_Dialogues for the Future_ provides a sneak peek at the long philosophic and intellectual journey of the renowned Arab scholar Taha Abderrahmane. This English translation allows English-speaking readers to engage with the open canvas of dialogue Taha has resiliently initiated.

In this paper we critically review recent developments in policies, practices and philosophies pertaining to the mediation between science and the public within the EU and the UK, focusing in particular on the current paradigm of Public Understanding of Science and Technology (PEST) which seeks to depart from the science information-transmission associated with previous paradigms, and enact a deliberative democracy model. We first outline the features of the current crisis in democracy and discuss deliberative democracy as a response to this (...) crisis. We then map out and critically review the broad outlines of recent policy developments in public-science mediation in the EU and UK contexts, focusing on the shift towards the deliberative-democratic model. We conclude with some critical thoughts on the complex interrelationships between democracy, equality, science and informal pedagogies in public-science mediations. We argue that science and democracy operate within distinct value-spheres that are not necessarily consonant with each other. We also problematize the now common dismissal of information-transmission of science as inimical to democratic engagement, and argue for a reassessment of the role and importance of informal science learning for the lay public, provided within the framework of a deliberative democracy that is not reducible to consensus building or the mere expression of opinions rooted in social and cultural givens. This, we argue, can be delivered by a model of PEST that is creative and experimental, with both educational and democratic functions. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to trace some lines of thinking towards a conceptualization of the uniqueness of the creative work of museums, the mode of creativeness that belongs exclusively to museums, or at least that museums are capable of by virtue of the types of materials and forms as well as activities unique to what will be referred to as museography. This is linked to the question of what it is that constitutes the uniqueness of museum work as (...) a professional field. The article characterizes the uniqueness of museum professional knowledge primarily in terms of a mode of creativeness, or bricolage in Levi-Strauss’s sense, mediated through the museographic form, and applied to the chance assemblies of materials to generate museum-specific modes of engaging questions—across science, culture, and society—particularly through creating unique temporal arrangements, or durations, that provoke thought, learning, and engagement on museographic terms. Museography’s originality, it is argued, consists in a bricolage that works through the museum’s unique material and form to create learning resources and encounters, museographic assemblages that depart from a conception of linear time as the space of evolutionary narrative to facilitate the experience of Bergsonian durations. (shrink)

The design, implementation, and outcome of game-based learning for learners with disabilities have not been sufficiently examined systematically. Particularly, learner-based and contextual factors, as well as the essential roles played by various stakeholders, have not been addressed when game-based learning applications are used in special education. Therefore, a systematic literature review using the Activity Theory was conducted to analyse studies about game-based learning for learners with disabilities. Content analysis of 96 studies reported relevant information with respect to each activity component— (...) subject, technology, object, rules, community, division of labour and outcome. Furthermore, this study identified existing gaps from the reviewed studies, including occasional lack of parental engagement, difficulty of standardising performance measures due to the heterogeneity of learner profiles and contradictions. Finally, recommendations were made under each activity component. The study concluded that both general and domain-specific guidelines should be created for each disability category proposed in this review to assist practitioners who wish to use game-based learning with learners with disabilities. (shrink)

Museum professionalism remains an unexplored area in museum studies, particularly with regard to what is arguably the core generic question of a sui generis professional knowledge base, and its necessary and sufficient conditions. The need to examine this question becomes all the more important with the increasing expansion of the museum’s roles and functions. This paper starts by mapping out the policy and organizational context within which the roles of museums have expanded in the UK. It then situates the discussion (...) of museum professional knowledge within a cross-disciplinary matrix bearing on the question of what is professional about occupations classified—or classifiable—as professions. Against the backdrop of the current organizational context of the museum as well as theories of professional knowledge, it highlights the ways in which museum work, more specifically museography, poses a distinctive set of questions compared to other ‘professional’ fields; the paper thus homes in on the question of what it is that constitutes the uniqueness of museum professional knowledge in relation to museographic practice and the type of professional knowledge and expertise that can sustain it and enact its creative and educational potentials and affordances. (shrink)

Chelicerates (scorpions, horseshoe crabs, spiders, mites and ticks) are the second largest group of arthropods and are of immense importance for fundamental and applied science. They occupy a basal phylogenetic position within the phylum Arthropoda, and are of crucial significance for understanding the evolution of various arthropod lineages. Chelicerates are vectors of human diseases, such as ticks, and major agricultural pests, such as spider mites, thus this group is also of importance for both medicine and agriculture. The developmental genetics of (...) chelicerates is poorly understood and a challenge for the future progress for many aspects of chelicerate biology is the development of a model organism for this group. Toward this end, we are developing a chelicerate genetic model: the two‐spotted spider mite Tetranychus urticae. T. urticae has the smallest genome of any arthropod determined so far (75 Mbp, 60% of the size of the Drosophila genome), undergoes rapid development and is easy to maintain in the laboratory. These features make T. urticae a promising reference organism for the economically important, poorly studied and species‐rich chelicerate lineage. BioEssays 29:489–496, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Open Education opens up learning opportunities to, potentially, every person in the world. Additionally, it allows teachers, researchers, and practitioners to find, share, reuse, and improve existing resources under a dependable legal framework. Aiming to spread and foster the introduction of open policies in Higher Education institutions, the gamified interactive learning experience Catch the Open! was developed. Catch the Open! targets HE educators who wish to learn, or who wish to deepen their existing knowledge, about OE and Open Educational Practices. (...) Within the gamified learning experience, the user becomes an educator, Alex, the game character, who receives a task from the Rector: to investigate how to best include OE and OEP in teaching and learning practice within the institution. Alex proceeds to explore and gather information in a web-based 2D virtual HE institution where students, colleagues, and guest researchers will help her to develop a comprehensive understanding of OE and the practical application of OEP. The educational content within Catch the Open! is underpinned by an OE competences framework for HE educators, developed in a previous phase of the Erasmus+ OpenGame project. In this paper, the design process to link pedagogical and technological approaches, which results in the Catch the Open! gamified web-based interactive application, is presented as well as the application itself. Moreover, two phases of piloting with 153 HE educators from six different HE institutions are presented. The obtained findings showed that the gamified environment helped in learning about OE. On the other hand, learners also suggested several improvement aspects of the gamified environment, such as the length of finishing a learning mission while playing. (shrink)

The Mediterranean region is facing major challenges for soil conservation and sustainable agriculture. Conservation agriculture (CA), including reduced soil disturbance, can help conserve soils and improve soil fertility, but its adoption in the Mediterranean region is limited. Examining farmers’ perceptions of soil and underlying sociocultural factors can help shed light on adoption of soil management practices. In this paper, we conducted a survey with 590 farmers across Morocco, Spain and Tunisia to explore concepts that are cognitively associated with soil and (...) perceptions of tillage. We also evaluated differences in perceptions of innovation, community, adaptive capacity, and responsibility for soil. We found that farmers’ cognitive associations with soil show awareness of soil as a living resource, go beyond agriculture and livelihoods to reveal cultural ties, and link to multiple levels of human needs. Beliefs about the benefits of tillage for water availability and yield persist among the surveyed farmers. We found that openness towards innovation, perceived adaptive capacity and responsibility for soil were associated with minimum tillage, whereas community integration was not. Education, age and farm lifestyle were also associated with differences in these perceptions. CA promotion in the Mediterranean should emphasize the multiple values of soil, should demonstrate how sufficient yields may be achieved alongside resilience to drought, and be tailored to differing levels of environmental awareness and economic needs across north and south. (shrink)

The Moroccan philosopher Taha Abderrahmane is one of the leading surviving philosophers of the Arab-Islamic world. His fields of study are issues such as logic, philosophy of language, moral philosophy and political theology. He built a holistic and versatile Islamic methodology in his works and formed a world of thought on the axis of trusteeship (divine contract and trust paradigm) and circulation tedavuliyya (pragmatic-word-action theory). Taha Abderrahmane has analyzed, criticized and constructed the Islamic thought tradition, which he handled with a (...) holistic view, with a versatile reference network. In addition, one of his most important contributions is that he put forward a moral philosophy in the Qurʾānic and prophetic axis. Taha Abderrahmane proved to be a prolific thinker with his thirty-five work consisting of ten thousand pages. He proposes a deliberative model of political communication in harmony with his theo-political writings and physical and metaphysical integrity. While this article aim to provide information on the main components of Abderrahmane’s paradigm of divine contract and trusteeship (i’timaniyya), essentially a theory of morality, such as political theology, linguistics, and negotiation ethics, it also tries to identify the Western references of these elements. In this context how the theory of speech acts that seems quite important in the field of modern social sciences and created by theorists such as John Searl and Austin was transformed by Taha Abderrahmane into an Islamic theory of speech is also subject to a comparative assessment. In addition, the possibility of the issue of negotiation ethics, which gained more importance with new communication theories in the West, in the axis of Islamic thought was questioned in the article. The article reviews how views on negotiation ethics are positioned by Taha Abderrahmane within the Islamic paradigm. Therefore, the article is limited in scope to Taha Abderrahmane’s references about the theories in the West. Taha Abderrahmane attempts to construct an Islamic Pragmatic or Islamic Theory of Verbal Action, with reference to Pragmatics or Theory of Speech Acts, which is a sub-branch of linguistics, but in line with principles specific to the Islamic paradigm. Taha Abderrahmane combined the Islamic concept of pragmatic with the concept of negotiation. The terms “praxis” and “praxeology [fiqh al falsafa]”, which define the framework of the Trust Paradigm and the Islamic Pragmatic Model proposed by Taha Abderrahmane, emphasize “deed” or, in other words, “action” and he is linguistically referencing the founding masters of the pragmatics field such as J. L. Austin and J. R. Searle. However, there are two other fields that constitute the main reference to his concept of praxis (action) and praxeology (action science). These are economics and philosophy. Praxeology is a scientific field that deserves to be mentioned especially with the economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973). According to Mises, the laws of the field about which physics, biology, and praxeology [mainly economics] provide information, are independent of human will. These are primary ontological facts that strictly limit the human power to act (Mises, 1998, 67). Taha Abderrahmane references western thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises, Jürgen Habermas, Chantal Mouffe and Hannah Arendt, as well as Islamic sources. However, the way he makes use of them takes place within the framework of criticism and analysis. He also refers to other personalities such as Jonas, Freud, Ellul, Putnam, Ricoeur and Rawls. While Taha Abderrahmane explains the process of turning words into action, he also draws on the Action Theory of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), who was one of the children of Heidegger, such as Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse, and who was accepted as a real philosopher even though he rejected the title of philosopher during his lifetime. On the other hand, Taha Abderrahmane makes strong references to the basic dimension of Islam, such as “O believers! If you avoid opposing Allah; It gives you an understanding to distinguish good from bad (Al-Anfal, 8/29)” verse. He makes strong references to the supposed dimension of Islam, and in this context, he tries to create a praxis based on nature, especially based on the hadith known as nawāfil hadith. (shrink)

This article adds philosopher Judith Butler to the list of thinkers whose work underpins the interest in ethics and/in film that began in earnest in the 2000s. Beginning with Precarious Life: Powers of Mourning and Violence, Butler has published several volumes that blend ethical thinking with moral theory and political philosophy, focusing on the concepts of precariousness and vulnerability. This article suggests that two films directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, Bamako and Timbuktu, as dramas of precariousness and vulnerability respectively, can inform (...) thinking about cinematic ethics: the staging of a trial of global institutions in Bamako dramatizes the possible universalization of an ethic of precarity, while in Timbuktu the condemnation to death of a Tuareg shepherd by Ansar Dine, the militant Islamist group that occupied parts of Mali in 2012, allows Sissako to give full rein to his talent for filming the vulnerability of both victims and oppressors. (shrink)

_Islamic Ethics and the Trusteeship Paradigm_ offers a highly relevant and needed introduction to the various interpretations and applications of the trusteeship ethical theory as developed by the Moroccan philosopher Taha Abderrahmane (b. 1944). يُقدم كتاب "الأخلاق الإسلامية ونسق الائتمانية" دراسات نقدية مقارنة للنظرية الأخلاقية الإسلامية المعاصرة كما طورها الفيلسوف المغربي طه عبد الرحمن (و. 1944م)، وتتميز هذه الدراسات بأنها تأتي من حقول وتخصصات متعددة.

The main thesis of this essay is that contemporary management problems are results of the inherent reductionism in classical science and modernist worldview. Reductionism is inherent in modernist worldview since it limits its scope of cognition and considerations to the seen and sensible aspects of reality. It ignores the unseen divine aspect of it. To overcome reductionism and expand management ethical responsibility, I build on the contemporary Moroccan philosopher Taha Abderrahmane work to argue that the unseen divine dimension of reality (...) should be restored to guide man’s continuous spiritual and ethical development. The restoration of this dimension requires emphasizing Man-God relationship rather than being concerned with conceptualizing God himself. I argue that understanding God as beyond man’s realization while conceptualizing Man-God relationship as a dimension of continuous spiritual exaltation for man can overcome reductionism. This view expands man’s existence and cognition. It restores the excluded divine aspect without reducing it to certain values or specific practices since the ultimate reality (God) is always above and ahead. Consequently, it expands man’s responsibility when dealing with (managing) things in the world, including himself. (shrink)

This paper examines how, building on earlier filmic representations such as Ousmane Sembene’s La Noire de… and Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako, Khady Sylla’s Le Monologue de la muette traces a continuum of women’s exploitation, from slavery to colonization to globalization.

L'auteur analyse les contributions de quatre penseurs arabes ayant travaillé sur le rapport au Turâth (tradition) et à la modernité : Abdallah Laroui, Mohamed Abed Al Jabri, Georges Tarabishi et Taha Abderrahmane. L'analyse tente de montrer que les apports divergents de ces quatre penseurs, quant à la manière d'assimiler le Turâth et la modernité occidentale afin d'échapper à leur emprise dans le but de façonner sa propre modernité, pourraient constituer le point de départ pour un nouveau rapport à la tradition (...) et à la modernité. (shrink)

This book offers the first comprehensive introduction to one of the most significant Arab thinkers of the late 20th century and the early 21st century: the Moroccan philosopher and social theorist Mohammed Abed al-Jabri. With his intellectual and political engagement, al-Jabri has influenced the development of a modern reading of the Islamic tradition in the broad Arab-Islamic world and has been, in recent years, subject to an increasing interest among Muslims and non-Muslim scholars, social activists and lay men. The contributors (...) to this volume read al-Jabri with reference to prominent past Arab-Muslim scholars, such as Ibn Rushd, al-Ghazali, al-Shatibi, and Ibn Khaldun, as well as contemporary Arab philosophers, like Hassan Hanafi, Abdellah Laroui, George Tarabishi, Taha Abderrahmane; they engage with various aspects of his intellectual project, and trace his influence in non-Arab-Islamic lands, like Indonesia, as well. His analysis of Arab thought since the 1970s as a harbinger analysis of the ongoing “Arab Spring uprising” remains relevant for today's political challenges in the region. (shrink)