Ego consciousness in the Japanese psyche: culture,myth and disaster

With globalization, modern Western consciousness has spread across the world. This influx has affected the Japanese culture but ego consciousness has emerged through a long history and different course from that of the West. At a personal level, I have been interested in the establishment of a subject in a culture that values homogeneity and to understand this, I reflect on my own history of living in both the East and the West and on my experience practising psychotherapy. To show Japanese collective functioning at its best, I describe the human inter‐connectedness and collaboration during the 2011 disaster. I explore the ‘Nothing’ at the centre of the Japanese psyche, through a reading of Japanese myth, especially the most originary and almost pre‐human stories that come before the anthropomorphized ‘First Parents’. A retelling of this founding story, reveals the multiple iterations over time that manifest in embodied being; this gradual emergence of consciousness is contrasted with Western myths of origin that are more clear and specific. This study attempts to bring awareness of the value and meaning of Eastern consciousness and its centre in the ‘Nothing’.     

Inverting the Object of Study: Recalibrating the Frame of Reference in Study Abroad Experiences

This essay is concerned with study abroad experiences as opportunities for student cognitive development, using the interpretive lens of educational psychologist William G. Perry. A standard and often valuable assignment in courses on world religions is a site visit to a religious institution in one's local area. This may concretize otherwise abstract materials and help students reflect on ways in which the lived experience of religion differs from its presentation in course texts and other academic materials. Increasingly, study abroad trips are being offered as extended and more intensive ways of bringing this material to life, offering students opportunity to see lived religion within another cultural framework. At the heart of this paper is the contention that such study abroad experiences function not simply as longer, more intense versions of site visits but, rather, as experiences that invert the subject and object of study. The worldview of the student becomes a primary object of study, which is examined, as it were, by the particulars of the religion(s) under investigation and the cultures of which said religion(s) are a part. Where site visits offer students an opportunity to visit the strange amidst the familiar, study abroad trips provide opportunities for students to become the strange within a recalibrated familiar. The subject becomes the object and is interrogated by the context of study. While local, stateside site visits can offer a degree of such dislocation, their brevity, together with some degree of assimilation to the larger culture flows on the part of the local religious institution being visited, most often mitigates any significant inversion. Students generally see such institutions as either mildly or wildly exotic, but always within their frame of reference, which constitutes the norm. When abroad, the normative experience of students is often subverted in ways that lay bare the assumptions behind such views and makes possible another world in which to live. Simply put, the subject and object of study change places. If this inversion is carefully attended to, it can provide rich insight into not only the topics nominally being studied but also occasion opportunity for real cognitive development on the part of the student. This essay is published alongside of six other essays, including a response from John Barbour, comprising a special section of the journal (see Teaching Theology and Religion 18:1, January 2015).     

中学生物理学科问题分类表征层次的研究

以三套分别含有按照解题方法可以分为二类、三类、四类的物理学科问题分类实验材料,对济南市6所中学3个年级766名中学生进行研究,结果表明:不同年级、不同学业水平学生分类表征层次的差异显著,呈现随年级升高而升高的趋势,学优生的水平明显高于学困生,学优生更多地倾向内在分类表征;随着分类任务的类别数量增多,更多学生倾向外在分类表征;不同性别学生的分类表征层次没有显著差异;不同物理学科问题分类表征层次学生的物理成绩之间存在显著差异。     

Depicting Caribbean Theological Libraries

Theological libraries in the Caribbean have suffered from invisibility, so this study aims to bring these libraries to the fore. It presents key features of the libraries and seeks to determine if these are influenced by the libraries’ denominational affiliation, geographic location, and size. Geographically speaking, the target area was twenty-nine Caribbean territories. Data was gathered using a questionnaire containing mainly open-ended questions in English and Spanish, which was mostly administered face-to-face. The general results are offered first: the number of libraries found, their geographic location—whether in the English, Spanish and Dutch-speaking Caribbean—their denominations, and their size. These results are followed by a more detailed presentation focusing on classification schemes, subject headings, automation, and staffing at the supervisory level. The findings are then analyzed by denomination, location, and size. The article ends with a discussion of the results, comparing theological libraries in the Caribbean with theological libraries in the United States, Asia, and Europe. The study concludes that denomination and location have not affected the findings; but size has to some extent. Also, in some areas, Caribbean theological libraries resemble those in North America, while in others they resemble those in Asia and Europe.     

The emotional geographies of neoliberal school reforms: Spaces of refuge and containment

This paper draws from a larger research project about the post high school transitions of young people who were at school during New Zealand’s neoliberal reforms. Our participants included a group of four young men excluded from school and redirected to an Alternative Education programme. Their accounts of their experiences at school differed starkly from what they said about their Alternative Education programme. The emotional content of their accounts reveals how the social and material practices of these respective education sites are constituted differently. Alternative Education operated as a space of refuge from alienation experienced in mainstream schooling as well as a site of containment, separating Alternative Education students from their mainstream peers. Focusing on the emotional geography of one Alternative Education programme offers insight into the emotional geographies of mainstream schooling and, more broadly, of neoliberal education reforms. Drawing on ideas from Massey and Bondi, we demonstrate how alienation is produced and manifested on different scales: teacher–student interactions, school exclusions and policies establishing Alternative Education. The Alternative Education programme discussed here provides a barometer of the broader emotional geographies of New Zealand’s neoliberal education reforms.     

An Emancipatory Topology of Desire

Abstract

In this article, I explore how the emancipatory potential of the human capacity to desire and be desired can contribute to more inclusive, sustainable, and convivial futures. I differentiate four manifestations of desire: (1) the consuming aspect of desire with acts of deliberate noncapitalist desire, (2) the arousing aspect of desire encouraging acts of playful profanation, (3) the identity-shaping aspect of desire enabling acts of radical unbecoming, and (4) the future-shaping aspect of desire associated with acts of courageous deviantness. Examples of practices that highlight the emancipatory potential of the different manifestations are discussed.     

Exploring subject positions in Greek migrants' discourse on mobility decisions

The current study explores the ways in which Greek migrants in their early adulthood position themselves in discourse on mobility decisions. For the purposes of the study, 17 virtual interviews with Greek migrants (aged between 25–40 years old) in European cities were conducted. Analysis, based on the principles of critical discursive social psychology, indicated that, in their accounts of migration decision-making, participants positioned themselves in various ways: as career/job seekers, as adventurers, as well as (personal or institutional/economic) crisis-ridden individuals. Multiple subject positions were constituted by an amalgam of rational/practical and affective repertoires which depicted migration as a multifaceted, dynamic and non-linear project. Analysis also highlighted the multiple spatial (transnational, national and local) and dynamic temporal constructions mobilized by participants, in order to construct their motivations for migrating. Discussion of findings suggests that social psychology (a) can vitally contribute to migration literature, by considering ways in which social actors position themselves by the use of historically and culturally specific resources and by their orientation to local interactional concerns in the context of accounting for their mobility and (b) can be benefited by considering spatial and temporal aspects in the analysis of migration.     

Empathy and the responsiveness to social affordances

The direct perception theory of empathy claims that we can immediately experience a person’s state of mind. I can see for instance that my neighbour is angry with me in his bodily countenance. I develop a version of the direct perception theory of empathy which takes this perceptual capacity to depend upon recognising in what way the other person is responsive to the affordances the environment provides. By recognising which possibilities for action are relevant to a person, I can thereby understand something about the meaning they give to the world. I come to share something of their perspective on the world, and this allows me to grasp based on my perception of them something about their current state of mind. I argue that shared affect plays a central role in this perceptual capacity. Shared affect allows me to orient my attention to possibilities for action that matter to the other person. I end by briefly discuss the implications of this view of empathy for the disturbances in so-called “cognitive empathy” that are found in people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.     

The minimal self hypothesis

For millennia self has been conjectured to be necessary for consciousness. But scant empirical evidence has been adduced to support this hypothesis. Inconsistent explications of “self” and failure to design apt experiments have impeded progress. Advocates of phenomenological psychiatry, however, have helped explicate “self,” and employed it to explain some psychopathological symptoms. In those studies, “self” is understood in a minimalist sense, sheer “for-me-ness.” Unfortunately, explication of the “minimal self” (MS) has relied on conceptual analysis, and applications to psychopathology have been hermeneutic, allowing for many degrees of interpretive latitude. The result is that MS’s current scientific status is analogous to that of the “atom,” at the time when “atom” was just beginning to undergo transformation from a philosophical to a scientific concept. Fortunately, there is now an opportunity to promote a similar transformation for “MS.” Discovery of the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN) opened the door to neuroimaging investigations of self. Taking the DMN and other forms of intrinsic activity as a starting point, an empirical foothold can be established, one that spurs experimental research and that enables extension of research into multiple phenomena. New experimental protocols that posit “MS” can help explain phenomena hitherto not thought to be related to self, thereby hastening development of a mature science of self. In particular, targeting phenomena wherein consciousness is lost and recovered, as in some cases of Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome (UWS), allow for design of neuroimaging probes that enable detection of MS during non-conscious states. These probes, as well as other experimental protocols applied to NREM Sleep, General Anesthesia (GA), and the waking state, provide some evidence to suggest that not only can self and consciousness dissociate, MS might be a necessary precondition for conscious experience. Finally, these findings have implications for the science of consciousness: it has been suggested that “levels of consciousness” (LoC) is not a legitimate concept for the science of consciousness. But because we have the conceptual and methodological tools with which to refine investigations of MS, we have the means to identify a possible foundation—a bifurcation point—for consciousness, as well as the means by which to measure degrees of distance from that foundation. These neuroimaging investigations of MS position us to better assess whether LoC has a role to play in a mature science of consciousness.