Western aesthetics attends to its art as a symbohsm-statement created by an artist with a signature-statement. Accompanying every piece is a unique set of informative signs, symbols and techniques which allow for interpretive readings from an individual expression within the Western cultural context. Does an art form from another culture, specifically the Tibetan thanka as selfless art in a selfless culture, retain its aflfectivity and integrity when attended to by Western perusal outside its cultural context? And when the thanka travels, (...) does it come with all its baggage? (shrink)

This paper charts the concepts of grip and the bodily auxiliary in Maurice Merleau-Ponty to consider how they find expression in disability narratives. Arguing against the notion of “maximal grip” that some commentators have used to explicate intentionality in Merleau-Ponty, I argue that grip in his texts functions instead as a compensatory effort to stave off uncertainty, lack of mastery, and ambiguity. Nearly without exception in Phenomenology of Perception, the mobilization of “grip” is a signal of impending loss, and is (...) offered as a strategy for managing failure rather than as an example of sure-footed mastery. I read Merleau-Ponty alongside Mary Felstiner's Out of Joint: A Public and Private Story of Arthritis to explore these other, attenuated dimensions of grip. Finally, the paper turns to Harriet McBryde Johnson's memoir Too Late to Die Young as an example of a way of thinking disabled embodiment otherwise. (shrink)

Abstract.Arthur Peacocke was one of the most important scholars to contribute to the modern dialogue on science and religion, and for this he is remembered in the science‐religion community. Many people, however, are unaware of his exceptional career as a biochemist prior to his decision to pursue a life working as a clergyman in the Church of England. His contributions to studies of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) structure, effects of radiation damage on DNA, and on the interactions of DNA and proteins (...) are among the most important in the field at the time and have had a lasting scientific impact that is still felt today. Peacocke's arguments with Jacques Monod over stochastic (chance) and deterministic (necessity) processes driving evolution became important independently for both the science and the religion communities and appear to have contributed significantly to his decision to become involved in science‐religion dialogue rather than continuing his work exclusively in the field of science. Nevertheless, although Peacocke took on an active church life and ceased his experimental work, he never left science but continued to read the scientific literature and published a scientific review on different approaches in defining DNA structure as recently as 2005. (shrink)

This paper charts the concepts of grip and the bodily auxiliary in Maurice Merleau-Ponty to consider how they find expression in disability narratives. Arguing against the notion of “maximal grip” that some commentators have used to explicate intentionality in Merleau-Ponty, I argue that grip in his texts functions instead as a compensatory effort to stave off uncertainty, lack of mastery, and ambiguity. Nearly without exception in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, the mobilisation of “grip” is a signal of impending loss and (...) is offered as a strategy for managing failure rather than as an example of sure-footed mastery. I read Merleau-Ponty alongside Mary Felstiner’s Out of Joint: A Public and Private Story of Arthritis to explore these other, attenuated dimensions of grip as an example of a way of thinking disabled embodiment otherwise. (shrink)

This essay reads Iris Marion Young’s foundational essay “Throwing Like a Girl” as one of the first serious attempts to mount a critique of phenomenology’s universal aspirations using its own methods, in order to show that its humanism was deeply, if unknowingly, inflected by gender. I show how Young’s use of Erwin Straus’s and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological methods both extend and challenge their claims, and her how assertions about the particularity of feminine existence call into question some of phenome-nology’s deepest (...) convictions about bodily existence in general. Her argument thus uses phenomenology to call into question the phenomenological foundation on which it rests, in a feminist reconsideration of motility, space, intentionality, and transcendence. I conclude by turning to “Throwing Like a Girl: Twenty Years Later” twenty years after its publication and consider the phenomenology of action and relation that Young gestures toward there. Dans cet article, nous présenterons l’article révolutionnaire d’Iris Marion Young, « Lancer comme une fille », comme l’une des premières tentatives de critiquer les aspirations universelles de la phénoménologie en utilisant ses propres méthodes. Young démontre que l’humanisme de la phénoménologie est profondément (et mal-gré elle) influencé par le genre. Nous montrerons en quoi le recours par Young aux approches phénoménologiques d’Erwin Straus et de Maurice Merleau-Ponty permet de mettre à l’épreuve leurs thèses. Nous expliquerons ensuite comment son exploration de la spécificité de l’existence féminine met en question les convictions les plus profondes de la phénoménologie concernant l’existence corporelle en général. Ainsi, en examinant la motilité, l’intentionnalité et la transcendance dans une perspective féministe, Young fait appel à la phénoménologie pour questionner les fondements phénoménologiques sur lesquels il repose. Dans un deuxième temps, nous abor-derons, vingt ans après sa publication, l’article « Throwing Like a Girl : Twenty Years Later » pour présenter la phénoménologie de l’action et de la relation qui y est esquissée. (shrink)

The strategy of deconstruction displayed in the writing of Jacques Derrida forces a self-reflexive moment, in the encounter with the text, that disqualifies and obliterates the protocols of reading. "Binding Textuality" broaches and embraces the question of reading through an enactment of specific Derridean textual motifs. ;A central aim of the text is to expose Jacques Derrida through a reading of the relations his writing exhibits with respect to particular texts and textual themes promulgated in the history of Western philosophy. (...) To achieve this aim, a certain economy is established and maintained to force an opening in the style Jacques Derrida models. "Binding Textuality" proceeds in three Parts entitled "The Question of Reading: An Introduction," "Semeiotic, Language, Tradition," and "The Play of Ellipsis: Annular Translation." These parts proffer a rendering of the Derridean text, respectively, through: a series of questions that affords a pre-opening to that script; a staging of the horizontal boundaries or the tradition which prefigures that script; and an interpretive unraveling and restitching of Derrida's text to indicate the play at work in reading such a contemporary style of writing. ;The strategy of "Binding Textuality" is obliged to deploy or to undergo, and as such to demonstrate and to capitalize on, the contortions and tropes of Derrida's maneuvers and strategies as a style that plays with dissimulation, deceit, and artifice. Derrida's text is shown to afford a certain style of inquiry, a style of philosophy, or philosophic cunning. Affirming the invitation and encouragement of Derrida's text to risk the uncertainty of inquiry, the insight of "Binding Textuality" comes to just this: the writing of Jacques Derrida fosters a genuinely novel and unselfish rendering of paideia. Now, Jacques Derrida is read or seen as a bricoleur attempting to realize the necessity of self-criticism and the need for the recombination of ideas and possibilities that unfold through self-critique. (shrink)

Bringing together 20 foundational texts in contemporary modernist criticism in one accessible volume, this book explores the debates that have transformed the field of modernist studies at the turn of the millennium and into the 21st century. The New Modernist Studies Reader features chapters covering the major topics central to the study of modernism today, including: Feminism, gender and sexuality; Empire and race; Print and media cultures; Historical and geographical debates. Each text includes an introductory summary of its historical and (...) intellectual contexts, as well as guides to further reading to help students and teachers explore the ideas further. Includes essential texts by leading critics such as: Pascale Casanova, Anne Anlin Cheng, Brent Hayes Edwards, Rita Felski, Susan Stanford Friedman, Mark Goble, Miriam Hansen, Andreas Huyssen, David James, Fredric Jameson, Heather K. Love, Douglas Mao, Mark S. Morrisson, Michael North, Jessica Pressman, Lawrence Rainey, Paul K. Saint-Amour, Bonnie Kime Scott, Urmila Seshagiri, Robert Spoo, and Rebecca Walkowitz. (shrink)

The focus of this essay is to display and to work within the congruent levels of discourse at play in Nietzsche's text, with particular reference to the trope ''woman." Derrida's treatment of Nietzsche produced in Eperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche provides the medium, the universe of discourse if you will, for reading Nietzsche's deployment of "woman" in his writings. Derrida is a prop that sets up the discourse in the following fashion: Nietzsche's metaphor of the vita femina is comprehended in (...) light of and integrated with Derrida's conception o/la femme-verite . The desire of this reading is to question the following: the ideal or idol of feminism and antifeminism, i.e., the image, the figure of woman as such, woman engenderedthrough the idiom of what should be the case or the condition of woman as a human being; and the presumptuous attitude of the feminist and/or anti-feminist, scholar or priest, that a particular discourse, her/his discourse, is of any interest or pertinence to women or woman. (shrink)

The focus of this essay is to display and to work within the congruent levels of discourse at play in Nietzsche's text, with particular reference to the trope ''woman." Derrida's treatment of Nietzsche produced in Eperons: Les Styles de Nietzsche provides the medium, the universe of discourse if you will, for reading Nietzsche's deployment of "woman" in his writings. Derrida is a prop that sets up the discourse in the following fashion: Nietzsche's metaphor of the vita femina is comprehended in (...) light of and integrated with Derrida's conception o/la femme-verite. The desire of this reading is to question the following: the ideal or idol of feminism and antifeminism, i.e., the image, the figure of woman as such, woman engenderedthrough the idiom of what should be the case or the condition of woman as a human being; and the presumptuous attitude of the feminist and/or anti-feminist, scholar or priest, that a particular discourse, her/his discourse, is of any interest or pertinence to women or woman. (shrink)

Phenomenology, the philosophical method that seeks to uncover the taken-for-granted presuppositions, habits, and norms that structure everyday experience, is increasingly framed by ethical and political concerns. Critical phenomenology foregrounds experiences of marginalization, oppression, and power in order to identify and transform common experiences of injustice that render “the familiar” a site of oppression for many. In Fifty Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, leading scholars present fresh readings of classic phenomenological topics and introduce newer concepts developed by feminist theorists, critical race (...) theorists, disability theorists, and queer and trans theorists that capture aspects of lived experience that have traditionally been neglected. By centering historically marginalized perspectives, the chapters in this book breathe new life into the phenomenological tradition and reveal its ethical, social, and political promise. This volume will be an invaluable resource for teaching and research in continental philosophy; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; critical race theory; disability studies; cultural studies; and critical theory more generally. (shrink)

Abstract:This article examines how two American theorists, Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler, deploy geologic language during the 1990s moment when their feminist careers morphed into queer careers. I argue that the precise composition of this institutional shift – methodological, material, and epistemological – is both reflected and refracted in the figure of the rock. A symbol that connotes fixity in short time spans, but dynamism in long ones, the rock oscillates between facticity and dissolution, mirroring shifting notions of sex (...) and gender in the 1990s. In her retrospective account of the emergence of queer theory, Rubin’s use of a fossil metaphor ushers the field toward a non-reproductive and non-procreative genealogy, illuminating a different temporal texture to such seemingly fixed structures as sex, gender, and sexuality. Butler’s inherited geologic language conceives of gender as the process of sedimentation that resists the biological determinism of identity-based feminist politics. Examining the rock provides crucial readings of Butler’s materiality, one that oscillates between fixed being and dynamic becoming, stability and change, surface signification and depth excavation. (shrink)

By exploring and giving equal weight to transgendered subjectivities, however, Gayle Salamon upends these certainties.

This essay considers what is critical in critical phenomenology, and asks what features critical and phenomenological methods share. I suggest three fundamentally significant resonances between the critical and phenomenological enterprises. First is the suggestion that critique, like phenomenology, is an attempt to move beyond a dualism of inside and outside in order to extend into outer regions of what is known. Second is the insistence that what at first appears to be a purely negative endeavor, a finding of limit, is (...) incomplete if, upon finding that limit, it comes to a stop. Just as the reduction is not a means to banish or negate the world, but rather the condition through which it can more fully emerge, critique cannot be merely a cataloguing of the limitations of the present situation. Third is the openness to the possibilities of the world, a wonder or curiosity, that is revealed through the work of description in phenomenology, or Foucault’s characterization of philosophy not as an unmasking, but a making visible of what is visible. Finally I consider critical phenomenology’s futures: How is a newly enlivened kind of scholarship emerging from these two forms of thinking, both of which have been dismissed as outmoded or irrelevant? The new work currently emerging in phenomenology, with its emphasis on its own reflexive self-consideration and decolonization, offers hope that it might yet be capacious enough to simultaneously encompass the revelation of its limitations as well as the expansion of its reach. (shrink)

Inequity has been a hallmark of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, especially in the sharply disproportionate impacts among people of color. Recent studies have confirmed that t...

Sterilisation has been increasing in the United States in recent decades. Using the National Survey of Families and Households, this paper examines sterilisation among married couples using event history techniques, viewing husband and wife sterilisation as competing risks. Wives are more likely to experience sterilisation and at shorter durations of marriage. Number of children has a curvilinear effect on sterilisation, increasing and then decreasing its likelihood. Wives who are older than their husbands are more likely to get sterilised themselves. Black (...) and Hispanic husbands are more likely to undergo sterilisation. (shrink)

This study compares employee attitudes to their reports of whether they consider their socio-economic status to be higher, the same, or lower than that of their parents. The premise of the research was based on the apparent deterioration of the expectation that each generation will live in greater economic comfort than their parents, referred to as a vital component of the American dream. Where this pattern of socio-economic progress has been interrupted, it may relate to certain attitudes. These attitudes, in (...) turn, are likely to influence behavior. Here the focus is on whether employees' survey responses indicate they are honest, trustworthy, and tolerant. Differences in these characteristics that relate to self-reported socio- economic progress, may serve to explain the occurrence of certain behaviors among people who otherwise seem highly ethical. This information may also help create organizational awareness of the potential for unethical behavior, when employees have been blocked from their own expectations for betterment. (shrink)

AIDS is a debilitating and fatal disease that was first identified as an infectious disease syndrome in the 1970s. The discovery of a nearly universally fatal infectious and rapidly spreading disease in the post–antibiotics era created apprehension in the medical community and alarm in the general population. Questions about how patients should be handled in medical and nonmedical settings resulted in the ostracizing of many AIDS patients and inappropriate patient management. Scientific investigation into modes of disease transmission and control helped (...) to shape the management of AIDS patient care in such a way that ethical and protective practices could be developed. In this article I discuss some of the ethical questions that were addressed by appropriate scientific inquiry. (shrink)

This book, written by leading authors in the field, takes a completely new approach to objectivity and subjectivity, no longer treating them as opposed - as many existing texts do - but as logically and methodologically related in social research. The authors explain complex arguments with great clarity for social science students, while also providing the detail and comprehensiveness required to meet the needs of practicing researchers and scholars.

Care work is both gendered and relational, defined typically as the care women do for others. When faced with a chronic life-threatening illness such as breast cancer, women must learn to perform care work for the self. Drawing from participant observation and 60 in-depth interviews, the author explores the gendered strategies and justifications women use to cope with breast cancer and engage in care work for the self. Women in the study used a multiprocess, gendered “balancing act” to learn to (...) balance their needs with the needs of others, which involves setting boundaries and establishing criteria for accepting and asking for help. These strategies reflect a negotiation of normative expectations that stress women's selflessness, empathy, and caring for others. (shrink)

This ‘story from the field’ emerges from qualitative research conducted with relatives of patients admitted to intensive care. A disturbing feature of researching the needs of family members of critically ill patients is the intense emotion that is often generated during the course of interviewing. For some the opportunity to talk about the experience of having a loved one in an intensive care unit was therapeutic; for others it meant anguish and despair as they relived the event that resulted in (...) a life‐threatening illness. Despite being a reasonably experienced educator and critical care nurse, I was unprepared for the intensity of feelings shown by many of the participants. I found that exposure to this kind of suffering was emotionally draining, experiencing the various roles of confidante, nurse, counsellor and researcher. It became important to share my thoughts and feelings and unwind with an independent friend and colleague as a way of debriefing. Methodological and ethical issues that arose included: generating a situation that potentially required therapeutic intervention; the impact on the ‘purity’ of data of becoming emotionally enmeshed; and the level of investigator preparedness when researching sensitive topics. The issue of walking away from an intensely emotional and intimate interview often leaves one with a sense of ‘unfinished business’. (shrink)

Transplantation is becoming an increasingly more common approach to treatment of diseases of organ failure, making organ donation an important means of saving lives. Most world religions find organ donation for the purpose of transplantation to be acceptable, and some even encourage members to donate their organs as a gift of love to others. Recent developments, including artificial organs, transplants from nonhuman species, use of stem cells, and cloning, are impacting the field of transplantation. These new approaches should be discussed (...) with bioethical considerations in mind, particularly the notion of human beings as a unity of body and spirit. (shrink)

As the world watched the Fukushima reactors spew incalculable quantities of radionuclides into the sea and air and wondered what effect this would have on our health and that of generations to come, the warnings of Dr. Alice Stewart about low-dose radiation risk assumed a terrible timeliness. As industry, governments, and the media attempted to quiet the alarms, assuring us that radioactive releases will dilute and disperse and become too miniscule to matter, the reassurances of Sir Richard Doll, foremost among (...) Stewart's detractors, also became relevant. It is clear, as proponents and opponents of nuclear energy thrash it out, that there is not much more scientific consensus about the hazards of low-dose radiation .. (shrink)

Over the last 30 years the breast cancer movement has worked to make breast cancer a national priority, raise awareness and funds, galvanize social support, and impact the direction of research. Women have been at the forefront of information sharing, activism, and patient empowerment. Treatments have improved incrementally and mortality rates have declined overall. By these indicators, the movement is a success. Yet, 70 percent of those diagnosed with breast cancer have none of the known risk factors, making causation and (...) prevention uncertain; approximately 40,000 women die from metastatic breast cancer each year, a number that hasn’t changed for decades; corporate and political agendas stand in the way of patients’ rights and access to quality care; profit motives and disease branding supersede efforts to provide meaningful support and accurate health information; and breast cancer is popularized to the degree that “pink consumption” has become more of a trendy pastime than a rallying call for social change. Tenacious activists and a growing number of citizens, though divergent in the problems they tackle and methods they use, share a critical stance that fosters new thinking about breast cancer and calls for transparency, accountability, and alternatives to the pink ribbon. (shrink)

This article discusses views of leadership in the light of the financial crisis. Giving attention to views such as Plato and modern technocratic views, the paper is structured around a discussion of a specific organisation; Manchester: Knowledge Capital (M:KC), an organisation that seems to me to exemplify in practice the ideas about leadership that I am proposing as being a valuable way forward.

Steroid use in professional sports continues to receive much media attention in the United States. The predominant response to the use of steroids in professional sports is negative. Much of the opposition to steroid use focuses on the critical importance of fair play in American society. To the degree that steroids provide some players with an unfair advantage, the use of steroids is said to undermine fair play. This paper provides an analogical analysis of SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test) coaching services, (...) and the manner in which these services similarly undermine ?fair play? in college admissions competition. Ultimately, our national commitment to fair play is context?specific. If one looks closely, it further reveals the troubling possibility that fair play as a core value is not a core value at all, but little more than an empty mantra. (shrink)

Economic progress in the United States has been attributed to the successful combination of two social structures — capitalism as an economic system and democracy as a political system. At the heart of this interaction is a particular work ethic in which hard work is considered the path to both immediate and future rewards. This article examines the evolution of work ethic in the United States, as well as the returns experienced through various adaptations in the country's history. From this (...) grounding, the information is structured into a proposal that key messages contained in the current, accepted work ethic are subject to distortions that may contribute to unethical decision making. These distortions result from two potentials: (1) efforts to reconcile the work ethic with contradictory messages and (2) exaggerations of the work ethic that become dysfunctional. The intent is to provide a framework that may explain to organizational leaders how people with the same basic work ethic can behave differently in terms of ethical work. Along with this understanding comes the potential to offset possible distortions and to encourage more ethical behavior. (shrink)