I Focus (i + focus)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences

Kinds of I Focus

  • article i focus
  • paper i focus


  • Selected Abstracts


    Networks as a means of supporting the adoption of organizational innovations in SMEs: the case of Environmental Management Systems (EMSs) based on ISO 14001

    CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT, Issue 3 2007
    Fawzi Halila
    Abstract In spite of their large numbers, most SMEs have little knowledge of or interest in environmental questions and generally have difficulties when it comes to integrating environmental aspects into their activities. One way for SMEs to shift from a reactive to a proactive environmental behavior is to adopt environmental innovations. Environmental innovations consist of new or modified processes, techniques, practices, systems and products to avoid or reduce environmental harms. In this study, I focus on a particular type of innovation: organizational environmental innovations, such as an EMS in accordance with ISO 14001. ,,One objective of this study was to understand and describe how SMEs can use a network as a basis for initiating environmental work. Another objective was to develop a model that can be used as a guideline for the adoption of an ISO 14001 EMS by SMEs collaborating in a network. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [source]


    The Paradoxes of Environmental Policy and Resource Management in Reform-Era China,

    ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY, Issue 3 2000
    Joshua Muldavin
    Abstract: Over the last 5,000 years serious environmental problems,deforestation, desertification, erosion, and widespread pollution of air, land, and water,have prevailed throughout most of China, brought about by a diverse set of social and political contexts. In this paper I focus on an enduring contradiction associated with the post-1978 reforms, namely accelerated environmental resource degradation in rural areas amid unprecedented national economic growth. Declining entitlements to assets and social capital in China's rural village populations are a crucial aspect of altered state-peasant relations, as these are increasingly mediated by the market during China's transition to a hybrid economy. This has resulted in changing patterns of resource use, impacting both the environment and peasant livelihoods. A brief assessment of China's postrevolutionary environmental policy and management practices provides the context for detailed case studies in Henan Province. These examples highlight the relationship between political-economic changes and environmental policy and management. Contrary to reform rhetoric, rural peasants' embracing of reform policies does not necessarily optimize their welfare or promote sustainable use of resources. The case studies reveal alternative pathways for villages, ones that ought to be brought into the policy debate spotlight. [source]


    Geographic Scale and Grass-Roots Internationalism: The Liverpool Dock Dispute, 1995,1998,

    ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY, Issue 3 2000
    Noel Castree
    Abstract: In the context of ongoing debates over the effects of "globalization" on organized labor and, specifically, recent experiments in labor internationalism, this paper examines the geography of the Liverpool dock dispute, 1995,98. The dispute has rarely been subject to a serious analysis of its causes and trajectory. This is surprising since it was not only the most protracted industrial dispute in recent British history but also the hub of a relatively novel form of transnational labor organizing: namely, a form of grass-roots internationalism organized largely outside the formal apparatuses of national and international unionism. In the paper I focus on the nature and dynamics of this "grass-roots internationalism" with a view to making two claims that have a wider thematic and theoretical relevance to the study of labor geographies. First, contrary to an emerging new orthodoxy in labor geography (and labor studies more generally), the Liverpool case in fact suggests that the necessity for labor to "up-scale" solidarity and struggle in the 1990s is much overstated. Second, the Liverpool case suggests that international labor organizing is only efficacious when considered in relation to two scales of struggle often thought increasingly irrelevant or ineffectual in a globalizing world: the local and the national. Thus, while those few analysts who have cited the Liverpool dispute, basing their assessments on secondhand knowledge, have held the dockers up as exemplars of a new form of labor internationalism, in this paper I suggest the need for a more complex and contingent appreciation of the multiscalar dynamics of labor struggles. In short, we have not yet reached the stage, even in a globalizing world, where labor's "spatial fixes" must be preeminently supranational. [source]


    COALITION GOVERNMENTS AND SOVEREIGN DEBT CRISES

    ECONOMICS & POLITICS, Issue 2 2009
    SEBASTIAN M. SAIEGH
    This article examines the domestic politics of sovereign debt crises. I focus on two alternative mechanisms that aggregate the preferences of domestic actors over debt repayment: single-party versus multiparty coalition governments. I uncover a very strong empirical regularity using cross-national data from 48 developing countries between 1971 and 1997. Countries that are governed by a coalition of parties are less likely to reschedule their debts than those under single-party governments. The effect of multiparty coalitions on sovereign defaults is quantitatively large and roughly of the same order of magnitude as liquidity factors such as debt burden and debt service. These results are robust to numerous specifications and samples. [source]


    UNDERSTANDING THE OTHER/UNDERSTANDING OURSELVES: TOWARD A CONSTRUCTIVE DIALOGUE ABOUT "PRINCIPLES' IN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

    EDUCATIONAL THEORY, Issue 3 2005
    Pamela A. Moss
    The recent federal interest in advancing "scientifically based research," along with the National Research Council's 2002 report Scientific Research in Education (SRE), have provided space and impetus for a more general dialogue across discourse boundaries within the field of educational research. The goal of this article is to develop and illustrate principles for an educative dialogue across research discourses. I have turned to Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and the critical dialogue that surrounds it to seek guidance about how we might better understand one another's perspectives and learn more about ourselves through the encounter. To illustrate these principles, I consider the dialogue between SRE authors and critics that was published in Educational Researcher shortly after the release of the report. I focus in particular on one of the many issues about which misunderstandings seem to arise , the nature, status, and role of generalizations , and point to some instructive challenges that each of the articles seems to raise for the others. Finally, I propose what I argue is a more prudent aspiration for general principles in educational research: developing the principles through which open critique and debate across differences might occur and through which sound decisions about particular programs for research might be made. [source]


    Spaces of Encounter: Public Bureaucracy and the Making of Client Identities

    ETHOS, Issue 3 2010
    Lauren J. Silver
    I emphasize the material deficits, spatial barriers, and bureaucratic procedures that restrict the storylines clients and officials use to make sense of one another. This article is drawn from a two-year ethnographic study with African American young mothers (ages 16,20) under the custody of the child welfare system. I focus here on the experiences of one young mother and explore several scenarios in her struggle to obtain public housing. I argue that service deficits can be explained not by the commonly articulated narratives of client "shortcomings" but, rather, by the nature of the organizational and material conditions guiding exchanges between public service gatekeepers and young mothers. I suggest that this work advances narrative approaches to psychological anthropology by attending to the roles of social and material boundaries in framing the stories people can tell each other. [identity, adolescent mothers, public bureaucracy, service negotiation, narrative] [source]


    Culture and Mind: Their Fruitful Incommensurability

    ETHOS, Issue 1 2008
    Jerome Bruner
    I focus on institutions as means for canonizing the ordinary, on narrative as a mode of positioning the extraordinary vis-à-vis mundane expectations, and on agency, each of which entails intersections of mind and culture. Recent encounters with U.S. legal culture provide a ground for illustrating these intertwining relations of subjects and their cultural milieux. [culture, mind, law, institutions, selectivity] [source]


    Between East and West: Geographic Metaphors of Identity in Poland

    ETHOS, Issue 1 2004
    Marysia H. Galbraith
    As Poland enters the European Union, questions of national identity relative to wider group loyalties become particularly salient. This study considers how individual life stories contribute to the discourse on what constitutes the Polish nation, and contemplates the implications of respondents' views for the achievement of European integration. I focus on Polish youths' use of metaphors of "betweenness," in which Poland fills the conceptual space between East and West, and "nested identities," based on simultaneous attachments to region, nation, and Europe, and consider how they might provide alternatives to models of identity which assume conflict with outside groups. In postcommunist Poland, more protectionist or conflict-based stances are sometimes taken, not so much because of political threats as in the past, but more in response to economic inequalities within Poland, and between Poland and the West. [source]


    Past success and convergent thinking in groups: The role of group-focused attributions

    EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 4 2004
    Jack A. Goncalo
    Past success often causes groups to think narrowly around strategies that have worked in the past, even when environmental change has rendered these strategies ineffective. From a psychological perspective, this research seems to indicate that past success may give rise to convergent thinking in groups. Why might successful groups be prone to convergent thinking? I argue that the relationship between past success and convergent thinking may depend on the attributions that groups generate to explain their shared success. In this paper, I focus on two distinct attributions at the group level: Individual-focused attributions that reflect the idiosyncratic characteristics of individual group members and group-focused attributions that reflect the emergent properties of the group as a whole. I found that group-focused attributions for past success cause groups to generate fewer ideas that are, on average, more convergent. In contrast, individual-focused attributions cause groups to generate more ideas that are on average more divergent. These findings suggest that the experience of success may actually stimulate divergent thinking depending on how a group chooses to explain it. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


    Ontogenesis in Narrative Therapy: A Linguistic-Semiotic Examination of Client Change

    FAMILY PROCESS, Issue 1 2004
    Peter Muntigl Ph.D.
    In this article I investigate how the narrative therapy process facilitates client change. The kind of change that I focus on is linguistic-semiotic; that is, how clients develop their meaning potential through language. What I will demonstrate is how an examination of the linguistic-semiotic level provides new insights into narrative therapy's role in endowing clients with the semiotic materials to make new meanings. An examination of six conjoint sessions involving a narrative therapist with one couple revealed that client change or ontogenesis is composed of three semiotic phases. In the first phase of ontogenesis clients display a beginning semiotic repertoire by formulating "extreme case" descriptions of self and other's behaviors. In the second phase clients are scaffolded by therapist's questions and reformulations into construing events as problems and problems as the agents of negative behaviors. In the final phase clients display a development in their semiotic potential. Clients are able to eliminate problems and construe themselves as agents without prior therapist scaffolding. Therefore, in the latter stages of the narrative process clients are able to deploy meanings that have been generated throughout therapy, in order to produce narratives of self agency and self control. [source]


    Multifunctional host defense peptides: intracellular-targeting antimicrobial peptides

    FEBS JOURNAL, Issue 22 2009
    Pierre Nicolas
    There is widespread acceptance that cationic antimicrobial peptides, apart from their membrane-permeabilizing/disrupting properties, also operate through interactions with intracellular targets, or disruption of key cellular processes. Examples of intracellular activity include inhibition of DNA and protein synthesis, inhibition of chaperone-assisted protein folding and enzymatic activity, and inhibition of cytoplasmic membrane septum formation and cell wall synthesis. The purpose of this minireview is to question some widely held views about intracellular-targeting antimicrobial peptides. In particular, I focus on the relative contributions of intracellular targeting and membrane disruption to the overall killing strategy of antimicrobial peptides, as well as on mechanisms whereby some peptides are able to translocate spontaneously across the plasma membrane. Currently, there are no more than three peptides that have been convincingly demonstrated to enter microbial cells without the involvement of stereospecific interactions with a receptor/docking molecule and, once in the cell, to interfere with cellular functions. From the limited data currently available, it seems unlikely that this property, which is isolated in particular peptide families, is also shared by the hundreds of naturally occurring antimicrobial peptides that differ in length, amino acid composition, sequence, hydrophobicity, amphipathicity, and membrane-bound conformation. Microbial cell entry and/or membrane damage associated with membrane phase/transient pore or long-lived transitions could be a feature common to intracellular-targeting antimicrobial peptides and mammalian cell-penetrating peptides that have an overrepresentation of one or two amino acids, i.e. Trp and Pro, His, or Arg. Differences in membrane lipid composition, as well as differential lipid recruitment by peptides, may provide a basis for microbial cell killing on one hand, and mammalian cell passage on the other. [source]


    Spaces of Work and Everyday Life: Labour Geographies and the Agency of Unorganised Temporary Migrant Workers

    GEOGRAPHY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 6 2009
    Ben Rogaly
    In this study, I focus on the agency of unorganised temporary migrant workers , people who travel away to work for just a few weeks or months. Such workers have been relatively neglected in labour geography. Perhaps surprisingly, given the focus on the agency of capital in much of his writing, I build on two arguments made by David Harvey. First, workers' spatial mobility is complex and may involve short as well as longer term migrations, and secondly that this can have significance both materially and in relation to the subjective experience of employment. The spatial embeddedness of temporary migrant workers' everyday lives can be a resource for shaping landscapes (and ordinary histories) of capitalism, even though any changes may be short-lived and take place at the micro-scale. The article is illustrated with case study material from research with workers in the agriculture sector in India and the UK, and concludes with more general implications for labour geographers engaged with other sectors and places. [source]


    Learning to be Palestinian in Athens: constructing national identities in diaspora

    GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 4 2007
    ELIZABETH MAVROUDI
    Abstract In this article I focus on constructions of diasporic national identities and the nation as active and strategic processes using the case study of Palestinians in Athens. I seek, thereby, to contribute to debates on national identity, the nation and long-distance nationalism, particularly in relation to those in diaspora with a collective cause to advocate. I explore how first- and second-generation Palestinians in Athens construct and narrate Palestinian national identities, the homeland and political unity. I argue that the need to ,choose' to be Palestinian, often for political reasons, highlights that the nation is not a ,given' entity. This can be a difficult process for those in diaspora to deal with, as there may be tensions between constructions of political unity and attachment to the homeland and feelings of ambivalence and in-between-ness that may be seen as politically counterproductive. However, I stress that ,messy' and contradictory narratives and spatialities of diasporic national identities that come about as a result of cross-border or transnational (dis)connections do not necessarily lead to apathy and, therefore, can be important. [source]


    The blessings and burdens of communication: cell phones in Jamaican transnational social fields

    GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 2 2006
    HEATHER A. HORST
    Tracing the shift from community phone boxes to individually owned mobile (cell) phones in rural Jamaica, in this article I focus on the integration of mobile phones in Jamaican transnational communication. Equipped with a mobile phone, rural Jamaicans no longer rely on collect phone calls and expensive calling cards to initiate the connections between their friends and relatives living abroad. For many Jamaicans without access to a regular or reliable phone service prior to 2001, the mobile phone is viewed as an unadulterated blessing, transforming the role of transnational communication from an intermittent event to a part of daily life. For others, however, the mobile phone remains an object of ambivalence, bringing unforeseen burdens and obligations. [source]


    Consuming the transnational family: Indonesian migrant domestic workers to Saudi Arabia

    GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 1 2006
    RACHEL SILVEY
    In this article, which is based on field work in a migrant-sending community in West Java, I focus on migrant women's narratives of transnational migration and employment as domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. I contribute to the literature on gender and transnational migration by exploring migrants' consumption desires and practices as reflective not only of commoditized exchange but also of affect and sentiment. In addition, I show in detail how religion and class inflect low-income women's narrations of morally appropriate mothering practices. In conclusion, I suggest that interpreting these debates from the ground up can contribute towards understanding the larger struggles animating the Indonesian state's contemporary relationships with women and Islam. [source]


    3. "PRESENCE" AND MYTH

    HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 3 2006
    F. R. ANKERSMIT
    ABSTRACT There are no dictionary meanings or authoritative discussions of "presence" that fix the significance of this word in a way that ought to be accepted by anybody using it. So we are in the welcome possession of great freedom to maneuver when using the term. In fact, the only feasible requirement for its use is that it should maximally contribute to our understanding of the humanities. When trying to satisfy this requirement I shall relate "presence" to representation. Then I focus on a variant of representation in which the past is allowed to travel to the present as a kind of "stowaway" (Runia), so that the past is literally "present" in historical representation. I appeal to Runia's notion of so-called "parallel processes" for an analysis of this variant of historical representation. [source]


    Changing the Concepts to Justify the Standards,

    ACCOUNTING PERSPECTIVES, Issue 4 2009
    Patricia C. O'brien
    ABSTRACT In this paper, I discuss the current project to converge the IASB and FASB conceptual frameworks, specifically efforts to purge the converged framework of concepts that hinder the promotion of balance sheet valuation using fair values. I discuss why I believe these efforts to be misguided, based on how investors who analyze financial statements employ accounting information. I focus on stewardship, reliability, and earnings , terms either demoted in importance or at risk of being eliminated in the framework convergence project. I explain their salience to financial statement users and argue against their deletion or demotion. [source]


    The Trickle-down Effect: Ideology and the Development of Premium Water Networks in China's Cities

    INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 1 2007
    ALANA BOLAND
    This article examines the relationship between networked infrastructure and uneven development in transitional cities through a study of premium water networks in China. Beginning in the mid-1990s, select buildings and housing enclaves began to bypass municipal tap water supply systems through the construction of small-scale secondary pipe networks for purified drinking water. I focus on the early development of these premium water networks to highlight the ideological interplay between a new more market-based approach to networked supply and the existing model characterized by relatively universal and uniform access within cities. I illustrate how this dual water supply model was well suited to the ideological conditions and contradictions associated with China's economic liberalization in the 1990s. While the emergence of premium water networks can be linked to ascendant forms of market reasoning in the environmental and social spheres, I also argue that they were enabled by unresolved ideological tensions associated with China's transitional program. Rather than providing a basis for resistance in the early development of premium water supply, the socialist legacy in urban water supply left its mark more in the noticeable absence of debate regarding the distributional outcomes. By examining premium water networks in relation to the politics of ideology in China's transitional period, my analysis highlights the complex and sometimes unexpected ways that ideologies can influence the development of new infrastructural spaces and processes of splintering urbanism. [source]


    Evaluating Migrant Integration: Political Attitudes Across Generations in Europe,

    INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION REVIEW, Issue 1 2010
    Rahsaan Maxwell
    This article engages debates about migrant integration by analyzing political trust and satisfaction in 24 European countries. The evidence suggests that first-generation migrants have the most positive attitudes, while native-origin and second-generation migrant-origin individuals have similar political trust and satisfaction scores. To explain these outcomes, I focus on the importance of subjective integration factors related to the stages of migration. I claim that first-generation migrants, who have gone through the disruptive process of changing countries, will have lower expectations and be more likely to have positive evaluations of the host society. In comparison, native-origin and second-generation migrant-origin individuals have been raised in the same society and are likely to share perspectives toward that society's political institutions. [source]


    A Constitution for Europe?

    JCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 4 2002
    Some Hard Choices
    The Convention on the Future of Europe is likely to produce a constitutional prototype for Europe. In this article I focus on five hard constitutional choices which Europe will face: the constitutional significance of enlargement; the ,pure' constitutional issue, namely the significance of form; the issue of Europe's social solidarity as a defining identity marker and the question of whether it should, therefore, be constitutionalized thereby taking it out of day,to,day politics; the issue of policing rather than defining the demarcation of competences between the Union and Member States; and, finally, the tricky issue of a human rights policy for Europe. [source]


    The Cultural Burden of Architecture

    JOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION, Issue 4 2004
    GÜLSÜM BAYDAR
    Contemporary architectural discourse mostly assumes an unmediated link between architecture and culture. This is a historical assumption, however, rooted in colonial encounters when the notion of cultural difference first entered the architectural scene. In the first part of my article, I focus on a statement by Vitruvius that provides ways of thinking about architecture outside cultural identity categories. In the second part, I analyze two nineteenth-century texts to show both the cultural inscriptions of architectural discourse and their breaking points. Finally, I argue that recognizing the historicity of the relationship between architecture and culture involves problematizing architecture as an identity category as much as questioning culture as an architectural category. [source]


    Use of Forecasts of Earnings to Estimate and Compare Cost of Capital Across Regimes

    JOURNAL OF BUSINESS FINANCE & ACCOUNTING, Issue 3-4 2006
    Article first published online: 19 MAY 200, Peter Easton
    Abstract: I critically examine several of the methods used in the recent literature to estimate and compare the cost of capital across different accounting/regulatory regimes. I focus on the central importance of expectations of growth beyond the short period for which forecasts of future pay-offs (dividends and/or earnings) are available. I illustrate, using the stocks that comprised the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) at December 31, 2004, as an example, the differences between the growth rates implied by the data, and growth rates that are often assumed in the literature. My analyses show that assumptions about growth beyond the (short) forecast horizon may seriously affect the estimates of the expected rate of return and may lead to spurious inferences. [source]


    Consuming Projects in Uncertain Times: Making Selves in the Galilee1

    JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 3 2003
    TANIA FORTE
    This article proposes a different approach. It explores how ordinary people, through projects of their own which exhibit particular forms of intentional cultural production and consumption, manifest historically situated notions of selves. I use the idea of "projects" to understand the interconnections between global consumer culture, identity, and nationalism as they are manifested in the everyday lives of Palestinian citizens of Israel. To exemplify these interconnections, I focus on two significant, creative projects through which Palestinian inhabitants of the Western Galilee shape and manifest selves in history. Though these projects appear very different on the surface, they are used to address the same central question , that is, to understand how senses of self in history and attending identities are materially and discursively constituted by members of a national minority in the ever-present context of political conflict. They show that people are not passive consumers of homogenizing rituals and discourse and reveal how, through a bricolage of objects and ideas, people inscribe intentions, meanings, ways of thinking, and self-narration in places and histories. [source]


    Envisioning Power in Mexico: Legitimacy, Crisis, and the Practice of Patrimony

    JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2003
    Elizabeth Emma Ferry
    Yet once he broadened his interests to peasant studies and the history of capitalism, he never returned to make a sustained examination of power in Mexico. This article extends Wolf's insights into an analysis of the current political and economic situation in Mexico. I focus on the practice of categorizing objects as the inalienable property of a given collective, such as a city, region, institution, or nation. These possessions , often referred to as patrimonio (patrimony) , are understood to have been handed down from prior generations and intended to be handed down in turn to future generations. I look at this mode of characterizing property in the areas of subsoil resources, collectively held land, and "cultural properties." [source]


    Changing Definitions of Risk and Responsibility in French Political Scandals

    JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 3 2002
    Violaine Roussel
    In the 1990s in France, a large number of political scandals developed and many political actors were prosecuted. This process of making politicians responsible related, in particular, to the rise of ,new risks' regarding public health and security. In this paper, I analyse the diffusion and the crystallization of discourses linking public risk and political responsibility. First, I point to some of the social and cognitive bases in which the recent uses of the notions of risk and responsibility are rooted. Second, I focus on the mechanisms through which the notions were mobilized and invested with new definitions in the course of the scandal hearings. Third, I explore some of the effects of the changes which occurred during the 1990s: new perception frames in terms of risk and responsibility are consolidated and are progressively appropriated by social actors located in various professional spheres. [source]


    Reclaiming Sacred Sparks: Linguistic Syncretism and Gendered Language Shift among Hasidic Jews in New York

    JOURNAL OF LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 1 2007
    Ayala Fader
    In this article I examine the relationship between linguistic boundaries and community boundaries, shaped by religious beliefs about gender and difference. I focus on gendered language shift and syncretic registers of Yiddish and English among Hasidic Jews in New York. Hasidic Jews, an example of a nonliberal (fundamentalist) urban religious community, claimed essentialized gender and ethno-religious identities by using syncretic language practices. Syncretism was a resource which allowed believers to participate in secular modernity while rejecting any aspect which threatened their way of life. This has implications for those who study syncretic languages and simultaneities as well as social reproduction and change in nonliberal religious communities. [source]


    Children and Power in Mexican Transnational Families

    JOURNAL OF MARRIAGE AND FAMILY, Issue 4 2007
    Joanna Dreby
    Today, many families find that they are unable to fulfill the goal of maintaining a household by living together under the same roof. Some members migrate internationally. This article addresses the consequences of a transnational lifestyle for children who are left behind by migrant parents. Using ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with a total of 141 members of Mexican transnational families, I explore how children who are left behind react to parents' migrations. I focus on how Mexican children manifest the competing pressures they feel surrounding parents' migrations and consequently shape family migration patterns. The article shows that children may experience power, albeit in different ways at different ages, while simultaneously being disadvantaged as dependents and in terms of their families' socioeconomic status. [source]


    The Aetiology of Vampires and Revenants: Theological Debate and Popular Belief

    JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY, Issue 2 2010
    DAVID KEYWORTH
    In this paper, I discuss the supposed aetiology of undead corpses (by which I mean corpses that refused to stay dead), and the theological explanations for their existence, as outlined in the historical documents at the time, and the various arguments that ensued. I examine the medieval notion that the Devil might reanimate a corpse and pretend to be the deceased, for example, the post-mortem effects of excommunication, and the incorruptibility of deceased saints and martyrs. In particular, I focus upon the vampires of eighteenth-century Europe and the aetiological explanations proffered by the theologians, philosophers and medical fraternity at the time, such as vestigium vitae and premature burial, compared to folk belief at the village level. Furthermore, I argue that despite the largely successful campaign by the socio-religious elite to eradicate such notions, muted belief in the existence of vampires continued to emerge thereafter because folk belief was fuelled by an entrenched early modern belief-system that had itself promoted the existence of undead corpses. [source]


    Double-mouthed discourse: Interpreting, framing, and participant roles1

    JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 3 2010
    Cécile B. Vigouroux
    In this article I examine multilingual displays in a Congolese Pentecostal church in Cape Town, South Africa. I focus on the simultaneous interpreting of the pastor's French sermon into English. I argue that the interpreting activity performed at church is used as a powerful interactional device to dramatize and shape the pastor's sermon. A close examination of participant roles shows that although these may appear to be predetermined by the interpretee-interpreter format of the sermon, speaking roles are actually fluid and negotiated. I submit that an important role of the church interpreter is to convey the pastor's inspiration from the Holy Spirit and reach out to the potential audience absent from the here and now of the service. His high emotional engagement helps convey this inspiration prospectively to the audience and retroactively to the pastor himself. [source]


    Calling the Judiciary to Account for the Past: Transitional Justice and Judicial Accountability in Nigeria

    LAW & POLICY, Issue 2 2008
    HAKEEM O. YUSUF
    Institutional and individual accountability is an important feature of societies in transition from conflict or authoritarian rule. The imperative of accountability has both normative and transformational underpinnings in the context of restoration of the rule of law and democracy. This article argues a case for extending the purview of truth-telling processes to the judiciary in postauthoritarian contexts. The driving force behind the inquiry is the proposition that the judiciary as the third arm of government at all times participates in governance. To contextualize the argument, I focus on judicial governance and accountability within the paradigm of Nigeria's transition to democracy after decades of authoritarian military rule. [source]