Normative World Research Articles

Demarcating rights in divided social worlds

Abstract This article outlines a framework for studying practices of boundary-making as pivotal to the various ways in which “rights” become objects of contention and sources of narrativization in contemporary constitutional democracies. Firstly, we reconsider the dynamics of boundary-making that underline polarization by drawing on the notion of “moral economy”. This concept is well-suited for making sense of how social groups draw lines of demarcation through the appropriation, circulation, and confrontation of values and emotions. However, we argue that the concept must be enriched by acknowledging the generative role of narratives. Hence, we introduce the notion of “narrative boundaries” for comprehending how moral economies are produced by storytelling practices. Based on this, we explore the paradoxical moral economy of constitutional struggles. While the discourse of rights pursues modes of inclusion, the struggles over their demarcation often result in narratives that build fences that reinforce the division between almost irreconcilable normative worlds.

A Plural Nomos: Law, Life, and Knowledge

AbstractEven in its limited state-based form, human law owes its existence to the natural physical world with its self-created value systems. What is understood as human law is grounded in human-nonhuman entanglements, themselves a subset of a multi-dimensional natural nomos consisting of the intricately connected normative worlds of animals, plants, earth, and cosmos. Complex and intersecting plural normative fields include those associated with the nonliving world, the multiple ontological worlds produced by life forms, and the many strata of human becoming – cultural, cognitive, social, and representational. As plural the nomos contains many irreducible dimensions. Normative fields intersect, hybridise, and clash; they can mutually strengthen and also negate other normativities. In this article, I set out and explore some dimensions of the plural nomos with a focus on living beings, notably the connectedness of being, knowing and normativity. The living nomos co-emerges with being and with the embodied knowledge of even the simplest forms of life. Life is both cognitive and normative; living beings inherit ancestral norms but, in living and adapting, life creates new norms, biological, cultural, and behavioural. The living-knowing being is always normative – produced by the norming processes and constraints of life and matter at large. Normative elements are a critical part of the ontological and epistemological embeddedness of human beings in more than human worlds. Before law (or knowledge) can be about life, it is also of or from life. Expanding the analytical frame of law in this way is one method by which we might reshape western narratives of law, with the aims of promoting better openness to First Nations laws, discouraging western cultural superiority and human exceptionalism, and moving toward a more eco-sensitive view of the continuity between human law-culture-society and the natural world.

What is normal in group analysis?

In just a few decades, the normative world we inhabit is comprehensively different to the one in which S.H. Foulkes lived. As the pace, scope and content of change have transformed society, we have ‘greater indeterminacy to decide our movements and identity’ (p. 67). Personal identity has been released from many of its traditional moorings. The pervasive influence of contemporary ‘psy-sciences’ and exponential growth of therapeutic experts is one aspect of these changes. Seemingly, we live with more flux and flow than ever before. Have our theories kept up with theses fundamental changes? This paper offers a critical, post-Foulksean, post-psychoanalytic perspective on the normative world and our practices within it. It begins with history and the importance of locating who we are and what we do within the mutations of long-term change.

Misunderstanding the Ngen Kintuantü: a study from the legal pluralism of water rights in the conflict around Statkraft’s hydroelectric power plants on the Pilmaiquén River, Futawillimapu, Chile

This paper draws analytical attention to the debates on legal pluralism to understand Mapuche-Williche expressions of water rights in southern Chile in the context of Chile’s environmental institutions, based on a case study of the long-standing conflict over the hydroelectric power plants developed by the Norwegian state-owned company Statkraft on the Pilmaiquén River. The analysis focuses on the hermeneutical problems that emerge from the process through which the Chilean environmental institutions translated the dense cosmogony of the Mapuche-Williche communities around the Pilmaiquén River during the environmental assessment of the Osorno Hydroelectric Power Plant, through the category of a “site of cultural significance”, and the impacts that this process has had over time. I argue that, although the category of site of cultural significance made the meaning of water in the normative world of the Mapuche-Williche communities of this territory commensurable, understandable, and partially comparable, it deprived it of its complex meanings, giving rise to various equivocations that imply forms of epistemic injustice of a hermeneutic type.

근대적 규범 세계의 붕괴와 원시 공동체의 회복

Mo Yan was greatly influenced by William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as many people are aware, but it is difficult to accurately understand the thematic consciousness of each of his works by only mentioning the impacts of the two writers without a detailed consideration into his creative periods. To highlight his individuality and originality, Yan has specifically mentioned the times when he was influenced by Faulkner and the period when he was exposed to Marquez. From this, the researcher tries to demonstrate that Red Sorghum, one of Yan’s greatest works, depicts the process of his desire, which had been accumulated inside of him to search for a new world, being fulfilled through the rediscovery of a primitive community called Gaomi Dongbei Xiang. Mo Yan has expressed the “collapse of a modern normative world” and explored the essence of human beings and the world by using modern techniques, such as multiple speakers and stream of consciousness. This study examines the collapse patterns of a modern normative world in Yan’s work and found the essential elements of living and life that would remain on top of its ruins and could not be removed. His work discussed similarities between the essential elements and the archetypes of mankind as well as the worlds he dreamed of based on borrowing theories from Carl G. Jung and Joseph J. Campbell.

How to … use theory as method in HPE research.

Recognising that scholars in health professions education (HPE) are often unfamiliar with theory-informed research, we provide guidance on a robust method for using theory as a method to inform every aspect of research design from research question formation to data analysis and reporting. Using the Figured Worlds theory to illustrate the process, we mapped six concepts of particular importance to HPE: the figured world, agency, improvisation, discourse, positionality and power. Together the concepts were helpful analytic tools for our topic of interest. The concept of the figured world informed the construction of our program of research. Agency was useful in exploring the ways that subjects acted or did not act. We crafted interview questions to illustrate participants' unique improvisations. Discourse, or the world's artefacts both verbal and embodied, informed our understanding of the world's norms. Positionality allowed us to compare the agentic action of different participants. Finally, power offered an opportunity to recognise the intersection of the positional identities of participants and their stories of action or inaction. While theory-informed analytic tools offer an opportunity to construct nuanced understanding, generating new insights into study subjects and their worlds, caution is necessary as qualitative inquiry is an evolving process of give and take. Everything from the study's questions, methods and even theories might need to flex in response to the data. Ultimately, though initially intimidating, theories offer concrete methodological tools HPE scholars can rely on.

Effectiveness and Acceptability of Laboratory Experiment Videos in Blended Chemistry Learning

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed most of the world's norms, from people's lifestyles to the education system. The transition from offline to online teaching, communication barriers inherent in online teaching, preparation, and teaching style were just a few of the difficulties faced by the instructors. On the other hand, problems with the content included creating new materials and using multimedia tools, among other things. This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of using laboratory experiment videos instead of hands-on experiments as an alternative to the blended learning modality. Furthermore, this study also investigated the acceptability of the developed videos from the learners' perspective. According to the study's findings, blended learning for chemistry is successful and acceptable when laboratory experiment videos are included. Students' performance improved significantly from their pretest to posttest when exposed to several teaching strategies for chemical reactions, including lectures, hands-on laboratory activities, and the presentation of videos of laboratory experiments. As a result, utilizing laboratory experiment videos in blended chemistry learning can be an effective tool and approach for delivering education and assisting in the teaching and learning process for teachers and students.

A data ethics framework for responsible responsive organizations in the digital world

Data are an integral part of the normative world and therefore ethics. With the advent of big data and data science, increased attention has been given to the ethics of artificial intelligence. However, data ethics is broader than that and must now be considered on its own as a field of ethics. In this paper, we make the case for the importance of data ethics and propose a general framework to support organizations in adopting ethical data practices. We provide the examples of statistics and standards as two contexts within which data ethics can be advanced and where advancements have already been made.

Respite. Quiet. A House of Dreams.

Respite. Quiet. A House of Dreams.

Peter Weiss and Others

Peter Weiss and Others

Relational legal pluralism and Indigenous legal orders in Canada

AbstractThe survival and resurgence of Indigenous legal orders and constitutional traditions in Canada, as elsewhere, disrupt the normative hegemony of the liberal state and articulate a constitutionalism that accounts for a plurality of laws. How can state and non-state legal orders interact across vastly different normative worlds? How can their interaction address the colonial power imbalance and what role should recognition play in this relationship? This article draws on the work of Ralf Michaels on relational legal pluralism and Aaron Mills on Anishinaabe constitutionalism to explore how a legally plural society must embrace Michaels’ challenge of constitutive external recognition: the idea that legal orders mutually constitute each other through recognition without interfering with each other’s factual status as law. External recognition is consistent with strong legal pluralism and is distinct from recognition within the multicultural liberal state, a form of weak legal pluralism and continued colonialism. Mills’ discussion of treaty, rather than contract, as a foundation for shared political community assists in imagining a constitutionalism with/in Canada in which distinct legal orders can mutually constitute each other without domination. Linkage norms may help to establish reciprocal relations among state law and Indigenous legal orders, and the enactment of such ‘tertiary rules of recognition’ from within Indigenous legal orders may itself shift the balance of power.

Deconstructing gender and family norms in new Tunisian cinema: A queer reading of Ala Eddine Slim’s Tlamess/طلامس‎(2019)

This article seeks to problematize the concept of queer cinema and then to illuminate conceptual nuances through the analysis of a specific film. The Tunisian feature film Tlamess can be read as queer on two levels. First, its queerness relates to the protagonist, a deserter who undergoes a fundamental metamorphosis: he frees himself from the patterns of military masculinity and, far from the normative world, takes on a maternal role. Second, the dissolution of the traditional gender and family order is staged through cinematic processes that introduce the viewers to a pre-verbal world outside of established symbolic and social patterns. Expressive audio-visual techniques transfer the viewers into this alternative world and create an experience of difference, a kind of mind game. Thus, queer cinema should not only be understood in terms of political activism, as an examination of characters supposedly deviating from gender norms. Rather, and crucially, it emerges in a much broader sense out of the strategies of aesthetic mise en scène.

Evaluative Potential of Lexemes — Representatives of Concept TRUE in Russian

The study of the evaluative potential of the concept TRUTH in the Russian language picture of the world has been carried out. The results of the analysis of the use of the word true in the role of a qualitative adjective with evaluative semantics and the word truly in the role of a qualitative adverb with the semantics of the degree of manifestation of a property, feature or action / state are presented based on the materials of the Russian National Corpus and the authors’ own Internet monitoring in the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet. It is shown that in the total semantic content of the concept TRUTH, two semantic layers of its conceptual content in the modern Russian are realized: correspondence to reality; compliance with the norm in the world of people, the highest ideal. The following varieties of uses of the qualitative adjective true and the qualitative adverb truly as a secondary assessment based on the general meaning of “corresponding to the ideal in the world of norms and values of the speaker” were found: the meaning is “ideal, exemplary, perfect”; the meaning is “full, reached / brought to the maximum degree of manifestation of the entity named by the defined word” and the meaning of a strong degree of manifestation of something. It is concluded that the words true and truly embody the subjective moral and value ideas of native speakers about how it should be in the world of human relations, and not about “how it really is”.

The Devil Finds Use

Abstract Beginning with James Baldwin’s critique of The Exorcist in The Devil Finds Work (1976) and ending with campy allusions to the film in the works of three contemporary black gay authors, this article argues that the aesthetics of possession helps articulate queer forms of desire that blur the lines between agency and passivity. Deploying José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of disidentification, it shows how black and queer subjects disruptively locate themselves in the horror genre by drawing on their racial affinities with the genre. The first section proposes that the most prevalent claim in black horror studies today—that black life is more frightening than the supernatural—actually originates with Baldwin’s 1976 rebuke of the film. By disidentifying with horror, Baldwin shifts attention away from paranormal evils and onto a more horrifying normative world. Sketching enthusiastic alternatives to Baldwin, the latter half of this article examines idiosyncratic attachments to the film that are routed through the demonic. By disidentifying with the possessed child, the narrators of Larry Duplechan’s Eight Days a Week (1985) and Blackbird (1986), James Earl Hardy’s B-Boy Blues (1994), and G. Winston James’s Shaming the Devil (2009) all articulate fraught performances of desire.

The Normative World of Memes: Political Communication Strategies in the United States and Ecuador

The media convergence model presents an environment in which everyone produces information without intermediates or filters. A subsequent insight shows that users (prosumers) —gathered in networked communities—also shape messages’ flow. Social media play a substantial role. This information is loaded with public values and ideologies that shape a normative world: social media has become a fundamental platform where users interact and promote public values. Memetics facilitates this phenomenon. Memes have three main characteristics: (1) Diffuse at the micro-level but shape the macrostructure of society; (2) Are based on popular culture; (3) Travel through competition and selection. In this context, this paper examineshow citizens from Ecuador and the United States reappropriate memes during a public discussion? The investigation is based on multimodal analysis and compares the most popular memes among the United States and Ecuador produced during the candidate debate (Trump vs. Biden [2020] and Lasso vs. Arauz [2021]). The findings suggest that, during a public discussion, it is common to use humor based on popular culture to question authority. Furthermore, a message becomes a meme when it evidences the gap between reality and expectations (normativity). Normativity depends on the context: Americans complain about the expectations of a debate; Ecuadorians, about discourtesy and violence.

Verbotsgrade und „kontra-normative“, hypothetische Welten. Zu Wolfgang Spohns Rangtheorie, übertragen auf rechtliche Normensysteme

That wrongdoing can be understood as scalar rather than bivalent, is a kind of truism in modern criminal law theory. But how exactly the strength and stringency of legal prohibitions and corresponding obligations can be conceptualized, is a complicated and intriguing topic. So, Wolfgang Spohn’s elegant, fresh start with a normative ranking theoretic conception of a prohibition order should be warmly welcomed by legal theorists for scrutinized discussion. Anyhow caution is warranted when “counter-normative”, similar worlds-thought experiments are introduced which promise an easy way out of the bramble bush of comparing and weighing different wrongdoings and offences in our actual (factual and normative) world. Furthermore, Spohn’s fact-regarding normative reasoning is too much rooted in modern decision theory, that it can be regarded as completely “theory-neutral” between different understandings of legal norms within deontological and consequentialist theories.

The Monte Carlo simulation approach to verification of the attenuation factors k for isotropic gamma-ray sources commonly used in industry, medicine and science

An important problem, which is currently overlooked in radiological protection, is the omission of the contribution from low-energy photons when estimating the dose received by persons working in conditions of exposure to ionizing radiation. As shown in this study, this contribution cannot be omitted because it determines the dose in the workplace when an isotropic source of gamma rays (uncollimated beams) and thick shields are used. The omission of the contribution from low-energy photons causes that the gamma-ray attenuation factors, often marked in radiological protection with the letter k, as well as the transmission curves for isotropic gamma-ray beams resemble those for collimated beams without the typical features of uncollimated beams. This causes the estimated doses to be significantly underestimated. In this work the gamma-ray attenuation factors k were determined by Monte Carlo simulations for basic shielding materials, for commonly used isotropic gamma-ray sources. These factors are the basic parameters used to calculate the gamma-ray dose that a person who performs professional activities with gamma rays can receive. Accurate calculation of this dose translates into work safety. Justification for this research is the necessity to apply the exact k-factor values in radiological protection in Poland where doses at workplaces are calculated according to the procedure given in Gostkowska's book based on the old Polish norm (1987). The ground of this norm are transmission curves from NCRP Report 49 (1976) based on data obtained in the 1930's, 40's and 50's, unsuitable for isotropic sources. Although the obtained results refer to the Polish standard, the world's norms based on the NCRP Report 49 also need innovation, because the subsequent versions of this report published in 1991, 1994 and 1998 as well as the NCRP Report No. 151 considered as the new face of the NCRP Report No. 49 do not make the required correction. This work meets these requirements by using the Monte Carlo simulation method based on the GEANT4 code.

‘Soft, Wild and Free’: A magical realist fairytale

‘Soft, Wild and Free’ is a magical realist fairytale about a creature that was soft and wild. It is also a magical realist fairytale about the courage of a guerilla princess who freed this creature from its foundations. With my research on magical realism, fairytales and the combination of the two, I am looking into fictional narratives that have the potential for the creation of spaces which are magical and critical. These fictional narratives exist in words and images that are constructed with a sensitivity to ideas of place and a place’s spirit and character. Through the writing I bring together elements from magical realist literature and the classic magical fairytale, into a hybrid style, which then translates into drawings that I make physically and digitally. Clay, wood, card models, as well as sketches, orthographic drawings and paintings of buildings weave into a series of drawings whose scope is to suggest a version of architecture with a critical and poetic stance to the world. These drawings propose buildings as characters and characters as places that talk about the past and the present while imagining a poetic and critical future. In my work there are three types of processes, which are based on translations; two intersemiotic and one interlingual. The two intersemiotic translations are from writing to drawings and models and from drawings to writing; the interlingual translation is from modern Greek to English. These processes become spatial acts, as they allow for a perpetual generation of fictional and factual stories in words and images. My research is rooted in an inherent understanding of architecture through a literature that is critical and magical, an existential potion for our allegedly normal and normative world, which is really a wondrous, magical realist dream.

The Queerness of the Man-Child

The literary man-child character can function as a subversive agent within the text to expose traditional ideologies and suggest alternate possibilities. Much beloved in Sweden, Karlson from Astrid Lindgren’s Karlson on the Roof trilogy (1955–1968) represents this kind of man-child character in texts for children, particularly through his queerness. The trilogy illuminates Karlson’s queerness by contrasting him with the normative reality of 20th-century Stockholm through his trademark narcissism, primal desires, and illogical or fallacious rhetoric that often invokes silence from children and adults within the story. Through the lens of Jack Halberstam’s queer subcultures, Karlson can be appreciated as a specific kind of literary man-child character that necessitates a legitimated queer visibility. This visibility is cultivated by his non-normative belief system and buttressed by his resistance to being silenced or kept secret from this normative world. Furthermore, Karlson’s queerness fuels his charisma, making him popular because of his behaviour, not despite it. Ultimately, his queerness as a man-child character disrupts traditional boundaries and delineations of the child/adult binary and allows the child reader to witness the vulnerabilities of normative institutions while also appreciating diversity in non-normative family structures.

The Pro-Life Movement and the Fight for the Constitution in Argentina: Between Law and Transcendence

The constitutional history of abortion in Argentina is long and complex. This paper overviews a small part of it: how Catholic legal academia developed, since the early 1980s, constitutional arguments to dispute with the feminist camp the meaning of the Constitution. This process has two dimensions. One is linked to the intellectual history of Catholic ideas over reproduction and how they were adapted to the peculiarities of Argentinean law. The other is related to the way in which these arguments formed the framing of the “pro-life” movement in Argentina. Exploring this normative world reveals the “depth of field” with which social movements seeking constitutional change work (Cover, 1983). It also reveals the stakes involved when the battle is waged in that terrain. This article explores what this means for constitutional theory.