A teoria da sociedade de Niklas Luhmann, construída como teoria de sistemas sociais, encontra freqüentes críticas voltadas contra seu pretendido distanciamento moral e político no diagnóstico da sociedade contemporânea. Pesa sobre a teoria de sistemas sociais a generalização de um juízo prematuro conforme o qual ela se reduziria a uma sociologia conservadora de tendência tecnocrata, uma herdeira radicalizada do positivismo. Contudo, e contrariamente a essa percepção geral, a teoria de sistemas sociais parece ter um potencial crítico ainda inexplorado em toda a sua extensão, e que pode ser ativado por uma leitura que permita expandir o alcance da teoria. Essa expansão pode ser promovida quando a teoria de sistemas sociais é mobilizada para fundamentar uma teoria da comunicação de matriz materialista (capítulo 1), capaz de permitir que sua categoria fundamental a autopoiese seja compreendida em estreita relação com a apresentação do capital por Karl Marx (capítulo 2) e confrontada com uma teoria do capitalismo (capítulo e 3). Na seqüência, a teoria de sistemas sociais é empregada para dar conta das múltiplas dimensões da desigualdade social (capítulo 4) e da dinâmica dos conflitos e das contradições da sociedade atual (capítulo 5). Esta tese propõe um primeiro passo na direção de uma recepção crítica da obra teórica de Niklas Luhmann. Trata-se de testar os limites e as possibilidades da teoria de sistemas sociais. / Niklas Luhmanns theory of society, built as theory of social systems, is usually met with criticisms pointed against its intended moral and political distance in diagnosing contemporary society. Weights upon the social systems theory the generalization of a premature judgement according to which, this theory would be reduced to a conservative sociology with technocratic tendencies, a radicalised heir to positivism. However, and against this usual perception, the theory of social systems seems to have a critical potential not yet developed in its full extension and which may be activated by an interpretation capable of expanding its range. This extension can be carried out when we handle social systems theory in order to ground a materialistic theory of communication (chapter 1), enabling a close connection between its main conceptual category autopoiesis and Karl Marxs presentation of the capital (chapter 2), as well as a confrontation with a theory of capitalism (chapter 3). Afterwards, social systems theory is used to explaining the manifoldness of social inequality (chapter 4) and the dynamics of contemporary conflicts and societal contradictions (chapter 5). This thesis proposes a first step in the direction of a critical reception of Niklas Luhmanns theoretical work. It is a matter of testing limits and possibilities of social systems theory

Orientador: Renato Eugênio da Silva Diniz / Resumo: Apropriando-se do materialismo histórico-dialético e da pedagogia histórico-crítica como fundamentos metodológico e teórico, respectivamente, este trabalho tem como tema de pesquisa a influência da pós-modernidade e do neoliberalismo na Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC) do Ensino Médio para a disciplina escolar Biologia. Parte-se da tese central de que as políticas educacionais brasileiras desenvolvidas e difundidas no final e no início dos séculos XX e XXI, possuem articulações com o neoliberalismo e a pós-modernidade. Sendo fruto desse período sócio-histórico, a BNCC para o ensino de Biologia – bem como seus fundamentos gerais para o Ensino Médio – também remetem a essas articulações, que, no campo educacional, são expressas em concepções pedagógicas relativistas: o neoprodutivistismo, o neoescolanovismo, o neoconstrutivismo e o neotecnicismo. Diante disto, este estudo objetiva indicar e desvelar as expressões pedagógicas relativistas na BNCC do Ensino Médio no que se diz respeito às concepções de ensino, aprendizagem, escola, homem, estudante, professor, conhecimento, mundo, trabalho e sociedade. O método de pesquisa e de análise dos dados é o materialismo histórico-dialético que supera, por incorporação, a lógica formal. A fim de desvelar o imediatismo do currículo de Biologia, parte-se da categoria simples intitulada trabalho pedagógico. A categoria simples carrega os traços essenciais do objeto de pesquisa e a apreensão dessas determinações permite a definição das c... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Doutor

Given the state of the planet at present —specifically, the linked global ecological and economic crises that conjure dark imaginings and nihilistic actualities of increasing resource depletion, poisonings, and wide-scale sufferings and extinctions—I ask What might we hope now? What points of intervention offer possibility for transformation? At best, the response can only be partial. The approach this thesis takes initiates from specific pre-discursive assumptions. The first understands current conditions as having been produced, and continuing to be so, through practices that enact and sustain neoliberal relations. Secondly, these practices are expressive of a subjectivity tied to a Cartesian worldview, which, therefore, needs to be interrupted at its foundational roots. Thirdly, the scaffolding that supports this subjectivity draws on Newtonian science and neo-Darwinian narratives deemed to be natural law and, therefore, ontological, immutable reality. Contrary to modernist thinking, I premise that these two strains, subjectivity and science, are neither autonomous nor ontological, but that they are materially and contingently integral. Finally, this thesis presumes that different and life-affirming trajectories are, in fact, desired. An integral framing of science and subjectivity provides a productive method of feminist science studies analysis and theorization. Observing the capitalist Western social imaginary through this lens reveals its philosophical and scientific infrastructures to be outdated and crumbling. Observing how emerging scientific narratives in quantum physics and systems-biology intersect with marginalized theories in process-philosophy and subjectivity reveals a life-affirming imaginary of difference, one that arrests nihilism and sets ethical trajectories in motion. Certain, though not all, percepts of feminist new materialism engage twentieth and twenty-first century sciences successfully to show that ethicality matters. Though many questions remain, this points auspiciously towards the possibility for a transformed politics of justice.

<p>This research uses the composition practices of three experienced letterpress typesetters as a case study for the development of a methodology for studying human-technology interaction. This methodology tries to take seriously the implications that theories of materiality have for empirical research in writing and technology.</p> <p>Data was collected from three experienced typesetters, each of whom was observed setting type for two hours, then interviewed for 1 ½ to 2 hours, using observation footage to inform interview questions. Interview transcripts and observation footage were then coded for observable material intra-actions and the influences that characterized those actions and brought them into being.</p> <p>Data analysis produced six desiderata, or desires for design, that emerged as driving the composition process: 1) a desire to use the technology, 2) a desire for efficiency, 3) a desire to imitate/defer to historical practices, 4) a desire for letter-level correctness, 5) attention to aesthetics, and 6) a desire to communicate.</p>

Orientador: Luciana Maria Lunardi Campos / Resumo: A presente pesquisa buscou analisar relações entre os conhecimentos sobre o ser humano e as concepções de mundo dos licenciandos em Ciências Biológicas, tendo em vista a relação dialética estabelecida entre indivíduo-sociedade. A partir dos questionamentos: 1. Quais concepções estes licenciandos possuem sobre o ser humano? 2. Quais tipos de conhecimentos auxiliam na formação destas concepções? 3. Como estes conhecimentos se relacionam com as concepções de mundo destes estudantes? Dois instrumentos de coleta de dados foram desenvolvidos (questionário e entrevista) com o objetivo de apreender as determinações gerais e particulares dos licenciandos acerca das relações descritas. No total, 55 estudantes de três turmas de uma universidade estadual pública responderam ao questionário e quatro deles participaram da entrevista após contato. Os fundamentos filosóficos formadores das concepções dos licenciandos foram: idealismo, materialismo, concepções transcendentais, ontologia, epistemologia, sujeito abstrato, sujeito concreto, lógica formal e lógica dialética. Além destes, os conceitos de classe e de práxis foram utilizados para constituir a concepção de mundo dos licenciandos, tendo em vista o referencial ontológico do materialismo histórico dialético adotado na pesquisa. Assim, a partir deste referencial, as múltiplas determinações contraditórias do objeto (ser humano) foram utilizadas para a análise das relações dialéticas presentes nas concepções de mundo dos licenciandos, send... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: This research aimed to analyze the knowledges about the human being and their relations with the world views of Biological Sciences undergraduates. The relationships were analyzed by a dialectical perspective of individual-society. From the concerns: 1. What conceptions these students have about the human being? 2. What types of knowledge helps them form these conceptions? 3. How these knowledges relate with the world views these students carry? Two data collection instruments were developed (questionnaire and interview) in order to apprehend the relationships between the knowledge about the human being and the world views of the students. 55 students of three different classes of a public state university answered the questionnaire and four of them the interview. The philosophical fundaments that formed the undergraduates’ world views were: idealism, materialism, transcendental conceptions, ontology, epistemology, abstract subject, concrete subject, formal logic and dialectical logic. The concepts of class and praxis were used to build the world views of the students, having the same theoretical reference used in this research: dialectical historical materialism. Thus, by this reference, the object’s multiple contradictory determinations were used to analyze the dialectical relations present in the world views of the students, and they were: subject x object; objectification x appropriation; teleology x causality; humanization x alienation. The undergraduates, under the infl... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre

As a life-limiting illness mediated by rapid advancements in biomedical technologies, metastatic breast cancer (MBC) now presents in increasingly unexpected ways where women are living longer. These women’s lives may not fit well with established healthcare and societal understandings of an advanced breast cancer, including disease progression and prognosis. This qualitative inquiry aims to think differently about women’s daily lives with an ongoing MBC. While also considering the underexplored context of these women living in smaller communities. I explored communities on Central Vancouver Island, which is on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. The research question directing my inquiry was: how are women, who are living with MBC as a life-limiting illness over an extended period, produced as both living and dying subjects? Informing this research was a feminist relational materialist approach with a healthcare practitioner orientation, primarily informed by Braidotti. I used multiple data collection methods centred around sequential interviews with 14 women who had been living relatively well with MBC for at least two years. Working with relational materialist and post qualitative principles, analysis disclosed the importance of temporal pulses and bodily transpositions in women’s lives. Temporal pulses speak to how time was laden with tensions such that a distinctive part of living with ongoing MBC was an embodied sense of fluctuating time. There was also the idea as to how, at any given moment, women could bodily know their illness and mortality through varying frequencies of the presence and/or absence of markers of living and dying, often at the same time. Bodily transpositions speak to how life-limiting illness was not so much about women moving from one set of circumstances to another as part of a clean-edged transition. Rather, the women navigated daily life with few set waymarkers. Within this context, ‘hope’ took on new forms and living with their advanced breast cancer became a kind of endurance demarcated by what I refer to as generative living. These findings call into question the ways in which MBC gets talked about in categorical terms as palliative or end of life, and/or as chronic. Findings are an opportunity for healthcare practitioners, policymakers, and interdisciplinary leaders to further understand MBC specific to our contemporary context. Project findings renew discussions of how best to support women’s needs, including the ways MBC is talked about. There is also the opportunity to direct further research into MBC as an example of today’s shifting boundaries of living and dying (which I am framing as living<=>dying). / Graduate

(English) By the time the liberals triumphantly proclaimed the end of history, some environmentalists started to mobilize the public against western modernity by proclaiming the end of nature. For many people, the environmentalist agenda meant a new ideology that could exceed the classical ones; many, on the other hand, understood environmentalism as radically anti-ideological. In this thesis, I'll focus on the relationship between nature and society that lies in the core of both, environmental thought and modern emancipatory projects. I'll try to expose the inherent contradictions that the environmental discourse inherited from liberalism and Marxism.

This dissertation on “Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism” proceeds from the premise that a perspectival shift occurred in the early 2000s that altered the tenor of British climate fiction published in the decade that followed. The release of a third Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, prompted an acute awareness of the present as a post-apocalyptic condition bracketed by catastrophe and extinction. In response, British authors experimented with double-mapping techniques designed to concretize the supranational scope of advanced climate change. An increasing number of British authors projected the historical ruination of remote island communities onto speculative topographies extrapolated from IPCC Assessments to compel contemporary readers to conceive of a climate-changed planet aslant. Given the spate of ruined-island- as-future-Earth novels published at the turn of the millennium, this dissertation intervenes in extant criticism by identifying David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) as noteworthy examples of a metamodernist subgenre that makes a distant future of a “futureless” past to position the reader in a state of imagined obsolescence. This project consequently draws on metamodernist theory as a useful heuristic for articulating the traits that distinguish metamodernist cli-fi from precursory texts, with the aim to connect British post-apocalyptic fiction, climate-fiction, and literary metamodernism in productive ways. As the body chapters of this dissertation demonstrate, metamodernist cli-fi primarily uses the double-mapped island to structurally discredit the present as singular in cataclysmic consequence and, therefore, deserving of an unprecedented technological fix. Ultimately, in attempting to refute the moment of completion that would mark history’s end, metamodernist cli-fi challenges the givenness of an anticipated future through which to anchor the advent of an irreversible tipping point. Given the relative dearth of literary scholarship devoted to metamodernist cli-fi, this project posits that this subgenre warrants greater critical attention because it offers potent means for short-circuiting the type of cynical optimism that insists on envisioning human survival in terms of divine, authoritarian, or techno-escapist interventions. / Graduate / 2021-08-08

This study aims to examine outdoor play as a phenomenon in a selection of Swedish preschools; the purpose, the teaching that occurs and to explore the term “teaching” through a new materialist lens. We employ a thematic analysis which focuses on issues such as the environment, staff attitudes, materials available together with curriculum aspirations. Through interviews, case studies and blueprints over two schoolyards we have painted a picture that is more complex than at first glance. A new materials interpretation offers a view that there are more aspects at play than simply staffing levels or the availability of an adequate schoolyard. Other agents that shape the outdoor experience include non-human elements such as materials, the environment, discourses and organizational structures as well as phenomena like the weather. The outdoors doesn’t just offer a range of pedagogical opportunities, it also offers vital opportunities for both staff and children to enjoy restoration; a break for both mind and body. Finally, we review and re-interpret the term “teaching” through a new materials perspective. With the inclusion of materials as potential producers of knowledge we broaden this term to acknowledge the importance of children’s interactions with their environment. We posit that this allows children to elevate their own learning experiences to equal or more than the value of learning facilitated by an adult.

“Jarðnæði; Tranquil Terra” is a meditation on the relationship between the dwelling and the dramatic ever-changing landscapes of the rural Icelandic countryside. The project is anchored in a place with a long and complex history and with a profound relationship with its landscapes - a place of wandering churches, lifesaving shipwrecks, growing houses, teeth in the ground, paths lined with crosses to protect against the ghosts and other dark creatures. It is a place where everything is vibrant, alive and has a story to tell. In the journey to the Tranquil Terra I navigated by means of cartography and critical fiction in search of ways to rethink the Icelandic architectural heritage beyond the nature-culture divide. / "Jarðnæði; Tranquil Terra " är en meditation över förhållandet mellan bostaden och det ständigt föränderliga  landskapet på den isländska landsbygden. Projektet är förankrat i en plats med en lång och komplicerad historia och med en djup relation med sitt landskap - en plats för vandrande kyrkor, skeppsvrak, växande hus, vägar kantade med kors för att skydda mot spöken och andra skrämmande varelser. Det är en plats där allt är levande och har en historia att berätta. I resan till Tranquil Terra navigerade jag med hjälp av kartografi och kritisk fiction på jakt efter ett nytt sätt att tänka kring det isländska arkitektoniska arvet utöver klyftan mellan natur-kultur.