Communitarian Approach Research Articles

Rethinking Ownership, Power and Policy in Drug Patents: The Case for an Ubuntu-Infused Approach

Abstract The conceptualization of a proper approach to patent law, as it relates to drug patents and access to medicines, remains contested. This article joins the discourse by positing that an application of the communitarian approach of ubuntu to the might of human rights is a useful framing for normalizing equity-based interventions and would help tilt the balance of power from a narrow profit-seeking imperative to one that prioritizes the public good. It contends that, while private entity ubuntu, corporate social responsibility or charity yield some positive results, they are inadequate and must be buttressed by the right to health, which entails access to the necessary diagnostics, therapeutics and medicine for all. The article argues against the predominant hegemony of current thought, which has so far not yielded meaningful and timely access, and advocates for a rethink of the possibilities of more just outcomes through more just processes.

Unveiling injustice: Disrupting child removal policies and upholding breastfeeding: An emancipatory framework.

Before colonization, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities had nurturing, holistic, and communitarian approaches that promoted extended and healthy lives for their children. Colonization, marked by policies of genocide and assimilation, has resulted in an alarming overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children under the care of child protection agencies, resulting in compromised health outcomes and reduced life expectancies. We are conducting a study designed to enhance positive developmental outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children by articulating and enabling the rights of mothers and children to breastfeed in the context of a child protection intervention and child removal. To understand and address this problem, it is critical to implement culturally safe, de-colonized, emancipatory research that is guided by and benefits Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. This article presents an emancipatory framework that we are applying to our study using an Aboriginal participatory action research approach, that serves as a guide for non-Indigenous researchers seeking to conduct research with Indigenous communities. We emphasize the importance of incorporating an Aboriginal participatory action research framework, using community consultation and codesign; culturally secure data collection methods, and paying attention to Indigenous data sovereignty. Developing trusting respectful relationships is conducive to knowledge acquisition, exchange, and use, when research approaches deeply rooted in community involvement are applied. A call to action by the critical midwifery studies collective, urges non-Indigenous researchers to become accountable allies that demonstrates respect for community leadership while actively striving to ensure research does not perpetuate further harm, and produces effective change. This article provides an overview of ways to conduct ethical emancipatory research with Indigenous participants, that is, of benefit to midwifery practitioners and is applicable to many areas of research, policy, and practice.

Reframing sexual violence against Indigenous women as genocide: Mayan women’s experiences of sexual offenses during Guatemala’s Armed Conflict

ABSTRACT Judgment of sexual violences against Mayan women during the Armed Conflict in Guatemala remains neglected. Justice processes have yearned harassment of victims and judges, sentences overruled, and epistemological barriers distancing the Western judiciary system from Mayan women’s experiences of sexual violence. Judiciary expert reports suppose a dialogue opportunity between epistemic margins and Western hegemony, as they play the role of objectifying the experiences of victims via scientific research methods. Here, I show how using decolonial and communitarian feminism theoretical-methodological approaches builds epistemic bridges. I discuss that sexual offences targeted a subject whose existence supposes a threat to the State’s patriarch-colonialist, and misogynist-racist interests: Mayan women or Ixoq. I argue that sexual violence targeted against Mayan women must be understood as genocide, for it aims at Ixoq’s annihilation in the context of the Ladino Nation Project in 1980s Guatemala. This novel cartographic approach helps building epistemic bridges to ensure hermeneutic justice.

Creation, Thomas Berry, and the Church in Africa

The ecological crisis is a sign of the times, demanding adequate understanding, appropriate interpretation, and pastoral action in light of the Christian faith. Scholarly discourse on the ecological crisis continues to inspire partnership and collaborative actions in Africa. Sometimes, these efforts have yielded significant results, though amid uncharted territories. Scholars appeal for humans to embrace a mutually enhancing relationship with creation to build a common home for all creatures. A suitable and sustainable ecological vision that supports a communitarian approach to resolving the ecological crisis is Thomas Berry’s cosmology. Berry’s cosmological vision reclaims a creation theology that fosters a mutual relationship between humans and other creatures. Humans are beings in communion and beings in relationships created by God and thus from a common origin and moving toward a common destiny. This cosmological presupposition of Berry aligns with the ecological vision of Pope Francis in his encyclical Laudato Si’. The Pope calls humanity to a new cosmic relationship that would foster interdependency of the ecosystem and respect the intrinsic value of every creature. Given the unprecedented ecological challenges, humans have a unique role as intelligent beings toward other creatures, for future generations and the common good of the earth. This human responsibility toward the earth can be realized through an ecological ethics that fosters interdependence, interconnection, and mutuality in the human–earth relationship. Berry’s insights and Catholic ecological teachings merit consideration for African Catholicism.

Farmers’ perceptions of agroforestry, Democratic Republic of the Congo

The development of agriculture, particularly monocultures and extensive land-consuming practices, are causing deforestation and forest degradation, and this destruction of important carbon sinks is fueling climate change. Agroforestry, which involves the association of trees with crops and/or livestock, is presented as an alternative to industrial agriculture and slash-and-burn practices, to promote climate change resilience. In addition to climate change mitigation, agroforestry offers a plenitude of benefits, but there are often challenges to implementing agroforestry models. These include ensuring feasibility in local contexts and meeting diverse needs, which requires constant adaptation and mutual learning between farmers and technical experts. This proved true for Tropenbos DRC who worked to promote agroforestry among small forest and agricultural producers in the Bafwasende area of Tshopo Province. Tropenbos DRC’s initial approach of creating community agroforestry fields faced limited success as an unexpected degree of individualism made a communitarian approach unsuitable. The original model also met resistance as it combined cocoa and plantain with trees despite plantain not being an economically viable crop for farmers. In response, a shift in approach was made to rather support individual farmers interested in agroforestry, who could prioritise cocoa plants amongst trees, to ensure greater profits. In the former model, from 2019 to 2021, only 4 ha of cocoa trees were planted. Conversely, in just six months of adopting the new model in 2021, 45 ha of cocoa trees were planted. It is clear then, that the success of agroforestry models depends on farmer’s acceptance. All stakeholders must be included in what should be a participatory and iterative process that must remain flexible, as adaptability is essential for the continuous improvement and success of agroforestry initiatives.

A Social Ecological View in Overcoming the Environmental Crisis

Humans contribute to preserving nature and are even responsible for ecological disasters that occur. Humans have different characteristics from other living beings, which tend to be manipulative and want power. Conflicts related to exploiting natural resources will continue to arise if the harmony of social structures remains a problem. The orientation of modern humans tends to be materialistic and hedonistic, thus affecting the way they view their environmental systems, and contributing greatly to environmental damage. The increase in ecological disasters today cannot be separated from the poor environmental governance that tends to use natural resources without proper and sustainable environmental restoration. Through a socio-ecological approach, we seek to eliminate the commercialization of natural resources by adopting a social approach that embraces ecology, reconstruction, and communitarian approaches. This theory seeks to reconstruct and revise current views on social issues and environmental factors. The research data was collected through news fact collection and literature searches which were then subjected to descriptive and interpretive analysis. The results showed that (1) social ecology provides an understanding by prioritizing an egalitarian and democratic social structure so that humans can walk in harmony with nature, this aspect can be the basis for environmental management (2) social ecology is influenced by aspects of spirituality and egalitarianism in social structures to be a solution to the environmental crisis through changes in perspective on environmental management.

A qualitative study on informed consent decision-making at two tertiary hospitals in Uganda: Experiences of patients undergoing emergency surgery and their next of kin.

In emergency situations, patients and their next of kin must make complex medical and ethical decisions in a quick and timely way. To describe the decision-making process during informed consent for emergency surgery among patients and the next of kin of patients who have undergone emergency surgery. Consecutive sampling of 39 participants and in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted at two tertiary teaching hospitals in Uganda. There were 22 patients and 17 next of kin of patients who had undergone emergency surgery within 24-72 h. Responses about decision-making were coded into themes using the social constructivist theory and phenomenological approach. There were four emergent themes; decision-makers, people consulted, documentation of the consent and factors influencing decision-making. Most patients and next of kin made decisions on their own and documented the consent for themselves. Other family members and doctors were consulted during the decision-making process. Decision-making was influenced by reassurance of good outcomes of surgery and disclosure by the doctors. Decisions were made collaboratively with the patient at the center but with input of health personnel, the next of kin and other family members. A communitarian approach combined with shared decision-making between the doctor and the patient and next of kin with adequate discussion and disclosure of information in simple language would improve decision-making for patients and their next of kin.

International Institutions as Forms and Fora: Rao Geping and the Law of International Organizations in China

Abstract This article examines the emergence and development in China of the discipline of international organizations law by specifically focusing on the scholarship of Professor Rao Geping, a founding figure of the discipline. Rao’s writings are read in light of his personal life and professional career as well as China’s economic and social reforms and its foreign policy. A communitarian, cooperative and legal approach to international organizations emerged as Rao’s choice. International organizations are seen mostly as fora for interstate deliberations and negotiations and are approached mainly from their procedural aspect and channelling function. What has been highlighted is a facilitative, procedural and instrumental conception of international organizations rather than an autonomous, functional or regulatory one. Rao advocates an inclusive approach to international organizations, which tends to include flexible, informal frameworks into the ambit of the study of international organizations. In constructing institutions as forms and fora, Rao’s writings effectively play a double role, translating the liberal, progressive ideas of international organizations into domestic international legal studies and facilitating China’s continuous economic reform and political integration into the international system. Rao’s scholarship presents an instructive example of how a scholar from a semi-periphery country may navigate various tensions and paradoxes behind universal concepts and negotiate their concept of international organizations.

The Governance Turn in the World Bank Discourse from a Normative IR Lens: Cosmopolitanism or Communitarianism?

When structural adjustment programmes which had dominated the lending conditionality of the leading international financial institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) in the 1980s failed to deliver the expected success stories, governance gained traction as a predictor of aid effectiveness. Development discourse and practice began incorporating governance indicators and defining a governance concept in line with the effort to reassess the role of the state in development. This paper examines whether the inclusion of governance in the development discourse of the World Bank in the 1990s reflects cosmopolitan or communitarian ethical norms. Normative international relations theory permits an assessment of the so-called governance turn in World Bank conditionality which interrogates the understanding of the state and of the international community which are put forth. Key World Bank publications from the 1990s are selected for content analysis. The first level of analysis interrogates whether the conceptualization of the state emerging from the documents reflects a communitarian or cosmopolitan approach. The second level of analysis focuses on the universalism-particularism tension in the cosmopolitan-communitarian debate. What emerges from the analysis is a hybrid of cosmopolitan and communitarian sensibilities where the technocratic approach of the World Bank allows operationalizing conditionality and (good) governance in a list of indicators without a consistent normative framework.

Knowledge and society: A comprehensive approach to social epistemology

This article proposes an alternative approach to social epistemology – a comprehensive approach. It argues that the dominant approaches to social epistemology, which it identifies as communitarian and veritistic, are inadequate. It observes that the nature of the emphasis that the communitarian approach places on the epistemic community foster mindless tolerance in epistemology, which makes the pursuit of the cognitive goal of truth difficult to attain. It also observes that the veritistic approach that seeks to refocus social epistemology on the pursuit of the cognitive goal of obtaining truth does this at the expense of the affective goals of social epistemology. To overcome the inadequacies of the communitarian and the veritistic approaches and to ensure that social epistemology effectively pursues its cognitive and affective goals, this article offers the comprehensive approach. This approach absorbs the virtues of the communitarian and the veritistic approaches while avoiding their errors. Hence, it thrives on a view of truth that posits an objective and a subjective dimension of truth. The objective dimension ensures that the community only fosters and never impedes social epistemological projects such that social epistemology continues to pursue the cognitive goal of truth. The subjective dimension guarantees that the concern for truth does not lead to the neglect or abandonment of the pursuit of the affective goals of social epistemology. The rationale behind this approach is that for social epistemological projects and practices to remain truly epistemological and social, they must always take into consideration the cognitive and affective features of knowledge and knowers.

Is a right to health a means to protect public health? South Africa as a model for a communitarian interpretation of the right to health for the promotion of public health

ABSTRACT The right to health has primarily been developed and understood as an individualistic right and framed in terms of healthcare services. Public health and disease prevention have become increasingly important, particularly with the increasing occurrence of novel pandemics. The ability of the traditional framing of the right to health is less helpful in contexts where one seeks to apply a human rights-based approach to public health interventions. Though it has been posited that this may be remedied through the introduction of a collective right to public health, the South African experience illustrates the potential of the existing right to health to support public health efforts. Drawing on the African concept of ‘ubuntu’, one can adopt a communitarian approach to the right to health to enforce and protect the right, even where identifying discrete rights-holders and beneficiaries is challenging. This paper further argues that this communitarian approach to the right to health can ameliorate some difficulties experienced with judicialisation of health in other jurisdictions. The South African experience of judicial enforcement of the right to healthcare is used to illustrate the potential value of utilising a communitarian approach to the development of the right to health to include public health.

“I Dreamed of an Alliance between the Authority of Dogma and Political Liberty”: Mormonism and Socialism in France in the Nineteenth Century

“I Dreamed of an Alliance between the Authority of Dogma and Political Liberty”: Mormonism and Socialism in France in the Nineteenth Century

ASPECTS OF ASSESSING THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE SOCIAL CAPITAL OF TERRITORIAL COMMUNITIES IN THE CONDITIONS OF WARFARE

Now social capital is a daempher of war threats and a social driver of all country resources and reserves and of producing the necessary military and political effects. During the war, the accumulated social capital of territorial communities made it possible to mobilize quickly existing social reserves to help the army, refugees, and implement other important socio-economic initiatives. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the components, evaluation indicators and quality indicators of the territorial community’s social capital transformation in the military operations conditions. The application of the PEST analysis of transformation of territorial communities to the social capital in the operations under military conditions is substantiated. The transformations evaluation content of the social capital of territorial communities with socio-anthropological, utilitarian-practical, communitarian, network, value, sociological and synergistic approaches is emphasized and revealed. Indicators and parameters for each approach assessing social capital are provided. By assessing the social capital transformations nature, the duration and nature (mediated, direct) of the hostilities impact on the territorial community should be considered. There are formulated signs of the social capital transformation productivity of the territorial communities during military operations and the post-war period: formation of strong social ties, public activity networks, unifying social capital; proactive socio-cultural adaptation of internally displaced persons, participants in hostilities; conflict-free system modernization of differentiated social roles in the community, territorial community cohesion, constructive interaction with external social groups, support communication with community members who have moved abroad; growth of the level of personalized and depersonalized trust, curtailment of behavior opportunistic practices; activation of the general education role and potential as a center of social involvement; intensification of joint local projects, scaling up of volunteering in the local economy for socially beneficial areas rebuilding, etc. Keywords: social capital, territorial community, social networks, trust, social involvement, volunteering

Balancing the Communitarian, Civic, and Liberal Aims of Religious Education: Islamic Reflections

Balancing the communitarian, civic, and liberal aims of faith-based education presents a significant challenge to most religious education teachers. The communitarian approach to religious education is the most common, as it socializes children to become members of a given faith community. It recognizes students’ rights to collective identity and belonging. The civic approach to religious education asks, “what is the preferred meaning of respect in a religiously pluralist society, and how can it be promoted in the context of a deep belief in the primacy of one religion?” This approach also concerns itself with managing religious identities in a multifaith and democratic society. Liberal religious education involves asking the question, “how can one’s own religious doctrine be taught so as to allow the widest possible scope for critical reflection within [and about] a faith tradition?”. The current review essay addresses these questions by exploring the meanings, significance, and limitations of each approach and their possible implications for Islamic education in Israeli-Arab and Muslim-majority schools.

Umunthu, Covid-19 and mental health in Malawi

This paper investigates the centrality of Umunthu in mental health conception and treatment in Malawi. Umunthu is an African philosophical worldview which stresses that an individual is human as they relate to others, as in the saying I am because we are. Its communitarian approach contrasts with a predominantly western individualistic worldview; I think therefore I am. There are spelling variations of the word across Bantu languages, including bomoto (Congo), gimuntu (Angola); umunthu (Malawi); vumutu (Mozambique); vumuntu, vhutu (South Africa); humhunu/ubuthosi (Zimbabwe); bumuntu (Tanzania); and umuntu (Uganda). Literature shows that if embraced and advocated for, Umunthu plays a positive and influential role in mainstreaming and dealing with mental health issues in communitarian societies where the Umunthu ideals are part of the social fabric. However, in the case of Covid-19 and mental health in Malawi, the paper argues that Covid-19 preventive measures, particularly self-isolation when Covid-19 positive; maintaining social distance at all times; and reducing the number of people gathered at funerals, challenge Umunthu ideals, which have in the past been crucial in reducing stress, trauma and anxiety. This original paper bases its arguments on empirical data collected in a study conducted in Mangochi, Blantyre, Karonga and Lilongwe. Based on the study's findings, the paper highlights that although Covid-19 preventative measures have been globally embraced, it is also a limiting factor in the quest for mental health in societies with communitarian value systems.

Problem solving in East Africa: A contextual definition

Over the years, the conceptualisation of problem solving as a transferable skill has led to the emergence of various constructs and framings. While the models and the defined stages of problem solving are similar across the available research studies, some have warned that the context in which problems are defined and solved matters and cannot be overlooked. This study, through an ethnographic design with 230 participants (113 males, 117 females), explored the meanings and understandings of problem solving within varied cultural contexts in Kenya (80 participants), Tanzania (55 participants), and Uganda (95 participants). The interview protocol was structured around three sections: (i) location and participant background information (9 items); (ii) definition of problem solving (4 items, all open-ended); and (iii) characterised traits of a problem solver (9 questions, all open-ended). A thematic and synthetic data analysis was applied obtaining a final system of categories and codes. The comparison of the findings of contextualisation studies on problem solving in the three countries shows significant similarities and only minor differences. The steps of this process that emerge from the interviews in the three countries surveyed are: identification of the problem; understanding the causes and consequences of the problem; asking for community members’ advice and opinions about the problem; evaluating the possible solutions; and adopting the best one. Subskills, dispositions, and values linked to problem solving are influenced by the understanding of the self as being part of a community. Overall, the communitarian approach to problem solving—supported by the institutions available in each community and fuelled by values such as confidentiality, love, and trust—emerges as the most unique premise in the contextualised understanding of problem solving in East Africa.

The Voluntary Sterilisation Act: Best Interests, Caregivers, and Disability Rights.

How can caregivers' interests be balanced with disability rights in decisions about whether to sterilise an intellectually disabled person? This question is considered in the context of Singapore, a commonwealth country that lacks a test case. Singapore has a lesser-known history of eugenics, and has struck an uneasy compromise between communitarian values and obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) in recent years. This article provides an overview of Singaporean law under the Voluntary Sterilisation Act 1974 and the Mental Capacity Act 2008, and compares this with the law in Canada, England and Wales, and Australia. This article also situates the CRPD in the context of Singapore's dualist view of international law and communitarian approach to disability policy. It argues that CRPD rights to bodily integrity can be presumptively upheld in best interests determinations on sterilisation, while caregivers' interests can be accommodated in a relational understanding of best interests. A decisional framework along these lines is proposed.

Ethics in Practice and Ethnography: Faux pas During Fieldwork with Structurally Vulnerable Groups

Ethical issues are an essential part of research and need to be considered throughout the process and in its aftermath, especially when including vulnerable groups. This Field Notes revisits some ethical tensions that emerged during fieldwork with a ‘vulnerable population’—a group of waste-pickers and their families—and links these to specific avenues for further thinking within ethical frameworks. I reflect on mistakes, omissions, and blunders committed over 5 years working with this social group affected by many different forms of injustices, part of my 25 years of wider research into social inequalities and health disparities within marginalised communities. I remark upon three emerging ethical tensions relating to: the exclusion of certain narratives; the layers of vulnerabilities and danger of harm; and the risk of stereotyping vulnerable groups. I conclude that, more than just considering ethical issues within the context of our own work as researchers on moral solipsism, decisions in applied ethics must be integrated into broader models that offer a connected rationale for the infinite situations that can emerge from research. Alternative ethical models—such as anti-racist, feminist, communitarian, and transformative approaches—provide chances for collective decision making and promote social justice, equity, and democracy.

Geography of madness: communitarian psychiatry and spatial logic in The Third Population

ABSTRACT Graphic medicine narrates illness experiences, criticises the inhumane and exploitative designs of biomedicine and partakes in health humanities’ attempt to humanise medicine. Psychiatry, as a treatment speciality, has been criticised for its reliance on incarceration, the conspicuous hierarchy in its institutional structures and its operation of power since time immemorial. These restrictive devices demote the mentally ill to a subhuman category of individuals. Aurelien Ducoudray and Jeff Pourquie’s graphic narrative, The Third Population (2020) features institutional psychotherapy which is a compassionate model of treating the mentally distressed through a human-centred, space-oriented and communitarian approach as practiced in the French psychiatric institution, La Chesnaie clinic. The work recounts the guiding philosophies of this communitarian model of psychiatry and simultaneously engages with the concept of spatiality in comics and in a psychiatric institution. Drawing theoretical insights from Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman, this research article analyzes the graphic narrative on how La Chesnaie model of institutional psychotherapy counters the incarcerative and hierarchical models of treatment systems through the reconfiguration of spatial logic and the unique ways in which comics capture such a reinvented spatial dimension.

Understanding the Suicide Phenomenon from the Perspectives of the Loss Survivors

The study is descriptive qualitative research that illustrates the circumstances and new dynamics contributing to the never-ending suicide occurrences. It described first-hand real-life experiences of the suicide-loss survivors to determine the contexts, reasons, and implications of suicide and recommend community-based intervention strategies. Purposive-criterion and convenient sampling methods were used to determine the respondents. Focused group discussion and in-depth interviews were conducted to gather data analyzed using Braun & Clarke’s six-phase guide. The findings revealed that the life experiences of the respondents are characterized by regret, pain, and bereavement. Suicides were committed due to dysfunctional families, economic hardships, breakdown of relationships, and drug abuse. The pain of suicide affected both the victim and their survivors and occurs within the psychosocial sphere. Interventions should therefore employ a familial, communitarian, and inter-institutional approach. Local Government Units (LGUs) are recommended to initiate a reach-out community-based suicide intervention program and debriefing services.