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Critical Account (critical + account)
Selected AbstractsWorld Bank-directed Development?DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 3 2009Negotiating Participation in the Nam Theun 2 Hydropower Project in Laos ABSTRACT The omnipotence of the World Bank on a global scale means that it is often regarded as the most influential partner in bringing about transformations in developing countries. This article contributes to ongoing discussions of this issue by examining some effects of the Bank's participatory agenda in one of its flagship projects, the Nam Theun 2 (NT2) hydropower scheme in Laos. Critical accounts suggest that the Bank's promotion of participation in donor-dependent countries like Laos is either a guise or an imposition. These propositions are considered in two settings where participation was debated around the time of the Bank's loan appraisal for NT2: first, an international stakeholders' workshop held in Vientiane; and second, some international attempts to identify the concerns of villagers living near the NT2 dam site. In workshops and villages, participation is a negotiated performance whereby competing representations emerge through the interaction between village, state and international actors. More generally, this article shows that a grounded view of development can attend to the practices that constrain the hegemonic tendencies of the World Bank, even while maintaining awareness of the potency of its policies and interventions. [source] The politics of risk and trust in mental healthCRITICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 3 2004John Wilkinson This essay provides a critical account of Risk Society theory through analysis of an article by ,I,ek on human genetics research, using this as a basis for distinguishing a range of meanings of 'risk' and describing their interplay within the mental health domain. The paper argues that mental health policy in the UK has been distorted through a preoccupation with a supposedly scientific practice of risk assessment which uncannily reflects popular and tabloid prejudice. It is argued that Risk Society theory does not, as its proponents claim, supersede the politics of inclusion and exclusion, so much as overlay and disguise them. The importance of Risk Society theory in the development of Third Way politics would invite a similarly critical view of a range of contemporary British social policy. [source] Beyond the regional lifeworld against the global systemworld: towards a relational ,scalar perspective on spatial,economic developmentGEOGRAFISKA ANNALER SERIES B: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY, Issue 2 2002Arnoud Lagendijk Recent writings in economic geography have questioned the way the literature has featured the regional scale in discussing issues of innovation and economic competitiveness, and called for a different conceptualization of scale. This paper takes up the challenge to go beyond what is called the ,regional gaze', by presenting a critical review of the regionalist literature and outlining an alternative approach. The critique of the ,regional gaze' is developed in two steps: first, by discussing the influence of strategic management discourse; and second, by invoking the twin concepts of lifeworld,systemworld. This critical account results in identifying various windows for elaborating an alternative conceptualization of the relationship between economic development and space. A first alternative is found in the dimension of the ,non,local' or ,extra,local', but the significance of these notions is considered to be limited. Drawing on recent work on scaling and the ,politics of scale', a relational,scalar approach is proposed that focuses on the question of how scalar qualities are socially produced and contested. What is called for is a geographical imagination that sees innovation and economic competitiveness as braced on spatialized networks rather than bounded territories scaled at the regional level. An illustration of how such a perspective may be elaborated is found in recent discussions on the concept of ,global production networks'. [source] Spoon River Anthology's Heterosexual HeartlandLITERATURE COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 3 2006Scott Herring Critics often assume Edgar Lee Masters's best-selling 1915 collection of poems, Spoon River Anthology, to be a damning account of small-town corruption and sexual degeneration. This essay argues the counter-intuitive claim that the anthology instead confirms a pastoral image of small town life even as it appears to negate this ideal. I suggest that Spoon River Anthology paradoxically confirms the idyllic image of the small Midwestern town through the collection's representations of adultery, unrestrained lust, and promiscuity , activities that were often associated with an "unnatural" version of heterosexuality in the early twentieth-century United States. To show that Masters's critical account of Spoon River's citizenry serves to substantiate representations of the heartland as an idyllic space for opposite-sex couplings, I offer close readings of two poems ,"Lucinda Matlock" and "Washington McNeely", and illustrate how they each present readers with compulsory versions of heterosexual couplings that contrast to the "deviant" opposite-sex activities that saturate the remainder of the text. [source] Cognitive-Behavioural Work with Offenders in the UK: A History of Influential EndeavourTHE HOWARD JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, Issue 2 2000Maurice Vanstone Programmes premised on the cognitive-behavioural theoretical model have become an important feature of work with people who offend, and the model itself has become a cornerstone of the ,what works' enterprise in the United Kingdom. This has not occurred without critical attention from commentators in both the academic and practice worlds. This article attempts to draw together the strands of that debate, and provide a critical account of the recent history of the model's development and application within the criminal justice system that accords more significance to pioneering work in the United Kingdom than has been hitherto recognised. It is argued that one of the features of the response of the probation service to the pessimistic conclusions of research into the impact of community supervision in the 1970s was a divergence of policy and practice, the former redirecting the efforts of the service towards diversion from custody and the latter retaining its commitment to rehabilitation. While acknowledging the limitations of the cognitive-behavioural model, it is argued that by contributing positively to evidence-based, rehabilitative effort it has given impetus to a reunification of the focus of policy and practice. [source] Wishful sinking: Disappearing islands, climate refugees and cosmopolitan experimentationASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 1 2010Carol Farbotko Abstract Disappearing islands and climate refugees have become signifiers of the scale and urgency of uneven impacts of climate change. This paper offers a critical account of how sea level rise debates reverberate around Western mythologies of island laboratories. I argue that representations of low-lying Oceania islands as experimental spaces burden these sites with providing proof of a global climate change crisis. The emergence of Tuvalu as a climate change ,canary' has inscribed its islands as a location where developed world anxieties about global climate change are articulated. As Tuvalu islands and Tuvaluan bodies become sites to concretize climate science's statistical abstractions, they can enforce an eco-colonial gaze on Tuvalu and its inhabitants. Expressions of ,wishful sinking' create a problematic moral geography in some prominent environmentalist narratives: only after they disappear are the islands useful as an absolute truth of the urgency of climate change, and thus a prompt to save the rest of the planet. [source] A Defense of Puttenham's Arte of English PoesyENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 1 2009Julian Lamb Recent critical accounts of Puttenham's treatise have tended to focus on the political nature of its poetics, and have in turn read the text as an exercise in courtly dissembling, or in self-fashioning. My argument is that such readings misunderstand the pedagogical nature of Puttenham's text, which distinguishes it from Sidney's Defense of Poetry and Daniel's Defense of Rhyme (to which the Art has been compared unfavourably). In the first half of this article I provide a re-interpretation of Puttenham's conception of decorum, suggesting that it is not an inexplicable rule designed to keep poetry the property the courtly elite, but rather a appetite and an imperative motivating the writing of poetry. In the second half of the article I consider Puttenham's understanding of the nature of decorum in terms of the relationship between custom and the rule. I suggest that Puttenham conceptualises this relationship as one between the aural and visual properties of language; between the ear and the eye. [source] Estranged but not Alienated: A Precondition of Critical Educational TheoryJOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION, Issue 1 2001Marianna Papastephanou Alienation is a double-edged concept adaptable to both positive and negative or critical accounts of the individual, culture and society. It is also elastic enough to describe very different economical and cultural effects, and thus it is a potential source of confusion and inconsistency. Alienation is characterised by a Janus-faced adaptability to both neutral/positive and negative uses: the former may be considered as endemic, the latter as historical. In some respects alienation is neither avoidable in education nor wholly undesirable. [source] Anthropological and accounting knowledge in Islamic banking and finance: rethinking critical accountsTHE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 4 2002Bill Maurer Accounting for accounting demands renewed attention to the knowledge practices of the accounting profession and anthropological analysis. Using data and theory from Islamic accountancy in Indonesia and the global network of Islamic financial engineers, this article challenges work on accounting's rhetorical functions by attending to the inherent reflexivity of accounting practice and the practice of accounting for accounting. Such a move is necessary because critical accounting scholarship mirrors, and has been taken up by, Islamic accountancy debates around the form of accounting knowledge. The article explores the work that accounting literature shoulders in carving up putatively stable domains of the technical and rhetorical, and makes a case for a reappreciation of the techniques for creating anthropological knowledge in the light of new cultures of accounting. [source] | |||||||||||||||||||