The central claim of this article is that narrative agency, which I will define as a subject’s capacity to make sense of herself as an ‘I’ over time and in relation to other ‘I’s, is a precondition for identity formation. I engage with two critiques of this claim: first, that narrative agency is limited by, rather than primary to, subordinating gender norms and, second, that a view of narrative agency as primary is committed to too ambitious a conception of the (...) communicability of narratives. I argue that the narrative model survives these two criticisms by emphasising its irreducibility, its inherent relationality and its generative potential. I then suggest some of the ways in which a concept of narrative agency might help feminist critical theory to posit mutual recognition and respect as productive criteria for progressive self and social transformation. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. Work on Stanley Cavell in contemporary political theory tends to foreground Cavell’s reading of Emersonian moral perfectionism, but this aspect of Cavell’s thought is often left out of feminist readings of his work. In this paper, I give an overview of Cavell’s importance to political theory, and I also trace two Cavellian-inspired feminisms: Sandra Laugier’s ordinary language inflected ethics of care and Toril Moi’s understanding of feminist theory as the close and careful reading (...) of examples. I argue that Cavellian-Emersonian moral perfectionism enhances these feminist readings of Cavell because it helps us explain certain practices in feminist activism, such as resisting conformity, acknowledging the limits of our understanding and being receptive to other members of our feminist community. (shrink)

Whether supplementing written articles in newspapers or playing a leading role in photo-reporting, photography has achieved an influencial role in the delivery of information and framing of narratives to mass audiences. Photojournalism archives represent a unique source of historical data and public records about local, national, and international events, political movements, demonstrations, and urban development. This paper outlines a data archaeology project that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) for organizing and searching through photojournalism collections, based on the Boston Globe photograph morgue. (...) While the primary goal of the project is to foster public access to news archives, the large-scale digitization and recovery of information from photojournalism collections raises ethical questions about intellectual property and the right to identity protection when records are made available online. We present a proof of concept that tackles these issues by means of AI, while still offering equitable access to journalism archives that are often kept inaccessible within private media institutions. The first part of the paper discusses how machine learning can resolve the lack of resources to parse through data on digital surrogates. After providing an introduction to the use of ML to facilitate access to information in the Boston Globe photograph morgue, we outline two partially automated computational tasks: (1) an AI toolkit for transcribing archivists’ notes and to recover photographers’ names and creation dates, which can be used by librarians and archivists to assess copyright on records; (2) a pipeline for face detection and blurring that detects areas where identifiable people are present and allows for anonymization. As news archiving is confronted with challenges derived from the “digital heap” of orphaned data, privatization, and other barriers to journalism records, this report explores an ethical approach to structuring data in news archives for public access, by preserving intellectual property and privacy. (shrink)

The beneficial effects of physical exercise on physical health and cognitive functioning have been repeatedly shown. However, evidence of its effect on psychosocial functioning in healthy adults is still scarce or inconclusive. One limitation of many studies examining this link is their reliance on correlational approaches or specific subpopulations, such as clinical populations. The present study investigated the effects of a physical exercise intervention on key factors of psychosocial functioning, specifically well-being, stress, loneliness, and future time perspective. We used data (...) from healthy, previously sedentary older adults who participated in a 6-month at-home intervention, either engaging in aerobic exercise or as part of a control group who participated in foreign language-learning or reading of selected native-language literature. Before and after the intervention, comprehensive cardiovascular pulmonary testing and a psychosocial questionnaire were administered. The exercise group showed significantly increased fitness compared to the control group. Contrary to expectations, however, we did not find evidence for a beneficial effect of this fitness improvement on any of the four domains of psychosocial functioning we assessed. This may be due to pronounced stability of such psychological traits in older age, especially in older adults who show high levels of well-being initially. Alternatively, it may be that the well-documented beneficial effects of physical exercise on brain structure and function, as well as cognition differ markedly from beneficial effects on psychosocial functioning. While aerobic exercise may be the driving factor for the former, positive effects on the latter may only be invoked by other aspects of exercise, for example, experiences of mastery or a feeling of community. (shrink)

Visual research is a fast-growing interdisciplinary field. The flexibility and diversity of visual research methods are seen as strengths by their adherents, yet adoption of such approaches often requires researchers to negotiate complex ethical terrain. The digital technological explosion has also provided visual researchers with access to an increasingly diverse array of visual methodologies and tools that, far from being ethically neutral, require careful deliberation and planning for use. To explore these issues, the Symposium on Exploring Ethical Frontiers of Visual (...) Methods was held at the University of Melbourne, Australia, on 4 March 2014. The symposium was hosted by the Visual Research Collaboratory, a consortium of Australian and Canadian visual researchers, with support from Melbourne Social Equity Institute, University of Melbourne. The symposium represented the culmination of a process to develop a resource outlining principles of ethical practice for visual researchers and ethics committee members, the Guidelines for Ethical Visual Research Methods, which were launched at the event. The Guidelines present a framework for considering ethical matters in visual research, distinguishing six groups of issues united by an overarching theme: confidentiality; minimizing harm; consent; fuzzy boundaries; authorship and ownership; and representation and audiences. (shrink)

Lochlann Jain's debut non-fiction graphic novel, Things That Art, playfully interrogates the order of things. Toying with the relationship between words and images, Jain's whimsical compositions may seem straightforward. Upon closer inspection, however, the drawings reveal profound and startling paradoxes at the heart of how we make sense of the world. Commentaries by architect and theorist Maria McVarish, poet and naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield, musician and English Professor Drew Daniel, and the author offer further insight into the drawings in this (...) collection. A captivating look at the fundamental absurdities of everyday communication, Things that Art jolts us toward new forms of collation and collaboration. (shrink)

My paper explores the extent to which More’s ‘Spirit of Nature’ and Cudworth’s ‘Plastic Nature’ incorporated the functions of the Aristotelian vegetable soul, and how far, if at all, each was indebted to Aristotle. I argue that, although, on the matter of vegetable life there is some overlap between the functions of the Aristotelian vegetative soul and those ascribed by Cudworth to Plastic Nature and More to the Spirit of Nature, Cudworth and More were not simply reviving Aristotle in new (...) dress. Both certainly drew on Aristotle when formulating their hypotheses, but these have a much broader range of functions than the Aristotelian vegetative soul. Even among those functions which concern the basics of organic life, both hypotheses have affinities with other the well-developed medico-physiological traditions of the late Renaissance. And, although this type of formative spirit is often compared to the Platonic World Soul, both hypotheses are indebted as much, if not more to Stoicism. (shrink)

Hobbes was an unusual Christian, and one that recognized the potential power of the Christian story to strengthen commonwealths. This chapter discusses the account of Christianity found in Leviathan, which was designed to replace contemporary versions with one that would promote stability and obedience within the state. Hobbes’s religious ideas, like his political philosophy, began from his understanding of human beings; he insisted that religious belief was natural to humans, stemmed from anxiety, and needed to be coordinated by a sovereign (...) to prevent strife. For Hobbes, Christianity was a particularly effective remedy for such anxiety, at least when interpreted along correct lines. The theology developed by Hobbes was original, but it probably drew on ideas circulating among his Anglican acquaintances; indeed in Leviathan we see these ideas being used for a very different purpose. As Hobbes’s acquaintances realized, at the center of Hobbes’s project in Leviathan lay an extremely heterodox theology which could enhance the state while destroying the independent authority of the Church. (shrink)

This article explores the accounts of eugenics made by a small but important group of British scientists and clinicians working on the new genetics as applied to human health. These scientists and clinicians used special rhetorical strategies for distancing the new genetics from eugenics and to sustain their professional autonomy. They drew a number of boundaries or distinctions between eugenics and their own field, describing eugenics as politically distorted "bad science, " as being technically unfeasible, a feature of totalitarian (...) regimes, the abuse of neutral knowledge, and as the manipulation of the population's gene pool as opposed to diagnosing and treating individuals with genetic conditions. Their more sophisticated defense strategies invoked the importance of individual choice and the relationship between nature and nurture. The article highlights the ambiguities and difficulties in professionals' use of this rhetoric, drawing on historical and sociological analyses of eugenics, genetics, and medical science and technology more broadly. (shrink)

This paper has been translated from the French by Cosmin Toma. It focuses on Jacques Derrida's very last lecture, given in Rio de Janeiro, on the 16thof August 2004, which Derrida drew from his ‘Le parjure et le pardon’ (‘Perjury and Forgiveness’) seminar held at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), in Paris, from 1997 to 1999. In reference to this final lecture in which Derrida deals with ‘forgiveness,’ ‘truth’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘testimony’ and ‘genre’, the paper also (...) takes up the question of justice as well as of what he calls the ‘worst violence’ via testimonial writings by Sarah Kofman and Antjie Krog so as to rethink forgiveness. (shrink)

Recent studies of naturalistic face‐to‐face communication have demonstrated coordination patterns such as the temporal matching of verbal and non‐verbal behavior, which provides evidence for the proposal that verbal and non‐verbal communicative control derives from one system. In this study, we argue that the observed relationship between verbal and non‐verbal behaviors depends on the level of analysis. In a reanalysis of a corpus of naturalistic multimodal communication (Louwerse, Dale, Bard, & Jeuniaux, ), we focus on measuring the temporal patterns of specific (...) communicative behaviors in terms of their burstiness. We examined burstiness estimates across different roles of the speaker and different communicative modalities. We observed more burstiness for verbal versus non‐verbal channels, and for more versus less informative language subchannels. Using this new method for analyzing temporal patterns in communicative behaviors, we show that there is a complex relationship between verbal and non‐verbal channels. We propose a “temporal heterogeneity” hypothesis to explain how the language system adapts to the demands of dialog. (shrink)

This paper investigates how we can most effectively argue that partiality toward certain people and not others is morally permissible. Philosophers who strongly insist that morality must leave room for partiality have not made explicit their basis for this conclusion; the present paper comparatively assesses a variety of possible argument strategies which could be deployed in this regard. One promising strategy exploits the acknowledged force of the argument from “the personal point of view,” here interpreted as referring specifically to an (...) agent’s projects. If moral demands must be tempered in light of the special significance to an agent of his own projects, then perhaps the agent’s partial attachments to other people should also receive a measure of protection from impartial moral claims. The case is bolstered by noting the ubiquity of plural or collective agency in contexts of close personal relations: often the two agents in such relationships together pursue joint projects and even constitute a plural agent. This approach does justify special moral treatment of one’s co-agents, although it does not match our initial conception of partiality in all respects. (shrink)

Most scholarly fields, at least in the humanities, have been asking the same questions about the politics of encounter for hundreds of years: Should we try to find a way to encounter an other without appropriating it, without imposing ourselves on it? Is encountering-without-appropriating even possible? These questions are profuse and taken up with intense interest in scholarship about the personal essay, specifically, which has often been credited as a philosophical form. Within debates about the ethics of the personal essay, (...) the most significant concern is about the traditionally accepted relationship of the writer-represented-on-the-page. For example, the notable rhetoric and composition scholar, David Bartholomae, argues that students of what he calls '"creative nonfiction" or "literary nonfiction"' (1995, p. 68) write '... as though they [are] not the products of their time, politics and culture, as though they could be free, elegant, smart, independent, the owners of all that they saw' (p. 70). In other words, the personal essay, as a subgenre of creative or literary nonfiction, allows for the perpetuation of the fallacy that a writer can be 'free' of social influences, 'independent' of a society and of its politics, and 'owners' of their own perspectives and experiences—of those the writer expresses on the page, specifically. Consequently, if the writer is not conscious and critical of the social influences acting on him/her, if s/he believes the text to be the singular and uninfluenced production of his/her own self, then the topic taken up in the essay is tyrannized by the self-centered (and dangerously un-critically-conscious) perspective of the writer. However, the personal essay also has its strengths as a philosophical form: in its privileging of skepticism; in its attention to complexity and complication; and even in its existence-as-evidence of some quality of its writer. Too, very often essays pay homage to works of other essayists, as in the case of Gass's 'Emerson and the Essay', instead of mowing down other works in order to establish its own reign. Despite these ethically responsible characteristics, though, I show, using Gass's essay about Emerson's work, that the personal essay continues to be devalued because of its reliance on and celebration of its transparent relationship to its author. In general, essayists don't complain in their work about the belief in this transparent relationship; they advocate it. Thus, my purpose is not to suggest that there is no relationship between the essayist and the essay. Rather, I will, in the latter half of the article, turn to the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, which describes and enacts an approach to an other (writer/text) that does not hinge on the assumption that writer and text are in a transparent relationship to each other. I hope that in presenting this possibility for re-thinking the essay (and its relationship to its writer), writers, scholars, and teachers of the essay—and even its opposition—will give it new attention and explore further the possibilities that it may provide for engagement, for encounter. (shrink)

Synthetic biology has generated extensive discussion about a wide range of risks and potential benefits, the intrinsic value of the technology, and the soci­etal distribution of its risks and benefits. However, be­fore these questions can be resolved, it is important to first ask a critical question: Is synthetic biology different enough from the technologies that came before it that it raises new questions or concerns? By putting synthetic biology into context, we gain a better understanding of the issues, both old (...) and new, that it raises. We can then consider practical governance questions, including ways to improve current practices. (shrink)

The Half-Life of Oracles speaks from a way-station between mortals and immortals, a place where the strangeness of daily life meets the intimacy of distant ages. These are poems in which the living and the dead play endless games of musical chairs, emperors and philosophers wage war against rivers, and dusty incantations for achieving immortality are reborn as pick-up lines. By turns tender and thundering, capable of calling the gods down from Olympus if necessary, The Half-Life of Oracles charts with (...) lucidity and intensity the cross-pollination of memory and myth. (shrink)

With the rapid growth of native advertising, there has been an increased interest to address ethical concerns and deception online. To address this concern, we look at the consumer's ethical efficacy toward native ads and we compare native ads to banner ads. Results confirm that consumers trust native ads more than banner ads. Moreover, we uncover that consumers ethical efficacy affects their intention to share native ads through eWOM. However, consumer individual differences influence intention to share content online and trust (...) in the native ads. We study the moderating effects of salience, using the fashion context, and its influence on ad trust and willingness to share through eWOM. Recommendations for business professionals and academics are discussed and future research guidelines are addressed. (shrink)

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00565-2.

Christian ethicists rarely study apology or forgiveness about climate change, possibly because it is just another sin that God may forgive. Yet apology between humans may be critical to avoiding paralysis after people realize the horror of their actions and enabling cooperative responses to climate change among its perpetrators and victims. Climate change challenges traditional ideas and practices of apology because it involves unintentional, ongoing acts of diffuse collectives that harm other diffuse collectives across space and time. Developing concepts of (...) collective agency and responsibility enable a reconceptualization of apology for an era of climate change. While more work is needed to understand and implement such ideas, this paper lays the groundwork for future studies of collective apology and forgiveness by identifying general features of climate apologies including their symbolic dimensions and connection to ongoing changed actions. (shrink)

Although environmental ethicists often focus on applying ethics to policy, the ethics embedded in policy documents such as Agenda 21 are also significant. Though largely ignored by ethicists after early responses to the document focused on intrinsic value, Agenda 21's ethics are particularly valuable for their ability to resonate with many people and link politics, technical studies, and ethics. For instance, their use draws attention to the need to ethically evaluate sustainability indexes and identifies limitations of existing indexes. At a (...) broad level, this study of the ethics of Agenda 21 also suggests that the ethics of international environmental policy documents deserves more attention. (shrink)

Over the course of development, children acquire adult-like thinking about social categories such as race, which in turn informs their perceptions, attitudes, and behavior. However, children’s developing perceptions of race have been understudied particularly with respect to their potential influence on cross-race egalitarianism. Specifically, the acquisition of racial constancy, defined as the perception that race is a concrete and stable category, has been associated with increased awareness of racial stereotypes and group status differences. Yet, little work has investigated behavioral outcomes (...) stemming from the acquisition of racial constancy beliefs. Here, we investigate whether the presence or absence of racial constancy beliefs differentially predicts inequality aversion with racial ingroup versus outgroup members for young children. White children ( N = 202; ages 3–8) completed three sticker resource-allocation games with either a White or a Black partner shown in a photograph, after which racial constancy was measured. Results revealed that the acquisition of racial constancy interacted with partner race to predict inequality aversion outcomes in one game; however, age and gender also exerted strong effects. (shrink)

This article examines MichËle Roberts' novel In the Red Kitchen in the light of contemporary spatial theory: in particular, the geographer Doreen Massey's critique of space and time. It argues that Roberts' text is particularly susceptible to such readings because of its multilayered portrayal of space, examining women's enclosure within the home across three different time periods, and through five different voices, which are overlaid one upon another in order to create a sense of simultaneity. In so doing, the text (...) shows that while the nature of women's oppression may change over time, their fundamental association with the domestic space does not. The article explores three different recurring spaces in the text: the kitchen, the bedroom and the crypt, the last of which acts as the receptacle for the trauma experienced by the female subject within the other two. The Gothic trope of the crypt is associated with incestuous abuse at the hands of a father-figure whom the woman both fears and desires; and thus it also signifies the precarious security to be found within the home. ‘Homelessness’, however, becomes another traumatic concept within a text which, while problematizing the relationship between home and identity, the subject and the space that contains and confines her, can envisage no other way of sustaining a secure sense of subjectivity. In the final analysis, while the boundaries that separate space from time are rendered porous and permeable in this novel, the complete collapse of all spatial boundaries is not conceptualized as desirable. (shrink)

Discusses songs by the troubadours, trouvères, and Guillaume de Machaut, performed live and on the page, in the context of antique, late antique, and medieval thought and poetic practice and in the light of later opera. Topics include cosmology, education, astronomy, breath, beasts, monsters, hybridity, imagination, life, and death.

This article takes as its starting point and its main problematic the status of evolution as a ‘sterile belief’ in contemporary technoscientific culture. Focusing in particular on the role of evolution across the boundaries of art and science in the contexts of artificial life and transgenic engineering, it offers a critique of the belief in evolutionary possibility as an abstract process. The lack of what François Jacob refers to as a dialogue between the possible and the actual is seen to (...) account for the sterility of evolutionary possibility and for its status as myth. In particular, evolutionary possibility recalls the myth of metamorphoses, the conservatism of which is demonstrated in an analysis of two art/science works - Galápagos by Karl Sims and Genesis by Eduardo Kac. Lacking a dialogue with the actual, metamorphic evolutionary possibility here becomes self-referential and produces nothing new. Rather than a rejection of evolution per se, this article takes up Jacob’s critique of its over-extension by showing how this operates in two works representing the fields of artificial life and transgenesis respectively. (shrink)