This chapter discusses intergenerational class mobility, which is the extent to which sons — and even daughters — follow in their father's footsteps. It asks how ‘open’ India is, and whether it is becoming more ‘open’ with greater equality of opportunity as it slowly modernises. The discussion is limited to the patterns of intergenerational mobility of men and women who are actually in paid employment.

Abstract“Shut the door,” the chief resident said to me. While I was green enough at the beginning of my clinical clerkships to believe that most of my medical education would happen at the bedside, at that moment, I was learning another important fact: a large part of my ethical education was going to happen behind the closed doors of a call room. The health care team was polluted by a pervasive atmosphere of frustration, as silent but tangible as a thick (...) layer of fog, that obscured the patient's ability to evaluate the consequences of the choice that lay before her. The attending did not permit, let alone create, an environment that provided room for dissent.Institutions should encourage the leaders of clinical education to foster an emotionally safer learning environment in which honest moral dialogue may occur without fear of repercussions. If students cannot learn to apply the principles of ethics actively throughout their clerkships, it will be much harder to do so when they practice independently, and ultimately, patient care will suffer. Conversely, when students and trainees are empowered by their teachers, patient care improves. (shrink)

Although current literature about the “cure versus care” issue tends to promote a patient-centered approach, the disease-centered approach remains the prevailing model in practice. The perceived dichotomy between the two approaches has created a barrier that could make it difficult for medical students and physicians to integrate psychosocial aspects of patient care into the prevailing disease-based model. This article examines the influence of the formal and hidden curricula on the perception of these two approaches and finds that the hidden curriculum (...) perpetuates the notion that “cure” and “care” based approaches are dichotomous despite significant changes in formal curricula that promote a more integrated approach. The authors argue that it is detrimental for clinicians to view the two approaches as oppositional rather than complementary and attempt to give recommendations on how the influence of the hidden curriculum can be reduced to get a both-cure-and-care-approach, rather than an either-cure-or-care-approach. (shrink)

Our moral compass is not the only thing that compels us to provide compassionate health care, which also improves patient outcomes and patient and provider satisfaction. In the current era of increasing medical complexity, provider burnout, and value-based reimbursement, health care systems struggle to durably improve their providers’ compassion in the provision of care. A religious retreat curriculum for leaders at OSF HealthCare, in Illinois and Michigan, has led to a significant, long-term increase among employees in their compassion toward patients, (...) colleagues, and self. (shrink)

Demanding work-life and excessive workload, the conflict between professional and personal lives, problems with patients and those related to the occurrence of death and high risk for their own life are a few factors causing burnout, disengagement, and dissatisfaction in the professional lives of healthcare professionals. The situation worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is of utmost importance to find effective solutions to mitigate the stress and anxiety adversely affecting the mental well-being and professional lives of HCPs. This study was (...) designed to examine the efficacy of Sudarshan Kriya Yoga for alleviating work exhaustion, improving Professional Fulfillment, and influencing positivity among HCPs during COVID-19. In a comparative observation before the intervention, after the intervention, and 30 days after the intervention in the Experimental Group and Control Group, it was found that immediately after SKY, HCPs experienced a significant improvement in Professional Fulfillment, work exhaustion, positive affect, and negative affect compared to the Control Group. The effect of SKY continued until Day 30 for Professional Fulfillment and had positive and negative effects. Findings suggest that SKY elevated Professional Fulfillment among HCPs during the COVID-19 pandemic and reduced their work exhaustion and the negative effect on their mental health. SKY can aid HCPs in maintaining their well-being when faced with unprecedented challenges. (shrink)

This paper argues that in social circumstances deformed by persistent anti-black racisms, invisibility does not necessarily constitute a failure of recognition or acknowledgment by others. Rather, it comes forth as a protective shield, to resist reductive and objectifying forms of seeing that often result in violence. But such invisibility has its limits. In this paper, I read Incendiary Art (2017) by Patricia Smith, a collection of poems set in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, to (...) interrogate both the limits of such protective invisibility, and the responsibility of the reader to acknowledge the potential violence of their own gaze. I examine the emancipatory political value of the poetic as showing a way towards a transformative engagement with others as ‘who’ they are, and subsequently towards a mutual co-constitution that is at the very heart of actualising a democratic political plurality. (shrink)

In the fight against racism, philosophy has to interrogate caste in its own histories and current decolonial consensus. Caste has been evading its interrogation as the oldest race theory and racist practice, which continue to oppress the lower-caste peoples who constitute the majority population of the Indian subcontinent. Caste and race are species of the hypophysics of man, which consecrates scaled intrinsic value in human nature through the notion of “being born as” by “being born to.” They are analogues in (...) having the same denigrate-dominate function of exploiting by including as born inferior. However, caste and race are also homologues since the hypophysics of caste has been at the origins of the hypophysics of race from at least the eighteenth century, culminating in the “Aryan doctrine” of the Nazis, now being revived. Caste was the empirical, conceptual, and textual resource for Europeans as it showed that large groups could be dominated as well as excluded through the self-designated superiority, supplied by the Brahminical texts, of the oppressing group. Rather than a colonial construct, caste is the oldest racism, which in colonial times devised new calypsologies—ways to mask itself against rising anticaste thought and politics. Postcolonial and subaltern theories disguise caste’s racism as “religion,” “culture,” and subaltern subjectivity, while some sociologists have denigrated Dalit scholarship as unacademic and emotional. The homologies of caste are still dangerously regnant today. (shrink)

BackgroundA requisite for ethical human subjects research is that participation should be informed and voluntary. Participation during the informed consent process by way of asking questions is an indicator of the extent to which consent is informed.AimsThe aims of this study were to assess the extent to which parents providing consent for children's participation in an observational tuberculosis (TB) research study in India actively participated during the informed consent discussion, and to identify correlates of that participation.MethodsIn an observational cohort study (...) of tuberculosis in infants in South India, field supervisors who were responsible for obtaining informed consent noted down questions asked during the informed consent discussions for 4,382 infants who were enrolled in the study. These questions were post-coded by topic. Bivariate and multivariate analysis was conducted to examine factors associated with asking at least one question during the informed consent process.ResultsIn total, 590 out of 4,382 (13.4%) parents/guardians asked any question during the informed consent process. We found that the likelihood of parents asking questions during the informed consent process was significantly associated with education level of either parent both parents being present, and location.ConclusionsThe findings have implications for planning the informed consent process in a largely rural setting with low levels of literacy. Greater effort needs to be directed towards developing simple participatory communication materials for the informed consent process. Furthermore, including both parents in a discussion about a child's participation in a research study may increase the extent to which consent is truly informed. Finally, continuing efforts need to be made to improve the communication skills of research workers with regard to explaining research processes and putting potential research participants at ease. (shrink)

The practice of paying prisoners to for their participation in research has long been debated, and the controversy is reflected in the differing policies in the U.S. prison systems. Empirical study of financial payments to inmates who enroll in research has focused on whether this practice is coercive. In this study, we examined whether monetary incentives have the potential to be unduly influential among fifty HIV‐positive prisoners. The majority of prisoners surveyed believed that inmates should receive some compensation for their (...) involvement in research and disagreed with statements suggesting that the offer of payment constitutes undue influence. However, a sense of potentially being susceptible to undue influence was significantly higher among participants who had spent a longer time in prison and had less education. Overall, our findings suggest that most prisoners feel that they would be able to make a decision about research enrollment that is not solely based on an offer of monetary payment. (shrink)

Is there a philosophical nationalism? Reading Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation and its use by the Nazis, Derrida concluded that all nationalisms are philosophical and onto-theological as they are posited beyond race, biology, and nature. However, Fichte’s text reveals a specific form of racism that insists on biology and nature. Fichte’s racism is a species of “hypophysics,” a consecration of nature as value. His theory of language is simultaneously biological and spiritual, these two aspects flowing from a single geistige (...) Naturgesetz (spiritual-natural-law) and determining the hypophysical unity of language, community and “philosophy” (as he defined it). The logic of such a hypophysics is misrecognized and left unaddressed in the conventional categories of “naturalism” and “biologism.” Further, hypophysical-logic is not onto-theo-logic (in Heidegger’s definition). This imposes new questions for the history and future of philosophy: how does hypophysics enter philosophy; can there be philosophy without hypophysics and its attendant racisms? (shrink)

Freud’s late works established the schema of a more or less inexorable civilizational course built around one drive—the death drive—despite his emphatic insistence on a dual structure of two drives. This schema became influential for Critical Theory and in a more subterranean way, also for decolonial thought, and has been widely invoked during the pandemic. It indicates the extent to which drive, destruction, and mastery have consolidated into a, which not only fails to be dislodged by but even informs Derrida’s (...) readings of Freud. Instead, we have to be attentive to the play of homology in Freud as of life, psyche, and civilization, as archaic inheritance. Freudian homology distinguishes itself from what Derrida called “genealogical drive.” The Freudian assumptions in this regard need to be addressed in a step beyond which works with a concept of origin—as its own interruption—that can neither comprehend nor deconstruct the concept of origin as a single and perpetually active homological power as is to be found in Freud. (shrink)

The authors of this insightful and urgent collection both use the metaphor of evil as a virus or contagion and conceptualize the COVID-19 virus as a manifestation of evil to reconsider the purpose of philosophy in and for a pandemic.

This paper uses Castoriadis’s idea of the imaginary and Agnes Heller’s conceptualization of modernity as an interplay of the historical and technological imaginations, to examine how modernity engages with the idea of development to foster a particular vision of the future as always in progression. It uses the examples of Tasmania and Kerala, in Australia and India, respectively, as case studies which challenge the dominant perception of development as a linear and progressive ideology of growth that translates into ‘the development (...) of productive forces and the rational mastery of nature’. The case studies also show how, despite the radically different paths through modernity, it is the same logics of modernity that are at work in both locations. (shrink)

The emphasis in human pluripotent stem cell (hPSC) technologies has shifted from cell therapy to in vitro disease modelling and drug screening. This review examines why this shift has occurred, and how current technological limitations might be overcome to fully realise the potential of hPSCs. Details are provided for all disease‐specific human induced pluripotent stem cell lines spanning a dozen dysfunctional organ systems. Phenotype and pharmacology have been examined in only 17 of 63 lines, primarily those that model neurological and (...) cardiac conditions. Drug screening is most advanced in hPSC‐cardiomyocytes. Responses for almost 60 agents include examples of how careful tests in hPSC‐cardiomyocytes have improved on existing in vitro assays, and how these cells have been integrated into high throughput imaging and electrophysiology industrial platforms. Such successes will provide an incentive to overcome bottlenecks in hPSC technology such as improving cell maturity and industrial scalability whilst reducing cost. (shrink)

Are idioms stored in memory in ways that preserve their surface form or language or are they represented amodally? We examined this question using an inci- dental cued recall paradigm in which two word idiomatic expressions were presented to adult bilinguals proficient in Russian and English. Stimuli included phrases with idiomat- ic equivalents in both languages (e.g. “empty words/пycтыe cлoвa”) or in one language only (English—e.g. “empty suit/пycтoй кocтюм” or Russian—e.g. “empty sound/пycтoй звyк”), or in neither language (e.g. “empty rain/пycтoй (...) дoждь”). If idioms are stored in a language-specific format, then phrases with idiomatic equivalents in both languages would have dual representation, and should therefore be more easily recalled than phrases with idiomatic meaning in only one language. This result was obtained. As such, the findings support the dual-coding theory of memory and are also compatible with models of the bilingual lexicon that include language tags or nodes. (shrink)

The experience of embarrassment was explored in two experiments comparing monolingual and bilingual speakers from cultures varying in the degree of elabo- ration of the embarrassment lexicon. In Experiment 1, narratives in English or Korean depicting three types of embarrassing predicaments were to be rated on their embarrassability and humorousness by Korean-English bilinguals, Korean monolinguals, and Euro-American monolinguals. All groups judged certain predicaments (involving social gaffes) to be the most embarrassing. However, significant group and language differences occurred in judgments of (...) the inten- sity of embarrassment and amusement judgments evoked. Euro-Americans ex- hibited higher overall levels of amusement than the two Korean groups who, in turn, reported higher levels of embarrassment, particularly for certain predica- ment types and contexts (ingroup members present). Further, for the bilinguals, inept performance predicaments in English were judged more embarrassing than those in Korean, whereas all predicament types were judged more amusing when framed with English emotion labels. Bilinguals also appeared to show a heightened embarrassability relative to both monolingual groups. Experiment 2 found lexical selection differences in open-ended responses to embarrassing predicaments depicted in each language, with Euro-Americans preferring to give justifications or use humor to minimize the embarrassment and Korean-English bilinguals preferring to give apologies or say nothing. The findings are interpret- ed to reflect the influence of culturally-mediated schemas guiding the activation and processing of emotion vocabulary. (shrink)

Mainstream psychological research has been characterized as androcentric in its construction of males as the norm. Does an androcentric bias also characterize the professional visibility of psychologists? We examined this issue for cognitive psychology, where the gender distribution in doctoral degrees has been roughly equal for several decades. Our investigation revealed that, across all indicators surveyed, male cognitive psychologists are more visible than their female counterparts: they are over-represented in professional society governance, as editors-in-chief of leading journals in the field, (...) as Fellows in professional societies, and as recipients of prestigious senior level awards. Taken together, our findings indicate that a gender parity in doctoral degrees in cognitive psychology does not translate into a parity in professional visibility. We discuss a variety of potential reasons for the observed gender gap and suggest that, without attention to gendered structures of status and power, as noted by Shields, existing gender hierarchies may persist and be reproduced. (shrink)

Unlike other writing systems that are readily classifiable as alphabetic or syllabic in their structure, the Indic Devanagari script (of which Hindi is an example) has properties of both syllabic and alphabetic writing systems. Whereas Devanagari consonants are written in a linear left-to-right order, vowel signs are positioned nonlinearly above, below, or to either side of the consonants. This fact results in certain words in Hindi for which, in a given syllable, the vowel precedes the consonant in writing but follows (...) it in speech. The current research exploited this property of the script to examine when the disparity between spatial and temporal sequenc- ing would incur a processing cost and the implications of the findings from naming speed, accuracy, and writing order for the level at which words in Devanagari are segmented. The results support a partly phonemic and partly syllabic level of segmentation, consistent with the structural hybridity of the script. (shrink)

Finding something humorous is intrinsically rewarding and may facilitate emotion regulation, but what creates humour has been underexplored. The present experimental study examined humour generated under controlled conditions with varying social, affective, and cognitive factors. Participants listed five ways in which a set of concept pairs (e.g. MONEY and CHOCOLATE) were similar or different in either a funny way (intentional humour elicitation) or a “catchy” way (incidental humour elicitation). Results showed that more funny responses were produced under the incidental condition, (...) and particularly more for affectively charged than neutral concepts, for semantically unrelated than related concepts, and for responses highlighting differences rather than similarities between concepts. Further analyses revealed that funny responses showed a relative divergence in output dominance of the properties typically associated with each concept in the pair (that is, funny responses frequently highlighted a property high in output dominance for one concept but simultaneously low in output dominance for the other concept); by contrast, responses judged not funny did not show this pattern. These findings reinforce the centrality of incongruity resolution as a key cognitive ingredient for some pleasurable emotional elements arising from humour and demonstrate how it may operate within the context of humour generation. (shrink)

“Humble” and “business school” are not two words you might associate together, but we can address grand challenges only if business school education instills epistemic humility through reflexivity. We hope that this call-to-action challenges educators to consider how we develop future business leaders who are sensitized to the communities around them, open to tackling the range of challenges that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) present to all of society.

Purpose Google commands approximately 70 per cent of search market share worldwide, resulting in businesses investing heavily in search engine advertising on Google to target potential customers. Recently, Google changed the way in which content and ads were displayed on the search engine results page. This reshuffling of content and ads is expected to affect the advertisers who advertise on Google and/or use it to drive traffic to their websites. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of (...) these changes on various stakeholders. Design/methodology/approach Data have been collected from various sources on the internet including blogs and discussion forums. Netnography has been used as it allows a detailed evaluation of the consumers’ needs, wants and choices in a virtual space. Findings The average cost-per-click for ads on the top positions is expected to increase. Advertisers whose ads usually occupy the lower positions would be adversely affected. To counter this, more emphasis should be placed on ad extensions and on product listing ads. In addition, organizations would benefit from increased efforts on search engine optimization. Practical implications A variety of coping strategies have been developed that can help marketers to successfully navigate through the change, including the use of ad extensions and the use of product listing ads. Originality/value This practice-focused paper offers guidelines for digital marketers to use sponsored search more effectively as part of their arsenal in light of some important changes recently made by Google. The potential of netnography as a research methodology has also been expanded by using it in a novel setting and in drawing up actionable insights. (shrink)

In her article, around the vision of Obiora Ike, the author presents how multicultural education is made possible, in a world where, as university education functions as a fantastic bridge builder, it is a good catalyst for social reforms and equality. University is a place for dynamical leadership at all levels and for a peaceful engagement along the advancement of the digital revolution and reliance on information technology.

Two meta-analyses of 66 behavioral studies examined variables influencing functional cerebral lateralization of each language of brain-intact bilingual adults. Functional lateralization was found to be primarily influenced by age of onset of bilingualism: bilinguals who acquired both languages by 6 years of age showed bilateral hemispheric involvement for both languages, whereas those who acquired their second language after age 6 showed left hemisphere dominance for both languages. Moreover, among late bilinguals, left hemisphere involvement was found to be greater for those (...) less proficient in their second language, those whose second language was English, and for studies involving dichotic listening paradigms; early bilinguals instead showed bilateral involvement in every condition. Implications of the observed differences in lateralization between early and late bilinguals are explored for existing theories of bilingualism and for neurocognitive models of brain functional organization of language. (shrink)

Purpose This research aims to study the coping experience of visually impaired bankers in India after they have received reasonable accommodation from their employers, that is, the work process or environment has been suitably modified to ensure a barrier-free environment for them. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 12 VI bankers working with public sector banks in India. A phenomenological approach was adopted during data analysis. Findings Despite the provision of reasonable accommodations, VI employees often find it difficult (...) to fulfill their job responsibilities. This is on account of extensive paperwork required for completion of their jobs and the partially accessible information systems available to them. As a result, these VI employees are found resorting to workarounds to carry out their jobs, with the nature of workarounds adopted varying with the type and extent of visual impairment. Furthermore, it is observed that VI employees require social support not only from their superiors and peers but also from their subordinates and customers to carry out their tasks. Research limitations/implications Data collection was done through snowball sampling which could have resulted in sampling bias. Due to confidentiality issues, observation of workarounds in practice by VI employees could not be carried out as part of the study. Originality/value The study contributes to the literature on integration of persons with disabilities by examining their coping experience after provision of reasonable accommodations. It emphasizes the role of workarounds, an under-studied area in PwD integration, as well as support of other stakeholders in the experience. (shrink)

Oceanic languages typically make a grammatical contrast between expres- sions of alienable and inalienable possession. Moreover, further distinctions are made in the alienable category but not in the inalienable category. The present research tests the hypothesis that there is a good motivation for such a development in the former case. As English does not have a grammaticalized distinction between alienable and inalienable possession, it provides a good testing ground. Three studies were conducted. In Study 1, participants were asked to write (...) down the first interpretation that came to mind for possessive phrases, some of which contained inherently relational possessums, while o thers contained possessums that are not inherently relational. Phrases with non-relational possessums elicited a broader range of interpretations and a lower consistency of a given interpretation across possessor modifiers than those with relational possessums. Study 2 demonstrated that users assign a default interpretation to a possessive phrase containing a relational possessum even when another reading is plausible. Study 3, a corpus-based analysis of possessive phrase use, showed that phrases with relational possessums have a narrower range of interpretations than those with other possessums. Taken together, the findings strongly suggest that grammatical distinctions between different types of alienable possession are motivated. (shrink)

Gandhi’s notion of passive-resistance is critical in two ways and defines swaraj and swadeshi, leading to his assertion that India alone is the land of redemption for the world afflicted with modern civilization, “the sheet-anchor of our hope”. “Sound at the foundation”, “India remains as it was before”, while the world speeds on, “usurp[ing] the function of Godhead” and indulg[ing] in novel experiments”. This paper aims at elaborating Gandhi’s definition of nature in terms of the scalar, speed, as found in (...) Hind Swaraj and other writings in order to demonstrate that India as hind swaraj is critical nation. (shrink)

Trisomy 13 and 18 are rare chromosomal abnormalities associated with high morbidity and mortality. Improved survival rates and increased prevalence of aggressive medical intervention have resulted in families and physicians holding different perspectives regarding the appropriate management of children with T 13/18. Families were invited for open-ended interviews regarding their experiences with the medical care of a child with T 13/18 over the past 5 years. Seven of 33 invited families were surveyed; those who had spent more than 40 days (...) in the hospital were most likely to accept the invitation. Grounded theory technique was used to analyze the interviews. This method elicited four key themes regarding family perspectives on children with T 13/18: they are unique and significant, they transform the lives of others, their families can feel overwhelmed and powerless in the medical setting, their families are motivated to “carry the torch” and tell their story. Families also emphasized ways in which Internet support groups can provide both positive and negative perspectives. The ensuing discussion explores the difficulties of parents and physicians in forecasting the impact that T 13/18 will have on families and emphasizes a narrative approach to elicit a map of the things that matter to them. The paper concludes that while over-reliance on dire prognostic data can alienate families, examining the voice, character and plot of patient stories can be a powerful way for physicians to foster shared decision-making with families. (shrink)

PurposeThis paper presumes that a public policy document must aim at protecting human rights. The question being raised is- what kind of moral reasoning or grounding can we afford to the idea that human rights are important for the whole framework of public policy. The paper aims at looking at the moral and political philosophy of Immanuel Kant as we find it in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and the Metaphysics of Morals for providing this background.MethodThe paper provides (...) an exegetical account of some of the key concepts in Kant’s moral philosophy and the application of these in socio-political contexts.Result and DiscussionThe processes involved in the framing of the document, the document itself, as well as the persons framing the document must aspire to respect and protect human rights. The implication itself rests on the principle that a moral end cannot be achieved by immoral means and protecting human rights is a moral end that all societies must seek to achieve. Hence not only the end, which in this case is the policy document itself, but the means, i.e., the processes of framing the documents and intentions of those responsible and accountable for it, must also be moral. (shrink)

Respecting patients’ rights is a fundamental aspect of providing quality healthcare. The present investigation attempts to explore the awareness among patients about their rights in a coastal township in India. A questionnaire-based cross-sectional study was carried out among 215 patients admitted to the wards of a tertiary care teaching hospital in Mangalore. Awareness among patients regarding their rights varied for various issues and ranged between 48.4 and 87.4 %. Awareness about patients’ rights was independent of gender, socio-economic and educational status. (...) Doctors were found to be the most common source of information for patient’s about their rights in the study. Doctors must conform to the relevant legislations and involve patients in all aspects of healthcare. There is a need to increase awareness among patients about their rights to ensure informed decisions and better health care services. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand the dark side of blockchain technology (BCT) adoption in small and mid-size enterprises. The focus of the authors is to decode the intricate relationship among the selected variables missing in the existing literature. Design/methodology/approach A focused group approach is initiated by the authors to identify the barriers. Total interpretive structural modeling, Matrice d'impacts croisés multiplication appliquée á un classment, that is, matrix multiplication applied to classification and decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (...) are used to analyze the complex relationships among identified barriers. Findings This study finds that implementation of BCT reduces maintenance cost by withdrawing manual effort, as BCT has better capability to quantify the internal status of the system (observability characteristic). The observability characteristic of BCT provides high compatibility to the system. This study also finds that the compatibility of BCT with the organization reduces implementation cost and facilitates project management. The findings of this study recommend analyzing maintenance cost and compatibility of BCT before implementing it. Small and mid-size enterprises can select complex BCT depending on the sophistication level of IT usage and IT project management capabilities. Research limitations/implications This study comes with various limitations, where the model developed by the authors may not be conclusive, as it is based exclusively on expert opinion. The samples collected may not help in validating the model statistically. Though the model has its limitations, it can still be considered as a nascent initiative for further investigation using structural equation modeling. Originality/value The outcomes of the theoretical and managerial contributions of the study can be categorized into three levels. This study can be used both by the industrialists and researchers to understand the barriers and the recovery methods thereafter. Suggestions that serve as future directives are also discussed by the authors. (shrink)

Recent scholarship on the social history of health and medicine in colonial India has moved beyond enclavist or hegemonic aspects of imperial medicine and has rather focused on the role of Indian intermediaries and the fractured nature of colonial hegemony. Drawing inspiration from this scholarship, the article highlights the significance of the Indian subordinates in the lock hospital system in the nineteenth century Madras Presidency. This study focuses on a class of Indian subordinates called the “gomastah”, who were employed to (...) detect clandestine prostitution in Madras to control the spread of venereal disease. It also underlines the role of other native and non-native subordinates such as Dhais, Chowdranies and Matrons, the ways in which they became indispensable for the smoother operation of the Contagious Diseases Act and the lock hospitals on a day-to-day basis. By emphasising how Indian subordinates were able to bring in caste biases within colonial governmentality, adding another layer to the colonial prejudices and xenophobia against the native population, it underlines the fact that there was not a one-way appropriation or facilitation of the coloniser’s knowledge or biases by the colonised intermediaries. Rather, it argues for an interaction between them, and highlights the complexities of caste hierarchies and prejudice within the everyday colonial governmentality. Moreover, the article focuses on the consequent chaos and inherent power struggle between different factions of colonial staff. (shrink)

Two meta-analyses were conducted to examine two potential sources of spatial orientation biases in human profile drawings by brain-intact individuals. The first examined profile facing direction as function of hand used to draw. The second examined profile facing direction in relation to directional scanning biases related to reading/writing habits. Results of the first meta-analysis, based on 27 study samples with 4171 participants, showed that leftward facing of profiles (from the viewer's perspective) was significantly associated with using the right hand to (...) draw. The reading/writing direction meta-analysis, based on 10 study samples with 1552 participants, suggested a modest relationship between leftward profile facing and primary use of a left-to-right reading/writing direction. These findings suggest that biomechanical and cultural factors jointly influence hand movement preferences and in turn the direction of facing of human profile drawings. -/- . (shrink)

Evidentiality refers to the linguistic marking of the nature/directness of source of evidence of an asserted event. Some languages (e.g., Turkish) mark source obligatorily in their grammar, while other languages (e.g., English) provide only lexical options for conveying source. The present study examined whether or under what conditions firsthand source information is relied on more than nonfirsthand sources in establishing discourse coherence. Turkish- and English-speaking participants read a series of somewhat incongruous two-sentence narratives and were to come up with a (...) way of completing each narrative so that it would form a coherent story. Each narrative contrasted two source types (firsthand vs. hearsay, firsthand vs. inference, or inference vs. hearsay) and two information types (general vs. particular information) each presented first or second. Analysis of story completions showed greater overall reliance on firsthand information when it was presented second and referred to a particular event. When the firsthand source occurred first and the particular event occurred second, the latter was favored, especially by Turkish participants. Taken together, the findings suggest that evidentiality interacts with information type in establishing discourse coherence and that both firsthand and particular information are relied on more when presented later rather than earlier in discourse. (shrink)