‘A brutal blow against the democratic normality’: unlearning the epistemology of the political

ABSTRACT

The objective of this paper is to rethink our understanding of ‘the political’ through an examination of two novels by José Saramago, Blindness and Seeing. Both novels tackle directly a central, if not the central, signature metaphor of Western political thought, namely that of ‘seeing the light’. This metaphor takes many forms and recurs throughout the tradition of Western political philosophy as a source, legitimiser, and validator of knowing, and perhaps even a guarantor of knowledge. In particular, this metaphor has served to make knowable whatever it is that is signified by ‘the political’. By extension, it also means that whatever might be outside of this epistemological frame is rendered unknowable, if not unthinkable. Both of Saramago’s novels provide a fruitful means to recalibrate how we might know ‘the political’. The novels call into question the epistemic signatures that frame our commonly accepted understandings of ‘the political’ and in so doing provoke us further to question how we might move towards unlearning the epistemology of the political.     

Raymond Williams and sociology

The purpose of this article is to recover Williams as a major theoretical inspiration for the social sciences, specifically, as the inaugurator of what might be regarded as a research paradigm, cultural materialism. In the first section, Williams's encounter with the discipline of sociology is traced and distinguished as a critical alternative to the presently ascendant – at least in the USA – neo‐Durkeimian school of ‘cultural sociology’. In the second section, his cultural‐materialist programme is proposed as a powerful analytical framework for the study of culture and society today. In the final section, a key concept of Williams's cultural materialism, mobile privatization, is selected illustratively and proposed as a powerful analytical tool for studying the production and technological mediation of typical modes of communicative sociality in the early twenty‐first century.     

A polynomial equation to predict low back compression force: accounting for the effects of load height on instability

The purpose of this study was to develop a regression equation that, incorporating the potential energy of the load in the hands, was capable of improved predictions of spinal compression forces. A stepwise polynomial equation was developed from EMG profiles of 15 muscles, and its spinal joint loading predictions at L4/L5 were compared to current methods of calculating spinal compression. Absolute muscle activation was shown to increase with increased loading height, indicating that the central nervous system responds to changes in spinal stability. The inclusion of potential energy into the calculation of spinal disc compression at L4/L5 improved estimates of the compressive forces acting on the spine. This is the first model to incorporate potential energy into a predictive model for lumbar spine compression without the use of electromyography. It was concluded that potential energy plays a vital role in dictating the recruitment patterns of the trunk.     

Social work and a love of humanity

Abstract

The idea of a ‘love of humanity’, though largely absent from social work literature, is a potent concept for challenging the dominant discourses of individual material wealth, greed and power. It can be associated with the postmodern agenda of emancipation from oppressive discourses of professional ‘expertise’. Love, or a ‘love of humanity’, has the same intent as formulations of social work grounded in postmodern critical theory, but it uses a different language. It uses a language of lived experience and personal commitment - a language that appeals to our hearts -a language passionate about, and incorporating, human rights and social justice.     

Seasonal work and aboriginal employment in two rural areas of New South Wales, 1921–78

This paper has several areas of focus. It chronicles the history of Aboriginal employment in Australia in two contrasting areas; it identifies the characteristics of that employment and traces the nature of its change over time; it outlines the attitude of Aborigines towards their work, and the impact of that work on Aboriginal society; it also considers the attitudes of white Australians towards Aborigines and their employment. Finally, it draws some conclusions concerning the responses of the Aborigines to pressures put on them by the economy and society of the white man.     

Information preserving statistical obfuscation

The problem of limiting the disclosure of information gathered on a set of companies or individuals (the respondents) is considered, the aim being to provide useful information while preserving confidentiality of sensitive information. The paper proposes a method which explicitly preserves certain information contained in the data. The data are assumed to consist of two sets of information on each respondent: public data and specific survey data. It is assumed in this paper that both sets of data are liable to be released for a subset of respondents. However, the public data will be altered in some way to preserve confidentiality whereas the specific survey data is to be disclosed without alteration. The paper proposes a model based approach to this problem by utilizing the information contained in the sufficient statistics obtained from fitting a model to the public data by conditioning on the survey data. Deterministic and stochastic variants of the method are considered.