In this article, the theme of introductory engagement is developed through the conversational interviews and participatory observations I carried out with perinatal nurses and birthing women in the context of a feminist phenomenological methodology. Positioned against the landscape of hierarchical health care practices embedded with power dynamics and disembodied practices, this research explored the ways in which perinatal nurses related to birthing women in the context of relational care. The focus of attention in this article is to describe the theme (...) of introductory engagement by way of a storied phenomenological text. (shrink)

The explosion of data grows at a rate of roughly five trillion bits a second, giving rise to greater urgency in conceptualizing the infosphere and understanding its implications for knowledge and public policy. Philosophers of technology and information technologists alike who wrestle with ontological and epistemological questions of digital information tend to emphasize, as Floridi does, information as our new ecosystem and human beings as interconnected informational organisms, inforgs at home in ambient intelligence. But the linguistic and conceptual representations of (...) Big Data—the massive volume of both structured and unstructured data—and the real world practice of data-mining for patterns and meaningful interpretation of evidence reveal tension and ambiguity in the bold promise of data analytics. This paper explores the tacit epistemology of the rhetoric and representation of Big Data and suggests a richer account of its ambiguities and the paradox of its real world materiality. We argue that Big Data should be recognized as manifesting multiple and conflicting trajectories that reflect human intentionality and particular patterns of power and authority. Such patterns require attentive exploration and moral appraisal if we are to resist simplistic informationist ontologies of Big Data, and the subtle forms of control in the political ecology of Big Data that undermine its promise as transformational knowledge. (shrink)

Unable to answer the call of our patients: mental health nurses’ experience of moral distress When health practitioners’ moral choices and actions are thwarted by constraints, they may respond with feelings of moral distress. In a Canadian hermeneutic phenomenological study, physicians, nurses, psychologists and non‐professional aides were asked to identify care situations that they found morally distressing, and to elaborate on how moral concerns regarding the care of patients were raised and resolved. In this paper, we describe the experience of (...) moral distress related by nurses working in mental healthcare settings who believed that lack of resources (such as time and staff) leads to dispiritedness, lack of respect, and absence of recognition (for both patients and staff) which severely diminished their ability to provide quality care. The metaphors of flashlight and hammer are used to elaborate nurses’ possible responses to intolerable situations. (shrink)

Different types of consent are used to obtain human biospecimens for future research. This variation has resulted in confusion regarding what research is permitted, inadvertent constraints on future research, and research proceeding without consent. The National Institutes of Health Clinical Center's Department of Bioethics held a workshop to consider the ethical acceptability of addressing these concerns by using broad consent for future research on stored biospecimens. Multiple bioethics scholars, who have written on these issues, discussed the reasons for consent, the (...) range of consent strategies, and gaps in our understanding, and concluded with a proposal for broad initial consent coupled with oversight and, when feasible, ongoing provision of information to donors. This article describes areas of agreement and areas that need more research and dialogue. Given recent proposed changes to the Common Rule, and new guidance regarding storing and sharing data and samples, this is an important and tim.. (shrink)

This paper draws on findings from qualitative interviews with queer and trans patients and with physicians providing care to queer and trans patients in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, to explore how routine practices of health care can perpetuate or challenge the marginalization of queers. One of the most common “measures” of improved cultural competence in health care practice is self-reported increases in confidence and comfort, though it seems unlikely that an increase in physician comfort levels with queer and trans patients (...) will necessarily mean better health care for queers. More attention to current felt discomfort in patient–provider encounters is required. Policies and practices that avoid discomfort at all costs are not always helpful for care, and experiences of shared discomfort in queer health contexts are not always harmful. (shrink)

Mind &Language, Volume 34, Issue 5, Page 667-680, November 2019.

Phenomenological interviews with queer women in rural Nova Scotia reveal significant forms of trauma experienced during labour and birth. Situating the accounts of participants within both phenomenological and intersectional analyses reveals harms enabled by structurally embedded heteronormative and homophobic healthcare practices and policies. Our account illustrates the breadth and depth of harm experienced and outlines how these violate core ethical principles and values in healthcare.

An understanding of autonomy has important significance in North American health care. Although a respect for autonomy is necessary to protect the self-determination and agency of birthing women in hospital settings, I suggest that enactments of autonomy that are independent of relationships offer only an incomplete interpretation of such a vital concept. In this article I explore an understanding of autonomy situated within the context of a relational birthing narrative. In so doing, autonomy becomes conceptualized as contextual and concrete, giving (...) rise to an embodied view of the birthing woman. (shrink)

Aims and objectives. Participant narratives from a feminist and queer phe- nomenological study aim to broaden current understandings of trauma. Examin- ing structural marginalisation within perinatal care relationships provides insights into the impact of dominant models of care on queer birthing women. More specifically, validation of queer experience as a key finding from the study offers trauma-informed strategies that reconstruct formerly disempowering perinatal relationships. Background. Heteronormativity governs birthing spaces and presents considerable challenges for queer birthing women who may also have (...) an increased risk of trauma due to structurally marginalising processes that create and maintain socially constructed differences. Design. Analysis of the qualitative data was guided by feminist and queer phe- nomenology. This was well suited to understanding queer women’s storied narra- tives of trauma, including disempowering processes of structural marginalisation. Methods. Semistructured and conversational interviews were conducted with a purposeful sample of thirteen queer-identified women who had experiences of birthing in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. Results. Validation was identified as meaningful for queer women in the context of perinatal care in rural Nova Scotia. Offering new perspectives on traditional models of assessment provide strategies to create a context of care that recon- structs the birthing space insofar as women at risk do not have to come out as queer in opposition to the expectation of heterosexuality. Conclusions. Normative practices were found to further the effects of structural marginalisation suggesting that perinatal care providers, including nurses, can challenge dominant models of care and reconstruct the relationality between queer women and formerly disempowering expectations of heteronormativity that govern birthing spaces. Relevance to clinical practice. New trauma-informed assessment strategies recon- struct the relationality within historically disempowering perinatal relationships through potentiating difference which avoids retraumatising women with re- experiencing the process of coming out as queer in opposition to the expectation of heterosexuality. (shrink)

The following Acknowledgments were omitted in the original publication.

Medical students’ concerns during clinical clerkships may not always be addressed with mentors who work under significant time constraints. This study examined 3rd year students’ survey responses regarding patient encounters to elucidate what may be hidden aspects of their learning environment. We analyzed results to an 18-item survey completed during a required ethics and professionalism course in third-year medicine clerkships over a period of 18 months. The survey covered types of concerns elicited by patient encounters, interactions with mentors about concerns, (...) perceptions of mentors, and level of moral distress. We also examined results of a 7-item evaluation of small group discussions during the study period. 1210 surveys and 195 evaluations constituted the study samples. Students’ concerns related primarily to ethics (36.4%, n = 441) and quality of care (34.5%, n = 418). Concerns had not been raised with a mentor in 535 (44.2%) instances. Students experienced moral distress in connection with 35.4% (n = 324) of cases; this was particularly common when a concern applied to a mentor. Higher levels of moral distress were associated with a lower likelihood of wishing to emulate the mentor (r = -0.27, p <.001). Two thirds of students, 66.9% (n = 107), stated that small group discussions where concerns were discussed lowered their stress levels. We suggest that clinical mentors be made aware of students’ learning needs and that structured discussions be available for students to articulate concerns with peers and facilitators in efforts to uncover elements of the hidden curriculum with the goal of optimizing students’ well-being, learning and professional development. (shrink)

The rise of neurotechnologies, especially in combination with artificial intelligence (AI)-based methods for brain data analytics, has given rise to concerns around the protection of mental privacy, mental integrity and cognitive liberty – often framed as “neurorights” in ethical, legal, and policy discussions. Several states are now looking at including neurorights into their constitutional legal frameworks, and international institutions and organizations, such as UNESCO and the Council of Europe, are taking an active interest in developing international policy and governance guidelines (...) on this issue. However, in many discussions of neurorights the philosophical assumptions, ethical frames of reference and legal interpretation are either not made explicit or conflict with each other. The aim of this multidisciplinary work is to provide conceptual, ethical, and legal foundations that allow for facilitating a common minimalist conceptual understanding of mental privacy, mental integrity, and cognitive liberty to facilitate scholarly, legal, and policy discussions. (shrink)

Heideggerian philosophy is frequently chosen as a philosophical framing, and/or a hermeneutic analytical structure in qualitative nursing research. As Heideggerian philosophy is dense, there is merit in the development of scholarly resources that help to explain discrete Heideggerian concepts and to uncover their relevance to contemporary human experience. This paper uses a meta-synthesis methodology to pool and synthesise findings from 29 phenomenological research reports on Being-with in the nurse–patient relationship. We firstly considered and secured the most relevant Heideggerian elements to (...) nurse–patient Being-with. Under these deductive codes, we then inductively developed sub-themes that seemed to explain the multifaceted nature of Being-with, through a secondary analysis and synthesis of published data from 417 patient, carer and nurse participants. Dasein-with was enhanced when nurses had first-hand experience with a phenomenon. Nurses moved between the inauthentic they-mode, and the authentic self-mode. Through circumspection, technology and people were encountered environmentally feeding into nursing attention, assessment and communication. Nursing as a social arrangement was expressed through either leaping-in care or leaping-ahead care. There was a place for both inauthentic and authentic discourse that nurses wove through the ontic everydayness of nursing tasks. (shrink)

This collection of essays provides a reassessment of the question of sexual difference, taking into account important shifts in feminist thought, post-humanist theories, and queer studies. The contributors offer new and refreshing insights into the complex question of sexual difference from a post-feminist perspective, and how it is reformulated in various related areas of study, such as ontology, epistemology, metaphysics, biology, technology, and mass-media.

Meat is a multi-billion-dollar industry that relies on people performing risky physical work inside meat-processing facilities over long shifts in close proximity. These workers are socially disempowered, and many are members of groups beset by historic and ongoing structural discrimination. The combination of working conditions and worker characteristics facilitate the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Workers have been expected to put their health and lives at risk during the pandemic because of government and industry pressures to keep (...) this “essential industry” producing. Numerous interventions can significantly reduce the risks to workers and their communities; however, the industry’s implementation has been sporadic and inconsistent. With a focus on the U.S. context, this paper offers an ethical framework for infection prevention and control recommendations grounded in public health values of health and safety, interdependence and solidarity, and health equity and justice, with particular attention to considerations of reciprocity, equitable burden sharing, harm reduction, and health promotion. Meat-processing workers are owed an approach that protects their health relative to the risks of harms to them, their families, and their communities. Sacrifices from businesses benefitting financially from essential industry status are ethically warranted and should acknowledge the risks assumed by workers in the context of existing structural inequities. (shrink)

America’s increasing obesity problem requires federal, state, and local lawyers, policymakers, and public health practitioners to consider legal strategies to encourage healthy eating and physical activity. The complexity of the legal landscape as it affects obesity requires an analysis of coordination across multiple sectors and disciplines. Government jurisdictions can be viewed “vertically,” including the local, state, tribal, and federal levels, or “horizontally” as agencies or branches of government at the same vertical level. Inspired by the successful tobacco control movement, obesity (...) prevention advocates seek comprehensive strategies to “normalize” healthy behaviors by creating environmental and legal changes that ensure healthy choices are the default or easy choices. With many competing demands on diminishing municipal budgets, strategic coordination both vertically and horizontally is essential to foster the environmental and social changes needed to reverse the obesity epidemic. (shrink)

America’s increasing obesity problem requires federal, state, and local lawyers, policymakers, and public health practitioners to consider legal strategies to encourage healthy eating and physical activity. The complexity of the legal landscape as it affects obesity requires an analysis of coordination across multiple sectors and disciplines. Government jurisdictions can be viewed “vertically,” including the local, state, tribal, and federal levels, or “horizontally” as agencies or branches of government at the same vertical level. Inspired by the successful tobacco control movement, obesity (...) prevention advocates seek comprehensive strategies to “normalize” healthy behaviors by creating environmental and legal changes that ensure healthy choices are the default or easy choices. With many competing demands on diminishing municipal budgets, strategic coordination both vertically and horizontally is essential to foster the environmental and social changes needed to reverse the obesity epidemic. (shrink)

Person‐specific evidence was developed as a grounded theory by analyzing 20 selected case descriptions from interventions using the guided self‐determination method with people with various long‐term health conditions. It explains the mechanisms of mobilizing relational capacity by including person‐specific evidence in shared decision‐making. Person‐specific self‐insight was the first step, achieved as individuals completed reflection sheets enabling them to clarify their personal values and identify actions or omissions related to self‐management challenges. This step paved the way for sharing these insights and (...) challenges in a relationship with a supportive health professional, who could then rely on person‐specific evidence instead of assumptions or a narrow disease perspective for shared decision‐making. Trust in the evidence encouraged the supportive health professional to transfer it to the interdisciplinary team. Person‐specific evidence then enhanced the ability of team members to apply general evidence in a meaningful way. The increased openness achieved by individuals through these steps enabled them to eventually share their new self‐insights in daily life with other people, decreasing loneliness they experienced in self‐management. Relational capacity, the core of the theory, is mobilized in both people with long‐term health conditions and healthcare professionals. Further research on person‐specific evidence and relational capacity in healthcare is recommended. (shrink)

This paper is the companion to the “Assessment of Coordination of Legal-Based Efforts across Jurisdictions and Sectors for Obesity Prevention and Control” paper, and the third of four papers outlining action options that policymakers can consider as discussed as part of the National Summit on Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control. The goal of this paper is to identify potential action and policy strategies related to coordination across jurisdictions and sectors that can be adopted by policymakers and implemented by (...) practitioners to address the obesity epidemic. The paper examines collaboration among four sectors — community agencies and organizations, schools, health care institutions, and workplaces — and examines collaboration from both vertical and horizontal perspectives. Additionally, the paper is structured around three legal themes — which are posed as questions — to frame the policy action discussion. (shrink)

This paper is the companion to the “Assessment of Coordination of Legal-Based Efforts across Jurisdictions and Sectors for Obesity Prevention and Control” paper, and the third of four papers outlining action options that policymakers can consider as discussed as part of the National Summit on Legal Preparedness for Obesity Prevention and Control. The goal of this paper is to identify potential action and policy strategies related to coordination across jurisdictions and sectors that can be adopted by policymakers and implemented by (...) practitioners to address the obesity epidemic. The paper examines collaboration among four sectors — community agencies and organizations, schools, health care institutions, and workplaces — and examines collaboration from both vertical and horizontal perspectives. Additionally, the paper is structured around three legal themes — which are posed as questions — to frame the policy action discussion. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

In the first of a trilogy of articles published in the New England Journal of Medicine in May 2015, physician–journalist Lisa Rosenbaum observes that the crucial question regarding conflicts of interest between physicians and commercial industry is the extent to which interactions between the two are “beneficial or harmful to patients?”. She goes on to note that the answer to this question “depends on how you define harm,”1 and argues that many of the claims of harm flowing from COI (...) are incomplete, insufficient, or are based on “suggestive extrapolations from data”. If there are benefits to be gained from physician–industry relationships, and if the evidence... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface “Africa Reconfigured,” the cluster in this issue on recent scholarly and creative work on Africa, displays a variety of cultural, artistic, and linguistic approaches to decolonizing gender. Originating in disparate fields, each article in this cluster presents examples of how new meanings of gender are produced that defy dominant definitions. Xavier Livermon examines the cultural and political context of postapartheid South Africa, arguing that redefinitions of “tradition”—not just (...) legal rights—have led Black South Africans to “queer” marriage practices. Busi Makoni pushes the boundaries of feminist linguistics to consider how young women creatively relate to the prevailing lexicon of body parts in southern African languages and, in doing so, how they challenge normative gender identities. Cheryl Toman offers an account of writer, playwright, and performer Werewere Liking’s distinctive lifelong fusing of performance art and social activism in Côte d’Ivoire and Mali and how Liking’s plays, prose, and poetry enact decolonization in unique ways. Nigerian artist Peju Alatise, whose work is featured in our art spread, presents an array of ideas, materials, and genealogies that deeply question European and US aesthetics, as the art essay by Moyo Okediji explains. Concluding “Africa Reconfigured” are critical perspectives on Euro-American gender orders found in Olumide Popoola’s except from a novel and the poems by Gabeba Baderoon. Two articles in the second half of this issue reconsider a specific moment of US women’s history: women’s liberation in the 1960s and early 1970s. Sara M. Evans challenges the stereotyping of the women’s liberation movement as white, middle class, and antisex, arguing that this is a myth fostered by academic theory, the movement’s opponents, and the mistaken notion that women ’s liberation rejected its New Left roots. Complementing Evans’s argument, Agatha Beins addresses the issue of racism in that same historical moment of women’s liberation in the United States by revisiting images 8Preface of revolutionary women of color in US feminist periodicals of the time, arguing that we have to understand the use of these images in the context of mainstream and New Left portrayals that demeaned feminism as being not serious about politics. Also in this issue is Mark Schuller ’s analysis of gender-based violence in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake of 2010, in which he examines how international humanitarian organizations are not always fully aware of how structural violence operates in the country. In our forum “Teaching about Ferguson,” Feminist Studies offers our readers reflections on the pedagogical challenges and opportunities in taking up the issue of state-sanctioned violence against people of color in the United States. All the articles and essays in this issue emphasize that the specificities of transnational, historical, and political contexts—rather than abstract invocations of globalization —are essential for understanding the changing meanings of gender identities and hierarchies as well as the political goals of women ’s organizations. The first article in our cluster on “Africa Reconfigured” takes on a popular Western assumption about South Africa, which is that the constitutional changes that acknowledged and legalized same-sex partnerships replaced intolerant “traditional” practices among Black South Africans. Xavier Livermon challenges this assumption by demonstrating how Black South Africans engage tradition in creative nonheteronormative ways. He closely follows how Black South Africans redefine autochthonous cultural practices in order to create new meanings and practices for marriage. Just as the very definitions of gender have been continuously in flux, so have the definitions of marriage, and Livermon demonstrates how marriage and long-standing coupling practices have become queered and reconstituted in contemporary Black South Africa. In line with Livermon’s interest in redefinitions of sexuality and gender in a postapartheid context, Busi Makoni explores the relationship between the naming of genitalia and gender positionings. Studying both men’s and women’s uses of the lexicon for body parts in multiple Southern African languages, Makoni concludes that women engage in a process of dis-identification with, and reappropriation of, socially inscribed language for their bodies. Women use the same name labels, but assign them completely different meanings, thereby creating counternarratives of feminine identity. Preface 9 The ability to create new meanings permeates the art... (shrink)

As members of a neuroethics research group funded by the NIH, we echo the call from Fabi and Goldberg for greater funding parity between the ethics of specialized medical technologies and br...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface The essays in this special issue on Indigenous Feminisms in Settler Contexts engage feminist politics from multiple Indigenous geographies, histories, and standpoints. What emerges is a panoramic view of Indigenous feminist scholarship’s conceptual, linguistic, and artistic activism at this moment in time. We learn of praxis aimed at reclaiming Indigenous languages and ecological perspectives and the varied modes of resistance, survivance, and persistence. We also unpack the complex (...) racial/gender politics of colonial encounters in contexts where white women cared intimately for Indigenous children, or where they helped to recover Indigenous oral traditions, and we note how modes of help can also reproduce imperial power relations. Some essays, art works, and poems extend the geographic ambit of critiques of settler colonialism beyond American contexts: they deploy feminist rubrics to critique the continuing violent settlement of Palestine and Kashmir to demonstrate that the occupation of “marginal” places is constitutive of state-​ society relations; others describe how Australian Aboriginal and Sámi artists engage the question of Indigenous visibility. In different ways, they each show how staying in place, against all odds, can be radical. Our first two articles examine the politics of praxis. Michelle M. Jacob, Virginia R. Beavert, Regan Anderson, Leilani Sabzalian, and Joana Jansen analyze Indigenous feminist praxis surrounding Ichishkíin Indigenous language education. The “artivism” of Sámi artists Maxida 284Preface and Timimie Märak, which expresses concern for land and water rights, gender and sexuality, and Indigenous rights in Northern Europe takes center stage in Kyle Bladow’s essay. The next three articles interrogate historical records shaping Indigenous lives in northern Canada, southwest Pacific, and southwestern United States and Mexico. Val Marie Johnson examines how white women staff members’ intimate care relations at residential schools for Inuvialuit, Inuinnait, and Iñupiat peoples in Canada were bound up with the latter’s dispossession. Carolyn J. Eichner recounts the encounter between the Indigenous Kanak people and Louise Michel, a feminist and participant in the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871 who was banished to New Caledonia for seven years; Eichner argues that although Michel was staunchly anti-imperialist, her liberatory political project bore the temporal logics of colonization. Drawing on examples of Nahua reconfigurations of Christian scripture, Kenna Neitch proposes the language of “persistence” as a heuristic for avoiding the reactive, relational connotations that can pervade scholarly usages of “resistance” rhetoric. Next, our review essay by Jennifer McLerran describes recent Indigenous feminist scholarship that recasts the concept of sovereignty. Our News and Views piece focuses on modalities of occupation in the context of Kashmir: Nosheen Ali, Mona Bhan, Sahana Ghosh, Hafsa Kanjwal, Zunaira Komal, Deepti Misri, Shruti Mukherjee, Nishant Upadhyay, Saiba Varma, and Ather Zia argue that occupation is foundational to the making and reproduction of nationstates, and not exceptional to state power. The varied forms of resistance to occupation are examined by Sara Ihmoud in her article about how a group of Palestinian women, the Murabitat al-Haram, agitate for religious freedom simply by “staying in place.” Rabab Abdulhadi comments on shifts in contemporary settler colonial discourse in Israel, noting the increasingly overt and unapologetic deployment of highly sexualized and gendered images. Marina Tyquiengco examines the art of Australian Aboriginal artist Fiona Foley, specifically her Black Velvet series. Art and myth are also fused in Shantell Powell’s textual and visual rendering of Inuit memory. This issue features a range of poetry on topics such as language loss, human-land relationships, and sexual violence, written by Katherine Agyemaa Agard, Kei Kaimana, and Kai Minosh Pyle, and curated by our creative writing editor, Alexis Pauline Gumbs. In “Átaw Iwá Ichishkíin Sínwit: The Importance of Ichishkíin Language in Advancing Indigenous Feminist Education,” Michelle M. Jacob, Preface 285 Virginia R. Beavert, Regan Anderson, Leilani Sabzalian, and Joana Jansen examine Indigenous feminist praxis surrounding Ichishkíin-language education. They critique how Western education systems inflict pernicious forms of violence within Native communities, engaging in practices of linguistic genocide and alienating Indigenous peoples from their homelands. In response, Native peoples, along with non-Native allies, are engaging in educational and political activism to reclaim and revitalize Indigenous languages and ecological perspectives. In examining the foundational teaching of Ichishk... (shrink)

The most popular uniting theme in feminist peace literature grounds women's peace work in mothering. I argue if maternal arguments do not address the variety of relationships different races and classes of mothers have to institutional violence and/or the military, then the resulting peace politics can only draw incomplete conclusions about the relationships between maternal work/thinking and peace. To illustrate this I compare two models of mothering: Sara Ruddick's decription of "maternal practice" and Patricia Hill Collins's account of racial-ethnic (...) women's "motherwork.". (shrink)

The most popular uniting theme in feminist peace literature grounds women's peace work in mothering. I argue if maternal arguments do not address the variety of relationships different races and classes of mothers have to institutional violence and/or the military, then the resulting peace politics can only draw incomplete conclusions about the relationships between maternal work/thinking and peace. To illustrate this I compare two models of mothering: Sara Ruddick's decription of "maternal practice" and Patricia Hill Collins's account of racial-ethnic (...) women's "motherwork.". (shrink)

This paper offers a critical analysis of program evaluation in contemporary urban agriculture. Drawing on data from an exploratory study designed at the request of and in collaboration with urban agriculture practitioners in Massachusetts, it describes both their critiques of extant practices of program evaluation and their visions for alternative ways of telling the story of their work. Related, it explores practitioners’ interest in building capacity for policy advocacy, working collectively to create transformative social change, and, related, establishing new kinds (...) of relationships with state and philanthropic funders. Building on scholarship that has observed that urban agriculture is characterized by an internal contradiction—i.e., its simultaneous orientation to “neoliberal” and “radical” agendas —this analysis calls attention, especially, to the complex role of metrics, which may not only entrench neoliberalism in UA organizations, but also provide a mechanism for challenging its assumptions and advancing the radical project of food justice. (shrink)

We are currently seeing dramatic changes in the ways we imagine and experience time. Permanent debt, unending violent conflict, climate change, economic instability, and widening social inequalities have led to suggestions that we are now living in the time of the 'end times'. In the shadow of a foreshortened future, the present is increasingly experienced as a form of 'non-stop inertia', resulting in experiences of time as both frenetic but also stuck - revving up, as Ivor Southwood puts it, to (...) go nowhere. So, where do we go and how when all options seem to have run their course and time is no longer moving forward? Enduring Time proposes some alternative relations of time which provide hopeful alternatives to the dominating models of oppression, limitation and exploitation. A strikingly original philosophy of time which also provides students and scholars with a rigorous and detailed survey of contemporary theories of time, Enduring Time is an indispensable read for those attempting to live meaningfully in the current age. (shrink)

This paper proposes the ‘AGENCY model’ of conscious state attribution, according to which an entity's displaying certain relatively simple features (e.g. eyes, distinctive motions, interactive behavior) automatically triggers a disposition to attribute conscious states to that entity. To test the model's predictions, participants completed a speeded object/attribution task, in which they responded positively or negatively to attributions of mental properties (including conscious and non-conscious states) to different sorts of entities (insects, plants, artifacts, etc.). As predicted, participants responded positively to conscious (...) state attributions only for those entities that typically display the simple features identified in the AGENCY model (eyes, distinctive motion, interaction) and took longer to deny conscious states to those entities. (shrink)

Some claim that moral factors affect the epistemic status of our beliefs. Call this _the moral encroachment thesis_. It’s been argued that the moral encroachment thesis can explain at least part of the wrongness of racial profiling. The thesis predicts that the high moral stakes in cases of racial profiling make it more difficult for these racist beliefs to be justified or to constitute knowledge. This paper considers a class of racial generalizations that seem to do just the opposite of (...) this. The high moral stakes of the beliefs we infer from these generalizations make it _easier_ rather than _harder_ for these beliefs to be justified or to constitute knowledge. I argue that the existence of this class of cases—cases of “positive profiling”—give us reason to expand our account of moral encroachment in a way that brings it closer to the ideal of pragmatic encroachment that motivates it in the first place. (shrink)

Individuals differ considerably in their emotion experience. Some experience emotions in a highly differentiated manner, clearly distinguishing among a variety of negative and positive discrete emotions. Others experience emotions in a relatively undifferentiated manner, treating a range of like-valence terms as interchangeable. Drawing on self-regulation theory, we hypothesised that individuals with highly differentiated emotion experience should be better able to regulate emotions than individuals with poorly differentiated emotion experience. In particular, we hypothesised that emotion differentiation and emotion regulation would be (...) positively related in the context of intense negative emotions, where the press for emotion regulation is generally greatest. To test this hypothesis, participants' negative and positive emotion differentiation was assessed using a 14-day diary protocol. Participants' regulation of negative and positive emotions was assessed using laboratory measures. As predicted, negative emotion differentiation was positively related to the frequency of negative emotion regulation, particularly at higher levels of emotional intensity. (shrink)

Psychological construction constitutes a different paradigm for the scientific study of emotion when compared to the current paradigm that is inspired by faculty psychology. This new paradigm is more consistent with the post-Darwinian conceptual framework in biology that includes a focus on (a) population thinking (vs. typologies), (b) domain-general core systems (vs. physical essences), and (c) constructive analysis (vs. reductionism). Three psychological construction approaches (the OCC model, the iterative reprocessing model, and the conceptual act theory) are discussed with respect to (...) these ideas. (shrink)

This paper examines processes of translation through which molecular genetic technologies and practices are incorporated into environmental health research and regulation. Specifically, it considers how scientists, risk assessors, and regulators have used genetically modified mouse models to translate across scientific disciplines, articulate emergent molecular forms, standards, and practices with the extant? gold standard,? and establish roles for molecular knowledge in risk assessment and regulation. Noting variation both within and between regulatory agencies in responses to data from these models, the article (...) describes also the role of public-private networks and their effects on professional and institutional imperatives which shape regulators? responses to the potential applications of these models. The conclusions address the importance of translation for understanding the wider implications of the molecularization of environmental health science. (shrink)

The university is situated within white colonial projects that underpin the nation in the UK, US and Canada. While the institutional whiteness of universities reflects these structural conditions of whiteness in society, it is also more flexible and dynamic in the present, reflecting both national and transnational racial politics. The Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 and student movements calling on universities to be accountable for their ties to slavery and colonialism have made this connection visible. In (...) this context, this paper examines how racial politics affects postracial whiteness in the university, using two cases from a British and Canadian university, respectively, and drawing on Sara Ahmed’s (2007;, 2019) work on whiteness and the university and David Theo Goldberg’s (2015) theorization of the postracial. (shrink)

The present study provides evidence that valence focus and arousal focus are important processes in determining whether a dimensional or a discrete emotion model best captures how people label their affective states. Individuals high in valence focus and low in arousal focus fit a dimensional model better in that they reported more co-occurrences among like-valenced affective states, whereas those lower in valence focus and higher in arousal focus fit a discrete model better in that they reported fewer co-occurrences between like-valenced (...) affective states. Taken together, these findings suggest that one static, nomothetic theory may not accurately describe the subjective affective experience of all individuals. (shrink)