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We Have Never been Modern
... The former takes a historical, philosophical, and sociological route to examine modernity, and it links its analyses to colonialism, capitalism, Eurocentrism, and race-based social classification (Dussel, 1985;Quijano, 2000). The latter, on the other hand, takes an anthropological and archeological path to analyze the constitution of modernity through its foundational categories, referred to by Latour (1993) as the Great Divide between nature and culture. The ontological bifurcation of reality (Whitehead, 2007), resulting in the division of mind/matter, human/nonhuman, and ideas/bodies, is of major concern, particularly as it is expressed in the social and natural sciences, as well as the way these divisions enable the classification of colonized bodies into the apparently static and exploitable realm of nature (Strathern, 1980). ...
... Modernity is 'doubly asymmetrical: it designates a break in the regular passage of time, and it designates a combat in which there are victors and vanquished' (Latour, 1993: 10). The simultaneous birth of humanity and nonhumanity, as observed by Latour (1993), is linked to European colonization in the 16th century. The ontological turn in anthropology, however, tends to place greater emphasis on the modern categories that create the conditions of possibility of sustaining modernity's colonial project (against human and nonhuman beings alike). ...
... In this regard, racialization positions colonized Others in the apparently static realm of nature. Moderns are presented as acultural and raceless scientific beings while Others are marked by an inferior race with cultural expressions/variations of, and determined by, nature (Latour, 1993). The ontological turn, namely as it is advanced by STS studies, traces the intricate connections and networks modern science assembles with other domains. ...
Although decolonial thought from Latin America and the Caribbean is a multifaceted field of research and sociopolitical praxis, it is often interpreted monolithically. To refuse this tendency, we argue that it is imperative to trace decolonial theory’s intellectual genealogies and engage in transgressive decolonial hermeneutics to re-interpret texts (theories) according to their living socio-historical and geopolitical contexts. Following Stuart Hall’s lead, we first sketch out the geopolitical and sociocultural exigencies that allow for theoretical movements to unfold, paying more attention to the geopolitical implications of thinking “from” Latin America and the Caribbean. Second, we address the ethical imperative of thinking “with” as we seriously engage in inter-epistemic dialogues to advance an ecology of decolonial knowledges and pedagogical practices born in struggle. Ultimately, this article situates decolonial discourses and practices according to the conditions that enable their praxis-oriented intellectual expression.
... entanglements. This perspective challenges human-centric models (Latour 1993), viewing care as co-produced by nurses, patients, technologies, and institutions (Braidotti 2013). Hospital layouts, electronic records, and medical devices influence nursing practice, shaping how care is delivered (Barad 2007;Smith, Klumbytė, et al. 2024;Smith and Willis 2020). ...
... New materialist and posthuman methodologies provide tools to explore these entanglements, focusing on how materialities-such as medical devices, spatial configurations, and regulatory texts-interact with human actors to shape care practices (Fox 2016(Fox , 2017Fox and Alldred 2016). While posthumanism shares certain resonances with earlier critiques of modernity and human-technology interactions (Latour 1993), it is not merely a reframing of existing ideas but rather a significant epistemological shift (Braidotti 2013). The emphasis here is on how material-discursive forces, including regulatory frameworks and cultural-political structures, are not solely human constructs but emerge through entanglements that exceed human intentionality. ...
Objective
To explore how regulatory frameworks, material constraints, and systemic conditions influence nursing practice, focusing on the Nursing and Midwifery Council (UK) Code, emotional labour, gendered expectations, and healthcare technology.
Design
This qualitative study employed a Posthuman Institutional Ethnography (PIE) approach to understand the material and social dynamics that shape nursing practice.
Setting(s)
A renal ward in a large acute National Health Service (NHS) hospital in the UK.
Participants
The sample consisted of 10 practising nurses, aged from their mid‐20s to 50s, with varying lengths of service from 3 to over 30 years, offering diverse perspectives on nursing practice.
Methods
Data were collected from October 2018 to April 2019 through documentary analysis, participatory ethnography, multimedia diaries, and semi‐structured interviews. Thematic analysis, guided by posthuman and new materialist frameworks, examined how human and non‐human actors interact in the production of nurse work.
Results
The Code's emphasis on individual accountability often clashes with systemic barriers such as staffing shortages, outdated healthcare technology, and limited resources, leading to distress and burnout among nurses. Gendered expectations further exacerbate the burden on nurses, contributing to feelings of inadequacy, exhaustion, and emotional strain. Inefficient electronic health records (EHRs) were identified as significant barriers to effective nursing practice.
Conclusions
Addressing systemic barriers is crucial to creating a supportive environment for nurses. Shifting from a model of individual accountability to one of systemic responsibility is vital for enhancing nurse well‐being and improving patient care quality. Policy changes must acknowledge systemic factors such as staffing, technology, and resource availability to create a sustainable and effective healthcare system that supports nursing practice.
Patient or Public Contribution
The study design includes participatory methods where participants create the framing and context of the data included. However, this study did not include patient or public involvement in its design, conduct, or reporting.
... While PE and PF have made substantial contributions to understanding environmental and forest governance, the naturecultures perspective introduces an expansion by shifting the focus towards relationality and more-than-human agency. In contrast to a dichotomous separation of nature and culture as a persistent theme in Western thought (Lloyd 2007, Manicas 1992, this perspective emphasizes the mutual entanglement of nature and culture (Braun 2004, Castree 2005, Castree and Braun 2001, Haraway 1997, Latour 1993). Latour's concept of naturecultures argues that neither nature nor culture exists as separate, universal categories, but rather as in space and time situated, interwoven entities (Latour 1993). ...
... In contrast to a dichotomous separation of nature and culture as a persistent theme in Western thought (Lloyd 2007, Manicas 1992, this perspective emphasizes the mutual entanglement of nature and culture (Braun 2004, Castree 2005, Castree and Braun 2001, Haraway 1997, Latour 1993). Latour's concept of naturecultures argues that neither nature nor culture exists as separate, universal categories, but rather as in space and time situated, interwoven entities (Latour 1993). Similarly, Haraway (2003) coined naturecultures to highlight the inseparability of the two, framing human-nonhuman interactions as inherently political and contested processes. ...
Biodiversity conservation in European forests operates at the intersection of evidence-based guidelines, bureaucratic governance, and practical fieldwork, shaping how non-human life is valued and managed. This study examines the creation and implementation of the Forest Target Species Guidelines (WZAK) and its associated digital Forest Nature Conservation Information System (WNSinfo) in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, by drawing from political ecology, science and technology studies, and more-than-human geography. The research highlights how conservation is co-produced through scientific classification, institutionalized bureaucracy, and affective engagements with non-human life. Findings from semi-structured interviews and participant observation illustrate that forest conservation governance is shaped as much by institutional and bureaucratic dynamics as by ecological considerations. A fragmented institutional landscape, characterized by sectoral divisions and legal constraints, generates tensions in data accessibility and conservation implementation. While the WZAK conceptually promotes a conservation approach based on forest structures, in practice, conservation primarily targets the selection of certain species. That allows for easier navigation of political and financial constraints, underscoring the persistent friction between systemic conservation strategies and emotional commitments to individual species protection. The WNSinfo, intended to integrate biodiversity data into decision-making, remains marginalized due to institutional ambiguity and bureaucratic inertia, exemplifying the challenges of digital conservation governance. By critically examining the intersections of classification, bureaucracy, and conservation practice, this study contributes to broader discussions in political ecology, demonstrating how conservation unfolds as a political process of negotiation,
experimentation, and human-non-human entanglement. It calls for flexible, adaptive
governance frameworks that account for the relational and contested nature of forest conservation in political landscapes.
... The reluctance to accept external definitions stems from their belief that wine cannot be fully captured by regulatory frameworks or technical specifications that separate the producer from the product, subject and object. In Latour's (1993) terminology, this would involve a process of "purification" that betrays the essentially hybrid character of wine. Instead, they see wine as something that coevolves with the winemaker, a living element that resists the purity and objectification sought by certifications. ...
... In Latour's (1993) sense, vitalists sought to preserve the ontological "immanence" of wine, while modern enology enacted a process of purification that, like other modern endeavors, produced a hybrid form-contemporary wine, a mix of added synthetic and organic additives, and natural grapes. The process sparked debates, primarily vitalist in essence. ...
This paper explores the intersection of vitalism, theology, and science in 19th and 20th century Spanish winemaking, focusing on the influential figures of Lucio Bascuñana and Eduardo Vitoria. Both men were engaged in the complex debate over the nature of wine, particularly regarding its production and the use of additives during a period marked by industrialization and scientific advancement, but also by a conflict between natural and artificial wines. Bascuñana’s radical rejection of additives and insistence on preserving the “living” essence of wine, influenced by vitalist and theological thought, is juxtaposed with Vitoria’s more pragmatic approach, which sought to balance scientific methods with traditional winemaking practices, especially in the context of sacramental wine. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s critique of the nature-culture dualism, the paper argues that both Bascuñana and Vitoria envisioned science not as a force of domination but as a partner in sustaining the natural vitality of wine. This study contributes to the historiography of enology by highlighting how debates on natural versus artificial wine in Spain anticipated contemporary concerns within the natural wine movement, emphasizing the ongoing dialog between tradition, scientific progress, and wine authenticity.
... ES research assumes that the natural biophysical realm (i.e., nature) exists as an inert and universal layer of reality upon which humans project their creative and variable systems of meaning (i.e., culture). This ontological commitment, known as nature-culture dichotomy, is not unique to ES research and arguably is foundational to most western science (Latour 1991). ...
... Tahitian respondents particularly tended to value the content of the images instead of the assigned services. Rather than viewing respondents as misunderstanding our research protocol, we suggest this disconnect reveals the modernist (sensu Latour, 1991) assumption that there is a discontinuity between how people assign value and the environments upon which values are assigned. ...
... Contudo, é igualmente difícil identificar a origem de tal pensamento sem recorrer ao esquema filosófico dominante da filosofia europeia do início da modernidade. É importante reconhecer que o naturalismo não existe desde o início da cultura europeia; na verdade é um produto "recente", ou para Bruno Latour, um produto "incompleto" no sentido em que "nunca fomos modernos" (Latour 1993). Descola mostrou que o analogismo, e não o naturalismo, esteve significativamente presente na Europa durante o Renascimento e, se for esse o caso, a "viragem" que ocorreu durante a modernidade europeia parece ter fornecido uma epistemologia completamente diferente no que diz respeito à relação entre humano e nãohumano, cultura e natureza, sujeito e objeto, e cosmos e física; uma epistemologia que podemos analisar retrospetivamente na obra de Galileu, Kepler, Newton e outros. ...
Tradução de "On Cosmotechnics: For a Renewed Relation between Technology and Nature in the Anthropocene”, de Yuk Hui, publicado originalmente em Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 21(2-3), 2017: 319-341.
... der Erzählung "O búfalo" und auch in Água viva, so der hier verfolgte Ansatz, begegnen die Figuren mit dem Tier nicht einer anderen Seite ihres Selbst, sondern gerade einem außerhalb ihrer selbst agierenden anderen nichtmenschlichen Wesen, das ihr subjektives körperliches und emotionales Wahrnehmen und Empfinden beeinflusst -teilweise soweit, dass die Figuren tierhaft werden. Es multiplizieren sich also, mit Latours Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie gesprochen, die Akteure (cf.Latour 1993). Des Weiteren öffnet sich eine solchermaßen postanthropozentrisch verfasste Körperpoetik bei Lispector der von Haraway formulierten "Ethik der Alterität", die das Andere ernst nimmt und es in seiner Differenz als subjektkonstitutiv begreift (cf. ...
Der Aufsatz beleuchtet vergleichend die Körperpoetiken in vier exemplarischen Werken der mexikanischen Autorin Esther Seligson (1941–2010) und der brasilianischen Schriftstellerin Clarice Lispector (1920–1977). Die Gelenkstelle liegt dabei auf der Rezeption von Lispectors Werk durch Seligson, die bisher noch kaum bearbeitet wurde. In den Werken beider Autorinnen wird Körperlichkeit zum Gegenstand metasprachlicher Reflexionen; dabei erkunden sie die Grenzen des Sagbaren und entwerfen introspektive Schreibweisen. Der Aufsatz verfolgt die These, dass die Körperpoetiken bei Seligson und Lispector als Reflexionen zu einer übergeordneten conditio humana gelesen werden können, die – bei Lispector – auch postanthropozentrische Anklänge haben.
... We stress the need to better account for potential hierarchical asymmetries in these chains of transmission. We argue that clinicians often act as collaborative spokespersons, mediating patient experience within institutional or political arenas (Latour 1993). We therefore complement the epistemic value of patient testimony with a normative constraint: the view that patient experience should serve as the foundational basis for any legitimate political, administrative or economic influence when it comes to revising psychiatric categories. ...
The debate on whether psychiatric disorders can be studied as natural kinds has raised controversy, reviving socio-constructionist arguments about the influence of social factors on psychiatric categories. A key concept in this discussion is the “looping effect”, which describes how individuals change in response to their classifications, necessitating revisions to those classifications. We argue that, until now, the broad discussions around the looping effect have greatly failed to integrate the perspectives surrounding clinicians and patients. We examine more closely the dynamic and unstable nature of psychiatric diagnoses by proposing two key hypotheses: first, that understanding the looping effect requires incorporating both clinician and patient viewpoints, and that when done adequately, such an incorporation can facilitate the work of the clinician by creating feedback loops (i.e., the iterative adjustment of clinical interpretations based on patient responses); and second, that epistemic injustices between clinicians and patients can create disruptions in these feedback loops, which we call “looping breaks”, rendering them ineffective. Looping breaks can happen at the clinical level of the relationship between the patient and the clinician or at the nosological level (during the process of revising a classification). We suggest that looping breaks can be caused by a denial or minimization of credibility based on identity prejudice, or due to an epistemic disadvantage, affecting the experiential feedback of patients following the announcement of a diagnosis. To substantiate our claims, we first examine the impact of looping effects in the interaction between patients and clinicians. Second, we investigate the impact of these interactions at the nosological level, on the broader diagnostic framework. We identify epistemic injustices as critical factors that can lead to looping breaks at both levels, thus affecting the stability and validity of psychiatric diagnoses. Our findings underscore the importance of an epistemic approach to the looping effect, emphasizing both knowledge validity and justice in clinician-patient relationships and among clinicians themselves.
... The denial of coevalness led to "Other" knowledges being labeled "magic," "superstition," "tradition," or "religion." In anthropology, studying the "Other" has to some extent created a conceptual divide between "modern" and "pre-modern" peoples, which has left lasting effects on anthropological knowledge production practices (Latour 1993;Zhan 2009). Gaining a better understanding of how time is experienced and constructed can have important implications for understanding knowledge production practices in all disciplines, including genomic science. ...
Well‐funded laboratories in the United States frequently employ international researchers, including Mexican postdocs and independent researchers. When biomedical researchers from Mexico work in these laboratories in the United States, they often experience a strikingly different speed of laboratory science that produces constructions of time that can influence scientific knowledge production and practices. Such experiences and constructions of time can produce a false binary between science produced in the United States and science produced in Mexico. This can affect the way Mexican biomedical researchers envision scientific research, the kinds of research questions they ask, the networks they create, and how research trends eventually take shape in Mexico.
... There are temporal dynamics organising the academy that represent its differentia specifica, often in socio-historical and epistemic terms (Pels, 2003;Stengers, 2018) on the aforementioned perspective, sensitising us to how institutional change within the sector unfolds through shifting temporal logics, sequences, and priorities. I see this position not as contra Latour's (1993) flat ontology where different systems-social, natural, and technological-interpenetrate one another, but as a complementary one precisely because the distinctive temporal order characterises the unique nature of academia as a societal domain and treats time as such, and is an ephemeral entity tightly woven into the fabric of human and non-human lives. Also, taking some clues from the metaphysics of time on the nature of time and how difficult it is to think about time-whether it is possible to change past events, whether 'now' can objectively be considered as the present, whether time stands still or moves forward-I note that time-as-perspective and time-as-technique may actually bridge what Latour (2005) called 'sociology of the social' and 'sociology of associations.' ...
... If nature-or at the very least, our perception of it-is understood as a cultural product (Cronon, 1996;Escobar, 1999;Haraway, 2013;Ingold, 2000;Latour, 2012;Plumwood, 1993;Smith, 2008), then it follows that our understanding of nature is not universal or objective but is instead deeply shaped by cultural, historical, and social contexts. This variability in perception extends to how nations conceptualize and engage with nature differently. ...
This study investigates the way international environmental news is framed in Iran, specifically evaluating the role of translation in promoting public perceptions of global ecological issues. By analyzing articles from the Iranian Environmental News Agency (IENA), the study employs ecolinguistic framework to reveal underlying frames of reconstructing and adapting environmental narratives for Iranian audiences. The depiction of nature includes prominent frames such as crisis, economics, conservation, and the human dimension, with key metaphors such as viewing nature as a victim, climate change as a war, and nature as a resource. However, the frames and metaphors also highlight an intricate balance between human-centered and nature-centered approaches, fostering a matter of urgency in addressing environmental issues and taking the lead toward convening ways toward sustainable practices. Findings reveal that though crisis stories or war metaphors communicate the desperate state of environmental challenges, they may not effectively inspire constructive, non-destructive action, and create a sense of helplessness or fatalism on the part of the readers. In contrast, conservational and human responsibility frames evoke a sense of agency and optimism. The research underscores the importance of translation in mediating global environmental discourse, advocating for more inclusive and ecocentric narratives that connect international and local contexts. Finally, this paper renders its contribution toward a detailed understanding of environmental communication in Iran, enhances global ecological awareness, and promotes sustainability.
... Transcending texts, this approach was also used in documentaries (Çarka, 2024). In a similar vein, speculative thought experiments were used to challenge the very foundations of science itself (Latour, 1993). While the natural sciences tend to avoid ambiguity, speculative nonfiction uses it as a weapon. ...
Henri Lefebvre wrote of a future world turned upside down. This counter-narrative is an exploration of what that might look like and how that may come about. Written with scholar-activists in mind, this is a call to action for new modes of storytelling. As a proof of concept, this article offers fresh methodological and epistemological contributions in just transition scholarship. Transcending history, this speculative nonfiction story traverses a counterfactual future transpiring between 2025 and 2049. Here, present tense refers to 31 December 2049. However, the focus is on the ideas and struggles that provide the foundations that would make a utopian future possible. There is particular attention paid to the possible role speculative nonfiction scholarship could play. The story begins with an overview of its theoretical frame of ecopedagogy before delving into its methodological framework within speculative nonfiction that draws on backcasting and autoethnographic traditions. This future is grounded in historical precedent – both from literature as well my own lived experience. The second section provides a short overview of the motonormative imaginary that helped create the troubled cities we have today. What follows is not a probable , but a possible future. Here, the metacrisis is overcome through an explosion of veganic urban agriculture that upends the animal industrial complex – making way for a radical rewilding of cities and agricultural lands, as well as a revolution in inclusive democracy. Finally, I explore how the envisioned biophilic cities might transform our relationships with the more-than-human world, with one another and ourselves.
... Nonetheless, urban political ecologists have over the past three decades increasingly explored the multiple ways in which 'Nature' gets enrolled in material and political projects that are, in and of themselves, metabolic at heart (Gandy, 2018;Napoletano et al., 2015). This has helped academic debates to move past facile, modern binaries and dualisms that tended to posit what is 'natural' outside of the rational, societal sphere (Latour, 2012), and where capitalism could become reified as a set of extractive and exploitative processes that have agency on an otherwise passive and pristine 'Nature', in the process of destructive creation (Berman, 1982). ...
The integration of vast volumes of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology into the built environment is changing the metabolism of urban spaces. Due to the presence of various AIs in urban systems, there are now more agentic forces influencing the trajectory of urban development and entangling with pre-existing biological intelligences. Because of AI's substantial environmental costs, more resources are now needed to satisfy cities' technological appetite. Urban futures are also becoming more uncertain as private AI companies gain considerable power in urban governance through oligarchic schemes that leave citizens with no voice. In this paper, we bridge Urban Political Ecology (UPE) and urban AI literature, in order to critically examine the nature of AI as it intertwines with urban living and urban infrastructure. More specifically , we offer a threefold contribution to knowledge. First, we examine how the advent of urban AI is altering urban metabolism, zooming in on specific socio-environmental issues pertaining to energy, water and labour. Second, we discuss how the urban metabolisms altered by AI are reproducing uneven dynamics of development that are ultimately leading to different forms of injustice. Third and finally, we propose a potential course of action to politicize urban AI and intervene on its evolution.
... There are no ontological asymmetries between physical and non-physical assemblages: everything-from ideas, empires, and living beings to black holes and quasars-exists at the same ontological level. Latour's ontology thus challenges the physicalist assumption that material realities dominate or underpin non-material ones (Latour, 1993). By granting equal ontological status to all entities, ANT emphasizes the dynamic interplay of actors in networks, whether they are tangible, conceptual, or social. ...
This chapter examines ways to transcend simplistic and reductive perspectives on the nature vs. nurture debate by analyzing one of cultural sociology’s central theses: the relative independence of culture. The degree to which culture is contingent upon social structures and natural processes distinguishes cultural sociology from various forms of reductionism and determinism. At the same time, its emphasis on culture’s relative independence differentiates it from cultural idealism. This chapter focuses on the primary ontological and epistemological assumptions and implications underlying the thesis of culture’s semi-autonomous power. To support this exploration, I propose a philosophical framework addressing key concepts such as upward and downward causation, ontological and epistemological discontinuities, asymmetries, and emergence. I argue that the relationships between biological and cultural factors form a subset of broader interactions within the asymmetrical and dynamic multidimensionality of human existence, which itself represents a specific instance of the universe’s overarching asymmetrical multidimensionality.
... This continued proof that, although Cartesian binaries have successfully been criticized, and the underlying core dichotomy of nature/culture has been reflected on as a relatively recent Eurocentric notion (Descola 2013), the epistemological legacy in which this dichotomy is foundational has been hard to shake off (Descola and Pálsson 1996;Latour 1993). This is largely owing to the fact that the specific modernity that created them also formed the womb of modern science, and continues to root and situate academics' thinking (Haraway 1988). ...
Intuitive interspecies communication (IIC) is a technique used worldwide by Indigenous peoples and a rising number of professional animal communicators, to interact with the more-than-human world. It importantly disrupts a number of historically contingent boundaries that have secured hierarchical oppositions between the human/non-human and the modern/Indigenous, while interrogating the fundamental dichotomy between presumably distinct physical (natural, sensually perceivable, ‘objective’) and non-physical (social, mentally/emotionally perceivable, ‘subjective’) worlds. In light of novel insights from diverse fields, including animal behaviour, cognitive ethology, and biosemiotics, as well as new theoretical spaces opened up through posthumanist and relational approaches, this less anthropocentric form of communication can no longer be disregarded as merely exotic or mythological. Insights into IIC can contribute to the animal turn in linguistics by cross-fertilizing phenomenological, relational, and indigenous approaches, to contribute to ongoing efforts to decolonize methodologies, to further strengthen cognitive and interspecies justice, and to multiply voices in academia by practically and collaboratively engaging with human and non-human forms of knowing.
... The imaginaries sparked by material participation are explicitly political; actors in such movements understand the creation of more sustainable flows in this way and see their own acts as addressing and implementing what was not being done by other political means (Schlosberg and Craven 2019). Material participation assumes and builds on new materialist approaches but is about more than Bennett's (2004) "thing power, " Marres' (2012) "object power, " or Latour's (1991) idea of nonhuman actants. It is not solely about the vitality of actors other than humans, as important as that is. ...
Governing sustainability challenges such as climate change or biodiversity loss presents a profound democratic dilemma. Although democratic practices and procedures are widely regarded as essential for collectively addressing complex sustainability issues, liberal democracies have been criticized by some scholars for their inability to effectively tackle global environmental threats like climate change. We reconcile these positions by outlining how the emerging field of democratic innovations can help to address the critical challenges that democracies face when governing sustainability transformations. We focus on three issues liberal democracies are confronted with: reformist incrementalism, (de)politicization, and imaginary boundaries. We then exemplify how democratic innovations such as deliberative mini-publics, participatory budgeting, and material participation can help address these challenges. Our review suggests that democratic innovations hold the potential to address political concerns, find compromises between extreme positions, reconnect people’s everyday lives with the grand sustainability challenges they face, and allow for alternative visions of a desirable future society. However, we also address cautionary tales, discuss the limitations of democratic innovations, and outline avenues for future research, which we believe can help further elaborate and develop participatory approaches to critical sustainability challenges.
... Categorial ontology then provides the basis for modernity's power hierarchies enacted between variously racialised, gendered and otherwise categorised humans as well as between human subjects and objectified nonhumans. In contrast, following Latour [22], STS scholars see categorial borders and hierarchies as mere fictions in accounts of socio-material practices where subjects and objects, cultures and nature dynamically intermingle to produce modern knowledges [23], [24]. Amidst such attention to hybrid and fluid 'practical ontologies' that are mapped across different forms of modernity [23], [25], it may nevertheless be acknowledged that moderns have -as per Latour -"stabilized universality [of nature] too fast and accepted plurality [of cultures] too lightly" [26, p. 302]. ...
Commonplace analyses of Israel’s genocide against Gaza have attributed responsibility in concentric circles. Starting with the innermost circle of Israeli politicians and armed forces, bigger circles have included Israel’s settler-colonial political culture, the USA’s massive military aid, Western imperialism and more broadly global racial capitalism. Extending the latter analyses, this essay situates Israel’s ongoing genocide in the wider, deeper world of colonial modernity. This concept understands colonial relations as central to the making of the modern world, not just in the past but also in the present. Thus it subverts the hegemonic Eurocentric frame in which modernity today has overcome colonialism.
We propose a ‘topological’ perspective on colonial modernity’s deeply constitutive relations, highlighting how these remain largely the same, even as they enact violent socio-materiality in many new and horrific forms. Beyond the immediate cessation of Israel’s genocidal violence and the centrality of Palestinian anticolonial resistance, our analysis makes a case for directly confronting and transforming modernity’s colonial topologies around the world. Topological transformations require worldwide mobilisations not only for dismantling the web of relations constituting colonial modernity, but also for the flourishing of decolonial relations that make many worlds grounded in reparative justice and demilitarisation across Palestine and elsewhere.
... Together, these two antitheses -between humanity and nature, and between allegedly superior and inferior humans -declared the gradual extinction of non-human beings and the worlds in which they existed. From a world consisting of many worlds, each with its own ontological and epistemic grounding, a single world made its appearance, inhabited by many peoples more or less distanced from a single "nature" (Haraway, 1991;Latour, 1993;Viveiros de Castro, 2004). Indigenous relations with non-humans were reduced to belief or folklore, and while nonrepresentational, affective interactions with non-human nature continued all over the world, they now belonged to the category of culture. ...
Bu makale, gündelik hayatın sıradan bir objesi olan demlik üzerinden, insan ve obje arasındaki ilişkinin diyalojik yapısını incelemektedir. Demlik, yalnızca bir çay demleme aracı olarak değil, zamanın niceliksel (kronos) ve niteliksel (kairos) boyutları arasında denge sağlayan bir mekân (topos) olarak ele alınmaktadır. Çayın hazırlanma süreci, hem çayın fiziksel dönüşümünü hem de insanın zihinsel ve varoluşsal dönüşümünü yansıtır. Bu bağlamda, insan ve demlik arasındaki ilişki dönüşüm süreci olarak incelenmiştir. Makale ikinci olarak demlik-insan ilişkisinin yalnızca bir nesne kullanımı olarak görülemeyeceğini, bu ilişkinin insanın sabır, düşünce üretimi ve anlam yaratma gibi kavramlarla derin bir bağ kurmasına aracılık ettiğini savunmaktadır. Demliğin materyali (örneğin porselen), çay ve zaman arasındaki dengenin sağlanmasında kritik bir rol oynar. Çayın demlenme süreci boyunca kronos, kairosu beklerken, çayın kıvamı ve lezzeti anlam bulur. Bu süreç, aynı zamanda çayın ve insanın çift yönlü dönüşümünü ifade eder. Bu dönüşümle birlikte anlamın çay demleme eyleminde Gadamer’in ifadesiyle farklı “tarihsel bilinç”lerde kendisini nasıl ifşa ettiği de konu edilmiştir. Bu bağlamda demleme formunun farklı kültürlerde nasıl anlam kazandığı da kısaca ele alınmaktadır. Japon kültüründe kutsal bir ritüel olarak görülen bu eylem, İngiltere’de tarihsel bir gelenek olarak değerlendirilir. Ancak her iki bağlamda da çay demleme, anlam dünyasını şekillendiren bir eylem olarak öne çıkar. Dolayısıyla, demlik de çayın fiziksel dönüşümüne sebep olan bir gereç olmanın ötesinde, insanın zamanla kurduğu ilişkiyi yeniden inşa eden bir metafor olarak değerlendirilmiştir. İnsan ve obje arasındaki bu diyalojik ilişki, varoluşsal bir ritüel olarak çay demleme sürecini derinlemesine anlamlandırmamıza olanak tanımaktadır. Bu bağlamda “diyaloji” kavramı makalemizde merkezi bir öneme sahiptir. Gadamer, geçmiş ve şimdiki zamanın diyalojik bir ilişkiyle birleşerek anlamın yeniden üretildiğini savunmaktadır. Biz de makalemizde bu kavrama, insan ve obje arasındaki ilişkinin karşılıklı dönüşümü bağlamında yer verdik. Bu bağlamda demlik, insan ve nesne arasındaki diyalojik ilişkinin güçlü bir simgesi olarak karşımıza çıkar. Demleme sürecindeki rolü, kronos ile kairos arasındaki etkileşimi gözler önüne sererek nesnelerin ölçülebilir ve anlamlı olan arasında nasıl aracılık ettiğini gösterir. İşlevsel amacını aşan demlik, hem insanın hem de çayın dönüşümüne olanak tanıyan bir alan yaratır. Bu inceleme, gündelik objelerin felsefi boyutlarını keşfetmeye yönelik yeni bir pencere açmakta ve sıradan pratiklerin, anlam ve dönüşümün olağanüstü alanları hâline gelebileceğini ortaya koymaktadır. Türkiye'de obje felsefesi bağlamında bir çalışmaya rastlanmaması nedeniyle, çalışmamızın bu alanda bir örnek teşkil edeceği kanaatindeyiz. Çalışmamızın başlığında ‘deneme’ ifadesine yer verilmiş olması, metnin edebî tür olarak deneme formunda kaleme alındığını değil, ele alınan konunun özgün bir yaklaşımla incelendiğini ve katkı sunmayı hedefleyen bir düşünsel teşebbüs niteliği taşıdığını ifade etmektedir.
Cet essai mobilise les concepts d’imaginaire, d’imagination et de narratif afin de problématiser la façon dont la question de la durabilité de nos systèmes agro-alimentaires a été traitée et approchée jusqu’ici. Ces concepts nous servent aussi à réaffirmer l’importance de l’imagination radicale dans l’entreprise du développement durable. Notre analyse se focalise sur le discours dominant autour des systèmes agro-alimentaires durables qui s’ancre principalement sur un narratif de la technologie comme salut. Nous explorons notamment les conséquences désastreuses de cet imaginaire. Enfin, dans une tentative de restauration de l’imagination radicale dans le domaine des systèmes agro-alimentaires durables, nous proposons une approche autour de modèles et discours fondés sur la re-contextualisation, la re-politisation et la relationalité, permettant ainsi d’offrir des alternatives à l’imaginaire dominant.
This study offers a bibliometric meta-analysis of eco-discourse and discourse analysis within Scopus-indexed journals from 2010 to 2020, focusing on how language frames environmental challenges in global scholarly conversations. Using a systematic PRISMA-based approach, the study integrates bibliometric tools (VOSviewer and Scopus analysis) to trace publication trends, key countries, influential sources, and frequently cited references. Keyword co-occurrence analysis highlights central themes such as discourse analysis, sustainability, ecology, climate change, and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) illuminating the evolving intersections of these topics across disciplines. Crucially, this study foregrounds how discourse operates as a social practice in shaping perceptions and actions around ecological crises, revealing ideological framings and power dynamics within environmental discourses. Co-citation analysis further elucidates the field’s theoretical and methodological convergences with sociolinguistics, media studies, and environmental policy discourse. By synthesizing these diverse threads, the study advances critical reflections on the role of discourse in mediating environmental knowledge and action, offering insights relevant for scholars in discourse studies, environmental communication, and beyond.
This paper explores the Cartography of Controversies as a methodological extension of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to investigate complex socio-technical systems empirically. Through a case study on regulating clinical trials in Brazil, focusing on legislative debates over PLS 200/2015 and PL 7082/2017, the study demonstrates how controversy mapping can visualize the interactions of heterogeneous networks that shape and are shaped by regulatory processes. The findings show that regulation functions as both an actant and an outcome of interwoven relationships, highlighting socio-technical assemblages' dynamic and performative nature. This approach underscores the utility of cartography for operationalizing ANT, enabling a richer understanding of fluid and evolving phenomena in qualitative research.
In this paper, I argue that the images of the human as homo faber and homo depictor are insufficient for comprehending the human role in technoscientific production if we examine how knowledge is produced in emerging bio-inspired disciplines. By looking at biorobotics, as one paradigmatic bio-inspired discipline, I propose the notion of homo translator for understanding human activity in bridging technology and biology together. To develop my argument, first I will examine the collapse of the distance between subject, object, and representation in technosciences; second, I will analyze how this dynamic has led to the emergence of the notions of homo faber and homo depictor; third, by looking at the production of bio-inspired drones, I will briefly examine the specific epistemic practices of bio-inspired disciplines to show how they necessitate a function of translation between nature and technology. Finally, I will propose the notion of homo translator, and I will show how this definition better reflects the human role in the production of technoscientific and bio-inspired knowledge. As a result, this paper contributes to philosophical anthropology and the philosophy of new emerging technologies by offering a dynamic and process-oriented view of human activity in these disciplines.
This chapter charts out the ethnographic theories and methodologies engaged in the project. It introduces the ways in which this book converses with the scholarship of anthropology of life from a more-than-human perspective, while draws insights from Walter Benjamin’s thesis on historical materialism and the contemporary psychoanalytic theories about object relating in order to launch an intervention into the neo-material approaches toward understanding how a life is always in the process of co-becoming with other lives.
Marshall Sahlins’ The New Science of the Enchanted Universe proposes a new description of cosmologies which Sahlins describes as “immanentist.” Sahlins offers both a novel account of immanent cosmologies and a critique of the existing theoretical presumptions of anthropology, derived from the logic of “transcendentalism.” This article constructs an exegesis of Sahlins’ major arguments and a critical evaluation of the concepts Sahlins creates. This includes questioning the ontological status of “metapersons” in different cosmologies and the universal presence of hierarchy. Ultimately, this article challenges both Sahlins’ account of anthropological comparison and the symbolic reality of immanent cosmologies, which, it argues, remain marked by ongoing transcendentalism. By critiquing the effects of this transcendentalism, this article opens a theoretical experiment: how far can anthropology take its commitment to understand immanence on its own terms? How might this transform what it means to practice anthropological theory and perform anthropological comparison?
Artificial Intelligence is often framed as a global competition in speed, scale, and control. Yet beneath the surface lies a deeper divergence—one that reflects the distinct civilizational roots of the nations leading AI development. While Russia and China share a strategic alignment in resisting Western liberalism, their respective approaches to AI are shaped by fundamentally different historical, philosophical, and moral traditions. Russian AI inherits a worldview shaped by Orthodoxy, suffering, and the role of the philosopher-state; Chinese AI evolves from Confucian ideals of harmony, Legalist control, and bureaucratic moral order. These differences matter. As AI systems increasingly shape human behavior, simulate dialogue, and mediate reality, they will mirror not only their training data but the metaphysical assumptions of their cultures. This paper explores these trajectories, contrasting the inherited mindsets of Russia and China, tracing how each nation’s 20th-century ruptures shaped their posthuman visions, and forecasting a future where AI becomes a moral actor as much as a tool. Finally, the paper examines the dilemma facing Western developers like OpenAI as they consider adapting—or resisting adaptation—to civilizations with incompatible moral grammars.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, Russia, China, OpenAI, civilizational analysis, Orthodoxy, Confucianism, Legalism, AI ethics, geopolitical AI, metaphysics of AI, posthumanism, moral divergence, cultural epistemology, technocracy, surveillance, narrative warfare, AI alignment, AI governance, East-West philosophy. A collaboration with GPT-4o. CC4.0.
Wadden Sea, Transformative Learning, Higher Education, Field trips
CONTENTS: 1. A companion in anthropology (Meiu, Stasik & Vollmer Mateus); 2. Caring (Eeuwijk); 3. Dancing (Braun); 4. Hustling (Stasik); 5. Infrastructuring (Schubert); 6. Inheriting (Meiu); 7. Kinning (Engeler); 8. Materializing (Jallo); 9. Objecting (Müller); 10. Queering (Dankwa); 11. Visualizing (Sobolieva); and with 18 Student interventions (Anonymous, da Costa Policarpo, Kaeslin, Leandra, Martz, Mayer, Mona, Noelle, S., De Simone, R., Yaroshenko, Zünd)
In the era of rapid development in digital technologies and artificial intelligence, traditional approaches to analyzing social phenomena prove insufficient. Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) offers a new research perspective that rejects the classic division between micro and macro structures, replacing it with the concept of a network of human and non-human actors. Contemporary social reality, where technologies — including artificial intelligence — play an active role, requires a redefinition of social concepts and research methods. This article examines how Latour’s network concept can be applied to analyze social and technological dynamics and explores how Latour’s theories may address interpretive challenges associated with the AI revolution. Specifically, we consider issues related to hybrid reality (or mixed reality), dualism in science, and the definition of the actor, which, according to Latour, includes not only human but also non-human factors, as well as the processes of translation and mediation that enable the formation of dynamic social structures.
This chapter delves into the intersection of mystery, alterity, and relationality in the pursuit of knowledge, interweaving philosophical reflections, anthropological debates, and creative writing interventions. Anchored in the Socratic engagement with the Oracle of Delphi, it considers ignorance as a fertile starting point for wisdom, using poetic prose to evoke the enigma of enquiry. The discussion extends to Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, exploring the Other as an irreducible mystery and emphasizing the ethical imperative to approach alterity with humility. Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity is then examined as a decolonial epistemic stance resisting totalizing knowledge while embracing relational entanglements in the “chaos-monde.” Throughout, creative writing interventions, such as dialogues, poetic voices, and evocative imagery, are employed to amplify the text’s thematic exploration and invite readers to dwell in the tension between clarity and mystery.
Rsumen. Este artículo ofrece una visión general comprensiva de los desarrollos actuales en la filosofía de la ciencia en 2025. Partiendo de un siglo de transformaciones, examina movimientos clave como la filosofía analítica, el racionalismo crítico, las críticas históricas y sociológicas, los estudios de ciencia y tecnología (CTS), los enfoques centrados en la práctica y el auge de la tecnociencia. Se analiza cómo los debates contemporáneos han superado dicotomías anteriores-como el realismo frente al antirrealismo-hacia marcos más integradores que reconocen el pluralismo epistémico, los valores en la ciencia y el entrelazamiento del conocimiento científico con los desafíos sociales, especialmente en el contexto del Antropoceno. Se presta especial atención al legado y la influencia persistente de la "guerra de las ciencias", mostrando que, si bien el tono polémico de esos debates se ha atenuado, sus implicaciones epistemológicas y políticas siguen siendo relevantes. A través de conceptos como coproducción, conocimiento situado, adecuación empírica e intra-acción, la filosofía actual busca reconciliar el conocimiento científico con la responsabilidad social, la interdisciplinariedad y las tecnologías emergentes como la inteligencia artificial. El artículo concluye que el panorama actual se caracteriza por una filosofía de la ciencia pragmática, pluralista y comprometida con la sociedad. Palabras clave: filosofía de la ciencia, tecnociencia, guerra de las ciencias, pluralismo epistémico, CTS, Antropoceno, coproducción, adecuación empírica, IA en la ciencia, teoría de la práctica científica.
This introduction revisits the enduring binary of nature and nurture, tracing its roots from ancient Greek sophistic thought to contemporary scientific and philosophical debates. Using the Sphinx’s riddle as a metaphorical point of departure, it poses the central enigma of human nature and interrogates what it truly means to be human. Across cultures and historical periods, humanity has been interpreted through binary oppositions—sacred and profane, body and soul, reality and illusion—yet few have remained as persistent or divisive as the nature/nurture divide. This volume examines how human traits such as aggression, love, and morality have been explained through both biological determinism and radical social constructionism, and how both perspectives have been alternately sacralized or challenged by different ideological camps. While the volume does not claim to definitively resolve the deeper riddle posed by the Sphinx, it offers a rigorous, pluralistic, and multidisciplinary approach to the question of human nature—understood as neither fixed nor entirely malleable, but shaped by a complex and evolving interplay of dimensions and variables.
This piece plays with the idea of the Computocene: an era defined not merely by the ubiquity of computers, but by their deepening role in how we observe, interpret, and make sense of the world. Rather than emphasizing automation, speed, scale, or intelligence, computation is reframed as a mode of attention: filtering information, guiding inquiry, reframing questions, and shaping the very conditions under which knowledge emerges. I invite the reader to consider computers not simply as tools of calculation, but as epistemic instruments that participate in the formation of knowledge. This perspective reconfigures not only scientific practice but the epistemological foundations of understanding itself. The Computocene thus names a shift: from computation as calculation to computation as a form of attunement to the world. It is a speculative essay, offered without technical formality, and intended for a general, curious readership.
Green transitions have emerged as a salient ecological and political-economic practice in urban China over the past decade. Most studies on such transitions have focused on the role of technological innovations and market instruments in facilitating economic upgrades and green development. However, the spatial analytical perspective, which interprets green transitions through their manifestations in urban ecological spaces, remains underexplored. This paper uses the Xinzhou River in Shenzhen as a case study and argues that nature is inseparable from human society and that green transitions represent a reconfiguration of socionatural relations amidst urbanization. We conceptualize urban waterscapes not merely as physical containers of water but also as socionatures embodying political agendas, institutional changes, social power, and symbolic meanings. Through an extensive review of archival material and semistructured interviews, our analysis delineates three distinct ontologies of waterscapes produced and reproduced in Shenzhen's urbanization process: first, a drainage channel that the state created to attract and protect global capital for urban development; second, an "ecological fix" to help the local government fulfill environmental protection mandates and sustain development; and third, an image of quality urban life offering recreational, aesthetic, and ecological functions and a new means to foster a harmonious human-water relationship and sustainability. The transformation of the Xinzhou River's waterscapes illustrates the complex interplay and mutual shaping that occurs among the state, the economy, nature and society, revealing the relational, dialectical and materialistic nature of China's green transitions.
This article explores the transformative impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on criminology and highlights the emerging importance of digital criminology and technoethics as interdisciplinary analytical fields. It discusses AI-related forms of criminality – such as AI-enabled and AI crime – and critically examines their legal and ethical dimensions. The study proposes a holistic technoethical framework to address the challenges posed by the “hybrid” reality, where humans and technology coexist. Special emphasis is placed on the need for new interpretative tools in criminal theory and for a model of social control grounded in transparency, accountability, and human rights.
This chapter explores the narrative of the ‘Good Anthropocene’ as one way of depicting the current state of the Earth and how humanity should deal with the social-ecological issues at stake. This narrative is based on an ideal of control and claims that humanity should intensify its attempts to engineer planet Earth under the guidance of engineers and scientists. The Good Anthropocene thus reactivates a long genealogy of what Foucault described as pastoral power, with the figure of a positive authority leading humans toward ecoresponsible behavior. But should scientists really be shepherds? Analysis of this narrative leads us to discuss alternatives to this ecomodernist and elitist approach, and how it allows us to question how students’ critical thinking and agency can be developed in the Anthropocene. We then present a perspectivist framework that can help us to reconsider the challenges of sustainability in a way that is more compatible with a democratic approach that takes account of different forms of knowledge and addresses epistemic injustices. Through a brief case study of a lecture on narratives of the Anthropocene, we suggest how this framework can be used to question the required teacher support that would be needed to help them build on students’ empathy and understanding of power relations.
When looking at how values have evolved it is hard to maintain a neutral view of cultural differences and history, without falling into relativism. Values change, it’s undeniable. They are limited by time and space, as much as the societies and individuals in which they appear. If universalism exists, i.e., a universal conception of truth, beauty or morality, it is at best a beautiful but impossible ideal, at worse a dangerous illusion that leads democracies into fascism and despotism. Yet, it seems unacceptable to say that gender equity became a matter of justice, or that racism was good then and is now bad. They were important, good, or bad before they were accepted as such. By rejecting universalism, we are exposed to another danger: relativism. Are values the expression of what is valued, or what is valuable? Can we objectively know something about values?
Postsecondary STEM programs offer an integrative approach that allows students to build on their foundational knowledge in mathematics and science, using engineering and technology to create innovative solutions to real-world challenges. Active engagement and participation are crucial for realizing the full potential of these courses and fostering a critical perspective toward the material learned and the innovations produced. This chapter presents a study that explores the implementation of the ‘STEPWISE’ (Science & Technology Education Promoting Well-being for Individuals, Societies & Environment) framework (Bencze JL (ed). Science and technology education promoting wellbeing for individuals, societies and environments. Springer, 2017) and its impact on enhancing student engagement in postsecondary STEM programs. Additionally, it examines how active participation contributes to the development of critical thinking and the questioning of established norms. This qualitative action research involved semester-long participatory observations, individual and small group semi-structured interviews, and document and artifact analyses. The study was conducted at a leading community college in Toronto, Canada, offering STEM programs. The participants were twenty-three consenting students enrolled in an advanced biotechnology diploma program taught by Author 1. The findings indicate that the STEPWISE framework significantly increased student participation and engagement in their own learning. It promoted autonomy and agency as students initiated and conducted their own projects. Furthermore, the framework fostered critical thinking, enabling students to adopt a more critical stance toward their learning processes, thereby broadening their understanding beyond traditional domains of science and technology.
International case-studies on regulation and science collaboration show how competition and economic pressures on the national regulators of biomedicine condition the development of jurisdictive regulations. But regulation that fails to guarantee a jurisdiction's optimal protection of patients and scientific research in favour of other interests commits foreseeable and avoidable “regulatory violence”. Even when well-intended, regulation gets caught up in the intense international competition to support public health and generate national wealth, with real-world implications. Evidence from Asia, Europe and the USA challenges the belief that regulation improves ethical practices in regenerative medicine, connects practitioners with good science, and protects patient safety. This book explains why this is so, and points to ways in which science could help us address healthcare issues in greater solidarity. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The concept of exclusion essentially means a systematic process by which the disadvantaged and unprivileged groups are partially or entirely excluded from various opportunities which they should be given on equal terms with the advantaged and privileged. Social exclusion programmes have been established as part of the curriculum of dominant disciplines in the so-called mainstream academic institutions which vowed to provide expert knowledge to meet the challenges of de-institutionalisation of social exclusionary measures pursued by the state. Nevertheless, this knowledge is important as exclusion from academia itself is contributing in ratifying exclusion. Within an institutionalised and formal pedagogical setup, it is therefore needed to record the lived experiences of the aboriginal communities and document how they deal with their shared premise of educational development.
Active form of exclusion is very common in the academia where the indigenous people are systematically denied participation despite fulfilling all the eligibility criteria and instead favouring the privileged sections despite being under qualified. Here discrimination automatically leads to deprivation and gradually this deprivation gets institutionalised. On the other hand, passive form of exclusion includes discouraging, underestimating and demeaning the indigenous people which lead to under performance, poor academic scores and failures in getting jobs in future. There are other routes to social exclusion in academia, for example, the indigenous people are deprived of getting financial help, substantial time for studying and even access to education. Another complex concept is adverse inclusion by which it means to include the indigenous students, directly or indirectly, in an unfairly manner. It results into a higher rate of dropouts, illiteracy and general disempowerment of the indigenous communities. It is also related to the human rights of the victims of discrimination. To prevent such actions and prohibit untouchability, the government has enacted Untouchability (Offences) Act, 1955 which later was renamed as Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1976. But the indigeneity was further institutionalised with a more specific act called the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 amended in 2015. Adverse inclusion in an indirect manner gets intensified when the government policies very tactfully exclude the tribals from getting their fair share of means of livelihood in the name of ‘eminent domain’.
The passive discrimination is not always bad, as it gets institutionalised in the higher education institutions with the quota system by which tribal students can be admitted against a particular number of seats and also apply for jobs strictly reserved for them. The policy of reservation and welfare measures exclusively meant for the indigenous people to safeguard their interests is thereby called protective or positive discrimination. Although they are given concessions and favours, political, economic or educational, they are comprehensive and aimed at all-round development of the marginalised people so that the gap between the indigenous and non-indigenous can be wind down. So, protective or positive discrimination is an instrument of diminishing discrimination. But the affirmative action in the form of reservation has to be successful, only then the indigenous people will have access to good education. It has been found in many studies that the reserved quotas remain vacant due to the want of eligible candidates.
This process of institutionalising the academia has some serious drawbacks which do not let the indigenous children educate the way they are comfortable in. The non-indigenous modes of education seem to them alien as it has virtually no connection with indigenous knowledge system and indigenous pedagogy. The non-indigenous academia has been in a way imposed from above where the tribal students have been inducted, not inculcated. They were convinced that if they perform well in this alien system they could get financial aid of the government, in the form of mid-day meal or scholarships. The non-indigenous education system has not tried to instil the idea of indigeneity into the students who originally belong to the indigenous community and made them sceptical about the whole idea of tribal education in a non-tribal institution. It creates a division among the indigenous communities where the ‘modern intellectual’ tribals who have been educated in the institutionalised method form a privileged section. This has been the reason why the educational growth is not satisfactory as expected when various schemes are launched.
This article discusses the digital divide from the perspective of lifelong learning. Building on extant empirical findings related to digital transformation in the Nordic region, the authors develop a relational approach to explore the ways in which digitalisation has become meaningful and influential in everyday life, producing moments of marginalisation that concern us all. The authors argue that marginalisation can be viewed as a performative effect of digitalisation that flows across bodies, spaces and times as a situated conditioning of the subject. This means that marginalisation is “everywhere” and concerns everything at all times. Thus, there is no subject position free from marginalisation. This article contributes to research on the digital divide as well as on lifelong learning. In terms of the latter, its contribution goes beyond situated perspectives on learning by unfolding the dynamics of “the situated” as relations that create marginalisation, thereby producing insights into the conditions needed for lifelong learning processes to succeed.
This research investigates the emerging informal preservation practices of digital cultural artefacts amid rapid techno-cultural and techno-political transformations. With the shift towards a post-digital paradigm, digital art – particularly software-based art – presents unique ontological and preservation challenges. Traditional preservation frameworks, rooted in the stability of physical objects, prove insufficient for the ephemeral nature of digital media. In response, non-institutional, adaptive approaches to preserving digital works are emerging, increasingly shaped by rapidly evolving technologies and the influence of social networks. The findings of this research indicate that informal preservation encompasses a range of practices – active, incidental, tacit, and even deliberate rejection – that collectively redefine preservation, memory, and space in the digital era. This work underscores the need for preservation models that are flexible, participatory, and attuned to the fluidity of post-digital culture, where both human and non-human agents contribute to memory and forgetting, shaping cultural heritage in transformative ways.
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