Derrida’s “Indecent Objection”

Derrida’s account of forgiveness appears to oppose politics to ethics, challenging political reconciliation in the name of unconditional forgiveness. Yet at the same time Derrida seems to sacrifice ethics to politics by advancing but refusing to take the side of what he calls an “indecent objection” to reconciliation. This essay seeks to account for Derrida’s strategy and to think through some of the consequences of Derrida’s emphasis on the “impossibility” of forgiveness.     

Coming out of the Therapy Closet: Women’s Disclosure of Same-sex Attraction in Counselling

“Coming out” is a process that same-sex attracted people undergo if they choose to acknowledge it to others. Minimal research exists examining the coming-out experience for same-sex attracted women in counselling settings. This qualitative study addressed the gaps in existing research by exploring counsellors’ perceptions of factors influencing same-sex attracted female clients to disclose their sexual orientation to a counsellor. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 counsellors from diverse clinical backgrounds. In their view, the main factors influencing disclosure were the perceived lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) friendliness of a service or counsellor; the presence of LGBQ symbols within services; using gender-neutral language; and the level of a client’s self-acceptance of their sexual orientation. These findings suggest that the utilisation of culturally affirming models by counsellors working with same-sex attracted female clients can create a safe environment for disclosure of sexual orientation.     

China’s modern image – contemporary Chinese art

Abstract

As a worldwide cultural phenomenon, contemporary art in China has not only been used as a diplomatic language but also a reflection of contemporary Chinese culture. Contemporary Chinese art, as an emerging field to display China’s global role, provides an important perspective to study China’s self-position in global relations, China’s diplomacy in exercising its soft power, contemporary Chinese culture, and the reinvention of China’s cultural/national identity in post-Mao China. Using the 2000 Shanghai Biennale and the Chinese pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale as case studies, this article investigates how the fluid construct of Chineseness is successfully promoted and demonstrated through the government’s support of contemporary Chinese art.     

Fo(u)nts of etymology: abstraction and the absolute in Derrida’s 'Faith and Knowledge…'

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt actively engaged in the problem of a Jewish homeland and the politics of Zionism in the years 1941–1948. She advocated a Binational solution to Palestine – a single political commonwealth with two national identities, Jewish and Arab, integrated in a federation with other countries in the region. In the crucial period leading up to the establishment of the State of Israel, Arendt became increasingly disillusioned with the Jewish Agency and the Zionist movement for failing to organize a Jewish response to Nazism (a Jewish Army) and rejecting the Palestinian right to a homeland.     

Is Starting a Business a Sustainable way out of Unemployment? Treatment Effects of the Swedish Start-up Subsidy

In this paper, we evaluate the Swedish self-employment start-up program based on a matching approach using data from administrative records. In addition to information of labor market history, traditional human capital and socio-economic variables, the data at hand also include information on the self-employment history of participants and nonparticipants as well as that of their parents. Our results indicate that the start-up subsidy program for unemployed persons is a successful program regarding the integration of the unemployed into the mainstream of the labor market. We find that, relative to members of control groups, participants, on average, have an increased probability of unsubsidized employment. Our analysis of different educational backgrounds presents the strongest employment effects for the low educated unemployed.     

Manufacturing Naxi’s original ecological culture in contemporary China

For over a decade, original ecological (yuanshengtai原生态) has contested ethnic (minzu) as an influential framework in representing minority folk culture in Chinese official and popular media. This article explores the ideological implications of such a shift in the context of state-minority relationships. By examining Han elites’ invention of the neologism and Naxi elites’ adaptations, I argue that YST transforms local ethnic categories into a transethnic, translocal, and transnational concept, and therefore allows both the nation state and the minority groups to promote their own versions of ethnic identities. Compared to the antagonistic model between state domination and minority resistance, YST reflects a shift from minority political self-determination to cultural self-representation in the drastically changing global environments.     

The Fathers’ Dark Triumph: terror and the end of revolution in J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg

This paper interrogates the work performed by the figure of the terrorist in J.M. Coetzee’s novel The Master of Petersburg (1994), a fictionalised account of the events prompting Fyodor Dostoevsky’s writing of the novel Demons. It does so to illustrate the waning of the cultural signs of revolt and revolution in the ways that they were valorised by the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. The idea that writing is able to enact a revolt against the representational and epistemic violence of the symbolic order, is, I argue, one that Coetzee rejects. In denying writing revolutionary power, what emerges instead is the idea of art as itself terroristic: an act of violence rather than one of redemption.     

Carl Schmitt’s politics in the age of drone strikes: examining the Schmittian texture of Obama’s enemy

When George Bush declared to his global audience that they were either ‘with us or against us’, he appeared to directly invoke the Schmittian antithesis of friend vs. enemy. Against the historical backdrop of Bush’s war on terror, and the scholarly attention his foreign policy received in relation to Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political, this paper examines whether the Obama administration’s targeted killing regime has marked a departure from Schmitt’s paradigms of war and enmity. Focusing specifically upon the rapid increase in use of drone strikes during Barack Obama’s presidency, this paper argues that the production of the enemy’s abstractness and drive for its annihilation together push at the limits of the Schmittian political logic. However, rather than denoting the point at which political relations are unexplainable through a Schmittian lens, this paper proposes that this produced enemy and its treatment in drone ‘warfare’ obfuscates the lines between a complex of Schmittian paradigms.     

On the probability of observing Borda’s paradox

Previous studies have shown that, when voters’ preferences become more internally consistent or mutually coherent, the probability of observing Condorcet’s Paradox of cyclic majorities is reduced and tends to zero, in accordance with intuition. The current study shows that the impact of an increasing degree of mutual coherence among voters’ preferences on the likelihood of observing Borda’s Paradox is much more subtle and more difficult to analyze. The degree of the impact in this case depends both on the measure of mutual coherence that is considered and on the voting rule that is used. In some circumstances, the probability that Borda’s Paradox will occur actually increases when voters’ preferences become more internally consistent.     

A sublimed experience of the rhetoric of Plato’s Republic

This article argues that Plato’s Republic promotes a public memory characterized by a sublimed experience of reason. The standard understanding of the meaning and value of the Republic is a product of processes of sublimation rather than a necessary conclusion drawn from the text’s propositional content. Key moments of the text illustrate this pattern of sublimation. The particular strand of arguments from the Republic addressed in this article invite readers to justify the use of deception, to forget the ethical implications of achieving and maintaining justice through deceit, and to identify with the ruling and deceiving class. Critical attention to this line of arguments offers an understanding of the symbiotic, rather than antagonistic, relationship between philosophy and rhetoric while allowing us to recognize the danger inherent in our willingness to rationalize the unethical foundation of the kallipolis.     

Young people’s perceptions of power and influence as a basis for understanding contemporary citizenship

Persistent simplistic binary discourses of young people’s citizenship portray them either as civically deficit and disengaged citizens or the creators of new democratic modes and approaches. This paper draws on field research with two groups of young people in Australia to better recognise the nuance of young people’s experiences of citizenship, power and influence. The study investigated the extent to which different groups of young people believe that they have the power to influence society; the ways in which they seek this influence; the current barriers to their influence; and what would enable them to have greater influence. Our analysis in this paper draws on Lukes’ concepts of power [2005. Power: A Radical View. 2nd ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan] and Arvanitakis’ framework of citizenship engagement and empowerment [in Arvanitakis, J., and E. Sidoti. 2011. “The Politics of Change: Where to for Young People and Politics.” In Their Own Hands: Can Young People Change Australia?, edited by L. Walsh and R. Black, 11–20. Melbourne: ACER Press], but also builds on an emerging scholarship concerned with the geographic dimensions of young people’s citizenship engagement and action, as well as with the affective, relational and temporal dimensions of this engagement and action. Our findings suggest that power works in different ways to both constrain and liberate young people as citizens – sometimes at the same time. The paper concludes with an argument for the continuing need to understand young people’s lived and located experiences of engagement, power and influence in more nuanced and sophisticated ways. This includes reframing the discussion about young people’s experiences in terms of the nature of their democratic engagement and action rather than simply their citizenship.     

Running out of time: A qualitative investigation of homeless men’s access to health services

Abstract

This study examined health beliefs and health care utilisation among 20 homeless men in Liverpool, through the voices of homeless men themselves. Using semi-structured interviews and framework analysis, narratives highlighted the interplay between the limiting structures of the health care system and an individual's ability to know how to seek out health care in order to improve their own health. Specifically, we found that individual agency was contingent on the availability of a set of minimum resources, to which homeless men did not have access. These findings have important implications in terms of practical policy recommendations for improving health care utilisation among the homeless.     

Dowry in the absence of the legal protection of women’s inheritance rights

Review of Economics of the Household - The practice of dowry is often thought to be the root cause of the unequal treatment of girls in India, as represented by sex-selective abortion and female...     

Exploring the Potential of Shadow Controls in the Evaluation of Children’s Services

This article describes and presents a framework for an under‐used evaluation technique in the context of an evaluation of a programme for disaffected young people. Shadow controls—the use of expert judgement to estimate the success of a programme—are often dismissed in research design as an unreliable form of comparison, but can be useful in situations where there is limited scope for a control group or to enhance the causal inference attributable to non‐experimental evaluations. The exercise described uses a practice tool as a structure for making predictions about the situations of the young people on the programme, assuming they do not receive an intervention. These predictions (shadow controls) are then compared to outcome data for the young people at the end of the programme. The results of the exercise provide some important messages about the programme’s effectiveness and the potential for strengthening non‐experimental evaluation methods. The article also discusses how the method can usefully inform evaluations of social programmes and encourage agency and user collaboration.     

Skuka and the Absurd in Gogol'’s Tale of the ‘Two Ivans’

The present article is devoted to an analysis of Gogol'’s last story from his Ukrainian cycle, “The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich”; it makes use of canonical as well as innovative approaches to Gogol'’s tale in order to explore the significance of the epilogue to an interpretation of the story as a whole. The examination will encompass ideas on the temporal aspects of the narration, the philosophical concept of ennui/skuka, and the possible significance of the camera obscura as the setting for one of the key moments in the story. Whereas the camera obscura is the setting of the quarrel between the two main characters, the story ends with a manifestation of skuka from the narrator: how do these two elements relate to each other, and what do they suggest in terms of the possibility of reaching an all-encompassing interpretation of the ‘Two Ivans’?     

Understanding the origin of the Bohai state in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

The state of Bohai (on Korean reading – Parhae, ??) existed in what is modern Russian Primorye region (Приморский край/Maritime Region), North Korea and Northeastern China, from the late seventh to the early tenth centuries AD. It played an important role in the history of the area as a major regional power for over two centuries. Recently, the history of Bohai has begun to attract scholarly interest. However, North Korean studies of Bohai remain basically almost unknown in the Western world. In this article, I present the history of Bohai studies in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). In this article, I analyze not only North Korean studies of Bohai but also the opinions of the Korean scholars on the subject. They are rather specific for North Koreans who have unique access to the archaeological and historical materials on Bohai but are also subjected to unusually severe political pressures. The history of Bohai has now become an object of active political games which are related to territorial claims based on alleged archaeological and historical material. This situation increases the general interest in Bohai but also makes honest and unbiased research more difficult.     

Jack Michael’s Musings on the 60th Anniversary of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - When the B. F. Skinner Foundation reprinted Skinner’s Verbal Behavior in 1992, Jack Michael wrote one of its two forewords, a detailed outline of the...