Method as Identity considers how social identity shapes methodological standpoints. With a refreshing hip hop sensibility, Miller and Driscoll reorient the contemporary academic study of religion toward recognition of the costs and benefits of manufacturing “critical” distance from our objects of study.

Academic productivity is realized through resources obtained from professional networks in which scientists are embedded. Using a national survey of academic faculty in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics fields across multiple institution types, we examine how the structure of professional networks affects scholarly productivity and how those effects may differ by race, ethnicity, and gender. We find that network size masks important differences in composition. Using negative binomial regression, we find that both the size and composition of professional networks affect (...) scientific productivity, but bigger is not always better. We find that instrumental networks increase scholarly productivity, while advice networks reduce it. There are important interactive effects that are masked by modeling only direct effects. We find that white men are especially advantaged by instrumental networks, and women are especially advantaged by advice networks. (shrink)

In early March 2014, some of the members of Culture on the Edge—a scholarly research collaboration of seven scholars of religion, interested in more theoretically sophisticated studies of identity, and all of whom are at different career stages and at a variety of North American institutions—had a conversation online on the use of the terms “critique” and “critical,” terms widely used in the field today but employed in such a variety of ways that the members of the group thought it (...) worthwhile to focus some attention on them. What follows is the transcript of their conversation. (shrink)

A criticism of some research involving Aboriginal people is that it is not equitable in its design or application, further disadvantaging the poor and marginalized. In Australia, much research has been done on Aboriginal people, but Aboriginal people themselves have benefited little, adding to distrust between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people over many years. Is it possible to take “scientific” research practices and transform them into research that can be done with a community rather than on a community? How can research (...) findings benefit Aboriginal people? This chapter shares our study of Aboriginal people’s stories of diabetes care. It is a collaborative story told by four Aboriginal Health Workers and two non-Aboriginal researchers which focuses on methodology rather than findings. We share aspects of our research which we propose values Aboriginal people and invites participation and reciprocity at design, data collection, and research translation stages. We discuss tensions which occur between the “scientific way” and the “culturally appropriate way” and describe how we resolved this. Imposing research designs and practices on Aboriginal people and communities without consideration that each community is unique has the potential to cause further harm and disempowerment. Valuing an Aboriginal way of knowing influenced all aspects of our study design and procedures. We would like to inspire others to challenge methodological norms to develop research methods with their community to allow the unique voice of their community to be heard and for this to facilitate pragmatic change leading to meaningful improvements in health. (shrink)

The text is part of the investigative concerns from the authors with regard to the dialogue between literature and science teaching. It starts from several theoretical approaches around the general didactics, university or superior didactics, science’s didactics and for last, literature’s didactics. This is largely due to our search which is focused in articulate the university didactics with science and literature’s didactics, meanwhile, we pretend to answer to the questions ¿How are the specific didactics of science and literature going to (...) contribute to the university didactics and how is the last one going to contribute to these specific didactics? ¿Is it the dialogue between science and literature possible? The paper has been made in middle education, in Educative Institution José Miguel de Restrepo y Puerta, from Copacabana and also in university education, in the academic unities of Dietetics and Nutrition School, Agricultural Sciences and Medicine, from the University of Antioquia. Finally, the partial results indicate: i) the necessity of general Didactics as a discipline focused on teaching and learning processes to ask itself for its internal problems and establish relations with specific didactics. (shrink)

Communication about diagnosis and medical treatment for children suffering from life-threatening illnesses is complex. It is a primary step in involving underage patients and families in care and lays the foundation for obtaining parental permission and patient assent for treatment. In practice child participation in care is often difficult to obtain due to patients' different and sometimes fluctuating preferences, but also parents' protective strategies. Physicians may be susceptible to parental wishes to limit information and feel uncomfortable discussing issues related to (...) uncertainty of cure with patients. A qualitative study in Romanian paediatric oncology units was conducted to explore children's involvement from the perspectives of parents and oncologists. Interviews with participants discussed 18 patient cases. Data were transcribed and thematic analysis was used to interpret and mine patients' involvement during treatment. Different facets of patient participation were identified: restricting, widening and enhancing involvement. A fourth category, unintentional involvement, occurred for all patients due to children's observations during long-term hospitalisations and access to Internet. Uncertainty overarched parental attitudes regarding the extent to which children should be included. Physicians usually complied with parental wishes to limit involvement, but together with parents involved patients at least in a practical way. Adults' protective attitude may backfire, as adolescents' online searches often expose patients to worse-case scenarios. Further research should acknowledge the hazards of restricted diagnosis disclosure and develop clinician tools to support families in communicating with patients. This should be paralleled by physician efforts to elicit patients' needs regarding participation. (shrink)

O estudo apresenta o resultado da experiência em mediação familiar desenvolvida em um Núcleo de Práticas Judiciárias numa instituição pública de ensino, através de projeto de extensão. O objetivo deste trabalho é compartilhar as vivências do serviço de psicologia inserido em um espaço eminentemente ..

This paper discusses problems associated with the use of optimality models in human behavioral ecology. Optimality models are used in both human and non-human animal behavioral ecology to test hypotheses about the conditions generating and maintaining behavioral strategies in populations via natural selection. The way optimality models are currently used in behavioral ecology faces significant problems, which are exacerbated by employing the so-called ‘phenotypic gambit’: that is, the bet that the psychological and inheritance mechanisms responsible for behavioral strategies will be (...) straightforward. I argue that each of several different possible ways we might interpret how optimality models are being used for humans face similar and additional problems. I suggest some ways in which human behavioral ecologists might adjust how they employ optimality models; in particular, I urge the abandonment of the phenotypic gambit in the human case. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is to further a discussion of codes of ethics as institutionalized organizational structures that extend some form of legitimacy to organizations. The particular form of legitimacy is of critical importance to our analysis. After reviewing various theories of legitimacy, we analyze the literature on how legitimacy is derived from codes of ethics to discover which specific form of legitimacy is gained from their presence in organizations. We content analyze a sample of codes to consider the (...) question of whether a strategic, self-interested rationale lies behind the adoption of a code of ethics. We propose that the process of employing codes of ethics in this strategic manner has become, through isomorphism, an institutionalized practice that itself confers a cognitive form of legitimacy to the organization and further distances the codes from their moral foundation. (shrink)

As a neonatal neurologist, I serve families facing tragic decisions in which they must balance trade-offs between death and life with profound disability. I often find myself in complex discussions about future outcome, in which families sort through in real-time what information they value most in making such a choice. Will he laugh? Will he be in pain? Will he know how much he’s loved? In this month’s feature article, Brick et al share the results of an online survey aimed (...) at assessing public views on when a life is not worth living, in an effort to inform ongoing legal and clinical debates about withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment for children. These findings raise important questions about how we define and measure outcomes that matter to parents as they make these tragic decisions. It is challenging to interpret these findings in the absence of context of how decision-making for infants occurs in real-time. The nature of this study and its objective required that cases be substantially simplified. As the authors acknowledge, the prognoses and function of the children involved in these cases were often deeply contested. Prognostic uncertainty is common for children with significant …. (shrink)

Gadamer's Ethics of Play examines the ethical dimensions of understanding by focusing on the concept of dialogical "play" in Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method. The book is accessible to an undergraduate audience, while also being relevant to ongoing debates among Gadamer scholars.

Through cultural transmission, repeated learning by new individuals transforms cultural information, which tends to become increasingly compressible . Existing diffusion chain studies include in their design two processes that could be responsible for this tendency: learning and reproducing . This paper manipulates the presence of learning in a simple iterated drawing design experiment. We find that learning seems to be the causal factor behind the increase in compressibility observed in the transmitted information, while reproducing is a source of random heritable (...) innovations. Only a theory invoking these two aspects of cultural learning will be able to explain human culture's fundamental balance between stability and innovation. (shrink)

The term ‘vitalism’ is most readily associated with a series of debates among 18th- and 19th-century biologists, and broadly with the claim that the explanation of living phenomena is not compatible with, or is not exhausted by, the principles of basic sciences like physics and chemistry. Scientists and philosophers have continued to address vitalism - mostly in order to reject it - well into the second half of the 20th century, in connection with classic concepts such as mechanism, reductionism, emergence, (...) complexity and artificial intelligence, and in connection with approaches such as information theory and cybernetics. This article problematizes and transforms the claim that vitalism is obsolete by evaluating it diachronically, in the spirit of the historian and philosopher of medicine, Georges Canguilhem. It discusses the contrast between classical vitalism and Canguilhem’s own claim that vitalism is ‘an imperative rather than a method and more of an ethical system, perhaps, than a theory’. At the same time, it argues that Canguilhem’s position cannot be reduced to a ‘polemical vitalism’ devoid of compromising references to reality or ontology. In relation to contemporary forms of engagement between social theory and biotechnoscience, Canguilhem’s vitalism continues to provide the critical corrective that is proper to its ‘vitality’. (shrink)

Plato wrote in theRepublicthat quarrels between fellow countrymen are wont to be more virulent and nasty than those between external enemies. Sigmund Freud have similarly cautioned of the malice and excess that can attend conflicts that are fuelled not by antithetical oppositions, but by the “narcissism of minor difference.” Bearing these warnings in mind, scholars of the ethics of war would be well advised to consider the implications of James Turner Johnson's acute observation in his contribution to this special section (...) ofEthics & International Affairsthat their field of study is currently beset not so much by external opposition as by divisions within the ranks. The principal antagonism within the field, at least as I understand it, is the rift that has emerged between what I shall call historical and analytical approaches to the subject. Laying my cards on the table, the work that I have done in the past connects more clearly with the former than the latter. However, it has struck me, as it must have struck others, that the historical approach has in recent years come to assume a rather scuffed and unfashionable, evenoutré, appearance. It has been the subject of numerous curt dismissals, but has also, more interestingly, been tarnished by a few powerful critiques. This article will elucidate four of the most hard-hitting charges levied at the historical approach, and evaluate its continuing utility in light of them. The question then is: Have the critics of this approach landed it a knock-out blow, or can the historical approach withstand the bricks and bats that have been hurled its way? (shrink)

Drawing on Isaiah Berlin's celebrated essay on Tolstoy, this paper poses the question should James Turner Johnson be deemed a hedgehog or a fox? That is, it considers whether Johnson should be regarded as a monist (hedgehog) or a pluralist (fox) in his contribution to the just war tradition. It contends that his commitment to history, while superficially indicative of a hedgehog, serves to conceal a deep-lying pluralism ? or at least the possibility of such ? in his views on (...) the meaning of history. Contrary to initial appearances, then, Johnson's commitment to history is not univocal: it does not speak with one voice, and to one purpose. Rather it suggests a variety of voices or positions, and is amenable to multiple interpretations, not all of which are of a piece with one another. This paper seeks to uncover these various voices or positions, with a view to raising some searching questions pertaining to how we should properly understand the just war tradition today. (shrink)

Discussions of the framework and terminology associated with the right to health tend to treat the indeterminacy of ‘health’ as conceptual noise that the construction of effective policy must not focus on, but find ways of bracketing out. On this basis, the right to health is broadly regarded as a social and economic, rather than a civil and political right. This article draws critically on literature about the implications of developments in medical biotechnologies, to argue that a positive acknowledgement of (...) the indeterminate character of health should transform, rather than simply hinder, the quality of debate over what is to be understood and expected in connection with a right to health. A focus on indeterminacy allows for the perception and the formulation of health-related demands that may not stem from the scarcity of material resources or technical means, but from the misplaced authority of particular voices in defining what possibilities are to be seriously envisaged. This proposition only becomes politically effective, it is argued, when ‘indeterminacy’ (and the capacity for normativity) is referred to life itself and not merely to social and moral judgements about life. Although more immediately pertinent to the concerns of relatively privileged populations, the focus on indeterminacy provides a key to generating a certain symmetry and complementarity of interest, across the privileged/underprivileged divide, in promoting health as a (human) right. (shrink)

The results in this paper are in a context of abstract elementary classes identified by Shelah and Villaveces in which the amalgamation property is not assumed. The long-term goal is to solve Shelah’s Categoricity Conjecture in this context. Here we tackle a problem of Shelah and Villaveces by proving that in their context, the uniqueness of limit models follows from categoricity under the assumption that the subclass of amalgamation bases is closed under unions of bounded, -increasing chains.

James Turner Johnson is the foremost scholar of the just war tradition working today. His treatment of the historical development of the just war tradition has been hugely important, influencing a generation of theorists. Despite this, Johnson's work has not generated much in the way of critical commentary or analysis. This paper aims to rectify this oversight. Engaging in a close and critical reading of Johnson's work, it claims that his historical reconstruction of the just war tradition is bounded by (...) two key thematic lines — the imperative of vindicative justice and the ideal of Christian love — and occasionally betrays an excessive deference to the authority of past practice. By way of conclusion, this paper sums up the promise and limits of Johnson's approach, and reflects upon its contribution to contemporary just war scholarship. (shrink)

Traditionally, what we are conscious of in self-consciousness is something non-corporeal. But anti-Cartesian philosophers argue that the self is as much corporeal as it is mental. Because we have the sense of proprioception, a kind of body awareness, we are immediately aware of ourselves as bodies in physical space. In this debate the case histories of patients who have lost their sense of proprioception are clearly relevant. These patients do retain an awareness of themselves as corporeal beings, although they hardly (...) feel their bodies. They can initiate movements, and with the help of visual feedback learn to control them. It is shown that the traditional view of the self as immaterial is not supported by these cases. But the argument against this view has to be amended. It relies too much on bodily sensations, and misses the importance of active self-movement. (shrink)

This paper examines folk theories of algorithmic recommendations on Spotify in order to make visible the cultural specificities of data assemblages in the global South. The study was conducted in Costa Rica and draws on triangulated data from 30 interviews, 4 focus groups with 22 users, and the study of “rich pictures” made by individuals to graphically represent their understanding of algorithmic recommendations. We found two main folk theories: one that personifies Spotify and another one that envisions it as a (...) system full of resources. Whereas the first theory emphasizes local conceptions of social relations to make sense of algorithms, the second one stresses the role of algorithms in providing a global experience of music and technology. We analyze why people espouse either one of these theories and how these theories provide users with resources to enact different modalities of power and resistance in relation to recommendation algorithms. We argue that folk theories thus offer a productive way to broaden understanding of what agency means in relation to algorithms. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore the theoretical contributions of Axel Honneth, particularly in his works, The Struggle for Recognition and Reification, aiming at diving deep into the debate on the contemporary ideological expressions and their incidence in the process of subjective constitution in teenage years. This particular interest springs from the need to interweave the concepts of reification, forgetfulness and recognition within a fruitful theoretical field in order to interpret a project work called Hip-Hop: cultures and identities, developed with teenagers (...) in a public school in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. From our point of view, the concepts of reification and forgetfulness are fundamental to identify how the conservative ideological expressions are present in the imaginary of adolescents in the contemporary world. Although rereading the concepts of reification and forgetfulness, as proposed by the author, is regarded as essential for understanding the ideological expressions that are based on and guided by consumption. However, even though we acknowledge Honneth's efforts toward moving forward with the concept of reification, it is crucial to emphasize the mediation concept Lukács explored in his work, History and Class Consciousness, so as to elucidate how the forgetfulness of the primary recognition relations is processed. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 5, May 2019, Page 62-63.