Mainstream Academia Research Articles

The Middle East governance Failure and the Prospect of Democratic Confederalism

Examining the notion of the state and governance in the Middle East leads to the argument that a prolonged dilemma has become embedded in the region’s political culture. Commentators suggest that these states could be considered failed states. Nevertheless, over the past century, there have been several attempts to resolve the crises and propose alternatives to the projects of states and governance in the Middle East. This paper aims to examine three key points. Firstly, it critically analyses the crises in the Middle East, the root causes, and the repercussions of the chaos in the present and future. To achieve this, the paper delves into the past and explores the causes of events to understand the complete picture of the chaos. Secondly, it suggests and contemplates alternatives for the crises by reviewing proposed alternatives implemented in the last century and the resulting changes observed. Thirdly, the paper examines a suggested project a not yet implemented alternative to the dilemma in the Middle East. The paper attempts to scrutinise a newly suggested approach that has been theoretically understudied and less discussed. The discussion about this model has hardly seen the light of mainstream academia, media, and think tank centres. Democratic Confederalism is a project suggested as a solution to the dilemma in the Middle East. It is a societal grassroots approach proposed as a realistic alternative to the model of the Nation State that has been the primary governance model in the region for the entire last century.

Paraquat Poisoning: A Growing Homicidal Threat: Insights and Strategies

Abstract Paraquat is a widely used non-selective herbicide in Indian agriculture. It has gained popularity for its misuse in suicidal poisoning, primarily because it lacks an antidote, and ingestion often leads to death. When examining the historical trends of pesticide-related suicidal poisonings in India, there is a noticeable transition from endrin, organophosphates and rodenticides to the current prevalent use of paraquat. This review delves into globally reported cases of homicidal paraquat poisonings, which are sporadically reported in India as well, although not published in mainstream academia. Clinicians must remain vigilant in homicidal paraquat poisoning situations as there is often improper history at the time of presentation. Such cases typically present with some non-specific symptoms such as oral and pharyngeal burns and appear like any other typical acute gastroenteritis or a flu-like illness which ultimately leads to death as a result of pulmonary complications. At the same time, forensic pathologists need to be well versed in the characteristic autopsy findings and analytical toxicology considerations of paraquat-induced criminal poisoning, given the occasional incidents in India. The use of paraquat as a weapon in poisoning cases is a significant public health concern that underscores the need for a ban on paraquat in India.

Cultivating Social Cohesion through Conflict Transformation in Educational Environments

Teaching in our current times brings many new challenges that professors and students are navigating together. In the conflict resolution field, there are a variety of frameworks that may support fostering inclusivity in the classroom, though these elements still need to be discovered in mainstream academia and beyond. Several strategies will be shared that were implemented in classes, along with feedback from students, indicating a successful and inclusive atmosphere, even though a majority of the topics discussed were challenging. Developing effective strategies can transform a classroom. Active learning strategies can also create inclusive classrooms. In addition to the traditional challenges that students and teachers face, there are political challenges to what, how, and why specific topics are taught. Looking broadly and critically at these challenges may result in negotiating a collaborative process to actively create social cohesion within the classroom and beyond.

Developments in the stereoselective synthesis of benzopyran, benzopyrone and flavonoid based natural product analogues using C-glycosides as an intrinsic chiral synthon

Stereoselective synthesis is essential for propelling mainstream academia toward a relentless pursuit of novel and cutting-edge strategies for constructing molecules with unparalleled precision. Naturally derived benzopyrans, benzopyrones, and flavonoids are an essentially prominent group of oxa-heterocycles, highly significant targets in medicinal chemistry owing to their extensive abundance in biologically active natural products and pharmaceuticals. The molecular complexity and stereoselectivity induced by heterocycles embedded with C-glycosides have attracted considerable interest and emerged as a fascinating area of research for synthetic organic chemists. This present article emphasizes the existing growths in the strategies involving the diastereoselective synthesis of C-glycosylated benzopyrans, benzopyrones, and flavonoids using naturally acquired glycones as chiral synthons.

Center-Staging Decolonial and Southern Thinking for Hopeful Epistemic-Existentially Sustainable Futures

Abstract The essay presented in this paper constitutes a reflection based on my explorations of transcending siloed academic areas from Southern or Decolonial frameworks generally and on my reading of the 572-page, 2023 volume Decolonizing The Mind. A guide to decolonial theory and practice by Sandew Hira published by Amrit Publishers more specifically. Aligning with emerging discussions regarding the need to trouble the colonially framed ways of mainstream academia and academic writing itself, I – like an increasing number of scholars, including Sandew Hira – attempt to present these reflections in what may appear as unconventional writing. This paper is organized in six sections that talk to the human condition across the territories of the contemporary planet based on situating and historicizing its narrative as a response to emerging decolonial waves that have so far marked academic settings differently across the global North and the global South, including my open-ended reading of Sandew Hira’s 2023 volume. In lieu of a standard summary, this reflective paper functions as an expanded teaser to the volumes rich and troubling offerings.

The Dark Spirit of the Trickster Archetype in Parapsychology

In this paper, the phenomenology of the Trickster (its ‘darker’ side) is explored. The archetypal Trickster is shown to manifest as psychosociological aberrations and bizarre physical effects often associated with unique individuals during certain emotionally charged states. Though the Trickster and its many variants have mythological roots, the modern-day equivalent (free, for example, from anthropomorphization) can be seen as an activated psychological proneness to err in thinking when a liminal phase is entered into—that borderland between doubt and certainty. Mainstream academia considers the field of parapsychology to be controversial—it is marginalized because the phenomena it studies (the paranormal) is mostly illusive, usually weak even when proved to be statistically anomalous, and the psi process itself has not been theoretically explained. This state of affairs propagates uncertainty which can trigger ‘tricksterish’ (spurious) interpretations of parapsychological data and findings: Long-term experimenter psi and chronological decline effects are cases in point. Due caution and bias-free analysis of the data and findings may help ameliorate, perhaps even dissolve, the problem of the Trickster.

Envisioning the Ecological Future: Three Perspectives off the Beaten Track

With few truly hopeful visions currently emerging from mainstream academia or from established science concerning humanity’s collective environmental outlook, it might be necessary to go off the beaten track in order to see how we can maintain a sense of hope while realistically preparing for the gradual erosion of the world as we know it, therefore also leaving some psychological and emotional room for a sense of the tragic. This essay considers three lesser-known but, in our eyes, important contemporary perspectives on the ecological future: Ernest Callenbach’s “ecotopia,” John Michael Greer’s “catabolic descent” and William deBuys’s “hospice for Earth”—all three of which aim to challenge the currently still dominant focus on the binary of “progress or apocalypse” that flows from modern thought. We critically examine these visions and argue that, when combined, they offer an approach to the ecological future that is both more realistic and more inspiring. In essence, Callenbach’s ecotopian vision still has significant traction—and an almost “erotic” appeal—today, but needs to be adapted to contemporary ecological realities through Greer’s and deBuys’s insights into decline, grief and the tragic.

Towards a Post-Colonial Eco-Cosmopolitanism: Reviving the Sense of Place in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Thinner Than Skin

In an era of unprecedented global connectivity and ecological crises, the concept of “place” has been profoundly transformed within post-colonised communities. This study examines how literature, specifically Uzma Aslam Khan’s Thinner Than Skin (2012), as a medium can revive the sense of place, particularly the place sense redefined by the experiences of post-colonial eco-social catastrophes, as a dialogical co-habitation of human-non-human environment in mainstream academia. This study, at first, moves beyond the Western perception of place as an isolated source of individual identity. It then engages with the recent scholarships on “eco-cosmopolitanism” and political ecology of the global South to show how the forces of (neo)colonial-capitalist modernity and consequent eco-social crises in Pakistan were registered both in Khan’s experimental narrative content and style. This study argues that Khan’s novel employs a “post-colonial eco-cosmopolitan” approach, focusing on the fluidity of place-based identities and the challenges of narrating a post-colonial sense of place in the zones of conflict, catastrophes, and crises. Finally, this study contends that when socio-ecological crises affect various aspects of life—body, home, society, and environment—local cultural practices like oral story-telling, folklore sharing, and traditional rituals serve as sources of collective memory, providing inner stability amid external turmoil.

Enhancing Methodological Rigour: Control Variable Utilisation and Reporting in Social Entrepreneurship Research

Social entrepreneurship research has increasingly adopted quantitative methodologies, reflecting the field’s evolution into mainstream academia. However, there remains a noted deficiency in rigorous hypothesis testing. Furthermore, instances abound that conventional entrepreneurship and management research often employ control variables in hypothesis testing without clear theoretical grounding or sufficient justifications, often relying on precedent. This study investigates how social entrepreneurship researchers incorporate and report control variables in their studies. A thorough examination of 78 empirical studies published from 2010 to 2023 in the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship and the Social Enterprise Journal reveals several key insights. The findings indicate that only about 60% of social entrepreneurship research integrates control variables, with a mere 34% providing a justification for their inclusion. Only 22% present a theoretically or empirically substantiated rationale, while a substantial 85% lack any justification for their chosen measurements. Furthermore, over 75% of studies do not specify the anticipated relationship between control and dependent variables. To enhance methodological rigour in social entrepreneurship research, this study provides critical recommendations for both researchers and reviewers through a decision tree. It emphasises the importance of grounding the application of control variables in robust theoretical and empirical foundations, rather than simply following precedent.

REVIEW OF THE BOOK: HANDBOOK OF POSITIVE YOUTH DEVELOPMENT: CRITICAL INSIGHTS ON YOUTH POTENTIAL FROM THE MAINSTREAM TO THE GLOBAL SOUTH

The Positive Youth Development (PYD) framework promotes a vision of youth based on their strengths. This paper is a review the Handbook of positive youth development. Advancing research, policy, and practice in global contexts. This review expands on the core themes of the Handbook by delving into challenges for PYD research as it moves forward to reach populations that have been systematically excluded from mainstream academia. It is proposed that the publication of this book, and its valuable contributions to youth research and policy, is a timely opportunity to highlight the mismatch between youth possibilities in developed and developing contexts, as it is the Handbook’s aim to decrease the gap between mainstream and Global South youth psychology.

Epistemic and Existential, E2-sustainability. On the need to un-learn for re-learning in contemporary spaces

This paper contributes to a re-thinking, un-learning, and re-learning agenda by interrogating some core ideas and assumptions related to contemporary societal and planetary concerns, including concerns within the research enterprise. Transcending the first step that calls for pausing and re-thinking, this paper troubles universalizing vocabularies that naturalize conceptual framings and ways/waves-of-being in research and educational practices. Furthermore, it illuminates the ways in which scholarship has become complicit in re-cycling and re-creating reductionistic ideas that loop back into educational practices. Its overarching argument aligns with an emergent call within research and higher education for going beyond its universalizing monolithic ethos that has become naturalized in contemporary digital-analog entangled existence. Framed as alternative theorizing that is variously termed post/decolonial/southern thinking, these emergent perspectives are part of the introspection that is critically needed in mainstream academia, in particular in the Learning Sciences. This paper argues that this is needed to contribute to bothEpistemicandExistentialsustainability, i.e.,E2-sustainability. E2-sustainability enables transcending issues of environmental-, economic-, social-, and cultural-sustainability: E2-sustainability assumes and includes these. Marked by alternative conceptual framings and pushed by amobile gaze, this theoretical paper argues that major and minor shifts in thinking are needed for attending to contemporary societal and planetary challenges. E2-sustainability in the scholarly realm has relevance for transcending ethnocentrically framed biases and siloed framings of contemporary education and higher education, including teacher education. Troubling key, taken-for-granted universalizing truths and using the areas of language and educational scholarship as illustrative points of departure, this paper raises concerns regarding the outsourcing of important educational agendas to technologies, including digitalization on the one hand and concepts that build on contentious assumptions on the other hand. It is suchdefaultoutsourcing that is troubled through a curiosity-drivenmultiversalandglobal-centricmobile gaze wherein both northern and southern knowledge-regimes need to be privileged. The theorizing presented in this paper builds on a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives (SWaSP) framing that has relevance for both north-centric and south-centric scholarship, including writing research. Explicitly multi/inter/cross/trans-disciplinary, this work is relevant to Epistemic and Existential sustainability given its non-allegiance to the imaginaries of mono-disciplinarity, nation-state essences, or universalisms.

Fucking with grammar

Art practices occupy a space of liminality within academia, being valid, appropriate to illustrate questions and discourses in social sciences and humanities, and not sufficient in mainstream academia to assert what art foregrounds as ‘knowledge’. So, what happens when art has something to claim through non-academic methods of inquiry? Even more complicated, what happens when art allows putting forward theoretical hypothesis involving the immateriality of affect? Departing from a practice-led research focusing on the endurance of white, cisgender, and heteropatriarchic impositions, as well as the ways these impositions materialise themselves on the body, this paper explores the possibilities of Fucking with grammar, a writing method developed throughout the writing of my PhD research. Linguistics has been stretched for centuries by QUILTBAG individuals — queer and questioning, unsure, intersex, lesbian, transgender and two-spirit, bisexual, asexual and aromantic, gay and genderqueer; swardspeak, lavender, and code-switching all entail ways of reshaping and creating language as response to socio-political necessities, camouflage, or simply to access a jargon that can be more faithful to practices and embodiments of the group creating it. However, there is a different kind of reclaiming emerging, when performance artist, actress, and activist Linn da Quebrada utters “I am a cisgender woman with one breast and a penis,” she is committing the kind of epistemic disobedience that undoes epistemology. Here, I focus on disobediences that bring western epistemologies to collapse. These challenges that contribute to what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls “the end of the world as we know it” (2014). To end what ‘we’ know requires a different ‘how’, it entails methodological deployments that help bringing into crisis academic hierarchies regarding [research] corroborability. Questioning after Audre Lorde: how does one make tangible the immeasurable and unpredictable without being averted and undercut by the tools still sustaining the master’s house? The approach I propose here is Fucking with grammar. Fucking with is associated with messing with someone; fuck you or fuck me is negatively perceived; in sex, ‘fuck you’ or ‘fuck me’ is one-sided — the act of fucking should be fucking with, because even when saying ‘I want to fuck you’ it is still necessary more than one person for this ‘fucking’ to actually happen. Similarly, in English, the correct preposition following the verb ‘to dream’ is ‘of’ or ‘about’, which makes absolutely no sense: because when one is dreaming, one is embedded in a withness that ‘of’ or ‘about’ cannot account for. This piece shares how I fuck with grammar within a practice-led PhD research: applying Portuguese and Turkish grammar structures to English, generating verbs or nouns out of adjectives and vice versa[s]. Fucking with grammar is a mode of surpassing some of language’s limitations when speaking of that which is immaterial; it is a semantic slap in the face calling for decolonisation of one’s immediacy of logic when assuming typos and linguistic ignorance within writings not following English normativities. I t is a method that contributes to a broader challenge to formats sustaining hierarchies around what is considered ‘academic’ research.

Social media affordances in sense-making and knowledge transfer

Background: Social media (SM) affordances and knowledge transfer (KT) culture permit sense-making, sense-unmaking and insights into an organisational performance improvement strategy. The article provides an analysis of SM affordances and how they enable sense-making. Objectives: The purpose of this article was to explore how SM can facilitate effective KT in an innovative business environment (IBE). The question inspiring the article is: How can the use of SM facilitate effective KT in an IBE? Method: Twenty online interviews with experts from various organisations were used to gather qualitative data and make sense of the key concepts. Data extracted were thematically analysed using ATLAS.ti software. Results: Mainstream academia concentrates more on the operational usefulness of SM, and not much is concentrating on how SM affordances facilitate social, organisational sense-making and KT from strategic level expert’s perspective other than the operational level. Conclusion: Social media affordances are in the form of media richness, cost reduction, the meta-knowledge in community of practice, conversation frame-clues interlink, creativity, editability and creativity. The conversation leads to productive dialogue (PD) and KT. Contribution of the research: The sense-making theory enables reconceptualisation of how SM affordances facilitate social, organisational sense-making and KT. Sense-making and KT are shaped by individual cognition, absorptive capacity, technology perceived ease of use (PEOU) as well as usefulness and the environment. The research is supportive to information and communication technology researchers and novice researchers in developing new knowledge and KT measurement and SM management strategies. This study is unique compared to the existing literature because of its exclusive and innovative approach regarding participant’s selection, data collection and methods.

Apparent micro-realism in mainstream orthodox economics

As reiterated for a long, mainstream economics mainly relies upon a set of unrealistic axioms and deductive assumptions, which, nevertheless, are what underpins its core postulates. They are unnecessarily unrealistic assumptions, mainly because the empirical evidence for contrasting them is as overwhelming as old. Even the claim for (returning to) realism in economics is already old within part of the profession. However, most mainstream academics tend to consider that their research works have in fact empirical contents insofar as they usually start by considering simplified cases, situations, or descriptions that allude to some real economic facet; this, in the way of specificities to be introduced into the standard General Equilibrium model. This seeming paradox is discussed in this paper, and as a result, it is argued that there do is a predominance of a research programme in mainstream orthodox economics (modern neoclassical “economic theory,” plus “econometrics”) that is mainly characterized, more than by micro-empirical precisions, by a sort of abstract micro empiricism. It is also argued that the outcomes brought about by such a “mode of research production” (contributions) do not appear significantly relevant in terms of the quantum of knowledge provided about the functioning and problems of our economies.

Colonial Roots of the Aryan Invasion/Migration Theory and the Contemporary Archaeological Evidence in Western Sources

William Jones, famously, by identifying close linkages between Sanskrit and European languages, gave birth to research into the common ancestry between Indians and Europeans. In the earlier years of contention on the matter, India was considered the cradle of civilisation and Sanskrit as the mother of all Indo-European languages. With the rise in the imperial power of Europe over India, the cradle of civilisation began to shift outside India and ultimately landed in Europe. Simultaneously, the idea of invasion of India by the ‘Aryan race’, or the Aryan invasion theory (AIT), was promoted. Since then, however, one archaeological find over another have consistently refuted the AIT, proving it as false. As flawed as it remains, this theory has, nonetheless, persisted and morphed in its current form as the Aryan migration theory (AMT) and continues to find mention and favour in contemporary academic discourse. In mainstream academia, today, whether in grade-school texts or in texts meant for undergraduate and graduate study, whenever India and Hinduism are mentioned, the coming of Aryans from outside of India and establishing Hinduism and civilisation in India are discussed as veritable facts. By examining the theory in anticolonial and postcolonial contexts, we show that despite considerable archaeological evidence refuting the theories of the invasion or migration of Aryans into India, its colonial embeddedness in the notion of the racial superiority of the Europeans or people with European ancestry that the theory does not fade into oblivion.

Introducing Oceanic Societies in COVID‐19

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Intersecting Dalit and Cultural Studies: De-brahmanising the Disciplinary Space

The paper begins with the context in which Dalit culture and resistance emerges and the way brahmanical social order tries to maintain their status quo through established cultural inequalities with the dominance of power and knowledge. By invoking different claims of dominant epistemologies re-articulated by Dalit intellectuals and locating the cultural past of Dalit humiliation, this paper examines the anti-caste discourse and the Dalit cultural resistance from the colonial and postcolonial time. With an attempt to bring in the intersections of Dalit and cultural studies, the paper argues that by challenging brahmanical cultural knowledge production, Dalits can reclaim power and knowledge in relation with the ‘politics of difference’. The Dalit aesthetic decenters the cultural production and circulation of the hitherto grand narratives. Further, it attempts to de-brahmanize the established disciplinary space by bringing the discourse of Dalit experience of caste and humiliation into mainstream academia. Lastly, drawing from the interdisciplinary context, the paper has elaborated the possibility of the making of a field of Dalit Cultural Studies as a step forward- a newer way for the cultural resistance of the oppressed.

Indigenous Epistemologies, Worldviews and Theories of Power

The purpose of the study is to understand Indigenous epistemologies of power from the standpoint of Indigenous participants who are originally from or currently living in the Sudbury and Manitoulin Island areas of Ontario, Canada. Indigenous research methods are privileged throughout, and key aspects of grounded theory are woven in to add support. Comparisons between the Indigenous epistemological concept of power and the Western theories of power of mainstream academia are made, as are relevant criticisms of Western epistemology.&#x0D; Fifteen Indigenous participants were interviewed. The central category that arose from the data is, relationships. This central category ties the other main categories together which are: language, sacred sources of power, Indigenous women, abuse of power, and knowledge. The findings indicate that there are many forms and manifestations of power which are related to each other. The source of power is in the interrelatedness of everyone to everything else that is known and unknown. Humility, harmony and balanced relationships produce the healthiest and most magnificent manifestations of power.&#x0D; The paper argues that understanding more about epistemologies of power will help illuminate a pathway by which Indigenous peoples and Canadians of settler ancestry can better understand one another, creating the shift in these relationships that is required in order to gather large-scale support for reconciliation and for ethical distribution of power resources in Canada.

Listening to Silence: Approaching a Discursive Void Addressed in Alice Walker's Novels

This study attempts to discern the meaning of unspoken works related to both African and African American women as presented in the novels of the leading African American writer, Alice Walker. Therefore, the discourse of the silence is central to the study. It deploys different concepts from linguistic and critical theories and offers a close reading of relevant parts of the texts to grab the discursive void, evaporating the very generic experience of African originated women in America or elsewhere. Correspondingly, it contributes to Black Feminist discourse by registering into academia the systematic discussion of ignored, collateral experience of Black women. The study concedes that in mainstream academia the absence of discussion regarding Black women’s suppression, oppression, and commodification is, in fact, multi-patterned primarily caused by the intersectional systems of racism, sexism, and classism which Walker delineate with. Exploring and naming out that silence generating factors, this paper gives words to the traumatic wound conserved deep in the collective unconscious of Black women as a whole. While exploring those reasons, it argues that pulling those women’s issues off the discussion is more a politicised venture than anything else of western academia.

Irihapeti Ramsden: The Public Narrative on Cultural Safety

The magnificent voices of Indigenous women who want to restore, preserve and extend the beauty of Indigenous culture must be relocated and honoured as the last best hope of escaping the tragic impacts of colonization. This paper started as an exploration of New Zealand Indigenous scholar Irihapeti Ramsden’s extraordinary efforts to imbed Cultural Safety as a foundation for nursing training and unity of purpose for all community helpers to alter the trajectory of colonization and its tragic impacts on Indigenous peoples. It morphed into a celebration of the powerful ‘reflective topical auto-biographies’ or meta-narratives of adaptability and resilience all Indigenous people need to share as we recover and heal from intergenerational traumas inflicted in the name of civilization and racial supremacy. Transformative change starts with self discovery as Irihapeti Ramsden taught her student nurses. Women and children are the most poignant victims of that foolish colonial project and their survival stories can lead all humanity back to respectful and loving sustainability. Indigenous women’s resilience stories need a special space in academic literature. Their enduring women-spirit has always guided this First Nations to be better first as an Indigenous man and more importantly as a human being. Irihapeti Ramsden’s journey to put Cultural Safety out there in mainstream academia began with a powerful reflective inner healing journey. Her life and work was a remarkable gift to all. The title of this paper derives from Section Three of her PhD thesis. It must be shared throughout all the worlds’ spaces in need of decolonization. Her ultimately political meta-narrative to alter ignorance and arrogance within education, government and society is one all Indigenous writers and scholars must study and articulate across often culturally unsafe places and spaces within Canada’s colleges and universities.