Kind Of Freedom Research Articles

Rx for Reading Detroit: Place-Based Social Justice Pedagogy

While social justice models of service-learning improve on volunteerism that ignores structural inequality, they often neglect the critical role of local environments in which the service occurs. I argue that a place-based model of service-learning enables a diverse student body to move beyond compassionate service to social justice activism. In 2014, I founded Rx for Reading Detroit, a service-learning program at University of Detroit Mercy that works to promote children's literacy in Detroit. Augmenting critical service-learning models with a place-based approach offers students a theoretical frame with which to interrogate the complex intersections of geography and justice. Examining Rx for Reading Detroit as a case study in place-based social justice pedagogy, I argue that this paradigm is particularly useful for service-learning in Detroit and other urban contexts because it calls attention to, rather than effaces, the power dynamics inherent with service, including students' diverse relationships to the environments in which they serve. Talent is spread evenly across America, opportunity is --Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation, former Head Start student Frederick Douglass said that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path. --Carl Sagan, Scientist and Writer Despite various media outlets touting rebirth, rejuvenation, and renaissance, Detroit remains the most impoverished large city in America. According to the most recent census data, 40.3% of the city's residents live below the poverty line--$24,008 for a family of four. The median family income is $25,764, approximately half that of the state as a whole (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015 data), while Detroit's unemployment rate is 16.7%, more than twice that of the Michigan average (Michigan League for Public Policy, 2016). 81.6% percent of Detroit children qualify for free or reduced lunch (Michigan League for Public Policy, 2016) (1), and 29% percent of children in the city are living in extreme poverty--less than 50% of the federal poverty level (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2015). Moreover, while there has been a surge in development in the city, much of the economic investment is not benefiting its poorest citizens; in many cases it is pushing them further to the margins (Brookings Institute, 2016; Economic Innovation Group, 2016; Reese, Elkers, Sands, & Vojnovic, 2017; We the People of Detroit, 2016). From 2007 to 2014 Detroit jobs held by Detroit residents actually dropped by 35.5%, while jobs in the city held by individuals living in the suburbs, many of whom are White, increased by 16.6% (Reese & Sands, 2017). Detroit is also the most racially segregated city in America (Logan & Stults, 2011), an enduring legacy of housing policies that institutionalized racism and exacerbated economic disparities in the region. From 1934 to 1968, the Federal Housing Administration's notorious redlining policy undermined minority home ownership and contributed to economic collapse in Black neighborhoods (Silverman, 2005; Sugrue, 2014). Eight Mile Wall, a 6-foot high, half-mile long barrier built between a Black and White neighborhood in northwest Detroit, is only the most tangible artifact of FHA policy. Stark disparities between Detroit and its surrounding suburbs were amplified by White flight in the second half of the 20th century. In 1950, Detroit was 84% White; by 2010, 82.68% of the population was African-American (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010 data). The metaphorical and physical boundary of 8 Mile Road continues to reverberate as a dividing line between suburb and city, White and Black, rich and poor. The startling extent of racial segregation in Metro Detroit is made visual in Cable's Racial Dot Map (2013), which represents every American with a colored dot indicating their race. …

The Adolescent Condition in Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders.

In The Woodlanders, Hardy examines the intersections between adolescence as scientific fact and adolescence as utilitarian economic construction. Hardy posits that the emergence of adolescence as a social category provides an opportunity for further, excessive control of young women in a patriarchal society when science is taken at its word, but, paradoxically, also opens up a space for a new kind of freedom and rebellion when the adolescent condition of nineteenth-century scientific theorists is seized for the very subversive qualities which the Victorians oppose.

The Control of "Invasive" Ideas in a Digital Age

The Control of "Invasive" Ideas in a Digital Age Agnes Callamard (bio) INTRODUCTION With the end of World War Two, it seemed that much of the world emerged resolute to turn away from the horrors of genocide and massacre, as well as from authoritarianism, central control, and heavy censorship of any and all ideas deemed invasive and challenging of authority. The United Nations was established, international human-rights standards were introduced, the free market and free trade developed, and liberal democracies flourished—at least in some parts of the world. These developments also cleared the way for freedom of expression to become an international human-rights norm and, as such, to gain state protection. Some 60 years later, the advent of the Internet constituted a significant, even radical and historical turning point in the realization of freedom of expression. The Internet not only proclaimed and enabled the global exchange of ideas across borders; it also announced the advent of a new world—a world without sovereignty, a world of no government, no central control. The vision of this first digital generation was to unleash a new social contract: with a truly global technology, a new (online) world was to emerge, and its rules and governance would arise organically (Barlow 1996). In that new world, ideas were to flow unhindered, largely uncontrolled except by the working of the technology. These were Internet "genesis" claims, hyperbolic but not entirely beyond the realm of reality. [End Page 119] Not surprisingly, in this new world, conceptions of freedom loomed far larger than notions of control or censorship. Regulation, censorship, and control of ideas could only be conceived as the collateral "damage" of technological developments, of glitches in need of corrections, reached through a collective and transparent process. The early-days Internet was off limits to legislation and control by political authorities and institutions, the traditional instruments of censorship. Such a state of affairs (as idealized as it may have been by Internet founders) shifted progressively and then considerably over the past decade, with Internet management and governance the object of a range of competing and acrimonious claims. The governance of the Internet, of which regulation and censorship are key elements, has become a central subject of inquiry and concern, at the heart of international disputes, amongst states and between state and nonstate actors. If the initial vision of a free flow of information across frontiers is no longer the order of the day, what kind of freedom and what kinds of control and censorship have emerged in the online world of the 2010s? Has the revolutionary technology unleashed and allowed control over ideas, as unprecedented as the global exchange of ideas it has also permitted? THE INTERNATIONAL FREE SPEECH REGIME Ideas have been censored throughout history—from the banning of Bibles produced in the vernacular German language to the burning of books in Nazi Germany and the purging of artists and writers in the Soviet Union—because they were perceived and defined by those in power as threatening the cohesion of a community (geographically based or not), the mores and/or the orthodoxy of a dogma upon which the community, the country, the church, or the state is founded. In the views of the state or the church, such ideas were akin to an invasion of organized marauders intent on challenging or destroying the status quo, the order of things, the way society thought of itself, the systems of power allocation and distribution. [End Page 120] From Socrates' death by poison for impiety and corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens, to the censors in Rome responsible for both public accounting and oversight of mores in society, and to the early days of the Inquisition—all of these testify to the existence of organized control over ideas as a method of governance and of the preservation of power structures. The advent of Gutenberg's printing press and its capacity for mass production of information—and thus the development of a new and expanding literate class—heightened the necessity of censorship from the standpoint of those in power. Censorship by church and state, in turn, produced resistance, resulting in the adoption of the 1689...

Democracy and Choice: Do These Mean Anything to the Average Ghanaian?

The concept of “African democracy” invokes James and Stuart Rachels’ (2003) treatise against “Cultural Relativism”. That is to say, it is generally assumed that there is democracy relative to Africa and therefore, there is a concept of “African Democracy Relativism”. Due to this, democracy in Africa oughts to be different from democracy everywhere else. “Choice” as an ethical value subsists and emanates from autonomy and freedom. When people are free in the democracy, they also have the freedom of “choice” in their functionings. There are many limitations on the right to choose in Africa due to the general limitations placed on freedoms. This paper proposes that there is but one type of democracy in the world, which offers individuals the same kind of freedom of choice and wellbeing, provided it is also accepted that the African is an indivisible part of the universal man or woman. What may have given rise to the erroneous concept of an “African democracy type” is the general assumption that Africa is familiar and understands democratic principles. It was further mistakenly assumed that Africa considered all human beings as equal based on some resplendent intellectual expositions on democracy, which was accepted and known to all. Therefore, all had equal rights, freedom of choice and privileges before the law and man, and that “due process” was part of the mundane administration of justice articulated in a systematic and reviewable medium such as a tablet, stone, book or film or other archival systems. Africa’s unwritten history is subject to the revisionist manipulation, prevarication, and unsupported by the cultural norms of the respective nations. These concepts as used in this paper would be defined and discussed accordingly and present a different view point on this matter, using Ghana as a case.

Searching for a “Different Kind of Freedom”: Postcoloniality and Postfeminist Subjecthood in Zadie Smith’s "NW"

This paper attempts to open a new line of inquiry into Zadie Smith’s fourth novel NW (2012) by drawing attention to her investment in the contemporary feminine experience. I argue that by bringing women to center stage, NW marks a turning point in Smith’s fiction, while also bearing the hallmarks of the author’s previous work, namely her concern with Britain’s postcolonial legacy and issues of human connection. While Smith’s focus on self-monitoring educated women links the text to a postfeminist paradigm, the fact that these characters, and others, are of immigrant background locates the novel in the terrain of Britain’s postcolonial history and its multicultural present in twenty-first century London. My contention will be that far from adopting a celebratory approach to her postfeminist subjects as harbingers of social change, Smith points at the disabling aspects of this ideology, and the prevalence of racial and gender inequalities, problematizing individualistic notions of failure as self-responsibility. Keywords: postcolonialism; connectedness; postfeminism; female friendship; bildungsroman; impressionistic narrative

Quality Improvement of Indonesian University in The Face of Globalization

This article shed light on sustainable quality improvement of Indonesian universities by embracing autonomous principle as the propulsion for a more dynamic and accountable system in order to back up a reliable autonomy with accreditation to assure the quality of graduate students, and self evaluation to guarantee an apt decision making based on empirical data and information. Therefore, it is vital to reassess university vision and mission of teaching, researching, and community service, especially in the face of a more democratic globalization era sustained with science and technological development. Government, universities, and other research institutions, together with industrial sector, are highly potential to form a synergistic triangle to jointly handle internalization transfer and strategic technological development to enhance productivity and national competitiveness sustainably. Autonomy is a right or authority provided by the authorized party or government, while academic freedom is a kind of freedom owned by academicians in performing their duty and their functional activity, namely education and scientific research. The development of University accountability is meant to make the best use of university resources for activities sustaining the stated goals.

Freedom of Thought as a Basic Liberty

Freedom of thought has been lauded in political theory and celebrated in human rights discourse. But what kind of freedom is it? I propose that freedom of thought deserves status as a basic liberty, given the significance of thought to human life, the fundamental importance of freedom of thought in establishing and sustaining crucial rights and freedoms, and the value of being able to develop and experience one’s thoughts without undue influence from others.

LIBERDADE POLÍTICA E REPRESENTAÇÃO: ELEMENTOS PARA A COMPREENSÃO DO REPUBLICANISMO DE HANNAH ARENDT

The political thought of Hannah Arendt develops through a membership on her part to sustained republicanism by the experience of political freedom in indoor public spaces. These spaces, once conceived as spontaneous manifestation of political freedom, are established using joint words and actions based on the daily lives of people in them are involved. It is a kind of freedom that is similar to that experienced by the ancient polis of the Greeks. We are interested in demonstrating that the thinker analyzes, in good measure, as the preservation of political freedom is presented as a relevant factor for the treasure of revolutions does not become a lost purpose. From there, we see that you can not understand the republicanism of the configuration according to the thought of Arendt, without permanently in your pulse inside the experience of political freedom, which is opposed to the institutional political representation conceived in modernity through parliaments.

The complex tapestry of free will: striving will, indeterminism and volitional streams

The aim of this paper is to respond to recent discussion of, and objections to, the libertarian view of free will I have developed in many works over the past four decades. The issues discussed all have a bearing on the central question of how one might make sense of a traditional free will requiring indeterminism in the light of modern science. This task involves, among other things, avoiding all traditional libertarian appeals to unusual forms of agency or causation (uncaused causes, noumenal selves, non-event agent causes, etc.) that cannot be accounted for by ordinary modes of explanation familiar to the natural and human sciences. Doing this, I argue, requires piecing together a “complex tapestry” of ideas and arguments that involve rethinking many traditional assumptions about free will. The paper also argues that one cannot get to the heart of historical debates about free will without distinguishing different kinds of freedom, different senses of will, and different notions of control, among other distinctions. I especially focus here on different notions of freedom and control that are necessary to make sense of free will.

Experiences of Older Men Living Alone: A Qualitative Study

More and more old people live alone, and living alone is reported to be a key risk factor for experiencing loneliness and developing poor health. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the experiences of living alone for older men. Systematic text condensation and hermeneutic interpretation were used in analysis of the data. Four themes emerged: lonely at times, missing and longing for a shared life, keeping active, and some kind of freedom. The findings revealed that inner and outer resources come into play and have influence on the processes of managing and solving the situation of living alone. The findings are in accordance with theoretical perspectives on loneliness, aloneness, and solitude. The findings offer nurses in any clinical context valuable information to allow them to address the core emotional and potential mental health issues old men face in coping with the situation of living alone.

The Discourse on Human Rights and the International Regime of Human Rights

The international regime of human rights is concerned with the kinds of freedoms, liberties, benefits, autonomy and protection which we are entitled to, and the corresponding obligations that flow from these. The sources, foundation and justifications for these rights and who we are by nature to deserve them have always been controversial, not least because we live in social context which require meeting the requirements of political order, stability, and the general welfare. This paper re-visits some of the contentious positions surrounding the discourse on human rights. The goal is to reveal how the international community navigated when shaping the contours of the regime of human rights. In this regard efforts will be made to cast light on some of the contentious positions that have been endorsed, rejected or avoided by the United Nations. This may make one wonder whether the international regime of human rights follows a clear political ideology.

Nietzsche's Existentialist Freedom

ABSTRACT Following Robert C. Solomon's Living with Nietzsche, I defend an interpretation of Nietzsche's views about freedom that are in line with the existentialist notion of self-creation. Given Nietzsche's emphasis on the limitations on human freedom, his critique of the notion of causa sui (self-creation out of nothing), and his critique of morality for relying on the assumption that we have free will, it may be surprising that he could be taken seriously as an existentialist—existentialism characteristically takes freedom and self-creation to be central to the human condition. Nietzsche does not endorse a radical notion of freedom; he is rather emphatically critical of any such notion. However, I argue that he does have room for a certain kind of freedom and self-creation that supports Solomon's characterization of him as an existentialist.

On the role of indeterminism in libertarian free will

In a recent paper in this journal, “How should libertarians conceive of the location and role of indeterminism?” Christopher Evan Franklin critically examines my libertarian view of free will and attempts to improve upon it. He says that while Kane's influential [view] offers many important advances in the development of a defensible libertarian theory of free will and moral responsibility … [he made] “two crucial mistakes in formulating libertarianism” – one about the location of indeterminism, the other about its role – “both of which have helped fan the flame of the luck argument”. In this paper, I respond to Franklin's criticisms, arguing that, so far from making it significantly more difficult to answer objections about luck and control, as he claims, giving indeterminism the location and role I do makes it possible to answer such objections and many other related objections to libertarian free will. A central theme of this paper will emerge in my responses: In order to make sense of freedom of will in general and to do justice to the complex historical debates about it, one must distinguish different kinds of control agents may have over events and correspondingly different kinds of freedom they may possess.

Subversive Freedom: Libertine Anthropology and the Geography of Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century France

To understand how the idea of freedom operates in seventeenth-century France, and in libertine writing in particular, this article argues that it is important to take into account new social and spatial constraints that arose in the period, as well as the fictional figures of libertine travel writing. French libertine conceptions of freedom are then seen primarily as the reflection of a developing practice of mobility. To give substance to the hypothesis of a relationship between mobility, moral geography, and conceptions of freedom, the article contrasts two examples of attitudes to kinds of freedom in the French libertine world. The first example is that of French libertines themselves, and their relationship to the decline of liberty in France which took place in the aftermath of Theophile de Viau's trial. The second is centred on the banks of the Ganges and the experience of libertine travellers to India in the mid-seventeenth century. The suggestion is that libertine travelling culture modified its representations of freedom by introducing anthropological and comparative dimensions to the discourse.

Positive Freedom in Networked Capitalism: An Empirical Analysis

The article proposes a social network analysis of the main European capitalisms and its correspondence with an index of economic freedom. The analysis relates to two kinds of economic liberties taken from the concept of freedom formulated by Isaiah Berlin. While the first kind of freedom (negative freedom) depends on the external system (e.g. the constraints on the firm defined by the regulations), the second refers to the internal obligations within the business system itself that prevent the free exercise of business (positive freedom): specifically, the social network, in which the company is embedded. After an operationalization of the two concepts of freedom, the analysis of a comprehensive database allows us to explore the relationship between the two kinds of freedom.

Osmanli YYnetiminin Oryantalist nnasi (The Orientalist Construction of the Ottoman Governance)

Edward Said formulated and discussed Orientalism for the first time and he concentrated more on the attitutes mostly towards Islam and the Arabs. He mainly examined the literary texts that were produced by the “Western mind.” By defining Orientalism as a discourse, he made an invaluable contribution to the field. This article, however, concentrates on the European perception of the Ottoman Empire starting from the sixteenth century until the modern times in terms of the interpretations about the Ottoman governance. It aims to show the Orientalist tendencies in European texts in describing the Ottoman government. It begins with the examination of selected texts written about the Ottomans by the sixteenth and seventeenth century travellers. The article determines that the general approach towards the Ottoman Empire lacked a theoretical base although the travellers did define the empire as a tyranny. The definition of tyranny, however, was quite ambigious. In the second part, the article concentrates on the Enlightenment thinker Montesquieu and his model of “Oriental Despotism.” Montesquieu argued that this was the worst governance method and the Ottoman Empire was the perfect example of it. In the final part, “Sultanism” of Max Weber was outlined. The article trys to show how Orientalist assumptions about the Ottoman Empire carried to modern sociological theory through Weber’s internalization of them. Weber argued that the enslaved janissary army caused both the Ottoman government and society to lack all kinds of freedom.

Positive Freedom in Networked Capitalism: An Empirical Analysis

The article proposes a social network analysis of the main European capitalisms and its correspondence with an index of economic freedom. The analysis relates to two kinds of economic liberties taken from the concept of freedom formulated by Isaiah Berlin. While the first kind of freedom (negative freedom) depends on the external system (e.g. the constraints on the firm defined by the regulations), the second refers to the internal obligations within the business system itself that prevent the free exercise of business (positive freedom): specifically, the social network, in which the company is embedded. After an operationalization of the two concepts of freedom, the analysis of a comprehensive database allows us to explore the relationship between the two kinds of freedom.

On Risk & Responsibility: Gun Control and the Ethics of Hunting

This article explores gun control and the ethics of hunting and suggests that hunting ought not to be permitted, and not because of its impact on those animals that are hunted, but because of the risk other humans are subjected to as a result of some being permitted to own guns for mere preference satisfaction. This article examines the nature of freedom, its value, and how responsibility for the exercising of that freedom ought to be regarded when it involves subjecting others to a risk of grave bodily harm. A distinction between two kinds of freedom is put forth and it is argued that it would be wrong to sacrifice freedoms of intrinsic worth for freedoms of instrumental worth. Essays Philos (2015)16:217-231 | DOI: 10.7710/1526-0569.1533 Published online: 7 July 2015. © Christopher A. Riddle 2015 Contact author: cariddle@utica.edu Acknowledgement: I would like to thank Robert Halliday, John Johnsen, Chet LoConti, and Luke Perry for helpful suggestions and comments. On Risk & Responsibility | Riddle

Choosing Life

Choosing Life

Freedom and happiness in nations: why the Finns are happier than the French

Cross-national studies on happiness have revealed large differences, not only is average happiness higher in rich nations than in poor ones, but there are also sizable differences in happiness among rich nations. For instance, the Finns are happier than the French, while GDP per capita is similar in France and Finland. In this paper we discuss whether freedom can explain that difference. The Finns feel more free than the French do. Does this discrepancy in perceived freedom correspond to a difference in actual freedom? Following Bay, we distinguished three kinds of actual freedom: social freedom, potential freedom and psychological freedom. In a comparative analysis of 49 nations we find that actual freedom reflects only partially in perceived freedom and that all kinds of freedom have some independent relation with average happiness. Psychological freedom is most strongly related to happiness in rich nations. The Finns are happier than the French because they dare more to be free.