Apparent Impasse Research Articles

Joachim Bruhn’s Left-Wing Critique of Anti-Zionism and the Capitalist State in the 1990s: An Intellectual History of the Antideutsche

In one of the greatest alliances of the German extraparliamentary Left since 1968, rival factions from more than one hundred organizations came together in 1990 to express their opposition to German reunification, sparking the Antideutsche (Anti-German) current within the German Left. The theoretically sophisticated but little-studied Antideutsche group, the Initiative Sozialistisches Forum (Socialist Forum Initiative), led by Joachim Bruhn, used the occasion of unification skepticism and increased anti-immigrant violence in the 1990s to develop a unique Kapitalismuskritik, before the Antideutsche movement liquidated its critical edge around the turn of the century. Bruhn drew on German leftist national self-hatred from the nineteenth century to the 1970s New Left, Moishe Postone’s theory of structural anti-Semitism from the 1970s, and the Frankfurt School’s critique of “state capitalism” from the 1930s and 1940s to develop a threefold critique of a “German” predilection for reactionary-conservative anti-capitalism, left-wing anti-Zionism as concealed Stalinism, and de facto nationalist and statist ideology, respectively. While Bruhn brought to the surface several repressed ideological concessions of the German Left, his fixation on historical national guilt and the purely negative aspects of the capitalist state prohibited a genuinely dialectical critique revealing opportunities from within the apparent impasse.

A critical assessment of Bruce L. McCormack's christological proposal

AbstractBruce L. McCormack's recent christological proposal intends to move beyond the apparent impasse in theological discourse between God's aseity and God's world relation. In describing the second mode of divine being as personally constituted by receptivity to the human Jesus of Nazareth without losing the logos asarkos, McCormack's proposed christological innovation offers a way to consider relation to the world as proper to God through the Son, without absolute pronobeity coming to dominate in the doctrine of God. This being said, his christological proposal, as it stands, implies both that election is antecedent to triunity and that the person of Jesus of Nazareth is antecedent to the act of the incarnation. With the former comes the problem of sequence in the priority of divine act over divine being. With the latter comes the problem of offering a unified account of two agencies. As such, while ontological receptivity continues to hold significant possibilities for the doctrine of God, it requires more careful coordination to the relation of passive generation as such.

Panpsychism and the mind-body problem in contemporary analytic philosophy

ABSTRACTNot so long ago, the idea that analytic philosophers would be taking panpsychism seriously would have been hard to believe. That is because in its early, logical positivist, stage, the analytic movement earned the reputation of being militantly anti-metaphysical. But analytic philosophy has come a long way since the heyday of logical positivism; and, in fact, the dialectic of recent debates on the mind–body problem among analytic philosophers has pushed many of them in the direction of panpsychism. In this paper, I want to explain how this has come about and take a look at some of the versions of panpsychism that have emerged. This will involve running through a quick history of debates on the mind–body problem since about 1960, focusing on how panpsychism has been proposed as a promising, though not unproblematic, way of breaking an apparent impasse that has emerged between more standard physicalist and dualist theories of mind. Along the way, I will also have occasion to comment on the prospects of panpsychism as a respectable scientific theory and how a number of scientists stand on this.

Reforming narratives on human sexuality in the Dutch Reformed Church

This article offers a critique on the dominant narrative on human sexuality in the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC). A mirror is held up to the binary nature of this dominant discourse, centred on ethics, hermeneutics, and ecclesiology. The limitations of how the DRC has engaged with human sexuality, and homosexuality in particular, are framed within the church’s own construction of being “vasgeloop” (stuck) amidst plurality and diversity. These limitations are discussed as issues of church unity, justice, and embodiment. Finally, a subaltern “window” is offered out of this apparent impasse, that looks upon the liberating alternatives presented by embodied queer narratives. In an attempt at seeing queerness within the Reformed tradition, queer phenomenology is presented as an epistemic shift away from the normative, binary discourse that has dominated the discourse on human sexuality in the Dutch Reformed Church.

Conscientious objection to caring for transgender people: An ethical right or a discriminatory attitude?

In modern society, health professionals are often asked to use their technical skills to serve purposes other than treating illnesses. In such cases, some clinicians may express ethical reluctance to fulfill their patients' preferences. Conscientious objection in health care is the refusal by providers to perform a legally valid and scientifically approved clinical intervention because of moral concerns. Although health services and staff are obliged to respect gender identity and prohibit discrimination, some clinicians may exempt themselves from caring for transgender people, citing ethical reasons. The decision of health professionals to object to medical activities related to transgender care may collide with the interests of trans people and further marginalizes the already underprivileged gender-diverse population. This discussion paper analyses the concept of 'conscientious objection' and its application in health care settings in relation to transgender-related care. In general, the right of health professionals to abstain from contested duties on moral grounds must be protected. However, claims to conscience cannot be accepted within centers specialized in gender transitioning and for services unrelated to gender affirmation such as routine and urgent care. Personal responsibility and discretion on the part of clinicians is the most appropriate way to compromise between protecting the moral integrity of health professionals and shielding trans persons' access to care. Guidance is proffered on how to resolve the apparent impasse emerging from the denial of various types of health services to transgender people.

The challenge of compassion in predator conservation.

This paper argues that compassion for wild animals and the humans living alongside them should be integral to wildlife conservation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in predator conservation, and case studies are used to explore the consequences of wild animal attacks for human victims. Some arguments for extending compassionate consideration to animals seen as individuals are considered, along with the challenges these pose for predator conservation. A way forward from this apparent impasse is suggested, drawing on the capacity approach to embrace human with animal actors. The paper concludes with implications for predator conservation and recommendations, including incident responses sensitive to the traumatic impacts of attacks, and more collaborative approaches to handling human-wildlife interactions taking account of the capacities of local humans and wildlife.

Transgender Children: From Controvery to Dialogue

ABSTRACT This paper introduces the topic and unique format of the section that follows, on psychoanalytic work with transgender children. We first review the apparent impasse that characterizes our field regarding clinical work with gender diverse kids, as well as the reasons we pursued a live dialog to push thinking forward. Then, we outline the structure of the entire section, in which four contributors offer short essays, followed by a transcribed and edited version of the dialog we facilitated, which uses these essays as a starting point. We conclude with reflections on some of the themes that arise in the dialog, and implications for all of us who work in the arena of gender and young people.

Rethinking China–Taiwan relations as a yin–yang imbalance: political healing by Taiwanese Buddhist organisations

For many, relations across the Taiwan Strait appears to be an unresolvable sovereignty-cum-security impasse in the Westphalian world. Drawing analogies and metaphors from East Asian medicine (EAM), we reconceive this apparent zero-sum impasse as an inner imbalance of the China–Taiwan ‘body’ and investigate the possible healing effects of some Taiwanese Buddhist organisations. We identify three interrelated patterns in cross-Strait relations analogous to Spleen qi deficiency, Blood deficiency and yin deficiency. In EAM, the Spleen is associated with holding and its qi deficiency means poor digestion and/or Blood loss. Insufficient Blood is a type of yin deficiency, affecting all the fluids and lubrication of the body. While the cross-Strait movements of people, goods, services and capital have been increasing since the end of the Cold War, the ‘body’ fails to transform such ‘food’ into trust or a sense of ‘we-ness’ as ‘Blood’. We argue that cross-Strait Buddhist exchanges are conducive to conflict transformation, although they do not amount to a cure-all. Specifically, Tzu Chi Foundation’s charity work and Fo Guang Shan’s cultural education in China have cultivated mutual understandings and goodwill at the grassroots level, resembling therapeutic responses that help to relieve some of the symptoms.

Prospects for incorporation of epigenetic biomarkers in human health and environmental risk assessment of chemicals.

Epigenetic mechanisms have gained relevance in human health and environmental studies, due to their pivotal role in disease, gene × environment interactions and adaptation to environmental change and/or contamination. Epigenetic mechanisms are highly responsive to external stimuli and a wide range of chemicals has been shown to determine specific epigenetic patterns in several organisms. Furthermore, the mitotic/meiotic inheritance of such epigenetic marks as well as the resulting changes in gene expression and cell/organismal phenotypes has now been demonstrated. Therefore, epigenetic signatures are interesting candidates for linking environmental exposures to disease as well as informing on past exposures to stressors. Accordingly, epigenetic biomarkers could be useful tools in both prospective and retrospective risk assessment but epigenetic endpoints are currently not yet incorporated into risk assessments. Achieving a better understanding on this apparent impasse, as well as identifying routes to promote the application of epigenetic biomarkers within environmental risk assessment frameworks are the objectives of this review. We first compile evidence from human health studies supporting the use of epigenetic exposure-associated changes as reliable biomarkers of exposure. Then, specifically focusing on environmental science, we examine the potential and challenges of developing epigenetic biomarkers for environmental fields, and discuss useful organisms and appropriate sequencing techniques to foster their development in this context. Finally, we discuss the practical incorporation of epigenetic biomarkers in the environmental risk assessment of chemicals, highlighting critical data gaps and making key recommendations for future research within a regulatory context.

Mise en perspective chiasmique des histoires de l’art global au Canada

This article offers a critical perspective on the pedagogical direction of what I call “global art histories” in Canada by addressing the apparent impasse posed by the notion of what is euphemistically called “ethnocultural art” in this country. It examines different interpretations of the latter chiefly through a survey of course titles from art history programs in Canada and a course on the subject that I teach at Concordia University in Montreal. Generally speaking, the term “ethnocultural art” refers to what is more commonly understood as “ethnic minority arts” in the ostensibly more derisive discourses on Canadian multiculturalism and cultural diversity. The addition of the term “culture” emphasizes the voluntary self-definition involved in ethnic identification and makes the distinction with “racial minorities.” “Ethnocultural communities,” along with the moniker “cultural communities” (or “culturally diverse” communities), however, is still often understood to refer to immigrants (whether recent or long-standing), members of racialized minorities, and even First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples. Not surprisingly, courses on ethnocultural art histories tend to concentrate on the cultural production of visible minorities or ethnocultural groups. However, I also see teaching the subject as an opportunity to shift the classification of art according to particular geographic areas to consider a myriad of issues in myriad of issues in the visual field predicated on local senses of belonging shaped by migration histories and “first” contacts. As such, ethnocultural art histories call attention to, but not exclusively, the art of various diasporic becomings inexorably bound to histories of settler colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty. This leads me to reflect on some aspects of Quebec’s internal dynamics concerning nationalism and ethnocultural diversity that have affected the course of ethnocultural art histories in the province. I argue that the Eurocentric hegemonic hold of ethno-nationalist discourses on art and art history can be seen with particular clarity in this context. Moreover, I suggest that these discourses have hindered not only the awareness and study of art by so-called culturally diverse communities but also efforts to offer a more global, transnational, and heterogeneous (or chiastic) sense of the histories from which this art emerges. In today’s political climate, the project that is art history, now more than ever, needs to address and engage with the reverse parallelism that chiastic perspectives on the historiography of contemporary art entail. My critique is forcefully speculative and meant to bring together different critical vocabularies in the consideration of implications of the global and ethnic turns in art and art history for the understanding of the other. I engage in an aspect less covered in the literature on the global turn in contemporary art, namely the ways in which the mutual and dialectical relation between “cultural identity,” better described as a “localized sense of belonging” (Appadurai) and the contingency of place may shape, resist, or undermine the introduction of world or global art historical approaches in specific national institutional sites. I argue a more attentive politics of engagement is required within this pedagogical rapprochement to address how histories not only of so-called non-Western art but also diasporic and Indigenous art are transferred holistically as knowledge, if the objective is to shift understandings of the other by emphasizing points of practice in art history as a field, rather than simply the cultural productions themselves. I propose the term “global art histories” as a provisional rubric that slants the study of globalism in art history to more explicitly include these kinds of located intercultural negotiations.

Sexual Capitalism: Marxist Reflections on Sexual Politics, Culture and Economy in the 21st Century

From an apparent impasse and crisis in the 1970s and 1980s – politically and intellectually – Marxism has recovered to offer critical insights into contemporary changes and developments in late capitalist societies. Sexuality has been one area where Marxist critiques of commodification and consumption, reification, cultural production and its hegemonic effects and the structures of feeling and meaning-making that compose contemporary subjectivities have been of significant value in decoding legal, political and cultural changes in the regulation, prohibition and propagation of forms of sex and sexuality. This discussion will draw from some of the most important contributions to Marxist critiques of sexuality, contemporary and historical, to outline the contours of a critique of contemporary sexuality in society, notably Peter Drucker, Holly Lewis, Rosemary Hennessy, David Evans, and Keith Floyd. The Marxist critique of contemporary sexual politics and rights claims both recognises the importance of these struggles and provides a materialist critique that demonstrates both the contemporary power of Marxist analysis and a critical engagement with queer and constructionist “orthodoxies”. Marxism has become a central and important ground for exploring the vagaries of sexuality under capitalism in all its objectifying, commodifying, alienating and exploitative forms.

A critical analysis of vulnerability

Vulnerability is a concept fundamental to the theoretical and practical dimensions of disasters. Paralleling, and sometimes diverging from, the dominant physicalist discourse in disaster studies, disaster management and engineering-oriented studies, the conceptualisations of vulnerability and their application have undergone several transformations. In this paper, I critically examine the naissance, use and critiques of a structural understanding of vulnerability in the context of disasters. I contend that a structural understanding of vulnerability is less problematic than its physicalist predecessor from both theoretical and practical perspectives, but it is not unassailable. In fact, not only does structural vulnerability have an Achilles heel, but its potentially fatal flaws are shared by the physicalist paradigm. Instead of rejecting the structural vulnerability paradigm or being paralysed by the apparent impasse, I argue that scholars, practitioners and policy-makers should focus on the ways in which structural vulnerability benefits disaster theory and practice, and foreground the relational character of vulnerability.

Transgender women in Malaysia, in the context of HIV and Islam: a qualitative study of stakeholders\u2019 perceptions

BackgroundGlobally, one of the key groups considered to be at high risk of acquiring HIV are transgender women, often a marginalised group. In the Malaysian context there has been a scarcity of published research relating to transgender women, a sensitive issue in a Muslim majority country, where Islam plays an influential role in society. Furthermore, there has been a paucity of research relating to how such issues relate to HIV prevention in transgender women in Malaysia.Thus, the aim of this study is to explore the attitudes of stakeholders involved in HIV prevention policy in Malaysia towards transgender women, given the Islamic context.MethodsIn-depth interviews were undertaken with stakeholders involved in HIV prevention, Ministry of Health, Religious Leaders and People Living with HIV, including transgender women. Thirty five participants were recruited using purposive sampling from June to December 2013 within Kuala Lumpur and surrounding vicinities. Interviews were in person, audiotaped, transcribed verbatim and used a framework analysis.ResultsFive central themes emerged from the qualitative data; Perceptions of Transgender women and their place in Society; Reaching out to Transgender Women; Islamic doctrine; ‘Cure’, ‘Correction’ and finally, Stigma and Discrimination.Discussion: Islamic rulings about transgenderism were often the justification given by participants chastising transgender women, whilst there were also more progressive attitudes and room for debate. Pervasive negative attitudes and stigma and discrimination created a climate where transgender women often felt more comfortable with non-governmental organisations.ConclusionThe situation of transgender women in Malaysia and HIV prevention is a highly sensitive and challenging environment for all stakeholders, given the Muslim context and current legal system. Despite this apparent impasse, there are practically achievable areas that can be improved upon to optimise HIV prevention services and the environment for transgender women in Malaysia.

Exploring the Predictors of the International Digital Divide

ABSTRACTThe digital divide, while attracting considerable research and political attention since the introduction of the Internet, remains an apparently intractable issue for parts of the developing world. While most prior research focuses on national income as the most significant predictor of the digital divide and thus leaves little room for intervention when financial resources are scarce, the current study identifies institutional stability and infrastructure development as being of similar importance, thereby demonstrating a route out of the otherwise apparent impasse. In this study, we employ TreeNet, a software tool based on the gradient descent algorithm, which has not been previously used in digital divide studies. This tool allows for the determination of the relative importance of predictors of digital development and the importance of predictors that propel countries to top or bottom levels of digital development. The authors also uncover important interactions among predictors of digital development. Separate models were built for the level of Internet use and for the number of mobile phone subscriptions at a country level and these models were found to be different. As a result, the authors were able to determine critical thresholds of infrastructure at which the level of digital development drastically increases.

Progress in refining the global radiocarbon calibration curve using New Zealand kauri (Agathis australis) tree-ring series from Oxygen Isotope Stage 3

Ancient kauri (Agathis australis) buried in bogs across Northland, New Zealand, provide potential for a continuous high-precision radiocarbon calibration curve that extends to the full chronologic range of the dating method. Here we report four new tree-ring series which in addition to previous work represent some 5312 years across Oxygen Isotope Stage 3, a period during which human evolution, migration and extinction took place against a backdrop of extreme and abrupt global climate and environmental change. We compare our radiocarbon-dated series against three different calibration datasets and find considerable differences in the wiggle-matched solutions, demonstrating the difficulty in undertaking high-precision correlation between ice, marine and terrestrial sequences. One way around the apparent impasse is the use of 10Be in the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores to precisely link to kauri 14C from which a decadally/bidecadally-resolved floating ‘calibration’ dataset can be generated.

Surface Tensions: Framing the Flow of a Poetry-Film Collaboration

The article is a record of collaboration between a poet and a filmmaker – one undertaken under several people's gaze, becoming aware of itself through the perspectives of the visual and the verbal artist, of the critic and creative maker. It observes the process from the poet's and the filmmaker's sides of the interface, in the language and thought processes that come naturally to each, exploring particularly the use of metaphor to throw light upon the collaborators' investigation of poetry-film. As the project progressed it revealed the tensions between the participants' allegiance to the idea of collaboration and the urge to retain control of one's own medium and ways of working. Tracking the collaboration throughout each stage of development, from initial conversations, through false turns and periods of apparent impasse, the article records the inputs and shifts that led to a final synthesis and publication in an unexpected form.

Egalitarianism, Cultural Distance, and Foreign Direct Investment: A New Approach

This study addresses an apparent impasse in the research on organizations’ responses to cultural distance. We posit that cross-country differences in egalitarianism—a cultural orientation manifested in intolerance for abuses of market and political power and support for protection of less powerful actors—affect multinational firms’ choices of destinations for foreign direct investment (FDI). Using historically motivated instrumental variables, we observe that egalitarianism distance has a negative causal impact on FDI flows. This effect is robust to a broad set of competing accounts, including the effects of other cultural dimensions, various features of the prevailing legal and regulatory regimes, other features of the institutional environment, economic development, and time-invariant unobserved characteristics of origin and host countries. We further show that egalitarianism correlates in a conceptually compatible way with an array of organizational practices pertinent to firms’ interactions with nonfinancial stakeholders, such that national differences in these egalitarianism-related features may affect firms’ international expansion decisions.

Transport Sector Driving Economic Activity in Sri Lanka: Opportunities and Challenges

An expectation to double the per capita income in five years through a sustained GDP growth rate of 9 per cent could only hold ground under very favourable economic conditions. On the one hand, this projected acceleration of economic activity, if practically realized, would demand a substantial amount of investment expenditure which could cause a widening of resource gap leading the economy into a debt trap. On the other hand, if the service sector including the transport sector could not augment to meet up the investments and expected output expansions, the targeted growth itself could be at risk. Neither scenario would be favourable. A way out of this apparent impasse is to increase investment productivity—by way of being observant in capital spending and improving the trickle-down effect of investment expenditure against mere capital accumulation.

Mapping the hobosexual: A queer materialism

The following article introduces the hobosexual as a concept in queer materialism. Mapped at the intersection of not-for-profit hobo sex and labor practices historically, the hobosexual collapses the apparent impasse between the material and the symbolic so prevalent in queer studies. The concept represents the redeployment of queer as anti-capitalist practice; highlighted are the non-normative hobo practices of nonproductive expenditure, but also the recognition that these abnormalities are organized by capitalist systems of normalization designed to engender profit. The article also considers the degree to which industrial capitalism affected both hobo mobility and hobo anti-capitalist practice in the 19th century. Generated out of hobo history and queer as anti-capitalist practice, the hobosexual represents resistance to capitalist systems of normalization and enables connections, not necessarily between identities, but between anti-capitalist practices generated out of difference.

Can Deconstructing Paradigms Be Used as a Method for Deconstructing Texts?

Problems surrounding representations of texts have previously been raised and discussed, as has the difficulty, in the light of hermeneutic, critical and post-structuralist writers, of arriving at definitive meanings of texts. This paper is part of ongoing research into the problem of evaluating the representation of original texts in the organisation/management area. The texts in question are Burns and Stalker’s The Management of Innovation 1961, 1966, and to a lesser degree Lawrence and Lorsch’s Organization and Environment 1967. The representations are those in three widely used textbooks typical of many, and applications in management accounting research. A way round this apparent impasse may be to see whether there are any ‘objective’ or commonly accepted standards and criteria within a particular system of thought, assuming that the texts in question are all located within the same system. These texts will be explored in terms of the paradigmatic boundaries they encompass to see whether the same kinds of problems and solutions are presented, and whether they ultimately lie within the same boundaries. Finally, having argued that they are largely located in different paradigms, the underlying question is raised as to whether one paradigm can be an adequate vehicle for the transmission of a text substantially in another.