Papers by francis gooding
Critical Quarterly, Dec 1, 2022
Critical Quarterly, 2005
History-making is a defining property of the human species; the ability to retain information in ... more History-making is a defining property of the human species; the ability to retain information in symbolic form over time (an ability which is granted principally by the presence of true natural language) is a unique attribute of the human animal. It has allowed human beings to enter in a qualitatively different relationship with the physical environment, and to operate in and alter that environment in highly complex, highly effective ways. To a great extent, the types of events that structure this way of life are absent from the rest of the natural world; in order to describe them accurately, it is necessary to attend to the special quality which defines them, a quality which we can characterise as their 'historical-ness'. Descriptions of human events cannot overlook the histories that organise and determine them, and to that extent they are not fruitfully apprehended with the tools of the exact sciences and instead require attention from the social sciences; but nevertheless, the phenomena of history are a part of the natural world, since they are part of the life of the organism. History itself arises in the non-historical crucible of biology. The paper examines a particular suite of events which have distinct historical and non-historical aspects - the extinction of the Dodo - in order to explore the epistemological difficulties which necessarily complicate any attempt to view human conduct as an integrated part of the natural world.
American Sociological Review, 2010
This article returns to a classic question of political economy: the zero-sum conflict between ca... more This article returns to a classic question of political economy: the zero-sum conflict between capital and labor over the division of the national income pie. A detailed description of labor’s share of national income in 16 industrialized democracies from 1960 to 2005 uncovers two long-term trends: an increase in labor’s share in the aftermath of World War II, followed by a decrease since the early 1980s. I argue that the working class’s relative bargaining power explains the dynamics of labor’s share, and I model inter- and intra-class bargaining power in the economic, political, and global spheres. Time-series cross-section equations predicting the short- and long-term determinants of labor’s share support most of my theoretical arguments and the main findings are robust to alternative specifications. Results suggest that the common trend in the dynamics of labor’s share of national income is largely explained by indicators for working-class organizational power in the economic (i...
Film and the End of Empire, 2011
No, no, you are not thinking; you are just being logical.-Physicist Niels Bohr defending "spooky ... more No, no, you are not thinking; you are just being logical.-Physicist Niels Bohr defending "spooky action at a distance" To lISten to And tell A ruSh oF StorIeS IS A method. And why not make the strong claim and call it a science, an addition to knowledge? Its research object is contaminated diversity; its unit of analysis is the indeterminate encounter. To learn anything we must revitalize arts of noticing and include ethnography and natural history. But we have a problem with scale. A rush of stories cannot be neatly summed up. Its scales do not nest neatly; they draw attention to interrupting geographies and tempos. These interruptions elicit more stories. This is the rush of stories' power as a science. Yet it is just these interruptions that step out of the bounds of most modern science, which demands the possibility for infinite expansion without changing the research framework. Arts of noticing are considered archaic because Conjuring time, Tokyo. Arranging matsutake for auction at the Tsukiji wholesale market. Turning mushrooms into inventory takes work: commodities accelerate to market tempos only when earlier ties are severed.
Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 2014
By examining official films of Palestine made during the British Mandate period, this paper seeks... more By examining official films of Palestine made during the British Mandate period, this paper seeks to show that a recognizable visual trope—the ‘street scene in Jerusalem’—can be identified, and that it can be linked historically to the proclamation of British martial law in Jerusalem by General Allenby. The paper argues that this trope, and in particular its recurrence in a news report on the King David Hotel bombing of 1946, can be understood as typical of the way that British imperial power was projected throughout the Empire. In conclusion, the paper argues that the tolerance and egalitarianism that Jerusalem signifies in British colonial films of Palestine are values whose invocation is historically linked to the advent of militarized colonial control.
Critical Quarterly, 2021
This paper examines historical amateur films and home movies created during the final years of th... more This paper examines historical amateur films and home movies created during the final years of the British Empire, and tries to examine and provisionally define some of the fundamental features of 'amateur film' as such.
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Papers by francis gooding