Community Engagement Through Extension and Outreach Activities

Extension and outreach services of libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) are to be essentially considered as an important aspect of social and ethical responsibility of an institution towards the society. An academic library, especially a college library, has immense scope for engagement of the community constituting the stakeholders of the institution for participation, involvement, skill development, and enrichment as well as the individuals outside the institution, ultimately towards inclusion, empathy, and compassion for the society at large. Exemplary evidences of the opportunities and accomplishments of a college library with special reference to the extension and outreach activities of Sir Gurudas Mahavidyalaya, Kolkata, West Bengal, India are provided. Innovation, collaboration, communication, creativity, and effective employment of ICT tools are the keys to successful execution.

Rorty and Addams

Despite Rorty’s oeuvre containing limited commentary on Jane Addams, this chapter illuminates their distinctive shared contribution to pragmatist ethics: They merge epistemic and ethical priorities to unite sympathetic understanding with the cultivation of social ethical responsibility and orient their ethical projects explicitly toward responsiveness to marginalized or excluded others. Its chief claims are: first, that Rorty can be read as extending Addams’s project of creating a democratic moral community; and second, that a constructive dialogue between Rorty and Addams reveals key points of complementarity that, when taken together, generate a more robust conception of democratic social ethics than Addams’s alone. Reading Rorty alongside Addams elucidates the ethical commitments implicit in his more familiar epistemological critiques, including how Rorty’s understanding of the social practice of justification can be understood as a philosophical defense of Addams’s notion of a “social test.”

Resilience Ethics and Sustainable Governance

Resilience ethics means a shared ethical responsibility for our actions and environment. Sustainable governance is interested in the complexity of sustainability and the rise of resilience thinking. There are multiple ways to apply the idea of resilience to shared narratives about public problems and environmental concerns for the future. In particular, resilience ethics are related to human interventions in ecosystems and the resultant responsibility to care for them. The integration of resilience and sustainability leads us to study the distribution of wealth and other root causes of social inequality and injustice. The current paper argues that institutional change and collective action are critical elements in society’s resilience. Therefore, three global problems should be addressed as the focus of resilience and sustainability: (1) divided societies and growing inequalities should be considered in terms of income distribution, employment, and education; (2) wealth and power should be redistributed in terms of common-pool resources and affected communities; and (3) intersectional inequality should be reconsidered in different axes of oppression and social injustice. A renewed perspective for democratic and responsible citizenship is required to enhance direct citizen participation in public policies and social change. In this regard, social and administrative scientific advances create opportunities for the resilient future.

Anthropologists as Experts: Cultural Expertise, Colonialism, and Positionality

This article addresses the positionality of anthropologists and the impact of anthropological theories in cultural expertise with the help of three case studies that highlight the engagement of anthropologists with law and governance during colonialism and in the wake of it: a well-known case of witchcraft in Kenya, Volkekunde theories in Africa, and the Rwandan genocide. The article starts with a short genesis of the concept of cultural expertise and its cognate concepts of culturally motivated crimes and cultural defense, to introduce the main question of this article: What can we learn from the use of cultural expertise in the colonial past? Today, as much as in the colonial past, anthropologists have been torn between action and abstention. The article’s three case studies show that neither action nor abstention is free from ethical responsibility. This article argues that the concept of procedural neutrality and its reformulation in the form of critical affirmation help anthropologists to carve out an independent role for themselves in the legal process. Procedural neutrality and its reformulation as critical affirmation make it possible to comply with the ethics and deontologies of the disciplines across which anthropologists operate when providing cultural expertise.

Epistemic and ethical responsibility during the pandemic

Intellectual (specialised) knowledge is omnipresent in human lives and decisions. We are constantly trying to make good and correct decisions. However, responsible decision-making is characterised by rather difficult epistemic conditions. It applies all the more during the pandemic when decisions require not only specialised knowledge in a number of disciplines, scientific consensus, and participants from different fields, but also responsibility and respect for moral principles in order to ensure that the human rights of all groups are observed. Pandemic measures are created by politicians, healthcare policy-makers, and epidemiologists. However, what is the role of ethics as a moral philosophy and experts in ethics? Experts in ethics and philosophy are carefully scrutinising political decisions. Levy and Savulescu (2020) have claimed that Ethicists and philosophers are not epistemically arrogant if they question policy responses. They played an important role in the creation of a reliable consensus. This study analyses epistemic and moral responsibility, their similarities, analogies, and differences. Are they interconnected? What is their relationship and how can they be filled with actual content during the pandemic?

Ethical Responsibility to Distant Others through the Coffee Industry

<p>How we live our lives here in New Zealand affects others who are distant from us. We live in a world with many networks across space, which connect people with radically different lifestyles. These connections create an avenue to respond to the poverty of these ‘distant others’. One such network of connections is the coffee industry. Ethical consumption and social entrepreneurship within the coffee industry are a means to address development issues, and ultimately poverty. This research will look into coffee social enterprises, and how they can be included in a post-development theoretical framework. In particular, it will discuss the motivations of social entrepreneurs involved in the coffee companies interviewed. Post-development provides a theoretical framework for this research of coffee social enterprises. It provides a critique to mainstream development, and has questioned how development is done, as well as its very validity. In doing so, it has encouraged new ways of ‘doing development’. One example of this is Sally Matthews’ three responses the wealthy can have to poverty: first, re-thinking of the development discourse in light of post-development; secondly, supporting popular initiatives; and thirdly, solidarity with distant others here at home. This is an appreciative inquiry into different coffee companies, using qualitative ethnographic methods. Seven in-depth interviews have been conducted with managers, past owners or head roasters, as well as one with an expert on social enterprise.</p>

Ethical Responsibility to Distant Others through the Coffee Industry

<p>How we live our lives here in New Zealand affects others who are distant from us. We live in a world with many networks across space, which connect people with radically different lifestyles. These connections create an avenue to respond to the poverty of these ‘distant others’. One such network of connections is the coffee industry. Ethical consumption and social entrepreneurship within the coffee industry are a means to address development issues, and ultimately poverty. This research will look into coffee social enterprises, and how they can be included in a post-development theoretical framework. In particular, it will discuss the motivations of social entrepreneurs involved in the coffee companies interviewed. Post-development provides a theoretical framework for this research of coffee social enterprises. It provides a critique to mainstream development, and has questioned how development is done, as well as its very validity. In doing so, it has encouraged new ways of ‘doing development’. One example of this is Sally Matthews’ three responses the wealthy can have to poverty: first, re-thinking of the development discourse in light of post-development; secondly, supporting popular initiatives; and thirdly, solidarity with distant others here at home. This is an appreciative inquiry into different coffee companies, using qualitative ethnographic methods. Seven in-depth interviews have been conducted with managers, past owners or head roasters, as well as one with an expert on social enterprise.</p>

FACTUM 1: 1

The concept of facticity is under question, and a climate of post-truth affects global politics. The facticity of human design constructs is based on ‘solid’ evidence and actions and our making rest upon ethical responsibility for how we do things. As a way to become aware of the significance of chosen tools, their intentional and unintentional narrative capacity and bearing on design, this chapter raises awareness about the significance of chosen tools, their intentional and unintentional bearing on design, suggesting to reconnect — one by one — and 1:1 with the drawing’s ability to generate drawing-thinking and not mere illustrations of architecture. Designing drafting tools is herenin suggested to be an extension of the thinking that comes to define thinking-through-making as an act of resistance to the passive acceptance of ‘pre-packaged’ tools that dominate the design industry.