Through a Bergsonian analysis of contemporary user-facing large language models, I distinguish their operational organization from the sociotechnical assemblages that produce their outputs and from the discourses that attribute these distributed processes to a unified intelligent subject. Drawing on Bergson’s accounts of duration, memory, embodiment, and action, I argue that material execution, interactional path dependence, operational histories, opacity, and unforeseen novelty are genuine properties of large language models, although they do not by themselves establish lived duration or morally answerable subjectivity. I contend that process philosophy and theories of algorithmic temporality clarify the differences between technical process and lived continuity, operational novelty and Bergsonian creation, causal efficacy and moral answerability, and black-box opacity and interiority. On this basis, I reframe agency and responsibility while demonstrating how the personification of artificial intelligence can conceal the labour, institutions, infrastructures, and political decisions through which algorithmic effects are produced.
Clinical practice frequently encounters a paradox: patients articulate a clear desire for change and possess explicit intellectual awareness of their self-defeating trajectories, yet remain locked in them. While frameworks such as habit formation or repetition compulsion explain specific behavioral persistence, they do not fully capture the overarching directional persistence of a life as a whole. This paper introduces Biographical Inertia as a clinical-phenomenological concept to address this gap. Drawing on the phenomenology of lived time as developed by Minkowski and Fuchs, and narrative identity theory as developed by Ricoeur and McAdams, Biographical Inertia is defined as the resistance of an ongoing life trajectory to redirection, even when that redirection is consciously desired and structurally available. This resistance emerges from the sedimentation of embodied routines, narrative emplotment, and existential affective background, and is best understood as an emergent structural feature of an ongoing life trajectory rather than a deficit or diagnosis. Through composite clinical vignettes, the paper illustrates how this resistance manifests across diagnostic categories. A qualitative heuristic is proposed to help clinicians recognize and engage with biographical inertia in case formulation. By reframing apparent “resistance to change” as the pre-reflective preservation of a trajectory that anchors personal identity, the framework offers a non-pathologizing and clinically useful lens for understanding the complexities of therapeutic change.
This paper offers a decolonial feminist reading of embodied memory in Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile (2014), The Barefoot Woman (2016), Cockroaches (2018), and Kibogo (2021). Situating the analysis within decolonial feminism, memory studies, and trauma theory, the article argues that Mukasonga relocates memory from institutional archives and official historiography into bodies, domestic practices, oral traditions, rituals, silence, and everyday acts of survival. The study explores how women’s embodied experiences function as counter-archival modes of preserving cultural identity in the face of colonial, patriarchal, and genocidal violence. Through a qualitative literary-critical methodology grounded in close textual analysis, the article examines the interconnected themes of silence, absence, trauma, gendered survival, and resistant remembrance across Mukasonga’s select works. The analysis demonstrates that silence in Mukasonga’s writings is not merely the absence of speech, but a politically charged and affective mode through which trauma and historical violence become legible. Similarly, absence functions not as disappearance but as a continuing presence sustained through memory, ritual continuity, mourning, storytelling, and domestic labour. The study further argues that Mukasonga constructs a decolonial counter-archive that preserves marginalized histories excluded from dominant institutional narratives, particularly women’s labour, oral memory, and embodied knowledge. By foregrounding maternal care, ritual practice, bodily endurance, and communal continuity, Mukasonga challenges Eurocentric archival frameworks and redefines resistance through intimate and everyday practices of remembrance. Ultimately, the article demonstrates that Mukasonga’s literary project transforms silence, absence, and embodied memory into powerful forms of historical preservation that resist cultural erasure and affirm the survival of communal identity in post-genocide Rwanda.
This article examines the cinematic subversion of authoritarian Savarna masculinity in Ratheena P. T.’s film Puzhu (2022). The article situates the film against the backdrop of real-world caste killings in contemporary Keralam, such as the highly publicized cases of Athira Rajan and Kevin George. It investigates how inter-caste marriage serves as the ultimate site for the violent reproduction of caste boundaries, effectively dismantling the secular façade of a post-caste Keralam. Combining theories on caste with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of micro fascism, the analysis explores how the Savarna patriarch deploys lethal violence in the domestic sphere. The article argues that caste killings occur not as isolated instances of individual madness or impulsive anger, but as the final, desperate necropolitical attempt of a decaying Savarna patriarchal order threatened by Dalit upward mobility and marital agency. Ultimately, the article’s contribution to film theory is inextricably linked to its social critique; by employing an anti-caste aesthetic, the film makes visible the invisible necropolitical mechanics that protect the caste-based order of marriage. Thus, the discussion of contemporary cinema becomes a discussion of how caste survives and is actively resisted even in the twenty-first century.
This multi-site educational ethnographic study explores the reception of tsunami mythology drawn from Indonesian, Japanese, Chinese, and Thai traditions among ninety-three senior high school students across three disaster-prone provinces in Java. The findings reveal that students actively negotiate, reproduce, and transform cross-cultural disaster narratives through complex interactions among local knowledge sources, family-school-community transmission agents, digital media, and cultural-cognitive processes. Students’ identification of structural parallelisms across Asian mythologies fosters awareness of regional interconnectedness. Students resist technocratic hegemony by reasserting the validity of ancestral signs (e.g., animal behavior) over malfunctioning sirens, and critique the commodification of myths (e.g., Nyi Roro Kidul used for hotel branding) as symbolic violence. This reveals disaster knowledge as a contested political field, not merely a technical one. Our ideological framework positions youth as active agents circulating living knowledge.
This article is not about data. It is about the afterlife of research, the writing that followed, the selves it shaped, and the theories it called into being. Drawing on a corpus of over twenty completed articles, we reflect not on what we found, but on what we became through recursive writing. We revisit the metaphors that stayed with us, the tonal shifts that marked turning points, and the ways in which writing ceased to be a method and became a mode of becoming. This is not a culmination, but a recursive arc and a return to the archive of our own authorship to ask how theory is lived, how language carries us, and how the researcher is not only the one who writes, but the one who is written. Through this reflexive inquiry, we propose Writing-With as a meta-stance: relational, recursive, re-forming, and reflexive. The researcher, in this view, is not a stable knower but a shifting participant in a long conversation, one that unfolds through echoes, hesitations, and the persistent call of unfinished thought. We ground this account in teacher excerpts, changes across successive analyses, and encounters with reviewers. These return trails make visible the epistemological dissonance between recursive becoming and demands for linear, discretely bounded academic knowledge.
This article examines vulnerability as a gendered mode of affective regulation within conditions of domestic precarity, with particular reference to Tales from a Vending Machine by Anees Salim. While neoliberal precarity has been predominantly theorized in economic terms, its affective constitution within everyday domestic life remains insufficiently explored. With cross references to Judith Butler and Arlie Hochschild, the analysis conceptualizes emotional labor as an internalized, gendered practice through which relational continuity is sustained under conditions of instability. The article argues that emotional regulation operates not merely as a response to precarity but as a constitutive condition of everyday domestic life. Through narrative strategies such as interior monologue and diary form, the text renders visible otherwise obscured affective processes, foregrounding the embodied and discursive dimensions of emotional labor. Tracing the interplay between economic constraint, affective management, and gendered subjectivity, the study demonstrates that emotional labor functions simultaneously as a sustaining infrastructure of domestic life and as a site of cumulative psychological strain. In doing so, it situates literary narrative within broader interdisciplinary debates on vulnerability, affect, and the lived experience of precarity.
The aim of this article is to examine the relationship between aesthetics and ethics in human cultural experience by focusing on the interplay of playfulness and seriousness in Pássaro Junino (Bird of June), a popular musical theater tradition from Pará, Brazil. Reflection on the efforts of resistance and persistence undertaken to prevent the disappearance of the Pássaro led us to construct the notion of playful strenuousness, designating the warrior-like mood of its practitioners in their struggle to preserve and ensure the continuity of this cultural tradition. Playful strenuousness emerges from the co-constructive friction between the disposition to play and the disposition to struggle within the aesth-ethical experience of the Pássaro, guided by and oriented toward an ethics of responsibility for the culture of the other. Methodologically, the study is qualitative, empirical, and conceptual, grounded in the construction of multiple dialogues between empirical forms of knowing and doing, on the one hand, and scientific knowledge, on the other.
Contemporary modern and modernist societies are increasingly marked by fragmentation, relational disconnection, polarization, and the erosion of meaningful human encounters. Within this condition, peace is often reduced to a political or institutional project centered on the absence of conflict, while the existential and relational dimensions of peace remain insufficiently explored. This article philosophically reexamines the meaning of peace through Thich Nhat Hanh’s concept of interbeing, a relational understanding of existence grounded in mindfulness, compassion, and interdependence rather than isolated selfhood. Employing a philosophical-hermeneutic approach and conceptual reflection through close engagement with selected works of Thich Nhat Hanh, this study argues that peace should not merely be understood as a socio-political condition, but as a mode of relational consciousness emerging from the awareness of mutual interdependence. The article further contends that crises associated with fragmented modernity including hyperindividualism, digital alienation, symbolic violence, anthropocentric separation, and the fragmentation of human identity reflect a deeper rupture in relational existence. In response, the philosophy of interbeing offers an alternative framework for reimagining peace as an existential, ethical, and transformative relational practice. By situating Thich Nhat Hanh’s thought within broader discussions of relational peace, modernity, decolonial critiques of separation, contemplative studies, and the human sciences, this article contributes to interdisciplinary conversations in philosophy, peace studies, contemplative studies, and the human sciences. Ultimately, it proposes that the cultivation of awareness, compassionate presence, and relational understanding constitutes a vital foundation for reimagining peace in fragmented modernity without reducing it either to institutional order or to individualized inner calm.
Integral Humanism is a profound socio-political-spiritual doctrine that has inspired numerous politicians and intellectuals across Europe and India. Deen Dayal Upadhyay’s integral humanist principles provided a foundational framework for the Hindu Nationalist Movement in India, while Jacques Maritain’s interpretation of Integral Humanism, originating three decades earlier, became the guiding force behind the Christian Democratic Movement in Europe (Pandit, 2002). Maritain introduced his concept of Integral Humanism in 1936, which was later published in the January 1939 issue of the quarterly journal of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA. Nearly three decades later, in 1965, Deen Dayal Upadhyay delivered his landmark lectures on Integral Humanism in Mumbai, where he contextualized the philosophy within the Indian cultural and spiritual framework.(Kumari J et al., 2021). A crucial element of Integral Humanism lies in its connection to Advaita Vedanta, a cornerstone of Indian philosophy that emphasizes the unity of all existence.(Advaita Vedānta and Swami Alokananda, 2017) Rooted in the non-dualistic vision of Advaita, Integral Humanism adopts the perspective that individual well-being is intrinsically linked to collective harmony. (Ashok Kumar Varma, 2020).This interconnectedness aligns with Maritain’s emphasis on spiritual values and the dignity of the human person.(Ashok Kumar Varma, 2020) Examining the parallels between Maritain and Deen Dayal’s theses reveals that, contrary to Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” hypothesis, there existed a convergence of intellectual traditions between the East and the West(John M. Olin, 2010) .The interplay of Maritain’s Christian philosophy, Upadhyay’s Bharatiya ethos, and the Advaita Vedantic worldview highlights Integral Humanism as a synthesis of diverse cultural and philosophical streams.(Ram Madhav, 2024) (Thakur, 2023). This paper will explore the concept and origin of Integral Humanism, the historical and philosophical ideologies that shaped it, and the diverse worldviews that converged to give rise to this holistic doctrine.
Emotional disorders are among the most prevalent psychological conditions and are significantly shaped by ethnic, racial, and cultural influences. This study aimed to investigate the cultural dimensions of depression, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD) within the Iranian cultural context. A qualitative study was conducted with 103 participants from three ethnic groups (Fars, Turks, and Kurds), divided into patients, laypersons, and professionals. Semi-structured, in-depth individual interviews were conducted, and data were analyzed using conventional content analysis. Analysis of signs and symptoms yielded 11 categories: somatization, negative emotionality, repetition, maladaptive cognition, problematic behavior, avoidance, dysfunction, positive emotionality, arousality, disorganized personality, and awareness. Participants identified three main factors contributing to comorbidity: a shared core among disorders, developmental perspectives, and the absence of interaction between disorders. The primary etiological clusters included physiological foundations, psychological processes, and socio-environmental factors. Health-seeking behaviors encompassed individual factors, social factors, professional treatments, and interpersonal issues. The identified categories illustrated how emotional distress is expressed through both culturally influenced symptom patterns and individual experiences. Findings highlight the importance of focusing on individual patterns in the etiology and treatment of emotional disorders and underscore the need for culturally sensitive approaches in the study of mental health conditions.
This paper maps a minority configuration of suffering in which articulation survives while practical return to life weakens. It begins from a distinction between two contrasting structures. In one, suffering is blocked by difficulty in articulation. In the other, danger emerges when the disassembly of meaning and value outpaces the reconstruction of livable footholds despite high vocabulary, reflective capacity, and existential insight. This paper calls the latter the right peak. What makes the right peak dangerous is not suffering alone, but an asymmetry between disassembly and reconstruction that allows clarity, self-analysis, and expressive power to be misread as signs of safety. At its center lies residual fatality: a lethal inclination that persists after explanation has largely been exhausted. The paper develops this structure through nine interconnected paradoxes concerning misrecognition, structural loneliness, the self-contaminating risk of theory, rational withdrawal, and the possibility that accurate recognition may itself become harmful. The aim is not to propose a diagnosis or protocol, but to offer a conceptual cartography of this structural position, one that remains difficult to see precisely because language remains intact.
Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT occupy a novel structural position within contemporary symbolic life. Rather than treating generative AI as a question of machine cognition or ethical governance alone, this article analyzes it as a transformation in the organization of authority, knowledge, and subjectivity. Drawing on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, media theory, political economics, and the philosophy of technology, the article argues that generative AI comes to occupy a functional position analogous to the Big Other within specific practices of consultation, reliance, and symbolic delegation: users address it as if knowledge were located there, institutions increasingly route epistemic labor through it, and its fluent outputs can appear to stabilize meaning without embodied judgment, responsibility, or desire. In this way, it does not literally become the Lacanian Big Other, nor does it possess symbolic authority in an ontological sense. Unlike institutional authority, which historically depended on visible structures of legitimacy and embodied expertise, algorithmic authority emerges through infrastructural opacity and probabilistic fluency. This shift reconfigures transference and redistributes epistemic trust. The article further argues that AI-driven symbolic cartography encloses linguistic commons within proprietary architectures, altering the political economy of discourse. At the level of subjectivity, compulsive engagement with generative systems reveals an asymmetry between human jouissance and algorithmic repetition. Finally, the phenomenon of hallucination is interpreted as the return of structural lack within computational discourse, exposing the impossibility of total epistemic closure. Generative AI creates a virtual realm for the symbolic order and reshapes the opaque technical systems underpinning it.
The feeling of togetherness, which we understand as creating something larger than oneself with others, often emerges in creative, open-ended interactions. Existing ethnographic accounts suggest that contact improvisation, which is an improvised dance form stressing tactile somatic communication, elicits particularly strong feelings of intimacy and connection. We ask what forms of attention are associated with these feelings and what interactional skills can be used to foster them. To investigate this, in this study, we record eight short contact improvisation duets in controlled conditions. Video recordings are used as prompts for in-depth interviews with dancers involved and with expert contact improvisation teachers. Based on the interviews, we portray togetherness as a state of mindful attunement to one’s partner, in which dancers co-create their dance without visible roles or turn-taking dynamics. We associate togetherness with moments in dance when dancers’ attention is focused on the process happening “in between” individuals, and they feel that the “dance dances itself”. To achieve this state, dancers use deliberate strategies, such as shifting attention focus to peripheral vision, adjusting the speed of their actions, and expanding the field of trust. Our results show that, if theories of social cognition are to be congruent with human experience, they should explain both individual- and collective-level processes.
Semarang experiences increasing urban heat exposure associated with rising temperatures and urban heat island effects. While climatic data document these environmental changes, limited research has explored how university students experience and adapt to heat in their everyday lives. This study examined how a small group of university students in Semarang perceive and negotiate urban heat exposure within their daily routines. Using a qualitative phenomenological design, four students were recruited through purposive sampling based on their experience of adapting to Semarang’s thermal conditions and willingness to participate in Photovoice activities. Participants generated photographs representing heat-related experiences and discussed them during semi-structured interviews. Data were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). The findings revealed four adaptation patterns: clothing modification for thermal comfort and self-presentation, anticipatory use of weather information, bodily heat-management practices such as hydration and sun protection, and activity adjustment through indoor retreat and schedule modification. These strategies were shaped not only by environmental conditions but also by participants’ prior thermal experiences, mobility patterns, and subjective interpretations of comfort. The findings suggest that participants primarily employed problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies to manage everyday heat exposure. This study contributes a context-specific understanding of urban heat adaptation among university students in Semarang and demonstrates the value of Photovoice and IPA for capturing lived environmental experiences.
Perezhivanie as one of the main concepts of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), related to psychology and personality development, has been widely used by scholars interested in pedagogy, teacher training and language learning. However, multiple interpretations and vagueness of the concept have made its meaning too elusive. This article a theoretical contribution to further development of this category through enriching it with Bakhtin’s aesthetic theory, informed by autoethnographic material. Bakhtin’s theory of artistic creation can provide analytical tools to understand the creative process of deep changes in the psychological system through an aesthetic lens and conceptualise it via literary devices. In this article I propose three situations (absurd, picaresque, and ressentiment) as examples of how the dialogue between CHAT and Bakhtin’s aesthetic theory can provide insight in understanding deep personality change and development. In the end, I have used the theoretical framework as an interpretive tool to briefly analyse the autoethnographic data in relation to my own situation of becoming an environmental scholar-activist.
Literature traces the footsteps of time across history and civilization. Literary imagination unveils the shadow of truth which is beneath the glare of opinion. Margaret Atwood, a contemporary Canadian author and two-time Booker Prize winner, published the MaddAddam trilogy in the early twenty-first century. The trilogy, comprising Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam, belongs to the tradition of speculative fiction. Though taken together as a volume, each text stands independently, especially Oryx and Crake, the first installment, which was published in 2003. Atwood’s narrative presents a stark dystopia by juxtaposing two temporal dimensions, the world before and after a bioengineered apocalypse. The engineered pandemic that caused the apocalypse is referred to metaphorically as the “waterless flood” in The Year of the Flood. The apocalypse emerges from a range of sequences including unchecked corporate power, technocratic overreach, and ecological disregard. In Oryx and Crake, the population are depicted not merely as a victim but as the major architects of their own downfall. This study foregrounds a nuanced question beyond the ecocritical approach that how ecological disruption affects human psychology. The study traces how the two realms, the environmental welfare and the human psychological health, are intertwined. In the fiction, these two realms form a complex matrix that ultimately led to catastrophe. Using the theoretical lens of ecopsychology, the study examines how Atwood constructs this ecological-psychological relationship, urging a re-evaluation of human responsibility in the Anthropocene.
Care operates at the intersection of intimacy and structure, becoming a key lens through which to understand how migration reshapes gendered lives. This article explores how African migrant women living in Southern Spain negotiate caregiving practices across migration, focusing on the reconfiguration of care responsibilities, support networks, and gender relations in their everyday lives. The study adopts an intersectional feminist perspective to examine how care is shaped by the interaction of gender, migration status, and race in a new cultural context. The findings show that migration entails a profound transformation of care arrangements. While women lose the extended family and community networks that previously sustained caregiving, this absence becomes a key factor prompting the questioning of traditional gender roles within the household. At the same time, participants identify access to public healthcare, education, and social services in Andalusia as a significant structural difference, even as their position as migrant and racialized women generates barriers to fully accessing these resources. The analysis highlights care as a central site where inequalities, resistances, and negotiations converge. Women simultaneously experience increased caregiving burdens, new forms of vulnerability linked to institutional dependence, and opportunities to renegotiate responsibilities with male partners. By situating care at the intersection of informal support systems and welfare-state structures, this study contributes a nuanced understanding of how migration reshapes caregiving practices and gender relations, challenging linear narratives of either empowerment or deterioration in migrant women’s lives.
This study aims to develop an in-depth understanding of the longitudinal process of identity reconstruction and the reclamation of professional existence from the perspective of a public servant who has experienced workplace violence. To do so, we tracked the trajectory of a Brazilian employee over 24 months. Adopting a strategic single-case design selected for its high explanatory power and idiographic depth, we analyzed themes through a phenomenologically informed reflexive thematic analysis and narrative reconstruction. Three major themes captured the progression from vulnerability to agency: (a) institutional coping, (b) sensemaking and meaning-making, and (c) identity reconstruction. Second, these themes revealed that recovery was not a return to baseline but a process of existential transformation. The process began with a fractured, self-diminishing identity and advanced by legitimizing undervalued forms of knowledge through “job crafting,” reconciling a ‘broken self’ with a ‘determined self.’ Crucially, we found that substantial amounts of sedimented professional capital were insufficient to prevent illness; instead, sustainable reintegration relied on an environment characterized by relational recognition. Based on the results, we discuss how identity reconstruction becomes a form of freedom, where agency is reclaimed not through passive obedience but through creative restructuring within the system’s fissures. This study contributes to organizational and scholarly understandings by showing that sustainable meaning derives from the essence of work identity rather than from bureaucratic tenure.
Self-concept is central to human development, yet its philosophical dimensions remain underexplored in the context of hearing-impaired students. While inclusive education emphasizes academic and social participation, it often approaches selfhood through psychological or instrumental lenses, overlooking deeper existential, cultural, and spiritual dimensions. This paper addresses this gap by integrating existential and phenomenological philosophies with cross-civilizational insights from Advaita Vedanta, Islamic teachings, and Sufi allegory. Complementing these perspectives, Fariduddin Attar’s Mantiq-ut-Tair (Conference of the Birds) allegorizes the journey of self-discovery, resilience, and transcendence, further highlighting the relational and transformative dimensions of identity. Weaving these philosophical traditions together, the paper constructs a multidimensional framework for understanding self-concept among deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students, moving beyond deficit-oriented narratives to embrace empowerment, relationality, and self-actualization. The study contributes to philosophy of education by demonstrating how integrating Western and non-Western traditions can enrich theoretical and pedagogical discourse, offering new ways to conceptualize inclusion and human flourishing. This framework has implications not only for educational practice but also for reimagining the ontology of disability, suggesting that silence, difference, and alternative modes of being can be sites of philosophical insight and transformative learning.
