How do democratic ideals and constitutional provisions of inclusive citizenship and “reasonable classification” of universal rights to combat social oppression and promote social justice get worked out in the crannies of state policies, citizen politics and legislative and legal pronouncements? This article addresses these issues by revisiting the convoluted trajectory of positive discrimination (termed “reservation”) in India as an illustrative and instructive example. It combines an innovative reading of Constitutional Assembly Debates, constitutional provisions, constitutional amendments, and crucial Supreme Court rulings (...) to trace the gradual undoing of constitutional ideals and provisions. An exploration of changing state policies in tune with the imperatives of a neo-liberal Hindu authoritarian regime, and shifting electoral demands of privileged upper castes and classes, allows the article to underscore a radical shift in ethos that has resulted in an interrogation of constitutional provisions for social equality and justice. A lack of consensus on the justifiability of (re)distribution of resources by extending special benefits to the socially suppressed (“backward”) castes and classes of citizens, has laid bare the ambiguities inherent in constitutional ideals and provisions, highlighted the resourceful use of such ambiguities by the socially entitled citizens to disavow caste-based social oppression, and insist on economic weakness that hampers equal opportunity as the fair ground for “reservation.” A shift in emphasis from “social backwardness” of the oppressed to “economic weakness” of the advantaged in the language of the state ratified by the Supreme Court, underscores the undemocratic consequences of democratic provisions. A serious interrogation of the fairness of reasonable classification of equality and the justifiability of distribution on the part of the socially privileged, has served to disavow calls for social justice and recognition of difference by the oppressed, and overturned the basic premise of equal respect that ground liberal theories of social justice and social democracy. (shrink)

In this volume well-known scholars from India and Latin America - Enrique Dussel, Madhu Dubey, Walter D. Mignolo, and Sudipta Sen, to name a few - discuss the concepts of modernity and colonialism and describe how the two relate to each other. This second edition to the volume comes with a new introduction which extends and critically supplements the discussion in the earlier introduction to the volume. It explores the vital impact of the colonial pasts of India, Mexico, China, and (...) even the Unites States, on the processes through which these countries have become modern. The collection is unique, as it brings together a range of disciplines and perspectives. The topics discussed include the Zapatista movement in Southern Mexico, the image of the South in recent African-American literature, the theories of Andre Gunder Frank about the early modernization of Asian countries, and the contradictions of the colonial state in India. (shrink)

This article investigates the contribution of white liberal politics of an ex-missionary New Zealander, Sir Reginald Stephen Garfield Todd, on the development of Southern Rhodesia towards becoming an independent state. It outlines the contribution he made towards the progress of black Zimbabweans in a number of spheres. It arouses interest in contemporary Zimbabwean religious and political discourses. Todd held a hybridity of roles in transitional politics from the blunting settler racism to the sharpening of African capability on multi-racial democracy important (...) for our debate on the decolonisation of southern Africa. He was a rhetorically gifted radical paternalist who adopted reformist policies to advance both the African cause and his prophetic vocation. He suggested technocratic solutions that could reorganise and diversify political and economic options.CONTRIBUTION: This study uses critical discourse analysis on the wider literature on Todd's biography and African policies in view of his Christian vocation towards changing conditions of socio-economic, political-religious and technological-technocratic solutions to contemporary African independence. He was a man of his times living and working in an increasingly problematic context guided by the Christian principles in which he was reared. He is the 'father of faith' in the Church of Christ in Zimbabwe, and leaves us pedagogical lessons on human security, gender equality, church governance and human well-being that require review within the contemporary Christian fraternity. (shrink)

English is commonly used in academic settings despite being a secondary language for a considerable portion of the student population. Recognising the critical role that language plays in shaping educational experiences in the South African constitution and related legislative tools provides a supportive framework for multilingual education. In support of the framework Auditing and Internal controls lecturers developed multilingual glossaries which were translated into the majority of the South African official languages and also introduced tutorial classes that were conducted in (...) IsiZulu and Sepedi. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to determine whether these tutorials conducted in indigenous languages for second-year students in auditing had an impact on their level of participation and engagement in the tutorial classes. The study will follow a mixed methodology approach to evaluate the participation and engagement levels of students who attended the multilingual tutorials. Qualitative data will be collected through focus group discussions, which will explore students’ experiences and attitude towards attending multilingual tutorials and using the glossaries. Quantitative data would be collected through google forms, which will include questions about students’ engagement levels and understanding of Auditing concepts. This will provide numerical data to complement the qualitative insights, obtained from the focus group discussion. The findings from this study will assist universities in recognising the necessity of using translanguaging or code-switching to breach the gap caused by monolingual use of English. (shrink)

Modelling that exploits visual elements and information visualisation are important areas that have contributed immensely to understanding and the computerisation advancements in many domains and yet remain unexplored for the benefit of the law and legal practice. This paper investigates the challenge of modelling and expressing structures and processes in legislation and the law by using visual modelling and information visualisation (InfoVis) to assist accessibility of legal knowledge, practice and knowledge formalisation as a basis for legal AI. The paper uses (...) a subset of the well-defined Unified Modelling Language (UML) to visually express the structure and process of the legislation and the law to create visual flow diagrams called lawmaps, which form the basis of further formalisation. A lawmap development methodology is presented and evaluated by creating a set of lawmaps for the practice of conveyancing and the Landlords and Tenants Act 1954 of the United Kingdom. This paper is the first of a new breed of preliminary solutions capable of application across all aspects, from legislation to practice; and capable of accelerating development of legal AI. (shrink)

The evolution of the Ladies’ Circle into the Mother’s Union in the Church of Christ in Zimbabwe (COCZ) holds great significance in that circles in Africa symbolize collectiveness and consensual decision-making. The Ladies’ Circle emerged as a response by white women influenced by the Victorian Womanhood Cult with regard to the discontent they felt with patriarchy in the church. Black women supported white female missionaries in leadership roles, when they (black women), continued to face oppression due to (white and black) (...) male resistance to change, as well as fear of losing male-privileges. Empirical evidence in the COCZ suggests that black women in Zimbabwe made significant progress in the secular world compared to their progress in church. This study uses a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a theoretical framework to examine how the transformation of the Ladies’ Circle into the Mothers’ Union empowered African women to deal with their own oppression. It aims to understand how white women overcame restrictive Victorian norms and the Womanhood Cult, which promoted submissiveness and domesticity as defining aspects of womanhood. The study further notes that inconsistencies in addressing race and gender differences in the church perpetuated the dominance of African men on women within the church. This study thus acknowledges that the Women’s Unions, like the Mothers’ Union, have the potential to empower COCZ women and challenge racial and gender oppression within that church.Contribution: The study reveals that denying women’s involvement in church can have debilitating effects on gender equality in Zimbabwe. The Ladies’ Circle, a platform created by the Church of Christ, provides women with a space for social and religious participation. The intersection of gender, race, and religion used by religious and cultural authorities to control women, call for a re-examination of the COCZ’s theological foundations on these subjects. (shrink)

Inspired by Goffman and Mead Social Interactionism theory and Ghanaian traditional leadership model, this article interprets Mark 7:24-30 as text that re-imagines alternative leadership practice. The study suggest that social interactionism theory tenants of ritual making, people processing, characterisation, frame making and dramaturgy provide a alternative heuristic tools to understand Jesus' view of leadership. Seemingly and for Jesus, leadership is a product of social interaction derived from the manner one interacts with various people. This study proposes that the Ghanaian Akan (...) traditional notion of leadership based on social interaction provides analogical model that complements social interactionism theory in interpreting Jesus' leadership practices. Therefore, the study explains social interactionism theory and then illustrated it through Akan leadership model analogue. The story of the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7:24-30 gives the social interaction, people processing, characterisation, frame making and dramaturgy that informs Jesus' leadership model to be modelled by the Church. (shrink)

The paper presents a comparative and doctrinal discourse on surrogacy laws in India and places the Surrogacy (Regulation) Act, 2021, into the context of more general constitutional and ethical as well as transnational policies. It contends that the transformation of a commercial into an altruistic exclusive regime is indicative of a protective legislative motivation but creates strains around reproductive autonomy, equality and feasibility of regulations. The paper will show how various districts strike a balance between autonomy, concerns of exploitation and (...) child welfare through structured comparison with two contrasting models of state regulation in the United States and the United Kingdom, which are contract driven or welfare driven. Going beyond the descriptive comparison, this paper critically assesses the proportionality as well as constitutional coherence of India exclusions and compensation ban especially against the backdrop of privacy and equality jurisprudence. It also evaluates enforcement realities, which emphasise the impacts of restrictive formal law on informal or cross-border surrogacy practice in a setting where there is limited institutional capacity. The article proposes a balanced reform agenda that is based on compensated altruism, institutional control, procedural protection as well as harmonisation of the standards with the international human rights. The paper provides a rights-based avenue to a balanced and workable system of surrogacy regulation by combining the doctrinal reasoning and comparative institutional analysis. (shrink)

We have analyzed many discrimination learning difficulties as reflecting multiple stimulus control topographies (SCTs). Nevin & Grace's analysis offers new variables to consider in the design of stimulus-control shaping procedures and cross-setting generalization of newly established behavior. A multiple-SCT perspective also suggests that fixed-trial discrimination procedures may offer advantages for reconciling momentum theory and partial reinforcement extinction effects.

Purpose Cyberbullying occurs when a minor is tormented, threatened, harassed, humiliated, embarrassed or otherwise targeted by another child. Given that cyberbullying entails defamation or spreading false information or portfolios about someone, it is regarded as a violation of the ethical code of information use. The purpose of the study was to explore the perceptions, experiences and challenges of post-high school youth with regards to cyberbullying. This is a quantitative study that used a survey approach to gather data using a self-administered (...) questionnaire, which was distributed to 60 youth from the KwaZulu-Natal computer literacy community engagement project. The findings attest that youth recognise that cyberbullying might have detrimental effects on victims, such as alcohol and drugs abuse, low self-esteem, high level of absenteeism, poor grades and depression and suicidal thoughts. There is a low percentage of victims and perpetrators of cyberbullying in rural contexts in South Africa. It is hoped that findings may will a positive impact in the rural communities and enable the youth to interact with the modern technologies and handle them in an ethical manner. The study recommends that parents need to take cognisance of the probable possible dangers of the various technologies so that they could be instrumental in educating their children about children cyberbullying. Further, the schools and the Department of Education can play a fundamental role in educating children about cyberbullying and cyber ethics. Design/methodology/approach This survey was conducted to explore youth perceptions and experiences, as well as violations, of ethics through cyberbullying as experienced by the rural community at Mbazwana in the North Coast of KwaZulu-Natal. Convenience sampling was used, because although the questionnaire was distributed to all 60 participants in the project, not all of them completed the instrument, as participation was voluntary. Only 43 were completed, which is equal to 72 per cent response rate. The validity of the data collection instrument used was enhanced by the fact that questions were derived from the main objective of the study. Some themes of the instrument were self-designed and others were adapted from a similar study by Dehue et al. (2008), who looked at cyberbullying experiences of youth. The instrument was tried out in a pilot study in grade 12 classes in two high schools at Mbazwana in a bid to find out whether the learners would understand the questionnaire. Post-high school learners were considered to be at a similar level as the grade 12 learners polled. The pilot study proved its own importance: students who filled in the questionnaire indicated that they were not familiar with some terms and the researchers had to simplify the language to make it more understandable. Findings A large portion of the youth studied (45 per cent) indicated that they used their smartphones to access the internet, 25 per cent identified libraries as their source of access to the internet and 13 per cent reported accessing the internet from community laboratories (usually found in Department of Education centres). In total, 13 per cent of respondents reported accessing the internet from friends’ computers. Last, the smallest proportion at 4 per cent reported having internet access via their home desktop computers. The South African Mobile Report (2014) reveals that a great majority of South Africans access the internet via their own smartphones. These findings might indicate that many people nowadays do indeed have internet access in their regions. Research limitations/implications The results of this study indicate that not all households own a desktop computer, as some people rely on community laboratories and others rely on friends who own desktop or laptop computers. Practical implications The study results reveal that most students who did the computer literacy course consider themselves at an “intermediate” level. It was noted that cellphones/smartphones play a significant role in gaining access to the internet and to social networking applications in rural communities. The social media applications most visited by youth in this study were shown to be Facebook and WhatsApp. Only a relatively low percentage of the respondents in this study in a rural context in South Africa reported being either victims or perpetrators of cyberbullying. Social implications Social media give people ample opportunities to interact and socialise with other people in global context. Only a relatively low percentage of the respondents in this study in a rural context in South Africa reported being either victims or perpetrators of cyberbullying. It is hoped that insights gained from these findings may have a positive effect in the rural communities if awareness programmes are put in place to enable the youth to interact with the modern technologies and handle them in an ethical manner. Originality/value The contribution to the world of knowledge is that this study gives a clear indication of experiences and perceptions of cyberbullying in rural areas in South Africa. This will inform other scholars who want to engage in similar studies in different contexts that can be compared with the results of this study. It is notable that one cannot predict one’s own knowledge of a certain aspect of a community until one has fully engaged in research. Prior to this study, the researchers did not know whether the rural community youth participated in cyberbullying. (shrink)

Despite increasing pressure to deal with climate change, firms have been slow to respond with effective action. This article presents a multi-level framework for a better understanding of why many firms are failing to reduce their absolute greenhouse gas emissions, which contribute to climate change. The concepts of short-termism and uncertainty avoidance from research in psychology, sociology, and organization theory can explain the phenomenon of organizational inaction on climate change. Antecedents related to short-termism and uncertainty avoidance reinforce one another at (...) three levels—individual, organizational, and institutional—and result in organizational inaction on climate change. The article also discusses the implications of this multi-level framework for research on corporate sustainability. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a decolonial critique of received knowledge about deliberative democracy. Legacies of colonialism have generally been overlooked in theories of democracy. These omissions challenge several key assumptions of deliberative democracy. I argue that deliberative democracy does not travel well outside Western sites and its key assumptions begin to unravel in the ‘developing’ regions of the world. The context for a decolonial critique of deliberative democracy is the ongoing violent conflicts over resource extraction in the former colonies (...) of Africa, Asia and Latin America. I argue that deliberative democracy cannot take into account the needs of marginalized stakeholders who are defending their lands and livelihoods. The paper contributes to the literature by (1) offering a critique of hegemonic models of democracy that cannot address issues of inequality and colonial difference and (2) offering possibilities to imagine counterhegemonic alternatives for a democratization of democracy from below. (shrink)

In this article I provide a critical perspective on governing the global corporation. While the papers in the 2009 special issue of Business Ethics Quarterly explore the political role of corporations I argue that they lack a sophisticated analysis of power acrossinstitutional and actor networks. The argument that corporate engagement with deliberative democracy can enhance the legitimacy of corporations does not take into account the effects of institutional, material and discursive forms of power that determine legitimacycriteria. As a result corporate (...) versions of citizenship mediate versions of social responsibility and morality, which are reflected in the institutional and political economic norms that are produced by this power/knowledge. In order to overcome the limits of corporate social responsibility there is a need to develop more democratic forms of global governance of corporations. A radical revisioning of democratic governance would also need to overcome the limits posed by sovereignty and would require new forms of multi-actor and multi-level translocal governance arrangements in an attempt to create forms of power that are more compatible with the principles of economic democracy. (shrink)

Previous research with adults suggests that a catalog of minimally counterintuitive concepts, which underlies supernatural or religious concepts, may constitute a cognitive optimum and is therefore cognitively encoded and culturally transmitted more successfully than either entirely intuitive concepts or maximally counterintuitive concepts. This study examines whether children's concept recall similarly is sensitive to the degree of conceptual counterintuitiveness (operationalized as a concept's number of ontological domain violations) for items presented in the context of a fictional narrative. Seven- to nine-year-old children (...) who listened to a story including both intuitive and counterintuitive concepts recalled the counterintuitive concepts containing one (Experiment 1) or two (Experiment 2), but not three (Experiment 3), violations of intuitive ontological expectations significantly more and in greater detail than the intuitive concepts, both immediately after hearing the story and 1 week later. We conclude that one or two violations of expectation may be a cognitive optimum for children: They are more inferentially rich and therefore more memorable, whereas three or more violations diminish memorability for target concepts. These results suggest that the cognitive bias for minimally counterintuitive ideas is present and active early in human development, near the start of formal religious instruction. This finding supports a growing literature suggesting that diverse, early-emerging, evolved psychological biases predispose humans to hold and perform religious beliefs and practices whose primary form and content is not derived from arbitrary custom or the social environment alone. (shrink)

Research on moral psychology has frequently appealed to three, apparently consistent patterns: Males are more likely to engage in transgressions involving harm than females; educated people are likely to be more thorough in their moral deliberations because they have better resources for rationally navigating and evaluating complex information; political affiliations and religious ideologies are an important source of our moral principles. Here, we provide a test of how four factors ‐ gender, education, politics and religion ‐ affect intuitive moral judgments (...) in unfamiliar situations. Using a large-scale sample of participants who voluntarily logged on to the internet-based Moral Sense Test, we analyzed responses to 145 unique moral and conventional scenarios that varied widely in content. Although each demographic or cultural factor sometimes yielded a statistically significant difference in the predicted direction, these differences were consistently associated with extremely small effect sizes. We conclude that gender, education, politics and religion are likely to be relatively insignificant for moral judgments of unfamiliar scenarios. We discuss these results in light of current debates concerning the mechanisms underlying our moral judgments and, especially, the idea that we share a universal moral sense that constrains the range of cross-cultural variation. (shrink)

In _Elementary Aspects of the Political_ Prathama Banerjee moves beyond postcolonial and decolonial critiques of European political philosophy to rethink modern conceptions of "the political" from the perspective of the global South. Drawing on Indian and Bengali practices and philosophies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banerjee identifies four elements of the political: the self, action, the idea, and the people. She examines selfhood in light of precolonial Indic traditions of renunciation and realpolitik; action in the (...) constitutive tension between traditional conceptions of karma and modern ideas of labor; the idea of equality as it emerges in the dialectic between spirituality and economics; and people in the friction between the structure of the political party and the atmospherics of fiction and theater. Throughout, Banerjee reasserts the historical specificity of political thought and challenges modern assumptions about the universality, primacy, and self-evidence of the political. In formulating a new theory of the political, Banerjee gestures toward a globally salient political philosophy that displaces prevailing Western notions of the political masquerading as universal. (shrink)

In this paper, multi attribute decision making problem based on grey relational analysis in neutrosophic cubic set environment is investigated. In the decision making situation, the attribute weights are considered as single valued neutrosophic sets. The neutrosophic weights are converted into crisp weights. Both positve and negative GRA coefficients, and weighted GRA coefficients are determined. Hamming distances for weighted GRA coefficients and standard (ideal) GRA coefficients are determined. The relative closeness coefficients are derived in order to rank the alternatives. The (...) relative closeness coefficients are designed in ascending order. Finally, a numerical example is solved to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach. (shrink)

When it comes to discourses around women's labor in global contexts, we need feminist philosophical frameworks that take the intersections of gender, race, and global capitalism seriously in order to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of women's lives within global processes. Women of color feminist philosophy can bring much to the table in such discussions. In this essay, I theorize about a concrete instance of global women's labor: transnational commercial gestational surrogacy. By introducing a “racialized gender” analysis into the philosophical (...) debate on this issue, I argue that women's reproductive labor is becoming increasingly stratified within the global economy along racial and other lines. This paves the way for a “transnational reproductive caste system,” which ends up reifying various social hierarchies and sustaining existing global inequities. I aim to expose the kind of violence that surrogates experience due to such stratification as women of color in a transnational space. I discuss how discourses of race and existing racial hierarchies play out in international surrogacy and ways in which these, and indeed, the very category of “woman of color” get complicated in international contexts when they intermingle with other localized social forms and global inequities. For the purposes of my argument, I engage several insights from feminist of color Dorothy Roberts's work on race and reproductive technologies in the US. (shrink)

In this article, we examine the shifting roles played by non-state actors in governing areas of limited statehood. In particular, we focus on the emergence of voluntary grassroots organizations in Palestine and describe how regimes of international development aid transformed these organizations into professional nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that created new forms of colonial control. Based on in-depth interviews with 145 NGO members and key stakeholders and a historical analysis of limited statehood in Palestine, we found that social relations became disembedded (...) from the local context and re-embedded in new relations with international donor organizations resulting in a depoliticized public sphere. NGOization of the economy also resulted in new forms of exclusion and inclusion as well as contestations between a new class of urban middle-class professionals working in NGOs and the older generation of activists who were involved in grassroots organizations. Our findings have implications for business and human rights and governance in areas of limited statehood, in particular how private actors such as NGOs are able to exercise power in the economy. (shrink)

After going through this section, participants will be able to.

Here we discuss direct links of the number of fundamental dimensions to the fundamental natural constants using simple arguments of dimensional analysis based on Maxwell’s dimensions length (L), time (T) and mass (M) as well as the constants G, c, $$\hbar $$ and e. We find that the form of the fine-structure constant is a direct consequence of this connection. Additionally, our approach emphasises that gravity is a quite distinct area of physics which is not yet successfully quantised, i.e. not (...) yet combined with quantum mechanics. We also discuss different unit systems based on dimensional analysis and natural constants. (shrink)

The issue of surrogacy has received a great deal of attention in the West ever since the famous Baby M case in the latter part of the 1980s. Ethicists, psychologists, and legal experts have struggled with the meanings and implications of this practice, especially in its commercial form. In contemporary times, however, the phenomenon of surrogacy has assumed new dimensions as it travels across national borders in the context of globalization. As a transnational phenomenon, it is now marketed as an (...) attractive part of "Reproductive Tourism," for the most part, by various clinics and organizations located in the global south to some of the so-called "First World nations."Until now, most of the philosophical literature. (shrink)

In recent years, political theorists have come to recognize the central role of affect in social and political life. A host of scholars, coming from a number of distinct traditions, have variously drawn our attention to the importance of the emotions to the tradition of the history of political thought, as well as to normative political theory. This attentiveness to affect is often cast as a break with earlier, Enlightenment-inspired liberal approaches towards politics, approaches that marginalized the emotions, dismissing the (...) passions as potentially dangerous, or neglected them altogether. According to the conventional liberal view, emotions are said to have no place in the public sphere, while proceduralist institutions abstract away from citizens’ affective attachments, now cast as private preferences of individuals qua citizens. In this paper we challenge this prevalent view. We argue that no less a liberal theorist than John Rawls is deeply attentive to the place of emotions in his account of liberalism. This may seem counterintuitive given that Rawls' work has been frequently criticized for epitomizing some of the deepest problems of contemporary liberal theory, as a result of the emphasis on rationalism and reasonableness in his account of liberal justice. However, against this prevalent reading, we demonstrate that Rawls is in fact highly concerned with the role of affect and presents us with an account of the embedded liberal subject. By drawing out these dimensions of Rawls' thought, we hope to contribute to upending the conventional view of liberalism as affect-blind in order to encourage a more nuanced reading of the liberal tradition. (shrink)

In the early twenty-first century, the concept of citizenship is more contested than ever. As refugees set out to cross the Mediterranean, European nation-states refer to »cultural integrity« and »immigrant inassimilability,« revealing citizenship to be much more than a legal concept. The contributors to this volume take an interdisciplinary approach to considering how cultures of citizenship are being envisioned and interrogated in literary and cultural (con)texts. Through this framework, they attend to the tension between the citizen and its spectral others (...) – a tension determined by how a country defines difference at a given moment. (shrink)

SUMMARYJ.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment played a pivotal role in inaugurating the important turn toward the classical republican tradition in the history of political thought. In this revival of republicanism, the people are primarily presented as integral to combining active political participation and military prowess in the context of a common defence of liberty against foreign and domestic tyranny. In this essay we wish to revisit the role of the people in Pocock's interpretation of Machiavelli's republican thought. In doing so, (...) we wish to bring Pocock's contentions relative to the governo popolare one step further by introducing and analysing Machiavelli's expositions of popular behaviour in the context of the Florentine Histories. Contrary to Pocock's assumptions, the Florentine Histories shows how Machiavelli became substantively more critical of the people as a sound political agent. We demonstrate this by reconstructing important shifts in the presentation of the people apparent in this later work, suggesting a number of important elaborations to Machiavelli's understanding of both the people and citizenship. (shrink)

This article explores the organization of instructional corrections in pre-clinical dental education. The students are practising manual skills using a simulator and tutors are inspecting and evaluating their progress. Simulators and simulation are critical to the organization of contemporary healthcare training, and the academic literature that explores forms of simulation in healthcare tends to consider the ‘fidelity’ (or ‘realism’) of systems and the extent to which they match the clinical situations that they are designed to mimic. In contrast, this article (...) considers how tutors and students explicitly attend to matters of realism in the course of instructional sequences. We highlight the ways in which tutors routinely invoke ‘real life’ in instructional corrections and we discuss how these sequences reveal the work that tutors undertake to compensate for the ‘chronic insufficiency’ of the simulator. We show how tutors emphasize the reasoned character of manual bodily skills, reasons linked to the complexities and contingencies of clinical practice. To explore these issues and concerns, the article draws on the analysis of audio-visual data of everyday instruction. (shrink)

The phenomenon of consciousness has always been a central question for philosophers and scientists. Emerging in the past decade are new approaches to the understanding of consciousness in a scientific light. This book presents a series of essays by leading thinkers giving an account of the current ideas prevalent in the scientific study of consciousness. The value of the book lies in the discussion of this interesting though complex subject from different points of view ranging from physics, computer science to (...) the cognitive sciences. Reviews of controversial ideas related to the philosophy of mind from western and eastern sources including classical Indian first person methodologies provide a breadth of coverage that has seldom been attempted in a book before. Additionally, chapters relating to the new approaches in computational modelling of higher order cognitive function and consciousness are included. The book is of great value for established as well as young researchers from a wide cross-section of interdisciplinary scientific backgrounds, aiming to pursue research in this field, as well as an informed public. * Presents the latest developments in the scientific study of consciousness * Critically reviews different theoretical and philosophical explanations related to the subject * An important book for both students and researchers in designing research projects on consciousness. (shrink)

This paper stages an interdisciplinary dialogue between deconstruction and feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) through Jacques Derrida's theorization of the trace. Deploying Deborah Goldgaber's reading of the iterability of generalized writing in Speculative Grammatology, I show potential ways of intervening into Jane Bennett's notion of vital matter and Deboleena Roy's analysis of bacterial writing in order to formulate a more rigorous understanding of life processes and materiality. Pushing against STS critiques of deconstruction as a correlationist philosophy of language, I (...) read Derrida's Life Death alongside the works of Dawne McCance and Francesco Vitale to demonstrate how Derrida's conception of the iterability of the trace succeeds precisely where it is presumed to fail: as a robust theorization of both matter and ideology. (shrink)

IntroductionFrontline healthcare workers have faced significant plight during the ongoing Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. Studies have shown their vulnerabilities to depression, anxiety disorders, post-traumatic stress, and insomnia. In a developing country like India, with a rising caseload, resource limitations, and stigma, the adversities faced by the physicians are more significant. We attempted to hear their “voices” to understand their adversities and conceptualize their resilience framework.MethodsA qualitative approach was used with a constructivist paradigm. After an initial pilot, a socio-demographically heterogeneous population (...) of 172 physicians working in COVID-designated centers were purposively sampled from all over India. Following in-depth virtual interviews using a pre-formed semi-structured guide, the data was transcribed and translated verbatim. The interview was focused on their challenges, needs, and processes of coping and support. Charmaz’s grounded theory was used for analysis supplemented by NVivo 10 software.ResultsFear of infection, uncertainty, stigma, guilt, and social isolation emerged as the main challenges. Simultaneously, their “unmet needs” were flexible work policies, administrative measures for better medical protection, the sensitivity of media toward the image of HCW, effective risk communication for their health, and finally, social inclusion. Their resilience “framework” emerged as a process while navigating these adversities and consisted of three facets: forming a “resilient identity,” managing the resilience, and working through the socio-occupational distress. The role of mental well-being, social network, peer support, problem negotiation, and self-care emerged as the key coping strategies.ConclusionThe study findings support the global call for better psychosocial health and quality of life of the frontline HCWs. Their “unheard voices” explored in the study can anchor subsequent resilience-enhancing interventions and policies. Guidelines focusing on the psychological wellbeing of frontline HCWs need to be grounded in their unmet needs and lived experiences. (shrink)

Description: In this book Professor Banerjee has brought together a few of his ideas, bearing directly in some cases and indirectly in others, upon the philosophic thought of India. His understanding of Indian philosophy is rather unorthodox. He is less dependent upon textual evidence than writers on Indian philosophy usually are, and he makes use of his own philosophical insight in the discovery of the true spirit of Indian thought and wisdom. It is some of the Western interpreters of (...) the religious and philosophical literature of India who have tried to establish that the Indian outlook on life is notoriously religious and spiritual and, what is more, is wedded to the doctrine of world-negation. It is most unfortunate, however, that Indians have by and large accepted with approval this misleading Western assessment of the Indian view of life. As a result, immense harm has ensued to the cause of the discovery of the cultural and spiritual heritage of India. It is, therefore, in the fitness of things that Professor Banerjee for fresh researches in the field of Indian philosophy with a view to showing that the Indian way of thinking is essentially humanistic, and that humanism in ancient India reached its culmination in the wisdom which found the clearest and the boldest expression in the life and teaching of Gautama the Buddha. (shrink)

PCW Editors’ Comments: In this volume we are privileged to publish a special edition on mothering from the margins. The guest editors Amrita Banerjee and Bonnie Mann have collected a range of submissions representing original and insightful perspectives on motherhood.

We work with symmetric extensions based on Lévy collapse and extend a few results of Apter, Cody, and Koepke. We prove a conjecture of Dimitriou from her Ph.D. thesis. We also observe that if V is a model of $$\textsf {ZFC}$$ ZFC, then $$\textsf {DC}_{<\kappa }$$ DC < κ can be preserved in the symmetric extension of V in terms of symmetric system $$\langle {\mathbb {P}},{\mathcal {G}},{\mathcal {F}}\rangle $$ ⟨ P, G, F ⟩, if $${\mathbb {P}}$$ P is $$\kappa $$ (...) κ -distributive and $${\mathcal {F}}$$ F is $$\kappa $$ κ -complete. Further we observe that if $$\delta <\kappa $$ δ < κ and V is a model of $$\textsf {ZF}+\textsf {DC}_{\delta }$$ ZF + DC δ, then $$\textsf {DC}_{\delta }$$ DC δ can be preserved in the symmetric extension of V in terms of symmetric system $$\langle {\mathbb {P}},{\mathcal {G}},{\mathcal {F}}\rangle $$ ⟨ P, G, F ⟩, if $${\mathbb {P}}$$ P is ($$\delta +1$$ δ + 1 )-strategically closed and $${\mathcal {F}}$$ F is $$\kappa $$ κ -complete. (shrink)

This article describes “Eco-Delirium” as a historically situated theory of realism arising from the environmental crisis of the late-Cold War. Challenging the claims that postmodernism exhausted realism or made post-factual relativism possible, it argues that the exigent ecological conditions under the threat of nuclear proliferation and chemical toxicity fundamentally altered what realism could be. Environmental reality became systemic, delayed, and not primarily perceptible, surpassing sensory experience and distorting narrative sense coherence. This transformation gives rise to Eco-Delirium, the literary registering of (...) this excess: paranoia, narrative overload, fragmentation and speculative projection function as realist strategies for registering an unassimilable environmental reality. Drawing on psychoanalysis and in particular the notion of the Real as that which resists symbolization, the article redefines realism not as the transparent depiction of an object but as the staging of representational failure. Literature does not leave the reality of ecological crisis behind; it is presented with a reality of traumatic excess. Through readings of the works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo the paper shows how late twentieth-century literature registers environmental systems operating outside the bounds of cognition via disturbance, mediation, and affective disorientation. Eco-Delirium is established as a transitional, postmodernistic realism between postmodern skepticism and metamodern engagement. It keeps suspicion of totality, and refuses to be paralyzed, oscillating between critique and feeble hope. By foregrounding fantasy and disavowal as constitutive of lived reality, Eco-Delirium reforms realism as an adaptive critical paradigm in environmental-excess conditions. (shrink)

This article offers an overview of the development of Joseph Carens’s political thought and serves as the introduction to a special issue devoted to his scholarly work. It begins by offering an account of the ethos that we see engaging Carens’s work over his illustrious career. We underscore how his approach to normative problems is acutely informed by questions of context and feasibility, while resisting the impulse to accept existing conditions as defining the limits of justice. The account we offer (...) points us toward Carens’s theoretical development as a figure in political theory, addressing four key themes that have animated Carens’s work, which in turn inform the contributions that span this special issue. These include the ethics of immigration, the question of membership and community, egalitarian political economy, and the place of methodology in political theory. To do so, the article provides a brief overview of each of these areas, Carens’s key contributions to advancing our understanding of these themes, and the essays in this special issue that bear on them. (shrink)

Political theory and political philosophy are marked by a wide variety of approaches, which can be grouped broadly into normative/prescriptive, historical, and critical traditions of political thought. These are not just distinct in terms of scholarly focus, but also in methods, standards for evaluation, informal networks, conferences, and journals. Many scholars spend their graduate school years and much of their careers largely engaged in one or another of these fields, leading to a fractionalization of political theory. This contribution offers a (...) conceptual framework for better understanding their interrelated nature, seeing these distinct fields as part of a common project of political theorizing. We call this framework ‘The Toronto School,’ named after a class Carens taught for graduate students at the University of Toronto. The Toronto School is less a particular method for doing political theory (the way, say, Skinner or Foucault offers) and more an ecumenical understanding of political theory as a discipline, which sees the various approaches and aims of our field as having unique and complementing competencies and blindspots that fit into a more general project of intellectual inquiry. This contribution articulates the broad contours of the Toronto School, with a particular eye toward the way it reconciles normative, historical, and critical approaches. (shrink)

Existing discourse on refugee resettlement in the West is rife with imperialist and neoliberal allusions. Materially, this discourse assumes refugees as passive recipients of resettlement programs in the host country denying them their subjectivities. Given the amplification of all social and economic inequities during the pandemic, our paper explores how Canada's response to the pandemic vis-a-vis refugees impacted the everyday of Yazidis in Calgary - a recently arrived refugee group who survived the most horrific genocidal atrocities of our times. Based (...) on interviews with Yazidi families in Calgary and with resettlement staff we unpack Canada's paternalistic response to COVID-19 toward refugees. We show how resettlement provisions and social isolation along with pre-migration histories have furthered the conditions of social, economic, and affective inequities for the Yazidis. We also show how Yazidi women who were most impacted by the genocide and the subsequent pandemic find ways of asserting their personhood and engage in healing through a land-based resettlement initiative during the pandemic. Adopting a Feminist Refugee Epistemology and a southern moral imaginary as our discursive lenses, we highlight the need to dismantle the existing paternalistic structures and re resettlement practices and praxis to a social justice framework centering the voices of refugee women and families in their resettlement process. (shrink)

in this article I tried to show the present scenario of educational structure of India which is far away from the vision of Tagorean Brahmacharyasram.