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Two dissertations at the department

Lisa Justesen and Jakob Strandgaard have defended their dissertations this week.

Lisa Justesen

Lisa Justesen defended her dissertation "The Emerging Outer Space Order: Professional Orders, Heterarchy, Hypermodernity and Political Reason" on May 20 at 10.15. The external reviewer was Professor Mark Rhinard, Stockholms University.

Lisa Justesen’s dissertation aims to make sense of, and to conceptualize, the ongoing developments in outer space, in particular the development of the growing number of satellites in the Earth’s orbits. Because she finds that despite our technically advanced societies’ dependence on satellite information, we seldom reflect on who decides in outer space, nor how it is politically ordered. The thesis portraits how more actors and access to new technology create a new political order in outer space.

Based on substantial participant observations, as well as interviews, Lisa describes the emerging outer space order and theorizes about its impact on the broader world order.
 

She concludes that the emerging outer space order calls for a different ‘way of being political’


The explorative inquiry shows that the kind of order emerging in outer space is not (as often assumed) anarchical or hierarchical but heterarchical. The thesis also illustrates how rather than states, the political order of various professional communities are the principal units that define the future of the political order in outer space. 

Justesen finds that the prominent and defining professional orders are the scientific, commercial and military orders. She concludes that the emerging outer space order calls for a different ‘way of being political’ – for reflective political reason at the individual level including reconsiderations of professional identities.

Jakob Strandgaard

Jakob Strandgaard defended his dissertation "Normative Recursion: on Recursive Grounding and the Capacity for Radical Critique in Formal Pragmatics, Recognition, Social Freedom and Justification" on May 21 at 13.15. The external reviewer was Professor Lars Tönder, University of Copenhagen.

Jakob Strandgaard’s dissertation looks at fixed standards of normative critique that are flexible enough as to be open to pluralism and disagreement. Suitable candidates on fixed-yet-flexible critical standards that Jakob Strandgaard mentions in his dissertation are language, identity, and our need for being given reasons.
 

With communication, for instance, there is a definitive answer to what it means to reach understanding. We certainly know when we haven’t reached it.


In order to show how this works, Jakob Strandgaard explores normative recursion. That is, how some critical concepts refer to themselves, contains themselves, and are able to produce potentially infinite outputs from a finite starting point. 

With communication, for instance, there is a definitive answer to what it means to reach understanding. We certainly know when we haven’t reached it. But even so, there is no upper limit to how many different types of understandings about however many different things we can achieve.

In other words, the rules of what constitutes understanding are fixed, but the content of understanding(s) is flexible.