Cultural Dynamics in a Globalized World

The book contains essays on current issues in arts and humanities in which peoples and cultures compete as well as collaborate in globalizing the world while maintaining their uniqueness as viewed from cross- and inter-disciplinary perspectives. The book covers areas such as literature, cultural studies, archaeology, philosophy, history, language studies, information and literacy studies, and area studies. Asia and the Pacific are the particular regions that the conference focuses on as they have become new centers of knowledge production in arts and humanities and, in the future, seem to be able to grow significantly as a major contributor of culture, science and arts to the globalized world. The book will help shed light on what arts and humanities scholars in Asia and the Pacific have done in terms of research and knowledge development, as well as the new frontiers of research that have been explored and opening up, which can connect the two regions with the rest of the globe

Learning systems: An ecological perspective on advanced academic literacy practices of multilingual writers

Recent work in composition\u27s leading journals has challenged the field\u27s exclusive focus on native English speakers and has called for a more international perspective on writing research and pedagogy. This dissertation, which grew from requests from multilingual graduate students in my own institution for more advanced academic writing support, extends this call to explore ways writing programs can better account for the needs of international graduate students, a growing population in US institutions. The role English has assumed as the lingua franca of international academic communication has made writing in English a critical skill for these students\u27 professional development. In many cases, even international students who return to their home countries after graduating must continue publishing in English if their work is to receive international recognition. This dissertation includes case studies of five international doctoral students in an interdisciplinary environmental studies program learning to write for their fields. To examine this process, I meld theories of situated learning (i.e., learning by doing ) with systems theory, a construct commonly used in natural resources management to study interrelationships between ecological, economic, and social factors in environmental phenomena. This ecological lens has allowed me to view more holistically the complex interrelationships between various factors on these students\u27 learning. Not only must these students write high-stakes academic documents in their second language and negotiate a variety of cultural differences between educational contexts in their home countries and in the US, but they must also piece together often implicit writing expertise distributed across a network of teachers and colleagues in the university and in their fields. Writing, for these students, is an intensely integrated process, requiring a more integrated model of university writing support than we generally provide. The goal of this study is to offer a more holistic perspective on advanced academic literacy learning and suggest ways of making more efficient use of departmental and university resources to meet these students\u27 needs

Collective and Individual Rationality: Some Episodes in the History of Economic Thought

This thesis argues for the fundamental importance of the opposition between holistic and reductionistic world-views in economics. Both reductionism and holism may nevertheless underpin laissez-faire policy prescriptions. Scrutiny of the nature of the articulation between micro and macro levels in the writings of economists suggests that invisible hand theories play a key role in reconciling reductionist policy prescriptions with a holistic world. An examination of the prisoners' dilemma in game theory and Arrow's impossibility theorem in social choice theory sets the scene. The prisoners' dilemma epitomises the collective irrationality coordination problems lead to. The source of the dilemma is identified as the combination of interdependence in content and independence in form of the decision making process. Arrovian impossibility has been perceived as challenging traditional views of the relationship between micro and macro levels in economics. Conservative arguments against the possibility in principle of a social welfare function are criticised here as depending on an illicit dualism. The thesis then reviews the standpoints of Smith, Hayek and Keynes. For Smith, the social desirability of individual self-seeking activity is ensured by the 'invisible hand' of a god who has moulded us so to behave, that the quantity of happiness in the world is always maximised. Hayek seeks to re-establish the invisible hand in a secular age, replacing the agency of a deity with an evolutionary mechanism. Hayek's evolutionary theory, criticised here as being based on the exploded notion of group selection, cannot underpin the desirability of spontaneous outcomes. I conclude by arguing that Keynes shares the holistic approach of Smith and Hayek, but without their reliance on invisible hand mechanisms. If spontaneous processes cannot be relied upon to generate desirable social outcomes then we have to take responsibility for achieving this ourselves by establishing the appropriate institutional framework to eliminate macroeconomic prisoners' dilemmas