There is an increasing recognition internationally of the critical impact of communication within healthcare. The link between ineffective communication, patient dissatisfaction and critical incidents is well established. Family Planning New South Wales has sought to address patient-centred care and communication in its policy platform. This article reports on research conducted within FPNSW, which analysed the discourse features that constituted effective doctor–patient1 communication in sexual and reproductive health consultations. The principal aim of the research was to understand how effectively messages were (...) conveyed and received and to what degree patients were active participants in their own sexual healthcare. Analysed consultations were characterised by extremely high levels of communicative competence on the part of the doctors who integrated medical expertise with the development of interpersonal relationships with patients, thus positioning patients as active contributors to the consultations and to decisions about their ongoing treatment. The detailed linguistic analysis identified characteristic features of patient-centred communication that are essential to patient-centred care. These interactions demonstrate that communicating care is just as important as delivering care and involves a drawing together of the medical and the interpersonal in consultations. The article details strategies for interweaving medical knowledge and establishing rapport that can inform practitioner communication practices across different healthcare contexts. (shrink)

Effective communication and interpersonal skills have long been recognized as fundamental to the delivery of quality health care. However, there is mounting evidence that the pressures of communication in high stress work areas such as hospital emergency departments present particular challenges to the delivery of quality care. A recent report on incident management in the Australian health care system cites the main cause of critical incidents, as being poor and inadequate communication between clinicians and patients. This article presents research that (...) describes and analyses spoken interactions between health care practitioners and patients in one ED of a large, public teaching hospital in Sydney, Australia. The research aimed to address the challenges and critical incidents caused by breakdowns in communication that occur between health practitioners and patients and by refining and extending knowledge of discourse structures, to identify ways in which health care practitioners can enhance their communicative practices thereby improving the quality of the patient journey through the ED. The research used a qualitative ethnographic approach combined with discourse analysis of audio-recorded interactions. Some key findings from the analysis of data are outlined including how the absence of information about processes, the pressure of time within the ED, divergent goals of clinicians and patients, the delivery of diagnoses and professional roles impact on patient experiences. Finally, the article presents an in-depth linguistic analysis on interpersonal and experiential patterns in the discursive practices of patients, nurses and doctors. (shrink)

Lozano-Vásquez, Andrea y Meléndez, Germán, comps. Convertir la vida en arte: una introducción histórica a la filosofía como forma de vida. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2016. 389 pp.

Interferons (IFNs) are a diverse group of cytokines whose potent antitumor effects have piqued the interest of scientists for decades. Some of the most sustained clinical accomplishments have been in the field of myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs). Here, we discuss how both historical and novel breakthroughs in our understanding of IFN function may lead to more effective therapies for MPNs. The particular relevance and importance of modulating the novel IFN‐regulated ULK1 pathway to optimize IFN responses is highlighted.

This paper explores how University as social entity has great potential to confront epistemic injustices by expanding epistemic capabilities. To do this, we primarily follow the contributions of scholars such as Miranda Fricker and José Medina. The epistemic capabilities and epistemic injustice nexus will be explored via two empirical cases: the first one is an experience developed in Lagos using participatory video; the second is a service learning pedagogical strategy for final year undergraduate students conducted at Universidad de Ibagué. The (...) Lagos experience shows how participatory action-research methodologies could promote epistemic capabilities and functioning, making it possible for the participants to generate interpretive materials to speak of their own realities. However, this experience is too limited to address testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. The Colombian experience is a remarkable experience that is building epistemic capabilities among students and other local participants. However, there is a hermeneutical and structural injustice that tends to give more value to disciplinary and codified knowledge at the expense of experiential and tacit knowledge. (shrink)

El presente artículo pretende dar cuenta de cómo el pensamiento de Slavoj Žižek posibilita el diagnóstico, la comprensión y la interpretación de nuevas o diversas formas de confrontación de algunas de las crisis más importantes de este tiempo, para lo cual esta investigación partió del estudio del concepto de crisis en el pensamiento del filósofo esloveno y de la descripción breve de algunos hechos que podrían considerarse como críticos o verdaderas crisis de este tiempo. Posteriormente se realizó un análisis de (...) la teoría del acontecimiento desarrollada por Žižek en varias de sus obras, para finalizar con algunas recomendaciones y reflexiones en torno a la forma en que el pensamiento de dicho autor posibilita tanto una nueva comprensión de las crisis, como la construcción de alternativas y focos de atención que constituyan, en sí mismos, nuevas formas de confrontación de ellos. El método empleado para realizar el abordaje así propuesto fue el hermenéutico, el instrumento fue el estudio bibliográfico y la técnica de análisis de información fue el análisis del discurso. (shrink)

El artículo intenta reflexionar sobre cierta renuencia y aparente desinterés de las mujeres (que a veces se pretende interpretar como incapacidad) para intervenir y competir en las ramas más duras de la ciencia, así como en elevadas posiciones en el campo de la política. Las interpretaciones habituales olvidan la vigencia de un modelo esencialmente androcéntrico, anclado en la subjetividad y el género, en la concepción del sujeto de la ciencia y de la ciudadanía. No pueden discutirse meramente las condiciones de (...) acceso de las mujeres a las instituciones, sin discutir primero la legitimidad de un modelo que se pretende neutro, genuino reflejo de la naturaleza, en el caso de la ciencia o de la «condición humana», en política. Esta discusión adquiere especial relieve en el contexto latinoamericano, cuando no se hace lugar al debate geopolítico sobre centro y periferia. (shrink)

Musical ensemble performances provide an ideal environment to gain knowledge about complex human interactions. Network structures of synchronization can reflect specific roles of individual performers on the one hand and a higher level of organization of all performers as a superordinate system on the other. This study builds on research on joint singing, using hyperscanning of respiration and heart rate variability from eight professional singers. Singers performed polyphonic music, distributing their breathing within the same voice and singing without and with (...) physical contact: that is touching each other's shoulder or waist. The idea of singing with touch was motivated by historical depictions of ensemble performances that showed singers touching each other. It raises the question of the potential benefit of touch for group performances. From a psycho-physiological point of view, physical contact should increase the synchronization of singing coordination. The results confirm previous findings on synchronization of respiration and HRV during choir singing and extend those findings to a non-homophonic musical repertoire while also revealing an increase in synchronization in respiration during physical contact. These effects were significant across different frequency ranges. The effect of physical contact was stronger when all singers were singing in comparison to the partial ensemble. Importantly, the synchronization could not be fully explained by the singing action or by the standing position or touch. This finding suggests a higher level of organization of all singers, forming a superordinate system. (shrink)

The recent availability of multiple avian genomes has laid the foundation for a huge variety of comparative genomics analyses including scans for changes and signatures of selection that arose from adaptions to new ecological niches. Nocturnal adaptation in birds, unlike in mammals, is comparatively recent, a fact that makes birds good candidates for identifying early genetic changes that support adaptation to dim‐light environments. In this review, we give examples of comparative genomics analyses that could shed light on mechanisms of adaptation (...) to nocturnality. We present advantages and disadvantages of both “data‐driven” and “hypothesis‐driven” approaches that lead to the discovery of candidate genes and genetic changes promoting nocturnality. We anticipate that the accessibility of multiple genomes from the Genome 10K Project will allow a better understanding of evolutionary mechanisms and adaptation in general. -/- . (shrink)

Zika infection in pregnant women is associated with an elevated probability of giving birth to a child with microcephaly and multiple other disabilities. Public health messaging on Zika prevention has predominantly targeted women who know they are pregnant or intend to become pregnant, but not teenage females for whom unintended pregnancy is more likely. Vulnerabilities among this population to reproductive risks associated with Zika are further amplified by restrictive abortion laws in several Zika-impacted states. Key to prevention is enhanced, targeted (...) public health messaging centered on teens nationally and particularly in certain high-risk regions. (shrink)

Corporate Physicians: Between Medicine and Management. By Diana Chapman Walsh.

Peter Zachar. A Metaphysics of Psychopathology. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Press, 2014. 274 pp.

In this brief and powerful book, Diana Fuss takes on the debate of pure essence versus social construct, engaging with the work of Luce Irigaray and Monique ...

New Materialisms brings into focus and explains the significance of the innovative materialist critiques that are emerging across the social sciences and humanities. By gathering essays that exemplify the new thinking about matter and processes of materialization, this important collection shows how scholars are reworking older materialist traditions, contemporary theoretical debates, and advances in scientific knowledge to address pressing ethical and political challenges. In the introduction, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost highlight common themes among the distinctive critical projects that (...) comprise the new materialisms. The continuities they discern include a posthumanist conception of matter as lively or exhibiting agency, and a reengagement with both the material realities of everyday life and broader geopolitical and socioeconomic structures. Coole and Frost argue that contemporary economic, environmental, geopolitical, and technological developments demand new accounts of nature, agency, and social and political relationships; modes of inquiry that privilege consciousness and subjectivity are not adequate to the task. New materialist philosophies are needed to do justice to the complexities of twenty-first-century biopolitics and political economy, because they raise fundamental questions about the place of embodied humans in a material world and the ways that we produce, reproduce, and consume our material environment. Contributors Sara Ahmed Jane Bennett Rosi Braidotti Pheng Cheah Rey Chow William E. Connolly Diana Coole Jason Edwards Samantha Frost Elizabeth Grosz Sonia Kruks Melissa A. Orlie. (shrink)

Meyers examines the question of personal autonomy. She observes the effects of childrearing practices and sexual biases, and reflects upon the results in women. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

¡PRESENTE! investigates the many answers to a seemingly simple question: What does it mean to be present? Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor answers that question by offering an expansive explication of presence as both ethical command and performative knowledge production. Taking the histories of state violence, colonialism, and imperialism as her starting point, Taylor situates being ¡Presente! as an embodied and performed practice of standing alongside those harmed by historical and ongoing violence. Noting that Present/e is simultaneously single and (...) plural in English and Spanish, and drawing on Jean Luc Nancy's formulation of being singular plural, Taylor asks how presence is imbricated in questions of subject formation and collectivity. She begins with reframing the racialization of Latin Americans as a coming into presence through colonial conquest-a presence not as subjects but as subjugated objects-and asks what was made absent through this racialized process. For Taylor, the epistemicide of Indigenous, Native, and African ways of knowing stands at the center of this process of presence and absence. To counter this ongoing epistemicide, Taylor situates ¡Presente! as a performative and decolonial mode of knowledge production that decenters European Enlightenment traditions and seriously takes up Native, Indigenous, and African ways of knowledge and temporality. Grounded in performance studies, this book links knowledge to action as a doing practice, or what Taylor calls a "peripatetic strategy" that emphasis movement in learning. This book offers an expansive theory of ¡Presente! in various locations and situations: the original colonial conquest of Columbus and the Spanish; the May 1968 student protests; a study in Zapatistan autonomy; the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa; queer histories of Mexico; and the former torture centers of the Pinochet dictatorship. Throughout these varied locations, Taylor weaves a methodology, theory, and practice of ¡Presente!. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of performance studies, Latin American studies, American studies, critical ethnic studies, colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial studies, and queer theory. (shrink)

A critical analysis of Diana Fuss's Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference and Elizabeth Grosz's Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists.

The primary focus of this work is to show that it is possible to find a certain way to think the community, a very different kind of community to those ways of conceiving the community from a certain dialectic of inclusion and exclusion, defining an inside and an outside of the collective, a proper and improper. In that sense, we believe that through the aforementioned work emerges a concern for the community but in a rather shifted from how we usually (...) think this. When we think about a community experience through The Nights of Labor we refer to a certain attitude that opens possibilities of change and possibilities of being-in-common. (shrink)

John Searle has mistakenly claimed that emergence is the central concept in the account of social ontology defended by Tony Lawson, the central figure in the project now regularly referred to as Cambridge Social Ontology. This is not the case. Rather, if any concept can be considered central for Lawson, it is organisation. In this paper, I explain how Searle could misunderstand Lawson and, in doing so, I bring out the importance of organisation for understanding how phenomena, both social and (...) non-social, are constituted. (shrink)

This is both a book about ourselves, our world, and education. What made an education successful is too often left behind when we focus too closely on what we think should be in the spotlight. Re-looking at how these things interact and intersect will be pertinent to their and our success.

In Thomas Metzinger, Conscious Experience, Schoningh Verlag. 1995. [ online ].

This study tests a model that links stakeholder pressure to the implementation of corporate social responsibility activities and market performance. Stakeholder groups and competitors might exert pressure on companies to implement CSR, which could lead to positive effects on market performance. Using structural equation modeling, the authors find that stakeholders and competitors exert pressure differently. The effect of CSR implementation on market performance is moderated by market dynamism: It affects market performance more in dynamic environments. The authors discuss implications for (...) both companies and stakeholders. (shrink)

Rights and obligations—sometimes referred to as deontology or deontic powers—are key to most contemporary conceptions of social ontology. Both Cambridge Social Ontology and the dominant analytic conception associated, most prominently, with John Searle, place rights and obligations at the centre of their accounts. Such a common emphasis has led some to consider deontology to be a point of similarity between these different theories. This is a mistake. In this paper, I show that a distinctive conception of rights and obligations underpins (...) Cambridge Social Ontology and its social positioning theory. Moreover, I argue that a fuller understanding of the account of rights and obligations defended in Cambridge in fact reveals that it can be differentiated from other conceptions and, most importantly, Searle's, by its recognition that a practical dimension is always involved in social constitution. (shrink)

What is sportsmanship? Following Keating, we may say that sportsmanship is conduct befitting a person involved in sports. This raises the question of what kind of activity exactly sport is. This is notoriously difficult to answer, but roughly speaking, sport is a rule-governed activity that is about excellence, an understanding of how to play the game, and, in competitive sports, winning. Accordingly, there are four elements of sportsmanship: fairness, equity, good form and the will to win. These four elements are (...) equally important and not reducible to one another. Yet, the will to win is in systematic conflict with the other three elements. Hence, sportsmanship is not only compromised of these four elements, but also requires that a balance be held between them. (shrink)

Diana Tietjens Meyers examines the political underpinnings of psychoanalytic feminism, analyzing the relation between the nature of the self and the structure of good societies. She argues that impartial reason--the approach to moral reflection which has dominated 20th-century Anglo-American philosophy--is inadequate for addressing real world injustices. ____Subjection and Subjectivity__ is central to feminist thought across a wide range of disciplines.

Diana Lobel takes readers on a journey across Eastern and Western philosophical and religious traditions to discover a beauty and purpose at the heart of reality that makes life worth living. Guided by the ideas of ancient thinkers and the insight of the philosophical historian Pierre Hadot, _The Quest for God and the Good_ treats philosophy not as an abstract, theoretical discipline, but as a living experience. For centuries, human beings have struggled to know why we are here, whether (...) a higher being or dimension exists, and whether our existence is fundamentally good. Above all, we want to know whether the search for God and the good will bring happiness. Following in the path of the ancient philosophers, Lobel directly connects conceptions of God or an Absolute with notions of the good, illuminating diverse classical texts and thinkers. She explores the Bible and the work of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Maimonides, al-Farabi, and al-Ghazali. She reads the _Tao Te Ching_, _I Ching_, _Bhagavad Gita_, and _Upanishads_, as well as the texts of Theravada, Mahayana, and Zen Buddhism, and traces the repercussions of these works in the modern thought of Alfred North Whitehead, Iris Murdoch, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor. While each of these texts and thinkers sets forth a distinct and unique vision, all maintain that human beings find fulfillment in their contact with beauty and purpose. Rather than arriving at one universal definition of God or the good, Lobel demonstrates the aesthetic value of multiple visions presented by many thinkers across cultures. _The Quest for God and the Good_ sets forth a path of investigation and discovery culminating in intellectual and spiritual communion. (shrink)

Public values failure occurs when the market and the public sector fail to provide goods and services required to achieve the core values of society such as equity (Bozeman 2007). That public policy for emerging health technologies should address intrinsic societal values such as equity is not a novel concept. However, the ways that the public values discourse of stakeholders is structured is less clear and rarely studied through the lens of public interests. This is especially true in the health (...) sciences discourse. Using the public value mapping (PVM) model I present a case study of the intrinsic value of equity in nanomedicine for cancer and the imperatives for translational research, an instrumental value to achieve equity. After reviewing and coding nearly 700 value statements from several hundred public documents, I find that that the discourse on values varies between documents that address basic research and documents that address the application of the knowledge produced in basic research, with some especially notable disconnections. This paper demonstrates the importance of further refinement of methods for testing the PVM framework if the societal goal is to improve consistency of the public value discussion by those involved in developing and applying new technologies. The paper also demonstrates the value of a PVM approach for complex science policy analysis, especially for emerging technologies like nanomedicine. (shrink)

This paper argues that advertisements have been wrongly conceived as appealing to the irrational. Advertisements contain a structure of argumentation, but often far more complex than would initially appear. Advertisements give reasons for consumers to choose products, voters to elect a candidate, or citizens to alter their behavior. The way they do so is to best explained in terms of their argumentative structure.

This paper develops the treatment of vague predicates begun in my "Vagueness Without Paradox" (Philosophical Review 103, 1 [1994]). In particular, I show how my account of vague words dissolves an "eternal" version of the sorites paradox, i.e., a version in which the paradox is generated independently of any particular run of judgments of the items in a sorites series. In so doing I refine the notion of an internal contest, introduced in the earlier paper, and draw a distinction within (...) the class of internal contexts between contexts of judgment and contexts of consideration. (shrink)

In Unruly Words, Diana Raffman advances a new theory of vagueness which, unlike previous accounts, is genuinely semantic while preserving bivalence. According to this new approach, called the multiple range theory, vagueness consists essentially in a term's being applicable in multiple arbitrarily different, but equally competent, ways, even when contextual factors are fixed.

Calm is a little-theorized but important link between Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett. Beginning with Beckett, moving on to Barthes, and then interleaving the two, this paper proposes calm as a ‘scandalous’ category not reducible to kindred states like languor or apatheia. In dialogue with theorists of repose, such as Kant and De Quincey, calmness becomes less a sedated condition than an interactive process, entailing intense sensitivity to the fluctuations of what Barthes calls ‘the affective minimal’. Artistically generative, this ‘emotive (...) lucidity’ encourages inquisitiveness towards the natural world, and enables in both writers specific writing practices — from lists to notation to haiku. (shrink)