scholarly journals Vulnerability, Response-Ability, and the Promise of Making Refuge

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 80
Author(s):  
Edwin Ng ◽  
Zack Walsh

This paper proposes “making refuge” as a conceptual placeholder and an analytical rubric, a guiding ethos and praxis, for the engaged Buddhist aspiration of responding to the social, political, economic, and planetary crises facing the world. Making refuge is conceived as the work of building the conditions of trust and safety necessary for living and dying well together as co-inhabitants of diverse communities and habitats. The paper will explain the rationale for making refuge by connecting the dharmic understanding of dukkha with feminist conceptualizations of the body and vulnerability. This will chart some theoretical and methodological pathways for engaged Buddhism to further its liberatory aspirations in reciprocity with emergent movements in radical critical theory, contemplative studies, and social and ecological activism. The paper will also examine the effects of white supremacy in U.S. Buddhism through the framework of making refuge. This will demonstrate how political healing and restorative justice might be cultivated through a dispositional ethics that pays appropriate attention to the vulnerabilities facing oppressed people.

GIS Business ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 202-206
Author(s):  
SAJITHA M

Food is one of the main requirements of human being. It is flattering for the preservation of wellbeing and nourishment of the body.  The food of a society exposes its custom, prosperity, status, habits as well as it help to develop a culture. Food is one of the most important social indicators of a society. History of food carries a dynamic character in the socio- economic, political, and cultural realm of a society. The food is one of the obligatory components in our daily life. It occupied an obvious atmosphere for the augmentation of healthy life and anticipation against the diseases.  The food also shows a significant character in establishing cultural distinctiveness, and it reflects who we are. Food also reflected as the symbol of individuality, generosity, social status and religious believes etc in a civilized society. Food is not a discriminating aspect. It is the part of a culture, habits, addiction, and identity of a civilization.Food plays a symbolic role in the social activities the world over. It’s a universal sign of hospitality.[1]


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
Lisa Guenther

In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry analyzes the structure of torture as an unmaking of the world in which the tools that ought to support a person’s embodied capacities are used as weapons to break them down. The Security Housing Unit (SHU) of California’s Pelican Bay State Prison functions as a weaponized architecture of torture in precisely this sense; but in recent years, prisoners in the Pelican Bay Short Corridor have re-purposed this weaponized architecture as a tool for remaking the world through collective resistance. This resistance took the form of a hunger strike in which prisoners exposed themselves to the possibility of biological death in order to contest the social and civil death of solitary confinement. By collectively refusing food, and by articulating the meaning and motivation of this refusal in articles, interviews, artwork, and legal documents, prisoners reclaimed and expanded their perceptual, cognitive, and expressive capacities for world-making, even in a space of systematic torture.


1982 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 283-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josianne Bodart

While mutual aid is secular, social work as a profession is not yet a hundred years old, and training in this field only began at the turn of the century. Neither priest nor doctor, but equally devoted and competent, the social worker is half-way between the two. His relay function is mediatized by a salary received not from his client, but from an institution which acknowledges he has a cer tain effectiveness. Social work thus reminds us at one and the same time of the priest's priesthood and the doctor's specializa tion. This neo-cleric treats the soul as well as the body and he has ambiguous relations with spelialized institutions which are in pur suit of the sacred or in pursuit of health. The social worker tries to find reference models both in the religious world and in the medi cal world. Furthermore, an analysis of his discourse reveals that he mobilizes items of counter-legitimacy with respect to both the religious and the medical field. This intentionally marginal belonging to two worlds leads him to constantly have doubts about the objectives to be pursued and the decisions to be taken. It is probably in this perspective that the feeling of uneasiness which persuades the world of social work and which prevents these professionals from getting away from vagueness and uncertainty, should be understood.


2018 ◽  
pp. 165-197
Author(s):  
Richard T. Hughes

Capitalism in the United States is unthinkable apart from the myth of White Supremacy, for capitalism was built on stolen land and stolen people. Further, white Americans imagined that capitalism was God-ordained, grounded in “Nature and Nature’s God,” and heralded a golden age of peace and prosperity for all humankind. Following the Civil War, the myth of the Chosen Nation morphed into the myth that God blessed the righteous with wealth and the wicked with poverty—the central assumption of the Gospel of Wealth. Andrew Carnegie appealed to all these myths in his 1889 essay, “Wealth,” in the North American Review. Likewise, many American industrialists invoked these myths to justify their goal: the economic conquest of the world. Government and industry, however, typically excluded blacks from this engine of economic prosperity, thereby contributing to realities already in place—systemic racism and white privilege. In the early twentieth century, laissez-faire capitalism and the myths that sustained it came under withering assault from labor, the Social Gospel movement, and black social critics like W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Langston Hughes, especially since the wealth of the Gilded Age contrasted with unprecedented numbers of lynchings of America’s blacks.


2017 ◽  
pp. 147-166
Author(s):  
James Miller

An ecological civilization is one in which the social, cultural, and political order is rooted in the capacity of nature to promote the flourishing of the human species. The Daoist tradition offers four insights that can help promote this: (1) an aesthetics of flourishing founded on the practical experience of the world in the body; (2) an ethic of flourishing founded on the mutual porosity and vulnerability of the world and the body; (3) a politics of flourishing founded on a democracy of local contexts; (4) a spirituality of flourishing founded on religious themes of consumption, violence, death, and transcendence. Altogether this produces a vision of flourishing based on overcoming the modern dichotomies of self and world, matter and spirit, nature and culture.


Author(s):  
Anna Leander

The terms habitus and field are useful heuristic devices for thinking about power relations in international studies. Habitus refers to a person’s taken-for-granted, unreflected—hence largely habitual—way of thinking and acting. The habitus is a “structuring structure” shaping understandings, attitudes, behavior, and the body. It is formed through the accumulated experience of people in different fields. Using fields to study the social world is to acknowledge that social life is highly differentiated. A field can be exceedingly varied in scope and scale. A family, a village, a market, an organization, or a profession may be conceptualized as a field provided it develops its own organizing logic around a stake at stake. Each field is marked by its own taken-for-granted understanding of the world, implicit and explicit rules of behavior, and valuation of what confers power onto someone: that is, what counts as “capital.” The analysis of power through the habitus/field makes it possible to transcend the distinctions between the material and the “ideational” as well as between the individual and the structural. Moreover, working with habitus/field in international studies problematizes the role played by central organizing divides, such as the inside/outside and the public/private; and can uncover politics not primarily structured by these divides. Developing research drawing on habitus/field in international studies will be worthwhile for international studies scholars wishing to raise and answer questions about symbolic power/violence.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-55
Author(s):  
Alessandro Ferrara

InRousseau and Critical Theory, Alessandro Ferrara argues that among the modern philosophers who have shaped the world we inhabit, Rousseau is the one to whom we owe the idea that identity can be a source of normativity (moral and political) and that an identity’s potential for playing such a role rests on its capacity for being authentic. This normative idea of authenticity brings unity to Rousseau’s reflections on the negative effects of the social order, on the just political order, on education, and more generally, on ethics. It is also shown to contain important teachings for contemporary Critical Theory, contemporary views of self-constitution (Korsgaard, Frankfurt and Larmore), and contemporary political philosophy.


Author(s):  
Justin Gest

In recent years, the world has been re-introduced to the constituency of “white working class” people. In a wave of revolutionary populism, far right parties have scored victories across the transatlantic political world: Britain voted to leave the European Union, the United States elected President Donald Trump to enact an “America First” agenda, and Radical Right movements are threatening European centrists in elections across the Continent. In each case, white working class people are driving a broad reaction to the inequities and social change brought by globalization, and its cosmopolitan champions. In the midst of this rebellion, a new group consciousness has emerged among the very people who not so long ago could take their political, economic, and cultural primacy for granted. Who are white working class people? What do they believe? Are white working class people an “interest group”? What has driven them to break so sharply with the world’s trajectory toward a more borderless, interconnected meritocracy? How can a group with such enduring power feel marginalized? This perplexing constituency must be understood if the world is to address and respond to the social and political backlash they are driving. The White Working Class: What Everyone Needs to Know® provides the context for understanding the politics of this large, perplexing group of people. The book begins by explaining what “white working class” means in terms of demographics, history, and geography, as well as the ways in which this group defines itself and has been defined by others. It will address whether white identity is on the rise, why white people perceive themselves as marginalized, and the roles of racism and xenophobia in white consciousness. It will also look at whether the white working class has distinct political attitudes, their voting behavior, and their prospects for the future. This accessible book provides a nuanced view into the forces driving one of the most complicated and consequential political constituencies today.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-70
Author(s):  
Ayu Indira Hasugian

AbstrakDesa Siruar Parmaksian Tobasa di salah satu desa yang berada di daerah Toba mengalami perubahan sosial akibat dampak negatif berdirinya PT TPL. Dampak yang diberikan mengarah kepada kaum perempuan/ibu sehingga mengakibatkan aktivitas sehari-hari perempuan/ibu menjadi terkendala. Dampak ini terjadi di setiap harinya, sehingga akan sangat berdampak buruk bagi hubungan antara perempuan dan alam. Melihat kasus tersebut peneliti ingin melakukan penelitian terhadap kondisi  yang dialami kaum perempuan/ibu tersebut. Tujuan penelitian ini untuk menganalisa dampak sosial akibat pabrik kertas di Desa Siruar Parmaksian Tobasa kepada para perempuan dengan menggunakan paradigma Ekofeminis yang di tawarkan oleh McFague dan Warren, dan dikaji dalam bentuk studi kasus. Metode penelitian yang peneliti pakai adalah Metode Studi Kasus dari Teori E.P Gintings. Ada beberapa isu yang muncul dari kasus atau masalah ini, diantaranya : dampak sosial, dampak kerusakan alam terhadap kehidupan para perempuan, dan paradigma baru relasi perempuan dan alam atau rekonstruksi paradigma. Hal ini dilakukan untuk mengetahui Bagaimana dampak sosial akibat pabrik kertas terhadap masyarakat yang berada di lingkungan  Industri Kertas di Desa Siruar Parmaksian Tobasa yang mengarah kepada perempuan yang terdampak dan Bagaimana upaya-upaya yang dilakukan kaum perempuan/ibu di desa siruar untuk mempertahankan tanah/wilayahnya yang telah di rusak oleh perusahaan tersebut?. Hasil Analisis menunjukkan bahwa  paradigma Ekofeminis sudah menerapkan paradigma dengan istilah “Konstruksionisme”, yang disebut dengan istilah metafora dunia sebagai tubuh Allah, artinya dunia harus dipahami sebagai satu kesatuan organik, tubuh Tuhan dan bisa menanamkan sikap yang menghargai dunia.Kata Kunci: dampak sosial, paradigma ekofeminis AbstractThe village of Siruar Parm testimony Tobasa in a village in the Toba area experienced social changes due to the negative impact of the establishment of PT TPL. The impact that is given is directed at women / mothers so that it causes the daily activities of women / mothers to be constrained. This impact occurs every day, so it will have a very bad impact on the relationship between women and nature. Seeing this case, the researchers wanted to conduct research on the conditions experienced by these women / mothers. The purpose of this study is to analyze the social impacts of the paper mill in Siruar Parm testimony Tobasa on women using the Ecofemist paradigm offered by McFague and Warren, and study it in the form of a case study. The research method that researchers use is the Case Study Method of E.P Gintings Theory. There are several issues that arise from this case or problem, including: social impacts, the impact of natural destruction on women's lives, and a new paradigm of relations between women and nature or paradigm reconstruction. This is done to find out how the social impact of the paper mill on the community living in the Paper Industry in Siruar Parm testimony Tobasa Village which leads to affected women and how the efforts made by women / mothers in Siruar Village to defend their has been damaged by the company ?. The results of the analysis show that the Ecofemist paradigm has applied a paradigm with the term "Constructionism", which is called the metaphor of the world as the body of God, meaning that the world must be understood as an organic unit, the body of God and can instill an attitude of respect for the world. Keywords: social impact, eco-feminist paradigm


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