This essay considers gender in relation toBrazilian science and technology. It reviewsleading studies in the field, and offers briefbiographies of pioneering women in science.While there is still much room for improvement,the essay suggests that the situation of womenin science experienced significant progressduring the closing decades of the twentiethcentury.

Democracy has become disentangled from our ordinary lives. Mere cooperation or ethical consumption now often stands in for a robust concept of solidarity that structures the entirety of sociality and forms the basis of democratic culture. How did democracy become something that is done only at ballot boxes and what role can solidarity play in reviving it? In Solidarity in Conflict, Rochelle DuFord presents a theory of solidarity fit for developing democratic life and a complementary theory of democracy that (...) emerges from a society typified by solidarity. DuFord argues that solidarity is best understood as a set of relations, one agonistic and one antagonistic: the solidarity groups' internal organization and its interactions with the broader world. Such a picture of solidarity develops through careful consideration of the conflicts endemic to social relations and solidarity organizations. Examining men's rights groups, labor organizing's role in recognitional protections for LGBTQ members of society, and the debate over trans inclusion in feminist praxis, DuFord explores how conflict, in these contexts, becomes the locus of solidarity's democratic functions and thereby critiques democratic theorizing for having become either overly idealized or overly focused on building and maintaining stability. Working in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, DuFord makes a provocative case that the conflict generated by solidarity organizations can address a variety of forms of domination, oppression, and exploitation while building a democratic society. (shrink)

Immigration is often associated with a situation in which would-be migrants and their countries of origin are put at the mercy of others’ decisions. The main objective of this article is to theorize this ‘being at the mercy’ in light of a republican definition of what freedom is about: the absence of domination. Immigration policy represents instances of domination on a wide spectrum of individuals and political communities. This article focuses on the procedural discretion claimed by states of destination in (...) their relations with would-be migrants. On the basis of a definition of the concept of ‘jurisdiction’, the article distinguishes 4 paradigmatic situations of immigration, which all display situations of domination. In each situation, the state of destination arbitrarily interferes with important interests of individuals and political communities. In light of this argument, existing mechanisms in national, transnational and international settings can be identified and justified as anti-domination measures. The argument offers a blueprint on how to further develop them in preventing domination in immigration. (shrink)

Immigration is often associated with a situation in which would-be migrants and their countries of origin are put at the mercy of others’ decisions. The main objective of this article is to theorize this ‘being at the mercy’ in light of a republican definition of what freedom is about: the absence of domination. Immigration policy represents instances of domination on a wide spectrum of individuals and political communities. This article focuses on the procedural discretion claimed by states of destination in (...) their relations with would-be migrants. On the basis of a definition of the concept of ‘jurisdiction’, the article distinguishes 4 paradigmatic situations of immigration, which all display situations of domination. In each situation, the state of destination arbitrarily interferes with important interests of individuals and political communities. In light of this argument, existing mechanisms in national, transnational and international settings can be identified and justified as anti-domination measures. The argument offers a blueprint on how to further develop them in preventing domination in immigration. (shrink)

This article discusses recent critical works within the frame of what is considered a paramount concern in feminist scholarship today: How do we name and publicize acts of violence against women without providing ideological fuel for orientalism and Islamophobia? By privileging a critique of western imperialism in discussions of violence against women in Muslim contexts, I argue this work: 1) obscures a complete understanding of violence against women in Muslim contexts, 2) is unjustifiably dismissive and belittling to activists working in (...) the Muslim world, and 3) is an expression of a Euro/American experience of Islamophobia post 9/11 that is projected in an ahistorical and politically counterproductive way onto local Muslim and Arab communities. The cumulative result is a teleology of an anti-imperialism that naturalizes the double bind between Islamophobia and gender injustice by presenting women’s rights activism not just as complicit in imperialism and Islamophobia but as inescapably imperialist and Islamophobic. (shrink)

Nurses are well positioned to contribute to child protection efforts but are underutilised. This paper describes a critical discursive analysis of nursing responses to child neglect and abuse (CN&A) in British Columbia, Canada. Legal and practice guidelines were analysed alongside nurse interview texts, offering a glimpse into how nurses prevent CN&A in their everyday practice with families. Results show how the primacy of mandatory reporting to child protection authorities coordinates a series of deferrals and how nurses engage with and interrupt (...) these deferrals in everyday practice. Nurses' relational approaches are essential to gain access to the private sphere of the family to assess, plan, elicit cooperation with interventions and monitor the situation. They considered reporting to be one among many possible responses. This study highlights how nursing contributions to prevention are largely overlooked and points to the potential for a more significant role for nurses in a public health approach to child protection. (shrink)

B. F. Skinner is perhaps even more widely known for his views on science than for his experimental work. His comments on the role of theory in science have been labeled “anti-theoretical,” “ultra-empirical”, “non-theoretical,” “radical,” and worse. His position appears to be both extreme and untenable. Scriven [1] has given us a critique of Skinner that goes beyond mere labeling; it is an examination of the assumptions and implications of such a position.

Motivated by discourses that link early child development and health, nurses engage in seemingly benign surveillance of children. These practices are based on knowledge claims and technologies of developmental science, which remain anchored in assumptions of the child body as an incomplete form with a universal developmental trajectory and inherent potentiality. This paper engages in a critical discursive analysis, drawing on Donna Haraway's conceptualizations of technoscience and figuration. Using a contemporary developmental screening tool from nursing practice, this analysis traces the (...) effects of this tool through production, transformation, distribution, and consumption. It reveals how the techniques of imaging, abstraction, and measurement collide to fix the open, transformative child body in a figuration of the developing child. This analysis also demonstrates how technobiopower infuses nurses' understandings of children and structures developmentally appropriate expectations for children, parents, and nurses. Furthermore, it describes how practices that claim to facilitate healthy child development may inversely deprive children of agency and foster the production of normal or ideal children. An alternative ontological perspective is offered as a challenge to the individualism of developmental models and other dominant ideologies of development, as well as practices associated with these ideologies. In summary, this analysis argues that nurses must pay closer attention to how technobiopower infuses practices that monitor and promote child development. Fostering a critical understanding of the harmful implications of these practices is warranted and offers the space to conceive of human development in alternate and exciting ways. (shrink)

The use of Big Data—however the term is defined—involves a wide array of issues and stakeholders, thereby increasing numbers of complex decisions around issues including data acquisition, use, and sharing. Big Data is becoming a significant component of practice in an ever-increasing range of disciplines; however, since it is not a coherent “discipline” itself, specific codes of conduct for Big Data users and researchers do not exist. While many institutions have created, or will create, training opportunities to prepare people to (...) work in and around Big Data, insufficient time, space, and thought have been dedicated to training these people to engage with the ethical, legal, and social issues in this new domain. Since Big Data practitioners come from, and work in, diverse contexts, neither a relevant professional code of conduct nor specific formal ethics training are likely to be readily available. This normative paper describes an approach to conceptualizing ethical reasoning and integrating it into training for Big Data use and research. Our approach is based on a published framework that emphasizes ethical reasoning rather than topical knowledge. We describe the formation of professional community norms from two key disciplines that contribute to the emergent field of Big Data: computer science and statistics. Historical analogies from these professions suggest strategies for introducing trainees and orienting practitioners both to ethical reasoning and to a code of professional conduct itself. We include two semester course syllabi to strengthen our thesis that codes of conduct can be harnessed to support the development of ethical reasoning in, and a sense of professional identity among, Big Data practitioners. (shrink)

Norris, McQueen & Cutler provide two possible explanations for neighborhood effects. The first suggests that nonwords that are more similar to words tend to activate those words more than do less similar nonwords, and the second is based on sequential probabilities between phonemes. Unfortunately, neither explanation is sufficient to explain all reported neighborhood effects.

Enacting an AI system typically requires three iterative phases where AI engineers are in command: selection and preparation of the data, selection and configuration of algorithmic tools, and fine-tuning of the different parameters on the basis of intermediate results. Our main hypothesis is that these phases involve practices with ethical questions. This paper maps these ethical questions and proposes a way to address them in light of a neo-republican understanding of freedom, defined as absence of domination. We thereby identify different (...) types of responsibility held by AI engineers and link them to concrete suggestions on how to improve professional practices. This paper contributes to the literature on AI and ethics by focusing on the work necessary to configure AI systems, thereby offering an input to better practices and an input for societal debates. (shrink)

This article offers a reconstruction of Theodor Adorno's work as it concerns sex/gender and feminist praxis. Although the prevailing interpretation of Adorno's work conceptualizes its relationship to women as one of either exclusion or essentialism, I argue that both the reading of Sade's Juliette in Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as a number of Adorno's aphorisms in Minima Moralia, present complex feminist claims and commitments. Max Horkheimer and Adorno position Juliette as a subject of the Enlightenment, forestalling the possibility that (...) women qua women are potentially utopian figures. I utilize Adorno's work in Minima Moralia to show that he—far from excluding or essentializing women—was interested in metaphorically capturing the subjective conditions developed by a system of binary sex/gender within a heteropatriarchal society. Indeed, one can find an iteration of queer theoretical commitments in Minima Moralia. As a result, I argue that he displays a number of straightforwardly feminist commitments: that a liberated society requires the disambiguation of sex from gender, affirming the nonnaturalness of our social sex/gender regime, and claiming that all subjects as gendered subjects are damaged by living within a heteropatriarchal society. Lastly, I provide preliminary evidence of Adorno's critique of liberal feminist praxis. (shrink)

Clinical delusions are difficult to investigate in the laboratory because they co-occur with other symptoms and with intellectual impairment. Partly for these reasons, researchers have recently begun to use hypnosis with neurologically intact people in order to model clinical delusions. In this paper we describe striking analogies between the behavior of patients with a clinical delusion of mirrored self misidentification, and the behavior of highly hypnotizable subjects who receive a hypnotic suggestion to see a stranger when they look in the (...) mirror. Based on these analogies, we argue that the use of hypnosis is a reliable method to investigate the surface features of clinical delusions. But to what extent can hypnosis successfully recreate delusions? Can it also contribute to a better understanding of delusion formation? Although clinical delusions and hypnotically induced beliefs are different in etiology, some analogies can be identified in the underlying processes that characterise them, based on the two-factor theory of delusion formation. (shrink)

Some photographs, more than mere representations, are ethical commands, calling us to respond to human suffering. Photos of Abu Graib, like iconic photos of Vietnam, called us to a posture of care, and confronted us with ourselves, with our national domination, and with how we represent ourselves to the world. This article, drawing on Kittay (1999), Butler (2004), and Levinas (1961, 1974, 1985), attempts to untangle the relation among care, domination, and representation. Implications for philosophers and journalists are suggested.

Theories of Hope: Exploring Affective Dimensions of Human Experience explores the nature of hope from varied and diverse perspectives. This volume includes chapters examining hope within contexts of social and political philosophy, policy, and struggle from both deeply theoretical and practical approaches.

Law enforcement poses a difficult work environment. Employees’ wellbeing is uniquely taxed in coping with daily violent, aggressive and hostile encounters. These challenges are compounded for women, because law enforcement remains to be a male-dominated occupational context. Yet, many women in law enforcement display resilience and succeed in maintaining a satisfying career. This study explores the experience of being authentic from a best-self perspective, for women with successful careers in the South African police and traffic law enforcement services. Authenticity research (...) substantiates a clear link between feeling authentic and experiencing psychological wellbeing. The theoretical assumption on which the study is based holds that being authentic relates to a sense of best-self and enables constructive coping and adjustment in a challenging work environment. A qualitative study was conducted on a purposive sample of 12 women, comprising 6 police officers and 6 traffic officers from the Western Cape province in South Africa. Data were gathered through narrative interviews focussing on experiences of best-self and were analysed using interpretive phenomenological analysis. During the interviews, participants predominantly described feeling authentic in response to work-related events of a conflictual and challenging nature. Four themes were constructed from the data to describe authenticity from a best-self perspective for women in the study. These themes denote that the participating women in law enforcement, express feeling authentic when they present with a mature sense of self, feel spiritually congruent and grounded, experience self-actualisation in the work–role and realign to a positive way of being. Women should be empowered towards authenticity in their world of work, by helping them to acquire the best-self characteristics needed for developing authenticity. (shrink)

Traffic officers are faced with many stressful situations, yet each traffic officer might cope differently with these stressors. Spirituality is regarded as an essential defence in stressful situations. Therefore, this article provides a basic framework guiding traffic officers and practitioners, on how spirituality can be used as a coping mechanism when faced with various work-related stressors. An interpretative, qualitative study was conducted utilising purposive sampling in which 10 traffic officers participated in in-depth interviews. In line with the interpretive paradigm, data (...) were analysed using content analysis. The research findings indicate when utilising spirituality to various degrees in their workplace, traffic officers displayed adaptive coping capabilities. Traffic officers associated less spirituality or a lack thereof with weaker coping capability. Furthermore, spirituality in traffic officers is informed by their spiritual or religious foundation, their purpose in work and life, their connection to a spiritual source, and the fruits of spirituality. The coping ability of traffic officers is influenced by their upbringing and background, by stressors in their work environment and by their coping mechanisms. The role of spirituality in the coping of traffic officers culminated in their ability to interpret the meaning of spirituality, and then implementing spirituality as a coping mechanism. (shrink)

Ramsey, Stick and Garon (1991) argue that if the correct theory of mind is some parallel distributed processing theory, then folk psychology must be false. Their idea is that if the nodes and connections that encode one representation are causally active then all representations encoded by the same set of nodes and connections are also causally active. We present a clear, and concrete, counterexample to RSG's argument. In conclusion, we suggest that folk psychology and connectionism are best understood as complementary (...) theories. Each has different limitations, yet each will co-evolve with the other in an overlapping domain of 'normal' psychology. (shrink)

Critical discursive analyses offer possibilities for equity‐oriented research, and are a resource for addressing resistant social problems, such as child neglect and abuse (CN&A). A key challenge for discourse analysts in health disciplines is the tensions between materiality and social constructions, particularly at the site of the body. This paper describes how Donna Haraway's ideas of figuration and technobiopower can augment critical discourse analysis to address this tension. Technobiopower, an intensification of biopower in the context of technoscience, is seen as (...) underpinning the melding of material and semiotic practices. The subject is no longer a material body, but a hybrid body that exists in tropic figuration between the real and unreal. This paper uses an analysis of the figuration of The Monstrous Perpetrator from a study of nursing responses to CN&A to illustrate how Haraway's figuration aligns with and provides an analytical tool to extend critical discursive analyses. Specifically, this methodology offers new ways to identify the discursive qualities of bodies, and how material aspects of bodies are exaggerated, concealing their hegemonic ideologies and discriminatory effects. By identifying discourses within or inscribed upon the body, they can be disrupted, opening new possibilities for social change. (shrink)

In the wake of several highly publicized lawsuits over drugs recalled for safety – most notably, Vioxx and Paxil – the Food and Drug Administration and the pharmaceutical industry have faced increasingly intense public scrutiny over the drug testing and approval process. Critics blame the FDA's shorter pre-market approval process that has resulted from the enactment of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which effected, among other changes, an increased number of reviewers, a higher review load for each reviewer, and (...) the implementation of “user fees” from companies submitting drugs for review. While many have posited that the lack of safety in some FDA-approved drugs was caused by the enactment of PDUFA, the results of a recent study from the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development have indicated that there is no statistically significant correlation between the number of drugs recalled for safety and the enactment of PDUFA. (shrink)

Entendemos que promover a qualidade na educação para crianças pequenas é uma das metas da Educação Básica brasileira e que, nesse sentido, há ainda muito por fazer no cenário nacional. Desse modo, busca-se inspiração na experiência de décadas do trabalho nos serviços educativos com crianças pequenas na Itália para pensar peculiaridades da etapa Educação Infantil que contribuam para qualificá-la. Assim, este artigo propõe-se a discutir aspectos relacionados à qualidade dos serviços educativos destinados a crianças pequenas na Itália. Para analisar a (...) questão posta, apoiamo-nos em Galardini e Malaguzzi. O estudo segue delineamento qualitativo e parte da observação de serviços educacionais na cidade de Pistóia, região da Toscana, na Itália, durante período de estágio de doutoramento no ano de 2018. Dessa observação, emergem categorias que serão problematizadas: a formação do professor que atua com crianças pequenas, o papel do coordenador pedagógico nas escolas e, por fim, a relevância do espaço, seja interno ou externo, como um princípio educativo. Aponta-se como resultados que qualificar o espaço nos serviços educativos significa construir um ambiente bem dimensionado e articulado às demandas infantis e que o coordenador pedagógico e os educadores são profissionais fundamentais para garantir a qualidade nos serviços ofertados. (shrink)

Teaching Joe Kincheloe is one of a handful of important recent books posthumously pushing Kincheloe's work further into the twenty-first century. Written and edited by former students and colleagues, the book underscores the depth and breath of his extraordinarily productive career. The text offers students and educators alike invaluable insights into transformative ways of seeing conducive to challenging the technocratic, imperialistic purpose of dominant forms education in an era marked by ruling elite desperation as U.S. power wanes globally. Through this (...) and other projects, Kincheloe would surely have been pleased to see his many postformal contributions counter-hegemonically providing critical pedagogy the theoretical and practical strength to contribute to the global uprising currently challenging the imperialist project of wealth extraction and cultural domination from Cuba; Venezuela; Peru; Chiapas, Mexico; Tunisia; Libya; Egypt; Yemen; and Iran, to regions in the United States. Teaching Joe L. Kincheloe will surely gain relevancy as the global movement against authoritarianism and domination intensifies and citizens begin to search for new ways to better understand their worlds and how those contexts interrelate with the historical development of their own identities. (shrink)

The use of the term `honor killing' has elicited strong reactions from a variety of groups for years; but the recent Aqsa Parvez and Aasiya Hassan cases have brought a renewed interest from women's rights activists, community leaders, and law enforcement to study the term and come to a consensus on its validity and usefulness, particularly in the North American and European Diaspora. While some aver that the term `honor killing' is an appropriate description of a unique and particular crime, (...) others deem it as rather a racist and misleading phrase used to promote violent stereotypes of particular communities, particularly Muslim minorities in North America and Europe. This article works to lay the groundwork by presenting both sides of the debate over the term `honor killing' and analyzing the arguments various groups use in order to justify their particular definition of the term, and if and how they support its use in public discourse. I argue two main points: one, that `honor killing' exists as a specific form of violence against women, having particular characteristics that warrants its classification as a unique category of violence. Second, I show that while `honor killings' are recognized as such in many non-Western contexts, there is a trend among advocacy organizations in the North American and European Diaspora to avoid, ignore, or rebuke the term `honor killings' as a misleading label that is racist, xenophobic, and/or harmful to Muslim populations. This is a direct response to the misuse of the term mostly within media outlets and public discourse that serves to further marginalize Muslim and immigrant groups. (shrink)