汉族作家视野中的西藏文化想象

西藏作为一种独特的文学想象和诗性建构,在汉族作家的笔下,在不同的文本中显现出不同的面孔,阐释和表达本身就产生西藏的形象和意义：西藏是一种对生命憩园和情感故乡的追寻;西藏是一种空间性的参与因素,是作者表达历史意识的不可或缺的要素;西藏是动态的施动意义的救赎力量。当然,作为异质文化者的作家对于西藏的表达不可避免也会表现出疑惑与困境：马丽华表现出一种情感与理智之间难以调和的文化困境;马原用独特的叙事方式试图摆脱面对异于自己的西藏文化时不知如何表达的尴尬,暴露了他的叙事之中的潜在裂缝。     

Representation of Muslim characters living in the West in Ontario’s language textbooks

This study examined how Muslims living in the West were represented in English language textbooks in Ontario, Canada. The review showed that Muslims were consistently placed in inferior and dependent positions in relation to ‘white folks’ by focusing on their origins in violent and backward societies, their cultural deficits, social ineptitudes, conflicted identities, and low-status jobs. It is suggested that textbooks should encourage critical literacy by including a wider, more accurate range of depictions of Muslims in western societies to combat stereotyping.     

The Post-Washington Consensus and Economic Representations of Women in Development at the World Bank

In the past few years, the neoliberal Washington consensus has given way to a "post-Washington consensus' aimed at integrating social and economic dimensions of development, paying attention to broader goals such as sustainability, and challenging the old state versus market dichotomy. Among its other effects, this shift in development thinking has contributed to a greater emphasis on gender concerns in development institutions such as the World Bank. This article examines the recent innovations in economic theory that have informed these efforts. Through an analysis of the ways that these theories construct meanings about gender equity and development, the article concludes that the post-Washington consensus maintains the economistic and colonial discourses of neoliberalism, and thus provides little space for the meaningful social transformations called for by feminists working in development.     

Imag(in)ing Women's Agency

The use of images is central to Amnesty International's 2004 campaign ‘Stop Violence against Women’. Looking at how Amnesty International uses images to show women's agency reveals a conflation of the terms sex and gender. Despite its best efforts, Amnesty International's goal of empowering women ultimately remains out of reach because it fails to read violence against women in a gendered context. Through interviews and analyses of the images, this article claims that Amnesty International's concept of agency is trapped in a heterosexist, masculinist grammar that perpetuates non-agential articulations of women in human rights discourse. This article offers an alternative reading of gender and agency that contextualizes violence, opening up spaces in human rights discourse to begin to look at what causes individuals to resort to violence and at how violence may be perpetrated because of the presence of particular genders.     

The Wild West,the industrial East and the outlaw

This paper argues that dominant academic understandings of the Wild West overstate the extent to which it can be understood as a pro-capitalist mythology. The paper begins with an account of the making of the mythic West, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century. I then consider the cultural economics of this process, noting that, for most of the twentieth century, the Western was the dominant genre across whole swathes of cultural production. This is followed by a consideration of the place of the outlaw and related figures that appear to problematize the legitimacy of new forms of social order, particularly in relation to land and ownership. I conclude with some thoughts on what it might mean to propose an anti-modern and radical reading of the Western, and to connect the cowboy with other social bandits, such as the pirate and the Mafiosi.     

Colonial legacies,post-colonial (in)securities,and gender(ed) representations in South Asia's nuclear policies

Through a comparative study of India and Pakistan's national security discourses, this article explores the linkages between post-colonial India and Pakistan's nationalist/communalist identities, configurations of masculinities, and gendered representations underpinning their nuclear (in)securities. This paper contends that the colonial politics of place-making in the sub-continent has not only inscribed a process of ‘othering’ between these states but has also facilitated the rise of divergent visions of post-colonial nationalisms, which, at each of their phases and with particular configurations of masculinities, have used women's bodies to re-map India-Pakistan's borders and national (in)securities. This article particularly draws attention to a new form of gendered manipulation in South Asian politics in the late 1990s, whereby both states, embedded in colonial notions of religious/cultural masculinities, have relied on discourses of Hindu/Indian and Muslim/Pakistani women's violence and protection from the ‘other’ to pursue aggressive policies of nuclearization. It is at this conjectural moment of a Hinduicized and Islamicized nationalism (flamed by the contestations of a Hindu versus an Islamic masculinity) that one needs to provide a feminist re-interpretation of India-Pakistan's nationalist identities, gendered imaginaries, and their re-articulation of national (in)securities – that represents a religious/gendered ‘otherness’ in South Asia's nuclear policies.     

The Epistemological Significance of the Theory of Social Representations

The theory of social representations must be understood in terms of its proper epistemology so that it can accomplish its full potential in social sciences. This is often difficult to achieve because researchers comprehend it in terms of concepts that are part of static and individualistic Newtonian epistemology rather than in terms of dynamic and relational Einsteinian epistemology. This article considers three signposts that Moscovici identifies and analyses in the theory of relativity, namely the relation between epistemology and science, theory and method, and the argument against the explanation of effects by their causes. The following question is posed: are these signposts also characteristic of the theory of social representations? This question is examined focusing on interactional epistemology, theory and method and the diversity of natural thinking and communication. Moscovici's Psychoanalysis shows that natural thinking appears in a plurality of modes according to the situation in which it takes place and according to social groups towards which it is directed. Natural thinking is controversial and communication‐centred. Different professionals, groups and lay people use different kinds of speaking and different communicative genres when they try to resolve “the same” problem. The article suggests that bringing together dialogicality, dialogical linguistics and the theory of social representations may open up new possibilities for theoretical developments in social psychology.     

Continuous Utility Functions Through Scales

We present here a direct elementary construction of continuous utility functions on perfectly separable totally preordered sets that does not make use of the well-known Debreu’s open gap lemma. This new construction leans on the concept of a separating countable decreasing scale. Starting from a perfectly separable totally ordered structure, we give an explicit construction of a separating countable decreasing scale, from which we show how to get a continuous utility map.