Sustained Dialogue Research Articles

Establishing Prospective Road Traffic Injury Surveillance in India: Challenges and Solutions

There are many challenges in establishing surveillance systems for road injuries in India, predominantly rapid staff turnover, heavy workload and the absence of already existing data recording and management in hospitals. Pending administrative solutions such as improved staffing and posting, the chief measures to address these challenges were sustained dialogue and rapport-building with hospital administrators, training of data collectors, and enlisting the aid of bridge personnel, such as interns. Reiterating the value of surveillance data to negotiate for hospital resources commensurate with the high burden of road injuries may help convince hospital administrators to sustain such surveillance initiatives.

Lessons from self-assessments within urban climate resilience programs

Purpose – This paper aims to review and develop lessons learned from the United Nations Office of Disaster Risk Reduction Local Government Self Assessment Tool (LGSAT) experience in four cities. The capacity to understand, learn from and respond to or reorganize in the face of change is at the core of urban resilience to disasters, climate change and major shocks. Self assessments, like the LGSAT, can be used to engage city stakeholders in critically assessing and understanding their capacity according to a set of standards of resilience. Design/methodology/approach – City stakeholders in four cities, Hat Yai and Udon Thani, Thailand and Hue and Lao Cai, Vietnam, completed the LGSAT in an open multi-stakeholder process as part of urban climate resilience programs. Findings – Completing the LGSAT provided important and valuable information about institutional capacity that is important for disaster risk reduction and climate change efforts. Multi-stakeholder processes allowed for greater and more sustained dialogue among groups that may not have a chance to interact regularly and helped build trust and relationships that contribute to climate resilience and disaster risk reduction efforts. Originality/value – Further, the inclusion of multiple viewpoints allowed for more nuanced and novel consideration of issues and in multiple cities led to new projects that focused on building institutional and agent capacity. The LGSAT process relied on facilitation that was able to guide discussion, ensure safe spaces for dialogue and address stakeholder questions. Finally, while the tool was applied to questions of climate change in this process, there is still room to improve the tool to more adequately and directly address issues of climate change risk.

Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russia: Culture, History, Context ed. by Patrick Lally Michelson, Judith Deutsch Kornblatt (review)

Reviewed by: Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russia: Culture, History, Context ed. by Patrick Lally Michelson, Judith Deutsch Kornblatt Josephine von ZITZEWITZ (bio) Patrick Lally Michelson and Judith Deutsch Kornblatt (Eds.), Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russia: Culture, History, Context (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). 303pp. Index. ISBN: 978-0-299-29894-4. This collection, comprising eleven essays, is in many respects a sequel to Russian Religious Thought, the volume edited by Judith Deutsch Kornblatt and Richard F. Gustafson in 1996. Russian Religious Thoughtexplored the work of a group of thinkers whose names have become synonymous with that term: Vladimir Solov’ev, Pavel Florensky, Sergei Bulgakov, and Semen Frank; there are a few others who could join this list. Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russia has set itself a different task: to redress the rigid division of Russian religious thought into “lay” and “ecclesiastical.” The collection provides historical, social, philosophical, and ecclesiastical context, placing well-known texts into a web of relations and cross-influences and introducing less well-known voices from within the Russian Orthodox Church and the Spiritual Academies to the English-language reader. The commitment to context is reflected in the division of the book into three sections – “Thinking Orthodox in the Church,” “Thinking Orthodox in the Academy,” and “Thinking Orthodox in Society and Culture.” Thus the volume presents a more balanced picture of the origins of religious ideas, complicating the simplistic binary opposition that locates “thought,” as opposed to “dogma,” outside the Church or at its fringes. This goes some distance toward weakening the prejudice that, in the absence of a scholastic tradition within the Orthodox Church, Orthodox thought was developed by lay thinkers who were, strictly speaking, philosophers rather than theologians. Composition is a strong point of Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russia. Within the sections, the essays are ordered chronologically; moreover, the individual contributions are in sustained dialogue with each other, and there is also dialogue between the sections. The sense of cohesion this imparts to the reader is rare for an edited collection. And yet, the book implicitly confirms the primacy of the early twentieth-century religious philosophers, whose names recur in most of the essays. The very first essay sets the tone, identifying a key theme that runs through the entire volume. This focal point is the relationship between Orthodox theology and the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment. Indeed, seven out of eleven essays focus on this relationship in one form or other. The concern with the Enlightenment and the challenges it posed to traditional [End Page 542] religious faith means that the unlikely protagonist of the volume is a German – the idealist philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose attempts to ground religious faith in human reason tried to cement religion’s place in a changing worldview. Kantian theism – a vision of morality that depended on a particular conception of God and posited moral perfection as the goal of human life – forms, in one sense or other, the backdrop for all essays that deal with Orthodoxy and the Enlightenment. In the first essay, Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter reads a cycle of sermons by Metropolitan Platon (Levshin, 1737–1812), by all accounts a traditional eighteenthcentury churchman, for his attempt to provide Christian answers to questions raised by the Enlightenment, in other words, to find a “reasonable faith.” The conclusion Wirtschafter reaches is provocative – not only was the Orthodox Church after the Petrine reforms a much more dynamic environment than commonly assumed, but the efforts of Enlightenment churchmen prepared the ground on which Russia subsequently adopted Western cultural models. A more explicitly Kantian reading of Metropolitan Platon is provided by the late Oliver Smith in the third section. In “The Theological Roots of Russian Hermeneutics,” he elaborates on Platon’s adaptation of Enlightenment beliefs in the autonomy of reason for the purpose of developing an Orthodox hermeneutics that became influential beyond the confines of theology and the Academy (more below). The section on thought originating in the four prerevolutionary Spiritual Academies (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, and Kazan) contains two essays that function as thesis and antithesis. Sean Gillen, in “V. D. Kudriavtsev-Platonov and the Making of Russian Orthodox Theism,” details how Kudriavtsev-Platonov (1828–91) uses Kantian theism in order to...

Developers' Views about Public Meetings in the Context of Public Relations Theory

Employing popular normative public relations paradigms, this study identified practices used by developers that improve long-range project outcomes, based on successful engagement in public meetings. Perceptions of public meeting processes, as well as mechanisms to improve outcomes and participant diversity, are discussed. Generally, findings indicate that larger developers were more likely to use public meetings successfully to identify, monitor, and resolve issues; and develop collaborative relationships. These developers were also likely to seek opportunities to increase public involvement by finding ways to lower constraints to participation. These strategies include varying meeting formats, sustained dialog throughout the project life span, employing consultants to aid in the development of public meeting plans, innovation in communication strategies, transparent exchange of ideas, and collaborative negotiations.

Media and the limits of transnational solidarity: Unanswered questions in the relationship between diaspora, communication and community

In this article, I critically analyse the relationship between media and conceptualisations of diaspora as a form of imagined transnational community. Despite the central place of transnational media in understandings of diasporic communities, there is yet to be a sustained dialogue between theoretical understandings of diaspora and diaspora media studies. I argue that the role of transnational media in conceptualisations of diaspora is too often reduced to the facilitation of cross-border communities. Not enough attention is paid to the alternative possibilities, including the potential of media to challenge cross-border solidarities in ways that fundamentally undermine prevalent understandings of the media and diaspora relationship. As a way to address this issue, it is important that studies of diaspora and media incorporate non-diasporic media into their analyses.

Pain worlds: towards the integration of a sociocultural perspective of pain in clinical physical therapy.

The World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (WHO-ICF) model has been advocated as a model of function to conceptualize physical therapist practice. Among its advances, the WHO-ICF model explicitly recognizes the existence of social factors that may influence patients' and clients' understanding of pain. However, understandings of the historical, social and cultural processes that shape the individual and collective experiences of pain and the therapeutic relationship remain limited. We call for a more intentional and sustained dialogue between clinical practice and sociology to help elucidate the nature, characteristics, complexities and clinical implications of one specific element of the WHO-ICF model, environmental factors. The purpose of this review is to advocate for the continued adoption of a sociological lens to help physical therapists better understand the broader networks of people, ideologies and practices in which people 'in pain' are enmeshed and the historical, geographical and cultural spaces in which they operate. In this review, we discuss existing empirical findings in sociology to introduce the concept of 'pain worlds', which can be applied by physical therapists to help characterize the sociocultural factors identified in the WHO-ICF model. Pain worlds is designed to complement the WHO-ICF model and assist in developing interdisciplinary research agendas that illuminate and examine the role, significance and clinical implications of sociocultural and environmental dimensions of pain. We conclude with a brief set of recommendations for the development of such translational research agendas and call for the integration of pain worlds in clinical practice.

Tone It Down a Bit!: Euphemism as a Colonial Device in Australian Indigenous Studies

In a previous article discussing the politics of language in Australian Indigenous Studies teaching and learning contexts, the author and her colleague stated their objective in writing that article was to ''instill'' a sense of the importance of the political nature of language to their student body (McGloin and Carlson 2013). They wanted to engage students in the idea that language, as a conduit for describing the world, is not a neutral channel for its portrayal or depiction; rather, that it is a political device that is often a contributing force to racism and the perpetuation of colonial violence. While reviews of the article were favorable to, and enthusiastic about its aims and content, and some suggestions for refinement helpful, one of the reviewer's comments presented a quandary: the authors were advised to replace the word instill (as in the above context) with develop, a term considered ''less invasive.'' In stating that their aim was to a sense of the importance of language, the authors were advised, their article would better ''recognise the varying trajectories of student learning.'' After much consideration, they declined this suggestion contending that the word instill fit the aims of the article in that were introducing a practice that would inculcate the importance of language in Indigenous contexts. Their thoughts were that such a practice went beyond a gradual developmental process. Indeed, instilling the importance of language by using concrete examples of its application, and its effects, in their view, should be the starting point of a critical pedagogical practice in anticolonial studies. The term develop suggested less immediacy than they wanted to convey about what they thought a serious issue for their students, their discipline, and those interested in work that examines language use for the purpose of disclosing its significatory potential and its capacity for misrepresentation. So although grateful for suggestions for improvement, the irony of substituting a ''less invasive'' term was not lost on them and has inspired this writer to return to the terrain with the aim of further understanding the capacity of language to seamlessly naturalize, and to level and conflate difference as much as to mark otherness. The author invokes the anecdote of the review process not in arrogance or disrespect but to illustrate the way in which language is often euphemized for the purpose of palatability or social convention. In this article, she wants to emphasize the importance of language, in all its contexts, following Bakhtin (1992), to tease out those ''varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of 'our own-ness''' in what is spoken and what is heard, what is understood and misunderstood (89). The article builds on previous work by further complicating the politics of language in contexts of sociocultural difference in order to draw attention to its usage and to make visible that which is hidden, unspeakable, offensive, or deemed unpalatable, by examining closely the use of euphemism as it shapes ''public pedagogy'' and cultural politics in broader discursive terrains. The focus is on what cannot be said, what is left out of the telling of violent histories, and how this affects both the subjects under erasure and those doing the erasing. The author asks: Why events, histories, and practices that are too difficult, too political, or too emotionally loaded to be uttered toned down? and How does the sanitizing of historical events affect those doing the narrating as well as those who are subjects of narrative? She concludes with some insight into the reason for students' use of euphemism in Indigenous studies and argues for a praxis whereby effective strategies for addressing euphemism might be developed through sustained dialogue about the politics of language. Language: en

India–Pakistan Peace Process

Attempts to stay engaged in a process of sustained dialogue and achieve incremental progress towards peace by the Indian and Pakistani political leadership suffered another setback in the form of cross-border firing and allegations of ceasefire violations along the Line of Control and the international boundary in 2013. While New Delhi’s Congress party-led regime, facing parliamentary elections in 2014, buckled under pressure from an intrusive media and the opposition political parties, the new civilian government in Islamabad, in its edgy relationship with the country’s powerful military, put the peace project in the back burner. As allegations and counter charges flew, incapacities of both countries to bring the situation under control were reinforced. The article uses this case study to assess the intent of as well as limitations on leadership of both countries for staying engaged in a process of dialogue. Not just their commitment to peace, but the ability to defy the limitations would shape the future of Indo–Pak relations, the article argues.

Re-Imagining Text - Re-Imagining Hermeneutics

With the advent of the digital age and new mediums of communication, it is becoming increasingly important for those interested in the interpretation of religious text to look beyond traditional ideas of text and textuality to find the sacred in unlikely places. Philosophical and theological hermeneutics have been invigorated by a de-regionalization of the interpretation of texts that corresponds with this journal’s mandate to “cross traditional boundaries, bringing different disciplinary tools to the process of analysis and opening up a sustained dialogue between and among scholars and others who are interested in religion, textuality, media, and mediation and the contemporary world.” Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological reorientation of classical hermeneutics from romanticized notions of authorial intent and psychological divinations to a serious engagement with the “science of the text” is a hermeneutical tool that opens up an important dialogue between the interpreter, the world of the text, and the contemporary world in front of the text. This article examines three significant insights that Paul Ricoeur contributes to our expanding understanding of text. First under scrutiny will be Ricoeur’s de-regionalization of classic hermeneutics culminating in his understanding of Dasein (Being) as “being-in-the-world,” allowing meaning to transcend the physical boundaries of the text. Next, Ricoeur’s threefold under-standing of traditionality/Traditions/tradition as the “chain of interpretations” through which religious language transcends the temporal boundary of historicity will be explored. The final section will focus on Ricoeur’s understanding of the productive imagination and metaphoric truth as the under-appreciated yet key insight around which Ricoeur’s philosophical investigation into the metaphoric transfer from text to life revolves.

Collective Fieldwork Interviews in the Classroom Without Walls

This article uses a course that meets from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. as a context to critically examine collective collaborative fieldwork as an experiential pedagogy that helps students better understand and practice qualitative fieldwork interviews. A collective interviewing experience can provide each student with practice and establish a situation for relatively sustained learning-focused dialogue and debate about interviewing ethics. With this context in mind, I critically examine how interviewing participants in a group scenario can help students understand spurned interview requests, the effects on researcher-participant relationships, and the alteration of temporal and spatial scenes in which interviews take shape as well as teach students about the important nuances of translation during interviews. Taken together, these four issues offer important ways to think about team-based fieldwork projects as an alternative to lone-ethnographer models of research practices that are foregrounded in qualitative research literature and in fieldwork-based courses.

‘Greatly exaggerated’: the death of EU studies–new regionalism dialogue? A reply to Jørgensen and Valbjørn

In a recent piece in this journal Jørgensen and Valbjørn develop a typology of intellectual dialogue across fields that yields rather negative conclusions about the prospects for sustainable dialogue between ‘European studies’ and the ‘new regionalism’. This response disputes this pessimistic conclusion. First, it is argued that while their derivation of models of dialogue is impressive, it is nonetheless incomplete. Using Jørgensen and Valbjørn’s premises, the article derives a ‘market’ mode of dialogue that represents a challenge to their assumption that dialogue will tend towards hierarchy. Second, the article accepts that there are important ‘sociology of knowledge’ impediments to effective dialogue within political science and International Relations, but maintains that Jørgensen and Valbjørn fail to work through the question of ‘dialogue between whom?’ The article argues that methodological division is the most significant impediment to dialogue, but maintains that within-methodology dialogue is more than viable in the case under scrutiny in this debate. Third, having established these general parameters of disagreement, the article moves to a number of more particular criticisms of the assumptions made by Jørgensen and Valbjørn about extant calls for dialogue between scholars in these two fields.

Stakeholder Analysis on Boycott Movement: A Preliminary Study Using Media Contexts

Just like the celebrities, social movement depends, to an extent, on media in communicating its activities to the public. The relationship between social movement and media is transactional. On the one hand, social movement needs media to disseminate its activities. On the other hand, media needs social movement as the news source. Scant (beyond very few notable exceptions) empirical research is not available on boycott product as a social movement and stakeholder analysis in Indonesia. The objective of this study is to perform stakeholder analysis on boycott product as a social movement. To do so, the study attempts to answer some questions: (i) what are the trigger and root cause of boycott movement?; (ii) what are the interest and influence of each stakeholder on boycott movement?; (iii) how is the existing relationship among stakeholders?; and (iv) among the stakeholders, which group does get priority? The news about boycott was collected from national media. The news was then analyzed by content analysis. The results show that in the case of boycott, many parties are involved. However, firms’ management has to give priority to consumers, special interest groups, and the gov-ernment. Attention can be manifested in a continuous and sustainable dialogue with them. Keywords: Boycott movement, media, content analysis, agenda setting, stakeholder theory.

Dialogue and interethnic trust

The growing field of peacebuilding has tried to mitigate interethnic conflicts by creating various sorts of dialogue programs, aiming to build social bonds and bridges between individuals from groups with a history of violent interaction. Yet, little is known of the effect of dialogue initiatives on interethnic relations and peacebuilding. Previous research on dialogue programs has suffered from the serious problem of selection bias: in other words, by not having comparable control groups it has not been possible to separate selection effects (that a program attracts certain types of people) from process effects (that programs have an effect on people). The present study is the first to examine the effects of a dialogue process in a context of political tension and ethnic violence through a randomized field experiment, thereby eliminating this problem. Using a stratified randomization process, participants were selected to a two-term Sustained Dialogue program at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, in 2009–10. Immediately following the dialogue intervention, an attitudinal survey and a behavioral trust game were conducted with a group of 716 participants and non-participants. We found that the program had a positive effect on participants’ attitudes: it worked for decreasing mistrust and increasing the level of trust between people of different ethnic origins. Concurrently, however, participation in the dialogue program increased the sense of importance of ethnic identities as well as the perception of being ethnically discriminated – a somewhat counter-intuitive finding. Participation in dialogue processes had no significant effect on game behavior: participants in Sustained Dialogue were neither more trusting nor trustworthy than non-participants. This study shows the fruitfulness of randomized field-experiments in the area of peace and conflict research and finishes by identifying some important paths for future research.

Collaborative Partnerships: A Case Study of the Executive Master of Public Governance Program in Copenhagen, Denmark

This article gives an introduction to the Executive Master of Public Governance degree program in Copenhagen, Denmark—a joint effort by the University of Copenhagen and Copenhagen Business School, aided by Aalborg University— which in the winter of 2012 had enrolled 600+ public managers from Denmark as executive master students. The average age of participants is 45 years. The degree program itself began its first intake of participants in August 2009. To understand the context of the program, the article gives an introduction to the background of the establishment of the program that was a result of a government reform—the Quality Reform—agreed upon by the Danish Parliament in 2008. The second part of the paper describes the organization and purpose of the program. The third part presents the content of the program. The article ends by pointing to lessons learned. Four lessons are highlighted: (a) Sustained dialogue is important; (b) Engage in a multiple sector project to improve public management; (c) Public funding helps fuel enthusiasm; and (d) Efficient organizing and alignment with faculty interests are crucial to success.

Fighting for the Soul of Germany: The Catholic Struggle for Inclusion after Unification by Rebecca Ayako Bennette (review)

Reviewed by: Fighting for the Soul of Germany: The Catholic Struggle for Inclusion after Unification by Rebecca Ayako Bennette Eric Yonke Fighting for the Soul of Germany: The Catholic Struggle for Inclusion after Unification. By Rebecca Ayako Bennette. [Harvard Historical Studies, Vol.178.] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2012. Pp. xi, 368. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-674-06563-5.) Rebecca Ayako Bennette has given us good reason to reconsider the 1870s in German Catholic history. Her book analyzes Catholic public discourse on German national identity, bringing contemporary cultural analysis to bear on the subject. Rather than interpreting the 1870s as a period of Catholic reaction and rejection of the Reich, Bennette argues convincingly that the basis of Catholic integration is forged in this decade. Bennette has divided her study into two parts, highlighting her two major challenges to traditional historiography. Part I is a close chronological analysis of the Kulturkampf. Here Bennette separates the Kulturkampf into its component parts as a corrective to customary historical shorthand. This allows us to see more clearly the development of Catholic thought about the nation after the defeat of Austria in 1866, then through an initial phase of Catholic integration in 1871–72, and then through the political battles of 1873–75. Throughout these phases, Catholic journalists and politicians never questioned the core concept of a German Reich, but rather argued that Bismarck’s policies and the Liberals were leading Germany down an essentially “un-German” path. Part II addresses four themes in the Catholic construction of national identity, where Catholic leaders challenged the concepts of the nation of Bismarck and the Liberals. First, Bennette examines how regionalism was “central” to the new nation and to the Catholic view of German-ness. Second, German Catholic writers at least briefly offered a “feminine gendering of the nation” (p. 13) as an alternative to the Protestant, masculine, and militaristic images. Third, Bennette examines Catholic attempts to claim German scholarship (Bildung and Wissenschaft) and attack Liberal bias in the professoriate. Bennette’s fourth theme is the Catholic vision of a new German epoch. Through these themes, Catholic writers fashioned their own version of the “special path” (Sonderweg) for the German nation, one that heralded the New Imperialism to come and brought true Christian culture to a world threatened by materialist civilization. Catholic writers argued that it was their duty to fend off the Liberal destruction of true German-ness so that Germany could embrace its moment in world history and lead in the advancement of Christian civilization. Bennette notes that her analysis relies heavily on newspapers, but her study reaches beyond newspapers into the larger body of Catholic publications and the personal records of Catholic leaders. Newspapers and “confessional” journals, however, present unique challenges for historical research. Newspapers can provide a “dialogic format,” as Bennette states, in which the publications both shape public opinion and respond to it. Yet Catholic public [End Page 378] opinion, especially in the 1870s, is difficult to grasp. Given the Church’s censorship of materials as well as the self-censorship of Catholic writers, we need to question the dialogic openness of these publications. Bennette comments that roughly half of German Catholics did not vote for the Center Party. This is a significant fact that suggests a very large portion of Catholics did not engage in sustained dialogue with writers for Germania, the Historisch-Politische Blätter, or the Kölnische Volkszeitung. The chasm that existed, with social elites and their “mass” publications on one side and the German Catholic population on the other, is still a major problem for historical analysis. Bennette’s work is nonetheless a masterful study of the Catholic journals and their vision of Germany in the Kulturkampf era. Her work rightly brings us to reconsider the problem of Catholic integration in the Kaiserreich and provides a solid basis for further historical inquiry. Eric Yonke University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point Copyright © 2013 The Catholic University of America Press

Resolving Community Conflicts and Problems: Public Deliberation and Sustained Dialogue

Resolving Community Conflicts and Problems: Public Deliberation and Sustained Dialogue

Toward Transpacific Ecopoetics: Three Indigenous Texts

In this article, I employ "the Pacific" as a contact zone, method, and concept with which to examine the dynamic, shifting relationship between land and sea that allows indigenous literature in the transpacific context to engage all of its ecopoetic complexity. The Pacific is the largest oceanic divide on earth. In recent years, issues around global capitalism, national identity, community, and the ecology of the Pacific region have sparked intriguing and provoca- tive discussions. Research along these lines celebrates the networking and coalition activities of various groups of people in the Pacific, and highlights the circulation of ideas and cultures that I believe to be crucial to contem- porary ecological scholarship. It offers an oceanic perspective that serves as a counterweight to continental ways of thinking, and it supplements or challenges transnational approaches to imperialism, postcolonialism, indi- geneity, globalization, and ecology. 1 A recent special issue of the Contemporary Pacific titled "Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge" examines uncharted spaces of the Pacific Islands and historicizes indigenous discourses about making landfall, showing how they have contested the production of new transoceanic environments. The articles in this special issue "explore notions of Pacific indigeneity as they circulate through geographical, cultural, political, and historical flows of people(s), things, knowledge, power—between islands and continents." 2 As the United States and China battle over this geographical space, the message from the indigenous Pacific can be inspiring: neighboring communities have always exchanged ideas and products, often across vast oceanic distances. It was a large world in which indigenous people intermingled along numerous interconnecting routes, unhindered by the boundaries erected much later by imperial powers. Indeed, the recent wave of research on transnational

Being in the World: Dialogue and Cosmopolis by Fred Dallmayr (review)

Reviewed by: Being in the World: Dialogue and Cosmopolis by Fred Dallmayr Franklin J. Woo, (retired) (bio) Fred Dallmayr. Being in the World: Dialogue and Cosmopolis. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. xiv, 270 pp. Hardcover $50.00, isbn 978-0-8131-4191-6. Fred Dallmayr is emeritus professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. For me, he is an unusual scholar of political science. Most of those whom I know are hard-nosed social scientists who deal only with quantifiable data, while all the intangibles in the realm of culture, such as myths of a people, religion, morality, and ethics, have no place within their academic purview. As an engaged scholar with the pressing problems of the world, Dallmayr unabashedly trangresses the canons of good scholarship of his stated discipline of political science. He advocates the humanities, a liberal arts education in the manner of the German Bildung, nurturing the image of God as part of well-rounded human flourishing and responsibility. He interprets textual passages from the Hebrew bible (such as Psalm 19:1) in advocating that humans should care for all of God’s creation. Above all, he draws on the Socratic tradition of inquiry, which for him is “sustained dialogue” and “multilateral interactions” between diverse peoples in our shrunken, globalized world, where every place is virtually a “cosmopolis.” His cosmopolis is “the just and harmoniously ordered global city promised in all scriptures and philosophical mediations” (p. xii). For Dallmayr, the cosmopolis contains all the cultural treasures of humanity, which today are readily accessible to be reappropriated and reinterpreted for the common good of our time. In short, Dallmayr is “anguished” about the future possibility of life on Earth, about the prospect of a decent, humane, just “being-in-the-world” (p. xii), amid today’s massive problems of the maldistribution of Earth’s resources, the economic [End Page 71] meltdown in seamless global capitalism, terrorism by the disinherited, the nuclear threat, and the degradation and nonsustainability of planet Earth. More than a decade ago, Stephen Toulmin described the cosmopolis as an ethos of certainty and exactitude that arose in the late seventeenth century following Europe’s devastating Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). That three decades of religious war ended with the Peace of Westphalia and the rise of nation-states, resulting in the diminishing power and influence of ecclesiastical authorities, especially of the Roman Catholic Church. That ethos of Europe was part of the Enlightenment, with its freedom from authorities and rise of modern pagan belief—all undergirded by positivistic scientific thinking. According to Toulmin, the cosmopolis is a rationally ordered society, just as ordered as Newtonian nature. Its hidden agenda is the delusion that human nature and society could be fitted into precise, manageable, and rational categories. This positivistic approach to reality has given rise to extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavor, including social institutions and all the better things and conveniences of modern life, including modernity itself. The negative and unintended consequences that threaten humanity and planet Earth itself, however, are manifold. These have led Toulmin to conclude that the notion of nation-states is outmoded, and that some global governance and regulatory mechanisms are imperative. This is not to mention the fact that, coming from an entirely different cultural context, China has, along with modernity, adopted the nation-state model, a concept foreign to the civilizational nature of the Middle Kingdom and forced on China by Western aggressors in the nineteenth century. Ironically, China has not only adopted the Westphalian system but is insisting on Chinese sovereignty, as well as refusing to interfere with the sovereignty of other nations, including those that are despotic towards their own people and others. Toulmin suggests that to move toward a better world, perhaps the United Nation should really become a “Cooperative of States.”1 Dallmayr’s Dialogue and Cosmopolis carries on from where Toulmin left off. The former’s exploration is an Aristotelian quest for the good life in which all in the inhabited earth may live and grow, fortified by a Martin Heideggerian notion of Dasein, “being-in-the-world,” which is much more than simply being present or contained...

Courting the Dragon: Australia's Emerging Dialogue With China

Australia and China have evolved a synergistic relationship driven largely by the rapidly expanding Chinese demand for Australian resources. China's growing political and economic influence, regionally and globally, has prompted for different reasons the leadership of both countries to develop new channels and forms of communication. It has left Australian society with the unfamiliar task of engaging with a major center of power whose cultural and political traditions are radically different from its own. This article explores the scope and limitations of Australia's emerging dialogue with China. It makes the case for a sustained and multidimensional dialogue that harnesses more effectively the energies of civil society as well as business and government, thereby facilitating the task of redefining the relationship in a period of far‐reaching transition.

Framing the Sustainability Dialogue in Research

Framing the Sustainability Dialogue in Research