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This paper offers a socio-legal historical analysis of the process of formulation and evolution of Chinese marine insurance law by transplanting foreign laws, with a view to grasping from the material of legal history and social reality the deeper significance of the imported law’s relation to tradition, ideology and environmental context. The key argument is that this perspective reveals how transplanted law emerges as an authorless product shaped by social forces and processes. It is created by the operation of institutional arrangements of law-making, which provide the platform for the interplay of diverse traditions and interests generated by the social environment of the importing jurisdiction. This research integrates several lines of discussion of legal transplantation that lack connection, highlights the impact of the transplanting process and contributes to current theoretical debates by proposing potential interdisciplinary research for future studies of legal transplantation.
Political psychologists have long theorized that authoritarianism structures the positions people take on cultural issues and their party ties. Authoritarianism is durable; it resists the influence of other political judgments; and it is very impactful-in a word, it is strong. By contrast, researchers characterize the attitudes most people hold on most issues as unstable and ineffectual-in a word, weak. But what is true of most issues is not true of the issues that have driven America's long running culture war-abortion and gay rights. This Element demonstrates that moral issue attitudes are stronger than authoritarianism. With data from multiple sources over the period 1992-2020, it shows that (1) moral issue attitudes endure longer than authoritarianism; (2) moral issues predict change in authoritarianism; (3) authoritarianism does not systematically predict change in moral issues; and (4) moral issues have always played a much greater role structuring party ties than authoritarianism.
Insights from Social Network Analysis reveal that the structure of the social network surrounding international courts is important for these courts’ ability to secure compliance with their judgments and by this to initiate social change. International courts like the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) invest growing resources in shaping their networks, recognising that these networks are necessary tools that can help them to influence society. This paper will focus on the ways social network analysis can facilitate a better understanding of the ECtHR. The paper explains how certain characteristics of the network surrounding the ECtHR determine the ultimate social impact of the court.
Conversation analysts in a range of disciplines have pointed to a relationship between Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis. However, full descriptions of key elements of this relationship, and illustrations of how it matters in practical terms, are scarce. We specify ways in which the concerns and sensibility of Ethnomethodology (EM) can translate into the practice of Conversation Analysis (CA). Employing an EM sensibility involves attending to five major features of social interaction: how members of society co-produce social order, achieve social organization in their everyday lives, deploy concrete practices or methods of talk and embodied conduct, use commonsense knowledge, and operate in real-time, actual social interaction with its temporal dimensions. In specifying these features, our aim is to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Our goal is to appreciate how EM’s view of social phenomena—as actual, lived in real time, and member-produced—is fundamental to CA, and how EM’s theoretical insights and studies of commonsense and practice-assembled social events profoundly paved the way for CA. While integrating this EM backdrop, CA advanced the systematic analysis of concerted, real-time conduct-in-interaction. A concluding section of the chapter provides an illustration drawn from an internal medicine clinic, and involves doctor-patient interaction.
A significant part of our work as conversation analysts is to persuade different disciplinary communities of the insights from CA. Here, conversation analysts working within the broader domains of sociology, linguistics, psychology and communication, education, and health services discuss the ways in which our findings may be shaped for publication in journals particular to our own domains, and thereby engage with our wider disciplinary audiences. In the first instance, we situate CA with respect to its development in each of our disciplines and identify the core issues with which CA is engaging. We then examine some of the challenges in presenting CA to our disciplines. These include addressing the question that CA scholars often face from colleagues in those disciplines: ‘Why should this matter to us?’. We finally offer some practical guidance on writing CA for our particular audiences, including: how to manage the length constraints often imposed by journals, the issue of sampling size, and how to balance the demands of transcriptional detail as required by CA with those of clarity and legibility for those not accustomed to it. Such challenges can be highly creative – and worthwhile in showing how CA can enhance received theory in our own disciplines.
This chapter introduces social scientific perspectives and methods applicable to observing the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and religion. It discusses the contributions that anthropological and sociological approaches can make to this entanglement of two modern social phenomena while also drawing attention to the inherent biases and perspectives that both fields bring with them due to their histories. Examples of research on religion and AI are highlighted, especially when they demonstrate agile and new methodologies for engaging with AI in its many applications; including but not limited to online worlds, multimedia formats, games, social media and the new spaces made by technological innovation such as the innovations such as the platforms underpinning the gig economy. All these AI-enabled spaces can be entangled with religious and spiritual conceptions of the world. This chapter also aims to expand upon the relationship between AI and religion as it is perceived as a general concept or object within human society and civilisation. It explains how both anthropology and sociology can provide frameworks for conceptualising that relationship and give us ways to account for our narratives of secularisation – informed by AI development – that see religion as a remnant of a prior, less rational stage of human civilisation.
This review essay forms a contribution to the Dialogue & Debate symposium on Christian Joerges’s volume Conflict and Transformation (Hart 2022). The specific angle of this article is an interdisciplinary one that conceives of Joerges’s work as a boundary-crossing exercise between law and the social sciences. Aspects highlighted are the inspiration that his work finds in responding to Europe’s vocation, or realising the latter’s normative potential; the law-in-context quality of the approach, which combines inside and outside perspectives on what the law is and does, how it motivates and what it means; and the two-pronged ambition to take the law seriously as a legitimating force and to question, at the same time, the power of economic ‘facts’ and arguments, which sometimes overrule what seems legitimate. Moreover, this article considers the relevance and implications of two intellectual influences on Joerges’s work, one a more formative one (Habermas) and one resonating with recent experiences of crisis (Polanyi), and it follows the journey of Joerges’s reconstructive approach within European studies: between integration theory, governance approaches, and rethinking democracy in postnational constellations. As Joerges himself concedes, the normative vision that this yielded for European law and politics was overtaken by actual developments in the context of the monetary union, and conflicts-law constitutionalism became more of a counterfactual appeal. This article outlines how the critical edge of this approach could be enhanced by taking perspectives from critical political economy on board, which would also facilitate countering economic arguments.
Though the Polish rule of law crisis has been on the scholarly agenda since the Law and Justice Party (PiS) took power in 2015, the individual agents of legal disruption within the judiciary have been largely off the radar. This intervention aims to fill this gap. This article analyses the legal mobilisation practices of the Supreme Court (SC) judges appointed by the PiS party in a court-packing manner after 2017. It is argued that this is a specific type of legal mobilisation; because it is conducted from within the legal system by judges, it aims to challenge doctrinal views strategically and to legitimise the status of unlawfully elected judges, which consequently destabilises the legal system. Because the legal tools to solve the conflict appear to have been exhausted, new judges engage in public discourse to convince citizens that they have a right to sit on the bench. In the first part of this paper, I critically analyse this public discourse in order to explain the framing of the rule of law crisis. The analysis of this discourse is drawn from 106 texts produced by new SC judges between 2017 and 2023. It is argued that although the ‘populist’ group of SC judges is internally differentiated and does not exhibit clear ideological linkage with the PiS party, it strategically produces certain legal narratives in which their appointments and judicial practices at the SC conform to the Constitution and to relevant statutes and, as such, are legitimate in legal terms. The new judges’ narratives are based on four populist dichotomies that distinguish them from old judges (legitimacy–lack of legitimacy, autonomy–political dependence, formal rule of law–legal anarchy and accountability–corporatism). In the second part, the article proceeds to analyse selected case law of the Supreme Court to explore whether and how court-packing makes it more responsive to the legal mobilisation of the conservative Christian organisation Ordo Iuris (OI) and helps the governing party maintain its power. It is argued that the judicial mobilisation inside the packed Supreme Court is mostly of a discursive nature, as there is limited evidence that newly appointed judges side ideologically with the government and right-wing organisations in recent case law.
In the 21st century, educators’ work is arguably more complex and more needed than ever before. The last six decades have witnessed significant changes involving global economic forces, increased competitive production modes, climate change and its ramifications on human and non-human beings. We have felt the impact in education of a pandemic, which seemed to ‘slow us down’, amid a fast-moving and ever-developing technological landscape which had, and continues to have, significant impacts on people’s ways of life. There has been a merging of finance, trade and communication knowledges; societal instability; and a global resurgence in right-wing politics and social movements which are exercised around assumed threats of immigration, ‘race’ and ethnicity and other forms of diversity.
Comparative measures of educational achievement (e.g. PISA, TIMSS, NAPLAN) demonstrate that although Australia is broadly understood to offer quality education, this masks stark and persistent inequalities. Wider disparities are evident between students from advantaged and disadvantaged backgrounds than in many other OECD countries. These inequities start before children enter schools. Children experiencing economic and social adversity are underrepresented in preschool and overrepresented in population level measures of ‘developmental vulnerability’ prior to school commencement. Young people from Indigenous backgrounds, rural/remote areas, and lower socio-economic backgrounds suffer significant achievement gaps across all measures, and the gap widens as they progress through their education. Some young people are being left behind as their more advantaged peers outpace them, with life-long consequences. Although public discourse encourages us to see educational failure as the fault of individuals, there is wide agreement that these inequities result from policy failures in Australian education.
Educators in Australia have a duty of care to their students, inclusive of both a moral and legal obligation to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the students in their care. Specifically, this duty requires educators to take reasonable measures to protect students from experiencing foreseeable harm; failure to do so may constitute negligence. In the simplest sense, a foundational element of educators’ work is to ensure the schooling environment is a safe one, free from bodily or mental harm. In practice, this may be more complicated than it sounds. Students may reserve verbal abuse and/or physically violent behaviours for when school-based adults are not present, making educators’ intervention more challenging. Further, individual schooling cultures may inadvertently encourage or discourage these forms of harassment through the messages of in/tolerance that educators convey to their students via their un/willingness to engage when particular students identity characteristics are targeted for harassment or victimisation.
This chapter is based on mix-method research, funded by the Australian Research Council, that was undertaken by Associate Professors Tania Ferfolja and Jacqueline Ullman, called ’Gender and Sexuality Diversity in Schools: Parental Experiences and Schooling Responses’. The study sought answers to two key questions. The first was what do Australian parents with a school-aged child who attends a public school want in relation to gender and sexuality diversity-related content in the curriculum? The second question sought to understand the experiences of parents of gender and sexuality diverse (GSD) young people in navigating the public school system with and for their child. Understanding these experiences can help to create safer and more inclusive learning environments, for not only GSD students but all students.
Much of Australia’s superdiversity is apparent in the cultural and linguistic repertoires of children growing up in multilingual families and communities in linguistically diverse highly urbanised and peri‐urban communities. Ideally, this superdiversity should lead to positive views of early multilingualism that inform curriculum and pedagogy which is responsive to children’s multiple linguistic repertoires and cultural practices. This approach would represent a welcome departure from deficit-based views of multilingualism, embedded in a monolingual mindset and English-only pedagogies that informs much of educational policy in Australia. However, in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) there remains a serious lack of investment, curriculum guidelines and pedagogical support in promoting and extending young children’s multilingual potential.
‘Islamophobic discourse’ refers to the systemic and widespread negative attitudes, beliefs and narratives surrounding the Islamic religion and Muslims. In Australia, Islamophobia has been constructed in media and political spheres, and manifests through everyday experiences of discrimination for the Muslim community. Islamophobia is often characterised by the construction of stereotypes and disinformation that operate to promote fear and mistrust towards Muslims and the Islamic religion, and features Muslims as threatening and disloyal. In addition to Islamophobic discourses and the resulting negative attitudes, Islamophobia has become deeply embedded across societal institutions, and the government has addressed ‘terrorism’ as a priority. This includes education and is evident through the de-radicalisation and countering violent extremism (CVE) policies that have been rolled out in some schools.
This chapter draws from the theoretical perspectives of transnationalism, postcolonialism, and critical place-based pedagogy. We use selected constructs from these theories to analyse and address concerns identified in our qualitative studies related to early childhood education and care (ECEC) pedagogies that support migrant families’ transnational identities and practices in the particular context of Aotearoa New Zealand (Aotearoa). Aotearoa is a country with a history of colonisation by Britain, and it continues to address the impacts of colonisation on Māori, the Indigenous people. Postcolonial theorising seeks to understand and theorise restorative pathways beyond these impacts.
In one way or another, each of these teachers in the quotes above is grappling with the role of theory and how best to employ it in their teaching to assist their students to better understand the cultural complexity of the world in which they live. By ‘cultural complexity’, I am primarily referring to that derived from the ethnic diversity now characteristic of school communities in migrant-based nations, such as Australia. This, of course, is evident on a global scale with increasing migration, both voluntary and forced leading to the rapid transformation of national populations. Diversification through migration is more prevalent in some countries than others. But, with global flows of people occurring alongside that of information, goods, services and capital, aided by digital technologies and the speed of, and easier access to, travel, nowhere remains impervious to the forces of globalisation and the cultural complexity that results. Such rapid and complex change is difficult to comprehend, but its effects are so far-reaching that now, more than ever, there is a need for the appropriate conceptual resources to better navigate its impact.
In the 21st century, voluntary and increasingly forced migration has brought about linguistic, cultural, socioeconomic, and religious diversity that continues to enrich educational settings. Australian early childhood centres and schools, like many others around the world, are increasingly comprised of teachers and young people who speak multiple languages and dialects, and who connect to and interact with diverse cultures and traditions within a range of new and evolving spaces. Yet in English speaking countries in the global north and south there is a persistent and widespread adherence to a monocultural, monolingual orientation ‘English-only’ approach. This comprises of placing emphasis on knowledge created in and communicated through English only. This orientation has a significant influence on inclusion and engagement for all young people and the ways educators teach and students learn across educational contexts.
When we think of empirical research, we think of things we can observe. Empirical research, as conceived within a Western scientific framework, is discussed in this chapter by addressing the Eurocentric basis of research and the curriculum. It is now imperative to consider how to enrich sociological theory and find new ways of revealing innovative knowledge in educational research. This chapter highlights the role Indigenous knowledges and theories have in informing educational research and knowledge production. Indigenous Standpoint Theories (IST), situated within Indigenous knowledge paradigms, goes beyond Western research as this encompasses our way of knowing and being in the world. Foley and Rigney conclude that Indigenous research must work to free our people from oppressive barriers and reflect our lived experiences as Indigenous people. IST positions our people as knowledge holders and speaks to the significance of critically situating ourselves in relation to that knowledge.
Childhood is a critical period in terms of growth and development regarding cognition, language, social, emotional, and physical competence. This takes place within the context of different and varying social environments, which can impact on children’s learning and understandings of the worlds in which they live and how they fit into them. Childhood is a critical period in terms of addressing issues of discrimination and inequality that exist in society — discrimination that children and their families from minority cultures, and from other points of difference, can encounter, including in educational contexts. However, it is also a critical time in which to address the discrimination that children perpetuate in their daily interactions with others. Research shows that children are aware of and participate in, for example, racial, gendered, classed and (dis)ablist based discriminatory practices early, perpetuating the power relations that exist in the broader society around difference. However, much of this practice can go unnoticed or rationalised by adults through discourses of childhood, child development, and childhood innocence.
In this final chapter, we would like to extend the metaphor of the ‘unseen half’ by exploring how sociological theory itself is ‘unseen’ in early childhood, primary and secondary educational contexts, at least outside of pre-service teacher education and academia itself. When stories about education settings, educational-related issues or educational research findings enter the public milieu via the media, there is rarely any explicit acknowledgement of the theoretical perspectives that might have informed the analysis of the story, issue, or ‘problem’. We propose that ignoring these theoretical influences is due less to a lack of theoretical presence and more to theory’s unfortunate relegation to the background as bland, unintelligible, irrelevant or even elitist.