The rapid growth of pharmaceutical markets in the 20th century has increased the demand for human research participants in clinical trials. However, with the globalization of clinical research, most clinical trials are conducted in low-income countries (LICs) with political and economic instability, and lack of basic healthcare, but easy access to human subjects. This paper explores the unique ethical challenges faced during the pre-enrollment phase of cross-cultural research in a country like Pakistan, and how these challenges make the Pakistani population (...) vulnerable to exploitation. It also outlines recommendations regarding conducting research in Pakistan within ethical parameters adopted according to local culture. This discussion is important because researchers must focus on the pre-enrollment phase of the research process for it’s cultural suitability and acceptability so that the research conducted is credible and valid and has social value for the research population. (shrink)

Manufacturing companies in today's industrial world are seeking to use the new manufacturing process methods. The primary goal of corporations is to achieve optimum production while deploying minimal capital. The fundamental purpose of this study is to examine the influence of various lean manufacturing practices on the sustainability performance of companies and the mediating role of green supply chain management. The data was gathered using questionnaires from 250 Pakistani manufacturing firms and analyzed using AMOS 25. Results demonstrate that process and (...) equipment, product design, supplier relationships, and customer relationships significantly affect sustainable performance. It is also recognized that Green Supply Chain Management mediates the interaction between HR processes, product design, supplier relationship, customer relationship, and environmental performance. The findings of this study will enable managers and decision-makers of manufacturing companies to increase sustainable efficiency and reduce waste through the use of lean manufacturing and GSCM implementation. (shrink)

Local reports from different international societies have considered the achievement of the successful Glocalized architecture model in line with the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Aga Khan Cultural Foundation’s International Program for Islamic Architecture has also prioritized the understanding of the success drivers in architectural projects. This study aimed to detect the potentials of the common global indicators to access qualitative design assessment through analyzing the Aga Khan Award’s reports. The selected methodology in the present study is a (...) quantitative approach using the systematic content analysis and coding techniques for qualitative data obtained from the technical. The physical, non-physical, modern, and traditional factors that have contributed to the success of the works as well as their combinations were extracted and analyzed using Sensible and Abstract international, national, and local indications. There is a relative superiority for Sensible indications (A combination of modern and physical factors). The hybrid data distribution provides the ground to assess the works, and this can be used to manage the globalization challenges in the contemporary architecture of Muslim societies. (shrink)

This book develops a theory of how the imagination functions, and how it evolved. The imagination is characterized as an embodied cognitive system. The system draws upon sensory-motor, visual, and linguistic capacities, but it is a flexible, developmental ability, typified by creative improvisation. The imagination is a voluntary simulation system that draws on perceptual, emotional, and conceptual elements, for the purpose of creating works that adaptively investigate external (environmental) and internal (psychological) resources. Beyond the adaptive useful values of this system, (...) imagination also possesses significant intrinsic value (e.g., in the joy of play, and states of wonder). The book argues that imagination is not a late arrival in the evolution of mind, but one of the earliest human abilities. (shrink)

This article focuses on how an often-overlooked portion of PPACA, “Community Transformation Grants,” might close the evidence gap in the relationship between obesity and the built environment and provide a pathway to effectively address this medically and economically costly epidemic.

It is no secret that one of the biggest public health challenges facing this nation is the obesity epidemic. Two-thirds of adults and one-third of children and teens are either obese or overweight. For adults, the number of obese has doubled since 1980, and for children age 6-11 the number of obese has quadrupled. The epidemic has changed what we thought we knew about medicine. For example, until fairly recently, type 2 diabetes was known as “adult-onset” diabetes. But doctors have (...) dropped this moniker as youth account for almost half of new type 2 diabetes in certain communities. Further, there has always been an assumption that life spans and health would improve with advancements in medicine and technology. However, obesity is related to over 20 major chronic diseases, and therefore obese children are more than twice as likely to die before the age of 55 compared to healthy-weight children. In other words, if trends are not reversed, America’s current generation of children are likely to have shorter life spans than their parents. (shrink)

Michael A. Petersa and Fazal Rizvib aBeijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China; bMelbourne University, Melbourne, Australia Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to ‘no...

In the World Library of Educationalists, international experts compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and practical contributions so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands and see how their work contributes to the development of the field. This volume brings together the selected works of Fazal Rizvi.Born in India, Fazal (...) Rizvi has lived and worked in a number of countries, including Australia, England and the United States. Most of his educational encounters have been 'in the global'. He has developed a keen sense of the multiple and conflicting ways in which transnational ties and interactions are transforming the spaces in which identities and cultures are forged and performed, and in which education takes place. Much of his research has sought to examine how educational systems around the world have interpreted and responded to the challenges and opportunities of globalization. In this collection of his papers, written over a period of more than two decades, Fazal Rizvi seeks to understand the shifting discourses and practices of globalization and education, critically examining the ways in which these are:reshaping our sense of identity and citizenship, and our communitiescreating transnational systems of ties, networks and exchangetaken into account in the development of policies and programs of educational reform producing uneven social effects that benefit some communities more than others.Fazal Rizvi's analysis shows how recent global transformations have mostly been interpreted through the conceptual prism of a neo-liberal imaginary that have undermined education's democratic and cosmopolitan possibilities. (shrink)

A mythopoetic paradigm or perspective sees the world primarily as a dramatic story of competing personal intentions, rather than a system of objective impersonal laws. Asma argued that our contemporary imaginative cognition is evolutionarily conserved-it has structural and functional similarities to premodern Homo sapiens’s cognition. This article will outline the essential features of mythopoetic cognition or adaptive imagination, delineate the adaptive sociocultural advantages of mythopoetic cognition, explain the phylogenetic and ontogenetic mechanisms that give rise to human mythopoetic mind, show (...) how mythopoetic cognition challeng­es contemporary trends in cognitive science and philosophy, and recognize and outline empirical approaches for a new cognitive science of the imagination. (shrink)

Computer vision and human–computer interaction are essential in many technological fields. Researchers in CV are particularly interested in real-time object detection techniques, which have a wide range of applications, including inspection systems. In this study, we design and implement real-time object detection and recognition systems using the single-shoot detector algorithm and deep learning techniques with pre-trained models. The system can detect static and moving objects in real-time and recognize the object’s class. The primary goals of this research were to investigate (...) and develop a real-time object detection system that employs deep learning and neural systems for real-time object detection and recognition. In addition, we evaluated the free available, pre-trained models with the SSD algorithm on various types of datasets to determine which models have high accuracy and speed when detecting an object. Moreover, the system is required to be operational on reasonable equipment. We tried and evaluated several deep learning structures and techniques during the coding procedure and developed and proposed a highly accurate and efficient object detection system. This system utilizes freely available datasets such as MS Common Objects in Context, PASCAL VOC, and Kitti. We evaluated our system’s accuracy using various metrics such as precision and recall. The proposed system achieved a high accuracy of 97% while detecting and recognizing real-time objects. (shrink)

This study explores threats to journalists in Sindh, searching the journalist’s community, allocating its existence through a premeditated survey with directional questionnaire. Consulting 150 journalists to find out the essence, magnitude and targeting aspects of the threats they are facing in wake of their line of duty. Journalists and threats are both enter-linked since the birth of journalism, a journalist is a Watch-Dog or Gate-Keeper, who guards the boundaries of transparency, freedom of expression, sphere of laws and protects and promotes (...) the social values and norms and facilitates political communication to educate and update the citizens. Doing all this in a part of the state where the situation of law and order is deteriorated, the population is heterogeneous in its nature, is a big challenge. Attacks on journalists have been searched from the history of media landscape for last 17 years in Sindh to weigh up the threats to Watch-Dogs. The study generalizes, whether working journalists are serving under pressure in an environment governed by threats or they feel safe and free to perform their journalistic duties. It also calculates the responses of the affected journalists in the outward appearance of complaints they file in connection with the threats faced for their professional work. (shrink)

This study has examined the problems’ related to communicativeecology of pilgrim sojourners in Saudi Arabia and its impact on the levelsof their satisfaction with the services provided in a probability sample of439 Pakistani pilgrims. The sojourners’ communication ecology in problemsituations comprises eleven communication sources. Of these, contactswith family/friends and co-pilgrims made top of the list followed by suchcommunity organization sources like information counters, tour operators, andthe Pakistani Hajj mission officials. The mediated sources of contacts with theethnic newspaper, and the mainstream (...) Saudimass media ranked the 3rd and the 4th. The Internet and the digital billboardswere each cited in less than 10 percent of the responses. Stepwise multipleregressions revealed that the most important sources of impact on satisfactionwere: contact with community organizations, family/friends and co-pilgrims,the ethnic newspaper, and the digital screens. Implications of the impact onsatisfaction are discussed for communicating with the pilgrims. (shrink)

Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were (...) hard at work. If we want to properly understand the evolution of the mind, we must explore this more primal capability that we share with other animals: the power to feel. Emotions saturate every thought and perception with the weight of feelings. The Emotional Mind reveals that many of the distinctive behaviors and social structures of our species are best discerned through the lens of emotions. Even the roots of so much that makes us uniquely human—art, mythology, religion—can be traced to feelings of caring, longing, fear, loneliness, awe, rage, lust, playfulness, and more. From prehistoric cave art to the songs of Hank Williams, Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel explore how the evolution of the emotional mind stimulated our species’ cultural expression in all its rich variety. Bringing together insights and data from philosophy, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology, The Emotional Mind offers a new paradigm for understanding what it is that makes us so unique. (shrink)

Guided by neuroscience, animal behavior, evolution, philosophy, and psychology, Asma burrows deep into the human psyche to look right at the enigmatic but powerful engine that is our improvisational creativity—the source, he argues, of our remarkable imaginational capacity. How is it, he asks, that a story can evoke a whole world inside of us? How are we able to rehearse a skill, a speech, or even an entire scenario simply by thinking about it? How does creativity go beyond experience (...) and help us make something completely new? And how does our moral imagination help us sculpt a better society? As he shows, we live in a world that is only partly happening in reality. Huge swaths of our cognitive experiences are made up by “what-ifs,” “almosts,” and “maybes,” an imagined terrain that churns out one of the most overlooked but necessary resources for our flourishing: possibilities. Considering everything from how imagination works in our physical bodies to the ways we make images, from the mechanics of language and our ability to tell stories to the creative composition of self-consciousness, Asma expands our personal and day-to-day forms of imagination into a grand scale: as one of the decisive evolutionary forces that has guided human development from the Paleolithic era to today. The result is an inspiring look at the rich relationships among improvisation, imagination, and culture, and a privileged glimpse into the unique nature of our evolved minds. (shrink)

In this article I review two contrasting approaches to Muslim women’s rights: those that want Muslims to secularize the Qur’an as the precondition for getting rights and those that emphasize the importance of a liberatory Qur’anic hermeneutics to Muslim women’s struggles for rights and equality. As examples of the former, I take the works of Nasr Abu Zayd and Raja Rhouni and, of the latter, my own. In addition to joining the debates on Muslim women’s rights, this exercise is meant (...) to illustrate that secular attempts to undermine Islam also undermine the prospects for rights and democracy in Muslim societies. In fact, I see the secular project in Muslim societies as a form of self-harm. Lastly, I revisit Antonio Gramsci’s critique of democracy as a way to query the title of the İstanbul Seminars, ‘The Promises of Democracy’. (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to investigate the associations of internal and external support mechanisms with entrepreneurial success, in the context of China's entrepreneurial sector from network theory perspective. The role of digital technology, as a moderator, has also been analyzed. Data has been obtained from 500 entrepreneurs in Jiangsu, a province in China. All hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling. It has been found that family support, business partner support, community support and external stakeholder relationships have positive (...) effects on entrepreneurial success. It has also been discovered that digital technology adoption strengthens the positive relationship between business partner support and entrepreneurial success. Theoretical and practical implications have been highlighted and future research suggestions have been provided. (shrink)

In this article I review two contrasting approaches to Muslim women’s rights: those that want Muslims to secularize the Qur’an as the precondition for getting rights and those that emphasize the importance of a liberatory Qur’anic hermeneutics to Muslim women’s struggles for rights and equality. As examples of the former, I take the works of Nasr Abu Zayd and Raja Rhouni and, of the latter, my own. In addition to joining the debates on Muslim women’s rights, this exercise is meant (...) to illustrate that secular attempts to undermine Islam also undermine the prospects for rights and democracy in Muslim societies. In fact, I see the secular project in Muslim societies as a form of self-harm. Lastly, I revisit Antonio Gramsci’s critique of democracy as a way to query the title of the İstanbul Seminars, ‘The Promises of Democracy’. (shrink)

What will be the consequences of the criminalization of aggression? In 2010, the International Criminal Court made aggression a crime for which individuals can be prosecuted. But questions around what constitutes aggression, who decides, and, most important, how effective this legal change will be in reducing the incidence of war remain. This essay considers these questions in light of two recent books on the criminalization of aggression: Noah Weisbord'sThe Crime of Aggression: The Quest for Justice in an Age of Drones, (...) Cyberattacks, Insurgents, and Autocratsand Tom Dannenbaum'sThe Crime of Aggression, Humanity, and the Soldier. While the authors argue in favor of the efficacy of the criminalization of aggression as a means to reduce future war, it is also likely that the criminalization of aggression will reshape war in potentially profound ways. (shrink)

Purpose: Organ donation and transplantation are practices that are supported by all of the world's major religions, including Sikhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Judaism. Recent developments in the fields of organ donation and organ transplantation have sparked a renewed sense of optimism for the treatment of critical illnesses. The jurists permitted organ transplants on the basis of certain principles, including ownership and categories of property. On the other hand, moralists strive to deny the ownership of human organs by using principles such (...) as faith and Almighty Allah’s absolute authority. Then main objective of this research paper is on one hand to identify and emphasize arguments for and against organ donation and transplantation in the framework of scared provisions of Islam and its corresponding legal requirements and on the other hand to understand and teach the people that not only Islam allows organ donation but also encourage its followers to assist one another and make an effort to promote organ donations in society. Methodology: The doctrinal methodology. Explanatory and analytical research approaches are used in this work. It is worth mentioning that this research study is entirely based on library sources. Most of the sources are reputable and trustworthy textbooks, scholarly published and unpublished journal articles, law reports, and online websites related to the research area. Findings: According to the arguments as well as clear and explicit rulings, principles and authentic evidence from the Holy Quran, it is clear that the donation and transplantation of human body organs is permissible. The Holy religion of Islam persuades its followers to participate in charity, assist people, and donate organs to save the lives of those patients who are waiting for organ transplant. Recommendations: Theoretically, this work is very useful in contributing to the existing body of literature of knowledge. Practically, this work identifies the circumstances in which Muslim jurists not only allow but encourage its followers to assist one another and make an effort to promote organ donations in society in order to save people’s life. It is recommended that both the donor and the recipient of an organ must belong to the same nationality or legal jurisdiction in order to prevent the growth of an international organ trade, which would be far more difficult to regulate. Additionally, in order to protect the health of both the recipients and the donors, it is imperative that transplants from unknown sources be prohibited. (shrink)

Port Cities are historically the places for paradigm shifts, radical changes, and socio-economic transitions. In particular, the interaction zone between the port infrastructure and urban activities creates liminal spaces at the forefront of many contemporary challenges. In these liminal spaces, the port's flows, form, and function intertwine with urban contexts and conflict with the living conditions. Conceptualizing the portcityscape and harborscape as liminal space and urban thresholds leads to (re)thinking about innovative participatory methods and technologies for building community resilience in (...) port cities. Additionally, inevitable constant development in port cities requires adaptability and resilience from the waterfronts to the hinterlands and city centers. Such confrontation of port infrastructures and urbanization is socio-politically and spatially challenging, specifically in historic port cities. Therefore, as the approach to exploiting energy and human resources changes over time, the physicality of the built environment in port cities and how we (re)use the resources need to be redefined. This research investigates key socio-spatial features and challenges of port cities by examining how the port's proximity to the city requires coordination, collaboration, transparency, and community dialogue. The introduction and background literature discuss three domains and notions of port city studies, building community resiliency through participatory frameworks, and parasitic architecture. By building upon this analytical framework, the paper presents case studies developed within the research-led design studio focusing on building resilient communities in four port cities, including Amsterdam, Constanta, Alexandria, and Rio De Janeiro. This research focus on the community-enabled application of emerging technologies, innovative approaches, and co-designing and co-building participatory methods. The selected case studies introduce an integrative and multi-scalar pedagogical framework for building resilient communities in liminal spaces of port cities. (shrink)

The paper presents a ‘multiple agent’ logic where formulas are pairs of the form, made of a proposition and a subset of agents. The formula is intended to mean ‘ all agents in believe that is true’. The formal similarity of such formulas with those of possibilistic logic, where propositions are associated with certainty levels, is emphasised. However, the subsets of agents are organised in a Boolean lattice, while certainty levels belong to a totally ordered scale. The semantics of a (...) set of ‘multiple agent’ logic formulas is expressed by a mapping which associates a subset of agents with each interpretation. Soundness and completeness results are established. Then a joint extension of the multiple agent logic and possibilistic logic is outlined. In this extended logic, propositions are then associated with both sets of agents and certainty levels. A formula then expresses that ‘all agents in set believe that is true at least at some level’. The semantics is then given in terms of fuzzy sets of agents that find an interpretation more or less possible. A specific feature of possibilistic logic is that the inconsistency of a knowledge base is a matter of degree. The proposed setting enables us to distinguish between the global consistency of a set of agents and their individual consistency. In particular, given a set of multiple agent possibilistic formulas, one can compute the subset of agents that are individually consistent to some degree. (shrink)

In this article, complete synchronization and antisynchronization in the identical financial chaotic system are presented. The proposed control strategies depend on first-order sliding mode and adaptive integral sliding mode for complete synchronization and antisynchronization of the identical financial chaotic system. In the primary case, the system parameters should be known, and first-order sliding mode control is utilized for synchronization and antisynchronization while in the second case, the system parameters are considered unknown. An adaptive integral sliding mode control strategy is utilized (...) for synchronization and antisynchronization of the system considering the parameters unknown. The error system is changed into a particular structure containing a nominal part and several unknown terms to utilize the adaptive integral sliding mode control. Then, this error system is stabilized using integral sliding mode control. The stabilizing controller is usually developed based on the nominal part plus the compensator control part. To suppress the high-frequency oscillation phenomenon, smooth continuous compensator control can be used rather than conventional discontinuous control. The compensator controller along with the adapted law is derived such that the time derivative of the Lyapunov function becomes strictly negative. The effectiveness of the proposed method was tested through computer simulations. The proposed control strategies are verified for that Identical 4D hyperchaotic financial system to attain complete synchronization and antisynchronization along with the improved performance. (shrink)

In recent years, the notion of a ‘clash of civilizations’, first put forward by Samuel Huntington (1996), has been widely used to explain the contemporary dynamics of geo-political conflict. It has been argued that the fundamental source of conflict is no longer primarily ideological, or even economic, but cultural. Despite many trenchant and largely debilitating academic critiques of Huntington's argument, the popular appeal of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis remains undiminished. In many parts of the world, the binary it describes (...) is often taken to be self-evident, especially after the tragic events of September 11. This paper uses the ideas of ‘social imaginary’ (Taylor, 2004) and ‘political myth’ (Blumenberg, 1984) to understand the popular appeal of the idea of civilizational conflict, and suggests that this appeal is unlikely to be punctured by theoretical arguments alone, but by an equally plausible political narrative located in an alternative social imaginary, acquired through cosmopolitan learning. (shrink)

At almost every election, Americans are inclined to say that this is the most consequential election in American history. 2020 is no exception. However, what is particularly remarkable about the No...

How can agents act virtuously out of habit? Virtuous actions are done for the right reasons, and acting for (right) reasons seems to involve deliberation. Yet, deliberation is absent if an agent’s action is habitual. That implies that the relationship between reasons and actions should be characterized in such a way that deliberation is unnecessary. In this paper, I examine three possible solutions: radical externalism, unconscious psychologism, and unconscious factualism. I argue that these proposals all fail to cast reasons in (...) their proper role. In light of that, I propose an alternative view of how to account for habitual virtuous actions, based on the work of G. E. M. Anscombe. I maintain that if we focus on the inherently rational structure of actions, the tension between acting habitually and acting for the right reason dissolves. (shrink)

From the school yard to the workplace, there’s no charge more damning than “you’re being unfair!” Born out of democracy and raised in open markets, fairness has become our de facto modern creed. The very symbol of American ethics—Lady Justice—wears a blindfold as she weighs the law on her impartial scale. In our zealous pursuit of fairness, we have banished our urges to like one person more than another, one thing over another, hiding them away as dirty secrets of our (...) humanity. In Against Fairness, polymath philosopher Stephen T. Asma drags them triumphantly back into the light. Through playful, witty, but always serious arguments and examples, he vindicates our unspoken and undeniable instinct to favor, making the case that we would all be better off if we showed our unfair tendencies a little more kindness—indeed, if we favored favoritism. Conscious of the egalitarian feathers his argument is sure to ruffle, Asma makes his point by synthesizing a startling array of scientific findings, historical philosophies, cultural practices, analytic arguments, and a variety of personal and literary narratives to give a remarkably nuanced and thorough understanding of how fairness and favoritism fit within our moral architecture. Examining everything from the survival-enhancing biochemistry that makes our mothers love us to the motivating properties of our “affective community,” he not only shows how we favor but the reasons we should. Drawing on thinkers from Confucius to Tocqueville to Nietzsche, he reveals how we have confused fairness with more noble traits, like compassion and open-mindedness. He dismantles a number of seemingly egalitarian pursuits, from classwide Valentine’s Day cards to civil rights, to reveal the envy that lies at their hearts, going on to prove that we can still be kind to strangers, have no prejudice, and fight for equal opportunity at the same time we reserve the best of what we can offer for those dearest to us. Fed up with the blue-ribbons-for-all absurdity of "fairness" today, and wary of the psychological paralysis it creates, Asma resets our moral compass with favoritism as its lodestar, providing a strikingly new and remarkably positive way to think through all our actions, big and small. (shrink)

This study examines the role of digital technologies in building resilient communities, focusing on data collected during the pandemic. This research aims to explore the impact of digital technologies on community development, assess their effectiveness in enhancing community resilience, and identify key success factors. The study adopts a mixed-methods approach, including qualitative data collected through interviews and focus groups, a review of existing literature and case studies. Preliminary findings indicate that digital technologies have been crucial in supporting community resilience, enabling (...) virtual communication, remote access to resources, and community engagement. However, disparities in digital access and literacy have influenced their effectiveness. Addressing the digital divide and ensuring equitable access is crucial while providing ongoing support, capacity building, and community engagement. Digital technologies have demonstrated their potential to build resilient communities, particularly in times of crisis. (shrink)

In the realm of pixels and virtual spaces, the art of placemaking transcends physical confines, weaving a digital mosaic of voices and visions. Feminist digital placemaking emerges as a vibrant brushstroke on this canvas, painting online environments with the hues of inclusion, safety, and empowerment. The "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement in Iran, mirrored in the "Year of Hope" digital exhibition, showcases the transformative power of feminist digital placemaking in amplifying voices, knitting solidarity, and challenging oppressive narratives. The "Woman, Life, Freedom" (...) movement, sparked by the tragic demise of Mahsa (Jina) Amini, unfolds like a poignant narrative, with women scripting the chapters of resistance. This movement, a collage of courage and defiance, has found a digital stage in the "Year of Hope" exhibition, where each artwork tells a story, each pixel a testament to the unyielding spirit of Iranian women. (shrink)

Kuala Lumpur is a diverse city representing many different religions and nationalities. Recent government policy has actively promoted unity and cohesion throughout the city; and the country of Malaysia, with the implementation of a programme called 1Malaysia. In this book, the authors investigate the aims of this programme – predominantly to unify the Malaysian society – and how these objectives resonate in the daily spatial practices of the city’s residents. -/- This book argues that elements of urban infrastructure could work (...) as an essential mediator ‘beyond community’, allowing inclusive social structures to be built, despite cultural and religious tensions existing within the city. It builds on the premise of an empirical study which explores the ways in which different communities use the same spaces, supported through the implementation of a theoretical framework which looks at both Western and Islamic conceptualisations of the notion of community. Through the analysis of Kuala Lumpur, this book contributes towards the creation of more inclusive places in multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious communities across the world. (shrink)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explain how abstract space of the State – universally and specifically within the context of Middle Eastern cities – aims to homogenise the city and eliminate any anomaly that threatens its power structure. Design/methodology/approach – Through a historical and discourse analysis of these policies and processes in the two case studies, this paper presents a contextualised reading of Lefebvre’s concept of abstract space and process of abstraction in relation to the alienation (...) of political public spaces. Findings – The paper proposes that regardless of these homogenising strategies being applied universally, they fail to respond to contextual particularities and therefore they – in a contradictory manner – may themselves produce a space of resistance and difference. Originality/value – This paper focusses on Iran, the case of Tehran and Turkey, the case of Taksim Square and Gezi Park in Istanbul. Recent policies and strategies have been proposed and implemented to reduce, alienate and possibly neutralise the impacts of urban and political protests in these cities and socio-political contexts. (shrink)

Theories based on Frankfurt’s (Am Philos Q 15(2):157–162, 1978) view of action have recently been developed to account for passive, automatic, and habitual actions. What these theories share is that they aim to distinguish between actions and mere bodily movements without appealing to psychological states as causes. Instead, agents have guidance control over their actions. In this paper I argue that the versions of the theory that have been proposed are problematic. I propose to pay attention to Frankfurt’s other claim (...) instead: that actions and mere bodily movements are inherently different. I argue that Anscombe’s approach to action does take this inherent distinction seriously, and is able to account for passive, automatic, and habitual actions. (shrink)

The word "jihad" is everywhere in the global media. It generally appears in the context of violence waged against the West by militants in or from Muslim-majority societies. This usage overwhelmingly colors popular discourse about Islam and Muslims and it has resulted in highly simplistic, distorted, and a historical understandings of the concept of jihad. For most Muslims, jihad refers to the continuous human struggle to promote and implement what is morally good and noble in all walks of life, as (...) well as to resist and prevent what is morally wrong and unjust. This book addresses the great need for a discussion of jihad that explores its various dimensions without fear-mongering or sensationalism. Here it is examined from multiple perspectives: scriptural, theological, moral and ethical, legal and socio-political. Asma Afsaruddin looks at the key questions about jihad and provides concise yet thorough answers. Jihad: What Everyone Needs to Know® provides a historically-grounded, scholarly yet accessible treatment of the meanings of jihad from the formative period of Islam until the contemporary period." -- Amazon. (shrink)

Through analysing different case studies in the Middle East, this section uses rooted cosmopolitanism as a theoretical lens to explore exported modernism and architecture between socialist and capitalist countries during the Cold War. This research analyses the circulation and local applications of urban development and modernisation paradigms in so-called ‘Third World’ countries. For assessing the socialist and capitalist-inspired modernisation processes in the Middle East, this chapter studies the cosmopolitan and trans-cultural architecture created by global and local influences. Comparing two types (...) of cosmopolitan architecture (socialist and capitalist) during the Cold War period in third-world contexts will help us to analyse and compare their relative rootedness and to learn from the interconnected, multifaceted, and multilayered planning transfers and architectural exportations. (shrink)

Music is a universal human activity. Its evolution and its value as a cognitive resource are starting to come into focus. This chapter endeavors to give readers a clearer sense of the adaptive aspects of music, as well as the underlying cognitive and neural structures. Special attention is given to the important emotional dimensions of music, and an evolutionary argument is made for thinking of music as a prelinguistic embodied form of cognition—a form that is still available to us as (...) contemporary music creators and consumers. (shrink)

Radical cities have historically been hotbeds of transformative paradigms, political changes, activism, and social movements, and have given rise to visionary ideas, utopian projects, revolutionary ideologies, and debates. These cities have served as incubators for innovative ideas, idealistic projects, revolutionary philosophies, and lively debates. The streets, squares, and public spaces of radical cities have been the backdrop for protests, uprisings, and social movements that have had both local and global significance. This research project aims to explore and reimagine radical cities (...) and urban activism using a variety of visual and collaborative pedagogical approaches. This project will study and categorize these cities through comparative case studies from different regions, including North America, and Latin America, and beyond, in order to better understand and interpret pivotal societal transitions. (shrink)

This book investigates the sources and implications of our encounters with suffering in contemporary politics and culture, exploring the forces that determine ...