Sympathy for Oswald Mosley: Politics of Reading and Historical Resemblance in the Moral Imagination of an English Literary Society

The mid-twentieth-century English novelist, Henry Williamson, wrote nature stories but also romantic and historical fiction, including a fifteen-volume saga that contains a largely favorable characterization of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists. This essay considers the challenge of such a fascist character through the prism of the literary imagination of Williamson readers, and more specifically through my longstanding ethnographic work with an English literary society constituted in the author’s name. I am centrally concerned with how literary society members deal with the positive depiction of the Mosley-based character through the stages of the reading process that they identify and describe. Do the immersive values commonly attached to their solitary reading culture, for instance, assist or further problematize that engagement? What role does their subsequent, shared practice of character evaluation play? As well as considering the treatment of characters as objects of sympathy, I explore the vital sympathies that for literary society members tie characters together with historical persons. Across the essay I dialogue with anthropological literature on exemplars, historical commentaries on the fascist cult of leadership, and finally with the philosophical claims that Nussbaum makes for the moral and political consequences of fiction reading.

Intergenerational leisure and family reconciliation

Scientific literature suggests the contribution to family reconciliation as a motivation for leisure shared by grandparents and grandchildren. However, there are some discrepant results. The study aimed to examine the need for family reconciliation as a practical motivation for grandparents’ and grandchildren’s shared leisure, and its linkage with its frequency, the geographical residential area, and the cohabitation of both generations in the same home. A questionnaire was administered to 357 grandparents of children aged 6 to 12 years residing in northern Spain, and a descriptive study and inferential analysis of the data were performed. The results placed the need for family reconciliation in an intermediate position, below the motivations of entertainment and emotional motivations, but above those related to co-learning and the absence of other people to perform such activities. The need for family reconciliation is associated with the frequency of shared practice, but not with the geographical residential area or the fact that both generations cohabitate at the same address. The possible exceptionality of the current situation, within the framework of COVID-19, which may have produced significant alterations in the grandparent-grandchildren relationship, is discussed, with the consequent need to continue this line of inquiry. [1] Throughout the document, an attempt will be made to use inclusive language, although "under Law 3/2007 of 22 March, for the effective equality of women and men, any reference to positions, persons, or groups included in this document in the masculine, are to be understood as including both women and men.”

Health Dialogue Experiences of Students, Teachers and School Nurses in Swedish Health-promoting Schools

According to Swedish law, all students are to be offered health dialogues with a school nurse, which helps to promote students’ health literacy. However, research shows that the health dialogues are not being used to their fullest potential. To explore how health dialogues are experienced by school actors – students, teachers and school nurses. The 93 participants from 14 municipalities in northern Sweden wrote open letters sharing their experiences with health dialogues. Phenomenological analysis resulted in two themes with three sub-themes each that describe well-functioning health-promoting schools in which health promotion was seen as a shared practice among staff. In contrast, the participants expressed frustration or resignation with the challenges connected to health dialogues. When given a voice, school actors paint an informative collective picture of health dialogues. Based on our findings, we argue that health dialogues can \promote students' health literacy and enable collaboration between different actors within educational systems. Furthermore, promoting health in school must be viewed as a common assignment for all school staff, and support from school leadership is needed to systematically use the results from health dialogues to inform effective health promotion practice.

School Nurse Poverty Education: Why It Is Important to Your Practice

School nurses are seeing increased numbers of children who are living in poverty. The Missouri Community Action Program Poverty Simulation was presented to school nurses to increase their awareness of what it might be like to live in poverty and the related healthcare barriers. Participants shared their reactions and knowledge gained in the simulation in a postparticipation survey with the simulation facilitators. Some participants shared practice changes that they made as a result of their participation in the simulation, which included use of additional referral resources, being less judgmental, and increased empathy.

A multi-level perspective on trust, collaboration and knowledge sharing cultures in a highly formalized organization

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate organizational culture’s perceived importance and practice as it unfolds across hierarchal layers of a formalized organization. Organizational culture is important in innovation and change and becomes significant if its importance and practice are shared across all levels of an organization. Highly formalized organizations are not an exception to this. Yet, there is a shortage of empirical evidence on how the organizational culture’s perceived importance and practice unfold across the senior-management, middle-management and operational levels of a formalized organization. Design/methodology/approach Applying a theoretical frame incorporating information asymmetry, knowledge sharing and cultural participation, this paper examined three important facets of culture, namely, trust, collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Using a Jordanian bank’s case study, this paper collected data using a mixed-methods approach; quantitative to identify variations across levels and, subsequently, qualitative to explore the nuanced patterns in the perceived importance and practice of the three facets across different organizational levels in the context of a formalized organization. Findings The findings suggest that the importance and practice of the three cultural facets are shared, as well as differentiated across organizational levels based on purposiveness, person/situation-dependency and nature of work and nature/relevance of knowledge. Originality/value Using a multi-level lens provided insight not yet gained by current work in the field. This allowed us to unearth nuanced differences in the perception of organizational culture across organizational hierarchies. The paper contributes to the scholarship on organizational culture in the context of formalized organizations and to managerial practice by offering insights on how a shared practice of trust, collaboration and knowledge sharing is distributed across organizational levels, not captured before. This paper also suggests propositions related to each of three cultural facets, not spelled out before.

Joint Action without Mutual Beliefs

Joint action among human beings is characterized by using elaborate cognitive feats, such as representing the mental states of others about a certain state of affairs. It is still debated how these capacities evolved in the hominid lineage. I suggest that the consolidation of a shared practice over time can foster the predictability of other’s behavior. This might facilitate the evolutionary passage from inferring what others might know by simply seeing them and what they are viewing towards a mutual awareness of each other’s beliefs. I will examine the case for cooperative hunting in one chimpanzee community and argue that it is evidence that they have the potential to achieve common ground, suggesting that the consolidation of a practice might have supported the evolution of higher social cognition in the hominid lineage.

English as an Academic Lingua Franca: discourse hybridity and meaning multiplicity in an international Anglophone HE institution

Factors of globalization have led to a constant rise of English as an academic lingua franca (ELFA). This is evidenced not only by the increasing use of English in scientific publications, but also in the attraction held by Anglophone countries as destinations of high-achieving international students and the rise of English-medium instruction (EMI) outside of Anglophone institutions. While ongoing research in ELF has shown that the native-only norms are being challenged through the changed realities of English use, little attention has so far been paid to how similarly or differently ELFA is conceptualized and practiced across academic disciplines within the same international Anglophone University. For this end, this work presents data on the English for Special Purposes/English for Academic Purposes and content teachers’ perceptions on English and how this, in turn, shapes their classroom discourse as a shared practice among members of the same academic discipline in a highly international UK-based university. Findings suggest that ELFA is characterized with its versatility and volatility as part of the dynamic nature of disciplinary norms for meaning-making and knowledge-construction practices.

Grounding together: Shared reality and cleansing practices

We propose that cleansing behaviors and other acts of separation or connection have more powerful effects when they are grounded in shared practices – in a shared reality. We conceptualize sensorimotor and shared reality effects as synergistic. Most potent should be physical behaviors performed collectively as a shared practice (e.g., communal bathing), grounded both in sensorimotor experience and in shared reality.

6 The Quest of Participation: Studying from the Perspective of Practice Theory

Instead of viewing study as a matter of effective learning—as it is done in the current discourse on “digitalization,” we approach study from the viewpoint of “participation,” that is, on the grounds of a shared practice of world disclosure or world building. Drawing on a phenomenological attitude, we describe various study practices, such as reading and writing and listening and speaking in their correlational and suspenseful constitution. The (ambiguous) affects and attunements and how they bring about intellectual involvement point toward our main conclusion: study is about opening the space of knowledge (re-)formation. The delay and deceleration of study points to the university as a liminal institution (Waldenfels)—an institution that does not close itself off from that which still has to be studied.