I would like to discuss the possibility of a parallactic view of ecology and the environment. There is very little discussion of theoretical approaches to ecocriticism that is not either polarizing dualism or reactionary attempts to dissolve important boundaries between us and the space around us. I draw significantly on the work of Timothy Morton who in turn utilizes new readings of Descartes, Heidegger and other phenomenologists, Marx, and Lacan, among others, to discuss the aesthetic in eco-critique. This has significant (...) links to Zizek’s description of parallax and his positioning of Hegelian dialectics, in particular the need for tension between positions, determinate negation, and resurrection of irony as necessary for understanding paradox. (shrink)

Human nature is a puzzling matter that must be analysed through a holistic lens. In this commentary, I foray into anthropology's biosocial dimensions to underscore that human relations span from microorganisms to global commodities. I argue that the future of social-cultural anthropology depends on the integration of evolutionary theory for its advancement. Ultimately, since the likelihood of novel zoonoses' emergence, digital ethnography could offer remarkable opportunities for ethical and responsible inquiries.

La intención fundamental de la presente investigación es dar cuenta de la paradoja política que supone la identidad para la teoría crítica feminista, como lugar del que es necesario partir y como heterodesignación limitadora que queremos superar en parte. La identidad ha devenido un concepto clave para los feminismos contemporáneos: así, si el desde el diferencialismo se opta por un reforzamiento de la identidad femenina; desde la teoría queer se reclama la constante desestabilización de toda identidad. Queremos reivindicar, para el (...) siglo XXI, la necesidad de recuperar la idea ilustrada de un feminismo de la igualdad que beba de la tradición republicana, que parta de la identidad no como fin, sino como el comienzo necesario para un proyecto emancipatorio a la vez que sede de opresiones. Sostenemos que el feminismo de hoy debe atender a dos tareas fundamentales: (1) hacerse cargo de la paradoja de la identidad para la construcción de una subjetividad política feminista y (2) pensar las condiciones materiales, institucionales y simbólicas de la igualdad y la ciudadanía como aspiraciones a reivinidicar. (shrink)

Over the course of the year 2020, the global scientific community dedicated considerable effort to understanding COVID-19. In this review, we discuss some of the findings accumulated between the onset of the pandemic and the end of 2020, and argue that although COVID-19 is clearly a biological disease tied to a specific virus, the culture–mind relation at the heart of cultural psychology is nonetheless essential to understanding the pandemic. Striking differences have been observed in terms of relative mortality, transmission rates, (...) behavioral responses, official policies, compliance with authorities, and even the extent to which beliefs about COVID-19 have been politicized across different societies and groups. Moreover, many minority groups have very different experiences of the pandemic relative to dominant groups, notably through existing health inequities as well as discrimination and marginalization, which we believe calls for a better integration of political and socioeconomic factors into cultural psychology and into the narrative of health and illness in psychological science more broadly. Finally, individual differences in, for example, intolerance of uncertainty, optimism, conspiratorial thinking, or collectivist orientation are influenced by cultural context, with implications for behaviors that are relevant to the spread and impact of COVID-19, such as mask-wearing and social distancing. The interplay between cultural context and the experience and expression of mental disorders continues to be documented by cultural-clinical psychology; the current work extends this thinking to infectious disease, with special attention to diseases spread by social contact and fought at least in part through social interventions. We will discuss cultural influences on the transmission, course, and outcome of COVID-19 at three levels: cross-society differences; within-society communities and intergroup relations; and individual differences shaped by cultural context. We conclude by considering potential theoretical implications of this perspective on infectious disease for cultural psychology and related disciplines, as well as practical implications of this perspective on science communication and public health interventions. (shrink)

Este trabajo analiza el concepto de espacio público en el pensamiento de Hannah Arendt a partir de metáforas provenientes del ámbito teatral. El objetivo principal es reconstruir el camino entre las intuiciones provenientes del mundo del teatro y la construcción del concepto de lo público arendtiano. Después de algunas precisiones metodológicas, se enumeran las expresiones vinculadas con el ámbito teatral que se encuentran en distintas obras arendtianas. Posteriormente, se analiza la fuente de la metáfora teatral y se caracteriza el concepto (...) de espacio público a partir de ellas. Este trabajo muestra que: 1. La fuente de la metáfora teatral incluye a la tragedia antigua tanto como a formas contemporáneas de teatro. 2. Las formas contemporáneas de teatro permiten: a) conceptualizar las formas sociales de publicidad y, b) considerar el rol de los espectadores como políticamente relevante. (shrink)

Indecent Theology has provided both Feminist Theology and Liberation Theology with new contours for rethinking bodies, power, dominance, and submission. With regard to the logic of dominance that radically pushes the margins of the margins into a form of inexistent living, I suggest a material turn to rethink the contours that are evoked with Indecent Theology. Materialism has long stood as a philosophy opposing the overwhelming dominance of language and the poststructuralist emphasis that has emerged as the ‘linguistic turn’. Considering (...) ‘new materialism’ as a theoretical platform to reread Indecent Theology provides theologies and ethics an opportunity to re-imagine indecent methodologies through indecency, a sort of ethical perversion. I suggest an indecent turn in mobilizing materialism and kink as theories to reread indecent theology for a productive queer materialist sexual theology. The feminist liberation theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid pushes both feminism and liberation into new contours of power and submission and initiates new contours of queer sexuality into the discourse. When analysing Althaus-Reid’s work, we are brought to attention to the margins of the margins, an awareness of the struggle for power and control by those deemed less than. There are contours of power at and in the margins of the margins, those who occupy ‘bottom space’. From a kink/bdsm orientation, I propose to reread Alrhaus-Read’s feminist liberation theology as decolonial erotics that helps to generate a productive materialist queer sexuality. The overarching methodology of this article is a quasi-auto ethnographic investigation into the ways in which the contours of race, class, gender, sex, sexuality, and ability affect power and submission and in turn reframes both queer theology and queer sexuality that is rooted in the living out of a very particular theology and ethics, which is rooted in queer relating. Theology can neither materialize in a vacuum nor in isolation. An indecent turn to a queer sexual theology that is rooted in a queer relationality demands attention to the interdependence of queer relating that is materialized through the interdependency of the growing queer desires of bodies, power, dominance, and submission. (shrink)

La educación patrimonial es necesaria para asegurar la protección, el respeto y la sostenibilidad de los bienes que constituyen nuestro patrimonio. En este sentido, procurar la concienciación patrimonial debe ser un objetivo común tanto para la educación reglada como para la no reglada, fortaleciendo la cooperación entre escuelas e instituciones de investigación y museísticas. Conocer cómo colaboran las instituciones educativas, museísticas y de investigación de la ciudad de Mérida para educar en patrimonio cultural es el objetivo de este trabajo. Para (...) ello, por un lado, entrevistamos a docentes de diferentes centros educativos de Educación Primaria y a los responsables de los departamentos de divulgación de instituciones patrimoniales y, por otro lado, valoramos el interés de alumnos y alumnas, de distintos colegios de la ciudad, mediante un sencillo cuestionario. (shrink)

The book Teorizando desde los pequeños lugares is presented, with the intention of showing the importance of thinking in non-hegemonic places.

This issue contains a book symposium on Anneli Jefferson’s book, Are mental disorders brain disorders?. It is a delight that the symposium brings together a variety of perspectives from philosopher...

Cultural landscapes represent a complex category where the nature-culture dichotomy seem to not be able to unfold the main features and the profound relations that humans have with the environment. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in the saltpans of Se-ovlje (Slovene Istria) and Janubio (Lanzarote--Canary Islands) this article examines informant`s perceptions about the awareness of the importance and the enhancement of the holistic values of both saltpans, as well as the impacts and benefits of tourism. Comparing these perceptions about both (...) cultural landscapes, I try to suggest that the complex fruitfully relations between humans and nature in these saltpans are at odds with the neoliberal logic of nature which exploit and commoditize its resources depriving them of their respective agency. A sustainability to contrast the harmful activities of the market ought to be understood not as a simply isolation and fencing of nature for the sake of conservation, but as a preservation that need to foster the continuity of the deep interactions between human culture and non-human nature which are the core of the cultural landscapes. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 215 Seiten: 255-268.

With the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, teaching online became a norm for universities in Canada. Besides the challenges of teaching topics that may be impossible to be taught online, a major issue that the mandatory physical distancing brought is the relationality between teachers and students. In order to investigate how educators were making sense of such changes, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 education professors across Canada. In light of Derrida’s and Ruitenberg’s ethic of hospitality, this paper explores (...) how the abrupt shift to online education unveiled the nature and challenges of hospitable education, especially in the online context. The implications of online instruction to professors’ relationality, however, are also instrumental in illuminating the complexities and ambiguities of a teacher’s responsibility even in what could be considered the “normal circumstances” of face-to-face instruction. (shrink)

This paper describes the ways by which state regulations created fertile soil on which legal labor migration in Israel developed into an unfree labor force. We show how state policies effectively subject foreign workers to a high degree of regulation, giving employers and manpower agencies mechanisms of control that they do not have over Israeli citizens. These mechanisms create a group of non-citizen workers that are more desirable as cheap, flexible, exploitable and expendable employees through enforcing atypical employment relations: fixed-term (...) contracts, the binding system enforcing direct dependence of the migrants on manpower agencies and employers, and the threat of automatic deportation. These stringent state regulations have provided the context for the legal labor migrants to turn into a captive labor force, the system sometimes even degenerating into a human trafficking industry. (shrink)

Se revisitan las distintas resoluciones de Schmitt y Agamben ante una misma percepción ontopolítica: la contingencia en la definición del derecho, cuya función primaria es la organización de lo múltiple, tradicionalmente entendido como caos. Mientras Schmitt se decanta hacia un posfundacionalismo organicista, hacia una política del origen, Agamben opta por suspender, en un plano ontoético, la fundación del nomos. En este artículo se recorre con Schmitt la búsqueda de la forma transcendente y se acompaña a Agamben en la descripción aporética (...) de la política, exponiendo el estado de excepción como muestra de los factores de politización y despolitización que la atraviesan, y concluyendo con la propuesta mesiánica que pretende recuperar la potencia (múltiple del no-origen). (shrink)

The iconic and diagrammatic features of abduction, as expressed in Peirce’s works after 1890, allow one to re-read the Kantian concept of schema. By means of this new reading, it is possible to consider the dynamics between legality and creative acts, which, according to Emilio Garroni, keep cultures alive. This process can be analysed by a semiotic theory that could combine the features of Kant’s Aesthetic Judgment (as an answer to schema’s problems) and Peirce’s last theory of abduction. In this (...) way, it becomes possible to go beyond the simple subsumption, through Reflective Judgment, of sensible intuitions under a concept. Thus, creativity becomes the process, both mental and cultural, whereby a new regularity come from the background of the previous one as a result of the free play of our faculties (Musement), which sets links between universes of experience apparently very distant one from another. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 225 Seiten: 129-140.

Asia, America, and Europe have been intellectually intertwined for centuries. Several studies have been published revealing European scholars’ interest in the “exotic” languages of Asia and America, as well as in ethnographic and anthropological aspects. Some scholars such as Polymath Leibniz (1646–1716), were interested in these languages in an attempt to construct a universal language, while others tried to establish language families, like the Jesuit Hervás y Panduro (1735–1809). However, all acknowledge the importance of language and the circulation of knowledge. (...) This paper analyzes the dissemination of the compilation of eighteenth‐century multilingual lexical compilations for comparative purposes as an early globalized project. These compilations were designed by European scholars and subsequently elaborated in different languages by missionaries, explorers, and scientists in the Philippines and America. Taking the correspondence and relations between botanist Mutis (1732–1808) and bureaucrats, European scientists such as polymath Humboldt (1769–1859) and Botanist Linnaeus (1707–1778) among others, and navy officers of the scientific exploration commanded by Malaspina (1754–1809) and Bustamante y Guerra (1759–1825) into consideration, I will analyze how simultaneous projects followed a unified aim, and illustrate their substantial contribution to the study of language in the late eighteenth century. (shrink)

Emotional self-regulation in childhood and adolescence constitutes a growing interest in the scientific community, highlighting in recent years the need to observe its development in their daily life. Therefore, the objective of this systematic review is to characterize publications referring to the development of emotional self-regulation of people under 18 years-old, in natural contexts. Based on the PRISMA guidelines, searches are carried out in the Web of Science, Scopus and PsycINFO databases, and in Google Scholar until May 2020. After reviewing (...) the full text of 376 publications, 14 works are selected that are observed in their extrinsic, substantive and methodological characteristics based on the GREOM and MQCOM guidelines, by two independent evaluators. Most of the studies correspond to the last 20 years, increasing the interest in observing older children, in interaction with adults and/or in different cultures. They apply mixed methodologies, not always ascribing to a low intensity design. Strengths are observed regarding the collection and analysis of the quality of the data; and weaknesses related to the failure to record the duration and sequence of behaviors, highlighting the use of guidelines as guides for future research. (shrink)

The consideration of the development of the being like personality is seen in this article on the base of the unit of the theoretician, epistemology and the methodological, offered as the contribution to the production of scientific knowledge, in the Superior Education, on the category of persona..

Recientes innovaciones en la teoría social están abocadas a desarrollar puntos de encuentro y colaboración con la teoría de la complejidad. Por supuesto, tal aproximación conlleva una reconceptualizacion profunda de la noción de sistema y de diversas dinámicas y procesos asociados. En el artículo se mostrará cómo la síntesis constructiva entre teoría social y teoría de la complejidad hace posible avanzar en el estudio e investigación de ciertos problemas teóricos sociológicos y de la “complejidad global”.

The small-improvement argument is usually considered the most powerful argument against comparability, viz the view that for any two alternatives an agent is rationally required either to prefer one of the alternatives to the other or to be indifferent between them. We argue that while there might be reasons to believe each of the premises in the small-improvement argument, there is a conflict between these reasons. As a result, the reasons do not provide support for believing the conjunction of the (...) premises. Without support for the conjunction of the premises, the small-improvement argument for incomparability fails. (shrink)

The organizational climate is the work environment conceived by emotions and motivation of an organization and, an optimal way of increasing participation is with working groups in the dependencies to improve: objectives, processes, conflicts, leadership. Thus the objective was to determine the characterization of variables. The method incorporates the quantitative approach, non -experimental design, descriptive level, applied and transversal type, analysis and deductive methods. The results show, there is a high organizational climate level, due to the contribution of three dimensions (...) or aspects that are: economic conditions, management values and organizational policies. (shrink)

This essay deals with the problem of religious transformation in Tanabe Hajime. In his Philosophy as Metanoetics, Tanabe examines this transformation through the relationship between vows of the Buddhas as described in the writings of the Pure Land Buddhist thinker Shinran. For Tanabe, each vow expresses a moment of the religious transformation. Furthermore,he argues against all possibility of immediacy in human existence and sets out to demonstrate that the meaning of existence is mediated by the transformation of self-power into Other-power, (...) wherein the drive to affirm the self is transformed into a radical return to the world in which the self becomes a medium for the salvation of others. This is where Tanabe locates the deepest power of nothingness: in negating every effort of the self to ground itself and to make human being an upāya, a skillful means to a greater end. This is possible, in turn, because being itself, in all its manifestations, is upāya. (shrink)

In Tanabe’s reading of time in the work of Heidegger and, through Shinran’s interpretation, of the seventh-century Chinese philosopher Shandao, one can see that both Heidegger’s and Zendō’s viewpoints do not go beyond the ethical standpoint of self-power. Tanabe distances himself from any view that strays from the eternal present as it is witnessed in the practice of metanoesis, in which one attempts to live the continuous practice, not as if one were dead, but by effectively being so, that is, (...) by practicing and witnessing the breaking through of the self, which in turn is the only thing that can foster the eternal present of naturalness. This is definitively Shinran’s viewpoint. (shrink)

RESUMEN:El siguiente escrito ensaya una interpretación del rendimiento del mito de los metales expuesto por Platón en su diálogo llamado Politeia a propósito de la siguiente interrogación: ¿Cómo se constituye el orden social en la pólis platónica? Para responder a esta pregunta debemos esclarecernos respecto de: i) El papel de la educación en la constitución del orden social. ii) La correlación entre el mito de los metales y el orden social. iii) La constitución tripartita de la psykhḗ humana. Una vez (...) aclarado estos distintos puntos podremos comprender la oculta pero significativa función del mito de los metales en la constitución del orden social platónico. ABSTRACT:This article attempts an interpretation of the account of the myth of the metals as expounded by Plato in the Politeia. We address the following question: How is the social order established in the Platonic polis? To answer this question we must clarify: i) the role of education in the constitution of the social order; ii) the correlation between the myth of the metals and the social order; iii) the tripartite constitution of the human psyche. Once these various points have been made clear, we can understand the hidden but significant function of the myth of the metals in the constitution of the Platonic social order. (shrink)

Conocer el lenguaje de una disciplina científica permite entender mejor su epistemología. El lenguaje pedagógico precisa de un análisis, dado que no ha sido objeto de estudio. Por ello, el objetivo de este artículo es mostrar su caracterización lingüística del lenguaje de la Pedagogía. Se realiza una revisión bibliográfica del concepto de «lenguas especiales» y se analiza el léxico y los factores extralingüísticos. Se utiliza una metodología de investigación cualitativa, en una dimensión descriptiva. Los resultados muestran que es un «lenguaje (...) sectorial». La caracterización del léxico y de los factores pragmáticos muestra que este lenguaje se sitúa en un «nivel umbral». Esta caracterización permite conocer cómo la Pedagogía construye su lenguaje, cómo sus hablantes transmiten los significados. (shrink)