scholarly journals Too good to be a sport? Why dog agility struggles in gaining recognition as a sport

2016 ◽  
Vol 53 (6) ◽  
pp. 745-761 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samu Pehkonen ◽  
Hanna-Mari Ikonen

Over the last two decades, the Finnish community of dog agility practitioners has worked diligently towards gaining recognition for agility as a sport. The process reached an important milestone in 2016 when the National Sports Council listed the Finnish Agility Association as eligible for financial support from the state. As one of the pioneer countries in this regard, Finland is of great interest, as the agility sport continues to become more popular and professionalised worldwide. Using the findings from a qualitative study of media coverage and expert interviews about attempts to gain recognition for agility as a sport, this article explores the strategies that practitioners and the Finnish Agility Association have utilised in their work. This article shows that recognition comes with the need to find a balance between elite sports, on the one hand, and sport for all on the other. Although agility may risk losing some of its particular character as a human–animal teamwork dynamic, it has the potential to contribute to the culture of sports more widely.

Author(s):  
Peter Coss

In the introduction to his great work of 2005, Framing the Early Middle Ages, Chris Wickham urged not only the necessity of carefully framing our studies at the outset but also the importance of closely defining the words and concepts that we employ, the avoidance ‘cultural sollipsism’ wherever possible and the need to pay particular attention to continuities and discontinuities. Chris has, of course, followed these precepts on a vast scale. My aim in this chapter is a modest one. I aim to review the framing of thirteenth-century England in terms of two only of Chris’s themes: the aristocracy and the state—and even then primarily in terms of the relationship between the two. By the thirteenth century I mean a long thirteenth century stretching from the period of the Angevin reforms of the later twelfth century on the one hand to the early to mid-fourteenth on the other; the reasons for taking this span will, I hope, become clearer during the course of the chapter, but few would doubt that it has a validity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 650-672
Author(s):  
Josef Weinzierl

AbstractQuite a few recent ECJ judgments touch on various elements of territorial rule. Thereby, they raise the profile of the main question this Article asks: Which territorial claims does the EU make? To provide an answer, the present Article discusses and categorizes the individual elements of territoriality in the EU’s architecture. The influence of EU law on national territorial rule on the one hand and the emergence of territorial governance elements at the European level on the other provide the main pillars of the inquiry. Once combined, these features not only help to improve our understanding of the EU’s distinctly supranational conception of territoriality. What is more, the discussion raises several important legitimacy questions. As a consequence, the Article calls for the development of a theoretical model to evaluate and justify territoriality in a political community beyond the state.


Author(s):  
José Duke S. Bagulaya

Abstract This article argues that international law and the literature of civil war, specifically the narratives from the Philippine communist insurgency, present two visions of the child. On the one hand, international law constructs a child that is individual and vulnerable, a victim of violence trapped between the contending parties. Hence, the child is a person who needs to be insulated from the brutality of the civil war. On the other hand, the article reads Filipino writer Kris Montañez’s stories as revolutionary tales that present a rational child, a literary resolution of the dilemmas of a minor’s participation in the world’s longest-running communist insurgency. Indeed, the short narratives collected in Kabanbanuagan (Youth) reveal a tension between a minor’s right to resist in the context of the people’s war and the juridical right to be insulated from the violence. As their youthful bodies are thrown into the world of the state of exception, violence forces children to make the choice of active participation in the hostilities by symbolically and literally assuming the roles played by their elders in the narrative. The article concludes that while this narrative resolution appears to offer a realistic representation and closure, what it proffers is actually a utopian vision that is in tension with international law’s own utopian vision of children. Thus, international law and the stories of youth in Kabanbanuagan provide a powerful critique of each other’s utopian visions.


1967 ◽  
Vol 71 (677) ◽  
pp. 342-343
Author(s):  
F. H. East

The Aviation Group of the Ministry of Technology (formerly the Ministry of Aviation) is responsible for spending a large part of the country's defence budget, both in research and development on the one hand and production or procurement on the other. In addition, it has responsibilities in many non-defence fields, mainly, but not exclusively, in aerospace.Few developments have been carried out entirely within the Ministry's own Establishments; almost all have required continuous co-operation between the Ministry and Industry. In the past the methods of management and collaboration and the relative responsibilities of the Ministry and Industry have varied with time, with the type of equipment to be developed, with the size of the development project and so on. But over the past ten years there has been a growing awareness of the need to put some system into the complex business of translating a requirement into a specification and a specification into a product within reasonable bounds of time and cost.


Philosophy ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 58 (224) ◽  
pp. 215-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen R. L. Clark

Philosophers of earlier ages have usually spent time in considering thenature of marital, and in general familial, duty. Paley devotes an entire book to those ‘relative duties which result from the constitution of the sexes’,1 a book notable on the one hand for its humanity and on the other for Paley‘s strange refusal to acknowledge that the evils for which he condemns any breach of pure monogamy are in large part the result of the fact that such breaches are generally condemned. In a society where an unmarried mother is ruined no decent male should put a woman in such danger: but why precisely should social feeling be so severe? Marriage, the monogamist would say, must be defended at all costs, for it is a centrally important institution of our society. Political community was, in the past, understood as emerging from or imposed upon families, or similar associations. The struggle to establish the state was a struggle against families, clans and clubs; the state, once established, rested upon the social institutions to which it gave legal backing.


2006 ◽  
pp. 29-56
Author(s):  
Michal Sládecek

In first chapters of this article MacIntyre?s view of ethics is analyzed, together with his critics of liberalism as philosophical and political theory, as well as dominant ideological conception. In last chapters MacIntyre?s view of the relation between politics and ethics is considered, along with the critical review of his theoretical positions. Macintyre?s conception is regarded on the one hand as very broad, because the entire morality is identified with ethical life, while on the other hand it is regarded as too narrow since it excludes certain essential aspects of deliberation which refers to the sphere of individual rights, the relations between communities, as well as distribution of goods within the state.


2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 319-330
Author(s):  
Flaubert Mbiekop

It is now conventional wisdom that institutions shape household fertility choices, especially in developing countries. However, deeper insights into the mechanisms at play are still needed. This paper develops a game-theoretical framework with a simple overlapping-generations model to show how a typical household may come to prefer bearing and raising numerous children as a savings scheme for retirement and not rely on conventional outlets for saving when facing weak institutions. On the one hand weak institutions increase the risk that individuals may lose their savings if relying on conventional outlets. On the other hand, childbearing as an investment/savings scheme carries with it the risk that disguised or complete unemployment may prevent grown children from providing the expected old-age financial support. The typical household thus trades off between both types of risks, yet with more control in the latter case, as the likelihood of unemployment can be reduced by carefully selecting a child quality-quantity strategy. Mild conditions are sufficient to show that sound institutions induce less fertility and foster private saving and oldage consumption. A simple voting experiment unveils a tricky socio- economic dynamics whereby wealthier households may have stakes supporting weak institutions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. e055005
Author(s):  
Elena Theodoropoulou

The connection between a non philosophical work and its reception in education through its transformation into a learning/teaching material and a possible philosophical reading, in order to recognize and define the philosophical stance of this very material, could not but be a challenge for philosophy of education itself, namely, in its relation to (or as) practical philosophy. This kind of reduction to the state of material could instrumentalize the latter raising practical, ethical and methodological issues about the pedagogical intention itself; subsequently, the art, literature, philosophy, and science lying behind materials become equally instrumentalized and evacuated. This article attempts, on the one hand, to circumscribe and describe this movement of “becoming material” as a question philosophically and pedagogically challenging and, on the other, to reflect about a critical understanding of this very question as an example of research in practical philosophy. 


2015 ◽  
Vol 95 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 245-255
Author(s):  
Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin

This paper contrasts the very different roles played by the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland, on the one hand, and Turkish-occupied Hungary, on the other, in the movement of early modern religious reform. It suggests that the decision of Propaganda Fide to adopt an episcopal model of organisation in Ireland after 1618, despite the obvious difficulties posed by the Protestant nature of the state, was a crucial aspect of the consolidation of a Catholic confessional identity within the island. The importance of the hierarchy in leadership terms was subsequently demonstrated in the short-lived period of de facto independence during the 1640s and after the repression of the Cromwellian period the episcopal model was successfully revived in the later seventeenth century. The paper also offers a parallel examination of the case of Turkish Hungary, where an effective episcopal model of reform could not be adopted, principally because of the jurisdictional jealousy of the Habsburg Kings of Hungary, who continued to claim rights of nomination to Turkish controlled dioceses but whose nominees were unable to reside in their sees. Consequently, the hierarchy of Turkish-occupied Hungary played little or no role in the movement of Catholic reform, prior to the Habsburg reconquest.


The author had already stated, in a former communication to the Royal Society, his having noticed that for several days previous to the settling of a swarm of bees in the cavity of a hollow tree adapted to their reception, a considerable number of these insects were incessantly employed in examining the state of the tree, and particularly of every dead knot above the cavity which appeared likely to admit water. He has since had an opportunity of observing that the bees who performed this task of inspection, instead of being the same individuals as he had formerly supposed, were in fact a continual succession of different bees; the whole number in the course of three days being such as to warrant the inference that not a single labouring bee ever emigrates in a swarm without having seen its proposed future habitation. He finds that the same applies not only to the place of permanent settlement, but also to that where the bees rest temporarily, soon after swarming, in order to collect their numbers. The swarms, which were the subjects of Mr. Knight’s experiments, showed a remarkable disposition to unite under the same queen. On one occasion a swarm, which had arisen from one of his hives, settled upon a bush at a distance of about twenty-five yards; but instead of collecting together into a compact mass, as they usually do, they remained thinly dispersed for nearly half an hour; after which, as if tired of waiting, they singly, one after the other, and not in obedience to any signal, arose and returned home. The next morning a swarm issued from a neighbouring hive, and proceeded to the same bush upon which the other bees had settled on the preceding day; collecting themselves into a mass, as they usually do when their queen is present. In a few minutes afterwards a very large assemblage of bees rushed from the hive from which the former swarm had issued, and proceeded directly to the one which had just settled, and instantly united with them. The author is led from these and other facts to conclude that such unions of swarms are generally, if not always, the result of previous concert and arrangement.


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