scholarly journals Understanding the self in relation to others: Infants spontaneously map another's face to their own at 16 to 26 months

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dora Kampis ◽  
Charlotte Grosse Wiesmann ◽  
Sarah Koop ◽  
Victoria Southgate
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 479-525 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianpiero Petriglieri ◽  
Jennifer Louise Petriglieri ◽  
Jack Denfeld Wood

Through a longitudinal, qualitative study of 55 managers engaged in mobile careers across organizations, industries, and countries, and pursuing a one-year international master’s of business administration (MBA), we build a process model of the crafting of portable selves in temporary identity workspaces. Our findings reveal that contemporary careers in general, and temporary membership in an institution, fuel people’s efforts to craft portable selves: selves endowed with definitions, motives, and abilities that can be deployed across roles and organizations over time. Two pathways for crafting a portable self—one adaptive, the other exploratory—emerged from the interaction of individuals’ aims and concerns with institutional resources and demands. Each pathway involved developing a coherent understanding of the self in relation to others and to the institution that anchored participants to their current organization while preparing them for future ones. The study shows how institutions that host members temporarily can help them craft selves that afford a sense of agentic direction and enduring connection, tempering anxieties and bolstering hopes associated with mobile working lives. It also suggests that institutions serving as identity workspaces for portable selves may remain attractive and extend their cultural influence in an age of workforce mobility.


Author(s):  
Erel Shvil ◽  
Herbert Krauss ◽  
Elizabeth Midlarsky

The construct “self” appears in diverse forms in theories about what it is to be a person. As the sense of “self” is typically assessed through personal reports, differences in its description undoubtedly reflect significant differences in peoples’ apperception of self. This report describes the development, reliability, and factorial structure of the Experience of Sense of Self (E-SOS), an inventory designed to assess one’s perception of self in relation to the person’s perception of various potential “others.” It does so using Venn diagrams to depict and quantify the experienced overlap between the self and “others.” Participant responses to the instrument were studied through Exploratory Factor Analysis. This yielded a five-factor solution: 1) Experience of Positive Sensation; 2) Experience of Challenges; 3) Experience of Temptations; 4) Experience of Higher Power; and 5) Experience of Family. The items comprising each of these were found to produce reliable subscales. Further research with the E-SOS and suggestions for its use are offered.  DOI:10.2458/azu_jmmss_v4i2_shvil


Author(s):  
Maher Ben Moussa

This article examines the issue of child agency and empowerment in Mildred’s D. Taylor’s novel Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry. This theme is addressed by some critics who come to the conclusion that Taylor’s protagonist, the young girl Cassie Logan, develops agency and subversive subjectivity in the course of the novel. This study challenges such readings to argue that the ending of Taylor’s novel does not reflect empowerment; and consequently does not support such conclusions. Through expanding self-in-relation theory to feminism as an interpretive tool, this paper suggests that Cassie Logan’s subversive agency remains partial and incomplete because she fails to engage in an inter-connected and constructive relationship with the ‘other’. Cassie’s empowerment is partial because she fails to exert it in the larger community of African Americans and whites, that otherwise could have stimulated a greater impetus for activism. This study concludes that agency and subjectivity are constructed and empowered within the community which is larger than the self and the family.  


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart J Murray

This paper explores a novel philosophy of ethical care in the face of burgeoning biomedical technologies. I respond to a serious challenge facing traditional bioethics with its roots in analytic philosophy. The hallmarks of these traditional approaches are reason and autonomy, founded on a belief in the liberal humanist subject. In recent years, however, there have been mounting challenges to this view of human subjectivity, emerging from poststructuralist critiques, such as Michel Foucault's, but increasingly also as a result of advances in biotechnology itself. In the face of these developments, I argue that the theoretical relevance and practical application of mainstream bioethics is increasingly under strain. Traditionalists will undoubtedly resist. Together, professional philosopher-bioethicists, public health policymakers, and the global commercial healthcare industry tend to respond conservatively by shoring up the liberal humanist subject as the foundation for medical ethics and consumer decision-making, appealing to the familiar tropes of reason, autonomy, and freedom. I argue for a different approach to bioethics, and work towards a new way to conceive of ethical relations in healthcare – one that does not presume a sovereign subject as the basis of dignity, personhood or democracy. Instead, I am critical of the narrow instantiations of reason, autonomy, and freedom, which, more recently, have been co-opted by a troubling neo-liberal politics of the self. Thus, I am critical of current trends in medical ethics, often running in tandem with corporate-governmental models of efficiency, accountability, and so-called evidence-based best practices. As an example of such market-driven conceptions of subjectivity, I discuss the paradigm of "self-care." Self-care shores up the traditional view of the self as a free agent. In this sense, self-care is looked upon favourably by mainstream bioethics in its focus on autonomy, while healthcare policy endorses this model for ideological and economic reasons. To contrast this, I propose a different model of care together with a different model of selfhood. Here I develop and apply Foucault's late work on the "care of the self." In this understanding of "care," I suggest that we might work towards an ethical self that is more commensurable both with recent theoretical views on subjectivity and – more pressingly – with the challenges of emergent biotechnologies. I end this paper with a discussion on ethical parenthood, which offers a practical reading of the "care of the self" in relation to new reproductive technologies (NRTs).


2019 ◽  
pp. 197-240
Author(s):  
Richa Nagar ◽  
Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan ◽  
Parakh Theatre

Can the ways of knowing and being co-developed with SKMS and Parakh be reworked pedagogically in a public research university? This exploration births a combined undergraduate and graduate course, 'Stories, Bodies, Movements,' which unfolds in the form of fifteen weekly 'Acts' and uses storytelling, writing, and theatre as modes of collective relearning. In absorbing the writing of W.E.B. Du Bois, June Jordan, Nina Simone, Sujatha Gidla, Om Prakash Valmiki, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and others, the Syllabus asks: What of ourselves must each member of the class offer in order to become an ethical receiver of the stories we are reading? And how might this commitment to ethically receive stories translate into an embodied journey that seeks to transform the self in relation to the collective?


2021 ◽  
pp. 172-178
Author(s):  
Janet Metcalfe

Contemporary psychology has explored the concept of the self in relation to the second order characteristics of metacognition. On the dominant theoretical framework, cognitive processes are taken to be split into two specifically interrelated levels called the object level and the metalevel, with the latter monitoring and controlling the former. The metalevel is thought to be self referential. For example, retrieving an answer to a question, or making a response to a cue, at the object level, does not involve reflection and is not self-referential. By contrast, judgments about whether the response was or was not true, or about whether one would be able to remember the response later entails second-order or metalevel processing, and it thought to be self-referential and to involve consciousness. This Reflection presents some of recent work on self-referential thought in humans. It also reviews studies of the neurological basis of these judgments, and investigations which have sought to determine whether any animals other than humans have this capacity.


Hinduism ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Pati

Sree Narayana Guru (b. 1856?–d. 1928), a member of the Īzhava caste, a low-caste group in the fourfold caste system of Kerala, and a pioneer in socioreligious reform in early-20th-century Kerala, was born in Chempazhanthi, Kerala, possibly on August 20, 1856. A learned man, he was fluent in Malayalam, Sanskrit, and Tamil. From 1876 to 1879 he studied Sanskrit at Puthupalli in Karunagapally taluk, and was broadly trained in various traditions, including vyākarṇa (grammar), nyāya (logic), Vedānta, kāvya (poetry), nātaka (drama), and alaṁkāra (rhetoric), in addition to Ayurveda and astrology. After his formal education, he was more interested in finding the truth about the self and its relation to the Ultimate Reality. Once he had attained aṟivu (self-knowledge), he returned to his village and became an itinerant sanyāsin, recognized as a saint, and people from all strata of the caste-oriented Kerala society—Nāyars, Īzhavas, Christians, and Muslims—sought his teachings and blessings. In his teachings Guru emphasized the knowledge of self as essential to his notion of oneness. He claimed that oneness depends on consciousness of the self in relation to others and plays a significant role in spiritual and social emancipation. Guru, who at one point in life was a devotee of Viṣṇu, after attaining self-realization, emphasized the concept of “one God” and the unity of all being in a singular divinity. This oneness was not confined to his concept of God, but he considered the whole world to be of one family—vasudhaiva kudumbakam. In 1903 Guru founded the Śrī Nārāyaṇa Dharma Paripālana Yōgam (SNDP), with its manifesto, “One Caste, One Religion, One God for Mankind,” which directed the many Hindus of Kerala from belief in many gods to belief in one God. Narayana Guru had the support of Dr. Palpu, a medical doctor and social revolutionary, and Kumaran Asan, a disciple and poet, and founding secretary of the SNDP. The oneness of God and unity of all humankind became apparent when Narayana Guru propelled religious and social reforms in Kerala. More importantly, his exposure to the inhumane condition of people in the lower castes and his education in the various philosophical schools, especially Advaita Vedānta, or nondualism, served as a foundation for his literary works and social and religious reforms in Kerala. On September 20, 1928, Guru attained samādhi (liberation upon death). Since his death, the SNDP organization has continued to function, propelled by those who follow Guru’s teachings, who hold regular meetings and worship services affirming Guru as a divine being.


2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco A. Vieira

In this article, I critically engage with and develop an alternative approach to ontological security informed by Jacques Lacan’s theory of the subject. I argue that ontological security relates to a lack; that is, the always frustrated desire to provide meaningful discursive interpretations to one’s self. This lack is generative of anxiety which functions as the subject’s affective and necessary drive to a continuous, albeit elusive, pursuit of self-coherence. I theorise subjectivity in Lacanian terms as fantasised discursive articulations of the Self in relation to an idealised mirror-image other. The focus on postcolonial states’ subjectivity allows for the examination of the anxiety-driven lack generated by the ever-present desire to emulate but also resist the Western other. I propose, therefore, to explore the theoretical assertion that postcolonial ontological security refers to the institutionalisation and discursive articulation of enduring and anxiety-driven affective traces related to these states’ colonial pasts that are still active and influence current foreign policy practices. I illustrate the force of this interpretation of ontological security by focusing on Brazil as an example of a postcolonial state coping with the lack caused by its ambivalent/hybrid self-identity.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document