Religious Vehicle Stickers in Nigeria: a discourse of identity, faith and social vision

This study focuses on analysing the ways in which vehicle stickers construct individual and group identities, people’s religious faith and social vision in the context of religious assumptions and practices in Nigeria. Data comprise 73 vehicle stickers collected in Lagos and Ota, between 2006 and 2007 and are analysed within the framework of the post-structuralist model of discourse analysis which views discourse as a product of a complex system of social and institutional practices that sustain its continuous existence (Derrida, 1982; Fairclough, 1989, 1992, 1995; Foucault, 1972, 1981). Results show that through stickers people define their individual and group identities within religious institutional practices. And as a means of group identification, they guarantee social security and privileges. In constructing social vision the stickers help mould the individual aspiration about a future which transcends the present. Significantly, stickers in the data also reveal the tension between Islam and Christianity and the struggle to propagate one above the other. KEY WORDS: assumption, discourse, discursive, practices, religion, stickers

Potencial de produtos naturais comerciais no controle de Thaumastocoris peregrinus Carpintero & Dellapé (Hemiptera: Thaumastocoridae).

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Multiple Rotations of Gaussian Quadratures: An Efficient Method for Uncertainty Analyses in Large-Scale Simulation Models

Concerns regarding the impact of climate change, food price volatility, and weather uncertainty have motivated users of simulation models to consider uncertainty in their simulations. One way to do this is to integrate uncertainty components in the model equations, thus turning the model into a problem of numerical integration. Most of these problems do not have analytical solutions, and researchers, therefore, apply numerical approximation methods. This article presents a novel approach to conducting an uncertainty analysis as an alternative to the computationally burdensome Monte Carlo-based (MC) methods. The developed method is based on the degree three Gaussian quadrature (GQ) formulae and is tested using three large-scale simulation models. While a standard single GQ method often produces low-quality approximations, the results of this study demonstrate that the proposed approach reduces the approximation errors by a factor of nine using only 3.4% of the computational effort required by the MC-based methods in the most computationally demanding model

Curricular L1 Disciplinarities: Between Norwegianness and Internationality

The chapter explores how international impulses may have affected national L1 curricula in Norway from 1939 to 2020. It compares the descriptions of aims and content in seven curricula chronologically, using content analysis. One eye is on changes within these elements of the subject: the other is on disciplinarity. The hypothesis that the disciplinarity of this L1 subject is at risk, based on the assumption of a clash between national and international forces, termed Norwegianness and internationality. From the 1930s to the 1980s, L1 curricula are dominated, in different periods, by formalism, semanticism, and functionalism. In the 1990s, L1 opened up as communication in general, rather than focusing on ‘language and literature’. Later trends are less clear. Two kinds of international forces are traced, disciplinary and political. While disciplinary ones were strong in the first 50 years, political forces have had more impact since. Further, the chapter draws on other researchers’ critical studies of the impact of international policies, discussing whether political regimes are in conflict with disciplinary paradigms. It is concluded that politics has taken control of curricula as an educational genre, while L1 disciplinarities have had to adjust to a strongly homogenised design. This creates polarised tensions between competence-oriented verbs and disciplinary-oriented nouns in the curricula, hence side-lining the question of students’ Bildung. A further conclusion is that curricular L1 disciplinarities in Norway have moved from Norwegianness toward internationality.acceptedVersio

Beyond a Dichotomy of Perspectives: Understanding Religion on the Basis of Paul Natorp’s Logic of Boundary

Based on Paul Natorp’s (1854–1924) late post-Neo-Kantian “Logic of Boundary” (German: “Grenzlogik”) I will offer a methodically controlled, non-reductionist and equally anti-essentialist reconstruction of the notion of religion. The pre-eminent objective of this reconstructive work is to overcome the well-known epistemological as well as methodological problem of a dichotomy between inside and outside perspectives on the subject of religion. Differently put, the objective consists in an attempt to demonstrate that there actually is “reason in religion” that is intellectually accessible for academic knowledge production. Following Natorp’s splendid formulation I will argue that religion operates neither ‘within’ nor ‘beyond’ the ‘boundary of humanity’ but exactly on [or ‘in’] this boundary. More precisely, I will explicate that religious praxis (including its specific production of knowledge) from Natorp’s standpoint can be understood as the performative realization, and habitual embodiment of the (contextually concrete) boundary of humanity or human reason itself. Due to its principial self-referentiality this boundary carries the crucial sense of a first and last positive and, therefore, both in theoretical terms definitive and in practical terms eminently instructive notion of boundary with no outside. This paradoxically all-enclosing, positive boundary, while explicitly including life’s inevitable negativity but, nonetheless, able to ideally sublate it, is the reason why the practice of religion, as empirical evidence unmistakably documents, can provide an incommensurably fulfilling, significant and meaningful closure with regards to the innermost self-perception of its practitioners (concerning their self-determination or agency)