Scholarly Reflections Research Articles

Consciously quarantined: a review of the early anthropological response to the global COVID-19 lockdown

Whilst quarantine has been experienced in a multitude of ways around the world, for some anthropologists the quietening of public movement was met with a flurry of attentive typing. For those who were consciously quarantined, a social science response to COVID-19 was sought at University College London through a call for posts as part of the UCL Medical Anthropology blog; capturing the real-time observations and scholarly reflections on the unfolding pandemic situation as it reached its height across the globe. The global flow of coronavirus – both as a literal microbial agent and as an idea – has played out on the ‘coronascape’ in multiple ways since it exploded onto worldwide consciousness in early 2020. From an anthropological perspective, concerns have oscillated around a number of crucial themes, from (micro)biopolitics, governance, and sovereignty; the defence of borders from foreign bodies and post-colonial Others; a strengthening of medical pluralism and the global biomedical hegemony, and concerns over where to go from here as second-waves and the social consequences of such loom large. Such themes have often interrelated and tangoed with one another as individuals have reflected upon their significance. In this review we provide a critical overview of the first fifty-seven posts that were sent to the blog in the initial months of the pandemic; with contributors exploring the developing pandemic in over twenty countries, and with posts visited daily by over two thousand visitors from across the world during the months of the UK lockdown (March-May).

How to Learn Together, Apart

Jones offers insights about learning together apart Claude Coste notes that the first session in particular suffered a number of interruptions: the retransmission not working, the irritated amusement of the students, having to send out for a technician, Barthess own embarrassment at the many technical failings The pandemic has enabled an efflorescence of thoughts on the modalities of isolated thinking and feeling What follows are flash reflections (half-cooled hot takes) on what the continuing pandemic might entail both for critical theory and applied pedagogy

Unskewing the Data Value Chain: A Policy Research Project for Equitable Platform Economies - Background Paper

Development outcomes in the digital era are closely tied to the ability of countries to harness the data value chain and ensure fair and just digital economies. However, as things stand, the digital economy is anything but equitable. IT for Change’s two-year regional project, Unskewing the Data Value Chain: A Policy Research Project for Equitable Platform Economies aims to assess current policy gaps and explore new policy directions on data value chains that can promote equitable and inclusive economic development. As part of the call for researchers to build the project's global research network, IT for Change published a background paper that lays the ground for researchers to investigate policy frameworks and evolve scholarly reflections on future directions for the governance of data value chains.

Layering, unknowing, and unlocking: Thinking beyond structure through arts-based research

While it is still disputed in some academic traditions, the potentials of artistic practice as research and arts-based research have demonstrated that creative engagement with materials, processes and ideas lead to holistic insights that move well beyond the goals of objective research and its quest for solid answers. The article retraces our experience as Art Education instructors guiding graduate students through an online capstone arts-based research course, as we endeavored to bring our students' artists’, researchers’ and in-service K-12 art teachers’ identities into a productive place of “knowing-in-being," an embodied and relational model of inquiry. Emphasizing students' voices and their thinking throughout their a/r/tographic and phenomenological projects, we reexamine their artistic experiences and scholarly reflections as the course unfolded, arguing that our students' identity as teaching artists transformed in the process of making and thinking in, with, and through arts-based inquiry. The discussion of the paper is a narrative about pedagogical strategies and curricular decisions that were adopted as we designed, taught, and reflected upon the outcomes of the course. The article emphasizes how the processes of layering, unknowing and unlocking constituted experiential thresholds through which students discovered new creative capacities as artists, scholars and art teachers.

Peer reviews of teaching as appreciative inquiry: learning from “the best” of our colleagues

Research on peer review to date has focused on its role as a formal compliance mechanism, a process for enhancing and developing teaching practice, and as a considerable source of anxiety for educators. In this paper, we draw on scholarly reflections from our experience of undertaking a reciprocal, formative peer review in an Australian higher education setting. Our findings provide novel conceptual, empirical, and practical insights by providing the first application of an appreciative inquiry framework to the process of peer review. We argue that adopting an appreciative inquiry framework assists us in learning from “the best” aspects of our colleagues’ teaching. Moreover, it offers a framework for understanding and responding to some of the challenges long-associated with peer review. In doing so, it presents potential benefits pertaining to student retention and learning outcomes, while opening up new possibilities for researching and practicing peer review.

Digitalization and the greening of supply chains

PurposeThis study provides a reflective overview on the role of traditional and emergent digitalization and information technologies for leveraging environmental supply chain sustainability – while reflecting on potential trade-offs and conflicts of digitalization and greening.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use relevant literature and literature from Industrial Management and Data Systems (IMDS) research published in this journal over the past 50 years. They also use their knowledge and over 30 years of research experience in the field to provide professional scholarly reflections and perspective.FindingsThe authors provide a focused and succinct evaluation for research directions. A pressures, practices and performance framework sets the stage for pertinent research questions and theoretical needs to investigate the nexus of digitalization and green supply chain management. The authors provide two frameworks with exemplary practices and research for traditional and emergent digitalization and information technology. Their reflection concludes with a summary and steps forward.Social implicationsThe authors show how research and practice can be used to affect supply chain greening with digitalization and information technology. They observe that care should be taken given that these technologies can paradoxically simultaneously offer solutions to environmental degradation and potentially be a source of environmental degradation across the supply chain.Originality/valueThis work provides a summary and unique perspective that links traditional and emergent digitalization technology to green and environmental sustainability work. The area has not seen a clear summary and path forward and shows how IMDS literature has contributed to the field for decades.

Thinking with the drone – visual lessons in aerial and volumetric thinking

This paper set out to do three things: First, it proposes that a given technology (here drones) may prompt scholarly reflections around key ontological dimensions of the world. The advent of drones thus invite urban theorists to ‘think with the drone’ and reflect upon if our primarily two-dimensional conceptualisation of cities and spaces needs revision. Answering this in the affirmative leads to a need for so-called ‘volumetric thinking’ as the second task of the paper. The emergence of drones necessitates us to comprehend the ‘space between the buildings’ and the vertical dimension as key dimension of urban space (which for many still are confined to a simple two dimensional ‘flat world’ view). This touches upon the third ambition of the paper. By adding a new ‘point of view’ in a literal sense drones also prompt us to think about aerial visions of the city. How can volumetric thinking be coupled with the new aerial vision in such a way that it enhances our critical understanding of the spatial conditions of cities? The position of this paper is that we need the volumetric ‘corrective’ not just to counter old habits of ‘flat cartographies’, but also to prevent the new aerial views opened up by drone technologies to simply become an extension of the ‘old two-dimensional view’.

Autoritõlke teoreetilisest ja praktilisest väärtusest Jaan Kaplinski luuletuse "Valgus ei saagi vanaks" näitel / On the theoretical and practical significance of self-translation on the example of Jaan Kaplinski's poem "Light Does Not Get Old"

Autoritõlke teoreetilisest ja praktilisest väärtusest Jaan Kaplinski luuletuse "Valgus ei saagi vanaks" näitel / On the theoretical and practical significance of self-translation on the example of Jaan Kaplinski's poem "Light Does Not Get Old"

SOCIAL SCIENTISTS AS TECHNICIANS, ADVISORS AND MEANING PRODUCERS

In this paper, we are addressing three issues that are at the core of scholarly reflections about the societal role of social science knowledge: (1) Social scientists tend to follow – although this is not always a deliberate choice – one of three models that describe their role as the producers of practical knowledge. For the sake of simplicity we have called the three models the “model of the technician”, the “model of the advisor” and the “model of the meaning producer”. (2) Due to the need for social inquiry to adopt a particular, restrictive perspective of its domain, useful knowledge is a complicated matter. Hence the need to put into question a widely supported notion at least among social scientists: When asked about the reasons for the limited “power” of social science knowledge the response frequently is that the adequacy and practical usefulness of social science knowledge is a function of its capturing the full complexity of what indeed are complex social phenomena. (3) Social scientists often tend to lament the marginal impact their intellectual efforts have on society, and they look with great envy across the divide of the so-called two cultures, wondering how and when they will be able to achieve the same kind of success and prestige the natural sciences and technology appear to enjoy in most societies. However, this unhappy view systematically understates the actual power of social science knowledge, in particular its role as a mind maker or meaning producer.

Lewis Barnavelt and the Rainbow over New Zebedee: Queering The House with a Clock in Its Walls

The paper discusses The House with a Clock in Its Walls (1973) by John Bellairs and its film adaptation, directed by Eli Roth (2018), from queer theory and gender studies perspectives. The author of the article aims to overview and develop existing queer in‑terpretations of the first novel in the Lewis Barnavelt series, with contextual references to the cycle’s subsequent volumes, and to conduct a queer theory ‑inspired analysis of Roth’s motion picture. The genre represented by the novel and the film is also consid‑ered by taking the scholarly reflections on the queer aspects of the Gothic and the hor‑ror into account. The author concludes that although both versions of the story fail at portraying femininity in an unconventional way, they succeed in showing that queer‑ness and, more generally, the Otherness should be highly appreciated and valued.

Endō Shūsaku’s Wonderful Fool: Gaston, a Christ-Figure for Japan

This article aims to identify the hidden and obvious parallels between Endō Shūsaku’s Christ-figure and Gaston Bonaparte in Endō Shūsaku’s novel Wonderful Fool. I argue that the post-war writer develops and realizes a Christ-figure that would take root in the Japanese religious landscape through the character of Gaston. Building on the late author’s literary works and other scholarly reflections, this study attempts to piece together and reorganize Endō’s inculurated Christ-figure in relation to the French protagonist in Wonderful Fool. Tracing the Catholic author’s literary and theological development of Gaston enriches the research into Endō’s Christology and Japanese Christianity.

Leading article: A meta-reflection on my emerging as a scholar of action research

The self-enquiry reported in this article is conducted at a meta-level of meaning making. A meta-level of reflection is typical of a meta-cognitive mind-set; it entails reflecting on my reflection from a scholarly point of view. The theory on whole brain thinking informs the conceptual framework for my research and teaching practice; therefore I have given new meaning to action research as being whole brain action research, reflection as whole brain reflection, and for the purpose of this article specifically, whole brain meta-reflection. My scholarly reflections focus on what is reported in publications. Data sets gathered over the years are not reported per se as it has already been made public. Instead, I reflect at macro level on existing data. What is made public by means of this article is my reflection on my reflections in the past. It is inevitable that the raw data I have drawn from forms the core of my article. Therefore, a great number of references indicate me as author or co-author.

Introduction: Compiling ‘Endangered Knowledge’

This essay introduces a special issue of KULA on the subject of ‘endangered knowledge,’ comprising 22 essays by 34 authors working across a wide array of disciplines and fields. Guest editors Samantha MacFarlane, Rachel Mattson, and Bethany Nowviskie have assembled a collection of scholarly articles, pedagogical reflections, and project reports that take up theoretical and practical considerations of archival salvage and erasure, the persistence of the public record, indigenous knowledge, and the politics of loss. The special issue explores endangerment as a critical category of analysis for records, data, collections, languages, ecosystems, and networks.

The Madness of Jodh Singh: Patriotism and Paranoia in the Ghadar Archives

My paper focuses on Jodh Singh, a marginal figure in the archives of the Ghadar Party, who was arrested for High Treason against the United States for his role in the “Hindu Conspiracy” plots aimed at the British government of India. Incarcerated in a California prison, Singh was moved to a sanatarium on displaying symptoms of insanity. Through a close reading of a web of archival documents and scholarly reflections—at the center of which lies the report of a commission appointed to inquire into his mental condition—I examine the account of the madness of Jodh Singh as a statement about patriotism and paranoia. In engagement with the work of Foucault, Guha, and scholars of the Ghadar movement, I describe how the record of Singh’s experiences indicts the juridical-legal-medical framework of American society as operating on a distinction between legtimate and illegitimate madness. I also examine how Jodh Singh points to the glimmers of a critique of the self-image of the Ghadar Party as a revolutionary movement committed to egalitarian principles. I conclude with a reflection on what Jodh Singh might tell us about the relationship between madness, political aspiration, and the yearning for solidarity.

Understanding Democratic and Distributed Leadership: How Democratic Leadership of School Principals Related to Distributed Leadership in Schools?

The purpose of this study was to determine democratic and distributed leadership perceptions of teachers in their school and to explore the relationship between democratic and distributed leadership. This study intended to enrich and expand scholarly reflections on democratic and distributed leadership as regards considering the association between them, thereby deepening our understanding of leadership. Correlational research design was used as a research design in the study. Study population included teachers working at high schools in Eskisehir district in Turkey. Stratified sampling was used as a sampling method. The study sample included 462 teachers working at high schools. Descriptive statistics for democratic leadership suggested that respondent teachers perceive democratic leadership in their school in moderate level. Support and supervision were perceived as distributed leadership functions of the leadership team in schools. Regarding the leadership team characteristics, it was concluded that leadership teams are moderately perceived as coherent. The study results also revealed that there is a strong relationship between democratic leadership, distribution of leadership functions and coherent leadership team characteristics.

Engaging with popular media through tourism: A brief introduction

Featuring research cases in Australia, China, Japan, Switzerland and the United States, from cosmopolitan New York to the American wilderness, this Special Issue reviews the ways in which popular media can be engaged through tourism across the globe. In this introduction, we set the scene for the six papers that follow, which collectively demonstrate the diversity of touristic, cultural and societal engagement with different forms of popular media through travel and tourism. The qualitative research papers present rich theoretical analysis and diverse and deliberate methodological approaches to critically examine a range of theoretical themes and constructs, including more amorphous concepts such as mediatised mobility, nationalism, gendered narratives and inter- and intra-personal authenticity, to more practical demonstrations of destination choice, contents tourism, placemaking and fandom. Each paper features a different popular media, including music, film, television series, animation, advertising and social media, and contributing authors critique the manifold uses of these mediums in tourism as well as their theoretical, managerial and operational implications. Also presented in this introduction is a brief explanation of the mentoring process in which some of the contributors participated to develop their scholarly practice and reflections with the support of a ‘critical reader’.

On Responsibility in the Classroom and the Ubiquity of Politics: Postelection Reflections from the United States and Canada, by Way of the World

AbstractThe outcome of the recent US election has stirred emotions and become a turning point in history. It has invoked deep reflections on our responsibility as teachers educating future generations of information professionals and affected the North American library and information science (LIS) space. In this space, the United States and Canada share the same foundational values but find themselves in different geopolitical situations implementing these values in practice. In the context of postelection reality, through personal flashbacks and critical scholarly reflections, this article brings together the views of two educators from opposite sides of the border: views on the ubiquity of politics in the classroom, on information as a human right, and on the North American LIS landscape, now divided by more than geographic borders.

Cannibal Translations: Cultural Identity and Alterity in Early Modern China and Latin America

Inspired by Columbus's short- lived misreading of accounts that describe the supposedly man- eating Caniba as the soldiers of the Great Khan of China, this essay analyzes representations of cannibalism in China and Latin America in the early modern age. This anecdote, involving cannibal (mis)translation between Europe, the Americas, and China, forms the basis for a reflection on early modern constructions of cultural identity and alterity. Instead of looking through a European perspective that would treat the Americas and China as cultural antipodes—one a territory in need of civilizing, one an object of civilizational envy—the essay focuses on a comparison of representations of cannibalism in China and Latin America by paying particular attention to the tension between, on the one hand, the impulse to frame cannibalism as barbarian atrocity that would deny its practitioners humanity and, on the other hand, cannibal imaginaries as an integral part of civilization. In dialogue with scholarly reflections on the early modern period as a global constellation as well as with recent theories of intercultural comparison, this essay's consideration of cannibal translations between China and Latin America performs and tests a type of comparison that combines an attention to links between two cultures with observations on the patterns of similarity and difference that structure such comparisons.

Christianity 2017: Reflections on the Protestant Reformation by Tony Equale

Reviewed by: Christianity 2017: Reflections on the Protestant Reformation by Tony Equale Paul F. Knitter Tony Equale, Christianity 2017: Reflections on the Protestant Reformation. Willis, VA: Boundary Rock Publishers, 2016. Pp. 256. $23.00, paper. Among the many scholarly reflections marking the 500th Anniversary (2017) of the Protestant Reformation, this one is sure to stand out. Scholar, activist, former Catholic priest, Equale makes a carefully crafted historical and philosophical case that the Reformation actually missed its mark. What needed reforming was never really reformed. The problem was not a misunderstanding of justification but "a misrepresentation of the character of 'God' derived from and in turn nourishing a pathological evaluation of human nature." That, he tells us, is "the point" of his book (p. 178). From Equale's perspective, the God who tormented Luther and who supported the theocratic political structures of European kings and princes (as well as of Roman emperors after Constantine) was not "the Jewish Yahweh that Jesus knew as 'Father'" (p. 5). The loving God of Jesus was "irreparably assassinated" first by "a Platonic matter-spirit metaphysics, coupled to a cosmic good-evil dualism that defined humanity as morally crippled and imprisoned by matter, and 'God' as remote and inaccessible." But, the most influential assassin of Jesus' God was, according to Equale, Augustine with his doctrine of a punitive personal God "who ruled a corrupt humankind, saving some and damning others" and who demanded obedience to both himself and the temporal rulers (p. 178). Luther's "tower-experience" that saved him "by faith alone" identified the problem of this transcendent, punitive God but did not solve it. Even after his "sola fide" revelation, Luther believed he was just as corrupt and that God was just as wrathful as before; "by Scripture alone" he knew he would not be punished only because of the substitutionary death of Christ. "Luther never challenged that 'God' [Augustine's]; he simply found a way to live with it or vault over it, through faith" (pp. 53, 37, 194). Equale laments that this transcendent, [End Page 470] punitive God "is as solidly in place today for religionists and 'atheists' alike as it was in 1517" (p. 54). However one might assess Equale's analysis of Luther and Augustine, his own suggestions for how our understanding of God and the human condition can be reformed are both empirical (grounded in contemporary evolutionary science) and inspiring (equally grounded in scripture and tradition). Connecting Aquinas's understanding of the divine as "esse in se subsistens" (being subsisting in itself) and science's understanding of matter-as-energy, Equale concludes that "there is only one 'esse' and it is 'God'" (p. 96). Therefore, "'matter' and 'spirit' no longer refer to separate things. Neither word is valid any longer. What exists is one 'substance' bearing the qualities of both. I call it 'matter's energy'" (p. 227). He concludes that "the only metaphysics that will support Jesus' message [that humans are able to live God's life and love] is some form of panentheism . . . we are 'indeed God's offspring' . . . by nature we 'live and move and have our being in 'God'" (p. 197). Critical of the reformers, Equale intends here to carry on their still urgent task. His multiple writings, offered outside the precincts of the academy (see https://tonyequale.wordpress.com), deserve a greater hearing and conversation within the academy. Paul F. Knitter Union Theological Seminary (emer.), New York, NY Copyright © 2017 Journal of Ecumenical Studies

Social scientists as technicians, advisors and meaning producers

In this paper, we are addressing three issues that are at the core of scholarly reflections about the societal role of social science knowledge: (1) Social scientists tend to follow – although this is not always a deliberate choice – one of three models that describe their role as the producers of practical knowledge. For the sake of simplicity we have called the three models the “model of the technician”, the “model of the advisor” and the “model of the meaning producer”. (2) Due to the need for social inquiry to adopt a particular, restrictive perspective of its domain, useful knowledge is a complicated matter. Hence the need to put into question a widely supported notion at least among social scientists: When asked about the reasons for the limited “power” of social science knowledge the response frequently is that the adequacy and practical usefulness of social science knowledge is a function of its capturing the full complexity of what indeed are complex social phenomena. (3) Social scientists often tend to lament the marginal impact their intellectual efforts have on society, and they look with great envy across the divide of the so-called two cultures, wondering how and when they will be able to achieve the same kind of success and prestige the natural sciences and technology appear to enjoy in most societies. However, this unhappy view systematically understates the actual power of social science knowledge, in particular its role as a mind maker or meaning producer.