Research on cross-border reproductive care has shown how the geographical, historical, economic and political contexts in which egg donation takes place shape this transnational practice. As many women offer their oocytes due to their precarious conditions, they become seen as ‘bioavailable bodies’. The presence of these bioavailable bodies is key to the emergence of global egg donation hotspots. We argue that feminist research needs to go beyond the conceptualization of egg donors as bioavailable bodies. We suggest the analysis of ‘reproductive (...) biographies’ as an innovative way to understand the entanglements of the global bioeconomy with intimate experiences of reproduction. We suggest advancing current feminist discussions around clinical labour by studying the entanglements between the global bioeconomy, a neoliberalized healthcare system, systematic feminicide and women’s reproductive biographies, and by revealing how women’s decision to donate results from gendered dependencies, obligations of care and coercive moments in egg donors’ reproductive biographies. (shrink)

A recent report from the UN makes the case for “global data literacy” in order to realise the opportunities afforded by the “data revolution”. Here and in many other contexts, data literacy is characterised in terms of a combination of numerical, statistical and technical capacities. In this article, we argue for an expansion of the concept to include not just competencies in reading and working with datasets but also the ability to account for, intervene around and participate in the wider (...) socio-technical infrastructures through which data is created, stored and analysed – which we call “data infrastructure literacy”. We illustrate this notion with examples of “inventive data practice” from previous and ongoing research on open data, online platforms, data journalism and data activism. Drawing on these perspectives, we argue that data literacy initiatives might cultivate sensibilities not only for data science but also for data sociology, data politics as well as wider public engagement with digital data infrastructures. The proposed notion of data infrastructure literacy is intended to make space for collective inquiry, experimentation, imagination and intervention around data in educational programmes and beyond, including how data infrastructures can be challenged, contested, reshaped and repurposed to align with interests and publics other than those originally intended. (shrink)

Almost a quarter-century after the Carnegie report, Scholarship Reconsidered, the scholarship of teaching remains a contested idea, celebrated by some and critiqued by others. This new book is particularly relevant now however as it explores the notion of the scholarship of teaching through the lens of authenticity, a complex, intriguing and particularly striking and distinctively helpful notion which has caught the attention of several authors in adult and higher education. However, those writing about authenticity do not always make explicit what (...) it is that they mean by this notion, nor are they clear about the philosophical foundations underpinning it. In developing the notion of the scholarship of teaching as an 'authentic practice', the author draws on several complementary philosophical ideas to explore the nature of this practice, why it is imperative for universities to engage in it, what meaningful engagement wold look like and the conditions under which it might qualify as 'authentic'. Core constructs employed include practice virtue communicative action 'being', 'power', critical reflection and transformationThe scholarship of teaching is described as a practice sustained through critical reflection and critical self-reflection. Being a scholar of teaching is viewed as an ongoing transformative learning process, a process of becoming authentic, the latter ultimately aimed at both helping students to become authentic and creating a better world in which to teach, learn and live. Although explored as a practice in its own right, the scholarship of teaching is seen to be strengthened by being situated within a wider integrated notion of academic practice. The book combines the author's previous research on authenticity with earlier work on the meaning of the scholarship of teaching, offering a provocative, fresh and timely perspective on the scholarship of teaching and professional learning in our times but also providing guidance on how to create a better world in which to learn, teach and live. (shrink)

Studies have demonstrated that parents often exhibit a still face while silently reading their cell phones when responding to texts. Such disruptions to parent-child interactions have been observed during parental media use such as texting and these disruptions have been termed technoference. In the present study, we explored changes to mother-child interactions that occur before, during and after interruptions due to texting using an adapted naturalistic still face paradigm. Specifically, we examined the effect of an interruption due to either maternal (...) smartphone use or use of an analog medium on maternal interaction quality with their 20- to 22-month-old children. Mother-child interactions during free play were interrupted for 2 min by asking the mothers to fill out a questionnaire either by typing on the smartphone or on paper with a pen. Interactional quality was compared between free-play and interruption phases and to a no-interruption control group. Mixed ANOVA across phase and condition indicated that maternal responsiveness and pedagogical behavior decreased during the interruption phase for both the interruption groups but not for the no-interruption group. Children also increased their positive bids for attention during the paper-and-pencil and the smartphone conditions relative to the no-interruption control. These findings are consistent with a large body of research on the still-face paradigm and with a recent study demonstrating that smartphone interruptions decreased parenting quality. The present study, however, connects these lines of research showing the many everyday disruptions to parent-child interactions are likely to decrease parenting quality and that toddlers are likely to detect and attempt to repair such interruptions. (shrink)

Der Aufsatz sondiert das geisteswissenschaftliche Feld einer Theorie von Praktiken mit dem Fluchtpunkt der Literaturwissenschaften. In der germanistischen Forschung hat der Fokus auf Praktiken zur Neujustierung der Literatursoziologie geführt, der eine dezidierte praxeologische Begründung fehlt. Die ›Ursprünge‹ praxeologischer Theoriebildung liegen in der Soziologie, deren aktuelle Positionierungen die Analyse von Praktiken mit poststrukturalistischen Theoremen zu verbinden suchen. Dabei werden Michel Foucaults Diskurskonzept und dessen Arbeiten zu den antiken Praktiken des Selbst in ein kultursoziologisches Programm integriert (Reckwitz). Der Beitrag argumentiert, dass dies (...) Foucaults eigenem Verständnis von Praktiken zuwiderläuft. Denn anders als die sozialtheoretische Praxeologie denkt Foucault Praktiken nicht als ein zwischen agency und structure vermitteln- des Handlungsterrain. Sein doppelter Praktikenbegriff stellt eine unhintergehbare Interdependenz von Prozessen der Disziplinierung und ästhetischer Formung, von Norm und Freiheit zentral und bringt so einen genuin ethischen Gehalt von Praktiken ins Spiel. Foucaults Ausführungen zur ästhetischen Form von Praktiken sind aber so wenig spezifisch, dass hier ein Einsatzpunkt für die Literaturwissenschaften liegt, den ›späten‹ Foucault für eine Revision der Dynamiken von Ethik und Ästhetik produktiv zu machen. In dieser Perspektive lassen sich die Künste nicht als Zirkulationsräume ethischen Wissens, sondern als praktische Erprobungsfelder moralischer Formungsprozesse verstehen, in denen sich Normerfüllung und agency verbinden. Anvisiert wird dergestalt ein Beitrag zur Theorie des Zusammenhangs von Ethik und Ästhetik, der es ermöglicht, die ästhetische Formung praktischer Moralität und in diesem Sinne das ethos, ja die konkreten Tugendübungen der Literatur zu untersuchen. (shrink)

This book represents a considerable revision and expansion of Public Choice II. Six new chapters have been added, and several chapters from the previous edition have been extensively revised. The discussion of empirical work in public choice has been greatly expanded. As in the previous editions, all of the major topics of public choice are covered. These include: why the state exists, voting rules, federalism, the theory of clubs, two-party and multiparty electoral systems, rent seeking, bureaucracy, interest groups, dictatorship, the (...) size of government, voter participation, and political business cycles. Normative issues in public choice are also examined including a normative analysis of the simple majority rule, Bergson–Samuelson social welfare functions, the Arrow and Sen impossibility theorems, Rawls's social contract theory and the constitutional political economy of Buchanan and Tullock. (shrink)

Increasingly, companies implement social and environmental standards as instruments towards corporate social responsibility (CSR) in supply chains. This is based on the assumption that such standards increase legitimacy among stakeholders. Yet, a wide variety of standards with different requirement levels exist and companies might tend to introduce the ones with low exigencies, using them as a legitimacy front. This strategy jeopardizes the reputation of social and environmental standards among stakeholders and their long-term trust in these instruments of CSR, meaning that (...) all expenses for their implementation are of no avail for the companies. Therefore, this paper highlights which criteria are important for the selection, implementation and improvement in order to achieve a company's aim, but also to strengthen the legitimacy of social and environmental standards. This research is based on conceptual thought and some existing empirical research, comparing four different social and environmental standards, revealing weaknesses and strengths. It exposes the basic conditions for the success of such standards among stakeholders and identifies the need for more empirical data. (shrink)

Conversational negation often behaves differently from negation as a logical operator: when rejecting a state of affairs, it does not present all members of the complement set as equally plausible alternatives, but it rather suggests some of them as more plausible than others (e.g., “This is not a dog, it is a wolf/*screwdriver”). Entities that are semantically similar to a negated entity tend to be judged as better alternatives (Kruszewski et al., 2016). In fact, Kruszewski et al. (2016) show that (...) the cosine similarity scores between the distributional semantics representations of a negated noun and its potential alternatives are highly correlated with the negated noun-alternatives human plausibility ratings. In a series of cloze tasks, we show that negation likewise restricts the production of plausible alternatives to similar entities. Furthermore, completions to negative sentences appear to be even more restricted than completions to an affirmative conjunctive context, hinting at a peculiarity of negation. (shrink)

The digital revolution has made a multitude of text documents from highly diverse perspectives on almost any topic easily available. Accordingly, the ability to integrate and evaluate information from different sources, known as multiple document comprehension, has become increasingly important. Because multiple document comprehension requires the integration of content and source information across texts, it is assumed to exceed the demands of single text comprehension due to the inclusion of two additional mental representations: the integrated situation model and the intertext (...) model. To date, there is little empirical evidence on commonalities and differences between single text and multiple document comprehension. Although the relationships between single text and multiple document comprehension can be well distinguished conceptually, there is a lack of empirical studies supporting these assumptions. Therefore, we investigated the dimensional structure of single text and multiple document comprehension with similar test setups. We examined commonalities and differences between the two forms of text comprehension in terms of their relations to final school exam grades, level of university studies and university performance. Using a sample of n = 501 students from two German universities, we jointly modeled single text and multiple document comprehension and applied a series of regression models. Concerning the relationship between single text and multiple document compr... (shrink)

School gardens are part of many schools. Especially in primary schools, but also in secondary schools, they are used as a learning space and experience space for the pupils. Their importance for the development of cognitive and emotional-affective abilities of pupils is empirically well proven. It is also empirically well proven that exposure to nature has an influence on the prosocial behavior of children and adults. However, there is a lack of studies investigating the effect of the stay in the (...) school garden on the social behavior of pupils in secondary class. To investigate whether a school garden is a good environment for social learning, a self-report study and standardized observations with sixth-grade pupils were carried out. Thus, the socially competent behavior of the pupils (communication and cooperation) and their emotions could be analyzed. In order to provide emotional access to the scientific content of biology lessons and to strengthen social learning, each pupil was responsible for their own plant and the group bed over a period of 10 weeks. The design of the lessons followed the principles of basic needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness—of the Self Determination Theory. The observations were made during a 90-min class, in the school garden as well in the classroom. The 31 girls and 22 boys, aged 11–12 years, changed weekly between the garden and the classroom. Over 150 observations were made in the school garden (82) and in the classroom (68). In summary, pupils showed more socially competent behavior in school garden lessons than in classroom lessons. The school garden lessons, designed according to the basic needs, seem to create favorable incentives for social learning. Due to frequent social interactions, it can be assumed that learning activities in school gardens can promote emotional and social competence. (shrink)

Corporate reputation is decisive for stakeholders’ supporting or repelling behavior and, therefore, one of firms’ most valuable intangible resources. Drawing on signaling theory, this paper focuses on the usefulness of voluntarily provided corporate reputation disclosures (CRDs) and examines their impact on stakeholders’ attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. Our experimental vignette studies reveal that CRDs reduce stakeholders’ information asymmetries, which positively affects perceived organizational performance and corporate reputation as well as stakeholders’ purchase, investment, and employment intentions. The relationships between CRDs and stakeholders’ (...) behavioral intentions are sequentially mediated by changes in the perceived organizational performance and corporate reputation. This implies that stakeholders use the signals transmitted by CRDs to adjust their perceptions of a firm’s organizational performance and corporate reputation, which ultimately induces their behavioral outcomes. Overall, our empirical results show the usefulness of CRDs for firms in effectively developing stakeholder relationships and, thereby, contributing to assure their going concern. For stakeholders, CRDs improve efficiency in evaluating a firm’s future development. (shrink)

It is a popular thought that emotions play an important epistemic role. Thus, a considerable number of philosophers find it compelling to suppose that emotions apprehend the value of objects and events in our surroundings. I refer to this view as the Epistemic View of emotion. In this paper, my concern is with a rivaling picture of emotion, which has so far received much less attention. On this account, emotions do not constitute a form of epistemic access to specific axiological (...) aspects of their objects. Instead it proposes that they are ways of taking a stand or position on the world. I refer to this as the Position-Taking View of emotion. Whilst some authors seem sympathetic to this view, this it has so far not been systematically motivated and elaborated. In this paper, I fill this gap and propose a more adequate account of our emotional engagement with the world than the predominant epistemic paradigm. I start by highlighting the specific way in which emotions are directed at something, which I contrast with the intentionality of perception and other forms of apprehension. I then go on to offer a specific account of the valence of emotion and show how this account and the directedness of emotions makes them intelligible as a way of taking a position on something. (shrink)

Technologien haben schon lange Eingang in unseren Alltag gefunden und transformieren zahlreiche Lebensbereiche wie Politik, Wirtschaft, Bildung, Gesundheit und Pflege. Mittels Social Media pflegen wir zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen und kommunizieren miteinander, wir haben Apps zum Schlafen oder für die Ernährung und in der Medizin werden Technologien in den Körper implantiert oder zur Untersuchung des Körpers verwendet. Wearables, wie z. B. die Smart Watch, werden direkt am Körper getragen und müssen kaum noch abgenommen werden. Smart Watches messen den Puls und Herzschlag, zählen (...) unsere Schritte, melden sich, wenn man wieder aufstehen sollte und erfassen den Schlafrhythmus. Wir schlagen Wissen bei Wikipedia nach und lernen interaktiv über Smart Boards in der Schule. Über digitale Tools lässt sich das orts- und zeitunabhängige Zusammenarbeiten organisieren. Wie verändert sich das Menschsein in einer solchen technisierten Welt? Wie verändern sich die menschliche Lebenswelt, Handeln, Verantwortungsstrukturen und Identitätskonzepte? Puzio, Anna/Rutzmoser, Carolin/Endres, Eva-Maria: Menschsein in einer technisierten Welt – Einleitende Bemerkungen zu einer interdisziplinären Auseinandersetzung mit der digitalen Transformation. In: Endres, Eva-Maria/Puzio, Anna/Rutzmoser, Carolin (Hg.): Menschsein in einer technisierten Welt. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf den Menschen im Zeichen der digitalen Transformation. Wiesbaden 2022. (shrink)

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine raises fundamental ethical issues. As one example, AI systems in the field of mental health successfully detect signs of mental disorders, such as depression, by using data from social media. These AI depression detectors (AIDDs) identify users who are at risk of depression prior to any contact with the healthcare system. The article focuses on the ethical implications of AIDDs regarding affected users’ health-related autonomy. Firstly, it presents the (ethical) discussion of AI (...) in medicine and, specifically, in mental health. Secondly, two models of AIDDs using social media data and different usage scenarios are introduced. Thirdly, the concept of patient autonomy, according to Beauchamp and Childress, is critically discussed. Since this concept does not encompass the specific challenges linked with the digital context of AIDDs in social media sufficiently, the current analysis suggests, finally, an extended concept of health-related digital autonomy. (shrink)

Theories of embodied cognition assume that concepts are grounded in non-linguistic, sensorimotor experience. In support of this assumption, previous studies have shown that upwards response movements are faster than downwards movements after participants have been presented with words whose referents are typically located in the upper vertical space. This is taken as evidence that processing these words reactivates sensorimotor experiential traces. This congruency effect was also found for novel words, after participants learned these words as labels for novel objects that (...) they encountered either in their upper or lower visual field. While this indicates that direct experience with a word's referent is sufficient to evoke said congruency effects, the present study investigates whether this direct experience is also a necessary condition. To this end, we conducted five experiments in which participants learned novel words from purely linguistic input: Novel words were presented in pairs with real up- or down-words ; they were presented in natural sentences where they replaced these real words ; they were presented as new labels for these real words ; and they were presented as labels for novel combined concepts based on these real words. In all five experiments, we did not find any congruency effects elicited by the novel words; however, participants were always able to make correct explicit judgements about the vertical dimension associated to the novel words. These results suggest that direct experience is necessary for reactivating experiential traces, but this reactivation is not a necessary condition for understanding the corresponding aspects of word meaning. (shrink)

Research into consumer responses to corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives has expanded in the past four decades, yet the evidence thus far provided does not paint a cohesive picture. Results suggest both positive and negative consumer reactions to CSR, and unless such mixed findings can be reconciled, the outcome might be an amalgamation of disparate empirical results rather than a coherent body of knowledge. The current meta-analysis therefore tests whether the mixed findings might reflect consumers’ distinct, altruistic inferences across various (...) contingency factors. On the basis of 337 effect sizes, involving 584,990 unique respondents, in 162 studies published between 1996 and 2021, this study reveals that altruistic inferences are central to the current CSR paradigm, such that they mediate the effects of CSR initiatives on consumer responses across multiple contingencies. The mediation by altruistic inferences is stronger (weaker) in conditions favorable to dispositional (situational) motive attributions. Furthermore, consumers respond more favorably to cause marketing or philanthropy rather than business-related CSR initiatives, when the initiative is environmental (vs. social), the firm’s offering is utilitarian (vs. hedonic), the CSR initiative takes place in self-expressive (vs. survival) cultures and in earlier (vs. later) periods. These findings offer several ethical implications, and they inform both practical recommendations and an agenda for further research directions. (shrink)

I argue against Schroeder's explanation of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge. In section 1, I introduce pragmatic encroachment and point out that an explanation of it should avoid Pascalian considerations. In section 2, summarize the key aspects of Schroeder's explanation of pragmatic encroachment. In section 3, I argue that Schroeder's explanation faces a dilemma: it either allows for an objectionable form of Pascalian encroachment or it fails to be a fully general explanation of pragmatic encroachment.

Several lines of evidence suggest that children born via Cesarean section are at greater risk for adverse health outcomes including allergies, asthma and obesity. Vaginal seeding is a medical procedure in which infants born by C-section are swabbed immediately after birth with vaginal secretions from the mother. This procedure has been proposed as a way to transfer the mother's vaginal microbiome to the child, thereby restoring the natural exposure that occurs during vaginal birth that is interrupted in the case of (...) babies born via C-section. Preliminary evidence indicates partial restoration of microbes. However, there is insufficient evidence to determine the health benefits of the procedure. Several studies, including trial, are currently underway. At the same time, in the clinic setting, doctors are increasingly being asked to by expectant mothers to have their babies seeded. This article reports on the current research on this procedure and the issues it raises for regulators, researchers, physicians, and patients. (shrink)

ObjectivePrevious research has shown reduced interoceptive accuracy in depression. Attention deficit represents a key symptom of depression. Moreover, IAcc is positively correlated with attention. There is no study that investigates the effect of depression on IAcc and attention. The aim of this study is to examine the mediating effect of IAcc on depression and attention.MethodsThirty-six depressed patients from the Psychosomatic Clinic in Windach were matched with 36 healthy controls according to age and sex and were assessed at Ulm University. All (...) participants completed the Beck Depression Inventory-II, the heartbeat perception task to examine IAcc, and the d2 test assessing selective attention.ResultsDepressed patients showed attention deficits—both for general visual attention and IAcc—compared to healthy controls. The mediation analyses revealed that the relationship between depression and attention is not mediated via IAcc. Furthermore, depression predicts IAcc and attention, but these effects are direct and largely unaffected by the respective other variable.DiscussionThe results of the present study highlight both interoceptive as well as attention deficits in depressed patients. No clear mediation between these variables could be shown in this study. More elaborative research is needed to clarify whether different approaches to improve IAcc are effective for these deficits in depressed patients and could therefore be of importance as an additional aspect of therapy in depression. (shrink)

Goethe's objections to Newton's theory of light and colours are better than often acknowledged. You can accept the most important elements of these objections without disagreeing with Newton about light and colours. As I will argue, Goethe exposed a crucial weakness of Newton's methodological self-assessment. Newton believed that with the help of his prism experiments, he could prove that sunlight was composed of variously coloured rays of light. Goethe showed that this step from observation to theory is more problematic than (...) Newton wanted to admit. By insisting that the step to theory is not forced upon us by the phenomena, Goethe revealed our own free, creative contribution to theory construction. And Goethe's insight is surprisingly significant, because he correctly claimed that all of the results of Newton's prism experiments fit a theoretical alternative equally well. If this is correct, then by suggesting an alternative to a well-established physical theory, Goethe developed the problem of underdete... (shrink)

This essay presents a novel approach to specifying the meaning of the concept of populism, on the political position it occupies and on the nature of populism. Employing analytic techniques of concept clarification and recent analytic ideology critique, it develops populism as a political kind in three steps. First, it descriptively specifies the stereotype of populist platforms as identified in extant research and thereby delimits the peculiar political position populism occupies in representative democracies as neither inclusionary nor fascist. Second, it (...) specifies on this basis analytically–normatively the particular stance towards liberal representative democracy (in particular towards popular sovereignty and democratic legitimacy) that unifies populism’s political position and explains how populist politics can be compelling for democratic citizens. The normative core (populist ideology) turns out to require no more than two general principles of legitimizing political authority by elections. Surprisingly, it does not need a separate anti-pluralist or exclusionary commitment: it entails it. Third, this normative model allows a response to a contested question in the theoretical discussion, namely, whether populism (properly specified) can be democracy-enhancing. The article defends the negative answer in virtue of the normative core alone and does so as much vis-à-vis a minimal (purely electoral) as vis-à-vis a normatively ambitious (liberal) conception of democracy. The reconstruction of the normative core of populist ideology enables a novel argument to show that populism is incompatible with the continued democratic legitimation of political authority even in the normatively most austere conception of ‘electoral democracy’, not just with ‘liberal democracy’. Assuming a normatively more ambitious concept of democratic legitimation in terms of political autonomy, the model also produces an extremely direct argument showing that populists cannot fulfil their promise of ‘taking back control’ over political decision-making to the population. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 2, February 2020, Page 49-50.

Research on the cognitive abilities involved in decision making has shown that, under objective risk conditions (i.e., when explicit information about possible outcomes and risks is available), superior decisions are especially predicted by executive functions and exact number processing skills, also referred to as objective numeracy. So far, decision-making research has mainly focused on exact number processing skills, such as performing calculations or transformations of symbolic numbers. There is evidence that such exact numeric skills are based on approximate number processing (...) (ANP) skills, which enable quick and accurate processing of non-symbolic numbers (e.g. Chen and Li, 2014). Very few studies, however, have investigated ANP skills in the context of risky decision making and have analyzed direct associations among the aforementioned sub functions. Possible interactions between the closely related skills have not been considered. The current study (N = 128) examines interactions of ANP skills with executive functions and objective numeracy, in predicting risky choice behavior. ANP skills are represented by the accuracy in a dot-comparison task. Decision making is measured by two versions of the Game of Dice Task (GDT), which place different emphases on the reflection of potential risks. The results show two-way as well as three-way interactions between the measures of ANP skills, executive functions, and objective numeracy in predicting risky decisions in both GDT versions. The riskiest decisions were most frequently made in case of low scores in all of the three competencies, while good performance in any one of them resulted in significant reductions of disadvantageous decisions. The findings indicate that high ANP skills can positively affect choice behavior in individuals who have weaknesses in reflectively attributed skills, namely executive functions and objective numeracy. Potential compensatory effects and mechanisms of ANP in decision making are discussed. (shrink)

RESUMO Segundo Mikhail Bakhtin, a 'palavra monológica' não é realizada no diálogo; dela se depreende a 'palavra autoritária' que, como seu próprio nome indica, provém da autoridade, legal ou eclesiástica, do professor ou dos pais. Sua característica, como se escuta no discurso religioso, é a de não permitir a discussão; pede ser reconhecida e assimilada por nós. Entretanto, é possível que tal palavra, ainda que 'de outrem', seja convincente, incorporando-se ao nosso discurso com plena consciência; sendo assim, pode inclusive ser (...) considerada 'palavra dialógica'. Para explicá-la melhor, a 'palavra autoritária' será vinculada a enunciados dogmáticos próprios das religiões, como o judaísmo e o islã, e, sobretudo, do cristianismo católico.ABSTRACT According to Mihail Bakhtin, a 'monologic word' is not realized in dialogue; related to it, an 'authoritative word,' as its name implies, comes from authority, be it legal or ecclesiastical, from teachers or parents. As in religious discourse, it does not allow discussion; it asks to be recognized and assimilated. However, it may be that this word, coming from the 'discourse of the other,' is convincing, being incorporated into our discourse in full consciousness. Being so, it can even be considered a 'dialogical word.' To better explain it, the 'authoritative word' will be connected to dogmatic utterances of religions, such as Judaism or Islam, and especially the Catholic Christianity.RESUMEN Según Mijaíl Bajtín, la 'palabra monológica' es una que no está en diálogo; a ella se vincula la 'palabra autoritaria' que, como su nombre lo indica, proviene de la autoridad, sea legal o eclesial, del maestro, de los padres. Su característica, como se escucha en el discurso religioso, es que no permite la discusión; pide ser reconocida y asimilada por nosotros. Sin embargo, puede ser que dicha palabra, aunque sea 'ajena', resulte convincente y se incorpore a nuestro discurso con plena conciencia; siendo así, puede, incluso, ser considerada 'palabra dialógica'. Para explicarla mejor, la 'palabra autoritaria' será analizada con algunos enunciados dogmáticos, propios de las religiones, como el judaísmo o el islam y, sobre todo, del cristianismo católico. (shrink)

Genetic modification of crop plants is frequently described by its proponents as a continuation of the ancient process of domestication. While domestication, crop breeding, and GM all modify the genomes and phenotypes of plants, GM fundamentally differs from domestication in terms of the biological and sociopolitical processes by which change occurs, and the subsequent impacts on agrobiodiversity and seed sovereignty. We review the history of domestication, crop breeding, and GM, and show that crop breeding and GM are continuous with each (...) other in many important ways, but represent a momentous break from domestication because they move plant evolution off of farms and into centralized institutions. The social contexts in which these processes unfold dictate who holds rights to germplasm and agricultural knowledge, shape incentives to effect particular kinds of changes in our crops, and create or constrict biodiversity. Presenting GM as a continuation of domestication puts forward a false equivalency that fundamentally misrepresents how domestication, crop breeding, and GM occur. In doing so, this narrative diminishes public understanding of these important processes and obscures the effects of industrial agriculture on in situ biodiversity and the practice of farming. This misrepresentation is used in public-facing science communication by representatives of the biotechnology industry to silence meaningful debate on GM by convincing the public that it is the continuation of an age-old process that underlies all agricultural societies. (shrink)

The past 20 years have seen dramatic rises in suicide rates in the United States and other countries around the world. These trends have been identified as a public health crisis in urgent need of new solutions and have spurred significant research efforts to improve our understanding of suicide and strategies to prevent it. Unfortunately, despite making significant contributions to the founding of suicidology – through Emile Durkheim’s classic Suicide (1897/1951) – sociology’s role has been less prominent in contemporary efforts (...) to address these tragic trends, though as we will show, sociological theories offer great promise for advancing our understanding of suicide and improving the efficacy of suicide prevention. Here, we review sociological theory and empirical research on suicide. We begin where all sociologists must: with Durkheim. However, we offer a more comprehensive understanding of Durkheim’s insights into suicide than the prior reviews provided by those in other disciplines. In so doing, we reveal the nuance and richness of Durkheim’s insights that have been largely lost in modern suicidology, despite being foundational to all sociological theories of suicide – even those that have moved beyond his model. We proceed to discuss broadly acknowledged limitations to Durkheim’s theory of suicide and review how more recent theoretical efforts have not only addressed those concerns, but have done so by bringing a larger swatch of sociology’s theoretical and empirical toolkit to bare on suicide. Specifically, we review how recent sociological theories of suicide have incorporated insights from social network theories, cultural sociology, sociology of emotions, and sociological social psychology to better theorize how the external social world matters to individual psychological pain and suffering. We conclude by making explicit bridges between sociological and psychological theories of suicide; by noting important limitations in knowledge about suicide – particularly regarding the roles of organizations, inequality, and intersectionality in suicide – that sociology is well situated to help address. (shrink)

Digitalisierung und technologischer Fortschritt verändern das menschliche Selbstverständnis. Während sich der Mensch in Abgrenzung zu Tier und Natur als kultiviertes und autonom handelndes Wesen definiert, steht er angesichts der zunehmenden Technologisierung nun vor der Frage: Was bedeutet Menschsein vor dem Hintergrund der neuen Technologien? Wie verändern sich die menschliche Lebenswelt, Verantwortungsstrukturen und Identitätskonzepte? Was können Menschen, was Technologien nicht können? Was macht den Menschen aus und wo wird er in Frage gestellt? Der Band bietet einen umfassenden Blick auf diese Fragestellungen. (...) Im ersten Teil befassen sich Beiträge aus der Philosophie und Anthropologie mit dem Spannungsfeld Mensch-Maschine. Die anschließenden Beiträge eröffnen interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf die technisierte Lebenswelt des Menschen in den Bereichen Kultur, Kommunikation und Bildung. Im letzten Teil des Bandes wird schließlich als Kontrapunkt das Menschsein in einer technisierten Welt aus der Perspektive von Spiritualität und Pflege in den Blick genommen. (shrink)