Quest For Emancipation Research Articles

Thoreau’s civil disobedience from Concord, Massachusetts: global impact

Major wars or battles, political revolutions, scientific breakthroughs, or profound social changes often constitute substantial historical turning points. The nineteenth century was a period of intense struggle for America, wrestling with its identity and unity, the quest for emancipation, and conflicts with Mexico. Amid these turbulent times, an initially inconspicuous essay, “Civil Disobedience,” penned in 1849 by a then-unknown Henry David Thoreau, proved to be a turning point that eventually changed the world. The essay provided the framework for a conscience-driven protest, which, when applied on a mass scale, gave the world an effective and non-violent method of war. The power of the voice rooted in conscience and courage, an approach sans violence, inspired “successful” movements across cultures, countries, and time. The essay Civil Disobedience laid the foundation for a conscience-driven, non-violent struggle against injustices that changed the course of human history and remains the best hope for fighting injustices in the future. While less recognized in the annals of popular culture than the political machinations of Machiavelli or the strategic doctrines of Sun Tzu, Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience has wielded a far more profound influence. In a world still riven by conflict and injustice, Thoreau’s 1849 essay offered the most impactful turning point in humanity’s struggle against injustice. It remains as compelling as ever, offering a blueprint for confronting tyranny not with arms but with the power of human conscience. It serves as a reminder that revolutionary changes sometimes begin with the quietest voice.

Legendary Expatriation of American Women Writers: Salon Coteries in Adventures of the Mind and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

The expatriate life of American women writers based upon salon coteries in Paris in the early 20th century is probed into in this paper. The expatriate American women writers constructed an impressive female community through artistic salons led by Natalie Clifford Barney and Gertrude Stein as well as cosmopolitan bookshops run by Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier. When post-war despair and cultural bankruptcy prevailed, they found a new approach in a different world, far from their hometown, and thus promoting American-European cultural exchanges, diversifying modernist ecosphere. The influx of expatriate women also benefited gender equality and feminist writing. Salon coteries reflected their quest for emancipation under constraints and nurtured collective creativity. In the modernist hemisphere belonging to them, the expatriate women writers shared new modes of language, and found their own freedom to write, to voice, to live. The innovation of the paper is the detailed study of salon hostesses Barney’s memoir Adventures of the Mind and Stein’s life narrative The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, with the analysis of public sphere theory and life-writing theory to highlight the memory of collaborative salon space—a created gender-equal sphere of women writers, and their self-discovery spirit in the legendary expatriation.

Voice of resistance and quest for emancipation from patriarchy: A study of dalit women writings

From time immemorial women have been the subject of victimization, oppression and subjugation by the patriarchal society which always prefer to see women in the periphery. When the question arises about Dalit women, the situation worsens as the Dalit women are considered the subaltern of the subalterns. They are the oppressed among the oppressed as they are exploited double – by the patriarchal society as a whole and by the Dalit patriarchy. But the history of discrimination and traumatic experiences of the Dalit women has not been effectively heard and represented as it lacks agency owing to the homogenization of the similar experiences of the elite class women. In this regard, several Dalit women writers took the initiative to register their literary presence through autobiographies, memoirs, narratives etc. with the main objective to expose the society which has objectified them, discriminated them, victimized them, stripped them off their identity and always looked upon them with a patronizing stance. The present article aims to highlight the plight of the Dalit women, the multiple layers of oppression and the struggle towards emancipation, as depicted in the literary writings of some selected Dalit women writers.

Emancipatory Concepts for Newer Understanding – A View from the Periphery

The present that we dwell in gets constituted by varied institutional and ideological fixations that shape our views, rationalities, desires, and they also condition the way we perceive our realities. We live in a society where commercial wealth gets acclaimed, destructive power gets sought, markets become the priority, and experts rationalise. In the current global structure, we see the establishment of fixed regimes that, through various ways, perpetuate a myth that the existing state of global condition is but natural. Even if one is a firm believer in the current global neoliberal structure, the question arises; who decides what is ideal in the first place? The authors here discuss the need for emancipation from existing practices. We move forward by tinkering with the term emancipation and following a nomadic reflexive methodology. The article looks at the historical conditions that necessitated the desire for emancipation and the various concepts developed in the quest for emancipation. The concepts mentioned can be used as a stepping stone and function as threshold concepts for those from diverse educational backgrounds.

Black November: Interrogating The Niger Delta Question

The paper interrogates the thematic preoccupations of Jeta Amata’s Black November on the vexed issues of the Niger Delta in Nigeria. The issues bordering on the quest for emancipation from injustice, environmental degradation, deprivation, inhuman treatment, negligence, are at the nexus of the agitations and militancy in the region. It draws inferences from what the movie overlooked and what it portrayed such as the failure of dialogue births violence. The objective is to highlight the problems in the Niger Delta and give credence to the thematic concerns raised by the director. Based on Relative Deprivation Theory (RDT), which sees violence as a product of frustration borne out of depriving people of their rights, denial of justice; a sense of oppression sets in that then leads to reactions that may be violent. The method adopted is descriptive analysis. Findings reveal that the Niger Delta region is much misunderstood, abused and betrayed by its own people, the media, Nigerian government, oil multinationals and the world at large. It concludes that the misunderstanding is largely a product of media misinformation and that of ignorance on the part of stakeholders and that the filmmaker succeeded in getting his message across.

Philosophy and Women Emancipation in Africa

The various cultures of the world embody customs and traditions through which they display their specific identities. The social aspect of culture encapsulates the various strata of human social institutions with the attendant characteristics they express. Within the socio-natural milieu, humanity is gender driven. A society is either patriarchal or matriarchal depending mainly on the historical circumstances that must have informed such designation. The popular feeling of wide discrimination against women is found mainly in patriarchal societies where their freedom, fundamental human rights are deemed limited by the artifice of the men folk. Such setting tends to adopt a sense of gender divide which ascribes inferiority to the feminine gender. The sense of injustice informed by this kind of situation gave meaning to the necessity of women emancipation. This paper therefore brings into focus the African women existing mainly in a patriarchal driven setting of whose culturally informed subjugation engender sustained quest for emancipation. Using Philosophical tools, the paper examines the essence, nature and approaches to African women emancipation. It submits that in as much as African cultural practices which defile women dignity should be abolished in totality, African women emancipation ought not to take the African woman away from her essential motherliness. Keywords: Philosophy, Women Emancipation, Africa DOI: 10.7176/JPCR/50-06 Publication date: September 30th 2020

Ideology, power and inclusion: using the critical perspective to study how older ICT users make sense of digitisation

Critical Internet and media scholarship has primarily focused on contributing to theoretical debates within the field of media and communications but few empirical studies have applied this theoretical approach. This article uses data on older active ICT users’ understandings of digitisation. It draws inspiration from Boltanski’s pragmatist sociology of critique and the notion that people’s own take on their situation are fruitful sources of information in the quest for emancipation. It employs the notions of ideology, power and inclusion – which are central to critical scholarship – to make sense of older active ICT users’ understandings of digitisation. In doing so, it explores the fruitfulness of the critical lens for studies of ICT users while bringing attention to older active ICT users’ critical capacities.

Desafios para a pesquisa e pós-graduação em Serviço Social

Resumo O objetivo do ensaio é indicar desafios para a pesquisa e a pós-graduação em Serviço Social ressaltando a relevância da pesquisa e da produção do conhecimento nesse campo de estudo e intervenção. Articula o pensamento considerando o ato de pesquisar como um ato soberano de liberdade e a luta pela liberdade como uma marca da história da humanidade, em busca permanente pela emancipação. Considera os cinco primeiros planos nacionais de pós-graduação para identificar demandas e tendências da pós-graduação brasileira e destacar a pós-graduação em Serviço Social nesse contexto. Utiliza como metodologia a pesquisa bibliográfica e documental com abordagem histórica e qualitativa. O aporte a pesquisa teórica e aplicada ao Serviço Social no âmbito da pós-graduação ressalta aspectos relacionados à história, ao sentido e à consolidação dessa área como campo de estudo, de formação e de intervenção.

Empowering Women: The Role of Emancipative Forces in Board Gender Diversity

This study investigates the effect of country-level emancipative forces on corporate gender diversity around the world. Based on Welzel’s (Freedom rising: human empowerment and the quest for emancipation. Cambridge University Press, New York, 2013) theory of emancipation, we develop an emancipatory framework of board gender diversity that explains how action resources, emancipative values and civic entitlements enable, motivate and encourage women to take leadership roles on corporate boards. Using a sample of 6390 firms operating in 30 countries around the world, our results show positive single and combined effects of the framework components on board gender diversity. Our research adds to the existing literature in a twofold manner. First, our integrated framework offers a more encompassing, complete and theoretically richer picture of the key drivers of board gender diversity. Second, by testing the framework empirically, we extend the evidence on national drivers of board gender diversity.

Freedom Rising. Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation

Bibliography: Nestler, Christian: Freedom Rising. Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation, PCS, 1-2-2015, pp. 202-204. https://doi.org/10.3224/pcs.v6i1-2.15

Commitment, Identity and Dreams of Independence in Contemporary Scottish Playwriting

In the pre-referendum period, the Scottish theatrical world expressed what makes the Scottish Nation different as well as the pride, affection and commitment of her people. The country’s quest for emancipation and independence is part of a historical continuum in which the English Other has been omnipresent. In this paper, a few examples of how the Scottish theatrical world showed interest and commitment during the pre-referendum period will be given and analysed.

Religious Politics in Mandate Palestine: The Christian Orthodox Community Controversy in the Thirties

The paper elaborates on the power struggle over the patriarchal election that took place in the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem in the 1930s and the key role of the Mandatory Authorities in its resolution. The lengthy electoral process reignited the old controversy between the Greek hierarchy and the Arab congregation over the institution’s alleged national character and centralized administrative structure. Consequently, the conflict became entangled in the Arab quest for emancipation from Greek ‘cultural imperialism’. The British position in the conflict evolved according to two stages: a) an early pro-Arab stance, determined by British colonial objectives in Palestine; and b) a late pro-Greek stance, as a result of the new British diplomatic priorities at the eve of the Second World War. The British government followed a ‘divide and rule’ policy: it abstained from resolving the conflict, while exploiting the existing inter-communal divisions to its own political ends.

O pós-estruturalismo e os estudos críticos de gestão: da busca pela emancipação à constituição do sujeito

Os Estudos Críticos em Gestão (ECG) são formados por bases epistemológicas distintas. Contudo, haveria algum ponto em comum que fosse capaz de dar um status de campo de estudo aos ECG? Alguns autores afirmam que a busca pela emancipação seria uma característica comum às correntes de pensamento que fazem parte dos ECG. Diante desse panorama, este artigo problematiza se a emancipação realmente é uma característica presente no movimento pós-estruturalista, enfocando principalmente as possíveis diferenças entre o pós-estruturalismo e a Teoria Crítica sobre esse tema, bem como analisando quais as possíveis distinções existentes entre autores pós-estruturalistas relacionadas à emancipação e à subjetividade. Para tanto, realizou-se uma pesquisa bibliográfica em estudos que discutem as principais características dos Estudos Críticos em Gestão. Conforme será descrito, o pós-estruturalismo deixa claro que pretende romper com a dicotomia existente na concepção de sujeito, na qual, em um polo, encontra-se um sujeito completamente autônomo (sujeito individual) e, no outro, um sujeito determinado pelo social (sujeito coletivo), rompendo com a dicotomia agência versus estrutura. Entende-se que emancipação é um ponto-nodal entre os Estudos Críticos em Gestão e não somente uma característica comum. Nesse sentido, o que existem são emancipações no plural, pois há diferenças conceituais entre e dentro das abordagens dos Estudos Críticos em Gestão que têm implicações diretas nos conceitos de universalidade, subjetividade e emancipação, bem como em suas formas de ação política.

A dimensão histórica dos discursos acerca do empreendedor e do empreendedorismo

Este ensaio teórico busca identificar e discutir diferentes apropriações da ideia de empreendedorismo ao longo da história por meio dos discursos acerca do empreendedor e de seu papel na sociedade capitalista ocidental. Os contextos selecionados para reflexão são: (a) o período clássico de formação do capitalismo; (b) o advento do capitalismo monopolista; e (c) o capitalismo em sua atual configuração. Como os discursos não são neutros, a identificação de tais descontinuidades permite desvelar argumentos ideológicos que muitas vezes naturalizam os fenômenos históricos que permeiam os discursos e corroboram o atual resgate de um modelo específico de empreendedor, elegendo a empresa capitalista contemporânea como centro do processo socioeconômico de geração de riqueza, de renda e de trabalho. Como resultado da pesquisa, sugere-se que a (re)produção de discursos sob a lógica do sistema de mercado permite que, nos dias de hoje, a ideia de empreendedorismo desempenhe papel primordial na sociedade: assegurar que cada indivíduo assuma, como suas, as metas de reprodução do sistema capitalista. Por essa mesma razão, tal processo se distancia da busca pela emancipação e, ao contrário, promove modelos opressivos de comportamentos individuais destinados, em conjunto, a trabalhar ideologicamente para o alcance dos objetivos do capital.

Implications And Challenges Of Nigerian Universities As Learning Organizations

University education as a learning organization started in Europe in the eleventh century, and one of thefirst universities in Africa was the one in Timbuktu. Fafunwa (1971) has indicated that the 1945 reportsof the Commission on Higher Education in the colonies have shown that since the world wars,Nigerians have always demonstrated an insuppressible desire for higher education because it wasseen as an important weapon against the colonial masters in the quest for emancipation and nationaldevelopment. As early as 1944 therefore, there were already about 10 Nigerians who were studying inSierra Leone at the Fourah Bay College of the University of Durham, about the same time educationalhistorians have reported that there were as many as 150 Nigerians studying for various first degrees inthe United Kingdom.

Culture, Social Science & the Philippine Nation-State

AbstractThe self-understanding of a national community as a culturally homogeneous and spatiotemporally delimited entity provided the model for a distinct sphere of the social. It was this new understanding of the social as a theoretical category that made sociology possible. The modern nation-state and sociology are intimately linked. But even as social science requires the resources of the nation-state, it is equally dependent on a vigorous civil culture distinct from the state. Society is the ultimate source for the state's legitimacy. Society arises out of an association of which the nation-state, however important, is but one expression.Technological and economic development is now often used as justifications for the nation-state. But in the present global context, the nation-state is no longer the primary source for knowledge or investment, at least for countries such as the Philippines. The boundaries between nation-states have become porous as center and periphery are increasingly intertwined. Under these conditions, identities no longer represent cores but rather intersections of experience.No longer grounded in a local routine of everyday life with its corresponding set of collective images, culture increasingly becomes merely representation or the domain of signifying practices rather than the arena of practical significations. Under these conditions, where culture is not necessarily collectively shared but only synchronically networked, it becomes almost a personal quest rather than a communal affair. The expression of such a diasporal and subjective identity is manifested in the rise of new forms of ethnicities. In these contexts, culture can be visualized as landscapes and experienced as representations.Cartesian space-time assumes the homogeneous nature of extension/duration, such that any point in the system of coordinates can be expressed as a value of a given function. For modernity, the social can be plotted or imagined as one such function, all of whose members are linked to one another spatio-temporally. A nation-state is a collectivity whose functional representation assumes that all its members share a simultaneous present, and hence, a commonly anticipated future. Any point on this set of spatio-temporal coordinates is functionally linked to other points through membership in a common order called the nation-state.Nation-states see themselves as culturally homogeneous to facilitate the rational negotiation of difference. This view of culture is possible (but not necessary) because modernity is based on a sense of simultaneous presentness generating a commonly anticipated future. Modern society is an association of individuals functionally coordinating their actions to this simultaneous present. However, globality is making other presents possible, resulting in a world with an excess of meaning but a lack of sense.A feature of modernity is the crucial role of knowledge for the expression, maintenance and reproduction of power. While knowledge represents a form of power in all societies, certain modes of power can only be expressed through their relationship with knowledge. Hence, the functionalization of society is a pre-condition for power to be exercised through its control of knowledge. Power requires new forms of knowledge, such as social science, for its effectiveness in modern society. A critical social science is necessary to counterbalance modern society's functional goals if social science is also to play an emancipatory role.he indigenization of social science is an attempt to formalize this distinct perspective but its insistence on unproblematically using the nation as its referent limits its usefulness. In the present condition, the nation-state is no longer the primary site for knowledge-production or identity-formation. These practices now involve personal, local, global and other choices, following their increasingly polyvalent nature. In its attempts to imagine the nation through indigenous concepts, a Philippine social science risks essentializing Filipinohood by reducing its differences. Instead, a Philippine social science should explore the rich sources of difference within civil and global society, as well as point out the contingent and narrow interests of nation-states, thereby helping to establish a universal basis for understanding. This understanding sees social science as part of the human quest for emancipation.

The Autonomy and Democracy of Indigenous Peoples in Canada and Mexico

This article has two objectives. One is to explain how, in the current international relations environment, the trend of global democratization is producing, ironically, the opposite trend of ethnic fragmentation of the multinational state and how this tension is resulting in new sources of international conflict. The other is to analyze the way in which, as a result of the aforementioned trends, local conflicts within the nation-states are representing a challenge to the nation-state as we know it. Taking advantage of the democratization wave, ethnic groups have launched, some with violence, some peacefully, a quest for emancipation, which constitutes a threat to the idea of the unitary nation-state and asks questions about the nature of civil society.

The Labour Church Movement, 1891–1902

Historians of British socialism have tended to discount the significance of religious belief. Yet the conference held in Bradford in 1893 to form the Independent Labour Party (I.L.P.) was accompanied by a Labour Church service attended by some five thousand persons. The conference took place in a disused chapel then being run as a Labour Institute by the Bradford Labour Church along with the local Labour Union and Fabian Society. The Labour Church movement, which played such an important role in the history of British socialism, was inspired by John Trevor, a Unitarian minister who resigned to found the first Labour Church in Manchester in 1891. At the new church's first service, on 4 October 1891, a string band opened the proceedings, after which Trevor led those present in prayer, the congregation listened to a reading of James Russell Lowell's poem “On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves,” and Harold Rylett, a Unitarian minister, read Isaiah 15. The choir rose to sing “England Arise,” the popular socialist hymn by Edward Carpenter:England arise! the long, long night is over,Faint in the east behold the dawn appear;Out of your evil dream of toil and sorrow—Arise, O England, for the day is here;From your fields and hills,Hark! the answer swells—Arise, O England, for the day is here.As the singing stopped, Trevor rose to give a sermon on the religious aspect of the labor movement. He argued the failure of existing churches to support labor made it necessary for workers to form a new movement to embody the religious aspect of their quest for emancipation.

Tableaux of Renunciation: Wharton's Use of The Shaughran in The Age of Innocence

TABLEAUX OF RENUNCIATION: WHARTON'S USE OF THE SHAUGHRAN IN THE AGE OF INNOCENCE James W. Gargano* The first chapter of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence opens like a parodie introduction to a lavish period-piece. Wharton assembles her patrician characters at New York's Academy of Music "on a January evening of the early seventies" to hear Christine Nillson singing in Gounod 's Faust"1. The stage setting is re-created with meticulous detail and satirical flourishes: "The foreground, to the footlights, was covered by emerald green cloth"; the huge pansies were "considerably larger than the roses, and closely resembled . . . floral penwipers"; and "Madame Nillson" as Marguerite appears in "white cashmere slashed with pale blue satin, a reticule dangling from a blue girdle."2 With deft strokes and sophisticated condescension, Wharton operatically accommodates her fictional characters to her design. May Weiland, representing the "abysmal purity" of New York's aristocratic maidens, shyly clutches her liliesof -the-valleys with "white-gloved finger tips" and apparently fails to understand Faust's attempt to seduce the chaste Marguerite; Ellen Olenska, the worldly and estranged wife of a notorious Polish count, causes genteel shudders when she appears in the Wellands' box dressed in a "dark blue velvet gown rather theatrically caught up under her bosom"; Newland Archer, May's dillettantish suitor, modishly arrives at the opera just in time to hear the Daisy song, to champion Ellen, and to publicize his attachment to May; and Laurence Lefferts and Sillerton Jackson, New York's authorities on "form" and pedigree, judge the social maneuvers taking place in the boxes. Because of its footlight brilliance, the opera scene has naturally attracted more critical attention than Edith Wharton's presentation, in Chapter 13, of a sentimental episode from Dion Boucicault's once-famous play The Shaughran? In fact, of the many critics of The Age of Innocence, only Cynthia Griffin Woolf mentions The Shaughran, and she consigns her notice to a footnote.4 Yet, the brief incident from Boucicault 's drama provides a major insight into the novel's development; if Gounod's opera is the theatrical counterpart of Archer's quest for unli- *James W. Gargano is an Emeritus Professor of English at Washington and Jefferson College. His articles have appeared in the Sewanee Review, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, American Literature, College English, Novel, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, and many other journals. Among his books are Critical Essays on Henry James and Critical Essays on John W. DeForest. 2 James W. Gargano censed freedom, Wharton's variations on the carefully etched scene from The Shaughran reveals her intention of making restraint and renunciation her dominant themes. The two spectacles, thus, project contrasting motifs and stress the difficult balance that keeps Archer, like so many of Wharton's other protagonists, vacillating between social rebellion and conformity. In the final analysis, however, the abnegation Wharton arbitrarily associates with The Shaughran and with social stability triumphs over her hero's search for self-gratification. Gounod's Faust, which, with Nillson as Marguerite, was actually performed in New York in 1874, serves Wharton as an authentic backdrop that emphasizes Archer's desire to liberate himself from his artificial and claustrophobic world.5 Even without a Mephistopheles to abet him, Archer is romantic enough to risk status and respectability for "forbidden love." His quest for emancipation is marked by a Faustian impulse to ignore the humane values that underlie responsible social intercourse: He tests all the legitimate and some illegitimate avenues of escape from his fate and measures the depth of his own ambivalent allegiance to what Wharton satirizes as tribal rituals and codes. His engagement to May results in the early discovery that her Diana-like beauty conceals a sterile innocence that will starve his strong emotional and aesthetic cravings. In contrast, he finds Ellen Olenska's European tastes and behavior disturbing , enlarging, and irresistible. From the moment he enters her arty house on the outskirts of New York's bohemia, he adventurously perceives his own capacity for growth. In Edith Wharton's romantic idiom, he begins to see New York's tightly knit society from the perspective of Samarkand. His nature more and more awakened, he...