Digital Commons Network^™

Accomplishing Robotic Autonomy: The Complexities Of Sociotechnical Care And Agency In The Laboratory, Yifan Xu, Elliott Hauser

Human-Machine Communication

Effective ethical interventions in emerging technologies such as robotic autonomy demand situated understandings of the practices that shape them. Drawing upon a year of participatory ethnography, this study examines the sociomaterial practices used to accomplish robotic agency in an engineering research laboratory. Ironically, the robot was often a helpless, even pathetic, figure. Roboticists displayed an attitude of surprisingly genuine, diligent, and self-effacing care toward the robot as they helped enable it to perform basic competencies such as picking up a bottle. Using a practice theory, we show how roboticists’ care practices, motivated and sustained by anticipatory narratives of robotic agency, …

Between Autonomy And Automation: Mapping Practices Among Syrian Delivery Drivers In Beirut, Blake Atwood

Human-Machine Communication

This article studies the tension between autonomy and automation as it is experienced by Syrian refugee food-delivery drivers who work on the Toters app in Beirut, Lebanon. Central to this study are the freedom narratives these drivers construct, which reflect their ambivalent relationship with digital labor platforms. These narratives highlight how the algorithmic nature of the Toters app provides opportunities for self-employment and flexible work, crucial for refugees facing employment barriers and limited physical and social mobility in Lebanon. However, in these narratives, the drivers’ sense of autonomy is also often compromised by the app’s increasing automation, which imposes surveillance …

Autonomy And Agency In Farming: Exploring Human, Machine, And Animal Dynamics, Ricarda Drüeke, Corinna Peil

Human-Machine Communication

Human-Machine Communication is reshaping the agricultural sector as digital technologies and automated systems transform farms into complex communicative environments. Farms, which serve as both workplaces and living spaces, uniquely integrate these technologies, yet their impact on farmers’ daily practices, labor, and decision-making remains underexplored. Through an ethnographic approach involving qualitative interviews and farm visits in Austria and southern Germany, the study investigates the interactions among farmers, automated technologies, smart devices, and animals. Using Actor-Network Theory, the redistribution of labor and agency in smart farming is explored. This analysis examines two forms of human-machine relations: the dynamics of automation and autonomy …

"There Is No Such Thing As A Machine That Acts Outside Of Relations With Humans”, Lucy Suchman, Caja Thimm

Human-Machine Communication

Starting with her early works on “Talk with Machines” (1986, republished in 2021) and her books Plans and Situated Actions: The Problem of Human-Machine Communication (1987) and Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007a), Lucy Suchman not only opened up a new domain of scientific interest in humans and technology, but also showed how the scope of human machine relations needs to be reconceptualized. With her most recent works (2023a, 2023b), she not only widens the perspective on the contexts for machine usage, particularly by the military, but she also gives insights on how to conceptualize AI in terms of its ontological status and …

From Automation To Autonomy: Human Machine Relations In The Age Of Artificial Intelligence, Caja Thimm, Gabriele Gramelsberger, Maximilian Mayer, Frank T. Piller

Human-Machine Communication

The shift from automation to autonomy marks a new chapter in human-machine relations, especially in the context of the expanding and diversifying applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI). As machines gain capabilities that resemble autonomous agency, the boundary between human and machine autonomy blurs, challenging traditional concepts of agency, control, and independence. This special issue examines the multidisciplinary perspectives on autonomy in the digital age, addressing the complexities of attributing autonomy to machines and AI systems. Philosophical, sociological, and technical approaches converge to explore how emerging forms of machine autonomy impacts human agency, freedom, and decision-making, with applications spanning from autonomous …

How Are We To Think About The Knowledge That We Should Know?, RaúL Fornet-Betancourt

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

As a precondition of philosophical dialogue among different cultures, this essay forwards a series of questions regarding the epistemological presuppositions of the current dominant knowledge culture, which is characterized by a capitalistic, technological, and colonial ethos. By stating its presuppositions, situating these in the historical context of its development, and drawing their consequences, the essay opens up the possibility of overcoming this dominant ethos of knowledge through the recuperation of epistemological plurality by way of exchanges among a multiplicity of knowledge cultures. The essay proposes that it is philosophy’s task today to resist the dehumanization of knowledge by asking what …

Dwelling Near In Mountains Farthest Apart: A Conversation, Remmon E. Barbaza

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

In November 2012, Amsterdam-based Spanish visual artist Paloma Polo came to the Philippines for the initial phase of her project on land use and vulnerability. She was hosted by the Department of Philosophy at the Ateneo de Manila University, with some of whose members she began collaborating, including Remmon E. Barbaza, an associate professor of philosophy who is currently working on an interdisciplinary project on disaster risk management. Polo is currently based in Manila to develop a research project and to work on a film project on the topics mentioned earlier, and is collaborating and teaching as an adjunct professor …

Philosophy And Transformative Learning: Lessons In Natural Resource Management From Cordillera Communities, Julius D. Mendoza

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

In this paper, the objects of philosophical reflection are the important lessons learned from a participatory action research program conducted by the Cordillera Studies Center of UP Baguio in Sagada, Mountain Province, in Northern Luzon, Philippines, which ran from March 1997 to February 2001. This research program used the Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) approach. Concepts of philosophy are made to re-describe “second order” concepts of theory, as well as “first order” concepts of community-based natural resource management research, planning, testing, implementation, and monitoring. Concepts used in the context of field work are given philosophical re-descriptions in the form …

Becoming-Religion: Re-/Thinking Religion With A.N. Whitehead And Keiji Nishitani, Kenneth C. Masong

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

For Whitehead and Nishitani, a rethinking of religion necessitates a rethinking of the metaphysics that underlie one’s concept of religion. The dynamism of religion is unveiled only within the metaphysical grounding of an ontology that accommodates the philosophical preference of “becoming” as an ultimate category of reality. The novelty of Whitehead’s theory of religion lies in the process metaphysics that is presupposes. For him, religion, like the whole of reality, is inherently developing and evolving. What Nishitani offers is a rethinking of Western understanding of religion by way of an Asian speculative approach grounded in Zen Buddhism. He argues that …

An Inquiry Into The Historical Development Of Philosophy In Japan, Kelly Louise Rexzy P. Agra

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

What is Japanese Philosophy? This paper will address this question, not by giving a survey of the works of Japanese philosophers or a definition of the subject matter of Japanese philosophy, but by attempting to present how it emerged as a distinct philosophical tradition—by sketching the controversies that gave rise to its formation; the social, intellectual, and historical factors that paved the way to its development; and the revolution of thought which finally gave it the title “Japanese philosophy.” I will argue that Japanese philosophy was born not because Japanese thinkers desperately wanted a philosophy that they could call their …

Queering The Relationship Between Research, Researcher And Research Participant: Procedural Ethics, Relational Ethics, And Inverted Hierarchies, Val Meneau

The Qualitative Report

Ethics committees (ECs) typically base their decisions on established assumptions about the impact of the research process, the researcher and the participant on each other, which my doctoral research project failed to meet. This paper discusses the challenging clash between my experiences as a queer scholar doing fieldwork and the expectations of my EC. I argue that queer feminist ethnography complicates the established assumptions concerning the impact of the research process, researcher, and participant on each other. In doing so, I argue that we need models of this relationship that allow us to capture its complexity, for example in the …

Autopercepción De Envejecimiento A Temprana Edad En Pobladores De Escasos Recursos Económicos, Luis Hesneide Morales López

The Qualitative Report

Un buen número de personas que viven en condiciones de pobreza se consideran personas de la tercera edad a pesar de que no están en esa etapa de sus vidas. Además, afirman con nostalgia que todo tiempo pasado fue mejor en comparación con la situación actual en la que viven. En este estudio cualitativo de enfoque fenomenológico participaron 181 pobladores que viven en precariedad económica de las tres regiones del Perú: Chimbote (costa), Juliaca (sierra) y Pucallpa (selva), quienes participaron en el estudio a través de entrevistas a profundidad y grupos focales. Se puede aseverar que tales percepciones afectan sus …

Tale Of Transitions: Experiences Of A First-Year Ph.D. Asian Student In America, Aakash Kumar

The Qualitative Report

This autoethnographic account narrates my transition as a first-year Ph.D. student at Texas A&M University, USA. Employing Kurt Lewin’s Change Model, I have structured my narrative around three phases: (a) unfreeze, (b) change, and (c) refreeze. The unfreeze phase details the process of unlearning, adjusting to American academic practices, and the initial cultural shock intensified by homesickness. The change phase describes embracing a new identity, integrating into campus and cultural life, and overcoming academic challenges. Lastly, the refreezing phase involves consolidating new beliefs, perspectives, and skills, solidifying the transition to becoming a more confident and competent scholar. This autoethnographic account …

Relationship-Influenced Cyber Hygiene (Rich) In Community Banks, Monte L. Ward

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a research study that introduces the theoretical model of Relationship-Influenced Cyber Hygiene (RICH) through its investigation of the phenomenon the researcher experienced: how the interpersonal relationship between top management and cybersecurity personnel within smaller community banks influences the cyber hygiene of top management. Due to the value proposition of community banks to their clients and the limited budget of smaller institutions for investment in cybersecurity controls and initiates, community banks need additional strategies to achieve stronger cyber hygiene, especially as it relates the greatest weakness in most cybersecurity infrastructures—the human element. This study identifies and addresses a …

Fragile Arena: The Struggle Between Protest And Confinement In Three Sugilanon, Ma. Teresa Wright

Kritika Kultura

Though the Hiligaynon prose narrative form called the sugilanon appears innocuous enough, it can also be—and has been—used as a channel of social protest. As a protest text, the sugilanon can expose, criticize, and propose alternatives to perceived social wrongs such as the oppression of one individual by another or of one social class by another. This paper seeks to explore the protest aspect of the sugilanon through three examples of the form. The three texts are analyzed and evaluated in terms of the extent to which they manifest recognition of and engagement with, the oppression in the world that …

From Birmingham To Angkor Wat: Demarcations Of Contemporary Cultural Studies, E. San Juan Jr.

Kritika Kultura

The radical inspiration of Cultural Studies has been betrayed, declares E. San Juan, Jr. In this timely essay, he argues that this betrayal springs from the postmodernist temperament, the “metaphysical turn,” of contemporary Cultural Studies. By exaggerating “the possibility of liberation over the established fact of domination,” Cultural Studies has abandoned fundamental categories such as class and nation in favor of race and gender, among others. The frivolous has overcome the political: commercial icons and rituals are now fantasized to topple the very system that makes their condition possible. “In what sense can this still inchoate and contested terrain called …

Shearman, Patricia, Larisa Filippov

Querying the Past: LGBTQ Maine Oral History Project Collection

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Pat Shearman is a 75 year old lesbian currently living in Norway, ME. Although she was born in Waterville, she has lived in other places around the country such as Massachusetts and Ohio. Born to an American Baptist minister, Pat eventually distanced herself from religion as a college student despite her father’s liberal attitude. Years later, she began going to church again, and now identifies as a Unitarian Universalist. Pat was very involved in multiple types of activism during and after college, including antiwar activism and women’s rights activism. Although she does not march anymore, Pat is still politically …

Serving The Voiceless: Investigating Local Organizations For Immigrant Empowerment, Aliyah Whitfield, Kiya Demps, Chance Brown, Daniel Kabithe, Acia Diallo

The Cardinal Edge

This research project delves into the landscape of community organizations that serve the immigrant population in Louisville, Kentucky, focusing on 6 key entities: La Casita Center, Kentucky Refugee Ministries, Catholic Charities of Louisville, English Conversation Club, Backside Learning Center, and American Community Center. Through a combination of interviews, phone calls and research, the study discovered the roles, missions, and offered services by each organization. Through these methods, the study identified some of the critical needs within the immigrant community and examined how these organizations address them. Not only did the finding highlight the importance of services provided, but it also …

Can Men Be Feminists?, Abigail M Stanger

The Cardinal Edge

At the emergence of the feminist movements of the mid-nineteenth century, women advocated for and eventually gained the right to make their voices heard in the political arena. As feminism has evolved to campaign for social, economic, and further political equality among genders, the question of who can be a feminist remains a topic of debate. This presentation will first attempt to define feminism historically and in the modern sense, then ponder the evolving definition of a man in relation to their potential role or lack thereof in the modern feminist movement.

The Louisville Housing Crisis, Rebecca Klukowski

The Cardinal Edge

There is no question of whether the United States is facing a housing crisis. With approximately 653,104 Americans experiencing homelessness on a given night in 2023 and 22.4 million renter households cost-burdened in 2022, the facts speak for themselves (de Sousa et al., 2023; Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2024). However, understanding the complex contributing factors to a housing crisis can be difficult. What does it mean for housing to be affordable? How is our state of Kentucky affected by housing insecurity, and what can the general public do to help?

Cambodian American Parents Perspectives And Knowledge Of Special Education Supports For Their Children With Disabilities, Robai N. Werunga, Minjeong Kim, Rocio Rosales

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

Knowledge of the special education process has been found to enhance parental involvement with collateral effects of positive school outcomes for students with disabilities. Although research on immigrant families with children with disabilities has increased in recent years, there is limited research specific to Southeast Asian American (SEAA) families, and that of Cambodian American families, in particular. In this study authors examined the perspectives and knowledge of Cambodian American parents regarding disabilities, special education services and supports provided to their children with disabilities, and the extent to which these perspectives and their knowledge impacted their level of engagement in their …

Program Of The 2024 Mississippi Historical Society Annual Meeting, William "Brother" Rogers

Journal of Mississippi History

No abstract provided.

Lukas Kaelin, Strong Family, Weak State: Hegel's Political Philosophy And The Filipino Family, Anton Luis Sevilla

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

Lukas Kaelin, Strong Family, Weak State: Hegel's Political Philosophy and the Filipino Family

How To Leave Modernity Behind: The Relationship Between Colonialism And Enlightenment, And The Possibility Of Altermodern Decoloniality, Britta Saal

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

Starting from the fact that we all share modern history while at the same time having very different and sometimes contrasting experiences of what modernity is, I’d first like to look at the connection between colonialism and Enlightenment, because the modern norms and values developed then are still discussed very actively on the global scale. One of the major problems that constrain the transcendence of the colonial impact of these norms and values is the colonized mind. It is very clear that it is necessary to decolonize both the colonized and the colonizer’s minds. Here the project of conceptual decolonization, …

Agenda For A South-South Philosophical Dialogue, Enrique Dussel

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture

The intercultural dialogue that has been developing since the beginning of the 21st century as a cultural and political priority should have an inter philosophical global dialogue as its epistemological and ontological foundation. However, given the asymmetric relation between the Global North and the Global South, it is necessary that this global dialogue begin with an inter philosophical dialogue among the world’s post-colonial communities. This essay argues that it is imperative for philosophers of the South to come together to define and claim for themselves a philosophical practice—generating its topics and methods from its own historical, socio-economic-political realities and traditions—that …

“I’M A Needed Commodity In The Academy”: Racial Capitalism And The Positioning Of Race As Capital In The Faculty Job Market, Román Liera, Aireale Rodgers

Department of Educational Leadership Scholarship and Creative Works

Guided by racial capitalism, interest convergence, and positioning theory, we analyzed focus group data from 30 racially minoritized PhD candidates to understand how they experienced and responded to racial commodification in the academic job market. Although our participants perceived their hireability might be contingent on their performance of “the right typeof diversity,” they decided to position themselves in authentic and humanizing ways. The study highlights how racial commodification incentivizes racially minoritized PhD students in the academic job market to position themselves such that Historically White Serving Institutions could exploit them while maintaining the status quo. We provide recommendations for faculty …

Evaluating Trauma-Informed Design In A Mental Health Setting: A Community-Based Research Case Study, Marie Spence

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This case study utilized a community-based research framework to explore how the Trauma-Informed Design framework can be implemented in a mental health setting. This study focused on the site of Empower Therapy Practice, a private mental health practice in the Denver Metro Area, to engage clients and staff to participate in advisory boards and inform the interior design of a new office space. To explore the application of Trauma-Informed Design, participants engaged in a variety of research activities, including an evaluative questionnaire, Photovoice, and focus group. Advisory board members identified various aspects of Trauma-Informed Design which meaningfully translate to therapeutic …

My Superpower: Research Collaborator Strategies Among Faculty Members Who Are First-Generation College Graduates, Faye Farmer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This inductive study examined the intersectional experience within research collaborations of tenure-track faculty who are both first-generation college graduate students and from racial and ethnic groups (as defined in the United States) that are underrepresented in STEM fields (as defined by the National Science Foundation). I interviewed twelve current and former faculty members from doctoral-granting universities in the United States. I used identity as the theoretical lens to explore research collaborations at the individual level. The interviews revealed three themes reflecting identity's role in selecting and being selected as a collaborator and working with a collaborator. The themes are: an …

Secondary Teacher Perceptions And Practices Of Intercultural Communicative Competence Development In Online Intercultural Exchanges, Paige L. Roland

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Secondary level world language programs in the United States lack efficient infusion and assessment of intercultural communicative competence in the curricula. When a learner acquires a new language, they also shape their personal identity and expand their ability to successfully interact cross-culturally, thus the need for culture and language to be understood as interdependent components of the bigger whole is evident (Liontas & Siegel, 2019). While there are extensive research theories and studies regarding models of assessment for various competences underlying intercultural communicative competence (e.g., communicative competence, idiomatic competence, sociolinguistic competence) throughout the decades, little research is available which utilizes …

Ud In The News Nov. 16-22, University Of Dayton

News Releases

The Conversation, Scripps News and U.S. Catholic sought UD faculty expertise. Local media highlighted a grant for the Greater West Dayton Incubator to help up-and-coming businesses and an award for the Roger Glass Center for the Arts for being green.