Contemporary bioethics education has been developed predominately within Euro-American contexts, and now, other global regions are increasingly joining the field, leading to a richer global understanding. Nevertheless, many standard bioethics curriculum materials retain a narrow geographic focus. The purpose of this article is to use local cases from the Asia-Pacific region as examples for exploring questions such as ‘what makes a case or example truly local, and why?’, ‘what topics have we found to be best explained through local cases or (...) examples?’, and ‘how does one identify a relevant local case?’ Furthermore, we consider the global application of local cases to help extend the possible scope of the discussion, opening new avenues for the development of practical bioethics educational materials. We begin with a background description and discussion of why local cases enhance bioethics education, move to an overview of what is currently available and what is not for the region, and then outline a discussion of what it means to be local using example cases drawn from Hong Kong, Australia, Pakistan, and Malaysia. We are not creating a casebook but rather constructing by example a toolbox for designing active and dynamic learning cases using regional diversity as contextualised cases with generalised principles. (shrink)

This article treats the public display of emotion as social performance. The concept of "emotive performance" is developed to highlight the overlooked quality of performativity in the social use of emotion. We argue that emotive performance is reflexive, cultural, and communicative. As an active social act, emotive performance draws from the cultural repertoire of interpretative frameworks and dominant narratives. We illustrate the utility of the concept by analyzing two episodes of unrehearsed emotive performances by two well-known politicians, Bill Clinton and (...) Jiang Zemin. The two cases demonstrate how emotion can be analyzed as a domain in which culturally specific narratives and rhetorics are used to advance the situational agenda of actors. The concept opens up a more expansive research agenda for sociology. It pushes sociologists to pay greater attention to people's experiences, interpretations, and deployments of emotions in social life. (shrink)