The COVID-19 vaccine has been a miraculous, life-saving advance, offering staggering efficacy in adults, and was developed with astonishing speed. The time from sequencing the virus to authorizing the first COVID-19 vaccine was so brisk even the optimists appear close-minded. Yet, simultaneously, United States’ COVID-19 vaccination roll-out and related policies have contained missed opportunities, errors, run counter to evidence-based medicine, and revealed limitations in the judgment of public policymakers. Misplaced utilization, contradictory messaging, and poor deployment in those who would benefit (...) most—the elderly and high-risk—alongside unrealistic messaging, exaggeration, and coercion in those who benefit least—young, healthy Americans—is at the heart. It is important to consider the history of COVID-19 vaccines to identify where we succeeded and where we failed, and the effects that these errors may have more broadly on vaccination hesitancy and routine childhood immunization programs in the decades to come. (shrink)

This paper raises several concerns about vulnerability as an alternative language to conceptualize injustice and politicize its attendant injuries. First, the project of resignifying “vulnerability” by emphasizing its universality and amplifying its generative capacity, I suggest, might dilute perceptions of inequality and muddle important distinctions among specific vulnerabilities, as well as differences between those who are injurable and those who are already injured. Vulnerability scholars, moreover, have yet to elaborate the path from acknowledging constitutive vulnerability to addressing concrete injustices. Second, (...) vulnerability studies respond to, and have been shaped by, debates in the 1980s and 1990s over oppression, identity and agency. This genealogy needs to be acknowledged and evaluated. As I demonstrate, prominent theorists define vulnerability in contradistinction to victimization, adopting neo-liberal formulations of victims and victimhood. Finally, I turn to address the politics of vulnerability. At issue are not simply matters of utility or programmes for implementation, but the fraught relationship among ontology, ethics and politics, which I address through an engagement with Rancière's conception of the political and the case of the Black Lives Matter movement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.3 (2002) 237-241 [Access article in PDF] Practical, Functional, and Natural Kinds Nick Haslam Keywords: Classification, essentialism, natural kinds, practical kinds. I am grateful to the two commentators for giving my paper their serious attention, and for writing such stimulating, clarifying, and challenging responses. In a brief response I can only begin to discuss a select few issues, although both commentaries could generate a (...) great deal of profitable exchange.Zachar's commentary elaborates his practical kinds model, discusses several of the graded series of kinds proposed in my taxonomy of psychiatric categories, and disputes some aspects of my treatment of natural kinds. Zachar and I have no quarrel on his first point. I recognize his practical kinds model as a general theory of psychiatric classification rather than simply as a description of one type of category, the "practical kind." It was perhaps bad form to pilfer a term from Zachar's model and give it a more circumscribed role in my own, although by doing so I intended both to acknowledge the importance of the concept and to situate it among some of its alternatives.All the same, I stand by the account of practical kinds developed in my paper, even if it reflects a narrower sense than Zachar's. In my sense, practical kinds are pragmatically drawn distinctions imposed on continuous dimensions, whereas to Zachar all psychiatric categories are at least to some degree practical. He therefore proposes a broad "continuum" of practical kinds. The difficulty that I have with this proposal is that such a continuum implies a fundamental unity among psychiatric categories: categories are all to be understood first and foremost in pragmatic terms and differences in kind between them in internal structure are to be neglected. In my view, although the pragmatic bases of psychiatric classification are vitally important, and perhaps inadequately formulated in my paper, the neglect of internal structure and of possible breaks in the continuum of kinds are real limitations of the practical kinds model. Although Zachar is partially justified in claiming that his view is pluralistic, allowing as it does for variability in degrees of practicality, by failing to acknowledge distinctly different kinds of categories in the psychiatric domain, his view is less pluralistic than I believe it should be.One example of what I take to be this neglect of structural differences is a conflation of two sorts of practicality in Zachar's work. On the one hand, certain categories such as hypertension or obesity are defined on pragmatic grounds, a binary distinction being drawn in the absence of an internal discontinuity, because individuals identified as category members are adjudged to [End Page 237] be at significantly elevated risk. On the other hand, some categories just happen to have high practical utility. Zachar argues that schizotaxia, for example, is practical because it affords a variety of scientific and clinical inferences.It seems to me that these sorts of practicality—or perhaps these sorts of relations to practicality—are importantly different. Hypertension is defined as a category because of its practical utility—because a certain blood pressure threshold marks an inflection in actuarial risk of other illnesses—and might therefore be said to have "front-end" or constitutive practicality. Schizotaxia, which taxometric research shows to be a discrete kind (Haslam, 2003), is not defined and identified primarily on the basis of its relation to an external criterion, but on the basis of its internal structure. Its features cohere in a way that indicates a category with a determinate prevalence. It has "back-end" or consequential practicality to the degree that this category enables useful predictions. These two proposed forms of practicality are equally important: both mean that categories will be pragmatically valuable. However, they are also different, being characteristic of different kinds of categories and perhaps even negatively related. Kinds with front-end practicality, that is, may tend to have a more restricted range of practical implications, defined as they are in relation to specific external criteria. Kinds with back-end practicality, in contrast, may enable a wider array of predictions to the extent that... (shrink)

A pluralistic view of psychiatric classification is defended, according to which psychiatric categories take a variety of structural forms. An ordered taxonomy of these forms—non-kinds, practical kinds, fuzzy kinds, discrete kinds, and natural kinds—is presented and exemplified. It is argued that psychiatric categories cannot all be understood as pragmatically grounded, and at least some reflect naturally occurring discontinuities without thereby representing natural kinds. Even if essentialist accounts of mental disorders are generally mistaken, they are not implied whenever a psychiatric category (...) that is not pragmatically grounded is posited. (shrink)

Users have adopted a wide range of digital technologies into their communication repertoire. It remains unclear why they adopt multiple forms of communication instead of substituting one medium for another. It also raises the question: What type of need does each of these media fulfill? In the present article, the authors conduct comparative work that examines the gratifications obtained from Facebook with those from instant messaging. This comparison between media allows one to draw conclusions about how different social media fulfill (...) user needs. Data were collected from undergraduate students through a multimethod study based on 77 surveys and 21 interviews. A factor analysis of gratifications obtained from Facebook revealed six key dimensions: pastime, affection, fashion, share problems, sociability, and social information. Comparative analysis showed that Facebook is about having fun and knowing about the social activities occurring in one’s social network, whereas instant messaging is geared more toward relationship maintenance and development. The authors discuss differences in the two technologies and outline a framework based on uses and gratifications theory as to why young people integrate numerous media into their communication habits. (shrink)

This article unravels the complex set of financial dealings that are at the heart of the Enron story and follows the story through the highs and lows of Enron share prices. The key players are identified and their roles described. Apart from the financial and accounting issues, the Enron story also raises a wide range of ethical issues including corporate governance, organisational culture and ethical leadership and scrutiny. These are discussed in the article. It might be argued that Enron could (...) never have got away with some of its practices if it had been operating in Europe. The article concludes that this view may be naïve, particularly in the light of recent media disclosures of the UK Labour government's continuing flirtation with business donations. The Enron story raises serious considerations in a whole host of financial, economic, political and ethical areas. As the Enron story continues to unfold, an article of this type can only begin to scratch the surface of some of these issues and to lay them out for further investigation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmotion regulation is a topic of great interest due to its relevance to navigating everyday life, as well as its relevance to psychopathology. Recent research indicates that beliefs about t...

Krueger & Funder's (K&F's) diagnosis of social psychology's obsession with bias is correct and accords with similar observations by self-categorization theorists. However, the analysis of causes is incomplete and suggestions for cures are flawed. The primary problem is not imbalance, but a failure to acknowledge that social reality has different forms, depending on one's social and political vantage point in relation to a specific social context.

The conventional approach to international development by civil society—that is, the installation of “Western” programs and institutions by “Western” groups in “underdeveloped” regions—has remained largely unchanged since global poverty reduction, whether for political or social justice motivations, gained prominence in public discourse after World War II. Yet poverty rates, literacy, life expectancy, and unemployment in one of the poorest regions of the world, sub-Saharan Africa, has remained the same if not worsened since the 1970s . And, still, the great Development (...) Project continues: Problems in under-resourced areas are identified by well-meaning people from well-resourced areas, proposals to solve those problems are crafted by project managers and submitted to government and nongovernmental agencies, and successful projects are implemented by other well-meaning people who, for the most part, honestly want to make a difference. This is the system in which Priya seems to .. (shrink)

Abstract:The Thesmophoriazousai brims with themes of imitation, from its broader tragic parodies to its finer sonic textures. This study uncovers the functions and effects of imitation on the dramatically crucial (but often neglected) verbal level by means of Echo—a bizarre metatheatrical character who embodies the dynamics of mimicking speech and parody. The aural echo is provided as a conceptual frame, illustrating how verbal mimicry functions to both degrade and bolster identity and status in Echo's scene and elsewhere in the play. (...) Echo's speech patterns ultimately serve to perform, manipulate, and expand forms of mimicry in Old Comedy. (shrink)

Regardless of leaders’ efforts to do the right thing and meet performance expectations, they make mistakes, with possible ramifications for followers’ and leaders’ well-being. Some leaders will apologize following transgressions, which may have positive implications for their followers’ and their own well-being, contingent upon the nature and severity of the transgressions. We examine these relationships in two separate studies. In Study 1, leader apologies had a positive relationship with followers’ psychological well-being and emotional health, and these relationships were moderated by (...) the severity of the transgression. In Study 2, leader apologies had a positive relationship with their own psychological well-being, positive emotional health and authentic pride. In addition, the nature of transgressions moderated the relationship between leader apologies and leaders’ positive emotions and authentic pride, while the severity of transgressions moderated the relationship between leader apologies and their positive emotions, psychological health, and authentic pride. Implications and future research directions are discussed. (shrink)

Even before ‘economic precarity’ became the default explanation for the rise of defensive nationalism globally, scholars had already begun returning to ground their work in the economy and material...

Three points that are implicit in Dixon et al.'s paradigm-challenging paper serve to make prejudice potent. First, prejudice reflects understandings of social identity usthem that are shared within particular groups. Second, these understandings are actively promoted by leaders who represent and advance in-group identity. Third, prejudice is identified in out-groups, not in-groups.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Going Polyphonic I: With Namita Goswami et al.Alyson Cole and Kyoo LeeThis time around, we go polyphonic.The articles in the next two issues, Vol. 13 and Vol. 14, explore critical questions, paradigm-shifting idseas, and fresh connections arising from the intimately networked fields of intersectional, decolonial, and trans studies today. “Polyphonia,” a term we borrowed from music, is meant to characterize ways in which each piece as in a (...) “note” remains distinctly their own while dialogically and dynamically connected to an evolving ecosystem of ideas and visions in the making. As an umbrella term, it is meant to shelter resonances from each article that speaks directly not only of, but to, theory today by doing it in their own way.In this issue, we are presenting “A Forum on Namita Goswami’s Subjects That Matter.” It consists of seven responses to Goswami’s pioneering work on intersectionality as exemplified by her recent book, Subjects That Matter: Philosophy, Feminism, and Postcolonial Theory (SUNY Press, 2019) as well as the earlier co-edited volume, Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach (Routledge, 2014, co-edited by Maeve M. O’Donovan, Namita Goswami, and Lisa Yount). What is polyphonic about this assemblage is its interlocutory structure and orientation: each scholar—Al Frankowski, Falguni Sheth, Jennifer Scuro, Lauren Guilmette, Luce deLire, Russell Ford, and Tyler M. Williams, all coming from different angles, perspectives, and positions—discusses their reading of Goswami on intersectionality while showing how and where their own scholarship meets hers. Goswami, in turn, responds to each response while providing a synthesized account of what she gleans from this choral interaction, what she finds inspiring, as well as challenging. The articles in the next issue, [End Page 1] Vol. 14, following the forum, will virtually continue the music, although not in direct response to Goswami’s work.We hope you will join us in this somewhat experimental virtual symposium that is not even on Zoom. We hope you will join us in thinking that this more literalized model of a “scholarly conversation,” actual and virtual, vitally embodies the very spirit of interdisciplinary, intergenerational, intercontinental intersectionality as a conversation, ongoing intellectual encounters among many of us in various “sub-fields,” for the lack of a better word, that, again literally, cannot be neatly contained in any disciplinary terms, boxes, or territories.The tranScripts section in this issue consists of two entries, the first of which is the fourth installment of Mieke Bal’s Moments of Meaning-Making, J–L. Then we have Margaret Carson’s translation of Juliana González on Remedios Varo.Again, this issue has been a labor of collective love. We would like to thank all the brilliant authors and extraordinarily generous and helpful peer reviewers for this issue, not to mention the ever so resourceful and skillful editorial staff at the press we constantly rely on for expert guidance and feedback, all of whom have been inspirations for us editors. [End Page 2]Copyright © 2024 State University of New York... (shrink)

This article examines two interrelated themes in the scholarship categorized as ‘new materialism’: first, the aim to undermine the subject/object distinction; second, the proposition that agency exists across the material world. While new materialists, such as Jane Bennett, conceive of their approach as an intervention against the injurious effects of capitalism, I argue that destabilizing the object/subject binary and endowing inanimate objects with vitality and agency is actually a constitutive feature of capitalism itself. To illustrate this point, I turn to (...) Marx’s analysis, providing a queer reading of his theorization of commodities. Revisting Marx’s account of commodity fetishism in tandem with new materialism yields fresh insights into the logics of capitalism, specifically, the manner in which it thrives on concurrently producing and erasing subjectivities, thereby distorting social materiality and material sociality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Folk Taxonomies Versus Official TaxonomiesNick Haslam (bio)Keywordsclassification, DSM-IV, folk taxonomyFlanagan and Blashfield’s paper continues a highly original program of research on clinicians’ understandings of psychopathology. This work is unique in bringing concepts and methods from cognitive anthropology to bear on psychiatric classification. At first blush, it might seem questionable to treat clinicians’ beliefs about psychiatric disorders as folk taxonomies, no different in kind from classifications of birds produced (...) by members of a forest-dwelling tribe. Unlike birds and other natural objects of folk taxonomies, mental disorders are not concrete entities and they cannot be distinguished on perceptual grounds. Unlike tribespeople, clinicians are not simply “folk” whose naïve classifications can be compared with those of scientific authorities. They are, in fact, heavily exposed to the reigning official taxonomy during their professional training, and their thinking can hardly remain unaffected by it. It is a testament to Flanagan and Blashfield’s work that despite these apparent disanalogies, their folk-taxonomic approach manages to illuminate how clinicians carve up the psychiatric domain.This paper reports some careful, creative, and labor-intensive studies to make a few fundamental claims about how clinicians classify. First, the authors argue that clinicians hold simplified taxonomies compared with the official DSM-IV taxonomy: They encompass fewer disorders and classify them in a shallower hierarchy. Second, they claim that clinicians substantially agree in how they classify disorders, and that a consensus classification can therefore be extracted from their individual taxonomies. Third, they argue that clinicians’ taxonomies show only a modest consistency with DSM-IV, and that the discrepancies may be systematic and important. Notably, for example, clinicians did not preserve the fundamental divide between the DSM’s Axes I and II. My comments address the second and third claims.Is There a “Consensus” among the Clinicians?One of the main achievements of Flanagan and Blashfield’s paper is to develop a “consensual taxonomy,” which is laid out in their Table 2a. This taxonomy clearly distils how their clinicians tended to judge the relations among diagnoses. However, it is an exaggeration to present it as a consensus. If, by Romney, Weller, and Batchelder’s (1986) third criterion, “cultural consensus” requires that the primary factor in a principal components analysis accounts for “most” of the variance in clinicians’ judgments, then Flanagan and Blashfield’s analysis [End Page 281] fails to show consensus. Their first factor accounts for only twenty-five percent of the variance, well short of the required majority. This finding implies that there is three times as much inconsistency or variability among clinicians’ taxonomic judgments than there is consistency and commonality. The observed factor-analytic findings are compatible with the average correlation between pairs of clinicians being only about 0.2, a very weak level of agreement.This is not to say that there is no consistency among the clinicians, or that there is no value in summarizing that consistency, but it does indicate that there is a great deal of diversity as well. Clinicians’ folk taxonomies seem to be highly idiosyncratic, more a Babel of distinctive classifications than a chorus of agreement. It is therefore risky to draw strong generalizations about how clinicians classify, and to imply that there is a single consensual taxonomy.Several things are very interesting about this diversity of classifications. First, Flanagan and Blashfield show that it cannot be explained by the clinicians’ differing levels of experience or by the different methodologies used to elicit their taxonomies. The variability among clinicians must therefore have some other basis, which awaits further investigation. Second, the level of agreement (“consensus”) obtained here is significantly lower than what has been found in more orthodox studies of folk taxonomy. By implication, the classification of psychiatric disorders is a slipperier enterprise than the classification of animals and plants. People who have extensive professional experience and training in the field of psychopathology—vocational training that includes the standardizing forces of accrediting bodies and a dominant psychiatric nosology—nevertheless tend not to agree substantially about how to map that territory. One guess about why this might be is that clinicians’ folk taxonomies are not merely descriptive maps of the interrelations among diagnostic entities, but are... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Coeditors’ IntroductionRetro III: As We RestartAlyson Cole and Kyoo Leethe covid-19 pandemic drags on, and, as the world is now trying to recover from it by learning to at least live with it better, philoSOPHIA has arrived at the third and final issue of RETRO. The fact that this series ended up being framed by the turbulent temporality of the current pandemic is something that some future editors of (...) philoSOPHIA, too, might find worth remembering.For now, we return to the now-point, as expected. To that end, here we have assembled articles on historical, individual, and gendered stigmas and wounds and traumas, among others, focusing also on their relationships to existential time, namely, present moments that persist.We turn first to the pressing issue presented by “Shackling Pregnant Women: US Prisons, Anti-Blackness, and the Unfinished Project of American Abolition”: Brady Heiner offers a lucid “interpretation of the social meaning of shackling imprisoned pregnant women and its persistence despite widespread normative consensus in favor of its abolition,” a joltingly specific, haunting reminder of how deeply the legacy of slavery is embedded in the US criminal legal system and the ways in which American abolition remains an “unfinished project.”Finally, RETRO III marks an ending and a restart of another kind. As of this issue—or, rather, this volume—philoSOPHIA is transitioning from a biannual to an annual publication schedule. In recent years, the journal has transformed in various ways. In 2018, we adopted a new transContinental approach and, with it, a new subtitle. We have expanded to include different [End Page v] genres, media, and voices, always aiming to reflect on our current moment and rethink persistent feminist philosophical questions from divergent angles. Publishing one volume per year is, we are certain, the best way to sustain this breadth of inquiry and continue deepening our alliances with critical race, disability, literary, media, and queer studies, among other fields. As we restart, readers can expect us to keep pushing boundaries, as we always have, while maintaining the same high quality and standards. This is essentially a change in the journal’s format, not in its substance.Wound/stigma as process also emerged as a key notion in Retro III partly because of our preliminary editorial conversation with Annette-Carina van der Zaag about three years ago, who, in response to our call for proposals on “retro” themes, had proposed an idea of guest editing an issue. Although that plan unfortunately did not materialize as we dealt with various pandemic challenges still faced by so many of us on a daily basis, Annette did write a spirited article while encouraging some other colleagues to explore related ideas, for which we remain grateful. In this piece, “Touching Wounds: On the Fugitivity of Stigma,” which explores stigma’s queer-responsive “transformational energy,” van der Zaag articulates ways of “inhabiting” wounds on three registers—material, affective, and fugitive—as an open-ended, future-embracing pathway beyond identity-bound ontology. Ghalya Saadawi, in turn, in her engagingly autobiographical essay “Critical Incision: Hypochondria, Autotheory, and the Health-Illness Dialectic,” autotheoretically draws out “critical” energy from this critical “illness” of hers, hypochondria, to the effect of destabilizing the temporally linearized and medically coordinated discursive ideals of health and being/living well.Survival, at the end of the day, often requires some literal transcending. A case in point has been movingly portrayed and theorized by Na-Young Lee, a sociologist and justice activist who, in “Multiple Encounters and Reconstructed Identities,” revisits questions of historical trauma and collective stigma. Here, she introduces and reflects on her oral history interviews with Korean “Halmoni Activist-Survivors of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery as Postcolonial Subjects,” with whom she herself continues to fight in solidarity. Focusing on the stories of two foundational figures, “Yun Chung-ok, a leading scholar and activist who, having managed to escape the fate of many other peers, first spoke out about Japanese military sexual slavery, and Kim Bok-dong, a survivor and human rights activist,” Lee shows how “overcoming trauma and reaching out to others continues to drive the redress movement” and how “through mutually constructed identities, activist-survivors broke away from... (shrink)

The network approach to psychiatric phenomena has the potential to clarify and enhance psychiatric diagnosis and classification. However, its generally well-justified anti-essentialism views psychiatric disorders as invariably fuzzy and arbitrary, and overlooks the likelihood that the domain includes some latent categories. Network models misrepresent these categories, and fail to recognize that some comorbidity may represent valid co-occurrence of discrete conditions.

The target article challenges standard approaches to prejudice reduction, warning that they may inure people to inequality and deflect them from seeking collective solutions to it. I argue that the collective action approach has its own risks and limitations and that standard contact and common identity approaches may complement rather than work against it.

On the basis of research in the social identity tradition, we contend (a) that identification and differentiation are not mutually exclusive, (b) that a sequence in which identification gives way to differentiation is not necessarily associated with superior organizational outcomes, and (c) that social identification, and leadership that builds this, is generally a prerequisite for group success.

Neither can stand. ‘Argos of the land’ is nonsense, and even if it were not, is absurd as an apostrophe of the River Inachus. ‘a plain’, indistinguishable from is similarly impossible: the audience would be baffled; in 6 has to be the first occurrence of the vox; ‘streams’ cannot be apposed to a ‘plain’, even if could have been understood as meaning this.

Cultural differences between animal groups offer a means of tracing social relationships and cognition through time and across space. Where behaviours include tool use, we can observe the influence of available materials and role models on the development of tool-based activities. Here, we discuss the ways that we can study the social influence of tool-use behaviour in wild primates, focusing on two species that use durable stone tools: bearded capuchin monkeys and Western chimpanzees. We concentrate on durable tools, as these (...) provide an archaeologically recoverable record of activities. However, we also consider the influence of less durable tools when examining behavioural patterns in capuchins and chimpanzees. In order to study abstract concepts like culture and cognition, we identify socially learned behavioural diversity that is not influenced by environmental circumstances. This diversity, when compared among social units, allows us to detect cultural differences. Our bottom-up approach identifies some of the opportunities and challenges in studying social cognition through tool use in wild-ranging primates. (shrink)

This article is driven by death. Thematically, death serves as a figure in the central creative works I discuss: Samuel R. Delany's sword-and-sorcery novella The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, one of the first novels to deal directly with the AIDS pandemic,1 and Lou Reed's songs, especially the proto-punk "Heroin" and the queer soul song "Coney Island Baby." Meanwhile, the argument's methodology also concerns death. As many theorists and critics have discussed,2 the field of queer studies has seen, for at (...) least the past few decades, a general division between a methodology that isolates queerness as a singularly significant figure of identity and a more intersectional queer studies that figures sexuality within a... (shrink)

The reality and validity of the moral sense — which ordinary people take for granted — took a battering in the last century. Materialist trends in philosophy, decline in religious faith, and a loosening of traditional moral constraints contributed to a shift in public attitudes, with many decent honest folk both aware of a questioning of moral claims and uneasy with a world that has no place for the moral dimension. Haslam shows how important the moral sense is to (...) the human personality and exposes the weakness in much current thinking that suggests otherwise. His goal is to help the reader to a mature and confident understanding of the moral mind, which constitutes an essential part of what it is to be human. (shrink)

The current coronavirus pandemic presents the greatest healthcare crisis in living memory. Hospitals across the world have faced unprecedented pressure. In the face of this tidal wave of demand for limited healthcare resources, how are clinicians to identify patients most likely to benefit? Should age or frailty be discriminators? This paper seeks to analyse the current evidence-base, seeking a nuanced approach to pandemic decision-making, such as admission to critical care.

Existing challenges to the legitimacy of mental health nursing in the United Kingdom and beyond have stimulated a critical self‐reflection and discourse around the mental health nursing role, forcing the profession to question its identity and critically re‐evaluate its position within the wider healthcare arena. In this discussion paper, I suggest that the current difficulties in conceptualising mental health nurse identity arise from our role being inherently interwoven with distinctive challenges and unique needs of our service users. Emerging from this (...) idea is that the ‘being’ (and the ‘doing’) of mental health nursing is firmly situated within the sphere of intersubjective relations. Drawing upon Hegel's ideas of reciprocal recognitive relations, to support the notion that our profession's role and purpose are better understood when defined in relation to the work that we do with our service users, I argue that it is in the understanding (and even embracing) of intersubjectivity as a core principle of mental health nursing, where we might not just better understand ourselves but also know how to shift asymmetric relations with our service users towards those which are more commensurate and mutually beneficial. (shrink)