Arts and Humanities Commons^™

"I Have A Right To Exist Here": An Interview With Photographer Justin Murphy, Nicole Lawrence

Remembrance: A Journal of Queer Culture, Information, and Preservation

An interview with Justin Murphy, founder of Out of the Attic Photography. Born, raised, and still residing in Huntington, WV, Murphy volunteers and freelances for the ACLU of WV. Murphy’s photography and counselor work with AQYS was featured by Nico Lang in Xtra Magazine.

"'What The Suffering Was Like': Digital Affect In The Act Up Oral History Project, Margaret Sullivan

Remembrance: A Journal of Queer Culture, Information, and Preservation

This article considers The ACT UP Oral History Project as an affective site that renders visible the impact of loss and suffering. Focusing on the archive’s filmic and computer-mediated interviews, and placing both in conversation with memory and queer identity studies, I demonstrate that the Oral History Project, as a discursive space, invites its audience into a felt physical contact with grief, loss, anger, and rage.

The Coming Wave By Mustafa Suleyman: A Review, Puspa Damai

Critical Humanities

A Review of Mustafa Suleyman's The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the 21^st Century’s Greatest Dilemma (NY: Crown, 2023).

“The Hard Work Of Programming Germinates Soft Pleasures”: Creating Synthetic Comics With Ai Collaboration, Barbara Postema, Ilan Manouach

Critical Humanities

A Discussion between Barbara Postema and Ilan Manouach.

Catastrophe Of War, Sujit Kumar Singh, Ayushi Jaiswal

Critical Humanities

The paper selects the novel Palpasa Café (2005) by Nepali author Narayan Wagle to highlight the factors that contributed to the Maoist insurgency and counter-insurgency that punctured the Nepali consciousness. It will also critique Eurocentric trauma theory for diminishing the South Asian perspectives of trauma (incidents) from the main discourse of trauma theory. In addition, the paper will explore the detrimental impacts of war and conflict as experienced by Nepalese cops and civilians together, and its long-lasting imprint on their psyche as manifested in different forms of trauma in the text. The dissemination of the 'inarticulable trauma' concept into something …

An Affirmation Of Coexistence Between Artificial Intelligence (Ai) And Human Intelligence (Hi): An Inquiry Into The Structure Of Kazuo Ishiguro’S Novel, Klara And The Sun, Shiva Hari Mainaly

Critical Humanities

A narrative reflective of the perils and promises of automation entering the subjective realm of humankind, Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest novel, Klara and the Sun, confronts us with the notion of coexistence between artificial intelligence (AF) and human intelligence (HF) by uncovering a robust structure arising from the contestation amidst a host of binaries: Human versus machine, AI versus HI, self versus the other, science versus nature, and the list goes on. Although a vast majority of analytical inquiries into this novel uncover the incoherence of human identity and consciousness in the society deeply invested in affordances of the fifth industrial …

How Fears Of Ai In The Classroom Reflect Anxieties About Choosing Sophistry Over True Knowledge In The American Education System, David Arellano Smith

Critical Humanities

The rise of ChatGPT has educators across the United States of America worried about scholastic integrity like never before. This paper argues, however, that underneath this initial concern lies an even greater one, that the education system in the United States so closely resembles the style of teaching used by the sophists in Ancient Greece that it has ultimately failed to cultivate critical thinking skills in America’s youth, so much so that ChatGPT has become a far greater issue than it ever needed to be. The practice of ‘teaching to the test’ and the commodification of education, which is akin …

Chatgpt And Death Of An Author, Al Karim Datoo, Kamran Akhtar Siddiqui

Critical Humanities

The proposed piece seeks to critically explore pedagogical implication of ChatGPT, especially on students’ capacities to author a text. The piece suggests that increased reliance on the ChatGPT, while provide short term solution to produce a text, in the long term it is likely to lead to ‘death of an author’. Here the usage of the phrase is a twist to earlier usage by Barthes- which refers to ‘death of an author’ where once the text is written, it gets re-created in readers’ reception and through interpretive act and imagination. The overarching argument of the paper emphasizes that technology is …

“This Wonderful Machine”: How Should We Teach Humanities Texts Like Gulliver’S Travels In The Time Of Chatgpt?, Richard J. Haslam

Critical Humanities

The quoted phrase in the essay title comes from a passage in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver’s Travels in which a Grand Academy of Lagado professor demonstrates a “wonderful Machine” that can generate scores of books “without the least Assistance from Genius or Study.” The essay explore the challenge for teaching classic humanities texts like Gulliver that the (perhaps not so) “wonderful Machine” called ChatGPT poses. Student Owen Terry’s Chronicle essay (May 12, 2023) identifies two crucial aspects of that challenge: “We don’t fully lean into AI and teach how to best use it, and we don’t fully prohibit it to keep …

Ai Meets Ai: Chatgpt As A Pedagogical Tool To Teach American Indian History, Jeffrey Washburn, Jennifer Monroe Mccutchen

Critical Humanities

Our paper illustrates how we used Artificial Intelligence to teach the tools of ethnohistory and highlight American Indian voices in our classrooms. It overviews our integration of ChatGPT in both survey and upper-level history courses at two different institutions: a small liberal arts college in the Midwest and a regional-comprehensive university in Texas. Though it acknowledges the benefits and pitfalls of using ChatGPT to teach Native American history, this article emphasizes the pedagogical value of large language models (LLMs) for student engagement and analytical thinking through a variety of critical review, peer review, and group annotation assessments; this included analyses …

Introduction Issue 2: Humanities In The Time Of Chatgpt And Other Forms Of Ai, Barbara Postema, Puspa Damai

Critical Humanities

Introduction to this Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence and Pedagogy.

Ai Love, Hannah R. Turner

Critical Humanities

Hannah Turner is an Appalachian poet who often writes of personal insecurities, self-discovery, and ascension beyond the ordinary. Hannah enjoys incorporating conversations of worldly phenomenon into her poems. There is much beauty all around us. As poetry enables a writer to communicate the beauty that underlies even the greatest misfortunes, Hannah has identified the medium of expression as being opportunistic for a lyrical delivery while making mention of emotional human encounters. She is a B.S./Ph.D. Biomedical Research student at Marshall University in Huntington, WV, and a native of Matewan, WV. She draws support from both living and passed family members, …

Imagining Ai: How The World Sees Intelligent Machines, Amine Oudghiri

Critical Humanities

Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines

The New Old Logic Of Ai: A Review Of Mark Coeckelbergh’S The Political Philosophy Of Ai And Calvin Lawrence’S Hidden In White Sight, Steven Wandler

Critical Humanities

The New Old Logic of AI: A Review of Mark Coeckelbergh’s The Political Philosophy of AI and Calvin Lawrence’s Hidden in White Sight by Steven Wandler, St. Catherine University

Algorithmic Reason: Tobias Blanke Interviewed By Puspa Damai, Tobias Blanke, Puspa Damai

Critical Humanities

Algorithmic Reason: Tobias Blanke

interviewed by Puspa Damai

Aesthetics After The Ontological Turn: An Ecological Approach To Artificial Creativity, Miguel Carvalhais, Diniz C. Ribeiro

Critical Humanities

The development of chatbots and other generative systems powered by AI, particularly the latest version of ChatGPT, rekindled many discussions on topics such as intelligence and creativity, even leading some to suggest that we may be undergoing a “fourth narcissistic wound”. Starting from Margaret Boden’s approach to creativity, we will argue that if computational systems have always excelled at combinatorial creativity, current AI systems stand out at exploratory creativity but are perceived as still falling flat regarding transformational creativity. This paper explores some of the reasons for this, including how, despite the immensity of the conceptual space that results from …

Guilty Machines: On Ab-Sens In The Age Of Ai, Dylan Lackey, Katherine Weinschenk

Critical Humanities

For Lacan, guilt arises in the sublimation of ab-sens (non-sense) into the symbolic comprehension of sen-absexe (sense without sex, sense in the deficiency of sexual relation), or in the maturation of language to sensibility through the effacement of sex. Though, as Slavoj Žižek himself points out in a recent article regarding ChatGPT, the split subject always misapprehends the true reason for guilt’s manifestation, such guilt at best provides a sort of evidence for the inclusion of the subject in the order of language, acting as a necessary, even enjoyable mark of the subject’s coherence (or, more importantly, the subject’s separation …

On Chatgpt And The Forces And Relations Of Production, Matthew Rellihan

Critical Humanities

ChatGPT and artificial intelligence more generally are transformative technologies capable of liberating humanity from the necessity of burdensome toil. Recent discussions have neglected this possibility because they suffer from the sorts of cognitive distortions catalogued by Marx and the Marxist tradition. Technology fetishism, understood on the model of commodity fetishism, occurs when the use and development allowed by a certain mode of production appear as intrinsic features of the technology itself. Naturalistic mystification occurs when the socially contingent use and development of these technologies is made to appear natural and therefore inevitable. To those suffering from either distortion, it will …

Llms And Crisis Epistemology: The Business Of Making Old Crises Seem New, Mich Ciurria

Critical Humanities

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have set in motion a series of crises. These include disruptions to the labor force, education, and democracy. Some people believe that rich technocratic ‘saviors’ should solve these crises. Naomi Klein, however, argues that this is a neoliberal fantasy. Tech CEOs will not solve AI-related crises because they have a vested interest in perpetuating disaster capitalism and the social inequalities that keep wages low. Who, then, can solve the AI crisis? I submit that the answer is: oppressed groups with experiential and intergenerational knowledge of crises. To oppressed folks, technological crises are not new, …

Humanities In The Time Of Chatgpt And Other Forms Of Ai, Puspa Damai, Barbara Postema

Critical Humanities

Humanities in the time of ChatGPT and other forms of AI

Review Of Fainberg, Cold War Correspondents, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

Journal of 20th Century Media History

Review of Cold War Correspondents: Soviet and American Reporters on the Ideological Front Lines, by Dina Fainberg.

Review Of Berke, Their Own Best Creations, Cynthia Meyers

Journal of 20th Century Media History

Review of Their Own Best Creation: Women Writers in Postwar Television, by Annie Berke.

Review Of Amenta And Caren, Rough Draft Of History, Karen Miller Russell

Journal of 20th Century Media History

Review of Rough Draft of History

Review Of Fawaz, Queer Forms, Axelle Demus

Journal of 20th Century Media History

Review of Queer Forms, by Rams Fawaz.

Review Of Doherty, Little Lindy Is Kidnapped, Philip M. Glende

Journal of 20th Century Media History

Review of Little Lindy is Kidnapped by Thomas Doherty

Broadcast History Gaps When Archival Material Exists: Inserting Peg Lynch And Ethel And Albert Into Sitcom History, Lauren Bratslavsky

Journal of 20th Century Media History

Lucy and Desi. Burns and Allen. Ozzie and Harriet. Ethel and Albert? The first three television couples tend to be the familiar husband-wife pairs that typify American 1950s sitcoms. These characters and their namesake programs, along with the Andersons in Father Knows Best and the Cleavers in Leave it to Beaver, are credited as templates for the domestic sitcom genre, where the narrative logic oscillates between morality lessons and outlandish plots to escape domestic life. When we study or reminisce about 1950s television, Ethel and Albert and their namesake program do not readily come to mind. However, the popularity …

License To Spill: Credentialing In 20th Century Journalism Education, Nate Floyd

Journal of 20th Century Media History

This study begins with a war of words between industry insiders and journalism educators in 1947 regarding the establishment of the American Council on Education for Journalism (ACEJ). Although the accrediting agency for journalism education was still a year away from announcing its first list of accredited programs, discussions surrounding how to elevate the status of journalism and regulate entry into the profession had been ongoing since at least 1923, involving metropolitan newspaper editors and journalism educators. This study explores a plan formulated during the interwar period, involving metropolitan newspaper editors affiliated with the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) …

“America’S Nervous Breakdown”: Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Popular Psychology, And The Demise Of The Housewife In The 1970s, Kate L. Flach

Journal of 20th Century Media History

In 1976, soap opera satire Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (MH, MH) debuted and reached an estimated 55 million households. Produced by Norman Lear, the central storyline developed during the first season involved the mental breakdown of Mary Hartman (Louise Lasser), a typical consumer housewife who Lear claimed metaphorically represented the United States. Portraying a discontent housewife with mental illness as a proxy for the nation reflects how ubiquitous popular psychology became in explaining American anxieties over the transformations of the family and politics. An analysis of tape-recorded writers meetings reveals that the show’s creators pulled from contemporary books, theories, and …

Editor's Note, Rob Rabe

Journal of 20th Century Media History

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the Journal of 20^th Century Media History. Although it has taken longer than expected to get this project underway, we are proud to see the journal go live for the first time. I think readers will agree that the three research articles and five book reviews included here are important contributions to the field of media history. We want this journal to emerge as a respected home for quality scholarship and I think we are establishing a solid foundation with our first effort. For me personally, it has been exciting to work …

A Review Of Anthony J. Viola's All Lies Begin With Truth, Nicole Lawrence

Critical Humanities

The Appalachian and Pennyroyal Plateau localities that Anthony J. Viola’s ecofiction inhabits are spaces that I have grown up in and have lived in my entire life. All Lies Begin With Truth, Viola’s second novel, takes place in the fictional town of West York, Kentucky.