China – EU’s “Significant Other”?

Following the idea of the “other” in the work of Ernesto Laclau and the perspective of post-foundational discourse analysis, the study focusses on Chinese strategical internal and external pre- and post-Covid-19 political specifics and policies and how they interact (or contradict) with the “European” vision of the world and most importantly itself. As Laclau says, “the notion of “constitutive outside” emphasizes the always present possibility that differential relationship between an entity and its “constitutive outside” turns into antagonism.” For more than three decades, the EC/EU has been steadily building up its foreign relations architecture and has proven its desire to project its ideals and values worldwide. However, during the same period, after “the century of humiliation,” China has also reached a point in its history where it wants to see the world according to its national interests and views. This work attempts to analyze some key features inherent to both the EU and China, such as strategies, relation with other countries, typical governmental architecture, and some aspects of identity, which could help in better understanding the possible contradictions and areas of cooperation in their way of conceptualizing themselves as key players on the world stage. This will reflect the need for greater European civic awareness in the upcoming decades, as suggested by the author.

Ethics of AI in Education: Towards a Community-Wide Framework

While Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) research has at its core the desire to support student learning, experience from other AI domains suggest that such ethical intentions are not by themselves sufficient. There is also the need to consider explicitly issues such as fairness, accountability, transparency, bias, autonomy, agency, and inclusion. At a more general level, there is also a need to differentiate between doing ethical things and doing things ethically, to understand and to make pedagogical choices that are ethical, and to account for the ever-present possibility of unintended consequences. However, addressing these and related questions is far from trivial. As a first step towards addressing this critical gap, we invited 60 of the AIED community’s leading researchers to respond to a survey of questions about ethics and the application of AI in educational contexts. In this paper, we first introduce issues around the ethics of AI in education. Next, we summarise the contributions of the 17 respondents, and discuss the complex issues that they raised. Specific outcomes include the recognition that most AIED researchers are not trained to tackle the emerging ethical questions. A well-designed framework for engaging with ethics of AIED that combined a multidisciplinary approach and a set of robust guidelines seems vital in this context.

‘Which I Presume is Permitted, Since We Are Talking About A Writer.’ Lateness, Memory, and Imagination in Literary Autobiography

In Summertime, a fictional biographer, Mr Vincent, conducts interviews with contemporaries of the novelist J.M. Coetzee for a biography of the late author. However, every claim made about the late Coetzee by the characters in Summertime is composed by the author himself, so the hidden, yet obvious presence of the novelist gives the book’s supposedly biographical outlook an autobiographical twist. Summertime’s Coetzee is distinctly both alive and dead. I propose to analyse works such as Summertime as literary autobiographies that employ narrative strategies otherwise found in fiction in order to creatively explore lateness, belatedness, and a sense of ending with regard to their writing life. Performative contradiction, as a deliberate stylistic manifestation of paradoxical contradictions, is a result of such narrative strategies. This enables a portrayal of memory and sincerity in autobiography that acknowledges the fraught nature of these notions. Drawing on autobiographical writing by novelists, such as Coetzee, Philip Roth, and Günter Grass, this article analyses the use of tense and fictionality to create performative contradiction. It shows how the novelist’s memory and imagination engage with the ever-present possibility of death to subvert traditional ideas of lateness as well as perceived limitations to the temporality of autobiographical writing.

Votes and violence: Electoral vote share and international conflict in democratic states

This article argues that the effect of a democratic leader’s electoral margin of victory on their conflict behaviour once in office is highly dependent upon the state’s institutional structure. I show that, uniquely in parliamentary democracies, governments that win a larger share of the vote are significantly less likely to initiate disputes abroad. Such governments entail broad coalitions that, combined with the ever-present possibility of governmental collapse and new elections, require leaders to pursue a more cautious, lowest-common-denominator foreign policy. This effect is significantly stronger for right-wing governments. Conversely, in presidential democracies, I find that electoral vote share has no effect on a leader’s subsequent conflict propensity. Vote shares thus function very differently in parliamentary and presidential systems, with important implications for conflict behaviour abroad.

‘Containment, delay, mitigation’: waiting and care in the time of a pandemic

In this paper, we take up three terms – containment, delay, mitigation – that have been used by the UK Government to describe their phased response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the terms refer to a political and public health strategy – contain the virus, flatten the peak of the epidemic, mitigate its effects – we offer a psychosocial reading that draws attention to the relation between time and care embedded in each term. We do so to call for the development of a form of care-ful attention under conditions that tend to prompt action rather than reflection, closing down time for thinking. Using Adriana Cavarero’s notion of ‘horrorism’, in which violence is enacted at precisely the point that care is most needed, we discuss the ever-present possibility of failures within acts of care. We argue that dwelling in the temporality of delay can be understood as an act of care if delaying allows us to pay care-ful attention to violence. We then circle back to a point in twentieth-century history – World War II – that was also concerned with an existential threat requiring a response from a whole population. Our purpose is not to invoke a fantasised narrative of ‘Blitz spirit’, but to suggest that the British psychoanalytic tradition born of that moment offers resources for understanding how to keep thinking while ‘under fire’ through containing unbearable anxiety and the capacity for violence in the intersubjective space and time between people. In conditions of lockdown and what will be a long and drawn-out ‘after life’ of COVID-19, this commitment to thinking in and with delay and containment might help to inhabit this time of waiting – waiting that is the management and mitigation of a future threat, but also a time of care in and for the present.

Storytelling, space and power: An Arendtian account of subjectivity in organizations

Drawing on Arendt’s work, this article develops a storytelling account of subjectivity and politics in organizations. Storytelling is understood as the process through which actors reconstruct their experiences and appear in a collective space. Storytelling is thus enacted within and from spaces and is a means for political action. Three theoretical consequences are drawn. First, storytelling implies the ever-present possibility of a ‘space of appearance’ in which the subject is an originator of action. Second, the notion of storytelling as a spatial practice implies focusing on how stories are shaped through interactions and collective engagements, or ‘emplacement’. Third, a material and embodied reconfiguration of Arendt’s notion of action shows how material relations offer important affordances to change organizations. Because storytelling is both a process of engaging with ourselves and the power relations that we are part of, Arendt’s notion of storytelling is helpful for understanding how and in what circumstances we can act politically in organizations. In particular, the article argues that Arendt’s account is useful for framing an interventionist third stream of critical management studies, or ‘critical performativity’.

‘Containment, delay, mitigation’: waiting and care in the time of a pandemic

In this paper we take up three terms – containment, delay, mitigation – that have been used by the UK Government to describe their phased response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the terms refer to a political and public health strategy – contain the virus, flatten the peak of the epidemic, mitigate its effects – we offer a psychosocial reading that draws attention to the relation between time and care embedded in each term. We do so to call for the development of a form of care-ful attention under conditions that tend to prompt action rather than reflection, closing down time for thinking. Using Adriana Cavarero’s notion of ‘horrorism’, in which violence is enacted at precisely the point that care is most needed, we discuss the ever-present possibility of failures within acts of care. We argue that dwelling in the temporality of delay can be understood as an act of care if delaying allows us to pay care-ful attention to violence. We then circle back to a point in twentieth-century history – World War II – that was also concerned with an existential threat requiring a response from a whole population. Our purpose is not to invoke a fantasised narrative of ‘Blitz spirit’, but to suggest that the British psychoanalytic tradition born of that moment offers resources for understanding how to keep thinking while ‘under fire’ through containing unbearable anxiety and the capacity for violence in the intersubjective space and time between people. In conditions of lockdown and what will be a long and drawn-out ‘after life’ of COVID-19, this commitment to thinking in and with delay and containment might help to inhabit this time of waiting – waiting that is the management and mitigation of a future threat, but also a time of care in and for the present.

Gastric cytoprotection as a basis for defense and restoration of gastrointestinal mucosa in erosive-ulcerative lesions of different etiologies

Aim: to analyze the mechanism of action and effectiveness of gastrointestinal (GI) tract mucosa defense within the scope of latest treatment scheme using the example of MMSC (Vitamin U) and to present possibility of its use in erosive-ulcerative lesions of different etiologies.General findings:Conclusion: Medications, that exert protective effect on gastroduodenal mucosa, MMSC (vitamin U), particularly, could be used for the purpose of main treatment schemes fortification and remission maintaining in erosive-ulcera- tive damage of upper GI tract.

Neurologist, 11 years’ experience, USA

This chapter focuses on the clinical value of continued vigilance and neurologic follow-up after video-EEG (VEEG) confirmation of the diagnosis of Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures (PNES), even when long-term EEG recordings over two separate admissions to an epilepsy monitoring unit have not captured any epileptiform activity. It has been shown that 19% of patients with epilepsy will not have interictal epileptiform abnormality during an admission for long-term VEEG monitoring. In particular, patients with extratemporal lobe epilepsies who have deep/mesial seizure foci and those with well-controlled epilepsies will be likely not to have epileptiform interictal EEG activity. In consideration of these observations, it has been advised that patients with PNES and non-epileptiform long-term EEG recordings should be followed by a neurologist for at least six months after discontinuation of antiepileptic drugs (AED). This consideration is due to the small but ever-present possibility of coexisting epilepsy as well as the observation that the risk of breakthrough epileptic seizures is highest during the initial six months after discontinuation of AEDs.