Delicate Years: Children and Identity in Zimbabwean Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Muganiwa
Keyword(s):  
Growing Up ◽  
Economic Crises ◽  
Child Characters ◽  
The People ◽  
Do So

The paper argues that children face challenges in growing up and fitting into their societies and that these challenges need to be addressed with care. These challenges, which are complicated by the effects of colonialism, war and economic crises in the context of Zimbabwe, are portrayed in the novels Nervous Conditions (Dangarembga 1989), The Book of Not (Dangarembga 2006), The Uncertainty of Hope (Tagwira 2006) and Running with Mother (Mlalazi 2012). In analysing the characters of the children portrayed in these four novels, the vulnerability of children, regardless of their age, is demonstrated. The child characters strive to help their parents and be useful citizens and yet at times this contrasts with their desire to be sheltered and treated as children. This contradiction is best exhibited in teenagers who try to fashion their own identity that is separate from the people around them but who still require guidance to do so.

scholarly journals Populism, Twitter, and COVID-19: Narrative, Fantasies, and Desires

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 294
Author(s):  
Laura Cervi ◽  
Fernando García ◽  
Carles Marín Lladó
Keyword(s):  
Text Analysis ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Ability To Work ◽  
The Core ◽  
Global Pandemic ◽  
The People ◽  
Working People ◽  
The Government ◽  
Do So

During a global pandemic, the great impact of populist discourse on the construction of social reality is undeniable. This study analyzes the fantasmatic dimension of political discourse from Donald Trump’s and Jair Bolsonaro’s Twitter accounts between 1 March and 31 May. To do so, it applies a Clause-Based Semantic Text Analysis (CBSTA) methodology that categorizes speech in Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) triplets. The study findings show that in spite of the Coronavirus pandemic, the main beatific and horrific subjects remain the core populist signifiers: the people and the elite. While Bolsonaro’s narrative was predominantly beatific, centered on the government, Trump’s was mostly horrific, centered on the elite. Trump signified the pandemic as a subject and an enemy to be defeated, whereas Bolsonaro portrayed it as a circumstance. Finally, both leaders defined the people as working people, therefore their concerns about the pandemic were focused on the people’s ability to work.

I Do So, Like Durian

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (6) ◽  
pp. 66-75
Author(s):  
Jann Everard ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Fiction ◽  
Public Transportation ◽  
Teenage Girl ◽  
Chinese Restaurant ◽  
The People ◽  
Food And Culture ◽  
The Right ◽  
Wrong Place ◽  
Do So

Where does racism come from? How do experiences with other cultures change our views of race? In this work of philosophical short fiction, Holly, a young teenage girl, heads into Chinatown against her mother’s wishes to visit Jon, a teenage boy, she is interested in dating. He is working at his parents’ Chinese restaurant. She has taken public transportation to Chinatown with her mother knowing, and against her mother’s wishes. Her mother has a strong bias against the area and the people. Holly gets off the bus at the wrong place and gets lost, but friendly locals direct her the right way. She is amazed by the differences in food and culture she sees all around her and ends up buying a durian. Eventually, she finds the restaurant (still carrying the durian), and finds Jon working. Jon is surprised and slightly embarrassed to see Holly and explains to her she will not like taste of the durian. Holly is warmly welcomed by one of Jon’s relatives in the restaurant who agrees to take her in the back and show her out to prepare her exotic fruit.

Logical Writing in the Education of John Stuart Mill: The Autobiography and the Privileging of Reason

1988 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 153-168
Author(s):  
Kathleen E. Welch
Keyword(s):  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Philosophical Writing ◽  
The People ◽  
Writing Strategy ◽  
Do So

In his Autobiography, published posthumously in 1873, twenty years after it was first drafted, John Stuart Mill writes a series of logical essays on ideas. The people who appear in the book do so as personifications of these ideas rather than as palpable characters. This writing strategy leads Mill to make ideas rather than people exciting, and this unusual hierarchy makes his autobiography not only a fascinating book but a peculiar one as well. One in fact wishes that Mill had thought of the title The Autobiography of an Idea sixty years before his intellectual grandson, Louis Sullivan, used it for his autobiography. Mill composes his autobiography of personified ideas with a series of logical essays on his remarkable education and on his political and philosophical writing. Consequently, deductive writing forms these essays, a kind of writing that is not surprising for a logician and an essayist but rare for an autobiographer.

scholarly journals Prophetic Conflict in Jeremiah 27-28 and the Question of True and False Prophecy

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-107
Author(s):  
Ikenna L. Umeanolue
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
The People ◽  
False Prophets ◽  
Do So ◽  
Easy Solution ◽  
Prophetic Office

The Old Testament text of Jeremiah 27-28 presents prophetic conflict between Jeremiah and Hananiah. Jeremiah proclaimed a message of God’s judgment against the rulers and the people of Judah because of their violation of the religious and the legal traditions of the nation but Hananiah opposed him preaching a message of peace and salvation and predicted the deliverance of Israelite nation from the hands of their enemies. Both claimed to have God’s authority. Jeremiah 27-28 provides a window into the problem of discerning a true prophet from a false one. Contemporary Nigerian Christians are also being challenged with such opposing prophecies by prophets who claim that their prophecies come from God. This study adopts exegetical method of interpretation and application of the message of Jeremiah 27-28 to the fact of truity and falsity in prophecy in contemporary Christianity. This study discovered that true prophetic office is a call, and not all comers’ affair. Prophecy lacks empirical proof and is sometimes manipulative and susceptible to barratry. The study further discovered that true prophets prophesy by the spirit of God while false Prophets prophesy from their own mind but also claim to do so by the spirit of God. Just like Prophet Hananiah, there are prophets who could be genuinely called but have refused to stay within their call because of loss of focus and desire for material gains. Thus the prevalent worldview of contemporary Nigerians concerning easy solution to life’s problems that leads to abuse of prophetic consultations needs to be changed.

The Kind Master is Petting Puppies - Transmutation of the Simplified Populist Rhetoric into Instagram Photography

2020 ◽  
pp. 28-31
Author(s):  
Teja Miholič
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
Do So

The communication power of the social network Instagram is important to address due to its relaxed nature of presenting details from the ordinary lives of individuals. A comparison of the manners in which influencers and politicians represent themselves brings to front a changed dynamic of social power, as it is available online to anyone who can persuade followers to identify with them or to wish to do so in the future. Two ways of identification with an influencer are assumed, namely increasing and decreasing of distance between them and their followers. The text focuses on the latter, where politicians approach the people by showing the banality of their everyday lives. After reviewing the profiles of two Slovenian politicians, a noticeable pattern is that they most often do so with photographs of puppies and kittens. Keywords: populists’ rhetoric, master, Instagram, politics, pets, selfie

Who do the people want to govern?

2021 ◽  
pp. 135406882110500
Author(s):  
John R Hibbing ◽  
Elizabeth Theiss-Morse ◽  
Matthew V Hibbing ◽  
David Fortunato
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Process Research ◽  
Alternative Theory ◽  
The People ◽  
Deep Appreciation ◽  
Political Decisions ◽  
Policy Solutions ◽  
Do So ◽  
Real World Problems ◽  
Cross National

Relative to the well-developed theory and extensive survey batteries on people’s preferences for substantive policy solutions, scholarly understanding of people’s preferences for the mechanisms by which policies should be adopted is disappointing. Theory rarely goes beyond the assumption that people would prefer to rule themselves rather than leave decisions up to elites and measurement rests largely on four items that are not up to the task. In this article, we seek to provide a firmer footing for “process” research by 1) offering an alternative theory holding that people actually want elites to continue to make important political decisions but want them to do so only after acquiring a deep appreciation for the real-world problems facing regular people, and 2) developing and testing a battery of over 50 survey items, appropriate for cross-national research, that extend understanding of how the people want political decisions to be made.

Politics as Morality Pageant

Grandstanding ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 139-166
Author(s):  
Justin Tosi ◽  
Brandon Warmke
Keyword(s):  
Social Problems ◽  
Character Traits ◽  
The People ◽  
Opposing Party ◽  
Do So

This chapter argues that grandstanding contributes to significant problems for politics in democracies. Politicians are notorious for grandstanding, likely because they have strong incentives to do so. Many voters choose candidates for their perceived character traits, so politicians grandstand to give the people what they want. Because people associate morality with taking unyielding stands, politicians who grandstand have strong incentives not to compromise with the opposing party. If they do, voters will treat them as flip-floppers. The same is true for activists, who risk being seen as having a weak commitment to the cause by other activists. Political grandstanders also tend to support expressive or symbolic policies, which seem to straightforwardly address a problem, but are actually ineffective. Finally, grandstanders sometimes have reason not to solve social problems at all, as doing so may eliminate opportunities to advance their interests.

scholarly journals A Cloud-Based Crime Reporting System with Identity Protection

Symmetry ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tzay-Farn Shih ◽  
Chin-Ling Chen ◽  
Bo-Yan Syu ◽  
Yong-Yuan Deng
Keyword(s):  
Reporting System ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Reporting Scheme ◽  
Event Reporting ◽  
The People ◽  
Digital Certificates ◽  
Identity Protection ◽  
Do So

Criminal activities have always been a part of human society, and even today, in a world of extremely advanced surveillance and policing capabilities, many different kinds of crimes are still committed in almost every social environment. However, since those who commit crimes are not representative of the majority of their community, members of these communities tend to wish to report crime when they see it; however, they are often reluctant to do so for fear of their own safety should the people they report identify them. Thus, a great deal of crime goes unreported, and investigations fail to gain key evidence from witnesses, which serves only to foster an environment in which criminal activity is more likely to occur. In order to address this problem, this paper proposes an online illegal event reporting scheme based on cloud technology, which combines digital certificates, symmetric keys, asymmetric keys, and digital signatures. The proposed scheme can process illegal activity reports from the reporting event to the issuing of a reward. The scheme not only ensures informers’ safety, anonymity and non-repudiation, but also prevents cases and reports being erased, and ensures data integrity. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is designed to be robust against abusive use, and is able to preclude false reports. Therefore, it provides a convenient and secure platform for reporting and fighting crime.

Imam Sajjad and the Rights of Mankind

2020 ◽  
pp. 73-86
Author(s):  
Mohsen Kadivar
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Philosophy Of Law ◽  
General Review ◽  
The People ◽  
Do So

This chapter investigates critically the Treatise on Rights (Resalat al-Huquq) of the fourth Shi‘a Imam ‘Ali b. al-Husain Sajad (48–94 h/658–713 ad), which is mostly ethical teachings and in fact, was a letter he wrote to one of his companions. The chapter includes the following: first, a brief consideration of the sources of the treatise, assessing the documents of the treatise, determining the most accurate text of the treatise among differing versions, and a general review of the introduction and categorization of the fifty-one rights listed in the treatise. Following this, the chapter addresses the meaning of “rights” in the Treatise of Rights. To do so, the chapter will distinguish various terminologies of right in the Qur’an, the hadith as well as in philosophy, theology, ethics and fiqh, and compare Imam Sajjad’s notion of “right” with the concept as it appears in the philosophy of law, political philosophy and law. Finally, and as an example, the chapter analyses the section on political rights (al-huquq al-asasi), that is, the rights of the sultan and the people (the ruler and the ruled) in relation to one another.

Young Russians are increasingly prepared to protest

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Due Process ◽  
The State ◽  
Age Group ◽  
Content Type ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Speaking Out ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Younger Age ◽  
Do So

Significance Although Ustinov, 23, says he was not even part of the demonstration, his case became a cause celebre pointing to a gulf between the Kremlin and the people, particularly a younger generation that seems less fearful of speaking out. The court's unusual step reflects concerns that the case against Ustinov is fabricated, and that tough action against protesters compounded with indifference to due process risks a loss of legitimacy for the state. Impacts Russians, including the young, are losing trust in state institutions across the board. Many in the younger age-group are considering emigration, and have the personal and other resources to do so. Environmental protests are more likely to be given official authorisation than political events.

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