Notion Of Pluralism Research Articles

AMBIVALENT CITIZENS

ABSTRACT This paper deals with the ambivalent position of Turkish nationalism vis-à-vis the Alevi ethno-religious identity. The Alevi are the largest ethno-religious minority in Turkey. Via a critical pluralist stance, the authors argue that the debates revolving around the origins and nature of the Alevi identity disclose the cultural –and, to a lesser extent, romantic – characteristics of Turkish nationalism and its relative inability to accommodate a fully civic and pluralist notion of national identity. The paper argues that the Alevi question is one of the litmus tests that reveal Turkish nationalism's uneasiness with adopting the idea of an ethno-religiously plural society. Two hegemonic branches of Turkish nationalism conceptualize the Alevi identity through ethno-cultural and religio-cultural lenses. This leads to the Alevi being coded as ‘ambivalent citizens’. This ambivalent status creates a bifurcated yet intertwined process of belonging and non-belonging, authenticity and stigmatization. The paper argues that the unremitting oscillation between the status of ‘genuine self-ness’ and ‘heretical otherness’ discloses the very non-civic and cultural foundations of Turkish nationalism.

Religious Tolerance, Diversity, and Pluralism

The theme of this paper can be introduced in this way: does a pluralist approach to religion entail a pluralist approach to religion? My theme is notthatodd, because I have two notions of pluralism in mind. There is what I will call ‘tolerant pluralism’ and what I will call ‘religious pluralism’. And thus my question is ‘Does tolerant pluralism re religion entail religious pluralism?’

Fred Evans: The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity

In his latest book, The Multivoiced Body: Society and Communication in the Age of Diversity , Fred Evans proposes a novel philosophical framework for interpreting human communication within a 21st-century political milieu of pluralism and difference. Evans' "multivoiced body" is, as the term suggests, a hybrid theory of society that engages writings as diverse as Chomskyan linguistics to postcolonial critiques of the Zapatista rebellion. Throughout the text, Evans skillfully places his conception of the social body in dialogue with numerous philosophical and literary theories of communication with the aim of articulating a new approach to contemporary questions of globalization, justice, and democracy. In response to what he calls "the dilemma of diversity," Evans' multivoiced body is an interpretation of the social body as a mutual interplay of subjectivities, cultures, and histories, which relies on the continual recognition of the interdependency of meaning. The dilemma that Evans intends to avoid is that a notion of plurality must either reduce the social whole to a mere collection of disparate parts thereby lacking any unified notion of "the good" or to a monological collective unit wherein one belief system dominates and represses other dissenting forms of thought and practice (pp. 3-4). To avoid these two horns, Evans establishes a dialogic account of meaning and social cohesion. This account of the dialogical nature of social bodies then lays the groundwork for his concluding critiques of capitalistic globalization and various views that fetishize social consensus and nihilism.

Authority and trust in information

As information science becomes better grounded in late-modernity's notions of pluralism and interpretative facts, many of the services and systems that information science have traditionally been associated with are being challenged to justify themselves as cognitive authorities. Further, designers and developers are being challenged to consider how information sources, systems, and services are trusted by users, what constitute authority and how that it is expressed, and how credibility plays out in a world of infinite choice and opinions. While relevance was once a central challenge in information science, authority and trust are quickly becoming the defining aspects of systems, services and sources. This panel will explore the notions of authority and trust from multiple perspectives and offer insights from across the broad spectrum of information science, incl. specific technologies, epistemologies, media, traditions, etc.

International Workshop Report "Between the National and the Transnational, 1945-1980: Masculinities in British and American Literature between World War II and Thatcher/Reagan" (June 9-11, 2010, Dresden University of Technology, Germany)

THE NATIONAL AND THE TRANSNATIONAL, 1945-1980: MASCULINITIES IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE BETWEEN WORLD WAR II AND THATCHER/REAGAN (JUNE 9-11, 2010, DRESDEN UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, GERMANY) If current trends in popular entertainment are anything to go by, it seems that gender concepts of 1950s and 60s culture are currently heading for comeback. Successful TV series like Mad Men have been focusing on renegotiations of masculinity after the Second World War and its epitome, the man in the gray flannel suit/' to cite the title of Sloan Wilson's novel and subsequent film adaptation. Even then, a normative masculinity functioned on screen to mask the social differences that stratified U.S. society (Cohan, 1997, p. x), and the narrative constructions of masculinity have been indicative of this dialectic ever since: norma tivity on the one hand, challenging concepts and the notion of pluralism on the other. The shadow of the man in the gray flannel suit was also one of the major themes to provide food for thought during an international workshop on masculinities that took place in Dresden in June, 2010. Organized by Professor Stefan Horlacher (Dresden), the workshop Between the National and the Transnational, 1945-1980 was part of the ongoing research project Towards Comparative Masculinity by Professors Stefan Horlacher and Kevin Floyd (Kent State), sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Kent State University. Dedicated to in-depth analyses of national masculinities in British and American literature and culture, the project seeks an understanding of the larger context for the emergence of more plural, culturally differentiated, and ultimately transnational masculinities. The analytic methods employed show both diversity and commonality, with regard to redefinitions of Britishness and Americanness as well as masculine identities. At the heart of nationhood and gendered identity lies, we believe, the notion of narrative, crucial in conceptualizations of both rubrics, given that masculinity, like femininity, is fictional construction (Murphy, 1994, p. 1). In this workshop designed to facilitate conversation about the impact of globalization, migration, subaltern subjects, and social mechanisms on different narrative forms, literary scholars from three different continents met in Dresden to discuss changing notions of masculinity as reflected in postwar British and American literature and culture, with the explicit goal of providing comparative analyses and exchanging perspectives on gender-oriented interpretations of texts, plays, films, and photographs. After the welcome address by THOMAS KUHN, Dean of Studies of the Faculty of Linguistics, Literary Studies and Cultural Studies at Dresden, representatives of the two cooperating universities shared their perspectives on the transatlantic framework and the aim of the workshop. Thus, Ronald J. Corthell (Kent State) stressed the importance of transatlantic cooperations as opportunities for comparative studies. According to Corthell, the Humboldt Partnership is treading on new territory, not only as far as the regular exchange between Dresden and Kent State is concerned, but also with regard to transcultural dialogue on masculinities and interdisciplinary work, outside of the monolithic, one-sided framework of traditional scholarship. It was up to STEFAN HORLACHER (Dresden) to provide the Theoretical and Cultural Framework for such comparative approach toward Masculinity Studies (see also Horlacher, 2006). Horlacher not only pointed out the social necessity of such discipline in light of the perceived crisis of manhood, but also highlighted the importance of literary studies, that is, their potential to question seemingly immovable, essentialist models. By locating masculinity at the intersection of literary and cultural studies, works of literature (to give but one example) become accessible as parts of the symbolic order where culture reflects on itself. …

LA NOCIÓN DE PLURALISMO EN EMMANUEL LéVINAS

En el siguiente artículo, el planteamiento filosófico-metafísico de Lévinas es abordado desde su formulación de la subjetividad como Yo y Mismo hasta la aparición del Otro, para plantear que la idea de lo infinito anuncia la orientación del Mismo hacia el Otro.<br />De este modo, la noción de pluralismo en Lévinas queda enmarcada en dos condiciones fundamentales: la subjetividad separada fundada en la idea de lo infinito, y su orientación hacia el Otro que proviene de la idea de lo infinito en el Otro.

How to Tell Better Cosmic Stories

In response to Hostettler, I clarify the intended meanings of ‘After Critical Realism?’ My point is not to abandon critical realism but to develop it further and make it more self-reflexively critical. Bhaskar's journey through different stories about our place in the cosmos is a dialectical learning process from Althusserian scientist existentialism, via an all-encompassing dialectical philosophy as a theory of moral good grounded in every expressively veracious action or remark, to a pluralist notion of God. Bhaskar's questions are deep and his answers pertinent, but there are more hypothetical, scholarly and dialogical ways of telling ethico-political and cosmic stories.

Mosul, the Ottoman legacy and the League of Nations

This article looks into the workings of the special Commission on Mosul sent by the League of Nations after World War I. The Commission was assigned to determine whether the province of Mosul should be part of the new Republic of Turkey or of British mandatory Iraq. Its chief guiding principal was the new notion of national self-determination. Yet the people of Mosul, like other Ottoman communities, had belonged to multiple groups simultaneously, identifying by family, location, occupation and faith. Such plural notions of identity were inconsistent with the nation-state model that had recently been reified by the League of Nations. The effort to define affiliations based on a European taxonomy that emphasized ethnicity and nation clashed with Mosulis' older Ottoman-style affiliations, proved initially confusing and then quite frustrating to the Commissioners.

Pluralism and its Purposeful Introduction to a Jewish Day School

Pluralism is an ambiguous term with a multiplicity of meanings. In recent decades there has been a proliferation of a newer category of Jewish Day Schools, the Jewish Community School. Jewish Community Schools distinguish themselves by positioning pluralism as a foundational concept of their school's ethos. Very little is known about how individuals within these schools understand the notion of pluralism. This case study uses in-depth interviews, documentary research, and school observations to determine how policymakers in one such Community School think about pluralism in general, and how this understanding influences their vision for the school's Jewish Education.

How monist is heterodoxy?

Some heterodox economists, most notably Tony Lawson, have come under suspicion of not being true pluralists, but ‘strategic pluralists’: their advocacy of pluralism is thought to be merely instrumental to a hidden monist agenda. This paper does not aim to judge the accused but rather to assess the accusations; the focus is on clarifying the notion of pluralism itself. First a paradox is found to lie at the core of scientific pluralism. Different responses to this paradox can be traced to different views on pluralism found in the literature. The resulting classification allows an analysis of the current controversy among pluralists and provides an understanding of the different aspects of the debate.

How do teachers think about pluralism in a Jewish Community School?

Pluralism is a notion that regularly appears in education literature regarding social injustice or teaching for democracy. Over the last decade, a new type of Jewish Day School has emerged, the Jewish Community School. These Jewish Community Schools distinguish themselves by adopting pluralism as one of their core values. What is unclear is how teachers within such a school think about the notion of pluralism. This case study describes and analyses the way that members of a Jewish Studies faculty in one Jewish Community High School thinks about pluralism and the pedagogical implications of this thinking.

The inequalities of medical pluralism: Hierarchies of health, the politics of tradition and the economies of care in Indian oncology

India has an eclectic health system that incorporates biomedical as well as traditional, complementary and alternative medicine (TCAM). Our understanding of the co-existence of these therapeutic modalities in this diverse, postcolonial and developing nation is extremely limited, and in the context of cancer care, to our knowledge no sociological work has been carried out. Contemporary Indian oncology represents a fascinating site for examining the interplay and articulation of forms of tradition/modernity, economic progress/structural constraint and individual beliefs/cultural norms. In a context of an increase in the prevalence and impact of cancer in an ageing Indian population, this paper reports on a qualitative investigation of a group of oncology clinicians' accounts of 'pluralism' in India. The results illustrate the embeddedness of patient disease and therapeutic trajectories in vast social inequalities and, indeed, the intermingling of therapeutic pluralism and the politics of social value. We conclude that notions of pluralism, so often espoused by global health organisations, may conceal important forms of social inequality and cultural divides, and that sociologists should play a critical role in highlighting these issues.

Discourse, Power, and Energy Conflicts: Understanding Welsh Renewable Energy Planning Policy

The Welsh Assembly updated their planning policy for renewables in the form of Technical Advice Note 8 (TAN 8) on renewable energy in 2005. The policy-making process was in line with the Assembly's commitment to participative and stakeholder policy-led development. I explore the policymaking process through a Foucauldian understanding of power, discourses, and policy rationalities, identifing four primary rationalities within the TAN 8 policy: spatial planning, energy targets, reliance on large-scale wind power, and the rationale that the traditional planning paradigm can resolve deep-seated conflicts over renewable energy. I explore how these rationalities emerged and were reinforced through the powerful discourse coalitions that emerged within the TAN 8 stakeholder group. As a result, I suggest that ‘consensus' should not necessarily be the aim of participative policy making and that the participatory process should not be relied upon to deliver ‘rational’ planning policies, leading to sustainable development. Instead, we must embrace the notion of pluralism with an understanding of the discursive powers at work within the policy-making process.

Effective delivery of evidence-informed practice

There is much support from the UK government for the development and implementation of policy and practice that is based on evidence. For over a decade, Research in Practice (RiP) has developed a web of interconnected strategies for delivering evidence-informed practice to professionals at all levels in children’s services. This article examines why the RiP model has proved sustainable and has grown in size and influence over the past 12 years. The article starts with a brief outline and illustrative examples of RiP’s mechanisms of delivery. Delivery is then explored in relation to the concepts of the individual, the champion, the agency and the network to enable analysis of need and impact at these levels. Cross-cutting this framework is the argument that an essential factor in RiP’s success has been a move away from traditional evidence-based practice towards the adoption of a pluralistic notion of ‘evidence’ (Blewett, 2007). Furthermore, the use of the term ‘informed’ deliberately places human agency at the heart of decision making. In RiP’s approach, research is a key but not sole determinant of decision making and evidence is inclusive of practice wisdom and service user views. In particular, the development of RiP’s Change Project method is described as a response to deepening engagement with practice. It is argued that engagement with research as a process, rather than the pure transfer of research knowledge, is essential in delivering effective methods of evidence-informed practice.

Causation in the Social Sciences

All univocal analyses of causation face counterexamples. An attractive response to this situation is to become a pluralist about causal relationships. “Causal pluralism” is itself, however, a pluralistic notion. In this article, I argue in favor of pluralism about concepts of cause in the social sciences. The article will show that evidence for, inference from, and the purpose of causal claims are very closely linked.

Just Above the Fray - Interpretive Social Criticism and the Ends of Social Justice

The article lays down the broad strokes of an interpretive approach to social criticism. In developing this approach, the author stresses the importance of both a pluralistic notion of social justice and a rich ideal of personal growth. While objecting to one-dimensional conceptions of social justice centering on legal equality, the author develops the idea of there being multiple "spheres of justice", including the spheres of "care" and "merit". Each of these spheres, he argues, is subject to historical interpretation. He furthers this view by arguing that the social basis for these different spheres is best understood against the canvas of an ideal of self-fulfillment and individuality. Based on the elaboration of these two sets of premises—a pluralistic conception of social justice and a collective ideal of personal self-fulfillment—the article outlines the basis for and challenges inherent to the practice of interpretive social criticism.

'Mixing and Matching': The Shape of Everyday Hindu Religiosity in Singapore

AbstractReligious pluralism is the norm rather than the exception in contemporary societies but this is by no means a recent phenomenon. This is also an empirical field that students of religion have long engaged theoretically. Such scholarly attention has generated a plethora of conceptual tools to make sense of religious encounters in multi-religious settings. As such, a number of phrases — 'religious pluralism,' 'religious diversity' and 'multi-religiosity' — abound in the relevant literature and the notions of pluralism, multiplicity and diversity inform these discussions. Such expressions as 'religious syncretism' and 'religious hybridisation' have also been proposed to address the various interactions witnessed across a variety of religious traditions. I argue that this terminology and the conceptual frames it advances need to be queried in order to assess their value and relevance for theorising interactions amongst religious traditions. This paper focuses on everyday forms of Hindu religiosity in urban Singapore and the kinds of engagement and participation that occur across religious traditions in this multi-religious context. Through my ethnography, I problematise the above-mentioned noted categories, as well as the sense-making strategies they have led to, while proposing alternative modes of approaching the realm of everyday religiosity at the level of practice.

Constitutionalism, Legal Pluralism, and International Regimes

The international legal order, although pluralist in structure, is in the process of being constitutionalized. This article supports this claim in several different ways. In the Part I, I argue that most accepted understandings of constitution would readily apply to at least some international regimes. In Part II, I discuss different notions of pluralism, and demonstrate that legal pluralism is not necessarily antithetical to constitutionalism. In fact, one finds a great deal of constitutional pluralism within national legal orders in Europe. Part III puts forward an argument that the European Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization are constitutional jurisdictions. In the Conclusion, I respond what I take to be the most important objections to these claims.

The ideal of equal health revisited: definitions and measures of inequity in health should be better integrated with theories of distributive justice

The past decade witnessed great progress in research on health inequities. The most widely cited definition of health inequity is, arguably, the one proposed by Whitehead and Dahlgren: "Health inequalities that are avoidable, unnecessary, and unfair are unjust." We argue that this definition is useful but in need of further clarification because it is not linked to broader theories of justice. We propose an alternative, pluralist notion of fair distribution of health that is compatible with several theories of distributive justice. Our proposed view consists of the weak principle of health equality and the principle of fair trade-offs. The weak principle of health equality offers an alternative definition of health equity to those proposed in the past. It maintains the all-encompassing nature of the popular Whitehead/Dahlgren definition of health equity, and at the same time offers a richer philosophical foundation. This principle states that every person or group should have equal health except when: (a) health equality is only possible by making someone less healthy, or (b) there are technological limitations on further health improvement. In short, health inequalities that are amenable to positive human intervention are unfair. The principle of fair trade-offs states that weak equality of health is morally objectionable if and only if: (c) further reduction of weak inequality leads to unacceptable sacrifices of average or overall health of the population, or (d) further reduction in weak health inequality would result in unacceptable sacrifices of other important goods, such as education, employment, and social security.

Alain Locke on Race and Reciprocity: The Necessity of Epideictic Rhetoric for Cultural Pluralism

In this essay, Alain Locke's work is read as a search for an epideictic rhetoric. Locke, through his philosophy and editorial work, helps rethink the significance of epideictic rhetoric by articulating a pluralist notion of values and accounting for competition between value-systems. He suggested that race can and should be celebrated, and that acts of celebration should use aesthetic sensibilities capable of displaying the value of race. Showing the connections between Locke's philosophy and the rhetorical tradition illustrates the value and potential of a multi-cultural citizenry and the necessity of epideictic rhetoric in producing, maintaining, and negotiating relationships within such a community.