Earticle

When we try to explain our feelings about love, the more we try to describe them, the more the feelings of love run away from what we feel. Can we articulate the feelings of love in language? The Giver shows us to sense love and its feelings which are living in the relation with others. Hegel wrote two articles about love in his early writings. According to Hegel, love is a feeling not understanding or reason. Love is not connected to ‘a’ feeling but various feelings. As we know, love does not have only joyous or happy feelings. Love is very complicated with a multitude of feelings. Distinguishing love which is animating from one which is deadening, Hegel connects love with feelings of indignation, anger, hostility, and shame. He seeks love which is living in others. Moreover, Judith Butler thinks love can be animating in grief or loss. She insists mourning the loss is the precondition of love. She believes the animating powers of love which testify to a persistent aliveness in the loss. In The Giver, there is no love in the community where a protagonist, Jonas, lives. They try to define their feelings into some words but the feelings are deadened as soon as they are fixed in language. The community seeks the same, equality, and safety but people in the community are dispossessed of their living feelings, imagination, and even love. Just there are lifeless laws, prohibitions, and obedience without any conflict in the community. Through Hegel’s perspective, the community and people in community are also deadened. Through Butler’s view, sensing what is living in love with others is to give up a fantasy that the sameness, equality and safety without any lack are the best policy for the community which struggles to prevent from difference, conflict, and disorder.

In his award winning speculative novel The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi depicts the devastating effects of western capitalism with its neoliberal policies on the third world countries in relation to ecological issues. Thailand is the only nation that has developed new gene-hacked produces and fruits on their own and resisted this foreign pressures that demand opening the market for the agricultural crops which have been biotechnologically developed by global companies. Embedded also in this ingenious infiltration of foreign global companies are scientific and technological products such as windup girls that are specially created cyborgs for many purposes by Japanese due to the dwindling number of people and work forces. Bacigalupi not only warns the rivalry between western companies that only strive to gain profits in every corner of the world but he also suggests that we renew the way of our life and the understanding of the world we live in so that we can transform the naïve attitude towards environmental issues and nation/state policies that have contributed to endangering the earth. This paper examines the way in which the author represents the neoliberal drives of western countries that have complicated the order of international economic and trade within the third world nations and how that move has caused internal conflicts and problems in the affected nations as it struggles to defend nation/state and political capability. It also tries to understand the author’s reflection on how we can maintain our human nature in the posthuman era in which we will have to coexist with new people of novelty like windup girls in the midst of some contradictions inherent in the economic and political forces of the North world. The author helps us to confront new challenges we may face when the new technological revolution leads us to recognize ethical issues on human nature.

Descartes claimed for the two fundamentally different substances that compose the Universe, res cogitance and res extensa as : res extensa is a substance to think and res extensa is one to extend in space, including the body and the brain. He had supposed the abyss between the two substances and modern philosophy and science have loyally sticked to his dualism. Refusing the dualist idea—further the philosophical tradition of dualism since Descartes—with the term “Descartes’s error,” the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio maintains that the sophisticated process of mind is not separated from the organization and function of a biological organism. Yet, the French philosopher Catherine Malabou, paying attention to Descartes’s reference to the pineal gland located in the center of the brain, holds that the interactivity between the material and the spiritual is assumed even in Descartes: Descartes assumed the pineal gland as the place that res cogitance and res extensa interact, implying the interactivity between the material and the mind and the function of the brain for it. Along with this claim, she proposes a new materialism grounded on the interactive relationship between the biological and the conscious. As neuroscientists like Damasio and new materialists including Malabou and N. Katherine Hayles have claimed by exploring neuronal processes for constructing emotion and feeling, human consciousness and reality are primitively material. The new wounded, Malabou’s term for the patients with brain damage experience the complete transformation of consciousness only to be a totally new person. The new wounded have become the good example to show the function of nonconscious process within the body—particularly the brain—as a fundamental ingredient in constructing a self; thusly, it is called nonconscious cognition. The new materialists, such as Hayles and Malabou, assert that the understanding of the nonconscious cognition helps us reconfigure human consciousness and reality. Hayles points out as an example of the new materialism Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005), which deals with a new wounded protagonist’s obsession to the authenticity of reality. Its protagonist after the brain damage desires to have authentic feelings about reality and for the feelings he re-enacts some selected situations in a large scale. His desire for the authenticity and re-enactment of reality appears immoral, unempathetic, and anti-social. The paper discusses how the novel’s description of the new wounded’s non-normality reveals what conscious cognition-based discourses have not told about the human and reality.

This poster uses Critical Animal Studies to examine the anthroparchal cultural messages transmitted to children through mandated curriculum in Ontario schools. Through a close examination of the language used I aim to “critically explore the way that children’s ethical practices in relation to other animals are shaped” (Matsuoka & Sorenson, 2018, p. 94). I think that this exploration will lend itself to another interesting conundrum in education: climate change education should be integrated into every subject but the language of the curriculum works to purport the deemed culturally appropriate relations with nonhuman animals, and thereby against the kind of oppression-less relationship needed to make a change.

To date, a great amount of emphasis has been placed on competency-based learning in college education. Much research has shown the effects of core competencies in college education. However, little attention has been paid on the effects of core competencies in English education and extracurricular English programs. This study examines the effects of a 2-week intensive English program based on the college students’ perceptions of core competencies: English Communication Competency, Self-Directed Competency, Community Competency, and Knowledge and Information Literacy Competency. The program was non-credit and was held in 2019 for first-year students who had chosen to attend a university in Korea in the upcoming semester. The data for this case study was collected through a questionnaire completed by 33 students and reflection papers from students and was analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The items were adopted from the report from Korea Council for University Education (2018). The results showed that three competencies (English Communication Competency, Self-Directed Competency, and Knowledge and Information Literacy Competency) of the participants were improved after joining the English program. The results also revealed that Community Competency did not improve significantly after joining the program but showed a strong tendency. The results indicated that a short term English program is effective in the aspects of enhancing college students’ core competencies. It is necessary to continuously monitor the effects of the program in the aspects of core competencies. The pedagogical implications and future directions of the study were discussed.

Shortly after the decision among campuses was made to move online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Korean tertiary students demanded tuition refunds, citing fees paid did not equate to levels of education received. Considering the numerous concerns involved in switching from traditional to online classes, student dissatisfaction with online classes may not solely be with what students have deemed ‘poor lecture quality’. It is probable that a number of student factors are playing strong roles in overall satisfaction. Korean universities place high value on i) satisfaction, semesterly students offer opinions on classes through completion of teacher evaluations, and ii) EMI, one of the indices assessing global competitiveness on the Jungang-Ilbo university ranking. This study examined English as the Medium of Instruction (EMI) distance learners’ perspectives of satisfaction. While there have been a number of studies on L1 and EFL/ESL online classes, research on EMI distance learning in Korea, and even EMI distance learning classes, is yet uncommon. Results indicated instructional strategy use was higher among students with prior EMI experience, and instructional strategy use and satisfaction differed among specialty disciplines. Analysis of the effects of factors on satisfaction revealed academic integration, academic conscientiousness, and instructional strategy mediated the link between distance learner class engagement and satisfaction. Interestingly, academic conscientiousness was inversely associated with instructional strategy and engagement did not directly influence instruction strategy use. Results suggest simplification might increase efficiency, and this combined with academic conscientiousness and academic integration, which increase when students are engaged, increases EMI distance learning satisfaction.