Innocent Activities Research Articles

Conceptualizing Discursive Analysis as a Culturally Contextualized Activity

Discursive psychology recognizes the primacy of the social and relational nature of human life. Research participants whose discourses (empirical data) we analyze do not exist independent of material and social world. In this paper, I attempt to develop an understanding of discursive analysis of social and psychological phenomena as a culturally contextualized activity in which discursive researchers analyze and interpret participants’ discourses in the light of the cultural context in which the discourses are embedded. First, I provide a brief background to discursive psychology. Second, I discuss the cultural embeddedness of discursive analysis. I then conceptualize discursive data analysis as a culturally contextualized enterprise by drawing upon my own reflexive accounts on gender-based violence research to illustrate how discursive analysts can bring together an analysis of in-the-moment performative accounting with an understanding of the cultural context in which this accounting is embedded. I argue for and foreground research participants’ lived experiences and the embodied socio-cultural meanings as origins of the consciousness and social behavior of people with whom and about whom psychological research is conducted. I conclude that data analysis is not and cannot be an innocent activity; it involves active thinking through the cultural lens of both the researcher and the researched.

LA TRADUCCIÓN EN LAS RELACIONES ENTRE ORIENTE Y OCCIDENTE: EL CASO DE MAHATMA GANDHI

Translation is one of the most important channels in the diffusion of an author and his/her work in other cultures and literatures. It is essential when considering his/her reception, and specially when dealing between very distant cultures like in Eastern-Western relationships. Translation is always relevant in the image of a certain author abroad, since it is never a neutral and innocent activity, but a highly manipulatory one through the mediation process that it implies. From that point of view, the aim of this paper is to analyse the reception of Mahatma Gandhi in one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, that is Spanish, through the translations of his writings published in that language both for the Spanish and the Latin American audiences, as a contribution to the study of Gandhi's influence in the world literature.

Strategic Interviewing to Detect Deception: Cues to Deception across Repeated Interviews.

Previous deception research on repeated interviews found that liars are not less consistent than truth tellers, presumably because liars use a “repeat strategy” to be consistent across interviews. The goal of this study was to design an interview procedure to overcome this strategy. Innocent participants (truth tellers) and guilty participants (liars) had to convince an interviewer that they had performed several innocent activities rather than committing a mock crime. The interview focused on the innocent activities (alibi), contained specific central and peripheral questions, and was repeated after 1 week without forewarning. Cognitive load was increased by asking participants to reply quickly. The liars’ answers in replying to both central and peripheral questions were significantly less accurate, less consistent, and more evasive than the truth tellers’ answers. Logistic regression analyses yielded classification rates ranging from around 70% (with consistency as the predictor variable), 85% (with evasive answers as the predictor variable), to over 90% (with an improved measure of consistency that incorporated evasive answers as the predictor variable, as well as with response accuracy as the predictor variable). These classification rates were higher than the interviewers’ accuracy rate (54%).

Can someone fabricate verifiable details when planning in advance? It all depends on the crime scenario

In the current study we examined the effect of having the opportunity to plan an alibi in advance on the suitability of the verifiability approach in two crime scenarios that differed in their opportunity to carry out innocent activities at the time of the crime. One hundred and two participants imagined being involved in stealing money either from a café at a time when it was open (allows innocent activities) or from a bank at a time when it was closed (does not allow innocent activities). We asked participants about their strategies and difficulties in preparing a verifiable alibi in advance, and to write down their prepared alibis. The participants in both groups found this task difficult and did not differ in the difficulties they experienced, however they differed in their strategies (plans to include true witnesses) and actual success in the task. Participants in the Café scenario provided 30% more verifiable details than the participants in the Bank scenario. Strategies and difficulties mentioned by the participants are presented in the paper, and the implications of the study's results on the application of the verifiability approach are discussed.

Undiagnosed Berry Aneurysm: A Silent Killer - A Case Report

Subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH) due to spontaneous rupture of Berry aneurysm is the second most common cause of death after coronary artery disease. Intracranial aneurysms cause more than 50% cases of spontaneous subarachnoid haemorhage. Rupture can occur in young to middle aged persons during innocent activities such as jogging, sexual intercourse and sporting exertion. Here we are presenting a case of sudden natural death due to spontaneous rupture of an undiagnosed Berry aneurysm without any precipitating factors in a previously healthy person.

Pourquoi écrire sous le nom d'un autre ? Hypothèses sur le phénomène de la pseudépigraphie néotestamentaire

Why are some texts of the New Testament Pseudepigraphs? Regis Burnet reviews the various responses that have been brought to this question and comes to the conclusion that the phenomenon is best explained as a reinterpretation of the work of an apostle by his disciples. He warns, however, against a naive understanding of this explanation by reminding that writing under the name of someone else was never an innocent activity in classical antiquity: the practice must challenge our notions of truth and faithfulness as well as our understanding of inspiration.

A Deference to Protocol: Fashioning a Three-Dimensional Public Policy Framework for the Internet Era

A Deference to Protocol: Fashioning a Three-Dimensional Public Policy Framework for the Internet Era

Le jeu pathologique à l’adolescence

Today's juveniles are the first generation to be raised in an environment where gambling is very accessible and socially acceptable. The recent legalization of Internet gambling has increased this accessibility. With 28,8 millions of gamblers in France in 2010, many believe that gambling is an innocent leisure activity. The first results of the national survey on the prevalence of gambling practices conducted in France show that in 2010, 1.3% of the population had a gambling problem. Also, despite the prohibition of gambling to minors, the mean age of onset of gambling behavior in the world is 11.5 years. Gambling (even non-problematic) in adolescence is associated with poor school performance, criminal behavior and family conflict. Recreational gambling shares with pathological gambling high rates of psychiatric comorbidities in adults, and risk behaviors among adolescents. Similarly, international studies show prevalence of problem gambling 2 to 4 times higher among adolescents than among adult, 3.5% to 8% of adolescents between 12 and 17 are pathological gamblers. The validity of the screening instruments and the frequency of spontaneous recovery in adulthood are discussed to explain the high prevalence in adolescence. This article proposes a focus on the practice of gambling in adolescence and its characteristics when the practice becomes pathological. We discuss the epidemiological, diagnostic, etiologic and therapeutic aspects of this problem. Three major types of risk factors implicated in gambling problems are identified: some of them are related to the subject (individual factors), others are related to the object of the addiction, here the gambling activity by itself (structural factors) like Internet with the recent legalization of gambling online, and the last are related to environment (contextual or situational factors). Thus, the development and maintenance of pathological gambling in youth seems to be conditioned by the interaction of a person and a gambling activity, in a particular context. This conceptual model is based on the well-known theory of Olivenstein on toxicomania, which was proposed in the seventies. In France, very few is known about problem gambling in this age and its implications in terms of treatment, prevention and research. There is little in the way of specific treatments for adolescent pathological gamblers so we briefly reviewed possibilities and limits. We discuss the importance to develop prevention, in particular to delay the initiation, and the necessity of research to develop screening instruments and news studies to have a better knowledge of this population.

On the margins of education, or two stories of arriving at school

Arrival stories are said to be typical components of anthropologically informed ethnographies in which the ethnographer as ‘stranger’ comes face to face with research subjects as ‘others’, establishes a context for the research and perhaps uses the story to justify the validity of his or her observations. The notion of a conventional ethnographic arrival is critiqued from the position of teacher–ethnographer, revealing a less conventional sense of arrival and a text relying more on reflexive ethnographic practice. After briefly considering arrival stories in ethnographic studies of schooling, those illustrating modernist epistemological tendencies are compared to more recent attempts to write a more reflexive sense of arrival. The trope of the arrival story is illustrated with reference to the author's arrival as a teacher–researcher at a school where research for this paper was carried out, and to the arrival of a student. Arrival is shown to be far more than an innocent physical activity but one that is accompanied by a range of emotions as both researcher and student confront their subjectivation. In the case of the student, the process of getting to school and arriving reveals some of the intensity with which his subjectivation is contested and throws light on what it is to be regarded as disaffected with one's schooling.

Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response

Andre Schwarz-Bart's slim novel A Woman Named (La mulatresse Solitude, 1972) tells an epic tale of trans-Atlantic slavery with implications for contemporary trauma studies. Over the course of Solitude, the descendants of a pastoral African landscape depicted at the novel's opening become diasporic subjects in the Caribbean-still tilling the land but under significantly different conditions. Captured, deported, and raped during the Middle Passage, the novel's protagonist Bayangumay gives birth to a daughter, la mulatresse Solitude (the mulatto Solitude), a legendary figure in Guadeloupe's history. is later executed for her role in a slave rebellion the day after giving birth to her own child, who is also destined to live as someone's property. In the novel's brief epilogue, the narrator breaks the historical frame of the text and imagines that a tourist will one day come to visit the plantation where and other rebels fought against their enslavement--a site that was dynamited in desperation by the rebellion's leader: If the traveler insists, he will be permitted to visit the remains of the Danglemont plantation. The guard will wave his hand, and as though by magic a tattered black field worker will appear. He will greet the lover of stones with a vaguely incredulous look, and they will start off.... [T]hey will stroll this way and that and ultimately come to a remnant of knee-high wall and a mound of earth intermingled with bone splinters.... Conscious of a faint taste of ashes, the visitor will take a few steps at random, tracing wider and wider circles around the site of the mansion. His foot will collide with one of the building concealed by dead leaves, which were dispersed by the explosion and then over the years buffed, dug up, covered over, and dug up again by the hoes of the field workers. If he is in the mood to salute a memory, his imagination will people the environing space, and human figures will rise up around him, just as the phantoms that wander about the humiliated ruins of the Warsaw ghetto are said to rise up before the eyes of other travelers. (A Woman 149-50) In these concluding sentences of the novel, Schwarz-Bart depicts a landscape of trauma replete with ruins, bone splinters, ashes, and phantoms. (1) He mobilizes various forms of anachronism and anatopism (spatial misplacement) in order to depict multiple traumatic legacies. (2) Like the novel's opening paragraphs, this passage mingles the mythical and the mundane. But in the place of the opening's invocation of the fairy-tale (Once upon a time, the novel begins [3]), more gothic, even traumatic, temporalities emerge in the epilogue. Like the fragments of bone, time is literally splintered. While the novel proper moves continuously from Africa to Guadeloupe and from the mid-eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth, the epilogue jumps to the contemporary moment of the novel's enunciation and to a hypothetical, layered European/ Caribbean space. Both the presumably European traveler and the West Indian guide appear equally displaced spatially and temporally--the former because of his perplexing love of old stones, the latter because of his magical emergence and tattered appearance. As ruin, the site of the plantation is itself disjoined from the present, half-buried by nearly two centuries of innocent activities but still testifying to a violent past. If, as many of the contributors to this important special issue of Studies in the Novel convincingly argue, turn-of-the-millennium trauma studies has remained stuck within Euro-American conceptual and historical frameworks, Schwarz-Bart's work demonstrates another tendency: for sixty years (at least), certain writers and intellectuals have been seeking to articulate traumas within Europe with traumas in colonial and postcolonial space. …

Regulation by generalization

AbstractBoth criminal and regulatory laws have traditionally been skeptical of what Jeremy Bentham referred to as evidentiary offenses – the prohibition (or regulation) of some activity not because it is wrong, but because it probabilistically (but not universally) indicates that a real wrong has occurred. From Bentham to the present, courts and theorists have worried about this form of regulation, believing that certainly in the criminal law context, but even with respect to regulation, it is wrong to impose sanctions on a “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” theory of governmental intervention. Yet, although this kind punishment by proxy continues to be held in disrepute both in courts and in the published work, we argue that this distaste is unwarranted. Regulating – even through the criminal law – by regulating intrinsically innocent activities that probabilistically, but not inexorably, indicate not‐so‐innocent activities is no different from the vast number of other probabilistic elements that pervade the regulatory process. Once we recognize the frequency with which we accept probabilistic but not certain burdens of proof, probabilistic but not certain substantive rules, and probabilistic but not certain pieces of evidence, we can see that defining offenses and regulatory targets in terms of non‐wrongful behavior that is evidence of wrongful behavior is neither surprising nor inadvisable.

Terrorism, counter-terrorism and norms in Africa

Terrorism and counter-terrorism measures have undermined the norms, rules and institutions that underpin security in Africa. Through the use of indiscriminate violence, terrorism has maimed and killed innocent people, threatened jobs and various social activities, and dented democratic processes of resolving conflict in society. Similarly, military and legislative counter-terrorism measures have caused the deaths of innocent people, undermined democratic governance and eroded civil liberties. In the face of these problems, African states need creative and innovative approaches to combat terrorism. A sustainable counter-terrorism strategy should focus on institutions, development and social justice.

Regulation by Generalization

Both criminal and regulatory law have traditionally been skeptical of what Jeremy Bentham referred to as evidentiary offenses - the prohibition (or regulation) of some activity not because it is wrong, but because it probabilistically (but not universally) indicates that a real wrong has occurred. From Bentham to the present, courts and theorists have worried about this form of regulation, believing that certainly in the criminal law context but even with respect to regulation it is wrong to impose sanctions on a where there's smoke there's fire theory of governmental intervention. Yet although this kind punishment by proxy continues to be held in disrepute, both in courts and in the literature, we argue that this distaste is unwarranted. Regulating - even through the criminal law - by regulating intrinsically innocent activities that probabilistically but not inexorably indicate not-so-innocent activities is no different from the vast number of other probabilistic elements that pervade the regulatory process. Once we recognize the frequency with which we accept probabilistic but not certain burdens of proof, probabilistic but not certain substantive rules, and probabilistic but not certain pieces of evidence, we can see that defining offenses and regulatory targets in terms of non-wrongful behavior that is evidence of wrongful behavior is neither surprising nor inadvisable.

The Publicity of Law and the Regulatory State

Theorists usually agree that the rule of law requires that the law be public, that is, available so that those whose conduct it governs may discover what it requires of them. In the regulatory state, however, every regulation is likely to be lost in a mountain of other regulations. This would not violate the publicity condition if regulated conduct invariably carries telltale signs that it is likely to be subject to legal requirements ­ but in a technological society even this weaker condition may not be met, because a great deal of seemingly-innocuous conduct may be regulated. The present paper examines the publicity problem raised by regulation in a technological society. It does so by examining the U.S. Supreme Court's mens rea jurisprudence for regulatory crimes, on the question of whether knowledge that one is violating a regulation is an element of the offense. The chief cases are Balint, Freed, United States Minerals, Liparota, Staples, Ratzlaf, and Cheek, along with the 9th Circuit's Weitzenhof decision. As I analyze them, the first four of these cases set out a theory of publicity, according to which knowledge that one is violating a regulation need not be proven if the conduct signals its own regulability. Selling narcotics, possessing hand grenades, and shipping sulfuric acid are all the sort of thing that one should anticipate are regulable (thus Balint, Freed, and United States Minerals); trafficking in food stamps is not (thus Liparota). However, in Staples the Supreme Court held that possessing a machine gun is not signaling behavior, because so many Americans regard gun ownership as innocent activity. Similarly, Ratzlaf remarks that structuring financial transactions to evade federal reporting requirements can be innocent behavior, apparently because so many Americans regard regulatory dodging as a legitimate pastime. These decisions pose a complication for the signaling theory: Our intuitions about what sort of conduct is intrinsically regulable are affected by the expectations of those around us. Thus, the phenomenon of social cognition creates the possibility of a cultural excuse for regulatory crime. Furthermore, it seems clear that many defendants do not recognize the non-innocence of their behavior because (like the tax resister Cheek) they do not want to recognize it in which case the cultural excuse becomes more like a cultural veto, by which those who dislike a regulation may nullify it (at least once). The paper canvasses several possible solutions to this difficulty, concluding that the needs of legitimate regulation outweigh the requirement of publicity.

Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature Carole Ferrier (bio) Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children's Literature. By Clare Bradford. Melbourne: Melbourne P, 2001 In the Summer 2001 issue of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly, John Cohen, in reviewing Heather Scutter's 1999 Displaced Fictions, raised the issue of how many international readers consider "that Australia produces YA literature that deserves reading" (106), with the implication that books about Australian literature should be more celebratory than critical. In the current context of a persistence of public denial in some influential quarters that Aboriginal people were massacred and their children stolen, this argument can become rather ingenuous. Clare Bradford aligns her race-cognisant perspective in Reading Race with the work of Richard Dyer, Anne McClintock, Stephen Slemon, Stephen Muecke, Robert Dixon, and others, but her stance is not counterposed to demonstrating that pleasure is to be gained from these texts—even though much of the engaged teacher's pleasure is likely to come from evaluating the knowledges that can be read in them. The discourses of, and surrounding, "children's literature" have never been innocent activities, and Bradford's central focus on representations of racial difference and race relations in Australian texts provides many striking instances of this. She ranges from analyzing the dominant liberal attitude of earlier periods: "I do not see what can be done for them, except we must [End Page 103] treat them [the indigenous population] kindly and not render their life more miserable than it is. They have no religion and therefore no hope," through to more diverse perspectives in writing by whites and indigenes (69). Many of the former deployed—and some still do"mechanisms of forgetfulness" in relation to what has been called the "black history" of white settlement (29). The mid-nineteenth-century adventure story The Boy in the Bush by Richard Rowe (his pseudonym was Edward Howe—confusing somebody in cover-production who has jumbled the names), provides Bradford's telling cover illustration in which two white boys gaze secretly at the Other, and observe: "The black fellows were in a very savage mood"—as indeed the boys' white relations became when some of their tribe were similarly killed in frontier violence. There are several levels of innocence that might be deconstructed here. Bradford's book finds itself wanting to burst the boundaries of the category of the "children's literature" of her (or perhaps the publisher's?) title and, even, of the associated category of young adult fiction. Some of the texts she discusses were not published as youth fiction at all: for example, the writing of the Nyoongah (Western Australian) Glenys Ward, When You Grow Up (1996) by Connie McDonald, or the novel Lori (1989) by John Wilson, all published by Magabala Books, as well as perhaps Phillip Gwynne's Nukkin Ya (2000). In sometimes moving beyond texts directed towards a youth readership and substantially about youth (if this might be one working definition of children's literature) to include texts that she considers "easily accessible to adolescent readers," Bradford gives her argument a richer field over which to play (73). Given this, and if she is aiming at a comprehensive picture of past practices, there are some odd omissions. These include two ("adult fiction") texts that have had great currency on secondary school syllabi: Katharine Susannah Prichard's Coonardoo (1929), long lauded as the first novel to draw a (comparatively) full and credible Aboriginal woman and, more recently, the Koori (South Eastern Australian), and Ruby Langford Ginibi's Don't Take Your Love to Town (1988), an example of Aboriginal autobiographical fiction which, particularly by women, has been a prominent genre in Australian publishing since the 1960s. Bradford's book has a central interest in methodological and political issues, but there are some that might have been engaged with more depth. While able to observe an "internalization of discourses that construct Aborigines as children," Bradford doesn't grapple with the issue of how, for example, self-censorship in much Aboriginal autobiography such as Ward's might make it ostensibly readable by youth (153). Ginibi's Don't Take was innovative in refusing a respectable...

On How To Be or Not To Be: Theoretical Reflection On Religion and Identity in Africa

AbstractIn introducing this issue on 'Religion and Identity in Africa' the debates regarding African identity in religion here is placed within a wider theoretical framework of social constructivist theories of religion. Within the ambit of these social approaches to religion, it is argued that issues of identity and religion are essentially issues of mythmaking and social formation with a view to satisfying social interests. However, describing religion and explaining identity formation are not innocent scholarly activities, embedded as they are in the politics of conceptual manipulation and the rhetoric of identity creation. In light of this it can be argued that the contributions assembled in this issue represent both descriptions of processes, and appeals to or indicators towards the development of an African identity in conceptualising religion in the African context.

Flip Horizontal

Flip Horizontal

Going to School with Savages: Authorship and Authority among the Jesuits of New France

N < r OT long after he founded the Society of Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola counseled his followers to tolerate selectively unfamiliar peoples and their ways. In 1541, he sent two men to Ireland, telling them to follow the method adopted by our enemy, the devil, when trying to gain adherents: For he goes in by the other's door to come out by his own. By applauding innocent activities and passing over other things of a bad complexion, the Jesuits could win sympathy and further our good purpose.1 Fourteen years later, Ignatius made this rationale more concrete in his instructions to a delegation to Ethiopia, whose church he hoped to align with that of Rome. He advised the group to accept Jewish and native customs that did not directly contradict church teaching, to introduce changes gradually and by popular means, and to provide technical and material assistance to the Ethiopians.2 In Asia, Francis Xavier and Allesandro Valignano followed one of Loyola's favorite mandates from St. Paul, to become things to all men in order to win all to Jesus Christ.3

A smoke screen to keep the controversy alive

A smoke screen to keep the controversy alive

‘Private vices, public virtues’ revisited: The Dutch background of Bernard Mandeville 1

During the last half century the English writer of Dutch origin, Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), has come to be one of the better-known authors of the early eighteenth century. His name is cited in the same breath as Hume, Swift and Defoe, and he is recognised as having influenced both Adam Smith and Voltaire.2 His works are being reprinted and dozens of studies have appeared in recent years.3 This growing popularity is partially due to the reevaluation of the literary genre that Mandeville practised: satire. Mandeville also benefits from the attention being given to less prominent figures in the history of ideas. It is true that his humorous poems, dialogues and essays are not high-minded philosophical treatises, but their contents are nonetheless striking. His slogan ‘private vices, public benefits’ has made him immortal, for it represents a highly original view of the economy. Failings such as greed, lust, vanity, extravagance and even crime, are given a positive value by Mandeville, in contrast to earlier authors, since in his opinion they stimulate the economy. In this way private sins add up unintentionally to strengthen society. This moral of the ‘Fable of the Bees’ makes Mandeville a forerunner of economic liberalism. In religious matters, among others, Mandeville also expressed a very tolerant point of view. His message had important consequences for ethics. He settled accounts with the idea of earlier moralists that personal virtue was a condition for being a good public servant. But the question is whether we should always take Mandeville literally. The recent tendency is toward an increasingly nuanced view of his ideas. It is much too simple to see him as a sarcastic misanthrope with an extremely pessimistic view of human nature. His works contain a double meaning in many places that makes his message compatible with classical opinions on honor and virtue after all. Mandeville may have made use in many places of a stylistic device with a long tradition: inversion. A recent biographer therefore speaks of ‘the two Mandevilles’, describing him on the one hand as ‘a pious Christian, an ascetic, and an unusually austere moralist, who finds corruption even in apparently laudable or at least innocent activities’, and on the other as ‘a cynic, a scoffer of all virtue and religion.. .‘.4 Mandeville remains a puzzle for modern scholars. The titles of studies devoted to him speak volumes: ‘The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville’, ‘Mandeville: Cynic or Fool’, and ‘Paradox and Society’.5 Mandeville research still has to fill many gaps, the greatest of which is the relationship between his ideas and his