Favour Borokini

@favourboroks.bsky.social

375 Followers 457 Following

Recovering *anemoiac*. Law PhD researcher researching legal materiality in avatar/tech design and use. Legal Materiality. Legal Humanities. University of Nottingham, Horizon CDT. Nigerian. Gawking Akure girl.

Inequality is, here, a problem without origin or beneficiary, and equality has become a governmental project promising benefits to all, not a distributive recalibration in which the shares of some will contract. Yet, non-subordinates do get contacted in another guise: as the unmarked universal class comprising equality’s political audience. Contemporary equality governance aligns the credibility, legitimacy and future of its agenda with touching this broader, proto-sceptical public. As a result, various venues, spaces, arenas and relays get utilised—from the Conservative press to ventures such as the EHRC’s summer camp for youth “champions”Footnote14—to render amenable, over a temporally extended “now”, public opinion’s easily worked-up surface.
Remember that for anyone to check that your work was written by Al using AI, they will have to feed your original text into Al, and that text entered into Al models can become part of the training data. So these weird vigilantes are in fact only part of the problem. think writers need to start pushing pack by clearly demanding that their work not be fed into Al checkers without their permission. If you make a submission to a publisher or organisation you can say: I do not give permission for my work, in part or in full to be fed into any Al model, whether for the purpose of analysis, fact checking or Al-use detection. Because if you want to become a virtue signalling anti-Al vigilante you do not get to use Al as your cudgel.
A poem by Charles Causley Innocent's Song Who's that knocking on the window, Who's that standing at the door, What are all those presents Lying on the kitchen floor? Who is the smiling stranger With hair as white as gin, What is he doing with the children And who could have let him in? Why has he rubies on his fingers, A cold, cold crown on his head, Why, when he caws his carol, Does the salty snow run red? Why does he ferry my fireside As a spider on a thread His fingers made of fuses
A clear-eyed understanding of the strengths and limitations of a techn is a step towards advancing it. Blind cheerleading or unalloyed cynicism, in contrast, are just steps towards advancing your influencer career..
The conflict around the Benin Bronzes is not really about climate controlor museum storage. It is about two entirely different understandings of what these pieces are. In the West, they are treated as fragile artifacts. For the Benin people, they are living vessels that hold spirit, lineage, and presence. The West sees objects. Benin sees ancestors. So when the Oba has a different vision for how they should live, it clashes with Western preservation ideals. But once you understand the spiritual role these bronzes play, the debate shifts. These are not collectibles. They are sacred technologies. And if an object is sacred, the culture that created it must have full authority over it. Repatriation without autonomy is not repatriation at all. It is supervision. The decision belongs to the Benin people. Only they can decide how a living spiritual object should live.
Let me use an example that is closer to home. My experience has been that, at academic conferences, reading groups or colloquia, or in humanities or law classes, much of the conversation centers on all the issues the book or article under discussion failed to address. Thus, we hear that the author left out a consideration of X, which would have complicated her analysis, or that she failed to recognize the ways in which issues of power were embedded in Y, so she missed a key part of what was "really" going on, etc. Almost inevitably, the piece that was "left out" happens to be the focus of the critic's own scholarly agenda. These are not sympathetic readings. Because human experience is widely varied and multi-faceted, there will always be aspects of an issue that are omitted in any given scholarly account. But instead of focusing on what the author failed to do, we might look at what her particular project was and see if we can form the best possible understanding of that project. I remember
IV. A HERMENEUTICS OF MEANING, FAITH, AND SYMPATHETIC INTERPRETATION Ricoeur contrasts the hermeneutics of suspicion with a hermeneutics of meaning. This hermeneutics is based on a conception of faith. In Ricoeur's words, "The contrary of suspicion, I will say bluntly, is faith. What faith? No longer, to be sure, the first faith of the simple soul, but rather the second faith of one who has engaged in hermeneutics, faith that has undergone criticism, postcritical faith."' 16 Such faith is difficult if one employs the hermeneutics of suspicion because such a skeptical approach tends to promote "knowingness" rather than belief. Once one has exposed or demystified a cultural practice, it will inevitably be more difficult to believe in that practice whole-heartedly. One might accept it as the best of a bunch of poor alternatives, but it will lose its power to inspire. As Rorty argues, "Knowingness is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe. It makes one immune to romantic enthusiasm." '17 For example, he points out that it is difficult to be inspired by a cultural practice while at the same time viewing that practice "as the product of a mechanism of cultural production.""' 8 To view a work in this way, he contends, may yield understanding, but not self-transformation. The hermeneutics of suspicion tends to require that the cultural practices under observation be placed within the framework of the critic. But if a practice, such as the work of the United States Supreme Court, is to have inspirational value, it must be allowed to recontextualize much of what the observer previously thought she knew; it cannot, at least at first, be itself recontextualized by what the observer already believes.' 19 Thus, if we
Screenshot from Conversation article titled Deeply religious African countries (surprisingly) provide little state support to religion – unlike countries in Europe by David Jeffery-Schwikkard, King's College London A politician might use religious rhetoric, but this does not mean that it will translate into religious laws. Equally, some state support for religion is not unusual globally. Analyses of single policies need to keep this in mind. This research also upends the way many people normally think about secularism. Many people in Europe have become less religious. Consequently, European states are offered as models of secularism. However, this has it backwards. Despite their electorates being less religious, European states are more involved in religion than their counterparts in sub-Saharan African. If secularism is the separation of religion and the state, then countries in sub-Saharan Africa – which maintain a secular state despite widespread religion – are in fact the exemplar.