Edith Stein's Contribution to Critical Phenomenology: On Self-Formation and Value-Modification

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-42
Author(s):  
Rachel Bath ◽  

One defining claim that critical phenomenologists make of the critical phenomenological method is that description no longer simply plays the role of detailing the world around the describing phenomenologist, but rather has the potential to transform worlds and persons. The transformative potential of the critical phenomenological enterprise is motivated by aspirations of social and political transformation. Critical phenomenology accordingly takes, as its starting point, descriptions of the oppressive historical social structures and contexts that have shaped our experience and shows how these produce inequitable ways of being in the world (Guenther 2020, 12). For example, critical phenomenologists have provided rich descriptions of marginalized lived experience, particularly racialized experience (Ngo, 2017; Yancy, 2017), dis-abled experience and experiences of illness (Lajoie and Douglas, 2020; Toombs, 1993), gendered experience (Beauvoir, 2009; Salamon, 2010), and so forth. What is common across these accounts is the assumption that these descriptions provide means of enacting political change. First, they illuminate the existence of oppressive structures and their effects upon us, our possibilities, and our relations. Second, through increasing awareness they begin to denaturalize the oppressive historical structures that “privilege, naturalize, and normalize certain experiences of the world while marginalizing, pathologizing, and discrediting others” (Guenther 2020, 15). Third, through strategic responses (e.g., hesitation in Alia Al-Saji’s work), they produce new possibilities of action and experience, which initiates the process of creating different ways of being in the world (Al-Saji 2014).2

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-51
Author(s):  
Sabrina Magris

The paper addresses the importance of the role of women in Intelligence and National Security with the specific purpose to highlight the quality of female contribution in all different domains. The world is changing and in this change, Intelligence risks being left behind as never before. An epic evolution and change are underway that will upset ways of being and ways of thinking. All this not suddenly and all this without realizing it if not after the fact. The world is changing, women “are gain the upper hand” taking over also numerically and it is not realized that a change must happen in the field of Intelligence with a space left to women, not because they are women but because of their abilities. In all domains, from strategic to an operational one. Blindness to change that many Agencies are having. And those who are making changes often do so because they are obliged by the rules but not by evaluating the concrete capability of individuals. Two factors risk being explosive if no action is taken. The paper highlights the physiological and psychological contribution of the female component in the National Security and Intelligence work, and why diversity is scientifically important to successfully conduct operational and strategic tasks. It also describes the existing lack of models, how to enlarge the interest of young girls to join the Intelligence Community, and a look into the near future regarding the training and the recruitment processes with specific regards to women.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Roseane Santos Mesquita ◽  
Késia Dos Anjos Rocha

The present text bets on the power of reflections on a pedagogy guided by cosmoperception. It is a collective call for the enchanted ways of perceiving and relating to the other. “Ọrọ, nwa, ẹkọ”, the talk, the look, the education, insurgent forces that grow in the cracks, just like moss, alive, reborn. That is the way we think about education, as a living practice, turned to freedom. Freedom understood as a force that enables us to question certain hegemonic truths entrenched in our ways of being, thinking and producing knowledge. In dialogue with the criticisms on the decolonial thought and by authors and authoresses who are putting themselves into thinking about an epistemology from a diasporic place, from the edges of the world, we will try to problematize the effects of the epistemic erasures promoted by the colonial processes and how that has affected our educative practices. The look at the educational experience that happens in the sacred territory of candomblé, will be our starting point to think about politically and poetically transformative educational practices.


Author(s):  
Jarosław Macała

A large portion of geopolitical research of the last decades, especially geopolitical criticism, undertakes the concept of the importance of culture, value and identity in explaining the relation between the space and politics, which was an aspect underappreciated by classical and neoclassical geopolitics. It might be assumed that the currently growing role of popculture and mass-media in our lives lead to the establishment of a kind of a “cultural order”, a particular filter that decides on the perception of the world and, consequently, geopolitics. This article relates to this issue as it deals with the meaning of popular culture in contemporary geopolitical research, mostly accentuated by popular geopolitics. This review briefly analyses what popular geopolitics is, how to sketch its research area, stages of development, applied definitions and research methods. The starting point is the assumption that the hegemonic structure of geographical/geopolitical thinking that the elites are trying to impose on the society by using popcultural artifacts may, in fact, be reconstructed thanks to popular geopolitics studies. It shows the scale and reach of resistance towards such imaginations as displayed by the non-elites, who also reach for symbols, texts and images from popular culture. Such circumstances allow to observe either legitimizing or debunking a particular view of the world and geopolitics.


Hypatia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 521-536
Author(s):  
Kimberly S. Love

This article investigates the role of shame in shaping the epistolary form and aesthetic structure of Alice Walker's The Color Purple. I argue that the epistolary framing presents a crisis in the development of Celie's shamed self‐consciousness. To explain the connection between shame and Celie's self‐consciousness, I build on Jean Paul Sartre's theory of existentialism and explore three phases of Celie's evolution as it is represented in three phrases that I identify as significant transitions in the text: “I am,” “But I'm here,” and “It mine.” The first section examines how shame fractures Celie's self‐consciousness; the second focuses on how Celie positions and locates herself in the world; and the third explains how Celie mobilizes shame by connecting her self‐consciousness to a past that is shameful but also generative. I conclude by considering the novel's emergence in the Cosby/Reagan era in order to illuminate the mutual constitution of black familial pride and black racial shame.


2018 ◽  
Vol 115 (4) ◽  
pp. 483-499
Author(s):  
Jayme R. Reaves

Womanist biblical interpretation tradition calls for white women to see themselves, not as the marginalized character, but as the text’s oppressor. The text, and a community who reads that same text and has daily experiences of oppression, asks white women to recognize that, because of our position in society, we have wittingly or unwittingly been in the role of Sarah more often than we have been in the role of Hagar. Therefore, we have a responsibility to take that reality seriously by acknowledging it, delving deeper, being receptive to challenge, and allowing it to transform how we view, and operate within, the world. This article expands on and models this approach by acknowledging the ways in which the Sarah narrative has been read by white women, with a particular view to nineteenth-century historical readings in the context of American slavery as well as with an awareness of whiteness and white privilege. It seeks to dig deeper into the text to understand the fullness of Sarah’s experience as both victim and perpetrator, to hear the challenge to whiteness and privilege, and to find a way to read the text that speaks to the lived experience of the oppressed as well as giving challenge to the privileged.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Malou Strandvad

Based on a study of the admission test at a design school, this paper investigates the contingencies of aesthetic values as these become visible in assessment practices. Theoretically, the paper takes its starting point in Herrnstein Smith’s notion of ‘contingencies of values’ and outlines a pragmatist ground where cultural sociology and economic sociology meet. Informed by the literature on cultural intermediaries, the paper discusses the role of evaluators and the devices which accompany them. Whereas studies of cultural intermediaries traditionally apply a Bourdieusian perspective, recent developments within this field of literature draws inspiration from the so-called ‘new new economic sociology,’ which this paper adds to. While the admission test is easily described as a matter of overcoming “subjective” aesthetic evaluations by means of “objective” and standardized assessment criteria, the paper does not accept this storyline. As an alternative, the paper outlines the contingencies of values which are at play at the admission test, composed of official assessment criteria and scoring devices together with conventions within the world of design, and set in motion by interactions with the objects that applicants submit.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 391-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katja Frimberger ◽  
Ross White ◽  
Lyn Ma

AbstractThe following article puts to work an affirmative approach to critical theory through poetic mappings of the process of crafting identity boxes with ESOL students from refugee and asylum backgrounds in a Glasgow-based college in Scotland (UK). The article takes as its starting point the work of feminist and neo-materialist thinkers who argue for an ontological re-orientation of our practices of inquiry. This involves the questioning of positivist research orientations, which regard language as mere second-order representations of a primary reality. We argue that such representationalist logic can implicate research participants in deficit orientations, especially when their embodied and often contested ways of being in the world defy purely linguistic or other ‘fixed’ cultural representations. With the aim to embrace epistemological uncertainty and prioritise our participants’ embodied self-articulations over our “rage for meaning” (MacLure 2013), we experimented with poetic mappings as neomaterialist, arts-based research tools.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-180
Author(s):  
Monika Kavalir

In homage to the work of Uroš Mozetič, the paper takes as its starting point previously developed suggestions about how the language of “Eveline” conveys a picture of the heroine as a passive, paralysed character. Using Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics as a model of stylistic analysis, it investigates the contribution of both the ideational and the interpersonal metafunctions to the meaning of the text. The results extend and amend some ideas from the literature, such as the supposed prevalence of stative verbs, and suggest that while the short story as a whole predominantly uses material processes, their potential for change is mitigated by Joyce’s aspect, tense, and usuality choices. Eveline as the main character crucially has the role of a Senser, observing and internally reacting to the world around her, and even the processes in which she acts upon things and people are modalised and shown to be either hypothetical or instigated by others.


Author(s):  
Soelma Ts.-D. Dashieva ◽  
◽  
Inga D. Alekseeva ◽  

The article examines the concepts “Mother” and “Father” in Buryat, Russian and Chinese phraseology, which constitute the basic and most culturally significant fragment of the linguistic picture of the world, which records the spiritual and moral experience of a person and the nation as a whole. The gender approach to the kinship terminology study significantly enriches and expands the phraseological unit boundaries containing the lexemes mother and father, which are the starting point and core of family-kinship relations. The study of the family institution seems to be especially relevant for the Buryat, Russian and Chinese linguistic cultures increasingly interacting on the territory of the Republic of Buryatia. The results of investigating the corresponding phraseological units enable to indicate the following features common for the three languages: 1) setting authoritarian family model headed by father; 2) key role of concept “Mother” having unbreakable physiological ties with child, giving love, warmth and forgiveness. Unique features include equal representation of father and mother in Buryat, dominating role of mother in Russian, absolute power of father particularly over son and strictness of mother in Chinese. Identification and understanding the universal and unique mentality features of closely contacting ethnic groups will help implement effective and competent intercultural communication.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-42
Author(s):  
Alex Franklin

AbstractThis chapter explores the relationship between collaboration and creativity within social sustainability research. Aimed at stimulating further reflection and debate on the role of ‘co-creativity’ in enabling transformative sustainability agendas, the chapter acts also as an introduction to the entire edited collection. A key guiding question posed from the outset is how co-creative research practice, as a generative process, can best support the emergence of alternative—potentially even transformative—ways of being in the world. The discussion proceeds with a conceptual review of creativity, followed by a detailed explanation of how co-creativity is defined for the purposes of this edited collection. The remainder of the chapter looks towards the nurturing of co-creative practice within social sustainability research; particular attention is given to socially inclusive forms of co-creative and engaged research praxis. The term co-creativity is used in reference to both individual methods and overarching research approaches that, through action and reflection, stimulate alternative understandings of why and how things are, and how they could be. Accordingly, emphasis is placed throughout this chapter on co-creative research practice as requiring a retained sensitivity to the importance of researching ‘with’.


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