ACERP2023 Pre-Recorded Virtual Presentations

Interdisciplinary - Conflict Resolution and Mediation Studies

67352 | What Does It Mean to Give Faithfully in the COVID-19 Pandemic and Polarized America? A Case Study of Liberal Mennonites

Tomomi Naka, Tottori University, Japan

This presentation aims to examine the ways in which American liberal Mennonites collectively and individually allocate their financial resources to reflect their faith. Based on their religious interpretation, Mennonite congregations have encouraged their members to offer funds for peace promotion and support for the poor and socially disadvantaged. However, it is sometimes challenging to figure out the best way to do so with their limited resources. Recent situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and economic and political polarizations, created diverse occasions to reflect on how they could demonstrate their religious commitments through their offerings. Based on interviews and observations between 2020 and 2022, this study discusses how Mennonite congregations and their members individually and collectively deal with the many, and sometimes competing, needs and desires to give. With uncertainty brought on by the pandemic, congregations initially provided emergency assistance to those who were in need. Additionally, many congregants extended their contributions to aid such efforts. As the situation gradually returned to the pre-pandemic period, congregations began working to reinforce their religious communities and adjust the new spending priorities. While several members were willing to support such initiatives, their offering practices were not necessarily easily adjusted. Incorporating recent studies on religious giving, this presentation suggests that religious giving can provide an important window through which we can explore how believers imagine and reimagine their faith communities.

Philosophy - Philosophy and Religion

68900 | East West Discourse: An Esoteric Comparison of the Western Philosophy and the Eastern Vedanta

Chandrabati Chakraborty, Adamas University, India

The progressive emergence, in the course of evolution of life, mind and personality, requires to assume a creative Principle operating timeless Reality in the temporal.The difference between Western philosophy and India, concerns the origin and the purpose of the philosophical enquiry. While the former wonders at the external world, the latter is awareness of perennial suffering associated with human existence.The present world suffers from a basic form of rootlessness,reflecting many psychological, philosophical studies.Alienation,a major theme of human condition in the contemporary epoch has emerged as natural consequences of existential predicament,observed by Edmund Fuller as, “man suffers not only from war,persecution, famine and ruin but from inner problems....a conviction of isolation, randomness, meaninglessness in his way of exixtence.”.The post world war scenario well analyses the chaos and anguished estrangement.In such conditions when the West cries out , “What is there?I know first of all that I am.But who am I?..... What I am seperated from I cannot name it. But I am seperated.”(Dostoevsky:The Confession), Vedantic philosophy looks upon the Pilgrim’s Progress of Humanity as being essentially one, reflecting a basic human experience, outbraving indecorous dictims that have failed to give due honour to human beings,echoing with ultimate certitude:

(The Atman is the same in the ant, the same in the gnat, the same in the elephant, the same in these three worlds....the same in the whole Universe). The present paper aims at a comperative study of cultural and philosophical expression taking in view extensive illustrations from The Vedantic lores of Indian philosophy.

Philosophy - Philosophy and Technology

69051 | METAssemblage: Meta, Privacy and the Meaning of Faces

Mario Rodriguez, American University in the Emirates, United Arab Emirates

Revelations regarding major tech companies and their collaboration with government have opened up a new dialogue regarding online monitoring, adding to preexisting concerns over self-presentation and access to personal information. There is a new awareness of “dividuals” and “data doubles” online, as in the work of scholars such as Andrejevic, Murakami-Wood and others. Users of social media are followed by shadow identities and digital doppelgängers, and the public has a growing awareness of algorithmic bias in automated systems. The digital reconstruction of users by the company Meta, for example, within a “surveillant assemblage” provokes comparison with Badley’s conceptualizations of body horror. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Facebook profile picture. This study explores the meaning of facialization on Facebook and the implications of reducing users to faces in the context of surveillant assemblage, and Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on faces. Taken together, “data doubles” and facialization on Facebook arguably perpetuate a kind of violence against users, both symbolically and in terms of personal privacy. The paper considers the historical use of facial recognition software by Meta and Facebook, including implications for women, and also the “coded bias” of Buolamwini. What have Meta and Facebook already implemented, and what does the company hope to implement (e.g. “Deep Face”)? How might this enable Facebook to further augment or transgress users’ privacy and digital personae?

Philosophy - Philosophy and the Arts

68357 | How to Plan Urban Environments: Rethinking Criteria for Urban Planning Verena Gottschling, York University, Canada

Urban Planning (UP) is about the ways a city should be structured. I address the meta-question of the criteria used to evaluate and judge the appropriateness of UP. The issue is pressing: given climate change, more extreme temperatures and weather conditions, and fast-growing populations in cities we need to rethink UP, its criteria and their relationship. I argue that (1) are there are no uniform criteria to judge good UP, moreover, (2) the reason is not just simply high context specificity. Rather, (3) the criteria in given contexts are necessarily conflicting and stand in severe tension to each other. I defend a relational concept of UP inspired by considerations in the 1960s we need to consider (a) place and context, as suggested by Utzon’s architectural transculturation; and (b) the psychological needs of people, as Aalto. I suggest a framework characterized by continuing search for coherence between combined architectural elements, social contexts, psychological needs and cultural influences. Consequently, even in specified contexts absolute judgments about good UP are void. I will (4) show that modern claims in Philosophy of Psychology and Neuroaesthetics developed for Art (Zeki 2001, Ramachandran/Hirstein 1999) are transferable and give new insights for better characterizations for several valuable acp.iafor.org/acp2023-virtual-presentations