Possibly the main reason why China can completely control the COVID-19 pandemic is that it can use state power to implement holistic and systemic deployment, integrate all resources, and form an efficient and refined grassroots management system. The sense of responsibility of the Chinese people has been a very important factor. The obedience of individuals in China does not come from the authority imposed by any external agent. It stems from its Confucian traditions and the positive pursuit of common ways of self-recognition and self-realization. These traditional values are very different from the Western individualistic construction of modernity. China’s cultural orientation may not be replicated by other countries, but its way of shaping the people's sense of social responsibility and the holistic way of handling crises should be worthy of study and reference.

In early 2020 COVID-19 turned the whole world into place of horror, capitals into ghost-towns, and hospitals into tombs. But this was not the first time the world was hit by such a catastrophic pandemic. Many countries have hit by innumerable plagues, epidemics and pandemics. It is important to keep these terrible incidents in the collective memory so that precautions are taken and they do not happen again. In 1947, a huge spread of cholera hit Egypt leaving thousands of death and infected as well as a disastrous impact on the socio-economic life of the country. Writer Andrée Chedid sheds light on this epidemic in her novel The Sixth Day, which discusses a wide range of issues at a time when class division dominated in the country. The novel is a testimony to the poor medical condition of the Egyptian countryside.

In online communication, writers incorporate into fictional representation imaginaries that arise from the interaction between various artistic manifestations (text, photography and illustration). This paper explores the work of two spanish authors, Patricia Esteban Erlés and Albert Soloviev in order to study the social impact and ethical aspects of hypermedial short stories in the virtual space, since their works function as vehicles for social criticism. At the same time, the paper addresses fundamental questions associated with the understanding and interpretation of hybrid narrative microtexts.

Artistic representation is an instrument of historical memory that, unlike history, serves to transfer the emotional imprint that historical records leave behind for the sake of objectivity. Art memorializes achievements and success, but also tragic moments of death and destruction. Cultural differences between China and the West lead to varied perspectives and patterns of expression in the Fine Arts. This paper offers several examples showing how art has dealt with epidemic and pandemic. No one is immune to such tragedies in our increasingly globalized world. By looking back at the memories recorded in artistic representation, we can learn from the past and cooperate in order to face future crises successfully. However, cooperation is only possible if we are aware of cultural differences. This paper provides a brief example on how Chinese and European art face inter-artistic plague narratives in different ways.

Through a large number of data analysis, this paper analyzes the different influences of COVID-19 on the traditional art and the new media art in China. China’s industries of new media art have made a rapid development during the pandemic. The industrial growth of the new media art has enabled them to play an important role in safeguarding employments, and to assume greater social responsibility in fighting the epidemic. With the help of internet technology, new media art can quickly adjust to the broadcast plan, timely send excellent artistic content to the audience who stay at home through the network, and help them vent their fear and soothe their wounded hearts in face of the pandemic.

Sun Yat-Sen was a Chinese philosopher and politician, who served as the provisional first president of the Republic of China, and first leader of the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party of China). He argued that common blood, language, customs, religion and livelihood were the five essential elements that constituted a nation. Sun was influenced by social Darwinism in his understanding that socio-cultural forces could override the innate characteristics of race. Thus, he employed racially defined nationalism by invoking anti-Manchuism. Although China’s modernisation in the first decades of the 20th century was attributed to Sen, this paper shows that his insistence on the consanguine Han race produced inconsistencies, as his racially defined nationalism and republicanism were mutually exclusive, the latter being based on the inclusion of all citizens regardless of their ethnic background. Indeed, modern nations are constituted by both naturally inherited and culturally acquired qualities of the people. Since China consists of many ethnic groups, Sen’s emphasis on consanguine Chinese race has produced a racially exclusionary nation and has caused racial conflict.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the current characteristics of organizational culture and climate in Kazakhstani higher educational institutions during the COVID-19 crisis. Materials for the study were collected from interviews and online discussions published on the website of Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (KazNU). In addition, results from the social monitoring systems of the university’s educational activities as well as an official survey have been used. The study offers details of how Kazakhstani universities dealt with the crisis by presenting KazNU case study. The paper presents the responsible actions developed at the university as well as the problems faced by students and teachers. One important lesson to be learnt is that educational organization needs to be more comprehensive, caring for appropriate technical equipment, helping develop skills for staff and students, and include vulnerable groups of the population.

This paper investigates the contexts on the grand narrative and the memory manipulation of the media in the case of Soviet Korean migrants. The study focuses on the forced migration of Soviet Koreans and how their memories were covered up by dominant Soviet narratives. Specifically, the paper explores LeninKichi, a Korean newspaper that became the mouth of institutional power. The research brings to light part of the history of Soviet Koreans migrants, whose memories were buried by a socio-cultural system that encouraged narratives of victory and progress through an oppositional symbolism of glorious patriots versus enemies and traitors.

This paper examines Chinese imagery of smokestacks both as a concrete object and an abstract concept emerging from early futurist eulogy to modernist allergy, and from Maoist propaganda to post-Fifth Generation environmental reflections. In the Republican era, writers from the Creation Society eulogize the smokes of steamboat smokestacks as beautified symbols of modern civilization. Yet members from the Beijing School convey their concerns about the Janus face of industrialization and environmental impairments (towering smokestacks as the target). After 1949, smokestacks are eulogized as an icon of socialist industrialization and pervade cinematic productions, literary imaginations, and artistic exhibitions. Since the 1980s, smokestacks have been gradually understood as vestiges of problematic socialist practice. The growing ecological deterioration in the 21st century propels public intellectuals and film directors to expose industrial pollution and to invoke environmental protection. Yet another type of representation arises in the post-Fifth Generation films, where smokestacks are visualized as a token of the “insulted and injured” working class, individual discovery, and collective sentiment worn out by the post Mao-Deng global developmentalism and social injustice. The metamorphoses of smokestacks in literary, cinematic, and artistic imaginations envision and exhibit the structural transformation of modern Chinese environmental and ecological consciousness.

The epidemic outbreak of the coronavirus has meant a sudden, temporary ceasing of activities as we knew them. The health crisis has led to a social and economic crisis, and these circumstances have revealed solidarity on a global scale. In moments of separation, when culture has brought us closer together, the global phenomenon of charity songs has emerged, generating financial aid for scientific research and care for the most vulnerable people. This work focuses on a charity song turned into a hymn, a narrative poem in the first person that tells everyone's common story, “Aves enjauladas” (‘Caged Birds’) by the Spanish singer-songwriter Rozalén. This paper carries out a linguistic, stylistic and audiovisual analysis of this multimodal event, which has been transmitted through a ‘lyric video’ and spread in a vertiginous way on digital platforms and social networks, reaching millions of views. Ultimately, the paper analyses the spiritual and material impact, the body and soul of this living poem, taking a still photograph of the artistic recreations and musical, visual, pictorial and pedagogical ‘echoicities’ of this work (Balsera & López, 2015), as well as appreciating its material socio-economic repercussions in the real lives of families at risk of exclusion.

This article discusses the factors that confer a contemplative atmosphere to the village of Girilayu (Central Java Province, Indonesia) and stimulate local artisans to create batik motifs that contain symbolic philosophical meanings that confer ethical values to batik making while adapting to contemporary design and technological processes. Since 2016, Mbok Semok batik has struggled to preserve local traditions and patterns that stimulate contemplation in its designs. The paper is based an ethnographic approach involving data collection from Girilayu batik artisans; later analyzed using a phenomenological approach in order to describe the correlation between design and contemplative philosophical meaning in Mbok Semok. Thus, the paper functions as an example of the need to articulate local ethical practices with technological change in a way that grounds harmony in human relationships with the environment and the supernatural beyond.

The present piece is aimed at discussing the relationship between religion and political power. Basically, social psychology like other humanistic sciences had been fully impacted by the effects of first and Second World War. Under such a context, many scholars devoted particular attention to the study of prejudice and discrimination. In the following pages we will try to synthesize how religion contributes for the conformation of ideology and social depictions. In part, this does not suffice to affirm religion is responsible for nationalism but both share analogical element in their respective formations. This paper is accompanied with the analysis of an empirical research carried out from 2006-2007 in Cromagnon Sanctuary, Buenos Aires Argentina. In brief, let us readers to remind that on 30 December of 2004, more than 400 hundred youths congregated to celebrate a new year and hear Callejeros recital, their favorite Rock and Roll band. But came out wrong whenever a flare impacted in the ceiling firing suddenly all stadiums wherein this event was being carried out. As a result of this tragic accident, 194people died and more than 400 manifested diverse respiratory chronic pathologies. This event was well known as the Republic of Cromagnon tragedy.

The aim of this article is to investigate the ways in which memory and imagination operate in and through the development of consciousness in literary texts. Itsguiding theme shall be the double consciousness in modern life which sets the plot for one of the masterpieces of Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903). Thus The Ambassadors artfully crafts the “inwardness of the modern mind” by plotting it as a process of maturity and of becoming mindful through the powers of imagination, recollection and memory. The prospect of the novel consists in the possibility of envisioning a sense of freedom or of life that is one’s own making. The interpretation that I endorse here is guided by the question of intimacy and its relation to freedom, and is made in the light of what Hegel says in his Philosophy of Mind with regard to the development of mind’s powers. This assessment may disclose a way of learning and growing through becoming mindful of the oppositions that pervade the modern mind. Henry James and Hegel, each in their unique way, recollect this lesson that modern life teaches by raising it to a higher consciousness as we find in the form of their art and philosophy.

The aim of this article is to discuss and clarify the general framework of teachers’ competencies. The general framework regarding teacher competencies wereexplained in nine different dimensions as field competencies, research competencies, curriculum competencies, lifelong learning competencies, social-cultural competen cies, emotional competencies, communication competencies, information and communication technologies competencies (ICT) and environmental competencies. Teachers’ competencies affect their values, behaviors, communication, aims and practices in school and also they support professional development and curricular studies. Thus, the discussion on teachers’ competencies to improve the teaching-learning process in school is of great importance.

In the context of today.s moral and ecological crisis, and the accelerated advance of information and communication technologies, when human beings intensively experience their own fragility, a major question is that of well-being. That raises the issue of moral health, which represents, in an axiological and normative sense, a basis for the human being to find proper opportunities for remaking and protecting the beingness' equilibrium in face of a variety of risks in a society of excesses. We consider that a significant element of moral health lies in the old Greek value of sophrosýne. In this essay, we highlight its meaning and role. We do this by reviving the core of a wise learning coming from Ancient philosophy about one of the moral excellences. Sophrosýne is approached as a necessary factor in human well-being; it is pursued in the prophylactic and therapeutic potential for the maintenance of human health; finally, it is developed inits fundamental action of allowing happiness in a well-functioning and self-fulfilling life of the human being.

The essay hypothesizes a norm condition of stasis—the mood of sentient peace occupied on a quiet porch. From there the psyche is drawn upward by concept, into the benign/abstract world or downward into the pre-verbal which links us with prespeech man/woman. Is there any default position in this map of the positions of consciousness?

Africa’s widespread problems are well publicized and none receives more attention than that of periodic outbreaks of ethnic violence. Past events in Rwanda, and in the ongoing conflict in Darfur-Sudan, linger in the memory while the outbreak of postelection violence in Kenya is a more recent example of the seemingly endless capacity of Africa to generate ethnic unrest. The problems of Africa have become the subject of intense philosophical debate and reflection in an effort to find a just and sustainable future for the continent. This contribution to the ongoing debate will argue that the root cause of ethnic violence (and indeed many of Africa’s other problems) is a lack of subjectivity and that the insights of Søren Kierkegaard, with regard to the role of subjectivity in intersubjective relations, will not only give us a perspective on the origins of these problems, but through education, offer a way forward to a more optimistic future.

Architecture culture is the synthesis of material possession and spiritual wealth, created by human society history development and reflects historic continuity and nationality character. This paper has a comprehensive comparison analysis on distinctions of originality, architecture characteristic, developing logic, art forms, and intention between China and Western Countries exhibited on architectural culture, including three parts: ancient period, current period, and future development. Through comparison studies, it presents a comprehensive cognition on different cultural backgrounds and unique exhibition forms for different architectural styles on China and Western Countries; have a deeper understanding on architectural culture communion in two different civilization zones; and find a future developing way with ethical features and spirit for Chinese and Western architecture.

In the following lines the symbolic oppression founded on binary hierarchies that exist inside the framework of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Basic Freedoms will be presented. In those binary oppositions opposed terms are not equally valued. One of these terms is dominant, while the other is subordinated and mostly defined only as the first term’s other. This symbolic oppression creates various forms of discrimination. This paper argues that this problem can be resolved by deliberative democracy. Effective deliberation leads to more informed public sphere which is capable to embrace otherness and diversity.

William Whewell is usually portraied as an anti-Hegelian. This article shows that, despite his criticism for Hegel’s philosophical system, Whewell was influenced by the Hegelian “historical” approach in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, and by the conception of the progressive development of though (philosophy for Hegel, science for Whewell) as a dialectical unity.