Each contributor to this book has used personal experience as the basis from which to frame his individual sociological perspectives. Because they have personalized their work, their accounts are real, and recognizable as having come from 'real' persons, about 'real' experiences. There are no objectively-distanced disembodied third person entities in these accounts. These writers are actual people whose stories will make you laugh, cry, think, and want to know more.

Bioethical consensus promotes a shared decision making model, which requires healthcare professionals to partner their knowledge with that of their patients—who, at a minimum, contribute their valu...

:In a recent paper in Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics on the necessary conditions for morally responsible animal research David DeGrazia and Jeff Sebo claim that the key requirements for morally responsible animal research are an assertion of sufficient net benefit, a worthwhile-life condition, and a no-unnecessary-harm condition. With regards to the assertion of sufficient net benefit, the authors claim that morally responsible research offers unique benefits to humans that outweigh the costs and harms to humans and animals. In this (...) commentary we will raise epistemic, practical, and ethical challenges to DeGrazia and Sebo’s emphasis on benefits in the prospective assessment of research studies involving animals. We do not disagree with DeGrazia and Sebo that, at the theoretical level, the benefits of research justify our using animals. Our contribution intends to clarify, at the practical level, how we should understand benefits in the prospective assessment and moral justification of animal research. We argue that ASNB should be understood as an assessment of Expectation of Knowledge Production in the prospective assessment and justification of animal research. EKP breaks down into two further claims: that morally responsible research generates knowledge worth having and that morally responsible research is designed and executed to produce generalizable knowledge. We understand the condition called knowledge worth having as scientists’ testing a hypothesis that, whether verified or falsified, advances an important interest, and production of generalizable knowledge in terms of scientific integrity. Generalizable knowledge refers to experimental results that generalize to a larger population beyond the animals studied. Generalizable scientific knowledge is reliable, replicable, and accurately descriptive. In sum, morally responsible research will be designed and carefully executed to successfully test a hypothesis that, whether verified or falsified, advances important interests. Our formulation of EKP, crucially, does not require further showing that an experiment involving animals will produce societal benefits. (shrink)

This is the first feminist special issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Introduction written by Brand [Weiser] and Korsmeyer with essays by Hilde Hein, Paul Mattick, Jr., Timothy Gould, Joanne B. Waugh, Joseph Margolis, Mary Devereaux, Noel Carroll, Flo Leibowitz, Anita Silvers, Elizabeth Ann Dobie, Renee Cox, and Ellen Handler Spitz. A fuller publication from Indiana University Press followed in 1995 edited by Brand [Weiser] and Korsmeyer entitled, Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics.

Since the early 1990s, the extractive industries have increasingly valued corporate social responsibility in the communities where they operate. More recently, these industries have begun to recognize the importance of adapting CSR efforts to unique local contexts rather than applying a one-size-fits-all model. However, firms understand local context to mean culture and treat the physical properties of the host region—topography, geology, hydrology, and climate—as the exclusive purview of mineral geologists and engineers. In this article, we examine the organization of CSR (...) at two industrial-scale gold mines in Guatemala, owned by the same firm, which yielded starkly distinct levels of support among host community residents. We develop the idea of social terrain to convey the way in which the biophysical environment informs local social relations and imbues phenomena with particular social meanings. We argue that firms must account for social terrain in organizing for CSR. The literature struggles to provide guidelines for identifying and understanding stakeholders. Social terrain, we argue, can begin to bridge this gap between theory and practice. (shrink)

Keller & Miller's (K&M's) conclusion appears to be correct; namely, that common, harmful, heritable mental disorders are largely maintained at present frequencies by mutation-selection balance at many different loci. However, their “paradox” is questionable. (Published Online November 9 2006).

Results of Sierpiski and others have shown that certain finite-dimensional product sets can be written as unions of subsets, each of which is ‘narrow’ in a corresponding direction; that is, each line in that direction intersects the subset in a small set. For example, if the set ω × ω is partitioned into two pieces along the diagonal, then one piece meets every horizontal line in a finite set, and the other piece meets each vertical line in a finite set. (...) Such partitions or coverings can exist only when the sets forming the product are of limited size.This paper considers such coverings for products of infinitely many sets . In this case, a covering of the product by narrow sets, one for each coordinate direction, will exist no matter how large the factor sets are. But if one restricts the sets used in the covering , then the existence of narrow coverings is related to a number of large cardinal properties: partition cardinals, the free subset problem, nonregular ultrafilters, and so on.One result given here is a relative consistency proof for a hypothesis used by S. Mrówka to produce a counterexample in the dimension theory of metric spaces. (shrink)

By examining selected works by Stephen Gaukroger, Alfred North Whitehead, Lynn White, Jr., Benjamin Farrington, and Paul Gans, the author discusses the formation of Western culture and the intellectual tools and the social conditions that contributed (and still contribute) to its being. He concludes that a metaphysics and a realistic epistemology—based on an ancient Greek confidence in the human intellect, in its ability to reason to truths that acknowledge the immaterial character of human intellection—is required for the West to retain (...) its identity and develop its own culture. (shrink)

This is an ethnographic and theoretical exploration of the `shadows': vast transnational networks of goods, services, people and exchanges that flow outside formal and legal state channels and international laws. These networks involve millions of people and more than a trillion dollars yearly worldwide, and my research demonstrates these are more formalized, integrated and rule-bound than traditional studies have suggested. Thus, `shadow' networks broker political, economic and social power that can rival many of the world's states, and they are profoundly (...) implicated in world markets. This article explores core characteristics and cultures defining extant extra-state systems, and the power and potentialities for social sovereignty they wield. Investigation into shadow realities prompts a reassessment of the basic theoretical ideas concerning the nexus of legality/illegality, state/non-state and formal/non-formal power relations defining the world today. (shrink)

Through illustrating the similarities between embodied practices rooted in different cultural contexts (such as `African' female genital cutting and `Western' cosmetic surgery), feminist theorists seek to reveal the instability of essentialist binaries which distinguish various groups as culturally, ethnically and morally `different'. They also aim to query how the term `culture' is employed differentially on the basis of embodied axes such as race and nation. However, in emphasizing overarching commonalities between practices, feminist cross-cultural comparisons risk collapsing into economies of sameness (...) that elide the complex relations of power through which such practices have been constituted. They can also fix the imagined subjects of these practices in troubling ways. Using the ubiquitous `African' female genital cutting and `Western' cosmetic surgery binary as an example, this article explores the difference it might make to address culturally essentialist constructions of embodied practice with a focus on relationality rather than commonality. As a means to reorient feminist cross-cultural approaches which depend on assertions of similarity or sameness, it argues for the theoretical and pedagogical utility of thinking through relational webs. (shrink)