Humanistic Framework Research Articles

Stigma relating to tuberculosis infection prevention and control implementation in rural health facilities in South Africa — a qualitative study outlining opportunities for mitigation

BackgroundTuberculosis (TB) is a stigmatised disease with intersectional associations with poverty, HIV, transmission risk and mortality. The use of visible TB infection prevention and control (IPC) measures, such as masks or isolation, can contribute to stigma.MethodsTo explore stigma in this condition, we conducted in-depth individual interviews with 18 health workers and 15 patients in the rural Eastern Cape of South Africa using a semi-structured interview guide and narrative approach. We used reflexive thematic analysis guided by line-by-line coding. We then interpreted these key findings using Link and Phelan’s theoretical model of stigma, related this to stigma mitigation recommendations from participants and identified levels of intervention with the Health Stigma and Discrimination Framework.ResultsParticipants shared narratives of how TB IPC measures can contribute to stigma, with some describing feeling ‘less than human’. We found TB IPC measures sometimes exacerbated stigma, for example through introducing physical isolation that became prolonged or through a mask marking the person out as being ill with TB. In this context, stigma emerged from the narrow definition of what mask-wearing symbolises, in contrast with broader uses of masks as a preventative measure. Patient and health workers had contrasting perspectives on the implications of TB IPC-related stigma, with patients focussing on communal benefit, while health workers focussed on the negative impact on the health worker-patient relationship. Participant recommendations to mitigate TB IPC-related stigma included comprehensive information on TB IPC measures, respectful communication between health workers and patients, shifting the focus of TB IPC messages to communal safety (which could draw on ubuntu, a humanist framework) and using universal IPC precautions instead of measures targeted at someone with infectious TB.ConclusionsHealth facilities may unwittingly perpetuate stigma through TB IPC implementation, but they also have the potential to reduce it. Evoking ‘ubuntu’ as an African humanist conceptual framework could provide a novel perspective to guide future TB IPC stigma mitigation interventions, including policy changes to universal IPC precautions.

Healing-Centered Restorative Justice

This concept paper maps out an approach to restorative justice that enriches current trauma-informed understandings and promotes healing and repair. The paper draws upon many sources, including qualitative research undertaken between 2021-23 in Israel/Palestine and New Zealand/Aotearoa, and an ongoing collaborative research project in the U.S. It also incorporates gathered wisdom on trauma and healing from leading experts across many disciplines. The paper begins by delineating different understandings of trauma, including personal, collective, historical, and structural forms. It then highlights three critical perspectives that offer useful insights into how the field of restorative justice can more effectively achieve its transformational potential: (1) Indigenous/collectivist perspectives; (2) positive psychology-related perspectives; and (3) transformative justice/abolitionist perspectives. The paper goes on to reframe these critical perspectives as core features of healing-centered restorative justice: first, a contextualized, multi-dimensional understanding of trauma; second, a strengths orientation toward human behavior; and third, a relational worldview grounded in interconnectedness, mutuality, and shared responsibility. By adopting this holistic and humanistic framework, restorative justice scholars and practitioners can develop effective and culturally sustaining conflict transformation processes that contribute to healing and repair at individual, interpersonal, and systemic levels of society.

Maximizing the Benefits of ChatGPT with FIRST-ADLX Framework: Promoting Responsible, Ethical, and Impactful AI Integration in Education

In the era of fast technological advancements and the inclusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education, it is more important than ever for educators to have a pedagogy that embeds this technology. A humanistic approach to education is demanded. The focus on the individual student and their emotional and spiritual needs is essential if an active deep learner experience is to be created.This paper aims to explore the integration of Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) within Focusing, Interacting, Reviewing, Sequencing, Transforming-Active Deep Learner eXperience Framework (FIRST-ADLX Framework) and investigate the framework’s capacity to effectively incorporate the latest technology while prioritizing the learners’ needs and promoting responsible and ethical use of AI in education. By embedding ChatGPT within a comprehensive, holistic, and humanized Framework that prioritizes pedagogy over technology and focuses on the learner rather than on the digital tool, it becomes possible to create an immersive and impactful ADLX. This ensures that the technology used enhances the learner’s experience and does not overshadow it. Furthermore, the study shows how the implementation of the domains and principles of FIRST-ADLX Framework can maximize the benefits of ChatGPT in particular, encourages facilitators and learners to embrace AI technologies as valuable tools and resources, and supports both in utilizing AI ethically, responsibly, and appropriately.The study adopts a qualitative auto-ethnographic approach where data is collected from the facilitator’s personal diary, observations, participants’ comments, and assessments furthermore, this study offers a more objective perspective and embraces descriptive quantitative methods to analyze the results of formative quizzes and the final summative assessment. This approach aims to emphasize the importance of integrating AI within a comprehensive and humanistic framework, avoiding its random use and ensuring alignment with student-centered principles.

Guaranteed Basic Income from the Perspective of Self‐Determination Theory

AbstractIn capitalistic societies the concepts of income and labour are inseparable, and as such, providing all citizens with an unconditional living wage is a contentious issue. Capitalist ideals that emphasize individual effort, competition, and financial prosperity have spurred tremendous economic growth but underestimate human motivation and have implications for human wellbeing. The aim of this essay is to examine the implications of guaranteed basic income based on existing data from the perspective of self‐determination theory, a humanistic theory of motivation that considers both practical performance‐related outcomes as well as human flourishing. I discuss the motivational dynamics involved in labour participation rates, how basic income may impact basic psychological needs and wellbeing, how basic income may impact workplace environments, and whether neoliberal capitalist values are a useful framework through which to discuss basic income. From this perspective, the benefits of basic income to individuals and society are promising. A shift in values from hyper‐rational competitive ideologies towards more humanistic frameworks such as self‐determination theory may be beneficial for not only for basic income and management research, but also the evaluation of public policy.

Embodiment in Anthropological Epigenetics Research

abstract: This article reviews literature in human epigenetic research as a case study in order to examine and critique the dominant framework of embodiment as unidirectional or bidirectional and mechanistically driven. The authors identify three major critiques to this approach: (1) the treatment of epigenetic traits as a mechanism of embodiment, rather than as multidirectional components of a dynamic and ongoing embodiment process; (2) a tendency to view changing epigenetic traits as both the cause and the solution for embodied social inequalities rather than examining the need for systemic change; and (3) a loss of the complexity of varied lived experiences within epigenetic studies. The authors suggest weaving in humanistic frameworks and expanding toward a multidirectional definition of embodiment in the field as a way forward.

Beyond voice: An onto-epistemological analysis of maternal transition inquiry

The maternal transition is a key concept for studying first-time motherhood. Whilst qualitative research in this space has contributed much to understanding the psychological and sociocultural shifts in this transition, a broad adoption of conventional humanistic qualitative methodologies has produced linear and rather homogenous knowledges. In this article, we interrogate the onto-epistemological repercussions of such inquiry and cut into this work by plugging into feminist/new materialisms and critical posthumanism. We trace the trail of qualitative maternal transition literature by examining methodologies and methods to think through the limits and potentialities of their knowledge-production capacity. We read across the research practices of 56 maternal transition articles spanning the past 5 decades. We found most reside within a liberal humanist framework, which inevitably positions mothers as rational, agentic, disembodied, and responsible actors. We explore what is in-between, missing, or could be in future becoming-mother research assemblages. Through thinking with feminist/new materialist and critical posthuman theories as inquiry pathways, we open up the maternal transition as a constantly evolving and fluctuating process of becoming-mother. Findings underscore the importance of diversifying theory and methodologies in studying first-time motherhood and paying greater attention to the relations between human and non-human agencies.

“A Radiance Hurtful . . . to the Eyes”: Fossil-Fueled Modernity and Environmental Degradation in Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad”

ABSTRACT In addition to the obvious religious allegory that frames Hawthorne’s 1843 short story “The Celestial Railroad,” this article proposes that the story might be read more literally and ecocritcally, as evidence of Hawthorne’s growing skepticism toward the emergent transportation industry as well as toward the environmentally deleterious fossil fuels that would animate it for decades and centuries to come. Reading “The Celestial Railroad” through an energy humanist framework might reveal, as the author suggests, Hawthorne’s prescient intimations of the social and ecological degradation that would eventually result from the expansion of the fossil-fueled transportation industry. Placing the story in the context of Hawthorne’s nascent concerns with industrialism and environmental decay—reading “The Celestial Railroad” historically and materially, rather than merely symbolically—provides crucial insight into Hawthorne’s environmental imagination, particularly in relation to the increasingly visible ecological effects of industrial modernity upon the American landscape.

The politics of Chinese immigrants’ double unbelonging and deglobalization

This study theorizes the politics of belonging, drawing on the case of Chinese immigrants. In the heyday of globalization, Chinese immigrants used to enjoy a high degree of transnational mobility and multiple belongings. Now, in the wake of China–West geopolitical contestations and during the time of COVID-19, many Chinese immigrants are experiencing double unbelonging due to marginalization in both the host society and China. By analyzing double unbelonging, this study makes three theoretical contributions. First, it expands the conventional cultural–humanistic framework of belonging to incorporate political analysis. Second, it discusses why and how to replace the positivist approach to belonging as exemplified by acculturation theory with a social constructionist approach to the politics of belonging. Finally, the study theorizes unbelonging—its epistemological advantage, its dialectical relation with belonging, its production by the nation-state and media, and how polarizing geopolitics produce double unbelonging.

Sentiment Analysis for a Humanist Framework: How Emotions are Recognized and Interpreted in the Age of Social Media

Language is in constant evolution – this theory has been demonstrated most aptly and comprehensively by Marshall McLuhan. Specialisation in the different areas of knowledge, especially technology, has contributed to this process. Technological advances and the development of so-called intelligent devices allow interaction through voice interfaces, text, or gesture and in its most advanced forms by means of the incorporation of artificial intelligence-generated linguistic communications in human-machine interfaces. In recent years, the ways of communication or watching news have changed, now we do it by means of the internet and through different options of the social networks. We interact with people and react to their communications by means of divergent ways of language formation. It is increasingly common to express opinions through social networks and the internet. So much so that now we know that it is possible to analyse a person’s sentiment from his or her communications of opinion issued in social networks? The question is, can we determine, for example, whether the opinion has a positive or negative emotive charge only by analysing the written or inscribed texts of such formats of communication? This paper presents a brief description of how technological evolution has created an x-factor of language, that is expressed, appropriated and re-used in machine learning modules, artificial intelligence, and automatic sentiment analysis.

Deicide and the Drama of the Holocaust: Gian Paolo Callegari’s Cristo ha ucciso (1948)

ABSTRACT Gian Paolo Callegari’s prize-winning 1948 play, Cristo ha ucciso, marks an overlooked milestone in Italy’s response to the Holocaust. Among the earliest Italian creative works to confront the genocide of the European Jews, Callegari’s play challenged the legacies of anti-Semitism in European culture. Yet it also concealed the troubling history of its author’s own Fascist anti-Semitism. Exploring this apparent paradox, the present essay situates both play and playwright in the post-war Italian context. I argue that Cristo ha ucciso makes possible a substantial reconsideration of the public reckoning that attended news of the liberation of the death camps. This is because, with its provocative claim that Christian forgiveness had to be abandoned as an impediment to justice, Callegari’s play offered a radical alternative to the Christian humanist framework predominant in Italian narratives of the Second World War.

Animals and Animality in Primo Levi's Work

Animals and Animality in Primo Levi's Work

The Diffractive Politics of Postcolonial Cyborg Translation

The Diffractive Politics of Postcolonial Cyborg Translation Chun-Mei Chuang (bio) The one who is tortured is fundamentally one who loses his or her face, entering into a becoming-animal, a becoming-molecular the ashes of which are thrown to the wind. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia So my cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work. —Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto" Diffraction marks the limits of the determinacy and permanency of boundaries. —Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway Politics of Boundaries in Molecular Translation The features of a human face are a combination of biology, culture, education, personality, and spirituality. The translator is tortured between the unfathomable choices of losing one's face or stretching one's heart. No matter what choice she makes, she will never be the same. The boundaries of a person's heart are flowing on the liquid edges of the conscious and the unconscious. Being lost in translation is more than a human endeavor to understand one another from diverse cultural backgrounds; it is always already a process of self-exploration that never sees its end. The translator goes adrift in the bewilderingly flowing and rigid boundaries. As a sociologist and academic translator, I have argued that translation is an embodied molecular process, especially between theoretical texts articulated with different languages that emerged and developed in diverse, intertwined networks of historical, cultural, religious, epistemic, and ecological conditions (Chuang 2019a). I propose "molecular translation" as a keyword for Taiwan theory's ongoing construction and [End Page 47] evolution (Chuang 2019b). "Molecular translation" is not a term borrowed from molecular biology, nor is it an attempt to restore the meaning of translation to its rightful literary place. Instead, the concept of molecular translation is naturally transgressing all boundaries, including those between nature and culture. In the times of the Anthropocene and COVID-19, translation in the broad sense is part of the multiscale transcreation of matter, energy, and information, circulating among many other things. Since the emergence of quantum physics in the 1920s and the innovation of electron microscopy in the 1930s, the technoscientific molecular turn has made possible human observation of phenomena on the subatomic scale. For us living with the COVID-19 pandemic, the most significant result of the electron imaging revolution for the past century is that viruses finally show their true colors to human eyes, manifesting delicate, complex submolecular interface dynamics, even though the concept of color proves to be meaningless for entities at the viral scale. However, we do not "see" viruses; we translate in many ways their structures across multiple scales and articulate the complicated constitution of heterogeneous components. The meaning of the "original" is transmuting; so are the implications of "seeing" and "imaging" (Chuang 2020a, 2020b). In contemporary epistemic landscapes, the concept of agency overflows the humanistic frameworks and extends to the performative capacity of nonhuman agents, including infinite life-forms, artificial entities, and their assemblages (Barad 2003, 2007; Chuang 2020c). The difficulty with the "Anthropocene" is that while its conceptualization relies on centuries of capitalist overdevelopment and technoscientific advancement, oftentimes people regard it as an empty vogue or academic virus without apprehending its material conditions (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Edwards 2017). Nonetheless, the metaphor of the virus is timely. A virus is a sequence of genetic information, a fragmentary text of messages to be decoded, translated, and replicated, and is susceptible to mutation. Regardless of its degree of complexity, any life-form is a product of deep coevolution with other life-forms in their specific habitat. Likewise, academic concepts such as the Anthropocene, or the cyborg whose translation in Taiwan will be at the center of this paper, as epistemic and affective viruses, always carry historical specificities shared with their hosts, symbionts, and media. There are many aspects of definition for any theoretical concept, and every aspect involves at least some elements of translation. This situation is evident in but not limited to cross-linguistic translation. What is at stake is the politics of boundaries beyond the humanist scope. In the age of molecular and subatomic...

Integrating Humanistic Counseling and Ecotherapy

ABSTRACT Counselors continue to incorporate ecotherapy into practice and research. Greater conceptualization of ecotherapy within a humanistic framework can inform counselors on how to incorporate clients’ relationships with nature into counseling. Examining ecotherapy application from specific humanistic counseling theories with clients can demonstrate the intentional integration of principles.

ECHOs of Medication Non-Adherence in Hypertensive Patients: A Systematic Review

Globally, hypertension has been one of the most common diseases. Although there has been improvement in the blood pressure control with the use of antihypertensive drugs, poor adherence to medications is still a problem. This has caused economic, clinical and humanistic outcomes (ECHOs) resulting in severe health crisis. This includes worsening of present disease condition, increase in co morbid diseases, increase in health care costs and ultimately death. This systematic review has broadened the scope of knowledge by providing valuable input into the development of clinical, economic and humanistic framework to standardize the consequences of medication non-adherence with the ECHOs. Literature documents the multiple adverse clinical consequences of medication non-adherence. It is also associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular events including vascular stiffness, left ventricular hypertrophy, micro albuminuria, acute coronary syndromes, stroke and transient ischemic attack and chronic heart failure ultimately leading to death. Humanistic outcomes were evaluated by measuring the symptomatic and functional status and quality of life. Economic outcomes were mainly affected by hospital related costs, productivity costs, social welfare costs, personal costs, cost to the family and friends and other associated costs. Keywords: Hypertension, Medication non-adherence, Clinical outcomes, Economic outcomes, Humanistic outcomes.

Promoting equity in the use of algorithms for high-seas conservation

Promoting equity in the use of algorithms for high-seas conservation

A Qualitative Study of Intention and Impact of Ayahuasca Use by Westerners

Ayahuasca has gained the attention of researchers over the past decade as psychedelic-assisted therapy for MDMA and psilocybin have progressed through FDA approved clinical trials. In spite of the increase in research, there are relatively few clinical studies of ayahuasca and little qualitative research on the therapeutic or healing uses of psychedelics in general. The present study included 41 Western participants who were interviewed about their participation in facilitated group ayahuasca experiences (e.g., in shamanic, neoshamanic, spiritual, and religious settings). Participants were interviewed about their intentions for participating, along with the perceived impact of the experiences. In particular, we focused on impacts that participants perceived to be sustained and enduring. We identified an impressive range of beneficial impacts, including improvements in areas that are often a focus of psychotherapy, such as mental health and substance use, health behaviors, interpersonal relationships, sense of self, attitude. Extratherapeutic effects were also observed in areas such as changes in creativity, somatic sensations, physical health/pain, sense of connection to nature, spirituality, and concern for the greater good. Two participants also reported problematic experiences, apparently related to set and setting. Implications for research and practice, along with a humanistic framework for interpreting these findings is provided.

Revolutionizing School HR Strategies and Practices to Reflect Talent Centered Education Leadership

ABSTRACT Grounded in the theories of inclusive talent management (TM) and social-exchange, this conceptual paper draws on the education working conditions and broader TM scholarship to promote Talent Centered Education Leadership, an education human resource management (HRM) approach that emphasizes an “employee centered” philosophy to enhance teachers’ experience and engagement. Schools will benefit by improving TM and school performance outcomes, reconciling the “corporate reformer” perspective, emphasizing performance accountability, and the teacher professionalism perspective, emphasizing teacher respect. This article redefines school HRM from a standardized-product focus to one that emphasizes employee value and care, an empirically supported humanistic framework compatible with education.

Knowing You: Personal Tutoring, Learning Analytics and the Johari Window

Recent decades have seen increased concern for the student experience by higher education institutions, along with more pressure on students due to the highly competitive job market and the financial implications of doing a degree. The growth in the number of non-traditional students attending higher education has added to pressures on students and staff. There are impacts on the mental health and well-being of both as university education becomes massified, commodified and increasingly time-pressured. In this context, informed and kindly human interaction is crucial to mitigate negative influences. However, staff are less likely than ever to know their students well enough to have meaningful and impactful exchanges. Student record systems and learning analytics present themselves as a promising tool to be used in finding solutions to the complex problems of student achievement and wellbeing. This paper explores the use of big data and learning analytics to facilitate the work of personal tutors (also known as academic advisors), illustrated by practical examples from the Student Support System used at the University of Plymouth. It will argue that learning analytics systems have the potential to facilitate communication and sharing of information, and thus enhance the quality of communication between personal tutors and their tutees to improve student engagement and support the tutee. However, the major contention of the paper is that tutors may need advice and guidance in how to make effective use of this data, and that information requires the lens of a humanistic framework in order to be transformed into knowledge and insight. The heuristic of the Johari Window is presented as a possible tool to stimulate thinking and to integrate the information from learning analytics into a meaningful framework to develop a powerful way of knowing tutees better and thus creating more supportive relationships with them. As such, the paper proposes an original contribution to the underexplored field of the use of learning analytics in personal tutoring in the UK, with ideas applicable to a range of institutional contexts.

Transforming Research into Sign Language and Identity Advocacy in the Community

This presentation discusses the process from moving from research results to applications through the compilation of a large-scale Japanese Sign Language corpus for both synchronic and diachronic analysis, focusing on 100 lexical items from the 49 prefectures in Japan. Also discussed is the key involvement of the Deaf community (status planning, acquisition planning, and corpus planning) including the exploring of their linguistic identities via evidence of the change of lexical sharing phenomenon from generation to generation. The implication is that humanistic framework for research on the history, spiritual value, and dialogue among Deaf individuals would be linked directly to the nature of the Deaf Studies.

On progress and reason: stories of gods, animals and humans

PurposeWhile transhumanists and posthumanists understand the human condition as mutable, for transhumanists, this represents the possibility for enhancement, opening up a teleological narrative of evolution toward. For posthumanists, it represents a fracturing of the liberal human subject, undermining its hegemonic principles. The former advocates the potentiality of instrumental rationality, the latter engages with values, demanding ethical consideration of the implications of the unmooring. This paper aims to conceive of a way to underpin posthumanist thought to enable to serve a more effective critique of transhumanist aims.Design/methodology/approachThis is a theoretical paper that outlines a history of transhumanist thought and the roots of posthumanism. It provides a partially reconstructed enlightenment humanist framework to bolster the effectiveness of posthumanism as a critique of transhumanist thought.FindingsThe paper recognizes Theodor Adorno's conception that the central contradiction inherent to enlightenment thinking is the entanglement of knowledge and power. Hence, the metanarrative of progress as historical fact is fundamentally imbued with an imperial, colonizing force. For reason to achieve its promise as the organ of progress, it must become self-aware of its own limitations and its own potential destructiveness. Humility is, thus, vital in the task of preventing instrumental reason leading to inhuman ends.Originality/valueWhilst developments such as “metahumanism” attempt to bring “posthumanism” and “transhumanism” into direct conversation, it is done from the perspective of uniting their positions. Here, the author endeavors instead to consider their antithetical nature and in particular whether posthumanism can provide an effective critique of transhumanism. Drawing on Adorno and Feenberg in particular, the author attempts to justify the posthuamanist theory but also to employ a partially reconstructed enlightenment humanism to bolster its fruitfulness as a critique of transhumanism.