The human body has come to be seen as forever susceptible to both external and internal hazards, which in many circumstances require immediate, heroic, and expensive intervention. In response to this, there has been a shift from a treatment‐based healthcare model to one of prevention wherein nurses play an integral role by identifying and assessing risks for individuals, communities, and populations. This paper uses Deborah Lupton’s outline of the spectrum of risk and applies the theoretical works of Foucault and Plato (...) to demonstrate the means by which nurses maintain social order by identifying and counselling risk takers. It also utilizes the work of Deleuze and Guattari to illustrate how Plato’s framework for creating social order through the creation of the good citizen can be viewed as a micro‐fascist system, which has been adopted wholeheartedly by preventative health professionals. The goal of this paper is to present an alternate understanding of risk to provide nurses and other healthcare professionals with a non‐traditional appreciation of certain aspects of their practice as researchers and clinicians. (shrink)

Philosophers are accustomed to thinking about human existence as finite and deathbound. Anne O'Byrne focuses instead on birth as a way to make sense of being alive. Building on the work of Heidegger, Dilthey, Arendt, and Nancy, O'Byrne discusses how the world becomes ours and how meaning emerges from our relations to generations past and to come. Themes such as creation, time, inheritance, birth and action, embodiment, biological determinism, and cloning anchor this sensitive and powerful analysis. O'Byrne's (...) thinking advances and deepens important discussions at the intersections of feminism, continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and social and political thought. (shrink)

There is a tension between present and future at the forefront of anarchist thought: if we reject authority, how can we bear the authority we inevitably have over those who come after us? This is not a problem exclusive to anarchism, but a tension that is also embedded in every politics that strives to both promote freedom and sustain itself as the best possible structure for the realization of that freedom. While “anarchist eugenics” sounds like an oxymoron, it was a (...) theme developed in Spanish anarchist thought in the 1920s and 30s as it addressed this problem and struggled to sustain revolutionary practice. The cause of freedom and equality could be served and “the race of the poor” eliminated by sex education, free love and conscious generation. (shrink)

In this article I use Baudrillard’s claim that systems of exchange are ontologically and historically prior to systems of production, and Arendt’s understanding of birth as the arrival of something both quite familiar and quite new into the world as the starting-points for a theory of labour as relation. Such a theory has the virtue of avoiding the problem, found in Marx, Arendt and elsewhere, that labour is both a vital feature of being human and yet a drudgery that will (...) be absent from post-revolutionary society (in the case of Marx) or strictly relegated to the private realm (for Arendt). It also involves repositioning the work of social reproduction – of which women’s labour in giving birth is exemplary – as paradigmatic. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted unprecedented global disruption. For medical schools, this has manifested as examination and curricular restructuring as well as significant changes to clinical attachments. With the available evidence suggesting that medical students’ mental health status is already poorer than that of the general population, with academic stress being a chief predictor, such changes are likely to have a significant effect on these students. In addition, there is an assumption that these students are an available resource in terms (...) of volunteerism during a crisis. This conjecture should be questioned; however, as those engaging in such work without sufficient preparation are susceptible to moral trauma and adverse health outcomes. This, in conjunction with the likelihood of future pandemics, highlights the need for ‘pandemic preparedness’ to be embedded in the medical curriculum. (shrink)

For medical schools, the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated examination and curricular restructuring as well as significant changes to clinical attachments. With the available evidence suggesting that medical students’ mental health status is already poorer than that of the general population, with academic stress being a chief predictor, such changes are likely to have a significant effect on these students. This online, cross-sectional study aimed to determine the impact of COVID-19 on perceived stress levels of medical students, investigate possible contributing and alleviating (...) factors, and produce recommendations for medical schools to implement during future healthcare emergencies. The majority of respondents reported levels of stress ranging from moderate to extreme. Higher levels of stress were significantly associated with female gender and international status. A significant association was also noted between reported stress and the transition to online learning and online assessment formatting, concerns for personal health and for the health of family members. Students who reported higher stress levels were less confident in their government’s management of the crisis. Additionally, students who reported lower stress agreed highly that their medical school had an appropriate response to the crisis, had provided sufficient information regarding the crisis, that they trust their school in handling the continuing of their education and that their school had appropriate plans in place to support the continuing of education. (shrink)

Book review for 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, edited by Gail Weiss, Anne V. Murphy, and Gayle Salamon (2020).

From its earliest beginnings, political thought has grappled with the problem of those who both do and do not belong to the city, those who cannot be exactly included or excluded, that is to say, with the problem of difference. Most often this emerges first as the problem of what to do with women. Communitas is an intense engagement with central figures in the history of political thought – Augustine, Hobbes, Rousseau – but also a remarkably efficient avoidance of women (...) and difference. Even as he deals with Augustine, who cannot stop discussing begetting and desire, and Hobbes, who insists on the maternal right of nature, Esposito's attention remains fixed on the fraternal violence rather than parental sex as the founding of community, and the result is a strangely phallic work. (shrink)

Objectives To review the extant literature on HIV criminal laws, and to determine the impact of these laws on public health practice.Methods The available research on this topic was obtained and reviewed.Results The extant literature addressed three main topics: people's awareness of HIV criminal laws; people's perceptions of HIV criminal laws; and the potential effects of HIV criminal laws on people's sexual, HIV-status disclosure and healthcare-seeking practices. Within these categories, the literature demonstrated a high level of awareness of HIV criminal (...) laws, but a poor comprehension of these laws. For perceptions, on the whole, the quantitative research identified support for, while the qualitative literature indicated opposition to, these laws. Lastly, the behavioural effects of HIV criminal laws appear to be complex and non-linear.Conclusions A review of the extant literature from a public health perspective leads to the conclusion that HIV criminal laws undermine public health. (shrink)

Recently, patient safety has gained popularity in the nursing literature. While this topic is used extensively and has been analyzed thoroughly, some of the concepts upon which it relies, such as risk, have remained undertheorized. In fact, despite its considerable use, the term ‘risk’ has been largely assumed to be inherently neutral — meaning that its definition and discovery is seen as objective and impartial, and that risk avoidance is natural and logical. Such an oversight in evaluation requires that the (...) concept of risk be thoroughly analyzed as it relates to nursing practices, particularly in relation to those practices surrounding bio‐political nursing care, such as public health, as well as other more trendy nursing topics, such as patient safety. Thus, this paper applies the Evolutionary Model of concept analysis to explore ‘risk’, and expose it as one mechanism of maintaining prescribed/ proscribed social practices. Thereby, an analysis of risk results in the definitions and roles of the discipline and profession of nursing expanding from solely being dedicated to patient care, to include, in addition, its functions as a governmental body that unwittingly maintains hegemonic infrastructures. (shrink)

Recently, focus groups and qualitative interviews with nurses who provide frontline care for persons living with HIV highlighted the contentiousness surrounding the seemingly innocuous activity of counselling clients about HIV‐status disclosure, hereafter disclosure counselling. These empirical studies highlighted that while some nurses felt they should instruct clients to disclose their HIV‐positive status if HIV transmission were possible, other nurses were equally adamant that such counselling was outside the nursing scope of practice. A review of these opposing perceptions about disclosure counselling, (...) including an examination of the empirical evidence which supports each point, revealed that the dichotomous arguments needed to be nuanced. The empirical evidence about serostatus disclosure neither supported nor refuted either of these assertions; rather, it substantiated parts of each. To create this understanding, both empirical and theoretical works are used. First, the results of empirical studies about serostatus disclosure, or lack thereof and HIV transmission is presented; as part of this, Marks and Crepaz's HIV disclosure and exposure framework is examined. Second, the work of Michel Foucault on disciplinary and pastoral power is drawn from. The outcome is a nuanced understanding about the interrelationships between disclosure counselling and nursing practice and a final interpretation about what this understanding means for public health practice. (shrink)

This study tests an instructional model designed to empower students in an early childhood classroom as emerging digital storytellers. Educators can use digital storytelling to support students’ learning by encouraging them to organize and express their ideas and knowledge in an individual and meaningful way while developing voice and facility in child-computer interactions. This work also helps develop traditional communication skills, fosters collaboration, and strengthens emergent literacy practices. Students may develop enhanced communications skills by learning to organize their ideas, ask (...) questions, express opinions, and construct narratives as they interact with others and computers in the creation of digital stories. The “Emerging Digital Storytellers” instructional model focuses on social-emotional development and finding student voice through writing and digital content construction in the early childhood educational context. (shrink)

O’BYRNE P and WATTS J. Nursing Inquiry 2012 [Epub ahead of print] Include, differentiate and manage: gay male youth, stigma and healthcare utilizationIn Canada, there has been a recent increase in HIV incidence among young men who have sex with men. However, gay male youth (GMY) may forego HIV testing due to fear of stigmatization. Therefore, the aim of this research was to explore the perceptions of stigma in health care within this population. The research was conducted through a series (...) of semi‐structured interviews with eight GMY aged 20–29, who frequented a gay‐friendly clinic in downtown Ottawa, Canada. In a sub‐analysis of the interviews utilizing the work of Hardt and Negri’s three‐part sequence – inclusion, differentiation and management – we found that homosexuality‐related stigmatization affects the interaction between GMY and health professionals. Interview participants perceived HIV‐related risk counselling as a manifestation of stigma. These findings reveal that the experience of stigma and stigmatization is not necessarily based on health professionals’ intentions, but rather, on patients’ perceptions of the interactions they have with health professionals. Specific modifications to the delivery of health care may help to overcome stigmatization. (shrink)

Of all the terms Jean Améry might have chosen to explain the deepest effects of torture, the one he selected was world. To be tortured was to lose trust in the world, to become incapable of feeling at home in the world. In July 1943, Améry was arrested by the Gestapo in Belgium and tortured by the SS at the former fortress of Breendonk. With the first blow from the torturers, he famously wrote, one loses trust in the world. With (...) that blow, one can no l onger be certain that “by reason of written or unwritten social contracts the other person will spare me — and more precisely stated, that he will respect my physical, and with it also my metaphysical, being.” In a vault inside the fortress, beyond the reach of anyone who might help — a wife, a mother, a brother, a friend — it turned out that all social contracts had been broken and torture was possible. His attackers had no respect for him, and no-one else could or would help. (shrink)

O’BYRNE P. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 357–367 Nomadic sexualities: an in‐depth case study about unsafe sexIn an era when researchers are identifying increased rates of unsafe sex among gay and bisexual men, it is important that the practice of unsafe sex be adequately explored. While much literature is already dedicated to this topic, only recently have researchers begun to develop in‐depth understandings of the personal meanings that people ascribe to unsafe sex. This study continues such explorations by examining (i) why (...) one self‐defined gay man engaged in unsafe sex, and (ii) how he defined unsafe sex. The findings suggest that, for this man, his sexuality is nomadic and that what he feels is unsafe sex is the outcome of his nomadic sexuality conflicting with social imperatives for sexual stratification. (shrink)

In this interview with Kathryn Sophia Belle (formerly Kathryn T. Gines), Edward O'Byrn discusses Belle's publications from 2010–2017. His questions focus on Simone de Beauvoir and her use of analogy in The Second Sex, along with broader questions that engage Belle's work on existential philosophy, Beauvoir, Black feminism, and intersectionality.

This paper examines Angela Davis’s 1969 Lectures on Liberation and her critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s views regarding freedom and enslaved agency. Across four sections, the paper etches out Davis’s response to what she calls Sartre’s ‘notorious statement’ through her own existential reading of Frederick Douglass’s resistance to chattel slavery. Instead of interpreting Davis’s existential insights through the work of Sartre or other Western continental philosophers, the paper engages Lewis Gordon, George Yancy, Frank Kirkland, and LaRose Parris to develop an alternative (...) frame for assessing Davis’s existential thinking. Embracing a diverse lineage of existential philosophy, the paper argues for Black-centered approaches to existential philosophy that resonate with, but are not reducible or indebted to, European existentialism. (shrink)

Lewis Gordon's Fear of Black Consciousness is a resolute response to the ongoing pessimism present in contemporary culture and academia regarding Black life. As a towering figure in Black existential philosophy, Gordon seamlessly weaves together discussions of contemporary and historical Western philosophers such as Gabriel Marcel and Friedrich Nietzsche with his analyses of film, music, culture, and more. Across the text's twelve chapters, Gordon reveals the pervasiveness of anti-black ideologies while challenging his readers to affirm various forms of resistance to (...) violence, invisibility, and erasure. The book is written for an audience beyond academia, and is invested in telling a practical philosophical story about generating an empowering sense of Black consciousness. Sprinkled with personal stories, witty anecdotes, and powerful arguments, the book encourages readers to rethink historical descriptions of anti-black violence as well as the vocabulary used to talk about race and racism today. An example of this is Gordon's discussion of various slave trades across the planet. He writes, ‘Only the Arab designation is correct, since it refers to Arabs trading in the enslavement of peoples. The others should properly be called the European slave trade and the East Indian slave trade or Asian slave trade. Oceans do not trade people’ (pp. 52). Another insightful aspect of the text is the author's study of films like Jordan Peele's Get Out, Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You, and Ryan Coogler's Black Panther. Through these films, he provides a detailed look at how cinematic representation engages complex dialogues of anti-Blackness and Black power, as well as anti-capitalism. Overall, Gordon's book is a wonderful resource for anyone curious about cultivating a resistant and critical lens on contemporary culture. The aim of this review is to highlight a few of the book's major contributions for academics, casual readers, and those interested in ongoing discussions within Africana philosophy. (shrink)

The world is full of unattended nooks, places known to no one living, places hidden from all but a few, places unheard-of, not quite remembered, yet to be discovered or rediscovered, places vastly remote and others close to where we are right now. That is to say, the world is riddled with contingency. It is a condition of worldliness, merely the case, neither here nor there. But among those sites are places haunted by suffering, even cruelty, and our not knowing (...) them is a cause for concern. Contingency is at work here too—the claim that emanates from such a place may or may not be heard—but now our failure to hear it is a question for us. The very universality of contingency turns out to be trivial, and dwelling on it turns out to be a way of ignoring the suffering that it not permitted to register. Once such a place—of unjust imprisonment, of industrial dying, of disposal—presents itself to consciousness, our not having seen it before is shocking. How can we not have known? What else have we failed to hear? (shrink)

This book is concerned with the connection between the formal structure of agency and the formal structure of genocide. The contributors employ philosophical approaches to explore the idea of genocidal violence as a structural element in the world. Do mechanisms or structures in nation-states produce types of national citizens that are more susceptible to genocidal projects? There are powerful arguments within philosophy that in order to be the subjects of our own lives, we must constitute ourselves specifically as national subjects (...) and organize ourselves into nation states. Additionally, there are other genocidal structures of human society that spill beyond historically limited episodes. The chapters in this volume address the significance--moral, ethical, political--of the fact that our very form of agency suggests or requires these structures. The contributors touch on topics including birthright citizenship, contemporary mass incarceration, anti-black racism, and late capitalism. Logics of Genocide will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy, critical theory, genocide studies, Holocaust and Jewish studies, history, and anthropology. (shrink)

Methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) is a harm reduction approach for persons who wish to stop using opioids and is rather effective if used for a minimum of 12 months. Notably, research demonstrates that many persons enrolled in MMT programs discontinue care before this time, limiting its effects. To better understand this process, we undertook an exploratory descriptive qualitative study and interviewed 12 men and women who were using MMT. Using the theoretical work of Foucault and Hardt and Negri, the interview (...) data highlighted that MMT continues to be strongly stigmatized, and that it is a system of care that involves rewards and penalties, based on if patients behave according to prescribed norms. These results suggest that MMT is a disciplinary mechanism, albeit one that impedes its own access. We consequently recommend that healthcare providers work to facilitate access to MMT, which means altering care delivery. (shrink)

Subjects and Simulations presents essays focused on suffering and sublimity, representation and subjectivity, and the relation of truth and appearance through engagement with the legacies of Jean Baudrillard and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 3, pp 429 - 448 Taxonomy is our response to the proliferating variety of the natural world on the one hand, and the principle of unrelieved universality on the other. From Aristotle, through Porphyry to Linneaus, Kant and others, thinkers have struggled to develop taxonomies that could order what we know and also what we do not yet know, and this essay is a reflection on the existential desire that propels this effort. Porphyry’s tree of (...) logic is an exhaustive account of the things we can say about the sort of beings we are; Linneaus’s system of nature reaches completion in the classification of humans; Kant discovers a way to have natural and logical forms coincide in the thought of natural purpose and purposiveness. The stakes are high. When we order the world, we order ourselves: when we enter the taxonomy, it enters us and confronts us with our judgments of kind, race and kin. (shrink)

Arendt was famously dismissive of the work of psychologists, claiming that they did nothing more than reveal the pervasive ugliness and monotony of the psyche. If we want to know who people are, she argued, we should observe what they do and say rather than delving into the turmoil of their inner lives; if we want to understand humanity, we would be better off reading Oedipus Rex than hearing about someone’s Oedipus complex. The rejection has a certain coherence in the (...) context of her understanding of public life as the realm of appearance and opinion, but examining it through the specific question of ugliness complicates that understanding. While beauty invites us to contemplate the world and admire it, ugliness repels our attention and sows the seed of a worry that the world might not want to be known. Working with Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, the Kant lectures and a striking Denktagebuch entry in which she reacts with revulsion to Matisse’s Heads of Jeannette, I argue that Arendt’s response to the ugly psyche requires a re-examination of the sensus communis. If the psyche does not want to be known, and if not all points of view are open to imaginative occupation, the ideal and practice of enlarged mentality must reckon with a right to opacity. (shrink)

The Collegium Phaenomenologicum has met in Umbria, Italy every summer since 1976; only COVID made it pause, and hopefully only temporarily. It has been a forum for deep and broad discussion of the phenomenological tradition; it has also been a place where that tradition has itself been broadened and deepened by generations of thinkers who came to study the classical texts and to do phenomenology. In 2019, over the course of three weeks in July, in three lecture courses, several talks (...) by visiting faculty, twelve text seminars sessions, art workshops, and very many informal talks over dinner, on the terrace, and on long walks through the town of Città di Castello and beyond, the Collegium worked on the question of critical phenomenology. (shrink)

This book, by one of the most innovative and challenging contemporary thinkers, consists of an extensive essay from which the book takes its title and five shorter essays that are internally related to “Being Singular Plural.” One of the strongest strands in Nancy’s philosophy is his attempt to rethink community and the very idea of the social in a way that does not ground these ideas in some individual subject or subjectivity. The fundamental argument of the book is that being (...) is always “being with,” that “I” is not prior to “we,” that existence is essentially co-existence. Nancy thinks of this “being-with” not as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a mutual abandonment and exposure to each other, one that would preserve the “I” and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a “society of spectacle” nor via some form of authenticity. The five shorter essays impressively translate the philosophical insight of “Being Singular Plural” into sophisticated discussions of national sovereignty, war and technology, identity politics, the Gulf War, and the tragic plight of Sarajevo. The essay “Eulogy for the Mêlée,” in particular, is a brilliant discussion of identity and hybridism that resonates with many contemporary social concerns. As Nancy moves through the exposition of his central concern, being-with, he engages a number of other important issues, including current notions of the “other” and “self” that are relevant to psychoanalytic, political, and multicultural concepts. He also offers astonishingly original reinterpretations of major philosophical positions, such as Nietzsche’s doctrine of “eternal recurrence,” Descartes’s “cogito,” and the nature of language and meaning. (shrink)

John J. Cleary was an internationally recognised authority in ancient Greek philosophy. This volume of penetrating studies of Plato, Aristotle, and Proclus, philosophy of mathematics, and ancient theories of education, display Cleary’s range of expertise and originality of approach.

On 18 November 2014, the United Nations launched an urgent new campaign to end AIDS as a global health threat by 2030. With its proposed strategy, the UN follows leading scientists who had declared the failure of former prevention strategies and now were promoting a ‘Seek and Treat for Optimal Prevention’ (STOP) approach as the most cost‐effective response to the pandemic to meet the goal of ‘an AIDS‐free generation’. STOP combines antiretroviral therapy and routine HIV screening to find persons unaware (...) that they are HIV‐positive, because research has shown that people consistently change their behaviour (i.e. increase condom use, have fewer partners) after an HIV diagnosis. AIDS activists have broadly criticized this strategy on different levels. In this article, we go beyond these criticisms and try to analyse the political rationalities behind this ‘new’ strategy. We believe that it is necessary to put the rationale underpinning the STOP programme into the context of broader societal transformations that can best be captured as the development of advanced liberal societies and the new emphasis on self‐controlling or self‐responsibility rather than on disciplining behaviour. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that nurses need to be aware of how the production of space in specific contexts – including health care systems and research institutions – perpetuates marginalized populations' state of social otherness. Lefebvre's idea regarding spatial triad is mobilized in this paper, as it pertains to two‐spirited, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer populations (2SLGBTQ*). We believe that nurses can create counter‐spaces within health care systems and research institutions that challenge normative discourses. Lefebvre's work provides us (...) the necessary tools to understand how various places or environments produce identities. In understanding Lefebvre's principles, we believe that nurses can play an essential role in creating counter‐spaces, thereby instigating counter‐institutional practices, for those who experience otherness. (shrink)

In this author-meets critics discussion of Howard Thurman’s Philosophical Mysticism, Anthony Sean Neal argues that Thurman’s work requires systematic recognition of how he was rooted firmly within the Modern Era of the African American Freedom Struggle (1896–1975). Michael Barber suggests that Thurman may be understood in contrast to Levinas on two counts. Whereas Thurman develops the duty to love from within the one who must love, Levinas grasps the origin of love’s duty in the command of the one who is (...) to be loved. And while Thurman’s mysticism yearns for oneness, Levinas warns that oneness is ethically problematic. Eddie O'Byrn challenges the symbolic validity of calling love a weapon, and asks why the book has not treated Thurman’s relations to Gandhi or King. Neal defends a provisional usage of the term weapon in relation to love and offers some preliminary considerations of Thurman’s relation to Gandhi and King, especially in the symbolic significance of "the dream.". (shrink)

Resilience is often promoted as a boundary concept to integrate the social and natural dimensions of sustainability. However, it is a troubled dialogue from which social scientists may feel detached. To explain this, we first scrutinize the meanings, attributes, and uses of resilience in ecology and elsewhere to construct a typology of definitions. Second, we analyze core concepts and principles in resilience theory that cause disciplinary tensions between the social and natural sciences. Third, we provide empirical evidence of the asymmetry (...) in the use of resilience theory in ecology and environmental sciences compared to five relevant social science disciplines. Fourth, we contrast the unification ambition in resilience theory with methodological pluralism. Throughout, we develop the argument that incommensurability and unification constrain the interdisciplinary dialogue, whereas pluralism drawing on core social scientific concepts would better facilitate integrated sustainability research. (shrink)