News

Critical Terrorism Studies and the Normative Turn

Chair members J. Peter Burgess and Sarah Perret will present a paper entitled 'Law and the politics of uncertainty in French anti-terrorism legislation' at the annual conference.

J. Peter Burgess has recently published an article critiquing Alexandre Wendt's 2015 Quantum Mind and the Social Sciences from the perspective of Vedantic philosophy. 

Abstract

Alexander Wendt’s 2015 The Quantum Mind and Social Scienceis nothing if not true to its aims. Through rigorous argumentation and solid erudition it from the state-of-the art of quantum physics theory to social reality. The result is a set of conclusions about the nature of social life that may appear marginally plausible. And yet the voyage comes at high price, It blithely navigates any traces of meaningful human experience or social relation that does not already hold social scientific currency. It avoids more deeply spiritual connections that have been made tenable by growing literature on the Eastern religious thought. All indices point to an explanation of the remaining quantum riddles through a rebooting of our ontological assumptions of the quantum mechanics. Caught in a narrow understanding of the question of being as the question of ‘which being’, The Quantum Mind misses the chance for truly insightful discoveries about the nature of social relations.    

Amplifiées par la révolution numérique, les « fake news » s’inscrivent dans un contexte plus large et ancien (crise des autorités, montée du relativisme et de l’irrationalisme, mécanismes de rumeur …). C’est pourquoi l’alliance de la technologie et des sciences humaines est nécessaire pour comprendre ce phénomène et lui apporter des réponses appropriées. C’est le but du Fakathon, un hakathon ouvert aux développeurs, chercheurs en SHS et professionnels de l’information.

Identity studies have long understood national identity as a matter of national security. In the high era of terrorism, the question of ‘us and them’ is increasingly collapsing on the question of ‘us and the terrorist’. Identity studies as terrorism studies. The Chair Geopolitics of Risk will welcome a group of international researchers to discuss the rise of identity-politics in a close workshop at Campus Jourdan.