This methodological article explores issues related to having the ontological ground for phenomenological empirical research present throughout the research process. We discuss how ontology needs to be taken into consideration regarding the phenomena to be studied and how ontological aspects of phenomena need to be highlighted during various data collection and analysis procedures. Here, we discuss how philosophical works can be used in the context of specific research projects. In illustrating our statements, we present four empirical examples connected to the (...) themes of life changes and learning processes with the purpose of exemplifying and discussing how general lifeworld ontology can be integrated as an active resource in empirical phenomenological research. (shrink)

Education is important in shaping professional identity, including how one approaches norms and normalisation. In the analysis presented in this study, nursing students' own constructions of norms and normality from the outlook of their education are highlighted and problematised. To deepen the understanding of these matters, the aim of this study was to explore constructions of norms and normality among students in nursing education. Students studying in a nursing department at a Swedish university college were approached and asked to consider (...) open survey questions targeting their views on norms and normality; 154 of them replied. After a discourse analytic approach to the data, we could see how the students constructed norms and normality as (a) instrumental instructions, consisting of easy‐to‐digest statements grounded in the profession's obvious moral and ethical values, (b) limiting and frustrating obstacles for personal freedom that were important to challenge, (c) rules to be obeyed for the stability of society and (d) a matter of reflection, with each individual being responsible for understanding differences in norms, perspectives and opinions. We conclude that nursing education would benefit from norm‐critical perspectives, problematising students' own positions to norms, power and privilege. (shrink)

Background:Fear and aggression are often reported among professionals working in locked psychiatric wards and also among the patients in the same wards. Such situations often lead to coercive intervention. In order to prevent coercion, we need to understand what happens in dangerous situations and how patients and professionals interpret them.Research questions:What happens when dangerous situations occur in a ward? How do professionals and patients interpret these situations and what is ethically at stake?Research design:Participant observation and interviews.Participants:A total of 12 patients (...) and 22 professionals participated.Ethical considerations:This study has been accepted by the Regional Committee for Medical and Health Research Ethics in Norway.Findings:(a) Both atmosphere and material surroundings were interweaved within dangerous situations, (b) the professionals applied stereotypes when interpreting dangerous situations and (c) the professionals and the patients had different interpretations of what triggered dangerous situations.Discussion:The discussion centres on how care ethics and a dialogical practice might contribute towards combating difficult situations and the ways in which change is an ongoing ethical process of becoming.Conclusion:The ethics of care and a dialogical approach are suggested as ethical frameworks for preventing fear, danger and aggression in psychiatric wards. Both frameworks can be understood as patient-driven, including the relational and contextual perspectives. It means a shift from professionally driven processes to patient-driven dialogue. (shrink)

Severe obesity has been associated with reduced performance on tests of verbal memory in bariatric surgery candidates. There is also some evidence that bariatric surgery leads to improved verbal memory, yet these findings need further elucidation. Little is known regarding postoperative memory changes in the visual domain and how patients subjectively experience their everyday memory after surgery. The aim of the current study was to repeat and extend prior findings on postoperative memory by investigating visual, verbal, and self-reported everyday memory (...) following surgery, and to examine whether weight loss and somatic comorbidity predict memory performance. The study was a prospective, observational study in which participants underwent cognitive testing at baseline, 1 and 2 years after bariatric surgery. Repeated measures analyses of variance revealed significantly poorer visual and verbal memory performance at the 1-year follow-up, with performance subsequently returning to baseline levels after 2 years. Verbal learning and self-reported everyday memory did not show significant postoperative changes. Memory performance at 1 year was not significantly predicted by weight loss, changes in C-reactive protein levels or postoperative somatic comorbidity. The study demonstrated poorer visual and verbal memory performance at 1-year follow-up that returned to baseline levels after 2 years. These findings are in contrast to most previous studies and require further replication, however, the results indicate that postoperative memory improvements following bariatric surgery are not universal. Findings suggest that treatment providers should also be aware of patients potentially having poorer memory at 1 year following surgery. (shrink)

De plus en plus fréquente, la revendication du droit d’ingérence, c’est-à-dire de l’intervention autoritaire dans les affaires intérieures d’un État qui viole sur son territoire des droits humains fondamentaux, révèle une prise de conscience plus vive de l’universelle dignité humaine. Sa mise en pratique doit trouver ses formes adéquates. Juridiquement et moralement, le recours aux armes, en raison de ses conséquences dramatiques, ne peut constituer qu’une modalité extrême.

Person‐centred care is founded on ethics as a basis for organizing care. In spite of healthcare systems claiming that they have implemented person‐centred care, patients report less satisfaction with care. These contrasting results require clarification of how to practice person‐centred ethics using Paul Ricoeur's ‘Little ethics’, summarized as: ‘aiming for the good life, with and for others in just institutions’. In this ethic Kantian morality is at once subordinate and complementary to Aristotelian ethics because the ethical goal needs to be (...) critically assessed and passed through the examination of the norm in each care situation. This paper presents examples that describes a person‐centred care practice that balance a critical review of care activities based on a conviction of aiming for patients' wellbeing. In contrast to patients' experiences of person‐centred care in real life, research projects have shown that if the clinical performers comprehend and apply the practice of person‐centred ethics, patients report positive outcomes. The implementation of person‐centred care therefore demands that stakeholders and managers enables and requires that healthcare staff study ethics in the same way as studying for example pharmacology is required when handling patients' medicines. (shrink)

BackgroundResearch proactively and deliberately aims to bring about specific changes to how societies function and individual lives fare. However, in the ever-expanding field of ethical regulations and guidance for researchers, one ethical consideration seems to have passed under the radar: How should researchers act when pursuing actual, societal changes based on their academic work?Main textWhen researchers engage in the process of bringing about societal impact to tackle local or global challenges important concerns arise: cultural, social and political values and institutions (...) can be put at risk, transformed or even hampered if researchers lack awareness of how their ‘acting to impact’ influences the social world. With today’s strong focus on research impacts, addressing such ethical challenges has become urgent within in all fields of research involved in finding solutions to the challenges societies are facing. Due to the overall goal of doing something good that is often inherent in ethical approaches, boundaries to researchers’ impact of something good is neither obvious, nor easy to detect. We suggest that it is time for the field of bioethics to explore normative boundaries for researchers’ pursuit of impact and to consider, in detail, the ethical obligations that ought to shape this process, and we provide a four-step framework of fair conditions for such an approach. Our suggested approach within this field can be useful for other fields of research as well.ConclusionWith this paper, we draw attention to how the transition from pursuing impact within the Academy to trying to initiate and achieve impact beyond the Academy ought to be configured, and the ethical challenges inherent in this transition. We suggest a stepwise strategy to identify, discuss and constitute consensus-based boundaries to this academic activity. This strategy calls for efforts from a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, advisors from the humanities and social sciences, as well as discussants from funding institutions, ethical committees, politics and the society in general. Such efforts should be able to offer new and useful assistance to researchers, as well as research funding agencies, in choosing ethically acceptable, impact-pursuing projects. (shrink)

This article is a contribution to the existing debate about the marketization of higher education and offers a detailed study of the way the practices of marketization manifest themselves at the level of discourse in higher education. Taking its point of departure in Critical Discourse Analysis and using a text-driven procedure for genre analysis, the article describes and analyses the international student prospectus as an instance of a highly promotional genre which clearly reflects the values and forces of the free (...) market. The article contains two analyses. The first analysis compares four instances of the international student prospectus genre from Finland, Scotland, Australia and Japan and tries to establish genre membership and genre characteristics by considering the overall text structure, and by looking for similarities in content and `rhetorical moves'. The second analysis is an in-depth analysis of the language use in the international student prospectus from the University of Stirling, Scotland. This analysis pays particular attention to the way the rhetorical moves and visual and lexico-grammatical features in the text are used to represent the two main participants in the text: the university and its students. Both analyses show that the student prospectus is trying to construct an image of the University of Stirling and its students which goes hand in hand with the new trend in higher education — namely that of offering innovative products to `demanding' clients on the look-out for the best possible `university experience'. (shrink)

The purpose of this overview of published articles on decision making in paediatric care was to identify important aspects of its possible use in clinical practice and to obtain a base for future research. A literature review was undertaken utilizing snowball sampling to identify articles because of the diversity present within the area of decision making in paediatric care. The databases PubMed and CINAHL were used. The search was limited to articles published in English during the period 1994-2004. The analysis (...) entailed a series of comparisons across articles, focusing on major areas of enquiry and patterns of results. Various levels of decision making are described because these seem to form a basis for how decisions are made. Concepts found to be of importance for decision making are described under the following headings: competence, the child’s best interests, knowledge, values and attitudes, roles and partnership, power, and economy. Further research is suggested. (shrink)

When a child is hospitalized, the parents find themselves in an unfamiliar environment and their parental role changes. They are in a stressful and often anxiety-filled situation and it may be difficult for them to participate in decisions. The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which parents participate in decisions during the course of events when their child is hospitalized. Thirty-five parents of 24 children (aged 5 months to 18 years) were followed by mobile observation during (...) their child’s hospitalization in a paediatric department in Sweden. Three researchers analysed field notes in three steps, using manifest and latent coding. In step 1, 119 situations that included a decision process were identified. In step 2, the situations were assessed according to a five-level scale concerning how the parents’ wishes, desires or values had been respected. In step 3, each situation was scrutinized with respect to factors influencing the extent of the parents’ participation. The results showed that parents have varying ability to be involved in decision making. Professionals need to communicate more openly with them in order to identify and satisfy their needs because some parents are unwilling or incapable of expressing them. (shrink)

Patients are supposed to be given care according to their needs. This concept is, however, difficult to define and patients and caregivers may have different opinions about a patient’s needs. Twenty patients were interviewed and asked to give a definition of need, describe their needs while hospitalized and depict what they do to make sure their needs are fulfilled. Ten groups of needs were identified: communication, basic care, contact with other people, behaviour of staff, empathy, competent caregivers, continuity, integrity, participation (...) in decision making, and pain relief. The descriptions patients gave of how they ensured their needs were met could be divided into two groups: openly seeking attention; or not wanting to disturb the staff. Interviews with patients emphasized the importance of recognizing that they have individual needs and varying abilities to see that their needs are fulfilled. (shrink)

The theory of formal spaces is developed in terms of presentations, in order to study effectivity.

De Interpretatione is among Aristotle's most influential and widely read writings; C. W. A. Whitaker presents the first systematic study of this work, and offers a radical new view of its aims, its structure, and its place in Aristotle's system. He shows that De Interpretatione is not a disjointed essay on ill-connected subjects, as traditionally thought, but a highly organized and systematic treatise on logic, argument, and dialectic.

The article argues that cognitive linguistic theory may prove an alternative to the Montague paradigm for designing natural language understanding systems. Within this framework it describes a system which models language understanding as a dialogical process between user and computer. The system operates with natural language texts as input and represent language meaning as entity-relationship diagrams.

As contemporary socio-ecological challenges such as climate change and biodiversity preservation have become more important, the three pillars concept has increasingly been used in planning and policy circles as a framework for analysis and action. However, the issue of how culture influences sustainability is still an underexplored theme. Understanding how culture can act as a resource to promote sustainability, rather than a barrier, is the key to the development of cultural sustainability. This book explores the interfaces between nature and culture (...) through the perspective of cultural sustainability. A cultural perspective on environmental sustainability enables a renewal of sustainability discourse and practices across rural and urban landscapes, natural and cultural systems, stressing heterogeneity and complexity. The book focuses on the nature-culture interface conceptualised as a place where experiences, practices, policies, ideas and knowledge meet, are negotiated, discussed and resolved. Rather than looking for lost unities, or an imaginary view of harmonious relationships between humans and nature based in the past, it explores cases of interfaces that are context-sensitive and which consciously convey the problems of scale and time. While calling attention to a cultural or 'culturalised' view of the sustainability debate, this book questions the radical nature-culture dualism dominating positive modern thinking as well as its underlying view of nature as pre-given and independent from human life. (shrink)

The United Nation’s (UN) 3rd Annual Multi-stakeholder Forum on ‘Science, Technology and Innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals (STI Forum) - Transformation Towards Sustainable and Resilient Societies’ was held at the UN Headquarters in New York on 5th and 6th of June, 2018. This STI Forum set out to discuss a suit of the sustainable development goals, namely sustainable management of water and sanitation for all (SDG 6), sustainable consumption and production patterns (SDG 12), and sustainable terrestrial ecosystems (SDG 15). (...) It also discussed how to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all (SDG 7) and how to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable (SDG 11). I participated in the panel debate on ‘Science, Technology and Innovation for Sustainable Terrestrial Ecosystems (SDG 15)’ – emphasizing the importance of food systems in the context of SDG 15. My statement is summarized below. The panel debate aimed at helping to identify good practices and policy recommendations, as well as challenges and needs, especially as they relate to international cooperation, innovation and capacity-building, with a view to facilitate the development, scaling up adoption and dissemination of relevant technologies for SDG 15. A food system can be described as a system that embraces all the elements (environment, people, inputs, processes, institutions, infrastructure, markets and trade) and activities that relate to the production, processing, distribution and marketing, preparation and consumption of food and the outputs of these activities, including socio-economic and environmental outcomes. A sustainable food system delivers food and nutrition security for all in such a way that the economic, social and environmental bases to generate food security and nutrition for future generations are not compromised. (shrink)

Twenty-four children (aged 5 months to 18 years) who were admitted to a university hospital were observed for a total of 135 hours with the aim of describing their degree of participation in decisions concerning their own care. Grading of their participation was made by using a 5-point scale. An assessment was also made of what was considered as optimal participation in each situation. The results indicate that children are not always allowed to participate in decision making to the extent (...) that is considered optimal. In no case was it judged that a child participated in or was forced to make a decision that was too difficult for the child. The interactions between children, parents and staff were also described in connection with discussions and decision-making processes. This showed that parents do not always support their children in difficult situations and that health care staff often inform children about what is going to happen without presenting alternatives or asking for their views. Staff may, however, find themselves facing an ethical conflict in deciding between supporting a child’s view or following hospital routine. It is of great importance that children are looked upon as potentially autonomous individuals and that staff members realize that one of their core duties is to facilitate children’s participation in decision making concerning their health care. (shrink)

This comment challenges essentialist “brain biased” interpretations of emotions from a historical perspective. humanities research shows that the embodying of emotions is historically contingent. Emotion metaphors do not so much reflect what is happening in our brain or in other parts of the body: they reflect what people think/thought is/was happening in and outside their body.

Although using different labels, genre theorists from different traditions have generally given privilege to the communicative purpose, in this article referred to as rhetorical objective, as genre determinant. Genre analysts who have studied press releases in particular tend to share this view, but nevertheless categorize communicative events conveyed through the press release as belonging to one genre despite variation in rhetorical objectives. This article argues that although the press release may be seen as a genre on the basis of textual (...) form, it does not qualify for the genre label if analysed in terms of content and rhetorical objective. To substantiate my claim, I shall discuss a small corpus of press releases, all focusing on a specific biotechnological issue. In my analyses I shall discuss staging in terms of content as well as logico-semantic relations between stages, patterns of stage combinations and their linguistic realizations with the aim of identifying variation in rhetorical objective. (shrink)

A transition to a sustainable future depends on mobilizing social and cultural resources associated with a re-animation of place. Taking as its basis ongoing research in Rjukan, an industrial monocultural town in Norway, the article shows how industrialized regions in a post-industrial world are in the frontline of western societies' relationship to nature and the environment. There is much potential in the restoration of human relationships to place in industrial towns, in terms of health and social and economic development, but (...) not least in terms of sustainability understood as authentic, positive and healthy self-development. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRecent years have seen an increase in the influx of asylum-seekers in Scandinavia, and in Denmark this has led to ever-tighter immigration control. This article discusses emerging practices of refugee solidarity and resistance to migration policy in Danish civil society in the wake of what has been referred to as the European refugee crisis. To accomplish this purpose, I analyse how participants in Facebook discussions construe topoi and attitudes when facing the ethical dilemma of respecting the law versus showing concern (...) for humans in need, in line with what Foucault, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press) has referred to as ‘ethical self-formation’. This is illustrated through a case study of an incident from September 2015, when a member of a Danish City Council offered private shelter to immigrants on their way to Norway. The incident led to legal proceedings in August 2016 for what the defendant referred to as ‘the offense of helping fellow human beings in need’. The study is informed by Critical Discourse Analysis. Analysing Discourse. Textual analysis for social research. London and New York: Routledge; Wodak, R.. The politics of fear. London and New York: Sage) and governmentality theory. The subject and Power. In H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; Foucault, M.. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78.. New York: Palgrave Macmillan; McIlvenny, P., Klausen, J. Z., & Lindegaard, L. B.. Studies of Discourse and Governmentality. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins). Data include media representations and facebook comments published during 2016. The analytical approach combines topos analysis.. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. London: Sage; Wodak, R.. The politics of fear. London and New York: Sage) and appraisal analysis to tease out evaluative meaning. (shrink)