Total Indifference Research Articles

A Review of Mirjam Galley, Building Communism and Policing Deviance in the Soviet Union: Residential Childcare, 1958–1991. Philadelphia, PA: Routledge, 2020, 240 pp.

Mirjam Galley’s monograph on the history of boarding schools in the USSR from 1958 to 1991 fills a significant gap in the historiography of Soviet boarding institutions. Prior to the publication of this book, there was no in-depth analysis and description of this phenomenon throughout the post-Stalin era. The monograph analyses the historical context which conditioned the project of boarding schools, reconstructs their routine, which the author describes as unchanged during thirty years, and uncovers the personal experiences of boarding school staff and charges. However, the author’s primary interests lie within the domain of management principles. While high officials postulated ideals of care and concern, the key features of these institutions were austere conditions, on the one hand, and the almost total indifference that officials and representatives of state institutions demonstrated towards the project of boarding schools and schoolchildren in particular, on the other hand. Galley outlines how the upbringing of future workers, which was advertised as a duty of the utmost importance, actually depended on the personal goodwill of bureaucrats as well as on the ability of boarding schools’ staff to present the paper results of their work in the best possible manner.

From The Furrow

from The Furrow Valérie Manteau (bio) and Claire Foster (bio) Hrant, according to translator Dominique Eddé, addressed his reader not as one person in need of persuading, but rather as two people in conflict whom he hoped to bring closer together. Karin Karakasli, his longtime partner at Agos, says he "invented a language that wholly seizes nationalism by the throat." I flip through all the translations I can find, in English and in French, while sitting outside my favorite cafés, where I seem to attract frequent demonstrations of sympathy from neighbors and servers. Erol, the souvenir seller just next to Café Muz, is the only one who doesn't hide his disappointment. If you write about Hrant, there won't be any room in your book for me, even though you promised. I ask if he has any stories about Hrant but he shrugs, I'm just a humble shopkeeper. I point out that Hrant himself had a slew of businesses before going into journalism, but Erol doesn't want to be a character in a book about Hrant. I remember the day I saw on TV that he'd died, I didn't know who he was, but I heard it was an Armenian journalist killed by a Turk and trust me: it was the first time in my life I'd ever felt so Turkish, so ashamed of being Turkish. I'd be happy to play the villain, but in a story. Whatever your thing is, it hits too close to home. Erol's souvenir shop is trying to change with the times, as Westerners are scarce, and have been somewhat replaced by tourists from the Gulf region who, in addition to buying traditional soaps, napkins, magnets, and tchotchkes, acquire calligraphies that Erol can't read, but which he sells as authentically Turkish. I'd sell anything, he says, as long as I can take some time off and ride around with my friends. I ask whom he votes for, but he dodges the question—I don't do politics, I'm for peace, I just want everyone to respect each other, that's it. He still does some politics, though—I mention the Syrian guy he'd hired but eventually asked to leave. He'd wanted to do his prayers and he entirely has that right, Erol contends, but he couldn't just abandon the store like that without letting me know. And then he bothered the customers at Muz because the music was too loud, it was all too much. It's a shame, because it was nice having someone who could speak Arabic to customers, but there's always trouble with Middle Easterners. Hearing him say this I burst out laughing, but he doesn't know what he's said that's funny—just so you know, it's Europe here. "The difference between East and West," writes Hakan Günday, "is Turkey. [End Page 50] I don't know if Turkey is the result of subtraction, but I do know that the distance that separates East and West is as wide as the country itself." And within this space emerges a third path, which occurs in any space between two things—without which Europe wouldn't be Europe, and the Middle East would be seen as a flat, illegible mess. Erol tried to hire Fares, who's tired of making coffee at Muz, but Fares declined without a second thought—the ridiculously low wages, 12 hours a day, six days per week, plus his total indifference towards the work. And why not shine the shoes of Emiratis too, while we're at it. Erol gets it, but can only bemoan his own situation, because of course he too would prefer to have a garage filled with old motorcycles. And to live closer to Izmir, spend the day doing nothing—like you, by the way, living la dolce vita. I wonder what it is you see in this place. If I weren't stuck here, I'd be long gone. If I had a foreign girlfriend, easy, I'd marry her, and we'd go to Europe. You see, the problem with having...

Unreasonably Caused (on the Essence of Evil)

A hypothesis is presented and justified, according to which the essence of evil is considered as something that is unreasonably caused. The author's arguments are supported by the conceptual interrelation between the following three statements: 1) dialectically conflicting interpretation of evil; 2) traditional classification of evil as an unvalue; 3) suspicious attitude towards causality, which is characteristic of philosophical schools that are not strictly rationalistically oriented. By differentiating causation and founding, evil differs from good, which is understood in its essence as something unreasonably (extra casually) founded. Within the conceptual matrix of “causation and founding” some other meaningful ethical phenomena are determined, in particular, indifference. To support his hypothesis, the author uses, first of all, modernist style texts (or texts that are read as modernist ones) both of realistic and religious orientation, by interpreting them. In the meaningful explanation of the essence of evil as of something that is unreasonably caused, special emphasis is given to the F.M. Dostoevsky’s characters — Kirillov and Stavrogin. Attention is paid to the semantic nuances of the termed word combination (when bringing together the “unreasonableness” with the «involuntariness» and “inadvertence”). When drawing conclusions, the author emphasizes that evil cannot do in its manifestation without a causal action, which is absolutely formal, but at the same time solely reliably ascertained reason of an evil deed drowning in a lot of reasons that are empirically meaningful, but pretty speculative ones. Causality provokes and protects evil. Indifference being the thing that is reasonably not caused constitutes evil deeds that are turned inside out. Total indifference is indistinguishable from interminable evil. The “free” causality that is rationalistically confident cannot overcome nature's indifference to humans (which, however, can never be complete or thorough) and cannot support freedom (which is belittled by any causality) it the latter’s nurturing of good. And last but not least, good and evil are not that asymmetric so that a final victory of one over the other would be possible, and not that symmetric, too, so that the struggle for good against evil would become meaningless and hopeless.

Trans Chaplin

Trans Chaplin Rox Samer (bio) A body in process, in transformation, an incomplete body able to merge with other bodies—or other things—and create new bodies … this new body, for all its composite weirdness, strikes us as immediately recognizable rather than entirely alien: an insight into our own bodily experience, whether remembered from childhood or glimpsed in dreams. —Tom Gunning1 The lift of an eyebrow, however faint, may convey more than a hundred words. —Charles Chaplin2 In the weeks following my top surgery in December 2019, I enjoyed many a movie and television series with my care web.3 As my body healed and I turned my attention to preparing for the spring 2020 semester, including a course on US film history, I was taken with the most iconic and popular of historical media figures: Charlie Chaplin. The filmmaker's short films and silent features supported the recalibration of my body-mind as I prepared to re-enter the social world. They would also become films that I'd return to, that my own body would recall over the coming year, as I started taking testosterone and continued to transition with the minimal surveillance from cis society, quarantined at home with my cats and partner as my only witnesses. Chaplin's films, surprisingly, gave image to both the changes I yearned for and those I joyfully experienced. Until quite recently, transgender media studies has centered the study of transgender representation, meaning the analysis of film and television's few canonical trans characters. But the last five years have seen a renaissance in the field with a number of studies devoted to trans aesthetics, genre studies, [End Page 175] and industry studies revealing what is trans about the most mainstream, most popular, and oldest film and television fare.4 Among these, Cáel M. Keegan's Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender (2018) demonstrates how the Wachowskis established a cinematic language for sensing beyond gender's dictated forms, and Quinlan Miller's Camp TV: Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History (2019) reveals the camp humor of 1950s and 1960s sitcoms to be brimming with gender nonconformity or queer gender. Their archives and methods are welcome in contemporary trans political discourse where trans activists, journalists, and scholars' paranoid readings routinely cite anti-trans violence—particularly the murders of trans women of color. Time and again, this discourse reduces trans women of color to a signifier for white supremacist and transphobic violence.5 As Jules Gill-Peterson argues, it's high time we shed "the predictive control that is the hallmark of paranoia for the much messier and potentially more pleasurable terrain of perverse laughter."6 Trans life is teeming with awkwardness and joy. Thus, while it may sound antithetical to much popular trans discourse, we find ourselves addressed by much film and television, past and present, including the futures of science fiction and humor of comedy (and not only when the butt of jokes). Here I demonstrate how the silent film comedian Charlie Chaplin, through a pantomime of agile, embodied shifts across not only gender but also species and kingdom, gave early moving image to trans phenomenology. Cinema and media studies has long acknowledged how "queer positions, queer readings, and queer pleasures are part of a reception space that stands simultaneously beside and within that created by heterosexuals and straight positions."7 Here I show how trans positions, readings, and pleasures likewise exist beside and within those of cisgender scholars and spectators. In what Tom Gunning once called Chaplin's "cinematic body" and "plastic ontology" and what André Bazin called the character Charlie's "unlimited imagination in the face of danger" and "total indifference to the category of things held sacred," one can perceive a trans way of life in all its awkward sensational and somatic glory.8 This trans retrospectatorship, which not only decodes but also encodes meaning, invites further reencounters and models a media studies methodology that affirms the very possibility of gleeful transition in the present.9 [End Page 176] Chaplin's oeuvre is replete with fluctuating forms of queer gender. In several short films, Chaplin evokes the early-twentieth-century figure of...

The Elderly and the COVID 19 Crisis: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold, in Isolation and Total Indifference.

OPINION article Front. Public Health, 08 January 2021Sec. Aging and Public Health Volume 8 - 2020 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2020.602982

Robust implementation in weakly perfect Bayesian strategies

We examine a strong form of robust implementation in dynamic mechanisms that is both belief- and belief-revision-free. Specifically, we characterize robust wPBE-implementation, that is, full implementation in weak Perfect Bayesian equilibrium across all type spaces. We introduce a dynamic robust monotonicity condition that is weaker than Bergemann and Morris' (2011) robust monotonicity condition and show that under a conditional no total indifference condition, ex-post incentive compatibility and dynamic robust monotonicity characterize robust wPBE-implementation in general dynamic mechanisms. We also introduce a notion of weakly rationalizable implementation (wr-implementation) and prove that it is equivalent to robust wPBE-implementation. Applied to static mechanisms, wr-implementation exactly characterizes a version of static belief-free implementation.

Characterisation of fresh fruit consumption in Spain based on food-related lifestyle

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe fresh fruit consumers in Spain according to their food-related lifestyle (FRL).Design/methodology/approachA random stratified sample of 500 people, representative of the persons responsible for household food purchasing and resident in Spain, was interviewed in 2017 using a revised and adapted version of the FRL instrument (Grunert et al., 1993). Questions about fruit purchasing criteria, consumption habits and demographics were also included. Factor and cluster analysis (Ward method) yielded four segments.FindingsThe segments identified are: “Total indifference (TI)”, small segment with disinterest in extra-domestic and social consumption, nutrition and innovation; “Little time to cook, concerned about nutrition and extra-domestic consumption (LICNE)”, the largest consumers of fresh fruit who show interest in nutrition and health, but no interest in the price of products, convenience foods or liking cooking; “Cooks and preference for natural products (COOKNAT)”, the largest segment, with a medium-high consumption of fresh fruits, who are related to cooking at home, natural products and a concern for the price-quality ratio; and “Unconcerned (UNC)” presents the lowest fresh fruit consumption and shows the lowest interest in natural products and some indifference to the other criteria.Originality/valueThe information obtained in this study gives interesting new insights for the marketing strategies of the fresh fruit suppliers to Spain and the Food and Public Health Administrations.

206 Influence of partner sexuality on the sexual activity of aged men and women

The aim of this study was to demonstrate the Influence of partner sexuality on the sexual activity of aged Tunisian men and women. A prospective study with a questionnaire for patients over 60 years who consulted in the urology department of urology Mahdia Hospital for health issues not related to sexuality. The study included 60 men with an average age of 69.5 (60-80 years) and 40 women with an average age of 60.15 (60-70 years).Among men, 75% are still having a satisfying sexual activity with variable intensity (0.4-1.4/week), 25% have no sexual activity since years. An erection dysfunction was found among 58.3%. The reaction of the feminine partner was comprehensive in 45% of cases. In the other cases, we noted a total indifference (19%), avoidance (22.5%), nervousness and irritability (13.5%). In case of dysfunction, men incriminate conjugal conflict in 6.6% of cases, failure phobia in 30% and menopause of the partner or her disinterest for sex in 30%. Concerning women, only 22 % of them still have a sexual activity after menopause with an average frequency of 2 sexual intercourses per month. Sexual partner’s performance was satisfying only in only 19.2% of cases. Otherwise we reported an erection dysfunction (38.5%), a disinterest (30.8%) and no sexual activity (11.5%). A failing or absent sexuality of the partner was directly incriminated by 65.4% of women as the mean cause of the sexual dysfunction.

An East–West confrontation in the North-China Herald during the Nationalist Revolution: a case study of Shao Futang’s letters to the editor

ABSTRACT In the Republican period, Shao Futang, secretary to the general manager of the International Dispensary of Shanghai (Wuzhou yaofang), wrote numerous letters to the editor that were published under the initials F. D. Z. in the English-language newspapers of Shanghai, such as the North-China Herald and the China Press. He wrote frequently to these newspapers out of dissatisfaction with the total indifference shown by Chinese residents of the Shanghai International Settlement to what foreigners said about China in these newspapers. The North-China Herald and other newspapers also had Chinese readers and thus needed to hear from those like Shao who could represent the voice of the Chinese people. When anti-imperialism and abrogation of unequal treaties were first proposed in 1924, Shao for the first time voiced his opinion in these newspapers. He defended Chinese patriotism by pointing out that it was not “anti-foreignism.” When the Nationalist Revolution broke out in 1926, an increasingly strong sense of nationalism emerged in the published letters he wrote. He denounced Western readers’ disparagement of the Nationalist Revolution, expressed the desire of the Chinese people for the abrogation of the unequal treaties, and appealed to the Municipal Council of the Shanghai International Settlement to make necessary changes and give political rights to the Chinese people.

Impostors and Alienated Women: Passion, Politics and Passive Resistance in Camilo's A Brasileira de Prazins

This article re-examines Camilo Castelo Branco's novel A Brasileira de Prazins (1882) in light of the title's identification of the novel's heroine as the exclusive property of her husband, Feliciano de Prazins. It will be argued that not only the fact that others impose their wills on Marta but also the lack of realistic alternatives to her arranged marriage reflect the unsatisfactory political solution of compromise imposed on Portugal after the popular Maria da Fonte revolution of the 1840s. The total indifference to Marta's own needs displayed by those around her (and her own apparent reaction in retreating into compensatory wish-fulfilment) reflect the author's own sense of the futility of political idealism as an agent of meaningful change at a time when the Republican movement was beginning to gain some popular support in Portugal, which Camilo expresses in his own recollections and reflections on the rebellion which forms the historical basis for the novel.

Déni, connaissance, responsabilité: le régime stalinien et la grande famine ukrainienne de 1932–3

The great 1932–3 famine in Ukraine and Kuban, considered a major disaster in twentieth-century European history, is starting to be recognised as the opening act of a terrible cycle of violence against the populations of a vast area in the heart of Europe, perpetrated by the two great totalitarian regimes that were Nazism and Stalinism. As James Mace, the pioneer in studying this famine, has written, the Ukrainian famine was a ‘man-made famine’. It was the consequence of an extreme political violence – the forced collectivisation of rural areas. The Stalinist regime exhibited a total indifference to human suffering. Famine was just ‘collateral damage’ of modernisation introduced by collectivisation. Beyond the total denial of famine by Stalinist authorities, this article raises the double question of its knowledge and its responsibility, using new sources. How far can the chain of decision-making that led to the famine and its aggravation be reconstructed? What did the executives of the Party know about what was happening in starving rural areas? Which argumentation and which explanatory strategy were they developing in their correspondence to deal with the reality they were denying?

Is Teaching of English Language and Literature in India a Perpetuation of Literary Colonialism?

The teaching of English language and literature in India is a futile exercise in the academia since this mechanically imitative academic activity is carried out with total indifference and insensitivity to the needs and hopes, and aspirations and ambitions of thousands of students who join B.A. English either on their volition or on compulsion. While framing course objectives and syllabi, Boards of Studies in English in Indian universities never take into account the needs and competencies of the prospective students who join the course without any academic preparation at the school. English Studies is being offered at all levels as if it were an extension of the colonial project. Its grand objectives are incommensurate with contemporary Indian realities. Ironically, it is a sordid state of affairs that English language and literature students can leave the portals of their institutions with degrees in first class but without ever having truly read any literature or acquired functional literacy skills in English at all. Indigestible literary explications in the form of dry lectures in the classroom without their being solicited by student demands drive students to rely upon rote learning through bazaar notes, and the demand for proficiency in English remains a distant dream for many a student even after M. Phil degree programme. English language and literature teaching in India has become a highly subsidized sick industry with a vicious circle of imagined consumers and untrained or ill-trained workforce. It lacks both direction and vision. It has to be revamped with changing times and needs by making it more consumer-friendly and relevant with objectives revisited. Students of English literature as well as General English demand the acquisition of skills in communicative modern English. Literacy skills in English are a pre-requisite for the appreciation of literary merits of the canonical literature. Literary skills of reading and interpreting literature and cognitive skills of academic, research, and rhetorical writing on literary works are the demands of the students of English literature. Emphasis should therefore be laid on the ‘reading’ of English literature and ‘learning’ of the English language by students rather than ‘teaching’ them by teachers. Indian students of English literature as post-colonial second-language users of English need English as a weapon to win the material world for better economic prospects in social life rather than as a wand to capture the world imaginatively for aesthetic considerations in private life. Therefore, this paper argues that teachers of English should change their role as service- providers with a view to facilitating the learning process. They should metamorphose from being all-knowing undemocratic ‘interpreters’ and ‘dictators’ of literary knowledge into becoming ‘catalysts’ and ‘guides’ of students who need literacy skills in English for occupational purposes. In short, English language and literature teaching should be ‘de- institutionalized.’

The Naval Mutinies of 1797: Unity and Perseverance, ed. Ann Veronica Coats and Philip MacDougall

England’s ‘French Revolutionary’ moment came, if it was ever going to come, with the great naval mutinies of 1797, which seemed to open the door to French armies and announce the fall of another ancien régime. Contemporaries regarded the prospect with horror or delight, but nobody could ignore what was going on. For two months the three kingdoms held their breath while the outcome, first at Spithead and then at the Nore, seemed to tremble in the balance. There can have been few events in modern British history on which so much turned, and one would naturally expect that generations of historians would have devoted themselves to studying and interpreting them. Instead, we find almost total indifference. One rather unsatisfactory monograph appeared in 1913, and there has been a handful of semi-popular works since. Several recent historians have invoked the mutinies in passing to support their theories, but none of them has done any original research on the subject. To remedy this neglect the editors of this volume, Ann Veronica Coats and Philip MacDougall, organised in 1997 two conferences on the mutinies. It has taken them fourteen years to find a publisher, but at last we have a handsome volume which advances our knowledge of the subject further and faster than it has moved in the whole of the past century. There are sixteen chapters, of which nine are the work of one or both of the editors. They deal with the principal mutinies in home waters: two in succession at Spithead, the Nore mutiny, and the mutiny of the North Sea Squadron which joined the Nore. Other chapters look at naval discipline and shipboard life in a wider perspective, by way of context. The editors and some, though not all, of the other contributors have kept their work up to date, which is important, because there have been some significant additions to the literature on the subject since 1997. All these chapters are based on solid research, and this should make it impossible for even the most careless historian to repeat some of the baseless myths which have swirled around the mutinies for so long. No longer can we be told that the mutinies were led by quota-men—scheming landsmen teaching the simple sailors how to undertake a political act. On the contrary, the mutinies were led—as mutinies were always led—by the natural leaders of the lower deck, the petty officers and leading hands. They drew on the long traditions of collective action which were native to the seafaring world—but they were far from politically innocent, and were well aware of what was going on in the outside world. Their skilful handling of the newspapers gained, and kept, public support. The Spithead mutineers won in the end because they were more united, better informed and more politically sophisticated than the Lords of the Admiralty, whose tactless blunders wrecked their own position. In this sense the mutineer-leaders were thoroughly political, but the majority did not choose to involve themselves with the political ambitions of the Corresponding Societies, still less the French revolutionaries. Only at the Nore was there a minority of extremists who tried to push the mutiny in a much more political direction than the majority were willing to take. Only here were there, possibly, some United Irishmen, for Irish leadership is another hardy myth which will have to go.

Naked Women And IAP Case Law: A Defense Against The Inappropriate Use Of Women In Italian Commercial Advertising

In July 2007, an American journalist for the Financial Times wrote an article stating, in no uncertain terms, his astonishment at the inappropriate use of women in advertising and on television in Italy. He criticized and joked that the Italian advertising system uses and abuses women’s bodies with the total indifference of the Italian people. However, there has been a strong movement towards defending women’s dignity and against the disparaging treatment of the female body in commercial communication in particular over the past few years in Italian society. In order to make an impact, these feelings need to be addressed in the legal process, they need to find an appropriate institutional player; player which has finally been found in the Jury of the “Istituto dell’Autodisciplina Pubblicitaria” (IAP). The Jury, in applying the Code of Marketing Communication, has given a concrete meaning to the general and abstract clause that is included in Article 10 C.A., stating that marketing communication should respect human dignity. Dignity is an elusive concept that offers judges great power and that can be interpreted in many different ways. The German Benetton Advertising Cases show dealing with values can be very troublesome. There is always the risk of “censorious attitudes”. Returning to Italy, although the Jury of the IAP takes the values which inspire its decisions from the legal and social community, the risk of “idiosyncratic attitudes” cannot be completely avoided. In this respect, it is better that those who are obliged to respect rules and decisions are bound by their own contractual consent (consent that could, in the case, be revoked). The struggle against the commodification of women's bodies in advertising has yet to be won, but since the publication of the article in the Financial Times, much has already been accomplished.

Pain asymbolia

The main object of this paper is a rare syndrome in human pain experience, known as the pain asymbolia. The first thing that will be considered in this paper is the nature of pain asymbolia. I will try to examine and prove professor Grahek's claim that pain asymbolia differs from other dissociation syndromes in human pain experience. Also, the special attention will be given to Grahek's claim that typical cases of indifference to pain are not the cases of radical or total indifference to pain. Finally, it will be shown how pain asymbolia can be used against some famous arguments in the philosophy of mind. Namely, it can be used to undermine both the subjectivist and the objectivist conceptions of pain. More specifically, it can be used to disprove the functionalist interpretation of pain and the perceptual or representational model of pain. Also, pain asymbolia can be used against the subjectivist view, according to which the sensation of pain is to be considered as the essential component of pain.

Introduction: affecting words

In August 1964 the poet Allen Ginsberg decided that one reason why the Vietnam War was set to escalate was because many American people felt ‘TOTAL indifference’ towards it.1 In his view, the euphe...

(Un)reasonable Doubt: A "Narrative Immunity" for Footballers against Sexual Assault Allegations

(Un)reasonable Doubt: A "Narrative Immunity" for Footballers against Sexual Assault Allegations

From sémiologie to postmodernism: A genealogy

The purpose of this article is to present the genealogy of neomodernism, as it starts with the Saussurean linguistic turn and was further elaborated by Russian Formalism and the Prague Circle, as well as by the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen with its leading figure Hjelmslev. Deely points to an actual overlapping between Peircian semiotics and the French tradition (the quest for a general theory of signs), an overlapping that acts as the background for the operations of comparison and replacement he performs. From this common root or summit, the two paradigms split and follow two totally different directions. The strong position of Deely that it is the (discontinuous) tradition starting with Augustine and reemerging with the “high semiotics” of the later “Latin” age that leads to “postmodernity,” as well as his view that Peirce (to whom he adds secondarily Heidegger), who takes over from the “Latins,” opens the fourth age of human understanding and is the last modern but also the first postmodern philosopher, comes as a surprise, because of the divergence of Deely's genealogy of postmodernism from the actual historical continuities. This divergence becomes even more striking if we take into account the almost total indifference of neomodernism to Peirce's ideas: replacement of the historical with the normative leads to an historical anachronism, because Deely is obliged to recess postmodernism about a century back, with the result of creating a philosophical postmodernism that contradicts historical postmodernism. What should be emphatically stated is that neostructuralism / neomodernism is not a partial theory, as Deely believes, but a global one that, contrary to Deely's view, subsumes natural under cultural signs, thus proposing a different global theory of signs from the Peircian one; this different theory is the only theory inseparably linked to neomodernity as an historical condition.

Teletechnology and Higher Education: Does the Approach Matter?

This article discusses how international and national understandings of information and communication technology (ICT) and the knowledge economy inform contemporary higher education policies. Acknowledging that national educational policies in Latin America are increasingly influenced by the recommendations of international organizations (e.g. the World Bank, UNESCO, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), the article provides a clear example of the logics of policy transfer operating in the region. Challenging the interpretations that have tended to stress either the imposition and domination of international meanings and recommendations onto national policies or the total indifference of national reforms vis à vis those international views, this article contends that international policy narratives are locally appropriated and resignified. Specifically, the article deals with the ways in which higher education policy narratives on knowledge and information found in UNESCO's publications are appropriated and reconstituted in Mexico's policy documents.

Loops and and Illusions

Loops and and Illusions