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Much contemporary scholarship on ziran and wuwei views these concepts, which are often coupled, as being 1) anti-intention, effort, purpose, and self-consciousness; 2) indicative of a distinct type of ethics and/or morality; and 3) a rejection of following custom and convention. This paper will draw largely on the philosophy of Guo Xiang to demonstrate that these widely agreed upon avenues of interpretation are limited and run contrary to other more nuanced readings of ziran and wuwei. I argue that ziran and wuwei are better appreciated as speaking to attitudes, that they should be understood in terms of degrees rather than categories, and that the Laozi and Zhuangzi offer them as advice for ways of reflecting—they are not standardizable ethical rules. In this way, we can see how ziran and wuwei include intention and effort, are anti (most forms of) ethics and morality, and are inherently intertwined with customs and convention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine self-categorization practices as resources for the interactional organization of relative experiential entitlements. Locating the study in talk about child death, an explicitly moral domain of social life, this study utilizes 18 radio-based interactions from a South African talk-radio broadcaster. Using an ethnomethodological, conversation-analytic approach, I examine affective responses to reports of child deaths, demonstrating how these practices reproduce child death as a contemporary social and moral concern. My findings demonstrate how practices of, and variations in, self-reference and self-categorization are resources for managing relative rights and obligations, thereby reproducing common-sense knowledge about parents and children in contemporary South African society. This research contributes to advancing knowledge in the fields of membership categorization analysis and the social organization of experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the weekend of the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the Irish Consulate in Chicago memorialised a different occasion: the 86th anniversary of the death of Francis O'Neill (1848–1936), a Cork-born collector of Irish music in the United States. This paper posits that the sociopolitical construction "Irish traditional culture" constitutes an exercise of power over land and bodies, shaping and sustaining the structures of the island's political economy as part of a racial/colonial/imperial project. My argument centres James Byrne (1868–1931), an itinerant piper "discovered" in Kilkenny in 1903. O'Neill's account of Byrne's life demonstrates the development of an ideological narrative of tradition as the foundation of Irish modernity. To deterritorialise land-based practices and construct a White Irish citizen subject to global capital, colonial technologies of governance mobilise resources from "authentic" points of origin, inventing their administrators as the heroic saviours of vanishing culture. James Byrne, in contrast, is situated as a possession containing value to be extracted and as a contaminated body refusing to become a compliant capitalist subject harnessed to empire. By interrogating this narrative, I hope to foster nuanced discussion around the enduring structural interdependence of "Irishness" with transnational political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to establish a contextual understanding of the body of work created by the little-researched amateur photographer Andrew Begbie Ovenstone (1851–1935) and to problematize the status of the Victorian amateur photographer in the Scottish Photographic tradition. Whilst acknowledging the generally accepted 'social documentary' characteristics of the Scottish photographic tradition, this paper argues that because they were less motivated by a moral or social agenda, amateur photographers like Ovenstone offer us a more nuanced perspective on late-Victorian society. One of the primary questions to be addressed is the extent to which Ovenstone's photographs conform to convention and how far they show signs of an original perspective. Glasgow's burgeoning sense of cultural identity, the prevailing attitude of Empire including notions of 'self-fashioning' and 'othering', as well as the didactic propensities of the photographic magazines of the day all had an important influence on the Victorian amateur photographer. Ovenstone's photographs indicate the effect of these powerful forces. However, alongside the forces of convention, Ovenstone reveals himself to have been a genuine experimentalist. He kept two sets of albums, one of which reveals the 'public' amateur photographer who adhered to the conventions, tastes and aspirations of the day, whilst another set of more 'private' albums reveal a photographer of distinctive and original characteristics. The paper questions the narrow ascendent canon within the Scottish Victorian photographic tradition and shows that the role of the amateur photographer outside of that tradition is still undervalued and under researched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Dickens's literary preoccupation with bureaucracy reflects its ascendant, but often contradictory, position in Victorian society. Exclusive, disordered, and in parts archaic – but at the same time increasingly pervasive, and visibly cohering into a recognisably modern form – bureaucratic organisation became a major (albeit neither infallible, nor uncontested) phenomenon in fiction during this period as much as in real life. In this article I explore such portrayals by focusing on Dickens's aesthetic of the ostensible centre of bureaucratic power, the office itself, as a space. By rooting his ironical and often paradoxical uses of this setting within the broader crises of social knowledge and materiality that underlay nineteenth-century bureaucratisation, I argue that the Dickensian office, between The Pickwick Papers, Dombey and Son, and Bleak House, performs a range of functions directly linked to its multifaceted condition of interstiality. These interstices are literal, in the office's capacity as a physical intermediary, but also social, conceptual, and in terms of literary form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning circles has a long tradition in the Nordic countries as a model for adult non-formal education, but has gained little scholarly attention and is thus sparsely theorised. The purpose of this article is to discuss the revitalisation of learning circles as highly relevant in times of what we term 'social innovation imperatives'. To illustrate this, we report from two Nordic learning circles in which we were involved as evaluators. We provide an overview of the Nordic tradition of learning in 'circles' and draw on social innovation literatures to sketch a framework for theorising learning circles, comprising three aspects of the 'social' in social innovation: social ends, social means and capacity building. Despite the increasing popularity, there is still limited knowledge about social innovation in practice. The Nordic tradition of learning circles provides a practice-based reply to how social innovation can be facilitated, and vice versa; social innovation theory provides input for theorising learning circles. As such, this paper's originality lies in allowing learning circles (as a practice) and social innovation (as the theory) to cross-pollinate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lei and si (ancient Chinese plough) are the earliest agricultural tools in Chinese agricultural history. They played an important role, which is incomparable for the origin and significance of Chinese agriculture and farming. However, previous investigations mainly focused on the perspectives of history, archaeology and science development, leaving few explorations from the perspective of folklore. This paper attempts to investigate these ancient agricultural tools from the perspective of folklore, and explore the social and cultural customs originating from the primitive farming society. In addition, lei and si appeared in the world as the earliest agricultural tools, which played an important role in promoting human agricultural cultivation. Because they were advanced during that time, people fabricated a lot of myths and legends related. This folklore investigation analyzed the myths and legends related to lei and si, considering the loaded agricultural cultures. Folklore investigation not only traces the cultural and historical context contained in si and lei, but also pays attention to the inheritance and influence in following generations. Therefore, this paper, from the perspective of folklore, investigates the application of lei and si in the following agricultural customs of all ethnic groups, figuring out their inheriting features in ancient Chinese agriculture. From this, it can be seen that Lei and si, an ancient agricultural tool, not only existed in people's agricultural cultivation at the material level, but also connected the ancient time and the present as an ancient cultural custom, with the cultural value and significance endowed by folklore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are reasons to believe that conventional obligations are impossible. Thus, it could be argued that for me to have an obligation to Φ in virtue of the fact that a convention so requires, it must be the case that I have a convention-independent obligation to do something else such that, given the existence of the convention, Φing is a way of doing just that. But, then, my obligation to Φ would not really be conventional at all. On closer inspection, so-called conventional obligations turn out to be no more than a specification of what our nonconventional obligations require given the circumstances. In this paper, I shall argue that contra to what this argument suggests, there can be genuinely conventional obligations. To do so, I develop a second-personal account of conventional obligations, according to which obligations are grounded by conventions in virtue of an explanation that does not follow the indicated pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on the larger experience of urbanisation in two villages in Delhi, in particular the changing political and social life of these villages. Based on field research conducted between 2017 and 2019, it aims to explore the associational life of the villages and the ways in which traditional and newer forms of association and governance interact with each other and the state. In the new landscape, where panchayats operate alongside resident welfare associations and youth-led self-help organisations, a multiplicity of 'political' and 'associational' strategies have been adopted, with the invocation of terms such as 'social work' alongside an older invocation of biradari or community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on Correspondence from the Double-Cassia Studio (Shuanggui xuan chidu 雙桂軒尺牘), a collection of letters by a gentlewoman named Ding Shanyi 丁善儀 (1799-after 1861), this paper examines how elite women in mid-nineteenth-century China applied epistolary conventions in their social life. Compared to other literary collections of individual women in late imperial China, Ding's letter collection is exceptional in recording the life of its author through the epistolary genre and in revealing the sociopolitical dynamics that underlay elite women's epistolary gentility. Ding's letters are indicative of the noticeable concerns shared by gentlewomen in mid-nineteenth-century China and provide specific contexts for understanding some of the epistolary techniques used by literary women to facilitate social networking. This paper uncovers Ding's life and explores three major themes in her epistolary collection: her responses to crises, concerns about health, and cultivation of friendship. Ding's letters show how elite women evinced sophistication and erudition in their epistolary composition, which was an important way for them to express themselves and demonstrate their mastery of language and rhetorical tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public space as an extension of private living spaces carries the different social life and customs of human settlement. To analyze the spatial distribution characteristics of traditional villages in northern Guangxi based on spatial syntax and its influencing factors, this paper analyzed and compared the spatial structure and morphology of traditional villages in northern Guangxi by using the theory of spatial syntax and linguistics as the quantitative analysis method of spatial syntax, and verified the feasibility of expanding the application of spatial syntax, finally, the generality and characteristics of the spatial structure and form of traditional villages in northern Guangxi were put forward. Protection has been implemented. According to the comprehensibility data in this paper, the comprehensibility of the village 1 in northern Guangxi is 0.52, the village 2 is 0.40, the village 3 is 0.35, the village 4 is 0.48, the village 5 is 0.55 and the village 6 is 0.50. It showed that in the selected 6 village samples, except for the 3 ones in northern Guangxi, the local space of the other 3 villages could better perceive the overall space, which also reflected the overall space permeability of most traditional villages in northern Guangxi was good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rwanda and Nicaragua are well-known for their high levels of gender equality despite being developing authoritarian regime countries, especially when the gender equality is measured using official norms such as institution and law. However, when considering unofficial social norms such as traditional customs, cultural practices, and violence against women, women’s everyday lives are not as good as the official norms suggest. In the SIGI Index, which includes attitudes and practices as indicators, these two countries rank much lower (160th and 128th respectively) than they do in the Global Gender Gap Index, which gives high weight to institutional aspects such as the share of women in parliament. This paper aims to investigate the impact of the gap between the law and custom on social change, by analyzing the cases of Rwanda and Nicaragua. Specifically, this study examines the areas of women’s rights, land ownership, and domestic violence to identify the extent to which the gap between the law and custom influences the everyday lives of women in these countries. The analysis indicates that it is necessary to find a balance between the law and custom that promotes change while reducing conflicts. This requires a moderate law that aligns with customs or surpasses customs by a moderate margin. Moreover, the presence of enforcement mechanisms is crucial in effecting change from customary practices to new laws. In this regard, active women’s movements can serve to exert pressure for effective enforcement, which eventually can bridge the gap between the law and custom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a historical ethnography of how Brazil's post-dictatorial psychiatric reforms have shaped young people's lives, this paper builds on Eve Sedgwick's analysis of the hermeneutics of suspicion to show that narrow applications of Foucault's biopower concept nurture forms of resistance to bio-reductionism centred primarily on epistemic deconstruction. To unsettle this hermeneutic, I put young people's theories of power into conversation with Georges Canguilhem's concept of the milieu and with feminist scholars' work on prefigurative politics. I introduce the concepts of threading and unthreading to consider how one subject of biopower, the child-like biobehavioural figure, was continuously being threaded within a specific milieu and in relation to another key figure: the elite angst-ridden 'storm-and-stress' adolescent. Young people's subsequent unthreading and reweaving politics, flourishing in co-construction with what I call the politicizing clinic, illustrate how decolonial pedagogies can incrementally change the patterning of social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral perceptualism is the view that perceptual experience is attuned to pick up on moral features in our environment, just as it is attuned to pick up on mundane features of an environment like textures, shapes, colors, pitches, and timbres. One important family of views that incorporate moral perception are those of virtue theorists and sensibility theorists. On these views, one central ability of the virtuous agent is her sensitivity to morally relevant features of situations, where this sensitivity is often spoken of in perceptual terms. However, sensibility theorists have often not been careful to specify how to understand their claims about moral sensibilities as perceptual. In this paper, we distinguish between what we call Attentional Moral Perception and Contentful Moral Perception. We argue that sensibility theorists should endorse Attentional Moral Perception, because it has very powerful empirical evidence in its favor, and it can play all of the explanatory roles that the sensibility theorist needs in her theory of moral sensibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following scenario seems possible: a community uses concepts that play the same role in guiding actions and shaping social life as our normative concepts, and yet refer to something else. As Eklund (2017) argues, this apparent possibility poses a problem for any normative realist who aspires to vindicate the thought that reality itself favors our ways of valuing and acting. How can realists make good on this idea, given that anything they might say in support of the privileged status of our normative concepts can be mirrored by the imagined community? E.g., the realist might claim that using our concepts is what we ought to do if we are to describe normative facts correctly, but members of the other community can claim the same about their concepts, using their own concept of ought. A promising approach to this challenge is to try to rule out the possibility of alternative normative concepts, by arguing that any concepts that have the same normative role must share a reference as well. (Eklund calls this referential normativity.) In this paper I argue that normative quasi-naturalism, a view that combines expressivism about normative discourse with a naturalist metaphysics of normativity, supports referential normativity and solves the problem of alternative normative concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article's premise is that war is ontological devastation, which opens up questions as to how to write about it. The paper contends that even critiques of war, whether critical-geopolitical analyses of global structures or ethnographies of the everyday, center war in ways that underscore erasures of non-war life, and therefore risk participating in that same ontological devastation. Engagement with extra-academic conversational worlds, both their social lives and their intellectual ones, is ethically necessary in writing war. To that end, this article examines poetic production from one front in the US-led "Global War on Terror": Swat Valley, Pakistan. Poets in Swat have produced an analysis of war as ontological devastation, but also protest their reduction, in the minds of others and themselves, to the violence-stricken present. This intervention is not an intellectual critique alone. Focusing on a new genre of "resistance" poetry, this article shows how poets resist war by maintaining worlds partly beyond it. In this, the critical content and the social lives of poetry are inseparable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper claims that there is such a thing as poetry that is sensitive to the capitalist logics of financial abstraction. It does this by situating poetry from the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries in relation to historically comparable revolutions in finance and financial instruments. It argues that such poetry offers ways in which to apprehend and materialise historical and contemporary financial abstraction; it further claims that such work signals and responds to the ways in which finance influences the relationship between social life and knowledge, in poems that interface the production of knowledge with capital's relentless chasing after value. In different ways and from different motivations, the work of Jonathan Swift and William Fuller leverages aesthetic form against the abstractive mechanisms of financialization and acts as a counterbalance against them. For Swift, this means the Tory humanist satire of credit and banking in the wake of the English Financial Revolution (and especially in the context of England's first great financial crisis, the so-called South Sea Bubble of 1720); for Fuller, this means his poetry's syntactical animation, and lyrical transcendence, of the formal logics of the derivative, the most profoundly transformative financial form of modern capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we will seek to bring together two authors separated by four centuries: Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) and Karl Popper (1902-1994). The first proceeds in line with the Pyrrhonian adaptation to social traditions and customs combined with an adogmatic defense of traditional Catholicism. The second proceeds through the adogmatic defense of the ideals of primitive Christianity as driving forces of the liberal-democratic tradition. To do so, we will begin with an exposition of Montaigne's fideism and the aforementioned Pyrrhonian adaptation. Next, we will explain Popper's way of dealing with tradition, placing it as the main vector of social order. Furthermore, we will show how the Christian tradition influenced his thinking to the point that the philosopher conceived it as one of the main ingredients of the open society. We conclude by emphasizing that, despite the differences between the two authors, both are united both in the critique of human cognitive pretensions and in the consideration of traditions as a factor of social stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This volume argues that looking at gardens through the lens of art and aesthetics generates new insights into the role that gardens have for those who make and depend on them. Drawing on some of the debates around the anthropology of art, we suggest that aesthetics provides a rich analytical perspective on the importance of gardens to many wider aspects of social life. We argue for the critical conceptual significance of gardens in Melanesia, and in Amazonia. In doing so, we foreground the importance of diversity in gardening: in plants and knowledge practices, and in the recognition of non-human beings and their collaboration with gardeners. This is, in part, a factor of the satisfactions that people find in growing beautiful and diverse gardens that link to myth, to history and to place. This introduction sets out these arguments and also provides a summary of each of the papers presented in the volume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I propose an approach for enhancing the consistency of the decisions made by business executives, which is achieved through the development of their capacity for decision-making. I explain why this is a relevant contribution both for individual executives and for society, and why Philosophical Practice is well positioned to offer a substantial contribution in the direction of addressing the issue. I also offer a description of key inconsistencies in the decision-making process of executives, propose a solution in terms of specific ways in which those inconsistencies need to be improved, and offer the basis for a Philosophical Practice approach to promoting the development of the executive's capacity for decision-making in such a way as to solve those inconsistencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout history, political cartoons have shown themselves to be an extremely powerful media for satirizing and criticizing regimes and social customs. They have been employed by the social and political movements during the Arab Spring. This paper is an attempt to analyze the importance of and the backlash to political cartoons that have been published on Facebook by three important cartoonists in terms of their number of followers and the magnitude of political backlash to their works. A qualitative and interpretative methodology has been used as well as a multimodal analysis to study the cartoons of Ali Ferzat, Nadia Khiary, and Mohammed Sabaaneh. Consequently, the conclusions are that variety in style, irony, and perception have been used, with the help of Facebook, the favorite social network of the Arab world, to irritate the established regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic Survival and Social Support in Sports activities is a multifaceted area of research interest. Active participation of women in sports activities has a significant contribution to the growth and success of the sports industry. This article seeks to discuss the impact of sports activities on sportswomen's economic survival and social life. This is done using questionnaire themed around issues such lack of availability of time, limitations of knowledge, family-related and financial difficulties, and nature of activities, all of which can potentially impact the social life of sportswomen. The study shows that economic survival is a significant part of sport's activities as well as the social life of sportswomen. Economic survival supports the social life of sportswomen. The current article highlights the findings from big data analysis pertaining to the social life of sportswomen. The paper uses Big Data Analysis to examine the social life of sportswomen. However, BDA is a complex process resulting from data sources' diverse and unstructured nature. Big Data Analysis (BDA) is critical in the sports field, as it covers the data at the macro-level (such as the national sports industry, teams, and individuals). It was analyzed using the AMOS 23v and SPSS 26v after being collected from female sports players belonging to a geographically diverse region. The study found that there is a significant association between sports activities, economic survival, and the social life of sportswomen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite contested definitions, trauma is often conceptualized as an event that shocks or overloads human systems, shaping memory and meanings as the body and mind attempt to cope and survive. Adoption is often the presumed redress for childhood trauma. Thus, few scholars have examined how, or if, some conditions of adoption or the status itself might involve unique traumas or adversities. In this paper, I argue that the condition of being transracially adopted can represent intersectional minoritized statuses, which in turn activate potentially distinct formations of epistemic trauma— structurally and relationally transmitted harms to a person as a knower and to their capacities for claiming, making sense of, and healing through their lived experiences. I draw from my personal and professional standpoints as a black, mixed-race, woman who was transracially adopted from public foster care as an infant, became a child welfare caseworker and later, a child welfare scholar. Using a critical and reflexive autoethnographic method I ask how theories of epistemic injustice might help to highlight conditions tied to the status "transracial adoptee" that distinguish adoption-specific trauma. By reflexively analyzing my experiences in the context of extant theory and research, this paper brings theories of epistemic injustice into conversation with an emic perspective on adoption. In my experience, "transracial adoptee" and "mixed race" operated as statuses that occasioned epistemic injustices. I propose these conditions can become traumatic when they chronically and structurally disenfranchise claiming and cultivating folkways essential to one's healing and resilience across the life course. This paper is a call to invest in advancing epistemologies of adoption and theories of trauma that are anchored within diverse adoption experiences. I also invite future scholarship to explore epistemic injustice in adoption as trauma, and to identify and disrupt the many spaces in which it may be enacted culturally, relationally, familially, and in a society through its laws, policies, practices, and scientific knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Proposed a Reasoning Graph framework to cooperate conflicting platoons with complex interactions. • Introduced a situation-aware optimization to optimize the systemic utility in mixed traffic environments. • Modeled the social interaction custom to guarantee the social compliance of the cooperation scheme. • Tested the Reasoning Graph framework and did a comparative analysis with a reservation-based method and an optimization-based method. Cooperating unprotected turns in mixed connected and autonomous traffic environments is beneficial to improving the systemic utility of intersections. However, interactions among connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) and manually driving vehicles (MVs) are varied and interrelated. These factors make the cooperation a multimodal problem and bring many difficulties to interactions analyzing and the optimal plan solving. This paper proposes a situation-aware Reasoning Graph (RG) framework that consists of the Reasoning Process and the Solution Process. Complex interactions are first described by a graph, where the mapping from situations to the graph is constructed. Then the Reasoning Process divides future motion space into numerous situations and reasons potential situations using the graph search-based algorithm. Some rules for maneuver compatibility and social interaction customs are integrated into the graph search to ensure the maneuver compatibility and social compliance of these reasoned situations. The Solution Process develops a heuristic algorithm to quickly search for speed profiles that follow the reasoned situations. After comparative tests of the reservation-based and the optimization-based methods, the results show that the RG-based method helped decrease the average systemic cost by approximately 10%. However, it did not cause losses in individual performances. The statistical analysis of individual performance shows that the RG even increased the individual performances regarding safety, efficiency, and energy-saving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rising use of online media has changed the social customs of the public. Users have become accustomed to sharing daily experiences and publishing personal opinions on social networks. Social data carrying emotion and attitude has provided significant decision support for numerous tasks in sentiment analysis. Conventional methods for sentiment classification only concern textual modality and are vulnerable to the multimodal scenario, while common multimodal approaches only focus on the interactive relationship among modalities without considering unique intra-modal information. A hybrid fusion network is proposed in this paper to capture both inter-modal and intra-modal features. Firstly, in the stage of representation fusion, a multi-head visual attention is proposed to extract accurate semantic and sentimental information from textual contents, with the guidance of visual features. Then, multiple base classifiers are trained to learn independent and diverse discriminative information from different modal representations in the stage of decision fusion. The final decision is determined based on fusing the decision supports from base classifiers via a decision fusion method. To improve the generalization of our hybrid fusion network, a similarity loss is employed to inject decision diversity into the whole model. Empiric results on five multimodal datasets have demonstrated that the proposed model achieves higher accuracy and better generalization capacity for multimodal sentiment analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]