Shaking off the neoliberal shackles: “democratic emergence” and the negotiation of democratic knowledge in the Middle East North Africa context

ABSTRACT

There is a general assumption in democracy promotion that liberal democracy is the panacea that will solve all political and economic problems faced by developing countries. Using the concept of “good society” as analytical prism, the analysis shows that while there is a rhetorical agreement as to what the “good society” entails, democracy promotion practices fail to allow for recipients’ inclusion in the negotiation and delivery of the “good society”. Contrasting US and Tunisian discourses on the “good society”, the article argues that democracy promotion practices are underpinned by neoliberal parameters borne out from a reliance on the transition paradigm, which in turn leave little room to democracy promotion recipients to formulate knowledge claims supporting the emergence of alternative conceptions of the “good society”. In contrast, the article opens up a reflective pathway to a negotiated democratic knowledge, which would reside in a paradigmatic change that consists in the abandonment of the transition paradigm in favour of a “democratic emergence” paradigm.     

犯罪学视角下的矫正社会工作专业性和有效性分析

当前我国矫正社会工作教育主要采取福利服务模式，且面临专业性和有效性的考问。西方犯罪学不同流派提出了不同的预防犯罪策略。实证学派之后矫正恢复成为主流，矫正社会工作由此得以蓬勃发展。然而，20世纪70年代中期后矫正社会工作的有效性受到空前质疑，由此兴起的反矫正运动导致矫正社工发展严重受挫。20世纪90年代起北美循证矫正运动开始全面量化检验影响犯罪和再犯的因素，得出了若干核心原则和因素。我国矫正社会工作福利服务模式集中体现在上海模式上，但最终被迫与刑事司法进行融合。我国本土性循证矫正得出，有效矫正应建立在实证知识和实践性知识与策略的结合上，这需要社会工作同犯罪学、法学和地方性知识的深度融合。     

What role does gender have in shaping knowledge that underpins the practice of midwifery?

Midwifery is an ancient profession that continues to be practiced almost exclusively by women. This paper explores the role that millennia of gender exclusivity has had in shaping the knowledge that informs the profession. Prior to the Renaissance this knowledge was exclusively female, largely oral, tacit and intuitive whilst recognising childbearing as an important transformative period in a woman’s lifecycle. Male scientific enquiry in the seventeenth century into human anatomy extended to women’s bodies and childbirth and disrupted the female ways of knowing. Their positivist ontology focussing on the mechanics of childbirth created an opportunity for intervening in a normal process and receiving payment for it. The perceived structural superiority of a male obstetric ontology of childbirth has posed an existential threat to the midwifery profession. This paper concludes by discussing how 20^th century professional regulation of midwifery has encouraged midwives to use patriarchal structures and frameworks of knowledge to co-exist within the hegemonic biomedical model advocated by the majority of their obstetric colleagues.     

专家参与刑事司法的多元功能及其体系化

从1979年刑事诉讼法颁布至今,专家参与我国刑事司法的制度功能变得开放而多元。专家制度功能的多元化,根源于刑事司法的三重逻辑:弥合法律人与专家之间知识鸿沟的“认知逻辑”;落实公检法机关“分工负责,互相配合,互相制约”原则的“权力逻辑”;保障当事人合法权益与实现控辩平等的“权利逻辑”。从结构主义与整体主义的视角看,当前,刑事专家制度存在明显的体系化缺陷,主要表现为专家制度过度权力化、专家制度功能尚未结构化、专家制度不够规范化。改进刑事专家制度,应当采取体系化路径:首先,将多元专家参与模式调整为鉴定人与专家辅助人二元专家模式;其次,彰显专家制度的“权利逻辑”,矫正过度权力化倾向;最后,构建系统化的专家制度,为专家服务刑事司法创造制度条件。     

Exploring the Effects of North–South and South–South Research Collaboration in Emerging Economies,the Colombian Case

International research collaboration (IRC) is associated with both positive and negative effects on the performance of research in emerging economies. While some authors claim that North–South collaborations improve scientific quality and visibility for Southern countries, others claim that it may entail the reorientation of research to comply with Northern agendas. South–South collaborations are thought to increase the focus on local affairs, therefore leading to a relatively small number of scientific international publications appearing in “high quality” journals. Research on the impact of IRC beyond publications in international journals has been neglected despite the importance of other products in knowledge creation. This research uses a broad range of scientific outputs to empirically assess such assumptions and explore the outcomes of IRC in Colombia. Results from multivariate regressions and nonparametric analyses show that, contrary to common assumptions, Colombian research teams collaborating with partners from the global South report higher scientific production, while those collaborating with Northern countries seem to contribute to local knowledge the most.     

快感的考古消费:文博类文创产业的产品特性研究

中国文创产业发展到今天的水平,应当重视产业细分与产业细分条件下产品特色的开发问题。对故宫文创业的个案进行“知识考古学”研究和考察的结果表明,文博类文创产品的基本特性为快感的考古消费,快感消费为产品经济面向的一端,考古则显示了该类产品的文化内涵。它通常包含了知识性、叙事性、场景性的精神内容。所谓知识性将涉及教育、权威、权力批判等几个方面的内涵;叙事性包含文本性、历史秩序性和可阐释性等内容;场景性则通过展演、姿态的造型等凸显。     

Adolescent Co-occurring Disorders Treatment: Clinicians' Attitudes,Values, and Knowledge

This study examined community-based clinicians’ (N = 294) attitudes, background/experiences, values, and knowledge relating to issues of co-occurring disorders, which occur at a high rate among adolescents involved in the juvenile justice system. Study results reveal that clinicians self-rate their clinical values and attitudes at or above the expected level of competency, but they concede that their skill and knowledge levels are not adequate. Comparison measures reveal that employment setting conditions, geographic region, hours worked per week, and strongly held convictions about the importance of integrated mental health and substance use disorders service delivery distinguish clinicians’ co-occurring disorders knowledge levels. Implications are offered.     

Is there a global environmental justice movement?

One of the causes of the increasing number of ecological distribution conflicts around the world is the changing metabolism of the economy in terms of growing flows of energy and materials. There are conflicts on resource extraction, transport and waste disposal. Therefore, there are many local complaints, as shown in the Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJatlas) and other inventories. And not only complaints; there are also many successful examples of stopping projects and developing alternatives, testifying to the existence of a rural and urban global movement for environmental justice. Moreover, since the 1980s and 1990s, this movement has developed a set of concepts and campaign slogans to describe and intervene in such conflicts. They include environmental racism, popular epidemiology, the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous, biopiracy, tree plantations are not forests, the ecological debt, climate justice, food sovereignty, land grabbing and water justice, among other concepts. These terms were born from socio-environmental activism, but sometimes they have also been taken up by academic political ecologists and ecological economists who, for their part, have contributed other concepts to the global environmental justice movement, such as ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ or the ‘ecological footprint’.     

Bridging the gap: online materials to equip graduate entrants to a law degree with essential subject knowledge and skills

Graduate entrants to law degrees can be disadvantaged by being exempted from Level 4 modules. Many lack the law-specific knowledge and skills that they would have gained from their first-year studies, making it more difficult for them to achieve mastery of higher-level modules. This poses risks to their retention and progression. The Open University Law School sought to bridge this gap by providing optional online “catch-up” materials, including 12 sessions of knowledge-based learning. Each session was followed by a brief Moodle poll so that we could ascertain that session’s fitness for purpose, and which students had studied it. The sessions were highly rated by respondents, and most had been studied in the target time of around 15 minutes. Studying the sessions was statistically associated with academic success. This finding does not prove that the sessions contribute towards student's attaining higher grades, but it is encouraging. Only a small percentage of students studied any sessions, and most of those did not study all of them. Since the sessions met their intended purpose for those who studied them, the Law School has now decided on a range of initiatives designed to increase the number of LLB students who study most of them.     

Public Service Motivation,Organizational Social Capital,and Knowledge Sharing in the Korean Public Sector

This article investigates whether public service motivation (PSM) and organizational social capital predict knowledge sharing in the public sector. The hypothesized relationships in the proposed model are verified with the online survey data of 506 public employees in Korea. The test results show that the two dimensions of PSM (attraction to public service and commitment to public values) and the trust component of organizational social capital are both positively related to knowledge sharing in the Korean public sector, and that the associability component of organizational social capital is indirectly associated with knowledge sharing through its influence on PSM. The article discusses the ways that PSM and organizational social capital may contribute to overcome the social dilemma of knowledge sharing in public organizations. It also suggests that there is need for further research on the individual dimensions of the PSM construct.