Food-for-work programs distribute food aid to recipients in exchange for labor, and are an important mode of aid delivery for both public and private aid providers. While debate continues as to whether food-for-work programs are socially just and economically sensible, governments, international institutions, and NGOs continue to tout them as a flexible and cost-effective way to deliver targeted aid and promote community development. This paper critiques the underlying logic of food-for-work, focusing on how this approach to food aid and food (...) security promote labor force participation by leveraging hunger against poverty, and how the ideological and practical assumptions of food-for-work become enmeshed within discourses of geopolitical security. I rely on a case study examination of US-funded food-for-work programs implemented in Jakarta, Indonesia following the 1997 financial crisis. The crisis produced acute food insecurity and poverty in Indonesia, provoking fears of mob violence by the hungry poor and the spread of radical Islamism in the post-crisis political vacuum. Food-for-work programs were, in this context, meant to resolve the problems of both food insecurity and geopolitical insecurity by providing food to targeted populations, employment to those otherwise thrown out of work, and resituating the hungry poor in relation to broader scales of local, national, and global power. (shrink)

This chapter talks about the love story that defines Anna and Elsa's relationship in Frozen. At its core, the story of Frozen is about two sisters who love one another but cannot be together. As children, then as adults, a heavy door keeps Anna and Elsa apart. In her willingness to speak despite their separation, Anna reveals a hint of the true love that will later save both Elsa's life and her own. Anna turns away from Kristoff to protect Elsa (...) from Hans. As Hans swings his sword, which condenses all of the masculine‐defined tropes in anger, to kill Elsa. When Anna shatters Han's sword, people finally realize the power of true love. Anna overcomes fear and puts her sister's safety before her own. The act of true love that saves Anna is her own loving act for her sister. (shrink)

COVID-19 has substantially affected our lives during 2020. Since its beginning, several epidemiological models have been developed to investigate the specific dynamics of the disease. Early COVID-19 epidemiological models were purely statistical, based on a curve-fitting approach, and did not include causal knowledge about the disease. Yet, these models had predictive capacity; thus they were used to ground important political decisions, in virtue of the understanding of the dynamics of the pandemic that they offered. This raises a philosophical question about (...) how purely statistical models can yield understanding, and if so, what the relationship between prediction and understanding in these models is. Drawing on the model that was developed by the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, we argue that early epidemiological models yielded a modality of understanding that we call descriptive understanding, which contrasts with the so-called explanatory understanding which is assumed to be the main form of scientific understanding. We spell out the exact details of how descriptive understanding works, and efficiently yields understanding of the phenomena. Finally, we vindicate the necessity of studying other modalities of understanding that go beyond the conventionally assumed explanatory understanding. (shrink)

Literatur, die von Pandemien handelt, ist kenntlich oft durch ihren parabolischen Charakter. Sie schildert Pandemien als eine Katastrophe, die die Fragilität gesellschaftlicher Institutionen entlarvt, soziale Normen außer Kraft zu setzen und Menschen auf das Animalische zu reduzieren vermag. Der gewohnte Rhythmus des Lebens, Denkens, Handelns ist während der Pandemie unterbrochen: Die Literatur spiegelt diesen Kontrollverlust und widersteht ihm zugleich in der poetologischen Ordnung ihrer Werke, durch deren freie und autonome Wahl. Sie vermag in Sinnbildern vom begrifflich kaum Fassbaren, von Sterben (...) und Tod und zugleich tröstlich gegen den Tod zu erzählen. Von dieser Macht poetischen Denkens handeln die folgenden Analysen von Giovanni Boccaccios Decamerone, Heinrich von Kleists Der Findling und Die Verlobung in St. Domingo, Albert Camus’ La Peste und Mircea Cārtārescus aktuellem Corona-Tagebuch Nach-Leben. (shrink)

The following dissertation shows how German Literature negotiates the relationship between language and the visual arts, particularly in Romantic narratives. In contrast with authors of the Enlightenment, the Romantics tend to deny specificity to visual experience and in so doing dedifferentiate visual experience from the textual. ;The initial, methodological, chapter explicates perceptual models informed by the interplay of the philosophical approaches of Kant and Wittgenstein with the psychoanalytic discourse of Freud. In Chapter Two, I turn to Lessing's Laokoon Uder uber (...) die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie , in which he divides the arts into pictoral and linguistic signs. While the boundary between the two appears quite clear in Laokoon, his play Emilia Galotti reveals Lessing's anxiety that the difference cannot be so easily maintained. ;The subsequent chapter explores the representation of the visual arts in Tieck's Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen . After a discussion of Wackenroder's Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders , 1 turn to Tieck's novel about a young student of Albrecht Durer. The novel responds to the ostensible binary between language and the visual arts by transmuting the distinction into one between readable landscape paintings and phantasmatic images that guide the protagonist. ;As another example of this Romantic viewpoint, I analyze Brentano's Godwi oder das steinerne Bild der Mutter . Here I use the distinction between symbol and allegory to point out the ways in which the text turns the difference between the arts into one between rhetorical figures. A similar manifestation of the problem occurs in Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild , discussed in Chapter Five. The novella follows the same lines as Lessing's Laokoon, thematizing the materiality of its eponymous marble statue. My final chapter concerns Kleist's model of visual perception, which is closely bound to his theology in his tales "Die heilige Cacilie" and "Der Findling" . ;Writing Images interprets the role of visuality in German Romantic literature in order to understand an unresolved problematic of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century thought for those who would too quickly either differentiate between or conflate the visual and the written. (shrink)