Antimicrobial Resistance is a threat to individual and to population health and to future generations, requiring “collective sacrifices” in order to preserve antibiotic efficacy. ‘Who should make the sacrifices?’ and ‘Who will most likely make them?’ are ethical concerns posited as potentially manageable through Antimicrobial Stewardship. Antimicrobial stewardship almost inevitably involves a form of clinical cost-benefit analysis that assesses the possible effects of antibiotics to treat a diagnosed infection in a particular patient. However, this process rarely accounts properly for patients (...) – above and beyond assessments of potential (non)compliance or adherence to care regimes. Drawing on a vignette of a pregnant woman of colour and migrant diagnosed with Mycoplasma genitalium, a sexually transmissible bacterium, this article draws out some of the ethical, speculative, and practical tensions and complexities involved in Antimicrobial Stewardship. We argue that patients also engage in a form of cost-benefit analysis influenced by experiences of reproductive and social (in)justice and comprising speculative variables - to anticipate future possibilities. These processes have the potential to have effects above and beyond the specific infection antimicrobial stewardship was activated to address. We contend that efforts to practice and research antimicrobial stewardship should accommodate and incorporate these variables and acknowledge the structures they emerge with(in), even if their components remain unknown. This would involve recognising that antimicrobial stewardship is intricately connected to other social justice issues such as immigration policy, economic justice, access to appropriate medical care, racism, etc. (shrink)

The first extensive examination of Stein's notebooks, manuscripts and letters, prepared over a period of twenty years, _Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises_ asks new questions and explores new ways of reading Stein. This definitive study give us a finely detailed, deeply felt understanding of Stein, the great modernist, throughout one of her most productive periods. From "An Elucidation" in 1923 to _Lectures In America_ in 1934, Ulla E. Dydo examines the process of the making and remaking of Stein's (...) texts as they move from notepad to notebook to manuscript, from an idea to the ultimate refinement of the author's intentions. The result is an unprecedented view of the development of Stein's work, word by word, text by text, and over time. (shrink)

The "public sphere" -- an idea with deep roots in the European enlightenment -- has always been a contested concept in American culture and society. American intellectuals, artists, politicians, and activists have stressed the non-unitary, diversified, and oppositional dynamics of all things public. From the early days of the American republic, competing interest groups and commercial mass media (first newspapers, novels, and the theater, then radio, television, and the internet) have worked to pluralize public speech and public action -- and (...) ultimately the notion of "publicness" itself. This essay collection explores the public sphere in North America as a multi-agential, commercially embattled, highly mediated, and ultimately trans-nationalized aggregate of publics and counterpublics. The contributors present innovative theoretical and historical assessments of American counter/publics across an array of fields including social activism, political communication, literary discourse, and contemporary mass media. (shrink)

Merchants in late medieval Antwerp worked with a number of different representatives: They appointed proxies to trade on their behalf, to collect debts in their name or to represent them in court. If a merchant wanted to authorize another person to act on his behalf, he went to a notary who issued a letter of procuration. The article discusses the role of Roman law in these procurations. It contrasts the procurations issued by the notaries with other models for procurations found (...) in a form book for notaries in Antwerp. The analysis comes to the conclusion that the basic idea of installing a proxy did not rely on Roman law. However, knowledge of Roman law was crucial if someone wanted to be represented in a Roman law court. Furthermore, concepts derived from Roman law were applied when complicated problems or phenomena had to be shortened to a few words. In sum, the practice of including phrases and concepts of Roman law wherever they proved useful can be regarded as a part of the lex mercatoria, the customary law of merchants. (shrink)

Respect for autonomy and self-determination is a central principle in nursing ethics. Autonomy and quality of life are strongly connected, and, at the same time, autonomy is an important quality indicator on how older persons' housing functions. In this study, autonomy was conceived as self-determination. The aim of the study was to describe how older people living in sheltered housing experience self-determination and how they are valued as human beings. Eleven persons living in five different housing facilities for older people (...) in southern Sweden were interviewed. The data were analysed by manifest and latent qualitative content analysis. The overall theme expressing the latent content in the interviews emerged as disempowerment, which implied an environment that does not strengthen individual self-determination. The results showed a negative experience of how these older people thought they were valued in the sheltered housing where they lived. In sheltered housing, more attention should be paid to residents' self-determination and sense of value. (shrink)

Today, coolness is a term most often used in advertising trendy commodities, or, more generally, in promoting urban lifestyles. The Cultural Career of Coolness explores the history of the term as a metaphor for affect control and aesthetic detachment, charts various cultural p...

In a wide variety of publications,1 Johannes B. Metz programatically represented a new political theology of subject, society, history, and future. This theology participates intensely in the lively, ongoing discourse on the political and theological actuality and significance of the critical theory of society, religion and future set forth by the Marxist, Walter Benjamin.2 The purpose of this study is to illuminate several connections between Benjamin's critical theory and Metz's political theology, particularly with respect to the present stage of development (...) in advanced capitalistic society and to their future. (shrink)

A woman risks her life to save someone else's child from a house that is on fire. While in his prime, a man donates one of his kidneys to a dialysis patient whom he does not know. In Auschwitz, Maximilian Kolbe sacrifices his life for the life of another prisoner.

The prevention, treatment and management of disease are closely linked to how the causes of a particular disease are explained. For multi-factorial conditions, the causal explanations are inevitably complex and competing models may exist to explain the same condition. Selecting one particular causal explanation over another will carry practical and ethical consequences that are acutely relevant for health policy. In this paper our focus is two-fold; the different models of causal explanation that are put forward within current scientific literature for (...) the high and rising prevalence of the common complex conditions of coronary artery disease and type 2 diabetes mellitus ; and how these explanations are taken up within national health policy guidelines. We examine the causal explanations for these two conditions through a systematic database search of current scientific literature. By identifying different causal explanations we propose a three-tier taxonomy of the most prominent models of explanations: evolutionary, lifecourse, and lifestyle and environment. We elaborate this taxonomy with a micro-level thematic analysis to illustrate how some explanations are semantically and rhetorically foregrounded over others. We then investigate the uptake of the scientific causal explanations in health policy documents with regard to the prevention and management recommendations of current National Service Frameworks for CAD and T2D. Our findings indicate a lack of congruence between the complexity and frequent overlap of causal explanations evident in the scientific literature and the predominant focus on lifestyle recommendations found in the mainstream health policy documents. (shrink)

Handlungen, mit denen wir mehr Gutes tun, als unsere Pflicht ist, heißen in der Ethik supererogatorisch. Die Autorin steckt einen Rahmen für Theorien der Supererogation ab. In jenem Rahmen dokumentiert sie die Geschichte dieses Begriffes und würdigt aktuelle Theorien - um deren Beschränkungen zu überwinden. Auch wenn wir über das Gebotene hinausgehen, so ihre These, können wir fehlen; wir können uns neue Pflichten einhandeln.

Even though teacher education has been successful in preparing students for their future profession, the classroom reality can differ greatly from the inservice training. Many novice teachers therefore find the transition from student teacher to inservice teacher overwhelming To support beginning teachers, mentoring programs—where more experienced teachers support novice teachers—have become commonplace in many schools worldwide. In Sweden, mentoring for beginning teachers has been a frequent feature of support since 2001. This study, conducted in Sweden, examines seven novice teachers and (...) the impact the mentoring process had upon them during their first‐year teaching. Based on interviews, it was found that these experienced both professional and personal support from their mentors. The study also showed the significance of observant leaders within the mentorship program following up on the development of the mentor–mentee relationship. (shrink)

For over fifty years, Rudolf J. Siebert (b.1927) has developed his Critical Theory of Religion and Society out of the Critical Theory of the Institute for Social Research, commonly known as the "Frankfurt School." Born from the World War II ruins of his hometown in Frankfurt, Germany, Siebert's Hegelian thought has developed in conversation with Christian theology, German Idealism, comparative religion, political-economy, sociology, psychology, and history. Also known as Dialectical Religiology, Siebert's literary corpus is saturated with the (...) dialectics of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), especially Hegel's philosophy of right, history, religion, as well as Hegel's theodicy, which lays at the core of the enlightener's work. This volume has collected Siebert's most important works on Hegel and the Hegelian influence on his Critical Theory of Religion and Society, some of which have never been published before. The articles contained in this volume represent over five decades worth of Siebert's engagements with Hegel, and his application of his dialectical critique to a variety of subjects, including secularization, theology, rebellion and revolution, civil society and the family, war and peace, the future of the West, and many other important subjects. As philosophers frequently return to Hegel, especially within the troubling conditions of modernity, this collection of Siebert's articles will serve as a foundational source for the study of Hegelian thought and its relevance to the contemporary moment well into the 21st century and beyond. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Paragrana Jahrgang: 23 Heft: 2 Seiten: 185-193.

The word belief is widely assumed to designate a special class of mental states, the attitude of representing something as being the case. This book providesa critique of representationalism by focusing on the role that psychological concepts play in language, the way in which they are used in practice. Offering an alternative conception of their meaning, it finds a new way to deal with Moore's Paradox.