In the last year of the Great War, Italy was also hit by the Spanish flu. The Civic Hospitals faced a deadly disaster with insufficient resources. All the heavy workload fell on the female nursing staff, who were the only ones able ensure the continuity of the hospital services. This study aimed to explore the impact of the influenza on the health of the nurses at the Maggiore Hospital in Milan during the second and third epidemic waves. Historical research was (...) conducted between February and May 2020. Primary sources were retrieved from the historical archives of the Fondazione IRCCS Ca' Granda Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico and the daily newspaper Corriere della Sera. In the autumn of 1918, the Maggiore Hospital in Milan changed its organization to hospitalise patients affected by the influenza pandemic. Although the hospital managers wanted to protect their healthcare staff from the risks of contagion by means of prophylaxis rules, 388 lay nurses and 80 religious sister nurses were affected by this insidious disease. The second and third waves of the pandemic claimed 25 victims of duty. Remembered for their altruism and spirit of abnegation, the hospital community honoured their sacrifice, and the citizens expressed their gratitude. (shrink)

Background:Horizontal violence, defined in the literature as ‘interpersonal conflict between two nurses at the same hierarchical levels in organizations’, often associated with bullying, affects the well-being of nurses, care recipients and the professional image of nursing and the organization due to increased turnover. One in every three newly graduated nurses is a victim of horizontal violence, although they do not always know how to define it.Aim:To investigate the direct and indirect experiences of horizontal violence in newly graduated nurses as well (...) as to shed light on the phenomenon, on its awareness and recognition.Methods:A qualitative phenomenological study was conducted between September and October 2018 with newly graduated nurses, with a work experience ranging between 6 months and 3 years. The interviews were conducted face-to-face, consisting of a first open general question, followed by semi-structured questions.Ethical considerations:The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the Institution Review Board.Results:From the analysis of the interviews of the 21 participants, four main themes were identified: the ‘enemies’, that is those who exercised violence, the ‘weapons’ used by them to exercise violence, the ‘effects’ and the types of ‘armor’ identified to protect themselves.Discussion:Horizontal violence is rarely recognized by newly graduated nurses, even though our sample had directly or indirectly experienced horizontal violence. Tackling the phenomenon starting from the undergraduate degree courses, focusing on effective support and more protection by the organization leaders were the silent requests that emerged from this study.Conclusion:Preventing horizontal violence is important for nurses’ professional and private well-being, for professional conduct and for the quality of care provided to patients. (shrink)

En un contexto nacional e internacional de emergencia sanitaria que generó una situación atípica de cierre simultáneo de todas las instituciones educativas, atravesamos una experiencia del ejercicio de la docencia extremadamente particular: una migración forzada hacia la virtualidad cargada de incertidumbre. En este escenario, se reactualiza la pregunta por las desigualdades y su presencia en las trayectorias educativas, en este caso, de estudiantes universitarias/os de la universidad pública. Aquí presentamos algunas reflexiones, preguntas y algunos pasos en el camino de la (...) interpretación, para que, en toda la vorágine del teletrabajo en pandemia, lo que pasa a quienes están a ambos lados de la pantalla no nos pase desapercibido. (shrink)

La primera comprensión husserliana de la evidencia en cuanto “vivencia de la verdad”, se ve reformulada en las Investigaciones lógicas con la consideración de la vivencia como mención –que implica una gradualidad de la dación y del cumplimiento– por la que es dada una objetividad. La reducción fenomenológica y los análisis noético-noemáticos que de ella resultan en Ideas I , manifiestan la remisión necesaria de toda conciencia modificada a la que da originariamente como fundamento primitivo de su legitimidad. Esta originariedad (...) del cumplimiento se ve determinada por una clase y estilo de evidencia propios de cada región de objetos. (shrink)

Academic engagement describes students’ involvement in academic learning and achievement. This paper reports the psychometric properties of the University Student Engagement Inventory (USEI) with a sample of 3992 university students from nine different countries and regions from Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. The USEI operationalizes a trifactorial conceptualization of academic engagement (behavioral, emotional and cognitive). Construct validity was assessed by means of confirmatory factor analysis and reliability was assessed using Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega coefficients. Weak measurement (...) invariance was observed for country/region, while strong measurement invariance was observed for gender and area of graduation. The USEI scores showed predictive validity for dropout intention, self-rated academic performance, and course approval rate while divergent validity with student burnout scores was also evident. Overall, the results indicate that the USEI can produce reliable and valid data on academic engagement of university students across the world. (shrink)

This article puts Shani Mootoo’s novel, Polar Vortex (2020), in conversation with the vitalist philosophy of Rosi Braidotti, as illustrated in the study Posthuman Feminism (2022) and Libe García Zarranz “Sustainable Affects” (2017a, 2020b). I look at the centrality of affective relations in the transformation of queer subjectivity under processes of the growing (un)happiness in the diasporic homeSpace. Shani Mootoo’s (non)diasporic cross-border narrative proposes contrastive figurations of the subject through temporal and spatial frameworks. Mootoo’s “transposable moves” resist a naïve (...) return to sentimentality or nostalgic love to advocate instead a turn to sustainable affects. (shrink)

This particular roundtable falls at the end of a four-year networking project (COST Action IS1307 New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’) and reflects upon the genealogies of new materialism and how these flow into the individual working practices of participants. The texts below were contributed remotely via email by members of the group, following face-to-face meetings in Barcelona, Maribor, Warsaw, Liverpool, Paris and Utrecht. Authors were unaware of each other’s responses and in this way the (...) dialogue has unfolded a little like a game of Exquisite Corpse or Consequences, with questions acting like a trail of breadcrumbs to follow. Accordingly, the text is the product of a partially bounded experimental system ‘designed to give unknown answers to questions that the experimenters themselves are not yet able to clearly ask’ (Rheinberger 1997: 28). Thus, it both ruminates upon work to date and is intended to generate novel responses from authors and readers alike. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Knock at the Door: Utopian Dreams for Post-Covid TimesPedro Mora-Ramírez, María Amo-Hernández, and Paula García-RodríguezAnswering the Knock at the Door, Welcoming Utopian Futures, The Knock at the Door: Utopian Dreams for Post-Covid Times, May 21–24, 2023, University of Huelva, Spain, and University of Calgary, CanadaThe COVID-19 pandemic has fostered new adversities and vulnerabilities, prompting reflection on the economic, social, and political paradigms that endanger human and nonhuman lives. (...) For many, it was anxiety and uncertainty that “knock[ed] at the door”; for others, however, those same feelings of unease prompted one of hopefulness: reflecting on the possibilities for resilience and regeneration in the process of changing our vision of the world.1 The Knock at the Door conference brought contemporary utopianism to the forefront of thinking about how to respond to global crises while remaining attentive to other adversities of daily life. Scholars and artists answered the knock in an attempt to examine paths toward utopia, and to take advantage of the regenerative and resilient potential of the present.The conference was the culmination of author/activist Larissa Lai’s fellowship period at the University of Huelva. The 2022–23 María Zambrano Fellowship for the academic year2 allowed Lai to complete the project “Utopian Dreams for Post-Covid Times,” carried out in collaboration with the Huelva research group led by Professor Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, who hosted a number of online and in-person seminars on speculative fiction with Lai. The Knock at the Door conference, marking the end of Lai’s fellowship, created yet another space for scholars, artists, and critics to discuss the potential of utopian narratives. Lai asks: “What does our cultural moment require, and how can we get where we need to go from where we are? How can literature, especially speculative fiction literature, help us get from here to there?”3 [End Page 641] The intention of the conference was to encourage others to continue Lai’s work on how to imagine futures where human and posthuman beings need to remain vigilant to adversities. Utopian scholars, among others, might find the complications of “getting there from here” closely related to Lai’s conception of “insurgent utopias,” or “emergent insurgency.” They could find Lai’s concept of “insurgent utopianism” interesting as it lays the foundations of futurity in terms of crisis responses.The aim of the conference was to explore the imagination of better futures through utopian thinking and practice. In addition, it focused on “the knock at the door,” which is “a moment of contingent arrival... open to cooptation, destruction, bastardization, incorporation, death, or defusal.” Yet, it presents “the powerful possibility of critique—narratively or discursively, in its very materiality.”4 One way of doing this might be to look back at the past century of utopianism and ask who or what has been missing. The conference took up Lai’s idea of insurgent utopianism as a method of paving a path toward a multitude of dreams and actions, all shaped by the unique circumstances of one’s positionality.After the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for utopian thinking has become more pressing than ever. New horizons of hope must be created in the face of emerging anxieties. In a world where anthropocentrism is showing signs of its deadly potential, conference participants reflected on the relevance of the utopian imagination to political resistance and resilience building.Utopian Visions: Contesting Better Worlds in Neoliberal and Feminist UtopiasThe first two panels of the conference addressed the critique of two dominant theoretical (and interrelated) frameworks: capitalism and neoliberalism. Speakers reflected on both in light of theoretical interventions by theorists Rosi Braidotti and Francesca Ferrando. Panelists Benjamin Ghan and Marc Lynch reflected on how creative writers envision ideal worlds and temporalities. In Ghan’s view, utopian narratives create a symphony of voices historically excluded from the category of “the human”: women; LGBTQ+ people; Indigenous peoples. In a similar vein, Lynch described his own novel, A Wasp’s Waist, as highlighting the impossibility of imagining utopias within the capitalist paradigm—and thus the necessity of imagining futures beyond capitalism, and beyond... (shrink)

Dialogue has become a central theoretical concept in human and social sciences as well as in professions such as education, health, and psychotherapy. This 'dialogical turn' emphasises the importance of social relations and interaction to our behaviour and how we make sense of the world; hence the dialogical mind is the mind in interaction with others - with individuals, groups, institutions, and cultures in historical perspectives. Through a combination of rigorous theoretical work and empirical investigation, Marková presents an ethics of (...) dialogicality as an alternative to the narrow perspective of individualism and cognitivism that has traditionally dominated the field of social psychology. The dialogical perspective, which focuses on interdependencies among the Self and Others, offers a powerful theoretical basis to comprehend, analyse, and discuss complex social issues. Marková considers the implications of dialogical epistemology both in daily life and in professional practices involving problems of communication, care, and therapy. (shrink)

Just how ordinary was everyday life during normalization in Czechoslovakia? In their discussions of the lives of “ordinary people,” historians have underplayed the fear and secrecy present in the daily experiences of Czechs and Slovaks in the late communist period. In linking writings by dissidents to Czech and Slovak oral histories in the collections of the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library, I seek to problematize the dissident/ordinary person dichotomy used in recent historiography, and argue that the chasm between (...) these two apparently opposite groups has been exaggerated. Through an analysis of the themes of family, education and mobility, I will show that domestic life was not an escape from politics, but was in itself politicized. From audiovisual interviews, I will glean normalization-era memories of the need for what Václav Havel called “silence” and “mystification”-in the classroom, in the pub and in the home. (shrink)

Ernst Lubitsch, the great author of Hollywood comedy and pioneer of such genres as the sophisticated romantic comedy, the musical, and the screwball comedy, is a relatively overlooked figure in mainstream film theory. In this collection, renowned world thinkers and philosophers position Lubitsch as the premium director of subversive cinema, reflecting on his attitude toward love and politics which correspond to contemporary issues.Followers of the Hegelian, Marxist, Freudian, Lacanian, and Deleuzian traditions discuss thephilosophical, political, and ethical dimensions of Lubitsch's late (...) Hollywood work. They focus on love as stealing, the ethics of style, and comedy in times of austerity in the director's masterpiece, _Trouble in Paradise_ (1932); answer the question of why comedy is always polygamous; discuss links between masochism, melancholia, and ideology in _Ninotchka_(1939); celebrate the ethical gesture of comedy in _To Be or Not to Be_ (1942); and promote the revolutionary comic spirit of Lubitsch's last directorial effort, _Cluny Brown_ (1946). These essays' witty, subversive, and provocative approaches highlight Lubitsch's unique understanding of love, sex, comedy, and politics and idiosyncratic conception of totalitarian"nightmares" and capitalistic "paradise," countering the non-dialectic and politically correct discourse of mainstream and independent cinema today. (shrink)

One of the fundamental problems in the philosophy of psychology is to determine the relation between personal and subpersonal explanations of human behavior. The problem of determining the relation between the personal and subpersonal levels is called the “interface problem”. This paper has two goals. The first is to introduce the domestic reader to the interface problem from the perspective of the philosophy of psychology. The second goal is to show that insufficient focus on the interface problem and its potential (...) solutions can lead to uncritical and fallacious reasoning that can have significant consequences for particular debates in philosophy of medicine and philosophy of law. (shrink)

In this Chapter, Maria Kronfeldner discusses whether psychological essentialism is a necessary part of dehumanization. This involves different elements of essentialism, and a narrow and a broad way of conceptualizing psychological essentialism, the first akin to natural kind thinking, the second based on entitativity. She first presents authors that have connected essentialism with dehumanization. She then introduces the error theory of psychological essentialism regarding the category of the human, and distinguishes different elements of psychological essentialism. On that basis, Kronfeldner (...) connects historical, socio-psychological, and philosophical insights in order to show that although essentialism can act as a catalyst for dehumanization, it is not necessary for it. Examples relate to dehumanization in the context of colonialism and evolutionary thinking, to the history of dehumanizing women from Aristotle to 19th-century craniology, and to contemporary self-dehumanization and ‘lesser mind’ attribution. (shrink)

Ziel dieser Untersuchung ist es zu zeigen, wie Platons Verständnis von Lust und Unlust in seinem Dialog Philebus mit Spinozas Theorie der Affekte zusammenhängt. Beide Denker verstehen den Affekt der Lust in Relation zu Werturteilen und dem Charakter einer Person. Ich behaupte, dass Platon und Spinoza gleichermaßen feststellen, dass die Wahl des Individuums für lustvolle Objekte von der Definition und Bestimmung des Guten und des Ideals des Individuums selbst abhängt, und somit auch von der Ursache der Lust. Beide Philosophen stimmen (...) darin überein, dass sich das Vergnügen eines vernünftigen Menschen von dem eines unvernünftigen unterscheidet, da auch ihr Urteil über Gut und Böse jeweils unterschiedlich ist. Ich schließe, dass Platons und Spinozas Bild eines vernünftigen Menschen im Zusammenhang mit den Affekten der Lust und des Unlustempfindens übereinstimmt, weil es hierbei um ein ganzheitliches Bild vom Menschen geht, der Affekte nur entsprechend seiner Natur oder seines Wesens erlebt. (shrink)

Batteries are a fundamental storage component due to its various applications in mobility, renewable energies and consumer electronics among others. Regardless of the battery typology, one key variable from a user’s perspective is the remaining energy in the battery. It is usually presented as the percentage of remaining energy compared to the total energy that can be stored and is labeled State Of Charge (SOC). This work addresses the development of a hybrid model based on a Lithium Iron Phosphate (LiFePO4) (...) power cell, due to its broad implementation. The proposed model calculates the SOC, by means of voltage and electric current as inputs and the latter as the output. Therefore, four models based on k-Means, Agglomerative Clustering, Gaussian Mixture and Spectral Clustering techniques have been tested in order to obtain an optimal solution. (shrink)

Maria Kronfeldner’s Preface and Introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization maps the landscape of dehumanization studies. She starts with a brief portrayal of the history of the field. The systematically minded sections that follow guide the reader through the resulting rugged landscape represented in the Handbook’s contributions. Different realizations, levels, forms, and ontological contrasts of dehumanization are distinguished, followed by remarks on the variety of targets of dehumanization. A discussion on valence and emotional aspects is added. Causes, functions, (...) and consequences of dehumanization, and the prospects for reducing or undoing it, are introduced. The systematic overview closes with a discussion of some important theoretical complexities that arise in studying dehumanization. After these systematic sections, the scholarly work on dehumanization gets situated in the broader intellectual landscape of debates about the ‘human’ in the humanities and social sciences. The Introduction ends with some notes on scope, limitations, and intended readership of the Handbook. (shrink)

Publication date: 25 October 2017 Source: Author: Ivana Slavoljub Domazet, Darko Milivoj Marjanović The main aim of this work is to determine, on the basis of empirical research, whether and to what extent foreign direct investment has impact on the overall economic development of selected countries in the Western Balkans. Analyses made for the purpose of this paper were performed on the basis of available secondary data possessed by the World Bank for the period of 2000-2012. The research methodology (...) involved the use of the techniques of linear regression and correlation analysis. The first task was to determine whether there is an impact of foreign direct investment on the overall economic development of these countries. Where such influence occurred, it was necessary to define its level in comparison to the influence of other variables. The results of the analysis in this paper suggest that inflow of foreign direct investment does not affect to a significant extent the economic development of selected countries in the Western Balkans. (shrink)

Studies on age-related differences in risk perception in a real-world situation, such as the recent COVID-19 outbreak, showed that the risk perception of getting COVID-19 tends to decrease as age increases. This finding raised the question on what factors could explain risk perception in older adults. The present study examined age-related differences in risk perception in the early stages of COVID-19 lockdown, analyzing variables that can explain the differences in perception of risk at different ages. A total of 1,765 adults (...) aged between 18 and 87 years old completed an online survey assessing perceived risk severity and risk vulnerability of getting COVID-19, sociodemographic status, emotional state, experience relating to COVID-19, and physical health status. Results showed that the older the participants, the lower the perceived vulnerability to getting COVID-19, but the higher the perceived severity. Different predictors explain the perception of risk severity and vulnerability at different ages. Overall, self-reported anxiety over the pandemic is a crucial predictor in explaining risk perceptions in all age groups. Theoretical and practical implications of the empirical findings are discussed. (shrink)

Las fuentes de la tradición indirecta de las Vidas (βίοι) de Alejandro se distinguen entre las más creíbles, enmarcadas en los límites de la historiografía y de la biografía imperiales, y aquellas de invención, más cercanas a la novela de viajes y la paradoxografía. Este trabajo propone ir más allá de esa categorización genérica para pensar la dualidad historia / ficción como material coexistente en las diferentes versiones en torno a la fundación de Alejandría según tres autores griegos de la (...) época imperial: Anábasis de Alejandro Magno de Arriano, Vida de Alejandro de Plutarco, Vida y Hazañas de Alejandro de Macedonia del Pseudo Calístenes. The sources of the indirect tradition of Alexander's Lives (βίοι) are distinguished among those more credible, framed within the limits of imperial historiography and biography, and those of invention, closer to the travel novels and paradoxography. This paper attempts to go beyond these genre categories to understand the duality history / fiction as material coexisting in the different versions about the founding of Alexandria by three Greek authors of the imperial period: Anabasis of Alexander the Great by Arrian, Life of Alexander by Plutarch and The life and exploits of Alexander the Great by Pseudo- Callisthenes. (shrink)

Croatian literary culture of the 18th century is marked by stylistic pluralism, considering that its Enlightenment character and its didactic and utilitaristic dimensions are emphasized the most. Austrian catechism was the fundamental book of school religious education from 1777 until 1847 in the whole Habsburg Monarchy, and it played an important role in the upbringing of children, but also of the entire family and social community in the spirit of Josephine politics. This topic is viewed from the perspective of Immanuel (...) Kant who found it important to emphasise the dangers to which the fetishisation of ecclesiastical norms can lead to, i.e. to hinder the development of critical moments of liberty and upbringing. The absence of Enlightenment period in Croatian countries of the Habsburg Monarchy is complexly conditioned: from religious resistance and changes in a social and political sense to stagnancy and lack of education of a large part of the population, altogether favourable to the Croatian nobility and clergy. (shrink)

This article focuses on the work of Czech Jesuit Cardinal Tomáš Špidlík (1919-2010), continued in his pupils, both in Rome, where he taught for most of his life, and in the Czech Republic. It explores in particular how studies of hesychasm marked their understanding of deification. It asks in which sense their work can be seen as a Western attempt to rehabilitate the doctrine of deification in its experiential and theological complexity, where they contribute to the renewal of the communication (...) between the Christian East and the Christian West, and what are the complications present in their attempt expressed against the background of uniatism. (shrink)

This volume focuses on the most urgent themes in contemporary cultural theory, namely ecology, the posthuman, and the rise of the digital in a globally interlinked world. Contributions by the most prominent voices in the field provide up-to-date and accessible introductions to complex theories.

ABSTRACT In 1588 Tycho Brahe proposed a new cosmological system keeping a motionless Earth at the centre of the world. In the first half of the following century the reception of Tycho’s model within the Society of Jesus was characterized by a strong resistance at the beginning, followed by a long and winding path, and then a good fortune, whereas heliocentric models were increasingly investigated in European observatories. In 1651 a Jesuit astronomer, Giovan Battista Riccioli, published the Almagestum novum, an (...) encyclopaedic synthesis of astronomical knowledge where the Earth’s motions or rest were extensively discussed in order to prove the Earth's immobility. However, through the period 1650–1687 the Almagestum novum did not entirely fulfil its aims, rather seeming like the dying swan’s song of Tychonic or semi-Tychonic models. Contemporary scholars appreciated the encyclopaedic effort by Riccioli, but many were critical of his proofs. Even influential Jesuit astronomers showed a remarkable interest in the Copernican model, accepting geocentric models only on the basis of Holy Scripture’s authority. This conduct and the tacitly allowed circulation in Catholic Europe of openly Copernican books, indicate that Catholic science tolerated heliocentric theory, when presented as a computational device rather than a representation of reality, more frequently than we usually think. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to expose, and provide a possible solution to, an internal inconsistency in Axel Honneth's critical theory of recognition. Honneth requires a way of making his claim that misrecognition causes subjective suffering, with the potential to cognitively disclose injustice, consistent with his account of ideological recognition as a form of misrecognition that engenders compliance with an oppressive social order. Only by reconciling these claims—that is, by showing how ideological recognition can engender an acceptance of domination (...) whilst at the same time causing subjective suffering—can Honneth's theory of recognition retain the kind of critical capacities he desires. As a means of achieving this reconciliation, I propose the notion of “invisible suffering.” In the case of ideological recognition, I suggest that the suffering caused by misrecognition has its disclosive power blocked by the faux-affirmation that the ideology discursively accords, and this renders the experience of suffering, qua painful indicator of social injustice, invisible to the subject. Drawing on insights from medical sociology, I show how the need to supplement Honneth's theory of recognition with the idea of invisible suffering is revelatory of the kind of critical theoretical stance demanded by his ontological commitments. (shrink)

The Posthuman offers both an introduction and major contribution to contemporary debates on the posthuman. Digital 'second life', genetically modified food, advanced prosthetics, robotics and reproductive technologies are familiar facets of our globally linked and technologically mediated societies. This has blurred the traditional distinction between the human and its others, exposing the non-naturalistic structure of the human. The Posthuman starts by exploring the extent to which a post-humanist move displaces the traditional humanistic unity of the subject. Rather than perceiving this (...) situation as a loss of cognitive and moral self-mastery, Braidotti argues that the posthuman helps us make sense of our flexible and multiple identities. Braidotti then analyzes the escalating effects of post-anthropocentric thought, which encompass not only other species, but also the sustainability of our planet as a whole. Because contemporary market economies profit from the control and commodification of all that lives, they result in hybridization, erasing categorical distinctions between the human and other species, seeds, plants, animals and bacteria. These dislocations induced by globalized cultures and economies enable a critique of anthropocentrism, but how reliable are they as indicators of a sustainable future? The Posthuman concludes by considering the implications of these shifts for the institutional practice of the humanities. Braidotti outlines new forms of cosmopolitan neo-humanism that emerge from the spectrum of post-colonial and race studies, as well as gender analysis and environmentalism. The challenge of the posthuman condition consists in seizing the opportunities for new social bonding and community building, while pursuing sustainability and empowerment. (shrink)

Testimonio que recoge algunas experiencias y reflexiones de la artista visual costarricense María Rapela en Alemania y de cómo se involucró en la gestión cultural, coordinando el Fieber Festival, una plataforma colaborativa y auto-gestionada de mujeres artistas migrantes iberoamericanas en Berlín entre el 2011 y el 2017.

The philosophical literature on the standing to forgive is divided. The majority view holds that only victims have the standing to forgive (Murphy and Hampton 1988, Owens 2012, Zaragoza 2012, Walker 2013), while recent contributions challenge the majority view and argue that third parties also have the standing to forgive (MacLachlan 2008, Norlock 2009, Pettigrove 2009, Chaplin 2019). This chapter defends the victim’s unique standing to forgive by way of a specific account of the nature of forgiveness. The standard account (...) of forgiveness says that forgiveness is the overcoming of resentment for the right reasons. The standard account can explain how forgiveness differs from similar responses, like excusing and condoning, but falls short of explaining how forgiveness can be a voluntary action. A satisfactory account of forgiveness should be able to explain how forgiveness can be separate from excusing and condoning, as well as how forgiveness can be voluntary. To account for all the desiderata, this chapter suggests an account of forgiveness that depends on the wrongdoer’s repentance and the victim’s decision to absorb the cost of the wrongdoing. On this account, forgiveness is necessarily the prerogative of the victim. (shrink)

This study explored the impact of facilitating collaborative philosophical inquiry, in the tradition of “Philosophy for Children,” on connectedness pedagogies. The study employed an experimental design that included 59 primary teachers in 2 groups. The experimental group received an intervention that comprised training in CPI and the comparison group received training in Thinking Tools, a subset of the CPI training. Lessons were coded on four variables of connectedness pedagogies, across the two groups, at three time-points. Teacher interviews were conducted to (...) gather participants’ perspectives. Between-groups analysis of variance on particular measures of pedagogy revealed that CPI significantly broadened teachers’ pedagogical repertoires, in ways that included drawing on students’ background knowledge and preparing a problem-based curriculum which connects students to the world beyond the classroom. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility research has burgeoned in the past several decades. Despite significant advances, our review of the literature reveals a problematic gap: We know little about how culture, practices, and interactions shape CSR. On further investigation, we discover that limited research utilizes ethnography to understand CSR, which may provide some explanation for this gap. Thus, the purpose of this article is to illustrate the utility of ethnography for advancing business and society research via a multistage framework that demonstrates how (...) three different types of ethnography may be applied to the exploration of CSR. We specifically focus on the alignment between stages in the research process, or methodological fit, as a key criterion of high-quality research. In doing so, we provide researchers embracing different worldviews a tool they may utilize to conduct and evaluate ethnographies in business and society research. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine whether it is possible to improve democracy by encouraging ordinary citizens to participate in political decision-making and if participation in deliberative institutions can make citizens more competent decision-makers. By using qualitative data, we analyze the discussion from the Belgrade citizens? assembly focused on the topic of expanding the pedestrian zone in the city center. The CA was organized in Serbia for the first time, as part of a research project aimed at promoting and advancing innovative (...) democratic practices in the Western Balkans. The goal was to encourage the involvement of citizens in discussions of public interest. Our hypothesis was that, through the process of participation and deliberation in CA, ordinary citizens can make reasonable and informed choices, increase their knowledge of the issue discussed, and become more motivated to participate in political decision-making on the local level. Our qualitative content analysis suggests that deliberation had a positive impact on participants? knowledge of the chosen topic of the assembly. It also shows that citizens used exhaustive explanations rather than brief statements, could differentiate the good arguments from the bad, and more often appealed to general rather than private interests. Participants in the assembly reported a significant increase in interest in political decision-making that affects their lives, as well as a sense of being informed about politics. Finally, we wanted to draw attention to the challenges and open questions that remain, namely those that concern the impact of a deliberative body on political decision-making in the real world. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between three temperament dimensions: strength of excitation, strength of inhibition and mobility measured by Pavlov’s Temperament Survey, and amplitudes and latencies of evoked brain potentials measured by a visual oddball paradigm in two blocks. The participants were female psychology students with mean age of 20. Significant positive correlations were determined between amplitudes of N1-P2-N2-P3 components and strength of excitation and mobility in the first and second block, mostly on parietal electrodes, (...) as well as significant negative correlations of amplitudes of N1-P2-N2-P3 components and strength of inhibition. Considering measurement limitations important future study directions have been given. (shrink)

National early childhood education and care (ECEC) systems have been shaped by external influences and have taken different forms in developed countries than in post-colonial countries. This study systematically compares and examines the autonomous elements in national ECEC systems and the countervailing homogenisation process in Slovakia and Indonesia -two countries located in a different hemisphere with different historical, cultural, and political backgrounds. The study shows new rhetoric triggering different tendencies. In Slovakia, the “competency” and “standards” turn led to steps to (...) increase ECEC institutions’ autonomy and give them greater power to create tailor-made education programmes. While in Indonesia, the turn went in the opposite direction, reinforcing curriculum centralisation and increasing its regulatory functions regarding ECEC. This shift towards the same discourse, terminology and concepts does not automatically trigger processes that lead to a significant similarity and the convergence between ECEC systems due to their specific historical, cultural, and political contexts. (shrink)