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Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness.
... Today, Japan does not have one ethical system or outlook, which means that attempts to label and essentialise Japanese ethical and spiritual values are oversimplistic. Nevertheless, religion and belief matter, and it is notable that 'the oldest past is still present, side by side with the newest forms of modern civilization' (Nishida, 2003(Nishida, [1958: 57). As any resident or visitor of Japan will know, micro-Shinto shrines sit alongside (and within) the high modern architecture of Tokyo's business district. ...
... Today, Japan does not have one ethical system or outlook, which means that attempts to label and essentialise Japanese ethical and spiritual values are oversimplistic. Nevertheless, religion and belief matter, and it is notable that 'the oldest past is still present, side by side with the newest forms of modern civilization' (Nishida, 2003(Nishida, [1958: 57). As any resident or visitor of Japan will know, micro-Shinto shrines sit alongside (and within) the high modern architecture of Tokyo's business district. ...
... In short, Nishida acts as a two-way bridge between influential Western philosophical thought and key parts of Japanese ways of being. For example, Nishida (2003Nishida ( [1958: 16) remarks that Heidegger's (2011Heidegger's ( [1962) work on Being is familiar to not just him, but other Japanese thinkers. Indeed, the Kyoto School that Nishida founded would go on to have extensive engagement with Heidegger, both in-person and through his diverse output (Carter, 2013). ...
This paper assesses leading Japanese philosophical thought since the onset of Japan's modernity: namely, from the Meiji Restoration (1868) onwards. It argues that there are lessons of global value for AI ethics to be found from examining leading Japanese philosophers of modernity and ethics (Yukichi Fukuzawa, Nishida Kitaro, Nishi Amane, and Watsuji Tetsurō), each of whom engaged closely with Western philosophical traditions. Turning to these philosophers allows us to advance from what are broadly individualistically and Western-oriented ethical debates regarding emergent technologies that function in relation to AI, by introducing notions of community , wholeness, sincerity, and heart. With reference to AI that pertains to profile, judge, learn, and interact with human emotion (emotional AI), this paper contends that (a) Japan itself may internally make better use of historic indigenous ethical thought, especially as it applies to question of data and relationships with technology ; but also (b) that externally Western and global ethical discussion regarding emerging technologies will find valuable insights from Japan. The paper concludes by distilling from Japanese philosophers of modernity four ethical suggestions, or spices, in relation to emerging technological contexts for Japan's national AI policies and international fora, such as standards development and global AI ethics policymaking.
... MDT can be understood as a 'theoretical position within critical discourse analysis' (Scollon 2008a:15), where the vantage point is social action, rather than, e.g., a text or a genre. MDT is an interdisciplinary framework, and the Scollons appear to be linguists with a particular broad research interest, as they draw on (among a variety of research within linguistics) the thoughts of scholars from Soviet psychology (Vygotsky, e.g., 1978(Vygotsky, e.g., , 1981 and literary sciences (Bakhtin, e.g., 1981(Bakhtin, e.g., , 1986, as well as Southeast Asian philosophy (Nishida 1958, on the concept of historical body). The writings of Vygotsky, Bakhtin and Wertsch (who develops Vygotsky's thoughts, e.g. ...
... In contrary to what the name might suggest, the historical body has both a historical aspect and an anticipatory aspect, as it concerns the embodied past experiences of a social actor, and the process in which new discourse is acquired. The historical body is a concept originating from the Japanese philosopher Nishida (1958), as adopted by Scollon (1998Scollon ( , 2001a. It resembles Bourdieu's (1977) notion of habitus. ...
... Ett teoretisk antagande med stöd i sociolingvistisk forskning om narrativ och berättelser är att både tidigare och framtida erfarenheter kan representeras som muntliga berättelser (Labov & Waletzky 1997;Bamberg & Georgakopoulou 2008). I enlighet med avhandlingens MTD-perspektiv förstås personliga berättelser här som diskurs som återuppstår ur den historiska kroppen (Nishida 1958), genom resemiotisering . Studien bidrar med kunskap om hur personliga berättelser kan användas till att producera samhörande identitet (affinity-identity, Gee 2001) som används till att både vårda sociala relationer till elever och till att hantera interaktionsordningen i klassrummet. ...
This thesis comprises three separate studies that together explore how Swedish student teachers construct or produce professional identity in interaction while navigating different institutional and professional instances of teacher education. As a discourse analytical contribution to research on teacher identity, the main theoretical framework is mediated discourse theory (e.g. Scollon 2001a). For data construction and analysis in the studies, different parts of the two related methodologies of nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon 2004) and multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris 2011) are employed. Constructed through an ethnographic approach, the interactional data consist of audio and video recordings of interaction in instances from three different components of a Swedish teacher education program: a rhetoric course, a bachelor thesis course in history and teaching placement. Furthermore, the data include observational field notes and interviews, as well as resources used by the participants, primarily written texts.
Taking place early on in teacher education, Study I focuses on student teachers performing oral presentations under the fictitious presumption that they are speaking as teachers. Employing the notion of communicative project (Linell 1998), the empirical aim of the study is to shed light on how student teachers manage institutional affordances and constraints affecting interactional role shifts from student teacher to teacher. In Study II, three student teachers are writing their bachelor theses in the subject of history, and the study focuses on the interactional production of teacher identity of one of the students during seminars. While partly being a methodological study, Study II empirically explores how student teachers interactionally relate to their future profession in an academic disciplinary setting, highlighting which actors and institutions are involved in the production of professional identity. Finally, Study III concentrates on a student teacher during his final teaching placement. Focusing on previous experiences resemiotized as stories, Study III highlights how discourse re-emerging from the historical body (Nishida 1958) can be used in interaction in producing identity.
The results suggest that the production of teacher identity by the student teachers is a co-operative and communicative task, where previous experiences as well as an anticipatory perspective on the teaching profession are important features. The three studies identify different resources that can be used and adapted by students to suit different purposes in professional identity production, described as textual resources, embodied resources, and narrative resources. In turn, the different uses of such resources motivate the need for studying identity in interaction with an approach where ethnographic and sociocultural knowledge is part of the analysis. The creative use of resources in identity production highlights that students use knowledge and experience linked to academic and professional as well as everyday discourse in producing professional identity. Presuming an interest in opportunities for student teachers to develop professional identity during their education, it appears fruitful to reflect upon how potential resources are designed and implemented in teacher education, and how institutional affordances and constraints affect the possibilities of using them.
... • Social constructions that are historically elaborated and connected to social activities (Saxe 1991 (Goffman 1983;Scollon and Scollon 2004). Historical body • Refers to the overall aggregated experiences, histories, and knowledge of people's lives which ultimately shape and embody their behaviour (Nishida 1958;Scollon and Scollon 2004) Science capital • Science-related forms of social and cultural capital. Science capital acts as a predictive model describing the probability that a child will be drawn to a career in STEM (Archer et al. 2015). ...
... Interaction order (Goffman 1983) resembles Bourdieu's social capital and indicates participants' networks, their social interactions, and how those are shaped. The concept of historical body (Nishida 1958) is similar to the funds of knowledge concept and refers to the overall aggregated experiences, histories, and knowledge of children, which ultimately shape and embody their behaviours. It is argued that a multidisciplinary perspective is essential in order to gain deeper insights into complex social actions of children (Iivari et al. 2020;Kuure et al. 2010). ...
The importance of child empowerment in and through design and making has been acknowledged. The notion of "child as a Design Protagonist" concerning technology has recently been introduced. We conducted a narrative literature review to examine the current understanding of what it requires from children to become a Protagonist in design. The main objective of this study is to examine the concepts associated with children's competences relevant for design, such as various capitals, skills, and capacities. We identify core concepts used as well as several gaps in this literature base. We separate the competences into 1) those that need to be nurtured in children and 2) those that children already have and bring to the design process. We propose a concept of design capital for mapping these competences of child Design Protagonists.
... Figure 3 sets out the three elements of social action. The historical body, a concept borrowed from Nishida (1958), takes into account the experiences of the participating social actors. The historical body accumulates our social actions and makes us act in accordance with earlier experiences; "It is the practices in and through which we act without a second thought that most clearly reveal our habitusthe historical-body, as Nishida (1958) puts it, of our lives" (Scollon, 2001, p. 153). ...
... The historical body, a concept borrowed from Nishida (1958), takes into account the experiences of the participating social actors. The historical body accumulates our social actions and makes us act in accordance with earlier experiences; "It is the practices in and through which we act without a second thought that most clearly reveal our habitusthe historical-body, as Nishida (1958) puts it, of our lives" (Scollon, 2001, p. 153). ...
... Unity in Opposites and Absolute Nothingness: The truth that every reality is impermanent, everything is subject to decay and dies, and that impermanence in things will eventually make humans unhappy are fundamental ontological realizations in Buddhism. Hence, the Kyoto School of Thoughts believes that a human experiences absolute nothingness when there is a unity of opposites (Kitaro, 1958). The meaning that one derives from the tension that grows from within the seer (tourist) and the seen (site) can disappear into nothingness when the epistemological difference between demand for perfection and deductive assumption towards authentic presentation find a middle way. ...
... Intelligibility of the phenomenon transcends while the so-called reality is does the same. Other than the outer world, according to Kitaro (1958), there is an inner world too that aims to develop consciousness through transcending. Though these two worlds are connected, the latter is deeper than the former. ...
This theoretical review argues that the western tourist gaze can be deconstructed through the Buddhist ontology of avidyā and prajnā. If Buddhism is about discovering the truth of 'self' (end of self and everyday ego) in which emptiness in life is enveloped in a fictional darkness of ignorance (avidyā), its ontology unfolds to overcome that emptiness and to bring in awareness about the illusion that covers the above truth (prajnā). When the ordinary consciousness is based on the sensory perception of subject-object dichotomy, the foundation of the western way of looking at a phenomenon becomes incomplete, since such experience, according to Buddhist ontology, belongs to a cosmic illusion that disturbs prajnā (true wisdom). 'The knowing of not-knowing' (prajnā) and understanding the emptiness of ego are the true Buddhist home grounds of 'being' rather than 'becoming'. In this context, with the philosophical insights advanced by the Kyoto School of Thoughts, this paper articulates that the western gaze in the discovery of the outer world can become meaningless. Hence, the western tourist gaze that seeks pleasure or leisure or even newness would be futile as it leads to avidya, the manifestation of the ego. The conclusion is that 'the union of the seer and the seen' gets deconstructed when the individual deeply realizes the fundamental nothingness that creates the above subjective-objective illusion (avidyā)-the foundation of the western tourist gaze. Reaching the Buddhist metaphysical assumption of sûnyatâ (zero or permanent void), where the ego is dissolved is only possible when one realizes that nothingness is the thread that ties both subject (tourist) and object (site) together.
... Habitus or historical body refers to the historical accumulation of actions that social actors have accrued throughout their lifespans. Norris (2005) , following the work of both Nishida (1958) and Bourdieu (1977) , notes that "…social identity is embedded in cultural and social currents, constructed through social and societal histories, and internalized by the individual as habitus" (p. 193). ...
... It is the latter that I feel is important to discuss here. The historical body is derived from Nishida (1958) and later Bourdieu's (1977) concepts of habitus , and refers to the accumulation of actions within the body of a social actor. Many of these actions are the result of socialization practices, whether within society at large or in specific institutions, such as a university. ...
The present study reports on the geosemiotics (Scollon & Scollon, 2003) of a Thai University. Walking interview tours (Lou, 2017; Stroud & Jegels, 2014a) of Thammasat University’s Tha Prachan campus were conducted. These interviews reveal how students narrate and take stances towards the geosemiotic artifacts that are found on their campus. The purpose of the study was twofold: 1) to gain an understanding of how students react to the geosemiotics on campus, and 2) to get a sense of their understanding of Thai history. For the latter the university has been the site of several historical events pertaining to Thailand’s spotty relationship with democracy, most notably the Thammasat massacre, and much of this history has been repressed (Huebner, 2017; Winichakul, 2002, 2020). Using the geosemiotic framework to discuss the multimodal make-up of this university’s signs and space, I illustrate how the narrations that emerged during walking interviews serve as lenses through which we are offered a glimpse of how students are socialized to think about the material environment of their campus. We can observe how students take different stances to the signs and places of their campus as well as Thailand’s history. Such narrations reveal traces of socialization on the one hand and the emergence of an affective regime of reverence on the other (Wee & Goh, 2019). The findings contribute to the growing body of literature on schoolscapes in multilingual educational settings (Gorter, 02018; Gorter & Cenoz, 2015).
... Impoliteness is defined herein as a mediated practice that is discursively and culturally embedded for the purpose of underscoring the "negotiability of the emic understandings of evaluative concepts such as polite, impolite, rude, etc., and, in connection with this, to highlight the embeddedness of the observed social practices within their local situated framework of the moral order (see, e.g., Kádár and Haugh 2013, p. 95)" (Locher 2015: 6). Moral order is defined in this paper as a ritualistic, authoritative practice engrained in the historical body (Nishida 1958) that requires cultural intersubjectivity for its change. The analysis section is divided into three parts: 1) the triggering tweet, 2) cultural contextualization to ground the tweet, and 3) the responses to the tweet (The rites of aggression); the response or comments section is in turn divided into three subsections: keeping the questioned supplication intact, responding to the first part, and changing the questioned practice. ...
... Because religion is the source of their identity, verses from the Quran and hadith as well as ritualistic prayers are memorized by all since childhood-it is a rite of passage into adulthood. Therefore, many intertextual references in this study are only implied ("this is what we have learnt", Example 2) because they are part of the Islamic historical body (Nishida 1958). Furthermore, because Muslim identity is based on religion, any act by Muslims has to be justified through religious texts. ...
In this paper, I examine impoliteness-oriented discourse on Arabic Twitter as a resource for the negotiation of Islamic moral order. I do so by highlighting the responses Arabs post in reaction to a tweet which attacks Islamic cultural face. As the triggering act poses an indirect request to change an authoritative Islamic practice deemed immoral by the instigator of the tweet, sundry responses were generated to repair the damaged collective face through keeping intact or arguing against the questionable moral order. The main strategy I identify as a response to the professed face-attack is divine (im)politeness, intertextually referencing religious texts in favor of (or against) the existing (im)moral order. The rites of moral aggression also draw upon questions, provocation, personal attacks and projection of Islamic behavior onto unaddressed third parties (e.g., Christians and Hindus). The findings capture one moment of a historic shift in Islamic moral order and the role that impoliteness plays in digital Arabic contexts.
... The basic unit of analysis in nexus analysis is social action (for example, children engaging in Making activities is the social action, as in our study), which is always studied in its context and linked with other actions, situations, and events [53]. Nexus analysis [53] draws on Goffman's theory of social interaction [64], Bourdieu's practice theory [65], cultural-historical activity theory [66], and the thinking of, for example, Bateson [67] and Nishida [68]. In nexus analysis, the links between micro-actions and broader social issues are acknowledged and studied [53]. ...
... For example, related to our context, in Making sessions children may discuss different issues: (1) with their close friends as compared to with peers they know only distantly, (2) with facilitators of sessions, and/or (3) with their teachers. Participants' historical bodies [53], a concept originally from Nishida [68], refers to their accumulated life histories in the form of, for example, cultural background, upbringing, studies, and personal experiences. These affect participants' possibilities to act as productive members in a team and how they act and react in different familiar or unfamiliar situations. ...
The importance of familiarizing children with the Maker Movement, Makerspaces and Maker mindset has been acknowledged. In this literature review, we examine the complex social action of children, aged from 7 to 17 (K-12), engaging in technology Making activities as it is seen in the extant literature. The included papers contain empirical data from actual digital Making workshops and diverse research projects with children, conducted in both formal and non-formal/informal settings, such as schools or museums, libraries, Fab Labs and other makerspaces. We utilized the theoretical lens of nexus analysis and its concepts of interaction order and historical body, and as a result of our analysis, we report best practices and helping and hindering factors. Two gaps in the current knowledge were identified: (1) the current research focuses on success stories instead of challenges in the working, and, (2) histories of the participants and interaction between them are very rarely in the focus of the existing studies or reported in detail, even though they significantly affect what happens and what is possible to happen in Making sessions.
Keywords: digital fabrication; technology making; intergenerational; child; teacher; facilitator; mentor; parent; interaction order; historical body; nexus analysis.
... The basic unit of analysis in nexus analysis is social action (for example, children engaging in Making activities is the social action, as in our study), which is always studied in its context and linked with other actions, situations, and events [53]. Nexus analysis [53] draws on Goffman's theory of social interaction [64], Bourdieu's practice theory [65], cultural-historical activity theory [66], and the thinking of, for example, Bateson [67] and Nishida [68]. In nexus analysis, the links between micro-actions and broader social issues are acknowledged and studied [53]. ...
... For example, related to our context, in Making sessions children may discuss different issues: (1) with their close friends as compared to with peers they know only distantly, (2) with facilitators of sessions, and/or (3) with their teachers. Participants' historical bodies [53], a concept originally from Nishida [68], refers to their accumulated life histories in the form of, for example, cultural background, upbringing, studies, and personal experiences. These affect participants' possibilities to act as productive members in a team and how they act and react in different familiar or unfamiliar situations. ...
The importance of familiarizing children with the Maker Movement, Makerspaces and Maker mindset has been acknowledged. In this literature review, we examine the complex social action of children, aged from 7 to 17 (K-12), engaging in technology Making activities as it is seen in the extant literature. The included papers contain empirical data from actual digital Making workshops and diverse research projects with children, conducted in both formal and non-formal/informal settings, such as schools or museums, libraries, Fab Labs and other makerspaces. We utilized the theoretical lens of nexus analysis and its concepts of interaction order and historical body, and as a result of our analysis, we report best practices and helping and hindering factors. Two gaps in the current knowledge were identified: (1) the current research focuses on success stories instead of challenges in the working, and, (2) histories of the participants and interaction between them are very rarely in the focus of the existing studies or reported in detail, even though they significantly affect what happens and what is possible to happen in Making sessions.
Keywords: digital fabrication; technology making; intergenerational; child; teacher; facilitator; mentor; parent; interaction order; historical body; nexus analysis.
... Scollon's (20 01; Jones, 20 08 ) view on the self -what he coined as the historical body -aligns with posthuman perspectives in a number of ways. Primarily informed by Nishida's (1959) work on intelligibility and the philosophy of nothingness, Scollon (2001) sees our ways of "being" as a fluid construct that is always changing -as we engage in nonlinear trajectories of social actions that involve other social individuals and mediational means (the nonhuman others in Barad's work) across time, place, and media. With this shared ontological stance, both Scollon (2001) and Barad (1999) conceptualize what has been called "agency" as always produced, contested, and reproduced in our (including our bodies') intra-action with the others, rather than being possessed by either us or the others. ...
Over the past two decades, embodiment has been seen as valuable in the field of language and literacy education. Drawing on a six-month long ethnographic case study conducted at an R1 university in the U.S., this paper examines how a range of embodied activities, as part of the shared and distinct material←→discursive itineraries (Barad, 2007; Scollon, 2008), were mediated into culturally and linguistically diverse students’ (pre-service teachers’) doing and be(com)ing across time and place. Data analysis includes a mediated approach and theory-informed thematic analysis of classroom discourse and two individual interviews with the students. Findings point to the affordances of using embodied activities to (1) support students from diverse backgrounds in (un)making sense of theories and practices in connection to their lived experiences and identifications, and (2) create critical and dialogic spaces for students to engage with and contest dominant discourses in both school context and society at large.
... For ELPAs, the historical bodies might reveal itself through unnoticed actions, such as the habits that guide individuals to act as a student or know how a school is run "without seemingly being told what to do" (Scollon & Scollon, 2004, p. 13) or equally reveal inequalities in access to educational systems. However, at the same time, the final result of a social action is at least, in part, a product of an individual's efforts with the potential to impact society suggesting a level of agency within this scale (Hult, 2017;Lane, 2014;Nishida, 1958). ...
Spring 2020 ushered a new set of educational challenges for English language program administrators (ELPAs) ranging from the COVID-19 pandemic to social and racial injustices experienced by staff, faculty, and learners. Recognizing the lack of materials to support ELPA professional development, this article introduces the theoretical and methodological approach of Nexus Analysis as a possible approach for administrators when navigating complex educational ecosystems. Along with a review of literature that describes the role of ELPAs and their associated duties, this article positions the actions of language program administration, which range from policy creation to ordering supplies, as mediated by outside factors on the societal, community, and individual scale. Following this, the Nexus Analysis methodological approach of engagement, navigation, and change is reviewed and generalized to educational settings. To conclude, past research studies that have used Nexus Analysis are reviewed with the aim to connect with familiar ELPA management scenarios and practical considerations unique to our current time in history. Keywords: English language program management, English language program administrators, Nexus Analysis
... Nexus analysis involves a view of social action as an intersection of: 1) interaction order (i.e., mutual relationships and social arrangements between social actors), 2) historical body (i.e., participants' personal histories, social identities, and roles with the action), and 3) discourses in place (i.e., the semiotic systems that emerge in situ and echo the past and anticipate the future). Scollon and Scollon (2004) developed the concept of interaction order from Goffman's (1983) work and historical body from Nishida's (1958) work. Discourses may cycle at a rapid pace as in conversational encounters or more slowly as in the media. ...
... The notion of historical body (see, e.g. Nishida, 1958) refers to the bodily memoriesthat is, the previous experiences, learned practices and understandingsthat people bring with them to every scene of action (Scollon and Scollon, 2004). The concept is inspired by Bourdieu's (1977) notion of habitus, but it adopts a more dynamic and organic perspective (Scollon and Scollon, 2004). ...
Purpose
This study examines the information literacy practices of young video bloggers, focusing on the ways in which they construct their cognitive authority through a health-related information creation process.
Design/methodology/approach
This study draws upon socially oriented information literacy research and nexus analysis as its methodological framework. Data, including YouTube videos, theme interviews and video diaries, were collected with three Finnish video bloggers and qualitatively analysed using nexus analytical concepts to describe the central elements of social action.
Findings
The study shows that video bloggers employ several information practices during the information creation process, including planning, information-seeking, organization, editing and presentation of information. They construct their cognitive authority in relation to their anticipated audience by grounding it on different types of information: experience-based, embodied and scientific. Trustworthiness, emphasized with authenticity and genuineness, and competence, based on experience, expertise and second-hand information, were recognized as key components of credibility in this context.
Originality/value
This study increases the understanding of the complex ways in which young people create information on social media and influence their audiences. The study contributes to information literacy research by offering insights into the under-researched area of information creation. It is among the few studies to examine cognitive authority construction in the information creation process. The notion of authority as constructed through trustworthiness and competence and grounded on different types of information, can be taken into account in practice by information professionals and educators when planning information literacy instruction.
... Some say this leads to an experience of consciousness that resembles Zen Awakening (LeVine, 2018). 34 Largely, Nishida (1958) 28 Appreciating Professor Christopher Ives for his translation and generosity. 29 Philosophical cosmology in Morita's era was directed towards the contemplation of the universe and the place and meaning of human existence therein; cosmogony or the shared mythic accounts on the origins of being were often contemplated, too. ...
This article clarifies the theory of consciousness intended by Shōma Morita, MD (1874-1938) that informed his design of restorative ecological habitats to enhance human health. His therapy resonates with Indigenous notions of wellbeing wherein unhealthy habitats = unhealthy life. This orientation challenges Western notions of "mental" health determinants of evidence-based practice). Morita four stages begin in a safe habitat with silence, rest, natural light and kindness. (Morita took his patients out of artificial psychiatric hospitals so they could dwell in (be restored by) the natural setting and wisdom of the therapist. There, clients’ diurnal rhythms recalibrate naturally as they sleep-wake-rest-eat-play-work and (most importantly) regain their curiosity about their living ecological habitat. They realise their own body is a habitat with requirements for thriving according to Nature. 'Sensefulness' and renewed trust in one's intuitive (body-knowing) increases, which is far from Western notions of mindfulness approaches to therapy.
... In any social action, one should consider the participants, the interactions among them and how these form and are constituted. HB (Scollon & Scollon, 2004), coined by (Nishida, 1958), refers to the accumulated life histories and experiences of people. These are highly significant in any social action, enabling certain kinds of actions while hindering others. ...
Cultivating children’s Maker mindset by facilitating their involvement in Makerspaces is recognized by researchers around the world as a topic worth investigating. Previous studies have revealed several different roles for the adults involved; however, there is little elaboration on the characteristics and strategies associated with these roles. This study focuses on digital fabrication and Making activities with children aged (K12). It presents the results of interview data collected from nine adult actors analysed using nexus analytic concepts of interaction order and historical body as sensitizing devices. The results reveal the diverse strategies the adult actors employed as the mediators of children’s learning, independent of their formal roles, when engaged with children. The study identifies numerous challenges the adult actors faced. Overall, it shows significant variety in the mediation of children’s digital fabrication and Making activities, shaped by adult actors with different histories and backgrounds and within different contexts. The study includes the implications for the research and practice of digital fabrication and Making with children.
... Some say this leads to an experience of consciousness that resembles Zen Awakening (LeVine, 2018). 34 Largely, Nishida (1958) 28 Appreciating Professor Christopher Ives for his translation and generosity. 29 Philosophical cosmology in Morita's era was directed towards the contemplation of the universe and the place and meaning of human existence therein; cosmogony or the shared mythic accounts on the origins of being were often contemplated, too. ...
Shōma Morita, MD (1874-1938) designed his ecological-based therapy at the turn of the last century. While Morita trained as a physician, psychiatrist and psychotherapist, he was also a researcher, naturalist philosopher, bonsai artist, Zen practitioner, and human rights advocate in psychiatry. In Morita’s era, practitioners were invigorated by discussions on philosophy, naturalism, and the phenomenology of consciousness (Kora and Sato, 1958). Over the course of a decade, Morita tested the efficacy of his theories, sequential methods, and design of his therapeutic eco-habitat.
In keeping with Morita’s formulation of consciousness, clients are meant to reside in a restorative ecological habitat for all four progressive stages. In a nature-drenched setting, clients’ diurnal rhythms recalibrate naturally as they wake, rest, eat, and explore according to natural cycles of light-and-dark. Surrounding flora, fauna and balancing elements in Nature have therapeutic agency.
... The first central concept in the nexus analytic research framework, historical body, was coined by the philosopher Nishida (Nishida, 1958). It refers to the overall accumulated life experiences of people that shape their behaviour. ...
We articulate in this paper what participation at its best entails in the context of digital technology design with children, forming a theoretical framework for genuine participation of children in digital technology design and making. We integrate in the framework a set of conditions for the meaningful and effective participation of children and the nexus analytic concepts of historical body, interaction order and discourses in place, and complement that with the lenses of empowerment, values and value. In addition to these theoretical lenses, we rely on the insights gained during our empirical work with children for more than a decade. We contribute to research on Child Computer Interaction (CCI) by explaining what ‘participation at its best’ entails in practice and how it can be studied in research. Thus, CCI researchers and practitioners advocating participation, empowerment and inclusion of children can benefit from this framework when planning, analysing and evaluating their projects with children.
... Some say this leads to an experience of consciousness that resembles Zen Awakening (LeVine, 2018). 34 Largely, Nishida (1958) 28 Appreciating Professor Christopher Ives for his translation and generosity. 29 Philosophical cosmology in Morita's era was directed towards the contemplation of the universe and the place and meaning of human existence therein; cosmogony or the shared mythic accounts on the origins of being were often contemplated, too. ...
... It originates from Goffman's (1955Goffman's ( , 1983 observations: people behave differently in different configurations of participants. Finally, according to Nishida (1958), the life experiences of social actors are referred to as their historical body, a concept closely related to Bourdieu's (1990) notion of "habitus". However, the historical body refers more to participants' concrete embodied actions (Scollon and Scollon, 2004, p. 13). ...
Purpose-The low number of women in the information technology (IT) field is a concern. The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors behind the exclusion of girls from the IT field.
Design/methodology/approach-The present work includes a narrative literature review and an exploratory interview study with ten girls and six study guidance counsellors (GCs) from Finnish senior high schools. Using the nexus analysis as a theoretical lens, the authors examined the exclusion of girls from IT.
Findings-Earlier literature directed attention to the cultural norms, assumptions and stereotypes still prevalent in society and the lack of role models and positive media as factors contributing to girls excluding themselves from the IT field. In this research study's data, the authors not only found evidence of the unintentional exclusion of girls from IT by others but also by the girls themselves. Findings of this research study illustrate the various discourses, actors and their interactions, their background and history-related factors affecting girls' career choices. The novelty of this study is in approaching high school as a site of exclusion, where problematic discourses, interactions and histories come together, reproducing exclusion of girls from the IT field.
Originality/value-The authors contribute with a literature review of the research study on gender and IT and the inclusion/exclusion dynamics around IT. Using the nexus analysis, the authors identify the exclusion dynamics in this complex social issue. Several decades of research have shown that the inclusion of women remains low in IT disciplines. In this study, high schools are viewed as sites of exclusion, engendering a prevalent lack of information and education on the field. The authors offer novel insights into the role of curriculum, GCs and online information excluding girls from the IT field.
... Social action is seen as an intersection of interaction order, historical body, and discourses in place (Scollon and Scollon 2004, 13-14). Interaction order (applied from Goffman 1971) refers to relationships between participants with their historical bodies (personal habits and experiences; term coined from Nishida 1958). Discourses in place are situationally foregrounded discourses echoing the past and projecting the future. ...
Technology development allows new ways of communication, learning and collaboration. This is reflected in the professional scenarios of language teaching. Modern curricula value participants’ interest and meaningful (inter)action as a basis for learning. Sensitivity is important in anticipating participants’ changing needs in modern learning environments, characterised by linguistic and technological hybridity, as well as novel pedagogical approaches. Language students, more familiar with teaching in the traditional classroom, need to appropriate new practices to orchestrate learning in settings requiring multiple activities simultaneously. This study explores how language students learn to manage complex pedagogical situations during a university course in which they create an online project for school children. During online chat sessions administered for the school pupils, the university lecturer’s office was an important site for negotiating and acting on pedagogical issues as well as practical matters arising from the work at hand. Nexus analysis was used as a research approach. Primary research materials include video recordings from the university lecturer’s office, chatlogs and reflection papers from students. The study is relevant for reconceptualising the changing roles of (language) teachers and provides new perspectives for language teacher education in a technology-rich world.
KEYWORDS: Language teacher education, sense-making, complexity, change, nexus analysis
... Nexus analysis [52] is an ethnographically oriented research framework that draws on cultural-historical activity theory [69], theory on social interaction [24], practice theory [13], as well as the thinking of e.g. Nishida [46] and Bateson [7]. Discourses in place tell us how participants position the topic as well as themselves in social space [10], e.g., the girls speaking about IT field as male-dominated and boring. ...
Girls’ disinterest in Information Technology (IT) careers is a persisting problem. We wanted to examine girls’ perceptions of the IT field as well as factors shaping their career choices, to find ways girls might see IT/Information Systems careers as more interesting. For this purpose, we interviewed Finnish senior high school students, as senior high school is the last opportunity to influence girls’ career choice in higher education. In addition, we asked senior high school IT teachers about IT education and their perceptions of students’ relations to IT. Using nexus analysis as a sensitizing device, we focused on various discourses circulating around, different actors and their relations, as well as experience and background related matters that affect girls’ career choice. Surprisingly gendered understandings of the IT field and career choices were still prevalent among the studied young people, and this supports educational and occupational segregation.
... Nishida's agent is not merely the product of her past; she is formed by her past into a being capable of forming herself, her world, and others like her. For this to be possible, Nishida (1958) argues that the agent's past must confront her environment and present circumstances, which serve as possibilities to enact her future. ...
The enactive and ecological approaches to embodied cognitive science are on a collision course. While both draw inspiration from similar views in psychology and phenomenology, the two approaches initially held seemingly contradictory views and points of focus. Early enactivists saw value in the ecological approach but insisted that the two schools remain distinct. While ecological psychology challenged the common foes of mental representation and mind-body dualism, it seemingly did so at the cost of the autonomy of the agent. This is evidence that the early enactive and ecological approaches told different stories about how agents and environments interact. Whereas the enactive approach broadly focuses on agency and the organism’s resilience to environmental perturbations, the ecological approach insists that organisms are best understood in terms of the organism–environment system and at the ecological scale. Historically, this tension created space for harsh criticisms from both sides and for some ecological psychologists to dismiss enactivism altogether. Despite their differences, both approaches use dynamic systems theory to explain the interactions between embodied agents and the environment or contextual milieu in which they are embedded. This has led some scholars to focus on the complementary elements of each approach and argue that the two schools are allies, thus rejecting the historical disagreements between the two approaches and calling for an ecological–enactive synthesis. The attempts to synthesize the approaches are noteworthy and should be considered steps in the right direction but are potentially problematic. If the two schools are merely synthesized to some form of ecological–enactivism, then something of value from both approaches could be lost. This is analogous to the hasty comparison between two seemingly similar schools of thought found in early attempts at East-West comparative philosophy. I argue that the relationship between the enactive and ecological approaches is both complementary and contrary and is thus best understood in terms of complementarity. Given the complexity of complementarity I will unpack the notion in steps. I will begin with the exploration of analogous concepts in Japanese Philosophy and gradually build a lens through which both agent environment and ecological enactive complementarities can be understood.
... The second cycle, coined from Nishida [46], emerges from the historical body, i.e., the aggregation of practices or repeated experiences of the social actor in the course of life [55]. The notion of historical body aims to make visible how people's personal experiences and accumulated life histories shape their behavior [54,55]. ...
... Nexus analysis considers social action as being constituted by three intertwined aspects: by historical bodies of the participants, by interaction order among them, and by discourses in place circulating around (Scollon and de Saint-Georges, 2012). The concept of historical body was introduced by the philosopher Nishida (1958), while Bourdieu's (1977) concept of habitus is also a closely related concept. Historical body refers to people's history, background, knowledge, and skills that underlie and shape their action. ...
Women remain underrepresented in IT-related fields, including IS. To address this issue, we need to listen to the women and girls making their career choice. We used a discourse lens to analyse qualitative interview data collected in Finland with 12 high school girls, 14 university students in IT, and 3 women in IT occupations. This selection of participants gave us versatile perspectives from different generations and nationalities, showing how the gender issue has evolved as our lives have become increasingly digitalized. Our findings show the participants from different life stages re-produced negative discourses found in earlier studies, but also questioned them. Based on our findings, we identified three discourses on IT careers – ‘Not my thing’; ‘Could try but probably won’t’; and ‘Curious about everything’ – and associated three subject positions: 1) The Resistant; 2) The Indifferent; and 3) The Explorer. We contribute to IS research with a view of IT career choice as a process, where girls can end up in IT from any subject position. We also show that IS education needs to work on its visibility, differentiating IS careers, and support students’ professional development.
... This notion of 'what things are good for', however, is quite complex. What makes Cristian Monterroza's iPhone 'good for' tracking his location or the narrative structure of a 'show and tell talk' 'good for' explaining what he did and what he learned has to do not just with the technical or structural properties of these tools but also with their histories, the various conventions of use that have built up around them, the ways they have come to be associated with particular social practices and particular 'communities of practice' (Lave and Wenger 1991) and the way they have come to be part of Cristian Monterroza's 'historical body' (Jones 2007;Nishida 1958;, the practices, beliefs, knowledge, competencies and bodily dispositions that he has accumulated throughout his life. ...
In this chapter, I will discuss how technology can affect our study of the humanities and the way the humanities can offer insights into our encounters with technology. The theoretical framework that will form the basis of this discussion is mediated discourse analysis (Norris and Jones 2005; Scollon 2001), an approach to discourse which focuses on how the semiotic and technological tools we use to interact with the world serve to enable and constrain what we can know and who we can be. Mediated discourse analysis sees the analysis of texts and technologies as occasions for understanding how human social life is constituted and how it might be constituted differently though the exercise of human agency that can come as a result of a heightened awareness of the mediated nature of our experience of reality.. For researchers in the field of digital humanities, it provides a way to reflect on how the tools we use to transform language, history and art into data also end up transforming what we consider language, history and art to be and who we consider ourselves to be as researchers. It reframes key questions about what we regard as knowledge and the nature of research as questions about the nature of mediation and the ways in which tools affect our actions, our perspectives, our values and our identities, and it reframes the mission of scholars in the digital humanities as not just a matter of using software to analyse texts but of analysing how people use software and how it changes the way they interact with texts.
... Also implied in this phrase is the suspension of all artificial categorizations, such as you/me, subject/object, and inside/outside. Many Eastern philosophers (Watsuji, 1952;Nishida, 1958;Sagara, 1980Sagara, , 1998bAbe & Heine, 1992;Møllgaard, 2007) maintain that the concept of emptiness has strongly influenced many fields of East Asian culture and is inherent in people's thoughts and habits. In this conception, all beings and entities in this world are seen as a part of an indefinable Nature, and there are no self/other differences. ...
... The notion of historical body (see Nishida, 1958) refers to the idea that all participants in social action bring their previous experiences, learned practices and understandings to a scene (Scollon and Scollon, 2004). Discourses can, through practice and habit, become internalized in a way that they become part of people's historical bodies (Lane, 2014). ...
Introduction. This study discusses the potential of nexus analysis in information literacy research. Nexus analysis is a theoretical-methodological approach that examines the linkages between discourse and action. Method. Nexus analysis is discussed in relation to other socially oriented approaches to information literacy research and illustrated with an empirical example. Analysis. The key ideas and concepts of nexus analysis are explained, compared to related approaches, namely, practice and sociocultural theories and discourse analysis. An empirical example on the information literacy practices of a young video blogger is used to illustrate the application of this approach. Results. Whereas practice-theoretical and sociocultural information literacy studies tend to examine the practices of fixed social groups, nexus analysis focuses first on social action. In contrast to most discourse analytical studies, it investigates how discourses are manifested in action. The empirical example illustrated how the key tasks of nexus analysis and data triangulation provided diverse perspectives on exploring information literacy. Conclusion. The value of nexus analysis lies in its unique way of combining elements from various approaches and the practical guidelines it offers for multimodal analysis. It provides new insight for socially oriented information literacy research by focusing on the ways individuals' histories and identities, discourses circulating in a scene and mutually produced interaction order intersect in a specific moment in time to enable social action.
... Finally, the notion of the historical body (Nishida 1959) draws inspiration from Bourdieu's notion of habitus (1977), but whereas habitus tends to focus attention on structured bodily dispositions as engines of social reproduction, a nexus analysis emphasizes the body as a dynamic material-somatic zone of social transformation (Scollon and Scollon 2005). In this case, this idea directs attention to how a particular practice associated with sea turtle protection enters into the historical body of a volunteer through the various actions they routinely take to protect sea turtles at the beach. ...
This article argues that human-animal relationships are a key conceptual terrain for applied linguists to intervene in emerging interdisciplinary debates on how to address problematic human-environment relations in a time of growing ecological degradation. The scientific diagnosis of the Anthropocene has further generated critical discussion in the social sciences on the need to understand the diversity of local cultural responses to global environmental crises, ranging from climate change to species extinction. This article proposes that a 'green applied linguistics' can offer empirical insights into the role of language and discourse in mediating diverse human relationships with animals and nature. Taking human interactions with protected wildlife as one aspect of these wider socio-environmental debates, this article builds on recent embodied, materialist and posthu-manist research in applied linguistics to suggest that nexus analysis offers a holistic methodology to examine the problematic ways people become caught up with threatened species through their semiotic practices. I illustrate these ideas through examples from my ethnographic research on the convergence of sea turtle conservation and ecotourism practices at Lania ¯ kea Beach, Hawai'i.
This study is situated in the context of a design-driven master’s-level course at a Finnish university where pre-service teachers (PSTs) planned and carried out an online English learning project for 11- to 12-year-old pupils in two schools. During the working process, the PSTs needed to rethink their perceptions of technology-mediated language education and look for new ways to organise pedagogical activities for the children. The study explores how the PSTs’ professional vision and agency emerged in a hybrid space when orchestrating pupils’ participation online. Diverse materials from orchestration sessions were examined through nexus analysis. The findings highlight the PSTs’ professional vision and agency arising from interactions with the following activities while orchestrating language learning: 1) coordinating action and establishing continuity in design; 2) monitoring action and attending to emerging needs; and 3) attending to pupils’ engagement with the designed activities and revising the design during action if necessary. The setting allowed collaborative problem solving and sense making which advanced a balanced interaction order. This made space for new experiences and discourses contributing to the development of the PSTs’ professional vision as language teachers. The study has implications for language teacher education and language teaching in hybrid spaces.
This one-year-long, qualitative study explores material mediation in L2 writing activities in a college Russian FL classroom in Japan. I examine how students interact with material artifacts to construct texts during their L2 writing activities. Data include video and audio-recordings of four 90-minute-class sessions of writing activities, formal and informal interviews with the students, students’ written work, participant observations, and field notes. Mediated discourse analyses of L2 writing activities illuminate the materiality of L2 writing practices. In particular, social actions of writing took different forms, such as copying, outlining, composing, and paraphrasing, depending on the type of material objects the students interacted with. Through my multimodal investigation, I highlight the importance of materiality in language learning processes. I argue that it is crucial for language teachers to recognize and understand affordances and constraints of different mediational tools to promote different aspects of language learning.
The Advancing Data Justice Research and Practice (ADJRP) project aims to widen the lens of current thinking around data justice and to provide actionable resources that will help policymakers, practitioners, and impacted communities gain a broader understanding of what equitable, freedom-promoting, and rights-sustaining data collection, governance, and use should look like in increasingly dynamic and global data innovation ecosystems. In this integrated literature review we hope to lay the conceptual groundwork needed to support this aspiration. The introduction motivates the broadening of data justice that is undertaken by the literature review which follows. First, we address how certain limitations of the current study of data justice drive the need for a re-location of data justice research and practice. We map out the strengths and shortcomings of the contemporary state of the art and then elaborate on the challenges faced by our own effort to broaden the data justice perspective in the decolonial context. The body of the literature review covers seven thematic areas. For each theme, the ADJRP team has systematically collected and analysed key texts in order to tell the critical empirical story of how existing social structures and power dynamics present challenges to data justice and related justice fields. In each case, this critical empirical story is also supplemented by the transformational story of how activists, policymakers, and academics are challenging longstanding structures of inequity to advance social justice in data innovation ecosystems and adjacent areas of technological practice.
Au Japon, les premières expériences de musique créée sur bande magnétique ont lieu en 1952 dans les locaux de la NHK. À partir de 1955, la mise en place d’espaces physiques et radiophoniques dédiés à cette musique en gestation témoigne d’une certaine volonté de poser à cet endroit une partie des rudiments d’une modernité musicale des plus radicales. Ce qui sera plus tard connu comme le « studio de musique électronique de la NHK », modelé en regard du studio de la NWDR à Cologne fondé en 1951, permet ainsi à de nombreux compositeurs d’avoir accès à de nouvelles technologies et de mettre à l’épreuve de nouvelles techniques sondées au cours d’un dialogue entretenu avec la production occidentale. Alors que le studio est strictement contemporain aux autres institutions du genre en Europe, la production de musique pour bande japonaise reste pourtant largement ignorée, et aucune historiographie réalisée par le biais de l’histoire de l’art et de l’histoire de la musique contemporaine n’en a encore été proposée. Restent obscurs dès lors les rapports qu’entretinrent les compositeurs avec la création occidentale, mais aussi avec l’idée de modernité nationale – tiraillée entre une certaine conception de la tradition à perpétuer et celle de la réalité sociale dont le caractère international est à rendre compte de manière sincère. Au cours de ce travail, il s’agit, en suivant une progression diachronique de l’art, d’examiner la relation que les compositeurs japonais tissèrent avec les textes étrangers pour appréhender le matériau théorique et les effets sensibles de la musique, puis les dispositions critiques desdits compositeurs vis-à-vis de la production locale à une époque où les échanges directs avec la scène internationale se font davantage présents. Il est question pour finir de considérer en quoi les mesures prises par la direction du studio et par les musiciens pour valoriser l’œuvre japonaise donnent lieu au creusement d’un écart fondamental avec la création occidentale.
One of the most important points of contact that student teachers have with the teaching profession occurs during placement, as placement provides a prime opportunity for them to interact with pupils and to further develop their teaching. In this article, a mediated discourse analytical perspective is employed as a lens to study a student teacher during his final teaching placement, with the aim of exploring how resemiotizations of previous experiences in the shape of oral stories can be interactionally used in the classroom. The data consist of three video recorded oral presentations, two video recorded sessions in a classroom, interview data, and observational field notes. Due to its potential to link past multimodal semiosis to present-time actions, nexus analysis is employed as the method for analysis. By unpacking a student teacher’s use of oral stories in the classroom, the study demonstrates how stories are adaptable resources that can be used to mark proximity to pupils, and thus serve as a means to manage the interaction order in the classroom. This is an activity with relevance for the teaching profession and, by extension, student teachers' development of professional identity.
The subject of this article is the role of spirituality in diaconal work. This raises two questions: first, what do we mean by spirituality, and second, what characterises the field of diaconia and diaconal practice? To begin with, a few conceptual clarifications are necessary. C. Otto Scharmer’s Theory U (TU) provides the conceptual and methodological framework for operationalising spirituality in diaconal work. It is argued that the concept of “presencing” is an adequate way to express “spirituality”, and that, overall TU is an appropriate model to describe and develop the essential features of diaconal social work and diaconal leadership. I shall use the Danish Blue Cross as an example of an organisation that can be interpreted as working on the basis of TU.
Written and compiled in commemoration of the centenary of Russell’s visit to China (1920-1921), the anthology Bertrand Russell’s Visit to China: Selected Text on the Centenary of Intercultural Dialogues in Logic and Epistemology offers a focused account of reception of Bertrand Russell and his thought in China. Set in the time of Russell’s stay in China, the selection of texts revolves around the initial reception of Russell as a person, philosopher, and scientist in Chinese intellectual world. As a retrospective anthology concerned with the reception of Russell’s thought in China, the work is comprised both of translations of articles and essays written by Chinese intellectuals and other public figures at the time of his visit there, as well as a few contemporary studies analysing the reception and propagation of Russell’s ideas in China in the abovementioned period. Following a general introduction to Russell’s visit in China, the subsequent sections of the anthology cover a wide spectrum of original documents and secondary studies, including the welcome addresses, reports from the Russell Study Society established in late 1920 in Beijing, introductions to Russell’s philosophical thought and, in the main part, interpretations of Russell’s humanistic thought, mathematical logic and epistemology by two Chinese contemporary philosophers, Zhang Shenfu and Zhang Dongsun. The section on Zhang Shenfu explores his earliest relationship with Russell’s philosophy and his notion of mathematical logic, whilst the section on Zhang Dongsun aims at casting some light on his critical reading of Russell’s logicism on the one hand and the disparities between their models of structural perception on the other. As such the anthology provides a unique insight into the intertwined influences of Russell’s humanistic, philosophical, and logical thought on the Chinese intellectual landscape in the aftermath of the May Fourth events. This volume of the Studia Humanitatis Asiatica series was edited by Jan Vrhovski and Jana S. Rošker. The foreword was contributed by Vera Schwarcz, a professor emerita at Wesleyan University and Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The presentation is based on my ongoing manuscript Embodied Multimodality in Action and is a continuation of my forthcoming article Embodied Multimodal Praxis in a College Classroom.
The economic crisis we have been facing has been almost unprecedented in scope and scale, and, in my understanding, it possesses not only an objective but also a distinctively subjective dimension. Stated otherwise, it is a crisis of reason. We thus need to fmd ways beyond the closed chamber of economic reason, which has shrunk the scope of meaningful knowledge by describing the current state of affairs solely in terms of computable and controllable "empirical sets of facts." But how is it possible to do so? Can religious philosophy guide us in our quest for the deeper subjectivity and self-realization we need to successfully cope with the state of affairs? The current discussion seeks to present a possible answer to these questions from the perspective of Zen Buddhism as expounded by the Japanese philosophen; of the Kyoto School.
Im folgenden wird ausgehend vom Weltbegriff der modernen japanischen Philosophie ein neuer Ansatzpunkt zur Beschreibung der Arbeitswelt und des in ihr Handelnden vorgestellt. Hierzu werden Erkenntnisse der japanischen Philosophie Aussagen der ökonomischen Theorie, insbesondere der neoklassischen Arbeitsmarkttheorie, vergleichend gegenübergestellt. Darüber hinaus werden internal labour markets als eine Form der Arbeitswelt dieskutiert, die sich den vorherrschenden ökonomischen Erklärungsansätzen entzieht und eine interessante Alternative zu 'westlichen' Arbeitsmärkten bietet.
The globalization of art therapy requires a high level of multicultural competence among art therapists for ethical practice, which includes understanding the traditional materials of the client’s culture. However, the common materials used in art therapy remain mostly Western, which neglects the therapeutic value of art materials from outside the Eurocentric world. This article explores the relations between culture and art materials, using the traditional Eastern materials from the Korean cultural context called Jipilmuk — Ji (paper) pil (brush) muk (Meok [inkstick]). A focus on the philosophical esthetics of East Asia reveals the close connection between materials and culture as well as their therapeutic implications.
Branching off Heidegger’s phenomenology of death, Zen master Dōgen’s views on birth-and-death and being-time and their relation to the Buddhist notion of the great death are examined. The Kyoto School thinkers Tanabe and Nishitani’s positions regarding karma, samsāra, nirvāna, reincarnation, Buddha-nature, and the great death are then considered with respect to Nietzsche and Deleuze’s interpretations of time and the eternal recurrence. The purpose of this transcontinental approach is not only to examine the similarities and differences between two significantly different cultural perspectives but also to advance those viewpoints via a hermeneutic phenomenological analysis of their respective philosophical practices.
Nishida Kitarō shared with phenomenologists a concern to account for experience as it is lived, prior to how it is described objectively. His philosophy implies the phenomenological sense of experience, consciousness and self-awareness as dimensions of illuminating or revealing things. His engagement with Husserl in particular guided much of his questioning and criticisms of the centrality of intentionality and of reflective self-awareness. This chapter shows why his critique of Husserl is mistaken, but also indicates how Nishida contributes to the phenomenology of self-awareness. His notion of awareness as inherently reflexive or self-mirroring helps clarify the connection between pre-reflective awareness and reflection and the connection between awareness and the role of a self. Other themes in Nishida’s philosophy, such as the practice of awareness in engaged bodily action, hold promise for further phenomenological investigation.
Nishida Kitarō is one of the most important philosophers in modern Japan. He was well aware of the development of the phenomenological movement. In Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, it has been written that “Phenomenology was introduced into Japan by Kitarō Nishida through his articles before World War I, and it is well known that Edmund Husserl himself contributed two articles to the Japanese journal Kaizo in 1923 and 1924.” Yet, it is also stated that “Nishida’s philosophy is ultimately not phenomenological but dialectical.” In this chapter, I shall argue that even though he never calls himself a phenomenologist, we can still read Nishida in a phenomenological way.
The article opens with a discussion of recent theoretical and methodological innovations in the field of comparative philosophy. In this regard, I propose and explain a new possible method of contrasting particular aspects of divergent philosophical texts or discourses and denote it as a ‘philosophy of sublation’. Then, the paper provides a concrete example for such a post-comparative method of reasoning, I will try to apply a ‘sublation philosophy’ approach for a reinterpretation of certain aspects of the complex philosophical intersections between modern Japanese and Chinese philosophies through the lens of a contrastive analysis of Nishida Kitarō’s and Mou Zongsan’s dialectical thought. In this way, I hope to shed some new light upon some general questions regarding different models of dialectics.
This study illuminates the political, ideological, moral and ethical driving forces behind the Swedish governmental initiative to digitalize the educational system—the Swedish Digitalization Initiative (SDI). Taking a sociocultural point of departure, policy documents are considered mediational means and have agency. Nexus analysis is the analytical lens that is deployed. Policies are analyzed according to the public consultative discourse analysis scheme. Three main findings are reported in this study: The policy documents are chained, that is, one document is linked to one or more others.
There are three important discourses that circulate in the policy documents: digital competence, programming and an economical discourse.
Different policy documents have different strengths of agency, expressed rhetorically in terms of both languaging and layout.
The driving forces of SDI are politically and ideologically economical liberalism. Moral and ethical driving forces can be seen in terms of equality between women and men.
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