Death in Jonestown: Techniques of Political Control by a Paranoid Leader

ABSTRACT: Jim Jones and Jonestown are discussed from a “political control” point of view. Seven basic techniques of political control are identified: Control of property and income, weaking of family ties, a sociopolitical caste system, control of egression (escape), control of verbal expression, cognitive control and emotional control. Jonestown is identified as a mini-totalitarian state ruled by a delusional and paranoid person.     

Intersubjectivity in infancy: A second-person approach to ontogenetic development

The aim of this paper is to present the principles of intersubjectivity as a second-person relational account of mind, set against individualist first- and third-person accounts of the sharing of mental representations. I will set out a summary of these positions and defend the claim that understanding proto-conversations as “expressive communications” allows one to understand them as genuine communications, as in, mutually manifest communications that entail intersubjectivity. To support this interpretation, I will propose a novel explanation of expression, understood as constitutive of the mental state.     

Knowledge and Justice: A Comment

ABSTRACT

Epistemic justice projects are now one of the most important sites of science studies scholarship and engagement. The papers in this collection make clear that we divorce science and technology from questions of power at our peril, if we are to understand what generates and remediates the inequalities that past and extant knowledge creation and distribution systems have wrought. Expertise and experts are the conceptual anchors for these articles, and they offer quite different perspectives on whether expertise and counter-expertise are the terrain on which epistemic justice struggles ought to be fought. Some challenge older conceptualizations of expertise as narrow and specific, providing new evidence and frameworks for treating epistemes that are heterogeneous and boundary-crossing as means to justice; others demonstrate that acting on concerns as purely technical matters can provide strategic advantages; and others make clear that formally trained experts are neither welcome nor visible in technopolitical justice struggles. Reflected in the innovative approaches that the papers take, a second major contribution of the collection is to show why inclusion is itself a just goal, and a means to uncovering stories of injustice, technical innovations, and visions of the future that can offer new pathways to justice. The collection inspires new directions in sts, including which stories, and by whom, matter and why, and how attention to innovation can be balanced with attention to the extant, and to history.