Peeling back the layers: Deconstructing information literacy discourse in higher education

The discourses of information literacy practice create epistemological assumptions about how the practice should happen, who should be responsible and under what conditions instruction should be given. Analysis of a wide range of documents and texts emerging from the Higher Education (HE) sector suggest that information literacy (IL) is shaped by two competing and incongruent narratives. The outward facing narrative of information literacy (located in information literacy standards and guidelines) positions information literacy as an empowering practice that arms students with the knowledge and skills to battle the complexity of the modern information world. In contrast, the inward facing narrative (located in information literacy texts) positions students as lacking appropriate knowledge, skills and agency. This deficit perception, which has the capacity to influence pedagogical practice, is at odds with constructivist and action-oriented views that are espoused within information literacy instructional pedagogy. This presentation represents the first paper in a research programme that interrogates the epistemological premises and discourses of information literacy within HE

The global subject of precarity

Peer reviewedPostprin

The dynamism of the light conditions changes in a carp pond during a breeding period

In the paper there have been presented the results of a fi eld studies performed in 2001–2003 (carp breeding period), in order to establish the dynamism of the light conditions changes in a fi sh pond. The infl uence of shade caused by vegetation growing on the shore of the light conditions in the pond has been also analyzed. The results show a great changeability of the light conditions in a breeding period characterized by the tendency to worsen of the light conditions in the pond till the extreme conditions of a complete absorption of the sunlight by the surface layers of the pond water and, observed from the middle of June, 24 hours – night on the pond bottom

Levinas and the Possibility of Dialogue with “Strangers”

This programmatic essay explores some of the challenges that a seemingly quintessential European or Continental philosopher such as Levinas faces when his thought on alterity and on the responsibility we bear towards the Other, is brought face-to-face with other (non-Western) ways of thinking alterity and especially difference(s). Given the fact that Levinas‟s entire oeuvre is dedicated to exposing the violent reductionism at work in Western philosophy, a colonizing tradition par excellence that establishes its self-certainty by way of usurping anything and everything that is other-than-itself, such an encounter seems critical. Yet, Levinas and his thinking seem to be burdened with a number of inherent biases that severely compromise any possibility of dialogue. These include the fact that Levinas‟s notion of an abstract Alterity does not account for differences; his undeniable Eurocentric bias and racist prejudice; and finally, the irreconcilability of ethics and politics in this thinking. This essay attempts to address these indictments head on an attempt to prepare the ground for future research that will endeavour to stage an actual encounter between Levinas and his non-Western counterparts.http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbsp202017-03-31hb2016Philosoph