Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations (...) concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles. (shrink)

What kind of challenge does sexual and racial difference pose for postmodern ethics? What is the relation between ethical obligation and feminist interpretations of embodiment, passion, and eros? How can we negotiate between ethical responsibility for the Other and democratic struggles against domination, injustice, and equality, on the one hand, and internal conflicts within the subject, on the other? We cannot address such questions, Ziarek argues, without putting into dialogue discourses that have hitherto been segregated: postmodern ethics, feminism, race theory, (...) and the idea of radical democracy. Addressing a constellation of diverse thinkers - including Emmanuel Levinas, Patricia Williams, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray - the author proposes a new conception of ethics, an ethics of dissensus that rethinks the relation between freedom and obligation in a double context of embodiment and antagonism. (shrink)

Experimental emotion inductions provide the strongest causal evidence of the effects of emotions on psychological and physiological outcomes. In the present qualitative review, we evaluated five common experimental emotion induction techniques: visual stimuli, music, autobiographical recall, situational procedures, and imagery. For each technique, we discuss the extent to which they induce six basic emotions: anger, disgust, surprise, happiness, fear, and sadness. For each emotion, we discuss the relative influences of the induction methods on subjective emotional experience and physiological responses. Based (...) on the literature reviewed, we make emotion-specific recommendations for induction methods to use in experiments. (shrink)

Children bring intuitive arithmetic knowledge to the classroom before formal instruction in mathematics begins. For example, children can use their number sense to add, subtract, compare ratios, and even perform scaling operations that increase or decrease a set of dots by a factor of 2 or 4. However, it is currently unknown whether children can engage in a true division operation before formal mathematical instruction. Here we examined the ability of 6- to 9-year-old children and college students to perform symbolic (...) and non-symbolic approximate division. Subjects were presented with non-symbolic or symbolic dividends ranging from 32 to 185, and non-symbolic divisors ranging from 2 to 8. Subjects compared their imagined quotient to a visible target quantity. Both children and adults were successful at the approximate division tasks in both dots and numeral formats. This was true even among the subset of children that could not recognize the division symbol or solve simple division equations, suggesting intuitive division ability precedes formal division instruction. For both children and adults, the ability to divide non-symbolically mediated the relation between Approximate Number System acuity and symbolic math performance, suggesting that the ability to calculate non-symbolically may be a mechanism of the relation between ANS acuity and symbolic math. Our findings highlight the intuitive arithmetic abilities children possess before formal math instruction. (shrink)

Previous research reported that college students' symbolic addition and subtraction fluency improved after training with non-symbolic, approximate addition and subtraction. These findings were widely interpreted as strong support for the hypothesis that the Approximate Number System (ANS) plays a causal role in symbolic mathematics, and that this relation holds into adulthood. Here we report four experiments that fail to find evidence for this causal relation. Experiment 1 examined whether the approximate arithmetic training effect exists within a shorter training period than (...) originally reported (2 vs 6 days of training). Experiment 2 attempted to replicate and compare the approximate arithmetic training effect to a control training condition matched in working memory load. Experiments 3 and 4 replicated the original approximate arithmetic training experiments with a larger sample size. Across all four experiments (N = 318) approximate arithmetic training was no more effective at improving the arithmetic fluency of adults than training with control tasks. Results call into question any causal relationship between approximate, non-symbolic arithmetic and precise symbolic arithmetic. (shrink)

The introduction of Women and Gender Studies in Polish universities is intrinsically connected with the systemic transformation following 1989. This change was marked by the rejection of the communist past with its nominal sexual equality and acceptance of a conservative culture legally restricting women’s rights. Since the mid-nineties, Women and Gender Studies programs have been instituted in many state and private universities albeit on an auxiliary, extramural bases or as “specialization” within other degrees (e.g., sociology, or cultural studies). Since the (...) mid-2000s, gender studies in Poland include studies of masculinity, gender identity formation and queer theory in addition to the traditional women studies program. After Poland joined the EU, the introduction of European legal standards started to influence the progress in Poland’s gender politics towards greater recognition of minority rights. Gender Studies are in the foreground of these changes in teaching and training students and colleagues in gender issues seen as crucial for building a democratic inclusive society. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to provide a general overview of the work of Wanda Jakubowska, the first Polish, female film director to gain national and international recognition. Her career spanned over 50 years, in which she directed 14 full-length feature films, thus being the longest working film director in the history of Polish cinema. She was also one of the highest profile filmmakers to join the Polish communist party after the Second World War and in subsequent years represented (...) the ‘party line’ among her fellow film-makers, and lobbied the party on behalf of the cinema industry. The article looks at style, ideology and the most important themes of Jakubowska’s work. Its focus is on her films about concentration camps and about contemporary Poland. The article also attempts to establish whether and to what degree Jakubowska was a feminist. (shrink)

In this text I concentrate on semiotic aspects of the theory of political identity in the work of Ernesto Laclau, and especially on the connection between metaphors, metonymies, catachreses and synecdoches. Those tropes are of ontological status, and therefore they are of key importance in understanding the discursive “production” of identity in political and educational practices. I use the conceptions of both Laclau and Eco to elucidate the operation of this structure, and illustrate it with an example of the emergence (...) of the “Solidarność” movement in Poland, expanding its analysis provided by Laclau. I focus on the moment when one of particular demands assumes the representation of totality, which, in Laclau, is left to “circumstantial” determination. This moment inspires several questions and needs to be given special attention if Laclau’s theory is to be used in theory of education. It is so because theory of education cannot remain on the level of the ontological, but has to theorize “non-ontological” dimensions as well, that is the ontic, the deontic, as well as what I call the deontological—the very relation between “what there is” and “what there is not” as the locus of education. (shrink)

How Tocqueville’s ideas can help us build resilient liberal democracies in a divided world How can today’s liberal democracies withstand the illiberal wave sweeping the globe? What can revive our waning faith in constitutional democracy? Tocqueville’s Dilemmas, and Ours argues that Alexis de Tocqueville, one of democracy’s greatest champions and most incisive critics, can guide us forward. Drawing on Tocqueville’s major works and lesser-known policy writings, Ewa Atanassow shines a bright light on the foundations of liberal democracy. She argues that (...) its prospects depend on how we tackle three dilemmas that were as urgent in Tocqueville’s day as they are in ours: how to institutionalize popular sovereignty, how to define nationhood, and how to grasp the possibility and limits of global governance. These are pivotal but often neglected dimensions of Tocqueville’s work, and this fresh look at his writings provides a powerful framework for addressing the tensions between liberalism and democracy in the twenty-first century. Recovering a richer liberalism capable of weathering today’s political storms, Tocqueville’s Dilemmas, and Ours explains how we can reclaim nationalism as a liberal force and reimagine sovereignty in a global age—and do so with one of democracy’s most discerning thinkers as our guide. (shrink)

The paper assumes that education is part of the process of discursive construction of society. The theoretical framework on which this argument is based includes Ernesto Laclau’s theory of the “ontological impossibility and political necessity of society”, and the role discourse and empty signifiers play in the establishment of political identities. Laclau’s theory is supplemented here by ideas of Derrida, Lacan, Žižek and Marx, and by other traits in contemporary semiotics that relate to the notion of “the void” in semantic (...) systems. My claim is that empty signifiers, crucial to the production of the totality of society, are discursively produced, among others, in pedagogical debates. This is illustrated by one historical example (Rouuseau), which gives ground for more contemporary analyses, and on the basis of the present economic discourse of educating and the idea of “knowledge society”. The main conclusion is that education, in contemporary discourse of learning, becomes a neurotic symptom of the lack of overt domination in social relations. (shrink)

Ethicalisation processes that partake in the construction of a firm or a professional group’s ethical identity are often described as a relatively linear combination of several components, such as policies (starting with the development of a code of ethics), corporate practices, and leadership. Our study of a professional community dealing with the topics related to cultural diversity indicates a more reciprocal relationship between ethical identity and ethicalisation processes. We argue that a tangible form of ethical identity can pre-date the ethicalisation (...) process of a professional group, and additionally, can impact this process at the start. We highlight that, despite the absence of official ethical statements in the community, a form of ethical professional identity is already present among the interculturalists of the international organisation Society for Intercultural Education Training and Research. Using critical discourse analysis, we identify the proclaimed humanist ethos in the discourses that interculturalists co-produce and diffuse during conferences, on on-line discussion forums, and in the mission of their professional organisations. This study contributes to the literature on ethical identity development by showing how a pre-existing form of ethical identity can influence the early stage of the development of a code of ethics. In addition, we indicate that, similar to organisational identity construction, ethical identity construction uses self-other identity talks, thus, defining an ethical other (or less ethical other) in its development. (shrink)

I present the scope andcharacteristics of Marx''s interest in Russiaand review its evolution. Initially, Marx''sattitudes were marked by russophobia,pronounced anti-panslavism, assessments ofRussia as an outpost of European reaction andcounterrevolution, and even as the head of aconspiracy to block the world revolution. Withtime, however, Marx came to consider Russia asthe country in which the outbreak of theRevolution was most likely. In his research forsucessive volumes of Capital, he readRussian theoretical works by, among others, V.Bervi-Flerovskij and A. Koshelev. Marx''sattitudes to the anticipated (...) peasant revolutionin Russia remained ambivalent; to a certaindegree he feared its occurrence suspecting thatit could take on an `asiatic'' hue. (shrink)

Przedmiotem artykułu są dokonania plastyków olsztyńskich w pierwszym dziesięcioleciu po II wojnie światowej. | Przedstawiono tu niektóre wyniki prowadzonych badań. Dystans czasowy pozwala obiektywnie spostrzec pierwsze powojenne lata w sztuce, później czas panowania w niej realizmu socjalitycznego nie tylko jako niezwykłe zjawisko artystyczne, ale również I społeczne. Artykuł stara się podkreślić dodatkowy wymiar kulturalny i polityczny działalnośći artystycznej na tzw. Ziemiach Odzyskanych, ukazując dorobek artystyczny plastyki olsztyńskiej usiłuje naszkicować jej miejsce na tle historii sztuki polskiej tego okresu. Jest także próbą (...) zaznaczenia roli sztuki w całokształcie życia w latach 1946-1956 I czynników determinujących postawy twórcze. (shrink)

In this paper we look at the relations between knowledge and thinking through the lens of ignorance. In relation to knowledge, ignorance becomes its “constitutive outside,” and as such it may be politically organised in order to delimit the borders of the right to knowledge [the “ignorance economy,” see Roberts and Armitage : 335–354, 2008)]. In this light, the notion of a knowledge-based society should be understood as a society structured along the lines of knowledge distribution: the rights of possession (...) of and access to knowledge demand that ignorance is planned and executed as the condition of their establishment. In relation to thinking, ignorance appears differently. According to Rancière, the teacher's ignorance conditions the student's appearance as Anthropos, a being who can be asked: what do you think about it? Hence, we are dealing with the ambiguity of ignorance which seems to be both the criterion of social exclusion, and the condition of emancipation. Following this thread with reference to Heidegger's discourse on thinking, we would like to explore the possibility of comprehending knowledge and education beyond the relations of ownership and demands of productivity. Following Rancière, we may say that thinking—as displacing the notion of ignorance—stands in the position of “politics” and questions the ways knowledge societies are structured as “police orders” along the lines of knowledge possession and exclusion. (shrink)

Financial exclusion can be considered one of the important problems at the average level of socioeconomic development, which includes, among others, Poland. It consists in the presence of difficulties in accessing and/or using financial products and services on the main market that are suitable for the needs of individuals, and prevents them from leading a normal life in society. Due to its own characteristics and the trends in financial markets, this phenomenon is closely linked to the issue of the digital (...) divide. Accordingly, it can be seen that solutions leading to the reduction of the financial exclusion are based on tools using information technology innovations and modern technologies. One of the methods recognized as the most effective in this area is financial education, which is aimed largely at children and adolescents, which justifies additionally the choice of such tools. It was equally important to determine the extent to which modern instruments are preferred in comparison to traditional ones. The aim of this paper will be the analysis of the solutions based on modern technologies that are used in actions taken to prevent financial exclusion in selected EU countries, including Poland. The structure of the paper is as follows: the first part will present the problem of financial exclusion (identifying groups particularly at risk), then it will review methods of preventing and combating financial exclusion, with particular emphasis on modern ICT tools, and the final part will indicate the possible directions and barriers facing the solutions that may lead to a reduced level of financial exclusion of individuals. The method made use of indepth analysis of the literature and a review of existing solutions, which financial institutions provide on the Web. (shrink)

How do wealth managers understand and comply with the social norms embedded in banks’ codes of conduct (CoC), and how do they cope with ethical dilemmas? Do they have a tendency after the global financial crisis to prioritize banks’ financial security over clients’ interests? To answer these and related questions, we conduct a nonincentivized online survey with wealth management employees of the Swiss legal entity of a large multinational bank. We propose a method to estimate the comprehension and the level (...) of expected adherence to the CoC principles that we test with our sample. We further show that framing questions under the label of “Financial Security” increased response accuracy and that employees’ honesty helped guide their decision-making toward integrity in ethical dilemmas. Thus, in addition to validating a method for testing the level of CoC comprehension and the expected adherence to its principles, our study is among the first to show that in the wealth management business, honesty and social injunctive norms defined in the bank’s CoC reinforce one another. (shrink)

In the paper I analyze two features of the genre of the pedagogical. First is a particular usage of “should” statements where one can identify an effect of erasing present normative behavior, while that which is postulated is turned into an unattainable ideal, or a value. Second, I analyze “presumptive tautologies” in the discourse of aims of education. I focus on negative dimensions of these two features and, using theoretical insights from Laclau and Rancière, I connect them to the work (...) of negativity in political ontology so that the relation between the pedagogical and the political can thus be re-articulated. (shrink)

The paper is an interpretation of J.-J.Rousseau’s book on the government of Poland. The central part of the paper is devoted to complex relations between the notions of nature, nation, childhood, and civic education. Methodologically, the analysis involves interpretation of historical contexts and positions significant in the writing of the book, and deconstruction of its key categories. In the latter respect, the idea of “strangeness” of Poland is the point of departure, and the role it plays in the construction of (...) national and European identity is the aim of analysis. (shrink)