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Papers by Gemma Lucy Smart
Palgrave Encylopedia of Disablility, 2024
In this chapter I give a brief overview of the Mad Pride, Disability Pride and Neurodiversity/Neu... more In this chapter I give a brief overview of the Mad Pride, Disability Pride and Neurodiversity/Neurodivergent Movements, and suggest a path forward for more solidarity between them.
This report provides a comparative analysis of Indigenous homelessness in the contrasting setting... more This report provides a comparative analysis of Indigenous homelessness in the contrasting settings of major cities and regional country town centres. The research sought to compare the understandings of Indigenous homelessness held by Indigenous homeless people, and those of the providers of services to Indigenous homeless people. It offers an analysis of the relationship between homelessness, household overcrowding and mobility patterns in the context of Indigenous culture. To this end, an anthropological consideration was undertaken of the social and cultural drivers of Indigenous homelessness. To understand 'the place, house and home needs' of Indigenous people, it was necessary to differentiate those aspects of Indigenous culture that structure the Indigenous response to homelessness from the forces of the wider Australian society that act on the ways Indigenous people solve the problem of housing in the context of poverty and a shortage of affordable housing. Data were gathered through ethnographic interviews yielding text which was subjected to thematic analysis. Interviews were conducted in Broome, Carnarvon and Perth. (Executive summary, edited.)
Routledge eBooks, Jan 20, 2022
Post-COVID-19 environments have challenged our embodied identities with these challenges coming f... more Post-COVID-19 environments have challenged our embodied identities with these challenges coming from a variety of domains, that is, microbiological, semiotic, and digital. We are embedded in a new complex set of relations, with other species, with cultural signs, and with technology and venturing further into an era that pushes back on our anthropocentrism to create a post-human dystopia. This does not imply that we are less human or forfeit ethics in this state of flux, but can lead to considering new ways of being alive and humanists. The aim of this project was to explore walking through our associated psychogeographies as captured in photographs and text from individual walks, as the means by which to characterize responses to the distress of the pandemic and to assess resistance to non-being. The psychogeographies were the starting points for our dialogic enquiry between authors who each represent living theory, representing their own emergent knowledge, inseparable from person...
The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Science of Addiction, 2018
The very understanding of addiction as a disease is controversial, as is the best way to explain ... more The very understanding of addiction as a disease is controversial, as is the best way to explain it. Psychiatry is dominated by a version of the medical model that sees psychopathologies as diseases whose observable symptoms are causally explained by abnormalities in underlying neu-robiological systems. Although addictions seem similar in terms of symptoms, they can vary widely in their consequences and pathology. Many conceptions of addiction see the symptoms as primarily behavioural or psychological, defining it in terms of phenomena like craving (Elster 1999) or in economic terms (Ross et al. 2008). However, even if these psychological or economic theories of the phenomena are correct, there is still room for exploring the logic of the causal explanations that comport with the medical model. This is because the medical model can be seen as an application to psychiatry of the commitments of cognitive neuroscience (Murphy 2006) and the dominant approach in the cognitive neurosciences is that human behaviour consists of capacities that can be analysed into other personal level capacities (Cummins 2000). In turn, these can then be situated within a hierarchy of biological processes. Personal-level phenomena can be broken down into their component processes and these processes can be understood, typically in representational terms, as the outputs of sub-personal systems that do things like assign a meaning to a phonological representation or compute visual edges. This decomposition of the task and the allocation of the subtasks to interacting physical entities gives the general form of a mechanistic explanation. In this chapter we will discuss the application of this mechanistic perspective to addiction. It is important to note at the outset that mechanistic explanations are a specific type of causal explanation. Not all phenomena admit of mechanistic explanations, and not all causal explanations can be expressed in terms of mechanisms. What distinguishes a mechanistic explanation is that it depends on the spatial arrangement of component parts and the nature of their interactions. In the neurosciences we expect to identify processes that can be assigned to parts of the brain, where they will be revealed as the outcome of mechanisms-interacting systems of biological components. If it is the right approach, it will work throughout cognitive neuroscience. So, even if addiction is best understood as neither a disorder nor a fundamentally neurological phenomenon , proponents of the mechanistic approach would still expect to explain it in the terms we will present, provided that we can explain the features of addiction as the result of interacting neurological systems. Addiction does not have to be a pathological phenomenon in order to receive a mechanistic explanation.
Book Reviews by Gemma Lucy Smart
Journal of Philosophy of Disability, 2024
Review of Making and Unmaking Disability: The Three-Body Approach. By Julie E. Maybee. Lanham, MA... more Review of Making and Unmaking Disability: The Three-Body Approach. By Julie E. Maybee. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019. 264 pp. Hardcover, $99.00. ISBN 978-1-5381-2772-8
Palgrave Encylopedia of Disablility, 2024
In this chapter I give a brief overview of the Mad Pride, Disability Pride and Neurodiversity/Neu... more In this chapter I give a brief overview of the Mad Pride, Disability Pride and Neurodiversity/Neurodivergent Movements, and suggest a path forward for more solidarity between them.
This report provides a comparative analysis of Indigenous homelessness in the contrasting setting... more This report provides a comparative analysis of Indigenous homelessness in the contrasting settings of major cities and regional country town centres. The research sought to compare the understandings of Indigenous homelessness held by Indigenous homeless people, and those of the providers of services to Indigenous homeless people. It offers an analysis of the relationship between homelessness, household overcrowding and mobility patterns in the context of Indigenous culture. To this end, an anthropological consideration was undertaken of the social and cultural drivers of Indigenous homelessness. To understand 'the place, house and home needs' of Indigenous people, it was necessary to differentiate those aspects of Indigenous culture that structure the Indigenous response to homelessness from the forces of the wider Australian society that act on the ways Indigenous people solve the problem of housing in the context of poverty and a shortage of affordable housing. Data were gathered through ethnographic interviews yielding text which was subjected to thematic analysis. Interviews were conducted in Broome, Carnarvon and Perth. (Executive summary, edited.)
Routledge eBooks, Jan 20, 2022
Post-COVID-19 environments have challenged our embodied identities with these challenges coming f... more Post-COVID-19 environments have challenged our embodied identities with these challenges coming from a variety of domains, that is, microbiological, semiotic, and digital. We are embedded in a new complex set of relations, with other species, with cultural signs, and with technology and venturing further into an era that pushes back on our anthropocentrism to create a post-human dystopia. This does not imply that we are less human or forfeit ethics in this state of flux, but can lead to considering new ways of being alive and humanists. The aim of this project was to explore walking through our associated psychogeographies as captured in photographs and text from individual walks, as the means by which to characterize responses to the distress of the pandemic and to assess resistance to non-being. The psychogeographies were the starting points for our dialogic enquiry between authors who each represent living theory, representing their own emergent knowledge, inseparable from person...
The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Science of Addiction, 2018
The very understanding of addiction as a disease is controversial, as is the best way to explain ... more The very understanding of addiction as a disease is controversial, as is the best way to explain it. Psychiatry is dominated by a version of the medical model that sees psychopathologies as diseases whose observable symptoms are causally explained by abnormalities in underlying neu-robiological systems. Although addictions seem similar in terms of symptoms, they can vary widely in their consequences and pathology. Many conceptions of addiction see the symptoms as primarily behavioural or psychological, defining it in terms of phenomena like craving (Elster 1999) or in economic terms (Ross et al. 2008). However, even if these psychological or economic theories of the phenomena are correct, there is still room for exploring the logic of the causal explanations that comport with the medical model. This is because the medical model can be seen as an application to psychiatry of the commitments of cognitive neuroscience (Murphy 2006) and the dominant approach in the cognitive neurosciences is that human behaviour consists of capacities that can be analysed into other personal level capacities (Cummins 2000). In turn, these can then be situated within a hierarchy of biological processes. Personal-level phenomena can be broken down into their component processes and these processes can be understood, typically in representational terms, as the outputs of sub-personal systems that do things like assign a meaning to a phonological representation or compute visual edges. This decomposition of the task and the allocation of the subtasks to interacting physical entities gives the general form of a mechanistic explanation. In this chapter we will discuss the application of this mechanistic perspective to addiction. It is important to note at the outset that mechanistic explanations are a specific type of causal explanation. Not all phenomena admit of mechanistic explanations, and not all causal explanations can be expressed in terms of mechanisms. What distinguishes a mechanistic explanation is that it depends on the spatial arrangement of component parts and the nature of their interactions. In the neurosciences we expect to identify processes that can be assigned to parts of the brain, where they will be revealed as the outcome of mechanisms-interacting systems of biological components. If it is the right approach, it will work throughout cognitive neuroscience. So, even if addiction is best understood as neither a disorder nor a fundamentally neurological phenomenon , proponents of the mechanistic approach would still expect to explain it in the terms we will present, provided that we can explain the features of addiction as the result of interacting neurological systems. Addiction does not have to be a pathological phenomenon in order to receive a mechanistic explanation.
Journal of Philosophy of Disability, 2024
Review of Making and Unmaking Disability: The Three-Body Approach. By Julie E. Maybee. Lanham, MA... more Review of Making and Unmaking Disability: The Three-Body Approach. By Julie E. Maybee. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019. 264 pp. Hardcover, $99.00. ISBN 978-1-5381-2772-8