Search Results (17)

Structural semiotics, as developed by A. J. Greimas and the Paris School, provides a powerful framework for analyzing narrative meaning through actantial roles, modalities, and hierarchical narrative structures. Despite its longstanding engagement with formal reasoning and diagrammatic tools, it has seen relatively few explicit mathematical formalizations. This article proposes a diagrammatic reconstruction of key Greimassian concepts using the language of symmetric monoidal and hypergraph categories. We treat the actantial model as a typing schema and introduce wiring diagrams as a formal semantics for representing narrative configurations, modal transformations, and actantial redistribution. Modal operations such as knowing-how-to-do, wanting-to-do, and causing-to-do are modeled as typed morphisms, while Frobenius structures account for duplication, erasure, and persistence of actants across narrative time. We show how operadic nesting captures hypotaxis, and how diagrammatic factorization yields higher-level abstractions corresponding to the hypotactical clusters of the canonical narrative schema. The approach is illustrated through a detailed analysis of Aesop’s The Fox & the Crow, culminating in a formal account of discoursivization via actorialization, spatialization, and temporalization. Rather than replacing structural semiotics, this work provides it with a compositional and mathematically explicit toolkit that clarifies existing concepts and opens new possibilities for comparative, computational, and interdisciplinary analysis. Full article

Recent scholarship has called for greater attention to white supremacy. This is closely linked to broader efforts to foreground the structural and institutional dimensions of racism. In the Nordic context, such a perspective challenges longstanding assumptions of exceptionalism by highlighting the historical and contemporary presence of coloniality and racism in the Nordic countries. This article examines the concept of white supremacy in relation to the Nordic countries, arguing that white supremacy has constituted a longstanding feature of Nordic societies and that the erasure of Indigenous concerns and voices presents one way in which white supremacy has been expressed. It uses two recent cases involving artist production connected to Iceland, Kalaallit Nunaat, and Denmark to analyze the links between the past and the present. The historical embedded analysis of these cases demonstrates that white supremacy has been an enduring feature of Nordic societies. Nordic Indigenous critiques, as well as discussions concerning Indigenous people within and beyond the Nordic countries, reveal thus how white supremacy operates through everyday structural and institutional practices in the Nordic context. These findings underscore the importance of addressing white supremacy as a pervasive and normalized aspect of Nordic social and political life. Full article

This article reconceptualizes entropy not as a metaphysical substance but as a structural constraint that shapes the formation, energetic cost, and durability of records. It links the coarse-grained—and typically irreversible—flow of time to questions of moral responsibility and divine justice. Drawing on the second law of thermodynamics, information theory, and contemporary cosmology, it advances an analogical and operational framework in which actions are accountable in an analogical sense insofar as they leave energetically costly traces that resist erasure. Within a Qur’ānic metaphysical horizon, concepts such as kitāb (Book), ṣaḥīfa (Record), and tawba (Repentance) function as structural counterparts to informational inscription and revision, without reducing theological meaning to physical process. In contrast to Kantian ethics, which grounds moral law in rational autonomy, the Qurʾān situates responsibility within the irreversible structure of time. Understood in this way, entropy is not a threat to coherence but a condition for accountability. By placing the Qurʾānic vision in dialog with modern science and theology, the article contributes to broader discussions on justice, agency, and the metaphysics of time within the science–religion discourse. Full article

This essay theorizes the body-land, a living site where colonial violence, displacement, and resurgence converge through a hemispheric dialogue between Indigenous and decolonial feminisms from Abya Yala and Turtle Island. Drawing on Lorena Cabnal’s concept of the body-land as the primary terrain of colonial invasion and regeneration, María Lugones’s analysis of the coloniality of gender as a system that fractures body, land, and relations, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s theory of embodied relational resurgence, and Diana Taylor’s notion of the repertoire as embodied memory beyond the archive, the essay argues that silence, gesture, and affect function as insurgent practices of knowledge transmission that contest colonial modes of erasure. Through an autoethnographic narrative spanning displacement from Villarrica, Tolima, and re-rooting on the territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Nations, the analysis traces how colonial grammars of race, gender, and territory are inscribed in the body. Yet these embodied inscriptions also generate practices of resurgence. By bringing Cabnal, Lugones, Simpson, and Taylor into direct conversation, the essay demonstrates that resurgence must be understood as an embodied, relational, and hemispheric process, one in which the body becomes a generative territory for reimagining belonging and repairing the fractures of colonial modernity. Full article

The link between information and energy introduces the observer and their knowledge into the understanding of a fundamental quantity in physics. Two approaches compete to account for this link—Brillouin’s negentropy law of information and Landauer’s law on data erasure—which are often confused. The first, based on Clausius’ inequality and Shannon’s mathematical results, is very robust, whereas the second, based on the simple idea that information requires a material embodiment (data bits), is now perceived as more physical and therefore prevails. In this paper, we show that Landauer’s idea results from a confusion between information (a global emergent concept) and data (a local material object). This confusion leads to many inconsistencies and is incompatible with thermodynamics and information theory. The reason it prevails is interpreted as being due to a frequent tendency of materialism towards reductionism, neglecting emergence and seeking to eliminate the role of the observer. A paradoxical trend, considering that it is often accompanied by the materialist idea that all scientific knowledge, nevertheless, originates from observation. Information and entropy are actually emergent quantities introduced in the theory by convention. Full article

Generative video diffusion models (GVDs) generate high-fidelity, text-conditioned videos but risk producing unsafe or copyrighted content due to training on large, uncurated datasets. Concept erasure techniques aim to remove such harmful concepts from pre-trained models while preserving overall generative performance. However, existing methods mainly target single-concept erasure and thus cannot satisfy the demand for simultaneously eliminating multi-concept in real-world scenarios. On the one hand, naively applying single-concept erasure sequentially to multi-concept often yields suboptimal results due to conflicts among target concepts; on the other hand, methods that alter concept mappings exhibit very poor adaptability and fail to accommodate the dynamic concept changes. To address these, we propose ConceptVoid, a scalable multi-concept erasure framework formulated as a constrained multi-objective optimization problem. For each target concept, an erasure loss is defined as the discrepancy between noise predictions conditioned and unconditioned on the concept. Non-target generation capabilities are preserved via output-distribution alignment regularization. We apply the multiple gradient descent algorithm (MGDA) to obtain Pareto-optimal solutions, aiming to minimize conflicts among different concept erasure objectives. In addition, we improve MGDA by introducing an importance-weighting mechanism, which adjusts the weights of gradients corresponding to each erasure objective, enabling flexible control over the priority and intensity of erasing different concepts, thereby enhancing the scalability of ConceptVoid. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of ConceptVoid, validating our key contributions: (1) a scalable framework for multi-concept erasure in GVDs; (2) the integration of per-concept erasure with distribution alignment to retain non-target quality; and (3) an enhanced MGDA for conflict-aware, controllable erasure. Full article

‘Marriage equality’ has been a widely used slogan and mobilizing concept for LGBTQ+ rights’ movements across the globe striving for formal recognition for ‘same-sex’ or ‘same-gender’ marriages. In this article, we critically interrogate the terminology and political rationality that have given shape to ‘marriage equality’ campaigns. We demonstrate the structural erasure of non-monogamous relations and populations from the changes hoped for and envisioned in these mobilizations. The lack of any genuine and substantial concern with consensual non-monogamies (CNMs) from most of the literature in the field highlights the close entanglement of marriage with monogamy. As a result, ideas are scarce about how meaningful and adequate legal recognition and social policy provisions for a wide range of intimate, sexual, familial, and/or caring bonds or constellations on the CNM continuum could look like. We argue that the critique of the mononormativity inherent to marriage is fundamental to understanding the role of this in the 21st century. We identify the roots of the mononormativity of marriage in its governmental role as a necropolitical and biopolitical technology, evidenced by its ‘civilizing’ function in white settler colonial projects. Because of this, an expansion of the call for equality to include non-monogamous populations does not resolve but rather aggravates the problem. We conclude that any truly queer politics of CNM consequently needs to be anti-marriage. Full article

In a previous paper, we introduced an axiomatic system for information thermodynamics, deriving an entropy function that includes both thermodynamic and information components. From this function, we derived an entropic probability distribution for certain uniform collections of states. Here, we extend the concept of entropic probability to more general collections, augmenting the states by reservoir and context states. This leads to an abstract concept of free energy and establishes a relation between free energy, information erasure, and generalized work. Full article

The present article scrutinizes the intricacies surrounding defensive warfare aimed at reclaiming territories perceived by Muslims as under non-Muslim occupation through the lens of the four Sunni schools and Twelver Shia perspectives. In Shia jurisprudence, in the absence of the twelfth Imam, the concept of defensive war does not extend to reclaiming Islamic territories per se; rather, Muslims are not sanctioned to engage in warfare solely for territorial defense. Instead, the imperative for Muslim involvement in armed conflict arises only when the fundamental tenets of Islam face jeopardy. According to Shia’s legal interpretation, jeopardizing the core principles of Islam implies a scenario where the erasure of Prophet Muhammad’s legacy and the utter annihilation of Sharia law are imminent. Such a predicament is not contingent upon the occupation of Islamic lands. However, Sunni jurisprudence posits a prerequisite for Muslims to engage in warfare, even in defense, necessitating a certainty of prevailing in the conflict. Consequently, given the contemporary milieu, wherein the requisite conditions for assured victory remain unattainable and are likely unattainable, defensive warfare for territorial reclamation is deemed impermissible. The findings of this inquiry propose an Islamic legal framework that advocates abstention from resorting to warfare concerning the mentioned territories in current circumstances, absolving Muslims of any obligation in this regard. Closing the avenue of armed conflict thereby paves the way for alternative avenues such as negotiation, reconciliation, and peace-building. It underscores Islam’s reverence for human life, prioritizing it over territorial concerns. Full article

This article delves into the underexplored intersection of Jewish identities and feminist art. It critically examines artworks by Judit Hersko and Susan Hiller, aligning with evolving identity constructs in contemporary aesthetics. Concepts like “postmemory” link second-generation Jewish artists to past experiences and unveil the erasure of Jewish women’s memory of Jewish genocide. Analyzing Hersko and Hiller’s diverse works, from landscape photography and sculpture to performance art, it underscores their shared pursuit: illuminating lingering “ghosts” of the Holocaust in modern landscapes. Susan Hiller’s The J Street Project represents an ongoing exploration of loss and trauma beyond the Holocaust in Germany, using archives as a dynamic, evolving phenomenon. Judit Hersko’s art calls for bearing witness to a potential climate catastrophe in Antarctica. The article culminates in the exploration of “The Memorial” (2017), an art project by the activist collective Center for Political Beauty that focuses on the resurgence of overt anti-Semitism in Germany. In essence, Hiller and Hersko confront erasures in history and nature, emphasizing justice and repair. Their art, intertwined with a project addressing contemporary anti-Semitism, serves as a testament to the enduring power of feminist art, reflecting, mourning, and transforming a world marked by historical traumas and war. Full article

The Bible translated into South Africa’s indigenous languages has a colonial history. For the Vhavenḓa people, the 1936 and 1998 Bible translations are revered as icons that hold a privileged position. However, this paper argues that these two translations should be seen as colonial language tools that do not serve the culture of the Vhavenḓa people. Instead, they can be viewed as weapons against them. These translations distorted the Tshivenḓa language by imposing distorted and foreign concepts of God, thereby rendering the Vhavenḓa people to have been without knowledge of God. Full article

During gestation, maternal (F0), embryonic (F1), and migrating primordial germ cell (F2) genomes can be simultaneously exposed to environmental influences. Accumulating evidence suggests that operating epi- or above the genetic DNA sequence, covalent DNA methylation (DNAme) can be recorded onto DNA in response to environmental insults, some sites which escape normal germline erasure. These appear to intrinsically regulate future disease propensity, even transgenerationally. Thus, an organism’s genome can undergo epigenetic adjustment based on environmental influences experienced by prior generations. During the earliest stages of mammalian development, the three-dimensional presentation of the genome is dramatically changed, and DNAme is removed genome wide. Why, then, do some pathological DNAme patterns appear to be heritable? Are these correctable? In the following sections, I review concepts of transgenerational epigenetics and recent work towards programming transgenerational DNAme. A framework for editing heritable DNAme and challenges are discussed, and ethics in human research is introduced. Full article

This article considers Rachel Greenwald Smith’s concept of the “Affective Turn” in contemporary fiction by looking at a constellation of novels published near the turn of the twenty-first century: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000). As Rachel Greenwald Smith claims, this “Turn” offers a “corrective or counter to postmodernist suspicion towards subjective emotion” and has foundations of sincerity and authenticity, which align it with the premise of post-postmodernism. These novels, I argue, collectively engage with the affective turn’s inherent post-postmodern potential, as their authors respond to, challenge, and react against postmodern irony and the license of inauthenticity that comes with this. Full article

This paper articulates a paradigm shift in the adoption of a critical ecopedagogy focused on substantive and systemic change within nature sports. In analyzing the unifying concept of nature sports, we propose an ontological shift towards genuine sustainability, a communion among people and with nature. These activities comprise a group of physical practices that have the potential to challenge participants in novel ways that provide an alternative to traditional sports and the ideological values associated with these dominant sports, such as competition and personal gain. Nature sports inscribe meaning on bodies in motion, with a blurring or erasure of boundaries, as participants become one with nature rather than seeking to exploit or conquer it. These novel and countercultural practices promise the possibility of systemic sustainability, as participants redefine sport in terms of relational equity and ecoliteracy. As a utopian project, this systems approach recognizes the nature-sport nexus as a living framework to honor culturally appropriate practices and traditions in building an ecological movement centered on environmental justice. In this way, nature sports offer an opportunity to reimagine sustainable development through the promotion of a circular, rather than linear, economy—an economy based on re-creation rather than exploitation and waste. Full article

Monomial codes were recently equipped with partial order relations, a fact that allowed researchers to discover structural properties and efficient algorithm for constructing polar codes. Here, we refine the existing order relations in the particular case of the binary erasure channel. The new order relation takes us closer to the ultimate order relation induced by the pointwise evaluation of the Bhattacharyya parameter of the synthetic channels, which is still a partial order relation. To overcome this issue, we appeal to a related technique from network theory. Reliability network theory was recently used in the context of polar coding and more generally in connection with decreasing monomial codes. In this article, we investigate how the concept of average reliability is applied for polar codes designed for the binary erasure channel. Instead of minimizing the error probability of the synthetic channels, for a particular value of the erasure parameter p, our codes minimize the average error probability of the synthetic channels. By means of basic network theory results, we determine a closed formula for the average reliability of a particular synthetic channel, that recently gain the attention of researchers. Full article