ABSTRACT This article examines the fiction of the Self-Reliance Literary Group as a form of ethical narrative in which modern subjectivity is constituted through processes of moral choice rather than through the affirmation of predefined ethical norms. Moving beyond approaches that interpret these works primarily in terms of individual liberation or social reform, the study argues that the ethical significance of the Self-Reliance Literary Group’s narratives lies in their capacity to stage moral dilemmas, ethical hesitation, and responsibility within the specific historical context of colonial modernity in Vietnam during the 1930 s. Drawing on narrative ethics and literary ethical criticism, the article analyzes how ethical meaning is generated not only through characters’ actions and decisions but also through narrative form, including open endings, shifts in focalization, and the deliberate suspension of moral judgment. These narrative strategies invite readers to participate in ethical reflection rather than to accept fixed moral conclusions. By situating Vietnamese modern fiction within broader debates on ethical narrative and moral reasoning, this study contributes to the reconfiguration of ethical criticism from a comparative and non-Western perspective, highlighting the discursive potential of Vietnamese literature in global discussions of narrative ethics.

ABSTRACT While fiction-science (fi-sci) pattern mapping has been discussed as a way to use fictional patterns to help learners understand analogous patterns in science, this article embeds that pedagogical objective within a larger framework in Literature and Science Studies. If one of the affordances of fictionality is to lower barriers to scientific comprehension, this article argues that, reciprocally, literary engagements with science can provide the spur and material for critical inquiry and literary interpretation. Grounded in a study of David Lodge’s novel Thinks . . . , the article’s two sections and conclusion thus seek to model the recursive process of literary criticism as a sequence of readings and rereadings that begins with detecting analogies between scientific and fictional patterns. Specifically, this article uses fi-sci pattern mapping to identify, then explore, the intriguing analogy Thinks . . . sets up between the whodunit plot (a fictional pattern) and the phenomenon of quantum superposition, as manifested in Schrödinger’s cat paradox. In addition to helping nonscientists understand quantum physics, this analogy serves as the foundation for a counterintuitive reading of the novel’s narrative form and ethics and, more broadly, as an illustration of how fi-sci pattern mapping can be integrated into a broader approach to reading in Literature and Science Studies.

Abstract This article explores how interdisciplinary family law professionals can use narrative ethics to elevate the voice of older adults and benefit multiple generations of family members. Narrative Ethics is the study of the way in which an individual tells us a story and the way in which we listen to that story. We offer a hypothetical older adult's story as we consider the application of narrative ethics to the story and discuss relevant professional ethical codes and standards for various professions. We then reflect on the practical application of narrative ethics and ethical obligations in our professional lives.

This article examines Le storie degli altri (Other People’s Stories), a theatre project conceived within the partnership between the University for Foreigners of Siena, the Siena University Hospital “Le Scotte” (Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria Senese) and Doctors Without Borders-Italy. As part of project THE, Unistrasi, Spoke 3/3-4, and Spoke 10/5, it draws on long-standing experiences in community-based theatre. Grounded on the notion of extra moenia performance, the project explores how narrative and performance can function as tools for reflection, ethical engagement, and the construction of intersubjective spaces beyond traditional theatrical boundaries. The study situates the project within a genealogy of Western theatre, from ritual forms to contemporary performance theory, emphasizing the shift from character-centred representation to collective performativity. Central to the analysis is Arthur Frank’s concept of narrative ethics and the transformative potential of storytelling, particularly in relation to testimonies of suffering collected by humanitarian workers. Through a process of narrative “retelling”, participants – students, healthcare professionals, and community members – become performers who enact empathy and shared responsibility. The project thus reconfigures the actor–audience relationship, fostering a horizontal communicative space where witnessing becomes a collective practice. Ultimately, the article argues that extra moenia theatre can cultivate a participatory ethics capable of strengthening community bonds and expanding the social function of performance.

AI for good, and AI for sustainability projects, are being developed by often well-meaning innovators across the world, intending to support initiatives in sustainable development. Some such projects have been positioned within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals. In this paper, we critically engage with this phenomenon using a virtue-based Ricoeurian narrative philosophy. Through conceptual analysis and normative argumentation, we make a theoretical contribution to scholarship on this topic. We argue that SDGs could be regarded as internationally agreed high-order end-norms that crystallise values considered to constitute the good life. We argue for exercising caution in applying SDGs as end-norms to AI projects as they are of a high order, are not directly action guiding, and threaten to sediment presentist dominant values. We argue for narrative hospitality between AI innovators and community stakeholders to guide reflection on specifying the SDGs to more situated contexts and to support the development of AI systems that may be more contextually appropriate, and more capable of supporting plural visions of the good life. Such narrative hospitality represents accommodation between parties, but refusal or resistance to engagement with AI innovators can be justified when community interests are not respected, and actors within AI industries can also be morally obliged to resist or refuse development or deployment of systems for contextually inappropriate environments that would be incompatible with a critical reading of the SDGs formed in narrative exchange with the other.

The Rāmāyaṇa, far from being a fixed or monolithic text, survives as a dynamic cultural continuum shaped through translation, transcreation, oral performance, and regional adaptation. This paper examines the Eastern and North-Eastern Indian Rāmāyaṇa traditions—particularly Madhav Kandali’s Saptakanda Rāmāyaṇa (Assamese) and Krittivas Ojha’s Rām Panchali (Bengali) to demonstrate how dharma functions as a unifying ethical principle across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. Drawing upon literary history, oral tradition studies, and comparative textual analysis, the study foregrounds the role of semi-oral poetic forms, performative modes, and colloquial diction in making the epic accessible to non-elite audiences. The paper argues that these regional retellings privilege moral action and social consciousness over doctrinal rigidity, thereby reflecting localized cultural values while retaining the epic’s core philosophical intent. Through close readings of selected narrative episodes and phrases, the analysis highlights how deviations from Valmiki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa—such as the incorporation of goddess worship in Krittivas’s text or the pastoral and ethical focus in Kandali’s rendering—reinforce righteous conduct within specific socio-historical milieus. Ultimately, the study contends that the paradoxical play of words, images, and narrative choices across Eastern Rāmāyaṇa traditions does not dilute the epic’s meaning but reaffirms dharma as a stable moral condition that offers ethical coherence and cultural continuity across time, language, and region.

ABSTRACT When sustainability is on the agenda, school and education are often assigned a key societal role in providing relevant knowledge and values. However, sustainability advocacy could be problematic when considered against parents’ and children’s formal rights to freedom of thought/belief, creating an ethical tension for teachers. We suggest that classrooms should be pedagogical interspaces and then argue for a narrative ethics approach focusing on utopian visions of sustainable society, without compromising individual agency. Imaginary futures, like fiction, offer to students knowledge of the possibilities to see and preparation for possible scenarios. Narratives also constitute contexts where the individual can expand their perspective, where it may be important to let conflicting narratives clash, allowing for enlarged thought generated in democratic iterations. They also allow students to move between the individual and the planet, from past to the future, and from the human to the more-than-human.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate accounting practices as intertwined technical, social and ethical mechanisms in a large-scale afforestation project in Pakistan – the Billion Tree Afforestation Project (BTAP). The study examines how accounting mediates accountability, participation and ethical stewardship in environmental governance, as well as the challenges faced and how they are overcome. Design/methodology/approach An interpretive extended case methodology, guided by Carnegie et al.’s (2021) tripartite conceptualisation of accounting, complemented by institutional and stakeholder perspectives, is used. Thematic analysis is used to analyse data from 29 semi-structured interviews, alongside project documentation, archival material and field observations. Findings Accounting in the BTAP operated simultaneously as a technical practice, social process and moral framing. Technically, it enabled monitoring and accountability and supported legitimacy claims, yet it also exposed tensions between bureaucratic demands for precise reporting and field-level realities. Socially, accounting structured participation and trust, but participatory arrangements sometimes became tokenistic when decision authority remained centralised. Morally, religious and ethical narratives helped mobilise stewardship, while at times redirecting attention away from institutional accountability. Together, these dynamics show accounting's performative, contested and potentially transformative role in environmental governance. Originality/value The study extends sustainability accounting theory by theorising how technical, social and moral dimensions interact and generate tensions in practice. It reframes technical accounting as a fragile credibility practice, social accounting as a negotiated arena of participation and power, and moral accounting as ethically charged yet ambivalent. In doing so, it develops accounting as a multi-dimensional social technology that mediates legitimacy, authority and accountability in sustainability governance.

Memory and Narrative Ethics: Holocaust Testimony, Fiction, and Film by JakobLothe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025. xiv + 424 pp. $90.00 (hardback). ISBN: 978‐0‐19‐757950‐3

This paper examines how contemporary Indian English fiction constructs the body as a contested site where power, precarity, and resistance converge. Drawing on theories of corporeality and biopolitics, particularly the works of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben, the study argues that the novels under consideration reimagine the body not merely as a passive recipient of violence but as an active locus of ethical and political meaning. Situating the analysis within the socio-political contexts of migration, gendered labour, carceral systems, and medicalized control, the paper explores how narrative voice, temporal structure, and focalization shape readers’ ethical engagement with suffering and survival. Through close textual analysis, the study demonstrates that gendered bodies experience precarity differently, yet both women’s and men’s narratives reveal strategies of everyday and symbolic resistance. Fragmented timelines, confessional modes, testimonial realism, and interior monologue function as formal mechanisms that transform private pain into collective critique. The paper further argues that narrative form itself becomes a political act: by controlling perspective and temporality, these texts compel readers to confront vulnerability as a shared human condition rather than a marginal exception. Ultimately, this study proposes that contemporary Indian English fiction participates in an ethics of witnessing, where storytelling becomes a mode of reclaiming agency from structures of domination. By linking corporeal politics to narrative ethics, the paper offers a framework for understanding how literary form mediates resistance in contexts of gendered precarity and institutional power.

ABSTRACT CITES has demonstrated a persistent trend of regulatory tightening over five decades, raising critical questions about both equity and effectiveness in global conservation governance. This study examines how structural power imbalances and dominant Northern narratives within the Convention have systematically marginalized pluralistic conservation discourses, disproportionately disadvantaging Global South states. Through mixed‐methods analysis—combining voting pattern data from CITES Appendix amendment proposals (CoP3–CoP19) with case studies of giraffes, European eels, and totoaba—this study reveals systemic inequities in decision‐making processes. Findings indicate that Northern countries disproportionately promote “strict conservation” narratives, targeting Southern species, with upgrade proposals adopted at significantly higher rates than downgrades despite equivalent voting thresholds. Concurrently, sustainable utilization strategies face institutional barriers in Southern states, further reflecting structural inequities. Our study shows that centralization within CITES correlates with the underrepresentation of Southern voices and the disproportionate influence of Northern‐dominated NGOs. Ultimately, we argue that CITES’ regulatory tightening reflects neocolonial dynamics, prioritizing Northern ethical narratives over resource sovereignty and local realities. Thus, to ensure more equitable and effective governance, reforms must democratize decision‐making processes and better respect pluralistic conservation discourses.

The article examines the religio-ecological framework articulated in Ming–Qing morality books 勸善書, focusing on how animals, Ledgers of merit 功過格, and karmic 業報 are integrated into a system of moral causality. Within this framework, actions such as killing or saving animals are directly linked to karmic reward and punishment, generating a dual mechanism that combines moral technology with an ultimate logic of justice to cultivate ecological consciousness and enforce social discipline. A central contribution of the study is the articulation of a triadic analytical framework—merit–demerit ledgers, karmic narrative, and animal ethics—showing how these elements form a coherent system of measurable and actionable ethical practice. In doing so, the framework challenges a strictly human-centered worldview by foregrounding an interconnected ecological order in which humans and animals are bound together through shared moral obligations and karmic entanglements. The article further situates this religio-ecological mechanism within contemporary debates in environmental ethics and animal rights. Through comparison with modern approaches—such as anti-speciesism, animal welfare and rights discourse, and proposals for cross-species political communities—it identifies both points of convergence and structural divergence. It concludes by exploring how this historical model might be critically translated and revised for present-day conditions, proposing a “revised morality book” framework that is more publicly defensible and more amenable to institutional implementation.

This article compares William Carlos Williams's short story 'The Use of Force' (1938) and Tess Gerritsen's novel The Surgeon (2001) to explore how biomedical care can slide into coercion and how clinical spaces oscillate between sanctuary and sacrilege. Building on Michel Foucault's formulation of clinical vision, together with Julia Kristeva's account of abjection and René Girard's sacrificial theory, I propose a three-strand analytic-power/knowledge, Gothic embodiment and parareligious affect-supplemented by an ecoGothic perspective that scales clinical violence from flesh to environment. Through close reading, the essay shows how Williams's intimate house call converts beneficent intention into brute force, while Gerritsen's medical thriller grotesquely weaponises medical expertise: the gaze that sees also dominates, and instruments of cure-tongue depressor, spoon, scalpel-become ritual implements that breach bodily borders. Attending to gendered vulnerability and trauma poetics, the analysis situates Gerritsen's femicidal surgeries within patriarchal control and foregrounds the counter-agency of Jane Rizzoli and Catherine Cordell. Placing a modernist vignette beside a 21st century medical thriller, the article maps both continuities and ruptures in the ontological, epistemic and ethical stakes of clinical authority, tracing how sacrificial logic, secular priesthood and toxic ecologies persist across periods. The contribution is twofold: to Gothic studies, by clarifying medicine's parasacral volatility and its ecological imaginaries; and to bioethics and the medical humanities, by articulating a normative claim that only practices disciplined by consent, narrative reciprocity and institutional accountability can sustain the secular covenant of care. Otherwise, curative ritual hardens into authorised brutality, and knowledge is purchased through a sacrificial economy in which cura collapses into cruelty. Such findings refine debates on clinical paternalism, narrative ethics and trauma representation in literature.

ABSTRACT In her Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sea, The Sea (1978), Iris Murdoch displays morality and ethics through her characters’ intersubjective relationships. The implied ethics in each character’s relation toward the other is akin to the Levinasian ethics. Although various studies have been done on this contemporary novel, it has not been analyzed through the Levinasian ethical lens. Emmanuel Levinas tries to decipher his ethical notions using figurative language, especially metaphors. He compares responsibility, substitution, and suffering for the Other to the state of ‘maternity’. This paper will argue that the narrative explores this ethical notion of ‘maternity’ through an implied comparison between all female and two male characters. Both sexes are included since the other aim of this research is to prove Levinasian ‘maternity’ to be a gender-neutral trope applicable to both women and men. This research will be done by the help of C.Fred Alford’s critical comparative essay, since we aim to contribute to the ongoing attempt to perceive Levinas’s ethical notions through a detailed analysis of one of Murdoch’s ethical narratives, The Sea, The Sea. Although we share a common goal with Alford, this paper is a complement to, as well as a critique of his essay.

In this paper, a feminist refusal is proposed as a critical approach to reading women’s fiction in Indian society and suggests that women’s "no" to care, marriage, obligation, respectability, and narrative confession operates as a positive and productive form of feminist ethics that has been wrongly characterised as a negativity and failure of feminism. Counter to dominant feminist approaches that conceptualise agency through empowerment and resolution as vision and presence, this paper highlights refusal as a form of feminist realism that attends to constraint and structural violence. From the perspectives of feminist ethics of narrative and intersectional feminisms, this paper will explore how refusal through silence and withdrawal in certain narratives of Indian feminisms has been mistakenly interpreted as a lack of activity and a failure of morality. However, this paper will contend that these texts represent an alternate form of feminist language that challenges the patriarchal codes of sacrifice, logic, and redemption. The feminist refusal makes visible how “care” and “duty” function as forced virtues imposed upon women as morality itself, while structural equality is papered over by culturally constructed feminine norms. Through the application of refusal as an optic of interpretation, this paper will enhance the scope of the feminist literary tradition in India from one of celebratory empowerment to one of resistance through the ethics of self-preservation.

Since the 19th century, Protestant missionaries in Guangdong have extensively engaged in the translation and publication of religious texts, employing localized strategies in the illustration of Christian novels. Within the local cultural context of late Qing Guangdong, missionaries collaborated with local scholars, used Cantonese for writing, and designed novel illustrations to overcome barriers in doctrinal dissemination, thereby facilitating the spread of Christianity. The illustrations in missionary-published novels, such as The Pilgrim’s Progress in Vernacular and The Spiritual Warfare in Vernacular, adopted the stylistic features of Ming and Qing novel woodcuts in terms of lines, composition, character attire, and settings. Furthermore, they skillfully incorporated the Confucian moral framework of loyalty, filial piety, chastity, and righteousness, as represented in the Sacred Edict, into their narrative ethics, while integrating elements such as Buddhist causality and Daoist imagery into a “didactic” system. This localization strategy, combined with a “trinity” reading guidance model comprising images, text, and biblical annotations, visually elucidated the tenets of the Bible and encouraged the public to embrace Christianity. The localized practice of missionary novel illustrations served as a conscious and effective visual strategy aimed at bridging cultural divides and promoting the dissemination of the Gospel. It profoundly reflects the visual agency in modern Sino–Western cultural exchanges and significantly advanced the propagation of Christianity.

Contemporary narratives often return to familiar communities to uncover the moral tensions hidden in everyday life. Such works invite readers to question how social traditions influence choice, behaviour and responsibility. Through the lens of Narrative Ethics, storytelling becomes a space where ethical awareness is activated through emotional and reflective engagement. The study analyses Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” using Narrative Ethics to show how its calm, routine tone intensifies the horror of unquestioned traditions. Jackson portrays an ordinary village participating in a violent ritual without reflection, revealing how cruelty is sustained when it becomes a normalized cultural practice. The narrator’s neutral voice positions readers to confront their assumptions about morality and collective behaviour. The study argues that “The Lottery” highlights the dangers of inherited customs that remain unchallenged. It suggests that ethical understanding demands critical engagement rather than passive acceptance of tradition. Ultimately, the research shows how Jackson’s narrative exposes moral failures within everyday life and encourages readers to reconsider the limits of their own ethical boundaries.

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This essay synthesizes theological, phenomenological, and clinical perspectives to argue that financial insecurity constitutes not a peripheral social determinant but a primary pathological condition reshaping disease expression, treatment access, and healing possibility. Drawing upon an extensive body of published work examining capitalism’s corrosive effects on healthcare, the nature of physician bias, and the sacred dimensions of therapeutic encounters, I propose a comprehensive model of healthcare inequity grounded in narrative ethics, trauma theory, and a post-biomedical understanding of poverty as chronic illness. The model integrates three critical frameworks: the hermeneutics of patient suffering, structural competency as clinical obligation, and economic justice as preventive medicine. This integrated approach challenges the dominant epidemiological paradigm that quantifies inequity without transforming it, offering instead a praxis-oriented framework that recognizes the moral ecology of healing and the physician’s role as interpreter of structural wounds.

Abstract Indonesia's vigorous support of the ASEAN Gender Mainstreaming Strategic Framework (AGMSF) presents a compelling paradox. Despite possessing a comprehensive domestic legal architecture for gender equality, its championing of a regional framework appears redundant. This article argues that the apparent contradiction reflects a dual-track strategy in which regional norm-building is used to reinforce domestic governance while enhancing Indonesia’s standing in ASEAN. It examines Indonesia’s framing of the AGMSF, the factors shaping the translation of regional commitments into national practice, and how global gender norms are articulated alongside locally grounded ethical narratives. The article adopts a qualitative descriptive-analytical design grounded in constructivist International Relations. Data come from analysis of the AGMSF, Indonesian and ASEAN policy documents and official statements, and relevant scholarly and policy literature. Qualitative content analysis, supported by selective discourse analysis, is used to trace dominant themes and justifications. Findings show that Indonesia positions itself as a norm entrepreneur and presents the AGMSF as a non-coercive, capacity-building vehicle for localizing global gender equality principles to fit the ASEAN Way. It is also framed as an external lever for peer learning and reputational incentives to address persistent implementation gaps at home. The article concludes that the AGMSF is a strategic supplement rather than a redundant policy layer. It contributes to limited scholarship on ASEAN gender governance by linking norm entrepreneurship, regional institutionalism, and value negotiation. The findings imply that regionally resonant frameworks can strengthen domestic implementation and call for future comparative and field-based research across member states.