__Learning for Careers_ provides a comprehensive account of the Pathways to Prosperity Network, a national initiative focused on helping more young people successfully complete high school, attain a first postsecondary credential with value in the labor market, and get started on a career without foreclosing the opportunity for further education._ It takes as its starting point the influential 2011 _Pathways to Prosperity_ report, which challenged the prevailing idea that the core mission of high schools was to prepare all students for (...) college. In response, the Pathways Network was founded in 2012 to promote cooperative arrangements between educational and business institutions in order to fashion pathways for young people to acquire twenty-first-century skills and achieve professional success. This book traces the evolution of the Pathways Network over the past five years, focusing on the efforts of a diverse set of states and regions to build systems that span high school and the first two years of postsecondary education. States such as Delaware and Tennessee have been highly effective in establishing systems designed to equip students with credentials valued in the contemporary labor market. At the same time, the authors acknowledge the technical, political, and cultural challenges in redesigning career-focused education to produce satisfactory outcomes for young people throughout the country. _Learning for Careers_ offers a way forward for the millions of young people and employers that face a rapidly evolving and ever more competitive globalized workplace. This book will be essential reading for all who have a stake in educational and economic opportunity in the United States. (shrink)

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

In this review essay, K. Peter Kuchinke uses three recent publications to consider the question of how to educate young people for work and career. Historically, this question has been central to vocational education, and it is receiving renewed attention in the context of concerns over the ability of schools to provide adequate preparation for occupational roles and career success in a rapidly changing economic landscape. Philip Gonon's Quest for Modern Vocational Education provides a historical account of Georg Kerschensteiner's vision (...) of the role of work as a central subject matter for all students. His approach served as the foundation for the dual system in present-day Germany. Nancy Hoffman's Schooling in the Workplace contrasts the U.S. system of career preparation for non-college-bound students with that of five other OECD nations where workforce and academic preparation are more strongly connected to learning in the workplace. Christopher Winch's Dimensions of Expertise, finally, offers a conceptual analysis of central ideas of vocational knowledge and underscores the important role of learning in the context of practice. The three texts offer historical, comparative, and philosophical analyses of the complex task of preparation for work and challenge education scholars to move the subject matter into the center of contemporary educational theory. (shrink)

In this review essay, K. Peter Kuchinke uses three recent publications to consider the question of how to educate young people for work and career. Historically, this question has been central to vocational education, and it is receiving renewed attention in the context of concerns over the ability of schools to provide adequate preparation for occupational roles and career success in a rapidly changing economic landscape. Philip Gonon's Quest for Modern Vocational Education provides a historical account of Georg Kerschensteiner's vision (...) of the role of work as a central subject matter for all students. His approach served as the foundation for the dual system in present‐day Germany. Nancy Hoffman's Schooling in the Workplace contrasts the U.S. system of career preparation for non‐college‐bound students with that of five other OECD nations where workforce and academic preparation are more strongly connected to learning in the workplace. Christopher Winch's Dimensions of Expertise, finally, offers a conceptual analysis of central ideas of vocational knowledge and underscores the important role of learning in the context of practice. The three texts offer historical, comparative, and philosophical analyses of the complex task of preparation for work and challenge education scholars to move the subject matter into the center of contemporary educational theory. (shrink)

This volume stages a debate between two philosophers, one North American, the other German, who hold different views of the relation of redistribution to ...

Political Thought and Political Thinkers. By Judith Shklar, edited by Stanley Hoffman (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998) xxvi + 402 pp. £47.95, $60.00 cloth, £16.75, $21.00 paper. Thoreau: Political Writings. Edited by Nancy L. Rosenblum, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) xxxv + 178 pp. £30.00, $39.95 hardcover, £10.95, $14.95 paper.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Beyond Rivalry?Rethinking Community in View of Apocalyptical ViolenceAndreas Oberprantacher (bio)But the republic of crime must also be the republic of the suicide of criminals, and down to the last among them—the sacrifice of the sacrificers unleashed in passion.—Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative CommunityThe Crisis and Apocalyptic Intensification of RivalryAt first it seemed as if the "rivalry between two rates of speed"1 set at the center of Derrida's essay "No (...) Apocalypse, Not Now," published more than twenty years ago in Diacritics, had finally come to an end, at least in the form of a general and unmistakable division of the world into two competing geopolitical units. Following the breakdown of the USSR, the former super-enemy of the industrialized Northwest, that part of the world that claimed and still claims to be the sole referent of the adjective free, the dynamics of ideological rivalry had, at first, lost considerable momentum. After half a century of mostly symmetrical even if undeclared wars, the period from 1989 to 1991 was truly significant, [End Page 175] for it marked a moment of epistemological crisis, a moment when political fractions that derived their identity from a binary tension were all of a sudden stunned: no visible enemy anymore to deter, no willing scapegoat to blame, just eschatological abandonment.The aftershocks of this historical event can be traced in today's commentaries on and analyses of the political situation: It is certainly no coincidence that two of the most influential US-American political analysts, Samuel Huntington and Bruce Hoffman, both at the same time direct their attention toward questions about the conditions of social identity and cohesion, though from inverted perspectives. In his recent book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity (2004), Huntington bemoans the "deconstruction of the American identity,"2 as it challenges—along with certain political developments—"the substance, and the desirability of this concept of America."3 Huntington's fervent interest in US-American identity and his call for its renewal become readily comprehensible when read against the background of his concern that an existential threat might again be imminent, possibly in the form of jihadist terrorism. In Huntington's argument, however, the United States's potential confrontation with militant Islamist movements—the explicit subtext of his book—is not assessed only in terms of political risks and military expenditures; for Huntington, this confrontation also holds out a unique chance of rediscovering one's own (lost, forgotten) identity. Revealing himself as an attentive reader of Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political, Huntington argues that "the absence of an ideological threat produced an absence of purpose.... The ideal enemy for America would be ideologically hostile, racially and culturally different, and militarily strong enough to pose a credible threat to American security."4While Huntington is concerned with reaffirming and securing a phantasmagoric vision of the United States's past glory, Hoffman, on the other hand, may be mentioned as a political analyst deeply worried about the inverse aspect of the epistemological crisis, i.e., worried by the fact that "the United States has utterly failed to fulfill the timeless admonition to 'know your enemy'"5 by declaring an all too abstract global war on terrorism. In his commentary, published in March 2007 under the title "Fighting Blind: We Can't Win if We Don't Know the Enemy" in the Washington Post, he argues that a long-term strategy is desperately needed to identify "our adversaries, who are much too elusive and complicated to be vanquished by mere decapitation."6Taking Huntington's and Hoffman's positions seriously as paradigmatic examples of a wider and well-established discursive strategy that calls for a renewed need for binary-opposed collective identities—us/them; the coalition [End Page 176] of the willing/the axis of evil—in order to affirm a state of potentially ubiquitous and highly moralized rivalry, one may well argue with Schmitt that "a new nomos of the earth" is immanent.7 In Schmitt's understanding, such a new paradigm of warfare will no longer be characterized by relative understandings of enmity, but by enemies declared "totally criminal... (shrink)

<I>Conducting Hermeneutic Research: From Philosophy to Practice is the only textbook that teaches the reader ways to conduct research from a philosophical hermeneutic perspective. It is an invaluable resource for graduate students about to embark in hermeneutic research and for academics or other researchers who are novice to this research method or who wish to extend their knowledge. In 2009, the lead author of this proposed text was one of three co-founders of the Canadian Hermeneutic Institute. The institute was created (...) as a means of bringing together scholars of hermeneutics and hermeneutic research across disciplines in creative dialogue and conversations of philosophy, research, and practice. An outcome of this was the launch of the <I>Journal of Applied Hermeneutics, with Nancy J. Moules serving as Editor. The work of the institute and the journal make clear that people (both students and professors) seek practical guidance on how to conduct hermeneutic research. This book is a must read for this audience. (shrink)

In this article I reply to four critics. Responding to Linda Alcoff, I contend that my original two-dimensional framework discloses the entwinement of economic and cultural strands of subordination, while also illuminating the dangers of identity politics. Responding to James Bohman, I maintain that, with the addition of the third dimension of representation, my approach illuminates the structural exclusion of the global poor, the relation between justice and democracy, and the status of comprehensive theorizing. Responding to Nikolas Kompridis, I defend (...) a view of recognition that prioritizes the critique of institutionalized injustice. Responding to Rainer Forst, I argue that such a critique is better formulated in participation-theoretic than justification-theoretic terms. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to call for the formulation and adoption of a declaration on the universal rights and duties of business. We do not attempt to define the specific contents of such a declaration, but rather attempt to explain why such a declaration is needed and what would be some of its general characteristics. The catalyst for this call was the recognition that even under optimal conditions, good companies sometimes are susceptible to moral lapses, and when companies (...) undertake ventures in authoritarian countries with poor human rights records, even those with the best intentions may find themselves drawn into complicity in human rights abuses. There, market exigencies may persuade them to leave their codes of ethics and commitments to human rights at home. Pragmatism, it would seem, requires thatthey accept the ethical inconsistencies that follow from a “When in Rome, do as they Romans do” outlook. When facing the moral dilemma about whether or not to invest in human rights abusing countries, companies are offered two alternatives: they can operate in those countries and accept potential complicity or they can stay away. We suggest, however, that a preferable option is to address the underlying problem, and to this end we advocate the promulgation of a declaration for business that is comparable to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Our proposed name for this is the “Declaration on the Universal Rights and Duties of Business.” To be effective, such a declaration would require enforcement mechanisms. To illustrate this issue, we focus on China, not because China is unique in its human rights abuses, but because China occupies such a central place in the globalization efforts of the major companies from around the world. A robust international declaration is needed to provide a common framework for the practice of consistent and fair business competition everywhere. (shrink)

In this paper, the authors describe an aspect of a program of research around grief and clinical practice. The first phase of the study involves examination of experiences of grief with attention to troublesome or problematic beliefs that fuel the extent of suffering in the bereaved. The data, obtained from a review of videotaped clinical interviews with families seen in the Family Nursing Unit at the University of Calgary, were analyzed according to philosophical hermeneutic tradition. Findings suggest that grief is (...) an experience that is ongoing, that changes in nature over time, but that involves a continuing relationship with the deceased; it is a graceful, periodic, deliberate walk backwards while keeping a sure foot in living forward. (shrink)

Kitcher urges us to think of mathematics as an idealized science of human operations, rather than a theory describing abstract mathematical objects. I argue that Kitcher's invocation of idealization cannot save mathematical truth and avoid platonism. Nevertheless, what is left of Kitcher's view is worth holding onto. I propose that Kitcher's account should be fictionalized, making use of Walton's and Currie's make-believe theory of fiction, and argue that the resulting ideal-agent fictionalism has advantages over mathematical-object fictionalism.

Nature-based solutions (NbS) have in recent years occupied a central position in conservation and climate discussions among both scientists and policy makers. NbS generally refer to a set of strategies which use nature, or natural objects, to address societal (human) issues while simultaneously supporting the broader environment. This paper examines the concept of NbS to determine whether it is a useful and well-motivated category to guide future climate and conservation efforts. I argue that NbS may in fact be a valuable (...) contribution to environmental thought and policy, but not for the reasons that they are typically thought to be. Specifically: while we have reason to doubt that NbS should be prioritized over other environmental strategies on the grounds that they are uniquely environmentally-friendly or supportive of biodiversity, they may nevertheless have an advantage insofar as they play a vital aesthetic role in developing a healthier relationship between humans and the nonhuman world. (shrink)

In this paper, the authors address the perceived recent trend of funding and publishing bodies that seem to have taken a regard of qualitative research as a subordinate to, or even a subset of, quantitative research. In this reflection, they pull on insights that Hans-Georg Gadamer offered around the history of the natural and human science bifurcation, ending with a plea that qualitative research needs to be received, appraised, judged, and promoted by different lenses and criteria of value.

Many research-intensive universities have moved into the business of promoting technology development that promises revenue, impact, and legitimacy. While the scholarship on academic capitalism has documented the general dynamics of this institutional shift, we know less about the ground-level challenges of research priority and scientific problem choice. This paper unites the practice tradition in science and technology studies with an organizational analysis of decision-making to compare how two university artificial intelligence labs manage ambiguities at the edge of scientific knowledge. One (...) lab focuses on garnering funding through commercialization schemes, while the other is oriented to federal science agencies. The ethnographic comparison identifies the mechanisms through which an industry-oriented lab can be highly adventurous yet produce a research program that is thin and erratic due to a priority placed on commercialization. However, the comparison does not yield an implicit nostalgia for federalized science; it reveals the mechanisms through which agency-oriented labs can pursue a thick and consistent research portfolio but in a strikingly myopic fashion. (shrink)

The present article examines the contemporary stakes and “application” of The Differend with particular attention to neo-fascist denialism, trolling, and alt-right “free speech” discourse. This entails investigating the text’s own rhetorical performance as well as the shifting attitudes towards the sophistic tradition in The Differend and its precursor text, “On the Force of the Weak.” The article thus also takes up in detail three examples of the characteristic sophistic form of the dilemma or double-bind, two of which are drawn from (...) Lyotard: the Holocaust denialist Robert Faurisson’s infamous dilemma of “the witness to the gas-chambers”; the canonical ancient dilemma through which Protagoras wins his fee from his student Euathlus despite seemingly never having helped him win a dispute; and “if you can speak, you can breathe,” the contemporary denialist’s rejoinder to “I can’t breathe.” Lyotard’s arguments are briefly compared to those of other thinkers. (shrink)

Problem: Medical student mistreatment, as well as patient and staff mistreatment by all levels of medical trainees and faculty, is still prevalent in U.S. clinical training. Largely missing in interventions to reduce mistreatment is acknowledgement of the abuse of power produced by the hierarchical structure in which medicine is practiced. Approach: Beginning in 2001, Yale School of Medicine has held annual “Power Day” workshops for third year medical students and advanced practice nursing students, to define and analyse power dynamics within (...) the medical hierarchy and hidden curriculum using literature, guest speakers, and small groups. During rotations, medical students write narratives about the use of power witnessed in the wards. In response to student and small group leader feedback, workshop organizers have developed additional activities related to examining and changing the use of power in clinical teams. Outcome: Emerging narrative themes included the potential impact of small acts and students feeling “mute” and “complicit” in morally distressing situations. Small groups provided safe spaces for advice, support, and professional identity formation. By 2005, students recognized residents that used power positively with Power Day awards and alumni served as keynote speakers on the use of power in medicine. By 2010, departments including OB/GYN, surgery, psychiatry, and paediatrics, had added weekly team Power Hour discussions. Next Steps: The authors highlight barriers, benefits, and lessons learned. Barriers include the notion of clinical irrelevance and resistance to the word “power” due to perceived accusation of abuse. Benefits include promoting open dialogue about power, fostering inter-professional collaboration, rewarding positive role modelling by residents and faculty, and creating a network of trainee empowerment and leadership. Furthermore, faculty have started to ask that issues of power be addressed in a more transparent way at their level of the hierarchy as well. (shrink)

Nursing on paper: therapeutic letters in nursing practice This paper offers a selected piece of interpretive research extracted from the context of a larger research study. The hermeneutic research inquiry described in this paper involved the examination of the nursing and family therapy intervention of therapeutic letters. It incorporated the textual interpretation of 11 therapeutic letters, clinical sessions with three families, clinical team discussions, and research interviews with four family members and three nurse clinicians who participated in the writing of (...) the letters. This particular paper extracts segments of the research related to the letters received by two participants, as well as some general findings, with a focus on the possibilities and influences of therapeutic letters in nursing practice. The findings of this research offer suggestions, not as a template, but as an inspiration and evocation to write therapeutic letters that address the obligation of meeting people experiencing illness at the point of their suffering, with words and questions that invite relationship, reflection, and are large enough to sustain a meeting. (shrink)

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) is one of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's significant initiatives that aims to improve treatment outcomes and lower health care costs. This article takes CER a step further and suggests a novel clinical application for it. The article proposes the development of a national framework to enable physicians to rapidly perform, through a computerized service, medically sound personalized comparisons of the effectiveness of possible treatments for patients' conditions. A treatment comparison for a given patient (...) would be based on data from electronic health records of a cohort of clinically similar patients who received the treatments previously and whose outcomes were recorded. This framework has unique potential to simultaneously improve the quality of health care, reduce its cost, and alleviate public concerns about rationing and “one size fits all” medicine. (shrink)

The unsustainable growth in U.S. health care costs is in large part attributable to the rising costs of pharmaceuticals and medical devices and to unnecessary medical procedures. This fact has led health reform advocates and policymakers to place considerable hope in the idea that increased government support for research on the comparative effectiveness of medical treatments will eventually help to reduce health care expenses by informing patients, health care providers, and payers about which treatments for common conditions are effective and (...) which are not. Comparative effectiveness research has shown in some cases that expensive but commonly used treatments are significantly less effective than relatively inexpensive alternatives. Critics warn, however, that CER will homogenize patient care, limit patient choices, and lead to improper health care rationing and even to the denial of lifesaving treatments. (shrink)

Revolución y colonización en el pensamiento crítico sobre Orígenes.

Drug testing is widely deployed in the United States throughout the public and private sectors. This case study uses two emergent drug-testing technologies—hair analysis and the sweat patch—as examples of techniques of governance that should be subjected to the political equivalent of strict scrutiny. The article contributes to conceptual debates in science and technology studies, arguing that the study of social structure and subject formation should be integral rather than epiphenomenal to analysis in the transdisciplinary field of science and technology (...) studies. The article contextualizes the development and deployment of drug-testing technologies within the structural and epistemological categories of racial and ethnic difference, gender, sexuality, and class formation. Conflicts between proponents of the technologies and critical advocates who seek to constrain their use mark sites of productive theoretical engagement with structural sociology, racial formation theory, critical race theory, and feminist critique.1 Finally, the article demonstrates how STS analyses can contribute to the struggles of strategic counterpublics as they advocate for changing the meaning and material consequences of suspect technologies. (shrink)

There is a disconnect between the academy on the one hand, and the public, the Congress, and the courts on the other, with regard to punishment in the United States. The academy has highlighted the extraordinarily troubling implications of the mass imprisonment of the past two decades, the racial disparities, the social dislocation to poor communities and communities of color, the impact on this democracy of felon disenfranchisement, the extent to which retribution has surpassed all other purposes of punishment, displacing (...) any effort to determine "what works" to reduce crime. But the public is barely a participant in these discussions. If it reads the tabloids, watches television, or surfs the internet, it hears an entirely different story, a story about dangerous crime rates and impending doom, a story about fear and retribution. And so long as it hears that story, it will support ever more punitive laws, and rail against judges who are widely perceived to be lenient.The story is in fact more complex, the proverbial "good news" and "bad news." The good news is that the public may not be as punitive as the media and politicians suggest, if they are given the facts. They understand sentencing and individualized treatment. They can tell the difference between the king pin and the mule, between the postal worker who steals a check and the Enron executive who rapes a company. The bad news is that courts, who know the individual facts, nevertheless face extraordinary pressures to be tough, no matter what the offense. (shrink)