MENDENHALL TJ, BERGE JM, HARPER P, GREENCROW B, LITTLEWALKER N, WHITEEAGLE S and BROWNOWL S. Nursing Inquiry 2010; 17: 359–372 The Family Education Diabetes Series (FEDS): community‐based participatory research with a midwestern American Indian communityIndigenous people around the globe tend to struggle with poorer health and well‐being than their non‐indigenous counterparts. One area that this is especially evident is in the epidemic of diabetes in North America’s American Indians (AIs) – who evidence higher prevalence rates and concomitant disease‐related complications (...) than any other racial/ethnic group. As researchers and AI communities work together to transcend conventional top‐down, service‐delivery approaches to care, community‐based participatory research is beginning to show promise as a way to partner contemporary biomedical knowledge with the lived‐experience, wisdom, and customs of Indigenous people. This study describes the Family Education Diabetes Series (FEDS) as an example of such effort, and highlights pilot findings assessing its value and impact across key diabetes‐relevant variables. Following 36 intervention participants across baseline, 3‐month, and 6‐month time periods, data show significant improvements in weight, blood pressure, and metabolic control (A1c). Strengths and limitations of this investigation are presented, along with suggestions about how to further advance and empirically test the work across other Indigenous communities. (shrink)

This collection of essays by Sheila Jasanoff explores how democratic governments construct public reason, that is, the forms of evidence and argument used in making state decisions accountable to citizens.

In the past twenty years, the field of science and technology studies (S&TS) has made considerable progress toward illuminating the relationship between scientific knowledge and political power. These insights have not yet been synthesized or presented in a form that systematically highlights the connections between S&TS and other social sciences. This timely collection of essays by some of the leading scholars in the field attempts to fill that gap. The book develops the theme of "co-production", showing how scientific knowledge both (...) embeds and is embedded in social identities, institutions, representations and discourses. Accordingly, the authors argue, ways of knowing the world are inseparably linked to the ways in which people seek to organize and control it. Through studies of emerging knowledges, research practices and political institutions, the authors demonstrate that the idiom of co-production importantly extends the vocabulary of the traditional social sciences, offering fresh analytic perspectiveson the nexus of science, power and culture. (shrink)

Land art requires careful evaluation when assessing its aesthetic and ethical value. Critics of land art charge that it is unethical in that it uses nature without such use being justified by some future good. Other critics charge that land art harms nature aesthetically. In this essay, the author canvasses these charges and argues that some land art is ethically and aesthetically defensible, and that some has great and rare potential in both realms.

The Sera Jey Monastery, reestablished near Mysore, India, houses 5,000 Buddhist monks living in exile -- including survivors of the destruction of the Tibetan monastery in 1959. Sheila Rock's moving portraits are a celebration of the everyday simplicity and subtle beauty of the ascetic life. More than a hundred duotone photographs document the compassionate expressions, emotional openness, and aura of serenity inspired by lives of renunciation and seclusion. A percentage of the royalties from this book go to the Sera (...) Jhe Health Care Committee in aid of various humanitarian projects. (shrink)

STS research has devoted relatively little attention to the promotion and reception of science and technology by non-scientific actors and institutions. One consequence is that the relationship of science and technology to political power has tended to remain undertheorized. This article aims to fill that gap by introducing the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. Through a comparative examination of the development and regulation of nuclear power in the US and South Korea, the article demonstrates the analytic potential of the imaginaries concept. (...) Although nuclear power and nationhood have long been imagined together in both countries, the nature of those imaginations has remained strikingly different. In the US, the state’s central move was to present itself as a responsible regulator of a potentially runaway technology that demands effective containment. In South Korea, the dominant imaginary was of atoms for development which the state not only imported but incorporated into its scientific, technological and political practices. In turn, these disparate imaginaries have underwritten very different responses to a variety of nuclear shocks and challenges, such as Three Mile Island (TMI), Chernobyl, and the spread of the anti-nuclear movement. (shrink)

This book is a comprehensive study of the Odyssey's plot, which shows how the motifs of disguise and recognition are used to articulate the central values of Homeric society. The story of Odysseus' homecoming is discussed in relation to family dynamics, heroic competition, the social institutions of marriage and hospitality, gender relations, and the enduring power of song.

pt. 1. Background you need. -- What is brain-compatible teaching -- The old and new of it -- When brain research is applied to the classroom everything will change -- Change can be easy -- We're not in Kansas anymore -- Where's the proof -- Tools for exploring the brain -- Ten reasons to care about brain research -- The evolution of brain models -- Be a brain-smart consumer: recognizing good research -- Action or theory: who wants to read all (...) that research -- Excellent sources of research -- Fun factoids on the brain -- What's in the human brain -- Brain teaser -- The brain divided -- The brain connected -- Brain geography -- Brain "cell" ebration: far-out facts about brain cells -- Learning happens but how -- Are today's kids different -- Boy's and girl's brain differences -- Learning disabilities; different brains -- The cranial soup bowl: understanding the chemicals in our brains -- pt. 2. The foundation for teaching is principles, not strategies. What are the principles -- Principle 1: the principle of change: brain is dynamic, not fixed -- Principle 2: the principle of variety: all brains are unique -- Principle 3: the principle of developmental sensitivity -- Principle 4: the principle of interaction: we have a social brain -- Principle 5: the principle of connectivity: the brain is an integrated system of systems -- Principle 6: the principle of memory malleability -- Principle 7: the principle of resource consumption -- necessity for processing -- pt. 3. So what; now what. Asking big questions: what's in a brain-compatible curriculum -- Brain-compatible test-taking success strategies -- Systemic change: the next level -- Big picture analysis: transformation happens -- Action research makes a difference -- The learning community -- What's next. (shrink)

Community care for frail elderly people rests heavily on the work of low-status, paraprofessional home care workers. Home care workers describe their work as highly personalized caring labor that often seeps out of its formal boundaries into informal, unpaid activities. Although these activities are valued by workers, their supervisors, elderly clients, and family members, they represent uncompensated and exploited labor. Cost-cutting trends in home care management that seek to depersonalize home care labor are likely to increase its exploitative potential for (...) paid care workers and, simultaneously, to disadvantage and jeopardize elderly home care clients and their unpaid family caregivers. (shrink)

Though feminists are correct to note that conventional standards of sexiness are oppressive, we argue that feminism should reclaim sexiness rather than reject it. We argue for an aesthetic and ethical practice of working to shift from conventional attributions of sexiness to respectful attributions, in which embodied sexual subjects are appreciated in their full individual magnificence. We argue that undertaking this practice is an ethical obligation, since it contributes to the full recognition of others’ humanity. We discuss the relationship of (...) ethical to aesthetic considerations and argue that the respectful notion of sexiness is a genuinely aesthetic one, even though it does not involve assessment in relation to standards. (shrink)

'Gender Hurts' examines the wider social and political context and implications of the phenomenon of transgenderism. Jeffreys and Gottschalk propose that gender in western culture is socially constructed as the basis of male domination and that the concept of gender has the potential to hurt many.

The power of technology? -- Risk and responsibility? -- The ethical anatomy of disasters? -- Remaking nature? -- Tinkering with humans? -- Information's wild frontiers? -- Whose knowledge, whose property? -- Reclaiming the future? -- The ethics of invention?

Topics discussed in this work are abortion, euthanasia, medical negligence and human experimentation.

The economic crisis has exposed shortcomings in standard economic theory and provided an impetus for new economic thinking. But the theoretical debate in the wake of the crisis has been unduly constrained by the terms of the mainstream approach to economic theory. Like any approach, it is characterised by a way of framing reality, giving meaning to terms and setting criteria for good argument. It also determines how any economic theory is understood, whether from the history of economic thought or (...) from the contemporary literature. But there are other approaches to economics which would open up the field to a much wider range of possibilities for new economic thinking. Addressing the challenge that any reader bases her understanding on her own approach, the purpose of this paper is to attempt to explain what it means to consider different approaches and why it matters for policy. This is done by discussing two features of the financial crisis which pose particular problems for economic theory. These are the role of changing market sentiment in driving asset prices on the one hand and the breakdown of trust relationships in banking on the other (the moral hazard issue). We will see how these are addressed by mainstream theory and by alternative approaches. First, market sentiment is discussed within the mainstream rational-optimising framework, where risk is quantifiable, and compared with the Keynesian approach based on the general uncertainty of knowledge, where reason, evidence and sentiment are integrated. The moral hazard issue is then discussed in its mainstream form in terms of rational opportunism and in its institutionalist form in terms of the foundation of social relations (including relations between institutions) in trust. It is shown that different ways of approaching theorising in each case imply different policy measures. It is argued further that an exclusively deductive mathematical approach to analysis of market sentiment and trust is unduly limiting and that a more pluralist approach would more fully address the issues. (shrink)

An important function of the self is to identify external objects that are potentially personally relevant. We suggest that such objects may be identified through mere ownership. Extant research suggests that encoding information in a self-relevant context enhances memory , thus an experiment was designed to test the impact of ownership on memory performance. Participants either moved or observed the movement of picture cards into two baskets; one of which belonged to self and one which belonged to another participant. A (...) subsequent recognition test revealed that there was a significant memory advantage for objects that were owned by self. Acting on items had no impact on memory. Results are discussed with reference to the importance of self-object associations in cognition. (shrink)

From Hippocrates to paternalism to autonomy : the new hegemony -- From autonomy to consent -- Consent, autonomy, and the law -- Autonomy at the end of life -- Autonomy and pregnancy -- Autonomy and genetic information -- Autonomy and organ transplantation -- Autonomy, consent, and the law.

Although many philosophers have attempted to explain how we do and how we ought to aesthetically appreciate nature, I argue that such appreciation has yet to be fully understood. I agree with the vast majority of aestheticians who argue that a successful model of nature appreciation will take into account the ways in which natural objects differ from art objects.Hence, the model I present illustrates that the way we appreciate art objects differs in important respects from the way we appreciate (...) natural objects. ;It seems to me that critics of the assimilation of nature appreciation to art appreciation have been too hasty. They mistakenly confine their analysis to the appreciation that an audience has for an artwork. By focussing on the spectator-to-artwork relationship, these critics have failed to notice the salient similarities between a certain type of experience of nature and a certain type of experience of art. I argue that nature appreciation, although not identical to, shares important similarities with the way a performing artist interprets an artwork. I call the model I present and defend the performative interpretation model of nature appreciation. (shrink)

In a recent article, ‘An Epistemic Dilemma for Actual Intentionalism’, Saam Trivedi argues that the way we ought to interpret artworks is best understood using the model proposed by hypothetical intentionalism. Trivedi alleges that actual intentionalism faces a serious dilemma, the upshot of which is that actual intentionalists must choose between redundancy and indeterminacy. Largely on the basis of this dilemma, he concludes that even if actual intentionalism is descriptively accurate, it is prescriptively untenable. In this essay, I focus on (...) this alleged dilemma and argue that, contra Trivedi, it fails to undermine the prescriptive legitimacy of moderate actual intentionalism. That is, Trivedi's dilemma does not offer us a good reason to refrain from working to understand works of art under the methodological guidance of actual intentionalism. (shrink)

Despite triggering one of the largest civilian death tolls in modern history, the policy and human consequences of economic sanctions on Iraq between 1990-2003 remain largely unexamined. This lack of scrutiny mirrors the euphemism and mis-information surrounding the embargo itself and the Oil-for-Food program ostensibly adopted to protect Iraq's civilian population. But it also reflects incomprehension among Western publics - long removed from the realities of hunger and economic destitution - of the intimate link between economic conditions and mortality. Iraq (...) suffered an estimated 1.5 million excess deaths because of a catastrophic undermining of civilian livelihood triggered by the embargo; an outcome termed slow famine in the demographic literature. With much of the population fully dependent on daily food rations of less than 21 cents per person for much of the sanctions period, OfF `relief' was inherently incapable of substituting for a functioning civil economy. Recent positive accounts of the impact of OfF, in the form of the Independent Inquiry Committee into the Oil-for-Food Program, are refuted by close analysis of malnutrition and mortality rates across the sanctions period. The example of Iraq reveals the danger in treating economic sanctions as a cheap, `non-violent' tool for conflict resolution. In reality their deadly power is terrorizing for societies not protected from their application by permanent member status on the UN Security Council, a threat which continues to generate global insecurity. The Iraq experience reveals how current, narrowly framed, international law prohibitions on starvation as a weapon of war need to be extended to cover interference with civilian livelihood and hence access to food. (shrink)

Dreamscapes of Modernity offers the first book-length treatment of sociotechnical imaginaries, a concept originated by Sheila Jasanoff and developed in close collaboration with Sang-Hyun Kim to describe how visions of scientific and technological progress carry with them implicit ideas about public purposes, collective futures, and the common good. The book presents a mix of case studies—including nuclear power in Austria, Chinese rice biotechnology, Korean stem cell research, the Indonesian Internet, US bioethics, global health, and more—to illustrate how the concept (...) of sociotechnical imaginaries can lead to more sophisticated understandings of the national and transnational politics of science and technology. A theoretical introduction sets the stage for the contributors’ wide-ranging analyses, and a conclusion gathers and synthesizes their collective findings. The book marks a major theoretical advance for a concept that has been rapidly taken up across the social sciences and promises to become central to scholarship in science and technology studies. (shrink)

Scholars in science and technology studies (STS) have recently been called upon to advise governments on the design of procedures for public engagement. Any such instrumental function should be carried out consistently with STS’s interpretive and normative obligations as a social science discipline. This article illustrates how such threefold integration can be achieved by reviewing current US participatory politics against a 70-year backdrop of tacit constitutional developments in governing science and technology. Two broad cycles of constitutional adjustment are discerned: the (...) first enlarging the scope of state action as well as public participation, with liberalized rules of access and sympathetic judicial review; the second cutting back on the role of the state, fostering the rise of an academic-industrial complex for technology transfer, and privatizing value debates through increasing delegation to professional ethicists. New rules for public engagement in the United Sates should take account of these historical developments and seek to counteract some of the anti-democratic tendencies observable in recent decades. (shrink)

Economics has developed into one of the most specialised social sciences. Yet at the same time, it shares its subject matter with other social sciences and humanities and its method of analysis has developed in close correspondence with the natural and life sciences. This book offers an up to date assessment of economics in relation to other disciplines. -/- This edited collection explores fields as diverse as mathematics, physics, biology, medicine, sociology, architecture, and literature, drawing from selected contributions to the (...) 2005 Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET). There is currently much discussion at the leading edges of modern economics about openness to other disciplines, such as psychology and sociology. But what we see here is that economics has drawn on (as well as contributed to) other disciplines throughout its history. In this sense, in spite of the increasing specialisation within all disciplines, economics has always been an open discipline and the chapters in this volume provide a vivid illustration for this. -/- Open Economics is a testament to the intellectual vibrancy of historical research in economics. It presents the reader with a historical introduction to the disciplinary context of economics that is the first of its kind, and will appeal to practising economists and students of the discipline alike, as well as to anybody interested in economics and its position in the scientific and social scientific landscape. -/- Table of Contents -/- Introduction: Economics in relation to other disciplines Richard Arena, Sheila Dow and Matthias Klaes Part I. Economics in relation to the humanities and social sciences 1. The social science of economics Brian J. Loasby 2. Economics and literature Bruna Ingrao 3. Happiness: what Kahneman could have learnt from Pietro Verri Pier Luigi Porta Part II. Economics in relation to the life and natural sciences 4. Newtonian physics, experimental moral philosophy and the shaping of political economy Sergio Cremaschi 5. Evolutionary biology and economic behaviour: re-visiting Veblen's instinct of workmanship Mark Harrison 6. Medicine and economics in pre-classical economics Alain Clément and Ludovic Desmedt Part III. Economics and mathematics 7. Mathematics as the role model for neoclassical economics Nicola Giocoli 8. The role of econometric method in economic analysis: A reassessment of the Keynes-Tinbergen debate, 1938-43 Giovanna Garrone and Roberto Marchionatti IV. Economics and architecture 9. Economics and architecture Maurice Lagueux 10. Economic policies and urban development in Latin America Michele Alacevich and Andrea Costa V. Economics and geography 11. ‘Space’ in economic thought Giovanna Vertova 12. Economics, geography and colonialism in the writings of William Petty Hugh Goodacre Part VI. Economics and sociology 13. Economics and sociology: Gustav Schmoller and Werner Sombart on social differentiation Joachim Zweynert 14. Is Homo Oeconomicus a 'bad guy'? Isabelle This Saint-Jean -/- . (shrink)

In this article, I consider the standard interpretation of the superiority theory of humor attributed to Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes, according to which the theory allegedly places feelings of superiority at the center of humor and comic amusement. The view that feelings of superiority are at the heart of all comic amusement is wildly implausible. Therefore textual evidence for the interpretation of Plato, Aristotle, or Hobbes as offering the superiority theory as an essentialist theory of humor is worth careful consideration. (...) Through textual analysis I argue that not one of these three philosophers defends an essentialist theory of comic amusement. I also discuss the way various theories of humor relate to one another and the proper place of a superiority theory in humor theory in light of my analysis. (shrink)

Environmentalists can make individuals more eco-friendly by dispelling many of the myths and misconceptions about the natural world. By learning what in nature is and is not dangerous, and in what contexts the danger is real, individuals can come to aesthetically appreciate seemingly unappreciable nature. Since aesthetic attraction can be an extremely valuable tool for environmentalists, with potentialbeyond that of scientific education, the quest for an eco-friendly is neither unnecessary nor redundant. Rather, an eco-friendly aesthetic ought to be pursued in (...) conjunction with other efforts to protect nature. (shrink)

Individual, family, economic, and other forms of people suffering impact organizations. Suffering in the workplace is probably a more common occurrence than expected in everyday life, and opposite to health and employee wellbeing. According to the World Health Organization, 300 million people worldwide struggle with depression and close to 800.000 people die due to suicide every year. The European Survey on Working Conditions in the European Union gathers the most varied aspects of working conditions, such as the duration of the (...) working day, relationships between collaborators in organizations, or healthy work habits. Among the results of that survey it is noteworthy that almost half of the close to twenty-two thousand workers surveyed in the 27 member countries stated that they felt uneasiness due to the conditions of their work. (shrink)

This paper explores the politics of representing events in the world in the form of data points, data sets, or data associations. Data collection involves an act of seeing and recording something that was previously hidden and possibly unnamed. The incidences included in a data set are not random or unrelated but stand for coherent, classifiable phenomena in the world. Moreover, for data to have an impact on law and policy, such information must be seen as actionable, that is, the (...) aggregated data must show people both something they can perceive and something that demands interrogation, explanation, or resolution. Actionable data problematize the taken-for-granted order of society by pointing to questions or imbalances that can be corrected or rectified, or simply better understood, through systematic compilations of occurrences, frequencies, distributions, or correlations. The paper describes and analyzes three different modes of authorized seeing that render data on global environmental phenomena such as climate change both visible and actionable. It argues that the political force of environmental data compilations derives from the divergent epistemological standpoints and expert practices associated with producing views from nowhere, everywhere, and somewhere. (shrink)