That's according to Niall Lucy in his latest book, PoMo Oz. Pitting his humour and intellect against the conservative power brokers, Lucy champions the notion that free thought, not free trade, is the basis of democracy.

'There is nothing outside the text.' Possibly no single statement has caused such a storm in critical theory as this famous observation by the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. While it is often misunderstood as meaning that nothing is real and that political actions are therefore pointless, Debating Derrida demonstrates that Derrida's philosophy does not lack political conviction. Niall Lucy examines three key terms - text, writing and differance - as they are used in three famous debates: Derrida's disputes (...) over speech-acts with John R. Searle, over discourse with Michel Foucault and over apartheid. Lucy also takes up the issue of Derrida's relationship to postmodernism and questions the 'political imperative' of the need to justify philosophy and the humanities in general according to a notion of their 'usefulness'. Debating Derrida decisively shows that instead of disagreeing with Derrida, we should rather be defending him. (shrink)

What I was looking for were folk music records and the first one I saw was Odetta on the Tradition label. I went into the listening booth to hear it. Odetta was great. I had never heard of her unti...

(2009). Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things. Angelaki: Vol. 14, Ecopoetics and Pedagogies, pp. 21-28.

This paper responds to the commentaries from Stacy Carter and Alan Cribb. We pick up on two main themes in our response. First, we reflect on how the process of setting standards for empirical bioethics research entails drawing boundaries around what research counts as empirical bioethics research, and we discuss whether the standards agreed in the consensus process draw these boundaries correctly. Second, we expand on the discussion in the original paper of the role and significance of the concept of (...) ‘integrating’ empirical methods and ethical argument as a standard for research practice within empirical bioethics. (shrink)

The use of psychometric tools to investigate the impact of school-based wellbeing programs raises a number of ethical issues around students’ rights, confidentiality and protection. Researchers have explicit ethical obligations to protect participants from potential psychological harms, but guidance is needed for effectively navigating disclosure of identifiable confidential information that indicates signs of psychological distress. Drawing on a large-scale study examining student, school, and system-based factors that impact the implementation of a school-based social and emotional learning program, we describe patterns (...) of distress attained from quantitative and qualitative questions and describe the process that we evolved to monitor and disclose sensitive mental health information, providing one example of how researchers might effectively address the responsibilities that emerge when collecting sensitive information from students within an education system. The patterns and processes that emerged illustrate that the inclusion of mental distress information can elicit important insights, but also brings responsibilities for minimising risks and maximising benefits. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue of the same title sets out the context for a critical examination of contemporary developments in sociotechnical systems deployed in the name of security. Our focus is on technologies of tracking, with their claims to enable the identification of those who comprise legitimate targets for the use of violent force. Taking these claims as deeply problematic, we join a growing body of scholarship on the technopolitical logics that underpin an increasingly violent landscape of institutions, (...) infrastructures, and actions, promising protection to some but arguably contributing to our collective insecurity. We examine the asymmetric distributions of sociotechnologies of security; their deadly and injurious effects; and the legal, ethical, and moral questions that haunt their operations. (shrink)

Population-level biomedical research offers new opportunities to improve population health, but also raises new challenges to traditional systems of research governance and ethical oversight. Partly in response to these challenges, various models of public involvement in research are being introduced. Yet, the ways in which public involvement should meet governance challenges are not well understood. We conducted a qualitative study with 36 experts and stakeholders using the World Café method to identify key governance challenges and explore how public involvement can (...) meet these challenges. This brief report discusses four cross-cutting themes from the study: the need to move beyond individual consent; issues in benefit and data sharing; the challenge of delineating and understanding publics; and the goal of clarifying justifications for public involvement. The report aims to provide a starting point for making sense of the relationship between public involvement and the governance of population-level biomedical research, showing connections, potential solutions and issues arising at their intersection. We suggest that, in population-level biomedical research, there is a pressing need for a shift away from conventional governance frameworks focused on the individual and towards a focus on collectives, as well as to foreground ethical issues around social justice and develop ways to address cultural diversity, value pluralism and competing stakeholder interests. There are many unresolved questions around how this shift could be realised, but these unresolved questions should form the basis for developing justificatory accounts and frameworks for suitable collective models of public involvement in population-level biomedical research governance. (shrink)

COVID-19 continues to dominate 2020 and is likely to be a feature of our lives for some time to come. Given this, how should health systems respond ethically to the persistent challenges of responding to the ongoing impact of the pandemic? Relatedly, what ethical values should underpin the resetting of health services after the initial wave, knowing that local spikes and further waves now seem inevitable? In this editorial, we outline some of the ethical challenges confronting those running health services (...) as they try to resume non-COVID-related services, and the downstream ethical implications these have for healthcare professionals’ day-to-day decision making. This is a phase of recovery, resumption and renewal; a form of reset for health services.1 This reset phase will define the ‘new normal' for healthcare delivery, and it offers an opportunity to reimagine and change services for the better. There are difficulties, however, healthcare systems are already weakened by austerity and the first wave of COVID-19 and remain under stress as the pandemic continues. The reset period is operating alongside, rather than at the end, of the pandemic and this creates difficult ethical choices. ### Balancing the greater good with individual care Pandemics—and public health emergencies more generally—reinforce approaches to ethics that emphasise or derive from the interests of communities, rather than those grounded in the claims of the autonomous individual. The response has been to draw on more public health focused ethics, ‘if demand outstrips the ability to deliver to existing standards, more strictly utilitarian considerations will have to be applied, and decisions about how to meet the individual's need will give way to decisions about how to maximise overall benefit’.2 Alongside this, effective …. (shrink)

The editors of the _Journal of Medical Ethics_ support the call of the UK Health Alliance on Climate for urgent action to ensure that the current Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ‘finally delivers climate justice for Africa and vulnerable countries’. 1 As they note ‘Africa has suffered disproportionately although it has done little to cause the crisis’. The burden of climate change has thus far fallen disproportionately on Global South countries. The monsoon (...) in Pakistan this year killed over 1100 people and the public health implications of the flooding might affect the health of over 5 million people. 2 The South Asian monsoon impacts the lives of a billion people and the flooding associated with wet seasons is likely to occur eight times more frequently in future years than at present. 3 For many pacific islands such as Kiribati,... (shrink)

There is a growing interest in the ethics of Health Policy and Systems Research, and especially in areas that have particular ethical salience across HPSR. Hyder et al provide an initial framework to consider this, and call for more conceptual and empirical work. In this paper, we respond by examining the ethical issues that arose for researchers over the course of conducting three HPSR studies in Kenya in which health managers and providers were key participants. All three studies involved qualitative (...) work including observations and individual and group interviews. Many of the ethical dilemmas researchers faced only emerged over the course of the fieldwork, or on completion, and were related to interactions and relationships between individuals operating at different levels or positions in health/research systems. The dilemmas reveal significant ethical challenges for these forms of HPSR, and show that potential ‘solutions’ to dilemmas often lead to new issues and complications. Our experiences support the value of research ethics frameworks, and suggest that these can be enriched by incorporating careful consideration of context embedded social relations into research planning and conduct. Many of these essential relational elements of ethical practice, and of producing quality data, are given stronger emphasis in social science research ethics than in epidemiological, clinical or biomedical research ethics, and are particularly relevant where health systems are understood as social and political constructs. We conclude with practical and research implications. (shrink)

This article is the result of a research that was carried out to obtain the degree of Master's Degree in Education in the postgraduate program of the Faculty of Education of the Popular University of Cesar and monographic work of the degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science and Mathematics and Physics of the same university. The main objective of this study was to analyze the influence of the family environment on the learning and academic performance of students in tenth grade (...) trigonometry from a public educational institution in the city of Valledupar. Applying a mixed method, the research employed a simultaneous integrated design, where quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analyzed at the same time. This approach allowed for a complete and nuanced understanding of the research questions, providing a holistic view by exploring family dynamics and environment and how these impact performance and understanding of trigonometry. As for the implications for educational practice, it is evident that there is a need to implement strategies that involve families in the teaching-learning process of trigonometry, since the data collected revealed a clear correlation between the level of parental participation in education and students' understanding of trigonometric concepts. In addition, the study found that a positive and supportive family environment contributed significantly to higher academic achievement in trigonometry. (shrink)

Esta investigación reconoce la paz como un escenario en el que el conflicto está presente y en el que las diferentes posiciones deben aprender a convivir. Para ello, se plantea la pregunta: ¿Cómo se han transformado las prácticas pedagógicas de docentes y profesores en los últimos 20 años para la reconstrucción del tejido social en territorios afectados por el conflicto armado en Colombia? Estas prácticas buscan mediar las relaciones entre los individuos y sus tensiones, enseñando resiliencia y la capacidad de (...) mitigar los efectos negativos que las expresiones de violencia pueden tener en el desarrollo de los jóvenes que viven en este contexto. (shrink)

The Chinese traditionally have valued sons over daughters, depending on their sons to support them in old age. Recent changes, however, suggest a shift toward greater gender equality, with daughters also keeping elderly parents. The present study, undertaken in 1979 in the People's Republic of China, assessed attitudes of 48 university staff members toward financial support for aged parents and living arrangements in old age, with an emphasis on gender differences. We found that most sons and daughters gave financial support (...) to their parents regularly and most men and women still believed adult children should share housing with their aged parents. In this sample, the sons assumed this responsibility far more than the daughters, and few of the respondents believed their parents should live with a daughter. However, when asked to project their own preferences in old age, sons thought they would prefer to live with a son, but daughters feel they would like to live with a daughter. These results are discussed in terms of two important cultural changes, the new marriage laws and the one-child policy, that were implemented at the time of the study. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic will generate vexing ethical issues for the foreseeable future and many journals will be open to content that is relevant to our collective effort to meet this challenge. While the pandemic is clearly the critical issue of the moment, it’s important that other issues in medical ethics continue to be addressed as well. As can be seen in this issue, the Journal of Medical Ethics will uphold its commitment to publishing high quality papers on the full array (...) of medical ethics. At the same time, JME aims to be a premiere home for ground-breaking scholarship on the ethical issues raised by COVID-19. Toward this end, we have a number of papers that are freely available online and for which production has been fast-tracked.1–5 A challenge for authors who want to write about the pandemic is the rapidly evolving nature of the situation and the time it takes for journal content to be reviewed and published, even when fast-tracked. For that reason, all authors who would like to submit a paper on the pandemic can also submit a post to the JME blog prior to submitting a full paper to the journal. Those interested in writing for the JME blog should contact one of its editors, Hazem Zohny or Mike King. Over the last 3 weeks, 30 high-quality commentaries on the pandemic have been posted to the blog. These posts are circulated widely via the JME Twitter and Facebook feeds and have stimulated significant …. (shrink)

Cancer and its treatment pose challenges that affect not only patients but also their significant others, including intimate partners. Accumulating evidence suggests that couples’ ability to communicate effectively plays a major role in the psychological adjustment of both individuals and the quality of their relationship. Two key conceptual models have been proposed to account for how couple communication impacts psychological and relationship adjustment: the social-cognitive processing (SCP) model and the relationship intimacy (RI) model. These models posit different mechanisms and outcomes, (...) and thus have different implications for intervention. The purpose of this project is to test and compare the utility of these models using comprehensive and methodologically rigorous methods. Aims are: (1) to examine the overall fit of the SCP and RI models in explaining patient and partner psychological and relationship adjustment as they occur on a day-to-day basis and over the course of 1 year; (2) to examine the fit of the models for different subgroups (males vs. females, and patients vs. partners); and (3) to examine the utility of various methods of assessing communication by examining the degree to which baseline indices from different measurement strategies predict self-reported adjustment at 1-year follow up. The study employs a longitudinal, multi-method approach to examining communication processes including: standard self-report questionnaires assessing process and outcome variables collected quarterly over the course of 1 year; smartphone-based ecological momentary assessments to sample participant reports in real time; and laboratory-based couple conversations from which we derive observational measures of communicative behavior and affective expression, as well as vocal indices of emotional arousal. Participants are patients with stage II-IV breast, colon, rectal, or lung cancer and their spouses/partners, recruited from two NCI-designated comprehensive cancer centers. Results will be published in scientific journals, presented at scientific conferences, and conveyed to a larger audience through infographics and social media outlets. Findings will inform theory, measurement, and the design and implementation of efficacious interventions aimed at optimizing both patient and partner well-being. (shrink)

In a number of membrane-bound viruses, ion channels are formed by integral membrane proteins. These channel proteins include M2 from influenza A, NB from influenza B, and, possibly, Vpu from HIV-1. M2 is important in facilitating uncoating of the influenza A viral genome and is the target of amantadine, an anti-influenza drug. The biological roles of NB and Vpu are less certain. In all cases, the protein contains a single transmembrane α-helix close to its N-terminus. Channels can be formed by (...) homo-oligomerization of these proteins, yielding bundles of transmembrane helices that span the membrane and surround a central ion-permeable pore. Molecular modeling may be used to integrate and interpret available experimental data concerning the structure of such transmembrane pores. This has proved successful for the M2 channel domain, where two independently derived models are in agreement with one another, and with solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) data. Simulations based on channel models may yield insights into possible ion conduction and selectivity mechanisms. BioEssays 20:992–1000, 1998. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

A fundamental fact about human minds is that they are never truly alone: all minds are steeped in situated interaction. That social interaction matters is recognized by any experimentalist who seeks to exclude its influence by studying individuals in isolation. On this view, interaction complicates cognition. Here, we explore the more radical stance that interaction co-constitutes cognition: that we benefit from looking beyond single minds toward cognition as a process involving interacting minds. All around the cognitive sciences, there are approaches (...) that put interaction center stage. Their diverse and pluralistic origins may obscure the fact that collectively, they harbor insights and methods that can respecify foundational assumptions and fuel novel interdisciplinary work. What might the cognitive sciences gain from stronger interactional foundations? This represents, we believe, one of the key questions for the future. Writing as a transdisciplinary collective assembled from across the classic cognitive science hexagon and beyond, we highlight the opportunity for a figure-ground reversal that puts interaction at the heart of cognition. The interactive stance is a way of seeing that deserves to be a key part of the conceptual toolkit of cognitive scientists. (shrink)

The elaborated intrusion (EI) theory of desire (Kavanagh, Andrade, & May, 2005) attributes the motivational force of cravings to cognitive elaboration, including imagery, of apparently spontaneous thoughts that intrude into awareness. We report a questionnaire study in which respondents rated a craving for food or drink. Questionnaire items derived from EI theory formed a single factor alongside factors for anticipated reward/relief, resistance, and opportunity. In a multiple regression predicting strength of craving, the first three factors accounted for 36% of the (...) variance. Opportunity did not enter the model. In a second study, the difference between individuals' strong and weak cravings to take part in a sporting activity was shown to be related to visual, auditory, and general imagery, and to anticipated reward or relief from engaging in the activity. Implications for treatment of craving-related disorders are discussed in the light of these results and of other research indicating that interference with imagery can reduce the strength of craving. (shrink)

The age-old debate about the relation between science and society has, in the last two decades, materialized in novel forms at many universities. In this article, we follow the reconfiguration of relevance at one institute of higher education that aspires to become an impact-driven university. We employ a socio-technical instrumentation perspective to this institutional transformation so that we can follow how relevance is being enacted in terms of impact at different organizational levels. To grasp the links between organizational changes and (...) the conditions for academic practices, we analyze three policy instruments in-the-making and in-use: impact narratives as novel evaluation tool, the creation of impact profiles as part of human resource policy and new data infrastructures to monitor impact on the sustainable development goals. We investigate their problematizations and imaginaries through qualitative methods, namely document analysis and semi-structured interviews with researchers at various career levels and faculties at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Through the cases, we analyze how these new impact-oriented instruments open up or close down opportunities for academic practices. Our observations show that the reconfiguration of relevance as impact implies the advancement of a strategic approach to relevance and to academic work and institutions more generally. Ultimately, the site-specific case also includes bottom-up problematizations of impact that lead us to reflect on the limitations of a policy instrument approach and stress the importance of addressing the politics of the social relations of ‘relevant’ scientific work. (shrink)

In response to the phenomenon of women converting to Islam, a body of research has emerged, engaging with the question, ‘Why are Western women, raised in liberal contexts, converting to Islam?’ This line of enquiry is not limited to academic literature. In recent years, converts to Islam have faced intense scrutiny in mainstream media across Europe. This article contributes an analysis of documentaries to the study of representations of female converts to Islam, focusing particularly on the British documentary Make Me (...) a Muslim and the Swiss documentary Les Converties d’Allah. We suggest that comparing these two documentaries illuminates certain common narrative threads in media representations of female converts to Islam across different European contexts. In this article, we firstly situate this research within existing literature on gender and conversion to Islam and outline our approach to the study of documentaries on women’s conversion to Islam. Secondly, we analyse the two documentaries, focusing on their shared concerns, namely gender equality and women’s oppression, and the familial environment of the female convert. We argue that paying attention to how female converts are represented illuminates some of the ways in which European framings of the ‘in-betweenness’ of female converts to Islam create notions of female converts as ‘vulnerable-fanatics’ prone to ‘radicalisation’, and threatened by ‘oppressive’ Islam. We demonstrate how female converts participating in documentaries at times complicate and talk back to apprehensions regarding equality, oppression and radicalisation. Finally, we focus in a similar way on understandings of female converts as ‘troublemakers’ within their family environments. Throughout the analysis, we show how the figure of the female convert as vulnerable-fanatic and as family troublemaker is gendered and interlaced with concerns about essentialised cultural difference and radicalisation. (shrink)

This study uses the longitudinal data from the Building a New Life in Australia survey to examine the relationships between human capital and labour market participation and employment status among recently arrived/approved humanitarian migrants. We find that the likelihood of participating in the labour force is higher for those who had pre-immigration paid job experience, completed study/job training and have better job searching knowledge/skills in Australia and possess higher proficiency in spoken English. We find that the chance of getting a (...) paid job is negatively related to having better pre-immigration education, but it is positively related to having unpaid work experience and job searching skills in Australia, and better health. We also explore the ethical implications of the findings. (shrink)

Background Caring is a core function of nurses and it confers upon them ethical obligations as ethical agents. Failure to carry out such ethical obligations raises ethical concerns. This study was not intended to explore ethical concerns, but the reported findings reveal problems which have ethical implications. This paper aims to elucidate the ethical issues inherent in the findings and propose strategies to mitigate them. Research design and methods An exploratory-descriptive qualitative design was used within a larger Action Research Study. (...) Data were collected through focus group discussions with nurse/midwives, and through exit interviews which were conducted with the women who participated in the study on their day of discharge. Six focus group discussions and thirty exit interviews were conducted, and data were analysed through thematic analysis. Participants and research context The study took place at selected maternal and child healthcare settings in Lilongwe, Malawi. The participants were nurse/midwives and women who were admitted in maternal and child healthcare settings and were purposively sampled. Ethical considerations Ethical approval was obtained from the relevant ethics committee and all ethical guidelines were followed in the conduct of the study. Findings The findings are presented under three themes which emerged from the data. The findings reveal effects of staff shortages on patient outcomes, problems experienced in low resource clinical settings and disrespectful nurse/patient communication. Conclusion The findings reveal that institutional factors constrain moral agency and patient safety is severely compromised in some of the clinical settings in Malawi which raises serious ethical concerns. (shrink)

The fashion industry needs to become more circular, given the unsustainable levels of waste it produces. Our research empirically explores and theoretically develops how adopting a virtue ethics approach can encourage and support second-hand clothing consumption as a form of reuse and a way of practicing sustainability. Based on ethnographic interviews with consumers who shop in UK charity shops, our grounded theory study focuses on how consumers experience second-hand clothing consumption as constitutive of sources of (in)action that encourage or inhibit (...) virtuous, sustainable behaviour. We find that pleasure and/or shame or guilt (pain) are key to enabling virtuous moral decision-making towards reuse and sustainability. We furthermore argue that seduction and conversion, hand in hand with pleasure, act as levers supporting such moral decision-making, mitigating aversions and wayward desires that obstruct good moral intentions to consume second-hand clothing. By engaging empirically with moral decision-making, our research theoretically advances scholarship on virtue ethics and second-hand clothing consumption, whilst contributing to an ethically informed vision of the circular economy. We conclude with implications for charity retail practices in support of circularity and sustainability informed by a virtue ethics perspective, as well as suggestions for future research. (shrink)

To study how religiosity affects family business goals, we merge literatures on goal setting, temporal orientation, and family business to argue that family business goals can be distinguished into short-term and long-term orientations and propose that religiosity affects both orientations, but to varying degrees. Drawing on a sample of private U.S. family businesses and applying partial least squares structural equations modeling, we find tentative support that religiosity has a stronger positive effect on long-term goal orientation than on short-term goal orientation. (...) We discuss implications for theory development and future research involving religiosity and family business goals. (shrink)

Globalization theories posit organizational convergence, suggesting that Codes of Ethics will become commonplace and include greater consideration of global issues. This study explores the degree to which the Codes of Ethics of 157 corporations on the Global 500 and/or Fortune 500 lists include the "third generation" of corporate social responsibility. Unlike first generation ethics, which focus on the legal context of corporate behavior, and second generation ethics, which locate responsibility to groups directly associated with the corporation, third generation ethics transcend (...) both the profit motive and the immediate corporate environment. Third generation ethics are grounded in responsibilities to the larger interconnected environment. The results of the study suggest convergence, insofar as Codes of Ethics are becoming standard communication features of corporations across region and industrial sector but still manifest a primary concern with profits and those behaviors which are mandated by law. Only corporations headquartered in the European Union demonstrate a significant degree of global consciousness and reflexivity. However, there is some evidence that third generation ethics and thinking are becoming part of the corporate landscape. More then three quarters of the corporations made at least some reference to third generation ethics. (shrink)

Using a parallel mixed-methods design, the current study examined university students’ perceptions of academic cheating through collecting and analyzing both the quantitative and qualitative data. Our quantitative findings corroborate previous research that male students have engaged more in academic cheating than females based on students’ self-reports, and that undergraduate students are less willing to discuss issues on academic cheating as compared with their graduate counterparts. Five themes emerged from the thematic analysis of the qualitative data: flexible definitions for cheating, environmental (...) promotion of cheating, the moral transgression of cheating, cheating as an ambiguous justification, and cheating as a conscious decision making process. The mixed-methods findings indicate that there is no relationship between students’ gender or classification and their endorsements of the qualitative themes. However, non-White students are more likely to endorse the theme “cheating as an ambiguous justification.” Implications for reducing and preventing academic cheating at the university level are discussed. (shrink)

A growing body of literature critical of ethics review boards has drawn attention to the processes used to determine the ethical merit of research. Citing criticism on the bureaucratic nature of ethics review processes, this literature provides a useful provocation for (re)considering how the ethics review might be enacted. Much of this criticism focuses on how ethics review boards _deliberate,_ with particular attention given to the lack of transparency and opportunities for researcher recourse that characterise ethics review processes. Centered specifically (...) on the conduct of ethics review boards convened within university settings, this paper draws on these inherent criticisms to consider the ways that ethics review boards might enact more communicative and deliberative practices. Outlining a set of principles against which ethics review boards might establish strategies for engaging with researchers and research communities, this paper draws attention to how _Deliberative communication_, _Engagement with researchers_ and the _Distribution of responsibility_ for the ethics review might be enacted in the day-to-day practice of the university human ethics review board. This paper develops these themes via a conceptual lens derived from Habermas’ (The theory of communicative action. Volume 1: Reason and the rationalization of society, 1984 ) articulation of ‘communicative action’ and Fraser’s (Social Text, 25(26), 56–80, 1990 ) consideration of ‘strong publics’ to cast consideration of the role that human ethics review boards might play in supporting university research cultures. _Deliberative communication_, _Engagement with researchers_ and the _Distribution of responsibility_ provide useful conceptual prompts for considering how ethics review boards might undertake their work. (shrink)

In this introduction, we argue for a basic idea. Community-based spaces for promoting forgiveness and memory-making bear the promise of promoting some of the cultural transformations needed for thick, structural reconciliation. As we show by discussing some recent examples taken from the Colombian context of the past decade, these spaces do not compete, but actually complement a pragmatic, thin institutional design for reconciliation. This idea, as we discuss here, serves as the common thread connecting the articles in this special issue. (...) The texts reflect on the practice of forgiveness and some of its specific contours in the context of the Colombian conflict. (shrink)