Seattle police sergeant Lou Boldt is stunned when the local fire investigator presents him with frightening evidence in a series of fires that have occurred in the Seattle area. These white-hot fires burn so cleanly that even the ash disintegrates--leaving not a trace of its victims or any evidence of criminal activity. Only when Boldt is taunted by someone sending him pieces of melted green plastic--houses from a Monopoly board--does he realize that an arsonist is involving him in a deadly game.
Writing Beyond Recognition: Queer Re-Storying for Social Change documents and analyzes the insidious ways heteronormativity produces homophobia and heterosexism, including how this operates and is experienced by those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and queer. Using critical arts research practices read through queer and feminist theories and perspectives, the chapters in the book describe how participants who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered gained critical insights by learning to write and read about their experiences in new ways. Their revised queer stories function to enable a movement beyond merely recognizing to appreciating and understanding those differences. Robson offers a powerful argument about how everyone is narrated by and through discourses of gender and sexuality. Therefore, the content of the book is directed at all readers, not only those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered or queer. The book will be important as a text in any course or area of study that is focused on inclusive education, cultural studies in education, critical arts research methods, gender and sexuality studies, and critical literacy approaches in education. Perfect for courses such as: Qualitative Research Methods | Social Justice | Ethnography | Critical Qualitative Inquiry | Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies | Participatory Action Research | Arts-Based Research | Writing | Autobiography | Curriculum Studies | Teacher Education | Cultural Studies | Reading and Literacy Education | Community Education | Adult Education
This thesis addresses the need to balance the use of facial recognition systems with the need to protect personal privacy in machine learning and biometric identification. As advances in deep learning accelerate their evolution, facial recognition systems enhance security capabilities, but also risk invading personal privacy. Our research identifies and addresses critical vulnerabilities inherent in facial recognition systems, and proposes innovative privacy-enhancing technologies that anonymize facial data while maintaining its utility for legitimate applications. Our investigation centers on the development of methodologies and frameworks that achieve k-anonymity in facial datasets; leverage identity disentanglement to facilitate anonymization; exploit the vulnerabilities of facial recognition systems to underscore their limitations; and implement practical defenses against unauthorized recognition systems. We introduce novel contributions such as AnonFACES, StyleID, IdDecoder, StyleAdv, and DiffPrivate, each designed to protect facial privacy through advanced adversarial machine learning techniques and generative models. These solutions not only demonstrate the feasibility of protecting facial privacy in an increasingly surveilled world, but also highlight the ongoing need for robust countermeasures against the ever-evolving capabilities of facial recognition technology. Continuous innovation in privacy-enhancing technologies is required to safeguard individuals from the pervasive reach of digital surveillance and protect their fundamental right to privacy. By providing open-source, publicly available tools, and frameworks, this thesis contributes to the collective effort to ensure that advancements in facial recognition serve the public good without compromising individual rights. Our multi-disciplinary approach bridges the gap between biometric systems, adversarial machine learning, and generative modeling to pave the way for future research in the domain and support AI innovation where technological advancement and privacy are balanced.
In this Novel, our hero, Arthur, a regular church goer and a married father of two children, leaves his native Wales, UK, for a two years assignment with a charitable foundation on the Island of Mindanao, the Philippines. Exposed to a more permissive society than his own, he fends off various temptations until he meets Didi. His love for her breaks his ability to think rationally and he accepts to participate in a scheme developed by her shrewd brother that would free him to marry her. For a fee and with the help of the Islamic fundamentalist movement of Abu Sayyaf, active on the Island, his death is staged in a car accident where his body is presumably burnt beyond recognition. Arthur then marries Didi under an assumed name. With time his life becomes increasingly turbulent and circumstances force him to try and redeem his original identity. However, he finds the task daunting as he struggles to start a new life with Didi, back in the UK, and reconcile it with his own British family who gave him for dead twelve years earlier. Eventually, things fall into place with the various pieces fitting together. While the characters in this novel are fictious, their actions are woven in non-fiction real life settings, reflected in present day issues, such as the difficulties sometimes encountered in keeping up a married life, the behavior of persons as they move from one culture to another and the underlying causes and realities of fundamentalist insurgency movements.
Challenging the fundamental tenet of the multicultural movement -- that social struggles turning upon race, gender, and sexuality are struggles for recognition -- this work offers a powerful critique of current conceptions of identity and subjectivity based on Hegelian notions of recognition. The author's critical engagement with major texts of contemporary philosophy prepares the way for a highly original conception of ethics based on witnessing. Central to this project is Oliver's contention that the demand for recognition is a symptom of the pathology of oppression that perpetuates subject-object and same-different hierarchies. While theorists across the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences focus their research on multiculturalism around the struggle for recognition, Oliver argues that the actual texts and survivors' accounts from the aftermath of the Holocaust and slavery are testimonials to a pathos that is "beyond recognition". Oliver traces many of the problems with the recognition model of subjective identity to a particular notion of vision presupposed in theories of recognition and misrecognition. Contesting the idea of an objectifying gaze, she reformulates vision as a loving look that facilitates connection rather than necessitates alienation. As an alternative, Oliver develops a theory of witnessing subjectivity. She suggests that the notion of witnessing, with its double meaning as either eyewitness or bearing witness to the unseen, is more promising than recognition for describing the onset and sustenance of subjectivity. Subjectivity is born out of and sustained by the process of witnessing -- the possibility of address and response -- which puts ethicalobligations at its heart.
When Benjamin was a boy he believed in the afterlife. When he was bitten by a cat as a boy he became a devout ailurophobe and cat bully who vowed to hate cats forever. When he was an adult Benjamin was startled by a stray cat at a rooftop dance party. He fell off the roof and the next morning he woke up inside a cardboard box behind a 1970s-themed Disco bar. He was later taken in and adopted by his neighbor and friend and spent the rest of his life as the very thing he detested, a cat. Author's Note: When you finish the book there is a very simply crochet pattern at the end for you to enjoy!
Do you need healing from the heartbreaking consequences of your past? Have intrusive memories, soul ties, and debilitating anger bombarded your thoughts, kept you in bondage and consumed your very soul? Katherine takes you on a personal journey of her life, love, and losses. This is not a fairy-tale. It is a candid, courageous, real-life story of a woman broken beyond recognition. Childhood abuse and abandonment, drug addiction, prostitution, anger, and emotional distress form this narrative. But it is also dynamic evidence of the power of divine intervention. Whether you are a sinner or saint suffering from trauma, haunted by your troublesome past, hurt by the people you trusted most, hooked on drugs and alcohol, searching for true love, behind the jailhouse bars or a “fly” girl devastated on the inside, this book can help you. The difficulties you face right now may be linked to your past, but your past doesn’t have to control your present or future. “Katherine’s journey expresses the prophetic revelation of coming out of the wilderness. I believe this book is a catalyst for transformation.” –John Harke, Passion Ministries “This book reaches into the psychology of men in ways that traditional therapy falls short. It’s a microcosm of the depth of divine grace.” –Dr. G.E. Lassiter Sr., Love Unlimited Church “Katherine is one of the most influential leaders, powerful speakers, progressive thinkers and writers in last 20 years.” –Bishop John Mark Richardson Sr., New Journey Jurisdiction
WINNER OF: Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book from the Caribbean Philosophical Association Canadian Political Science Association’s C.B. MacPherson Prize Studies in Political Economy Book Prize Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term “recognition” shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples’ right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics—one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a “place-based” modification of Karl Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation” throws light on Indigenous–state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization.
In Beyond Doer and Done To, Jessica Benjamin, author of the path-breaking Bonds of Love, expands her theory of mutual recognition and its breakdown into the complementarity of "doer and done to." Her innovative theory charts the growth of the Third in early development through the movement between recognition and breakdown, and shows how it parallels the enactments in the psychoanalytic relationship. Benjamin’s recognition theory illuminates the radical potential of acknowledgment in healing both individual and social trauma, in creating relational repair in the transformational space of thirdness. Benjamin’s unique formulations of intersubjectivity make essential reading for both psychoanalytic therapists and theorists in the humanities and social sciences.
