The language of prison re-education between agency and responsibility

Author(s):  
Marco BRANCUCCI

"Learning about freedom as freedom to make right choices responsibly is the pivotal task of educational intervention (Chionna 2001). As a practitioner of juvenile penitentiary re-education I experiment it, trying to re-educate young offenders in a prison, where the “capability approach” should be invoked (Sen 2011) and, according to the relational ethics paradigm (Muschitiello, 2012), we teach the young the capacity/ability of choice between alternative life experiences, which should be inspired and embodied by the educational authority of the adults. As agency is a constitutive element of a capability, I wonder: who is the agent? The one who re-educates an inmate? Or the inmate himself? Who should be more efficient and responsible to act in prison? Is it all about specific required competencies that are influenced by the context where penitentiary personnel and inmates act/react reciprocally? Penitentiary educators should adjust their approach, improving their language-as-dialogue tools first, just because the relationship with inmates is based on a dialogic axis. No exception can be made for cultural and linguistic mediators, who are involved in the treatment of foreign inmates (Brancucci 2018). So, I investigate the agency level of penitentiary educators and cultural/linguistic mediators, working together synergistically and/or autonomously. They try to respond to different scenarios, recognizing there is no one-size -fits-all approach to managing cases of re-educational emergencies, and assuming that educational interventions recall a daily presence in the context (Bertolini 1993), especially in prison where people ‘live’ in close proximity (WHO, 2020). But, how to achieve agency when this proximity fades away, or is temporarily interrupted, even turning into a virtual telematic educational approach? The challenge is to transform the consolidated educational-linguistic-dialogic practices into a new bidirectional way to think, act/react (from prison personnel towards inmates and vice-versa), because of the social distance required by the COVID-19 breakthrough."

2020 ◽  
Vol 136 (2) ◽  
pp. 538-566
Author(s):  
Sandra Issel-Dombert

AbstractFrom a theoretical and empirical linguistic point of view, this paper emphasizes the importance of the relationship between populism and the media. The aim of this article is to explore the language use of the Spanish right wing populism party Vox on the basis of its multimodal postings on the social network Instagram. For the analysis of their Instagram account, a suitable multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) provides a variety of methods and allows a theoretical integration into constructivism. A hashtag-analysis reveals that Vox’s ideology consists of a nativist and ethnocentric nationalism on the one hand and conservatism on the other. With a topos analysis, the linguistic realisations of these core elements are illustrated with two case studies.


2009 ◽  
pp. 93-112
Author(s):  
Emanuela Confalonieri ◽  
Cristina Giuliani ◽  
Alessandra Bongiana ◽  
Paola Pavesi

- The present study, related to the one published some years ago (Confalonieri et al., 2004), is an investigation on forced prostitution and the related violence's types in immigrant women involved in streetwalking prostitution. Using the social records available by the Ufficio Stranieri (Comune di Milano), the purpose is to identify the presence of 1) childhood maltreatments or violence before the entry in sex exploitation market and 2) subsequent adult sexual revictimization from partners, pimps and clients. Data were analysed using phenomenological descriptive analysis. The relationship between childhood maltreatment and abuse and subsequent involvement in sex work is discussed comparing data and life histories of immigrant prostitutes coming from Nigeria and East Europe. The role played by social and contexual variables in sexual exploitation story are also considered.Key words: immigration, violence, prostitution, infancy, adulthood.Parole chiave: immigrazione, violenza, prostituzione, infanzia, etŕ adulta.


2000 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
P. A. Geyser

Why Jesus studies? Present-day historical Jesus studies are the epistemological product of what has become known as the New Historicism. The aim of the article is to emphasize two aspects of the New Historicism as epistemological approach. The one aspect focuses on the profitability of this endeavour and the other on the historical nature of the New Historicism. As far as profitability is concerned, the social standing and identity of the researcher are emphasized. Among otherthings, the social interests of the researcher are taken into account. Concerning the historical nature of this kind of research, a distinction is drawn between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith. The aim of the article is to gain clarity on the relationship between the Jesus of history (pre-Easter) and the Jesus of faith (post-Easter). J D Crossan's exposition of the reasons for Jesus studies is followed. He distinguishes three reasons: historical, ethical and theological.


2022 ◽  
Vol 9 (17) ◽  
pp. 197-225
Author(s):  
Hernán Maltz

I propose a close reading on two critical interventions about crime fiction in Argentina: “Estado policial y novela negra argentina” (1991) by José Pablo Feinmann and “Para una reformulación del género policial argentino” (2006) by Carlos Gamerro. Beyond the time difference between the two, I observe aspects in common. Both texts elaborate a corpus of writers and fictions; propose an interpretative guide between the literary and the political-social series; maintain a specific interest in the relationship between crime fiction and police; and elaborate figures of enunciators who serve both as theorists of the genre and as writers of fiction. Among these four dimensions, the one that particularly interests me here is the third, since it allows me to investigate the link that is assumed between “detective fiction” and “police institution”. My conclusion is twofold: on the one hand, in both essays predominates a reductionist vision of the genre, since a kind of necessity is emphasized in the representation of the social order; on the other, its main objective seems to lie in intervening directly on the definitions of the detective fiction in Argentina (and, on this point, both texts acquire an undoubtedly prescriptive nuance).


Author(s):  
Cem Özatalay ◽  
Gözde Aytemur Nüfusçu ◽  
Gülistan Zeren

The use of blood money by powerful people during the judicial process following different kinds of homicides (workplace homicides, state homicides, gun homicides and so on) has become commonplace within the neoliberal context. Based on data obtained from five cases in Turkey, this chapter shows, on the one hand, how the use of blood money serves as an effective tool in the hands of powerful people to consolidate power relations, particularly necropower, as well as the relationship of domination, which rests upon class and identity-based inequalities. The analysis indicates that the blood money offers made by powerful people allows them to minimize potential penalties within penal courts and also to keep their privileged positions in the social hierarchy by purchasing the ‘right to kill’. On the other hand, the resistance of the oppressed and aggrieved people to the subjugation of life to the power of death is analysed with a particular focus on the role of power asymmetries between perpetrators and victims and their unequal positions in the social hierarchy. This conflictual relationship, which we qualify as an expression of necrodomination, offers novel insights into Turkey’s historically shaped system of domination.


Author(s):  
Nicolas Langlitz

This chapter investigates how Christophe Boesch's colleague and codirector Michael Tomasello derived truth claims about the anthropological difference between Homo sapiens and Pan troglodytes from controlled experiments comparing the social cognition of human children with that of grown chimpanzees. Tomasello's claim that humans were the only primates capable of culture and cooperation received an enthusiastic reception by German philosophers. Yet Boesch called into question the validity of Tomasello's findings by pointing out that the social behavior of both humans and apes was too contingent on local circumstances for Leipzig kindergarten children and zoo chimpanzees rescued from a Dutch pharmaceutical company to represent all of humanity and chimpanzeehood. He accused Tomasello of not controlling for the different conditions under which Tomasello tested humans and apes. The ensuing controversy over the relationship between laboratory work and fieldwork happened at a time when new statistical methods were opening up vast new possibilities for chimpanzee ethnography, even fostering hopes that experimentation with captive animals would become superfluous because uncontrolled observations in the wild would allow the establishment of causal relations. The chapter then assesses whether Boesch's cultural primatology could inform a different philosophical anthropology than the one drawing from Tomasello's comparative psychology.


2022 ◽  
pp. 54-64
Author(s):  
Gianluca Attademo ◽  
Alessia Maccaro

The formulation of Charts for research ethics and Codes of conduct has been growing in the last few decades, on the one hand due to a renewed awareness of the ethical dimensions of research governance and the relationship between regulators and researchers, and on the other hand for the expansion of possibilities achieved by innovation in information and communication technologies. The voluntary involvement of research participants, risk management and prevention, data protection, community engagement, reflexivity of researchers are some of the centres of gravity of a debate that involves researchers, institutions, and citizens.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-69
Author(s):  
Vijendra Singh

This article explores the repeated invocation of the spiritual by Vivekananda, Gandhi and Radhakrishnan. It attempts to understand the nature of the relationship they established between the spiritual and the secular domains while invoking the spiritual. The article argues that what was distinctive about frequent usage of the spiritual was its usage to articulate both the secular and the otherworldly goals in different ways. Moreover, none of them are strictly secular, if it means differentiation of the social and political domain from religion on the one hand and rise of ‘exclusive humanism’ on the other. For them, the domain of secular is the domain of realizing the spiritual. They are not two separate domains but constituted an integral whole where the activities of secular were defined and redefined in the light of the quest for the spiritual and vice versa.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dietmar Crailsheim ◽  
Toni Romani ◽  
Miquel Llorente ◽  
Elfriede Kalcher-Sommersguter

AbstractAdvances in the field of social network analysis facilitate the creation of multiplex networks where several interaction types can be analysed simultaneously. In order to test the potential benefits of this approach, we investigated the sociability of atypically raised chimpanzees by constructing and analysing 4-layered multiplex networks of two groups of former pet and entertainment chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). These networks are based on four social interaction types (stationary vicinity, affiliative behaviour, allogrooming, passive close proximity) representing low- to high-level interaction types in terms of sociability. Using the tools provided by the MuxViz software, we could assess and compare the similarity and information gain of each these social interaction types. We found some social interaction types to be more similar than other ones. However, each social interaction type imparted different information. We also tested for a possible impact of the chimpanzees’ biographical background on the social interaction types and found affiliative behaviour as well as allogrooming to be affected by adverse early life experiences. We conclude that this multiplex approach provides a more realistic framework giving detailed insight into the sociability of these chimpanzees and can function as a tool to support captive care management decisions.


2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Tyler

This article considers inclusion through the lens of embodied ethics. It does so by connecting feminist writing on recognition, ethics and embodiment to recent examples of political activism as instances of recognition-based organizing. In making these connections, the article draws on insights from Judith Butler’s recent writing on the ethics and politics of assembly in order to rethink how inclusion might be understood and practised. The article has three interrelated aims: (i) to emphasize the importance of a critical reconsideration of the ethics and politics of inclusion given – on the one hand, its positioning as an organizational ‘good’, and on the other, the conditions attached to it; (ii) to develop a critique of inclusion, drawing on insights from recent feminist thinking on relational ethics; and (iii) to connect this theoretical critique of inclusion, reconsidered here through the lens of embodied ethics, to assembly as a form of feminist activism. Each of these aims underpins the theoretical and empirical discussion developed in the article, specifically its focus on the relationship between embodied ethics, the interplay between theory and practice, and a politics of assembly as the basis for a critical reconsideration of inclusion.


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