Levinas, Durkheim, and the Everyday Ethics of Education

This article explores the influence of Émile Durkheim on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in order both to open up the political significance of Levinas’s thought and to develop more expansive meanings of moral and political community within education. Education was a central preoccupation for both thinkers: Durkheim saw secular education as the site for promoting the values of organic solidarity, while Levinas was throughout his professional life engaged in debates on Jewish education and conceptualized ethical subjectivity as a condition of being taught. Durkheim has been accused of dissolving the moral into the social, and his view of education as a means of imparting a sense of civic republican values is sometimes seen as conservative, while Levinas’s argument for an ‘unfounded foundation’ for morality is sometimes seen as paralyzing the impetus for concrete political action. Against these interpretations, I argue that their approaches present provocative challenges for conceptualizing the nature of the social, offering theoretical resources to deepen understanding of education as the site of an everyday ethics and a prophetic politics opening onto more compelling ideals for education than those dominant within standard educational discourses

RE: pedagogy – after neutrality

Within the UK and in many parts of the world, official accounts of what it is to make sense of religion are framed within a rhetorics of neutrality in which such study is premised upon the possibility of dispassionate engagement and analysis. This paper, which is largely theoretical in scope, explores both the affordances and the costs of such an approach which has become ‘black boxed’ on account of the work that it achieves. A series of new orientations within the academy that are broadly associated with post-structuralist philosophies, feminist and post-colonial studies, together with insights from Science and Technology Studies, question the plausibility of these claims for neutrality whilst in turn raising a series of new questions and priorities. It therefore becomes necessary to re-think and re-frame what it is to make sense of religious and cultural difference after neutrality. The gathering and co-ordination of new planes of sense-making that are responsive to an emergent series of epistemological, ontological, and ethical orientations are considered. Some of the distinctive pedagogical implications of such an approach that engages material practice, difference and uncertainty are then entertained

On plexus representation of dissimilarities

Correspondence analysis has found widespread application in analysing vegetation gradients. However, it is not clear how it is robust to situations where structures other than a simple gradient exist. The introduction of instrumental variables in canonical correspondence analysis does not avoid these difficulties. In this paper I propose to examine some simple methods based on the notion of the plexus (sensu McIntosh) where graphs or networks are used to display some of the structure of the data so that an informed choice of models is possible. I showthat two different classes of plexus model are available. These classes are distinguished by the use in one case of a global Euclidean model to obtain well-separated pair decomposition (WSPD) of a set of points which implicitly involves all dissimilarities, while in the other a Riemannian view is taken and emphasis is placed locally, i.e., on small dissimilarities. I showan example of each of these classes applied to vegetation data

The land resources of Walhallow Station

This report documents the land resources of Walhallow Station, occupying an area 3952km2 on the northern margin of the Barkly Tableland and the very southern most part of the Gulf Fall. It aims to assist with the land management decisionmaking on the property. Twenty four types of country (land units) have been identified and mapped, each described in terms of landform features, soil type and vegetation. The land management issues, specifically for pastoral use and soil management, are described for each land type.Made available by the Northern Territory Library via the Publications (Legal Deposit) Act 2004 (NT)

The land resources of Mittiebah Station

Made available by the Northern Territory Library via the Publications (Legal Deposit) Act 2004 (NT).This report documents the land resources of Mittiebah Station, occupying an area of 4037 km2 on the northeastern margin of the Barkly Tableland and the Gulf. The aim of this report is to assist with the land management decision-making on the property. Twenty-seven types of country (land units) have been identified and mapped, each described in terms of landform features, soil type and vegetation. The land management issues, specifically for pastoral use and soil management, are described for each land type.Cover title

Kay Winstanley, Chris Edgoose.

Made available by the Northern Territory Library via the Publications (Legal Deposit) Act 2004 (NT).Watarrka National Watarrka National Park (WNP) is located approximately 240 km SW of Alice Springs and occupies a total of about 1050 km2, of which 730 km2 is managed as Park. The remainder is leased to the adjacent Tempe Downs pastoral lease for grazing cattle. The purpose of the survey is to provide information on the land resources of the Park at an appropriate level of detail of the land attributes. This information can then be used as a basis for future planning and development as well as providing information to aid decision-making in land and natural resource management. Park has been mapped into forty land units at a scale of 1:50,000.Date:1994Cover title

by Christine Edgoose and Alison Kennedy.

This report documents the land resources of Brunette Downs Station (PPL 925), occupying an area of 12 254 km2 on the central Barkly Tableland. Brunette Downs is notable for its sizeit is the largest pastoral property in the NT, and is approximately three times the size of the average Barkly Tableland lease. This work aims to assist with land management decision-making on the property. Fifty one types of country (land units) have been identified and mapped, each described in terms of landform features, soil type and vegetation. The land management issues, specifically for pastoral use and soil management, are described for each land type.Made available by the Northern Territory Library via the Publications (Legal Deposit) Act 2004 (NT)."January 1996" --title page