Search Results (126)

International policy frameworks, including the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) and the WHO Quality Rights initiative, have established dignity as a foundational right in mental health care. However, a significant gap remains between these policy aspirations and the lived experience of service users, often due to risk-averse cultures that prioritize control over autonomy. This commentary employs an interpretive synthesis of international literature (2006–2025) and illustrative case examples, such as the Trieste model and Quality Rights implementation in low-resource settings, to examine the operationalization of dignity-centered care. I argue for a paradigm shift from control-based safety models to relational safety grounded in biographical literacy and positive risk-taking. Key findings highlight that dignity-centered approaches not only improve patient experiences of respect and agency but also mitigate moral injury and burnout among the nursing workforce. Furthermore, as digital mental health tools and AI-driven risk assessments emerge, systems must ensure these technologies enhance rather than automate paternalism. I conclude that realizing dignity-centered care requires a structural and cultural transformation, embedding dignity into clinical protocols, leadership practices, and environmental design to move beyond rhetorical commitments toward measurable, humane standards. Full article

Local and Indigenous knowledge (LIK) systems are recognised as a pertinent component of effective and equitable water governance, especially for building resilient, sustainable, and climate-resilient water management systems; however, their incorporation into water governance systems and processes remains limited, symbolic, and hindered by technocratic, legal, and power barriers. This study, through a systematic overview of existing work from Africa, aims to explore critically the role and contribution of LIK systems in water governance and climate adaptation, with the goal of establishing that LIK systems should be understood and operationalised as a water governance system, not as a supplementary knowledge system. Through systematic thematic analysis, four recurring themes are identified: (i) rhetorical recognition of LIK without substantive institutionalisation; (ii) evidence of contributions to local-scale climate adaptation, ecosystem management, and water resource allocation; (iii) inherent challenges of legal marginalisation, epistemic dominance, and power asymmetry; and (iv) transformative limitations of participatory or co-management frameworks that maintain state-led authority. SWOT analysis reveals LIK’s strengths in adaptive innovation, knowledge coproduction, and governance legitimacy, with potential threats of marginalisation, institutional fragmentation, and dominance by technocratic discourses. The results show that the failure of integration is governance-driven rather than knowledge-driven, emphasising the importance of institutional recognition, legal pluralism, vertical integration, and the sharing of power. Partnership with LIK as an equal in governance helps create policy environments that are inclusive, flexible, and socially legitimate. This approach to integration directly contributes to the achievement of SDG 6 (Clean Water and Sanitation), SDG 13 (Climate Action), SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), SDG 16 (Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions), and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals). This review establishes a conceptual, empirical, and practical basis for incorporating LIK into water governance, promoting adaptive, equitable, and resilient water resource management in a climate of uncertainty and complexity. Additionally, the review argues that climate-resilient water governance requires institutional recognition of legal pluralism, vertically integrated decision-making structures, and explicit power-sharing arrangements that treat LIK as coequal governance rather than consultative input. By reframing LIK integration as a question of authority and institutional design, this review contributes to debates on epistemic justice and adaptive water governance under climate change. While grounded in African case studies, the findings contribute to broader global debates on epistemic pluralism and inclusive water governance. Full article

Environmental commitments disclosed in merger and acquisition (M&A) announcements have become an important channel through which firms signal their green governance intentions. However, systematic empirical evidence remains limited regarding whether and how capital markets respond to such commitments. Using a sample of M&A events involving Chinese A-share listed firms from 2010 to 2023, this study develops a multidimensional framework to measure environmental commitment quality and examines its association with market performance while exploring potential channels through which capital markets respond to such disclosures. The results show that: (1) high-quality environmental commitments are associated with significant short-term and long-term abnormal returns, suggesting that investors respond positively to such disclosures. (2) Increased public attention and enhanced green innovation emerge as key channels linking environmental commitments to market performance. (3) More importantly, firms issuing high-quality commitments subsequently exhibit improvements in long-term financial, environmental, market, investment, and governance performance, suggesting that these commitments may function as credible signals rather than mere “greenwashing” rhetoric. (4) These observed patterns are structurally heterogeneous and more pronounced in firms with abundant resource endowments and stronger executive environmental awareness. Overall, this study provides new evidence on how event-driven environmental disclosures are associated with firms’ resource acquisition processes and offers insights for policies aimed at improving disclosure regulation and guiding capital toward green transformation. Full article

Architecture exists at a moment of instability as economic forces narrow professional agency, as knowledge domains challenge disciplinary boundaries, and as calls for decolonisation and sustainability demand epistemological reorientation. Architectural education occupies a strategic position within these dynamics, simultaneously shaped by professional uncertainty and actively constructing alternative futures. This article examines contemporary architectural education as an experiential lens through which a perceptive understanding of how the discipline negotiates transformation can be developed. It draws on a global survey of 345 architecture schools across 159 countries, conducted by the Architectural Education Commission of the International Union of Architects (UIA), and investigates institutional responses to economic constraints, transdisciplinarity, technological transformation, labour precarity, and ethical imperatives. Employing a nine-dimensional framework and six thematic lenses to map global patterns, the findings reveal a convergence–divergence paradox where schools converge around studio pedagogy (78%), national accreditation (92%), and professional degrees (62%), while diverging substantially in thematic priorities. Near-universal engagement with allied disciplines (99%) and SDG integration (88%) contrast sharply with limited efforts at decolonisation (29%) and a health focus (26%), revealing selective adoption of key ethical imperatives. The analysis unveils systematic gaps between declared commitments and enacted practices, with high adoption rates masking shallow implementation, a pattern evidenced by the gap between near-universal SDG declarations (88%) and the persistence of individual-authorship assessment structures (76–78%). Regional patterns reflect resource stratification, reinforcing colonial or dominant knowledge hierarchies. The study concludes that architecture’s agency remains constrained where schools perform transformation rhetorically while reproducing conventional professional formation structurally. Full article

Curbing pornography consumption is the subject of keen debate and the object of numerous social efforts. The methods of structuring the discourse on combatting pornography use reveal a wide range of sociocultural views. This study utilizes semiotic and textual analyses of videos and advertisements (ads) dedicated to preventing pornography use in the secular and religious sectors of the Israeli Jewish public, which illuminates the differing perceptions and social norms among these groups. To this end, we conducted a comparative study of ads aimed at both audiences. By analyzing their symbolic representations and the rhetoric emerging from their content, we discovered that, while the prohibition narrative for the observant religious public centers on pornography use negatively impact the individual’s environment (their relationship family and community), the ads designed for viewing by the secular public focus on the individuals themselves. Thus, divergent socio ethical perspectives on the use of pornography emerge, illuminating how individuals relate to both their environment and their sense of self. The present study teaches us how different communities adapt words and symbols to convey social messages, particularly those associated with charged issues such as sexuality. Full article

We propose a semantic, geometric, and statistical framework for quantifying and ordering textual cohesion in long-form discourse. Sentences are embedded into a semantic similarity graph and Ollivier–Ricci curvature is used to extract sentence- and document-level structural profiles, represented as step functions on a normalized rhetorical-time axis. On this functional space we define the Weighted Utopia Index (wUI), a corpus-relative measure of weighted shortfall from an upper-envelope profile under a dominance-type ordering. The rhetorical-time weighting function is learned self-supervised: we generate controlled sentence-order perturbations with known ordinal coherence degradation and estimate the weight parameters via an ordered probit model on a training split. We evaluate ordering recovery on held-out State of the Union speeches using rank correlations, pairwise and adjacent ordering accuracy, and violation-localization diagnostics with bootstrap uncertainty. Across these criteria, wUI systematically outperforms embedding-only adjacent-similarity baselines, while a Nash-type aggregation provides an interpretable semantic–structural trade-off score. An application to later-period speeches illustrates how the method yields interpretable cohesion rankings and curvature-profile diagnostics without requiring external annotations. Full article

This paper examines the political instrumentalization of Islam under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, highlighting their distinct approaches to consolidating political authority. The concept of Sovereign Islam is introduced to describe how both leaders engaged with Islam, thereby shaping legitimacy, national identity, and state power. Atatürk, in establishing the secular Turkish Republic, sought to place religion under state supervision, viewing it as closely tied to the modernization project. In contrast, Erdoğan has expanded the public role of religion through Islamic and nationalist rhetoric, reintegrating it into political and social life. While their ideological orientations differ significantly, both leaders demonstrate how religion can become intertwined with state authority, influencing political loyalty, public discourse, and institutional structures. This paper suggests that Türkiye’s democratic challenges are better understood not as a consequence of Islam itself but through an analysis of how political actors have engaged with religion in state-building and governance. In doing so, it offers a perspective on the evolving relationship between religion, secularism, and political power in modern Türkiye. Full article

This article proposes a literary and semantic analysis of Surah 12, Yūsuf, centred on the concept of iḥsān (virtue, goodness, or beauty), which reveals the intimate connection between the Qur’ān’s aesthetic value and the veracity of its contents. A close reading of the surah reveals that iḥsān encompasses dream interpretation, wisdom, forbearance, moral excellence, and other prophetic qualities bestowed by God and displayed by Yūsuf throughout the story. Likewise, iḥsān is presented as structurally antithetical to the intrigues (kuyūd, sing. kayd) plotted by the characters of the story, such as Yūsuf’s brothers, or the mistress of the house. These intrigues are explicitly associated with falsehood and deceit, which explains their ultimate failure against Yūsuf, the bearer of iḥsān and the knowledge of truth, and the Divine Decree. This story presents an ethical model which transcends the boundaries of the narrative and is constantly appropriated by the Qur’ān at the metalevel to demonstrate its veracity and its divine origin. Qur’ānic claims such as being the most beautiful of the stories (aḥsan al-qaṣaṣ) are not simply declarations of its unparalleled eloquence, but rhetorical devices that confirm the text’s contents and its authority by constructing a nexus between iḥsān and truth. Full article

This study investigates how people in certain online communities engage with and adopt hateful rhetoric, specifically examining the escalation of antisemitic language in two deplatformed QAnon-related subreddits. Utilizing a lexicon of implicit and explicit antisemitic terms, the research analyzes over 1.26 million Reddit posts and comments. This study’s objective is to describe the process through which users become more deeply engaged with antisemitic content within hate-filled subcultures found online. Through the application of survival models, chi-square tests, and logistic regressions, the findings reveal that most users do not begin their engagement using antisemitic language and instead engage with antisemitic content before posting it on their own. Moreover, users who transition to posting antisemitic language typically commence with posts containing implicit terms, progressively transitioning from implicit to explicit hate speech. This escalation is particularly pronounced among users demonstrating higher levels of engagement and those interacting with influential community members, often referred to as hyper-posters. The results indicate increased involvement, exposure, and interaction with antisemitic language, especially with hyper-posters, significantly predict increased and more extreme antisemitic language. These findings illuminate the dynamic and socially contingent process through which users engage with and internalize antisemitic language within subcultural digital spaces. The study posits that language radicalization is a structured process shaped by both individual user behavior and the broader community’s social architecture. Full article

Over the past century, literary theory has branched out in several directions. Diverse schools of literary thought, such as Semiotics, New Criticism, Intentionalism, Structuralism, and Deconstruction, have passionately plowed new ground within the academy and just as passionately defended that territory against their neighbor’s incursions. At times, authors and their intentions have been central to literary criticism, while at others, they are intellectually discarded or severely reduced in importance. Much of the friction caused by the shifting focus of literary criticism is driven by impassioned rhetoric and convictions that leave little room for compromise. The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has opened the possibility of a dispassionate arbiter, one that, should the literary community have the courage and conviction to embrace and exploit, could offer a new level of harmony between divergent literary theories. Full article

Nahj al-Balāghah is widely recognized as a foundational and authoritative scripture in Shia Islam. One notable aspect of Nahj al-Balāghah is the deliberate selection and structured arrangement of Ḥadiths. According to the book’s introduction, al-Raḍī explains that he chose the Ḥadiths based on literary considerations. An analysis comparing the selected Ḥadiths with their full versions suggests their inclusion was determined not only by eloquence and rhetorical value but also by conceptual significance. Through textual and descriptive analytical methods, this study examines the author’s motives, especially his political and religious aims, in incorporating materials related to ʿĀisha. A comparison of the relevant ḥadīths in Nahj al-Balāghah and other historical sources indicates that Sayyid Raḍī omitted—or at least refrained from including—certain statements attributed to ʿAlī regarding the Prophet Muḥammad’s youngest wife. The omitted parts concern ʿĀisha’s inconsiderate behavior, grudges, sins, following Satan, and ignoring the Prophet’s prediction. Considering sectarian conflicts between Shiites and Sunnis in the 3rd and 4th centuries AH, some arising from criticisms of ʿĀisha’s conduct and sometimes escalating into violence, al-Raḍī, the supreme judge appointed by the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate, was compelled to omit and censor ʿAli’s harsh remarks about ʿĀisha to prevent further sectarian tensions. Full article

Inclusive education is at the forefront of transnational policy agendas. Yet, normative, deficit-oriented disability discourses and institutional gaps continue to shape how inclusion is enacted in schools, often displacing extensive and unacknowledged labour onto families, especially mothers. Drawing on feminist theories of invisible work, this article critically examines the everyday labour performed by mothers of disabled children as they navigate inclusive education systems in Alberta, Canada. Situated within a broader collective case study, this analysis asks: What forms of invisible work do mothers undertake in pursuit of inclusion within education systems labelled as inclusive? Semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine mothers of disabled children. Reflexive thematic analysis illuminated four intersecting dimensions of invisible work: (1) working within the system, (2) working to fit the system, (3) crafting system workarounds, and (4) working above and beyond the system. These forms of work reveal how inclusive education systems rely on mothers to bridge the gap between policy rhetoric and lived experiences. Findings illuminate how mothers’ invisible work simultaneously sustains, negotiates, and resists systemic ableism, highlighting the need to recognize and redistribute this work and reimagine inclusion as a shared structural responsibility rather than an individual, maternal pursuit. Full article

Understanding how moral and emotional language operates in paid social advertising is essential for evaluating persuasion and its ethical contours. We provide a descriptive map of Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) language in Meta ad copy (Facebook/Instagram) drawn from seven global beverage brands across eight English-speaking markets. Using the moralstrength toolkit, we implement a two-channel pipeline that combines an unsupervised semantic estimator (SIMON) with supervised classifiers, enforces a strict cross-channel consensus rule, and adds a non-overriding purity diagnostic to reduce attribute-based false positives. The corpus comprises 758 text units, of which only 25 ads (3.3%) exhibit strong consensus, indicating that much of the copy is either non-moral or linguistically ambiguous. Within this high-consensus subset, the distribution of moral cues varies systematically by brand and category, with loyalty, fairness, and purity emerging as the most prominent frames. A valence pass (VADER) indicates that moralized copy tends toward negative valence, yet it may still yield a constructive overall tone when advertisers follow a crisis–resolution structure in which high-intensity moral cues set the stakes while surrounding copy positions the brand as the solution. We caution that text-only models undercapture multimodal signaling and that platform policies and algorithmic recombination shape which moral cues appear in copy. Overall, the study demonstrates both the promise and the limits of current text-based MFT estimators for advertising: they support transparent, reproducible mapping of moral rhetoric, but future progress requires multimodal, domain-sensitive pipelines, policy-aware sampling, and (where available) impression/spend weighting to contextualize descriptive labels. Full article

Effective communication is essential for professional practice, yet medical curricula rarely incorporate systematic, performance-based training. The Sell Yourself!—Presentation Techniques course was developed to address this gap through a two-day, practice-oriented program integrating rhetorical training, evolutionary psychology, and structured peer feedback. We examined anonymized institutional evaluations from 450 medical students using descriptive statistics and combined inductive–deductive thematic and content coding to gauge the perceived educational utility of the course. The course received a mean satisfaction rating of 9.6/10, with approximately 74% of students assigning the maximum score. Inductive analysis identified interactivity (143 mentions), practical usefulness (76), feedback and improvement (75), positive atmosphere (51), instructor quality (47), and multimedia examples (37) as key strengths, while critiques primarily concerned breaks and scheduling (62), course length and intensity (59), and smaller concerns regarding feedback processes, content structure, and technical issues. Deductive coding indicated perceived improvements across five predefined dimensions: increased confidence, rhetorical fluency, feedback quality, peer recognition, and cultural inclusivity. Structured rhetorical training appears to be well received by learners and may provide a feasible model for embedding communication competence in medical education. These findings also offer a transferable template for integrating performance-based communication training into other programs. However, conclusions are limited by reliance on self-reported perceptions and the absence of a control group or direct assessment of applied communication outcomes. Full article

This article re-interprets V. S. Naipaul’s “Tell Me Who to Kill” from In a Free State (1971) through a Heideggerian lens, focusing on the ‘groundlessness’ of existence and the dialectics of ‘danger’ that structure the unnamed narrator’s life within colonial ‘modernity’. Using Hiedegger’s phenomenology as a rhetorical hermeneutic, it traces how ordinary existential structures—fear, anxiety, boredom, curiosity, idle talk, and ambiguity—surface in the narrator’s and other characters’ comportments and speech. In Heidegger’s sense, these moods do not simply describe psychological states but reveal the conditions of Dasein’s being-in-the-world and the ontological disclosures of a being unhomed by empire. By situating Heidegger’s concepts of Dasein, thrownness, and fallenness within Naipaul’s world of migration, labour, and racial precarity, the paper reveals how metaphysical homelessness becomes historically tangible. The narrator’s obsessive drive for success, his failed fraternal duty, and his descent into estrangement dramatize a colonial subjectivity torn between aspiration and abjection. In reframing Heidegger through the postcolonial experience, the article both deprovincializes European existentialism and reclaims phenomenology as a site for interrogating the psychic economies of empire. Ultimately, the novella becomes a poetics of nihilism—where the search for authenticity collapses under the weight of displacement. Full article