Working the night shift can be fraught and experienced as demanding and, yet, is often dismissed as babysitting. Few researchers have explored the social and cultural meanings of night nursing, including storytelling rituals. In 2019, a narrative study was undertaken. The aim was to explore the stories recalled by nurses about working night shifts. Thirteen Australian nurses participated. Data were gathered using the Biographical Narrative Interview Method, and narrative analysis produced forty stories and three themes: strange and challenging experiences; colleagues (...) can be mentors (or not); and textbook knowledge is only part of what is needed on night shift. Nursing students who engage with these stories may come to understand the challenges of the night shift, and the valuable work that nurses engage in throughout a 24‐hr period, work that involves adept psychosocial and interpersonal skills alongside technical and physical competence. (shrink)

Children's exposure to food marketing has exploded in recent years, along with rates of obesity and overweight. Children of color and low-income children are disproportionately at risk for both marketing exposure and becoming overweight.Comprehensive reviews of the literature show that advertising is effective in changing children's food preferences and diets.This paper surveys the scope and scale of current marketing practices, and focuses on the growing use of symbolic appeals that are central in food brands to themes such as finding an (...) identity and feeling powerful and in control.These themes are so potent because they are central to children in their development and constitution of self. The paper concludes that reduction of exposure to marketing will be a central part of any successfu anti-obesity strategy. (shrink)

It is now well recognized that the United States is a consumer-driven society. Private consumption comprises a rising fraction of GDP, advertising is proliferating, and consumerism, as an ideology and set of values, is widespread. Not surprisingly, those developments are not confined to adults; they also characterize what some have called “the commercialization of childhood.” Children are more involved than ever in media, celebrity, shopping, brand names, and other consumer practices. At the core of this change is children's growing role (...) as independent consumers. In recent years, children's access to income has risen markedly, and they have gone from being purchasers of cheap plastic goods and a few select food items to being a major market for a diverse set of goods and services, including foodstuffs. Unofficial estimates suggest that children aged four to twelve spent a reported $6.1 billion in purchases from their own money in 1989, $23.4 billion in 1997, and $30 billion in 2002, for a total increase of four hundred percent. (shrink)

British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) has been described as "one of the Finest portraitists of the nineteenth century-in any medium.

Multidisciplinary healthcare committees meet regularly to discuss patients’ candidacy for emerging functional neurosurgical procedures, such as Deep Brain Stimulation . Through debate and discussion around the surgical candidacy of particular patients, functional neurosurgery programs begin to mold practice and policy supported both by scientific evidence and clear value choices. These neurosurgical decisions have special considerations not found in non-neurologic committees. The professional time used to resolve these conflicts provides opportunities for the emergence of careful, ethical practices simultaneous with the expansion (...) of therapy applications. (shrink)

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The moral expertise of clinical ethicists is not a question of mastering codelike theories and lawlike principles. Rather, ethicists are architects of moral space within the health care setting, as well as mediators in the conversations taking place within that space.

Several foundational documents of bioethics mention the special obligation researchers have to vulnerable research participants. However, the treatment of vulnerability offered by these documents often relies on enumeration of vulnerable groups rather than an analysis of the features that make such groups vulnerable. Recent attempts in the scholarly literature to lend philosophical weight to the concept of vulnerability are offered by Luna and Hurst. Luna suggests that vulnerability is irreducibly contextual and that Institutional Review Boards (Research Ethics Committees) can only (...) identify vulnerable participants by carefully examining the details of the proposed research. Hurst, in contrast, defines the vulnerable as those especially at risk of incurring the wrongs to which all research ethics participants are exposed. We offer a more substantive conception of vulnerability than Luna but one that gives rise to a different rubric of responsibilities from Hurst's. While we understand vulnerability to be an ontological condition of human existence, in the context of research ethics, we take the vulnerable to be research subjects who are especially prone to harm or exploitation. Our analysis rests on developing a typology of sources of vulnerability and showing how distinct sources generate distinct obligations on the part of the researcher. Our account emphasizes that the researcher's first obligation is not to make the research participant even more vulnerable than they already are. To illustrate our framework, we consider two cases: that of a vulnerable population involved in international research and that of a domestic population of people with diminished capacity. (shrink)

Brain–computer interfaces are a form of technology that read a user’s neural signals to perform a task, often with the aim of inferring user intention. They demonstrate potential in a wide range of clinical, commercial, and personal applications. But BCIs are not always simple to operate, and even with training some BCI users do not operate their systems as intended. Many researchers have described this phenomenon as “BCI illiteracy,” and a body of research has emerged aiming to characterize, predict, and (...) solve this perceived problem. However, BCI illiteracy is an inadequate concept for explaining difficulty that users face in operating BCI systems. BCI illiteracy is a methodologically weak concept; furthermore, it relies on the flawed assumption that BCI users possess physiological or functional traits that prevent proficient performance during BCI use. Alternative concepts to BCI illiteracy may offer better outcomes for prospective users and may avoid the conceptual pitfalls that BCI illiteracy brings to the BCI research process. (shrink)

Along the way, she calls upon us to recognize the mysteries that lie at the heart of our lives and the metaphysical reality that gives meaning to life.The ...

Atheism as a belief does not have to present intellectual credentials within academia. Yet to hold beliefs means giving reasons for doing so, ones which may be found wanting. Instead, atheism is the automatic default setting within the academic world. Conversely, religious belief confronts a double standard. Religious believers are not permitted to make truth claims but are instead forced to present their beliefs as part of one language game amongst many. Religious truth claims are expected to satisfy empiricist criteria (...) of evidence but when they fail, as they must, religious belief becomes subject to the hermeneutics of suspicion. This book explores religious experience as a justifiable reason for religious belief. It uniquely demonstrates that the three pillars of critical realism --ontological intransitivity, epistemic relativity and judgemental rationality -- can be applied to religion as to any other beliefs or theories. The three authors are critical realists by philosophical position. They seek to establish a level playing field between religion and secular ideas, which has not existed in the academic world for some generations, in order for reasoned debate to be conducted. (shrink)

This book is about the influence of varying theological conceptions of contingency and necessity on two versions of the mechanical philosophy in the seventeenth century. Pierre Gassendi and René Descartes both believed that all natural phenomena could be explained in terms of matter and motion alone. They disagreed about the details of their mechanical accounts of the world, in particular about their theories of matter and their approaches to scientific method. This book traces their differences back to theological presuppositions they (...) inherited from the Middle Ages. Theological ideas were transformed into philosophical and scientific ideas which led to the emergence of different styles of science in the second half of the seventeenth century. (shrink)

The large, ancient ape population of the Miocene reached across Eurasia and down into Africa. From this genetically diverse group, the chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and humans evolved from populations of successively reduced size. Using the findings of genomics, population genetics, cognitive science, neuroscience, and archaeology, the authors construct a theoretical framework of evolutionary innovations without which religious capacity could not have emerged as it did. They begin with primate sociality and strength from a basic ape model, and then explore how (...) the human line came to be the most adaptive and flexible of all, while coming from populations with reduced genetic variability. Their analysis then delves into the importance of neurological plasticity and a lengthening developmental trajectory, and points to their following article and the last building block: the expansion of the parietal areas, which allowed visuospatial reckoning, and imagined spaces and beings essential to human theologies. Approximate times for the major cognitive building blocks of religious capacity are given. (shrink)

Intrigued by Robinson and Southgate's 2010 work on “entering a semiotic matrix,” we expand their model to include the juxtaposition of all signs, symbols, and mental categories, and to explore the underpinnings of creativity in science, religion, and art. We rely on an interdisciplinary review of human sentience in archaeology, evolutionary biology, the cognitive science of religion, and literature, and speculate on the development of sentience in response to strong selection pressure on the hominin evolutionary line, leaving us the “lone (...) survivors” of complex, multiple lines of physical and cultural evolution. What we call Matrix Thinking—the creative driver of human sentience—has important cognitive and intellectual features, but also equally important characteristics traced to our intense sociability and use of emotionality in vetting rational models. Scientist, theologian, and artist create new cultural knowledge within a social context even if alone. They are rewarded by emotional validation from group members, and guided by the ever present question, “Does it feel right?”. (shrink)

Our understanding of what microbes are and how they evolve has undergone many radical shifts since the late nineteenth century, when many still believed that bacteria could be spontaneously generated and most thought microbial “species” (if any) to be unstable and interchangeable in form and function (pleomorphic). By the late twentieth century, an ontology based on single cells and definable species with predictable properties, evolving like species of animals or plants, was widely accepted. Now, however, genomic and metagenomic data show (...) that lateral gene transfer compromises this picture of stability and predictability, and refocuses our attention on multilineage communities. Treating such communities as unstable but identifiable evolving “individuals” makes us again pleomorphists, of a sort. (shrink)

In Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism, Shannon Sullivan considers: "What can white people do to help end racial injustice?". As one response to this question, Sullivan argues that prescribing "white shame" and "white guilt" is useless, since promoting these ideas leads to self-hate and inaction on the part of white people. In this paper, I agree with Sullivan, but for different reasons. I argue that assuming that white people can feel ashamed simply about being white within (...) our current society is unfounded. I will maintain that the project of "promoting white shame" is fraught to begin with, and show the significance of this finding for conversations about white people's role in... (shrink)

This essay investigates a strand of left-republicanism that emerged in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The solidarists developed a distinctive theory of social property and a thorough critique of the liberal, republican, and socialist alternatives. Solidarism rests on the claim that the modern division of labor creates a social product that does not naturally belong to the individuals who control it as their private property; property, therefore, should be conceived as “common wealth,” divided into individual and (...) public shares. When the wealthy appropriate a disproportionate share, they have a quasi-contractual debt to society that they are obliged to repay. The concepts of social debt, common-wealth, reparations, and rent played an important role in legitimizing egalitarian policies, but they have been largely forgotten today. This article resuscitates the theoretical arguments introduced by the solidarists and explains their relevance for contemporary debates about alternative economic arrangements. (shrink)

In this third and last article on the evolution of religious capacity, the authors focus on compassion, one of religious expression's common companions. They explore the various meanings of compassion, using Biblical and early related documents, and derive general cognitive components before an evolutionary analysis of compassion using their model. Then, in taking on neural reuse theory, they adapt a model from linguistics theory to understand how neural reuse could have operated to fix religious capacity in the human genome. They (...) present a teaching tool on “Religious Capacity in Action,” and develop an example of compassionate decision making in very early Homo sapiens in North Africa. They round out their analysis of compassion by exploring theory in neuroscience on a standard decision-making model, and investigate what goes on in the human brain when a values-based decision is made. (shrink)

Religious capacity is a highly elaborate, neurocognitive human trait that has a solid evolutionary foundation. This book uses a multidisciplinary approach to describe millions of years of biological innovations that eventually give rise to the modern trait and its varied expression in humanity’s many religions. The authors present a scientific model and a central thesis that the brain organs, networks, and capacities that allowed humans to survive physically also gave our species the ability to create theologies, find sustenance in religious (...) practice, and use religion to support the social group. Yet, the trait of religious capacity remains non-obligatory, like reading and mathematics. The individual can choose not to use it. The approach relies on research findings in nine disciplines, including the work of countless neuroscientists, paleoneurologists, archaeologists, cognitive scientists, and psychologists. This is a cutting-edge examination of the evolutionary origins of humanity’s interaction with the supernatural. It will be of keen interest to academics working in Religious Studies, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Anthropology, Evolutionary Biology, and Psychology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Going Polyphonic I: With Namita Goswami et al.Alyson Cole and Kyoo LeeThis time around, we go polyphonic.The articles in the next two issues, Vol. 13 and Vol. 14, explore critical questions, paradigm-shifting idseas, and fresh connections arising from the intimately networked fields of intersectional, decolonial, and trans studies today. “Polyphonia,” a term we borrowed from music, is meant to characterize ways in which each piece as in a “note” (...) remains distinctly their own while dialogically and dynamically connected to an evolving ecosystem of ideas and visions in the making. As an umbrella term, it is meant to shelter resonances from each article that speaks directly not only of, but to, theory today by doing it in their own way.In this issue, we are presenting “A Forum on Namita Goswami’s Subjects That Matter.” It consists of seven responses to Goswami’s pioneering work on intersectionality as exemplified by her recent book, Subjects That Matter: Philosophy, Feminism, and Postcolonial Theory (SUNY Press, 2019) as well as the earlier co-edited volume, Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach (Routledge, 2014, co-edited by Maeve M. O’Donovan, Namita Goswami, and Lisa Yount). What is polyphonic about this assemblage is its interlocutory structure and orientation: each scholar—Al Frankowski, Falguni Sheth, Jennifer Scuro, Lauren Guilmette, Luce deLire, Russell Ford, and Tyler M. Williams, all coming from different angles, perspectives, and positions—discusses their reading of Goswami on intersectionality while showing how and where their own scholarship meets hers. Goswami, in turn, responds to each response while providing a synthesized account of what she gleans from this choral interaction, what she finds inspiring, as well as challenging. The articles in the next issue, [End Page 1] Vol. 14, following the forum, will virtually continue the music, although not in direct response to Goswami’s work.We hope you will join us in this somewhat experimental virtual symposium that is not even on Zoom. We hope you will join us in thinking that this more literalized model of a “scholarly conversation,” actual and virtual, vitally embodies the very spirit of interdisciplinary, intergenerational, intercontinental intersectionality as a conversation, ongoing intellectual encounters among many of us in various “sub-fields,” for the lack of a better word, that, again literally, cannot be neatly contained in any disciplinary terms, boxes, or territories.The tranScripts section in this issue consists of two entries, the first of which is the fourth installment of Mieke Bal’s Moments of Meaning-Making, J–L. Then we have Margaret Carson’s translation of Juliana González on Remedios Varo.Again, this issue has been a labor of collective love. We would like to thank all the brilliant authors and extraordinarily generous and helpful peer reviewers for this issue, not to mention the ever so resourceful and skillful editorial staff at the press we constantly rely on for expert guidance and feedback, all of whom have been inspirations for us editors. [End Page 2]Copyright © 2024 State University of New York... (shrink)

Co-creating knowledge takes a new approach to human phenotypic morality as a biologically based, human lineage specific trait. Authors from very different backgrounds first review research on the nature and origins of morality using the social brain network, and studies of individuals who cannot “know good” or think morally because of brain dysfunction. They find these models helpful but insufficient, and turn to paleoanthropology, cognitive science, and neuroscience to understand human moral capacity and its origins long ago, in the genus (...) Homo. An unusual narrative capturing “morality in action” takes the reader back 900,000 years, and then the authors analyze the essential features of moral thinking and behavior as expressed by early and later species on our lineage. In what has primarily been the province of philosophers to date, the authors’ morality model is presented for further scientific testing. (shrink)

In this article we investigate the nature of problem presentation and responses on an online forum for young people who self-harm. Previous studies have raised concerns about the peer encouragement of self-harming behaviours in online forums, and this analysis considers the nature of peer interaction on a specific forum, ‘ SharpTalk’. This was a research forum which explored the potential of online communities to foster engagement and shared learning between NHS professionals and young people who self-harm. This analysis draws on (...) conversation analysis methods to study problem presentation and responses, and nature of advice given. Analysis highlighted both the tendency to offer advice where it was not asked for, and the mundane ‘safe’ nature of advice. This awareness of how young people interact and provide support online is important for those setting up online interventions to support young people who self-harm. (shrink)

This book offers and affirms an innovative governance approach, arguing that it holds promise as a universal framework that is not colonizing in nature due to its grounding in relational process assumptions and practices.

The Cambridge Analytica–Facebook scandal led to widespread concern over the methods deployed by Cambridge Analytica to target voters through psychographic profiling algorithms, built upon Facebook user data. The scandal ultimately led to a record-breaking $5 billion penalty imposed upon Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission in July 2019. The FTC action, however, has been criticized as failing to adequately address the privacy and other harms emanating from Facebook’s release of approximately 87 million Facebook users’ data, which was exploited without user (...) authorization. This Essay summarizes the FTC’s response to the Cambridge Analytica–Facebook scandal. It concludes that the scandal focuses attention on the need to explore the potential for embedding due process-type inquiries and protections within the enforcement actions by regulatory agencies such as the FTC. These protections are increasingly important in addressing the problem of “black boxing the voter” that is now presented by data- and algorithmic-driven companies such as Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. (shrink)

This book, the last volume in the Social Morphogenesis series, examines whether or not a Morphogenic society can foster new modes of human relations that could exercise a form of 'relational steering', protecting and promoting a nuanced version of the good life for all. It analyses the way in which the intensification of morphogenesis and the diminishing of morphostasis impact upon human flourishing. The book links intensified morphogenesis to promoting human flourishing based on the assumption that new opportunities open up (...) novel experiences, skills, and modes of communication that appeal to talents previously lacking any outlet or recognition. It proposes that equality of opportunity would increase as ascribed characteristics diminished in importance, and it could be maintained as the notion of achievement continued to diversify. Digitalization has opened the cultural 'archive' for more to explore and, as it expands exponentially, so do new complementary compatibilities whose development foster yet further opportunities. If more people can do more of what they do best, these represent stepping stones towards the 'good life' for more of them. (shrink)

Economists study "The Economy," or so one might suppose. Yet this overarching entity is strikingly absent from mainstream theory. Since the 1950s, it has generally been described with a few mathematical propositions and not given a description that attends to institutions, power relations, or the emergent properties that form the leading indicators in macroeconomic theory. There is thus a significant divergence between folk economics and scientific economics on this theoretical entity. This article briefly addresses the history of this concept, noting (...) its heyday in the interwar years, and brings to bear some of the analytical apparatus on institutional facts devised by John Searle. Whatever is meant by "The Economy" in folk economics appears to be significantly divergent from what is posited in scientific economics. Key Words: economy • Searle • theoretical entities • macroeconomics • economic indicators • folk economics. (shrink)

New Zealand has received world-wide accolades for its Early Childhood Education curriculum, Te Whāriki. This paper explores the tension between economic imperialism, and a curriculum acknowledged as visionary. The foundational ideas of Te Whāriki emanate from sociocultural and anti-racist pedagogies. However, its implementation is hampered by the overarching policy discourse of Human Capital Theory, with its instrumental emphasis on economic outcomes. While Te Whāriki offers local cultural and educational possibilities, HCT is presented by those espousing economic disciplines, as having universal (...) application. These tensions, largely unacknowledged and unexplored, place ECE teachers in positions of difficulty. While trying to meet aspirational curriculum goals in their daily practices, teachers’ attempts are constrained by supranational economic discourses. I ask how Edward Said’s concept of contrapuntal readings can offer spaces for resistance to the dominance of economics. (shrink)

This first scholarly edition in English of the philosophical writings of Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), the German Romantic poet, philosopher, and mining engineer, includes two collections of fragments published in 1798, Miscellaneous Observations and Faith and Love, the controversial essay Christendom or Europe, and substantial selections from his unpublished notebooks.