Conscientious Engagement Research Articles

Bandolier Bags and Indigenous Modernism

This is a material culture-based case study of two bandolier bags dated to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century in the Agnes Etherington Art Center collection in Kingston, Canada. The floral motifs that decorate these two bags are not made from porcupine quills, nor are all of them bilaterally symmetrical as in “traditional” Indigenous art. Instead, they are made from glass beads, and most of the floral designs are asymmetrical. The bags’ surface patterns and materials were made possible through international trade, which facilitated the merging of European and other global designs, materials, and forms with Indigenous visual and material culture. Contemporary Western anthropological discourse framed these Indigenous objects as “hybrids” and alleged that they distorted the original meaning of such styles in a European context while simultaneously “corrupting” traditional Indigenous art and culture. Such art forms were denied a place in modernity due to their supposed inauthenticity. Ironically, “authentic” Indigenous art and material culture was likewise barred from being considered “modern” due to its hand-made, “preindustrial” nature. Connecting North American historical developments with discourse on Indigenous modernisms, I argue that on the contrary, these bags evince their makers’ conscientious engagement with modernity and can be considered modern Indigenous art.

The Impact of Smartphone Use on Students' Motor Skills and Emotional Well-being: A Comprehensive Study

The widespread adoption of smartphones among students has raised intriguing questions about their potential influence on various aspects of development, including motor skills and emotional well-being. This research undertook a comprehensive investigation into these relationships, employing a mixed-methods approach encompassing surveys, interviews, and observational assessments. The findings revealed a complex interplay between smartphone use and motor skills. While certain aspects of motor development exhibited negative associations with prolonged smartphone usage, nuances emerged when considering the types of activities engaged in and the presence of parental guidance. These results underscore the significance of maintaining a balanced approach to technology use that encourages physical activity alongside screen time. In the realm of emotional well-being, this study unveiled a spectrum of effects associated with smartphone use. While some students reported experiencing stress, anxiety, and social comparison related to their digital interactions, others discovered solace in mindfulness apps and maintained positive social connections. These results underscore the need for comprehensive digital literacy programs to empower students with the skills to navigate the emotional landscape of the digital age adeptly. Furthermore, the research highlights the pivotal roles of parents and educators in guiding responsible smartphone use. Parents are instrumental in setting boundaries, fostering healthy technology habits, and promoting a harmonious equilibrium between virtual and real-world experiences. Educators, on the other hand, can harness the potential of smartphones for educational enrichment, leveraging interactive learning and digital resources to enhance students' academic journeys. In conclusion, this research elucidates the intricate relationship between smartphone use and students' motor skills and emotional well-being. Recognizing the dual nature of technology's impact, it emphasizes the importance of conscientious engagement with smartphones to maximize their advantages while mitigating potential risks. As we navigate the digital era, the insights from this study contribute to informed discussions, enabling educators, parents, and policymakers to craft strategies that harness the potential of smartphones as tools for empowerment and enrichment in the lives of students.

The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Albert J. Rivero.

<i>The Sentimental Novel in the Eighteenth Century</i>. Ed. Albert J. Rivero.

Citing you on behalf of an other digital geographical imagination

In replying to Natalie Oswin’s ‘An Other Geography’, I extend Oswin’s argument for ‘solidarities across modes of difference’ to the place of the scholarly Internet, through the specific case of citation practices. The scholarly Internet—ranging across platforms such as Google Scholar, Socarxiv, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu , to social media including the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram—affords new connections and communities, particularly over citations that further give voice to the marginalized, erased, and oppressed of geography that Oswin centers in her article. At the same time, most of these software reproduce whiteness, sexism, heteronormativity, ableism, and colonialism in their algorithmic biases. I urge geographers to reconsider their attachments to and expectation of the scholarly Internet, particularly around citation practices. Instead, I call for practices of survival for Others that must necessarily include, in the words of Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne, conscientious engagement and disengagement.

Citation practices in tourism research: Toward a gender conscientious engagement

This study explores gender gaps and differences in citation practices of scholars in the top-cited articles in tourism research. The results suggest that male researchers dominate the authorship of those articles and are more likely to engage in self-citation than females. The study also finds a disparity in citation counts between male- and female-authored articles. Controlling for other factors, author gender is an important determinant of citation counts. The study advocates for a more gender conscious citation practices and provides potential gender-based interventions to reduce the citation gap. The research raises awareness about the dangers of the perfunctory use of citations and paves the way for further debates on the politics and embedded inequalities of citations in tourism research.

Mother Trouble

Mother Trouble David Greven (bio) Review of Andrew Parker, The Theorist's Mother, Durham: Duke UP, 2012. 200 pp. The figure of the mother—her theoretical importance, even simply her human presence—has historically been suppressed in the fields of philosophy and psychoanalysis. As a characteristic example, Lacan's entire theory of our formation into individual subjects depends upon the rejection of the mother as we enter the "Father's" Symbolic domain of language and law. Inhabiting a pre-verbal realm of bodies and sensations, the mother is rendered a materiality that must be transcended in order to acquire patriarchal personhood, a narrative repeated in psychoanalytic literature ranging from Freud to Lacan to Kristeva. For the most part, conscientious engagement with the role and the theoretical possibilities of the figure of the mother have occurred in feminist theory, amplifying the silences about mothering in male intellectual endeavor. Andrew Parker's bracing, engaging, lucid, often thrilling study The Theorist's Mother redresses this theoretical, cultural, gendered, and emotional imbalance, putting the significance of the mother in the making of thought essential. His effort, as I will show, is valuable even though not fully successful; there is a way in which the mother gets lost even in Parker's attempt to restore or at least illuminate her presence. But this book, a bold intellectual adventure, will be required reading for anyone interested in the vagaries of the gender politics of psychoanalytic and philosophical thinking. Discussing Simon Critchley's lack of "reflection on maternity from his discussion of the 'created character of human experience,'" Parker notes that it has the "effect of suggesting that motherhood is a kind of in human experience, alien to the forms of conceptual generality to which philosophy aspires" (3). As with Critchley, so with the other philosophers discussed here. Focusing mainly on Marx, Freud, Lukács, Lacan, and Derrida, and touching on figures such as Heidegger, Barthes, Levinas, Foucault, and Badiou, Parker does a marvellous job of evoking each thinker's work in its context and then using this evocation as the basis from which to consider [End Page 435] the shaping power of their failure to consider the mother as an autonomous being with a reality of her own, or the role that a mother who was not simply framed and then conceptually discarded as a reproductive body might play in intellectual inquiry. Even Derrida, so sensitively attuned to language and its biases, falters rather pitifully when asked about the mother's significance to philosophy, or, more specifically, "what philosopher would you have liked to be your mother?" (5). The Introduction, "Philosophy's Mother Trouble," lays the groundwork effectively and provocatively. The tour Parker provides here of lapses in philosophical thinking on the mother, such as Derrida's, exposes some key blind spots: the emphasis on thinking of the mother as "One": one person, one figure, one experience, in a word, monolithic; the tendency to view the mother as being exactly as one perceives her to be, and not an assumption or a projection; the failure to understand that "multiple from the outset, the mother exceeds her traditionally derogated role as the father's counterpart, unsettling the binary logic modeled on their relationship" (17). Because of these biases, mother trouble abounds. The Introduction also provides incisive snapshots of feminist theory, which has some lapses of its own, such as Julia Kristeva's pronouncement that she will speak for the Mother, as if there were only one. A definite weakness of the book is that this well-informed dialogue with feminist theory is not sustained; one longs for a discrete chapter in which Parker works through the equally conflicted and various accounts of the mother in feminist thought. Chapter 1, "Reading, Teaching, and 'Maternal Divination,'" focuses on Lacan. Parker considers, for example, Lacan's cryptic reference to "maternal divination" in his reading of the famous fort/da moment from Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle in which the child throws and retrieves a spool out of his (or her) crib in order to manage the experience of the mother's absence and return. "I, too, have seen with my own eyes," writes Lacan, "opened by maternal divination [la...

Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement’

An increasing amount of scholarship in critical, feminist, and anti-racist geographies has recently focused self-reflexively on the topics of exclusion and discrimination within the discipline itself. In this article we contribute to this literature by considering citation as a problematic technology that contributes to the reproduction of the white heteromasculinity of geographical thought and scholarship, despite advances toward more inclusivity in the discipline in recent decades. Yet we also suggest, against citation counting and other related neoliberal technologies that imprecisely approximate measures of impact, influence, and academic excellence, citation thought conscientiously can also be a feminist and anti-racist technology of resistance that demonstrates engagement with those authors and voices we want to carry forward. We argue for a conscientious engagement with the politics of citation as a geographical practice that is mindful of how citational practices can be a tool for either the reification of, or resistance to, unethical hierarchies of knowledge production. We offer practical and conceptual reasons for carefully thinking through the role of citation as a performative embodiment of the reproduction of geographical thought.

Transforming disagreements into opportunities to enhance learning, decision making and trust

Purpose – Disagreements related to processes, priorities, and purpose surface within organizations. Disagreements may be between colleagues, or between internal and external protagonists, or between managers and their direct reports. Rather than avoiding or ignoring or even trying to eradicate disagreement, this paper highlights the potential value to be extracted from disagreement and offers some ideas on how best to be in a position to do so. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is the result of the insights offered by one of the world’s leading ethicists and the reflective thought based on hundreds of discussions by all three authors with practicing managers combining for over 60 years of such engagement. Findings – Practical considerations, examples, and suggestions for extracting the benefit resident in disagreement are presented and discussed. Practical implications – The ideas and outcomes posed are immediately and broadly applicable. Originality/value – Readers are provided with an array of field-observed benefits that are potential outcomes from a conscientious engagement with disagreement. Within an organizational “climate of possibilities”, ten potential benefits from constructive engagement with disagreement are presented and discussed. In addition, ten means for enhancing the likelihood of capturing those benefits are presented.

History from Six‐feet Below: Death Studies and the Field of Modern Middle East History

AbstractThis article explores the intersections between scholarship of the nascent field of Death Studies and that of modern Middle East history. Death is both present and absent in the field of modern Middle East history. Death is present in that it is omnipresent; the discipline of history requires an inquiry into the worlds of those who have died, and Middle East scholars have long spoken of death and used the archives of death (e.g. probate courts or death certificates) in their research. However, death is absent in that it usually plays a supporting role and is rarely the primary lens of analysis in Middle East scholarship. This article discusses some of the existing literature, including that of cemeteries, burials and funerals, public health, crime, and legal reform. I argue that increased and conscientious engagement between the fields of Death Studies and modern Middle East history is both possible and productive. Placing death at the center of historical analysis asks questions of power and space, such as who controls the body, where a body might be buried, how a death should be processed, and what impact the dead might have on the various domains of the living. Moreover, it requires the scholar to grapple ideas that cannot be disentwined such as the tangible (e.g. body) and the intangible (e.g. spirituality), or public space and political belonging, in the process of illuminating how the dead continue to make social, spatial, and political claims on the living.

Comments on Carnahan, Anderson, and Wolterstorff

In this paper, I reflect on a number of issues raised in Kevin Carnahan’s “Religion, and not just Religious Reasons, in the Public Square: A Consideration of Robert Audi’s and Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Religion in the Public Square” and Eric A. Anderson’s “Religiously Conservative Citizens and the Ideal of Conscientious Engagement: A Comment on Wolterstorff and Eberle.” In response to Carnahan, I argue that recent discussions of the proper public role of religious reason do not depend on an objectionable conception of religion. I also respond to Anderson's concern that my “ideal of conscientious engagement” is an insufficiently robust alternative to public reason liberalism.

Religiously Conservative Citizens and the Ideal of Conscientious Engagement: A Comment on Wolterstorff and Eberle

Nicholas Wolterstorff and Christopher J. Eberle have defended the view that the ethics of liberal citizenship allows citizens to publicly support the passage of coercive laws based solely on their religious convictions. They also develop positive conceptions of virtuous citizenship that place moral limits on how citizens may appeal to their religion. The question I address in this essay is whether the limits they impose on citizens’ appeals to their religion are adequate. Since Eberle’s “ideal of conscientious engagement” provides us with the most extensive statement of these limits, it is the primary focus of my attention here. My conclusion is that in its current form, Eberle’s ideal is not constraining enough. In the first section, I argue that Eberle’s ideal does not require citizens to be self-critical enough about their religious and political commitments. In the second section, I highlight a conflict between Eberle’s ideal and the need for citizens to respect the religious freedom of their fellow citizens. I argue that the way to resolve this conflict is to adopt a more fine-grained conception of religious reasons and to hold that citizens should not rely on religious reasons of certain kinds. In the final section, I argue that laws punishing or discouraging homosexual conduct (which Eberle’s ideal would apparently allow) violate what Wolterstorff calls “the Idea of liberal democracy” and so are not the kind of proposal that virtuous citizens can defend.

The Ethics of Food for Tomorrow: On the Viability of Agrarianism—How Far can it Go? Comments on Paul Thompson’s Agrarian Vision

I consider Paul Thompson’s Agrarian Vision from the perspective of the philosophy of technology, especially as it relates to certain questions about public engagement and deliberative democracy around food issues. Is it able to promote an attitudinal shift or reorientation in values to overcome the view of “food as device” so that conscientious engagement in the food system by consumers can become more the norm? Next, I consider briefly, some questions to which it must face up in order to move closer in dismantling the barriers that inhibit the capacity for virtuous caretaking of the food system at various levels. Lastly, and more deeply, how successful might agrarianism be in inculcating citizenship values (ones that go beyond food ethics as a private affair), for the democratization of agricultural technologies? Might the Jeffersonian foundation to which the agrarianism (a la) Thompson appeals need something like a contemporary theory of justice in order to facilitate the reconstitution of our politico-moral selves? How can it help guide appropriate ruminations on the intra and intergenerational question, “What do we want the shape of our current and future social and political institutions to look like in relation to food?”

Legacies of Reading in the Late Poetry of Thomas Merton

Legacies of Reading in the Late Poetry of Thomas Merton Dustin D. Stewart Before his tragic death in 1968, Thomas Merton established his peculiar legacy as a cosmopolitan monk. Merton construed the contemplative life as a mode of conscientious engagement with, rather than as a safe haven from, the world. That engagement took the forms of ecumenism (in, say, his engagement with Zen Buddhism); of activism (notably, in his reactions to American military involvement in Vietnam); of correspondence (with clergy, poets, theologians, editors); and of receptivity to intellectual developments (in, for instance, psychoanalysis and evolutionary thought).1 Of the world, Merton could thus write in a posthumously published book, “It is a living and self-creating mystery of which I am myself a part, to which I am myself my own unique door.”2 If the self is the door opening upon but also within the world, then contemplation for Merton is its hinge. Thomas Merton’s poetry likewise needs its hinge—a way of opening itself to the world forty years after the poet’s death. Much of the late poetry, in particular, warrants fresh attention, for in it Merton attempts to encounter that wide, increasingly fractured world, and his innovative choices of form and material often reflect the radical reassessments of meaning that we have come to associate with the year 1968. So I begin with the suggestion that two competing views of reading, drawn from two glances at Merton the reader, can illuminate those late poems by revealing how they imply and address interpretive questions. Such matters pertain to the role or, more precisely, the location of the interpretive reader. Does the reader have access to the heart of the text, or must one remain at its impenetrable boundary? Merton’s late poetry traces, though it cannot bridge, the distance between these two perspectives, which I will proceed to examine. Reading Merton Reading: Rilke to Barthes A useful starting point is a 1953 essay on the Psalms as poetry, in which Merton correlates interpretation with experience. “What the poem actually ‘means,’” the writer claims in the essay, “can only be summed up in the [End Page 115] whole content of poetic experience which it is capable of producing in the reader. This total poetic experience is what the poet is trying to communicate to the rest of the world.”3 Merton defines the “soul” of a poem as its embodiment in readerly experience.4 With this definition one can usefully juxtapose a passage from another 1953 text, the journal The Sign of Jonas, in which Merton translates several lines from Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel, The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge. The passage envisions a sublime moment when the writer becomes the written. To adopt Merton’s language, such a transformation withdraws from the writer the soul of, and authority over, written meaning: For a while yet I can write all this down and express it. But there will come a day when my hand will be far from me and when I bid it write it will write words I do not mean. The time of that other interpretation will dawn when not one word will remain upon another and all meaning will dissolve like clouds and fall down like rain. Despite my fear I am yet like one standing before something great . . . This time I shall be written. I am the impression that will change.5 Probably translating it from the German, Merton the reader thereby enacts what the excerpt itself envisions.6 Rilke “shall be written,” for reading Rilke entails rewriting Rilke. Merton translates part of Rilke’s fictional notebook, grafting it into his own journal and reorienting, restating, and resituating the language of the passage. His reading of Rilke becomes a signal that Merton’s Sign, too, must subject itself to the reorientations of reading. If his translating hand changes the “impression” of Rilke, it acknowledges in so doing the similar impressionability of Merton’s own text.7 A touchstone for this essay, Merton’s translation registers the tension, but also the glory, of the diarist before the book: to begin with reading is to end with “being written” and thus being read...