Valuing local built heritage in a global setting : identity & visual perceptions of cultural built heritage in Northern Ireland

‘In these troubled times with the world in search of its bearings and way ward minds using the terms “culture” and “civilization” in an attempt to turn human beings against one another, there is an urgent need to remember how fundamental cultural diversity is to humanity itself’ (UNESCO 2002). The progressive idea of culture can be used in regressive ways by extremists who used it occasionally to pursue the politics of xenophobia and exclusion. The hypothesis that different communities can share the same culture but have different visual perception of their built environment might seems contradictory. It is essential to describe what is meant by the ‘same culture’. The ever evolving changes of definition and re-definition of the word has not yet settled. This paper adopts the descriptive definition of culture while challenging its interpretation. The descriptive definition refers to ‘all the characteristics activities by a people’. While this description is generally accepted, the interpretation of what ‘a people’ means is divisive. It is not clear how Eliot defines ‘a people’. Is the term genetically prescribed or is ‘a people’ place related? And what about the moral and religious orientation? This paper argues that culture is basically place related and the forces that shape a culture of a ‘people’ are deeply embedded in the environmental forces that also shape other aspects of the place making and its identity. The paper addresses the questions of conflicts, value systems, and culture definitions and the inseparable links with architecture aesthetics.

Local built heritage in Northern Ireland is taken as a case study. Unlike many parts of the world, visual perceptions in Northern Ireland is well recognised with iconic as well as formal representations. The population is well aware of the signified as well as the signifiers. The boundaries between iconology and formalism theories are very blurred in the Northern Ireland context. This paper examines how the two communities visually perceive their shared built heritage and the extent of overlapping between the understanding of iconic and formalist visual representations in the built environment. The paper takes the buildings of the successful economic ventures of the shirt industry in the 19th century as a case study. The case study provides an insight of how a signified value of a successful economic regeneration initiative that is deeply imbedded in the social structure and within the urban fabric can overcome divisive visual perception. The paper examines the possibility of building upon the historical success of the shirt industry to promote architectural cultural dialogue in which cultural built heritage in Derry is able to facilitate knowledge creation and social capital in different arenas.

From efficiency to effectiveness :a new management model of social inclusion

This paper challenges the tendency in the contemporary management literature to conceptualize management within a micro-framework that focuses on short-term efficiency and privatized economic gain. Based on a literature review of social-relation theories, we propose a new management model of social inclusion for general management across contexts with a particular concern for profit-for organizations. The model conceptualizes management within a systemic societal framework where its effectiveness is demonstrated for society, organizations, groups and individuals.  We suggest that management based on the collectivistic values of shared humanity and social inclusion (not only organization) is expected to reduce management-led systematic marginalization in the workplace and social whole. For the purpose of this paper, we define management as “mutually interdependent activities that add value to individuals’, groups’, organizations’ and societal wellbeing by ensuring social inclusion at each of these dimensions.” We term this management process ‘Management Process of Social Inclusion’ as it extends management perspectives to not only organizational effectiveness but societal effectiveness. The paper concludes by proposing several propositions and implications for future research.

Phenomenon of ordinariness in nursing

This phenomenological research aimed to illuminate the nature and effects of ordinariness in nursing and to discover whether the phenomenon enhanced the nursing encounter. The researcher worked as a participant observer with six registered nurses in a Professorial Nursing Unit. Following each interaction, the researcher wrote her impressions in a personal-professional journal and audiotaped conversations with the respective nurses and patients to gain their impressions. Using a theoretical framework of the phenomenological concepts of lived experience, Dasein, Being-in-the-world and fusion of horizons as an underpinning methodology, an initial hermeneutical analysis and interpretation of the impressions generated qualities and activities indicative of the aspects of the phenomenon of ordinariness in nursing. The second phase of the analysis and interpretation sought to illuminate the nature of the phenomenon itself. Eight actualities of the nature of the phenomenon emerged: 'allowingness,' 'straightforwardness,' 'self-likeness,' 'homeliness,' 'favourableness,' 'intuneness,' 'lightheartedness' and 'connectedness.' These actualities were described in relation to the phenomenon of interest. The effects of the phenomenon were the creative potential to enhance the nursing encounter and included many and various effects of facilitation, fair play, familiarity, family, favouring, feelings, fun and friendship. The research found that nurses and patients shared a common sense of humanity, which enhanced the nursing encounter. Within the context of caring, the nurses were ordinary people, perceived as being extraordinarily effective, by the very ways in which their humanness shone through their knowledge and skills, to make their whole being with patients something more than just professional helping. The shared sense of ordinariness between nurses and patients made them as one in then- humanness and created a special place, in which the relative strangeness of the experience of being in a health care setting, could be made familiar and manageable.

Not the holocaust memorial

Evoking Genocide compiles more than sixty short essays written by leading scholars and activists in the field of genocide studies. These authors pay eloquent tribute to the works of art and media that influenced their engagement with genocide and crimes against humanity. The subjects include books and stories, films, songs, drawings, documents, monuments, sculptures, personal testimonies, and even a Lego set. In an accessible and often deeply personal way, contributors explore their own relationships with the works in question. Edited by Adam Jones, recently selected as one of fifty key thinkers in Holocaust and genocide studies, Evoking Genocide makes an important contribution to the study of the art and culture of mass atrocity.

Cultural diversity, heritage and human rights : intersections in theory and practice

This theoretically innovative anthology investigates the problematic linkages between conserving cultural heritage, maintaining cultural diversity, defining and establishing cultural citizenship, and enforcing human rights.

It is the first publication to address the notions of cultural diversity, cultural heritage and human rights in one volume. Heritage provides the basis of humanity’s rich cultural diversity. While there is a considerable literature dealing separately with cultural diversity, cultural heritage and human rights, this book is distinctive and has contemporary relevance in focusing on the intersection between the three concepts. Cultural Diversity, Heritage and Human Rights establishes a fresh approach that will interest students and practitioners alike and on which future work in the heritage field might proceed.

Literature and environmental ethics

This thesis contends that literature which reflects, and is informed by (whether consciously or not), reconstructive postmodern ecology is not a static literature but by representing and confronting the underpinning causes that have led humanity to violence, literature generates new engagements and the potential to reconstruct - ethically, cognitively, perceptually- alternative ways of being-in-the-world for political ends.

Intersecting concepts and practices

This theoretically innovative anthology investigates the problematic linkages between conserving cultural heritage, maintaining cultural diversity, defining and establishing cultural citizenship, and enforcing human rights.

It is the first publication to address the notions of cultural diversity, cultural heritage and human rights in one volume. Heritage provides the basis of humanity’s rich cultural diversity. While there is a considerable literature dealing separately with cultural diversity, cultural heritage and human rights, this book is distinctive and has contemporary relevance in focusing on the intersection between the three concepts. Cultural Diversity, Heritage and Human Rights establishes a fresh approach that will interest students and practitioners alike and on which future work in the heritage field might proceed.

Indigenous peoples are not multicultural minorities : cultural diversity, heritage and indigenous human rights in Australia

This theoretically innovative anthology investigates the problematic linkages between conserving cultural heritage, maintaining cultural diversity, defining and establishing cultural citizenship, and enforcing human rights.

It is the first publication to address the notions of cultural diversity, cultural heritage and human rights in one volume. Heritage provides the basis of humanity’s rich cultural diversity. While there is a considerable literature dealing separately with cultural diversity, cultural heritage and human rights, this book is distinctive and has contemporary relevance in focusing on the intersection between the three concepts. Cultural Diversity, Heritage and Human Rights establishes a fresh approach that will interest students and practitioners alike and on which future work in the heritage field might proceed.

Protecting the Tay Nguyen gongs : conflicting rights in Vietnam’s central plateau

This theoretically innovative anthology investigates the problematic linkages between conserving cultural heritage, maintaining cultural diversity, defining and establishing cultural citizenship, and enforcing human rights.

It is the first publication to address the notions of cultural diversity, cultural heritage and human rights in one volume. Heritage provides the basis of humanity’s rich cultural diversity. While there is a considerable literature dealing separately with cultural diversity, cultural heritage and human rights, this book is distinctive and has contemporary relevance in focusing on the intersection between the three concepts. Cultural Diversity, Heritage and Human Rights establishes a fresh approach that will interest students and practitioners alike and on which future work in the heritage field might proceed.

Perfecting nature : Friedrich Nietzsche's ideal and politics of cultivation

What I have called the Ideal of Cultivation is a fundamental ethical principle of civilisation, originated by aristocratic warriors in Greek antiquity who held that the true purpose of humanity is to perfect nature

It was then professed that individuals and even entire peoples could consciously develop and improve themselves in a way that was thought to obey the original lawful impulses of nature, a process which was likened to those of agriculture and animal husbandry.

Subsequently the cognate idea of a politics of cultivation arose which deemed that society should be organised specifically to produce more virtuous or perfect human types. Given their fundamental association with Hellenism both ideas have been revisited constantly in the intellectual history of the west, and most notably during the great secular periods, the Renaissance and Enlightenment when active attempts were made to retrieve the ideals of antiquity. Both ideas were particularly pervasive in the German enlightenment, the Aufklärung, and were assimilated by the succeeding Romantic generation.

In nineteenth century Germany, when interest in these ideas was quickly waning, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche acquired an unswerving attachment to them and made the service of them his life's work.

The intention of this essay is to trace methodically the appearance of the Ideal of Cultivation in Nietzsche's philosophy and politics, and to outline his responses to a world which was abandoning the principles in which he deeply believed. This essay should be regarded as a case study in the long history of a fundamental ethical idea rather than one about the philosopher Nietzsche.

About global leadership and global ethics, and a possible moral compass : an introduction to the special issue

This paper reviews a number of huge challenges to ethical leadership in the twenty-first century and concludes that the need for global ethical leadership is not merely a desirable option, but rather – and quite literally – a matter of survival. The crises of the recent past reveal huge, and in some cases criminal, failures of both ethics and leadership in finance, business and government. We posit that mainstream economic theory’s construct of ‘homo economicus’ and its faith in the ‘invisible hand’ of the market constitute deeply flawed foundations upon which alone policy may be built and, farthermore, that these problematic foundations exert substantial shaping power over the institutional and discursive landscapes in which international business is transacted. Analogously, we argue that dominant approaches to business ethics and corporate social responsibility are, if not incorrect, at least in need of revisiting in terms of questioning their basic assumptions. Instead of the smugness of Western (especially Anglo-American) attitudes towards other ways of thinking, valuing and organising, it appears clear that openness, cooperation and co-creation between the developed and developing worlds is a basic prerequisite for dealing with the global challenges facing not just leaders, but humanity as a whole. This objective of stimulating discussion between dominant and marginal voices has guided our selection of papers for this Special Issue. We have thus included not only representatives of research from within the parameters of mainstream business ethics, IB or leadership scholarship, but also innovative contributions from fields such as military history, information technology, regulation, spirituality and sociology.

Collapse

Collapse was a visual performance installation presented at the Old Port of Melbourne in 2008. The audience travelled by boat across Port Phillip Bay to witness the performance begins at Sciencework’s Spotswood Jetty, where the audience travelled by ferry across the Port Phillip Bay to a remote location, where society has “collapsed”. The performance then becomes a walking tour around this new location, encountering and experiencing the world that Red Cabbage has created.

“At that point…the collapse of their morale, their will power and their patience was so abrupt that they felt they would never be able to climb back out of their hole…Hence, floundering halfway between the abyss and the peak, they drifted rather than lived, given up to aimless days and sterile memories, wandering shadows who could have only found strength by resigning themselves to taking root in the soil of their distress.”- Albert Camus The Plague

Floundering halfway between the abyss and the peak…exist those that have not yet fallen…in a state of recurring collapse. The girl in the yellow dress, the man in the grey suit, the old man in the brown pants, the woman in the blue shirt and the man in the red hat are suspected carriers of the white sickness. They have been removed from their homes to the edge of the city for standard assessment. Here they meet the others, processed…waiting…isolated. By boat…they travel across the bay to their final destination. Not another Hollywood style apocalyptic melodrama in which our heroes find grace, hope and redemption in the utter destruction of modern civilization…in the collapse of lived time the ruins of humanity are exposed as already existent…the limits of our ability to be graceful were discovered long ago…the trauma of the end of time a given…the plague is now.

Caring, objectivity and justice : an integrative view

The argument of this article is framed by a debate between the principle of humanity and the principle of justice. Whereas the principle of humanity requires us to care about others and to want to help them meet their vital needs, and so to be partial towards those others, the principle of justice requires us to consider their needs without the intrusion of our subjective interests or emotions so that we can act with impartiality. I argue that a deep form of caring lies behind both approaches and so unites them. In the course of the argument, I reject Michael Slote’s sentimentalist form of an ethics of care, and expound Thomas Nagel’s moral theory, which seems to lie at the opposite end of a spectrum ranging from moral sentiments to impersonal objectivity. Nevertheless, Nagel’s theory of normative realism provides unexpected support for the thesis that a deep and subjective form of caring lies at the base of even our most objective moral reasons.

Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)

Pierre Hadot, classical philosopher and historian of philosophy, is best known for his conception of ancient philosophy as a bios or way of life (manière de vivre). His work has been widely influential in classical studies and on thinkers, including Michel Foucault. According to Hadot, twentieth- and twenty-first-century academic philosophy has largely lost sight of its ancient origin in a set of spiritual practices that range from forms of dialogue, via species of meditative reflection, to theoretical contemplation. These philosophical practices, as well as the philosophical discourses the different ancient schools developed in conjunction with them, aimed primarily to form, rather than only to inform, the philosophical student. The goal of the ancient philosophies, Hadot argued, was to cultivate a specific, constant attitude toward existence, by way of the rational comprehension of the nature of humanity and its place in the cosmos. This cultivation required, specifically, that students learn to combat their passions and the illusory evaluative beliefs instilled by their passions, habits, and upbringing. To cultivate philosophical discourse or writing without connection to such a transformed ethical comportment was, for the ancients, to be as a rhetorician or a sophist, not a philosopher. However, according to Hadot, with the advent of the Christian era and the eventual outlawing, in 529 C.E., of the ancient philosophical schools, philosophy conceived of as a bios largely disappeared from the West. Its spiritual practices were integrated into, and adapted by, forms of Christian monasticism. The philosophers’ dialectical techniques and metaphysical views were integrated into, and subordinated, first to revealed theology and then, later, to the modern natural sciences. However, Hadot maintained that the conception of philosophy as a bios has never completely disappeared from the West, resurfacing in Montaigne, Rousseau, Goethe, Thoreau, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, and even in the works of Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Heidegger.

Hadot’s conception of ancient philosophy and his historical narrative of its disappearance in the West have provoked both praise and criticism. Hadot received a host of letters from students around the world telling him that his works had changed their lives, perhaps the most fitting tribute given the nature of Hadot’s meta-philosophical claims. Unlike many of his European contemporaries, Hadot’s work is characterized by lucid, restrained prose; clarity of argument; the near-complete absence of recondite jargon; and a gentle, if sometimes self-depreciating, humor. While Hadot was an admirer of Nietzsche and Heidegger, and committed to a kind of philosophical recasting of the history of Western ideas, Hadot’s work lacks any eschatological sense of the end of philosophy, humanism, or the West. Late in life, Hadot would report that this was because he was animated by the sense that philosophy, as conceived and practiced in the ancient schools, remains possible for men and women of his era: “from 1970 on, I have felt very strongly that it was Epicureanism and Stoicism which could nourish the spiritual life of men and women of our times, as well as my own” (PWL 280).

History paintings

In this series of works Cameron Bishop has concentrated on three types of space: the zoo, museum and the art gallery. Envisaged as heterotopias (from the combined Greek literally meaning other spaces), the three spaces are where time, represented in stratified objects, never stops accumulating. They are spaces of display in which objects are classified and arranged according to various needs: scientific, educational or historical. The philosopher Michel Foucault discusses how all cultures create heterotopias against which their “real sites” become unambiguous, clarified and legitimated. It is alongside these institutions that we emerge as subjects; that we come to place ourselves in a narrative and learn who we are and who we are not. By questioning the spaces with which we historicize ourselves and others, identify ourselves and others, and construct our very humanity with Cameron Bishop not only speaks of the fictions we create in our own real lives, outside the exhibition space, but those created on behalf of others.