Understanding Something Research Articles

Exile and the City F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Lost Decade”

Exile and the City F. Scott Fitzgerald's “The Lost Decade”

Vision and Persistence: Changing the Education of Physicians is Possible

Vision and Persistence: Changing the Education of Physicians is Possible

Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre (review)

Reviewed by: Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre Rebecca Rovit Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, edited by Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem. Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. 304 pp. $49.95. Historians and arts scholars have long discussed the rightful place of German-born Jews in German society and the tenuous relationship that they held historically vis-à-vis their non-Jewish-born fellow citizens. The curious paradigm of both belonging to German society and at the same time being apart from it distinguished Jews in Germany for centuries, despite the Enlightenment and subsequent freedoms for Jews within the unified Germany of 1871. During Wilhelmine Germany and in the Weimar Republic, Jews typically gravitated to occupations which reflected this trend. So it is not surprising that a majority of assimilated German Jews entered independent professions related to the arts, especially the theatre. What role did Jewish artists play in shaping modern German theatre during the late nineteenth- and twentieth centuries? What effect did avant-garde theatre trends have on German Jews and their self-identity? Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem's fascinating, edited collection of essays, Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, begins to address such long-neglected questions. With the expert collaboration of twelve scholars, the recent addition to editor Thomas E. Postlewait's prize-winning series, Studies in Theatre History and Culture, offers an unusually varied palette of perspectives on the extent to which German Jews not only contributed to, but co-created modern German theatre. The editors, known for their scholarship in performance history, delimit their study as dating from 1871 to 1933 and encompassing non-traditional forms of theatre, known as "modernist." The book's organization devotes roughly the first half of the book to how theatre constituted Jewish identity in Germany. Many of the authors address the notion of Jewish modernization in terms of a remaking of self, acculturation, and self-transformation when Jewish actors performed their identity. In the book's second chapter, for example, [End Page 198] Steven E. Aschheim posits the theatre as an actual "physical and psychosymbolic site" within which the complexities of Jewish post-Enlightenment identity played out (p. 27). Other scholars like Bernhard Greiner and Peter M. Marx, in Chapters 6 and 7, respectively, reconsider Jewish identity and the theatre through the lens of Jewish philosopher Theodore Lessing and literary critic Arnold Zweig's provocative twentieth-century writings on the Jewish actor's propensity for mimicry and talent for physical expressiveness. The book's thematic focus on Jewish theatre artists within the German theatre resonates in each chapter wherein authors emphasize the shaping force that Jews had on their Gentile theatre colleagues. Among the anthology's strengths, in addition to excellent editing, are the thematic correspondences between the chapters. Many of the assembled essays inform one another from different points of view; and yet the separate essays also provide the reader with an overlay of topics, creating a dialogic discourse between chapters. In this way, Malkin, in her essay about Jewish actors on the German Expressionist Stage (Chapter 9), refers to the modernist director Leopold Jessner's concept of transformation (1922) by which the German Jewish actor "navigated" between being and impersonation, passing between the Jewish and the German identities enfolded within him (p. 168). Anat Feinberg (Chapter 13) offers a biography of Jessner and his influence on modernist German theatre. Feinberg's chapter thus builds on Malkin's analysis of the Jewish actor's capacity for on-stage doubleness as a social strategy to hide his identity as a Jew, while revealing a specific Jewish expressive creativity. Read together, these chapters allow the reader to better assess theatre production by Jews during the 1920s, while understanding something about Jewish identity. So too do several authors provide essays on such theatre innovators and directors as Otto Brahm (born Abrahamsohn) and Max Reinhardt (born Goldmann) and their vital contribution to German theatre. Peter Jelavich (Chapter 3) situates these theatre impresarios and their artistic influence within Imperial Germany, while Lisa Silverman discusses Reinhardt's personal metamorphosis and the impact of Yiddish theatre on his grand...

Avoiding Evil in Perpetrator Fiction

The recent boom in perpetrator fiction seems to play to the very reasonable desire to ‘understand’ the mind of a perpetrator, which means, at base, understanding the evil involved in perpetration. However, as I try to suggest, this is far from straightforward. Looking at two recent examples (Maureen Myant’s The Search and Steve Sem-Sandberg’s The Emperor of Lies), I suggest that imprecise prose (indeed, bad writing) and preordained ideas prevent this happening. I turn then to the very major recent work in this area, Jonathan Littell’s novel The Kindly Ones. Here, too, I identify a ‘swerve’ away from addressing the evil of ‘ordinary’ genocidal perpetrators. However, by following through an idea of Hannah Arendt’s, I suggest that this novel does, in fact, get the reader closer, if obliquely, to understanding something of the genocide.

The roads not taken

Last month I came across a folder of papers I had written at the age of 16 for my high school English class. This occasion, in some ways like Proust's madeleine, triggered recollections of how I, as a 16 year-old, framed the thoughts I had about what I wanted to do with my life.One of those early papers was about Frost's poem The Road Not Taken. I remember not terribly liking the poem. But the image of paths leading off in different directions in the woods, leading to different futures stayed with me. At 16, I didn't know if I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer, write poems, be a journalist, run my father's business, or be a scientist. I found the plethora of choices bewildering, as I searched for clues to what my ‘optimal path’ should be. I worried how I would ever know what the ‘best’ decision would be. And, I had a palpable sense of loss for all of those unchosen futures. Then it dawned on me that there was no sense in thinking about ‘optimal paths’ or loss when giving up the alternatives. Instead, all one could do was choose one future and live it, as there were many possible futures that could lead to adventure and meaning, and it just mattered that the chosen path was a good one.When I started as an undergraduate I was going to be a lawyer, but I ended up a scientist. I made career-determining decisions without looking at the long future, but always asking myself, “Does this make sense to do now?” So I studied biology as an undergraduate, and I applied to graduate school. I went to Paris for a postdoc because I was angry at the US for Vietnam and was curious to see how JacSue Kehoe could do such elegant work and raise children. Did I stubbornly continue this path called academic science? Yes. Could I have been derailed or drawn into a different path by different circumstances? Almost certainly.Today, as a senior woman scientist and President of the Society for Neuroscience, I am aware that many of our most talented students opt to follow careers other than science. I wouldn't feel badly about the student talented in mathematics who decides to be a film maker as long as I knew that she had been well-taught in science. I am angry when I see graduate students deeply excited about studying the brain lose their joy when their laboratory environment becomes more about “getting the paper in Neuron” than about discovering new knowledge. I am angry when I see graduate students crying over gratuitously hostile or mean reviews of their first papers.Many of us are struggling for resources to do our work, with a sense of frustration because today's opportunities for scientific discovery are unparalleled. It is now, when things are difficult, that we have to be mindful that the biggest asset we have is each other. Our best and brightest young scientists came to science with the greatest of fascination with the mysteries of life. We should remember it is the drive to know and wish to help mankind that brings them to science. We are right to push them hard to explore the unknown. We are wrong to allow ourselves to be petty and ungracious in the way we treat our colleagues. Almost every manuscript that gets rejected carries the hopes and aspirations of graduate students and postdocs. We should be clear in articulating scientific issues that arise in review, but refrain from the imposition of arbitrary hurdles. We should discipline ourselves to ask for more experiments only when they are required for the scientific points of the paper, but not as an automatic response to all manuscripts when first submitted.There is no virtue in hazing the young entering any field. They have many possible paths to follow. Extracting new knowledge is difficult enough: we should take care not to drive our best and brightest from our field for the wrong reasons. I hope that the young will join us on the long and arduous hikes to open vistas of new understanding. I hope that they will come to know the joy of seeing something or understanding something for the first time. We should take care that they avoid the paths strewn with the detritus of broken dreams. False idols often arise in troubled times. Today, more than ever, we must say that it is what the paper shows that is more important than where it is published.

Wa! Ningeningma arakba akina da! (Oh! Now I know, that's it!).

Our aim was to disseminate research results about the very high rates of cannabis use in three remote Aboriginal communities in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, to the study populations. To achieve this we translated prevalence estimates, using local concepts of life stages, numbers and quantities. The reaction of the local community to results presented in this way was characterised by the phrase used when understanding something for the first time: Wa! Ningeningma arakba akina da! ("Oh! Now I know, that's it!"). To successfully disseminate research findings in these communities, it is critical to undertake comprehensive community liaison, to find common conceptual understandings and to build the skills of local Indigenous researchers.

Autism and the amygdala: An endocrine hypothesis

Children become oriented to the world, in part, by coming to understand something of the experiences of others. The facial expressions that people make are an avenue for understanding something about them, as are the diverse forms of bodily responses emitted and interpreted by individuals. People with autism often find bodily communications to be aversive, thereby limiting what they can learn from others during social interactions. The amygdala is an important area of the brain, amongst others, for integrating the internal milieu with the social ambiance. Individuals with autism consistently demonstrate dysregulation of amygdala function. Diverse regions of the amygdala, which contain neuropeptides, figure in the appraisal systems that underlie behavioral approach and avoidance responses. One neuropeptide linked to social recognition and approach behaviors is oxytocin (which is known to be decreased in autistic individuals) and another neuropeptide corticotropin releasing hormone is tied to avoidance behaviors. A neuroendocrine hypothesis is suggested to account for some of the features associated with autism.

Taking the Pulse: New Books in the History of Health and Medicine in Canada

J.B. Collip and the Development of Medical Research in Canada: Extracts and Enterprise. By Alison Li. McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society no. 18. Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. 256 pp. $55.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780773526099. Women, Health, and Nation: Canada and the United States since 1945. Ed. Georgina Feldberg, Molly Ladd-Taylor, Alison Li, and Kathryn McPherson. McGill-Queen's/ Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society no. 16. Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003. 448 pp. $80.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780773525009. $29.95 (paper) ISBN 9780773525016. An Element of Hope: Radium and the Response to Cancer in Canada, 1900-1940. By Charles Hayter. McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health and Society no. 22. Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. 288 pp. $70.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780773528697. The Struggle to Serve: A History of the Moncton Hospital, 1895-1953. By W.G. Godfrey. McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society no. 21. Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2004. 256 pp. $75.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780773525122. Nutrition Policy in Canada, 1870-1939. By Aleck Ostry. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006. 160 pp. $85.00 (cloth) ISBN 9780774813273. $34.95 (paper) ISBN 9780774813280. Aboriginal Health in Canada: Historical, Cultural, and Epidemiological Perspectives. 2nd ed. By James B. Waldram, D. Ann Herring, and T. Kue Young. 2006. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. 352 pp. $70.00 (cloth) ISBN 0802087922. $29.95 (paper) ISBN 0802085792. The social history of medicine in Canada is healthy and fit, judging by the new titles published in the past few years. Scholars have developed important new work that widens and deepens the historiography. Moreover, these new books also address the history of some of the most pressing health concerns today: medical research, transnational studies of women's health, cancer and its treatment, hospitals and health-care funding, diet and nutrition, and the history of Aboriginal health. Historians of medicine in Canada are fortunate to have solid publishing support from the partnership of McGill-Queen's University Press and Associated Medical Services (Hannah Institute) in their Studies in the History of Medicine, Health, and Society series, which published all but two of the titles under consideration. The Hannah Institute also provides generous research funding for students and scholars in the history of medicine. Such substantial assistance is rare for scholars in Canada and bodes well for the continued strength of the field. The books reviewed below all address the historic roots of contemporary health-care issues. Although historians are generally cautious about applying the lessons of the past to current concerns, they will agree that understanding something about how things came to be may indeed illuminate how things might be changed. Medical research in Canada today is a multi-million dollar enterprise, but its roots are humble. Alison Li's J.B. Collip and the Development of Medical Research in Canada charts this history by linking the major events in one man's career to the bigger story of the development of institutional research in Canada. Frederick Grant Banting and Charles Best, as the developers of insulin, are familiar to most Canadians, but the other member of the team, J.B. Bert Collip is not so well-known. Collip was the young biochemist who purified the extract and made the development of insulin possible. Alison Li's book is not so much the biography of a man as it is the story of a career that spanned the most important developments in medical research in Canada. Collip was one of the few who were able to earn a PhD in Canada at the University of Toronto before the First World War. …

Transferring Tourism Knowledge

SUMMARY Knowledge sharing and quality assurance in hospitality and tourism is a very broad topic to cover. This paper focuses mainly on the role of higher education in transferring knowledge into practice. Knowledge can be defined as “an understanding of something and the ability to use that understanding through study and experience.”1

Perfect Listening: Audiophilia, Ambiguity, and the Reduction of the Arbitrary

In the increasingly demanding sonic environment of contemporary urban life, consumers-now we are all consumers, of even our own experiences-have developed various strategies for maintaining at least an illusion of control over what they hear and how they hear it. What I am interested in is the particular activity of audiophilia, the ardent pursuit of high-fidelity sound reproduction, and its place within the larger field of the reception of music in contemporary American culture,1 as a means of understanding something about the nature of commodity aesthetics and the way in which certain consumers re-empower themselves by full immersion in the conditions of their profoundly mediated acoustic worlds. Audiophilia depends upon reducing sonic arbitrariness to the point where communication can take place in what Niklas Luhmann in his writings on art and social systems calls the medium of meaning [Sinn] (Art 2-52). All sound reproduction operates by reducing arbitrariness in the acoustic field, in which noise is exactly the arbitrary, and hence meaningless, state of vastly possible sound. A meaningful musical event is constituted by reproducing a relatively narrow range of sounds in predetermined ways. The audiophile, however, typically invests his faith in the idea that once noise has been excluded from the listening experience, his high-fidelity playback equipment can, by transmitting an informationrich signal, most nearly ideally reproduce/recapture/recreate an originary event, providing the fullest sense of being, thus the greatest pleasure. The audiophile, although he2 claims to pursue the absolute sound, the perfect reproduction of an originary event using expensive and laborintensive electronic equipment,3 is, I argue, actually trying to over-reduce both a real and imagined initial chaos to a knowable state in which he can exercise domination and thereby reduce his existential anxiety. Audiophilia resembles many of our other relationships with modern technology-automobiles, computers, cell phones, or televisions are not merely tools for more easily accomplishing traditional human tasks but generators of uniquely modern experience -but it might be more instructive to think about how audiophilous experience illuminates the relationship between observers and art, pointing to the observer's role in the creation of aesthetic quasiobjects.4 Luhmann sees art as the mediation between perception (the operation of the individual psychic system) and communication (the operation of the social system) (Art 2-52). When we discuss audiophilia, we are concerned with a system within the larger system of art. How audiophilia functions as a (sub)system and ideological quasiobject within the social system of art must address the relationship among the recording artists, the engineers, the producers, the composers, the marketers, the critics, the recording and playback technology, the conditions of composition, the site at which the recording was produced, the site(s) at which it is reproduced, and the audiophile listener's unique physical and psychic condition. This autological network of operations becomes what Luhmann, borrowing from biological research by Maturana and Varela, terms an autopoietic system, i.e., a system that is self-generating, self-perpetuating, and operatively closed but structurally coupled with the environment.5 Autopoietic systems are marked by recursiveness and reflexivity. By this standard, audiophilia-indeed, all ideology-is autopoietic. One reason it is useful to look at connoisseur pursuits such as audiophilia as a system rather than simply a social phenomenon or a psychological disorder6 is that doing so leads us to consider the reproduction of sound as a quasi-object of the audiophile's reactionary ideology of strong knowing through ultra-mimesis, which is called into question by the very activity of his specialized listening. By considering this paradox, we can begin to understand how the form of this experience determines and is determined by its place in American consumer culture. …

Abductive Reasoning (review)

Reviewed by: Abductive Reasoning David Hitchcock (bio) Douglas Walton . Abductive Reasoning University of Alabama Press. xvi, 304. US $40.00 Abductive reasoning is reasoning from observed data to a hypothesis that would explain them. A famous example is Kepler's inference from a mass of data about the positions of the planets at various times to the hypothesis that they travel in elliptical orbits about the sun. As philosophers of science have only recently begun to appreciate, such reasoning to a possible explanatory hypothesis is common in scientific research. It is also common in legal contexts, for example in determining what caused a particular accident, as well as in medical diagnosis. Researchers in artificial intelligence have incorporated models of it in various expert systems for use in law and medicine. In this study, Douglas Walton summarizes and synthesizes for the non-specialist the scholarly literature on abductive reasoning, and presents his own theory of how one should evaluate abductive reasoning as strong or weak. Abductive reasoning generates a possible explanation. According to Walton, explanation is the transmission of understanding: an explanation communicates information that enables its recipient to infer the thing explained. Thus Walton implicitly equates understanding something with being able to infer it from information at one's disposal. For an explanation to be successful, the recipient must understand its language and must have the background information needed to make the inferences to the thing explained. These requirements, he holds, can be met by a procedural model of rationality according to which the person requesting an explanation asks a series of questions until completely satisfied. The inferences involved in the understanding that is acquired through this process are often defeasible, meaning that they can be defeated (shown to be illegitimate) by further information; for example, from the fact that a moving car goes into a skid one can infer that it will leave tire marks on the pavement, but this inference can be defeated by further information that the pavement was wet or icy or snow-covered. On the basis of these considerations, Walton proposes what he calls a 'query-driven' model of abductive reasoning. He recognizes two forms of abductive reasoning, whose strength is proportional to the extent to which its associated 'critical questions' receive satisfactory answers in an ongoing dialogue. One form reasons from the fact that some account E explains given data d better than its identified competitors to its being the most plausible account. Its critical questions are: How successful is E as an explanation of D? How much more successful is E than its identified competitors? How thorough has the search for alternative explanations been? Would it be better to investigate further before making a commitment for or against E? The other form reasons in a corresponding way from the comparative superiority of an argument from D to E, and has analogous [End Page 155] critical questions. The components of either form emerge in a dialogue with four phases: the dialogue setting, explanation attempts, evaluation of explanations, closure. Walton's dialogue model captures the open-endedness of the search for explanations. It highlights the defeasibility of abductive reasoning, the practical impossibility of absolute proof that our favoured explanation is correct. But it needs to be amplified and qualified. More criteria are needed for what makes an explanation successful. We need to distinguish the sort of explanation that transmits already acquired understanding - e.g., of how to get a photocopier to make double-sided copies - from the sort that expresses newly acquired understanding - e.g., of what caused a particular accident or why a cloudless sky is blue. And the model needs to take account of the fact that ability to infer the occurrence of a phenomenon is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding it; for example, one can understand why an atom of a radioactive isotope decays without being able to infer it from the data, and one can infer from hearing thunder that lightning just struck without understanding why the lightning struck. But the model, as Walton himself points out, provides a framework for investigating outstanding problems about abductive reasoning. And his book is a useful discussion of a wide range of scholarship...

An Other Love

As LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER I have been in love with some manifestations of Christianity (not always ones that my Christian friends would themselves love, or even approve). Tennessee Ernie Ford singing on television the hymn The Garden moved me to tears when I was a child (I won't pretend to remember how old). For an oddly gendered teenager, St. Francis the Sissy proved an incredibly tantalizing figure of a man. Later on it was medieval Christian art and architecture, the cathedrals of Europe, the spirituality of Meister Ekhardt and Jacob Bohme. Still later, and most significantly, it has been the writings of the Fathers of the Church (and their excluded others, the Christian heretics) that have been most riveting to me, pulling me into a world so close to that of my own beloved rabbis of late antiquity and yet so foreign as well, a world in which oceans of ink (and rivers of blood) could be spilt on questions of detail in the description of the precise relationships between the posited persons of a complex godhead -a world, as well, in which massive numbers of men and women could choose freely and enthusiastically to live lives without the pleasures of sex and the joys of family. I find this world endlessly moving, alluring, even at its most bizarre to me. For the last decade or so I have devoted much of my time and spirit to learning the languages of and understanding something of the inner and outer worlds of those early Christian men and women who wrote such texts and lived such lives. Some Jews, it seems, are destined by fate, psychology, personal history, or whatever to be drawn to Christianity.2 My research won't be

Imagination, Emotion and Inquiry: The Teachable Moment

We explore some aspects of the elusive idea of a “teachable moment” with a special emphasis on the role of emotion, intuition, and imagination as well as intuition, paradox and possibility. The teachable moment occurs when students and teachers genuinely share an interest in better understanding something, some situation, or, in the case discussed, some text, and wish to inquire into the object of mutual concern together. Some of the aesthetic elements of John Dewey’s theory of inquiry serve as a way to gain insight into the “logic” of creating and sustaining teachable moments.

Conquests of Chocolate

Chocolate—along with tomatoes, potatoes, maize, and tobacco— originated in the Americas. How did chocolate make its way to Europeans and Europe? One might think that Europeans knew a good thing when they saw it, and immediately began exporting chocolate to savor in the “Old World.” Or maybe Europeans found chocolate overly bitter and strange-tasting and so thought to sweeten it with sugar and Old World spices and make it “European.” Both of these answers are wrong. Europeans neither found chocolate instantly tantalizing nor did they begin to experiment with Indian chocolate recipes to suit their palates right away. To understand how Europeans developed a taste for chocolate and integrated it into their culture requires understanding something about Mesoamerica, Spanish colonialism, and their interactions. Liking chocolate required learning to like chocolate. And in learning to like the Indian taste of chocolate, Europeans also absorbed several important Indian ideas about chocolate....

A new dialectical theory of explanation

This paper offers a dialogue theory of explanation. A successful explanation is defined as a transfer of understanding in a dialogue system in which a questioner and a respondent take part. The questioner asks a special sort of why-question that asks for understanding of something and the respondent provides a reply that transfers understanding to the questioner. The theory is drawn from recent work on explanation in artificial intelligence (AI), especially in expert systems, but applies to scientific, legal and everyday conversational explanations.

Response to Raymond Saner and Lichia Yiu's Paper: Porous Boundaries and Power Politics

AbstractThis review starts by addressing the style of this particular account and makes a plea for objective third-person theorising to be supplemented by rich textured descriptions of what the consultants are actually doing. This describing should also aim to bring into the story the presence of the consultants with their personal needs, biases, and experiences so that subjectivity can be critically embraced. Drawing on examples from ethnography, as well as other Gestalt authors, Rob argues that such an approach may be particularly appropriate to providing an account of interventions in large, complex systems where understanding can only be very partial. Such an approach may be further enriched by adopting other ways of understanding something about these systems such as drama or video.Rob goes on to suggest that the “porous boundaries” that form the key idea in Raymond Saner and Lichia Yiu's paper may be addressed by approaches that aim to build affiliation within task groups. He concludes by offering the notion of “dusting off Max Weber” and his idealised bureaucrat as a figure who might provide a useful model for the organization development (OD) consultant in a globally politicised environment and expresses a preference for this over Raymond and Lichia's idea of the OD consultant as a politician.

Tracing the contours of postmodern social work

Postmodern ideas and the ferment of debate generated by them continue to influence and challenge social work policy and practice. Recent discourses within the social sci ence literature have rarely acknowledged earlier contributions concerning the develop ment of social work in the context of the debate between modernist and postmodern ist epistemology. This paper examines some of the links between earlier and more contemporary ideas, and in so doing highlights their complementary nature and the potential contributions they offer to the shape and texture of social work in the future as it seeks to define itself in a postmodern world. Examining these debates in this way enables them to be perceived as helpful resources for social workers to draw upon, rather than choices from which to exclude. It is therefore possible to begin to map the contours of changing practice as it evolves whilst understanding something of its ori gins, traditions and connections. This paper concludes by recommending a broader intellectual panorama and less allegiance to opposing theoretical positions by social work policy makers and practitioners who feel constrained to choose between either postmodernist or modernist epistemology.

Men, Women and Changing Managements of Further Education

Since the 1970s a growing number of authors have argued that an analysis of gender and gender relations is crucial to understanding organisations and their management (Ledworth & Colgan, 1996). Yet as recently as 1994, Wild wrote in the Journal of Further and Higher Education of the lack of 'any research which is concerned with the particular area of women in FE management'. Given that the percentage of women FE principals has increased from 5.5% in 1998 to 17% since 1997, such an analysis would appear increasingly pertinent to understanding something of the gendered character of contemporary FE. This article attempts to contribute to this analysis of gender and gender relations in FE management today, specfically thorough an exploration of the perceptions of seven men and seven women in senior management positions in the sector.

Response to James Swindal and Bill Martin on Reason, History, and Politics

Jim’s and Bill’s comments raise similar questions about how I characterize the relationship between theory and practice, philosophy and politics, and reason and community. In Reason, History, and Politics (RHP) I sought to characterize that relationship in terms of the model of hermeneutics. That is, I argued that the terms in each of these pairings must be understood as mutually informing one another in a way that is circular in two senses: both in the manner by which any process of understanding interpretatively shapes and participates in what it is trying to understand and in the manner by which understanding itself proceeds narratively, clarifying the meaning of a particular narrative episode in terms of the wider meaning of the text or context within which it is situated, and vice versa. The circular nature of this hermeneutical relationship between theory and practice, philosophy and politics, reason and community raises several problems for the problem of legitimation. First, if, following Kant, we assume that the enterprise of legitimating involves giving reasons or grounds that are independent of and prior to what is being legitimated, then it is hard to conceive how a process of understanding that is shaped by some subject-matter (say, a tradition or cultural form of life) can in turn legitimate it. For it would seem that legitimation ‐ conceived as a normative enterprise requiring the delimitation of boundaries setting off the rightful from the merely factual ‐ must entail something like an original and transcendent founding or prescribing in terms of which the thing to be judged can be critically evaluated. Furthermore, absent some transcendent foundation of legitimation ‐ one standing free of any particular cultural practice ‐ it would seem that there can be no authentic criticism ‐ at least not a form of rational criticism that might appeal to all persons impartially, regardless of the circumstantial differences that otherwise separate them from one another. Let us, then, call this the problem of legitimate pedigree. Second, if understanding something always adds something to what is understood, selectively interpreting and altering its subject-matter in

Agency, Power and Personhood

This article examines the prevalence of domestic violence in a fishing community in Kerala, south India. Understanding violence here necessitates understanding something about local ideas of gender, personhood and agency; ideas which are strongly resistant to change. Violence is linked by people to the embodied nature of gender difference, the inevitably greater ‘heat’ of men’s bodies, and also the ways in which men and women are bound to each other in marriage, the actions of each being elicited by the other. Violence here seems inevitable and men are not usually seen as to blame. More recently, activist discourses condemning violence have become common, but the collision between a feminist inspired criticism of male violence and local understandings of person and agency has led to a focus on alcohol as the root of the problem, with men still perceived to be personally not at fault.