The eight meter high Apartheid Wall bordering the Aida Refugee Camp near Bethlehem features a tattered and faded replica of Pablo Picasso’s 1937 painting “Guernica.” The painting famously commemorates the bombing and massacre of nearly 1,600 civilians by Nazi German and Italian warplanes during the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Hand-painted barbed wire and a Palestinian flag frame the Wall’s reproduction. The caption above reads:
On July 1, 2011, the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI), sent a letter to several scholars at US universities, inviting them to join a historic delegation to Palestine. The letter began: We … Continue reading “529-2”
This manifesto is for those of us who do not consider ourselves as belonging to one of the scientific fields generating official brain knowledge. We need a neurocultural manifesto because the brain has been put forward by others as foundational … Continue reading “Neurocultures Manifesto”
The senses (… depicted by examples of vision, balance, smell, touch, taste and hearing) provide an interface between the external world and its internal representation in our minds. — Vosshall and Carandini, (2009, Current Opinion in Neurobiology) Free will is … Continue reading “Neurocultural Feedback Loops”
Recently, feminine desire has received a lot of attention in the popular press. In 2009, two feature-length articles were published in the New York Times Magazine that focused on the phenomenon of diagnosably-low sexual desire in women, and, since then, stories of … Continue reading “Where is My Subjectivity? Techno-Imagery, Femininity & Desire”
One consequence of the Enlightenment is that human beings have become a subject of scientific scrutiny. Another consequence is that the sciences are regarded as hierarchically arranged. Officially, the hierarchy is mereological. We move from the tiny particles of physics, up to … Continue reading “Locating the Moral Brain”
In 2009, a team of psychotherapists sent by a humanitarian aid organization rushed to Honduras to treat survivors traumatized by the geopolitical crisis of a military coup and the resulting violence (Jarero, et al 2010). The targets of their war … Continue reading “Should We Be Triggered? NeuroGovernance in the Future/(Tense)”
For those who prefer history chopped up into neat slices, John McCain’s modest concession speech on the lawn of the Arizona Biltmore on November 5, 2008, seemed like a clean cut of the knife. With the economy in a nosedive, it was not just the end of a presidential campaign. The neoliberal era seemed to be over–its reigning troika of deregulation, marketization, and privatization cast into disgrace, along with its most recent fiscal vehicles such as debt leveraging and speculation in finance and land. Nowhere was the devastation more visible than in McCain’s hometown. Phoenix had flown highest in the race to profit from the housing bubble, and it had fallen the furthest. Footage of the metro region’s outer-ring subdivisions reclaimed by sage grass, tumbleweed, and geckos was as evocative of the bubble’s savage aftermath as photographs of the Dust Bowl’s windblown soil had been of the Great Depression.
Andrew Ross has done it again. He’s researched something new, and written it up elegantly. In this case, the topic is sustainability, in that most right-wing of cities, Phoenix (Arizona). Ross weaves in a complex set of stories and voices, … Continue reading “Bird on Fire: Response”
I confess: I drive “a Prius, eat organic and support wilderness preservation.” I am under no illusion, however, that doing these things makes my lifestyle sustainable. There is much more to achieving sustainability goals personally and, more significantly, sustainability … Continue reading “A City like the Desert”
On one side of town, there would be ecological ‘haves,’ enjoying access to healthy, morally upstanding green products and services. On the other side of town, ecological ‘have-nots’ would be languishing in the smoke, fumes, toxic chemicals, and illnesses … Continue reading “The Future is Now: Climate Change and Environmental Justice”
In our dystopian present, the term speculation is associated with an epistemology of greed, a sanctioned terrorism, and a new dimension of imperialism no longer based in production but in abstract futures. But speculation means something else for those who refuse to give its logic over to power and profit.
“What will you do when the apocalypse comes??” he asked me urgently. My first reaction was to laugh derisively. But a friend made me think twice. “Who knows, maybe he’s right,” she said. Then came the Tsunami that devastated South Asia in 2004. And the levees that breached during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Who’s to say what’s real?
