Ning Chen

Hace casi 40 años, Gayatri Spivak planteó el concepto de “violencia epistémica” como la clave para desvelar la estructura del poder asimétrico entre Inglaterra victoriana y su periferia colonizada. Esta línea de reflexión sobre la injusticia cognitiva entre el centro y la periferia también ha sido abordada por los intelectuales latinoamericanos. El presente trabajo hace un recorrido sobre las proposiciones en cuanto a la violencia epistémica para llegar a una conceptualización provisional, sin intención de agotar todas las posibilidades teóricas por la magnitud del tema, y analiza sus manifestaciones en la literatura, tomando como ejemplo la colección de cuentos El informe de Brodie de Jorge Luis Borges.

Previous studies revealed that the susceptibility, contacting preference, and recovery probability markedly alter the epidemic outbreak size and threshold. The recovery probability of an infected node is closely related to its obtained resources. How to allocate limited resources to infected neighbors is extremely important for containing the epidemic spreading on complex networks. In this paper, we proposed an epidemic spreading model on complex networks, in which we assume that the node has heterogeneous susceptibility and contacting preference, and susceptible nodes are willing to share their resources to neighbors. Through a developed heterogeneous mean-field theory and a large number of numerical simulations, we find that the recovered nodes provide resources uniformly to their infected neighbor nodes, and the epidemic spreading can be suppressed optimally on homogeneous and heterogeneous networks. Besides, altering the susceptibility and contacting preference does not qualitatively change the results. The susceptibility of the node decreases, which makes the outbreak threshold of epidemic spreading increase, and the outbreak size decreases. Our theory agrees well with the numerical simulations.

This paper studies the theme of civilization and barbarism in El Sur, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Focusing on the historical perspective, it analyzes the political-geographical discourse of the Argentine elite on the Indians and the geopolitical imaginary of "the South" in the second half of the nineteenth century. The protagonist of the story, Juan Dalhmann, identifies himself as heir to this discourse based on European values as the only pattern of a universal civilization. Dalhmann interprets the difference in geography he encounters on his journey to the South as an anachronism in the temporal order, practicing the "denial of coevalness". The South is for him the space of the Other. The duel at the end of the story between Dalhmann and the man with indian face is a manifestation of the inescapable contradiction when Dalhmann becomes the new civilizer of modernity.

Calls for complementing, modifying and ‘decolonising’ the conceptualisation and implementation of Diversity Education (e.g. multicultural, intercultural, and/or social justice education) are currently being heard in the ‘West’. This paper explores some of the characteristics and benefits of Chinese Minzu Education as a potential addition to the field. Our starting point is that Chinese education is often misrepresented and that knowledge about diversity in China (which includes, amongst others, minority groups and Han people), and especially about how people are educated for and through it, is scarce and negatively evaluated in the ‘West’. Taking a university specialising in Minzu studies as a case study (which should not be generalized to other Minzu institutions), we problematise formal and informal aspects of Minzu education that could be inspiring to, e.g. interculturalists and multiculturalists in ‘Western’ education. Fieldwork notes, student interviews about Minzu education and models of Minzu Diversity Learning co-constructed by Minzu students, illustrate the characteristics of Minzu education in higher education. The paper ends on a call for exploring other ‘unknown’ perspectives on diversity in education emerging from the so-called peripheries of the ‘West’.