Sleep of Reason: critical reflections on performance arts-based research as psycho-social commentary in expressive arts therapy praxis

This arts-based case study is a critical reflection on how performance art can be used as psycho-social commentary. It is an attempt to amplify arts-based inquiry using critical understandings of diverse and inclusive meaning making in expressive arts praxis and psychology. It examines the use of performance art in the expressive arts to understand psycho-social proximity to and complicity in dehumanization and structural racism. This arts-based research exists in the intersections of culture, race, the arts, and social commentary with the goals of learning how it facilitates awareness of psycho-social justice and how current uncritical expressive arts and psychology praxis and practitioners can perpetuate structural racism and racial trauma. It asserts performance art can be utilized as a catalyst for psycho-social transformation in creative ways.     

Constructing and contesting threat: Representations of white British Muslims across British national and Muslim newspapers

White British Muslims pose a challenge to racialised representations of British Muslims as non‐white, foreign and Other. By drawing on tools from Critical Discourse Analysis to develop Social Representations Theory on a micro‐analytic level, and making connections with other relevant social psychological theories on intergroup relations, this article examines the constructions of white British Muslims as a threat in six national and two Muslim British newspapers. It looks at how discourses are used to create, perpetuate and challenge the ‘hegemonisation’ of social representations in majority and minority press. The findings show that white British Muslims are portrayed as a threat not just despite of, but because of, their position as part of the ‘white British’ ingroup. Consequently, the threat they pose often leads to their Muslimness being emphasised. This was, at times, contested, however, either through direct challenges, or by making the threat ambivalent by drawing on their whiteness.     

Why be critical? Introducing a symposium on Capitalizing Religion

This article introduces a review symposium on Craig Martin’s Capitalizing Religion: Ideology and the Opiate of the Bourgeoisie (2014). It provides a brief summary and situates Capitalizing Religion in relation to recent debates about what it means to engage in the ‘critical’ study of religion\s. The symposium consists of four commentaries: by Véronique Altglas (Queen’s University Belfast); Finbarr Curtis (Georgia Southern University); Sean McCloud (University of North Carolina at Charlotte); and Jörg Rüpke (Universität Erfurt).     

Utilizing Latinx Cultural Wealth to Create a College-Going Culture in High School

Capitalizing on Latinx students’ aspirational, linguistic, social, navigational, familial, resistant, perseverant, and spiritual community cultural wealth (CCW) can help school counselors empower Latinx students. We outline and integrate critical race theory and CCW and demonstrate how communities of color bring assets and protective factors with them to their educational settings. We also examine how school counselors can utilize these eight forms of CCW to promote postsecondary opportunities for Latinx youth. Aprovechar las ventajas que ofrece la riqueza cultural de la comunidad (CCW, por sus siglas en inglés) de estudiantes latinxs y su capital aspiracional, lingüístico, social, familiar, espiritual, de navegación, de resistencia y de perseverancia puede ayudar a los consejeros escolares a empoderar a estudiantes latinxs. Perfilamos e integramos la teoría crítica de la raza y el modelo de CCW y demostramos cómo las comunidades de color aportan recursos y factores de protección a sus entornos educativos. También examinamos cómo los consejeros escolares pueden utilizar estas ocho formas de CCW para potenciar las oportunidades disponibles para jóvenes latinxs después de su educación secundaria.     

Constructions of Participatory Democracy Institutions and Same-Sex Union Rights in Online Public Deliberation in Greece

This article aims to explore the argumentative lines employed in an online public deliberation concerned with legislation on same-sex civil union in Greece. Drawing on rhetorical and discursive developments in political social psychology and sexual citizenship debates, the article focuses on arguments regarding the relevance and the implications of public deliberation on the construction of LGBTQI+ claims and rights. The analytic corpus consisted of 1,000 comments, analyzed with the concepts and tools of Rhetorical and Critical Discursive Social Psychology. A recurring line of arguing against the legislation questioned the democratic quality of public deliberation, representing it as a means used to legitimize predetermined decisions. Moreover, overtly discriminatory arguments were predicated on the values of participatory democracy. Accounts in favor of the legislation, though, challenged public deliberation on the grounds that it allows room for the dispute of universal human rights. The potential contribution of these findings to the understanding of the dilemmas of participatory democracy, the reproduction of heteronormativity, and the assimilation of LGBTQI+ claims is discussed.     

Effects of neonatal treatment with cyproterone acetate on aggressive behavior induced by footshock in adult male rats

High levels of androgens are required to organize aggressive behavior in adult male rats. Footshock-induced aggression was tested in Wistar rats allocated to one of three experimental groups: control (oil-injected) males (M), males neonatally injected with the antiandrogen cyproterone acetate (CA), and males treated as in the CA group but gonadectomized just before puberty (CAG). An antiaggressive effect of CA in those adult male rats neonatally treated with this compound was found. Neonatal exposure to cyproterone acetate exerts an antiandrogenic effect over the expression of shock-induced aggressive behavior. The behavioral effects of CA were not countered by adult treatment with testosterone propionate.     

Science and the Future of Theology: Critical Issues

The ambivalent reputation of theology as an academic discipline is attributed to the often circular character of its procedures based on presumed authoritative sources. Recently, science too has come under the shadow of "postmodernist" critiques but, it is argued, has been able to withstand them successfully and make epistemologically warrantedclaims to be depicting reality—thereby vindicating human rationality. Evolutionary epistemological considerations also reinforce confidence in the more general deliverances of the human exploration of reasonableness through inference to the best explanation (IBE). The consequences of applying IBE, with its associated criteria, in theological investigation are considered in relation to theology as it is and as it might be. A number of issues critical for thedevelopment of a credible theology are identified. In spite of the challenging and somewhat negative view of contemporary theology to which this leads, hope is expressed that a genuinely credible "evangelical,""catholic," and liberal theology may yet emerge for the new millennium.     

The Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan: A Rhetoric of Ideological Pronouncement

One manifestation of argumentation is in critical discussions where people genuinely strive cooperatively to achieve critical decisions. Hence, argumentation can be recognized as the process of advancing, supporting, modifying, and criticizing claims so that appropriate decision makers may grant or deny adherence. This audience-centered definition holds the assumption that the participants must willingly engage in public debate and discussion, and their arguments must function to open a critical space and keep it open. This essay investigates `ideological pronouncement,' a kind of rhetoric that undermines and limits the possibility of critical discussion among target audiences, as an enemy of sound argumentation. First, the essential characteristics of sound argumentation are explained. Next, the typical characteristics of ideological rhetoric are described. At the same time, the Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan, a Japanese wartime moral education textbook, is examined as a paradigm case of ideological rhetoric. Third, three key pronouncements of the Cardinal Principles are outlined and discussed. Finally, implications from the critical discussion are drawn.     

Radical Democratic Communities Always-in-the-Making

This article explores the centralpragmatist and feminist philosophical assumption thatknowers can not be separated from what is known, thatthere is a dialectical relationship between socialbeings and ideas that is dynamic, flexible, andreciprocal. The author seeks a closer examination ofconstructive thinking in relation to the practice ofthinking constructively within social communities. She discusses social communities that constructknowledge as radical democratic communitiesalways-in-the-making, and the skills of communicatingand relating which help knowers be able to activelyparticipate in the construction of knowledge. Giventhe fallibility of the pluralistic subjects, she showsthe importance of addressing cultural influences andpolitical power in theories about thinking. Sheargues for the value of embracing pluralistic anddemocratic commitments on epistemological grounds aswell as moral grounds.     

The Death of a Child and the Birth of Practical Wisdom

This paper explores the notion of practical wisdom asan alternative to current formulations of criticalthinking. The practical realm is that ofill-structured problems that emerge from life aslived; it is a realm of legitimate uncertainty andambiguity that requires an ethical responsiveness orpractical wisdom. The death of a child is a case inpoint. The author identifies and examines threeaspects of practical wisdom – the ethical claims ofpartiality, a yielding responsiveness and the play ofthought – and juxtaposes them with aspects of criticalthinking. The work of Martha Nussbaum and RichardPaul are interwoven throughout the discussion. Theauthor concludes that the discourse of criticalthinking is in danger of lapsing into a form of moralescapism wherein all we are rationally responsible foris thinking correctly. Practical wisdom, on theother hand, recognizes that thinking is not simply anintellectual cognitive act of an individual but adance between the life of a child and the love of anelder, a conversation between what is and what couldbe, an openness to passionate sorrow and surprise, aplay between understanding and perception. As such,practical wisdom provides a more likely account ofliving in good faith with oneself and others.