Critical Strands Research Articles

Reenvisioning adaptive expertise as a distributed phenomenon

ABSTRACT A critical strand of educational research examines how people, and youth in particular, make adaptations to overcome unexpected and non-routine problems. In this conceptual paper, the authors propose an expanded framework that reenvisions adaptive expertise as a distributed phenomenon, focusing on three interrelated aspects relevant to how people work toward adaptations: (1) recruitment and coordination of resources, (2) reframing of problems and goals, and (3) navigational foresight. The paper illustrates the framework through examples drawn from a study of youth participation in the maker movement.

Towards a General Theory of Sustainable Development: Using a Sustainability Window Approach to Explore All Possible Scenario Paths of Economic Growth and Degrowth

Across decades of contemporary discussion on sustainable development, a core concern has been the balance between economic, social, and environmental dimensions. A critical strand of the debate focuses on economic growth versus economic degrowth and, more specifically, on whether economic growth can be sustainable in environmental terms and whether degrowth can be sustainable in social terms. This conceptual and theoretical article used the Sustainability Window, or “SuWi”’ method, to theoretically determine the sustainable window of economies. The window is defined as the upper and lower bounds of future change in GDP that could be deemed in line with achieving both environmental and social sustainability. The conceptual analysis considers all theoretically possible scenario paths for development by combining the outcome paths of economic, environmental, and social dimensions with the environmental and social productivities of GDP. Through SuWi analysis, it is found that only four of the logically possible scenario paths could be considered theoretically “sustainable”—two cases involving economic growth and two of degrowth. In the cases of each of the four paths, sustainability only emerges where they adhere to strict conditions in terms of environmental and social outcomes, as well as related productivities. The SuWi approach and its applied analytical formulas have many potential uses in 21st-century policymaking for sustainability, including supporting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. It provides a unique and comprehensive theoretical and analytical framework that enables the categorisation of the complex challenges of sustainability and quantitative analysis of policy choices. Such foresight analysis could greatly assist in providing an evidence base for future development planning and policy formulation, ex ante of locking in a pathway. Further implementation in applied studies that explore a comprehensive indicator set, robust and consistent across all relevant dimensions, offers a promising opportunity to advance empirical analysis of key questions in sustainable development globally at a critical juncture in human history.

Investing in knowledge assets: a novel approach for measuring national intellectual capital index in emerging economies

PurposeThe aims of the current study were twofold: first, to rank the world’s emerging economies based on a novel National Intellectual Capital Index (NICI) and its components; and second, to examine the impact of NICI and its components on economic growth, measured in terms of real GDP per capita.Design/methodology/approachWe employed principal component analysis (PCA) to construct the novel NICI based on five key socio-economic indicators including (1) national human capital, (2) national structural capital, (3) national relational capital, (4) national informational capital and (5) national innovational capital. These indicators are publicly available for many countries. The index was generated by considering the most appropriate socio-economic indicators as precise measures of NIC from the Penn world table (version 10.0), the World Bank’s database of world governance and development indicators and the KOF globalization across the selected emerging economies.FindingsThe empirical findings revealed that national human capital is a significant driver of NIC, corresponding to higher economic growth. This is followed by national informational capital, national relational capital, national innovation capital and national structural capital. Furthermore, results indicate that the contribution of national structural capital is marginal compared to other critical strands of NIC.Practical implicationsNIC is generally considered the most valuable strategic resource for driving knowledge economies, especially in the Industry 5.0 revolution. Ranking emerging economies based on the NICI sheds light on the accumulated stock of NIC and how it contributes to and improves the economic growth of these economies. The stock of NIC is considered a critical success factor for measuring both current and future economic prosperity. Therefore, using the socio-economic indicators of KOFGI as accurate measures of NICI will assist policymakers in formulating and implementing relevant policies to enhance the accumulation of knowledge-based capital, which are critical components of NIC.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study of its kind, both theoretically and empirically, to measure the National Intellectual Capital Index (NICI) using the most nascent socio-economic indicators of NIC. Moving forward, this study evaluates the impact of NICI and its components on economic growth, which is a relatively sparse area of research in the context of emerging knowledge economies.

Another Look at a Knowledge Organization Pioneer: Traces of Racism in Paul Otlet’s Writings

Critical strand of studies in Knowl­edge Organization (KO) and Library and Information Science (LIS) have been focused on gender bias and power inherent in the classification of knowl­edge artefacts. From the mid-2000s, attention turned to other types of biases notably racial biases. These studies have exposed and rightly critiqued how the supposedly “universal” classification and knowl­edge artefacts designed by LIS and KO pioneers were designed mostly by white men. Wiegand (1996) demonstrated that Melvil Dewey, the creator of DCC, was a notorious racist and antisemite. This paper raises the issue of how the LIS and KO communities have dealt with the legacy of one its most celebrated pioneers, Paul Otlet, whose writings had imprints of white supremacist ideologies at least in two of his texts ‘Afrique aux Noirs’ and ‘Monde. Essai d’universalisme’. In particular, we speculate about the quasi-omerta that had surrounded Otlet’s writings on race and racial relations considering the amount of exegesis done on his works. The one-sided narrative portraying Otlet mostly in a positive light and magnifying his works has led to epistemicide and “documentary injustice”.

Charting the complexities of a post-COVID energy transition: emerging research frontiers for a sustainable future

This paper delves into the implications of the global COVID-19 pandemic for the low-carbon transition in the post-pandemic era. The pandemic’s repercussions on global economies and societies have been extensive, characterized by uncertainty, economic slowdown, and disruptions in global supply chains and trade. Furthermore, it has unveiled vulnerabilities within energy and economic structures, underscoring the intrinsic link between public health, the environment, and the socioeconomic and political dimensions. Within this framework, this perspective pinpoints critical strands of research necessitating further exploration in the post-COVID energy transition landscape. These areas encompass the need for long-term scenarios, the influence of political dynamics on coordinated climate initiatives, the worldwide adoption of renewable energy technologies, the social and economic repercussions of energy transition policies on marginalized communities, the development of innovative financial mechanisms to bolster sustainable initiatives, and the influence of societal attitudes, behaviors, and culture on the adoption of renewable energy technologies. The analysis emphasizes the essential roles of resilient energy systems, climate policies, risk management frameworks, and sustainable finance in constructing a resilient and sustainable future. Finally, the paper underscores the significance of interdisciplinary collaboration and an all-encompassing strategy to tackle the challenges posed by the post-COVID energy transition effectively.

Benign and Radical Africanization in International Investment Law and Investor-State Dispute Settlement in Africa

Abstract The current Africanization approaches mask some nuances present in current reform efforts of international investment law (IIL) and investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS) in Africa. I adopt the categorization of international law scholarship in Africa developed elsewhere into two trends: contributionist (weak) and critical (strong) scholarship. For reforms in African IIL and ISDS, I relabel this trends benign Africanization representing the contributionist (weak) strand and radical Africanization representing the critical (strong) strand. I argue that African states must focus on wider economic justice engendered in the radical Africanization approach. I propose three lines of action that will implement radical Africanization: first African States, in their reforms, must focus on both extra and intra-African investment; second, the reforms must engage deeply seated substantive issues in addition to the current procedural reforms; and finally, African States must have a real reckoning and engagement with the imperial history of IIL generally and ISDS specifically.

“Visual Type? Not My Type”: A Systematic Study on the Learning Styles Neuromyth Employing Frequentist and Bayesian Statistics

ABSTRACTThe term learning styles (LS) describes the notion that individuals have a preferred modality of learning (i.e., vision, audition, or kinesthesis) and that matching instruction to this modality results in optimal learning. During the last decades, LS has received extensive criticism, yet they remain a virtual truism within education. One of the major strands of criticism is the fact that only a handful of studies have systematically put the LS assumptions to the test. In this study, we aimed to explore whether learners who are visual types will be better at learning sign‐words (i.e., ecologically valid stimuli) compared to auditory and kinesthetic types. Ninety‐nine volunteers (67 females, mean age = 28.66 years) naive to Greek Sign Language (GSL) were instructed to learn 20 GSL sign‐words. The volunteers further completed two LS questionnaires (i.e., the Barsch Learning Styles Inventory and the Learning Channels Inventory) and they also reported what their LS they believed was. No evidence of a difference in learning sign‐words among individuals with different LS (as identified by either of the LS questionnaires or by direct self‐report) was found, neither using a frequentist nor using a Bayesian approach to data analysis. Moreover, inconsistencies between the way participants were classified based on the different measures and direct self‐report were detected. These findings add further support to the criticism of the LS theory and its use in educational settings. We suggest that research and practice resources should be allocated to evidence‐based approaches.

Dirty Windows and Troublesome Things: The Problem of Object-Orientation in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie

This article investigates the representation of objects in La Jalousie (1957), a novel in the nouveau roman tradition written by French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. If the ‘new novel’ sought to render the material world with objective clarity, and positioned itself against traditional fiction, with its reliance on metaphor, allegory, and other ‘projections,’ this article argues that such an aesthetic program is undercut by its own assumptions about the power of description and the primacy of the visual. In an analysis which hybridizes three separate strands of criticism—object-oriented ontology, Heideggerian phenomenology, and the models of ‘resonation’ proposed by Brian Massumi—I will argue that such a treatment of objects, with its exclusive reliance on visual description, measurement, and enumeration, ends up depriving objects of the vitality and dynamism that would justify such a fictional project in the first place. However, traces of this dynamism do survive the flattening sweep of Robbe-Grillet’s narration, and indeed offer from the cracks and fissures of the novel’s otherwise smoothly controlled style the possibility of an alternate ‘object-orientation’—one, I will argue, which suspends its cool optical detachment to allow, however briefly, the eruption of a messy, entangling register of touch.

Critical ordinary language philosophy: A new project in experimental philosophy

Several important philosophical problems (including the problems of perception, free will, and scepticism) arise from antinomies that are developed through philosophical paradoxes. The critical strand of ordinary language philosophy (OLP), as practiced by J.L. Austin, provides an approach to such ‘antinomic problems’ that proceeds from an examination of ‘ordinary language’ (how people ordinarily talk about the phenomenon of interest) and ‘common sense’ (what they commonly think about it), and deploys findings to show that the problems at issue are artefacts of fallacious reasoning. The approach is capable, and in need of, empirical development. Proceeding from a case-study on Austin’s paradigmatic treatment of the problem of perception, this paper identifies the key empirical assumptions informing the approach, assesses them in the light of empirical findings about default inferences, contextualisation failures, and belief fragmentation, and explores how these findings can be deployed to address the problem of perception. This facilitates a novel resolution of the problem of perception. Proceeding from this paradigm, the paper proposes ‘experimental critical OLP’ as a new research program in experimental philosophy that avoids apparent non-sequiturs of OLP, extends and transforms experimental philosophy’s ‘sources program’, and provides a promising new strategy for deploying empirical findings about how people ordinarily talk and think about phenomena, to address longstanding philosophical problems.

Environmental themes in natural sciences textbooks: an analysis based on the macro-trends of environmental education

Environmental Education is seen as one of the main ways to raise awareness in society and mitigate environmental degradation. The school space is one of the essential places to provide the citizen development of students, so that they can act with environmental responsibility. Thus, the present work aims to analyze the contents of Environmental Education in the PNLD 2021 books belonging to Moderna Plus collection - Nature Sciences, used in the New High School (NEM) in a public school in the city of Santa Helena, Paraíba. The new PNLD books are organized by knowledge area, and 06 didactic copies are offered for the three high school grades. The research was characterized as exploratory and documentary, with the analysis based on the contributions of the work of Layrargues and Lima (2014), related to the conservative, pragmatic and critical strands of the Political-Pedagogical Macrotrends of Environmental Education. The themes selected to be analyzed stemmed from the themes related to EE, addressed by each book that makes up the collection under investigation. This research presents all environmental proposals inserted in the Moderna Plus - Nature Sciences collection, through the macrotrends, as well as points out some factors that were not addressed in some of the didactic copies, which serve to assist teachers and students of the NEM, following the principles of the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC), through the implementation of the NEM.

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The Ambiguous Role of Multistakeholder Meta-Organisations in Sustainable Supply Chains

Multistakeholder Meta-Organisations (MS-MOs) are often perceived as a ‘magic bullet’ that can tackle societal grand challenges in global supply chains. In this paper, we consider the case of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), and we investigate the extent to which an MS-MO reshapes the attribution of responsibility for sustainability in supply chains, especially in relation to underlying power dynamics. We conduct a multimodal critical discourse analysis of a broad range of sources, including videos and interviews. We show that through its discursive strategies, the RSPO allocates the responsibility for social and environmental issues to the two extremes of the supply chain: objectifying consumers at one end and smallholders at the other, hence reproducing and even exacerbating the traditional imbalanced power dynamics in supply chains. Our work contributes to the emerging, more critical strand of research investigating meta-organisations (MOs) and sustainable supply chain management.

Palestine and the British Empire in US Political Cartoons, 1917-1919

The article is devoted to the analysis of the process of formation of the image of Palestine and the British Empire at the end of the First World War. On the basis of the materials of American cartoons and periodicals, the main points in the evolution of the attitude of American society to Palestine are considered, the complexities and contradictions in understanding the features of the British Empire are shown. The study of cartoons will help determine the nature of the interaction of textual and visual images in the US media during the discussion of the results of the First World War, the Treaty of Versailles, the League of Nations and the mandate system. Based on the study of cartoons, two stages in the perception of Palestine in the United States are distinguished: 1) “romantic” and 2) “critical”. New images of Palestine, the British colonial empire, and the Middle East first appeared in newspaper articles, and only later in cartoons. The debate between apologetic and critical strands of US public opinion regarding Palestine and the British model of internal security in the colonies became in 1919 one element of a more global debate between Democrats and Republicans about the role of the US in the League of Nations.

Speaking Silences

Miranda Fricker’s account of what is involved in cases of hermeneutical injustice has been criticised for neglecting the existence of alternative hermeneutical resources developed by non-dominant groups and consequently overlooking its members’ cognitive agency. I argue that this critical strand might be extended to consider what I call “uncontroversial cases of hermeneutical injustice”, i.e. cases in which no alternative resources are available, but marginalized subjects can still be said to resist dominant interpretations of their experiences. Following Alice Crary, I trace the limitations of Fricker’s original account of hermeneutical injustice back to her reliance on a neutral conception of reason and argue that widening the realm of rationality to accommodate affective responses authorizes a revaluation of marginalized subjects’ agency under ideological systems. To illustrate this point, I indicate that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on hinges present a notion of objectivity that serves liberatory projects and might guide a more adequate response to cases of hermeneutical injustice.

Spectral Politics in Emir Kusturica's Underground

Spectral Politics in Emir Kusturica's Underground Zina Giannopoulou The film Underground (Dir. Emir Kusturica, 1995) examines the history of the former Yugoslavia—in a state of war from the 1940s to the 1990s—as a palimpsest of catastrophes. The film won the 1995 Palme d' Or in Cannes around the time that the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia and later Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SRFY) ceased to exist, having been divided into six independent countries. Framed by a prologue and an epilogue, the narrative of the film proceeds in three parts, each signaled by an intertitle. "Part 1—War" begins with the Nazi bombing of Belgrade on 6 April 1941 and shows the beginning of the Partisan resistance until the Allies bomb the remains of Belgrade in 1944; "Part 2—Cold War" marks the establishment of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tito's communist Yugoslavia and the opening up of the country to the West; and "Part 3—War" refers to the Bosnian conflict and breakup of former Yugoslavia. Kusturica is known for his raucous portrayals of Balkan life, but Underground's audiovisual and narrative excess sparked a domestic and international controversy. Some critics claim that the film propagates Balkanism by depicting "the impaired moral standards innate in the Balkan social character."1 Others interpret the characters' lust for life as "the authenticity of ordinary Yugoslavs that nourished the utopian impulse for a transnational identity."2 Still others stress the film's self-referentiality, its calling attention to itself as both fiction and document of historical reconstruction.3 Kusturica describes Underground as "a film about manipulation, the way that one or two people can keep large numbers of others in their power. In Tito's time, people were kept in a kind of metaphorical cellar, isolated and believing that they were living the best of lives. And in recent years the people who had kept the others in cellars announced themselves as democrats and promptly created new cellars."4 Instead of seeing these critical strands—wild Balkan passions, extravagance as impulse to a utopian and nostalgic pan-Yugoslavism, and cinematic self-reflexivity—as separate from or mutually incompatible with one another, I synthesize them into a reading that tries to do justice to the complex politics of former Yugoslavia as seen by Kusturica. My focus will be on the epilogue, the film's most spectacular sequence and "the main image that Kovačević and Kusturica (the screenwriters) had in mind when they first started working on the project and that they were determined to use as a metaphor in their film about Yugoslavia."5 I read the epilogue both intratextually, as the last narrative segment of a tripartite structure (the other two segments being the prologue and Part 2/the cellar), and intertextually through the theoretical lens of Derridean spectrality and the event, as articulated mostly in Specters of Marx (1994), a text written at the time Underground was made and grappling with the epistemological, ethical, and political exigencies occasioned by the collapse of the Soviet bloc after the fall of the Berlin Wall. [End Page 4] Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 5] My reading aims to answer two main questions. First, how does Kusturica use time, space, and cinematic self-referentiality to represent the political realities of former Yugoslavia? Given that Underground, like all Kusturica's films, is a specimen of historiographic metafiction, a term coined by Linda Hutcheon for hybrid texts of "fiction that is historically conditioned and history that is discursively structured," how does its inter-threading of history and fiction engage with the Yugoslav past?6 And secondly, how does the Derridean specter help to envision a space and time for Yugoslavia post-mortem that avoids traditional utopianism which Derrida rejects as rooted in ontology and thus closed to the transcendental "possibility of possibilities"?7 I begin with an overview of the film's use of time, space, and cinematic selfreferentiality, and then I examine these elements in the prologue, the cellar, and the epilogue. A brief detour into Derrida's spectrality and the event precedes my reading of the epilogue. Underground, or A Country Under Siege The titular...

Locating TWAIL Scholarship in China

AbstractThis paper opens a scholarly discourse about Chinese scholars’ engagement with TWAIL (Third World Approach to International Law). This paper shows that Chinese international law scholars and TWAIL align in their resistance to Eurocentrism in international law, while they differ in their attitude towards whether to refrain from “national allegories” and criticize international law as a state-centric invention. A state-centric approach means that mainstream Chinese international lawyers tend to adopt a pragmatic attitude towards international law, employing it as a strategic weapon. During the course of this inquiry, this paper also observes a critical strand in Chinese academics – mostly outside of the international law discipline, and within the disciplines of history and philosophy – that is dedicated to redeeming China's subjectivity and history, which may be useful to understand Chinese critical spirit.

Review: Las Hijas de Juan: Daughters Betrayed, by Josie Méndez-Negrete

Review: <i>Las Hijas de Juan: Daughters Betrayed</i>, by Josie Méndez-Negrete

The (Un)Changing Political Economy of Arts, Cultural and Community Engagement, the Creative Economy and Place-Based Development during Austere Times

This article explores arts, cultural and community engagement (ACCE) in the context of enduring austerity in England. Working with a methodically crafted synthesis of theoretical perspectives drawn from (1) the critical political economy (CPE) tradition, (2) the sociology of cultural production, (3) cultural studies and critical strands of community development scholarship, and (4) pertinent discourses on the creative economy and place-based development, the article reviews the political, economic and institutional ecosystem within which a bottom-up approach to ACCE operates. Making use of ethnography for data-gathering, the article explores how three carefully selected case studies respond to the demands and pressures generated by, and associated with, corporate interest and top-down, policy-driven subsidy—including how such responses shape and position the work of the case studies in the contemporary creative economy and local place-based development. The article argues that ACCE contributes meaningfully to the development of self-governance and organic growth through egalitarian cross-sectoral alliances and cultural and social entrepreneurship. However, this happens only if the said ecosystem genuinely supports equality and social justice. Where such support is non-existent, established hierarchies perpetuate domination and exploitation. This stifles wider creative and cultural engagement on the terms of communities.

Digital Phenotyping for Mental Health: Reviewing the Challenges of Using Data to Monitor and Predict Mental Health Problems.

We review recent developments within digital phenotyping for mental health, a field dedicated to using digital data for diagnosing, predicting, and monitoring mental health problems. We especially focus on recent critiques and challenges to digital phenotyping from within the social sciences. Three significant strands of criticism against digital phenotyping for mental health have been developed within the social sciences. This literature problematizes the idea that digital data can be objective, that it can be unbiased, and argues that it has multiple ethical and practical challenges. Digital phenotyping for mental health is a rapidly growing and developing field, but with considerable challenges that are not easily solvable. This includes when, and if, data from digital phenotyping is actionable in practice; the involvement of user and patient perspectives in digital phenotyping research; the possibility of biased data; and challenges to the idea that digital phenotyping can be more objective than other forms of psychiatric assessment.

LIMITES DO PÓS-DESENVOLVIMENTO NA CRÍTICA AO DESENVOLVIMENTO

The theoretical current known as post-development emerged in the 1980s. Its proponents were authors with different analytical focuses and diversified themes, firmly committed to a radical critique of the idea of development. In this regard, this article aims to analyze post-development's theoretical and propositional basis, evaluating its arguments' consistency and the coherence between the basis of this argument and its propositional direction. Initially, the main issues raised by post-development are examined, paying particular attention to the two main strands of criticism of the concept of development. Next, there is a counterargument to the criticisms discussed above to demonstrate their inconsistencies and possible contributions to the reflexive and operational development field. Based on this debate, it is concluded that post-development makes valid and necessary criticisms, if these are intended to improve development projects that aim to address the objective reality of a large part of the Brazilian and global population. However, stripped of this crucial practical focus and an awareness of the gravity of different populations' social situations, post-development contributes little to overcome the history of failures of different development proposals. Keywords: Development, Post-Development, Alternative Development, Theoretical-Propositional Critique.

The disciplinary and critical divide in social studies teacher education research: A review of the literature from 2009–2019

ABSTRACT For decades, scholarship on preservice social studies teacher education in the United States has grappled with the unsystematic nature of research in this field. Given the broad and enduring attempt to overcome these divisions, however, it is noteworthy that there has not been a recent attempt to systematically categorize those divisions. This literature review analyzes 139 articles published between 2009 and 2019 through the lens of the divisions between “traditional,” “disciplinary,” and “critical” strands of social studies research on teacher education. Results indicate that disciplinary and critical strands dominate the contemporary literature and provide two distinct research agendas for understanding the development of new social studies teachers. Reconsidering social studies teacher education as a field containing two divergent systems, this review maps the fault lines defining the field and explores how it might respond to those divisions in ways that are meaningful for researchers, students, and practitioners.