Abstract The positioning of movements for social and political change as forms postemancipation abolition democracy has a long history. Abolition been the watchword under which initiatives proceed to eradicate death penalty, human trafficking, nuclear weapons, hegemony Wall Street, prisons, police, deportation immigrants, more. essays in this forum examine nineteenth-century abolitionism’s comp...

The controversies around the 2020 US presidential elections certainly casts serious concerns on efficiency of current voting system in representing people's will. Is naive Plurality suitable an extremely polarized political environment? Alternate schemes are gradually gaining public support, wherein voters rank their choices instead just for first preference. However they do not capture certain...

The article undertakes a detailed analysis of Day the Laughter Stopped – simple text-based browser game about rape, told from perspective young teenage girl. While seemingly straightforward, uses choice poetics to build expectations agency on side player, only subvert them at most climactic moment, provoking emotional responses and serving as commentary experience loss control words in face tra...

Most text displays an internal coherence structure, which can be analyzed as a tree structure of relations that hold between short segments of text. We present a machine-learning governed approach to such an analysis in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory. Our rhetorical analyzer observes a variety of textual properties, such as cue phrases, part-of-speech information, rhetorical conte...

The emerging "diabetes epidemic" threatens to affect 366 million people worldwide by 2030. In the UK, almost 2 million people (about 3.9 percent of the population) are currently diagnosed with diabetes and it is estimated that a further 1 million people have the disease but do not realize it. The prevalence of diabetes, its complications and their effects on the lives of those living with diabe...

The growth of alternative medicine and its insurgence into the realms of the biomedical system raises a number of questions about the nature of evidence. Calls for 'gold standard' randomised controlled trial evidence, by both biomedical and political establishments, to legitimise the integration of alternative medicine into healthcare systems, can be interpreted as deeply political. In this pap...

posthuman is getting under our skin, and they offered ways of resisting interpretations of a posthuman future that depend on the notion that information is disembodied. Our discussions have attended to the distinction between practices of inscription and practices of incorporation. By “inscription practices” we mean the range of discourses and rhetorics of persuasion from computer science, biot...

Self-driving cars, a quintessentially 'smart' technology, are not born smart. The algorithms that control their movements are learning as the technology emerges. Self-driving cars represent a high-stakes test of the powers of machine learning, as well as a test case for social learning in technology governance. Society is learning about the technology while the technology learns about society. ...