This qualitative study investigated the personal and professional stances of 40 health and social care professionals confronted with assisted suicide of older persons living in nursing homes or supported by social welfare or home care and support services in French-speaking Switzerland. Requests of assisted suicide triggered questions with regard to the professional mission, the quality of accompaniment, values, and ethical principles. Four types of stances emerged from the analysis performed according to the principles of the grounded theory: favorable in principle, (...) professional compromise, personal compromise, and opposed in principle. Each stance results from the combination of several dimensions: personal or professional concordance or compatibility with assisted suicide; implication in, and impact of, the process; appreciation of the process; and satisfaction with the resources at disposal. The differentiated stances adopted by professionals depend largely on their way of interpreting their mission, deontology, and the relationship to the older person. (shrink)

Applying the idea of conversation broadly, Penny A. Weiss offers a collection of essays that are either constructed dialogues, letters, or discussions about voice and silencing. Conversation emerges as both a theory and a method of feminist political inquiry and practice. The most vocal participants in Weiss' conversations are historical political thinkers both within the Western canon (Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau) and beyond its confines (Astell, Coopers, Wollstonecraft, de Pizan). Other figures appear as well, from Anita Hill and U.S. (...) Supreme Court justices to the author's own students and children. Conflicts between feminists and anti-feminists frame some essays, while others represent debates within feminism. This unique collection is unified by a commitment to dialogue as a part of feminist ethics, strategy, and pedagogy, and builds upon the belief that a conversational approach does not preclude disagreement or contrasting stories, but requires them. Conversations With Feminism is an important book for students and scholars of political theory, philosophy, and women's studies. (shrink)

Author note: Penny A. Weiss, Associate Professor of Political Science at Purdue University, is the author of Gendered Community: Rousseau, Sex, and Politics. Marilyn Friedman, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Washington University, is the author of What Are Friends For? Feminist Perspectives on Personal Relationships and Moral Theory.

Weiss (political science, Purdue U.) wades through the tangled prose and ideas of the 18th-century French philosopher to resolve some of his male-female role contradictions. She finds that his gender-based division of labor was designed to make everyone dependent on the whole society, rather than to relegate women to a subordinate role, but that the actual arrangements he suggests are based on a purely antifeminist culture. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Minds, Brains and Biology -- A Body of Knowledge -- Towards an Aesthetics of Behavior.

The stage-like “exhibitionary space,” which members of the public visit, has received more scholarly scrutiny than the pedagogical and curatorial activities that take place in the back rooms of museums. This essay draws attention to the behind-the-scenes places in university museums as a pedagogic site where students learn through the close examination of artefacts. It addresses the social context of learning through the study of incomplete objects, which may involve handling them. This process of using artefacts to engage with different (...) groups of people (collectors, curators, teaching staff and students) contributes to the physical and intellectual development of academic disciplines. It enhances the museum's institutional mission and survival as an incorporated body that is embedded in a greater whole, the university itself. The Ashmolean Museum, in the University of Oxford, and the Balfourian and Sibbaldian Museums, in the University of Edinburgh, were founded in the seventeenth century. But whereas the Ashmolean survived as an institution, the first Edinburgh collections did not. These historical antecedents serve as a backdrop to a discussion of how one particular example, the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (CUMAA), trains new generations of learners to evaluate empirical evidence and by working with different communities of users—students and the wider public—it ensures its survival. (shrink)

This collection opens with an inquiry into the assumptions and methods of the historical study of culture, comparing the new cultural history with the old. Thirteen essays follow, each defining a problem within a particular culture. In the first section, Biography and Autobiography, three scholars explore historically changing types of self-conception, each reflecting larger cultural meanings; essays included examine Italian Renaissance biographers and the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Mohandas Gandhi. A second group of contributors explore problems raised by the (...) writing of history itself, especially as it relates to a notion of culture. Here examples are drawn from the writings of Thucydides, Jacob Burckhardt, and the art historians Alois Riegl and Josef Strzygowski. In the third section, Politics, Nationalism, and Culture, the essays explore relationships between cultural creativity and national identity, with case studies focusing on the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, the place of Castile within the national history of Spain, and the impact of World War I on work of Thomas Mann. The final section, Cultural Translation, raises the complex questions of cultural influence and the transmission of traditions over time through studies of Philo of Alexandria's interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, Erasmus' use of Socrates, Jean Bodin's conception of Roman law, and adaptations of the Hebrew Bible for American children. (shrink)

Women, Modernism, and Performance is an interdisciplinary 2004 study that looks at a variety of texts and modes of performance in order to clarify the position of women within - and in relation to - modern theatre history. Considering drama, fiction and dance, as well as a range of performance events such as suffrage demonstrations, lectures, and legal trials, Penny Farfan expands on theatre historical narratives that note the centrality of female characters in male-authored modern plays but that do (...) not address the efforts of women artists to develop alternatives both to mainstream theatre practice and to the patriarchal avant garde. Focusing on Henrik Ibsen, Elizabeth Robins, Ellen Terry, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Edith Craig, Radclyffe Hall and Isadora Duncan, Farfan identifies different objectives, strategies, possibilities and limitations of feminist-modernist performance practice and suggests how the artists in question transformed the representation of gender in art and life. (shrink)

In this sense the collection offers a model of how international collaborative work should proceed. The book is the product of a workshop held at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL) in Onati, Spain.

Renewed Accountability for Access and Excellence provides a forum for contributing scholars and practitioners to advance the discussion of Tenuto’s democratic professional practice in education by sharing additional insights, perspectives, and implications for both policy and practice. Consistent with the model itself, this collective work is intended to encourage meaningful conversations and critical thinking about inclusionary practices, equitable access, excellence, and renewed accountability for teaching and leading.

ABSTRACTBringing philosophical work on friendship to bear on the growing body of critique about the state of the neoliberal academy, this paper defends academic friendship. Initially a vignette illustrates the key features of academic friendship and the multiple demands on academics to account for themselves in the neoliberal university. We locate academic friendship in the context of that neoliberal university before discussing managerialist threats to this relationship. We indicate how the performativity-driven working environment contrasts radically and unfavourably with some defining (...) features of friendship. Academic friendship, we argue, can entail generative intellectual and moral activity and growth though trusting and honest reflection on research and scholarship, and teaching and learning. Contending that it may offer an antidote to aspects of the neoliberal academy, in our concluding section academic friendship is highlighted as both a defence and a means of resistance against the worst excesses of the university in dark times. (shrink)

Recognising the relevance of Iris Marion Young's work to education, this article poses the question: given Iris Young's commitment to both social justice and to recognition of the political and ethical significance of difference, to what extent does her position allow for transnational interventions in education to foster democracy? First, it explores some of Iris Young's arguments on the relationship between democracy and social justice, with particular reference to their implications for education. Second, I argue that if her ideas are (...) extended to the issue of global justice, the strategies which she offers should be extended, at least when it comes to educational intervention, to allow for a wider range of actions in support of global justice through education for democracy than Iris Young's work so far seems to allow. The wider range of strategies which I propose call on western feminists and their governments to do more to promote democracy and social justice globally. This can be done in ways that are consistent with Iris Young's stipulation that transnational interference is permissible if undertaken against dominative harm. (shrink)

For democracies to thrive, citizens have to be taught to be democrats. How do people learn to be democrats in circumstances of diversity and plurality? We address this question via a discussion of three models of deliberative democracy: public reason (as exemplified by Rawls), discursive democracy (as exemplified by Benhabib) and communicative democracy (as exemplified by Young). Each of the three theorists contributes to an account of how to educate citizens by teaching talk. Against a commonly held assumption that the (...) protection of diversity in a pluralist democracy requires a thin conception of citizenship education, we defend a thick conception that simultaneously fosters autonomy and participation without sacrificing tolerance of diversity. (shrink)

Discourse analysis is a relatively recent form of inquiry without a strict step‐by‐step method. The methodology of discourse analysis has a longer history in Continental Europe than in other countries.1 The complex theoretical assumptions, the goals and the target (discourse) have been explicated, but the methodology may be applied in different ways. This paper will describe discourse analysis and give examples of some of the possible variations. It is the claim of this paper that discourse analysis deserves consideration as a (...) methodology for nursing inquiry. (shrink)

Some concerns raised by gender violence have been taken up by churches and individuals within them over the last ten years or so, but now the World Council of Churches has set up a project to work specifically on Overcoming Violence Against Women. The project has a three-fold task aimed at enabling constructive engagement with the issue of gender violence: to support and encourage the churches' to develop a network of concerned theologians; to establish an accessible resource base. The prevalence (...) of violence against women in all parts of society, including churches and Christian communities, raises theological questions. Some areas of language, doctrine and the interpretation of Scripture need to be examined and perhaps reconsidered, to provide theologies consistent with churches as communities of safety, respect and justice for women. (shrink)

Feminist scholars have been highly attentive to the ways that crises have become an everyday technique of global governance. They are particularly sensitive to the mechanisms through which ‘crisis management’ entrenches the power of particular economic orders and constrains the possibilities, and space, for contestation and critique. This paper seeks to contribute to but also to extend existing feminist research on financial crisis by arguing that, over the course of what has commonly been labelled the ‘global financial crisis’, the emergence (...) of ‘crisis governance feminism’ has enabled existing structures and mechanisms of gendered privilege, such as the global financial industry, to suppress calls for their overhaul and to re-entrench their power in the global political economy. Adopting a discursive approach to gender and governance that situates gender centrally in understanding governance discourses and their reproduction of common sense (about what people do, how they labour, where they invest and so on), this paper argues that the governance of crisis in the contemporary era, in particular the various actors, institutions, policies and ideas that have sought to describe and ‘contain’ the global financial crisis, are gendered. Gender has become, in the contemporary global political economy, a technique of governance, and with deleterious effects. Despite inciting more discussion of ‘gender’ in economic systems than ever before (particularly in terms of discussions of ‘economic competitiveness’), this paper argues that the ‘global financial crisis’ has precipitated and continues to reproduce techniques of governance that trivialise feminist concerns while further embedding a masculinised, white and elitist culture of global financial privilege. (shrink)

"A collection of essays on the early modern English writer, proto-feminist, and rhetorician Mary Astell. Includes discussions on human nature, equality, rationality, power, freedom, friendship, marriage, and education"--Provided by publisher.

All organisms possess mechanisms to repair double strand breaks (dsbs) generated in their DNA by damaging agents. Site‐specific dsbs are also introduced during V(D)J recombination. Four complementation groups of radiosensitive rodent mutants are defective in the repair of dsbs, and are unable to carry out V(D)J recombination effectively. The immune defect in Severe Combined Immunodeficient (scid) mice also results from an inability to undergo effective V(D)J recombination, and scid cell lines display a repair defect and belong to one of these (...) complementation groups. These findings indicate a mechanistic overlap between the processes of DNA repair and V(D)J recombination. Recently, two of the genes defined by these complementation groups have been identified and shown to encode components of DNA‐dependent protein kinase (DNA‐PK). We review here the three fields which have become linked by these findings, and discuss the involvement of DNA‐PK in dsb rejoining and in V(D)J recombination. (shrink)

Birth cohort studies can be used not only to generate population-level quantitative data, but also to recompose persons. The crux is how we understand data and persons. Recomposition entails scavenging for various (including unrecognised) data. It foregrounds the perspective and subjectivity of survey participants, but without forgetting the partiality and incompleteness of the accounts that it may generate. Although interested in the singularity of individuals, it attends to the historical and relational embeddedness of personhood. It examines the multiple and complex (...) temporalities that suffuse people’s lives, hence departing from linear notions of the life course. It implies involvement, as well as reflexivity, on the part of researchers. It embraces the heterogeneity and transformations over time of scientific archives and the interpretive possibilities, as well as incompleteness, of birth cohort studies data. Interested in the unfolding of lives over time, it also shines light on meaningful biographical moments. (shrink)

This article examines the phenomenon of Black Madonnas as a discrete grouping within the iconography of the Virgin. It addresses the question whether they are just black/indigenous/dark-skinned versions of the Virgin or whether their meaning goes far beyond Christianity. Are they venerated as the Mother of God or are they deities in their own right? They are political and personal, leading both to action and to healing journeys.

Miller (1956) identified his famous limit of 7 ± 2 items based in part on absolute identification—the ability to identify stimuli that differ on a single physical dimension, such as lines of different length. An important aspect of this limit is its independence from perceptual effects and its application across all stimulus types. Recent research, however, has identified several exceptions. We investigate an explanation for these results that reconciles them with Miller’s work. We find support for the hypothesis that the (...) exceptional stimulus types have more complex psychological representations, which can therefore support better identification. Our investigation uses data sets with thousands of observations for each participant, which allows the application of a new technique for identifying psychological representations: the structural forms algorithm of Kemp and Tenenbaum (2008). This algorithm supports inferences not possible with previous techniques, such as multidimensional scaling. (shrink)

An influential view of liberalism and its view of education holds that it is a western construct unsuited to non-western societies. Bikhu Parekh’s critique of liberal democracy is taken here as representative of that position. In challenging that view, this article shows through an analysis of recent policy that post-apartheid education in South Africa expresses a liberal view of education, just as the political order introduced in 1994 is a liberal one. If we adopt Parekh’s principle that societies should be (...) allowed to choose their own destinies, there are transcendental grounds for promoting liberalism and a liberal view of education outside of the liberal western democracies. (shrink)

Citizenship has traditionally been equated with borders and boundaries and, in particular, membership of a nation-state. Motivated by recent interest in the crossing of boundaries and processes of inclusion which operate across a common basis such as the nation-state, this article explores the ways in which international relations were implicitly and explicitly embedded in constructions of British citizenship in the 1940s. Focusing on representations of English girls in literature relating to the education and leisure of girls, this article identifies and (...) explores four international aspects of citizenship. First, it addresses the ways in which British citizenship was defined through an implicit or explicit juxtaposition with the citizenship associated with other nation-states. This international dimension worked to delineate boundaries. Second, the article examines how British citizens were defined as members of a community which transcended the nation. Following this, it explores the expectation that girls required international knowledge in order to effectively fulfil their duties as British citizens. Finally, the article investigates some of the ways in which British citizenship involved international responsibilities. Although some aspects of girls’ citizenship challenged national parochialism, the duties and characteristics of apprentice female citizens were articulated in ways that restated hierarchies which assumed the distinctiveness and authority of Britain and the British. (shrink)

This study examines the potential effects of unethically perceived advertising executionson consumer responses to the ad. The study found that the unethical perceptions of the advertisement shown significantly and negatively affected all advertising response variables examined in the study.

A discussion of women thinkers in political philosophy, and the nature of political inquiry --Provided by publisher.