Using a virtual platform for an asynchronous co-operative inquiry

2021 ◽  
pp. 147675032110047
Author(s):  
Susan Crowther ◽  
Doreen Balabanoff ◽  
Lesley Kay ◽  
Jenny Hall

A participatory action research (PAR) study using co-operative inquiry methods was employed to examine the topic ‘spirituality and childbirth’. Co-operative inquiry (CI) reclaims the right of co-researchers to create knowledge from their own lived experience, an approach that works ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ people, valuing individual contributions. Traditionally, CI has been organised synchronously in the same physical location. However, with current events and need for greater global collaboration for divergent/convergent perspectives, an ‘asynchronous’ CI is important to consider. To date, the authors are not aware of any published/unpublished asynchronous co-operative inquiry research projects. This article describes how our inquiry group worked across global regions and time zones meeting online, via emails and discussion boards, and gathered data in an online repository. The outcomes of this inquiry are published elsewhere, here we discuss the novel methods used to support emergence of a modified CI. We offer insight into how our cycles of reflection and action matured and were possible and enhanced through virtual inquiry methods. While technology posed limitations, working asynchronously across time and space enabled rich and complex conversations. An asynchronous modified CI method allows a depth of inquiry to be achieved whilst retaining the purpose of CI.

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-43
Author(s):  
Yousef Awad

Abstract This article examines how Palestinian American novelist Hala Alyan employs sea imagery in her debut novel Salt Houses (2017) to reflect her characters’ emotions and thoughts. In particular, this article shows that by examining a number of events in which characters are sitting by the sea or wading into the waters of the sea, the reader is given an insight into these characters’ inner feelings and beliefs and the way they perceive their identities and contextualise their experiences as they move from one city to another. As the novel relates the narratives of four generations of a Palestinian family, sometimes using flashbacks, sea imagery increasingly occupies central positions in these narratives which reveal Alia’s and her descendants’ endeavours to express their opinions through memories and experiences of displacement, exile and estrangement. Although the title of the novel rightly heralds the significance of houses, it is the sea that forcefully emerges as a pivotal component in the narratives that these characters relate in their quests for a homeland that lives in the older generation’s memories and the young people’s imaginations. As Alia’s granddaughter, Manar, visits Palestine in the final chapter of the novel and draws the family tree of the Yacoubs on Jaffa’s beach, including her unborn baby, memories and imaginations merge to assert the right of Palestinians to “belong” to their homeland.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-69
Author(s):  
Aishath Muneeza ◽  
Zakariya Mustapha

Limitations of action designate extent of time after an event, as set by statutes of limitations, within which legal action can be initiated by a party to a transaction. No event is actionable outside the designated time as same is rendered statute-barred. This study aims to provide an insight into application and significance of Limitations Act 1950 and Limitation Ordinance 1952 to Islamic banking matters in Malaysia as well as Shariah viewpoint on the issue of limitation of action. In conducting the study, a qualitative research methodology is employed where reported Islamic banking cases from 1983 to 2018 in Malaysia were reviewed and analysed to ascertain the application of those statutes of limitations to Islamic banking. Likewise, relevant provisions of the statutes as invoked in the cases were examined to determine possible legislative conflicts between the provisions and the rule of Islamic law in governing the right and limitation of action in Islamic banking cases under the law. The reviewed cases show the extent to which statutes of limitations were invoked in Malaysian courts in determining validity of Islamic banking matters. The limitation provisions so referred to are largely sections 6(1)(a) and 21(1) Limitations Act 1953 and section 19 Limitation Ordinance 1953, which do not conflict with Shariah viewpoint on the matter. This study will prove invaluable to financial institutions and their customers alike in promoting knowledge and creating awareness over actionable event in the course of their transactions.


This research article focuses on the theme of violence and its representation by the characters of the novel “This Savage Song” by Victoria Schwab. How violence is transmitted through genes to next generations and to what extent socio- psycho factors are involved in it, has also been discussed. Similarly, in what manner violent events and deeds by the parents affect the psychology of children and how it inculcates aggressive behaviour in their minds has been studied. What role is played by the parents in grooming the personality of children and ultimately their decisions to choose the right or wrong way has been argued. In the light of the theory of Judith Harris, this research paper highlights all the phenomena involved: How the social hierarchy controls the behaviour. In addition, the aggressive approach of the people in their lives has been analyzed in the light of the study of second theorist Thomas W Blume. As the novel is a unique representation of supernatural characters, the monsters, which are the products of some cruel deeds, this research paper brings out different dimensions of human sufferings with respect to these supernatural beings. Moreover, the researcher also discusses that, in what manner the curse of violence creates an inevitable vicious cycle of cruel monsters that makes the life of the characters turbulent and miserable.


2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 276-289
Author(s):  
Naoise Murphy

Feminist critics have celebrated Kate O'Brien's pioneering approach to gender and sexuality, yet there has been little exploration of her innovations of the coming-of-age narrative. Creating a modern Irish reworking of the Bildungsroman, O'Brien's heroines represent an idealized model of female identity-formation which stands in sharp contrast to the nationalist state's vision of Irish womanhood. Using Franco Moretti's theory of the Bildungsroman, a framing of the genre as a thoroughly ‘modern’ form of the novel, this article applies a critical Marxist lens to O'Brien's output. This reading brings to light the ways in which the limitations of the Bildungsroman work to constrain O'Brien's subversive politics. Their middle-class status remains an integral part of the identity of her heroines, informing the forms of liberation they seek. Fundamentally, O'Brien's idealization of aristocratic culture, elitist exceptionalism and ‘detachment of spirit’ restricts the emancipatory potential of her vision of Irish womanhood.


Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adetunji Kazeem Adebiyi-Adelabu

Sello Duiker’s The Quiet Violence of Dreams offers an extensive treatment of homosexuality, a preoccupation which, until recently, is rare in black African fiction. On this account, as well as its depth and openness, the work has attracted some critical attention. It has been read from a masculinity perspective, as a coming-out novel, as a national allegory, as a work that challenges the notion of fixed sexuality, as a work that normalises same-sex sexuality, and so forth. Unlike these studies, this article examines the representation and disquisition around same-sex preference in the novel, with a view to demonstrating how some myths about homosexuality are exploded in the groundbreaking work, and showing that the narrative could also be apprehended as intellectual advocacy for the right to same-sex orientation.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrés Herane-Vives

BACKGROUND “Short-term” samples are not the most appropriate for reflecting Chronic Cortisol Concentration (CCC). Although hair is used for reflecting the systemic cortisol level over “long-term”, its use appears clinically problematic. Local stress and non-stress related factors may release a circumscribed cortisol secretion that is accumulated in hair. Non-stressful earwax extraction methods may provide a more accurate specimen to measure CCC. OBJECTIVE Correlate cortisol levels using hair, serum and earwax samples METHODS Earwax from both ears of 37 controls were extracted using a clinical procedure commonly associated with local pain. One month later, earwax from the left ear side was extracted using the same procedure, and earwax from the right ear side was comfortably extracted, using an earwax self-sampling device. Participants also provided one centimetre of hair that represented the retrospective month of cortisol output, and one serum sample that reflected the effect of systemic stressors on cortisol levels. Earwax (ECC), Hair (HCC) and Serum (SCC) Cortisol Concentration were correlated and compared. Confounders´ effect on cortisol levels were studied. RESULTS Serum showed the largest and hair the lowest cortisol concentration (p<0.01). Left-ECC was larger than Right-ECC (p=0.03). Right-ECC was the only sample unaffected by confounders (all p>0.05). Right-ECC and HCC showed the only significant association (r=0.39; p=0.03). CONCLUSIONS The self-sampling device did not represent a local stressor for the ceruminous glands. It provided the cortisol level with the least likely to be affected by confounding factors over the previous month. ECC using the novel device may constitute another accurate, but more suitable and affordable specimen for measuring CCC.


Author(s):  
Matthew Lewis

‘He was deaf to the murmurs of conscience, and resolved to satisfy his desires at any price.’ The Monk (1796) is a sensational story of temptation and depravity, a masterpiece of Gothic fiction and the first horror novel in English literature. The respected monk Ambrosio, the Abbot of a Capuchin monastery in Madrid, is overwhelmed with desire for a young girl; once having abandoned his monastic vows he begins a terrible descent into immorality and violence. His appalling fall from grace embraces blasphemy, black magic, torture, rape, and murder, and places his very soul in jeopardy. Lewis’s extraordinary tale drew on folklore, legendary ghost stories, and contemporary dread inspired by the terrors of the French Revolution. Its excesses shocked the reading public and it was condemned as obscene. The novel continues to beguile and shock readers today with its gruesome catalogue of iniquities, while at the same time giving a profound insight into the deep anxieties experienced by British citizens during one of the most turbulent periods in the nation’s history.


2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 849-862
Author(s):  
Shagun Banga ◽  
S. Sivaprasad Kumar

AbstractIn this paper, we use the novel idea of incorporating the recently derived formula for the fourth coefficient of Carathéodory functions, in place of the routine triangle inequality to achieve the sharp bounds of the Hankel determinants H3(1) and H2(3) for the well known class 𝓢𝓛* of starlike functions associated with the right lemniscate of Bernoulli. Apart from that the sharp bound of the Zalcman functional: $\begin{array}{} |a_3^2-a_5| \end{array}$ for the class 𝓢𝓛* is also estimated. Further, a couple of interesting results of 𝓢𝓛* are also discussed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-176
Author(s):  
Jeanne-Marie Jackson

This article theorizes the Zimbabwean writer Stanlake Samkange’s turn from the novel to philosophy as an effort to circumvent the representational pressure exerted by African cultural traumatization. In breaking with the novel form to coauthor a philosophical treatise called Hunhuism or Ubuntuism in the same year as Zimbabwe achieves independence (1980), Samkange advances a comportment-based, deontological alternative to the psychic or subjective model of personhood that anchors trauma theory. Revisiting the progression from his most achieved novel, The Mourned One, to Hunhuism or Ubuntuism thus offers fresh insight into the range of options available to independence-era writers for representing the relationship between African individuality and collectivity. At the same time, it suggests a complementary and overlooked relationship between novelistic and philosophical forms in an African context.


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