Sociality, Reciprocity, and Solidarity

This chapter unpacks three key conceptual components of everyday peace: sociality, reciprocity, and solidarity. The chapter has two parts. In the first, the concepts are unpacked in the abstract. In the second, they are illustrated, mainly by drawing on a set of interviews from Lebanon. Sociality, reciprocity, and solidarity are regarded as occupying a continuum, with sociality requiring a minimum commitment and solidarity requiring explicit action such as standing with members of an out-group when they are under threat. The chapter helps illustrate how everyday peace is a way of reasoning as well as a set of activities. It also helps illustrate how individuals and communities may not always be consistent in their everyday peace actions and stances. The interview material from Lebanon helps shows the tactical agency that individuals and communities use when living side by side with out-group members and how this might change over time.

Identifying and Meeting the Needs of Extension’s Target Audiences

This document provides an overview of the concept of target audiences as it relate to Extension education, and briefly presents concepts of audience analysis and educational content selection. In contrast to the general population, a target audience is comprised of people who can take some explicit action to help solve an identified problem addressed by an Extension program. Additionally, a target audience is sometimes the people who are affected most by that problem. An understanding of the concept of target audiences paired with intentional selection of appropriate educational activities and content can support an impactful Extension program.

How Levinas Can (and Cannot) Help Us with Political Apology in the Context of Systemic Racism

What is the structure of an apology? What is an apology supposed to achieve, and how do we know when it has achieved its purpose? These questions seem pretty straightforward when we are speaking of an apology as it is traditionally conceived, which considers an explicit action that I have performed toward another individual. But how does one apologize for one’s thrownness into systemic structures of inequality and violence—such as America’s long history of racism toward people of color? I call this here a “political apology,” which may take both national forms—such as Australia’s National “I’m Sorry Day”—or personal acts—such as when a white person might apologize to a friend who is a person of color for the persistence of anti-Black racism in America. This essay will consider Emmanuel Levinas’s work and how it relates to this notion of a political apology. In some respects, Levinas’s thought is profoundly constructive and useful; however, his ahistorical, asymmetrical account of intersubjectivity is inadequate to explain what an apology seeks to achieve on a substantial political level. For this, I believe we must articulate a Levinasian-inspired account of the self–other relation that more adequately takes into account both parties as well as the concrete situation in which the need for apology arises.

Refugee and Romani Immigrant Populations in Barcelona

This chapter describes how the migration crisis is constructed in Barcelona taking into consideration the role of political, media, and social movements. The chapter compares the response to the refugee population and to the Romani immigrant population. It argues that not all constructions of refugees as crises align with negative stereotypes and rejection. In the Barcelona case, the political, social, and media actors fostered an explicit action in favor of receiving refugees and put pressure on the central government and European institutions in the EU to attend to their requests. Nevertheless, for the Romani immigrant population, actors emphasized expulsion and rejection.

Behavioral Cloning from Observation

Humans often learn how to perform tasks via imitation: they observe others perform a task, and then very quickly infer the appropriate actions to take based on their observations. While extending this paradigm to autonomous agents is a well-studied problem in general, there are two particular aspects that have largely been overlooked: (1) that the learning is done from observation only (i.e., without explicit action information), and (2) that the learning is typically done very quickly. In this work, we propose a two-phase, autonomous imitation learning technique called behavioral cloning from observation (BCO), that aims to provide improved performance with respect to both of these aspects. First, we allow the agent to acquire experience in a self-supervised fashion. This experience is used to develop a model which is then utilized to learn a particular task by observing an expert perform that task without the knowledge of the specific actions taken. We experimentally compare BCO to imitation learning methods, including the state-of-the-art, generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) technique, and we show comparable task performance in several different simulation domains while exhibiting increased learning speed after expert trajectories become available.

Action-outcome knowledge dissociates from behavior in obsessive-compulsive disorder following contingency degradation

ABSTRACTGoal-directed and habitual systems orchestrate action control. In disorders of compulsivity, their interplay seems disrupted and actions persist despite being inappropriate and without relationship to the overall goal. We manipulated action–outcome contingency to test whether actions are goal-directed or habitual in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the prototypical disorder of compulsivity, in which prominent theories have suggested that dysfunctional beliefs underlie the necessity for compulsive actions.OCD patients responded more than controls when an action was causally less related to obtaining an outcome, indicating excessive habitual responding. Patients showed intact explicit action–outcome knowledge but this was not translated normally into behavior; the relationship between causality judgment and responding was blunted. OCD patients’ actions were dissociated from explicit action-outcome knowledge, providing experimental support for the ego-dystonic nature of OCD and suggesting that habitual action is not sustained by dysfunctional belief.