Wider Conversation Research Articles

Inspiring Collaborations: An Introduction to the Special Section

Front-line practice often happens at the confluence of many conversations that shape the immediate dialogues that therapists have with clients. While clients’ stories and concerns are typically the primary focus of these dialogues, chances are such stories have many co-authors beyond the consulting room. Systemically oriented therapists have long embraced this perspective, seeing clients as members of more extensive social networks (Speck, 1973), or “larger systems” (ImberBlack, 1992), with one group going so far as to suggest that the larger systems players should be brought together with clients in a “fifth province” of collaborative practice (e.g., McCarthy, 2001). The point of these approaches is to avoid circumstances where therapist and client find that their conversations are impotent in the face of those cultural or institutional conversations in which clients’ (and often therapists’) concerns are situated. Attending to the wider conversations is an important aspect of care. Discourse analysts point out that larger institutional and cultural conversations can both furnish the vocabularies and constrain the possibilities of what client and therapist might say and accomplish while talking together (Kogan, 1998; Parker, 1999). For therapeutic differences to arise from client-therapist dialogue, somehow such conversational influences often need to be acknowledged, negotiated, or at least

Barmen, the Ecumenical Movement, and the Jews: The Missing Thesis

Barmen, the Ecumenical Movement, and the Jews: The Missing Thesis

Knowledge free and ‘unfree’: Epistemic tensions in plant knowledge at the Cape in the 17th and 18 th centuries1

ABSTRACT This article utilises the same epistemic objects, particular indigenous medicinal plants of the Cape region, to explore the gamut of epistemologies in contested, dynamic tension in the early Cape Colony: That of the frontiersman, the Khoikhoi, the Sonqua or Sankwe, and the slave. Drawing on a transdisciplinary set of literatures, the article puts Africana studies, the study of indigenous knowledge systems, and social studies of science and technology in wider conversation with each other, and argues for the adoption of an epistemic openness, methodologies which ‘braid’ seemingly separate strands of social history and differing knowledge practices, and cross-border collaboration among scholars of African and African diasporic knowledges. The findings and interpretation suggest new ways to view the ‘multiplexity’ of early indigenous southern African botanical, therapeutic and ecological knowledges, as well as the necessity for rethinking both the construction of colonial sciences and contemporary concerns about indigenous knowledge, biosciences and their 21st century interaction.

Murder in Our Midst: Expanding Coverage to Include Care and Responsibility

Using a U.S. and a Canadian example, in this article we argue that news reports of murder, especially of the heavily covered signal crimes that become part of community storytelling, often employ predetermined formulas that probe intrusively into the lives of those involved in the murder but ultimately come away with only cheaply sketched, stick-figure portraits. The thesis is that crime coverage that is formulaic tends to produce cynicism and a distance between the reader and those involved in the crime. However, a deeper and more caring probe into the causes and consequences of crime could lead the community to wider conversations about responsibility, social justice, and reconciliation. What is required to expand the reporting of murder stories is more of the ethic of care that can serve to both deepen the public's understanding of the individual crime and widen the community's dialogue about its significance.

The edinburgh 1910 Centenary: Planning and Doing

Introduction: imagining the centenary At the close of the Edinburgh 1910 World Missionary Conference, its chairman John R. Mott pronounced that, end of the planning is the beginning of the doing. (1) Almost one hundred years later the memory of this inspirational event stimulates a fresh round of reflection and action. June 2005 saw a small but widely representative consultation meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland to reflect on the mission themes that call for attention at the beginning of the 21st Recalling the work that was completed by the eight commissions that reported to the 1910 conference, the consultation was able to identify themes that call for analysis by teams drawn from different parts of the world, and from different streams of Christian witness. (2) The consultation's work has been widely welcomed and its choice of themes strongly affirmed. Critical feedback has been considered, and the statement of the mission themes has been adjusted in light of further reflection (see Appendix A). This statement remains highly provisional; it is no more than a starting point. None of those involved in the drafting of the statement imagines that it will remain in the same form after sustained work has been done over a three-year period. It is anticipated that some of the themes will come to be understood in significantly different ways, while others may even be replaced. There is an openness to the leading of the Holy Spirit and the possibility that thinking might develop in directions not yet anticipated. Nonetheless, the statement of mission themes has been acclaimed as providing a coherent and promising starting point. The identification of the mission themes has provided a platform on which a range of Christian organizations, institutions and individuals have been gathering under the aegis of Towards 2010: mission in the 21st century. This platform is not a new organization but more of a network that brings together people and organizations with common aspirations. It aims to bring together representatives of many different strands of mission and church life for a well-focussed and well-organized process of preparation for the centenary. The memory of the 1910 conference brings people together in a creative way, and opens up new perspectives on mission today. The memory also challenges us to work on a bigger canvas, to engage in a wider conversation, to attempt a more comprehensive analysis, and to conceive new initiatives on a broader front. In this way, the memory of 1910 has stimulated imagination and created energy but, until now, has been very limited in terms of organizational capacity. The energy of the 2005 consultation was expended at a conceptual and missiological level. Comments received from many quarters have been very affirmative of the topics identified and the terms in which they are expressed. The document has undergone revision in response to helpful critical comments that have been offered but the substance of it has proved to be convincing. What the consultation did not do was to work out any practical plan for the organization and resourcing of the work envisaged. The idea, in broad terms, was to establish a new set of commissions, based on those which had reported to the 1910 conference but organized much more internationally, and with a much greater range of participation. The implementation of such a plan, however, would require significant financial and other resources. The 2005 consultation appointed a six-member sub-committee on organization and finance, and charged it with the challenging task of turning the dreams into reality. The sub-committee soon realised that, in terms of constructing a collaborative process, little could be achieved without bringing together the relevant stakeholders, viz. representatives of organizations with a vision for the centenary. Another consultation was needed but this time with the practical focus of constructing a viable collaborative process centred on the centenary. …

Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis:Impressionism as Traumatic Afterimage in Conrad and Ford

Pathologies of the Imperial Metropolis:Impressionism as Traumatic Afterimage in Conrad and Ford Christina Britzolakis (bio) The cognitive and aesthetic mapping of urban modernity has always relied heavily on notions of shock. From the 1880s onwards, neurological discourses occupied a central place in accounts of the origins of modernity, as well as in the genealogy of the modernist artifact. They serve as shorthand for the far-reaching reorganization of spatio-temporal experience brought about by changes in transport, energy, urban planning, communication and media, the "taylorizing" of labor in the factory, and the mass slaughter of modern mechanized warfare. The history of shock as a discursive formation of modernity, culminating in Freud's famous analysis in 1920 of the mechanisms of traumatic neurosis, is intertwined with notions of modernization itself as pathogenic.1 In recent years, a number of modernist scholars have embraced neurological readings of modernity, particularly in relation to the impact of visual technologies. Modernism, with its impressionistic sampling of the moment, is seen as decisively shaped by the advent of the cinema.2 If mass urbanized existence was conceived, from the outset, in terms of a constant assault on the senses, the nascent cinematic technology of the 1890s, based on the sudden and incessant displacement of images, formalized this principle as the basis of its medium (Charney and Schwartz).Attention emerges as, in Jonathan Crary's words, a problem of perceptual synthesis produced by "a social, urban, psychic and industrial field increasingly saturated with sensory impact" (17).3 Crary's work has been pivotal in the impetus to resituate impressionist painting, and modernism more generally, in relation to the field of mass visual culture. What arguably remains elusive, however, is the geopolitical location of the literary "impression" as the widely acknowledged cornerstone [End Page 1] of an emergent modernist rhetoric. The situation of the novel around the turn of the century—in particular, the impressionist remodelling of the form by the James-Conrad-Ford group—registers an intense anxiety concerning the imagined boundaries of the metropolis. Critics have long recognized Conrad's sustained if ambivalent interrogation of European imperialism and its cultural consequences.4 Less attention has been paid, however, to his collaboration with Ford Madox Hueffer (as he then was), between 1898 and 1908, which coincided with the appearance of many of Conrad's most well-known works. In his memoir Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1919), Ford claims that it was through their collaboration that a shared "impressionist" aesthetic was evolved: "we saw that life did not narrate, but made impressions on our brains" (182).5 During the period of the Congo debates and the Boer War, Conrad and Ford were participating in a wider conversation about imperialism, race, and capitalist modernity that included figures such as H.G. Wells and the socialist politician and writer R.B. Cunninghame Graham and whose implications for impressionism, as a term of literary-historical analysis, have yet to be unravelled (Delblanco). The Edwardian moment was characterized by considerable interchange between what are now seen as "modernist" and popular fictional forms (Trotter, Daly). As collaborators, Conrad and Ford explored the various possibilities of contemporary mass-market genre fiction, such as Wellsian fantasy, travel fiction, invasion novels, political satire, espionage fiction, and the detective novel. I shall focus here on a few of these generic experiments: Ford's travel book The Soul of London (1905), the jointly-authored scientific "romance"-cum-political novel The Inheritors (1901), and Conrad's spy story The Secret Agent (1907). These texts, I shall argue, respond to a historically specific metropolitan experience of cognitive dissonance in the face of violently reconfigured relations among urban, national, and global space. Their generic instability, or hybridity, is symptomatic of their attempted "cognitive mapping," in Fredric Jameson's phrase ("Modernism and Imperialism" 52), of the imperial world-order, following an accelerated period of European expansionism. What is at stake is a crisis in the location of a metropolitan subject increasingly grasped as an ensemble of particularized and disjunct sensory experiences. "Impressionism," the rubric which, by Ford's account, unites his and Conrad's literary endeavors during the 1900s, names, among other things, the conversion of late 19th century...

Projeto monumenta: filosofia e práticas em interface com o turismo

O Programa Monumenta é uma iniciativa do governo federal que propõe recuperar os centros históricos de 27 cidades brasileiras, a exemplo do que já aconteceu com o Pelourinho, em Salvador (Bahia). A fllosofia do Programa concretiza-se a partir de quatro eixos: sustentabilidade, visibilidade, atratividade e acessibilidade. Por suas implicações diretas com o turismo, faz-se urgente um maior diálogo e participação dos setores e dos profissionais desta área, no seu planejamento e implantação, em especial quando se pensa em turismo com responsabilidade social e culturalmente sustentável. O artigo centra-se na análise do Programa, em especial na formulação e nos documentos legais que embasaram a sua aplicação em Porto Alegre/RS.

Social science theory and methods in the study of alternative and complementary medicine.

Anthropology is a holistic science with theory, data, and methods that can be of great service to researchers on alternative medicine. In this paper useful models and methodologic stances were identified that can help researchers to deal creatively with the stresses imposed on science by worldview preferences that differ among both scientists and healthcare systems. I have argued that rather than prefer one paradigm over another, researchers should select techniques based on a rationale featuring deep knowledge of the context of the healthcare issue they want to study. This will not only produce the most accurate and useful data, but should also help free science of its current strictures and allow expansion into a wider conversation about human and medical realities.