Urbanization and the organization of territorial cohesion – results from a comparative Danish case-study on territorial inequality and social cohesion

PurposeThere is a growing importance for public facilitation of corporate social responsibility and involvement of civil organizations in securing territorial cohesion and development. In the present article, the authors focus on how we are to understand a locally sensitive organization of territorial cohesion in the Danish context. Traditional sociological concepts and standardized area-types used for administrative purposes have turned out not being very helpful in understanding the interrelation between inequality, urbanization and territorial cohesion. The authors argue for a processual and relational approach to urbanization.Design/methodology/approachThe present article is based on interview material and policy documents from three Danish case studies representing urban, suburban and rural forms of settlement. The case studies are part of a cross-European research project.FindingsThe authors show how territorial governance play a key role in the strategies of densification/de-densification facilitating shielding capacities of collective efficacy, and reversely that bottom-up innovations are crucial for the ability of territorial governance to mobilize territorial capital and mediate in effects of territorial inequality. Spatial imaginaries legitimize these efforts to organize cohesion. The spatial imaginaries work as common frame of references for the interplay between strategies of (de)densification and collective efficacy, and they activate particular balances between growth agendas and everyday life.Originality/valueThese findings represent an original perspective on how and why urbanization impact on places in a more specific and variated way than often portrayed as it highlight how social capacities tied to place might work with or against existing social, economic and cultural structures shaping territorial cohesion.

Discursive Positioning of Intimate Partners: A Structural-Relational Approach to Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)

Purpose: This study is about the discursive positioning of intimate partners: A structural-relational approach to intimate partner violence. The study attempts to uncover the story lines of the IPV narratives, the social force of the discursive acts of the narratives, the enacted positions, and the (de) legitimization of rights and duties of the positions of the referents in the narratives. Method: the study adopts the random sampling method in which two IPV narrative were randomly selected from one pseudo named male and female victims. The narratives were in the form of documented transcripts which is in line with Harre and Van lagenhoove (1999) accounting positioning that allows a retrospect study of social actors positioning of this kind. The study also adopted the Halliday’s transitivity process to substantiate the positioning works in the narrative and the mechanism with which these acts are tied to the social structure. Results: The findings of the study revealed that the declarations of the narratives indicates the evaluative and normative underlying judgment on the deontic powers to say and do something in the moral space of intimate partner relations. Conclusion: a socio-constructionist study of this nature reveals the relationship between the narrative referents point of view about actions, point of actions and line of life as regards the moralities of social behaviour in the moral space of intimate partner relationship and how it triggers tendencies for IPV.

Hymen ‘repair’: Views from feminists, medical professionals and the women involved in the middle east, North Africa and Europe

In Europe, hymen ‘repair’ is controversial because it is often seen as a concession to immigrant groups that do not respect women’s sexual autonomy. But how is hymen ‘repair’ viewed in societies in which the norm is that women should not have premarital sex? And why do women want hymen ‘repair’? Hymen ‘repair’ is also controversial in Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries because it is seen as undermining social mores about women and premarital sex. However, some Islamic leaders have defended the procedure. Women request hymen ‘repairs’ for a variety of reasons. Some have been sexually abused and may desire the surgery to overcome trauma. Some have had consensual sex and may fear sanctions, while others may see the surgery as a covert act of rebellion against the virginity rule. Still others may choose it to please their future husband. Hymen ‘repair’ is extensively discussed in MENA countries and in Europe. Feminists in MENA countries are divided over whether the surgery promotes sexual autonomy while, in the European debate, an important issue is whether the choice itself is an autonomous one that doctors should respect. Inspired by a relational approach to autonomy, I see the women involved as individuals with culturally informed identities and interests who may feel pressure to get the surgery yet are still capable of autonomy. I argue for a policy to stimulate debate in communities about the virginity norm and to make hymen ‘repair’ available to women. However, it should be combined with an attitude of sympathetic distrust, recognising that hymen ‘repair’ harms women’s dignity and authenticity.

Three Questions about Spirituality

Using the concepts of developed in the volume, this chapter concludes the book by addressing three important questions about spirituality. Our approach foregrounds how spirituality is shaped by the interplay of context and practice and influenced by the distribution of material resources. On the question of the meaning of spirituality, we advance an explicitly relational approach that identifies the polysemous nature of “spirituality.” On the question of spirituality’s influence, we highlight the social mechanisms through which spirituality is likely to influence individual and public outcomes. Regarding the future of spirituality, we argue that spirituality, in both supernatural and secular forms, will endure for the foreseeable future because the conditions of late modernity will continue to create a demand for it.

A re-consideration of interpretation. A relational approach

This paper is a discussion paper and it seeks to re-consider the Freudian psychoanalytic concept of interpretation within the relational approach to psychoanalysis. As such, it aims to argue the Freudian approach to interpretation is rejected because it is not relational but involves only the analyst as interpreter of the patient’s experience. Instead, within the relational approach, it is suggested that if interpretation, as a process of making meaning of experiences, is re-considered as the outcome of the intersubjective relationship in which the process of making-meaning is essentially a co-creational process of the patient’s experience of the analyst in the here-and-now, interpretation can potentially be an agent of change. The clinical implication is that interpretation must be the construction of the patient’s meaning of his experience but within the relational context. A clinical verbatim transcript is documented as it illustrates this relational process in interpretation.

A Relational Approach to Lexical Borrowings in the Discourse of Romanian Bilingual Immigrants in Spain

A Relational Approach to Lexical Borrowings in the Discourse of Romanian Bilingual Immigrants in Spain. This paper is a neurocognitive analysis of idiosyncratic lexical borrowings recorded in the discourse of bilingual Romanian immigrants living in Spain. The neurocognitive approach, also known as Relational Network Theory (RNT), conceives language as an interconnected relational network composed of nodes and lines, part of and connected to the general cognitive system. Linguistic processing is a result of spreading activation through the network and of interaction of the system with other biological systems. The model elegantly describes real and inferred linguistic behaviors, both well-formed and erroneous. We use this approach to explore the underlying mechanisms that trigger the emergence of linguistic interference in the discourse of bilingual speakers. We focus on several lexical borrowings selected from corpora of Romanian spoken in Spain, and we model them, using the NeuroLab tool, in relational network terms. The network modeling of these hybrid forms pinpoints new ways of understanding the differences between adapted and non-adapted, and between necessary and luxury borrowings. We conclude that the RNT model is well suited for explaining bilingual processing and, arguably, one of the few models that can account for the hybrid forms emerging in the discourse of bilingual speakers. Keywords: Relational Network Theory, lexical borrowing, Romanian, Spanish, Rumañol, neurocognitive linguistics.

A Relational Approach to Transforming Power in a Community-University Partnership

We use a relational understanding of power to analyze power dynamics at the institutional and interpersonal levels in our multi-year Co-Education/Co-Research (CORE) partnership between Tufts University Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning (UEP) and Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI). Power in community-university partnerships is often examined only at the institutional level, conceiving of power as a resource to be balanced and shared. Indeed, CORE has advanced institutional shifts through co-governance, equitable funding, co-production of curriculum and cross-flow of people. While institutional policies and practices are critical, they alone do not transform deep-seated hierarchies that value university knowledge, practices and people over community. To understand how intertwined interpersonal and institutional practices can reproduce or transform these cultural and ideological dynamics, we use a relational approach, understanding that power flows in and through all relations. As community members, students and faculty, we reflect on the contradictions we have encountered in CORE. We examine how we reinforce the dominance of academic over community knowledge, even as we leverage institutional power to further community goals. These tensions can be opportunities for shifting, disrupting and transforming towards more equitable relations, but they can also reproduce and reinforce the status quo. Through reflective practice and a relational ethic of care, we can try to recognize when we might be shifting power relations and when we might be reproducing them. This is messy work that requires a lot of communication, trust, reflection and time. A relational approach to power provides hope that we can be part of the change we seek in all of our relations, every day. And it reminds us that no matter what we have institutionalised or encoded, our individual beings, organizations and communities are always in a process of becoming.

Conceptualizations of Knowledge in Structuring Approaches to Moral Development: A Process-Relational Approach

Like other aspects of child development, views of the nature and development of morality depend on philosophical assumptions or worldviews presupposed by researchers. We analyze assumptions regarding knowledge linked to two contrasting worldviews: Cartesian-split-mechanistic and process-relational. We examine the implications of these worldviews for approaches to moral development, including relations between morality and social outcomes, and the concepts of information, meaning, interaction and computation. It is crucial to understand how researchers view these interrelated concepts in order to understand approaches to moral development. Within the Cartesian-split-mechanistic worldview, knowledge is viewed as representation and meaning is mechanistic and fixed. Both nativism and empiricism are based in this worldview, differing in whether the source of representations is assumed to be primarily internal or external. Morality is assumed to pre-exist, either in the genome or the culture. We discuss problems with these conceptions and endorse the process-relational paradigm, according to which knowledge is constructed through interaction, and morality begins in activity as a process of coordinating perspectives, rather than the application of fixed rules. The contrast is between beginning with the mind or beginning with social activity in explaining the mind.

THE RELATIONAL APPROACH TO THE MATHEMATICAL MODEL OF MEANING OF INFORMATION

A mathematical model of the meaning of the signal is proposed. The meaning is not the signal itself, but its effect on the recipient. Under the action of the signal, the state of the receiver changes, which is the meaning of the signal. The most general mathematical model is the description of the recipient’s state with the help of some mathematical object, and the meaning is modeled by the action of some operator on this object. Various concrete formalisms are considered: abstract automata, matrix representation, algorithms, Markov chains, parameter spaces. The article deals with finite, countable and continuous meanings, reversible and irreversible meanings, ambiguous meanings, decomposition into elementary meanings.