260 research outputs found

    Harmonious Living: Sustainability, Ecology, and Eco-Islam in Wales

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    This thesis is an in-depth examination of Eco-Islam in Wales. Eco-Islam refers to the conceptual intersection of Islamic principles with environmental and ecological concerns. It is not necessarily a formalised movement with a centralised structure but rather a broader concept that explores the compatibility between Islamic teachings and environmental stewardship. It emphasises the idea that Islamic values and ethics can be applied to address contemporary environmental challenges. This dissertation addresses the question of the normative influence of Islamic environmental principles and their implementation within Welsh Muslim communities and Welsh society. More generally, this thesis is embedded in the academic discourse on the normative role and agency of religions in motivating their members to engage in proenvironmental behaviour. Given the urgency of the environmental crisis facing humanity, which requires a concerted effort from all sectors of society, the research question of this thesis is particularly relevant. Furthermore, despite the growing body of literature on ecology and Islam, there has been little research on the practical implementation of Islamic teachings on nature. Therefore, whilst giving a comprehensive overview of Islamic environmental ethics based on a literature review, the thesis also provides research data on the Eco-Islam movement based on fieldwork conducted in Wales. Particular attention is paid to the social and power structures that contribute to or hinder the development of a Muslim environmental movement. The study provides practical recommendations for better cooperation between faith communities and the (still) predominantly secular environmental movement, with particular attention to the challenges faced by minority communities such as the Muslim communities in Wales

    Multidisciplinary perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the law

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    This open access book presents an interdisciplinary, multi-authored, edited collection of chapters on Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and the Law. AI technology has come to play a central role in the modern data economy. Through a combination of increased computing power, the growing availability of data and the advancement of algorithms, AI has now become an umbrella term for some of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of this age. The importance of AI stems from both the opportunities that it offers and the challenges that it entails. While AI applications hold the promise of economic growth and efficiency gains, they also create significant risks and uncertainty. The potential and perils of AI have thus come to dominate modern discussions of technology and ethics – and although AI was initially allowed to largely develop without guidelines or rules, few would deny that the law is set to play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. As the debate over AI is far from over, the need for rigorous analysis has never been greater. This book thus brings together contributors from different fields and backgrounds to explore how the law might provide answers to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI. An outcome of the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law and its interdisciplinary working group on Law and Artificial Intelligence, it includes contributions by leading scholars in the fields of technology, ethics and the law.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Logics of Responsibility

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    The study of responsibility is a complicated matter. The term is used in different ways in different fields, and it is easy to engage in everyday discussions as to why someone should be considered responsible for something. Typically, the backdrop of these discussions involves social, legal, moral, or philosophical problems. A clear pattern in all these spheres is the intent of issuing standards for when---and to what extent---an agent should be held responsible for a state of affairs. This is where Logic lends a hand. The development of expressive logics---to reason about agents' decisions in situations with moral consequences---involves devising unequivocal representations of components of behavior that are highly relevant to systematic responsibility attribution and to systematic blame-or-praise assignment. To put it plainly, expressive syntactic-and-semantic frameworks help us analyze responsibility-related problems in a methodical way. This thesis builds a formal theory of responsibility. The main tool used toward this aim is modal logic and, more specifically, a class of modal logics of action known as stit theory. The underlying motivation is to provide theoretical foundations for using symbolic techniques in the construction of ethical AI. Thus, this work means a contribution to formal philosophy and symbolic AI. The thesis's methodology consists in the development of stit-theoretic models and languages to explore the interplay between the following components of responsibility: agency, knowledge, beliefs, intentions, and obligations. Said models are integrated into a framework that is rich enough to provide logic-based characterizations for three categories of responsibility: causal, informational, and motivational responsibility. The thesis is structured as follows. Chapter 2 discusses at length stit theory, a logic that formalizes the notion of agency in the world over an indeterministic conception of time known as branching time. The idea is that agents act by constraining possible futures to definite subsets. On the road to formalizing informational responsibility, Chapter 3 extends stit theory with traditional epistemic notions (knowledge and belief). Thus, the chapter formalizes important aspects of agents' reasoning in the choice and performance of actions. In a context of responsibility attribution and excusability, Chapter 4 extends epistemic stit theory with measures of optimality of actions that underlie obligations. In essence, this chapter formalizes the interplay between agents' knowledge and what they ought to do. On the road to formalizing motivational responsibility, Chapter 5 adds intentions and intentional actions to epistemic stit theory and reasons about the interplay between knowledge and intentionality. Finally, Chapter 6 merges the previous chapters' formalisms into a rich logic that is able to express and model different modes of the aforementioned categories of responsibility. Technically, the most important contributions of this thesis lie in the axiomatizations of all the introduced logics. In particular, the proofs of soundness & completeness results involve long, step-by-step procedures that make use of novel techniques

    Challenges and perspectives of hate speech research

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    This book is the result of a conference that could not take place. It is a collection of 26 texts that address and discuss the latest developments in international hate speech research from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. This includes case studies from Brazil, Lebanon, Poland, Nigeria, and India, theoretical introductions to the concepts of hate speech, dangerous speech, incivility, toxicity, extreme speech, and dark participation, as well as reflections on methodological challenges such as scraping, annotation, datafication, implicity, explainability, and machine learning. As such, it provides a much-needed forum for cross-national and cross-disciplinary conversations in what is currently a very vibrant field of research

    Towards an authentic argumentation literacy test

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    A central goal of education is to improve argumentation literacy. How do we know how well this goal is achieved? Can we measure argumentation literacy? The present study is a preliminary step towards measuring the efficacy of education with regards to argumentation literacy. Tests currently in use to determine critical thinking skills are often similar to IQ-tests in that they predominantly measure logical and mathematical abilities. Thus, they may not measure the various other skills required in understanding authentic argumentation. To identify the elements of argumentation literacy, this exploratory study begins by surveying introductory textbooks within argumentation theory, critical thinking, and rhetoric. Eight main abilities have been identified. Then, the study outlines an Argumentation Literacy Test that would comprise these abilities suggested by the literature. Finally, the study presents results from a pilot of a version of such a test and discusses needs for further development

    Does Entrepreneurship Pay for Women? A social positioning investigation of entrepreneurial rewards.

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    Although entrepreneurship is widely promoted as a means of fulfilling personal and economic aspirations and avoiding gendered labour market discrimination, the nature and extent of entrepreneurial rewards for women, and whether all women benefit, are seldom empirically researched. In particular, very little is known about women’s entrepreneurial incomes, or how, why, and in what contexts they are subjectively evaluated as satisfactory. To address this issue, the thesis investigates the relationship between women entrepreneur’s social position and subjectively beneficial outcomes emerging from venture creation. Informed by critical, feminist and Bourdieusian perspectives, it employs an abductive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 52 women entrepreneurs purposefully selected to reflect different intersections of class, race and life course. Through an intersectional social positioning framework, it investigates the following question: “How do women from diverse social backgrounds experience entrepreneurship and its outcomes?” More specifically, it seeks understanding of how classed, gendered and racialised experiences of social position make entrepreneurship “worth it”. The ensuing abductive analysis provides comprehensive and nuanced insight on women’s entrepreneurial outcomes, including incomes, and a detailed analysis of women’s feelings about those outcomes in relation to social position. In contrast to much of the extant literature, the study finds that most women entrepreneurs have very strong pecuniary motivations. Non-monetary rewards do not fully compensate for poor remuneration and the main reason respondents give up their business is due to inadequate financial returns. Breadwinning and securing transgenerational benefits are key and low remuneration entrepreneurship is subsidised by a much wider range of household income streams than the current literature suggests. The study introduces novel concepts that extend theoretical understanding of women’s differentiated experiences of entrepreneurship including the malcontented female entrepreneur, narrative demonetisation, cognitive bookkeeping and new classifications of non-pecuniary rewards and social positioning goals. In showing how both outcomes and their subjective evaluation are socially embedded this thesis contributes to critical entrepreneurship scholarship and lays the groundwork for a future social theory of entrepreneurial satisfaction

    The Effects of a Brief Epistemic Cognition and Metacognition Intervention on the Continued Influence Effect

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    Individuals rely on accurate information to make important decisions, but in the current environment the vast amount of misinformation present in society is complicating people’s thinking. Many people fall prey to a cognitive bias called the continued influence effect, which occurs when they continue to use misinformation even when they have seen and can acknowledge a correction of the inaccurate messaging. Researchers have started to examine this phenomenon in the context of socioscientific issues such as vaccination, but it is not apparent that it occurs when people engage with less politicized topics. Debunking interventions have also largely been ineffective at helping people avoid the bias. In this dissertation, I conducted three studies examining if people exhibited the continued influence effect when dealing with misinformation about the topic of antioxidant supplements. In the first study, novel materials were reviewed by ten individuals who provided feedback on their accessibility and clarity. In the second study, a randomized control trial (n = 440), the continued influence effect was not detected, but the manipulation of beliefs by misinformation was. After revising the materials, a third study was conducted (n = 572) to examine the efficacy of a prebunking epistemic cognition and metacognition intervention at attenuating the occurrence of the continued influence effect. Again, the bias was not detected. The findings indicated that the continued influence effect may only occur with more politicized and controversial socioscientific issues.Doctor of Philosoph

    Victims' Access to Justice in Trinidad and Tobago: An exploratory study of experiences and challenges of accessing criminal justice in a post-colonial society

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    This thesis investigates victims' access to justice in Trinidad and Tobago, using their own narratives. It seeks to capture how their experiences affected their identities as victims and citizens, alongside their perceptions of legitimacy regarding the criminal justice system. While there have been some reforms in the administration of criminal justice in Trinidad and Tobago, such reforms have not focused on victims' accessibility to the justice system. Using grounded theory methodology, qualitative data was collected through 31 in-depth interviews with victims and victim advocates. The analysis found that victims experienced interpersonal, structural, and systemic barriers at varying levels throughout the criminal justice system, which manifested as institutionalized secondary victimization, silencing and inequality. This thesis argues that such experiences not only served to appropriate conflict but demonstrates that access is often given in a very narrow sense. Furthermore, it shows a failure to encompass access to justice as appropriated conflicts are left to stagnate in the system as there is often very little resolution. Adopting a postcolonial lens to analyse victims' experiences, the analysis identified othering practices that served to institutionalize the vulnerability and powerlessness associated with victim identities. Here, it is argued that these othering practices also affected the rights consciousness of victims, delegitimating their identities as citizens. Moreover, as a result of their experiences, victims had mixed perceptions of the justice system. It is argued that while the system is a legitimate authority victims' endorsement of the system is questionable, therefore victims' experiences suggest that there is a reinforcement of the system's legal hegemony. The findings suggest that within the legal system of Trinidad and Tobago, legacies of colonialism shape the postcolonial present as the psychology and inequalities of the past are present in the interactions and processes of justice. These findings are relevant for policymakers in Trinidad and Tobago and other regions. From this study it is recognized that, to improve access to justice for victims, there needs to be a move towards victim empowerment that promotes resilience and enhances social capital. Going forward it is noted that there is a need for further research

    A grammar of Doromu-Koki: a Papuan language of Papua New Guinea

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    Robert Bradshaw conducted research on the Doromu-Koki language of Papua New Guinea. He produced a grammatical analysis of this Papuan (Southeast Manubaran) language, spoken by 2,000 speakers. His research encompasses aspects of the language and promotes preservation of an endangered language for the benefit of speakers and linguistic scholarship

    Judicial Depictions of Responsibility and Risk: The Erasure of State Accountability in Canadian Sentencing Judgments Involving Indigenous People

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    This dissertation is set within the context of Canadas mass imprisonment of Indigenous people and centres on a critical evaluation of reported sentencing judgments. In particular, the dissertation examines some of the ways in which sentencing judges both draw attention to, and obscure, state accountability. The dissertation demonstrates that sentencing judges erase the role of the state in the criminalization of Indigenous people and in the construction of Indigenous people as risky. The result is that sentencing judgments rationalize and support the re-entrenchment, rather than the redressing, of the states oppression of Indigenous people. The dissertation is theoretical and descriptive, critically examining sentencing judges portrayals of Indigenous people and the state. The case studies are disheartening: the studies illustrate a few different ways in which sentencing law, despite purportedly aiming to repair systemic harm, continues to cement such harm. Yet the theoretical tools used to dissect sentencing judgments destructive practices can also assist in thinking through possibilities for change. The dissertation draws on theories that engage with the centrality of relationships in peoples lives (including peoples relationships with the state), the role of the state in generating and sustaining inequality, the interconnections between state efforts to contextualize Indigenous people and the reinforcement of stereotypes, and the resilience, strength, and diversity of Indigenous Peoples, communities, families, and individuals. These theories all support some existing proposals (and some current practices and possible new proposals) for pursuing decarceral approaches. The decarceral approaches that this dissertation addresses recognize that any sentencing analysis (including an analysis of how to assign responsibility for past criminalized conduct and an analysis of how to protect a community in the future) requires a consideration not only of criminalized individuals experiences but also of the states actions and inactions. A sentencing analysis must see and identify the state as having contributed to the criminalization of Indigenous people and to the construction of Indigenous people as risky. Additionally, the state must take accountability for its actions in historically and contemporarily inflicting violence on Indigenous people and for its potential to instead support Indigenous peoples resilience, safety, and sovereignty
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