Internationalisation, Indigenisation and Educational Research in China

2005 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rui Yang

Intimations of globality are challenging old ways of doing things in the social sciences. The new phase of reflexive thinking has seen many turning their thoughts to indigenous thinking. Within today's world of knowledge, one pressing task is to capture as many voices as possible to reaffirm a moral universe that respects the plurality of perspectives and paths to truth in order to avoid the homogenising monoculture of the mind. This article investigates how Chinese educational researchers respond to this momentous challenge. It finds that, at their maximum, they are emulating their more prestigious western counterparts, and are thus losing their opportunity to contribute more substantially to nurturing an international knowledge order that reflects and supports the rich diversity, although they are well positioned by their wealth of unique cultural heritage.

Author(s):  
Stefan Winter

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The book has shown that the multiplicity of lived ʻAlawi experiences cannot be reduced to the sole question of religion or framed within a monolithic narrative of persecution; that the very attempt to outline a single coherent history of “the ʻAlawis” may indeed be misguided. The sources on which this study has drawn are considerably more accessible, and the social and administrative realities they reflect consistently more mundane and disjointed, than the discourse of the ʻAlawis' supposed exceptionalism would lead one to believe. Therefore, the challenge for historians of ʻAlawi society in Syria and elsewhere is not to use the specific events and structures these sources detail to merely add to the already existing metanarratives of religious oppression, Ottoman misrule, and national resistance but rather to come to a newer and more intricate understanding of that community, and its place in wider Middle Eastern society, by investigating the lives of individual ʻAlawi (and other) actors within the rich diversity of local contexts these sources reveal.


Author(s):  
Eileen Anderson-Fye

Sociocultural factors have long been implicated in body image and eating disorders. Decades of data, drawn from multiple disciplines, consistently demonstrate the influence of culture on body image and eating disorders across several levels of analysis. This chapter engages the rich empirical literature on this subject to retheorize the role and importance of these contextual factors in light of anthropological and related social theories relevant to contemporary circumstances. Specifically, this chapter first analyzes and operationalizes what we mean by “culture” in body image and eating disorder scholarship, describes trends in salient sociocultural factors, and highlights the varying impacts of globalization where societies are increasingly interconnected. It also urges research that builds on current understandings by increasing collaborations among not only multiple disciplines within the social sciences but also biological and clinical sciences.


Author(s):  
Francisco V. Cipolla-Ficarra ◽  
Jaqueline Alma ◽  
Miguel Cipolla-Ficarra ◽  
Jim Carré

The first studies of the social sciences aimed at the videogames of the 80s and the methods to evaluate the usability engineering of the 90s have highlighted a set of positive and negative aspects in the human-computer interaction which go from the ergonomic aspects of the devices down to the motivations to draw the attention of the users in the interaction process. In this research we present the results reached with adult users in relation to the communicability and the usability in a classical videogame for PC. We also present the elements of interactive design which boost the poiesis in cultural heritage that the analyzed videogame contains.


2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (279) ◽  
pp. 282-301
Author(s):  
Laurent Jaffro ◽  
Vinícius França Freitas

Abstract Little attention has been paid to the fact that Thomas Reid's epistemology applies to ‘political reasoning’ as well as to various operations of the mind. Reid was interested in identifying the ‘first principles’ of political science as he did with other domains of human knowledge. This raises the question of the extent to which the study of human action falls within the competence of ‘common sense’. Our aim is to reconstruct and assess Reid's epistemology of the sciences of social action and to determine how it connects with the fundamental tenets of his general epistemology. In the first part, we portray Reid as a methodological individualist and focus on the status of the first principles of political reasoning. The second part examines Reid's views on the explanatory power of the principles of human action. Finally, we draw a parallel between Reid's epistemology and the methodology of Weberian sociology.


1989 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 431-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stjepan G. Mestrovic

Schopenhauer criticized Kant's moral theory on the grounds that it was non-empirical and inadequate, because it attempted to establish morality on the basis of reason and duty. Contrary to Kant, Schopenhauer argued that genuine morality is irrational, based on compassion, and a human product, hence that it could be studied empirically. Schopenhauer established the ‘science of morality’ which occupied the attention of a host of turn of the century precursors of the social sciences, especially Durkheim. Durkheim's version of the science of moral facts is compared and contrasted with Schopenhauer's critique of Kant, and it is demonstrated that Durkheim tends (o follow Schopenhauer's lead. Problems with Durkheim's and Schopenhauer's critiques of Kantian ethics are also discussed.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth Bloxam ◽  
Ian Shaw

This chapter discusses a range of current debates into the ways in which Egyptologists are engaging with the problems and demands of moving towards greater collaborations across the social sciences if it is to remain a relevant discipline in its own right. Viewpoints from contributing authors are synthesized into a discussion of recent developments in the field from fresh research across both the archaeological and textual arms of the discipline. The volume considers the extent to which scholars need to be revising and re-thinking their research questions and moving towards greater collaborations within the discipline, and crucially outside of it. Moving the discipline forward is also about including voices outside of western discourses and into volumes such as this. The contributions from Chinese and Egyptian scholars therefore bring a fresh perspective to some current problems in Egyptological research particularly in cultural heritage management, museum curation, and investigating archaeological landscapes.


1983 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 471-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Galambos

In this suggestive essay, Professor Galambos surveys the large number of books and articles, published since 1970, that together point toward a new “organizational synthesis” in American history. Expanding upon an earlier, more tentative essay on the same subject published in the Autumn 1970 issue of the Business History Review, he contrasts the widely disparate postures adopted in recent years by historians studying organizational behavior. His survey reveals a rich diversity of opinion, less reliant than was previous scholarship upon abstractions drawn from the social sciences. This diversity of opinion, Galambos concludes, provides the organizational synthesis with much of its continued vitality, and makes possible “the kind of moral judgments that have always characterized the best historical scholarship.”


2007 ◽  
Vol 191 (6) ◽  
pp. 567-570
Author(s):  
Allan Beveridge

In the novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens gives his views on education. His character Mr Gradgrind believes in ‘facts’ and is suspicious of the imagination. All we need to know about the world, he maintains, can be reduced to simple facts. Dickens shows that such a philosophy leads to the impoverishment of the mind and to the weakening of ethical reasoning. Today it seems that the descendants of Mr Gradgrind are still in charge. The main psychiatric library where I work has been closed. It is argued that we can obtain all the ‘facts’ we need from the internet. The notion that books might have more to offer than prosaic detail, that they reflect the rich diversity of human experience, seems alien to the modern-day Gradgrinds.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark D. Verhagen

Making out-of-sample predictions is an under-utilised tool in the social sciences, often for the wrong reasons. Many social scientists confuse prediction with unnecessarily complicated methods, or narrowly predicting the future. This is unfortunate, because prediction understood as the simple process of evaluating a model outside of the sample used for estimation is a much more general, and disarmingly simple technique that brings a host of benefits to our empirical workflow. One needn't use complicated methods or be solely concerned with predicting the future to use prediction, nor is it necessary to resolve the centuries-old philosophical debate between prediction and explanation to appreciate its benefits. Prediction can and should be used as a simple complement to the rich methodological tradition in the social sciences, and is equally applicable across a vast multitude of modelling approaches, owing to its simplicity and intuitive nature. For all its simplicity, the value of prediction should not be underestimated. Prediction can address some of the most enduring sources of criticism plaguing the social sciences, like lack of external validity and the use of overly simplistic models to capture social life. In this paper, I illustrate these benefits with a host of empirical examples that merely skim the surface of the many and varied ways in which prediction can be applied, staking the claim that prediction is one of those illustrious `free lunches' that can greatly benefit the empirical social sciences.


Author(s):  
Sara Delamont

Researchers who use qualitative methods, especially ethnography in educational settings, have to make conscious decisions about how to write about their results, their methods, and their experiences as investigators. Since the 1980s, initially in the discipline of social anthropology, but later across all the social sciences, there have been vigorous debates about how texts should be written and also about how they should be read. Before that, qualitative and quantitative educational research was written up in a similar way: reported in a passive or anonymous style designed to create an authoritative account. Over the course of 40 years, ethnographic writing has developed new literary forms, polyvocal texts, and authors have become visible and individual in their own texts. A wider range of texting genres is now published, and reflexivity is central to writing and reading. The causes and consequences of those changes are analyzed.


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