DUREY A, WYNADEN D, THOMPSON SC, DAVIDSON PM, BESSARAB D and KATZENELLENBOGEN JM. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 144–152 [Epub ahead of print]Owning solutions: a collaborative model to improve quality in hospital care for Aboriginal AustraliansWell‐documented health disparities between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (hereafter referred to as Aboriginal) and non‐Aboriginal Australians are underpinned by complex historical and social factors. The effects of colonisation including racism continue to impact negatively on Aboriginal health outcomes, despite being under‐recognised and under‐reported. Many Aboriginal (...) people find hospitals unwelcoming and are reluctant to attend for diagnosis and treatment, particularly with few Aboriginal health professionals employed on these facilities. In this paper, scientific literature and reports on Aboriginal health‐care, methodology and cross‐cultural education are reviewed to inform a collaborative model of hospital‐based organisational change. The paper proposes a collaborative model of care to improve health service delivery by building capacity in Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal personnel by recruiting more Aboriginal health professionals, increasing knowledge and skills to establish good relationships between non‐Aboriginal care providers and Aboriginal patients and their families, delivering quality care that is respectful of culture and improving Aboriginal health outcomes. A key element of model design, implementation and evaluation is critical reflection on barriers and facilitators to providing respectful and culturally safe quality care at systemic, interpersonal and patient/family‐centred levels. Nurses are central to addressing the current state of inequity and are pivotal change agents within the proposed model. (shrink)

This conversation between two scholars of international law focuses on the contemporary realities of feminist analysis of international law and on current and future spaces of resistance. It notes that feminism has moved from the margin towards the centre, but that this has also come at a cost. As the language of women’s rights and gender equality has travelled into the international policy worlds of crisis management and peace and security, feminist scholars need to become more careful in their analysis (...) and find new ways of resistance. While noting that we live in dangerous times, this is also a hopeful discussion. (shrink)

The micro-regional focus of bioregionalism is a small unit of physical space, typically a watershed region. In bioregional discourse, natural systems become metaphors for cultural coherence. However, when we look for laws embedded in the natural world, those that are found do not then reveal themselves as principles which apply to systems of culture. Further, within most individuals, the sense of regional identity spans several scales because our past narratives and present affiliations span several localities. Humans are not immersed in (...) singular niches, nor is the bioregionalist an existential, primordial localist, for his or her choice has been crafted. (shrink)

Women face extraordinary difficulty in seeking sterilization as physicians routinely deny them the procedure. Physicians defend such denials by citing the possibility of future regret, a well‐studied phenomenon in women’s sterilization literature. Regret is, however, a problematic emotion upon which to deny reproductive freedom as regret is neither satisfactorily defined and measured, nor is it centered in analogous cases regarding men’s decision to undergo sterilization or the decision of women to undergo fertility treatment. Why then is regret such a concern (...) in the voluntary sterilization of women? I argue that regret is centered in women’s voluntary sterilization due to pronatalism or expectations that womanhood means motherhood. Women seeking voluntary sterilization are regarded as a deviant identity that rejects what is taken to be their essential role of motherhood and they are thus seen as vulnerable to regret. (shrink)

Many opponents of BIG programs believe that receiving guaranteed subsistence income would act as a strong disincentive to work. In contrast, various areas of empirical research in psychology suggest that a BIG would not lead to meaningful reductions in work. To test these competing predictions, a comprehensive review of BIG outcome studies reporting data on adult labor responses was conducted. The results indicate that 93 % of reported outcomes support the prediction of no meaningful work reductions when the criterion for (...) support is set at less than a 5 % decrease in either average hours worked per week or the rate of labor participation. Overall, these results indicate that adult labor responses would show no substantial impact following a BIG intervention. (shrink)

This book presents an overview of these studies and attempts to clarify apparently disparate results by placing them in a coherent theoretical framework.

We suggest edits to Part Four of the Ethical and Religious Directives (ERDs) to help the US bishops address and clarify essential Church teachings on specific beginning-of-life issues facing Catholic health care today. As a teaching tool, Part Four must be updated so that Catholic health care professionals and the lay faithful can understand and apply Church teachings to new ethical challenges. Further, more direction and clarity from the ERDs is needed in applying general principles to assisted procreative technologies, pre- (...) and post-viability induction of labor, ectopic pregnancies, genetic screening and diagnosis, and contraception. Catholic health care clinicians and administrators also need to receive ongoing instruction on the ERDs’ teachings as well as the theological and philosophical rationales that undergird them. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Clearing Some Definitional Ground: Standards as Epistemic Objects What Counts as a Standard?: Orthodoxies and other Stories Travelling with Actor‐Network Theory: ‘It's Practice All theWay Down’6 The Project in Question: Data and Method Assemblage7 Teaching and Standards of Teaching: Performative Tales from the Field Assembling the Accomplished Teacher: Whose Assemblage Counts? The Critical Contribution of Actor‐Network Theory: Performative Politics Notes References.

Information technology, that assortment of technology that enables the conversion of data into information, has had an enormous impact on the field of public administration and its theoretical foundation. This article explores five of them. It begins with a discussion of one of the primary impacts of information technology on public administration theory: the development of systems theory and its descendants including the study of complex systems, chaos, and complexity theory. The importance of information technology in decision-making is explored next. (...) Does information technology free us from the limits of bounded rationality or are we simply overwhelmed by the volume of information available via new sources, such as the Internet and the World Wide Web? The third role examined is the use of information technology as a research tool to make previously intractable problems solvable. Computer capability has enormously advanced the theoretical underpinnings of public administration. Fourth, the significance of information technology as a change agent that calls for revision of other theoretical postulates is investigated. As information technology has diffused into public organizations, how has it called into question what we previously thought about the foundation of bureaucracy? Finally, learning by doing and the manner through which practice informs theory is considered. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Using Michael Fried’s work on absorption and theatricality, and Walter Benjamin’s figure of the flâneur and its counterpart, the detective, and his disparaged figure of the badaud, this article considers ways to characterize the walks of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s solitary walker, Socrates on the way to the Symposium, Henry V walking on the battlefield the night before Agincourt, and Trayvon Martin the evening he was killed by George Zimmerman. Each of these walks is a variation on contemplation, the risk of (...) death, and the role of absorption and theatricality. I work toward a notion of theatrical absorption, or absorptive theatricality—the right to be out walking dressed in what could be a costume, and yet absorbed. This right includes the right to make it home alive, a right denied to Trayvon Martin. The article explores the tensions that might explain this tragic fact. (shrink)

Until very recently, the lack of health insurance has been viewed primarily as a problem of financial risk for uninsured individuals. This article documents far broader adverse effects, drawn from the work of the Institute of Medicine Committee on the Consequences of Uninsurance. It also synthesizes the Committee’s key findings, conclusions, and recommendations.In early 2004, following 3½ years of study, the IOM Committee on the Consequences of Uninsurance recommended that “...the President and Congress develop a strategy to achieve universal insurance (...) coverage and establish a firm and explicit schedule to reach this goal by 2010.” The Committee presented 5 principles to be used to assess various proposals for extending coverage or to guide the design of a new strategy, specifying that health care coverage should be universal, continuous, affordable to individuals and families, and affordable and sustainable for society. (shrink)

This study aims to address how and when retailers’ sustainability efforts translate into positive consumer responses. Hypotheses are developed and tested through a scenario-based experiment among 672 consumers. Retailers’ assortment sustainability and distribution sustainability are manipulated. Retailers’ sustainability efforts lead to positive consumer responses via two underlying mechanisms: consumers’ identification with the store and store legitimacy. The effects of sustainability efforts are strengthened if consumers have personal norms favoring shopping at environmentally friendly stores. Remarkably, when controlling for moderation by personal (...) norms, social norms weaken the effects. The findings show that traditional marketing mix elements provide opportunities for retailers to improve their organizations’ bottom line and positively affect consumer well-being. This study helps retailers decide whether or not to invest in and communicate about sustainability. Past research has shown the clear potential for positive consumer responses to firms’ sustainability efforts, but little is known about the underlying mechanisms and the conditions under which such responses take place. This study advances theory by examining personal and social factors as mediators and moderators of the retailers’ sustainability efforts–consumer responses relationship. (shrink)

This essay uses the phenomenal advent of women's climbing as a paradigm case for integrating feminism and phenomenology, and for analyzing how women experience and evolve free movement and existence. In contrast to the paradigm set by Iris Marion Young's “Throwing like a Girl,” it stresses the category of the lived body over the category of gender, and it reveals how women, by employing and cultivating the body's motility and spatiality, engage and transcend the limits of crux situations.

The 'business judgement rule ' requires corporate directors only to act with honesty and reasonable care in the interest of shareholders. A stronger ' fiduciary ' duty is required where one party requires protection from another. This paper argues that where corporations take risks with the environment, directors are fiduciaries. Stakeholders are in that case the general public, future generations and other species, which have not voluntarily accepted risk and cannot limit liability. Recognition of fiduciary duty in such cases is (...) consistent with recent trends in the law of equity. It would require all economic activities to move from open to closed systems. (shrink)

Research ethics principles and regulations typically have been applied to the protection of individual human subjects. Yet, new paradigms of research that include the place-based community and cultural groups as partners or participants of environmental research interventions, in particular, require attention to place-based identities and geographical contexts. This paper argues the importance of respecting “place” within human subjects protections applied to communities and cultural groups as part of a critical need for research ethics and cultural competence training for graduate research (...) students. These protections and benefits are extensions of the Belmont Principles and have been included in recent recommendations from research regulatory committees. (shrink)

Self-protection can have psychological and behavioral implications. We contrast them with the implications of a self-enhancement strategy. Both self-enhancement and self-protection have costs and benefits as survival strategies, and we identify some of the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral tradeoffs associated with the differential preferences for each strategy. New analyses on a large existing data set confirm the target article's hypothesis that women are more attuned than men to potential negative consequences of innovations.

The aim of this article is to explore the worth of a materialist/posthumanist approach to ethics, specifically affirmative ethics, within the field of education. I work empirical material that ‘does’ this ethics in classrooms and draw on Deleuze’s ethically guided materialism as taken up by Braidotti, to gain purchase on it. Defined as a relational matter of human and non-human powers of acting in pursuit of affirmative values, affirmative ethics focuses up relations, forces and affects. It poses considerable challenges to (...) a normalised construction of ethics as located solely within a constituted human subject with moral intentionality as its core. Affirmative ethics presents empirically as an emergent property of relational assemblages of human and more than human elements that bring ethical subjectivity into effect. Pedagogy and curriculum perform a constitutive role in these assemblages, as does pedagogic affect, showing how this ethics can be activated. A materialist affirmative ethics makes for a multi-faceted and generative practice of ethics. Oriented to collectivity and with relationality ‘built-in’, it has the potential to play a significant role in the reconstitution of individualised subjectivity which neoliberal modes of governance continue to advance in education. (shrink)

Sixteen Canadian men and women, part of eight intact couples who had experienced severe and recurrent wife assault, were interviewed individually regarding their worst experience of violence. The self-reports of both spouses of one of these couples is presented and analyzed with a view towards isolating the emerging constituents of their narratives. Additionally, preliminary findings resulting from the analysis of all of the couple's self-reports are presented in the second part of the paper. A gendered reconstruction of their narratives emerges (...) that mirrors the different positions men and women hold in experiences of wife assault. Finally, the main constituents derived from all the participant's selfreports are analyzed and discussed. (shrink)

It is clear now that open education is much more than a binary consideration of open versus closed but also includes "opening." This book maps a range of different theoretical and practice-oriented approaches and proposals to (re)considering open education.

The male muse in the psychic territory Adrienne Rich called in 1971 ‘The Man’ represents sexualized death and phallic mourning, a concept of masculinity marked by the legacy of the 20th century’s two world wars. In the context of representations of ‘The Man’ in North American white women writers coming of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Sylvia Plath’s journal account of the Saint Botolph’s Review party, where she met her husband, and its fictional transformation in her 1957 (...) short story, ‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’, demonstrate Plath’s examination of the Bostonian Puritan heritage and the psychic aftermath of the Second World War. Plath’s constructions of heterosexual romance as participating in the history of Fascism and her concept of writing as sexy violence coincide culturally with Lacan’s theory of phallic signification. (shrink)

What does peace mean in today’s world of endless wars? Why has the project of ‘universal peace’, so ardently hoped for by the drafters of the UN Charter in 1945, failed so profoundly? I reflect on these questions through three stories of peace. The first is told by a series of four stained-glass windows in the Peace Palace in The Hague; the second is of the world’s demilitarised zones; and the third of a peace community in Colombia. These stories provide (...) a springboard to reflect on how we might rethink peace in the context of today’s world, drawing on feminist, queer and postcolonial analyses. My discussion exposes the limits of the UN Charter’s approach to peace, and the impossibility of its methods ever achieving ‘universal peace’. The Charter’s reliance on militarism and collective enforcement, as well as its commitment to peace as an evolutionary process, maintain rather than dismantle global hierarchies of domination. I also question the dualism of war and peace, which obscures much of the violence of what we call peace. The task of rethinking peace is urgent. To do so we need to go beyond the worlds we know, beyond the confines of law and the inevitability of quotidian hierarchies of gender, sexuality and race, to invent new methods of peace-making, outside the ‘frames of war’. (shrink)

A collaborative team of environmental sociologists, community psychologists, religious studies scholars, environmental studies/science researchers and engineers has been working together to design and implement new training in research ethics, culture and community-based approaches for place-based communities and cultural groups. The training is designed for short and semester-long graduate courses at several universities in the northeastern US. The team received a 3 year grant from the US National Science Foundation’s Ethics Education in Science and Engineering in 2010. This manuscript details the (...) curriculum topics developed that incorporate ethical principles, particularly for group protections/benefits within the field practices of environmental/engineering researchers. (shrink)

Reading Shakespeare’s plays alongside Plato’s Republic, this book shows the intersections between literary, philosophical, and political moments in the texts and demonstrates that philosophical interventions are crucial to decision making and managing uncertainty, error and risk.

Gun violence in American and Canadian schools is an ongoing tragedy that goes substantially beyond its roots in the interlocking emotional and behavioral issues of mental health and bullying. In light of the need for effective policy development, Dianne T. Gereluk, J. Kent Donlevy, and Merlin B. Thompson examine gun violence in schools from several relevant perspectives in this article. The authors consider the principle of standard of care as it relates to parents, teachers, and community members in a (...) particular school's context. They posit that normative principles may provide a procedural mechanism appropriate for policymakers and practitioners when contemplating and implementing heightened security measures. Finally, they propose Rawlsian reasonableness as an effective and deliberative democratic process that reduces emotional, reactive responses to school shootings. Through these overlapping concepts, the authors advocate for purposeful discussions regarding gun violence in schools based on the unique pragmatic, educational, social, political, and contextual circumstances of individual schools and their surrounding communities. (shrink)

BackgroundWith the enactment of Bill C-7 in Canada in March 2021, people who are eligible for medical assistance in dying (MAiD), whose death is reasonably foreseeable and are at risk of losing decision-making capacity, may enter into a written agreement with their healthcare provider to waive the final consent requirement at the time of provision. This study explored healthcare providers’ perspectives on honouring eligible patients’ request for MAiD in the absence of a contemporaneous consent following their loss of decision-making capacity. (...) MethodA critical qualitative methodology, using a feminist ethics theoretical lens with its focus on power and relationality, was used to examine how socio-political and environmental contexts influenced healthcare providers' moral agency and perspectives. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 healthcare providers (13 physicians, six nurse practitioners, nine nurses and two social workers) from across Canada who provide MAiD-related care.ResultsThemes identified include; (1) balancing personal values and professional responsibilities, (2) anticipating strengths and limitations of the proposed waiver of final consent amendment, (3) experiencing ethical influences on decisions to enter into written agreements with eligible patients, (4) recognizing barriers to the enactment of MAiD in the absence of a contemporaneous consent and (5) navigating the potential for increased risks and burden.DiscussionTo our knowledge, this is the first study in Canada to explore healthcare providers’ perspectives on waiving the final consent for MAiD using a written agreement. Most participants supported expanding eligible people’s access to MAiD following loss of capacity, as they believed it would improve the patients’ comfort and minimize suffering. However, the lack of patients’ input at the time of provision and related ethical and legal challenges may impact healthcare providers’ moral agency and reduce some patients’ access to MAiD. Providers indicated they would enter into written agreements to waive final consent for MAiD on a case-by-case basis. This study highlights the importance of organizational, legal and professional support, adequate resources, clear policies and guidelines for the safety and wellbeing of healthcare providers and to ensure equitable access to MAiD. (shrink)