Online research in philosophy

In this paper I introduce the concept of eco-masculinities as a philosophical and critical project to understand the links between gendered and pro-environmental behaviour. The background of the feminist project, the sociology of masculinity, and the post-gendered world to which they both aspire, alongside a brief history of the project of ecofeminism, occupy the bulk of the paper. In the last section I briefly consider how these philosophical approaches might impact upon analysis of an EU Project entitled Digital Environment Home (...) Energy Management System. (shrink)

Sexuality, understood as a Foucauldian discourse that expresses itself through our passions and pursuits and contributes massively to our socially- constructed identity formation, has from the outset been a major factor in the growth of the internet. As the ultimate look-but-don‘t-touch medium, the computer screen has offered us a pornographic emporium in the privacy of our homes, fed first by the producers of material in the standard broadcast mode, then more and more by ourselves, to each other, in the social (...) media context of online sexual social networking. The recent shift of sexual video material from broadcast to social media mode highlights the fundamental exhibitionism/voyeurism dyad at the core of all this activity, and finds its most impersonal, anonymous apotheosis in the phenomenon that is ChatRoulette, where visual discourse-objects are deployed in a nexus of online sexual power relations. (shrink)

The book on the semantics of sound by School of Art & Design researcher Mathias Fuchs has been published by Berliner Wissenschaftlicher Verlag and will be in the bookshops by the end of October. Mathias investigates the possibilities of assigning meaning to sonic structures and starts with a critical review of traditional theories. Sound has been described as a language, a narrative, a representation of extra-musical objects, as a non-discursive set of symbols or as an emotion. In his 368 pages (...) publication he offers a new way of understanding audio by “looking” at it as play. He further suggests to employ a methodological approach of exploring meaning between the established and new systems of reference. The book features an in depth analysis of sound art pieces as different at Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Hymnen, Missy Elliott’s Pass that Dutch and Robert Morrris’ Box with the Sound of its Own Making. (shrink)