How Reflective Practice Informs Blended and Online Language Instruction

This chapter discusses how reflection is essential to informing instruction. The authors reflect on the community-building strategies implemented through an onboarding process prior to the start of the semester that ensures connection and engagement among students who are physically separated. This process opens a line of communication between students and instructors providing essential feedback to identify and address needs as well as build a trusting and open relationship for student-instructor engagement. The authors discuss how throughout the course, student reflection on their learning enabled them to recognize achievements, identify issues, and shape instructional practices. These reflections are an integral part of the interweaving of asynchronous and synchronous sessions based on four different learning models. All learning models included clear scaffolding for maximum benefit regardless of learning environments. The ongoing adjustments based on reflection proved worthy as student communication skills remained equal to those of pre-pandemic learning.

Study of the Changing Relationship between Religion and the Digital Continent—In the Context of a COVID-19 Pandemic

This article proposes to study the changing relationship between religion and the digital continent as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve this objective, the paper is divided into three parts. First, it offers an overview of the connection between religion and the digital environment, outlining four possible paradigms of the open relationship between these two worlds. Second, the article discusses the research project undertaken during the COVID-19 pandemic on behalf of the Corporation of Thanatologists of Quebec, focusing on the relationship between delayed funerals and delayed grief. In particular, this article deals with one of the solutions proposed to thanatologists, i.e., the development of a culture of bimodal ritual, both in person and remote, and therefore partly digital. Using this solution as a pointer, religion’s shift toward digital technology in the COVID-19 period is analyzed in the third part of the article. To this end, the four paradigms drawn from the overview are set against the research focus areas resulting from the solution proposed to the Corporation of Thanatologists.

My Cat and Me—A Study of Cat Owner Perceptions of Their Bond and Relationship

Cats form close emotional relationships with humans, yet little is known about this. This study characterized different types of relationship that cats might establish with their owners. Data were analyzed from 3994 responses to a questionnaire developed using expressions of social support and attachment in relation to everyday cat–owner interactions. Principal component analysis reduced the items to four factors: the “owner’s emotional investment in the cat”, “cat’s acceptance of others”, “cat’s need for owner proximity” and “cat’s aloofness”. Cluster identified three groups of owners with two of these each sub-divided into two. The “open relationship bond” was characterized by a lightly emotionally invested owner and an avoidant cat. The “remote association” and “casual relationship” were characterized by an emotionally remote owner but differed in the cat’s acceptance of others. The “co-dependent” and “friendship” relationship were characterized by an emotionally invested owner but differed in the cat’s acceptance of others and need to maintain owner proximity. In conclusion, as with any complex social relationship, the type of cat–owner bond that develops is the product of the dynamic that exists between both the individuals involved, along with certain personality features, of which, the wider sociability of the cat and owner expectations may be particularly important.

Co-creating the Psychological “White Picket Fence”: Three Gay Couples’ Relationship Reconfiguration

Many gay couples engage in nonmonogamous relationships. Ideas about nonmonogamy have historically been theorised as individual pathology and indicating relational distress. Unlike mixed-sex couples, boundaries for gay couples are often not determined by sexual exclusivity. These relationships are built along a continuum of open and closed, and sexual exclusivity agreements are not restricted to binaries, thus requiring innovation and re-evaluation. Three white South African gay couples were each jointly interviewed about their open relationship, specifically about how this is negotiated. In contrast to research that uses the individual to investigate this topic, this study recruited dyads. The couples recalled the initial endorsement of heteronormative romantic constructions, after which they shifted to psychological restructuring. The dyad, domesticated through the stock image of a white picket fence, moved to a renewed arrangement, protected by “rules” and imperatives. Abbreviated grounded theory strategies led to a core category, “co-creating porous boundaries”, and two themes. First, the couple jointly made heteronormative ideals porous and, second, they reconfigured the relationship through dyadic protection. The overall relationship ideology associated with the white picket fence remained intact despite the micro-innovations through which the original heteronormative patterning was reconfigured.

The Cusp of Being: Further Studies on the Becoming of Being and Its Relationship to Technology

Technological applications must be differentiated from technological preconditions because the former are attributes thereof, but the latter are ontological as essential fundamentals. And this distinction is of the utmost importance for an explanation not only how technology originates, but why it originates. The how of technology is explainable by the relationship between non-being and being, and the why is explainable by the open relationship, expressed as a dependency, within the ontological gap that lies within us. It is this gap or this openness that enables possibilities that lie latent within technology’s non-being to appear as its being, and thereby empowering technology to come into the world, that is, the why posits the how. This understanding reveals the full and unconvoluted meaning of technology because when expressed in this way, it is the equivalent for the totality of human reality that is manifested through human culture. Because technology is fundamental to everything we do, it is by means of our humanity that technology’s non-being is empowered to become what it is.

Ferdinand Tönnies és a korai társadalomtudományok, I. rész

The theory of society-community stands in the centre of the „social” life. It however also stands in the centre of Tönnies’s positive work itself. This potentiation gives this theory a vitality that is looking for its equivalent and to which little is changed if its presence is not perceived accordingly in every corresponding context. Tönnies is one of the first most important social scientists, who was primarily concerned with being able to investigate society with a strictly scientific character. So he was already therefore much more interested in the optimal way of knowledge than in the diverse concrete results or even in the theoretical possibility of generalization of these results. The society-community theory is an epochal achievement, its result one of the bases of the social existence. It is certainly there, that the rare „open relationship structure” of both these categories is playing. Like many others, we decide to campaign against the political instrumentalization of the society-community theory, there is by no means any denying the fact, that it has extremely deeply secured this dichotomy in the structure-building principles of the political discourse. We see the force of the debate on the ideal level: diabolization and idealization are alternating in symmetrical order obvious. The first social scientists were in multiple paradoxical situations. The first paradox consisted in the fact, that had a very clear idea of a „science” of the society. Because however, such a „science” was not yet existing, they were constrained to make „philosophically” the first steps, but of course not how the „right” philosophers would have done them. The other paradox and eternally opened question are why the „society” as the object remained temporally so much behind the „nature” as an object. It is also hardly less interesting, why the new social sciences did not already emerge in Marx’s environment. The historically belated social science experiences in the medium of this situation a vocation to become a pioneer. Simmel also adheres consistently to his often formulated youth insight that a „new science” will emerge in any case around the society.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany is a profoundly influential and award-winning African-American gay author, critic, and teacher, whose many novels, short stories, memoirs, and essays are among the most important of the 20th and 21st centuries. His works have fundamentally altered the terrain of science fiction (SF) due in part to their formally consummate, theoretically sophisticated, materially grounded, and politically radical explorations of difference. These explorations reach an apogee in Dhalgren (1975), a bestselling countercultural classic. Delany is a Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) Grand Master. He is also one of SF’s best critics. The courageous humility and pragmatism with which he treats his subjects, when considered alongside the virtuosity with which he writes, gesture at a cosmologically scaled multiplicity, the understanding of which is dependent on biography, a point rendered clear in his exquisite autobiography The Motion of Light in Water (1988). Delany was born in Harlem, New York, on 1 April 1942. He was educated at the prestigious Dalton School and Bronx High School of Science. He spent summers at progressive youth camps. He also briefly attended the City College of New York. Delany has held professorships at University of Massachusetts Amherst, SUNY Buffalo, and Temple University. From 1961 to 1980, he and poet Marilyn Hacker had an open marriage; they have one child. He has been in an open relationship with Dennis Rickett since 1991. He was astoundingly prolific at a prodigal age. He translated Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre (1871) when he was eighteen. For a time, he lived in a commune in New York, writing songs for the folk-rock band Heavenly Breakfast. He has worked on shrimp boats in Texas. He has written graphic novels and a couple of stories for the Wonder Woman comics. He has written an opera, and he has written and directed a film. He has published pornographic novels that engage thoughtfully with the HIV/AIDS crisis. In short, to borrow a concept he develops in Empire Star (1966), Delany might be described as “multiplex”: even an ephemeral biography such as this one casts light on his singular ability to sustain and synthesize presumably opposed differences into a greater unity.

Gabriel Josipovici and The Book of God

There are many approaches to reading the Hebrew Bible, from the pietistic in both Jewish and Christian traditions to the scholarly. Gabriel Josipovici’s approach is not about seeking the reductive ‘meaning’ of a text, but encouraging readers into an open relationship with the text in order to preserve the ambiguities and mysteries that adhere to such texts. Joseph’s encounter with an unnamed stranger in Genesis 37 is used as an illustration of this approach. Standing ‘face to face’ with the text requires humility, and trust in the storyteller.

NEW INDIA INITIATIVE: ADVANCEMENT OF INDIA’S LOOK WEST POLICY

During the Cold War era, after the independence of India, India went ahead with a two-point program irst, India politically backed Arab; Second amplified the relations with their leaders who committed with secularism and socialism. India backed the NAM movement for a peaceful resolution between Arab and Isreal clash. Later on, after the Nasser‟s idea of Pan-Arabism failed and it provided cushion for religious extremism in the West Asian region. India realised the significance of the Islamic world. Due to the oil-based relationship between India and Iraq, India wanted to support Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war in 1980. Somehow India adopted the keep-distance approach with Israel during that period. So, during Cold War India espoused heedful approach. After the end of the Cold War, the balance was started to shift from normative flux to realistic flux, and India acknowledged the importance of remittance from its Indian diaspora in the Gulf. Indian commenced providing consultancy in advanced fields like the management, information technology and pharmaceutical sectors rather than old unskilled labour engagement. In 2005 India‟s Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh asserted the West Asia as their xtended neighbourhood. He sought an advanced economic relationship with the West Asain region. After 2014, With a new government at the centre, India extends the previous government Look West Policy and ventured to add more substantial dimensions to the former one. Newly elected Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi acknowledged the importance of engagement with West Asia with more considerable interest. At one hand in India de hyphenated its foreign policy from Israel and Palestine never-ending geopolitical flux, Government showcased a sheer amount of courage by establishing an open relationship with Israel. If one could make an attempt to understand this step through a glass of national interest, it could be considered as a significant step towards India strategic autonomy, while in another hand India grabbed the opportunity to engage more with West Asian countries especially after the turmoil of Shale revolution and oil price crisis. Additionally, he recognised the importance of Indian diaspora as a strategic tool. The Indian policymakers have striven for a delicate balance between Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel while supporting Palestinians. Such strategic autonomy has provided India with ample space to exercise in the region with ease. Indian policymakers assert that India‟s interests in the Gulf Cooperation