Barry Lord and Gail Dexter Lord focus their two lifetimes of international experience working in the cultural sector on the challenging questions of why and how culture changes. The answer is a dynamic and fascinating discourse that sets aesthetic culture in its material, physical, social, and political context, illuminating the primary role of the artist and the essential role of patronage in supporting the artist, from our ancient origins to the knowledge economy culture of today.

Si oblitus fuero tui, Jerusalem, oblivioni detur dextera mea.” When Jerome commented on Ps. 136.5, he interpreted the passage allegorically. Sitting in exile by the waters of Babylon, the Israelites had hung their harps on the willows and, in a foreign land, would not sing the songs of Zion. Yet they refused to forget their origin, preferring, as King James's translators put it, that “my right hand forget her cunning.” Jerome observes that this is always the hand whose work remembers (...) the Lord. Yet clearly, by the early fifth century, the idea of manual dexterity had become a trope, a figure in some higher argument. Augustine compares the “lower gods”, reduced to performing menial tasks in the administration of the universe, to workers in the silversmiths' quarter through whose many hands a vessel passes before it is finished, even if it could have been perfected by any skilled member of their team. Slightly more pragmatically, Justinian's Digest mentions a piece of silver plate, brought on approval to a client's house by a uascularius but then inadvertently destroyed, as an instance actionable under the laws of contract. (shrink)

People who believe they have greater efficacy to address climate change are more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviour. To confront the climate crisis, it will therefore be essential to understand the processes through which climate change efficacy is promoted. Some interventions in the literature assume that efficacy emerges from analytic reasoning processes: that it is deliberative, verbal, conscious, and influenced by information and education. In the current paper, we critique this notion. We review evidence showing that climate change efficacy (...) perceptions are (a) associated with climate-related distress and threat, (b) prescribed by social norms, (c) associated with social desirability and identity-expressive concerns, (d) surprisingly difficult to change through explicit, verbal instruction, but (e) responsive to imagery. We conclude by examining applied implications of these five propositions and discuss why non-analytic processes might (ironically) be beneficial for sustaining green activism. (shrink)

This paper analyses the activities of five organizations shaping the debate over the global governance of genome editing in order to assess current approaches to public engagement (PE). We compare the recommendations of each group with its own practices. All recommend broad engagement with the general public, but their practices vary from expert-driven models dominated by scientists, experts, and civil society groups to citizen deliberation-driven models that feature bidirectional consultation with local citizens, as well as hybrid models that combine elements (...) of both approaches. Only one group practices PE that seeks community perspectives to advance equity. In most cases, PE does little more than record already well-known views held by the most vocal groups, and thus is unlikely to produce more just or equitable processes or policy outcomes. Our exploration of the strengths, weaknesses, and possibilities of current forms of PE suggests a need to rethink both “public” and “engagement.”. (shrink)

Ethically challenging situations routinely arise in the course of illness and healthcare. However, very few studies have surveyed patients and family members about their experiences with ethically challenging situations. To address this gap in the literature, we surveyed patients and family members at three hospitals. We conducted a content analysis of their responses to open-ended questions about their most memorable experience with an ethical concern for them or their family member. Participants described 219 unique ethical experiences that spanned many of (...) the prevailing themes of bioethics, including the patient-physician relationship, end-of-life care, decision-making capacity, healthcare costs, and genetic testing. Participants focused on relational issues in the course of experiencing illness and receiving medical care and concerns regarding the patient-physician encounters. Many concerns arose outside of a healthcare setting. These data indicate areas for improvement for healthcare providers but some concerns may be better addressed outside of the traditional healthcare setting. (shrink)

Over several decades, ethics and law have been applied to medical education and practice in a way that reflects the continuation during the twentieth century of the strong distinction between facts and values. We explain the development of applied ethics and applied medical law and report selected results that reflect this applied model from an empirical project examining doctors’ decisions on withdrawing/withholding treatment from patients who lack decision-making capacity. The model is critiqued, and an alternative “constitutive” model is supported on (...) the basis that medicine, medical law, and medical ethics exemplify the inevitable entanglement of facts and values. The model requires that ethics and law be taught across the medical education curriculum and integrated with the basic and clinical sciences and that they be perceived as an integral component of medical evidence and practice. Law, in particular, would rank as equal in normative authority to the relevant clinical scientific “facts” of the case, with graduating doctors having as strong a basic command of each category as the other. The normalization of legal knowledge as part of the clinician’s evidence base to be utilized in practice may provide adequate consolation for clinicians who may initially resent further perceived incursions on their traditional independence and discretion. (shrink)

The Covid‐19 pandemic has concentrated bioethics attention on the “lifeboat ethics” of rationing and fair allocation of scarce medical resources, such as testing, intensive care unit beds, and ventilators. This focus drives ethics resources away from persistent and systemic problems—in particular, the structural injustices that give rise to health disparities affecting disadvantaged communities of color. Bioethics, long allied with academic medicine and highly attentive to individual decision‐making, has largely neglected its responsibility to address these difficult “upstream” issues. It is time (...) to broaden our teaching, research, and practice to match the breadth of the field in order to help address these significant societal inequities and unmet health needs. (shrink)

While somatic cell editing to treat disease is widely accepted, the use of human genome editing for “enhancement” remains contested. Scientists and policy-makers routinely cite the prospect of enhancement as a salient ethical challenge for human genome editing research. If preventive genome editing projects are perceived as pursuing human enhancement, they could face heightened barriers to scientific, public, and regulatory approval. This article outlines what we call “preventive strengthening research” (or “PSR”) to explore, through this example, how working to strengthen (...) individuals’ resistance to disease beyond what biomedicine considers to be the human functional range may be interpreted as pursuing human enhancement. Those involved in developing guidance for PSR will need to navigate the interface between preventive goals and enhancement implications. This article identifies and critiques three of these ideas in the interest of anticipating the wider emergence of PSR and the need for a normative approach for its pursuit. All three “candidate criteria” merit attention, but each also faces challenges that will need to be addressed as further research policy is developed. (shrink)

Pragmatic clinical trials offer important benefits, such as generating evidence that is suited to inform real-world health care decisions and increasing research efficiency. However, PCTs also present ethical challenges. One such challenge involves the management of information that emerges in a PCT that is unrelated to the primary research question, yet may have implications for the individual patients, clinicians, or health care systems from whom or within which research data were collected. We term these findings as?pragmatic clinical trial collateral findings,? (...) or?PCT-CFs?. In this article, we explore the ethical considerations associated with the identification, assessment, and management of PCT-CFs, and how these considerations may vary based upon the attributes of a specific PCT. Our purpose is to map the terrain of PCT-CFs to serve as a foundation for future scholarship as well as policy-making and to facilitate careful deliberation about actual cases as they occur in practice. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo prospectively study the cingulate cortex for the localization and role of the grasping action in humans during electrical stimulation of depth electrodes.MethodsAll the patients with intractable focal epilepsy and a depth electrode stereotactically placed in the cingulate cortex, as part of their pre-surgical epilepsy evaluation from 2015 to 2017, were included. Cortical stimulation was performed and examined for grasping actions. Post-implantation volumetric T1 MRIs were co-registered to determine the exact electrode position.ResultsFive patients exhibited contralateral grasping actions during electrical stimulation. (...) All patients had electrodes implanted in the ventral bank of the right cingulate sulcus adjacent to the vertical anterior commissure line. Stimulation of other electrodes in adjacent regions did not elicit grasping.ConclusionGrasping action elicited from a localized region in the mid-cingulate cortex directly supports the concept of the cingulate cortex being crucially involved in the grasping network. This opens an opportunity to explore this region with deep brain stimulation as a motor neuromodulation target for treatment in specific movement disorders or neurorehabilitation. (shrink)

Abstract:The lack of extant contemporary comparanda obscures the workings of iambic trimeter in Senecan tragedy. This article offers a quantitative analysis of the reception of Senecan trimeter in four early works of Italian Humanist Tragedy, which illuminates the creative possibilities afforded by the basic structure of the meter and identifies specific features important to questions of style and semantics. Our analysis demonstrates, among other things, that both Seneca and the Humanist tragedians use clusters of resolution in conjunction with antilabe as (...) a literary device to convey high emotion. (shrink)

In the last few decades, the emergence of mid-scale, intermediated marketing channels that fall between commodity and direct markets has attracted growing interest from scholars for their potential to preserve small and mid-sized farms while scaling up alternative agrifood sourcing. When such mid-scale supply chains are formed among multiple business partners with shared ethics or values related to the qualities of the food and the business relationships along the supply chain, they may be termed “values-based supply chains (VBSCs).” Most of (...) the research on VBSCs to date has relied primarily on a case study approach that investigates the performance of VBSCs from the perspective of VBSC founders or leaders. In contrast, this research seeks out the perspectives of farmers who participate in VBSCs. A nationwide farmer survey conducted in 2017 offers original insights on farmer motivations for participating in VBSCs and how they are being used by farmers relative to other marketing channels. We find that VBSCs serve farms of all sizes. Overall, smaller farms were more likely to market a higher percentage of overall sales through their VBSC and more likely to rank their VBSC as one of the top three marketing channels in their portfolio. But it was the larger farms that were more likely to perceive VBSC-specific benefits. Our findings confirm that while there is a limited volume of product that such regional supply chains can currently handle, farmers view VBSCs as a valuable marketing option that aligns with their own values and preserves their product’s identity. (shrink)

Research shows that the physician’s personal attributes and social characteristics have a strong association with their end-of-life decision making. Despite efforts to increase patient, family and surrogate input into EOL decision making, research shows the physician’s input to be dominant. Our research finds that physician’s social values, independent of religiosity, have a significant association with physician’s tendency to withhold or withdraw life sustaining, EOL treatments. It is suggested that physicians employ personal social values in their EOL medical coping, because they (...) have to cope with existential dilemmas posed by the mystery of death, and left unresolved by medical decision making mechanisms such as advanced directives and hospital ethics committees. (shrink)

Physicians who care for critically ill people with opioid use disorder frequently face medical, legal, and ethical questions related to the provision of life-saving medical care. We examine a complex medical case that illustrates these challenges in a person with relapsing injection drug use. We focus on a specific question: Is futility an appropriate and useful standard by which to determine provision of life-saving care to such individuals? If so, how should such determinations be made? If not, what alternative decisionmaking (...) framework exists? We determine that although futility has been historically utilized as a justification for withholding care in certain settings, it is not a useful standard to apply in cases involving people who use injection drugs for non-medical purposes. Instead, we are welladvised to explore each patient's situation in a holistic approach that includes the patient, family members, and care providers in the decision-making process. The scope of the problem illustrated demonstrates the urgent need to definitively improve outcomes in people who use injection drugs. Increasing access to high quality medication-assisted treatment and psychiatric care for individuals with opioid use disorder will help our patients achieve a sustained remission and allow us to reach this goal. (shrink)

Background: The factors influencing parents’ willingness to enroll their children in biobanks are poorly understood. This study sought to assess parents’ willingness to enroll their children, and their perceived benefits, concerns, and information needs under different consent and data-sharing scenarios, and to identify factors associated with willingness. Methods: This large, experimental survey of patients at the 11 eMERGE Network sites used a disproportionate stratified sampling scheme to enrich the sample with historically underrepresented groups. Participants were randomized to receive one of (...) three consent and data-sharing scenarios. Results: In total, 90,000 surveys were mailed and 13,000 individuals responded (15.8% response rate). 5737 respondents were parents of minor children. Overall, 55% (95% confidence interval 50–59%) of parents were willing to enroll their youngest minor child in a hypothetical biobank; willingness did not differ between consent and data-sharing scenarios. Lower educational attainment, higher religiosity, lower trust, worries about privacy, and attitudes about benefits, concerns, and information needs were independently associated with less willingness to allow their child to participate. Of parents who were willing to participate themselves, 25% were not willing to allow their child to participate. Being willing to participate but not willing to allow one’s child to participate was independently associated with multiple factors, including race, lower educational attainment, lower annual household income, public health care insurance, and higher religiosity. Conclusions: Fifty-five percent of parents were willing to allow their youngest minor child to participate in a hypothetical biobank. Building trust, protecting privacy, and addressing attitudes may increase enrollment and diversity in pediatric biobanks. (shrink)

Responding to a major pandemic and planning for allocation of scarce resources under crisis standards of care requires coordination and cooperation across federal, state and local governments in tandem with the larger societal infrastructure. Maryland remains one of the few states with no state-endorsed ASR plan, despite having a plan published in 2017 that was informed by public forums across the state. In this article, we review strengths and weaknesses of Maryland’s response to COVID-19 and the role of the Maryland (...) Healthcare Ethics Committee Network in bridging gaps in the state’s response to prepare health care facilities for potential implementation of ASR plans. Identified “lessons learned” include: Deliberative Democracy Provided a Strong Foundation for Maryland’s ASR Framework; Community Consensus is Informative, Not Normative; Hearing Community Voices Has Inherent Value; Lack of Transparency & Political Leadership Gaps Generate a Fragmented Response; Pandemic Politics Requires Diplomacy & Persistence; Strong Leadership is Needed to Avoid Implementing ASR … And to Plan for ASR; An Effective Pandemic Response Requires Coordination and Information-Sharing Beyond the Acute Care Hospital; and The Ability to Correct Course is Crucial: Reconsidering No-visitor Policies. (shrink)

The pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 has led to unprecedented changes to society, causing unique problems that call for extraordinary solutions. We consider one such extraordinary proposal: ‘safer infection sites’ that would offer individuals the opportunity to be intentionally infected with SARS-CoV-2, isolate, and receive medical care until they are no longer infectious. Safer infection could have value for various groups of workers and students. Health professionals place themselves at risk of infection daily and extend this risk to their family members and (...) community. Similarly, other essential workers who face workplace exposure must continue their work, even if have high-risk household members and live in fear of infecting. When schools are kept closed because of the fear that they will be sites of significant transmission, children and their families are harmed in multiple ways and college students who are living on campus, whether or not they are attending classes in person, are contributing to high rates of transmission and experiencing high rates of exposure. We consider whether offering safer infection sites to these groups could be ethically defensible and identify the empirical unknowns that would need to resolve before reaching definitive conclusions. This article is not an endorsement of intentional infection with the coronavirus, but rather is meant to spark conversation on the ethics of out-of-the-box proposals. Perhaps most meaningfully, our paper explores the value of control and peace of mind for those among us most impacted by the pandemic: those essential workers risking the most to keep us safe. (shrink)

Treating patients and their family members with respect and dignity is a broadly accepted goal of health care. The work presented in this article is part of a larger project aimed at better understanding what constitutes treatment with respect and dignity in the ICU to improve the care that patients and family members receive in this regard. Direct observation was selected as one of the methods to facilitate this understanding because it provides the opportunity to see and document what actually (...) occurs during encounters among patients, their families, and clinicians. This article reports seven major thematic domains and many subthemes that together create a detailed account of the interpersonal and environmental components of treatment with respect and dignity. Attention to these components might enhance the experience and treatment of patients and family members. (shrink)

There is growing evidence that a sense of meaning in life may emerge, in part, from the social relationships that people maintain. But it is not clear how the relationship between social ties and a sense of meaning might arise. The purpose of this study is to see if meaning in life is associated with three socially focused virtues: compassion, forgiveness of others, and providing social support to others. In the process, an effort is made to see if these social (...) virtues arise from social relationships in religious institutions. Two main findings emerge from a recent nationwide survey. First, people who are more compassionate, more forgiving, and who help others more often have a stronger sense of meaning in life. Second, individuals who receive more spiritual support from fellow church members are more likely to adopt these social virtues. The theoretical basis of these relationships is discussed. (shrink)

This volume addresses the impact of human movement on the aesthetic practices that make up the fabric of culture. The essays explore the ways in which cultural activities—ranging from the habitual gestures of the body to the production of specific artworks—register the impact of migration, from the forced transportation of slaves to the New World and of Jews to the death camps to the economic migration of peoples between the West and its erstwhile colonies; from the internal and external exile (...) of Palestinians to the free movement of cosmopolitan intellectuals. Rather than focusing exclusively on art produced by those identified as migrant subjects, this collection opens up the question of how aesthetics itself migrates, transforming not only its own practices and traditions, but also the very nature of our being in the world, as subjects producing, as well as produced by, the cultures in which we live. The transformative potential of cultures on the move is both affirmed and critiqued throughout the collection, as part of an exploration of the ways in which globalisation implicates us ever more tightly in the unequal relations of production that characterise late modernity. This collection brings academic scholars from a variety of disciplines into conversation with practising visual and verbal artists; indeed, many of the essays break down the distinction between artist and academic, suggesting a dynamic interchange between critical reflection and creativity. (shrink)

This qualitative study describes the lived experience of physicians who work in communities that have experienced a public mass shooting. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seventeen physicians involved in eight separate mass casualty shooting incidents in the United States. Four major themes emerged from constant comparative analysis: The psychological toll on physicians: “I wonder if I'm broken”; the importance of and need for mass casualty shooting preparedness: “[We need to] recognize this as a public health concern and train physicians to (...) manage it”; massive media attention: “The media onslaught was unbelievable”; and commitment to advocacy for a public health approach to firearm violence: “I want to do whatever I can to prevent some of these terrible events.”. (shrink)

Background and ObjectiveThe outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 has raised increased challenges for older adults’ personal growth in diverse cultural settings. The aim of this study was to analyze negative emotions and their role on older adults’ self-growth in Mexico, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, during the COVID-19 pandemic. For this purpose, a cross-national qualitative research was carried out.MethodsData were collected from 338 community-dwelling participants aged 65 years and older, using a semi-structured interview protocol. Older adults were asked about negative emotions (...) that significantly contribute to their self-growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. Content analysis was used to identify key themes.ResultsSeven main negative emotions significantly contributed to seven themes of self-growth, across the samples: sharing difficult experiences with others, supportive partner, spiritual practices, engagement with life, generativity, volunteering activities, and intimacy and sexual satisfaction. Sharing difficult experiences with others was most pertinent to Mexican and to Italian participants, and a supportive partner to Portuguese, and to Spanish participants.ConclusionThe findings of this study indicate that negative emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to their older adults’ self-growth. This study highlighted the cultural diversity of experiences during the pandemics and underlined the upside of negative emotions and its relation to older adults’ self-growth during this period. (shrink)

This article gives a broad sense of existing debate about Global Citizenship Education to help situate and contextualize a novel case study. Scholars for Syria originated at a small university in southern Indiana. This grassroots response to the turmoil in Syria bridges the gap between a seemingly distant crisis and a midwestern city in the United States. The unique pedagogical and curricular dimensions of the case study work as a helpful framing device for facilitating exploration of debates about the shape (...) of GCE, as well as providing new ways in which to imagine GCE curriculum, pedagogy, and embedding ethics into wider university initiatives. (shrink)

While cancer survivors commonly experience fear and anxiety, a substantial minority experience an enduring and debilitating fear that their cancer will return; a condition commonly referred to as fear of cancer recurrence. Despite recent advances in this area, little is known about FCR among people from Indigenous or other ethnic and racial minority populations. Given the high prevalence and poor outcomes of cancer among people from these populations, a robust understanding of FCR among people from these groups is critical. The (...) current review identified and aggregated existing literature on FCR amongst adult cancer survivors from Indigenous and minority populations. The protocol of this review was registered with PROSPERO in July 2020. A systematic search of bibliographic databases was conducted for relevant articles published from 1997 to November 2019. Data from eligible articles were extracted and appraised for quality by two independent reviewers. Nineteen articles from four countries met the inclusion criteria, including 14 quantitative, 4 qualitative and 1 mixed-methods study. Only one article reported on an Indigenous population. Few studies reported on FCR prevalence or severity. While the variation in tools used to measure FCR hindered a robust estimate of severity, results suggested some differences in FCR severity between minority and dominant populations, although these may have been due to study metholodological differences. Few factors were reported as being associated with FCR in minorities across multiple studies. The qualitative synthesis found five themes associated with the lived experience of FCR: variations in the lived experience of FCR; spirituality and worldview impacting on FCR; the importance of staying positive; complexities around support; and increasing cancer knowledge. The findings of this review highlight differences in FCR across cultures and contexts, which reinforces the need for culturally-specific approaches to this condition. The dearth of research in this area is of concern given the significant burden of cancer in these populations. A deeper understanding of this condition among Indigenous and minority populations is critical to developing and delivering appropriate and effective psychosocial care for cancer survivors from these groups. Systematic Review Registration: identifier [CRD42020161655]. (shrink)

Abnormalities in the ability of cells to properly degrade proteins have been identified in many neurodegenerative diseases. Recent work has implicated synaptojanin 1 (SynJ1) in Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease, although the role of this polyphosphoinositide phosphatase in protein degradation has not been thoroughly described. Here, we dissected in vivo the role of SynJ1 in endolysosomal trafficking in zebrafish cone photoreceptors using a SynJ1‐deficient zebrafish mutant, nrca14. We found that loss of SynJ1 leads to specific accumulation of late endosomes and (...) autophagosomes early in photoreceptor development. An analysis of autophagic flux revealed that autophagosomes accumulate because of a defect in maturation. In addition we found an increase in vesicles that are highly enriched for PI(3)P, but negative for an early endosome marker in nrca14 cones. A mutational analysis of SynJ1 enzymatic domains found that activity of the 5'phosphatase, but not the Sac1 domain, is required to rescue both aberrant late endosomes and autophagosomes. Finally, modulating activity of the PI(4,5)P2 regulator, Arf6, rescued the disrupted trafficking pathways in nrca14 cones. Our study describes a specific role for SynJ1 in autophagosomal and endosomal trafficking and provides evidence that PI(4,5)P2 participates in autophagy in a neuronal cell type. -/- . (shrink)

Starting from the 2009 Istanbul Biennial, with its Brechtian curatorial theme, this essay considers the Left’s varying responses to art’s so-called ‘political turn’. Discussion ranges from the local and regional context of the Biennial’s function as part of Turkey’s bid to join the EU, through to a longer theoretical perspective on the critical debates over ‘art and life’, artistic autonomy and heteronomy, and the revival in avant-gardism. The authors propose that the standard accounts of the intimate connection between the commodity (...) and art have become politically counterproductive. They suggest that Marxist analysis needs to develop a more complexly-articulated philosophical reflection on the relation between economy, politics, and art ‐ and between political and aesthetic praxes ‐ if it is to advance its longstanding contributions to considerations of ‘aesthetics and politics’. (shrink)

This article considers some of the ways in which ‘the black woman’ as both representation and embodied, sentient being is rendered visible and invisible, and to link these to the multiple and competing ways in which she is ‘present’. The issues are engaged through three distinct but overlapping conceptualisations of ‘presence’. ‘Presence’ as conceived (and highly contested) in performance studies; ‘presence’ as conceived and worked with in psychoanalysis; and ‘presence’ as decolonising political praxis among Indigenous communities. I use these conceptualisations (...) of presence to consider the various ways in which the black woman as figure and as embodied/sentient subject has been made present/absent in different discursive registers. I also explore what is foreclosed and how this is itself linked to legacies of colonial ‘worlding’. I end with consideration of alternative modes of black women's presence and how this offers a resource for new modes of sociality. (shrink)

An interview with Gail Weiss concerning her interests and influences, especially the body and embodiment.

We prove a finite model theorem and infinitary completeness result for the propositional -calculus. The construction establishes a link between finite model theorems for propositional program logics and the theory of well-quasi-orders.

The Peri ide^on is the only work in which Aristotle systematically sets out and criticizes arguments for the existence of Platonic forms. Gail Fine presents the first full-length treatment in English of this important but neglected work. She asks how, and how well, Aristotle understands Plato's theory of forms, and why and with what justification he favors an alternative metaphysical scheme. She examines the significance of the Peri ide^on for some central questions about Plato's theory of forms--whether, for example, (...) there are forms corresponding to every property or only to some, and if only to some, then to which ones; whether forms are universals, particulars or both; and whether they are meanings, properties or both. Fine also provides a general discussion of Plato's theory of forms, and of our evidence about the Peri ide^on and its date, scope, and aims. While she pays careful attention to the details of the text, she also relates it to contemporary philosophical concerns. The book will be valuable for anyone interested in metaphysics ancient or modern. (shrink)