Native food production in the Eastern Woodlands of North America before, and at the time of, European contact has been described by several writers as “slash-and-burn agriculture,” “shifting cultivation,” and even “swidden.” Select quotes from various early explorers, such as John Smith of Pocahontas fame, have been used out of context to support this position. Solid archaeological evidence of such practices is next to non-existent, as are ethnographic parallels from the region. In reality, the best data are documentary. (...) Unlike previous assessments, this paper evaluates sixteenth and seventeenth century ethnohistorical references to anything that can be even remotely construed as supportive of previous claims. Analyzed as a group these sources reveal something completely different from what common knowledge would have us believe. References to the slashing, the burning, and the shifting of fields are reasonably abundant. Rarely, however, are all three activities mentioned in a single passage, or by one chronicler. Furthermore, subtleties often overlooked in these quotes reveal great insight into native practices. This paper assesses explorers' and early settlers' descriptions in the context of the larger body of literature dealing with the ecology of swidden agriculture today. Indigenous fields in the Eastern Woodlands tended to be large, numerous, contiguous, and cleared of roots and stumps. Fields previously cleared of trees were covered with grass prior to preparation for planting. They were permanently cultivated. This condition stands in marked contrast to present-day swidden fields in other parts of the world that tend to be small, few, scattered, partially cleared of trees, and cultivated for only a year or two before being abandoned. Slash-and-burn shifting cultivation became common only after European settlers introduced steel axes. It was then practiced on uplands, not the formerly cultivated floodplains that were usurped by interlopers. (shrink)

This study examines how the cultivation effect is impacted by a sudden change in the content of news media reports. A content analysis of newspaper articles about Iceland published in Israel before and after the outbreak of the 2008 economic crisis was used to detect changes in the theme and tone of news reports regarding this country. It was followed by a survey that asked Israelis to give their estimates and views concerning the economic aspects of life in Iceland. (...) Both first order and second order cultivation effects, which correlated media consumption with a positive view of Iceland's economy and corresponded to the pre-crisis image of Iceland in the Israeli media, were noticed. These findings are supportive of the thesis that the long term frequency of media messages is more significant than their recency in establishing a cultivation effect. (shrink)

Collecting seeds and specimens was an integral aspect of botany and natural history in the eighteenth century. Historians have until recently paid less attention to the importance of collecting, trading and compiling knowledge of their cultivation, but knowing how to grow and maintain plants free from disease was crucial to agricultural and botanical projects. This is particularly true in the case of food security. At the close of the eighteenth century, European diets (particularly among the poor) began shifting (...) from wheat- to potato-dependence. In Britain and Ireland during these decades, extensive crop damage was caused by diseases like ‘curl’ and ‘dry rot’ – leading many agriculturists and journal editors to begin collecting data on potato cultivation in order to answer practical questions about the causes of disease and methods that might mitigate or even eliminate their appearance. Citizens not only produced the bulk of these data, but also used agricultural print culture and participation in surveys to shape and direct the interpretation of these data. This article explores this forgotten scientific ambition to harness agricultural citizen science in order to bring stability and renewed vitality to the potato plant and its cultivation. I argue that while many agriculturists did recognize that reliance upon the potato brought with it unique threats to the food supplies of Britain and Ireland, their views on this threat were wholly determined by the belief that the diseases attacking potato plants in Europe had largely been produced or encouraged by erroneous cultivation methods. (shrink)

Cultivation: Art and Aesthetics in Everyday Life is an inquiry into everyday practices with an aesthetic dimension such as collecting, walking and domestic life. I examine the implications of a critical engagement with these practices for philosophical aesthetics and cultural studies. Traditional aesthetic theory has been informed by a fine arts model of creativity and aesthetic experience and, thus, has not adequately treated everyday aesthetic life. The rapidly expanding field of contemporary cultural studies, on the other hand, has been (...) marked by a dramatic shift in attention toward non-fine art objects like film and television. However, the attention of cultural studies remains, for the most part, limited to mass produced commodities, thereby presenting a narrow picture of aesthetic life outside the fine arts. Cultivation presents an alternative to both approaches. Following John Dewey, I develop a model of cultivation that allows me to locate and describe creativity and aesthetic experience in everyday life. Seen within the framework of everyday life, cultivation becomes more than the development of aesthetic sensibility, as in traditional connoisseurship. Instead, it includes as well the ongoing development of the capacity to satisfy this sensibility through the creative manipulation of one's actions and the world. This Pragmatist version of cultivation emphasizes the importance of creating occasions for aesthetic experience, that is, of refining and developing experience through the design of aesthetically motivated endeavors like walking, interior decoration and collecting. Cultivation is essentially a process: we do or make things in order to have experiences which then, internalized through habit and re-organized and redirected upon reflection, serve as the basis for further doing or making and still more refined experiences. This model of cultivation is then deployed in extended analyses of everyday practices. In these analyses, I develop a critical approach that seeks to understand practice as a creative process whose possibilities are intrinsically open to development. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical phenomenological view of the concept of access intimacy, a term coined by disability justice advocate Mia Mingus. Access intimacy refers to a mode of relation between disabled people or between disabled and non-disabled people that can be born of concerted cultivation or instantly intimated and centrally concerns the feeling of someone genuinely understanding and anticipating another’s access needs. Putting in conversation this notion of intimacy with Kym Maclaren’s critical phenomenological account of intimacy, I show (...) how accessibility is not about what one person or institution can do for another but involves an ongoing, interpersonal process of relating and taking responsibility for our inevitable encroachment on one another in ways that enhance one another’s freedom. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper aims to offer a new perspective on role modelling by examining adolescents’ own efforts to lead a morally virtuous life. While traditional approaches to moral education emphasize the importance of teachers as role models, this study proposes a shift in focus towards adolescents’ own role models. Drawing on the philosophical concept of moral self-cultivation and psychological insights on identity development and social cognitive learning, it is argued that adolescents have the ability to cultivate their moral character (...) by emulating others. However, empirical evidence suggests that adolescents often do not perceive teachers as their role models. Consequently, moral educational theories are advised to demand less of teachers as role models. Teachers could invest more time in understanding students’ personal role models and encourage them to compare these role models with their own behavior. By acknowledging and addressing students’ role models, teachers can facilitate the moral self-cultivation of adolescents. (shrink)

Recent literature describing the process and pathways of the agrarian transition in Southeast Asia suggests that the rise of agricultural intensification and the growth of commodity markets will lead to the demise of swidden agriculture. This paper offers a longitudinal overview of the conditions that drive the agrarian transition amongst indigenous swidden cultivators and migrant paddy farmers in central Palawan Island, the Philippines. In line with regional agrarian change, we describe how a history of conservation policies has criminalized and pressured (...) swidden farmers to adopt more intensive “modern” agricultural practices. We examine how indigenous swidden cultivators adjust their practice in response to recent changes in policies, security of harvests, and socio-cultural values vis-à-vis intensification. Rather than suggest that this transition will lead to the demise of swidden, results reveal that farmers instead negotiate a shifting ground in which they lean on and value swidden as a means of negotiating agrarian change. (shrink)

Organic farming is spreading throughout Asia, including in Thailand. Little is known about whether farmers’ values change as they make the shift from conventional farming to organic farming. The benefits farmers perceive from making the shift have also scarcely been studied. We investigated these factors in Northeastern Thailand by conducting observations, key informant interviews, semi-structured interviews and questionnaire interviews. We found that as Thai farmers adopted organic methods, they developed an eco-consciousness. In comparing members of a Buddhist temple-based organic farmer (...) support group with members of a non-profit organic agriculture support group, we found that the temple-based group adopted deeper Buddhist eco-spiritual values while the non-profit group remained more commercially oriented. Farmers who adopted Buddhist eco-spiritual values enjoyed greater financial and health benefits from making the organic shift. A higher proportion of the temple-based group eliminated their debts after making the shift . Additionally, a higher proportion of members in the temple-based group felt that their physical health improved after becoming an organic farmer . Interestingly, the less debt farmers carried, the healthier they felt . Participants believed that eliminating the use of agro-chemicals, using organic fertilizers, consuming organic food, and increasing biodiversity on their farms also contributed to improving their health. We conclude that for Thai farmers who are devoutly committed to Buddhism, temple-based organic support programs provided an effective pathway to improving their finances, health and well-being. For Thai farmers generally, a fundamental adoption of eco-conscious values is integral to experiencing deeper non-commercial benefits from organic farming. Findings suggest that the expansion of organic farming systems depends on changing perspectives about well-being. (shrink)

Based on Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical concept of »reoccupation«, the study analyzes why the microbe has never really been situated in the world, demarcating ontological shifts in modeling microbes. The shifts are related to techniques such as sequencing and digitizing, to microbe banks acting as world models, and to metaphysical vacancies co-created. These can be operated on a historiographic level, as highlighted by the world formula of bacterial photosynthesis. It allowed for imaginations of the Early Earth and an Iron-Sulfur-World. In sum, (...) collecting and cultivating are shown to be crucial pre-operations for operative bio-ontologies, exemplified by a case study on the German Collection of Microorganisms (DSMZ). (shrink)

Peasants of the northeastern Pará cultivate cassava (manioc esculenta) using shifting cultivation. This paper discusses some factors in support of cassava production, even though it has some negative environmental impacts. These factors are the importance of cassava in the region's history, dietary traditions, and the cooperative labor systems employed in its cultivation and processing.

As the gap between the world’s rich and poor grows wider and the limitations of institutional solutions such as foreign aid continue to be exposed, students of development are shifting their focus toward individualistic business-based solutions that seek to draw members of marginalized communities into the global marketplace. This focus on the individual, however, raises three interconnected issues: it privileges a view of the human person as individualistic versus relational, it proposes isolated solutions that are not scalable, and it (...) can leave would-be change agents feeling hopeless. Drawing on insights from sociology, political philosophy, and Catholic social thought, the current paper presents an alternative path to educating for an inclusive economy by arguing that our greatest structural challenges require us not to abandon institutional solutions but rather to develop better institutions rooted in a fuller notion of the human person. Specifically, by cultivating a mindset of relationality through immersion experiences and mindfulness practices, we propose that business education can empower students to develop hope-filled solidarity with the marginalized, understand their role in the global economic system, and as future business leaders, build virtuous institutions for the common good. (shrink)

Based on Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical concept of »reoccupation«, the study analyzes why the microbe has never really been situated in the world, demarcating ontological shifts in modeling microbes. The shifts are related to techniques such as sequencing and digitizing, to microbe banks acting as world models, and to metaphysical vacancies co-created. These can be operated on a historiographic level, as highlighted by the world formula of bacterial photosynthesis. It allowed for imaginations of the Early Earth and an Iron-Sulfur-World. In sum, (...) collecting and cultivating are shown to be crucial pre-operations for operative bio-ontologies, exemplified by a case study on the German Collection of Microorganisms (DSMZ). (shrink)

In summaries of “best practices” for pedagogy, one typically encounters enthusiastic advocacy for metacognition. Some researchers assert that the body of evidence supplied by decades of education studies indicates a clear pedagogical imperative: that if one wants their students to learn well, one must implement teaching practices that cultivate students’ metacognitive skills. -/- In this dissertation, I counter that education research does not impose such a mandate upon instructors. We lack sufficient and reliable evidence from studies that use the appropriate (...) research design to validate the efficacy of metacognitive skill-building interventions (not just evaluate their relationship to learning outcomes). I argue that improved academic outcomes following these interventions aren’t necessarily mediated by increased metacognitive skills; rather, enhanced student performance can be accounted for by other factors that accompany metacognitive training, particularly the explicit provision of domain-specific knowledge. -/- On the way to this conclusion, I elaborate some complications and controversies surrounding “metacognition.” This is a sprawling and nebulous construct, which makes generalizations about its pedagogical value dubious from the outset. Moreover, it is unclear the extent to which the end goal of metacognitive skill-building (cognitive self-mastery, involving knowledge of and control over our own minds) is even possible, given our mental architecture; some cognitive scientists allege that we are subject to phenomenological illusions which make this seem more achievable than it actually is. -/- I also attempt to provide an account of how metacognitive skill-building could receive glowing endorsements from educators and education researchers, even though its conceptual and empirical underpinnings are flimsy. The error theory I offer identifies two major factors that may foster belief in the efficacy of metacognitive training: goalpost-shifting around the objective of such efforts, and motivated reasoning in defense of the desirable conclusion that educators can significantly reshape students’ minds and unlock their intellectual potential through simple pedagogical interventions. (shrink)

The recent surge in land-based investments in the global South has been seen as both an opportunity for rural economic development and as a trend that poses significant social and environmental risks. This study sheds light on this debate through a look at the tobacco industry in Malawi. We employ a case study approach to investigate how rights, property, and authority associated with land and forest resources have shifted in the context of expanded investments in tobacco, and the stakes for (...) both local land users and citizens. Findings point to the need to broaden the metric of risks and trade-offs associated with large-scale land acquisitions, and to engage in a deeper reading of how these are borne out throughout history. (shrink)

Sharply in focus in the United States right now is the disproportionate COVID‐19 infection, hospitalization, and mortality rates of Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, and Pacific Islanders living in the United States in contrast to White people. These COVID‐19 disparities are but one example of how systemic racism filters into health outcomes for many Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC). With these issues front and center, more attention is being given to the ways that White medical professionals contribute to these (...) disparities, including their socialization to ignore or deny inequities. As such, the present study sought to understand how educating White health‐care pre‐professionals about systemic racism might influence their understanding of and responsibility for disrupting White supremacy. Data were drawn from 49 White‐identified nursing students who participated in a mapping project that uncovered instantiations of systemic racism in the United States. Participant written reflections were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings revealed that mapping projects can develop White people's knowledge and understanding of systemic racism. We introduce the construct, transformative dissonant encounters, to describe how this project precipitated shifts in world view necessary for White people to confront systemic racism. Implications for nursing educators, psychological researchers, and antiracist activists are discussed. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has had profound effects on global health, healthcare, and public health policy. It has also impacted education. Within undergraduate healthcare education of doctors, nurses, and allied professions, rapid shifts to distance learning and pedagogic content creation within new realities, demands of healthcare practice settings, shortened curricula, and/or earlier graduation have also challenged ethics teaching in terms of curriculum allotments or content specification. We propose expanding the notion of resilience to the field of ethics education under the (...) conditions of remote learning. Educational resilience starts in the virtual classroom of ethics teaching, initially constituted as an “unpurposed space” of exchange about the pandemic’s challenging impact on students and educators. This continuously transforms into “purposed space” of reflection, discovering ethics as a repertory of orientative knowledge for addressing the pandemic’s challenges on personal, professional, societal, and global levels and for discovering (and then addressing) that the health of individuals and populations also has moral determinants. As such, an educational resilience framework with inherent adaptability rises to the challenge of supporting the moral agency of students acting both as professionals and as global citizens. Educational resilience is key in supporting and sustaining professional identify formation and facilitating the development of students’ moral resilience and leadership amid moral complexity and potential moral transgression—not only but especially in times of pandemic. (shrink)

Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced medical education toward more “online education” approaches, causing specific implications to arise for medical educators and learners. Considering an unprecedented and highly threatening, constrained, and confusing social and educational environment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided to shift the traditional focus of the Cognitive Load Theory from students to instructors. In this process, we considered recent suggestions to acknowledge the psychological environment in which learning happens. According to this fundamental fact, “Learning and instructional (...) procedures do not occur in a situational vacuum.” Following this assertion, we adapted and implemented principles of CLT to reduce the extraneous load for our faculty to facilitate continued scholarly activity and support the overall wellbeing of our faculty during these trying times. The adoption of these principles enabled our team to cultivate attitudes and skills across multiple domains, such as online presentation technologies, implementing and maintaining a “classroom atmosphere” in a virtual environment, encouraging discussion among large online groups of students, facilitating group work, providing virtual office hours, and proactively planning for subsequent sessions. (shrink)

The Korean concept of kyoyang conceives different layers of meaning corresponding to the enlightenment and reform project in the early modern and colonial periods of Korean society. This article traces the historical trajectory of kyoyang published in Korean vernacular magazines and newspapers by Korean reformists, the main media intellectuals who appropriated Japanese and Western ideas of enlightenment, nationalism, and culturalism. It reveals the way the reformist media intellectuals employed kyoyang to define the nature of modern print media while simultaneously transforming (...) the concept, providing resources for enlightening the populace. Accordingly, kyoyang, once assumed by a few literary men under the influence of Neo-Confucianism, was shifted to encompass the commoners, envisioning the enlightened national subjects who embody contradictory qualities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Practical Pursuits: Religion, Politics, and Personal Cultivation in Nineteenth-Century JapanStephen G. CovellPractical Pursuits: Religion, Politics, and Personal Cultivation in Nineteenth-Century Japan. By Janine Tasca Sawada. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004. Pp. xi + 387.In Practical Pursuits: Religion, Politics, and Personal Cultivation in Nineteenth Century Japan, her follow-up volume to Confucian Values and Popular Zen, Janine Sawada breaks new ground and sets a high mark (...) for future studies on Japanese religions. Practical Pursuits pulls down the sectarian barriers that have defined scholarly and sectarian studies of Japanese religions by looking at the common practice of personal cultivation through a detailed investigation that demonstrates the manner in which members of various groups—from Rinzai Zen to physiognomy movements— [End Page 512] engaged each other directly or indirectly in a conversation that came to shape religious practice in the modern period. The uncovering of what might be called a "common religion" is similar to the work of Ian Reader and George Tanabe in their book Practically Religious. Yet, in the process of exploring the contours of personal cultivation discourse, Sawada also sheds light on shifting lay and clerical identities, state-religion relations, and the development of new religions. The first half of the book is dedicated to an analysis of precedents set in the Tokugawa (Edo) period (1603-1868) and lays the groundwork for later changes during the Meiji period (1868-1912), which are the subject of the second half of the book.Sawada begins with the provocatively titled first chapter, "Dead Words." While this term derives specifically from eighteenth-century Nativist arguments, it is revealed in the course of the book to be a central theme in Japanese religious discourse. "Dead words" refers to the reaction by Nativists, Confucian scholars, Buddhist priests, and practitioners of various religious movements to what they perceived to be an overemphasis on obtaining a purely intellectual understanding of texts rather than realizing through practice the practical and moral implications of the texts. Here, Sawada introduces us to what she terms the "grammar" of personal cultivation, namely a framework of Confucian language upon which dialogue between often vastly different communities could take place. This "grammar" provided the foundation for broad and diverse conversations about personal cultivation, the content of which may have differed dramatically even as the language used was similar. Sawada also carefully traces the manner in which definitions of "learning" and "cultivation" changed over time, how religion and learning came to be viewed separately in the modern period, and the reactions of religious organizations to these fluctuations in definition.The "grammar" Sawada describes was used by a broad spectrum of elites and, as she demonstrates, was mediated by leaders of new religious movements. This mix of actors—Rinzai Zen priests, Shingaku leaders, Shintō practitioners, and others—"created their own interpretive conclaves, negotiated between textual systems of knowledge with which they had been imbued and the reality of their social and religious experience" (p. 27). This book brings to light the overlapping conversations between these different groups and peels back the multiple layers of their relations in which conversations over personal cultivation served as a bond between political, religious, and social elites.For students of Buddhism, the two chapters related to koji (lay) Zen are of particular interest. In these chapters Sawada details the interaction between those using the "grammar" she identifies earlier. In so doing, she begins to clarify how the clergy and elite lay practitioners negotiated new understandings of the boundaries dividing lay from professional practitioners. Sawada introduces evidence to counter the standard view that Zen clergy engaged in an "outreach" effort to expand lay practices in order to overcome the financial difficulties faced by temples in the Meiji period. While she gives evidence that finances were indeed a critical issue, she also shows us that, at least in some cases, the effort was more of an "inreach" by lay members seeking to gain or regain what they believed were traditional personal cultivation [End Page 513] practices. In such cases, Sawada shows, the clergy's reaction varied from resistance to passive acceptance.It is hard to find points to critique about this very enjoyable book. That... (shrink)

In the Abhidharma texts, that flowers perfume sesame is used as a simile describing the mechanism of perfuming (_vāsanā_/_paribhāvanā_) in the context of meditative cultivation. According to the Sarvāstivādins, the meditative perfuming requires the co-existence of the perfumer and the perfumed. In comparison, the Yogācāra-vijñānavādins employ the same simile to explain their doctrine of the perfuming of all _dharma_s in _ālayavijñāna_, which demands the _bīja_ as the perfumed and the manifested _dharma_s as the perfumer to be simultaneous. My hypothesis (...) is that the Yogācāra idea of the perfuming of all _dharma_s is derived from the Abhidharma doctrine of meditative perfuming through the Sautrāntika theory of perfuming in non-concentrated (_asamāhita_) state. The idea of equating _vāsanā_ and _bīja_ probably took place under the doctrine of successive causality during the sectarian communication among the Sarvāstivādins, the Dārṣṭāntika-Sautrāntikas, and the early Mahāyānists. The Vaibhāṣika principle of simultaneous perfuming, which requires that the perfumed must co-exist with the perfumer, makes it possible in the Yogācāra-vijñānavāda that a _bīja_ in _ālayavijñāna_ is simultaneous with its manifestation. (shrink)

The island of Palawan stretches northward from Borneo like a bridge to Luzon in the South China Sea. This tropical forest environment, rich in thousands of species of plants and animals, is home to about 50,000 people, known as the Palawan. Besides hunting with blowpipes, traps, spears, and dogs, these people also practice shifting cultivation. Hunting and gathering activities as well as work in the fields follow the alternation of two seasons, the “monsoon” and the “heat,” barat and (...) bulag. As an integral ecosystem, swidden places a high value on mobility rather than on land property. Land tenure, and recourse to physical violence of all kinds are considered unethical behavior. Social life among the Palawan is governed by a bilateral or undifferentiated kinship system, a complex customary law based on rules and values dictated by “the tradition of the Ancestors,” Adat ät Kägunggurangan. (shrink)

Shifts in technology and ideology blur distinctions between people and machines, nations, and multinationals. Neoliberal economic policies in Mexico clashed with the national identity traditionally fostered by the official educational system. Calling for dialogue not imposed truths, historians rejected at tempts to align textbooks with the new agenda during a 3-year controversy. [Curriculum is] a specially constructed information system whose purpose, in its totality, is to influence, teach, train, or cultivate the mind and character of youth. —Neil Postman (cited in (...) Brosio, 1994, p. 243). (shrink)

Robots and other smart machines are increasingly interwoven into the social fabric of our society, with the area and scope of their application continuing to expand. As we become accustomed to interacting through and with robots, we also begin to supplement or replace existing human–human interactions with human–machine interactions. This article aims to discuss the impacts of the shift from human–human interactions to human–machine interactions in one facet of our self-constitution, i.e., morality. More specifically, it sets out to explore whether (...) and how the shift to human–machine interactions can affect our moral cultivation. I shall structure the article around what Shannon Vallor calls technology-driven moral deskilling, i.e., the phenomenon of technology negatively affecting individual moral cultivation, and shall also attempt to offer a Confucian response to the problem. I first elaborate in detail Vallor’s idea of technology-driven moral deskilling. Next, I discuss three paradigms of virtue acquisition identified by Nancy E. Snow, i.e., the “folk” paradigm, the skill-and-expertise paradigm, and the Confucian paradigm, and show how the Confucian paradigm can help us to respond to technology-driven moral deskilling. Finally, I introduce the idea of Confucian rituals (li) and argue for the ritualizing of machines as an answer to technology-driven moral deskilling. (shrink)

While the cultivation of genetically modified organisms (GMO) and the spread of genetically engineered (GE) foods has gone largely unnoticed by the majority of Americans, a growing number of vocal civil society groups are opposing the technology and with it the entire conventional system of food provision. As with other alternative food movements, non-GMO activists focus on changing individual consumption habits as the best means of altering the practices of food manufacturers and thereby what and how food is produced. (...) In this paper I argue that the increasing use of consumerist tactics reflect the neoliberalization of food activism in the United States – a process that rather than heralding sustainable agricultural and economic futures may reinforce the status quo. Using the emerging non-GMO movement, and the associated market for non-GMO products, I challenge the assumptions that consumer sovereignty and freedom of choice will bring about the small-scale, localized alternatives espoused by activists and scholars in the field. Specifically, I explore three critical limitations of contemporary alternative food politics. First, the neoliberalization of activism shifts the responsibility for social reforms from the state and manufactures to individual consumers, bringing with it important social justice implications. Second, focusing on choice opens new spaces for the profit without seriously threatening contemporary market structures or agro-ecological practices. Third, contemporary consumerist politics focus on eating right not less and thereby provide few alternatives to the current trends towards convenience and processed foods. (shrink)

Philosophic attention shifted after Hegel from Kant's emphasis on sensibility to criticism and analyses of the fine arts. The arts themselves seemed as ample as nature; a disciplined science could devote as much energy to one as the other. But then the arts began to splinter because of new technologies: photography displaced figurative painting; hearing recorded music reduced the interest in learning to play it. The firm interiority that Hegel assumed was undermined by the speed, mechanization, and distractions of modern (...) life. We inherit two problems: restore quality and conviction in the arts; cultivate the interiority--the sensibility--that is a condition for judgment in every domain. What is sensibility's role in experiences of every sort, but especially those provoked when art is made and enjoyed? (shrink)

In _Vibrant Matter_ the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to (...) acknowledge that agency always emerges as the_ _effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy. (shrink)

In transformation research of late, accounts on the relation between intentionality and agency on the one hand, and the more routinised and structured side of social co-existence on the other, are increasingly nuanced. However, we observe a deficiency in the way arguments are set up by the interlocutors: both, scholars who grant intentionality a central role and those who emphasise its limitations generally do so at the level of ontology – debating degrees of human capacity for conscious planning versus a (...) largely unconscious reproduction. We wish to shift this question from an ontological to a pedagogical one, exploring possibilities to cultivate and learn intentionality. We do so by developing the concept of consciousness-in-nature that we derive from, and contextualise in, the traditions of deep ecology and (Westernised) Buddhism which both view human beings as inseparable from nature and one another. With consciousness-in-nature we refer to an understanding of humans as a part of nature that has developed the capacity for (self-) reflection and deliberation – a capacity that is not static or firm but can be nurtured and cultivated or clouded over and subdued. From this standpoint, we lay out an understanding of the role of (re)learning consciousness for processes of social change and explore potentials for its nurturing. (shrink)

Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) was a German sociologist and system theorist who wrote on law, economics, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love. Luhmann advocated a radical constructivism and antihumanism, or "grand theory," to explain society within a universal theoretical framework. Nevertheless, despite being an iconoclast, Luhmann is viewed as a political conservative. Hans-Georg Moeller challenges this legacy, repositioning Luhmann as an explosive thinker critical of Western humanism. Moeller focuses on Luhmann's shift from philosophy to theory, which introduced new perspectives (...) on the contemporary world. For centuries, the task of philosophy meant transforming contingency into necessity, in the sense that philosophy enabled an understanding of the necessity of everything that appeared contingent. Luhmann pursued the opposite--the transformation of necessity into contingency. Boldly breaking with the heritage of Western thought, Luhmann denied the central role of humans in social theory, particularly the possibility of autonomous agency. In this way, after Copernicus's cosmological, Darwin's biological, and Freud's psychological deconstructions of anthropocentrism, he added a sociological "fourth insult" to human vanity. A theoretical shift toward complex system-environment relations helped Luhmann "accidentally" solve one of Western philosophy's primary problems: mind-body dualism. By pulling communication into the mix, Luhmann rendered the Platonic dualist heritage obsolete. Moeller's clarity opens such formulations to general understanding and directly relates Luhmannian theory to contemporary social issues. He also captures for the first time a Luhmannian attitude toward society and life, defined through the cultivation of modesty, irony, and equanimity. (shrink)

Sugar, pork, beer, corn, cider, scrapple, and hoppin' John all became staples in the diet of colonial America. The ways Americans cultivated and prepared food and the values they attributed to it played an important role in shaping the identity of the newborn nation. In A Revolution in Eating, James E. McWilliams presents a colorful and spirited tour of culinary attitudes, tastes, and techniques throughout colonial America. Confronted by strange new animals, plants, and landscapes, settlers in the colonies and West (...) Indies found new ways to produce food. Integrating their British and European tastes with the demands and bounty of the rugged American environment, early Americans developed a range of regional cuisines. From the kitchen tables of typical Puritan families to Iroquois longhouses in the backcountry and slave kitchens on southern plantations, McWilliams portrays the grand variety and inventiveness that characterized colonial cuisine. As colonial America grew, so did its palate, as interactions among European settlers, Native Americans, and African slaves created new dishes and attitudes about food. McWilliams considers how Indian corn, once thought by the colonists as "fit for swine," became a fixture in the colonial diet. He also examines the ways in which African slaves influenced West Indian and American southern cuisine. While a mania for all things British was a unifying feature of eighteenth-century cuisine, the colonies discovered a national beverage in domestically brewed beer, which came to symbolize solidarity and loyalty to the patriotic cause in the Revolutionary era. The beer and alcohol industry also instigated unprecedented trade among the colonies and further integrated colonial habits and tastes. Victory in the American Revolution initiated a "culinary declaration of independence," prompting the antimonarchical habits of simplicity, frugality, and frontier ruggedness to define American cuisine. McWilliams demonstrates that this was a shift not so much in new ingredients or cooking methods, as in the way Americans imbued food and cuisine with values that continue to shape American attitudes to this day. (shrink)

This paper examines the political philosophy of Liberalism with particular focus on the principles of liberal neutrality and value pluralism. These principles, which are advocated by the most prominent contemporary liberal theorists mark a significant departure from classical liberalism and its monistic approach to seeking truth and the good. I argue that the shift to neutrality and pluralism have done a disservice to liberalism and that the cultivation of discrimination skills is needed to deal with the complex tasks of (...) making decisions intelligently and effectively. (shrink)

Although personal attributes have gained recognition as an important area of effective corporate governance, scholarship has largely overlooked the value and implications of individual virtue in governance practice. We explore how authenticity—a personal and morally significant virtue—affects the primary monitoring and strategy functions of the board of directors as well as core processes concerning director selection, cultivation, and enactment by the board. While the predominant focus in corporate governance research has been on structural factors that influence firm financial outcomes, (...) this paper shifts attention to the role of authenticity and its relationship to individual board member qualities and collective board activities. We explore how authenticity has the potential to influence board dynamics and decision making and to enhance transparency and accountability. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced higher education institutions to shift their teaching activities from traditional face-to-face to online learning. This brings a great challenge to the creativity training of vocational college students, who not only learn theoretical knowledge but also cultivate technical skills. Therefore, it is very important to explore the influencing factors of online learning on students’ creativity during the epidemic. By relying on the related literature review, an extensive model is developed by integrating the expectation confirmation model, technology (...) task fit model, and the technology acceptance model to illustrate key factors that influence creativity. Based on the proposed model, theory-based hypotheses are tested through structural equation modeling employing empirical data gathered through a survey questionnaire of 229 students from different vocational colleges in China. In addition, to extend the analysis results, this paper performs a comparative analysis based on gender. The findings demonstrate that perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness significantly influence knowledge sharing; knowledge sharing significantly affects creativity. However, there is no substantial relationship between perceived usefulness and attitude, and no relationship between attitude and knowledge sharing. Moreover, a multi-group comparison shows that there is a significant gender difference between perceived ease of use and attitude. Based on the findings, theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Contrary to the scholarly consensus, Augustine and the Dialogue argues that Augustine's dialogues, with their inconclusive debates and dramatic shifts in focus, betray a sophisticated pedagogical method which combines strategies for 'un-learning' and self-reflection with a willingness to proceed via provisional answers. By shifting the focus from doctrinal content to questions of method, Kenyon seeks to reframe scholarly discussions of Augustine's earliest surviving body of works. This approach shows the young Augustine not refuting so much as appropriating Academic skeptical (...) practices. It also shows that the dialogues' few scriptural references, e.g. Wisdom 11:20's 'measure, number, weight', come at key structural points. This helps articulate the dialogues' larger project of cultivating virtue and their approach to philosophy as a form of purification. Augustine is shown to be at home with pluralistic approaches, and Kenyon holds up his methodology as an attractive model for thinking through problems of the liberal academy today. (shrink)

How do people form beliefs, and how should they do so? This book presents seventeen new essays on these questions, drawing together perspectives from philosophy and psychology. The first section explores the ethics of belief from an individualistic framework. It begins by examining the question of doxastic voluntarism-i.e., the extent to which people have control over their beliefs. It then shifts to focusing on the kinds of character that epistemic agents should cultivate, what their epistemic ends ought to be, and (...) the way in which these issues are related to other traditional questions in epistemology. The section concludes by examining questions of epistemic value, of whether knowledge is in some sense primary, and of whether the ethics of belief falls within the domain of epistemology or ethics. The second section extends this traditional debate to issues concerning the social dimensions of belief formation. It begins with essays by social psychologists discussing the past three decades of research in 'lay epistemics'. It continues by examining Humean, Kantian, and feminist insights into the social aspects of belief formation, as well as questions concerning the ethics of assertion. The section concludes with a series of essays examining a topic that is currently of great interest to epistemologists: namely, the significance of peer disagreement. (shrink)

In this article, I trace a shift in Confucian scholars’ interpretations about the idea of ‘learning for one’s self’ vs. ‘learning for others’ from the Analects: a shift from the philological interpretation to the philosophical one. Despite its defect, most Neo-Confucians accepted the philosophical interpretation, because it was considered to play a role of minimizing a newly emerged educational bane, that is, students’ exclusively instrumental study for civil service examinations, while establishing the supremacy of ‘learning for the cultivation of (...) mind’. I will examine whether this shift would also be said to be valid to contemporary Koreans or East Asians, who are often pictured as exam obsessed. (shrink)

In the crucible of the pandemic, it has never before been clearer that, to ensure the relevance and even the survival of the discipline, nursing must cultivate a radical imagination. In the paper that follows, I trace the imperative for conjuring a radical imagination for nursing. In this fever dream for nursing futures, built on speculative visions of what could be, I draw on anarchist, abolitionist, posthuman, Black feminist, new materialist and other big ideas to plant seeds of generative insurrection (...) and creative resistance. In thinking through a radical imagination, I unpack the significance of reparatory history for nursing, a discipline founded on normative whiteness. From there, I consider what it would take to shift the capitalist frame of healthcare to one of mutual aid, which requires the deep work of abolition. With a radical imagination that breaks down the enclosures that contain us through reparatory history, mutual aid and abolition, kinship becomes urgently possible. (shrink)

The proposal of the ‘Anthropocene’ as a new geological epoch where humans represent the dominant natural force has renewed artistic interest in the ‘geopoetic’, which is mobilized by cultural producers to incite changes in personal and collective participation in planetary life and politics. This article draws attention to prior engagements with the geophysical and the political: the work of Simone Weil and of the editors of the Martinican cultural journal Tropiques, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire. Synthesizing the political and scientific shifts (...) in human-world relationships of their time, both projects are set against oppressive or narcissistic materialisms and experiment with the image of the ‘cosmic’ to cultivate a preoccupation not with a tangible materialism but with an intangible one that emphasizes process and connectivity across wide spatial and temporal scales. The writers’ movement between poetics and politics will be used to enquire what kind of socio-political work a contemporary geopoetic could potentially do. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking collection of essays the history of philosophy appears in a new light, not as reason's progressive discovery of its universal conditions, but as a series of unreconciled disputes over the proper way to conduct oneself as a philosopher. By shifting focus from the philosopher as proxy for the universal subject of reason to the philosopher as a special persona arising from rival forms of self-cultivation, philosophy is approached in terms of the social office and intellectual (...) deportment of the philosopher, as a personage with a definite moral physiognomy and institutional setting. In so doing, this collection of essays by leading figures in the fields of both philosophy and the history of ideas provides access to key early modern disputes over what it meant to be a philosopher, and to the institutional and larger political and religious contexts in which such disputes took place. (shrink)

This paper examines attempts to find a conception of justice in early Confucian contexts, focusing on the concept of yi (translated as ?appropriateness?, ?right?, ?rightness?, even ?justice?) in the Mencius. It argues against the approach of deriving principles of dividing burdens and benefits from the discussions of concrete cases employing the concept of yi and instead shows that Confucian ethical concerns are more attentive to what kinds of interpersonal relations are appropriate in specific circumstances. It questions the exclusive emphasis in (...) justice-centred ethical discourse on assessing actions, and even more narrowly actions of governments and other public institutions, and their consequences regarding distribution of rights and material resources and goods. Instead of applying some abstract principles of justice, whether of equality or some other priorities according to individual characteristics, distributive problems are approached from the perspective of the effect of any proposed distribution on interpersonal relationships. Principles of justice treat opportunities, resources, and goods that are supposed to be distributed as possessions or potential possessions of individuals always competing for resources and goods. Confucians treat them not as objects to be possessed by one and denied to others, but as facilitators of personal cultivation effecting appropriate interpersonal relationships constituting harmonious communities. The Mencius offers a different perspective on distributive problems by shifting our ethical attention from ?who gets what?? to ?how should we relate to others?? within a different conception of the good life and the ideal society or polity. (shrink)

This paper examines the vital role played by electron microscopy toward the modern definition of viruses, as formulated in the late 1950s. Before the 1930s viruses could neither be visualized by available technologies nor grown in artificial media. As such they were usually identified by their ability to cause diseases in their hosts and defined in such negative terms as “ultramicroscopic” or invisible infectious agents that could not be cultivated outside living cells. The invention of the electron microscope, with magnification (...) and resolution powers several orders of magnitude better than that of optical instruments, opened up possibilities for biological applications. The hitherto invisible viruses lent themselves especially well to investigation with this new instrument. We first offer a historical consideration of the development of the instrument and, more significantly, advances in techniques for preparing and observing specimens that turned the electron microscope into a routine biological tool. We then describe the ways in which the electron microscopic images, or micrographs, functioned as forms of new knowledge about viruses and resulted in a paradigm shift in the very definition of these entities. Micrographs were not mere illustrations since they did the work for the electron microscopists. Drawing extensively on primary publications, we adduce the role of the new instrument in understanding the so-called eclipse phase in virus multiplication and the unexpected spinoffs of data from electron microscopy in naming and classifying viruses. Thus, we show that electron microscopy functioned not only to provide evidence, but also arguments in facilitating a reordering of the world that it brought into the visual realm. (shrink)

In the history of Chinese philosophy, Mozi calls music a “waste of resources,” considering it an aristocratic extravagance that does not benefit the everyday people. In its defense, Confucians highlight music’s moral and metaphysical qualities, arguing that music aids in moral cultivation and that music’s form mimics the structure of reality. The aim of this paper is to show that Korean philosophers provide yet another reason to think music is important. Music, and art in general, was used to express (...) a national identity at a time Korean philosophers were beginning to develop their own aesthetic consciousness in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A cultural movement called Joseonpoong (조선풍), “Joseon wind”, marked a shift away from Sinocentrism and towards Korea’s own unique value and practices. The new attempt to justify art’s value apart from its relationship to morality or metaphysics set Joseon thinkers apart from their Chinese predecessors. Using art for identity expression allowed the Koreans to reconceive art’s value while Sinocentric cosmological and cultural views were being challenged with the introduction of western knowledge. Art also became a tool for reversing hermeneutic injustice as new artistic practices and standards allowed the Koreans to meaningfully engage with previously neglected aspects of their lived lives. (shrink)

Radical democrats highlight dramatic moments of political action, which disrupt everyday habits of perception that sustain unequal social relations. In doing so, however, we sometimes neglect how social conditions—such as precarious employment, social dislocation, and everyday exposure to violence—undermine political agency or might be contested in uneventful ways. Despite their differences, two thinkers who have significantly influenced radical democratic theory have been similarly criticized for contributing to such a socially weightless picture of politics. However, attending to how they are each (...) preoccupied by the social conditions of inequality and loneliness enables us to recognize two distinct aspects of democratic politics–emancipation and civility. Cultivating an interpretive flexibility to shift between these aspects of politics might enable radical democrats to more clearly picture how struggles for appearance are limited and shaped by the social conditions within which they are enacted. (shrink)

In this paper, I will explore Rorty’s recommendation to shift from a philosophical to a literary culture by addressing this theme through a philosophical-educational lens and in reference to the question of what kind of education we need in order to foster democratic ethos. In this perspective, I will establish a comparison/contrast between Rorty’s idea of sentimental education and Matthew Lipman’s Philosophy for Children understood as two (alternative?) ways of recontextualizing Dewey’s heritage. After discussing Rorty’s understanding of a need for (...) an end (instead of a “Deweyan” recovery) of philosophy starting from his dialogue with Castoriadis and by reconstructing his appeal to a poeticized culture, I will present Lipman’s case for education for philosophical inquiry in order to cultivate a democratic ethos in primary and secondary schools. I will contrast it with Rorty’s education as socialization and, contextually, I will illustrate their different stances towards Hirsch’s cultural literacy and his core curriculum approach to civic education. Finally, after problematizing Rorty’s views on the use of literature for a democratic culture, I will indicate the need to combine the Rortyan and Lipmanian thrusts and will claim that an aspect of the novel-driven education advocated by Rorty maintains a constitutive Socratic-inquiring dimension. (shrink)

The Jola are intensive wet-rice cultivators in the Lower Casamance region of Senegal. In this study, the author examines the reasons behind startling contrasts in the organization of agricultural tasks among three Jola communities located within a 45-kilometre radius from Ziguinchor. In Sambujat, situated in the non-Islamisized region south of the river, wet rice is a monocrop cultivated by both men and women. In Jipalom, in the Kajamutay region north of the river, Islam and cash cropping have been adopted; and (...) in Fatiya, in the so-called 'Mandingized' region of the Kalunay, social relations have become hierarchical and this has had profound effects on the cropping system and on the division of labour. The author examines the shift of power relations over time, and their effects on the way in which production has been organized by age and gender, kin and class. Larger issues dealt with are Islamization, women's labour and the introduction of cash cropping. A concluding section places the history of Jola labour relations within the context of the political economy of Senegal. (shrink)

Using the work of Bruno Latour, this book reimagines ayahuasca as liquid divinity, asking fundamental ontological questions that shift the focus from ayahuasca experiences to ayahuasca-based ritual practices that aim at cultivating relationships with more-than-human powers, described by Latour as "beings of transformation and religion.".

Society is looking to business to help solve our most complex environmental and social challenges as we transition to a more sustainable economic model. However, without a fundamental shift in the dominant virtues that have influenced business decision making for the past 150 years to a new set of dominant virtues that better fit today's environment, it will be more natural for companies to resist the necessary changes than to find the opportunities within them. We use the term “virtues” quite (...) broadly to describe dispositions to think, feel and act in skillful ways that promote the aims of a practice. Addressing this deeper level of cultural change is essential to cultivating new instinctive behavior in business decision making. In this article, we describe five clusters of virtues that facilitate effective response to the transition challenges—adaptive, collaborative, frugality, humility, and systems virtues. To illustrate the application of these virtues, we present a detailed case study of Green Mountain Power, a Vermont electric utility that has embraced the shift to renewable energy and smart-grid technology, and is creating an innovative business model that is disrupting the industry. After distilling key findings from the case, we outline an approach to leadership development that can help accelerate the infusion of transitional virtues across an organization. (shrink)

In this article, I explore an alternative model of Confucian distributive justice, namely the ‘family model’, by challenging the central claim of recent sufficientarian justifications of Confucian justice offered by Confucian political theorists – roughly, that inequalities of wealth and income beyond the threshold of sufficiency do not matter if they reflect different merits. I argue (1) that the telos of Confucian virtue politics – moral self-cultivation and fiduciary society – puts significant moral and institutional constraints on inequality even (...) if it meets the threshold of sufficiency and largely results from differing individual merits; (2) that the Confucian moral ideal of the family state establishes and gives justification to the ‘family model’ of distributive justice that shifts the focus from desert to vulnerability and from causal responsibility to remedial responsibility. The article concludes by presenting Confucian democracy as the socio-political institution and practice that can best realize the Confucian intuition of the family model of justice. (shrink)

Technology explosion induced by information explosion will eventually change artifacts into intelligent autonomous agents consisting of surrogates and mediators from which humans can receive services without special training. Four potential problems might arise as a result of the paradigm shift: technology abuse, responsibility flaw, moral in crisis, and overdependence on artifacts. Although the first and second might be resolved in principle by introduction of public mediators, the rest seems beyond technical solution. Under the circumstances, a reasonable goal might be to (...) create a mutual dependency between empathy and technology: Using technology to help people cultivate empathy among people, so empathy in the society may allow people to help each other to recover from disasters beyond the scope of the assumption underlying the society of mediators. I highlight an immersive collaborative interaction environment for helping people share first-person view and its application to building empathic agents. (shrink)

If We Were Kin is about the we of politics-how that we is made, fought over, and remade-and how these struggles lie at the very core of questions about power and political change. While reigning frameworks in the study of politics leave forms of identification sedimented in the background as a priori identities or prop them up front as a part of a mechanistic and calculated game, political identification cannot be captured by these frameworks and is a far more significant (...) and profound political process than they allow. While this book stakes a wider claim about the centrality of identification to politics, it attends most closely to its deeper registers, and in particular to attempts by political actors within racial and gender justice and queer and trans liberation movements to get people to shift or reshape their foundational identifications. Drawing on the political thought of Sylvia Rivera, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and grassroots LGBTQ activists in Southerners On New Ground, I identify a distinct lineage of calls which challenge the atomized and hierarchical racial formations that structure political life in the United States and advance powerful visions of political relationships rooted in mutuality and shared freedom. As I trace through activist archives, political speeches, and original interviews, these appeals demand not only a rethinking of fundamental assumptions in the study of politics, but provide critical resources for understanding the way power works in struggles to constitute a we, how commitments towards or away from racial justice are cultivated through battles over identification, and the dangers and possibilities of identificatory appeals. (shrink)

Debates over how best to ensure appropriate conduct in battle typically draw a binary distinction between rule compliance and rule violation. This framing is problematic, excluding a critical third element of battlefield conduct, supererogation—that is, positive acts that go beyond what is demanded by the explicit rules of war. This article investigates this moral category of action; specifically, situations in which combatants refrain from taking the life of an enemy despite their moral and legal license to do so. It first (...) considers the moral tension between the duty of combatants to kill and battlefield mercy, and goes on to explore the factors that motivate the latter. The article then shifts to consider the significance of supererogation to the ongoing efforts to moderate the conduct of contemporary war. As the article illustrates, supererogatory restraint is constituted by values that when cultivated also incentivize adherence to the more explicit rules and standards of the battlefield. This is demonstrated through analysis of the conduct of Western special forces. The concept of supererogation is of further use when evaluating the origins and implications of “moral injury.” This is verified empirically in the context of armed unmanned aerial vehicles. (shrink)