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Complex Understanding (complex + understanding)
Selected AbstractsOn the (In)Compatibility of Guilt and Suffering in German Memory1GERMAN LIFE AND LETTERS, Issue 2 2006Aleida Assmann This article analyses the current shift in German memory concerning the issue of German suffering at the end of the Second World War. Contrary to widely held belief, these themes are not novel: German suffering was a topic of discourse immediately after the war in the private and political sphere. What is new in the current context, however, is the intensity of the unexpected return of these issues and their wide social resonance among different classes and generations. With this shift in focus, new memory contests arise. One paradigmatic case is the polarity created between a memory of German guilt and a memory of German suffering as represented by the two popular historians Hannes Heer and Jörg Friedrich; another concerns the (still ongoing) debate around a new centre for flight and expulsion. It is argued that the impasse of recent cultural memory debate typified by Heer and Friedrich can be surpassed by a more complex understanding of the structure of memory. According to this view, various levels of heterogeneous memory can exist side by side if they are contained within a normative frame of generally accepted validity. [source] Role Stress, Exhaustion, and Satisfaction: A Cross-Lagged Structural Equation Modeling Approach Supporting Hobfoll's Loss SpiralsJOURNAL OF APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 6 2010Daniel ÖRtqvist This study applies Hobfoll's notion of loss spirals to argue for a reciprocal relationship between role stress and 2 of its most commonly studied consequences: exhaustion and satisfaction. By means of structural equation modeling and a cross-lagged design of 116 business managers, the researchers found support for a relationship between role stress and exhaustion. They also found that satisfaction influences role stress, a relationship that the existing literature has not examined. The study contributes a more complex understanding of the relationship between role stress and its modeled outcomes than has been achieved previously. [source] Socioeconomic Status and Patterns of Parent,Adolescent InteractionsJOURNAL OF RESEARCH ON ADOLESCENCE, Issue 1 2006Edith Chen This study investigated reciprocity in parent,adolescent interactions among 102 families from lower or higher socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. Negative behaviors between parents and adolescents were more reciprocal (strongly correlated) in higher SES than lower SES families, and this reciprocity correlated with higher family relationship quality. Lower SES families exhibited reciprocity related to withdrawn behaviors. Reciprocity of these behaviors also correlated with higher relationship quality. Results suggest that SES differences provide insights into a more complex understanding of family relationships within contexts, and importantly, suggest that different types of reciprocity may each have its own adaptive value in families from different SES backgrounds. [source] Good or bad rangeland?LAND DEGRADATION AND DEVELOPMENT, Issue 3 2004Hybrid knowledge, local understandings of vegetation dynamics in the Kalahari, science Abstract Using data from field studies in the Kalahari rangelands of Southern Africa, the relationships between ,scientific' and ,land user' interpretations of land degradation and change in nonequilibrium savanna ecosystems are explored. Scientific and land-user views are often regarded as distinct, and even opposed, knowledges. We contest that a more constructive view can be taken through the concept of hybrid knowledge, whereby value is attached to both approaches and through which a more useful and meaningful assessment of environmental change, and its implications for development and natural resource use, can be made. We find that in both the southwestern and northwestern Kalahari, pastoralists have a complex understanding of the patchiness of ecosystem variability, and that they utilise elements of this patchiness of change, notably dimensions of bush encroachment and grass species change that have commonly been regarded as degradation in scientific understandings, within livestock management strategies, especially at times of environmental stress. We urge caution in the application of the term degradation, and a more widespread recognition of the multifaceted dimensions, including benefits, of change within the scientifically recognized variability of nonequilibrium rangelands. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] "Maybe Tomorrow I'll Turn Capitalist": Cuentapropismo in a Workers' StateLAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Issue 2 2007Emma F. Phillips In 1993, the Cuban government significantly expanded the scope of legal self-employment on the island. The change has not been uncontroversial, and cuentapropistas have frequently been held up, both in Cuba and in the United States, as the symbol of Cuba's transition to a free-market economy. In framing cuentapropistas as the vanguards of capitalism, observers have adopted a concept of "transition" which is both rigidly ideological and teleological. This article argues that by employing a sociolegal approach toward cuentapropismo,examining close-up not only the Cuban government's regulation of self-employment, but also how the operation of law is mediated through cuentapropistas' own self-perceptions,we can develop a richer and more complex understanding of transitional periods. Rather than conceptualizing "transition" as a straight line from communism to capitalism, a sociolegal analysis draws attention to the complex relationship between law, identity, and work in the renegotiation of citizenship, and the constitutive role that evolving conceptions of citizenship may have for the shape and character of a transitional period. [source] Women's Careers Beyond the Classroom: Changing Roles in a Changing WorldCURRICULUM INQUIRY, Issue 3 2001Nina Bascia Drawing from our own and others' research over the past decade and a half, we present four "readings," each illuminating a different dimension of women educators' career development, particularly their movement into work beyond the classroom. The majority of the participants in our studies are women who work for change in their classrooms, schools, and district organizations, using the opportunities, vehicles, and channels available,or apparent,to them. They do this work in professional and personal contexts that are continually changing, sometimes as a result of their own choices and actions and sometimes not. While there is a growing body of literature on women's movement into, and their lives in, educational administration, we are concerned here with the broader and more varied manifestations of leadership beyond the classroom. In the four readings, we bring together several strands in the literature on women educators' lives and careers. We first lay out the taken-for-granted oppositional contrasts in the educational discourses that have tended to obscure more complex understandings of work lives and careers. Next, we explore how the particular kinds of work available to women actually encourage some to move beyond narrow conceptions of the distinctions between classroom and nonclassroom work. Third, we discuss the developmental nature of individual career paths. Fourth, we note the spatial and temporal nature of leadership work by showing how it is influenced and changed by greater economic, social, and political forces. We believe that these multiple interpretations are required to understand the range and combination of influences that propel and compel women educators to take up various forms of leadership work beyond the classroom. [source] Global Englishes, Rip Slyme, and performativityJOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 4 2003Alastair Pennycook In this article I suggest that while recent sociolinguistic work focusing on crossing, styling the Other or language boundaries is raising significant questions concerning how we relate language, identity and popular culture, these insights have largely passed by the sociolinguistics of world Englishes. This latter work is still caught between arguments about homogeneity and heterogeneity, between arguments based on liberal accommodationism, linguistic imperialism or linguistic hybridity that do not allow for sufficiently complex understandings of what is currently happening with global Englishes. Focusing particularly on rap music, I suggest that we need, at the very least, a critical understanding of globalization, a focus on popular cultural flows, and a way of taking up performance and performativity in relationship to identity and culture. [source] The Story Catches You and You Fall Down: Tragedy, Ethnography, and "Cultural Competence"MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGY QUARTERLY, Issue 2 2003Janelle S. Taylor Anne Fadiman 's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (Noonday Press, 1997) is widely used in "cultural competence" efforts within U.S. medical school curricula. This article addresses the relationship between theory, narrative form, and teaching through a close critical reading of that book that is informed by theories of tragedy and ethnographies of medicine. I argue that The Spirit Catches You is so influential as ethnography because it is so moving as a story; it is so moving as a story because it works so well as tragedy; and it works so well as tragedy precisely because of the static, reified, essentialist understanding of "culture" from which it proceeds. If professional anthropologists wish our own best work to speak to "apparitions of culture" within medicine and other "cultures of no culture," I suggest that we must find compelling new narrative forms in which to convey more complex understandings of "culture." [medical education, cultural competence, tragedy, ethnography, theories of culture] [source] | |||||||||||||