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Metapolitical: Practicing Our Human Future by Nowick Gray Pdf
Wise and humorous sensemaking in a mad world, grounded in wild nature, sustainable culture and free spirit. What is stopping us from practicing our human future now? Beyond the old paradigm of false narratives and party politics, we walk in natural law of nature, culture, spirit. An empowering deep dive for free thinkers, righteous rebels, and awaking activists, Nowick Gray’s essays from The New Agora (2020-21) paint visions of our creative sovereignty.
Unauthorized transmissions of a coronavirus skeptic, critiquing the global agenda with the voice of the natural human spirit. Nowick Gray's weekly articles for The New Agora offer a holographic time capsule of the Covid era. Witnessing the manufactured crisis as a war on humanity, the writer's lens sheds light on the narrative sabotage carried out as its primary strategy. Against that weapon of moral destruction, pen turns to sword in the ongoing battle for our body and soul, our truth and freedom.
Essays spanning three decades—reflective yet contemporary, philosophical and practical—address human nature and environmental ethics; personal and metapolitical intention; radical insight and live freedom in thought, emotion and action. While it might be said that everything pre-2020 is irrelevant in the light of our global paradigm shift, it is important to recognize both the long history of our present oppression, and the more ancient tradition of positive human spirit ever capable of rising to the challenge, to assert the primacy of our fundamental values and aspirations.
Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination by Henry Jenkins,Gabriel Peters-Lazaro,Sangita Shresthova Pdf
How popular culture is engaged by activists to effect emancipatory political change One cannot change the world unless one can imagine what a better world might look like. Civic imagination is the capacity to conceptualize alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; it also requires the ability to see oneself as a civic agent capable of making change, as a participant in a larger democratic culture. Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination represents a call for greater clarity about what we’re fighting for—not just what we’re fighting against. Across more than thirty examples from social movements around the world, this casebook proposes “civic imagination” as a framework that can help us identify, support, and practice new kinds of communal participation. As the contributors demonstrate, young people, in particular, are turning to popular culture—from Beyoncé to Bollywood, from Smokey Bear to Hamilton, from comic books to VR—for the vernacular through which they can express their discontent with current conditions. A young activist uses YouTube to speak back against J. K. Rowling in the voice of Cho Chang in order to challenge the superficial representation of Asian Americans in children’s literature. Murals in Los Angeles are employed to construct a mythic imagination of Chicano identity. Twitter users have turned to #BlackGirlMagic to highlight the black radical imagination and construct new visions of female empowerment. In each instance, activists demonstrate what happens when the creative energies of fans are infused with deep political commitment, mobilizing new visions of what a better democracy might look like.
Groundwork for the Practice of the Good Life by Omedi Ochieng Pdf
What makes for good societies and good lives in a global world? In this landmark work of political and ethical philosophy, Omedi Ochieng offers a radical reassessment of a millennia-old question. He does so by offering a stringent critique of both North Atlantic and African philosophical traditions, which he argues unfold visions of the good life that are characterized by idealism, moralism, and parochialism. But rather than simply opposing these flawed visions of the good life with his own set of alternative prescriptions, Ochieng argues that it is critically important to step back and understand the stakes of the question. Those stakes, he suggests, are to be found only through a social ontology – a comprehensive and in-depth account of the political, economic, and cultural structures that mark the boundaries and limits of life in the twenty-first century. It is only in light of this social ontology that Ochieng then proffers an alternative normative account of the good society and the good life – which he spells out as emergent from ecological embeddedness; social entanglement; embodied encounter; and aesthetic engenderment. At once sweeping and rigorous, incisive and subtle, original and revisionary, this book does more than just appeal to intellectuals and scholars across the humanities and social sciences – rather, it opens up the academic disciplines to a whole new landscape of exploration into the biggest and most pressing questions animating the human experience.
Superhumanity by Nick Axel,Beatriz Colomina,Nikolaus Hirsch,Anton Vidokle,Mark Wigley Pdf
A wide-ranging and challenging exploration of design and how it engages with the self The field of design has radically expanded. As a practice, design is no longer limited to the world of material objects but rather extends from carefully crafted individual styles and online identities to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. Superhumanity seeks to explore and challenge our understanding of “design” by engaging with and departing from the concept of the “self.” This volume brings together more than fifty essays by leading scientists, artists, architects, designers, philosophers, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, originally disseminated online via e-flux Architecture between September 2016 and February 2017 on the invitation of the Third Istanbul Design Biennial. Probing the idea that we are and always have been continuously reshaped by the artifacts we shape, this book asks: Who designed the lives we live today? What are the forms of life we inhabit, and what new forms are currently being designed? Where are the sites, and what are the techniques, to design others? This vital and far-reaching collection of essays and images seeks to explore and reflect on the ways in which both the concept and practice of design are operative well beyond tangible objects, expanding into the depths of self and forms of life. Contributors: Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Lucia Allais, Shumon Basar, Ruha Benjamin, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Daniel Birnbaum, Ina Blom, Benjamin H. Bratton, Giuliana Bruno, Tony Chakar, Mark Cousins, Simon Denny, Keller Easterling, Hu Fang, Rubén Gallo, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Rupali Gupte, Andrew Herscher, Tom Holert, Brooke Holmes, Francesca Hughes, Andrés Jaque, Lydia Kallipoliti, Thomas Keenan, Sylvia Lavin, Yongwoo Lee, Lesley Lokko, MAP Office, Chus Martínez, Ingo Niermann, Ahmet Ögüt, Trevor Paglen, Spyros Papapetros, Raqs Media Collective, Juliane Rebentisch, Sophia Roosth, Felicity D. Scott, Jack Self, Prasad Shetty, Hito Steyerl, Kali Stull, Pelin Tan, Alexander Tarakhovsky, Paulo Tavares, Stephan Trüby, Etienne Turpin, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Eyal Weizman, Mabel O. Wilson, Brian Kuan Wood, Liam Young, and Arseny Zhilyaev.
Climate Change and Intergenerational Justice by Tracey Skillington Pdf
Synonymous with catastrophe and destructive tendencies, the Anthropocene provokes reflection on the limits of existing applications of ideas of responsibility, ecological agency and democratic justice. Youth campaigners, in particular, make emerging insights on the Anthropocene of central importance to an intersubjectively generated redefinition of the just society of the future. Given their span of affectedness, escalating rates of greenhouse gas emissions shape the ecological circumstances of generations to come and implicate them in harm relations they had no hand in creating. The realization is that human-inspired climate-destructive practices reverberate across plural time frames, thereby raising serious questions about the value of conventional interpretations of the copresence of sources of climate harm and their effects on the health and environmental living standards of all peoples. If injuries provoked by environmental degradation emerge across multiple time frames and affect generations differentially, where do we draw the boundaries of the just society, and how do we identify its most relevant subjects? This book explores how such questions have ignited one of the most important debates on democratic justice in recent years - that between generations. For mobilized youth and future justice coalitions campaigning internationally, expanding resource inequalities (regionally and intergenerationally) are fundamentally issues of unfair exclusions and asymmetries in relations of power between generations. The book offers a comprehensive overview of new insights being generated through such debate on the limitations of democratic presentism, as well as current institutional applications of civil and human rights norms. It assesses overall how the metapolitical relevance of modernity's democratic project is being creatively redefined in terms more relevant to Anthropocene futures.
In Critique of Black Reason eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness—from the Atlantic slave trade to the present—to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. With Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future.
For some while we have been witnessing a series of destructive phenomena which seem to indicate a full-fledged return to the negative on the world stage – from terrorism and armed conflict to the threat of environmental catastrophe. At the same time, politics seems increasingly impotent in the face of these threats. In this book, the leading Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito reconstructs the genealogy of the reciprocal intertwining of politics and negation. He retraces the intensification of negation in the thought of various thinkers, from Schmitt and Freud to Heidegger, and examines the negative slant of some of our fundamental political categories, such as sovereignty, property and freedom. Against the centrality of negation, Esposito proposes an affirmative philosophy that does not negate or repress negation but radically rethinks it in the positive cipher of difference, determination and opposition. The result is a rigorous and original pathway which, in the tension between affirmation and negation, recognizes the disturbing traumas of our time, as well as the harbingers of what awaits at its limits. This highly original and timely book will be of great value to students and scholars in philosophy, cultural theory and the humanities more generally, and to anyone interested in contemporary European thought.
Freedom of Religion Under Bills of Rights by Paul Babie,Neville Rochow Pdf
"The Australian Constitution contains no guarantee of freedom of religion or freedom of conscience. Indeed, it contains very few provisions dealing with rights — in essence, it is a Constitution that confines itself mainly to prescribing a framework for federal government, setting out the various powers of government and limiting them as between federal and state governments and the three branches of government without attempting to define the rights of citizens except in minor respects. […] Whether Australia should have a national bill of rights has been a controversial issue for quite some time. This is despite the fact that Australia has acceded to the ICCPR, as well as the First Optional Protocol to the ICCPR, thereby accepting an international obligation to bring Australian law into line with the ICCPR, an obligation that Australia has not discharged. Australia is the only country in the Western world without a national bill of rights.4 The chapters that follow in this book debate the situation in Australia and in various other Western jurisdictions.' From Foreword by The Hon Sir Anthony Mason AC KBE: Human Rights and Courts
Unprecedented challenges await the future of the world's cities. Accelerating population pressure, climate change, food insecurity, poverty and geopolitical instability – in the face of such problems our current attempts at producing a sustainable agenda for the world's cities appear fragmented and inadequate. Fresh thinking is needed. In Remaking Cities, renowned design theorist Tony Fry brings a conceptual design perspective to the challenge of urban sustainability and resilience. In a typically far-sighted and provocative work, Fry presents ideas and actions for 'metrofitting' – a new kind of practice in architecture and urban design. Metrofitting expands the technological concept of retrofit up to the city scale, placing social, cultural, political and ethical concerns at its heart. Metrofitting is not about visionary technology, it is about transforming existing cities by combining available resources with human creativity, prompted by new thinking about new and old urban problems. It requires overcoming outmoded Eurocentric assumptions of what constitutes a city, rethinking their forms and structures, and understanding their metabolic processes and social and economic functions. This book provides conceptually strong practical approaches that will ultimately change the whole way we view cities and the way the urban future is designed. Illustrated with international case studies of metrofitting in action, Remaking Cities will provoke and stimulate debate among architects, urban designers, and anyone concerned with the urban environment and social and cultural change.
Metaphysics of Human Rights 1948-2018 by Luca Di Donato,Elisa Grimi Pdf
The 1948 Declaration of Human Rights demanded a collaboration among exponents from around the world. Embodying many different cultural perspectives, it was driven by a like-minded belief in the importance of finding common principles that would be essential for the very survival of civilization. Although an arduous and extensive process, the result was a much sought-after and collective endeavor that would be referenced for decades to come. Motivated by the seventieth anniversary of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and enriched by the contributions of eminent scholars, this volume aims to be a reflection on human rights and their universality. The underlying question is whether or not, after seventy years, this document can be considered universal, or better yet, how to define the concept of “universality.” We live in an age in which this notion seems to be guided not so much by the values that the subject intrinsically perceives as good, but rather by the demands of the subject. Universality is thus no longer deduced by something that is objectively given, within the shared praxis. Conversely, what seems to have to be universal is what we want to be valid for everyone. This volume will be of interest to those currently engaged in research or studying in a variety of fields including Philosophy, Politics and Law.
Until recently, struggles for justice proceeded against the background of a taken-for-granted frame: the bounded territorial state. With that "Westphalian" picture of political space assumed by default, the scope of justice was rarely subject to explicit dispute. Today, the scope of justice is hotly contested, as human-rights activists and international feminists join critics of structural adjustment and the WTO in targeting injustices that cut across borders. Seeking to re-map the bounds of justice on a broader scale, these movements are challenging the view that justice can only be a domestic relation among fellow citizens. As their claims collide with those of nationalists and Westphalian democrats, we witness new forms of "meta-political" contestation in which the scale of justice is an object of explicit dispute. Under these conditions, there is no avoiding an issue that had once seemed to go without saying: What is the proper frame for theorizing justice? Faced with a plurality of competing scales, how do we know which scale of justice is truly just? Scales of Justice tackles this issue. Interrogating struggles over globalization, Nancy Fraser reconstructs the theory of justice for a post-Westphalian world. Revising her widely discussed theory of redistribution and recognition, she introduces representation as a third, "political," dimension of justice, which permits us to re-conceive scale and scope as questions of justice. Seeking to re-imagine political space for a globalizing world, she revisits the concepts of democracy, solidarity, and the public sphere; the projects of critical theory, the World Social Forum, and second-wave feminism; and the thought of Habermas, Rawls, Foucault, and Arendt.