While many aspects of human life are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, values related to selfhood and community are among the most challenging to preserve. In what follows, I focus on the importance of values and valuing in climate change adaptation. To do so, I will first discuss two alternate approaches to valuing, both of which fail to recognise the loss of valued objects and practices that both of which help to generate a sense of self and deserve (...) to be respected and mourned. Ultimately, I argue that an approach to valuing that is responsive to change and open to loss will enable humans to be more resilient in the face of anthropogenic climate change, in order that we may move forward and construct selves that fit the context in which we live. (shrink)

Despite the substantial research into the peculiar political and legal status of climate migrants, there is comparatively little exploration of the particular forms of loss such migrants might face or how efforts might mitigate such loss. This paper aims to begin filling that void by characterizing such loss, using the framework of the UNFCC’s Warsaw Mechanism, as agential harm. Using existing models for thinking about the preservation of values and links with the past, I aim to use this idea of (...) a threat to agency to discuss how migration could occur to better preserve the agential control of displaced populations. (shrink)

Despite the numerous instances of PED use in professional sports, there continues to be a strong negative moral response to those athletes who dope. My goal is to offer a diagnosis of this response. I will argue that we do not experience such disdain because these athletes have broken some constitutive rule of sport, but because they have lied about who they are. In violating the constraints of their own public narratives, they make both themselves and their choices unintelligible. This (...) worry becomes especially profound as we care greatly about who our athletes are. Using cases from both athletics and US politics, I argue that certain kinds of lies so violate our understanding of who a person is that we can no longer recognize them as the person we took them to be. Fundamentally, I believe that PED users have lied about something central to their public narratives. I develop this view through an examination of narrative identity, primarily focusing on J. David Velleman’s work on agency and self-constitution. I do not claim that the athlete using steroids is nonidentical to who she would be in the absence of steroid use, but that through use of PEDs, she has misled us about an important component of her pubic narrative and this is difficult for us to reconcile. Ultimately, this has implications for sport as well as other other aspects of human social life. (shrink)

I argue that our current understanding of the philosophical dimensions of environmental injustice neglects an important component of those injustices. Specifically, by focusing on distributive, participatory and recognitional injustice, we fail to respond to the ways that environmental exposures, even in the absence of physiological harms, can impact upon a person’s experience of herself as a political agent. This has important implications for interventions in cases of environmental injustice, but also for how we understand what is required for full participation (...) in a polity. (shrink)

The private lives of elite athletes are frequently subject to the curiosity, scrutiny, and judgment of the general public. While this interest in life ‘off the field’ is not unique to athletes, this paper argues that our focus on athletes’ lives results, in part, from the fact that athletic achievement is deeply tied to the person. I will argue that athletic performance is distinct because it is both embodied and does not issue in an artifact. These features inextricably tie athletic (...) achievements to the persons whose achievements they are, making an appreciation of athletic achievement an appreciation of the athlete qua person and not merely qua athlete. Thus, in emulating athletes, we not only want to ‘play’ like them, we want to ‘be’ like them. While this helps to explain why the public is so concerned with features of elite athletes’ lives that have little bearing on athletic performance, it may also generate a responsibility on the part of athletes to live up to a basic standard of decency in all aspects of their lives and a correlative obligation on the part of fans to recognize and respect athletes as persons. (shrink)

The central concern of Roger S. Gottlieb’s spiritually rich Morality and the Environmental Crisis is the ‘moral malaise’ generated by the environmental crisis. This malaise results from our inabili...

The central concern of Roger S. Gottlieb’s spiritually rich Morality and the Environmental Crisis is the ‘moral malaise’ generated by the environmental crisis. This malaise results from our inabili...

A lump theorist claims that ordinary objects are spread out across possible worlds, much like many of us think that tables are spread out across space. We are not wholly located in any one particular world, the lump theorist claims, just as we are not wholly spatially located where one’s hand is. We are modally spread out, a trans-world mereological sum of world-bound parts. We are lump sums of modal parts. And so are all other ordinary objects. In this paper, (...) I explore lump theory and investigate five arguments against it. These arguments may be the primary reasons why lump theory has not been widely accepted––or extensively explored––until now. I maintain that these arguments can be answered, and moreover, that accepting lump theory has distinct advantages, making it a competitive view in its own right. (shrink)

J.M. Coetzee has unquestionably achieved the status of ‘international author’ within dominant conceptions of world literature: his works circulate widely in both English and translation and have been legitimated by the principal arbitrators of the global cultural industry. He has, however, recently positioned himself as ‘an international author, but in a different sense’; that is, as a writer whose internationalism is achieved through his location in ‘the South’. This article considers how Coetzee’s narratives thematize being ‘international’ in this ‘different sense’. (...) It focuses on the pivotal works of Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life (2002) and the opening chapters of Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003) while tracking an orientation southward across his oeuvre in allusions to Joseph Conrad, Jorge Luis Borges and, in particular, Pablo Neruda as well as in Coetzee’s repeated turn to littoral settings. These settings open to what the article describes as the ‘blue southern hemisphere’, implicating narrative world-making in the geophysical properties and ‘troubled histories’ that constitute the South and recasting the act of writing from ‘the far edges’ into a planetary perspective that contends with the uncanny nature of settler societies in the southern temperate zone. (shrink)

It is nearly universally presumed that redistribution can be carried out effectively only at the national or even global level, because local redistribution will be negated through personal mobility: recipients will move to high-paying jurisdictions while taxpayers will move away from those jurisdictions. To avoid this situation requires redistribution to be concentrated at national and not at local levels. In contrast to this standard line of argument, we explore how redistribution might be carried out more effectively at local levels than (...) at the national level. To explain this reversal from standard analytical implications, we integrate three concepts that are not present in the standard analysis. These concepts are the Samaritan’s dilemma, co-production, and polycentricity. It is interaction among these three concepts that reverses the implications of the standard analysis of redistribution. (shrink)

The right to be forgotten is a proposed legal response to the potential harms caused by easy digital access to information from one's past, including those to moral autonomy. While the future of these proposed laws is unclear, they attempt to respond to the new problem of increased ease of access to old personal information. These laws may flounder in the face of other rights and interests, but the social values related to moral autonomy they seek to preserve should be (...) promoted in the form of widespread ethical information practices: information stewardship. Code, norms, markets, and laws are analyzed as possible mechanisms for fostering information stewardship. All these mechanisms can support a new user role, one of librarian - curator of digital culture, protector of networked knowledge, and information steward. (shrink)

This article critically examines the origins and evolution of China’s unique land institutions and situates land policy in the larger context of China’s reforms and pursuit of economic growth. It argues that the Chinese Communist Party has strengthened the institutions that permit land expropriation—namely, urban/rural dualism, decentralized land ownership, and hierarchical land management—in order to use land as a key instrument of macroeconomic regulation, helping the CCP respond to domestic and international economic trends and manage expansion and contraction. Key episodes (...) of macroeconomic policymaking are analyzed, with the use of local and central documents, to show how the CCP relied on the manipulation and distribution of the national land supply either to stimulate economic growth or to rein in an overheating economy. China’s land institutions, therefore, share “complementarities” with fiscal and financial institutions and benefit powerful political actors while imposing costs on marginal ones. (shrink)

Literature is recognised as having significantly influenced the development of modern psychoanalytic thought. In recent years psychoanalysis has drawn increasingly on the literary and artistic traditions of western culture and moved away from its original medical–scientific context. Originally published in 1991 _The Chamber of Maiden Thought _ is an original and revealing exploration of the seminal role of literature in forming the modern psychoanalytic model of the mind. The crux of the 'post-Kleinian' psychoanalytic view of personality development lies in the (...) internal relations between the self and the mind's 'objects'. Meg Harris Williams and Margot Waddell show that these relations have their origins in the drama of identifications which we can see played out metaphorically and figuratively in literature, which presents the self-creative process in aesthetic terms. They argue that psychoanalysis is a true child of literature rather than merely the interpreter or explainer of literature, illustrating this with some examples from clinical experience, but drawing above all on close scrutiny of the dynamic mental processes presented in the work of Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantic poets, Emily Bronte and George Eliot. _The Chamber of Maiden Thought_ will encourage psychoanalytic workers to respond to the influence of literature in exploring symbolic mental processes. By bringing psychoanalysis into creative conjunction with the arts, it enables practitioners to tap a cultural potential whose insights into the human mind are of immense value. (shrink)

Literature is recognised as having significantly influenced the development of modern psychoanalytic thought. In recent years psychoanalysis has drawn increasingly on the literary and artistic traditions of western culture and moved away from its original medical–scientific context. Originally published in 1991 _The Chamber of Maiden Thought _ is an original and revealing exploration of the seminal role of literature in forming the modern psychoanalytic model of the mind. The crux of the 'post-Kleinian' psychoanalytic view of personality development lies in the (...) internal relations between the self and the mind's 'objects'. Meg Harris Williams and Margot Waddell show that these relations have their origins in the drama of identifications which we can see played out metaphorically and figuratively in literature, which presents the self-creative process in aesthetic terms. They argue that psychoanalysis is a true child of literature rather than merely the interpreter or explainer of literature, illustrating this with some examples from clinical experience, but drawing above all on close scrutiny of the dynamic mental processes presented in the work of Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantic poets, Emily Bronte and George Eliot. _The Chamber of Maiden Thought_ will encourage psychoanalytic workers to respond to the influence of literature in exploring symbolic mental processes. By bringing psychoanalysis into creative conjunction with the arts, it enables practitioners to tap a cultural potential whose insights into the human mind are of immense value. (shrink)

ResumoEste artigo aborda o nascimento do movimento de prostitutas no Brasil partindo de uma análise da Pastoral da Mulher Marginalizada, uma iniciativa da Igreja Católica que realizou um trabalho assistencialista e de conscientização política com mulheres prostitutas no Brasil a partir da década de 1970. Minha pesquisa examina as tensões entre as participantes e os agentes da Pastoral que deram origem a um movimento autônomo de profissionais do sexo em meados da década de 1980. Eu argumento que a Rede Brasileira (...) de Prostitutas (RBP) foi influenciada não só pelo clima político da democratização, mas também pelo discurso de autoestima e do valor intrínseco do indivíduo pregado pela Pastoral. Finalmente, eu considero o Primeiro Encontro Nacional de Prostitutas, realizado em 1987, destacando como a RBP acabou rejeitando o tropo da prostituta-como-vítima e as crenças abolicionistas do ramo progressista da Igreja.Palavras-chave: Prostituição. Igreja Católica. Movimentos sociais. Abertura política. AbstractThis article examines the birth of the Brazilian sex-worker movement by foregrounding an analysis of the Pastoral da Mulher Marginalizada, a ministry of the Catholic Church that conducted outreach and political consciousness-raising among prostitutes in Brazil starting in the 1970s. My research explores the tensions between ministry participants and agents that eventually led to the founding of an autonomous movement of sex workers in the mid-1980s. I argue that the Rede Brasileira de Prostitutas (RBP) was influenced not only by the political climate of Brazil’s democratization process, but also by the discourse of self-esteem and the intrinsic value of the individual espoused by the Pastoral. Finally, I consider the Primeiro Encontro Nacional de Prostitutas, held in 1987, highlighting how the RBP came to the trope of the prostitute-as-victim and the abolitionist beliefs of the progressive branch of the Catholic Church.Keywords: Prostitution. Catholic Church. Social Movements. Political opening. (shrink)

Paul, Meg Review(s) of: The testimony, by Halina Wagowska, Hardie Grant 2012 $24.95.

A number of the men who would become the 9/11 hijackers were stopped for minor traffic violations. They were pulled over by police officers for speeding or caught by random inspection without a driver’s license. For United States government commissions and the press, these brushes with the law were missed opportunities. For some police officers though, they were of personal and professional significance. These officers replayed the incidents of contact with the 19 men, which lay bare the uncertainty of every (...) encounter, whether a traffic stop, or with someone taking photos of a landmark. Representatives from law enforcement began to design policies to include local police in national intelligence, with the idea of capitalizing on what patrol officers already do in dealing with the general public. Several initiatives were launched, among these, the Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative. Routine reporting of suspicious activity was developed into steps for gathering, assessing and sharing terrorism-related information with a larger law enforcement and intelligence network. Through empirical analysis of counterterrorism efforts and recent scholarship on it, this chapter discusses prevention, preemption, and anticipation as three technologies of security, focusing on how each deals with uncertainty. The Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, this analysis suggests, is an anticipatory technology which constitutes police officers and intelligence analysts as subjects who work in a mode of uncertainty. (shrink)

Most ordinary folks think that there are ordinary objects such as trees and frogs. They do not think there are extraordinary objects such as the mereological sum of trees and frogs, as the permissivist does. Nor do they deny the existence of ordinary composite objects such as tables, as the eliminativist does. In his recent book, Objects: Nothing Out of the Ordinary, Korman positions himself alongside ordinary folk. He deftly defends the common sense view of ordinary objects, and argues against (...) the permissivist and eliminativist. One of the ways he does this is by launching what he calls ‘arguments from counterexample’. In this paper, I focus on the dialectical effectiveness of such arguments generally. I discuss whether and how we might sometimes be justified in using arguments from counterexample and commonsense in philosophical debate, even if they appear to be (or are) question-begging. I conclude that, given some of Korman’s other commitments, there is little reason for his opponents to take his arguments from counterexample seriously. (shrink)

This article contributes to the philosophical debate over whether and how different forms of value interact—more specifically, moral and aesthetic value. Whereas much of the debate has been preoccupied with how moral value might affect aesthetic value, this article explores the interaction from the opposite direction. To consider the plausibility of an interaction in this direction, I first expand upon Robert Stecker’s brief discussion of the reverse affective response argument. Following this, I propose an alternative description of an aesthetic-moral interaction (...) that might be more accurately described as “inverted moderate moralism.” Inverted moderate moralism (an inverted version of Noël Carroll’s moderate moralism) argues that aesthetic value sometimes affects moral value; sometimes aesthetic flaws yield moral flaws in works, and sometimes aesthetic merits yield moral merits. I defend inverted moderate moralism as one plausible account of aesthetic-moral value interaction, but this article hopes to illustrate that an interaction in this direction is not only plausible but warrants further consideration more generally. (shrink)

In this article, we explore some of the roles of cameras in policing in the United States. We outline the trajectory of key new media technologies, arguing that cameras and social media together generate the ambient surveillance through which graphic violence is now routinely captured and circulated. Drawing on Michel Foucault, we suggest that there are important intersections between this video footage and police subjectivity, and propose to look at two: recruit training at the Washington state Basic Law Enforcement Academy (...) and the Seattle Police Department’s body-worn camera project. We analyze these cases in relation to the major arguments for and against initiatives to increase police use of cameras, outlining what we see as techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic positions. Drawing on the pragmatism of John Dewey, we argue for a third position that calls for field-based inquiry into the specific co-production of socio-techno subjectivities. (shrink)

One of the primary burdens of the mereological nihilist is accounting for our ordinary intuitions about material objects. It certainly *seems* as if I am typing on a keyboard, which has particular keys and buttons as parts. But such intuitions are mistaken if mereological nihilism is right, leading to widespread error. So nihilists often propose paraphrases of our everyday utterances as compensation. Cotnoir aims to deliver a new paraphrase strategy on behalf of the nihilist: one that interprets parthood and composition (...) modally, and interprets (spatial) parts as (modal) counterparts. He advertises this view as the spatial analog of Sider’s stage-theoretic view. Unfortunately, I argue, it isn't. The spatial analog to the above views would be something like the following: individuals are region-bound spatial bits. Certain spatial claims about these objects may be true if the relevant spatial bits have the appropriate spatial counterparts. The table is flat iff the table (a spatial bit) has a spatial counterpart that is flat. That is, spatial *counterparts* make certain spatial claims true. Call this the *bit-theoretic* view. In this paper, I use the bit-theoretic view as a foil for highlighting certain aspects of Cotnoir’s proposal, as well as to show that the very ways in which Cotnoir’s view differs from the bit-theoretic view are ways in which it undermines advantages of nihilism. (shrink)

This chapter examines global policing as it takes shape through the work of Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization. Global policing emerges in the legal, political and technological amalgam through which transnational police cooperation is carried out, and includes the police practices inflected and made possible by this phenomenon. Interpol’s role is predominantly in the circulation of information, through which it enters into relationships and provides services that affect aspects of governance, from the local to national, regional and global. The (...) chapter describes this assemblage as a noteworthy experiment in developing what McKeon called a frame for common action. Drawing on Interpol publications, news stories, interviews with staff, and fieldwork at the General Secretariat in Lyon, France, the history, institutional structure, and daily practices are described. Three cases are analyzed, concerning Red Notices, national sovereignty, and terrorism, in order to explore some of the problems arising in Interpol’s political and technical operating arrangements. In conclusion, international and global policing are compared schematically, together with Interpol’s attempts to give institutional and procedural direction to the still-evolving form of global policing. (shrink)

This article explores the process of “re-imagined scenarios,” through which the moments of contact with the 9/11 hijackers were developed into scenarios that came to play a central role in U.S. counterterrorism training and policy. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with trainers, government officials, and police officers, it is argued that these scenarios do not recreate previous encounters, or conjure up possible futures, but instead rely on “the elasticity of the almost” to reactivate the past. The re-imagined scenarios call forth (...) "a certain array of recognizable elastic points," through which options for alternative movements are invented. (shrink)

In our study of U.S. counterterrorism programs, we found that anthropology needs a mode of analysis that considers security as a form distinct from insecurity, in order to capture the very heterogeneity of security objects, logics and forms of action. This article first presents a genealogy for the anthropology of security, and identifies four main approaches: violence and State terror; military, militarization, and militarism; para-state securitization; and what we submit as “security analytics.” Security analytics moves away from studying security formations, (...) and how much violence or insecurity they yield, to identifying security forms of action, whether or not they are part of the nation-state. As a framework for anthropological inquiry, it is oriented toward capturing how these forms of action work and what types of security they produce. We then illustrate this approach through our fieldwork on counterterrorism in the domains of law enforcement, biomedical research and federal-state counter extremism. In each of our cases, we use security analytics to arrive at a diagnosis of the form of action. The set of conceptual distinctions that we propose as an aid to approaching empirical situations and the study of security is, on another level, a proposal for an approach to anthropology today. We do not expect that the distinctions that aid us will suffice for every situation. Rather, we submit that this work presents a set of specific insights about contemporary U.S. security, and an example of a new approach to anthropological problems. (shrink)

Focuses on the enduring side of philosophical positions from the viewpoints of theology, science, literature, and social and political philosophy. Emphasizes the conflict and continuity of human values.

Wallace, Meg London's National Theatre recently hosted a debate about freedom of speech, multiculturalism and Islam called Can we talk about this? The opening line was a question to the audience, 'Are you morally superior to the Taliban?' Anne Marie Waters, who was present, wrote in her blog that 'very few people in the audience raised their hand to say they were.' This response demonstrates a misconceived attempt to be seen as tolerant and 'multiculturalist'. People could not bring themselves to (...) say their views are morally superior to a group that, Waters points out, 'denies women medical treatment, imprisons them in their homes, allows domestic violence, and executes people by stoning for having a private life or the audacity to not believe in God.' They fear being labelled, racist, 'Islamophobic', or discriminating against religion. Rather, they adopt a stance that treats all moral views generated by culture or religion as equally valid . They confuse the distinction between the right to think as you want, and the right to act as you want. (shrink)

Wallace, Meg A Northern Ireland Court recently held that a baker's refusal to provide a cake with same-sex decoration is discrimination. Here are the reasons why the judgment is right.

Slingshot arguments aim to show that an allegedly non-extensional sentential connective—such as “necessarily ” or “the statement that Φ corresponds to the fact that ”—is, to the contrary, an extensional sentential connective. Stephen Neale : 761-825, 1995, 2001) argues that a reformulation of Gödel’s slingshot puts pressure on us to adopt a particular view of definite descriptions. I formulate a revised version of the slingshot argument—one that relies on Kaplan’s notion of “dthat.” I aim to show that if Neale’s version (...) of the slingshot argument is successful, then there is another slingshot available, parallel in structure to Neale’s, but independent of definite descriptions. So either there is a version of the slingshot that succeeds independent of any particular theory of descriptions or else Neale’s slingshot was never threatening to begin with. (shrink)

Marielle Franco was part of a new generation of progressive activists in Brazilian politics. She was assassinated point-blank on March 14, 2018 by an elite shooter. In this piece, Meg Stalcup and Erika Robb Larkins examine how Marielle’s death is revealing of the issues that she fought for in her life. They also ask how she continues to be present in and beyond the unfolding investigation into who killed her.

A drug overdose epidemic in North America has sped the expansion of harm reduction services. Drawing on fieldwork in Ottawa, Ontario, we examine forms of care among people offering and accessing these resources. Notably, our interlocutors do not always characterize harm reduction as caring for oneself. Thus, we differentiate between the ethics of care through which one enters desired subject positions, and anethical careful practices. Harm reduction is sometimes anethical, enacted through minor gestures that do not constitute ethical work but (...) allow for its future realization. Une épidémie d’overdose de drogue en Amérique du Nord a accéléré l’expansion des services de réduction des risques. En s’appuyant sur un travail de terrain à Ottawa, Ontario, nous examinons les formes de souci et soin parmi les personnes qui fournissent ces ressources et qui y ont accès. Tout particulièrement, nos interlocuteurs ne caractérisent pas toujours la réduction des risques comme le souci de soi. Ainsi, nous faisons la différence entre l’éthique du souci de soi et des soins par laquelle on entre dans les positions de sujets souhaitées, et les pratiques soignantes anéthiques. La réduction des risques est parfois anéthique, mise en œuvre par des gestes mineurs qui ne constituent pas un travail éthique mais permettent sa réalisation future. (shrink)

As a normative concept, consent can perform the “moral magic” of transforming the moral relationship between two parties, rendering permissible otherwise impermissible actions. Yet, as a governance mechanism for achieving ethical data practices, consent has become strained—and AI has played no small part in its contentious state. In this chapter we will describe how consent has become such a controversial component of data protection as artificial intelligence systems have proliferated in our everyday lives, highlighting five distinct issues. We will then (...) lay out what we call consent’s “moral core,” which emphasizes five elements for meaningful consent. We next apply the moral core to AI systems, finding meaningful consent viable within a particular digital landscape. Finally, we discuss the forces driving some commentators away from individual consent and whether meaningful consent has a future in a smart world. (shrink)

Thinking about history as only a collection of dates and names prevents us from seeing the true value of the past. This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library reveals history as a mode of thinking with real current-day implications. Students learn to engage with the past in a way that promotes critical thinking about the present and future.

Avec le réveil d'une conscience de la richesse que chaque culture apporte au monde, le danger de la possible disparition des langues est apparu et a suscité de nombreux plaidoyers et de nouvelles orientations de recherche. Pourtant, la mort des langues à faible diffusion n'est pas liée à l'extension des grandes langues de communication. L'évolution des langues peut s'analyser selon les politiques des États mais elle dépend surtout de choix individuels qui expriment d'abord des liens communautaires : les langues locales (...) manifestent la volonté qu'ont des individus de se situer dans une relation à leurs ancêtres et à des groupes liés par des solidarités affectives et culturelles, faute d'avoir accès au pouvoir politique. Les choix individuels répondent ensuite au besoin de participer à la vie publique et/ou à la vie internationale, au développement durable. Ils reflètent, enfin, le désir de jouer avec une variété infinie de combinaisons de sens, de sons, et de formes qui fait de chaque langue un trésor qu'on ne saurait apprécier en termes strictement économiques. Principe d'utilité et principe de plaisir sont donc à l'oeuvre pour s'opposer durablement à la puissante capacité réductrice des hégémonies linguistiques. Ils devraient être également pris en compte par une politique de la diversité linguistique qui, tout en reconnaissant la variété des valeurs que porte toute langue, ne considérerait pas les évolutions en cours comme nécessairement réductrices, et n'attribuerait pas non plus des avantages exorbitants au fait de parler uniquement le français ou l'anglais. Ni anges, ni démons, les langues en ressortiraient plus fortes de leur mise en perspective historique et politique.The growing awareness that each culture brings unique riches to the world has revealed the danger of certain languages possibly becoming extinct which led to many calls for support and stimulated research to move in new directions. Yet the extinction of little-spoken languages is not due to the spread of the main languages used for communication. The evolution of any language can be seen as the result of national government policy, but is dependent, first and foremost, on the choices of individuals which express community bonds: local languages show the will of a group of individuals to place themselves in a relationship with their ancestors and with other groups bound by emotional and cultural ties as they have no access to political power. An individual's choice comes, secondly, as a response to the desire to be in the public and/or international arena, and to be part of sustainable development. Lastly, it reflects the desire to play around with the infinitely varied combinations of meanings, sounds and shapes that make each language a treasure, the value of which cannot be evaluated in mere economic terms. In other words, the concepts of usefulness and of pleasure are both involved in a long-lasting struggle against the mighty linguistic hegemonies that cause them to wane. These concepts should also be taken into account by a policy on linguistic diversity which, while recognising that each language carries a variety of values, would not see current developments as necessarily leading to the decline of other languages and would, likewise, not overly favour speaking only French or English. When taken neither as angels nor as devils, languages would come out all the stronger, viewed against their historical and political backgrounds. (shrink)

Introduction Financial incentive schemes have been commonly used by the hearing aid industry as a way of encouraging device sales. These schemes can lead to a conflict of interest as the hearing device dispenser is torn between personal reward over the best interests of their client. This conflict of interest has the potential for the dispenser to develop “moral distress”, a negative state of mind when an individual’s ethical values contrast with those of the employing organization. The purpose of this (...) study was to investigate if there was a relationship between financial incentives and moral distress in Australian audiologists and audiometrists. Methods An online survey was distributed to all members of Audiology Australia and the Australian College of Audiology via email. Participants rated their perceived moral distress from 0 to 10 on the Moral Distress Thermometer and answered four questions about financial incentives in their respective workplace. Results A total of 65 participants, 42 females and 23 males, completed the online survey. A quarter of participants rated their moral distress corresponding to levels of uncomfortable or above. A statistically significant association was found between financial incentives, sales target setting, and higher perceived moral distress in participants. Conclusions For our sample, the implementation of financial incentives created ethical challenges for practicing audiologists and audiometrists. Modifications to employee rewards programs as well as a regulation of device sales are recommended. (shrink)

Humphry Osmond wrote to Aldous Huxley in 1956 proposing the term “psychedelic,” coined from two Greek words to mean “mind manifesting.” The scholars, one a psychiatrist and the other a celebrated novelist and philosopher, were exuberant about the potential of drugs for accessing the mind. Huxley favored a phrase from William Blake: -/- If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. -/- He postulated that psychedelics disturbed the “cerebral reducing valve” (1954), and (...) that this was in fact the shared mechanism for regular drug trips, as well as schizophrenic and mystical experiences. If it were the case, the drugs could offer a chemical shortcut to the divine, and a reasonable way to scientifically study mental illness. -/- With such ideas in vogue, the 1950s were heady years, at least for research on psychedelic drugs. More than 750 articles were published on LSD alone. Some studies made use of the drug experience to model schizophrenia, others to develop treatments for alcoholism. And as Nicolas Langlitz explains in Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research Since the Decade of the Brain, the brain as filter – the idea of gates or doors (which, yes, also gave name to the band) – would go on to serve as a significant shared conceptual matrix for psychopharmacologic research, from experimental psychosis to experimental mysticism (10). (shrink)

All ethnographies, perhaps, contain some mystery: of how humans understand each other, or the way that words and glances, observations and encounters are turned into insights about what it means to be human at a given moment in history. But Sareeta Amrute’s Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin begins with a proper mystery, a person who has disappeared, and this literally missing body adroitly stages the subsequent exploration of IT workers’ missing bodies in scholarship on cognitive labor. (...) -/- Global software and service is often thought of as “immaterial,” a traffic of ideas in which effort is a matter of the mind, rather than a muscled arm. Without collapsing cognitive and manual labor, Amrute argues that both are nonetheless embodied ––and formidably marked by social difference, in particular post-genomic notions of race, and class. (shrink)

Through publicness we offer a reconceptualization of marginality in the city, one that makes apparent the “inherent porosity” of the boundaries that organize urban life (Harvey 2006, 19). Our analysis attends to moments of publicness during fieldwork spent in various spaces within the city of Ottawa, Ontario, with individuals who use drugs and/or panhandle. Much of this research took place in central neighborhoods of Ottawa, which serve as the public image of the nation’s capital: Lowertown to the East of Parliament (...) Hill, and Centretown to the South. These neighborhoods hold the largest concentration of national and historical monuments in the city. They also contain the largest concentration of public marginality, including a cluster of homeless shelters and harm reduction services. In this article we examine this paradox of urban marginality and the limits of exclusion for conceptualizing it. While marginal individuals are deemed invisible, unimportant, and apart from “normal” city life, they are present and visible, perhaps more visible than anyone else. Even from marginal positions individuals remain affective participants in the space of the city, and constitutive of the urban experience. (shrink)

This work examines how the conceptualization of knowledge as both problem and solution reconfigured intelligence and law enforcement after 9/11. The idea was that more information should be collected, and better analyzed. If the intelligence that resulted was shared, then terrorists could be identified, their acts predicted, and ultimately prevented. Law enforcement entered into this scenario in the United States, and internationally. "Policing terrorism" refers to the engagement of state and local law enforcement in intelligence, as well as approaching terrorism (...) as a legal crime, in addition to or as opposed to an act of war. Two venues are explored: fusion centers in the United States and the international organization of police, Interpol. The configuration can be thought of schematically as operating through the set of law, discipline and security. Intelligence is predominantly a security approach. It modulates that within its purview, wielding the techniques and technologies that are here discussed.The dissertation is divided into two sections: Intelligence and Policing Terrorism. In the first, intelligence is taken up as a term, and its changes in referent and concept are examined. The Preface and Chapter One present a general introduction to the contemporary situation and intelligence, via Sherman Kent, as knowledge, organization and activities. Chapter Two traces the development of intelligence in the United States as a craft and profession. Chapter Three discusses some of the issues involving the intersection of intelligence and policy, and how those manifested in the aftermath of 9/11 and the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The second section examines the turn to policing terrorism, beginning, in Chapter Four, with how Interpol has dealt with bioterrorism, and an examination of the shifting conceptualization of biological threats in international law. Moving from threats to their consequences, Chapter Five takes up the concept of an event in order to analyze the common comparison of Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Chapters Six and Seven turn to fieldwork done in the United States, with an examination of the suspicious activity reporting system and law enforcement's inclusion in the Information Sharing Environment, focusing on fusion centers and data mining. (shrink)

ObjectivesThe global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 heavily affected the arts and creative industries due to the instigation of lockdown measures in the United Kingdom and closure of venues. However, it also provided new opportunities for arts and cultural engagement through virtual activities and streamed performances. Yet it remains unclear who was likely to engage with the arts at home during lockdown, how this engagement differed from patterns of arts engagement prior to COVID-19, and whether home-based arts engagement was related to (...) people’s ability to cope with their emotions during lockdown. This study was therefore designed to address these questions.MethodsWe used data collected in late May from the United Kingdom COVID-19 Social Study run by University College London. Multivariate regressions were used for the analysis. Identified factors included demographic factors, socio-economic position, psychosocial wellbeing and health conditions, adverse events/worries, and coping styles.ResultsFour types of home-based arts engagement were identified during the COVID-19 pandemic: digital arts and writing, musical activities, crafts, and reading for pleasure. Our results show that the strongest predictors of the engagement were age, education attainment, social support, and emotion-focused or supportive coping styles. In particular, younger adults, non-keyworkers, people with greater social support, people who had lost work, those who were worried about catching the virus, and those with an emotion-focused, problem-focused or supportive coping style were more likely to have increased arts engagement during lockdown. Arts activities were used as approach and avoidance strategies to help cope with emotions, as well as to help improve self-development.ConclusionOverall, our study suggests that while some people who engaged in the arts during the COVID-19 pandemic were those who typically engage under normal circumstances, the pandemic has also created new incentives and opportunities for others to engage virtually. Additionally, this study highlights the value of the arts as coping tools during stressful situations. (shrink)

The ethical value—and to some scholars, necessity—of providing trial patients with post-trial access (PTA) to an investigational drug has been subject to significant attention in the field of research ethics. Although no consensus has emerged, it seems clear that, in some trial contexts, various factors make PTA particularly appropriate. We outline the atypical aspects of psychedelic clinical trials that support the case for introducing the provision of PTA within research in this field, including the broader legal status of psychedelics, the (...) nature of the researcher-therapist/participant relationship, and the extended time-frame of the full therapeutic process. As is increasingly understood, the efficacy of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is driven as much by extrapharmacological elements and the cultural therapeutic container as by the drug itself. As such, we also advocate for a refocusing of attention from post-trial access to a broader concept encompassing other elements of post-trial care. We provide an overview of some of the potential post-trial care provisions that may be appropriate in psychedelic clinical trials. Although the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki calls on researchers, sponsors, and governments to make provisions for post-trial access, such provision may feel impracticable or out-of-reach within psychedelic trials that are already constrained by a high resource demand and significant bureaucratic burden. We show how conceiving of post-trial provision as an integral site of the research process, and an appropriate destination for research funding, will serve to develop the infrastructure necessary for the post-legalisation psychedelic medicine ecosystem. (shrink)

A wave of recent scholarship has warned about the potential for discriminatory harms of algorithmic systems, spurring an interest in algorithmic accountability and regulation. Meanwhile, parallel concerns about surveillance practices have already led to multiple successful regulatory efforts of surveillance technologies—many of which have algorithmic components. Here, we examine municipal surveillance regulation as offering lessons for algorithmic oversight. Taking the 2017 Seattle Surveillance Ordinance as our primary case study and surveying efforts across five other cities, we describe the features of (...) existing surveillance regulation; including procedures for describing surveillance technologies in detail, requirements for public engagement, and processes for establishing acceptable uses. Although the Seattle Surveillance Ordinance was not intended to address algorithmic accountability, we find these considerations to be relevant to the law’s aim of surfacing disparate impacts of systems in use. We also find that in notable cases government employees did not identify regulated algorithmic surveillance technologies as reliant on algorithmic or machine learning systems, highlighting definitional gaps that could hinder future efforts toward algorithmic regulation. We argue that finer-grained distinctions between types of information systems in the language of law and policy, and risk assessment tools integrated into their implementation would strengthen future regulatory efforts by rendering underlying algorithmic components more legible and accountable to political and community stakeholders. (shrink)

A fiatal kutató a szociológiai értelemben vett segítés elméletével és gyakorlatával foglalkozik, s ezen belül is egyrészt azzal, hogy adott helyzetben miként jönnek létre az ún. jóról alkotott elképzelések, másrészt a kisebbségi magyarok segítésének elképzeléseiből miként erednek konkrét civil cselekvések, és ezek hogyan teremtik újra a résztvevők nemzet- és magyarságképét, harmadszor pedig górcső alá kerül a civil segítés hatalmi dimenziója. A bevezetőt követően olyan témákat érint a szerző, mint a jótékonyság modelljei, az "érdemesség" szerepe, a segítő-segített pozíciók aszimmetriája (hatalom újratermelésének (...) modelljei, elismerés és jótékonykodás, hatalom a jótékonyság elméleti modelljeiben), a kisebbségi magyarok támogatásának intézményes keretei, illetve a módszertan (programok kiválasztása, alkalmazott módszerek). ***A folytatásban olvashatunk négy konkrét programról, a segítés ideológiájáról és azok újratermeléséről (hiány és érdemesség toposzai, rítusok, "másság", érdemesség fenntartása és újraalkotása), az elismerés korlátairól és lehetőségeiről, valamint a gondoskodás és intimitás jótékonyságban játszott szerepéről. A szakkönyv a következtetések összegzésével, és a felhasznált irodalom felsorolásával zárul. A kötet az Ünnepi Könyvhét alkalmából jelenik meg. "www.kello.hu © minden jog fenntartva". (shrink)

Két, közelmúltban megrendezett filozófiai konferencia előadásaiból válogat a tanulmánykötet. A 2015-ben a kaposvári egyetemen és 2016-ban a Filozófiai Intézetben megtartott tanácskozások témája az érzelmek és a jelentés volt. Az érzelmek mibenléte, az ésszel és értelemmel való kapcsolata már a kezdetek óta foglalkoztatta a filozófusokat, érthető hát, hogy a kötet élén két filozófiatörténeti esettanulmány áll, az első az ókori sztoikusoknál vizsgálja az érzelmek és a cselekvés viszonyát, a másik a bűnös érzelmek problémáját mutatja be a skolasztika korában. A folytatásban már a (...) kortárs filozófiai viták egy-egy témája kerül elő: az éntapasztalat fenomenológiai leírása és az érzelmek lehetséges szerepe a racionális vitákban. Az érzelmekről szóló blokkot záró két kognitív pszichológiai tanulmány az empirikus tudományok felől közelíti meg a problémakört. A kiadvány második felében található négy tanulmányt a huszadik századi filozófia egyik kulcsfogalma, a jelentés köti össze, amelynek kapcsán nyelv- és elmefilozófiai problémák kerülnek tárgyalásra: intencionalitás és fenomenalitás viszonya, a szemantikai szkepticizmus, a vélekedések filozófiai leírása. A kortárs filozófiai diskurzusokba betekintést nyújtó, a szerkesztők rövid előszavával bevezetett kiadvány a szakkönyvtárak anyaga. "www.kello.hu © minden jog fenntartva". (shrink)