Adaptive immunity provides the unique ability to respond to a nearly infinite range of antigenic determinants. Given the inherent plasticity of the adaptive immune system, a series of tolerance mechanisms exist to reduce reactivity toward self. While this reduces the probability of autoimmunity, it also creates an important gap in adaptive immunity: the ability to recognize microbes that look like self. As a variety of microbes decorate themselves in self‐like carbohydrate antigens and tolerance reduces the ability of adaptive immunity to (...) react with self‐like structures, protection against molecular mimicry likely resides within the innate arm of immunity. In this review, we will explore the potential consequences of microbial molecular mimicry, including factors within innate immunity that appear to specifically target microbes expressing self‐like antigens, and therefore provide protection against molecular mimicry. (shrink)

The growing proportion of elderly people in society, together with recent advances in robotics, makes the use of robots in elder care increasingly likely. We outline developments in the areas of robot applications for assisting the elderly and their carers, for monitoring their health and safety, and for providing them with companionship. Despite the possible benefits, we raise and discuss six main ethical concerns associated with: (1) the potential reduction in the amount of human contact; (2) an increase in the (...) feelings of objectification and loss of control; (3) a loss of privacy; (4) a loss of personal liberty; (5) deception and infantilisation; (6) the circumstances in which elderly people should be allowed to control robots. We conclude by balancing the care benefits against the ethical costs. If introduced with foresight and careful guidelines, robots and robotic technology could improve the lives of the elderly, reducing their dependence, and creating more opportunities for social interaction. (shrink)

Karen L. Baird, Beyond reproduction: Women’s health, activism, and public policy, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009, reviewed by Amanda R. Clarke.

As the cognitive revolution was slow to come to the study of animal behavior, the vast majority of what we know about primate cognition has been discovered in the last 30 years. Building on the recognition that the physical and social worlds of humans and their living primate relatives pose many of the same evolutionary challenges, programs of research have established that the most basic cognitive skills and mental representations that humans use to navigate those worlds are already possessed by (...) other primates. There may be differences between humans and other primates, however, in more complex cognitive skills, such as reasoning about relations, causality, time, and other minds. Of special importance, the human primate seems to possess a species-unique set of adaptations for “cultural intelligence,” which are broad reaching in their effects on human cognition. (shrink)

This chapter considers infants' understanding that acts of attention — looking and pointing — as object-directed, that is, as implying a relation between the agent who produces them and the object at which they are directed. Sensitivity to the object-directed structure of these actions provides an essential framework for understanding the phenomenological, psychological, and behavioural implications of these actions. The evidence reviewed indicates that although young infants sometimes orient appropriately in response to others' gaze shifts and points, they seem not (...) to understand these actions as object-directed until late in the first year of life. Findings of relatively early success at orienting but later success in action understanding raise questions about the mechanisms by which action understanding emerges, and these are considered at the end of the chapter. (shrink)

This paper assesses the potential of organisational culture as a means for improving ethics in organisations. Organisational culture is recognised as one determinant of how people behave, more or less ethically, in organisations. It is also incresingly understood as an attribute that management can and should influence to improve organisational performance. When things go wrong in organisations, managers look to the culture as both the source of problems and the basis for solutions. Two models of organisational culture and ethical behaviour (...) are evaluated. They rest on different understandings of organisational culture and the processes by which ethics are enhanced. Firstly, the prevailing approach holds that creating a unitary cohesive culture around core moral values is the solution to enhancing ethical behaviour. Both the feasibility and desirability of this approach, in terms of ethical outcomes, is questioned. The second model queries the existence of organisational culture at all, arguing that organisations are nothing more than shifting coalitions of subcultures. In this second model, the very porousness of the subcultures provides a catalyst for the scrutiny and critique of norms and practices. Such diversity and debate is construed as potentially a better safeguard for ethical behaviour than the uniformity promised by the unitary, strong culture model. (shrink)

This paper proposes that human expression of pain in the presence or absence of caregivers, and the detection of pain by observers, arises from evolved propensities. The function of pain is to demand attention and prioritise escape, recovery, and healing; where others can help achieve these goals, effective communication of pain is required. Evidence is reviewed of a distinct and specific facial expression of pain from infancy to old age, consistent across stimuli, and recognizable as pain by observers. Voluntary control (...) over amplitude is incomplete, and observers can better detect pain that the individual attempts to suppress rather than amplify or simulate. In many clinical and experimental settings, the facial expression of pain is incorporated with verbal and nonverbal vocal activity, posture, and movement in an overall category of pain behaviour. This is assumed by clinicians to be under operant control of social contingencies such as sympathy, caregiving, and practical help; thus, strong facial expression is presumed to constitute an attempt to manipulate these contingencies by amplification of the normal expression. Operant formulations support skepticism about the presence or extent of pain, judgments of malingering, and sometimes the withholding of caregiving and help. To the extent that pain expression is influenced by environmental contingencies, however, could equally plausibly constitute the release of suppression according to evolved contingent propensities that guide behaviour. Pain has been largely neglected in the evolutionary literature and the literature on expression of emotion, but an evolutionary account can generate improved assessment of pain and reactions to it. (shrink)

Claims of progress in our ethical or moral beliefs and practices—as well as claims to ethical or moral regression—are commonplace in American social and political conversation. Often, such commentary involves a lamenting of the decline of “traditional” values in contemporary society or alternatively a rejoicing in the ways that we appear to have overcome prior prejudicial values. In this dissertation, I am concerned with the notions of progress and improvement that underlie such commonsense judgments. At a minimum, ethical progress requires (...) the idea that some values or practices are better than others and hence that replacing some beliefs or practices with others can be a genuine improvement. Taking inspiration from the ethical works of John Dewey, I sketch an account of evaluative progress that conceives of this sort of improvement in ethical beliefs or practices in terms of problem-resolving. On my view, resolving a problem involves both offering an adequate conception of the problem and finding a problem-solution which lives up to the world and to the values we reflectively endorse. On my account, resolving problems is not simply a matter of finding the best means to a fixed end; rather, I conceive of problem-resolving as a dynamic process in which ends themselves are typically in flux. The sort of “dynamic deliberation” I have in mind, then, goes beyond mere instrumental reasoning, by not only allowing us to recognize conflicts between ends or means to ends, but in also providing a way to rationally revise or reject ends. Finally, in order for this sort of problem-resolving to make good on the idea of genuine improvement or progress, the process of solving problems must involve some sense of objectivity. I offer a procedural account of objectivity that emphasizes the role of the world in constraining our inquiry, involves a naturalization of ethical epistemology, and allows for objective inquiry to be undertaken by an individual or a community. (shrink)

How do the ways we argue represent a practical philosophy or a way of life? Are concepts of character and ethos pertinent to our understanding of academic debate? In this book, Amanda Anderson analyzes arguments in literary, cultural, and political theory, with special attention to the ways in which theorists understand ideals of critical distance, forms of subjective experience, and the determinants of belief and practice. Drawing on the resources of the liberal and rationalist tradition, Anderson interrogates the limits (...) of identity politics and poststructuralism while holding to the importance of theory as a form of life. Considering high-profile trends as well as less noted patterns of argument, The Way We Argue Now addresses work in feminism, new historicism, queer theory, postcolonialism, cosmopolitanism, pragmatism, and proceduralism. The essays brought together here--lucid, precise, rigorously argued--combine pointed critique with an appreciative assessment of the productive internal contests and creative developments across these influential bodies of thought. Ultimately, The Way We Argue Now promotes a revitalized culture of argument through a richer understanding of the ways critical reason is practiced at the individual, collective, and institutional levels. Bringing to the fore the complexities of academic debate while shifting the terms by which we assess the continued influence of theory, it will appeal to readers interested in political theory, literary studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and the place of academic culture in society and politics. (shrink)

This is a preprint draft. Please cite published version (DOI: 10.1111/mila.12385). The aim of this paper is to provide a novel analysis of anorexia nervosa (AN) in the context of the sense of agency literature. I first show that two accounts of anorexia nervosa that we ought to take seriously— i.e., the first personal reports of those who have experienced it firsthand as well as the research that seeks to explain anorexic behavior from an empirical perspective— appear to be thoroughly (...) in tension with one another in their descriptions of anorexic actions. Rather than proceeding at this point by way of disregarding anorexic testimony as meaningless or insincere, I instead offer a positive account of the sense of agency in anorexia nervosa that renders these two depictions compatible. The resultant picture of anorexic behavior is one that accommodates current empirical findings while also providing valuable insight into how it is that anorexics can sincerely report feeling fully in control over their food restriction. (shrink)

This paper aims to better motivate the naturalization of metaphysics by identifying and criticizing a class of theories I call ’free range metaphysics’. I argue that free range metaphysics is epistemically inadequate because the constraints on its content—consistency, simplicity, intuitive plausibility, and explanatory power—are insufficiently robust and justificatory. However, since free range metaphysics yields clarity-conducive techniques, incubates science, and produces conceptual and formal tools useful for scientifically engaged philosophy, I do not recommend its discontinuation. I do recommend, however, ending the (...) discipline’s bad faith. That is, I urge that free range metaphysics not be taken to have fully satisfactory epistemic credentials over and above its pragmatic ones. (shrink)

In this paper, we aim to show that the framework of embedded, distributed, or extended cognition offers new perspectives on social cognition by applying it to one specific domain: the psychology of memory. In making our case, first we specify some key social dimensions of cognitive distribution and some basic distinctions between memory cases, and then describe stronger and weaker versions of distributed remembering in the general distributed cognition framework. Next, we examine studies of social influences on memory in cognitive (...) psychology, and identify the valuable concepts and methods to be extended and embedded in our framework; we focus in particular on three related paradigms: transactive memory, collaborative recall, and social contagion. Finally, we sketch our own early studies of individual and group memory developed within our framework of distributed cognition, on social contagion of autobiographical memories, collaborative flashbulb memories, and memories of high school at a high school reunion. We see two reciprocal benefits of this conceptual and empirical framework to social memory phenomena: that ideas about distributed cognition can be honed against and tested with the help of sophisticated methods in the social cognitive psychology of memory; and conversely, that a range of social memory phenomena that are as yet poorly understood can be approached afresh with theoretically motivated extensions of existing empirical paradigms. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene el propósito de defender que las razones personales en sentido amplio son una postura compatible con la defensa del largoplacismo. Para ello, en primer lugar, explicaré en qué se basa el largoplacismo, esto es, la posición según la cual debemos preocuparnos principalmente por el impacto que nuestras acciones tendrán en el futuro lejano. En segundo lugar, describiré y compararé las distintas posiciones que existen en ética de poblaciones. A continuación, señalaré la problematicidad de las razones personales en (...) sentido estrecho. Finalmente, evaluaré las razones personales en sentido amplio en relación con el largoplacismo y concluiré que pueden constituir una posición no sólo válida, sino útil, para quienes se preocupan por el futuro lejano. (shrink)

BackgroundPoor mental health is known to adversely affect functional abilities, social isolation, and quality of life. It is, therefore, crucial to consider the long-term impacts of mental health conditions as autistic adults grow older.ObjectivesTo explore, in a group of community-based autistic adults, the extent of: autistic traits, co-occurring physical and mental health conditions; age-related differences in those conditions, and changes over time; and their impact on everyday living and QoL.MethodAbout Sixty-eight autistic adults participated in the first study ; 49 participants (...) from T1 took part in a follow-up at T2. Standardised self-report measures of autistic traits, mental health, and QoL were completed at both time points.ResultsOver two-thirds of autistic adult participants experienced at least one co-occurring condition, and over a third met the criteria for three or more co-occurring conditions. Mental and physical health difficulties were related to autistic traits and difficulties in everyday life and were consistent predictors of poor QoL at T1 and T2.ConclusionMental health difficulties in autism persisted into older age and did not improve over time. These findings have important implications for mental health provision for autistic adults in older age. (shrink)

Affects have often been characterised as a hindrance to the rational thinker. In this paper I reconsider the role of affects in philosophical inquiry in the light of recent work on the emotions which suggests that affects play a role in framing the ways in which we experience the world. I explore affects as motivators and curtailers of philosophical inquiry drawing on work by Hookway. I suggest that although Hookway is correct in identifying the motivating role of affects, his account (...) is too sparse and does not take account of the wider role which affects play in philosophical inquiry. Drawing on phenomenological psychiatry I argue that affects play a pre-reflective role which enables successful ‘explicit’ reasoning to begin. Building on this I use accounts by de Sousa on emotions as salience providers and William James on the role of temperament in philosophical inquiry to supplement and fill the gaps left by Hookway’s account. Here I draw a distinction between sporadic and sustained affects, claiming that a full account of the role of affects in philosophy ought to take account of both. This paper ultimately provides an examination of how the recent work on emotions affects the way we may view philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

El sistema educativo es responsable por la transmisión y expresión de la mayor parte de los patrones socioculturales que integran nuestra sociedad, entre los cuales se encuentra el género. Este es un tema de reciente abordaje en el contexto educativo, por lo cual son necesarios los estudios respecto a las percepciones docentes al respecto. Por otro lado, la metáfora es una herramienta utilizada en la vida cotidiana de las personas, para facilitar la producción y comprensión de conceptos abstractos, por lo (...) cual es útil para el estudio de creencias, opiniones y conceptualizaciones por parte de distintos grupos humanos. Este artículo, basado en una investigación cualitativa realizada en contexto de posgrado, tiene como objetivo describir las metáforas de animales producidas por estudiantes de pedagogía de quinto año respecto a sus estudiantes de género femenino y/o masculino. Por medio de entrevistas semiestructuradas a diez estudiantes, se identificó un total de 9 metáforas en el campo semántico de los animales, donde se diferenció el comportamiento de estudiantes en el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje en base a su género. Como resultados principales, se destaca que las metáforas asociadas al género masculino refieren a la inquietud, el desorden y lo físico; mientras que las metáforas asociadas al género femenino destacaban lo verbal y la tranquilidad. Por otro lado, algunas de las metáforas producidas relevaban la influencia de la edad en el comportamiento de los y las estudiantes. Futuras investigaciones podrán ampliar la muestra, y facilitar la elección de estrategias para disminuir las inequidades de género por parte de los y las profesionales de educación. (shrink)

This paper presents findings from a survey conducted with formerly incarcerated individuals on their experiences of food and food systems within federal prisons in Canada. Beyond affirming the many problems with the quality and quantity of food provided to incarcerated individuals, the findings discussed in this article highlight the multi-faceted and paradoxical role of food behind bars. Food was a tool of punishment and a site of conflict, yet it simultaneously provides an important source of community and camaraderie. While there (...) can be no “just” carceral food system because carceral systems are inherently unjust systems, a conversation about food provisioning within prison helps bring into focus opportunities to improve the material conditions of incarcerated individuals in the short-term as well as openings to question the logic and legitimacy of carceral institutions more broadly. As we are all bound-up in carceral food systems, there is a collective responsibility to interrogate and make visible the realities of carceral food systems in order to work towards non-carceral futures. (shrink)

Concerns over medical paternalism are especially salient when there exists a conflict of values between patient and clinician. This is particularly relevant for psychiatry, the field of medicine for which the phenomenon of conflicting values is most present and for which the specter of medical paternalism looms large. Few cases are as glaring as that of anorexia nervosa (AN), a disorder that is considered to be egosyntonic (meaning its symptoms are reflectively endorsed by the patient) and maintained by the presence (...) of pathological values. One might think, given this, that an approach to medicine that foregrounds the role of values in clinical encounters would be particularly well suited to address the problem of medical paternalism in treating AN. As it happens, this is precisely the goal of values-based medicine, an approach to medicine that prioritizes the integration of patients’ unique values into the aims of treatment and that has been touted as being particularly applicable to psychiatric conditions such as AN. Although this strategy may initially appear promising, in this paper I will argue that the directive to incorporate patient values (as dictated by values-based medicine) cannot do the work of mitigating medical paternalism in the treatment of egosyntonic disorders such as AN. Rather than chalking this up as a failure due to AN being a particularly challenging case, I will instead conclude that the failure of values-based medicine in this context cuts to the heart of the limitations of rectifying medical paternalism within psychiatry as it currently exists. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between dignity and robot care for older people. It highlights the disquiet that is often expressed about failures to maintain the dignity of vulnerable older people, but points out some of the contradictory uses of the word ‘dignity’. Certain authors have resolved these contradictions by identifying different senses of dignity; contrasting the inviolable dignity inherent in human life to other forms of dignity which can be present to varying degrees. The Capability Approach (CA) is introduced (...) as a different but tangible account of what it means to live a life worthy of human dignity. It is used here as a framework for the assessment of the possible effects of eldercare robots on human dignity. The CA enables the identification of circumstances in which robots could enhance dignity by expanding the set of capabilities that are accessible to frail older people. At the same time, it is also possible within its framework to identify ways in which robots could have a negative impact, by impeding the access of older people to essential capabilities. It is concluded that the CA has some advantages over other accounts of dignity, but that further work and empirical study is needed in order to adapt it to the particular circumstances and concerns of those in the latter part of their lives. (shrink)

It is possible that the world contains infinitely many agents that have positive and negative levels of well-being. Theories have been developed to ethically rank such worlds based on the well-being levels of the agents in those worlds or other qualitative properties of the worlds in question, such as the distribution of agents across spacetime. In this thesis I argue that such ethical rankings ought to be consistent with the Pareto principle, which says that if two worlds contain the same (...) agents and some agents are better off in the first world than they are in the second and no agents are worse off than they are in the second, then the first world is better than the second. I show that if we accept four axioms – the Pareto principle, transitivity, an axiom stating that populations of worlds can be permuted, and the claim that if the ‘at least as good as’ relation holds between two worlds then it holds between qualitative duplicates of this world pair – then we must conclude that there is ubiquitous incomparability between infinite worlds. I show that this is true even if the populations of infinite worlds are disjoint or overlapping, and that we cannot use any qualitative properties of world pairs to rank these worlds. Finally, I argue that this incomparability result generates puzzles for both consequentialist and non-consequentialist theories of objective and subjective permissibility. (shrink)

Literary analysis offers English instructors an ideal vehicle for modeling, practicing, and teaching critical thinking skills. Because literature students must master the skills of analysis, reasoning, evaluation, and argumentation, they would benefit from deliberate and explicit instruction in the concepts and practices of critical thinking in the classroom. Part I of this paper describes strategies to incorporate explicit instruction in the elements of reasoning and the standards of critical thinking described by critical thinking experts Richard Paul, Linda Elder, and Gerald (...) Nosich into the literature classroom. In the companion piece, “Critical Thinking in the Literature Classroom, Part II: Dickens’s Great Expectations and the Emergent Critical Thinker,” a demonstration is given of how protagonists in literary works such as Pip from Dickens’s Great Expectations can be understood and interpreted as literary representations of an individual’s transition from a first-order, unreflective thinker to a second-order, reflective, metacognitive critical thinker, further illuminating the literary texts and further reinforcing students’ understanding of the concepts of critical thinking. (shrink)

Recent reports that human pluripotent stem cells can be captured in a spectrum of states with variable properties has prompted a re‐evaluation of how pluripotency is acquired and stabilised. The latest additions to the stem cell hierarchy open up opportunities for understanding human development, reprogramming, and cell state transitions more generally. Many of the new cell lines have been collectively termed ‘naïve’ human pluripotent stem cells to distinguish them from the conventional ‘primed’ cells. Here, several transcriptional and epigenetic hallmarks of (...) human pluripotent states in the recently described cell lines are reviewed and evaluated. Methods to derive and identify human naïve pluripotent stem cells are also discussed, with a focus on the uses and future developments of state‐specific reporter cell lines and cell‐surface proteins. Finally, opportunities and uncertainties in naïve stem cell biology are highlighted, and the current limitations of human naïve pluripotent stem cells considered, particularly in the context of differentiation. (shrink)

This edited volume brings together a range of perspectives on Educational Leadership, Management and Administration (ELMA) and various theories of resistance or compliance along with how policy and politics play out in school communities. The book makes a significant contribution to debates around theorising educational leadership and the implications of discourses on schooling and the politics of education. It brings together a broad array of international scholars to examine theories of resistance in ELMA and establish a resistance-oriented agenda for critical (...) ELMA research that promotes change and diverse ideas about leadership. Using both empirical data and conceptual analysis, the chapters provide opportunities for theorising the work and working conditions of educational leaders alongside questions of compliance and resistance that further improve the understanding of these concepts in the field. Providing cutting-edge research and theorisation into this emerging area, the book will be highly relevant for researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the fields of educational leadership, management and administration, and educational policy. It will also be of interest to school leaders. (shrink)

For Kant one of the goals of any critique of pure reason is to answer the question, how are a priori synthetic propositions possible? Because rationalists such as Eberhard and Wolff took the principle of sufficient reason (hereafter, the PSR) as the principle of all a priori synthetic judgments, understanding both the various formulations of this principle and arguments in favor of its use as an axiom in metaphysical reasoning provides an interesting back door to understanding The Critique of Pure (...) Reason. Despite his statements in the First Critique rejecting the PSR as a principle of judgment1, I argue that Kant was actually more sympathetic to the PSR than these passages alone would suggest. The Kant-Eberhard Controversy suggests that, even though Kant explicitly denies that the PSR can guide metaphysical reasoning, he actually presupposes its truth. I show that Kant’s position is tenable because, like the rationalists, Kant accepts the assumption that real essences exist and that they ground real possibility2; this leads him to accept the truth of all clear statements of the PSR. Unlike the rationalists, however, he does not accept the assumption that human understanding is isomorphic with real essences. As a result, Kant rejects only the use of the PSR to determine a priori the existence or properties of a thing. In this paper I hope to illuminate this position. I will begin with a survey of the various formulations of the PSR that have been put forward by Kant and his predecessors: Leibniz, Eberhard, and Wolff. Then I will examine Wolff and Eberhard’s arguments in favor of the PSR along with Kant’s criticisms of these arguments. Lastly, I will show why Kant rejected the very possibility of justifying this use of the PSR while presupposing its truth. (shrink)

This article argues that Augustine’s understanding of the internal dynamics of number, order, and weight as they pertain to corporeal creatures supplies the basis for an analogy which characterizes the process of the soul’s reformation. In other words, Augustine understands the soul’s simplicity in an analogous manner to the simplicity of corporeal creatures, and the simplicity of corporeal creatures is determined by the relations between number, order, and weight. This analogy shows that Augustine conceives of the soul as a composite (...) entity with different loves as its constituent parts. In the process of reformation, the soul acquires an ordered disposition as those loves become more like one another. By virtue of this ordered disposition, the soul also acquires a greater degree of integration or number because the likeness of weight among its constituent parts allows the soul to move as a unity toward God as its final end. (shrink)

Stigma is a factor of diseases of craniofacial disfigurement, associated with negative health outcomes. Psychosocial interventions can improve the “illness” experience. The law can improve care by framing patients' rights, defining physicians' obligations to make psychological referrals, and fostering an activist orientation among patients.

O artigo investiga as nuances dos discursos sobre Brasília presentes nos textos de pareceres de censores que atuaram durante a ditadura militar. Os filmes que sofreram censura prévia escolhidos para a construção do artigo foram ‘‘Vestibular 70’’, ‘‘Brasília Ano 10’’ e ‘‘Samba em Brasília’’. Os dois primeiros foram produzidos na capital e o último no Rio de Janeiro, no ano de 1960. Diante disso, foi importante refletir sobre a historicidade de como se apresentava o discurso dos pareceristas nos documentos. Para (...) tal, os pareceres foram examinados à luz da Análise do Discurso de Michel Pêcheux e Althusser, bem como outras reflexões dentro deste campo teórico-metodológico. A historiografia sobre Brasília foi de extrema importância para o entendimento da conjuntura na qual a linguagem dos pareceres está inserida. A pretensão desta análise foi identificar o papel do cinema candango na construção do imaginário da cidade e sua relação com o Estado, por meio dos pareceres. This article investigates the nuances of the discourses about Brasília in the texts of the censor’s opinion on who acted in the military dictatorship in Brazil. The movies that suffered previous censorship were ‘‘Vestibular 70’’, ‘‘Brasília Ano 10’’ and ‘‘Samba em Brasília’’. The first two were produced in the capital and the last one in Rio de Janeiro, in 1960. With that being said, it was important to reflect on the historicity of how the discourse was presented in those documents. For that, the opinions were examed in the light of the Speech Analysis of Michel Pêcheux and Althusser, alongside other reflections inside this theoretical-methodological field. The histography about Brasília was also of extreme importance for the understanding of the conjecture in which the language of the opinions is inserted. The aspiration of this analysis was to identify the role of the candango cinema in the construction of the city’s imaginary and its relation to the State, through the opinions of censorship. (shrink)

This article examines the development, activities and effectiveness of women’s NGOs in 10 Central and Eastern European countries. It begins by examining the establishment of women’s organizations post-1989, identifying their structure, funding difficulties and the issues on which they focus. It also addresses the tension between the work of NGOs and the wider development of civil society. The article goes on to explore how negative perceptions of feminism have hindered efforts to develop a unified and coherent agenda among women’s NGOs. (...) Finally, it analyses how public attitudes have affected relations between women’s organizations and women politicians as well as how competition and fragmentation have complicated relationships between NGOs. (shrink)