This volume brings together twenty original essays on the changes and continuities in gender relations and intersecting politics of sexuality, race, class and location. The book is located in debates about contemporary culture at a moment of rapid technological change, global interconnectedness and the growing cultural dominance of neoliberalism and postfeminism. The collection traverses disciplines, spaces and approaches. It is marked by an extraordinarily wide focus, ranging from analyses of celebrity magazines and makeover shows to examinations of the experiences of (...) young female migrants, 'mail order brides' and young women who repudiate feminism. The contributions are united by their attempts to think through the ways in which experiences and representations of femininity are changing in the twenty-first century. Are we seeing new femininities? Are neoliberalism and postfeminism constructing new identities and subjectivities? What kinds of analytic tools and cultural politics are needed to critically engage with the current moment? This book will be of interest to everyone studying gender, media or cultural studies. (shrink)

In this unconventional article, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Rosalind Gill and Catherine Rottenberg conduct a three-way ‘conversation’ in which they all take turns outlining how they understand the relationship among postfeminism, popular feminism and neoliberal feminism. It begins with a short introduction, and then Ros, Sarah and Catherine each define the term they have become associated with. This is followed by another round in which they discuss the overlaps, similarities and disjunctures among the terms, and the article ends with how each one (...) understands the current mediated feminist landscape. (shrink)

Bayesian models of legal arguments generally aim to produce a single integrated model, combining each of the legal arguments under consideration. This combined approach implicitly assumes that variables and their relationships can be represented without any contradiction or misalignment, and in a way that makes sense with respect to the competing argument narratives. This paper describes a novel approach to compare and ‘average’ Bayesian models of legal arguments that have been built independently and with no attempt to make them consistent (...) in terms of variables, causal assumptions or parameterization. The approach involves assessing whether competing models of legal arguments are explained or predict facts uncovered before or during the trial process. Those models that are more heavily disconfirmed by the facts are given lower weight, as model plausibility measures, in the Bayesian model comparison and averaging framework adopted. In this way a plurality of arguments is allowed yet a single judgement based on all arguments is possible and rational. (shrink)

This article introduces a special section concerned with precariousness and cultural work. Its aim is to bring into dialogue three bodies of ideas — the work of the autonomous Marxist `Italian laboratory'; activist writings about precariousness and precarity; and the emerging empirical scholarship concerned with the distinctive features of cultural work, at a moment when artists, designers and (new) media workers have taken centre stage as a supposed `creative class' of model entrepreneurs. The article is divided into three sections. It (...) starts by introducing the ideas of the autonomous Marxist tradition, highlighting arguments about the autonomy of labour, informational capitalism and the `factory without walls', as well as key concepts such as multitude and immaterial labour. The impact of these ideas and of Operaismo politics more generally on the precarity movement is then considered in the second section, discussing some of the issues that have animated debate both within and outside this movement, which has often treated cultural workers as exemplifying the experiences of a new `precariat'. In the third and final section we turn to the empirical literature about cultural work, pointing to its main features before bringing it into debate with the ideas already discussed. Several points of overlap and critique are elaborated — focusing in particular on issues of affect, temporality, subjectivity and solidarity. (shrink)

This article explores gender inequities and sexual double standards in teens’ digital image exchange, drawing on a UK qualitative research project on youth ‘sexting’. We develop a critique of ‘postfeminist’ media cultures, suggesting teen ‘sexting’ presents specific age and gender related contradictions: teen girls are called upon to produce particular forms of ‘sexy’ self display, yet face legal repercussions, moral condemnation and ‘slut shaming’ when they do so. We examine the production/circulation of gendered value and sexual morality via teens’ discussions (...) of activities on Facebook and Blackberry. For instance, some boys accumulated ‘ratings’ by possessing and exchanging images of girls’ breasts, which operated as a form of currency and value. Girls, in contrast, largely discussed the taking, sharing or posting of such images as risky, potentially inciting blame and shame around sexual reputation (e.g. being called ‘slut’, ‘slag’ or ‘sket’). The daily negotiations of these new digitally mediated, heterosexualised, classed and raced norms of performing teen feminine and masculine desirability are considered. (shrink)

This paper presents a poststructuralist, postcolonial and feminist interrogation of the ‘Girl Effect’. First coined by Nike inc, the ‘Girl Effect’ has become a key development discourse taken up by a wide range of governmental organisations, charities and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). At its heart is the idea that ‘girl power’ is the best way to lift the developing world out of poverty. As well as a policy discourse, the Girl Effect entails an address to Western girls. Through a range of (...) online and offline publicity campaigns, Western girls are invited to take up the cause of girls in the developing world and to lend their support through their use of social media, through fundraising and consumption. Drawing on a wide range of policy documents, media outputs and offline events, this paper explores the way in which the Girl Effect discourse articulates notions of girlhood, empowerment, development and the Global North/south divide. (shrink)

Drawing on interviews with 140 young British males, this article explores the ways in which men talk about their own bodies and bodily practices, and those of other men. The specific focus of interest is a variety of body modification practices. We argue, however, that the significance of this analysis extends beyond the topic of body modification. In discussing the appearance of their bodies, the men we interviewed talked less about muscle and skin than about their own selves located within (...) particular social, cultural and moral universes. This article shows that, in talking about seemingly trivial questions such as whether to have one’s nose pierced or join a gym, men are actively engaged in regulating normative masculinity. Our analysis lends support to the claim that the body has become a new (identity) project in high/late/post-modernity, but shows how fraught with difficulties this project is for young men who must simultaneously work on and discipline their bodies while disavowing any (inappropriate) interest in their own appearance. The analysis highlights the pervasive individualism of young men’s discourses, and the absence of alternative ways of making sense of embodied experiences. (shrink)

This paper comments on some of the different senses of the notion of discourse in the various relevant literatures and then overviews the basic features of a coherent discourse analytic programme in Psychology. Parker's approach is criticised for (a) its tendency to reify discourses as objects; (b) its undeveloped notion of analytic practice; (c) its vulnerability to common sense assumptions. It ends by exploring the virtues of 'interpretative repertoires' over 'discourses' as an analytic/theoretical notion.

Drawing on interviews with 140 young British males, this article explores the ways in which men talk about their own bodies and bodily practices, and those of other men. The specific focus of interest is a variety of body modification practices. We argue, however, that the significance of this analysis extends beyond the topic of body modification. In discussing the appearance of their bodies, the men we interviewed talked less about muscle and skin than about their own selves located within (...) particular social, cultural and moral universes. This article shows that, in talking about seemingly trivial questions such as whether to have one’s nose pierced or join a gym, men are actively engaged in regulating normative masculinity. Our analysis lends support to the claim that the body has become a new (identity) project in high/late/post-modernity, but shows how fraught with difficulties this project is for young men who must simultaneously work on and discipline their bodies while disavowing any (inappropriate) interest in their own appearance. The analysis highlights the pervasive individualism of young men’s discourses, and the absence of alternative ways of making sense of embodied experiences. (shrink)

Perhaps the gradualist position on abortion has re-emerged repeatedly because it corresponds to pastoral experienceAt one level David Albert Jones’s paper is very successful. Despite the high reputation of the late Gordon Dunstan, first as a mediaeval historian, then as an ethicist of considerable influence within the Anglican church, and finally as a pioneer medical ethicist, his crucial 1984 article appears to be overdrawn. Some caution is now needed before endorsing his claim that the Christian tradition according the embryo the (...) full moral status of a human person from conception is “virtually a creation of the later nineteenth century”. Dr Jones produces a wealth of historical scholarship to challenge it.At another level, however, Dr Jones is not concerned about nuancing a historical claim but about demonstrating that “licensing destructive research on human embryos for the sake of medical progress…cannot be justified…on the basis of the Christian tradition”.1 Unfortunately there is quite a large gap between these two claims. Manifestly “the Christian tradition” is not a unified tradition even within Jones’s own historical account. He admits himself that the Roman Catholic tradition diverged at times from what he clearly regards as the norm . And he is less than frank in admitting that many Reformed Christians …. (shrink)

En este artículo reúno los resultados de una serie de estudios sobre el trabajo en los empleos vinculados con las nuevas tecnologías (incluyendo mi propia investigación en el Reino Unido, los Estados Unidos y los Países Bajos), para explorar lo que significa gestionar las vidas en estos nuevos medios. Utilizo aquí la gestión no en su sentido convencional o de escuela de negocios, sino con una inflexión más crítica que proviene del pensamiento marxista, feminista y posestructuralista. Me interesa cómo los (...) propios trabajadores y trabajadoras gestionan vidas, una gestión que se caracteriza por procesos de aceleración, intensificación y contingencia. Usando una óptica foucaultiana, sugiero que trabajar en estos nuevos medios implica múltiples prácticas de autogestión en condiciones de incertidumbre radical.In this article I pull together the findings of a number of studies of new media work (including my own research in the UK, US and Netherlands) to explore what it means to manage lives in new media. I use management here not in its conventional or business school sense but with a more critical inflection that comes from Marxist, feminist and poststructuralist thinking. I am interested in how workers themselves manage lives that are characterised by processes of speeding up, intensification and contingency. Using a Foucauldian optic, I will suggest that working in new media involves multiple practices of managing the self in conditions of radical uncertainty. (shrink)

This article uses a discourse analytic perspective to analyse sex and relationship advice in a best-selling women’s magazine. It identifies three different interpretative repertoires which together structure constructions of sexual relationships: the intimate entrepreneurship repertoire, organized around plans, goals and the scientific management of relationships; men-ology, in which women are instructed in how to learn to please men; and transforming the self, which calls on women to remodel their interior lives in order to construct a desirable subjectivity. The article considers (...) each repertoire in turn, and also looks at how they work together in order to privilege men and heterosexuality. Discussion focuses in particular on the postfeminist nature of the advice, in which pre-feminist, feminist and anti-feminist ideas are entangled in such a way as to make gender ideologies more pernicious and difficult to contest. (shrink)

I should declare at the outset that I much enjoyed this thoughtful paper and personally agree with its overall stance. For the last 20 or more years I have been a member of various British and European bioethics committees—typically appointed to them because I am a theologian—and, within them, I have tried assiduously to adhere to public reason arguments. However, I do so, not out of a sense of moral obligation, but because I regard public reasoning to be more appropriate (...) and inclusive on these committees than specifically religious reasoning. This is my main point of difference with this otherwise admirable paper. Although towards the end of their paper the two authors do admit to rare exceptions, it does seem that there is a deontological basis to their Public Reason Argument. They state explicitly that ‘physicians have a moral duty to avoid engaging substantive religious considerations when helping patients or surrogates reach a medical decision’. For them non-sectarian public reasoning is ‘in keeping with the spirit …. (shrink)

A new, updated third edition of the most successful and widely used textbook on Christian ethics.

How can Christian ethics make a significant contribution to health care ethics in today's Western, pluralistic society? Robin Gill examines the 'moral gaps' in secular accounts of health care ethics and the tensions within specifically theological accounts. He explores the healing stories in the Synoptic Gospels, identifying four core virtues present within them - compassion, care, faith and humility - that might bring greater depth to a purely secular interpretation of health care ethics. Each of these virtues is examined in (...) turn, using a range of topical issues including health care rationing, genetics, HIV/AIDS, withholding/withdrawing nutrition from PVS patients, and the empirical evidence which suggests a connection between religion and health. Professor Gill also argues that these four virtues are shared by other major religious and humanistic traditions and that, together with secular principles, they can enrich health care ethics even in a pluralistic society. (shrink)

The literature on meaningful work often highlights the role of leaders in creating a sense of meaning in the work or tasks that their staff or followers carry out. However, a fundamental question arises about whether or not leaders are morally responsible for providing meaningful work when perceptions of what is meaningful may differ between leaders and followers. Drawing on Buddhist ethics and interviews with thirty-eight leaders in Vietnam who practise ‘engaged Buddhism’ in their leadership, we explore how leaders understand (...) their roles in creating meaningfulness at work and their perceptions of how employees experience their leadership approach in this respect. On the basis of Buddhist ontology on the sense of meaningfulness, we introduce a number of leadership approaches in cultivating meaning at work that question the argument that leaders are primarily responsible for enabling or satisfying employees’ search for meaning. The study provides an alternative lens through which to examine the role of leadership from a Buddhist ethics perspective and shows how an insight from this particular tradition can enrich secular interpretations of meaningful work and leadership. (shrink)

Since the last generation medical ethics has seen a remarkable shift from benign medical paternalism to patient rights and autonomy. Whereas once it might have been acceptable for doctors to decide, largely on their own, what was in the best interests of their patients, today senior health professionals are expected to make decisions jointly both with patients or their carers and with other health professionals. Patient autonomy and justice, and not simply beneficence, are usually thought to be crucial to medical (...) ethics today.Although I strongly support this shift in medical ethics, I believe it is important to recognise that it has some cost to medical professionals, to patients and even at times to the National Health Service . Medical paternalism, when it was genuinely benign, did have some benefits both for doctors and for their patients. Yet precisely because most of us are no longer prepared to be at the receiving end of such paternalism, these particular benefits are now largely lost to us.The new joint statement, Decisions Relating to Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation,1 illustrates this point well. At the outset it admits that “health professionals are aware that decisions about attempting resuscitation raise very sensitive and potentially distressing issues for the patient and people emotionally close to the patient”. It was because of these sensitive and potentially distressing issues that it was once thought acceptable to make do not attempt resuscitation orders without consulting either patients or their families and with the knowledge that the latter would probably never discover that such orders had ever been made. Now, however, health workers are warned frankly that they “should remember …. (shrink)

Robin Gill argues that once moral communities take centre stage in ethics - as they do in virtue ethics - then there should be a greater interest in sociological evidence about these communities. This book, first published in 1999, examines evidence gathered from social attitude surveys about church communities, in particular their views on faith, moral order and love. It shows that churchgoers are distinctive in their attitudes and behaviour. Some of their attitudes change over time, and there are a (...) number of obvious moral disagreements between different groups of churchgoers. Nonetheless, there are broad patterns of Christian beliefs, teleology and altruism which distinguish churchgoers as a whole from non-churchgoers. However, the values, virtues, moral attitudes and behaviour of churchgoers are shared by many other people as well. The distinctiveness of church communities in the modern world is thus real but relative, and is crucial for the task of Christian ethics. (shrink)

A challenging book examining issues such as biotechnology, AIDS and nuclear weapons and demonstrating that Christian ethics has something important and ...

Christian Ethics: The Basics sets out clearly and critically the different ways that Augustine, Aquinas and Luther continue to shape ethics today within and across Christian denominations. It assumes no previous knowledge of the subject and can be read by religious believers and non-believers alike. Readers are introduced to Christian ethics from the ground up before being invited to consider some of the most controversial but important questions facing people across the world today. Topics addressed include: Social justice War and (...) peace Migration/immigration Climate change Euthanasia Same-sex marriage Religiously-inspired violence Biotechnology Abrahamic ethics Concise, readable and authoritative, this is the ideal primer for anyone interested in the study of religious ethics and Christianity. (shrink)

The classic results obtained by Gödel, Tarski, Kleene, and Church in the early thirties are the finest flowers of symbolic logic. They are of fundamental importance to those investigations of the foundations of mathematics via the concept of a formal system that were inaugurated by Frege, and of obvious significance to the mathematical disciplines, such as computability theory, that developed from them. Derived from courses taught by the author over several years, this new exposition presents all of the results with (...) their original proofs and central concepts in a manner that is unified by a systematic grounding of the notion of effectiveness in the semantics of the existential quantifier. Logicians and non-mathematicians, repelled by detail which is not obviously relevant in the standard textbooks, will be able to reach the heart of the matter with a minimum of fuss. (shrink)

This book presents the results of these thinkers in a newly unified manner and displays their significance for the philosophy of mathematics.

This book presents the results of these thinkers in a newly unified manner and displays their significance for the philosophy of mathematics.

We trace the meeting and misalignment of competing moral economies in South Wales during the depression of the 1930s. Our case study is the Save the Children Fund's campaign to open emergency open-air nurseries in distressed communities and we analyse the contested meanings of work, voluntarism and cooperation that arose between charitable enterprises and local political organisers in the area. We also inquire into the attempt of a new generation of female political activists to shape a socialist moral economy of (...) the family in South Wales in a period of widening democracy and the growth of class politics and, in doing so, consider the place of gender in defining these social and political values. (shrink)

In this book, Robin Gill argues that moral passion and rational ethical deliberation are not enemies, and that moral passion often lurks behind many apparently rational ethical commitments. He also contends that though moral passion is a key component of truly selfless moral action, without rational ethical deliberation it can also be extremely dangerous. Gill maintains that a reanalysis of moral passion is overdue. He inspects the gap between the 'purely rational' accounts of ethics provided by some moral philosophers and (...) the normative positions that they espouse and/or the moral actions that they pursue. He also contends that Christian ethicists have not been adept at identifying their own implicit moral passion or at explaining why it is that doctrinal positions generate passionately held moral conclusions. Using a range of disciplines, including cognitive science and moral psychology, alongside the more usual disciplines of moral philosophy and religious ethics, Gill also makes links with moral passion in other world faith traditions. (shrink)