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Vision 2030 and Subjective Well-Being in Saudi Arabia
No full textSaudi Vision 2030 seeks to improve social sustainability in the Kingdom through comprehensive economic and social reforms. This study investigates whether these reforms are associated with changes in subjective well-being (SWB), commonly understood as individuals’ experienced quality of life. Using Gallup World Poll data from 2013 to 2023 on Cantril ladder scores and affect balance in Saudi Arabia, we find increases in SWB following the implementation of Vision 2030 reforms, particularly for the affective component of SWB. While positive changes in SWB are observed across the entire population, the gains in affective well-being are especially pronounced among women. Blinder–Oaxaca decompositions show that improvements are associated with enhanced community basics, followed by greater income sufficiency, improved perceptions of social life, and an increased sense of personal freedom
Editorial:Chimeras & other animals. The cultural imagination and conceptualization of human and non-human animals
No full textIn our editorial to the special issue Chimeras & other animals. The cultural imagination and conceptualization of human and non-human animals, we argue that the arts and literature are essential for expanding the human capacity to empathize with non-human species and for envisioning more eco-centric ways of multispecies coexistence
‘Heroes’, ‘street lawyers’ and ‘rotten apples’: the role of bystanders during police work in different contexts
No full textA review of the relationship between student growth mindset and self-regulated learning
No full textSelf-regulation is a crucial life skill. In particular, self-regulated learning (SRL) is an important factor in achieving academic success. Recent research has studied the association between SRL and growth mindset, a belief that emphasizes the importance of effort, perseverance, and the use of SRL strategies. Although recent research indicates positive associations, some findings are contradictory. This review systematically synthesized recent literature on the relationship between students' growth mindset and SRL in educational settings (e.g., school, college and university students), based on 10 peer-reviewed empirical studies with 15 samples published in English between 2010 and 2023. The studies were coded using a coding scheme. All studies examined a direct relationship between a growth mindset and SRL. The results showed that having a growth mindset is positively associated with SRL strategies overall (r = 0.40). The systematic review then revealed that there are positive associations across all phases of SRL, although with substantial variation in the strengths of the association across studies (also supported by Q statistic, p < 0.001). The results further suggest that the operationalization of mindset measures and socioeconomic disadvantage may moderate the association between mindset and SRL; however, more research is needed on the moderating and mediating factors that affect the relationship between growth mindset and SRL strategy use. These findings suggest that promoting a growth mindset could be a promising factor in interventions designed to foster SRL. Future research could further explore this area of research by taking into account how different contexts and conditions influence this relationship, for example, whether this relationship vary for growth mindset in different school subjects
Colonial Ghosts of Sinking Cities: Contemporary Climate Change Imaginaries in New York City, Mexico City and Amsterdam
No full textThis dissertation explores the role that colonials pasts play in the way in which the future is imagined in cities that are sinking due to climate change. Climate change is often presented as a planetary and universal problem: a future ecological threat looms over the entire world's population. Despite this "future" and "global" frame, this dissertation focuses on local differences and the impact of the past. Three cities from three different geographic areas therefore form the core of this research: New York City (North America), Mexico City (Central America), and Amsterdam (Europe). These cities face similar challenges because they are sinking or subsiding. In all cases, the risk of sinking and potential flooding is exacerbated by climate change. These risks call for adaptations and different ways of dealing with water. In all three cities the past is recollected in order to make the city resilient to ecological problems in the future: waterways that were erased in the past by a modernist conception of the landscape (in which water was always seen as an enemy and was pumped away or buried) are being brought back to light. They are once again given a place in the contemporary city, which is, as it were, opened up. Not only physically, but also mentally. "Nature" is no longer opposed to the "urban," but must, on the contrary, become part of it again. Frameworks of our thinking—frameworks that previously separated human and nature, or water and land—are being redefined. Such a shift in mentality demands a new perspective on the city. And it is precisely this "perspective"—the "new way of seeing"—with which landscape architects, scientists, artists, and writers reimagine and reshape the city that plays a central role in this dissertation. This ocular vocabulary reveals blind spots, things that transcend the existing frameworks of modern thinking about humanity and nature. This dissertation considers these blind spots as "ghosts." A ghost is something that doesn't adhere to existing frameworks and doesn't care about boundaries: a ghost is elusive and easily penetrates barriers. A ghost, too, is something that is dead and buried, but never a complete absence: it has always been able to stir the present and the world of the living from a position of invisibility. Many of the urban imaginaries that promote a new way of seeing, and which are explored in this dissertation, attempt to reconcile with the new reality of climate change. They often claim to have found ways to understand this new reality, to bear witness to it through a particular vision that allows them to bring ghosts to light: things from the past, buried or left out of view by old ways of thinking, that are evoked to make us see the city, our present, and ourselves differently. This dissertation approaches the ghosts attached to urban climate imaginaries at two levels: a metaphorical and a metonymic level. The metaphorical level focuses on the ghosts that are performed by the imaginaries under investigation and their new way of seeing. These ghosts are illuminating and, in that sense, metaphorical: the imaginaries point to something and say, "This element is like a ghost, and our vision brings it to light (we now see more, as it were)." What elements from the past are brought back into view and incorporated into the new urban space, and what does this say about the resulting image of the city? The metonymic level, on the other hand, focuses on the ghosts that unknowingly penetrate the perspective presented in the images under investigation—the blind spots of their own vision: the past that clings to the images, genres, clichés, and rhetoric presented, thus coloring how the new situation is perceived. These ghosts operate obscuringly and are, in that sense, metonymic: the imagaries attempt to clarify the new, but do so through images drawn from a different, older context
Chōra and basho. A playing field between west and east.
No full textIn the Timaeus, Plato used a word for space, ‘chōra’ (xώρα), to indicate a third kind of reality, besides eternal being and everchanging becoming. This concept did not fit in well with Greek philosophy and almost disappeared from view, until it was rediscovered by Jacques Derrida in the late 1960s. Derrida’s khōra is a radical otherness, defying any naming or logic. It became an aspect of Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. However, in 1926, Nishida Kitarō had already developed his concept of basho, Japanese (場所) for space, with a reference to Plato’s chōra. Nishida’s basho was the space of absolute nothingness, related to Buddhist emptiness, and a cornerstone to the philosophy of the Kyoto School. The ancient Greek chōra, the postmodern khōra and the Japanese basho overlap as being formless, but both Derrida and Nishida diverged from Plato’s concept. They found a possible weakness—a ‘soft spot’, so to speak—in Plato, where they could situate their own brainchild, namely, postmodern ‘deconstruction’ and the Japanese logic of basho. How are chōra, khōra, and basho related to each other? Are they completely different, or do they have a common ground?I approach this question by first adding context to chōra, khōra and basho, from the history of Platonism, post-modernism and Kyoto School philosophy, on the basis of textual references. Plato’s chōra quickly merged with Aristotle’s hylē, ‘matter’, becoming the prime matter of creation in Greek and Medieval philosophy. Derrida’s khōra opened Plato’s text to a renewed reading, and it had diverging parallels in postmodern theological and feminist thought. Nishida’s basho reappeared in the Kyoto School as ‘absolute mediation’ (Tanabe), ‘interrelatedness’ (Watsuji), ‘formless self’ (Hisamatsu), ‘the field of emptiness’ (Nishitani), ‘dynamic śūnyatā’ (Abe) and ‘infinite open’ (Ueda). Only recently has the question of an overlap of chōra and basho received scholarly attention. To give some examples, Rolf Elberfeld calls it ‘the self as a field of consciousness’, Augustin Berque ‘a place for ‘absolute being-thereness’, comprising the self’, and John Krummel a “self-forming formlessness”. I argue that ‘field’ is a better translation of chōra and basho than ‘space’ or ‘place’, to avoid the pitfalls of materialism. Its paradoxical nature of being empty yet permanent connects it with the question of a substratum of reality. There is a relevance to the myth of creatio ex nihilo, and to the question of overcoming dualism, as Plato calls chōra a third kind, triton genos. Derrida’s philosophy of ‘deconstruction’ operates by opening up the metaphysics of Plato’s Timaeus from within the text, but the Kyoto School basho goes much further, because of its connection to Nāgārjuna’s emptiness. The possibility of an overlap of chōra, khora and basho became evident in recent debates on deconstruction and emptiness, kenōsis and God, and interrelatedness and embodiment. These debates also included ecological ethics when basho was extended to nature, which was also the subject of Plato’s Timaeus. Both Nishida and Derrida focused on Plato’s chōra as ‘having no form’, a quality which questions the suitability of language to indicate its nature. Formlessness brings in concepts like apophasis, pre-verbal psychology, Zen, and Dao. If chōra, khōra and basho are beyond words, are they better understood as dynamics? In an excursus, I discuss Rolf Elberfeld’s method of ‘transformative phenomenology’, which could feature open-ended creativity as a function of a future philosophical praxis, engaging with chōra and basho. From Elberfeld, I borrow the phrase ‘a playing field between East and West’ (German: Spielraum) to indicate the overlap.My conclusion is that, because of the variety of readings of the ancient Greek chōra, the postmodern khōra and the Japanese basho, it is impossible to present a final statement on the overlap of the three concepts. I argue that the subject may therefore serve—and continue to serve—as a fertile ‘playing field’ between East and West for global comparative philosophy, in which the overcoming of dualism and a non-dual concept of the self will be core topics. The paradox, the enigma, the Zen kōan, the logic of myth, Plato’s ‘bastard reasoning’ and the various forms of non-binary logic, all appear to me as different linguistic ways of pointing to formlessness and to a formless self, meaning a self-contradictory identity beyond, yet including, body and mind. A formless self was the core doctrine of Hisamatsu, who wrote that ‘in the West such Nothingness has never been fully awakened, nor has there been penetration to such level’. This is creating an East-West juxtaposition rather than finding ways to bridge the gap, apparent in most other Kyoto School thinkers. Nishida’s contribution to articulating a ‘Zen element’ was mu no basho, the spatiality of what later in his career developed into the true self as self-contradictory. If he is correct in claiming that Zen ‘kensho means to penetrate to the bottomlessly contradictory existence of one’s own self’, then I agree with Izutsu when he points to ‘the philosophical potential hidden in the Zen experience of reality’. I do not think this potential has been exhausted at all, nor its overlap with Western philosophy. Chōra, khōra and basho are therefore fertile fields for further exploration
The salience of the invisible: insights into the evolution, dynamics and relational challenges of employee neurodiversity networks
No full textPraktische handvatten voor eerstelijns zorgverleners:Vroegtijdige proactieve zorgplanning
No full textIn de laatste levensfase komen mensen vaak voor lastige keuzes te staan, zoals wel of geen opname in het ziekenhuis. Het is waardevol als ouderen op tijd nadenken over hun wensen en deze bespreken met hun naasten en zorgverleners. Dit artikel beschrijft het proces van proactieve zorgplanning, waarbij we verschillende fasen onderscheiden, en biedt praktische handvatten aan eerstelijns zorgverleners
