У истоков Российского национального комитета по биоэтике: исторический, социокультурный и политический контексты

In the last decade, the total foreign-born population in the U.S. has grown exponentially, with the Hispanic Latino immigrants (HLI) experiencing the greatest growth. The literature clearly identifies that HLI experience significant health disparities as a result of the negative impact of influential social determinants of health, such as access to healthcare services. Barriers to healthcare access among HLI are related to the access dimensions of accessibility, availability, affordability, and acceptability. Despite research on the barriers to healthcare for this population, issues of access from the perspective of immigrant community members are poorly understood. There is an increased need to understand barriers and facilitators to healthcare access as perceived by HLI themselves to develop culturally appropriate strategies aimed at eliminating healthcare access inequities and health disparities. The purpose of this dissertation was to critically explore the perceived barriers and facilitators to primary healthcare access among HLI residing in highly concentrated communities of the southern metropolitan city of Louisville, KY. Critical ethnographic methods and postcolonial theory were used to investigate access to healthcare in this community within historical, sociocultural, economic and political contexts. Twenty participants were interviewed for this study using a semi-structured interview guide and descriptive survey form. Participant observations, document reviews and geospatial analysis assisted in providing in-depth understanding of findings within various contexts. Research findings revealed that significant barriers and facilitators to healthcare access were closely related to historical, sociocultural, political and economic contexts that shaped HLI health experiences in Louisville. These social determinants of healthcare access were influenced by the underlying social structures of race, ethnicity, power and oppression embedded in the colonial histories of the Americas. Additionally, findings indicated that although providers and HLI recipients shared similar perspectives on healthcare access, discrepancies between the provision and utilization of healthcare services were perpetuated by the social determinants of healthcare access. Findings from this study provide several implications and recommendations for healthcare systems, community programs, nursing, policy reform and future programs of research focused on enhanced culturally appropriate interventions and programs addressing the perceived needs of HLI in the Louisville community.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shed a glaring light on the range of obstacles to equitable learning and development in higher education across the globe. Higher education and Student Affairs and Services (SAS), as part of higher education, are faced with a set of challenges that are in part related to the characteristics of their student bodies, the resourcing of the institutions, and also the sociocultural and political contexts in which the institutions and the students are embedded. In this study, four researchers from different parts of the world explore how SAS has responded to the changes in student and institutional needs and responses due to COVID-19. To this end, we surveyed 781 SAS professionals from across the globe. Overall, the data show SAS changed its critical role in mediating the various challenges related to COVID-19 within and beyond the higher education institutions that impact student success.In the course of the analysis of our data, there emerged four domains that impact student success in the context of the pandemic. They include (1) the students’ personal situation; (2) the sociocultural context and familial milieu in which the student is embedded; (3) the institutional and academic domain; and (4) the broader, macro-public domain, which includes larger structural and political-economic conditions. Based on the data, we developed a heuristic model that aids in understanding SAS’ engagement with students’ ability to learn and develop in higher education under the unique conditions presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. The data show that the four domains have varying significance in different world regions and national systems of higher education, depending on political, economic, and sociocultural contexts. Additionally, while SAS and universities do a great deal to support students in their learning, factors in the macro-public domain and factors in the sociocultural community and familial milieu are mitigated by SAS to promote a context that is conducive to learning across the globe.Finally, the study demonstrated that COVID-19 has changed not only the scope of SAS but also its role in lobbying and advocating for living and learning contexts that are more conducive to student success. This is an expanding role and function of SAS and appears to emerge as a critical factor for SAS to become more impactful in supporting conditions for student success. The chapter concludes with recommendations to further develop this heuristic model to contribute to the development of a global SAS profession that plays a significant role in advancing higher education practices that promote equitable success for all students.

Recent work in ancient art history has sought to move beyond formalist interpretations of works of art to a concern to understand ancient images in terms of a broader cultural, political, and historical context. In the study of late Republican portraiture, traditional explanations of the origins of verism in terms of antecedent influences — Hellenistic realism, Egyptian realism, ancestral imagines — have been replaced by a concern to interpret portraits as signs functioning in a determinate historical and political context which serves to explain their particular visual patterning. In this paper I argue that, whilst these new perspectives have considerably enhanced our understanding of the forms and meanings of late Republican portraits, they are still flawed by a failure to establish a clear conception of the social functions of art. I develop an account of portraits which shifts the interpretative emphasis from art as object to art as a medium of socio-cultural action. Such a shift in analytic perspective places art firmly at the centre of our understanding of ancient societies, by snowing that art is not merely a social product or a symbol of power relationships, but also serves to construct relationships of power and solidarity in a way in which other cultural forms cannot, and thereby transforms those relationships with determinate consequences.

The representational politics of European cinema and literature were effectively determinant in shaping and reflecting the values and the ideologies of the dominant parties in dealing with encounters and representing cultural difference. Conditioned by the synchronous historical and political contexts, the work of stereotyping has persisted and Continued in deploying almost the same tropes and metaphors of representation that have been in operation since the medieval ages, constructing a logic of binarization of encounters on asymmetrical grounds. This article explores the genealogy of representation of North Africans in European cinema and literature, focusing on the metamorphosis of its dominant tropes and stereotypes over centuries. It addresses the ways fictional representation of North Africans, especially Moroccans, reinforce the orientalizing discourse of power, domination, and hegemonic construction of cultural difference on stereotypical and judgmental basis. It suggests that the visual and literary representation of North Africans has constantly kept appearing, disappearing, shifting and redefining in response to the prevailing political and historical contexts that shaped encounters between Europeans and North Africans. To track the mutation of the stereotype, its intertextuality and its hierarchical structures of power, Edward Said’s colonial discourse analysis and Homi Bhabha’s conceptualization of the stereotype will be used as theoretical frameworks in this article.

When the past haunts the present: Intergroup forgiveness and historical closure in post World War II societies in Asia and in Europe

The volunteer tourism program (VTP) is a popular form of travel for young tourists in which adventure travel is paired with short-term ‘volunteer’ placements in host communities around the countries of the global South. VTPs are now a routine mode of travel or pre-university ‘training’ for wealthy young people from across North America and Western Europe and exist outside of any historical or political context. They promise adventure travel, altruistic volunteer experiences, and an authentic experience of the other, whom the volunteer can help to transform. If not for the long history of intervention and domination that normalizes this new incarnation of the ‘civilizing mission’, the knowledge claims and authority asserted by the VTP would hardly appear so acceptable. The VTP exists in a cultural blind spot made possible by North–South relations structured on intervention and transformation of the other. This paper critically examines the promotional discourses of VTP providers and identifies the discursive strategies employed to normalize, encode, and legitimate the practice of volunteer intervention. VTP discourses legitimate volunteer intervention through representations of the host community that imagine poverty and authenticity as presenting a need for volunteers and through constructions of a volunteer identity that allows for travel outside of political and historical contexts. I suggest that the VTP can best be understood as a manifestation of continuing patterns of exploitation and domination of the global South, whereby VTP intervention discursively positions itself as ‘innocent’ of the very historical and political trends that make it possible.

School violence is a persistent international crisis, yet most analyses of the problem are very local in their focus. Many theories of school violence lack not only an international perspective but also political and historical contexts (Astor et al., 2006; Ohsako, 1997; Smith et al., 1999). This chapter argues two points. First, that theories stemming from work dating from the mid-twentieth century Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States are not always adequate in understanding school violence in a cross-national perspective in the early twenty-first century. Second, theories that account for historical and political contexts may be more valid in accounting for school violence in countries that are usually not at the forefront of theory development. In other words, though theories developed in the United Kingdom, Western Europe and the United States may have had validity in their own contexts, they do not necessarily transfer automatically to countries that have experienced vastly different histories and political situations.

تعادل زیباییشناختی در ترجمۀ رباعیات خیام با استفاده از نظریات زیباییشناسی دریافت و استعارۀ شناختی

Fifty-two maternal deaths occurred between September 2017 and August 2018 in the Rohingya refugee camps in Ukhia and Teknaf Upazilas, Cox’s Bazar District, Bangladesh. Behind every one of these lives lost is a complex narrative of historical, social, and political forces, which provide an important context for reproductive health programming in Rohingya camps. Rohingya women and girls have experienced human rights violations in Myanmar for decades, including government-sponsored sexual violence and population control efforts. An extension of nationalist, anti-Rohingya policies, the attacks of 2017 resulted in the rape and murder of an unknown number of women. The socio-cultural context among Rohingya and Bangladeshi host communities limits provision of reproductive health services in the refugee camps, as does a lack of legal status and continued restrictions on movement. In this review, the historical, political, and social contexts have been overlaid below on the Three Delays Model, a conceptual framework used to understand the determinants of maternal mortality. Attempts to improve maternal mortality among Rohingya women and girls in the refugee camps in Bangladesh should take into account these complex historical, social and political factors in order to reduce maternal mortality.

Among the theorists who, in the 1980s and 1990s, contributed to the burgeoning field of translation studies and sought to distance themselves from previous normative and prescriptive definitions were André Lefevere and Lawrence Venuti. They described translations as ideological constructs, rewritings emanating from new and different social, cultural, and political contexts, influenced by factors such as gender, patronage, and even the marketplace, and manipulated by a translator's beliefs, place in time and space, and goals.2 This view recognizes that translators have opportunities to intervene and appropriate a text that they may well have chosen for ideological reasons. Moreover, changes do not necessarily constitute mistakes, but can result from the translator's choices in determining the goals of the translation and reshaping the work for a new and different audience. Such choices are also often dictated by the historical and socio-cultural contexts in which they are created, for translations do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they constitute an integral part of a whole web of diverse activities in a given site. Thus Renaissance translations must be examined against the backdrop of contemporary social, historical, and cultural circumstances, which includes the world of early print. It is important to consider a translation as it relates to others being published at the same time or on the same subject and to place it within a movement that sought to advance knowledge in every sphere and disseminate religious, political, and cultural values and ideas.KeywordsHistorical CircumstanceWoman WriterChristian ReligionPrayer BookIdeological ConstructThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

A review of the scholarly literature within the field of Couple and Family Therapy (CFT) revealed a gap in the literature on the lives of African American lesbian women and their families, particularly as it relates to anti-gay legislation and marriage amendments. This has important implications for how clinicians, educators, and researchers come to understand the relational well-being of African American lesbian families within socio-historical, cultural and political contexts. Specifically, it has implications for understanding the effects of anti-gay agendas at the intersections of race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. This study utilized a phenomenological methodology with an intersectional perspective to explore the effects of anti-gay discourse, legislation and constitutional amendments on the emotional well-being (i.e., how one feels about their sexual orientation and/or sexual identity) and relational well-being (i.e., how the relationships with others are impacted) of African-American lesbian women. Thirty face-to-face interviews were conducted in the homes and/or communities of the participants in the following states: Pennsylvania (8), North Carolina (8), Maryland (8), New Jersey (4) and the District of Columbia (2). Analysis of the data indicated that the self-identified African American lesbian women who partici-pated in this study were variously affected by anti-gay discourse, legislation and constitutional amendments. The effects of the phenomena ranged from no emotional connection to feelings of a personal affront. The majority of participants felt so disconnected from the movement that, initially, they saw no need to get politi-cally involved. They shared that they did not identify with the marriage equality movement because the issues that were endemic in their lives and the lives of other African Americans in their communities were not a part of the discourse on marriage equality (e.g., economic disparities, afford-able housing and safe communities for their families, equal employment opportunities, quality education for their children, homeless for LGBTQ youth, HIV/AIDS awareness/prevention and legal protections for transgendered individuals). While they sup- ported the main goal of the movement they did not see representations of African American lesbian women and families in the discourse nor in the media campaigns for marriage equality. Therefore, they did not identify with the movement for they viewed it as one based primarily on the agenda of White gay men. This lack of identification with the movement held true for all of the participants unless they found themselves in the midst of a statewide marriage amendment campaign or they became aware of the limited state a federal benefits attached to their legally recognized relationship status (marriage or civil union). These were the turning points for many of the participants. Nearly 57% of the participants had become so incensed by what they viewed as attempts to legislate discrimination and mislead the public regarding the intent of the proposed amendments that they felt compelled to get involved in community organizing and political advocacy for marriage equality. Some of them testified in front of state legislatures and others worked at the polls on Election Day, held fundraisers, worked at phone banks and developed a website where people were invited to share their thoughts and feelings on marriage equality. The website was linked to other sites where people could go to obtain information on marriage equality and the proposed amendment. The participants were driven by a need to educate themselves and the public on the potential benefits and consequences of proposed legislation and public policies. The personal accounts of the African American lesbian women who participated in this study invites the reader to analyze the effects of anti-gay legislation from different viewpoints. For in spite of similar intersecting racial, gendered, and sexual identities; the participants' experiences of the phenomena were shaped by their respective sociocultural, historical, political, and legal contexts, the geographic locations that the participants navigated on a daily basis and their life cycle stages (young children, adult children, no children, and their relationship status). The findings also highlighted how instrumental local and national civil rights organizations (e.g., National Black Justice Coalition, the NAACP and the Human Rights Campaign) were in expanding the discourse on marriage equality to ensure that the diverse voices and faces within LGBTQ communities were an integral part of the movement. The ultimate goal of the study was to center the voices and experiences of African American lesbian women regarding the effects of anti-gay discourses and legislation and to reduce the gap in Couple and Family Therapy professional journals on this segment of the population. Reducing the gap in the literature can contribute to the development of new knowledge on the effects of anti-gay agendas enhancing the ability of clinicians, researchers and social justice advocates to develop culturally sensitive protocols to service the needs of African American lesbian women and their families.

Cross-cultural research acknowledges culturally dependent ways of understanding, interpreting, and processing psychological trauma. Discourses about individual responses to traumatic events in low-income countries like crisis-ridden Sierra Leone ought to consider a person’s psychosocial background in a sociocultural, historical, and political context. As a sub-study of a research project in Sierra Leone, we chose a qualitative approach to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of trauma in the West African country. Semi-structured interviews with 20 Sierra Leonean students and 4 Sierra Leonean experts from trauma-related scientific fields were conducted in the capital Freetown. Our emic findings revealed unique culture-specific insights, such as a cultural notion of trauma belonging to life, collective efforts to “forgive and forget”—reinforced by the government after the civil war—as well as religious and interpersonal counseling, to have an impact on an individual’s response to trauma in Sierra Leone. While we found specific tendencies of sociocultural, historical, and political patterns on a macro-level, the participants’ statements sometimes had a different manifestation on the micro-level. Therefore, these patterns should rather be assessed from case to case for a thorough understanding of an individual’s response to trauma in a specific culture. This research highlights the benefit of emic, culture-sensitive approaches and encourages more comprehensive trauma discourses. Our findings confirm that the impact of trauma is not only related to a limited event but also shaped by a person’s psychosocial environment, which is influenced by society, culture, history, and politics.

In mainstream second language acquisition theory, which dominantly draws on psycholinguistic perspectives, language acquisition/learning is often conceived as an “internally driven, individual phenomenon that is largely independent of the context in which it takes place” (Kramsch, 2000, p. 314). From psycholinguistic perspectives, language is considered as a formalized and rule-governed system (e.g., grammar), which is best acquired by separating it from its context of use. In line with this “autonomous” or psycholinguistic view of language (Firth & Wagner, 1997; Street, 1984), “literacy” in the field of world language education is often understood as the ability to read and write a written text. This is a narrow view that does not adequately account for the variety of literacy practices that exist in different sociocultural contexts, and which are not limited to reading and writing. Literacy, from sociocultural perspectives, is considered a social practice that is embedded in historical, sociocultural, and political contexts (Gee, 2012; New London Group (NLG), 2000; Street, 1984) (see also Chapter 1, this volume). The sociocultural perspectives posit that people engage in different types of literacy depending on the purpose, the medium, and the audience (or the interlocutor) of a particular communicative event.

1. Introduction The issue of translation equivalence has received increasing attention from translation theorists and translators, but it seems that this issue can be investigated at different levels and from different perspectives. Reception Theory which appeared from the second half of the 20th century as an opposition to New Criticism, was to re-define the author-reader-text relation in different forms. In this theory, the author is de-centralized and unfocused and the reader and his perception based on his historical and sociocultural contexts are at focus. In this regard, Wolfgang Iser developed a branch of Reception Theory, i.e. School of Reception Aesthetics, which per se represents the issue of equivalence in case of translation. Moreover, by presenting Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), Lakoff and Johnson (1980) opened a new window towards equivalence theory and dealt with the problem of equivalence at the conceptual level. Following this theory, diverse cognitive approaches such as Tabakowska’s experiential equivalence (1993) and Mandelblit’s Cognitive Translation Hypothesis (1995) were concerned about translation equivalence. Therefore, the main objective of the present study is to investigate aesthetic equivalence using the two theories of Iser’s Reception Aesthetics (1974) and Conceptual Metaphor Theory of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) in order to promote an integrated model out of Mandelblit (1995) and Tabakowska (1993) with aesthetic equivalence. 2. Methodology The study uses a qualitative approach and the research method is descriptive-analytical. Library research techniques, qualitative content analysis methods, and scientific conceptual metaphor identification methods were employed for collecting data. The sample size includes two quatrains selected in a purposive method from Rubayyat of Khayyam and their English translations by Fitzgerald. The inclusion criterion for selecting these two quatrains was their enrichment in terms of conceptual metaphors which were identified using methods of Pragglejaz Group (2007) and Steen (2007, 2009). 3. Discussion After extracting conceptual metaphors, they were analyzed using cross-domain mapping methods in the source text and target text and then, cultural, cognitive, and aesthetic models were analyzed and compared in the two texts. After that, employing the integrated model presented in the study, metaphorical mappings were investigated and compared in the Persian quatrains and their English translations in order to identify that cross-domain mappings in the two conceptual systems were similar (in case of Similar Mapping Conditions or SMC) or culture-specific (in case of Different Mapping Conditions or DMC). In addition, this issue was investigated that the translator employed which cognitive strategies in case of facing these two situations in translating metaphors. Moreover, aesthetics experiences and conceptualization of sociocultural worlds of Iranian-Khayyamic and Western-Victorian cultures were investigated based on Iser’s definitions and the ideas in relation with aesthetic reception of texts. In investigating quatrains, it seems that Khayyam reveals his ideologies and worldviews regarding the Universe, human destiny, determinism, creation (birth) and death, criticism of the Existence System, etc. in the form of conceptual metaphors. Therefore, he uses conceptual metaphors and metonymies to express his text-world and aesthetics towards humanity and the Universe. It seems that thoughts in these quatrains in the form of conceptual metaphors and metonymies can be based on Khayyam’s sociocultural and historical contexts constructing his cultural and aesthetic models in the form of cognitive schemas. Fitzgerald uses different cultural models such as “chess” instead of “puppetry” to create conceptual-aesthetic equivalence between the two conceptual systems. According to Iser’s reception aesthetics, and Lakoffian CMT, equivalence should be considered at the aesthetic level or the level of understanding texts as well as the conceptual level with regard to cultural and conceptual systems which apply imagination as well. As observed, in the new cultural, experiential, and conceptual system, Fitzgerald tries to create equivalence at the mentioned levels by switching in conceptualizations (conceptual metaphors). In addition, it seems that the translator faces different mapping conditions in conceptualization of these metaphors and metonymies due to differences in cultural models; therefore, these different mapping conditions make him keep equivalence at conceptual and aesthetic levels. As a result, in the framework of Iser’s theory according to which texts should be read in their specific sociocultural systems and via readers’ imagination, Fitzgerald uses the technique of switch of mapping to change conceptualizations. 4. Conclusion According to the results of the study, it can be concluded that in the two analyzed quatrains and their translations, conceptual metaphors have significant roots in cultural models of communities; therefore, production and perception of these metaphors need familiarity with their sociocultural and historical contexts in each discourse community. As a result, the translator changes conceptualization in his conceptual system in case of the DMC caused by differences in cultural models of the two systems to keep conceptual equivalence. Moreover, in case of the SMC, the translator, influenced by similar cultural models in the two cultures, tried to keep original conceptualizations. The results also indicated that aesthetic equivalence in translation can be investigated and aesthetics as a component can be added to the integrated model in the present study.

With more than 1,000 entries by more than 200 expert contributors, this encyclopedia is the most comprehensive reference available on African American literature. While most of the entries are on individual authors, the encyclopedia gives special attention to the historical, cultural, and political contexts that have shaped African American writing. Included are entries on critical movements and terms, critics and scholars, historical and social issues, cultural and historical figures, literary forms and genres, literary schools and organizations, and many other topics. The entries cite numerous print and electronic resources, and the encyclopedia concludes with a selected, general bibliography. Designed to meet the needs of high school students, undergraduates, and general readers, this encyclopedia is the most comprehensive reference available on African American literature from its origins to the present. Other works include many brief entries, or offer extended biographical sketches of a limited selection of writers. This encyclopedia surpasses existing references by offering full and current coverage of a vast range of authors and topics. While most of the entries are on individual authors, the encyclopedia gathers together information about the genres and geographical and cultural environments in which these writers have worked, and the social, political, and aesthetic movements in which they have participated. Thus the encyclopedia gives special attention to the historical and cultural forces that have shaped African American writing. In addition to drawing upon the learning of Hans Ostrom, J. David Macey, Jr., and more than 200 expert contributors, the encyclopedia benefits from an editorial board of such distinguished scholars as: Houston A. Baker, Jr., Emily Bernard, Michele Elam, Dolan Hubbard, and Sheila Smith McKoy. Because of its broad scope, substantial entries, current coverage, and extensive attention to historical, political, and social contexts, this encyclopedia will be the major resource for high school students and teachers interested in the full range of the African American experience. Academic and public libraries will also treasure this work as an incomparable guide to our nation's African American heritage.