Passive Subjects Research Articles

Resilience of traditional midwifery in Southern Cameroons: 1922-1961

It is instructive that well organized healthcare systems existed in Africa before contacts with the outside world. During this period, midwifery services were prioritized because societal wellbeing depended on the quality and availability of child and maternity services. The arrival of European colonial imperialists with their assumed superior culture/civilization and their colonial economic agenda caused the introduction of Western biomedicine. This was intended in part to maintain a constant and healthy work force for colonial exploitation. Drawing from the case of Southern Cameroons, this paper sets out to examine the resilience of local midwifery practices in the face of an imposed Western biomedicine. The paper was informed by both primary and secondary sources. Archival information and oral interviews made up the primary sources while books, published articles and dissertations constituted the secondary sources. The discriptive historical approach was employed in the analysis of the work. This study submits that: African women were not passive subjects on issues of their reproductive life but agents that could reject imposed values and stick to their tested practices. The ideological and cultural arrogance that characterized the introduction of Western biomedicine had the unintended impact of galvanizing an unexpected resilience of traditional medical practices. Consequently appreciable change in favor of Western biomedicine was only witnessed in the period after independence.

Who holds [educational] authority? Framing the authoritarian turn in the conservative “gag orders” in the United States

ABSTRACT Amid the democratic backsliding of the United States and other nations, this paper problematises how authoritarian policy trends complicate who holds educational authority over teacher pedagogy, the contested public education arena, and schools as knowledge production sites within a democratic society. This paper situates the entrenched war on the educated in the United States within a broader political context that has unearthed nationwide educational policies premised on anti-democratic tenets of authoritarian populism. Drawing upon language from enacted educational ‘gag orders’ in multiple states, this paper highlights how conservative policy language positions teachers as passive policy subjects and illustrates the aims of these educational orders to curtail academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and redefine what is true and worth knowing within the contested public education domain. Finally, this paper calls to attention the risks posed to democratic institutions and stakeholders in the wake of authoritarian turns occurring both nationally and globally.

Waiting for Discovery and Support?

PURPOSE: In this paper, we explore and contrast the Swedish state and NGO arguments for initiating two changes in national educational degree objectives in Swedish teacher education: one regarding sex and cohabitation education, and the other regarding support for pupils with ʻneuropsychiatric difficultiesʼ such as autism and ADHD (here referred to as neurodivergent pupils). APPROACH: Using critical policy analysis, we compare the arguments from the government as well as responding bodies for introducing the two objectives, with a focus on neurodivergent pupils. RESULTS: Our findings suggest that discourses concerning sex and cohabitation education for all pupils and support for pupils with ʻneuropsychiatric difficultiesʼ respectively derive from different educational ideologies and reproduce different ideas about pupils as active citizens versus passive objects of interventions. The objective of sex and cohabitation education is framed within a norm critical discourse putting forward reflexivity and identity, and where pupils are active subjects to be involved in the process. In contrast, neurodivergence is framed within a deficit approach as neurobiological, individual impairment, and a special educational problem that should be managed by professionals. It is seen as a risk for school failure, where neurodivergent pupils are passive objects of professional discovery and support. CONCLUSION: In a Swedish educational policy landscape, stressing the importance of educating pupils in line with ideas of children as right-bearers, our exploration illustrates how ʻall pupilsʼ versus neurodivergent pupils, within teacher education, are positioned as belonging to different categories of citizens: as active subjects of rights, versus passive subjects of care. This perception of neurodivergence, we argue, hampers progress towards embracing neurodivergence as a social category, and neurodivergent pupils as political subjects.

Perpetuating gender hierarchy in Indonesia through language: A deconstructive study on the online Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia

Gender relations in Indonesian social practices tend to marginalize women, as manifested in various methods and instruments. One of them is the use of language in Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (online KBBI), an Indonesian dictionary compiled by the Indonesian government. The dictionary is the primary standard and official reference for lemmas, meanings, and examples of sentences. This study aims to analyze the unequal relations between men and women reflected in linguistic units in the online KBBI and uncover their hidden meanings. Data was collected by searching, reading, and recording (documenting) the gender-related lemmas (words), definitions of lemmas, and examples of their use in sentences in the online KBBI from 7 May to 5 June 2022, and applying Derrida’s deconstruction approach to the words and their related features, with its main principles including (1) determining the meanings that are not determined (undecidable), (2) dismantling the ideology of the text (binary logic), (3) reversing the metaphysical hierarchy and neutralize it, and (4) disseminating the meaning. This study found a metaphysical hierarchy between women and men in binary concepts, including domestic-public hierarchy, passive object-active subject hierarchy, and negative-positive hierarchy for women and men regarding lemmas, meanings, and examples of sentences in the online KBBI. These findings suggest that KBBI tends to perpetuate unequal metaphysical hierarchies between women and men in Indonesia. This article is expected to contribute to language awareness and attitudes in Indonesia in addition to improving the online KBBI in terms of its language use.

Rules regarding the hearing of the defendant

The defendant is the person against whom the criminal action was initiated. The defendant is a part of the criminal incrimination process, both during the criminal investigation and during the preliminary phase or trial phase, being a passive subject of both the criminal investigation and the civil action taken. Authors, co-authors, accomplices, instigators of the crime in the form of a consummated or exhausted attempt, who have criminal capacity, can be accused. Both physical and legal persons can be defendants. One or more persons can acquire the quality of defendants during the criminal investigation. The purpose of the work is to show the important role of taking the defendant's statements and the way of listening to them by the judicial bodies. Unlike the statements of the injured person, which can be considered as having, in principle, more credibility and probative value, the statements of the defendants cannot have this characteristic, taking into account on the application of the procedural provisions and the consideration of the mental resources that determine each category of participants to process of adopting a sincere position or, on the contrary, insincere. With regard to the way of listening to the defendant, we will note that the New Code of Criminal Procedure provides that the following rights and obligations must be made known to him for the first time: the right not to give any statement during the criminal trial, the right to consult the file, the right to have a chosen lawyer, the right to propose the administration of evidence , the obligation to appear at all the summons of judicial bodies, the obligation to communicate any change of address, the obligation to tell the truth.

Educational procedures guided by emancipatory principles for education on soils in higher education: A proposal

ABSTRACT The traditional paradigm of education, although outdated, still supports Soil Educational procedures in several Brazilian universities. However, the strategic documents of these institutions (Institutional Development Plan-IDP, Institutional Political Project-IPP and Pedagogical Projects of Courses-PPC's) support a critical vision of education, which converges with the emancipatory paradigm and with the purpose of Soil Education (SE), which is the formation and transformation of subjects for conscious actions in reality. To overcome this problem, we propose educational procedures guided by emancipatory principles for two disciplines related to the subject of soils in Higher Education (HE) in a traditional paradigm structure, with the objective of meeting the conception of education supported in the strategic documents of a Brazilian public university and achieving the purpose of SE. A bibliographical research and documental analysis of the strategic documents were carried out to form a theoretical and methodological base. In addition, emancipatory principles were considered in the elements that made up the educational procedures in SE. The proposal was analyzed and discussed based on the behavior of these principles in the structure of the disciplines. To verify how the proposal articulates with the conception of education defended by the university, the analysis started from the didactic-pedagogical aspects expressed in the IDP, IPP, PPC's and Teaching Plans of the disciplines involved in the research. We emphasize that it was possible to propose and apply educational procedures on soils with emancipatory principles within a traditional paradigm structure. Some principles were considered in essence, while others could not be considered or were only partially considered, showing that the traditional paradigm limits principles that go against its foundations. The proposal responded more to the concept of critical education defended in the strategic documents than the Soil Educational procedures with traditional principles elaborated and used by professors, since the proposal considered the student’s protagonism, the constitution of their autonomy, knowledge as relational, research as an educational principle, interculturality and procedural and continuous evaluation. On the other hand, procedures with traditional principles considered students as passive subjects, knowledge was seen as fragmented and their approach was made in an authoritarian way, disregarding students’ knowledge and the evaluation was quantitative. Furthermore, the convergence of educational intentionality between Education in Soils and education with emancipatory principles allows us to state that the emancipatory paradigm was an alternative to achieve the educational and formative purpose in educational processes on soils.

A Multidisciplinary Vision of the Criminal, Social and Occupational Risk Consequences of the Use of Police Force

(1) Background: The use of force by public and private security forces is currently an issue of great relevance because of the potential injuries caused by any excessive use of force by either active or passive subjects or a deficit in the real mastery of appropriate physical intervention techniques (PITs). For this reason, certain traditionally used physical intervention techniques have been questioned by scientific research studies and punished by justice. On the other hand, certain media have dealt with this matter in a biased and unfair manner by broadcasting videos where the use of force by police officer is displayed out of context. As a consequence, this problem has been brought under the spotlight, causing general uneasiness of the communities and rapidly spreading over social networks while favoring all sorts of parallel judgments. (2) Research method: A suit was equipped with 19 inertial measurement units (IMUs) and a Biomechanics of Bodies software application for Marras analysis of the data collected on trajectory, trunk twisting velocity, sagittal angle, load, and nature and severity of the injuries associated with the different intervention techniques examined. (3) Results: According to the data registered, the implementation of operational tactical procedures (OTPs) reduces the probability of injuries and leads to a more satisfactory outcome. (4) Conclusions: The implementation of operational tactical procedures, together with an awareness of the risks associated with the excessive use of force by public and private security forces and bodies, could reduce the risk of injuries suffered by both officers and citizens.

Privatizing water in the Atacama Desert and the resurgence of Atacameño indigeneity

Until the mid-1980s, the Atacameño indigenous people were broadly caricatured as Chilean peasants or herders. In the 1980s, they began a process of resurgence as indigenous in order to attain legal recognition. Structural approaches to indigeneity have explored this phenomenon by seeing Atacameños as passive subjects whose identity has been imposed, fixed, or mediated by the law and by external actors (e.g. bureaucrats, intellectuals, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)). Problematizing these viewpoints, I argue here that Atacameños, rather than adopting indigeneity based on predetermined structural factors or instrumental motivations, are active agents in their resurgence and the articulation of their identity against cultural assimilation and extractive industries. Based largely on oral evidence collected from indigenous leaders and other key actors, I show that the dispossession and threats that the neoliberal Chilean Water Code brought to the Atacameños served as critical historical sediment for the resurgence and articulation of their indigeneity. The results problematize the hegemonic perspective that presents authenticity as a requisite for indigeneity and indigenous people as colonial power victims. Instead, Atacameños are situated agents who revived their identity within a broader process in order to challenge dominant structures concerning access to resources, principally water.

Karol Wojtyła reads and interprets Max Scheler

The present article addresses Karol Wojtyła’s “encounter” with Max Scheler’s thought, expressed mainly in his work Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die Materiale Wertethik (Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values). Three stages can be clearly distinguished: (1) first inspirations, which came about in particular as a result of contact with Rev. Ignacy Różycki, Jacek Woroniecki OP, and Roman Ingarden; (2) the duration of work on the habilitation thesis, which was based on Scheler’s above-mentioned work; and (3) further application of the philosophical findings. Wojtyła concluded that Scheler’s ethical system was unfit for scientific interpretation of Christian ethics. The reason was that the German philosopher focused almost exclusively on the emotional sphere and did not discern the person’s causal sphere. In a case like this a person is incapable of realizing values, and can only feel them, as a passive subject. However, inasmuch as Christian ethics is based on the thesis whereby man is the agent of the ethical good and evil of his own acts, perfecting himself through ethically positive values, and devaluing himself through negative ones, Scheler’s concept is absolutely unacceptable to Wojtyła. Still, Wojtyła discerned an eminently positive aspect in Scheler’s approach, namely, the very method of the phenomenological analysis of ethical facts on the phenomenal and experiential levels. Moreover, by attempting a certain integration of classical metaphysics with phenomenological analysis, Wojtyła – in a peculiar and creative way – developed his own philosophical position.

Forgotten pioneers? The Karelian connection and the role of Kaale women in the mobilization of Finnish Roma at the start of the twentieth century

While studies of Finnish Kaale pioneer men within the process of Roma mobilization in Finland have become more common in recent years, little to no information or discussion has thus far focused on the role of Roma women within these processes, their visions for the future of their communities, and their connection to the shaping of Roma civic emancipation in Finland. Based on recently discovered archival sources, this article addresses these gaps by exploring the lives of two key Roma women: Ida Blomerus and Sofia Schwartz. This article also analyzes the ways in which their engagement can only be understood by considering the dynamics occurring in a particular region of the country, Karelia. Through this, the aim of this article is to demonstrate that Romani women´s involvement constitutes a crucial aspect of the civic emancipation movement in Finland and that Roma women were neither passive subjects nor silent voices within the history of Roma mobilization.This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0.

Distorted Korean Idol’s Scandal, Deceitful Media, and The Role of Forensic Linguistics

A celebrity’s scandal can be an enthralling theme for the media to produce news, either factual or fabricated. This research primarily focuses on distorted content or media manipulation to report it. It explores the correlation between misleading news and the motives behind twisted reality. The method used in this research is a descriptive qualitative method through the lens of the forensic linguistics approach, supported by Villa’s interpretative pragmatics (2010). The collected data were from selected sources of distorted media reporting, especially about a highly considered Korean singer’s crime, known Seungri of Bigbang. His charge was not direct link with sexual abuse and systematic drugs, which is in fact unrevealed wealthy people committing them. Even nonconsensual disclosure of sexually-explicit videos was committed by other celebrities. Yet, the media fraudulently blended and misrepresented Seungri as the key figure of the scandal in a club named ‘Burning Sun’. Society was misled to hate and blame him. This research shows that passive constructions, lexical references, and subject matters of the texts become linguistic evidence of fact distortion. Manipulating celebrity’s scandal is driven by political goals, such as creating mistrust and bewildering larger audiences, especially in South Korea about proving the justice system as the actual culprits are withdrawn. This research is noteworthy since there are interwoven claims of the power of media to wriggle out of legal punishments after spreading distorted facts. Hence, it implies that pragmatics is applicable and efficacious to prove the case. It leads to defamation by media, correlated with forensic linguistics. To reveal the distorted facts by deceitful media, this study expectantly contributes in enhancing social awareness of the truth behind blatant public outrage and its social consequences.

Listening to the river: Representing non‐human needs and interests in debates about water governance and management

AbstractThe social sciences and humanities have become increasingly critical of the anthropocentrism that supports exploitative relations with the non‐human domain. This shift in positionality recognises that non‐human beings and ecosystems are not humankind's passive subjects but the co‐creators of shared lifeworlds. A logical consequence is a greater appreciation of the rights and interests of non‐human beings and ecosystems, both in law and in the decision‐making processes that shape human‐environmental relations. This requires some form of pan‐species democracy that simultaneously respects biocultural diversity. Drawing on ethnographic research on the River Stour in Dorset, this paper considers how we might reimagine the notion of community to encompass human and non‐human inhabitants in river catchment areas. It considers what ‘speaking for the river’ would entail, and what a river might want to say. Employing anthropological approaches to art and material culture, examining ‘what things do’, and the multi‐species ethnography that illuminates interspecies relations, this requires an imaginative leap, not into faux animism, but into serious consideration of the river as an active partner in human‐non‐human relations. This requires us to understand the river's properties and behaviours, and how it acts both creatively and destructively upon all of the living kinds that depend upon it—and vice versa. What does a river need to ensure its own flourishing and that of its dependent communities? This paper considers how ‘listening to the river’ enables the representation of its needs and interests in decision‐making processes.

In place, with power: (Re)conceptualising accountability in national non-government organisations

This paper analyses how a cross-section of non-government organisations (NGOs) in Australia interpret accountability under a neoliberal regime that combines the ‘soft’ power of markets with the ‘hard’ power of a new regulator. We focus on national NGOs, defined as NGOs whose primary services, beneficiaries and funders are co-located within one nation-state. National NGOs increasingly deliver core public services, but accountability in these organisations is understudied. Our paper addresses two questions: (i) What, if anything, is distinctive about how national NGOs interpret accountability; and (ii) How does the neoliberal mix of market and regulatory power affect accountability so defined? We conduct a hermeneutic analysis of 23 in-depth interviews and 80 consultation documents from national NGO Directors, CEOs and regulators. Our findings demonstrate initially the distinctive significance in national NGO accountability of what human geographers term place : Localised connections between people and socio-spatial context that persist even – arguably, especially , as neoliberalism diffuses accountability to national markets and/or standards. We also show how the effects of regulatory power on national NGO accountability are Janus-faced, largely because national NGOs are both subjects and agents of this power. This finding problematises prior research that polarises between viewing NGOs as either beneficiaries or passive subjects of regulatory power. We interpret the effects of regulatory power on national NGO accountability as more ambiguous, being dependent on both local contours of ‘place’ and how these NGOs assimilate regulatory power into their often-idiosyncratic assemblages of beliefs, norms and governance.

Legal Pluralism on Dyarubbin: Country-as-Lore/Law in Western Sydney, Australia

In Australia, urbanisation is synonymous with ecological and cultural fragmentation. In places that became cities through deeply colonising processes, this destruction is imbricated with the relegation of Indigenous Lore/Law below English-derived law. In this article we argue for appropriate recognition and respectful intercultural engagements with Country-as-Lore/Law as a counter to the conception of land as a passive subject of anthropocentric law. Weaving together autoethnography, historical research and more-than-human geographies we identify the colonial practices that perpetuate ecological and cultural fragmentation in Sydney, Australia, while providing a novel, situated engagement with the humans, animals, plants, lands and waters that co-become to co-create particular and overlapping more-than-human legal landscapes. We show how Indigenous-non-Indigenous collaboration grounded in Darug Country-as-Lore/Law refracts and disperses the colonial logics of the state on urban Country that is ostensibly held, yet certainly neglected, by the Crown.

A foot in both countries: the effect of origin-country enfranchisement on migrants’ political interest and partisanship

ABSTRACT How does emigrant enfranchisement affect immigrants’ political interest and partisanship? The ballot access granted by the origin country has both a symbolic and informational value for individuals. It returns political dignity to emigrants and transforms them from passive subjects to political actors, targeted by political campaigns and get-out-the-vote efforts. For the majority of the enfranchised, this empowerment spills over onto their attitude not only as emigrants toward the origin country but also as immigrants toward the country of residence. However, those international migrants who perceive strong rejection from the local environment are pulled away from residence-country politics, as the stark comparison between rights granted extraterritorially and political isolation around them becomes even starker. By combining existing cross-national surveys with data regarding electoral regulations, and an original survey of Latin American immigrants in the United States, this paper offers a unique insight into the political attitudes of individuals who are caught between origin and residence countries.

ONSHORE-OFFSHORE TRENDS IN THE TEMPORAL RESOLUTION OF MOLLUSCAN DEATH ASSEMBLAGES: HOW AGE-FREQUENCY DISTRIBUTIONS REVEAL QUATERNARY SEA-LEVEL HISTORY

Abstract Surficial shell accumulations from shallow marine settings are typically averaged over centennial-to-millennial time scales and dominated by specimens that died in the most recent centuries, resulting in strongly right-skewed age-frequency distributions (AFDs). However, AFDs from modern offshore settings (outer shelf and uppermost continental slope) still need to be explored. Using individually dated shells (14C-calibrated amino acid racemization), we compared AFDs along an onshore-offshore gradient across the southern Brazilian shelf, with sites ranging from the inner shelf, shallow-water (< 40 m) to offshore, deep-water (> 100 m) settings. The duration of time averaging is slightly higher in deeper water environments, and the AFD shapes change along the depositional profile. The inner shelf AFDs are strongly right-skewed due to the dominance of shells from the most recent millennia (median age range: 0–3 ka). In contrast, on the outer shelf and the uppermost continental slope, AFDs are symmetrical to left-skewed and dominated by specimens that died following the Last Glacial Maximum (median age range: 15–18 ka). The onshore-offshore changes in the observed properties of AFDs—increased median age and decreased skewness, but only slightly increased temporal mixing—likely reflect changes in sea level and concurrent water depth-related changes in biological productivity. These results suggest that on a passive continental margin subject to post-glacial sea-level changes, the magnitude of time-averaging of shell assemblages is less variable along the depositional profile than shell assemblage ages and the shapes of AFDs.

Citizenship Violence and the Afterlives of Dutch Colonialism

Through a close reading of Anton de Kom’s Wij slaven van Suriname (We Slaves of Suriname), this essay explores the complex legal, symbolic, social, and political lives of differentially positioned humans in the Dutch colonial and postindependent context. Firstly, De Kom’s 1934 book reveals the fundamental dualism between legal subjects and rightless bodies in the Dutch colonial context and how European law and the rights of citizens enabled the maximum exploitation of colonized and enslaved bodies. Contrary to universalist-inclusive and progressive notions of legal citizenship and the law, the concept of what the author terms “citizenship violence” seems appropriate to appreciate the dynamics revealed in Wij slaven. However, as De Kom demonstrates, the colonized were not passive subjects; they resisted citizenship violence in multiple ways. Secondly, in discussing the racialization of citizenship and belonging in contemporary Dutch society as part of broader European patterns, the essay highlights some ominous colonial afterlives.

The Role of Women as Agents and Beneficiaries in the Hungarian Family Planning System (1914–1944)

The article outlines the developments in the national concept of family planning with particular reference to the female agents of healthcare and social policy measures from the turn of the century up to 1944. After the lost war and the shattering Treaty of Trianon in 1920, Hungary found itself in a deepening demographic crisis. High infant mortality and criminal abortion rates, the deficiency of graduate midwives, and the one-child system in the south-western part of the country concerned both politicians and intellectuals. The paper aims at connecting the medical, political, and social discourses based on archival and press sources on family planning by analyzing the role and agency of different women's organizations. I argue that state social policy measures and aid actions of the church and civic organizations and associations principally assigned two types of roles to women. On the one hand, they were active participants and agents, on the other hand, they were passive subjects and beneficiaries of social assistance activities. Furthermore, the article highlights the role of medical professionals (doctors, midwives, nurses) intersecting with the role of women as active agents in the execution of social policy measures. By integrating documents on family planning such as journal articles, political speeches and criminal abortion data into the national and political discourses, the article claims that women have often played contradictory roles in the process of family planning. Midwives and nurses who served as gatekeepers either helped women by providing access to birth control and abortion or complied with the regulations of the pro-natalist state, depriving women of choice.

The criminal law protection of healthcare workers as persons entrusted with public functions

Since the second half of the 20th century, criminal law has offered enhanced protection to healthcare workers as persons exercising public service functions, and to this day, such specific protection affects the lives and work of health professionals. The aim of the study is to present how healthcare workers' enhanced criminal protection has developed since the second half of the 20th century, how the scope of its subjects has evolved and broadened, and what it really contains. It is also aimed at presenting how the crime of assault on persons exercising public service functions in this field is reflected in criminal statistics. The study was carried out by reviewing the relevant legislation, judicial practice and literature, as well as by analysing the data provided, upon request, by the Office of the Prosecutor General. Along with the expansion of the scope of passive subjects of the crime of assault on persons exercising public service functions, the range of healthcare workers has also expanded, and modern Hungarian criminal law has been offering them a higher level of criminal protection. Judicial practice has expanded this circle even further, thus, the current range of persons entitled to enhanced criminal protection is particularly wide. However, this protection is not general in nature, but it is linked to specific healthcare activities, which is confirmed by the available and analysed statistical data. Healthcare workers, being persons exercising public service functions, are entitled to enhanced criminal protection, as a result of which they are more likely to be victims of the crime of assault against persons exercising public service functions. Orv Hetil. 2023; 164(6): 227-233.

The Impact of Remote Work on Managerial Compliance: Changes in the Control Regime over Line Managers

Labour process approaches have extensively documented the impact of digitalisation and remote work on managerial control, though the role of managers has been less explored. This article fills that gap in the extant literature by examining how adopting remote work affects managerial compliance with corporate goals. Particularly, it shows that this development entails a process of de-institutionalisation and re-institutionalisation of the control regime operating over lower-level managers to act on behalf of companies. These processes are driven by corporate decisions but also by the managers’ attempts to negotiate this regime. Overall, the article claims the need to study managers as agents rather than as a mere extension of the management function or passive subjects of corporate restructurings. The arguments are based on a study conducted in a multinational mining company operating in Chile, which adopted a research-in-action approach and included interviews, document reviews and a survey of line managers.