Essay Sets Research Articles

REFLEXIÓN SOBRE CUATRO EJES DE INTERSECCIÓN DENTRO DE LA GESTIÓN EN LA EDUCACIÓN EN MÉXICO

From a teaching perspective, we can see several axes that have impacted Management since it is carried out with greater effort in Education in Mexico, especially at the Basic level; always the leadership in the first place, has marked the way of directing an Educational Institution, there are numerous studies and investigations giving answer to a number of types of leadership, as well as to the way to apply it. Secondly, this essay sets the tone to reflect on the Educational Evaluation and Quality, they practically go hand in hand, since both represent a substantial change that is not easy to implement within an Institution. The third term raises how much an Educational Policy of a given sexennial really impacts the Education of that time and permeates the present; Finally, we appreciate the need to create an Educational Reform that really works in most of the territory, specifying with some guidelines that invite reflection.

Shakespearean Pedagogy and Copious Paradox: How Might we Queer Shakespeare’s Work?

Despite opposition to ‘queering the text’ by established Shakespeare critics, this essay sets out to ponder the possibility of teaching Shakespeare in a queer context. The essay begins by examining the social and sexual conditions of the early modern period, making the observation that there were a wide variety of sexualities, moral attitudes, and sexual practices at that time, and that often the early modern moral codes of conduct contradicted each other. It then traces the significance of the rhetorical device of paradox through Lyly and Castiglione, and examines the method of Elizabethan rhetoric, which involved ‘copia’ (the elaboration of one idea into a variety of ideas through language) and its associated variety of meanings. The essay then turns to the text of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, observing that its subject matter—the love of an older woman for a younger man—may have reflected the early modern heterosexual fear of women’s sexuality—and continues to baffle male critics today. Finally, turning to the poem itself—analyzing it in terms of ‘copia’ and paradox—the conclusion suggests that perhaps there was a relationship between Shakespeare’s use of these rhetorical techniques and the sexuality of his time.

O punctum e a fotografia de arte. Nas sendas do último Barthes

O artigo trata da entrada da fotografia de arte no horizonte da obra tardia de Roland Barthes, onde é vista acedendo à dignidade do estilo. Nesse sentido, chama a atenção para um pequeno conjunto de ensaios sobre certa vanguarda da arte fotográfica francesa por ora pouco considerado pelos estudiosos. Trata-se de assinalar que esta produção barthesiana da fase final enseja revisar o conjunto probatório que dá sustentação ao conceito de “punctum”, entendido como aceno mínimo de significância de uma foto quando para um espectador contundente. É inseparável disso conjecturar que, ao referi-la ao estilo, o último Barthes confere à fotografia o mesmo valor de “escritura” que concede à arte da palavra, quando não assertiva.

Paraphrasing tools, language translation tools and plagiarism: an exploratory study

In a recent unit of study in an undergraduate Health Sciences pathway course, we identified a set of essays which exhibited similarity of content but demonstrated the use of bizarre and unidiomatic language. One of the distinct features of the essays was the inclusion of unusual synonyms in place of expected standard medical terminology.We suspected the use of online paraphrasing tools, but were also interested in investigating the possibility of the use of online language translation tools. In order to test the outputs of these tools, we used as a seed document a corpus of text which had been provided to the students as prompt for the essay. This document was put through six free online paraphrasing tools and six separate iterative language translations through the online Google Translate™ tool.The results demonstrated that free online paraphrasing tools did not identify medical terminology as standardised or accepted nomenclature and substituted synonyms, whereas Google Translate™ largely preserved medical terminology.We believe that textual indicators such as the absence of standard discipline-based terminology may be of assistance in the identification of machine paraphrased text.

The politics of the unknown: Uncertainty and the nuclear threat in Britain, 1979–1985

AbstractThis article seeks to map out possibilities for conducting a microhistorical study of the socio‐political and cultural roles that uncertainty, as a consequence of a lack of verifiable knowledge, played in political debates over the nuclear threat in Britain in the Second Cold War. Focusing on this politics of the unknown in the period from 1979 to 1985 when Britain witnessed resurging fears of nuclear war, this exploratory essay sets out to make three main interventions: First, it conceptualizes “uncertainty” as a subjective social and cultural construct with fluid meanings that does not necessarily have to hold exclusively negative connotations but might offer opportunities for historical actors. Second, this essay proposes an examination of the politics of the unknown about the anticipated effects of a nuclear war within a wider synchronic economy of non‐nuclear‐weapons‐related concerns such as de‐industrialization or unemployment. Finally, the article introduces the periodization of “Britain's long nuclear 1980s” to allow for a consideration of relevant diachronic aspects of this politics of the unknown, thereby adding further depth to the microhistory. Throughout, this exploratory study draws on historical examples to illustrate its key theoretical points.

Connecting writing assessment with critical thinking: An exploratory study of alternative rhetorical functions and objects of enquiry in writing prompts

Abstract This exploratory study investigated the effects of prompts on students’ writing performance and critical thinking. Two groups of Chinese undergraduates (n = 129) responded to two distinct prompts with differing rhetorical functions and objects of enquiry. The comparison group responded to a conventional prompt modelled after prompts in high-stakes English tests which tend to converge over narrow ranges, while the experimental group responded to a prompt with problem-solving as the main rhetorical function, and behavioral economics as the object of enquiry. Various differences were noted between the two sets of essays related to standardized indexes of writing quality, as well as other rhetorical and linguistic features including: use of metadiscourse, essay organization, and use of certain lexical items. The comparison group outperformed the experimental one in several aspects of writing. However, the experimental group generated more diverse language and displayed enhanced critical thinking. We argue that the washback of high-stakes tests may result in a better performance in some respects in students’ responses to conventional prompts. However, this may also reflect a cookie-cutter response to such prompts that arrives at the expense of a whole range of ignored rhetorical functions and objects of enquiry, some of which may stimulate increased critical thinking.

Review of The Mother in Psychoanalysis and Beyond: Matricide and Maternal Subjectivity

The Mother in Psychoanalysis and Beyond: Matricide and Maternal Subjectivity, by Rosalind Mayo and Christina Moutsou (Eds.), London; New York: Routledge, £24 approx. Paperback, 2017, ISBN: 978-1-138-88505-9. This set of essays cogently deconstructs much traditional psychoanalytic theory and points at a direction for a vibrant maternal subjectivity.

Introduction—and Invitation—to the Food Dignity Special Issue

First paragraphs: Over the course of five funded years and with five million dollars, three dozen community food justice leaders and academics across three U.S. states and nine organizations collaborated on action and research about community food justice, security, leadership, sustainability, and sovereignty. We called this collaboration Food Dignity. If you read this special issue, you will hear 20 voices (and about a dozen more, indirectly) presenting some of what we have learned since first proposing the Food Dignity collaboration in 2010 and also striving to make useful sense of it, for ourselves and for you. In this opening set of essays, leaders of the five community organizations partnering in Food Dignity each describe how and why they chose to collaborate in this project and reflect on their experiences with it (Daftary-Steel, 2018; Neideffer, 2018; Sequeira, 2018; Sutter, 2018; Woodsum, 2018a). Then we discuss how the three of us—the project PI, a community leader with decades of experience in community activism, and a non–tenure track academic team member who joined the project a little late—ended up being the ones leading this project to its close, including guest editing this journal issue (Hargraves, Porter, & Woodsum, 2018)....

Giovanni Pontano, Ad uxorem (De amore coniugali III 2)

The present essay sets out a detailed analysis of Giovanni Pontano’s Ad uxorem, an elegy included in the collection entitled De amore coniugali. Alongside linguistic, metrical, stylistic, allegorical and structural observations, it hones in on the representation of Pontano’s wife and children, on mythology and on symposiac and divinatory features. It furthermore examines from a comparative perspective the major influences: Horace’s Carmina, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid’s Heroides and exile poetry, as well as Statius’ Silvae. In addition, it pays attention to analogous passages elsewhere in Pontano, both within the same conjugal canzoniere and in the lyric collections Parthenopeus, De tumulis, Hendecasyllabi and Eridanus. Ad uxorem stems from the need for self-consolation, from Pontano’s desire to give vent to his nostalgia for his family during the Christmas festivities; the poetic medium proves to be an effective antidote to emotions of grief.

Introduction: Lebensraum and its discontents

This introductory essay sets up the discussion in this special section on the first English language translation of Friedrich Ratzel's 1901 Lebensraum essay. After providing biographical context for this controversial nineteenth-century German geographer, we offer a brief history of what is perhaps his most famous conceptual contribution: Lebensraum (living space). We end by introducing the five contributions to this special section.

Doing nothing: Anthropology sits at the same table with contemporary art in Lisbon and Tbilisi

This article proposes an artistic performance to reflect on the labour of fieldwork. The experimental method consists in installing myself at a café in Lisbon and Tbilisi for 35 hours beyond the reach of smartphones and laptops and then doing nothing. Across this exercise, time slows, opening a clearer window into ordinary life. The intervention raises questions about the way digital technologies transform the temporality and experience of ethnographic fieldwork. The essay sets up to make a methodological contribution to a growing literature on ‘inactivity’ and about experimental methods, reminding us that observation is a tiring physical experience and that slow time is correlated with anthropological quality. Doing nothing appears as a slow time being in front of others, which enables a break of consciousness, suspends politics of relevance, and leaves space for serendipity and embodied imagination.

Spaces of Identity: Gender, Ethnicity, and Race in Salome of the Tenements (1923) and Quicksand (1928)

Abstract The 1920s marked a fervent time for artistic and literary expression in the United States. Besides the famous authors of the decade, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, Anzia Yezierska and Nella Larsen, among other female writers, also managed to carve “a literary space” for their stories. Yezierska and Larsen depicted the struggles and tribulations of minority women during the fermenting 1920s, with a view to illustrating the impact of ethnicity and race on the individual female identity. Yezierska, a Jewish-American immigrant, and Larsen, a biracial American woman, share an interest in capturing the nuances of belonging to a particular community as an in-between subject. Therefore, this essay sets out to examine the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and choice in shaping individual identities in public and private in-between spaces in Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements (1923) and Larsen’s Quicksand (1928).

Desperately Seeking ‘Justice’ in Classical Chinese: On the Meanings of Yi

This essay sets out to search for an equivalent Chinese word to the English word ‘justice’ in classical Chinese language, through ancient Chinese philosophical texts, imperial codes and idioms. The study found that there does not seem to be a linguistic sign for ‘justice’ in classical Chinese, and further, yi resembles ‘justice’ in some ways and has been used sometimes to translate ‘justice’, but yi is a complex concept in traditional Chinese philosophy with multiple meanings and it is dissimilar to ‘justice’ in their semantic and pragmatic meanings in Chinese and English legal culture. While ‘justice’ is a keyword and fundamental to Western law, yi is not a legal word or concept in classical Chinese in traditional China. Given its complexity, yi does not have a one-to-one equivalent in English. It sometimes carries a sense of ‘righteousness’ and occasionally ‘justice’, but yi and ‘justice’ are not equivalent. In view of these, it becomes understandable that the translations of yi in contemporary Chinese usage vary ranging from ‘friendship and justice’ to ‘greater good’, among others. The meaning of yi is still uncertain and context sensitive as it was two thousand years ago.

Iran and Postcolonial Studies: Its Development and Current Status

Even though Iran has never been formally colonized, a brief glance at its history reveals western powers’ imperialistic tendencies toward and colonialist impositions on it. By providing a brief overview of Iran–West encounters since the nineteenth century, this essay sets the stage for understanding how postcolonialism is relevant to the Iranian context. It then attempts to trace the main elements which have conditioned the reception and development of postcolonial perspectives in Iran. Drawing briefly on the work of Iranian religious and political thinkers, it seeks to highlight the role of political Islam in promoting anti-imperialist discourses and practices which led to Iran's Islamic Revolution one year after the publication of Said's Orientalism (1978). Yet there has been no systematic development of postcolonial studies in Iran and indeed the arrival of postcolonial theory has been rather late – as late as the mid-2000s. Notwithstanding this situation, the first decade of the twenty-first century saw a flourishing of cultural studies which seems to have aroused an interest in postcolonial debates both within Iranian academia and research centers affiliated with the government. This research argues postcolonialism has been empowering for the multicultural society of Iran in the sense that it has provided Iranians with a critical framework to question lingering imperialistic legacies and to deal more effectively with current national and international issues, both in academia and in society.

The Efficient Design of Option Contracts: Principles and Applications

The law of contracts has often treated options quite differently from other contractual transactions; for example, the characterization of a transaction as an option contract calls forth specially required formalities, but on the other hand often has the effect of releasing parties from doctrinal limitations on their contractual freedom, such as the duty to mitigate damages or the rule that holds excessively high liquidated damages void as penalties. Such differential treatment is challenging to explain from a functional viewpoint, in part because all contracts resemble options to the extent they are enforceable in terms of monetary damages, and in part because contracts that are nominally structured as explicit options can be close economic substitutes for contracts that are nominally structured as unconditional. This essay sets out a theoretical account of the efficient design of option contracts - one that explains how contracting parties should strike the balance among option premium, option life, and exercise price, in order to maximize the expected surplus from their transaction. It shows that the tradeoffs between these various aspects of option contracts can affect the parties incentives to acquire and disclose information, to invest in relation-specific investments, and to take efficient precautions against the event of breach. It then goes on to develop an organizing framework for private parties choosing whether and how to structure their contractual arrangements as options, and for policymakers choosing whether or how to regulate such private choices. In short, the appropriate balance between option premium, option life, and exercise price will depend on the relative importance that the one attaches to these various dimensions of incentives.

Foundations and Futures of Innovation Management Theory

This manuscript provides an overview of key theories and themes in Innovation Management research through a series of short essays engaging with seminal texts and critical ideas in the field. Each essay gives an introduction to a particular paper or book and is intended to complement students' engagement with the original text. Each essay also ties the ideas described into the broader context of the research literature and tries to build up a sense of both intertextual coherence and unfinished discussion. Together, the set of essays represent a curated introduction to Innovation Management that can - ideally - substitute for conventional textbooks at both the Bachelor's and Master's level.

Exit the ‘Great Man’: On James Crossley’s Jesus and the Chaos of History

In Jesus and the Chaos of History (JCH), James G. Crossley invites us to ‘rethink some of the ways we approach the historical Jesus.’ The result of many years of critical engagement in Jesus Research, JCH is a helpful overview of the current state of the field and a programmatic set of essays seeking to ‘redirect’ Jesus Research by finding new ways to account for the social, economic, and political factors inherent and implicit in ‘historical change.’ In this review, I would like to engage and think with four of Crossley’s proposals: (1) the concept of an ‘Earliest Palestinian Tradition’; (2) the construction of Jesus as a ‘Great Man’; (3) the Jewish Jesus’ Torah observance; and (4) Jesus’ relationship to politico-military revolution and ‘(non)violence’.

The Islamic Secular

It is common to assume an inherent conflict between the substance of the category “religion” and the category “secular.” Given its putative rejection of the separation between the sacred and the profane, this conflict is presumed to be all the more solid in Islam. But even assuming Islam’s rejection of the sacred/profane dichotomy, there may be other ways of defining the secular in Islam and of thinking about its relationship with the religion. This is what the present essay sets out to do. By taking Sharia as its point of departure, it looks at the latter’s self-imposed limits as the boundary between a mode of assessing human acts that is grounded in concrete revelational sources (and/or their extension) and modes of assessing human acts that are independent of such sources, yet not necessarily outside God’s adjudicative gaze. This non-shar‘ī realm, it is argued, is the realm of the “Islamic secular.” It is “secular” inasmuchas it is differentiated from Sharia as the basis for assessing human acts. It remains “Islamic,” however, and thus “religious,” in its rejection of the notion of proceeding “as if God did not exist.” As I will show, this distinction between the shar‘ī and the nonshar‘ ī has a long pedigree in the Islamic legal (and theological) tradition. As such, the notion of the Islamic secular is more of an excavation than an innovation.

Putting the public (back) into public health: leadership, evidence and action.

There is a strong evidence-based rationale for community capacity building and community empowerment as part of a strategic response to reduce health inequalities. Within the current UK policy context, there are calls for increased public engagement in prevention and local decision-making in order to give people greater control over the conditions that determine health. With reference to the challenges and opportunities within the English public health system, this essay seeks to open debate about what is required to mainstream community-centred approaches and ensure that the public is central to public health. The essay sets out the case for a reorientation of public health practice in order to build impactful action with communities at scale leading to a reduction in the health gap. National frameworks that support local practice are described. Four areas of challenge that could potentially drive an implementation gap are discussed: (i) achieving integration and scale, (ii) effective community mobilization, (iii) evidencing impact and (iv) achieving a shift in power. The essay concludes with a call to action for developing a contemporary public health practice that is rooted in communities and offers local leadership to strengthen local assets, increase community control and reduce health inequalities.

Connecting Atlantic and Pacific: Theorizing the Arctic

ABSTRACTThis essay sets out to theorize the “new” Arctic Ocean as a pivot from which our standard map of the world is currently being reconceptualized. Drawing on theories from the fields of Atlantic and Pacific studies, I argue that the changing Arctic, characterized by melting ice and increased accessibility, must be understood both as a space of transit that connects Atlantic and Pacific worlds in unprecedented ways, and as an oceanic world and contact zone in its own right. I examine both functions of the Arctic via a reading of the dispute over the Northwest Passage (which emphasizes the Arctic as a space of transit) and the contemporary assessment of new models of sovereignty in the Arctic region (which concentrates on the circumpolar Arctic as an oceanic world). However, both of these debates frequently exclude indigenous positions on the Arctic. By reading Canadian Inuit theories on the Arctic alongside the more prominent debates, I argue for a decolonizing reading of the Arctic inspired by Inuit articulations of the “Inuit Sea.” In such a reading, Inuit conceptions provide crucial interventions into theorizing the Arctic. They also, in turn, contribute to discussions on indigeneity, sovereignty, and archipelagic theory in Atlantic and Pacific studies.