Pedagogy for a Liquid Time

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman characterizes our time as a time of “liquid modernity” (Bauman in Liquid modernity. Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000). Rather than settled meanings, categories, and frames of reference Bauman contends that meaning is always in flux, open ended rather than closed. Given Bauman’s assessment, pedagogies that are directed towards finding, accepting, or imposing meaning come up short. They offer closed, ‘finished’ meanings instead of an examination of the ongoing, open ended, process of meaning making. What might a pedagogy for a liquid time look like? This is the animating question of this essay. Pedagogically we are interested in this ambiguous space between paradigms of meaning. Rather than resolution or the accommodation and building of new schema (or the acceptance of established schema), we explore the need for constant schema building and renewal—the necessity of living in a state of perpetual emergence. Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “liquid modernity” suggests that anomalies, rather than exceptions, are the norm; we are living with permanent uncertainty, needing to hold all schemes lightly (Bauman 2000).     

Time for a unified approach to medical ethics

A code of ethics is used by individuals to justify their actions within an environment. Medical professionals require a keen understanding of specific ethical codes due to the potential consequences of their actions. Over the past thirty years there has been an increase in the scope and depth of ethics instruction in the medical profession; however the teaching of these codes is still highly variable. This inconsistency in implementation is problematic both for the medical practitioner and for the patient; without standardized training, neither party can be assured of the practitioner's overall depth of knowledge. Within the field of ethics certain principles have reached a consensus of importance. Incorporation of these concepts in meaningful ways via a consistent curriculum would provide students with an appropriate skill set for navigating their ethical environment. Moreover, this curriculum should also be extended to residents and professionals who may have missed formal ethical training. This would provide a consistent framework of knowledge for practitioners, creating a basis for clear judgment of complex issues.     

Change management: Time for a change!

We discuss some core issues in the field of change management. We use these topics to identify some mindsets that dominate the practice of change management, and argue that these should be replaced by some alternatives. The alternatives are drawn largely from operations management and sociotechnical thinking. We characterize existing approaches as partial, and speculate that this may be one of the reasons why so many change initiatives are ineffective at meeting their goals. We identify some of the reasons why existing mindsets are sustained. We also point to some ways forward, focusing on changes in the mindsets and language we use. We speculate that these would improve the effectiveness of change initiatives.     

Time for Change

Metaphysical theories of change incorporate substantive commitments to theories of persistence. The two most prominent classes of such theories are endurantism and perdurantism. Defenders of endurancestyle accounts of change, such as Klein, Hinchliff, and Oderberg, do so through appeal to a priori intuitions about change. We argue that this methodology is understandable but mistaken—an adequate metaphysics of change must accommodate all experiences of change, not merely intuitions about a limited variety of cases. Once we examine additional experiences of change, particularly those in (special) relativistic circumstances, it becomes clear that only a perdurance account of change is adequate.     

Time Management as a Stressor for Helping Professionals: Implications for Employment

This study summarizes and compares the findings of 5 studies completed between 1984 and 1994 that dealt with the factors that cause stress for 4 groups of helping professionals: regular classroom teachers, special education teachers, nurses in a tertiary care hospital, and social workers in child welfare. Time and its effective management proved to be the most significant stressor category for all groups. Possible explanations for the persistence of time management concerns in these helping professions, and possible implications for employment counselors, both as helpers and information providers to those who seek to enter such professions, are proposed.     

Time for Men's Liberation

The Women's Liberation movement has granted women the right to think, and thereby become "whole people." There is now a crying need for men to be made "whole" by granting them the right to feel.     

Time in a one-instant world

Many philosophers hold that ‘one-instant worlds’—worlds that contain a single instant—fail to contain time. We experimentally investigate whether these worlds satisfy the folk concept of time. We found that ~50% of participants hold that there is time in such worlds. We argue that this suggests one of two possibilities. First, the population disagree about whether at least one of the A-, B-, or C-series is necessary for time, with there being a substantial sub-population for whom the presence of neither an A-, B-, nor C-series, is necessary for time, and hence those folk have a radically more minimal concept of time than has been attributed to them by philosophers. Or, second, the population do not disagree about whether at least one of the A-, B-, or C-series is necessary for time, but disagree about what it takes for a world to fail to contain even a C-series.     

The Stranger to Time: What a Collector Stands for in a Hurried Society

City-dwellers who are threatened by the risk of natural or social disasters are in search of safer houses. Each attempt to satisfy their need for safety, however, turns into another version of the security problem; so much so that, escaping from risk itself turns into different (yet nevertheless more powerful) risks. The film 10 to 11 (2009) focuses on the socio-spatial conflict between a stranger and his neighbours who are anxious about a possible earthquake risk in Istanbul. Mithat, the protagonist of the film, is a stranger not only to place but essentially to time. He lives within time and understands place as an essential means loaded by temporal experiences and memories. This paper deals with the multiple dichotomies between time and memory, between risk and fear, between aesthetics and security, and between attachment and profit in the context of urban transformation. The stranger, who is analysed for the first time as a temporal being in this paper, is discussed using Zygmunt Bauman’s concepts of uncertainty and liquid modernity, Richard Sennett’s capitalism, Ulrich Beck’s risk society, Frank Furedi’s culture of fear, Stephen Bertman’s hurried culture, Elias Canetti’s death, Giorgio Agamben’s forgotten and gone, Svetlana Boym’s nostalgia, and Halbwachs, Assmann, Connerton, and Arendt’s memory, as well as around the temporal spaces of museums, bibliopoles, antique shops, and cemeteries.     

香山居士白居易

白居易是唐代的一位伟大的现实主义诗人、文艺理论家和新乐府运动的领袖,也是一位亦仕亦儒亦道亦释的学者和思想家.     

Hope in a Time of Cholera

What are the internal conditions or mental states that may facilitate the moving on with life? How does one explain that some, after undergoing severe trauma, fail to go on with productive and creative lives while others do?In this paper, I shall explore the effect of hope and its central position in mobilizing traumatized individuals so that they can move on with their lives. I shall be focusing on a specific aspect of trauma often neglected in the literature, namely the trauma elicited by the sudden, almost overnight loss of monetary funds accumulated over years of hard work. I will be referring to the psychological impact suffered by Argentineans after severe economic measures taken by the government in late 2001. I shall delve into these solutions and attempt to explore their influence on a contemporary exodus from Argentina.Hope nurtured by despair will be discussed. Is hope a mere palliative, a mental configuration coupling with a furtive affective state? Hope joins the ranks of religion in building a buffer against the silent awareness of inner despair—the most private of madness. I shall try to discuss how hope brings to the fore psyche's devices that are deployed in attempting to deal with our deepest fears.     

Time as a guide to cause

How do people learn causal structure? In 2 studies, the authors investigated the interplay between temporal-order, intervention, and covariational cues. In Study 1, temporal order overrode covariation information, leading to spurious causal inferences when the temporal cues were misleading. In Study 2, both temporal order and intervention contributed to accurate causal inference well beyond that achievable through covariational data alone. Together, the studies show that people use both temporal-order and interventional cues to infer causal structure and that these cues dominate the available statistical information. A hypothesis-driven account of learning is endorsed, whereby people use cues such as temporal order to generate initial models and then test these models against the incoming covariational data.