Social robots have the potential to support autistic school children with their wellbeing. This research reveals how a co-design approach with autistic children and their teachers was undertaken. Focus groups with autistic children and teachers collaboratively identified user requirements for the social robot and robot behaviours within the school ecosystem in order to improve student wellbeing. The results reveal the importance of including autistic children in the co-design process to ensure their voices are heard and also that the role of (...) the robot is appropriate and targeted to the users’ needs and requirements. Autistic children and their teachers report multiple potential benefits for social robots supporting emotional wellbeing in the school. Autistic children were supportive of the introduction of a social robot in their school, mostly expressing positive attitudes towards the robot. The research is significant in revealing how a user-centred co-design approach involving autistic children and social robots may support emotional wellbeing. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy stands as one of the great French theorists of "deconstruction." His writings on philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and religion have significantly contributed to the development of contemporary French thought and helped shape and transform the field of continental philosophy. Through Nancy's immense oeuvre, which covers a wide range of topics such as community, freedom, existence, sense/ touch, democracy, Christianity, the visual arts and music, and writing itself, we have learned to take stock of the world in a more nuanced (...) fashion. In this collection, contemporaries of Nancy and eminent scholars of continental philosophy, including Giorgio Agamben, Étienne Balibar, Ginette Michaud, Georges Van Den Abbeele, Gregg Lambert and Ian James, have been invited to reflect on the force of Nancy's "deconstruction" and how it has affected, or will affect, the ways we approach many of the most pertinent topics in contemporary philosophy. The collection also includes Jean-Luc Nancy's previously unpublished 'Dialogue Beneath the Ribs', where he reflects, twenty years after, on his heart transplant. Nancy Now will be of critical interest not only to scholars working on or with Nancy's philosophy, but also to those interested in the development and future of French thought. (shrink)

Given a countable transitive model of set theory and a partial order contained in it, there is a natural countable Borel equivalence relation on generic filters over the model; two are equivalent if they yield the same generic extension. We examine the complexity of this equivalence relation for various partial orders, focusing on Cohen and random forcing. We prove, among other results, that the former is an increasing union of countably many hyperfinite Borel equivalence relations, and hence is amenable, while (...) the latter is neither amenable nor treeable. (shrink)

We consider maximal almost disjoint families of block subspaces of countable vector spaces, focusing on questions of their size and definability. We prove that the minimum infinite cardinality of such a family cannot be decided in ZFC and that the “spectrum” of cardinalities of mad families of subspaces can be made arbitrarily large, in analogy to results for mad families on ω. We apply the author’s local Ramsey theory for vector spaces [32] to give partial results concerning their definability.

Landscapes of historiography in Christian social ethics -- A critical self-reflexive historiography for Christian ethics -- Metanarrative habits are hard to break -- Reevaluating Tertullian and the virtue of patience -- Continuity, discontinuity, and the quest for justice.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Persuasion and RhetoricThomas M. ConleyPersuasion and Rhetoric. Carlo Michelstaedter. Translated with an introduction and commentary by Russell Scott Valentino, Cinzia Sartini Blum, and David J. Depew : New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. 178. $32.50, hardcover.Readers of this book will not find much in it about the "persuasion" and "rhetoric" they might expect to read about in this journal. Nor will they find in it the Appendici (...) Critiche that appear in the original text, Michelstaedter's thesis entitled I concetti di persuasione e rettorica [sic] in Platone e Aristotele, which he submitted to the Faculty of Letters in Florence in 1910. But the version printed here by the editors (hereafter "VBD," as there is no indication of who did what) will no doubt appeal to those who dislike Plato and Aristotle, have the idea that something better can be found in the Presocratics, and claim allegiance to such philosophers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the Heidegger of Being and Time; for this is a book about the problem of attaining a sort of existential "authenticity" and not, in my view, "one of the most trenchant and influential studies in modern rhetoric," as the liner notes claim. To be sure, Persuasione e rettorica has been the subject of decades of contentious scholarship in Italy. But most of that scholarship (and that displayed in the headnotes provided by VBD) concerns the sources of Michelstaedter's ideas and his true debt to the likes of Parmenides and Heraclitus, both of whom figure significantly in his worldview."Persuasione"—and I use the Italian here to avoid confusion—might best be understood to mean a sort of self-possession, being at one with oneself and with the world, or what I called before "authenticity." Michelstaedter himself never makes an effort to define it, for to do that would be to turn it into the sort of abstraction that Michelstaedter opposes. Defining things, as we learn from the Appendici, is the sort of thing philosophers like Aristotle and Hegel do in an act of bad faith or delusion. "Persuasione" is, by contrast, something lived, not understood—or, more precisely, it is a state to which true philosophers (Parmenides and Socrates, for instance) aspire with the full understanding that, like the limit approached asymptotically by an hyperbola (see 48, 109), it can never be attained. That understanding was replaced by the false consciousness represented by the "rettorica" taught by the Sophists and Plato (along with his disciple, Aristotle), and continues to the present day. This account is hinted at in the "Historical Example" allegory of the present text (77–84); but is more fully "documented" in a section of the long Appendix 2, "Note alla triste historia" (107–56 in the 1972 Raschini edition), entitled "La decadenza" (129–35). [End Page 170]"Rettorica," then, is the name Michelstaedter gives to the whole range of ingenious linguistic devices we use to convince ourselves that we are satisfied, fulfilled, secure in our selves and in the world—i.e., "persuaded"—when we are only suffering from a delusion created by language itself. It is rettorica that gives rise to "commonplaces" that masquerade as true understanding, to the impostures of "science" in the name of "objectivity" (see 89–95), to technology and machines, to "education" (110–11, 148–52), and indeed to every manifestation of bourgeois ideology (see the "dialogue" at 104–6, for instance). Rettorica is a kind of hypocrisy, deception, and (self-) flattery; an instrument of "the community of the wicked" (100, 143), a collection of "ornaments of the darkness" (e.g., 137, 139).The problem we face in acknowledging all this is, of course, that the attempt to articulate it has to be done in language; and language, by its very nature in all its semantic and syntactic elements (the point of Appendix 1, Raschini, 103–6), subverts true "persuasione." How can one "speak truth to authenticity," so to speak, when one begins by "giving a name to" its contrary, "rettorica"?"Trenchant," in any event, is hardly the right term to describe Persuasion and Rhetoric. "Mordant" or "plangent" might be closer to the mark. And as for its influence on "modern rhetoric... (shrink)

Advances in genomics have led to calls for developing population-based preventive genomic sequencing programs with the goal of identifying genetic health risks in adults without known risk factors. One critical issue for minimizing the harms and maximizing the benefits of PGS is determining the kind and degree of control individuals should have over the generation, use, and handling of their genomic information. In this article we examine whether PGS programs should offer individuals the opportunity to selectively opt out of the (...) sequencing or analysis of specific genomic conditions or whether PGS should be implemented using an all-or-nothing panel approach. We conclude that any responsible scale-up of PGS will require a menu approach that may seem impractical to some, but that draws its justification from a rich mix of normative, legal, and practical considerations. (shrink)

The complex hexaploid wheat genome offers many challenges for genomics research. Expressed sequence tags facilitate the analysis of gene-coding regions and provide a rich source of molecular markers for mapping and comparison with model organisms. The objectives of this study were to construct a high-density EST chromosome bin map of wheat homoeologous group 2 chromosomes to determine the distribution of ESTs, construct a consensus map of group 2 ESTs, investigate synteny, examine patterns of duplication, and assess the colinearity with rice (...) of ESTs assigned to the group 2 consensus bin map. A total of 2600 loci generated from 1110 ESTs were mapped to group 2 chromosomes by Southern hybridization onto wheat aneuploid chromosome and deletion stocks. A consensus map was constructed of 552 ESTs mapping to more than one group 2 chromosome. Regions of high gene density in distal bins and low gene density in proximal bins were found. Two interstitial gene-rich islands flanked by relatively gene-poor regions on both the short and long arms and having good synteny with rice were discovered. The map locations of two ESTs indicated the possible presence of a small pericentric inversion on chromosome 2B. Wheat chromosome group 2 was shown to share syntenous blocks with rice chromosomes 4 and 7. (shrink)

This paper presents an experimental approach for engaging undergraduate STEM students in anticipatory ethical reasoning, or ethical reasoning applied to the analysis of potential mid- to long-term implications and outcomes of technological innovation. The authors implemented two variations of an approach that integrates three key components—scenario analysis, design fiction, and ethical frameworks—into five sections of an introductory course on the social contexts of science and technology that is required of STEM majors. The authors dub this approach Creative Anticipatory Ethical Reasoning, (...) or CAER. Scenario analysis is a strategy emerging from business consulting for grounded analysis of plausible future trajectories to inform planning. Design fiction is a creative hands-on activity that blends science fiction and design prototyping to facilitate critical thinking with respect to the societal dimensions of a plausible future technology. The authors present the following findings: in each of the variations, students demonstrated significant engagement with CAER and a substantive shift in their conception of what constitutes responsible innovation and ethical conduct in science and technology. Specifically, their integration of ethical reasoning with stakeholder perspectives and scenario analysis reframed technologies, from unproblematic solutions for societal problems to socially-embedded forms of life that might diverge from designers’ intentions. This suggests that CAER could be a useful pedagogical intervention for expanding students’ ethical engagement to consider the potential unintended consequences of technological innovation. (shrink)

_Parages_ brings together four essays by Derrida on the fictions of Maurice Blanchot. Three of the essays—"Living On," "Title To Be Specified," and "The Law of Genre," are by now canonical. The fourth, "_Pa_ce Not" as well as Derrida's 1986 introduction to the French edition of the book, appear here in English for the first time. This was a breakthrough publication in the analysis of Blanchot, a notoriously difficult writer. It is safe to say Derrida contributed much to that writer's (...) reputation in both French and English, always insisting on the philosophical pertinence of Blanchot's work to any discussion of the relationship between literature and critical thought. Through patient citation, and an ample collocation and readings of Blanchot's various motifs, Derrida explores a variety of questions, including the limits of genre, the procedure of crossing out, and the evocation of a non-dialectical and non-privative negativity. The book marks a crucial stage in Derrida's itinerary and provides a context for his later writings on apophatics in such works as _On the Name_ and his response to Heidegger on death in _Aporias_. (shrink)

'The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory' offers readers a unique survey of the new horizons of film and media theory, focusing on the applicability of screen theories and updating the field for new social, cultural and geopolitical contexts.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Boundaries: Writing and DrawingTom ConleyBoundaries: Writing and Drawing, edited by Martine Reid; Yale French Studies, iv & 268 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, $15.95 paper.The fifteen articles of this issue of Yale French Studies discern the limits of meaning and legibility wherever writing and drawing become coextensive. In pondering the origins of writing Henry-Jean Martin (in Le pouvoir et l’histoire de l’écrit) has recently asked if (...) script and print have evolved from pictographic or hieroglyphic writing. If so, he implies, to what degree does visual force animate all writing? How does meaning, otherwise conveyed through writing, get complicated or subverted by the shape or motion of its form? When does the writer engage the illegible to call into question communication in general? Citing Michel Foucault, for whom calligraphy and drawing offer a glimpse of an “immense and unavowable teratology” (p. 12), the editor argues that the visible matter of discourse becomes its repressed or irrecuperable—hence supremely literary—worth.She organizes the contributions under three rubrics. Part one studies the history of the relation of writing to drawing through emphasis on psychogenesis. For Serge Tisseron an “inscriptive gesture” (p. 29), a memory of a manual pleasure, is relayed through the artist’s or writer’s labors. The written trace recalls originary separation, the page becoming a “metaphoric container of one’s own body and the mother’s body” (p. 41). Georges Roque shows how postcartesian ideology associates line with philosophy and relegates color to a lower order of sensation. In a Derridean turn he notes, “color is to drawing as [End Page 410] writing is to speech” (p. 57). Jean-Gérard Lapacherie argues that we are taught to exclude reading from the act of looking at a text, and that contemporary literature forcibly erodes that division.Part two is devoted to close analysis of writers who draw. Jacques Leenhardt brilliantly analyzes visual and aural displacements, even condensations, what he calls “monograms of sensation,” in the sketches and notes in Stendhal’s Journal de Paris. Alain Buisine traces the appeal that drawings of Rimbaud’s face had for the poet’s milieu. Claude Gandelman studies Proust’s manuscript drawings in light of the broader process of dreamwork in A la recherche du temps perdu. Looking at the Cahiers, 1894–1914, Serge Bourjea contends that for Paul Valéry the labors of intellection and writing are a “matter of sketching” (p. 137), or of perpetually “rough” drafting. Jacques Derrida’s “Maddening the Subjectile,” Mary Ann Caws’s limpid translation of an essay on Artaud’s textual drawings (“Forcener le subjectile”), defines a pictogram as what moves ceaselessly and inseparably between painting, drawing, and verbal expression.Part three moves toward artists who write. Bernard Vouilloux rehearses Derrida’s arguments about the “supplement” and the pictogram to themes of painting and painters in Rousseau’s early and later works. Michel Thévoz gives a dazzling reading of Jean Dubuffet’s art brut dans l’écriture, the explosive sketching of discourse that fractures the icons of elegance and control that project the myth of clear and classical French. Jan Baetens calls “latent violence” the marvelous areas where image, geometrical form, typography, and enunciation abut each other in M. C. Escher’s drawings, Régis Franc’s comic strips, and Martin Vaughn-James’s La Cage. Renée Riese Hubert sums up the volume with a study of the double binds that Derrida and Adami project in their collaborations of drawing and writing.This issue of Yale French Studies holds to the theme of writing as drawing. Martine Reid’s introduction and her two interviews with Michel Butor and Yves Bonnefoy map out an overall itinerary of vicious circularity. Literature is a continuing regression, fraught with pleasure and risk, that takes place when language, writing, and drawing are conflated. All of the essays are of high quality. Tisseron, Leenhardt, Derrida, and Thévoz set a standard to which the others conform. All adepts of art and literature will welcome this fabulous volume.Tom ConleyHarvard UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Heuretics: The Logic of InventionTom ConleyHeuretics: The Logic of Invention, by Gregory L. Ulmer; xiv & 267 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, $40.00 cloth, $13.95 paper.Heuretics designates areas of logic devoted to discovery and invention. This book sets out to reconfigure the metaphors that have dominated investigation since the advent of print-culture and the Columbian voyages. Adventure, quest, risk, discovery: Francis Bacon’s analogy of scientific research (...) to oceanic travel established the stereotypes that Ulmer strives to dismantle. In 1962 Claude Lévi-Strauss noted in The Raw and the Cooked that in our time: “It is no longer a question of sailing toward other lands: only the voyage is real, not the earth, and the routes have been replaced by the rules of navigation.” With the advent of hypermedia, creation becomes an art of selection and combination. Truth gives way to discovery. Creation is likened to a programmed mélange of material ordered by negotiation, intuition, and strategy.Ulmer performs his proof—and proves his performance—by constructing a virtual staging of a multilayered commemoration he fashions from cinema, architecture, Jacques Derrida’s oeuvre, American history, and autobiography. The result is a collage of signifiers that apposes literary theory, memory-arts, Gary Cooper’s persona in Beau Geste (dir. William Wellman, 1939), Columbian voyages, Platonic dialogues, and a canon of postmodern writings. Ulmer divides the book into four parts, the first of which crafts the overall method from Cartesian reason and Surrealist practices of juxtaposition and automatism. Part two offers a dynamic definition of choreography, the study of local, inherited, and originary areas in which subjectivity is born. In part three Ulmer [End Page 147] sets forth textual rehearsals, based on Lee Strasner’s Method (via Stanislavsky), that mobilize the space and time of his chosen materials. Part four, “Yellowstone Desert,” bring together the strands of the narrative embroidery into a gag-joke (a “puncept” on Custer and custard) that explodes in the author’s face.A good deal of the work turns on Ulmer’s treatment of chora. Exploiting its signifying potential (chora, corps, choral, chorus, coral) he discovers that the myth of the world’s creation recounted in the Timaeus begins when the demiurge makes an X from two strands of plasma. The chi is folded as colures of a sphere that becomes the globe. Nonetheless the presence of the self as an unknown (x) is inferred (in I, or ich). Ulmer shows that “in subordinating mystery to memory, and arguments to paradigms,” choreography will “engage the users’ premises in the process of learning, opening a mutually transforming circuit between judgment and theory, and hence affect not only (...) institutional practices (...) but human subjectivation as well” (p. 202). Patterned constructions replace the creation and resolution of enigmas. Hypermedia becomes the technology of new creation, while choreography comprises “the institutional practice for augmenting the intuitions of inference, for writing with the logic of the unconscious” (p. 224).Heuretics extends the field of play staked out in Ulmer’s Teletheory. Here is offered a scheme for creating multileveled texts that are both creative and critical and infinitely generative, and that invite readers to connect electronic media to the unconscious. Most readers will not fail to appreciate the wit of the exposition and the clarity of the creative method. Others will pause over some of its assumptions. Certain critical paradigms, such as the antithetical ontologies of Lacan and Derrida, appear easily reconciled. The unnameable traumas of history (genocide) and psychogenesis (the birth and growth of subjectivity) are glossed with an effortless art of citation (pp. 114, 233). The unconscious is assimilated into an easily “accessed” logic, the latter effortlessly “logging in” to the former. The redesign of the Columbian quincentenary indirectly ratifies some of the modes of control that flexible capitalism seeks to impose upon the unconscious. These four points require greater space of exchange in the rich and problematic dialogue that informs Ulmer’s stunning performance of theory.Tom ConleyUniversity of MinnesotaCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Happiness is the definitive text for researchers and practitioners interested in human happiness. Its editors and chapter contributors are world leaders in the investigation of happiness across the fields of psychology, organizational behaviour, education, philosophy, social policy and economics.

This paper analyses the activities of five organizations shaping the debate over the global governance of genome editing in order to assess current approaches to public engagement (PE). We compare the recommendations of each group with its own practices. All recommend broad engagement with the general public, but their practices vary from expert-driven models dominated by scientists, experts, and civil society groups to citizen deliberation-driven models that feature bidirectional consultation with local citizens, as well as hybrid models that combine elements (...) of both approaches. Only one group practices PE that seeks community perspectives to advance equity. In most cases, PE does little more than record already well-known views held by the most vocal groups, and thus is unlikely to produce more just or equitable processes or policy outcomes. Our exploration of the strengths, weaknesses, and possibilities of current forms of PE suggests a need to rethink both “public” and “engagement.”. (shrink)

The growing practice of returning individual results to research participants has revealed a variety of interpretations of the multiple and sometimes conflicting duties that researchers may owe to participants. One particularly difficult question is the nature and extent of a researcher’s duty to facilitate a participant’s follow-up clinical care by placing research results in the participant’s medical record. The question is especially difficult in the context of genomic research. Some recent genomic research studies — enrolling patients as participants — boldly (...) address the question with protocols dictating that researchers place research results directly into study participants’ existing medical records, without participant consent. Such privileging of researcher judgment over participant choice may be motivated by a desire to discharge a duty that researchers perceive themselves as owing to participants. However, the underlying ethical, professional, legal, and regulatory duties that would compel or justify this action have not been fully explored. (shrink)

In this paper we evaluate how to effectively use the crowdsourcing service, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), to content analyze textual data for use in psychological research. MTurk is a marketplace for discrete tasks completed by workers, typically for small amounts of money. MTurk has been used to aid psychological research in general, and content analysis in particular. In the current study, MTurk workers content analyzed personally-written textual data using coding categories previously developed and validated in psychological research. These codes were (...) evaluated for reliability, accuracy, completion time, and cost. Results indicate that MTurk workers categorized textual data with comparable reliability and accuracy to both previously published studies and expert raters. Further, the coding tasks were performed quickly and cheaply. These data suggest that crowdsourced content analysis can help advance psychological research. (shrink)

In his monograph, Ryan Patrick Hanley offers a revisionist interpretation of the political philosophy of François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai. A series of Enlightenment commentators and their progeny have hailed Fénelon as a political subversive who boldly attacked the injustices of the reign of Louis XIV and who prepared the arrival of an egalitarian society with socialist and pacifist traits. Hanley, however, argues that Fénelon actually defended a more moderate and realistic model of political society than (...) his Enlightenment exegetes have suggested. Like earlier commentators, Hanley attempts to prove his argument primarily through an analysis of... (shrink)

Participants in clinical studies are frequently unable to remember study information for the duration of their participation in the research. Along with a nine-member work group and a seven-member advisory group, we determined that six elements of consent are necessary to uphold the validity of consent over time: awareness of ongoing participation; understanding the right to withdraw; understanding that withdrawal will not influence other treatment options; knowledge of the general purpose of the research; knowledge of potential risks of participation; and (...) understanding of the differences between traditional, individualized clinical care and standardized treatment during research participation. Based on these important elements, we developed an Assessment of Sustained Informed Consent as a tool to periodically review a protocol’s essential elements with its participants. We hope this will be a useful means of confirming research participants’ continued knowledge of the critical elements of consent, and of identifying those subjects who need reminding. (shrink)

The growing practice of returning individual results to research participants has revealed a variety of interpretations of the multiple and sometimes conflicting duties that researchers may owe to participants. One particularly difficult question is the nature and extent of a researcher’s duty to facilitate a participant’s follow-up clinical care by placing research results in the participant’s medical record. The question is especially difficult in the context of genomic research. Some recent genomic research studies — enrolling patients as participants — boldly (...) address the question with protocols dictating that researchers place research results directly into study participants’ existing medical records, without participant consent. Such privileging of researcher judgment over participant choice may be motivated by a desire to discharge a duty that researchers perceive themselves as owing to participants. However, the underlying ethical, professional, legal, and regulatory duties that would compel or justify this action have not been fully explored. (shrink)

This commentary builds on Haico te Kulve and Arie Rip’s ( 2011 ) notion of “engagement agents,” individuals that must be able to move between multiple dimensions, or “levels” of research, innovation, and policy processes. The commentary compares and contrasts the role of the engagement agent within the Constructive Technology Assessment and integration approaches, and suggests that on-site integration research represents one way to transform both social and natural scientists into competent and informed “engagement agents,” a new generation of researchers (...) that possess the knowledge and capacities to forge “novel linkages” between the oftentimes disparate terrains of science, politics, and policy. (shrink)

The current ethical norms of genomic biobanking creating and maintaining large repositories of human DNA and/or associated data for biomedical research have generated criticism from every angle, at both the practical and theoretical levels. The traditional research model has involved investigators seeking biospecimens for specific purposes that they can describe and disclose to prospective subjects, from whom they can then seek informed consent. In the case of many biobanks, however, the institution that collects and maintains the biospecimens may not itself (...) be directly involved in research, instead banking the biospecimens and associated data for other researchers. Moreover, the future uses of biospecimens may be unknown, if not unknowable, at the time of collection. Biobanking may thus stretch the meanings of inform and consent to their breaking point: if you cannot inform subjects about what their biospecimens will be used for, what can they consent to? Given that informed consent by individual subjects is the ethical gold standard, the seeming dilution of the concept in the context of biobanking is a profound problem. (shrink)

My aim here is (1) to argue that the usual argument for thinking dysfunction has no place in a dispositionalist approach to functions is deeply flawed and (2) to develop a positive account of the explanatory role dysfunction attributions play in dispositionalist-style functional analysis. I will also argue that while my account undermines one common motivation for preferring an etiological over a dispositionalist approach, perhaps more interestingly, it also blurs the boundary between the two and opens a path to unifying (...) them. (shrink)

Genomic biobanks present ethical challenges that are qualitatively unique and quantitatively unprecedented. Many critics have questioned whether the current system of informed consent can be meaningfully applied to genomic biobanking. Proposals for reform have come from many directions, but have tended to involve incremental change in current informed consent practice. This paper reports on our efforts to seek new ideas and approaches from those whom informed consent is designed to protect: research subjects. Our model emerged from semi-structured interviews with healthy (...) volunteers who had been recruited to join either of two biobanks , and whom we encouraged to explain their concerns and how they understood the relationship between specimen contributors and biobanks. These subjects spoke about their DNA and the information it contains in ways that were strikingly evocative of the legal concept of the trade secret. They then described the terms and conditions under which they might let others study their DNA, and there was a compelling analogy to the commonplace practice of trade secret licensing. We propose a novel biobanking model based on this trade secret concept, and argue that it would be a practical, legal, and ethical improvement on the status quo. (shrink)

Ecopolitics is a study of environmental awareness--or non-awareness--in contemporary French theory. Arguing that it is now impossible not to think in an ecological way, Verena Andermatt Conley traces the roots of today's concern for the environment back to the intellectual climate of the late '50s and '60s. Major thinkers of 1968, the author argues, changed the way we think the world; this owes much to an ecological awareness that remains at the heart of issues concerning cultural theory in general. (...) The book points to critiques of ecology in the work of Luc Ferry and Jean Baudrillard before turning to more complicated ecological awareness primarily in French thought. The author considers key texts by influential figures such as Michael Serres, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Michel de Certeau, Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray. (shrink)