Mutual aid as abolitionist praxis Davis, Simone Weil; Fayter, Rachel
Citizenship studies,
02/2021, Letnik:
25, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Prisons, jails, and detention facilities, by definition, are designed to isolate and separate people from their communities. To challenge and upend carcerality requires not just dismantlement, but ...radical revisioning, a building - of flourishing, free and caring communities. Collectively developed responses and resources for people and ecosystems, led by those with lived experience of oppression, are the foundation for a world without prisons.
Informed by my experiences in prison/university co-learning projects, this essay centres two community-based learning practices worth cultivating. First, what can happen when all participants truly ...prioritize what it means to build community as they address their shared project, co-discovering new ways of being and doing together, listening receptively and speaking authentically? How can project facilitators step beyond prescribed roles embedded in the charity paradigm of service-learning to invite and support egalitarian community and equity-driven decision-making from a project’s inception and development, through its unfolding and its assessment? Second, the sheer fact of a project taking place in the marginal place between two contexts gives all participants—students, faculty, community participants and hosts—the opportunity for meta-reflection on the institutional logics that construct and constrain our perspectives so acutely. What can we do, by way of project-conception and pedagogy, to open up those insights? The vantage that “the space between” provides can bring fresh understanding of the systemic forces at work in the lives of the community participants. And the university’s assumptions about itself and its place in the world can also suddenly appear strange and new, objects of scrutiny for students and community members both.
Although trained as a philosopher, Simone Weil (1909-43) contributed to a wide range of subjects, resulting in a rich field of interdisciplinary Weil studies. Yet those coming to her work from such ...disciplines as sociology, history, political science, religious studies, French studies, and women's studies are often ignorant of or baffled by her philosophical investigations. InSimone Weil: Late Philosophical Writings, Eric O. Springsted presents a unique collection of Weil's writings, one concentrating on her explicitlyphilosophical thinking.
The essays are drawn chiefly from the time Weil spent in Marseille in 1940-42, as well as one written from London; most have been out of print for some time; three appear for the first time; all are newly translated. Beyond making important texts available, this selection provides the context for understanding Weil's thought as a whole. This volume is important not only for those with a general interest in Weil; it also specifically presents Weil as a philosopher, chiefly one interested in questions of the nature of value, moral thought, and the relation of faith and reason. What also appears through this judicious selection is an important confirmation that on many issues respecting the nature of philosophy, Weil, Wittgenstein, and Kierkegaard shared a great deal.
Remembrances of Chandler Davis (1926–2022) Rosenthal, Peter; Benedetto, John J; Bhatia, Rajendra ...
Notices of the American Mathematical Society,
8/2023, Letnik:
70, Številka:
7
Journal Article
In Living Up to the Ads Simone Weil Davis examines commodity culture's impact on popular notions of gender and identity during the 1920s. Arguing that the newly ascendant advertising industry ...introduced three new metaphors for personhood—the ad man, the female consumer, and the often female advertising model or spokesperson—Davis traces the emergence of the pervasive gendering of American consumerism. Materials from advertising firms—including memos, manuals, meeting minutes, and newsletters—are considered alongside the fiction of Sinclair Lewis, Nella Larsen, Bruce Barton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Zelda Fitzgerald. Davis engages such books as Babbitt, Quicksand, and Save Me the Waltz in original and imaginative ways, asking each to participate in her discussion of commodity culture, gender, and identity. To illuminate the subjective, day-to-day experiences of 1920s consumerism in the United States, Davis juxtaposes print ads and industry manuals with works of fiction. Capturing the maverick voices of some of the decade's most influential advertisers and writers, Davis reveals the lines that were drawn between truths and lies, seduction and selling, white and black, and men and women. Davis's methodology challenges disciplinary borders by employing historical, sociological, and literary practices to discuss the enduring links between commodity culture, gender, and identity construction. Living Up to the Ads will appeal to students and scholars of advertising, American studies, women's studies, cultural studies, and early-twentieth-century American history.
In Living Up to the Ads Simone Weil Davis examines commodity culture’s impact on popular notions of gender and identity during the 1920s. Arguing that the newly ascendant advertising industry ...introduced three new metaphors for personhood—the ad man, the female consumer, and the often female advertising model or spokesperson—Davis traces the emergence of the pervasive gendering of American consumerism.Materials from advertising firms—including memos, manuals, meeting minutes, and newsletters—are considered alongside the fiction of Sinclair Lewis, Nella Larsen, Bruce Barton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Zelda Fitzgerald. Davis engages such books as Babbitt, Quicksand, and Save Me the Waltz in original and imaginative ways, asking each to participate in her discussion of commodity culture, gender, and identity. To illuminate the subjective, day-to-day experiences of 1920s consumerism in the United States, Davis juxtaposes print ads and industry manuals with works of fiction. Capturing the maverick voices of some of the decade’s most influential advertisers and writers, Davis reveals the lines that were drawn between truths and lies, seduction and selling, white and black, and men and women.Davis’s methodology challenges disciplinary borders by employing historical, sociological, and literary practices to discuss the enduring links between commodity culture, gender, and identity construction. Living Up to the Ads will appeal to students and scholars of advertising, American studies, women’s studies, cultural studies, and early-twentieth-century American history.
The government of June 1936 is no more. Dream or nightmare, there was something unreal about the year just passed. Everything depended on the imagination. A cooler look is needed for that prodigious ...history, still so close, yet already, alas, so far away. Imagination is both the fabric of social life and the motor of history. Real needs, real resources and interests act only indirectly, because they do not figure in the consciousness of crowds. It requires attentiveness to become aware of even the simplest realities, and human crowds are not attentive. In the meantime, imagination is and will remain a factor whose importance in human affairs it is almost impossible to overstate. But the effects that flow from it will vary depending on how we manage it -- or indeed, neglect to manage it.
Rationalisation Weil, Simone
Global labour journal,
01/2024, Letnik:
15, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The text translated here as "Rationalisation" is, to my knowledge, the first English version of a presentation given by Simone Weil in February 1937 and included in her complete works under the ...French title "Rationalisation."
In a comparative analysis, Davis examines the limitation of liberal discourses of "choice" as represented in the increasingly popular form of cosmetic vaginal surgery known as labiaplasty. By ...detailing several striking aesthetic parallels in the motivations of African and American women to seek cosmetic surgeries on their genitals, she challenges "oversimplified binaries that divide women into civilized and uncivilized."
