_The Promise of Happiness_ is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which (...) is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way. Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including_ Mrs. Dalloway_, _The Well of Loneliness_, _Bend It Like Beckham_, and _Children of Men_, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy. (shrink)

A welcome addition to the Routledge Critical Thinkers series, Judith Butler is the first guidebook on this renowned feminist and queer theory scholar, which will help not only students of literary criticism but also students of law, sociology, philosophy, film and cultural studies. Examining Butler's work through a variety of contexts, including the formation of gender performativity, identity and subjecthood, Sarah Salih address Butler's crucial ideas on the gender agenda, the body, pornography, race, gay self-expression and power and psychoanalysis. Concluding (...) with an annotated bibliography, this book will be the ideal starting point for all new to Butler. (shrink)

‘Intersectionality’ has now become a major feature of feminist scholarly work, despite continued debates surrounding its precise definition. Since the term was coined and the field established in the late 1980s, countless articles, volumes and conferences have grown out of it, heralding a new phase in feminist and gender studies. Over the past few years, however, the growing number of critiques leveled against intersectionality warrants us as feminists to pause and reflect on the trajectory the concept has taken and on (...) the ways in which it has traveled through time and space. Conceptualizing intersectionality as a traveling theory allows for these multiple critiques to be contextualized and addressed. It is argued that the context of the neoliberal academy plays a major role in the ways in which intersectionality has lost much of its critical potential in some of its usages today. It is further suggested that Marxist feminism offers an important means of grounding intersectionality critically and expanding intersectionality’s ability to engage with feminism transnationally. (shrink)

Decolonial/anti-colonial Black, Indigenous and Mestiza feminist movements and scholar-activists foreground how the oft-touted apocalypse that the Covid-19 pandemic heralds is not new, nor does it signify the great rupture into chaos that those from within modernity-coloniality often claim it to be. Rather Covid-19 is preceded by and will be out-lived by the apocalyptic anti-life onto-epistemological logics that are foundational to the production of hetero-patriarchal capitalist- coloniality. However, one would commit the violence of reproduction of the epistemological logics and rationalities constitutive (...) of the current system if the story ended there. We have survived and our survival points to the urgent necessity and responsibility of social theory to listen to the story of the pandemic from a Black/Indigenous genealogy and to begin the sense-making of the Covid-19 pandemic, from prior to this particular virus, outside, against and beyond the politics of knowledge of critical social theory itself. Thus, I invite you to journey to an affirmative re-enfleshment of reason and theory-making in relation to and dialogue with Black, Indigenous, and subaltern Mestiza feminist movements in southwest Colombia and in southeast so-called Australia in the unceded lands of the Awabakal and the Worimi. I explore this through the metaphor, the materiality, the cosmology and the herstory of the mangrove swamps a knowing-being otherwise visible to the dehumanising gave of Whiteness and bring to thought three stories of a politics of knowledge of/as the Black/racialised and feminised body/flesh. To do this is to suggest that the co-creation of pathways which are life affirming and life making beyond and out of the post-Covid 19 conjuncture involves an epistemological-political project which decolonises and feminises the containments of reason and knowing being of coloniality/modernity. (shrink)

A relation between two secrets, known in the literature as nondeducibility , was originally introduced by Sutherland. We extend it to a relation between sets of secrets that we call independence . This paper proposes a formal logical system for the independence relation, proves the completeness of the system with respect to a semantics of secrets, and shows that all axioms of the system are logically independent.

The article proposes Logic of Secrets in Collaboration Networks, a formal logical system for reasoning about a set of secrets established over a fixed configuration of communication channels. The system’s key feature, a multi-channel relation called independence, is a generalization of a two-channel relation known in the literature as nondeducibility. The main result is the completeness of the proposed system with respect to a semantics of secrets.

Predictive medicine presents opportunities to consider later life under conditions of illness, such as dementia. This paper examines how family caregivers (N = 27) assess the opportunity of prediction and early diagnosis of dementia for oneself based on their particular experience. Furthermore, it compares their attitudes with laypersons’ attitudes (N = 43) towards genetic testing of APOE. By this, we elaborate how much personal experience impacts anticipation and affects, but also moral attitudes towards predictive medicine. Differences in our settings do (...) not allow for direct comparison, so our analysis focuses on multiple similarities in the assessments of predictive (non-genetic vs. genetic) testing. Groups’ reasoning showed also differences influenced mainly by personal experience. Family caregivers addressed more responsibility towards family and had more hopes into medical treatments. To cope with the disease, they expressed expectations to start with medicine and care decisions as early as possible. Laypersons, however, stressed self-determination more and expressed worries about the influence of the pharmaceutical industry by referring to unnecessary medication and, implicitly, the medicalization of aging. (shrink)

Jones (1991) has proposed an issue-contingent model of ethical decision making by individuals in organizations. The distinguishing feature of the issue was identified as its moral intensity, which determines the moral imperative in the situation. In this study, we adapted three scenarios from the literature in order to examine the issue-contingent model. Findings, based on a student sample, suggest that (1) the perceived and actual dimensions of moral intensity often differed; (2) perceived moral intensity variables, in the aggregate, significantly affected (...) an individual''s moral judgments; and (3) some dimensions of moral intensity (namely, perceived social consensus and perceived magnitude of consequences) mattered more than others. (shrink)

The model of feminism as humanist in practice and postmodern in theory is inadequate. Feminist practice and theory directly inform each other to displace both humanist and postmodern conceptions of the subject. An examination of feminism's use of rights discourse suggests that feminist practice questions the humanist conception of the subject as a self-identity. Likewise, feminist theory undermines the postmodern emphasis on the constitutive instability and indeterminacy of the subject.

Cet article expose une analyse sémique d’un ensemble de mots, diffusé par le biais du discours religieux, censé présenter une définition des « non-musulmans ». Il s’agit, essentiellement, de montrer en quoi des mots (polythéiste, idolâtre, mécréant, athée, protégé, Nazaréens, chrétiens, Juifs, égaré), figurant dans le discours d’un prédicateur musulman, façonnent, d’une manière systémique, des images, des imaginaires, et peuvent potentiellement véhiculer une représentation altérée de l’Autre. Ces occurrences, généralement spécifiques à un balisage exégétique ou canonique, débordent de leurs contextes (...) et s’utilisent comme concepts génériques dans la prédication contemporaine. En circulation sur le Web et employés hors de leur contexte historique, ces discours sur l’Altérité, révèlent l’ambiguïté qu’engendre une assimilation d’un ensemble de mots, sémantiquement différents, sous l’hyperonyme de « non-musulmans ». (shrink)

Se reflexiona sobre la reprobabilidad moral de la Gestación por Sustitución a través del debate en torno a la autonomía de la gestante y los derechos reproductivos. En primer lugar, se contrastan las posturas liberal y feminista en países del Norte. Asimismo, se consideran las implicaciones para el debate de los intereses económicos de la industria de las Nuevas Técnicas de Reproducción Humana Asistida. Por último, se examina el fenómeno desde una perspectiva transnacional a través de un análisis interseccional y (...) teniendo en cuenta los estudios etnográficos realizados por investigadoras en la India y sus implicaciones para el debate. (shrink)

La Antropología filosófica es el ámbito que enmarca el tema que convoca esta presentación. En el terreno filosófico el marco teórico se apoya, primeramente, en el pensamiento de Nietzsche teniendo en cuenta el estatuto que asigna al cuerpo. En segundo lugar, Rancière ofrece aportes en lo que se refiere a la relación polémica entre lo representable y lo irrepresentable. En tercer término, la guía es proporcionada por la crítica cultural de Walter Benjamin, quien procura revelar la influencia del cine en (...) la masa que puede verse a sí misma en la pantalla. Desplazo el tratamiento del cine como recurso útil al plano educativo. Con este fin escojo escenas fílmicas donde intento aplicar las categorías y las determinaciones analizadas para ofrecerlas como herramienta de reflexión sobre la condición humana. (shrink)

In their 2010 article ‘Research Integrity in China: Problems and Prospects’, Zeng and Resnik challenge others to engage in empirical research on research integrity in China. Here we respond to that call in three ways: first, we provide updates to their analysis of regulations and allegations of scientific misconduct; second, we report on two surveys conducted in Hong Kong that provide empirical backing to describe ways in which problems and prospects that Zeng and Resnik identify are being explored; and third, (...) we continue the discussion started by Zeng and Resnik, pointing to ways in which China's high‐profile participation in international academic research presents concerns about research integrity. According to our research, based upon searches of both English and Chinese language literature and policies, and two surveys conducted in Hong Kong, academic faculty and research post‐graduate students in Hong Kong are aware of and have a positive attitude towards responsible conduct of research. Although Hong Kong is but one small part of China, we present this research as a response to concerns Zeng and Resnik introduce and as a call for a continued conversation. (shrink)

SummaryIn this article, I seek to develop a genetic/diachronic approach to the phenomenon of authorial revision, and to the interpretation of texts that exist in multiple versions. In all such cases, the reconstruction of textual meaning cannot be separated from the reconstruction of the process through which the text in its ‘final’ form came into being; furthermore, an understanding of the author's intentions in (re)writing cannot be entirely separated from an understanding of his/her motives for (re)writing. This article is divided (...) into three sections. In the first section, I consider recent trends in editorial and literary theory that aim at characterising texts in terms of processes rather than products, in order to uphold the equal dignity of each version without losing sight of its connectedness to other stages in the history of the text. In the second section, I discuss how Quentin Skinner's views on meaning and context apply to cases of authorial revision, and I suggest that some key aspects of Skinner's contextualism need to be reconsidered. In the concluding section, I focus on a case study in order to demonstrate the operational value of such a genetic and motive-based approach to authorial revision: more particularly, I seek to show how a close examination of Jean Bodin's rewriting practices in the Methodus (1566–1572) and the République (1576) can throw new light on his shift from a concept of limited sovereignty to one of absolute sovereignty. (shrink)

This article addresses the Egyptian women's movement of the 1950s–1970s through a recent film entitled Four Women of Egypt, which focuses on the lives of four prominent Egyptian women active in the movement during that period. Using the concept of political memory, the article traces some of the major debates within the women's movement throughout this era. By focusing on the ways in which these women conceptualize the geopolitical, I show that the twin concepts of imperialism and capitalism were central (...) to the ways in which they understood gender. The result was a complex understanding of how gender intersected with Egypt's position within a broader global system of imperial capitalism. Following the transition in the 1970s to an open-market economy, the women's movement shifted away from critiques of imperialism and capitalism. This shift can be understood Primarily in terms of geopolitics, specifically the rise of neoliberalism in Egypt. New neoliberal policies had dramatic effects on the women's movement, showing why both the rise and fall of the movement must be contextualized geopolitically and transnationally. (shrink)

This article traces Gramsci's concept of hegemony as it travels from Southern Italy to Egypt, arguing that the concept ‘stretches’, following Fanon, through an encounter with the nexus of capitalism and colonialism. I explore a reading of Gramsci's concepts in a postcolonial context, paying special attention to colonialism and anticolonialism as constitutive of the absence or presence of hegemony. Through an exploration of the Nasserist project in Egypt – the only instance of hegemony in modern Egyptian history – I show (...) how colonialism and anticolonialism were central to the formation of Nasserist hegemony. Drawing on Edward Said, I look at two particular aspects of hegemony as a traveling theory to bring to light some theoretical entanglements that arise when Gramsci travels, in turn highlighting the continuing theoretical potential thinking through such entanglements, as well as of thinking with Gramsci in Egypt and the broader postcolonial world. (shrink)

This article is a review of Ilham Khuri-Makdisi’s bookThe Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Capitalism, 1860–1914. I argue that this book is a valuable contribution to historiographies of the Left in the Middle East, a field that remains under-represented given the importance of labour to the nationalist movements as well as broader worker-activism in the region throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I review the main debates of the book, and raise critical questions about aspects that could have (...) been probed further, among them the questions of imperialism and race in contexts such as Egypt and Lebanon, and the relationship between workers and the radical intellectuals discussed throughout the book. (shrink)

This article focuses on Egypt’s moment of decolonisation in order to explore some of the productive tensions between Marxism, Frantz Fanon’s work, and postcolonial contexts. Through a reading of Egypt’s attempts at independent industrialisation and decolonising ‘the international’, the article uses Frantz Fanon’s invitation to ‘stretch Marxism’ as a way of understanding the particularities of capitalism in the colonial and postcolonial world. It is posited that events such as decolonisation across the postcolonial world have been central to the evolution of (...) global capitalism, and should be centred within Marxist analyses of global politics. It is further argued that these moments can shed light on the contradictions of nationalism, sovereignty and independence, and the ways in which anticolonialism in places like Egypt ultimately reproduced, rather than challenged, colonial capitalism. (shrink)

Inspection of surviving mirrors and related objects shows that they were too crude to offer the early Renaissance painter an optical short-cut to a naturalistic image of his subject. The craftsmanship of mirror makers was independent of and inferior to the quality of theories of image formation of the day.

La crise politique et religieuse de la seconde moitié du xvie siècle ouvre la voie en France à un débat enflammé concernant les limites du pouvoir souverain et le rôle du peuple au sein de l’État. Dans les Six livres de la République (1576), Jean Bodin développe un programme de réforme éthico-politique envisageant l’amitié entre les citoyens comme pierre angulaire de l’État. Bien que s’inspirant largement des réflexions d’Aristote sur le même sujet (Éthique à Nicomaque, Politique), il remplace toutefois la (...) théorie aristotélicienne de l’amitié-égalité (laquelle entraîne chez le Stagirite une vision égalitariste de la société et un net refus de la monarchie) par une nouvelle théorie de l’amitié-harmonie qui lui permet de justifier la nature hiérarchique et monarchique de sa « République bien ordonnée ». (shrink)

SUMMARYThis essay investigates censorial responses to Jean Bodin's Methodus in Counter-Reformation Italy, using evidence from Italian libraries and archives to shed new light on the process that led to the inclusion of the work in the Roman Expurgatory Index of 1607. By examining the diverse, and sometimes conflicting, opinions that Catholic censors expressed on Bodin's text and the ‘errors’ it contained, the essay shows that even a relatively cohesive ‘reading community’ such as that of Counter-Reformation censors could nurture fundamental disagreement (...) in evaluating the content and dangerousness of a book, as well as in devising appropriate countermeasures. Censors often made sense of the same texts in utterly different ways, based not only on their own intellectual interests and backgrounds, but also on the different interpretive strategies that they adopted. In light of this fact, the article suggests that early modern censorship should be seen less as a purely repressive practice than as a peculiar type of readership, characterised by instability, controversy and active ‘meaning-making’. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractGene editing with engineered nucleases introduce double-strand breaks that are repaired by error-prone nonhomologous end-joining (NHEJ). In article number 1900126, Sara G. Trimidal et al. propose that the length and type or resulting indels can now be controlled by editing with different engineered nucleases or by manipulating the expression of NHEJ genes.