Questions of Cultural Identity offers a wide-ranging exploration of these issues. Stuart Hall outlines the reasons why the question of identity is so compelling, and yet so problematic. Individual contributors interrogate different dimensions of the crisis of identity, providing both theoretical and substantive insights into its contemporary manifestations. Rather than privileging any one approach to the problem of identity, the book opens up a number of significant questions and offers insights into different approaches to understanding identity. In doing so it (...) both illuminates and advances debates about identity and its futures. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers in cultural studies and sociology, and across a wide range of the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. Among Those Who helped greatly in the initial stages of this project by making constructive suggestions on my first "caring" papers are Nick Burbules, William Doll, Bruce Fuller, Brian Hill, William Pinar, Mary Anne ...

Rescued in 1972 from a storeroom in which rats and seeping water had severely damaged the fifty-year-old manuscript, this text is the earliest major work (1919-1921) of the great Russian philosopher M. M. Bakhtin. Toward a Philosophy of the Act contains the first occurrences of themes that occupied Bakhtin throughout his long career. The topics of authoring, responsibility, self and other, the moral significance of "outsideness," participatory thinking, the implications for the individual subject of having "no-alibi in existence," the difference (...) between the world as experienced in actions and the world as represented in discourse--all are broached here in the heat of discovery. This is the "heart of the heart" of Bakhtin, the center of the dialogue between being and language, the world and mind, "the given" and "the created" that forms the core of Bakhtin's distinctive dialogism. A special feature of this work is Bakhtin's struggle with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Put very simply, this text is an attempt to go beyond Kant's formulation of the ethical imperative. Toward a Philosophy of the Act will be important for scholars across the humanities as they grapple with the increasingly vexed relationship between aesthetics and ethics. (shrink)

In this paper, I reconstruct Alasdair MacIntyre's aretaic, practical philosophy, drawing out its implications for professional ethics in general and the practice of teaching in particular. After reviewing the moral theory as a whole, I examine MacIntyre's notion of internal goods. Defined within the context of practices, such goods give us reason to reject the very idea of applied ethics. Being goods for the practitioner, they suggest that the eudaimonia of the practitioner is central to professional ethics. In this way, (...) MacIntyre's moral theory helps us recover the untimely question, how does teaching contribute to the flourishing of the teacher? (shrink)

The essays assembled here are all very early and differ in a number of ways from Bakhtin's previously published work.

Bruner sets forth nothing less than a new agenda for the study of the mind. He examines the irrepressibly human acts of imagination that allow us to make experience meaningful; he calls this side of mental activity the “narrative mode,” and his book makes important advances in the effort to unravel its nature.

This paper argues that young people are unlikely to integrate themselves positively into adult life - to adopt its values, responsibilities and opportunities - unless that life is made more morally acceptable in their terms. Central to this process of community building and reconciliation with the young is the condition of solidarity which both results from and results in common values and a shared conception of the good life.

Character education is a specific approach to morals or values education, which is consistently linked with citizenship education. But how is it possible for a heterogeneous society that disagrees about basic values to reach a consensus on what constitutes character education? This article explores how character education has returned to the agenda of British education policy, having been largely neglected since the 1960s in response to unsatisfactory attempts at character education going back to the nineteenth century. Between 1979 and 1997 (...) Conservative governments attempted to reverse a perceived decline in moral standards, established State control of the schools curriculum, imposed on State schools the duty to provide for moral and other development, and established a National Forum which attempted to articulate a set of consensus values in education. Labour has extended these developments in the curriculum, introduced compulsory citizenship education, and its White Paper of September 2001 speaks of 'education with character'. The character and virtues Labour seeks to promote through schools are pragmatic and instrumental in intention, linked to raising pupil school performance, meeting the needs of the new economy, and promoting democratic participation. Otherwise the vision is pluralistic and evades explicit directives, and there is no explanation or analysis of its theoretical basis. The question of how agreement can be reached on what counts as character education may benefit from Sunstein's analysis of how law is possible in a heterogeneous society - 'incompletely theorized agreements on particular cases' allow for common laws without agreement on fundamental principles. Many schools in fact operate in this way, but such a consensus is not entirely stable and runs the danger of teaching character education as a series of behaviour outcomes taught in a behaviourist fashion. (shrink)

This text addresses the central problem in anthropological theory of the late 1990s - the paradox that humans are both products of social discipline and creators of remarkable improvisation.

This book is not only a major twentieth-century contribution to Dostoevsky’s studies, but also one of the most important theories of the novel produced in our century. As a modern reinterpretation of poetics, it bears comparison with Aristotle.“Bakhtin’s statement on the dialogical nature of artistic creation, and his differentiation of this from a history of monological commentary, is profoundly original and illuminating. This is a classic work on Dostoevsky and a statement of importance to critical theory.” Edward Wasiolek“Concentrating on the (...) particular features of ‘Dostoevskian discourse,’ how Dostoevsky structures a hero and a plot, and what it means to write dialogically, Bakhtin concludes with a major theoretical statement on dialogue as a category of language. One of the most important theories of the novel in this century.” The Bloomsbury Review. (shrink)