Turn In Humanities Research Articles

The OECD’s new discourse of curriculum reform: student agency, competency, colonization, and translation

Abstract The Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) global governance of education has been gradually increasing. Its field of interest is currently expanding from educational evaluation through the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) to curriculum reform through the Education 2030 project. Here, it is interesting to note that the nature of the terms the OECD has been creating reveals a ‘humanistic turn’. This shows up well in the frequent occurrence of terms such as ‘well-being’, ‘attitudes and values’, ‘inclusiveness’, ‘responsibility’, and ‘sustainability’ in the ongoing Education 2030 project. Perhaps this new humanistic discourse increases the likelihood of the smooth adoption of the OECD’s proposed curriculum redesign in more countries. If the OECD’s new discourse captures and transforms contemporary people’s ways of thought and practice about education, then this is related to the problem of colonialism in our era. It is also worth noting that language plays a vital role in colonization. In particular, the need for translation between different languages serves as a useful means for colonization. Conversely, it is also seen as having a potential decolonizing power. In this context, I would like to examine the new language the OECD has adopted, specifically regarding student experience and the nature of knowing. Next, I shall attempt to criticize the underlying educational assumptions in the OECD’s pronouncements. Following this, I shall explore how the OECD’s new discourse has been translated in South Korea, taking this as an example of wider experience in the East Asian context and possibly elsewhere. Finally, I shall conclude by considering the direction of curriculum decolonization in terms of translation.

Digitalisation and the need for a “humanistic turn” in media management

ABSTRACT Newspaper organisations have seen their models overturned, largely due to the digitisation of formats. While the existing literature on media management has identified the economic and strategic consequences of this creeping digitalisation, there is a need for more in-depth analysis. How can digitalisation provide an opportunity for traditional news media organisations to regain their lost social legitimacy by enhancing the human development of societies? In this exploratory article, we study the recent “humanistic turn” in business ethics to draw theoretical insights for the newspaper sector. We then present a concrete example of an original digital project illustrating this possible shift, allowing us to discuss some of its theoretical and managerial implications.

Religious and Ethical Conception of Xiao-Filiality in Pre-Imperial China

Xiao-filiality is the most fundamental concept in the Chinese intellectual-cultural tradition. It represents not only family values but also religious, political and ethical ideologies. The conception of xiao, which originally denoted the meanings of presenting offerings to deceased ancestors and inheriting their legacy in the Shang dynasty, went through two stages of evolution from the early Zhou dynasty to the Warring States period. In the first stage, xiao was extended to ethical domain with the humanistic turn from human-spirit relationship to human-human relationship. Xiao was not only expanded to the empirical exercise of serving living parents but also established as a ritual-ethical norm that defined people’s familial, social, and hierarchical role duties and regulated their conducts of dealing with interpersonal relationships. As a result, the religious authority of paranormal ancestral spirits was transferred to the social-political authority who enforced the implement of the ritual-ethical norm of xiao. In the second stage, Confucius and his followers on the one hand recognized the importance of compliance with this prescribed ritual-ethical norm, and on the other internalized it to become the individual agent’s moral emotion and free choice. Consequently, the social-political authority was further transferred to the internal authority of moral autonomy.

Гуманистический перелом музыкального воспитания в эпоху Чжоу

Zhou Gong's “Ritual Management and Music Creation” is one of the most important milestones in the history of China. As a reformer of Yin rituals and the main predecessor of Confucius, he implemented the first humanistic turn of musical education in the Zhou era. An attempt is made to analyze from humanistic perspective Zhou Gong’s ideas and their impact on the culture and politics of China. The humanistic concepts and moral principles contained in his ideas are shown to play an important role in shaping the mentality of the Chinese and are still of great practical value.

Znaczenie metod komunikacji w medycynie i aptekarstwie z uwzględnieniem wybranych aspektów z historii medycyny i arteterapii

A humanistic turn in world medicine is also observed to the philosophical sources of medical art and referring to extremely important methods of communication. There is more to it than that. The manifestations of the humanistic revolution in medicine include appreciating the patient’s perspective and his participation in the treatment process involving cooperation with medical staff and family, which is especially important in family medicine. The importance of communication methods in medicine and pharmacy is indicated, taking into account selected aspects of the history of medicine and art therapy. Pharmaceutical, medical or nursing activity is an inexhaustible source for ethical and philosophical reflections, also with reference to art. Apart from the communication aspects in view of the confirmed healing effect of art, even an independent scientific discipline has emerged-art therapy. Art has been one of the ways of expression from the beginning myself.

Book review: Kravchenko S. A. “Sociology of Digitalisation: university textbook”

The review of a new book written by a leading Russian sociologist-theorist Sergey A. Kravchenko is presented. The book analyses the social implications and prospects of the digitalisation. The objectivity of this process leading to the complication of society, its dehumanisation and the emergence of new previously unseen risks, is noted. Scientific and technological innovations reduce the share of traditional risks, natural and technological, but increase the share of institutional risks. Sergey A. Kravchenko calls this new reality the socio-digital-natural reality, in which, primarily in social networks, both human actors and non-human (digital) actors, sociotechnical and techno-social hybrids operate. The author of the book being reviewed concludes that there is a need for a humanistic digital turn, a change in approaches and focus of modern scientific knowledge, which should be integrated and multidisciplinary, based on the social and natural sciences integration, aimed at the analysis of disequilibrium systems in which disequilibrium, turbulence do not exclude the tendencies towards organisation and self-organisation.The peer-reviewed work is an educational publication and it is aimed at developing students’ ability to think critically about the consequences of digitalisation and make balanced managerial decisions. It introduces students to the most modern and advanced sociological theories and concepts.

Conquergood’s other: materializing the cultural text of Hmong and Latinx

ABSTRACT Dwight Conquergood’s ethnographic performance studies research, much of which featured Latinx and Hmong cultures, influenced the Communication discipline. Analytically critiquing those Latinx and Hmong representations, we reinterpret them through our lived experiences. Via three separate vignettes of our culturally forefronted academic lives, we depict how Conquergood has reified and expanded the discursive constraints of our academic beings. Centering on three types of text (urtext, text, and context), we argue that our Hmong and Latinx cultures were and continue to be foundational to a humanistic and humane turn in the study of culture as embraced and advanced by Conquergood and ourselves.

“Smart watch” as a Factor for the Formation of Hybrid Doctor–Patient Communication

The relevance of the research derives from the necessity to analyze the influence of new non-human digital actants on the nature of doctor-patients communication. The authors prove that in modern society the digitalization of the healthcare system is proceeding at an accelerated pace and pushes individuals to monitor their health status regularly in background mode by using such digital actants as smartwatches with pre-installed medical applications. The active use of high-tech devices for self-diagnosis of health transforms the doctor-patient communication, making it hybrid and exerting ambivalent influence on the treatment process. On the one hand, individuals can collect health information continuously. However, on the other hand, the study reveals that smartwatches provide users with less accurate health information in comparison with the health information obtained via stationary medical equipment. The use of inaccurate information without the supervision of medical workers may lead to unforeseen consequences and health risks. The results of the content analysis of modern scientific research on the effectiveness of smart devices’ use in online health diagnostics indicate that formal and pragmatic trends take place in doctor-patient communication. In this regard, the authors prove that hybrid social communication in medicine needs a new vector of development in accordance with the principles of the proposed “humanistic turn”.

“Tak vy zhivaya istoriya?”: sovetskiy chelovek na fone tikhoy arkhivnoy revolyutsii pozdnego sotsializma

The article focuses on the changes that occurred in archiving practices after Stalin. Based on the analysis of publications in professional journals for archivists and in popular press — as well as the personal archival collection of Perm activist and local historian Valentina Sokolova — we argue that, as a result of the democratic and humanistic turn in Soviet society after Stalin’s death, late socialism saw a shift in the understanding of who is worthy of having their documents preserved in an archive. Whereas previously only “remarkable” individuals had the right for a private archival collection, now some members of the archivist community began a campaign to collect documents of “ordinary” citizens. The archivists found allies not only among specialists but also among elderly members of the Soviet intelligentsia — participants in the building of socialism, who had no prior connection to historical studies. This shift that we call the “quiet archival revolution” became an integral part of the late Soviet commemorative turn. With the help of the archivists — enthusiasts of the “quiet archival revolution,” elderly activist came to realize their own historical significance and the value of their documents, some of which later made it to the state archival depositories.

Институт философии как учреждение и общественный институт

The article examines the 100-year history of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IF) as a state organization and a special social institution. It traces the history of systematization of philosophical knowledge in an encyclopedic form: the initial plan (early 1920s) of G.G. Shpet to focus ef­forts on the question “What is philosophy?”; the project of the historical study of philosophy in the light of materialistic dialectics as its pinnacle (1928–1930); a partly realized plan (late 1930 – early 1940) of writing a 7-volume world his­tory of philosophy; “Philosophical Encyclopedia” in 5 volumes (1960–1970); “New Philosophical Encyclopedia” (2000–2001) in 4 volumes. The article shows the contradictory interaction of the tasks of the study of philosophy and its development. In the history of IF, the following stages are highlighted: the dog­matism of 1930–1940, the humanistic turn of the mid-1950s, rejection of the mo­nopoly of Marxist philosophy, pluralism of post-Soviet philosophy. The contem­porary situation has put into question the traditional beliefs what a human being is. The challenges from the brain and cognitive sciences highlight a new under­standing of consciousness and reason, which creates a common field of research for the IF and exciting creative perspectives for its staff

Metamorphization of society: The factor of ‘side effects’ and globalization of nothing

Today physical, biological and social worlds develop increasingly quicker and in a more complex way that includes the phenomena of metamorphoses. Traditionally, they were considered as determined mainly by external factors, i.e. the forces of nature. Contemporary metamorphoses seem to become of a complex man-made nature. Compared to traditional metamorphoses with rigid and predictable results, contemporary metamorphoses of societies can produce both negative and positive consequences, which proves the non-linear dynamic picture of the world. There is also a traumatic tendency - when something is metamorphosed into nothing. Due to digitalization, nothing becomes more complex and pure from cultural and humane characteristics, thus, revealing new expressions of the death of the social: humans are metamorphosed into digital beings. Metamorphization of society can produce common goods as a side effect of the bad. The author argues that the formal-rational, pragmatic transformations of society and nature, like the scientific and technological innovations of mercantile type, deform and dehumanize life-worlds. The global traumatization in the form of liquid catastrophes permanently changes the living and non-living nature, structure of soil, water and air, desocializes human relations, facilitates transformations of something into nothing, people into non-people, places into non-places, things into non-things. However, people as reflexive actors can turn metamorphoses into things-for-man. To start this process, it is necessary to change the pragmatic monodisciplinary principles of science by the interdisciplinarity ones to ensure a humanistic turn in science and technologies.

Toward a humanistic turn for a more ethical journalism

This article argues that the social scientific epistemology that has dominated journalism for the past half-century has devalued the moral implications of public affairs and deprived citizens of the ethical tools necessary to make humane political decisions. Reviewing the contingent history of the integration of journalistic and social scientific methods leading to journalism’s computational turn, the essay calls for a humanistic reconceptualization away from journalists’ role as political interpreters toward a comparable role as moral interpreters.

Sociology on the move: The demand for the humanistic digital turn

Digitalization of society has ambivalent consequences: there are new benefits (‘smart’ technologies, artificial intellect, multiple knowledge), but at the same time digital risks and metamorphoses that traumatize the behavior and thinking of people, alienate them from social ties and life-worlds. These processes have become a challenge for sociology and other social sciences that strive to develop new approaches, among which the digital and humanistic turns are the most relevant. The author aims at (a) analyzing the impact of digitalization on the production of metamorphoses and side effects on society and man, which are related to new complex risks and manifest challenges to sociology; (b) developing the contours of the conception of ‘the digital turn in sociology’ and identifying its essence in comparison with other, previous turns in sociology - linguistic, risk, cultural, etc.; (c) proposing the means that allow to overcome or minimize the side effects of the existing type of digitalization - the author argues for the demand to move sociology in the direction of the integral use of the instruments of the digital and humanistic turns. The article considers new challenges to mankind and scientific knowledge as determined not so much by the very process of digitalization, but by its existing type based on principles of formal rationality, pragmatism, and mercantilism neglecting, in fact, life-worlds of people. This type of digitalization is not ‘universal’ and can be changed by an alternative humanistic trend of digitalization. In order to begin establishing the humanistic trend of digitalization scientists should integrate the theoretical instruments of the proposed digital turn with other interdisciplinary turns and especially with the humanistic turn.

인공지능 시대 빅 히스토리의 ‘인문학적 전환’

인공지능 시대 빅 히스토리의 ‘인문학적 전환’

화쟁선(禪) 혹은 선(禪)으로서의 화쟁

Historically, the Hwajaeng (和諍) theory of Wonhyo (617-686) cannot be rightly understood without the consideration of the two main axes of IlsimHwajaeng-Muae (一心-和諍-無碍) and Gwi-il-sim-weon Yo-ik-jung-saeng(歸一心源 饒益衆生). From the perspective of recent Wonhyo-Seon (禪) research, where these two axes seem to play the same role, Hwajaeng needs to be inevitably Hwajaeng-Seon (禪). However, the Wonhyo-Seon (禪), as presented in this research, is not only easy to understand ‘theoretically’, but also seems, very difficult to practice, because it needs a very high level of achievement in Ilsim (一心). In this situation, the Conscience-Seon(良心禪) of the Philosophy of Conscience leads us to understand and practice relatively easily Hwajaeng as Hwajaeng-Seon (和諍禪), even before the Experience of Enlightenment, no matter what is our level in Ilsim (一心). The ConscienceSeon, which can be said to be a modern version of the Wonhyo-Seon, is ‘Six ParamitasSeon’, for Six Paramitas are the very Virtues of the Conscience. The Whajaeng-Seon can be defined as «Immersion and Immersion-Thinking about Hwajaeng or Hwajaeng research, as Jungyong’s ‘Hak-mun-sa-byeon-haeng’ (學問思辯行), accompanied by Metacognitive Six Paramitas Analysis». The Immersion-Thinking is possible only if the True-Self is awaked by Immersion in our Ego (generally more than 51%). The interpretation of Seonjeong(禪定) and Jihye(智慧), two axes of ‘Seon Practice’(禪修行), into ‘Immersion and Immersion-Thinking’ means the «Humanistic Turn», that of Buddhist Wonhyo-Seon into Spiritual Conscience-Seon, which is one of the ‘Inmun-Seon’ (人文禪). To search continuously the insightful «Way of Jungyong(中庸)», intending ‘the Perfecting of Self for perfecting Others’(自利利他), based on the True-Self, this ceaseless pursuit of harmony between Six Paramitas and Jungyong, in various cases of Hwajaeng or Hwajaeng research, is the core of the Whajaeng-Seon.

Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures for Knowledge

Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures for Knowledge

Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures for Knowledge

Middle East Studies for the New Millennium: Infrastructures for Knowledge

The Renewal and Reform of the Catholic Church's Relationship with the Religious Others: Prospects and Challenges for a Theological Humanistic Turn in Christian‐Muslim Dialogue

AbstractThis article aims at exploring some recent developments in Catholic Church's recent relationship with religious others. It does so by exploring the theological‐anthropological sources behind Vatican II and some subsequent Papal teachings concerning the Church's mission of dialogue. Specifically, it discusses the notion of common origin, destiny and common humanity as sources for praxis‐oriented and faith‐based initiatives in a Christian‐Muslim dialogue. This article is divided into three sub‐sections. First, it considers the Catholic Church's renewed dialogue with non‐Christian believers, with particular focus on the theological‐anthropological turn in recent Church teaching. Second, it examines the prospects and challenges of Christian‐Muslim dialogue based on belief in God the creator and divine revelation, and human beings' response to divine manifestations in history. Finally, it considers some faith‐based humanistic and dialogic initiatives that emerge from the Christian‐Muslim confession of one creator God. The paper suggests that a theology of dialogue that understands the world and human beings as the realm of encounter, uncovering and necessitating the divine and the Church's (salvific) activity in human history, can foster faith‐based humanistic and dialogic initiatives between Christians and Muslims.

The development of non-linear knowledge: New risks, vulnerabilities, and hopes

The article considers the non-linear knowledge as the result of the ‘arrow of time’ effect (I. Prigogine) that determined the new realities in which everything develops increasingly quicker and in a more complex way. The author extends the impact of this effect to the dynamics of knowledge and shows that the modern knowledge acquires the quality of reflexivity and takes on a completely new vector of non-linear development within the so-called ‘turns’ in the history of science. The transition from linear to non-linear knowledge determines more complex manufactured risks including the threat of dehumanization described in the article. The monitoring of these risks implies that the value-oriented non-linear knowledge should be taken into account not only by natural, technical and social sciences but also by the humanities. Among new challenges to the humanity there are vulnerabilities manifested in the increasing structural dysfunctions of complex social and/or techno-natural systems in the form of ‘normal accidents’, ‘collateral damage’, etc. The author believes that key challenges of such vulnerabilities are determined by the dominant pragmatic values of modern knowledge. There is also a new type of development in the form of metamorphosis leading to non-linear transformations, which aggravates the complex character of modern risks and vulnerabilities. The author finds answers to these challenges in the humanistic turn that can ensure the valid knowledge of complex risks and vulnerabilities together with the grounds for better future that people want.

Conceptualizing suffering and pain

BackgroundThis article aims to contribute to a better conceptualization of pain and suffering by providing non-essential and non-naturalistic definitions of both phenomena. Contributions of classical evidence-based medicine, the humanistic turn in medicine, as well as the phenomenology and narrative theories of suffering and pain, together with certain conceptions of the person beyond them (the mind-body dichotomy, Cassel’s idea of persons as “intact beings”) are critically discussed with such purpose.MethodsA philosophical methodology is used, based on the review of existent literature on the topic and the argumentation in favor of what are found as better definitions of suffering and pain.ResultsPain can be described in neurological terms but cognitive awareness, interpretation, behavioral dispositions, as well as cultural and educational factors have a decisive influence on pain perception. Suffering is proposed to be defined as an unpleasant or even anguishing experience, severely affecting a person at a psychophysical and existential level. Pain and suffering are considered unpleasant. However, the provided definitions neither include the idea that pain and suffering can attack and even destroy the self nor the idea that they can constructively expand the self; both perspectives can b e equally useful for managing pain and suffering, but they are not defining features of the same. Including the existential dimension in the definition of suffering highlights the relevance of suffering in life and its effect on one’s own attachment to the world (including personal management, or the cultural and social influences which shape it). An understanding of pain and suffering life experiences is proposed, meaning that they are considered aspects of a person’s life, and the self is the ever-changing sum of these (and other) experiences.ConclusionsThe provided definitions will be useful to the identification of pain and suffering, to the discussion of how to relieve them, and to a better understanding of how they are expressed and experienced. They lay the groundwork for further research in all these areas, with the twofold aim of a) avoiding epistemological mistakes and moral injustices, and b) highlighting the limitations of medicine in the treatment of suffering and pain.