Text Asks Research Articles

The transnational movement for Truth, Justice and Reconciliation as an emotional (rule) regime?

The text at first focuses on a recent human rights movement for Truth, Justice and Reconciliation (TJ&R) and the War against Impunity. It briefly presents power structures, values, events and mobilizations that have led to some key forms of its institutionalization, such as the Truth Commissions (TCs), International Crime Tribunals (ICTs) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. It then poses the question of the emotional regimes that have accompanied its emergence and institutionalization. It does so in a threefold manner: it asks what feeling rules have been proposed by the Western armchair critics of the West as appropriate for dealing with past/distant human suffering. It then focuses on the activists – the humanitarian and human rights movements active where the suffering takes place – to see what they propose as appropriate feeling rules. Finally, it reproduces some elements of a broader, transnational debate concerning TJ&R to tease out the feeling rules advocated for victims and perpetrators facing TCs, ICTs, and the ICC in The Hague. In conclusion, the text asks whether we can speak of a Western institutional and emotional regime growing out of the movement for TJ&R.

The place of reading in the training of teachers

Why focus on reading? Reading is one important human activity that is threatened by the knowledge economy in education. In this perspective, good reading tends to be fast reading. The objective for teachers is then to test pupils' reading skills according to how fast they read. In opposition to this, we think that good reading is a slow activity. A good text asks for a reading and a re-reading, again and again, because reading gives rise to thinking. Thus, you can interpret our writing as a political act. We want to participate in education in a way that opposes the force of a knowledge economy. The aim of this article is to argue why prospective teachers have to train their capability [Ricoeur (2005. The Course of Recognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) refers to four basic capabilities. He distinguishes between: the capability to speak, the capability to act, the capability to tell, and a fourth capability called imputation. Reading in this respect is subordinate to these basic capabilities] to read and, based on this, why we insist on this being a matter of necessity in order to develop reading as a reflexive activity, through what we have called ‘slow reading’ (this expression is meant to oppose the instrumentalization of reading toward a skill characterized as fast extractions of information, for instance, as measured in various tests). This represents one part of the argument that we are going to elaborate. The other part of the argument is related more specifically to the place of reading in the training of teachers, more precisely asking where this ‘place’ is. This has led us to ask the following question: Where are teachers' understandings challenged in teacher training? As our argument is laid out, we say that the place of reading is where teachers' understandings are challenged. This entails that this ‘place,’ this somewhere, is not a permanent ‘dwelling’; it is rather something which has to be created (repeatedly) in a dynamic relationship between reader (teacher) and text.

Trick questions: cosmopolitan hospitality

This paper consists of two texts. The first explores the limits of cosmopolitanism in practice, taking as its subject the Life in the UK Citizenship Test, inaugurated under the Labour Government in 2005. It argues that the test exemplifies the predicament of all attempts at cosmopolitan hospitality as unconditional welcoming, through a discussion of the relation between questioning and welcoming the stranger. Establishing the relationship between cosmopolitanism and hospitality as envisaged in Derrida’s reading of Kant it asks what kind of cosmopolitan hospitality is either possible or desirable by exploring what Derrida calls the ‘perversions’ inherent in the structures of hospitality. It focuses on the concept of the ‘trick questions’ that the state asks the foreigner observed by Derrida in his reading of The Apology of Socrates; questions that seem to invite answers but foreclose the possibilities of a free response. The second text asks how this logic that Derrida identifies can be pushed or coaxed into new ways of addressing the perceived threats of ‘unconditional’ hospitality through a reading of ‘unconditional hospitality’ as queer in the work of Tove Jansson

Under the Hood by C. Merlin

Merlin,Christophe. Under the Hood. Sommerville, MA.: Candlewick Press, 2011. Print. Interactive books are expensive to make and there are always compromises. In this case the publishers have reduced some cost by making the front cover the title page and placing the publication information on the back cover. Strangely, the author’s given name is not printed on the book at all. Under the Hood has many flaps that children can lift to see what is underneath. Sometimes lifting a flap reveals another flap. The story is about Mr. Bear’s car and garage. When you open the book, you see the garage, with large wooden doors. Open the flaps that are the double doors, and you see a tarped car. When you lift the tarp, you see the car. The text asks, “Is there anyone under the tarp?” Open the car door flap and look into the car and see the word, “No” written on the inside of the door. This fun book also includes a large two-page fold out that allows you see the car up on a hoist, and has a pull-tab car that lets you race against an elephant on a motorcycle. Many of the flaps reveal the mundane; bolts in a box or tools in a toolbox. However, some hide visual surprises. When you lift the armoured vehicle flap, you see gangsters who have stolen the truck and tied up the driver. A tiny two-seater car folds out to be a dragster that has side-pipes with flames coming out of them. In the last scene, where the text asks, “where is Mouse?”, lifting the hood on the tow-truck reveals Mouse, still in his mechanic’s coveralls, curled up with a pillow. The text is very simple, aimed at age three and up. The vehicles are a late 1940’s or early 1950’s models. The images are all solid blocks of colour outlined with heavy black outlines. The colours are muted and the prints are made to look like badly printed woodcuts or block prints, giving the book the look of a comic with a “vintage” feel. This will be a book that is “loved to death”. Even though the book is a reinforced trade edition, printed on fairly heavy card stock, children will want to repeatedly lift the flaps and they will wear out and tear. Libraries with small budgets may want to invest in other volumes that will last longer. Parents may want to keep Under the Hood as a “special” book that is only read under supervision. Recommended: 3 stars out of 4Reviewer: Sandy CampbellSandy is a Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Alberta, who has written hundreds of book reviews across many disciplines. Sandy thinks that sharing books with children is one of the greatest gifts anyone can give.

Prostori ramimoilaženja

The text asks how dissent can be organized spatially. Although, taking recent developments in arts, architecture and urban planning into consideration, the focus is put on two projects of the artist and architect Apolonija Šušteršič: the café KAFIČ, commissioned by Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, and the Community Pavilion in Hustadt, commissioned by the municipality of Bochum. Following these examples the text discusses the possibilities of how to transmute social antagonism into agonism thereby creating a vibrant public sphere that allows the expression of competing notions, opinions and approaches.

Reverse Mission

The text asks five questions regarding reverse mission. First, what is it? Secondly, is it actually being attempted? Thirdly, why “diasporic” attempts lag behind the rhetoric? Fourthly, why do “non-diasporic” attempts, on the other hand, have more chance of success? And lastly, what is the outlook for reverse mission in Europe? The concept of reverse mission is defined and it’s imprecision questioned. Attempts at diasporic reverse mission are then discussed, as well as reasons for their general failure. However, non-diasporic reverse mission, in various modalities, is also widespread. The advantages and disadvantages of this direct mission movement are analyzed, stressing the specific disadvantages that Pentecostals face in Europe. By far the most significant cross-cultural success story by global southern missionaries in Europe is in Ukraine, but there are many reasons for regarding Ukraine as exceptional rather than a foretaste of things to come. The article concludes that reverse mission via diaspora churches (to which disproportionate scholarly attention has been paid) is unlikely to work. Non-diasporic reverse mission (which deserves more research) is more promising, but even so faces huge obstacles and positive results are still few and far between (except in Ukraine). Over time, however, some success may be achieved; possible scenarios for such success in Europe are discussed.

Foundations of environmental physics: understanding energy use and human impacts

Foundations of Environmental Physics is designed to focus students on the current energy and environmental problems facing society, and to give them the critical thinking and computational skills needed to sort out potential solutions. From its pedagogical approach, students learn that a simple calculation based on first principles can often reveal the plausibility (or implausibility) of a proposed solution or new technology. Throughout its chapters, the text asks students to apply key concepts to current data (which they are required to locate using the internet and other sources) to get a clearer picture of the most pressing issues in environmental science. The text begins by exploring how changes in world population impact all aspects of the environment, particularly with respect to energy use. It then discusses what the first and second laws of thermodynamics tell us about renewable and nonrenewable energy; how current energy use is changing the global climate; and, how alternative technologies can be evaluated through scientific risk assessment. In approaching real-world problems, students come to understand the physical principles that underlie scientific findings. This informative and engaging textbook offers what prospective scientists, managers, and policymakers need most: the knowledge to understand environmental threats and the skills to find solutions.

Three Ways to Lose Your Epistemology

This piece offers an autoethnographic examination of the unraveling of epistemic certainty. The reader is offered three stories of falling, which explain the author's loss of knowing as a result of education, trauma, or apostacy. The aporias and assumptions in each story are teased out as we explore what they profess, where they fall silent, and how they understand uncertainty. Rather than determining which story is true, the text asks ethical and practical questions about where each story takes us. The irreconcilability of these three narratives raises questions about the limits of pluralism, how we respond to ideological difference, and the viability of our need to know.

What is the Question to Which Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation is the Answer?

Interpreters generally agree that the Fifth Cartesian Meditation fails to achieve its task, but they do not agree on what that task is. In my essay, I attempt to formulate the question to which the Fifth Cartesian Meditation gives the answer. While it is usually assumed that the text poses a rather ambitious question, I suggest that the text asks, “How is the Other given to me on the most basic level?” The answer would be that the Other is given as accessible in the mode of inaccessibility. Husserl’s failure to convey this question clearly seems rooted in ambiguities concerning the concepts of solipsism and the sphere of ownness.

Breaking the Circles of Uncertainty

This text asks if the notion of an avant-garde in art is viable today. It does this firstly with reference to recent (post-1967) theoretical and critical writing on avant-gardes in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and secondly, more indirectly, via questions in radical philosophy on the possibilities for radical social change. Perhaps to expect radical change today, or to foresee contemporary art as contributing to it, is forlorn, like waiting for Godot. Perhaps Beckett's violent gesture at the end of Waiting for Godot, when the characters walk on the spot, is as much as can be said, which is almost to refuse to say anything. And yet, while there is contemporary art, even at the margins, which engages on issues of social and environmental justice, and sees these as integral to each other, the effort to recover something of the hope once expressed by Courbet that art can change the world may yet be worthwhile.

Contents Under Pressure

Paul’s metaphorical text asks us to envision anew the feelings of urgency and elusiveness, the pensiveness and languor confronting all writers as they face the moment of composing text.

Ciclos de desenvolvimento humano e formação de educadores

Os ciclos não são mais uma proposta isolada de algumas escolas, a nova LDB os legitimou e estão sendo adotados por muitas redes escolares. Este texto se pergunta pelo tipo de profissional que está sendo formado nessa modalidade de organização do trabalho pedagógico. A reflexão está estruturada em duas partes. A primeira reflete sobre o caráter formador do repensar das concepções e práticas de formação que acontecem na implantação dos ciclos. A segunda parte reflete sobre as virtualidades formadoras de todo o processo de desconstrução de uma estrutura centrada nas Temporalidades ou Ciclos do Desenvolvimento Humano.

Extraordinary measures: the exercise of prerogative powers in the United States

An examination of the exercise of extraordinary powers in extraordinary times by the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the US government, this text asks at what point we risk destroying the state in order to save it.

Baudelaire's Theory of Practice: Ideology and Difference in “Les yeux des pauvres”

Baudelaire's poetry dramatizes the self-effacing quality of dominant discourse so well that until recently critics have failed to engage his interest in ideology. In the prose poem “Les yeux des pauvres,” the traces of that self-effacement allow us to read the ideological implications of what seem to be the text's purely aesthetic and ethical dimensions. By staging encounters with social and sexual difference, “Les yeux” challenges the principle of reflexivity underlying its announced aesthetic of the correspondences. In questioning the logic of the same that governs the mystified speaker's figuration and psychology, the text asks whether and how an Other can escape the confines of the official egalitarian ideology of post-1848 France, which tends to cast alterity in its own image.