Online education disrupting traditional academic models

By Kabir Chibber Technology of business reporter, BBC News

FP’s 2010 Global Thinkers gala in photos

Here are a few images from last night’s Top 100 Global Thinkers event at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art.

White House commission will review human research

Today, I am wearing my happy-with-the-government face. Why? Because somebody, somewhere in Washington, seems to have realized that the past actually has an impact on the present.

Culture, nature, and mediation

Matthew Engelke is right: religion is about mediation. Ironically so, because it is about the divine; but because the divine is never directly available, religion must instead be about how the divine is indirectly manifest. Thus, as Régis Debray has shown in his God: an Itinerary, monotheism, which is apparently the most other-worldly and non-mediated of creeds, has had to identify itself in concrete terms, which may bizarrely include preference for some landscapes over others, or for association with some animals over others.

Child and Community Mental Health in Cultural Perspective: a special issue of Transcultural Psychiatry

The latest Transcultural Psychiatry is a special issue on “Child and Community Mental Health in Cultural Perspective.” Consisting of papers presented at the 2009 McGill Advanced Institute in Cultural Psychiatry and others on the “interactions between developmental psychopathology, family systems, communities and culture,” (Guzder and Rousseau 2010). In their introduction to the issue, McGill University  child psychiatrists Jaswant Guzder and Cecile Rousseau write:

What Is Remythologizing?

That?s the subtitle of the introduction. In reply, we?re treated to an overview of the project and, at the end, 10 theses. In fact, this chapter isn?t so much an attempt to give a definition, but to raise and orient readers to the fundamental issues and concepts involved. The first of these is the concept of ?myth? and ?mythos,? where ?remythologizing pertains first and foremost to mythos, not myth? (p. 5). Mythos is about dramatic plot, a rendering of historical action and passion, ?a mode of discourse that configures human action so as to create a form of wholeness (i.e. a unified action) out of a multiplicity of incidents? (p. 6). Myth, however, is about the supratemporal. Mythos is essentially what the Bible is.

Stuart Hall in conversation with Les Back

In March 2006 I received an email from my friend and colleague Claire Alexander about her plan to edit a journal special issue dedicated to assessing and celebrating the work of Stuart Hall. She wanted particularly to foreground his contribution?

First Turkish-Romany dictionary to be completed soon

Book Review: Turkey and The Holocaust:Turkey?s Role in Rescuing Turkish and European Jewry from Nazi Persecution, 1933-1945(By Bernard Lewis)

reviewed by Irem Güney

Book Review: The Multiple Identities of the Middle East (By Bernard Lewis)

reviewed by Ozge Taylan

The French Academic Diaspora

Are too many of France’s most talented academics settling in the United States? more