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Displaying (1 - 19 of 19)
- Contributor(s)
- D. Scharie Tavcer; Tanya Trussler; Keri-Ann Loutit
- Date issued
- 2016
- Description
- As well as pinpointing gaps in available literature on adult sexual assault in Alberta, this study is focused on identifying the underlying issues that lead to the discrepancies in the number of police-reported sexual assault crimes and the data retrieved from individuals who access victim support services. It is believed that the crime-funnel effect on sexual assault cases, where many cases do not end up continuing through the justice system in Alberta, is a root factor that results in victims choosing not to report the incident; Victims choose not to report the incident knowing that a large percentage of crimes do not proceed to court, do not result in convictions, or the sentences are...
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- Steven Engler
- Date issued
- 2011
- Description
- This paper offers a brief overview of Canadian case law since the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted in 1982. At the same time that it has more firmly entrenched religious freedom, the Charter has placed explicit limits on the right of religious freedom. Canadian courts have shown themselves willing to intervene in the internal workings of religious institutions. Legal protection has been extended to include not only non-Christian religions but also non-religious beliefs more generally.The cumulative effect of these decisions has been to effectively erode the de facto separation between Church and State that has developed in Canada. The value of increased respect for...
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- Kyler R. Rasmussen; Daniel Millar; Jeremy Trenchuk
- Date issued
- 2018
- Description
- Research suggests that pornography has the potential to inform sexual and romantic scripts, but no studies have examined the relational content within modern mainstream pornography. In this article, we present a content analysis of 190 sexually explicit online video clips from mainstream pornography streaming websites, coding for the relationship between participants (if any) and whether the video portrayed acts of infidelity. We also contrasted those clips with a comparison sample of 77 YouTube videos. We found that depictions of on-screen committed relationships were relatively rare in pornography (7.9% of videos) compared to YouTube (18.2%), but that infidelity was relatively common ...
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- Steven Engler
- Date issued
- 2003
- Description
- This paper evaluates claims that classical Ayurveda was scientific, in a modern western sense, and that the many religious and magical elements found in the texts were all either stale Vedic remnants or later brahminic impositions. It argues (1) that Ayurveda did not manifest standard criteria of “science” (e.g., materialism, empirical observation, experimentation, falsification, quantification, or a developed conception of proof) and (2) that Vedic aspects of the classical texts are too central to be considered inauthentic or marginal. These points suggest that attempting to apply the modern western categories of “science” and “religion” to ancient South Asian medical texts at best...
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- Steven Engler
- Date issued
- 2011
- Description
- This paper interrogates a particular globalizing academic move: the appropriation of Afro-Brazilian religion by the academic study of religion in North America as a paradigmatic form of cultural mixture. Specifically, I ask what difference would it make if Umbanda were the key example of Brazilian cultural hybridity, rather than Candomblé serving as a more universal example of religious syncretism. I elaborate the concept of hybridity of refraction, according to which the ritual and doctrinal spectrum of Umbandas refracts the spectrum of social tensions in Brazilian society. Referring to recent theories of globalization, I argue that Umbanda’s internal variation manifests a variety of...
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- Karen Manarin
- Date issued
- 2018
- Description
- Why read? What is the point of reading in higher education if students can succeed in their classes without reading? Using Wigfield and Eccles’ Expectancy-Value theory of motivation as a framework, I explore why different instructors think their students should be reading and whether students share these motivations. Instructors and students attribute value to reading differently. Instructors value reading for what it allows students to do and become. Students may value reading but still not read depending on competing factors including time available and assessment tasks required. The essay concludes by asking higher educational professionals to consider what, if anything, should be done...
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- Melanie J. Rock; Dawn Rault; Chris Degeling
- Date issued
- 2017
- Description
- Dog-bites and rabies are neglected problems worldwide, notwithstanding recent efforts to raise awareness and to consolidate preventive action. As problems, dog-bites and rabies are entangled with one another, and both align with the concept of One Health. This concept emphasizes interdependence between humans and non-human species in complex socio-ecological systems. Despite intuitive appeal, One Health applications and critiques remain under-developed with respect to social science and social justice. In this article, we report on an ethnographic case-study of policies on dog bites and rabies, with a focus on Calgary, Alberta, Canada, which is widely recognized as a leader in animal...
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- D. Scharie Tavcer
- Date issued
- 2016
- Description
- Can young men distinguish between quotes from conventional magazines and quotes from convicted rapists? To what extent do young men agree/disagree with statements about dating, sex, women and sexual assault? The purpose of this study is to contribute to the existing literature about young men’s attitudes towards women and sex. This study is a partial replication of the work conducted in the United Kingdom (UK) by Horvath & Hegarty (2011) combined with a partial replication of the work conducted in the United States (USA) by Lonsway & Fitzgerald (1995) Myths, beliefs and the attitudes of today’s young men toward dating, sex, and sexual assault are also explored in this study. Similar...
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- Steven Engler
- Date issued
- 2009
- Description
- This article works with theory of ritual in order to begin addressing a series of questions raised by Brazilian spirit possession rituals (in Kardecism and Umbanda). Four contributions to theory of ritual highlight relevant conceptual issues: Humphrey and Laidlaw on non-intentionality; Bloch on deference; Houseman and Severi on social relations; and Kapferer on virtuality. Strawson’s philosophical distinction between objective and reactive attitudes toward intentionality is used to make a case (i) that certain formal aspects of ritual (indexicals) serve to (ii) mark culturally variable attitudes to agency within rituals, which are related to, but fundamentally distinct from, non-ritual...
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- Steven Engler
- Date issued
- 2009
- Description
- Scholars of religion continue to talk of syncretism where their colleagues have moved on to talk of hybridity. This paper reviews critiques of the latter concept and argues that ‘hybridity’ can be a useful concept, but only if further specified. I follow Peter Wade in distinguishing between hybridity of origin (the combination of pre-existing forms), and hybridity of encounter (the result of diasporic movements). I propose a third type, hybridity of refraction, in order to highlight the manner in which religiousor cultural phenomena refract social tensions within a specific nation or society, resulting in a spectrum of ritual, doctrinal and/or religious forms. The typology is not meant to...
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- D. Scharie Tavcer; Margaret Bowles
- Date issued
- 2018
- Description
- The Calgary Women’s Emergency Shelter (CWES) team continues to make a difference in lives of women and their children fleeing domestic violence. However, they realise they can do more. A challenge within their shelter program is that women with substance-related issues are occasionally not a good fit for the family centered approach currently in place at the CWES shelter. There are many women, with substance-related issues, who are in need of support related to domestic violence, but supports in Calgary are limited, and often in silos. CWES is considering how they can best serve this specific population of women in Calgary.
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- Steven Engler
- Date issued
- 2006
- Description
- This paper analyzes three influential studies of dāna (‘giving’ or ‘charity’) in South Asian religious traditions. After clarifying anthropological and sociological theories of the gift, it argues that a reliance on these ideas has distorted attempts by these and other scholars of religion to make sense of dāna, and of related South Asian social relations and religious motivations. It concludes by underlining the need for the ongoing reflexive refinement of the categories and concepts used by scholars of religion
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- Steven Engler; Mark Q. Gardiner
- Date issued
- 2013
- Description
- In this paper we argue that, despite the fact that the term ‘god’ may be used effectively as a comparative concept in the study of religion within narrowly circumscribed contexts, the risks of doing so as a broad cross-cultural category outweigh any possible benefits. We advance an account of the kind of meaning that complex concepts, like ‘god’, have. This account guarantees a risk that certain further concepts that are associated with ‘god’ in some cultural contexts will be illicitly transferred to its use in others. The centrality of ‘god’ in western and Christian contexts makes this risk particularly acute, to the point of not being worth the trouble.
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- Alain Morin
- Date issued
- 2011
- Description
- Self-awareness represents the capacity of becoming the object of one’s own attention. In this state one actively identifies, processes, and stores information about the self. This paper surveys the self-awareness literature by emphasizing definition issues, measurement techniques, effects and functions of self-attention, and antecedents of self-awareness. Key self-related concepts (e.g., minimal, reflective consciousness) are distinguished from the central notion of self-awareness. Reviewed measures include questionnaires, implicit tasks, and self-recognition. Main effects and functions of self-attention consist in self-evaluation, escape from the self, amplification of one’s subjective...
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- Mark Q. Gardiner; Steven Engler
- Date issued
- 2018
- Description
- This article investigates the extent to which the cognitive science of religion (CSR) and Donald Davidson’s semantic holism (DSH) harmonize. We first characterize CSR, philosophical semantics (and more specifically DSH). We then note a prima facie tension between CSR and DSH’s view of First-Person Authority (that we know what is meant when we speak in a way that we do not when others speak). If CSR is correct that the causes of religious belief are located in cognitive processes in the mind/brain, then religious insiders might have no idea what they are talking about: only the scholar of CSR would have a chance of knowing what they ‘really’ mean. The article argues that the resolution to...
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- Steven Engler
- Date issued
- 2012
- Description
- This article argues that scholarship on Umbanda (a distinctively Brazilian hybrid of Candomblé, Kardecist Spiritism, and popular Catholicism, with romanticized indigenous elements) manifests certain limitations that lead to insufficient emphasis on the religious tradition’s internal doctrinal, ritual, and organizational variation. It compares the complex and ambivalent place of African traditions in Umbanda and Candomblé, highlighting the extent to which Umbanda has been seen as derivative, more distant from Africa. The article also notes other distorting factors such as centros in the southeast of Brazil being considered normative, and scholars focusing inordinately on the question of...
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- Alain Morin
- Date issued
- 2010
- Description
- A fashionable view in comparative psychology states that primates possess self-awareness because they exhibit mirror self-recognition (MSR), which in turn makes it possible to infer mental states in others (‘‘theory-of-mind’’; ToM). In cognitive neuroscience, an increasingly popular position holds that the right hemisphere represents the centre of self-awareness because MSR and ToM tasks presumably increase activity in that hemisphere. These two claims are critically assessed here as follows: (1) MSR should not be equated with full-blown self-awareness, as it most probably only requires kinaesthetic self-knowledge and does not involve access to one’s mental events; (2) ToM and self...
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- Irene Shankar; D. Scharie Tavcer
- Date issued
- 2021; 2021
- Description
- This exploratory study investigates the expertise of committee members tasked with constructing sexual violence policies within a post-secondary institution (PSI) and the constraints under which they complete this work. Our findings indicate that allocated committees prioritize institutional risk management, normalize confusion, and most members have little or no understanding of the intersectionality of violence. These findings contextualize PSI’s failure to address structural violence. Our recommendations urge PSIs to include subject experts, consult with existing service providers, and integrate research on the intersectionality of sexualized violence within their policy and program...
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts
- Contributor(s)
- Bob Uttl; Victoria C. Violo
- Date issued
- 2021; 2021
- Description
- In a widely cited and widely talked about study, MacNell et al. (2015) [1] examined SET ratings of one female and one male instructor, each teaching two sections of the same online course, one section under their true gender and the other section under false/opposite gender. MacNell et al. concluded that students rated perceived female instructors more harshly than perceived male instructors, demonstrating gender bias against perceived female instructors. Boring, Ottoboni, and Stark (2016) [2] re-analyzed MacNell et al.’s data and confirmed their conclusions. However, the design of MacNell et al. study is fundamentally flawed. First, MacNell et al.’ section sample sizes were extremely...
- Type
- article
- Appears in collection(s)
- Arts