The article critically considers the role of NGOs at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. On the basis of observation of pre-trial hearings for the case against Khalid Sheik Mohammed et al.—those allegedly responsible for the September 11 attacks—the article analyses NGOs as trial monitors of the US military commissions set up to deal with ‘alien unprivileged enemy belligerents’. In spite of continued efforts by human rights NGOs and incremental improvements in the military commissions’ institutional arrangements and practice, (...) the article shows how NGOs have become so much a part of the everyday operation of justice at ‘Gitmo’ that they legitimate the military commissions’ claim to be delivering fair and transparent justice. (shrink)

Aim:The purpose of this study was to explore how adolescent patients displaying developmental trauma experience and describe meaning in life. Schnell’s model of meaning in life is applied to explore meaningfulness, crises of meaning and sources of meaning. Method: The study has a qualitative design based on individual interviews with eight adolescents aged 14–18 years in treatment in an outpatient clinic for mental health care for children and adolescents. The interviews were transcribed and analyzed using systematic text condensation. Results: The (...) adolescents related meaning in life to the experience of coherence, intrinsic values, progress and belonging, or the absence of these. Examples of sources of meaning among the informants were positive relations with meaningful others, structure and routines, moments of well-being, achieving goals related to education, work and family, and seeking something else outside oneself such as playing computer games, being engaged in politics, being with animals, having a belief in a god or being outdoors in natural surroundings. Conclusion: Although the topic of meaning in life was unknown to this group, they used sources of meaning intuitively. This group seems to have similar preferences to the general population. More knowledge is needed on how the topic of meaning in life can be useful in therapy for adolescents with development trauma. (shrink)

Objective: Previous research suggests a positive association between pain, depression and sleep. In this study, we investigate how sleep correlates with varying levels of pain and depression in nursing home patients with dementia.Materials and methods: Cross-sectional study with sleep-related data, derived from two multicenter studies conducted in Norway. We included NH patients with dementia according to the Mini-Mental State Examination from the COSMOS trial and the DEP.PAIN.DEM trial whose sleep was objectively measured with actigraphy. In the COSMOS trial, NH patients (...) were included if they were ≥65 years of age and with life expectancy >6 months. In the DEP.PAIN.DEM trial, patients were included if they were ≥60 years and if they had depression according to the Cornell Scale for Depression in Dementia. In both studies, pain was assessed with the Mobilization-Observation-Behavior-Intensity-Dementia-2 Pain Scale, and depression with CSDD. Sleep parameters were total sleep time, sleep efficiency, sleep onset latency, wake after sleep onset, early morning awakening, daytime total sleep time and time in bed. We registered use of sedatives, analgesics, opioids and antidepressants from patient health records and adjusted for these medications in the analyses.Results: Mean age was 86.2 years and 76.3% were female. Hierarchical regressions showed that pain was associated with higher TST and SE, less WASO and more DTS. More severe dementia was associated with more WASO and TiB. More severe depression was associated with less TST, less DTS and less TiB. Use of sedative medications was associated with less TiB.Conclusion: When sleep was measured with actigraphy, NH patients with dementia and pain slept more than patients without pain, in terms of higher total sleep time. Furthermore, their sleep efficiency was higher, indicating that the patients had more sleep within the time they spent in bed. Patients with more severe dementia spent more time awake during the time spent in bed. Furthermore, people with more severe depression slept less at daytime and had less total sleep time Controlling for concomitant medication use did not affect the obtained results. (shrink)

Food charity in the United States has grown into a critical appendage of agro-food supply chains. In 2016, 4.5 billion pounds of food waste was diverted through a network of 200 regional food banks, a fivefold increase in just 20 years. Recent global trade disruptions and the COVID-19 pandemic have further reinforced this trend. Economic geographers studying charitable food networks argue that its infrastructure and moral substructure serve to revalue food waste and surplus labor in the capitalist food system. The (...) political–legal framework undergirding this revaluation process however is still poorly understood. Drawing on a 6-year institutional ethnography of the food banking economy in West Virginia, this paper takes a supply-side approach to examine the material and moral values driving the expansion of food waste recovery as hunger relief. Empirically, it focuses on the laws, contracts and fiscal incentives regulating charitable food procurement at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Feeding America. The assemblage of government agencies, private businesses and non-profit organizations enrolled into this gift economy at different scales I argue, serves to enclose food waste into a public–private governance structure that regulates food surpluses and ensures these will not disrupt the scarcity logics driving profitability along primary food circuits. (shrink)

The paper discusses Rawls’ and Habermas’ theories of deliberative democracy, focusing on the question of religious reasons in political discourse. Whereas Rawls as well as Habermas defend a fully inclusivist position on the use of religious reasons in the ‘background culture’ or ‘informal public sphere’, we defend a moderately inclusivist position. Moderate inclusivism welcomes religiously inspired contributions to public debate, but it also makes normative demands on public argumentation beyond the ‘public forum’ or ‘formal public sphere’. In particular, moderate inclusivism (...) implies what we call a ‘conversational translation proviso’ according to which citizens have a duty to supplement religious with proper political arguments if – but only if – they are asked to do so by their co-discussants. This position, we argue, is more in line with the deeper intuitions behind Rawls’ political liberalism and Habermas’ deliberative model than is the fully inclusivist alternative. _Keywords_: conversational translation proviso, deliberative democracy, ethics of citizenship, Habermas, moderate inclusivism, public reason, Rawls. (shrink)

Much is known about the phenomenon of dignity, yet there is still a need for implementing this understanding in clinical practice. The main purpose of this study was to find out how persons suffering from multiple sclerosis experience and understand dignity and violation in the context of a rehabilitation ward. A phenomenological-hermeneutic approach was used to extract the meaningful content of narratives from 14 patients with multiple sclerosis. Data were collected by personal research interviews. The findings revealed three main themes: (...) (1) ‘invisibly captured in fatigue’; (2) ‘fighters’ law: one who does not ask will not receive’; and (3) ‘dignity is humanity’. The essence of the findings in this study is that dignity is humanity. According to the participants, dignity requires time and is experienced only in a context of empathy and mutual confidence. (shrink)

This paper investigates how people conceive and evaluate nature through language, in a climate change context. With material consisting of 1,200 answers to open-ended questions in nationally representative surveys in Norway, we explore what semantic roles and values the respondents attribute to nature as well as to how they interact with the public debate about climate change. We observe that different conceptions and valuations of nature are tied to different perspectives on the climate change issue: some address the responsibilities of (...) causing climate change, others its consequences, and others yet its potential solutions. The study provides knowledge about the variety of conceptions of nature that can be mobilised by individuals and suggests that policy measures and public communication could benefit by taking this diversity into account. (shrink)

Introduction: Expressions of dignity as a clinical phenomenon in nursing homes as expressed by caregivers were investigated. A coherence could be detected between the concepts and phenomena of existence and dignity in relationships and caring culture as a context. A caring culture is interpreted by caregivers as the meaning-making of what is accepted or not in the ward culture. Background: The rationale for the connection between existence and dignity in relationships and caring culture is that suffering is a part of (...) existence, as well as compassion in relieving suffering, and ontological interdependency. Aim: To describe different expressions of dignity in relationships and existence in context of caring cultures from the perspective of the caregivers. Research design: The methodology and method are hermeneutic. The method used was to merge the theoretical preunderstanding as one horizon of understanding with empirical data. Participants and research context: Focus group interviews with caregivers in nursing homes. Ethical considerations: The principles of the Helsinki Declaration have been followed to, for example, preserve self-determination, integrity, dignity, confidentiality and privacy of the research persons. Findings: Data interpretation resulted in four themes: Encountering existential needs that promote dignity in a caring culture; To amplify dignity in relationships by the creative art of caring in a caring culture; Violation of dignity by ignorance or neglect in a non-caring culture and The ethic of words and appropriated ground values in a caring culture. Discussion: Dignity-promoting acts of caring, or dignity-depriving acts of non-caring are adequate to see from the perspective of dignity in relationships and existence and the caring culture. Conclusions: Dignity in relationships seems to touch the innermost existential life, as the existential life is dependent on confirmation from others. (shrink)

The vertebrate Cdx genes (Cdx1 Cdx2 and Cdx4 in the mouse) encode homeodomain transcription factors related to the Drosophila caudal gene. The vertebrate Cdx gene products have been implicated in the development of the posterior embryo. In particular, loss‐ and gain‐of‐function experiments suggest that Cdx members are direct regulators of Hox genes and likely impart posterior information, in part, through this mechanism. Several signaling molecules, notably retinoic acid (RA*) and members of the Wnt (wingless) and fibroblast growth factor (FGF) families, (...) are also implicated in patterning of the posterior vertebrate embryo. Interestingly, recent work indicates that members of the Cdx family are targets of Wnt, RA and FGF signaling, suggesting that Cdx factors act to convey the activity of these signaling molecules to Hox genes. This article will briefly review Cdx expression and function, with particular emphasis on vertebrate model systems. BioEssays 25:971–980, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This book tackles the concerns of stressed teachers. Whether from nurturance suffering or from the piles of paperwork yet to be tackled, the author helps the reader sort through the causes of stress, the emotional, physical and social reactions to stress and how one can begin to plan a stress management plan.

The overall purpose of this cross-country Nordic study was to gain further knowledge about maintaining and promoting dignity in nursing home residents. The purpose of this article is to present results pertaining to the following question: How is nursing home residents’ dignity maintained, promoted or deprived from the perspective of family caregivers? In this article, we focus only on indignity in care. This study took place at six different nursing home residences in Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Data collection methods in (...) this part of this study consisted of individual research interviews. Altogether, the sample consisted of 28 family caregivers of nursing home residents. The empirical material was interpreted using a hermeneutical approach. The overall theme that emerged was as follows: ‘A feeling of being abandoned’. The sub-themes are designated as follows: deprived of the feeling of belonging, deprived of dignity due to acts of omission, deprived of confirmation, deprived of dignity due to physical humiliation, deprived of dignity due to psychological humiliation and deprived of parts of life. (shrink)

Motion-sound synesthesia is characterized by illusory auditory sensations linked to the pattern and rhythms of motion of visually experienced but soundless object, like an optical flow array, a ball bouncing or a horse galloping. In an MRI study with a group of three synesthetes and a group of eighteen control participants, we found structural changes in the brains of synesthetes in the subcortical multisensory areas of the superior and inferior colliculi. In addition, functional magnetic resonance imaging data showed activity in (...) motion-sensitive regions, as well as temporal and occipital areas, and the cerebellum. However, the synesthetes had a higher activation within the left and right cuneus, with stronger activations when viewing optical flow stimuli. There was also a general difference in connectivity of the colliculi with the above mentioned regions between the two groups. These findings implicate low-level mechanisms within the human neuroaxis as a substrate for local connectivity and cross activity between perceptual processes that are “distant” in terms of cortical topography. The present findings underline the importance of considering the role of subcortical systems and their connectivity to multimodal regions of the cortex and they strengthen a parsimonious account of synesthesia, at the least of the visual-auditory type. (shrink)

Background When a patient commits suicide while hospitalized in the psychiatric ward, the mental healthcare professionals (MHCPs) who have had the patient in their care encounter the family members immediately following the suicide. Professionals who encounter the bereaved in this first critical phase may have a significant impact on the grieving process. By providing ethically responsible and professionally competent care, they have the opportunity to influence what can alleviate and reduce suffering and promote health in a longer perspective. Aim The (...) aim of this study is to investigate MHCPs’ experiences in the encounter with family members who has been bereaved by suicide. Methods Data material consists of text from in-depth interviews with six MHCPs belonging to a total of five different psychiatric units in two hospitals. The findings have emerged through analysis using a hermeneutical approach based on Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Ethical considerations The study was approved by the Ombudsman for Privacy of the Norwegian Social Science Data Services and is based on informed consent and confidentiality. Findings Three themes emerged: Confirming the suffering. Creating encounter through dialogue. Providing consolation and reconciliation. Findings illuminate how MHCPs understand their responsibilities and how they act in the encounter with the bereaved following suicide. Conclusion The participants appear to be led by the responsibility that grows through witnessing the suffering of the bereaved. Encountering the family member’s aggression and threats against staff members is an ethical challenge to the professional’s ability to confirm the bereaved, create dialogue and provide consolation and reconciliation at the start of their grieving process. MHCPs need to be aware of the different reactions and needs of family members following suicide. More research is needed about how to provide sensitive and flexible care in ways that can be perceived as helpful for those left behind. (shrink)