Local Partnerships for Health on National Forests

The USDA Forest Service has recently piloted health partnerships that facilitate therapeutic outdoor experiences on national forests, building on the growing evidence of the multiple health benefits of activities and time spent in nature. This article presents brief case studies of three pilot partnerships between national forests and health organizations in California, Indiana, and Georgia (USA). These partnerships deliver nature-based programming for the general public as well as those who are in recovery from major surgeries, have been diagnosed with cancer, and face chronic health challenges. To help recreation managers and policy makers understand the potential for such local health partnerships in a federal context, we describe the programs’ enabling conditions, their incorporation of service and stewardship activities, and the challenges and successes they have faced. Insights inform an expanding variety of health partnership models that advance the interconnectedness of human and ecosystem health on public lands as a fundamental dimension of sustainable recreation management.

Diminished Faculties

In Diminished Faculties Jonathan Sterne offers a sweeping cultural study and theorization of impairment. Drawing on his personal history with thyroid cancer and a paralyzed vocal cord, Sterne undertakes a political phenomenology of impairment in which experience is understood from the standpoint of a subject that is not fully able to account for itself. He conceives of impairment as a fundamental dimension of human experience, examining it as both political and physical. While some impairments are enshrined as normal in international standards, others are treated as causes or effects of illness or disability. Alongside his fractured account of experience, Sterne provides a tour of alternative vocal technologies and practices; a study of “normal” hearing loss as a cultural practice rather than a medical problem; and an intertwined history and phenomenology of fatigue that follows the concept as it careens from people to materials science to industrial management to spoons. Sterne demonstrates how impairment is a problem, opportunity, and occasion for approaching larger questions about disability, subjectivity, power, technology, and experience in new ways. Diminished Faculties ends with a practical user’s guide to impairment theory.

FROM INNATE MORALITY TOWARDS A NEW POLITICAL ETHOS

In 1943, Simone Weil proposed to supersede the declaration of human rights with a declaration of obligations towards every human being's balancing pairs of body and soul's needs, for engaging and inspiring more effectively against autocratic and populist currents in times of crisis. We claim that Weil's proposal, which remains pertinent today, may have been sidestepped because her notion of needs lacked a fundamental dimension of relationality, prominent in the 'philosophical anthropology' underlying the (different) visions for a new political ethos of both Judith Butler and Carol Gilligan. From the radical starting point of innate morality common to all three thinkers, we therefore indicate how an enriched notion of interlaced needs, encompassing both balance and relationality, may restore the viability of a declaration of human obligations as a robust source of inspiration. In this combination of balance and relationality, Butler's notion of aggressive nonviolence is key.

A New Conceptualization of the Political Left and Right: One Dimension, Multiple Domains

Scholars of the political left-right divide often see equality as the core issue of contention, with the left seeking greater equality than the right. Though partially agreeing with this consensus, I propose a modified left-right conceptualization that offers three novel contributions. First, while accepting the idea of a single fundamental dimension underlying conflict in global politics, I argue the key issue is not necessarily equality but rather the diffusion or concentration of power within and across nations, communities and individuals. Second, given the inescapable complexity of politics, I argue in favour of distinguishing between those who seek to de-concentrate power and broaden inclusion (the left) from those advocating for a concentration of power (the right) in specific issue domains. Third, I illustrate the utility of this “one dimension, multiple domains” theoretical framework through a comparative analysis of eight contemporary political parties across the domains of economic, foreign and social policy.

Faith, Religion, and Spirituality: A Phenomenological and Hermeneutic Contribution to Parsing the Distinctions

Religion and spirituality are contested terms in the fields of Religious Studies, Theology, Sociology or Anthropology of Religion, and other areas, and the notion of faith has often been abandoned altogether. The present article attempts to make a distinctly philosophical contribution to this debate by employing phenomenological parameters, as they are articulated in the work of Martin Heidegger, for proposing distinctions between faith, religion, and spirituality. It then goes on to “fill” these structural distinctions in more detail with hermeneutic content by drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s work on faith and religion, as well as Johann Michel’s analysis of Ricoeur’s account of the self as a “spirituality.” The article thus employs Heidegger’s phenomenological categories and Ricoeur’s hermeneutic project in order to think through the possibility of making phenomenological distinctions between personal confession of faith, religious adhesion to a tradition via myth and ritual, and a broader spirituality as a fundamental dimension of the human being.

La política de la competencia versus la política social y de empleo en la UE

El objeto del presente trabajo, dentro de un número monográfico dedicado a la Política Social Comunitaria, es ofrecer una visión diferente de la que se ha asignado a las relaciones entre la Política Social y de Empleo y la de la Competencia, que tradicionalmente han sido vistas como antagónicas. Frente a esta consideración, percibida por muchos operadores económicos, trataremos de poner en evidencia la complementariedad de ambas, pues la Política de la Competencia, tiene una fundamental dimensión social en la medida en que promueve la eficiencia de las empresas y la mejor asignación de recursos públicos, estimulando el progreso económico y el bienestar de trabajadores y consumidores.

The knowledge map as a management tool for the perception of occupational health and safety for construction facul tiles students.

Work constitutes a fundamental dimension of human existence on earth. Humans plan, organize, perform work and thus develop through the work of their mind and the physical transformation of the world. Knowledge management has become a widely discussed and increasingly popular concept worldwide. The essence of this concept is the creation and dissemination of knowledge, understood as the entire content existing in the human mind as a result of accumulated learning and experience. The article presents a knowledge map as a management tool for the perception of occupational health and safety and health for construction faculties’ students.

Destination Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a prototypical neurodegenerative disease characterized by progressive degeneration of motor neurons both in the brain and spinal cord. The constantly evolving nature of ALS represents a fundamental dimension of individual differences that underlie this disorder, yet it involves multiple levels of functional entities that alternate in different directions and finally converge functionally to define ALS disease progression. ALS may start from a single entity and gradually becomes multifactorial. However, the functional convergence of these diverse entities in eventually defining ALS progression is poorly understood. Various hypotheses have been proposed without any consensus between the for-and-against schools of thought. The present review aims to capture explanatory hierarchy both in terms of hypotheses and mechanisms to provide better insights on how they functionally connect. We can then integrate them within a common functional frame of reference for a better understanding of ALS and defining future treatments and possible therapeutic strategies. Here, we provide a philosophical understanding of how early leads are crucial to understanding the endpoints in ALS, because invariably, all early symptomatic leads are underpinned by neurodegeneration at the cellular, molecular and genomic levels. Consolidation of these ideas could be applied to other neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) and guide further critical thinking to unveil their roadmap of destination ALS.

Are Teachers Prepared to Educate in Citizenship?

Education for active citizenship is a fundamental dimension of education, especially in the context of today's world. This is proclaimed by educational institutions and authorities, and has been incorporated into official curricula. But the reality of school is frequently incoherent with those statements. Indeed, the predominant school culture is a factor that conditions the activity of teachers as educators for citizenship. Research carried out in Andalusia (Spain) shows the difficulties teachers have in incorporating any education for citizenship into their subjects. Likewise, projects and initiatives coming from non-formal education are insufficiently exploited. These investigations also indicate that educational proposals organized around social and environmental problems facilitate the integration of education for citizenship into the school curriculum and the training of teachers as educators of citizens by getting them involved in these innovative experiences.

Lições de um Xamã Yanomami para a Construção de uma Identidade Pós-Antropocêntrica

Western culture's imaginary positions human figure as exceptional and identified with cosmological wholeness: "humanity" is taken for granted in the construction of people's identity, while non-human beings are assigned a condition of non-subjects. This paper departs from the assumption that this worldview is supported by a fundamentally mythical structure, which has, as an important representant, world creation narrative expressed in the Hebrew-Christian Bible. Thus, this paper proposes an analysis of the relations between humanity and animality that are expressed in The Book of Genesis, first book of the Bible, comparing them with the way those same relations are expressed in an Amerindian creation myth: The Falling Sky: Words from a Yanomami shaman, from indigenous leader and shaman David Kopenawa. The results are interpreted from a dialogue between anthropology of the imaginary and cultural psychology and show that, unlike Western narrative, in Amerindian animality and humanity figure like parts of the same whole, immanently present in all beings: the contact with spiritual ancestors is only possible through animal mediation, which makes "nature" a fundamental dimension of the "divine" in Yanomami cosmology. I discuss the implications of these findings for a fundamental assumption of psychological thought: the notion of humanity Palavras-chave : Imaginary; Cultural Psychology; Myths; Anthropocentrism; Identity.