COVID-19 has truly affected most of the world over the past many months, perhaps more than any other event in recent history. In the wake of this pandemic are patients, family members, and various types of care providers, all of whom share different levels of moral distress. Moral conflict occurs in disputes when individuals or groups have differences over, or are unable to translate to each other, deeply held beliefs, knowledge, and values. Such conflicts can seriously affect healthcare providers and (...) cause distress during disastrous situations such as pandemics when medical and human resources are stretched to the point of exhaustion. In the current pandemic, most hospitals and healthcare institutions in the United States have not allowed visitors to come to the hospitals to see their family or loved ones, even when the patient is dying. The moral conflict and moral distress among care providers when they see their patients dying alone can be unbearable and lead to ongoing grief and sadness. This paper will explore the concepts of moral distress and conflict among hospital staff and how a system-wide provider wellness programme can make a difference in healing and health. (shrink)

(2011). Review of David Perlman, R. Smith, and R. Cha, Bioethics 2.0 Podcasts E4–Eclipse Ethics Education Enterprises. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 42-43.

The purpose of this qualitative case study is to understand and critique the gendered political processes in the search for an athletic director following a merger between men’s and women’s intercollegiate athletic departments in a U.S. university. Semi-structured interviews were used to ask 55 athletic department stakeholders their perceptions of the search process and associated politics. Findings indicated gendered political activities occurred along gender-affiliated departmental lines. Political strategies contributed to gendered processes favoring certain masculinities and male candidates in the search (...) for an athletic director. While gender equity was an important consideration in the search process, because of the controversial nature of the merger and the politics expressed, the belief that hiring a man was essential to the merger’s success was widely accepted by many stakeholder groups. The findings are positioned in the critical management and sport literature. This research contributes to our understanding of the complexity of gender relations and provides insight into the gendered political processes that inform leadership searches. (shrink)

The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues was created by President Obama in 2009 to identify and promote policies and practices that ensure scientific research, health care delivery, and technological innovation are conducted in socially and ethically responsible manners. The bioethics commission is an independent and thoughtful group of experts who advises the President and, in so doing, strives to educate the nation on bioethical issues. As part of the effort to promote policies and practices ensuring the ethical (...) conduct of research, innovation, and health care delivery, the bioethics commission staff, in consultation with commission members, has used the bioethics commission reports to develop pedagogical materials for traditional and nontraditional educational settings. The goal is to use contemporary issues addressed by the bioethics commission to support teaching of bioethics ideas, principles, and theories across the major areas of study and practice. (shrink)

The conduct of research in settings affected by disasters such as hurricanes, floods and earthquakes is challenging, particularly when infrastructures and resources were already limited pre-disaster. However, since post-disaster research is essential to the improvement of the humanitarian response, it is important that adequate research ethics oversight be available. We aim to answer the following questions: 1) what do research ethics committee members who have reviewed research protocols to be conducted following disasters in low- and middle-income countries perceive as the (...) key ethical concerns associated with disaster research?, and 2) in what ways do REC members understand these concerns to be distinct from those arising in research conducted in non-crisis situations? This qualitative study was developed using interpretative description methodology; 15 interviews were conducted with REC members. Four key ethical issues were identified as presenting distinctive considerations for disaster research to be implemented in LMICs, and were described by participants as familiar research ethics issues that were amplified in these contexts. First, REC members viewed disaster research as having strong social value due to its potential for improving disaster response, but also as requiring a higher level of justification compared to other research settings. Second, they identified vulnerability as an overarching concern for disaster research ethics, and a feature that required careful and critical appraisal when assessing protocols. They noted that research participants’ vulnerabilities frequently change in the aftermath of a disaster and often in unpredictable ways. Third, they identified concerns related to promoting and maintaining safety, confidentiality and data security in insecure or austere environments. Lastly, though REC members endorsed the need and usefulness of community engagement, they noted that there are significant challenges in a disaster setting over and above those typically encountered in global health research to achieve meaningful community engagement. Disaster research presents distinctive ethical considerations that require attention to ensure that participants are protected. As RECs review disaster research protocols, they should address these concerns and consider how justification, vulnerability, security and confidentially, and community engagement are shaped by the realities of conducting research in a disaster. (shrink)

Evidence that placebo acupuncture is an effective treatment for chronic pain presents a puzzle: how do placebo needles appearing to patients to penetrate the body, but instead sitting on the skin’s surface in the manner of a tactile stimulus, evoke a healing response? Previous accounts of ritual touch healing in which patients often described enhanced touch sensations suggest an embodied healing mechanism. In this qualitative study, we asked a subset of patients in a singleblind randomized trial in irritable bowel syndrome (...) to describe their treatment experiences while undergoing placebo treament. Analysis focused on patients’ unprompted descriptions of any enhanced touch sensations and any significance patients assigned to the sensations. We found in 5/6 cases, patients associated sensations including “warmth” and “tingling” with treatment efficacy. The conclusion offers a “neurophenomenological” account of the placebo effect by considering dynamic effects of attentional filtering on early sensory cortices, possibly underlying the phenomenology of placebo acupuncture. (shrink)

Nietzsche wrote in Human, All Too Human: "The worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole" . Nonetheless, Nietzsche's interpreters have, to a large extent and to this day, proceeded in just this way. Instead, Nietzsche demanded that one read his aphorisms and aphorism books slowly and thoroughly within the contexts in which he placed them and, further, that one always be (...) attuned, in this reading, to new surprises. This article advocates for such a contextual interpretation of Nietzsche's works . This interpretation must be penetrating enough to clear away the ostensible ambivalence and contradiction with which Nietzsche's work is so often maligned. While notes that Nietzsche did not intend for publication can offer important assistance, they should not themselves become the basis of such an interpretation. (shrink)

While cancer survivors commonly experience fear and anxiety, a substantial minority experience an enduring and debilitating fear that their cancer will return; a condition commonly referred to as fear of cancer recurrence. Despite recent advances in this area, little is known about FCR among people from Indigenous or other ethnic and racial minority populations. Given the high prevalence and poor outcomes of cancer among people from these populations, a robust understanding of FCR among people from these groups is critical. The (...) current review identified and aggregated existing literature on FCR amongst adult cancer survivors from Indigenous and minority populations. The protocol of this review was registered with PROSPERO in July 2020. A systematic search of bibliographic databases was conducted for relevant articles published from 1997 to November 2019. Data from eligible articles were extracted and appraised for quality by two independent reviewers. Nineteen articles from four countries met the inclusion criteria, including 14 quantitative, 4 qualitative and 1 mixed-methods study. Only one article reported on an Indigenous population. Few studies reported on FCR prevalence or severity. While the variation in tools used to measure FCR hindered a robust estimate of severity, results suggested some differences in FCR severity between minority and dominant populations, although these may have been due to study metholodological differences. Few factors were reported as being associated with FCR in minorities across multiple studies. The qualitative synthesis found five themes associated with the lived experience of FCR: variations in the lived experience of FCR; spirituality and worldview impacting on FCR; the importance of staying positive; complexities around support; and increasing cancer knowledge. The findings of this review highlight differences in FCR across cultures and contexts, which reinforces the need for culturally-specific approaches to this condition. The dearth of research in this area is of concern given the significant burden of cancer in these populations. A deeper understanding of this condition among Indigenous and minority populations is critical to developing and delivering appropriate and effective psychosocial care for cancer survivors from these groups. Systematic Review Registration: identifier [CRD42020161655]. (shrink)

Although they produced vastly more turmoil, the uprisings in the Arab world shared many characteristics with other early 21st-century popular protests on both the left and the right, from Spain’s Indignados and Occupy Wall Street to the anti-elite votes for Brexit and Trump. The conviction that political elites and the states they rule, which were once responsible for welfare and development, now ignore and demean the interests and concerns of ordinary citizens takes many forms, but is virtually universal. The Arab (...) world was only one site of this discontent, but the story of the Arab Spring insurrections provides a cautionary illustration of the perils in abdication of political authority and accountability and provokes questions about how we understand historical moments when passions outstrip interests. (shrink)

In the modern Middle East, the public institutions associated with the internationally recognized states of the region are rarely viewed as trustworthy or reliable. Born in the demise of the Ottoman Empire, midwifed by European imperial powers who paid lip service to the development of the inhabitants, and nurtured in the cold war by superpowers largely indifferent to the well-being of the peoples of the region, the existing states came to be associated with expectations of welfare provision and structures of (...) accountability that privileged external actors over local interests. In the absence of public institutions that responded to and represented local interests, people organized around those still vibrant alternative forms of community that existed – the exchange networks of informal economies or the kinship systems of extended families and the ethnic and religious communities of language, sect and confession – and sometimes they reorganized and reinterpreted these identities to supplement and ultimately supplant the failing states in which they found themselves. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of scholarly interest in the work of Johann Georg Hamann, across disciplines. New translations of work by and about Hamann are appearing, as are a number of books and ar­ticles on Hamann’s aesthetics, theories of language and sexuality, and unique place in Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment thought. Edited by Lisa Marie Anderson, Hamann and the Tradition gathers estab­lished and emerging scholars to examine the full range of Hamann’s im­pact—be it on German Romanticism or (...) on the very practice of theology. Of particular interest to those not familiar with Hamann will be a chapter devoted to examining—or in some cases, placing—Hamann in dialogue with other important thinkers, such as Socrates, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Anderson explores the ramifications for the Middle East of the profound transformations in global politics at the end of the Cold War and the birth of a new, American-dominated world order.

Examination of the fluidity of communal and individual identity in the Middle East and North Africa suggests that such identities are not stable, singular or mutually exclusive but shaped by circumstances, particularly political and economic duress. An approach that adopts the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics may be more productive in understanding identity politics in the region and in general.

Feminists, critical race scholars, and other social‐justice theorists sometimes object to “abstraction” in liberal normative theory. Arguing that oppression affects individual agents in powerful yet subtle ways, they contend that allegedly abstract theories often reinforce oppressive power structures. Here I critically examine and ultimately reject Onora O'Neill's “abstraction without idealization” as a solution to this problem. Because O'Neill defines abstraction as simply the “bracketing of certain predicates,” her methodology fails to guide decisions about what to bracket and what to include (...) in the theory. Moreover, it may not be possible to abstract without also relying on some particular ideals. While abstraction is unavoidable, I conclude that it must be employed with greater attention to sociopolitical hierarchies and by using ideals that do not collude with structures of oppression. I discuss the work of Susan Babbitt and Elizabeth Anderson as examples of how nonoppressive ideals might be incorporated into normative theory. (shrink)

In this paper we construct an extension, ℒ, of Anderson and Belnap's relevance logic R that is classical in the sense that it contains p&p → q as a theorem, and we prove that ℒ is pretabular in the sense that while it does not have a finite characteristic matrix, every proper normal extension of it does. We end the paper by commenting on the possibility of finding other classical relevance logics that are also pretabular.

In responding to Anderson, Tobin, and Mills, I focus on questions about non-ideal theory, normative individualism, and standpoint theory. In particular, I ask whether feminist theorizing can be "liberal" and yet not embody the problematic forms of abstraction and individualism described in "Challenging Liberalism". Ultimately, I call for methods of theorizing that illuminate and challenge oppressive social hierarchies.

The Anderson Station massacre highlights problems with both sovereignty's fragmentation and biopolitics. Sovereign entities have power over and determine the value of human life. Over and over, Belter life is reduced to bare life. They are exploited and then exterminated when their “usefulness” runs its course. What we often see in these reductions of Belters to bare life is the way that capitalism corrupts—both other sovereign entities and as a sovereign. In The Expanse, the problems with the uncontrolled capitalist (...) sovereign and the influence of capitalism on other sovereign entities are stark. Adding in the aspect of biopolitics, a people considered inferior like the Belters, makes these problems even more stark. Even Ceres police detective Joe Miller says the Belter political organization, the Outer Planets Alliance, is beloved by the people it helped and feared by the ones who got in its way. (shrink)

Feminists are divided on whether consent should be employed in legal definitions of rape. Catharine MacKinnon has criticized the usefulness of consent in enabling legal systems to recognize and prosecute instances of rape (MacKinnon 1989, 2005, 2016). In a recent article in this journal, Lisa H. Schwartzman defends the use of affirmative consent in rape law against MacKinnon’s critique (Schwartzman 2019). In contrast to MacKinnon, Schwartzman claims our understanding of rape must include both force and consent components. In this (...) paper, I will argue in agreement with Schwartzman and against MacKinnon that the legal definition of rape should include an affirmative consent component. I will take Schwartzman’s discussion as my point of departure and consider whether she has responded adequately to MacKinnon’s criticisms of consent. I will argue that her responses are not fully adequate. In particular, she has not successfully rebutted the argument that an appeal to consent is unnecessary once we have accepted an expanded definition of coercion. I will then provide a more affirmative defense of affirmative consent in response to MacKinnon’s most challenging criticism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface The essays in this special issue on Indigenous Feminisms in Settler Contexts engage feminist politics from multiple Indigenous geographies, histories, and standpoints. What emerges is a panoramic view of Indigenous feminist scholarship’s conceptual, linguistic, and artistic activism at this moment in time. We learn of praxis aimed at reclaiming Indigenous languages and ecological perspectives and the varied modes of resistance, survivance, and persistence. We also unpack the complex (...) racial/gender politics of colonial encounters in contexts where white women cared intimately for Indigenous children, or where they helped to recover Indigenous oral traditions, and we note how modes of help can also reproduce imperial power relations. Some essays, art works, and poems extend the geographic ambit of critiques of settler colonialism beyond American contexts: they deploy feminist rubrics to critique the continuing violent settlement of Palestine and Kashmir to demonstrate that the occupation of “marginal” places is constitutive of state-​ society relations; others describe how Australian Aboriginal and Sámi artists engage the question of Indigenous visibility. In different ways, they each show how staying in place, against all odds, can be radical. Our first two articles examine the politics of praxis. Michelle M. Jacob, Virginia R. Beavert, Regan Anderson, Leilani Sabzalian, and Joana Jansen analyze Indigenous feminist praxis surrounding Ichishkíin Indigenous language education. The “artivism” of Sámi artists Maxida 284Preface and Timimie Märak, which expresses concern for land and water rights, gender and sexuality, and Indigenous rights in Northern Europe takes center stage in Kyle Bladow’s essay. The next three articles interrogate historical records shaping Indigenous lives in northern Canada, southwest Pacific, and southwestern United States and Mexico. Val Marie Johnson examines how white women staff members’ intimate care relations at residential schools for Inuvialuit, Inuinnait, and Iñupiat peoples in Canada were bound up with the latter’s dispossession. Carolyn J. Eichner recounts the encounter between the Indigenous Kanak people and Louise Michel, a feminist and participant in the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871 who was banished to New Caledonia for seven years; Eichner argues that although Michel was staunchly anti-imperialist, her liberatory political project bore the temporal logics of colonization. Drawing on examples of Nahua reconfigurations of Christian scripture, Kenna Neitch proposes the language of “persistence” as a heuristic for avoiding the reactive, relational connotations that can pervade scholarly usages of “resistance” rhetoric. Next, our review essay by Jennifer McLerran describes recent Indigenous feminist scholarship that recasts the concept of sovereignty. Our News and Views piece focuses on modalities of occupation in the context of Kashmir: Nosheen Ali, Mona Bhan, Sahana Ghosh, Hafsa Kanjwal, Zunaira Komal, Deepti Misri, Shruti Mukherjee, Nishant Upadhyay, Saiba Varma, and Ather Zia argue that occupation is foundational to the making and reproduction of nationstates, and not exceptional to state power. The varied forms of resistance to occupation are examined by Sara Ihmoud in her article about how a group of Palestinian women, the Murabitat al-Haram, agitate for religious freedom simply by “staying in place.” Rabab Abdulhadi comments on shifts in contemporary settler colonial discourse in Israel, noting the increasingly overt and unapologetic deployment of highly sexualized and gendered images. Marina Tyquiengco examines the art of Australian Aboriginal artist Fiona Foley, specifically her Black Velvet series. Art and myth are also fused in Shantell Powell’s textual and visual rendering of Inuit memory. This issue features a range of poetry on topics such as language loss, human-land relationships, and sexual violence, written by Katherine Agyemaa Agard, Kei Kaimana, and Kai Minosh Pyle, and curated by our creative writing editor, Alexis Pauline Gumbs. In “Átaw Iwá Ichishkíin Sínwit: The Importance of Ichishkíin Language in Advancing Indigenous Feminist Education,” Michelle M. Jacob, Preface 285 Virginia R. Beavert, Regan Anderson, Leilani Sabzalian, and Joana Jansen examine Indigenous feminist praxis surrounding Ichishkíin-language education. They critique how Western education systems inflict pernicious forms of violence within Native communities, engaging in practices of linguistic genocide and alienating Indigenous peoples from their homelands. In response, Native peoples, along with non-Native allies, are engaging in educational and political activism to reclaim and revitalize Indigenous languages and ecological perspectives. In examining the foundational teaching of Ichishk... (shrink)