“Domino regi piissimo, gratia Dei celsissimo, Carlo vere carissimo, regno Christi rectissimo, ultimus namque Cathuulfus, tamen vester servulus, intimo corde puro in spiritu salutem sancto.” In a flurry of flattery, humility, and sycophantic superlatives the Insular scholar and Carolingian courtier known to us as Cathwulf commenced his famous letter to Charlemagne. Composed almost certainly early in the year 775, Cathwulf's letter to the youthful Frankish king is a unique work. His name is associated with no other text, and indeed the (...) letter to Charlemagne exists in only a single manuscript, an indicator perhaps of restricted contemporary circulation. (shrink)

Everyone knows what is feels like to be in pain. Scraped knees, toothaches, migraines, giving birth, cancer, heart attacks, and heartaches: pain permeates our entire lives. We also witness other people - loved ones - suffering, and we 'feel with' them. It is easy to assume this is the end of the story: 'pain-is-pain-is-pain', and that is all there is to say. But it is not. In fact, the way in which people respond to what they describe as 'painful' (...) has changed considerably over time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, people believed that pain served a specific (and positive) function - it was a message from God or Nature; it would perfect the spirit. 'Suffer in this life and you wouldn't suffer in the next one'. Submission to pain was required. Nothing could be more removed from twentieth and twenty-first century understandings, where pain is regarded as an unremitting evil to be 'fought'. Focusing on the English-speaking world, this book tells the story of pain since the eighteenth century, addressing fundamental questions about the experience and nature of suffering over the last three centuries. How have those in pain interpreted their suffering - and how have these interpretations changed over time? How have people learnt to conduct themselves when suffering? How do friends and family react? And what about medical professionals: should they immerse themselves in the suffering person or is the best response a kind of professional detachment? (shrink)

The paper arises from a shared event that turned into an experience: the finding of a childlike piece of paper on our way to a conference about philosophy in schools and how it affects our educational ideas and research practices on listening to children. Triggered by the question of what it means to listen, we are led to the exercise of self-questioning inspired by some of the authors that have already written about the topic, specifically in the context of the (...) community of philosophical enquiry. The thinking unfolds with the telling of the story about the found piece of paper, crossing different layers of questioning and trying to keep the enquiry open for the readers: what is it that we do not know about listening to children? And to what extent might that, which we do not know, be the cause of biased and adultist practices? Is it necessary to return to what philosophy is and where one can find it inside the school environment? Is it already there when the adults arrive? Are we not listening to it? Or are there specific places for philosophical conversations, such as the classroom? Is philosophy also invited to the margins of those spaces? Who decides what counts as philosophical? It is not about answering questions and giving closure to our concerns as educators and researchers, but rather sharing with the readers how even in the least suspected place - an academic event about bringing philosophy to school - one might still not be listening to children. In returning to this self-questioning movement, we want to echo some of the troubling in the thinking and practices of listening in the so-called movement of Philosophy for/with Children: this for/with phenomenon, its politics and relations; some of the assumptions that might be present in the dilemmas in practice for educators and researchers; but also its aesthetics resonances, the sheer beauty of troubling, the (out of) tune of self-questioning, the questions it raises for us as researchers and the space of doubting and uncertainty it offers, like a hesitation or a breathing space. And perhaps, we wonder, it is in-between spaces, in its cracks and transitions, that important things can find their way into our thinking and conversations about childhood. Just like a piece of paper in a hotel room. (shrink)

For her entire childhood, Joanna's father, Bob, had a ritual: wake up at dawn, walk the dog, and sit down at the kitchen table with a blank pad of paper and plenty of colored markers to craft notes for his two children. Over the years, word games and puzzles for five-year-olds morphed into thoughtful guidance and reflections for his teenagers approaching adulthood. Now, with more than 3,500 of her father's colorful notes in hand, Joanna has decided that the (...) lessons tucked inside are worth sharing. Folded Wisdom highlights the collection of Bob's notes, telling a story filled with universal values that encourages meaningful self-reflection about how we all face successes and failures; express happiness and sadness; and communicate frustration, praise, and love to one another. Heartfelt and full of possibility for the future, a father's folded notes and drawings are timeless reminders of love. (shrink)

By many accounts, HBO’s The Wire was and remains the greatest and most important television drama of all time. Conceived by writers David Simon and ex-Baltimore homicide detective Ed Burns, this five-season, sixty-episode tour de force has raised the bar for compelling, intelligent television production. With each season addressing a different arena of life in the city of Baltimore, and each season’s narratives tapping into those from previous seasons, The Wire was able to reveal the overlapping, criss-crossing, and colliding realities (...) that shape—if not control—the people, institutions, and culture of the modern American city. The Wire and Philosophy celebrates this show’s realism as well as its intellectual and philosophical clarity. Selected philosophers who are fans of The Wire tap into these conflicts and interconnections to expose the underlying philosophical issues and assumptions and pursue questions, such as, Can cops really tell whether they are smarter than their perps? Or do they fall victim to intellectual vanity? Do individuals really have free will to resist the temptations—of gangs, of drugs, or corruption—that surround them? Is David Simon a modern-day Marx who sees capitalism leading ultimately to its own collapse, or is Baltimore’s story uniquely its own? (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to engage with the inherent humanism of bioethics and consider the possibility of thinking bioethics otherwise - beyond the belief in the intrinsic dignity and superior value of the human, and beyond the rules and procedures rooted in this belief. It is also to challenge what we may call the ‘cognitivist pretence’ of humanism, i.e. the conviction that the human can be distinguished from other forms of life by the inherent ‘truth’ and teleology of (...) his being which is to be revealed to him, and which he can uniquely grasp. The human as both a discrete subject and an object of bioethics becomes thus a critical point of interrogation in this study. What I want to outline in response is a non-systemic bioethics of relations which does not abdicate its ethical responsibility or its political commitment, although it questions many of the premises of established moral and political theories. Indeed, I want to ‘put to the test the pretentious belief that only a liberal and humanistic view of the subject can guarantee basic elements of human decency: moral and political agency and ethical probity’. But my project is more genealogical than futurologist. By revisiting the story of bioethics’ emergence as a separate discipline, I want to consider the following question: what if the cyborg rather than the human had been adopted as its foundation? Or, to put it another way, what would a bioethics for humans, animals and machines look like? (shrink)

In this article I examine how a ‘private’, inside story was constructed through an extended news interview drawing on models of both the experiential and the accountable broadcast interview. The analysis, based on aspects of adjacency sequencing, question/ response design, and narrative organization, explores the ways in which a personal account is elicited about an event that had been highly prominent in the news. However, I also look at how ‘accountability’ emerges as an issue during the interview, and on (...) how the tensions between these two types of interview are played out in its design and subsequent editing. Although the interview displays many of the characteristics identified by Montgomery as ‘experiential’, where the interviewee is positioned as ‘one of us’, with knowledge and experience of an event she is not to be held accountable for as a result of her high profile in the news coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis, Faye Turney had already become a public figure during the time she was held in Iran. Furthermore, she had already been positioned by the media as accountable for some of her actions during her captivity. I show that the personal dimensions of the interview as interaction are framed by the interview as documentary, thus producing a hybrid form in which both the experiential and the accountable can be managed. (shrink)

The article seeks to analyze the portrayal of the Jews in two plays from the Chester mystery cycle: “Trial and Flagellation” and “The Passion.” The analysis acknowledges that the cycle is a mixture of, and a dialogue between, the universal standpoint emerging from the presentation of the biblical story of humankind and a contemporary perspective, pertaining to the reality of the viewers. Therefore, while pointing to the unique formal and structural uniformity of the cycle, which strengthens the idea of (...) continuity between the Old and the New Covenant and the role of the Israelites in the history of salvation, it also recognizes the potential of the plays to engage in the current stereotypes. The article examines how the Gospel account of Christ’s trial and death is modified through presenting the Jews as torturers, whitewashing the non-Jewish characters, and placing special emphasis on the question of Jewish ignorance. It is demonstrated how different theological and popular stances concerning the Jewish people are merged and reconciled in the Chester representation of the passion of Christ and it is argued that the plays in question retell the biblical story in such a way that the justification for the expulsion of the Jews from England could be derived from it. (shrink)

The main task of this paper is to draw a normative picture of close interpersonal bonds and demonstrate why they are ethically relevant and important. I start by showing that the notion of ‘close relationships’ is a notion in its own right—overlapping with but not reducible to the notion of ‘love,’ ‘friendship,’ or ‘kinship.’ Then, I go on to discuss particular features of close relationships. I start with consensuality, reciprocity, persistence in time. After that, I move on to non-instrumental treatment (...) and the mutual sharing of responsibility, which is connected with treating the interests of the close other as one’s own. Another features I discuss are truthfulness in the way we narrate our autobiographical stories, openness to the close other’s co-creation of our narrative truth, and the readiness to co-create the narrative truth of the close other in return. Finally, I focus on trust; I show that the kind of trust which is characteristic of close relationships is connected with particular competences that a person should manifest in order to be a trustworthy close-relationship partner. From the fact that no person is morally infallible, it can be inferred that we need to depend on competent others in order to take full respon­sibility for ourselves as moral agents. The people we choose to be in close relationships with are precisely such competent others; they are the guardians and the co-authors of our moral agency and our narrative identity. (shrink)

Drawing on four years of ethnographic research with romance novel writers, we show how their affiliation with romance—a literary genre known for stories containing sexual content—prompted outsiders to sexually stigmatize them. Our work examines both the application and management of this stigma. We describe how outsiders applied the stigma in two ways: by conveying blatant disapproval through “sneering” and inviting writers to display a highly sexualized self through “leering.” Writers interpreted outsiders’ sneering as slut-shaming rhetoric and responded discursively to manage (...) the stigma; leering, however, sent a more complicated message that was harder for writers to manage. In revealing how these interactions threatened to strip writers of their sexual agency, our analysis suggests gender may be a primary mechanism by which stigma is applied and managed, which has theoretical implications for the stigmatization of women’s sexual selves. (shrink)

The article explores the rich and varied experiences of a collective writing project, unfolding through an anecdote involving Charlie, a young boy who creatively disrupted conventional photography methods. This incident, during an evening promenade by the sea in Ericeira (Portugal), epitomizes the project's embrace of playfulness and exploration of diverse perspectives–materialized through Charlie's playful insistence on experimenting with different angles. The event embodied the group’s approach to writing, leading to a collective inquiry into the interplay of ages, angles, and other (...) themes like waves, threads, shadows, and liminal spaces. The project, driven by the Between Ages Collective, began with informal gatherings in Plymouth, UK, and expanded into a year-long online reading group. Participants, spanning different generations and academic stages, shared various materials, including films, picture books, and scholarly texts, which inspired individual contributions. Influenced by the Collective's collaborative spirit, these contributions explore the concept of 'between ages' – a metaphorical and literal space of transition and fluidity. Contributors were invited to craft pieces that delve into the 'between ages' theme, often exploring serendipitous moments that transform interactions and experiences. The writing tries to capture a sense of openness and curiosity, embracing the uncertainties and ambiguities inherent in the process. The works do not strictly adhere to conventional academic or narrative forms but rather emerge from the collective's shared experiences, including cooking, eating, swimming and walking together. The article suggests that these writings are not meant to be definitive or conclusive but are explorations that invite readers to engage with the mundane and profound textures of everyday life. The stories and themes explored are marked by their diversity in style, rhythm, and imagery, ranging from reflections on the philosophy of shadows to the profound implications of intergenerational and interspecies relationships. The Collective’s work is presented as an ongoing experiment in thinking and writing together, with each piece offering unique insights into the fluid and often blurred boundaries between different states of being. This openness to the in-between spaces brings into question the notion of fixed identities and experiences, inviting a more nuanced understanding of the relational dynamics that shape existence. The article allows the readers to delve into these narratives and engage with the myriad ways they resonate with broader themes of being, storying, and connecting. (shrink)

The paper presents findings from an ethnography of dysmorphology, a specialism in genetic medicine, to explore genetic counselling as a process through which parents ‘become informed.’ Current professional and policy debate over the use of genetic technology in medicine emphasises the need for informed choice making, and for genetic services that provide parents with what is referred to as ‘non-directive genetic counselling.’ In the paper the process of becoming informed is shown to be very specific and to have its own (...) effects. Specifically, genetics is performed in dysmorphology as a space of ambiguity and uncertainty. In addition, parents are engaged by the clinic as participants in the very processes through which their child, and perhaps their family, are clinically classified. The paper examines the effects of parents’ immersion in this clinical space of deferral to suggest how the need for reproductive choice, and calculation, is predicated upon clinical processes that shift parents between the experience of definition and uncertainty. The paper thus troubles simple stories about autonomous and informed choice, particularly reproductive choice, as icons of contemporary versions of what it is to be fully human. (shrink)

The author argues that the moral of the Frankfurt stories is this: if causal determinism rules out moral responsibility, it is not in virtue of eliminating alternative possibilities, and replies the most important challenge to this claim, namely an argument called “The Dilemma Defense.”.

During an initial palliative care assessment, a dying man discloses that he had killed several people whilst a young man. The junior doctor, to whom he revealed his story, consulted with senior palliative care colleagues. It was agreed that legal advice would be sought on the issue of breaching the man’s confidentiality. Two legal opinions conflicted with each other. A decision was made by the clinical team not to inform the police.In this article the junior doctor, the palliative medicine (...) specialist, a medical ethicist, and a lawyer consider the case from their various perspectives. (shrink)

The paper scrutinizes the literary output of George Moore with reference to the expectations of the new generation of Irish writers emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although George Moore is considered to belong to the Anglo-Irish ascendancy writers, he began his writing career from dissociating himself from the literary achievements of his own social class. His infatuation with the ideals of the Gaelic League not only brought him back to Dublin, but also encouraged him to write short (...) stories analogous to famous Ivan Turgenev’s The Sportsman’s Sketches. The idea of using a Russian writer as a role model went along with the Gaelic League advocating the reading of non-English European literature in search for inspiration. However the poet’s involvement in the public cause did not last long. His critical view on Ireland together with his uncompromising approach towards literature resulted in a final disillusionment with the movement. The paper focuses on this particular period of Moore’s life in order to show how this seemingly unfruitful cooperation became essential for the development of Irish literature in the twentieth century. The Untilled Field, though not translated into Irish, still marks the beginning of a new genre into Irish literature—a short story. More importantly, the collection served as a source of inspiration for Joyce’s Dubliners. These and other aspects of Moore’s literary life are supposed to draw attention to the complexity of the writer’s literary output and his underplayed role in the construction of the literary Irish identity. (shrink)

Stroke survivors undergo a thorough cognitive diagnosis that often involves administration of multiple standardized tests. However, patient’s narrative discourse can provide clinicians with additional knowledge on patient’s subjective experience of illness, attitude toward current situation, and motivation for treatment. We evaluated the methods of analyzing thematic content and story types in relationship to cognitive impairment in stroke survivors with no aphasia (including 9 left hemisphere damage – LHD patients, and 16 right hemisphere damage – RHD patients). Cognitive impairment was (...) evaluated in comparison to a group of 25 patients with orthopaedic injury not involving the brain. Our findings primarily show that higher elaboration on own cognitive problems, physical ailments or coping strategies in LHD patients and cognitive problems, emotional issues and circumstances of illness onset in RHD patients is related to deficits in executive functions and retrieval of information from memory. Furthermore, RHD patients who use more chaos story type show lower executive functioning. However, these results did not survive the significance threshold ofp< 0.05 after Bonferroni adjustment for multiple comparisons. In conclusion, this study provides preliminary evidence that stroke survivor’s narrative can constitute an additional source of clinically-relevant information regarding patient’s experience of illness and attitude toward recovery. This knowledge can aid clinicians and nurses in everyday interactions with the patients and support individualized strategy to treatment. Still, the current results need be confirmed with future studies in a larger cohort of stroke patients. (shrink)

Most studies on bilingual language development focus on children’s second language (L2). Here, we investigated first language (L1) development of Polish-English early migrant bilinguals in four domains: vocabulary, grammar, phonological processing and discourse. We first compared Polish language skills between bilinguals and their Polish non-migrant monolingual peers, and then investigated the influence of the cumulative exposure to L1 and L2 on bilinguals’ performance. We then examined whether high exposure to L1 could possibly minimize the gap between monolinguals and bilinguals. We (...) analyzed data from 233 typically developing children (88 bilingual, 145 monolingual) aged 4;0 to 7;5 (years; months) on six language measures in Polish: receptive vocabulary, productive vocabulary, receptive grammar, productive grammar (sentence repetition), phonological processing (non-word repetition) and discourse abilities (narration). Information about language exposure was obtained via parental questionnaires. For each language task, we analyzed the data from the subsample of bilinguals who had completed all the tasks in question and from monolinguals matched one-on-one to the bilingual group on age, SES (measured by years of mother’s education), gender, non-verbal IQ and short term memory. The bilingual children scored lower than monolinguals in all language domains, except discourse. The group differences were more pronounced on the productive tasks (vocabulary, grammar, phonological processing) and moderate on the receptive tasks (vocabulary and grammar). L1 exposure correlated positively with the vocabulary size and phonological processing. Grammar scores were not related to the levels of L1 exposure, but were predicted by general cognitive abilities. L2 exposure negatively influenced productive grammar in L1, suggesting possible L2 transfer effects on L1 grammatical performance. Children’s narrative skills benefitted from exposure to two languages: both L1 and L2 exposure influenced story structure scores in L1. Importantly, we did not find any evidence (in any of the tasks in which the gap was present) that the performance gap between monolinguals and bilinguals could be fully closed with high amounts of L1 input. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In 1740, Joanna Stephens (fl. 1720–1741) produced a recipe for a tonic that she claimed cured bladder stones. Although she had the support of some notable and powerful men in the medical community and empirical evidence that her tonic worked, it took two years of petitioning, discussing, and even (unsuccessfully) crowd-sourcing before Parliament relented and awarded her the sum she requested to take her tonic public. Stephens’s interaction with the scientific community serves as a case study for how epistemic (...) credibility shapes how communities hear, interpret, and react to testimonies of knowledge claims from marginalized community members. Stephens’s position as an outsider, both qua woman and qua experimentalist, meant that she was effectively and almost immediately written out of her own story by learned and powerful men with who had both vested interests in the cure for the stone and epistemic prejudices that made it impossible for them to hear Stephens’s claim that she had made a discovery. (shrink)

In the traditions of narrative ethics and casuistry, stories have a well-established role. Specifically, illness narratives provide insight into patients’ perspectives and histories. However, because they tend to see fiction as an aesthetic endeavour, practitioners in these traditions often do not realize that fictional stories are valuable moral sources of their own. In this paper I employ two arguments to show the mutual relationship between bioethics and fiction, specifically, science fiction. First, both discourses use imagination to set a scene and (...) determine a perspective. Second, bioethics and science fiction share the family resemblance of expressing moral beliefs. I then consider how understanding bioethics and science fiction as interrelated discourses can be the basis of a methodology for inquiry into relational autonomy in the context of biotechnologies and medicine. As an example of this methodology, I analyse Fay Weldon’s novel The Cloning of Joanna May (1989). (shrink)

A growing body of research is exploring corporate communication in relation to corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities on social media (SM). Nonetheless, while these studies have shown that SM communication may be an effective tool for reaching and engaging various stakeholders, how the design of corporate CSR communication engenders trustworthiness has yet to be examined. To address this gap, we suggest that SM communication may include important signals related to trust; thus, we investigate whether companies use sources of trustworthiness (reputation, (...) performance, and appearance) while communicating with stakeholders and the response of the latter to such communication. Our empirical analysis is based on a database containing over 66,000 CSR-related messages from eight companies focusing on communication extracted from Twitter. These data are coded according to three sources of trustworthiness and two dimensions of CSR communication (social and environmental). Our findings indicate that all three attributes of trustworthiness are used by companies in their CSR social media communication. We also document how corporate efforts to use CSR communication that engenders trustworthiness influence stakeholder engagement. Our study therefore contributes to the literature on trust in relation to CSR by illustrating the importance of signaling that includes different sources of trustworthiness or their combination in corporate communication. By analyzing how the various trust attributes included in CSR communication affect SM reactions, we also identify which attributes lead to greater stakeholder engagement overall, particularly for the two analyzed dimensions of CSR communication. (shrink)

BackgroundNational guidelines require programmes use subjective assessments of social support when determining transplant suitability, despite limited evidence linking it to outcomes. We examined how transplant providers weigh the importance of social support for kidney transplantation compared with other factors, and variation by clinical role and personal beliefs.MethodsThe National survey of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons and the Society of Transplant Social Work in 2016. Using a discrete choice approach, respondents compared two hypothetical patient profiles and selected one for transplantation. (...) Conditional logistic regression estimated the relative importance of each factor; results were stratified by clinical role and beliefs.ResultsFive hundred and eighy-four transplant providers completed the survey. Social support was the second most influential factor among transplant providers. Providers were most likely to choose a candidate who had social support, always adhered to a medical regimen, and had a 15 years life expectancy with transplant. Psychosocial providers were more influenced by adherence and quality of life compared with medical/surgical providers, who were more influenced by candidates' life expectancy with transplant. For providers concerned with avoiding organ waste, social support was the most influential factor, while it was the least influential for clinicians concerned with fairness.ConclusionsSocial support is highly influential in listing decisions and may exacerbate transplant disparities. Providers’ beliefs and reliance on social support in determining suitability vary considerably, raising concerns about transparency and justice. (shrink)

This book is a tribute to Professor Ewa Orłowska, a Polish logician who was celebrating the 60th year of her scientific career in 2017. It offers a collection of contributed papers by different authors and covers the most important areas of her research. Prof. Orłowska made significant contributions to many fields of logic, such as proof theory, algebraic methods in logic and knowledge representation, and her work has been published in 3 monographs and over 100 articles in internationally acclaimed journals (...) and conference proceedings. The book also includes Prof. Orłowska’s autobiography, bibliography and a trialogue between her and the editors of the volume, as well as contributors' biographical notes, and is suitable for scholars and students of logic who are interested in understanding more about Prof. Orłowska’s work. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is a presentation of the H. Elzenberg's philosophical theory of the ethical ideal. I pay special attention to the most interesting, from the ethical point of view, parts of his concept. Elzen-berg proposed the ethical ideal, the so called ‘homo ethicus’. I present two ways of its realisation: melioristic and soteristic. My aim is also to prove that Elzenberg’s theory demonstrates that some features of ethical activity distinguish a human being from the background of (...) the natural world and make them exceptional. These attributes include: the realisation of the perfect values such as the good and the beauty, having an ethical will, self-sacrifice, aspiring to perfection and moral salvation. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine whether relational mobility on a country level related to individuals’ tendencies to restrict their movement following the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic and following the issuance of stay-at-home orders in their country. We use data on geographic mobility, composed of records of geolocation information provided via mobile phones, to examine changes in geographic mobility at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We show that individuals in countries with higher RM tended to decrease their geographic (...) mobility more than those in countries with lower RM following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Similar results were found for wealth gross domestic product, but were independent of RM. These results suggest that individuals in countries with higher RM were more responsive to calls to reduce geographic mobility. (shrink)

This book is a qualitative, interpretive, phenomenological, and interdisciplinary, examination of food and food practices and their meanings in the modern world. Each chapter thematically focuses upon a particular food practice and on some key details of the examined practice, or on the practice’s social and cultural impact.

Atypical emotion interpretation has been widely reported in individuals with borderline personality disorder ; however, empirical studies reported mixed results so far. We suggest that discrepancies in observations of emotion interpretation by iBPD can be explained by biases related to their fear of rejection and abandonment, i.e., the three moral emotions of anger, disgust, and contempt. In this study, we hypothesized that iBPD would show a higher tendency to correctly interpret these three displays of social rejection and attribute more negative (...) valence. A total of 28 inpatient iBPDs and 28 healthy controls were asked to judge static and dynamic facial expressions in terms of emotions, valence, and self-reported arousal evoked by the observed faces. Our results partially confirmed our expectations. The iBPD correctly interpreted the three unambiguous moral emotions. Contempt, a complex emotion with a difficulty in recognizing facial expressions, was recognized better by iBPD than by healthy controls. All negative emotions were judged more negatively by iBPD than by controls, but no difference was observed in the neutral or positive emotion. Alexithymia and anxiety trait and state levels were controlled in all analyses. (shrink)

This article presents the ethical implications for social science research emerging from our study on interpersonal communication after a laryngectomy. By tracing the evolution of our approach through specific research experiences and participant feedback, we provide empirical support for a flexible, multidimensional, and relational understanding of key ethical concepts, such as vulnerability and the researcher-participant relationship. Our approach has shifted from institutionally imposed rigid categorizations and somewhat stereotypical treatment of both the research group and the researcher-participant relationship to an emphasis (...) on building relationships founded on mutual care and rapport. We argue that this revised perspective fosters ethical collaboration that is beneficial and secure for all parties involved, and we offer practical examples of its implementation in research practice. (shrink)

Climate change exacts a devastating toll on health that is rarely incorporated into the economic calculus of climate action. By aligning health and environmental policy and collaborating across borders, governments and industries can develop powerful initiatives to promote both environmental and human health.

STORY L, MAYFIELD‐JOHNSON S, DOWNEY LH, ANDERSON‐LEWIS C, YOUNG R and DAY P. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 373–384 Getting on Target with Community Health Advisors (GOTCHA): an innovative stroke prevention projectHealth disparities along with insufficient numbers of healthcare providers and resources have created a need for effective and efficient grassroots approaches to improve community health. Community‐based participatory research (CBPR), more specifically the utilization of community health advisors (CHAs), is one such strategy. The Getting on Target with Community Health Advisors (...) (GOTCHA) project convened an interdisciplinary team to answer the call from 10 counties in the rural Mississippi Delta area of ‘The Stroke Belt’ to meet the region’s identified health needs, and to impact the health of a disparaged state. This article explores this CBPR project including the community involvement strategies, innovative CHA training curriculum, evaluation plan, and implications to healthcare professionals, particularly nurses. (shrink)

We are far too willing to reject the belief that much of what we see in life is random.Uncertainty is an everyday experience in medical research and practice, but theory and methods for reasoning clearly about uncertainty were developed only recently. Confirmation bias, selective memory, and many misleading heuristics are known enemies of the insightful clinician, researcher, or citizen, but other snares worth exposing may lurk in how we reason about uncertainty in our everyday lives. Here we draw attention to (...) a cognitive bias that is little known—or possibly unknown—to those outside the field of probability pedagogy. Described by Konold as the... (shrink)

A study was carried out involving persons representing high-anxious, low-anxious and repressor types according to the classification of Weinberger, Davidson & Schwartz, selected using the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale and the trait anxiety scale of the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. In seeking indicators of anxiety in repressors and high-anxious groups, the authors decided to analyse the level of dogmatism observed in utterance texts. The research was intended to determine whether styles of coping with threatening stimuli condition the level of dogmatism, (...) which was regarded as a cognitive defence mechanism against anxiety. The method of formal analysis of texts was used to identify their level of dogmatism, measured using the Dogmatism Quotient developed by Ertel. The highest value of the Dogmatism Quotient was recorded for repressors, and the lowest for the low-anxious subjects; a similar pattern was also observed for certain particular dimensions of dogmatism. Statistically significant differences in the level of dogmatism were found between the repressor and lowanxious groups and between the high-anxious and low-anxious groups. The study confirmed the previously discovered pattern whereby repressors exhibit more similarities to high-anxious than to low-anxious persons. (shrink)

Life typically becomes an object of reflection when it is seen to be under threat. In particular, humans have a tendency to engage in thinking about life (instead of just continuing to live it) when being confronted with the prospect of death: be it the death of individuals due to illness, accident or old age; the death of whole ethnic or national groups in wars and other forms of armed conflict; but also of whole populations, be they human or nonhuman. (...) Even though Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene is first and foremost concerned with life--understood as both a biological and social phenomenon--it is the narrative about the impending death of the human population (i.e., about the extinction of the human species), that provides a context for its argument. "Anthropocene" names a geo-historical period in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat to life on earth. However, rather than as a scientific descriptor, the term serves here primarily as an ethical injunction to think critically about human and nonhuman agency in the universe. Restrained in tone yet ambitious in scope, the book takes some steps towards outlining a minimal ethics thought on a universal scale. The task of such minimal ethics is to consider how humans can assume responsibility for various occurrences in the universe, across different scales, and how they can respond to the tangled mesh of connections and relations unfolding in it. Its goal is not so much to tell us how to live but rather to allow us to rethink "life" and what we can do with it, in whatever time we have left. The book embraces a speculative mode of thinking that is more akin to the artist's method; it also includes a photographic project by the author."--Publisher's description. (shrink)