Coalitional games raise a number of important questions from the point of view of computer science, key among them being how to represent such games compactly, and how to efficiently compute solution concepts assuming such representations. Marginal contribution nets , introduced by Ieong and Shoham, are one of the simplest and most influential representation schemes for coalitional games. MC-nets are a rulebased formalism, in which rules take the form pattern → value, where “pattern ” is a Boolean condition over agents, (...) and “value ” is a numeric value. Ieong and Shoham showed that, for a class of what we will call “basic” MC-nets, where patterns are constrained to be a conjunction of literals, marginal contribution nets permit the easy computation of solution concepts such as the Shapley value. However, there are very natural classes of coalitional games that require an exponential number of such basic MC-net rules. We present read-once MC-nets, a new class of MC-nets that is provably more compact than basic MC-nets, while retaining the attractive computational properties of basic MC-nets. We show how the techniques we develop for read-once MC-nets can be applied to other domains, in particular, computing solution concepts in network flow games on series-parallel networks. (shrink)

Progressive stacking is a strategy for prioritizing in-class contributions that allows marginalized students to speak before non-marginalized students. I argue that this strategy is both pedagogically and ethically defensible. Pedagogically, it provides benefits to all students (e.g., expanded in-class discourse) while providing special benefits (e.g., increased self-efficacy) to marginalized students, helping to address historic educational inequalities. Ethically, I argue that neither marginalized nor non-marginalized students are wronged by such a policy. First, I present a strategy (...) for self-disclosure that reduces the risk of inadvertent, unwanted disclosure while respecting marginalized student autonomy in a manner analogous to accommodations provided under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Second, I argue that non-marginalized students are not wronged because such students are not silenced during discussion and because non-marginalized students benefit from the prioritization of marginalized voices. (shrink)

The principle of differential marginality (Casajus in Theory and Decis 71(2):163-–174) for cooperative games is a very appealing property that requires equal productivity differentials to translate into equal payoff differentials. In this paper we apply this property to axiomatic characterizations of values. We show that differential marginality implies additivity and symmetry under certain conditions. Based on this result, we propose new characterizations of the equal division and the equal surplus division values. Finally, we characterize two classes of convex combinations (...) of values, i.e., α\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\alpha$$\end{document}-egalitarian Shapley values and α\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\alpha$$\end{document}-equal surplus division values, by employing differential marginality and establishing the uniqueness of these values on inessential games. (shrink)

Great critical theorists from Marx and Engels to Adorno and Horkheimer not only came from the margins but also stayed faithful to the plight of the marginalized. They refused to compromise about the struggle for equality and tried to universalize its emancipatory essence. From Marx to Benjamin, critical philosophers who showed fidelity to the cause were denied a career in European universities and made impoverished, stateless, and homeless. Marginalization and critical theory are inseparable; yet, today, Marxism is institutionalized, and (...) the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory is gentrified. Critical Theory from the Margins, however, revives the Critical Theory that endorses criticism, aiming to negate dominant regimes of truth. It is unapologetic in its fidelity to the universalist struggles of the minoritized. In that spirit, Saladdin Ahmed shows that capitalism imposes a totalitarian social mode of existence and neoliberalism perpetuates fascism as a class of ideology across nationalist and religious movements. This book, then, is both a theorization and an argument in favor of the application of the episteme of the silenced as the essence of the critical education necessary for achieving universal emancipation. (shrink)

Recently, Timothy Williamson has argued that considerations about margins of errors can generate a new class of cases where agents have justified true beliefs without knowledge. I think this is a great argument, and it has a number of interesting philosophical conclusions. In this note I’m going to go over the assumptions of Williamson’s argument. I’m going to argue that the assumptions which generate the justification without knowledge are true. I’m then going to go over some of the recent arguments (...) in epistemology that are refuted by Williamson’s work. And I’m going to end with an admittedly inconclusive discussion of what we can know when using an imperfect measuring device. (shrink)

We revisit the Nowak (Int J Game Theory 26:137–141, 1997) characterization of the Banzhaf value via 2-efficiency, the Dummy player axiom, symmetry, and marginality. In particular, we provide a brief proof that also works within the classes of superadditive games and of simple games. Within the intersection of these classes, one even can drop marginality. Further, we show that marginality and symmetry can be replaced by van den Brink fairness/differential marginality. For this axiomatization, 2-efficiency can be relaxed into (...) superadditivity on the full domain of games. (shrink)

We revisit the characterization of the Shapley value by van den Brink (Int J Game Theory, 2001, 30:309–319) via efficiency, the Null player axiom, and some fairness axiom. In particular, we show that this characterization also works within certain classes of TU games, including the classes of superadditive and of convex games. Further, we advocate some differential version of the marginality axiom (Young, Int J Game Theory, 1985, 14: 65–72), which turns out to be equivalent to the van (...) den Brink fairness axiom on large classes of games. (shrink)

In _Marx at the Margins_, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by the well-known political economist which cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the _New York Tribune_, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with our conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a (...) portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. _Marx at the Margins _ultimately argues that alongside his overarching critique of capital, Marx created a theory of history that was multi-layered and not easily reduced to a single model of development or revolution. Through highly-informed readings on work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond. (shrink)

This study will explore the Enlightenment conception of the individual of reason, its attempted formulations in actor biographies, and its ultimate denial by the reality of human identity as multiple, fluid, and dialogical. Such fluidity sought to overcome the marginal status of the stage player through the embodiment of rational models of personality. Some stage celebrities, most notably David Garrick, were offering themselves as public models of identity for the new age of reasoned discourse. This involved the presentation before the (...) public of stage performers as fully realized individuals. However, the unavoidable problem was that presenting an individual, even a renowned stage star, as a living paradigm of the enlightened person of reason would prove elusive. Aside from the inherent contradiction of locating any perfected stereotype in an actual person, the qualities making an individual in full conformity to his or her “reason” did not match the particular cultural qualities demanded for a successful eighteenth-century middle-class Englishman or Englishwoman. Nonetheless, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, significant advances were made both within the particular profession of acting and before the onstage and offstage public. The acting profession was moving quickly and for the first time in England away from its marginalized status to offer respected agents for cultural change. The new genre of actor biographies as well contributed to this more fully realized formulation of the modern individual. (shrink)

Explanations of how identity is constructed are fundamental to contemporary debates in feminism and social theory. In this important addition to the literature, Beverley Skeggs demonstrates that class needs to be featured more prominently in theoretical accounts of gender, identity, and power. Class has been marginalized in feminist and cultural theory and it has become increasingly difficult to teach, research, or speak about class. Formations of Class and Gender identifies the neglect of class issues in favor of gender issues, (...) and shows how class and gender must be fused together to produce an accurate representation of power relations in modern society. In a sustained examination of the production of knowledge, detailed ethnographic research is used to explain how ôrealö women modify and reformulate our understanding of class, subjectivity, and sexuality. A critical examination of cultural representationùinformed by recent feminist theory and the work of Pierre BourdieuùFormations of Class and Gender is an articulate demonstration of how to translate theory into practice. Engaged with theoretical and methodological issues, this will be the standard referenced ethnography on class and gender. It will be required reading for students and researchers in womenÆs studies and sociology. (shrink)

Colonial encounters in the 1850s: the European impact on India, Indonesia, and China -- Russia and Poland: the relationship of national emancipation to revolution -- Race, class, and slavery: the Civil War as a second American revolution -- Ireland: nationalism, class, and the labor movement -- From the Grundrisse to Capital: multilinear themes -- Late writings on non-western and precapitalist societies -- Conclusion -- Appendix: the vicissitudes of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe from the 1920s to today.

The following interview was conducted on July 13, 2009 at the JFK Institute for Graduate Studies, Freie Universität in Berlin, shortly after a conference, entitled “Class in Crisis: Das Prekariat zwischen Krise und Bewegung,” at which Harvey delivered a keynote address. The conference, organized by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, engaged the political, socio-economic, and conceptual dimensions of the so-called precariat class. The precariat (das Prekariat or la précarité) is typically defined by short-term employment, persistent marginalization, and social insecurity—something of a (...) fragmented urban underclass whose precariousness is increasingly evident in traditionally middle-class economic life. While the concept of the precariat has yet to take root in English-language social theory, the work of Loïc Wacquant (who also delivered a keynote at the Berlin conference), for example, has been popularizing it. (shrink)

This paper explores how gender can operate as a disguise for class in an examination of the self-sacrifice of the Maiden in Euripides' Children of Herakles. In Part I, I discuss the role of human sacrifice in terms of its radical potential to transform society and the role of class struggle in Athens. In Part II, I argue that the representation of women was intimately connected with the social and political life of the polis. In a discussion of iconography, the (...) theater industry and audience I argue that female characters became one of the means by which different groups promoted partisan interests based on class and social status. In Part III, I show how the Maiden solicits the competing interests of the theater audience. After discussing the centrality (as a heroine from an aristocratic family) and marginality (as a woman and associated with other marginal social groups) of the Maiden's character, I draw upon the funeral oration as a comparative model with which to understand the quite different role of self-sacrifice in tragedy. In addition to representing and mystifying the interests of elite, lower class and marginal groups, the play glorifies a subordinate character whose contradictory social status (both subordinate and elite) embodies the social position of other “marginal” members of Athenian society. The play stages a model for taking political action to transform the social system and for commemorating the tragic costs of such undertakings. (shrink)

The following interview was conducted on July 13, 2009 at the JFK Institute for Graduate Studies, Freie Universität in Berlin, shortly after a conference, entitled “Class in Crisis: Das Prekariat zwischen Krise und Bewegung,” at which Harvey delivered a keynote address. The conference, organized by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, engaged the political, socio-economic, and conceptual dimensions of the so-called precariat class. The precariat (das Prekariat or la précarité) is typically defined by short-term employment, persistent marginalization, and social insecurity—something of a (...) fragmented urban underclass whose precariousness is increasingly evident in traditionally middle-class economic life. While the concept of the precariat has yet to take root in English-language social theory, the work of Loïc Wacquant (who also delivered a keynote at the Berlin conference), for example, has been popularizing it. (shrink)

This paper explores how gender can operate as a disguise for class in an examination of the self-sacrifice of the Maiden in Euripides' Children of Herakles. In Part I, I discuss the role of human sacrifice in terms of its radical potential to transform society and the role of class struggle in Athens. In Part II, I argue that the representation of women was intimately connected with the social and political life of the polis. In a discussion of iconography, the (...) theater industry and audience I argue that female characters became one of the means by which different groups promoted partisan interests based on class and social status. In Part III, I show how the Maiden solicits the competing interests of the theater audience. After discussing the centrality and marginality of the Maiden's character, I draw upon the funeral oration as a comparative model with which to understand the quite different role of self-sacrifice in tragedy. In addition to representing and mystifying the interests of elite, lower class and marginal groups, the play glorifies a subordinate character whose contradictory social status embodies the social position of other “marginal” members of Athenian society. The play stages a model for taking political action to transform the social system and for commemorating the tragic costs of such undertakings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 54-63 [Access article in PDF] Movement Class as an Integrative Experience:Academic, Cognitive, and Social Effects Svetlana Nikitina I believe the benefits of this type of course reach beyond the obvious possibilities of professional and academic achievement. The degree of personal discovery, creativity, self-development and insight are immeasurable. I am particularly referring to my experience here at Harvard. Claire Mallardi, from course syllabus (...) Performing arts courses at research institutions such as Harvard University are often seen as extracurricular with only tangential or imperceptible effect on students' academic interests. Yet, when I interviewed biology, math, or neuroscience concentrators who took Claire Mallardi's Movement for Actors and Directors course at Harvard in the spring of 2000, most of them told me that it was one of the most meaningful experiences in their academic development, and, according to one psychology concentrator, "the best psychology course" she ever took. In spite of boundaries separating the arts courses from hard and soft sciences, in students' experience the connections run deep. What were those connections that students made from their dance class experience to their academic and social development? And, what in the teaching and nature of the course supported this highly integrative experience that allowed students to reach beyond mastering an artistic medium and become better learners in general? These were the two major questions that guided this study.Why am I interested in the integrative quality of arts education? I am highlighting the academic importance of performing arts programs to suggest to university administrators and instructors in other disciplines the "immeasurable" personal and academic value of such courses whose place is often seen as marginal. Perhaps also, pedagogy used for integration in this course into the academic fabric of the institution could provide models for other courses and curricula that are trying to be integrative or interdisciplinary in a more self-conscious way. And, there are more and more such [End Page 54] courses on every college campus these days. Moriel Blaisdell in Preparing Faculty for the New Conceptions of Scholarship for example, cites "integrative studies" programs among most important trends in higher education today with their goal "to synthesize, to look for new relationships between the parts and the whole, to relate the past and future to the present, and to ferret out patterns of meaning that cannot be seen through traditional disciplinary lenses." 1One of the most daring experiments in universities now, and the one to which the integrative dance course could speak directly, is interdisciplinary teaching in neuroscience, for example. Neuroscience proceeds from the belief in the inherent unity of mind and body and attempts to discover the nature of the relationship between them. In a different way and with a different goal than arts courses, neurosciences also try to cross the boundary of subjective and objective experience, mind and body, physical technique and personal interpretation, which are at the heart of teaching and learning in the performing arts. While not being prescriptive, I would like to suggest that perhaps close attention to the pedagogy and integrative experiences of students in the performing arts courses could provide some insights for pioneering bridge-making in other academic areas as well.I would like to propose that what lies at the core of integrative capacity of a performing arts course, like the one Claire Mallardi teaches at Harvard, is the inherent tendency of the arts to transcend the boundary of body with the mind, and to seek unity of self as both the subject and the object. In a dance, in the words of Margaret H'Doubler, the body is seen "as the outer aspect of personality, for it is the agent through which we receive impressions from the external world and by which we communicate our meaning." 2 This basic translation between body and mind, mental and physical, artistic and academic that went on in Mallardi's class, resulted in integrative and transformational experiences for her students. "I never until this class — comments one student — equated emotions with movement or... (shrink)

Gait recognition in video surveillance is still challenging because the employed gait features are usually affected by many variations. To overcome this difficulty, this paper presents a novel Deep Large Margin Nearest Neighbor (DLMNN) method for gait recognition. The proposed DLMNN trains a convolutional neural network to project gait feature onto a metric subspace, under which intra-class gait samples are pulled together as small as possible while inter-class samples are pushed apart by a large margin. We provide an extensive evaluation (...) in terms of various scenarios, namely, normal, carrying, clothing, and cross-view condition on two widely used gait datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DLMNN achieves competitive gait recognition performances and promising computational efficiency. (shrink)

Epistemicists say there is a last positive instance in a sorites sequence-we just cannot know which is the last. Timothy Williamson explains that knowledge requires a margin for error and this ensures that the last heap will not be knowable as a heap. However, there is a class of disjunctive predicates for which knowledge at the thresholds is possible. They generate sorites paradoxes that cannot be diagnosed with the margin for error principle.

The main focus of this special issue is on marginality, a multifaceted concept that requires a cross-disciplinary approach. The papers selected here deal with marginality in the formation of the epistemic canon (?the mainstream?) and the production of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences. By employing the vocabulary of marginality (?marginal,? ?margins,? ?luminal,? ?threshold,? as well as dichotomies such as ?minor-major,? ?center-periphery?), we propose a shift from a discussion of the canon in terms of just one category of ?marginals? (...) (a certain race, class, gender etc.) to considering this complex concept in terms of a plurality of players and factors related to marginality broadly defined, some of which have little or nothing to do with power structures and dichotomies. Marginality is thus conceived of as an epistemic category and not as a power status. (shrink)

A narrow conception of who counts among the marginalized can blind ethicists to the precarious position of groups who function as middle agents between elites and the lower class. The imposition of middle agency on such groups is a form of oppression that leaves them vulnerable to abandonment and attack. In Rwanda, discourses emanating from colonialism, classism, and racism obscured the Tutsi as middle agents, despite white Catholics' dedication to the poor. By neglecting to recognize middle agency as a (...) type of marginalization, missionaries contributed negatively to the genocide. Liberatory practices are recommended so that ethicists can expose and challenge the dynamics of middle agency and include all the marginalized in liberation strategies. (shrink)

Recent discussions of boundary theory, particularly in the field of ethnic relations, emphasize varying degrees of porousness of social boundaries and the importance of considering the effects of the intersections of multiple boundaries, most notably those of gender, ethnicity/race, and class. It is also increasingly acknowledged that within-group characteristics, including identities, of subordinate as well as of dominant groups may change, without their becoming less authentic distinctive collectivities. This article examines the changing identities of a specific collectivity—French-speaking Canadian women living (...) in Ontario—who, during the past century, have been either marginalized by, or excluded from, several larger collectivities for various reasons—religion, race/ethnicity, language, nationalism, region, and gender—related to boundary definitions of their multiple, intersecting identities. It explores the emergence of these various marginalities and the ability of these feminists to construct institutions and agendas on their own terms. (shrink)

In the final scene of Michel Tournier’s postcolonial novel La Goutte d’or, the protagonist, Idriss, shatters the glass of a Cristobal & Co. storefront window while operating a jackhammer in the working-class Parisian neighbourhood on the Rue de la Goutte d’or. Glass fragments fly everywhere as the Parisian police arrive. In La Goutte d’or, Tournier explores the identity construction of Idriss through a discussion of the role that visual images play in the development of a twentieth-century consciousness of the “Other.” (...) At the beginning of the novel, a French tourist takes a photograph of Idriss during her visit to the Sahara. The boy’s quest to reclaim his stolen image leads him from the Sahara to Marseille, and finally to the Rue de la Goutte d’or in Paris. The Rue de la Goutte d’or remains one the most cosmopolitan neighbourhoods of the city. In Tournier’s novel, the goutte d’or also corresponds to a symbolic object: a Berber jewel. It is the jewel that Idriss brings with him, but which he also subsequently loses upon his arrival in Marseille. From the very moment that the French tourist photographs him, a marginalization of Idriss’s identity occurs. Marginality, quite literally, refers to the spatial property of a location in which something is situated. Figuratively speaking, marginality suggests something that is on the edges or at the outer limits of social acceptability. In this essay, I explore the construction of the marginalized postcolonial self through an examination of the function of visual representation in the development of a postcolonial identity in La Goutte d’or. In the end, I conclude that the construction of a postcolonial identity is based upon fragmentation and marginalization, which ultimately leads its subject to create an identity based upon false constructions. (shrink)

The debate over abortion tends to be framed as life versus choice. Yet, neither pole matches the actual experiences of women, especially women of colour and poor women. Using the hermeneutical circle from the perspective of Christian liberation theology, this article argues that beginning with the voices of those marginalized in the debate leads us to a broader conversation of reproductive justice, which requires an analysis of reproduction as a whole. The article focuses on what constrains the ability of (...) women and men to choose whether to have children, across the spectrum from contraception to abortion to fetus selection. (shrink)

The present book, “Rights of Depressed Classes: A Constitutional Approach “is the fourth e-book of the Centre which includes the essence of the occasional papers presented in several seminars. Human Rights is one of the majors subjects for discussion in academics as well as in social sector and has an international approach to social issues and problems. The struggle to promote, protect and preserve human rights changes and holds continuity in every generation in our society. The concept and practice (...) of human rights is the hallmark of any modern society. Marginalized Groups of India includes SCs/STs, Women and Children etc. The Constitution of India provides equal rights to all its citizens’ right to live with equality, honour and dignity. But the caste system and untouchability somehow and others are still playing negative roles from different parts of the society. Talhan, Meham, Dulina, Gohana, Saalwan, Chakwada, Khairlanji, Khandamal and Mirchpur are some of the recent instances of atrocities against Dalits in India. Atrocities against Dalits thus continue to exist even today, despite constitutional safeguards, and various legislative measures. Empowerment is the process of increasing the capacity of individuals or groups to make choices and to transform those choices into desires actions and outcomes. (shrink)

Media reflect and affect social understandings, beliefs, and values on many topics, including the lives of autistic and disabled people. Media analysis has garnered attention in the field of disability studies, which some scholars and activists consider a promising approach to discussing the experiences of – and for promoting social justice for – autistic people, who remain underrepresented on scripted television. Additionally, existing portrayals often rely on stereotyped representations of disabled individuals as objects of pity, objects of inspiration, or villains. (...) Television may also serve as a primary source of public knowledge about disabled people and the concept of disability. It is therefore essential that such portrayals avoid stigma and stereotyping. We take a disability studies lens to critically analyze and compare representations of diverse people, who may sometimes be conflated in the popular imaginary, across television series about autistic characters, those with cerebral palsy, and a character with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. We employ an intersectional analytic framework to problematize representations of autistic and disabled people, using television, feminist, and critical disability studies literatures. We analyze how the formal structure of television storytelling can either enable or disable its characters, as well as how portrayals of disability that display a sensitivity to concerns raised by critical disability discourse do not necessarily display the same sensitivity when they intersect with marginalized experiences of gender, sexuality, race, and class. (shrink)

The present book, “Rights of Depressed Classes: A Constitutional Approach “is the fourth e-book of the Centre which includes the essence of the occasional papers presented in several seminars. Human Rights is one of the majors subjects for discussion in academics as well as in social sector and has an international approach to social issues and problems. The struggle to promote, protect and preserve human rights changes and holds continuity in every generation in our society. The concept and practice (...) of human rights is the hallmark of any modern society. Marginalized Groups of India includes SCs/STs, Women and Children etc. The Constitution of India provides equal rights to all its citizens’ right to live with equality, honour and dignity. But the caste system and untouchability somehow and others are still playing negative roles from different parts of the society. Talhan, Meham, Dulina, Gohana, Saalwan, Chakwada, Khairlanji, Khandamal and Mirchpur are some of the recent instances of atrocities against Dalits in India. Atrocities against Dalits thus continue to exist even today, despite constitutional safeguards, and various legislative measures. Empowerment is the process of increasing the capacity of individuals or groups to make choices and to transform those choices into desires actions and outcomes. (shrink)

DuBois, Fanon, Cabral is an examination of the overlap of culture, class, and political leadership in the Africana liberation struggle. Focusing on the writings and activism of W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, and Amilcar Cabral, this book explores the three theorists' articulation of the relationship between acculturation and mass popular leadership among colonized elites in the African diaspora.

Since the emergence of neoliberalism in the early 1980s, the interests of the working class have become progressively more marginalized within mainstream politics in the United Kingdom. Years of austerity politics following the financial crash of 2008 deepened popular disenchantment with the political class, paving the way for the 2016 Brexit referendum result. This, Brian Elliot argues, has precipitated a crisis of British democracy. -/- Does the current wave of populism constitute a threat to or promise for democracy? What (...) has led to the emergence of populism and to what extent can populism be shaped into a program of progressive reform of democracy today? In this timely new book, Brian Elliott takes a long view on populism, tracing its history back to the struggles waged by the British workers’ movement of the nineteenth century to gain general enfranchisement. -/- Countering the depiction of populism as a degradation of liberal democratic political culture into a xenophobic rejection of pluralism, internationalism and multiculturalism, Elliott argues that the populist sentiment contains the promise of a renewal of democratic political culture. Identifying and examining the contemporary challenges of work, Elliott outlines a new working-class politics to overturn the neoliberal logic that has come to dominate mainstream political thinking over the last forty years. (shrink)

As English plays a significant role in most professions, improving the English for Specific Purpose writing competence allows individuals to participate in the global professional community, which makes ESP writing important for research. However, research on ESP writing is reported to be insufficient, and how factors such as emotions affect ESP writing is rarely and marginally studied. Therefore, this study aimed at investigating how induced emotions influence the learning outcome in ESP writing classes with an emphasis on a particular (...) rhetorical choice among medical university undergraduates. A total of 63 medical university undergraduates were recruited. After the emotional inducement, they were taught with materials selected and adopted from the BioCauses corpus and with an explicitly inductive teaching approach. Results revealed that positive emotions positively correlated with better learning outcomes, while negative emotions hindered participants in their learning. The results shed light on the impact of emotional states on ESP/medical research article writing, learning, and teaching. Further study implications were provided accordingly. (shrink)

In their paper “Vagueness, Ignorance, and Margins for Error” Kenton Machina and Harry Deutsch criticize the epistemic theory of vagueness. This paper answers their objections. The main issues discussed are: the relation between meaning and use; the principle of bivalence; the ontology of vaguely specified classes; the proper form of margin for error principles; iterations of epistemic operators and semantic compositionality; the relation or lack of it between quantum mechanics and theories of vagueness.

The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and experience of urban relegation in the United States and the European Union during the past three decades reveals the emergence of a new regime of marginality. This regime generates forms of poverty that are neither residual, nor cyclical or transitional, but inscribed in the future of contemporary societies insofar as they are fed by the ongoing fragmentation of the wage labour relationship, the functional disconnection of dispossessed neighbourhoods from the national and global (...) economies, and the reconfiguration of the welfare state in the polarizing city. Based on a methodical comparison between the black American ghetto and the French working-class banlieue at century's turn, this article spotlights three distinctive spatial properties of `advanced marginality' — territorial fixation and stigmatization, spatial alienation and the dissolution of `place', and the loss of a hinterland — and draws out their implications for the formation of the `precariat' in postindustrial societies. (shrink)

Electoral support for right-wing populist parties is typically explained either by economic deprivation or cultural grievances. Attempting to bring economic and cultural explanations together, recent approaches have suggested to conceptualize right-wing populist support as a problem of social integration. Applying this perspective to the German case, this article investigates whether weak subjective social integration-or subjective social marginalization, respectively-is associated with the intention to vote for the AfD. Furthermore, it asks whether the strength of this association varies across income groups. Based (...) on original survey data from 2017, the results show that indicators of weak subjective social integration-feeling socially excluded, being anxious about one’s status, and distrusting others-increase the likelihood of voting for the AfD. Moreover, weak subjective social integration increases right-wing party support particularly among the middle-class. Thus, next to fears of downward mobility, feelings of subjective social marginalization emerge as a pathway to right-wing populism for the middle-class. (shrink)

The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and experience of urban relegation in the United States and the European Union during the past three decades reveals the emergence of a new regime of marginality. This regime generates forms of poverty that are neither residual, nor cyclical or transitional, but inscribed in the future of contemporary societies insofar as they are produced by the ongoing fragmentation of wage labor relation­ship, the functional disconnection of dispossessed neighborhoods from the national and global economies, (...) and the reconfiguration of the welfare state in the polarizing city. Based on a methodical comparison of the black American ghetto and the French working-class banlieue at century’s turn, this article spotlights three distinctive spatial properties of “advanced marginality”—territorial fixation and stigmatization, spatial alienation and the dissolution of “place,” and the loss of a hinterland—and draws out their implications for the formation of the “precariat” in postindustrial societies. (shrink)

Pursuing world-class universities, China has emerged in recent decades as an increasingly popular destination for internationally mobile academics. The goal of this study was to identify current education policy dispositions toward foreign faculty at the national and institutional levels in China. Findings indicate that within China’s higher education policy discourse, foreign faculty are identified as an advantage, and a source of conflict, ultimately having an ambiguous role as they attempt to manage their complicated status in Chinese higher education institutions. Foreign (...) faculty are typically regarded as an international asset, accelerating global competitiveness and international rankings to enhance the acceleration of China’s higher education system. They are also considered controversial in relation to Chinese culture, values, and traditions. However, the most prevalent policy disposition explored in this study was that of vagueness and marginality, indicating underlying ambiguity toward foreign faculty. The study concludes with implications for future scholars and policymakers to consider. (shrink)

We determine the bivariate probability densities with specified margins and show that the Cohen-Zaparovanny class of positive phase-space density functions, with the quantum mechanical marginal distributions of position and momentum, contains all such densities.

This paper explores the ways in which music educators have allowed others outside of music education to name who and how they are in the world. Often comfortable with voicing advocacy and purpose from the status of second class citizen, music educators are complicit in the very processes of reproduction they wish to challenge. Seeking to address what could be a privileged positioning of marginalized status, this paper also speaks to the spaces that are created that could afford possibilities (...) of transformation. Thus, rather than to allow the perceived netherworld of marginalized status to name who we are and can be, we can name our own reality as we challenge the ways in which our own thoughts, beliefs, and actions are acquired and reproduced. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond the Aesthetic Garden: Politics and Culture on the Margins of Fin-de Siècle ViennaScott SpectorThe rhetorical structure supporting Carl E. Schorske’s seminal Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture 1 is frankly exposed. The argument—which may have single-handedly changed the discipline of cultural history—is an apparently simple one, and it is reasserted in this series of essays on diverse areas of cultural activity through the use of recurring metaphors. Schorske’s famous (...) thesis (modern culture as political surrogate for a marginalized liberal bourgeoisie) is represented through constantly resurfacing dichotomies: liberal political engagement and (vs.) the aesthetic “garden” of modern art; history and (vs.) desire and “the psyche”; politics and (vs.) culture. All of this is well known. In this essay I want both to assess our necessary debt to Schorske’s powerful work and to suggest what lies beyond it. If at the end of our own century we want to rethink Schorske’s founding project of an interdisciplinary cultural history of Central Europe, we cannot limit this initiative to the obviously important question of extending the contents of cultural inquiry (from high culture to popular culture, from the hegemonic nationality to non-German-speaking cultures, from patriarchy to the voices of women). The formal question packed up in the image of refuge from the historico-political in the aesthetic garden or the fortress of the psyche may offer most productive access to rethinking the Schorskean paradigm, instead of merely expanding its scope. For these reasons I want to focus on the rhetorical structure of Schorske’s essay collection against that of aesthetic and critical works from the Central European turn of the century. 2 Schorske’s historical analysis seems to be at odds [End Page 691] with these projects seen on their own terms—but to utter this is ironically to reiterate the tension between history or politics and aesthetic modernism articulated in the essays.The question at hand is hence two-fold. First of all, what is ideologically at stake in a historiographical construction that identifies Central European modernist aesthetic innovation as an escape from history and politics? Schorske’s interdisciplinary project of contextualization (his significant subtitle “Politics and Culture” has become an unshakable legacy for cultural history) is peculiar insofar as his diagnosis is that culture became increasingly isolated from political life. I have chosen to focus on the rhetorical opposition of “center” and “margin” in this essay because of Schorske’s implicit claim that the very class which was central to nineteenth-century Austrian liberalism—the German-speaking bourgeoisie—was “marginalized” by the rise of hostile anti-liberal ideologies (the “culture-makers” were “alienated along with their class in its extrusion from political power”). 3 As I hope to show, this geometry of center and margins was at the heart of the most innovative and potentially explosive play within so-called aestheticist texts around 1900. This brings us to the second half of this two-fold question: how might the “aesthetic moment” of the Central European fin de siècle be seen if we wish to go beyond Schorske’s diagnosis of a forced retreat into the temple of art, the fortress of the psyche, or the aesthetic garden? To get at both sides of this question—the ideological valence of the aesthetic moment and of its histories—I will focus on literary products, in particular on essays, for several reasons. One of these is that Schorske’s synthetic work is, after all, itself a collection of essays published over two decades.The privileging of the essay genre in coming to terms with the problem of turn-of-the-century aestheticism was established long before Schorske’s work. If we can find early examples of this generic strategy in fin-de-siècle authors such as Musil and Broch, the paradigmatic instance—and the place where the function of the essay-critique within aestheticist criticism is worked through—is the collection of Georg Lukács, Soul and Forms. 4 Several positions are taken in that work which may be useful to an understanding of Schorske’s essay project: Lukács asserts the essay’s fragmentary nature at... (shrink)

Doubly robust (DR) estimators are an important class of statistics derived from a theory of semiparametric efficiency. They have become a popular tool in causal inference, including applications to dynamic treatment regimes. The doubly robust estimators for the mean response to a dynamic treatment regime may be conceived through the augmented inverse probability weighted (AIPW) estimating function, defined as the sum of the inverse probability weighted (IPW) estimating function and an augmentation term. The IPW estimating function of the causal estimand (...) via marginal structural model is defined as the complete-case score function for those subjects whose treatment sequence is consistent with the dynamic regime in question divided by the probability of observing the treatment sequence given the subject's treatment and covariate histories. The augmentation term is derived by projecting the IPW estimating function onto the nuisance tangent space and has mean-zero under the truth. The IPW estimator of the causal estimand is consistent if (i) the treatment assignment mechanism is correctly modeled and the AIPW estimator is consistent if either (i) is true or (ii) nested functions of intermediate and final outcomes are correctly modeled.Hence, the AIPW estimator is doubly robust and, moreover, the AIPW is semiparametric efficient if both (i) and (ii) are true simultaneously. Unfortunately, DR estimators can be inferior when either (i) or (ii) is true and the other false. In this case, the misspecified parts of the model can have a detrimental effect on the variance of the DR estimator. We propose an improved DR estimator of causal estimand in dynamic treatment regimes through a technique originally developed by [4] which aims to mitigate the ill-effects of model misspecification through a constrained optimization.In addition to solving a doubly robust system of equations, the improved DR estimator simultaneously minimizes the asymptotic variance of the estimator under a correctly specified treatment assignment mechanism but misspecification of intermediate and final outcome models. We illustrate the desirable operating characteristics of the estimator through Monte Carlo studies and apply the methods to data from a randomized study of integrilin therapy for patients undergoing coronary stent implantation. The methods proposed here are new and may be used to further improve personalized medicine, in general. (shrink)

The working class has been interpreted within various disciplines and conceptual frameworks, some pointing to the gap between the depiction of the working class as a potentially active social force in the neoliberal deregulated global market and its portrayal as a suffering class of the marginal and excluded. In this text, I move behind this dichotomy to explore the everyday experiences of working-class men and women. Based on ethnographic research at the Bata shoe factory in the Czech Republic, I examine (...) the meanings factory workers attach to their working classness. I investigate their sense of place in society in general. I argue that class matters in the workers’ perceptions of the self. On the one hand, the workers adopt the awareness of subalternity in relation to the educational and further the labor field that ranks them among the lowest positions. On the other hand, they take individual pride in their endurance of the hard work that shoemaking is believed to be. The committed work and emphasis on collectivity turn the microorganism of the factory into a place of mutual discipline, where the praised collectivity functions also as a tool for enhancing work effectivity, also in the interest of the management. By pointing to the concrete dimensions in which they balance the feelings of pride and shame, belonging, and symbolic displacement, I contribute to the sociological understanding of contemporary working classness. (shrink)

Here, I offer a candid response to bell hooks's call for a testimony to the “movement beyond a mere ‘us and them’ discussion” that purportedly informs contemporary radical and feminist thought on difference. In alignment with a tradition that includes bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Aurora Levins Morales, I offer a personal testimony to the ways in which I—a middle-class, French, immigrant, continental-philosophy-bred incest survivor—envision both that movement and its limits. To establish these alliances means forming necessary communities. (...) I call on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari to propose an account of the production of such communities that does not depend only on shared lived experience, but also on shared marginal spatiality, temporality, and “medicinal history”. I suggest that on the one hand, Deleuze's philosophy of immanence may indeed find apt expression in the politics of integrity that hooks, Lorde, and Morales call for. On the other hand, a genuine politics of integrity may benefit from drawing on the philosophy of immanence, which alone offers alternatives to the traditional, oppositional models of difference informed by transcendence. Finally, I propose the concept of “immanent forgiveness” to capture the movement at issue. (shrink)

This article documents a moment in history when poor and working-class white boys and men are struggling in their schools, communities, and workplaces against the “Other” as a means of framing identities. Drawing on two independent qualitative studies, the authors investigate distinct locations where poor and working-class boys and men invent, relate to, and distance from marginalized groups in an effort to create self. First the authors look at an ethnography of “the Freeway boys,” a community of urban white (...) working-class high school boys who must deal with the economic ravagement of their neighborhood and their insecure place in a world different than that of their fathers. Next, the authors draw from a large-scale survey of young adults to hear how a combined sample of urban poor and working-class white men narrate identities that are carved explicitly out of territory bordered by white women and African American men. Across sites, the authors theorize how high schools and workplaces both, in part, create white masculinities and interrupt them, at a time when white working-class boys and men feel under siege. (shrink)

If I told you that screening technologies are iteratively transforming how people experience pregnancy and early parenting, you might take notice. If I mentioned that a new class of newborn patients was being created and that particular forms of parental vigilance were emerging, you might want to know more. If I described how the particular stories told about screening in public, combined with parents’ fierce commitment to safeguarding their children’s health, make it difficult for problematic experiences with screening to translate (...) into negative opinions about it, you would most likely be intrigued. An extensive qualitative literature documents all these social phenomena, and more, in connection with the spread of prenatal and newborn screening. So why is it, then, that commentators frequently assert that the predicted psychosocial impact of increased screening and testing associated with “the genomic revolution” has been far less severe and worthy of attention than predicted? How can or should social science “evidence” that sits outside adopted measurement conventions be considered? Why is it that summary statements about the psychosocial impact of genomic information often ignore qualitative evidence, or sideline it as relevant only for improving communication among patients, clinicians, and public health systems? This essay addresses such questions, using qualitative research on prenatal and newborn screening as a case study for illustrating the broad methodological, ideological, and dialogical issues at stake. (shrink)

We report two studies on the effect of implicitly versus explicitly conveying affirmation and denial problems about conditionals. Recently Evans and Handley (1999) and Schroyens et al. (1999b, 2000b) showed that implicit referencing elicits matching bias: Fewer determinate inferences are made, when the categorical premise (e.g., B) mismatches the conditional's referred clause (e.g., A). Also, the effect of implicit affirmation (B affirms not-A) is larger than the effect of implicit denial (B denies A). Schroyens et al. hypothesised that this interaction (...) is due to uncertainty in the case-wise affirmation of the contrast class of negated elements involved in implicit affirmations. In Experiment 1 we tested this hypothesis by manipulating the set size of the conditional clauses. The results confirm that binary sets, where the contrast class is a singleton, eliminate the differential effect of implicit affirmation and denial. With non-binary sets the interaction is not modulated by the scope of the contrast class (3, 5, 9 elements). Experiment 2 further investigated the role of contrast classes by using class inclusion to construct implicit affirmations (Mammal vs Mammal or Monkey) and implicit denial (No-Mammal vs Mammal or Monkey), in addition to the standard implicit problems mediated by contrast-class inclusion [(No-)Mammal/No-Mammal; Reptile; Snake). Findings indicate that class inclusion (Mammal/Monkey; Reptile/ Snake) only marginally affects performance, and is independent of the type of problem. This would suggest that the implicitness problem-type interaction is dependent on constructing contrast classes. However, the experiment failed to replicate the interaction, even on the subset of problems repeating the abstract letter/number format of Experiment 1. Moreover, with the natural binary set-sizes (vowels/consonants) the implicitness effect was eliminated entirely. (shrink)

This article reports research in three Nottingham schools, concerned with (1) 'The school as fertile ground: how the ethos of a school enables everyone in it to benefit from the presence of artists in class'; (2) 'Children on the edge: how the arts reach those children who otherwise exclude themselves from class activities, for any reason' and (3) 'Children's voices and choices: how even very young children can learn to express their wishes, and then have them realised through arts projects'. (...) The research methodology was rooted in two modes of inquiry, philosophical investigation and action research. The article draws on this research to argue that arts-based work in school has helped disadvantaged and/or disaffected children to engage in activities (both arts-based and others), and to be able to lay the groundwork for exercising voice and agency as they did so. If social justice is to flourish there is a need for particular kinds of public spaces and a need to create conditions such that children can learn to participate in those spaces, whether or not they are comfortable with the usual settings for 'rational argument' or 'deliberative democracy'. It is suggested that arts-based education, in some forms, is one good way of creating these conditions. (shrink)

Classrooms are unlevel knowing fields, contested terrains where knowledge and ignorance are produced and circulate with equal vigor, and where members of dominant groups are accustomed to having an epistemic home-terrain advantage. My project focuses on one form of resistance that regularly surfaces in discussions with social-justice content. Privilege-protective epistemic pushback is a variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when asked to consider both the lived and structural injustices that members of marginalized groups (...) experience daily. I argue that this dominant form of resistance is neither an expression of skepticism nor a critical-thinking practice. I suggest that standard philosophical engagements with these expressions of resistance are incapable of tracking the harms of privilege-protecting epistemic pushback. I recommend treating this pushback as a “shadow text,” that is, as a text that runs alongside the readings in ways that offer no epistemic friction. I offer this as one critical philosophical practice for making students mindful of the ways they contribute to the circulation of ignorance and epistemic violence during the course of their discussions. (shrink)

Classrooms are unlevel knowing fields, contested terrains where knowledge and ignorance are produced and circulate with equal vigor, and where members of dominant groups are accustomed to having an epistemic home-terrain advantage. My project focuses on one form of resistance that regularly surfaces in discussions with social-justice content. Privilege-preserving epistemic pushback is a variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when asked to consider both the lived and structural injustices that members of marginalized groups (...) experience daily. I argue that this dominant form of resistance is neither an expression of skepticism nor a critical-thinking practice. I suggest that standard philosophical engagements with these expressions of resistance are incapable of tracking the harms of privilege-preserving epistemic pushback. I recommend treating this pushback as a “shadow text,” that is, as a text that runs alongside the readings in ways that offer no epistemic friction. I offer this as one critical philosophical practice for making students mindful of the ways they contribute to the circulation of ignorance and epistemic violence during the course of their discussions. (shrink)

Historians of science have traditionally concentrated on the achievements of scientists in Western Europe and North America. The usual assumption was that one did not need to study scientific communities outside of a few key countries because they were presumed to be analogous to (though weaker than) scientific communities in the West. In general, those who study women in science have shared this bias. This article provides examples that illustrate how cross-national research that includes less-studied areas of the world can (...) move us beyond generalizations that are based on small samples of women scientists in relatively few countries. This article is not definitive but rather suggests ways in which transnational studies of gender and science can contribute to our knowledge of not only the position of women in science but also the significance of class and social status and the meanings attached to the scientific enterprise in different cultural contexts. (shrink)

Schools in the United States have often been tasked with cultivating a political identity that is connected to the nation-state. In the civics classroom, this often means teaching a nation-state centered civic education, which can create a sense of disjuncture for some students. This year-long ethnographic study explores disenfranchised students living in the Virgin Islands’ political identities and interests and how their teachers responded to them. The findings suggest that students entered the classroom with developed and varied political interests and (...) identities that would not necessarily be recognized in a traditional nation-state centered civics class. Teachers responded by providing a culturally sustaining and humanizing civic education that honored their students’ diverse political and cultural identities and interests. (shrink)

Although Marx dubbed landowners one of the ‘three great classes’ of modern society, the most prominent Marxian and socialist thinkers of capitalism and land over the past century – from Lefebvre to Massey to Harvey – have implicitly or explicitly argued that landowners are not capitalism’s ‘third class’, and that the social relations of land are marginal or contingent to the mode of production as a whole. Through assessing the work of Marxist geographers, political economists, value-form theorists, and others (...) who have dismissed the class-status of landowners and blurred the line between ground rent and interest, this article argues that the theory of the landowning class is fundamental to the understanding of the totality of capitalist social relations, as well as to developing more incisive analyses of struggles around housing, land, and movement today. (shrink)