Spheres Of Everyday Life Research Articles

Methods and algorithms for solving multicriteria problems – classification approach

Multicriteria (multiobjective) optimization is widely used for solving a variety of problems in all spheres of everyday life. This could be explained by the fact that such models make it possible to take into account goals which may be different in nature and very often quite contradictory Researchers have developed and continued to improve methods, algorithms and procedures for solving such problems. In this paper we investigate various multicriteria optimization methods and propose an approach for classification of these methods, so that a decision maker can choose from a great variety of procedures the one that best suits his/her goals. Further, we show how our gravitation centers method, developed earlier for solving single objective programs, can be implemented through the multicriteria or multiobjective case.

"Państwo celów" jako instytucja kultury. Czy krytyka władz podmiotu jest wystarczającą podstawą filozofii kultury?

Using E. Wolicka book "Consideration on Kant" as an anchoring point, the author investigates the conditions under which 'kingdom of ends' can successfully play a role of institution of culture, i.e. be translated into rules of action and empirical facts in the sphere of every day life and history.

Political Culturalism, Representation and the People's Action Party of Singapore

The PAP has been attempting, particularly since the early 1990s, to establish a ‘political culturalism’ that aims to produce individuals as ‘cultural citizens’, in contrast to ‘liberal citizens’ associated with the representative politics of liberal democracies. Cultural citizenship steers participation through ethnic or communitarian channels while at the same time restricting political contestation. Through this, the PAP has reinterpreted the meaning and responsibility of being elected and redefined the structures and meaning of political representation and participation. These redefined concepts are reflected in institutions such as the Group Representation Constituency (GRC) as well as race-based self-help organizations. At stake in the production of cultural citizens is the shaping of the boundaries and meaning of politics, with important implications for which sites of participation are tolerated, supported or obstructed. Cultural citizenship mobilizes political conflict along ethnic lines excluding other forms of conflict such as class-based forms of collective representation. This essay examines the type of representation that is being articulated and how it provides an ideological basis for non-liberal political institutions that opens up pathways of participation in different spheres of everyday life, except in the arena of political contestation.

Life Seen:1 Touch and Vision in the Making of Sex in Western Kenya

This article is part of a project about transformations of relatedness among the Luo of western Kenya, which we examine by observing, in the everyday life of one village, concrete practices that constitute and negotiate material contact. In short, villagers understand physical touch and associated forms of material contact as practices that momentarily merge persons or their bodies by sharing substance. Such moments of merging release creative or transformative force, with its attendant ambiguity. To understand this link between merging and emergence, the Dholuo term riwo, is helpful. It can designate moments of ‘coming together, mixing, merging’ across all spheres of everyday life. Riwo is central to concerns with how things should be done, in everyday and in ritual situations, in order to sustain the order of life, commonly referred to as chike, which directs the ‘growth’ (dongruok) of the living. Since there is, in these times of death and confusion, little agreement among the villagers about how the continuity of life can be maintained, and which order should be created or restored, moments of physical contact (or its absence) are nodes around which the present predicament is debated, and alternative visions of past and future are produced. The present paper looks at one aspect of these debates: bodily intercourse between woman and man. We discuss how this practice, which among Luo tends to be associated with darkness and the absence of words, is increasingly drawn into the light of discourses – such as Christian, Traditionalist, medical and pornographic – which have emerged in western Kenya at different times during the past century, and which in different ways constitute ‘sex’ as a distinctive imagination of intercourse.

Герои и Предатели: Симптомы Коллективной Травмы В Народных Песнях Великой Отечественной Войны

SUMMARY: Zhanna Kormina’s article is devoted to an analysis of folklore songs that revolve around the theme of a soldier’s return from the Great Patriotic War. Kormina explores the differences between the popular perceptions of war and the official discourse. The author argues that as a result of the war, a large segment of the Soviet population internalized aspects of national identity. The key factor was the distinctive language with which the state spoke to, engaged, and mobilized the population for the war effort. A peculiar feature of this new language was the rendition of abstract patriotic slogans into images and terms taken from the sphere of everyday life, such as those of motherhood and spousal faithfulness. The author demonstrates how the common imagery was used in officially sponsored lyrics and popular ballads to the effect of telling different stories about the war.

Dedovshchina as an Element of the «Small Society» : Evidence From Russia and Other Countries.

Dedovshchina is considered as a by-product of a particular institutional organization, the «small» society. Non differentiation of the spheres of everyday life, personalized relationships, imperfect control of violence, duality of norms and the imposed authority characterize the «small» society. Dedovshchina consists in orienting the violence generated on everyday basis towards replacement victims or the victims that can be sacrificed. The «small» society produces phenomena similar to dedovshchina everywhere where it exists, in Russia as well as in the West. In the context of the Russian army, first-year soldiers transforms into replacement victims of the violence resulting from learning obedience as a centerpiece of the military service.

SKILLINGEN, BRODEREN OG TABLETTEN: Penge og sundhed i det østlige Uganda

Complaints about fees at the government health facilities in Uganda are incessant, and
 so are the more general statements about lack of money and problems of poverty. These
 complaints, however, cannot be reduced to questions of cost and the availability of
 resources. We also need to look at the kinds of exchanges money is made part of.
 Health has long been part of the economic sphere in Uganda, and people compensate
 healers and practitioners of different kinds for their services. The article explores why,
 then, people experience it as far more problematic to pay for treatment in the public
 health care system than to pay other health care providers. To answer this question
 requires a discussion of money, not as destructive to social relations, but as creative
 potential for relationships in all spheres of everyday life. In Uganda, as elsewhere,
 money can be used both to pay somebody and to give somebody something. Money is
 being made part of different modalities of exchange. In order to understand what takes
 place in various kinds of clinical interaction we need to look at the complex intersection
 of social relations, modalities of exchange, and the objects exchanged.

Review of Qualitative health psychology: Theories and methods.

MICHAEL MURRAY and KERRY CHAMBERLAIN (EDS.) Qualitative Health Psychology: Theories and Methods Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999, 272 pages (ISBN 0-7619-5661-1, US$25.95, Softcover) Reviewed by CLARE MACMARTIN Qualitative research in health psychology is relatively new but already displays considerable vigour. The 15 chapters of the present book offer wide-ranging examples of the contributions that qualitative research can make to the field of health psychology; they also encourage reflection and debate on the positivist, quantitative perspective that has traditionally dominated health psychology and underpins its epistemological alliance with biomedicine. The book is divided into three parts. The first is Constructing Health and Illness through Language. Editors Michael Murray and Kerry Chamberlain open with an informative chapter that introduces upcoming contributions in the context of the history of psychology as a quantitative science, the relationship between traditional health psychology and medicine, and social-constructionist challenges to quantitative research. The intent is not to dismiss the value of quantitative research but to question reliance on a single methodology. The editors argue that health psychology is best advanced through the promotion of multiple research techniques, including qualitative approaches. The rest of Part I draws on various ideas from social constructionism and discursive psychology that question the positivist view of health and illness as objectivist entities. In Chapter 2, Alan Radley treats health and illness as experiences that become tangible in different social realms or spheres of everyday life. He characterizes the qualitative interview not as a neutral conduit for the transmission of information but as communicative interaction conditioned by the relationship between the interviewer and the respondent. In Chapter 3, Lucy Yardley considers how material-discursive approaches can overcome the mind-body dualism that has hampered traditional theorizing in health psychology. She grounds her argument in qualitative research on dizziness. In Chapter 4, Michael Murray looks at accounts of illness as narratives, claiming that meaning-making emerges out of the social context of teller and hearer. In Chapter 5, Mandy Morgan adopts a Foucauldian discursive stance, demonstrating the contributions that such an approach can make to health psychology, including the articulation of reflexive concerns about the enabling and constraining effects of psychological discourse on our understanding of health. In Chapter 6, MaryJane Paris Spink integrates discursive and communicative theories to argue that making sense of illness requires consideration of two levels: the local face-to-face interactions in which illness is represented and the collective cultural-historical context that provides the repertoires or discourses for dialogical representation. As an illustration, Spink reports analyses of interactions in risk workshops on AIDS, showing how the collective construction of sexual identities has implications for primary prevention. In Chapter 7, Jane Ussher discusses feminist approaches to qualitative health research. She uses Premenstrual Syndrome as an example to compare and contrast the dominant strands of feminist theory and epistemology (feminist empiricism, postmodernism, critical realism, and standpoint theory) in terms of theory and research design in the investigation of women's health. Ussher considers the metatheoretical, theoretical, and methodological commonalities and differences among these strands and nonfeminist qualitative research. Parts II and III share similar concerns about methodology. The second part, Conversing About Health and Illness, emphasizes contextual issues. In Chapter 8, Cynthia Matheson discusses interviewing in the context of health and illness, treating it as a process of story-building. The forms and content of different interview approaches are introduced, as are contextual concerns such as the establishment of rapport. …

At Capriolo's Hotel: Heaven, Hell, and Otherworlds in Il Doppio Regno

Paola Capriolo has stated that the kind of truth she searches for and tries to express is outside the sphere of everyday life. She has also claimed: 'Per me la letteratura non puo essere che astrazione; anche autoestraniazione e distacco dall'io. Quindi sia dalla realta che dal realismo'. Her work stands in contrast to the realistic mode of writing and the novels of social comment and protest prevalent in the Italy of the 1960s and early 1970s (exemplified by authors such as Leonardo Sciascia and Dacia Maraini). Instead she focuses on traditional, timeless themes, embracing the preference for tales of the imagination and fantasy shared by Italo Calvino, Antonio Tabucchi, and Anna Maria Ortese, albeit in different contexts. However, she is distanced from writers like these by her nostalgic return to a more formal Italian, displaying little of the linguistic experimentalism of the 1980s and 1990s (Tabucchi, Alessandro Baricco) or the more 'provocative and innovative' styles and topics of very recent years.