In this paper we analyze results from 114 face-to-face qualitative interviews of people who had evacuated from the New Orleans area in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, interviews that were completed within weeks of the 2005 storm in most cases. Our goal was to understand the role information and knowledge played in people's decisions to leave the area. Contrary to the conventional wisdom underlying many disaster communication studies, we found that our interviewees almost always had extensive storm-related information from a (...) variety of sources, including media reports and other background knowledge gleaned from experiences with previous storms, often from interpersonal sources. However, consistent with a theme in communication research that has been identifiable since at least the 1940s, interpersonal communication networks were most often what ultimately caused these individuals to act on this information, and therefore those with “weak ties” to the broader “mainstream” community may have been disadvantaged, slower to leave, and thus more vulnerable to the storm's main effects. From our evidence, the end result was less a function of discrimination as it was one of differential activation of a relevant social network. These results argue for the rejection of a “deficit model” that assumes varied reactions to natural disaster result from some kind of an information deficiency, and remind us that behavior under such circumstances is the result of a process of collective behavior, not only individual cognition. (shrink)

Using exploratory factor analysis on a unique dataset of global executives, we find that their perceptions of their national government’s risk management effectiveness are largely driven by two latent factors: leadership virtue, and governance. We show that the leadership virtue signal is potentially a stronger signal. We hypothesize that this may be because making decisions and taking actions to manage risk is a continuous process requiring inter alia foresight and moral discipline in looking to the interests of others and acting (...) in service to those interests above self-interest. This suggests at least two propositions for further testing, for which, we offer rhetorical argument and anecdotal evidence at the end of this paper and suggest methodologies for further testing. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to uncover this connection empirically between national risk management and leadership virtue. (shrink)

In this paper we analyze results from 114 face-to-face qualitative interviews of people who had evacuated from the New Orleans area in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, interviews that were completed within weeks of the 2005 storm in most cases. Our goal was to understand the role information and knowledge played in people's decisions to leave the area. Contrary to the conventional wisdom underlying many disaster communication studies, we found that our interviewees almost always had extensive storm-related information from a (...) variety of sources, including media reports and (in many cases) other background knowledge gleaned from experiences with previous storms, often from interpersonal sources. However, consistent with a theme in communication research that has been identifiable since at least the 1940s, interpersonal communication networks were most often what ultimately caused these individuals to act on this information, and therefore those with “weak ties” (a concept borrowed from sociology) to the broader “mainstream” community may have been disadvantaged, slower to leave, and thus more vulnerable to the storm's main effects. From our evidence, the end result was less a function of discrimination as it was one of differential activation of a relevant social network. These results argue for the rejection of a “deficit model” that assumes varied reactions to natural disaster result from some kind of an information deficiency, and remind us that behavior under such circumstances is the result of a process of collective behavior, not only individual cognition. (shrink)

Cascades of Grace was formed within the United Reformed Church through Global and Intercultural Ministries to network and empower Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic women in the churches. In the article, two of the founding members describe the formation of the group, and their own experiences in URC and other churches, and in candidating for ministry.

When Congress passed the 19th Amendment in 1919 granting women voting rights, 13 western states had already adopted woman suffrage. Only 2 states outside the West had done so. Using event history analysis, the authors investigate why woman suffrage came early to the western states. Alan Grimes's hypotheses, that native-born, western men were willing to give women the vote to remedy western social problems and to increase the number of women in the region, receive little support in our analysis. Rather, (...) this study finds that woman suffrage came to the West because of the mobilization of the western suffrage movements and because of political and gendered opportunities existing in that region. (shrink)

Since Schleiermacher and Hegel it has been part of the tradition of German philosophy to view the history of philosophy as an essential aspect of philosophy itself. The topic of “Heidegger and the History of Philosophy” should be considered with this in mind, which means that our question is as follows: Within this general attitude towards the history of philosophy, which has dominated German philosophy since Hegel, what distinctive attitudes are to be found in Heidegger? The context assumed by the (...) question is clear: it is that created by the rise of historical consciousness. It was part of the heritage of German Romanticism that not only historical research as a whole but also the position of philosophical theories would henceforth be affected by the problem of the nature of history. Before the Romantic period there was no such thing as the history of philosophy in the sense we are concerned with here. There was only the sort of scholarship which compiles lists. Hegel’s concept of a history of philosophy was itself in the fullest sense “philosophy;” it was a special subdivision of the philosophy of history, which was itself an attempt to demonstrate the presence of reason in history. Indeed, Hegel termed the history of philosophy the very heart of world history. However, the substantive portion of the Hegelian history of philosophy—its attempt to exhibit the necessity underlying the sequence of forms of philosophical thought, and thus the “rational” character of the history of thought—did not survive the criticism of the “historical school.”. (shrink)

Moral psychology studies the features of cognition, judgement, perception and emotion that make human beings capable of moral action. Perspectives from feminist and race theory immensely enrich moral psychology. Writers who take these perspectives ask questions about mind, feeling, and action in contexts of social difference and unequal power and opportunity. These essays by a distinguished international cast of philosophers explore moral psychology as it connects to social life, scientific studies, and literature.

Research using mHealth apps has the potential to positively impact health care management and outcomes. However, choosing an appropriate mHealth app may be challenging for the health researcher. The author team used existing evaluation tools, checklists, and guidelines to assess selected mHealth apps to identify strengths, challenges, and potential gaps within existing evaluation tools. They identified specific evaluation tool components, questions, and items most effective in examining app content, usability, and features, including literacy demand and cultural appropriateness; technical information; practical (...) aspects of app functionality; and evolving capabilities of mobile medical apps. Challenges included the subjective nature of the results, time required to complete the evaluation, lack of emphasis on evidence‐based content, and inadequate tool flexibility. Health researchers considering the integration of mobile apps into research will benefit from evaluation tools that assess both evidence‐based content and the ability of the mobile app to securely integrate with other digital technologies involved in patient care. Next steps will include the involvement of health care providers and professionals, including nurses a wide range of expertise, to develop an mHealth evaluation tool that focuses on identifying quality, evidence‐based mobile apps into patient outcomes research. (shrink)

Where does agency lie in musical performance? How is it expressed? Recent music scholarship has highlighted an increasingly prominent tendency to conceive of agency as not confined to any one individual or type of individual, instead being distributed across diverse individuals that can be found occupying performance situations. . This article uses two ‘percussion’ works from the 1970s by the composer John Cage, Child of Tree (1975) and its multi-performer elaboration Branches (1976), as a foil for engaging with these practical (...) and theoretical musical concerns, and for suggesting some heretofore underappreciated distinctions within the ongoing work on multi-agential performance. (shrink)

In seeking an answer to the question of what it means for a theory to be fundamental, it is enlightening to ask why the current best theories of physics are not generally believed to be fundamental. This reveals a set of conditions that a theory of physics must satisfy in order to be considered fundamental. Physics aspires to describe ever deeper levels of reality, which may be without end. Ultimately, at any stage we may not be able to tell whether (...) we've reached rock bottom, or even if there is a base level – nevertheless, I draft a checklist to help us identify when to stop digging, in the case where we may have reached a candidate for a final theory. Given that the list is – according to (current) mainstream belief in high-energy physics – complete, and each criterion well-motivated, I argue that a physical theory that satisfies all the criteria can be assumed to be fundamental in the absence of evidence to the contrary (i.e., I argue that the necessary conditions are jointly sufficient for a claim of fundamentality in physics). (shrink)

This paper argues that modern virtue ethics provides a useful background against which to read the philosophical import of Christine de Pizan’s works. By recognizing the origins of much of her thought in the Medieval tradition of virtue ethics, the paper brings out the continuity between her writing and a rich stream of contemporary ethical debate. It shows how Christine’s strand of feminism was deeply indebted to Medieval virtue ethics; both as found in Boethius and in contemporary compilations on the (...) virtues, on which Christine drew. At the same time, this tradition was subtly transformed by Christine, in order to elevate the status of women, as well as the traditional practical and worldly activities of women. Indeed, Christine’s feminism can be read as a direct application of her meditation on virtue and the good life. The paper concludes with a brief sketch of the way in which, during the three centuries subsequent to Christine, the nature of virtue and the virtues continued to provide a central focus in women’s philosophical writings. (shrink)

A theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, Karen Barad elaborates her theory of agential realism, a schema that is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics.

We frequently speak of certain things or phenomena being built out of or based in others. Making Things Up concerns these relations, which connect more fundamental things to less fundamental things: Karen Bennett calls these 'building relations'. She aims to illuminate what it means to say that one thing is more fundamental than another.

Karen Gloys neues Buch geht der Funktion und Geschichte der Begriffe Individual- und Kollektivbewußtsein nach - Begriffe, die heute wegen ihrer politischsoziologischen Bedeutung und der geschichtlichen Entwicklung im 20. Jahrhunderts kaum noch unbelastet gebraucht werden können.

In this book John Campbell shows that the general structural features of human thought can be seen as having their source in the distinctive ways in which we...

Recent defenses of shaming as an effective tool for identifying bad practice and provoking social change appear compatible with feminism. I complicate this picture by examining two instances of online feminist shaming that resulted in shame backlashes. Shaming requires the assertion of social and epistemic authority on behalf of a larger community, and is dependent upon an audience that will be receptive to the shaming testimony. In cases where marginally situated knowers attempt to “shame up,” it presents challenges for feminist (...) uses. (shrink)

This paper examines the strategic use of corporate philanthropy in the 1990s by UK building societies faced with an intensification of societal pressure to change legal form from mutual to corporate status. While the economic case for mutuality has been made elsewhere, this paper examines the observation that community relationships were thought by management to be capable of assisting in the strategic positioning of mutual societies with regard to their legal form. By increasing charitable giving to respond to the level (...) of societal scrutiny and discussion on the issue of mutuality, this paper argues that charitable giving, as one proxy for community involvement, was used as a strategic tool to deflect calls for demutualisation, thereby preserving the existing mutual status of building societies. (shrink)

A fresh explication of the Thomist justification of self-defense casts off the hobbles of the principle of double effects to find a more secure footing in the historicaldevelopment of subjective natural rights by medieval jurists, and a straight-forward application to the latent threat of death in childbirth posed by non-consensual pregnancy. By articulating the implicit Thomistic right to defensive abortion in terms of conditional rights bestowed in Creation as correlative to particular natural law duties, justly proportionate limits to defensive abortion (...) are identified, and balanced against the forfeited or reserved natural rights variously imputed to conceptus and embryo in non-consensual pregnancies. Subsequently, the varieties of involuntary consent are examined from a Thomist perspective with a view to their relevance in justifying recourse to a rehabilitated practice of defensive abortion when free and full consent to impregnation and childbirth is absent. (shrink)

To 'consequentialise' is to take a putatively non-consequentialist moral theory and show that it is actually just another form of consequentialism. Some have speculated that every moral theory can be consequentialised. If this were so, then consequentialism would be empty; it would have no substantive content. As I argue here, however, this is not so. Beginning with the core consequentialist commitment to 'maximising the good', I formulate a precise definition of consequentialism and demonstrate that, given this definition, several sorts of (...) moral theory resist consequentialisation. My strategy is to decompose consequentialism into three conditions, which I call 'agent neutrality', 'no moral dilemmas', and 'dominance', and then to exhibit some moral theories which violate each of these. (shrink)

Ecological feminism is the position that there are important connections-historical, symbolic, theoretical-between the domination of women and the domination of nonhuman nature. I argue that because the conceptual connections between the dual dominations of women and nature are located in an oppressive patriarchal conceptual framework characterized by a logic of domination, (1) the logic of traditional feminism requires the expansion of feminism to include ecological feminism and (2) ecological feminism provides a framework for developing a distinctively feminist environmental ethic. I (...) conclude that any feminist theory and any environmental ethic which fails to take seriously the interconnected dominations of women and nature is simply inadequate. (shrink)

This book explains how gossip contributes to knowledge. Karen Adkins marshals scholarship and case studies spanning centuries and disciplines to show that although gossip is a constant activity in human history, it has rarely been studied as a source of knowledge. People gossip for many reasons, but most often out of desire to make sense of the world while lacking access to better options for obtaining knowledge. This volume explores how, when our access to knowledge is blocked, gossip becomes (...) a viable path to knowledge attainment, one that involves the asking of questions, the exchange of ideas, and the challenging of preconceived notions. (shrink)

A philosophical exploration of the nature, scope, and significance of ecofeminist theory and practice. This book presents the key issues, concepts, and arguments which motivate and sustain ecofeminism from a western philosophical perspective.

This book discusses the notion that quantum gravity may represent the "breakdown" of spacetime at extremely high energy scales. If spacetime does not exist at the fundamental level, then it has to be considered "emergent", in other words an effective structure, valid at low energy scales. The author develops a conception of emergence appropriate to effective theories in physics, and shows how it applies (or could apply) in various approaches to quantum gravity, including condensed matter approaches, discrete approaches, and loop (...) quantum gravity. (shrink)

Science and the originality of life -- Christian facticity -- Grasping life as a topic -- Ruinance -- The retrieval of history -- Facticity and ontology -- Factical speaking -- Rhetoric -- Sophistry.

Ecological feminism is the position that there are important connections-historical, symbolic, theoretical-between the domination of women and the domination of nonhuman nature. I argue that because the conceptual connections between the dual dominations of women and nature are located in an oppressive patriarchal conceptual framework characterized by a logic of domination, (1) the logic of traditional feminism requires the expansion of feminism to include ecological feminism and (2) ecological feminism provides a framework for developing a distinctively feminist environmental ethic. I (...) conclude that any feminist theory and any environmental ethic which fails to take seriously the interconnected dominations of women and nature is simply inadequate. (shrink)

The paper is an extended discussion of what I call the ‘dismissive attitude’ towards metaphysical questions. It has three parts. In the first part, I distinguish three quite different versions of dismissivism. I also argue that there is little reason to think that any of these positions is correct about the discipline of metaphysics as a whole; it is entirely possible that some metaphysical disputes should be dismissed and others should not be. Doing metametaphysics properly requires doing metaphysics first. I (...) then put two particular disputes on the table to be examined in the rest of the paper: the dispute over whether composite objects exist, and the dispute about whether distinct objects can be colocated. In the second part of the paper, I argue against the claim that these disputes are purely verbal disputes. In the third part of the paper, I present a new version of dismissivism, and argue that it is probably the correct view about the two disputes in question. They are not verbal disputes, and the discussion about them to date has not remotely been a waste of time. At this stage, however, our evidence has run out. I argue that neither side of either dispute is simpler than the other, and that the same objections in fact arise against both sides. (For example, the compositional nihilist does not in fact escape the problem of the many, and the one-thinger does not in fact escape the grounding problem.). (shrink)

We hypothesised that belief in conspiracy theories would be predicted by the general tendency to attribute agency and intentionality where it is unlikely to exist. We further hypothesised that this tendency would explain the relationship between education level and belief in conspiracy theories, where lower levels of education have been found to be associated with higher conspiracy belief. In Study 1 participants were more likely to agree with a range of conspiracy theories if they also tended to attribute intentionality and (...) agency to inanimate objects. As predicted, this relationship accounted for the link between education level and belief in conspiracy theories. We replicated this finding in Study 2, whilst taking into account beliefs in paranormal phenomena. These results suggest that education may undermine the reasoning processes and assumptions that are reflected in conspiracy belief. (shrink)

Nursing staff of many specialities are taking on and developing their roles in new and advanced practice areas. Patients will be offered new services from highly skilled advanced nurse practitioners. Such nurses need guidance, direction and information to assist them in their new roles. This book will offer insight and guidance on a variety of issues that are likely to be encountered by the Nurse Practitioner in everyday practice.

Systemic Constellation Work is a rapidly growing experiential healing process that is being embraced by a variety of helping professionals, both traditional and alternative, worldwide. This book explores the history, principles and methodology of this approach, and offers a detailed comparison with psychodrama - the original mind-body therapy - explaining how each method can enhance the other. Constellation work is based on the notion that people are connected by unseen energetic forces and suggests that the psychological, traumatic and survival experiences (...) of our ancestors are genetically passed forward to the next generation and may live within us. Using insightful case studies from a variety of client groups, this book shows how Systemic Constellation Work can expand the possibilities of psychodrama techniques, and can be successfully integrated with psychodramatic enactment, guided imagery, ritual, concretization and other methods of healing and personal growth. This book will be essential reading for students and practitioners of psychodrama and Constellation work, as well as counselors, mental health professionals, experiential therapists, creative and expressive arts therapists and alternative practitioners looking to widen their knowledge of mind-body therapies. (shrink)

A lot of people believe that distinct objects can occupy precisely the same place for the entire time during which they exist. Such people have to provide an answer to the 'grounding problem' – they have to explain how such things, alike in so many ways, nonetheless manage to fall under different sortals, or have different modal properties. I argue in detail that they cannot say that there is anything in virtue of which spatio-temporally coincident things have those properties. However, (...) I also argue that this may not be as bad as it looks, and that there is a way to make sense of the claim that such properties are primitive. (shrink)