New Forms Of Knowledge Research Articles

Rockefeller Foundation Funding and Medical Education in Toronto, Montreal and Halifax

ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION FUNDING AND MEDICAL EDUCATION IN TORONTO, MONTREAL AND HALIFAX Marianne P. Fedunkiw Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. 201pp, $47.25 cloth (ISBN 0773526970)Currently there is much discussion in Canada about the need to reform medical education. However, there is little discussion about embedded traditions of the past, how these came into play, and finally how the interplay of ideas, interests, resources, and institutions shaped the pace and direction of change. Marianne P. Fedunkiw fills some of this gap, and in doing so provides a insightful and well-written overview of the trials and tribulations connected with advancing medical education and research in Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax. The first section of the book provides an overview of the scientization of medicine, as well as the drivers and constraints that shaped events in our country. It is suggested that the Flexner report, which was a major driver in the United States, was not as significant in Canada. Put simply, it is a Canadian account of the scientization movement that focused much attention on the role played by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Eaton family in institutionalizing a new approach across provincial jurisdictions and institutions. As one would expect in a diverse federal system, the movement did not unfold the same way in each province or medical school. The rest of the book deals with the different responses to these external attempts to push new agendas and institutionalize new models. In each case study, emphasis is placed on explaining how these external initiatives influenced the process of change, both the opportunities and challenges that shaped decision-making, and, finally, the outcomes achieved in three very different contextual settings.This is a work that will appeal to different audiences, and Fedunkiw is an effective commentator and storyteller. It has never been easy moving reforms along a common universal path within a highly competitive federation, getting a consensus on priorities, striking an appropriate balance between practical and researched skills, agreeing on what should be taught, by whom and how it should be financed, levels and degrees of autonomy for universities, the role to be played by affiliated professional groups, and so on. These are common questions and challenges for professional schools, whether in the area of medicine, law, engineering, or business. The book offers a number of critical insights on the challenges of health care reform across institutions and provinces but these can also be applied in other policy fields.When universities play a significant role in generating new partnerships that encourage entrepreneurial work, new forms of knowledge, and better practices in service delivery, it is important to understand how this was achieved in the past. …

Culture, Social Science & the Philippine Nation-State

AbstractThe self-understanding of a national community as a culturally homogeneous and spatiotemporally delimited entity provided the model for a distinct sphere of the social. It was this new understanding of the social as a theoretical category that made sociology possible. The modern nation-state and sociology are intimately linked. But even as social science requires the resources of the nation-state, it is equally dependent on a vigorous civil culture distinct from the state. Society is the ultimate source for the state's legitimacy. Society arises out of an association of which the nation-state, however important, is but one expression.Technological and economic development is now often used as justifications for the nation-state. But in the present global context, the nation-state is no longer the primary source for knowledge or investment, at least for countries such as the Philippines. The boundaries between nation-states have become porous as center and periphery are increasingly intertwined. Under these conditions, identities no longer represent cores but rather intersections of experience.No longer grounded in a local routine of everyday life with its corresponding set of collective images, culture increasingly becomes merely representation or the domain of signifying practices rather than the arena of practical significations. Under these conditions, where culture is not necessarily collectively shared but only synchronically networked, it becomes almost a personal quest rather than a communal affair. The expression of such a diasporal and subjective identity is manifested in the rise of new forms of ethnicities. In these contexts, culture can be visualized as landscapes and experienced as representations.Cartesian space-time assumes the homogeneous nature of extension/duration, such that any point in the system of coordinates can be expressed as a value of a given function. For modernity, the social can be plotted or imagined as one such function, all of whose members are linked to one another spatio-temporally. A nation-state is a collectivity whose functional representation assumes that all its members share a simultaneous present, and hence, a commonly anticipated future. Any point on this set of spatio-temporal coordinates is functionally linked to other points through membership in a common order called the nation-state.Nation-states see themselves as culturally homogeneous to facilitate the rational negotiation of difference. This view of culture is possible (but not necessary) because modernity is based on a sense of simultaneous presentness generating a commonly anticipated future. Modern society is an association of individuals functionally coordinating their actions to this simultaneous present. However, globality is making other presents possible, resulting in a world with an excess of meaning but a lack of sense.A feature of modernity is the crucial role of knowledge for the expression, maintenance and reproduction of power. While knowledge represents a form of power in all societies, certain modes of power can only be expressed through their relationship with knowledge. Hence, the functionalization of society is a pre-condition for power to be exercised through its control of knowledge. Power requires new forms of knowledge, such as social science, for its effectiveness in modern society. A critical social science is necessary to counterbalance modern society's functional goals if social science is also to play an emancipatory role.he indigenization of social science is an attempt to formalize this distinct perspective but its insistence on unproblematically using the nation as its referent limits its usefulness. In the present condition, the nation-state is no longer the primary site for knowledge-production or identity-formation. These practices now involve personal, local, global and other choices, following their increasingly polyvalent nature. In its attempts to imagine the nation through indigenous concepts, a Philippine social science risks essentializing Filipinohood by reducing its differences. Instead, a Philippine social science should explore the rich sources of difference within civil and global society, as well as point out the contingent and narrow interests of nation-states, thereby helping to establish a universal basis for understanding. This understanding sees social science as part of the human quest for emancipation.

Walter Bernardi and Luigi Guerrini (eds), Francesco Redi, un protagonista della scienza moderna: documenti, esperimenti, immagini, Biblioteca di Nuncius, Studi e Testi 33, Florence, Leo S Olschki, 1999, pp. xi, 388, L 75,000 (paperback 88-222-47191).

Walter Bernardi and Luigi Guerrini (eds), Francesco Redi, un protagonista della scienza moderna: documenti, esperimenti, immagini, Biblioteca di Nuncius, Studi e Testi 33, Florence, Leo S Olschki, 1999, pp. xi, 388, L 75,000 (paperback 88-222-47191). - Volume 48 Issue 4

Revisando o passado e construindo o presente: o movimento gay como espaço educativo

Análise preliminar de uma pesquisa de doutorado que está sendo desenvolvida com cinco grupos gays organizados no Brasil, entendendo o trabalho realizado como processo educativo, já que estão produzindo novas formas de conhecimento para além dos seus integrantes e para além da homossexualidade. Baseando-se nas observações, foi possível centralizar a análise desse trabalho na questão da intimidade e sua relação com passado-presente e público-privado. Costurando essas relações, chega-se à conclusão que a herança moderna está mais presente do que se supõe.

Ethnopharmacognostic survey on the natural ingredients used in folk cosmetics, cosmeceuticals and remedies for healing skin diseases in the inland Marches, Central-Eastern Italy*1

An ethnopharmaceutical study focused on domestic cosmetics, cosmeceuticals, and remedies to heal skin diseases traditionally used in the inland part of the Marches region (Central-Eastern Italy) has been conducted. At present, traditional knowledge concerning home-made phytocosmetics is represented by both the remnants of an orally transmitted folk heritage and also by new forms of knowledge, sometimes coming from popular phytotherapeutical books and the mass media (out of the scope of this survey), but also as a result of recent migration trends from Eastern Europe. We recorded approximately 135 cosmetic or cosmeceutical preparations prepared from more than 70 botanical species and a very few animal or mineral ingredients. Among the recorded preparations, developing a clear distinction amongst cosmetics, cosmeceuticals and pharmaceuticals for skin diseases is very problematic, confirming that in folk knowledge systems medicinal products for healing skin diseases and cosmetics have often been perceived as two poles of a continuum. Many of the quoted species represented well-known medicinal plants of the European phytotherapy, although we also recorded a few unusual plant taxa, which are briefly discussed under the perspective of their eventual phytochemical and/or phytopharmacological potentialities. Exotic drugs or precious essences, even native of the Mediterranean, were not quoted as ingredients for preparing perfumes and fragrances by the interviewees of the present study, thus indicating that popular cosmetic practices in rural Central Italy have taken a much separated path away from the cosmetic “know-how” of the aristocracy and high bourgeois classes of the last centuries.

Ethnopharmacognostic survey on the natural ingredients used in folk cosmetics, cosmeceuticals and remedies for healing skin diseases in the inland Marches, Central-Eastern Italy

An ethnopharmaceutical study focused on domestic cosmetics, cosmeceuticals, and remedies to heal skin diseases traditionally used in the inland part of the Marches region (Central-Eastern Italy) has been conducted. At present, traditional knowledge concerning home-made phytocosmetics is represented by both the remnants of an orally transmitted folk heritage and also by new forms of knowledge, sometimes coming from popular phytotherapeutical books and the mass media (out of the scope of this survey), but also as a result of recent migration trends from Eastern Europe. We recorded approximately 135 cosmetic or cosmeceutical preparations prepared from more than 70 botanical species and a very few animal or mineral ingredients. Among the recorded preparations, developing a clear distinction amongst cosmetics, cosmeceuticals and pharmaceuticals for skin diseases is very problematic, confirming that in folk knowledge systems medicinal products for healing skin diseases and cosmetics have often been perceived as two poles of a continuum. Many of the quoted species represented well-known medicinal plants of the European phytotherapy, although we also recorded a few unusual plant taxa, which are briefly discussed under the perspective of their eventual phytochemical and/or phytopharmacological potentialities. Exotic drugs or precious essences, even native of the Mediterranean, were not quoted as ingredients for preparing perfumes and fragrances by the interviewees of the present study, thus indicating that popular cosmetic practices in rural Central Italy have taken a much separated path away from the cosmetic “know-how” of the aristocracy and high bourgeois classes of the last centuries.

Treatises of Development: The Context of Developmentalism in Bangladesh

This article analyzes the structure of the development discourse that has become prominent since the end of World War II. An understanding of this structure is vital to developing an appreciation of the making of Third World nations as objects of development. The Truman inaugural address provided a basis for the formulation of treatises of development and also enabled the configuration of development's structure. (1) The terms and concepts used in those treatises express a consistent account of the formation of new knowledge, institutions, and disciplines related to development. Elements of the treatises make possible the production of a set of relations within the domain of development, relations that were systematized to coordinate development deployments at various levels, from local to global. It was not these deployments alone, but also their interdependence--the structure of relations among elements, institutions, and practices--that enabled the production of the development project. Three representative treatises are examined here to uncover this structure and the interdependence among elements and practices forming development discourse. At the global level, the United Nations was the motive force promoting the development project, embodying Western rationality and modernity, among Third World nations. To this end, it produced some incisive reports, drawing upon what it saw as underdevelopment and recommending strategies for development. (2) Of these reports, Measures for the Economic Development of Underdeveloped Countries was the most prominent. (3) At the regional level, the Commonwealth nations formed a consultative committee, which in 1950 produced The Colombo Plan (CP), the well-known document for South and Southeast Asian nations. At the local level, the most renowned plan for development was the Agricultural Development Plan of Pakistan, (4) prepared by the Food and Agricultural Commission (FAC). The FAC comprised Pakistani as well as development specialists from international agencies, such as the World Bank, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, and the U.S. International Cooperation Administration--predecessor to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The three reports are examined here to reveal the broad structure of the discourse that constructed development and underdevelopment. These treatises enabled various organizations to deploy consistent strategies to bring Third World populations as subjects under the broad-ranging disciplinary power of development. A survey of these treatises is presented below to sketch the set of relations and their systematization, the UN report being examined first. The UN Treatise: Measures for the Economic Development of Underdeveloped Countries The UN treatise Measures for the Economic Development of Underdeveloped Countries was produced by a group of experts appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations in May 1951. Until the publication of this report, Harry Truman's sermon on development was the standard in the field. Truman claimed: More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of these people. The United States is pre-eminent among nations in the development of industrial and scientific techniques.... I believe that we should make available to peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for better life. (5) Under Resolution 290 (XI), the UN Economic and Social Council appointed a five-expert team to prepare a development plan. (6) This was the first concrete step to turn Truman's vision for development into an explicit policy. …

Narrative inquiry: Locating Aboriginal epistemology in a relational methodology.

This methodology utilizes narrative analysis and the elicitation of life stories as understood through dimensions of interaction, continuity, and situation. It is congruent with Aboriginal epistemology formulated by oral narratives through representation, connection, storytelling and art. Needed for culturally competent scholarship is an experience of research whereby inquiry into epiphanies, ritual, routines, metaphors and everyday experience creates a process of reflexive thinking for multiple ways of knowing. Based on the sharing of perspectives, narrative inquiry allows for experimentation into creating new forms of knowledge by contextualizing diabetes from the experience of a researcher overlapped with experiences of participants--a reflective practice in itself. The aim of this paper is to present narrative inquiry as a relational methodology and to analyse critically its appropriateness as an innovative research approach for exploring Aboriginal people's experience living with diabetes. Narrative inquiry represents an alternative culture of research for nursing science to generate understanding and explanation of Aboriginal people's 'diabetic self' stories, and to coax open a window for co-constructing a narrative about diabetes as a chronic illness. The ability to adapt a methodology for use in a cultural context, preserve the perspectives of Aboriginal peoples, maintain the holistic nature of social problems, and value co-participation in respectful ways are strengths of an inquiry partial to a responsive and embodied scholarship.

Illness and Internet empowerment: writing and reading breast cancer in cyberspace.

The Internet is now a site where women with breast cancer both read and write about the illness, and in doing so negotiate identity and definitions of situation in disembodied space. Cyberspace has been imagined as a liberatory realm where women can transgress gender roles, invent selves and create new forms of knowledge. This study explores the personal web pages of women with breast cancer with an interest in exploring the issue of 'cyber-agency' or empowerment in cyberspace. I suggest here that women's web pages might offer potentially critical opportunities for women's knowledge-making in relation to what are often highly political aspects of the body, gender and illness. However, the Internet is not an inherently empowering technology, and it can be a medium for affirming norms of femininity, consumerism, individualism and other powerful social messages.

Dryasdust Antiquarianism and Soppy Masculinity: The Waverley Novels and the Gender of History

This essay attempts to widen the discursive contexts through which scholars understand Romantic historicism and the role of Walter Scott's Waverley Novels in its development. Placing Scott's The Antiquary (1816) and ''Dedicatory Epistle'' to Ivanhoe (1819) in dialogue with contemporaneous verbal and visual discourse over antiquaries, Edmund Burke, and the Lady Hamilton affair, the essay proposes that Romantic historicism disciplined bodies as it defined and authorized new forms of knowledge. Romantic historicists perceived the ability to relate to and know the past properly as dependent on the manliness of the historical thinker's sentimental and sexual constitution. Thus, the era's arguments over the legitimacy of different forms of historical inquiry, as well as over the historical novel's cultural authority in relation to the field of history, frequently became contests over the manliness and sensibility of their practitioners' bodies.

Henry Adams: The Historian as Political Theorist. By James P. Young. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. 314p. $35.00

James Young wants political theorists to attend to Henry Adams (1838–1918), and they should. In certain ways, Adams is easy to admire. He is a splendid writer; he wrote a good deal, and nearly every sentence is perfect. He was a witty and urbane professor of history at Harvard and later he was a wry and wise Washington insider with powerful aesthetic faculties. As his America rapidly changed, he tried to master the new forms of knowledge needed to understand it.

'Patient satisfaction': knowledge for ruling hospital reform--an institutional ethnography.

Driven by funding restraint, Canadian health-care has undergone over a decade of significant reform. Hospitals are being restructured, as text-based practices of accountability bring a new business-orientation into hospital and clinical management. New forms of knowledge, generated through records of various sorts, are a necessary resource for managing care in the new environment. This paper's research uses Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith's institutional ethnographic methodology to critically analyse one instance of text-based management. I analyse information about 'patient satisfaction' as it is generated through a patient survey (in which I was implicated through my involvement with a hospitalized family member). Subsequently, I have studied the management environment into which that information would be entered. I argue that in the instance analysed, the information becomes part of a dominant consumer oriented healthcare discourse that subordinates concerns about 'what actually happened' as a professional caregiver would have known it. On this basis, I contend that this sort of taken-for-granted approach to making decisions about quality care in hospitals may be seriously, even dangerously, flawed.

Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (review)

Reviewed by: Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction Patrick F. McDevitt Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. By Robert J. C. Young. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Robert J.C. Young has made a major contribution to the field of postcolonial studies with this lucid, wide-ranging and compelling synthesis. Expanding on themes first visited in his Colonial Desires and White Mythologies, Young has given readers an insightful analysis of the ways in which anti-colonial struggles inspired and shaped new forms of knowledge that, for Young, constituted a “counter-modernity” to western modernity. In addition to the standard fare for an introduction of this type (e.g., Said, Spivak, Bhabha, subalternism, hybridity, etc.), Young draws on a broad spectrum of thinkers, including Las Casas, Bentham, Marx, Mao, Connolly, James, Césaire, Fanon, Gandhi and others, to detail a genealogy of anticolonial thought and practice which forms the roots of postcolonialism. The book’s two greatest strengths are its attention to the historical development of postcolonial theory in relation to imperialism and anti-colonialism, and the relative absence of jargon. Avoiding the common pitfall of over-quotation found in many introductions to post-structural and/or postcolonial theory, Young paraphrases widely and effectively without slipping into the academic argot that often obscures more than it illuminates for the non-initiated. Whereas some authors, for example Leela Gandhi in her Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction or Pauline Rosenau in her Post-Modernism and the Social Sciences, primarily quote difficult passages from other sources and leave them unclarified, Young effectively explains complex theories in plain, academic language. This would seem to remove a major stumbling block for students and non-specialists alike. However, this is not meant to imply that Young’s is a book for introductory undergraduate courses; it is probably not. Nonetheless, it certainly would appear to have great potential as a text for upper-level courses or a graduate seminar, especially in disciplines like history in which many students may be wary of ‘theory.’ Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction is fascinatingly theorized, it just is done in a way that is accessible. Young, a professor of English and critical theory at Wadham College, Oxford, does not confine his analysis to literary studies, as other similar introductions often do (Moore-Gilbert, McLeod, for example). Nor is postcolonialism portrayed primarily as an academic dispute between traditionalists and an avant-garde or between Marxists and poststructuralists. This book firmly places the development of postcolonial theory within the history of colonialism, imperialism and most importantly, the anti-colonial movements in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. From the beginning, where he carefully defines and analyzes the terms colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism, and postcolonialism, Young successfully avoids the reductive trap of creating an overly broad field of study. Postcolonialism, in Young’s estimation, never descends into a catchall phrase for the latest academic fashions in the study of imperialism and anti-imperialism. Specifically, postcolonialism (or “tricontinentalism” as Young would prefer) is used to designate the analysis of the historical and contemporary effects on both western and “tricontinental” (i.e., Asian, African and Latin American) cultures of western colonialism and imperialism and particularly the connection between the past and the present world. After defining his terms, Young examines the development of both resistance to imperial and colonial domination and the intellectual tradition that informs the academic discipline of postcolonialism. In both discussions, Young’s attention to historicity is particularly refreshing and instructive. He resists the temptation to homogenize all oppression into one phenomenon and is careful to distinguish between different types of colonialisms, French and British for example, and between different types of domination within one national tradition. Nonetheless, throughout the book, much is made of the interconnectedness and intellectual cross-fertilizations of people and institutions from around the world in a common goal of liberation. Young is also especially attuned to the nuances and subtleties of the postcolonial project and repeatedly stresses the ways in which easy dichotomies and simplistic reductions between the west and the non-west or between imperialists and anti-imperialists confuse as much as they explain. For Young, postcolonialism and anti-colonialism were both products of a revolutionary fusion of the indigenous and the cosmopolitan, which grew out...

Futurist networks: cases of epistemic community?

Futurist networks: cases of epistemic community?

A framework for continuous design of production systems and its application in collective redesign of production line equipment

AbstractThe continuous design of production systems is a major challenge facing companies, and one that requires organization and systematization. This article describes one of the continuous design endeavors implemented in a factory manufacturing steel tubes. We have studied the collective redesign of production line equipment. For 2 years, we followed the operations of a multioccupational group composed of the various actors involved in manufacturing (including the operators). Their task was to redesign the tools used in their production line.Our analysis is focused on the cognitive side of the activity and especially on the collective redesign processes. From the transcripts of the meetings, we have examined how the codesigners come to an agreement about the redesigned equipment. We show that the criteria spontaneously used for the evaluation of the solution are far wider (quantitatively and qualitatively) than the list of functional criteria prescribed to the codesigners for the decision‐making process. This analysis leads us to propose three conditions that have to be met to guarantee success: (a) a true systemic view of the production system must be developed by all the continuous design actors, (b) there must be support for the collective decision‐making process, and (c) new forms of knowledge must be institutionalized. © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Scripting Expertise: The History of Handwriting Identification Evidence and the Judicial Construction of Reliability

Expert evidence in handwriting identification - the claim to be able to identify an author from an examination of written documents - has, after a century of use, once again become highly controversial. As critics attack the so-called expertise as insufficiently proven and perhaps nonexistent, numerous judges have begun to rein in this form of expert testimony, and several have recently decided to exclude it altogether. This paper takes the current controversy over the admissibility of handwriting identification evidence as an opportunity to examine how handwriting identification evidence first became established as a legitimate and credible form of proof. Handwriting identification is an unusual form of expert evidence because it was the first kind of expertise that was primarily forensic, invented specifically for use in the legal arena. This paper is the first article-length examination of the history of this form of expertise, and offers a detailed examination of how handwriting experts convinced judges that their new form of knowledge was legitimate and worth permitting as legal evidence. It investigates the doctrinal and institutional context surrounding handwriting identification evidence, and examines both how expert evidence in document examination came to be admissible and how it came to be understood as persuasive. In addition, this historical study has two more general purposes. First, it seeks to shed new light on a dominant issue in the expert evidence literature, the tension between whether fact finders should defer to experts or be educated by them. Second, it challenges a bedrock assumption of most commentators on expert evidence: that reliability is exogenous to law, or, more specifically, that when judges make determinations about the validity and reliability of expert evidence, they are ratifying something that either exists or does not exist out in the world. This analysis suggests instead that, at least in some circumstances, judicial determinations can play a significant role in constructing broader cultural perceptions of reliability. At least in the case of handwriting identification evidence, judges did not simply import reliable evidence; rather, they helped to create it. Finally, this paper uses this history of handwriting evidence and the contemporary challenges to handwriting to offer some speculative musings on some of the problems implicit in Daubert's approach to expert evidence.

Scripting Expertise: The History of Handwriting Identification Evidence and the Judicial Construction of Reliability

Expert evidence in handwriting identification - the claim to be able to identify an author from an examination of written documents - has, after a century of use, once again become highly controversial. As critics attack the so-called expertise as insufficiently proven and perhaps nonexistent, numerous judges have begun to rein in this form of expert testimony, and several have recently decided to exclude it altogether. This paper takes the current controversy over the admissibility of handwriting identification evidence as an opportunity to examine how handwriting identification evidence first became established as a legitimate and credible form of proof. Handwriting identification is an unusual form of expert evidence because it was the first kind of expertise that was primarily forensic, invented specifically for use in the legal arena. This paper is the first article-length examination of the history of this form of expertise, and offers a detailed examination of how handwriting experts convinced judges that their new form of knowledge was legitimate and worth permitting as legal evidence. It investigates the doctrinal and institutional context surrounding handwriting identification evidence, and examines both how expert evidence in document examination came to be admissible and how it came to be understood as persuasive. In addition, this historical study has two more general purposes. First, it seeks to shed new light on a dominant issue in the expert evidence literature, the tension between whether fact finders should defer to experts or be educated by them. Second, it challenges a bedrock assumption of most commentators on expert evidence: that reliability is exogenous to law, or, more specifically, that when judges make determinations about the validity and reliability of expert evidence, they are ratifying something that either exists or does not exist out in the world. This analysis suggests instead that, at least in some circumstances, judicial determinations can play a significant role in constructing broader cultural perceptions of reliability. At least in the case of handwriting identification evidence, judges did not simply import reliable evidence; rather, they helped to create it. Finally, this paper uses this history of handwriting evidence and the contemporary challenges to handwriting to offer some speculative musings on some of the problems implicit in Daubert's approach to expert evidence.

Monstrous Lessons: The educational legacy of imperialism

The ‘age of imperialism’ is over. Or so it has been said. The above statement is often supported in the afterglow of the rise of a virulent postcolonialism that has rightfully sought to address the social injustices of European empire building. And yet, the educational legacy of imperialism lives on. The effects of its reality come alive through the consciousness and actions of those whose institutions and traditions have been forever marked by the arbitrary boundaries of a world geo-graphy constructed—mapped out, studied, carefully logged in, written down and taught—according to the ‘colonizing imperative’ of deŽ ning the difference of racial, ethnic, social and cultural identities as Ž nite polarities of human being in relation to the history of the West. To say the West has learned much from the global conquests that imperialism originally initiated as voyages of discovery is to underestimate the power and passion of the educational imagination that feeds the will to know ‘the Other’ no matter what the cost. To some, this may seem an odd way to put it, but there can be no denying the intensity of the Western desire to assimilate new forms of knowledge and experience beyond the safe horizons of the familiar so as to codify and therefore possess the ontological and epistemological domains of an ever expanding sense of world (Said, 1978, 1993). Indeed, the chronicles of difference archived during the era of European expansionism tell the tale of a wanting-to-know gone awry, the so-called ‘disinterestedness’ of intellectual and scientiŽ c objectives quite overtly implicated in the quest for power guided by imperialist economic and political agendas. That will ‘to know the Other’ which had signiŽ ed to Western consciousness a frontier of boundless possibilities beyond the limits of imagination, essentially facilitated the logic of the rise of a new mercantilism working methodically and ruthlessly toward the appropriation of material and human resources. Let us make no mistake, the golden age of imperialism was a movement intended to grow the economic power base of European states and governments through exploration and colonization designed to fulŽ l grandiose images and

In the shadow of "death with dignity": medicine and cultural quandaries of the vegetative state.

In this paper I address one site of technological development and cultural production, the permanent or persistent comatose condition and the institutions and practices that enable this life form to exist. As with other medical sites of ambiguity and change under recent scrutiny by anthropologists, the locations in which comatose bodies thrive are those in which the routinization of technology use in the clinic and a legitimating social and economic context come together to permit and create a further remapping of the notions of "life" and "person." I explore the new forms of knowledge, practice, and the body that are created at this site and how they are negotiated, and I discuss how the shifting understanding of "culture" and "nature" both have an impact on and are informed by American quandaries about approaching death. I argue that beings who are neither fully alive, biologically dead, nor "naturally" self-regulating, yet who are sustained by modern medical practice, destabilize the existing social order in ways that are different from other hybrid forms.

Technology in Teacher Education: examples of integration and implementation in early childhood courses

This article explores a number of ways in which information and communications technologies (ICT) have been incorporated and integrated in a teacher education program in order to extend opportunities for students to interact with ICT as part of their preparation for becoming early childhood professionals. It describes three examples where ICT have been utilised in different contexts to promote understanding of the implications of technologies in educational settings, to engage students with powerful conceptual ideas and as a means of communication between students on campus and those in remote areas. The examples reveal that both undergraduate and graduate students indicated that they were at a novice stage of use and understanding before embarking on the courses. In addition, the examples show that participation in the courses helped students to come to terms with computer technology as a device that could help them both to acquire new forms of knowledge as well as extend the possibilities for interactions with other early childhood professionals who were located in remote areas. The examples also highlighted the need for teacher educators to become aware of the variety of ways in which ICT can complement and extend teaching and learning contexts in new and dynamic ways rather than be used to perpetuate existing pedagogical strategies that need to be reconceptualized in the information age.