Interweaving positive and critical perspectives in management learning and teaching

Management learning is increasingly and rightfully called upon to address societal challenges beyond narrow concerns of economic performance. Within that agenda, we describe the generative aims of a special issue devoted to interweaving positive and critical perspectives in management learning and teaching. The five articles that comprise the issue describe the prospects for such interplay across a range of empirical and theoretical contexts. Together, these contributions suggest a way forward for work that is at once critical, positive, and reflexive. We identify key themes for future directions: the generative potential of contrarian learning dynamics, an ethics-first focus on ecological and human well-being, and the prospects of scholarly practice for systemic activism.

Disruptions, Decolonial Desire and Diaspora: A Provocation toward a Pacific Queer Worldmaking Scholarly Practice in Aotearoa–New Zealand

Pacific queer scholarship is underrepresented within Pacific research communities in Aotearoa–New Zealand. What does exist is either hypervisible or centres on narratives of oppression, both of which are archetypes that can deny the complexity of Pacific queer communities. As two queer Samoan scholars raised in the Aotearoa–New Zealand diasporic setting, we offer a provocation that tests the opportunities (and limits) queer theoretics provide for Pacific research. Through a combination of poetry, vignettes, and theory (queer and straight), as well as reflections, we intentionally and generatively transgress heteronormative, exclusionary and static boundaries that still exists within Pacific research in New Zealand.

Radical Islam in the Western Academy

Scholarly interest in radical Islam is long-standing and crosses multiple disciplines. Yet, while the labelling of Islam and Muslim actors as ‘radical’ is extensive, this has not been interrogated as a particular scholarly practice. And while studies of non-Western radicalism have grown in recent years, cross-cultural analysis of radicalism as a particular concept in political thought has been neglected. This article aims to begin to address this question, with reference to radical Islam. By treating radicalism as a meta-concept, it identifies radical Islam as a malleable and composite category that is constituted by, and made legible through, conceptual properties associated with four discourses in the study of radicalism with origins in the Western academy: Euro-radicalism, identified with the European left and critical theory; fundamentalism; radicalisation; and liberalism. I argue that radical Islam is under-theorised and over-determined as a scholarly category. This can be explained by how concepts originating in the Western academy to address Western contexts and phenomena function as master frameworks, narratives, or pivots against or around which radical Islam is defined. This is the case even when Eurocentrism is contested by critical theorists who tend to reproduce it because they do not abandon Western conceptions of radicalism but rather draw on them. Academic accounts of radical Islam also authenticate Islam by advancing selective, strategic or apologetic descriptions of what constitutes radicalism. In these ways, critical scholarship, including within IR, can also be insufficiently attentive to marginal and heterodox voices that fall outside hegemonic conceptions of Islamic normativity.

Marginalia Transcription and Scholarly Culture in the Qing Dynasty

In the Qing, transcription of marginalia became common scholarly practice, involving a number of different people who created a new reading culture. This article follows the marginalia trail of scholar and calligrapher He Zhuo 何焯 through various transcribers and others involved in the process: He's disciples, later generations of scholars, bibliophiles, calligraphers, and booksellers. Connected through He's and others' marginalia across time and space, these transcribers established a network for the efficient transmission of information, knowledge, and thought. Transcription of such marginalia created a unique book culture that shaped scholarship, thought, and society in the Qing and produced critical texts that are still read today.

Byzantijnse geleerden over Aristophanes

This article studies the reception of the comedies of the Athenian playwright Aristophanes in 12th-century Byzantium. It takes as its starting point various scholarly and didactic texts that facilitated this reception. These texts were written by Gregory of Corinth, John Tzetzes and Eustathius of Thessaloniki, who all used Aristophanes, and ancient literature more generally, in their teaching and scholarly practice. This article explores (1) what moral functions Byzantine scholars ascribe to ancient drama; (2) how they instruct Byzantine writers to weave elements of humour and ridicule into their own work by either imitating Aristophanes’ techniques or quoting his verses; (3) how they use the Athenian playwright as a model for correct atticizing language; (4) and how Tzetzes engages on a personal level with Aristophanes as a historical figure and with the comedies he wrote. This examination of the reception of Aristophanes in the work of Gregory, Tzetzes and Eustathius thus demonstrates the versatility of the Byzantine reception of ancient comedy.

Failing Is Not an Option, It Is the Only Option: Critical Politics as a Time of Contradiction and Failure

Questions regarding the political significance of international relations (IR) and how scholarly practice relates to/constitutes a political practice appear newly resonant, but are longstanding concerns. This article utilizes the growing literature on temporality within international politics to analyze the political potential of these intellectual interventions and generate new ways of framing scholarly practice. We observe two trends within the field. First, IR as a discipline remains largely—although not exclusively—imagined as an English-language discipline generated by scholars in the Global North. Each area's political discourse is currently dominated by fears surrounding foundational political and institutional change due to the rise of racialized authoritarianism within these self-imagined democratic societies. Despite these purportedly dramatic developments, there has not been a similarly dramatic shift in the scholarly relationship with politics. Scholars continue to successfully intervene in their collective presents, but scholarship itself remains oriented toward enduring claims that accumulate knowledge and resist the possibility of “failure.” This paper theorizes the temporality of critical intervention to better relate positively to the bodies that co-constitute our political present. Ultimately, this paper concludes by arguing for a reconsideration of contradiction and failure as frames for thinking scholarly practice in time.

Comparative Legal History

This research review has been written to serve two purposes. The first is to explain the coming-to-be of comparative legal history as a scholarly practice in both its European and its extra-European emphases. The second is to present exemplary research representing not only the comparative perspective’s concrete achievements to date, but also, and more pronouncedly, to stimulate the scholarly imagination. The review selects a key sampling of texts, which demonstrate how comparative legal history may be pursued and what it may achieve.

DISPUTES ON CHURCH DEANERY, AND THE MOSCOW EDITION OF THE OCTOECHOS OF 1649

The article deals with the two-volume Octoechos published in Moscow in January 1649, in the period of disputes concerning the unanimous singing and church deanery. For the first time in the scholarly practice, the handwritten and printed sources of all the prefaces are identified and analyzed, and suggestions are offered concerning the connection of these texts with the community of polemicists who were not only directly related to the Moscow publishing processes, but also had enough authority to influence the selection of texts for publication.

Progression géographique et régression mémorielle dans le De reditu de Rutilius Namatianus

The travelogue is intimately linked to memory in Antiquity, as shown in the example of Rutilius Namatianus’ De reditu suo. The structure of the iter, borrowed from geographic literature, is part of a scholarly practice, linked to the arts of memory, which allows location on a mental map marked out by common literary or historical memories. Rutilius’ real journey is thus coupled with a textual and memorial journey which brings him back to Rome, and even, in the footsteps of Aeneas, to the origins of the City. Between spatial progression and temporal regression, the poem thus deploys a paradoxical space.