Intellectual Responsibility Research Articles

Anthropology and Genocide in the Balkans

This article examines scholarly discourse on the wars in the former Yugoslavia. It focuses on relativistic arguments put forward by anthropologists and shows how such accounts mask and elide central historical realities of the conflict. Relativistic accounts of serious modern conflicts often mirror and offer legitimation to the accounts put forth by perpetrators. In this case, several leading accounts of the wars in the former Yugoslavia display a strong affinity to those asserted by Serbian nationalists. The article addresses the issue of ethics and intellectual responsibility in anthropological fieldwork in situations of conflict and the problem of the political uses of anthropological research.

Establishing Materials Selection Goals for Remote Storage

Increasingly, academic libraries are choosing remote storage as a solution to overcrowded book stacks. While the literature offers many examples of possible criteria to use in selecting materials for storage, little exists to guide libraries in setting specific numerical selection goals. Especially in libraries which allow bibliographers to determine selection criteria for subject areas over which they maintain intellectual responsibility, individual goals are desirable in order to insure that the institution's overall goal of creating shelf space will be met. This paper proposes an objective methodology for establishing these goals, and then discusses the limitations of both the methodology and the approach.

Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship, 1967-1974 (review)

Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship, 1967-1974 (review)

Between Intellectual Responsibility and Political Commodification of Knowledge: Nigeria's Academic Political Scientists under the Babangida Military Junta, 1985-1993

Between Intellectual Responsibility and Political Commodification of Knowledge: Nigeria's Academic Political Scientists under the Babangida Military Junta, 1985-1993

Between Intellectual Responsibility and Political Commodification of Knowledge: Nigeria's Academic Political Scientists under the Babangida Military Junta, 1985–1993

Abstract:The academic political scientists—mainly professors—who were hired by the Babangida military government in Nigeria between 1985 and 1993, ostensibly to theorize and articulate a new political culture and morality through the political transition program (PTP), have been objects, both then and ever since, of serious criticism concerning their role and contribution to a program that promised much but delivered little or nothing. The major criticism is that the political scientists, despite an initial commitment to help the military fashion a new political order, lost their “science” by providing an intellectual cover for the general's schemes and enriched the “political,” including the politics of corruption and self-enrichment. We examine this critique and show that these individuals, by choosing to remain in office—if not in power—even after witnessing so many broken promises by the regime, tarnished their intellectual integrity and moral credibility. Appointed to serve as an instrument of legitimization for the regime, they contained, constricted, and shrank the political and intellectual space rather than facilitating intellectual and democratic empowerment.

Critical Engagement with Technology in the Computer Classroom

This article proposes a model for critically engaging technology in technical communication graduate curricula. While computers and writing studies concentrates on academic writing, the development of the field provides a model for engaging technological issues in professional and classroom contexts. Technical communicators have an ethical as well as intellectual responsibility to engage the interface between technology and culture. This article describes one example, a graduate class in information architecture, as a model for engaging the nexus of literacy, technology, and culture.

Atrocity,memory,photography: Imaging the concentration camps of Bosnia - the case of ITN versus Living Marxism , Part 2

Part 1 of this article detailed the controversy surrounding the 1992 television image of Fikret Alic´ and others imprisoned at Trnopolje camp in Bosnia, demonstrating how doubts about its veracity were unsustainable. Part 2 explores the historical, political and visual context in which the particulars of the controversy are located. It explores what is involved in the concept of a 'concentration camp', as well as the nature of the Nazis' concentration camp system and the implications of this for the memory of the Holocaust and our understanding of contemporary atrocity. Then documentary evidence about the war in Bosnia is introduced in order to understand the significance of Omarska and Trnopolje in their wider context. Following that, the general question of the relationship between pictures and policy, and the specific question for the relationships between photography and the Holocaust, is considered to illuminate the larger questions of how particular atrocities are represented. Finally, the article concludes with some thoughts on the politics of critique and intellectual responsibility in instances where criticism becomes historical denial.

Atrocity,memory,photography: Imaging the concentration camps of Bosnia--the case of ITN versus Living Marxism , Part 1

Among the many images of atrocity that emerged from the Bosnian War, the picture of Fikret Ali ' and others imprisoned at the Trnopolje camp in the Prijedor region stands out. Taken from a 1992 British television report that detailed the role of camps such as Omarska and Trnopolje in the ethnic cleansing strategy of the Bosnian Serb authorities, the image of Ali ' has become the focal point of a controversy about how the Bosnian camps were represented, and the political impact and purpose of those representations. Resulting in a legal clash between Independent Television News (ITN) and Living Marxism (LM) magazine, this controversy is the subject of this two-part article. In Part 1, the allegations concerning the filming of the Trnopolje inmates is considered in detail. In Part 2 (forthcoming), the argument moves beyond the specifics of the case and the camp to an exploration of the historical, political and visual context in which those specificities are located. This involves understanding the significance of the camps in terms of the Bosnian War and the history of the concentration camps, as well as discussing the question of photography and the Holocaust to question how particular atrocities are represented. The articles conclude with the issue of intellectual responsibility and the politics of critique in cases such as these.

Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship, 1967‐1974

Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship, 1967‐1974

Teaching of Mandarin in an English Comprehensive School: A case study

A group of English children in a rural comprehensive are learning Mandarin, taught by a Chinese teacher. This article describes the background to this development and follows three cohorts of students, giving the pupils' views about learning Chinese and why they chose it. As a psychologist who has interests in education and who is also a part-time student of Chinese, the author welcomed the chance to share the pupils' experience. In the final cohort, sensation-seeking tendencies and intellectual achievement responsibility were investigated as personality traits which may influence a child's choice of foreign language study.

Psychoanalytic Participation: Action, Interaction, and Integration

KENNETH A. FRANK: Psychoanalytic Participation: Action, Interaction, and Integration. The Analytic Press, Hillsdale, NJ, 1999, 304 pp., $47.50, ISBN 0-88163873-2. Psychoanalytic Participation, Volume 16 of the Relational Perspectives Book Series edited by Stephen Mitchell and Lewis Aron, is written by an analyst steeped in the object relations-intersubjectivist-interactionist tradition, which in recent decades has furnished some of the more interesting and provocative developments in psychoanalysis. This tradition takes as its starting point the essentially moral idea that the analyst ought not to represent and conduct himself or herself as a patriarchal authority but rather as an ordinary helping person equipped with some special, if provisional, knowledge. Dr. Frank aims to review recent developments and to extend them in a useful way to some important practical problems, such as openness and self-disclosure on the part of the analyst, handling of countertransference, including erotic countertransference, equality and mutuality. Dr. Frank's book stands on two legs of very disparate length and strength. The short critical leg is an extremely truncated and overconfident assessment of classical psychoanalytic theory, done in a few pages. Frank's central assertion is that Freudianism theory is a one-person (p. 3) psychology, by which he means a based on a view of people as separate, self-enclosed systems whose motives and interactions with the world are to be understood as driven by endogenously arising drives (p. 6). Shifting to the much longer expository leg, which occupies virtually all of the remaining 268 pages, he argues and seeks to demonstrate that psychoanalysis is in process of being rescued from this error by the advent of a two-person psychology that acknowledges the importance of object-seeking as a, or perhaps the, basic developmental motive and which therefore understands mind in terms of internalized object-relations and intersubjective experience. This, of course, has become the conventional wisdom of a large segment of psychoanalysis. Frank knows object-relations theory and its latest refinements in intersubjectivity and interactional theories. He provides useful discussions of important practical analytic issues. He is at his best when he comes close to making a case for radical analytic openness and fearlessness, and for shifting the burden of intellectual responsibility to where it properly belongs, onto the analyst who claims special authority for anonymity and inequality. Frank seems to recognize intuitively that the authority of the Freudian analyst is bogus, based as it is on an indefensible theory. His problem is that he does not seem to really understand why the theory is indefensible. Thus he cannot make his case in a rigorous way or take his arguments far enough. His critique of Freudianism is actually that of the loyal opposition within psychoanalysis, which fails to penetrate beneath its rhetoric. What makes Freudianism intellectually slippery and even dangerous is not that it regards the person as a closed system determined by endogenous instincts or that it is a natural-science based theory, but that it pretends to do so (and seeks to derive its authority therefrom) while actually being an extreme socialization-based psychology. This is a problem of rhetoric versus reality. Freud's instinct and Oedipal theories are no more based on natural science and biology than is social Darwinism, with which it has much in common. …

The Betrayal of Pragmatism?: Rorty's Quarrel with James

For the past several decades, Richard Rorty has sought to reinvigorate pragmatism as a viable alternative to analytic philosophy and various postmodernisms. His project insists on the contemporary relevance of his pragmatist predecessors. In Consequences of Pragmatism, for example, he boldly observes that "James and Dewey were not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road which . . . Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling." He argues that while "James and Nietzsche make parallel criticisms of nineteenth century thought," James's perspective is preferable, since it avoids the "metaphysical" entanglements that have hampered Heidegger and Derrida. 1 Aside from such eulogizing, however, for many years William James did not receive any detailed consideration from Rorty. Thus, it is remarkable to encounter an extended critique of James's pragmatism in Rorty's recent essay, "Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility and Romance." Here Rorty focuses on James's approach to metaphysics, the very aspect of James's thinking that he had previously praised. The essay culminates in a stinging accusation that James, in "The Will to Believe," had "betrayed his own pragmatism." 2

On Human Rights

“It is certainly no accident that precisely here, in this region of continual threats to, and continual defence of one's own identity — whether personal, cultural or national identity — there is such a long tradition of the idea of truth, a truth for which one must pay, the truth as a moral value. One constantly runs up against this tradition, from Cyril and Methodius to Hus and Masaryk, Stefanik and Patocka”. This citation from a lecture entitled “Morality and Politics” provides a brief sketch of the background to the thought of the current Czech president, Vaclav Havel. Though lacking any academic training in philosophy, Havel was strongly influenced by the ideas of the philosophy professor from Prague, and founder of Charta 77, Jan Patocka. Inspired by some of Patocka's last writings, in 1978 Havel wrote an essay on Charta 77 which was dedicated to Patocka. The title of this essay was taken from one of Patocka's central statements: Attempt to Live in the Truth. Patocka's influence is also clearly evident in `Letters to Olga', in his speeches as president and in his thinking on Europe. Havel's thought, via the thought of Patocka, must be situated within a dual tradition. On the one hand it is rooted in Czech history. Patocka had already in his early writings thematized the ideas of Thomas Masaryk. The work of Masaryk, who became the first president of the new Czech republic after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, is characterized by an awareness of the crisis of (European) rationality, like in the later Husserl. On the other hand Havel's thought, again by way of Patocka, is rooted in a phenomenology that is primarily oriented toward Germany. Patocka is often regarded as the interpreter par excellence of the dialogue between Husserl and Heidegger. Yet despite this obvious indebtedness to a dual tradition, Havel's thought bears its own, unique stamp. Contrary to Husserl's phenomenology, he stresses the irreducible autonomy of a prior reality which is the ground out of which human subjectivity arises and about which it reflects. Havel is quite sensitive to the autonomous character of a transcendent truth of being. And contrary to Heidegger's phenomenology, Havel's attempt to `live in the truth' is always prompted by an awareness of the intellectual and ethical responsibility to reality, a `horizon' that surpasses us and thereby constantly challenges and criticizes any time-bound, epochal truth claims. It is particularly the emphasis on the ethical significance of the `absolute horizon' that distinguishes Havel from someone like Heidegger, as can be seen in this quotation about the meaning of responsibility: “it is a responsibility, a `higher responsibility', that consists exclusively of itself because it is metaphysically anchored: it is produced by the conscious or subconscious certainty that nothing ends with our death because everything is registered and judged for eternity somewhere `above', somewhere in what I once called `the memory of being', in that inscrutable order of the cosmos, nature and life that believers call `God' and to whose judgement everything is subject. A genuine conscience and a genuine feeling of responsibility can ultimately be explained only as an expression of the tacit assumption that we are watched `from above', that `above' everything is seen, that nothing is forgotten there, and that it is not within the power of earthly time to banish from our souls the accusation of earthly failure: our soul suspects that it is not the only one with some

Critical Reflections on Reflectiveness, Intellectual Responsibility, Critical Theory, Experience and the Moral Governance of Schools

"Critical Reflections on Reflectiveness, Intellectual Responsibility, Critical Theory, Experience and the Moral Governance of Schools." Educational Philosophy and Theory, 31(1), pp. 7–8

Dissecting a mighty mammoth: or, Lichtenberg's advice. A review article

PR Harris: A History of the British Museum Library 1753–1973 London, The British Library, 1998. xx, 833p. plans and illustrations, index. ISBN 0 7123 4562 0. Price: £50.To review this massive work raises questions of method and approach for reviewers, which must also have given the author similar headaches. It is not a work that can be easily or briefly reviewed, nor should the attempt be made if we are concerned with intellectual responsibility and justice. This will explain the nature of the present review and account for its length.

Open your eyes

THE LANCET • Vol 352 • September 12, 1998 I am convinced that our present system of authorship is badly broken. I see little future for any system that tries to do more than describe as accurately as possible who did what in a research project, and indicates who will be held accountable if the research proves to be fraudulent. The system is broken because authors of research papers commonly include many people who have done little, if anything, and exclude many who have done much work but who cannot take full intellectual responsibility for the whole of the study. Perhaps they have collected the data, designed a questionnaire, or written the first draft of the paper. Increasingly, research studies are done by people from mutually uncomprehending disciplines who are unable to take intellectual responsibility for the whole study. Open your eyes

Intellectual Responsibility: The Specter of Benda and the Phantom of Bakunin

Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, tr. by David Wills (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), viii + 115 pp.

On the Underdevelopment of the 'Sociology of Money'

As a result of the division of intellectual labour that followed the Methodenstreit in the social sciences, sociology neglected the analysis of the social production of money and has concentrated instead on its social effects or social meanings. Moreover, sociology tacitly endorsed the flawed conception of money as a 'veil' masking either the 'real' economy or the 'social relations' of production. Building on the approach of the 'historical school' of economics and Keynes and the post-Keynesians, an alternative theory of money, seen as primarily abstract money of account, is outlined. With this approach it is possible to develop an explanation for the development of capitalism's distinctive form of bank and state credit-money. Sociology should recover intellectual responsibility for the analysis of monetary phenomena such as inflation, interest rate determination, etc., as the outcome of economic conflict grounded in price-setting struggles.

Sociolinguistic and Ideological Dynamics of the Ebonics Controversy

This article undertakes a critical language analysis of the Oakland Unified School District's 1996 resolution on Ebonics. The analysis focuses upon the form, content, and function of the resolution's explicit text semantics, separate and distinct from public statements made in its defense. It reveals that the resolution frames Ebonics as a non-English-related language system, with associated implications for English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) funding as well as the unintended promotion and perpetuation of extant sociolinguistic stereotypes. The resulting controversy, the author contends, was due to ideological commitments, which often act as constraints on the exercise of intellectual responsibility. With the exception of Sapir (1921; Mendelbaum, 1949) and Whorf (Carroll, 1971), most modern work in linguistics, stimulated by the pioneering approach of Chomsky (1957, 1965), has tended to focus on language as an autonomous subject. The associated goal of this work has been to develop a theoretical apparatus oriented toward the observation, description, analysis, and explanation of the structure of language as opposed to its function. The widely acknowledged success of this emphasis on structure has led to the conviction that language is a separate code that can and must be studied independently of social contexts and social processes. The recent resurgence of interest in the social function of language has largely been due to advances in sociolinguistics and the ethnography of communication. Practitioners in these disciplines have postulated a relationship between language and social phenomena in which linguistic practices are the primary medium or expressive form through which social structure and social processes operate. In effect, this postulation views group, institutional, and societal diversity as being established and maintained largely through diversity in language use, both in speech and in writing. Thanks to the seminal work of Kress and Hodge (1979) in the 1970s, differential perspectives or ideological elements in language use have become clearer and easier to identify. Language and its relationship to group perspectives and ideologies have aroused the interest of a diverse audience of scholars, linguists as well as anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, semioticians, communication theorists, and literary theorists. A principal construct that has emerged from the study of language as a reflection of its users' ideology is that of discourse, which has been defined as the recurrent and characteristic use of (a) a constraining set of lexical and grammatical forms, and (b) the clustering of specific meaning categories (Fairclough, 1989). In tandem, these discursive elements provide a framework for projecting a selected image on various issues or making sense of the world.

Edward Shils in memoriam

When Edward Shils was awarded the International Balzan Prize in 1983 he was the first sociologist, and the second "social and moral" scientist after Jean Piaget, to be given that honor?the award citation singled Professor Shils out "for his important innovative and unique contribution to contemporary sociol ogy, bringing together the more empirical tradition of American sociology with the more theoretical one of European sociology, analysing and defending the intellectual and moral responsibility of the social sciences, emphasizing the components of civilization, of the cultural tradition and of the orientation to the sacred in the development of the social order. ... He has succeeded in bringing together the more empirical tradition of the Chicago school and the theoretical thinking of European social scientists such as Simmel, Weber, and Mannheim, and probably more than any other single person, he has stressed the importance of combining them in a single framework, thus making an important contribu tion towards a truly universal, general sociology, as against the Trench,' 'Ger man,' and 'American' sociologies." But it was not only because Edward Shils's work and writings united these varied traditions of sociological inquiry that he was distinguished by his peers. He was not recognized only because he was instrumental in bringing to the English reading public several of the most important works of classical European sociology and social thought and bringing also to this public his exposition of the probl?matique of Durkheim, Weber, Toennies, or Mannheim. He did indeed bring together these European traditions both with the empirical tradition and with the distinctive probl?matique of American sociology. It was, however, above all the mode in which he did all this that was so distinctive and that singled him out as the most towering world sociologist. He was a towering figure not because of his worldwide contacts, and his teaching through his sojourns in different countries and universities, but above all because the world was both Shils's province and his problem; because he undertook to understand the world, the constitution of society and especially the turbulences to modern society and to analyse them in terms of the great intellectual traditions of Europe