Constructing Academic Community: Power, Relationality, Hospitality, and Conversation

Academic community can be considered from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Exploring it from a philosophical point of view can incorporate other perspectives and identify basic common agencies that enable or diminish community. Using a philosophical organic perspective, I explore the four common agencies of power, relationality, hospitality, and conversation. I have primarily in mind the academic community that faculty create.Power can be used unilaterally or relationally. The former emphasizes control and yields a thin concept of community as an aggregation or collection of individuals. Relational power emphasizes connectivity and the common good, yielding a balanced concept of community as individuals in relationship. Emphasizing radical openness to the other, hospitality becomes a cardinal academic virtue in the framework of relational power. Hospitable academic communities are created and sustained through conversation, as Michael Oakeshott helps us to see.Although the concept of academic community advanced here is a rigorous one, it can serve as a regulative idea of what we are at our best. That is, it is both a standard against which to measure ourselves and a lure that can draw us out of ourselves.     

明清文人的疏离心态及其意象载体

明清时期一些文人热衷于写“落花”组诗，反映出一股“疏离”心理潜流在滋长。明代唐寅等人吟咏落花，以散漫自纵的生活态度疏离士大夫主群体；明清易代之际的遗民诗人吟咏落花，以飘零自守的精神气节疏离当朝统治者；清中叶袁枚吟咏落花，以洒脱自适的生活观念疏离主流价值取向；晚清龚自珍吟咏落花，以激愤和前瞻的姿态疏离主流社会。从这种疏离主流的心态可以感受到明清知识分子对精神自由的渴求，以及对传统文化精华的解悟。     

略论十七世纪中俄外交礼仪之争与两国关系

17世纪初,中俄两国开始从隔膜到接触的过程,由于国情的隔膜与差异,双方虽在一系列问题上发生了较为激烈的争执与冲突,但基本属于各自基于本国国情和国家利益,基于本国的化历史传统和对两国政治关系的认识而发生的礼仪之争,17世纪的中俄关系,基本上是和平正常的,18世纪20年代,俄国的萨瓦使团来华后,开始对中国进行武力威胁,这就超越了两国外交活动的范畴。     

Counter conducts as affective practices in the classroom: the task of pedagogies of affirmative estrangement

This paper suggests that scholarship in critical pedagogy needs to consider two important issues: first, how students’ affective life (‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ are used as interchangeable terms here) is manifested through ‘counter-conduct practices’, namely, practices of resistance that challenge dominant or hegemonic social forces; and, second, how critical pedagogies may cultivate such practices in order to inspire estrangement from hegemonic forces. Seeking to bring together these two issues, the paper explores opportunities for critical pedagogies that may subvert or redirect the conducting role of hegemonic emotion norms and rules. It is particularly emphasized that estrangement from hegemonic norms and rules is essential in developing critical and affective commitments to social justice. The conclusion points out that what are called here ‘pedagogies of affirmative estrangement’ can make a valuable intervention in the scholarship on critical pedagogy by renewing conceptualizations of the politics of the self and emotion in the classroom.