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)

Urban studies understandably dominate the historiography and our comprehension of the French Wars of Religion. Social, religious and, more recently, political issues have all been in vogue in studies of the wars and, therefore, in the histories of towns. Confessional conflict and coexistence, relations between royal and municipal authorities, affiliation to Protestantism or the Catholic League, have all exercised urban histories. Key moments during the wars highlight the importance of the towns and the trauma they experienced. Yet, despite tension and (...) division, urban communities had a shared concern in the maintenance of civic order and the defence of local integrity. (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)

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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)

This paper reflects on the qualities of living and learning in digital cultures, the design of digital technologies and the philosophical history that has informed that design. It takes as its critical perspective the field of embodied cognition as it has developed over the last three decades, in concert with emerging neurophysiology and neurocognitive research. From this perspective the paper considers cognitive, neurological and physiological effects that are increasingly becoming noticed in user populations, especially young populations. I call this class (...) of conditions ‘sensorimotor debility’, to distinguish it from other psychological, social, cultural and political symptoms associated with computer, internet and social media use. (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)

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.

A central feature of John Tomasi’s ‘Free Market Fairness’ is the emphasis it places upon the good of self-respect. Like Rawls, Tomasi believes that accounts of justice ought to offer support for the self-respect of citizens. Indeed, this is a key way in which Tomasi aspires to engage with the ‘high-liberal’ tradition. Unlike Rawls however, Tomasi argues that this support is best provided by our treating a broader set of economic liberties as basic liberties. In this paper I raise two (...) concerns about this latter claim. Firstly, I trace a number of significant ways in which Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect differs from that of Rawls. Whilst such divergences are not necessarily problematic, I argue that they serve to limit the purchase his account has on left-liberals. Further, I argue that the ideal of self-respect is more deeply ‘hard-wired’ into Rawls’s account of justice than Tomasi recognises. As such, Tomasi fails to address the full range of additional ways in which Rawls expects his principles of justice to support citizens’ self-respect. I argue that this also limits the force of Tomasi’s claims. Secondly, and more seriously, I argue that there are significant tensions between Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect and his most forceful argument in favour of the market democratic model he proposes. I argue firstly that Tomasi’s account of when citizens’ self-respect is jeopardised does not allow us to readily distinguish between economic security born of systems of welfare and redistribution, and economic security born of market forces and historical contingency. And more troubling still, is Tomasi’s belief that self-respecting citizens must view themselves as a ‘central cause’ of their situation. Such self-conceptions, I argue, can only coexist alongside the greater wealth thesis if citizens engage in quite naked self-delusions about their causal power. I argue that theorists of justice have good reason to be suspicious of promulgating such delusions and, as such, that this poses a serious problem for a justification of market democracy which aspires to rest upon an appeal to self-respect. (shrink)

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

Softlifting (software piracy by individuals) is an unethical behavior that pervades today''s computer dependent society. Since a better understanding of underlying considerations of the behavior may provide a basis for remedy, a model of potential determinants of softlifting behavior is developed and tested. The analysis provides some support for the hypothesized model, specifically situational variables, such as delayed acquisition times, and personal gain variables, such as the challenge of copying, affect softlifting behavior. Most importantly, the analysis indicated that ethical perception (...) of softlifting has no significant affect on softlifting behavior. These findings suggest major implications for both software manufacturers and academicians attempting to reduce piracy behavior through ethics instruction. (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.

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.

Kant thinks poetry is the greatest of all the arts, and that Milton is one of the greatest poets. Sanford Budick, a professor of English from Hebrew University, investigates the Miltonic echoes in Kant’s work in this very thorough, dense, and deliberate study. Budick argues that Milton’s poetic form, especially his use of successive images, informs some of the most crucial and complex passages in Kant’s ethical and aesthetic theory. Budick concedes that it may seem strange to blur the line (...) between poetry and philosophy, but he also underlines the fact that “in Kant’s world poetry and philosophy had not yet experienced the virtual divorce that characterizes our own age” (119). Budick contends that the .. (shrink)

Many of the concrete examples found in older philosophical texts that aim at showing how a philosophical idea is relevant tend, for many students, to be mysterious. While instructors can substitute examples from their own lives to show an idea’s relevance, such examples can fail to be effective since college students are not a homogenous group and faculty often do not know their students well. This paper describes a writing assignment where students are asked to choose an event from their (...) lives and write, in the first person, from the perspective of the theorist they are analyzing. Such an assignment not only challenges students to use their own lives to explain a philosophical idea but also allows charges them to use philosophical ideas to examine their own lives. (shrink)

This article examined the effects of body–object interaction (BOI) on semantic processing. BOI measures perceptions of the ease with which a human body can physically interact with a word's referent. In Experiment 1, BOI effects were examined in 2 semantic categorization tasks (SCT) in which participants decided if words are easily imageable. Responses were faster and more accurate for high BOI words (e.g., mask) than for low BOI words (e.g., ship). In Experiment 2, BOI effects were examined in a semantic (...) lexical decision task (SLDT), which taps both semantic feedback and semantic processing. The BOI effect was larger in the SLDT than in the SCT, suggesting that BOI facilitates both semantic feedback and semantic processing. The findings are consistent with the embodied cognition perspective (e.g.,, Perceptual Symbols Theory), which proposes that sensorimotor interactions with the environment are incorporated in semantic knowledge. (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)

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)