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Challenges that Early Career Researchers Face in Academic Research and Publishing: Pre- and post-COVID-19 perspectives
No full textthe academic community. Yet, in some respects, they occupy a selectively inferior niche due to structural constraints, as well as personal and professional limitations. ECRs, who are at an initial stage of their careers, face multiple challenges in research and publishing due to a relative lack of experience. These may make them vulnerable to abuse and cause stress and anxiety. Those challenges may have been amplified in the COVID-19 era. ECRs\u27 efforts may unfairly boost the reputation of their mentors and/or supervisors (Matthew Effect), so greater credit equity is needed in research and publishing. This opinion paper provides a broad appreciation of the struggles that ECRs face in research and publishing. This paper also attempts to identify extraneous factors that might make ECRs professionally more vulnerable in the COVID-19 era than their established seniors. ECRs may find it difficult to establish a unique career path that embraces creativity and accommodates their personal or professional desires. This is because they may encounter a rigid research and publishing environment that is dominated by a structurally determined status quo. The role of ECRs\u27 supervisors is essential in guiding ECRs in a scholarly volatile environment, allowing them to adapt to it. ECRs also need to be conscientious of the constantly evolving research and publishing landscape, the importance of open science and reproducibility, and the risks posed by spam and predatory publishing. Flexibility, sensitivity, creativity, adaptability, courage, good observational skills, and a focus on research and publishing integrity are key aspects that will hold ECRs in good stead on their scientific career path in a post-COVID-19 era
Christianity and Abortion Rights
Get PDFThe struggle for abortion rights continues to rage in the 21st century. On one side feminists, who see it as part of the struggle to establish a woman’s right to control her own body, and a wider constituency, who deplore the injury and death resulting from the lack of access to safe abortions, have campaigned energetically for abortion rights. On the other side, various religious fundamentalists have put pressure on states to block any expansion of rights and even take away existing rights. Prominent among the anti-abortion forces are the Roman Catholic establishment and right-wing Evangelical sects. Unable to find any prohibition of abortion in the scriptures, they have relied on the prohibition of murder, arguing that a fertilised ovum constitutes a human life, and therefore its destruction constitutes murder. This extreme anti-abortion position too finds no support in the Bible: indeed, even the Catholic church adopted it only in the latter part of the 19th century, and among Evangelicals it is much more recent, suggesting that it is part of the right-wing fundamentalist backlash against struggles for women’s rights. Progressive Christians have been among those fighting for reproductive justice. Their arguments are compatible with the feminist position that having a baby should be a matter of choice, and that those who care for children should do so out of love, not compulsion. Thus reproductive justice is not only a matter of securing the right of women to make decisions about their bodies and their lives, but also a matter of securing the right of children to be loved and wanted.
Keywords: abortion, feminism, Christianity, religious fundamentalism, women’s rights, children’s rights
Haun-Maun-Khaun: A Postcolonial Reading of the Cannibals in Some Fairy Tales from Colonial Bengal
No full textThis paper offers a postcolonial reading of some Bengali fairy tales, including selections from Folk-Tales of Bengal (the 1883 collected edition by Reverend Lal Behari Dey); Thakurmar Jhuli (Grandmother\u27s Bag Of Stories), a collection of Bengali fairy tales by Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumder (1907); and Bengal Fairy Tales, a 1920 edited volume by F. B. Bradley-Birt (a work by the British diplomat serving in India, which alludes frequently to Mitra Majumder’s text). It interprets the symbols and stalk images used in these texts in terms of the relationship of coloniser versus colonised. It argues that the depictions of the cannibal demons in these fairy tales have an emblematic significance akin to the expression of the anti-colonial resistance and the postcolonial reaction to the contemporary sociocultural scenarios of colonial India
The Implementation and Challenges of using Role-Play to Improve Chinese University Students’ English Communicative Competence
No full textEnglish is taught as a compulsory course in Chinese universities and it is necessary to find feasible ways to improve students’ English ability to communicate. Role-play is believed as an effective way to enhance second language learners’ communicative competence and it is also supposed to be able to be effective in Chinese universities EFL classes. The real effect, however, relies on the actual implementation in classes. If the teachers inappropriately adopt role-play, it is hard to be useful. Due to the lack of research paying attention to this issue, it is not clear how Chinese university English teachers use role-play and whether it is effective. For this reason, a case study was conducted, with a Chinese university EFL teacher taking part in the interviews. The results show that participants attempt to maximise the effectiveness of role-play to improve students’ English communicative competence by practising comprehensive language skills, linguistic knowledge, and workplace topics. Nonetheless, some issues, namely script preparation, students’ proficiency difference and class size are identified. These may challenge the actual effectiveness of role-play. Possible solutions, including selecting role-play according to students’ ability, considering individuals’ condition, mixed-ability grouping and small class size, are suggested thereafter
The Postcolonial Legacy and LGBTQ+ Advocacy in Egypt and Lebanon
No full textIn recent years, increased crackdowns on and legal persecution of LGBTQ+ rights in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have occurred as a result of the renewed use of colonial laws against ‘sexual deviance’ and ‘debauchery’. Sexual politics have emerged as a site of political domination in part as a result of financial and political crises in the region. This paper explores the various challenges faced by LGBTQ+ advocates in the MENA in the twenty-first century. The paper argues that advocates can overcome these challenges by separating their message from both International LGBTQ+ groups and domestic anti-LGBTQ+ dialogues, which converge in the view that LGBTQ+ identity and Arab cultural identity are permanently, inherently opposed. Using a Postcolonial International Relations framework and critical cultural theory, this paper will investigate the complex web of oppressions these advocates face. Two previously unexplored contemporary examples in Egypt and Lebanon will be investigated, focusing on advocates’ alliance-building capabilities and creation of a war of position. Using a deductive approach, the paper will conclude that LGBTQ+ advocates are able to overcome these challenges. The theoretical framework is therefore a useful tool in the study of modern international relations and culture
Special Issue Introduction: Development, Democracy and Culture
No full textIn a time of huge religious, political and territorial conflict, the cultural dimension of development is all too easily ignored. The last special issue of the Journal of Law, Social Justice and Global Development was concerned with Cultural Rights (culture and human rights); this current issue, thematically, follows from a question that emerged in the process of its editing: How have global cultural policies been conceived as development policies through a quest for the ‘ideal’ of democracy? The 2001 UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity, and then the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, appealed to the values of democracy as a ‘basis’ of their operational efficacy. But what kind of democracy is most effective in the implementation of cultural policies, and how that that re-adjust our thinking on the role of culture in development? What happened to the discourse on democracy and development that featured milestone texts like the World Commission on Culture and Development’s Our Creative Diversity (1966)? What happened to the notion that cultural pluralism was a road to democratisation, and why do policies on multiculturalism no longer seem to promise a vibrant participatory “culture” of democracy for the brave new “globalised” world? These questions cannot be decisively answered, but the articles in this issue serve to frame our investigation moving forward to a substantive response
The Problem of democracy in the ASEAN Creative City: The cases of Chiang Mai, Bandung, Cebu, and George Town
Get PDFThe ‘Creative City’ is a global policy trend that has, evidently, been adopted by many cities around the world. At the beginning of the putative post-industrial era (early-1970s) major cities across the Europe and USA faced significant economic and social transition, specifically when their economic core was progressively hollowed out as industrial production migrated to Asia or to other, cheaper, regions. There were demonstrable urban impacts of this transition, including poverty, crime, and a generalised underdevelopment. The Creative City discourse dates to this period in the UK, when cultural consultants like Charles Landry and Franco Bianchini recognised the conditions of urban change and the potential role of culture as a framework for policy intervention. They proposed new strategic approaches, which evolved and became influential within international policy spheres — British Council, UNESCO, and regional networks, such as ASEAN. In the Southeast Asian region, the Creative City discourse was welcomed by the Association of the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and a significant number of the major cities of the associated ten countries are currently using the Creative City as a model or framework for economic growth, social progress and cultural development (and as a broader means of internationalisation, cultural diplomacy and benefitting from UN-level development framework participation). This paper serves to consider the specific strategic manifestations of the Creative City idea and investigate its policy and ideological function in specific exemplar ASEAN cities
Comment: Germany’s Rule of Law Interventions, Like those Elsewhere, Need to Follow the Laws, Principles and Measures that Germany and the International Community Claim to Promote
No full textThis is a professional comment, and represents the views of the author
‘Monkey Meat’ and Metaphor in Shohei Ooka’s Fires on the Plain
No full textIn Fires on the Plain (1952) novelist Shohei Ooka critiques Japanese imperialism by depicting the collapse of the Japanese army in the Philippines during the final months of World War II. Structured as a post-war memoir written by a soldier named Private Tamura as a patient in a Tokyo mental hospital, the novel explores Tamura’s psychological breakdown in response to having succumbed to cannibalism in order to survive. A complex treatment of memory, guilt, and individual agency in times of war, Fires on the Plain also underscores the ways in which the cannibalistic act may function metaphorically as a commentary on matters related to sex, religion, militarism, and cultural imperialism, as well as revealing anxieties associated with the creation of a post-war narrative of national victimhood in Japan. While Ooka presents Tamura’s eating of human flesh as the culmination of his long descent into madness, the act also serves as a metaphor through which he explores the self-destructive nature of Japanese imperialism, as well as his own responsibility for his unwilling participation in it.