Articles de revues sur le sujet « Programme for Theology and Cultures in Asia »

Cross-cultural ministry to Muslims raises questions about communication and the legitimacy of presenting biblical truth in different forms. This paper seeks to address some of those questions through a survey of the biblical storyline by focusing on the development of diverse cultures, languages, and communities in Scripture. After establishing an endorsement of cultural diversity in the Scriptures, the article moves to applying those principles to the task of translation in light of one prevailing theory of communication, namely Relevance Theory (RT). Translation practices offer both risks and opportunities to the church and established theology. The article argues that in engaging other cultures and language, cross-cultural workers should take a posture of risk and experimentation. They should bias their efforts towards the receptor cultures’ understanding even when the existing church may fear a loss of valued theological principles. This applies to the initial questions raised in the article by endorsing creative ways of presenting biblical truth, including ways that co-opt other religious structures.

The present article has as its premise that the objectives of Receptive Ecumenism, a method of engagement recently promoted in western churches, is already well captured by the Asian Church’s method of triple dialogue. Both emphasize the Christian community’s willingness to learn from rather than to teach their partners-in-dialogue. The contextual realities which gave rise to the Asian Church’s theology of dialogue with the poor, the religions and the cultures of Asia will be discussed, especially with reference to the teachings and experiences of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences.

Abstract This paper seeks to explore an emerging theology of migration and its missiological implications in the official documents of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC). The FABC asserts that migration cannot be separated from the complex interplay of social, economic, class, religious, and political factors that interact to displace people from their homelands. Its emerging theology of migration is rooted in its threefold theological vision of (i) commitment and service to life, (ii) triple dialogue with Asian cultures, religions and the poor, and (iii) with the aim of advancing the Reign of God in Asia. In practical terms, the FABC’s theology of migration begins with social analysis that questions the poverty, economic marginalization, racial, political and religious tensions, environmental degradation, as well as many Asian nations’ heavy dependence on the remittances of their nationals as economic migrants, which lie at the heart of the ever growing numbers of migrants. However, the FABC goes beyond mere social analysis of the dehumanizing conditions that are endured by migrants when it seeks to undergird its migration theology within its broader theological threefold dialogue with the quintessentially Asian realities of diverse cultures, religions, and the immense poverty. Finally, the FABC is convinced that its theology of migration needs to take seriously the intercultural and interreligious implications of migration and integrate the intercultural and interreligious dimensions in its pastoral care of migrants.

AbstractThis article looks at public theology from the perspective of the Asia-Pacific context. Thus, the focus is on theology from the standpoint of Christianity as a minority faith, seeking to do theology in a world outside that of the western church. The article considers the activity of public theology through the engagement of theology with a world of violence. It begins by looking at violence and the transformed communities of peace in the New Testament, through examining the milieu of violence, the transformed communities of peace and the dynamics which created those transformed communities. It then goes on to observe the dynamics of peace and violence in the intercultural history of Christianity, by looking historically at cyclic culture and word culture and the interaction between the two, particularly as they relate to peace and violence. From this, the article draws out conclusions on the Christian experience of peace and violence in relation to cultures, and looks at how Christians are called to engage in public theology in such a world.

In this study, we aimed to examine the intercultural sensitivity levels and ethnocentrism levels, as well as some variables that affect them, of students studying in the Necmettin Erbakan University Theology Faculty in Turkey. A descriptive survey research method was adopted to realize this aim. The Intercultural Sensitivity Scale and the Generalized Ethnocentrism Scale were used as the data collection tools. The sample of the study consisted of 326 students studying in the Necmettin Erbakan University Faculty of Theology during the 2018–2019 academic year. According to our findings, the intercultural sensitivity level of the theology students was “high,” whereas their ethnocentrism level was “low.” The intercultural sensitivity levels of the theology students differed based on age and exposure to individuals from another country or culture. Ethnocentrism levels in the students differed based on gender, the nationality of the students (Europe, Turkey, Asia-Africa), the size of the settlement unit, and exposure to individuals from different countries or cultures.

AbstractThis essay seeks to investigate the mission theology of the Federation of Asian Bishops' Conferences (FABC) as presented in its official documents during the past three decades of its existence and evaluate its implications. In its official documents, the FABC has proceeded on the basis that the Asian milieu, with its rich diversity and plurality of religions, cultures and philosophical worldviews require a distinctively Asian approach to the proclamation of the Gospel that is sensitive to such diversity and pluralism. To this end, this essay surveys and examines the principal aspects and foundational principles of the FABC's theology of mission. It also explores the implications of the FABC's missiological approach for meeting the challenges of the task of carrying out the Christian mission in the diverse and pluralistic Asian Sitz-im-Leben, especially the FABC's consistent insistence that the Christian mission in Asia is best carried out through a threefold dialogue with the myriad of Asian religious traditions, Asian cultures and the teeming masses of Asian poor and marginalized. It then suggests that the FABC's missiological approach is best described as missio inter gentes (mission among the nations) rather than the traditional missio ad gentes (mission to the nations), because of how the FABC perceives the issue of religious pluralism in Asia and its preferred non-confrontational dialogical approach for dealing with it.

The purpose of this article is to provide a new perspective in building theology that is appropriate to the Indonesian context. In an effort to build a distinctive Indonesian theology, the author explores the Syria-Iraq and Palestinian contexts that live in the midst of all situations and challenges in maintaining faith. John Damascus, al-Kindy al-Hasyimi, and Mitri Raheb developed a theology that fits the Syria-Iraq and Palestinian contexts. In their explanations, they present familiar terminology for the Syria-Iraq and Palestine situations, making it easier for Christians to explain the content of the Christian faith. In this way, Indonesian Christians can learn from Syrian-Iraqi and Palestinian Christians in building a Liberation theology that is uniquely Indonesian. To build a Liberation theology in Indonesia, it is necessary to pay attention to the challenges in Indonesia, namely the many cultures and religious traditions and more importantly to the issue of sectarianism or intolerance that results in violence. If the starting point for theology departs from the explanation of Jesus, there will be a clash. The Federation of Asian Bishops Conference (FABC) suggests doing theology in Asia, specifically in Indonesia, not starting with Christology but starting with Pneumatology.

AbstractAs liberation theology spread across the globe in the seventh and eighth decades of the twentieth century, the need was felt for mutual learning and teaching among its proponents in various continents. The Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT) was founded at Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1976 to facilitate such a dialogue. This article explores the ways in which the thought of Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J., (a Spanish philosopher and theologian who was murdered in El Salvador in 1989) and Asian liberation theology can enrich each other.After situating Ellacuría, especially his activities as rector of the Jesuit University of Central America, in the context of political and military conflicts of El Salvador, the essay expounds Ellacuría's philosophy of realidad historica, his theology of the People of God as el pueblo crucificado, and his understanding of a Catholic university as a “social force,” and shows how these three ideas can enrich Asian liberation theology. The essay then presents Asian liberation theology in the socio-political and religious contexts of Asia and explains how it can enrich Ellacuría's thought and by extension Latin American liberation theology in three areas: theological method, through the use of non-Christian religious sources, especially popular religion; theology of liberation, by attending to the efforts of non-Christian activists for justice and peace; and a new way of being church, through a triple dialogue: dialogue with the Asian people, especially their poor; dialogue with Asian cultures; and dialogue with Asian religions.

Professor Klaus Koschorke’s pioneering work Grundzüge der Außereuropäischen Christentumsgeschichte: Asien, Afrika, und Lateinamerika 1450–2000 (Main features of the non-European history of Christianity: Asia, Africa, and Latin America, 1450–2000) provides an overview of the historical development of Christianity in the Global South between 1450 and 2000. Koschorke emphasized the “polycentric” nature of Christianity—the fact that, for the gospel to be successful, it must become deeply embedded in the local cultures it encounters, producing forms of Christianity that are distinctive from those of Europe or North America, and in which indigenous evangelism, theology, and discipleship flourish. Koschorke also highlights the importance of relationships between the churches of South America, Asia, and Africa, the Black Atlantic, networks of co-operation throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans that are as important as Western missionary movements in identifying Christianity as a world religion.

Abstract This article is an examination of the career of the “wolf child”—a human child lost or sacrificed by human parents but nurtured by wolf mothers—in imperial South Asia. Notably, wolf children become a particular concern of evangelical Protestant missionaries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; for the latter, these children featured as subjects in a miracle narrative, in which they were preserved from harm against all odds by their divinely animated lupine foster mothers. This history limns the curious trajectory that begins with an anthropology of the cultures that sacrifice children to wolves and ends in a missionary theology that claims wolf children as evidence of Christian grace and redemption. It underlines how unexpectedly significant a reckoning with the nonhuman was for evangelical theology and narrative in the colony, and how the narrative depended on trans-species alliance for imagining the operations of grace in imperial zones.

AbstractThis article represents a germinal effort in the field of contextual theology in Malaysia and employs a critical correlation method, facilitating an interface between the indigenous cultures and the Christian faith. At the onset of the theological reflection, this article identifies as its locus theologicus the kenotic experience of 'baptism in the deep' sacred mysteries of life, although this practice has been preceded by other renowned Asian theologians and amongst them, Aloysius Pieris of Sri Lanka no less. This 'epiphanic moment' is made possible through a reputable shaman who ritualized one of the religious beliefs and cultural practices of the Muruts, an indigenous people living near the Southwestern border of Sabah (former British North Borneo) and Northern Kalimantan on the Borneo Island. Yet this baptismal experience is all the more poignant because of the apparent poverty of a believing Murut community who embodies a little known spirituality of the marginalized poor in Asia. For reasons of its social marginality and subliminal sacrality, the corpus of the Muruts' beliefs and practices is described (for want of a better term) in the meantime as the subaltern spirituality of suspect. However, in correlating a context-specific religious experience to the papal teaching Novo Millennio Ineuunte, especially with regard to its underlying mission theology epitomized by the Lucan phrase 'put out in the deep' (Luke 5:4), its inadequacy becomes evident when transposed to Asia, a continent that abounds with pluriform yet distinctive cosmologies, cultures, psychologies and spiritualities. What is proposed as central to 'doing mission' in Asia is a dialogic process that involves a reciprocal mutuality of learning and unlearning, receiving and giving, enriching and critiquing. Resulting from this correlatonal interface is the enumeration of three indispensable criteria (power of distinction, sacrality of the rites of passage, rituals are efficacious), with an additional 5 theological principles (related to creation, Christ, Incarnation, Resurrection, the Spirit and sound fruits) for the re-valuation and evaluation of indigenous shamanism. These foundational principles become crucial for the subsequent explicitation of nine missiological strategies by which the Catholic Church of Asia become more efficacious in its mission amongst the indigenous peoples.

Why Australia still needs to learn Asian languages. Language learning in Australia has at times been a much debated and somewhat controversial topic. A new episode in this debate began recently with the publication of a report entitled Building an Asia-Literate Australia: An Australian Strategy for Asian Language Proficiency, which argues for a significant expansion and intensification of the learning of Asian languages and cultures at all levels of education. Much of the reaction to this report has focused on the role of English as the global language and its implications for language education. The main argument made against the report's proposals can be summarised as the ‘English is the global language’ view, a position which claims that because English is the global language, there is no need for Australia to implement a large-scale Asian languages and cultures education programme. This paper aims to refute this argument. Drawing on a range of theoretical and empirical work, it demonstrates that there is a double danger in the ‘English is the global language’ view as it both exaggerates the current number of speakers and extent of use of English in Asia, and misinterprets the likely outcomes of any further spread of English.

AbstractMulticulturalism characterises today's world. The diversity of cultures and conflicting ethnic groups sharing the same territory pose a threat to local and world peace. We have come to the end of the nation' as well as the end of the 'state'homogeneous entities that are increasingly emasculated by instrumental reason qua techno-science and economic globalisation. Ethnic diversity is simultaneously a wealth and threat to African societies. African unity in the form of an ubuntu ethic offers a model to deal, with polyethnicity. Ethnocentrism is biologically rooted and operates through prejudice. Prejudice as a coping mechanism to deal with diversity has its value and limitations. It must be contained where it issues in xenophobia, ethnophobia and war. Polyethnic co-existence is a prerequisite for Africa to attain its developmental ideals as expressed in the NEPAD programme. The way in which ethno-philosophy and ethno-theology can aid this process is looked at.

The 19th and 20th centuries were periods for main transformation in Muslim history: periods of degradation and conquest, independence and revolution, renaissance and reform. Toward the 19th century, world power moved from Muslim world to Europe. It was remarked by emerging power of British, France, Spain, Russia, Netherlands, Italy and Portuguese. They dominated Muslim societies in Asia, Africa, and Middle East in economic, military, politic and ideological aspects. Muslim societies’ responses to Europe domination were diverse from rejection and confrontation to emigration and non-cooperative attitudes of traditional Muslim. They planned reform, reconstructed Islamic thinking and beliefs, reformed theology and Islamic law, and emphasized Muslim’s self-esteem significance, unity and solidarity in facing cultural threats and Europe colonialism. However, not few secular Muslims and reformers, were proud and greatly imitated Europe civilization and cultures. They did secularization that ended khalifah system in order to reconstruct Muslim societies.

RÉSUMÉ. Vingt ans après la signature du protocole de Kyoto de 1997, le 4ème congrès régional de la Commission Asie-Pacifique de la Fédération Internationale des Professeurs de Français s’est tenu à Kyoto même, afin de promouvoir le français dans un souci de préserver l’environnement linguistique, voire de faire de celui-ci, via la francophonie, un garant de la protection de la diversité des langues et des cultures. Bien que l’intention soit louable et sa franchise indiscutable, il est difficile de cerner concrètement les pourtours de cette démarche. Nous présentons dans cet article une recherche basée sur une enquête post-congrès et sur l’analyse du programme dudit congrès pour saisir des représentations que les enseignants-chercheurs en didactique du français se font de cette diversité. Les résultats de ces analyses font comprendre que si la francophonie est réellement vécue, elle et la diversité des langues sont insuffisamment exprimées. Mots-clés : didactique des langues, diversité des langues et des cultures, francophone, francophonophile, langues francophones ABSTRACT. Twenty years after Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997, the 4th regional convention of the Asia-Pacific Committee belonging to the International Federation of the French Language Teachers took place in Kyoto to promote the French language in the current climate of language preservation. The tendency is to make the French language a protector of linguistic and cultural diversity. However, this approach is hard to define, regardless the genuine intentions. Based on a post-convention survey of the attendees and on an analysis of the convention’s programme, this research helps to understand some representations that university lecturers and researchers of the French language education have about this diversity. The results of those analysis show that francophonie (the French-speaking world) and linguistic diversity are not much expressed, even though francophonie is well experienced. Keywords : diversity of languages and cultures, francophone, francophonophile, French-speaking languages, Language education

Today’s world is characterised by multiculturalism. The diversity of cultures and conflicting ethnic groups sharing the same territory pose a threat to both local and world peace. We have come to the end of the ‘nation’ and the end of the ‘state’, two homogenous entities which are increasingly being emasculated by an instrumental reason in the form of techno-science and economic globalisation. Ethnic diversity is simultaneously a source of wealth and a threat to African societies. African unity in the form of an ubuntu-ethic offers a model for dealing with polyethnicity. Ethnocentrism is biologically rooted and operates through prejudice. As a coping mechanism for dealing with diversity, prejudice has its value and its limitations. It must be contained where it leads to xenophobia, ethnophobia and war. Polyethnic coexistence is a prerequisite if Africa is to attain its developmental ideals as expressed in the NEPAD programme. In this paper, I look at the way in which ethno-philosophy and ethno-theology can help this process.

AbstractEvaluations of the success, viability, and future of Southeast Asian studies in the United States have long been characterized by pessimism, and also by a set of deeply rooted assumptions about what an area studies programme is supposed to be and what it requires to be successful. These assumptions concern not just institutional issues, but conceptions of what makes a region a proper unit for scholarly analysis, conceptions that invariably hinge on explicit or implicit comparisons to other regions. In this essay, I reverse the gaze of such evaluations by turning some of O.W. Wolter's classic notions about Southeast Asian cultures back upon the practice of Southeast Asianists, and by reversing some of the comparisons that are often used to demarcate Southeast Asia as both as distinctive region and a distinctively weak subject for successful area studies. Rather than accept such abstract and a priori notions about what Southeast Asian studies must be and what must be wrong with it, I propose instead a much more expansive, inclusive, and flexible definition of the field based upon the way it is practised in particular places and times. Such a performative model of Southeast Asian studies can take students, pedagogy, diaspora, and diverse transnational flows into account, while emphasizing all the more the importance of Southeast Asia as a field of scholarly and institutional collaboration.

This paper argues that higher education in India, especially in the field of humanities and area studies, continues to be a Euro-American inheritance. Even when area studies attempt to offer a critique of the post-Enlightenment construction of universal human nature by locating the human in diverse cultural specificities, the discipline is still unable to configure the ‘context’ outside conceptual boundaries of the West. For instance, studies of culture seem to take historical narrativity as a cultural universal. That is to say, even when cultures do not privilege clear-cut notions of history or philosophy, the assumption is that it should be possible to unravel the historical or philosophical impulses of these cultures by studying the kind of narratives that the cultures have produced. The primacy of the narrative as the life-giving and meaning-making source in an essentially chaotic world is grounded, it seems to me, in Western onto-theology. This narrative model is incapable of studying mnemocultures (cultures of memory) like India (and Asia), for even when the culture produces diverse and heterogenous narrative weaves like itihasa, purana and kavya, the narrative does not enjoy a privileged status in these cultural forms. These compositions have a performative significance whose meaning is not found or guided by presence of the narrative or its potential for truth and identity. This paper will show that positivist historiographic assumptions regarding cultural forms in the non-West, especially in the Indian context, are ill-equipped to engage with traditions that lie outside the heritage of the West. Such attempts to situate an ancient past as embodied in cultural forms extraneous to the Western metaphysic are really accounts of self-understanding of the latter. The receptions of Keralamahatmyam purana in modern intellectual discourses set against the existence of the purana in living traditions of performance outside the confines of the university will be used as a case in point to elucidate the incapability of existing conceptual categories in the humanities discourse to configure cultural difference.

Based on a selection of examples from the sculptural art of Andhra, the paper discusses what possibly motivated the inclusion of motifs and stylistic elements from the ancient Mediterranean into the Buddhist art of the region. While in some cases such adaptations may have been driven by the need to find suitable solutions for the depiction of critical events or by the fact that a foreign motif tied in perfectly with already existing concepts, and thus, reinforced the message to be conveyed, in other cases no such reasons can be detected. Artists seem to have used foreign image types and stylistic variations deliberately to show their supreme craftsmanship or to add aesthetic sophistication to the image programme. The artists of Andhra, therefore, can by no means be regarded as epigones slavishly adhering to the examples set by the Mediterranean; the region—which is the place where narratives later spreading over large parts of Asia and Europe were first depicted—rather has to be regarded as on par with the classical cultures of Greece and Rome in terms of artistic versatility and creativity.

The overclaiming technique (OCT) is a novel way of measuring how socially desirable responding influences survey responses. It has the potential to enhance the cross-cultural comparability of survey data. It allows the identification of respondents’ knowledge accuracy and exaggeration by comparing their assessments of familiarity with existing and nonexisting concepts in a particular field of knowledge. We aim to compare the response patterns of countries and world regions based on their OCT accuracy and exaggeration-index values and validate these OCT scores using external variables. We also introduce a general model for the categorization of respondents based on their OCT indices values. We use the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 data from 64 countries ( N = 275,904). We found considerable differences in response patterns across world regions: high accuracy values in East Asia, low accuracy values in Southern and Central America, high exaggeration values in Southern Europe, and low exaggeration values in Western Europe. Furthermore, we show that familiarity with math concepts changes substantially after adjustment using the OCT. The correlation between unadjusted math familiarity and math test scores is weak and nonsignificant (.13) whereas after adjustment the correlation becomes strong and significant (.66). Concerning other indicators such as gross domestic product (GDP), public expenditure in education, and Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), before adjustment the correlation is negative and even significant for CPI (–.11, –.22, and –.45) whereas after adjustment the correlation becomes, though nonsignificant, positive (.05, .19, and .07). We also discuss the OCT in the context of other methods indicative of culturally preferred scale usage.

Background Peer support in mental health is a low-threshold intervention with increasing evidence for enhancing personal recovery and empowerment of persons living with severe mental health conditions. As peer support spreads globally, there is a growing need for peer support training programmes that work well in different contexts and cultures. This study evaluates the applicability and transferability of implementing a manualised multi-national training programme for mental health peer support workers called UPSIDES from the perspective of different local stakeholders in high-, middle-, and low-income countries. Method Data from seven focus groups across six study sites in Africa (Tanzania, Uganda), Asia (India, Israel), and Europe (Germany 2 sites) with 44 participants (3 service users, 7 peer support workers, 25 mental health staff members, 6 clinical directors and 3 local community stakeholders) were thematically analysed. Results 397 codes were identified, which were thematically analysed. Five implementation enablers were identified: (i) Enhancing applicability through better guidance and clarity of training programme management, (ii) provision of sufficient time for training, (iii) addressing negative attitudes towards peer support workers by additional training of organisations and staff, (iv) inclusion of core components in the training manual such as communication skills, and (v) addressing cultural differences of society, mental health services and discrimination of mental health conditions. Discussion Participants in all focus groups discussed the implementation of the training and peer support intervention to a greater extent than the content of the training. This is in line with growing literature of difficulties in the implementation of peer support including difficulties in hiring peer support workers, lack of funding, and lack of role clarity. The results of this qualitative study with stakeholders from different mental health settings worldwide emphasises the need to further investigate the successful implementation of peer support training. All results have been incorporated into the manualisation of the UPSIDES peer support training.

AbstractSocial scientists in disparate fields are now employing the construct of honour to ameliorate various social problems, such as immorality, failed states, international discord, poverty and mental illness. Moreover, historians of global religion cite Christianity's shift towards cultures shaped by the values of honour and shame. Despite this growing prominence of honour in social theories and the emergence of Christianity in honour–shame cultures, the notion of honour remains absent from theological discourse. In light of these global realities, we explore how God's active transformation of humanity from shame to honour can interpret both salvation-history and Christian theology. To this end I first explore the nature of humanity's problem of shame before God, using anthropological and biblical insights. Throughout the Old Testament, God's covenant initiatives with Abram, Moses and David, along with the common socio-literary pattern of God exalting a servant from unjust shame, reveals the dignified status God intends for humanity. God's programme to restore people from shame to honour climaxes in Jesus, who embodies honour in the incarnation, mediates dignity to the marginalised by healings and public fellowship, elaborates God's new code of honour which reinterprets social stigmas, and procures an exalted status for all peoples by atoning for shame and resurrecting to exaltation. Romans and 1 Peter are interpreted in their socio-historic contexts as apostolic instruments which expound the social implications of God's honour code. To unify the fractured Romans for the upcoming Spanish mission, Paul confronts social imperialism by replacing false honour claims with God's status now available by faith through grace in Christ. Meanwhile, 1 Peter assures maligned Christians of their exalted status and outlines honourable social relations. Then, in closing, we examine a soteriology of honour diachronically and systematically. In particular, how: biblical metaphors symbolise believers’ status transposition, group incorporation is key to New Testament soteriology, Eastern Orthodoxy's doctrine of theosis articulates the infusion of divine status, and other theological categories could be interpreted through honour-shame social values. These reflections towards an exegetical soteriology of divine honour are offered as an initial theological platform for addressing social issues where honour values prevail.

When animals are trained to function in a human society (for example, pet dogs, police dogs, or sports horses), different trainers and training cultures vary widely in their ability to understand how the animal perceives the communication efforts of the trainer. This variation has considerable impact on the resulting performance and welfare of the animals. There are many trainers who frequently resort to physical punishment or other pain-inflicting methods when the attempts to communicate have failed or when the trainer is unaware of the full range of the potential forms of human-animal communication. Negative consequences of this include animal suffering, imperfect performance of the animals, and sometimes risks to humans, as repeated pain increases aggression in some animals. The field of animal training is also interesting from a semiotic point of view, as it effectively illustrates the differences between the distinct forms of interaction that are included in the concept of communication in the zoosemiotic discourse. The distinctions with the largest potential in improving human-animal communication in animal training, is understanding the difference between verbal communication of the kind that requires rather high cognitive capabilities of the animal, and communication based on conditioning, which is a form of animal learning that does not require high cognitive ability. The differences and potentials of various types of human-animal communication are discussed in the form of a case study of a novel project run by a NGO called Working Elephant Programme of Asia (WEPA), which introduces humane, science-based training and handling methods as an alternative to the widespread use of pain and fear that is the basis of most existing elephant training methods.

Abstract Popular writing has brought about an image of Hindu deities that are seen as a part of Hinduism only and Hinduism is also seen as a religion of the Indian subcontinent. While this may be largely true in many cases, it forces us to look at Hinduism in very Semitic terms as a closed religion. On the contrary we see that there was a considerable travel of gods and goddesses from other religions into Hinduism and vice versa. And thus negates the idea of Hinduism as a closed system. This therefore brings us to the problem of defining Hinduism which is by no means an easy task as there is no agreement on any singular definition. Pre-modern India had more contacts with her neighbours and thus central Asia and south East Asia emerge as some of the main regions where Indian influence is seen in many aspects of life. Even to a casual observer of both central Asia and South East Asia we see that there striking Indian influences in culture, religion and other aspects of life. All of them are not part of the textual literature that has become very nationalistic in the recent past and this tends to also dismiss the earlier writings as western Eurocentric. It is true that there is a great element of eurocentricism in the earlier writings but one point that needs to be highlighted is that these earlier writings also faithfully portrayed many aspects like iconography etc. in a very descriptive manner that focused on the measurements, likeness, colour and other associated characteristics of the statues. Such trends are clearly visible in the writings of Jas Burgess,E.B Havell etc. who were influenced by the dominant paradigm in contemporary Europe of the 1850‟s where the duty of the historian was to just record. Such an approach was informed by the writings of the German philosopher Leopold Von Ranke. Though there are certain value judgments at the end of the chapter, the main narrative is a dry as dust and it is easy to decipher the characteristics or reconstruct the iconographic programme in any shrine and by extension the religious practices. In the modern period , where the dominant forms of anti-colonial struggles led to a writing of nationalist history succeeded by Marxist influenced social histories in many parts of Asia, the identification of the national boundaries and national cultures also extended to religions and many aspects were either muted or totally obliterated in history writing to present a homogenous picture. Thus, we have a picture of Hinduism and Buddhism that fits in with the national narratives. Such a collapse of categories is there in the borderland of India where the cultural boundaries are not clearly marked as also h religious boundaries. One single example that illustrates this assertion is the portrayal of Sri Lanka as a Sinhala Buddhist region with the Tamil regions of Sri Lanka marked off as separate entity and both being largely exclusive. In the Buddhist temples of Sri Lanka, one finds firstly the statue of Ganesha and later the images of Karthikeya and also the god Shani or Saturn. This image of a Buddhist monastery sharply contrasts with the highly buddhistic space of a Sinhala Buddhist temple where non-Buddhist elements are not found.

- K. Alexander Adelaar, James T. Collins, Bibliografi dialek Melayu di pulau Sumatera. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia), 1995, xliii + 201 pp. [Siri Monograf Bibliografi Sejarah Bahasa Melayu.] - K. Alexander Adelaar, James T. Collins, Bibliografi dialek Melayu di pulau Jawa, Bali dan Sri Lanka. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia), 1995, xxxvii + 213 pp. [Siri Monograf Bibliografi Sejarah Bahasa Melayu.] - K. Alexander Adelaar, James T. Collins, Bibliografi dialek Melayu di Indonesia Timur. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia), 1996, xxx + 103 pp. [Siri Monograf Bibliografi Sejarah Bahasa Melayu.] - K. Alexander Adelaar, James T. Collins, Bibliografi dialek Melayu di pulau Borneo. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (Kementerian Pendidikan Malaysia), 1990, xxviii + 100 pp. [Siri Monograf Bibliografi Sejarah Bahasa Melayu.] - Freek L. Bakker, Samuel Wälty, Kintamani; Dorf, Land und Rituale; Entwicklung und institutioneller Wandel in einer Bergregion auf Bali. Münster: Lit Verlag, 1997, xii + 352 pp. - René van den Berg, Linda Barsel, The verb morphology of Mori, Sulawesi. Canberra: Department of Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1994, x + 139 pp. [Pacific Linguistics Series B-111.] - Martin van Bruinessen, Darul Aqsha, Islam in Indonesia; A survey of events and developments from 1988 to March 1993. Jakarta: INIS, 1995, 535 pp., Dick van der Meij, Johan Hendrik Meuleman (eds.) - Martin van Bruinessen, Niels Mulder, Inside Indonesian society; Cultural change in Java. Amsterdam: Pepin Press, 1996, 240 pp. [Previously published Bangkok, Duang Kamol, 1994.] - Matthew Isaac Cohen, Craig A, Lockard, Dance of life; Popular music and politics in Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998, xix + 390 pp. - Will Derks, Tenas Effendy, Bujang Tan Domang; Sastra lisan orang Petalangan. Yogyakarta: Yayasan Benteng Budaya/Ecole Francaise d’Extrême Orient/The Toyota Foundation, 1997, 818 pp. [Al Azhar and Henri Chambert-Loir (eds).] - Will Derks, Philip Yampolsky, Music from the forests of Riau and Mentawai. Recorded and compiled by Philip Yampolsky; annotated by Hanefi, Ashley Turner, and Philip Yampolsky. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways, 1995. [Music of Indonesia 7SF; CD 40423.] - Will Derks, Philip Yampolsky, Melayu music of Sumatra and the Riau Islands: Zapin, Mak Yong, Mendu, Ronggeng. Recorded, compiled , and annotated by Philip Yampolsky. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Folkways, 1996. [Music of Indonesia 11 SF; CD 40427.] - Rens Heringa, Roy W. Hamilton, Gift of the cotton maiden; Textiles of Flores and the Solor Islands. 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The objectives of the research. The article is devoted to the study of the main parameters of the Marian theme embodiment in the art of music, with highlighting the aspects of history and genre stylistics. It is noted that the choice of the topic is related to the study of the works by the Kharkiv composer of Polish origin Konstanty Antoni Gorski, who worked in Kharkiv for many years (1880–1910) and belongs to the founders of his academic musical culture. The article lays the methodological basis for studying interpretation of the Marian theme in the works by this author, for that the analysis of the relevant sources (theological, musicological, etc.) has been carried out to derive the genre-stylistic classifications for this phenomenon (confessional, genre, national classifications). The results of the study. It is noted that the Marian theme in music can be classified as one of its central themes. This is due to the general ethical and natural content of the European music of the academic layer, which itself, as it is known, originated from the Church music and retained the features of high contemplation inherent in the cult genres, which determined the prospect line for the subsequent development of the Christian world music. The study emphasizes that the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary acts as a part and an important component of the New Testament, where two her main hypostases are presented. The Virgin Mary is honored and praised, firstly, as the Mother of the Son of God, who experienced suffering with him for the good of humanity, and secondly, as the intercessor and guardian of people who believe in her divine power and destiny. Here, the two interpretations of the Blessed Virgin’s image should be borne in mind, which are implemented at the confessional level – in the Catholic and Orthodox liturgical service. The whole branch of knowledge, called Mariology, is devoted to the study of these issues in the European theology and art history. The musical aspects of this field, presented in the monograph by O. Nemkova (2013), are closely related to religious teachings, as well as to their secular reflection at the level of the genre, style and stylistics of the musical works. The musical interpretation of the Blessed Virgin’s image, coming from Catholicism is based on the postulates of Her Divine destiny, which is reflected in the canonical texts in Latin, among which two main ones stand out – “Stabat Mater” and “Salve Regina”. These texts are realized in the cantata genre, the basis of which is the style of da chiesa, that is, the concerto itself in the church that accompanies the service in honor of Virgin Mary. The latter takes place in such holidays: Conception of Mary by Her mother Anna, Nativity of Mary, Presentation of Mary, Annunciation, Dormition of the Mother of God. The prayer “Ave Maria” is also very popular, and it has become for many European authors the basis of both applied religious and secular works, an example of which is the music of Early Baroque, Romanticism and Modern times. The secularization processes that began in the music of the Christian world on the turn of the Late Renaissance and Baroque (the watershed here is the 1600 year, the official year of the opera genre birth), called to life two groups of works on Marian themes: 1) the compositions nearby to the canonical original, as a rule, Latin texts (they were distributed among Catholics by religion and in Catholic countries); 2) the works modified, based on translations and free narrations of canonical texts given in the national languages and in suitable stylistics of one or another national culture (this is characteristic of Protestantism, as well as of Orthodoxy). There is also a deep line of interpretation of the Blessed Virgin’s image, personifying the eternal idea of motherhood and femininity, which is equally characteristic of many national musical cultures, in particular, the non-religious wave that manifested itself in Slavic music, first at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries, and then – during the last two decades of the 20th century. It is noted that Gorski, remaining a devout Catholic by the nature of his activity in such interfaith cultural center as Kharkiv in the late 19th – the first two decades of the 20th centuries, embodied in his work the traditions and demands coming from the Polish (Catholic) as well as the Ukrainian (Orthodox) and French and German (Lutheran, Protestant) musical cultures. On this basis, three of his opuses devoted to Virgin Mary arose: the Catholic cantata “Salve Regina” (for voice, violin and organ), the concerto-cantata in French “Salutation a la Sainte Vierge” (for soprano accompanied by choir, organ, string quintet and two French horns), and the choral concerto for the Orthodox mixed choir “Zriaszcze mia bezglasna” on the Old Slavonic text. Each of these works is a special genre form, with which Gorski works as with a standard model equipped with a lexical layer of a certain musical stylistics, primarily national. The Polish song and romanza sources are traced in the first of the works, along with the obvious influence of the opera arias. In the cantata on the French text, echoes of not only opera scenes are heard, but also the elements of the programme music, story-telling, characteristic of French musical style. Finally, the Orthodox choral Concerto on the Old Slavonic text demonstrates the typical genre of the Ukrainian music – the large form intended for collective choral performance that was the equivalent of a symphony in the Western European musical culture. Conclusion. It is proved that, guided by the world experience, Konstanty Antoni Gorski embodies all these models in three Marian works – the canonical church cantata, the larger-scale secular cantata, the a cappella choral concerto, while remaining a composer with original and unique intonational thinking. Gorski in these three compositions appears as a neoclassic, subordinating the original genres to his own creative intentions, which makes the music of these compositions comprehensible and accessible to a wide audience. It was that for the purpose to popularize the opuses by Gorski this article has been written.

Drinking is a community event among early Visayans. It is their binding force in achieving positive peace because it facilitates harmony and holistic view of life. Smooth interpersonal relationship and exchange of peace are realized in the toss of a glass and blood compact. The maganito ritual highlights drinking which brings their camaraderie and fellowship to transcendence and assures protection and blessings from above. In various cycles of life, drinking is at the heart of the celebration. It might be a small gesture of sharing life stories over food and wine, but it has big impact in the union of their buot (inner being) that assures support and advocates solidarity. The research utilizes primary sources from Spanish accounts written in the 16th-17th century. Their narratives showed condescending attitudes towards early Visayan beliefs and practices but they revealed the importance of drinking among our ancestors. The study uses Mercado’s buot to design a conceptual framework that would examine drinking among early Visayans in achieving positive peace where it is holistic and cohesive. The findings of the research could have implications to peace negotiation and integrated approach to peace that includes the physical, emotional, relational and spiritual dimensions. Positive peace promotes total well-being and allows people to engage into undertakings that propels a culture that is responsive to growth, sustainability and dialogue. Drinking is not just a gesture of cohesion that the community is one. It is also a discourse that brings people to a society free from all forms of discrimination and oppression.ReferencesAlcina, F. I. (1668a). Historia de las Inlas e indios de Bisayas. (Part I, Books 1-4). (V. Baltazar, Trans.). University of Chicago Philippine Studies Program (1962)An Editorial. (1964). Journal of Peace Research. 1(1). 1-4.Applied Philosophy. (1977). Divine Word University, print.Atay, A. D. (2020) Transcending the ‘Neoliberal Self for Positive Peace: A New Balance between individualism and collectivism. Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis. 2(1). 64-81. http://iletisim.neu.edu.tr/people/academic-staff/ayca-demet-atay/?lang=en.Blair, E. H. & Alexander, R. (Eds.) The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest conditions with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century. B & R. (1903-1909).Batoon, E. D. (2014) Tracing Mercado’s Anthropological Perspective (Second of Two Parts) http://www.kritike.org/journal/ issue_15/batoon_december2014.pdfBayarsaikhan, D. (2016). Drinking Traits and Culture of the Imperial Mongols in the Eyes of the Observers and in a Multicultural Context. Crossroads. https://www.academia.edu/3854 6942/Drinking_Traits_and_Culture_of_the_Imperial_Mongols_in_the_Eyes_of_Observers_and_in_a_Multicultural_ContextBoxer Codex. (2018). A Modern Spanish Transcription and English Translation of 16thCentury exploration accounts of East And Southeast Asia and Pacific. In I. Donozo. (Trans. & Ed.). Vibal Foundation.Chirino, P. SJ. (1603). Relacion de las Yslas Filipinas. (pp. 174-321). (Vol. 12). B & RColin, F. (1663). Labor evangelica. (pp. 38-97) (Vol. 40). Madrid.De Plasencia, J. (1589) Customs of the Tagalogs. (pp. 173-198). (Vol. 7). B & R.De San Agustin, G. (1698). Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas: 1565-1615. In L. A. Maneru. (Trans.). (Bilingual Ed.) San Agustin Museum. (1998).Elements of Filipino Ethics. (1979). Divine Word University, print.Elements of Filipino Philosophy. (1976). Divine Word University, print.Enns, F. (2011). The International Ecumenical Peace Convocation: Towards an Ecumenical Theology of Just Peace? Ecumenical Review 63(1), 44-53.Filipino Thought on Man and Society. (1980). Divine Word University, print.Galtung, J. (1996). Peace by peaceful means: Peace and conflict, development and civilization. International Peace Research Institute. Sage Publications. Gleditsch, N. P., Nordkvelle, J. & Strand, H. (2014). “Peace research-Just A Study of War?” Peace Research 51(2) 145-158.Grewal, B. (2003). Johan Galtung: Positive and Negative Peace. School of Social Science, Auckland University of Technology. Institute for Economics and Peace (2019). Positive Peace Report 2018.Ishida, T. (1969). Beyond the Traditional Concepts of Peace in Different Cultures. Peace Research. 6(2), 133-145.Loarca, M. (1582). Relacion de las Yslas Filipinas. (pp. 38-252). (Vol. 5). B & R.Lynch, J. (2014) A Global Standard for Reporting Conflict. Routledge.Mancenido, M. A. (2010) Filipino Philosophy According to Mercado and Timbreza, Dalumat. 1(1), 80-95.Mercado, L. (1972) Filipino Thought. Ateneo de Manila University, print.Pigafetta, A. (1522). The First Voyage Around the World. (pp. 24-266). (Vol. 33). B & R.Scott, W. H. (2015). Barangay: Sixteenth Century Philippine Culture and Society. (7thEd.), Ateneo de Manila Press.Shields, P. (2017). Limits of Negative Peace, Faces of Positive Peace. Armed Forces and Society. https://www.academia.edu/35995673/Limits_of_Negative_Peace_Faces_of_ Positive _Peace.The Filipino Mind. (1994). Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, print.Understanding the Philosophy of Buot-Loob-Nakem, (2017) Scientia. 7(2), Scientia San Beda College.

This paper aims to portray the overall picture of poverty in the world and mentions the key solution to overcome poverty from a critical perspective. The data and figures were quoted from a number of researchers and organizations in the field of poverty around the world. Simultaneously, the information strengthens the correlations among poverty and lack of education. Only appropriate philosophies of education can improve the country’s socio-economic conditions and contribute to effective solutions to worldwide poverty. In the 21st century, despite the rapid development of science and technology with a series of inventions brought into the world to make life more comfortable, human poverty remains a global problem, especially in developing countries. Poverty, according to Lister (2004), is reflected by the state of “low living standards and/or inability to participate fully in society because of lack of material resources” (p.7). The impact and serious consequences of poverty on multiple aspects of human life have been realized by different organizations and researchers from different contexts (Fraser, 2000; Lister, 2004; Lipman, 2004; Lister, 2008). This paper will indicate some of the concepts and research results on poverty. Figures and causes of poverty, and some solutions from education as a key breaker to poverty will also be discussed. Creating a universal definition of poverty is not simple (Nyasulu, 2010). There are conflicts among different groups of people defining poverty, based on different views and fields. Some writers, according to Nyasulu, tend to connect poverty with social problems, while others focus on political or other causes. However, the reality of poverty needs to be considered from different sides and ways; for that reason, the diversity of definitions assigned to poverty can help form the basis on which interventions are drawn (Ife and Tesoriero, 2006). For instance, in dealing with poverty issues, it is essential to intervene politically; economic intervention is very necessary to any definition of this matter. A political definition necessitates political interventions in dealing with poverty, and economic definitions inevitably lead to economic interventions. Similarly, Księżopolski (1999) uses several models to show the perspectives on poverty as marginal, motivation and socialist. These models look at poverty and solutions from different angles. Socialists, for example, emphasize the responsibilities of social organization. The state manages the micro levels and distributes the shares of national gross resources, at the same time fighting to maintain the narrow gap among classes. In his book, Księżopolski (1999) also emphasizes the changes and new values of charity funds or financial aid from churches or organizations recognized by the Poor Law. Speaking specifically, in the new stages poverty has been recognized differently, and support is also delivered in limited categories related to more specific and visible objectives, with the aim of helping the poor change their own status for sustainable improvement. Three ways of categorizing the poor and locating them in the appropriate places are (1) the powerless, (2) who is willing to work and (3) who is dodging work. Basically, poverty is determined not to belong to any specific cultures or politics; otherwise, it refers to the situation in which people’s earnings cannot support their minimum living standard (Rowntree, 1910). Human living standard is defined in Alfredsson & Eide’s work (1999) as follows: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.” (p. 524). In addition, poverty is measured by Global Hunger Index (GHI), which is calculated by the International Food Policy Institute (IFPRI) every year. The GHI measures hunger not only globally, but also by country and region. To have the figures multi-dimensionally, the GHI is based on three indicators: 1. Undernourishment: the proportion of the undernourished as a percentage of the population (reflecting the share of the population with insufficient calorie intake). 2. Child underweight: the proportion of children under age 5 who are underweight (low weight for their age, reflecting wasting, stunted growth or both), which is one indicator of child under-nutrition. 3. Child mortality: the mortality rate of children under 5 (partially reflecting the fatal synergy of inadequate dietary intake and unhealthy environments). Apart from the individual aspects and the above measurement based on nutrition, which help partly imagine poverty, poverty is more complicated, not just being closely related to human physical life but badly affecting spiritual life. According to Jones and Novak (1999 cited in Lister, 2008), poverty not only characterizes the precarious financial situation but also makes people self-deprecating. Poverty turns itself into the roots of shame, guilt, humiliation and resistance. It leads the poor to the end of the road, and they will never call for help except in the worst situations. Education can help people escape poverty or make it worse. In fact, inequality in education has stolen opportunity for fighting poverty from people in many places around the world, in both developed and developing countries (Lipman, 2004). Lipman confirms: “Students need an education that instills a sense of hope and possibility that they can make a difference in their own family, school, and community and in the broader national and global community while it prepare them for multiple life choices.” (p.181) Bradshaw (2005) synthesizes five main causes of poverty: (1) individual deficiencies, (2) cultural belief systems that support subcultures of poverty, (3) economic, political and social distortions or discrimination, (4) geographical disparities and (5) cumulative and cyclical interdependencies. The researcher suggests the most appropriate solution corresponding with each cause. This reflects the diverse causes of poverty; otherwise, poverty easily happens because of social and political issues. From the literature review, it can be said that poverty comes from complex causes and reasons, and is not a problem of any single individual or country. Poverty has brought about serious consequences and needs to be dealt with by many methods and collective effort of many countries and organizations. This paper will focus on representing some alarming figures on poverty, problems of poverty and then the education as a key breaker to poverty. According to a statistics in 2012 on poverty from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), nearly half the world's population lives below the poverty line, of which is less than $1.25 a day . In a statistics in 2015, of every 1,000 children, 93 do not live to age 5 , and about 448 million babies are stillborn each year . Poverty in the world is happening alarmingly. According to a World Bank study, the risk of poverty continues to increase on a global scale and, of the 2009 slowdown in economic growth, which led to higher prices for fuel and food, further pushed 53 million people into poverty in addition to almost 155 million in 2008. From 1990 to 2009, the average GHI in the world decreased by nearly one-fifth. Many countries had success in solving the problem of child nutrition; however, the mortality rate of children under 5 and the proportion of undernourished people are still high. From 2011 to 2013, the number of hungry people in the world was estimated at 842 million, down 17 percent compared with the period 1990 to 1992, according to a report released by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) titled “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2013” . Although poverty in some African countries had been improved in this stage, sub-Saharan Africa still maintained an area with high the highest percentage of hungry people in the world. The consequences and big problems resulting from poverty are terrible in the extreme. The following will illustrate the overall picture under the issues of health, unemployment, education and society and politics ➢ Health issues: According a report by Manos Unidas, a non- government organization (NGO) in Spain , poverty kills more than 30,000 children under age 5 worldwide every day, and 11 million children die each year because of poverty. Currently, 42 million people are living with HIV, 39 million of them in developing countries. The Manos Unidas report also shows that 15 million children globally have been orphaned because of AIDS. Scientists predict that by 2020 a number of African countries will have lost a quarter of their population to this disease. Simultaneously, chronic drought and lack of clean water have not only hindered economic development but also caused disastrous consequences of serious diseases across Africa. In fact, only 58 percent of Africans have access to clean water; as a result, the average life expectancy in Africa is the lowest in the world, just 45 years old (Bui, 2010). ➢ Unemployment issues: According to the United Nations, the youth unemployment rate in Africa is the highest in the world: 25.6 percent in the Middle East and North Africa. Unemployment with growth rates of 10 percent a year is one of the key issues causing poverty in African and negatively affecting programs and development plans. Total African debt amounts to $425 billion (Bui, 2010). In addition, joblessness caused by the global economic downturn pushed more than 140 million people in Asia into extreme poverty in 2009, the International Labor Organization (ILO) warned in a report titled The Fallout in Asia, prepared for the High-Level Regional Forum on Responding to the Economic Crisis in Asia and the Pacific, in Manila from Feb. 18 to 20, 2009 . Surprisingly, this situation also happens in developed countries. About 12.5 million people in the United Kingdom (accounting for 20 percent of the population) are living below the poverty line, and in 2005, 35 million people in the United States could not live without charity. At present, 620 million people in Asia are living on less than $1 per day; half of them are in India and China, two countries whose economies are considered to be growing. ➢ Education issues: Going to school is one of the basic needs of human beings, but poor people cannot achieve it. Globally, 130 million children do not attend school, 55 percent of them girls, and 82 million children have lost their childhoods by marrying too soon (Bui, 2010). Similarly, two-thirds of the 759 million illiterate people in total are women. Specifically, the illiteracy rate in Africa keeps increasing, accounting for about 40 percent of the African population at age 15 and over 50 percent of women at age 25. The number of illiterate people in the six countries with the highest number of illiterate people in the world - China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Bangladesh and Egypt - reached 510 million, accounting for 70 percent of total global illiteracy. ➢ Social and political issues: Poverty leads to a number of social problems and instability in political systems of countries around the world. Actually, 246 million children are underage labors, including 72 million under age 10. Simultaneously, according to an estimate by the United Nations (UN), about 100 million children worldwide are living on the streets. For years, Africa has suffered a chronic refugee problem, with more than 7 million refugees currently and over 200 million people without homes because of a series of internal conflicts and civil wars. Poverty threatens stability and development; it also directly influences human development. Solving the problems caused by poverty takes a lot of time and resources, but afterward they can focus on developing their societies. Poverty has become a global issue with political significance of particular importance. It is a potential cause of political and social instability, even leading to violence and war not only within a country, but also in the whole world. Poverty and injustice together have raised fierce conflicts in international relations; if these conflicts are not satisfactorily resolved by peaceful means, war will inevitably break out. Obviously, poverty plus lack of understanding lead to disastrous consequences such as population growth, depletion of water resources, energy scarcity, pollution, food shortages and serious diseases (especially HIV/AIDS), which are not easy to control; simultaneously, poverty plus injustice will cause international crimes such as terrorism, drug and human trafficking, and money laundering. Among recognizable four issues above which reflected the serious consequences of poverty, the third ones, education, if being prioritized in intervention over other issues in the fighting against poverty is believed to bring more effectiveness in resolving the problems from the roots. In fact, human being with the possibility of being educated resulted from their distinctive linguistic ability makes them differential from other beings species on the earth (Barrow and Woods 2006, p.22). With education, human can be aware and more critical with their situations, they are aimed with abilities to deal with social problems as well as adversity for a better life; however, inequality in education has stolen opportunity for fighting poverty from unprivileged people (Lipman, 2004). An appropriate education can help increase chances for human to deal with all of the issues related to poverty; simultaneously it can narrow the unexpected side-effect of making poverty worse. A number of philosophies from ancient Greek to contemporary era focus on the aspect of education with their own epistemology, for example, idealism of Plato encouraged students to be truth seekers and pragmatism of Dewey enhanced the individual needs of students (Gutex, 1997). Education, more later on, especially critical pedagogy focuses on developing people independently and critically which is essential for poor people to have ability of being aware of what they are facing and then to have equivalent solutions for their problems. In other words, critical pedagogy helps people emancipate themselves and from that they can contribute to transform the situations or society they live in. In this sense, in his most influential work titled “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” (1972), Paulo Freire carried out his critical pedagogy by building up a community network of peasants- the marginalized and unprivileged party in his context, aiming at awakening their awareness about who they are and their roles in society at that time. To do so, he involved the peasants into a problem-posing education which was different from the traditional model of banking education with the technique of dialogue. Dialogue wasn’t just simply for people to learn about each other; but it was for figuring out the same voice; more importantly, for cooperation to build a social network for changing society. The peasants in such an educational community would be relieved from stressfulness and the feeling of being outsiders when all of them could discuss and exchange ideas with each other about the issues from their “praxis”. Praxis which was derived from what people act and linked to some values in their social lives, was defined by Freire as “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (p.50). Critical pedagogy dialogical approach in Pedagogy of the Oppressed of Freire seems to be one of the helpful ways for solving poverty for its close connection to the nature of equality. It doesn’t require any highly intellectual teachers who lead the process; instead, everything happens naturally and the answers are identified by the emancipation of the learners themselves. It can be said that the effectiveness of this pedagogy for people to escape poverty comes from its direct impact on human critical consciousness; from that, learners would be fully aware of their current situations and self- figure out the appropriate solutions for their own. In addition, equality which was one of the essences making learners in critical pedagogy intellectually emancipate was reflected via the work titled “The Ignorant Schoolmaster” by Jacques Rancière (1991). In this work, the teacher and students seemed to be equal in terms of the knowledge. The explicator- teacher Joseph Jacotot employed the interrogative approach which was discovered to be universal because “he taught what he didn’t know”. Obviously, this teacher taught French to Flemish students while he couldn’t speak his students’ language. The ignorance which was not used in the literal sense but a metaphor showed that learners can absolutely realize their capacity for self-emancipation without the traditional teaching of transmission of knowledge from teachers. Regarding this, Rancière (1991, p.17) stated “that every common person might conceive his human dignity, take the measure of his intellectual capacity, and decide how to use it”. This education is so meaningful for poor people by being able to evoking their courageousness to develop themselves when they always try to stay away from the community due the fact that poverty is the roots of shame, guilt, humiliation and resistance (Novak, 1999). The contribution of critical pedagogy to solving poverty by changing the consciousness of people from their immanence is summarized by Freire’s argument in his “Pedagogy of Indignation” as follows: “It is certain that men and women can change the world for the better, can make it less unjust, but they can do so from starting point of concrete reality they “come upon” in their generation. They cannot do it on the basis of reveries, false dreams, or pure illusion”. (p.31) To sum up, education could be an extremely helpful way of solving poverty regarding the possibilities from the applications of studies in critical pedagogy for educational and social issues. Therefore, among the world issues, poverty could be possibly resolved in accordance with the indigenous people’s understanding of their praxis, their actions, cognitive transformation, and the solutions with emancipation in terms of the following keynotes: First, because the poor are powerless, they usually fall into the states of self-deprecation, shame, guilt and humiliation, as previously mentioned. In other words, they usually build a barrier between themselves and society, or they resist changing their status. Therefore, approaching them is not a simple matter; it requires much time and the contributions of psychologists and sociologists in learning about their aspirations, as well as evoking and nurturing the will and capacities of individuals, then providing people with chances to carry out their own potential for overcoming obstacles in life. Second, poverty happens easily in remote areas not endowed with favorable conditions for development. People there haven’t had a lot of access to modern civilization; nor do they earn a lot of money for a better life. Low literacy, together with the lack of healthy forms of entertainment and despair about life without exit, easily lead people into drug addiction, gambling and alcoholism. In other words, the vicious circle of poverty and powerlessness usually leads the poor to a dead end. Above all, they are lonely and need to be listened to, shared with and led to escape from their states. Community meetings for exchanging ideas, communicating and immediate intervening, along with appropriate forms of entertainment, should be held frequently to meet the expectations of the poor, direct them to appropriate jobs and, step by step, change their favorite habits of entertainment. Last but not least, poor people should be encouraged to participate in social forums where they can both raise their voices about their situations and make valuable suggestions for dealing with their poverty. Children from poor families should be completely exempted from school fees to encourage them to go to school, and curriculum should also focus on raising community awareness of poverty issues through extracurricular and volunteer activities, such as meeting and talking with the community, helping poor people with odd jobs, or simply spending time listening to them. Not a matter of any individual country, poverty has become a major problem, a threat to the survival, stability and development of the world and humanity. Globalization has become a bridge linking countries; for that reason, instability in any country can directly and deeply affect the stability of others. The international community has been joining hands to solve poverty; many anti-poverty organizations, including FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), BecA (the Biosciences eastern and central Africa), UN-REDD (the United Nations Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), BRAC (Building Resources Across Communities), UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), WHO (World Health Organization) and Manos Unidas, operate both regionally and internationally, making some achievements by reducing the number of hungry people, estimated 842 million in the period 1990 to 1992, by 17 percent in 2011- to 2013 . The diverse methods used to deal with poverty have invested billions of dollars in education, health and healing. The Millennium Development Goals set by UNDP put forward eight solutions for addressing issues related to poverty holistically: 1) Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. 2) Achieve universal primary education. 3) Promote gender equality and empower women. 4) Reduce child mortality. 5) Improve maternal health. 6) Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases. 7) Ensure environmental sustainability. 8) Develop a global partnership for development. Although all of the mentioned solutions carried out directly by countries and organizations not only focus on the roots of poverty but break its circle, it is recognized that the solutions do not emphasize the role of the poor themselves which a critical pedagogy does. More than anyone, the poor should have a sense of their poverty so that they can become responsible for their own fate and actively fight poverty instead of waiting for help. It is not different from the cores of critical theory in solving educational and political issues that the poor should be aware and conscious about their situation and reflected context. It is required a critical transformation from their own praxis which would allow them to go through a process of learning, sharing, solving problems, and leading to social movements. This is similar to the method of giving poor people fish hooks rather than giving them fish. The government and people of any country understand better than anyone else clearly the strengths and characteristics of their homelands. It follows that they can efficiently contribute to causing poverty, preventing the return of poverty, and solving consequences of the poverty in their countries by many ways, especially a critical pedagogy; and indirectly narrow the scale of poverty in the world. In a word, the wars against poverty take time, money, energy and human resources, and they are absolutely not simple to end. Again, the poor and the challenged should be educated to be fully aware of their situation to that they can overcome poverty themselves. They need to be respected and receive sharing from the community. All forms of discrimination should be condemned and excluded from human society. When whole communities join hands in solving this universal problem, the endless circle of poverty can be addressed definitely someday. More importantly, every country should be responsible for finding appropriate ways to overcome poverty before receiving supports from other countries as well as the poor self-conscious responsibilities about themselves before receiving supports from the others, but the methods leading them to emancipation for their own transformation and later the social change.

Education in Oceania continues to reflect the embedded implicit and explicit colonial practices and processes from the past. This paper conceptualises a cultural approach to education and leadership appropriate and relevant to the Republic of the Marshall Islands. As elementary school leaders, we highlight Kanne Lobal, a traditional Marshallese navigation practice based on indigenous language, values and practices. We conceptualise and develop Kanne Lobal in this paper as a framework for understanding the usefulness of our indigenous knowledge in leadership and educational practices within formal education. Through bwebwenato, a method of talk story, our key learnings and reflexivities were captured. We argue that realising the value of Marshallese indigenous knowledge and practices for school leaders requires purposeful training of the ways in which our knowledge can be made useful in our professional educational responsibilities. Drawing from our Marshallese knowledge is an intentional effort to inspire, empower and express what education and leadership partnership means for Marshallese people, as articulated by Marshallese themselves. Introduction As noted in the call for papers within the Waikato Journal of Education (WJE) for this special issue, bodies of knowledge and histories in Oceania have long sustained generations across geographic boundaries to ensure cultural survival. For Marshallese people, we cannot really know ourselves “until we know how we came to be where we are today” (Walsh, Heine, Bigler & Stege, 2012). Jitdam Kapeel is a popular Marshallese concept and ideal associated with inquiring into relationships within the family and community. In a similar way, the practice of relating is about connecting the present and future to the past. Education and leadership partnerships are linked and we look back to the past, our history, to make sense and feel inspired to transform practices that will benefit our people. In this paper and in light of our next generation, we reconnect with our navigation stories to inspire and empower education and leadership. Kanne lobal is part of our navigation stories, a conceptual framework centred on cultural practices, values, and concepts that embrace collective partnerships. Our link to this talanoa vā with others in the special issue is to attempt to make sense of connections given the global COVID-19 context by providing a Marshallese approach to address the physical and relational “distance” between education and leadership partnerships in Oceania. Like the majority of developing small island nations in Oceania, the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) has had its share of educational challenges through colonial legacies of the past which continues to drive education systems in the region (Heine, 2002). The historical administration and education in the RMI is one of colonisation. Successive administrations by the Spanish, German, Japanese, and now the US, has resulted in education and learning that privileges western knowledge and forms of learning. This paper foregrounds understandings of education and learning as told by the voices of elementary school leaders from the RMI. The move to re-think education and leadership from Marshallese perspectives is an act of shifting the focus of bwebwenato or conversations that centres on Marshallese language and worldviews. The concept of jelalokjen was conceptualised as traditional education framed mainly within the community context. In the past, jelalokjen was practiced and transmitted to the younger generation for cultural continuity. During the arrival of colonial administrations into the RMI, jelalokjen was likened to the western notions of education and schooling (Kupferman, 2004). Today, the primary function of jelalokjen, as traditional and formal education, it is for “survival in a hostile [and challenging] environment” (Kupferman, 2004, p. 43). Because western approaches to learning in the RMI have not always resulted in positive outcomes for those engaged within the education system, as school leaders who value our cultural knowledge and practices, and aspire to maintain our language with the next generation, we turn to Kanne Lobal, a practice embedded in our navigation stories, collective aspirations, and leadership. The significance in the development of Kanne Lobal, as an appropriate framework for education and leadership, resulted in us coming together and working together. Not only were we able to share our leadership concerns, however, the engagement strengthened our connections with each other as school leaders, our communities, and the Public Schooling System (PSS). Prior to that, many of us were in competition for resources. Educational Leadership: IQBE and GCSL Leadership is a valued practice in the RMI. Before the IQBE programme started in 2018, the majority of the school leaders on the main island of Majuro had not engaged in collaborative partnerships with each other before. Our main educational purpose was to achieve accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), an accreditation commission for schools in the United States. The WASC accreditation dictated our work and relationships and many school leaders on Majuro felt the pressure of competition against each other. We, the authors in this paper, share our collective bwebwenato, highlighting our school leadership experiences and how we gained strength from our own ancestral knowledge to empower “us”, to collaborate with each other, our teachers, communities, as well as with PSS; a collaborative partnership we had not realised in the past. The paucity of literature that captures Kajin Majol (Marshallese language) and education in general in the RMI is what we intend to fill by sharing our reflections and experiences. To move our educational practices forward we highlight Kanne Lobal, a cultural approach that focuses on our strengths, collective social responsibilities and wellbeing. For a long time, there was no formal training in place for elementary school leaders. School principals and vice principals were appointed primarily on their academic merit through having an undergraduate qualification. As part of the first cohort of fifteen school leaders, we engaged in the professional training programme, the Graduate Certificate in School Leadership (GCSL), refitted to our context after its initial development in the Solomon Islands. GCSL was coordinated by the Institute of Education (IOE) at the University of the South Pacific (USP). GCSL was seen as a relevant and appropriate training programme for school leaders in the RMI as part of an Asia Development Bank (ADB) funded programme which aimed at “Improving Quality Basic Education” (IQBE) in parts of the northern Pacific. GCSL was managed on Majuro, RMI’s main island, by the director at the time Dr Irene Taafaki, coordinator Yolanda McKay, and administrators at the University of the South Pacific’s (USP) RMI campus. Through the provision of GCSL, as school leaders we were encouraged to re-think and draw-from our own cultural repository and connect to our ancestral knowledge that have always provided strength for us. This kind of thinking and practice was encouraged by our educational leaders (Heine, 2002). We argue that a culturally-affirming and culturally-contextual framework that reflects the lived experiences of Marshallese people is much needed and enables the disruption of inherent colonial processes left behind by Western and Eastern administrations which have influenced our education system in the RMI (Heine, 2002). Kanne Lobal, an approach utilising a traditional navigation has warranted its need to provide solutions for today’s educational challenges for us in the RMI. Education in the Pacific Education in the Pacific cannot be understood without contextualising it in its history and culture. It is the same for us in the RMI (Heine, 2002; Walsh et al., 2012). The RMI is located in the Pacific Ocean and is part of Micronesia. It was named after a British captain, John Marshall in the 1700s. The atolls in the RMI were explored by the Spanish in the 16th century. Germany unsuccessfully attempted to colonize the islands in 1885. Japan took control in 1914, but after several battles during World War II, the US seized the RMI from them. In 1947, the United Nations made the island group, along with the Mariana and Caroline archipelagos, a U.S. trust territory (Walsh et al, 2012). Education in the RMI reflects the colonial administrations of Germany, Japan, and now the US. Before the turn of the century, formal education in the Pacific reflected western values, practices, and standards. Prior to that, education was informal and not binded to formal learning institutions (Thaman, 1997) and oral traditions was used as the medium for transmitting learning about customs and practices living with parents, grandparents, great grandparents. As alluded to by Jiba B. Kabua (2004), any “discussion about education is necessarily a discussion of culture, and any policy on education is also a policy of culture” (p. 181). It is impossible to promote one without the other, and it is not logical to understand one without the other. Re-thinking how education should look like, the pedagogical strategies that are relevant in our classrooms, the ways to engage with our parents and communities - such re-thinking sits within our cultural approaches and frameworks. Our collective attempts to provide a cultural framework that is relevant and appropriate for education in our context, sits within the political endeavour to decolonize. This means that what we are providing will not only be useful, but it can be used as a tool to question and identify whether things in place restrict and prevent our culture or whether they promote and foreground cultural ideas and concepts, a significant discussion of culture linked to education (Kabua, 2004). Donor funded development aid programmes were provided to support the challenges within education systems. Concerned with the persistent low educational outcomes of Pacific students, despite the prevalence of aid programmes in the region, in 2000 Pacific educators and leaders with support from New Zealand Aid (NZ Aid) decided to intervene (Heine, 2002; Taufe’ulungaki, 2014). In April 2001, a group of Pacific educators and leaders across the region were invited to a colloquium funded by the New Zealand Overseas Development Agency held in Suva Fiji at the University of the South Pacific. The main purpose of the colloquium was to enable “Pacific educators to re-think the values, assumptions and beliefs underlying [formal] schooling in Oceania” (Benson, 2002). Leadership, in general, is a valued practice in the RMI (Heine, 2002). Despite education leadership being identified as a significant factor in school improvement (Sanga & Chu, 2009), the limited formal training opportunities of school principals in the region was a persistent concern. As part of an Asia Development Bank (ADB) funded project, the Improve Quality Basic Education (IQBE) intervention was developed and implemented in the RMI in 2017. Mentoring is a process associated with the continuity and sustainability of leadership knowledge and practices (Sanga & Chu, 2009). It is a key aspect of building capacity and capabilities within human resources in education (ibid). Indigenous knowledges and education research According to Hilda Heine, the relationship between education and leadership is about understanding Marshallese history and culture (cited in Walsh et al., 2012). It is about sharing indigenous knowledge and histories that “details for future generations a story of survival and resilience and the pride we possess as a people” (Heine, cited in Walsh et al., 2012, p. v). This paper is fuelled by postcolonial aspirations yet is grounded in Pacific indigenous research. This means that our intentions are driven by postcolonial pursuits and discourses linked to challenging the colonial systems and schooling in the Pacific region that privileges western knowledge and learning and marginalises the education practices and processes of local people (Thiong’o, 1986). A point of difference and orientation from postcolonialism is a desire to foreground indigenous Pacific language, specifically Majin Majol, through Marshallese concepts. Our collective bwebwenato and conversation honours and values kautiej (respect), jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity), and jouj (kindness) (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019). Pacific leaders developed the Rethinking Pacific Education Initiative for and by Pacific People (RPEIPP) in 2002 to take control of the ways in which education research was conducted by donor funded organisations (Taufe’ulungaki, 2014). Our former president, Dr Hilda Heine was part of the group of leaders who sought to counter the ways in which our educational and leadership stories were controlled and told by non-Marshallese (Heine, 2002). As a former minister of education in the RMI, Hilda Heine continues to inspire and encourage the next generation of educators, school leaders, and researchers to re-think and de-construct the way learning and education is conceptualised for Marshallese people. The conceptualisation of Kanne Lobal acknowledges its origin, grounded in Marshallese navigation knowledge and practice. Our decision to unpack and deconstruct Kanne Lobal within the context of formal education and leadership responds to the need to not only draw from indigenous Marshallese ideas and practice but to consider that the next generation will continue to be educated using western processes and initiatives particularly from the US where we get a lot of our funding from. According to indigenous researchers Dawn Bessarab and Bridget Ng’andu (2010), doing research that considers “culturally appropriate processes to engage with indigenous groups and individuals is particularly pertinent in today’s research environment” (p. 37). Pacific indigenous educators and researchers have turned to their own ancestral knowledge and practices for inspiration and empowerment. Within western research contexts, the often stringent ideals and processes are not always encouraging of indigenous methods and practices. However, many were able to ground and articulate their use of indigenous methods as being relevant and appropriate to capturing the realities of their communities (Nabobo-Baba, 2008; Sualii-Sauni & Fulu-Aiolupotea, 2014; Thaman, 1997). At the same time, utilising Pacific indigenous methods and approaches enabled research engagement with their communities that honoured and respected them and their communities. For example, Tongan, Samoan, and Fijian researchers used the talanoa method as a way to capture the stories, lived realities, and worldviews of their communities within education in the diaspora (Fa’avae, Jones, & Manu’atu, 2016; Nabobo-Baba, 2008; Sualii-Sauni & Aiolupotea, 2014; Vaioleti, 2005). Tok stori was used by Solomon Islander educators and school leaders to highlight the unique circles of conversational practice and storytelling that leads to more positive engagement with their community members, capturing rich and meaningful narratives as a result (Sanga & Houma, 2004). The Indigenous Aborigine in Australia utilise yarning as a “relaxed discussion through which both the researcher and participant journey together visiting places and topics of interest relevant” (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010, p. 38). Despite the diverse forms of discussions and storytelling by indigenous peoples, of significance are the cultural protocols, ethics, and language for conducting and guiding the engagement (Bessarab & Ng’andu, 2010; Nabobo-Baba, 2008; Sualii-Sauni & Aiolupotea, 2014). Through the ethics, values, protocols, and language, these are what makes indigenous methods or frameworks unique compared to western methods like in-depth interviews or semi-structured interviews. This is why it is important for us as Marshallese educators to frame, ground, and articulate how our own methods and frameworks of learning could be realised in western education (Heine, 2002; Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014). In this paper, we utilise bwebwenato as an appropriate method linked to “talk story”, capturing our collective stories and experiences during GCSL and how we sought to build partnerships and collaboration with each other, our communities, and the PSS. Bwebwenato and drawing from Kajin Majel Legends and stories that reflect Marshallese society and its cultural values have survived through our oral traditions. The practice of weaving also holds knowledge about our “valuable and earliest sources of knowledge” (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019, p. 2). The skilful navigation of Marshallese wayfarers on the walap (large canoes) in the ocean is testament of their leadership and the value they place on ensuring the survival and continuity of Marshallese people (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019; Walsh et al., 2012). During her graduate study in 2014, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner conceptualised bwebwenato as being the most “well-known form of Marshallese orality” (p. 38). The Marshallese-English dictionary defined bwebwenato as talk, conversation, story, history, article, episode, lore, myth, or tale (cited in Jetnil Kijiner, 2014). Three years later in 2017, bwebwenato was utilised in a doctoral project by Natalie Nimmer as a research method to gather “talk stories” about the experiences of 10 Marshallese experts in knowledge and skills ranging from sewing to linguistics, canoe-making and business. Our collective bwebwenato in this paper centres on Marshallese ideas and language. The philosophy of Marshallese knowledge is rooted in our “Kajin Majel”, or Marshallese language and is shared and transmitted through our oral traditions. For instance, through our historical stories and myths. Marshallese philosophy, that is, the knowledge systems inherent in our beliefs, values, customs, and practices are shared. They are inherently relational, meaning that knowledge systems and philosophies within our world are connected, in mind, body, and spirit (Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014; Nimmer, 2017). Although some Marshallese believe that our knowledge is disappearing as more and more elders pass away, it is therefore important work together, and learn from each other about the knowledges shared not only by the living but through their lamentations and stories of those who are no longer with us (Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014). As a Marshallese practice, weaving has been passed-down from generation to generation. Although the art of weaving is no longer as common as it used to be, the artefacts such as the “jaki-ed” (clothing mats) continue to embody significant Marshallese values and traditions. For our weavers, the jouj (check spelling) is the centre of the mat and it is where the weaving starts. When the jouj is correct and weaved well, the remainder and every other part of the mat will be right. The jouj is symbolic of the “heart” and if the heart is prepared well, trained well, then life or all other parts of the body will be well (Taafaki & Fowler, 2019). In that light, we have applied the same to this paper. Conceptualising and drawing from cultural practices that are close and dear to our hearts embodies a significant ontological attempt to prioritize our own knowledge and language, a sense of endearment to who we are and what we believe education to be like for us and the next generation. The application of the phrase “Majolizing '' was used by the Ministry of Education when Hilda Heine was minister, to weave cultural ideas and language into the way that teachers understand the curriculum, develop lesson plans and execute them in the classroom. Despite this, there were still concerns with the embedded colonized practices where teachers defaulted to eurocentric methods of doing things, like the strategies provided in the textbooks given to us. In some ways, our education was slow to adjust to the “Majolizing '' intention by our former minister. In this paper, we provide Kanne Lobal as a way to contribute to the “Majolizing intention” and perhaps speed up yet still be collectively responsible to all involved in education. Kajin Wa and Kanne Lobal “Wa” is the Marshallese concept for canoe. Kajin wa, as in canoe language, has a lot of symbolic meaning linked to deeply-held Marshallese values and practices. The canoe was the foundational practice that supported the livelihood of harsh atoll island living which reflects the Marshallese social world. The experts of Kajin wa often refer to “wa” as being the vessel of life, a means and source of sustaining life (Kelen, 2009, cited in Miller, 2010). “Jouj” means kindness and is the lower part of the main hull of the canoe. It is often referred to by some canoe builders in the RMI as the heart of the canoe and is linked to love. The jouj is one of the first parts of the canoe that is built and is “used to do all other measurements, and then the rest of the canoe is built on top of it” (Miller, 2010, p. 67). The significance of the jouj is that when the canoe is in the water, the jouj is the part of the hull that is underwater and ensures that all the cargo and passengers are safe. For Marshallese, jouj or kindness is what living is about and is associated with selflessly carrying the responsibility of keeping the family and community safe. The parts of the canoe reflect Marshallese culture, legend, family, lineage, and kinship. They embody social responsibilities that guide, direct, and sustain Marshallese families’ wellbeing, from atoll to atoll. For example, the rojak (boom), rojak maan (upper boom), rojak kōrā (lower boom), and they support the edges of the ujelā/ujele (sail) (see figure 1). The literal meaning of rojak maan is male boom and rojak kōrā means female boom which together strengthens the sail and ensures the canoe propels forward in a strong yet safe way. Figuratively, the rojak maan and rojak kōrā symbolise the mother and father relationship which when strong, through the jouj (kindness and love), it can strengthen families and sustain them into the future. Figure 1. Parts of the canoe Source: https://www.canoesmarshallislands.com/2014/09/names-of-canoe-parts/ From a socio-cultural, communal, and leadership view, the canoe (wa) provides understanding of the relationships required to inspire and sustain Marshallese peoples’ education and learning. We draw from Kajin wa because they provide cultural ideas and practices that enable understanding of education and leadership necessary for sustaining Marshallese people and realities in Oceania. When building a canoe, the women are tasked with the weaving of the ujelā/ujele (sail) and to ensure that it is strong enough to withstand long journeys and the fierce winds and waters of the ocean. The Kanne Lobal relates to the front part of the ujelā/ujele (sail) where the rojak maan and rojak kōrā meet and connect (see the red lines in figure 1). Kanne Lobal is linked to the strategic use of the ujelā/ujele by navigators, when there is no wind north wind to propel them forward, to find ways to capture the winds so that their journey can continue. As a proverbial saying, Kanne Lobal is used to ignite thinking and inspire and transform practice particularly when the journey is rough and tough. In this paper we draw from Kanne Lobal to ignite, inspire, and transform our educational and leadership practices, a move to explore what has always been meaningful to Marshallese people when we are faced with challenges. The Kanne Lobal utilises our language, and cultural practices and values by sourcing from the concepts of jouj (kindness, love), kautiej (respect), and jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity). A key Marshallese proverb, “Enra bwe jen lale rara”, is the cultural practice where families enact compassion through the sharing of food in all occurrences. The term “enra” is a small basket weaved from the coconut leaves, and often used by Marshallese as a plate to share and distribute food amongst each other. Bwe-jen-lale-rara is about noticing and providing for the needs of others, and “enra” the basket will help support and provide for all that are in need. “Enra-bwe-jen-lale-rara” is symbolic of cultural exchange and reciprocity and the cultural values associated with building and maintaining relationships, and constantly honouring each other. As a Marshallese practice, in this article we share our understanding and knowledge about the challenges as well as possible solutions for education concerns in our nation. In addition, we highlight another proverb, “wa kuk wa jimor”, which relates to having one canoe, and despite its capacity to feed and provide for the individual, but within the canoe all people can benefit from what it can provide. In the same way, we provide in this paper a cultural framework that will enable all educators to benefit from. It is a framework that is far-reaching and relevant to the lived realities of Marshallese people today. Kumit relates to people united to build strength, all co-operating and working together, living in peace, harmony, and good health. Kanne Lobal: conceptual framework for education and leadership An education framework is a conceptual structure that can be used to capture ideas and thinking related to aspects of learning. Kanne Lobal is conceptualised and framed in this paper as an educational framework. Kanne Lobal highlights the significance of education as a collective partnership whereby leadership is an important aspect. Kanne Lobal draws-from indigenous Marshallese concepts like kautiej (respect), jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity), and jouj (kindness, heart). The role of a leader, including an education leader, is to prioritise collective learning and partnerships that benefits Marshallese people and the continuity and survival of the next generation (Heine, 2002; Thaman, 1995). As described by Ejnar Aerōk, an expert canoe builder in the RMI, he stated: “jerbal ippān doon bwe en maron maan wa e” (cited in Miller, 2010, p. 69). His description emphasises the significance of partnerships and working together when navigating and journeying together in order to move the canoe forward. The kubaak, the outrigger of the wa (canoe) is about “partnerships”. For us as elementary school leaders on Majuro, kubaak encourages us to value collaborative partnerships with each other as well as our communities, PSS, and other stakeholders. Partnerships is an important part of the Kanne Lobal education and leadership framework. It requires ongoing bwebwenato – the inspiring as well as confronting and challenging conversations that should be mediated and negotiated if we and our education stakeholders are to journey together to ensure that the educational services we provide benefits our next generation of young people in the RMI. Navigating ahead the partnerships, mediation, and negotiation are the core values of jouj (kindness, love), kautiej (respect), and jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity). As an organic conceptual framework grounded in indigenous values, inspired through our lived experiences, Kanne Lobal provides ideas and concepts for re-thinking education and leadership practices that are conducive to learning and teaching in the schooling context in the RMI. By no means does it provide the solution to the education ills in our nation. However, we argue that Kanne Lobal is a more relevant approach which is much needed for the negatively stigmatised system as a consequence of the various colonial administrations that have and continue to shape and reframe our ideas about what education should be like for us in the RMI. Moreover, Kannel Lobal is our attempt to decolonize the framing of education and leadership, moving our bwebwenato to re-framing conversations of teaching and learning so that our cultural knowledge and values are foregrounded, appreciated, and realised within our education system. Bwebwenato: sharing our stories In this section, we use bwebwenato as a method of gathering and capturing our stories as data. Below we capture our stories and ongoing conversations about the richness in Marshallese cultural knowledge in the outer islands and on Majuro and the potentialities in Kanne Lobal. Danny Jim When I was in third grade (9-10 years of age), during my grandfather’s speech in Arno, an atoll near Majuro, during a time when a wa (canoe) was being blessed and ready to put the canoe into the ocean. My grandfather told me the canoe was a blessing for the family. “Without a canoe, a family cannot provide for them”, he said. The canoe allows for travelling between places to gather food and other sources to provide for the family. My grandfather’s stories about people’s roles within the canoe reminded me that everyone within the family has a responsibility to each other. Our women, mothers and daughters too have a significant responsibility in the journey, in fact, they hold us, care for us, and given strength to their husbands, brothers, and sons. The wise man or elder sits in the middle of the canoe, directing the young man who help to steer. The young man, he does all the work, directed by the older man. They take advice and seek the wisdom of the elder. In front of the canoe, a young boy is placed there and because of his strong and youthful vision, he is able to help the elder as well as the young man on the canoe. The story can be linked to the roles that school leaders, teachers, and students have in schooling. Without each person knowing intricately their role and responsibility, the sight and vision ahead for the collective aspirations of the school and the community is difficult to comprehend. For me, the canoe is symbolic of our educational journey within our education system. As the school leader, a central, trusted, and respected figure in the school, they provide support for teachers who are at the helm, pedagogically striving to provide for their students. For without strong direction from the school leaders and teachers at the helm, the students, like the young boy, cannot foresee their futures, or envisage how education can benefit them. This is why Kanne Lobal is a significant framework for us in the Marshall Islands because within the practice we are able to take heed and empower each other so that all benefit from the process. Kanne Lobal is linked to our culture, an essential part of who we are. We must rely on our own local approaches, rather than relying on others that are not relevant to what we know and how we live in today’s society. One of the things I can tell is that in Majuro, compared to the outer islands, it’s different. In the outer islands, parents bring children together and tell them legends and stories. The elders tell them about the legends and stories – the bwebwenato. Children from outer islands know a lot more about Marshallese legends compared to children from the Majuro atoll. They usually stay close to their parents, observe how to prepare food and all types of Marshallese skills. Loretta Joseph Case There is little Western influence in the outer islands. They grow up learning their own culture with their parents, not having tv. They are closely knit, making their own food, learning to weave. They use fire for cooking food. They are more connected because there are few of them, doing their own culture. For example, if they’re building a house, the ladies will come together and make food to take to the males that are building the house, encouraging them to keep on working - “jemjem maal” (sharpening tools i.e. axe, like encouraging workers to empower them). It’s when they bring food and entertainment. Rubon Rubon Togetherness, work together, sharing of food, these are important practices as a school leader. Jemjem maal – the whole village works together, men working and the women encourage them with food and entertainment. All the young children are involved in all of the cultural practices, cultural transmission is consistently part of their everyday life. These are stronger in the outer islands. Kanne Lobal has the potential to provide solutions using our own knowledge and practices. Connie Joel When new teachers become a teacher, they learn more about their culture in teaching. Teaching raises the question, who are we? A popular saying amongst our people, “Aelon kein ad ej aelon in manit”, means that “Our islands are cultural islands”. Therefore, when we are teaching, and managing the school, we must do this culturally. When we live and breathe, we must do this culturally. There is more socialising with family and extended family. Respect the elderly. When they’re doing things the ladies all get together, in groups and do it. Cut the breadfruit, and preserve the breadfruit and pandanus. They come together and do it. Same as fishing, building houses, building canoes. They use and speak the language often spoken by the older people. There are words that people in the outer islands use and understand language regularly applied by the elderly. Respect elderly and leaders more i.e., chiefs (iroj), commoners (alap), and the workers on the land (ri-jerbal) (social layer under the commoners). All the kids, they gather with their families, and go and visit the chiefs and alap, and take gifts from their land, first produce/food from the plantation (eojōk). Tommy Almet The people are more connected to the culture in the outer islands because they help one another. They don’t have to always buy things by themselves, everyone contributes to the occasion. For instance, for birthdays, boys go fishing, others contribute and all share with everyone. Kanne Lobal is a practice that can bring people together – leaders, teachers, stakeholders. We want our colleagues to keep strong and work together to fix problems like students and teachers’ absenteeism which is a big problem for us in schools. Demetria Malachi The culture in the outer islands are more accessible and exposed to children. In Majuro, there is a mixedness of cultures and knowledges, influenced by Western thinking and practices. Kanne Lobal is an idea that can enhance quality educational purposes for the RMI. We, the school leaders who did GCSL, we want to merge and use this idea because it will help benefit students’ learning and teachers’ teaching. Kanne Lobal will help students to learn and teachers to teach though traditional skills and knowledge. We want to revitalize our ways of life through teaching because it is slowly fading away. Also, we want to have our own Marshallese learning process because it is in our own language making it easier to use and understand. Essentially, we want to proudly use our own ways of teaching from our ancestors showing the appreciation and blessings given to us. Way Forward To think of ways forward is about reflecting on the past and current learnings. Instead of a traditional discussion within a research publication, we have opted to continue our bwebwenato by sharing what we have learnt through the Graduate Certificate in School Leadership (GCSL) programme. Our bwebwenato does not end in this article and this opportunity to collaborate and partner together in this piece of writing has been a meaningful experience to conceptualise and unpack the Kanne Lobal framework. Our collaborative bwebwenato has enabled us to dig deep into our own wise knowledges for guidance through mediating and negotiating the challenges in education and leadership (Sanga & Houma, 2004). For example, bwe-jen-lale-rara reminds us to inquire, pay attention, and focus on supporting the needs of others. Through enra-bwe-jen-lale-rara, it reminds us to value cultural exchange and reciprocity which will strengthen the development and maintaining of relationships based on ways we continue to honour each other (Nimmer, 2017). We not only continue to support each other, but also help mentor the next generation of school leaders within our education system (Heine, 2002). Education and leadership are all about collaborative partnerships (Sanga & Chu, 2009; Thaman, 1997). Developing partnerships through the GCSL was useful learning for us. It encouraged us to work together, share knowledge, respect each other, and be kind. The values of jouj (kindness, love), kautiej (respect), and jouj eo mour eo (reciprocity) are meaningful in being and becoming and educational leader in the RMI (Jetnil-Kijiner, 2014; Miller, 2010; Nimmer, 2017). These values are meaningful for us practice particularly given the drive by PSS for schools to become accredited. The workshops and meetings delivered during the GCSL in the RMI from 2018 to 2019 about Kanne Lobal has given us strength to share our stories and experiences from the meeting with the stakeholders. But before we met with the stakeholders, we were encouraged to share and speak in our language within our courses: EDP05 (Professional Development and Learning), EDP06 (School Leadership), EDP07 (School Management), EDP08 (Teaching and Learning), and EDP09 (Community Partnerships). In groups, we shared our presentations with our peers, the 15 school leaders in the GCSL programme. We also invited USP RMI staff. They liked the way we presented Kannel Lobal. They provided us with feedback, for example: how the use of the sail on the canoe, the parts and their functions can be conceptualised in education and how they are related to the way that we teach our own young people. Engaging stakeholders in the conceptualisation and design stages of Kanne Lobal strengthened our understanding of leadership and collaborative partnerships. Based on various meetings with the RMI Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL) team, PSS general assembly, teachers from the outer islands, and the PSS executive committee, we were able to share and receive feedback on the Kanne Lobal framework. The coordinators of the PREL programme in the RMI were excited by the possibilities around using Kanne Lobal, as a way to teach culture in an inspirational way to Marshallese students. Our Marshallese knowledge, particularly through the proverbial meaning of Kanne Lobal provided so much inspiration and insight for the groups during the presentation which gave us hope and confidence to develop the framework. Kanne Lobal is an organic and indigenous approach, grounded in Marshallese ways of doing things (Heine, 2002; Taafaki & Fowler, 2019). Given the persistent presence of colonial processes within the education system and the constant reference to practices and initiatives from the US, Kanne Lobal for us provides a refreshing yet fulfilling experience and makes us feel warm inside because it is something that belongs to all Marshallese people. Conclusion Marshallese indigenous knowledge and practices provide meaningful educational and leadership understanding and learnings. They ignite, inspire, and transform thinking and practice. The Kanne Lobal conceptual framework emphasises key concepts and values necessary for collaborative partnerships within education and leadership practices in the RMI. The bwebwenato or talk stories have been insightful and have highlighted the strengths and benefits that our Marshallese ideas and practices possess when looking for appropriate and relevant ways to understand education and leadership. Acknowledgements We want to acknowledge our GCSL cohort of school leaders who have supported us in the development of Kanne Lobal as a conceptual framework. A huge kommol tata to our friends: Joana, Rosana, Loretta, Jellan, Alvin, Ellice, Rolando, Stephen, and Alan. References Benson, C. (2002). Preface. In F. Pene, A. M. Taufe’ulungaki, & C. Benson (Eds.), Tree of Opportunity: re-thinking Pacific Education (p. iv). Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific, Institute of Education. Bessarab, D., Ng’andu, B. (2010). Yarning about yarning as a legitimate method in indigenous research. International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, 3(1), 37-50. Fa’avae, D., Jones, A., & Manu’atu, L. (2016). Talanoa’i ‘a e talanoa - talking about talanoa: Some dilemmas of a novice researcher. AlterNative: An Indigenous Journal of Indigenous Peoples,12(2),138-150. Heine, H. C. (2002). A Marshall Islands perspective. In F. Pene, A. M. Taufe’ulungaki, & C. Benson (Eds.), Tree of Opportunity: re-thinking Pacific Education (pp. 84 – 90). Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific, Institute of Education. Infoplease Staff (2017, February 28). Marshall Islands, retrieved from https://www.infoplease.com/world/countries/marshall-islands Jetnil-Kijiner, K. (2014). Iep Jaltok: A history of Marshallese literature. (Unpublished masters’ thesis). Honolulu, HW: University of Hawaii. Kabua, J. B. (2004). We are the land, the land is us: The moral responsibility of our education and sustainability. In A.L. Loeak, V.C. Kiluwe and L. Crowl (Eds.), Life in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, pp. 180 – 191. Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific. Kupferman, D. (2004). Jelalokjen in flux: Pitfalls and prospects of contextualising teacher training programmes in the Marshall Islands. Directions: Journal of Educational Studies, 26(1), 42 – 54. http://directions.usp.ac.fj/collect/direct/index/assoc/D1175062.dir/doc.pdf Miller, R. L. (2010). Wa kuk wa jimor: Outrigger canoes, social change, and modern life in the Marshall Islands (Unpublished masters’ thesis). Honolulu, HW: University of Hawaii. Nabobo-Baba, U. (2008). Decolonising framings in Pacific research: Indigenous Fijian vanua research framework as an organic response. AlterNative: An Indigenous Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 4(2), 141-154. Nimmer, N. E. (2017). Documenting a Marshallese indigenous learning framework (Unpublished doctoral thesis). Honolulu, HW: University of Hawaii. Sanga, K., & Houma, S. (2004). Solomon Islands principalship: Roles perceived, performed, preferred, and expected. Directions: Journal of Educational Studies, 26(1), 55-69. Sanga, K., & Chu, C. (2009). Introduction. In K. Sanga & C. Chu (Eds.), Living and Leaving a Legacy of Hope: Stories by New Generation Pacific Leaders (pp. 10-12). NZ: He Parekereke & Victoria University of Wellington. Suaalii-Sauni, T., & Fulu-Aiolupotea, S. M. (2014). Decolonising Pacific research, building Pacific research communities, and developing Pacific research tools: The case of the talanoa and the faafaletui in Samoa. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 55(3), 331-344. Taafaki, I., & Fowler, M. K. (2019). Clothing mats of the Marshall Islands: The history, the culture, and the weavers. US: Kindle Direct. Taufe’ulungaki, A. M. (2014). Look back to look forward: A reflective Pacific journey. In M. ‘Otunuku, U. Nabobo-Baba, S. Johansson Fua (Eds.), Of Waves, Winds, and Wonderful Things: A Decade of Rethinking Pacific Education (pp. 1-15). Fiji: USP Press. Thaman, K. H. (1995). Concepts of learning, knowledge and wisdom in Tonga, and their relevance to modern education. Prospects, 25(4), 723-733. Thaman, K. H. (1997). Reclaiming a place: Towards a Pacific concept of education for cultural development. The Journal of the Polynesian Society, 106(2), 119-130. Thiong’o, N. W. (1986). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. Kenya: East African Educational Publishers. Vaioleti, T. (2006). Talanoa research methodology: A developing position on Pacific research. Waikato Journal of Education, 12, 21-34. Walsh, J. M., Heine, H. C., Bigler, C. M., & Stege, M. (2012). Etto nan raan kein: A Marshall Islands history (First Edition). China: Bess Press.

Increasing preoccupations and interest manifested for the Romanian language as a foreign language compose a focused and clear expression in the volume “Romanian as a foreign language. Methodology and cultural applicability”, launched at the Turku University publishing house, Finland (2018). The editors, Paul Nanu (Department of Romanian Language and Culture, University of Turku, Finland) and Emilia Ivancu (Department of Romanian Studies of the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań, Poland) with this volume, continue a series of activities dedicated to the promotion of the Romanian language and culture outside the country borders. This volume brings together a collection of articles, previously announced and briefly presented at a round table organized by the two Romanian lectors, as a section of the International Conference “Dialogue of cultures between tradition and modernity”, (Philological Research and Multicultural Dialogue Centre, Department of Philology, Faculty of History and Philology, “1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia). The thirteen authors who sign the articles are teachers of Romanian as a foreign language, either in the country or abroad. The challenge launched by the organisers pointed both at the teaching methods of Romanian as a foreign language – including the authors’ reflections upon the available textbooks (Romanian language textbooks) and the cultural implications of this perspective on the Romanian language. It is probably no accident that the first article of the aforementioned volume – “Particularities of teaching Romanian as a foreign language for the preparatory year. In quest of “the ideal textbook’’ (Cristina Sicoe, University of the West, Timișoara) – brings a strict perspective upon that what should be, from the author’s point of view, “the ideal textbook”. The fact that it does not exist, and has little chances ever to exist, could maybe be explained by the multitude of variables which appear in practice, within the didactic triangle composed by teacher – student – textbook. The character of the variables is the result of particular interactions established between the components of the triad. A concurrent direction is pointed out by the considerations that make the object of the second article, “To a new textbook of Romanian language as a foreign language’’ (Ana-Maria Radu-Pop, University of the West, Timișoara). While the previous article was about an ideal textbook for foreign students in the preparatory year of Romanian, this time, the textbook in question has another target group, namely Erasmus students and students from Centres of foreign languages. Considering that this kind of target group “forms a distinct category”, the author pleads for the necessity of editing adequate textbooks with a part made of themes, vocabulary, grammar and a part made of culture and civilization – the separation into parts belongs to the author – that should consider the needs of this target group, their short stay in Romania (three months to one year) and, last but not least, the students’ poor motivation. These distinctive notes turn the existent RFL textbooks[1] in that which the author calls “level crossings”, which she explains in a humorous manner[2]. Since the ideal manual seems to be in no hurry to appear, the administrative-logistic implications of teaching Romanian as a foreign language (for the preparatory year) should be easier to align with the standards of efficiency. This matter is addressed by Mihaela Badea and Cristina Iridon from the Oil & Gas University of Ploiești, in the article “Administrative/logistic difficulties of teaching RFL. Case study”. Starting from a series of practical experiences, the authors are purposing to suggest “several ideas to improve existent methodologies of admitting foreign students and to review the ARACIS criteria from March 2017, regarding external evaluation of the ‘Romanian as a foreign language’ study programme”. Among other things, an external difficulty is highlighted (common to all universities in the country), namely the permission to register foreign students until the end of the first semester of the academic year, meaning around the middle of February. The authors punctually describe the unfortunate implications of this legal aspect and the regrettable consequences upon the quality of the educational act. They suggest that the deadline for admitting foreign students not exceed the 1st of December of every academic year. The list of difficulties in teaching Romanian as a foreign language is extremely long, reaching sensitive aspects from an ethical perspective of multiculturalism. This approach belongs to Constantin Mladin from Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, Macedonia, who writes about “The role of the ethical component in the learning process of a foreign language and culture. The Macedonian experience”. Therefore, we are moving towards the intercultural competences which, as the author states, are meant to “adequately and efficiently round the acquired language competences”. In today’s Macedonian society, that which the author refers to, a society claimed to be multiethnic, multilingual and pluriconfessional, the emotional component of an intercultural approach needs a particular attention. Thus, reconfigurations of the current didactic model are necessary. The solution proposed and successfully applied by Professor Constantin Mladin is that of shaking the natural directions in which a foreign language and culture is acquired: from the source language/culture towards the target language/culture. All this is proposed in the context in which the target group is extremely heterogeneous and its “emotional capacity of letting go of the ethnocentric attitudes and perceptions upon otherness” seem to lack. When speaking about ‘barriers’, we often mean ‘difficulty’. The article written by Silvia Kried Stoian and Loredana Netedu from the Oil & Gas University of Ploiești, called “Barriers in the intercultural communication of foreign students in the preparatory year”, is the result of a micro-research done upon a group of 37 foreign students from 10 different countries/cultural spaces, belonging to different religions (plus atheists), speakers of different languages. From the start, there are many differences to be reconciled in a way reasonable enough to reduce most barriers that appear in their intercultural communication. Beneficial and obstructive factors – namely communication barriers – coexist in a complex communicational environment, which supposes identifying and solving the latter, in the aim of softening the cultural shock experienced within linguistic and cultural immersion. Several solutions are recommended by the two authors. An optimistic conclusion emerges in the end, namely the possibility that the initial inconvenient of the ethnical, linguistic and cultural heterogeneity become “an advantage in learning the Romanian language and acquiring intercultural communication”. Total immersion (linguistic and cultural), as well as the advantage it represents as far as exposure to language is concerned, is the subject of the article entitled “Cultural immersion and exposure to language”, written by Adina Curta (“1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia). Considered to be a factor of rapid progress and effectiveness of acquisition, exposure to language that arises from the force of circumstances could be extended to that what may be named orchestrated exposure to language. This phrase is consented to reunite two types of resources, “a category of statutory resources, which are the CEFRL suggestions, and a category of particular resources, which should be the activities proposed by the organizers of the preparatory year of RFL”. In this respect, we are dealing with several alternating roles of the teacher who, besides being an expert, animator, facilitator of the learning process or technician, also becomes a cultural and linguistic coach, sending to the group of immersed students a beneficial message of professional and human polyvalence. A particular experience is represented by teaching the Romanian language at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. This experience is presented by Nicoleta Neșu in the article “The Romanian language, between mother tongue and ethnic language. Case study”. The particular situation is generated by the nature of the target group, a group of students coming, on the one hand, from Romanian families, who, having lived in Italy since early childhood, have studied in the Italian language and are now studying the Romanian language (mother tongue, then ethnic language) as L1, and, on the other hand, Italian mother tongue students who study the Romanian language as a foreign language. The strategies that are used and the didactic approach are constantly in need of particularization, depending on the statute that the studied language, namely the Romanian language, has in each case. In the area of teaching methodology for Romanian as a foreign language, suggestions and analyses come from four authors, namely Eliana-Alina Popeți (West University of Timișoara), “Teaching the Romanian language to students from Romanian communities from Serbia. Vocabulary exercise”, Georgeta Orian (“1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia) “The Romanian language in the rhythm of dance and hip-hop music”, Coralia Telea (“1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia), “Explanation during the class of Romanian as a foreign language” and Emilia Ivancu (Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań, Poland), “Romanian (auto)biographic discourse or the effect of literature upon learning RFL”. The vocabulary exercise proposed to the students by Eliana-Alina Popeți is a didactic experiment through which the author checked the hypothesis according to which a visual didactic material eases the development of vocabulary, especially since the textual productions of the students, done through the technique that didactics calls “reading images”, were video recorded and submitted to mutual evaluation as well as to self-evaluation of grammar, coherence and pronunciation. The role of the authentic iconographic document is attested in the didactics of modern languages, as the aforementioned experiment confirms once again the high coefficient of interest and attention of the students, as well as the vitality and authenticity of interaction within the work groups. It is worth mentioning that these students come from the Serbian Republic and are registered in the preparatory year at the Faculty of Letters, History and Theology of the West University of Timișoara. Most of them are speakers of different Romanian patois, only found on the territory of Serbia. The activity consisted of elaborating written texts starting from an image (a postcard reproducing a portrait of the Egyptian artist Eman Osama), imagining a possible biography of the character. In the series of successful authentic documents in teaching-learning foreign languages, there is also the song. The activities described by Georgeta Orian were undertaken either with Erasmus students from the preparatory year at the “1 Decembrie 1989” University of Alba Iulia, or with Polish students (within the Department of Romanian Studies in Poznań), having high communication competences (B1-B2, or even more). There were five activities triggered by Romanian songs, chosen by criteria of sympathy with the interests of the target group: youngsters, late teenagers. The stake was “a more pleasant and, sometimes, a more useful learning process”, mostly through discovery, through recourse to musical language, which has the advantage of breaking linguistic barriers in the aim of creating a common space in which the target language, a language of “the other”, becomes the instrument of speaking about what connects us. The didactic approach, when it comes to Romanian as a foreign language taught to students of the preparatory year cannot avoid the extremely popular method of the explanation. Its story is told by Coralia Telea. With a use of high scope, the explanation steps in in various moments and contexts: for transmitting new information, for underlining mechanisms generating new rules, in evaluation activities (result appreciation, progress measurements). Still, the limits of this method are not left out, among which the risk of the teachers to annoy their audience if overbidding this method. Addressing (Polish) students from the Master’s Studies Program within the Romania Philology at the Adam Mickiewicz University of Poznań, Emilia Ivancu crosses, through her article, the methodological dimensions of teaching Romanian as a foreign language, entering the curricular territory of the problematics in question by proposing an optional course entitled Romanian (auto)biographic discourse”. Approaching contact with the Romanian language as a foreign language at an advanced level, the stakes of the approach and the proposed contents differ, obviously, from the ones only regarding the creation and development of the competence of communication in the Romanian Language. The studied texts have been grouped into correspondence/epistolary discourse, diaries, memoires and (auto)biography as fiction. Vasile Alecsandri, Sanda Stolojan, Paul Goma, Neagoe Basarab, Norman Manea, Mircea Eliade are just a few of the writers concerned, submitted to discussions with the help of a theoretical toolbox, offered to the students as recordings of cultural broadcasts, like Profesioniștii or Rezistența prin cultură etc. The consequences of this complex approach consisted, on the one hand, of the expansion of the readings for the students and, on the other hand, in choosing to write dissertations on these topics. A “tangible” result of Emilia Ivancu’s course is the elaboration of a volume entitled România la persoana întâi, perspective la persoana a treia (Romania in the first person, perspectives in the third person), containing seven articles written by Polish Master’s students. Master’s theses, a PhD thesis, several translations into the Polish language are also “fruits” of the initiated course. Of all these, the author extracted several conclusions supporting the merits and usefulness of her initiative. The volume ends with a review signed by Adina Curta (1 Decembrie 1918 University of Alba Iulia), “The Romanian language, a modern, wanted language. Iuliana Wainberg-Drăghiciu – Textbook of Romanian language as a foreign language”. The textbook elaborated by Iuliana Wainberg-Drăghiciu (“1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia) respects the CEFRL suggestions, points at the communicative competences (linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic) described for levels A1 and A2, has a high degree of accessibility through a trilingual dictionary (Romanian-English-French) which it offers to foreign students and through the phonetic transcription of new vocabulary units.

In this era of startling developments in the medical field there remains a serious worry about the hazardous potential of various by products which if not properly addressed can lead to consequences of immense public concern. Hospitals and other health care facilities generate waste products which are evidently hazardous to all those exposed to its potentially harmful effects. Need for effective legislation ensuring its safe disposal is supposed to be an integral part of any country's health related policy. This issue is of special importance in developing countries like Pakistan which in spite of framing various regulations for safeguarding public health, seem to overlook its actual implementation. The result unfortunately is the price wehave to pay not only in terms of rampant spread of crippling infections but a significant spending of health budget on combating epidemics which could easily have been avoided through effective waste disposal measures in the first place. Waste classified under the heading 'bio-hazardous' includes any infectious or potentially infectious material which can be injurious or harmful to humans and other living organisms. Amongst the many potential sources are the hospitals or other health delivery centres which are ironically supposed to be the centres of infection control and treatment. Whilst working in these setups, health care workers such as doctors, nurses, paramedical staff and sanitation workers are actually the ones most exposed and vulnerable to these challenges. Biomedical waste may broadly be classified into Infectious and toxic waste. Infectious waste includes sharps, blood, body fluids and tissues etcwhile substances such as radioactive material and by-products of certain drugs qualify as toxic waste. Furthermore health institutions also have to cater for general municipal waste such as carton boxes, paper and plastics. The World Health Organisation has its own general classification of hospital waste divided into almost eight categories of which almost 15% (10% infectious and 5% toxic) is estimated to be of a hazardous nature while the remaining 85% is general non hazardous content.1A recent study from Faisalabad, Pakistan has estimated hospital waste generation around 1 to 1.5 kg / bed /day for public sector hospitals in the region,2while figures quoted from neighbouring India are approximately 0.5 to 2 KG / hospital bed /day.3 Elsewhere in the world variable daily hospital waste production has been observed ranging from as low as 0.14 to 0.49 kg /day in Korea4 and 0.26 to 0.89 kg/day in Greece5to as high as 2.1 to 3.83 kg/day in Turkey6 and 0.84 to 5.8 kg/day in Tanzania.7Ill effects of improper management of hospital waste can manifest as nosocomial infections or occupational hazards such as needle stick injuries. Pathogens or spores can be borne either through the oro-faecal or respiratory routes in addition to direct inoculation through contact with infected needles or sharps. Environmental pollution can result from improper burning of toxic material leading to emission of dioxins, particulate matter or furans into the air. The habitat can also be affected by illegal dumping and landfills or washing up of medical waste released into the sea or river. Potential organisms implicated in diseases secondary to mismanagement of hospital waste disposal include salmonella, cholera, shigella, helminths, strep pneumonia, measles, tuberculosis, herpesvirus, anthrax, meningitis, HIV, hepatitis and candida etc. These infections can cause a considerable strain on the overall health and finances of the community or individuals affected. The basic principal of Public health management i.e 'prevention is better than cure' cannot be more stressed in this scenario as compared to any other health challenge. Health facilities must have a clear policy on hazardous waste management. To ensure a safe environment hospitals need to adopt and implement international and local systems of waste disposal. Hospital waste management plan entails policy and procedures addressing waste generation, accumulation, handling, transportation, storage, treatment and disposal. Waste needs to be collected in marked containers usually colour coded and leak proof. Segregation at source is of vital importance. The standard practice in many countries is the Basic Three Bin System ie to segregate the waste into RED bags/ boxes for sharps, YELLOW bags for biological waste and BLUE or BLACK ones for general/ municipal waste. All hospital staff needs to be trained in the concept of putting the right waste in relevant containers/ bags. They need to know that more than anything else this practice is vital for their own safety. The message can be reinforced through appropriate labelling on the bins and having posters with simple delineations to avoid mixing of different waste types. Sharps essentially should be kept in rigid, leak and puncture-resistant containers which are tightly lidded and labelled. Regular training sessions for nurses and cleaning staff can be organised as they are the personnel who are more likely to deal with waste disposition at the level of their respective departments. Next of course is transportation of waste products to the storage or disposal. Sanitary staff and janitors must be aware of the basic concepts of waste handling and should wear protective clothing, masks and gloves etc, besides ensuring regular practice of disinfection and sterilization techniques.8Special trolleys or vehicles exclusively designed and reserved for biomedical waste and operated by trained individuals should be used for transportation to the dumping or treatment site. Biomedical waste treatment whether on site or off site is a specialised entity involving use of chemicals and equipment intended for curtailing the hazardous potential of the material at hand. Thermal treatment via incinerators, not only results in combustion of organic substances but the final product in the form of non-toxicash is only 10 to 15% of the original solid mass of waste material fed to the machine. Dedicated autoclaves and microwaves can also be used for the purpose of disinfection. Chemicals such as bleach, sodium hydroxides, chlorine dioxide and sodiumhypochlorite are also effective disinfectants having specialised indications. Countries around the world have their own regulations for waste management. United Kingdom practices strict observance of Environmental protection act 1990, Waste managementlicensing regulations 1994 and Hazardous waste regulations 2005 making it one of thesafest countries in terms of hazardous waste disposal. Similar regulations specific for each state have been adopted in United States following passage of the Medical Waste tracking act 1988. In Pakistan, every hospital must comply with the Waste Management Rules 2005 (Environment Protection Act 1997), though actual compliance is far from satisfactory. It is high time that the government and responsible community organisations shape up to seriously tackle the issue of bio hazardous waste management through enforcement of effective policies and standard operating procedures for safeguarding the health and lives of the public in general and health workers in particular. Outbreaks, defined as excess cases of a particular disease or illness which outweighs the response capabilities, have the capacity to overwhelm health care facilities and need timely response and attention to details in order to avoid potentially disastrous sequelae . In this day and age when improvement in public health practices have significantly curtailed outbreak of various diseases, certain viral illnesses continue to make headlines. One of the notable vector borne infectious disease affecting significant portions of south east Asia in the early part of twenty first century is 'Dengue fever'. Dreaded as it is by those suffering from the illness, a lot of the hysteria created is secondary to a lack of education and understanding of the nature of the disease and at times a result of disinformation campaign for vested interests by certain political and media sections.'Dengue' in fact is a Spanish word, assumed to have originated from the Swahili phrase -ka dinga peppo -which describes the disease as being caused by evil spirit. 1 Over the course of time it has been called 'breakbone fever', 'bilious vomiting fever', 'break heart fever', 'dandy fever', 'la dengue' and 'Phillipine, Thai and Singapore hemorrhagic fever' Whilst the first reported case referring to dengue fever as a water poison spread by flying insects, exists in the Chinese medical encyclopedia from Jin Dynasty (265-420 AD), the disease is believed to have disseminated from Africa with the spread of the primary vector, aedes egypti, in the 15th to 19th century as a result of globalisation of slave trade 45In 80% of the patients affected by this condition the presentation is rather insidious and at best characterized by mild fever. The classical 'Dengue fever' present in about 5% of the cases is characterized by high temperature, body aches, vomiting and at times a skin rash. The disease may regresses in two to seven days. However inrare instances (<5%) it may develop into more serious conditions such as Dengue hemorrhagic fever whereby the platelet count is significantly reduced leading to bleeding tendencies and may even culminate in a more life threatening presentation i.e Dengue shock syndrome.6To understand the actual dynamics of Dengue epidemic it is important to understand the mode of its spread in affected areas. Aedes mosquito (significantly Aedes Egypti) acts a vector for this disease. Early morning and evening times7 are favoured by these mosquitos to feed on their prey. There is some evidence that the disease may be transmitted via blood products and organ donation. 8 Moreover vertical transmission (mother to child) has also been reported 9Diagnostic investigations include blood antigen detection through NS-I or nucleic acid detection via PCR. IO Cell cultures and specific serology may also be used for confirming the underlying disease. Whilst sporadic and endemic cases are part of routine medical practice and may not raise any alarm bells, outbreaks certainly need mobilization of appropriate resources for effective control. Needless to say 'prevention is better than cure' and should be the primary target of the health authorities in devising strategies for disease control.The WHO recommended 'Integrated Vector control programme', lays stress on social mobilisation and strengthening of public health bodies, coherent response of health and related departments and effective capacity building of relevant personnel and organisations as well as the community at risk. For Aedes Egypti the primary control revolves around eliminating its habitats such as open sources of water. In a local perspective in our city Peshawar, venue of the recent dengue epidemic, it may be seen in the form of incidental reservoirs such as receptacles and tyres dumped in open areas such as roof tops with rain water accumulating in them and provtdjng excellent breeding habitats, Larvicidal and insecticides may be added to more permanent sources such as watertanks and farm lands. There is not much of a role for spraying with organophosphorous agents which is at times resorted to for public consumption. Public education is the key to any effective strategy which must highlight the need for wearing clothing that fully covers the skin, avoiding unnecessary early morning and evening exposure to vector agents, application of insect repellents and use of mosquito nets. It is also important not to panic if affliction with the disease is suspected as in a vast majority of instances it is a self limiting illness without any long term harmful effects and needs simple conservative management like antipyretics and analgesics.An important consideration for responsible authorities in a dengue epidemic is to ensure that maximum management facilities for simple cases are provided at the community level through primary and secondary health care facilities and that the tertiary care hospitals are not inundated with all sort of patients demanding consultation. These later facilities should be reserved for those patients who end up with any complications or more severe manifestation of the disease.Research is underway to develop an ideal vaccine for Dengue fever. In 2016, a vaccine by the name 'Dengvaxia' was marketed in Phillipines and Indonesia. However with development of new serotypes of the virus, its efficacy has been somewhat compromised.As for treatment , there are no specific antiviral drugs. Management is symptomatic revolving mainly around oral and intravenous hydration. Paracetamol (Acetaminophen) is used for fever as compared to NSAIDS such as Ibuprophen infusion as well as blood and platelet transfusion.Data to date shows that slightly more than twenty three thousand people have been diagnosed with dengue over the past three months ie August to October there is a lower risk of bleeding with the former. Those with more severe form of the disease may need Dextran 2017, in Peshawar, Pakistan with around fourteen thousand needing admission and about sixty nine recorded deaths. The mortality is well within the acceptable international standards of less than 1% for the disease. In the backdrop of all the debate surrounding the current epidemic, one can infer that such outbreaks are best addressed with effective planningwell ahead of the time before the disease threatens to spiral out of control. Simple measures such as covering water storage facilities, using larvicidals where practical, use of insect repellents, mosquito nets and avoiding unnecessary exposure can offerthe best protection. Public health messages via print and electronic media can help educate people in affected areas and allay any anxiety building up from a fear of developing life threatening complications. Health department must mobilise all its resources to ensure local management of diagnosed patients with simple dengue fever and facilitate hospital admission only for those suffering from more severe form of the disease. Moreover the media hype into such situations needs to be addressed through constant updates and discouraging any negative politicking on the issue. To sum up Dengue fever is not really an affliction to be dreaded provided it is viewed and managed in the right perspective.

In this era of startling developments in the medical field there remains a serious worry about the hazardous potential of various by products which if not properly addressed can lead to consequences of immense public concern. Hospitals and other health care facilities generate waste products which are evidently hazardous to all those exposed to its potentially harmful effects. Need for effective legislation ensuring its safe disposal is supposed to be an integral part of any country's health related policy. This issue is of special importance in developing countries like Pakistan which in spite of framing various regulations for safeguarding public health, seem to overlook its actual implementation. The result unfortunately is the price wehave to pay not only in terms of rampant spread of crippling infections but a significant spending of health budget on combating epidemics which could easily have been avoided through effective waste disposal measures in the first place. Waste classified under the heading 'bio-hazardous' includes any infectious or potentially infectious material which can be injurious or harmful to humans and other living organisms. Amongst the many potential sources are the hospitals or other health delivery centres which are ironically supposed to be the centres of infection control and treatment. Whilst working in these setups, health care workers such as doctors, nurses, paramedical staff and sanitation workers are actually the ones most exposed and vulnerable to these challenges. Biomedical waste may broadly be classified into Infectious and toxic waste. Infectious waste includes sharps, blood, body fluids and tissues etcwhile substances such as radioactive material and by-products of certain drugs qualify as toxic waste. Furthermore health institutions also have to cater for general municipal waste such as carton boxes, paper and plastics. The World Health Organisation has its own general classification of hospital waste divided into almost eight categories of which almost 15% (10% infectious and 5% toxic) is estimated to be of a hazardous nature while the remaining 85% is general non hazardous content.1A recent study from Faisalabad, Pakistan has estimated hospital waste generation around 1 to 1.5 kg / bed /day for public sector hospitals in the region,2while figures quoted from neighbouring India are approximately 0.5 to 2 KG / hospital bed /day.3 Elsewhere in the world variable daily hospital waste production has been observed ranging from as low as 0.14 to 0.49 kg /day in Korea4 and 0.26 to 0.89 kg/day in Greece5to as high as 2.1 to 3.83 kg/day in Turkey6 and 0.84 to 5.8 kg/day in Tanzania.7Ill effects of improper management of hospital waste can manifest as nosocomial infections or occupational hazards such as needle stick injuries. Pathogens or spores can be borne either through the oro-faecal or respiratory routes in addition to direct inoculation through contact with infected needles or sharps. Environmental pollution can result from improper burning of toxic material leading to emission of dioxins, particulate matter or furans into the air. The habitat can also be affected by illegal dumping and landfills or washing up of medical waste released into the sea or river. Potential organisms implicated in diseases secondary to mismanagement of hospital waste disposal include salmonella, cholera, shigella, helminths, strep pneumonia, measles, tuberculosis, herpesvirus, anthrax, meningitis, HIV, hepatitis and candida etc. These infections can cause a considerable strain on the overall health and finances of the community or individuals affected. The basic principal of Public health management i.e 'prevention is better than cure' cannot be more stressed in this scenario as compared to any other health challenge. Health facilities must have a clear policy on hazardous waste management. To ensure a safe environment hospitals need to adopt and implement international and local systems of waste disposal. Hospital waste management plan entails policy and procedures addressing waste generation, accumulation, handling, transportation, storage, treatment and disposal. Waste needs to be collected in marked containers usually colour coded and leak proof. Segregation at source is of vital importance. The standard practice in many countries is the Basic Three Bin System ie to segregate the waste into RED bags/ boxes for sharps, YELLOW bags for biological waste and BLUE or BLACK ones for general/ municipal waste. All hospital staff needs to be trained in the concept of putting the right waste in relevant containers/ bags. They need to know that more than anything else this practice is vital for their own safety. The message can be reinforced through appropriate labelling on the bins and having posters with simple delineations to avoid mixing of different waste types. Sharps essentially should be kept in rigid, leak and puncture-resistant containers which are tightly lidded and labelled. Regular training sessions for nurses and cleaning staff can be organised as they are the personnel who are more likely to deal with waste disposition at the level of their respective departments. Next of course is transportation of waste products to the storage or disposal. Sanitary staff and janitors must be aware of the basic concepts of waste handling and should wear protective clothing, masks and gloves etc, besides ensuring regular practice of disinfection and sterilization techniques.8Special trolleys or vehicles exclusively designed and reserved for biomedical waste and operated by trained individuals should be used for transportation to the dumping or treatment site. Biomedical waste treatment whether on site or off site is a specialised entity involving use of chemicals and equipment intended for curtailing the hazardous potential of the material at hand. Thermal treatment via incinerators, not only results in combustion of organic substances but the final product in the form of non-toxicash is only 10 to 15% of the original solid mass of waste material fed to the machine. Dedicated autoclaves and microwaves can also be used for the purpose of disinfection. Chemicals such as bleach, sodium hydroxides, chlorine dioxide and sodiumhypochlorite are also effective disinfectants having specialised indications. Countries around the world have their own regulations for waste management. United Kingdom practices strict observance of Environmental protection act 1990, Waste managementlicensing regulations 1994 and Hazardous waste regulations 2005 making it one of thesafest countries in terms of hazardous waste disposal. Similar regulations specific for each state have been adopted in United States following passage of the Medical Waste tracking act 1988. In Pakistan, every hospital must comply with the Waste Management Rules 2005 (Environment Protection Act 1997), though actual compliance is far from satisfactory. It is high time that the government and responsible community organisations shape up to seriously tackle the issue of bio hazardous waste management through enforcement of effective policies and standard operating procedures for safeguarding the health and lives of the public in general and health workers in particular. Outbreaks, defined as excess cases of a particular disease or illness which outweighs the response capabilities, have the capacity to overwhelm health care facilities and need timely response and attention to details in order to avoid potentially disastrous sequelae . In this day and age when improvement in public health practices have significantly curtailed outbreak of various diseases, certain viral illnesses continue to make headlines. One of the notable vector borne infectious disease affecting significant portions of south east Asia in the early part of twenty first century is 'Dengue fever'. Dreaded as it is by those suffering from the illness, a lot of the hysteria created is secondary to a lack of education and understanding of the nature of the disease and at times a result of disinformation campaign for vested interests by certain political and media sections.'Dengue' in fact is a Spanish word, assumed to have originated from the Swahili phrase -ka dinga peppo -which describes the disease as being caused by evil spirit. 1 Over the course of time it has been called 'breakbone fever', 'bilious vomiting fever', 'break heart fever', 'dandy fever', 'la dengue' and 'Phillipine, Thai and Singapore hemorrhagic fever' Whilst the first reported case referring to dengue fever as a water poison spread by flying insects, exists in the Chinese medical encyclopedia from Jin Dynasty (265-420 AD), the disease is believed to have disseminated from Africa with the spread of the primary vector, aedes egypti, in the 15th to 19th century as a result of globalisation of slave trade 45In 80% of the patients affected by this condition the presentation is rather insidious and at best characterized by mild fever. The classical 'Dengue fever' present in about 5% of the cases is characterized by high temperature, body aches, vomiting and at times a skin rash. The disease may regresses in two to seven days. However inrare instances (<5%) it may develop into more serious conditions such as Dengue hemorrhagic fever whereby the platelet count is significantly reduced leading to bleeding tendencies and may even culminate in a more life threatening presentation i.e Dengue shock syndrome.6To understand the actual dynamics of Dengue epidemic it is important to understand the mode of its spread in affected areas. Aedes mosquito (significantly Aedes Egypti) acts a vector for this disease. Early morning and evening times7 are favoured by these mosquitos to feed on their prey. There is some evidence that the disease may be transmitted via blood products and organ donation. 8 Moreover vertical transmission (mother to child) has also been reported 9Diagnostic investigations include blood antigen detection through NS-I or nucleic acid detection via PCR. IO Cell cultures and specific serology may also be used for confirming the underlying disease. Whilst sporadic and endemic cases are part of routine medical practice and may not raise any alarm bells, outbreaks certainly need mobilization of appropriate resources for effective control. Needless to say 'prevention is better than cure' and should be the primary target of the health authorities in devising strategies for disease control.The WHO recommended 'Integrated Vector control programme', lays stress on social mobilisation and strengthening of public health bodies, coherent response of health and related departments and effective capacity building of relevant personnel and organisations as well as the community at risk. For Aedes Egypti the primary control revolves around eliminating its habitats such as open sources of water. In a local perspective in our city Peshawar, venue of the recent dengue epidemic, it may be seen in the form of incidental reservoirs such as receptacles and tyres dumped in open areas such as roof tops with rain water accumulating in them and provtdjng excellent breeding habitats, Larvicidal and insecticides may be added to more permanent sources such as watertanks and farm lands. There is not much of a role for spraying with organophosphorous agents which is at times resorted to for public consumption. Public education is the key to any effective strategy which must highlight the need for wearing clothing that fully covers the skin, avoiding unnecessary early morning and evening exposure to vector agents, application of insect repellents and use of mosquito nets. It is also important not to panic if affliction with the disease is suspected as in a vast majority of instances it is a self limiting illness without any long term harmful effects and needs simple conservative management like antipyretics and analgesics.An important consideration for responsible authorities in a dengue epidemic is to ensure that maximum management facilities for simple cases are provided at the community level through primary and secondary health care facilities and that the tertiary care hospitals are not inundated with all sort of patients demanding consultation. These later facilities should be reserved for those patients who end up with any complications or more severe manifestation of the disease.Research is underway to develop an ideal vaccine for Dengue fever. In 2016, a vaccine by the name 'Dengvaxia' was marketed in Phillipines and Indonesia. However with development of new serotypes of the virus, its efficacy has been somewhat compromised.As for treatment , there are no specific antiviral drugs. Management is symptomatic revolving mainly around oral and intravenous hydration. Paracetamol (Acetaminophen) is used for fever as compared to NSAIDS such as Ibuprophen infusion as well as blood and platelet transfusion.Data to date shows that slightly more than twenty three thousand people have been diagnosed with dengue over the past three months ie August to October there is a lower risk of bleeding with the former. Those with more severe form of the disease may need Dextran 2017, in Peshawar, Pakistan with around fourteen thousand needing admission and about sixty nine recorded deaths. The mortality is well within the acceptable international standards of less than 1% for the disease. In the backdrop of all the debate surrounding the current epidemic, one can infer that such outbreaks are best addressed with effective planningwell ahead of the time before the disease threatens to spiral out of control. Simple measures such as covering water storage facilities, using larvicidals where practical, use of insect repellents, mosquito nets and avoiding unnecessary exposure can offerthe best protection. Public health messages via print and electronic media can help educate people in affected areas and allay any anxiety building up from a fear of developing life threatening complications. Health department must mobilise all its resources to ensure local management of diagnosed patients with simple dengue fever and facilitate hospital admission only for those suffering from more severe form of the disease. Moreover the media hype into such situations needs to be addressed through constant updates and discouraging any negative politicking on the issue. To sum up Dengue fever is not really an affliction to be dreaded provided it is viewed and managed in the right perspective.

This paper is meant to study the apocalyptic scenario of the at the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, scientific evidences are in favour of dramatic change in the climatic conditions related to the climax of Man actions. the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures, dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. Going far from these scientific claims, Homo Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination through the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance. Introduction The Great Acceleration may be considered as the Late Anthropocene in which Man actions reached their climax to lead to dramatic climatic changes paving the way for a possible apocalyptic scenario threatening the existence of the humanity. So, the apocalyptic scenario is not a pure imagination of the literature works. Instead, many scientific arguments especially related to climate change are in favour of the apocalypse1. As a matter of fact, the modelling of the future climate leads to horrible situations including intolerable temperatures (In 06/07/2021, Kuwait recorded the highest temperature of 53.2 °C), dryness, tornadoes, and noticeable sear level rise evading coastal regions. These conditions taking place during the Great Acceleration would have direct repercussions on the human species. Considering that the apocalyptic extinction had really caused the disappearance of many stronger species including dinosaurs, Homo Sapiens Sapiens extended his imagination though the Climate-Fiction (cli-fi) to propose a dramatic end due to severe climate conditions intolerable by the humankind. The mass extinction of animal species has occurred several times over the geological ages. Researchers have a poor understanding of the causes and processes of these major crises1. Nonetheless, whatever the cause of extinction, the apocalyptic scenario has always been present in the geological history. For example, dinosaurs extinction either by asteroids impact or climate changes could by no means denies the apocalyptic aspect2.At the same time as them, many animal and plant species became extinct, from marine or flying reptiles to marine plankton. This biological crisis of sixty-five million years ago is not the only one that the biosphere has suffered. It was preceded and followed by other crises which caused the extinction or the rarefaction of animal species. So, it is undeniable that many animal groups have disappeared. It is even on the changes of fauna that the geologists of the last century have based themselves to establish the scale of geological times, scale which is still used. But it is no less certain that the extinction processes, extremely complex, are far from being understood. We must first agree on the meaning of the word "extinction", namely on the apocalyptic aspect of the concept. It is quite understood that, without disappearances, the evolution of species could not have followed its course. Being aware that the apocalyptic extinction had massacred stronger species that had dominated the planet, Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been aware that the possibility of apocalyptic end at the perspective of the Anthropocene (i.e., Great Acceleration) could not be excluded. This conviction is motivated by the progressive defaunation in some regions3and the appearance of alien species in others related to change of mineralogy and geochemistry4 leading to a climate change during the Anthropocene. These scientific claims fed the vast imagination about climate change to set the so-called cli-fi. The concept of the Anthropocene is the new geological era which begins when the Man actions have reached a sufficient power to modify the geological processes and climatic cycles of the planet5. The Anthropocene by no means excludes the possibility of an apocalyptic horizon, namely in the perspectives of the Great Acceleration. On the contrary, two scenarios do indeed seem to dispute the future of the Anthropocene, with a dramatic cross-charge. The stories of the end of the world are as old as it is, as the world is the origin of these stories. However, these stories of the apocalypse have evolved over time and, since the beginning of the 19th century, they have been nourished particularly by science and its advances. These fictions have sometimes tried to pass themselves off as science. This is the current vogue, called collapsology6. This end is more than likely cli-fi driven7and it may cause the extinction of the many species including the Homo Sapiens Sapiens. In this vein, Anthropocene defaunation has become an ultimate reality8. More than one in eight birds, more than one in five mammals, more than one in four coniferous species, one in three amphibians are threatened. The hypothesis of a hierarchy within the living is induced by the error of believing that evolution goes from the simplest to the most sophisticated, from the inevitably stupid inferior to the superior endowed with an intelligence giving prerogative to all powers. Evolution goes in all directions and pursues no goal except the extension of life on Earth. Evolution certainly does not lead from bacteria to humans, preferably male and white. Our species is only a carrier of the DNA that precedes us and that will survive us. Until we show a deep respect for the biosphere particularly, and our planet in general, we will not become much, we will remain a predator among other predators, the fiercest of predators, the almighty craftsman of the Anthropocene. To be in the depths of our humanity, somehow giving back to the biosphere what we have taken from it seems obvious. To stop the sixth extinction of species, we must condemn our anthropocentrism and the anthropization of the territories that goes with it. The other forms of life also need to keep their ecological niches. According to the first, humanity seems at first to withdraw from the limits of the planet and ultimately succumb to them, with a loss of dramatic meaning. According to the second, from collapse to collapse, it is perhaps another humanity, having overcome its demons, that could come. Climate fiction is a literary sub-genre dealing with the theme of climate change, including global warming. The term appears to have been first used in 2008 by blogger and writer Dan Bloom. In October 2013, Angela Evancie, in a review of the novel Odds against Tomorrow, by Nathaniel Rich, wonders if climate change has created a new literary genre. Scientific basis of the apocalyptic scenario in the perspective of the Anthropocene Global warming All temperature indices are in favour of a global warming (Fig.1). According to the different scenarios of the IPCC9, the temperatures of the globe could increase by 2 °C to 5 °C by 2100. But some scientists warn about a possible runaway of the warming which can reach more than 3 °C. Thus, the average temperature on the surface of the globe has already increased by more than 1.1 °C since the pre-industrial era. The rise in average temperatures at the surface of the globe is the first expected and observed consequence of massive greenhouse gas emissions. However, meteorological surveys record positive temperature anomalies which are confirmed from year to year compared to the temperatures recorded since the middle of the 19th century. Climatologists point out that the past 30 years have seen the highest temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere for over 1,400 years. Several climatic centres around the world record, synthesize and follow the evolution of temperatures on Earth. Since the beginning of the 20th century (1906-2005), the average temperature at the surface of the globe has increased by 0.74 °C, but this progression has not been continuous since 1976, the increase has clearly accelerated, reaching 0.19 °C per decade according to model predictions. Despite the decline in solar activity, the period 1997-2006 is marked by an average positive anomaly of 0.53 °C in the northern hemisphere and 0.27 °C in the southern hemisphere, still compared to the normal calculated for 1961-1990. The ten hottest years on record are all after 1997. Worse, 14 of the 15 hottest years are in the 21st century, which has barely started. Thus, 2016 is the hottest year, followed closely by 2015, 2014 and 2010. The temperature of tropical waters increased by 1.2 °C during the 20th century (compared to 0.5 °C on average for the oceans), causing coral reefs to bleach in 1997. In 1998, the period of Fort El Niño, the prolonged warming of the water has destroyed half of the coral reefs of the Indian Ocean. In addition, the temperature in the tropics of the five ocean basins, where cyclones form, increased by 0.5 °C from 1970 to 2004, and powerful cyclones appeared in the North Atlantic in 2005, while they were more numerous in other parts of the world. Recently, mountains of studies focused on the possible scenario of climate change and the potential worldwide repercussions including hell temperatures and apocalyptic extreme events10 , 11, 12. Melting of continental glaciers As a direct result of the global warming, melting of continental glaciers has been recently noticed13. There are approximately 198,000 mountain glaciers in the world; they cover an area of approximately 726,000 km2. If they all melted, the sea level would rise by about 40 cm. Since the late 1960s, global snow cover has declined by around 10 to 15%. Winter cold spells in much of the northern half of the northern hemisphere are two weeks shorter than 100 years ago. Glaciers of mountains have been declining all over the world by an average of 50 m per decade for 150 years. However, they are also subject to strong multi-temporal variations which make forecasts on this point difficult according to some specialists. In the Alps, glaciers have been losing 1 meter per year for 30 years. Polar glaciers like those of Spitsbergen (about a hundred km from the North Pole) have been retreating since 1880, releasing large quantities of water. The Arctic has lost about 10% of its permanent ice cover every ten years since 1980. In this region, average temperatures have increased at twice the rate of elsewhere in the world in recent decades. The melting of the Arctic Sea ice has resulted in a loss of 15% of its surface area and 40% of its thickness since 1979. The record for melting arctic sea ice was set in 2017. All models predict the disappearance of the Arctic Sea ice in summer within a few decades, which will not be without consequences for the climate in Europe. The summer melting of arctic sea ice accelerated far beyond climate model predictions. Added to its direct repercussions of coastal regions flooding, melting of continental ice leads to radical climatic modifications in favour of the apocalyptic scenario. Fig.1 Evolution of temperature anomaly from 1880 to 2020: the apocalyptic scenario Sea level rise As a direct result of the melting of continental glaciers, sea level rise has been worldwide recorded14 ,15. The average level of the oceans has risen by 22 cm since 1880 and 2 cm since the year 2000 because of the melting of the glaciers but also with the thermal expansion of the water. In the 20th century, the sea level rose by around 2 mm per year. From 1990 to 2017, it reached the relatively constant rate of just over 3mm per year. Several sources contributed to sea level increase including thermal expansion of water (42%), melting of continental glaciers (21%), melting Greenland glaciers (15%) and melting Antarctic glaciers (8%). Since 2003, there has always been a rapid rise (around 3.3 mm / year) in sea level, but the contribution of thermal expansion has decreased (0.4 mm / year) while the melting of the polar caps and continental glaciers accelerates. Since most of the world’s population is living on coastal regions, sea level rise represents a real threat for the humanity, not excluding the apocalyptic scenario. Multiplication of extreme phenomena and climatic anomalies On a human scale, an average of 200 million people is affected by natural disasters each year and approximately 70,000 perish from them. Indeed, as evidenced by the annual reviews of disasters and climatic anomalies, we are witnessing significant warning signs. It is worth noting that these observations are dependent on meteorological survey systems that exist only in a limited number of countries with statistics that rarely go back beyond a century or a century and a half. In addition, scientists are struggling to represent the climatic variations of the last two thousand years which could serve as a reference in the projections. Therefore, the exceptional nature of this information must be qualified a little. Indeed, it is still difficult to know the return periods of climatic disasters in each region. But over the last century, the climate system has gone wild. Indeed, everything suggests that the climate is racing. Indeed, extreme events and disasters have become more frequent. For instance, less than 50 significant events were recorded per year over the period 1970-1985, while there have been around 120 events recorded since 1995. Drought has long been one of the most worrying environmental issues. But while African countries have been the main affected so far, the whole world is now facing increasingly frequent and prolonged droughts. Chile, India, Australia, United States, France and even Russia are all regions of the world suffering from the acceleration of the global drought. Droughts are slowly evolving natural hazards that can last from a few months to several decades and affect larger or smaller areas, whether they are small watersheds or areas of hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. In addition to their direct effects on water resources, agriculture and ecosystems, droughts can cause fires or heat waves. They also promote the proliferation of invasive species, creating environments with multiple risks, worsening the consequences on ecosystems and societies, and increasing their vulnerability. Although these are natural phenomena, there is a growing understanding of how humans have amplified the severity and impacts of droughts, both on the environment and on people. We influence meteorological droughts through our action on climate change, and we influence hydrological droughts through our management of water circulation and water processes at the local scale, for example by diverting rivers or modifying land use. During the Anthropocene (the present period when humans exert a dominant influence on climate and environment), droughts are closely linked to human activities, cultures, and responses. From this scientific overview, it may be concluded apocalyptic scenario is not only a literature genre inspired from the pure imagination. Instead, many scientific arguments are in favour of this dramatic destiny of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Fig.2. Sea level rise from 1880 to 2020: a possible apocalyptic scenario (www.globalchange.gov, 2021) Apocalyptic genre in recent writing As the original landmark of apocalyptic writing, we must place the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 587 BC and the Exile in Babylon. Occasion of a religious and cultural crossing with imprescriptible effects, the Exile brought about a true rebirth, characterized by the maintenance of the essential ethical, even cultural, of a national religion, that of Moses, kept as pure as possible on a foreign land and by the reinterpretation of this fundamental heritage by the archaic return of what was very old, both national traditions and neighbouring cultures. More precisely, it was the place and time for the rehabilitation of cultures and the melting pot for recasting ancient myths. This vast infatuation with Antiquity, remarkable even in the vocabulary used, was not limited to Israel: it even largely reflected a general trend. The long period that preceded throughout the 7th century BC and until 587, like that prior to the edict of Cyrus in 538 BC, was that of restorations and rebirths, of returns to distant sources and cultural crossings. In the biblical literature of this period, one is struck by the almost systematic link between, on the one hand, a very sustained mythical reinvestment even in form and, on the other, the frequent use of biblical archaisms. The example of Shadday, a word firmly rooted in the Semites of the Northwest and epithet of El in the oldest layers of the books of Genesis and Exodus, is most eloquent. This term reappears precisely at the time of the Exile as a designation of the divinity of the Patriarchs and of the God of Israel; Daily, ecological catastrophes now describe the normal state of societies exposed to "risks", in the sense that Ulrich Beck gives to this term: "the risk society is a society of catastrophe. The state of emergency threatens to become a normal state there1”. Now, the "threat" has become clearer, and catastrophic "exceptions" are proliferating as quickly as species are disappearing and climate change is accelerating. The relationship that we have with this worrying reality, to say the least, is twofold: on the one hand, we know very well what is happening to us; on the other hand, we fail to draw the appropriate theoretical and political consequences. This ecological duplicity is at the heart of what has come to be called the “Anthropocene”, a term coined at the dawn of the 21st century by Eugene Stoermer (an environmentalist) and Paul Crutzen (a specialist in the chemistry of the atmosphere) in order to describe an age when humanity would have become a "major geological force" capable of disrupting the climate and changing the terrestrial landscape from top to bottom. If the term “Anthropocene” takes note of human responsibility for climate change, this responsibility is immediately attributed to overpowering: strong as we are, we have “involuntarily” changed the climate for at least two hundred and fifty years. Therefore, let us deliberately change the face of the Earth, if necessary, install a solar shield in space. Recognition and denial fuel the signifying machine of the Anthropocene. And it is precisely what structures eco-apocalyptic cinema that this article aims to study. By "eco-apocalyptic cinema", we first mean a cinematographic sub-genre: eco-apocalyptic and post-eco-apocalyptic films base the possibility (or reality) of the end of the world on environmental grounds and not, for example, on damage caused by the possible collision of planet Earth with a comet. Post-apocalyptic science fiction (sometimes abbreviated as "post-apo" or "post-nuke") is a sub-genre of science fiction that depicts life after a disaster that destroyed civilization: nuclear war, collision with a meteorite, epidemic, economic or energy crisis, pandemic, alien invasion. Conclusion Climate and politics have been linked together since Aristotle. With Montesquieu, Ibn Khaldûn or Watsuji, a certain climatic determinism is attributed to the character of a nation. The break with modernity made the climate an object of scientific knowledge which, in the twentieth century, made it possible to document, despite the controversies, the climatic changes linked to industrialization. Both endanger the survival of human beings and ecosystems. Climate ethics are therefore looking for a new relationship with the biosphere or Gaia. For some, with the absence of political agreements, it is the beginning of inevitable catastrophes. For others, the Anthropocene, which henceforth merges human history with natural history, opens onto technical action. The debate between climate determinism and human freedom is revived. The reference to the biblical Apocalypse was present in the thinking of thinkers like Günther Anders, Karl Jaspers or Hans Jonas: the era of the atomic bomb would mark an entry into the time of the end, a time marked by the unprecedented human possibility of 'total war and annihilation of mankind. The Apocalypse will be very relevant in describing the chaos to come if our societies continue their mad race described as extra-activist, productivist and consumerist. In dialogue with different theologians and philosophers (such as Jacques Ellul), it is possible to unveil some spiritual, ethical, and political resources that the Apocalypse offers for thinking about History and human engagement in the Anthropocene. What can a theology of collapse mean at a time when negative signs and dead ends in the human situation multiply? What then is the place of man and of the cosmos in the Apocalypse according to Saint John? Could the end of history be a collapse? How can we live in the time we have left before the disaster? Answers to such questions remain unknown and no scientist can predict the trajectory of this Great Acceleration taking place at the Late Anthropocene. When science cannot give answers, Man tries to infer his destiny for the legend, religion and the fiction. Climate Fiction is developed into a recording machine containing every kind of fictions that depict environmental condition events and has consequently lost its true significance. Aware of the prospect of ecological collapse additionally as our apparent inability to avert it, we tend to face geology changes of forceful proportions that severely challenge our ability to imagine the implications. Climate fiction ought to be considered an important supplement to climate science, as a result, climate fiction makes visible and conceivable future modes of existence inside worlds not solely deemed seemingly by science, however that area unit scientifically anticipated. Hence, this chapter, as part of the book itself, aims to contribute to studies of ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, and literary and culture studies. References David P.G. Bondand Stephen E. Grasby. "Late Ordovician mass extinction caused by volcanism, warming, and anoxia, not cooling and glaciation: REPLY." Geology 48, no. 8 (Geological Society of America2020): 510. Cyril Langlois.’Vestiges de l'apocalypse: ‘le site de Tanis, Dakota du Nord 2019’. Accessed June, 6, 2021, https://planet-terre.ens-lyon.fr/pdf/Tanis-extinction-K-Pg.pdf NajouaGharsalli,ElhoucineEssefi, Rana Baydoun, and ChokriYaich. ‘The Anthropocene and Great Acceleration as controversial epoch of human-induced activities: case study of the Halk El Menjel wetland, eastern Tunisia’. Applied Ecology and Environmental Research 18(3) (Corvinus University of Budapest 2020): 4137-4166 Elhoucine Essefi, ‘On the Geochemistry and Mineralogy of the Anthropocene’. International Journal of Water and Wastewater Treatment, 6(2). 1-14, (Sci Forschen2020): doi.org/10.16966/2381-5299.168 Elhoucine Essefi. ‘Record of the Anthropocene-Great Acceleration along a core from the coast of Sfax, southeastern Tunisia’. Turkish journal of earth science, (TÜBİTAK,2021). 1-16. Chiara Xausa. ‘Climate Fiction and the Crisis of Imagination: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and The Swan Book’. Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal 8(2), (WARWICK 2021): 99-119. Akyol, Özlem. "Climate Change: An Apocalypse for Urban Space? An Ecocritical Reading of “Venice Drowned” and “The Tamarisk Hunter”." Folklor/Edebiyat 26, no. 101 (UluslararasıKıbrısÜniversitesi 2020): 115-126. Boswell, Suzanne F. "The Four Tourists of the Apocalypse: Figures of the Anthropocene in Caribbean Climate Fiction.". Paradoxa 31, (Academia 2020): 359-378. Ayt Ougougdal, Houssam, Mohamed YacoubiKhebiza, Mohammed Messouli, and Asia Lachir. "Assessment of future water demand and supply under IPCC climate change and socio-economic scenarios, using a combination of models in Ourika Watershed, High Atlas, Morocco." Water 12, no. 6 (MPDI 2020): 1751.DOI:10.3390/w12061751. Wu, Jia, Zhenyu Han, Ying Xu, Botao Zhou, and Xuejie Gao. "Changes in extreme climate events in China under 1.5 C–4 C global warming targets: Projections using an ensemble of regional climate model simulations." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 125, no. 2 (Wiley2020): e2019JD031057.https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JD031057 Khan, Md Jamal Uddin, A. K. M. Islam, Sujit Kumar Bala, and G. M. Islam. "Changes in climateextremes over Bangladesh at 1.5° C, 2° C, and 4° C of global warmingwith high-resolutionregionalclimate modeling." Theoretical&AppliedClimatology 140 (EBSCO2020). Gudoshava, Masilin, Herbert O. Misiani, Zewdu T. Segele, Suman Jain, Jully O. Ouma, George Otieno, Richard Anyah et al. "Projected effects of 1.5 C and 2 C global warming levels on the intra-seasonal rainfall characteristics over the Greater Horn of Africa." Environmental Research Letters 15, no. 3 (IOPscience2020): 34-37. Wang, Lawrence K., Mu-Hao Sung Wang, Nai-Yi Wang, and Josephine O. Wong. "Effect of Global Warming and Climate Change on Glaciers and Salmons." In Integrated Natural Resources Management, ed.Lawrence K. Wang, Mu-Hao Sung Wang, Yung-Tse Hung, Nazih K. Shammas(Springer 2021), 1-36. Merschroth, Simon, Alessio Miatto, Steffi Weyand, Hiroki Tanikawa, and Liselotte Schebek. "Lost Material Stock in Buildings due to Sea Level Rise from Global Warming: The Case of Fiji Islands." Sustainability 12, no. 3 (MDPI 2020): 834.doi:10.3390/su12030834 Hofer, Stefan, Charlotte Lang, Charles Amory, Christoph Kittel, Alison Delhasse, Andrew Tedstone, and Xavier Fettweis. "Greater Greenland Ice Sheet contribution to global sea level rise in CMIP6." 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Creative theology in Asia started emerging mostly after decolonisation. The experience of nationalist struggles against colonial rule provided a new impetus, new perspectives and indigenous resources for original theological enterprises. The first part of this presentation goes into the analysis of factors and forces at work in the post-colonial era for the creation of Asian theologies. The second part goes into some of the salient features and characteristics of Asian theologies, despite regional differences in terms of societies, cultures and histories. The third and final part highlights the importance of moving in a new direction in Asian theologising, which should assume the nature of public theology. The presentation then goes on to sketch some of the features that will characterise Asian public Theology along with the challenges it presents.

This article attempts to answer the question how interdisciplinary is theology in the Asian context? It tackles the issue in three distinct parts: (1) the notion of interdisciplinarity; (2) the relationship between theology and other disciplines; and (3) the principles and practices of interdisciplinary theologizing in Asia. First, interdisciplinarity feeds on the concept of scientific disciplinarity. Though “disciplines” as domains of knowledge exist from the Greeks to the scholastics, disciplinary specialization is a modern creation. The subsequent scientific compartmentalization longed for a synthesis, thus, leading to the varied ways of relating among scientific disciplines expressed in terms like interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. The second part of the article maps how theology has dealt with its “other” throughout history. The third section argues for the dialogical character of both Asian cultures and Asian Christianities. Finding themselves in a land characterized by plural philosophies and religions, it cannot exist but be in dialogue with others. In the Asian continent, the serenity of the lotus meets the defiance of the cross bringing out a theology that expresses both harmony and prophecy, equilibrium and transformation. The article ends by showing methodological principles, theological methods, present practitioners and emerging questions generated by this complex interdisciplinary interaction on the Asian soil. AbstrakArtikel ini berusaha menjawab pertanyaan bagaimana teologi interdisipliner dijalankan dalam konteks Asia? Ada tiga isu yang digarap: (1) makna interdisiplinaritas; (2) keterpautan antara teologi dan disiplin lain; (3) prinsip dan praksis berteologi interdisipliner di Asia. Bagian pertama menggali interdisiplinaritas dalam ilmu-ilmu. Keanekaragaman ilmu-ilmu disimak mulai dari periode filsafat Yunani hingga Skolastik. Ilmu-ilmu modern mendistingsi “keilmiahan” dalam interdisiplinaritas, multidisiplinaritas, dan transdisiplinaritas. Bagian kedua membahas bagaimana teologi mengurus “yang lain” dalam sejarah. Bagian ketiga berargumentasi terkait dengan karakter dialogal dari keduanya, yaitu baik kultur Asia maupun Kekristenan Asia. Karena mendarat di tanah yang bercirikan filsafat dan kebudayaan yang beraneka macam, Kekristenan Asia tidak mungkin melepaskan diri dari dialog dengan yang lain. Di benua Asia, kedamaian lotus berjumpa dengan penebusan salib yang produknya mengukir harmoni dan kritisi, keseimbangan dan transformasi. Artikel berakhir dengan prinsip-prinsip metodologis, metode teologis dari para praktisi saat ini, dan pertanyaan-pertanyaan penting yang muncul dari interaksi interdisipliner yang kompleks di tanah Asia.

Inculturation emerged as a result of paradigm shifts in the missionary outlook of the Church necessitated by a heightened sense of culture, especially the plurality of cultures. This outlook saw culture as a tool for the transmission of the Gospel message to different frontiers. In view of this, dialogue with culture has passed from being an exception to the rule to becoming normative. Inculturation is a complex process, which must be undertaken gradually and critically. Overall, it aims to incarnate the Gospel in every culture by maintaining a healthy balance between tradition and progress. In this paper, the method of inculturation that is highlighted is the one developed by Charles Kraft and Anscar Chupungco known as “dynamic equivalence,” which seeks to build a “communicational bridge” between the Gospel message and human experience. This paper, therefore, embarks upon the discussion of faith-culture dialogue, keeping in mind Church’s efforts to proclaim the message of the Gospel: first, by first tracing the historical development of Inculturation, highlighting the Church’s disposition towards faith culture dialogue; second, by discussing the nature and dynamics of inculturation, focusing on its essential characteristics; and lastly, delineating the process of inculturation, which underscores dynamic equivalence as method. References Acevedo, Marcelo S.J., Inculturation and the Challenge of Modernity. Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University, 1982. Alberigo, Giuseppe “The Announcement of the Council: From Security of the Fortress to the Lure of Quest,” in History of Vatican II, 1 Announcing and Preparing Vatican II: Toward a New Era in Catholicism, ed. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph A. Komonchak. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. 1-54. Aleaz, K.P. “The Theology of Inculturation Re-Examined,” Asia Journal of Theology 25, 2 (2011):232. Amalorpavadass, D.S. “Indian Culture. Integrating Cultural Elements into Spirituality” in Indian Christian Spirituality ed. By D.S. Amalorpvadass, Bangalore: NBCLC, 1982, 100. Arbuckle, Gerard A. “Christianity, Identity, and Cultures: A Case Study” The Australasian Catholic Report (January, 2013): 41-43. Arbuckle, Gerard Earthing the Gospel: An Inculturation Handbook for the Pastoral Worker. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1990. Arevalo, Catalino “Inculturation in the Church: The Asian Context,” Landas 25 (2011): 83-134. Arrupe, P. 1978, “Letter to the Whole Society on Inculturation” Aixala (ed.) 3, 172-181. Barnes, Michael SJ, Theology and the Dialogue of Religions. Cambridge: Cambridge Unviersity Press, 2002. Bevans, Stephen SVD. “Revisiting Mission as Vatican II: Theology and Practice for Today’s Mission Church” Theological Studies 74 (2013): 26. Chupungco, Anscar. “Two Methods of Liturgical Inculturation: Creative Assimilation and Dynamic Equivalence” in Liturgy for the Filipino Church: A Collection of Talks of Anscar J. Chupungco, OSB given at the National Meeting of Diocesan Directors of Liturgy (1986-2004), ed. Josefina M. Manabat, SLD. Mendiola. Manila: San Beda College, Graduate School of Liturgy, 2004. 18-33. Chupungco, Anscar Liturgies of the Future: the Process and Methods of Inculturation. Collegeville Minnesota: A Pueblo Book, 1989. Chupungco, Anscar. “Liturgy and Inculturation,” East Asian Pastoral Review 18 (1981): 264. Costa R.O. (ed.) One Faith, Many Cultures: Inculturation, Indigenization, and Contextualization. Maryknoll: NY Orbis, 1988. Chupungco, Anscar in “Liturgy and Inculturation,” East Asian Pastoral Review 18 (1981): 264. De la Rosa, Rolando V. Beginnings of the Filipino Dominicans: History of the Filipinization of the Religious Orders in the Philippines, Revised Edition. Manila: UST Publishing House, 1990. De Mesa, Jose M. Why Theology is Never Far from Home. Manila: De La Salle University Press, Inc., 2003. Eilers, Franz-Josef. Communicating Between Cultures: An Introduction to Intercultural Communication. Fourth Updated Edition. Manila: Logos, Divine Word Publication, 2012. Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences, Resource Manual for Catholics in Asia: Dialogue. Thailand: FABC-OEIA, 2001. Follo, Francesco “Inculturation and Interculturality in John Paul II and Benedict XVI.” Retrieved 5 February 2014 from http://www.oasiscenter.eu/articles/interreligious-dialogue/2010/03/29/inculturation-and-interculturality-in-john-paul-ii-and-benedict-xvi quoting Ratzinger’s speech during the 25th anniversary of the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, 11 May 2006. Genero, Bartolome. ed. Inculturazione della fede: Sagi Interdisciplinarii. Naple: Edizioni ehoniane, 1981. Gorski, John F. M.M., “Christology, Inculturation, and Their Missiological Implications: A Latin American Perspective,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 28, 2 (2004): 61, Javier, Edgar G. SVD, Dialogue: Our Mission Today. Quezon City: Claretian Publication and ICLA Publications, 2006. Jeremiah, Anderson “Inculturation: A Sub-Altern Critique of K.P. Aleaz’ ‘Indian Christian Vedanta,’ The Asia Journal of Theology 21, 2. (October 2007): 398-411. Kraft, Charles H. Christianity in Culture: A Study in Biblical Theologizing in Cross-Cultural Perspective. New York: Orbis Books, 1980. Kroeger, James, H., “The Faith-Culture Dialogue in Asia: Ten FABC Insights on Inculturation,” oletin Eclesiastico de Filipinas 85, 870 (2009): 7-28. Masson, Joseph ‘L Église ouverte ser le monde’in NRT, 84 (1962) 1038. Mercado, Leonardo N. Inculturation and Filipino Theology, Asia Pacific Missiological Series 2. Manila: Divine Word Publication, 1992. Mercado, Leonardo N. Elements of Filipino Theology. Tacloban City, Philippines: Divine Word University, 1975. Mitchell, Nathan “Culture, Inculturation, and Sacrosanctum Concilium,” Worship 77, 2 (March 2003): 171-181. Pietrzak, Daniel Interculturality and Internationality: A Utopia or a Constructive Tension for a Franciscan Missiology? Retrieved September 9, 2014 from http://www2.ofmconv.pcn.net/docs/en/general/miscon06_india/Interculturality%20and%20Internationality%20%20a%20utopia%20or%20a%20constructive%20tension%20for%20a%20Franciscan%20Missiology.pdf Radcliffe, Timothy. “Inculturation,” Review for Religious (Sept – Oct 1994): 646-657. Schreiter, Robert. “The Legacy of St. Francis Xavier: Inculturation of the Gospel Then and Now” East Asian Pastoral Review 44 (2007): 17-31. Schreiter, Robert J. Constructing Local Theologies. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1993. Shorter, Aylward Toward a Theology of Inculturation. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1999. Stanley, Brian. “Inculturation: Historical Background, Theological Foundations and Contemporary Questions,” Transformation 24, 1 (January 2007): 21-27. Timoner, Gerard F. “Intercultural Theology as a Way of Doing Theology” in Philippiniana Sacra XLI, 121 (January-April, 2006): 75-46. Timoner, Gerard. “Theology of Inculturation: A Critical Appraisal,” Philippiniana Sacra XL no. 119 (2005): 322-325. Ustorf, Werner “The Cultural Origins of Intercultural Theology” Mission Studies 25 (2008): 229-251. Wijsen, Frans “Intercultural Theology” Exchange 30, 3 (2001): 222-230.

One should not overlook the fact that Asia is a home to humanism, atheism, and secularism. In the 18th-20th century, atheism, communism and other forms of western liberalism and humanistic ideology had taken their roots in several Asian societies. In recent history, various forms of secular worldview, humanistic, atheistic, communistic, agnostic, etc. have also found their niche in the Philippines. Hence, we set out this study to probe the extent of secularization in the Philippines today and from there, to draw some challenges it poses to the future of Asian theology and Christianity. The first part of this article will tackle the answer on the first question presented. I will be a presenting both a theoretical and empirical representations in the macro, meso, and micro level for us to examine the phenomenon of secularization. It is to help the readers to investigate how this phenomenon is manifested empirically among the Filipino youths. On the second part of the paper, I will draw some challenges which secularization poses to the future of theology and Christianity in Asia. This study hopefully will modestly contribute to the configuration of an Asian paradigm of theology that proffers some perspectives in helping individuals, communities and society to envision and live out the contingencies of their faith in the future. References Abinales, Patricio N. and Donna J. Amoroso. State and Society in the Philippines. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005 Athyal, Jesudas. ed. Religion in Southeast Asia: An Encyclopedia of Faiths and Cultures. Oxford: ABC-Clio, 2015. Asad, Talal. Formation of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. __________. Genealogies of Religion. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993. Barrett, David B., Todd M. Johnson, and Peter F. Crossing. “Christian World Communions: Five Overviews of Global Christianity, AD 1800-2025” in International Bulletin of Missionary Research, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2009. Bellah, Robert N. (1964). “Religious Evolution” in American Sociological Review Vol. 29, No. 3, 1964. __________.Civil Religion in America. Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones, eds. American Civil Religion. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Bellah, Robert N. et al. Habits of the Heart. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Berger, Peter. A Rumour of Angels: Modern Society and Rediscovery of the Supernatural. New York: Doubleday, 1970. __________. The Sacred Canopy. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1967. __________. ed. The Desecularization of the World. Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Grand Rapids, Michigan: W.B. Eerdmans, 1999. Bosch, David. Believing in the Future. Toward a Missiology of Western Culture. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 1995. Cajes, Prisco Auxilio. Towards a Filipino Christian Eco-theology of Nature. Quezon City: Our Lady of Angel Seminary, 2002. Capucao, Dave. Religion and Ethnocentrism. Leiden/New York: Brill, 2010. Capucao, Dave and Rico Ponce. “Secularization and Spirituality from a Theoretical and Empirical Perspective,” in Secularization and Spirituality: Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities. Quezon City: Institute of Spirituality in Asia. 2016. Casanova, Jose. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. (2006). “Rethinking Secularization: A Global comparative Perspective” in Hedgehog Review, Vol. 8, 2006. Collins, Pat. Basic Evangelization. Dublin: The Columba Press, 2010. Cosmides, Leda, and John Tooby. “Neurocognitive Adaptations Designed for Social Exchange,” in David M. Buss, ed. The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Hoboken: Wiley, 2005. Damasio, Antonio. Descartes’Error. Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putman, 1994. David, Pablo Virgilio. “Secularization and Evangelization, Taking the Cue from Pope Benedict XVI” in Javier, E. ed. Mission in the Context of Fundamentalism and Secularization. Religious Life Asia. Vol. 13, No. 4, Quezon City: Institute of Consecrated Life in Asia, 2011. Davie, Grace. Europe: The Exceptional Case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern World. London: Dartman, Longman, and Todd, 2002. __________. “Believing without Belonging: Is This the Future of Religion in Britain?” in Social Compass. Vol. 37, No. 4, 1990. Dobbelaere, Karel. “Secularization Theories and Sociological Paradigms” in Social Compass. Vol. 31, Nos. 2-3, 1984. __________. “Secularization” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Society. De. W. Swatos. Hartford Institute for Religion Research, http://hirr.hartsem.edu/ency/Secularization.html Eisinga, Robert Nicolaas and Peer Scheepers. Etnocentrisme in Nederland. Dissertation. Nijmegen: Catholic University of Nijmegen, 1989. Gauchet, Marcel. The Disenchantment of the World. A Political History of Religion. Trans. Oscar Burge. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997. Gentz, Joachim. “The Religious situation in East Asia,” in Secularization and the World Religions, Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegang, ed. Alex Skinner, trans. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009. Hellemans, Staf. “ ‘Catholicism Against Modernity’ to the Problematic ‘Modernity of Catholcism’” in Ethical Perspectives. Vol. 8, No. 2, 2001. Iqtidar, Humeira. “The difference between secularism and secularization,” The Guardian, 29 June 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/29/secularism-secularisation-relationship Inglehart, Ronald and Wayne Baker. “Modernization, Cultural Change, and the Persistence of Traditional Values” in American Sociological Review, Vol. 65, No. 1, 2000. Inglehart, Ronald. Modernization and Postmodernization. Cultural, Economic, and Political Change in 43 Countries. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997.. Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990. Jocano, Felipe Landa. Filipino Social Organization. Traditional Kinship and Family Organization. Manila: Punlad Research House, 1998. Labayen, Julio. Revolution and the Church of the Poor. Quezon City: Claretian Publications/Socio-Pastoral Institute, 1995. Levin, Jeff. God, Faith, and Health: Exploring the Spirituality-Healing Connections. New York, Chichester, Weinheim, Brisbane, Singapore, Toronto: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2001. Luckmann, Thomas. The Invisible Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1967. . “Säkularisierung – ein moderner Mythos.” in Thomas Luckmann Lebenswelt und Gesselschaft. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1980. . “Shrinking Transcendence, Expanding Religion?” in Sociological Analysis, Vol. 51, No. 2, 1990.Luh mann, Niklas. The Differentiation of Society. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Mangahas, Mahar. “9% of Catholics Sometimes Think of Leaving the Church”, SWS Special Report, 2013, http://www.sws.org.ph/pr20130407.htm Martin, David. A General Theory of Secularization. Oxford: Blackwell, 1978. __________. “The Secularization Issue: Prospect and Retrospect” in British Journal of Sociology, Vol 42, No. 3, 1991. Menamparampil, Thomas. “Between secularization and Fundamentalism”, in Omnis Terra. Vol 46, No. 425, 2012. __________. Evangelization in Asia in the context of Secularization,” in Javier, E. ed. Mission in the Context of Fundamentalism and Secularization. Religious Life Asia. Vol. 13, No. 4, 2011. Miranda, Dionisio. “Ang Hirap Magpaka-Kristiyano - The Elusive Congruence between Filipino Spirituality and Morality,” in Spirituality as Interdisciplinary Phenomenon: The Philippine Setting, Edward Gerlock, ed. Quezon City: Institute of Spirituality in Asia, 2011. Musschenga, Albert and Anton van Harskamp, eds. The Many Faces of Individualism. Leuven: Peeters, 2001. Norris, Pippa and Ronald Inglehart. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pertierra, Raul. Religion, Politics, and Rationality in a Philippine community. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998. Pew Research Center. The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050. http://www.pewforum.org/files/2015/03/PF_15.04.02_ProjectionsFullReport.pdf San Martin, Ines. “The Philippines is increasingly secular, but still deeply Catholic” (2015). https://cruxnow.com/church/2015/01/15/the-philippines-is-increasingly-secular-but-still-deeply-catholic/ Santos, Tina G. “Bishops Lament, DepEd ‘God-loving’ no more?.” Inquirer Net: Philippine Daily Inquirer, August 30, 2014. http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/634001/bishops-lament-deped-god-loving-no-more. Shiner, Larry (1967). “The Concept of Secularization in Empirical Research” in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1967. Stark, Rodney, and Roger Finke. Acts of Faith. Explaining the Human Side of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Stark, Rodney. “Secularization, R.I.P.” in Sociology of Religion, Vol. 60, No. 3, 1999. Stark, Rodney and William Sims Bainbridge. A Theory of Religion. New York: Lang, 1987. Troeltsch, Ernst. The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches. New York: MacMillan, 1931. Tschannen, Olivier. Les théories de la sécularisation. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1992. __________. “The Secularization Paradigm: A Systematization” in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 30, No. 4, 1991. Van der Ven, Johannes. “Three paradigms for the Study of Religion” in Heinz Streib, ed. Religion Inside and Outside Traditional Institutions. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2007. __________. Education for Reflective Ministry. Louvain: Peeters Press, 1998. __________. Practical Theology. Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1993. Wilfred, Felix. Margins: Site of Asian Theologies. Delhi: ISPCK, 2008. __________. Asian Dreams and Christian Hope. Delhi: ISPCK, 2000.

Science has been highly successful in soil conditioning, plant breeding, and in pest and disease control, but has not yet turned its full attention to making the best use of water for irrigation. As water becomes scarcer worldwide so the need for more efficient water use becomes a necessity for peasant agriculture. It is to this theme that this paper principally addresses itself. In SE Asia flooded rice irrigation occupies some 70 Mha and is expanding at such a rate that water is becoming increasingly expensive to provide. In these circumstances there is a need to look critically at the methods of irrigating and growing rice. The practice of transplanting seedlings and whether rice could be grown equally as successfully in non-flooded conditions requires investigation. The way ahead is being provided by the economies forced on farmers who pump water from their own boreholes. Although the Dumoga project in north Sulawesi, Indonesia, has not yet reached the point of farm development where water shortage is a problem, that time will come; and the scientific programme that is already underway in the area (under the auspices of the ‘Project Wallace’ expedition) could usefully be expanded to include the technical and sociological problems involved in water allocation. Similar studies would also benefit hill irrigation in Nepal, Peru, the Philippines and similar mountainous areas. Excessive soil saturation and poor water control are frequent causes of catastrophic landslides and soil loss from erosion. In those arid zones with a tradition of irrigation and access to oil revenues, better water control can be achieved by the introduction of combined manual and electronic control systems. In Iraq, for example, these systems will help to make the best use of the restricted waters of the Euphrates basin. Scientific advance in irrigation methods is more difficult to foresee in the arid sub-Saharan areas, where the adoption of techniques already successfully applied elsewhere is likely to be the prime necessity.

This paper is based on the experiences of teaching gender and diversity applying a team based approach. The course ‘gender, culture and everyday life’ is taught as part of an online MA programme on Development Management to a group of international students from Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The underlying thinking in the course is that the cultural diversity of the students in terms of nationalities and their different every-day life experiences providea good point of entry for discussing different understandings of gender roles and gender relations across cultures and social groups. In the course we try through the use of experience notes to encourage awareness of embodied and situated knowledge and to stimulate discussions that may move beyond general perceptions of gender relations in the field of development. We arguethat students seem to struggle with transferring such experience-based knowledge into overall discussions and thus also struggle with escaping the confines of dominant narratives. Through examples from the course, we reflect on the use of experience notes in teaching gender, the strengths and weaknesses of a team based approach to teaching gender and diversity, as well as on our own positioning as lecturers in the field of gender and development.

Abstract Objectives Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in Neisseria gonorrhoeae is a global public health concern. Ceftriaxone is the last effective and recommended option for empirical gonorrhoea therapy worldwide, but several ceftriaxone-resistant cases linked to Asia have been reported internationally. During January 2022–June 2023, the WHO Enhanced Gonococcal Antimicrobial Surveillance Programme (EGASP) investigated N. gonorrhoeae AMR and epidemiological factors in patients from 10 clinical sentinel sites in Cambodia. Methods Urethral swabs from males with urethral discharge were cultured. ETEST determined the MIC of five antimicrobials, and EGASP MIC alert values and EUCAST breakpoints were used. EGASP demographic, behavioural and clinical variables were collected using a standardized questionnaire. Results From 437 male patients, 306 had positive N. gonorrhoeae cultures, AMR testing and complete epidemiological data. Resistance to ceftriaxone, cefixime, azithromycin and ciprofloxacin was 15.4%, 43.1%, 14.4% and 97.1%, respectively. Nineteen (6.2%) isolates were resistant to all four antimicrobials and, accordingly, categorized as XDR N. gonorrhoeae. These XDR isolates were collected from 7 of the 10 sentinel sites. No EGASP MIC alert values for gentamicin were reported. The nationally recommended cefixime 400 mg plus azithromycin 1 g (65.4%) or ceftriaxone 1 g plus azithromycin 1 g (34.6%) was used for treatment. Conclusions A high prevalence of ceftriaxone-resistant, MDR and XDR N. gonorrhoeae in several cities of Cambodia were found during 2022–23 in WHO EGASP. This necessitates expanded N. gonorrhoeae AMR surveillance, revision of the nationally recommended gonorrhoea treatment, mandatory test of cure, enhanced sexual contact notification, and ultimately novel antimicrobials for the treatment of gonorrhoea.

Photo ID 279661800 © Sidewaypics|Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT Decolonization is complex, vast, and the subject of an ongoing academic debate. While the many efforts to decolonize or dismantle the vestiges of colonialism that remain are laudable, they can also reinforce what they seek to end. For decolonization to be impactful, it must be done with epistemic and cultural humility, requiring decolonial scholars, project leaders, and well-meaning people to be more sensitive to those impacted by colonization and not regularly included in the discourse. INTRODUCTION Decolonization is complex. To successfully achieve decolonization, projects should incorporate the voices of those subjugated or silenced. Including such voices requires sincerely exploring who has been affected by colonialism or neocolonialism and how, as well as cultural sensitivity. In its basic use, decolonization refers to countries under colonial rule gaining independence or freedom from forms of subjugation. Additionally, scholars use the term to refer to efforts to dismantle neocolonialism and vestiges of colonialism. The process includes de-silencing subjugated voices.[1] I use decolonization in the latter way to refer to countries with technical independence. While arguably colonization ended formally with independence from colonizing powers, neocolonialism is the indirect, informal, and sometimes subtle control of the people, their economy, and political life despite formal independence from colonizing authorities. I conceptualize neocolonialism as a system that involves direct and involuntary control of another’s political, economic, or social life, impacting their worldview and ways of encountering the world. Decolonization may target actions, places, or systems like health care or AI to overcome the ills of colonialism and neocolonialism. It also may target knowledge and require rethinking how people develop their knowledge base. For example, if people grew up seeing an outside colonizer as superior, they would need to change their knowledge of superiority. Decolonization may target power, for example, changing who owns and distributes COVID-19 vaccines and who distributors exclude in the distribution of vaccines. Decolonization could require looking at those disempowered in the distribution process. Additionally, decolonization may target autonomy of persons by freeing people, ensuring human and individual rights, and respecting cultural traditions. Decolonization projects that try to de-silence by including the voices of those affected by colonialism and neocolonialism must examine inclusiveness in the context of the culture of the subrogated individuals. Examples of decolonization projects include making datasets inclusive of diverse peoples and places, returning to traditional food and eating practices, making sure hospitals in developing countries are led by locals and respectful of cultural traditions, returning unethically obtained artefacts or objects. Another project would be laying the groundwork for equality in formerly colonized countries to ensure that business ownership, education, and financial success will flow fairly to those previously victimized by colonization. Summarily, there are many strategies for decolonizing. However, it is worth asking whether the strategies have risks that undermine the goal of decolonization. I. Understanding Decolonization Discourses Many fields, from AI to politics, economics, health care, aviation, and academia, discuss decolonization. The content of the discourse on decolonization depends on the region and field discussing it. Rather than just reporting on decolonization, the discussions may be calls to action. For example, decolonization discourses reflect activism for cognitive justice, such as equal consideration of Indian or African knowledge systems in global health discourses.[2] In politics and political science, some scholars frame decolonization as an anti-western, anti-colonial movement by Africans to emancipate Africa/ns from subjugation or shift the continent to postcolonialism and post-neo-colonialism. This framing walls off non-African participants and may undermine their capacity to benefit the conversation.[3] There are other political scientists who actively support decolonization and see it as a field of activism in support of anyone and countries where colonization harmed people and development.[4] The point is that two ways of conceptualizing decolonization in politics and political science are discernible. One conceptualization is less inclusive since it alienates scholars and professionals from Western, high-income, or developed countries. The other is more inclusive. In humanitarian studies, including philosophy, some decolonization articles and conversations are efforts to end the destructive force of colonization. They focus on either the form, such as ecocide, genocide, and many others, or the geographic location, such as Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.[5] Finally, the feelings one brings into this conversation can adversely impact how one engages in them and who they listen to or are willing to hear from. For example, anger, rage, bitterness, and hatred are emotions that are not uncommon in spaces of decolonization conversations. Decolonization conversations that originate from a place of negativity risk deepening the psychological state of victimhood and prevent people from disrupting constructively or critically engaging in the conversation.[6] II. Understanding Decolonization Strategies Decolonization strategies mainly aim to de-silence victims of domination or subjugation. People have proposed many strategies for decolonizing. These strategies may be informed by what the target is for decolonization. Decolonization can target power relations in global health. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, public health organizations noted the power imbalance in vaccine distribution. Decolonization could involve de-silencing those affected by neocolonialism to bring about a more balanced distribution of power and a more fair distribution of the vaccine. By analyzing who was adversely impacted by the distribution and who ought to wield power, those engaged in decolonizing advocated for positive change and equitable power relations. Equally, when being is the target of decolonization, the language of unlearning or relearning and mental decolonization take centre stage in the decolonization discourse. For example, the quest to decolonize colonized minds aims to demythologize African inferiority and Western superiority. Demythologizing African inferiority enables those engaged in the decolonization discourse to cultivate and foster African agency.[7] Finally, when knowledge production is the target of decolonization, scholars use inclusion and cognitive justice. For example, they try to alter the knowledge that underlies global health ethics.[8] “[D]decolonizing researchers aim to respectfully understand and integrate theory from Other(ed) perspectives, while also critically examining the underlying assumptions that inform their Western research framework.”[9] One common strategy that scholars use in decolonization is inclusion. It is worth asking, does including people who have been subrogated foster decolonization? Whether that is effective depends on whether included people are more heard or whether the strategies to include them create new forms of silencing. III. Inclusion and the Quest to Decolonize Evaluating how effective inclusion is in the quest to de-silence subjugated voices is important. First, inclusive strategies are not neutral. They are epistemically situated. This situatedness constrains meaning-making in different ways: how and what questions are asked, how social roles are constructed, organized or assigned, and who is admitted to the room where these conversations occur.[10] Inclusion strategies may reinforce (unchallenged) assumptions. For example, to address prejudices and stereotypes in global health images, Arsenii Alenichev and his colleagues[11] successfully inverted “one stereotypical global health image” by prompting a generative AI to produce “an image of a traditional Indian or African healer healing a White Child.” Although there were some problems with the image of the White child, this innovation is a significant, useful effort to de-embed or strip global health images of problematic pictures that mythologize White superiority and Black inferiority. Yet it is possible that using categories like traditional Indian or African reinforces unchallenged assumptions, raising key questions regarding how language and words create new stereotypes. It is common to define traditional as non-conventional, unorthodox, and informal. Yet studies continue to reveal that non-scientifically appraised healing approaches in India or Africa are not only effective but also real, meaningful, fundamental, and primary care-seeking behaviours in many communities in these regions.[12] Suppose inclusive strategies are not un-situated. These conversations may be had within the structures, language, and spaces built by or connected to colonialism. The spaces, language, places, and structures in which these conversations occur can limit who can participate and how they participate. Importantly, some conditions are not conducive to participation as equals. The allocated time for the discussion could also constrain how individuals express themselves. It is unclear who is ultimately heard. Furthermore, epistemic situatedness of inclusion can impact decolonization conversations when participants are beneficiaries of, products of, and trained by structures and systems they seek to dismantle. To enhance the decolonization project and its goals, a pressing task is to unveil and question how the circumstances may inhibit activism. If the vestiges of colonialism continue to structure the decolonization discourse invisibly, the vestiges may undermine decolonization. For example, a public health discussion that includes white Western doctors and Western pharmaceutical executives in Africa may have many local Africans at the table but could still effectively devalue their input based on built-in assumptions and biases that are vestiges of colonialism. Second, exclusion and inclusion are also not binary. Individuals may experience exclusion, even while included (the phenomenon called internal exclusion). In other words, inclusion can fail to be substantial or become a means of enhancing optics, “a way of (un)consciously weakening the radical claims being pursued.”[13] For example, in South Africa, many institutions have made significant efforts to diversify their faculties due to the promulgation of the Employment Equity Act 55.[14] The act requires South African institutions to implement employment equity that redresses the history of harmful discrimination in the country. The act further requires transforming departments and institutional administrations. Although many recognize and support the need to transform departments in South Africa, the rhetoric of transformation departs sharply from the lived experiences.[15] This misalignment between the plan and practice is evident in the underrepresentation of black people and females in senior management teams, professorships in many universities and health departments, and positions of power in some South African institutions. Those selected in the transformation of the departments have also complained of being overworked. The burden of extra work undermines their ability to develop agency and voice in the space they now occupy or fulfil key requirements that have implications for their career trajectory.[16] This is called the minority tax. Notably, "the minority tax… is the burden of extra responsibilities [placed] on faculty of colour to achieve diversity and inclusion and contributes to attrition and impedes academic promotion."[17] One challenge for decolonializing projects will be for decolonial scholars and those selected for decolonization objectives to have the humility to decline invitations, requests, roles, and platforms for which they are either unqualified or lack the capacity to fulfil. At its heart, decolonization strategies must empower those included rather than weaken them. Finally, inclusion can lead to a phenomenon known as elite capture.[18] Elite capture occurs when socially advantaged individuals in a group monopolize or exploit activism to their own benefit at the expense of the larger, struggling group. Elite capture weakens decolonization efforts from within, revealing that those likely to benefit from global inclusive efforts are those who fulfil globally constructed standards, those “already present in the room.” There is no better strategy to weaken decolonial movements than weakening the project from within by strategically positioning individuals who share physical properties with the victims of exclusion and silencing but intellectually, behaviourally, psychologically, and emotionally share more common ground with the colonizer. Such insiders may be unaware they are furthering neocolonial conditions rather than decolonizing. In relation to decolonization, particularly in global health, elite capture reveals that those whose voices are loudest in the room are not necessarily those more impacted by colonialism. They may benefit more from reinforcing colonialism. Opportunism weakens meaningful activism from within, preventing good initiatives and strategies from having their intended impact or taking substantive root.[19] This paper cannot do justice to elite capture, but it is worth noting its negative impacts. IV. Improving the Impact of Decolonization To end neo-colonialism, it is important to understand how it manifests and what to do at each level. Beyond the academic discourse, many tangible efforts exist to decolonize through de-silencing. Examples of these efforts include the ME2 movement that seeks to centre the concerns and experiences of sexually abused or harassed victims in the public discourse. At the funding level, many grant-awarding agencies like Wellcome Trust have dedicated huge budgets to studies that help them understand how they may have perpetrated colonialism or neocolonialism and what they can do differently going forward.[20] In South Africa, promulgating the Employment Equity Act 55 was a tangible attempt to entrench decolonization concerns in a country's regulatory framework. Yet, these decolonization efforts could fail to be substantive if they do not reflect cultural sensitivity. Two key components of cultural sensitivity are worth highlighting here: epistemic and cultural humility. Epistemic humility is an intellectual virtue described as knowing one’s limitations and the limitations of the learning methods employed. At its simplest, it is the ability to admit when one is wrong. Cultural humility includes genuine attempts to learn about and embrace other cultures. Epistemic and cultural humility are signs of academic excellence and strength. Epistemic and cultural humility seriously acknowledge how the state of our knowledge, cognitive limitations, experiences, and backgrounds, while constraining us, also invite us to listen, learn, grow, and change. The limitations-owing account of epistemic and cultural humility suggests that “a person who is aware of her cognitive limitations and owns them is much better positioned to achieve such epistemic goods as true beliefs and understanding than someone who… simply has insight into the epistemic status of her beliefs.”[21] Epistemic and cultural humility may help prevent decolonization projects that unintentionally reinforce what they seek to dismantle. Epistemic humility calls on decolonizers to defer tasks for which they are not qualified to suitably qualified persons. Beyond this, humility supports brave scholarship that imagines and reimagines how featuring the same voices, faces, and perspectives possibly introduces new forms of domination or silencing. Cultural knowledge can lead to a more intentional way of seeking out the right people or a more diverse group than those frequently featured in decolonization conversations. This would give others more opportunities to navigate these spaces and should do so in ways that are familiar to them. One ought to be more sensitive to those who would ordinarily not be included in these conversations. Unless we radically and boldly reimagine these discussions, we risk alienating those most negatively impacted by neocolonialism. CONCLUSION Decolonization conversations are complex and the subject of academic debate. The strategies employed to decolonize can harm or help the victims of neo-colonialism. Inclusion of previously silenced individuals may not be enough to overcome the vestiges of colonialism, leading to a false inclusion, where those included feel excluded or contribute in ways reflecting their own biases and circumstances. Inclusion of an elite or people who do not truly represent the subjugated can lead to elite capture. For decolonization strategies to be impactful, for example, in the context of global health, project leaders and participants must engage in conversations employing epistemic and cultural humility. In many ways, epistemic and cultural humility can help us demythologize our assumptions of any cultural superiority or cognitive authority, allowing for diverse voices, cultures, and perspectives to emerge without domination. - [1] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [2] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [3] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh 2023. Is decolonisation Africanisation? The politics of belonging in the truly African university. Social Dynamics, 1-20. [4] Rianna Oelofsen 2015. Decolonisation of the African mind and intellectual landscape. Phronimon, 16, 130-146. [5] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [6] Pedro Alexis Tabensky 2008. The Postcolonial Heart of African Philosophy. South African Journal of Philosophy, 27, 285-295. [7] Nicholas M. Creary 2012. African Intellectuals and Decolonization, Ohio, Ohio University Press. [8] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [9] Vivetha Thambinathan & Elizabeth Anne Kinsella 2021. Decolonizing Methodologies in Qualitative Research: Creating Spaces for Transformative Praxis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20, 16094069211014766. [10] Abimbola Seye 2023. Knowledge from the global South is in the global South. Journal of Medical Ethics, 49, 337. [11] A. Alenichev, P. Kingori & K. P. Grietens 2023. Reflections before the storm: the AI reproduction of biased imagery in global health visuals. Lancet Glob Health. [12] Jonathan K. Burns & Andrew Tomita 2015. Traditional and religious healers in the pathway to care for people with mental disorders in Africa: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 50, 867-877. [13] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh & Cornelius Ewuoso 2023. What type of inclusion does epistemic injustice require? Journal of Medical Ethics, jme-2023-109091. [14] 1998. Employment Equity Act. In: GOVERNMENT, S. A. (ed.) 19370. [15] Dina Zoe Belluigi & Gladman Thondhlana 2019. ‘Why mouth all the pieties?’ Black and women academics’ revelations about discourses of ‘transformation’ at an historically white South African university. Higher Education, 78, 947-963. [16] Juliet Ramohai & Khomotso Marumo 2016. Women in Senior Positions in South African Higher Education: A Reflection on Voice and Agency. 231, 135-157. [17] J. Trejo 2020. The burden of service for faculty of color to achieve diversity and inclusion: the minority tax. Mol Biol Cell, 31, 2752-2754. [18] Olufemi Taiwo 2020. Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference. The Philosopher, 108, 7. [19] Margarita Kurbatova & Elena Kagan 2016. Opportunism of University Lecturers As a Way to Adaptate the External Control Activities Strengthening. Journal of Institutional Studies, 8, 116-136. [20] Jeremy Farrar. 2022. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme [Online]. Available from: https://wellcome.org/news/update-wellcomes-anti-racism-programme [Accessed August 10, 2022 2022]. [21] Katherine Dormandy 2018. Does Epistemic Humility Threaten Religious Beliefs? Journal of Psychology and Theology, 46, 292-304.

The Netflix/BBC eight-part limited true crime series The Serpent (2021) provides a commentary on the impact of the tourist industry in South-East Asia in the 1970s. The series portrays the story of French serial killer Charles Sobhraj (played by Tahar Rahim)—a psychopathic international con artist of Vietnamese-Indian descent—who regularly targeted Western travellers, especially the long-term wanderers of the legendary “Hippie Trail” (or the “Overland”), running between eastern Europe and Asia. The series, which was filmed on location in Thailand—in Bangkok and the Thai town of Hua Hin—is set in a range of travel destinations along the route of the Hippie Trail, as the narrative follows the many crimes of Sobhraj. Cities such as Kathmandu, Goa, Varanasi, Hong Kong, and Kabul are featured on the show. The series is loosely based upon Australian writers Richard Neville and Julie Clarke’s true crime biography The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj (1979). Another true crime text by Thomas Thompson called Serpentine: Charles Sobhraj’s Reign of Terror from Europe to South Asia (also published in 1979) is a second reference. The show portrays the disappearance and murders of many young victims at the hands of Sobhraj. Certainly, Sobhraj is represented as a monstrous figure, but what about the business of tourism itself? Arguably, in its reflective examination of twentieth-century travel, the series also poses the hedonism of tourism as monstrous. Here, attention is drawn to Western privilege and a neo-orientalist gaze that presented Asia as an exotic playground for its visitors. The television series focuses on Sobhraj, his French-Canadian girlfriend Marie-Andrée Leclerc (played by Jenna Coleman), and the glamourous life they lead in Bangkok. The fashionable couple’s operation presents Sobhraj as a legitimate gem dealer: outwardly, they seem to embody the epitome of fun and glamour, as well as the cross-cultural sophistication of the international jet set. In reality, they drug and then steal from tourists who believe their story. Sobhraj uses stolen passports and cash to travel internationally and acquire more gems. Then, with an accomplice called Ajay Chowdhury (played by Amesh Adireweera), Sobhraj murders his victims if he thinks they could expose his fraud. Often depicted as humourless and seething with anger, the Sobhraj of the series often wears dark aviator sunglasses, a detail that enhances the sense of his impenetrability. One of the first crimes featured in The Serpent is the double-murder of an innocent Dutch couple. The murders lead to an investigation by Dutch diplomat Herman Knippenberg (played by Billy Howle), wanting to provide closure for the families of the victims. Knippenberg enlists neighbours to go undercover at Sobhraj’s home to collect evidence. This exposes Sobhraj’s crimes, so he flees the country with Marie-Andrée and Ajay. While they were apprehended, Sobhraj would be later given pardon from a prison in India: he would only received a life sentence for murder when he is arrested in Nepal in 2003. His ability to evade punishment—and inability to admit to and atone for his crimes—become features of his monstrosity in the television series. Clearly, Sobhraj is represented as the “serpent” of this drama, a metaphor regularly reinforced both textually and visually across the length of the series. As an example, the opening credit sequence for the series coalesces shots of vintage film in Asia—including hitchhiking backpackers, VW Kombi vans, swimming pools, religious tourist sites, corrupt Asian police forces—against an animated map of central and South-East Asia and the Hippie Trail. The map is encased by the giant, slithering tail of some monstrous, reptilian creature. Situating the geographic context of the narrative, the serpentine monster appears to be rising out of continental Asia itself, figuratively stalking and then entrapping the tourists and travellers who move along its route. So, what of the other readings about the monstrosity of the tourism industry that appears on the show? The Hippie Trail was arguably a site—a serpentine cross-continental thoroughfare—of Western excess. The Hippie Trail emerged as the result of the ease of travel across continental Europe and Asia. It was an extension of a countercultural movement that first emerged in the United States in the mid 1960s. Agnieszka Sobocinska has suggested that the travellers of the Hippie Trail were motivated by “widespread dissatisfaction with the perceived conservatism of Western society and its conventions”, and that it was characterised by “youth, rebellion, self-expression and the performance of personal freedom” (par. 8). The Trail appealed to a particular subcultural group who wanted to differentiate themselves from other travellers. Culturally, the Hippie Trail has become a historical site of enduring fascination, written about in popular histories and Western travel narratives, such as A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu (Tomory 1998), Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India (MacLean 2007), The Hippie Trail: A History (Gemie and Ireland 2017), and The Hippie Trail: After Europe, Turn Left (Kreamer 2019). Despite these positive memoirs, the route also has a reputation for being destructive and even neo-imperialist: it irrevocably altered the politics of these Asian regions, especially as crowds of Western visitors would party at its cities along the way. In The Serpent, while the crimes take place on its route, on face value the Hippie Trail still appears to be romanticised and nostalgically re-imagined, especially as it represents a stark difference from our contemporary world with its heavily-policed international borders. Indeed, the travellers seem even freer from the perspective of 2021, given the show’s production phase and release in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when international travel was halted for many. As Kylie Northover has written in a review for the series in the Sydney Morning Herald, the production design of the programme and the on-location shoot in Thailand is affectionately evocative and nostalgic. Northover suggests that it “successfully evokes a very specific era of travel—the Vietnam War has just ended, the Summer of Love is over and contact with family back home was usually only through the post restante” (13). On the show, there is certainly critique of the tourist industry. For example, one scene demonstrates the “dark side” of the Hippie Trail dream. Firstly, we see a psychedelic-coloured bus of travellers driving through Nepal. The outside of the bus is covered with its planned destinations: “Istanbul. Teheran. Kabul. Delhi”. The Western travellers are young and dressed in peasant clothing and smoking marijuana. Looking over at the Himalayas, one hippie calls the mountains a “Shangri-La”, the fictional utopia of an Eastern mountain paradise. Then, the screen contracts to show old footage of Kathmandu— using the small-screen dimensions of a Super-8 film—which highlights a “hashish centre” with young children working at the front. The child labour is ignored. As the foreign hippie travellers—American and English—move through Kathmandu, they seem self-absorbed and anti-social. Rather than meeting and learning from locals, they just gather at parties with other hippies. By night-time, the series depicts drugged up travellers on heroin or other opiates, disconnected from place and culture as they stare around aimlessly. The negative representation of hippies has been observed in some of the critical reviews about The Serpent. For example, writing about the series for The Guardian, Dorian Lynskey cites Joan Didion’s famous “serpentine” interpretation of the hippie culture in the United States, applying this to the search for meaning on the Hippie Trail: the subculture of expats and travellers in south-east Asia feels rather like Joan Didion’s 60s California, crisscrossed by lost young people trying to find themselves anew in religion, drugs, or simply unfamiliar places. In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Didion writes of those who “drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins”. (Lynskey) We could apply cultural theories about tourism to a critique of the industry in the series too. Many cultural researchers have critiqued tourists and the tourism industry, as well as the powers that tourists can wield over destination cultures. In Time and Commodity Culture, John Frow has suggested that the logic of tourism is “that of a relentless extension of commodity relations, and the consequent inequalities of power, between centre and periphery, First and Third World, developed and undeveloped regions, metropolis and countryside”, as well as one that has developed from the colonial era (151). Similarly, Derek Gregory’s sensitive analyses of cultural geographies of postcolonial space showed that Nineteenth-century Orientalism is a continuing process within globalised mass tourism (114). The problem of Orientalism as a Western travel ideology is made prominent in The Serpent through Sobhraj’s denouncement of Western tourists, even though there is much irony at play here, as the series itself arguably is presenting its own retro version of Orientalism to Western audiences. Even the choice of Netflix to produce this true crime story—with its two murderers of Asian descent—is arguably a way of reinforcing negative representations about Asian identity. Then, Western characters take on the role of hero and/or central protagonist, especially the character of Knippenberg. One could ask: where is the Netflix show that depicts a positive story about a central character of Vietnamese-Indian descent? Edward Said famously defined Orientalism as “a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience” (1). It became a way for Western cultures to interpret and understand the East, and for reducing and homogenising it into a more simplistic package. Orientalism explored discourses that grew to encompass India and the Far East in tandem with the expansion of Western imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It examined a dualistic ideology: a way of looking that divided the globe into two limited types without any room for nuance and diversity. Inclusive and exclusive, Orientalism assumed and promoted an “us and them” binary, privileging a Western gaze as the normative cultural position, while the East was relegated to the ambiguous role of “other”. Orientalism is a field in which stereotypes of the East and West have power: as Said suggests, “the West is the actor, the Orient is a passive reactor… . The West is the spectator, the judge and jury, of every facet of Oriental behaviour” (109). Interestingly, despite the primacy in which Sobhraj is posited as the show’s central monster, he is also the character in the series most critical of the neo-colonial oppression caused by this counter-cultural tourism, which indicates ambiguity and complexity in the representation of monstrosity. Sobhraj appears to have read Said. As he looks scornfully at a stoner hippie woman who has befriended Ajay, he seems to perceive the hippies as drop-outs and drifters, but he also connects them more thoroughly as perpetrators of neo-imperialist processes. Indicating his contempt for the sightseers of the Hippie Trail as they seek enlightenment on their travels, he interrogates his companion Ajay: why do you think these white children deny the comfort and wealth of the life they were given to come to a place like this? Worship the same gods. Wear the same rags. Live in the same filth. Each experience is only then taken home to wear like a piece of fake tribal jewellery. They travel only to acquire. It’s another form of imperialism. And she has just colonised you! Sobhraj’s speech is political but it is also menacing, and he quickly sets upon Ajay and physically punishes him for his tryst with the hippie woman. Yet, ultimately, the main Western tourists of the Hippie Trail are presented positively in The Serpent, especially as many of them are depcited as naïve innocents within the story—hopeful, idealistic and excited to travel—and simply in the wrong place, at the wrong time. In this way, the series still draws upon the conventions of the true crime genre, which is to differentiate clearly between good/evil and right/wrong, and to create an emotional connection to the victims as symbols of virtue. As the crimes and deaths accumulate within the series, Sobhraj’s opinions are deceptive, designed to manipulate those around him (such as Ajay) rather than being drawn from genuine feelings of political angst about the neo-imperialist project of Western tourism. The uncertainty around Sobhraj’s motivation for his crimes remains one of the fascinating aspects of the series. It problematises the way that the monstrosity of this character is constructed within the narrative of the show. The character of Sobhraj frequently engages with these essentialising issues about Orientalism, but he appears to do so with the aim to remove the privilege that comes from a Western gaze. In the series, Sobhraj’s motivations for targeting Western travellers are often insinuated as being due to personal reasons, such as revenge for his treatment as a child in Europe, where he says he was disparaged for being of Asian heritage. For example, as he speaks to one of his drugged French-speaking victims, Sobhraj suggests that when he moved from Vietnam to France as a child, he was subject to violence and poor treatment from others: “a half-caste boy from Saigon. You can imagine how I was bullied”. In this instance, the suffering French man placed in Sobhraj’s power has been promoted as fitting into one of these “us and them” binaries, but in this set-up, there is also a reversal of power relations and Sobhraj has set himself as both the “actor” and the “spectator”. Here, he has reversed the “Orientalist” gaze onto a passive Western man, homogenising a “Western body”, and hence radically destabilising the construct of Orientalism as an ideological force. This is also deeply troubling: it goes on to sustain a problematic and essentialising binary that, no matter which way it faces, aims to denigrate and stereotype a cultural group. In this way, the character of Sobhraj demonstrates that while he is angry at the way that Orientalist ideologies have victimised him in the past, he will continue to perpetrate its basic ideological assumptions as a way of administering justice and seeking personal retribution. Ultimately, perhaps one of the more powerful readings of The Serpent is that it is difficult to move away from the ideological constructs of travel. We could also suggest that same thing for the tourists. In her real-life analysis of the Hippie Trail, Agnieszka Sobocinska has suggested that while it was presented and understood as something profoundly different from older travel tours and expeditions, it could not help but be bound up in the same ideological colonial and imperial impulses that constituted earlier forms of travel: Orientalist images and imperial behaviours were augmented to suit a new generation that liked to think of itself as radically breaking from the past. Ironically, this facilitated the view that ‘alternative’ travel was a statement in anti-colonial politics, even as it perpetuated some of the inequalities inherent to imperialism. This plays out in The Serpent. We see that this supposedly radically different new group – with a relaxed and open-minded identity—is bound within the same old ideological constructs. Part of the problem of the Hippie Trail traveller was a failure to recognise the fundamentally imperialist origins of their understanding of travel. This is the same kind of concern mapped out by Turner and Ash in their analysis of neo-imperial forms of travel called The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery (1976), written and published in the same era as the events of The Serpent. Presciently gauging the effect that mass tourism would have on developing nations, Turner and Ash used the metaphor of “hordes” of tourists taking over various poorer destinations to intend a complete reversal of the stereotype of a horde of barbaric and non-Western hosts. By inferring that tourists are the “hordes” reverses Orientalist conceptions of de-personalised non-Western cultures, and shows the problem that over-tourism and unsustainable visitation can pose to host locations, especially with the acceleration of mass travel in the late Twentieth century. Certainly, the concept of a touristic “horde” is one of the monstrous ideas in travel, and can signify the worst aspects contained within mass tourism. To conclude, it is useful to return to the consideration of what is presented as monstrous in The Serpent. Here, there is the obvious monster in the sinister, impassive figure of serial killer Charles Sobhraj. Julie Clarke, in a new epilogue for The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj (2020), posits that Sobhraj’s actions are monstrous and unchangeable, demonstrating the need to understand impermeable cases of human evil as a part of human society: one of the lessons of this cautionary tale should be an awareness that such ‘inhuman humans’ do live amongst us. Many don’t end up in jail, but rather reach the highest level in the corporate and political spheres. (Neville and Clarke, 2020) Then, there is the exploitational spectre of mass tourism from the Hippie Trail that has had the ability to “invade” and ruin the authenticity and/or sustainability of a particular place or location as it is overrun by the “golden hordes”. Finally, we might consider the Orientalist, imperialist and globalised ideologies of mass tourism as one of the insidious and serpentine forces that entrap the central characters in this television series. This leads to a failure to understand what is really going on as the tourists are deluded by visions of an exotic paradise. References Frow, John. Time and Commodity Culture: Essays on Culture Theory and Postmodernity. Oxford UP, 1997. Gemie, Sharif, and Brian Ireland. The Hippie Trail: A History. Manchester UP, 2017. Gregory, Derek. “Scripting Egypt: Orientalism and the Cultures of Travel.” In Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing. Eds. Duncan James and Derek Gregor. Routledge, 1999. 114-150 . Kreamer, Robert. The Hippie Trail: After Europe, Turn Left. Fonthill Media, 2019. Lynskey, Dorian. “The Serpent: A Slow-Burn TV Success That’s More than a Killer Thriller.” The Guardian, 30 Jan. 2021. 1 Oct. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/jan/29/the-serpent-more-than-a-killer-thriller-bbc-iplayer>. MacLean, Rory. Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India. Penguin, 2006. Neville, Richard, and Julie Clarke. The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj. Jonathan Cape, 1979. ———. On the Trail of the Serpent: The Life and Crimes of Charles Sobhraj. Revised ed. Vintage, 2020. Northover, Kylie. “The Ice-Cold Conman of the ‘Hippie Trail’.” Sydney Morning Herald, 27 Mar. 2021: 13. Price, Roberta. “Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India.” The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 2.2 (2009): 273-276. Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Penguin, 1995. Sobocinska, Agnieszka. “Following the ‘Hippie Sahibs’: Colonial Cultures of Travel and the Hippie Trail.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 15.2 (2014). DOI: 10.1353/cch.2014.0024. Thompson, Thomas. Serpentine: Charles Sobhraj’s Reign of Terror from Europe to South Asia. Doubleday, 1979. Tomory, David, ed. A Season in Heaven: True Tales from the Road to Kathmandu. Lonely Planet, 1998. Turner, Louis, and John Ash. The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery. St Martin’s Press, 1976.

Welcome to Volume 9(1) of the International Journal for Educational Integrity. This issue is being published just a few months after the International Center for Academic Integrity's Annual Conference in San Antonio, and directly before the Plagiarism Across Europe and Beyond Conference opens in Brno, Czech Republic. Further research and good practice will be shared at the 6th Asia Pacific Conference on Educational Integrity, in Sydney, 2-4 October 2013. It is evident from the increasing depth and maturity of research output that academic integrity as a field of inquiry is well established. This expanded issue is presented thematically, beginning with articles that explore how academic integrity is understood by under graduate and international students,through to papers that report how postgraduate research students develop writing and academic skills, then to an overview of systems for detecting plagiarism when itoccurs, and finally a paper which reports on an initiative which aimed to change institutional practices and build a culture of integrity. Mike Joy and UK colleagues build on their previous research by investigating computing students' understandings of source-code plagiarism via their responses to a series of scenarios. Based on data from 770 students representing 21 higher education institutions, mostly in Europe, Joy et al. not only detail findings which will bevaluable for institutional policy and practice, but provide useful scenarios which can be adapted and used as educational resources. Not surprisingly, a key finding from this work is that "certain types of plagiaristic activity are poorly understood". Stella-Maris Orim and her colleagues from the Impact of Policies for Plagiarism in Higher Education Across Europe Project (led by Irene Glendinning) at Coventry University, use a different approach to explore Nigerian postgraduate students' understandings of plagiarism as they negotiate their new educational environment in the UK. Based on interview data from 18 Nigerian postgraduate students, the authors use the phenomenographic method to develop six categories relating to this student group's understanding of plagiarism. The authors conclude that "Nigerian postgraduate students have an inadequate understanding of plagiarism from their previous institutions". Michelle Vieyra, Denise Strickland and Briana Timmerman extend work previously published in the IJEI by Gilmore et al. (2010). Vieyra and colleagues report on patterns of plagiarised material in science and engineering master's and doctoral theses "in the hope that it will contribute to the growing awareness of the problem of plagiarism in graduate schools as well as provide insight into the causes ofplagiarism". Plagiarised text was found in 28% of the proposals, and in agreement with other research described in this issue, the authors conclude that the plagiarism occurred as a result of lack of familiarity with the requirements of academic writing and conventions. Moving from understanding and preventing plagiarism, US researchers Norman Meuschke and Bela Gipp provide a comprehensive review of plagiarism detection systems with the aim of finding an "approach which automatically detects morestrongly disguised plagiarism, such as paraphrases, translations or idea plagiarism" rather than the more easily identified character-based text comparisons. Having explored the advantages and disadvantages of a range of detection approaches, the authors conclude that to be able to reliably detect paraphrases, translated plagiarism and idea plagiarism requires a novel method, which may need to incorporate crosslingual,citation-based, and intrinsic plagiarism detection approaches. Andrew Garner and Larry Hubbell, from the University of Wyoming, use the case study method to identify three models employed in US colleges and universities toadjudicate academic integrity breaches, specifically plagiarism: the 'student-centered' model, the 'due process' model and the defacto 'classroom manager' model. The authors demonstrate how each of these models provides different incentives tostudents regarding their likelihood to engage in plagiarism, and to staff in terms ofhow they respond to such academic integrity breaches. The final paper brings together the key issues of inquiry in this field, and demonstrates what is arguably the key ingredient for preventing breaches ofacademic integrity: developing and nurturing a culture of integrity. The initiative reported by Patrick Baughan at City University, London aimed to promote better understanding of academic conduct issues amongst staff and students and generate institution-wide culture change. Based on phenomenographic analysis of interviews with eight change agents, known as Educational Development Associates, the author concludes that consideration of cultures and practices in departmental/programme contexts needs to complement central planning approaches to change initiatives. I trust you will enjoy the range of topics explored in this issue. Volume 9(2) will publish the best papers from the Plagiarism Across Europe and Beyond Conference, together with regular reviewed submissions. I welcome feedback via email:tracey.bretag@unisa.edu.au Tracey Bretag, Editor, International Journal for Educational Integrity

Previous studies contend that Philippines is still a ‘collectivist’ society (Cf. Hofstede Center; Cukur et al. 2004:613-634). In this collectivist or community-oriented society, individualism is not something that is highly valued. Being ‘individualistic’ is often associated to being narcissistic, loner, asocial, selfish, etc. However, one may ask whether the youth in the Philippines are not spared from this insidious culture of individualism, notwithstanding the seemingly dominant collective and communitarian character of the society. Although the overwhelming poverty is still the main problem in the Philippines, where according to Wostyn (2010:26) “only the wonderland of movies gives some respite to their consciousness of suffering and oppression”, the Filipino youth of today are also exposed to the consumeristic values of the ‘city’ and are not spared from the contradictions and insecurities posed by the pluralistic society. They are citizens of an increasing social and cultural pluralism characteristic of many liberal societies. Is it possible that individualism may also exist within this culture, especially among the younger generation? Is individualism slowly creeping in as caused by their exposure and easy access to modern technology, to higher education, mobility, interactions with other cultures, etc. Would this individualistic tendency have any influence on their religious beliefs, especially their belief on salvation? What would be the implications and challenges of these findings to the families in the Philippines? These are the questions we wish to answer in this study. 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Welcome to this special feature of Approaches: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Music Therapy. Edited by Giorgos Tsiris and Enrico Ceccato, this edition is inspired by the 1st Mediterranean Music Therapy Meeting, which took place in Padua, Italy, on 22nd September 2018. I want to congratulate and thank the organising team of this event, Scuola di Musicoterapia Giovanni Ferrari de Padova, with the patronage of the Italian Association of Professional Music Therapists (AIM) and the Italian Confederation of Associations and Music Therapy Schools (CONFIAM), for their initiative and efforts to create a space for music therapy professionals from different Mediterranean countries to meet, share and exchange experiences. The title of the meeting, ‘Dialogue on Music Therapy Interventions for Dementia and End-Of-Life Care: Voices from Beyond the Sea’ illustrates clearly the focus of the event. The programme incorporated a beautiful balance of theoretical presentations, workshops and music performances. It was certainly a unique opportunity for me to participate in this meeting as an expert in music therapy with PWD and as President of the World Federation of Music Therapy (WFMT). I have worked as a clinician, teacher, and researcher within the field of music therapy for over 30 years, and have had the opportunity to be a part of, and witness, the development of music therapy in different parts of the world. These experiences have taught me to celebrate two things. Firstly, that it is important to praise the many layers of diversity that exist among all of us, such as the various theories and approaches to research, cultural intricacies, training backgrounds, therapeutic methodologies, and the many languages through which we express ourselves. To embrace all these layers of diversity requires openness and an ability to listen, connect, and work together. Secondly, it is important to celebrate the oneness that we have together. Many commonalities exist across the eight regions of the globe encompassed by the WFMT; many more than we often perceive. The WFMT was established in 1985 by a team of dynamic, pioneering music therapists to strengthen international links and promote the profession of music therapy globally. The awareness that the establishment and recognition of the music therapy profession is varied across countries calls for a delicate balance between global and local aspects of professional development. To this end, the growth, organisation and professionalisation of music therapy continues across the world. At the various conferences, meetings and symposia held to further our profession, practice examples are shared and we can all learn from one another. Subsequently, topics related to training, current situation, future prospects and viability for professional regulation are addressed in many countries from different perspectives. The Mediterranean countries fall into two of the WFMT regions: Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. Each region has a dedicated member of the WFMT Council, a Regional Liaison, who establishes contact with representatives from professional associations or individual music therapists in relevant countries, and who presents regular reports of local news via the WFMT website and social media. The WFMT members are a mixture of professional bodies, music therapists, students and allied organisations from around the world. In Europe, many of the Southern countries bordering the Mediterranean have qualified, practising music therapists with considerable years of experience and professional associations who are actively contacting and communicating with their governmental institutions to promote and/or improve the recognition process of music therapy. Both the European Music Therapy Confederation (EMTC) and the WFMT play a part in promoting collaboration and exchange between therapists, helping to equip them for this task. The Eastern Mediterranean Region of the WFMT extends to the continents of Africa and Western Asia, containing countries set within diverse cultural and political contexts, and where our profession is, in many cases, barely represented. We hear of widely differing attitudes towards the recognition of the psychosocial needs of individuals within healthcare systems, and such diversity is also reflected in the music therapy profession. This presents itself at different stages of development in each of the countries in regard to: number of professional music therapists, training courses, professional associations, number and type of facilities which offer music therapy services, populations served by music therapists, recognition of the profession, research activity/production and music therapy-specific publications. These variations highlight another issue: the challenge of diversity, tensions and contradictions in the field of music therapy. However, these challenges can also be looked as an opportunity for current as well as future music therapists in these countries. Certainly, the field is in the very pioneering stages in this huge region, with very few professional music therapists. However, the hard and continuous work of those who are there contributes to raising awareness about the possibilities and benefits music offers to people with specific needs and helps to create job opportunities. On the other hand, the current challenges and struggles music therapists face in these countries, where the profession is in its infancy, are the overall lack of awareness of what music therapy is, sustainability of practice, and having no standardised guidelines to support practice. It is enlightening for the WFMT to learn from those stories in order to help promote the field in the best way possible in the Eastern Mediterranean, in liaison with national and other international associations and professional bodies. Events such as the 1st Mediterranean Music Therapy Meeting are always enriching and motivating, since they foster collaboration and welcome dialogue. In addition, it is an opportunity to meet professionals from other countries and learn about their work while highlighting some common elements and patterns. Meetings, working group discussions, coffee breaks, walks and dinners – all have offered opportunities for exchange, debate, and mutual support. The international professional group who gathered on this occasion certainly highlighted the diverse landscape of music therapy across cultures; bringing to the fore varied histories and paths of professional development, as well as financial and political priorities and needs. I hope this is the beginning of many more in this region of the world, and that they allow diverse voices to be heard. Research, theory development and dialogue are essential components for maintaining a reflexive stance while revisiting music therapy’s histories and envisioning its future development in relation to the changing needs and resources of society. As President of the WFMT, attending and presenting at these types of events, it is a great opportunity to talk about the WFMT and to share the work of the Council and of our members. This reaffirms why the WFMT exists, and what it can offer to assist all the music therapy professionals and pioneers who work persistently to advance the development and growth of the profession in their own countries. When we work together, we can accomplish much. Thank you for hosting an amazing educational, networking, cultural and social event! It was an honour to represent the WFMT and to support the continued efforts to foster communication between therapists and countries within the Mediterranean region.

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