Una pregunta inicial y fundamental para empezar la reflexión sería: en qué somos los seres humanos iguales y qué diferencias serían aceptables entre nosotros. Así uno de los retos de la sociedad actual sería cómo conjugar la igualdad social (y económica) y el derecho al reconocimiento cultural diferenciado. A menudo se han presentado como un binomio opuesto y difícilmente reconciliable. De manera tal que para lograr más igualdad de derechos políticos y sociales se tenía que perderla identidad más tribal.

Guizot aprendió el oficio de historiador preparando con su esposa,Pauline de Meulan, una edición crítica en francés de _Decline and Fall_ de Gibbon. Las personalidades históricas de Gibbon y Guizot fueron muy distintas. También sus respectivos “estilos de historia”. Pero en las obras de Guizot, en especial en su _Historia de la civilización en Europa_, es reconocible el legado de Gibbon. Así, en la eliminación de la barrera entre historia civil y historia religiosa, en la amplitud temática, en la ambición (...) cronológica y en una idea de Europa concebida como algo más que la suma de sus partes. Asimismo en la adopción de la misma palabra _civilización_ y en el hecho de que la interpretación guizotiana de la historia europea hunda sus raíces en tres factores presentes en Gibbon: lo que sobrevivió de las instituciones romanas, el impacto del cristianismo y el aporte germánico. (shrink)

The authors developed this textbook in response to an increasing interest in ethics, and a growing number of courses on this topic that are now being offered in educational leadership programs. It is designed to fill a gap in instructional materials for teaching the ethics component of the knowledge base that has been established for the profession. The text has several purposes: First, it demonstrates the application of different ethical paradigms (the ethics of justice, care, critique, and the profession) through (...) discussion and analysis of real-life moral dilemmas that educational leaders face in their schools and communities. Second, it addresses some of the practical, pedagogical, and curricular issues related to the teaching of ethics for educational leaders. Third, it emphasizes the importance of ethics instruction from a variety of theoretical approaches. Finally, it provides a process that instructors might follow to develop their own ethics unit or course. * Part I provides an overview of why ethics is so important, especially for today's educational leaders, and describes a multiparadigm approach essential to practitioners as they grapple with ethical dilemmas. * Part II deals with the dilemmas themselves. Ethical dilemmas written by the authors' graduate students bring readers face-to-face with the kinds of dilemmas faced by practicing administrators in urban, suburban, and rural settings in an era full of complexities and contradictions. * Part III focuses on pedagogy and provides teaching notes for the instructor. The authors discuss the importance of self-reflection on the part of both instructors and students, and model how they thought through their own personal and professional ethical codes as well as reflected upon the critical incidents in their lives that shaped their teaching and frequently determined what they privileged in class. (shrink)

Quins són els valors que regeixen la nostra vida? I per què vivim amb aquests valors i no amb uns altres? «Els valors van cap a on anem nosaltres perquè van amb nosaltres. ¬I mentre fem camí o mentre el busquem, els valors ens alimenten», diu el filòsof.

Sovint el humans ens hem somiat déus. I Déu n'hi do si hem fet coses admirables: ciència, organització social, art,...motius n'hi ha per estar orgullosos. La vida, però, també ens mostra amb insistència la cara més fosca de nosaltres mateixos, i en aquests moments el més fàcil és passar de l'orgull a la desesperança més absoluta. El camí, però, no pot ser el de l'abandonament. Ni déus ni bèsties! Els déus no trien i, sense esforç ni dubtes, coneixen i realitzen (...) sempre el millor. Els animals, empresonats en la seva naturalesa, tampoc no trenquen gaire el cap a decidir què faran amb les seves vides. Nosaltres no tenim la sort dels uns ni la dels altres, i ens toca amb feines i treballs anar bastint la nostra realitat, aquella que nosaltres farem. Per això existeix l'ètica. "Coneix-te a tu mateix", ordenava l'oracle: només amb les nostres llums i amb les nostres ombres, amb l'instint, amb la ràbia, amb el sentiment, amb la paraula, amb la raó; només coneixent i assumint tot allò que som, tindrem la possibilitat, tal vegada, de construir un món més humà. (shrink)

Gender, ‘race’, poverty, health and discourses of health reform in the context of globalization: a postcolonial feminist perspective in policy researchIn this paper, I draw on extant literature and my empirical work to discuss the impact of globalization and healthcare reform on the lives of women — those from countries of the South as well as of the North. First, I review briefly the economic hardships identified in different sectors of the population that have been attributed to how globalization is (...) now working. Second, I examine what these global processes mean for health, with particular focus on poverty, gender, racialization and health. Third, I reflect on how nurse scientists might develop research agendas in the 21st century that would foster social transformation and social justice for all people. The position taken here is not an indictment of globalization. Rather, I argue that globalization is a fact in all of our lives. There are positive aspects of globalization. There are also negative aspects which we must collectively address, given that the issues identified can have deleterious consequences for the world’s poor, women in particular. I suggest that, to construct knowledge for practice and praxis, research agendas of the future should be inclusive of subaltern voices. I argue that drawing on a postcolonial feminist epistemology might help us to define such agendas, and express the multilayered sociopolitical contexts of health and illness in advocacy with policy‐makers. (shrink)

There is a section in Samuel Delany’s magnificent autobiographical meditation, The Motion of Light in Water, that dramatically raises the problem of writing the history of difference, the history, that is, of the designation of “other,” of the attribution of characteristics that distinguish categories of people from some presumed norm.1 Delany recounts his reaction to his first visit to the St. Marks bathhouse in 1963. He remembers standing on the threshold of a “gym-sized room” dimly lit by blue bulbs. The (...) room was full of people, some standing, the rest an undulating mass of naked, male bodies, spread wall to wall. My first response was a kind of heart-thudding astonishment very close to fear. I have written of a space at certain libidinal saturation before. That was not what frightened me. It was rather that the saturation was not only kinesthetic but visible.2Watching the scene establishes for Delany a “fact that flew in the face” of the prevailing representation of homosexuals in the 1950s as “isolated perverts,” as subjects “gone awry.” The “apprehension of massed bodies” gave him a “sense of political power”:what this experience said was that there was a population—not of individual homosexuals … not of hundreds, not of thousands, but rather of millions of gay men, and that history had, actively and already, created for us whole galleries of institutions, good and bad, to accommodate our sex. [M, p. 174] 2. Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965 , p. 173; hereafter abbreviated M. Joan W. Scott is professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She is the author, most recently, of Gender and the Politics of History and is currently at work on a history of feminist claims for political rights in France during the period 1789-1945 as a way of exploring arguments about equality and difference. (shrink)

Recent events around the globe reflect the tensions and ethical dilemmas of the postmodern, postcolonial and neocolonial world that have far reaching implications for health, well-being, and human suffering. As we consider what is at stake, and what this means for local lives and human relationships, we need to examine whether the theories we draw on are adequate to further our understanding of health, and the social and material conditions of human suffering. In this paper I begin to explore the (...) question, ‘Can postcolonial feminist theories provide an inclusive scholarship that would further our understanding of human suffering and open up a path to healing?’ At issue here is whether this scholarship adds another dimension to a praxis-oriented nursing science. (shrink)

I would like to end this questioning of canonical origins by returning to my point of departure, [Lawrence] Lipking’s notion of a “poetics of abandonment.” Lipking’s article was included in an issue of Critical Inquiry entitled Canons, in which it seemingly was held to represent a feminist perspective on canon formation. Lipking centers his attention on literary theory, a domain that has been granted new prominence, sometimes even the status of literature, in the most recent reformulation of the canon. It (...) may be, as Viktor Shklovsky suggested in Zoo, or Letters Not about Love, that literary theory is the novel’s successor, in which case the resurrection of Ovid’s abandoned women would make generic sense. Furthermore, for the first time in the history of literary criticism, there are today numbers of influential female literary critics, many of whom have called for a major reorganization of literary canons. Given the strategies deployed during previous moments of canon formation, it is perhaps inevitable that some of today’s male literary critics would instigate a debasement of theoretical mothers. Contemporary literary critics are no longer attempting to consign women writers to abandonment. However, even as they promote the cause of women writers, some may also be responding in a manner that reveals their perception that feminist literary theory has provided the most forceful recent challenge not only to literary canons but to critical canons as well.In the final development in his attempt to prove that a mimetic investment in female pain is the basic theoretical strategy deployed by all female readers, Lipking provides an analysis of recent feminist theorists ending with this characterization of the authors of The Madwoman in the Attic: “Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar gaze at the mad and outcast heroines of the nineteenth century as if into a mirror” . Thus Gilbert and Gubar—Lipking also cites the examples of Kate Millett and Ellen Moers—become the most recent incarnations of the abandoned literary woman, the literary critic whose views originate in her fear of abandonment. If my analysis of strategies of canon formation deployed in earlier centuries is correct, then the pronouncement from Lipking’s article with which I opened this essay may be a red herring. “In the absence of mothers, a father must raise the right issues.” Lipking may be calling for “a poetics of abandonment” not in response to a perceived maternal deficiency, but in order to consign strong female critics to abandonment, out of a Phaeton complex, a fear that, unless female theorists are cast off, critical sons may have an increasingly difficult time proving their legitimacy. Joan DeJean is professor of French at Princeton University. Her most recent book is Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade, and she is currently at work on a study to be titled Fictions of Sappho: Sappho’s Presence in French Literature, 1546-1937. (shrink)

We introduce the large-cardinal notions of ξ-greatly-Mahlo and ξ-reflection cardinals and prove (1) in the constructible universe, L, the first ξ-reflection cardinal, for ξ a successor ordinal, is strictly between the first ξ-greatly-Mahlo and the first Π1ξ-indescribable cardinals, (2) assuming the existence of a ξ-reflection cardinal κ in L, ξ a successor ordinal, there exists a forcing notion in L that preserves cardinals and forces that κ is (ξ+1)-stationary, which implies that the consistency strength of the existence of a (ξ+1)-stationary (...) cardinal is strictly below a Π1ξ-indescribable cardinal. These results generalize to all successor ordinals ξ the original same result of Mekler–Shelah [A. Mekler and S. Shelah, The consistency strength of every stationary set reflects, Israel J. Math.67(3) (1989) 353–365] about a 2-stationary cardinal, i.e. a cardinal that reflects all its stationary sets. (shrink)