‘PUBLIC JUSTICE’ AS A CRITICAL POLITICAL NORM

2007 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 130-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Chaplin

'Public justice’ is one of the most widely-invoked of the many distinctive terms coined by Herman Dooyeweerd but, strangely, one of the least well analysed. Dooyeewerd holds that that the identity of the state is defined by a single, integrating and directing norm, the establishment of ‘public justice’. Elaborating the implications of this claim has occupied much neo-Calvinist political reflection and guided much political action inspired by that movement. Yet surprisingly little sustained theoretical reflection has been devoted in recent times to examining its inner meaning and coherence. This article offers some preliminary groundwork necessary to that theoretical project. The first part presents a close reading of Dooyeweerd’s account of public justice, identifies ambiguities and inconsistencies in that account, and suggests a reconstruction displaying its wide-ranging dynamic thrust more prominently. The second part identifies two substantial challenges confronting this account: its relative neglect of processes of democratic deliberation and advocacy, and its underdeveloped critical potentials.

2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Patterson

This article addresses the increasingly popular approach to Freud and his work which sees him primarily as a literary writer rather than a psychologist, and takes this as the context for an examination of Joyce Crick's recent translation of The Interpretation of Dreams. It claims that translation lies at the heart of psychoanalysis, and that the many interlocking and overlapping implications of the word need to be granted a greater degree of complexity. Those who argue that Freud is really a creative writer are themselves doing a work of translation, and one which fails to pay sufficiently careful attention to the role of translation in writing itself (including the notion of repression itself as a failure to translate). Lesley Chamberlain's The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud is taken as an example of the way Freud gets translated into a novelist or an artist, and her claims for his ‘bizarre poems' are criticized. The rest of the article looks closely at Crick's new translation and its claim to be restoring Freud the stylist, an ordinary language Freud, to the English reader. The experience of reading Crick's translation is compared with that of reading Strachey's, rather to the latter's advantage.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chuks Okpaluba

‘Accountability’ is one of the democratic values entrenched in the Constitution of South Africa, 1996. It is a value recognised throughout the Constitution and imposed upon the law-making organs of state, the Executive, the Judiciary and all public functionaries. This constitutional imperative is given pride of place among the other founding values: equality before the law, the rule of law and the supremacy of the Constitution. This study therefore sets out to investigate how the courts have grappled with the interpretation and application of the principle of accountability, the starting point being the relationship between accountability and judicial review. Therefore, in the exercise of its judicial review power, a court may enquire whether the failure of a public functionary to comply with a constitutional duty of accountability renders the decision made illegal, irrational or unreasonable. One of the many facets of the principle of accountability upon which this article dwells is to ascertain how the courts have deployed that expression in making the state and its agencies liable for the delictual wrongs committed against an individual in vindication of a breach of the individual’s constitutional right in the course of performing a public duty. Here, accountability and breach of public duty; the liability of the state for detaining illegal immigrants contrary to the prescripts of the law; the vicarious liability of the state for the criminal acts of the police and other law-enforcement officers (as in police rape cases and misuse of official firearms by police officers), and the liability of the state for delictual conduct in the context of public procurement are discussed. Having carefully analysed the available case law, this article concludes that no public functionary can brush aside the duty of accountability wherever it is imposed without being in breach of a vital constitutional mandate. Further, it is the constitutional duty of the courts, when called upon, to declare such act or conduct an infringement of the Constitution.


Author(s):  
Shuang Chen

The book explores the social economic processes of inequality produced by differential state entitlements. Drawing on uniquely rich source materials from central and local archives, the book provides an unprecedented, comprehensive view of the creation of a socio-economic and political hierarchy under the Eight Banners in the Qing dynasty in what is now Shuangcheng County, Heilongjiang province. Shuangcheng was settled by bannermen from urban Beijing and elsewhere in rural Manchuria in the nineteenth century. The state classified the immigrants into distinct categories, each associated with differentiated land entitlements. By reconstructing the history of settlement and land distribution in this county, the book shows that patterns of wealth stratification and the underlying social hierarchy were not merely imposed by the state from the top-down but created and reinforced by local people through practices on the ground. In the course of pursuing their own interests, settlers internalized the distinctions created by the state through its system of unequal land entitlements. The tensions built into the unequal land entitlements therefore shaped the identities of immigrant groups, and this social hierarchy persisted after the fall of the Qing in 1911. The book offers an in-depth understanding of the key factors that contributed to social stratification in agrarian societies in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. Moreover, it also sheds light on the many parallels between the stratification system in Qing-dynasty Shuangcheng and the structural inequality in contemporary China.


Author(s):  
Graeme D. Ruxton ◽  
William L. Allen ◽  
Thomas N. Sherratt ◽  
Michael P. Speed

In 2004, the first edition of ‘Avoiding Attack: The Evolutionary Ecology of Crypsis, Warning Signals, and Mimicry’ by Ruxton et al. was published. The book aimed to provide a systematic and up-to-date review and synthesis of widespread anti-predator defences. In it, we focussed on sensorially mediated defences and the many factors that underpin these adaptations, aiming to set out the state-of-understanding in the fascinating world of anti-predator adaptations, and highlight which topics within the field seem most ripe for further investigation....


Author(s):  
Dustin Gamza ◽  
Pauline Jones

What is the relationship between state repression of religion and political mobilization in Muslim-majority states? Does religious repression increase the likelihood that Muslims will support acts of rebellion against the state? This chapter contends that the effect of repression on attitudes toward political mobilization is conditional on both the degree of enforcement and the type of religious practice that is being targeted. When enforcement is high and the repressive regulation being enforced targets communal (rather than individualistic) religious practices, Muslims expect state persecution of their religious community to increase, and that this persecution will extract a much greater toll. They are thus more willing to support taking political action against the state in order to protect their community from this perceived harm. The chapter tests this argument with two novel survey experiments conducted in Kyrgyzstan in 2019. It finds that the degree of enforcement has a significant effect on attitudes toward political mobilization, but this effect is negative (reducing support) rather than positive (increasing support). The chapter also finds that repression targeting communal practices has a stronger effect on attitudes toward political mobilization than repression targeting individualistic practices, but again, these effects are negative. The chapter’s findings suggest that the fear of collective punishment increases as the degree of enforcement increases, particularly when it comes to repression targeting communal practices. Thus, while Muslims are motivated to protect their community from harm, it may be that the certainty of financial and physical harm outweighs the expectation of increasing religious persecution.


Electrochem ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-184
Author(s):  
Francisco T. T. Cavalcante ◽  
Italo R. R. de A. Falcão ◽  
José E. da S. Souza ◽  
Thales G. Rocha ◽  
Isamayra G. de Sousa ◽  
...  

Among the many biological entities employed in the development of biosensors, enzymes have attracted the most attention. Nanotechnology has been fostering excellent prospects in the development of enzymatic biosensors, since enzyme immobilization onto conductive nanostructures can improve characteristics that are crucial in biosensor transduction, such as surface-to-volume ratio, signal response, selectivity, sensitivity, conductivity, and biocatalytic activity, among others. These and other advantages of nanomaterial-based enzymatic biosensors are discussed in this work via the compilation of several reports on their applications in different industrial segments. To provide detailed insights into the state of the art of this technology, all the relevant concepts around the topic are discussed, including the properties of enzymes, the mechanisms involved in their immobilization, and the application of different enzyme-derived biosensors and nanomaterials. Finally, there is a discussion around the pressing challenges in this technology, which will be useful for guiding the development of future research in the area.


Author(s):  
David Menconi

This book is a love letter to the artists, scenes, and sounds defining North Carolina’s extraordinary contributions to American popular music. David Menconi spent three decades immersed in the state’s music, where traditions run deep but the energy expands in countless directions. Menconi shows how working-class roots and rebellion tie North Carolina’s Piedmont blues, jazz, and bluegrass to beach music, rock, hip-hop, and more. From mill towns and mountain coves to college-town clubs and the stage of American Idol, Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk, Step It Up and Go celebrates homegrown music just as essential to the state as barbecue and basketball. Spanning a century of history from the dawn of recorded music to the present, and with sidebars and photos that help reveal the many-splendored glory of North Carolina’s sonic landscape, this is a must-read for every music lover.


Author(s):  
Raissa Killoran

The many usages of the term ‘secularism’ have generated an ambiguity in the word; as a political guise, it may be used to engender anti-religious fervor. Particularly in regards to veiling among female Muslim adherents, the attainment of a secular state and touting of the necessity of dismantling religious symbols have functioned as linguistic shields. By calling a “burka ban” necessary or even egalitarian secularization, legislators employ ‘secularization’ as jargon for political ends, enacting a stance of supremacy under the semblance of progress. Secularization has come to function as a political tool - in the name of it, governments may prescribe which cultural symbols are normative and which are of ‘other’ cultures or religious origins. As such, the identification of some religious symbols as foreign and others as normative is a usage of secularization for normalization of dominant religious expression. In this, there is an implicit neocolonialism; by imposing standards of cultural normalcy which are definitively nonMuslim, such policies attempt to divorce Muslims from Islam.  Further, I intend to investigate the gendered aspect of secularization politics. By critiquing clothing and body policing of women, I will demonstrate how secularization projects use the female body and dress as a site for display. By rendering the female physically emblematic of the honor and virtue of an ‘other’ culture, those enacting secularization norms target women’s bodies to act as visual exhibitions of the dominant culture’s hegemony. Here, we see gendered secularization at work - female bodies become controlled by the antireligious zeal of the state, while the state carries out this control on the predicate that it is the religious group enacting unjust control. As such, the policing of female Muslim bodies is symbolic of the policing of Islam as a whole; it acts as an illustration of an imposed, gendered secularization project.


Author(s):  
Jessica M Hoffman ◽  
Caesar M Hernandez ◽  
Abbi R Hernandez ◽  
Jennifer L Bizon ◽  
Sara N Burke ◽  
...  

Abstract While neurodegenerative diseases can strike at any age, the majority of afflicted individuals are diagnosed at older ages. Due to the important impact of age in disease diagnosis, the field of neuroscience could greatly benefit from the many of the theories and ideas from the biology of aging – now commonly referred as geroscience. As discussed in our complementary perspective on the topic, there is often a “silo-ing” between geroscientists who work on understanding the mechanisms underlying aging and neuroscientists who are studying neurodegenerative diseases. While there have been some strong collaborations between the biology of aging and neuroscientists, there is still great potential for enhanced collaborative effort between the two fields. To this end, here, we review the state of the geroscience field, discuss how neuroscience could benefit from thinking from a geroscience perspective, and close with a brief discussion on some of the “missing links” between geroscience and neuroscience and how to remedy them. Notably, we have a corresponding, concurrent review from the neuroscience perspective. Our overall goal is to “bridge the gap” between geroscience and neuroscience such that more efficient, reproducible research with translational potential can be conducted.


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