To what risks may children participating in research be subjected? Institutional review boards can stand surrogate for parents by filtering out studies whose risk is unacceptably high.

As befits an emerging field of enquiry, there is on-going discussion about the scope, role and future of the medical humanities. One relatively recent contribution to this debate proposes a differentiation of the field into two distinct terrains, ‘medical humanities’ and ‘health humanities,’ and calls for a supersession of the former by the latter. In this paper, we revisit the conceptual underpinnings for a distinction between ‘the medical’ and ‘health’ by looking at the history of an analogous debate between ‘medical (...) geography’ and ‘the geographies of health’ that has, over the last few years, witnessed a re-blurring of the distinction. Highlighting the value of this debate within the social sciences for the future development of the medical humanities, we call for scholars to take seriously the challenges of critical and cultural theory, community-based arts and health, and the counter-cultural creative practices and strategies of activist movements in order to meet the new research challenges and fulfill the radical potential of a critical medical humanities. (shrink)

Neste artigo, refletimos sobre a história de vida no imbricado teórico-metodológico do movimento Lagoas do Norte para Quem?, deslocando o olhar para saber quem são os moradores que lutam pelo corpo-território da Comunidade Boa Esperança, no Piauí. Para isso, percorremos o caminho de uma comunicação decolonial (VILLANUEVA, 2017), partindo da construção do conhecimento horizontal (BERKIN, 2019), com perspectivas na territorialização e ciência do comum (SODRÉ, 2002, 2006, 2015), atravessados pela história de vida (PINEAU; LE GRAND, 2012) e imersos em um (...) direito à comunicação (HERRERA FLORES, 2009; GALLARDO, 2014). Na investigação, amparados pelas narrativas orais de histórias de vida (PERAZZO, 2015), nos dedicamos a estudar o site Museu da Boa Esperança. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Centre-pieceSarah Wood (bio)πoν σoν θαvατɛ τo κɛντρoν πoν σoν αδη τo νıκoςO death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy victory?- St. Paul, 1st Letter to the Corinthians… on dit en anglais, self-centred. En vérité je rêve depuis toujours d’écrire un texte self-centred, je n’y suis jamais arrive, je tombe toujours sur les autres, cela finira par se savoir.- Jacques Derrida, ‘Mes chances’The word exists, therefore the (...) feeling exists.- Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing.What makes a centre is something sharp: a goad, the point of a needle or the sting of an insect. A spur, peg, rivet or pin. One becomes aware of the possibility of a point, a douleur vive, a lively pain. For the word ‘centre’ is derived from the Greek for ‘sting.’Kentron can mean pain itself. The sting refers to an external cause of pain and to the pain as it is experienced, so it is not one but two; not two but one. And a kentron, even if it is pain and pains you or me, is not itself a perception. It arrives but it’s not given: we have to read and write towards it. For perception, as Derrida clarified in the discussion after giving ‘Structure, Sign and Play’: ‘is precisely a concept, a concept of an intuition or of a given originating from the thing itself, present itself in its meaning, independently from language as a system of reference’(Macksey and Donato 272). Sometimes, in torment, and perhaps still looking for origin and presence, I go to the dictionary.But words have no centre. The dictionary tells me this. Figuratively a kentron is an incentive, a metaphorical goad. However there is no mention of kentron in the etymology of ‘incentive,’ which comes, according to the OED, from canere, to sing. An incentive is what makes you sing. A beautiful mistake, one suspects. But let’s make no mistake, our word kentron is the enchanted and enchanting and chance vibration of a tuning-fork in the nerves that is silence and song. It hits me-and-the-dictionary like lightning because it is part of poetry. What I am saying is: a centre has a particular relation to the part of us that is capable of feeling a desire to die. Hélène Cixous is very precise about this wish: ‘The desire to die is the desire to know; it is not the desire to disappear, and it is not suicide, it is the desire to enjoy’ (Cixous, Three Steps 34). It makes us two, she says. It follows from this, I think, that we have to be two to want to be part of the events that ensue when a poem strikes, to want to know silence from the inside. This kentron, this centre, doubles us up like a stitch.How is it possible to know and enjoy what is not? To expand on this question I can point you to two later texts by Derrida: ‘“Che cos’è la poesia?”,’ and Archive Fever. The former gives an account of poetry as ‘a stranger to all production, especially creation,’ and the latter discusses the Freudian death drive, which is ‘an aggression and a destruction’ of a particularly thorough kind (Derrida, ‘Che’ 233 / 232; Archive Fever 11). A poem enjoins its reader: ‘destroy me [détruis-moi], or rather render my support invisible to the outside, in the world … in any case do what must be done so that the provenance of the mark remains from now on unlocatable or unrecognizable.’ It will be as if the thing Freud calls the death drive had come along, working in silence ‘to destroy [détruire] the archive: on the condition of effacing, but also with a view to effacing its own “proper traces.”‘ (Derrida, Archive Fever 10 / Mal d’archive 24.) Destruction without ruin, without trace, unreadable, completely missing but not without love: what Derrida calls poematic experience entails the forbidden knowing and enjoyment of what never happens as a kind of phenomenal allure that never was, but is all the more taken to heart, loved... (shrink)

The book re-examines some notable pre-modern accounts of the relation of passion, reason and faith, and from there goes on to overturn the widely-held presumption that it was the Enlightenment that was responsible for creating a gulf ...

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)

This is a book review of "Why be Moral?" Learning from the Neo-Confucian Cheng Brothers.

Fast food companies like Siam Burger that participate in health awareness campaigns create a conflict of interest between the social responsibility of promoting health and the business interest of increasing sales through marketing strategies like advertising. Alternative options of raising health awareness without mitigating the involvement of fast food companies either by denying advertisements or having a third party foundation should be explored.

Depuis la transgénèse des années 1970, d’autres techniques du génie génétique ont été élaborées dans le secteur végétal. Sur le plan juridique, certains soutiennent que les dénommées New Plant Breeding Techniques (NBPT) devraient échapper à la réglementation dédiée aux OGM. Il nous semble pourtant que les organismes issus de ces nouvelles techniques tombent dans la catégorie des OGM réglementés, et que leur exemption fragiliserait la réglementation en vigueur. À telle enseigne que le débat autour des NPBT met en jeu l’existence (...) même du droit des OGM. Encore faut-il préciser qu’au regard des risques sanitaires et environnementaux comme des incidences économiques, éthiques et sociales, l’échappement des NBPT à la réglementation ne paraît davantage justifié. (shrink)

Mastery imagery (i.e., images of being in control and coping in difficult situations) is used to regulate anxiety. The ability to image this content is associated with trait confidence and anxiety, but research examining mastery imagery ability's association with confidence and anxiety in response to a stressful event is scant. The present study examined whether trait mastery imagery ability mediated the relationship between confidence and anxiety, and the subsequent associations on performance in response to an acute psychological stress. Participants (N= (...) 130; 55% male;Mage= 19.94 years;SD= 1.07 years) completed assessments of mastery imagery ability and engaged in a standardized acute psychological stress task. Immediately prior to the task, confidence, cognitive and somatic anxiety intensity, and interpretation of anxiety symptoms regarding the task were assessed. Path analyses supported a model whereby mastery imagery ability mediated the relationship between confidence and cognitive and somatic anxiety interpretation. Greater mastery imagery ability and confidence were both directly associated with better performance on the stress task. Mastery imagery ability may help individuals experience more facilitative anxiety and perform better during stressful tasks. Improving mastery imagery ability by enhancing self-confidence may help individuals successfully cope with anxiety elicited during stressful situations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Let’s Start AgainSarah Wood (bio)Nicholas Royle. After Derrida. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995.Robert Smith. Derrida and Autobiography. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.start... v. i. to shoot, dart, move suddenly forth, or out: to spring up or forward: to strain forward: to break away: to make a sudden or involuntary movement as of surprise or becoming aware: to spring open, out of place, or loose: to begin to move: of a car, (...) engine, etc. to begin to work, to fire, combust: to set forth on a journey, race, career.—v. t. to begin: to set going: to set on foot: to set up: to drive from lair or hiding place: to cause or undergo displacement or loosening of: to startle (obs.): to pour out or shoot.—n. a sudden movement: a sudden involuntary motion of the body: a startled feeling: a spurt: an outburst or fit: a beginning of movement, esp. of a journey, race, or career: a beginning: a setting in motion: a help in or opportunity of beginning: an advantage in being early or ahead: the extent of such advantage in time or distance: a beginning of building work on a new house-site....—Chambers DictionaryAh, did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you And did you speak to him again? How strange it seems and new!But you were living before that, And also you are living after; And the memory I started at— My starting moves your laughter.—Robert Browning, “Memorabilia”The Shelley whose appearance regularly shocks Browning is, of course, a ghost. The bare fact of talking with a ghost is bound to be curious and impressive—enough to make one start. But at the same time it’s not unusual to converse with ghosts, and this generalization can be taken beyond the sphere of literature, beyond the notion of writers struggling with the mighty dead for imaginative priority, as it is conceived in Harold Bloom’s readings of Browning, for instance. Derrida insists that relationship in general requires the spectral: “[w]hat happens between two, and between all the ‘two’s’ one likes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost [s’entretenir de quelque fantôme]” [Derrida, Specters of Marx xviii]. Perhaps, then, what happens in and between the two books reviewed here needs to be approached in terms of ghosts and the psychoanalysis of ghosts, so powerfully thematized by Nicholas Royle. [End Page 4] Both his After Derrida and Robert Smith’s Derrida and Autobiography seek to make contact with something in writing that gets things going and produces breaks, that displaces and startles. Although each volume could still be called a monograph on Derrida, it responds to something other than a corpus.The sense of shock, wonder, and discontinuity that makes the imagined interlocutor in “Memorabilia” laugh illuminates also something playing itself out across the reception of Derrida’s work. Part of that reception could be conceived in familiar terms—the development of a canon of what could be called Derrida commentaries, the establishment of a set of themes readily associated with Derrida studies (charlatanism, the deconstruction of a metaphysics of presence, and so on). Yet to speak with or about ghosts entails having to start reading, listening, and thinking again, in order to broach familiarity anew without innocent recourse to sheer intuition. These books also, despite their scholarly knowledge of the field, share a sense of responsibility to discuss an aspect of writing—hard to ignore in Derrida—that has begun without commentary, that gets commentary started and that subjects the movement of thought to something like fits. Whether these fits are of phobia, laughter, melancholy, delirium, or anger, their irruption marks interesting gaps in thought’s continuity. More than moods, these strange outbursts might be understood better in terms of the theory of metapsychological “phantoms.” The phantom, according to Nicolas Abraham, is “sustained by secreted words, invisible gnomes whose aim is to wreak havoc, from within the unconscious, in the coherence of logical progression” [“Notes on the Phantom” 175]. The phantom is also “alien to the subject... (shrink)

This essay imagines Derrida by starting from the first page of Glas – read in terms of extinction and global warming. On that page we come across the imperative ‘stay and think’ and the rest of the piece addresses the condensations and displacements by which that staying and thinking are imagined and enacted. An unimaginable ecological crisis faces us today. Hearing, dreaming, and reading emerge from Glas as distinctively strange and necessary forms of agency that can sustain our efforts to (...) think non-destructively in response. (shrink)

I reconstruct Buber’s conception of personhood and identify in his work four criteria for personhood— uniqueness, wholeness, goodness, and a drive to relation—and an account of three basic degrees of personhood, stretching, as a kind of “chain of being,” from plants and animals, through humans, to God as the absolute person. I show that Buber’s “new” conception of personhood is rooted in older Neoplatonic notions, such the goodness of all being and the principle of plenitude. While other philosophers have used (...) reason and memory to distinguish persons, I find that Buber instead takes these to be specific to humanity, and I explore Buber’s account of a “fall” from a state of nature into a historical mode, such that our humanity threatens our personhood. (shrink)

I reconstruct the aestheticism of Martin Buber in order to provide a new way of framing his moral philosophy and development as a thinker. The evolution of Buber’s thought does not entail a shift from aesthetics to ethics, but a shift from one aspect of aesthetics to another, namely, from taking genius to be key to social renewal, to taking taste to be key. I draw on Kantian aesthetics to show the connection between Buber’s aesthetic concerns and his moral concerns, (...) and to defend the notion that a certain aesthetic orientation may be just what is needed for moral response. (shrink)

This book articulates the theoretical outlines of a feminism developed from Aristotle’s metaphysics, making a new contribution to feminist theory. Readers will discover why Aristotle was not a feminist and how he might have become one, through an investigation of Aristotle and Aristotelian tradition. The author shows how Aristotle’s metaphysics can be used to articulate a particularly subtle and theoretically powerful understanding of gender that may offer a highly useful tool for distinctively feminist arguments. This work builds on Martha Nussbaum’s (...) ‘capabilities approach’ in a more explicitly and thoroughly hylomorphist way. The author shows how Aristotle’s hylomorphic model, developed to run between the extremes of Platonic dualism and Democritean atomism, can similarly be used today to articulate a view of gender that takes bodily differences seriously without reducing gender to biological determinations. Although written for theorists, this scholarly yet accessible book can be used to address more practical issues and the final chapter explores women in universities as one example. This book will appeal to both feminists with limited familiarity with Aristotle’s philosophy, and scholars of Aristotle with limited familiarity with feminism. (shrink)

Unfortunately there has been a severe mis-referencing in the published article. Therefore the article has been updated.

This article seeks to go beyond the implied assumption from previous research that job candidate attraction to corporate social practices is equivalent across individuals. To this end, we propose a framework for categorizing individuals' attraction to different corporate social performance profiles. Our framework is grounded in relational models theory and Mitroff's model of managers' “ideal organizations.” An inductive approach was used to elaborate upon the model and assess the extent to which candidates preferences vary. Data were collected from prospective job (...) seekers regarding their attraction to social practices that benefit or harm various stakeholders, and these responses were used to develop profiles of job candidates' attraction to distinct profiles of organizations' social practices. The results provide a guide for managers who wish to improve the likelihood that an organization's social practices reflect what is best about its culture. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Habermas' proceduralist model of law can be put to feminist ends in at least two significant ways. First, in presenting an alternative to the liberal and welfare models of laws, the proceduralist model offers feminism a way out of the equality/difference dilemma. Both these attempts to secure women's equality by emphasising women's sameness to men or their difference from men have placed the onus on women to either find a way of integrating themselves into (...) existing institutions or to confront the so-called question of women's difference. The proceduralist model renders this dilemma irrelevant. Instead, it proceeds from the fact of sexual difference; a fact that produces competing and conflicting needs and interests that require interpretation by both men and women. This, I argue, marks a change in the very way we conceptualise the so-called problem of women's difference, insofar as the question is no longer framed in these terms. Second, I argue that this deliberative process over the interpretation of conflicting interests affects a fundamental shift in the nature of legal institutions themselves, insofar as law is no longer a vehicle for promoting male interests. (shrink)

In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas articulates a system of rights, including human rights, within the democratic constitutional state. For Habermas, while human rights, like other subjective rights have moral content, they do not structurally belong to a moral system; nor should they be grounded in one. Instead, human rights belong to a positive and coercive legal order upon which individuals can make actionable legal claims. Habermas extends this argument to include international human rights, which are realised within the context (...) of a cosmopolitan legal order. The aim of this paper is to assess the relevance of law as a mechanism for securing human rights protection. I argue that positive law does make a material difference to securing individual human rights and to cultivating and augmenting a general rights culture both nationally and globally. I suggest that Habermas' model of law presents the most viable way of negotiating the tensions that human rights discourse gives rise to: the tensions between morality and law, between legality and politics, and between the national and international contexts of human rights protection. (shrink)