Create accountLogin

Recent searches

No recent searches

Search options

Only available when logged in.
mstdn.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
A general-purpose Mastodon server with a 500 character limit. All languages are welcome.

Administered by:

Server stats:

14K
active users

mstdn.social: AboutStatusProfiles directoryPrivacy policy

Mastodon: AboutGet the appKeyboard shortcutsView source codev4.3.8

#humanities

12 posts12 participants1 post today
Public
RHR

[Actualité de nos adhérents] Jérôme Laubner, Jennifer Ruimi et Sophie Vasset pour l’équipe « Humanités, Médecine, Santé XVIe-XVIIIe siècles » de l’Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l’Âge Classique et les Lumières annoncent la dernière session de cette année de leur webinaire d’actualités dans le domaine des humanités en santé pour la première période moderne (Early Modern Health Humanities Webinar)

Affiche du webinaire, sur fond rose. Les informations pratiques qui y figurent sont dans les posts suivants. L'affiche donne le titre du webinaire, annonce l'invité, montre la couverture du livre.
#EarlyModern#Renaissance#Humanities
Public
Pete Hahnloser

Ancient Greek Hours, Not Roman: Koine’s Surprising Way to Tell Time

beehaw.org/post/20274263

beehaw.orgAncient Greek Hours, Not Roman: Koine’s Surprising Way to Tell Time - BeehawThis was a rabbit-hole discovery. It’s over an hour and could have used some tighter editing, but it’s truly fascinating stuff. The Greeks used hour ranges, not specific times (i.e., 6 p.m. meant 6:00-6:59), the origin of the 24-hour, seven-day week stems from gods in Egypt where each one cycled through being in charge for the first hour of the day, the length of an hour varied by time of year because it was sundial days … it’s rare to run into a video where I knew absolutely nothing about the subject matter already. It’s admittedly trivia in the end, but this was one of those finds I had to share.
#humanities
Public
ScienceOpen

'Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman' by University of Westminster Press is a global interdisciplinary journal that focuses on diverse theoretical approaches to the #Anthropocene from #SocialSciences and #Humanities: scienceopen.com/collection/UWP

ScienceOpenAnthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman<p><em><strong>Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman </strong></em>is a global interdisciplinary journal. Moving beyond concerns around global warming and the environment it focuses on diverse theoretical approaches to the anthropocene from social sciences and humanities.  It aims to be at the centre of conceptual debates regarding the current epoch and environment. <em>Anthropocenes –  Human, Inhuman, Posthuman</em>'s core contributor base and readership will be in the social sciences, arts and humanities although often social and political thought will be applied to aspects of the natural or ‘hard’ sciences.</p><p>(U Westminster Press)</p>
Public
Kwakigra

On Stupidity

beehaw.org/post/20221491

beehaw.orgOn Stupidity - BeehawI have been thinking about this issue a lot considering the context of my life and the present political situation and have been planning to write my own essay, only to find that Dietrich Bonhoeffer had written exactly was I was thinking decades ago just before he was murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. I think it’s an important thought to spread and I’m curious as to what y’all think. This is the essay: >Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. > >Against stupidity we are defenseless. > >Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed — in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical — and when facts are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. > >For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous. > >If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. > >We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them. > >We note further that people who have isolated themselves from others or who live in solitude manifest this defect less frequently than individuals or groups of people inclined or condemned to sociability. And so it would seem that stupidity is perhaps less a psychological than a sociological problem. > >It is a particular form of the impact of historical circumstances on human beings, a psychological concomitant of certain external conditions. Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or of a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. > >It would even seem that this is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. > >The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence, and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. > >The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with a person, but with slogans, catchwords and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings. > >Yet at this very point it becomes quite clear that only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity. > >Here we must come to terms with the fact that in most cases a genuine internal liberation becomes possible only when external liberation has preceded it. Until then we must abandon all attempts to convince the stupid person. > >This state of affairs explains why in such circumstances our attempts to know what ‘the people’ really think are in vain and why, under these circumstances, this question is so irrelevant for the person who is thinking and acting responsibly. The word of the Bible that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom declares that the internal liberation of human beings to live the responsible life before God is the only genuine way to overcome stupidity. > >But these thoughts about stupidity also offer consolation in that they utterly forbid us to consider the majority of people to be stupid in every circumstance. It really will depend on whether those in power expect more from people’s stupidity than from their inner independence and wisdom. Source [https://nsjonline.com/article/2021/12/bonhoeffer-on-stupidity/]
#humanities
Public *
sgt1372

#Harvard

As a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I was already familiar with #EdX, Harvard's online education program & have taken many free EdX programs in the past but honestly I had forgotten about it until people here started posting links to their #Legal & #Constitutional study courses but EdX offers many other courses of interest to me, particularly in the #Arts & #Humanities.

You can check out the complete EdX catalog here:

pll.harvard.edu/catalog

Harvard UniversityCatalog of CoursesBrowse the latest courses from Harvard University
Public
alyaza [they/she]

Permission to be ill: It took months for my functional neurological disorder to finally be diagnosed. It’s a condition that must be recognised

beehaw.org/post/20201791

beehaw.orgPermission to be ill: It took months for my functional neurological disorder to finally be diagnosed. It’s a condition that must be recognised - Beehaw> It began in late September 2022. I was just recovering from a severe case of COVID-19 when Hurricane Ian hit my hometown in southwest Florida. My wife and I evacuated to Miami for a week and watched the damage unfold on various news channels. When we returned to our home in Fort Myers a week later, we were shocked by the devastation. The scenes were absurd. There were huge fishing boats suspended like toys from mangrove and palm trees, entire homes floating in the middle of San Carlos Bay, the famous causeway to Sanibel Island ripped in half, and the town of Fort Myers Beach utterly flattened. But our house, albeit without power, made it through the storm relatively unscathed. > > One evening amid the power outage, I happened to be outside on the patio reading by headlamp when I began noticing my jaw clenching and tightening up. I was suddenly having difficulty controlling my tongue, lips and jaw. I came inside and asked my wife if I might be having a stroke. Beyond my Covid experience and the wreckage of the hurricane, this was an extremely stressful time in my life. As a philosophy professor, I had just published a new book that was generating a modest buzz, and it seemed as if I was being invited to give talks all over the place. Always an anxious traveller, I was scheduled to fly in rapid succession from Madison, Wisconsin to Birmingham, England and then to Sweden for a talk in Stockholm, then to Linköping for another talk and back to Stockholm again for a third. This, in addition to my normal work duties and some major upheavals in my personal life, appeared to short-circuit me physically and emotionally. > > My first thought was that I had temporomandibular joint disorder (TMJ) from excessive jaw clenching. I scheduled appointments with numerous dentists, who confirmed that I was a jaw clencher and created an occlusion splint to wear at night. But the movements continued, and the pain was getting worse. My tongue was moving constantly, and I noticed it affecting my speech with slurring and a pronounced lisp. I started chewing gum to occupy my tongue. The anxiety about what was happening to my body reached such a breaking point that I cancelled all my trips and gave my talks virtually via Zoom. I scheduled an appointment with a psychiatrist, who recommended I up the dose of the antidepressant Zoloft, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), a version of which I had been taking for well over two decades. But things got only worse. The increased dose of Zoloft made me feel dissociated and dangerously impulsive. Ativan was added to help take the edge off, but the spiral of depression and anxiety deepened. I considered checking into a psychiatric hospital. What was happening to me? > > In a panic, I went to the emergency department of the local hospital to be checked out and was quickly dismissed as someone suffering from work-related stress and maybe needing some botulinum toxin injections (‘Botox’) to ease the movement of my jaw. Then my wife began to do some research and suggested that perhaps the uncontrolled facial movements were the result my long-term use of SSRIs, the dosage of which I had just increased. I was unconvinced, assuring her that those kinds of side-effects came from antipsychotic and neuroleptic medications, not the relatively benign SSRIs that nearly every friend and colleague I knew had taken at one time or another. But then I started doing some digging and read reports that, although rare, an abnormal movement disorder called tardive dyskinesia (TD) could emerge from long-term use of SSRIs. I went back to the emergency department the next day, received blood work and a CT scan, all of which came back normal, with a suggestion that it may in fact be TD, and a referral to a neurologist. It was at this point that I officially entered the dehumanising maze of the biomedical industrial complex and encountered the so-called ‘blind spot’ in neurology, where a neurological disorder exists that is incompatible with neurological disease. — > Having suffered a massive heart attack in my late 40s, I am no stranger to dealing with health emergencies. But this experience has been different in kind. With a heart attack there are clear medical interventions, in my case, an angioplasty and a strict medication protocol. But over the span of a year and half, the many neurologists I saw didn’t just not know how to treat me; they couldn’t even come to a consensus about what I had. I left each consultation feeling more anxious and alone, to such a degree that I became suicidal for the first time in my life. > > I slogged through my days and weeks trying to cope with my condition. My mouth, jaw and tongue felt uncanny, like foreign objects that didn’t belong to me and that I had no control over. This lack of control affected my ability to move through the world, anticipate future projects or even relate to others in my life. All of it was collapsing. — > As my condition progressed, I found I could no longer eat without food falling out of my mouth, and I could no longer lecture with any of the fluency and precision that I had long taken for granted. The body that had propelled me effortlessly forward through a kind of tacit proprioception, what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called the ‘I can’ (je peux), was replaced with an awkward and debilitating sense of ‘I can’t’. This experience kept me from dissolving into the flow of everyday life, transforming me into what Sartre called a ‘body-for-others’ (corps pour autrui), a stigmatised object, self-conscious and filled with shame. And the more I internalised this judgment, the more I was sucked into a feedback loop of isolating behaviour and feelings of self-reproach that further intensified my suffering. I found myself chewing gum in a desperate attempt to disguise the uncontrolled jaw and tongue movements, and even took comfort in wearing pandemic masks when out in public. All of this illuminates the ways in which shame is fundamentally a social mood, felt by embodied beings who inhabit a shared world.
#humanities
Public
alyaza [they/she]

The Influencer Inspiring Girls to Eat As Little As Possible

beehaw.org/post/20163482

beehaw.orgThe Influencer Inspiring Girls to Eat As Little As Possible - Beehawarchive.is link [https://archive.ph/Fpv4b] > Last year, Emma, a 37-year-old teacher, broke up with her boyfriend. He had often taunted her for her weight, leaving snarky Post-it notes on her clothes and telling her she needed to eat better. “He told me I was so fat that no one else would ever love me,” she said. After they broke up, his words still haunted Emma (who asked to use a pseudonym for privacy). She spent a lot of time scrolling through #SkinnyTok, a growing community of weight-loss influencers, where she found Liv Schmidt. > > A 23-year-old model in New York City, Schmidt encourages her followers to “live the Skinni Girl lifestyle” by following her weight-loss advice. When Emma stumbled on her TikTok, Schmidt had more than 600,000 followers. She was shocked by some of the things Schmidt said — in one video, she mocks women who wear sundresses to hide their “puffy face and bloated bodies,” and she once reposted a TikTok with the caption “girls be 300 pounds saying ‘I’m a snack.’ No megatron you’re the fkn vending machine.” Emma was intrigued. “I just figured, Okay, if she was able to get that thin, she could help me lose that last 15 pounds,” she told me. Emma signed up for the Skinni Société, Schmidt’s subscription-only Instagram group. For $20 a month, members gain access to exclusive content on Schmidt’s Instagram page, including recipes, workout videos, and diaries of everything she eats in a day. They’re also added to a group DM thread on the platform, where they share their weight-loss goals and progress. When Emma joined, she saw members posting their step counts, meal plans, and before-and-after photos. She couldn’t help but notice many were quite young; some appeared to be in college or high school, posting about graduation or sharing prom pics. “I felt like I was old enough to be their mother,” she said. > > During her time in the Skinni Société, Emma’s life became dominated by a single obsession: food — and how to avoid eating it. She frequently felt weak and exhausted. At one point, she said, she had been on the treadmill at the gym for a minute when she had to get off; she was lightheaded and drenched in sweat. Every time she opened the app, she saw a new video or message from Schmidt urging her followers to “eat clean, feel light” or to chug water or green tea to trick their bodies into ignoring hunger cues. Her subscribers couldn’t get enough. “They’re all so obsessive, so it’s hard to not become obsessive too,” Emma said. “It’s, like, this little cult of being skinny.” > > In interviews, Schmidt — who didn’t respond to requests for comment — has claimed she merely offers common-sense weight-loss advice. The goal of the Skinni Société, she says, is to hold members accountable and support their goals. But where is the line between embracing diet culture and promoting eating disorders? Inside the group, members post ridiculously high step counts and commiserate over the side effects of their low-calorie diets, like hair loss and dizziness. Though the group is technically closed to those under 18, when I joined I found more than a dozen members who are high-school students, one of whom is a freshman. > > Last fall, Schmidt was kicked off TikTok after The Wall Street Journal asked the platform for comment on a story about her. Her fans rallied to her defense, and she made the ban part of her brand, arguing that she’s the victim of censorship. In April, the conservative women’s magazine Evie featured her in a glowing profile with the headline “Banned for Being Honest?” Now she’s more popular than ever and has quadrupled her follower count on Instagram. Air Mail recently estimated that Schmidt makes $130,000 a month from the 6,500 members in the Skinni Société. She takes the influencer playbook a step further, directly profiting from a little club of followers who encourage one another to eat, drink, and live just like Liv Schmidt. In March, she reposted a message from a follower who wrote a school paper about how much she looks up to Schmidt. “Her content has helped and continues to help so many young girls form a healthy relationship with food and exercise,” this fan wrote. “She truly exemplifies the values of what a role model should be.”
#humanities
Public
Pete Hahnloser

Systems are crumbling - but daily life continues. The dissonance is real

beehaw.org/post/20153510

beehaw.orgSystems are crumbling - but daily life continues. The dissonance is real - Beehaw> In January, the comedian Ashley Bez posted an Instagram video of herself, trying to describe a heavy mood in the air. “How come everything feels all …?” she says, trailing off and grimacing exaggeratedly into the camera. > > Digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush saw the video, and got it immediately. > > “Welcome to the hypernormalization club,” Harfoush said in a response video. “I’m so sorry that you’re here.” > > “Hypernormalization” is a heady, $10 word, but it captures the weird, dire atmosphere of the US in 2025. > > First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening. > > The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.
#humanities
ExploreLive feeds
About