This content analysis examines the ways that genocide is included in the high school world history content standards of eleven states with legislative mandates requiring genocide education, as well as if the content standards in those states differ from those of states without mandated genocide education. The null curriculum theorizes that the content that is not taught may be as important as what is taught; this lens allows for a nuanced analysis of the ways that (...) genocide is included and excluded in state standards. The findings suggest that states with legislative mandates requiring genocide education do not necessarily have high school world history content standards that require genocide education. The content standards in states with legislative mandates often omit acts of genocide, refrain from using the term “genocide,” and frame genocides as less important than the Holocaust, perpetuating the null curriculum of genocides. (shrink)

This article discusses how John Dewey's “Report and Recommendation upon Turkish Education” and some of Dewey's related travel narratives reflect “civilizing mission” imperatives and involve multiple utopian operations that have not yet attracted political-philosophical attention. Such critical attention would reveal Dewey's misjudgments concerning issues of diversity, geopolitics, and global justice. Based on an ethicopolitical reading of the relevant sources, the aim here is to expose developmentalist and colonial vestiges, to raise searching questions, and to obtain a heightened view on (...) the stakes of Dewey's utopianism and progressive pragmatism. The article concludes that the acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide constitutes a major challenge to Dewey scholarship. (shrink)

Genocide as a part of nation or ethnic group extermination process is not a well-defined concept. Its meaning is understood intuitively. When law intervenes, the issue of defining the term comes back. Nevertheless, the Polish nation has been recognized as subjected to genocide activities during the Second World War by the Nazi Germany and Soviet Union. The paper focuses on the genocide against mainly one group of Poles that is to say foresters. The martyrologic evidence proves that (...) foresters were an occupation group which for a variety of reasons suffered most. The research carried out in this respect by the National Forests in Poland has revealed that over 20% of pre-war staff of the institution actually lost their lives. They were killed by the German and Soviet occupiers, as well as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. In the eastern parts of Poland foresters and their families were deported and sent to various labour and extermination camps e.g. in Siberia. The aim of the paper is to present the scale of genocide with the main emphasis on genocide against foresters. The definition of genocide provided by Lemkin, who coined the term, is a starting point for the analysis. The main research methods included the analysis of pertinent literature and source materials as well as the semiotic analysis of genocide circumstances. The thesis put forward by the authors is that foresters due to their education, practical skills, professional experience and insight knowledge turned out to be the group especially vulnerable and subjected to extermination on purpose. (shrink)

This book champions teacher care and concern for students as the driving force for change, exposing the causes and chronicling the effects of educational malfeasance.

This paper examines the design and teaching of "Genocide and Human Rights," an innovative, higher education course introduced in 2002 to provide training for a new generation of scholars and teachers. The course was developed and funded by a small non-profit organization, the Zoryan Institute, in Toronto, Canada. One purpose of the course is to teach about the Armenian genocide within a comparative genocide and human rights framework. Another goal is to fill a gap in the (...) curriculum in response to increased student interest and research in genocide and human rights. The course serves as a valuable pedagogical model including its comparative framework, teaching by invited specialists, adjusting the curriculum to reflect student interest and new scholarship, and setting up and maintaining formal and informal scholarly networks. Features of critical pedagogy include classroom dialogue and critique and respect for differences in background and opinion. For example, interactions between students of Turkish and Armenian background provide an opportunity to explore issues of stereotypes, memory, denial and reconciliation. The course provides training for a new generation in research, publications, teaching and advocacy in fields related to genocide and human rights. (shrink)

This article argues for the claim that we are morally responsible (in the qualified sense proposed in the article) for the crimes of our ancestors if our ancestors, as a collectivity, were part of a community for whose sake and in whose name crimes were committed that meet the definition of the crime of genocide. This claim of ‘‘vicarious intergenerational moral responsibility’’ is supported by two arguments. The first counters the claim that one cannot have responsibilities for events in (...) the past by arguing that this claim oversimplifies one’s relationship to one’s past and the collectivities in which people live. Such collectivities, both ethnic and religious, have identities across time; identification with these collectivities involves accepting certain moral obligations. The second argument is based on the following premise: the political, social, cultural, and educational institutions that mark all large collectivities, such as nations, provide a degree of moral reliability that is necessary for individuals to carry out their legitimate interests. We count on such institutions to exemplify the values that allow individuals to flourish in their life activities. These institutions are by their very nature intergenerational. The moral reliability of such institutions thus requires that we endeavor to acknowledge and repair the damage caused by the failure of these institutions in the past. Accordingly, their health engenders a moral obligation on our part. Vicarious intergenerational moral responsibility is a responsibility not to the past per se but to the past as it plays an active role in the present. (shrink)

Alongside other types of mass atrocities, genocide has received extensive scholarly, policy, and practitioner attention. Missing, however, is the contribution of economists to better understand and prevent such crimes. This edited collection by 41 accomplished scholars examines economic aspects of genocides, other mass atrocities, and their prevention. Chapters include numerous case studies, probing literature reviews, and completely novel work based on extraordinary country-specific datasets. Also included are chapters on the demographic, gendered, and economic class nature of genocide. Replete (...) with research- and policy-relevant findings, new insights are derived from behavioral economics, law and economics, political economy, macroeconomic modeling, microeconomics, development economics, industrial organization, identity economics, and other fields. Analytical approaches include constrained optimization theory, game theory, and sophisticated statistical work in data-mining, econometrics, and forecasting.A foremost finding of the book concerns atrocity architects' purposeful, strategic use of violence, often manipulating nonrational proclivities among ordinary people to sway their participation in mass murder. Relatively understudied in the literature, the book also analyzes the options of victims before, during, and after mass violence. Further, the book shows how well-intended prevention efforts can backfire and increase violence, how wrong post-genocide design can entrench vested interests to reinforce exclusion of vulnerable peoples, and how businesses can become complicit in genocide. In addition to the necessity of healthy opportunities in employment, education, and key sectors in prevention work, the book shows why new genocide prevention laws and institutions must be based on reformulated incentives that consider insights from law and economics, behavioral economics, and collective action economics. (shrink)

Schools are expected to educate children into democratic citizens by providing "civics" or history courses. lt is believed that the formal curriculum affects the amount of cognition of each pupil, which - in its turn - would influence the civic competencies and social attitudes. This supposition is explicitly stated in 'holocaust-education 'programs and in 'civics'-courses. Accordingly, knowledge on the nazi-attrocities would stimulate tolerance, and by this way counter prejudice.The current contribution tests this supposition on survey-data from 773 Frenchspeakin g (...) and 469 Flemish-speaking last-grade pupils from secondary schools in the Brussels-Capital Region. The survey probed for knowledge on the nazi-genocide and attitudescales. The supposition about the connection between knowledge and tollerance, holds partially for the Flemish, but not for the French-speaking sample. Knowledge may be a necessary, but is certainly nota sufficient condition to foster tolerance. (shrink)

This article argues that college-educated women play a crucial part in successful resistance against genocide because they are more likely to forge secure interregional networks and, consequently, better able to shelter victims of mass-persecution than their male peers. We develop our argument through a study of Jewish rescue networks in the Netherlands during the Holocaust. College-educated women were especially valuable during rescue efforts due to their ability to operate as defiant conformists. These women – a small minority who were (...) anything but traditional – could more fully exploit their biographical availability and university networks by concealing interregional resistance work through the strategic performance of traditional feminine roles. Statistical analyses of geocoded rescue networks reveal that rescue networks involving college-educated women were more successful because they funneled Jews across the country without getting exposed. More in-depth exploration of distinct networks identifies three dramaturgical strategies that college-educated women deployed to facilitate clandestine and geographically expansive rescue work: 1) strategic coquetry; 2) strategic self-devaluation; 3) strategic motherhood and wedlock. Taken together, our findings suggest we should focus on how gender and other forms of social status interact to produce the relational and dramaturgical underpinnings of civilian agency in times of emergency. (shrink)

Language is a powerful tool that enables communication and shapes our identity and cultural practices. The right to choose one's language is a fundamental human right that helps preserve personal and communal identities. In a multilingual nation like Ethiopia, language goes beyond communication to define administrative boundaries. Consequently, depriving Ethiopians of their linguistic rights becomes a more complex punishment than food embargoes. This research investigated the motives and means by which the Amhara Regional State-enforced a monolingual and monocultural language (...) class='Hi'>education policy in western Tigray through the lens of linguistic genocide. The study involved interviews with ten teachers, selected using a snowball sampling method, and document analysis to reinforce the result. Political and economic factors and a desire to promote the assimilation of Tigrayans into Amhara culture and language, a process known as "Amharanization", appear to have impacted the implementation of the language education policy in western Tigray. Authorities have implemented a variety of measures, including bans, restrictions, penalties, enforcement, forced relocation, and even heinous acts, which have caused the Tigrayan community severe physical and psychological distress. Collectively, these policies, actions, and outcomes constituted an act of linguistic genocide. This study sheds light on the severe repercussions of such policies, examines their implications, acknowledges the inherent limitations, and offers valuable recommendations for future research in this crucial area. (shrink)

Language plays a role in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar and continues to shape their experiences in displacement, yet their linguistic rights are rarely discussed in relation to their human rights and humanitarian concerns. International human rights standards offer important foundations for conceptualizing the “right to language” and identifying how linguistic rights can be violated both in situ and in displacement. The Rohingya case highlights how language policies are weaponized to oppress unwanted minorities; their outsider status (...) is reinforced by the country’s language education policy and they face additional rights challenges in displacement—including obstacles to effectively accessing humanitarian aid. Moving forward, norms associated with self-determination and language rights offer a conceptual foundation for shifting attitudes and altering negative perceptions of Rohingya identity. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

In this paper, I consider pedagogical moments when the project of pedagogy is to _not understand_, as understanding would entail complicity with dehumanization. I explore the slipperiness of understanding and parse when understanding is helpful and when it reinscribes structures of dehumanization. I examine when it might be important in music education pedagogy to foster a refusal to understand, specifically in cases of extreme suffering that might occur in projects of dehumanization, atrocity, and genocide. Then, I explore the (...) ethics embedded in different forms of understanding and consider why not understanding is sometimes the ethical path and tease out the complexities of such refusals to understand. Subsequently, I focus on what music might contribute to this pedagogical approach. I then explore and critique empathy and the project of empathy in education. Ultimately, I consider the role of discomfort in music education to facilitate these kinds of refusals. I center the work of several scholars in this discussion: Sherene Razack (Dark threats and White knights: The Somalia Affair, peacekeeping, and the new imperialism University of Toronto Press Toronto, ON, 2004, Rev Educ Pedag Cult Stud 29 (4): 375-394, 2007), Megan Boler (Feeling power: Emotions and education. Routledge, New York, NY, 1999), Jennifer Geddes (Hypatia 18 (1):104-115, 2003), Charlotte Delbo (_Auschwitz and after_. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995/2014), Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Penguin Books, New York, NY, 1963/2006), Marie Hållander (Ethics Educ 10(2): 175-185, 2015, Stud Philos Educ 38: 467–480, 2019), Barbara Applebaum (Being White, being good: White complicity, White moral responsibility, and social justice pedagogy. Lexington Books, New York 2010, White educators negotiating complicity: Roadblocks paved with good intentions. Lexington Books, New York, NY, 2022), and Liora Gubkin (Teach Theol Relig 18(2): 103–120, 2015). (shrink)

This paper challenges a pervasive curricular justification for educationally acquainting young people with stories of genocide and other moral horrors from history. According to this justification, doing so favours the development of psycho-social soft skills connected with interpersonal awareness and the establishment and maintenance of positive relationships. It is argued that this justification not only renders the specific historical content incidental to the development of these skills. The educational intention of promoting such psycho-social soft skills by way of studying (...) moral horrors in history constitutes an ethically problematic instrumentalisation of the historical material itself. (shrink)

Why do people do horrific things to one another? This article reviews two recent books that attempt to answer that question, Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil and Barbara Coloroso’s Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide. The author discusses the educational implications of these works and raises preliminary considerations for an education for heroism.

We analyse the way in which the Holocaust is taught in The Netherlands, with an emphasis on critically examining the content of secondary school textbooks used to teach Dutch students about the history of the Holocaust. We also interview Dutch educators, government officials and academics about the state of Dutch Holocaust education. Our findings indicate that Dutch students are underexposed to the Holocaust and lack basic knowledge and conceptual understanding of it. Fundamental concerns regarding the civic obligations of citizens (...) in a democracy and basic principles of human rights that are raised by the history of the Holocaust in The Netherlands are often ignored or examined superficially, sometimes because of ambivalence about the extent of Dutch involvement in the genocide of Dutch Jewry. Little attention is paid to the complex moral choices that Dutch citizens faced during the Second World War and the life-or-death implications such decisions had for Dutch Jews. Finally, Jewish history and culture and the history of European anti-Semitism are rarely addressed in textbooks and history lessons about the Holocaust, undermining efforts to sensitise students to the implications of the Holocaust for The Netherlands and for Europe as a whole. In our conclusion, we offer some models of Holocaust education that could significantly improve the quality and content of Dutch Holocaust education. (shrink)

Why do people do horrific things to one another? This article reviews two recent books that attempt to answer that question, Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil and Barbara Coloroso's Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide . The author discusses the educational implications of these works and raises preliminary considerations for an education for heroism.

Since Plato, Western thought has framed knowing as a method within ‘some realm of what is’ and a predetermined ‘sphere of objects’. The roots and the consequences of this stance towards reason and truth were noted by Heidegger, who equates the history of Western thought with the history of metaphysics. Since Plato, truth has relied on definition, hierarchy and mastery. Discourse on the truth begins to be discourse on the limits of things and, thus, on who is able to set (...) these limits and discourse. This dominant position erases its own traces, presents itself as unique and unavoidable, and excludes all other ways of thinking. This exclusion includes violence, and this violence is not merely a philosophical matter. It is written in the history of the West, which is a history that includes conquest, genocide and war. However, we can also identify in Heidegger ways to transcend this inner violence by returning to the originating stance towards truth, namely, truth as aletheia, or world disclosure. This article provides the groundwork to argue that Heidegger's thought, based on a call for existential responsibility, requires education to remake our existence. (shrink)

This volume addresses whether, how, and where laws (variously defined) teach values and shape moral character in late modern liberal societies. Each author recognizes the essential value of state law in fostering peace, security, health, education, charity, trade, democracy, constitutionalism, justice, and human rights, among many other moral goods. Each author also recognizes, however, the grave betrayals of law in supporting fascism, slavery, apartheid, genocide, persecution, violence, racism, and other forms of immorality and injustice. They thus call for (...) state laws that set a basic civil morality of duty for society and for robust freedoms that protect private individuals and private groups to cultivate a higher morality of aspiration"--Back cover. (shrink)

The article reflects upon the possibility of educating sensitivity to the pain of the different Other by using feature cinema. The authors rely on the methodology suggested by Stanley Louis Cavell and Andrew Klevan, and also on the suggestions and conclusions by William B. Russell, III and Stewart Waters. The authors of this article reflected upon the results of their own interview with gymnasium students and selected three feature films suggested by them as a case study for the possibility of (...) developing not only critical thinking but also sensitivity to the pain of the unfamiliar Other. All three movies concern the humiliation and pain of the African people. The article raises questions for possible discussion in ethics class and suggests philosophical literature by E. Fromm, and K.R. Popper as a possible theoretical basis: moving from the concrete ethical problem discerned in the movie to the philosophical text and vice versa. (shrink)

Given the portion of his life spent at military schools, it is striking that Ender and his peers apparently never study military ethics. The ethical lessons Ender and his peers might have learned are so obviously relevant to operations against the buggers that you cannot help but ask how the I.F.'s leadership could have failed to teach military ethics at all. This chapter presents some highlights of Western thinking on the ethics of war and analyzes Ender's education and actions (...) in light of those moral traditions. Ender's Game teaches powerful lessons for students of just war theory and the just war tradition because it asks questions that matter to everyone, from national decision‐makers all the way down to individual soldiers. Genocide and xenocide are extreme in their quantity of killing, but not necessarily in their moral magnitude. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I argue that educators, by introducing young people to various ways of responding to wrongdoing, help prepare them for the task of acting in and taking responsibility for the world. I begin by introducing Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the world, the characteristics of action as unpredictable, boundless and irreversible, i.e. the frailty of human affairs. I then move to what Arendt calls the ‘power of forgiveness.’ Forgiving is an action, and as such is free and unpredictable. Moreover, forgiving concerns (...) the person not the deed. To understand the implications of this, I introduce Arendt’s understanding of being a person in distinction to being merely human. I then ask whether all deeds are forgivable, which brings me to the new crime against humanity. Finally, I ask whether one can be reconciled to acts, such as genocide and whether solidarity with the wrongdoer is possible. (shrink)

Two trips to Auschwitz (in 1989 and 2003) provide a context for reflection on fundamental issues in civic and moral education. Custodians of the Auschwitz historical site are currently aware of its responsibility to humanity to educate about the genocide against the Jews, as a morally distinct element in its presentation of Nazi crimes at Auschwitz. Prior to the fall of Communism in 1989, the site's message was dominated by a misleading civic narrative about Polish victimization by, and (...) resistance to, Naziism. In this article, I discuss the attempts of many Polish intellectuals during the past twenty‐five years to engage in an honest and difficult civic project of facing up to their history, as it is entwined with anti‐Semitism, with the centuries‐long presence of Jews in Poland, and with their current absence. An interaction with a tour guide who took me to be criticizing Poles for their failure to help Jews during the Holocaust prompts further reflections on the difficulties of grasping the moral enormity of genocide, on the dangers of stereotyping, on the conditions under which it is appropriate to proffer and to withhold well‐founded moral judgements, and on the moral importance of appropriate feelings and attitudes when moral action is extraordinarily risky or dangerous. (shrink)

Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's _Memory, History, Forgetting_ examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the (...) production of historical narrative. _Memory, History, Forgetting_, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, _Memory, History, Forgetting_ provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's _Time and Narrative_ and _Oneself as Another_ and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. “His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events.... It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—_Library Journal _“Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— _New York Times Book Review _. (shrink)

To eliminate racist prejudices, it is necessary to identify the root cause of racism. American slavery preceded racism, and it was closely associated with genocide. Accordingly, we seek the unique cause of the unique event of genocide + slavery. This was initially justified by religious prejudice, rather than colour prejudice. This religious justification was weakened when many Blacks converted to Christianity, after the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The curse of Kam, using quick visual cues to characterize Blacks as inferior (...) Christians, was inadequate. Hence, the church fell back on an ancient trick of using false history as secular justification for Christian superiority. This trick had resulted in a false history of science during the Crusades when scientific knowledge in translated Arabic texts was indiscriminately attributed to the early Greeks, without evidence. This false history enabled belief in religious superiority to mutate into a secular belief in White superiority. After colonialism, and the Aryan race conjecture, the belief in White superiority further mutated into a belief in Western civilizational superiority, openly propagated today by colonial education. Hence, to eliminate racist prejudice, it is necessary to engage simultaneously with the allied prejudices about Christian/White/Western superiority, based on the same false history of science. (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)

The problem of future generations is a growing ethical issue. There are ongoing discussions about what kind of earth we are leaving and what we should leave to future generations as a result of the delayed awareness – if not ignorance – of the fact that this World does not belong to us exclusively. When we look at the example of Turkey, we can see that there is a huge conflict between environmental utilization and environmental education. On the one (...) hand, we have classes on the environment and its health; on the other hand, it is a reality that we have a not-so-eco-friendly government policy, which takes no notice of any kind of environmental issues or requirements. To mention but few, governmental insistence on real estate investments in green spaces, even by covering grade 1 natural site areas, a decline in the extent of agricultural land due to uncontrollable urbanization, and hydroelectric power plant projects are among recent events. These are the instances of conflicts between inscriptive and operative environmental policies in Turkey. The purpose of this article is to call attention to this dilemma and to assert that ecocide might be just another kind of genocide for Turkey, i.e., the genocide-yet-to-come. (shrink)

Incorporating a discussion of physical and emotional trauma in medical education can help prepare students for their encounters with trauma survivors in clinical practice. A pedagogical approach begins with an inquiry into the purpose of historical or current representations of torture. Justifications include rationalizing state-sponsored torture, providing an outlet for critique and protest, and organizing representations of the enemy. Discussions of torture must further address the emotional and symbolic effects of clinical work with torture survivors on the caregiver. Introductory (...) workshops using visual representations can trigger pain, fear and anger in the viewer. Images of torture, war, and genocide may also invoke ethical concerns relating to the impact of visual images, where viewing can elicit an ambiguous response, casting the viewer into the role of voyeur. At the same time, learners should recognize that indifference or inattention to the provocations mediated through images has its own liabilities, signaling defensiveness. Discussions about the respective roles of perpetrators, victims and observers offer opportunities for the viewer to engage in self-reflection. Artistic representations also offer opportunities for advocacy on the survivor’s behalf, sometimes facilitated by dissemination of visual representations, but also by involving the survivors themselves in activities that exploit the healing power of art. (shrink)

Photo ID 279661800 © Sidewaypics|Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT Decolonization is complex, vast, and the subject of an ongoing academic debate. While the many efforts to decolonize or dismantle the vestiges of colonialism that remain are laudable, they can also reinforce what they seek to end. For decolonization to be impactful, it must be done with epistemic and cultural humility, requiring decolonial scholars, project leaders, and well-meaning people to be more sensitive to those impacted by colonization and not regularly included in the discourse. (...) INTRODUCTION Decolonization is complex. To successfully achieve decolonization, projects should incorporate the voices of those subjugated or silenced. Including such voices requires sincerely exploring who has been affected by colonialism or neocolonialism and how, as well as cultural sensitivity. In its basic use, decolonization refers to countries under colonial rule gaining independence or freedom from forms of subjugation. Additionally, scholars use the term to refer to efforts to dismantle neocolonialism and vestiges of colonialism. The process includes de-silencing subjugated voices.[1] I use decolonization in the latter way to refer to countries with technical independence. While arguably colonization ended formally with independence from colonizing powers, neocolonialism is the indirect, informal, and sometimes subtle control of the people, their economy, and political life despite formal independence from colonizing authorities. I conceptualize neocolonialism as a system that involves direct and involuntary control of another’s political, economic, or social life, impacting their worldview and ways of encountering the world. Decolonization may target actions, places, or systems like health care or AI to overcome the ills of colonialism and neocolonialism. It also may target knowledge and require rethinking how people develop their knowledge base. For example, if people grew up seeing an outside colonizer as superior, they would need to change their knowledge of superiority. Decolonization may target power, for example, changing who owns and distributes COVID-19 vaccines and who distributors exclude in the distribution of vaccines. Decolonization could require looking at those disempowered in the distribution process. Additionally, decolonization may target autonomy of persons by freeing people, ensuring human and individual rights, and respecting cultural traditions. Decolonization projects that try to de-silence by including the voices of those affected by colonialism and neocolonialism must examine inclusiveness in the context of the culture of the subrogated individuals. Examples of decolonization projects include making datasets inclusive of diverse peoples and places, returning to traditional food and eating practices, making sure hospitals in developing countries are led by locals and respectful of cultural traditions, returning unethically obtained artefacts or objects. Another project would be laying the groundwork for equality in formerly colonized countries to ensure that business ownership, education, and financial success will flow fairly to those previously victimized by colonization. Summarily, there are many strategies for decolonizing. However, it is worth asking whether the strategies have risks that undermine the goal of decolonization. I. Understanding Decolonization Discourses Many fields, from AI to politics, economics, health care, aviation, and academia, discuss decolonization. The content of the discourse on decolonization depends on the region and field discussing it. Rather than just reporting on decolonization, the discussions may be calls to action. For example, decolonization discourses reflect activism for cognitive justice, such as equal consideration of Indian or African knowledge systems in global health discourses.[2] In politics and political science, some scholars frame decolonization as an anti-western, anti-colonial movement by Africans to emancipate Africa/ns from subjugation or shift the continent to postcolonialism and post-neo-colonialism. This framing walls off non-African participants and may undermine their capacity to benefit the conversation.[3] There are other political scientists who actively support decolonization and see it as a field of activism in support of anyone and countries where colonization harmed people and development.[4] The point is that two ways of conceptualizing decolonization in politics and political science are discernible. One conceptualization is less inclusive since it alienates scholars and professionals from Western, high-income, or developed countries. The other is more inclusive. In humanitarian studies, including philosophy, some decolonization articles and conversations are efforts to end the destructive force of colonization. They focus on either the form, such as ecocide, genocide, and many others, or the geographic location, such as Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania.[5] Finally, the feelings one brings into this conversation can adversely impact how one engages in them and who they listen to or are willing to hear from. For example, anger, rage, bitterness, and hatred are emotions that are not uncommon in spaces of decolonization conversations. Decolonization conversations that originate from a place of negativity risk deepening the psychological state of victimhood and prevent people from disrupting constructively or critically engaging in the conversation.[6] II. Understanding Decolonization Strategies Decolonization strategies mainly aim to de-silence victims of domination or subjugation. People have proposed many strategies for decolonizing. These strategies may be informed by what the target is for decolonization. Decolonization can target power relations in global health. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, public health organizations noted the power imbalance in vaccine distribution. Decolonization could involve de-silencing those affected by neocolonialism to bring about a more balanced distribution of power and a more fair distribution of the vaccine. By analyzing who was adversely impacted by the distribution and who ought to wield power, those engaged in decolonizing advocated for positive change and equitable power relations. Equally, when being is the target of decolonization, the language of unlearning or relearning and mental decolonization take centre stage in the decolonization discourse. For example, the quest to decolonize colonized minds aims to demythologize African inferiority and Western superiority. Demythologizing African inferiority enables those engaged in the decolonization discourse to cultivate and foster African agency.[7] Finally, when knowledge production is the target of decolonization, scholars use inclusion and cognitive justice. For example, they try to alter the knowledge that underlies global health ethics.[8] “[D]decolonizing researchers aim to respectfully understand and integrate theory from Other(ed) perspectives, while also critically examining the underlying assumptions that inform their Western research framework.”[9] One common strategy that scholars use in decolonization is inclusion. It is worth asking, does including people who have been subrogated foster decolonization? Whether that is effective depends on whether included people are more heard or whether the strategies to include them create new forms of silencing. III. Inclusion and the Quest to Decolonize Evaluating how effective inclusion is in the quest to de-silence subjugated voices is important. First, inclusive strategies are not neutral. They are epistemically situated. This situatedness constrains meaning-making in different ways: how and what questions are asked, how social roles are constructed, organized or assigned, and who is admitted to the room where these conversations occur.[10] Inclusion strategies may reinforce (unchallenged) assumptions. For example, to address prejudices and stereotypes in global health images, Arsenii Alenichev and his colleagues[11] successfully inverted “one stereotypical global health image” by prompting a generative AI to produce “an image of a traditional Indian or African healer healing a White Child.” Although there were some problems with the image of the White child, this innovation is a significant, useful effort to de-embed or strip global health images of problematic pictures that mythologize White superiority and Black inferiority. Yet it is possible that using categories like traditional Indian or African reinforces unchallenged assumptions, raising key questions regarding how language and words create new stereotypes. It is common to define traditional as non-conventional, unorthodox, and informal. Yet studies continue to reveal that non-scientifically appraised healing approaches in India or Africa are not only effective but also real, meaningful, fundamental, and primary care-seeking behaviours in many communities in these regions.[12] Suppose inclusive strategies are not un-situated. These conversations may be had within the structures, language, and spaces built by or connected to colonialism. The spaces, language, places, and structures in which these conversations occur can limit who can participate and how they participate. Importantly, some conditions are not conducive to participation as equals. The allocated time for the discussion could also constrain how individuals express themselves. It is unclear who is ultimately heard. Furthermore, epistemic situatedness of inclusion can impact decolonization conversations when participants are beneficiaries of, products of, and trained by structures and systems they seek to dismantle. To enhance the decolonization project and its goals, a pressing task is to unveil and question how the circumstances may inhibit activism. If the vestiges of colonialism continue to structure the decolonization discourse invisibly, the vestiges may undermine decolonization. For example, a public health discussion that includes white Western doctors and Western pharmaceutical executives in Africa may have many local Africans at the table but could still effectively devalue their input based on built-in assumptions and biases that are vestiges of colonialism. Second, exclusion and inclusion are also not binary. Individuals may experience exclusion, even while included (the phenomenon called internal exclusion). In other words, inclusion can fail to be substantial or become a means of enhancing optics, “a way of (un)consciously weakening the radical claims being pursued.”[13] For example, in South Africa, many institutions have made significant efforts to diversify their faculties due to the promulgation of the Employment Equity Act 55.[14] The act requires South African institutions to implement employment equity that redresses the history of harmful discrimination in the country. The act further requires transforming departments and institutional administrations. Although many recognize and support the need to transform departments in South Africa, the rhetoric of transformation departs sharply from the lived experiences.[15] This misalignment between the plan and practice is evident in the underrepresentation of black people and females in senior management teams, professorships in many universities and health departments, and positions of power in some South African institutions. Those selected in the transformation of the departments have also complained of being overworked. The burden of extra work undermines their ability to develop agency and voice in the space they now occupy or fulfil key requirements that have implications for their career trajectory.[16] This is called the minority tax. Notably, "the minority tax… is the burden of extra responsibilities [placed] on faculty of colour to achieve diversity and inclusion and contributes to attrition and impedes academic promotion."[17] One challenge for decolonializing projects will be for decolonial scholars and those selected for decolonization objectives to have the humility to decline invitations, requests, roles, and platforms for which they are either unqualified or lack the capacity to fulfil. At its heart, decolonization strategies must empower those included rather than weaken them. Finally, inclusion can lead to a phenomenon known as elite capture.[18] Elite capture occurs when socially advantaged individuals in a group monopolize or exploit activism to their own benefit at the expense of the larger, struggling group. Elite capture weakens decolonization efforts from within, revealing that those likely to benefit from global inclusive efforts are those who fulfil globally constructed standards, those “already present in the room.” There is no better strategy to weaken decolonial movements than weakening the project from within by strategically positioning individuals who share physical properties with the victims of exclusion and silencing but intellectually, behaviourally, psychologically, and emotionally share more common ground with the colonizer. Such insiders may be unaware they are furthering neocolonial conditions rather than decolonizing. In relation to decolonization, particularly in global health, elite capture reveals that those whose voices are loudest in the room are not necessarily those more impacted by colonialism. They may benefit more from reinforcing colonialism. Opportunism weakens meaningful activism from within, preventing good initiatives and strategies from having their intended impact or taking substantive root.[19] This paper cannot do justice to elite capture, but it is worth noting its negative impacts. IV. Improving the Impact of Decolonization To end neo-colonialism, it is important to understand how it manifests and what to do at each level. Beyond the academic discourse, many tangible efforts exist to decolonize through de-silencing. Examples of these efforts include the ME2 movement that seeks to centre the concerns and experiences of sexually abused or harassed victims in the public discourse. At the funding level, many grant-awarding agencies like Wellcome Trust have dedicated huge budgets to studies that help them understand how they may have perpetrated colonialism or neocolonialism and what they can do differently going forward.[20] In South Africa, promulgating the Employment Equity Act 55 was a tangible attempt to entrench decolonization concerns in a country's regulatory framework. Yet, these decolonization efforts could fail to be substantive if they do not reflect cultural sensitivity. Two key components of cultural sensitivity are worth highlighting here: epistemic and cultural humility. Epistemic humility is an intellectual virtue described as knowing one’s limitations and the limitations of the learning methods employed. At its simplest, it is the ability to admit when one is wrong. Cultural humility includes genuine attempts to learn about and embrace other cultures. Epistemic and cultural humility are signs of academic excellence and strength. Epistemic and cultural humility seriously acknowledge how the state of our knowledge, cognitive limitations, experiences, and backgrounds, while constraining us, also invite us to listen, learn, grow, and change. The limitations-owing account of epistemic and cultural humility suggests that “a person who is aware of her cognitive limitations and owns them is much better positioned to achieve such epistemic goods as true beliefs and understanding than someone who… simply has insight into the epistemic status of her beliefs.”[21] Epistemic and cultural humility may help prevent decolonization projects that unintentionally reinforce what they seek to dismantle. Epistemic humility calls on decolonizers to defer tasks for which they are not qualified to suitably qualified persons. Beyond this, humility supports brave scholarship that imagines and reimagines how featuring the same voices, faces, and perspectives possibly introduces new forms of domination or silencing. Cultural knowledge can lead to a more intentional way of seeking out the right people or a more diverse group than those frequently featured in decolonization conversations. This would give others more opportunities to navigate these spaces and should do so in ways that are familiar to them. One ought to be more sensitive to those who would ordinarily not be included in these conversations. Unless we radically and boldly reimagine these discussions, we risk alienating those most negatively impacted by neocolonialism. CONCLUSION Decolonization conversations are complex and the subject of academic debate. The strategies employed to decolonize can harm or help the victims of neo-colonialism. Inclusion of previously silenced individuals may not be enough to overcome the vestiges of colonialism, leading to a false inclusion, where those included feel excluded or contribute in ways reflecting their own biases and circumstances. Inclusion of an elite or people who do not truly represent the subjugated can lead to elite capture. For decolonization strategies to be impactful, for example, in the context of global health, project leaders and participants must engage in conversations employing epistemic and cultural humility. In many ways, epistemic and cultural humility can help us demythologize our assumptions of any cultural superiority or cognitive authority, allowing for diverse voices, cultures, and perspectives to emerge without domination. - [1] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [2] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [3] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh 2023. Is decolonisation Africanisation? The politics of belonging in the truly African university. Social Dynamics, 1-20. [4] Rianna Oelofsen 2015. Decolonisation of the African mind and intellectual landscape. Phronimon, 16, 130-146. [5] Caesar Atuire & Olivia Rutazibwa. 2021. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization. An African Reading of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Stakes of Decolonization [Online]. Available from: https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/african-reading-covid-19-pandemic-and-stakes-decolonization [Accessed July 29, 2021 2021]. [6] Pedro Alexis Tabensky 2008. The Postcolonial Heart of African Philosophy. South African Journal of Philosophy, 27, 285-295. [7] Nicholas M. Creary 2012. African Intellectuals and Decolonization, Ohio, Ohio University Press. [8] Bridget Pratt & Jantina De Vries 2023. Where is knowledge from the Global South? An account of epistemic justice for a global bioethics. Journal of Medical Ethics, medethics-2022-108291. [9] Vivetha Thambinathan & Elizabeth Anne Kinsella 2021. Decolonizing Methodologies in Qualitative Research: Creating Spaces for Transformative Praxis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20, 16094069211014766. [10] Abimbola Seye 2023. Knowledge from the global South is in the global South. Journal of Medical Ethics, 49, 337. [11] A. Alenichev, P. Kingori & K. P. Grietens 2023. Reflections before the storm: the AI reproduction of biased imagery in global health visuals. Lancet Glob Health. [12] Jonathan K. Burns & Andrew Tomita 2015. Traditional and religious healers in the pathway to care for people with mental disorders in Africa: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 50, 867-877. [13] Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh & Cornelius Ewuoso 2023. What type of inclusion does epistemic injustice require? Journal of Medical Ethics, jme-2023-109091. [14] 1998. Employment Equity Act. In: GOVERNMENT, S. A. (ed.) 19370. [15] Dina Zoe Belluigi & Gladman Thondhlana 2019. ‘Why mouth all the pieties?’ Black and women academics’ revelations about discourses of ‘transformation’ at an historically white South African university. Higher Education, 78, 947-963. [16] Juliet Ramohai & Khomotso Marumo 2016. Women in Senior Positions in South African Higher Education: A Reflection on Voice and Agency. 231, 135-157. [17] J. Trejo 2020. The burden of service for faculty of color to achieve diversity and inclusion: the minority tax. Mol Biol Cell, 31, 2752-2754. [18] Olufemi Taiwo 2020. Being-in-the-Room Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference. The Philosopher, 108, 7. [19] Margarita Kurbatova & Elena Kagan 2016. Opportunism of University Lecturers As a Way to Adaptate the External Control Activities Strengthening. Journal of Institutional Studies, 8, 116-136. [20] Jeremy Farrar. 2022. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme. An update on Wellcome's anti-racist programme [Online]. Available from: https://wellcome.org/news/update-wellcomes-anti-racism-programme [Accessed August 10, 2022 2022]. [21] Katherine Dormandy 2018. Does Epistemic Humility Threaten Religious Beliefs? Journal of Psychology and Theology, 46, 292-304. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Biting the Bullet:The Ethics and Aesthetics of ViolenceJonathan AllenThe Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia, by William Pfaff. New York. Simon & Schuster, 2004, 368 pp.Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag. New York, Picador, 2003, 131 pp.In the nineteenth century a broadly influential branch of Romantic philosophy insisted that goodness and beauty were intimately related. The goals of ethical and aesthetic education were taken to be (...) one and the same—the cultivation of the kalokagathos or "noble-and-beautiful" individual.1 This robust view of the relation between ethical and aesthetic education is now rarely defended; it was dealt a mortal wound by the inconvenient fact that highly cultured or Gebildete individuals have been implicated in the twentieth century's worst political crimes.This does not mean, however, that connections between ethical and aesthetic projects are no longer made. One such attempt to relate ethics and aesthetic—a bleak, somber, and deeply chastened attempt—is presented in the late Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others. In this small but dense book, Sontag assesses the hope that the reproduction of images, especially photographic images, of violence and atrocity might help to abolish war, or at least to play a role in combating genocide or the commission of gross violations of the laws of war. While she evidently wishes to find "an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war," Sontag is doubtful that photography is equal to this moral burden.2Sontag's work concentrates on the aesthetic and ethical challenges that confront any attempt to convey the horrors of war to uninvolved observers. Her focus is thus trained on an attempt to exorcise what she refers to as the "seductiveness of war"; she is not primarily concerned to identify the source of war's allure (though she does have some interesting observations to make on the issue).3 William Pfaff, by contrast, is both repelled and fascinated by the modern embrace of violence. The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia offers an enthralling account of the intellectual and aesthetic forces that provoked the feverish modern love affair with violence and war. Pfaff is at least as doubtful as Sontag, however, that that love affair [End Page 100] is over and that we are in a position to forge a more pacific sensibility. Nevertheless, he insists that if we are to have the slightest hope of avoiding a full-scale repetition of the twentieth-century's "carnival of inhumanity," we need to understand the nature of its romance with violence.So how did that romance come about? The central theme of The Bullet's Song is the consequences of the loss of "chivalry." This, according to Pfaff, was a code that "held that what an individual or society could licitly do to another was limited by a morality linked to the essential values of Western civilization."4 Within this framework, it was expected that states would sometimes go to war with one another, but war was seen merely as an extreme means of settling disputes, not of eliminating entire societies or remaking the world. For individuals, war was presented as "a test of valor, rewarded by 'honor'"—in other words, it was seen as an occasion to test oneself in the light of a set of ideals of conduct that operated as constraints on permissible behavior in war.5 All of this came to a sticky end in the trenches of World War I, replaced by a morally nihilistic idea of total war. Pfaff claims that this moral vacuum proved intolerable to many individuals. They reacted in several different ways. Some attempted to construct "codes of individual transcendence" and "collective will," while others gave themselves over to "utopias based on historical fictions."6This is a very large story, and it is in fact too bulky for the confines of this book. First, it must be said that Pfaff fails to present his central claims clearly. He is unclear, for example, as to exactly what was lost with the destruction of the chivalric code, as well as what caused its destruction. At times, he seems to be suggesting that the rise of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Abortion to Abolition: Reproductive Health and Justice in Canada by Martha PaynterRebecca Simmons (bio)Abortion to Abolition: Reproductive Health and Justice in Canada by Martha Paynter Winnipeg, MB: Fernwood Publishing, 2022Martha Paynter's Abortion to Abolition: Reproductive Health and Justice in Canada is a bold, ambitious work that seeks to not only catalog Canada's meandering and often backtracking path toward reproductive justice, but to act as a manifesto for Paynter's (...) own ideas and goals for reproductive justice. The book takes the form of an anthology of stories, divided into chapters, that are grouped according to a certain right; for example, the right to bodily autonomy. This format effectively guides the reader from abortion to abolition. Paynter adroitly starts the book with white feminist favorites such as bodily autonomy and not having children. Then she logically progresses to more radical ideas such as parenting in prison and the total abolition of prisons. The stories in this book are accompanied by warm, colorful illustrations by Julia Hunt. These drawings help the reader visualize the person behind the story and the very real life that was affected by reproductive law and/or social norms. Paynter holds a PhD in nursing, and it is from this background that she writes, seeking to educate nurses and other healthcare professionals alongside a broader readership garnered through her clear, approachable writing style.Chapter 1 introduces the reader to many of the book's key themes by considering the right and need to have bodily autonomy, and the multiple ways this manifests itself in ordinary (and less-ordinary) life. Paynter considers the disparate stories of five women, all fighting in some way for bodily autonomy. The stories cover events of gender-based gun violence, sexual assault, transgender rights in prison, the legalization of sex work, police violence, and institutional racism. Each story recounted by Paynter catalogs tragedies and injustices with blunt and brutal honesty—perhaps to an unnecessary extent. Every horrific fact is laid bare for the readers as they uncover the intricacies of gender-based, imperialist, and racist violence. Paynter has chosen these stories to display the multitude of ways in which people—especially Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) and minoritized genders—can be willfully wronged by the state and [End Page 209] the criminal justice system, such that the reader must begin to confront the fact that these structures don't seem to exist to benefit or protect the most marginalized in society.Chapter 2 approaches the right not to have children through a number of stories related to contraception, abortion, and family planning. Paynter sketches some of the key points in Canada's journey toward the decriminalization of abortion, from paradoxical trailblazers, such as Dr. Emily Stowe in the 1800s, to the viral memefied content of art protestor iamkarats. While the unequivocal legality of abortion in Canada suggests incredible progressiveness and support for women's rights, Paynter paints a more complex picture through her chosen narratives. Crucially, the inequitable geographical access to abortion, in particular, throughout the huge landmass of Canada suggests that the right to not have children in Canada is not universal. Moreover, Paynter suggests that access is also bounded by financial constraints, finite public funding, and the limited availability of inclusive clinics that prioritize healthcare for LGBTQ2S+ people.Chapter 3 considers the topic of having children; in particular, the right to reproductive technologies and freedom from forced sterilization. Paynter quickly makes clear that while many white feminists might see having and not having children as diametrically opposed, they are two equally essential parts of reproductive justice. Paynter draws attention to the Sexual Sterilization Act of 1928 that was only overturned in 1972. She describes it as part of the "genocidal colonial project" (84), a collection of laws and policies aimed at fulfilling eugenicist, neoimperial ideals of increasing production of the white "race" and promoting the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Furthermore, Paynter argues that evidence of forced sterilization of Indigenous peoples, and other physical violence and neglect, persists to the present day and must be stopped and reparations made for previous harms. Paynter then considers the complex, often-debated case of commercialized surrogacy, which she defines... (shrink)

Why do major historical events such as the Holocaust occupy the forefront of the collective consciousness, while profound moments such as the Armenian genocide, the McCarthy era, and France's role in North Africa stand distantly behind? Is it possible that history "overly remembers" some events at the expense of others? A landmark work in philosophy, Paul Ricoeur's _Memory, History, Forgetting_ examines this reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, showing how it affects both the perception of historical experience and the (...) production of historical narrative. _Memory, History, Forgetting_, like its title, is divided into three major sections. Ricoeur first takes a phenomenological approach to memory and mnemonical devices. The underlying question here is how a memory of present can be of something absent, the past. The second section addresses recent work by historians by reopening the question of the nature and truth of historical knowledge. Ricoeur explores whether historians, who can write a history of memory, can truly break with all dependence on memory, including memories that resist representation. The third and final section is a profound meditation on the necessity of forgetting as a condition for the possibility of remembering, and whether there can be something like happy forgetting in parallel to happy memory. Throughout the book there are careful and close readings of the texts of Aristotle and Plato, of Descartes and Kant, and of Halbwachs and Pierre Nora. A momentous achievement in the career of one of the most significant philosophers of our age, _Memory, History, Forgetting_ provides the crucial link between Ricoeur's _Time and Narrative_ and _Oneself as Another_ and his recent reflections on ethics and the problems of responsibility and representation. “His success in revealing the internal relations between recalling and forgetting, and how this dynamic becomes problematic in light of events once present but now past, will inspire academic dialogue and response but also holds great appeal to educated general readers in search of both method for and insight from considering the ethical ramifications of modern events.... It is indeed a master work, not only in Ricoeur’s own vita but also in contemporary European philosophy.”—_Library Journal _“Ricoeur writes the best kind of philosophy—critical, economical, and clear.”— _New York Times Book Review _. (shrink)

Even with the passage of time, the misguided motivations of highly educated, physician-participants in the genocide known as the Holocaust remain inexplicable and opaque. Typically, the physician-patient relationship inherent within the practice of medicine, has been rooted in the partnership between individuals. However, under the Third Reich, this covenant between a physician and patient was displaced by a public health agenda that was grounded in the scientific theory of eugenics and which served the needs of a polarized political system (...) that relied on this hypothesis to justify society’s racial hygiene laws. As part of the National Socialist propaganda, Adolf Hitler ominously argued that the cultural decline of Germany after World War I could largely be based on interbreeding and a “resultant drop in the racial level.” This foundational premise defined those who could be ostracized, labeled and persecuted by society, including those who were assimilated. The indoctrination and implementation of this distorted social policy required the early and sustained cooperation and leadership of the medical profession. Because National Socialism promised it could restore Germany’s power, honor and dignity, physicians embraced their special role in the repair of the state. This article will explore the imperative role, moral risks and deliberate actions of physicians who participated in the amplification process from “euthanasia” to systemic murder to medically-sanctioned genocide. A goal of this analysis will be to explore what perils today’s physicians would face if they were to experience the transitional and collective behaviors of a corrupted medical profession, or if they would, instead, have the fortitude and courage necessary to protect themselves against this collaboration. Our premise is that an awareness of history can serve as a safeguard to the conceit of political ascendency and discrimination. (shrink)

Economics plays a key role in human rights issues as decision-makers weigh the incentives associated with choosing how to use scarce resources in the context of committing or escaping human rights violence. This textbook provides an introduction to the microeconomic analysis of human rights utilizing economics as a lens through which to examine social topics including capital punishment, violence against women, asylum seeking, terrorism, child abuse, genocide, and hate. Whether analyzing the decisions made in capital punishment cases, the causes (...) and consequences of genocide, or the impact of terrorist acts on domestic and international decision-making, the science of economics provides tools and a systematic method of analysis and policy recommendation. This key text presents a method for integrating the social sciences of economics and human rights to create new opportunities for the investigation of social issues. Within each chapter, readers gain a fundamental understanding of a specific human rights issue, the decision-makers and the decision-making process involved, and the benefits and costs leading to the decisions. Experts on each issue, drawn from a variety of fields, contribute to each chapter and present first-hand accounts and different perspectives on each issue. The detailed analyses and accounts provided also explore the potential incentives involved in the prevention and termination of human rights violations. Aiming to further economic inquiry and enhance interdisciplinary research, this textbook serves as a multi-purpose guide for a range of readers. Students, researchers, and educators, as well as those working in organizations supporting victims of human rights violations and policy-makers facing human rights challenges, will find this book informative and engaging. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to reflect and comment on certain scenes from Stanley Kramer’s film Judgment at Nuremberg based in the Case Method methodology used in university lessons to teach Law and Ethics. The judgement which this film addresses is extraordinary, being one in which judges themselves were judged by other judges; as such, it presents a perfect example through which to think about the social responsibility of the legal profession with respect to the application of Law and (...) what relationship this has to broader moral and ethical considerations of the value of human rights. (shrink)

Modern scholars and bioethicists continue to learn from the Holocaust. Scholarship and history show that the authoritarian Nazi state limited and steered the development and power of professions and professional ethics during the Holocaust. Eliminationist anti-Semitism drove German professions and many professionals to join in policies and programs of mass deportation and ultimately genocidal mass murder, while also excluding many professionals from paid work. For many physicians and other medical professionals, humane and truly ethical practices were limited by constrained professional (...) autonomy and coercive state laws. Education and research in natural sciences were distorted by applications of racist eugenic policies and practices. In law schools and legal professions, professionals were rewarded as judgmental enforcers of state policies, often working with limited independent agency and in the public sphere. Mass harm and mass crimes were therefore perpetrated in accordance with Nazi laws and policies, incorporating professions and professionals into destructive practices, along with other occupational groups. (shrink)

How to explain the contradiction between, on the one hand, the decline of teaching in contemporary history, which necessarily brings about the decline of the historical event “Shoah” itself, and, on the other hand, the ever more growing attention towards the memory of the genocide of the Jews? In the past year only, ten “trains of the memory” have left Italy to take more than fifteen thousand students to Poland — thereby making our country the third country in the (...) world as for amount of visitors of holocaust sites. Under the sign of the “duty of memory” and of an approach to Shoah more and more devoted to human rights and to moral education, most teachers prefer to focus on the visit to the places of the massacre and on the testimonies of survivals, rather than on a historical and political reconstruction of the context and of the facts.Precisely because the narrator-victims are survivors of the lagers, they are the mediators between the dark of the obscene world that they were compelled to see, and the world of the listeners: they are the human visages of a universe of victims without a name, and their stories are the key for us to question our sense of responsibility. However, with no solid historical teaching, their narration elicits only a emotive participation, it provides the impression to have fulfilled a moral duty, but it remains, as a matter of fact, incomprehensible. (shrink)

Art has the power to affect our thinking, changing not only the way we view and interact with the world but also how we create it. In Art in Mind , Ernst van Alphen probes this idea of art as a commanding force with the capacity to shape our intellect and intervene in our lives. Rather than interpreting art as merely a reflection of our social experience or a product of history, van Alphen here argues that art is a historical (...) agent, or a cultural creator, that propels thought and experience forward. Examining a broad range of works, van Alphen—a renowned art historian and cultural theorist—demonstrates how art serves a socially constructive function by actually experimenting with the parameters of thought. Employing work from artists as diverse as Picasso, Watteau, Francis Bacon, Marlene Dumas, and Matthew Barney, he shows how art confronts its viewers with the "pain points" of cultural experience-genocide, sexuality, diaspora, and transcultural identity-and thereby transforms the ways in which human existence is conceived. Van Alphen analyzes how art visually "thinks" about these difficult cultural issues, tapping into an understudied interpretation of art as the realm where ideas and values are actively created, given form, and mobilized. In this way, van Alphen's book is a work of art in itself as it educates us in a new mode of thought that will forge equally new approaches and responses to the world. (shrink)

Engineers, architects, and other technological professionals designed the genocidal death machines of the Third Reich. The death camp operations were highly efficient, so these technological professionals knew what they were doing: they were, so to speak, good engineers. As an educator at a technological university, I need to explain to my students—future engineers and architects—the motivations and ethical reasoning of the technological professionals of the Third Reich. I need to educate my students in the ethical practices of this hellish regime (...) so that they can avoid the kind of ethical justifications used by the Nazi engineers. In their own professional lives, my former students should not only be good engineers in a technical sense, but good engineers in a moral sense. In this essay, I examine several arguments about the ethical judgments of professionals in Nazi Germany, and attempt a synthesis that can provide a lesson for contemporary engineers and other technological professionals. How does an engineer avoid the error of the Nazi engineers in their embrace of an evil ideology underlying their technological creations? How does an engineer know that the values he embodies through his technological products are good values that will lead to a better world? This last question, I believe, is the fundamental issue for the understanding of engineering ethics. (shrink)

This article considers aspects of a development aid that provides medical support to strengthen pediatric orthopedics in Rwanda. We present part of the Afriquia foundation work, a nonprofit foundation from Poland involved in supporting the medical sector in Rwanda as a sign of global solidarity and the human right to health. The main foundation's activity is the treatment of orthopedic problems among Rwandan citizens. We present a case study of two children under the care of the Afiquia foundation. 11‐year‐old Seraphine (...) treated due to the consequences of right tibia osteomyelitis and 11‐year‐old Lavi suffering from osteogenesis imperfecta. Both children were treated surgically in Poland due to Rwanda's lack of treatment possibilities. After the applied treatment, Seraphine walks correctly without crutches and can attend school and thrive among her peers. Lavi has not sustained any fragility fracture since the surgery in Poland. He is healthy and constantly ongoing his rehabilitation including gait training. The described cases initiated development aid in Rwanda, supplying hospitals with orthopedic implants and training medical staff. The growing number of humanitarian crises across the globe and the people affected requires increasing organizations involved in providing relief. The emphasis should be on global education, aiming to make the recipients reflect and prepare them to face humanitarian crises. (shrink)

This paper analyzes how Transitional Justice mechanisms might be deployed to redress injustices resulting from the perpetration of ecocide. It develops the notion of ecocide as social deathas a class of environmental harms severe enough to trigger a Transitional Justice response. If a state authorizes ecological destruction in a way that demonstrates wanton disregard for the cultures intimately connected to those ecosystems, then it has violated core liberal principles of respect for pluralism. Transitional Justice can be effectively utilized in overcoming (...) these harms to transform societies from ones that tolerate grave forms of environmental destruction to eco-friendly states that further environmentalist aims. This paper explores how the four kinds of transitional justice mechanisms can aid in abating and mitigating environmental problems: (1) punitive justice mechanisms (criminal trials, lustration, and sanctions); (2) reparative justice mechanisms(reparations, rehabilitation, memorialization, apologies, and guarantees of non-repetition); (3) truth-oriented mechanisms(truth commissions, reports, and education programs); and (4) institutional reform mechanisms(changing laws and amending constitutions). (shrink)

A threat to humanity portending the end of our species lurks in the cold recesses of space. Our only hope is an eleven-year-old boy. Celebrating the long-awaited release of the movie adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s novel about highly trained child geniuses fighting a race of invading aliens, this collection of original essays probes key philosophical questions raised in the narrative, including the ethics of child soldiers, politics on the internet, and the morality of war and genocide. Original essays (...) dissect the diverse philosophical questions raised in Card’s best-selling sci-fi classic, winner of the Nebula and Hugo Awards and which has been translated in 29 languages Publication coincides with planned release of major motion picture adaptation of _Ender’s Game_ starring Asa Butterfield and Harrison Ford Treats a wealth of core contemporary issues in morality and ethics, including child soldiers, the best kind of education and the use and misuse of global communications for political purposes A stand-out addition to the Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture series. (shrink)

The associative chain between the personality of Joseph Stalin and his role in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 remains stable among the historical consciousness of Russians from the end of the war until now. Traditionally, high schools devote a large amount of time to study the history of the war, including a range of the events dedicated to remembering the war. As a result, a stable and positive attitude toward the war and its significance to the Russian nation has (...) been achieved, while the attitude toward Stalin remains ambivalent, ranging from assessing him as a perpetrator, who initiated genocide and terror against Soviet people, to national hero and great ruler, who led the country to victory. In 2017, the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation introduced three new national history textbooks based on the single goal of teaching Russian history in schools, but in practice has actually returned history back to a uniform standardized historical education across the country, similar to the Soviet education system. In this regard, the historical comparative research based on content analysis of Soviet, Russian, and newly issued textbooks is deemed topical and aimed to track the evolution of the image of Stalin and to understand how the historical representation of Stalin and his war policy has changed over the last 70 years in school education. There is also the goal of identifying the main reasons for the diverse attitudes toward Stalin currently inherent in different generations and rooted in stable ambivalent assessments of his war policy among Soviet and post-Soviet Russian society. (shrink)

Blurb: Thoreau wrote that we have professors of philosophy but no philosophers. Can't we have both? Why doesn't philosophy hold a more central place in our lives? Why should it? Eloquently opposing the analytic thrust of philosophy in academia, noted pluralist philosopher Bruce Wilshire answers these questions and more in an effort to make philosophy more meaningful to our everyday lives. Writing in an accessible style he resurrects classic yet neglected forms of inquiring and communicating. In a series of personal (...) essays, Wilshire describes what is wrong with the current state of philosophy in American higher education, namely the cozy but ultimately suffocating confinements of professionalism. He reclaims the role of the philosopher as one who, like Socrates, would goad us out of self-contentedness into a more authentic way of being and knowing. Table of Contents Preface 1. Nihilistic Consequences of Analytic Philosophy 2. ” The Ph.D. Octopus”: William James's Prophetic Grasp of the Failures of Academic Professionalism 3. The Pluralist Rebellion in the American Philosophical Association 4. Phenomenology in the United States 5. Nature or Nurture?: The Significance of Indigenous Thought 6. Conceptual Problems in Grasping Genocide 7. Henry Bugbee: Philospher of Intimacy 8. William James on the ” Spiritual” 9. Looking for Bek Acknowledgments Index. (shrink)

Launched in 1971, _Adolescent Psychiatry,_ in the words of founding coeditors Sherman C. Feinstein, Peter L. Giovacchinni, and Arthur A. Miller, promised "to explore adolescence as a process... to enter challenging and exciting areas that may have profound effects on our basic concepts." Further, they promised "a series that will provide a forum for the expression of ideas and problems that plague and excite so many of us working in this enigmatic but fascinating field." For over two decades, Adolescent Psychiatry (...) has fulfilled this promise. The repository of a wealth of original studies by preeminent clinicians, developmental researchers, and social scientists specializing in this stage of life, the series has become an essential resource for all mental health practitioners working with youth. With volume 22, the editorship of _Adolescent Psychiatry_ passes to Aaron E. Esman, a distinguished clinician and educator whose wide-ranging sensibilities gain expression in a collection rich in clinical, developmental, and scholarly insight. Encompassing developmental topics timely clinical issues, historical commentaries, and a special section on "ambient genocide and adolescence," volume 22 ably meets the needs of professional and scholarly readers interested in this vitally important stage of life. (shrink)

In 1986, Elie Wiesel received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his victory over “the powers of death and degradation, and to support the struggle of good against evil in the world.” Soon after, he and his wife, Marion, created the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. A project at the heart of the Foundation’s mission is its Ethics Prize—a remarkable essay-writing contest through which thousands of students from colleges across the country are encouraged to confront ethical issues of personal (...) significance. The Ethics Prize has grown exponentially over the past twenty years. “Of all the projects our Foundation has been involved in, none has been more exciting than this opportunity to inspire young students to examine the ethical aspect of what they have learned in their personal lives and from their teachers in the classroom,” writes Elie Wiesel. Readers will find essays on Bosnia, the genocide in Rwanda, sweatshops and globalization, and the political obligations of the mothers of Argentina’s Disappeared. Other essays tell of a white student who joins a black gospel choir, a young woman who learns to share in Ladakh, and the outsize implications of reporting on something as small as a cracked windshield. Readers will be fascinated by the ways in which essays on conflict, conscience, memory, illness, and God overlap and resonate with one another. These essays reflect those who are “sensitive to the sufferings and defects that confront a society yearning for guidance and eager to hear ethical voices,” writes Elie Wiesel. “And they are a beacon for what our schools must realize as an essential component of a true education.”. (shrink)

Calls for civility have been on the rise recently, as have presumptions that civility is both an academic virtue and a prerequisite for rational engagement and discussion among those who disagree. One imperative of epistemic decolonization is to unmask the ways that familiar conceptual resources are produced within and function to uphold a settler colonial epistemological framework. I argue that rhetorical deployments of ‘civility’ uphold settler colonialism by obscuring the systematic production of state violence against marginalized populations and Indigenous peoples, (...) relying on the colonial conceptual framework of ‘civilized’ vs ‘savage’, and excusing death-promoting rhetoric under the guise of liberal disagreement. (shrink)

One of the important determinants of development during the transition to adulthood is the undertaking of social roles characteristic of adults, also in the area of finishing formal education, which usually coincides with beginning fulltime employment. In the study discussed in this paper, it has been hypothesized that continuing full-time education above the age of 26, a phenomenon rarely observed in Poland, can be considered as an unpunctual event that may be connected with difficulties in the process of (...) identity formation. Relationships between identity dimensions and identity statuses, and age and educational context were analyzed. 693 individuals aged 19-35 took part in the study. The participants attended three types of educational institutions: full-time university studies, part-time university studies, and full-time post-secondary school. Among the students of full-time university studies predictable dependencies, also in respect of highlevels of indicators of identity crisis and a high frequency of diffused identity occurrence, were observed. Such dependencies were not found in the group of full-time post-secondary school students. (shrink)