How do we teach for human dignity in a context where life is, generally speaking, not treated as precious? How do we carve spaces for humanity amidst inhumane contexts? In this paper, five experienced teachers share how they work from the cracks to expand spaces for human dignity in their schools. They write and act as teacher-philosophers, dually considering it means to teach for human dignity and practically speaking how it can be done.

How do educators talk about trauma with young children? Specifically, how do they address children's secondhand experiences of crimes against humanity? In this article, Cara E. Furman argues that classrooms for young children must witness these experiences. A genre of picture books that Furman terms “eavesdropping texts” offer testimony that both witnesses and invites children's secondhand experiences of crimes against humanity. Here, Furman couples a close reading of the books with literary criticism and trauma theory in order (...) to showcase the nuances of the genre and the pedagogical potential of eavesdropping books for young readers. (shrink)

Educational Theory, Volume 72, Issue 1, Page 27-30, February 2022.

Longtime teacher and teacher educator Patricia Carini argues that numbers provide one of the many crucial tools that humans use to make sense of their world.4 In making this claim, Carini retells an extended "Number Story" from Alfred North Whitehead in which a squirrel moves her three children "one by one" to a new location.5 As Whitehead recounts: when the mother had placed them on a rock outside, the family group looked to her very different from its grouping within the (...) nest. She was vaguely disturbed, and ran backwards and forwards two or three times to make quite sure no young squirrel had been left behind. She was unable to count. … All she knew was that the vague multitude on the rock seemed very unlike the... (shrink)

Artificial intelligence plays an increasingly important role in legal disputes, influencing not only the reality outside the court but also the judicial decision-making process itself. While it is clear why judges may generally benefit from technology as a tool for reducing effort costs or increasing accuracy, the presence of technology in the judicial process may also affect the public perception of the courts. In particular, if individuals are averse to adjudication that involves a high degree of automation, particularly given fairness (...) concerns, then judicial technology may yield lower benefits than expected. However, the degree of aversion may well depend on how technology is used, i.e., on the timing and strength of judicial reliance on algorithms. Using an exploratory survey, we investigate whether the stage in which judges turn to algorithms for assistance matters for individual beliefs about the fairness of case outcomes. Specifically, we elicit beliefs about the use of algorithms in four different stages of adjudication: (i) information acquisition, (ii) information analysis, (iii) decision selection, and (iv) decision implementation. Our analysis indicates that individuals generally perceive the use of algorithms as fairer in the information acquisition stage than in other stages. However, individuals with a legal profession also perceive automation in the decision implementation stage as less fair compared to other individuals. Our findings, hence, suggest that individuals do care about how and when algorithms are used in the courts. (shrink)

The ideal of objectivity is in crisis in science and the law, and yet it continues to do important work in both practices. This article describes that crisis and develops a shared rescue strategy for objectivity in both domains. In a recent article, Inkeri Koskinen attempts to bring unity to the fragmented discourse on objectivity in the philosophy of science with a risk account of objectivity. To put it simply, she argues that we call practitioners, processes, and products of science (...) objective when they identify and manage certain important epistemic risks. We endorse this view and attempt to tailor Koskinen's strategy to the problem of objectivity in the legal context. To do so, we develop a novel notion of phronetic risk, and argue that we call practitioners, processes, and products of law objective when they identify and manage certain important epistemic and/or phronetic risks. Our attempt to rescue objectivity is especially important for work at the intersection of law and psychiatry. For that intersection represents a place where skeptical worries about objectivity in science and law work in tandem to pose serious critical challenges to contemporary practice; and our rescue strategy represents a promising way to negotiate those challenges. (shrink)

Pantomime has long been considered distinct from co-speech gesture. It has therefore been argued that pantomime cannot be part of gesture-speech integration. We examine pantomime as distinct from silent gesture, focusing on non-co-speech gestures that occur in the midst of children’s spoken narratives. We propose that gestures with features of pantomime are an infrequent but meaningful component of a multimodal communicative strategy. We examined spontaneous non-co-speech representational gesture production in the narratives of 30 monolingual English-speaking children between the ages of (...) 8- and 11-years. We compared the use of co-speech and non-co-speech gestures in both autobiographical and fictional narratives and examined viewpoint and the use of non-manual articulators, as well as the length of responses and narrative quality. The use of non-co-speech gestures was associated with longer narratives of equal or higher quality than those using only co-speech gestures. Non-co-speech gestures were most likely to adopt character-viewpoint and use non-manual articulators. The present study supports a deeper understanding of the term pantomime and its multimodal use by children in the integration of speech and gesture. (shrink)

This paper addresses the black-box problem in artificial intelligence (AI), and the related problem of explainability of AI in the legal context. We argue, first, that the black box problem is, in fact, a superficial one as it results from an overlap of four different – albeit interconnected – issues: the opacity problem, the strangeness problem, the unpredictability problem, and the justification problem. Thus, we propose a framework for discussing both the black box problem and the explainability of AI. We (...) argue further that contrary to often defended claims the opacity issue is not a genuine problem. We also dismiss the justification problem. Further, we describe the tensions involved in the strangeness and unpredictability problems and suggest some ways to alleviate them. (shrink)

In our interactions with science, we are often vulnerable; we do not have complete control of the situation and there is a risk that we, or those we love, might be harmed. This is not an emotionall...

One reason that fake news and other objectionable views gain traction is that they often come to us in the form of testimony from those in our immediate social circles – from those we trust. A language around this phenomenon has developed which describes social epistemic structures in terms of ‘epistemic bubbles’ and ‘epistemic echo chambers’. These concepts involve the exclusion of external evidence in various ways. While these concepts help us see the ways that evidence is socially filtered, it (...) doesn’t help us understand the social functions that these structures play, which limits our ability to intervene on them. In this paper, I introduce a new concept – that of the epistemic bunker. This concept helps us better account for a central feature of the phenomenon, which is that exclusionary social epistemic structures are often constructed to offer their members safety, either actual or perceived. Recognising this allows us to develop better strategies to mitigate their negative effects. (shrink)

The 2015 judgment of the Namibia Supreme Court in Government of the Republic of Namibia v LM and Others set an important precedent on informed consent in a case involving the coercive sterilisation of HIV-positive women. This article analyses the reasoning and factual narratives of the judgment by applying Neil Manson and Onora O’Neill’s approach to informed consent as a communicative process. This is done in an effort to understand the practical import of the judgment in the particular context of (...) resource constrained public healthcare facilities through which many women in southern Africa access reproductive healthcare. While the judgment affirms certain established tenets in informed consent to surgical procedures, aspects of the reasoning in context demand more particularised applications of what it means for a patient to have capacity and to be informed, and to appropriately accommodate the disruptive role of power dynamics in the communicative process. (shrink)

In this paper, I utilise the tools of analytic philosophy to amalgamate mono-causal and multi-causal theories of disease. My aim is to better integrate viral and socio-economic explanations of AIDS in particular, and to consider how the perceived divide between mono-causal and multi-causal theories played a role in the tragedy of AIDS denialism in South Africa in the early 2000s. Currently, there is conceptual ambiguity surrounding the relationship between mono-causal and multi-causal theories in biomedicine and epidemiology. Mono-causal theories focus on (...) single, typically microbial, sources of illness and are most concerned with infectious diseases. By contrast, multi-causal theories allow for multiple factors to underpin a disease’s aetiology, including socio-economic and behavioural factors, and they usually focus on chronic non-communicable diseases. However, if these theories are taken to be strictly distinct, this prevents the inclusion of both microbial and socio-economic factors in a single explanation of any particular disease. This strict distinction became a problem when trying to explain the disproportionate prevalence of AIDS in southern Africa and ultimately contributed to the tragedy of AIDS denialism in South Africa. In tandem with viewing how the perceived divide between multi-causal and mono-causal theories underpinned AIDS denialism, I examine Thabo Mbeki’s specific role, while acknowledging that AIDS is being deprioritised on a broader international level. Overall, I will demonstrate that any long-term plan to eliminate AIDS will require viral and socio-economic factors to be considered simultaneously and that such a theoretical approach requires a clearer understanding of the underlying concepts of disease aetiology. (shrink)

Is it possible for children with autism to live a good life, to flourish? Surprisingly, the answer is yes, given a particular understanding of flourishing. Our project is to explain the conception of flourishing that we have in mind and explain how children with autism may come to flourish.Instead of constructing an account of a good life from the ground up for this project, Aristotle’s conception of a good life, of human flourishing, will be used. Using Aristotle’s paradigm of a (...) good life, the initial prognosis for children with autism flourishing is very poor. But this prognosis is made in the absence of children with autism receiving early intensive behavioral intervention using the science... (shrink)

This paper investigates how principals can be supported in their work as teacher leaders. My focus is on how principals can help teachers respond ethically to classroom challenges. I argue that in aiding teachers, school leaders themselves need support and ongoing development. I turn to the care of the self to conceptually explore ethical self-cultivation. I then argue that a practice, Descriptive Inquiry, serves as a way for principals to care for themselves. To make this argument, I draw on a (...) qualitative study of four long-term elementary school principals. (shrink)

Ignorance can excuse otherwise blameworthy action, but only if the ignorance itself is blameless. One way to avoid culpable ignorance is to pay attention when epistemic peers disagree. Expressed disagreements place an obligation on the agent to pay attention when an interlocutor disagrees, or risk culpable ignorance for which they might later be found blameworthy. Silence, on the other hand, is typically taken as assent. But in cases of suppressed disagreement, the silenced interlocutor has information that could save the agent (...) from ignorance in scenarios where that ignorance might lead to harmful action, and silence does not actually indicate assent. The problem is further complicated because the agent might not be aware of the fact that a silenced interlocutor has information that could prevent ignorance, and consequent harmful action. In this paper, I provide a new account of excuses from ignorance in situations of suppressed disagreement. I do this in the context of two cases; Kelly’s hypothetical case of the Tyrannical Dictator, and the real-world case of former South African President Thabo Mbeki and his AIDS denialist policies in the late 1990s and early 2000s. (shrink)

In response to the abundance of parenting literature and a contemporary emphasis on expertise, recent scholars have suggested that how we parent should be determined by values and a family’s particular needs, a combination often referred to as practical wisdom. In this article, I build on previous calls for an ethical approach to being a parent. I argue that being able to share and cultivate one’s unique personality and have one’s aptitudes and interests recognized is a key condition of living (...) well and that parents play an important role in helping their children know and realize their gifts. I put forth an exercise for attending to children, the descriptive review of the child. In doing so, I first describe this practice, illustrate it, and then explain how it can help one live well as a parent. (shrink)

Previous philosophical work on distrust in science has argued that understanding public distrust in science and scientific interventions requires that we pay careful attention not only to epistemic considerations (that is, beliefs about science), but also to values, and the emotional contexts in which assessments of scientific credibility are made. This is likely to be a truncated list of relevant factors for understanding trust/distrust, but these are certainly key areas of concern. The aim of this paper is not to further (...) innumerate the list of relevant factors. Rather, it is to map the ways that these key areas (beliefs, values, and emotions) are related to each other. These are not distinct categories, but rather they interact, making our picture of distrust more complicated than we might otherwise imagine. This discussion will take place in the context of resistance to medical interventions. Notably, Ebola interventions in West Africa, HIV/AIDS testing in South Africa, and vaccines across the world. (shrink)

This is the story of a class of painters, puppeteers, puppy trainers, poets, and so much more. It is the story of how a community of first- and second-grade students, wonderful parents and colleagues, and a very wise principal helped me to teach so that each child could pursue a broad range of passions. It is a story about how my students, in recognizing one another’s passions, created a community where everyone, including the teacher, was celebrated.It is a story that (...) I tell with a joy tinged with sadness. The joy comes from my fondness for the memory as well as a conviction that my teaching that year created an experience that honored my students. The sadness comes from the fact that I tell this story from the.. (shrink)

As ethical agents, teachers regularly must decide whether compliance to rules and norms is in the best interest of their students. Yet, teachers in the United States are educated to be passively obedient. In this paper, I argue that part of pre-service teacher education ought to learn ways of resisting. I describe one approach to verbal resistance, what Michel Foucault calls Truth-Telling. Building on a qualitative self-study with pre-service teachers, I explain how a form of team-teaching called Interruptions can promote (...) Truth-Telling. (shrink)

What does it mean to teach for human dignity? Pivoting around the recently published, Descriptive Inquiry in Teacher Practice: Cultivating Practical Wisdom to Create Democratic Schools, book authors and critics with disparate backgrounds will respond to this question. In the process, they will invite readers to also respond, working together to construct further understanding. In bringing together scholars around a shared question, the review borrows from Descriptive Inquiry – the method for studying teaching described in the book. Critics: Ashley Taylor, (...) Colgate University & Vikramadity Joshi, Teachers College, Columbia, Doris Santoro, Bowdoin College, Sam Rocha, University of British Columbia, Rachel Wahl, University of Virginia. (shrink)

Towards and African Political Philosophy of Needs (2021) is an edited collection of ten chapters on the topic of needs in contemporary African political and soc.

I love that you have rediscovered your love for toddlers! They are in my opinion the best age to work with! That’s really cool that you work part time up at [local ski resort]. I love to ski and us...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading Bataille: The Invention of the FootLucette Finas (bio)Translated by Nelly Furman (bio)§ 1. Certainly, I wrote Le mort before the spring of 1944. This text must have been composed probably in 1943, not before. I do not know where I wrote it, in Normandy (end of 1942), in Paris in December 1942, or during the first three months of 1943; at Vézelay, from March to October 1943? (...) Or in Paris from November ‘43 to the spring of ‘44? Perhaps even at Samois from April to June. Or even perhaps in Paris on Cour de Rohan during the winter of ‘43–‘44. I can no longer remember. I am certain only of having recopied Le mort so as to sell a small number of manuscripts before June 1944 (as I am certain that I wrote this text after the spring of 1942, a time at which I fell ill; and even at the earliest during my stay in Normandy from September to November ‘42).§ 2. In any case, there is the closest relationship between Le mort and the stay in Normandy of the tubercular patient that I was; in Normandy, not far from the village of Tilly (which I name Quilly in Le mort). The inn of Quilly is in fact the inn of Tilly; 1 the woman innkeeper, the one from Tilly. I invented the other details, with the exception of the rain that wouldn’t stop in October or November ‘42. With the exception also of the very dark night when Julie knocked at the door of the inn? I can no longer even remember if I slept in this inn? It seems to me that yes. I believe furthermore that in the room there were two or three farmhands in gummed rubber boots and even a player piano. Whatever it was, it was sinister, and beyond measure. Finally, it is certain that the atmosphere of Tilly’s inn suggested to me the one of the inn of Le mort. I am also almost certain—in the end—that I slept—alone—in this place that terrified me.§ 3. The rest is linked to the frenzied sexual arousal in which I was during November’s extravagance; in my almost total solitude, I lived then not far from Tilly, but we lived apart, a kilometer from one another, a beautiful girl, my mistress, and I; I was ill, in an obscure state of depression, of horror, and of arousal. It is difficult to imagine the mud of the rough small roads where I traveled, without the right footwear, on a bicycle. Then, I ate most of my meals, but alone, with farmers.§ 4. I remember in particular having heard one day a plane whose engine sputtered [avait des ratés]. The noise of the engine was followed by a violent shock. I took my bicycle. I ended up finding the place where this German plane had fallen. It was burning in the middle of an immense orchard (apple trees); several trees were calcinated, and three or four dead, thrown around the plane, were spread out on the grass. At some distance, in the valley of the Seine, an Englishman had probably just shot down this enemy plane that could only crash at some distance. The foot of one of the Germans was bared [dénudé], the sole of the shoe having been torn away. The heads of the dead, it seems to me, were shapeless. The flames must have touched them; this foot alone was intact. It was [End Page 97] the only human thing belonging to a body, and its nakedness, having become earthen, was inhuman: the heat of the blaze had transfigured it; this thing was neither baked nor calcinated: in the upper [l’empeigne] with no sole of the shoe, it was diabolical: but no, it was unreal, stripped naked [dénudée], indecent to the highest degree. I remained motionless for a long time that day, for this naked foot was looking at me.§ 5. [The truth, I believe, has only one face: that of a violent denial. Truth has nothing in common with allegorical figures, with figures of naked women: but... (shrink)

If applied behavior analysis works as claimed by Furman and Tuminello, then both Schlinger and Potter agree that ABA could, in principle, be an aid for solving many more problems than just those associated with autism spectrum disorder. Does ABA work for children with ASD as Furman and Tuminello claim? Schlinger believes that ABA can, in fact, solve developmental and behavioral problems associated with ASD for some children to the point that those children might flourish in the Aristotelian (...) sense. On the other hand, Potter does not believe that ABA can, in fact, elevate children with ASD to the level of Aristotelian flourishing.Schlinger may be predisposed to agree with Furman and... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“We all love with the same part of the body, don’t we?”Iuliia Voznesenskaia’s Zhenskii Dekameron, New Women’s Prose, and French Feminist TheoryYelena Furman (bio)Starting out as a poet who eventually turned to fiction, Iuliia Voznesenskaia was also one of the main figures of the Soviet feminist movement, a fact that makes her biography both unusual and courageous. In the 1970s, Voznesenskaia’s involvement with the dissident movement in Leningrad (...) resulted in several arrests, imprisonment, and time in the camps.1 Although she was not initially interested in women’s issues, her incarceration in all-women’s camps and prisons convinced her that “the situation of women in our country demands special attention” (“Zhenskoe dvizhenie v Rossii” [“The Women’s Movement in Russia”] 41). Along with several other women dissidents, she founded the Soviet feminist movement, putting out the samizdat women’s journal Zhenshchina i Rossiia (Woman and Russia), which precipitated immediate reprisals from the KGB. A women’s club, Mariia, and a journal by the same name followed, as did more KGB reprisals. For her feminist activity, Voznesenskaia was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1980, settling in West Germany.2In 1985, in West Germany, Voznesenskaia wrote her first and best-known novel, Zhenskii Dekameron (The Women’s Decameron). The novel is set in a Leningrad maternity ward containing ten new mothers from different backgrounds with different life experiences: Larisa, Emma, Natasha, Nelia, Galina, and Valentina are educated and all have careers except Galina, whose occupation, admittedly strange for a feminist novel, seems to be a dissident’s wife; Ol’ga works in a shipyard; Irishka is a secretary; Al’bina is an Aeroflot flight attendant doubling as an escort on the KGB’s payroll; Zina is homeless and has served time in the camps; Valentina is a Party worker, whereas Galina is part of the dissident community. Quarantined together for ten days because of a spreading infection and inspired by Emma’s reading of Boccaccio’s Decameron, the women begin to tell each other stories to pass the time. As its title makes clear, Voznesenskaia’s novel is heavily indebted to Boccaccio’s, borrowing its structure and many of its themes, such as an emphasis on storytelling and sexual explicitness. The humor and poignancy of the women’s stories make it a highly enjoyable read, and the focus on female sexuality and the author’s play with the narrative set this novel apart from other Soviet writers’ works.3 The novel also features what is surely a unique occurrence in Russian and Soviet literature: an openly feminist character (Larisa), referred to by the authornarrator as “zhenshchinoi vpolne emansipirovannoi, mogushchei ukrasit’ soboi liuboe zapadnoe feministicheskoe obshchestvo” [“a completely emancipated woman, capable [End Page 95] of adorning any Western feminist group”] (13), who is moreover depicted in a wholly positive light.4Yet despite enjoying a modicum of success, including being translated into several languages and staged as a play, Zhenskii Dekameron remains an under-read and underrated work.5 The reasons for its relative obscurity are closely allied with Voznesenskaia’s political activities in the 1980s. Exiled abroad for being politically undesirable to Soviet authorities, she could not have her work published in the Soviet Union; rather, the novel came out in Russian in Israel in 1987 (Curtis 186n2).6 The lack of visibility from which she suffered in her native country changed only in the (post)glasnost’ period: in 1991, the novel was published in Russian in Tallinn, and in 1992, in Moscow.7 Despite being able to be published, however, Zhenskii Dekameron seems not to have made a strong impact on either readers or critics, and there does not appear to be any discussion of it in Soviet/ Russian literary journals.The novel likewise suffers from a lack of familiarity in the West. The interest Voznesenskaia generated among Western European and American feminists in the early 1980s was for her feminist activism in the Soviet Union, which preceded her novel writing. Zhenskii Dekameron seems to have made a modest impact on readers; scholars, too, discuss it only occasionally. The most comprehensive treatment of the work to date has been Jerzy Kolodziej... (shrink)

This paper presents a lesson plan originally designed for applied ethics classes filled with primarily white, conservative students. In an environment where students used the terminology of “reverse discrimination” and “quotas” rather than “Affirmative Action,” the author employs a fictionalized example of a claim jumper and the rightful owner’s entitlement to the claim in order to present basic arguments for compensatory justice. These arguments are extended by analogy to the issue of Affirmative Action in order to deliver several key points: (...) First, the “discrimination” of Affirmative Action programs is restitution, even if modern white people are not responsible for the privilege they possess, and thus Affirmative Action is not the same as the discrimination suffered by African-Americans. Second, an extraordinarily high number of African-Americans are still suffering as a result of past injustices. Third, while theoretical opportunity may exist for African-Americans today, true equal opportunity does not. Appended to this paper are a number of statistics relevant to the Affirmative Action debate and an Affirmative Action bibliography. (shrink)

Amidst a steady clamor about “learning loss” during the pandemic, a minority of educators have cautioned we must, in the words of Donna Haraway, “stay with the trouble,” giving children space to grieve, explore, and make sense of a new reality. In this paper I interrogate what it means to stay with trouble and specifically call for what I refer to as wander time to stay with trouble in schools. With the phrase wander time, I reference the 40 years the (...) Ancient Israelites spent wandering the desert after they left Egypt as slaves and before they founded a nation in Israel. Taking a phenomenological approach, I then illustrate the practical implications and the potential of wander time through a study of my then preschool-age son’s yearlong self-directed and adult supported multimedia exploration of Transformers (vehicles in popular culture that transform into robots with human-like personalities). I document how through this exploration, my son articulated fears, stayed with, and made sense of troubles. I close by analyzing the pedagogy of wander time to suggest practical implications for schools. (shrink)

Educational Theory, Volume 71, Issue 3, Page 311-330, June 2021.

In his classic paper, The Serpent Beguiled Me And I Did Eat, Gerald Dworkin makes the case that, without probable cause, the useof Proactive Law Enforcement Techniques (PALETs) is morally impermissible. Call this prohibition Dworkin’s Rule (DR). Here we argue that there are two reasonable exceptions to DR—the use of PALETs, without probable cause, is justifi ed when employed against High Level Government Officials (HLGOs) and High Level Business Officials (HLBOs). Moreover, these exceptions are consistent with Dworkin’s notion of Ideal (...) Criminal Sanctioning. Finally, if society were to endorse the use of PALETs on HLBOs, we might be able to dispose of the current bane of American business, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, and let business get back to the business of business. (shrink)

This article examines the role that civic agriculture in Georgia plays in shaping attitudes, strategies, and relationships that foster both sustainability and adaptation to a changing climate. Civic agriculture is a social movement that attracts a specific type of “activist” farmer, who is linked to a strong social network that includes other farmers and consumers. Positioning farmers’ practices within a social movement broadens the understanding of adaptive capacity beyond how farmers adapt to understand why they do so. By drawing upon (...) qualitative and quantitative data and by focusing on the cosmological, organizational, and technical dimensions of the social movement, the study illuminates how social values and networks shape production and marketing strategies that enable farmers to share resources and risks. We propose a conceptual framework for understanding how technical and social strategies aimed to address the sustainability goals of the movement also increase adaptive capacity at multiple timescales. In conclusion, we outline directions for future research, including the need for longitudinal studies that focus on consumer motivation and willingness to pay, the effects of scale on consumer loyalty and producer cooperation, and the role of a social movement in climate change adaptation. Finally, we stress that farmers’ ability to thrive in uncertain climate futures calls for transformative approaches to sustainable agriculture that support the development of strong social networks. (shrink)