The purpose of this thesis was set against the background of changed expectations on education and teachers’ work in contemporary Western societies, reflecting global educational trends of standardisation and assessment moving further down the ages. The overall aim of the thesis was to explore and gain understandings of how teachers’ work is constituted. The exploration was based on lived experience and philosophical perspectives, and the main research questions were: i) what is the significance of existential dimensions of teachers’ work, and (...) ii) how can they be understood in the light of a globalised and standardised education? The theoretical and methodological basis of the thesis was mainly the philosophy of the life-world as formulated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The studies included employed the following methods: drawings with associated oral comments, written teacher responses and follow-up interviews, visual documentation with associated oral comments, and finally, the study of the relevant philosophical literature. In total 50 teachers and 112 children participated in study I, ten teachers in study II and eight teachers in study III. In study IV, the data consisted of philosophical literature.The findings show that teachers’ work involves not only teachers’ intellectual capacities and skills, but also their emotional and embodied being, and intertwined relationships as well. Further, teachers’ work it affected not only by the views of children, knowledge and learning held by teachers, policymakers and society that affect teachers’ work, but also by ontological assumptions and existential dimensions in a wider sense. It emerged that teachers’ views of education and their attempt to appreciate the unpredictable beyond dualistic assumptions are holistic, and multidimensional, in comparison to the rather linear and standardised global agenda.The crossover analysis of the findings suggests that teachers’ work is mainly constituted by ambiguities and intertwinings of an ontological character that have epistemological implications. In this thesis ambiguities are used to describe aspects that at first seem contradictory but are in fact more like irreducible uncertainties – as intertwined and reversible aspects of teachers’ work as a whole. Accordingly, existential dimensions of teachers’ work are ubiquitous within these ambiguities and intertwinings, and appear as significant in mainly two ways – firstly, as closely connected dimensions of the life-world and lived experience, referred to as lived time, lived space, lived body and lived other; secondly, as basic notions mainly about the relationships between i) subject and object, ii) mind and body, iii) human, culture and nature, iv) linear and multidimensional temporality. These existential dimensions of teachers work are discussed as Intercorporeal reversibilities, Intertwinings, chiasm and flesh and A chiasmic being. The ambiguous aspects of teachers’ work seem to derive from a general ambiguity of views on education, in which the rationalistic view tends to dominate since it often reflects the management of education. This overall ambiguity demands a reconsideration of the wider aim of education as well as of different relationships within education beyond dualisms and divides. Particularly, intercorporeal and intertwined relationships are essential, encompassing the significant intertwinings of ‘subjectobject’, ‘mindbody’, and ‘humannatureculture’. It is argued that this rethinking needs to be done in order to create conceptual and operational space for diverse and challenging pedagogical relationships. Thereby, a process of a chiasmic being for teachers in their work and for children’s learning can be enhancedKey words: teachers’ work; teaching; school; early childhood education; lived experience; existential; pluralistic; Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

Recent developments in the natural sciences make a renewed dialogue with the humanities possible. Previously, humanists resisted transferring scientific paradigms into fields like history, fearing materialism and determinism would deprive experience of its meaning and people of their freedom. At the same time, scientists were realizing that deterministic materialism made understanding phenomena like life virtually impossible. Scientists escaped the irony of describing a nature to which they did not belong by also discovering that their knowledge can never be complete and (...) that descriptions of nature at the subatomic level were essentially random. These developments, as Monod said, weakened the “Modern” paradigm sufficiently to make life scientifically possible. To understand how life might actually exist, however, scientists had to move beyond laments about observations losing information and concentrate on how nature creates information. Nature creates information in the process of reducing thermodynamic gradients and stores created information in self-organized systems. Nature thus becomes historical, for it is defined by qualitative changes accumulating over time because of unpredictable contingencies. This paper will explore the possibility that the patterned processes by which nature changes apply in the human realm, where interactions can change people and created information can be stored in self-organized societies. Values, Ethics and Morals are the qualitatively new information stored in social systems. VEMs script the actions structuring societies, demonstrating there is meaning in history and solving the problem of how sequences of events –“chronicles”–become narratives. Moreover, when societies compete, their system-structuring information is tested in the same way natural selection tests DNA. Thus, the succession of social systems suggests there is a meaning of history. The meaning of history need be no more transcendental or intended than Darwinian evolution. But if organs and traits can have biological value without implying design, socially constructed attributes like morality, consciousness, and freedom can be valued without supposing history has an ultimate or eternal purpose. Aspiring to show how the cacophony of historical events becomes a cosmos, a “well-ordered” context in which changes become meaningful, this sketch suggests a new understanding of nature may provide a basis for ethics. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate how the shift to a completely urban global world intertwined by ubiquitous and mobile ICTs changes the ontological meaning of space, and how the use of these technologies challenges the social and political construction of territories and the cultural appropriation of places. Our approach to this conceptual debate will focus on what we consider to be more direct and tangible implications of this augmen-tation of urban life. Three types of manifestations will represent the core of (...) the discussions presented here, both through theoretical approaches and analytical descriptions of some examples: surveillance artefacts which permeate our daily life and allow a hypothetical total control of space; locative media that gives us the freedom of spatial mobility and the possibility of creating and recreating places; and the global networks of signs, values and ideologies, which break down the social and political boundaries of territories. (shrink)

Purpose: The objective of this study is to determine the importance of supplementary medical ethics course for resident physicians. In this study, we assessed the current state of their knowledge of medical ethics and aimed to improve and deepen their understanding of clinical scenarios to increase their awareness of the link between the practice of medicine and ethical issues. Methods: The course was held for groups of 10-12 people for 3 days a week for a total of 6 hours. Tests (...) given prior to and following completion of the course were used to assess the effectiveness of a medical ethics training course in which 120 resident physicians completed. The evaluation was made on the basis of the same pre-and post-tests (14 scenarios) and direct observation of participants. Result and Discussion: The average age was 28.23 ± 4.08 and 25% were female and 75% were male. Of the participants, 68.3% were training to be internists, 24.2% were training to be surgeons, and 7.5% were training in laboratory medicine. There was a significant statistical difference between the mean total scores of both tests (p=0.00). After completing the course, residents took into account the medical ethical principles while discussing ethical decisions. Conclusion: After finishing the course, participants defended their responses in regard to issues of medical ethics more carefully and articulated their thoughts more clearly. Our experience demonstrated that the trainees benefited from a structured curriculum in medical ethics. We believe that the development and implementation of our course may serve as a case study for training resident physicians in medical ethics. (shrink)

The current thesis discusses how tools for analysing power are developed predominately for adults, and thus remain underdeveloped in terms of understanding injustices related to age, ethnicity/race and gender in childhoods. The overall aim of this dissertation is to inscribe a discourse of intersecting social injustices as relevant for childhoods and child welfare, and by interlinking postcolonial, feminist, and critical childhood studies. The dissertation is set empirically within the policy and practice of Swedish child welfare, here exemplified by the assessment (...) framework Barns Behov i Centrum. It aims to explore how Swedish child welfare, as a field of knowledge, modes of knowing and knowing subjects, constitutes an arena for claims and responses to intersecting social justice issues. The material consists of BBIC primers and selected samples from, a total of 283 case reports from a Swedish social service agency. The case reports address assessments of children. This dissertation is based on four qualitative studies using discourse analysis, as well as analysis inspired by thematic and case-study methodology. Two studies focus on child welfare discourses in BBIC documents involving social problems and violence, and two studies are based on child welfare case reports. Studies I­­-II address child welfare policy and practice by analysing the conditions required for children to participate, in terms of children’s moral status and in terms of status of ‘evidencing’ needs for protection. Studies III­­-IV explore this further from the perspective of intersecting and embodied social injustices in childhoods. Together, the studies interconnect child welfare as a field of knowledge, modes of knowing and knowers with child welfare as a moral arena for claims to rights, recognition, and social justice. The synthesised findings point to child biowelfare, in which justice discourses are largely absent. Biowelfare is informed by a mode of knowing and ‘evidencing’ risks to children’s health and development, which are confined to scientific predicting-believing, seeing-believing by professionals and a moral economy of care, all of which constrain the idea that injustices are structural and intersecting. Biowelfare primarily responds to children as ‘speaking’ biological bodies, rather than as voices of justice. In this sense, injustices of an epistemological nature are interconnected with social injustices. When issues of justice are mobilised in case reports and policy, they come across as rather ‘unjust’, primarily confined to the sphere of the family home of racialised children and not connected to ‘general’ children. In addition to intersections of age, ethnicity/race and gender, class and health are fundamental to recognition and protection in biowelfare. Finally, the dissertation indicates the need for a moral economy which responds to intersecting social injustices such as racial, gender-based and ageist violence in childhoods, and violations of children’s bodily integrity. (shrink)

Sexuality, understood as a Foucauldian discourse that expresses itself through our passions and pursuits and contributes massively to our socially- constructed identity formation, has from the outset been a major factor in the growth of the internet. As the ultimate look-but-don‘t-touch medium, the computer screen has offered us a pornographic emporium in the privacy of our homes, fed first by the producers of material in the standard broadcast mode, then more and more by ourselves, to each other, in the social (...) media context of online sexual social networking. The recent shift of sexual video material from broadcast to social media mode highlights the fundamental exhibitionism/voyeurism dyad at the core of all this activity, and finds its most impersonal, anonymous apotheosis in the phenomenon that is ChatRoulette, where visual discourse-objects are deployed in a nexus of online sexual power relations. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline a theory of social kinds. A general theory of social kinds has to set out at least three conditions: existence conditions, persistence conditions, and identity conditions. For the sake of expediency, I focus on the existence and persistence conditions. The paper is organized just as life: first with existence, then persistence. I argue that anti-realism is more attractive than realism as an account of the existence conditions, despite the fact that realism has been under-appreciated. Then (...) I argue for a particular theory of the persistence conditions, which I call the basic overlapping traits theory (BOTT), based on an analogy to an approach to personal identity. The upshot of the argument is that from an anti-realist metaphysics we have the capacity to discuss a wider diversity of social phenomena. (shrink)

One determining characteristic of contemporary sociopolitical systems is their power over increasingly large and diverse populations. This raises questions about power relations between heterogeneous individuals and increasingly dominant and homogenizing system objectives. This article crosses epistemic boundaries by integrating computer engineering and a historicalphilosophical approach making the general organization of individuals within large-scale systems and corresponding individual homogenization intelligible. From a versatile archeological-genealogical perspective, an analysis of computer and social architectures is conducted that reinterprets Foucault’s disciplines and political anatomy to (...) establish the notion of politics for a purely technical system. This permits an understanding of system organization as modern technology with application to technical and social systems alike. Connecting to Heidegger’s notions of the enframing (Gestell) and a more primal truth (anfänglicheren Wahrheit), the recognition of politics in differently developing systems then challenges the immutability of contemporary organization. Following this critique of modernity and within the conceptualization of system organization, Derrida’s democracy to come (à venir) is then reformulated more abstractly as organizations to come. Through the integration of the discussed concepts, the framework of Large-Scale Systems Composed of Homogeneous Individuals (LSSCHI) is proposed, problematizing the relationships between individuals, structure, activity, and power within large-scale systems. The LSSCHI framework highlights the conflict of homogenizing system-level objectives and individual heterogeneity, and outlines power relations and mechanisms of control shared across different social and technical systems. (shrink)

Ambiguity in the athlete’s perception and description of pain that opens the door to a series of reinterpretations of athletic experience and events that argue the development of an increasingly inauthentic relation to self and others on the part of those who consume performance as third parties (spectators) and ultimately those who produce it first hand (athletes). The insertion of the spectator into the sport situation as a consumer of the athlete’s activity and the preference given to spectator interpretation shift (...) control of meaning away from the athlete and encourage a demand for athlete suffering in aid of the spectator’s own need for meaning. Through discussions of the function of narrative in sport spectacle, the witnessing role of spectators, and the phenomenon of vicarious substitution, I discuss the representation of the athlete as a character ideal and moral exemplar. At a more developed level of external interpretation, the athlete (or team) becomes the champion of the spectator, the role model or focal point of civic pride whose victory asserts the ascendence of my team and town over yours; and finally, the athlete or team is the intentional object of fan identification: my team is me. I conclude that the existential commitment of the spectator as devoted fan is an inauthentic one. (shrink)

The COVID-19 global health crisis has affected numerous lives, jobs, and properties. The virus is infectious and deadly, and the most vulnerable are the poor and the elderly. Due to its contagious nature, businesses were forced to shut down causing tremendous damage to many workers. The municipality of Burauen in Leyte as well as its neighboring towns are not exempt from the virus wrath. People perished and many lost their livelihood, disabling them if not limiting their purchasing capacity for food (...) and sustenance. The Eastern Visayas State University Burauen Campus is primarily an agricultural school. With the existence and persistence of COVID-19, such campus rose to the challenge by elevating its food production with the hope of providing food security not only in the town where it is located but also to neighboring municipalities. This paper will delve into the problems and challenges the school faced, and likewise its methods and strategies to hurdle the difficulties it handled to help provide cheap but healthy agricultural products for the people. (shrink)

The philosophy of Louis Althusser is often contrasted with the ideas of Michel Foucault. At first sight, the disagreement seems to be about the concept of ideology: while Althusser seem to be huge advocate of the use of the concept, Foucault apparently dislikes and avoids the concept altogether. However, I argue in this article that this reading is only superficial and that it obscures the real debate between these two authors. Althusser, especially in his recently posthumously published Sur la reproduction (...) (1995), appears to agree on many points with Foucault. The real dispute lies not in the concept of ideology, but in its connection with its counterpart ‘science’. Both Althusser and Foucault were in a way epistemologists, focusing on the question on how sciences develop and how scientific practice works. Focussing on their shared background in the French epistemology, with authors such as Gaston Bachelard and Jean Cavaillès, the real discussion appears to be about whether science can really be opposed to ideology or not. Focusing on these aspects of their works can shed new lights on their oeuvre as well as on the nature of scientific practice. (shrink)

Within Critical Management Theory as well as Critical Theory the possibility of individuals resisting taken for granted power asymmetries remains a highly debated subject. Intensified corporate culture programs seem to imply that within the sphere of labor, worker dissent is loosing ground. Based on a large interview material of critical cases, this notion is challenged. The interviewees mainly represent white-collar employees who spend more than half of their working hours on private activities. Studying the objectives and political ambitions behind their (...) extensive recalcitrance reveals a range of intentional structures that result in the same activity: time appropriation. First, time appropriation may be the effect of framed dissent ; a dissent intertwined with politically framed indignation. Second, the recalcitrance may spring from direct dissent in which personal indignation is the driving force whereas political formulations are not as prominent. Third, the activity of not doing your work while at work can be the effect of withdrawal in which case there is no motive other than avoiding work. Fourth, time appropriation may also be a (sometimes involuntary) consequence of adjustment : This occurs when the employee does not receive enough work assignments to fill the working day. I conclude by suggesting that the processes and leaps between these layers of dissent should be further studied. (shrink)

The article proposes to model the phenomenon of the cell phone as a wall-window. This model aims at explicating some of the perceptions and experiences associated with cellular technology. The wall-window model means that the cell phone simultaneously separates the user from the physical surroundings (the wall), and connects the user to a remote space (the window). The remote space may be where the interlocutor resides or where information is stored (e.g. the Internet). Most cell phone usage patterns are modeled (...) as a single dimension according to the level of distraction or attention of the user. In order to accommodate nuanced situations such as augmented reality, I suggest a two-dimensional layout: the wall-window. The wall represents the attention to the immediate physical environment, while the window represents the attention to a remote space. The wall-window model further evolves once a screen is woven into this layout. This addition is easily understood due to the screen’s etymology, which is associated with the concepts of shield or barrier. From a technical perspective, the screen has become an integral part of the cell phone. Furthermore, a screen itself is both a wall and a window. Lastly, once a cell phone is supplemented with a screen, it is easier to refer to it as media. And again, media fits into the wall-window model. (shrink)

From the Western value system, two kinds of ontological and epistemological standpoints are characterized in Management and Social Sciences research; realist ontology and subjectivist ontology or objectivist epistemology and subjectivist epistemology. The kind of ontology and epistemology a researcher commits to has inherent effects towards the researcher’s way of contributing new knowledge. This short communication attempts to contribute new knowledge to the literature of philosophical standpoints in management research by discussing the ontological and epistemological stances with respect to Islam. It (...) was shown that the Islamic viewpoint of ontology and epistemology is in the middle side between realist - subjectivist ontology and between objectivist – subjectivist epistemology. This stance of Islam on ontology and epistemology as elaborated in the Qur’an and the tradition of the Prophet Muhammad increases the resilience with which knowledge is contributed in a holistic manner regardless of social, cultural or political backgrounds. (shrink)

I argue that the televisual cosmetic surgical makeover is usefully understood as a contemporary manifestation of normalization, in Foucault’s sense—a process of defining a population in relation to its conformity or deviance from a norm, while simultaneously generating narratives of individual authenticity. Drawing on detailed analysis of “Extreme Makeover,” I suggest that the show erases its complicity with creating homogeneous bodies by representing cosmetic surgery as enabling of personal transformation through its narratives of intrinsic motivation and authentic becoming, and its (...) deployment of fairy tale tropes. (shrink)

The phenomenon of the proliferation of holiday homes, particularly in remote and isolated areas, has provoked widespread concern regarding the fate of the indigenous rural community. The central concern of this thesis is to investigate how the rural community is adapting to the presence of the outsider as both a temporary and permanent resident, by examining the interaction between local and outsider resident in order to get a sense of the dynamics involved in the restructuring of the rural community. The (...) study approached this central problematic, by looking at how rural space is being socially constructed as a result of this interaction, and how rural space is determining the dynamic involved in this interaction. The two rural villages which were chosen for this study, are located in regions of unique cultural and historical interest: Dunfarraig in the Burren region in the west of Ireland, and Gireux in the Cathar region in the south of France. Despite their empirical similarities, these villages have demonstrated quite different responses to the presence of the outsider, which has become apparent through a comparative analysis of the way in which concepts such as ‘community membership’ are played out in either context. The central findings of this research, has been to show how the landscapes of Dunfarraig and Gireux are being symbolically constructed as ‘suburban’ through the social practices of its residents, taking an abstract or social form in the French context, and a material form in the Irish context. Further, how these practices are appealing to a vocabulary of ‘suburbia’, located in the suburban imaginary of residents. These findings of ‘suburbia’ are premised on the theory that residents are constructing a view of the physical landscape for private consumption in the Irish context, and a view of the social landscape, for private consumption in the French context. However, the thesis ultimately defends the rural character of these two villages, maintaining that this interpretation of the ‘suburban imaginary’ is one way of understanding the complexity of these social practices. (shrink)

What I am trying to do in the present text is to draw a sketch of postwar French philosophy from the perspective of the question of relations between philosophy and politics. I am showing a distinction between the community and the text that is present in this philosophy from Sartre to Barthes to Foucault and beyond. The general passage from the community-oriented philosophy to the text-oriented philosophy took place in the sixties, following the books by Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, and (...) Pierre Klossowski on Nietzsche. I am discussing the formulation of this opposition by Jean-Paul Sartre, its reversal suggested by Roland Barthes and, finally, an attempt made by Michel Foucault to go beyond the very oppositions pertaining to "writing" as such in his dichotomy of "universal intellectuals"/"specific intellectuals". The passage from the French Hegel to the French Nietzsche as a "master thinker" in French philosphy was also a manifest passage from the community to the text as a main focus of philosophical interest, and the discussion of relations between philosophy and politics is at the same time that of the role, place, tasks and obligations of the philosopher in culture. The detour to these discussions is made in order to stress the continuity of the text/community opposition in current debates on postmodernity and to ask about relations between philosophy and politics today. (shrink)

Over the past century, mental health disorders have become an area of concern for maintaining a “productive” population, as attention has shifted to endemics that slowly diminish the capacity to live a long and productive life and the care of society depends upon disciplinary technologies that aim to educate and manage people about health and self-care. People deemed as a burden on the state, such as the mentally ill, are commonly objects of governmentality. In this study of the U.S. National (...) Institute for Mental Health media campaign, we explore the intersection between institutional discourse, narratives of personal experience, and media forms. This research contributes to the burgeoning field of Digital Discourse Studies to provide improved tools for sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic research in new media contexts by combining governmentality theory, multimodality studies, and CDA methodologies that serve new media environments. Through this case study we illustrate how institutions operationalize virtual visual synthetic personalization to reproduce institutional discourses in the service of governing, and we extend upon governmentality, introducing technologies of sociality as a disciplinary technology brought on by the affordances of social media. (shrink)

Cultural studies need nihilism. The current canon of work focuses too heavily on a political age and human condition that is rapidly being altered and replaced by the use of neoliberal technologies. A new understanding of ontology and politics is necessary to make sense of and challenge the changing technological orientation of human beings by what Deleuze has called a mutation of capital. It is not through institutional discipline that power permeates our being any longer but through our orientation to (...) exist through and for neoliberal networks via our participation with internet technologies. Neoliberal technologies include and appropriates all bodies and experiences via their reduction to data and network flow; difference is no longer a tool of resistance. This work will assert that a move to a nihilist reading of ontology is what is missing from the work of cultural scholars and from current political movements interested in challenging the power of capital in the present. This work will attempt to build through nihilism a lens and an orientation via psychoanalytic theory and the work of Slavoj Žižek that offers resistance to neoliberal governance. (shrink)

In Ghana, like in other Sub Saharan African (SSA) countries, land commands economic as well as social, cultural and political value. Access to land therefore becomes crucial to both government and farmers, given the rapid rate of urbanization with attendant increase in the commodification of land, redefinition of land ownership and tenure arrangements and contestation of rights to land. This study examine the accountability and legitimacy of local chiefs for land management. Using data obtained from questionnaire survey, in-depth interviews, and (...) focus group discussions conducted in five peri-urban communities of Kasoa (a satellite town to the capital Accra) between March 2009 and March 2010, the study focus on cases of conversion of agricultural land to residential lands as a form of reverse land-grabbing in the selected communities. Accountability mechanisms are highlighted in relation to the extent to which chiefs legitimize farm land conversions with customary law; how these actions impact on their subjects’ livelihoods; and how chiefs influence existing state reform initiatives on land administration. The key findings show that while 70% of migrant farmers are more likely to lose land they acquired on arrival, indigenes are equally no longer assured of secured land titles due to an increasing rate of land sales by chiefs and family heads. This practice has largely exacerbated land conflicts in the area. Local controls on land administration by chiefs consist of checks on chiefs administrative powers through a council of elders. However, these elders have been corrupted and abuse their authority to also gain substantial income from land sales. Government and donor initiatives to enhance accountability mechanisms in customary land management, such as the Office of Administrator of Stool lands and the Customary Land Secretariat exist. But chiefs use various means to legitimize their community farmland conversions through, for instance, making reference to outdated customary laws, the adaptation to vagaries of rapid urbanization that is out-stripping the pace of town planning initiatives, profiting from increased attention of selling unused farmland, and the manipulation of the meaning of communal landownership, to foment conflicts in the area. The real losers in the communities are those with little or no employment options outside agriculture. Individuals who have benefited from conversions and the changing livelihoods are the chief or landowners, women and youth acquiring skills in building construction. It is interesting to note that women have been positively affected, though excluded from traditional forms of land ownership, but can access land based on their financial strength. However, prices of foodstuffs have increased as they are now imported from other areas of Ghana. (shrink)

Drawing from secondary literature and three years of fieldwork in various post-conflict societies in Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, this article revisits the conceptual development of a term ‘Transitional Justice ’ in order to illuminate the political construction and deconstruction of TJ in international politics. Major patterns and themes are identified within the international thought and practice of TJ to unravel its potentials and pitfalls, with the aim to emphasise the difficulty in ‘defining justice’ in war-torn societies. TJ mechanisms (...) are explored which indicate more culpability for perpetrators and compensation for victims in the midst of authoritarianism and civil wars across the globe. There is an immediate pragmatic need to move beyond rigid and thick legal positivist traditions and going beyond romanticising ‘liberal’ values that TJ represent in arriving at an epistemological understanding about TJ. As such, and drawing from poststructuralist intellectual strands in International Relations, this article illuminates the unstable binary distinction between the idea that both law and politics represents in ‘defining’ TJ. (shrink)