Interpersonal Violence in Context

Negative reactions to interpersonal violence survivors are reproduced in patterned ways across multiple social settings. This chapter proposes a framework of cultural stigma surrounding interpersonal violence, one with utility in explaining a paradoxical pattern of condemnation of survivors (relative to perpetrators) and persistent delegitimization of interpersonal violence experiences (relative to impersonal or unintentional traumas). In the proposed framework, the state of being a victim is conceptualized as inherently stigmatizing in the setting of dominant Western cultural values that uplift invulnerability and individual responsibility. Cultural stigma enables disavowal of vulnerability and mutual accountability, reproducing cultural constructions of violence that legitimize abuse. Proposed forms of cultural stigma are denial, minimization, distortion, victim-blame, and labeling. This chapter summarizes relevant research and highlights ways that psychology as a discipline has transmitted such cultural stigma. The final section considers disciplinary avenues to resist stigma, toward a cultural awakening that affirms the full humanity of survivors.

Living in communion: visible unity and the Porvoo Common Statement

Living in communion is no mere organizational measure; it means sharing in a common life that is anchored in love, solidarity and mutual accountability. In the classic vision of the ecumenical movement, this is expressed through the goal of a visible and structured unity. The Porvoo Common Statement, in providing the basis for fellowship between Anglican and Lutheran Churches in Europe, is comparable to this goal. However, on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the signing of the text, it should be asked if today’s Porvoo communion lives up to the aspirations in the Porvoo statement.

Hearing God’s Command

When we claim that the command of God as a moral norm is rationally intelligible, we mean that it is in principle knowable, that we can reason about it, and that we can hold one another accountable to it. Barth’s theological ethics accommodates all three of these requisites. He holds that although we do not strictly know the specific action God will command, we have an approximate knowledge of it, and that in our asking it of God we stand in the space where it can be heard. He also holds that although our moral reasoning does not give us a definitive answer to what God requires and that we must bring our reasons before God’s ultimate verdict on them, the consideration of reasons for and against a proposed action or course of action is essential to hearing God’s command. Finally, he holds that human beings are bound to one another in relations of mutual speaking and hearing God’s commands, and these relations are at least implicitly relations of mutual accountability for what we hear as God’s command.

The Command of God as a Moral Norm

Barth’s divine command ethics claims that God’s grace to human beings in Jesus Christ is the norm of human action. In Jesus Christ, God both poses and answers the question of the good of human action, which is the question of its conformity to grace. Rather than a norm of a distinctively Christian way of acting or form of life, Barth argues that this is a moral norm that pertains to human action as such. When moral philosophy considers the question of conformity to the good that is posed to human action, it implicitly attests the grace of God which poses this question. And when moral philosophy considers the answers to the question of the good that derive from reason or experience, it implicitly attests the grace of God as the answer to the question. In its explicit attestation of the grace of God as the norm of human action, theological ethics makes use of this implicit attestation in moral philosophy. Barth thus endorses the traditional position according to which theology articulates the moral norm with the assistance of philosophy. However, Barth’s claim that the norm of human action is a revealed norm, and not a rational norm that is clarified, specified, and extended by revelation, qualifies the goodness of the human creature, fails to secure the mutual accountability of those who are inside and outside the circle of revelation, and limits the grounds on which Christians and others cooperate with one another in moral endeavors.

Disclaiming Responsibility, Voicing Disagreements, and Negotiating Boundaries

This chapter introduces the novel category of ‘disclaimers’—distinctive normative acts which challenge third-party attributions of responsibility in a community governed by norms of mutual accountability. While the debate focuses on evasive and wrongful refusals to take responsibility for one’s wrongs, this chapter argues that disclaimers are fundamental modes of exercising normative powers, whose main functions are demanding recognition, responding to wrongs, voicing disagreement, exiting alienating conditions, and calling for a fair redistribution of specific responsibilities. In particular, understood as disclaimers, denials of responsibility are shown to be key modes of ethical and political empowerment, which play a significant role in producing normative changes and directing societal transformations.

Assessing 30 Years of Neoliberal Environmental Management in Chile

Neoliberal environmental policies operate through markets, including for carbon, water, ecosystem services, or—as in contemporary Chile—for environmental scientific knowledge. Chile illustrates how markets for science operate, such as for monitoring data or environmental impact assessments, and their negative impacts on public trust in science and on the state’s regulatory efforts. In a society governed by a market for science, environmental scientists cannot escape the suspicion that conflicts of interest compromise their independence and the credibility of their work. Chile’s neoliberal 1980 Constitution sustains this market for knowledge but will be reformed following national demonstrations in 2019. The health of Chile’s environment depends on a new constitution that democratizes both democracy and science. Rights of nature doctrines, as in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution, can provide the constitutional foundation for strong mutual accountability between science, the state, society, and nature.

Monitoring implementation of the Tokyo Convention on recognition: a multi-stakeholder approach to the internationalization of higher education in the Asia-Pacific

PurposeThe impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have transformed the global outlook for international higher education. Given the rapid shift to online learning, the Tokyo Convention in the Asia-Pacific entrusted to UNESCO has become an important policy framework to facilitate regional collaboration, authoritative information sharing and recognition of qualifications across diverse modes of learning. This paper examines the role of the Tokyo Convention to establish an inclusive platform for monitoring and collaborative governance of mobility and internationalization based on fair and transparent recognition policies and practices in the Asia-Pacific.Design/methodology/approachIn August 2019, a standardized survey instrument was sent by the Secretariat of the Tokyo Convention Committee at UNESCO Bangkok to competent recognition authorities in 46 countries in the Asia-Pacific, including the eight State Parties to the Tokyo Convention that ratified the Convention as of the reporting period. In total, qualitative data from n = 27 countries/states was received and analyzed to assess implementation of the Tokyo Convention throughout the region. The research design illustrates how normative instruments such as the Tokyo Convention are monitored and assessed over time.FindingsA multi-stakeholder approach based on collaborative governance is needed to effectively monitor implementation and implications of the Tokyo Convention for diverse higher education stakeholders in the Asia-Pacific region.Research limitations/implicationsImplications include establishing baseline data and methods for monitoring implementation of the Tokyo Convention. Based on collaborative governance theory, the paper explores potential for a multi-stakeholder approach to promote mutual accountability in the Asia-Pacific and to develop mechanisms for inclusive participation in the governance of the forthcoming Global Convention on recognition.Originality/valueAs the first systematic review of its kind, this paper includes a unique dataset and insights into UNESCO's methodology to monitor implementation of standard-setting instruments for qualifications recognition in the Asia-Pacific.

Assessing national WaSH targets through a water governance lens: a case study of the Sanitation and Water for All partnership commitments

Dysfunctional water, sanitation and hygiene (WaSH) systems are mainly determined by poor water governance, exacerbating inequalities and poverty. Multi-stakeholder partnerships provide an approach to more flexible and adaptive governance to explore these problems. In this article, national commitments made to improve WaSH, made through the Sanitation and Water for All (SWA) partnership's Mutual Accountability Mechanism, are examined through qualitative content analysis and guided by the SMART framework to assess the current target-setting. The analysis reveals that there are differences in the participation of the different constituencies regarding the number of stakeholders participating and their performance for measurable and time-bound commitments. This applies especially to research and learning and the private sector. Countries have prioritized commitments related to policy and strategy, efficiency and enabling conditions; further research should understand the linkages of the SWA commitments with other priority-setting processes at the national level. In sum, the commitments leave room for improvement to specify approaches to water governance in more detail and the chance to support the creation of sustainable and resilient systems with more diversified commitments from a wider range of partners.

Rethinking Social Roles: Conflict and Modern Life

Does sociology have anything to gain by returning to the concept of social role? Has this concept been irretrievably damaged by its significance in functionalist theory? This article aims to recover the role concept through a consideration of alternative perspectives on normativity, illustrated through research on motherhood. A pragmatist re-conception of role is defended as a way of focusing on those aspects of social structures which exert normative authority over agents, while remaining open to some degree of interpretation. This perspective treats roles not as fixed mechanisms of functional coordination or social reproduction, but instead as variable sites of mutual accountability. The article argues that a pragmatist version of the role concept supports explanation of non-determined agency and complex, uncertain and conflictual forms of normative authority. Treated in these terms, the role concept offers a valuable route to understanding the creative quality of agency and normativity.

Roots and Routes Toward Decoloniality Within and Outside Psychology Praxis

Recent psychology scholarship has engaged topics of decoloniality, from conferences to journal publications to edited volumes. These efforts are examples of the decolonial turn, a paradigm shift oriented to interrupting the colonial legacies of power, knowledge, and being. As critical community psychologists, we contend that decoloniality/decolonization is an epistemic and ontological process of continuously disrupting the coloniality of power that is the hegemonic Western Eurocentric approach to theory, research, and practice. To document and critically understand this process of colonial disruption—the roots and routes toward decoloniality within and outside of community psychology—we collected information at conference workshops and an open-ended online survey disseminated across international contexts. Through an analysis of two conference workshops (Chile; United States) and a survey, we describe four orientations that capture how participants engage with a decolonizing praxis. The four orientations include Generating knowledge With and from Within, Sociohistorical Intersectional Consciousness, Relationships of Mutual Accountability, and Unsettling Subjectivities of Power/Privilege. The coloniality of power, which characterizes the ethics and tensions within the discipline, is uprooted through these orientations, thereby enabling possibilities to trek a route away from colonial theory, research, and practice, and toward the decolonial turn in community psychology.