Horizon Of Possibilities Research Articles

The Chaco Skies: A Socio-cultural History of Power Relations

This article looks into notions of the sky among the Guaycurú aboriginal groups in the Argentine Chaco within the context of the socio-religious changes they have undergone since the eighteenth century. By using ethno-astronomy and anthropology of religion perspectives, and based on our own ethnographic and documentary work, we have analyzed both the continuities and the ruptures in the Guaycurú skies. In doing so, we have found that social relations between humans and non-humans shape the Guaycurú experience of celestial space. These bonds have a strongly political character as they are structured around power asymmetries. The colonial experience, including Christian missions, has imposed modernity on these groups as an overall horizon of possibilities. However, the Guaycurú have sought to redefine modernity, creating their own ‘modernity paths’.

Legal Punishment and Its Limits: The Future of Abolitionism

Derrida notes that while many discourses—like law, politics, morality and theology—make use of the term cruelty, psychoanalysis alone takes psychical suffering as its own object of study. He is therefore incredulous that psychoanalysis has had so little to say about such important legal and political questions as the death penalty and other forms of state-sanctioned cruelty. His diagnosis is that insofar as psychoanalysis remains attached to a logic or a fantasy of sovereignty—one in which subjectivity is understood as individual or indivisible—its revolutionary force remains blunted. Thus, Derrida calls for ‘a psychoanalysis to come’, a psychoanalysis for whom ‘cruelty’ is delinked from moral or theological approaches, a psychoanalysis which is delinked from its reliance on sovereignty—the sovereign subject, the sovereign nation or sovereign knowledge. Significantly, the ‘to come’ here is not the positing of some horizon of possibility for psychoanalysis, as if this were just an Idea (in a Platonic or regulative, Kantian, sense) that we must move towards. Rather the ‘to come’ expresses the dislocation that structures the very possibility of psychoanalysis from within. I conclude by asking how this psychoanalysis to come might shed light on what Angela Davis called the ‘great feat of the imagination’ required to ‘envision life beyond the prison’.

A Simplified Approach to Semi-Precision Attachment

AbstractPrecision attachments open a new horizon of possibilities in prosthodontic rehabilitation. Varieties in size, shape and configuration allows them to be utilized in many clinical scenarios. However, the complex prosthesis with attachments does not serve the purpose of retention and esthetics but makes it cumbersome for the patient. Two cases in which a simplified approach to semi-precision attachments have been adopted, are discussed here.

Work transformation following the implementation of an ERP system

Purpose The purpose of this study is to introduce the Human Resources (HR) module of the SAP suite in the Italian branch of a leading multinational pharmaceutical company. This study can be re-conducted within the interpretive tradition of information technology studies focusing on the attempt to understand and describe how software users in the HR department interpreted the enterprise resource planning (ERP) technology, how they changed their work practices and the changes that occurred in organizational discourses and meanings alongside the process. Design/methodology/approach The case study/intervention took start with the impulse of the Italian HR department manager, who was struck by the way that the ERP system technology implementation was affecting work life of the employees in the department. This research/intervention used interviews, focus groups and internal documents as sources of data. The authors conducted and analyzed 20 narrative interviews and 3 focus groups with middle managers, and they analyzed about 120 pages of internal memos. Findings The implementation of ERP systems is almost invariably accompanied by great expectations of increased process rationalization, efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and upper managers’ discourses make large use of what Engeström et al., 2010 have called process efficiency rhetoric. But the ERP technology, most likely, will neither revolutionize management nor will it become a “complete calculation machine” that runs an entire work organization (Quattrone and Hopper, 2005, p. 731). Originality/value The implementation of the ERP system has caused conflicts and disturbances, aggravating contradictions that already existed between activity systems and introducing new types of contradictions. Pre-existent contradictions become clearer; there is a stronger interconnection between activity systems. The individual agents could experiment an expansion in their activities if only they will initiate a movement of expansive learning and if they are not prevented from doing so by coercive control. The natural expansion of the subjects’ scope of activity and horizons of possibilities could be sustained by the ERP technology if it is not used as a tool for domination and if the upper management does not try and separate what cannot in actuality be separated: The actors’ capabilities of improvised learning, which makes the institution of a new mode of the activity possible, and their capacity to assume collective control of the meaning and direction of the transformation of the activity. ERPs are technologies that can naturally bring transformations in the activity system and networks where they are introduced, but in some cases, they can easily and in a non reflective manner be intended as tools for oppression by the upper management.

REAL LOVE VERSUS REAL LIFE: YOUTH, MUSIC AND UTOPIA IN FREETOWN, SIERRA LEONE

ABSTRACTThe most popular music among youths in Sierra Leone's capital Freetown is music dealing with love. While the music, which is mainly of foreign origin, evokes idealized images of ‘real love’, the real-life relationships of its young audiences are characterized by chronic states of emotional uncertainty and dissatisfaction. Economic disparities lead to an increasing monetization of young people's relationships, driving them either into a fragile flux of multiple partners or out of intimate engagements altogether. Taking this ‘dissonance’ between sonic representations and social relations as a point of departure, in this article I explore the ways in which young Freetonians position themselves at the juncture of desire and reality. After an introduction to Freetown's contemporary music scene, I juxtapose various life and love stories of youths with the fantasies they invest in ‘love music’. In so doing, I discuss the complex relationships between affect, exchange, deprivation and the strictures involved in attaining social adulthood. Drawing on the notion of utopia – denoting a desired yet unattainable state – I argue that it is within the experiential gap between the consumption of a representation and the desire to live (up to) that representation that Freetown's youths rework their horizons of possibilities.

ESD: Power, politics, and policy: “Tragic optimism” from Latin America

ABSTRACTIn light of the challenging developmental issues confronting the countries of Latin America, this response article analyzes the power and resistance of education for sustainable development from both theoretical and policy perspectives. Of particular concern are the neo-productivist strategies driving the latest stage of capitalist development. This needed discussion about education and development fluctuates between necessity and contingency. Derrida's concept of the “constitutive outside” accounts for how existing tensions within education for sustainable development inform the need for new identification models that are open, unsteady, incomplete, and relational. The constitutive outside also recovers the notion of “tragic optimism” (Santos, 2009) for clarifying the complexity of the struggle for emancipation and the confidence of the human capacity to create horizons of possibility. This confidence and capacity cannot be objectified from the impossible discourse (and palimpsest) of the texts/policies of education for sustainable development.

Queer Forms and Contacts

Queer Forms and Contacts Sean Metzger (bio) The initial panel invitation asked me to reflect on queer performance and scholarship in my work as a way of addressing José Esteban Muñoz’s call to invest in both performance and queerness as pathways to imagine and rehearse more optimistic and radical futures. To respond to this request, I consider queer forms and contacts. Although I remain uncertain whether I share the principle of hope that queer studies has inherited from Ernst Bloch via Muñoz, I do believe that contradiction produces potentiality. Performance generates ways that we might see and, perhaps, inhabit the world differently. My first book, Chinese Looks, investigates such issues through fashion and costume, and my current monograph, titled The Chinese Atlantic, moves to a different kind of aesthetic production: seascapes. Both projects deal with transnational forms of Chineseness because I analyze present discourses of globalization and their antecedents by attending in terms of both fantasy and materiality to what one might call “Chinese things.” My efforts here register some new horizons of possibility, even if the nodal points I offer only bring into partial view my attempts at intervening in performance, queer theory, and sexuality studies. To consider costuming, dressing, and fashioning as modes of performance is to think about bodies and the ways that clothes help people to move through and shape social worlds. Each of these terms provides different valences to understand how outfits might matter. Often associated with stage and screen, costumes work in tandem with narrative to ground fictional and ritualistic contexts and often connote the festive. Dress signifies the everyday, but it also means to arrange or put into some order. Here, one might think of dressing a shop window or, perhaps more archaically, dressing to the right or left (that is, positioning a man’s package in the left or right side of the pants). Fashion signals capitalism, but it can also be defined as “to give form to.” These overlapping terms provide ways to unpack the significance of garments in general, but they also open a more specific inquiry into questions of representational forms, performance, and phenomenology. One critical modality to which this constellation of terms leads is queer style. I have used queer style to think specifically about normative relations among ostensibly Chinese clothing, image, and performance.1 What happens when a garment seems out of place? How does the use of a sartorial item in a nonnormative manner encourage spectators to consider not only what they see, but also how they see? One of the most conspicuous examples of such a shift is the work of Chinese artist Sui Jianguo, particularly his four-ton metal Mao jacket that occupied the corner of Park Avenue and 70th Street in New York City for several months as part of the Asia Society’s exhibition, “Art and China’s Revolution.” Monumental in scale, the wardrobe piece stood divested of its iconic namesake—a surface without apparent content. What kinds of desire does such a form elicit and represent? The sculpture raises questions about surfaces and their relations to sensuous pleasure and nagging discomfort, individual handiwork and mass production, subjective expression and public perception. My usage of queer style draws on my much larger study of how Chinese objects of dress and adornment (including hair) might alter understandings of race and its performance during periods when US–Chinese relations decisively shift. In Chinese Looks I coin the “skein of race” to name the material historical forces that compel spectators to see, hear, and even feel Chineseness within particular historical contexts: over the course of the long twentieth century, from the Opium Wars [End Page 53] through the Beijing Olympics. Queer style is a subcategory of the skein of race that opens the stakes of thinking about the migrating form and the queer together. For example, photographer Tseng Kwong Chi produced a body of work that offers no immediately apparent relation to sexual desire yet encourages his viewers to contemplate the conditions of possibility for rendering desire visible in the first place. Tseng’s most well-known photographs are self-portraits depicting the artist dressed in a gray suit consisting of a...

Uncolonizable: Freedom in the Muslim mind in colonial British India

ABSTRACTDoes Islam offer a vision of freedom? What did freedom’s imagination look like to the colonized Muslims of the Indian subcontinent? In this article, I engage the imagination of freedom of two revolutionary middle actors – Fazal Illahi, a mullah, and Iqbal Shedai, a self-styled middle-class rebel. Drawing upon the Islamic concept of the free human, these men developed a concept of azadi (freedom) making the colonized subjects of British India aware of the issues of dignity and natural human rights, which was more expansive in scope than political freedom that was demanded by the national leaders of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League. Further, by collaborating with anti-imperial internationalists in Europe, these men elevated India’s freedom struggle into an international agenda. By engaging the Islamic concept of freedom and making it an inclusive project for decolonization, the middle actors raised a critical question of the relationship between Islam and the state. I read their freedom imagination by engaging Malik Bennabi’s theory of (un)colonializability and the twelfth-century Islamic philosopher Ibn Arabi’s concept of hayrah (perplexity). I argue that Illahi and Shedai’s interpretation of azadi expands our understanding of freedom as an unenclosed horizon of possibilities, yet to be realized in the subcontinent.

La femme au Colt 45 par Marie Redonnet

La petite fille de Monsieur Linh (2005), also about an immigrant, though his trauma is induced by war, may be less surprised by the denouement, though appreciative of its probing toward integration. Regional distinctiveness and local color also pervade. Overall, this timely novel deals sensitively and deftly with the effects of natural disaster and loss, as well as nurturing, accepting relationships, on the human psyche. Rockhurst University (MO) M. Kathleen Madigan Redonnet, Marie. La femme au Colt 45. Paris: Tripode, 2015. ISBN 978-2-37055075 -0. Pp. 112. 15 a. A fiftyish woman, having left her career as the star actress of the“Magic Théâtre,” having become separated from her husband and her son during an insurrection in her native country, having traversed a dense and apparently endless forest, finds herself alone, perched on the edge of a tall cliff, with an old Colt 45 pistol in her hand. Clearly, the time for decision has come. Thus begins Redonnet’s new novel, her first since Diego (2005). Its heroine is “Lora Sander,” who has made her way out of a war-torn “Azirie” in order to seek refuge in “Santarie.” Sometimes we hear her own account of events, sometimes her speech is framed by that of another narrator. What becomes clear quickly is that life in Santarie is in many ways just as difficult as in Azirie. Readers familiar with Redonnet’s work will recognize the declarative simplicity and narrative naiveté that have been the hallmarks of her style since the beginning of her career.Yet they will also be greeted by new features in her writing that amply affirm Redonnet’s growth as an artist. Salient among those features is her focus on the political dimension of human experience—an impulse that was largely absent (or muted) in much of her earlier work. She asks a series of timely questions in this novel. How do people react to organized violence, and how do the terms of human behavior change during a time of war? How does society view refugees, and particularly female refugees? How do people live clandestinely, and what consequences does that have for their identity? Can non-violence and passive resistance be efficient tools in the face of utterly ruthless oppression? How do individuals survive disaster, and what are the wages of such survival? What kinds of priorities govern the relations of the personal and the collective? Does the work of art have a role to play in the political world, and what is its horizon of possibility therein? For her part, Lora Sander is struck by the way that fiction inflects our understanding of the real. As she makes her way toward the city of “Santaré,” she muses, “j’aurais pu croire que je roulais vers la frontière américaine et que je jouais dans un film” (38). Yet she realizes that such a dynamic can also be reversed. Speaking of a man she met in exile, she remarks,“sa vie a dû être un roman qu’il n’a jamais écrit, comme les vies de ces morts enterrés à côté de lui” (60). In a similar vein, she wonders how she ought to read her own story. Her husband, Lora 224 FRENCH REVIEW 90.2 Reviews 225 reflects, would certainly have seen it as Greek tragedy; she prefers to view it as a“drame moderne” (102). They are undoubtedly both right, and simultaneously so, because Redonnet presents this story both as fable and as urgent, immediate testimony, neither mode quite trumping the other. University of Colorado Warren Motte Redouane, Najib. L’année de tous les apprentissages. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015. ISBN 978-2-343-07470-2 Pp. 298. 25 a. Après avoir fini ses études au Canada, où il a laissé son grand amour Sarah, le jeune Wahid est de retour au Maroc dans le but d’accomplir son service civil. Devenu “civiliste” dans un ministère, il tente de s’intégrer à la société mais découvre rapidement qu’il est devenu un étranger dans son propre pays.Les incompétents,en revanche, ont obtenu de bons postes grâce à leur art de graisser les pattes. C’est...

L'Effet Barzakh

ABSTRACTThe role of aesthetics has been widely debated in the field of Maghrebi Literary Studies since its inception in the early 1960s. Francophone novels from the Maghreb are often called upon by publishers to serve as sociologically faithful reflections of North African society. At the same time, such works have been routinely criticized by scholars for their lack of literary artistry. The twenty-first century arrival of independent publishing houses in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia has altered the flow of cultural capital across the Mediterranean, with new centers of literary production shifting the landscape of French publishing. These local publishers afford Maghrebi writers the space in which to create narratives that complicate existing paradigms for postcolonial fiction. My paper addresses the relationship between literary aesthetics and national consciousness in recent novels from the catalogue of Éditions Barzakh, Algeria's most important independent publisher. I argue that Barzakh has expanded the horizon of possibility for the roman maghrébin in the twenty-first century by publishing texts that skirt the realist/formalist tug-of-war to which literatures from North Africa are so often subjected.

Ocio en clave pedagógica: significados del ocio escolar en escuelas públicas del Quindío, Colombia

Partiendo de los diversos significados atribuidos al ocio por los actores escolares, presentamos avances realizados en el marco de la investigación doctoral denominada: “El ocio en clave pedagógica”. Su diseño, asumido desde la complementariedad etnográfica, nos permite desvelar los significados que encierra el ocio para la cultura escolar en el contexto educativo colombiano, en especial en el departamento del Quindío, y contrastar desde la práctica, un acercamiento teórico sobre este concepto complejo y polisémico. Exponer las claves pedagógicas del ocio escolar, supondría abrir un horizonte de posibilidades para una educación del ocio como proceso sentido, vivo y vivido, de manera individual y colectiva. Antes del análisis de los resultados, es necesario presentar, a manera de reflexión, una aproximación teórica sobre el ocio en clave humanista para profundizar luego en teorías de la educación del ocio y, por último, aportar algunas miradas atribuidas al ocio desde las voces de los participantes en esta investigación.

Quatro ou Mais Pontos de Vista sobre o Ensino de Análise Matemática

Resumo Neste artigo apresentamos resultados de pesquisas focados na disciplina de análise, no âmbito de cursos de licenciatura em matemática, tendo como pano de fundo um panorama de como a disciplina vem se estruturando, no cenário brasileiro, no que diz respeito aos seus objetivos, conteúdos e bibliografia. Num primeiro momento vimos, de forma sucinta, como coordenadores de cursos e professores da disciplina compreendem o papel da análise na licenciatura. Num segundo momento, e constituindo o objetivo principal do trabalho, apresentamos o que pensam licenciandos e professores de matemática da educação básica a respeito dessa disciplina, por meio de uma pesquisa qualitativa inspirada em uma postura fenomenológica. Após os procedimentos metodológicos, chegou-se a três categorias abertas: “A presença da análise na licenciatura em matemática”, “A análise como corpo de conhecimento” e “A análise e a abertura de horizonte de possibilidades do professor”, que foram interpretadas com o intuito de transcender as manifestações de cada indivíduo, em um movimento de síntese compreensiva. Finalmente, num terceiro momento, apresentamos algumas propostas em andamento e perspectivas futuras para os trabalhos sobre ensino de análise.

The Transcendental in Ludwik Fleck’s Social Epistemology

Much of Ludwik Fleck’s work on the social constitution of knowledge, scientific facts, and objects of inquiry is informed by a specific use of transcendental arguments. This paper analyzes the ways in which Fleck looks for “conditions of possibilities” for the stylization and circulation of cognition. Following a brief discussion of his political agenda regarding science’s “cultural mission,” the paper offers a reconstruction of Fleck’s implicit concept of the transcendental. It is argued that Fleck addresses scientific truth as an ongoing revealing and concealing of possibilities for doing research. By implication, the truth about a scientific fact is at once situated in scientific practices and transcended by a horizon of possibilities. The transcendental takes shape in Fleck’s social epistemology as a result of the reflection upon knowledge production’s “situated transcendence.”

The interweaving of pharmaceutical and medical expectations as dynamics of micro-pharmaceuticalisation: Advanced-stage cancer patients' hope in medicines alongside trust in professionals

Existing pharmaceuticalisation research denotes the salience of expectations in novel medicines and in the medical contexts through which these may be accessed. Specific processes of expectation such as hope and trust, alongside their shaping of patients' lifeworlds around pharmaceutical use, remain neglected however. Considering data from in-depth interviews and observations involving thirteen patients with advanced-stage cancer diagnoses who were or had recently been involved in clinical trials, we develop an interpretative phenomenological analysis of the influence of hope and trust upon the accessing of novel medicines through trials, illuminating the depth and texture of pharmaceuticalisation at the micro-level. Trust in clinicians and hope in trial medicines, for self and future patients, were important in the reconfiguring of patients' horizon of possibilities when accessing new medicines. Interwoven processes of trust and hope, embedded within heightened vulnerability, sustained the bracketing out of doubts regarding medicines, trials and professionals. The need to maintain hopes, and trusting relations with professionals who facilitated these hopes, generated meaning and momentum of medicines use which inhibited disengagement from trials. Findings indicate the taken-for-granted, as well as more reflexive, pursuit of solutions through medicines, which in this case-study enabled the generation of evidence through trial involvement. Analyses of micro-level dynamics within both downstream-consumption and upstream-substantiation of pharmaceutical solutions assist more nuanced accounts of interests, agency and expectations within pharmaceuticalisation.

Radical reflexivity and hermeneutic pre-normativity

This article develops the thesis that normative social orders are always fore-structured by horizons of possibilities. The thesis is spelled out against the background of a criticism of ethnomethodology for its hermeneutic deficiency in coping with radical reflexivity. The article contributes to the debates concerning the status of normativity problematic in the cultural disciplines. The concept of hermeneutic pre-normativity is introduced to connote the interpretative fore-structuring of normative inter-subjectivity. Radical reflexivity is reformulated in terms of hermeneutic phenomenology.

The containment of Occupy: militarized police forces and social control in America

The spread of the Occupy movement across the globe has reinvigorated the political, expanding the horizon of possibility after over thirty years of closure imposed by neoliberalism. While a literature which analyzes the interlinking nature of these social movements across the world is emerging, the response to them by powerful public and private actors is less examined. This paper focuses upon the attempt by domestic authorities in the United States to curtail these struggles. Applying the work of Nicos Poulantzas on authoritarian statism it examines how private and public actors have worked together to contain the recent surge of protest. Specific attention is paid to the harsh response of police forces to the Occupy protests, which is analyzed in the context of the growing militarization of American police that has been underway since the declaration of the War on Drugs in 1971.

Engaging a visionary: Horizons of the (im)possible

Abstract Neville Alexander has had a profound impact on the way we think about language education and language policy in South Africa. His views on the harmonisation of African languages, mother-tongue education, the position of English and the importance of literacy have shaped academic and policy debates since the early 1990s. Visionaries are able to combine insight with foresight and so imagine a different way forward. In this way they change what Roger Simon describes as the ‘horizon of possibility’. This article examines Alexander's positions critically in relation to questions of power, identity, access and social transformation, in order to understand both their take-up and their rejection. Both history and geography – time and space – are central to this discussion of his achievements.

Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism by Antoinette Burton (review)

Reviewed by: Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism by Antoinette Burton Nicole M. Mares Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism. By Antoinette Burton. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011. 416 pp. $94.95 (cloth); $25.95 (paper). Antoinette Burton’s latest volume, Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism, is, in part, a mid-career reflection on her evolution as a scholar and teacher. The collection, in a way Burton’s academic “autobiography,” also serves as an important retrospective of new imperial history’s development into a vital approach to British historical studies. While both Burton and the field have solidified their places in contemporary historiography over the past two decades, this anthology of her most important essays reminds scholars of British imperial studies, postcolonial studies, and gender studies that such has not always been the case. The work of new imperial historians like Burton, alongside Catherine Hall, Ann Stoler, and Tony Ballantyne, has faced challenges from empiricists eager to maintain a divide between the metropole and the “periphery,” and between the historian and his or her work (p. 7). What Burton does in this volume is show how historians’ experiences are central to the questions they ask and the critiques they offer. And not taking for granted that new imperial historians have achieved their aims of decentering the metropole, Burton reminds us that there is still much work to do if we are to critique “the certainty of the nation as an analytical category, as a cherished idea, and as a guarantor of the sovereign Western self as well” (p. 3). [End Page 704] This collection of essays is divided into two sections: new imperial historical theory and practice. Part 1, “Home and Away: Mapping Imperial Cultures,” revisits the debates surrounding concepts of the nation and the “periphery.” Just as Downton Abbey thrusts a nostalgic, seemingly empire-free Britain onto the television screens of Britons and Americans, reinforcing ideas of a homogenous island nation, Burton’s essays reveal the ongoing academic challenges to new imperial history as scholars of British history have lamented waning institutional focus on Britain. Burton demonstrates that Britain is alive and quite strong, both popularly and academically, but it remains too easy to sidestep the foundational role empire played in developing notions of Britain and Britishness. The essays included in this section, which focus on the utility and persistence of concepts of “nation” and “Britain,” reveal that while scholars of new imperial studies have made significant progress in analyzing networks of Britishness, there still remains a longing for, and popular celebration of, an archaic, aristocratic Britain. In part 2, “Theory into Practice: Doing Critical Imperial History,” Burton’s essays remind us just how much the methodologies of new imperial history have enriched scholarly understandings of the often false distinctions between imperial and metropolitan identities. The essays included in this section of the book demonstrate the interconnectivity of imperial and domestic debates and show how the imperial “periphery” significantly shaped debates about race, gender, and identity in the metropole. For instance, in Burton’s examination of the London School of Medicine for Women she establishes how debates about the role of British women doctors in India reveal “how [metropolitan] gender categories were reconstituted by imperialism even as they helped to determine how the very concept of empire performed the kinds of ideological work it was capable of later in the nineteenth century” (p. 153). Using debates surrounding women’s emancipation, women’s virtue, and Victorian discourses of democracy in Britain, Burton shows the mutually constitutive ideological work of imperialism. In the end, this volume asks scholars and students to consider what’s next for new imperial studies and British history. As global systems take center stage in historiography, Burton evaluates in an original essay the potential impact of a global approach to British imperial history, positing that “the global would … appear to represent a new horizon of possibility, the last frontier, perhaps even the highest stage of imperial history—one that makes doing British empire studies feel respectable, politically relevant, and even redemptive” (p. 276). But [End Page 705] this development in the historiography threatens to repeat...

La educación: clave para el desarrollo humano Una perspectiva desde la educación auténtica

<p>En este artículo se presentan algunas reflexiones sobre la situación actual de la educación en sus relaciones con lo social, y se señala, desde una perspectiva situada, la importancia que adquieren las humanidades en la formación integral de los sujetos. Para ello, se describe la situación desde una mirada sociohistórica, se revalorizan los aportes significativos y relevantes de las humanidades y se enuncian algunas proyecciones hacia futuro. Asimismo, en este artículo se comparten algunas ideas o principios rectores para un abordaje pleno de la enseñanza y el aprendizaje, en los distintos niveles y modalidades del sistema educativo, especialmente en la educación superior. Esto principios se conciben como alternativa pedagógica y curricular que ayuda a pensar lo educativo en clave del desarrollo humano. En este marco, y a partir de un diálogo argumentado, se presentan cuestiones relacionadas con el aprender a aprender, aprender a convivir y aprender a emprender, desde la perspectiva de la educación auténtica, concebida no como una teoría, sino como un enfoque integral e integrado, un horizonte de posibilidades que se visualiza como alternativa para superar la fragmentación de los saberes y prácticas en los contextos educativos formales.</p>

Audiences, Brains, Sustainable Planets, and Communication Technologies: Four Horizons for the Rhetoric of Science and Technology

This response to papers by Leah Ceccarelli, Randy Harris, and Carl Herndl and Lauren Cutlip in the “Horizons of Possibility” panel at the 2012 ARST Vicentennial conference raises questions about each of the visions as they relate, respectively, to ARST audiences, brain science, and sustainable planets and programs. It also suggests renewed attention to communication technologies by scholars studying the rhetoric of science and technology, maintaining that rhetoricians need to come to terms with emerging twenty-first century communicative forms.