"Rorty special" and much more for the thinking minds...
Vincent van Gogh 1853-1890, Stone bench in the garden of the asylum, last week of May-first week of June 1889. VIA
Notes From the Field: Living Ethnography
Questions of gender in Islam, particularly of how Muslim women have been excluded from the interpretation and codification of religion has generated one of the most highly contested and controversial discourses in the contemporary moment of globalization. Across the Muslim world from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia, Islam's faithful, especially women, are calling for innovative ways to balance religious teaching with the demands of modernity and globalization. Within this context, Azza Basarudin's disseratation examines how Muslim women scholar-activists in two NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in Malaysia and in Egypt negotiate issues of gender, religion, and feminism in Islam...
World Without the West symposium
Europe holds out against reform of IMF
The board of the International Monetary Fund is bitterly divided over proposed reforms to give more votes and influence to fast-growing economies such as China at the expense of European countries.
Andy Warhols turquoise-background Liz (Colored Liz), 1963 VIA
Now online: Third issue of "Ecological and Environmental Anthropology"
Bilingualism and multiculturalism: New issue of Durham Anthropology Journal
Selected quotes from "On Suicide Bombing" by Talal Asad
Cultures of Consumption: Re-thinking the relationship between consumer and citizen
Thoughts Of A Conservative Christian Europe’s Dreaded Affliction
By Paul Belien
A Weak United States Also Means a Weak Europe By: Christoph Bertram | The Daily Star America's power has been so overwhelming for so long that many think it has survived George W. Bush's presidency unscathed. That this is untrue is demonstrated by those, from Russia's Putin and Venezuela's Chavez to Iran's Ahmadinejad and Zimbabwe's Mugabe, who are exploiting America's loss of standing and influence.
Why TV is Now Better Than Film(Heard ‘Round the Web - Pop Culture)
Think Tanks Talk Back Last week,Robert J. Samuelsoncriticized think tanks as failing to offer reasonable ways to address "the huge budget costs of aging baby boomers"
World Prison Population List, Seventh Edition (PDF; 80 KB)
Source: International Centre for Prison Studies, Kings College (UK)
The Tyranny of Capital Markets - Robert Samuelson, Newsweek
Ten Years After: The Lasting Impact of the Asian Financial Crisis CEPR
Asymmetry: Strategies for Adapting to Contemporary Security Threats (PDF; 1.15 MB) Source: National Strategy Forum Review (Summer 2007)
The Global State of Higher Education and the Rise of Private Finance
Source: The Institute for Higher Education Policy
Ingmar Bergman and Sweden: an epoch’s end, Birgitta Steene
In 1944-45 as the second world war was coming to a close, two artistic debuts occurred in Sweden that hardly impacted on the international political situation but were to be of decisive importance to the Swedish cultural scene. One was the publication of Pippi Långstrump (Pippi Longstocking) by Astrid Lindgren. The other was the appearance of the film Hets (Frenzy/Torment), scripted by Ingmar Bergman, at the time an amateur theatre director in Stockholm's old city.
Responsibility and neo-liberalism, Grahame Thompson
The issue of "responsibility" has increasingly become a defining feature of the current era of neo-liberal globalisation. At every level of governmental and social policy, and in many contexts of political and media discussion, the notion can be used to convey a potent sense both of empowerment and policing, of autonomy and control. How far can a close examination of the idea illuminate contemporary forms of power and governance?
An opportunity to think about this question in some detail was provoked by a conference in London on 20-21 July 2007 focusing on issues of corporate accountability and limited liability under globalisation. In the event, the thorough discussion of the complex question of what limited liability involves was matched by a central concern with "responsibility"....
New Thomas Lemke material on biopolitics
Via Foucauldian Reflections comes news of some new work by Thomas Lemke, who is at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt/Main. Lemke works on some of the issues surrounding genetics and reproduction from a biopolitical perspective. His new paper is a discussion of the 78-79 lectures: “An indigestible meal? Foucault, governmentality and state theory” (Distinktion: [...]
Foucault Archives go online
Dimitris Dimitriadis, or The desire for text
"Literature demolishes in order to renew, decomposes in order to recreate". On the Greek playwright and author Dimitris Dimitriadis.
The Armenian genocide: Issues of responsibility and democracy
Two public intellectuals discuss the role of the public sphere in guiding a politics of memory in relation to Turkey's fraught Armenian issue. [Catalan version added]
"Democracy and its opposite"
"Springerin" talks to Jacques Rancière about democracy and the political; "Artistas Unidos Revista" introduces a writer, full stop; "Kulturos barai" warns of theoretical dogmatism; "Osteuropa" urges intellectuals to criticize European integration; "The New Presence" asks what the Czechs actually want from the State; "L'Espill" tracks Salvador Allende back to a clinic in Santiago; and "du" finds Amitav Ghosh disillusioned by what happened to the US.
Rorty Special
Richard Rorty
"A true sceptic remains silent in depression, a cynic laughs with Schadenfreude, while Rorty pleads with us before it is too late - sadly, after 8 June, only through his texts", writes editor Samuel Abrahám in an issue of Kritika & Kontext dedicated to "our intellectual mentor"...
"We anti-foundationalists"
In Richard Rorty's article "Democracy and philosophy", he argued that moral insight is "not a product of rational reflection but a matter of imagining a better future, and observing the results of attempts to bring that future into existence." For Bela Egyed, this constitutes cultural and historical relativism and an abdication of critical rationality....
The afternoon of a pragmatist faun
In a fundamentally non-philosophical age, Richard Rorty offered a fast and easy solution to a fundamental philosophical question, writes Hungarian philosopher János Salamon. Rorty's critique of universalism constituted a liberation but left no alternative to moral ethnocentrism....
