Category: Uncategorized
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David Bollier’s Preface
Book: A political economy of attention, mindfulness and consumerism: reclaiming the mindful commons The process by which capitalist investment seeks to re-engineer and privatize nature, government, social life and even genes and physical matter is at once breathtakingly ambitious and subtle and insidious. The great contribution of Peter Doran’s A Political Economy of Attention, Mindfulness…
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Peter Sterling on the Neurology of Consumer Behaviour
First, we must grasp that humans consume compulsively—insatiably—in large part because our clever circuit for reward learning now encounters too few sources of small surprise. We may rail against the capitalist manipulations that drive consumption from the top down, but that will not satiate our innate, bottom-up drive to consume. Therefore, social policies should follow…
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Mindful and conscious living emerges as an imperative with the dawn of the Anthropocene.
The writer, Philip Pullman (2008) has observed that environmentalists – essentially – tell a story about ‘us’ and ‘themselves’ and about our place in the universe (e.g. Thomas Berry: the new cosmic story) In this sense, environmentalism has something in common with the function of religion. Questions are posed: why are we here? What is…
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Semiocapital puts neuro-psychic energies to work….
‘And the multitude cried: “Bio-rhythms….Not Algorithms”‘ (Doran, 2015) A word from Bifo “Semiocapital puts neuro-psychic energies to work, submitting them to mechanistic speed, compelling cognitive activity to follow the rhythm of networked productivity. As a result, the emotional sphere linked with cognition is stressed to its limit. Cyberspace overloads cybertime, because cyberspace is an unbounded…
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Wellbeing and Mindfulness Operate in the Key of Neoliberalism
Those who introduce mindfulness into corporate, university and public sector settings have a growing responsibility to engage with the biopolitics of our neoliberalized institutions. It is not sufficient to present disembedded tools for ‘wellbeing’ to a located, context-specific client [subject] for she is already embedded within a complex of targeted disciplines and power complexes, notably…
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Towards a Zero Waste – Circular Economy Strategy for the Derry-Strabane City Region
‘Countdown to Zero Waste Conference’ Hears Challenge to Transform the North West Economy (Creating an Intelligent Economy – How the North West Can Lead the Way on Zero Waste and A Circular Economy) Addressing a European Conference on Zero Waste in Derry on Monday, Dr Peter Doran, set out a series of steps…
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We are the product…The Meme
A powerful depiction of our imaginative absorption into the horizons of capitalist realism. “If I cannot dance, I want no part in your revolution Where once the rhythms of the Earth danced with my soul Today the algorithm translates me-me”
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Beyond Mindfulness – A call for a critical political economy of attention
The underlying teachings of mindfulness offer much more in this consumer age; they offer new sources of critical inquiry into our collective condition under the sway of consumer culture. Since the post-WWll rise of mass advertising and the more recent global advance of consumer culture cultivated through the ubiquitous forms of media technology, our collective…
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Touching the Earth
‘Touching the Earth’ is a Buddhist meditation that invites us into that place where we encounter archaic memory, the memory of blissful unknowing. It is a place within all of us that recalls – with every animal – that moment when we walked memoryless through bars of sunlight and shade in the morning of the…
Peter Doran 