Publication: Emerald Publishing Ltd.
Publication Date: Sept 2023
Author: Benjamin Freud, Ph.D. & Charlotte Hankin
s
aa
Democratic societies thrive when citizens actively and critically engage with new ideas, developments and claims to truth. Not only can such practices result in more effective choice-making, but they can also lead to widespread support for progressive beliefs, such as social justice. With Western societies in the midst of environmental, social and political crises, it seems more pertinent than ever that citizens become ‘ideas-informed’.
Presenting concepts from academia, industry, and practice, The Ideas-Informed Society closes the gap between the ideal of the ideas-informed society and the current reality. By exploring what it means to be ideas-informed and the benefits for both individuals and society, the chapters conceive what an ideal ideas-informed society would look like, what are the key ingredients of an ideas-informed society, and how to make it happen.
This paper illuminates the ethical entanglements that emerged/ are emerging/ might emerge with nonhumans (including multi-species others and the material world) during and throughout doctoral research processes. As education doctoral students with shared concerns about educating in the Anthropocene, we are hope-ful that posthuman, feminist new materialist philosophies can offer new ways to the environmental crises. We share our struggles and joys in enacting lively, relational ontologies, inspired by the work of Barad and Haraway. This paper share stories from our doctoral research to explore ethical entanglements: ‘Centipede and Wonderboy’ tells of a research event that emerged in the urban forest school where Hannah, the children and nonhuman nature are exploring the possibilities of play. Charlotte explores how animal-human stories are constituted through ‘multispecies moments’ in an international school. We consider the agentic nature of doctoral ethical procedures and the anthropocentrism they give force to. We end by reimagining a posthuman ethics where nonhumans are acknowledged and included at every stage of the research process in a generative, dynamic intra-play of situated, entangled engagements.
Publication: SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia
Publication Date: Volume 29, Number 1, March 2014
Author: Benjamin Freud, Ph.D.
Cut off from the metropole and coerced into trade with Japan, The French administration in Indochina under Governor General Jean Decoux had to find ingenious ways to produce locally what it had been accustomed to importing. Through the creating of a substitution economy, the nurturing of the artisanat, and appeals to Indochinese solidarity, Decoux designed policies to minimize the impact of Indochina’s isolation and exalt the benefits of French tutelage, as part of a final effort to convince the peoples of Indochina that French civilization could drive either societies forward—an approach founded on linearity that in itself reveals much about the colonial mind.
Coconut Thinking 