Background Informed consent is often cited as the “cornerstone” of research ethics. Its intent is that participants enter research voluntarily, with an understanding of what their participation entails. Despite agreement on the necessity to obtain informed consent in research, opinions vary on the threshold of disclosure necessary and the best method to obtain consent. We aimed to investigate Australian researchers’ views on, and their experiences with, obtaining informed consent. Methods Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 23 researchers from NSW institutions, working (...) in various fields of research. Interviews were analysed and coded to identify themes. Results Researchers reported that consent involved information disclosure, understanding and a voluntary decision. They emphasised the variability of consent interactions, which were dependent on potential participants’ abilities and interests, study complexity and context. All researchers reported providing written information to potential participants, yet questioned the readability and utility of this information. The majority reported using signed consent forms to ‘operationalise’ consent and reported little awareness of, and lack of support in implementing more dynamic informed consent procedures, such as verbal informed consent, that was fit for the purposes of their studies. Views on Human Research Ethics Committees varied. Some reported inconsistent, arduous inputs on the information form and consent process. Others expressed reliance on HRECs for guidance, viewing them as institutional safeguards. Conclusions This study highlights the importance of transparent relationships, both between researchers and participants, and between researchers and HRECs. Where the relationship with study participants was reported as more robust, researchers felt that they were better able to ensure participants made better, more informed decisions. Where the relationship with HRECs was reported as more robust, researchers were more likely to view them as institutional safeguards, rather than as bureaucratic hindrances. Conscientious and mindful researchers are paramount to ensuring the procedure accommodates individual requirements. This study advocates that when designing ethical informed consent practices, researchers should be integrated as autonomous players with a positive input on the process, rather than, in the worst case, predatory recruiters to be curtailed by information forms and oversight. (shrink)

PREFATORY NOTE T may be well at the outset to say clearly what is the aim of the present volume. The title is Ancient Art and Ritual, but the reader will ...

Buddhisms and Deconstructions considers the connection between Buddhism and Derridean deconstruction, focusing on the work of Robert Magliola. Fourteen distinguished contributors discuss deconstruction and various Buddhisms—Indian, Tibetan, and Chinese —followed by an afterword in which Magliola responds directly to his critics.

From February 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to closures of educational institutions to reduce the spread of infectious disease. This forced the U.S. education system into a massive experiment with online education. Despite conducting online bioethics education for nearly twenty years, our bioethics program, a joint endeavor of Clarkson University and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, was not immune to this disruption because our curriculum features intensive, one-week onsite courses. Even in the face of historic disruptions, it is (...) vital to ensure minimal interruptions to teaching and assessing students to provide effective education. This paper reviews the steps we took to successfully convert the onsite components of our curriculum to a synchronous online format, and it focuses on how we preserved instruction and assessment of practical skills that comprise these courses’ core. It also explains how we fostered interactive classroom environments. (shrink)

The authors of this article are previous or current members of the Clinical Ethics Consultation Affairs (CECA) Committee, a standing committee of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH). The committee is composed of seasoned healthcare ethics consultants (HCECs), and it is charged with developing and disseminating education materials for HCECs and ethics committees. The purpose of this article is to describe the educational research and development processes behind our teaching materials, which culminated in a case studies book called (...) A Case-Based Study Guide for Addressing Patient-Centered Ethical Issues in Health Care (hereafter, the Study Guide). In this article, we also enumerate how the Study Guide could be used in teaching and learning, and we identify areas that are ripe for future work. (shrink)

Feminism was born in controversy and it continues to flourish in controversy. The distinguished contributors to this volume provide an array of perspectives on issues including: universal values, justice and care, a feminist philosophy of science, and the relationship of biology to social theory.

To promote ethical practices, healthcare managers must understand the ethical challenges encountered by key stakeholders. To characterize ethical challenges in Veterans Administration (VA) facilities from the perspectives of managers, clinicians, patients, and ethics consultants. We conducted focus groups with patients (n = 32) and managers (n = 38); semi-structured interviews with managers (n = 31), clinicians (n = 55), and ethics committee chairpersons (n = 21). Data were analyzed using content analysis. Managers reported that the greatest ethical challenge was fairly (...) distributing resources across programs and services, whereas clinicians identified the effect of resource constraints on patient care. Ethics committee chairpersons identified end-of-life care as the greatest ethical challenge, whereas patients identified obtaining fair, respectful, and caring treatment. Perspectives on ethical challenges varied depending on the respondent's role. Understanding these differences can help managers take practical steps to address these challenges. Further, ethics committees seemingly, are not addressing the range of ethical challenges within their institutions. (shrink)

To promote ethical practices, healthcare managers must understand the ethical challenges encountered by key stakeholders. To characterize ethical challenges in Veterans Administration facilities from the perspectives of managers, clinicians, patients, and ethics consultants. We conducted focus groups with patients and managers ; semi-structured interviews with managers, clinicians, and ethics committee chairpersons. Data were analyzed using content analysis. Managers reported that the greatest ethical challenge was fairly distributing resources across programs and services, whereas clinicians identified the effect of resource constraints on (...) patient care. Ethics committee chairpersons identified end-of-life care as the greatest ethical challenge, whereas patients identified obtaining fair, respectful, and caring treatment. Perspectives on ethical challenges varied depending on the respondent's role. Understanding these differences can help managers take practical steps to address these challenges. Further, ethics committees seemingly, are not addressing the range of ethical challenges within their institutions. (shrink)

This is a unique, groundbreaking study in the history of philosophy, combining leading men and women philosophers across 2600 years of Western philosophy, covering key foundational topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Introductory essays, primary source readings, and commentaries comprise each chapter to offer a rich and accessible introduction to and evaluation of these vital philosophical contributions. A helpful appendix canvasses an extraordinary number of women philosophers throughout history for further discovery and study.

Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House in Chicago, may be best known as a social activist. She was also a brilliantly critical intellectual. Implicit in her many speeches, articles, and books is a view of education as a broad process of cultural transformation and renewal, a view that remains as compelling today as when it was first presented. Addams sees education as the foundation of democracy, the basis for the free expression of ideas. Addams's writings on education are (...) interpreted in an enlightening bio-graphical introduction by Ellen Lagemann. After the initial publication of this work, Barbara L. Jacquette of the Delta Group, Inc., in Phoenix wrote, "Professor Lagemann has brought life and immediacy to Jane Addams's work. Better, she has given us a context that shows us that some of our most pressing issues today are simply old problems in new guises, problems for which some of the old solutions may still be of use." Gerald Lee Gutek of Loyola University of Chicago commented "Lagemann's insightful and sensitive biography reveals Addams's transformation from a reserved graduate of a small women's college into the Progressive reformer and pioneer of the settlement house movement." The essays collected here span a significant portion of Jane Addams's life, from the time she spent in college to her founding of Hull House and beyond. Addams's constant interest in education is reflected in her writings. This book also reveals the many influences on Addams's life, including the philosopher and educator John Dewey. On Education is an important work for educators, women's studies specialists, social workers, and historians. (shrink)

Much work has recently been done on Jane Addams, her writings, and the general atmosphere and thought associated with Hull House and other settlement places in American cities.1 But although we might think of Addams and her work as the center of the Hull House effort, many other women (and a few men) were involved in the efforts, and the strengths that they brought to bear on the activities in Chicago in the early part of the twentieth century need (...) to be delineated and, to some extent, given pride of place. Two women whose work was applauded by Addams at the time, but whose thought remains somewhat under investigated are Ellen Gates Starr and Julia Lathrop. Indeed, Addams wrote a book about her partnership with .. (shrink)

In this special issue of _difference_s, leading feminist theorists acknowledge Derrida’s contribution to feminist theory, discuss the crucial place of difference in both Derridian deconstruction and feminist theory, and reflect on the ethical, professional, and epistemological implications of Derrida’s thought for the discipline of women’s studies. In bringing together major feminist critics whose work has been touched by the writings of Derrida, this issue both pays tribute to and reflects upon Derrida’s ideas. Among the essayists included, Jane Gallop considers (...) Derrida’s writings on Levinas; Judith Butler reads Derrida’s final interview in _Le Monde_ in 2004; Elizabeth Grosz signals Derrida as a rare philosopher for whom sexual difference was crucial; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explores the figure of the mother’s child in Derrida, focusing on the critique of reproductive heteronormativity and the question of agency in feminism; and Joan Wallach Scott argues for the importance of critique in the academy. The issue also includes an edited transcription of a vibrant discussion between feminist theorists and Derrida called “Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida,” which took place at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women in 1984. _Contributors_. Fran Bartkowski, Anne-Emmanuelle Berger, Susan Bernstein, Judith Butler, Pheng Cheah, Drucilla Cornell, Jane Gallop, Elizabeth Grosz, Peggy Kamuf, Christie McDonald, Joan Wallach Scott, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. (shrink)

The multifaceted work of the late Susan Leigh Star is explored through a selection of her writings and essays by friends and colleagues. Susan Leigh Star (1954–2010) was one of the most influential science studies scholars of the last several decades. In her work, Star highlighted the messy practices of discovering science, asking hard questions about the marginalizing as well as the liberating powers of science and technology. In the landmark work Sorting Things Out, Star and Geoffrey Bowker revealed the (...) social and ethical histories that are deeply embedded in classification systems. Star's most celebrated concept was the notion of boundary objects: representational forms—things or theories—that can be shared between different communities, with each holding its own understanding of the representation. Unfortunately, Leigh was unable to complete a work on the poetics of infrastructure that further developed the full range of her work. This volume collects articles by Star that set out some of her thinking on boundary objects, marginality, and infrastructure, together with essays by friends and colleagues from a range of disciplines—from philosophy of science to organization science—that testify to the wide-ranging influence of Star's work. Contributors Ellen Balka, Eevi E. Beck, Dick Boland, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Janet Ceja Alcalá, Adele E. Clarke, Les Gasser, James R. Griesemer, Gail Hornstein, John Leslie King, Cheris Kramarae, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Karen Ruhleder, Kjeld Schmidt, Brian Cantwell Smith, Susan Leigh Star, Anselm L. Strauss, Jane Summerton, Stefan Timmermans, Helen Verran, Nina Wakeford, Jutta Weber. (shrink)

George Bernard Shaw once fancied a dramatic rebuke against the garish religiosity of Lourdes: “I should like to bring a huge procession of atheists and unite myself to Jane Harrison by civil regist...

Jane Addams had two romantic partnerships during her years as Head of Hull House, one with Ellen Gates Starr and the second with Mary Rozet Smith. This paper traces the story of these two relationships, highlighting their importance in sustaining her emotionally and examining to the extent possible the place of sexuality in both.

American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG) recently provided two recommendations about predictive genetic testing of children. The Clinical Sequencing Exploratory Research Consortium's Pediatrics Working Group compared these recommendations, focusing on operational and ethical issues specific to decision making for children. Content analysis of the statements addresses two issues: (1) how these recommendations characterize and analyze locus of decision making, as well as the risks and benefits of testing, and (2) whether the guidelines conflict or (...) come to different but compatible conclusions because they consider different testing scenarios. These statements differ in ethically significant ways. AAP/ACMG analyzes risks and benefits using best interests of the child and recommends that, absent ameliorative interventions available during childhood, clinicians should generally decline to order testing. Parents authorize focused tests. ACMG analyzes risks and benefits using the interests of the child and other family members and recommends that sequencing results be examined for additional variants that can lead to ameliorative interventions, regardless of age, which laboratories should report to clinicians who should contextualize the results. Parents must accept additional analysis. The ethical arguments in these statements appear to be in tension with each other. (shrink)

The pressure for publication is ever present in academe. Rules for submission are elucidated by conferences, proceedings and journals for the benefit of authors; however, the rules for reviewers and editors are not so well established or consistent. This treatise examines examples of abuse of the editorial process and points to a need for formal recognition of rules for review. The manuscript culminates with proposed Codes of Ethics for researchers, referees and editors and suggestions for improvement of the peer review (...) process. (shrink)

The Emergence of Word-Meaning in Early China makes an innovative contribution to studies of language by historicizing the Chinese notion that words have "meaning" (content independent of instances of use). Rather than presuming that the concept of word-meaning had always existed, Jane Geaney explains how and why it arose in China. To account for why a normative term (yi, "duty, morality, appropriateness") came to be used for "meanings" found in dictionaries, Geaney examines interrelated patterns of word usage threading through (...) and across a wide range of genres. These patterns show that by the first millennium, as textual production exploded—and as radically different writing forms (in Buddhist sutras) were encountered—yi already functioned as an externally accessible "model" for semantic interpretation of texts and sayings. The book has far-reaching implications. Because the idea of word-meaning is fundamental to theorizing, the book illuminates not only semantic ideas and the normativity of language in Early China, but also aspects of early Chinese philosophy and intellectual history. As the internet supplants one form of media (print), thereby reducing knowledge to vast digital databases, so too, this book explains, two thousand years ago a culture that prized oral and visual balance became an "empire of the text.". (shrink)

In _Vibrant Matter_ the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we (...) to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the_ _effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy. (shrink)

Economic rights - rights to use, possess, exchange, and otherwise dispose of property - are at the centre of some of the most important and fundamental disputes in Western moral and political theory. This book provides a fresh look at assumptions that are sometimes overlooked in debates about capitalism, socialism and the welfare state. Essays in this book by internationally renowned academic lawyers, economists, and philosophers, explore what sort of economic rights people ought to have, how they ought to be (...) conceived of and grounded, and the consequences that would ensue were one system or another set up to ensure them; the related question of the nature of various economic systems and how well they do at guaranteeing such rights are also discussed. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to explore how Belgian nurses view issues related to the development, dissemination and implementation of a code of ethics for nurses. Fifty nurses took part in eight focus groups. The participants stated that, on the whole, a code of ethics for nurses would be useful. They stressed that a code should be a practical and useful instrument developed by nurses for nurses, and that it should be formulated and presented in a practical way, just (...) as educational courses dealing specifically with codes of ethics require a practical approach to be effective. They emphasized that the development of a code should be an ongoing process, enabling nurses to provide input as they reflect on the ethical issues dealt with in the code and apply the code in their practice. Finally, they stressed the need for support at institutional level for the effective implementation of a code. (shrink)