In other work I have argued that items can be on a par, where being on a par is a fourth, basic, sui generis value relation beyond the usual trichotomy of ‘better than’, ‘worse than’, and ‘equally good’. In this paper, I aim to marshal non-technical, intuitive arguments for this view. First, I try to cast doubt on the leading source of intuitive resistance to parity, the conviction that if two items are comparable, one must be better than the (...) other, worse than it, or they must be equally good. Second, I explain how parity can arise by appealing to an uncontroversial distinction between quantity and quality of value. I propose both sufficient conditions for parity and a nontechnical model of the notion. My overall aim is to bring into view a simple and intuitive picture of value – and more generally of normativity – in which parity plays a significant role. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Images >> Quan Zhou Wu and Linaje’s GenealogyJulia Haeyoon Chang (bio) Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuENJOY (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 5] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuUNA DE ELLAS (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan ZhouWu Digital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 6] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuMEMORIAS RETORCIDAS(Linaje (...) 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 30] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou Wu,NEGATIVOS (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 31] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuELLAS Y YO (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 49] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou Wu,STATEMENT (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 74] Click for larger view View full resolutionQuan Zhou WuLAS ARTISTAS QUE NO FUIMOS (Linaje 2024)Art and design by Quan Zhou WuDigital infrastructure by Marco Fratini[End Page 75]Quan Zhou Wu’s followers will surely be struck—as I was—by the multisensory digital exhibit “Linaje” (“Lineage”), which was published in 2024 and departs, perhaps unexpectedly, from the artist’s previous well-established oeuvre. Before delving into the work in question, it may be fruitful first to have a glimpse at the artist’s iconic aesthetic. In 2015, and at the age of twenty-seven, Wu, a self-taught artist, debuted her first graphic memoir, Gazpacho Agridulce. The book commences with her parents’ newfound life in Spain after leaving Qingtian, a province of Zhejiang, China, to run a restaurant in Algeciras, a municipality of Cadiz. The opening pages of Gazpacho pack a punch, depicting Wu’s dramatic and untimely birth in a taxicab en route to the hospital.Gazpacho’s publication initiated a crucial sea change in the predominantly white Spanish publishing world, which would soon after be rocked by a boom of racialized1 authors penning anti-racist memoirs and other works of non-fiction.2 Gazpacho would also eventually become the first of the author’s trilogy of graphic memoirs, which was completed by the sequels Andaluchinas por el mundo (2017) and the most recent La agridolce vita (2023).Wu’s narratives capture the familial, identarian, and social conflicts that erupt from cultural disloyalties and racism—direct consequences of migration. She and her sisters, for example, loathe their family’s rigid Chinese and Christian mores and long for the cultural markers of an ordinary Spanish childhood, structured of course by U.S. global consumer culture, e.g. Barbie, Pizza Hut, and McDonald’s.An illustrator, cartoonist, and podcaster, Wu’s talent as a storyteller lies in her complex use of humor. With great care for her subject and her reader, Wu deploys humor to tend to the uncouth, raw, and ugly parts of life. In so doing, the author invites us to laugh and ultimately reckon with our own discomfort as we with sit with the heaviness of racism, sexism, and post-migration melancholy—using humor as a salve.At her best, Wu serves irreverence, rawness, and wit. To be immersed in her books is to rub up against the rough-hewn emotions that bring her characters to life. The vibrancy of her palette and the whimsy of her pen strokes are inviting, animated, and deceptively light-hearted. In an instant, lines and pigment rearrange into abstractions dense with affect. Fiery hollowed eyes, a gaping mouth, and flushed skin burn through the frame—making the volcanic rage of a migrant mother immediately palpable. It’s so emotive, it practically singes your skin. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Cover of Wu’s first graphic memoir Gazpacho agridulce: Una autobiografía china-andaluza[End Page 102] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Excerpt from Gazpacho agridulce (courtesy of the artist)[End Page 103]While... (shrink)

Literature is a reflection of a certain era of social life, in particular in the creative process of the natural landscape and cultural environment, and through the writer's aesthetic and its profound impact. Sui and Tang dynasties ago, China has experienced 300 years of confrontation between north and south during the regime of political division and military confrontation, the literature in the isolated north and south of the closed state, the two sides to strengthen and develop their aesthetic characteristics of (...) this region: North Chongyang just of the gas, the South is still feminine style. Sui Zuo short years, and by the Tang Dynasty to consolidate and develop the political unification, so that the north and south to strengthen the development of literature and their two aesthetic fashion is becoming integrated. In general, the development of Tang poetry to melt north and south sides of the two United States in one extreme, to energetic quality is actually a bone to soft Wanhua Li for their skin, the two complement each dependent, the formation of a Tang Dynasty theme of sound. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * * Australia, Summer, 2012. …. essential humanity exists, and runs its course, within a system whose first principle is the preservation of balance. And arching over it all, is the logos of The Dreaming. How shall we state this when we fully understand it I do not know, but I should think we are more likely to ennoble it than not. Equilibrium ennobled is abidingness.” 1 On return to birthplace I write. Caught between jetlag and surprise, a relentless sun cracks my skin. Upright words fall under cockatoo roars. The attempt to settle, to be attentive, is shaken. Some kind of Dreaming surrounds and elements intrude without consent. Homeless at home. Exhausted, I fight sleep’s hard currents. Their victory would confuse the body clock, so the in-between wins. Half-there — half-awake — here in this place — I am driftwood. Driftwood: wood floating in or washed ashore by a body of water. A severed limb set adrift from the birthing body. Tossed from home it’s cast into processes of wind, water, sand, bacteria, decay and movement. Driftwood is orphaned members at the mercy and agency of weather, currents, submersion, and being thrown into dry world. Driftwood — singular plural. White man got no dreaming. Him go ‘nother way. White man, him go different Him got road belong himself. 2 photo: Bronwyn Lay The old man comes from the northern rivers. A while ago, he could no longer pay attention to wage slavery, so retreated north to be with dead redgum that lay abandoned in dry riverbeds. Derived from driftwood peoples tossed here by the sea, he followed the fragile river veins of his birth. He walked along water bodies and through country’s lungs. Some kind of displaced ancestral song compelled his leathered hands to pick up centuries old driftwood from flood plains. It emerged from under muddy creeks, was flung up by salt soaked coves, pushed underground by cracks in the claypan and lay embedded in mud and salinized soil. Smoothed and grooved in equal measure, the branches were marked by an organic alphabet that preceded him. As he held the wood, he touched decomposing circles that started with a blast and never ceased writing into abandoned flesh. When the ute was full the old man returned home having been away with the stuff that ‘growed him up’. His shed filled with red sawdust and the sound of tools at labour. His hands sculptured driftwood. History carved into itinerant skin. I sit opposite the old man. His body no longer holds the repetition of carpentry. He can no longer gift driftwood its detail. Outside redgum bits lie scattered around the fence line and beside the dam. He crouches over an unreliable computer researching the massacres of indigenous peoples that occurred along the same river veins that ‘growed him up’ long ago. Staring into the remnants of frontier resistance that he and I inherit, his eyes nurture fire. He discovers severed limbs and the slicing of tribes. In the ashes of sentences he sifts the lies that smoulder into our histories. In the 30’s the anthropologist Stanner said that due to certain factors — lack of change and isolation — the ideal and real come very close together in indigenous Dreaming. They are a people who were able to defeat history. 3 “If the Ideal and the Real drift too far away from one another (as they did at the end of the middle ages and seem increasingly to do this century) men face some difficult options. They have to change their way of life, or their philosophy, or both, or live unhappily somewhere in-between.” 4 Stanner says Indigenous Dreaming is blackfella thinking. 5 Dreamtime is not ethereal, not utopic, or otherworldly. It’s fused with the real and it’s not mine. I might never understand, but it’s the substance of my home. This here place ‘growed me up’. Is driftwood the unhappy in-between? Is it a radical itinerant written upon by currents? Where are we? The settler restless? photo: Alison Pouliot I return to the bush late one night, tired from high talk in city cafes, to find the old man at his computer. He’s either researching his white farming ancestors, or tracing unrecorded massacres of blackfellas. I laugh, “You know Dad, if you were indigenous you might go out by the dam and sing up your ancestors rather than try find them on a screen.” He peers over his glasses. His stare delivers an ancestral scold. He’s white man. Of course he archives. This is our way. One may see that, like all men, he is a metaphysician in being able to transcend himself. With the metaphysician goes a mood and spirit, which I can only call a mood or spirit of assent, neither despair nor resignation, optimism not pessimism, quietism nor indifference. The mood, and the outlook beneath it, make him hopelessly out of place in a world in which the renaissance has triumphed only to be perverted, and in which the products of secular humanism, rationalism and science challenge their own hopes, indeed their beginnings.” 6 The clinamen sometimes comes abstract — the rarefied swerve of possibility. But in the place we gather &mdash where this text has landed — in the heart of settler colony denial — the clinamen reminds of familiar violence and goes maximum. The earth’s swerve. Topography’s tip. Physics gone violent. Here, drift is initiated by the tear of flesh, scurvy voyages, frontier blood and the deracination from belonging. Here, war precedes drift. We all got tossed. Here. Pay attention. The country has its own gaze. ‘Lest we forget’. The seasonal turn on aborescent substances starts with a fall, an upwards rupture, a drop, a cut, a storm, a violence, a loss, forced migration, refugees, agricultural imperialism, settler wheat and poisoned rations. Pay attention to aftermath debris. Don’t drift too far from the real. History hasn’t settled into the water. It still tosses limbs back and forth. Surrounded by the backdrop of Dreaming country the old man archives and dreams. Both ways of settling into the real. But lest we forget, time, in this place, has no textual tick — tock. Our bodies know this, even though we persist with shipwreck illusions. It’s difficult being here. Here. Pay inattention. I walk through eucalyptus, over dried out clay pans and under kookaburras. It’s been two years in-between. This time country speaks strong underfoot. Forget books, forget texts, forget other lands and times, beginning and end. Be here. All falls raw. Leaves drop and refuse to compost. Bark untethers quick. Light denudes worlds. The heated horizon melts monoliths. It’s enough to make Cartesians shiver. Awake. Refuse the temptation to run. Have enough courage to drift into here. Love with a gum tree. Stand with her whole and dissolving. She moves light between our limbs, tossing them to wind. She — the original romance — is the dream that dares touch flesh and reaches over nightmares with elemental desire. I gaze and lose me. There’s no distance. The land that ‘growed me up’ speaks with symbiotic breath. There’s no division, no separation, no other. The gum is plastic arborescence. You be my body for me, always were. …..but I wake to driftwood histories and recall slaughters. Drifted, wicked fellow citizen — the other is someone else’s blind sleep. Betrayal maintains the other as mine. Archives reveal this place doesn’t belong to me. Body articulates that it became here. Gumtree cares not………her arms take me in anyway. “Like all men he is a philosopher in being able to use his power of abstract reason. His genius, his metier, and in some sense — his fate is that because of endowment and circumstance this power has channelled itself mainly into one activity, making sense out of social relations among men living together.” 7 The old man excavates seven generations of settler ancestors. They’re an ordinary lot with written-upon skin. He records genocides that occurred alongside his peoples fertility. Bodies rise from riverbeds like sovereign sacrifices. It hurts. It disrupts. He labours at the past with gestures that might go unnoticed in a country suffocated by rich amnesia. Inside walls, he seems attentive to historical details. Outside he seems inattentive to time, lost to us and embedded in a family of active matter — the bush. His driftwood skin appears around my eyes - grooves of experience, the rush of cruel sun, the push of blind winds, and the love of everything. The sovereign’s reluctant children are thrown here by, with and through blood, but country gets in and sculpts us here. photo: Chris Corrigan “But his abstractions do not put him at war with himself.” 8 The kangaroo family appears at dusk. When the sun is soft I follow the old man into the back paddock. Children skip behind us. In-between generations, I step into the old man’s driftwood leanings. My feet find traces of his understanding – the archivist that reads trees. Here, on home dirt, inattention and attention collapse as we wander into where we are. The roo family gaze at us. Through the grass the old man’s wooden finger articulates kin’s details. He points to the head male, the mother holding a joey in pouch and the young warriors side by side. My children, quieter than ever, meet the laser - eyed silence of another family. In half-light Dad, me, and the kids mirror the kangaroo constellation and stand gentle together. At the bushblock’s limit we encounter ancestral desires. White peoples are subject to driftwood histories. We’re severed limbs attempting to fuse here now, with what was, only to discover our skin becomes racked and embedded with the weather. Into the shelter and fissures of this difficult and ambiguous inheritance, I fall into dream light until balance saturates. Light breaks when the kangaroos move. They bounce someplace else without effort or impact. We turn and tread through the dark towards home. It’s time to sleep. Driftwood skin covers the country. Dreaming is still. photo: Bronwyn Lay NOTES W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming and Other Essays , (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2009), 72. Ibid., 56. Stanner is recalling one intelligent old man who said to him, “with a cadence almost as though he had been speaking in verse.” Ibid., 60. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 59.  . 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Many upper limb amputees experience an incessant, post-amputation “phantom limb pain” and report that their missing limbs feel paralyzed in an uncomfortable posture. One hypothesis is that efferent commands no longer generate expected afferent signals, such as proprioceptive feedback from changes in limb configuration, and that the mismatch of motor commands and visual feedback is interpreted as pain. Non-invasive therapeutic techniques for treating phantom limb pain, such as mirror visual feedback (MVF), rely on visualizations of postural changes. Advances (...) in neural interfaces for artificial sensory feedback now make it possible to combine MVF with a high-tech “rubber hand” illusion, in which subjects develop a sense of embodiment with a fake hand when subjected to congruent visual and somatosensory feedback. We discuss clinical benefits that could arise from the confluence of known concepts such as MVF and the rubber hand illusion, and new technologies such as neural interfaces for sensory feedback and highly sensorized robot hand testbeds, such as the “BairClaw” presented here. Our multi-articulating, anthropomorphic robot testbed can be used to study proprioceptive and tactile sensory stimuli during physical finger-object interactions. Conceived for artificial grasp, manipulation, and haptic exploration, the BairClaw could also be used for future studies on the neurorehabilitation of somatosensory disorders due to upper limb impairment or loss. A remote actuation system enables the modular control of tendon-driven hands. The artificial proprioception system enables direct measurement of joint angles and tendon tensions while temperature, vibration, and skin deformation are provided by a multimodal tactile sensor. The provision of multimodal sensory feedback that is spatiotemporally consistent with commanded actions could lead to benefits such as reduced phantom limb pain, and increased prosthesis use due to improved functionality and reduced cognitive burden. (shrink)

The current study aimed to highlight the factors that may influence teachers' psychological resistance to digital technologies in entrepreneurship and business schools. Theoretically grounded in the diffusion of innovations theory and the theory of planned behavior, the current research investigates teachers' psychological resistance to digital innovation, school culture and climate, and moderation of teacher attitudes toward educational technologies. A cross-sectional field survey of 600 business and entrepreneurship school teachers was conducted in Jordan. In this study, partial least square-structural (...) equation modeling was used to assess the variables' “direct and moderating impacts” using the Smart PLS software 3.0. According to the results, school culture and school innovation climate had a considerable positive impact on teachers' resistance to digital innovation. Additionally, teachers' attitudes toward educational technologies moderated the relationship between study constructs in the framework. The study is a significant advance to the literature related to entrepreneurship, business education, and digital innovation. Several key policy insights and recommendations for further research, as well as theoretical and practical implications, are suggested. (shrink)

Provides a robust theoretical and methodological framework for researching of resistance and social change.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:'I am cringe, but I am free':A Reparative Reading of Assuming the Ecosexual PositionVanesa Raditz (bio) and Jess Martinez (bio)Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, Jennie Klein, and Linda Montano. Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover. University of Minnesota Press, 2021. ISBN 9781452965796.INTRODUCTIONEcosexual: Eco from the ancient Greek oikos; sexual from Latin, sexuales 1. a person who finds nature romantic, sensual, erotic, or sexy, which can include humans or (...) not. 2. A new sexual identity (self-identified). 3. A person who takes the Earth as their lover. 4. A term used in dating advertisements. 5. An environmental activist strategy. 6. A grassroots movement. 7. A person who has a more expanded concept of what sex and orgasm are beyond mainstream definitions. 8. A person who imagines sex as an ecology that extends beyond the physical body.Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth As Lover (Sprinkle and Stephens 2021, 2)What does it mean to take the Earth as a lover? How does it change our experiences of pleasure in our bodies to give attention to the eroticism of air in our lungs, mud on our skin, or water in our throats? How would it shape our ethical commitments to these elements that we depend upon for life if we were to reconnect with them as pleasurable extensions of our own bodies? These questions are at the heart of the decades-long research-creation performance-art collaboration between Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens that has built an international "ecosexual" identity and movement, a tale that they document in their new book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover. Part travelog, part relationship memoir, part how-to guide, Assuming the Ecosexual Position chronicles [End Page 105] the emergence and evolution of their ecosex concept and community through a playful recounting of over a decade of productions: performative weddings to the earth, moon, lakes, rocks and beyond; theatrical two-women sexecology performances that culminate in explicit sex in piles of earth; ecosex walking tours; workshops; public sex clinics; documentary films; and so much more.Woven throughout are philosophical reflections on the entanglements between bodies, land, sex, eroticism, and love, many of which emerge from ecofeminist thought, pollinated with the post-porn, sex-positive, queer feminism of the 80s and 90s. In introducing their philosophical inspirations, they name Greta Gaard's classic piece on queering ecofeminism (18) which stimulated a body of work describing the ways that patriarchal systems of power simultaneously oppress women, the erotic, and nature (1997). Drawing upon Sprinkle's background in porn and post-porn modernist theater, Stephens' background as a queer artist with a doctorate in Performance Studies, their mutual interest in sex education, and their love for the redwoods of Santa Cruz, the pair crafted ecosexuality as a particular lens for expanding queer ecofeminist inquiry into the power of sexual liberation for ecological liberation, which they do through the creative methodologies of performance. The performance art practice that they develop has significant inspiration from the Fluxus art movement, which resisted the authority of museums to define the meaning or value of art, and encouraged the active practice and production of art throughout life.Among the inspirations they list in the introduction to Assuming the Ecosexual Position, Donna Haraway and Kim TallBear stand out. Donna Haraway's presence is felt throughout the book—as a colleague of Stephens at UC Santa Cruz, as a friend at their Wedding to the Earth, as a collaborator in the documentary Water Makes Us Wet, and ultimately, as a posthuman philosopher (Haraway 2000) who has inspired Stephens and Sprinkle to "see ecosex as a conceptual art practice and a way of thinking beyond individual identity, and even beyond human beings, to envision a larger system—an ecology of relationships" (8). The authors also express the influence of their evolving relationship with Kim TallBear, with whom Beth studied while pursuing her PhD, and who has encouraged the pair to leverage this posthuman and new materialist consciousness towards decolonial politics (TallBear 2015). They cite one of TallBear's blog posts on ecosexuality, where she encourages ecosexuals to use a critical eye towards "New Age" appropriation of Native American ceremonies... (shrink)

El sistema penitenciario de Ecuador enfrenta una crisis estructural de proporciones preocupantes. Esta investigación se centra en analizar las diversas causas que han precipitado esta situación, con el objetivo de determinar la responsabilidad del Estado ecuatoriano en esta crisis. Se examina específicamente si el Estado cumple adecuadamente con su obligación de rehabilitar a los condenados y reintegrarlos a la sociedad tras el cumplimiento de sus penas. Se evidencia una ausencia significativa de programas efectivos de reinserción para las Personas Privadas de (...) Libertad (PPL), lo que directamente contribuye a la crisis carcelaria actúa. El propósito de este estudio es analizar críticamente la situación del sistema penitenciario ecuatoriano, identificando las deficiencias en los programas de rehabilitación y reinserción social ofrecidos a las PPL. Se busca determinar si el Estado es el principal responsable de la crisis carcelaria mediante el análisis de diversas fuentes bibliográficas y la evaluación de su cumplimiento de las obligaciones legales y humanitarias hacia este grupo vulnerable. Se llevó a cabo una investigación cualitativa, donde se analizaron diversas fuentes bibliográficas especializadas para abordar el problema del sistema penitenciario en Ecuador. Se examinaron informes gubernamentales, estudios académicos y documentos legales pertinentes para comprender a fondo las causas subyacentes de la crisis carcelaria. Esta metodología permitió una evaluación exhaustiva de las deficiencias institucionales y la falta de programas de rehabilitación adecuados para las PPL en el país. Los resultados de la investigación revelan una serie de factores que contribuyen a la crisis carcelaria en Ecuador. Entre ellos se destacan el hacinamiento, la sobrepoblación, el debilitamiento institucional, el tráfico de drogas y armas, entre otros. Se evidencia que el Estado no cumple adecuadamente con su obligación de rehabilitar a los condenados y reintegrarlos a la sociedad, lo que agrava la situación y hace más miserable la vida de las PPL dentro de los centros de reclusión. Este estudio confirma que el Estado ecuatoriano es el principal responsable de la crisis carcelaria existente en el país. La falta de programas efectivos de rehabilitación y reinserción social para las PPL, junto con otras deficiencias institucionales, ha exacerbado la situación. Es imperativo que el Estado tome medidas urgentes y efectivas para abordar estas deficiencias y garantizar el respeto de los derechos humanos y la dignidad de las personas privadas de libertad en Ecuador. (shrink)

An extensive theoretical and research literature on organizational change and its implementation has been accumulating over the past fifty years. It is customary in this literature to find resistance to change mentioned as an inevitable consequence of organizational change initiatives. Yet there has been little discussion of the nature and forms of resistance that is institutionalized in organizational structure and processes. Furthermore, organization development perspectives on organizational change address management-initiated change, but not change proposed by advocates for the (...) powerless and disadvantaged. Focussing on institutionalized resistance from the standpoint of the advocate of fundamental change, this discussion proposes a typology consisting of a sequence of forms of active resistance to change, from denial through inaction to repression. The typology is illustrated by referring to responses of organizational decision makers to the efforts of employment equity change agents to address issues of systemic discrimination in the work place. The purpose of the typology is to assist change advocates, such as equality seekers, to name, analyze and think strategically about the institutionalized resistance they encounter, and about effective responses to the resistance. (shrink)

People seem more divided than ever before over social and political issues, entrenched in their existing beliefs and unwilling to change them. Empirical research on mechanisms driving this resistance to belief change has focused on a limited set of well-known, charged, contentious issues and has not accounted for deliberation over reasons and arguments in belief formation prior to experimental sessions. With a large, heterogeneous sample (N = 3,001), we attempt to overcome these existing problems, and we investigate the causes (...) and consequences of resistance to belief change for five diverse and less contentious socio-political issues. After participants chose initially to support or oppose a given socio-political position, they were provided with reasons favoring their chosen position (affirming reasons), reasons favoring the other, unchosen position (conflicting reasons), or all reasons for both positions (reasons for both sides). Our results indicate that participants are more likely to stick with their initial decisions than to change them no matter which reasons are considered, and that this resistance to belief change is likely due to a motivated, biased evaluation of the reasons to support their initial beliefs (prior-belief bias). More specifically, they rated affirming reasons more favorably than conflicting reasons—even after accounting for reported prior knowledge about the issue, the novelty of the reasons presented, and the reported strategy used to make the initial decision. In many cases, participants who did not change their positions tended to become more confident in the superiority of their positions after considering many reasons for both sides. (shrink)

The most famous korean Poet Jiha Kim had turned toward the thoughts for life in the beginning of eighties in Korea. I will here introduce the causes and the basis of his thoughts. It has been recognized already that Korean traditional philosophy of DongHak (the learning in the East Asia) and the western philosophies, ie the theology of liberation, the philosophy of Bergson or Deleuze had influenced much to his thoughts for life. But the most determinate basis of his thoughts, (...) I think is the experiences in the movements for democracy in Korea. His thoughts represent the dear believes which the mass have won since the seventies.These believes resides in the not exhausting life powers of the Minjung (Peoples repressed and alienated). His thoughts has succeed to the modern philosophy of democratic resistance but also criticised the severe problems of modern philosophies. After the democratic movement in Korea there has taken place the cultural revolution movements in Korea by new generations, which can not be adjoined to the previous democratic movements without the thoughts for life of Jiha Kim. (shrink)

European political theorists have argued that contemporary imaginaries of climate change are symptomatic of a post-political condition. My aim in this essay is to consider what this analysis might mean for a feminist green politics and how those who believe in such a project might respond. Whereas much of the gender-focused scholarship on climate change is concerned with questions of differentiated vulnerabilities and gendered divisions of responsibility and risk, I want to interrogate the strategic, epistemological, and normative implications for ecological (...) feminism of a dominant, neoliberal climate change narrative that arguably has no political subject, casts Nature as a threat to be endured, and that replaces democratic public debate with expert administration and individual behavior change. What hope is there for counter-hegemonic political theories and social movements in times like these? I suggest that rather than give in and get on the crowded climate change bandwagon, an alternative response is to pursue a project of feminist ecological citizenship that blends resistance to hegemonic neoliberal discourses with a specifically feminist commitment to reclaiming democratic debate about social-environmental futures. (shrink)

The term ‘inertia’ is often used to describe a kind of irrational resistance to change in individuals or institutions. Institutions, ideas and power structures appear to become entrenched over time, and may become ineffective or obsolete, even if they once played a legitimate or useful role. In this paper I argue that there is a common set of problems underlying the occurrence of resistance to change in individuals, social structures and the development of knowledge. Resistance to change (...) is not always irrational or problematic; it is also necessary to allow stable personal identities and social structures to survive in a constantly changing world. I offer a historical and theoretical framework for the question of inertia. Finally, I argue that philosophy has often seen its task to be the critique of ossified, inert or obsolete ideas and social structures, but that it has neglected the positive dimension of resistance to change. Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE. (shrink)

If we are to ensure the persistence of species in an increasingly warm world, of interest is the identification of drivers that affect the ability of an organism to resist thermal stress. Underpinning any organism's capacity for resistance is a complex interplay between biological and physical factors occurring over multiple scales. Tropical coral reefs are a unique system, in that their function is dependent upon the maintenance of a coral–algal symbiosis that is directly disrupted by increases in water temperature. (...) A number of physical factors have been identified as affecting the biological responses of the coral organism under broadscale thermal anomalies. One such factor is water flow, which is capable of modulating both organismal metabolic functioning and thermal environments. Understanding the physiological and hydrodynamic drivers of organism response to thermal stress improves predictive capabilities and informs targeted management responses, thereby increasing the resilience of reefs into the future. (shrink)

Robust techniques critically improve bearing-only target localization when the relevant measurements are being corrupted by impulsive noise. Resistance to isolated gross errors refers to the conventional least absolute residual method, and its estimate can be determined by linear programming when pseudolinear equations are set. The LAR approach, however, cannot reduce the bias attributed to the correlation between system matrices and noise vectors. In the present study, perturbations are introduced into the elements of the system matrix and the data vector (...) simultaneously, and the total optimization problem is formulated based on least absolute deviations. Subsequently, an equivalent form of total least absolute residuals is obtained, and an algorithm is developed to calculate the robust estimate by dual ascent algorithms. Moreover, the performance of the proposed method is verified through the numerical simulations by using two types of localization geometries, i.e., random and linear. As revealed from the results, the TLAR algorithm is capable of exhibiting significantly higher localization accuracy as compared with the LAR method. (shrink)

Teachers’ job satisfaction has been the subject of many studies that tried to identify its main sources. Based on the social cognitive career theory, the present study aimed to investigate the relationships between personality traits, goals orientation, and teachers’ job satisfaction. A total of 321 Romanian teachers completed an online questionnaire. The results demonstrated new insights regarding the relationships between psychological variables and teachers’ job satisfaction. Cognitive rigidity, as a mechanism to resistance to change, mediates between conscientiousness and teachers’ (...) job satisfaction. Moreover, the moderation role of learning goals orientation manifests in the relation between conscientiousness and job satisfaction. These findings emphasize that school management needs to offer teachers information and explain the change’s benefits if they want to prevent individual resistance to change and decrease satisfaction related to their work. (shrink)

Many studies have demonstrated differential resistance to change in the context of negative behavioral contrast. That is, as a result of introducing a disruptor, response rates decrease to a greater extent when the maintaining reinforcement schedule is leaner. Resistance to change also applies to positive contrast, in that increases in response rate are greater in leaner schedules. The negative contrast effects seen in studies of intrinsically motivated behavior reflect an increase in resistance to change as a result (...) of adding extrinsic reinforcers. (shrink)

In this empirical study, we investigate the variation in firms’ response to institutional pressure for gender-balanced boards, focusing specifically on the preservation of prevailing practices of director selection and its impact on the representation of women on the board of directors. Using 8 years of data from publicly listed Nordic corporations, we show societal pressure to be one of the determinants of female directorship. Moreover, in some corporations, the director selection process may work to maintain “a traditional type of board”. (...) In such boards, demographic diversity among male members appears to be associated with a lower share of female directors, although we cannot establish wether this reflects discrimination or a desire to maintain critical competencies. With this paper we add to the theoretical understanding of the factors underlying female board appointments by adopting an institutional theory lens to study female board representation. Viewing the demands for gender-balanced boards in terms of societal pressure for the de-institutionalization of the prevailing norms and practices, we highlight preferences for maintaining established practices as a potentially important barrier to institutional change. On these grounds, we conjecture on the relationship between the gender diversity of boards and other diversity dimensions. We suggest that a board room gender quota is supplemented by policies to ensure the transparency of board changes, in order to prevent the crowding out of other diversity dimensions. (shrink)

Skin as cover: the discursive effects of 'covering' metaphors on wound care practicesThis paper outlines a Foucauldian analysis of interactions between nurses and patients during wound care procedures in a burns unit. It explores the use of Kristeva's psychoanalytic concepts of abjection and the abject body to illuminate the emotional affects of wounds on nurse and patient. In this process, I identify how cultural metaphoric understandings about skin influence and organise the care of burns patients. Such analysis suggests (...) the import of the complete skin, the medical scientific control over the definition of this work, and the emotional forces that resist such control. (shrink)

Two important assumptions of behavioral momentum theory are contradicted by existing data. Resistance to change is not due simply to the Pavlovian contingency between a discriminative stimulus and the rate of reinforcement in its presence, because variations in the response-reinforcer contingency, independent of the stimulus-reinforcer contingency, produce differential resistance to change. Resistance to change is also not clearly related to measures of preference, in that several experiments show the two measures to dissociate.

Nevin & Grace's primary argument against theory and research on behavioral momentum is that preference and resistance to change may not covary. The method for evaluating preference and resistance to change seems problematic. Moreover, the theory fails to account convincingly for effects of average overall time to primary reinforcement on choice and preference for unsegmented schedules.