There is limited research into the situations of people living with precarious status in Canada, which includes people whose legal status is in-process, undocumented, or unauthorized, many of whom entered the country with a temporary resident visa, through family sponsorship arrangements, or as refugee claimants. In 2005, a community-university alliance sought to carry out a research study of the lived experiences of people living with precarious status. In this paper, we describe our negotiation of the ethics review process at a (...) Canadian university and the ethical, legal, and methodological issues that emerged. Although being able to guarantee our participants complete confidentiality was essential to the viability of the project due to their vulnerability to detention or deportation, we discovered that the Canadian legal framework limited us to being able to offer them confidentiality “to the fullest extent possible by law.” One way to overcome this conflict would have been through the construction of a Wigmore defence, in which we would document that the research would not be possible without assurance of our participants’ confidentiality. Such a defence would be tested in court if our research records were subpoenaed by immigration enforcement authorities. Rather than take the risk that this defence would not be successful and would result in our participants being deported, we altered the research methods from using multiple interviews to establish trust (which would have required that we store participants’ contact information) to meeting participants only once to discuss their experiences of living with precarious legal status in Canada. Our encounter with the ‘myth of confidentiality’ raised questions about the policing of knowledge production. (shrink)

The problem of theorizing privacy moves on two levels, the first consisting of an inadequate conceptual vocabulary and the second consisting of an inadequate institutional grammar. Privacy rights are supposed to protect individual subjects, and so conventional ways of understanding privacy are subject-centered, but subject-centered approaches to theorizing privacy also wrestle with deeply embedded contradictions. And privacy’s most enduring institutional failure modes flow from its insistence on placing the individual and individualized control at the center. Strategies for rescuing privacy from (...) irrelevance involve inverting both established ways of talking about privacy rights and established conventions for designing institutions to protect them. In terms of theory, turning privacy inside out entails focusing on the conditions that are needed to produce sufficiently private and privacy-valuing subjects. Institutionally, turning privacy inside out entails focusing on the design, production, and operational practices most likely to instantiate and preserve those conditions. (shrink)

A major aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between time perspective, i.e., habitual ways of relating to the past, present, and future, and sleep quality. A second aim was to test a model by which the expected negative relationship between deviation from a balanced time perspective, a measure taking temporal biases across all three time frames into account, and life satisfaction was mediated by poor sleep quality. To these ends, a sample of young adults completed (...) a version of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale. A measure of chronotype was in addition included for control purposes. Bivariate analyses revealed that the S-ZTPI subscales Past Negative, Future Negative and Present Fatalistic were associated with poorer sleep quality, with significant associations in the opposite direction for Past Positive and Future Positive. However, DBTP was the strongest predictor of sleep quality, suggesting that time perspective biases have an additive effect on sleep quality. Regression analyses with PSQI as the dependent variable and all six ZTPI subscales as the predictors indicated that time perspective accounted for about 20% of the variance in sleep quality, with Past Negative, Past Positive, and Future Negative as the unique predictors. The results additionally confirmed a strong relationship between DBTP and life satisfaction. Finally, data were consistent with the hypothesis that the association of DBTP and life satisfaction is mediated, in part, by sleep quality. Taken together, the results confirmed a substantial link between time perspective sleep-related problems, factors that may have a negative impact on life satisfaction. (shrink)

Within the political economy of informational capitalism, commercial surveillance practices are tools for resource extraction. That process requires an enabling legal construct, which this essay identifies and explores. Contemporary practices of personal information processing constitute a new type of public domain—a repository of raw materials that are there for the taking and that are framed as inputs to particular types of productive activity. As a legal construct, the biopolitical public domain shapes practices of appropriation and use of personal information in (...) two complementary and interrelated ways. First, it constitutes personal information as available and potentially valuable: as a pool of materials that may be freely appropriated as inputs to economic production. That framing supports the reorganization of sociotechnical activity in ways directed toward extraction and appropriation. Second, the biopolitical public domain constitutes the personal information harvested within networked information environments as raw. That framing creates the backdrop for culturally situated techniques of knowledge production and for the logic that designates those techniques as sites of legal privilege. (shrink)

Secularism is usually thought to contain the project of self-deification, in which humans attack God’s authority in order to take his place, freed from all constraints. Julie E. Cooper overturns this conception through an incisive analysis of the early modern justifications for secular politics. While she agrees that secularism is a means of empowerment, she argues that we have misunderstood the sources of secular empowerment and the kinds of strength to which it aspires. Contemporary understandings of secularism, Cooper contends, (...) have been shaped by a limited understanding of it as a shift from vulnerability to power. But the works of the foundational thinkers of secularism tell a different story. Analyzing the writings of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau at the moment of secularity’s inception, she shows that all three understood that acknowledging one’s limitations was a condition of successful self-rule. And while all three invited humans to collectively build and sustain a political world, their invitations did not amount to self-deification. Cooper establishes that secular politics as originally conceived does not require a choice between power and vulnerability. Rather, it challenges us—today as then—to reconcile them both as essential components of our humanity. (shrink)

This Article examines the regulatory state through the lens of evolving political economy, arguing that a significant reconstruction is now underway. The ongoing shift from an industrial mode of development to an informational one has created existential challenges for regulatory models and constructs developed in the context of the industrial economy. Contemporary contests over the substance of regulatory mandates and the shape of regulatory institutions are most usefully understood as moves within a larger struggle to chart a new direction for (...) the regulatory state in the era of informational capitalism. A regulatory state optimized for the information economy must develop rubrics for responding to three problems that have confounded existing regulatory regimes: platform power — the power to link facially separate markets and/or to constrain participation in markets by using technical protocols; infoglut — unmanageably voluminous, mediated information flows that create information overload; and systemic threat — nascent, probabilistically-defined harm to be realized at some point in the future. Additionally, it must develop institutions capable of exercising effective oversight of informationera activities. The information-era regulatory models that have begun to emerge are procedurally informal, mediated by networks of professional and technical expertise that define relevant standards, and financialized. Such models, however, also have tended to be both opaque to external observation and highly prone to capture. New institutional forms that might ensure their legal and political accountability have been slow to develop. (shrink)

Introduction -- Entering the gallery : Hegel's overall project and the project of the logic -- The skepticism of Hume and Kant -- Reason overgrasps reality -- Essential, necessary universals -- Reason drives itself : semantics and syntax -- Hegel's argument -- Hegel's overall project -- The conceptual and semantic project of the logic -- The syntactic project of the logic -- Introduction -- The doctrine of quality -- The doctrine of quantity -- The doctrine of measure -- Wrap up (...) being : comments on syntax -- Introduction -- Essence as the ground of existence -- The doctrine of appearance -- The doctrine of actuality -- Wrap up essence : comments on syntax -- Introduction -- The doctrine of the object -- The doctrine of the idea -- Wrap up concept : comments on syntax -- Epilogue: Hegel's materialism, optimism, and faith. (shrink)

In Morality and Global Justice, Michael Boylan presents us with a set of solutions to some of the world’s most pressing moral issues. Boylan claims that his solutions are not utopian; instead, they are practical, workable policy recommendations that governments and other organizations should adopt. For the most part, Boylan is correct; there are no obviously insurmountable obstacles to implementing many of his recommendations. But, as he himself admits, his position on immigrants and refugees borders on the utopian (Boylan 2011, (...) 204). In what follows, I will discuss two concerns that I have about his position. The first concern (1) is consequentialist: I fear that implementing a policy of open borders may lead to economic, environmental, and political consequences that are on balance undesirable. The second (2) is practical: even if American citizens have moral reasons for supporting a policy of open borders, they may have reasons of self-interest for rejecting it. If this is correct, then Boylan may have a difficult time garnering the support necessary to make the policy a reality. (shrink)

Some of the literature about teaching issues of race and racism in classrooms has addressed matters of audience. Zeus Leonardo, for example, has argued that teachers should use the language of white domination, rather than white privilege, when teaching about race and racism because the former language presupposes a minority audience, while the latter addresses an imaginary or presupposed white one. However, there seems to be little discussion in the literature about teaching these issues to an audience that is in (...) fact predominantly minority. Leonardo assumes that minority students need little convincing about the reality of white domination, but students of color are not a monolithic group. The paper addresses some specific challenges the author has faced teaching theories of white domination to a predominantly minority student audience in New York City. Leonardo is right that audience matters, but audience turns out to matter in ways that defy common assumptions. (shrink)

In this new theoretical approach to disability, Maybee traces societal constructions of human physicality along three dimensions: the personal body, the interpersonal body, and the institutional body. Each dimension has played a part in defining people as disabled in terms of employment, healthcare, education, and social and political roles.

In "Rethinking Rationality" I argue that a certain family of accounts of rationality that have historical roots in the history of philosophy and that have been recommended as ways of life, if actually adopted by people as ways of life, will make them psychologically unhealthy. I compare the sort of psychological illness they will have to the sort of illness experienced by alcoholic and other addictive persons. In effect, I suggest, the family of accounts of rationality I have in mind (...) recommends that people become addicted to rationality. ;The sort of picture of rationality that I have in mind is what I call an "external" account of rationality. An external account of rationality is an account that asks someone to adopt another's point of view in deciding what to do. In the history of philosophy most of the relevant external accounts have asked agents to adopt a completely impersonal perspective. Moreover, these pictures ask people who adopt them as ideal ways of life to ensure that each decision they make correspond to and be approved of by the rational picture. I argue that people who thus live their lives will become unhealthy by losing contact with their personal inner lives and identities, and thus with an important part of their humanness. ;Historical representatives of the family of accounts I criticize include Socrates, Kant, and Hegel, under particular interpretations. I also criticize Nicholas Rescher as a modern representative of that same historical tradition. ;The argument for this view, after an initial introductory chapter, is presented through close examinations of Genevieve Lloyd's The Man of Reason, pop-psychologist John Bradshaw's Bradshaw On: The Family, Soren Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments and Friedrich Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols. (shrink)

Maybee asserts that racial group formation and identity politics may be more complex than simply shared cultural practices or skin color. They may be based on political interests and commitment to liberation and antiracist struggles.

In civil libertarian discourse, the inverse relationship between government secrecy and privacy is well recognized and widely acknowledged - so widely, in fact, that it can come to seem as though we might regain sufficient privacy simply by cabining official secrecy. But regimes of secrecy that insulate private-sector data processing practices also contribute materially to the decline of privacy, and indeed play a vital role in facilitating government efforts to make citizens' lives transparent. In addition, there is an inverse relationship (...) between openness and privacy that we are inclined to resist discussing. When, for example, a government agency posts on its website documents containing private information about individual citizens, or when a social networking service establishes default rules for transmitting information from member pages to commercial partners, openness contributes materially to the exposure that people experience. Our public discourse about information policy reinforces the devaluation of privacy in two opposite but mutually-reinforcing ways, by valorizing political economies organized around secrecy and by elevating openness as an ultimate good. The shelter that privacy affords for self-development is essential to a healthy democracy. It is therefore important to interrogate both our regimes of secrecy and our discourses about openness. (shrink)

The Venetian state has aptly been called a work of art. So absolute and necessary appear its fictions that continuity and tradition are always in the foreground, while change recedes to the distant horizon. It is this quality of timeless truth that characterizes the “myth of Venice”: Venice remains perfect and unchanged while other governments rise and fall. It remains unchanged because of two things: the “perfect” system of government, combining the best features of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy; and the (...) reliance on impartial justice, the key to preserving harmony between conflicting groups. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars of Jewish politics have invested political hopes in the revival of “political imagination.” If only we could recapture some of the imaginativeness that early Zionists displayed when wrestling with questions of regime design, it is argued, we might be able to advance more compelling “solutions” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet how does one cultivate political imagination? Curiously, scholars who rehearse the catalogue of regimes that Jews have historically entertained seldom pose this question. In this Article, I (...) revisit a historical episode—the appropriation of diasporic historical narratives by Zionists in mandatory Palestine—in an effort to cultivate a richer political imaginary. I analyze the labor Zionist deployment of Simon Dubnow’s influential master narrative, focusing on a 1926 speech in which David Ben Gurion depicts the autonomist regime that he advocates as a variation upon diasporic political practices. On my reading, this episode illustrates the dilemmas that confront thinkers who invest political hopes in regime design. To realize the promise that new political configurations may emerge from reflections upon Jewish history, I argue, we must develop a new account of political agency, once foundational assumptions of the nation-state have been suspended. (shrink)

This study assessed the knowledge and perception of human biological materials (HBM) and biorepositories among three study groups in South Korea. The relationship between the knowledge and the perception among different groups was also examined by using factor and regression analyses. In a self-reporting survey of 440 respondents, the expert group was found more likely to be knowledgeable and positively perceived than the others. Four factors emerged: Sale and Consent, Flexible Use, Self-Confidence, and Korean Bioethics and Biosafety Action restriction perception. (...) The results indicate that those who are well aware of the existence of biobanks were more positively inclined to receive the Sale and Consent perception. As a result of the need for high quality HBMs and the use of appropriate sampling procedures for every aspect of the collection and use process, the biorepository community should pay attention to ethical, legal, and policy issues. (shrink)

This study assessed the knowledge and perception of human biological materials (HBM) and biorepositories among three study groups in South Korea. The relationship between the knowledge and the perception among different groups was also examined by using factor and regression analyses. In a self‐reporting survey of 440 respondents, the expert group was found more likely to be knowledgeable and positively perceived than the others. Four factors emerged: Sale and Consent, Flexible Use, Self‐Confidence, and Korean Bioethics and Biosafety Action restriction perception. (...) The results indicate that those who are well aware of the existence of biobanks were more positively inclined to receive the Sale and Consent perception. As a result of the need for high quality HBMs and the use of appropriate sampling procedures for every aspect of the collection and use process, the biorepository community should pay attention to ethical, legal, and policy issues. (shrink)

This investigation places recent research about changes in wives' and husbands' domestic labor in the context of well-known reporting differences between different kinds of housework surveys. An analysis of the “reporting gap” between direct-question reports of housework hours from the National Survey of Families and Households and time-diary reports from Americans' Use of Time, 1985, shows that both husbands and wives overreport their housework contributions. Furthermore, gender attitudes, total housework, class, education, income, family size, and employment status together significantly affect (...) the overreport, although the variables operate in different ways for wives and husbands. It is concluded that changing and uneven social perceptions of the appropriate domestic roles of women and men have resulted in reporting biases that do not necessarily correspond to actual changes in housework behavior. These findings cast doubt on claims that contemporary husbands are doing more housework than their predecessors. (shrink)

In this article, the authors operationalize the intersection of gender and race in survey research. Using quantitative data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, they investigate how gender/racial stereotypes about African Americans affect Whites’ attitudes about two types of affirmative action programs: job training and education and hiring and promotion. The authors find that gender/racial prejudice towards Black women and Black men influences Whites’ opposition to affirmative action at different levels than negative attitudes towards Blacks as a group. Prejudice (...) toward Black women has a larger effect on Whites’ policy preferences than does prejudice toward Black men or Blacks in general. In future research, survey methodologists should develop better intersectional measures to further document these gender/racial attitudes. (shrink)

The famous Russian historian V. O. Kluchevsky had been constantly interested in literature. In this article, the author considers Kluchevsky’s observations on M. Yu. Lermontov’s creativity through the analyses of sadness motives in the article ‘Sadness‘ published in the journal ‘Russian Thought‘. Kluchevsky tried to understand how sadness motives were appeared in the Russian literature and how these motives influenced Lermontov’s self-reflection. Literary analyses is constructed on famous Lermontov’s lyrics, such as ‘Sail‘, ‘The golden cloud slept…‘, ‘Dream‘ and ‘July the (...) 11th of 1831‘. Analyzing the lyrics ‘I go out alone on the road…‘ the author of this article paying attention to ‘hidden sadness‘, which is expressed impressively in melodious Lermontov’s lyric without ‘arrangement for notes‘. Kluchevsky had expressed it on the 50th anniversary of Lermontov’s death. The position of the historian reflected in his comparison of sad Lermontov with meek and devout Russian tsar Alexey Mikhailovich. For this comparison, he was reproached by writer and literary critic N. M. Mikhailovsky, but Kluchevsky thoroughly considered sadness motives in poet’s creativity based on examples from the lyrics and disagreed literary critic’s reproaches. The origins of sadness motives studied in the historian’s article are in lesser degree connected with the biography of young Lermontov and rooted in the ‘moral history‘ of all Russian society. (shrink)