Scholarship flourishes in inclusive environments where open deliberations and generative feedback expand both individual and collective thinking. Many researchers, however, have limited access to such settings, and most conventional academic conferences fall short of promises to provide them. We have written this Field Report to share our methods for cultivating a vibrant intellectual community within the Science and Technology Studies Food and Agriculture Network (STSFAN). This is paired with insights from 21 network members on aspects that have allowed STSFAN to (...) thrive, even amid a global pandemic. Our hope is that these insights will encourage others to cultivate their own intellectual communities, where they too can receive the support they need to deepen their scholarship and strengthen their intellectual relationships. (shrink)

The philosophy of “presence” seeks to challenge current understandings of meaning and understanding. One can trace its origins back to Vico, Dilthey, and Heidegger, though its more immediate exponents include Jean-Luc Nancy, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and such contemporary philosophers of history as Frank Ankersmit and Eelco Runia. The theoretical paradigm of presence conveys how the past is literally with us in the present in significant and material ways: Things we cannot touch nonetheless touch us. This makes presence a post-linguistic or (...) post-discursive theory that challenges current understandings of “meaning” and “interpretation.” Presence provides an overview of the concept and surveys both its weaknesses and its possible uses. In this book, Ethan Kleinberg and Ranjan Ghosh bring together an interdisciplinary group of contributors to explore the possibilities and limitations of presence from a variety of perspectives—history, sociology, literature, cultural theory, media studies, photography, memory, and political theory. The book features critical engagements with the presence paradigm within intellectual history, literary criticism, and the philosophy of history. In three original case studies, presence illuminates the relationships among photography, the past, memory, and the Other. What these diverse but overlapping essays have in common is a shared commitment to investigate the attempt to reconnect meaning with something “real” and to push the paradigm of presence beyond its current uses. The volume is thus an important intervention in the most fundamental debates within the humanities today. Contributors: Bill Ashcroft, University of New South Wales; Mark Bevir, University of California, Berkeley; Susan A. Crane, University of Arizona; Ranjan Ghosh, University of North Bengal; Suman Gupta, Open University Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University; John Michael, University of Rochester; Vincent P. Pecora, University of Utah; Roger I. Simon. (shrink)

This paper attempts to unravel how a reader embraces the idea of moral education while enjoying the aesthetic pleasure of the Harry Potter series. It develops a view on moral education through literary experience, which is intrinsically intertwined with aesthetic experience. The amalgamation of reality and fantasy in the Harry Potter novels creates an authenticity that can easily capture the moral attention of a reader by which his/her self-realized valuable emotional intelligence takes place. The well-knit plot encourages reader's self-efficacy (“I” (...) reactive attitude) that triggers the sui-generis, first-personal sense of morality and gradually develops the third-personal “we” attitude. Finally, based on an empirical study, the article explains how the Harry Potter series is productive in building the reader's positive moral psychology through different applications like moral agency, moral point of view, and moral judgment. (shrink)

This book highlights some of the most pressing safety, ethical, legal and societal issues related to the diverse contexts in which robotic technologies apply. Focusing on the essential concept of well-being, it addresses topics that are fundamental not only for research, but also for industry and end-users, discussing the challenges in a wide variety of applications, including domestic robots, autonomous manufacturing, personal care robots and drones.

Balancing Change and Tradition in Global Education Reform is an invaluable resource for policymakers, faculty, students, and anyone interested in how decisions made about the education system ultimately affect the quality of education, educational access, and social justice.

This book provides a radical rethinking of the prominent Indian thinker Rabindranath Tagore, exploring how his philosophy of education relates to the ideas of Western theorists such as Kant, Plato and Aristotle. Tagore's thoughts on pedagogy, university and formal education are subjected to a fascinating critique within Ghosh's transcultural framework, referencing a wide range of thinkers across varying time periods, places, and cultures, and developing a greater sensitivity to other traditions, languages, and forms of thinking and writing. The book changes (...) the way we have so far thought about the educationist Tagore, and will be of interest to scholars and specialists of literature, Indian history, and philosophy of education. It is political, deeply philosophical and has a transcultural take on our understanding of a variety of issues relating to Tagore and to philosophy of education in general. (shrink)

The book deals with philosophical issues concerning the understanding of the literary text and its distinctive nature, meaning, and relevance to life. It also provides an occasion to revisit many of the seminal ideas towards these ends by contextualizing them in the current ongoing philosophical discourse on art, in general, and literary art, in particular. Some of the questions addressed in this book are: What is a literary text? What do we understand by the concept of intention in the context (...) of literary arts? Are the feelings experienced in a literary text real? What then is the sense of “truth” in literature which is fictional in character? What relevance do moral concerns and perceptions have in appreciation of the literary text? These are some of the seminal questions that are dealt with by critically responding to views of contemporary thinkers. In short, the book makes an attempt to provide a critical overview of contemporary debates and discussions of literary aesthetics mainly from a Western analytical perspective. The author argues that understanding a literary text is not a purely cognitive exercise; on the contrary, we experience aesthetic meaning or truth in terms of valuable insights that play a role in our understanding of life and emotions. This book is useful for scholars, researchers and students of philosophy and literature interested in aesthetics. (shrink)

fusion theory challenges efforts to see theory as inhibiting by presenting an approach that is innovative, eclectic, and subtle in order to draw out competing and constellating ideas and opinions. This collected volume of essays examines fusion theory and demonstrates how the theory can be applied to the reading of various works of Indian English novelists.

An effective and enriching discourse on comparative historiography invests itself in understanding the distinctness and identity that have created various civilizations. Very often, infected by bias, ideology, and cultural one-upmanship, we encounter a presumptuousness that is redolent of impatience with the cultural other and of an ingrained refusal to acknowledge what one’s own history and culture fail to provide. This “failure” need not be the inspiration to subsume the other within one’s own understanding of the world and history and, thereby, (...) neuter the possibilities of knowledge-sharing and cultural interface. It is a realization of the “lack” that provokes and generates encounters among civilizations. It should goad us to move away from what we have universalized and, hence, normalized into an axis of dialogue and mutuality. What Indians would claim as itihasa need not be rudely frowned upon because it does not chime perfectly with what the West or the Chinese know as history. Accepting the truth that our ways of understanding the past, the sense of the past, and historical sense-generation vary with different cultures and civilizations will enable us to consider itihasa from a perspective different from the Hegelian modes of doing history and hence preclude its subsumption under the totalitarian rubric of world history. How have Indians “done” their history differently? What distinctiveness have they been able to weave into their discourses and understanding of the past? Does the fact of their proceeding differently from how the West or the Chinese conceptualize history delegitimize and render inferior the subcontinental consciousness of “encounters with past” and its ways of being “moved by the past”? This article expatiates on the distinctiveness of itihasa and argues in favor of relocating its epistemological and ideological persuasions within a comparative historiographical discourse. (shrink)

When Matthew Arnold's wandering scholar-gipsy encounters former colleagues in a country lane who "of his way of life enquired," he replies thatHe spends the rest of his days in this lonely pursuit, "waiting for the spark from heaven to fall." If literature is compared to the scholar gipsy, what would be the politics and dynamics of the "spark"? Both have their presences, but in trying to understand their character—via the normative, aesthetic and cultural ways of understanding how they both matter (...) —have we forgotten the absences that circumscribe their existences? Is knowing the scholar-gipsy and literature as significant as knowing that both are also elusive? How can they be known outside their established and .. (shrink)

This Book Is The Result Of Intensive And Critical Study Of The Different Aspects Of Indian Epistemology Viz. The Nyaya Theory Of Perception, Some Problems Of Meaning In Purva-Mimamsa And Vedanta, Problem Of Vyapti According To Jaina-Logicians And Vallabhacarya Etc.

Papers presented at the National Seminar on Language, Interpretation and Understanding: Hermeneutics from East-West Perspective, held in 2005 at the University of North Bengal in India.

Although not a professional historian, the author raises several issues pertinent to the state of history today.Qualifying the "non-historian" as an "able" interventionist in historical studies, the author explores the relationship between ...

How empty and barren would life be if all our art and literature were taken away. What a calamity!Beyond the circle of the reading room are the world's greatest collection of books and the finest works of art from all places and times—sculpture from the Parthenon, Ming vases, Viking jewelry, great stone bulls and lions from Assyria, Egyptian mummies, medieval tapestries—brought together and taken out of context and time, like Keats's Grecian urn, because in themselves and in conjunction they create—they (...) are—art. In the courtyard before the huge pillars of the classical front of a Greek temple, thousands of people waited in long lines, like pilgrims at a shrine, to be admitted to look for a few moments at the rare .. (shrink)