Comment expliquer la persistance des ateliers protégés dans l’insertion professionnelle des personnes en situation de handicap? Malgré les mouvements mondiaux en faveur de l’inclusion et de l’égalité d’accès au marché du travail ordinaire, les ateliers protégés restent un pilier important de la politique d’emploi des personnes en situation de handicap, en particulier pour les personnes ayant des déficiences intellectuelles ou des troubles neuro-développementaux. Cet article aborde l’avenir de l’emploi ségrégé à la lumière du droit international des droits humains garantissant un (...) droit au travail, notamment dans les dispositions relatives à l’emploi de la Convention relative aux droits des personnes handicapées (CRPD). De plus, l’article examine les appels du Comité des Nations Unies en faveur de leur abolition progressive, les tentatives du Comité de clarifier ce qui est considéré comme un emploi ségrégé, et le lien entre cette ségrégation et le principe de désinstitutionalisation. À la lumière des limites de la doctrine des droits humains pour aborder la persistance des ateliers protégés, cet article se tourne ensuite vers les recherches critiques sur le handicap concernant l’abolition des prisons, la désinstitutionalisation et les dispositions concernant l’esclavage moderne pour suggérer de nouveaux cadres théoriques ouvrant la voie à l’abolition de l’emploi ségrégé des personnes en situation de handicap. (shrink)

Based on interviews and observations conducted in France between 2018 and 2019, this article discusses the notion of a “social welfare model” theorised by sociologist Katharina Heyer, by examining of the implementation of sheltered work policies in France. Facing the evolution of public policies in France, and their will to transform sheltered workshops into transition platforms leading to ordinary employment, can sheltered work establishments still be described as parallel and separate paths to the ordinary labour market? (...) This article shows that the organisation of work in a sheltered environment cannot be thought of in isolation from what is practised in an ordinary environment. Sheltered workshops can provide a response to the specific needs of disabled people, given the dysfunctional nature of the rights model in the ordinary workplace. Nevertheless, ordinary employment remains a reference when organising productive activities in the workshops: it helps define what constitutes work from leisure activities, and it constitutes a model from which to distinguish or to aspire to. (shrink)

During the mid 1980s, the renowned American documentary filmmaker Fred Wiseman produced a four-part series of films that sought to record the operations of institutions in Talladega, Alabama, devoted to the care and training of people with disabilities. These films—designated as the Multi-handicapped Series—have received much less attention than Wiseman's earlier work, as if films about disability mark a drastic departure from his previous award-winning productions, such as Titicut Follies (1965) and Hospital (1970). The Multi-handicapped Series takes up general categories (...) of disabled populations as discrete documentary topics, Deaf (1986), Blind (1986), Multi-handicapped (1986) and Adjustment & Work (1986) as opposed to a specific location as in his earlier films. As a result, the latter series of films identify social and interpersonal structures developed in the name of specific conditions. Like Foucault's research on disciplinary tactics, Wiseman's films seek out many of the segregated social spaces typically occupied by persons classified as deviant: prisons, hospitals, charity networks, sheltered workshops, resident facilities, and vocational training structures. The Multi-handicapped Series focuses on the activities of professions and practitioners in education, administration, and therapy, as well as the institutional roles designed for bodies marked as disabled. Unlike its 19th century predecessor classification, feebleminded, the latter twentieth century U.S. policy answer has been waged as a matter of dividing disabilities into a binary structure of orthopedic or cognitive categories. Such a development has left many crossover bodies in a diagnostic no-body's-land. To analyze the history of these developments, this essay recognizes the formation of today's disability category as an effect of new regimes of power; a form of domination based upon the application of particularized diagnostic pathologies that provide the basis for cordoning off bodies which fail to fit neatly within the cognitive/orthopedic binary. As documents of the social spaces that are occupied by disabled people, Wiseman's films offer a rare contemplation of institutional practices and their application to populations viewed as nonnormative. (shrink)

In Japan, inclusion policies place great emphasis on participation in the local community. Sheltered workshops are evolving in this direction, and their number has risen sharply while mainstream employment was being promoted as well. The aim of this paper is to examine the forms of participation in local life offered by these workshops to their workers. It analyzes the strategies implemented by workshop managers to develop opportunities for interaction between disabled workers and the outside population, as well (...) as their impact on the image of sheltered work and disabled workers in the eyes of non-disabled members of the community. This study is based on a fieldwork conducted in 12 workshops in Tokyo, Kyoto and Akita. It shows that many Japanese sheltered workshops allow disabled people who so wish to work in contact with the local population, but also that there is a tension between emphasizing disability and asserting the status of the disabled people as workers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Expose of a BreakdownIngrid HindellIregard my pension as a social wage, and even though I wish it took my disability and the extra costs that brings into consideration, eighteen years ago, I felt privileged to be able to work in the community, not in a sheltered workshop.At this time, a number of us worked voluntarily for numerous little organizations when the government cut their funding and in effect, (...) took away our jobs.It was around this time that I started a “stress cough.” Foolishly, I didn’t take much notice. I was enjoying “life”—studying, working, taking part in a documentary called “Untold Desires” and being a member of the “Friendship Group”—in which a group of us tackled the subject and nature of friendship for people with and without disabilities....The processes and the cohesion of the group brought up a lot of “stuff” for me that I wasn’t able to articulate. It made me question the wisdom of my lifestyle up to then—of marrying a person without a physical disability, for example.My mother used to tell me to tell him to tidy the flat, not in the least realizing that: i) it was distressing that I couldn’t do this; ii) that given all our interests it was difficult to tidy up. (This situation was also not helped, I now realize, by us trying to live and run home businesses from my small three–roomed accommodation behind my parent’s home, without enough support worker hours....)The flat was always cluttered, not conducive to encouraging a feeling of ease in us bringing clients onto the premises. As Robert’s massage workload grew, so did our underlying tension, I see now. And when I was starting to counsel other people with disabilities the situation was made worse....Added to this, my mother had, just prior to this period in our lives, stopped giving us our main meal because we were becoming more and more interested in eating organic and vegetarian food.At the same time, listening to other group members’ stories made me realize how “undervalued” people with disabilities are in society as I had been brought up in a loving extended family and had not long been “out.”It made me realize how much people with disabilities were constrained by lack of governmental funding for recreational—especially relationship options—with each other and with able–bodied people. The government was trying to close down little advocacy organizations that could keep this issue in the forefront of policy makers’ minds. No wonder I was getting close to breaking point! [End Page E1]When I got really bad, my husband almost went mad himself trying to cope with me. I had been the outgoing partner in the relationship for the past 12 years. Now I was getting panic attacks and clinging like poison ivy....And the therapists I went to at that stage didn’t help. The Naturopath was so expensive she made me much worse. She had told a “friend” of Rob’s that she would treat me for $30.00 a time. She did not say that she would present me with an ever– increasing bill every time I had an appointment—to pay her back when I could! And that her admin assistant would keep commenting, in my hearing, that people wouldn’t pay their bills on time.... At last, when the amount got to $450.00, I paid her all my savings, and managed to quit.I now also believe she treated me with a totally inappropriate therapy—colonic irrigation—for far too long, any natural therapist would say nowadays—five weeks!I believe it made my mental state worse. People say that an unquiet mind can stress the body into illness but I believe losing too much weight too fast as I certainly did, stressed my mind, instead of other way around.By this time I wasn’t only having panic attacks. I had slipped into, what I recently discovered, was a clinical depression. This brought in its wake, a terror so real, so all encompassing that I wonder I lived through a day of it—much less four... (shrink)

This study endorses the use of data envelopment analysis, which uses benefit-of-the-doubt weighting to evaluate the social, economic and overall performance of social enterprises. This methodology is especially useful for creating composite indicators based on multiple outputs expressed in different measurement units, and allows for enterprise-specific weighting of the different objectives. Applying this methodology on a unique longitudinal dataset of Flemish sheltered workshops suggests that social enterprises may face different types of mission drift. Further, our results show that (...) top-performing social enterprises are more economically and socially efficient than low performers. These top performers also have a stronger economic orientation, which sheds new light on the balance between social and economic orientations in social enterprises. (shrink)

The article elaborates on the emergence of a new social category: the “worker incapable of working,” which has not yet been recognized in the scientific literature. In Germany, people excluded from the labour market are increasingly employed in workshops for people with disabilities due to what is defined as a total incapacity to work. In addition to the objective of labour market participation of people with disabilities, these workshops assume the aim of (re)establishing their performance and monitoring their (...) reintegration into the general labour market. Changes in the profiles of people working in the workshops and their recent expansion are described, as well as the transformation of working processes and conditions, especially through digitalisation. The consequences of these transformations are studied within the framework of “activating” policies. (shrink)

Cet article remet en question les critiques conventionnelles des institutions dans le cadre des études sur le handicap et de l’activisme en s’appuyant sur un travail de terrain dans un foyer catholique et une école pentecôtiste pour les personnes ayant une déficience intellectuelle en Ouganda. Plutôt que de considérer les espaces institutionnels de ces organisations chrétiennes comme des exclusions ségrégatives de la vie sociale au sens large, cet article aborde le travail de ces institutions en termes d’inclusion – des inclusions (...) constitutives, en référence à la manière dont ces organisations pennent en charge non seulement l’existence de base, mais aussi la personnalité de leurs résidents et de leurs étudiants. En retour, une telle analyse permet de repenser les conceptions conventionnelles des institutions dans les pays du Nord ainsi que les distinctions entre les institutions totales et les institutions sociales. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 (2011): 60-67. At the beginning of Martin Heidegger’s lecture “Time and Being,” presented to the University of Freiburg in 1962, he cautions against, it would seem, the requirement that philosophy make sense, or be necessarily responsible (Stambaugh, 1972). At that time Heidegger's project focused on thinking as thinking and in order to elucidate his ideas he drew comparisons between his project and two paintings by Paul Klee as well with a poem by Georg Trakl. In front of Klee's (...) Saints from the Window and Death of Fire —though we wouldn’t absolutely understand what we were seeing—he writes, “we should want to stand…a long while.” In a similar manner, of Trakl’s poem “Septet of Death”—although it is likely we are unsure in what we hear—Heidegger states that, “we should want to hear…[it] often.” Heidegger further states that in appreciating these, “we “should abandon any claim that [they] be immediately intelligible” (1). So also we must we approach, Heidegger continues, the realm of theoretical physics, in which the difficult work of Werner Heisenberg, be listened to “without protest” and without “any claim that he be immediately understood.” These works, like his own project, merit the time they take to be originally (mis)understood. But this is not necessarily true for philosophy, Heidegger advises, because, “That thinking is supposed to offer ‘worldly wisdom’ and perhaps even a ‘way to a blessed life’” (1). Philosophy is in the unique position of being both abstract (what do we talk about when we talk?) and at the same moment, useful. There are demands that it make sense, that it be, grounded, immediate, and most importantly, rational. Heidegger draws these comparisons between the works of Klee and Trakl and Heisenberg not to claim that philosophy is totally irresponsible. He does not claim that the poet, the painter, nor the physicist have acted irresponsibly. Rather, he would say, they are rising to the highest levels of intelligibility, though it is perhaps an intelligibility that is commonly unavailable to us. In Trakl’s case, as we shall see, mastery is the end result of difficult words. Instead, Heidegger seems be making pleas: for a period of uninterrupted unintelligibility (pure unintelligibility); and that there is a time (that time is now) when, “thinking is…placed in a position which demands of it reflections that are far removed from any useful, practical wisdom” (1-2). Heidegger argues that philosophy requires a period of time in which, instead of focusing on the practical—or even on the worldly—the discipline draw its “determination” instead from the place of painting and poetry and physics. In doing so, “we should have to abandon any claims to immediate intelligibility” (2). But Heidegger doesn’t offer this as a way out. We still have to turn up, we “still have to listen, because we must think what is inevitable, but preliminary” (2). The point for Heidegger, is not to listen to a series of propositions, but instead to “follow the movement of showing” (2). I. … Maybe we're here only to say: house, bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window— at most: pillar, tower … but to say them, remember, oh, to say them in a way that the things themselves never dreamed of existing so intensely.… Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Ninth Elegy” There is little more fundamental, preliminary, in the world than language. We use language, in the form of speech, constantly, whether we are saying anything or not. “Man speaks,” Heidegger writes, and goes on to describe in his essay “Language” (2001) the constant speaking that we do. “We are always speaking, even when we do not utter a single word aloud, but merely listen or read, and even when we are not particularly speaking or listening but are attending to some work or taking a rest” (187). Speaking is expression, an utterance of something internal. It is a recognition of a world. It is a way of communicating thought and it is an activity that we all do, inevitably. Speaking separates the human from the animal world, and despite advances in primatology that seek to give ‘voice’ to primates and other non-human animals, it can safely be said that our form of communication—what we call speech and know as language—is the most advanced, the most complicated. We use it to present and represent the world around us; through actual utterances (vocalization) or through the written word or through ‘unvoiced thoughts’ and dreams. We use language, but more specifically speech—naming—to transmit moods, thoughts, desires, aversions, and feelings. These expressions, mere utterances, nearly always find a source in words, whether spoken or not. Heidegger writes that this common view of language means “that only speech enables man to be the living being he is as man. It is as the one who speaks that man is—man” (187). Speaking then—utterance—surrounds us constantly, whether in the form of careful thought—in the form of an academic paper, say—or in the half mutterings and forgotten thoughts of a nearly remembered dream. Like scaffolding, the apparatus of speech sustains and explains the world, making, in a sense, the world rational, making it apparent. When we speak, we describe, and in doing so, name the world. We use words, through this process of naming, to interpret and sustain the world we see, and the world we imagine. Like Rilke’s naming of jug, and bridge, and window, and stream, we describe—and inscribe upon—the world through an activity of naming. Are we here, perhaps, to name? Is it possible not to name? Is it possible to regard and to view and to look around without naming what we see? Is it possible to feel—to experience—world without giving utterance to that feeling, that process? Sadness, grief, joy, ecstasy, hunger, thirst. Desk, light, room, pen, book, world. White, black, tomorrow, today. Each of these words is a name given to a thing I see in front of me, or a concept that I imagine (in the case of tomorrow or world). What arises in my mind has already existed. If I imagine it, it is named. The word for ‘tomorrow’ and ‘desk’ and ‘light’ precedes me, and precedes my concept of it. The idea of it is already pre-informed, and I must, in a certain sense, bend my ideas to it. When I imagine a table, I imagine my own table (or I imagine an idea of table) but that imagining must follow certain general rules; while, perhaps, it might not always require four legs and a horizontal surface, it must, at least not be, say, a pool of water, or a pile of excrement. It must have some tableness to it to be a table. It must, with Heidegger, table. Otherwise, speech is reduced to gibberish. For Heidegger however, the discussion of language points to something deeper than its “scientific and analytic” study as a communicative device. Indeed, Heidegger seeks to understand language not in reference to man or woman, not as an utterance of humanity, but in reference to itself. In doing so he abandons the conversation—that is, he casts away the traditional arguments surrounding philosophy of language; that it is a means of expression; that it is a human activity; and that it is somehow a representation of something that is—in order to seek to understand language as language, on its own terms. Heidegger is not a philosopher of language, but a philosopher of world, of being. Despite these “correct ideas” holding sway “over the whole field of the varied scientific perspectives on language…they ignore completely the oldest natural cast of language” (191). What is this “oldest natural cast of language? It is the act of language itself. Language is language and language speaks. “Most often,” Heidegger writes, “and too often, we encounter what is spoken only as the residue of a speaking long past” (195). Speech, as we normally encounter it, is like Echo herself calling out to Narcissus, doomed to repeat what has already been said, a mere remnant of what was once language, a trace left behind in the gathering silence of becoming. In both the essay “Language” and in his three lecture course “The Nature of Language” (1982), Heidegger attempts to unpack the seeming tautology of language as language. In each, he focuses on poetry as a way out, or into, a true discussion of the oldest natural cast of language. Poetry is pure speech. In poetry, language is brought to language and language speaks ( Die Sprach spricht ). In the act of poetry, the act of pure speech, the poet names (on the surface not different from how I name this table, this computer) but in the poet naming, the naming does not “hand out titles,” “apply terms,” but rather the naming is a call, a calling forth of entities that bring them into their own, allow them to take their place purely, without compromise. This calling, Heidegger (2001) states, “here calls into a nearness. But even so the call does not wrest what it calls away from the remoteness, in which it is kept by the calling there. The calling calls into itself and therefor always here and there—here into presence, there into absence” (196). II. Window with falling snow is arrayed, Long tolls the vesper bell, The house is provided well, The table is for many laid. Wandering ones, more than a few, Come to the door on darksome courses. Golden blooms the tree of graces Drawing up the earth’s cool dew. Wanderer quietly steps within; Pain has turned the threshold to stone. There lie, in limpid brightness shown, Upon the table bread and wine. Georg Trakl “A Winter Evening” Heidegger is often given short shrift as an abysmally difficult writer, as one that makes no sense and is needlessly difficult. In doing this though, we forget sometimes his eloquence, his simple beauty in writing. Of the above opening stanza, “Window with falling snow is arrayed/ Long tolls the vesper bell.” he writes (2001), This speaking names the snow that soundlessly strikes the window late in the waning day, while the vesper bell rings. In such a snowfall, everything lasts longer. Therefore the vesper bell, which daily rings for a strictly fixed time, tolls long. The speaking names the winter evening time (197). The speaking names the winter evening time. It is almost impossible to comment on that one line by Heidegger. It is as though it must exist on its own completely, without elucidation—as though in front of it we must stand as we do in front of a painting by Klee, that is, we must abandon any claim . Silent and devoted. The speaking of the poem here is not clearly different from common speech ( rede ) yet there is, via Heidegger, an invitation to experience that auracular quality of light and stillness that a gentle, dusk tinged snowfall gives; words evoking a quality so clear, so poignant that, in a sense, Heidegger’s work, at this moment, has been done. But what does this naming accomplish? What does the call call? Remember, it is not the poet that calls, but the naming which calls. The poet has only brought the words forward; it is now the words— snow, vesper bell, window— that take new life in the pure language of the poem. Entities are called forth into presence, like the speaking that names the winter evening time. Not to be present amongst us now, however; naming ‘table’ in the poem does not place it in front of us in this room. Rather, the naming places entities into a gathering which is also a sheltering. The naming brings them to be. In an act of appropriation, things come to be purely as their own, unimpeded by a predetermined expectation. They are called to themselves into an arrival. In Being and Time (1962), Heidegger famously describes the movement between present-at-hand and ready-to-hand in his analysis of the hammer, and of equipment in general. This analysis is already known, if not always clear, to most readers of Heidegger. Briefly, a hammer is ordinarily zuhanden or ready-to-hand; it is part of the background of the world, equipment used and never thought about, like this desk, this sheet of paper, this room. Our interaction with it is temporary and it is historically different for each entity and each relation. We need a hammer, we use a hammer. If all goes according to plan, the hammer remains ready-to-hand; it remains, in a sense, undisclosed and certainly unobtrusive. Our world is undisturbed by the hammer. Only when the hammer or the car or the computer is broken (or sometimes unused or unrecognized or missing) does it intrude into our world, become conspicuous as an object present-at-hand, or vorhanden . In this case, we reach for the hammer, it is broken and we suddenly notice it’s being, broken though it is. The thing which was always ready to hand—handy—is suddenly abstract, something to be examined, if only in its absence or disfunction. This can be exhibited for all entities, and it is important to note that in this analysis the zuhanden / vorhanden split is not restricted to a specific form of constructed material; zuhanden does not refer to the car, and vorhanden the sunset. No entity is ever exclusively ready-to-hand or present-at-hand; they are instead, interpenetrated with each others mode of being, one informing the other in a way that both brings things forth into the world—discloses is the word Heidegger chooses—and at the same time conceals them. As one mode is coming to be so another mode is withdrawing. This flux and movement between modes is precisely what brings the world forward, and what makes it manifest. It exists beyond where we tread and before man took dubious control of the world. We go to find a book or turn on the computer and it is missing or broken and we become aware of the object, as though for the first time. We walk to the water to glimpse the sunset and miss it, or it is less than stellar; in the sunset’s grayness, we become aware of it’s being sunset. The thing is disclosed in its withdrawal. Echoing Heraclitus, we can say that as something is coming to be, it is already becoming something other. Of similar importance to the fact that things are never all of one, or all of the other, they are also never alone. The hammer is never a single object, but is in relation always to the whole. Heidegger (1962) states, Equipment—in accordance with its equipmentality—always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These ‘Things’ never show themselves proximally as they are for themselves…What we encounter as closest to us…is the room; and we encounter it not as something ‘between four walls’ in a geometrical, spatial sense, but as equipment for residing…it is in this that any ‘individual’ item of equipment shows itself. Before its does so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered (97). Equipment resides—dwells—in its relations, in its proximal being to other beings. Within the structure of totality, a series of relations is always occurring. The hammer is on the workbench in the carpenter’s hand in the workshop in the village under the sky and under the sun. It doesn’t stop there. Equipment surrounds us and the focus is not on what it does, or what one does with it—the carpenter with the hammer, the writer with laptop—but with the fact that it is. Equipment occurs in relation and is always occurring around us overhead, underfoot, by the stream and in the city. There is a constant exchange of relations happening, and as this occurs, so the world occurs, so the world both discloses and withdraws, into and out of itself. In a very real sense, language is also equipment. It is the thing that we use most often without thought, it is ready-to-hand (except when it’s not.) As we re- cognize the world around us, as we offer names for things and make lists, we are using language much like we might use a hammer, that is, bluntly. Most of the time it is invisible and we draw on it without wondering how we are going to say something. When language does intrude, it does so in an awkward moment, that moment when we can’t remember the right word, when we forget a phrase. At that second, it “speaks itself as language,” it reveals itself as malfunctioning equipment, and we “undergo” an experience with language, in Heidegger’s famous formulation. Language is not a tool anymore that we use to bludgeon an object, but something instead that we submit to, that we experience. In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger (1982) writes, But when does language speak to us as language? Curiously enough, when we cannot find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without rightly giving it a thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly touched us with its essential being (59). The poet’s words become themselves, become appropriate, only when they no longer function in the prosaic world; they instead intrude as they come to be. Language itself brings itself to language. Names, like the entities they indicate, are always becoming something else. As noted above, language, through the poet, has brought forth entities from words previously “known.” I thought that I knew snow, but through Trakl’s re- presentation of the word, language calls forth a new image of snow, indeed calls forth snow itself. The vesper bell tolls longer, the table is for many laid. In bringing forth things , language has brought the world to presence. In everyday naming, word occludes world, preventing, in its everydayness, its coming forth, its disclosing. But what is this world that word has been brought forth into? In the same way that language speaks, world worlds. World, left alone, un-interfered with, comes into itself. It worlds. Again, this sounds like a tautology, but it is essential to Heidegger’s thought (and in my mind is more of a “god killer” than Nietzsche.) One of the most overlooked (and under-appreciated) aspects of Heidegger is his later examination and enthusiasm for the “fourfold,” or the system through which things come to be, through which things thing in a world worlding. The fourfold is the interaction of earth and sky, mortals and gods. Things come to be in the interstices and gathering of the fourfold. The fourfold provides both a place of being, and a sheltering, a place to dwell. Heidegger writes that “the things that were named, thus called, gather to themselves sky and earth, mortals and divinities. The four are united primally in being toward one another, a fourfold.” The poet has called, through the act of pure naming, things to come forth. In the purity of the fourfold—that is, when that is all that there is, when there are no other distractions, definitions, things—entities themselves can come to be. It is important to note that Heidegger is not saying that there are four formal things in the world, autonomous entities unto themselves. He is not evoking a pre-Socratic formula as to what makes up the world; instead, the four mirror each other constantly. (Heidegger calls this the ‘mirror-play.’) They interpenetrate in the same way that the modes of being of things interpenetrate themselves. There is no discrete exclusivity in being or the fourfold. What makes up things is not a precise recipe of the four main components; what makes up things is the action of the fourfold coming together, the movement of the fourfold which is a becoming. Heidegger (2001) writes that “this gathering, assembling, letting stay is the thinging of things.” And he later adds that “thinging, things are things. Thinging, they gesture—gestate—world” (197). Language brings the world to be. It works not again as a recipe added to things, but instead it is a bridge, or more precisely, a relation. Language relates world to thing, brings world to thing. In a sense, it does not say anything; rather it allows, or calls in its movement. Heidegger (2001) writes that, The intimacy of world and thing is not a fusion. Intimacy obtains only where the intimate—world and thing—divides itself cleanly and remains separated. In the midst of the two, in the between of world and thing, in their inter, division prevails: a dif-ference (199). It is in this inter that language prevails. Language is difference, it is the differential aspect between world and thing that brings world to thing. In the final stanza of Trakl’s poem “The Winter Evening,” Trakl evokes this difference in the second line when he writes, “Pain has turned the threshold to stone.” Christopher Fynsk, in his essay “Noise at the Threshold,” draws attention to this point when he writes “it is the figure of the threshold that is language itself, inasmuch as language is defined as the articulation of difference by which difference comes about” (25). Language, as used in the pure language of the poem, draws together world and thing, bridging relation between entity and world. The calling of language calls world to thing, world to being. Heidegger (2001) describes this difference as unique; “of itself, it holds apart the middle in and through which world and things are at one with each other” (200). III. Neither reading nor writing, nor speaking—and yet it is by those paths that we escape what has been said already, and knowledge, and reciprocity, and enter the unknown space, the space of distress where what is given is perhaps not received by anyone (99). Maurice Blanchot The Writing of Disaster So far, we have allowed Heidegger to put forward what language does, how it functions as a relation and how it operates as a threshold, as a bridge. What interests me is what happens beyond language, beyond the relation. What happens to the thing without the naming, without the poet, or even without the everyday chatter—Fynsk calls this ‘noise’—intruding on being? If language allows things to become by bringing thing to world, what happens when we remove this bringing, this threshold turned to pain? In “The Nature of Language,” Heidegger examines the work of the poet Stefan George, specifically “The Word”: Wonder or dream from distant land I carried to my county’s strand And waited till the twilight norn Had found the name within her bourn— Then I could grasp it close and strong It blooms and shines now the front along… Once I returned from happy sail, I had a prize so rich and frail, She sought for long and tidings told: “No like of these depths unfold.” And straight it vanished from my hand, The treasure never graced my land… So I renounced and sadly see: Where word breaks off no thing may be. That final line, “Where word breaks off no thing may be” is evoked on nearly every page of Heidegger’s essay. It is the line to which he returns over and over and bears repeating. Where word breaks off no thing may be. Where naming ends, no thing. We can interpret this in two ways (at least.) Where word—naming—breaks off, then there is nothing . Or, as I choose to read it, where word breaks off no thing may be. In this I see a hint forward, a marker left behind by Heidegger. What could this look like? What does no thing look like? Like a zen koan ( there is no mirror ) it is as thrilling and horrifying as contemplating what preceded the Big Bang. Because language as naming wasn’t always here; we weren’t always here. One or maybe two aspects of the fourfold (depending on your view of gods) were not always here, and there is no guarantee that we will always be around. What then? Heidegger (1982) describes the landscape that the poet finds, “It names the realm into which the renunciation must enter: it names the call to enter into that relation between thing and word which has now been experienced” (65). The poet, in renouncing, allows for the “may be” of “where word breaks off no thing may be.” This “may be” becomes “a kind of imperative, a command which the poet follows, to keep it from then on.” No thing is lacking. Where word breaks off, there may be, a totality, a completion. If we place the emphasis on may be , we make it affirmative, make it positive. One allows it. No thing is where the word, that is the name, is lacking. If we remove then (if we can remove) the word, the name, than that is where no thing is, that is where no thing may blossom, enrich, belong, become. What is no thing? Heidegger writes that “thing is anything that in any way is.” And just after this he writes that the “world alone gives being to the thing.” But what happens if there is no word? Word, in this formulation can be seen as an enframing, a challenging of language. By naming, by drawing a perimeter around an object, we hold it, by its definition (that is a brick) to an ordered future. If we borrow from Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1993) the idea of this standing-reserve of an ordered future, we see that “everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering” (322). What happens if there is no naming of the thing? Silence perhaps. Stillness. We can name—and do name—that which we know. We equate knowledge with knowing the name of something. A brick is a brick, a hammer is a hammer, the universe is the universe. By naming a thing, we create, and draw its parameters, the parameters of the thing, not as thing thinging in the fourfold, but as blunt object apparent. In the four dimensions relatively available to us, we observe (and name) that the brick takes up possibly six by four by two inches and is, in the sense that it currently occupies this time slot. It fulfills its destiny, its being, its brickness, it bricks . But what happens when we remove the name for this brick. We no longer know what to call this no-thing (if indeed we can even arrive at the point of uncalled calling.) In fact the it (this brick) is no longer a thing in the sense that by not naming—by removing the name—it still occupies the same dimension but is indiscernible from the world. It simply is , un-reliant, un- needed by me. By removing the subject (me) from it (the brick) do I not then also remove the object—or at least the duality objectifying it? Why is this important? Why does this matter? I have not really removed anything. I have not changed any thing , per se . The brick still occupies the same space in geographic and temporal dimensions. I have literally not even touched the brick sitting on my desk. But what I have done is removed the name, removed the word (the bridge, according to Heidegger) and in this (again, if this is even possible) there is something vertiginously liberating, not only for me (and my way of thinking) but also for the brick itself. Like the poet who calls the thing forward, by refusing to name, by avoiding any thing that demands me to name it, I release the thing into the fourfold. I am no longer challenging the thing to be there for me ; I do not en frame it through language. Rather I, in an act of extreme responsibility, am refusing the challenge. By refusing the name (refusing to name) one allows, (or no one allows no thing) the brick to be all things , to manifest its manifold being, to incorporate all things into its thinging . It becomes, quite literally, every thing . Because, in its infinite manifestness, it incorporates everything; the mud that gave it its current being, the water that formed the mud, the sun, the stars, the universe and it also allows it to become mud again, to become landfill, to become again, water and sun and stars and universe in an endless, infinite cycle of coming to be some thing (else). Perhaps this is what Heidegger is suggesting when he talks about the stillness at the end of his essay, “Language” (2001): The dif-ference stills particularly in two ways: it stills the things in thinging and the world in worlding. Thus stilled, thing and world never escape from the dif-ference. Rather, they rescue it in the stilling, where the dif-ference is itself the stillness (206). It is in this stillness that I can imagine a gellasenheit (here I mean both “releasement in the Heideggarean sense, as well as Meister Eckhart’s use of the term meaning “letting the world go and giving oneself to God”) of thing and world, a releasing into the stillness and silence of no thing beyond where word breaks off. It is here where I may no longer be, and yet no thing is, but may be. (shrink)

In France, establishments and services of assistance through work (ESAT) are medico-social establishments in which disabled workers -supervised by employees and accompanied by medico-social and educational support- carry out activities of a professional nature aimed at economic production. Echoing their normal functioning, the options chosen in ESAT in response to the upheaval caused by the health crisis of March 2020 and its subsequent generalized lockdown showed contrasting realities. Relying on various understanding of what the notion of disability covers, arguments developed (...) by supervisors led to opposite solutions: total closure, operation with employees only or with disabled workers. Which disability constitutes a strict contraindication to work or an argument for continuity or resumption of their activities. In addition, the new organization of workshops, under health constraints, was an opportunity to look at some working conditions. The view taken of the skills of disabled workers in this context and the enhancement of their activities through the award of a bonus have showed that some ESAT reconsidered the importance of their contribution to the production carried out. (shrink)

Just Shelter: Gentrification, Integration, Race, and Reconstruction is a work of political philosophy that examines the core injustices of the contemporary U.S. housing crisis and its relation to enduring racial injustices. It posits that what is required to achieve justice in social-spatial arrangements—what is otherwise called “spatial justice”—is to prioritize, in the crafting and enforcement of housing policy, individual moral equality and liberty; distributive justice; equal citizenship; and, due to history and continuing practice and effects of racial discrimination in housing (...) policy and the housing market in the United States, corrective justice in the form of rectification programs to address the history of racism in housing policy that should be implemented by local, state, and federal governments. To arrive at and illustrate this conclusion, it investigates aspects of the housing crisis closely related to the history of American racial injustice, such as gentrification, segregation, desegregation, integration, and, to a lesser extent, homelessness, and offers liberal reform gestures toward a broad view of reconstructive justice. (shrink)

Animal shelters -- Why we need animal shelters -- Types of shelters and how they're made -- The origins of animal shelters -- Shelter animals -- Animal shelters today and in the future -- Final thoughts.

Far from being indiscriminately critical of the ideas he associated with the morality system, Bernard Williams offered vindicatory explanations of its crucial building blocks, such as the moral/non-moral distinction, the idea of obligation, the voluntary/involuntary distinction, and the practice of blame. The rationale for these concessive moves, I argue, is that understanding what these ideas do for us when they are not in the service of the system is just as important to leading us out of the system as the (...) critique of that system. I then show how regarding the aspiration to shelter life from luck as the system’s organizing ambition explains why the system elaborates and combines these building blocks in the way it does. Finally, I argue that the ultimate problem with the resulting construction is its frictionless purity. It robs valuable concepts of their grip on the world we live in, and, by insisting on purity from contingency, threatens to issue in nihilism about value and scepticism about agency. (shrink)

Childhood cancers are life-threatening diseases that affect the whole family. During the treatment moral situations might arise. Research on how parents perceive moral challenges in childhood cancer care is sparse. The aim was to explore parents’ main concern, and how they deal with their main concern, when facing moral challenges in childhood cancer care. Data collection included focus group interviews with parents. The data analysis was carried out according to a classical theory and revealed the core category “Sheltering in chaos”. (...) The strategies to handle the main concern included “To bring the child through a life-saving trajectory” by “Balancing control” and “Deliberating of suffering. The consequences included feelings of being “Torn between roles”. “Familiarity” emerged as a facilitating factor to handle moral challenges. The results indicate that parents are torn between different roles, and that the care experience is improved through familiarity with the healthcare professionals. The following findings may inspire new ways of offering moral support to families in childhood cancer care. (shrink)

A beautiful paperback edition of a landmark of 20th Century literature, by acclaimed author Paul Bowles In this classic work of psychological terror, Paul Bowles examines the ways in which Americans apprehend an alien culture--and the ways in which their incomprehension destroys them. The story of three American travelers adrift in the cities and deserts of North Africa after World War II, The Sheltering Sky is at once merciless and heartbreaking in its compassion. It etches the limits of human reason (...) and intelligence--perhaps even the limits of human life --when they touch the unfathomable emptiness and impassive cruelty of the dessert. (shrink)

Poetry and informational text showcase the work of community animal shelters. Ten different fictional animals represent the millions of pets brought to shelters every day. Suggestions on animal adoption, including how to prepare and appropriate pet selection, are included, along with resources list.

What is xenophobia? Why is xenophobia immoral? How is xenophobia's conceptual and moral meaning diminished? Investigations of these questions would invigorate xenophobia as a topic in public morality and discourage the public's acquiescing to xenophobia's new prominence. This paper focuses on the third question, the diminishment of xenophobia. In the first section, I outline a general conception of xenophobia. In the second, I explain how theories of membership in liberal democratic societies relegate xenophobia to a minor moral concern. And, in (...) the third, that the conflation of xenophobia with racism disadvantages the former. How liberal Democratic nations imagine membership and how those nations imagine racism shelters xenophobia. (shrink)

Shelter Theology offers insight into the worlds of the invisible: individuals experiencing homelessness and those living in extreme poverty. Based on over ten years of chaplaincy in a homeless shelter, Dunlap shares the nuanced theology of people in harsh circumstances and outlines how their beliefs and practices enable survival and resistance.

s for the Second Workshop on Implementing Machine Ethics.

The current COVID-19 pandemic has reactivated ancient metaphors but also initiated a new vocabulary: social distancing, lockdown, self-isolation, and sheltering in place. Terminology is not ethically neutral but reflects prevailing value systems. I will argue that there are two metaphorical vocabularies at work: an authoritarian one and a liberal one. Missing is an ecological vocabulary. It has been known for a long time that emerging infectious diseases are associated with the destruction of functioning ecosystems and biodiversity. Ebola and avian influenza (...) viruses have been significant warnings. Obviously, this pandemic will not be the last one. As the planet is our common home, the major metaphor to explore is sheltering at this home. (shrink)

In our life with science, we trust experts; we form judgements by inference from past evidence. We conduct ourselves very differently in the aesthetic domain. We avoid deferring to aesthetic experts. We form our judgements through direct perception of particulars rather than through inference. Why the difference? I suggest that we avoid aesthetic testimony and aesthetic inference, not because they’re unusable, but because we have adopted social norms to avoid them. Aesthetic appreciation turns out to be something like a game. (...) We have laid down certain rules and restrictions in order to shape a kind of activity we cherish. And aesthetic properties turn out to be a kind of social construct. Much like the goal of a game, they are constituted in part by our obedience to certain rules. The norms of aesthetic life are different from those of science because our purposes are different. We engage in science to get the right answers; we engage in aesthetic appreciation to be absorbed in the activity of the sensuous perception of particulars. Our aesthetic practices are a constructed shelter from science; they restore to us a small domain where we may once again engage in our own sensuous perception of particulars. (shrink)

Retraction note: Ortega Camarero, M. T. (2023). Sheltered employment in Spain: Challenges for a new model of special employment centres. HUMAN REVIEW. International Humanities Revista Internacional De Humanidades, 17(3), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.37467/revhuman.v12.4729 The Editorial Office of Eurasia Academic Publishing Group has retracted this article. An investigation carried out by our Research Integrity Department has found a group of articles, among which this one is found, that are not within the thematic scope of the journal. We believe that the editorial process (...) was manipulated and, furthermore, acceptance decisions were made under possibly inappropriate peer review. (shrink)

The Workshop of Being brings into conversation Jonathan Edwards and William James on the pragmatic value of religious experience. The author shows how Edwards and James employ psychological dynamics and theological and philosophical investigations to interpret religious feeling and its value for the transformation of an unfinished universe in need of repair. The Workshop of Being offers a meditative analysis of the work of America’s two greatest thinkers on the nature of religious experience.

In this article, Palmer provides a clear survey of positions on killing domestic animals in animal shelters. She argues that there are three ways of understanding the killing that occurs in animal shelters: consequentialism, rights based, and relation based. She considers the relationship of humans and domesticated animals that leads to their killing in animal shelters as well as providing an ethical assessment of the practice.

The goal of the workshop is to bring IABS performance measurement researchers together, so that they can improve the quality of their research, develop new ideas and projects, strengthen and enlarge their networks, and increase collaboration. During the workshop four discussion sessions were facilitated, all discussion a specific issue related to performance measurement; (1) evaluation methods for CSP, (2) measurement metrics, (3) level of analysis, and (4) relation between motivations and impact.

This workshop was designed for faculty teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels who incorporate or wish to incorporate climate change and sustainability into their teaching repertoire. Following an introduction, the workshop addressed challenges, frameworks, and models for teaching about climate change and sustainability. Breakout sessions then focused on these three aspects of our teaching. The workshop concluded with a sharing of ideas from the breakout sessions and thoughts on moving forward. A resource list for teaching about climate change (...) was discussed at the workshop and is included herein. (shrink)

As part of an effort to improve the teaching of medical ethics in the College of Medicine, Lagos University two-day workshops were organised. Participants included people from various walks of life, for example politicians, lawyers, doctors, and patients. The workshops were quite successful, and have led to more extensive teaching of medical ethics in the college.

How could the right to work for persons with disabilities be upheld? How to ensure that the jobs they are accessing are actually rewarding, do not relegate them to a subaltern position, are neither exploitative nor a form of patronisation, where the activity is only symbolic or even non-existent? Several countries have implemented “anti-discrimination” legislations, which establish the right to “reasonable accommodation” in the workplace. Quotas for recruitment in the mainstream workplace, as...

Ethical dilemmas and decision-making are a persistent feature of the everyday operations of animal shelters and animal protection organizations. These organizations frequently face difficult decisions about how to treat the animals in their care, decisions that are made all the more difficult by limited funding, material resources, and human labor. Moreover, animal protection organizations must also determine how to act within and toward the wider social and institutional environment in which non-human animals are routinely exploited. The first section of The (...) Ethics of Animal Shelters contains practical recommendations developed by ethicists in response to the ethical challenges identified by employees of the Montreal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. These challenges arise across the organization's activities, including its internal structure; shelter operations; public campaigns and advocacy work; dealing with the public, animal agriculture and governmental agencies; and their work with feral animals. The second section offers philosophical analyses of the ethical challenges unique to animal shelters. Issues explored include the killing of shelter animals; shelter animals' diets; medical decision-making procedures; adoption policies; and the role shelters might play in transforming social attitudes and norms. (shrink)

One of the main strands of the Cartesian tradition is the view that the mental realm is cognitively accessible to us in a special way: whenever one is in a mental state of a certain sort, one can know it just by considering the matter. In that sense, the mental realm is thought to be a cognitive home for us, and the mental states it comprises are luminous. Recently, however, Timothy Williamson has argued that we are cognitively homeless: no mental (...) state is in fact luminous. But his argument depends on an excessively strong account of luminosity. I formulate a weaker conception of luminosity that is unaffected by Williamson’s argument and yet is substantial enough to satisfy those who wish to retain this part of the Cartesian tradition. (shrink)

Bioethics is a diverse field that accommodates a broad range of perspectives and disciplines. The recent explosion of literature on methods in interdisciplinary and empirical ethics might appear, however, to overshadow the fact that ‘bioethics’ has long been an interdisciplinary field. The Interdisciplinary and Empirical Ethics Network (IEEN) was established, with funding from the Wellcome Trust, to facilitate critical and constructive discussion around the nature of this disciplinary diversity and shift focus away from the ‘empirical turn’, towards the ongoing development (...) of bioethics as an evolving field of interdisciplinary study. In April 2012 the IEEN organized a workshop at the Centre for Public Policy Research, King's College London, dedicated to discussing the relationship between aims and methods in interdisciplinary and empirical bioethics. This paper reports on that first meeting. (shrink)

Bioethics is an interdisciplinary field that accommodates a broad range of perspectives and disciplines. This inherent diversity sets a number of challenges for both teachers and students of bioethics, notably in respect to the appropriate aims and methods of bioethics education, standards and criteria for evaluating performance and disciplinary identity. The Interdisciplinary and Empirical Ethics Network (IEEN) was established, with funding from the Wellcome Trust, to facilitate critical and constructive discussion about the ongoing development of bioethics as an evolving field (...) of interdisciplinary study. In November 2012 the IEEN organised a workshop at the University of Birmingham to discuss the issues relating to teaching and learning in interdisciplinary and empirical bioethics. This paper reports on that meeting. (shrink)

Strategies for Successful Animal Shelters is the first book to assess the relationship between shelter traits, activities and critical outcome variables, such as live release or save rates. This book provides a data-based evaluation of shelter processes and practices with explicit recommendations for improved shelter activities. Using a survey of licensed animal shelters, case studies, and data on state inspections, complaints, and save rates, this book provides an assessment of the activities, processes, and procedures that are most likely to lead (...) to positive outcomes for a variety of animal shelters. The book also contributes to community debate around animal sheltering and provides best practices, methods and means to assess local shelters to ensure the highest level of animal welfare. It is a valuable resource for animal shelter professionals and rescue groups, as well as students in disciplines such as animal science, animal welfare and shelter medicine."--Back cover. (shrink)

I give a short report on the origin of the International Working Group on Business Ethics Education (IWBEE) the group’s workshop sessions at the IABSconference. Building on the discussions throughout these workshop sessions, I outline how IWBEE’s perspective on business ethics education can be related to analytical perspectives from anthropology and economics.

Why may not our acts be "the workshop of being, where we catch fact in the making?"1I find it difficult to respond to Peter H. Hare's writings because we come from different universes of discourse and have presumably different intentions. Whereas Peter translates James's writings into traditional philosophical issues as expressed through analytic discourse, I tend to follow James's quirky re-working of these issues to see where they lead and use his own vocabulary rather than translating it into another one. (...) We bring our intellectual backgrounds with us, though, and my way of understanding James—or Dewey or Addams, for that matter—is no more a transparent reading than is his. Although I choose to read and .. (shrink)

In his book Byzantine Art in the Making; Main Lines of Stylistic Development in Mediterranean Art 3 rd–7 th Century, Ernst Kitzinger describes three types of subjects represented in a group of ivory plaques most likely executed in the same Roman workshop c. 400. He begins with the famous pair of ivory panels inscribed with the names Nicomachi (Paris, Musée Cluny) and Symmachi (London, Victoria and Albert Museum), two of the old Roman senatorial families known for their efforts and actions (...) to preserve and protect pagan rites during the final decades of the fourth century in Rome [fig. 1]. Each of the two panels shows a priestess performing a rite before an altar. Kitzinger's main interest was in the classicistic style of the settings and figures, recruited to emphasize the patrons' purposes. He compares the priestess diptych with the official ivory diptych of Rufius Probianus. There in each part Probianus, vicarius of the city of Rome, is seen seated on a throne flanked by two notaries [fig. 2]. Below, two patricians stand in acclamation pose. The devotional pair of ivories and the official one, says Kitzinger, are closely related. The borders of the first diptych, made of “delicately wrought palmette ornament” are identical with the frames of the second one, including the borders dividing the Probianus panels into upper and lower zones. (shrink)

A possible explanation for policy implementation failure is that the views of the policy’s target groups are insufficiently taken into account during policy development. It has been argued that involving these groups in an interactive process of policy development could improve this. We analysed a project in which several target populations participated in workshops aimed to optimise the utilisation of an expensive novel drug (interferon beta) for patients with Multiple Sclerosis. All participants seemed to agree on the appropriateness of (...) establishing a central registry of Multiple Sclerosis patients and developing guidelines. Nevertheless, these policy measures were not implemented. Possible explanations include (1) the subject no longer had high priority when the costs appeared lower than expected, (2) the organisers had paid insufficient attention to the perceived problems of parties involved, and (3) changes within the socio-political context. The workshops in which representatives of the policy’s target populations participated did not provide enough interactivity to prevent policy implementation failure. (shrink)

From 1945 to date Holocaust research has concentrated on complex matters such as militant Jewish resistance, convoluted Nazi strategies, ambivalent bystander behavior, controversial ghetto leadersh...

Francis Bacon's New Atlantis -- Galileo and the authority of science -- Rene Descartes : workshop thinking -- Giambattista Vico : going mad rationally -- Mary Shelley's hideous idea -- Auguste Comte's religion of humanity -- Max Weber : authority and bureaucracy -- Kemal Atatørk : science and patriotism -- Edmund Husserl : cultural crisis -- Hannah Arendt : action -- Conclusion.