Contemporary Thinking Research Articles

Teaching (History) in the 21st Century

Contemporary thinking in Education must go beyond what is already known and feed on a utopian vision. Regardless of the contents, the change needs to happen, within the pedagogical practice above anything else: listening more and talking less; embracing new perspectives and different readings from well-known authors; preparing our interlocutors (students) to face the unforeseen and the uncertainty with optimism. In Basic and Secondary Education, this circumstance assumes the characteristics of a historical thinking and a historical consciousness progressively more sophisticated and, therefore, coincident with a reading of the world desirably more complex and humanistic. In Higher Education, it is crucial that future teachers perceive the relevance of that attitude of change. Based on these contemporary educational potentialities and challenges, we intend to discuss possible paths to consider, today, a teaching of History that allows us to design new futures or other competencies.

The school workshop as the basis for the continuation school (1908)

Abstract This classic essay—Die Schulwerkstatt als Grundlage der Organisation der Fortbildungsschule—by George Kerschensteiner (1854–1932) is here published for the first time in English, in a translation by Stephanie Wilde and Christopher Winch. The essay was highly influential in the formation of the successful economy in modern Germany. It has had a bearing on the development of modern conceptions of the place of work, career and profession in a human life, and of the significance of this or the development of both the society as a whole and the individual's Bildung. It provides the means to question again some of the assumptions embedded not only in contemporary thinking about vocational education but about the idea of education as a whole. Much turns in the discussion of differences between German and English expressions, and these are discussed in the complementary essay, ‘Re-Reading Kerschensteiner today—Doing VET in German vocational schools’, by Peter Sloane. An introduction to the broader context is provided in ‘Founding German Vocational Education: Kerschensteiner, Spranger and Fischer as key figures in the classical German VET Theory’ by Christian Steibe, Dina Kuhlee and Christopher Winch, the Editors of this Special Issue.

From Secret Fashion Shoots to the #100projectors

From Secret Fashion Shoots to the #100projectors

C.W. Mills’ notion of the ‘social milieu’ and its relevance for contemporary society

In Mills’ sociological analysis, a central notion is the ‘social milieu’ which encapsulates ‘the social setting of a person that is directly open to his personal experience’. For Mills, sociology should entail an investigation of the set of relations and practices that are a feature of human experience. Understanding the significance of Mills’ approach, we argue, requires grasping the way the notion of ‘milieu’ or ‘setting’ itself draws upon spatial and topological notions – notions that have become prominent in much contemporary sociological thinking. From this perspective, Mills’ work turns out to be relevant as a corrective, both to the undue emphasis on empirical particularity that is evident in some contemporary sociology and to what Mills viewed as ‘abstract’ theorisation. A large part of the relevance of Mills’ work for contemporary sociological problems and challenges is thus to be found in the way his emphasis on situation (or ‘place’), as given through the idea of ‘milieu’, allows a more complex and encompassing approach.

The Nature and Destiny of Niebuhr’s Augustine

AbstractThis essay poses a twofold question regarding the Augustine who influenced Niebuhr’s work: to which of the many versions of Augustine was Niebuhr drawn? What has happened to this Augustine across the reception of Niebuhr’s thought? As a first matter, I argue that Niebuhr was helped to resolve long‐standing questions not by Augustine the pessimistic realist, but rather by the distinctively analogical Augustine, mediated through the work of the Polish Jesuit Erich Przywara, who understands there to be an ‘in and beyond’ relation between God and creation, Church and world, the ultimate and penultimate. As a second matter, I argue that the reception of Niebuhr’s work is marked by repeating the structure that Niebuhr’s Augustine was intended to avoid. Niebuhr turned to Augustine in an effort to avoid a back and forth between exaggerated accounts of continuity and discontinuity between Church and world; but a Barthian reading depicted Niebuhr’s work as an inflated vision of continuity to which a strong statement of discontinuity was the appropriate response. This reading has, in turn, summoned forth fresh accounts of continuity from contemporary thinkers. I aim to show that accurately situating Niebuhr in relation to Augustine helps us to see that the reception of his work has perpetuated a difficulty that he sought to address, and that his Augustine may, all along, have presented an alternative.

Reading Readers Reading: A Brief Reply to my Interlocutors

Reading Readers Reading: A Brief Reply to my Interlocutors

‘C’est à ce prix que vous mangez du sucre en Europe’: Decolonizing plantationocene visualities in Amalia Ramanankirahina’s Le grand couvert

This article explores how the installation Le grand couvert by Malagasy artist Amalia Ramanankirahina intersects colonial plantations and a French Parisian orchard to decolonize contemporary French ecological thinking. As this article explores how French rural ecologies are embedded within a wider variety of environments and their violent plantationocenic histories, it argues that Le grand couvert performs ‘aesthetic marronage’, a form of fugitivity that breaks through ‘traditional’ plantation visual cultures – ones that freeze plantations into a space of leisure and exoticism, albeit a violent one. Tracing the contours of the material, economic and ecological, ‘legacies’ of the plantationocene in and across contemporary France and its overseas territories, this article ultimately demonstrates how Le grand couvert helps interrogate what Stephanie Posthumus has called ‘ecological dwelling’, the evolving processes of bodies in and with space. While Posthumus understands ecological dwelling primarily along urban/rural paradigms, Ramanankirahina’s decolonial work injects new perspectives on this concept. In Le grand couvert, the plantation bleeds into the colonial space of a former rural space now known as a banlieue. At the intersection of the plantation and the banlieue, aesthetic marronage reveals the tensions of dwelling ecologically in sites that racially and economically restrict one’s subjective formation.

Pragmatic approaches to visual learning in postmodernism education

The article analyzes the signifcant correlation between postmodernism and pragmatic learning. Postmodernism, as a cultural phenomenon, manages to dispose of a contemporary pedagogical thinking in a pragmatic challenge of proportions. Postmodernism promotes a new kind of understanding of the relationship between knowledge and experience, theory and practice at the level of human action. Postmodernist education aspires to an integration between pedagogical theory and pedagogical practice.

Reconstructing Pragmatism in the New Climate Regime: Education After the Intrusion of Gaia

AbstractIn this essay, Stefano Oliverio engages with the question of how to think about education in times of climate change and the “intrusion of Gaia” by establishing a dialogue between Bruno Latour's political ecology and John Dewey's appeal to the need to bring a genuine Copernican revolution to fruition. Oliverio argues that the panoply of conceptual tools Dewey fashioned by recognizing the influence of Darwin on philosophy not only maintains its topicality but can be fruitfully deployed to make sense of our contemporary condition and to frame an earthbound education. On the other hand, the encounter with the views of contemporary thinkers reflecting on the New Climate Regime and the endeavors it invokes may help us to recontextualize the Deweyan heritage in order to “face Gaia.” In this horizon, the idea of the school as a site of collective inquiry is acclimatized to the new existential situation, and its significance in promoting an art of the learning of attention to contrast the contemporary negligence and risk of barbarism is vindicated.

Workspace and Productivity: Guidelines for Virtual Reality Workplace Design and Optimization

Employee satisfaction and productivity are highly dependent on the alignment between the design of a workplace, the culture, the work activities, and the technology used, and while the understanding of such interactions has received increased interest in fields including architecture, health, and psychology, very little is known in relation to virtual work and reality (VR). VR workplaces have the potential to become an integral part of new work arrangements, enabling employees to execute teamwork and task work through (mature) simulated environments designed to meet individual, team, and organizational productivity needs. Thus, the aim of this study was three-fold: In study 1, we gained, through expert interviews, insights into contemporary thinking in workplace design, and gathered a greater understanding of the dimensions of design, behaviors, environments, and tools that affect collaborative work and productivity. In study 2, we observed knowledge workers in home environments and open, closed, and balanced office layouts, in order to understand the potential for successful integration in VR. In study 3, we evaluated environmental needs and opportunities through VR. Based on our findings, we developed an Ecology of Work model, combining work systems and pillars of performance success. These are followed by discussions on design needs and implications for VR.

On the Transformation of Thinking on Personal Responsibility Towards Requirements of Environmental Ethics in Slovakia

The main purpose of this paper is to confirm a remarkable transformation in contemporary thinking on responsibility for the environment in Slovakia, since the Velvet Revolution (1989). Terminology is derived from Guardini’s educational, environmental ethics of responsibility, and actualised via Bauman-Lipovetsky’s critics of the post-modern way of thinking. Comparisons of the situation in thinking on responsibility for the environment, before and after the Velvet revolution, are based on an analysis of findings of various inter-disciplinary research-projects, argued via enviro-criminal cases mentioned in the Slovak media, existentially verified by the author herself, as a living witness, and fostered by appropriate Slovak legislation. The main findings of the paper are as follows: liquidity of thinking on responsibility for the environment was confirmed; transformation of the Slovak mentality is remarkable – there are still enough people, who transfer responsibility, to be taken by “competent ones” (Homo Sovieticus mentality); however, many influencers and volunteers, also politicians, are pro-environment engaged in various public projects (‘The Man of the Velvet Revolution mentality’); people are more aware of their environmental rights and duties, and feel more invited to take personal responsibility for the environment. Conclusion: Slovaks are interested in pro-environmental projects, if it pays off, and if they do not feel alone in pro-environmental efforts.

Workplace well-being and support systems in journalism: Comparative analysis of Germany and the United Kingdom

Contemporary thinking of journalism as a high emotional labour profession calls into question the systems that are, or should be, in place to support journalists with this labour and in this way mitigate any of its potentially negative consequences, such as those on well-being, mental and physical health, and job performance. By drawing on organisational and social support theories, this article examines the perceptions, expectations, and support needs of journalists in Germany and the United Kingdom, the two European countries with the biggest bodies of practising journalists. Qualitative interviews with 32 German and 34 British journalists reveal important similarities but also differences between the two countries. Specifically, in both countries journalists reported primarily relying on their psychological capital to deal with emotional labour, although many were unsure what exactly constitutes it or how it has been developed. In Germany the social and supervisor support were often mentioned as effective, while in the UK social support was at times found to be hindered by newsroom culture and supervisors’ lack of understanding of the job pressures. Finally, it has been suggested by journalists in both countries that organisational support could be improved by an offer of training in emotional literacy for both journalists and managers, establishment of a point of contact tasked with pastoral care, and fair, transparent and formal structures that encourage and enable journalists to effectively deal with emotional stressors in the job.

A Relational View of Searles and Chestnut Lodge

A review of a clinical report by Harold Searles, attending to Searles’ ways of working with psychotic patients, his influences and those he influenced, as well as contemporary thinkers (Laplanche), who speak as Searles did, of the power of the other in the construction of psychic life.

Colloquy with Juan José García-Noblejas on understanding communication from the perspective of Aristotle's Poetics

In this interview we will explore García-Noblejas’ thought on public communication, which is deeply marked by his interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics and influenced by some contemporary thinkers. For García-Noblejas, communication is a service and a form of practical knowledge with five dimensions: ethics, politics, rhetoric, aesthetics, and poetics. Poetics is the most important of these, since its symbolic perspective of the representation of human actions allows us to deeply understand the narrative and dramatic texts typical of journalism, advertising, and propaganda, as well as written and audiovisual fiction. Poetics is the art of creating “possible worlds” in which the reader/spectator recognizes himself (or herself) and with which he dialogues starting from his own identity. García-Noblejas defends public communication that is based on the gift of self and looks to community fruitfulness. He also discusses some frequent pathologies in the media. Finally, he proposes his theory of the Second Navigation to discern the meaning of a text and explains why it is necessary to give a transcendent meaning to the Aristotelian concept of catharsis.

Paraontology: Interruption, Inheritance, or a Debt One Often Regrets

Abstract Once referring to the debt he owed to Martin Heidegger for his research on the question of death, Emmanuel Levinas explained that, though he distinguished his work from Heidegger’s thought, he did so in spite of “whatever” the debt “every contemporary thinker” owed to Heidegger—a debt that, Levinas then quipped, one “often owes to his regrets.” Contemporary thinkers working in the field of Black Studies have acknowledged their own “debt” to the black philosopher Nahum Chandler for the concept of paraontology. Fred Moten, most notably, credits Chandler for providing a conceptual opening for a renewed thinking of blackness’ modes of resisting ongoing regimes of racial predation. Typifying disturbance, therefore, paraontology offers us the possibility of considering blackness beyond (though always with and against) the violence of its constitution. To heed the ramifications of transformative events, I attempt to measure those hermeneutical passages often compressed by the force of such groundbreaking discursive moments. Thus, responding to Chandler’s wish for his concerns to remain “perennial” rather than “fashionable,” I trace the history of the concept of paraontology back to its first use by Heidegger’s student Oskar Becker, whose main concern uncannily echoes the concept’s seemingly axiomatic use in Black Studies: namely, a radical disruption in the hegemonic and purist logic of ontology.

Geoffrey Chaucer in Context. The Oxford Handbook of ChaucerThe Oxford Handbook of Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer in Context. The Oxford Handbook of ChaucerThe Oxford Handbook of Chaucer

ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI AND THE POLITICAL MEANING OF LOVE

In the given article I analyze the contribution of the prominent socialist feminist thinker and politician Alexandra Kollontai to the development of conceptual vision of a just society, that would be based on the equality of the sexes, and to the formation of contemporary views onto the problem of the of the political, intellectual and emotional autonomy of women . In my view, the rethinking of Kollontai's views in regards to the issues of love, sexuality and the role of emotional life under socialism and capitalism may be helpful for better understanding of the complex relationship between gender and class identities, collisions of public and private lives, and the emancipation of women (politically, economically, emotionally and symbolically). I also argue that Kollontai's legacy is relevant for the contemporary scholarship on political , gender-specific aspects of emotional life as well as the affective dimension of the politics.My analysis is based on three types of sources: theoretical works and literary texts by Alexandra Kollontai, in which she developed her views on love relationships and women's autonomy; selected works of other Marxist and feminist thinkers of the early XX century (V.I. Lenin, I. Armand) that dealt with the questions of free love and sexual mores; the works by contemporary gender scholars and feminist thinkers, that engage with the texts of Kollontai and debates on love and sexuality in the Soviet 1920s.

Okasyonalizme İtirazlar ve Verilen Cevaplar: Diyalektik Bir Çözümleme

Okasyonalizme göre Tanrı, sonsuz iradesi ve kudreti ile evrene sürekli müdahale eder ve bu yüzden evrende var olan bütün sebep-sonuç ilişkilerinin yegâne hakiki nedenidir. Sebep-sonuç ilişkisine dair gözlemlediğimiz bütün failler Tanrısal müdahalenin vesile nedenleridir. Bu makale ilk olarak okasyonalizmin temel iddialarını Gazzâlî ve Malebranche perspektifinden betimleyici bir anlatımla ele almaktadır. Ardından okasyonalizme yapılan itirazları ve verilen cevapları diyalektik bir biçimde analiz etmektedir. Makale, okasyonalizmin iç tutarlılığa sahip bir yaklaşım olduğunu, ancak yapılan itirazlara bu iç tutarlılık perspektifi dışında cevap vermediğini iddia etmektedir. Son olarak makale, çağdaş zihin felsefesi kapsamında okasyonalizmin zihnin ve bilincin doğasına yönelik bilimsel çalışmaları dışladığını ve gizemci bir pozisyonu savunduğunu ortaya koymaktadır.

Paul Fraisse’s Psychology of Rhythm: A Case for Filmology?

My contribution aims to discuss the topic of rhythm as presented by the classic psychologist and filmologist, Paul Fraisse (1911-1994) in his founding studies, to understand its scope, and to consider the possible inheritance to be spent in contemporary research on film. I will first outline Fraisse’s contribution to the psychology of rhythm, a model grounded both on the value of Gestalt organisation and on related dimensions of sensory-motor activation. Secondly, I will investigate contemporary thinking in this field, showing on the one hand how Fraisse’s contribution still helps the psychology of music in defining rhythmic listening experiences, and on the other how the French scholar’s multilayered notion of time perception finds legitimation in neuroscientific research on timing. Finally, I will delve into film theory. In particular, I will put forward the assumption that the sense of rhythm, due to its values of Gestalt organisation, plays a fundamental role in narrative and event-based viewing, enhancing it; yet, due to the dimensions of sensory-motor activation, sound rhythms, in particular, can induce both bodily and neural entrainment and constitute in film an auditive analogon of those embodied and enactive visual processes recognised by the most recent neurofilmological approaches.

The evolution of human skin pigmentation: A changing medley of vitamins, genetic variability, and UV radiation during human expansion.

This review examines putative, yet likely critical evolutionary pressures contributing to human skin pigmentation and subsequently, depigmentation phenotypes. To achieve this, it provides a synthesis of ideas that frame contemporary thinking, without limiting the narrative to pigmentation genes alone. It examines how geography and hence the quality and quantity of UV exposure, pigmentation genes, diet-related genes, vitamins, anti-oxidant nutrients, and cultural practices intersect and interact to facilitate the evolution of human skin color. The article has a strong focus on the vitamin D-folate evolutionary model, with updates on the latest biophysical research findings to support this paradigm. This model is examined within a broad canvas that takes human expansion out of Africa and genetic architecture into account. A thorough discourse on the biology of melanization is provided (includes relationship to BH4 and DNA damage repair), with the relevance of this to the UV sensitivity of folate and UV photosynthesis of vitamin D explained in detail, including the relevance of these vitamins to reproductive success. It explores whether we might be able to predict vitamin-related gene polymorphisms that pivot metabolism to the prevailing UVR exposome within the vitamin D-folate evolutionary hypothesis context. This is discussed in terms of a primary adaptive phenotype (pigmentation/depigmentation), a secondary adaptive phenotype (flexible metabolic phenotype based on vitamin-related gene polymorphism profile), and a tertiary adaptive strategy (dietary anti-oxidants to support the secondary adaptive phenotype). Finally, alternative evolutionary models for pigmentation are discussed, as are challenges to future research in this area.