Staying with discomfort: Early childhood teachers’ emotional themes in relation to children's peer-culture aggression

This research examines one lead teacher's and two assistant teachers’ emotional discomfort as they participated in an eight-month collaborative ethnography of 19 children's peer-culture aggression in an early care and education classroom in the USA. Two questions guided this analysis: (1) What are the emotional themes of teachers in relation to children's peer-culture aggression? (2) How did the teachers utilize an ethic of discomfort when responding to children's peer-culture aggression? Collaborative ethnographic procedures, along with a post-structural account of teacher emotion, were used in a qualitative thematic analysis to determine salient themes and patterns. The data consisted of participant observation, field notes, video recordings of children's play, audio-recorded teacher team meetings, classroom artifacts, informal discussions, and a data-revisiting journal. Over the course of the study, the three teachers moved from resistance to emotional discomfort with children's peer-culture aggression, to a less resistant and more reflexive position toward emotional discomfort and child aggression. This shift occurred as the teachers began to release the goal of certainty and instead acknowledge and accept the unknowing and complexities associated with an ethic of discomfort. The implications center on the importance of teachers’ openness to “staying with” emotional discomfort, as well as making time and space to uncover a range of teacher and child emotions.

Exploitation, Trade Justice, and Corporate Obligations

In On Trade Justice, Risse and Wollner defend an account of trade justice on which the central requirement, applying to both states and firms, is a requirement of non-exploitation. On their view, trade exploitation consists in ‘power-induced failure of reciprocity’, which generates an unfair distribution of the benefits and burdens associated with trade relationships. In this paper, I argue that while there are many appealing features of Risse and Wollner’s account, their discussion does not articulate and develop the unified picture of states’ and firms’ obligations that they aim to provide as clearly as it might have. In particular, it is, I claim, unclear exactly how they understand the relationship between the fairness-based requirements that apply to states and those that apply to firms. I argue that there are two types of accounts that they might accept: a transactional account and a structural account. I offer reasons to think that there are reasons to prefer a structural account. In addition, I note some of the key implications of accepting such an account, and suggest that if Risse and Wollner accept these implications and revise other aspects of their view accordingly, the result is a plausible and unified account of what trade justice requires.

Isolation but Diffusion? A Structural Account of Depression Clustering among Adolescents

Depression can cause people to withdraw from friendships or be avoided by others, protecting others from exposure to that depression. Yet, researchers observe depression contagion, particularly among adolescents. We address this empirical puzzle by examining the role of gender in structuring friendship networks and the implications for isolation and the spreading of depression. Using stochastic actor-based models of friendships among 421 adolescents from mixed-gender, all-girls, and all-boys classrooms in six Taiwanese high schools, we find that networks with only girls are characterized by high reciprocity and low transitivity. This, in turn, facilitates the withdrawal of depressed girls from interactions. In contrast, networks with all boys create more opportunities for depression to spread through interconnected pathways. Our computational experiment further demonstrates that local preferences governing friendship choice influence levels of network connectivity. This, coupled with depression withdrawal and peer influence, shapes depression prevalence at the network level. These findings refine our understanding of the mechanisms through which friendships expose boys and girls unequally to health risks of depression.

Frankfurt and the Problem of Self-Control

Frankfurt’s compatibilist account of free will considers an individual to be free when her first- and second-order volitions align. This structural account of the will, this chapter argues, fails to engage with the dynamics of will, resulting in two shortcomings: (1) the problem of directionality, or that Frankfurtian freedom obtains whenever first- and second-order volitions align, regardless of which desire was made to change, and (2) the potential for infinite regress of higher-order desires. The authors propose that a satisfying account of the genesis of second-order volitions can resolve these issues. To provide this they draw from George Ainslie’s mechanistic account of self-control, which relies on intertemporal bargaining wherein an individual’s self-predictions about future decisions affect the value of her current choices. They suggest that second-order volitions emerge from precisely this sort of process, and that a Frankfurt-Ainslie account of free will avoids the objections previously raised.

Structural determinants of dynamic fluctuations between segregation and integration on the human connectome

While segregation and integration of neural information in the neocortex are thought to be important for human behavior and cognition, the neural substrates enabling their dynamic fluctuations remain elusive. To tackle this problem, we aim to identify specific network features of the connectome (the complete set of structural brain connections) that are responsible for the emergence of dynamic fluctuations between segregated and integrated patterns in human resting-state fMRI functional connectivity. The contributions of network features to the dynamic fluctuations were examined by constructing randomly rewired surrogate connectome data in which network features of interest were selectively preserved, and then by assessing the magnitude of fluctuations simulated with these surrogates. Our analysis demonstrates significant contributions from spatial geometry and network topology of the connectome, as well as from localized structural connections involving visual areas. By providing a structural account of dynamic fluctuations in functional connectivity, this study offers new insights into generative mechanisms driving temporal changes in segregation and integration in the brain.

Issueless Campus Riots: Toward a Structural Account of Disorderly Gatherings, 1997–2007

Serious public disorders on or near US college and university campuses became common in the mid-1990s and have remained widespread. This research examines the structural conditions of campus communities where disorders are more likely to occur, drawing on findings from earlier work on racial disorders occurring in American cities during the 1960s. We propose several predictors of disorderly events, including concentrated student populations, alcohol availability, campus drinking behavior, and police behavior. We use a sample of 226 disorders occurring on the largest 274 campus communities between 1997 and 2007. Our results show that institutions with a combination of high student density and extensive alcohol availability experience the most disturbances. Aggressive policing of alcohol-related infractions is also associated with the likelihood of disturbances.

Some experimental evidence for sound–emotion interaction

This paper describes a structural account of phonetic symbolism and submits it to empirical investigation. To enable testing for possible iconic sound–emotion relations, participants compared pairs of syllables (e.g., ma – ba) as well as pairs of emotional states (e.g., joyful – sad) on various perceptual scales (e.g., softness). In addition, we replicated the classic ‘bouba/kiki’ experiment to investigate sound-shape symbolism. In accordance with the theoretical model, the results of the experimental tasks suggest that participants can detect abstract similarities between speech sounds and emotions as well as geometrical shapes. We discuss the theoretical model and the experimental results in relation to previous empirical findings and conflicting evidence from the study of affective iconicity in poetry.

On the event structure of Chinese resultative compounds

It has been observed that Chinese resultative compounds display varied aspectual behaviors. Yong (1997) distinguishes between simple change resultatives, i.e. resultatives expressing instantaneous change, but allowing a process preliminary to the final change, and complex change resultatives, i.e. those allowing a gradual development of action. Starting from this distinction, this paper aims at providing a structural account of these resultative compounds, based on the constructionist framework put forth by Ramchand (2008), arguing that only simple change resultatives are characterized by having a result layer in their eventive structure. Complex change resultatives, in contrast, are characterized by having the result element in the complement position of the process projection, providing a scalar path. This allows a gradual change of state, and telicity emerges when the path is bounded. The paper also discusses the relation between complex change resultatives and degree achievements.

Structural Alienation: Lu’s Structural Approach to Reconciliation from within a Relational Framework

In Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics Catherine Lu argues that structural reconciliation, rather than interactional reconciliation, ought to be the primary normative goal for political reconciliation efforts. I suggest that we might have good reason to want to retain relational approaches – such as that of Linda Radzik – as the primary focus of reconciliatory efforts, but that Lu’s approach is invaluable for identifying the parties who ought to bear responsibility for those efforts in cases of structural injustice. First, I outline Lu’s analysis of reconciliation, where she argues for the normative priority of structural approaches within the global political sphere, and propose that it will be useful to identify whether or not a relational account could instead identify underlying structural injustices. Second, I examine one particular relational account of reconciliation (based on Radzik’s account of atonement) and argue that this type of account brings to light underlying structural injustices of the kind Lu is concerned with. Finally, I identify an issue for relational accounts in identifying relevant responsible parties for reconciliation before returning to Lu’s structural account to address this gap.