Advancing women’s empowerment and gender equality in agriculture is a recognised development goal, also within crop breeding. Increasingly, breeding teams are expected to use ‘market-based’ approaches to design more ‘demand-led’ and ‘gender-responsive’ crop varieties. Based on an institutional ethnography that includes high-profile development-oriented breeding initiatives, we unpack these terms using perspectives from political agronomy and feminist science and technology studies. By conceptualising the market as an ongoing, relational performance made up of discourses, practices and human and nonhuman actors, we trace (...) how the market is understood as an effective socioeconomic institution for soliciting demand, but also becomes a normative agenda. Construed as a demand variable, the relational and structural dimensions of gender are rendered less visible, which might strengthen rather than transform power relations’ status quo. On the other hand, a feminist science and technology perspective broadens the field of vision not only to the gendered dimensions of crop breeding, but also to the nonhuman actors, such as the crops and traits falling outside the market sphere of interest. By putting political agronomy and feminist science and technology studies into conversation, the article contributes to the development of a feminist political agronomy. (shrink)

This is the text of the keynote lecture delivered at the launch of Black, Lynsey and Dunne, Peter. Law and Gender in Modern Ireland. Oxford: Hart, delivered 13th September 2019, Department of Law, Maynooth University, Ireland. The lecture locates the book within the context of rapid, radical transformation in gender law and politics in Ireland, highlighting some of the issues which have been the focus of activism and/or reform. The lecture goes on to outline some of the challenges which arise (...) in the legislative pursuit of gender equality including the tension between respecting agency and choice and curbing exploitative and/or gender disadvantaging practices. Comparisons are also made with legislative initiatives in neighbouring Britain. The lecture concludes with some reflections on the interplay of sex and gender in law and public debate and their embedding in the constitutional creation of the modern Irish State. (shrink)

This paper integrates theoretical and methodological evaluations of the effect of group size on helping. Bystander theory includes a reward–cost model for understanding the general helping context and a more specific designation of three psychological processes that produce the bystander effect. The three processes include: diffusion of responsibility, audience inhibition, and social influence. The present analysis identifies incompatibilities between the general model and the three processes and incompatibilities between the three processes and the definition of the bystander effect. Implications of (...) these problems in the theory extend to the passive confederate design, one of the two major methods used in bystander research. This method is an attempt to test the bystander effect by manipulating social influence. But, because of a previously unrecognized disjunction between social influence and the bystander effect, we conclude that passive confederate studies do not actually test the bystander effect. (shrink)

In this article, I consider the interpersonal support, i.e., scaffolding, that agents provide to one another to share emotions. Moreover, the main target of this paper is to identify those scaffolds and their features that effectively function to boost, support, or enable emotional sharing interactions. To do so, I engage with the “multi-dimensional framework of environmental scaffolding” proposed by Sterelny (_Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences_ 9:465–481, 2010). This framework highlights various types of environmental resources, including social and interpersonal factors, that (...) serve as scaffolds for human cognitive agency. Furthermore, the model identifies the functional characteristics associated with these resources, which significantly contribute to scaffolding cognitive (and emotional) performance and skillfulness. Mainly concentrating on social interaction, I argue that individual, familiar social interaction behaviors, shared references, and shared bodily-affective and habitual patterns scaffold the interacting individuals allowing them to effectively share emotions. By examining the functional relationship between these particularly interpersonal scaffolds and shared emotions, I suggest that we can better understand the complex, situationally unfolding dynamics and the versatility of conditions that can boost emotional sharing. As a result, my analysis reveals that there are different types of social interactional scaffolds that vary in familiarity, predictability, robustness, individualization, and mutual adaptation. These features boost and trigger emotional sharing in degrees and different functions and different degrees of these functional features; therefore, different types of social interaction scaffolds are required depending on the situation to situation. (shrink)

Mind attribution may be divided into the subcategories of attribution of agency, associated with moral agency, and attribution of experience and emotion, associated with moral concern and moral patiency (Gray et al. Science 315(5812):619, 2007; Gray et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108(2):477–479, 2011b; Robbins and Jack Philosophical Studies 127(1):59–85, 2006). In this paper I attend to social context and the different psychological needs influencing the different types of mind attribution. A (...) need for social connection drives the attribution of experiences and emotions. The individual’s capacity to regulate emotional reactions is crucial for empathic concern. I further relate differences of mind attribution, attention, and emotional processing, to two different modes of functioning: In an interactive state of mind (comparable to the “second-person perspective” described by Schilbach et al. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, in press), social and emotional cues are attended to; In a detached task-oriented state of mind it may be beneficial to predict the behaviors of others but emotional information may not be attended to. The complexity and plasticity of mind attribution, including the possibility to train attentional mechanisms and regulation of emotions, is promising for the field of moral enhancement. (shrink)

In 1807 the first life insurance society was established in The Netherlands. In the second half of the century, life insurance societies underwent considerable expansion. During the intervening period, the lines had to be laid along which this new phenomenon was to develop in the future: between 1827 and 1830, the government started discussing the nature of its responsibility in this field and the kind of policy to be developed, and in 1830, a book on the organization of life insurance (...) societies, the calculation of life annuities and widows' fund premiums was published, written by the mathematician Rehuel Lobatto. This book played an important role in the government's discussion. Royal Decrees which prescribed government approval for the establishment of life assurance societies were promulgated in 1830, 1833 and 1840. In 1832, Lobatto became the government's scientific adviser on the assessment of the calculations performed by these societies, and in the same year, he was also appointed adviser to the first life insurance society. From 1832 until his death in 1866 he advised the company on the use of life tables for life as well as for reversionary annuities, and he calculated the premiums based on these life tables. Another decree was promulgated in 1864 prescribing exactly which life tables were to be used. Because Lobatto probably played a part in this decree, he was responsible for a very ‘conservative’ government policy, which was no longer adequate in the second half of the century. (shrink)

Understanding the nature of science has long been a desired outcome of science education, despite ongoing disagreements about the content, structure, and focus of NOS expectations. Addressing the concern that teachers likely focus only on student learning expectations appearing in standards documents, this study examines the current state of NOS in science education standards documents from nine diverse countries to determine the overt NOS learning expectations that appeared, NOS statements provided near those learning expectations, but not identified as learning outcomes, (...) and NOS statements found in ancillary text. Findings indicate that NOS ideas rarely occur as expectations for student learning and are far more commonly found in ancillary material. Moreover, consensus was not apparent in the overt learning outcomes for students. Given the well-documented poor state of NOS instruction and the consistent lack of NOS appearing in published curriculum materials, the NOS standards appearing in nearly all documents analyzed are unlikely to provide sufficient conceptual or pedagogical support for NOS to be accurately interpreted or translated into meaningful experiences for students. (shrink)

We contribute to the literature on ethics in the professions by theorizing how global mobility precipitates professional insecurity and constrained moral agency. We present our findings of a study of accountants migrating to Canada. Using postcolonial theory and relational/poststructuralist theories of identity and ethics, we contrast the experiences of marginalized and privileged migrant accountants to show how those with “diverse” social identities are not recognized by professionals in Canada and must seek recognition from Canadian colleagues, employers, and clients to reconstitute (...) their professional identities and moral agency. We discuss the implications of the exclusion and marginalization of professionals for migrants, the profession, and society more generally. (shrink)

One of the main features of Italian feminism of "difference," as seen from an international perspective, is its distinctly political vocation. This vocation is not only, nor especially, limited to the perimeter of a gender politics, but is to be found in the radical critique or in the rethinking of traditional political categories, in the invention of new practices, in the redefinition of the very sphere of politics and in the modes of its transformation. The Italian case, as far as (...) feminism is concerned, is also characterised by the fact that this feminist political critique has been carried on for more than three decades alongside a crisis of traditional politics. The aim of this essay is twofold: one the one hand I analyse the relationship between political crisis and a critique of politics as seen in the larger framework of the relationship between the demise of patriarchy and the end of modern politics; on the other, I examine the resources which may derive from a feminist thought and practice in the present season, which, in Italy, seems marked not only by a crisis but by the collapse of democratic politics. (shrink)

An in-depth examination of the work of this important medieval woman mystic.

There is strong social and political interest in active citizenship and values in education internationally. Active citizenship requires children to experience and internalize moral values for human rights, developing their own opinions and moral responsibility. While investment in young children is recognised as an important factor in the development of citizenship for a cohesive society, less is known about how early years teachers can encourage this in the classroom. This book will present new directions on how teachers can promote children's (...) learning of moral values for citizenship in classrooms. The research provided offers important insights into teaching for active citizenship by: • providing an analysis of educational contexts for moral values for active citizenship • highlighting teachers’ beliefs about knowing and knowledge and how these relate to children’s learning and understanding about social and moral values • discussing the impact of teachers’ beliefs on teaching practices. Evidence suggests that investment in the early years is vital for all learning, and specifically for developing an understanding of active citizenship for tolerant and cohesive societies. This book will be essential reading for the professional education of early years teachers interested in teaching for active citizenship. (shrink)

Environmental journalism has been criticized by various special interest groups and some editors for advocacy and faulted for inaccuracies. Sources, in turn, many from the science communities, have been accused of inaccessibility, and public relations representatiws from both industry and environmental organizations are regularly blamed for unethical behaviors rangingfrom hyperbole to more serious discussion or omission of factual information. This article reports a preliminary study of ethical decision making among members of the Society of Environmental Journalists, identifying ethical motivation diljerences (...) using the Ethical Motivation Scale. The implications of the reported dominant extrinsic guides are discussed in light of a proposed protocol for ethical environmental communication. (shrink)

Published to coincide with an exhibition at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, Women on the Waterfront combines essays, first-person accounts, and stunning photographic images to tell the story of the twentieth-century women who worked, and continue to work, in and around the city’s waterfront—or who abandoned urban life to earn a living at sea. At the heart of the project are Michelle Sank’s remarkable and vibrant portraits of the women she has photographed, alongside their own words—alternately chillingly real in their (...) gritty depictions of life on the waterfront and remarkably confident, vulnerable, and even otherworldly. Enhancing these already extraordinary stories is Joanne Lacey’s rich essay, “Journey to the Water’s Edge,” which examines the story behind this fascinating archive and its origins in Lacey’s own family history. (shrink)

"Over many centuries, philosophers, theologians, and poets have been fascinated by the interplay of will and desire in the human psyche. Does will follow or precede desire? How can we bond them and thus unite body, soul, and spirit in harmonic concord? For fresh insights to these age-old questions, Dr. Joanne Stroud enlists the tools of modern psychology. Her eclectic probe of basic human drives moves from the awesome power of Eros, the great liberator of antiquity, through the impact of (...) the monotheistic faiths on will and desire, and finally to the discordant views of the great philosophers and psychologists of the modern era, among them Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and the little known but magnetic Frenchman, Gaston Bachelard." "Love and will, human aspirations and desires, are caught - the author concludes - in a whirlwind of change, with impersonal scientific data supplanting the myths, the ancient lore, the stories rich in imagery, that previously contoured human behavior. As a result we live, in W.B. Yeat's famous phrase, in "the age of disordered will."" "In the twentieth century will became recognized only in its more conscious applications, as almost synonymous with ego. With this increasing reverence for the strong ego, will was elevated (by psychologists, among many others) to new egotistical summits as a potent tool of power. The more subtle aspects of will, such as the way it delineates identity, have been neglected, the author contends, and can only be recaptured by an understanding of how will becomes bonded to desire."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)