Binary Opposition Research Articles

Deference, Dignity and ‘Theoretical Crisis’: Justifying ECtHR Rights Between Prudence and Protection

Abstract The present article engages with human rights law’s purported ‘theoretical crisis’, according to which rights—and specifically those in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)—are bereft of a convincing theoretical foundation. In doing so, the article interrogates the use of crisis-oriented language, challenging the very idea of a ‘theoretical crisis’ of rights. Identifying the tension between judicial activism and judicial deference as the source of the crisis narrative, this piece engages with the theoretical foundations of ECHR rights, rejecting binary opposition between opposing moral and political accounts of these rights. It presents an alternative account by framing human rights as capable of combining convincing moral foundations with institutional and political realities. This means melding principle and dynamism, and using moral values to interrogate a human rights law that remains indivisible from its institutional backdrop. Under this account, both the Court’s tools of deference, especially its European consensus doctrine, and the objection of rights inflationism must be subjected to scrutiny. This article straddles theory and practice to allow for a fresh perspective concerning the justification of rights, what is at stake, who bears the burden of restraint, and how current responses to backlash should be re-evaluated.

The Church in a Digital Society: An Effort to Transform Church Ministry in Indonesia

The development of technology has had a very significant impact on many aspects of human life, including the religious one. Regarding the effects, how should the Church carry out its tasks and calling in the middle of the rapidly advancing technology in Indonesia? This research applied the descriptive-qualitative method, emphasizing inductive reasoning, in which the researcher tried to develop a hypothesis from observations. The data collection was done with a bibliographical study by taking references from relevant books, academic journals, and online articles. The research suggests the Church should avoid viewing the world’s reality and digital society with a binary opposition lens. The Church must realize her mission to the world (in which digital culture is included), that is, to disciple the people for Christ. As ‘The Word’ has become ‘The Flesh’, the Church must also incarnate itself digitally. With her presence in the middle of the digital society, the Church must digitally carry out her tasks/calling-marturia (witnessing), koinonia (community), and diakonia (service). A digital Church must solidify itself within the digital society in the struggle to wade through the strong current of information and communication technology development for a more effective service to humanity.

The information status of iconic enrichments: modelling gradient at-issueness

Abstract Linguistic structures can contribute different types of meaning alongside standard assertions, such as conventional implicatures and presuppositions, which have long been described as being non-at-issue meaning contributions. Although information status has long been handled as a binary opposition between non-at-issue and at-issue content, recent research suggests that a gradient approach may be more appropriate. Building on new – and in the formal linguistic framework so far mostly neglected – data targeting spoken and gestural iconicity, specifically iconic gestures and ideophones, this paper investigates the information status of such iconic contributions in spoken language and suggests a new theoretical concept of at-issueness by spelling it out as a gradient category. The paper highlights a range of factors which can affect the information status of iconic contributions, proposing a scale for iconic phenomena based on these factors. To formally model this scale, we propose an approach in which at-issueness is analysed as a gradient property based on a given structure-inherent at-issueness status and the corresponding proposition’s relevance to a Question Under Discussion in a given context. This analysis accounts for the variations in information status observed between different iconic enrichments and their impact on truth conditions and paves the way for an approach to Common Ground updates using this model. The analysis outlined here allows for a more nuanced understanding of non-at-issue content and its interaction with at-issue content and provides predictions which can guide further experimental work on information status and the factors that influence it.

The Transformation of Rural Areas Located in China’s Agricultural Heritage Systems under the Evolution of Urban–Rural Relationships

The sustainable logic between the Agricultural Heritage System (AHS) and environmental synergy has been significantly changing with China’s urban–rural relationship shift from binary opposition to a stronger network exchange. During the process of transformation, China’s AHS rural areas encounter two major development trends and social realities, i.e., whether to continue conventional characteristic agricultural development or detach from conventional characteristic agricultural resources to achieve industrial transformation. Our aim is to analyze the structure, identity and functional transformation characteristics of AHS rural areas from the urban and rural scale, as well as to build an explanatory framework for transformation mechanisms. A total of 109 counties and five cases of important AHS areas in China are taken as research objects, combining quantitative and qualitative analyses to analyze the transformation of AHS rural areas from two aspects. On the one hand, for changes in single development elements, there are three development elements and corresponding transformation dimensions: (1) Land structure: there is a synergistic change between the increase in urbanization rate and the loss of rural land, with associated changes in space and production structure. (2) Population identity: the rural population loss in high-urbanization-level areas is severe, where farmers are combined or separated from traditional agriculture. (3) Industry function: the trend of non-agricultural development of the industrial economy is obvious, and the traditional functions of agriculture are facing a continuation or a deep transformation. On the other hand, for relations among development elements, combined with a regression analysis and field investigation, we try to explain how the development elements and characteristic elements influence each other while working together on the transformation of AHS rural areas. The transformation depends on the path of the original industrial structure, while the urban–rural income ratio, regional distribution and land urbanization rate all positively stimulate the transformation from agricultural industries to non-agricultural ones. Moreover, the transformation of AHS rural areas is also affected by the characteristic elements of their special agricultural heritage, specifically, whether the heritage is scalable, scarce or socialized, etc., and these special attributes can determine the different development forms of heritage elements in the modern agricultural industrial system.

Charles Dickens and Colonial Expansionism ‘Obscured’ in "When We Were Orphans" by Kazuo Ishiguro

The intertextual associations with Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations in When We Were Orphans seem unobvious. In this paper I will show that Dickensian motifs are nonetheless noticeable in Ishiguro’s novel and, relating to Dickens’s fictionalised biography by Peter Ackroyd, some events from his turbulent life can also be recognised. The concept of “obscurity” of the image that derives from Emanuel Levinas, and which was later elucidated by Homi K. Bhabha, will be employed in my analysis. Ishiguro seems to conceal a true picture of British colonialism, drawing the reader’s attention to Christopher Banks’s futile mission to find his missing parents, remaining myopic to the real evil around him. The enunciation of “the unspoken,” that is to say, the history of colonial power dynamics will be particularly clear while elaborating on the story of Christopher’s mother, Diana Banks. I will also demonstrate that When We Were Orphans accentuates the issue of the binary opposition between the West and the East, which explicitly alludes to Edward Said’s politics of bipolarity.

The Analysis of the Binary Opposition of “Good” and “Evil” in Modern English and French in the Context of Foreign Language Teaching

The research examines the binary opposition of “good” and “evil” in the English and French languages within the context of foreign language teaching. The aim is to analyze these concepts’ lexical-semantic and cultural aspects and explore their implications for foreign language learners. The study adopts a comparative approach, considering the similarities and differences in representing “good” and “evil” in the two distantly related languages. The analysis focuses on the semantic structure and distribution of lexical units associated with these concepts and the cultural connotations embedded in their usage. The research focuses on how the binary opposition of “good” and “evil” impacts language learners’ understanding of the target culture and their ability to communicate effectively in the foreign language. The latter gain a deeper appreciation of the target culture’s moral values and social dynamics by examining the cultural meanings and connotations associated with these oppositions. The findings highlight the asymmetry of lexical units within the lexical-semantic groups of “good” and “evil”, revealing discrepancies in the number and distribution of words and their meanings. Antonymy and enantiosemy are identified as regularities in forming vocabulary, denoting good and evil in the compared languages. These linguistic tools enable learners to express contrasting concepts and enhance their linguistic and intercultural awareness. Incorporating the binary opposition of “good” and “evil” in foreign language teaching can promote a deeper understanding of the target culture’s values, norms, and worldview. Learners become more sensitive to cultural aspects and better equipped to navigate intercultural interactions by unravelling the underlying cultural codes embedded in language.

Wilderness Ethics in the Anthropocene

Abstract The concept of wilderness has been deconstructed with the arrival of the age of Anthropocene, so the wilderness ethics of the Anthropocene was once ignored. But in fact, what has been deconstructed is only the “natural” wilderness as pure nature, not the “untrammeled” wilderness. In addition, the environmental system corresponding to the traditional wilderness concept still exists, and is still the closest to the original natural environmental system. There is a debate on how to treat this environmental system in the age of Anthropocene, so it is necessary to clarify the concept of wilderness in the Anthropocene and rebuild the wilderness ethics. The wilderness ethics of Anthropocene is a responsive one, which calls for both sides to interact and blend without denying the autonomy of both sides: On the one hand, we should establish a holistic view of harmonious coexistence between man and the wilderness, basing on the ideological basis provided by the Anthropocene to break the binary opposition between culture and nature. The view does not include a sacred order. On the other hand, we should affirm the autonomy and uncertainty of the “untrammeled” wilderness. The wilderness ethics of the Anthropocene enlightens us that we should regulate the intervention of human and technology in a certain range when protecting the wilderness, respect “locality” and derive ecological wisdom from indigenous peoples.

Language and Power: How Democracy and Pluralism Shape Patterns of Minority Political Representation in Bali, Indonesia

This study aims to portray the political representation of minorities using discourse analysis as a tool to analyse the 2019 legislative election in Bali province. Bali is a province with the largest Hindu population in Indonesia. It is necessary for minority groups to take strategic steps to express their participation and existence in political contestation. The power of language and the strength of minority political candidates have led to successful competition for seats in the legislature. The ethnically and religiously heterogeneous electorate sympathized with the candidate. Using a linguistic semiotic approach, the analysis results are obtained, and the use of language as a representation of Muslim power is aimed at the diction of “Khadimul Ummah”, or servant of the public. While this study uses a qualitative approach to semiotic analysis, the diction of servant of the public is interpreted using a binary opposition approach. The results of this study show that language creates its identity and becomes a figure of interest to the Balinese people as a representation of Indonesian legislative members in the electoral district of Bali. For most people in Bali, there is a belief that this diction is something that strengthens inter-religious harmony between societies. The significance of this study lies in the fact that language may have symbolic power for both ethnic minority and majority groups.

Crafts in the Time of Coronavirus

Crafts in the Time of Coronavirus

Maqollar tilida gender va kuch munosabatlari: erkak qiyofasi

It is very interesting to study proverbs and sayings describing the image of a man and a woman in-nonnative Kazakh and English languages. Proverbs and sayings that describe the image of a man which are used in everyday spoken language add value to the theme of the article. In addition, the relevance of the work lies in the examination of cross-comparisons of proverbs and sayings between non-native languages. The article aims at studying proverbs and phrases in English that describe the appearance, character, social characteristics, and position of men in society. Gender is one of the most important parameters of binary opposition and social existence.

Психология смеха в структурно-диалектическом подходе

<p>The article is devoted to the discussion of the psychology of laughter from the perspective of its functional purpose in culture. Addressing the topic of laughter is needed to describe its counterintuitive nature, consisting of dialectical contradictions. The study of the formation of laughter in children's subculture and its inclusion in the subject area of developmental psychology is of immediate interest. The purpose of the study is to determine the psychological significance of laughter in culture as a system of normative situations. We assumed that in a normative situation such as a biosocial unit of culture, laughter will manifest itself as a phenomenon of a binary nature, containing contrasting relations. The structural-dialectical method of analysis, which consists of the search for contrasts, made it possible to build an explanatory model of the phenomenon under study. In the capacity of binary pairs in the study of laughter as a psychological phenomenon, such antinomies as "freedom-fear", "good-evil", "world-antiworld" were singled out. Laughter as a psychological phenomenon has a dialectical structure in which fear gives rise to the desire for freedom; the cultural mission of laughter is associated with the discovery of evil as a violation of the norm and good as the inviolability of culture. The condition for overcoming fear and achieving illusory freedom through laughter is the displacement of evil into the unreal world, which leads to the supra-situation of the subject.</p>

Psy wojny kontra kundle pokoju: siła hybrydowości w powieści Vieta Thanha Nguyena „Sympatyk"

The protagonist-narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel, as he often repeats, is a person of two minds. As the child of a Vietnamese woman and a French Catholic priest, he becomes a „hybrid” on the genetic level and later also in the cultural sphere. His upbringing has not only been influenced by the Catholic religion, communist indoctrination but also by the American literary canon, as he has graduated from a literary studies program in the US. He is a communist spy in the South Vietnamese Army during the war, and after the fall of South Vietnam he escapes to the United States as one of the few refugees. Loyal to the communist revolution in the US, he continues his intelligence activities going to any lengths and using any means considered necessary. The nameless narrator is not only a character that reminds a hero from a Hollywood action movie, but also a hybrid – a man who, through diversity or perhaps the merging of mutually exclusive identities, inhabits the sphere in between. This phenomenon, called nepantlerismo by Gloria Anzaldúa, means consciously navigating the gaps between the binary oppositions of those who belong to neither of the two sides. In the article, I look at the phenomenon of hybridity and consider to what measure it can be seen as an antidote to national chauvinism, imperialism and violence. I also examine what Viet Thanh Nguyen in his scholarly work calls the „industrialization of memory,” viewing Hollywood as a tool for producing memories of the Vietnam War operating within the US military-industrial complex.

The Gender-Sexuality Continuum in K-12 Spaces: A Case Study of Five Male Educators Teaching Youth in New York City

ABSTRACT The prevalence of hegemonic masculinity praxis and heteropatriarchal normalization in the United States produces a challenging work environment for male K-12 teachers in dance-educational spaces. This interview-based case study investigates five male New York City-based K-12 dance educators’ personal, cultural, and professional identities relating to students, the education environment, and the community. Building on existing masculinity theory, gender-in-dance, and psychosocial research, this study furthers the understanding of beliefs, values, biases, and opinions of dancing men within K-12 schools. Data present (a) current gendered experiences within dance curricula, (b) community concerns related to the queerness of dance, and (c) contrarily, the frequent celebration of students’ gender-sexuality expressions. The interviewed teachers report increased acceptance of the art form and, conversely, increased binary thinking. Participants indicate that male teenagers have difficulty finding support and affirmation for engaging in a dance curriculum.

Genderkompetenz in der Medizin und Osteopathie

Since over a century gender mainstreaming tries to take root in our society to ensure equality of all genders on all social levels. Nevertheless, the so-called gender gap is still omnipresent, especially the gender health gap. Men are still the main focus in (medical) research, the androcentric system and binary thinking are tenacious.This can cause severe consequences for medical issues for non-male genders. Late or wrong diagnosis for heart diseases or pain syndromes in women happen a lot of times because of unawareness of early symptoms or wrongly blaming a psychosomatic cause. Non-binary people are not represented at all.The medical knowledge of gender differences is also important for osteopathy, because we have to interpret those symptoms in a gender sensitive way in order to avoid missing contraindications for a treatment.

Derrida Reads George Eliot: Ticks and Arrows on The Lifted Veil

Abstract The personal library of Jacques Derrida, acquired by Princeton University in 2015, includes a richly annotated copy of George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil. Derrida’s marginal markings reveal preoccupations shared between Eliot’s narrator, Latimer, and the persona of his 2001 book Veils, specifically the allure of the unknown, the city of Prague as a volatile setting, certain versions of the veil they hold in common (in particular veil as shroud), and the inclination they share toward deconstructing binary oppositions (in particular life and death). Such connections justify the continued interest in Eliot by deconstructionists in this century, as well as K. M. Newton’s description of George Eliot as “proto-Derridean.”

Life History Research and the Violence of War: Experiencing Binary Thinking on Pain and Privilege, Being and Knowing

This reflective piece explores the ‘I am the evidence’ side of the process of knowing. It offers the story of the Yugoslav wars of secession (1991–1999) and their human consequences from the point of view of someone who refuses to surrender ground to the socio-political conditions of life in which ethno-national and cultural differences have to be transgressed. The core of this article is based on the life history of Maja Korac, developed in conversation with Cindy Horst. It approaches the intersections of her life and research from a narrative research perspective. We engage in a contrapuntal discussion of how Maja’s family background, gender, social class, and ethnic/national identity affected her life choices in terms of political engagement, research trajectories, and mobility paths. In doing so, we follow Barad’s argument that we do not obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are part of the world. Hence, our discussion and analysis enables the multivocal articulation of the interweaving of personal, collective, geopolitical, and historical contexts in Maja’s research. This process made Maja feel visible after a very long time, because it opened the possibility of (re)gaining the vocabulary to express who she is, and how it has been for her as a human being within a professional role and identity, as well as within an ascribed ethnic identity during a specific historic time. This opportunity for understanding and knowing while being inside the world allowed Maja to repossess her life and identity—individual, professional, collective. It also re-opened the possibility to challenge further the notion of ‘true knowledge’ that is presumably based on ‘methodologically sound paradigms’, all of which exclude the researcher as a person, as who, as a life.

TRACES OF POST-STRUCTURALIST FEMINISM IN LOCHHEAD’S BLOOD AND ICE

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, which is considered as the foremost British gothic novel, has influenced numerous writers as a source of inspiration. Liz Lochhead, a renowned Scottish poet and playwright, offers her unique perspective on the classic novel of Frankenstein, which has been retold and reinvented numerous times in contemporary literature. Lochhead skilfully weaves together the ideas of dream and reality, as well as past and present, in a seamless and significant manner throughout the play. In the play, she raises doubts about Mary's ability to create as a writer and care for her child, while also questioning Claire's feminine identity. Lochhead is able to demonstrate her remarkable power that defies the limitations imposed by the phallocentric society and traditional gender roles. Through her characters Mary Shelley and Claire, Lochhead serves as a force that contradicts and challenges the prevailing patriarchal mind set. Using the theoretical principles of poststructuralist feminism, this study initially intends to demonstrate how Lochhead challenges the binary oppositions that have historically limited women's roles and identities in the play. In the light of Cixous's écriture feminine concept, the second objective is to examine how Lochhead approaches the issue of women's alienation in a phallocentric culture, how she disrupts patriarchal linguistic structures, and opens up new avenues for women’s self-expression.

Crossing home – school border as rites de passage

We can analyse home – school discourse in accordance to Arnold van Gennep’s theory of the rites de passage (Van Gennep, 1986). Its essential three components (rites) might be perceived in the process of children’s and parents’ home – school transitions. Assuming that children and their parents transit from one to another social status quo we can see the basis for ritual forms of transition that are typical in such processes.We can also indicate binary oppositions that describe these statuses, e.g.: child vs. student, parent vs. parent of student. Thus, after van Gennep, we are able to name the following rites: rite of exclusion, rite de marge (marginalisation), and rite of inclusion in the home - school transition.The paper presents selected landscapes of school life, in which ritual pattern of transition (rittes de passage) are indicated and analysed in the context of potential opportunities of changes in the ways of parental involvement and democratisation of social life in Poland.

The capture of small near-Earth asteroids in a bound binary pair in Earth's orbit

Hill's approximation models the motion of two small masses gravitationally interacting with each other and perturbed by a large central body. An application of the model is employed in this paper to manoeuvre the relative motion of two asteroids by a small impulse to capture them in bound binary motion in Earth's orbit. The initial conditions prior to the capture manoeuvre are restricted in a parameter space termed the gateway region. The gateway region is produced by applying the constraint that the capture impulse is a real-valued function, and the zero-velocity curve closes, enveloping both asteroids. A full mission scenario is designed with three impulses. The first impulse transfers one asteroid from a far field region to the gateway region, where there is mutual interaction with the second asteroid, which is assumed to be the origin of the relative motion. The second impulse changes the trajectory of the asteroid in the gateway region to a linear drift approaching the second asteroid. The third impulse is calculated by means of increasing the Jacobi integral to reach the critical value required to close the zero-velocity curve. It is demonstrated in principle that the triple impulses enable the candidate asteroids to be captured in a bound pair in Earth's orbit. It is also shown that the thruster on-time for the capture impulse as applied for the different small asteroids considered is short relative to the natural time-scale of the orbital dynamics of the problem, which shows the feasibility of the impulse approximation with the typical thruster forces applied. This strategy could provide a basis for parking small captured near-Earth asteroids in Earth's orbit.

A prognostic model for ovarian neoplasms established by an integrated analysis of 1580 transcriptomic profiles

Even after debulking surgery combined with chemotherapy or new adjuvant chemotherapy paired with internal surgery, the average year of disease free survival in advanced ovarian cancer was approximately 1.7 years1. The development of a molecular predictor of early recurrence would allow for the identification of ovarian cancer (OC) patients with high risk of relapse. The Ovarian Cancer Disease Free Survival Predictor (ODFSP), a predictive model constructed from a special set of 1580 OC tumors in which gene expression was assessed using both microarray and sequencing platforms, was created by our team. To construct gene expression barcodes that were resistant to biases caused by disparate profiling platforms and batch effects, we employed a meta-analysis methodology that was based on the binary gene pair technique. We demonstrate that ODFSP is a reliable single-sample predictor of early recurrence (1 year or less) using the largest pool of OC transcriptome data sets available to date. The ODFSP model showed significantly high prognostic value for binary recurrence prediction unaffected by clinicopathologic factors, with a meta-estimate of the area under the receiver operating curve of 0.64 (P = 4.6E-05) and a D-index (robust hazard ratio) of 1.67 (P = 9.2E-06), respectively. GO analysis of ODFSP’s 2040 gene pairs (collapsed to 886 distinct genes) revealed the involvement in small molecular catabolic process, sulfur compound metabolic process, organic acid catabolic process, sulfur compound biosynthetic process, glycosaminoglycan metabolic process and aminometabolic process. Kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes pathway analysis of ODFSP’s signature genes identified prominent pathways that included cAMP signaling pathway and FoxO signaling pathway. By identifying individuals who might benefit from a more aggressive treatment plan or enrolment in a clinical trial but who will not benefit from standard surgery or chemotherapy, ODFSP could help with treatment decisions.