Albanian women’s interpretations of Islam enlarge the space of women

Even though rarely acknowledged, approximately one fourth of all European Muslims live in the Balkans. These Muslims, as well as women of the Balkans, are seldom in the focus of scientific research on Islam and Europe. This article discusses themes related to the women’s movement and feminism in the Balkans and within Islamic framework from women’s point of view. The research context is located in the Republic of Macedonia and ethnographic material builds on thematic interviews with Albanian Muslim women. Four generally recognized orientations are distinguished (1) atheist or antireligious feminism, (2) secular feminism, (3) gender complementarity as an ideal and (4) Islamic/Muslim feminism(s), and used as analytical tools while ethnographic interview material is tackled. Article sheds light on Albanian-speaking women’s thoughts concerning Islam in the contemporary context, and tendencies of these thoughts to enlarge space that women occupy through personal interpretations of Islamic tradition.     

Exploring the influences of country-level factors on mature-aged women’s drink driving attitudes

The current study examined drink driving attitudes among mature-aged women in Sweden and Australia, two countries with a Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) limit of 0.02% and 0.05%, respectively. The study aimed to identify attitudes that might influence drink driving tendency among this group of women and further show how these attitudes vary across countries. Using an ethnographic approach, 15 mature-aged women (Sweden: mean age = 52.5 years, SD = 4.8; Australia: mean age 52.2 years, SD = 3.4) were interviewed in each country. General patterns and themes from the data were developed using thematic analysis methods. The findings indicate that while women in both countries viewed drink driving negatively, the understanding of what the concept entailed differed between the two samples. The Swedish women appeared to cognitively separate alcohol consumption and driving, and consequently, drink driving was often spoken of as driving after any alcohol consumption. The Australian women’s understanding of drink driving was more closely related to the legal BAC limit. However, for some Australian women, a “Grey Zone” existed, which denoted driving with a BAC of just above the enforceable limit. While illegal, these instances were subjectively seen as similar to driving with a BAC of just under the legal limit and therefore not morally reprehensible. The practice of cognitively separating drinking from driving appeared to have implications for the tendency to drink and drive among the interviewed women. These findings are discussed in relation to current policy and legislation in Australia and the need for further research into mature-aged women’s drink driving is outlined.     

The child in time: The influence of parent–child discussion about a future experience on how it is remembered

We investigated the influence of preparation provided by parents on preschoolers’ recall. One day before children participated in a staged novel event, parents discussed the event with their child either with (verbal+photos) or without (verbal) photographs. Parents and children in a control condition read an unrelated story. Then 8–10 days later the children were interviewed about the event. Children in the verbal+photos condition recalled significantly more than those in the control condition. Parental preparation style (e.g., evaluations, hypothetical language) was associated with the child's contributions to the preparatory discussion, but no aspect of parent or child style or content was associated with children's verbal recall. Similarly, there were no significant associations between children's performance on a task of episodic future thinking, and their preparatory discussion or recall, although episodic future thinking was strongly associated with language ability. The potential underlying mechanisms and theoretical implications are discussed.     

The cultural hermeneutic of Russia’s historical experience: the case of Aleksandr Samojlovič Akhiezer

The article presents an overview of A. S. Akhiezer’s reconstruction of Russia’s socio-cultural history as a cultural hermeneutic. The underlying idea is that the way humans make sense of their existence is driven by an algorithm of meaning production informing the organization of their ‘world’, in particular the selection of the means involved in that production. Thus the central axis of Akhiezer’s hermeneutic, methodogically, is symbolization: ‘worlds’, that is, socio-cultural matrices, are made according to and reflect specific modes of symbolization. Akhiezer’s account of the Russian socio-cultural experience is centred on the particular algorithm that he names raskol (schism). His purpose was twofold: to examine the ‘logic’ of raskol, on the one hand, and to investigate, on the other hand, in the manner of a historian, its impact and consequences for Russian society at large, including its effects on institution-building. In this way, the study of raskol goes hand in hand with an investigation of and commentary concerning the uncertain state in Russia of what Akhiezer named the bol’?oe ob??estvo (roughly, the modern differentiated, dynamic institutional order). In effect, his theory is a social ontology with culture at the centre.     

A qualitative exploration of apprehended women’s experience of drink driving events

BackgroundIn Australia, drink driving remains a serious road safety issue. The few studies that have addressed drink driving behaviour amongst women often focus on aggregated statistical comparisons to men or view the concept of drink driving as part of broader criminological behaviour. In contrast, scant research has directly focused on convicted female drink drivers. The aim of this study was to explore the factors that contribute to drink driving in a cohort of women convicted for drink driving and examine why these women were unsuccessful in mitigating the risk of engaging in drink driving behaviour.MethodThe study thematically analysed the narratives of 14 women who had been apprehended and subsequently convicted of a drink driving offence in the state of Queensland (Australia). All participants were recruited by way of their attendance at a drink driving education program.ResultsOverall examination of participants’ narratives revealed drink driving behaviour derived from a complex set of processes including taking a risk, using alcohol to self-medicate and alleviate psychological distress, basing the decision to drive on subjective assessment, and past engagement in drink driving behaviour and punishment avoidance. Underpinning these themes was the participants lack of awareness about the increasing risks associated with their alcohol consumption levels, with cognisance only being achieved after apprehension.ConclusionThese findings add to the limited research addressing drink driving behaviour among women and highlight important factors to explain why women are increasingly engaging in this risky behaviour.     

The portrayal of women in prime time, 1953–1977

A content analysis of 1314 television programs and 2444 starring characters appearing on prime-time television from 1953–1977 revealed that the number of females in starring roles has remained relatively constant over the last 25 years and that most women are still found in situation comedies. While the number of women shown as housewives or housekeepers has declined from the 1950s to the present, the makeup of the television labor force has consistently shown no relationship to the real-life employment patterns of women. The data seem to support the findings announced in a recent study by the United States Commission on Civil Rights, which concluded that women were underrepresented on television and were frequently seen in stereotyped roles.     

The portrayal of women’s images in magazine advertisements: Goffman’s gender analysis revisited

The research objective of this paper was to study the specific behaviors mentioned above and determine what gender behavior patterns have been most prevalent in magazine advertisements in 1979 and 1991. In this research, comparisons were made regarding gender displays between the years of 1979 and 1991 with random samples of print advertisements. The basic and essential starting question of this research project is: What messages about women have been given to society through magazine advertisements? This study was intended to be a conceptual replication of Erving Gofian’s study of Gender Advertisements to see how gender images in print advertisements have changed since Goffman’s study. For this research, advertisements were analyzed the gender behavior portrayed, utilizing Goffman’s categories of decoding behavior: relative size, feminine touch, function ranking, ritualization of subordination, and licensed withdrawal. Body display and IndependencelSelf-assertiveness categories were added. Advertisements that featured human subjects were collected from 1979 and 1991 women’s popular magazines. The random sampling procedure resulted in 252 samples in 1979 magazine advertisements and 252 samples in 1991 counterparts. This research showed that few changes have been made in the images of women in magazine advertisements since Goffman’s 1979 study. The findings indicate that the images of women in 1991 advertisements did not significantly change from the images found in 1979 advertisements. However; distribution or dispersion of stereotypical portrayal of women did change. In the categories of licensed withdrawal and body display, the magazine advertisements from 1991 showed more stereotyping of women than those from 1979. Two of Goffman’s categories-Relative Size and Function Ranking-were not prevalent depictions in magazine advertisements.     

The Joy of Suffering: Nietzsche,Theodicy and women’s bodies

Abstract

I use Nietzsche’s work on theodicy to explore gendered valuation systems around women’s bodies. The notion of theodicy provides a different entry point to questions of ideology as it begins with an account of people’s attempts to find meaning in their lives. Nietzsche traced humans’ propensity to look for and create stories that give meaning to their lives, even when this meaning is one that may ultimately oppress them or celebrate something negative such as suffering. For him it is not the suffering that torments humans, but rather its meaninglessness. In the slums of Northeast Brazil, Afro-Brazilian women invest in the Christian glorification of suffering in a context where they experience their bodies in terms of loss, shame and alienation. I explore how, through a process of creative deception, this suffering comes to be experienced as pleasure. That is, the women reconstruct their bodies using two dominant stories to which they have access: Christianity and the glamorous Brazilian soap operas.     

Fearful asymmetry: Kierkegaard’s search for the direction of time

The ancient problem of whether our asymmetrical attitudes towards time are justified (or normatively required) remains a live one in contemporary philosophy. Drawing on themes in the work of McTaggart, Parfit, and Heidegger, I argue that this problem is also a key concern of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (1843). Part I of Either/Or presents the “aesthete” as living a temporally volatilized form of life, devoid of temporal location, sequence and direction. Like Parfit’s character “Timeless,” these aesthetes are indifferent to the direction of time and seemingly do not experience McTaggart’s “A-Series” mode of temporality. The “ethical” conception of time that Judge William offers in Part II contains an attempt to normativize the direction of time, by re-orienting the aesthete towards an awareness of time’s finitude. However, the form of life Judge William articulates gives time sequentiality but not necessarily the robust directionality necessary to justify (and make normative) our asymmetrical attitudes to time. Hence while Either/Or raises this problem it remains unanswered until The Concept of Anxiety (1844). Only with the eschatological understanding of time developed in The Concept of Anxiety does Kierkegaard answer the question of why directional and asymmetrical conative and affective attitudes towards time are normative.     

The pregnant therapist and the psychotic client: A phenomenological understanding of the impact of the therapist’s pregnancy on the therapeutic process

This original paper examines the underresearched area of therapist pregnancy. It explores the impact of psychosis as an additional complicating factor to the therapeutic process and the experience of one British counselling psychologist working in the National Health Service whilst pregnant. Five brief client summaries/clinical examples are presented to explore the common themes of anger, rejection, abandonment and envy that often emerge following the disclosure of a therapist’s pregnancy or the opposite reactions of over-protectiveness and an unwillingness to engage in therapy for fear of harming the therapist. Recommendations are made for further research within this neglected area and the need to incorporate the themes within training for therapists and training for supervisors.     

Game outcome and elite Japanese women’s field hockey player’s experience of emotions and stress

Objectives: To measure the effects of game outcome on pleasant and unpleasant emotions and stress during elite-level competition.Design: Quasi-experimental repeated pre- and post-game measurement in a field setting.Methods: Participants were 16 members of the Japanese women’s field hockey team playing a world cup preliminary qualifying tournament in Trinidad. Players completed the Tension and Effort Stress Inventory (TESI), a measure of emotion and stress, at the seven games of the tournament (five wins, two losses).Results: The pattern of emotions after game 1 (a loss) were in sharp contrast to the results from the other six games (five wins, one loss). When compared to other games, significant increases in anxiety, humiliation and excitement pre- to post-game 1 were found, as were significantly higher scores in sullenness and lower scores in relaxation post-game 1. No significant decreases in external tension stress and somatic tension and effort stress pre- to post-game 1 were found. For the other games, athletes were significantly more relaxed and excited after games, increasing with each game in the tournament. Also, the unpleasant emotion and stress results, associated with game 1, significantly diminished as the team progressed to the tournament final. There was no evidence for a simple win/loss difference on post-game emotions and stress.Conclusions: The relationship between game outcome and emotional response is not straightforward. Other factors, such as cognition, may also play a role.     

The healing relationship: Edmund Pellegrino’s philosophy of the physician–patient encounter

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics - In this paper I briefly summarize Pellegrino’s phenomenological analysis of the ethics of the physician–patient relationship. In delineating the...     

The fate of the forgotten: Chamberlain’s work reconsidered

This article discusses the early psychological traditions developed at Clark University under the guidance of G. Stanley Hall. Anthropology and cultural psychology are both rooted in the notion that humans are social beings. That idea constituted a brief moment of theoretical unity between psychology and anthropology in the study of human language in its psychological functions. In that context, the work of Alexander Chamberlain is explored as a major contribution. Chamberlain—if viewed in the jargon of our contemporary social scientists—was deeply “interdisciplinary” in his work. Despite the positive meaning of the term “interdisciplinary” in contemporary discourse about the social sciences, the realities of social organization of any science entail separation rather than integration. Chamberlain’s work took place in parallel in anthropology and in developmental psychology under the interdisciplinary emphasis of “child study” as set up by G. Stanley Hall. Hall made child study the distinctive feature of the “Clark tradition” of psychology. Chamberlain’s work constituted both the beginning and the end of the (miniscule) “Clark tradition” in anthropology.     

This time it’s personal: the memory benefit of hearing oneself

The production effect is the memory advantage of saying words aloud over simply reading them silently. It has been hypothesised that this advantage stems from production featuring distinctive information that stands out at study relative to reading silently. MacLeod (2011) (I said, you said: The production effect gets personal. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18, 1197–1202. doi:10.3758/s13423-011-0168-8) found superior memory for reading aloud oneself vs. hearing another person read aloud, which suggests that motor information (speaking), self-referential information (i.e., “I said it”), or both contribute to the production effect. In the present experiment, we dissociated the influence on memory of these two components by including a study condition in which participants heard themselves read words aloud (recorded earlier) – a first for production effect research – along with the more typical study conditions of reading aloud, hearing someone else speak, and reading silently. There was a gradient of memory across these four conditions, with hearing oneself lying between speaking and hearing someone else speak. These results imply that oral production is beneficial because it entails two distinctive components: a motor (speech) act and a unique, self-referential auditory input.     

The poet’s school and the parrot’s cage: the educational spirituality of Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Asia’s first Nobel laureate, was a man of myriad gifts, but he sought to articulate a single global vision. He believed that for our flourishing we must strive towards ‘the other and the beyond’. In so doing we discover that, as we seek, we are ourselves being sought. Tagore believed that we find our meaning and fulfilment relationally; in our relationships one with another, to be sure, but fundamentally in our kinship with all that is. We must be liberated, Tagore believed, from the bounds of our separateness and so discover a wholeness larger than our individual well‐being. That wholeness is ultimately realised in our union with the eternal Divine Spirit. In the establishment of his ‘poet’s school’ at Shantiniketan Tagore sought to make his ideals come true. This paper will focus on Tagore’s understanding of childhood and on the pattern of education by which, he believed, the spirit of the child may be nurtured. It will also enter a plea that we return to someone whose neglect in the West has been much to its loss.     

The Identified Donor Effect: Disclosure of the Donor’s Name Shapes the Recipient’s Behavior

Previous research on charitable donations has examined the costs and benefits of anonymity from the perspectives of donors and charities. However, it is unclear how anonymity affects the recipients of a donation. This research examines how donor name disclosure affects recipients’ behaviors. The findings demonstrate that recipients of donations from named individuals (vs. recipients of anonymous donations) tend to regulate their behaviors to be more in line with the general goal of the donation. This occurs because name disclosure increases the salience of the donor’s identity in the mind of the recipient, which in turn leads to an increased feeling of obligation. Six lab and online studies (including two preregistered studies) and one field study assess this effect. The implications of these findings for charities, individual donors, and public policymakers are discussed.