7,775 research outputs found

    Education, time-poverty and well-being

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    This article focuses on ‘objective list’ accounts of personal well-being and the related view that schools should aim at inducting students into a wide range of objective goods. It reviews various objective lists and notes that very many of them include knowledge, a love of beauty and close personal relationships. It then seeks to explain why this might be so and cautions against narrowness in specifying intrinsic goods, before exploring the role of extensive personal time in engaging in them. This article links all this to the current UK government’s advocacy of knowledge and other cultural goods in English school aims, seeing this as an instance of a more global tendency. It argues that this approach both assumes a too restricted notion of intrinsic goods and – especially – is unrealistic in the light of widespread time-poverty. It suggests, finally, that if more personal time is to be sought, school reform must go hand in hand with wider social changes

    Samuel Beckett's trilogy and the revolution of the body in Vichy France

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    This essay explores the depiction of the degenerating male form in Samuel Beckett’s post-World War II trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) in the context of Vichy France’s ideology of the body—specifically the male body—and the propaganda of the regime’s RĂ©volution nationale, which Beckett would have encountered in wartime France. Read with this historical situation in mind, this essay argues that Beckett’s move from the limping Molloy to the bed-bound Malone and finally to the physically limbless figure of The Unnamable gives expression to a reality of physical deterioration that is unique to the degenerating body, a reality that also inverts the ideal of physical perfection that regimes such as Vichy produced. Analyzed in this way, Beckett’s work can be seen to aggravate and challenge both Vichy’s idolization of the strong, athletic male form and the ways in which Vichy and other midcentury ideologies produced narratives of the body steeped in a narrow and ultimately violent essentialism

    Embedded Identities and Dialogic Consensus: Educational implications from the communitarian theory of Bhikhu Parekh

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    In this article the author will investigate the extent to which Bhikhu Parekh believes that a person's cultural/religious background must be preserved and whether, by implication, religious schooling is justified by his theory. His discussion will explore—by inference and implication—whether Parekh's carefully crafted multiculturalism, enriched and illuminated by numerous practical insights, is socially tenable. The author will also consider whether, by extension, it is justifiable, on his line of reasoning, to cultivate cultural and religious understandings among one's own children. Finally, the author will contend that Parekh, notwithstanding his cautious, even‐handed approach, commits several important errors, including conflating the culture of the parents with that of the children and insisting that cultural and religious persons ought to be allowed to defend their views in the public square on religious grounds

    Civic Republicanism Provides Theoretical Support for Making Individuals More Environmentally Responsible

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    The genesis for this essay is the recognition that individual behavior is contributing in a significant way to the remaining environmental problems we have. For a variety of reasons, ranging from the difficulty of trying to identify and then regulate all of these individual sources to the political backlash that might result if such regulation was tried, efforts to control that behavior have either failed or not been tried. The phenomenon of individuals as irresponsible environmental actors seems counter-intuitive given the durability of the environmental protection norm and polls that consistently show that people contribute to environmental causes, are willing to pay more to protect environmental resources, and consider protecting the environment among their highest priorities. This conflict between thought and deed and its serious effect, if not resolved, is the puzzle that has sent me on this quest. This essay is the author\u27s third attempt at unraveling the problem of irresponsible individual environmental behavior and at suggesting possible ways to reform how people behave toward the environment. The first article proposed expanding the abstract environmental protection norm to include individual environmental responsibility as the approach most likely to overcome barriers to behavioral change. The article recommended enlisting environmental groups as the most effective norm entrepreneurs to achieve widespread change in personal environmental conduct. In that piece, she concluded that the best way to change norms and thus change behavior was through education, but additional measures might be necessary. The second article expanded on the earlier discussion of norms and their influence on behavior, and why changing norms, though difficult, is more effective than other means of inciting behavioral change. However, given the difficulty inherent in creating or changing norms, the second article also identified and evaluated other norm and behavior-changing tactics, such as shaming, public education, and market-based incentives, which might supplement norms as a means of changing behavior. The article concluded that no one approach alone is sufficient to secure both norm and behavior change, but a combination of any or all of them when properly tailored to the source and nature of the harm and when accompanied by public education can lead to both norm and behavioral changes. Thus, both articles concluded that public education plays a critical role in any effort to alter public behavior through changing norms. This essay examines how republican theory supports that conclusion and provides the theoretical framework within which norm change can occur. All three pieces start with the premise that the current crisis over global climate change has created the circumstances in which norm change can occur--circumstances that collectively have created what the author calls a second environmental republican moment. This second republican moment, like the first one in the 1970s, might result in widespread public support for a variety of environmentally protective legislative and regulatory initiatives and offers a rare, albeit brief, opportunity in which to educate the public about its contribution to environmental harm. This essay develops the republican aspect of that thought further, demonstrating how the overlapping strands of republican thought and norm development support the creation of a new norm of personal environmental responsibility. The essay also shows how, during republican moments, the public is more amenable to being educated about civic matters, including their responsibilities as environmental citizens. It is particularly during republican moments that people acquire information that may influence their expressed preferences, lending a sense of urgency to the present moment we find ourselves in. This essay begins by discussing the concept of an environmental republican moment, and why the public\u27s response to the crisis of global climate change appears to be such a moment. The essay then identifies the key features of republican theory and shows how those features replicate many of the elements necessary for norm and behavioral change. The essay concludes by showing how republicanism--with its emphasis on public education, civic involvement, and achieving the common good through civic virtue--provides a useful construct for thinking about how to make people behave in more environmentally responsible ways

    Education vs. Entertainment: A Cultural History of Children's Software

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    Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning This chapter draws on ethnographic material to consider the cultural politics and recent history of children's software and reflects on how this past can inform our current efforts to mobilize games for learning. The analysis uses a concept of genre as a way of making linkages across the distributed but interconnected circuit of everyday play, software content, and industry context. Organized through three genres in children's software -- academic, entertainment, and construction -- the body of the chapter describes how these genres play out within a production and advertising context, in the design of particular software titles, and at sites of play in after-school computer centers where the fieldwork was conducted

    Capoeira Angola: An alternative intervention program for traumatized adolescent refugees from war-torn countries

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    Background: Following resettlement in Australia, young traumatized refugees often face social challenges, including language and cultural barriers and social adjustment, which can lead to behavioral difficulties. Providing support at this vulnerable stage is therefore vital for reducing future setbacks.Objective: The STARTTS Capoeira Angola program was developed to help traumatized adolescents successfully integrate into their school environments. As an Afro-Brazilian martial art that incorporates dance, Capoeira appeared an appropriate intervention for adolescent refugees due to its unique ethos of empowerment and group membership. Method: 32 refugeesfrom Middle Eastern and African countries (aged12-17) from the Intensive English Centre (IEC) department of the participant schools were assessed pre- and post- intervention using the Teacher’s Strengths and Difficulties Scale (SDQ). Teachers were also asked to observe the students’ functioning in a range of different situations at school. Results/conclusions: A significant overall decrease in behavioral problems was observed, which was associated with improvements in interpersonal skills, confidence, respect for self and others, self-discipline, and overall sense of responsibility

    Research campaigns in the UK National Health Service: patient recruitment and questions of valuation

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    The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) aims to improve national ‘health and wealth' by providing infrastructural support to enable clinical research in National Health Service settings in England and Wales. Cognisant of the consequences of studies' failure to achieve required numbers of participants, it also actively campaigns to promote patient awareness of research, and willingness to participate in trials. In this paper, we analyse recent NIHR campaigns and policies designed to encourage patients to participate in clinical research to interrogate how they are implicated in the national bioeconomy. In doing so we expand the notion of ‘clinical labour' to include the work of patient recruitment and highlight an emergent obligation on patients to contribute to research processes. Whereas once patient knowledge and experience may have been devalued, here we draw on the concept of ‘assetisation' (Birch 2012) to explore the emergent relationship between healthcare system and patient as research participant. We consider how patients' contribution goes beyond the provision of standardised objects of valuation so that patients themselves may be perceived as assets to, not only recipients of, the national healthcare system

    Brothers in Motion: Religious Practice, Political Action, and the Mobilization of the Early Muslim Brotherhood

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    In light of Randy Martin\u27s proposal to use dance as an analytic tool for understanding social movements, this article seeks to reconstruct the early mobilization of the Muslim Brotherhood as bodies in motion. Through a re-examination of both primary and secondary source material, this study highlights the ways in which founder Hasan al-Banna appropriated both Islamic and colonial choreographic logics into the Muslim Brotherhood\u27s pious training regimen, scouting programs, political expression, and social welfare projects. I argue that the Muslim Brotherhood was mobilized through al-Banna\u27s revival of traditional Islamic practices concerning the body, reconfigured for the goal not of otherworldly transcendence, but of the construction of a moral community committed to da`wa and the care of the material needs of others. This reconfiguration of embodied Islamic practices sets al-Banna apart as a unique figure within the political problem space of 1930s and \u2740s Egypt

    Culture and Motherhood: Findings from a Qualitative Study of East Asian Mothers in Britain’

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    This article focuses on the possible impacts of Confucianism on the experiences of middle-class East Asian women with dependent children in Britain. By using the concept of ‘intersectionality’, it aims to understand the ways in which mothering identity intersects with class and East Asian cultural identity in the British context, and how identities emerge through this interaction. The study was based on in-depth interview data collected from 20 first-generation East Asian mothers living in Britain, and suggests that East Asian mothers in this study appear to share a discernible trace of Confucianism, including a strong emphasis on education, alongside a high value placed on seniority, and children as a mother’s possession. These Confucian values were portrayed by the interviewees as salient in constructing their mothering identities. Simultaneously, however, certain aspects of British culture were also perceived to be significant in their mothering, in that they appeared to provide the interviewees with opportunities to question and modify their cultural values
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