Teaching urban spaces and world politics: Perdido Street Station and pedagogies of production

This article explores teaching international politics, international political economy (IPE) and urbanism through a reading of China Miéville’s novel, Perdido Street Station. The novel as an artefact of popular culture affords a critical encounter with the production of space for students of international politics and IPE. Departing from prevailing approaches to understanding the urban in relation to the international that tend to focus on networks and circulation, the article offers a reading of the novel as demonstrating the production of space. The article links a critique of the hierarchical relations between teacher and student to critiques of the subordination of labour to design and planning, both of which render invisible the work of producing knowledge and space. Through an analysis of the political struggles over the formal and real subsumption of labour in Perdido Street Station, the article argues that studying the politics of urbanism in relation to the international through artefacts of popular culture can disrupt the invisibility of work.

Student-faculty interactions within a physiotherapy curriculum in South Africa

Interactions between faculty and students in higher education has the potential to influence and shape many aspects of teaching, learning, curricula, student experiences and performance, yet has received little attention as an area of study. This study investigates student-faculty interactions within a physiotherapy curriculum from the perspectives of students, faculty and physiotherapy managers at a South African university. The data, produced through multiple methods, derive from students, faculty and physiotherapy managers underpinned by critical-feminist perspectives. Thematic analysis of the data produced four themes. Two dominant threads emerging from the analysis as characterising student-faculty relationships are the deeply hierarchical relations of power characterised by a lack of caring and concern for students, and the exclusion of wider constructs for interaction; deriving from a particular entrenched medical model. Ironically, while caring relationships with patients are overtly advocated and developed, they appear to be largely absent in the same physiotherapy curriculum spaces in the relationships between faculty and students. These findings raise questions about how the most foundational attribute of a health science professional, that of caring, is being produced through the curriculum in the relationship between faculty and students in the health sciences.

Regional Fracture and Its Intractability in World Politics: The Case of the Late Ottoman Empire

Scholars have long grappled with the puzzle as to why some regions become peaceful and resilient while others crumble into perpetual insecurity. Much of the scholarship that they produced viewed regional formations as extensions of the state system. This work argues that state-centric tools to study regionalism have precluded us from uncovering regional forms of engagement under hierarchical relations of empires. They have privileged great power politics, at the expense of the political agency of non-state actors, such as minority communities, constitutional assemblies, and political parties, among others. This work highlights the lack of conceptual tools to capture historical continuity in the regional fabric of world politics. The bulk of the article engages in the methodology of concept development for regional fracture, in an effort to advance comparative regional studies historically and systematically. The concept development is then applied in the context of the Eastern Anatolian region of the late Ottoman Empire.

Crisis Coordination in First Responder Organizations

Crisis coordination as process can be understood as the adjustment of actions and decisions among interdependent actors to achieve specified goals. Coordination during crises typically involves a broad variety of first responder organizations, from professionals, such as emergency agencies and nongovernmental organizations like the Red Cross, to nonprofessional organizations and individuals, who often play a decisive role in crisis response. Traditionally, research on crisis coordination in first responder organizations seemed to be, broadly speaking, divided into two camps. One strand of literature focused on the formal structures of the government and the established first responder organizations and how they are interdependent via hierarchical relations and unity of command. The other strand of literature, with a long history in the field of disaster sociology, has taken a primary interest in the actual coordination that occurs “on the scene” in the immediate aftermath of crises and disasters. From this perspective, the actors involved in crisis coordination are conceptualized as a network of actors that are interrelated via novel structures and relations that emerge and develop as the crisis response unfolds. In the broader literature on coordination, there has been a shift in focus from explaining why coordination mechanisms work to a growing interest in how coordination happens by focusing on the emergent nature of the process of coordination. Following this shift and the scholarly work on organizational improvisation, there seems to be a growing consensus that crisis coordination is enabled by a combination of routinized practices and improvised action. More generally, recent scholarly work builds on the extant perspectives and literatures by seeing them in combination rather than as opposites. Instead of focusing primarily on the formal hierarchical relations in the established first responder organizations or the collaborative networks that emerge at the incident scene, current research tries to theorize how they are intertwined, and when, how, and why they sometimes reinforce each other and sometimes not.

Paternalism as a concept of russian legal culture

The article examines the essence of hierarchical relations in Russian society and the state, the specifics of the genesis and modifications of paternalism as a special form of legitimization of power. The author draws attention to the traditional and archaic foundations of paternalism, which addresses the explanation of its justification from the point of view of the relationship between father and children and identifies the essence of state relations with relations in the family.

Setworks: Networks of Complex Set Intersections

Sets are a universal concept in science. Visualizations of sets and their intersections contribute to an understanding of the complex relations that they comprise. Setworks capitalize on networks and bring set visualizations the power to scale and visualize increasingly complex, hierarchical, relations.

People and the Place: Social Dominance Orientation Is Reciprocally Associated With Hierarchy-Enhancing Occupations Over Time

Social dominance orientation (SDO) is a widely researched construct that indexes a preference for hierarchical intergroup relations. However, it remains unclear whether this preference (a) motivates people to seek out occupations that enhance hierarchical relations between groups (i.e., occupational assortment), (b) develops as a result of working within hierarchy-enhancing occupations (i.e., occupational socialization), or (c) both. One reason for this gap is that the large-scale longitudinal data required to simultaneously model assortment and socialization processes are scarce. In this study, we analyzed data from two waves of longitudinal data (spaced either 1, 3, or 5 years apart) from a nationwide sample of adults ( N = 3,452–4,412) who were already working in either hierarchy-enhancing occupations (e.g., law enforcement) or hierarchy-attenuating occupations (e.g., social work). Results showed that SDO predicted an increased probability of working in a hierarchy-enhancing occupation 3 and 5 years later. Working in a hierarchy-enhancing occupation was also positively associated with SDO after 1 and 5 years. These patterns generally suggest that occupations both shape, and are shaped by, intergroup beliefs.

Atypical Reinforcement Learning in Developmental Dyslexia

Objectives: According to the Procedural Deficit Hypothesis, abnormalities in corticostriatal pathways could account for the language-related deficits observed in developmental dyslexia. The same neural network has also been implicated in the ability to learn contingencies based on trial and error (i.e., reinforcement learning [RL]). On this basis, the present study tested the assumption that dyslexic individuals would be impaired in RL compared with neurotypicals in two different tasks. Methods: In a probabilistic selection task, participants were required to learn reinforcement contingencies based on probabilistic feedback. In an implicit transitive inference task, participants were also required to base their decisions on reinforcement histories, but feedback was deterministic and stimulus pairs were partially overlapping, such that participants were required to learn hierarchical relations. Results: Across tasks, results revealed that although the ability to learn from positive/negative feedback did not differ between the two groups, the learning of reinforcement contingencies was poorer in the dyslexia group compared with the neurotypicals group. Furthermore, in novel test pairs where previously learned information was presented in new combinations, dyslexic individuals performed similarly to neurotypicals. Conclusions: Taken together, these results suggest that learning of reinforcement contingencies occurs less robustly in individuals with developmental dyslexia. Inferences for the neuro-cognitive mechanisms of developmental dyslexia are discussed.

ELDERLY WOMAN IN KARELIAN TRADITIONAL CULTURE: AGE BOUNDARIES AND SOCIOCULTURAL STATUS

To a larger extend than in case of a man the transition of a woman from one socio-age status to another in traditional culture was connected with her physiological changes. Stages of growing-up and ageing which were similar in many societies were regulated by the means of local tradition. It included complex of rights and obligations, restrictions and opportunities, which were determined by a combination of climatic, socioeconomic, cultural, religious, ethnic and other factors. The focus of the paper is to identify the universal and the ethnically specific traits in the scenarios of women aging in Karelian culture. Research purposes included consideration of issues about the old age limits, the field of female socio- age stratification terminology, the matter of sociocultural status, limitations and opportunities for Karelian women within and outside the family. The study observes the period of the late XIX - early XX century. The territorial framework is outlined by the boundaries of the Karelian population dwelling in the Olonets and Arkhangelsk provinces (the part of the Republic of Karelia in present). The authors conclude that late maturity was an important milestone in the life of Karelian woman. Normative role was growing, hierarchical relations in the family were redefined. However, the life of an elderly woman was not limited to family affairs. Participation in life cycle ceremonies, religious and missionary activities was a symbolic resource of the Karelian women in rural society and could be converted into revenue.

Professional Institutional Engagement as a Framework for Negotiating Space for Teacher Autonomy in Authoritarian Work Environments

Teacher involvement in decision making at school leads to increased motivation, engagement and empowerment. Using the Participatory Action Research (PAR) framework to increase opportunities for teacher participation in school affairs, we found that traditional hierarchical power relations and bureaucracy are barriers to teachers’ autonomy, participation and engagement in the day-to-day decision making process. The conceptual model of Professional Institutional Engagement (PIE) was used to enable teachers to frame the challenges to autonomy and decision making within their professional practice, craft interventional strategies to mitigate them, which included open communication, reflection and dialogue within the school environment. The results highlighted that PIE provided a practical mechanism through which traditional hierarchical relations and bureaucracies were circumvented, resulting in increased collaboration, improved institutional communication; which motivated and engaged teachers.RésuméL’engagement des enseignants dans le processus de prise de décision à l’école conduit à une augmentation de motivation, engagement et affranchissement. Faisant usage du cadre de Recherche d’Action Participative (RAP) dans le but d’augmenter les opportunités pour la participation des enseignants dans la gestion de l’école, nous avons trouvé que les hiérarchies traditionnelles de relations de pouvoir ainsi que la bureaucratie sont des barrières à l’autonomie, participation et engagement des enseignants dans le processus quotidien de prise de décision. Le modèle conceptuel d’Engagement Institutionnel Professionnel (EIP) fut utilisé pour permettre aux enseignants de formuler les défis à l’autonomie et processus de prise de décision dans leur pratique professionnel, d’élaborer des stratégies interventionnelles pour les mitiger, incluant la communication ouverte, réflexion et dialogue dans le milieu scolaire. Les résultats ont montré que EIP a fourni un mécanisme pratique à travers duquel les relations hiérarchiques traditionnelles ainsi que bureaucraties étaient dépassées, résultant ainsi en une grande collaboration et une communication institutionnelle améliorée, chose qui avait motivé et engagé les enseignants.