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Janus Head

Volume 19, Issue 1, 2021
Essays on COVID-19

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Displaying: 1-17 of 17 documents


essays

1. Janus Head: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
John Pauley

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2. Janus Head: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Maeve Callan

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This essay explores connections between the fourteenth-century “Black Death” and the current COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the ways in which prejudice and inequality exacerbate their impacts and considering how the upheaval created by catastrophe creates opportunity for greater equity and community, but also exploitation and oppression, depending on human response.
3. Janus Head: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Lenore Metrick-Chen

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Trump and his administration brought with them an inflammatory rhetoric that reduced complex issues into the simplified polarity of "us" and "them." With this as the dominant paradigm, racism was encouraged and spread like a virus throughout the nation, appearing in heightened jingoism against other nations, anger towards fellow citizens and violence towards neighbors. When the pandemic Covid-19 spread throughout the nation and the world, it became politicized, used by Trump as a novel corona vehicle help inflame intolerance. He repeatedly associated China and Chinese people with the virus to forward his political agenda regarding US trade with China and he used the resulting demonization of China as a foil for his complicity with Russian crimes. In response to increased and well-publicized acts of violence against Black Americans, systemic racism against Black people is finally being noticed. However, anti-Asian violence has largely been disregarded. This paper discusses both the increased violence against Asian Americans and the lack of attention to it. Dividing the paper into three sections, I correlate an artwork to the main issue in each section: the state-of-affairs provide a context in which to understand the artworks. Reciprocally, because artworks evoke an embodied understanding, involving our senses as well cognition, artworks change our relationship with issues from topical to personal. The artworks recontextualize what we thought we already knew and present possibilities for constructing the world differently.
4. Janus Head: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Eric Kwame Adae Orcid-ID

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Trendwatchers have spotted some seismic shifts in relations between business and politics. Particularly, Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) are increasingly weighing in on greater good issues. Although a global phenomenon, current CEO activism scholarship reflects a Western focus; an ideological bias for modernist perspectives; a preponderance of White male CEO voices, and the relative elision of female activist CEOs. While, generally, no empirically-based typology of the sociopolitical issues that matter to activist CEOs exists, the specific range of causes of particular concern to non-Western CEO activists is neatly absent. This paper addresses all of these concerns, offering an inquiry into the emerging CEO activism phenomenon in the Ghanaian non-Western sociocultural milieu. Data collection entailed three separate rounds of fieldwork that saw long interviews with a corps of 24 self-identified informants, featuring an even split of men and women activist CEOs. The hermeneutic phenomenological theme-based approach guided data analysis. Following extant brand activism models, a typology of six clusters of CEO activism issues is offered that highlights the weightier matters of sociocultural activism, environmental activism, business/workplace activism, political activism, legal activism, and economic activism. Sociocultural issues include Ghana’s fight against COVID-19, where activist CEOs pooled resources to construct and equip a new multimillion dollar 100-bed infectious diseases hospital facility, embarked on risk communication campaigns, donated critical health supplies, funded the screening and testing of employees, provided food and essential supplies to vulnerable groups, and called out the government for lapses in the management of this health crisis. Besides internationalizing CEO activism studies for the strategic communications, leadership, business ethics and responsible management fields, the results suggest the need to consider the perspectives of CEO activists in non- Western societies. This paper contributes mainly to current discussions in CEO activism (aka corporate social advocacy) and brand activism. It contributes to other theoretical and conceptual streams, including covenantal notions of public relations, Caritas, Ubuntu Philosophy, Africapitalism, and postmodern values in strategic communication. This paper contributes to the upper echelon perspective; insider activism; sustainability transitions; and current discussions concerning how to address issues of diversity, equity, inclusivity, and social justice in the public relations literature. Policy implications are laid out, and areas for future research are indicated.
5. Janus Head: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Simon Ravenscroft Orcid-ID

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This essay uses Hannah Arendt’s theory of action and her critique of modern politics to explore the themes of predictability and unpredictability in human affairs, and the political meaning of interruption and refusal. It draws on the life and literature of the Russian avant-gardist, Daniil Kharms (1905- 1942), alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky and several contemporary theorists, to offer a reading of action as taking the form, specifically, of playful interruption and generative refusal. A marginal figure whose deeds and writings were disruptively strange, Kharms is taken as an exemplar of action in this ludic mode. This serves to elaborate upon Arendt’s concepts of plurality and natality, while challenging some weaknesses in her theory of action as a whole.
6. Janus Head: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Tom Grimwood Orcid-ID

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A number of writers have recently challenged the notion of the demonic as mere superstition, arguing for a need to understand the demonic in terms of the often-obscured ways in which it operates in relation to contemporary thought and critique. Building on this, this paper offers an analysis of the demonic as a rhetorical concept. Moving beyond the notion of the demonic as simply a trope at the disposal of a speaker or writer, the paper explores how the expression of the demonic performs a more foundational, repetitive, and indeed, deceptively banal role in shaping the discourses it inhabits. This precedes and frames the ethico-political discourses on evil commonly associated with demonology today.
7. Janus Head: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Norman Kenneth Swazo

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In view of intensified danger from multiple causes manifesting what Heidegger understood as the rule of planetary technology and the possibility of pitting meditative thinking (besinnliches Denken) against the dominant calculative thinking (rechnendes Denken), there is enhanced need to think further Heidegger’s turn to the poetic word of Hölderlin. Here Heidegger’s attentiveness to Hölderlin’s “The Ister” is engaged with a view to clarifying the significance of “becoming homely” and “dwelling” as part of the task of thinking required of Western humanity if it is to appropriate a “second beginning” such as Heidegger intimates possible. Absent this thinking, the “first beginning” initiated in Greek antiquity promises a thoroughly techno-cratic world order.
8. Janus Head: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Dušan Bjelić Orcid-ID

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In the 1990s, Julija Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek developed a unique discourse within psychoanalysis - the psychoanalysis of the Balkans. Their cultural and political analysis represented the Balkans as a pathological region of nations suffering from the syndrome of an “archaic mother.” They propose in their different ways that the subject (nation) must radically separate from oedipal attachment to the attachment to nationalism as unemancipated Oedipus and subordinate to the authority of the symbolic father, that is, to the West. At the heart of such an approach is a conservative policy of labeling the Balkans as primitive behind Kristeva and Žižek loom self-orientalization and geopolitical de-identification with the Balkans as a precondition for their cosmopolitan and universalist identity.

poems

9. Janus Head: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
John Pauley

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10. Janus Head: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Arthur Brown

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11. Janus Head: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Arthur Brown

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12. Janus Head: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Arthur Brown

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13. Janus Head: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Arthur Brown

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14. Janus Head: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Arthur Brown

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15. Janus Head: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Arthur Brown

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16. Janus Head: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1
Arthur Brown

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17. Janus Head: Volume > 19 > Issue: 1

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