Innovate this ! Bullshit in academic libraries and what we can do about it

Academic libraries produce and perpetuate their fair share of management speak - or, bullshit. We create checklists of core competencies to actualize our value propositions. We revere the Thought Leaders in the Innovative Library of the 21st Century. We create synergistic space to incubate the next big game changers. We create and administer committees and task forces that in turn generate a never ending cycle of emails to nail down agendas and meeting minutes. I will reflect on how this proliferation of empty language affects our collective psyche, and what we might do to shovel our way out and focus on meaningful work that provides resonance through all stages of our careers.

Innovate this ! Bullshit in academic libraries and what we can do about it

Academic libraries produce and perpetuate their fair share of management speak - or, bullshit. We create checklists of core competencies to actualize our value propositions. We revere the Thought Leaders in the Innovative Library of the 21st Century. We create synergistic space to incubate the next big game changers. We create and administer committees and task forces that in turn generate a never ending cycle of emails to nail down agendas and meeting minutes. I will reflect on how this proliferation of empty language affects our collective psyche, and what we might do to shovel our way out and focus on meaningful work that provides resonance through all stages of our careers.

Mircea Eliade et l’herméneutique psycho-historique

"Mircea Eliade and Psycho-Historical Methodology. Starting from Thomas Kuhn’s seminal work on scientific paradigms, the venerable concept of Weltanschauung (world-vision) can be upgraded in order to reach a psycho-historical understanding of cultural evolutions. In this paper I intend to adapt to contemporary cultural hermeneutics a schema proposed by Nietzsche and developed by Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis. In this model, the relations between the individual consciousness and the unconscious offer the blueprint for describing the dynamics of the collective psyche. The model states that, when a culture (religion, etc.) has been overruled by a new dominant culture (religion), it remains active by way of survivals and reminiscences (Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin) and eventually, after a period of persecution and censorship, it will re-emerge in a new form, transformed by the general principles of the dominant culture but nevertheless contesting and challenging it. I will attempt to show that such a psychohistorical dialectic has occurred six successive times in the history of European civilization. Keywords: psycho-history, Mircea Eliade, remerging cultures, European civilization, history of religions "

The Emergence of I

Among the ancients, there was no proper conception of the I. Yet an I emerges in ancient Israel. I therefore inquire into the philosophical anthropology of ancient Israel. How did the I emerge? By interpreting the Song of Songs as political myth, from which a philosophical anthropology can be unearthed and reconstructed, I theorize that not only an I, but also a different kind of we emerged through gift-dynamics. Then I demonstrate that these gift-dynamics are compatible with the ancient Israelites’ religious-political institutions and manifest itself in their collective psyche.

Celebrity Personas, Self-help Culture, and Collective Psychology: Reflections and transformations

The self-help industry bombards us with books and messages about how to live happier lives, but their advice is not always helpful. Celebrity endorsements of self-help methods and mythologies in popular culture create communicative tensions in our collective psyche, feeding messages of hope and optimism that are often, somewhat ironically, detrimental to our happiness. As a result, we now have a growing body of anti-self-help literature telling us to ditch the positive thinking, cut the endless fixation on goal setting, and live more resiliently in the face of life’s inevitable adversity (Brown 2016; Manson 2016; Brinkmann 2017).

Analyzing Psychoanalytical Perspective of Immigration and Marginalization: Hyphenated Diasporic Identities in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

This research explores the psychoanalytical aspects of the lives of South Asian immigrant characters in the novel Brick Lane (2003). The novel highlights the theme of migration, describing the shock of arrival, the process of settlement, and the subsequent problems involved in the transition from one country to another, as well as from a rural environment to an urban. This research explores cultural issues related to migrant diaspora living in London. The novel constructs a detailed exploration of the psychological responses of particular individuals to the traumas of migration and marginalization, alongside an investigation of the psychological roots of the current conflicts between different ethnic and religious groups. This research represents an interdisciplinary study, combining a detailed reading of Brick Lane with recent psychoanalytic analyses of personality development and the effects of geographical displacement and migration on the individual and collective psyche. Salman Akhtar’s work on the psychological causes and consequences of migration is used as a major theoretical framework in this research. The novel is mainly concerned with the personal development of a protagonist Bangladeshi woman, Nazneen, in England. This paper presents the diasporic consciousness along with the psychoanalytical perspectives of the migrants of the South Asian region and how they face the issues of cultural ambivalence.

De/Constructing White Supremacy: Contending Antipodal Politics in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940)

Arguably, fear, anger and despair dominate the poor, uneducated, twenty-year-old Bigger Thomas’s daily existence in Richard Wright’s Native Son. Nevertheless, old lies of white supremacy that have held black people in perpetual turmoil are crushed through violent reaction when Bigger strikes at white hegemony through the killing of Mary Dalton. This backlash throws the white community into panic mode. Apparently, African Americans’ increased susceptibility to the inferiority complex of the 1930s was dictated by the dubious racial stratification that allotted a place of superiority to the white race over the black race, which was considered inferior. This misconception was supported by Arthur de Gobineau’s The Inequality of Human Races ([1853] 1915) and Lucien Levy-Bruhl’s How Natives Think (1926). Bigger’s humanity, like that of other African-American youth of this period, is overwhelmed by the racial prejudices of the supremacist whites which demand that they must be meek, submissive and self-debased. As summed up at the trial of Bigger, American society gives black people no options in life and essentially denies them the basic rights of all humans to fulfil their destiny in relationship to the measure of their intelligence and talents. These denials have led to anger, shame and fear which have snowballed into crime and murder. We may, without difficulty, agree that Wright’s portrayal of the killing of Mary is not in any way designed to make Bigger a hero of the black protest against racial marginality. Rather, Bigger is created to accentuate the effects of suffocating social conditions that could turn an individual into an American “native son” raised in an atmosphere of transcendental hopelessness and weaned on the diet of violence, hatred and viciousness which provided the immediate platform for the launching of a backlash against American racism. Using the foregoing as its standpoint, this article examines white/black antipodes and race tensions in Richard Wright’s Native Son. It employs the Freudian conceptual construct of the human psyche, divided into the id, ego and superego, as a theoretical framework. A parallel of the hypothesis is conceived to expound the white/black taxonomy in race discourse. In Freudian psychology, the id is irrational and it projects pleasure principles. The ego is, however, rational and mature, while the superego mediates between the id and the ego. These paradigms are used to explore the collective psyche of race theorists in the paper.

Archetypes of Corporativity and Hierarchy in the Internet

C.G. Jung defined the concept of a collective unconsciousness (CU). Fundamentally, Jungian archetypes of the unconscious may be understood as quantum electrodynamic (QED) patterns that exist at deep levels of human individual and collective psyche. Unlike the concepts of Sigmund Freud, comparative research demonstrates that Jungian dream therapy—which is based on archetypal dynamics—accords with the most recent research in the field of neurolinguistics. Archetypal dynamics of the collective unconsciousness have direct applicability to research on sentience in a quantum electrodynamic field according to quantum field theory (QFT). Increasingly in today's science that which has been considered unconscious must be understood as “sentient.” Before Freud and Jung, science did not contemplate the unconscious because a “nullity” cannot be measured.

Values in the contemporary Russian society

The report highlights the results of sociological studies devoted to the value system of the Russian society. Value priorities of Russians are considered in dynamics and in comparison with other European countries. In the light of empirical data various stereotypes and autostereotypes of national identity are critically analyzed, including the widespread myths about Russians’ special inclination towards collectivism and the lack of civil society in Russia. On the basis of data obtained by an original method of psychosemantic sounding the deep structures of the collective psyche together with the specific social representations of Russians and the “world view” that the majority of them share are analyzed. Considerable attention is also paid to the subject-matters of national pride, and to the peculiarities of Russian historical consciousness. On the basis empirical data collected by means of sociological research the question of Russia’s place in the system of relations of East – West is posed and discussed.