5,322 research outputs found

    Logical disagreement : an epistemological study

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    While the epistemic signiïŹcance of disagreement has been a popular topic in epistemology for at least a decade, little attention has been paid to logical disagreement. This monograph is meant as a remedy. The text starts with an extensive literature review of the epistemology of (peer) disagreement and sets the stage for an epistemological study of logical disagreement. The guiding thread for the rest of the work is then three distinct readings of the ambiguous term ‘logical disagreement’. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the Ad Hoc Reading according to which logical disagreements occur when two subjects take incompatible doxastic attitudes toward a speciïŹc proposition in or about logic. Chapter 2 presents a new counterexample to the widely discussed Uniqueness Thesis. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the Theory Choice Reading of ‘logical disagreement’. According to this interpretation, logical disagreements occur at the level of entire logical theories rather than individual entailment-claims. Chapter 4 concerns a key question from the philosophy of logic, viz., how we have epistemic justiïŹcation for claims about logical consequence. In Chapters 5 and 6 we turn to the Akrasia Reading. On this reading, logical disagreements occur when there is a mismatch between the deductive strength of one’s background logic and the logical theory one prefers (oïŹƒcially). Chapter 6 introduces logical akrasia by analogy to epistemic akrasia and presents a novel dilemma. Chapter 7 revisits the epistemology of peer disagreement and argues that the epistemic signiïŹcance of central principles from the literature are at best deïŹ‚ated in the context of logical disagreement. The chapter also develops a simple formal model of deep disagreement in Default Logic, relating this to our general discussion of logical disagreement. The monograph ends in an epilogue with some reïŹ‚ections on the potential epistemic signiïŹcance of convergence in logical theorizing

    Making sense of psychological abuse in romantic relationships: a thematic analysis

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    Studies indicate that psychological abuse is more pervasive and insidious than physical or sexual abuse (Semple, 2001). It has serious physical and psychological consequences, and yet is an under-researched area of intimate partner violence (Lammers et al., 2005). Moreover, there is little consensus among researchers (e.g. Chang, 1996; Follingstad et al., 1990; Kelly, 2004; Lammers et al., 2005; Marshall, 1996; Murphy & O’Leary, 1989; Tolman, 1989) as to what constitutes psychological abuse, how it is experienced over time, and how victims make sense of it. This research therefore aims to address the questions: (1) How do victims describe their experiences of being in psychologically abusive romantic relationships? (2) How do victims make sense of, and address issues of accountability in their psychologically abusive relationships? An inductive thematic analysis was conducted on two data sets. Seven blog entries of victims’ experiences of psychological abuse and 20 semi-structured interviews with victims of psychologically abusive relationships were analyzed. One overarching theme and five key themes were identified across the blogs. The overarching theme of (Retrospective Accountability) encapsulated the way that individuals tended to account for their own thoughts or actions upon the reflection of their relationships. In the first key theme, the bloggers described the beginning stages of their relationship as 'blissful' and overwhelmingly happy (Blissful Beginnings), but tended to question upon reflection whether the beginning stages were in fact ever truly happy. Second, the invisibility of psychological abuse pervaded accounts and its presence was described as building imperceptibly over time (The Invisible Nature of Abuse). Third, many of the bloggers described a Loss of Self or identity. Fourth, they portrayed abuse as a 'cycle' of brief periods of warmth, abusive and manipulating tactics, withdrawal, and intermittent warmth again (The Continuous Cycle of Abuse). Finally, victims described the ending process of their relationship as a series of stages which led to leaving (The Leaving Process). Similar themes were identified in the analysis of the interview data with some differences. One overarching theme and four key themes were identified across the semi-structured interviews. The overarching theme, (Retrospective Sense-Making), referred to the idea that through several retrospective descriptions, victims tended to make sense of the abuse, changes within themselves, and their experience as a whole. The first key theme, How This Was Abuse, encapsulated the ways in which victims constructed how they experienced psychological abuse showing that psychological abuse was an all-consuming, confusing experience that left significant impact on its victims and was difficult to describe in retrospect. A second theme, I am Less Than I Was Before, related to the way the victims noted a change in interests and loss of identity over the course of the relationship, but with difficulty in recognizing and understanding it at the time. Third, Managing Blame and Accountability, focused on the ways in which victims addressed issues of accountability and blame within themselves and others. Several victims attributed aspects of getting involved in the relationship and their partners’ abusive behaviors to violence or neglect in families of origin. Fourth, It’s Good That it Ended? consisted of the ways in which victims reflected upon the dissolution of their relationships while concurrently seeking confirmation that it was the right thing to do during the process of describing these endings. Here in contrast to the stages above, victims described a series of turning points which they claimed were key in recognizing the abuse and moving them toward the end of their relationships. Together the findings of the two studies provided insight into how victims made sense of their psychologically abusive relationships over time revealing a difficulty in identifying abuse as well as changes within themselves at the time of the relationship. A continuous cycle of abuse became apparent in the descriptions indicating the utility of Loring’s (1994) Connection-Deprivation Cycle, although this is rarely referred to by other researchers when attempting to understand how psychological abuse functions in a relationship. The findings also served to address/reject common assumptions or potential criticisms of victims (e.g. why didn’t they just leave?) and furthermore extended previous work (Chang, 1996) on how individuals accounted for getting involved in a psychologically abusive relationship. New research was added on how victims reflected upon their beliefs as to why their partners may have been more prone to implementing psychological abuse in romantic relationships

    Non-Market Food Practices Do Things Markets Cannot: Why Vermonters Produce and Distribute Food That\u27s Not For Sale

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    Researchers tend to portray food self-provisioning in high-income societies as a coping mechanism for the poor or a hobby for the well-off. They describe food charity as a regrettable band-aid. Vegetable gardens and neighborly sharing are considered remnants of precapitalist tradition. These are non-market food practices: producing food that is not for sale and distributing food in ways other than selling it. Recent scholarship challenges those standard understandings by showing (i) that non-market food practices remain prevalent in high-income countries, (ii) that people in diverse social groups engage in these practices, and (iii) that they articulate diverse reasons for doing so. In this dissertation, I investigate the persistent pervasiveness of non-market food practices in Vermont. To go beyond explanations that rely on individual motivation, I examine the roles these practices play in society. First, I investigate the prevalence of non-market food practices. Several surveys with large, representative samples reveal that more than half of Vermont households grow, hunt, fish, or gather some of their own food. Respondents estimate that they acquire 14% of the food they consume through non-market means, on average. For reference, commercial local food makes up about the same portion of total consumption. Then, drawing on the words of 94 non-market food practitioners I interviewed, I demonstrate that these practices serve functions that markets cannot. Interviewees attested that non-market distribution is special because it feeds the hungry, strengthens relationships, builds resilience, puts edible-but-unsellable food to use, and aligns with a desired future in which food is not for sale. Hunters, fishers, foragers, scavengers, and homesteaders said that these activities contribute to their long-run food security as a skills-based safety net. Self-provisioning allows them to eat from the landscape despite disruptions to their ability to access market food such as job loss, supply chain problems, or a global pandemic. Additional evidence from vegetable growers suggests that non-market settings liberate production from financial discipline, making space for work that is meaningful, playful, educational, and therapeutic. Non-market food practices mend holes in the social fabric torn by the commodification of everyday life. Finally, I synthesize scholarly critiques of markets as institutions for organizing the production and distribution of food. Markets send food toward money rather than hunger. Producing for market compels farmers to prioritize financial viability over other values such as stewardship. Historically, people rarely if ever sell each other food until external authorities coerce them to do so through taxation, indebtedness, cutting off access to the means of subsistence, or extinguishing non-market institutions. Today, more humans than ever suffer from chronic undernourishment even as the scale of commercial agriculture pushes environmental pressures past critical thresholds of planetary sustainability. This research substantiates that alternatives to markets exist and have the potential to address their shortcomings

    Gender disenfranchisement in Hong Kong churches

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    Open Access via the T&F AgreementPeer reviewedPublisher PD

    Teaching the actuality of revolution: Aesthetics, unlearning, and the sensations of struggle

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    Exploring the nexus between aesthetics, pedagogy, and politics illustrates the central role education plays in reproducing injustice and inhibiting confidence in revolutionary struggle. Demonstrating how capitalism and its attendant forms of oppression are not merely cognitive but perceptual, Derek R. Ford proposes that revolutionary education demands the production of aesthetic experiences through which we sense the possibility and actuality of alternative worlds. To create such encounters, Ford develops a praxis of teaching and a pedagogy of unlearning that, in our current conjuncture, creates conditions for encountering what Jennifer Ponce de León calls “an other aesthetics.” Mapping contemporary capital as a perceptual ecology of structures, social relations, beliefs, and feelings, Teaching the Actuality of Revolution: Aesthetics, Unlearning, and the Sensations of Struggle provides an extensive new set of concepts, practices, and readings for revolutionaries to better plan, enact, reflect on, and refine our organizing efforts

    The Elusive Pursuit of Justice: Sexual Assault Survivors' Speak About Redress in the Aftermath of Violence

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    The struggle of survivors to obtain justice after they have been sexually assaulted has been a much discussed topic in recent years. Significant attention and resources are being directed towards this issue, making academic research particularly valuable at this time. However, instead of asking how legal processes can theoretically be made better, as is the case in most of the literature on this topic, my focus has been on asking why survivors want to engage in a legal process at all. What do they get from reporting their assaults and does what the legal system offers them respond to what survivors are looking for from justice? This project starts this conversation by asking survivors what they think justice should be in the aftermath of a sexual assault. Using feminist standpoint epistemology and grounded theory, I interviewed sixteen survivors and seven lawyers to explore what justice means for survivors in the aftermath of an assault. From the data, I identified four major themes including: harms and healing, accountability, punishment, and restorative justice. I found that survivors were not satisfied with the justice they could obtain under criminal law. They stated that it was difficult, financially and emotionally, to engage in criminal proceedings that were unlikely to resolve in a way that made them feel as if justice was done. While other forms of legal justice are also available, survivors often found these to be inaccessible as well, or they were unaware of the existence of these alternative options. The survivors I spoke with imagined an expansive ideal of justice. To most of the women I interviewed with, justice involved the prevention of future violence, something they did not think the legal system was currently equipped to deal with. They were curious, though conflicted, about restorative models, but appreciated their focus on attempting to reform offender behaviour. They also stressed the importance of being supported in their attempts to recover from sexual assault, highlighting that financial compensation was crucial for any survivor to heal

    Oltreoceano. The Isthmus and the American Continent: Literatures, Cultures and Histories

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    Il presente studio si propone di analizzare la funzione di contatto/ponte tra le realtĂ  anglofone, francofone, latinoamericane, esercitata dalla zona istmica e, per estensione, da tutti i territori centroamericani, isole comprese. Nell'acquisizione estetica della natura, nel dialogo aperto con l'individuo e con la societĂ , la letteratura diventa un punto nodale per penetrare nel mondo esterno e nel microcosmo interno e per indicare nel viaggio all'interno dello spazio fisico una necessitĂ  per tutti coloro che intendono la scrittura come missione della conoscenza. Il contatto tra culture mette in gioco qualsiasi base identitaria e stabilisce nuovi punti di riferimento, trasformando la cultura in ricchezza e coscienza, anche individuale. Pertanto, partendo dal contesto, Ăš interessante vedere se i testi letterari inglesi, francesi e spagnoli dell'area affermano gli impulsi nella direzione di una globalizzazione inarrestabile o se prevale la scelta di coltivare le proprie radici culturali, seppur modificate o "contaminate" all'interno di un territorio multiculturale

    Investigating the learning potential of the Second Quantum Revolution: development of an approach for secondary school students

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    In recent years we have witnessed important changes: the Second Quantum Revolution is in the spotlight of many countries, and it is creating a new generation of technologies. To unlock the potential of the Second Quantum Revolution, several countries have launched strategic plans and research programs that finance and set the pace of research and development of these new technologies (like the Quantum Flagship, the National Quantum Initiative Act and so on). The increasing pace of technological changes is also challenging science education and institutional systems, requiring them to help to prepare new generations of experts. This work is placed within physics education research and contributes to the challenge by developing an approach and a course about the Second Quantum Revolution. The aims are to promote quantum literacy and, in particular, to value from a cultural and educational perspective the Second Revolution. The dissertation is articulated in two parts. In the first, we unpack the Second Quantum Revolution from a cultural perspective and shed light on the main revolutionary aspects that are elevated to the rank of principles implemented in the design of a course for secondary school students, prospective and in-service teachers. The design process and the educational reconstruction of the activities are presented as well as the results of a pilot study conducted to investigate the impact of the approach on students' understanding and to gather feedback to refine and improve the instructional materials. The second part consists of the exploration of the Second Quantum Revolution as a context to introduce some basic concepts of quantum physics. We present the results of an implementation with secondary school students to investigate if and to what extent external representations could play any role to promote students’ understanding and acceptance of quantum physics as a personal reliable description of the world

    Minoritized Knowledges: Agency, Literature, Temporalities

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    Abstract “I am not erudite enough to be interdisciplinary, but I can break rules.” Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, xiii “Minoritized Knowledges: Agency, Literature, Temporalities,” queries an agency exercised by literature in excess of authorial intention as well as the text itself, which is transforming in its unoriginality, as a convergence of exploited, minoritized knowledges. The six chapters engage multiple fields as discourses rather than territories. “Nonidentity and Vectors of History,” brings Critical Theory’s notion of nonidentity into dialogue with key literary work by authors including Claudia Rankine and Elfriede Jelinek. The historical principle of nonidentity illuminates a convergence in their writing, which facilitates understanding history as vectors of trauma rather than modes of domination. Chapter 2. “Literary Agency and Minoritized Grammar'' addresses the political work of contemporary poets, including Fred Moten, contesting the sequestering of alternative minoritized grammars in poetic terms. Limiting alternative grammar to poetic experimentation perpetuates melancholy and epistemic hegemony. Chapter 3. “Economies of Sacrifice,” situates the work historically, where sacrifice emerges as central to western hegemonic logic. Recent feminist and queer mobilizations of the figure of Antigone highlight how sacrifice undergirds western tradition/s of exploitation and increasingly generates economies of violence that mobilize current knowledge markets. Chapter 4. “Unfinished Knowledge,” sets the stage by underscoring the convergence of partial, situated and unfinished knowledges in the works of Black, feminist and queer theorists for which literature is key. Such incomplete epistemologies continue to be underestimated and ambivalently received. Chapter 5. “The Folly of Narrative,” engages with current critical re-readings of literary realism, to draw out alternative epistemological figures and temporalities that contest the logic of sacrifice. Chapter 6. “Literary Agency and Minoritized Knowledges” revisits the history of western ideas decentering eurocentrism’s deployment of certainty qua mastery and completion under the guise of knowledge. Pivoting from the convergence of decolonial queer feminist critique, I elaborate alternative epistemological figures, including counter-grammar, nonidentity and folly. By undermining dominant dichotomous epistemologies and inviting diasporic study, these figures challenge epistemic injustice. The contrast between epistemologies of exploitation versus decolonization is not dichotomous but performative. Hence, it is situated, situational, contextual, temporal, historical and (dis)located

    Reviews

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    The Dragon Daughter and Other Lin Lan Fairy Tales. (edited and translated by Juwen Zhang). Reviewed by Gregory Hesse The Island of Happiness: Tales of Madame d’Aulnoy. (translated by Jack Zipes, drawings by Natalie Frank). Reviewed by Justin Cosner The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest. (by Felix Salten, translated and introduced by Jack Zipes, illustrated by Alenka Sottler). Reviewed by Francesca Arnavas The Power of a Tale: Stories from the Israel Folktale Archives. (edited by Haya Bar-Itzhak and Idit Pintel-Ginsberg). Reviewed by Jeana Jorgensen Tistou: The Boy with the Green Thumbs of Peace. (by Maurice Druon, adapted by Jack Zipes). Reviewed by Marisca Pichette Women Writing Wonder: An Anthology of Subversive Nineteenth-Century British, French, and German Fairy Tales. (edited and translated by Julie L. J. Koehler, Shandi Lynne Wagner, Anne E. Duggan, and Adrion Dula). Reviewed by Hannah Mummert Folklore 101: An Accessible Introduction to Folklore Studies. (by Jeana Jorgensen). Reviewed by Jennifer Eastman Attebery L’écho des contes. Des FĂ©es de Perrault Ă  Dame Holle des Grimm. Version LittĂ©raires, variantes populaires et reconfigurations pour la jeunesse. (edited by Dominique Peyrache-Leborgne). Reviewed by Charlotte Trinquet du Lys Gender Fluidity in Early-Modern to Post-Modern Children’s Literature and Culture. (edited by Sophie Raynard-Leroy and Charlotte Trinquet du Lys). Reviewed by Jen Pendragon MĂ€rchenfilme diesseits und jenseits des Atlantiks. (edited by Ludger Scherer). Reviewed by Julie Koehler 101 Middle Eastern Tales and Their Impact on Western Oral Tradition. (by Ulrich Marzolph). Reviewed by Maurice A. Pomerantz La fabbrica di Pinocchio. Dalla fiaba all’illustrazione, l’immaginario di Collodi. (by Veronica Bonanni). Reviewed by Cristina Bacchilega The Goddess Myth in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture. (by Mary J. Magoulick). Reviewed by Marisa Mills The Heroine with 1,001 Faces. (by Maria Tatar). Reviewed by Kathleen Raga
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