I’ve posted before about the coronavirus “silver lining” of the (partial) opening of access to peer-reviewed literature that some academic presses have been offering through the Covid-19 pandemic. Peer-reviewed literature is the bread and butter of scholarship, and access to it is not just a perk of being in academia, but one of the only ways it’s possible to stay on top of the thinking within any field of scholarship. The fact that only those who are in universities can regularly access these journals (and the fact that so much ill-digested information is much more readily available online) is one of the great barriers to a “knowledge society.”
Continue Reading »Posted in Academe | Tagged academic publishing, journals, JSTOR, knowledge society, open access, peer-reviewed literature, Process Studies, public scholarship, university presses | Leave a Comment »
People’s identities are an object of study in a range of fields, but it’s the field of cultural studies that has most singularly, even obsessively, sought to understand how identities interact with politics in changing media environments. Cultural studies first emerged in a British milieu marked by very specific relations between socio-economic classes, media industries, and an industrial-capitalist economic system. As it has struggled to keep up with a changing and increasingly globalized world (e.g., Abbas and Erni 2004, Bachman-Medick 2014, Connery and Wilson 2007, Freeman and Proctor 2018, Szeman 2011), cultural studies has become necessarily more informed by the sociology of globalization and by the anthropology of “multiple globalizations,” with their late colonial, postcolonial, and decolonizing contexts and their various relationships with the transnational capitalist economy.
Developing theoretical frameworks that cover the entirety of global culture has been challenging, and there seems to be a shared sentiment among scholars that no single such framework can ever adequately encompass the study of cultural identities writ large across the world. The following is a framework that I have been finding useful in thinking about the cognitive (or worldview) dimensions of “global culture,” including emerging manifestations of “ecoculture” or “ecocultural identity.” It is intended to help us think about how people, as individuals and as communities, make sense of their place (and time) in the world in relation to others.
Continue Reading »Posted in Cultural politics, Eco-culture, Media ecology | Tagged anthropology of globalization, capitalism, cognitive capitalism, colonialism, cosmopolitics, critical realism, cultural identity, cultural studies, cultural theory, decoloniality, ecocultural identity, etic, global cultural studies, globalization, identity politics, modernism, modernity, modernization, multiple modernities, postmodernization, reflexive modernization, reflexivity, sociology of globalization, tradition, traditionalism, traditionalization | Leave a Comment »
Some people believe you’re born from nothing; you live, which is something; and then you’re gone again, back to nothing. (Here’s a poignantly compressed version of that, a life in under 6 minutes.)
Others believe you’re part of a much larger thing, which keeps recycling itself (including you). Maybe there’s progress or development over the long arc of it, from something primordial and undifferentiated to something perhaps unimaginable.
Still others believe you came here from somewhere else, and that this place is a kind of trial, a testing or proving ground, which you’ll eventually leave to go back to that someplace else. (There’s some debate over whether you get to bring anything back with you.)
Finally, there are those who believe you’re not ever alone. There are always others with you: those who came before, those who will follow, and those alongside you over the course of it. And all that you do, you do with and for them.
There. Did I miss anyone?
Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged beliefs, Buddhism, Christianity, cosmology, humanism, immanence, indigenous philosophy, mortality, perspectives on life, reincarnation, religion, transcendence, world philosophy | Leave a Comment »
The “reopening” of the world’s economies, locally and nationally, piece by piece, after the sudden and massive stoppage of the entire economic system, is raising important questions about whether the system can be put back into motion selectively and into a more viable direction than it had been moving beforehand.
Some observers have suggested, optimistically, that this pandemic has already heralded the end of the neoliberal era, or that at the very least it has provided death blows to a few of its key industries (such as oil and gas). Others disagree, and fear that the only reopening on the table is to an even more vicious “business as usual.”
Arundhati Roy’s call to arms, “Our Task is to Disable the Engine,” published last week on the web page of the Progressive International (an important new space for the growing movement of left-of-center eco-justice thinking), presents one of the more provocative and poignant volleys into this debate.
Continue Reading »Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics | Tagged Arundhati Roy, Coronavirus, crisis, crisis capitalism, Dean Baker, disaster capitalism, disaster environmentalism, disaster socialism, economics, global economy, global political change, New Republic, pandemic politics, Progressive International, rebuilding the economy, reopening the economy | 5 Comments »
The global pandemic of Covid-19 has been accompanied by a proliferation of competing narratives of what the crisis is and means, and how it should be addressed. The UN and the World Health Organization have called this an “infodemic,” that is, an epidemic (or pandemic) of information that, in its confusing diversity, has made it more rather than less difficult to make sense of things. The infodemic has included a rapid spread of (what are being called) conspiracy theories.
In what follows, I outline an intentionally simplified theory about the Covid-19 “infodemic,” which I call a “media reliability theory,” and I provide an example to support it. I then discuss a few of its limitations and suggest the need for a more comprehensive model of the infodemic and of information in general. I call the latter an “infovirology” model, that is, one that focuses on how information spreads and the forms it takes as it does that. Like viruses, information spreads within ecosystems (information or media ecologies) and it is those ecosystems that need better understanding today. I end with some recommendations for a media regimen around the pandemic.
This is all work in progress, connected to a course I’ll be teaching this fall and to longer-standing work on media and cultural politics. Comments are welcome.
Continue Reading »Posted in Media ecology, Science & society | Tagged Anomalies, Bruno Latour, conspiracies, conspiracy culture, conspiracy theories, Coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, epidemiology of media trust, epistemology, fake news, information regimes, infovirology, media, media ecology, media politics, media theory, media trust, mediasphere, post-truth, Q, QAnon, Steve Fuller | 4 Comments »
I’ve been haunted by Ed Yong’s description of science from the Atlantic article “Why Coronavirus is So Confusing,” which I shared a few days ago:
“This is how science actually works. It’s less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty. “Our understanding oscillates at first, but converges on an answer,” says Natalie Dean, a statistician at the University of Florida. “That’s the normal scientific process, but it looks jarring to people who aren’t used to it.”
The problem with this line, I now realize, is that it’s a good description of how “frontier science” becomes “consensus science” except for the fact that the oscillations sometimes settle around multiple competing perspectives (nowadays we might call them “basins of attraction,” using complex systems terminology).
Continue Reading »Posted in Science & society | Tagged Coronavirus, COVID-19, Ed Yong, epistemology, frontier science, interdisciplinarity, pandemic politics, pandemic response, sociology of science, Thomas Kuhn, transdisciplinarity | Leave a Comment »
This past week has seen a firestorm of reaction among environmentalists and climate and energy scientists to the online release of the film Planet of the Humans. Written, directed, and produced by first-time director Jeff Gibbs, but — much more importantly — executive-produced and actively promoted by Michael Moore, the film is incendiary and intentionally controversial. Since it falls squarely into the confluence of interests I study and teach about (ecology, film, social critique, cultural perceptions of the future, the impact of images and image production, et al.), I decided I should see it for myself despite the criticisms and calls for it to be withdrawn. Here are some thoughts on it, still somewhat inchoate and fluid from having just watched it last night.
Posted in Cinema, Climate change, Eco-culture, Visual culture | Tagged apocalypticism, becoming human, Bil McKibben, biocentrism, climate change communication, climate change politics, Deep Adaptation, deep ecology, degrowth, diversity, doomism, ecodocumentaries, ecopolitics, energy politics, films, green energy, Green New Deal, Malthusianism, Michael Moore, Planet of the Humans, post-human, Vermont | 5 Comments »
One of the silver linings about the coronavirus pandemic is that it has made some people, and even institutions, more generous (at least temporarily). Among them are popular and academic journals that have removed their paywalls and offered their publications for free. (I shared one of my own articles in that category yesterday. The irony, as my colleague, UVM dean of libraries Bryn Geffert, points out, is that right-wing disinformation tanks that have long flooded the internet with their free “studies,” while legit academics get paywalled into marginalization by their profit-seeking publishers.)
Then there are popular magazines that have made their coronavirus coverage freely available. The Atlantic Monthly has had some excellent coverage, and Ed Yong’s “Why the Coronavirus is So Confusing” is especially helpful in mapping out exactly what its title asks. The epistemological issues the pandemic has raised — about how science and medicine work, whom we should trust, what sorts of interests are at play, and why this issue is different from others — make it an important and valuable case study.
Continue Reading »Posted in Science & society | Tagged Anomalies, anomalistics, Atlantic Monthly, conspiracies, Coronavirus, COVID-19, Ed Yong, epistemology, media, mediasphere, pandemic politics, pandemics, public communication of science, public trust, science communication | Leave a Comment »
I’ve been posting short pieces all this week in connection with EcoCultureLab‘s EarthDay+50 events, which include talks and a student arts exhibition. You can read the posts here:
- Monday: Frozen Moment
- Tuesday: Art and Sustainability in a Pandemic
- Wednesday (Earth Day): The Day Itself
- Thursday: Creativity is Not Optional
- Friday: What We Did, What Will We Do?
Recorded events will be viewable at the EcoCultureLab web site.
Posted in Eco-culture | Tagged Earth Week, Earth Week 2020, EarthDay+50, EcoCultureLab | Leave a Comment »
I dreamt that Leonard Cohen appeared by my bedside. He smiled and reassured me that things will be alright: “They will all have been beautiful in the end.” I wanted to ask him something, but wasn’t sure what. Then he was gone.
The radio (it was Radio Moskva, from back when I spent a fall in Kyïv in late Soviet days, with the radio wired directly into the communal apartments so that all you could do was turn it down or let it play) announced that the Catholic Church had recognized him as a saint, and I imagined him and Pope Francis talking in a bar together, or strolling across a golf course in heaven. Saint Leonard of Westmount, the headlines said.
They were building a temple for him outside Kyïv and pilgrims were starting to filter into the city. There was a rumor that Irving Layton was arriving by train. I tried to get to the station, but the (super-long) metro escalators were all tangled and people were reporting flooding on the tracks below. We all had to walk. The botanical gardens were in full bloom and I thought I heard the Vydubychi monastery bells ringing.
Continue Reading »Posted in Manifestos & auguries | Tagged communal apartments, Earth Day, Irving Layton, Kiev, Kyiv, Leonard Cohen, Pope Francis, Radio Moscow, Radio Moskva, St. Leonard of Westmount, Ukraine, Vydubychi monastery | 1 Comment »
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