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European Traditions (european + tradition)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences60%

Selected Abstracts

Community psychology: should there be a European perspective?

JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY & APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 5 2001
Donata Francescato
In this era of globalisation community psychologists have to examine how globalisation patterns interact with local cultural norms, to find tools to promote a sense of community that fits a particular context. We cannot therefore acritically adopt for many European contexts, community psychology concepts and intervention strategies geared to USA values. The paper argues for the need to develop a European perspective in Community Psychology, built more on the European tradition of political concern for promoting social capital, besides an individual's freedom and autonomy. The paper attempts to identity some of the main differences that have emerged in the last decades between USA and European approaches to community psychology. It also describes two empowering tools, which integrate traditional and post modern views of science: community profiling and multidimensional organisational analysis, that have been used by European community psychologists to rebuild social capital in organisations and local communities. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Why Australian History Matters

HISTORY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2003
Carl Bridge
I have been teaching Australian history to students in the University of London on and off over the last fifteen years. Most of the class are young Britons, and there is a scattering of exchange students from other European universities, the Americas and Asia. It is a perennially popular subject and I often wonder why? One answer, better than it seems at first sight, is the mountaineer's: ,because it is there'. But there are certainly some things that attract students to Australian history more than others. There is a fascination with the exotic and the natural wonders. Students are particularly interested in the Aboriginal past and culture. And they are curious to explore what European and other immigrants and their descendants have achieved when they have a chance to invent a society de novo. There is also an interest in how a country of predominantly European traditions has negotiated its position permanently anchored as it is in Pacific Asia. As our London students all study Australian history along with courses on the histories of other countries and movements, there is also considerable opportunity for comparative work, and this offers perspectives that do not naturally occur to historians studying Australia from within. [source]

The Role of Critique in Philosophy of Education: its Subject Matter and its Ambiguities

JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION, Issue 3 2004
Frieda Heyting
The role of critique in the Anglophone analytical tradition of philosophy of education is outlined and some of its shortcomings are noted, particularly its apparent claim to methodological objectivity in arriving at what are clearly contestable positions about the normative basis of education. Many of these issues can be seen to have a long history within European, and especially German, philosophy of education. In the light of this the discussion moves on to a consideration of similarities and contrasts between the Anglophone and German-inspired deployment of the concept of critical rationality in philosophy of education. The claims to objectivity of the Anglophone tradition are contrasted with a more self-conscious concern for social justice and improvement in other European traditions, which has been followed more recently by a greater scepticism concerning the potential of critique for delivering social justice and improvement in education. This has parallels with the growing Anglophone disillusion with ,classical' analytic philosophy of education. This in turn has resulted in a greater awareness of the limitations of critique: its ideological character, its rootedness in specific contexts, its own potential dogmatism and its ambiguities. The various contributions to this volume are briefly described and related to each other. [source]

"This Great Emptiness We Are Feeling": Toward a Decolonization of Schooling in Simunurwa, Colombia

ANTHROPOLOGY & EDUCATION QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2009
Luz A. MurilloArticle first published online: 14 DEC 200
This article examines the decolonization of schooling in an Arhuaco community in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region of Colombia. Interweaving ethnographic description with accounts of key events that took place between 1915 and 2006, I trace the community's struggle to develop an Indigenous school capable of appropriating Western forms of knowledge while retaining Indigenous practices and beliefs. I describe how Indigenous educators incorporate local forms of knowledge into schooling, and how these are presented and understood relative to the structures and discourses of the colonized school. Using the concepts of "translocality" and "transculturation," I frame this discussion of the struggle for educational autonomy within broader efforts to decolonize knowledge and epistemologies inherited from European traditions and the Colombian state. I argue that educators have transformed the school from a colonizing space to one in which Indigenous people contest and negotiate, via practices of cultural and linguistic revitalization, the state violence that threatens to surround them.,[Arhuaco, Colombia, decolonization, Indigenous education, local knowledge, transculturation, translocality] [source]

Construction of an Aboriginal Theory of Mind and Mental Health1

ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS, Issue 2 2009
Lewis Mehl-Madrona
ABSTRACT Most research on aboriginal mind and mental health has sought to apply or confirm preexisting European-derived theories among aboriginal people. Culture has been underappreciate. An understanding of uniquely aboriginal models for mind and mental health might lead to more effective and robust interventions. To address this issue, a core group of elders from five separate regions of North America was developed to help determine how aboriginal people conceived of mind, self, and identity before European contact. The process utilized for this study is iterative and involves discussions of teachings, traditional stories, and elder's comments on conclusions drawn. The elders endorsed a relational theory of mind in which mind exists between people as a product of the stories told and created within and by that relationship. Mind is distinguished from consciousness which is without language and exists within the individual as awareness. Language immediately results in an "out there" orientation in which two or more individuals generate stories about their experiences. The community is the basic unit of study for mind and mental health, and mental "illness" is not distinguished from physical "illness," but rather all are seen as a continuum of suffering and pain. What emerged from this research is that North American theories of mind are more closely related to Daoist and Shinto theories than to the logical positivism which drives most of North America's conventional psychology and psychiatry. Within European traditions, however, the philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin with his emphasis on a dialogical self coupled with system theory comes closest to resembling North American aboriginal theories. This model explains why ceremony and ritual, community interventions, talking circles (including AA and the Wellbriety Movement), and family therapy are more compatible with aboriginal thought than conventional North American biomedicine and psychology. [source]