Hegel’s Jena Practical Philosophy

This chapter examines the development of Hegel’s Jena social and political philosophy prior to the publication of the Phenomenology, with a focus on Hegel’s engagement with Fichte. Hegel’s culminating project in his Jena practical philosophy involves synthesizing two social ideals: classical Greek communitarianism and modern liberal individualism. According to Hegel’s conception, the classical communitarian ideal threatens a form of nihilism: the destruction of free, independent subjectivity. The modern individualist ideal, by contrast, threatens atomism: the breakdown of community attachments in favor of the pursuit of private interests. Hegel’s Jena project is to avoid nihilism and atomism by synthesizing the two ideals into one coherent picture of ethical life. Two related conceptual innovations prove crucial to this project: first, the idea that human agency is formed through a struggle for recognition; and second, the idea that modern ethical life is a shape of objective spirit.

Approaches to Work in Reducing Entrenched Patterns of Violent Behavior

In this chapter, the author will demonstrate the use of a peace intervention to increase children's self-identity, community attachments, and coping mechanisms. With correct training and awareness, this project could be implemented throughout elementary schools and community organizations. This chapter will highlight the connection between social and emotional learning as a peace intervention to further reduce the impact of trauma at a later stage in a child's life. Leaning on Axline's play therapy principles and Bronfenbrenner's bio-ecological theory, the author will illustrate how this will become a feasible and sustainable peace intervention. For this, the author has developed the CAI model.

Culture and Emotional Development

Emotions can be biologically born, but socio-culturally nurtured. Emotions are more than our personal reactions their antecedents. They play important social and political roles and are fundamental to identity and community attachments rather than simple biological bases. Suppression of emotions affects mental health. Emotions are formed and structured within particular social and cultural environment. The cultural organization of emotion development implied here is related to the prevailing cultural model of self-construal—the independent or the interdependent self.

Evaluation of general practice house officer attachments in Counties Manukau: insights and benefits

ABSTRACT BACKGROUND The Medical Council of New Zealand requires graduating doctors to have community attachments within their first two years of practice by 2020. Counties Manukau Health has developed a programme where house officers (HOs) are attached to a general practice for three months. AIM This study aimed to establish the value of four HO general practice attachments in Counties Manukau and describe how HOs are being used in these practices. METHODS A mixed-methods design was used to evaluate three attachment runs. Two practices provided the number of patients seen by HOs. Fifty-eight patients were surveyed to assess patient perceptions of the HOs. Six HOs, four supervising general practitioners, two PHO senior staff and one practice manager participated in semi-structured interviews. Focus groups were held with nurses, doctors and administrative staff at all four practices. FINDINGS HOs saw 300–600 patients in one practice and 800–1000 in the other during their attachment. Practices developed their own approach to mentoring and teaching HOs. Most patients reported positive perceptions of the HOs. Themes from interviews and focus groups were consistent among participants and included: improved HO confidence, clinical skills and understanding of general practice; extra capacity and improved quality of care and staff satisfaction among practices. CONCLUSION HOs and practices viewed HO attachments in general practice positively. HOs developed clinical skills and understanding of primary health care. Practice teams enjoyed the energy and enthusiasm of the HOs, while providing clinical support to ensure quality patient care.

EVOLUTIONARY DYNAMICS IN OPINION FORMATION MODEL WITH COUPLING OF SOCIAL COMMUNITIES

By incorporating multi-community attachments into the continuous opinion formation model, we investigate the driving force for reaching consensus in networked systems. A phase transition from fragmentation to consensus is determined by the multiplex network structures and the coupling of different communities. A moderate number of layers and weak coupling are beneficial for consensus. The evolutionary dynamics in the present model is governed by the prolonged evolutionary time, which results from the disparities of individual opinions in different communities. Increasing the multiple layers is similar to promoting coupling between different communities. A functional relation between the convergence time and the coupling coefficient is found.

Shamanism in Motion, Pentecostalism on Hold, and Maya Mormonism

This article examines how religion, including new religious movements as well as older options in new contexts, combines with ethnic and community attachments in shaping the identity of Guatemalan economic migrants in southern California. While the literature on transnationalism tends to view religion and ethnicity as different though sometimes overlapping means by which migrants seek incorporation into new social and political contexts, the ethnographic evidence presented here suggests more complicated dynamics. These are reflected in the experiences of three migrants from a single indigenous community in Guatemala, each with different backgrounds of faith and ethnic identity: a nominal Catholic in his early 20s who is sympathetic to Mesoamerican shamanism though ambivalent about Maya ethnic identity; a middle-aged Pentecostal Christian who is ambivalent about religious practice and belief in the United States and rejects the Maya ethnic label; and a convert to Mormonism in his 30s who has attenuated his ties to his home community while adopting a broader Maya ethnic identity. To interpret these experiences, I develop an analytical framework which draws upon some of Thomas Csordas’ ideas about religion in globalization but stresses a renewed attention to community as a persistent, if ambivalent and perhaps inherently conflictive, site for identity formation, especially in the context of migration.

Inferring Community Structure in Healthcare Forums

SummaryBackground: Detecting community structures in complex networks is a problem interesting to several domains. In healthcare, discovering communities may enhance the quality of web offerings for people with chronic diseases. Understanding the social dynamics and community attachments is key to predicting and influencing interaction and information flow to the right patients.Objectives: The goal of the study is to empirically assess the extent to which we can infer meaningful community structures from implicit networks of peer interaction in online healthcare forums.Methods: We used datasets from five online diabetes forums to design networks based on peer-interactions. A quality function based on user interaction similarity was used to assess the quality of the discovered communities to complement existing homophily measures.Results: Results show that we can infer meaningful communities by observing forum interactions. Closely similar users tended to co-appear in the top communities, suggesting the discovered communities are intuitive. The number of years since diagnosis was a significant factor for cohesiveness in some diabetes communities.Conclusion: Network analysis is a tool that can be useful in studying implicit networks that form in healthcare forums. Current analysis informs further work on predicting and influencing interaction, information flow and user interests that could be useful for personalizing medical social media.