Dialogic Encounter Research Articles

Il presente della relazione. Dialogo, differenze, società-mondo

The article offers some reflections on the problems and opportunities that the practice of dialogue encounters in present times, inscribed within the whole human history. These times are considered to be the troubled beginning of a new societal form, the world-society, understood, with Morin, as a new community of destiny. Three notions are discussed, which are considered able to highlight the most challenging questions: heterogeneity, simultaneity and fall of the hierarchy. It is assumed, with Girard, that human social interactions have al-ways been ruled by hierarchies unanimously believed as sacred, to say extra-human, primarily based on the evolutionary efficacy of the sacrificial device. It is hypothesized that with the affirmation of the narratives that reveal the innocence of the expiatory victim (especially the Gospels), a radical weakening of the hierarchy has begun which has led from the vertical regulation of social interactions to the unprecedented challenge of more direct and horizontal regulations. With modernism and then with the recent globalization marked by the development of hyper-speedy communication technologies, this process has experienced a dramatic acceleration, with predominantly individualistic and destructive results. It is suggested that different outcomes, capable of favoring positive processes of subjectivation, require the promotion of an ecological feeling (in the sense of Bateson) of relational participation in the beginning world-society.

Balancing loving and caring in times of chronic illness

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of chronic illness on a couple’s life experiences over a period of 40 years. It critically examines the assumptions of the public health discourse in the light of this couple’s attempts to balance love and health care within their relationship.Design/methodology/approachThe couple, the first two authors, put themselves under the magnifying glass. They arranged for a dialogic encounter and built a co-constructed auto-ethnography. This study consists of a “raw” narrative and a reflection. This reflexive part was added by the third author, interpreting the couple’s experiences applying in a sociocultural way theories of ethical care. This sheds light on ethical care aspects encountered in the couple’s balancing of love and health care.FindingsThis study shows that the couple copes with adversity rather than being in control of it. Nonetheless their love relationship appears to be flourishing, thanks to their acknowledgement of the importance of mutual caring.Research limitations/implicationsThe current public health discourse puts the couple’s private love relationship under pressure. It turns a blind eye towards the difficulties they experience with the contemporary “self-management” paradigm. The couple feels that the government is an interloper intruding into their private relationship. This creates tension, friction, anxiety, as well as increasing the burden of the illness and makes them feel insecure and unsafe.Originality/valueThe novel method used in this study offers a rare and deep insight.

Collaborative professional identities and continuity of practice: a narrative inquiry of preschool and primary teachers

This paper focuses on collaboration between Australian preschool and primary school teachers co-located on same sites, with a view to understanding and strengthening collaboration for supporting continuity of practice across preschool and primary school settings. Based on findings from a narrative inquiry study framed by Freire’s notion of dialogic encounters, we examine teachers’ challenges to collaboration within an Australian public education system, understood through their perspectives and enactment of their professional identities as collaborators in this physically shared space. We present a possible framework for creating a shared space in which preschool and primary teachers collaborate to support continuity of learning for children.

Dialogue on Dialogue

Dialogue on Dialogue Nourah Abdullah M. Alhasawi interreligious dialogue, Saudi Islamic studies, Leonard Swidler, Dialogue Decalogue, Fahad al-Homoudi, interpretation of religious texts Interreligious dialogue (IRD) is relatively new in many contexts. However, dialogue in itself is an activity that humans have always done and continue to do in almost all aspects of their everyday life, including in religious encounters. In other words, the essence of dialogue has always been present in human interaction, although not exactly in the way that it is understood and practiced today as "interreligious dialogue." This relatively new version of dialogue is considered by some to be a revolutionary achievement of humanity in the few last decades. Others think of it as a manipulative tool of the dominant, who are now exploiting religion to gain more power. Some others accept "dialogue" in some situations but hesitate to accept how it is thought of and practiced today by dominant cultures under the name of IRD. In my country, Saudi Arabia, there are all three points of view. Here, I will focus on Saudi Islamic Studies academics. Many of them are considered to be religious leaders with enough influence to promote IRD and to encourage its acceptance among Saudis. However, generally speaking, those academics are hesitant and distrustful when it comes to IRD. Therefore, introducing IRD to them through academic work could be the most practical way to confront their disinclination and to build trust. I must stress here that not all academics in the field of Islamic Studies [End Page 587] are reluctant to enter the world of IRD, as some have already started initiatives. My aim is to study one set of IRD principles and anticipate the questions and doubts of veracity that Saudi scholars might have regarding those principles. This essay explores the possible reasons for the disinclination toward IRD by many Saudi Islamic Studies scholars. As a Saudi involved in Islamic Studies and a participant in IRD, I assume that the ambiguity of the term "IRD" is an essential part of the problem. In other words, not knowing the theory and the principles behind IRD, people are unable to decide whether it is compatible or incompatible with their religious beliefs and personal values. However, that cannot be the only reason. Before investigating their own reasons, IRD should be introduced to them by someone with whom they can relate in a way that they are used to. Thus, I chose to interview Professor Leonard Swidler. His "Dialogue Decalogue" (DD),1 which I have studied, is well known and accessible among IRD practitioners. Further, both Swidler and his work are better known in Saudi Arabia than are other experts in the field. In addition to the interview transcription, Swidler shared with me five research papers to explain where he currently stands on the topic: (1) "The Importance of Critical-Thinking for Deep-Dialogue, for Humanization"; (2) "Deep-Dialogue/ Critical-Thinking/ Emotional-Intelligence/ Imagination/ Competitive-Cooperation/' Spiritual-AIKIDO"; (3) "Interreligious Dialogue: Origin and Meaning"; (4) "Commonalities among Religions"; and (5) "The Meaning of Life in the 21th Century."2 I will focus here only on interreligious, not ideological, dialogue. Throughout this essay and the interview, I discuss the ten principles of IRD that Swidler learned from his experience and shared with the world as the DD. By interviewing Swidler and clarifying my understanding of his principles and logic, I avoid misunderstanding and misinterpreting his valuable work. [End Page 588] Dialogue in Saudi Arabia As concept and practice, dialogue is not new in the Islamic tradition. In the Holy Qur'ān and Hadeeth, the Prophet's (PBUH) teachings, there are many examples of women, men, angels, animals, and other beings who dialogued with everyone, including God. In the Middle Ages, Muslim scholars dialogued about religions and religious issues. They wrote books and organized dialogue encounters with people from different religious backgrounds. Some of Swidler's work3 mentions the positive influence of Muslims on Western thought. The dialogue continues even today. However, most of the earlier dialogue was more doctrinal than interreligious in nature. Even though dialogue is encouraged in the Qur'ān and the Hadeeth, the majority of people in some countries in the Islamic world...

Building comprehensive narratives from dialogical encounters: A path in search of meanings

Abstract Phenomenological investigations are concerned with unfolding the nature of a phenomenon through the process of describing and understanding subjective lived experiences. The process through which this is accomplished varies according to the underlying philosophical concepts and specific methodological strategies adopted. A common means of achieving this objective is through hours-long interviews that are recorded and later transcribed and analyzed. The present article describes an alternative method that accesses the participants’ experiences of a phenomenon through encounters with a researcher, who then uses dialogical data to develop comprehensive narratives. These are written in first person in order to grasp the participant’s significant meanings based on what emerged during their encounter and its impact on the researcher. A narrative synthesis is then constructed in order to enable the phenomenological process of analysis to reach the structural elements based on all participants’ experiences. Exemplary excerpts are presented in order to illustrate the process.

Dialogics, Diacritics, Diasporics: Ranjan Ghosh, J. Hillis Miller, and the Becoming-Now of Theory

My aim in this essay is to reflect on the compelling dialogic project undertaken by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller in Thinking Literature Across Continents, focusing in particular on its implications for contemporary literary theory. Situating this project within a wider philosophical tradition that invests in dialogue as the textual space where theorein is the product of a synergic as much as conflictual endeavor, I argue that the Ghosh-Miller exchange across continents performs the becoming-Now of literary theory. In other words, I suggest that the dialogic encounter among more-than-one voices in this book reclaims the immanent doing of theory and cultivates a world-concerned thinking that diverges from dominant paradigms of theoria as the experience of an inevitable belatedness. Reading for the silences and tensions in the intimate, entangled becoming staged by the Ghosh-Miller book, I demonstrate how the process of worlding in the literary field can unfold in a minor mode, introducing hermeneutic possibilities that deterritorialise Angloglobalism and diffractively infringe habituated colonial traditions.

Expanding the Notion of Dialogic Trading Zones for Impactful Research: The Case of Women on Boards Research

Debates about research impact highlight the importance of involving practitioners in research processes but are unclear as to how precisely to foster this dialogue. This paper considers how dialogic encounter can be encouraged through ‘trading zones’ where academics and practitioners collaborate. We draw on our experience of conducting research on women on boards for over 15 years to examine (a) how we established and evolved our role within trading zones in this field, achieving impact on policy and business practice, and (b) how we interfaced between trading zones and the academic field, thereby enabling cross‐fertilization of ideas between academics and practitioners. We contribute to literature on research impact by empirically examining and critically evaluating the key characteristics of trading zones. First, trading zones are theorized to be action‐oriented. Our analysis reveals how multiple stakeholders collectively redefine the action goals, illustrating the need to expand our understanding of relevant ‘practitioners’ beyond managers. Second, we find that durability of trading zones is crucial because it enables gestation of ideas and reframing problems. Third, we problematize the notion of psychological safety in trading zones, arguing that dialogic capability and the pursuit of impact require acceptance of trade‐offs and political manoeuvrings.

Dōgen and Sōtō Zen ed. by Steven Heine

Reviewed by: Dōgen and Sōtō Zen ed. by Steven Heine Taigen Dan Leighton Dōgen and Sōtō Zen. Edited by Steven Heine. Oxford University Press, 2015. 336 pages. Hardcover £74.00/ $105.00; softcover £23.99/ $31.95. This volume of collected essays by respected academics is another valuable contribution from editor Steven Heine. This book offers many original insights into both Dōgen (1200–1253) and the influence of the Sōtō school that his teachings later inspired. The material on Dōgen delves further into areas already broached in previous studies. Outside Japan, the study of later developments and current practices of Sōtō Zen is still at an early stage, so these essays open interesting new pathways for research. Heine is one of the most eminent and prolific scholars of Dōgen and Zen koan literature in the West. His numerous edited compilations, many done in collaboration with Dale Wright, include books focusing on Dōgen, koans (Ch. gong'an), and other topics pertinent to Zen. This reviewer has contributed essays to a few of those collections. Heine has also independently authored valuable books about Dōgen and koans, of which two are particularly noteworthy. Dōgen and the Kōan Tradition (SUNY Press, 1994) is an essential, highly under-appreciated work about Dōgen's mastery of the vast koan literature in China, and how he used this material to develop his own unique approach to teaching and practicing Zen. Dōgen's position on koan study continues in some of modern Sōtō Zen practice, quite apart from how koan practice is conventionally understood today in most of American Zen. Equally valuable is Heine's Did Dōgen Go to China? What He Wrote and When He Wrote It (Oxford University Press, 2006), which provides a much-needed, subtle, and nuanced overview of the many phases of Dōgen's teaching career and how he shifted teaching emphasis and styles in accordance with his audience. Thus, Heine overturns simplistic stereotypes about periods of Dōgen's teaching that posit major shifts in his primary doctrinal positions. Dōgen and Sōtō Zen includes ten essays, five on aspects of Dōgen's teaching and five on later developments in the Sōtō tradition, all of which display a wide variety of interests and approaches. The section on Dōgen begins in chapter 1 with Griffith Foulk's "Dōgen's Use of Rujing's 'Just Sit' (shikan taza) and Other Kōans," which starts by dispelling the obvious delusion, still sadly adhered to by scholars and sectarian spokespersons, that only Rinzai, and not Dōgen or Sōtō, used koans. Foulk describes being attacked at a conference in Korea where this distinction, imposed upon Rinzai and Sōtō schools by the Meiji government in the second half of the nineteenth century, was still ignorantly upheld due to Japanese scholars influential in Korea (pp. 23–26). Anyone who reads Dōgen knows that a clear majority of his writings comment on the old dialogue encounters that are enshrined in the classic koan collections. Foulk's article itemizes contexts for Dōgen's extensive deployment of koans, including in his sutra commentaries and discussions of monastic procedures. [End Page 287] The article then focuses on Dōgen's approach to meditation and the concept of "just sitting" (shikan taza), originating from Rujing, Dōgen's teacher in China, and sometimes considered central to Dōgen's meditation style. This essay explicitly acts as a sequel to Foulk's article in a previous Heine collection and comprehensively elucidates how just sitting has been misunderstood by modern commentators as a dismissal of other practices such as sutra reading, koan study, or ritual expressions, all of which were very much part of Dōgen's practice and teaching.1 As Foulk clarifies, shikan taza was not the primary term Dōgen used in discussing Zen practice. Other terms appearing more often include "going beyond buddha" (bukkō jōji), which encourages sustained practice, "dropping off body-mind" (shinjin datsuraku), and "the oneness of practice-realization" (shushō no ittō). Foulk emphasizes the extent to which Dōgen speaks of...

Virtues in Clinical Practice: Teaching Students about the Complexities and Depth of Professional Practice

This paper investigates the integration of virtues into teaching programs for allied health students. It explores the notion that practitioners’ effectiveness is enhanced when they practice virtues along with their technical expertise. These virtues include wisdom and love and they imbue the practitioner’s role with a meaning that extends beyond efficient diagnosis and competent case management. Practicing virtues can deepen the clinical relationship. Allied health students may feel cautious and uncertain about what it actually means to be a virtuous practitioner. Reflexive practice and dialogic encounters are presented as teaching activities that can cultivate virtuous practice.

Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana by Steven Feld

Reviewed by: Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana by Steven Feld Karl J. Haas (bio) Steven Feld, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 312 + xvi pages. Jazz Cosmopolitanism presents a nuanced and complex theorization of the sonic, material, and imagined connections of the Black Atlantic through the words and music of Ghanaian musicians. The birthplace of hybrid musical styles including highlife, palmwine, and bɔbɔɔbɔ, Ghana has been fertile ground for such soundings and imaginings for well over a hundred years. In his written compliment to a series of DVDs and CDs, Steven Feld offers us a glimpse into the music and philosophies of three jazz musicians (Guy Warren/Ghanaba, Nii Noi Nortey, and Nii Otoo Annan) and a por por squeeze-bulb honk-horn ensemble invented by and for the Accra La Drivers Union—multifaceted subjects all—in 21st-century Accra. Drawing from the theoretical framework of cosmopolitanism, Feld situates these musicians within a sound world pervaded by race, class, spirituality, and politics. Looming over it all is the legacy of American jazz, especially John Coltrane and the New Orleans second line. Feld's goal is to explore the sonic and political worlds of Accra by way of story telling that recounts his interactions, including conversations, jam sessions, and recording projects. He explores the musicians' life stories through such theoretical lenses as cosmopolitanism, diasporic intimacy, and acoustemology, acknowledging the many contradictions therein.1 Juxtaposing his own voice and the voices of his collaborators in his theoretical work of telling stories, Feld writes that these dialogic encounters mimic "the way I have listened in to repetitions and ruptures, reemplacing stories in my voice and thus theorizing their experiential authority through performed intervocality rather than through academic contextualization," insisting that "cosmopolitanism is produced and circulated in storied encounters" (202). The seven chapters are laid out in the form of a hard-bop jazz performance. Following a brief foreword ("Four-Bar Intro") and introduction ("Vamp In, Head") are four chapters dedicated to each of the musicians and the por por ensemble, [End Page 221] followed by a "non-conclusion" ("Head Again, Vamp Out"). In the chapter on Ghanaba ("First Chorus, with Transposition"), we are treated to Cold War–era intrigue via recollections of his life as a jazz drummer and spy for the United States. Feld's expertise as an ethnographer and jazz aficionado are revealed in a series of enlightening interviews that draw out the many ironies of Ghanaba's personality—at turns bitter, jealous, spiritual, jocular, and brilliant. Nii Noi Nortey ("Second Chorus, Blow Free"), multi-instrumentalist and creator of the hybrid afriphone, is a fascinating subject, having traveled to the United Kingdom in the 1970s as an economics student only to become a devotee of John Coltrane (even building a shrine to the late jazz great), and eventually touring Africa and Europe in a reggae band. Through interview transcriptions, Feld teases out Nii Noi's personal spiritual-political philosophy, a Pan-African politics grounded as much in the music of Coltrane as in the philosophy of Kwame Nkrumah, and constructed from a cosmopolitan mash-up of black African, European, and American icons. Nii Otoo Annan ("Third Chorus, Back Inside") is unique among the jazz musicians featured in the book in that he grew up a prodigy of traditional music in a working-class Ga neighborhood and had not traveled outside Ghana before his work with Feld. Nii Otoo's cosmopolitanism, insofar as it is bound up in connections with Europe and the Americas, is mediated through cinema and LPs, notably recordings from Coltrane's later period. The history of the Accra-based La Drivers Union informs the following chapter's ("Fourth Chorus, Shout to the Groove") exploration of the individual and social importance of nicknames for people and vehicles in Ghana. The connection of the por por ensemble's performances to jazz comes in what Feld observes to be their uncanny resemblance to the jazz funerals of New Orleans, two traditions of the Black Atlantic with much in common despite separate histories. It is not an ethnography in the traditional sense, but rather "a memoir of...

Writing ‘between-the-six’: Mentorship, distance and the co-construction of dissertation research

Abstract In this article, three faculty members and three doctoral students make visible the mutual construction of dissertation research. Through a collaborative and duographic approach, the co-authors write in pairs to explore the relational, affective, and personal processes surrounding mentoring doctoral research. The pairs of duographic narratives are placed side by side to enable multifaceted interaction ‘between-the-six’ authors. The authors theorize and perform the process and concept of mentoring through affective, embodied, sensory, reflective, and dialogic encounters. They also acknowledge the ways in which all mentoring encounters differ and are therefore subject to how individual awarenesses inform multiple, collective, and reciprocal understandings.

Parallel Paradoxes and Useful Uselessness

This article explores potentially productive parallels between ethnographic interviewing, mindfulness-based practices, and recovery processes. First, we consider ethnographic interviews as dialogic and affective encounters that reflect and complement the recovery process, paradoxically enhancing agency by illuminating one’s lack of control. For individuals in recovery from substance abuse and associated trauma, the ethnographic interview may provide an opportunity to examine past events and gain insight into factors that contributed to risky situations and behaviors. We propose that the dialogic space created by the ethnographic interview resembles the moment-to-moment awareness cultivated by mindfulness practices and may have individual-level benefits for similar reasons. We briefly explore the relevance of recent research on epigenetic and neural plasticity. Finally, the potential for greater awareness of these mindfulness mechanisms to enhance ethnographic interviews is discussed.

“How Philly Moves”: from urban branding to kinesthetic sympathy through an aesthetic of blur

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the production and mural aesthetic of the “How Philly Moves” mural, photography, and dance project. The project enables scholars to trace different intensities of dialogic encounter throughout its process, exploring how the remediation of a dance event leaves kinesthetic and rhythmic traces. This project, works against commodifying tendencies while within dominant frameworks and cultivates what I call “kinesthetic sympathy,” an ethic and aesthetic of rhythmic resonance that acknowledges the ongoingness of the subject while inspiring a sense of kinetic impact in the viewer or participant, part of a spectrum of affective connection constituted through rhythmic intimacies.

Children’s creative understanding of drama education: A Bakhtinian perspective

Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of creative understanding, this paper aims to investigate children’s creative learning of drama education in a group of preschoolers aged 4–5 in a Hong Kong kindergarten. The research was designed originally to offer a case study to identify the emergence of creative learning during and after drama lessons, and investigate its relation to teaching. The field observations, however, noticed the contrary effect brought by a product-oriented and a teacher-centred approach of teaching. These approaches had strongly undermined the stimulus to imaginative and playful participation that drama education is able to generate purportedly. Not only had they restricted dialogic encounters in the lessons but also the feasibility of identifying children’s creative response emerging from within. These observations led to a shift of the study focus to the method and data of draw-and-tell, which was used to enable children to creatively re-imagine and retell their drama experiences as a concluding reflection. The findings were analysed in three categories, namely Characterization, Re-conceptualization and Transformation to illustrate children’s capacity and techniques of restorying drama experiences with their interest, knowledge, language and culture. The research process as well as the results of the study reveal a complex interplay between teaching, learning and researching affirming that a particular type of creative learning of drama education is not only shaped by a particular form of teaching, but also the research method.

Dialogic Ruptures: An Ethical Imperative

Dialogue is promoted as a key strategy to ‘solve’ the ‘problem’ of diversity in educational settings. Yet, “[w]hen we select words … We usually take them from other utterances, and mainly from utterances that are kindred to ours in genre, that is in theme, composition or style” (p. 87, emphasis in the original). This article problematises the complexities of dialogic engagements with foreigner teachers in educational encounters. Bakhtin’s treatment of polyphonic dialogic encounters provides an analytical frame for explicating the intertextuality of foreigner teacher engagements as not only temporally and culturally, but also individually volatile. The article suggests that dialogic encounters are unpredictably complex, alive and never neutral, and that dialogic engagements can be so fraught with fear that verbal or cross cultural engagements with teacher foreigners must be recognised as risky and dangerous, and not always smooth ‘solutions’ to a ‘problem’. A dual Bakhtinian/Kristevan lens expands the analysis to expose the vulnerability of dialogue, through unconscious revelations of teacher subjects that are forever in process. The article culminates in an argument for the crucial importance of a receptive, attentive ethics of care in dialogic engagements with cultural foreigners in educational relationships, to avoid fearful exposure, lifeless dialogue and silence.

In Their Own Words: Assessing Global Citizenship in a Short-Term Study-Abroad Program in Bangladesh

ABSTRACTThe article examines whether short-term study-abroad (STSA) experiences can cultivate the cultural understandings and ethical commitments entailed by a cosmopolitan civic education. We examine students’ critical reflections on their participation in a two-week study-abroad program titled Climate Change and Sustainable Development in Bangladesh. Based on our analysis of student reflective essays, we argue that a well-designed STSA with multiple dialogical encounters with diverse constituents in the host county can provide students with significant opportunities to deepen and complicate their understanding of themselves as citizens with local, national, and global responsibilities. We use the study trip to Bangladesh as a “high impact” case study exploring the possibilities of STSA as a form of “dialogical cosmopolitan education.”

On the Role of Interreligious Dialogue in Religious Studies Programs at Indonesian State Islamic Universities

The academic study of religion has seen a crucial re-examination of its disciplinary identity over the past decades that has challenged the theoretical foundations and core concepts around which this identity is constructed. The process has led not only to greater disciplinary self-awareness but also to an understanding of the study's genealogy and to an ongoing concern with the theoretical basis and constitution of the field. This essay is, at least partially, informed by this genre of scholarship that demands we use the same kind of critical scrutiny and intellectual rigor with which we study the institutions and behaviors of religious subjects to examine the disciplinary parameters in which our own production of knowledge about religion takes place. It is concerned with the role of interreligious dialogue in religious studies programs at Indonesia's state Islamic colleges and universities, not so much as an object of study or as a practice but in terms of the shaping influence it has on the self-understanding of the academic study of religion itself. In tracing the development of the study of religion in the state system of Islamic higher education in Indonesia from its beginnings in the 1960's to the present, the article highlights the significant link the discipline has with interreligious dialogue. Quite different from the resistance of United States scholars in the emerging discipline of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who mostly sought to remain aloof from theology and sociopolitical involvement, Indonesian scholars have been led by a specific set of idiosyncratic circumstances to place the study of religion beyond purely academic concerns and to connect it to theological and ethicopolitical goals. As a result of the specifics of the Indonesian case, this short contribution certainly is limited. But, this will not prevent my extrapolating a more general claim from it. To anticipate my conclusion, I want to claim that the relevance of interreligious dialogue for the academic study of religion in Indonesia (and by implication for the discipline itself) lies beyond the myriad of fascinating cases of dialogue encounters and interreligious cooperation that we will do well to study as expression of contemporary religious reality in the challenge it poses to conceptualizations of our field that limit it to a mere scientific interest in particular religious expressions or the concept of religion itself. Indonesian State Islamic Colleges and Universities The beginnings of state Islamic higher education go back to the foundation of the State Institute of Islamic Studies or Institut Agama Islam Negeri (IAIN) in Yogyakartag in 1960, from which it quickly expanded to other parts of Indonesia. (1) One of the hallmarks of this system has been its leaders' commitment to the modernization of Islamic studies or, as Dhofier calls it, to its intellectualization through a conscious embrace of both Western and Islamic intellectual traditions. (2) This process was facilitated in part by student and faculty exchanges and institutional relationships with universities in Western Europe and North America among which the cooperation with McGill University's Institute of Islamic Studies was a particularly prominent example. (3) Paralleling the state's larger goals for national modernization, the innovative efforts in the IAIN system received considerable government support, which resulted in the broadening of the curriculum through the increased integration of religious with general sciences. Educational innovation has also aimed at the study of Islam itself through the updating of teaching methods and the introduction of nondogmatic and contextual approaches. (4) These developments reflect a long history of intellectual openness and instructional inventiveness that have allowed Muslim educators in the state system to be responsive to and to shape Islamic intellectual discourse on relevant social issues. …

Lectionary Selections and Ecological Concerns: A Contribution to Dialogue

Inspired by spirit and documents of Second Vatican Council (1962-65), Dr. Leonard Swidler, theologian and historian, became a leading voice in ecumenical, interfaith, and interreligious dialogues worldwide. Whether as sponsor, host, or participant in conferences, meetings, or symposia, Swidler has been a leading theorist for dialogue among religious and ideological communities. His Decalogue has become ideal for dialogical encounters. (1) His 4-H's of Interreligious Dialogues: Head, Hand, Heart, and Holy identifies areas for fruitful dialogical exchange. (2) To meet need for publication of serious discourse in these emerging fields in 1964 with his late beloved wife Arlene, he established this Journal of Ecumenical Studies. His graduate courses and Dialogue Institute for International, Intercultural, and Interreligious exchange motivated many students from Temple University's Department of Religion to engage in and foster dialogue. I am among these students. Although Swidler's extensive writings do not focus on ecology, in Toward a Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic (3) he called for multinational/religious/ideological dialogues to establish an ethic that is anthropocosmo-centric. This call recognized that future dialogues must address challenges to natural world. (4) I am convinced that ecological concerns are today's most essential dialogue. While Swidler has rightly insisted that goal of dialogue is to learn more than to communicate one's own perspectives, dialogue assumes one has a perspective to offer. I live and teach in Alaska, canary to a worldwide ecological crisis. Here, villages of Kivalena, Shishmaref, Shaktoolik, Unalakleet, Koyukuk, and Newtok are already seriously threatened, if not yet irreparably destroyed, by climate change. Those truly familiar with situation accept that in thirty to fifty years, 193 more Alaskan Native Villages will either to move or disband, their present locations having become uninhabitable. Alaska is not only locus of Exxon Valdez oil-spill disaster in 1989 that ravaged waters and marine life of Prince William Sound, but it is also home to an oil-based economy populated by a significant majority of voices who deny scientific evidence of ecological concerns. While scientific and technological knowledge as well as industrialization greatly enhanced human comforts, these come at the price of unexpected consequences that proved increasingly disastrous for rest of creation as well as ourselves. (5) Environmental concerns (air and soil pollution, resource depletion, loss of biodiversity, overpopulation, climate change, etc.) are most pressing threat to humanity and to all other living beings. While disputes over natural resources preoccupied human history, if we fail to arrest ecological degradation, there will be no resources at all. Ecological concerns entered Christian discourse in response to an important article published in 1967 by Lynn White, claiming that Christian anthropocentricity was culpable for growing ecological problems. (6) In response, biblical scholars identified biblical texts for earth-affirming insights. These efforts to respond to secular critics who minimized every religion also led scholars and practitioners of other religious to identify ways in which they or their traditions appreciate and affirm nature. (7) It is thus that ecology became a topic for ecumenical, interfaith, and interreligious dialogues. Today, many recognize that all religious communities that determine how people understand nature and establish moral imperatives and values have potential to mobilize sensibilities of people toward goals of Earth Stewardship, here defined as shaping trajectories of social-ecological change to enhance ecosystem resilience and human well-being. (8) Statements identifying related concerns and protocols that been issued by religious bodies throughout world are posted on Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale (9) Pope Francis is currently working on a much anticipated encyclical on environment, which will be an important addition to these statements. …

The Work of the Eye in Infant Pedagogy: A Dialogic Encounter of ‘Seeing’ in an Education and Care Setting

This paper examines the significance of a ‘look’ in infant–teacher dialogues in an early education and care centre in New Zealand. Drawing on Bakhtin’s principle of ‘visual surplus’ video recordings of two infants’, aged under 1 year of age, interactions with their teacher and teacher interpretations of these interactions were analysed in terms of the time it took for an infant to be ‘noticed’. The results revealed that teachers responded to infants’ initiations significantly faster when a ‘look’ accompanied verbal initiation than when it did not, while the length of the interaction did not depend on whether or not a ‘look’ was used to initiate an interaction. Different types of ‘looks’ (a gaze/glance/watch) were found to generate different responses and were given different values by teachers. Results also highlight the fact that ‘look’ initiations are often nested within language sequences that take place in a larger dialogic space of adults and peers. The findings point to the significance of the ‘work of the eye’ in understanding the complex nature of communications that occur between adults and infants in early childhood education settings.

In the Neighborhood of Zero: Ontology and Pedagogy

The classroom is arguably the space where all of William V. Spanos’s work intersects. Delivered always with a sense of urgency, his pedagogy seeks to disclose the violence of “disinterestedness” inhering in liberal humanism. By offering his undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to engage in a contestatory dialogic encounter where something is at stake for them and for him, Spanos practices a pedagogy geared toward the activation and renewal of critical consciousness through an ethical practice of care. Throughout his work but particularly in his book The End of Education, Spanos has advocated for a pedagogy that productively maintains a sense of dialogic crisis as generating change. The End of Education is particularly aimed at those who teach literature and criticism, because they have been trained in the liberal humanist tradition themselves and are encouraged to reproduce it by the profession at large, especially in designing their pedagogy. Practitioners of the literary and cultural humanities must continually be aware of their complicity in reproducing a “thinking of colonized and docile bodies in the service of the dominant sociopolitical order whether conceived as disciplinary society or imperial state” (EE, 205); in other words, they must think ontologically as well as sociopolitically.