Sex Education: Need of the Hour

Sex education, despite the everlasting force of modernisation in other regards, has remained a contentious issue, especially in India. This short note attempts to briefly explore the history of sexuality and how societal perspectives and expectations have evolved with time. The importance of sex education and sensitisation cannot go ignored for much longer. This paper makes reference to the recommendations of prominent international organisations and makes recommendations of its own, all with the objective of limiting stigma and precipitating sexual/reproductive welfare.

Homoconjugation in Triptycenes: An Inquiry Through Photochromism

The spatial disposition of three benzene rings in triptycene permits through-space overlap of the orbitals of fused benzene sp2 carbons, leading to ‘homoconjugation’; the latter is a contentious issue in...

Preferences in Between: Moderates in the Catalan Secessionist Conflict

Recent research on territorial preferences focuses on explaining who supports or opposes independence. However, this research overlooks the relevance of an “intermediate” category of citizens who may oppose the territorial status quo of a sub-state territory but not support independence. We use evidence from the critical case of Catalonia to illustrate the relevance of individuals with such preferences for policies and outcomes highly relevant to secessionist conflicts. We present four sets of findings using two-wave panel data from December 2017 (just prior to the December regional elections when Catalan independence was the most salient and contentious issue) and September 2018. First, we find that a sizable plurality within Catalonia supports greater autonomy short of independence; conventional sociodemographic variables explaining support for independence do not strongly account for this preference. Second, such pro-autonomy individuals have considerably more intermediate attitudes regarding the key “on the ground” actions that the Spanish and Catalan governments pursued during the crucial independence drive in 2017. They were more opposed than pro-independence individuals to the unilateral independence efforts, and more opposed than pro-status quo individuals to the Spanish government’s actions to counter these efforts. Third, they expressed emotions around the secessionist conflict similar to pro-status quo individuals. Finally, using an embedded survey experiment, we find that pro-autonomy individuals are more trusting of both the central and regional governments regarding their abiding by an agreement to resolve the conflict, and are less easily “polarized” through priming. Overall, these findings indicate the importance of further analyzing individuals with intermediate territorial views in secessionist conflicts.

position of culture in English language teaching

This thesis investigates the overlapping relationship between the community and English-language teaching in a descriptive manner. It sets out the various points of view and interpretations of linguistic scholars on the contentious issue of incorporating Culture into ESL/EFL classrooms. Although some accept that in today's globalized world, we must open our ESL/EFL learners to other cultures as part of their ESL/EFL learning, others disagree and dispute the value of doing so. Some are more radical, seeing it as linguistic hegemony that can be avoided. Including several observational findings, the present thesis also addresses the perspectives and views of scholars on the convergence of language teaching and community.

Was Chagas disease responsible for Darwin’s illness? The overlooked eco-epidemiological context in Chile

The source of Darwin’s illness has been a contentious issue in the literature for almost 70 years. Different causal factors have been invoked to account for his symptoms, including Chagas disease. The Chagas hypothesis is based upon Darwin’s diary, in which he narrates his experience with kissing bugs, the main vector of the protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi, the etiological agent of Chagas disease. In this contribution, we examine the consistency of the “Chagas disease hypothesis” in the light of current ecological and epidemiological knowledge of the disease in Chile. According to his diary and letters, during his overland trips, Darwin slept in rural houses and outdoors for 128 days in a “hyperendemic” area for Chagas disease, more than exposing him to kissing bugs. This observation conveys a likely additional source of infection than previously considered, which might reinforce the idea that Chagas disease contributed to Darwin’s manifest physical deterioration.

Moral Judgements of Junior Sports Sponsorships: An Emerging Mediator of Sponsor Goodwill

The sponsorship of junior sport is a contentious issue with community concerns raised about the appropriateness of some marketing targetted at children. Parents and coaches are guardians of junior sports players and often faced with a moral dilemma. On the one hand they know sponsors, who are trying to generate goodwill through providing financial or in-kind support, are crucial to the affordability of junior sports when competition for securing sponsorships is intense. On the other hand, they hold concerns that some sponsors may exploit their access to these young, vulnerable players. Guardians are caught at a crossroads with equally undesirable alternatives—financially unviable junior sports without sponsors or junior sports with potentially exploitative sponsors. Our study fills a gap in the literature where the tensions of commercial sponsorship agendas and moral concerns in sponsorship has not been well explored with our study being the first to apply the construct of moral judgements in a sponsorship model. Mixed methodology is used to examine the role that moral judgements play in determining sponsor goodwill. A qualitative study ( n = 18) informed an online survey ( n = 306) of Australian junior sports guardians. Structural equation modelling revealed that guardians’ moral judgements mediated the relationships between sponsor fit, perceived sponsor altruism and the outcome variable, sponsorship goodwill. The findings of this study extend scholarly understanding of consumers’ appraisal of sponsorships and provide useful insights to guide practitioners in sponsorship decision making, particularly in contexts that stimulate community interest or concerns.

Hegemony and mediations in melodrama of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema

<p>The influence of the mass media is a contentious issue, especially in regards to the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema in the mid-twentieth century. These melodramatic films have often been viewed by critics as instruments of hegemony. However, melodrama contains an inherent ambivalence, as it not only has a potential for imparting dominant messages but also offers a platform from which to defy and exceed the restraining boundaries imposed by dominant ideologies. An examination of a number of important Golden Age films, especially focussing on their contradictory tensions and their portrayals of modernity, illustrates this. The Nosotros los pobres series serves as an example of how melodramatic elements are incorporated into popular Mexican films and how melodrama could be used as an ideological tool to encourage the state’s goals. Similarly, the maternal melodrama Cuando los hijos se van uses the family to represent the processes of conflict and negotiation that Mexicans experienced as a result of modernization. Consistent with the reactionary nature of melodrama and its simultaneous suggestive potential, the film combines a Catholic worldview with an underlying allegory of moving forward. The issue of progress is also at the centre of a number of films starring iconic actor Pedro Infante, which offer an avenue for exploring what modernisation might mean for male identity in Mexico. His films show a masculinity in transition and how lower-class men could cope with this change. Likewise, the depiction of women in Golden Age film overall supports the stabilising goals of the 1940s Revolutionary government, while also providing some transgressive figures. Therefore, these films helped the Mexican audience process the sudden modernization of the post-Revolutionary period, which was in the state’s best interest; however, the masses were also able to reconfigure the messages of these films and find their own sense of meaning in them.</p>

Hegemony and mediations in melodrama of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema

<p>The influence of the mass media is a contentious issue, especially in regards to the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema in the mid-twentieth century. These melodramatic films have often been viewed by critics as instruments of hegemony. However, melodrama contains an inherent ambivalence, as it not only has a potential for imparting dominant messages but also offers a platform from which to defy and exceed the restraining boundaries imposed by dominant ideologies. An examination of a number of important Golden Age films, especially focussing on their contradictory tensions and their portrayals of modernity, illustrates this. The Nosotros los pobres series serves as an example of how melodramatic elements are incorporated into popular Mexican films and how melodrama could be used as an ideological tool to encourage the state’s goals. Similarly, the maternal melodrama Cuando los hijos se van uses the family to represent the processes of conflict and negotiation that Mexicans experienced as a result of modernization. Consistent with the reactionary nature of melodrama and its simultaneous suggestive potential, the film combines a Catholic worldview with an underlying allegory of moving forward. The issue of progress is also at the centre of a number of films starring iconic actor Pedro Infante, which offer an avenue for exploring what modernisation might mean for male identity in Mexico. His films show a masculinity in transition and how lower-class men could cope with this change. Likewise, the depiction of women in Golden Age film overall supports the stabilising goals of the 1940s Revolutionary government, while also providing some transgressive figures. Therefore, these films helped the Mexican audience process the sudden modernization of the post-Revolutionary period, which was in the state’s best interest; however, the masses were also able to reconfigure the messages of these films and find their own sense of meaning in them.</p>

Traditions Can Be Changed

Whether and to what extent African states and societies have been able to break away from colonial impact is a still contentious issue. Harald Barre considers newspapers and academic activism in Tanzania as forums in which the project of an independent African nation was shaped through heated debates. Examining the changing discourses on race and gender in the 1960s and 1970s, he reveals that equating difference with inequality in the national narrative was fiercely contested. Pervasive images rooted in colonialism were thus challenged and in some cases fundamentally transformed by journalists, students, (inter)national scholars, (inter)national events and the promise of an egalitarian socialist state.

Taking Sides

From the 1970s on, the treatment of modern science as simultaneously an induction-based account of experience and a deduction-based account of reality became an increasingly contentious issue in the academic world. A great deal was at stake in how one answered the question of whether scientific knowledge was objective and validated by its correspondence with reality. Respect and privileged social status were accorded to science, not to mention public support for research. At the same time, however, scientists faced the more fundamental question of whether there existed a neutral arbiter of questions relating to truth, or at least truths about the world. Philosophers and social scientists lined up on both sides of this issue, either attacking scientific knowledge as a socially constructed belief system or defending it as objective and correlated with reality.