In the late nineteenth century, the anthropology curators of the Smithsonian Institution consulted their cataloguing systems and storerooms, assessing specimens in order to determine which could be designated as duplicate specimens and exchanged with museums domestically and abroad. The status of ‘duplicate’ for specimens was contingent on conceptions of similiarity impacted by disciplinary classification praxis, with particular emphasis on object nomenclature and formal attributes. Using rattles from Haida Gwaii collected between 1881 and 1885 by James Swan for the Smithsonian Institution, (...) this article explores how anthropology curators designated rattles as exchangeable duplicate specimens. It considers cataloguing and spatial arrangements, as well as changing populations and formal characteristics of rattles, in order to explore how similarity was operationalized in the museum to produce duplicate anthropological specimens. (shrink)

Key to precision medicine is the development of expert database projects that gather data, integrate them in the pre-existing database, and publish the product of their processing for others to make use of. Increasingly, it is required that data infrastructure managers and curators pursue and lead research projects on the data so as to learn about new ways data could be used or information that could be potentially generated from them. I call these efforts “data curation-research” and use the case (...) study of COSMIC, the Catalogue of Somatic Mutations in Cancer, to analyze the contextual factors shaping the science of data curation-research. I build on March’s organizational learning categories of exploitation and exploration to place these factors within a theory of organizational change and innovation, and contribute to a richer picture of the social drivers of cancer genomics. (shrink)

This book explores the under-researched sources of the consumerist culture and the environmental damage it has brought about. The book is an outcome of the symposium on “The Ethics of Consumption” organised and hosted by the Las Casas Institute at the Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford as part of its Economics as a Moral Science Programme. It takes on two contemporary problems: the human weakness and capacity for wrong-doing, and the failure of modern economic theory to account for the moral (...) character of human behaviour and its implicit encouragement of gluttonous life-styles. In a time when grand political schemes are proposed to revive sustainability of global economy, the authors of the papers collected in this book highlight the need for moral renewal without which the most revolutionary structural reforms are bound to fail at producing the desired outcome. Topics of the book include the meaning and sources of avarice, the attempt to define what is enough, exploration of philosophical and theological perspectives which can serve as building blocks for the ethics of consumption. This makes the book of great interest to a broad readership of economists, social scientists and philosophers. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with everyday data practices, considering how people record data produced through self-monitoring. The analysis unpacks the relationships between taking a measure, and making and reviewing records. The paper is based on an interview study with people who monitor their blood pressure and/or body mass index/weight. Animated by discussions of ‘data power’ which are, in part, predicated on the flow and aggregation of data, we aim to extend important work concerning the everyday constitution of digital data. In (...) the paper, we adopt and develop the idea of curation as a theory of attention. We introduce the idea of discerning work to characterise the skilful judgements people make about which readings they record, how readings are presented, and about the records they retain and those they discard. We suggest self-monitoring produces partial data, both in the sense that it embodies these judgements, and also because monitoring might be conducted intermittently. We also extend previous analyses by exploring the broad set of materials, digital and analogue, networked and not networked, involved in record keeping to consider the different ways these contributed to regulating attention to self-monitoring. By paying attention to which data is recorded and the occasions when data is not recorded, as well as the ways data is recorded, the research provides specificity to the different ways in which self-monitoring data may or may not flow or contribute to big data sets. We argue that ultimately our analysis contributes to nuancing our understanding of ‘data power’. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

A new ethics for the global practice of curating Today, everyone is a curator. What was once considered a hallowed expertise is now a commonplace and global activity. Can this new worldwide activity be ethical and, if yes, how? This book argues that curating can be more than just selecting, organizing, and presenting information in galleries or online. Curating can also constitute an ethics, one of acquiring, arranging, and distributing an always conjectural knowledge about the world. Curating as Ethics (...) is primarily philosophical in scope, evading normative approaches to ethics in favor of an intuitive ethics that operates at the threshold of thought and action. It explores the work of authors as diverse as Heidegger, Spinoza, Meillassoux, Mudimbe, Chalier, and Kofman. Jean-Paul Martinon begins with the fabric of these ethics: how it stems from matter, how it addresses death, how it apprehends interhuman relationships. In the second part he establishes the ground on which the ethics is based, the things that make up the curatorial--for example, the textual and visual evidence or the digital medium. The final part focuses on the activity of curating as such--sharing, caring, preparing, dispensing, and so on. With its invigorating new approach to curatorial studies, Curating as Ethics moves beyond the field of museum and exhibition studies to provide an ethics for anyone engaged in this highly visible activity, including those using social media as a curatorial endeavor, and shows how philosophy and curating can work together to articulate the world today. (shrink)

This article explores issues involved in representing Buddhism in museums, drawing on the author’s experience of curating the Buddhism display at the World Museum Liverpool. It is concerned with processes of de-contextualization and re-contextualization, focussing on whether sacred images become divested of their religious functions once they enter a museum or if, instead, the gallery can be considered an alternative arena for contemplation. The article begins by reviewing the literature on museums and the sacred. It discusses the lack of concern (...) historically for religion in museums, noting how sacred objects have tended to be ‘secularized’ in exhibitionary contexts. It then examines the Buddhism display at the World Museum Liverpool, part of the permanent World Cultures gallery which opened in 2005, with its reconstructions of a shrine, an altar and a protective chapel — this is a museological environment which deliberately evokes the atmosphere of a temple. (shrink)

My intention is to consider Bernard Stiegler’s concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’. Open Humanities Press, 2020) and to explore how one might rethink the knowledge-creating potentialities of information itself. This has become all the more apparent in the time of lockdowns, physical distancing during the pandemic but the primary purpose of the paper is to look at the distinction between knowledge/information and the role of the teacher in using technology pharmacologically to safeguard the savoirs and to stem the proletarianization of (...) knowledge or stupidity as such. The point is that the pandemic is bringing home the question of the role of the teacher, the role of the school and the necessity of the co-production and co-creation of knowledge. It seems essential to understand the concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’ in the time of the pandemic as students are left at home without a journey to voyage upon. As such, there is a lack of futurally-bound collective protentions, an absence of any vision projection into the future. What is there in the concept of ‘journeys of knowledge’ that demonstrates how to use the Internet in bifurcatory ways, to produce what Stiegler calls negentropic knowledge or new forms of knowledge, or what I want to designate as experiments with truth-telling. What does it mean to produce negentropic knowledge without the teacher to guide, curate and care? With the above in mind, and by writing out of the wound of thinking, it is by rethinking the concept of curation in a different way that it is hoped one can contribute to educational research to produce unheard-of bifurcations of knowledge, to invoke Deleuze’s sense of the incomprehensible and Stiegler’s sense of the impossible, the improbable and the incalculable in educational concerns, to pave a path out of the aporia of the present—a present which is without decision and epoch. (shrink)

This article foregrounds the great translation movement (GTM), initially mobilised on X (formerly Twitter) in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as an example of activist journalism countering China's 'mainstream' narrative of the war and its broader implications. Using Fairclough’s dialectical-relational approach, adapted to the specifics of social media communication, we examine GTM postings throughout the first calendar year of the war, highlighting how the GTM evolves into a broader activist-journalistic initiative that challenges the party-state beyond its involvement in (...) the war. This paradigm of intervention unfolds as GTM activists report on evidential events within China that bear the potential to spark public contention outside of the party-state’s censorship reach. By examining the dialectical relations between reportage and advocacy, this analysis demonstrates how activist journalism constitutes an emerging cross-border civic engagement, challenging a Southern authoritarian regime from the outside. A critical evaluation of activist journalism and its broader societal impacts is also provided, highlighting its progressive potential and future development in the Chinese context and beyond. (shrink)

This particular roundtable falls at the end of a four-year networking project (COST Action IS1307 New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’) and reflects upon the genealogies of new materialism and how these flow into the individual working practices of participants. The texts below were contributed remotely via email by members of the group, following face-to-face meetings in Barcelona, Maribor, Warsaw, Liverpool, Paris and Utrecht. Authors were unaware of each other’s responses and in this way the (...) dialogue has unfolded a little like a game of Exquisite Corpse or Consequences, with questions acting like a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. Accordingly, the text is the product of a partially bounded experimental system ‘designed to give unknown answers to questions that the experimenters themselves are not yet able to clearly ask’ (Rheinberger 1997: 28). Thus, it both ruminates upon work to date and is intended to generate novel responses from authors and readers alike. (shrink)

New hardware such as mobile handheld devices and digital cameras; new online social venues such as social networking, microblogging, and online photo sharing sites; and new infrastructures such as the global positioning system are beginning to establish new practices—what the author refers to as “sociolocative”—that combine data about a physical location, such as a geotag, with a virtual social act. This research investigates the phenomenon of documentary broadcasting, whereby individuals curate lasting descriptions and commentaries about a location for a public (...) audience, often using the photo sharing site, Flickr. Unlike many photographs shared online, the subject of a documentary post is always a place and not the activities nor identity of the broadcaster himself or herself. When presented together as curated narratives, posted images transform Flickr into a virtual public “gallery space” that captures, presents, and preserves aspects of a place that may last longer than the physical location itself. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of the curator in hospitals. The arts play a significant role in every society; however, recent studies indicate a neglect of the aesthetic environment of healthcare. This international study explores the complex role of the curator in modern hospitals. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten arts specialists in hospitals across five countries and three continents for a qualitative, phenomenological study. Five themes arose from the data: Patient involvement and influence on the arts programme (...) in hospital Understanding the role of the curator in hospital Influences on arts programming in hospital Types of arts programmes Limitations to effective curation in hospital. Recommendations arising from the research included recognition of the specialised role of the curator in hospitals; building positive links with clinical staff to effect positive hospital arts programmes and increasing formal involvement of patients in arts planning in hospital. Hospital curation can be a vibrant arena for arts development, and the role of the hospital curator is a ground-breaking specialist role that can bring benefits to hospital life. The role of curator in hospital deserves to be supported and developed by both the arts and health sectors. (shrink)

This article addresses the development of an online residency platform Floating Reverie, for artists who work in and around digital media. The particular focus of this article is on the methodology used by the curator of the residencies and the artists as a form of networked curation within a South African creative digital art context.

This collection of essays contextualises the discourse on Ubuntu within the wider historical framework of postcolonial attempts to re-articulate African humanism as a substantial philosophy and emancipatory ideology." -- Back cover.

This is a philosophical review of the exhibition dedicated to Literature – Art titled Mukhaputa (Cover page) held on occasion of the Manipal International Literature and Arts Platform 2017 in Manipal, India. The curatorial strategy of the exhibition explores the intersectional relationships between literature and visual arts at large. The context of this critical review is the recent past of modern literature journals in print that encouraged artists and illustrators to converse with literature and in turn poets and authors to (...) be artists in their own right. Through a reflection on the nature of new forms of art works submitted by various artists to the exhibition, the review situates new methods of interdisciplinary curating which is highly contingent and speculative. Curation, thus, demands a new reading in terms of its role in interdisciplinary creative practice. (shrink)

Addressing Mbembe’s interview with Goldberg and reflecting upon the book – Critique of Black Reason – that the interview probes, the author points to a tension in Mbembe’s thought. Mbembe apprehends black reason as all-at-once ‘reason’s unreason’ and the remaking-reasonable of reason. In this respect, there is a clear sense of a simultaneity of imposition–struggle and destruction–repair. Yet this ethos of simultaneity is in tension with Mbembe’s sequential exposition of the black archive, especially the indebtedness of the ‘response’ by blacks (...) to the reasoning about blacks. In his response, the author works through the productive tension between ethos and sequence as a way to demonstrate the richness of Mbembe’s curation of a black archive. (shrink)

We talk about curatorship as a process in which someone carefully and thoughtfully chooses and organizes a way to present particular artworks to the public. Some have theorized that curating an art exhibit and exercising the selection and organization of artworks is very similar to telling a story. This analogy invites us to expand it and reflect on how it can help illuminate what historians do as storytellers of the past. The central point of this paper is to think of (...) historical work as a curatorial practice. This, in turn, allows us to understand the constructive enterprise that historians engage in and challenge a rooted and prevalent commitment in the historical discipline that the past is discovered rather than constructed. Historians as curators of the past select and organize undetermined materials that become determined when subsumed under a narrative that bestows the past with a particular meaning. The analogy also serves to clarify that no epistemic or metaphysical tension need exist between a notion of the real and an acknowledgment of narrative construction. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a way for philosophical aesthetics to make sense of the curator's work and specifically its claim to creativity and value making. My thesis is that selecting art should be thought of as a fine art in itself. This thesis, in various formulations, has been a source of controversy for art historians, critics, and theorists for more than a century. Even though philosophers have barely addressed the issue, philosophical aesthetics has been complicit in the prevalent (...) modes of resistance. The unspoken reason that various figures of the artworld find it problematic to identify curators as artists is that the divisions of labor they protect are inherently normative. The inadvertent application of this normativity in equal measure affects curators who style themselves as artists. I offer a critique of the historical and philosophical underpinnings of this normative picture, which sets the stage for a reconsideration of curatorship and its stake on a place among the rest of the fine arts. (shrink)

Consisting of curated interviews with yoga pioneers including Gail Parker, Heather Mason and Neil Pearson, this book shows the transformational benefits of personal yoga practice and uncovers a collective deepening, resulting from accumulated practice and conscious application at scale. The yoga narratives that form the heart of the book are inspirational stories from elders who have created transformational change in their own lives, or incorporated yoga into a bigger vision to benefit society and the planet. The book also presents a (...) toolkit of actionable steps for readers to create social action and/or change. A unique example of moving from the 'me' consciousness to the 'we' consciousness, Yoga Radicals invites readers to join pioneers on a path of social action through personal transformation. (shrink)

I have been anxious to improve the nick of time... to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.It is never too late to give up our prejudices.Inspired by Thoreau’s Walden and Other Writings, these epigraphs speak to the bridging potential I see in literature and art.1 Literature can link global issues of the day to human struggles that are anything but new, narratively fusing the past and (...) future together, helping the present to appear. When I make reference to aesthetic works in my classes, I am striving with my students to “improve the nick of time... [and] toe that line” of the present moment right there in the classroom. But what... (shrink)

This study invited curates and training incumbents attending a 3-day residential programme to function as a hermeneutical community engaging conversation between the Lucan post-resurrection narrative concerning the Road to Emmaus and the learning relationship in which they were engaged. Building on the SIFT approach to biblical hermeneutics the participants were invited to work in type-alike groups, structured first on the basis of the perceiving process and second on the basis of the judging process. This approach facilitated rich and varied insights (...) into the Emmaus Road narrative and into the theme of learning relationships. (shrink)

Digital transformations and processes of “datafication” fundamentally reshape how information is produced, circulated and given meaning. In this article, we provide a concept of “datastructuring” which seeks to capture this reshaping as both a product of and productive of social activity. To do this we focus on how new forms of social action map onto and are enabled by technological changes related to datafication, and how new forms of datafied social action constitute a form of knowledge production which becomes embedded (...) in technologies themselves. We illustrate the potential of the datastructuring concept with empirical examples which also serve to highlight some new avenues for research and some empirical questions to explore further. We suggest a focus on datastructuring can ignite scholarly debates across disciplines that may share an interest in the technological configurations, sorting activities, and other socio-material forces that shape digital spaces, but which are rarely brought together. Such cross-disciplinary conceptualizations may give more attention to how information is structured and organized, becomes “algorithmically recognizable”, and emerges as visible in digital, datafied spaces. Such a concept, we suggest, may help us better understand the novel ways in which “backstage datawork” and “data sorting processes” gain traction in political interventions, commercial processes, and social ordering. (shrink)

As a leader of the crusade to defeat aging, working to demonstrate both its feasibility and its desirability, I am often seen as an implacable opponent of all arguments that defend aging and criticize this crusade. This is an oversimplification.

The aim of this article is to explore the spatial constitution of the university today, its relation to Bildung in the university, and the way that changes of the universities are conceptually articulated or even programmatically demanded. In the first part of the article, the concept of the so-called ‘non-places’ advanced by the French ethnologist Marc Augé is used in order to set a conceptual framework for reflecting on the place of the university. In the second part of the article, (...) it is demonstrated that the university is currently being reshaped as a non-place and more specifically, as a transit lounge. Using the example of Minerva University, it is shown how mobilization, optimization, and functionalization of learning become dominant at the expense of forming its own place. In the third part of the article, the relations between Bildung and place are reflected on following Ronald Barnett’s ecological approach of the university. In this approach, care and curation are central, as is shown in the final part of the article. (shrink)

The technologies used to govern performance at universities consist of monitoring and comparative instruments. They are designed to affect and direct behaviour. In these academic environments of exposure, comparison and self-monitoring are deeply entangled with a vulnerable affective economy. This article explores how these data may affect our moods and how academic value could be curated by other means and with care. Drawing on feminist new materialist thinking and speculative feminist storytelling, the article takes this picture of the actual as (...) a point of departure for discussing ways of experimenting with affirmative critique of the current use of data. Through a smaller experiment with thirty PhD students, the article discusses how to speculatively curate academic value by other means that provide more liveable world(ing)s than data visuals measuring performance and that engage other sensorial and affective registers. (shrink)

Dr Ernst Mayr has been one of the seminal figures of 20th century biology. His essential contributions were in the development of the Modern Synthesis in evolutionary biology. His landmark book Systematics and the Origin of Species, was published in 1942 and has long been acknowledged as one of the key foundations of 20th century evolutionary biology. In many subsequent articles and books on evolution and the history and philosophy of biology during the past half century, he has continued to (...) be a key contributor of ideas and inspiration to successive generations of evolutionary biologists.In the first of two ‘Roots’ articles, he describes the early stages of his career and the serendipitous events that furthered it. This article was first presented as a talk, on October 27, 1993, at the 50 year Jubilee celebration of the founding of the Whitney wing, the ornithological section, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In next month's ‘Roots’ article, Dr Mayr will describe the events that led to the founding of the Society for the Study of Evolution in 1946, in St Louis, Missouri. (shrink)