PurposeIn Western society, the measurement of weight is prioritized over a person’s bodily experience. Hermeneutic philosopher Gadamer warned against the emphasis on measurement, rather than experience, in the medical sciences. An examination of the complexity of the experience of weight provides the opportunity to shift focus from quantifying the connection between health and weight to the experience of the person being weighed.MethodsThis qualitative hermeneutic study aims to understand people’s experiences of weight from the interviews of professionals and lay experts. Interviews (...) were analyzed using an interpretive hermeneutic method.ResultsThe interviews revealed that weight was experienced as a number imbued with meaning and bias, as a number that could be manipulated, and as a constant and anticipated bodily change. Weight change was expected and often unwelcomed, despite weight being a quality of the body that is always in flux. External measures of weight meant to monitor wellness and health inadvertently became an unhealthy fixation that prevented some participants from fully participating in life events and appreciating the stages their bodies were in.ConclusionWeight change is a necessary condition of being human, and bodies are and will be constantly changing. To achieve health and harmony, one must fit together the acceptance of change and their bodily experience of weight. It is often the preoccupation with weight, not weight itself, that gets in the way of living. (shrink)

When faith traditions confront postmodern uncertainties regarding historical liturgical practices, political and cultural ideologies, the self and sacred space, the assurance of truth claims, allegorical readings and interpretations of sites where divine presence is found are equally questioned. Can allegorical interpretations offer a valuable strategy in postmodern understandings for identifying how Divine presence is embodied? One possibility is to discover how two Anglican women embody their faith community’s via media and in turn these women may be read as an “open (...) icon.” To provide contrasting views, Orthodox Icons are particularly noted for their allegorical certainties that identify and point with sharp clarification to Tradition and the Church’s sacramental understandings. An allegorical frame “closes” the Orthodox icon. In a postmodern view, allegory “opens” said frame to a vast horizontal landscape that discovers spaces, places, and persons in which the Holy Spirit works mysteriously and unexpectedly. Both Evelyn Underhill and Barbara Brown Taylor writing almost a century apart and each encountering their respective historical reactions to “modernism,” trace the margins of their faith along the Anglican understanding of the via media. In doing so, both suggest the notion of “open” icon—the body itself. (shrink)

Recent feminist theory has attempted to bring considerations of women’s agency into analyses of the meaning and consequence of beauty norms in women’s lives. This article argues that these works have often been limited by their use of individualist frameworks or by their neglect of considerations of race and class. In this article I draw upon examples of African-American utilization of beauty discourse and practices in collective efforts to resist racism. I argue that there is no singular beauty standard enforced (...) by a unified male gaze. Instead, we should conceive of fields in which differently located individuals and groups invest in and promote particular ways of seeing beauty, producing both penalties and pleasures in women’s lives. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the attitudes and behaviors of persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities related to their information privacy when using information technology. Six persons with IDD were recruited to participate to a series of 3 semistructured focus groups. Data were analyzed following a hybrid thematic analysis approach. Only 2 participants reported using IT every day. However, they all perceived IT use benefits, such as an increased autonomy. Participants demonstrated awareness of privacy concerns, but not in situations involving (...) the use of technology; their awareness is not transferred to the abstract context of IT use. Privacy breaches were revealed to be a major risk for persons with IDD, who did not seem to understand how their personal information was used. Most protection mechanisms and tools reported were those suggested and implemented by caregivers and close relatives who had a great influence on the participants’ attitudes and behaviors toward IT and privacy. Our findings suggest that when using IT, persons with IDD often experience the consequences of a trade-off between autonomy and privacy. Further research and action is needed to support persons with IDD to understand and balance the benefits of IT use and the inherent threats to information privacy. (shrink)

Feminist scholarship has advanced our understanding of the family's relationship to the economy and the state over different historical periods. Theorizing about gender, class, and family life has led us to conclude that global explanations of the family are false. Our knowledge about the meaning of racial stratification for family life, however, still remains fragmented. This article asks, What does including race have to offer the study of the family? Analysis of two streams of revisionist family scholarship demonstrates the need (...) for reconceptualizing racial diversity in a way that embraces the experiences of White families as well as racial ethnic families. Family upheavals created by industrialization and deindustrialization offer concrete examples of the importance of race in theorizing family life throughout American society. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the attitudes and behaviors of persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) related to their information privacy when using information technology (IT). Six persons with IDD were recruited to participate to a series of 3 semistructured focus groups. Data were analyzed following a hybrid thematic analysis approach. Only 2 participants reported using IT every day. However, they all perceived IT use benefits, such as an increased autonomy. Participants demonstrated awareness of privacy concerns, but not in (...) situations involving the use of technology; their awareness is not transferred to the abstract context of IT use. Privacy breaches were revealed to be a major risk for persons with IDD, who did not seem to understand how their personal information was used. Most protection mechanisms and tools reported were those suggested and implemented by caregivers and close relatives who had a great influence on the participants’ attitudes and behaviors toward IT and privacy. Our findings suggest that when using IT, persons with IDD often experience the consequences of a trade-off between autonomy and privacy. Further research and action is needed to support persons with IDD to understand and balance the benefits of IT use and the inherent threats to information privacy. (shrink)

In 2003 Japanese folk horror game Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly directed by Makoto Shibata, the protagonist bears witness to an ancient tradition of a community linked to the ritual sacrifice of twins, which results in the female victim becoming a malevolent spirit. Gradually the player, as Mio, equipped with the Camera Obscura, transitions from observer to participant in the cycle of events that results in sacrificing their own twin sister. This article focuses on establishing the game within the folk (...) horror subgenre, before examining three female characters: Mio, the protagonist, who shifts from witness/voyeur to participant; Mayu, their twin, who transitions from unwilling to willing sacrifice; and Sae, the victim of the original ritual and antagonist. In Fatal Frame II, the Camera Obscura, which captures the supernatural world, is the lens through which past and present blur as the player is confronted by the twisted beliefs of the village. Through analysis of the game’s narrative, ludic elements, and visual aesthetics, I examine how these roles fit within the context of folk horror, gender and Japanese folklore. (shrink)

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1930.

The Spiral Staircase, Karen Armstrong’s self-narrative, shows the limitations of theological or religious reflections within a specific religious community. Leaving the Sisters of Charity for a tumultuous academic life, historian of religion Karen Armstrong lives a wrenching ontological dislocation that originates in her undiagnosed epilepsy and negative body experiences. Using semiotician Algirdas Greimas’s ‘Semiotic Square’ as an interpretive strategy, the unresolved tensions and contradictions exposed in the deep narrative structure of this non-traditional conversion memoir are resolved by ‘compassion’ at the (...) manifest level. Armstrong’s experiences, both in and out of the convent, will inform her academic study and lead her to compassionate solidarity with the marginalized. Armstrong’s memoir reveals various internal and external forces that shape an individual woman’s way of being in the world, and that inform her investigation of multiple faith practices and beliefs. In a time of mass refugee migration and ‘homelessness’, the one woman, the one ‘other’, matters in how one thinks about the body and about God. (shrink)

This article responds directly to an article published in Research Ethics in 2011 where Schrag argued against ethics review for social science and humanities research. He argued that review committees offer solutions in search of a problem, impose silly restrictions and apply inappropriate principles. He suggests that review committees typically lack appropriate expertise and argued that the process harms the innocent. This article refutes these claims and offers a case study of the ethical review process at Queen Mary University of (...) London (QMUL) to offer counter claims. The discussion highlights the way in which the QMUL process is sensitized to the challenges posed by social science and humanities research and is a process that, rather than focusing upon avoiding harm, emphasizes notions of care to both participants and researchers. (shrink)

Previous research has shown that short-term fasting in healthy individuals is associated with changes in risky decision-making. The current experiment was designed to examine the influence of short-term fasting in healthy individuals on four types of impulsivity: reflection impulsivity, risky decision-making, delay aversion, and action inhibition. Participants were tested twice, once when fasted for 20 hours, and once when satiated. Participants demonstrated impaired action inhibition when fasted; committing significantly more errors of commission during a food-related Affective Shifting Task. Participants also (...) displayed decreased reflection impulsivity when fasted, opening significantly more boxes during the Information Sampling Task (IST). There were no significant differences in performance between fasted and satiated sessions for risky decision-making or delay aversion. These findings may have implications for understanding eating disorders such as Bulimia Nervosa (BN). Although BN has been characterised as a disorder of poor impulse control, inconsistent findings when comparing individuals with BN and healthy individuals on behavioural measures of impulsivity question this characterisation. Since individuals with BN undergo periods of short-term fasting, the inconsistent findings could be due to differences in the levels of satiation of participants. The current results indicate that fasting can affect performance on the IST, a measure of impulsivity previously studied in BN, whilst performance on other impulsivity measures were unaffected. However, the results from the IST were contrary to the original hypothesis and should be replicated before specific conclusions can be made. (shrink)

The relationship between the family and the market has long been an issue of contention in Western societies. Since the 1970s, that relationship has required renegotiation as women, who had performed the great majority of caretaking work, have entered the workforce in increasing numbers. At the same time, women’s movement into the workplace and the changes in public policy that have accompanied it have spurred significant scholarly commentary over how the familymarket relationship should be reconstructed. This Article argues against one (...) possible approach to this reconstruction, in which the state withdraws barriers between the family and the market that support families’ caretaking and human development activities. Under this approach, which by and large has been adopted in public policy in the United States, women’s movement into the role of breadwinner has been accompanied by decreased state support for caretaking and human development, in the belief that market forces should properly determine how these activities are conducted. This Article argues that the market is the wrong tool to use to “distribute” these activities. Doing so is not only resulting in an unjust distribution of these activities among and within families, it is causing serious harm, not only to society’s most vulnerable citizens, but also to the polity as a whole. The proper role of the state, this Article argues, is to buffer caretaking and human development activities from market forces in order to ensure the wellbeing of individuals, families, and society. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: Not Philosophy‐as‐Usual An Overview of Feminisms in Relation to Philosophy (of Education) Two Personal Narratives of Identity and Philosophy of Education A Joint Preoccupation with Social Justice and Politics in Education Women in Public (and Noticing Them When They are There) An Indeterminate Ending.

Multidisciplinary studies indicate that auditory hallucinations may arise from speech perception neurocircuitry without disrupted theory of mind capacities. Computer simulations of excessive pruning in speech perception neural networks provide a model for these hallucinations and demonstrate that connectivity reductions just below a “psychotogenic threshold” enhance information processing. These data suggest a process whereby vulnerability to schizophrenia is maintained in the human population despite reproductive disadvantages of this illness.

The educational philosophers who wrote in The Social Frontier dealt unabashedly with problems arising out of the social conflicts of their time. Their universe of discourse opened outward to the turbulent domains of politics, economics, and the ideational changes occurring all·around. Fundamental to their concern was the question of liberty in its relation to equality and social control. Rejecting 18th century atomistic notions, persistent dualisms, and the association of liberalism with laissez-faire ideas, they sought a view that “combined equality and (...) liberty as coordinate ideals...”1 Because this placed them in a position of opposition to what they called “finance-capitalism,” they then had to confront the... (shrink)

Robert Preece’s The Psychology of Buddhist Tantra and Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche’s Everyday Consciousness and Primordial Awareness are reviewed. Both books address Tibetan Buddhism, and their common threads underscore this discussion. Even when separated from their original contexts, the Tibetan Buddhist teachings offer understandings about a common human nature and a method of transforming consciousness through awareness.