Essentialist View Research Articles

How Muslims’ denomination shapes their integration: the effects of religious marginalization in origin countries on Muslim migrants’ national identifications and support for gender equality

ABSTRACT Public debates proclaim that Muslims have turned their backs on Western societies and their “core values”. Quantitative studies have shown that Muslim migrants identify more with their origin nation and less with their host country, and that they support gender equality less than other migrants. While often attributed to Muslims’ religiosity, migrants’ denominations also reflect whether they belonged to the dominant religious majority or a marginalized minority in their origin country, which also shapes national identifications and support for gender equality. EURISLAM data on 1,500 migrants from Turkey and Pakistan show that Alevi and Ahmadiyya minority-migrants identify less with their origin country and more with their host society than Sunni majority-migrants. Pivotally, marginalized minority-migrants acculturate faster, as their support for gender equality increases more strongly over the years than majority-migrants’. Altogether, focusing on essentialist views of Muslims’ religion overlooks other mechanisms that shape diversity in acculturation among Muslim migrants.

“I am an atypical mother”: Motherhood and maternal language in Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto’s poetry

In her debut book Dolore minimo, Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto engages in a reflection on motherhood to recount an autobiographical story of gender self-determination and male to female transition. This article explores Vivinetto’s poetry as the retelling of transformative moments in two mother–daughter relationships, which generate a reshaping of life and language. In the book, these two storylines intersect, blur, and even overlap, creating a poetic discourse in which the maternal acts simultaneously as powerful catalyzer and producer of meanings. In discussing how, in Dolore minimo, the relationship of two atypical mothers becomes the creative site of a new possible symbolic order, my analysis engages an atypical approach: it reads Vivinetto’s queer representation of motherhood via the theorization developed by the women of Diotima—including, in particular, Luisa Muraro, Chiara Zamboni, Diana Sartori, and Ida Dominijanni. These feminist thinkers have been generally criticized for reinforcing binary understandings of sex and gender, based on an essentialist view of the category of woman. Yet, what if the feminism forwarded by Diotima, by positioning the feminine as a creative producer and first-person narrator of change, could still offer a productive avenue for dialogue? The article begins with a discussion of Diotima’s key theorizations, which lays the groundwork for interpreting the maternal poetics of Dolore minimo. The subsequent sections examine in more depth how Vivinetto’s poetry has reinvented the figure of the mother as a teacher and learner of new words, and how, through this reinvention, she has crafted a maternal language that knits together new relations of contiguity and change. Ultimately, by redeploying the figure of the mother beyond cisgender norms, Vivinetto’s poetry is revealing the inexhaustible vitality of this character.

Ethnic bias in restorative processes? An analysis of access to the police-based national Danish VOM-programme

In this article, possible ethnic bias in access to the national Danish police-based Victim Offender Mediation (VOM) programme is investigated. The analyses of this project show that the VOM personnel informants believe that ethnic minority offenders are underrepresented in this VOM programme. Also, numerous examples of essentialist views on ethnicity and culture emerge among police personnel in the interview and observation data. Yet interestingly, the national VOM participation rates in penal cases analysed for this article show that while young male ethnic minority immigrants are underrepresented in VOM some years, young male ethnic minority descendants are actually overrepresented in VOM meetings.

Love, Fear, and Disgust: Deconstructing Masculinities and Affective Embodiment in Pregnancy Guides for Men

Employing a material discursive approach, this article deconstructs advice within published guides to pregnancy and birth written by men for men. We deconstruct the representation of feelings and emotions in men during this period rejecting essentialist and social constructionist views of gendered emotionality. We find the texts are saturated with emotional advice, which is ambivalent and resorts to forms of essentialism that obscure male vulnerabilities and leave male forms of power intact. While men can expect to feel love, fear, and disgust, the case for male calm and stoicism is reconstructed, threatening dire consequences if he fails. Our study makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the affective assemblage that accompanies men who are now expected to care during pregnancy, labor, and birth. Men are constructed as having an embodied experience that cannot be admitted to, ensuring that hegemonic masculine understandings reinforce gendered constructions of care, caring and emotions during pregnancy, labor and birth.

Representaciones Sociales de docentes acerca de las Diferencias cognitivas en el aula: condiciones de producción y campo de información

Este artículo presenta un estudio que aborda las representaciones sociales de profesores de primer ciclo básico sobre las diferencias cognitivas en colegios con programa de integración escolar de la región de Coquimbo, analizadas desde sus condiciones de producción y campo de información. La investigación utilizó un enfoque metodológico cualitativo con un alcance descriptivo-interpretativo, permitiendo esta aproximación acceder y comprender los razonamientos que tienen los docentes acerca del objeto de investigación. Los participantes de la investigación fueron cinco docentes que se desempeñan en primer ciclo de enseñanza general básica en colegios de dependencia municipal y particular subvencionada que cuentan con programa de integración escolar. Los docentes respondieron a una entrevista semiestructurada de representaciones sociales. Se concluye que los docentes organizan el conocimiento e información respecto a las diferencias cognitivas a partir de representaciones sociales construidas predominantemente desde una visión patológica esencialista de las diferencias.

ПОСТАНОВКА ПРОБЛЕМЫ ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ В ПОСТГУМАНИСТИЧЕСКОЙ ФИЛОСОФИИ

Posthumanism is considered as one of the significant areas of modern philosophy. The article describes the main provisions of modern philosophical posthumanism: the multiplicity of human experience, the rejection of anthropocentrism and hierarchical representation of nature; overcoming dichotomous thinking. Its connection with the movements of feminism and postcolonialism is indicated. Based on contemporary philosophical and pedagogical research, the authors provide a general outline of the post-humanist theory of education. We can talk about the posthumanist nature of the modern understanding of university education, formed by the openness of universities, their international rivalry in the postindustrial economy and the active involvement of foreign students. This nature is expressed in the transition from personality formation to the formation of assigned skills, expressed in competencies. The growth of the importance of environmental issues at all levels of education, the interaction of education with new technologies, the constitution of new ethics and new aesthetics are also considered. It is noted that in modern conditions pedagogy and philosophy of education cannot avoid discussing the issues posed by the posthumanist movement. The authors believe that a characteristic feature of the posthumanist concept of the necessary transformation of education is its focus on the problem of modernizing its content. An example is the saturation of educational programs with environmental issues. The authors interpret this situation as the preservation of the traditional structure of education, which adapts to the solution of new, including ideological, tasks. The vulnerability of this approach lies in the impossibility for posthumanism to legitimize it by referring to the essentialist view of man.

Are friends electric? The benefits and risks of human-robot relationships.

SummarySocial robots that can interact and communicate with people are growing in popularity for use at home and in customer-service, education, and healthcare settings. Although growing evidence suggests that co-operative and emotionally aligned social robots could benefit users across the lifespan, controversy continues about the ethical implications of these devices and their potential harms. In this perspective, we explore this balance between benefit and risk through the lens of human-robot relationships. We review the definitions and purposes of social robots, explore their philosophical and psychological status, and relate research on human-human and human-animal relationships to the emerging literature on human-robot relationships. Advocating a relational rather than essentialist view, we consider the balance of benefits and harms that can arise from different types of relationship with social robots and conclude by considering the role of researchers in understanding the ethical and societal impacts of social robotics.

Kingdom of Heaven: The One State Solution and Western Military Intervention in the Holy Land

In this article I argue that in Kingdom of Heaven Ridley Scott creates historical analogies between Saladin's taking of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade, on the one hand, and the Israeli-Palestinian question and American-led ‘War on Terror’, on the other hand. I maintain that Scott pictures the one-state solution in which both the Israelis and the Palestinians can coexist peacefully as a feasible settlement. By presenting the idea of a shared Jerusalem under the Crusaders' rule in the past, Scott wittingly promotes through a contrived historical analogy to contemporary Western interventionism in the Middle East. Crucially, Scott goes beyond Samuel Huntington's essentialist views of Muslims. He provides variable representations of Muslim characters, fluctuating between characters that are superstitious, on the one hand, and characters that are capable of rational thinking, on the other hand. Nevertheless, Scott seems to be highly convinced about the myth of religious violence, as suggested by William Cavanaugh. This myth suggests that secular violence is rational and useful whereas religious violence is irrational and dangerous. Moreover, Scott proves to be swayed by the idea of the ‘just war’ according to which the use of force can be legitimate. In Kingdom of Heaven, Scott pictures the ongoing ‘War on Terror’ as an incarnation of earlier centuries' European (colonial) ‘civilising missions’ towards the ‘less-civilised’ nations.

Historical borders and maps as symbolic supports to master narratives and history education

This article represents an attempt to establish a fruitful dialogue among the field of border studies, history education, sociocultural psychology, and the history of cartography. Seminal studies on borders have asserted that the historical maps included in textbooks are basically an imagined representation. This paper will consider the extent to which cultural and educational origins and uses of these maps, particularly in school settings, act as a support to historical essentialist views. Via the example of history education in Argentina, we carried out an empirical and theoretical examination of the processes of cultural production and consumption of historical maps and their relationship to historical master narratives. Results show that most laypeople largely think of national borders as possessing an essential and immutable character. We consider that closer study, from a sociocultural perspective, of the relationship between master narratives and historical maps may add an enriching element to the existing body of work produced by border studies.

The Theoretical and Methodological Status of the Concept of Religion According to the Essentialist Interpretation of Ethnic Community in Foreign Researches

The article focuses on the theoretical and methodological status of the concept of religion in the essentialist interpretation of ethnic community by analyzing the material of foreign researches. The key effort is to reveal whether the essentialist views on ethnic communities are compatible with the constructivist paradigm of religion. The essentialist approach to the notion of an ethnic community now develops in the frame of primordialism, which can be divided into two main directions: cultural and socio-biological. Proponents of the former concentrate on a detailed description of cultural differences between ethnic communities, with cultural diversity being accepted only to describe the essence of a particular ethnic community. Sociobiological primordialists deny cultural features’ status at the face of biological evolution. The common theoretical assumption of primordialisms turns out to be the essentialist vision: an ethnic community is endowed with the essence defined by a number of attributes, including religion. The constructivist approach, however, suggests that religion has no referent in reality and its notion is defined conventionally and empirically. Accepting this approach would deprive religion of its essence. Rendering the essence of religion relative, therefore, means blurring the boundaries defining the essence of an ethnic community. This consequence clearly contradicts the essentialist approach to an ethnic community. Thus, embracing an essentialist approach to ethnic community leads to the need to adopt the essentialist interpretation of religion.

Women's Agency: Promoting, Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism in Tanzania and Kenya

Until recently, the participation of women in violent extremism (VE) on the one hand, and the engagement of women in efforts to prevent and/or counter violent extremism (PCVE), on the other, have largely been under-theorised. This article examines the agentic dimensions of women’s VE practices and a mechanism for preventing and countering VE in Kenya and Tanzania. It is argued that women, as actors who have agency, play multiple roles in VE and PCVE. Drawing on empirical data from Tanzania and Kenya, the article illuminates how women, as agents in their own right, can be mobilised or can actively mobilise themselves and their community to promote VE and/or PCVE practices both proactively and reactively. Contrary to essentialist and reductionist views, which bracket the nuances of women’s lived experiences with VE, this article lays bare women’s multiple roles in VE, the motives behind taking on such roles and the contexts that shape women’s social dispositions in relation to VE and PCVE.

The Gendered Brain: Implications of Exposure to Neuroscience Research for Gender Essentialist Beliefs

How fundamentally different do people generally think men and women are? Gender essentialism refers to beliefs that women and men have distinct, innate, and fixed biological essences that differentiate them from each other. Exposure to popularized neuroscience research may shape such views. We examined whether exposure to scientific evidence for gender differences or similarities in the brain affects beliefs about gender essentialism, and indirectly shapes sexism and justification of gender inequality, using samples from Turkey. Study 1 (n = 414 undergraduates) showed that exposure to evidence on brain similarities led to lower gender essentialist beliefs, which, in turn, negatively predicted sexism and justification of gender inequality. Unexpectedly, exposure to evidence on gender differences did not lead to an increase in gender essentialist beliefs. Although men scored higher than women on all measures, the indirect effects were significant for both men and women. In Study 2 (n = 119 online community respondents), we found indirect effects of exposure to evidence of brain similarities on justification of gender inequality. We discuss the implications of our findings for challenging gender essentialist views among students and the general public through exposure to research on gender similarities and increased critical thinking about scientific research evidence.

De Se Attitudes and Computation

AbstractThere has been debate between those who maintain that indexical expressions are not essential and those who maintain that such indexicals cannot be dispensed with without an important loss of content. This version of the essentialist view holds that thoughts must also have indexical elements. Indexical thoughts appear to be in tension with the computational theory of mind (CTM). In this case we have the following inconsistent triad: (i) De se thoughts are essential. (ii) De se thoughts are indexical, they have a (Kaplanian) character. (iii) Computations can only take the syntactic type into account, they cannot take tokens into account. If (iii) is correct, then it seems we cannot make sense of a thought which uses a character such that its referent could vary from tokening to tokening. I argue that (iii) need not cause a problem, while maintaining the CTM. I claim that computations need not be sensitive to the features of a tokened symbol in the way that character demands. This job may be performed by a non‐modular part of the mind. Resolving the triad in this way provides a reason to accept that indexicals in thought are possible.

Social deixis of gender boundaries

This article studies aspects of the multi-layered role of language in establishing and maintaining a social order based on gender. Gendered person appellations are traditionally seen as person reference, an interpretation loaded with essentialist views of gender that hardly comply with current gender theories. By taking a close look at the Croatian context, this article analyses the indexical meaning and active role of language use in normalising dominant gender norms. Slavic languages have played a minor role in international discussions on gender and language. However, they convincingly allow us to show how indexical functions of language use are integrated in and contribute to gendered perceptions of people in general. For this, an interdisciplinary approach is taken that alludes to both the production and the perception of this specific dimension of social deixis by (1) evaluating the linguistic norm of person appellation as found in a leading conservative newspaper, and (2) testing the perception of these normalised appellation forms against alternative person-naming practices in an online-based questionnaire. As highlighted in this article, the making of linguistically manifest gender boundaries is clearly observable in research on a language possessing rigid grammatical rules of gender marking in person appellation, such as Croatian.

Managing multiple identities

In this article, we offer an identity perspective on compliment responses (CRs). Our purpose is twofold: first, to enrich our understanding of CRs by addressing the bias in research towards CRs as an im/politeness phenomenon; second, to question the assumption of the correlation between CR strategies and identities and to challenge the essentialist view of identity implicit in previous studies. We propose a four-fold perspective on identity by incorporating cultural identity into the influential three levels of self-construal formulated by Brewer and her colleagues (e.g. Brewer & Gardner, 1996). We present it by illustrating the dynamic construction of individual identity, relational identity, group identity, and cultural identity through qualitative analyses of naturally occurring CRs in Chinese. We show that macro strategies (i.e. acceptance, refusal, and in-betweenness) and, by implication, micro strategies (e.g. upgrade) can all construct the above four identities depending on context. We argue that there is no such thing as a simple correlation between CR strategies and identities widely assumed in the existing literature.

Martin Luther and the Early Modern Beginnings of a Feminist Maternal Theology

This essay argues that the German Reformer, Martin Luther, makes a contribution to a Christian feminist theology of mothering. His preaching and theology about child-bearing stand out in the Christian theology of his time because of the realistic way in which he describes the experiences of pregnancy and birth, especially in contrast to conventional descriptions of the Virgin Mary’s maternity. Yet Luther is no feminist. He maintains essentialist views of women and attaches women too closely to home life. But his optimistic view of the female child-bearing body subverts the traditional Christian views of the cursed female body and affirms the power that women have in God’s activities of creation and new creation.

Neurotechnologies, Relational Autonomy, and Authenticity

The ethical debate about neurotechnologies has been largely framed around their effects on authenticity. In this paper, we investigate the concept of authenticity and associated conceptions of the self. We develop a conception of authenticity that eschews problematic essentialist or existentialist views of the self and the assumption that the authentic self transcends socialization. In our view, authenticity is a condition for self-governance and can involve either endorsement or acknowledgment. Revisiting the debate about neurotechnologies, we show why framing the ethical debate in terms of authenticity is unhelpful and argue that these ethical concerns are better understood as concerns about autonomy.

Willem Jacob 's Gravesande’s philosophical trajectory: “between” Leibniz and Newton

ABSTRACT This article challenges the scholarly consensus on Willem Jacob 's Gravesande’s philosophy, namely the view that it was predominantly influenced by Newton, Locke, and Descartes. More generally, it opposes the tendency to read the work of eighteenth-century natural philosophers as being part of well-defined strands of Newtonianism. I argue that we will understand the intellectual history of the early eighteenth century better if we let go of essentialist taxonomic views and instead pay attention to the historical trajectories of various actors and ideas. In the case of 's Gravesande (1688–1742), it has often been assumed that he used a particular form of Newtonianism to combat rationalist metaphysics, particularly Spinozism. Here I show that this view is not tenable when we take account of 's Gravesande’s metaphysical writings. On topics such as liberty, necessity, and theodicy, these writings deviate from what Newtonianism is usually taken to stand for. Instead, 's Gravesande’s views on such matters correspond more closely to certain interpretations of Leibniz’s Théodicée.

Do genetic ancestry tests increase racial essentialism? Findings from a randomized controlled trial.

Genetic ancestry testing is a billion-dollar industry, with more than 26 million tests sold by 2018, which raises concerns over how it might influence test-takers' understandings of race. While social scientists argue that genetic ancestry tests may promote an essentialist view of race as fixed and determining innate abilities, others suggest it could reduce essentialist views by reinforcing a view of race as socially constructed. Essentialist views are a concern because of their association with racism, particularly in its most extreme forms. Here we report the first randomized controlled trial of genetic ancestry testing conducted to examine potential causal relationships between taking the tests and essentialist views of race. Native-born White Americans were randomly assigned to receive Admixture and mtDNA tests or no tests. While we find no significant average effect of genetic ancestry testing on essentialism, secondary analyses reveal that the impact of these tests on racial essentialism varies by type of genetic knowledge. Within the treatment arm, essentialist beliefs significantly declined after testing among individuals with high genetic knowledge, but increased among those with the least genetic knowledge. Additional secondary analysis show that essentialist beliefs do not change based on the specific ancestries reported in test-takers' results. These results indicate that individuals' interpretations of genetic ancestry testing results, and the links between genes and race, may depend on their understanding of genetics.

Considering the practices of the classification of societies – A step towards indigenization

The reasonability of the construction of classificatory rankings of societies and related theoretical implications are considered in this paper. I argue that existing classificatory rankings are based on the essentialist views and represent societies as homogenous entities whereas they ignore intra-societal variety. Moreover, the quantitative methodology and methods which underlie those rankings are based on the etic approach and use concepts and indicators which are constructed in the west and don’t reflect indigenous socio-cultural dynamics. Besides, existing rankings simply equalize particular aspects to the whole societal development. For example, gross domestic product is equalized to the level of societal development; however, it actually can’t fully reflect even the situation in the economic field. Though it can be still reasonable to use such impersonal indicators as gross domestic product or longevity which are based entirely on impersonal data and are free from subjective interpretations, for the exploration of general tendencies in particular fields, however, we should restrain ourselves from invalid generalizations. Krys et al. proposed to elaborate culturally sensitive approach, however, still remained in frame of the etic approach, whereas I argue that the only way for the comprehensive and deeper assessment of the level of societal development is to construct a fully emic and indigenous approach that implies the usage of only locally constructed concepts during the definition of indicators. Those indigenous concepts most probably won’t be translatable to other languages that make the aim of the creation of a unified scale theoretically impossible; however, this is the only way for getting valid results at least concerning particular societies with current methodological apparatus. The solution to this issue requires further theoretical development and methodological innovations.