This interview with media anthropologist, Rebecca L. Stein, conducted by Noa Levin and Andrew Fisher in Spring 2023, takes her recent book Screenshots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine (2021) as its starting point in order to explore issues of state violence and the militarization of social media in Israel/Palestine. This book marks the culmination of a decade-long research project into the camera dreams introduced by digital imaging technologies and the fraught histories of their disillusionment. Stein discusses (...) the way her research has critically conceptualized the recent history of hopes invested in the digital image in this geopolitical context, by the occupier as much as the occupied, and charts the failures and mistakes, obstructions and appropriations that characterize the conflicted visual cultures of Israel/Palestine. (shrink)

Population-level biomedical research offers new opportunities to improve population health, but also raises new challenges to traditional systems of research governance and ethical oversight. Partly in response to these challenges, various models of public involvement in research are being introduced. Yet, the ways in which public involvement should meet governance challenges are not well understood. We conducted a qualitative study with 36 experts and stakeholders using the World Café method to identify key governance challenges and explore how public involvement can (...) meet these challenges. This brief report discusses four cross-cutting themes from the study: the need to move beyond individual consent; issues in benefit and data sharing; the challenge of delineating and understanding publics; and the goal of clarifying justifications for public involvement. The report aims to provide a starting point for making sense of the relationship between public involvement and the governance of population-level biomedical research, showing connections, potential solutions and issues arising at their intersection. We suggest that, in population-level biomedical research, there is a pressing need for a shift away from conventional governance frameworks focused on the individual and towards a focus on collectives, as well as to foreground ethical issues around social justice and develop ways to address cultural diversity, value pluralism and competing stakeholder interests. There are many unresolved questions around how this shift could be realised, but these unresolved questions should form the basis for developing justificatory accounts and frameworks for suitable collective models of public involvement in population-level biomedical research governance. (shrink)

Amidst expanding interest in local food and agriculture, food banks and allied organizations across the United States have increasingly engaged in diverse gleaning, gardening, and farming activities. Some of these programs reinforce food banks’ traditional role in distributing surplus commodities, and most extend food banks’ reliance on middle class volunteers and charitable donations. But some gleaning and especially gardening and farming programs seek to build poor people’s and communities’ capacity to meet more of their own food needs, signaling new roles (...) for some food banks in promoting community food security and food justice. This article reports the results of a national survey and in-depth case studies of the ways in which food banks are engaging in and with local agriculture and how this influences food banks’ roles in community and regional food systems. The patterns it reveals reflect broader tensions in debates about hunger relief and food security. (shrink)

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

Many consumers are motivated to attend Farmers’ Markets because of the opportunity to purchase fresh and local products. The subsequent interactions at FMs provide an important pathway for the direct exchange of information. While previous research suggests that people value local food and the FM shopping experience and that purchasing directly from producers can lead to transformative learning, little is known about exactly how the shopping experience at FMs can influence consumer purchasing behavior. This study examines the extent of and (...) mechanism for such “influencing.” Using data from surveys, observations, and interviews gathered at six FMs, we analyze the interactions between consumers and vendors, including the motivations and values of both parties. We explore the question, “How do farmers’ markets facilitate change in consumer purchasing behavior?” We propose that the dynamic of change in consumer purchasing behavior at FMs takes root in the exchange of information between consumers and vendors during interactions. Our results suggest that there are three specific characteristics shared by FM consumers and vendors that lead to these meaningful interactions at FMs: symmetry of motivations to attend FMs, shared values, and mutual dependence on interactions. Then, when a consumer learns new information from a FM vendor during an interaction, the consumer is more likely to make a change in their immediate purchase. Information about the products for sale and the modes of production of those items can especially impact consumers’ immediate purchases at FMs. We found that FM interactions can also impact long-term purchasing behavior, such as purchasing more organic or locally produced foods. Our results suggest that FM interactions may have significant implications for consumer health, local economies, and the environment. (shrink)

IntroductionThe COVID-19 pandemic required more responsibilities from teachers, including implementing prevention strategies, changes in school policies, and managing their own mental health, which yielded higher dissatisfaction in the field.MethodsA cross-sectional web survey was conducted among educators to collect information on their experiences teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic throughout the 2020–2021 academic year. Qualtrics, an online survey platform, fielded the survey from May 6 to June 8, 2021 to a national, convenience sample of 1,807 respondents.ResultsFindings revealed that overall, 43% of K-12 (...) teachers reported a greater intention to leave the profession than previously recalled prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Intention to leave was multi-level, and associated with socio-demographic factors, individual factors, and teachers’ agency. We also found demographic disparities with respect to race and gender around teachers’ ability to provide feedback to schools on opening/closing and overall dissatisfaction with school/district COVID-19 prevention strategies implementation and policies.ConclusionThese findings are consistent with the Job-Demand and Resources Model, which posits that lack of organizational support can exacerbate job stressors, leading to burnout. Specifically, dissatisfaction with the way school policies were implemented took a toll on teachers’ mental health, leading to a desire to leave the profession. These findings are also consistent with research conducted once in-person teaching resumed in 2020–2021, specifically that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated preexisting teacher shortages that led to self-reported issues of stress, burnout, and retention.ImplicationsFurther research is necessary to understand the resources that may be most useful to reduce the demands of teaching in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some teachers are more likely to leave the field, and educational agencies may wish to target their teacher-retention efforts with emphasis on strong employee wellness programs that help educators to manage and reduce their stress. Education agency staff may wish to review policies and practices to provide meaningful opportunities to give input to school/district decisions and enable proactive communication channels. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, we have seen an increase in the use of medical-legal partnerships in health-care and/or legal settings to address health disparities affecting vulnerable populations. MLPs increase medical teams' capacity to address social and environmental threats to patients' health, such as unsafe housing conditions, through partnership with legal professionals. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses guidelines, we systematically reviewed observational studies published from January 1993-January 2016 to investigate the capacity of MLPs to address (...) legal and health disparities. We identified 13 articles for qualitative analysis from an initial pool of 355 records. The resulting pool of 13 articles revealed more information regarding the capacity of MLPs to address legal outcomes than their capacity to address health outcomes; only 4 studies directly addressed the impact of MLP intervention on patient wellbeing and/or patient utilization of healthcare services. We call for further evaluation/longitudinal studies that specifically address MLPs' short and long term effects upon patient health disparities. Finally, given the demonstrated capacity of MLPs to address unmet legal needs, and their evident potential in regards to improving health outcomes, we present the MLP model as a framework to address HIV-related legal and health disparities. (shrink)

A study was conducted to investigate the perceptions of academic dishonesty in fifth-grade students. Two methods were used to gather data: a sorting task, which was used to indirectly assess the students' perceptions, and a rating scale task, which was used to externally validate the results of the sorting task. Results of the multidimensional scaling analysis yielded two dimensions, the first being tests/homework and papers, and the second, more ambiguous appearing to differentiate based on seriousness.

Three issues related to Feldman and Levin's treatment of biological variability are discussed. We question the usefulness of the indirect component of δλ. We suggest that trade-offs between speed and accuracy in aimed movements support identification of δλ, rather than λ, as a control variable. We take issue with the authors' proposal for resolving redundancy in multi-joint movements, given recent data.

What stands out when we blend in? Performing Ground is the first book to explore camouflage as a performance practice, arguing that the act of blending into one's environment is central to the ways we negotiate our identities in and through space. Laura Levin tracks contemporary performances of camouflage through a variety of forms - performative photography; environmental, immersive, and site-specific performance; activist infiltration; and solo artworks - and rejects the conventional dismissal of blending in as an abdication of self. (...) Instead, she contemplates the empowering political possibilities of 'performing ground,' of human bodies intermingling with the material world, while directly engaging with the reality that women and other marginalized persons are often relegated to the background and associated with the properties of space. Performing Ground engages these questions through the works of some of today's most exciting performance artists such as Rebecca Belmore, Liu Bolin, Janieta Eyre, and Violeta Luna, and groups like Gob Squad, Punchdrunk, The Yes Men, and Urban Mimics. (shrink)

Throughout, this book questions our accepted definitions and biases, showing the self-reflective nature of scientific activity within society.

Former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal's attempted transition from the white to the black race occasioned heated controversy. Her story gained notoriety at the same time that Caitlyn Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair, signaling a growing acceptance of transgender identity. Yet criticisms of Dolezal for misrepresenting her birth race indicate a widespread social perception that it is neither possible nor acceptable to change one's race in the way it might be to change one's sex. Considerations that support transgenderism (...) seem to apply equally to transracialism. Although Dolezal herself may or may not represent a genuine case of a transracial person, her story and the public reaction to it serve helpful illustrative purposes. (shrink)

Most public and non-profit organisations that fund health research provide the majority of their funding in the form of grants. The calls for grant applications are often untargeted, such that a wide variety of applications may compete for the same funding. The grant review process therefore plays a critical role in determining how limited research resources are allocated. Despite this, little attention has been paid to whether grant review criteria align with widely endorsed ethical criteria for allocating health research resources. (...) Here, we analyse the criteria and processes that ten of the largest public and non-profit research funders use to choose between competing grant applications. Our data suggest that research funders rarely instruct reviewers to consider disease burden or to prioritise research for sicker or more disadvantaged populations, and typically only include scientists in the review processes. This is liable to undermine efforts to link research funding to health needs. (shrink)

I explore how gender can shape the pragmatics of speech. In some circumstances, when a woman deploys standard discursive conventions in order to produce a speech act with a specific performative force, her utterance can turn out, in virtue of its uptake, to have a quite different force—a less empowering force—than it would have if performed by a man. When members of a disadvantaged group face a systematic inability to produce a specific kind of speech act that they are entitled (...) to perform—and in particular when their attempts result in their actually producing a different kind of speech act that further compromises their social position and agency—then they are victims of what I call discursive injustice. I examine three examples of discursive injustice. I contrast my account with Langton and Hornsby's account of illocutionary silencing. I argue that lack of complete control over the performative force of our speech acts is universal, and not a special marker of social disadvantage. However, women and other relatively disempowered speakers are sometimes subject to a distinctive distortion of the path from speaking to uptake, which undercuts their social agency in ways that track and enhance existing social disadvantages. (shrink)

I offer a new interpretation of Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety in Being and Time as an account of the relationship between individual agents and the public normative practices of their communities. According to a prominent recent interpretation, Heidegger’s discussions of anxiety, death and the “call of conscience” together explain how we can respond to the norms of our practices as reasons and subject them to critical reflection. I argue that this is only part of the story. Anxiety is an occasion (...) for Dasein to take responsibility for its ongoing activity of interpreting the possibilities for living and acting made available by the normative practices of its community, which is presupposed and overlooked from the perspective of everyday Dasein. Public normativity underdetermines Dasein’s conception of what it would mean to take up any of the possibilities available in its world as a way of living its own life. (shrink)

This article tells the story of the oil and gas origins of the Gaia hypothesis, the theory that the Earth is a homeostatic system. It shows how Gaia’s key assumption—that the climate is a fundamentally stable system, able to withstand perturbations—emerged as a result of a collaboration between the theory’s progenitor, James Lovelock, and Royal Dutch Shell in response to Shell’s concerns about the effects of its products on the climate. The article explains how Lovelock elaborated the Gaia hypothesis and (...) gave it evidential depth through a series of Royal Dutch Shell-funded research projects meant to identify organisms whose biological activities might double as climate-regulating mechanisms. The article goes on to show how this research subsequently laid the foundation for a distinct genre of climate change denialism, in which corporations sowed doubt not by denying the phenomenon of global warming but by naturalizing it. (shrink)

The paper proposes a solution to the problem with Odysseus’ kingship in the Odyssey by maintaining that Odysseus is not officially considered dead. Consequently, Telemachus cannot inherit the position of king and Penelope must leave Odysseus’ household before remarrying. After discussing the modern concept of legal death and previous interpretations of the Ithacan situation, the paper focusses on Athena's speech at 1.275–92. A close reading demonstrates that erecting a cenotaph to Odysseus would be tantamount to a modern declaration of death (...) in absentia, since it will render Penelope a widow and Telemachus the head of the household. This legal convention chimes with the Homeric depiction of Hades. (shrink)

The research we fund today will improve the health of people who will live tomorrow. But future people will not all benefit equally: decisions we make about what research to prioritize will predictably affect when and how much different people benefit from research. Organizations that fund health research should thus fairly account for the health needs of future populations when setting priorities. To this end, some research funders aim to allocate research resources in accordance with disease burden, prioritizing illnesses that (...) cause more morbidity and mortality. In this article, I defend research funders' practice of aligning research funding with disease burden but argue that funders should aim to align research funding with future—rather than present—disease burden. I suggest that research funders should allocate research funding in proportion to aggregated estimates of disease burden over the period when research could plausibly start to yield benefits until indefinitely into the future. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker claims that a “gap” in collective hermeneutical resources with respect to the social experiences of marginalized groups prevents members of those groups from understanding their own experiences (Fricker 2007). I argue that because Fricker misdescribes dominant hermeneutical resources as collective, she fails to locate the ethically bad epistemic practices that maintain gaps in dominant hermeneutical resources even while alternative interpretations are in fact offered by non-dominant discourses. Fricker's analysis of hermeneutical injustice does not account for the possibility that (...) marginalized groups can be silenced relative to dominant discourses without being prevented from understanding or expressing their own social experiences. I suggest that a gap in dominant hermeneutical resources is ambiguous between two kinds of unknowing: hermeneutical injustice suffered by members of marginalized groups, and epistemically and ethically blameworthy ignorance perpetrated by members of dominant groups. (shrink)

The vast majority of health research resources are used to study conditions that affect a small, advantaged portion of the global population. This distribution has been widely criticized as inequitable and threatens to exacerbate health disparities. However, there has been little systematic work on what individual health research funders ought to do in response. In this article, we analyze the general and special duties of research funders to the different populations that might benefit from health research. We assess how these (...) duties apply to governmental, multilateral, nonprofit, and for-profit organizations. We thereby derive a framework for how different types of funders should take the beneficiaries of research into account when they allocate scarce research resources. (shrink)

_K. al-Manām_ by Ibn Abī al-Dunyā is a compendium of 350 Muslim dream narratives in Arabic. The English introduction examines the function of dreams in classical Arabic literature with a focus on dreams as a means of edification.

"Patient advocates can help make research more ethical, but advocacy raises ethical issues of its own.

Bioethicists influence practices and policies in medicine, science, and public health. However, little is known about bioethicists’ views. We recently surveyed 824 U.S. bioethicists on a wide range of ethical issues, including topics related to abortion, medical aid in dying, and resource allocation, among others. We also asked bioethicists about their demographic, religious, academic, and professional backgrounds. We find that bioethicists’ normative commitments predict their views on bioethical issues. We also find that, in important ways, bioethicists’ views do not align (...) with those of the U.S. public: for instance, bioethicists are more likely than members of the public to think abortion is ethically permissible but are less likely to believe compensating organ donors is. Our demographic results indicate the field of bioethics is far less diverse than the U.S. population—less diverse even than other academic disciplines—suggesting far more work needs to be done to build an inclusive field. (shrink)

Traditionally, social entities (i.e., social properties, facts, kinds, groups, institutions, and structures) have not fallen within the purview of mainstream metaphysics. In this chapter, we consider whether the exclusion of social entities from mainstream metaphysics is philosophically warranted or if it instead rests on historical accident or bias. We examine three ways one might attempt to justify excluding social metaphysics from the domain of metaphysical inquiry and argue that each fails. Thus, we conclude that social entities are not justifiably excluded (...) from metaphysical inquiry. Finally, we ask how focusing on social entities could change the character of metaphysical inquiry. We suggest that starting from examples of social entities might lead metaphysicians to rethink the assumption that describing reality in terms of intrinsic, independent, and individualistic features is preferable to describing it in terms of relational, dependent, and non-individualistic features. (shrink)

The authors respond to a letter by Mitchell Berger in the March‐April 2024 issue of the Hastings Center Report concerning their essay “Securing the Trustworthiness of the FDA to Build Public Trust in Vaccines.”.

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

The need for greater privacy protections in the United States has never been greater. In their work, “Ethical Responsibilities for Companies That Process Personal Data”, McCoy et al. (2023) correct...

ABSTRACT Anthony Fauci, an infectious disease expert in the White House's coronavirus task force, is challenged to offer responsible public communication of science despite working under a habitual liar who has no tolerance for criticism or dissent. Fauci manages this rhetorical exigence by using strategic ambiguity, the topos of the honest broker, dissociation, and a narrative that constrains executive decision making.

ABSTRACT According to one widely accepted view, our actions and emotions ought to be proportional to the degree of value present in their objects. Against this proportionality principle, Pettigrove sketches a view according to which the value of some virtuous actions and attitudes derives from the characteristic way of being of the agent herself, and not from any other goods that agent appreciates, pursues, or promotes. Granting Pettigrove’s rejection of the proportionality principle, I raise some questions for his replacement account. (...) I suggest that it is not just the characteristic way of being of an agent who loves and forgives virtuously that explains the goodness of their love and forgiveness, but also the role such virtues play in making possible valuable relationships that are partially constitutive of human flourishing. (shrink)

Darwin in Argentina -- Conflicting Systems -- Francisco Javier Muniz (1795-1871) -- Hermann Burmeister (1807-1891) -- Francisco P. Moreno (1852-1919) -- Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811-1888) -- Eduardo Holmberg (1852-1937) -- Florentino Ameghino (1854-1911) -- Jose Ingenieros (1877-1925) -- Carlos Octavio Bunge (1875-1918).

In this book, Dr. Robert J. Levine reviews federal regulations, ethical analysis, and case studies in an attempt to answer these questions.

Proofs are central, and unique, to mathematics. They establish the truth of theorems and provide us with the most secure knowledge we can possess. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that philosophers once thought that the only value proofs have lies in establishing the truth of theorems. However, such a view is inconsistent with mathematical practice. If a proof’s only value is to show a theorem is true, then mathematicians would have no reason to reprove the same theorem in different ways, (...) yet this is a practice they frequently engage in. This suggests that proofs can have a wide variety of values. My purpose in this chapter is to provide a survey of some of them. I will discuss how proofs can have practical value, for example, by helping mathematicians to make new discoveries or learn new mathematical tools, and how they can have abstract value, for example, by being beautiful or explanatory. I will also explore the relationships between different proof values. (shrink)

Darwin the writer -- Learning to see : Darwin's prophetic apprenticeship on the Beagle voyage -- The prose of On the origin of species -- Surprise and paradox : Darwin's artful legacy -- Darwinian mind and Wildean paradox -- Hardy's Woodlanders and the Darwinian grotesque -- Coda : the comic Darwin.