectivity. The etiology of algorithms, mathemes, and other formulae and diagrams in Lacan’s oeuvre has been under-studied, in part because for some readers they are not as attractive as his more bravura flourishes of word play as exegetical excess, and in part because they derive largely from the ‘hard’ structuralist moment of his work in …
Platform Psychoanalysis: What Does The Algorithm Want?,
2023
University of Winnipeg
Platform Psychoanalysis: What Does The Algorithm Want?, Matthew Flisfeder
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
No abstract provided.
From Extractivism To Adjacency. A Research Manifesto,
2023
Birkbeck, University of London
From Extractivism To Adjacency. A Research Manifesto, Margarita Palacios, Anette Baldauf
Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis
This essay concerns with the ways in which extractivism continues to be reproduced in academic frameworks despite innumerous initiatives of decolonization. Engaging with artistic research and embracing a materialist approach that emphasizes embeddedness and embodiment, as well as acknowledging the affective-aesthetic flows that accompany research, the authors locate the heart of the problem at the disjuncture between critical epistemology and research practices. This disavowed space of knowledge production, they argue, is where the logics of extractivism and its racialized epistemic dualism are reproduced. The authors put forward the notion of adjacency, as in their view, dwelling on the power of …
Encountering Ghosts Of The Capitalocene On Northern German Walkways,
2023
Christian Albrecht University of Kiel, Germany
Encountering Ghosts Of The Capitalocene On Northern German Walkways, Lara-Lane Plambeck
Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis
Walking is a two-fold practice of both transcendence reflecting capitalist conformity as well as of potential for resistance. Applying the theory on walking traditionally associated with the subject in the modern city (Benjamin 1999) to today‘s Northern German countryside, I will argue that the dominant structures of feeling reflected in the walking culture and rural people‘s engagement with the land today is characterized by a sense of capitalist realism (Fisher 2009) and informed by the feeling of alienation leading to the fetishization of landscape. I, too want to explore walking‘s potential to step out of capitalist conformity. When intentionally walking …
Commedia Dell’Arte: The Mechanisms Of Othering,
2023
University of Connecticut
Commedia Dell’Arte: The Mechanisms Of Othering, Olly Crick
Representing Alterity through Puppetry and Performing Objects
This chapter proposes that the dramaturgic flexibility within historical Commedia dell’Arte was predicated on a performance methodology that demanded a changing pattern of othering, depending on the class, economic strength and region of their audiences.
Exhibiting Blackface Puppets From The German Imaginary,
2023
University of Connecticut
Exhibiting Blackface Puppets From The German Imaginary, William T.F. Condee
Representing Alterity through Puppetry and Performing Objects
German puppet collections face the problem of how—and whether—to display their extensive holdings of blackface puppets that are built on grotesquely racist stereotypes, including the Imagined Turk, the Imagined African, the Imagined African American, and the Imagined Multicultural German.
Sicilian Puppet Theater: Alterity Or Diversity?,
2023
University of Connecticut
Sicilian Puppet Theater: Alterity Or Diversity?, Jo Ann Cavallo
Representing Alterity through Puppetry and Performing Objects
From the perspective of alterity, the predominant figure of the Other in Sicilian puppet theater is undoubtedly the Saracen (Muslim) aggressor. Yet the Paladins of France cycle, with its over 300 nightly episodes, is replete with stories that eschew an opposition between an “us” and a “them” and instead underscore our common humanity across borders of all kinds. Indeed, camaraderie, friendship, and even romance can readily develop between individuals from the most disparate corners of the globe. My paper focuses on a selection of examples under the guise of both alterity and diversity, the latter achieved especially through heterogamous marriages.
The Other In Southeast Asian Puppetry,
2023
University of Connecticut
The Other In Southeast Asian Puppetry, Kathy Foley
Representing Alterity through Puppetry and Performing Objects
Southeast Asian wayang/nang talung puppetry presents the local hero as refined. Three types of “others” repeat: 1) comic foreigners, 2) Raja Sabrangan (“Overseas King”) and followers, and 3) physically deformed clown servants. The last two groups are important and may relate to Austronesian concepts of spirit siblings accompanying each person through life.
The Western Tourist As Exotic Other: Coping With The Aggressive Ways Of The Casual Stranger,
2023
University of Connecticut
The Western Tourist As Exotic Other: Coping With The Aggressive Ways Of The Casual Stranger, John Emigh
Representing Alterity through Puppetry and Performing Objects
In the summer of 2004, the author traveled with Prof. Barbara Hatley to see a performance by the Ludruk Karya Budaya troupe of Mojokerto in Eastern Java and while there, the author participated in the performance; this chapter reflects on the minefield of cultural issues involved in their improvised sketch.
Raising Ourselves Up: Oral Histories From First Generation College Students At Bcc, 2016-19,
2023
CUNY Bronx Community College
Raising Ourselves Up: Oral Histories From First Generation College Students At Bcc, 2016-19, Cynthia Tobar, Oscar Zamora Flores
Finding Aids
Finding aid for Raising Ourselves Up: Oral Histories from First Generation College Students at BCC, 2016-19, prepared by Bronx Community College Archives
