Practice and Evidence of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 2008
This paper describes the progress of a project running at the University of Glasgow to develop el... more This paper describes the progress of a project running at the University of Glasgow to develop elements of Enquiry Based Learning (EBL) in undergraduate degree courses across a range of disciplines. It focuses on the second part of the project but an overview of the first part is also given. During phase 1 of the project, in the summer of 2007, seven undergraduate students spent four weeks working together exploring enquiry based learning (EBL) in the institution's central, educational development unit. This phase was ...
Critchley’s new cookbook for experimentation with quasi-, proto-, or postpolitical forms of assoc... more Critchley’s new cookbook for experimentation with quasi-, proto-, or postpolitical forms of association is compelling, often beautiful. Indeed, one cannot help but be struck by the way such good writing, such clear formulations, of our contemporary political scene have emerged under the rubric of the theologico-political (assuming here that alongside Critchley’s book we could also name Paul Kahn’s Political Theology, Giorgio Agamben’s Power and the Glory, and Eric Santner’s Royal Remains, all important figures in my little pantheon of “where we are today”). And while this clustering of such forceful cultural diagnoses under the aegis of political theology for me still feels surprising, maybe this surprise is just the point, an indication of a form of sensibility that has not yet become common, tired, worn out. In any case, this is a surprise worth reflecting on in the sense that we could wonder aloud about why it is that—at this particular moment in time—an attention to the theologico-political seems to focus very directly and illuminatingly on those contemporary paradoxes, deadlocks, or experiences of what Boris Groys explores so provocatively in his Communist Postscript as being oddly “stuck” in and with the problem of the common and the shareable.
Cinema Theory has for a long time been haunted by the question: is noir a genre of its own kind o... more Cinema Theory has for a long time been haunted by the question: is noir a genre of its own kind or a kind of anamorphic distortion affecting different genres? From the very beginning, noir was not limited to hard-boiled detective stories: reverberations of noir motifs are easily discernible in comedies (Arsenic and Old Lace), in westerns (Pursued), in political and social dramas (All the King’s Men, The Lost Weekend), etc. Do we have here a secondary impact of something that originally constitutes a genre of its own (the noir crime universe), or is the crime film only one of the possible fields of application of the noir logic? That is, is noir a predicate that entertains toward the crime universe the same relationship as toward comedy or western, a kind of logical operator introducing the same anamorphic distortion in every genre to which it is applied, so that finding its strongest application in the crime film turns on nothing but historical contin-
Cinema Theory has for a long time been haunted by the question: is noir a genre of its own kind o... more Cinema Theory has for a long time been haunted by the question: is noir a genre of its own kind or a kind of anamorphic distortion affecting different genres? From the very beginning, noir was not limited to hardboiled detective stories: reverberations of noir motifs are easily discernible in comedies (Arsenic and Old Lace), in westerns (Pursued), in political and social dramas (All the King’s Men, The Lost Weekend), etc. Do we have here a secondary impact of something that originally constitutes a genre of its own (the noir crime universe), or is the crime film only one of the possible fields of application of the noir logic? That is, is noir a predicate that entertains toward the crime universe the same relationship as toward comedy or western, a kind of logical operator introducing the same anamorphic distortion in every genre to which it is applied, so that finding its strongest application in the crime film turns on nothing but historical contingency (Žižek, Tarrying with the N...
Practice and Evidence of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 2008
This paper describes the progress of a project running at the University of Glasgow to develop el... more This paper describes the progress of a project running at the University of Glasgow to develop elements of Enquiry Based Learning (EBL) in undergraduate degree courses across a range of disciplines. It focuses on the second part of the project but an overview of the first part is also given. During phase 1 of the project, in the summer of 2007, seven undergraduate students spent four weeks working together exploring enquiry based learning (EBL) in the institution's central, educational development unit. This phase was ...
Critchley’s new cookbook for experimentation with quasi-, proto-, or postpolitical forms of assoc... more Critchley’s new cookbook for experimentation with quasi-, proto-, or postpolitical forms of association is compelling, often beautiful. Indeed, one cannot help but be struck by the way such good writing, such clear formulations, of our contemporary political scene have emerged under the rubric of the theologico-political (assuming here that alongside Critchley’s book we could also name Paul Kahn’s Political Theology, Giorgio Agamben’s Power and the Glory, and Eric Santner’s Royal Remains, all important figures in my little pantheon of “where we are today”). And while this clustering of such forceful cultural diagnoses under the aegis of political theology for me still feels surprising, maybe this surprise is just the point, an indication of a form of sensibility that has not yet become common, tired, worn out. In any case, this is a surprise worth reflecting on in the sense that we could wonder aloud about why it is that—at this particular moment in time—an attention to the theologico-political seems to focus very directly and illuminatingly on those contemporary paradoxes, deadlocks, or experiences of what Boris Groys explores so provocatively in his Communist Postscript as being oddly “stuck” in and with the problem of the common and the shareable.
Cinema Theory has for a long time been haunted by the question: is noir a genre of its own kind o... more Cinema Theory has for a long time been haunted by the question: is noir a genre of its own kind or a kind of anamorphic distortion affecting different genres? From the very beginning, noir was not limited to hard-boiled detective stories: reverberations of noir motifs are easily discernible in comedies (Arsenic and Old Lace), in westerns (Pursued), in political and social dramas (All the King’s Men, The Lost Weekend), etc. Do we have here a secondary impact of something that originally constitutes a genre of its own (the noir crime universe), or is the crime film only one of the possible fields of application of the noir logic? That is, is noir a predicate that entertains toward the crime universe the same relationship as toward comedy or western, a kind of logical operator introducing the same anamorphic distortion in every genre to which it is applied, so that finding its strongest application in the crime film turns on nothing but historical contin-
Cinema Theory has for a long time been haunted by the question: is noir a genre of its own kind o... more Cinema Theory has for a long time been haunted by the question: is noir a genre of its own kind or a kind of anamorphic distortion affecting different genres? From the very beginning, noir was not limited to hardboiled detective stories: reverberations of noir motifs are easily discernible in comedies (Arsenic and Old Lace), in westerns (Pursued), in political and social dramas (All the King’s Men, The Lost Weekend), etc. Do we have here a secondary impact of something that originally constitutes a genre of its own (the noir crime universe), or is the crime film only one of the possible fields of application of the noir logic? That is, is noir a predicate that entertains toward the crime universe the same relationship as toward comedy or western, a kind of logical operator introducing the same anamorphic distortion in every genre to which it is applied, so that finding its strongest application in the crime film turns on nothing but historical contingency (Žižek, Tarrying with the N...
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