Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 2, Page 49-57, March‐April 2022.

In recent decades, academic science has increasingly been directed toward commercializable ends by neoliberal governments. In this article, I outline a concern that academic scientists have not been consulted about the transformation of science, but nevertheless, in some ways accept commercialization as the way things are done. I focus on the ways in which academic scientists attempt to exercise agency, albeit within the parameters of the neoliberal knowledge economy. In this economy, scientific inquiry has transformed to be focused more on (...) producing marketable products. In order to explore the parameters of scientists’ agency in the context of that transformation, I first elaborate on the idea of agency’s “parameters” and argue that the literature on commercialization lacks attention to how researchers’ agency is encouraged and discouraged in the context of academic research in the United States and Canada; second, I make a case for using the concept of hegemony to understand the ideas and practices of contemporary science; third, I propose a methodological direction that can attend to researchers’ agency in the contemporary context of the neoliberal knowledge economy. (shrink)

Nehama Aschkenasy Eves Journey: Feminine Images in Hebraic Literary Tradition Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. ISBN 0‐8122‐8033‐4. Hardcover, $36.95. Pp. xv+269.

A thought-provoking and playful examination of how we make sense of the world, from the Sunday Times bestselling author.

This article focuses on emergency medical care in black urban populations, suggesting that the classification of a "community" within clinical trial language is problematic. The article references a cultural history of black Americans with pre-hospital emergency medical treatment as relevant to contemporary emergency medicine paradigms. Part I explores a relationship between "autonomy" and "community." The idea of community emerges as a displacement for the ethical principle of autonomy precisely at the moment that institutionalized medicine focuses on diversity. Part II examines (...) a clinical trial for the blood substitute PolyHeme® (Northfield Laboratories, Inc., Evanston, IL). It illustrates the ways in which bias in research paradigms and Institutional Review Board decisions attach to the notion and utility of the language of "community." The conclusion's contemporary anecdote makes apparent the vitality of the issues of prehospital emergency medical care and the ways in which decisions and practices fall too easily into a narrative of culturally biased treatment. (shrink)

“Buddhisms” captures the challenge inherent in the diverse practices and beliefs of this religion. In this book, grounding the analysis in the bodies of practitioners provides a new opportunity for coherence that reaches across vast expanses of time and space.

People are susceptible to forces that are not fully understood. In his thought-provoking new book Richard Holloway holds a mirror up to the human condition.

In this essay, I argue that contemporary democratic theory gives insufficient attention to the important contributions dissenting citizens make to democratic life. Guided by the dissident practices of activist women, I develop a more expansive conception of citizenship that recognizes dissent and an ethic of political courage as vital elements of democratic participation. I illustrate how this perspective on citizenship recasts and reclaims women's courageous dissidence by reconsidering the well-known story of Rosa Parks.

What is God doing about a world marked by conflict and division? What about a world in which our technologies promise great good but also threaten our existence? What is God doing in a world where the demands for accumulation and acquisition create division and despair? Can Christians hope to be of positive influence in a world that does not always support, reflect, or even understand Christian commitments? Christian ethics often raises such questions as these, and the possible answers vary (...) widely. Paul's Letter to the Ephesians is a tremendous resource for exploring a faithful response to perhaps the toughest question of all: what is God doing about evil? The role of Christian ethics is to take seriously the challenge that, whatever God is doing, God calls us to participate in a distinctive task that embraces our own commitments and labors within the divine purpose. Ephesians says that God has taken the initiative to pursue that purpose and, remarkably, offers that we ourselves are part of the answer to the question, what is God doing about evil? (shrink)

There are two different ways of understanding alienation: as a condition and as a struggle. On this distinction turns the whole theory and practice of Marxism.

The first and preliminary part of this discussion examines Todorov's remark, in his article "Structural Analysis of Narrative" , on certain tales in the Decameron. These are advanced as dealing with a "concrete problem" which "illustrates" what Todorov "conceive[s] to be the structural approach to literature." The second part offers an alternative analysis of the Decameron tales. The third part comprises some observations, from a similar point of view, on Crime and Punishment. The anterior purpose of the whole discussion is (...) to identify at least some points where insights about "structure," in a fairly strict sense, seem to bear genuinely upon the insights of the literary critic. John Holloway, Professor of Modern English at the University of Cambridge, is the author of, among others, The Victorian Sage, The Charted Mirror, The Story of the Night, Blake: The Lyric Poetry, The Proud Knowledge, Planet of Winds, and five volumes of verse. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Narrative Structure and Text Structure," appeared in the March 1975 issue. (shrink)

Robotic or automatic milking systems are novel technologies that take over the labor of dairy farming and reduce the need for human–animal interactions. Because robotic milking involves the replacement of ‘conventional’ twice-a-day milking managed by people with a system that supposedly allows cows the freedom to be milked automatically whenever they choose, some claim robotic milking has health and welfare benefits for cows, increases productivity, and has lifestyle advantages for dairy farmers. This paper examines how established ethical relations on dairy (...) farms are unsettled by the intervention of a radically different technology such as AMS. The renegotiation of ethical relationships is thus an important dimension of how the actors involved are re-assembled around a new technology. The paper draws on in-depth research on UK dairy farms comparing those using conventional milking technologies with those using AMS. We explore the situated ethical relations that are negotiated in practice, focusing on the contingent and complex nature of human–animal–technology interactions. We show that ethical relations are situated and emergent, and that as the identities, roles, and subjectivities of humans and animals are unsettled through the intervention of a new technology, the ethical relations also shift. (shrink)

When I first starting hearing and reading about Jacques Rancière a number of years ago, I was deeply skeptical. Wasn’t this yet another European man becoming the new political theory “It Girl”? Wasn’t the claim that Rancière had a singular, fresh approach to dissent and protest overblown, when other people—especially critical race scholars, postcolonial theorists, feminists, queer theorists, and so on—had already addressed these topics thoroughly but were rarely acknowledged in mainstream scholarship? Did we really need to deify and create (...) a cottage industry around yet one more white male Western theorist, especially one who so rarely deigns to cite his influences or the work of others? It took... (shrink)

Data do exist to support the fact that the corpus callosum is relatively larger in women than in men. The corpus callosum is an integral part of the brain, and contrary to Fitch & Denenberg's examples of “pseudostatistics,” is not an extrinsic structure when determining its relative size.

This article is concerned with ethical issues that have to be considered when under taking qualitative research. Some of the issues - such as informed consent, the dignity and privacy of the research subjects, voluntary participation and protection from harm - are the same as in other types of research and have their basis in moral and ethical principles. Qualitative research, however, generates specific ethical problems because of the close relationship that researchers form with participants. Qualitative research with patients is (...) especially difficult because of their vulnerability and lack of power in the clinical situation. Therefore the potential conflict between the dual role of the nurse - the professional and the research roles - has to be solved. Researchers also learn how to cope with the tension of subjective and objective elements of the research. Nurses who attempt qualitative research have to consider a variety of complex ethical issues, which are addressed in this paper. (shrink)

In this challenging 1993 book John Holloway explores one of the most significant aspects of contemporary culture, arguing that over the last hundred years or so there has been a radical change in the very nature of individual consciousness. He traces a crucial shift from an 'Apollonian' ideal of human involvement in the widest range of experience to a narrower and less integrated engagement with the world. He plots this shift through a number of quite different fields: there are (...) chapters on the visual arts, on colloquial language and slang, on cartoons, on political rhetoric, and on 'personality' studies by psychologists. He goes on to examine the work of certain literary figures who seem to have recognized, and registered in imaginative terms, the pervasive but generally unrecorded changes in consciousness for which the book is arguing. (shrink)

This paper describes neoliberalism and summarizes new works on democracy in Continental philosophy. Unlike laissez-faire or liberal economic theory—a “leave us alone” strategy in which the state does not interfere with private enterprise—neoliberal governments use the resources of the state to assist the market directly and employ the market to direct or oversee the resources of the state. Alongside neoliberal government, and in its wake, is a society in which the guiding axioms for each human being are self-entrepreneurship and competition. (...) Over the last decade, however, a new body of philosophical work has been dissociating democracy from neoliberal government, critiquing a failed system of political representation, and considering to what extent democracy must take place beyond or outside of the current state. Of equal concern to these philosophers is how to take flight from a way of life that is characterized by self-entrepreneurship and competition. For some, the start of a political future beyond neoliberalism hinges upon a recent distinction between constituent and destituent forms of power. Whereas constituent power attempts to reform one’s government through demonstrations in public space, destituent power abandons the project of reforming one’s government momentarily or even completely in order to experience another form of life entirely. (shrink)