In Polish historiography on radio in the Stalinist period, the official propaganda broadcast by Polish Radio is very often juxtaposed with the free and unbiased broadcasting of Radio Free Europe (RFE), which can create the impression that RFE was the only source of information in Poland and tends to diminish the importance of Polish Radio. In fact, both broadcasting institutions were crucial players in Cold War warfare, which was described by George F. Kennan in terms of Clausewitz's “fog of war.” (...) Indeed, both RFE and Polish Radio were listening to each other through the Iron Curtain because “white propaganda” (along with the intelligence obtained from political refugees) was one of the most important sources of information. The two broadcasting stations were more alike than we are willing to admit. For instance, the Polish section of RFE mimicked the post-war strategy of Polish Radio. While the latter pretended to be the continuation and successor of the pre-war institution, RFE's propaganda shaped the programme of Polish Radio for many years. Using this case study on RFE's attitude toward Poland's western borders along the Odra and Nysa Rivers, I show how these two opposing broadcasting stations functioned within an endless propaganda feedback loop. (shrink)

Consent governs innumerable everyday social interactions, including sex, medical exams, the use of property, and economic transactions. Yet little is known about how ordinary people reason about the validity of consent. Across the domains of sex, medicine, and police entry, Study 1 showed that when agents lack autonomous decision-making capacities, participants are less likely to view their consent as valid; however, failing to exercise this capacity and deciding in a nonautonomous way did not reduce consent judgments. Study 2 found that (...) specific and concrete incapacities reduced judgments of valid consent, but failing to exercise these specific capacities did not, even when the consenter makes an irrational and inauthentic decision. Finally, Study 3 showed that the effect of autonomy on judgments of valid consent carries important downstream consequences for moral reasoning about the rights and obligations of third parties, even when the consented-to action is morally wrong. Overall, these findings suggest that laypeople embrace a normative, domain-general concept of valid consent that depends consistently on the possession of autonomous capacities, but not on the exercise of these capacities. Autonomous decisions and autonomous capacities thus play divergent roles in moral reasoning about consent interactions: while the former appears relevant for assessing the wrongfulness of consented-to acts, the latter plays a role in whether consent is regarded as authoritative and therefore as transforming moral rights. (shrink)

The chapter is a transcription of editors’ discussion with Ewa Orłowska. It reveals some extracurricular flavors of Ewa Orłowska’s biography, brings to light a difficult historical context of her academic career and life, and shows how much internal fortitude she demonstrated while overcoming these difficulties.

In an influential paper, James Lenman argues that consequentialism can provide no basis for ethical guidance, because we are irredeemably ignorant of most of the consequences of our actions. If our ignorance of distant consequences is great, he says, we can have little reason to recommend one action over another on consequentialist grounds. In this article, I show that for reasons to do with statistical theory, the cluelessness objection is too pessimistic. We have good reason to believe that certain patterns (...) of action will tend to have better consequences, and we have good reason to recommend acting in accordance with strategies based on those advantageous patterns. I close by saying something about the strategies that this argument should lead us to favour. (shrink)

In this issue, our contributors demonstrate how art in the city, art “about” the city, art compared to the city, can bring to attention the insidious forces underlying every city’s gleaming, wide-awake veneer.

Qualitative data typically contain multiple identifiable characteristics about people, places and events, in the unique voice of each participant. This short report considers sensitivity and security of audio-recordings, drawing attention to a lack of guidelines for researchers on the preservation or destruction of such data. The authors urge debate on this issue, with due consideration to both ethics and scientific rigour.

We introduce an Automatic Theorem Prover (ATP) of a dual tableau system for a relational logic for order of magnitude qualitative reasoning, which allows us to deal with relations such as negligibility, non-closeness and distance. Dual tableau systems are validity checkers that can serve as a tool for verification of a variety of tasks in order of magnitude reasoning, such as the use of qualitative sum of some classes of numbers. In the design of our ATP, we have introduced some (...) heuristics, such as the so called phantom variables, which improve the efficiency of the selection of variables used un the proof. (shrink)

The review discusses the book The Origin of Concepts by Susan Carey, in which she presents three main theses — the innateness of some kind of conceptual representations, the presence of a qualitative change during conceptual development and the existence of a special learning mechanism that achieves that discontinuity called bootstrapping. The general reception of the work is positive. Minor doubts are presented regarding two claims: first, the speculation about the iconic format of core cognition representations, which seems to be (...) underdeveloped and slightly unclear, second, the claim that core cognition representations are innate, which seems to be insufficiently supported by empirical data presented. (shrink)

Counselling acts consist in indicating useful activities, remedying human deficiencies. Counselling acts are guided by practical cognition. Since counselling activities are oriented towards the future, their crucial element is foresight. It is cognitive reflection foreseeing the implementation of counselling acts. Counselling acts are actualised in rhetorical and communicational context which is associated with persuasive delivery of counselling content. Belonging to the rhetorical canon, invention disposes of factors that influence the justifying formulation of advisory content. Invention factors introduce the anticipatory determinations (...) and concretisations of counselling content. At rhetorical level, inventive methodology plays anticipatory functions which are convergent with tasks of foresight in practical cognition. (shrink)

Different forms of mindfulness meditation are increasingly integrated in the clinical practice in the last three decades. Previous studies have identified changes in the neurophysiology and neurochemistry of the brain resulting from different mindfulness meditation practices in the general population. However, research on neural correlates of different types of meditation, particularly on the clinical outcomes, is still very sparse. Therefore, the aim of this article is to review the neural impact of mindfulness meditation interventions on different mental disorders via the (...) classification of main components of mindfulness meditation. The clearer classification of mindfulness meditation may inform future clinical practice and research directions. (shrink)

We present a relational proof system in the style of dual tableaux for the relational logic associated with a multimodal propositional logic for order of magnitude qualitative reasoning with a bidirectional relation of negligibility. We study soundness and completeness of the proof system and we show how it can be used for verification of validity of formulas of the logic.

Logics of binary relations corresponding, among others, to the class RRA of representable relation algebras and the class FRA of full relation algebras are presented together with the proof systems in the style of dual tableaux. Next, the logics are extended with relational constants interpreted as point relations. Applications of these logics to reasoning in non-classical logics are recalled. An example is given of a dual tableau proof of an equation which is RRA-valid, while not RA-valid.

In this paper, I advance a new interpretation of Heidegger's reflections on art as we find them in his essay, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. I begin, in Section 1, by uncovering the fundamental concern that motivates Heidegger's essay. I show that Heidegger's reflections on art are part of his attempt to uncover a path beyond the history of metaphysics. I then suggest, in Section 2, that while Heidegger does think that art may allow for the overcoming of (...) metaphysics, recent interpreters [Dreyfus (2005), Thomson (2011), and Young (2001)] have mistook the kind of art that Heidegger has in mind here. The kind of art that can allow for the overcoming of metaphysics, I argue, is not art that simply thematizes and/or reconfigures cultural worlds. It is instead what Heidegger calls ‘primal poesy’. After discussing the nature of primal poesy, I show in more detail how this kind of art may be capable of getting us beyond the history of metaphysics in Section 3. Finally, in Section 4, I reconsider the more common reading of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in light of the interpretation I've offered in Sections 2 and 3. (shrink)

Recent work in moral philosophy has emphasized the foundational role played by interpersonal accountability in the analysis of moral concepts such as moral right and wrong, moral obligation and duty, blameworthiness, and moral responsibility (Darwall 2006; 2013a; 2013b). Extending this framework to the field of moral psychology, we hypothesize that our moral attitudes, emotions, and motives are also best understood as based in accountability. Drawing on a large body of empirical evidence, we argue that the implicit aim of the central (...) moral motives and emotions is to hold people - whether oneself or others - accountable for compliance with the demands of morality. Moral condemnation is based in a motive to get perpetrators to hold themselves accountable for their wrongdoing, not, as is commonly supposed, a mere retributive motive to make perpetrators suffer (�2). And moral conscience is based in a genuine motive to hold oneself accountable for behaving in accordance with moral demands, not, as is commonly supposed, a mere egoistic motive to appear moral to others (�3). The accountability-based theory of the moral motives and emotions we offer provides better explanations of the extant empirical data than any of the major alternative theories of moral motivation. Moreover, conceiving of moral psychology in this way gives us a new and illuminating perspective on what makes morality distinctive: its essential connection to our practice of holding one another accountable (�4). (shrink)

In this paper, we contend that the psychology of addiction is similar to the psychology of ordinary, non-addictive temptation in important respects, and explore the ways in which these parallels can illuminate both addiction and ordinary action. The incentive salience account of addiction proposed by Robinson and Berridge (1993; 2001; 2008) entails that addictive desires are not in their nature different from many of the desires had by non-addicts; what is different is rather the way that addictive desires are acquired, (...) which in turn affects their strength. We examine these “incentive salience” desires, both in addicts and non-addicts, contrasting them with more cognitive desires. On this account, the self-control challenge faced by addicted agents is not different in kind from that faced by non-addicted agents – though the two may, of course, differ greatly in degree of difficulty. We explore a general model of self-control for both the addict and the non-addict, stressing that self-control may be employed at three different stages, and examining the ways in which it might be strengthened. This helps elucidate a general model of intentional action. (shrink)

This article suggests that the best available normative framework for guiding conduct in war rests on categories that do not echo the terms of an individual rights-based morality, but acknowledge the impossibility of rendering warfare fully morally justified. Avoiding the undue moralization of conduct in war is an imperative for a normative framework that strives to actually give behavioral guidance to combatants, most of whom will inevitably be ignorant of the moral status of the individuals they encounter on the battlefield (...) and will often be uncertain or mistaken about the justice of their own cause. We identify the requirement of military necessity, applied on the basis of what we refer to as the “St. Petersburg assumption”, as the main principle according to which a combatant should act, regardless of which side or in which battlefield encounter she finds herself. This pragmatic normative framework enjoys moral traction for three reasons: first, in the circumstances of war it protects human life to a certain extent; second, it makes no false claims about the moral justification of individual conduct in combat operations; and, third, it fulfills morally important functions of law. However, the criterion of military necessity interpreted on the basis of the St. Petersburg assumption does not directly replicate fundamental moral prescriptions about the preservation of individual rights. (shrink)

In this piece, I argue that we Homo sapiens have an ethical duty to restore natural darkness to biodiverse, forested ecosystems. Historically, human beings have relied on forests for material sustenance and psychophysiological wellbeing. Utilizing the philosophical concepts of wildness and relational value, I argue that we are thereby bound by reciprocity to (in return) mitigate forestadjacent light pollution. After all, a variety of forest-dwelling species are negatively impacted by dwindling natural darkness, including (but not limited to): insectivorous and frugivorous (...) bats, various plant (including tree) species, fungi, and a variety of nocturnal pollinators. In addition, the loss of natural darkness precludes human subjects from undergoing a variety of transformative experiences that are uniquely associated with immersion in dark, biodiverse forests. Finally, as oldgrowth groves disproportionately sequester carbon and are negatively impacted by light pollution, increasing artificial light at night indirectly (and worryingly) serves as a driver of global climate change. (shrink)

Some experts and advocates propose environmental biotechnologies such as genetic engineering, gene drive systems, and synthetic biology as potential solutions to accelerating rates of species loss. While these tools may offer hope for a seemingly intractable problem, they also present potential governance challenges for which innovative decision‐making systems are required. Two of the perennial governance challenges include, when are broader stakeholder groups involved in these decisions and who exactly should be involved? We propose the decision phases framework—which includes research and (...) development, regulatory review, and deployment, management, and monitoring—as a framework for identifying which stakeholders might be best suited for different phases throughout the innovation and deployment of emerging environmental biotechnologies for species protection. (shrink)

Broadly, I endorse the view that biodiverse species and spaces warrant conservation (partially) in virtue of their power to induce epistemic (Paul 2015; Sarkar 2011), relational, and positive, psycho-physiological transformation. However, if we are (in the not-so-distant future) able to construct cross-modally replete simulations of biodiverse environments, then what reason would we have to conserve genuine, biodiverse ecosystems? In order to address this “Simulation Problem,” I argue that the authenticity of biodiverse environments matters, both in itself and insofar as authenticity (...) plays an important psychological, cultural, personal, and epistemic role in the lives of human agents. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to examine questions about the role and responsibilities of transaction lawyers working in the financial sector that, it is argued here, deserve closer scrutiny than they have hitherto received since the banking and economic crisis of 2008. It considers the manner in which the conduct of such lawyers in the pre-crisis financial markets may have played a particular role in contributing to the sources of latent risk that bore systemic fruit in 2008. (...) It poses the question, ‘Could they have acted differently?’. The first section concludes that there are strong and persuasive arguments both for and against reorienting the responsibilities of the transaction lawyer to include some obligation to take account of the risk to the financial system which the transactions they are conducting for their clients may pose. Secondly, this paper explores ways in which, nonetheless, financial sector lawyers could – and indeed should – be expected to play a part... (shrink)

This book is an empirical study of global citizenship education in ten secondary schools in the United States and Asia. Proponents seek to equip students with the consciousness and competencies necessary to make a world of universal benevolence, peace, and prosperity. However, many of the moral assumptions of global citizenship education are more complex and contradict these goals, and are just as likely to have the unintended consequence of reinforcing a more particular Western individualism. Dill argues that global citizenship (...) education in its current forms has significant limits that proponents have not yet acknowledged, which may very well undermine it in the long run. (shrink)

Joanna Demers argues that Houellebecqs apocalypse can be understood as a system analogous to Hegels, and interrogates the ethics of such a system.

How do civilians react to being harmed in war? Existing studies argue that civilian casualties are strategically costly because civilian populations punish a belligerent who kills civilians and support the latter's opponent. Relying on eighty-seven semi-structured interviews with victims of coalition attacks in Afghanistan, this article shows that moral principles inform civilians’ attitudes toward their own harming. Their attitudes may therefore vary with the perceived circumstances of an attack. Civilians’ perception of harm as unintended and necessary, in accordance with the (...) moral principles of distinction and necessity, was associated with narratives that cast an attack as relatively more legitimate and with a partial or full release of the coalition from blame. The principle of proportionality, which requires that civilian casualties are caused in pursuit of a legitimate war aim, informed their abstract attitudes toward civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Two rules of international law, which accord with the moral principles of distinction and necessity, were reflected in the civilians’ attitudes. The legal rule of proportionality, which diverges from the namesake moral principle, failed to resonate with the civilians. The article explores whether compliance with the legal rules of distinction and necessity can contribute to mitigating the strategic costs of civilian casualties. (shrink)

Paying research subjects for their participation in biomedical studies is an increasingly common and acceptable practice. Nevertheless, it continues to raise numerous conceptual, ethical, and pract...

Rather than focus on effects, the isolatable and measureable outcomes of events and interventions, the papers assembled here offer different perspectives on the affective dimension of the meaning and politics of human/non-human relations. The authors begin by drawing attention to the constructed discontinuity between humans and non-humans, and to the kinds of knowledge and socialities that this discontinuity sustains, including those underpinned by nature-culture, subject-object, body-mind, individual-society polarities. The articles presented track human/non-human relations through different domains, including: humans/non-humans in history (...) and animal welfare science (Fudge and Buller); the relationship between the way we live, the effects on our natural environment and contested knowledges about ‘nature’ (Whatmore); choreographies of everyday life and everyday science practices with non-human animals such as horses, meerkats, mice, and wolves (Latimer, Candea, Davies, Despret). Each paper also goes on to offer different perspectives on the human/non-human not just as division, or even as an asymmetrical relation, but as relations that are mutually affective, however invisible and inexpressible in the domain of science. Thus the collection contributes to new epistemologies/ontologies that undercut the usual ordering of relations and their dichotomies, particularly in that dominant domain of contemporary culture that we call science. Indeed, in their impetus to capture ‘affect’, the collection goes beyond the usual turn towards a more inclusive ontology, and contributes to the radical shift in the epistemology and philosophy of science’s terms of engagement. (shrink)

A person who is liable to defensive harm has forfeited his rights against the imposition of the harm, and so is not wronged if that harm is imposed. A number of philosophers, most notably Jeff McMahan, argue for an instrumental account of liability, whereby a person is liable to defensive harm when he is either morally or culpably responsible for an unjust threat of harm to others, and when the imposition of defensive harm is necessary to avert the threatened unjust (...) harm. Others may favour a purely noninstrumental account of liability: one that looks only to the past behaviour of the potentially liable person. We argue that both views are vulnerable to serious objections. Instead we develop and defend a new view of liability to defensive harm: the pluralist account. The pluralist account states that liability to defensive harm has at least two bases. First, if an attacker is morally or culpably responsible for an unjust attack then he has forfeited what we call his agency right, and in doing so he has made himself partially liable to defensive harm. Whether the attacker is fully liable to defensive harm depends, however, on whether the imposition of defensive harm would infringe a different right held by the attacker: his humanitarian right. Humanitarian rights are rights to be provided with urgently needed resources or to be protected from serious harms when others can do so at reasonably low cost. We argue the pluralist account avoids the objections to which the instrumental and noninstrumental views are vulnerable, coheres with our intuitive reactions in a wide range of cases, and sheds new light on the way different rights combine to determine a person's liability to suffer harm. (shrink)

Introduction -- John Locke and the problem of personal identity : the principium individuationis, personal immortality, and bodily resurrection -- On separation and immortality : Descartes and the nature of the soul -- On materialism and immortality or Hobbes' rejection of the natural argument for the immortality of the soul -- Henry More and John Locke on the dangers of materialism : immateriality, immortality, immorality, and identity -- Robert Boyle : on seeds, cannibalism, and the resurrection of the body -- (...) Locke's theory of personal identity in its context : a reassessment of classic objections. (shrink)

Heidegger and ethics is a contentious conjunction of terms. Martin Heidegger himself rejected the notion of ethics, while his endorsement of Nazism is widely seen as unethical. This major new study examines the complex and controversial issues involved in bringing them together. By working backwards through his work, from his 1964 claim that philosophy has been completed to _Being and Time_, his first major work, Joanna Hodge questions Heidegger's denial that his enquires were concerned with ethics. She discovers a (...) form of ethics in Heidegger's thinking which elucidates his important distinction between metaphysics and philosophy. Against many contemporary views, she proposes therefore that ethics can be retrieved and questions the relation between ethics and metaphysics that Heidegger had made so pervasive. (shrink)

This paper broadens out existing challenges to the divisions between the human and the animal that keep humans distinct, and apart, from other animals. Much attention to date has focused on how the Euro-American individuation of the human subject intensifies the asymmetries inculcated by these divisions. This paper rehearses some of this literature but goes on to attend to how these divisions undercut understandings of sociality and limit social organization to interaction between persons. Drawing together debates around the human/animal relation, (...) the paper juxtaposes different perspectives of nature-cultures to bring ‘worlds’ of relations into view. Specifically, I distinguish here between the state of ‘being alongside’ and the process of ‘being-with’. Ranging from approaches that try to settle ideas of difference through appeals to ‘ethical health’, through to work on identity that ‘unconceals’ a wealth of connection, this distinction will help to keep apart those situated moments of relations, where the constituent parts are left more provisional and contingent, from more sought-out relationships, where a sense of togetherness purposefully dominates the conjoining of activities. Contrasting hybridity as a totalizing form of ‘being-with’, with alongsideness, as a form of intermittent and partial connection, the analysis eschews the obfuscation of difference entrenched in contemporary emphasis on connectivity. Proposing instead the importance of creatures as ‘division preserving', the paper theorizes ways to sustain regard for division as well as connection as key to understanding the arts of dwelling amidst different kinds. (shrink)

In the decades since the Science Wars of the 1990s, climate science has become a crucible for the negotiation of claims about reality and expertise. This negotiation, which has drawn explicitly on the ideas and techniques of science and technology studies, has taken place in genres of fiction as well as non-fiction, which intersect in surprising ways. In this case study, I focus on two interwoven strands of this history. One follows Michael Crichton’s best-selling 2004 novel, State of Fear and (...) its reception by neo-conservatives as a commentary on the mis-uses of facts to stoke fear about anthropogenic climate change. The other considers Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s 2010 publishing success Merchants of Doubt as the inverse, a demonstration of the forms of disinformation that have been used to undermine scientific consensus around climate change. I show that both Crichton’s as well as Oreskes and Conway’s approaches were critiqued by academic STS even as their accounts constituted the most high-profile performances of its stakes and the politics of knowledge since the Science Wars. In highlighting the STS practices deployed by each, as well as how those practices were differently linked to accusations of fear-mongering and a perversion of the purity of STS, I demonstrate the need for a reflexive history of STS. Such an approach, I argue, can better consider the social life of STS ideas and practices amidst calls for more politically-engaged approaches to knowledge production. (shrink)

In this piece, I extend a transformative power account to the conservation of dark (and starry) night skies. More specifically, I argue that the transformative power that dark nights bear warrants their conservation and is best understood in terms of the important intellectual, cultural, aesthetic, and (psycho-physiologically) restorative effects that they afford. This gives us a pressing set of reasons to combat the growing, global phenomenon of light pollution. To do so, I argue, we ought to preserve the few remaining (...) dark refuges that we have left (what I term wildness regions) and synergistically re-wild (i.e. re-darken) urban and suburban environments. Synergistic re-darkening, I propose, can be achieved by (i) establishing interpretive (educational) ‘dark zones’, (ii) implementing bioluminescent lighting technologies, and (iii) strategically employing lighting design. Finally, and in order to enact a degree of epistemic justice, I argue that we ought to implement multi-cultural ‘co-learning’ initiatives, which promote education pertaining to both Western, scientific and indigenous, North American astronomies. (shrink)

In this article I offer a new interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power by treating its relation to an often neglected conceptual distinction in Nietzsche’s philosophy: the distinction between (a) parasitism and (b) overflow. I show that Nietzsche treats (a) and (b) as two different ways of willing power, but with an important qualification: (a) is always a means to (b), which is the real aim of power. Because (b) is conceived of as the real aim of power, (...) it serves as Nietzsche’s standard for evaluating the degree of power attained by beings and their actions. The more that a being or activity attains (b), the greater is its power and rank according to Nietzsche. (shrink)

Unprecedented advances in medicine, genetic engineering, and demographic forecasting raise new questions that strain the categories and assumptions of traditional ethical theories. Heyd's approach resolves many paradoxes in intergenerational justice, while offering a major test case for the profound problems of the limits of ethics and the nature of value.

In this paper, I challenge the distinction between “epistemic” and “ontic” states propounded by Harrigan and Spekkens (Found Phys 40:125–157, 2010) by pointing out that because knowledge is factive, any state that represents someone’s knowledge about a physical system thereby also represents something about the physical system itself, so there is no such thing as “mere knowledge”. This criticism leads to the reformulation of the main question of the debate: instead of asking whether a given state is ontic or epistemic, (...) we should instead ask whether a given change of a state is ontic or epistemic. In particular, in the context of quantum mechanics, one can ask whether the collapse of the quantum state could be understood as an epistemically successful change of the observer’s beliefs about the complete state of the system that is not associated with any change in the physical reality. I argue that the answer to this question should be in the negative because it is possible that, in a series of measurements, the collapse rule tells us to update a certain state to a different one and then back to the same state; if both of these updates are merely changes of our beliefs, then they could not both be epistemically successful. (shrink)

This innovative book explores one of the most important concepts in contemporary cultural debates: the sublime. Joanna Zylinska looks at the consequences of feminism and its rethinking of sexual differences, and how it has led to the sublime tradition. She argues that what is generally considered aesthetics can now be more productive thought of in terms of ethics instead. Looking at a range of diverse discourses—Orlan's carnal art, philosophies of the everyday, the French feminism of Cixous and Irigaray, and (...) the gender theory of Judith Butler—Zylinska intertwines the boundaries of cultural theory and textual practice to produce an ethics of the feminine sublime. (shrink)

Each year thousands of individuals enrol in clinical trials as healthy volunteers to earn money. Some of them pursue research participation as a full-time or at least a part-time job. They call themselves professional or semiprofessional guinea pigs. The practice of paying healthy volunteers raises numerous ethical concerns. Different payment models have been discussed in literature. Dickert and Grady argue for a wage-payment model. This model gives research subjects a standardised hourly wage, and it is based on an assumption that (...) research participation is morally indistinguishable from other forms of unskilled labour. In this paper, I will challenge this assumption. I will argue that human guinea pigging has particular characteristics which taken together make it significantly different from other forms of labour. Participation in research is skill-independent. Healthy volunteers are valuable not because they are skilful persons, but because they are human bodies. The role of research volunteers is mainly passive. They are not asked to produce goods or deliver services. They are paid for enduring unpleasant, painful and risky interventions performed by investigators. Research volunteering involves inherent risks and uncertainties, and subjects have little or no control over their minimisation and materialisation. I conclude that participation in clinical research is a specific kind of activity. It is more like renting out one’s body to strangers, than working. Thus, research participation should not be treated on par with other forms of employment. (shrink)

Recently, scholars have described the emotional consequences of transnational motherhood on families. Research, however, has neglected to address the lives of migrant fathers and how they compare to those of migrant mothers. This article fills the gap by analyzing the experiences of Mexican transnational mothers and fathers residing in New Jersey. Ethnographic data and interviews show that parents behave in similar ways when internationally separated from children. However, their migration patterns and emotional responses to separation differ. I show that these (...) differences are tied to Mexican gender ideology in which women’s maternal roles are sacralized, whereas fathers’ roles are tied to financial provision. Although the contemporary Mexican transnational family structure challenges gender norms, the analysis of how parents understand their family roles when separated from their children proves gender ideals to be highly durable in the transnational context. (shrink)