Showing posts sorted by relevance for query SI. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query SI. Sort by date Show all posts

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

 

Fighting the climate emergency: SACRU Universities united for planetary health


The paper Laudato Si' and the emerging contribution of Catholic research universities to planetary health, a collaborative effort of academics from the SACRU network, has been published in Lancet Planetary Health

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITA CATTOLICA DEL SACRO CUORE





Research in the footsteps of Laudato Si and the integral ecology of Pope Francis is one of the main areas driving the action of the Strategic Alliance of Catholic Research Universities (SACRU), an international network of Catholic universities. The experts of the Working Group Catholic Identity and Laudato Si', The Common Home and Social Justice confirmed this commitment by publishing the paper Laudato Si' and the emerging contribution of Catholic research universities to planetary health in The Lancet Planetary Health, a prestigious scientific journal.

Among the authors is Paolo Gomarasca, Full Professor of Moral Philosophy at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore: «Human exploitation of resources worsens climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss, disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. Pope Francis, in ‘Laudato Si', advocates integrated solutions, emphasizing social justice and renewable energy. Catholic universities, like those in the SACRU network, promote interdisciplinary research and education, fostering sustainable solutions and planetary stewardship. Through collaboration with organizations like the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, they translate science into equitable policies, addressing global challenges effectively».

The paper points out that the main threats to the health of the planet - climate change, pollution, and loss of biodiversity - fall disproportionately on minorities and marginalized communities, who pay the heaviest price in terms of diseases and premature deaths. While technical solutions to planetary threats are often effective, as seen in the sharp declines in the manufacture of chlorofluorocarbon resulting from the Montreal Protocol, researchers point out that these are insufficient policies to prevent hazards yet to come.

The paper refers to Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si, published in 2015, in which the Holy Father, recognizing that human activity is the primary driver of climate change, urges the adoption of long-term solutions that can 'restore dignity to marginalized people.' To implement the Holy Father's vision in 2021, the Laudato Si Platform was launched to catalyze the cultural shift from exploiting the planet to protecting the common home for the well-being of all.

At the higher education level, this goal is expressed in the international and multidisciplinary collaboration between Catholic universities, of which SACRU is a virtuous example. The network is active in teaching, research, and service to society with the aim of putting scientific activities at the disposal of the common good. An example of this mission is embodied in the collaboration initiated by SACRU with FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. The bilateral agreement aims to tackle food and health inequalities on the planet, with special attention paid to developing countries.

Tuesday, December 13, 2022

Changing our mobility, designing our future

Grant and Award Announcement

KOC UNIVERSITY

Barış Yıldız 

IMAGE: ASST. PROF. BARIŞ YILDIZ, KOÇ UNIVERSITY, ISTANBUL, 2022. view more 

CREDIT: KOÇ UNIVERSITY

Our ways of coming together and transporting goods and services are changing drastically with huge implications for cities, their residents, and the environment day by day. But even so, the current city logistics (CL) paradigm does not consider the mobility of goods a social need but a business problem. Current trends therefore limit our capacity to understand and respond to the challenges and opportunities brought by this profound change.

Asst. Prof. Barış Yıldız from Koç University Department of Industrial Engineering recently received a Starting Grant of 1.5 million euros from the European Research Council (ERC) for his project tackling the issue with a new perspective. It is the first ERC project focused on logistics.

“GoodMobility: A New Perspective on City Logistics: Concepts, Theory, and Models for Designing and Managing Logistics as a Service” proposes to replace techno-business-centric smart thinking with network-centric wise logistics. While designing the future of urban logistics, the project will consider public value as its priority and follow three main objectives.

Firstly, the public value will be constructed as a measurement system to assess and guide CL planning and management. Principles, models, and tools for logistics as a service (LaaS) infrastructure design will be developed as a second step. The third objective will be to develop a theoretical framework and models for the operating procedures of LaaS, introducing the logistics markets to ensure efficiency and reliability and secure public value in matching logistics demand and supply.

GoodMobility envisions laying the foundations of a new theory of CL with significant scientific and practical implications. It aims to realize new transportation technologies and business models that have not been considered before, in a way that will maximize social benefit, with public-private partnerships. The project aims to deliver products and services that will increase the innovation capacity and quality of life of cities to the residents in a much faster, more economical, and environmentally friendly manner. The novel ideas, concepts, and methodologies will open new research perspectives in transport and logistics with far-reaching social, economic, and environmental consequences.

https://www.academia.edu/12090740/Psychogeography_A_New_Paradigm

Such a legend has accrued to this movement that the story of the SI now demands to be told in a contemporary voice capable of putting it into the context of ...

https://www.academia.edu/544845/Psychogeography_D%C3%A9tournement_Cyberspace

View PDF. Revisiting Guy Debord and the Situationist International ... For the early SI, “psychogeography”—the “study of the precise laws and specific ...

https://libcom.org/files/Situationist%20International%20Anthology.pdf

Cover image.from a 1957 psychogeographical map of Paris by Guy Debord ... The only previous English-language SI anthology, Christopher Gray's.

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/333900651.pdf

2 Guy Debord, 'Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography' in Knabb, SI Anthology, pp. 5-8 (p. 5). For examples of psychogeographical analyses of urban ...

http://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/748596/0adc648845e60cc5a2074713fdd3e82d.pdf?1477521938

Psychogeographic Committee of London at the launch of the SI was expelled a bit later for failing to complete his psychogeographical report of Venice on ...

https://krygier.owu.edu/krygier_html/geog_222/geog_222_lo/Lynch_Debord_Carto.45.3.003.pdf

Keywords: psychogeography, Situationists, Guy Debord, Kevin Lynch, David Stea, Clark University. Résumé. La psychogéographie est née de manie`re ...

https://research.sabanciuniv.edu/34603/1/MuhittinerenSulamaci_10124636.pdf

Then, we continue to explore psychogeography within the theories of Situationist. International (SI) where the term psychogeography is theorised and put ...

https://escholarship.org/content/qt3xv3634r/qt3xv3634r.pdf?t=krnecm

Jun 24, 2008 ... http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/urbgeog.htm. Can also be found here: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/geography.html ...

https://ap5.fas.nus.edu.sg/fass/geojds/research/pyschogeography%20pihg%209%20june%202021.pdf

pdf. (accessed 22 January 2021). Brace C and Johns-Putra A (2010) Recovering inspiration in the spaces of creative writing. Transactions of the. Institute of ...

http://www.leahlovett.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Psychogeography-Framing-Urban-Experience-2008.pdf

Initially, “the word psychogeography,” so Guy Debord's story goes, was a neologism, ... and from 1957-72, also Situationist International (SI), ...


Monday, February 22, 2021

Environmental policies not always bad for business, study finds

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

Research News

ITHACA, N.Y. - Critics claim environmental regulations hurt productivity and profits, but the reality is more nuanced, according to an analysis of environmental policies in China by a pair of Cornell economists.

The analysis found that, contrary to conventional wisdom, market-based or incentive-based policies may actually benefit regulated firms in the traditional and "green" energy sectors, by spurring innovation and improvements in production processes. Policies that mandate environmental standards and technologies, on the other hand, may broadly harm output and profits.

"The conventional wisdom is not entirely accurate," said Shuyang Si, a doctoral student in applied economics and management. "The type of policy matters, and policy effects vary by firm, industry and sector."

Si is the lead author of "The Effects of Environmental Policies in China on GDP, Output, and Profits," published in the current issue of the journal Energy Economics. C.-Y. Cynthia Lin Lawell, associate professor in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and the Robert Dyson Sesquicentennial Chair in Environmental, Energy and Resource Economics, is a co-author.

Si mined Chinese provincial government websites and other online sources to compile a comprehensive data set of nearly 2,700 environmental laws and regulations in effect in at least one of 30 provinces between 2002 and 2013. This period came just before China declared a "war on pollution," instituting major regulatory changes that shifted its longtime prioritization of economic growth over environmental concerns.

"We really looked deep into the policies and carefully examined their features and provisions," Si said.

The researchers categorized each policy as one of four types: "command and control," such as mandates to use a portion of electricity from renewable sources; financial incentives, including taxes, subsidies and loans; monetary awards for cutting pollution or improving efficiency and technology; and nonmonetary awards, such as public recognition.

They assessed how each type of policy impacted China's gross domestic product, industrial output in traditional energy industries and the profits of new energy sector companies, using publicly available data on economic indicators and publicly traded companies.

Command and control policies and nonmonetary award policies had significant negative effects on GDP, output and profits, Si and Lin Lawell concluded. But a financial incentive - loans for increasing renewable energy consumption - improved industrial output in the petroleum and nuclear energy industries, and monetary awards for reducing pollution boosted new energy sector profits.

"Environmental policies do not necessarily lead to a decrease in output or profits," the researchers wrote.

That finding, they said, is consistent with the "Porter hypothesis" - Harvard Business School Professor Michael Porter's 1991 proposal that environmental policies could stimulate growth and development, by spurring technology and business innovation to reduce both pollution and costs.

While certain policies benefitted regulated firms and industries, the study found that those benefits came at a cost to other sectors and to the overall economy. Nevertheless, Si and Lin Lawell said, these costs should be weighed against the benefits of these policies to the environment and society, and to the regulated firms and industries.

Economists generally prefer market-based or incentive-based environmental policies, Lin Lawell said, with a carbon tax or tradeable permit system representing the gold standard. The new study led by Si, she said, provides more support for those types of policies.

"This work will make people aware, including firms that may be opposed to environmental regulation, that it's not necessarily the case that these regulations will be harmful to their profits and productivity," Lin Lawell said. "In fact, if policies promoting environmental protection are designed carefully, there are some that these firms might actually like."

###

Additional co-authors contributing to the study were Mingjie Lyu of Shanghai Lixin University of Accounting and Finance, and Song Chen of Tongji University. The authors acknowledged financial support from the Shanghai Science and Technology Development Fund and an Exxon-Mobil ITS-Davis Corporate Affiliate Fellowship.

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Sen. Bernie Sanders is embracing his anger. A new book details what he's angry about

Updated February 21, 2023
Heard on Morning Edition
STEVE INSKEEP
JOJO MACALUSO
Download

Transcript




Sen. Bernie Sanders walks into NPR Headquarters in Washington D.C.Elizabeth Gillis/NPR

Senator Bernie Sanders is embracing his anger.

He's shown a lot of it during three decades in Congress. In 1992, he attacked both parties for defense spending, claiming they were "hoping and praying that maybe we'll have another war."

During his first presidential run, he spoke sarcastically of people who fear his identification as a socialist. "I don't want to get people nervous falling off their chairs, but Social Security is a socialist program," Sanders told NPR in 2015.

POLITICS
Bernie Sanders On Being Jewish And A Democratic Socialist

It's no surprise that the Vermont senator spoke harshly of President Donald Trump, vowing: "You're damn right we're going to hold him accountable" at the time.

But he also bristled when social justice activists insisted that Democrats use the phrase "Black Lives Matter."

"It's too easy for 'liberals,' to be saying, well, let's use this phrase. What are we going to do about 51 percent of young African Americans unemployed?" Sanders said.


Enlarge this image


Sen. Sanders' latest book, 'It's Ok to Be Angry About Capitalism.'Elizabeth Gillis/NPR

The Senator is preoccupied with America's economic divides; and his new book about his recent campaigns and legislation is titled It's Okay to be Angry About Capitalism.

"They say the older you get, the more conservative you become," he writes. "That's not me. The older I get, the angrier I become about the uber-capitalist system."
Sponsor Message




IT'S ALL POLITICS
Sanders: 'My Goal Right Now Is To Win This Election'

He says his anger grows in part out of his youth in a struggling family in Brooklyn in the 1940s and 1950s. He dedicates the book, in part, to his older brother Larry, who introduced him to authors ranging from psychoanalysis founder Sigmund Freud to political theorist Karl Marx, who, along with Friedrich Engels, established the far-left ideology known as Marxism.

"We didn't have a lot of books in the house, and my brother brought books into the house and talked with me about politics, talked to me about history, talked to me about psychology," Sanders told NPR.

"And kind of intellectually opened up my eyes to the world that we're living in."

Today Larry Sanders is a Green Party politician in the United Kingdom.

And Bernie Sanders, after two presidential campaigns, now chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. For all his anger and demands for systemic change, the senator told NPR he is working within a divided Congress to make more modest changes that he thinks are possible.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.



Interview highlights

On his anger at some Democrats in Congress


I was bitterly disappointed [at the failure of giant social legislation known as] Build Back Better... What many of us said is... Let's deal with the structural crises facing America. Our child care system is a disaster. Our healthcare system is dysfunctional. Kids can't afford to go to college. Let's deal with the existential threat of climate change. Let's deal with income and wealth inequality. We came within two votes of bringing forth legislation which would have been transformative for the working families.
Sponsor Message

SI: Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who would be described as more moderate or more conservative, and represent more conservative states–

Corporate Democrats would be the term.

SI: Corporate Democrats?

These are folks who've got a whole lot of money from wealthy people and large corporations and they do their bidding.

SI: I was going to ask if you're still angry at someone like Joe Manchin. It sounds like you are. From his perspective, he's representing a very conservative state that votes for Republicans for president hugely and needs to bring them something that they can believe in. Do you sympathize with his political situation?

In 2016 when I was running for president, I won a landslide victory in West Virginia.

SI: In the Democratic primary.

In the Democratic primary.

SI: But there's a general election.

I understand... In my view, politicians do well when they stand up and fight for working people.



On the power of the working-class vote


SI: You write about the working class: "You can't win elections without the overwhelming support of the working class." It seems that many Republicans now agree with you and openly court the working class and get a lot of working class votes. Why do you think that is?

Well, that is an enormously important political issue. That is the most important political question of our time. [It's] not that working class people agree with Republican views... But what I think has happened over the years, and this is no great secret as a result of a lot of corporate contributions, the Democratic Party has kind of turned its back on the needs of working class people. And then you have a gap there where you have people like Trump coming along and say, "You know what the problem is? It's immigrants, it's gays, it's transgender people." And you get people angry around those issues rather than Democrats saying, I'll tell you what the problem is. The problem is the wealthy are getting richer. Corporations have enormous power. We're going to take them on to create a nation that works for you.
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On what Sanders thinks he can accomplish in a divided Congress


What I want to see, a Medicare-for-all system, ain't going to happen. No Republicans support it. Half the Democrats won't support it. But this is what we can do: We can expand primary health care and community health centers to every region of the country...We now have 30 million people accessing community health centers [and can do more]... You walk into a community health center, you get affordable health care, dental care... mental health counseling and low cost prescription drugs. Republicans understand that in red states it is very hard often for people to access a doctor.

On his pragmatism

SI: Even though you say it's okay to be angry about capitalism, there's a place for capitalism in the world as you envision it.

Yes, there is. Yes, there is.

SI: If you made all the rules, there would still be large corporations.

Well, I don't know about that. But look, there's nothing in that book to suggest that it is bad for people to go out and start a business, to come up with innovation. That's great. That's good. What is bad is when a handful of corporations control sector after sector.

The audio version of this interview was produced by Milton Guevara and Nina Kravinsky, and edited by Olivia Hampton.







Sunday, March 27, 2022

EVERYBODY KNOWS DEBORD WHO KNOWS VANEIGEM

The Radical Subject: An Intellectual Biography of Raoul Vaneigem (1934 - Present)

     306 Pages
This thesis proposes an intellectual biography of Raoul Vaneigem (1934-Present). Vaneigem was a member of the Situationist International (SI) between 1961 and 1970. Today the SI is widely recognised as one of the significant avant-garde groups to have contributed to the historical events that shook France in May 1968. Most people will have come to Vaneigem through his Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations (1967), (THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE) which he wrote as a member of the SI and was published just months before the largest wildcat strike in French history. Vaneigem is therefore of interest from a cultural history or history of ideas perspective because his work embodies both a political moment and because it emerged out of debates that are still informing contemporary theory. Moreover, Vaneigem is something of an anomaly in that he has always worked outside and against intellectual and political institutions, he comes from a working-class background and he has lived the great majority of his life in the province of Hainaut, the old industrial heartland of Belgium, where he was born. This makes Vaneigem an outsider in a world that has ostensibly been dominated by the Parisian intellectual elite. More often than not Vaneigem has been dismissed, even vilified, by academics interested in the Situationist International. This is all the more surprising given that his Situationist comrade Guy Debord (1931-1994) has become a cause célèbre among the intellectual left since his death, igniting a veritable publishing industry in France and the English-speaking world. The intention of this thesis is not an attempt to earn Vaneigem the dubious acclaim that has feted Guy Debord these past decades. Rather, it endeavours to contextualise, clarify and bring out the complexity of the life and work of Raoul Vaneigem, making him the focus of a critical commentary that will reassess his place in the field.



How the Situationist International became what it was

Anthony Paul Hayes

A thesis 

submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The Australian National University.

April, 2017


Abstract

The Situationist International (1957-1972) was a small group of communist revolutionaries, originally organised out of the West European artistic avant-garde of the 1950s. The focus of my thesis is to explain how the Situationist International (SI) became a group able to exert a considerable influence on the ultra-left criticism that emerged during and in the wake of the May movement in France in 1968. My wager is that the pivotal period of the group is to be found between 1960 and 1963, a period marked by the split of 1962. Often this is described as the transition of the group from being more concerned with art to being more concerned with politics, but as I will argue this definitional shorthand elides the significance of the Situationist critique of art, philosophy and politics. The two axes of my thesis are as follows. First, that the significant minority in the group which carried out the break of 1962, identified a homology between the earlier Situationist critique of art — embodied in the Situationist ‘hypothesis of the construction of situations’ — and Marx's critique and supersession of the radical milieu of philosophy from which he emerged in the mid-1840s. 

This homology was summarised in the expression of the Situationist project as the 'supersession of art’ (dépassement de l’art ). Secondly, this homology was practically embodied in the resolution of the debates over the role of art in the elaboration of the Situationist hypothesis, which had been ongoing since 1957. However, it was the SI’s encounter with the ultra-left group Socialisme ou Barbarie that would prove decisive. Via Guy Debord’s membership, the group was exposed to both the idea of a more general revolutionary criticism, but also ultimately what was identified as the insufficiently criticised ‘political militancy’ of this group. Indeed, in the ‘political alienation’ found in Socialisme ou Barbarie, a further homology was established between the alienation of the political and artistic avant-gardes. This identity would prove crucial to the further elaboration of the concept of ‘spectacle'. 

By way of an examination of the peculiar and enigmatic ‘Hamburg Theses’ of 1961, and the relationship between these ‘Theses’ and the Situationist criticism of art and politics worked out over the first five years of the group, I will argue that the break in 1962 should be conceived as one against politics as much as art (rather than just the latter, as it is more often represented).Additionally, I will outline how the SI, through the paradoxical reassertion of their artistic origins, attempted to synthesise their criticism of art with the recovery of the work of Marx beyond its mutilation as Marxism. Indeed, it was the synthesis of these critiques that enabled the considerable development of the concept of ‘spectacle’, opening the way to the unique influence the SI exerted in the re-emergence of a revolutionary movement at the end of the 1960s.

https://www.academia.edu/74612204/How_the_Situationist_International_became_what_it_was?auto=download&email_work_card=download-paper


Sunday, January 19, 2020

A Genealogy and Critique of Guy Debord's Theory of Spectacle - PhD Thesis


Cover of the 1983 edition of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle

PhD Thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2011

Tom Bunyard

This thesis addresses Guy Debord's theory of spectacle through its primary philosophical and theoretical influences. Through doing so it highlights the importance of his largely overlooked concerns with time and history, and interprets the theory on that basis. The theory of spectacle is shown to be not simply a critique of the mass media, as is often assumed, but rather an account of a relationship with history; or more specifically, an alienated relation to the construction of history. This approach thus offers a means of addressing Debord’s Hegelian Marxism. The thesis connects the latter to Debord’s interests in strategy, chance and play by way of its existential elements, and uses these themes to investigate his own and the Situationist International’s (S.I.) concerns with praxis, political action and organisation.
Addressing Debord and the S.I.’s work in this way also highlights the shortcomings of the theory of spectacle. The theory is based upon the separation of an acting subject from his or her own actions, and in viewing capitalist society under this rubric it tends towards replacing Marx's presentation of capital as an antagonistic social relation with an abstract opposition between an alienated consciousness and a homogenised world. Yet whilst the theory itself may be problematic, the conceptions of time, history and subjectivity that inform it may be of greater interest. Drawing attention to Debord's claims that theories should be understood as strategic interventions, and also to the S.I.'s calls for their own supersession, the thesis uses its observations on the nature of Debord's Hegelian Marxism to cast the theory of spectacle as a particular moment within a broader notion of historical agency. It thus contends that Debord's work can be seen to imply a model of collective political will, and offers initial suggestions as to how that interpretation might be developed.

Publication Name: PhD Thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2011






Anthony Hayes







Three Situationists walk into a bar - Or, the peculiar case of the Hamburg Theses
Anthony Hayes


Guy Debord, filmmaker, Situationist and author of The Society of the Spectacle, called The Hamburg Theses ‘the most mysterious of all the documents that emanated from the Situationist International.’ What makes the Hamburg Theses most enigmatic, apart from the fleeting and elusive references made to them in the Situationist journal, is that they were never published — left to fade along with the memories of their ‘co-authors’. Nonetheless their significance to the group was paramount. The Theses were formulated in response to the crisis regarding the role of art and artistic practice within the group. In essence their apparent failure to appear was intended to reflect the Situationist project itself: the rejection of the fetish of objects and other forms of reified human activity beloved of capitalism. In the Hamburg Theses, then, we have the Situationist project expressed in its most concise and impossibly elusive form, making it one of the most vital works of the Situationist International.

Art, ideology, and everyday space: subversive tendencies from Dada to situationism

alastair bonnett