The present study aims to identify contextual and psychological factors of proneness to radicalization and violent extremism operationalized through the Militant Extremist Mindset scale consisting of three distinct aspects: Proviolence, Vile World beliefs, and trust in Divine Power. A community sample of 271 high school students from Belgrade and Sandžak regions in Serbia completed: a 24-item MEM scale; contextual measures including a 6-item scale of family dysfunction and a 4-item composite measure capturing exposure to a harsh school environment and peer (...) abuse ; psychological measures including the 9-item Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale, the 5-item Social Dominance Orientation scale, and the 20-item UCLA Loneliness scale. A path analysis was conducted with contextual factors on the first and psychological factors on the second level of the model predicting the three factors of MEM. LON was positively predicted by FDys and HSE, SDO by HSE only, while RWA was positively predicted by FDys only. Contextual and psychological factors accounted for 27% of the variance in PV, 15% of the variance in VW, and 31% of the variance in DP. Obtained findings reveal a complex interplay of contextual and psychological drivers in the prediction of different aspects of RVE and build upon existing knowledge on risk factors associated with RVE. (shrink)

The article examines the political challenge and significance of forgiveness as an indispensable response to the inherently imperfect and tragic nature of political life through the lens of the existential, narrative-inspired judging sensibility. While the political significance of forgiveness has been broadly recognized in transitional justice and reconciliation contexts, the question of its importance and appropriateness in the wake of grave injustice and suffering has commonly been approached through constructing a self-centred, rule-based framework, defining forgiveness in terms of a moral (...) duty or virtue. Reliant on a set of prefabricated moral standards, however, this approach risks abstracting from the historical, situated condition of human political existence and thus arguably stands at a remove from the very quandaries and imperfections of the political world, which it purports to address. Against this background, this article draws on Albert Camus’s and Hannah Arendt’s aesthetic, worldly judging sensibility and its ability to kindle the process of coming to terms with the absurd, and perhaps unforgivable character of reality after evil. As an aptitude to engage the world in its particularity, plurality and contingency rather than seeking to subdue and tame it under prefabricated standards of thought, namely, worldly judgement is able to reveal how past tragedies have arisen from the ambiguity of human engagement in the world and thereby also elicit the distinctly human capacities of beginning anew and resisting such actions in the future. As such, I suggest, it is well-suited to bring into clearer focus and confront the main political challenge and significance of forgiveness: how to acknowledge the seriousness of the wrongs committed, yet also enable the possibility of a new beginning and restore among former enemies the sense of responsibility for the shared world. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide an overview of surveillance theories and concepts that can help to understand and debate surveillance in its many forms. As scholars from an increasingly wide range of disciplines are discussing surveillance, this literature review can offer much-needed common ground for the debate. We structure surveillance theory in three roughly chronological/thematic phases. The first two conceptualise surveillance through comprehensive theoretical frameworks which are elaborated in the third phase. The first phase, featuring Bentham and Foucault, offers architectural (...) theories of surveillance, where surveillance is often physical and spatial, involving centralised mechanisms of watching over subjects. Panoptic structures function as architectures of power, not only directly but also through disciplining of the watched subjects. The second phase offers infrastructural theories of surveillance, where surveillance is networked and relies primarily on digital rather than physical technologies. It involves distributed forms of watching over people, with increasing distance to the watched and often dealing with data doubles rather than physical persons. Deleuze, Haggerty and Ericson, and Zuboff develop different theoretical frameworks than panopticism to conceptualise the power play involved in networked surveillance. The third phase of scholarship refines, combines or extends the main conceptual frameworks developed earlier. Surveillance theory branches out to conceptualise surveillance through concepts such as dataveillance, access control, social sorting, peer-to-peer surveillance and resistance. With the datafication of society, surveillance combines the physical with the digital, government with corporate surveillance and top-down with self-surveillance. (shrink)

The first book-length study to provide a detailed examination of a distinctive crossroads in the history of the left.

The job of butcher requires the routinized mass killing of nonhuman animals and has damaging mental health consequences for individuals and negative impacts on society. However, vocational training for butchers is part of many educational systems in the European Union where teenagers can start training from the age 0/15. In this article, I explore the effects of the violent content of this training on young people and its relation to the context of their developmental period—adolescence. In addition, I examine society’s (...) paradoxical stance on violence where it is both abhorred and sanctioned as well as normalized in various employment contexts. (shrink)

Japan is among the few countries that have passed laws concerning eugenics. Consequently, the practice of selective abortion (abortion of an abnormal foetus) has been publicly debated for the past 35 years. Nevertheless, data show that knowledge in Japan about prenatal diagnosis is anything but common. In my fieldwork (April- June 2006) only 38% of interviewees (13/34) knew or had heard of 'amniocentesis' and 6% knew nothing about it at all. There are many explanations for why people are unaware of (...) prenatal diagnosis. The most crucial factor is that medical doctors do not talk to their patients about it. My interviews with 11 medical doctors revealed that they do not talk about it because they want to respect the principle of patient selfdetermination. In this paper I aim first to introduce and analyse, in the context of Japanese eugenic history and the contemporary notion of the patient-doctor relationship, medical doctors' explanations for not talking to their patients about amniocentesis. Second, I address whether the principle of 'non-intervention' equates to 'self-determination'. Lastly, I suggest possible improvements to the practice of 'self-determination' in Japan. (shrink)

Emotionally arousing events reach awareness more easily and evoke greater visual cortex activation than more mundane events. Recent studies have shown that they are also perceived more vividly and that emotionally enhanced perceptual vividness predicts memory vividness. We propose that affect-biased attention (ABA) – selective attention to emotionally salient events – is an endogenous attentional system tuned by an individual's history of reward and punishment. We present the Biased Attention via Norepinephrine (BANE) model, which unifies genetic, neuromodulatory, neural and behavioural (...) evidence to account for ABA. We review evidence supporting BANE's proposal that a key mechanism of ABA is locus coeruleus–norepinephrine (LC–NE) activity, which interacts with activity in hubs of affective salience networks to modulate visual cortex activation and heighten the subjective vividness of emotionally salient stimuli. We further review literature on biased competition and look at initial evidence for its potential as a neural mechanism behind ABA. We also review evidence supporting the role of the LC–NE system as a driving force of ABA. Finally, we review individual differences in ABA and memory including differences in sensitivity to stimulus category and valence. We focus on differences arising from a variant of the ADRA2b gene, which codes for the alpha2b adrenoreceptor as a way of investigating influences of NE availability on ABA in humans. (shrink)

Of late, resistance has become a central notion in political theory, standing at the heart of attempts to respond to the dilemmas of contemporary times. However, many accounts tend to ascribe to an idealised, heroic view. In this view, resistance represents a clearcut action against injustice and stems from individuals’ conscious choice and their unwavering ethical commitment to the cause. Some liberal scholars, most notably Candice Delmas and Jason Brennan, have argued that citizens of democratic societies have a moral duty (...) to resist state-sanctioned injustice. This resistance occurs either through ‘principled – civil or uncivil – disobedience’ or through ‘defensive actions’. While acknowledging that pervasive injustice can compromise our cognitive and moral capacities, however, their articulation of our political obligation to resist refrains from a sustained examination of the moral dilemmas, uncertainties and risks that arise when fighting systemic oppression. (shrink)

This essay examines how the disappointment of ex-resistance fighters can illuminate the grey zone of founding—the ambiguity of beginning anew against the background of systemic violence that eludes the predominant linear visions of transition. For a theoretical framework, I draw on Hannah Arendt’s insights into the ambiguity of beginning anew as a practice of attunement that takes oppressive practices as points of departure for democratizing political action. I explore how the ex-resisters’ stories of disappointment can invigorate this practice, focusing on (...) their ability to reorient political action towards reframing unjust relationships in a way that guards against systematic exclusions in the future. This essay demonstrates the political relevance of disappointment on the example of a South African ex-resister’s memoir, Pregs Govender’s Love and Courage. Govender’s narrative discloses how experiences of disappointment can orient the ex-resisters’ efforts to confront the complexities of founding obscured from the official story. (shrink)

The article aims to expose and contest the gendered representation of betrayal in resistance movements. For a theoretical framework, I draw on Simone de Beauvoir’s critique of masculinist myths of femininity inThe Second Sex, combined with contemporary feminist scholarship on the oppressive constructions of female subjectivity in debates on war and violence. I trace how the hegemonic visions of virile resistance tend to subsume the grey zones of women’s resistance activity under two reductive myths of femininity – the self-sacrificial mother (...) and the seductivefemme fatale– while obscuring the complexities of betrayal arising from women’s embodied vulnerabilities. I demonstrate the political relevance of this theoretical exploration on the example of two representative French Resistance novels, Joseph Kessel’sArmy of Shadowsand Roger Vailland’sPlaying with Fire. (shrink)

La crisis sanitaria provocada por el SARS-COV2 ha planteado la necesidad de un cierto control social por parte de los Gobiernos como medida para luchar más eficazmente contra la pandemia. Este control social puede ejercerse, entre otras formas, a través de las tecnologías y en especial las Tecnologías de la Informática y las Comunicaciones (TIC). El abanico de posibilidades es muy amplio y recibe un tratamiento distinto, así como diferentes aplicaciones, según el régimen político, la religión o religiones y en (...) general la cultura de cada país. El control social no es una cosa nueva y lo ejercen no solo los estados, sino también las empresas —en especial las tecnológicas— con objetivos distintos pero quizás con mayor eficacia. Algunas de ellas basan su modelo de negocio precisamente en el control social. (shrink)

A necessary first step in collaboration between hypnosis research and meditation research is clarification of key concepts. The authors propose that such clarification is best advanced by neurophenomenological investigations that integrate neuroscience methods with phenomenological models based on first-person reports of hypnotic versus meditative experiences. Focusing on absorption, the authors argue that previous treatments of hypnosis and meditation as equivalent are incorrect, but that they can be fruitfully compared when characteristic features of the states described by these concepts are examined. (...) To this end, the authors use the “phenomenological and neurocognitive matrix of mindfulness” (PNM), a multidimensional model recently proposed by Lutz and colleagues. The authors compare focused attention meditation and open monitoring meditation with hypnosis across the dimensions of the PNM, using it to interpret empirical research on hypnosis, and to shed light on debates about the role of meta-awareness in hypnosis and the role of suggestion in meditation. (shrink)

The idMirror project consists of a tablet computer, specially equipped with a small mirror and a newly developed android app. The Android application uses face recognition to detect the location of the user’s face in relation to the device and based on this renders a computer graphic at the location of his or her reflection. The goal of the idMirror project setting as a research tool was to make an exploratory study on cultural differences at exhibition venues. For this study, (...) we have analyzed 150 participants’ face images aged between 18 and 75; among them, 50 participants’ face images collected in Europe, 50 participants’ face images collected in the USA, and 50 participants’ face images collected in Japan. We found global exhibitions a good research platform for random sampling of the subjects. For the study, we examined the first 50 participants at each exhibition and we found some significant differences. Through the explanatory study in the form of an art installation, we wanted to learn if the facial expression upon one’s own self-observation is a function of gender and place of exhibition setting origin. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe article contributes to current theoretical debates about the political significance of narrative imagination by drawing on Camus’s and Arendt’s existential aesthetic judging sensibility. It seeks to displace the prevalent tendency to probe literature for its moral-philosophical insights, and instead delves into the experiential reality of our engagement with literary works. It starts from Martha Nussbaum’s recognition of the literary ability to account for the fragility of human affairs, yet finds her reduction of narrative imagination to the role of furthering (...) moral lessons wanting politically. Against this background, the article reclaims Camus’s and Arendt’s dialogical-representative judging orientation and its insight into the narrative ability to respond to the intersubjective character of politics. As such, their aesthetic sensibility reveals the potential political significance of literary imagination in its capacity to open a public space where the contradictions of our situated existence can be confronted through politics between plural equals. (shrink)

Монография отражает лингвистический поворот в философии XX века. Особое внимание уделяется невербальным формам коммуникации, предлагается техника анализа таких медиумов, как образы и звуки, тело, лицо, жилище, еда и другие. Для специалистов.

Unchosen transformative experiences—transformative experiences that are imposed upon an agent by external circumstances—present a fundamental problem for agency: how does one act intentionally in circumstances that transform oneself as an agent, and that disrupt one’s core projects, cares, or goals? Drawing from William James’s analysis of conversion and Matthew Ratcliffe’s account of grief, I give a phenomenological analysis of transformative experiences as involving the restructuring of systems of practical meaning. On this analysis, an agent’s experience of the world is structured (...) by practically significant possibilities that form organized systems on the basis of the agent’s projects and relationships. Transformative experiences involve shifts to systems of possibility, that is, changes to habitual meanings and to how an agent’s projects are situated in relation to one another. I employ the enactivist notion of sense-making to analyze how an agent rebuilds the meaning structures disrupted by a transformative experience. In an unchosen transformative experience, an agent adjusts to a significant disruption through a process of sense-making in precarious conditions. By establishing new patterns of bodily and social interaction with the world, one alters the practical meanings of one’s surroundings, and thereby reconstitutes oneself as an intentional agent. (shrink)

This book explores the spiritual potential of faith, mysticism and transcendence in answer to the dangers of a mythologised state and the sacro-sanctification of (liberal) democracy and its rule of law. It searches for a curative for the pathological transformation of these institutions into--so called--political religions. Along this line, it explores the importance of spirituality and transcendence for political legitimacy, democratic participation and international cooperation, law and politics. There being no general agreed-upon definition of 'spirituality', the authors examine what may (...) be seen as 'spiritual' dimensions of the political. These dimensions have in common a focus on transcendence as a vanishing point of rationality and rational justification. This vanishing point may become manifest, for example, in a primordial requisite of becoming an individual person; in responding--in freedom--to the call of theocracy; in the phenomenon of prophecy or political wisdom; in the remaining shards of formerly all-pervasive religious institutions; in tenacious hope for a democracy-to-come; in the courageous resilience and resistance of citizens of 'non-' or 'un-democratic' states; etc."--Page 4 of back cover. (shrink)