The expansion of ethics review, beyond its origins in medical research, is the subject of growing critical analysis internationally, especially from social science researchers. Our study builds on this analysis by considering ethics review specifically within tertiary-based educational research. As a foundation for a larger study, we explore the reporting of ethics review within articles from a snapshot of education journals. A cross-sectional review considered 125 articles from 24 journals spanning medical and nurse education, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, (...) and educational technology. Among similar types of research our findings highlight variation in institutional ethical review processes and outcomes. Despite most journals providing guidelines for reporting ethics review, adherence to these guidelines by authors or editors was not always evident, but more likely in health-related education journals. We argue that identified areas of variation may reflect the differing influence and proximity of biomedical values. This influence has been under examined in tertiary-based educational research but may contribute to inequitable learning, researching and publishing experiences, potentially adding to negative sentiment about ethics review. (shrink)

While the need to protect vulnerable research participants is universal, conceptual challenges with the notion of vulnerability may result in the under or over-protection of participants. Ethics review bodies making assumptions about who is vulnerable and in what circumstance can be viewed as paternalistic if they do not consider participant viewpoints. Our study focuses on participant vulnerability in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) research. We aim to illuminate students’ views on participant vulnerability to contribute to critical analysis of the (...) role and processes of ethics review. Additionally, we aim to highlight the importance of seeking the views of participant communities, especially in research environments beyond ethics review’s medical origins. Thirty-four students from a health-related faculty at a university in Aotearoa New Zealand, participated in five focus groups. Participants discussed factors affecting their potential participation in research drawing upon a series of vignettes based on examples of published SoTL projects. Themes, generated using reflexive thematic analysis, built a participant-informed picture of vulnerability. Findings indicate that students do not generally consider themselves vulnerable and instead consider participation in SoTL research through an agentic lens. Students expect that participation will be voluntary, not negatively impact their grades, and not single them out so that others could judge them. Our study also highlights the value students place on relationships with one another and teaching staff and the implications these have for SoTL research participation and future professional practice. This research challenges research ethics committees to think further about vulnerability in the context of SoTL whilst highlighting the importance of providing opportunities for research participants more broadly to explore and vocalize their views as members of participant communities. (shrink)

IntroductionAllocation of research funds relies on peer review to support funding decisions, and these processes can be susceptible to biases and inefficiencies. The aim of this work was to determine which past interventions to peer review and decision-making have worked to improve research funding practices, how they worked, and for whom.MethodsRealist synthesis of peer-review publications and grey literature reporting interventions in peer review for research funding.ResultsWe analysed 96 publications and 36 website sources. Sixty publications enabled us to extract stakeholder-specific context-mechanism-outcomes (...) configurations for 50 interventions, which formed the basis of our synthesis. Shorter applications, reviewer and applicant training, virtual funding panels, enhanced decision models, institutional submission quotas, applicant training in peer review and grant-writing reduced interrater variability, increased relevance of funded research, reduced time taken to write and review applications, promoted increased investment into innovation, and lowered cost of panels.ConclusionsReports of 50 interventions in different areas of peer review provide useful guidance on ways of solving common issues with the peer review process. Evidence of the broader impact of these interventions on the research ecosystem is still needed, and future research should aim to identify processes that consistently work to improve peer review across funders and research contexts. (shrink)

Background Design thinking is a tool for generating and exploring ideas from multiple stakeholders. We used DT principles to introduce students to the ethical implications of organ transplantation. Students applied DT principles to propose solutions to maximise social justice in liver transplant allocation. Methods A 150 min interactive workshop was integrated into the longitudinal ethics curriculum. Following a group didactic on challenges of organ donation in the USA supplemented by patient stories, teams of students considered alternative solutions to optimise fairness (...) of organ distribution and ethical implications of changing the current model. Facilitators led students through DT steps of empathy, defining the team’s point of view, ideating on potential solutions, prototyping a specific idea and testing the idea through oral presentation, with questions and answers by peers and faculty. The curriculum was evaluated with presurveys and postsurveys including quantitative and open-ended items. Results 100 first year medical students participated. Before the session, 75.3% of students had no practical experience with DT. Following participation, students reported an increased understanding of the current liver transplant allocation system and an increased appreciation of shortcomings of the current organ allocation system. After the session, 73.8% of students felt that DT could be used to approach complex health system problems. Discussion Students participating in a DT workshop displayed improved knowledge and attitudes toward organ transplantation and DT. In this pilot study, DT showed promise as a student-led approach emphasising collaboration and creativity in ethics curricula in medical education. (shrink)

ObjectiveCo-morbid insomnia and sleep apnea is a common and debilitating condition that is more difficult to treat compared to insomnia or sleep apnea-alone. Emerging evidence suggests that cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is effective in patients with COMISA, however, those with more severe sleep apnea and evidence of greater objective sleep disturbance may be less responsive to CBTi. Polysomnographic sleep study data has been used to predict treatment response to CBTi in patients with insomnia-alone, but not in patients with COMISA. (...) We used randomized controlled trial data to investigate polysomnographic predictors of insomnia improvement following CBTi, versus control in participants with COMISA.MethodsOne hundred and forty five participants with insomnia and sleep apnea [apnea-hypopnea index ≥ 15] were randomized to CBTi or no-treatment control. Mixed models were used to investigate the effect of pre-treatment AHI, sleep duration, and other traditional, and novel [quantitative electroencephalography ] polysomnographic predictors of between-group changes in Insomnia Severity Index scores from pre-treatment to post-treatment.ResultsCompared to control, CBTi was associated with greater ISI improvement among participants with; higher AHI, less wake after sleep onset, and less N3 sleep. No quantitative electroencephalographic, or other traditional polysomnographic variables predicted between-group ISI change.DiscussionAmong participants with COMISA, higher OSA severity predicted a greater treatment-response to CBTi, versus control. People with COMISA should be treated with CBTi, which is effective even in the presence of severe OSA and objective sleep disturbance. (shrink)

Social anxiety may disrupt the empathic process, and well-regulated empathy is critical for navigating the social world. Two studies aimed to further understand empathy in the context of social anxiety. Study 1 compared individuals with elevated or normative social anxiety on a measure assessing cognitive and affective empathy for positive and negative emotions conveyed by other people (“targets”), completed under social threat. Relative to individuals with normative social anxiety, individuals with elevated social anxiety had greater cognitive empathy and no differences (...) in affective empathy, regardless of emotion type. As greater cognitive empathy can be maladaptive, Study 2 tested whether this could be down-regulated. Individuals with elevated social anxiety underwent emotional working memory training (eWMT) for negative emotional information, or control training (CT). Effects on an empathy measure completed under social threat were assessed. Cognitive empathy for negative emotions decreased following eWMT but not CT, and this was only evident for those with higher pre-training working memory capacity. Cognitive empathy for positive emotions and affective empathy were not affected. Overall, social anxiety is associated with aberrant elevated cognitive empathy for negative and positive emotions, and the deviation in cognitive empathy for negative emotions can be regulated with eWMT for certain individuals.Trial registration: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry identifier: ACTRN12618001196235.. (shrink)

Constitutional reform has been an important means to push populist authoritarian agendas in Hungary, Poland, Turkey and Venezuela. The embrace of constitutional means and rhetoric in pursuit of these agendas has led to the growing recognition of ‘populist constitutionalism’ as a contemporary political phenomenon. In all four examples mentioned above, democracy, popular sovereignty and direct plebiscitary appeal to the people is the rhetorical and justificatory framework for constitutional reform. This, I worry, gives democracy a bad name and reinforces the widespread (...) suspicion that citizens should not be directly involved in constitutional reform as popular participation can lead to dangerous majoritarianism and is easily manipulated by elite actors seeking to weaken constitutional checks and balances. But the problem, I argue, is not inherent in citizen’s participation in constitutional reform. In contrast to populist constitutionalism, I develop an idea of deliberative constitutionalism in which citizens can participate in constitution-making and reform without hijacking constitutionalism for majoritarian, nationalist or anti-pluralist ends. Deliberative constitutionalism as I understand it has four features: a Habermasian co-originality thesis that articulates the interdependence of democracy and liberalism mediated by a conception of discourse; a proceduralized idea of popular sovereignty that reduces the tension between appeal to the people and respect for pluralism; the centrality of the public sphere over the voting booth as the cradle of democracy; institutional innovations intended to include citizens in constitutional reform but avoid majoritarian and populist pathologies. (shrink)

Emerging from thought-provoking discussions and correspondence Simone Weil had with the Reverend Father Perrin, this classic collection of essays contains her most profound meditations on the relationship of human life to the realm of the transcendant.An enlightening introduction by Leslie Fiedler examines Weil's extraordinary roles as a philosophy teacher turned mystic. "One of the most neglected resources of our century ", Waiting for God will continue to influence spiritual and political thought for centuries to come.

Making better choices about future technologies that are being researched or developed is an important motivator behind lay ethics interventions. However, in practice, they do not always succeed to serve that goal. Especially authors who have noted that lay ethicists sometimes take recourse to well-known themes which stem from old, even ‘archetypical’ stories, have been criticized for making too little room for agency and decision-making in their approach. This paper aims to contribute to a reflection on how lay ethics can (...) acquire more practical relevance. It will use resources in narrative ethics to suggest that in order to be relevant for action, facilitators of lay ethics interventions need to invite participants to engage in a narrative quest. As part of a quest, lay ethicists should be asked to reflect on a specific question or choice, use diverse input which is informative about the heterogeneity of viewpoints that are defended in society and argue for their standpoints. (shrink)

This paper reports experiences from an art-science project set up in an educational context as well as in the tradition of placing artists in labs. It documents artists’ and scientists’ imaginations of their encounter and analyses them drawing on the concepts of “boundary object” and “boundary work”. Conceptually, the paper argues to broaden the idea of boundary objects to include inhibitory boundary objects that hinder rather than facilitate communication across boundaries. This focus on failures to link social worlds brings the (...) boundary object concept closer to Gieryn’s boundary work and allows for a co-application of the two concepts in the analysis of cross-boundary communication. Empirically, the paper provides an in-depth ethnographic description of an art-science project as a resource for future practice. In conclusion, the art-science encounter included meeting points as well as multiple levels of boundary work which engaged the artists in a different way than as illustrators of scientific representations of climate change. The closer they got to the research practice the more the public and policy construct of climate change disappeared. Rather than political activism, the approach triggered explorations of the scientific context, including affirmative as well as critical re-imaginations of research practices. Artists and scientists acted as publics for one another, as resources to draw on for reflection and self-identification. But instead of cutting back or renegotiating standards of one’s own practice, especially the artists engaged in boundary work creating space to produce a piece of art according to their own criteria of quality and relevance. (shrink)

Gravity and Grace was the first ever publication by the remarkable thinker and activist, Simone Weil. In it Gustave Thibon, the priest to whom she had entrusted her notebooks before her untimely death, compiled in one remarkable volume a compendium of her writings that have become a source of spiritual guidance and wisdom for countless individuals.

Courses on ethics and technology have become compulsory for many students at the three Dutch technical universities during the past few years. During this time, teachers have faced a number of didactic problems, which are partly due to a growing number of students. In order to deal with these challenges, teachers in ethics at the three technical universities in the Netherlands — in Delft, Eindhoven and Twente — have developed a web-based computer program called Agora (see www.ethicsandtechnology.com). This program enables (...) students to exercise their ethical understanding and skills extensively. The program makes it possible for students to participate actively in moral reflection and reasoning, and to develop the moral competencies that are needed in their later professional practice. The developers of the program have tried to avoid two traps. Firstly, they rejected, from the outset, a cookbook style of dealing with ethical problems that applied ethics is often taken to be and, secondly, they wanted to design a flexible program that respects the student’s as well as the teacher’s creativity, and that tries to engage students in moral reflection. Agora meets these requirements. The program offers possibilities that extend beyond the requirements that are usually accepted for case-exercises in applied ethics, and that have been realised in several other computer models for teaching ethics. In this article, we describe the main considerations in the development of Agora and the features of the resulting program. (shrink)

_Oppression and Liberty_ is one of Simone Weil's most important books on political theory.Here she discusses political and social oppression, its permanent causes, the way it works and its contemporary forms. Simone Weil's writings on oppression and liberty continue to be as valid and thought-provoking today as they were in her lifetime.

A widespread historiographical portrayal represented Descartes' dualism as constituted in direct contrast with Aquinas' concept of soul-form. In the wake of the many studies that have opposed this prejudice in recent decades, this book reconstructs the fifteenth and seventeenth-century debate on psychology, focusing primarily on the Jesuit context and on the intersection between Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Augustinianism in early modern France. Beginning with a rigorous investigation of the theories of the separated soul, particular attention is then given to the indirect (...) derivation of the Cartesian cogito and innatism from angelological themes of the time. Indeed, in the years in which Descartes elaborates his metaphysics, the immediate proximity between souls and angels is somehow a matter of fact, in the light of which many of the argumentative choices of the Meditations, and even the relationship that closely joins the "thinking substance" with the body-machine, appear clear. -/- . (shrink)

The complexity of current social and environmental grand challenges generates many conflicts and tensions at the individual, organization and/or systems levels. Paradox theory has emerged as a promising way to approach such a complexity of corporate sustainability going beyond the instrumental business-case perspective and achieving superior sustainability performance. However, the fuzziness in the empirical use of the concept of “paradox” and the absence of a systems perspective limits its potential. In this paper, we perform a systematic review and content analysis (...) of the empirical literature related to paradox and sustainability, offering a useful guide for researchers who intend to adopt the concept of “paradox” empirically. Our analysis provides a comprehensive account of the uses of the construct - which allows the categorization of the literature into three distinct research streams: 1) paradoxical tensions, 2) paradoxical frame/thinking, and 3) paradoxical actions/strategies - and a comprehensive overview of the findings that emerge in each of the three. Further, by adopting a system perspective, we propose a theoretical framework that considers possible interconnections across the identified paradoxical meanings and different levels of analysis (individual, organizational, systems) and discuss key research gaps emerging. Finally, we reflect on the role a clear notion of paradox can have in supporting business ethics scholars in developing a more “immanent” evaluation of corporate sustainability, overcoming the current instrumental view. (shrink)

The pathologies of the democratic public sphere, first articulated by Plato in his attack on rhetoric, have pushed much of deliberative theory out of the mass public and into the study and design of small scale deliberative venues. The move away from the mass public can be seen in a growing split in deliberative theory between theories of democratic deliberation (on the ascendancy) which focus on discrete deliberative initiatives within democracies and theories of deliberative democracy (on the decline) that attempt (...) to tackle the large questions of how the public, or civil society in general, relates to the state. Using rhetoric as the lens through which to view mass democracy, this essay argues that the key to understanding the deliberative potential of the mass public is in the distinction between deliberative and plebiscitary rhetoric. (shrink)

Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer’s A Crisis of Beliefs is a rich, elaborate and ambitious book. It relies on more than twenty years of the authors’ work on fields as different as financial econ...

This paper investigates early modern and enlightenment roots of contemporary ideas of public reason. I argue that concepts of public reason arose in answer to the question ‘who shall judge?’ The religious and moral pluralism unleashed by the reformation lead first to the weakening of authoritative common forms of reasoning, this in turn and more importantly lead to the question who is the final arbiter when a political community is faced with deep disagreement about political/ moral questions. The rise of (...) pluralism meant that to the question ‘what are the standards of public right?’ is added the corollary and equally important question ‘who judges when those standards are violated?’ The answer is that the public judges. Public reason thus refers to the role of the public as judge of public right and not simply to a set of reasons that an actual public happens to share. On this reading of Hobbes, Locke, and Kant, the initial contract recedes in importance while the seat of authoritative political judgment comes to the fore. Keywords: public reason; pluralism; Hobbes; Locke; Kant (Published: 4 December 2009) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 2, No. 4, 2009, pp. 349368. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v2i4.2135. (shrink)

ObjectiveThe COVID-19 pandemic and government measures implemented to counter the spread of the infection may be a major stressor affecting the psychological health of university students. This study aimed to explore how anxiety symptoms changed during the pandemic.Methods676 students at Zurich University of Applied Sciences participated in the first and second survey waves. Anxiety symptoms were assessed using the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-Scale-7. Risk and protective factors were examined.ResultsGAD-7 scores decreased significantly from T0 to T1. Participants with moderate-to-severe anxiety score were (...) 20.2 and 15.6% at T0 and T1, respectively. The following positively predicted anxiety: older age, female gender, non-Swiss nationality, loneliness, participants’ concern about their own health, and interaction between time and participants’ concern about their own health. Resilience and social support negatively predicted anxiety.ConclusionsOur findings provide information for public health measures and psychological interventions supporting the mental health of university students during the COVID-19 emergency. (shrink)

In recent years, the debate on emotions has been influenced by postconstructionist research, particularly the use of performativity as a key concept. According to Judith Butler (1993, 1997) the construction of emotions is a process open to constant change and redefinition. The final result of emotionlanguage “natural” development is what is known as technoscience. New ways of naming emotions have emerged within technoscience. In our research on the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) by cyber-café and call shop users, (...) we came to understand how these technologies are significant in those users’ daily life. The emphasis will be on analyzing emotions related to the use of ICT in the aforementioned settings. Using the concept of performance (Butler, 1990), we will explore how narratives create a need for particular emotions, which did not exist before they were performed. To understand this performance, we use an ad hoc tool called Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) as it is used by the Manchester School. Analysis has revealed the existence of a membership category in which velocity is salient as performance. This ‘velocity’ seems to follow the evolution of technoscience in the social sciences. We will observe velocity in the context created by two concepts, Donna Haraway’s (1990) cyborg and Alessandro Baricco’s (2007) mutant. (shrink)

Through an analysis of the histrionic “man of acute consciousness”” in Notes from Underground, this text tries to highlight a sneaky question posed by Dostoevsky's novel: is it in the underground’s ground that literature is born?

A partir de um personagem conceitual, a cartógrafa, as autoras descrevem e analisam os encontros promovidos por uma intervenção institucional realizada com a equipe de trabalhadores da Emergência de um hospital de grande porte de Porto Alegre. Utilizando o conceito de atenção ao presente, a interven..

This introduces a series of articles in a themed section entitled City of Potentialities: Race, Violence and Invention. The section concerns how we might think more specifically about how to act in domains where complexity is both a resource for the imagination and an impediment to action. What kinds of dilemmas do residents face and what kinds of practices do they engage in in order to continuously gather up the tools and possibilities to endure in volatile urban conditions, where volatility (...) seems a critical force in the simultaneous undoing and remaking of life, as well as in providing assets and opportunities to inhabitants? How does violence obscure the various manoeuvres and practices that keep things together or apart? (shrink)