In this article I consider the presence of negative space in the form of imaginative listening spaces in Chantal Akerman's documentary South. This article examines the workings of memory and imagination from an auditory perspective, aided by two conceptions of the imagination, set out by Hannah Arendt and Toni Morrison, which I equate to a process of listening. Focusing my attention on the ‘inverted face’ or ‘back’ of the face-to-face encounter, my study brings together Don Ihde's work on relative silence (...) and the auditory imagination, Max Silverman's concept of ‘palimpsestic memory’ and Sara Ahmed's theorizing of a ‘politics of sides’. It suggests that a polyphonic mode of listening is required if the spectator is to see with doubled vision, beyond a racialized dichotomy, thereby gaining access to the ‘non-forms’ of hidden voices, stories and histories. (shrink)

El trabajo sexual durante la pandemia COVID-19 ha sufrido un impacto en cuanto a la precarización de las vidas de las mujeres que lo ejercen. Tanto el vacío de reconocimiento social y estatal, como la falta de redistribución de recursos han sido elementos recurrentes. Ambas dimensiones han acentuado la estigmatización del colectivo, que oscila entre la victimización y la criminalización. A pesar de ello, también han emergido prácticas de movilidad, solidaridad y alianzas que les han permitido desestabilizar las representaciones dominantes (...) que las encasillan en patrones estereotipados. (shrink)

Drawing on everyday telephone and video interactions, this book surveys how English speakers use grammar to formulate responses in ordinary conversation. The authors show that speakers build their responses in a variety of ways: the responses can be longer or shorter, repetitive or not, and can be uttered with different intonational 'melodies'. Focusing on four sequence types: responses to questions, responses to informings, responses to assessments, and responses to requests, they argue that an interactional approach holds the key to explaining (...) why some types of utterances in English conversation seem to have something 'missing' and others seem overly wordy. (shrink)

Recent observations of power-law distributions in the connectivity of complex networks came as a big surprise to researchers steeped in the tradition of random networks. Even more surprising was the discovery that power-law distributions also characterize many biological and social networks. Many attributed a deep significance to this fact, inferring a “universal architecture” of complex systems. Closer examination, however, challenges the assumptions that (1) such distributions are special and (2) they signify a common architecture, independent of the system's specifics. The (...) real surprise, if any, is that power-law distributions are easy to generate, and by a variety of mechanisms. The architecture that results is not universal, but particular; it is determined by the actual constraints on the system in question. BioEssays 27:1060–1068, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Background: Ethics consultation is the traditional way of resolving challenging ethical questions raised about patient care in the United States. Little research has been published on the resolution process used during ethics consultations and on how this experience affects healthcare professionals who participate in them. Objectives: The purpose of this qualitative research was to uncover the basic process that occurs in consultation services through study of the perceptions of healthcare professionals. Design and Method: The researchers in this study used a (...) constructivist grounded theory approach that represents how one group of professionals experienced ethics consultations in their hospital in the United States. Results: The results were sufficient to develop an initial theory that has been named after the core concept: Moving It Along. Three process stages emerged from data interpretation: moral questioning, seeing the big picture, and coming together. It is hoped that this initial work stimulates additional research in describing and understanding the complex social process that occurs for healthcare professionals as they address the difficult moral issues that arise in clinical practice. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Systems Biology Function: A Minimalist Conception Kant and As‐If Purpose Cybernetics and Bernard Machines A Guarded Optimism Postscript: Counterpoint References.

What I suggest we can see in this brief overview of the literature is an extensive interpenetration on both sides of these debates between scientific, political, and social values. Important shifts in political and social values were of course occurring over the same period, some of them in parallel with, and perhaps even contributing to, these transitions I have been speaking of in evolutionary discourse. The developments that I think of as at least suggestive of possible parallels include the progressive (...) encroachment of public values into the private domain of post-World War II American life, the cold war, the rise of consumerism, and the flowering of what Christopher Lasch calls a “narcissistic individualism.”35 In popular language, the 1960s gave birth to the “me” generation. Perhaps the most tantalizing analogue is suggested by Barbara Ehrenreich's argument for the emergence of a new meaning of masculinity — an ideal of masculinity measured not by commitment, responsibility, or success as family provider, but precisely by the strength of a man's autonomy in the private sphere, his resistance to the demands of a hampering female.36 It is tempting to speculate about possible connections between changes in scientific discourse and developments in the social and political spheres, but such connections, however suggestive, would clearly have to be demonstrated.For now, however, I want to focus on another kind of change —a transformation not so much in the social or political sphere as in the scientific sphere. I make this turn, or return, in support of a more complex account of scientific change that incorporates reverberations within the scientific communty along with social and political changes.In the 1960s, all of biology was undergoing a major transformation in direct response to the dramatic successes of molecular biology. These successes seemed to completely vindicate the values on which the molecular revolution was premised — namely, simplicity and mechanism. Following the victory of Watson and Crick, and of others after them, the fever of that endeavor swept through biology leaving in its wake a new standard of science, and of scientific discourse — one predicated on clarity, simplicity, and analyzability; on the definition of legitimate questions as those capable of clear and unambiguous answers. Every biological discipline felt it — even evolutionary biology, which in some respects was at the furthest pole. Perhaps precisely because it seemed conceptually so remote, evolutionary biology may have felt it most of all. Lewontin inadvertently provides us with some direct support for this view. Indeed, he begins his introduction to Population Biology and Evolution with the following remarks: The twenty years since World War II have seen a vindication in biology of our faith in the Cartesian method as a way of doing science. Some of the most fundamental and interesting problems of biology have been solved or are very nearly solved by an analytic technique that is now loosely called “molecular biology.” But it is not specifically the “molecular” aspect of biology of the last twenty years that has led to its success. It is, rather, the analytic aspect, the belief that by breaking systems down into their component parts, by simplifying them or using simpler organisms, one can learn about more complex systems. As it happens, the problems that were attacked and are being attacked by this method lead to answers in terms of molecules and cell organelles.... There is a host of problems in biology, however, that has been much neglected in these twenty exciting years, because the answers to them cannot be meaningfully framed in molecular and cellular terms.37Lewontin is referring, of course, to problems in evolution. The remainder of his remarks is devoted to an argument for the applicability of the method, if not the content, of molecular biology to these problems. He writes, “It is not the case that molecular biology is Cartesian and analytic while population biology is holistic. Population biology is properly analytic and operates, within the framework of its own problems, by the process of simplification, analysis, and resynthesis.”38 With these remarks, he leads into the criticism of the “holists” who have “held up progress.”This new ethic of simplicity, clarity, and mechanism — embodying the very virtues lauded by Williams — was explicitly carried into evolutionary biology in the name of scientific progress. As it happened, the values implied also fit conveniently well with other values — each set of values providing crucial support for the other.However substantive the scientific gains may have been in some respects, the net effect of this ethic has also been a systematic “perceptual bias” — a bias with profound practical consequences for the entire program of methodological individualism in evolutionary biology, if not elsewhere as well. It may well be that the whole is equivalent to the reconstituted aggregate of its parts, if, in the process of aggregation or summation, all possible interactions among the parts are included. But if certain kinds of interactions are systematically excluded, our confidence in that program necessarily founders. My claim here is that such systematic exclusion does occur, and that it occurs on a number of different levels. To briefly review the interlocking kinds of “bias” that I see occurring in practice, I suggest the following schematic listing:On the most general level: The ethic of simplicity — the privileging of certain values, even certain methodologies, as having an a priori superior claim to scientific credibility.Only slightly less general, and crucially related, is the equation of “scientific” with “tractible”: Given the techniques of analysis available, the equation of science with what we can do inevitably leads to a systematic technical bias favoring simplicity. That is, because we don't know how to model complex dynamics, nonlinear interactions are systematically biased against because of the limitations of our technical know-how. The consequences of this equation of the scientific with the tractible are greatly compounded by the additional equation between what we can do and what is — that is, by our temptation to confuse tractibility with reality.Finally, and also closely related, a further kind of elision occurs even within the confines of tractibility. This kind of elision — taking the form almost of inferring tractibility from one's prior assumptions of what is real — is exemplified by the history of a mathematical ecology of mutualism. Even when mutualism can be introduced into the same technical machinery, it is still not pursued. The basic assumption is that competition is what is real, not because it is easier to model, but because it is what we expect. When the actual difficulties of modeling competition are then in turn suppressed, as in the Robert May story, what we have, given the temptation to equate the tractible with the real, is the possibility of a truly self-fulfilling prophecy. (shrink)

Las experiencias que se sitúan al margen de las lógicas heterosexuales y cisgénericas han sido objeto de interés penal desde el siglo XVIII. Sin embargo, en las últimas décadas, las prácticas sexuales entre personas del mismo sexo, así como las identidades o expresiones de género que no se articulan a través de la concordancia entre genitales y género, han pasado de ser perseguidas a ser protegidas por el Código Penal en buena parte de los países occidentales. En este artículo, se (...) hace un breve recorrido histórico que nos permite explicar cómo los cambios sociales también han significado cambios legales en materia de sexualidad y género, lo que ha generado el espacio que ha permitido la incorporación del paradigma de los delitos de odio en España, incluso con el apoyo de grupos sociales históricamente contestatarios. Asimismo, también se problematiza el paradigma de los delitos de odio, sus contradicciones y limitaciones para proteger a los grupos sociales vulnerables, y concretamente a las personas LGBTIQ. Finalmente, este texto propone algunas reflexiones que ayuden a pensar en vías de justicia restaurativa que puedan contribuir a la reparación o restauración en el caso de delitos de odio en el contexto español. (shrink)

We analyze programs for undergraduate women in science and engineering as strategic research sites in the study of disparities between women and men in scientific fields within higher education. Based on responses to a survey of the directors of the universe of these programs in the United States, the findings reveal key patterns in the programs’ definitions of the issues of women in science and engineering, their solutions to address the issues, their goals and perceived success with goals, and their (...) organizational characteristics and relationship to the larger institutional environments. The findings—which are conceptually grounded in the distinction between structural/institutional and individual issues facing women in science—have implications for understanding gender, science, and higher education, and for initiatives undertaken to improve the condition of women in scientific fields. The findings may also inform strategic efforts to reduce gender disparity in other organizational contexts. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWe investigated the impact of emotions on learning vocabulary in an unfamiliar language to better understand affective influences in foreign language acquisition. Seventy native English speakers learned new vocabulary in either a negative or a neutral emotional state. Participants also completed two sets of working memory tasks to examine the potential mediating role of working memory. Results revealed that participants exposed to negative stimuli exhibited difficulty in retrieving and correctly pairing English words with Indonesian words, as reflected in a lower (...) performance on the prompted recall tests and the free recall measure. Emotional induction did not change working memory scores from pre to post manipulation. This suggests working memory could not explain the reduced vocabulary learning in the negative group. We argue that negative mood can adversely affect language learning by suppressing aspects of native-language processing and impeding form-meaning mapping with second language words. (shrink)

We explore two special challenges indigenous peoples pose to the idea of sovereigns as trustees for humanity. The first challenge is rooted in a colonial history during which a trusteeship model of sovereignty served as an enabler of paternalistic colonial policies. The challenge is to show that the trusteeship model is not irreparably colonial in nature. The second challenge, which emerges from the first, is to specify the scope and nature of indigenous peoples’ sovereignty within the trusteeship model. Whereas the (...) interaction between states and foreign nationals is the locus of cosmopolitan law, the relationship between states and indigenous peoples is distinctive. In the ordinary cosmopolitan case, foreign nationals do not purport to possess legal authority. Indigenous peoples often do make such a claim, pitting their claim to authority against the state’s. We discuss how international law has attempted to come to grips with indigenous sovereignty by requiring states to include indigenous peoples in decision-making processes that affect their historical lands and rights. A crucial fault line in the jurisprudence, however, separates a duty to consult indigenous peoples from a duty to acquire their free, prior and informed consent. The latter but not the former recognizes that indigenous peoples possess a veto over state projects on their lands, in effect recognizing in them a limited co-legislative power. We focus on recent jurisprudence from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and consider whether either the duty to consult or FPIC are enough to dispel the shadow of the trusteeship model’s colonial past. We suggest that they are a move in the right direction, and that implicitly they represent international law’s recognition that states are no longer the sole bearers of sovereignty at international law. In limited circumstances, international law recognizes indigenous peoples as sovereign actors. (shrink)

A substantial literature on risk perception demonstrates the limits of human rationality, especially in the face of catastrophic risks. Human judgment, it seems, is flawed by the tendency to overestimate the magnitude of rare but evocative risks, while underestimating risks associated with commonplace dangers. Such findings are particularly relevant to the problem of crafting responsible public policy in the face of the kinds of threat posed by climate change. If the risk perception of ordinary citizens cannot be trusted, then it (...) would seem logical to base policy decisions on expert judgment. But how rational, how trustworthy, are expert assessments of catastrophic risk? I briefly review the limitations of conventional models of expert risk analysis, especially in dealing with the large uncertainties endemic to the risk of low-probability, high-impact events in the distant future. The challenges such events pose to the underlying assumptions of these analyses are severe enough to question their basic rationality. I argue that a conception of rationality premised on the bounded knowledge of experts and lay citizens alike, based on context-appropriate heuristics, may help us in the search for a more trustworthy basis for decision making. (shrink)

This essay explores how the authors’ curatorial process has roots in _wonder_: how it is one of inquiry, beginning and ending with open questions. The authors describe how their “crip” curatorial methods can be used to refuse extractive practices that might result from a disengaged wonder and to generate exhibitions that hold both the viewers and the artists with the care necessary to move passive viewing into a reciprocal engagement that can lead to an activist turn. These curatorial methods acknowledge (...) and embrace medical professionals as potentially fellow disabled people and view them as current or potential allies. Through the participatory nature of the art in the exhibitions, the gallery becomes a space of encounter, one that creates support structures for people to build out from their individual, personal experiences and to become part of something shared across people, objects, memory, and experience. However, this shared space is not intended to collapse into ever fully knowing or understanding another person’s experience. Critically, it is also a shared engagement where access to someone else’s story, or body, or memories is not freely granted. Crip curation takes seriously the intentional omissions of both viewers and artists that upend not only what we get to know but how we get to know it and emphasizes that what we get to know and how we know it necessarily remains incomplete; viewers and artists alone retain full access to their own experiences. (shrink)

The State of Nature in Comparative Political Thought addresses non-Western conceptions of the "state of nature", revealing how basic questions related to political thought are reflected in Chinese, Islamic, Indic, and other cultural contexts. It contributes to the burgeoning field of comparative political theory, and should be of interest to political theorists, regional specialists, students of globalization, as well as anyone interested in non-Western approaches to basic political questions.

In international law, the term "jus cogens" refers to norms that are considered peremptory in the sense that they are mandatory and do not admit derogation. Although the jus cogens concept has achieved widespread acceptance, international legal theory has yet to furnish a satisfying account of jus cogens's legal basis. We argue that peremptory norms are inextricably linked to the sovereign powers assumed by all states. The key to understanding international jus cogens lies in Immanuel Kant 's discussion of the (...) innate right of children to their parents' care. Drawing on Kant 's account, our theory of jus cogens posits that states exercise sovereign authority as fiduciaries of the people subject to their power. An immanent feature of this state-subject fiduciary relationship is that the state must comply with jus cogens. The fiduciary theory clarifies jus cogens's content by generating discrete criteria for identifying peremptory norms. (shrink)

Tout au long de sa longue carrière, Henri Lecoq a eu une réputation contrastée dans la communauté scientifique. Son oeuvre est citée par Mendel et par Darwin; cependant certains de ses compatriotes, tels qu'Adolphe Brongniart lui ont dénié originalité et profondeur. Dans une certaine mesure, Lecoq a subi le destin de beaucoup de naturalistes provinciaux dont les efforts n'étaient pas vraiment reconnus par les maîtres de la discipline. Mais une explication plus spécifique se trouve peut-être dans l'habitude qu'avait Lecoq d'utiliser (...) dans le même texte différents styles considérés comme incompatibles. Son travail sur l'hybridation végétale est à cet égard significatif: des bribes de vulgarisation hautes en couleurs y côtoient des conseils pratiques pour les horticulteurs, et les descriptions pittoresques s'y mêlent aux réflexions théoriques. Au terme de cette étude, Lecoq apparaît comme un homme de science qui combine un sens aigu de l'observation avec les caractéristiques d'un auteur romantique. (shrink)

The campaign to discredit predictions of man-made global warming—originally organized by readily identifiable vested interests—has by now recruited a large popular constituency of declared “skeptics” increasingly disposed to “take a stand”: some of them opposed to government regulation in general, some resistant to any claims to intellectual authority (perhaps especially scientific), and some mobilized by a version of the right to individual freedom of opinion. As a result, confidence in the expertise of scientists has reached an all time low: Internet (...) sites, radio talk shows, and television channels preferentially transmit “contrarian” attacks on the credibility of climate scientists. Even our most responsible newspapers and journals, in their very commitment to the traditional ethic of “balance,” sometimes contribute to the widespread misimpression that climate scientists are deeply divided about both the extent of the dangers we face and the relevance of human activity to global warming. Not knowing who or what to believe, the natural response for most people is to do nothing, and the consequence, as Thomas Homer-Dixon wrote last year for the New York Times: “Climate policy is gridlocked, and there’s virtually no chance of a breakthrough” (2010). Meanwhile, as evidence both of the role of human contributions to global warming and the dangers of that warming continues to mount, consensus among climate scientists grows ever stronger, and those of us who attend to that evidence are increasingly alarmed. (shrink)

This article explores the distribution and use of a relatively new grammatical format in English, it’s like + enactment. We propose that it’s like utterances are used to enact thoughts, feelings and attitudes which are internal and affect-laden assessments of a prior utterance or event, produced as assessments that anyone in the same situation might have had. As such they tend to occur within stories, typically during the closing of a story. The enactments are often ‘response cries’ such as oh, (...) mm, wow, and man. Because of the highly indexical nature of this grammatical format, it represents a fascinating site for participants to work out a ‘world known in common’. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractCephalopods provide a unique model system to investigate how organismal novelties evolve. In article number 1900073, Elena A. Ritschard et al. discuss how co-evolutionary signatures among various genomic characters have contributed to cephalopod organismal novelties and can be used to dissect their functional organization. Cover illustration by Hannah Schmidbaur.