Religion in urban assemblages: space,law, and power

ABSTRACT

This contribution explores how religious diversity is governed at the urban level and seeks to explain patterns of regulatory practice. It does so by developing the notion of the urban religious diversity assemblage, by which I mean heterogeneous regulatory apparatuses that are territorially ambiguous and fluid, change over time, and operate as enabling and constraining conditions for religious expressions in diverse cities. Made up of human actors (both state and non-state, secular and religious), material elements (infrastructures, technologies, and artefacts), laws, and representational tools (e.g. maps), I argue that these urban assemblages produce and configure religious diversity as an urban social reality. I draw on empirical examples from my fieldwork in Quebec to illustrate the arguments. Based on these theoretical concerns, the contribution identifies and elaborates on fields of regulatory practice and shows how they are shaped by law and judicial contestations.     

Exploring Gender in South-Asian Cultural Memory Through Artistic Process

Abstract

My artistic inquiries draw from gender and sexuality in public space and use performance as process. In inspiration, the works emerge as aesthetic responses to post-colonial, gendered public identities and as negotiations with the cultural politics of modernity. Dwelling on the interaction of Indian modernity with cultural memory through myth, ritual, traditions and colonial histories, I hope to touch upon multiple influences of the Indian public sphere. Through a fragmented contemplation on guiding impulses, this discussion propositions the production of works as potentials to re-eroticise the public sphere.     

Near-hand effects are robust: Three OSF pre-registered replications of visual biases in perihand space

ABSTRACT

Although previous work provides evidence that observers experience biases in visual processing when they view stimuli in perihand space, a few recent investigations have questioned the reliability of these near-hand effects. We addressed this controversy by running three pre-registered replication experiments. Experiment 1 was a replication of one of the initial studies on facilitated target detection near the hands in which participants performed an attentional cueing task while placing a single hand either near or far from the display. Experiment 2 tested the same paradigm while adopting the design of a recent experiment that called into question near-hand facilitation. Experiment 3 was a replication of a study in which hand proximity influenced working memory performance in a change detection paradigm. Across all three experiments, we found significant interactions between hand position and stimulus characteristics that indicated the hands’ presence altered visual processing, bolstering evidence favouring the robustness of near-hand effects.