Humanities, Volume 13, Issue 1 (February 2024) – 38 articles

This paper is a collaborative interdisciplinary examination of the scientific, political, and cultural determinants of the conservation status of mammal species that occur in both Canada and the USA. We read Canada’s Species at Risk Act as a document of bio-cultural nationalism circumscribed by the weak federalism and Crown–Indigenous relations of the nation’s constitution. We also provide a numerical comparison of at-risk species listings either side of the US–Canada border and examples of provincial/state listings in comparison with those at a federal level. We find 17 mammal species listed as at-risk in Canada as distinct from the USA, and only 6 transboundary species that have comparable levels of protection in both countries, and we consider several explanations for this asymmetry. We evaluate the concept of ‘jurisdictional rarity’, in which species are endangered only because a geopolitical boundary isolates a small population. The paper begins and ends with reflections on interdisciplinary collaboration, and our findings highlight the importance of considering and explicitly acknowledging political influences on science and conservation-decision making, including in the context of at-risk-species protection. Full article

Hundreds of thousands of hectares of bushland and accompanying biodiversity were lost over a few short weeks during the Black Summer fires of 2019–2020 along the east coast of Australia. On the night of 19 December 2019, fire swept up the escarpment from the coast, slowed down with the thick understory of temperate rainforest and burnt through the lower dry sclerophyll forest on Plumwood Mountain. The aftermath of the bare, burnt landscape meant a significant change in the structure and diversity of vegetation, while the consequences of the fire also brought about fundamental changes to Plumwood as a conservation and heritage organisation. Plumwood Mountain as a place, the individual plumwood tree as an agentive being, Val Plumwood as a person and Plumwood as an organisation are all an entangled form of natureculture and indicative of a practice-based conservation humanities approach. Conservation as part of the environmental humanities can offer an alternative to mainstream models of conservation with the potential to instigate active participation on the ground, engaging in a different form of stewardship. Full article

The year 2021 witnessed the publication of the latest volume of Refugee Tales, which chronologically coincided with the seventieth anniversary of the adoption of the 1951 Refugee Convention by the UK and other countries. This collection is the fourth volume of the Refugee Tales Project, which began in 2015 with a yearly meeting to walk and share stories by victims of detention, with the main goal of abolishing indefinite detention in the UK. The Refugee Tales Project, which exposes the humanitarian crisis involved in displacement, refugeehood, and detention, is primarily a spatial project that is concerned with borders and boundary crossings. The centrality of space can be seen reflected in the stories collected in Refugee Tales IV, which also reveal a sustained interest in the dimension of time. In this context, the present study addresses borders and border-crossing in the literary voicing of migrants’ experience as these migrants interact with spatial and temporal planes, with the aim of exploring such an interaction in a selection of narratives from Refugee Tales IV. This analysis examines the selected tales from the perspectives of the treatment of space, time, and the disoriented perception of both, considering how the articulation of these parameters contributes to the exposure of the injustices in detention and refugeehood. Full article

This article examines the nuanced discourse of hospitality in Dina Nayeri’s works Refuge (2017) and The Ungrateful Refugee (2019), attending to the ethics of interdependency that transcend beyond borders of different natures. By making the limits of hospitality evident, both texts bring forth the ethical implications beyond borders that are present in opposing, yet equally significant paradigms: security and danger—depending on whose interests prevail; recognition and non-recognition—attending to the precarious conditions that potential guests are requested to endure or fulfil to be acknowledged and hosted; and rights and duties—considering borders as exclusive and independent rather than as contact zones. Following Jacques Derrida (2000) Jeffrey Clapp and Emily Ridge (2016), and Judith Butler (2009, 2015, 2016), among others, I will consider the complexities of locating home after forced displacement and the (dis)connection between belonging and identity. In both of Nayeri’s works, the direct experience of displacement becomes key to understanding the need for refuge in the recreation of a home-like experience beyond home and borders. This is particularly evident in the negotiated spaces of vulnerability and resistance that refugees inhabit. Full article

Kristen Sandrock (2020) connects John Lanchester’s 2019 Brexit novel The Wall with what she refers to as ‘British border epistemologies’; that is, a radical process of re-bordering due to global warming and its impact on human mobility. The literary phenomenon that is now referred to as ‘BrexLit’ bears witness to the way in which borders and the fear to the other seem to impinge on contemporary British fiction. BrexLit is framed by an increasing global interest in exploring interdisciplinary bordering practices. Primarily, BrexLit manifests through realist and/or speculative long fiction, although there are numerous short stories and poetry that deal with this seismic political event. This article proposes to focus on different samples of speculative long fiction born from Brexit before highlighting Lanchester’s The Wall. Posthuman studies offer a convenient theoretical framework with which to approach this specific text where the British border, refugees and the fear of the other are the drivers of the plot. Thus, this contribution will explore alien configurations of refugees in contemporary British speculative fiction and the way in which these texts question Brexit rhetoric in an eye-opening and thought-provoking way, assisting readers to understand the context and consequences of such a profound political event. Full article

Emanuele Tesauro’s Il cannocchiale aristotelico (The Spyglass of Aristotle) is widely considered a masterpiece of the Baroque, mainly because of his theory of metaphor as a cognitive tool. But this work is much more than that. Tesauro presents his volume as the ultimate interpretation of Aristotle’s rhetorical art, which is clearly not the case. Indeed, his work is a polycentric discourse on a revolutionary theory of rhetoric that goes beyond any previous treatise written on the subject, including Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Despite his relevance in the history of rhetorical theories, Tesauro’s work is still waiting for a comprehensive study of its own as well as investigations of some of its specific aspects. Furthermore, the majority of the existing studies of Tesauro are in Italian (with only very few in English), which makes it difficult for this text to reach an international public. This essay explores what seems to be a specific aspect that has so far been almost completely neglected: the role played by the ancient sophists in the Cannocchiale aristotelico and in the history of rhetoric that Tesauro redesigns. Tesauro proclaims his fidelity to Aristotle but actually contradicts Aristotle’s anti-sophistic approach. During this analysis, we will discover even more about Tesauro’s pro-sophistic attitude: he grounds the climax of Latin rhetorical tradition in Greek sophistry. This positive assessment of the ancient sophists, especially Thrasymachus and Gorgias of Leontini, coexists with a critique of Socrates. Except for Sperone Speroni, no other early modern Italian author—or European author—has proposed this radical inversion of the canon established by Plato. This reversal makes Tesauro a relevant case study in the on-going exploration of the legacy of ancient sophists in Western literature. Full article

To completely understand Dante’s work, we would need to perfectly comprehend the foundations on which it is built, as well as Dante’s own “constructs” and reinterpretations of earlier texts—the transformations of these texts and the whole ideological superstructure of the work built on them. The goal of this essay is to introduce, for the first time in English-language scholarship, a discussion of Pavol Koprda’s Slovak translation of Dante’s Paradise (2020), the result of extensive Slovak academic research on this topic, based on key sections in which Dante’s philosophical background is revealed, and focusing on an interpretation of the third canticle and a reconciliation of the intellectual debates of Dante’s time. Full article

Central American writers have perceptively engaged with the concept of world literature from their minor positionality. For instance, as implied in the mocking undertone of its title, Roberto Quesada’s Big Banana (2000) deals with being at the edge of the periphery, following a Honduran migrant in the Latin American community in New York. Quesada explores how the protagonist channels his “deseo de mundo”, to use Mariano Siskind’s words, into a strategy of performing distinction to carve out a place for himself in a cosmopolitan society. Compounding “banana republic”—an expression coined by O. Henry, inspired by Honduras—with “The Big Apple”, Big Banana’s title underscores the book’s play with cultural registers and national and worldly identities. The growing scholarship on Central American and U.S. Central American literature has analyzed the novel through the lens of coloniality, the limits of solidarity, the experience of the Central American diaspora, and as “denuncia social”. My article instead traces how cultural productions acquire different valences each time they cross the center–periphery border in the performance of distinction that Big Banana and its protagonist carry out in response to their doubly peripheral position. In other words, this essay is concerned with the novel’s problematic instrumentalization of Western hegemonic culture—both highbrow and commercial popular culture—to make claims of worldliness and carve a space for itself in world literary circuits. Full article

In this paper, I discuss Dante’s conception of theology and rational thinking through a reading of the cantos of the Heaven of the Sun. I address the hermeneutical challenge of understanding the meaning of the peace which Dante identifies as the main feature of divine science, and I do so by employing liturgical hermeneutics, a methodological approach characteristic of the celebration of Mass. This hermeneutical approach looks simultaneously at the constative content of a text and its performative dimension and emphasises the importance of not concealing but taking into account the unavoidable personal dimension of any hermeneutical or intellectual activity. In this way, I challenge the conclusion that the reconciliation of the Wise Spirits is merely and only a textual reality and therefore a beautiful, poetic lie, and I instead show how Dante’s poetic depiction has serious implications for our use and understanding of rational thought. His representation does not rest on the application of the principle of non-contradiction as the ultimate foundation of reality and rational thinking: in Dante’s Paradiso, this abstract principle is replaced by a living reality, and the inner life of the Trinity is shown as being the true foundation for any possible knowledge and reality. Full article

In the process of adapting a written narrative for the silver screen, there is much that can be lost (or gained) in translation. Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s adaption of Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, is no exception. Often analyzed as a work of science fiction, this article argues that understanding Arrival as a work of the frontier gothic renders the attempted erasure of Indigenous presence in the film visible. The frontier gothic elements of Arrival, most prominently the transformation of Chiang’s protagonist, Louise, into a frontier hero(ine), and the looming Montana setting, both evoke and attempt to erase the Indigenous presence in this “frontier”. As a frontier hero, Louise ultimately supersedes the aliens of Arrival, absorbing and appropriating their knowledge and language to save the world (and the superiority of the United States). Full article

Historicizing the musical genre known as “Chicago blues,” I further complicate Richard Wright’s already complicated attitudes toward “the folk” and modernity. Utilizing close readings of 12 Million Black Voices, I show how Wright’s apparent denigration of the blues as an outmoded, pre-modern artistic form is dependent on his historical situation writing before the advent of a new electrified form of blues that developed in Chicago shortly after the book’s publication. Utilizing biographical details of the life of Muddy Waters, I show how his work as a musician in Mississippi, then in Chicago, and his development of an electrified blues style, parallels and personifies the shift from an African American perspective rooted in an agrarian, pre-modern south to an industrial, modern north documented so effectively by Wright. Furthermore, the Chicago blues musicians’ transmogrification of the rural Delta blues into an electrified, urban expression manifests the vernacular-modernist artistic conception which Wright seems to be envisioning and pointing toward in 12 Million Black Voices. Full article

Studies show that diverse representation in children’s literature can positively impact the self-perceptions of marginalized children. To promote feelings of self-worth, children must see their cultural identities authentically portrayed in a manner that does not promote stereotypes in stories that affirm and support their world experiences. This essay focuses specifically on Afro-Latin@ identity in the United States and the role Afro-Latin@ representation in children’s and young adult literature can play in shaping Afro-Latin@ feelings regarding race and cultural heritage, and in constructing and affirming self-identity and feelings of self-worth. Full article

This article historicizes the character of Bouki in the context of Creole Louisiana, showing how the story of Bouki has evolved to become the story of Kouri-Vini, Louisiana’s native and endangered Creole language. This historicization takes place in three distinct periods; those periods are defined by their relation to Kouri-Vini. The first period aligns with the Antebellum period; the second aligns with the early 20th century; and the final coincides with the present day. Moving across these periods, Bouki finds himself demoted, at which point he enters the ‘creolized folkloresque.’ The folkloresque is a larger mosaic of folkloric forms detached from the material conditions of their production and available to popular culture; for the folkloresque to be creolized designates the same process but under vastly unequal social and material conditions. In short, Bouki enters the creolized folkloresque, becoming a folkoresque figure available to all who find themselves subject to creolized conditions. In the pre-American part of Louisiana’s history, creolized conditions included slavery and colonization; post-Americanization, linguistic discrimination plays an outsized role. Where such conditions persist in Louisiana, there Bouki can be found. Full article

Diachronically, Mesopotamian data pertaining to the religious spheres point to a transversal notion that deities were considered responsible for every cause–effect event observed/experienced by humans in their natural/cosmic surroundings. Such notion is especially visible on texts pertaining to the restoration of human health, where such an aspect was ultimately considered as a divine prerogative. Yet, these textual data also show how natural elements were basilar to the success of healing practices when thoroughly manipulated by specialists. Their examination through a perspective that intertwines the apparatus of History of Religions and Environmental History thus reveals great potential for contributing to the topic of human/nonhuman entanglements in the longue durée. With this paper, we propose to revisit the uses of aquatic fauna as displayed in Babylonian and Assyrian healing texts dated to the second half of the 2nd millennium and the first half of the 1st millennium BC. Although at a preliminary stage, our research has been guided by the combined theoretical-methodological perspective above-mentioned, aiming at highlighting the great importance conferred to these animals. Ultimately, we aim at stressing the importance of addressing the dependence of Mesopotamian specialists and patients on such elements of Nature to better understand this ancient context. Full article

Few plays make such varied or such bravura use of soliloquies as Shakespeare’s Richard III. The opening forty-one-line monologue by Richard himself allows an actor to show what he can do and to capture his audience and offers a view on processes of historical causation: having started with six uses of the word ‘our’, Richard not only moves on to say ‘I’ nine times (supplemented by ‘my’ and ‘me’), but also explains that his plans are going to affect the future of others, too. His plot to set his brothers against each other is going to change the course of history; moreover, it will do so by using the stalking-horse of a prophecy, a form of speech which presumes that the future is already unalterably fixed. Other soliloquies in the play also offer insights into historical process. This paper examines the differing tonality of the play’s soliloquies and the kind of information offered in them to argue that while Richard III officially subscribes to Tudor myths of the past, it not only implicitly urges the audience to a more sceptical take, but in fact raises questions about whether we can ever be sure about how history was made. Full article

Shatila camp in Beirut was founded in 1949 and now houses up to 40,000 refugees. In 2017, the Peirene Press publisher Meike Ziervogel and London-based Syrian editor Suhir Hedal travelled to the camp to hold a three-day creative writing workshop in which nine Syrian and Palestinian refugees participated. The result is Shatila Stories (2018), a brilliant piece of collaborative fiction translated from Arabic to English by Naswa Gowanlock. It is a hybrid between a novel and a short story collection, in which refugee voices are given the chance to speak up, share their stories, and negotiate their identities. This article examines Shatila Stories (2018) as a book that highlights Shatila as a campscape (Diana Martín). These stories show that the camp, as Adam Ramadan argues, is not empty of law and political life, but rather it is a meaningful space produced by who and what is in it, and how they interrelate and interact. Shatila Stories is, indeed, an effective platform that allows readers to understand how refugees’ conflicts and thoughts are processed and the ways in which refugees in Shatila accept and embody the camp’s liminality and their border subject identity to gain agency and resist the restrained passivity to which they are often relegated. Ultimately, my analysis pays attention to how these stories encourage the renegotiation of the refugees’ selfhood and counter Agamben’s perception of refugees as “bare lives” by portraying them as autonomous, active and humanized individuals in the eyes of the international reader. Full article

Food has been an enduring presence in the construction of collective identities of migrant communities. From honing cooking techniques and selecting ingredients and tools to developing cultures of consumption and appreciation, diasporic communities seem to hold food as one of the primary markers of identity. Women writers from the diaspora not only emblematized their identities by writing about food but also opened feminist methodological opportunities for writing resistance. These ‘culinary fictions’ have since been mined to delve into the gendering of migrant identities. The genre of cookbooks shares a significant overlap with ‘culinary fiction’ in terms of its scope by stabilizing ‘authentic’ identities. However, it surgically punctures the romantic appeal of food imagination, shifting its focus instead to the labor that produces the sensory stimulation of culinary memory. This article uses this overlap and this gap as incentives to read select cookbooks published in the heydays of culinary fiction. Reading cookbooks against the metrics of labor provides a certain intimacy of engagement that offers entry into complex negotiations of uncertain migrant identities. Affective labor and its postcolonial entanglements have been used as catalysts in the article to read into the multilayered understanding of the politics of women writing about food in the diaspora. To this extent, it will challenge the stabilized ways of reading culinary identities and open food writing to more robust negotiations of gendered writings of food. Full article

This article will critically appraise the extent to which new developments in the fields of reproductive technology are shown to impact female bodily autonomy and reproductive choice in Eva Hoffman’s novel The Secret. The Secret pushes its readers towards the more pressing and urgent questions arising from ongoing developments within the field of NRT and human cloning in a neoliberal climate. The novel cautions that, ultimately, the individual right to reproductive choice is never completely free; an awareness of external influences and a consideration of possible repercussions is integral to responsible decision-making in the context of NRT and cloning. However, the novel moves towards a possible reconceptualization of NRTs as part of the evolutionary progress of humankind. In returning to the body and biopolitical figurations, this article sees the novel’s protagonist, Iris, and her emergent cyborg identity as a manifestation of Haraway’s monstrous cyborg replete with possibility. Full article

Since the late 1990s, Chinese internet publishing has seen a surge in literary production in terms of danmei, which are webnovels that share many of the features of Anglophone fanfiction. Thanks in part to recent live-action adaptations, there has been an influx of new Western and Chinese diaspora readers of danmei. Juxtaposing these bodies of literature in English in particular enables us to examine the complexities of how danmei are newly circulating in the Anglophone world and have become available themselves for transformative work, as readers also write fanfiction based on danmei. This paper offers a comparative reading of the following three such texts, which explore trauma recovery through the arc of romance: Tianya Ke, a danmei novel by Priest; Notebook No. 6 by magdaliny, a novella-length piece of fanfiction based on Marvel characters; and orange_crushed’s Strays, a fanfiction based on the live-action drama that was, in turn, based on Tianya Ke. The space described by Lotman’s semiosphere offers an additional model in which these texts reflect on one another; furthermore, along the porous digital border between fanfiction, danmei in translation, and fan novels based on danmei, readers and writers negotiate and vex contemporary culture. Full article

In Posthuman Ecology, anthropocentrism, based on the binary division between the privileged human and the ‘other’, gets deconstructed, leading to an acknowledgment of humans as essentially tangled in an intricate web of the natural world. In such ecologies, boundaries between the human and the more-than-human (non-human) worlds become porous, creating fluid identities and conditions of being within a framework of active interplay between the human and the non-human world. The ecology of folktales is replete with Posthumanism, as their narratives consistently break the unbridgeable gap between the human, non-human, and the spiritual and/or supernatural worlds and present certain non-naturalist ontologies that are mostly at odds with naturalism or modern empirical science. Such tales provided much-needed templates for sustainable development in the time of the Anthropocene. This paper attempts to study Easterine Kire’s When the River Sleeps (2014) as a posthumanist narrative where Vilie (a hunter) goes on a fantastical journey to find a fabled magical stone from the bottom of the ‘sleeping river’. Vilie’s journey comes out as a playground for both mundane and fantastic elements. He grows as a human being, and this happens as he transacts with the non-human and the supernatural world and comes across deep metaphysical questions and presents keys to understanding balance-in-transcendence. Full article

This article carries out a psychoanalytic and political critique of recent attempts at fighting racism, focusing on antiracist “unconscious bias training” at universities and in international development. It claims that these regimes of institutional training depend on knowledge- and awareness-based education of university staff and international cooperants, thereby not only negating the significant psychoanalytic dimensions of racism, but also disavowing any meaningful or collective engagement precisely with the unconscious. The political consequence is the treatment of racism as both symptom and individualized responsibility, thereby depoliticizing the struggle against global/structural racism. The article concludes by considering what a psychoanalytic antiracist politics might look like. Full article

In recent times, global events have starkly illuminated the disturbing absence of ethnic tolerance, thrusting interethnic conflicts into the spotlight and casting shadows over both individual and collective identities. This research focuses on the Holocaust, delving into the annals of history through the lenses of recollection, personal identification, and genetic memory, as portrayed within the pages of the novel Echoes: From the Dead Grandfather to the Deceased. The primary aim is to fathom the gradual erosion of collective historical memory over time and discern its profound significance for future generations. Within this study, an examination of the interplay between the ‘collective unconscious’ and the ‘personal unconscious’ is undertaken. Additionally, the novel’s utilization of symbols and details is scrutinized. The research employs a multifaceted approach, encompassing historical-genetic, interpretative, narrative, and psychoanalytic methodologies. Through the protagonist’s transformative journey, the novel highlights the importance of preserving historical memory and recognizing its lasting impact on individual and collective consciousness. Full article

This article places the question of the presence of the Averroist philosopher Siger of Brabant in Dante’s Paradiso within the debate concerning Dante’s relationship with Averroistic philosophy throughout his works, particularly in the Commedia. The purpose of this research is to initially query the issue of Dante’s potential retraction of previously adopted Averroistic positions in the Commedia, and then to examine in greater detail the relationship between the Florentine poet and the Brabantian philosopher. United by the thematic and autobiographical thread of knowledge persecuted by power, embodied in the history of both figures, the proposed viewpoint is that Dante finds a model of intellectual honesty and freedom in Siger’s thought, ready to question even the authority of Aristotle, a model that Dante admires, places in Paradise, and upon which he structures his poema sacro. In conclusion, this work suggests a reading of some paradigmatic and antithetical pairs in the Commedia, linked by common principles yet opposite destinies, including Dante himself. Full article

While discourse surrounding decolonization is not new, in recent years it has gained significant momentum with many advocating for its implementation as a means to address historical injustices. However, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s thought-provoking book, coupled with the movie “Mortu Nega”, invites us to critically examine the concept of decolonization. This article aims to present an argument that challenges decolonization narratives by exploring the potential limitations and unintended consequences of embracing decolonization as an absolute solution for humanitarian issues in African societies. To accomplish this, I will begin by providing historical context on Guinea-Bissau, the former Portuguese colony that serves as the focal point of the film. Furthermore, this article will provide a comprehensive description of Flora Gomes’ film, followed by a discussion addressing the trope of decolonization theory. I will use the persistent lack of women’s emancipation and their ongoing struggle for genuine liberation and gender justice in Guinea-Bissau as an example of the need, following Táíwò’s thought, to rethink the uses of decolonization as a tool for analyzing Africa’s issues. Full article

This article examines how trauma, crime, violence, and masculinity are connected in the novel Moronga (2018) by Honduran–Salvadoran author Horacio Castellanos Moya. The novel highlights the ways in which, thirty years after the signing of the Peace Accords, war trauma continues to oppress survivors of the civil war and determine their daily lives, beyond temporal and geographical borders. The novel points out how the transition into the neoliberal economy has transnationalized all aspects of the Salvadoran economy, including that of organized crime, which has undergone globalization, as have trauma and Salvadoran communities. Through the novel’s depiction of violence and crime, the author suggests that only those who perpetuate patriarchal violence in postwar diasporic communities will thrive, whereas those who aspire to carry out memory labor and peacefully heal the emotional wounds of the past will be defeated by the perverse logic of the system. Full article

The digital humanities are rapidly expanding access to scholarly and literary materials once largely confined to the university. No more: now, with free digital resources, like Giuseppe Mazzotta’s lecture series available for free through Open Yale Courses on YouTube, or Teodolinda Barolini’s 54-lecture long “The Dante Course”, also available for free through her Digital Dante website, academic discussions of difficult masterpieces are available to any person with enough bandwidth to handle it. I, too, made a brief foray into the digital humanities, and prior to turning to academic work, I provided a 42-lecture Dante-in-translation course which itself covered the entirety of Dante’s Comedy and sought to offer a less academic, and more accessible series of lectures on Dante than its more academic and more popular predecessors. Full article

In this article, I will highlight how Dante’s clear separation between heretics and schismatics is radical compared to contemporary thought and can, therefore, tell us a great deal about his conception of these two sins and about the nature of the characters condemned in Cantos X and XXVIII. In fact, the heresy of disobedience, a political weapon created ad hoc to favor the imposition of the hierocratic model, tended, in the reflection of jurists, to bring together these two sins so well-separated by Dante. The proposal of a new interpretation of these concepts that is more adherent to their historicity, with a specific and radical meaning, can open up interesting reflections on Dante’s possible desire to affect this historical process. It also brings new interpretations to questions that still lack a convincing answer, such as the silence on the numerous heretical movements that had characterized the decades preceding the writing of the Commedia, the presence of Dolcino among the schismatics, and the selection of Epicurus as an exemplum of heresy. Full article

Participation has become the keyword in museum and gallery education during the past decades. However, the focus on participation might contain neoliberalist tendencies, creating more entertainment and consumerism than art. In this study based on practice-based research, I explore a gallery educational method to mediate contemporary art to primary and high school students inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s process philosophy and new materialist theory–practice. What kind of roles can the method of Concept Play Workshop create for the participating body and how can it challenge neoliberal tendencies in museum and gallery education? In the workshops, children and young people create philosophical concepts with contemporary art, dialogue-based practices and artistic experiments in the exhibition space of Kunsthall 3,14 in Bergen, Norway. I argue that the method can create philosophizing, critical, uncomfortable, resting, dictatorial and protesting bodies. Representational logic becomes challenged, and discomfort and resistance become educational potential. The method creates multiple and overlapping roles for the participating body, shifting the focus towards multiplicities instead of the passive/active binary. Humans are not the only participating bodies, but attention is given to agential matter, contesting human-centeredness. The study is a contribution to the field of post-approaches in gallery and museum education. Full article

The article argues that where secrecy and secrets are key aspects of conspiracy theory narratives and practice, the genealogies of the/a secret have not been well understood. We argue that two forms of the secret, one a premodern notion of the secret as truth and revelation, the other a post-Derridean non-secret, inform two distinct forms and functions of contemporary conspiracy practice. Full article

This practice-based paper explores the methods of answering the question: what is our collective body? This article offers a case study of collaborative research and seeks to enact a collective body as a means of transgressing and occupying individuated neoliberal spaces of higher education. Understanding the processes through which knowledge is collectively built highlights the in-becoming nature of practice-based research and the enabling forces of this inquiry. The methods enacted access a particular rendering of how we understand ourselves as a collective; we answer the question through doing together. The ways we encounter the collective enable understanding around the shifting boundaries of the individual–collective connection, made palpable by a string. Through playful forms of dissent, such as embodied, remembered, and writing encounters, enable connections with others and inspire a refocusing of our individual practices. Full article