As scientific progress approaches the point where significant human enhancements could become reality, debates arise whether such technologies should be made available. This paper evaluates the widespread concern that human enhancements will inevitably accentuate existing inequality and analyzes whether prohibition is the optimal public policy to avoid this outcome. Beyond these empirical questions, this paper considers whether the inequality objection is a sound argument against the set of enhancements most threatening to equality, i.e., cognitive enhancements. In doing so, (...) I shall argue that cognitive enhancements can be embraced wholeheartedly, for three separate reasons. However, though the inequality objection does not sufficiently support the conclusion that cognitive enhancements should be prohibited, it raises several concerns for optimal policy design that shall be addressed here. (shrink)

Given demonstrated global knowledge inequality, this article attempts to draw out the connection between tertiary education and research (TER), economic development and infrastructure, and human development. We first explore the connection between knowledge and economic development by tracing a short history of the emergence of knowledge in economic analysis and by introducing the concept of a ‘knowledge economy’. The World Bank’s ‘Knowledge Assessment Methodology’ (2000) attempted to evaluate such ‘knowledge economies’ through a number of proposed variables. We describe relationships (...) between such TER-variables, economic development, and infrastructure building, especially in the shift towards digital economies. We will show that there is a tangible, negative human impact from disparities in knowledge production, and significant improvement in human welfare when knowledge production capacities improve. Finally, we will illustrate how these relationships play out in two case studies, in Montenegro and Bangladesh. (shrink)

The United States Supreme Court hasrecently ruled that virtual child pornographyis protected free speech, partly on the groundsthat virtual pornography does not harm actualchildren. I review the evidence for thecontention that virtual pornography might harmchildren, and find that it is, at best,inconclusive. Saying that virtual childpornography does not harm actual children isnot to say that it is completely harmless,however. Child pornography, actual or virtual,necessarily eroticizes inequality; in a sexistsociety it therefore contributes to thesubordination of women.

In his Discourses, Rousseau argues that inequalities of rank, wealth, and power are the inevitable result of the civilizing process. If inequality is intolerable - and Rousseau shows with unparalledled eloquence how it robs us not only of our material but also of our psychological independence - then how can we recover the peaceful self-sufficiency of life in the state of nature? We cannot return to a simpler time, but measuring the costs of progress may help us to imagine (...) alternatives to the corruption and oppressive conformity of modern society. Rousseau's sweeping account of humanity's social and political development epitomizes the innovative boldness of the Englightment, and it is one of the most provocative and influential works of the eighteenth century. This new translation includes all Rousseau's own notes, and Patrick Coleman's introduction builds on recent key scholarship, considering particularly the relationship between political and aesthetic thought. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. (shrink)

John Bell showed that a big class of local hidden-variable models stands in conflict with quantum mechanics and experiment. Recently, there were suggestions that empirically adequate hidden-variable models might exist which presuppose a weaker notion of local causality. We will show that a Bell-type inequality can be derived also from these weaker assumptions. IntroductionThe EPR-Bohm experimentLocal causalityBell's inequality from separate common causes4.1 A weak screening-off principle4.2 Perfect correlation and ‘determinism’4.3 A minimal theory for spins4.4 No conspiracyDiscussion.

Immanuel Kant’s political philosophy has enjoyed renewed attention as an egalitarian alternative to contemporary inequality since it seems to uncompromisingly reassert the primacy of the state over the economy, enabling it to defend the modern welfare state against encroaching neoliberal markets. However, I argue that, when understood as a free-standing approach to politics, Kant’s doctrine of right shares essential features with the prevailing theories that legitimate really existing economic inequality. Like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, Kant understands the (...) state’s function as essentially coercive and, in justifying state coercion, he adopts a narrow conception of political freedom that formally preserves the right to choose while denying that the range of choices one actually has can be a matter of justice. As a result, Kant cannot identify various forms of social pressure as potential injustices even as he recognizes their power to create and sustain troubling inequalities. For both Kant and the neoliberals, the result is that economic relations almost never count as unjust forms of coercion, no matter how unequal they are. Views that identify coercion as the trigger for duties of justice are thus particularly ill-suited to orient us to contemporary inequality. (shrink)

This article analyses Adam Smith's and Sophie de Grouchy's accounts of sympathy to show how they arrive at strikingly different views on whether inequality is a threat to, or precondition of, social order. Where many scholars have recently sought to recover Smith's egalitarianism, I instead focus on how his account of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments naturalises socioeconomic inequalities, while also highlighting the wider inegalitarian implications of his analysis. I demonstrate that Grouchy was alert to these implications (...) and reveal how her own account of sympathy challenges the moral psychology underlying Smith's position on inequality. By reconstructing Grouchy's response to Smith, I illustrate how retrieving the insights of long‐overlooked thinkers can reorient the way we understand key debates in the history of philosophy, since Grouchy was far more concerned than Smith with exposing how economic inequality imperils the prospects of relating to one another as equals. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been an escalation in cases of cyber violence, which has had a chilling effect on users' behavior toward social media sites. This article explores the causes behind cyber violence and provides empirical data for developing means for effective prevention. Using elements of the stimulus–organism–response theory, we constructed a model of cyber-violence behavior. A closed-ended questionnaire was administered to collect data through an online survey, which results in 531 valid responses. A proposed model was tested using (...) partial least squares structural equation modeling using SmartPLS 3.0, v. Research findings show that information inequality is a strong external stimulus with a significant positive impact on digital distrust and negative emotion. However, the effects of information overload on digital distrust and the adverse effects of communication overload on negative emotions should not be ignored. Both digital distrust and negative emotions have significant positive impacts on cyber violence and cumulatively represent 11.5% changes in cyber violence. Furthermore, information overload, communication overload, information inequality, and digital distrust show a 27.1% change in negative emotions. This study also presents evidence for competitive mediation of digital distrust by information overload, information inequality, and cyber violence. The results of this study have implications for individual practitioners and scholars, for organizations, and at the governmental level regarding cyber-violence behavior. To test our hypotheses, we have constructed an empirical, multidimensional model, including the role of specific mediators in creating relationships. (shrink)

Institute of Theoretical Physics, Exact Sciences Sidlerstrasse 5, University of Bern, CH-3012 Bern Switzerland portmann{at}itp.unibe.ch' + u + '@' + d + ''//--> awuethr{at}itp.unibe.ch' + u + '@' + d + ''//--> John Bell showed that a big class of local hidden-variable models stands in conflict with quantum mechanics and experiment. Recently, there were suggestions that empirically adequate hidden-variable models might exist which presuppose a weaker notion of local causality. We will show that a Bell-type inequality can be derived (...) also from these weaker assumptions. Introduction The EPR-Bohm experiment Local causality Bell's inequality from separate common causes 4.1 A weak screening-off principle 4.2 Perfect correlation and ‘determinism’ 4.3 A minimal theory for spins 4.4 No conspiracy Discussion. (shrink)

The postwar welfare state provides social insurance against economic, health, and related risks in an uncertain world. Because everyone can envision themselves to be among the unfortunate, social insurance fuses self-interest and solidarism in a normative principle Friedman (2020) calls probabilistic justice. But there is a competing principle of status defense, where the aim is to erect boundaries between socioeconomic strata and discourage cross-class mobility. We argue that this principle dominates when inequality is high and uncertainty low. The current (...) moment is one of high inequality and high uncertainty, which results in intense status anxiety, yet does not rule out solidaristic solutions. Our contributions are to diagnose the causes of our current malaise, and to theorize the normative bases for the political choice facing contemporary western democracies. (shrink)

Corporate concentration in the United States has been on the rise in recent years, sparking a heated debate about its causes, consequences, and potential remedies. This article examines a facet of public policy that has been neglected in the debate: corporate taxation. Developing the first empirical mapping of the effective tax rates of nonfinancial corporations disaggregated by size and broken down by jurisdiction, the article reveals a striking tax advantage for big business at home and abroad. The analysis goes on (...) to show how persistent regressivity in the tax structure is bound up with the increasing relative power of large corporations within the corporate universe, as well as a shift in firm-level power relations. As large corporations become less disposed to investments that may indirectly benefit ordinary workers, they become more disposed to shareholder value enhancement that directly benefits the asset-rich. What this means is that the corporate tax structure is connected not only to rising corporate concentration but also to widening household inequality. (shrink)

South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world and any discussion around poverty and the church's response cannot exclude this reality. This article attempts to analyse the response of wealthy, 'majority white' suburban congregations in the southern suburbs of Cape Town to issues of poverty and inequality. This is attempted through the lense of restorative justice, which is broadly explored and defined through a threefold perspective of reconciliation, reparations and restitution. The first part explores a (...) description of the basic features of poverty and inequality in South Africa today, followed by a discussion on restorative justice. This is followed by the case study, which gives the views of clergy and lay leaders with regard to their congregations' perspectives and responses to poverty and inequality within the context of restorative justice. Findings from the case study begin to plot a tentative 'way forward' as to how our reality can more constructively be engaged from the perspective of congregational involvement in reconstruction of our society. (shrink)

Structural injustice broadly refers to objectionable outcomes produced by generally accepted social structures for members of particular social groups. But theorists of structural injustice have said relatively little about why certain outcomes are objectionable, and many theorists suggestively connect structural injustice to a worry about oppression without explaining their precise normative concerns. I provide a normative analysis of structural injustice that addresses this gap and clarifies its connection to oppression. On this view, there are two kinds of structural injustice, each (...) grounded in a distinct moral concern. One is a freedom-based concern for how social structures harmfully constrain members of a social group, depriving them of the means to develop and exercise their capacities. The other is an equality-based concern for how social structures subordinate a social group to others in hierarchies of power, standing, and esteem. By disentangling these concerns, this account shows that our social structures contain multiple kinds of injustice that do not necessarily travel together; some social groups experience unfreedom without being subordinated to others, and indeed their unfreedom is intertwined with their dominant position over subordinated groups. Furthermore, against prevailing philosophical accounts, this analysis shows that there are good reasons to understand oppression primarily as an issue of inequality rather than an issue of unfreedom. (shrink)

It Is Of Man That I Have To Speak; And The Question I Am Investigating Shows Me That It Is To Men That I Must Address Myself: For Questions Of This Sort Are Not ...

Globalization, technological advances, and changing employment structures have facilitated greater flexibility in how and where many Americans do their paid work. In response, a new work arrangement, coworking, has emerged in the United States. Coworking organizations bring together professionals from different companies to share a common workspace and build community. Despite the prevalence and potential benefits of coworking, little systematic research about coworking contexts exists, let alone research focused on gender inequality therein. Using 78 interviews and more than 700 (...) hours of observation across nine coworking spaces, we examine the organizational logics that shape gender dynamics, as well as intersecting racial and class dynamics, in coworking spaces. Building on Acker’s inequality regimes framework, we uncover organizational logic that either reduces or reproduces inequality for diverse groups of women in coworking contexts. We conclude by discussing important theoretical and empirical implications of these findings. (shrink)

The Levelling-Down Objection is a standard objection to monistic egalitarian theories where equality is the only thing that has intrinsic value. Most egalitarians, however, are value pluralists; they hold that, in addition to equality being intrinsically valuable, the egalitarian currency in which we are equal or unequal is also intrinsically valuable. In this paper, I shall argue that the Levelling-Down Objection still minimizes the weight that the intrinsic badness of inequality could have in the overall intrinsic evaluation of outcomes, (...) given a certain way of measuring the badness of inequality, namely, the Additive Individual-Complaints Measure. (shrink)

This article explores how anticipations of parenthood differentially affect the career aspirations and choices of women and men who have not had children. Drawing from in-depth interviews conducted separately with 60 coupled young adults, I find that women in my sample were disproportionately likely to think and worry about future parenthood in their imagined work paths. Moreover, women were more likely than men to alter or downshift their present-day career goals in anticipation of the changes in preferences and responsibilities that (...) accompany new parenthood. Because men were unlikely to engage in the mental work of anticipating parenthood, they were also free from its emotional and behavioral consequences. In this way, gendered anticipations of parenthood, which begin relatively early in an individual’s career path, are likely to play a key role in reproducing patterns of labor market inequality even before the real constraints of parenthood have set in. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the discussion of social freedom in the family in Axel Honneth's most recent book Freedom's Right. I argue, on the one hand, that radical democrats have much to learn from Honneth's method of normative reconstruction because it provides a much needed corrective to the “social weightlessness” that characterizes their thought about democracy. In contrast to the current preoccupation with rarefied issues of political ontology, Freedom's Right exemplifies a type of sociologically attuned thinking that is essential for (...) addressing issues of power and inequality. On the other hand, I argue that Honneth's reliance on a teleological notion of historical progress has deeply constraining effects on his critique of power. First, in so far as it underestimates the impact of growing social inequality on personal and intimate relations, it fails to acknowledge just how extensive, radical and, potentially deeply contentious the political measures needed to realize social freedom in the family may have to be. Second, Honneth's teleological reconstruction provides too thin a basis to generate substantive normative solutions to issues of social justice in the family. Third, teleology tends to depoliticize the process of emancipatory social change by construing it in terms of impersonal mechanisms and developmental tendencies rather than as open-ended, often polemical and deeply contested forms of political struggle. (shrink)

The news media is a critical source of information for the public. However, it neglects the interests of the poor. In this paper, we explore why this happens, why it matters, and what might be done about it. As to why this happens, we identify two main reasons: because of the way that media is funded and because of the composition of its journalists and its sources. As to why this matters, we argue that this neglect is problematic for three (...) main reasons: it deprives the poor of vital information; it contributes to public support for or acceptance of policies that harm the interests of the poor; and it undermines political equality. And as to what might be done about it, we suggest two proposals: proposals that change the composition of who makes the news and proposals that change how the media is funded. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, Volume 52, Issue 1, Page 10-16, Spring 2021.

I. Accompanying the rise of professed socialists to political prominence in the United States and Britain, a growing academic literature, spearheaded by French economist Thomas Piketty’s bestsellin...

This article offers an institutional explanation for the conflicting trends in income inequality both across the Eurozone and within its member states. It argues that the euro’s introduction created different economic policy incentives for peripheral and core members. First, the euro’s design was a political choice skewed toward deflationary adjustment policies in hard times, leading to falling incomes and employment in the periphery. Second, the institutional incentives of the Eurozone are the opposite for export-driven coordinated market economies and demand-led (...) mixed market economies during booms and downturns, respectively. During the euro crisis, the Eurozone’s Northern countries gained at the expense of the Southern ones, while at the same time seeing lower domestic inequality compared to increased inequality in the periphery. This diverging pattern of European inequality was exacerbated by EU economic policy drift, the lack of any real national democratic choice in the periphery, and the growing importance of organized financial interests in Brussels. (shrink)

In this introduction to the special issue “The New Politics of Inequality in Europe,” recent literature on income inequality in the advanced democracies is summarized. It is argued that dominant accounts are too heavily focused on the United States, whereas the experience of Western European countries has been neglected. Although income inequality has risen nearly everywhere in the rich industrial democracies since the end of the 1970s, it has done so from different starting points, at different rates, (...) and for reasons connected to different mechanisms and different parts of the distribution. Extending the analysis to Western Europe enables us to understand these variations more fully. (shrink)

Economic inequality is one of the most daunting challenges of our time, with public debate often turning to questions of whether it is an inevitable outcome of economic systems and what, if anything, can be done about it. But why, exactly, should inequality worry us? The Greatest of All Plagues demonstrates that this underlying question has been a central preoccupation of some of the most eminent political thinkers of the Western intellectual tradition. David Lay Williams shares bold new (...) perspectives on the writings and ideas of Plato, Jesus, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. He shows how they describe economic inequality as a source of political instability and a corrupter of character and soul, and how they view unchecked inequality as a threat to their most cherished values, such as justice, faith, civic harmony, peace, democracy, and freedom. Williams draws invaluable insights into the societal problems generated by what Plato called "the greatest of all plagues," and examines the solutions employed through the centuries. An eye-opening work of intellectual history, The Greatest of All Plagues recovers a forgotten past for some of the most timeless books in the Western canon, revealing how economic inequality has been a paramount problem throughout the history of political thought. (shrink)

Childhood scholars have found that age inequality can be as profound an axis of meaningful difference as race, gender, or class, and yet the impact of this understanding has not permeated the discipline of sociology as a whole. This is one particularly stark example of the central argument of this article: despite decades of empirical and theoretical work by scholars in “the social studies of childhood,” sociologists in general have not incorporated the central contributions of this subfield: that children (...) are active social agents (not passive), knowing actors strategizing within their constraints (not innocent), with their capacities and challenges shaped by their contexts (not universally the same). I contend that mainstream sociology’s relative imperviousness has led to theoretical costs for both childhood scholars—who must re-assert and re-prove the core insights of the field—and sociologists in general. Using three core theoretical debates in the larger discipline—about independence, insecurity, and inequality—I argue that children’s perspectives can help scholars ask new questions, render the invisible visible, and break through theoretical logjams. Thus would further research utilizing children’s perspectives and the dynamics of age extend the explanatory power of social theory. (shrink)

With splendid new translations, these four major works offer a superlative introduction to a great social philosopher whose ideas helped spark a revolution that has still not ended. Can individual freedom and social stability be reconciled? What is the function of government? What are the benefits and liabilities of civilization? What is the original nature of man, and how can he most fully realize his potential? These were the questions that Jean-Jacques Rousseau investigated in works that helped set the stage (...) for the French Revolution and have since stood as eloquent expressions of revolutionary views, not only in politics but also in such areas as personal lifestyles and educational practices. Rousseau’s concepts of the natural goodness of man, the corrupting influence of social institutions, and the right and the power of the people to overthrow their oppressors and create new and more responsive forms of government and society are as richly relevant today as they were in eighteenth-century France. Includes: The Social Contract Discourse on Inequality Discourse on the Arts and Sciences “The Creed of a Savoyard Priest”. (shrink)

In this article, I develop the point that whereas talent is the basis for desert, talent itself is not meritocratically deserved. It is produced by three processes, none of which are meritocratic: talent is unequally distributed by the rigged lottery of birth, talent is defined in ways that favor some traits over others, and the market for talent is manipulated to maximally extract advantages by those who have more of it. To see how, we require a sociological perspective on economic (...) rent. I argue that talent is a major means through which people seek rent in modern-day capitalism. Talent today is what inherited land was to feudal societies; an unchallenged source of symbolic and economic rewards. Whereas God sanctified the aristocracy’s wealth, contemporary privilege is legitimated by meritocracy. Drawing on the work of Gary Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jerome Karabel, I show how rent-seeking in modern societies has come to rely principally on rent-definition and creation. Inequality is produced by the ways in which talent is defined, institutionalized, and sustained by the moral deservingness we attribute to the accomplishments of talents. Consequently, today’s inequalities are as striking as ever, yet harder to challenge than ever before. (shrink)

Whatever the merits idealized liberal accounts of citizenship education may have in the seminar room, in this essay I argue that they are both unpersuasive and ineffectual. This is the case, because they are insufficiently attentive to the empirical realities, first (a) with respect to how real – versus imaginary – school systems function; and second, (b) with respect to the broader political context in which citizenship education policies are implemented. Because so much is already known about the former, I (...) devote more attention in this essay to the latter. (shrink)

Advances in genetic technology will enable us to intervene in human biological development to prevent and cure diseases, to restore individuals' functions and capacities back to a normal level after injury and even to enhance them beyond what has hitherto been considered as normal functioning for our species. Such a power to reshape and modify the human condition raises fundamental questions that touch upon the central core of morality. One of these questions is distributive justice. Will all people have equal (...) access to the beneficial effects of genetic technology in general and medical genetics in particular? Most of the new therapeutic and enhancement techniques will probably be quite expensive. That means that, probably during a long period of time after the new genetic technology enters medical practice, its use will be practically monopolized by the rich, to the detriment of all those who are not in a position to afford genetic treatments. In this paper, I argue that the health care inequality that inevitably will follow from the adoption of genetic technology, while posing a challenge to provide as long as possible for genetic interventions for all, is hardly a reason to reject the new technology. In that case, we would have to reject any new medicine or medical technique that cannot be made available to all people at once. Finally, I also argue that the ?enhanced new world? that would follow the introduction of genetic technology, even with the kind of inequality that might then arise, poses no serious threat either to elite sports or to society and should therefore be welcome. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze survey data from more than 1,000 financial services employees to understand how gender inequality manifests itself in employees' informal networks. I found that even when Black and white women had jobs in which they controlled organizational resources and had ties to powerful employees, they received less work-related help from their network members than did white men. Drawing on status characteristics theory, I explain that network members were less likely to invest in women than in (...) white men because of cultural beliefs that rank women below that of white men. While past research has documented how employers use gender to rank workers and distribute rewards unequally, my research indicates that workers use gender to categorize and rank their network members as well. (shrink)

This work is a thought experiment in re-interpreting the virtue of li or ritual/propriety for the contemporary, multi-cultural, world. Using Zhuangzi, the Lunyu, and Zhongyong as my primary points of departure, I re-interpret the Confucian ideas of hierarchy in terms of the Daoist conception of harmony. Many scholars today argue that Confucianism has a relational ontology, yet at the same time, we find that Confucian values can and do lead to rigid and harmful traditions that have historically oppressed marginalized groups (...) like women. As such, I re-imagine what li might look like if we take relational ontology seriously, Drawing from Zhuangzi, I argue that Confucian harmony and order do not necessarily arise out of hierarchy, and that harmony, the most primary goal of li and of the Confucian project, can be best attained through propriety that is influenced by Daoism and feminist values such as equality. (shrink)

Beyond the reaches of scholarly debates about how to define and value civility properly, social actors across various institutional domains routinely demarcate civil from uncivil behavior. Yet this everyday classification process remains understudied and undertheorized, despite being widespread and having significant stakes for the individuals and groups involved. This article begins to fill this gap by developing the concept of civility contests—practical efforts to draw symbolic boundaries between civil and uncivil individuals, groups, or behaviors. Through a focus on the realm (...) of political protest in the United States, this article demonstrates that civility contests involve a wide range of political actors (including institutionalized power holders, opposing movements, and the media) who engage in this boundary-work in order to justify the control or (de)legitimation of protest. It then highlights patterned disparities in the outcomes of these contests, demonstrating that the likelihood of being marked as uncivil and the extent to which this prompts negative social sanction is shaped by one’s social position. Overall, the article seeks to stimulate and guide future empirical research on civility contests and to deepen theoretical understandings of the relationship between symbolic and social boundaries and the role of symbolic boundary-work in the reproduction of political inequality. (shrink)

Distinctive features of culture industries suggest that women culture workers face formidable barriers to career advancement. Using longitudinal data on the careers of screenwriters, we examine gender inequality in the labor market for writers of feature films. We hypothesize and test three different models of labor market dynamics and find support for a model of cumulative disadvantage whereby the gender gap in earnings grows as men and women move through their careers. We suggest that the transition of screenwriting from (...) a mixed to a male-dominated occupation parallels the “empty field” phenomenon described in a study by Tuchman of nineteenth-century novelists. The institutionalization of male dominance of the film industry in the 1930s and the typecasting of women writers has had a lasting impact on gender inequality, which shows little change through the early 1990s. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

The global inequality in the distribution of vaccines is unjust. As countries scrambled to ensure enough vaccines, the world’s poorest were left to fend for themselves, and the generosity meant to mitigate this through COVAX was not sufficiently forthcoming. In light of this, I proposed a vaccine tax, which obligates those willing and able to pay to protect their own population to contribute to protecting those residing in the world’s low-income countries. Petrovic has offered an important critique of this (...) proposal, questioning both the fairness and the efficiency of the tax. However, when properly specified, the vaccine tax is not vulnerable to these critiques. (shrink)

In this introduction, I briefly summarize Sophia Moreau's Faces of Inequality. I situate her monograph within two highly contemporary bodies of literature — relational egalitarianism and discrimination theory — to show how it provides important insights for understanding both what it means to treat others as equals in society and how to define wrongful discrimination. Moreau's work on discrimination is of great relevance for philosophers and socio-legal theorists alike as the commentaries from the symposium contributors demonstrate, including Dale Smith, (...) Pablo Gilabert, Andrea Sangiovanni, Daniel Viehoff, Jessica Eisen, Alysia Blackham, and Iyiola Solanke. (shrink)

Relying on more expansive criteria for defining “mass shootings” than much existing research, we examine a subset of a unique dataset incorporating 7,048 news documents covering 2,170 shootings in the United States between 2013 and 2019. We analyze the descriptive language used to describe incidents and perpetrators and discover significant racial disparities in representation. This research enables a critical examination of the explanatory frames utilized by news media to tell the public who mass shooters are and journalistic attempts to explain (...) why they occur. Data were analyzed utilizing a mixed methods approach, relying on content analysis to inductively code emergent categories of descriptions of shooters and binary logistic regressions to analyze the preponderance of descriptive categories when comparing news articles reporting on shootings committed by differently racialized shooters. Our results confirm some recent research showing that mass shooters racialized as white are more likely to be described with kind and compassionate language. With our larger sample, however, we also find that mass shooters racialized as white are additionally more likely to be described with negative language as “bad” or “evil” in comparison to shooters of color. We discuss how these data demonstrate that media reports present a more complex picture of white mass shooters for the public than shooters of color. (shrink)

Large-scale data systems are increasingly envisioned as tools for justice, with big data analytics offering a key opportunity to advance health equity. Health systems face growing public pressure to collect data on patient “social factors,” and advocates and public officials seek to leverage such data sources as a means of system transformation. Despite the promise of this “data-driven” strategy, there is little empirical work that examines big data in action directly within the sites of care expected to transform. In this (...) article, I present a case study on one such initiative, focusing on a large public safety-net health system’s initiation of sexual orientation and gender identity data collection within the clinical setting. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with providers, staff, and administrators, I highlight three main challenges that elude big data’s grasp on inequality: provider and staff’s limited understanding of the social significance of data collection; patient perception of the cultural insensitivity of data items; and clinic need to balance data requests with competing priorities within a constrained time window. These issues reflect structural challenges within safety-net care that big data alone are unable to address in advancing social justice. I discuss these findings by considering the present data-driven strategy alongside two complementary courses of action: diversifying the health professions workforce and clinical education reform. To truly advance justice, we need more than “just data”: we need to confront the fundamental conditions of social inequality. (shrink)

The concept of vulnerability is widely used in human rights policy documents, reports, and case law focusing on the impacts of climate change on human rights. In academic discussions, the concept, however, has also sparked a discussion on its benefits and challenges for the advancement of human rights, especially concerning the principles of equality and non-discrimination. This article aims at contributing to this debate from a frame-analytical perspective. In social sciences, frame-analysis is a form of discourse analysis which focuses on (...) the consequences of different concepts for legal, political, and social discussions and norms. With the example of selected UN documents on different human rights issues in the context of climate change, the article, firstly, analyzes whether and how the concept of vulnerability is defined in the documents and why it is used in the documents. Secondly, it is elaborated to which individuals and groups the concept is applied. Thirdly, it is discussed how vulnerability is conceptualized in relation to or in distinction to the concepts of inequality and discrimination. In a further section it is analyzed what narratives are mobilized by the frame of vulnerability. The article concludes that from a discourse-analytical perspective the frame of vulnerability mobilizes problematic narratives which has gendered and racialized implications for those labeled vulnerable. (shrink)