Modern Dilemma Research Articles

Special Issue Concluding Discussion: Time for De‐Mythifying Dilemmas of Tradition and Modernity in Mexico?

Special Issue Concluding Discussion: Time for De‐Mythifying Dilemmas of Tradition and Modernity in Mexico?

Introduction: Capturing the Dilemmas of Modernity and Tradition in Mexico

This Special Issue examines the dilemmas of modernity, modernization, and tradition in Mexico from a variety of disciplinary perspectives covering foreign policy, cultural diplomacy and nation image creation, security politics, civil society participation in domestic and foreign policy making, congruence/dissonance in the implementation of global and national development goals, poverty reduction strategies, education reforms and global education models, urban growth, and environmental concerns. The contributors identify and analyze events associated with the concept of disjuncture and how it has produced fragmented and confusing realities. Implicitly or explicitly, each author discusses the “push” and “pull” factors embedded in the forces of tradition and modernity that influence the policy‐making processes and occasionally give rise to disjunctures in specific areas. How do these disjunctures manifest themselves empirically and conceptually? If they seem to be produced and reproduced over and over again, what can be done to break this pattern? These are some of the underlying questions facing Mexico and its current transition in political history.

루소와 서구 근대성의 딜레마

루소와 서구 근대성의 딜레마

PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCE AND PROFESSIONAL MOBILITY OF FUTURE BACHELORS OF NURSING: THE DILEMMA OF MODERNITY

The article deals with the actual problem that is connected with a differentiation of notions «professional competence» and «professional mobility» of future bachelors of nursing. Modern world develops and perfects constantly, that is why it provides significant social and professional mobility. In these circumstances the society needs graduates, who are ready to be involved in future life activities, able to decide life and professional problems and this depends not only from the received knowledge, but also from some additional qualities, to indicate which notions «mobility» and «competence» are used, and which correspond to the understanding of modern educational goals. The purpose of the article is solving of the main dilemma of modernity: formed professional competence or professional mobility of future bachelors of nursing as precondition of effectiveness of future professional activity in medicine. The research methods are used: theoretical analysis and synthesis, generalization of psychological and pedagogical, methodical and special literature, informational resources on problems of the research; scientific interpretation of actual pedagogical facts, retrospective analysis of future bachelors of nursing professional activity. The terms «competence» and «mobility» have a classical defect of terminological popularity: the number of their interpretations steadily rises as the number of researches increases in the sphere of competence and mobility. New authors, joining the system of scientific analysis, follow the necessity of compliance with the criterion of novelty and create own definitions and structure of phenomena in their individual understanding. However, the key semantics in all definitions is one. It is connected with the original meaning of the word mobility – is a movement, dynamics. The basis of the formation professional mobility of future bachelors of nursing is the professional activity competence, which provides practical mastering all the types of nursing activity; includes the values of nursing mastering, professionally meaningful knowledge, abilities, skills and a set of personal qualities, which reflect the readiness to implement effectively future professional activity, and also self-development and self-improvement; the development and activation of critical thinking, formation of skills and abilities of autonomous studying, which is directed on the formation of students’ personal responsibility for study results by organizing an educational process with an instructor.

Moralne dylematy kultury współczesnej

Przedmiotem artykułu jest namysł nad kulturą współczesną postrzeganą z perspektywy etycznej, a punktem wyjścia przekonanie o kryzysie kultury europejskiej, którego źródłem miałaby być „śmierć Boga” (Nietzsche) czy też klęska „projektu oświeceniowego” (Gray). Istotą kryzysu kultury jest załamanie się dotychczas obowiązujących systemów wartości, co rodzi szereg dylematów moralnych. Typowy dla kultury współczesnej indywidualizm zaoowocował relatywizmem aksjologicznym, doprowadził do atomizmu społecznego oraz, paradoksalnie, zrodził nowe formy zniewolenia. Inną cechą współczesności jest dominacja rozumu instrumentalnego, który głównym kryterium oceny działań czyni efektywność. Konsekwencją tych przemian dokonujących się w kulturze jest z jednej strony zagubienie etyczne, z drugiej zagrożenie wolności i podmiotowości. Czy istnieje jakieś dobre wyjście z tej sytuacji? Być może lekarstwem na moralne dylematy współczesności byłby powrót do aksjologicznych źródeł. Próbę taką podjął Henryk Elzenberg w swojej etyce perfekcjonistycznej.

‘L’essentiel, c’est la contingence’: how literature does and does not cope with contingency

ABSTRACTThis essay offers a critique of the concept of containing or coping with contingency (Kontingenzbewältigung) put forward by a group of German philosophers and intellectuals throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This group put an emphasis on literature, especially story-telling, for thinking about contingency as a characteristic dilemma of modernity. In contrast to their anthropological perspective, I claim not only that different literary genres, periods, and even individual works and readings perform different coping practices in a historically and aesthetically specific manner, but also that literature primarily serves as a means for reflecting on the enactment of a wide variety of coping practices. I demonstrate my theses with three short literary examples (Voltaire, Sartre, contemporary zombie fiction).

Violence, Morality, and Religion

Violence, Morality, and Religion

Did Expressions Hair Design V. Schneiderman Reconstitute the Bygone Lochner Era: How a New Case About Free Speech is Like an Old Case About the Right to Contract

In Expressions Hair Design v. Schneiderman, a seemingly innocuous eleven-page slip opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. made manifest that the communicative effects of any law are considered speech subject to some level of scrutiny under the First Amendment. In a different era, and under a different constitutional provision, the Supreme Court scrutinized, and often ruled as unconstitutional, many governmental laws and regulations. In 1905, Lochner v. United States recognized a potent weapon against business regulation: the right to contract under the Fourteenth Amendment. Not until 1937 did the Court revisit and decline to continue recognizing such a right as a bulwark against democratically enacted laws. The Lochner era is often a term of opprobrium; yet the case still has its champions. Is Schneiderman the new Lochner? In three parts, this paper reviews Lochner and its atmospherics, delineates the Court’s first speech jurisprudence through Schneiderman, and discusses how Schneiderman presents a renewed opportunity to challenge any law or regulation. This paper does not take a position on whether the Court was correct in Lochner, and this paper does not weigh in on whether principles emanating from Lochner could or should salve modern dilemmas. This paper, at bottom, addresses the litigation-tactic consequences of Schneiderman and the implications that arise from the decision.

Health systems in an era of biophysical limits: the wicked dilemmas of modernity

Modernity is characterized by social complexity, the development of the nation state, disembedded processes of market exchange, an intrinsic logic of growth, increasing throughputs of energy and materials, and an expanding range of environmental impacts. Modern health systems reflect, at every level, the process of ‘disenchantment’ associated with reductive scientific rationality, as well as an ontology of methodological and analytical individualism, which privileges the integrity of the ‘body’ as opposed to networked ‘figurations’ of linked individuals within nested ecological systems. Biophysical limits to growth present a systemic challenge to all aspects of modern society, including health systems. Opportunities for an alternative ‘low-throughput’ health system would center on reconciling wicked dilemmas of modernity, including (1) the increasing vulnerability of high-overhead, materially and energetically intensive global healthcare systems funded through the welfare state in a future defined by ecological limits to economic growth, and (2) the diminishing returns of a curative health system that treats individual human bodies while incurring negative health outcomes at the level of society and ecology.

Keeping up appearances: (Management ? performance appraisals)

Preserve the outer appearance, revolutionise the inner dynamic. Sam Wells shows how this advice from a 7th century Pope provides the solution to a modern day management dilemma. Copyright 2007 Sam Wells. No part of this article may be reproduced by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

Utility and Happiness in a Prosperous Society

Some examples of human behavior which seem paradoxical or irrational in view of the utility maximization principle can be explained as rational if we distinguish between two types of utility. The first type is the conventional utility – cardinal or ordinal – which the rational economic actors are expected to maximize. The second type is connected to actions which fulfill some psychological needs and might appear irrational by cost-effective calculations. Two instances of the second type are philanthropy and altruism on the one hand and excessive consumption, on the other. Although they stem from totally different drives, both are economically irrational but can be linked to the utility of the second type. The two-utilities model is rooted in Humanistic Psychology tenets, such as Maslow's hierarchy of needs as well as in recent results in Happiness Economics. It can be assumed that, on the average, the richer a person is, the less he cares about maximizing the first type of utility, while the importance of the second type in his life increases. As the society becomes more prosperous, both positive and negative trends of the second type of utility become more widespread: more resources are wasted on unnecessary products and services, and more money is spent on philanthropy. The two-utilities model can explain some seemingly odd features of the prosperous society, and may have practical applications as well. This article is scheduled to be a chapter in a book on the economics of the prosperous society. My claim is that there is a gap between economic theory and economic reality in the western world, since economics was traditionally established to deal with conditions of scarcity. As many of our current problems are associated with abundance rather than with scarcity, new tools are needed to tackle the modern dilemmas. For a definition of a prosperous society, please see the previous chapter (Unemployment and Job Creation in a Prosperous Economy). http://ssrn.com/abstract=2827204

Divisions in Treaty 6 Perspectives: the dilemma of written text and oral tradition

Since the signing of Treaty 6 in 1876, there has been ongoing controversy between the First Nations and the Canadian government regarding the understanding and fulfillment of the treaty terms. Through investigating both historical texts and oral tradition, this article hopes to give insight on the modern dilemma of treaty rights in the specific case of Treaty 6. In order for the most accurate understanding of Treaty 6 to be obtained, First Nations oral tradition and perspectives must be considered as valid evidence.

A ocultação da violência canalizada para o processo penal

The concealment of violence within criminal procedure is a permanent factor in modern criminal law dilemmas, which can be explained through Rene Girard’s theory on the issue of mimesis of violence and its direction to the elected enemy groups. Thus, this article seeks to examine the criminal procedure dynamic through a basic concept, seeking to indicate the language activation points developed throughout procedural doctrine, with the purpose of imposing a governmental sanction, completely unattached from the mimetic dynamic of violence, leading to true dilemmas. These dilemmas are verified by activating the procedural language, and reveal the concealment of violence and its mimicry, as well as its collateral effects, broadly discussed by criminal law and criminal procedure.

Dilemma of modernity: interrogating cross‐border ethnic identities at China's southwest frontier

Recent theoretical advancement in human geography has reconceptualised the border as a process and becoming, which is appropriated and constructed by myriad actors to yield diverse and changing meanings, and accommodate various needs and interests. This enables us to appreciate the dual qualities of the border, both as a barrier to be overcome and an enabling factor for practices and meanings. In particular, cross‐border mobility plays an essential role in mediating meanings of the border and identities of those whose lifeworlds are affected by the very existence of the border. On the one hand, mobilities transgress territorial orders imposed by official conceptions of the border. But, on the other hand, the distinctions between economic, social and political milieus at the two sides of the border may give rise to heightened senses of difference and lead to diverging identities. Building on these insights, this article argues for a more nuanced, dynamic understanding of the relationship between border crossing and belonging. It examines two empirical cases: the cross‐border attendance of Huashan Festival celebration for Miao people at the Sino‐Vietnamese borderland, and the trans‐border mobility of Buddhist monks from the Myanmar city Muse to the Chinese border city Ruili. Overall, this paper argues that the potentials of the border to both connect and differentiate are inscribed in the lifeworlds in the borderlands in equally visible ways. Also, this paper adds some twists to Scott's thesis on Zomia, and argues that we must not downplay the importance of the frame of nation‐states in shaping the lifeworlds of border inhabitants.

Space, Place, Narrative: Critical Regionalism and the Idea of Home in a Global Age

Abstract How to become modern and, simultaneously, return to sources, how to integrate historical progress and the preservation and availability of cultural traditions has been variously described as a major dilemma of modernity. Underlying this dilemma are differing notions of home and of the role of places and regions in a staggeringly globalized, technology-driven civilization. Regionalist movements, such as Agrarianism in the South of the US, have thrived on their antipathy to a fast changing modern world; they have also promulgated a renewed sense of place and a return to regional history and traditions. The essay discusses critical regionalists’ celebration of the local and the region; in so doing it also looks at two representatives of opposing notions of home in modernity, Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. Finally, it contends that it is primarily by way of narrative and storytelling that a sense of place, of being-in-the-world can be reconstructed.

Imperial Normativities and Sciences of the Child: The Politics of Development in the USSR, 1920s–1930s

Between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s, Soviet researchers in child biopsychosocial development became especially interested in the question of ethnoracial differences in the Soviet child population. During the First Five-Year Plan a specialist subarea of research briefly flourished within Soviet pedology. Dubbed the “pedology of national minorities,” it was fostered in concert with the broader efforts of the Soviet state to incorporate “backward” populations living in more peripheral parts of the Union into the normatively framed Soviet body politic as part of accelerated economic, social, and cultural “development.” Focusing on examples of psychometric research done on Uzbek children in Tashkent, Tatar children in Moscow, and more remote ethnic groups in Siberia, this article analyzes how the early-Soviet “pedology of national minorities” became embroiled in a complicated knot of contradictions in its attempt to account for and negotiate the ambiguous relationship between, on the one hand, normative deviations in the Soviet child population (a population that was expected to be unified into a single body politic, especially through the expansion and standardization of the Soviet education system) and, on the other, ethnoracial differences within this population in the distinctive context of early Soviet efforts to manage the Union’s federative structure along ethnonational lines through the Soviet state’s nationalities policy. The article argues that this contradiction between “deviation” and “difference” reflected one of the central dilemmas of Soviet modernity as a sociopolitical experiment – namely, how to adapt universalizing thinking and utopian aspirations to an “imperial” reality marked by nonsystemic diversity.

Burnout and depression in academia: A look at the discourse of the university

Burnout and depression are no strangers to academics. For both students and faculty, these psychological phenomena can plague and even end careers. In this article, it is proposed that burnout and depression among both graduate students and faculty are a primary manifestation of the underlying discourse that is prevalent among many academic institutions. Through the lens of Lacanian discourse theory we will look at the unconscious communication within academia that may be perpetuating the modern dilemma of depression and burnout for both students and professors. Initially, we will look at the concepts of burnout and depression in terms of their clinical manifestations and prevalence. From there, we will consider Lacan’s discourse theory, most notably the concept of the university discourse, and how the unconscious dimension of communication may be effectively propagating psychological distress in academia. Lastly, the article will conclude possible avenues that the academic field can take in order to avoid the pitfalls of such a discourse.

Knut Hamsun’s “Meditations on Nansen” Revisited: The Dilemma of Modernity

<p align="left">Knut Hamsun’s polemic about the Norwegian Nansen cult round 1889 (on the occasion of Fridtjof Nansen’s ski crossing of Greenland), which he published in a newspaper article titled “Meditations on Nansen” (“Nansen-Betragtninger”), was mainly directed against the public enthusiasm for sportive records as a typical modern trend, whose pointless absurdity Hamsun shows in an incisive and specifically provocative way. His critique is primarily aimed at a kind of hero worship that in his opinion is out of all proportion to the uselessness of the expedition’s results. Thus, “a daredevil, well finished adventure, a breakneck act, a sports affair, a lucky strike,” as he outlines Nansen’s venture, becomes the basis for a mass hysteria whose driving forces are invested in the signatures of modernity. The fascination of crossing the line and of extreme forms of progress in “both sports and science”, their entanglement as an example for the “proliferation of hybrids” (Latour 1993), and the contingent dimension of success stories are symptoms of modernity that Hamsun is polemically engaged with. In conclusion, I investigate to what extent Hamsun ironically refers to these symptoms in his novel <span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;"><em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">Editor Lynge </span></em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">(</span><em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;">Redakteur </span></em></span>Lynge, <em><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT;"><span style="font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT;">1893). My argument is supported by the assumption that Hamsun’s vehement </span></span></em>denunciation of such tendencies is owed to the fact that he himself is embroiled in them.</p>

Urine free cortisol in the diagnosis of Cushing's syndrome: is it worth doing and, if so, how?

Urine free cortisol in the diagnosis of Cushing's syndrome: is it worth doing and, if so, how?

Explorations in History, Films and the Nation: A Study of the Representations of Kashmir Insurgency in the Hindi Mainstream Cinema

This paper engages with the politics of framing to explicate how Bollywood has framed the political, material and ideological compulsions of Kashmir insurgency, nation-formation, and citizenship in India. Moving beyond traditional readings, I will focus on the multiple ways in which the images of Kashmir's conflict in the past and present are communicated to, and shared in, the popular culture, highlighting the importance of “remembering” certain segments of the past and “forgetting” or ignoring others. This paper deals with the cinematic images that seek to challenge and renegotiate modern, political, and ethical dilemmas by exploring the constitutive tension, aporias, perplexities and paradoxes between— “man” and “citizen,” the principle of universal human rights and that of state sovereignty, the growing problem of statelessness, and biopolitical humanitarianism.