Lexical alignment, a communication phenomenon where conversational partners adapt their word choices to become more similar, plays an important role in the development of language and social communication skills. While this has been studied extensively in the conversations of preschool‐aged children and their parents in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) communities, research in other pediatric populations is sparse. This study makes significant expansions on the existing literature by focusing on alignment in naturalistic conversations of school‐aged children from a (...) non‐WEIRD population across multiple conversational tasks and with different types of adult partners. Typically developing children aged 5 to 8 years (n = 45) engaged in four semi‐structured conversations that differed by task (problem‐solving vs. play‐based) and by partner (parent vs. university student), resulting in a corpus of 180 conversations. Lexical alignment scores were calculated and compared to sham conversations, representing alignment occurring at the level of chance. Both children and adults coordinated their conversational utterances by re‐using or aligning each other's word choices. This alignment behavior persisted across conversational tasks and partners, although the degree of alignment was moderated by the conversational context. These findings suggest that lexical alignment is a robust phenomenon in conversations between school‐age children and adults. Furthermore, this study extends lexical alignment findings to a non‐WEIRD culture, suggesting that alignment may be a coordination strategy employed by adults and children across diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. (shrink)

This remarkable book is about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, sex and science and spirits to Schrodinger's cat. Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from an Indigenous perspective. He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently? Sand Talk provides a template for living. It's about how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It's about how we (...) learn and how we remember. It's about talking to everybody and listening carefully. It's about finding different ways to look at things. Most of all it's about Indigenous thinking, and how it can save the world. (shrink)

Cinema Derrida charts Jacques Derrida's collaborations and appearances in film, video, and television beginning with 1983's Ghost Dance (dir. Ken McMullen, West Germany/UK) and ending with 2002's biographical documentary Derrida (dir. Dick and Ziering, USA). In the last half of his working life, Derrida embraced popular art forms and media in more ways than one: not only did he start making more media appearances after years of refusing to have his photo taken in the 1960s and 1970s, but his philosophy (...) started to draw more explicitly from visual culture and artistic endeavours. While this book offers explanations of this transition, it contends the image of "Jacques Derrida" that emerges from film and TV appearances remains spectral, constantly deferring a complete grasp of him. Tyson Stewart draws out the main tenets of spectrality from Derrida's seminal texts Of Grammatology and Specters of Marx and other writings, like Echographies of Television, in order to fill a gap in studies of Derrida and film. Throughout the book, he explains how various techniques and spectral effects such as slow motion, stillness, repetition, mise-en-abîme, direct address, and focus on body parts/bodily presence bring about a structure of spectrality wherein the past other returns to make impressions and ethical demands on the viewer. Drawing on communication theory and film and media studies, Cinema Derrida makes a major intervention in classical communication thought. (shrink)

Reclamation strategies -- Conceptual exclusion -- Reclamation from absence -- Insults and their possibilities -- From exclusion to reclamation -- Injuries and usurpations.

In this paper, Tyson E. Lewis challenges the dominant theoretical and practical educational responses to globalization. On the level of public policy, Lewis demonstrates the limitations of both neoliberal privatization and liberal calls for rehabilitating public schooling. On the level of pedagogy, Lewis breaks with the dominant liberal democratic tradition which focuses on the cultivation of democratic dispositions for cosmopolitan citizenship. Shifting focus, Lewis posits a new location for education out of bounds of the common sense of public versus (...) private, nationalism versus cosmopolitanism, inclusion versus exclusion, human versus civil rights. This is the space of the commonwealth whose actors cannot be identified as ‘citizens’ but are rather the anonymous multitude. In conclusion, Lewis finds a model for organizing this commonwealth in the work of Ivan Illich, whose learning networks speak to the urgent political and pedagogical need for exodus from the conceptual vocabulary that defines much of the contemporary field of educational theory. (shrink)

Inoperative Learning draws upon the movement towards a weak philosophy that is currently gaining ground in educational philosophy: this weak philosophy does not offer a set of solutions or guidelines for improving educational outcomes, but rather renders assumptions about the theory-practice coupling that is so popular in contemporary education inoperative. By arguing that such logic reduces education to merely instrumental ends, which can only be assessed in terms of predefined measurement tools, this book presents a challenge to contemporary notions of (...) education as learning. There are various forms of inoperative education that temporarily suspend the goal-directedness of learning. From the perspective of learning, the neutralization of progress, growth, and maturity would usually be seen as obstacles needing to be overcome on the path toward set goals. Yet Lewis argues that a serious investigation of inoperativity opens up possibilities that would be otherwise unavailable in a world fixated on the question of learning. In dialogue with philosophers (Agamben, Benjamin, and Esposito), as well as authors (Kafka and Walser), and qualitative researchers (Lather), Lewis turns our collective attention to what remains when concepts such as learning, child development, teacher effectivity, and personal growth are left idle. Inoperative Learning presents a radical rewriting of educational possibilities. It should therefore be of great interest to educational researchers and educational philosophers concerned with the question of alternative logics of education beyond learning. The book may also be of interest to educational policy specialists who are looking for new and innovative forms of critique and analysis. (shrink)

In this article, I consider some of the forms that truthfulness can take in the Christian life. Drawing on the notion of storied identity, I address the following questions. In general terms, what does it take to live truthfully with respect to some narrative? More exactly, how might that truthfulness be realized in bodily terms? And, finally, how might living truthfully with respect to a narrative contribute to the further elaboration of the narrative? I examine these questions with reference to (...) the concerns of Christian ethics in particular, by taking as my focus the kind of storied truthfulness that is embodied in the practice of neighbour love, and the question of how that truthfulness may be extended through participation in the eucharist. (shrink)

In an educational landscape dominated by discourses and practices of learning, standardized testing, and the pressure to succeed, what space and time remain for studying? In this book, Tyson E. Lewis argues that studying is a distinctive educational experience with its own temporal, spatial, methodological, aesthetic, and phenomenological dimensions. Unlike learning, which presents the actualization of a student’s "potential" in recognizable and measurable forms, study emphasizes the experience of potentiality, freed from predetermined outcomes. Studying suspends and interrupts the conventional (...) logic of learning, opening up a new space and time for educational freedom to emerge. Drawing upon the work of Italian philosopher and critical theorist Giorgio Agamben, Lewis provides a conceptually and poetically rich account of the interconnections between potentiality, freedom, and study. Through a mixture of educational critique, phenomenological description, and ontological analysis, Lewis redeems study as an invaluable and urgent educational experience that provides alternatives to the economization of education and the cooptation of potentiality in the name of efficiency. The resulting discussion uncovers multiple forms of study in a variety of unexpected places: from the political poetry of Adrienne Rich, to tinkering classrooms, to abandoned manifestos, and, finally, to Occupy Wall Street. By reconnecting education with potentiality this book provides an educational philosophy that undermines the logic of learning and assessment, and turns our attention to the interminable paradoxes of studying. The book will be key reading for scholars in the fields of educational philosophy, critical pedagogy, foundations of education, composition and rhetoric, and critical thinking and literacy studies. (shrink)

The pressure for results applied by some research funders concerns some academicians. Sometimes, for example, a sponsor requests preliminary data that the researcher is not ready to release. This paper presents three interviews — two with researchers and one with a representative from industry — dealing with these issues and makes recommendations on the basis of those interviews. It also looks briefly at the different norms that exist in industry and academia for research and communication and the tensions these can (...) cause for a scientist working simultaneously in both realms. (shrink)

Background: Families and clinicians must often weigh competing priorities when making medical decisions for a pediatric patient at the end of life. Few empirical data exist regarding the importance that clinicians place on varying priorities and whether clinical practice conforms to decision-making standards discussed in the literature. Methods: We administered a discrete choice experiment to understand the relative importance of nine pediatric end-of-life decision-making priorities using responses from 364 nurses and physicians from three intensive care units (ICUs) (pediatric ICU, pediatric (...) cardiothoracic ICU, neonatal ICU) in a large children's hospital, with a 54% response rate. We used latent class analysis to characterize subgroups of health professionals based on their patterns of importance for the nine attributes and examined differences in class membership using multinomial logistic regression. Results: Eighty-two percent of respondents were nurses, consistent with the proportion of nurse and physician staff in the units. Latent class analysis separated our sample of health professionals into five distinct classes. All five groups rated the child's comfort and the best interests as most important but differed regarding how they valued other considerations: Group 1 rated highly consideration of the entire family and medical judgment; Group 2, the entire family's interests, parents’ preferences, and religious beliefs; Group 3, maintaining harmony between parents and medical team; Group 4, responsible use of medical resources; and Group 5, medical evidence and prolonging the child's life. Those with more years of experience were less likely to fall in Group 5 (medical evidence/life-prolonging). Profession was not associated with group membership. Conclusions: Nurses and physicians who care for dying children prioritize foremost the child's best interests and comfort but then possess varying secondary priorities about what is most important when making medical decisions. Pediatric palliative care and ethics consultative services should be aware of and prepared to address these differing concerns. (shrink)

Satisficing is a central concept in both individual and social multiagent decision making. In this paper we first extend the notion of satisficing by formally modeling the tradeoff between costs and decision failure. Second, we extend this notion of “neo”-satisficing into the context of social or multiagent decision making and interaction, and model the social conditioning of preferences in a satisficing framework.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 11, Page 15-16, November 2011.

'Political reconciliation' refers to processes for establishing right relations between groups that are emerging from a history coloured by violent relations. However, dominant Western, euro-descendent philosophies of political reconciliation rarely focus on ecological forms of harm or consider practices of ecological violence as constitutive of the violent relations that reconciliation hopes to repair. This article argues that the exclusion of ecological dimensions of harm from dominant Western models of political reconciliation is one way of understanding Indigenous claims of dissatisfaction with (...) such reconciliation projects. This article analyses and contextualises these claims of dissatisfaction by focusing on how dominant Western, euro-descendent models of reconciliation in the North American context import settler-colonial commitments that obscure the primacy of ecological violence in settler-Indigenous land-based conflicts. Furthermore, this article posits that settler-colonial commitments in reconciliation models pose an obstacle to deeper forms of reconciliation, partly because these models uphold dominant euro-descendent cosmologies and conceptions of land over and above Indigenous ones. Finally, this article suggests that that the possibility of deep reconciliation exists, and requires engaging with Indigenous philosophies that place land and relations to land at the centre of right relations, thus working toward decolonising settler-colonial-infused forms of reconciliation. (shrink)

Walter Benjamin's Antifascist Education is the first comprehensive analysis of educational themes across the entirety of the critical theorist's diverse writings. Starting with Benjamin's early reflections on teaching and learning, Tyson E. Lewis argues that the aesthetic and cultural forms to which Benjamin so often turned-namely, radio broadcasts, children's theatrical productions, collections, cityscapes, public cinemas, and word games-swell with educational potentialities. What emerges from Lewis's reading is a constellational curriculum composed of minor practices such as poor teaching, absentminded learning, (...) and nondurational studying. This curriculum carries political significance, offering an antidote to past and present forms of fascist manipulation, hardness, and coldness. Walter Benjamin's Antifascist Education is a testimony to Benjamin's belief that "everyone is an educator and everyone needs to be educated and everything is education.". (shrink)

In this essay Tyson Lewis reevaluates Jean-Jacques Rousseau's assessment of the pedagogical value of fables in Emile's education using Giorgio Agamben's theory of poetic production and Thomas Keenan's theory of the inherent ambiguity of the fable. From this perspective, the “unreadable” nature of the fable that Rousseau exposed is not simply the result of a child's innocence or developmental immaturity, but is rather a structural quality of the fable as such. Moving from a discussion of Rousseau's description of the (...) fable and its relation to early childhood development, Lewis then telescopes outward into an analysis of Emile as a reenactment of the paradoxes of the fable. While Rousseau critiqued the pedagogical value of the fable, his own pedagogical project is informed by many of the qualities that he attributed to the fable. This return of the fable is enacted through Rousseau's writing on three interconnected levels: the question of the maxim, the paradox of truth, and the paradox of freedom. Lewis argues that if we take seriously the textually fabulous dimension of Emile, then the reader is left exposed to the very same anxieties as a child who is confronted with the ambiguity of the fable. In a concluding gesture, Lewis speculates about what Emile's fabulous dimension means for the practice of educational philosophy itself. (shrink)

The recent philosophical literature on religious experience has mostly been concerned with experiences which are taken by the subject of the experience to be directly of God or some other supernatural entity, or to involve some suspension of the subject–object structure of conventional experience. In this paper I consider a further kind of experience, where the sense of God is mediated by way of an appreciation of the existential meanings which are presented by a material context. In this way the (...) paper aims to extend the standard philosophical concept of religious experience so as to take account of phenomenological treatments of sacred place, and to give more prominence to the materially mediated or sacramental character of much religious experience. (shrink)

In response to the growing emphasis on learning outcomes, life-long learning, and what could be called the learning society, scholars are turning to alternative educational logics that problematize the reduction of education to learning. In this article, we draw on these critics but also extend their thinking in two ways. First, we use Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze to posit two educational logics—tinkering and hacking, respectively—that suspend and render inoperative learning logics, expectations, and evaluative metrics. Second, we argue that contemporary (...) artists and designers such as Katerina Kamprani and Grupo de Arte Callejero have much to offer educational philosophers and theorists interested in practices of suspension. In conclusion, we suggest ways in which educators can tinker with and hack into the curriculum by playing with the quintessential embodiment of learning: the test. (shrink)

History educators find themselves in the peculiar situation of wishing to introduce students to the history discipline while lacking a clear conception of the features intrinsic to historical inquiry across its various specialisations and subject matters. In affirming that no one methodological charter hangs in the corridors of academic history departments, we fail to provide an adequate justification for an education in history. The doctrine that history is an exercise in disciplined knowledge, a specific way of knowing, is weakened by (...) disciplinary disquietude and dissimilitude. Three features impress themselves upon all who inquire into the past. In the learning and teaching of history, these three features assume a distinct structural shape. First, colligation consists in grouping the events and concepts to be studied according to their shared purposes. Second, historical distance, intimately tied up with tradition and collective memory, provides the means for identifying a past separate from the present to be studied in its own right. Third, reconstruction describes the process of supplying individual content to the general categories illuminated by the earlier stages. To work knowingly in this structure of historical inquiry offers no solutions to the problems of historical thinking, it is to work productively within these problems. (shrink)

Transitional justice is positioned as an emergent discourse to grapple with the aim, and subsequent practices, of moving societies mired in violent political relations to more stable, democratic political relations. Increasingly, precepts of transitional justice are being applied to political reconciliatory processes in so- called liberal democratic states. This article examines limitations to transitional justice paradigms especially when applied to Indigenous-state reconciliatory processes by centering Indigenous scholarly discourse critical of both transitional justice and reconciliation processes that position Indigenous peoples, Indigenous (...) lands, and the landed violence of colonialism as fixed in the past. The article offers an analysis of the limitations of neoliberal transitional justice and reconciliation processes that do not realize justice for Indigenous peoples and Indigenous lands by highlighting Indigenous-centered accounts of justice that promote collective capacities of Indigenous nations rooted in the ability of Indigenous peoples to experience themselves in the world in ways that center relations to land, world, and relatives (human and non-human). (shrink)

Andrew Webster proposes that science and technology studies align itself more thoroughly with practical policy contexts, actors and issues, so as to become more useful, and thus more a regular actor in such worlds. This commentary raises some questions about this approach. First, I note that manifest influence in science or policy or both should not become-by default, or deliberately-a criterion of intellectual quality for STS research work. I distinguish between reflective historical work, which delineates the contingent ways in which (...) existing policy and technoscientific cultures have become entrenched as such inscribed and perhaps dysfunctional institutional habit; and, work of the kind that Webster's three case studies exemplify, that is, geared to influence policy-decision outcomes. I suggest that many of the important issues facing STS-and "policy"-are not explicit "policy-decision issues" as such, but implicit "policy syndromes" that need naming, diagnosing and open, if enforced, institutional reflection. (shrink)

The concept of empathy in history education involves students in the attempt to think within the context of historical agents’ particular predicaments. Tracing the concept’s philosophical heritage to R. G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history and ‘re-enactment doctrine’, this article argues that our efforts in history classrooms to understand historical agents by their own standards are constrained by a tension that arises out of the need to disconnect ourselves from a present that provides the very means for understanding the past. Though (...) rather than serving to undermine the concept, it is proposed that the moderate hermeneutics of H.-G. Gadamer, through a positive conception of prejudice, tradition and temporal distance, transforms the factors typically seen as inhibitors to empathy’s operation into those that potentially enable it. The article aspires to shed new light on what is at play when history students engage in the intellectually demanding task of empathizing in history. (shrink)

In this article I re-examine the role that aesthetics play in Paulo Freire's pedagogy of the oppressed. As opposed to the vast majority of scholarship in this area, I suggest that aesthetics play a more centralised role in pedagogy above and beyond arts-based curricula. To help clarify Freire's position, I will argue that underlying the linguistic resolution of the student/teacher dialectic in the problem-posing classroom is an accompanying shift in the very aesthetics of recognition. In order to demonstrate the always (...) already aesthetic nature of all education, I will turn to the aesthetic philosophy of Jacques Rancière. Through Rancière we can begin to understand how the pedagogy of the oppressed is predicated on an aesthetic redistribution of the sensible, of what can be seen and what can be heard. As Rancière will confirm, if we truly want to understand the aesthetics of pedagogy, we cannot simply see aesthetics as external to teaching and learning. Rather, education as an aesthetic event has to be taken seriously, and aesthetics should regain primacy in discussions of critical pedagogy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 101-116 [Access article in PDF] Persons and Awareness Tyson Anderson Saint Leo University The aim of this essay is to relate Christianity and Buddhism through a consideration of two key terms, "persons" and "awareness," the first being central for Christianity and the second being central for Buddhism.The first thing that needs to be noticed is the relatively indefinable character of these words. I of (...) course intend to give as clear an indication as is possible concerning their meaning, but as I considered some of the important concepts that are involved in the topic—language, world, love, understanding—I began to realize that we are surely in the realm of mystery here. By "mystery" I mean something that we can understand somewhat but cannot comprehend, much as Saint Thomas Aquinas thought of God. 1 As is well known, LudwigWittgenstein believed that there is something mysterious even about language itself, that basically what it is can be "shown" but not "said." 2 A certain tentativeness here in regard to propositional adequacy, I might add, is perfectly compatible with strong confidence in one's relation to what Wittgenstein called "the higher." 3 In regard to the truth to be found in the beliefs of others, even a megapandit such as Ken Wilber—not noted for his modesty and circumspection—observes that "the human mind is incapable of producing 100% error." 4 Perhaps some misunderstandings among those engaging in dialogue can be avoided if we remain mindful of the mysterious character of the subject matter and are less confident about the sufficiency of our own articulation of the truth.As to dialogue itself, it is perhaps well to remember when the issues of "fruit salad" and syncretism arise, 5 that thinking itself has typically a dialogical structure, with the result that "fruit salad" is actually the normal condition of persons as they develop in understanding themselves and their world. 6 In conversation with Laurence Freeman, O.S.B., the Dalai Lama appears to disapprove of mixing traditions—"Do not try to put a yak's head on a sheep's body" 7 —but it would be difficult to conceive of a more syncretistic religion than Tibetan Buddhism or Catholicism. Indeed, if we compare the early Jesus movement to the medieval church, the development of Catholicism might well be described by Luther or Calvin, had they thought of it, as an operation that put a yak's head on a sheep's body. The dialogical and finite structure of thinking is in fact one of the reasons why it is possible to conceive of a "universal religion," contrary to what the Dalai Lama thinks. 8 This is so because, since human understanding is never absolute and completed, there is always the possibility that future [End Page 101] understanding will yield a vision that embraces a multiplicity and diversity of religious insights in a way that is impossible for us to foresee at this time. Moreover, part of the point of American culture, I would think, is the benefits of mongrelization, and so perhaps Americans ought to be less suspicious than some at the thought of having "strange bedfellows." Looking for historical examples of conscious syncretism, one thinks of Mani and Jesuit syncretism exemplified in Matteo Ricci (outfitted first as a Buddhist monk and then later as a Confucian scholar) and the evangelization of New Spain, 9 and more recently, Hazrat Inayat Khan and his son, Pir Vilayat Khan. Also, there is Jesaiah Ben-Aharon, a Jewish thinker who interprets the Holocaust in terms of the Christ. 10 I find such efforts to be commendable, and so although doctrinal and cultural immaculacy has its charms, I believe it to be the call of maya. I will proceed, then, in constructing a mysterious and miscegenational fruit salad, my only justification being that this seems to reflect accurately the truth of the matter and that we really have no other peaceable choice. 11 Persons "Person" is often used in the same sense as "human being." By "person" I mean a being who can love and who, as a human being, is the... (shrink)

In Ontological Aspects of Early Jewish Anthropology, Tyson L. Putthoff combines contemporary theory and sound exegesis to understand early Jewish beliefs about how the human self reacts ontologically in God s presence.".

In an effort to disrupt the hegemonic dominance of learning theory, in this article Tyson Lewis explores the unique educational logic of studying. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, we can understand the operation of study as one of suspension through three modes: preferring not; no longer, not yet; and as not. But the relationship between the operation of suspension and the everyday mode of learning remains an open question requiring further analysis. In order to accomplish this task, (...) it is important to remember that for Agamben, study is a kind of profanation or improper life. Through examining Heidegger's analytic of Dasein's everyday being, Lewis demonstrates that the nature of study is always already saturated with the everyday, and is itself a contaminated process that is neither simply everyday living nor “authentic” existence. To be absolutely precise, the studier engages in idle talk, is curious, and is caught up in ambiguity in order to explore the seemingly uninhabitable zone that rests between everyday falling and authentically standing. Lewis concludes by offering Agamben's own work as a paradigm of study, illustrating how the smallest of freedoms opens to the studier: the freedom to dwell in potentiality. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the role of materiality in human cognition. We address issues such as the ways in which brain functions may change in response to interactions with material forms, the attributes of material forms that may cause change in brain functions, and the spans of time required for brain functions to reorganize when interacting with material forms. We then contrast thinking through materiality with thinking about it. We discuss these in terms of their evolutionary significance and history (...) as attested by stone tools and writing, material forms whose interaction endowed our lineage with conceptual thought and meta-awareness of conceptual domains. (shrink)

In this article, the author rethinks critiques of the learning society using Giorgio Agamben’s theory of potentiality. Summarizing several major contributions to our understanding of the limitations of the discourse of learning, the author proposes that critics thus far have failed to fully pinpoint the exact danger of learning. Importantly, learning is not only a rejection of the democratic or political dimension of education but it is first and foremost predicated on a false ontology of potentiality. What is put at (...) risk in learning is a sacrifice of our (im)potential, our capacity to be or not to be this or that within the order of things. Through a reconstruction of Agamben’s theory of studying, the author argues for a different conceptualization of freedom in education, of teaching, and of the time of education. (shrink)

This article proceeds from the thesis proposed by Frantz Fanon that colonialism, specifically settler colonialism, is a world-destroying structure that the colonized witness as a “veritable apocalypse.” Settler colonialism is apocalyptic not only in the sense that it attempts to permanently destroy and make irretrievable various other Indigenous worlds and ways of being-in-the-world, but also in that it builds the settler colonial world in, on, and with Indigenous lands and bodies. I read Fanon as proposing that settler colonialism builds apocalyptic (...) worlds with the murdered worlds of the colonized and then forces the colonized to navigate and embrace these violent and traumatic landscapes, which I call terrortories. I argue this is directly connected to Fanon's revolutionary psychiatric work and practice to decolonize and disalienate colonial medical and psychiatric facilities as structures of disablement, which requires the abolition of settler colonialism altogether. (shrink)

The history of the idea of progress and the history of the concept of progress are two different things, not least because they emanate from considerably different intellectual traditions. In anglophone history of ideas, progress has typically been viewed as a belief. Historians of ideas explore the past evaluating the extent to which a given society met certain conditions of belief. By contrast, in the history of concepts as developed by Reinhart Koselleck, progress has occupied the dual role of a (...) ‘basic concept’ that grasps modern sociopolitical reality and a ‘collective singular’ that aggregates previous and adjacent meanings in the one linguistic unit. This article compares these two historical research programmes, highlights their merits and deficiencies, and concludes by offering a new approach to the history of concepts as suggested by R.G. Collingwood’s theory of a scale of forms. In each of the approaches to the history of ideas and concepts addressed, particular attention is given to the problem of what qualifies as progress, and thus to a longstanding problem concerning the attribution of progress to past societies routinely excluded from its history, including those left out by Koselleck’s conventional secular-modern thesis. (shrink)

This article examines what happens when local gender rights activism is taken up by international allies and appropriators, using case studies of activism in Saudi Arabia and India. The relationship between local and transnational activists is shaped by histories of Euro-Americans writing about the gendered organisation of Eastern societies. In an economic system where nongovernmental activist groups compete for donor support, political causes are commodities with value, and value is generated through representations (e.g. of patriarchal oppression). These representations of the (...) sexuality and gender organisation of other societies are fetishes in the Marxian sense, essential to the commodity-cause that generates value in circulation. These representations gain value through the accretion of cultural images and texts that adhere to the cause, e.g. the stereotype of the violent brown man and oppressed woman. Such images in the cultural repository allow transnational consumers to make sense of issues they are called to support. But such images also reify stereotypes that activists seek to undermine, even at the same time that these representations generate an international audience. We analyse this process and identify strategies for how transnational allies can show solidarity without overshadowing or devaluing the voices of local activists, with primary focus on the case of activism against male guardianship laws in Saudi Arabia. (shrink)

Working in healthcare can be fulfilling, meaningful, and sometimes exhausting. Creative endeavors may be one way to foster personal resilience in healthcare providers. In this article, we describe an annual arts and humanities program, the Ludwig Rounds, developed at a large academic children’s hospital. The event encourages staff to reflect on resilience by sharing their creative work and how it had an impact on their clinical careers. The multidisciplinary forum also allows staff to connect and learn about each other. We (...) discuss the development of the program, its format and logistics, and lessons learned over the past 15 years. (shrink)