Culture and Ideas
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Who’s Really Working from Home? Re-evaluating Housework in a New Virtual Era
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For the past 18 months, the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed virtually every aspect of our lives. With the onset of stay-at-home orders and the closures of schools and office buildings, millions of employees shifted to remote work, which has quickly become a fixture of modern life. However, the transition to remote work for parents and…
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An Interview with Dr Lorna Finlayson
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Political Philosophy & Critique Q: The Value of Political Philosophy. In your 2020 article ‘If This Isn’t Racism, What Is?’, you offer a searing critique of the state of contemporary political philosophy. Drawing on recent debates around immigration, abortion, and the marketisation of higher education, you write that “it seems to me that philosophers vacate the…
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Why on Earth Did Shatner Go to Space?
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Despite what Amazon’s PR department almost desperately tried to make us believe, neither Jeff Bezos nor even William Shatner, Captain Kirk himself, really reached the final frontier. The Kármán Line is, rather, the lowest common denominator of space, a definition based on the ratio of air lift versus Keppler force for the legal purpose of…
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A Renewed Space: Rural Communities and the Countryside
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21st Century political wisdom has been invested in a city-based future for most of the world. City-life is seen as the future of the world. Paul Collier in 2010 espoused that ‘as populations grow and the Southern climate deteriorates due to global warming, the South will necessarily urbanize. The future of populations will live not…
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How Muslim Women Can Save Indian Secularism
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Muslim Women have occupied a peculiar position in the mainstream Indian imagination. Through their (inaccurate) perception as a homogenous category, Indian Muslim Women have invoked either imagery of communal normativity through the visible invisibility of the black burqa within the public sphere, or fetishized as mysterious suffering figures who need saving. Beyond these narrative constructions,…
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Caliberating the moral contours of Indian religious freedom
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On 27th November 2020, the Governor of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh promulgated an anti-religious-conversion ordinance. This ordinance prohibits all unlawful conversions from one religion to another which take place by employment of any one or more than one of the following methods – misrepresentation, force, undue influence, allurement or by any fraudulent means…
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Why Slogans Like “I Will Never Understand, But I Stand” Undermine the Fight for Racial Equality
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At least since Ancient Greece, humans have recognized that they are not always rational. One of the major legacies of the Ancient Greek intellectual tradition (most famously articulated in Aristotle’s Rhetoric) is the three-layered theory of persuasion: logos–pathos–ethos. In this school of thought, reason (logos) was only one of three–often equally important–modes of human persuasion, alongside with credibility…
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The Problem of Facial (Mis)Recognition
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In the past five years, facial recognition systems have frequently misrecognised the faces of minority groups. For instance, Amazon’s Rekognition API, during an experiment, failed to recognize 11 persons-of-colour who are members of US Congress, and misidentified them with criminal mug shots[1]. It does not stop there, with multiple instances reported around the world of…
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David Graeber (1961-2020): a take on his legacy as challenger of political common sense
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Beginning of this month, David Graeber, a thinker fitting many labels, passed away. “It might be said that all my work has been exploring the relation between anthropology as an intellectual pursuit, and practical attempts to create a free society, free, at least of capitalism, patriarchy, and coercive state bureaucracies”. These words highlight the dualism…
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Liberal Theory’s Neglect of Environmentalism
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It is no exaggeration to say that climate change is the most pressing issue facing the world today. This is a strong claim to make, but the scientific evidence is more or less incontrovertible.[1] Barring the emergence of an imminent nuclear war, an alien invasion, or a deadly coronavirus mutation, climate change will remain the…