Promoting Climate Actions: A Cognitive-Constraints Approach

Many Americans do not view climate change as a threat requiring urgent action. Moreover, among U.S. conservatives, higher science literacy is paradoxically associated with higher anthropogenic climate-change skepticism. The present study harnessed the power of two cognitive constraints essential to belief formation and revision to design educational materials that can mitigate these problems. The key role of the coherence and causal-invariance constraints, which map onto two narrative proclivities that anthropologists have identified as universal, predicts that climate-change information embedded in scientific explanations of (indisputable) everyday observations within a coherent personal moral narrative, juxtaposed with reasoners’ typically less coherent explanations, will be more persuasive than climate-change information by itself. An experiment conducted in U.S. states with the highest level of climate skepticism demonstrates that across the political spectrum, conveying science information using materials that leverage these constraints raises both appreciation of science and willingness to take pro-climate actions.

The 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda

This study, written collaboratively with a native Rwandan author, briefly recalls the historical reality from a Rwandan perspective and addresses the consequences of the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Furthermore, the way the Western world was a passive spectator to the economic, political and social pillage and Genocide that occurred in the last part of the 20th Century, that was, in 1994, is discussed. How is reconciliation fostered in the communities across Rwanda? In particular, the sites and communities where massacres were held? Strong community ties and community being central to social work practice is observed in most East African countries, with no exception to Rwanda. While social work pedagogy is something new and possibly introduced by Western idiom, the tradition of welfare and mutual caring (would have been/ has been part) of the Kinyarwanda culture, language, and manner of living. What factors have worked for reconciliation, reconstruction of the society? How were people made to understand violence, and what did they replace it with? How is the post-genocide moral narrative shaped? The traditional indigenous processes that have been utilised, including the Gacaca, unique court process, are briefly discussed. How do people implant hate into people? By the same token, how do people put peace and love into people? These are a few questions that were central to this study throughout.

Nathalie Skowronek « a la recherche de Max » : Construction litteraire et autometatextualite dans les ouvrages de la 3e generation de la Shoah

The third generation survivors of the World War II genocide of the European Jews withstand, analyse and create literary texts about the Holocaust, a historical event, which was not endured by them directly but experienced through scientific papers and creative literature. Thanks to Nathalie Skowronek, a novelist living in Brussels, and her publication of Max en apparence (2013) and La Shoah de Monsieur Durand (2015), we can gain some insight into the social and literary reality of Jewish genocide memory and into its intergenerational transmission. Firstly, we will carefully analyse the approach used by this author in the composition of a biographical text about her grandfather’s reconstruction of events. After that, using an intertextual approach, we will analyse formal and moral narrative considerations of the authoress which govern the literary reconstruction grandfather’s biography.

Paris, the End of the Party in Alberto Blest Gana’s Los Trasplantados

Los Trasplantados [the Transplanted; the Uprooted] (1904) relates the saga of the Canalejas, a Hispanic American family that travels to France to educate their children. With the sole purpose of entering the ranks of the European aristocracy, they ultimately sacrifice one of their daughters by way of marriage. The family patriarch’s entrepreneurial vocation for social climbing, which served him well as he successfully rose into the ranks of the provincial elite in his country of origin, collapses in Paris. The Canalejas’ initial expectations of a journey give way to aspirations to integrate into Parisian high society. The narration develops as a moral narrative of the social, ethical and cultural wreckage endured by those who not only aspire to enjoy Europe at the end of the nineteenth century but also to integrate their lives into a city whose image they forged in Latin America. They sacrifice everything that connects them to their countries of origin, except for their ambition to advance socially and be recognised in their new communities and at home. Above all, the children are worse off, losing their places in a nineteenth-century vision of national aspiration.

Finding Resonance Amid Trauma: Moral Injury and the Role of Religion Among Christian Post-9/11 U.S. Veterans

Recent scholarship examines the relationship between moral injury and religion but rarely analyzes social processes at work therein. This article uses data from interviews with 47 post-9/11 veterans who once or currently identified as Christian to explore how religious beliefs and practices preempt, mitigate, or exacerbate moral injury. While many veterans experienced potentially morally injurious events, the differences between those with moral injury and those without depended on whether they could find resonance with meaning-making toolkits amid trauma. Dissonance stirred by incoherence in one’s moral narrative and betrayal of significant relationships spurred manifestations of moral injury. Those who achieved resonance relied on religious moral frames they brought with them or those supplied by military culture, or they engaged in explicit moral deliberation. This study reveals a complex process of belief maintenance during moral crises that extends and challenges previous examinations of culture in action, resonance, and moral injury.

The Subject of the Newgate Novel: Crime, Interest, What Novels Are About

This chapter examines a central moment in the development of moral narrative practices—one that is, at the same time, a moment in the coming into being of “the Victorian novel.” Looking at Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and the “Newgate novel” controversy of the 1830s, it offers an example of one way in which the experience of diachronic reading could be interpreted in an explicitly moral fashion. Oliver Twist was to be distinguished from other similar novels, and particularly from William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard, because of the ways in which it appealed to the moral sensibilities of its reader: “natural sentiment,” “moral sense.” The general implications seem clear enough: Oliver Twist is more appealing to its readers' moral feelings because it has other, “healthier,” focuses than crime alone. According to the novel's reviewers, Oliver Twist might feature crime, but unlike Jack Sheppard, crime is not the novel's subject. Ultimately, what a survey of the discourse surrounding Newgate novels makes clear is how debated this question of subject matter actually was.

Reframing Morality through Youthful Voices

Chapter Four analyzes the interactional practices of young Lamu residents in a variety of contexts. Particularly, it looks at how young people are able to differently present themselves by drawing upon a broad linguistic repertoire and upon their awareness of the evaluation of different language varieties. For example, a young Swahili woman, in an attempt to speak with authority, shifts between English-infused Standard Swahili and local Swahili dialects when addressing her peers or elders respectively. The chapter thus shows how young people use linguistic tactics to negotiate new social positions, but also how a moral narrative of modernity can be linked to or mediated within linguistic practices. The analysis simultaneously raises the question of reception and whether young people’s strategic self-positionings are always successful.

Punitive and preventive justice in an era of profiling, smart prediction and practical preclusion: three key questions

In the context of a technology-driven algorithmic approach to criminal justice, this paper responds to the following three questions: (1) what reasons are there for treating liberal values and human rights as guiding for punitive justice; (2) is preventive justice comparable to punitive justice (such that the guiding values of the latter should be applied to the former); and (3) what should we make of preventive measures that rely not so much on rules and orders, but on ‘technological management’ (where the preventive strategy is focused on eliminating practical options)? Responding to the first question, a Gewirthian-inspired theory of punishment is sketched – a theory that is, broadly speaking, supportive of liberal values and respect for human rights. What makes this theory apodictic for any human agent is that it demands respect for the very conditions on which any articulation of agency is predicated. With regard to the second question, we indicate how a Gewirthian view of the relationship between punitive and preventive justice supports the logic of referring to the principles that guide the former as a benchmark for the latter; and we suggest some particular principles of preventive justice where the restrictions are targeted at individual agents (whether in their own right or as members of classes). Finally, we suggest that, although technological management of crime changes the complexion of the regulatory environment in ways that might be a challenge to a Gewirthian moral community, it should not be categorically rejected. Crucially, technological management, like other preventive strategies, needs to be integrated into the community's moral narrative and authorised only to the extent that it is compatible with the governing moral principles.