Marquée par le pluralisme, la décennie 1970 a vu apparaître l’étiquette « Narrative Art » regroupant de nouvelles pratiques conceptuelles, orientées vers la subjectivité et la transmission de récits, qui combinent photographie et texte. Cette étude retrace pour la première fois l’histoire de cette mouvance internationale encore méconnue et mal définie. L’analyse de sa fortune critique et l’observation de ses différents contextes d’émergence, en Europe et aux États-Unis, vise à dégager la spécificité d’un champ de recherche révélant une sensibilité de l’époque, où l’identité, la mémoire, l’autobiographie et la fiction constituent des thèmes dominants. Il s’agit également de mettre l’accent sur l’articulation polysémique de l’image et du langage au sein du dispositif photo-texte, une forme hybride qui se prête à de multiples manipulations et modes de diffusion. Les œuvres rattachées au Narrative Art invitent par ailleurs à réfléchir aux mutations introduites par le photoconceptualisme. En investissant les ressources formelles de la photographie, ces expérimentations traduisent le passage d’une assimilation du style documentaire et amateur à une attention esthétique grandissante qui renoue avec le paradigme pictural. Cette prolifération des usages artistiques du médium photographique a généré une investigation soutenue de ses propriétés et conventions, qui a contribué simultanément à interroger son objectivité et à accélérer son institutionnalisation. / Marked by pluralism, the Seventies witnessed the appearance of the label « Narrative Art » uniting new conceptual practices, oriented towards subjectivity and the transmission of stories, which combine photography and text. This study recounts for the first time the history of this international trend still misunderstood and ill-defined. The analysis of its critical fortunes and the observation of its different contexts of emergence, in Europe and in the United States, aims to bring out the specificity of a research field revealing the sensitivity of the period, for which identity, memory, autobiography and fiction constitute prevailing themes. It is also the matter of stressing on the polysemous articulation of image and language within the photo-text scheme, a hybrid form which lends itself to numerous manipulations and modes of diffusion. Moreover, the works attached to Narrative Art induce to consider the mutations introduced by photoconceptualism. In investing the formal resources of photography, these experiments convey the shift from an assimilation of the documentary and amateur style to a growing aesthetic attention which takes up again with the pictoral paradigm. This proliferation of the artistic uses of the photographic medium has generated a sustained investigation of its characteristics and conventions, which has contributed simultaneously to question its objectivity and to accelerate its institutionalization.

How people survive and thrive through adversity is a question which has prompted much research. There is little agreement on the definition of resilience beyond the basic idea of "bouncing back", resulting in many studies which offer contradictory and confusing information. This study sought to organise the literature into broad conceptual categories, and attempted to explain some of the differences in definitions and research methods at the level of paradigm. A need to reconceptualise resilience was identified and undertaken in view of input from ecosystemic, cybernetic and postmodem paradigms. Attention was given especially to the role oflanguage, meaning and description, and the role of the observer/researcher in such a reconceptualisation. Guidelines were offered for approaching research in future. Finally, the context of the researcher was examined in an attempt at self-reflexivity as part of the process of research as proposed in the reconceptualisation. / Psychology / M.A. (Clinical Psychology)

This is a study of the creation and negotiation of different forms of knowledge about dengue fever. I explore how anthropology, in collaboration with ideas and practices drawn from science and art, may transform public understandings of dengue. Dengue is a vector-borne disease transmitted to humans by the bite of a mosquito which is infected with the dengue virus. Mosquito-borne diseases have normally been treated through vector control and the elimination of breeding sites. Until 1960, the use of the pesticide DDT allowed the virtual eradication of Aedes aegypti (Ae. aegypti) in many places of the world. DDT was banned in most of the world by 1970 and by 1980 the focus on vector-control was replaced by a discourse of sanitation, in which health authorities tried to ‘educate’ populations and ‘teach’ proper hygienic habits to avoid mosquito-human contact. At present, these practices are changing again. The World Health Organisation (WHO) suggests that dengue incidence could be reduced at least 50% by 2020 through applying health campaigns and social interventions that involve having people participating in the control of dengue outbreaks. In this thesis I explore how WHO guidelines are applied in the control of dengue in Medellín, and how we can think about the concepts of ‘knowledge’, ‘education’ and public health campaigns through ethnographic methods. My project has been about looking at how different understandings – or different forms of knowledge – are part of interactions of different ‘publics’, non-expert citizens, virologists, entomologists and artists. My argument is that health campaigns should be re-designed – privileging relations and stimulating debate – by focusing on experience and moving towards managing the disease and living with the mosquito. Contrary to the different models enacted in health campaigns – which neglect the value of everyday experiences – I advocate for interdisciplinary collaboration as a relational art strategy that can generate an intersubjective exchange of experiences.

Paradoxale et anachronique, l’idée d’un « conceptualisme romantique » apparaît dès 1977 dans un article que Boris Groys consacre aux artistes moscovites imprégnés d’idéalisme russe. Réexaminée, dans les années 2000, par Jörg Heiser et Jan Verwoert, l’hypothèse critique est ensuite élargie à la scène conceptuelle internationale, où subsisteraient certains traits du premier romantisme allemand, comme l’écriture collective, la forme fragmentaire ou l’esprit du Witz. Contre la biographie, la subjectivité et l’expression, l’art conceptuel affiche pourtant, à la fin des années 1960, un anti-romantisme virulent. Défendant une pratique « émotionnellement neutre » où l’idée serait devenue « une machine à faire l’art », le mouvement se fait l’écho de l’antihumanisme des structuralistes et de leur mise à mort de l’auteur. Un existentialisme contrarié persiste pourtant chez certains artistes, continuant d’explorer les concepts de l’identité et de l’intersubjectivité, à l’ère des systèmes capitalistes et des réseaux cybernétiques. C’est à force d’explorations linguistiques que le sujet conceptuel se romantise, redécouvrant, par le biais des incohérences de la logique formelle, du mysticisme des pensées combinatoires et de l’ambiguïté de l’ironie, les bénéfices d’un « langage non gouverné ». / Paradoxical and anachronistic, the idea of a “romantic conceptualism” first appeared in 1977 in an article by Boris Groys dedicated to Muscovite artists imbued with Russian Idealism. Reexamined in the 2000s by Jörg Heiser and Jan Verwoert, the critical hypothesis was extended to take in the international Conceptual scene, where certain elements of the original German romanticism survived, such as collective writing, the fragmentary form or the Witz spirit. Against biography, subjectivity and expression, at the end of the 1960s Conceptual Art still showed itself to be virulently anti-Romantic. Defending an “emotionally dry” practice in which the idea would become “a machine that makes the art”, the movement echoed the Structuralists’ anti-Humanism as well as their putting to death of the author. Yet a frustrated existentialism persisted among certain artists who continued exploring the concepts of identity and intersubjectivity, in an epoch of capitalist systems and cybernetic networks. It is through linguistic explorations that the conceptual subject romanticises itself, rediscovering, through incoherencies in formal logic, the mysticism of combinational thoughts and from the ambiguity of irony, the benefits of a “non-governed language”.

The conceptualist view of property is based on the conceptual system or hierarchy of rights conceived by Grotius and developed by the pandectists. It rests on the assumptions that ownership is neutral and timeless. As such it has a number of abstract, timeless and universal characteristics, namely absoluteness, uniformity and exclusivity. Combined with liberalism, this concept of property becomes the guarantee of liberty and equality. The first part of this study shows that not only are the assumptions historically unfounded, but this conceptualist view of property made liberty and equality for women, in particular, impossible. The liberal, conceptualist property concept is a modernist construct that cannot guarantee either liberty or equality. The question then becomes whether constitutionalism can do what conceptualism cannot- can die constitutional protection of property guarantee liberty and equality. The second part of this study suggests that the answer to this is an "it depends" kind of answer. It depends on the structure of a constitution, underlying philosophical, political and, above all, hermeneutics theories employed by courts. In the South African context courts need to reject the private-law conceptualist view of ownership in favour of a constitutional property concept. This last-mentioned concept should be based on the values and normative context of the 1996 constitution. As such it involves value choices and making a political stand. Courts need to abandon conceptualist frameworks and decide on the proportionality of limitations on property. The conclusion to this study suggests that a feminist understanding of human beings as socially constructed and constrained, so that democracy alone cannot provide an answer to the counter-majaritarian dilemma, is necessary far an understanding of property. The creative tension provided by the feminist conflict between a political agenda and a respect far contexts may provide a framework far adjudicating an property issues. / Private Law / LL.D.

Recent scholarship on conceptual writing has turned to the role of affect in poetry. Critics such as Calvin Bedient claim that by using appropriated text and appealing to intellectual encounters with poetry based around a central “concept,” conceptual writing diminishes or even ignores affect. Bedient in particular is concerned with affect's relationship with political efficacy, a relationship I call “æffect.” I make the case that because of its use of appropriated material, we must examine the transformation from source text to poetic work when discussing affect in conceptual writing. Kenneth Goldsmith's Seven American Deaths and Disasters, which consists of transcriptions of audio recordings made during and immediately following major American tragedies, involves a specific kind of affective transformation: the cliché. I discuss what makes a cliché, especially in relation to affect, before turning to Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings and her concept of “stuplimity.” Stuplimity is an often ignored and not easily articulated affect that arises from boredom and repetition. Stuplimity is critical for Seven American Deaths and Disasters, especially for the “open feeling” that it produces in its wake. This uncanny feeling indicates a changing tide in conversations about conceptual writing. Rather than focus on the affect of æffect, we should instead turn to the effect. / text

A dissertação aqui presente procura cartografar a produção artística da brasileira Regina Vater, desde seu período de formação durante os anos 60 no Rio de Janeiro, até meados da década de 90, quando já fixara residência nos EUA. Vater é contemporânea de um período fértil da produção plástica nacional, tendo participado tanto dos pressupostos figurativos dos anos 60, até os conceitualismos dos 70, culminando assim nas décadas seguintes em um ecologismo artístico votivo que se perpetua até os dias atuais. Nesse percurso, deu-se ênfase nas relações entre sua produção artística e o movimento feminista brasileiro, procurando com isso estabelecer vínculos teóricos e críticos com as principais questões feministas em voga e as práticas artísticas conceitualistas e de vanguarda. / The dissertation presented here seeks to chart the artistic production of the Brazilian artist Regina Vater, since her formation during the period of 60`s in Rio de Janeiro until the mid-90´s, when she already set residence in the U.S.. Vater is contemporary of a fertile plastic production in the country, taking part in both figurative assumptions of 60´s, until the conceptualism of 70´s, thus leading to the following decades in an artistic votive environmentalism that is perpetuated to this day. In this course, was placed emphasis on the relationship between artistic production and Brazilian feminist movement, seeking to establish theorists and critics links with the principal feminist issues and practices in vogue and the artistic avant-garde and conceptual.

Submitted by Maicon Juliano Schmidt (maicons) on 2015-06-03T13:53:36Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Debora Fontoura de Oliveira_.pdf: 2619652 bytes, checksum: e8c53e9ee6aabe91ccc15fcccae1c55c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-06-03T13:53:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Debora Fontoura de Oliveira_.pdf: 2619652 bytes, checksum: e8c53e9ee6aabe91ccc15fcccae1c55c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-04-09 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / PROSUP - Programa de Suporte à Pós-Gradução de Instituições de Ensino Particulares / Este trabalho visa apresentar e avaliar as diferentes teorias sobre o processo perceptivo, a fim de defender que a percepção é um processo objetivo, categórico e não conceitual. A ideia é, juntamente com a posição adotada por Tyler Burge,assegurar que a percepção é um processo representacional no qual a experiência perceptual consiste na apreensão direta dos dados sensoriais, os quais servem de base para a construção das representações perceptuais. As representações perceptuais são concebidas como proxytypes, que servem como o conteúdo não conceitual da percepção e correspondem ao mundo externo. Estes representam os objetos e os estados de coisas do mundo devido a uma semelhança entre as propriedades dos objetos e as propriedades sensoriais representadas pelos indivíduos. Os objetos e as suas propriedades são, então, representados a partir da integração das informações sensoriais pelo mecanismo da percepção categórica, o qual é responsável pela discriminação e identificação dessas informações em categorias perceptuais independentes de estruturas conceituais. Desse modo, propomos que a percepção é objetiva por dois motivos: (a) porque ela é um processo que pressupõe como verdadeiro um realismo frente ao mundo físico e nos permite acessar e conhecer os objetos dispostos no mundo de modo objetivo, e (b) por ser um processo que é alcançado tanto por animais humanos quanto não humanos. Ela é um processo categórico porque ela admite que as informações sensoriais são categorizadas em representações perceptuais durante a própria experiência perceptiva, função esta realizada pela percepção categórica. Ao mesmo tempo, ela é não conceitual, uma vez que qualquer criatura, dotada de um sistema sensorial e nervoso, é capaz de perceber o mundo mesmo quando ela não possui um conceito para descrever dado conteúdo ou ainda não possua a capacidade de se referir a ele demonstrativamente. / This work aims to present and evaluate different theories regarding the perceptual process, defending that the perception is an objective, categorical and non-conceptual process. The idea is to, along with Tyler Burge’s position, ensure that the perception is a representational process where the perceptual experience consists in the direct apprehension of sensory data, which are used as the basis for the construction of perceptual representations. The perceptual representations are designed as proxytypes, and they serve as the non-conceptual content of the perception and correspond to the outside world. They represent the objects and the states of affairs of the world due to a similarity between the properties of the objects and the sensory properties represented by the individuals. The objects and their properties are then represented through the integration of sensory information by the mechanism of categorical perception, which is responsible for the discrimination and identification of that information in perceptual categories, and are independent of conceptual structures. This way, we propose that the perception is objective for two reasons (a) because it is a process that assumes as true a realism of the physical world and allows us to access and understand the objects arranged in the world in an objective way, and (b) because it is a process that is accomplished by both human and non-human animals. Perception is a categorical process because it admits that sensory information is categorized into perceptual representations during the actual perceptual experience, and this function is performed by categorical perception. At the same time, it is not conceptual, since any creature equipped with a sensory and nervous system is able to perceive the world even if it does not have a concept for describing given contents or not yet has the ability to refer to them demonstratively.

This Thesis engages with contemporary philosophical controversies about the nature of dispositional properties or powers and the relationship they have to their non-dispositional counterparts. The focus concerns fundamentality. In particular, I seek to answer the question, ‘What fundamental properties suffice to account for the manifest world?’ The answer I defend is that fundamental categorical properties need not be invoked in order to derive a viable explanation for the manifest world. My stance is a field-theoretic view which describes the world as a single system comprised of pure power, and involves the further contention that ‘pure power’ should not be interpreted as ‘purely dispositional’, if dispositionality means potentiality, possibility or otherwise unmanifested power or ability bestowed upon some bearer. The theoretical positions examined include David Armstrong’s Categoricalism, Sydney Shoemaker’s Causal Theory of Properties, Brian Ellis’s New Essentialism, Ullin Place’s Conceptualism, Charles Martin’s and John Heil’s Identity Theory of Properties and Rom Harré’s Theory of Causal Powers. The central concern of this Thesis is to examine reasons for holding a pure-power theory, and to defend such a stance. This involves two tasks. The first requires explaining what plays the substance role in a pure-power world. This Thesis argues that fundamental power, although not categorical, can be considered ontologically-robust and thus able to fulfil the substance role. A second task—answering the challenge put forward by Richard Swinburne and thereafter replicated in various neo-Swinburne arguments—concerns how the manifestly qualitative world can be explained starting from a pure-power base. The Light-like Network Account is put forward in an attempt to show how the manifest world can be derived from fundamental pure power.

- Doctoral Thesis Second Nature: A Contribution to the Social Philosophy of Art (Jakub Stejskal) In what sense can one speak of art as a source of insight into the social? In my thesis I focus on criticizing a position that explains art's social-cognitive potential in terms of its purported intrinsic adherence to a normative view of society as a reconciled second nature: Art either offers insight into the nature of social reality as such a second nature or it makes us feel its unreconciled condition and becomes a promise of reconciliation. I identify two traditions of art interpretation holding this position, which both have their intellectual roots in early German Idealism: the Frankfurt Critical Theory and analytic Kantian Revisionism. In the writings of their adherents art is - implicitly or explicitly - understood essentially as a means of enchantment and affirmation that can at most suppress its affirmative character in the name of future reconciliation. Against this conception I develop an understanding of artistic modernism as belonging to an aesthetics of disenchantment, which takes art to be a way of establishing a specific cognitive distance from the social second nature without evoking reconciliation.