scholarly journals Scenes of Commitment

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bharat Jayram Venkat

What shape does ethical reasoning assume in the face of potentially contradictory commitments? Drawing on fieldwork in a private clinic in Chennai, the capital of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, I examine how patients, their families, and the clinic’s staff navigated ethically complex situations in which one was called on as both family member and patient. I argue that the doctors and counselors at the clinic attempted to reconfigure the relationship between what were experienced as divergent or contradictory commitments—to treatment and to close kin—in terms of what I call hierarchical subsumption. This mode of response worked not simply to recast treatment as noncontradictory with familial obligations; rather, the commitment to therapy became hierarchically subsumed by and therefore necessary to the fulfillment of such kin-based commitments. In attending to those ordinary moments in which commitments are felt to be at odds, I suggest that we might develop a better understanding of the particular styles of ethical reasoning that people employ to manage such conflictual situations, which refuse the kind of tacitness that scholars have associated with everyday life.

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Santhi Madhavan Samyuktha ◽  
Devarajan Malarvizhi ◽  
Adhimoolam Karthikeyan ◽  
Manickam Dhasarathan ◽  
Arumugam Thanga Hemavathy ◽  
...  

In the present study, fifty-two mungbean (Vigna radiata) genotypes were evaluated for seven morphological traits at three different environments in South Indian state Tamil Nadu, namely Virinjipuram (E1), Eachangkottai (E2), and Bhavanisagar (E3) during Kharif 2017, 2018, and 2019, respectively. The data collected were subjected to variability and correlation analyses, followed by stability analysis using additive main effects and multiplicative interaction (AMMI) model, genotype and genotype × environment interaction effects (GGE) biplot. Variablility was observed among the genotypes for the following traits viz., plant height, days to fifty per cent flowering, number of pods per plant, pod length, number of seeds per pod, hundred seed weight and grain yield. Correlation analysis showed that the trait number of pods per plant was significantly associated with grain yield. The G × E was smaller than the genetic variation of grain yield as it portrayed the maximum contribution of genotypic effects (61.07%). GGE biplot showed E3 as a highly discriminating and representative environment. It also identified environment-specific genotypes viz., EC 396111 for E1, EC 396125 for E2 and EC 396101 for E3 environments. The genotypes with minimum genotype stability index (GSI) viz., V2802BG (7), HG 22 (13), and EC 396098 (13) were observed with wide adaptation and high yields across all the three environments. In summary, we identified stable genotypes adapted across environments for grain yield. These genotypes can be used as parent/pre-breeding materials in future mungbean breeding programs.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kritika Chettri

This article focuses on a comparative analysis of the chronicling of the civil war in Nepal, within the collection of short stories by Maheshbikram Shah, titled Chapamar ko Choro (‘The guerrilla’s son’), with the novels Palpasa Café by Narayan Wagle and Urgen ko Ghoda (‘Urgen’s horse’) by Yug Pathak, and a memoir, Khalanga ma Hamla (‘Attack at Khalanga’), by Radha Paudel. I argue that the short stories adopt a lens of humility in viewing the conflict as opposed to the totalizing narratives of the novels and the memoir that seek to represent their idea of a humble life. The stories engage with an everyday life of the conflict that overturns its representation into a humble life within the novels. This argument opens up a myriad of questions about forms and ways of seeing: what does it mean to have humility in the face of a conflict? How does humility reconcile with questions of agency and dignity? If humility is a way of seeing, then does it also influence the form taken by the short stories? What are the ethical dimensions of the relationship humility forges between self and others? As the article seeks to answer these questions, the aim will be to establish the short stories of Shah as providing an interpretation of the conflict that remains obliterated within the novels and the memoir.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Bharath ◽  
V. Sreedevi

Purpose The paper aims to considering quality that comes from quality employees taking discretionary efforts, having right perception towards quality, getting satisfied from their contribution. Exploring the relationship of engagement, perception and satisfaction, and mapping the levels and identifying managerial implications for improving the levels. Design/methodology/approach William Kahn’s employee engagement dimensions, Parasuraman and Zeithaml’s quality dimensions and Harter et al.’s satisfaction dimensions applied and variables framed in health-care context, tested and applied. Survey data collected from randomly selected medical and non-medical employees from south Indian state Tamil Nadu health-care organizations, using structured questionnaire. Findings Age, experience and roles of the respondents in work have a significant association with the levels. It explores a significant positive relationship of perception, engagement and satisfaction. The study explores an average 28% of employees have high level of engagement, perception (18%) and satisfaction (22%), and the rest fall under moderate and low levels. The roles of the respondents significantly predict the levels. Originality/value The study focuses on engagement, perception and satisfaction of employees, not of patients. It registered the responses of trained physicians, nurses and administrative staff. It illustrates human resource strategic importance to improve the levels concerning quality measures.


Author(s):  
Leszek Koczanowicz ◽  
Rafał Włodarczyk

AbstractThe current heated debate on the deteriorating status of the university raises a range of pertinent questions, including: What role can the humanities play in culture today in the face of the crisis of higher education? To answer this question, the authors begin by problematizing the relationship between culture, the humanities, and education. In the second part of the paper, they examine the changing role of the humanities in conjunction with the understandings of culture, and outline three salient ways in which culture is conceived of today. Subsequently, they focus on the loss of the dominant status that culture suffered when everyday life was discovered in modernity. In the third part, they argue that everyday life, or rather social representations of everyday life and its practices, are currently becoming the chief criterion for assessing culture, the humanities, and education. However, everyday life remains complex both in theoretical conceptualizations and in research observations. For example, everyday life harbors a range of risks and anxieties which are veiled by its own obviousness and reinforced by socialization. The authors conclude that, given this, everyday life in democratic societies calls for the work of understanding, support, affirmation, and criticism, in which the humanities can retain their superior status. In the fourth part, the authors discuss non-consensual democracy, critical community, and the pedagogy of asylum as the forms of organization and action that promote an auspicious interconnection of culture, the humanities, and education.


2020 ◽  
pp. 17-27
Author(s):  
D. Meshkov

The article presents some of the author’s research results that has got while elaboration of the theme “Everyday life in the mirror of conflicts: Germans and their neighbors on the Southern and South-West periphery of the Russian Empire 1861–1914”. The relationship between Germans and Jews is studied in the context of the growing confrontation in Southern cities that resulted in a wave of pogroms. Sources are information provided by the police and court archival funds. The German colonists Ludwig Koenig and Alexandra Kirchner (the resident of Odessa) were involved into Odessa pogrom (1871), in particular. While Koenig with other rioters was arrested by the police, Kirchner led a crowd of rioters to the shop of her Jewish neighbor, whom she had a conflict with. The second part of the article is devoted to the analyses of unty-Jewish violence causes and history in Ak-Kerman at the second half of the 19th and early years of 20th centuries. Akkerman was one of the southern Bessarabia cities, where multiethnic population, including the Jews, grew rapidly. It was one of the reasons of the pogroms in 1865 and 1905. The author uses criminal cases` papers to analyze the reasons of the Germans participation in the civilian squads that had been organized to protect the population and their property in Ackerman and Shabo in 1905.


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-332
Author(s):  
Kate Zebiri

This article aims to explore the Shaykh-mur?d (disciple) or teacher-pupil relationship as portrayed in Western Sufi life writing in recent decades, observing elements of continuity and discontinuity with classical Sufism. Additionally, it traces the influence on the texts of certain developments in religiosity in contemporary Western societies, especially New Age understandings of religious authority. Studying these works will provide an insight into the diversity of expressions of contemporary Sufism, while shedding light on a phenomenon which seems to fly in the face of contemporary social and religious trends which deemphasize external authority and promote the authority of the self or individual autonomy.


2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-93
Author(s):  
Timothy Beal

This article reads between two recent explorations of the relationship between religion, chaos, and the monstrous: Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep and Author's Religion and Its Monsters. Both are oriented toward the edge of chaos and order; both see the primordial and chaotic as generative; both pursue monstrous mythological figures as divine personifications of primordial chaos; both find a deep theological ambivalences in Christian and Jewish tradition with regard to the monstrous, chaotic divine; both are critical of theological and cultural tendencies to demonize chaos and the monstrous; and finally, both read the divine speech from the whirlwind in the book of Job as a revelation of divine chaos. But whereas one sees it as a call for laughter, a chaotic life-affirming laughter with Leviathan in the face of the deep, the other sees it as an incarnation of theological horror, leaving Job and the reader overwhelmed and out-monstered by God. Must it be one way or the other? Can laughter and horror coincide in the face of the deep?


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