Dominant group/Humanities

< Dominant group
This is a dance group from Argentina that performs the Tango and various folk dances on tour in Greece. Credit: Sergio grazioli.

It is arguable that a dominant group may exist in the humanities when there is an emphasis on humanism and what is humane.

Humanities

"The term 'humanities' includes, but is not limited to, the study and interpretation of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life." --National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, 1965, as amended.[1]

The Division of Research Programs for the National Endowment for the Humanities encourages research and writing in all areas of the humanities, including the study of history, literature, philosophy, religion, and foreign cultures. Through grants to individual scholars and institutions, the division fosters work that enables Americans to understand the world.

Dominant group

Is dominant group an aspect of societal organization or the human condition?

Def. "[b]eing in a position of power, authority or ascendancy over others"[2] is called dominance, or "[t]he state of being dominant; of prime importance".[2]

Is there a patrician class that controls the humanities so as to dictate what the humanities are?

Examples from primary sources are to be used to prove or disprove each hypothesis. These can be collected per subject or in general.

Humanistic methods

Any grouping of humans on some basis seems to be contrary to the emphasis on individualization and individual differences of humanistic methods. A dominant group, or the application of the term to some group, may actually reduce the sense of humanity toward the individuals to the point of denying them individual rights and freedoms just as such a dominant group may be said to do to a dominated group.

The concept of dominance may be contrary to humanism and humanistic methods.

Personality and social psychology

"We anticipated that targeting these core components would allow us to capture dominant group members' interpersonal behaviors that were apt to have the greatest impact on their interaction partner. ... This research was facilitated by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to Jacquie D. Vorauer."[3]

Individualization

"Critical multiculturalism aims to move beyond a recognition and legitimizing of cultures—or what some think of as a celebration of difference. Instead advocates of critical multiculturalism seek to understand first how assumptions about such characteristics as race, class, and gender lead to oppression. In addition, critical multiculturalism examines both how power structures provide a dominant group’s control of social institutions and how cultural practices naturalize the dominant group’s advantage by attributing it to individual achievement."[4]

Communication

"Discourses are intimately related to the distribution of social power and hierarchical structure in society, which is why they are always and everywhere ideological. Control over certain Discourses can lead to the acquisition of social goods (money, power, status) in a society. These Discourses empower those groups that have the least conflicts with their other Discourses when they use them. Let us call Discourses that lead to social goods in a society dominant Discourses, and let us refer to those groups that have the fewest conflicts when using them as dominant groups."[5]

Medicine

The table lists the 12 tenets for each of the three paradigms of medicine: the technocratic, humanistic, and holistic models. Credit: R Davis-Floyd.

"The word ‘hegemony’ refers to an ideology espoused by the dominant group in a given society."[6]

There "are ideologies that are obviously dominant: in economics, the hegemonic ideology is capitalism, and in health care, it is the technomedical model. When an ideology is hegemonic, all other competing ideologies become ‘alternative’ to it. Thus healing modalities such as midwifery, chiropractic, homeopathy, naturopathy, acupuncture, and so forth have been viewed as alternative to allopathy. While these modalities command increasing respect and usage, allopathic technomedicine still sets the standards for care. Its hegemonic status works to ensure its profitability: pharmaceutical and medical technology companies constitute by far one of the most profitable industries in the United States. The median after-research profit rate in 1993 for the makers of the top-selling prescription drugs was more than five times higher than the median profit rate for all Fortune 500 companies in the same year [15]. Any system -- medical, economic, religious, or otherwise -- that gains sociocultural ascendancy and then rigidifies, shutting out new information and refusing to incorporate contradictory evidence, is in mortal danger both to itself and to the public it serves. Such hegemonic systems can benefit from frontal attacks, which can serve to keep them flexible and responsive to the changing realities of changing times."[6]

Research

Hypothesis:

  1. An emphasis on humanism and what is humane may not include egalitarianism.
  2. An emphasis on humanism and what is humane may include a dominant group.

Control groups

This is an image of a Lewis rat. Credit: Charles River Laboratories.

The findings demonstrate a statistically systematic change from the status quo or the control group.

“In the design of experiments, treatments [or special properties or characteristics] are applied to [or observed in] experimental units in the treatment group(s).[7] In comparative experiments, members of the complementary group, the control group, receive either no treatment or a standard treatment.[8]"[9]

Proof of concept

Def. a “short and/or incomplete realization of a certain method or idea to demonstrate its feasibility"[10] is called a proof of concept.

Def. evidence that demonstrates that a concept is possible is called proof of concept.

The proof-of-concept structure consists of

  1. background,
  2. procedures,
  3. findings, and
  4. interpretation.[11]

See also

References

  1. ↑ National Endowment for the Humanities (December 2012). "About NEH". 1100 Pennsylvania Ave., NW Washington, D.C. 20506, USA: www.NEH.gov. Retrieved 2012-12-30.
  2. 1 2 "dominance, In: Wiktionary". San Francisco, California: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. February 9, 2013. Retrieved 2013-02-19.
  3. ↑ Jacquie D. Vorauer, Cory A. Turpie (September 2004). "Disruptive effects of vigilance on dominant group members' treatment of outgroup members: choking versus shining under pressure". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87 (3): 384-99. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.87.3.384. http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/psp/87/3/384/. Retrieved 2013-02-19.
  4. ↑ Cynthia Lewis and Jean Ketter (2004). Rebecca Rogers. ed. Learning as Social Interaction: Interdiscursivity in a Teacher and Researcher Study Group, In: An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education. Mahwah, New Jersey USA: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pp. 117-46. http://aleteya.cs.buap.mx/~jlavalle/papers/books_on_line/Lawrence.Erlbaum.Associates.An.Introduction.to.Critical.Discourse.Analysis.in.Education.pdf#page=148. Retrieved 2016-01-21.
  5. ↑ Rebecca Rogers (2004). Rebecca Rogers. ed. An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education, In: An Introduction to Critical Discourse Analysis in Education. Mahwah, New Jersey USA: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. pp. 1-18. http://aleteya.cs.buap.mx/~jlavalle/papers/books_on_line/Lawrence.Erlbaum.Associates.An.Introduction.to.Critical.Discourse.Analysis.in.Education.pdf#page=148. Retrieved 2016-01-21.
  6. 1 2 R Davis-Floyd (November 2001). "The technocratic, humanistic, and holistic paradigms of childbirth". International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics 75 (Supplement 1): S5–S23. doi:10.1016/S0020-7292(01)00510-0. http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robbie_Davis-Floyd/publication/11613458_The_technocratic_humanistic_and_holistic_paradigms_of_childbirth/links/0fcfd511ea268eed7c000000.pdf. Retrieved 2015-02-22.
  7. ↑ Klaus Hinkelmann, Oscar Kempthorne (2008). Design and Analysis of Experiments, Volume I: Introduction to Experimental Design (2nd ed.). Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-72756-9. http://books.google.com/?id=T3wWj2kVYZgC&printsec=frontcover.
  8. ↑ R. A. Bailey (2008). Design of comparative experiments. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-68357-9. http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521683579.
  9. ↑ "Treatment and control groups, In: Wikipedia". San Francisco, California: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. May 18, 2012. Retrieved 2012-05-31.
  10. ↑ "proof of concept, In: Wiktionary". San Francisco, California: Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. November 10, 2012. Retrieved 2013-01-13.
  11. ↑ Ginger Lehrman and Ian B Hogue, Sarah Palmer, Cheryl Jennings, Celsa A Spina, Ann Wiegand, Alan L Landay, Robert W Coombs, Douglas D Richman, John W Mellors, John M Coffin, Ronald J Bosch, David M Margolis (August 13, 2005). "Depletion of latent HIV-1 infection in vivo: a proof-of-concept study". Lancet 366 (9485): 549-55. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)67098-5. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1894952/. Retrieved 2012-05-09.

External links

This is a research project at http://en.wikiversity.org

Development status: this resource is experimental in nature.
Educational level: this is a research resource.
Resource type: this resource is an article.
Resource type: this resource contains a lecture or lecture notes.
Subject classification: this is a humanities resource.
This article is issued from Wikiversity - version of the Monday, February 01, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.