An Interview with Topher Campbell

This Curated Spaces features an interview with Topher Campbell of rukus! archive. The rukus! archive was founded in 2005 by photographer Ajamu X and filmmaker and theatre director Topher Campbell. The archive is dedicated to collecting, preserving, and making available artistic, social, and cultural histories related to Black LGBTQ+ communities in the United Kingdom. Its intellectual origins reside in the work of Stuart Hall and British cultural studies, and the critical dialogue it establishes with both mainstream heritage practices and dominant Black and queer identity discourses.

Critical Discourse Analysis as an Instrument to Enhance Social Justice Among Teenage Mothers

The aim of this study is to present how critical discourse analysis was used to enhance social justice among teenaged mothers. Critical discourse analysis was used to promote critical dialogue between the socially legitimate structures and the marginalized teenaged mothers to deconstruct text and discourses that perpetuate social injustice. The study is anchored on community engagement. Data was generated with seven teenaged mothers, parents, and community leaders. Individual interviews, focus group discussions, and reflections were used to generate data with co-researchers. The study found that when teenaged mothers are exposed to social marginalization, they are denied the needed support in the development of personal, cultural, and social skills. Through critical dialogue, social text and discourses were deconstructed to co-create contextual and shared meaning leading to social justice for the marginalized teenaged mothers. The study concludes that critical discourse analysis is most appropriate in studies with youth or marginalized groups.

THE CONCEPT OF “TOLERANCE” IN LEXICO-SEMANTIC, COGNITIVE-DISCURSIVE, SEMIOTIC AND LINGUOCULTURAL ASPECTS

The article is devoted to the study of lexico-semantic, cognitive-discursive, semiotic and linguocultural aspects of the concept “TOLERANCE”. The aim of the study is to analyze the features of the concept in the above-mentioned aspects in modern political discourse. Analyzing the concept of “TOLERANCE” in lexical and semantic aspects of dictionary definitions, we can determine that there are mainly four ways to understand it: 1) indifference to the existence of different views; 2) the impossibility of mutual understanding; 3) indulgence to the weakness of others in combination with a certain dose of contempt for them; 4) expanding one's own experience and critical dialogue. In our opinion, the first three methods have negative connotations. The concept “TOLERANCE” reveals the cognitive side of language, which expresses the diverse characteristics of human beings, their qualities, cognitive abilities, humanism in terms of ethnocultural relations. However, the position of the ambiguity and emotional coloring of this phenomenon is unique, often depending on the perception in a particular cultural conceptosphere. The typology of tolerance is based on the main criterion - moral potential, the presence or absence of a moral basis in a particular direction of tolerance. The vector of tolerance allows to attribute the components of the concept of “TOLERANCE” from a semiotic point of view to palliative or constructive. Based on the study, we can conclude that the three components of the concept “TOLERANCE” have a negative connotation and a palliative vector that closes the way to dialogue (tolerance as indifference, tolerance as impossibility of understanding, tolerance as indulgence), and only one component can be characterized as a such that has a constructive orientation, moral potential - tolerance as an extension of one's own experience and critical dialogue. The linguistic and cultural aspect of the concept “TOLERANCE“ is that in different languages ​​this concept is different and has its own specifics of verbalization. In modern English and Ukrainian, the concept of “TOLERANCE” retains an ambivalent meaning: it can be replaced by the word “acceptable” (to someone else's way of life, behavior, customs, feelings, thoughts, ideas, beliefs). Tolerance is the willingness to accept and acknowledge the behavior, beliefs, and attitudes of others that are different from one's own, even if the beliefs are not shared but are accepted as having a right to exist.

Everything Is Connected

It is a mainstay that spiritual seekers—from New Age thinkers, neopagans, esoteric cults, or people referring to themselves as “spiritual, not religious”—imagine nature as a mysterious, spiritual, and meaningful force to counter alienating and disenchanting modernity. In this chapter, I argue that this spiritual imagination about “mysterious incalculable forces” is not necessarily projected on nature, but, perhaps increasingly, on complex modern institutions. In critical dialogue with the ideas of the classics—that is, Weber, Marx, Mannheim—on modernity and religion, I will argue that such undertheorized forms of modern re-enchantment should be understood as cultural responses to powerful, yet highly opaque systems that are beyond the control of contemporary citizens. Although various examples are used throughout this chapter to illustrate this relocation of spiritual power from nature to society, the main case used is the phenomenon of conspiracy culture or, rather, the phenomenon of “conspirituality.”

Dramatyzacja tradycji. Dramaturgiczne konfrontacje z kanonem literackim

The article opens with a statement that dramaturgical creativity, long marginalized by literary studies, has returned to the area of its interest together with its researchers’ use of the achievements of performative and cultural turns. Taking these into account allows us to treat drama as a distinctive literary practice in which the reception of a text is exemplary. As the author claims, with the New Humanities, integrating scattered reading perspectives known to the history of literary studies into the horizons of New Positivity, dramatic studies enrich this standpoint and maintain a critical view making creative use of the antagonism of perspectives, confrontation of attitudes, conflict of qualities or different visions and ideas. The potential tensions revealed in the practice of active reading of a literary text in accordance with the dramatic matrix guarantee the positive effects of each act of engaged reading. The dramatization of tradition is a specific field of critical dialogue between the reader and the existing literary tradition. Three dramatic works by Jan Czapliński are indicated as examples of mediators for this dialogue. The work of this playwright presents and suggests a critical reading of the characters and works of Gabriela Zapolska, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Adam Mickiewicz, leading to the emancipation of their works that is situated beyond the framework of the discursively created, existing canon of contemporary Polish literature and culture. A critical view enriches and updates the canon. Dramatization, which allows the revaluation of existing values, appears as the basic category of contemporary art – revealing existing, usually ineffable conflicts and using them to build new, positive values.

Diverser a project of inclusive education from and for diversity

This article is a systematization of experiences related to inclusive education. From which the Universidad del Atlántico has been a leader in knowledge, promoting the development and transformation of the Caribbean region. Through a critical interpretation of this experience in its reconstruction, to understand the phenomenon, discover, and explain the logic of the process, the factors that have intervened in it, how they have related to each other and why they have done it in that way and not another. The systematizations of experiences involve a reflection on the practice, recapitulate what has been done, to relate it to other experiences or theoretical constructs that support or sustain it. It is a search for logic of meaning through the pertinent theorization with the developed actions. Once the results were obtained, a validation of them was conducted through a traffic light. For the indicators measured in the different scales (frequency, recognition, and existence), the percentage of people who had a favorable response was calculated and based on this percentage, the traffic light was obtained, achieving some results with which they triangle with the experiences conducted and the theoretical foundations. The scope of this research, established as a defined purpose for the educational community of the Universidad del Atlántico to take a critical approach to the experiences developed from an institutional project. Which accounts for learning that contributes to improving them, with the aim of contributing to a critical dialogue between the actors of educational processes?

La laicità come apertura al dialogo critico nel rispetto delle identità culturali (riflessioni a partire da Corte di Cassazione, Sezioni Unite civili, n. 24414 del 2021)

SOMMARIO: 1. Una vexata quaestio e l’andamento carsico del suo periodico riproporsi - 2. Premessa di metodo: guardare un paesaggio consueto con nuovi occhi per scoprire orizzonti prima inesplorati - 3. I meri fatti e il caso sub judice come modo di “leggerli” - 4. Le questioni di merito: a) del buon uso dei simboli pubblici, veicoli di messaggi “istituzionali” o espressione di sentimenti popolari condivisi - 5. b) L’antica saggezza del “ragionevole accomodamento” come bussola tratta dalle esperienze multiculturali per navigare oggi il mare tempestoso del mondo variegato - 6. Dal diario di bordo di un vecchio professore. Secularism as a critical dialogue respecting cultural differences ABSTRACT: The ruling decision pronounced by the United Sections of the Supreme Court of Cassation in Italy, which calls for a “reasonable accomodation” about the posting of the crucifix in the class-rooms, as a precious opportunity to promote at the public school - primary place of socialization beyond family - dialogical practices of intercultural and inter-religious encounter.

Body, Self and Others: Harding, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on Intersubjectivity

Douglas Harding developed a unique first-person experimental approach for investigating consciousness that is still relatively unknown in academia. In this paper, I present a critical dialogue between Harding, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty on the phenomenology of the body and intersubjectivity. Like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Harding observes that from the first-person perspective, I cannot see my own head. He points out that visually speaking nothing gets in the way of others. I am radically open to others and the world. Neither does my somatic experience establish a boundary between me and the world. Rather to experience these sensations as part of a bounded, shaped thing (a body), already involves bringing in the perspectives of others. The reader is guided through a series of Harding’s first-person experiments to test these phenomenological claims for themselves. For Sartre, the other’s subjectivity is known through The Look, which makes me into a mere object for them. Merleau-Ponty criticised Sartre for making intersubjective relations primarily ones of conflict. Rather he held that the intentionality of my body is primordially interconnected with that of others’ bodies. We are already situated in a shared social world. For Harding, like Sartre, my consciousness is a form of nothingness; however, in contrast to Sartre, it does not negate the world, but is absolutely united with it. Confrontation is a delusion that comes from imagining that I am behind a face. Rather in lived personal relationships, I become the other. I conclude by arguing that for Harding all self-awareness is a form of other-awareness, and vice versa.