Wide Reflection Research Articles

Practical concerns of educators assessing reflections of physiotherapy students

Background: Reflection has become an accepted element of physiotherapy education. Reflection is a cognitive, emotional, and embodied activity that remains largely invisible as individuals undertake their professional work. The use of reflection has been related to a number of positive benefits for practitioners such as to develop their capacity for self-assessment and critique, to challenge their existing knowledge base, to engage in lifelong learning, to make sense of their experiences, and to improve decision making.Objectives: Although there is an extensive debate in the wider reflection literature about assessing reflection, this has yet to be applied to physiotherapy and developed as a discourse held by the members of the profession.Major findings: The current body of physiotherapy literature does not offer educators realistic tools to deal with the practical concerns and hands-on educational decisions they face when assessing reflection. The findings from physiotherapy research investigating how reflection is practiced and assessed in physiotherapy implies a need to engage in a dialogue as a profession about teaching and assessing reflective practice.Conclusion: This paper concludes that the assessment of reflection is complex and difficult and explains the practical concerns of educators. Physiotherapy educators are faced with rethinking how reflection is assessed to carefully consider the intentions of reflection in their assessment design and the impact of assessment on how reflection is learnt and practiced.

Do sistema à ação, do homogêneo ao heterogêneo: movimentos fundantes dos conceitos de dialogismo, polifonia e interdiscurso

Apesar de inicialmente fundamentados em uma perspectiva homogênea da linguagem - e, consequentemente, da enunciação e dos sujeitos - os estudos discursivos evoluíram no sentido de reconhecer uma heterogeneidade fundadora do discurso, capaz de sustentar conceitos como dialogismo, polifonia e interdiscursividade. Este artigo pretende apresentar essa evolução através de uma breve retrospectiva teórica, que vai dos atos de fala austinianos à heterogeneidade constitutiva de Authier-Revuz, passando pelo dialogismo bakhtiniano e pela polifonia de Oswald Ducrot. Derivados dessa virada paradigmática nos estudos discursivos, esses conceitos são considerados através de uma reflexão mais ampla, que compreende a instituição da heterogeneidade discursiva como seu fundamento.

The closing of critique, pluralism and reflexivity: A response to Hardy and Grant and some wider reflections

This article is a follow-up of Alvesson and Kärreman (2011a), which was in itself a follow-up of Alvesson and Kärreman (2000), and a response to a critique of the former by Hardy and Grant (2012). The critique is addressed directly and the logic behind it investigated critically. The article also addresses wider concerns regarding the politics of research and publishing and the conditions of critique at the present time. The pressure and eagerness to get published lead to strong subspecialization and an inclination to build research approaches within which authors are inclined to reproduce shared assumptions and be unwelcome to critical explorations. The article points to the risk of assumption-challenging work being marginalized through the anticipation of critique leading to hostile reactions and specialized, politically motivated reviewers blocking the publication of far-reaching critique.

Techno-animism in Japan: Shinto Cosmograms, Actor-network Theory, and the Enabling Powers of Non-human Agencies

In a wide range of contemporary debates on Japanese cultures of technological practice, brief reference is often made to distinct Shinto legacies, as forming an animist substratum of indigenous spiritual beliefs and cosmological imaginations. Japan has been described as a land of Shinto-infused ‘techno-animism’: exhibiting a ‘polymorphous perversity’ that resolutely ignores boundaries between human, animal, spiritual and mechanical beings. In this article, we deploy instances of Japanese techno-animism as sites of theoretical experimentation on what Bruno Latour calls a symmetrical anthropology of nature-cultures. In staging a dialogue between actor-network theory and Japanese techno-animism, we show how Shinto cosmograms provide an enlivening and alternative diffraction device on several of the ontological motifs manifested in Latour’s work. In particular, by mobilizing the territory of a ‘new’ animism debate in anthropology – manifested in the work of Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro – we attempt to infuse Latourian ‘multinaturalism’ with new, other-than-western analytical energy. Extending actor-network theory, we argue, Shinto cosmograms offer an interesting vantage point for interpreting the immanent, affective, enchanting and enabling powers of non-humans in contributing to collective life. By thus broadening the ‘cosmopolitical’ imagination beyond Latour’s own European-Catholic frame of reference, Shinto techno-animism offers up a wider reflection on contemporary entanglements of science, politics, ecology and cosmos. This reflection, we conclude, opens up a new intellectual territory, allowing us to trace techno-animist streams of thinking both ‘East’ and ‘West’, beyond the confines of the scientific naturalism indigenous to European thinking.

Hannah Arendt and the Concept of Law. Against the Tradition

A permanent approach to what law is has been that of interpreting it in terms of repression or reduction of chances or courses of conduct. This approach, however, is not able to render justice to fundamental moments of the legal practice, beginning with constitutional law and its empowering rules. Nonetheless, the mainstream in the philosophy of law and in the legal theory has not at all been worried about this strange inadequacy of imperativism to offer a complete view of legal practice and legal institutions. Force, violence, sanction, prescription still are the basic conceptual knots used to weave the cloth of law and lawyers. Hannah Arendt perceptive though scanty remarks on law, within her wider reflections on action and judgment, offer a different view and open a new path for a jurisprudence less obsessed with coercion, and against the tradition supporting the centrality of command in the ilegal domain. Such view and that path this paper tries sympathetically to explore.

Uma revisitação «espetacular»: presença francesa no teatro vicentino

Inscrevendo-se numa reflexão mais ampla, si­multaneamente focalizada nas releituras do pas­sado no presente e nas culturas entre fronteiras, este trabalho toma por base o teatro vicentino, paradigma dessa cultura do outro – estrangeiro ou predecessor – que os tempos tinham em alto preço. Durante as três primeiras décadas do sé­culo XVI, entre 1502 e 1536, época de abertura e de incessantes intercâmbios entre cortes, com o seu séquito de artistas, Gil Vicente presidiu aos divertimentos de uma corte já por si bilingue e bicultural. Marcadamente devedor à literatura vizinha, o seu teatro não despreza outras in-fluências. Entre elas, a francesa ocupa um lugar relevante, visível quer na retomada de temas, de personagens ou ainda de elementos linguísticos, quer na imitação de gêneros e de formas. O presente estudo tenta não se limitar à constatação de uma influência; questiona o texto e os próprios mecanis­mos do espetáculo para avaliar a forma como esse teatro perfeitamente se coadunava com as culturas europeias, de que a sua veia jocosa se alimentava. Confronta-se um texto – a cena que põe em presença o Juiz e a Moça de Floresta de enganos – com o seu «hipotexto» – uma das novelas que compõem o livro das Cent nouvelles nouvelles oferecido ao duque de Borgonha por volta de 1461-2. O propó­sito é também o de recolher algum esclarecimento sobre domínios que mal conhecemos, tal como, precisamente, o que respeita à cultura do poeta dramaturgo, muito mal avaliada pela interpretação séria de um texto largamente manipulado e exces­sivamente manipulador.

Lessons from America? News and Politics in Hard Times

On 30 October 2010, US news satirists Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert jointly held the ‘Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear’, attracting a crowd of over 200,000 in Washington, DC, and an estimated national audience of two million viewers on Comedy Central. While Stewart denied it, this event was widely interpreted as a satirical response to Fox News Anchor Glenn Beck's earlier ‘Restoring Honor’ rally, a controversial event that hosted numerous figures of the conservative and Christian right, including Sarah Palin. This event provides a case study in this article for a wider reflection on contemporary debates surrounding contemporary journalism, drawing on work that has situated ‘new political television’ in relation to wider transformations in mediated democracy, as this has been impacted by political-economic, technological, political and socio-cultural change.

Decoupling equality, diversity, and inclusion from liberal projects

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to bring wider‐reaching feminism to confluence with relational indigenous values for transformative responses to systemic exclusion.Design/methodology/approach – The authors critique the prevailing (corporate) institutional logic in higher education through their stories and experiences, weaving in diverse feminist perspectives. Liberal feminist perspectives, the most visible gender critique, may merely increase numerical equality, diversifying the biographical characteristics of privilege. Exclusion for many is systemically retained. The authors argue that relational logics underpinning indigenous worldviews hold generative potential for institutional change toward deeper inclusiveness and justice.Findings – Liberal feminists' two‐fold transformative aspirations for gender equality and deeper respect for currently marginalized “feminine” values leave room for deeper and wider reflection on how indigenous perspectives might contribute to institutional change.Practica...

Cum Nimis Absurdum and the Ancona Auto-da-Fé revisited: their impact on Venice and some wider reflections

Two major events are generally cited as indicative of the new hostile Counter-Reformation attitude of the Papacy toward the Jews and consequently as causing a deterioration of the situation of the Jews throughout the Italian peninsula. The first is the papal bull Cum Nimis Absurdum issued in 1555 by Paul IV, the zealous former Cardinal Caraffa, only months after he assumed the papal throne, while the second is the burning at the stake in 1556 of the former New Christians who had reverted to Judaism in Ancona. While not minimizing the importance of Cum Nimis Absurdum and the action against the former New Christians in Ancona, it may nevertheless be instructive to step back and reconsider their impact on the Jews of the Italian peninsula and clarify whether they really represented a major peninsula-wide turning point.

Broadening of Photonic Band Gap in a One—Dimensional Superconductor Star Waveguide Structure

The present paper describes the theoretical investigation of enlarged reflection bands (photonic band gaps) in a 1D star waveguide (SWG) structure consists of superconductor and dielectric as its constituent materials. For the present study, we take the different combinations of superconductor and dielectric materials as a backbone and side branches of the SWG structure. In order to obtain the dispersion relation, Interface Response Theory (IRT) has been employed. Photonic band gaps of SWG structure having superconductor–superconductor, superconductor–dielectric, and dielectric–superconductor materials are compared with the band gaps of the conventional photonic crystal (PC) structure having superconductor–superconductor and dielectric–superconductor materials. Analysis of the dispersion characteristics shows that there exists no band gaps for conventional PC when both layers are made of the same superconducting materials (as the usual case) while the SWG structure shows forbidden bands of finite width even the backbone and side branches are made of same materials. Also, the SWG structure having superconductor–dielectric shows the wider reflection bands in comparison with the structure having dielectric–superconductor as its constituent materials, while for the conventional PC structure it is same in both the cases. Further, the effect of temperature and the effect of variation of number of grafted branches on the photonic bands of SWG structure have been studied.

Flood-Risk Management, Mapping, and Planning: The Institutional Politics of Decision Support in England

Flood maps play an increasingly prominent role in government strategies for flood-risk management. Maps are instruments not just for defining and communicating flood risks, but also for regulating them and for rationalizing the inevitable limits and failures of those controls. Drawing on policy document analysis, official statistics, and 66 key-informant interviews, this paper explores the institutional conflicts over the use of the Environment Agency (EA) Flood Map to support decision making by English local planning authorities (LPAs), whose local political mandate, statutory obligations, and professionalized planning culture put them at odds with the narrower bureaucratic imperative of the Agency to restrict developments at risk of flooding. The paper shows how the Flood Map was designed to standardize and script the planning process and ensure that LPA decisions were aligned with EA views about avoiding development in zones at risk of flooding without actually banning such development outright. But technologies are also shaped by their users, and so the paper documents how planners accommodated and resisted this technology of indirect rule. Their concerns about sterilizing areas depicted as being at risk of flooding and about the difficulties of actually using the Flood Map for speedy and defensible development-control decisions were crucial in its eventual replacement by a new decision-support technology, Strategic Flood Risk Assessments, which then led to the descripting of the Flood Map to influence a new set of users: the public. The paper closes with some wider reflections on the significance of the case for risk-based governance.

Research in Charity Accounting and Reporting: A Fertile Field for Exploration

Although the charity sectors in the United Kingdom (UK) and the Republic of Ireland (RoI) are both substantial in numerical terms and in economic impact, research in the area by accounting and finance academics is limited. Substantial challenges in terms of accounting, accountability andgovernance are faced by the secors as they strive to engage with their stakeholders in meaningful ways. This paper explores some key themes of research in this area that have been central to the authors’ interests over many years and, on the basis of this, and on wider reflection as to the operation and importance of the charity sector in both the UK and the RoI, highlight potentially fruitful future research for accounting and finance academics.

Research with experimental games

Experimental methods in general, and games in particular, are increasingly significant in development economics, but have had rather a limited and partial engagement with anthropology. Given the multidisciplinary character of development studies, it is timely to consider the potential of experimental games for multi-methods development research. Here I give a brief account of experimental economics and key games, for newcomers, followed by a critical discussion of the game methods as applied in a large and influential set of cross-cultural studies by (predominantly) anthropologists working with evolutionist paradigms. I conclude with a wider reflection on core assumptions in the experimental approach which need re-thinking from a broader base in social theory.

The UK's dysfunctional relationship with medical migrants: the Daniel Ubani case and reform of out-of-hours services

In 2008, a patient died in the UK after being given an excessive dose of diamorphine by an overseas-trained doctor working in out-of-hours (OOH) primary care. This incident led to a debate on the recourse to international medical graduates and on the shortcomings of the OOH system. It is argued here that a historical reflection on the ways in which the NHS uses migrant labour can serve to reframe these discussions. The British Medical Association, the General Medical Council, and the House of Commons Health Committee have emphasised the need for more regulation of overseas graduates. Such arguments fit into a well-established pattern of dependency on and denigration of overseas graduates. They give insufficient weight to the multiple systemic failings identified in reports on OOH provision by the Department of Health and the Care Quality Commission. Medical migrants are often found in under-resourced and unpopular parts of healthcare systems, in the UK and elsewhere. Their presence provides an additional dimension to Julian Tudor Hart's inverse care law: the resources are fewer where the need is greatest, and the practitioner dealing with the consequences is more likely to be a migrant. The failings of the UK OOH system need to be understood in this context. Efforts to improve OOH care should be focused on controlling quality rather than the movement of doctors. A wider reflection on the nature of the roles that international medical graduates are asked to play in healthcare systems is also required.

Writing About a Woman Writer’s Writing: On Gender Identification(s) and Being a Male Critic of Carol Shields’s Work

This essay takes as its starting point my experience as a male critic of Carol Shields's work. Throughout the researching and writing of my PhD on Shields, I have noted with curiosity the surprise registered by many people upon discovering that a male critic would choose to write about the work of a female author. This reaction, confirmed by other male academics working on female authors, raises a number of interesting questions. What does it mean for a male critic to write about the work of a female author? Why is this still considered surprising, unusual, even strange? Is this view symptomatic of the kind of disturbing devaluation of women's fiction (and of women's experience generally) that Shields herself explores so candidly in her final novel Unless (2002)? I suggest that the anti-feminist backlash (outlined by Faludi [1991]), and the profitable establishment of popular literary genres such as "Chick Lit" and "Lad Lit," have led to a retrogressive "hardening" of gender roles within popular culture, one which endorses a simplistic relationship between author and audience, presuming that texts "by" women must necessarily be "for" women only. Situated within the context of Shields's own professed ambivalence about her status as a "women's writer," and drawing on the theories of Emma Wilson, the essay attempts to broaden out into a wider reflection upon issues of gender and identification within contemporary literary culture. Shields's work, I argue, subverts assumptions about gendered reading patterns, encouraging through its polyphony and its use of dual narrators a mobile and flexible reading experience which allows the reader to inhabit a range of perspectives and to read productively across gender binaries.

Leadership and power in Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom

Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom analyzes the racial power conflict in South Africa, and Mandela’s own role as a leader in that struggle. Mandela saw the conflict in variable‐sum, not zero‐sum terms: it was in all sides’ interest to avoid civil war, but without risk‐taking leadership civil war was the likely outcome. Mandela employed several of the strategies for resolving variable‐sum (‘mixed‐motive’) conflict described in Thomas Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict, including rendering oneself powerless to make further concessions and not pushing an opponent too far. But Mandela’s accomplishments also highlight the limitations of Schelling’s analysis, which minimizes the role of creative leadership in resolving conflict. The episode invites wider reflection on the nature of both leadership and power.

‘One Island, One Team, One Mission’: Geopolitics, Sovereignty, ‘Race’ and Rendition

This article interprets the strategies that have been associated with the war on terror against the backdrop of historical geographies of colonial violence and dispossession. It joins those who argue that wider anxieties about the sources of danger, criminality, violence and terror have become intertwined. These reveal as much about sensibilities of race, class and ‘security’ as they do objective dangers. Thus the article considers how, drawing on the British case, detentions and deportations marked by race are connected with and form part of an overlapping regime of ‘security’, ‘immigration’ and asylum. This is exemplified via an account of the trajectory British sovereign territory of Diego Garcia, leading to wider reflections on contemporary forms of sovereignty and the operation of ‘race’ in geopolitics.

High-dynamic-range camera-based bidirectional reflectance distribution function measurement system for isotropic materials

We present a novel high-dynamic-range (HDR) camera-based bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) measurement system that can measure the reflectance property of isotropic materials. Our developed system can measure the BRDF of highly specular materials much faster than previous systems. It measures highly dense BRDF samples for a wider reflection angle with less noise so that it provides accuracy that is necessary for computer graphics application. To estimate the reflectance of a given material, we perform an absolute photometric calibration for the HDR camera. Our system is verified by checking the Helmholtz reciprocity and comparing the performance with that of previous image-based systems. The capability and efficiency of the developed system is demonstrated by comparing the images generated by measure-and-fit and direct-rendering methods using the measured data of four different isotropic materials.

Incorporating Otherness: Food Imagery in Anita Desai’s In Custody

This paper focuses on the recurrence of food imagery in Desai’s In Custody where the motif fulfils functions exceeding the literal, the referential, or even the social dimension acknowledged by E. M. Forster. Although in this novel food and the sharing of meals do index otherness in terms of the various characters’ community, their creed and gender, Desai’s use of the motif is only superficially realistic as she integrates within it a wider reflection upon the nature of art and its enigmatic, grotesque relation to the body in which it is originated.

Broadband optical reflector based on Si/SiO2 one-dimensional graded photonic crystal structure

We propose the design of broadband optical reflector using a one-dimensional graded photonic crystal (GPC) structure. The proposed structure consists of a periodic array of two alternate layers of SiO2 and Si with low and high values of refractive indices (n 1 and n 2) and thicknesses a and b, respectively. The GPC structure considered here has a linear change in the thickness of the constituent layers for a certain number of layers and has a periodic repetition of this unit. In order to calculate the reflection properties a transfer matrix method (TMM) has been used. This investigation shows that GPC structures have wider reflection bands in comparison to a conventional PC structure and the width of the reflection bands can be enlarged by increasing the number of graded periods and also by increasing the thickness of periods. We also observe that in a GPC structure, omnidirectional reflection (ODR) bands get enhanced without increasing the number of layers of the structure. Hence, a GPC structure can be used as a broadband optical reflector and the range of reflection can be tuned to any wavelength region by varying the thickness of the graded periods.