Summer Session 2020 – Final Program
You can view the official page for the Circle 8 summer session (2020), here: https://tracingthespirit.com/category/circle-8/
On Zoom: for information on how to join follow this link: https://cutt.ly/XsjVtXj
Parallel and/or Divided? The Information Spaces of Russian Speaking Minorities in the EU
Presentation by Heidi Erbsen
International relations between Russia and ‘the West’ have historically had, and continue to have, a significant impact on Russian speaking minority populations in terms of social inclusion. In the case of Estonia, where Russian speakers make up 33% of the population, different interpretations of history and security threats have perpetuated parallel information and cultural spaces. This presentation considers how these information spaces interact in Estonia by looking at 1) how international media (in English and Russian) frames the minority population 2) how international institutions (such as the EU and American Councils) shift but do not change the social paradigms of inclusion, and 3) how local Russian speakers interact with national and international frames.
Posted on 28th July 2020
C5 & C8: Saturday 1. August, 13.30-15.30 The idea of Sustainable Development – and NCM’s Vision 2030 for the Nordic Region
On Zoom: for information on how to join follow this link: https://cutt.ly/XsjVtXj
13.30-14.20 – Jesper Garsdal: A Narrative about the development of the idea of Sustainable Development between idealism and politics (especially UN)
Background info (in Danish) on the presentation can be be found in “Efterskrift: om begrebet bæredygtig udvikling” in this publication https://cutt.ly/PapieXw
10 minutes break
14.30-15.30 – Seminar and Debate on the Nordic Council of Minsters Vision 2030 for the Nordic Region in light of the notion of Sustainable Development and NSU
Critical-constructive seminar and discussion of the Nordic Council of Ministers Vision for 2030 especially concerning the notion of Sustainable Development and the role NSU can play in critical-constructively qualifying this vision:
Links:
UN, 2015 – Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Developmenthttps://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld/publication
Nordic Council of Ministers, 2019 – Our Vision 2030https://www.norden.org/en/declaration/our-vision-2030
https://www.norden.org/en/news/new-vision-nordic-co-operation
Posted on 17th July 2020
C5 & C8: Saturday 1. August, 10.00-10.50: Magda Tabernacka: (dis-) organizing the Polish Educational system – (updated version)
On Zoom: for information on how to join follow this link: https://cutt.ly/XsjVtXj
Background text for the presentation follow this link: https://cutt.ly/rsD05CU
More info in week 30
Posted on 17th July 2020
C5 & C8 Thompson: Author, Actor, Audience…
On Zoom: for information on how to join follow this link: https://cutt.ly/XsjVtXj
Presentation by Bill Thompson
In the Friedrichstadt – Palast1 in Berlin, the green room is a café. Those familiar with “theatre” may know of the green room in which actors prepare. I want to take you from this, traditionally, historically, room painted green, to the green room of contemporary post production cinema. A technical requirement so that any phenomenon in that room is related to what is effectively a blank slate insofar as the “memory” of the maker of memories. And then I want to take you from this blank slate, a la Locke, which remember is not in fact devoid of artefacts, [there is the green room itself, the phenomenon in the room, and the “memory maker” making an historic record of events] to the record of events itself as capable of insertion into anything that the green room becomes qua mise en scene post hoc.
Then I want to take you to Heidegger’s fourfold of sky, earth, gods, and men, and turn this into a proscenium arch, a fourth wall, as if through which you view the phenomena in the green room. So this time the mise en scene has been inserted into the green room, and other actors, and you are looking through this proscenium arch into it with all its characters and settings. And you can see yourself, perhaps as one of the characters, and recognise bits of scenery, and others in what has become this play. And then you realise that this event is not to your liking, because this is your culture, being that person at the time of the event, and it should not look like this. And so you seek an author, someone to write a script to orchestrate this event more
Submitted to coordinators of study circles 5 & 8, as paper relating to Theme B: The Elite
People Gap as a response to the revised call for papers for summer session 2020 of the
Nordic Summer University with European Humanities University – by dr. bill thompson
in the way you remember it, so that other audiences might understand your concerns. And then I will introduce you to Pirandello. And he, author of “six characters in search of an author” will tell you that he gave his characters a similar problem. And it is only by being those characters in that event at that time, that the actual experiences are felt rather than simply understood by looking as audience, or acting as actor, or even writing as author. And Stanislavski, having been introduced, will tell you that acting is not being, but acting being. And then I will tell you that as speaking mammals, we have this opportunity to speak of events before and after they happen, and even whilst they happen, as in Pirandello’s play, and yet the actual experience of the phenomenal milieu that appears to us is indeed unique to each one of us and subject to this inferential machine we have such that we are synchronous to the stark physicalities of being, but speaking is not being except as some geist wish perhaps. And, also, that because we can speak, we can historicise and futurise these experiences and orchestrate ourselves to be members of an audience, actors, and authors, and all the other parts of the necessary orchestrations if we have the knowledge and the skills. And what we can thus create is a play but not being. Because as Adorno said, being has its very own history and future, this is the humanist [enlightenment] dilemma. How to interpret, and be instrumental in, the right geist [not Arnold’s zeitgeist nor Maslow’s seingeist] on the workshop floor.
And so the synchronicity in which we simply are cannot be known to us other than as a play, and only known by our memories aided by the products of speaking and writing and printing and so forth, such that we can peddle our orchestrations, and use them to orchestrate others, and they us. And we can find ourselves playing different parts in this orchestrating but with different roles to play if we play our parts correctly. And then we may insist on street plays, and theatre plays, and social games, and the games of empires, all with authors, actors, audiences, where the characters are spent, or yet to be spent, energies manifesting themselves as characters expressing geist wishes when they are, in fact, synchronically epicentric to their own speaking mammal being, that if truly in being as being, the event would be as yet unknown as an event, unhistoricised, unfuturised, an empty green room in which the characters synchronic to their own mammalian selves act with the phenomena they can manage to orchestrate on their own, and with others as Nature provides what we take to be the necessary orchestration.
This begs the question then. Is it not then the most anarchic, the least superstitious, the least abrahamic, and the least humanistic, the least responsible to others for the consequences of their orchestrations, an Ayn Rand2 perhaps, who will act entirely as they can and must in order to orchestrate all others to perform the event that appears to them in their very own green room as most desirable. And is this not, in fact, where the shamanisms, the abrahamics and the humanisms, and five thousand cultures come from ? And what we share are the opportunities for our instrumental involvements in orchestrations of both tradition and experimention, a la Dewey3, from the bottom up. As Mannheim put it, rebuilding the train whilst it is running.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWhkxhV1wEo accessed June 2020
- See; Duggan L, Mean Girl, University of California Press, 2019
- See; Rorty R, Consequences of Pragmatism, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, and Gellner E, Ligitimation of Belief, Cambridge Uni Press, 1974, for developmental knowledge.
Posted on 15th July 2020
C5 & C8 Szygenda: Could Student Mobility Favor Democratic Growth?
On Zoom: for information on how to join follow this link: https://cutt.ly/XsjVtXj
Could Student Mobility Favor Democratic Growth? An analysis of Rancière’s conception of democracy
Presentation by Elodie Szygenda
In this paper, I examine the relationships between student mobility and democratic growth. More precisely, I take a look at the Erasmus experience while moving aside from traditional conceptions of democracy. It is from the work of the philosopher Jacques Rancière that a more substantial and dynamic conception of democracy is found. Indeed, for the philosopher, democracy is not a state of thing but rather a sporadic event, a never ending activity moving society from a hierarchical order to an equal order. An order where invisible conflicts become visible, where illegitimate subjects enter the scene of politics. With this idea in mind, I argue on the one hand, that the experience of student mobility engenders more democracy through emancipation via displacement. Mobile students disturb the preestablished hierarchical order by disidentifying themselves from assigned roles and places. On the other hand, in order to explore the anti-democratic forces that could apply on student travellers, I analyse the impact of transnational institutions in shaping the student’s experience. Empirical studies show that very little evidence is found concerning the factual impact of those institutions despite their will to, for instance, create a European identity and legitimate governance at the European level.
However, a very factual hindrance to democratization through student mobility is investigated by looking at who participate in those mobility programmes. Therefore, I conclude that despite being on the path of engendering emancipated citizens, the Erasmus programme would gain being more inclusive in order to favor democratic growth.
Perhaps you also need(?) a few words on my background, so here it is: I am a student at the University of Oslo. I finished my BA in Pedagogikk this June and applied for the masters “Utdanning, Danning og Oppvekst” with the Utdanningsvitenskapelig institutt. I also have a BA in French Literature and a one year’s masters in Language Didactics with the University Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. My interests lie greatly in philosophy of education a particular appeal for questions related to emancipation on the one side and how we live together (in democracy?) on the other side.
Posted on 15th July 2020
C5 & C8 Rozhkova: Democracy: between equality and inequality
On Zoom: for information on how to join follow this link: https://cutt.ly/XsjVtXj
PRESENTATION BY ZINAIDA ROZHKOVA
American journalist Irving Kristol has a saying: “Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions; it only guarantees equality of opportunities.” Irving Kristol believed that in a democracy, people have the same number of rights and freedoms, but they do not have the same conditions for their use. This opinion is particularly relevant in the context of the development of democracy in our time. The conditions under which one has to develop depend on factors such as the political regime, social inequality, and prescribed social status…
The transition to democracy in the twentieth century accelerated the pace of economic development and the processes of social stratification of society. Despite the positive impact of democratic institutions on economic development, democracy cannot solve the problem of social inequality. History shows that democracy reduces the level of social inequality, but only in some cases, and in most cases increases it.
Posted on 15th July 2020
C5 & C8 Albertsen: A Dialogical Metaphysics of problems for encountering pedagogies otherwise
On Zoom: for information on how to join follow this link: https://cutt.ly/XsjVtXj
Presentation by Torben Albertsen
How to enter into a dialogue with Mapuche (or native) pedagogies from an academical context? The question we ask here is what type of theoretical or metaphysical inspiration might be relevant to such a task? We would like to propose an inspiration based on two authors, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the anthropologist Viveiros De Castro.
Posted on 15th July 2020
C5 & C8 Koteska: The Technological Visions of the Human
On Zoom: for information on how to join follow this link: https://cutt.ly/XsjVtXj
The Technological Visions of the Human (From the Perspective of the Futures of Education)
Presentation by Jasna Koteska, Skopje
“Of all the prostheses that mark the history of the body, the double is doubtless the oldest.”
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
The question of the “extended” human has been raised already in the beginning of the last century. The early anticipations of the forthcoming world in the 21 century concentrated on how the technological means might become the only condition for enduring the intensified ecological problems and ideological sadism in the world. The grandiosity of the human will be achieved by bringing the organic closer to the prosthetic. Some of many prognoses were that the environmental and societal degradation will become so impossible, so uncomfortable, that humans could bear to stand them only with technological means. And while the idea of the symbiosis of the human and the technology dates back to Aristotle’s concept of Automaton, the reality is that the mechanical culture of the 20 century that marked the beginnings of the New Deal capitalism, communism, and fascism, has been organized with the help of the prosthesis of aggression: machines, camps, industrialisation… At the same time, curiously enough, the prognosis was that the same aggression could only be tolerated if the technological extensions, prosthetic additions, and implants of various kinds could be implemented. (Note for e.g. the famous quote from the Civilization and Its Discontents: “Human has, as it were, to become a kind of prosthetic God. Only when s/he puts on all his/her auxiliary organs, s/he is truly magnificent”.) The prosthetic additions were seen as a way in which humans ease aggression they themselves produced in nature and in culture, and vice versa are therefore subjected to it, and how could they bear the ecological, social, and political fate less painfully?
The paper will explore how to conceptualize the Technological vision of human at the present time? What it means for the current time of the ongoing pandemic, and the ecological, social, and economic crisis? Furthermore, what form/s will that Technological vision of Human achieve in the present times of uniformity, homogeneity, social media, advertising, consumerism, the instant publicity, the transformation of the public into a “monstrous nonentity”, of endless chattering, and most importantly, in the time of the current pandemic? Also, how to understand the possible merger/s between human and the technological other? And most importantly what implications it has and will have for the futures of education? How to conceptualize the technological vision of humans from the perspective of the education of the futures?
Posted on 15th July 2020
C5 & C8, Monday 27, 09.30-10.30 Welcome Introduction and presentation of participants. Presentation of the two traces arranged by members of C5 and C8
On Zoom: for information on how to join follow this link: https://cutt.ly/XsjVtXj
“Study Circle 5: Patterns of Dysfunction in Contemporary Democracies; Impact on Human Rights and Governance” and “Study Circle 8: Learning and Bildung in time of Globalization” are joining forces at this year’s summer session. The members of the two circles are involved in arranging two traces:
- Women and the social gap. How the social, cultural and economic position of women can affect the emerging or closing of the social gap
- Governance, Learning, Sustainable Development and the future of the Human Condition
Trace 1, Women, and the social gap. How the social, cultural, and economic position of women can affect the emerging or closing of the social gap, is arranged by professor Magdalena Tabernacka, Wroclaw University, Poland, SC5
This Trace is scattered when it comes to geographical space. Communication will take place on the Internet. Ideas that will be the result of our virtual meetings will be available on the web and in the form of publications. Session abstracts and discussion lists will be available throughout the summer session. On Sunday, 2 August between 12.00 and 14.00, there will be an online discussion and exchange of views on the problem and brief summaries of the results of the mailing list discussion.
Trace2, Governance, Learning, Sustainable Development and the future of the Human Condition arranged by coordinators from SC5 and SC8
The Trace will include seminars, presentations and debates from Monday to Saturday over Zoom, notably a Trace Keynote Friday 31 July, 11.30-13.00 by Professor Abrahim H. (Ivan) Khan, Faculty of Divinity, Toronto School of Theology, Trinity College Toronto on “Tagore and Bildung ” (https://www.tst.edu/directory/faculty/khan-abrahim-h ). The Trace ends Saturday 1. August by a seminar, which after a presentation of the development of the notion of Sustainable Development opens up for a critical constructive discussion of the Nordic Council of Ministers Vision for 2030 especially concerning the notion of Sustainable Development and the role NSU can play in qualifying this vision.
Posted on 14th July 2020
Tuesday 28, 10.00-12.00 C8 & C5 Seminar on Bateson: Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind
On Zoom: for information on how to join follow this link: https://cutt.ly/XsjVtXj
Seminar on / text-reading of George Bateson: Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind
Intro and teaser to Nora Bateson’s two keynotes
Texts: https://cutt.ly/4apyKWd
We will focus on reading and discussing the logical categories of learning (Text A).
If time permits we might also briefly touch on two minor texts on ecology, eco-mentality and the ecological crisis, Text B1 and B2
Finally, there are also secondary texts for a rainy day, but they will not be our primary focus. Notice though, that in the text on Hegel and Bateson, then figure 9.1 at page 174 refers directly to the three dimensions mentioned in text B2
Posted on 14th July 2020
Women and the social gap. How the social, cultural and economic position of women can affect the emerging or closing of the social gap.
Moderator: Magdalena Tabernacka
- Circles and participants
It is a trace carried out under the circle 5 and 8 activities. But this project is open to everyone. Participants from other circles can join the mailing list or discussion if they think they are competent in the field or would like to express their opinion.
- Inspiration
The assumption of the project is to describe, taking into account cultural, social and legal aspects, the current or future role of women in bridging the negative effects of the social divide. This project has many dimensions, but the common denominator is the cultural, legal and social position of women as a factor determining the growth of society in a democratic environment.
The problem of discrimination against women hindering the development of societies in permanently democratic countries is not a pressing social problem. However, under certain cultural and legal conditions, it may happen that the law or a tradition or religion sanctioned will cause actual discrimination of specific social groups – for example women, where their sexual orientation is not an important factor here because they are subject to discrimination they can regardless.
It is important to track down such factors of potential discrimination and to see how they are socially compensated or how they are responded by law or institutional action. In some cultures, discriminatory factors may be the result of the law or groups holding power in this society. It is important that blocking the use of the potential of a specific group of people in society is harmful to the whole society. In this Trace, we want to show this by illustrating the phenomenon of the situation of women whose socio-cultural position translates directly into the activities of the family, local community and the entire society or federation.
Scandinavian countries, thanks to the culturally established standard of functioning of public authorities and the standard of universal social assessments as to the role of women, could be treated as a reference model. Nevertheless, it is important to carry out individual analyses for all shades of local subtleties when it comes to cultural conditions and other important factors, e.g. economic.
The starting point for the research are 3 texts (about 1000 words). These studies contain theses and short analyses of the situation in Japan, Arab countries and Poland. It would be expected that other people would post their texts on this problem in other parts of the world.
- What topics are we going to deal with specifically?
Active participants will include Agnieszka Sobieska – who will analyse the problem from the point of view of social relations between Islam and local culture, and Barbara Jelonek, who will deal with the problem through the prism of the conditions prevailing in Japan. The essay by Magdalena Tabernacka is to inspire you to creatively approach the problem of the active role of women in society, and in particular in the public sphere.The reference to the considerations is how the life chances of both sexes are influenced by the law of culture and economic conditions.
These essays will be developed during the Sunday meeting and in a future publication.
- Research scheme In this year’s research, it is important to look for answers to the following questions:
- Where is the disproportion?
- Where is the cause / risk of disproportion?
- To what extent and scope do it generate attitudes towards women and to what extent attitudes of women and what they are conditioned by?
- What specific factors / actions / reactions / manifestations of discrimination related to the “cultural burden” of women or legal regulations towards them cause the emergence or widening of social gaps? The point is to show that the institutional or cultural inhibition of individual growth translates into the inhibition of social growth.
The subject of the analysis may be a specific country, not only those to which the base texts relate, social environment, religious group – any clearly identifiable human community.
- How will Trace look technically:
Session abstracts and wordpress mailing list will be available throughout the summer session. On Sunday, August 2 between 12.00 and 14.00 there will be an online discussion and exchange of views on the problem and brief summaries of the results of the mailing list discussion.
Link to the meeting:https://meet.google.com/qoj-wmvc-nch
The basic texts are presented below. Click on their title to read the content. You can post your comment or send your comments to magdalena.tabernacka@uwr.edu.pl. If you want, and your text will fit in the subject line – I can put your text in this post. Essay title, author identification and affiliation are expected
After summer session, it is planned to publish a publication containing a summary of the results of the discussion and short texts containing theses of individual speeches.
Posted on 13th July 2020
Circle 8: Learning and Bildung in Times of Globalisation
Current updates on our Facebook page! Or find out more about the history of the circle here.
Posted on 3rd July 2020