Sphere Of Concern Research Articles

Hydrosocial geographies: Cycles, spaces and spheres of concern

Over recent decades, hydrosocial scholarship focusing on the plural, often contested relations of waters and societies has advanced significantly. This article reviews hydrosocial scholarship in three steps that are contextualized by geography's long-standing efforts to use water to ‘think geography’. The article begins by revisiting critiques of the hydrological cycle as circulating free of anthropogenic forces and wholly on the ‘nature’ side of the society/nature dualism. We consider how this critique shapes engagement with other fields where human–water relations are crucial, such as socio-hydrology and those focused on climate change. The article then examines the extension of hydrosocial scholarship from critiques of the hydrological cycle to its use in explaining social spaces, such as territory, urban processes and citizenship. Finally, we consider how hydrosocial scholarship from Black, Indigenous and anti-colonial praxis challenges epistemologies and ontologies that, even in their critiques, recentre Eurocentric notions of water.

Nature and Norm: Judaism, Christianity, and the Theopolitical Problem

Nature and Norm: Judaism, Christianity, and the Theopolitical Problem

The Flight of the All-One to the All-One: The φυγὴ μόνου πρὸς μόνον as the Basis of Plotinian Altruism

AbstractIt has become commonplace to contrast Plotinus’s spirituality with Christian spirituality by portraying the former as solipsistic and the latter as communal. In particular, this critique has centred around Plotinus’s description of mystical ascent as a “flight of the alone to the alone” and his presentation of Plato’s Phaedrus as an exhortation to “work on your own statue.” Yet, should one understand the One as a supreme unity, it would appear that the Plotinian unio mystica renders the mystic supremely unified with the rest of being. Accordingly, this article emphasizes Plotinus’s “inclusive monotheism” in order to argue that the “flight of the alone to the alone” should be understood as a movement towards the supreme unity that underlies reality. The unificatory effects of this ascent are emphasized by the way in which Plotinus, in both his life and works, depicts teaching as a common response to henosis. This didactic turn, it is argued, is a response to glimpsing the deep unity of reality, which expands the mystic’s sphere of concern to include the “other” as another self.

The Disconnect Between Design Practice and Political Interests

Long-term, sustainable transitions cannot occur without working at the political level to address the serious, global political challenges we are facing today. However, the capacity of design as a rigorous component and complement of the political world is yet to be seen. In this paper we discuss surveys we conducted, showing that there is a clear discrepancy between how designers engage in the political process as citizens and as professionals. We also discuss a subsequent workshop which allowed survey participants to explore these questions of roles and agency in greater depth and offered insights into barriers and opportunities. We found the workshop to be an effective method of helping designers identify leverage points and courses to intervene within both the designer’s sphere of influence and sphere of concern. In so doing, we might begin to draw more designers into the critical work of designing for a transition towards more inclusive and equitable socio-political futures.

Christian Ethics and Ecologies of Violence

This essay introduces “ecologies of violence” as a problem for Christian ethics. Understanding the links between violence and the natural environment will be critical to the pursuit of justice, peace, and sustainability in the twenty-first century. Yet these links often evade political action and escape moral attention because they do not fit comfortably within any of the fields requisite to address them. In most cases, the available resources for confronting these issues—“environmental issues” and “peace and conflict issues”—exist in separate toolkits, and no single discourse has developed resources to address their progressively merging spheres of concern. The essay outlines four types of ecological violence, examines recent work in Christian ethics relevant to them, and then argues for a dialogical method of ethics to confront them. Doing Christian ethics at the intersections of violence and environmental issues will require careful attention to environmental ethics as well as to the ethics of violence. More than that, it will require judicious efforts to navigate between them within case-based and place-based ethical analyses. Ecologies of violence invite Christian ethics to develop possibilities of ethical discernment and reparative action that do justice to the deep entanglement of ecological and sociopolitical systems.

Integrating People of Terek Oblast into Socio-Cultural Space of Russia: Help of Charity (The Second Half of 19th – Early 20th Centuries)

The article is devoted to the entry of the peoples of the North Caucasus into the Russian socio-cultural space on the basis of the entry of the region into the Russian Empire. In the research the authors focus their attention on the issues of implementing such socio-cultural activity as charity within the mentioned process. Being traditional phenomena for worldview bases and cultural practices of the peoples of the North Caucasus that joined the Russian Empire and the peoples of the Russian Empire itself, encouragement for doing good and charity as such became significant factors contributing to peoples’ cultural rapprochement. This is confirmed by the analysis of specific historical data, facts of creating charity communities and diverse charity activities in Terek Oblast in particular, covering the second half of XIXth – early XXth centuries, that is presented in the article. At the same time the authors primarily consider the process of public care of the development of education in the region and the substitution of the efforts of the state that were organised into charity communities by society in the sphere of concern for socially disadvantaged groups of the region’s population.

The North American Forest Database: going beyond national-level forest resource assessment statistics.

Forests cannot be managed sustainably without reliable data to inform decisions. National Forest Inventories (NFI) tend to report national statistics, with sub-national stratification based on domestic ecological classification systems. It is becoming increasingly important to be able to report statistics on ecosystems that span international borders, as global change and globalization expand stakeholders' spheres of concern. The state of a transnational ecosystem can only be properly assessed by examining the entire ecosystem. In global forest resource assessments, it may be useful to break national statistics down by ecosystem, especially for large countries. The Inventory and Monitoring Working Group (IMWG) of the North American Forest Commission (NAFC) has begun developing a harmonized North American Forest Database (NAFD) for managing forest inventory data, enabling consistent, continental-scale forest assessment supporting ecosystem-level reporting and relational queries. The first iteration of the database contains data describing 1.9 billion ha, including 677.5 million ha of forest. Data harmonization is made challenging by the existence of definitions and methodologies tailored to suit national circumstances, emerging from each country's professional forestry development. This paper reports the methods used to synchronize three national forest inventories, starting with a small suite of variables and attributes.

Australia in Antarctica: realising an ambition

From the mid-1880s, during the movement for Federation, colonial Australians identified Antarctica as a strategic part of Australia’s sphere of concern. Extending Australian control over the region due south of Australia appealed to the colonies and became a national ambition. Nascent Australian nationalism, the protection of Australia’s southern approaches and a determination to be part of the global quest to unlock Antarctic science underpinned the Australian quest for Antarctic territory, and fostered a national community of interest between government, science and the press. Australia’s determination to be the controlling authority over what Douglas Mawson called the Australian quadrant strained the Anglo-Australian relationship during the inter-war years, and paved the way for Australia’s entry into the field of international diplomacy. The literature relating to Australia’s interests and policies with respect to its northern borders is substantial, but little is known about Australia’s thinking with respect to its southern approaches. This paper seeks to address that imbalance by exploring the political and diplomatic dimensions that led to Australia becoming the largest Antarctic claimant state.

A London Legacy of Ira Aldridge: Henry Francis Downing and the Paratheatrical Poetics of Plot and Cast(e)

ABSTRACT: Situating Henry Francis Downing as an important if traditionally overlooked black playwright of America, Britain, and the Atlantic world, this article brings focus to Downing’s 1914 drama Incentives, which evinces Downing’s indebtedness to nineteenthcentury black dramatist Ira Aldridge even as it conceives of the world (during the months immediately preceding the First World War) as interconnected by sinews of capital, empire, and transnational alliance. As Incentives weaves its settings, back-stories, and spheres of concern through Britain, the American West, New York City, continental Europe, and European empires throughout the world, the drama’s preoccupations with the theatrical conventions of plot and cast contribute to Downing’s larger legacy as a playwright attempting to use drama to alter representations of diasporic blackness within a version of the world that envisions transnational capitalism as usurping the hegemony of nation-states. Downing’s current status as a little-known playwright should cause critical reflection on the ways in which scholars have pursued questions of diaspora and the black Atlantic.

Epilogue

As my co-editor Paula McGee (2009) rightly notes, this collection of papers on gender and nursing was diffi cult to assemble. Despite the fact that our call for abstracts was catholic in its scope and had to be extended a number of times to increase the possibility that papers would eventually amass to form a special issue of Contemporary Nurse, alas this was not to transpire; both Paula and I pondered and vexed over this problem during the many, many months of this collection's gestation. To be honest neither of us could muster a plausible theory as to why the issue of nursing and gender failed to grab the individual and collective imaginations of our colleagues.This failure to arouse signifi cant interest is certainly perplexing as Paula (2009) also rightly notes in her considered and comprehensive prologue. Gender is undoubtedly still a pressing and perennial one for nurses in terms of the gender divide that separates men's and women's health issues into quite disparate and sometimes contradictory spheres of concern and eventual resolution. The tensions between men's and women's health status and the ways in which we respond to these were evident in this collection and amplifi ed by the various reports and literature cited by Paula but, clearly, gender as an underpinning narrative to the larger story of how health and sickness are conceived, planned for, managed and evaluated is perhaps not the priority some of us would like to imagine it should be.What, then, might this mean for nurses themselves in what is a profoundly gendered profession? Given that we have only one paper (Brown, 2009) on this topic perhaps this too, is not as relevant today as I recall it was in the late 80s through the late 90s. During this decade a reasonably vibrant corpus of feminist and postmodern nursing scholarship was fi nding its way into print exploring concerns about the gendered nature of nursing and the issues this invoked.In closing this small collection I indulge in some refl ections on nursing and gender from my own perspective as a man and as one for whom nursing and gender has always created in me a sense that 'I'm stuck, I cannot get out, I'm helpless' (after Aristotle in Derrida, 1993, p. 13). This is not suggesting that I am a victim of some sort of existential anguish; rather, it is to say that it's all about power, as Foucault (1980) would say. And if that is the case, then everything is dangerous and there is always something to be done (as he would also say!).In a still deeply patriarchal healthcare system, where mostly male medicos and executives continue to call the shots and nurses struggle to be heard at the decision making tables, if they are even invited to them, nursing - as a profession comprised almost exclusively of women - has much work to do. By this I mean that still far too many asymmetries of knowledge and power operate to render nurses' voices and actions as less authoritative and compelling than those of doctors and health administrators; our future potential as a profession still hinges far too acutely on the desires and wishes of these omnipotent 'others' than I and many of my colleagues consider necessary or appropriate. And for those who think that several decades of feminist thought and activism has changed all this; think again. Almost daily I read in the press of situations where women generally struggle to gain recognition and rewards commensurate with their male counterparts (e.g. far too few female professors in the academy; far too few female politicians in the parliaments; far too few female CEOs of major corporations; far too few female surgeons - the list is longer than I have space for).Therefore, I take it as axiomatic that the profession's profoundly feminised culture and the effects this perpetuates on nurses and non nurses alike is and always has been one of its deep and abiding aporia. As Murray (2009, p. 11) explains:The term 'aporia' comes from the ancient Greek aporos and literally means 'without passage' or 'impasse' If we arrive at an aporia, it means we are in doubt we are perplexed, we are confused about how (best) to proceed. …

Resisting the Pedagogical Domestication of Cosmopolitanism: From Nussbaum’s Concentric Circles of Humanity to Derrida’s Aporetic Ethics of Hospitality

THE TOPOS OF CULTURE IN THINKING COSMOPOLITANISM Between globalism and nationalism, the hegemonic Westernization of cultures and the — no less tyrannical— indigenization of non-Western cultures, the economic logic of globalization’s inevitability and grassroots efforts to “globalize from below,” cosmopolitanism re-emerges today as a guiding ideal for envisioning and institutionalizing an international civil society. Whereas modernist debates on cosmopolitanism were fueled by antinomies such as engagement versus estrangement, patriotism versus universalism, sentiment versus detached reason, today cosmopolitanism is endorsed as a dialectic that resolves such antinomies. This dialectic reconciliation of the local and the global in the cosmopolitan ideal has been transcribed pedagogically in Martha Nussbaum’s organic figure of the concentric circles. According to this cosmopolitan figure of growth and learning, the ethical self orients itself from smaller circles of local identifications and cultural affiliations to larger circles, to reach the outer and also broadest circle of belongingness, that of “humanity as a whole.” Considering local identifications and affiliations as a “source of richness” in cosmopolitan life rather than the departure point for a journey of uprootedness towards the cosmopolitan self, Nussbaum articulates the dialectic in a regressive rather than linear manner: “Our task as citizens of the world will be to ‘draw the circles somehow toward the center,’ making all human beings more like our fellow city dwellers, and so forth. In general, we should think of nobody as a stranger, as outside our sphere of concern and obligation.”

Two Kingdoms, Two Loyalties: Mennonite Pacifism in Modern America.

For over 300 years, Mennonites adhered to a strict two-kingdom theology, owing their supreme adherence to divine kingdom whole serving as loyal, law-abiding subjects to state in all matters that did not contradict their religious beliefs. Traditionally, Mennonites saw affairs of state as none of their business. In times of war, Mennonite church counselled conscientious objection and spoke against military participation in either combatant or non-combatant roles. Mennonites did not serve in coercive government offices, most refused to vote or sue in courts of law and held a generally negative view of expressions of political protest to government authorities. During World War II, however, voluntary participation of Mennonites in conscientious objector labour camps pulled Mennonite youth out of rural isolation and raised their awareness of America's social ills and their own responsibilities as Christians. In post-war era, Mennonites were no longer the quiet in land, but began to articulate publicly their concerns about such issues as draft, civil rights movement and Vietnam war. In this study, author explores dramatic changes both within Mennonite communities and in their relationship with mainstream American society between 1920s and 1970s, as Mennonite society and culture underwent a profound transformation from seclusion to nearly complete acculturation. Congruent with their entrance into national society, Mennonites began to engage state on a number of new issues which an older theological and behavioural tradition had previously defined as outside their sphere of concern. Bush notes that as was case in mainstream society, it was primarily church's youth who were most passionately involved in struggle to speak out against war and other concerns.

The One Body of Christian Environmentalism

Using a conceptual model consisting of three intersecting spheres of concern (environmental protection, human needs provision, and economic welfare) central to most environmental issues, we map six major Christian traditions of thought. Our purpose is to highlight the complementarities among these diverse responses in order to inform a more holistic Christian environmentalism founded on one or more of the major tenets of each of the six core traditions. Our approach also incorporates major premises of at least the more moderate versions of biocentrism, ecocentrism, and anthropocentrism. We label this holistic approach “cosmocentrism” and use it as the basis for a preliminary description of the notion of “pluralistic stewardship.” We argue that only such holistic environmental perspectives, where societal needs are more directly coupled with environmental protection, and a pluralism of worldviews are acknowledged as potentially contributing to such efforts are capable of successfully addressing the complex issues we face today. We note that, at the international level in particular, Christian thought and secular environmentalism already have been moving in such a direction.

Private rights and public illusions

When members of the media address politicians or report on social problems they assume that whatever issues are important in society must be a matter of or state concern. Yet, the state or government is but a small part of any human society. Machan asserts that while the exact nature of government is a complicated question, only a totalitarian government aims to assume responsibility for every possible concern of its citizenry. Machan believes that the concept public is too broadly used to mean any problem that vocal citizens want government to address. Private Rights, Public Illusions focuses on the proper scope of government authority, especially in regard to people's economic or commercial affairs. The realm is one wherein we must act collectively and subordinate individual will to a common purpose. But, according to Machan, in the rest of our spheres of concern no such subjugation is necessary or even desirable. Because he sees the realm as smaller than is generally believed, he argues that if government continues to intervene in affairs outside this realm, then restrictions on individual liberties will become an obstacle to society's important progress. Private Rights, Public Illusions combines empirical with philosophical analysis and argument. Its radical critique of government intervention will be of interest to policymakers, philosophers, and political scientists, and theorists. From the foreword by Nicholas Rescher, [Machan] clearly sees that the state that protects is a state that controls, and that an all-controlling state is to all intents and purposes a prison. Deeply rooted in a widely informed background in political philosophy and American constitutional thought, Machan's book issues a clarion call against such an assault on citizen sovereignty and individual rights . . . [He] proceeds to examine a great host of issues in the domain of contemporary policy disputes: governmental regulation, prior restraint, occupational health and safety, the right to know, pollution control, product liability, freedom of expressions, and various others. His discussion does not simply ride some ideological hobby horse--as so many in this area do--but is deeply concerned to ground its deliberations in a combined care for philosophical principles, empirical realities, and contemporary texts.

Meeting the Demand for Vocational Courses: influences on the development of engineering technician training in New South Wales, Australia, in the 1950s and 1960s

ABSTRACT This paper raises questions about the training debate today in Australia through its examination of the factors, among them the roles of government and professional associations, that influenced the development of engineering technician training and education in New South Wales in the 1950s and 1960s. Technical educators grasped the need for courses that provided for a new range of workplace classifications which tended to fall outside the province or sphere of concern of tradesmen or the professional engineer. One of the major factors stimulating the interest in, and growth of, the provision of such courses was the strength of demand by the youths themselves. To what extent did the technical education authorities exercise power over training for industry? A contrast between apprenticeship and technician training in the metal industry is used here to answer this question. With respect to apprenticeship training, technical educators were essentially marginalised by the power struggles that centred...