Marxist-inflected praxis in Paulo Freire's political pedagogy

This paper discusses and explains Freire's Marxist-inflected concept of praxis as developed throughout his oeuvre. A key feature, deriving from Marx and others, notably Gramsci, is the positing of a dialectical relationship between consciousness and the world. This is at the heart of his celebrated pedagogical approach. Praxis dates back to the time of the ancient Greek ‘civilisation’ Aristotle in primis. It involves an intellectual effort, a reflection on one’s individual and collective lifeworld. These are the reflecting on action processes that can ultimately collectively lead to political change. Praxis lies at the heart of Marxian and Gramscian political thought and strategy. It is the kernel of Paulo Freire's pedagogical politics; it differs from simply practice. This pedagogical politics involves the codification of this reflection on action into theory. It, in turn, entails evaluating relevant theory against the very reflection on everyday action. The world of action is life itself with all its dimensions, including community living and work, but extends well beyond.

Imagination Reduces False Memories for Everyday Action Sentences: Evidence From Pragmatic Inferences

Human memory can be unreliable, and when reading a sentence with a pragmatic implication, such as “the karate champion hit the cinder block,” people often falsely remember that the karate champion “broke” the cinder block. Yet, research has shown that encoding instructions affect the false memories we form. On the one hand, instructing participants to imagine themselves manipulating the to-be-recalled items increase false memories (imagination inflation effect). But on the other hand, instructions to imagine have reduced false memories in the DRM paradigm (imagination facilitation effect). Here, we explored the effect of imaginal encoding with pragmatic inferences, a way to study false memories for information about everyday actions. Across two experiments, we manipulated imaginal encoding through the instructions given to participants and the after-item filler task (none vs. math operations). In Experiment 1, participants were either assigned to the encoding condition of imagine+no filler; pay attention+math; or memorize+math. In Experiment 2, the encoding instructions (imagine vs. memorize) and the filler task (none vs. math) were compared across four separate conditions. Results from the two experiments showed that imagination instructions lead to better memory, by showing a higher proportion of correct responses and better performance in a memory benefit index. Similarly, a significant reduction of false memories was observed across both experiments, even though a complementary Bayesian analysis only supported this conclusion for Experiment 1. The findings show that imaginal encoding improves memory, suggesting the engagement of a distinctiveness heuristic and source-monitoring process.

Behavioral and Neural Representations en route to Intuitive Action Understanding

When we observe another person's actions, we process many kinds of information -- from how their body moves to the intention behind their movements. What kinds of information underlie our intuitive understanding about how similar actions are to each other? To address this question, we measured the intuitive similarities among a large set of everyday action videos using multi-arrangement experiments, then used a modeling approach to predict this intuitive similarity space along three hypothesized properties. We found that similarity in the actors' inferred goals predicted the intuitive similarity judgments the best, followed by similarity in the actors' movements, with little contribution from the videos' visual appearance. In opportunistic fMRI analyses assessing brain-behavior correlations, we found evidence for an action processing hierarchy, in which these three kinds of action similarities are reflected in the structure of brain responses along a posterior-to-anterior gradient on the lateral surface of the visual cortex. Altogether, this work joins existing literature suggesting that humans are naturally tuned to process others' intentions, and that the visuo-motor cortex computes the perceptual precursors of the higher-level representations over which intuitive action perception operates.

The View from the Kitchen: Women’s ‘Official’ Life in the Family

This chapter covers official domestic practices. Orthodox Judaism is firmly rooted in the world of everyday action: several central commandments and their halakhic elaboration include activities such as the preparation and consumption of food, the observance of the weekly sabbath and numerous festivals, dress, education, and the recital of blessings before and after eating and in other daily contexts. The home is explicitly designated as a sacred sphere, to a greater extent than in Christian and general British culture. The conception, nurturing, and education of children are often seen as central to the Jewish woman's role, even though no formal commandments are entailed. Most Orthodox women see their domestic role in very different, more nuanced, and complex terms, viewing it as central to their identity and to Jewish continuity, but not as the only sphere in which they should be active religiously. Many of them, particularly the Modern Orthodox, have indeed internalized feminist arguments and seek to extend their religious lives outside the boundaries of the home, and to take a more active religious role within it, but they all share the conviction that the creation of a Jewish home and the raising of children to be good human beings and faithful Jews is a task of vital importance.

Everyday action research for complex times: A peacebuilder’s guide

In the midst of the increasing intensity of our world, peacebuilding practice is rapidly transforming. These changes come with a growing recognition that complexity is a new type of problem that requires new approaches and responses. As conflict resolution and peacebuilding actors are increasingly adopting complexity thinking and approaches to program implementation, I propose that we can learn to better master complexity by how we attend to our everyday experience. This, I suggest, is something that peacebuilding practitioners can do as a form of ongoing inquiry into the first-person territory of relational, contextual information that surrounds and includes the problems we care about and seek to address. I use a difficult incident from my experience to demonstrate some of what makes complexity so challenging and to explore ways we can learn to deal with these challenges. In keeping with the emancipatory and self-reflective traditions of action research and conflict resolution, an everyday action research is my way of harnessing inquiry and practice to expand capacities to meet the challenges we face in an increasingly complex world.

Marketing in a socially connected world: the impact of value on sharing of commercial videos

The viral marketing offers answers for the structuring and disseminating fast and large-scale information in favor of content, products, and their brands. Sustained by the growth of technological users, social networks and mobile technology, video viewing, posts, and sharing, it has become an everyday action. Thus, the organizations started to produce commercial videos and dissemination them in the social networks, where consumer users share what they identify themselves with. Lister (2018) highlights that a video that is socially shared generates 1.200% more shares than the text and images combined. Video is a trend in terms of online communication, as millions of dollars are spent on these efforts to persuade and generate an impact on their audiences target monthly (Lister, 2018). However, most of the studies about video sharing are related to consumer content, not firm generated content. In this sense, the central objective of this study is to identify the antecedents of commercial video sharing and its impact on the consumers' attitudes. The videos that were mostly seen on YouTube in 2017 and the top of mind brands were selected as the research's corpus. A total of 368 questionnaires were collected, preceded by the viewing of the videos that were selected. The results reveal significant impacts of the entertainment value and utility value with the intention of sharing videos, but the social value has no significant impact. In this sense, this study contributed by identifying content and persuasion strategies for firms in order to earn media from sharing of commercial videos, which every day more represent a larger share in the organizations' communication budget.

Making Sense of Assignment

The primary aim of this paper is to narrow down the description of how school leaders interpret the assign-ment (the task) and identify the markers for how they look upon the conditions of doing a good job in Sweden. The aim is in the context of practice-based and process-oriented research. We use complexity and complexity theories to frame the emerging practice of leading and organizing. This is in contrast to techno-cratic homogenization—that is, law texts, steering documents, documentation, standardized methods, plan-ning, and ceremonies. A questionnaire was conducted with three open questions (n=363 out of a possible 548 participants) and four focus groups (n=21). Complexity, dilemmas, and inconsistency emerge in the respondents’ answers the closer they are to everyday action. The results show that complexity theories put focus on a conflict between the image of schools as complicated and complex. Complicated is accompanied by generalizing and weak contextualizing of control systems, standardized methods, planning, law texts, and evidence-based education—that is, the concept of technocratic homogenization. Complexity theories emphasize the life in organizations, everyday practice as leaders, and a conflict between weak and robust contextualizing from the perspective as practice-based and process-oriented research.