Theory in Africa, Africa in Theory explores the place of Africa in archaeological theory, and the place of theory in African archaeology. The centrality of African models in reconstructions is explored, focusing on materiality and agency in the past. The differences between how African models are used in western theoretical discourse and the use of that theory within Africa are also highlighted, as a means to explore the nature of theory itself. Thus, this dual purposed volume is a timely intervention (...) into archaeological theory, deconstructing the taken-for-granted foundations of the ways we approach the past. (shrink)

This paper is about rewilding and the tensions it involves. Rewilding is a relatively novel approach to nature conservation, which seeks to be proactive and ambitious in the face of continuing environmental decline. Whilst definitions of rewilding place a strong emphasis on non-human agency, it is an inescapably human aspiration resulting in a range of social conflicts. The paper focuses on the case study of the Cambrian Wildwood project in Mid Wales (UK), evaluating the ways in which debate and strategic (...) action to advance rewilding is proceeding, assessing the extent to which compromise and learning has occurred amongst advocates. As such, we provide an important addition to the field, by detailing how conflicts play out over time and how actors' positioning and approach shifts, and why. In this case, tempers have flared around the threat that rewilding is seen to pose to resident farming communities. Tensions discussed include the differing social constructions of landscape and nature involved; the distribution of impacts on different stakeholders; and the relative power of different actors to make decisions and gain representation. Responding to these, the paper outlines how rewilding advocates have sought to advance a more peopled and culturally responsive vision, which seeks to champion sustainable livelihood strategies. The changes in approach detailed demonstrate a reflexive stance from rewilders, which suggests that learning and adaptation can occur. Nonetheless, caution is expressed regarding the extent to which rewilding can truly advance inclusive opportunities for rural change, given a continued return amongst stakeholders to exclusionary narratives of belonging and authenticity, suggesting substantive difficulty in moving beyond longstanding concerns over identity and the re-imagination of place. Rewilding, it would seem, is about who we think we are and how we co-constitute our sense of self. We, therefore, close by arguing that tactics and politicking can only have so much bearing, tensions over rewilding are unavoidably emotional. (shrink)

This paper examines a model of decision-making within the context of current and emerging regimes of accountability being proposed and implemented for school systems in a number of jurisdictions. These approaches to accountability typically involve the use of various measurable student learning outcomes as well as other measures of performance to do with teachers and schools in general, often having high-stakes consequences. Given this context of performativity, the paper proposes a model that uses an objective knowledge growth framework, where teachers (...) can engage in their own professional learning through defined structures for solving the problems of their professional practice. The model is both empowering for teachers while being sensitive to the constraints of cultures of performativity. (shrink)

Lexical alignment, a communication phenomenon where conversational partners adapt their word choices to become more similar, plays an important role in the development of language and social communication skills. While this has been studied extensively in the conversations of preschool‐aged children and their parents in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) communities, research in other pediatric populations is sparse. This study makes significant expansions on the existing literature by focusing on alignment in naturalistic conversations of school‐aged children from a (...) non‐WEIRD population across multiple conversational tasks and with different types of adult partners. Typically developing children aged 5 to 8 years (n = 45) engaged in four semi‐structured conversations that differed by task (problem‐solving vs. play‐based) and by partner (parent vs. university student), resulting in a corpus of 180 conversations. Lexical alignment scores were calculated and compared to sham conversations, representing alignment occurring at the level of chance. Both children and adults coordinated their conversational utterances by re‐using or aligning each other's word choices. This alignment behavior persisted across conversational tasks and partners, although the degree of alignment was moderated by the conversational context. These findings suggest that lexical alignment is a robust phenomenon in conversations between school‐age children and adults. Furthermore, this study extends lexical alignment findings to a non‐WEIRD culture, suggesting that alignment may be a coordination strategy employed by adults and children across diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. (shrink)

This article describes a personal relationship to a common green space in a town in the United Kingdom during the lockdowns prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020–21. It considers the new meanings that are attaching to ‘commons’ as conceptual spaces and material places; and it links this consideration to the terms in which values and norms are being reassessed in the context of environmental crises.

The authors in this edited volume reflect on their experiences with culturally relevant pedagogy-as students, as teachers, as researchers-and how these experiences were often at odds with their backgrounds and/or expectations.

Jeffery Aubin ,Marie Chantal ,Dianne Cole ,Julio Chaves ,Cathelyne Duchesne ,Christel Freu ,Steve Johnston ,Brice Jones ,Amaury Levillayer ,Stéphanie Machabée ,Paul-Hubert Poirier ,Philippe Therrien ,Jonathan von Kodar ,Martin Voyer ,Jennifer Wees ,Eric Crégheur.

ABSTRACT:A wide range of research uses patterns of genetic variation to infer genetic similarity between individuals, typically referred to as genetic ancestry. This research includes inference of human demographic history, understanding the genetic architecture of traits, and predicting disease risk. Researchers are not just structuring an intellectual inquiry when using genetic ancestry, they are also creating analytical frameworks with broader societal ramifications. This essay presents an ethics framework in the spirit of virtue ethics for these researchers: rather than focus on (...) rule following, the framework is designed to build researchers’ capacities to react to the ethical dimensions of their work. The authors identify one overarching principle of intellectual freedom and responsibility, noting that freedom in all its guises comes with responsibility, and they identify and define four principles that collectively uphold researchers’ intellectual responsibility: truthfulness, justice and fairness, anti-racism, and public beneficence. Researchers should bring their practices into alignment with these principles, and to aid this, the authors name three common ways research practices infringe these principles, suggest a step-by-step process for aligning research choices with the principles, provide rules of thumb for achieving alignment, and give a worked case. The essay concludes by identifying support needed by researchers to act in accord with the proposed framework. (shrink)

This book offers both the theoretical background behind the minority effect, teachers' personal experiences as they experienced being a minority, and their analyses and insights for teaching diverse learners. This book uses real-life experiences of diverse people to illustrate that, if not understood and addressed, situational minorities at school or work are unlikely to perform at their highest potentials.

We explore the relationship between corporate sustainability, reputation, and firm value by asking whether signaling sustainability leadership through membership on a recognized sustainability index is value generating. Increasingly, stakeholders are demanding that firms demonstrate their commitment to sustainability. One signal that companies can send to stakeholders to indicate that they are sustainability leaders is membership on a recognized “best in class” sustainability index. This article explores both the short-term and the intermediary impact on North American firms of being included or (...) removed from the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index (DJSI). Our results provide evidence that being added to the DJSI results in a sustained increase in a firm’s share price, suggesting that the benefits of being included on the DJSI outweigh the costs associated with applying. This article also notes a temporary decrease in the value of firms for the first 10 days after their removal from the DJSI; however, this effect is eliminated within the next ten trading days. (shrink)

This paper critically evaluates current conceptions of pregnancy as a possession of either mother or infant. In opposition to the more common stance that marks birth as the beginning of intercorporeality and perception, pregnancy is instead phenomenologically delineated as a chiasmic relationship between mother and her pre‐infant from a Merleau‐Pontian perspective. This paper maintains that during pregnancy a mother‐to‐be and her pre‐infant are deepened and modified through their intertwining.

De Marco _et al_ 1 argue that the standard account of medical ‘invasiveness’ (as ‘incision’ or ‘insertion’) fails to capture three aspects of its existing use, namely that invasiveness can come in degrees, often depends on features of alternative medical interventions and can be non-physical. They propose a new schematic account that suggests that medical interventions can possess ‘basic invasiveness’ (which can come in degrees and of which they suggest at least two types: physical and mental), and ‘threshold invasiveness’ which (...) can depend on the alternatives a specific intervention is being compared with. While we agree that the standard account of invasiveness fails to capture existing use and are supportive of their aim, here we express scepticism about the practical utility of De Marco _et al_’s revised account. Our scepticism concerns the application of De Marco _et al’s_ revised account in the narrow context of clinician–patient communication and... (shrink)

James Wynn’s timely investigation highlights scientific studies grounded in publicly gathered data and probes the rhetoric these studies employ. Many of these endeavors, such as the widely used SETI@home project, simply draw on the processing power of participants’ home computers; others, like the protein-folding game FoldIt, ask users to take a more active role in solving scientific problems. In Citizen Science in the Digital Age: Rhetoric, Science, and Public Engagement, Wynn analyzes the discourse that enables these scientific ventures, as well (...) as the difficulties that arise in communication between scientists and lay people and the potential for misuse of publicly gathered data. (shrink)

"New foreword by Rhian Evans Allvin"--Cover.

Transitioning to food systems that are equitable, resilient, healthy and environmentally sustainable will require the cultivation and diffusion of transformational sociotechnical innovations—and grassroots movements are an essential source of such innovations. Within the literature on strategic niche management, government-provided ‘protected spaces’ where niche innovations can develop without facing the pressures of the market is an essential part of sustainability transitions. However, because of their desire to _transform_ rather than _transition_ food systems, grassroots movements often struggle to acquire such protected spaces (...) and so must determine how and where to generate change whilst being marginalised and exposed to unprotected spaces. The aim of this research is to gain a precise view of the multiple touchpoints of marginalisation that exist across the grassroots-government interface and to apply a new framework for conceptual analysis of these touchpoints that can help to identify where and how grassroots movements might be able to push against this marginalisation. The study finds that, by applying a ‘who, what, where’ framework of analysis to policies across this interface, it is possible to find pathways forward for achieving small wins towards food systems transformation. (shrink)

A comprehensive exploration of the philosophical issues raised by mysticism. This work is a comprehensive study of the philosophical issues raised by mysticism. Mystics claim to experience reality in a way not available in normal life, a claim which makes this phenomenon interesting from a philosophical perspective. Richard H. Jones’s inquiry focuses on the skeleton of beliefs and values of mysticism: knowledge claims made about the nature of reality and of human beings; value claims about what is significant and (...) what is ethical; and mystical goals and ways of life. Jones engages language, epistemology, metaphysics, science, and the philosophy of mind. Methodological issues in the study of mysticism are also addressed. Examples of mystical experience are drawn chiefly from Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, but also from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Daoism. “This is a significant extension of the seminal work by Walter Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy. That work has stimulated much literature, all of which Jones manages to review here. He critically extends Stace’s universal core and embeds it in a sophisticated discussion of the extent, range, and metaphysical implications of mysticism.” — Ralph W. Hood, Jr., coauthor of The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach. (shrink)

Stephanie Kleiner beschreibt das Musiktheater in der Ära einer krisengeladenen klassischen Moderne und über die Zäsur des Ersten Weltkriegs hinweg als Ort sozialer Praxis und als Medium politischer Sinnbildung. Konkret nimmt sie die beiden damals preußischen Städte Frankfurt am Main und Wiesbaden in den Blick. Entlang einer Reihe von herausragenden Festanlässen werden einige markante Stationen der politischen Festkultur beider Städte abgeschritten und ihre Bedeutung für die staatliche Repräsentation bewertet.

The prominence of Bayesian modeling of cognition has increased recently largely because of mathematical advances in specifying and deriving predictions from complex probabilistic models. Much of this research aims to demonstrate that cognitive behavior can be explained from rational principles alone, without recourse to psychological or neurological processes and representations. We note commonalities between this rational approach and other movements in psychology – namely, Behaviorism and evolutionary psychology – that set aside mechanistic explanations or make use of optimality assumptions. Through (...) these comparisons, we identify a number of challenges that limit the rational program's potential contribution to psychological theory. Specifically, rational Bayesian models are significantly unconstrained, both because they are uninformed by a wide range of process-level data and because their assumptions about the environment are generally not grounded in empirical measurement. The psychological implications of most Bayesian models are also unclear. Bayesian inference itself is conceptually trivial, but strong assumptions are often embedded in the hypothesis sets and the approximation algorithms used to derive model predictions, without a clear delineation between psychological commitments and implementational details. Comparing multiple Bayesian models of the same task is rare, as is the realization that many Bayesian models recapitulate existing (mechanistic level) theories. Despite the expressive power of current Bayesian models, we argue they must be developed in conjunction with mechanistic considerations to offer substantive explanations of cognition. We lay out several means for such an integration, which take into account the representations on which Bayesian inference operates, as well as the algorithms and heuristics that carry it out. We argue this unification will better facilitate lasting contributions to psychological theory, avoiding the pitfalls that have plagued previous theoretical movements. (shrink)

There is disagreement in the literature about the exact nature of the phenomenon of empathy. There are emotional, cognitive, and conditioning views, applying in varying degrees across species. An adequate description of the ultimate and proximate mechanism can integrate these views. Proximately, the perception of an object's state activates the subject's corresponding representations, which in turn activate somatic and autonomic responses. This mechanism supports basic behaviors that are crucial for the reproductive success of animals living in groups. The Perception-Action Model, (...) together with an understanding of how representations change with experience, can explain the major empirical effects in the literature. It can also predict a variety of empathy disorders. The interaction between the PAM and prefrontal functioning can also explain different levels of empathy across species and age groups. This view can advance our evolutionary understanding of empathy beyond inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism and can explain different levels of empathy across individuals, species, stages of development, and situations. Key Words: altruism; cognitive empathy ; comparative; emotion; emotional contagion; empathy ; evolution; human; perception-action; perspective taking. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 3, March 2020, Page 63-65.

The Dark Posthuman: Dehumanization, Technology, and the Atlantic World explores how liberal humanism first enlivened, racialized, and gendered global cartographies, and how memory, ancestry, expression, and other aspects of social identity founded in its theories and practices made for the advent of the category of the posthuman through the dimensions of cultural, geographic, political, social, and scientific classification. The posthuman is very much the product of world-building narratives that have their beginnings in the commercial franchise and are fundamentally rooted in (...) science, governance, and economics around the hegemonic appropriation of environments and commodification of bodies that initially fuelled white settler life worlds and continue to be operational in the way we conceive of these worlds as continuous ontological formations. The want has always been for ownership of any of these dimensions of being without regard to condition, to not remain stranded as the subsidiary of another's being, to another's claim to humanity, and finally, to escape the suffocating confines of an instrumental ontology that suggests a subcategory of humanity without rights onto itself. The Dark Posthuman distinguishes the posthuman's place within both the liberal and neoliberal imaginary and reveals how its appearance first entrenched itself through the avarice of English settler colonialism, and subsequently, through the paranoia of American slavery. This same figure of the posthuman played a crucial role in the functional adaptation of Cold War behavioural cybernetics, and thereafter, in the fetishization of technology within the era of global financialization. The shadowing of this arrangement during and beyond the long duration of humanity's domination of this world becomes the structural web work of this book. Stephanie Polsky is an interdisciplinary writer and academic working in the areas of Media Studies and Visual Culture. Her work explores the confluence of power around race and gender as technologies of governance. She has lectured widely in media and cultural studies, critical theory, and visual culture at a number of prestigious institutions including Goldsmiths University, Regent's University London, University of Greenwich, and Winchester School of Art. Most recently she has worked at California College of the Arts in Critical Studies and Diversity Studies. She holds a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London and an MA in Media Studies from the University of Sussex. Her books include The End of the Future: Governing Consequence in the Age of Digital Sovereignty (Academica Press, 2019), Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London (Zero Books, 2015), and Walter Benjamin's Transit: A Destructive Tour of Modernity (Academica Press, 2009). (shrink)

Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones was an English logician and contemporary of Bertrand Russell, as well as Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge. In this book, originally published in 1911, she argues for the existence of another fundamental law of thought to join the Law of Contradiction and the Law of Excluded Middle: the Law of Significant Assertion. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in logic or in Jones' work.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 11, Page 15-16, November 2011.

This chapter focuses on the question of who has duties regarding poverty and what those duties demand, from within the perspective of contemporary analytic normative philosophy. The chapter is structured in three sections. Section 1 considers the duties of those living in poverty, which might be either self-regarding or other-regarding duties, and which must be tempered by concerns of overdemandingness. Section 2 considers the duties of affluent individuals. These are imperfect duties grounded in affluent individuals’ relations to the structures that (...) produce poverty: relations of contribution, benefit, and ability to change. Section 3 considers duties of collective agents – including states, for-profits, charities, and civil society groups. The poverty-related duties of these collective agents are sometimes perfect and sometimes imperfect, and include both primary and secondary duties, and both positive and negative duties. (shrink)

Ethics and Educational Technology explores the creation and implementation of learning technologies through an applied ethical lens. The success of digital tools and platforms in today's multifaceted learning and performance contexts is dependent not only on effective design and pedagogical principles but, further, on an awareness of these technologies' interactions with and implications for users and social systems. This first-of-its-kind book provides an evidence-based, process-oriented model for ethics in technology-driven instructional design and development, one that necessitates intentional reflective practice, a (...) critical and theoretically informed interrogation of technology, and a participatory, emancipatory approach to technology design and applications. Rich with real-world ethics examples and design cases, supported by reflection questions and applied activities, and attentive to ethical codes among preeminent educational technology organizations, this is an ideal resource for students, faculty, researchers, and professionals across educational technology, instructional design, learning sciences, learning engineering, organizational training, and other disciplines. (shrink)

Research in anthropology has shown that kin terminologies have a complex combinatorial structure and vary systematically across cultures. This article argues that universals and variation in kin terminology result from the interaction of (1) an innate conceptual structure of kinship, homologous with conceptual structure in other domains, and (2) principles of optimal, “grammatical” communication active in language in general. Kin terms from two languages, English and Seneca, show how terminologies that look very different on the surface may result from variation (...) in the rankings of a universal set of constraints. Constraints on kin terms form a system: some are concerned with absolute features of kin (sex), others with the position (distance and direction) of kin in “kinship space,” others with groups and group boundaries (matrilines, patrilines, generations, etc.). Also, kin terms sometimes extend indefinitely via recursion, and recursion in kin terminology has parallels with recursion in other areas of language. Thus the study of kinship sheds light on two areas of cognition, and their phylogeny. The conceptual structure of kinship seems to borrow its organization from the conceptual structure of space, while being specialized for representing genealogy. And the grammar of kinship looks like the product of an evolved grammar faculty, opportunistically active across traditional domains of semantics, syntax, and phonology. Grammar is best understood as an offshoot of a uniquely human capacity for playing coordination games. (shrink)

The study of social norms sprawls across all of the social sciences but the the concept lacks a unified conception and formal theory. We synthesize an account that can be applied generally, at the social scale of analysis, and can be applied to empirical evidence generated in field and lab experiments. More specifically, we provide new analysis on representing norms for application in empirical political science, and in parts of economics that do not follow the recent trend among some behavioral (...) economists to build models of the cognitive and motivational states of individuals taken “one at a time”. Foundational sources for our project are Bicchieri (2006, 2017), Kuran (1995), and Stirling (2012, 2016). From Bicchieri take that a norm exists in a social structure when a significant networked subset of individuals share descriptive and injunctive expectations that it regulates their interactions. From Kuran we take the insight that prevailing norms may come to be widely disliked by participants in networks but survive because norm suppress public displays of disenchantment. From Stirling we apply conditional game theory (CGT) to provide the technical resources for building our model of a norm-regulated social interaction. The example we use is a multi-player Investment/Trust Game. (shrink)