Fourteen enjoyable papers, from the Theoretical Archaeology Conference held in Oxford in December 2000, which reflect on the relationship between archaeology and the outside world' and investigate the meaning of archaeology to the general public and the relevance of archaeology to society. Essays examine the development of archaeology as a discipline through the medieval, Romantic and Post-Modern eras, looking, for example, at the treatment of archaeological themes in the works of Mary Shelley and Byron. Contributors also consider the impact of (...) Stonehenge on astronomical studies, the influence of Roman finds and sites, including Bath and Caerleon, on Edwardian jewellery and children's stories and the dramatisation of the Iceman's' discovery in a recent play. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary field of neurorobotics looks to neuroscience to overcome the limitations of modern robotics technology, to robotics to advance our understanding of the neural system’s inner workings, and to information technology to develop tools that support those complementary endeavours. The development of these technologies is still at an early stage, which makes them an ideal candidate for proactive and anticipatory ethical reflection. This article explains the current state of neurorobotics development within the Human Brain Project, originating from a close (...) collaboration between the scientific and technical experts who drive neurorobotics innovation, and the humanities and social sciences scholars who provide contextualising and reflective capabilities. This article discusses some of the ethical issues which can reasonably be expected. On this basis, the article explores possible gaps identified within this collaborative, ethical reflection that calls for attention to ensure that the development of neurorobotics is ethically sound and socially acceptable and desirable. (shrink)

Then you have a look around, and see that none of the uninitiated are listening to us—I mean the people who think that nothing exists but what they can grasp with both hands; people who refuse to admit that actions and processes and the invisible world in general have any place in reality.

In this article I begin by discussing the persistent problem of relations between educational inequality and the attainment gap in schools. Because benefits accruing from an education are substantial, the ‘gap’ leads to large disparities in the quality of life many young people can expect to experience in the future. Curriculum knowledge has been a focus for debate in England in relation to educational equality for over 40 years. Given the contestation surrounding views about curriculum knowledge and equality I consider (...) the thinking of two philosophers, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, and their work on justice, to trouble the curriculum framework and discourse of knowledge promoted through the policy text of The Importance of Teaching: The Schools White Paper (2010) and later associated policy reforms to the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) curriculum in England. The Schools White Paper aims to make the curriculum more challenging to students by introducing tight controls in terms of the assessment framework and curriculum knowledge. I argue that, when considered through Derrida's perspective on language and meaning and Levinas' view on the ethical responsibility for the other, the reforms present obstacles to the search for a just curriculum. I look to the work of Sharon Todd and Paul Standish for a re-imagination of curriculum as or through relations in the light of Derrida's and Levinas' philosophies. (shrink)

Phenomenology provides a method for disability theorists to describe embodied subjectivity lacking within the social model of disability. Within the literature on body integrity identity disorder (BIID), dominant narratives of disability are influential, individual bodies are considered in isolation, and experiences of disabled people are omitted. Research on BIID tends to incorporate an individualist ontology. In this article, I argue that Merleau-Ponty's conceptualization of “being in the world,” which recognizes subjectivity as embodied and intersubjective, provides a better starting point for (...) research describing the experiences of those with BIID and amputees. (shrink)

Journal of Global Ethics, Volume 9, Issue 3, Page 263-275, December 2013.

Sometimes beliefs that are shared are treated as if they are knowledge in spite of a lack of evidence or even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Beliefs informed by prejudices and ignorance about people with disabilities are often treated as certain and reinforced by social practices. In this paper, I distinguish between knowledge claims and beliefs that are treated as if they are true. I use Wittgenstein’s account of the connection between epistemic and other social practices in (...) On Certainty to consider how it is possible to change beliefs about disability. I draw on Naomi Scheman’s “Forms of life: Mapping the Rough Ground” to consider political applications of Wittgenstein’s thought. I use a Wittgensteinian framework to critique Peter Singer’s claims regarding the lives of disabilities in Practical Ethics. I draw attention to the ways in which unjustified beliefs about disability can inform and be reified through social practices. Likewise, changes in social practices can dislodge common ableist beliefs about disability. (shrink)

Cytoplasmic messenger ribonucleoprotein particles (mRNPs) represent the cellular transcriptome, and recent data have challenged our current understanding of their architecture, transport, and complexity before translation. Pre‐translational mRNPs are composed of a single transcript, whereas P‐bodies and stress granules are condensates. Both pre‐translational mRNPs and actively translating mRNPs seem to adopt a linear rather than a closed‐loop configuration. Moreover, assembly of pre‐translational mRNPs in physical RNA regulons is an unlikely event, and co‐regulated translation may occur locally following extracellular cues. We envisage (...) a stochastic mRNP transport mechanism where translational repression of single mRNPs—in combination with microtubule‐mediated cytoplasmic streaming and docking events—are prerequisites for local translation, rather than direct transport. (shrink)

Samantha Brennan notes in her survey article, “Recent Works in Feminist Ethics,” that “the reshaping of moral concepts in light of feminist critiques of individualism and feminist development of relational alternatives represents significant progress in feminist ethics, indeed in ethics at large.” Two suggestions in this claim serve as a starting point for my application of a relational approach to inequalities in a global context. First, equality is a moral concept that has been and continues to be central to Western (...) liberal theory. The global context reveals liberalism's dominance on the world scene as well as increases in inequalities of wealth both within and across borders. I claim that this context calls for renewed vigilance in the “reshaping of moral concepts” that are central to liberal theory. To clarify, I do not argue that feminists must work with these concepts. Rather I hold that some concepts, one of them being equality, have enduring moral value and this makes continued feminist analyses of them important, particularly in the contemporary global context. (shrink)

There seems to be a broad agreement that curiosity is important in education. However, current research often seeks to answer the question of how best to nurture curiosity and fails to ask the normative question of why this should be done. A closer look reveals that the reasons for justifying the importance of curiosity vary, with some theorists pointing to its role in cognitive development as a starting point for learning, and others praising it as an element of democracy and (...) a child’s right to participation. Most of these approaches understand curiosity as an individual urge or desire for knowledge. In contrast, this article will examine a relational understanding of the concept by focussing on social curiosity. Instead of following a cognitive developmentalist, intellectual virtue or emancipatory approach to valuing curiosity, I will employ relational ethical theory. The argument then explores a possible analogy between social curiosity and the concept of sovereign expressions of life, as developed by the Danish philosopher and theologian K.E. Løgstrup. By drawing on his relational ethics, the article aims to expand the theoretical grounds on which curiosity can be normatively legitimised in education. With children spending longer and longer hours in educational, structured and adult-led settings, I conclude with a twofold normative claim: Social curiosity should be a part of all relations in education and its absence should lead to an ethical demand. In addition, an awareness of the actual deeds through which social curiosity is realised is also a topic that must be addressed by educators. (shrink)

At a time when neoliberalism and financial austerity are together encouraging academic scientists to seek market alternatives to state funding, this essay investigates why, a century ago, their predecessors explicitly rejected private enterprise and the private ownership of ideas and inventions available to them through the patent system. The early twentieth century witnessed the success of a long campaign by British scientists to persuade the state to assume responsibility for the funding of basic research : their findings would enter the (...) intellectual commons; their rewards would be primarily reputational . The essay summarizes recent research in three separate fields of British technoscience—electricity, aviation, and agricultural botany—all of which were laying claim, at this time, to a heightened commercial or military importance that raised new questions about the ownership of scientific ideas. It suggests that each of the three established an idiosyncratic relationship with the patent system or with other forms of “intellectual property,” which would both influence their emergent disciplines and affect the extent to which commercial enterprise could remain a viable funding strategy. (shrink)

We explore an unsolved challenge in the era of evidence-based medicine (EBM): the recognition of the patient as an epistemic agent or ‘knower’. While patients are increasingly acknowledged as carriers of values and preferences, it seems more challenging to acknowledge them as carriers of important causal information. In contrast, the science of pharmacovigilance depends on patient testimonies as valuable sources of causal evidence. This incompatibility can give rise to cases of what has been called participatory epistemic injustice. We analyse the (...) testimony of a chronic pain patient and co-author of this article, Christine. Christine gives an auto-ethnographic account of her interactions with healthcare professionals trying to find the right pharmacological treatment for her condition. Through the analysis of her own story, she identifies some relevant themes for the epistemic interaction between healthcare professionals and chronic pain patients. We argue that such epistemic interactions are increasingly shaped by EBM and its conception of causality, which devalues patient subjective testimonies and emphasises statistical evidence. We conclude that outlier patients face an inherent risk of being left vulnerable to participatory epistemic injustice, particularly regarding the discovery of novel, rare adverse effects of medicines. (shrink)

No country has yet implemented a pilot to ensure access to or the innovation of new antibiotics for multi-drug infections. A team from national health agencies in Norway, with the support of the Innovative Medicine Initiative-funded project DRIVE-AB, designed a model suitable for the national context, including the selection of the antibiotics, the potential value, and the operational model.

We discuss here one of our projects, aimed at developing an automatic facial expression interpreter, mainly in terms of signaled emotions. We present some of the relevant findings on facial expressions from cognitive science and psychology that can be understood by and be useful to researchers in Human-Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence. We then give an overview of HCI applications involving automated facial expression recognition, we survey some of the latest progresses in this area reached by various approaches in computer (...) vision, and we describe the design of our facial expression recognizer. We also give some background knowledge about our motivation for understanding facial expressions and we propose an architecture for a multimodal intelligent interface capable of recognizing and adapting to computer users¿ affective states. Finally, we discuss current interdisciplinary issues and research questions which will need to be addressed for further progress to be made in the promising area of computational facial expression recognition. (shrink)

We address two main issues: the distinction between time-constrained and spatially constrained tasks, and the separable A and W effects on movement time (MT) in spatially-constrained tasks. We consider MT and 3-D kinematic data from human adults pointing to targets in human-computer interaction. These are better fit by Welford's (1968) two-part model, than Fitts' (1954; Fitts & Peterson 1964) ID model. We identify theoretical and practical implications.

Research examining consumer responses to the provision of nutritional information as part of restaurant menus has produced mixed results. In light of pending legislation requiring the provision of nutritional information, the authors examine the how corporate social responsibility impacts consumer service evaluation of restaurants. Findings from three studies demonstrate that the relationship between consumer attitudes toward the disclosure of nutrition information and their subsequent evaluation of the food provider is impacted by CSR-related initiatives. Studies one and two find that consumer (...) evaluations are enhanced when the firm has an existing reputation for CSR and when the firm includes healthy product options as part of the introduction of the nutritional information. Study 3 finds these effects are particularly strong with fast-food restaurants. Overall, the findings suggest that, for some firms, the introduction of the legislation provides an opportunity to strengthen relationships with customers and gain advantage over some competitors. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the claim that phenomenological accounts grounded in the lived experiences of those most tangibly impacted by social norms related to ability can provide crucial correctives and supplements to the existing philosophical literature on disability. After situating discussions of the body within disability theory and debates over the impairment/disability distinction in philosophy of disability more specifically, I argue that extant models are inadequate for theorizing subjective experiences of living as a disabled person. I then develop an (...) account of the relationship between impairment/disability by drawing upon critical phenomenological approaches to embodiment. In conclusion, I turn to the methodological and metaphilosophical issue of how to conduct ethical inquiry concerning disability. I examine some of the ways that ableist assumptions can inform curiosity, provide examples of disabled people’s accounts of experiencing derivatizing curiosity, and offer suggestions for practices of curiosity that not only avoid epistemic harms, but are actively anti-ableist. (shrink)

Although many women experience harmful behaviors that fit the legal definition of sexual harassment, very few ever label their experiences as such. I explore how psychological ambivalence expressed as sadomasochism may account for some of this gap. Following Lynn Chancer, I argue that certain structural circumstances characteristic of highly stratified bureaucratic organizations may promote these psychological responses. After discussing two illustrations of this dynamic, I draw out the implications for sexual harassment theory and policy.

Platón y Kant plantean un modelo “constitucional” del alma, en el que la razón y el apetito o la pasión tienen diferentes roles estructurales y funcionales en la generación de la motivación, en contraposición al común “modelo combativo,” en el que son mostrados como fuentes de motivación independientes que luchan por el control. Desde el punto de vista del modelo constitucional, podemos explicar qué hace que una acción sea diferente de un evento. Lo que hace que una acción sea atribuible (...) a una persona y, por lo tanto, lo que la hace una acción, es que surge desde la constitución de la persona y, por lo tanto, desde la persona como un todo, y no desde una fuerza que actúa sobre o en ella. Esto, a su vez, implica una explicación de lo que hace buena a una acción: lo que hace que una acción sea buena es que se delibere sobre ella y se la elija de una manera que unifique a la persona en un sistema constitucional. A través de la acción deliberativa nos constituimos como agentes unificados. La justicia platónica y el imperativo categórico de Kant se muestran como estándares normativos para la acción porque son principios de autoconstitución. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World ed. by Beatriz Ilari, Susan YoungAmy Christine BeegleBeatriz Ilari and Susan Young, eds., Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016)Historically, most studies of children’s musical learning have been informed by stage theories of developmental psychology and focused on school music or private instrumental lesson contexts. Over the past few decades, scholars have conducted research (...) that increasingly explores children’s involvement with music in contexts outside of formal learning settings, utilizing methods and models from ethnomusicology, sociology, social psychology, and/or cultural psychology. Nine individually authored chapters in the volume, Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World, edited by Beatriz Ilari and Susan Young, convey results, applications, and extensions of one such project that reaches beyond the conventional ethnographic music education study.The bulk of this collection contains findings and interpretations from a collaborative project called MyPlace, MyMusic, followed by several additional chapters that provide descriptions and narratives from subsequent related projects. The original project included fourteen scholars from the International Society of Music Education-Early Childhood Commission, who conducted in-home observations and interviews with parents and children in order to examine the nature of, influences on, and meaning of musical activities that took place in the homes of middle-class seven-year-olds in diverse locations, including Brazil, Denmark, [End Page 105] Greece, Israel, Kenya, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, Taiwan, the U.K., and the United States.Importantly, the project’s designers attempted to avoid complications of transcultural developments by asking each researcher to select children whose families had not recently migrated to their country/locality. The seventeen participating children from twelve countries were also of the same ethnicity and lived in the same “locality” as each researcher in order to ease communication during in-home observations and interviews. Results shed light on issues of children’s family life, schooling, identity, gender, and social class.This project presents a unique contribution to the field of music education in a number of ways. First, most previous studies of music in the homes of children have centered around preschoolers, toddlers, and infants, whereas the present project focuses on seven-year-old children, whose age places them on the cusp of crossing from early to middle childhood. Second, most previous music education researchers have considered issues of social class, ethnicity, and race as independent variables, but the methodology for this project calls for observation and description of each child in his or her home first, followed by comparison of the “cases” to each other. Third, the researchers utilize a Wiki platform to share and collaboratively interpret data collected from home lives of children (photographs, video and audio recordings, texts, and pdf files) among researchers from different countries.The volume is organized into three major sections. Susan Young and Jèssica Pérez-Moreno set the scene in the first two chapters by describing the theoretical underpinnings and methodology for the MyPlace, MyMusic project. The second section of the book includes four chapters in which several individual researchers interpret the project’s data based upon the themes of children’s private musical worlds; belonging/identity/gendered meanings of children’s music making; perspectives and influences of parents; and the role of social class on children’s musical lives. The last three chapters of the book provide detailed descriptions of projects and extensions that developed after the MyPlace, MyMusic project.Following the introductory chapter, in which Ilari and Young explain the background, rationale, goals, and methods of the MyPlace, MyMusic project and provide a reader-friendly table that presents the cultural background and “sources of musical stimulation in the home” for each participating child,1 Susan Young outlines the theoretical and analytical frameworks for the project in the first chapter. Rather than viewing children’s learning as developing and socializing into adulthood, the project researchers were encouraged to look at children as being instead of becoming, as subjects, rather than objects of research, and as having opportunities for agency that are contextual. This theoretical framework stems from the field of Childhood Studies (as cultivated in Scandinavia [End Page 106] and... (shrink)

This article explores the reasons some pregnant women enter maternity homes with the plan to place their babies for adoption. The authors discuss changes in maternity homes over the twentieth century and report on findings from a survey of currently licensed homes in Texas. Next, the authors discuss the findings from fieldwork and in-depth interviews with residents of two maternity homes. They identify three major reasons why birth mothers enter maternity homes: the desire to escape abusive or stressful family lives, (...) the desire to avoid the stigma of placing a child for adoption, and the desire to provide their children, and in some cases themselves, with a stable and loving family life. The authors contend that entering a maternity home with the intention of placing their babies for adoption represents an effort on the part of birth mothers to reconfigure their own, often impoverished family lives. (shrink)

Part-time work schedules are a popular option for many women struggling to reconcile the competing demands of employment and motherhood. They are controversial among feminists because they are associated with job penalties that promote gender inequality. Previous research on this topic has focused on issues confronting women workers in professional and managerial jobs. In this article, we compare and contrast the experiences of women in professional and secondary part-time jobs, drawing on 60 in-depth interviews with mothers working in such “good” (...) and “bad” jobs. We find that mothers at the top and at the bottom of the employment hierarchy face unique disadvantages from their part-time employment to which they respond in different ways. Yet in both instances, mothers assume responsibility for their “choices,” which absolves organizations of blame for exploitation and discrimination against part-time workers. We suggest alternative possibilities for the organization of work in the conclusion. (shrink)

"_Minding Women _embraces a generation of scholarship, culminating in major new work by leading scholars who are reconfiguring feminist research. This important collection will again change the way we think about race, history, education, and the lives of girls." —_Sally Schwager_, Director Women's History Institute, Harvard University Research on women and girls has exploded during the past twenty years. Since 1977, when the _Harvard Educational Review_ published Carol Gilligan's now-classic article "In a Different Voice," in which she argued so persuasively (...) that women and girls must be understood on their own terms, researchers have been discovering, uncovering, and recovering women's ways of knowing, being, thinking, teaching, and learning. _Minding Women_ charts the wealth of thought and writing related to women and girls and education that this process of discovery has produced. _Minding Women_ begins with a "Classics" section—articles that call attention to the lack of research on girls and women and describe the effect this has had on knowledge and society. The contributors then discuss feminist pedagogy, and how it has changed and been refined over time. Girls and young women are the focus of the next section. Too often their voices and viewpoints are excluded from these discussions, so some of their own writings are included here. The book then explores women's educational history, showcasing some of the rich work in this area over the past twenty years. Identity issues are addressed in the final section, acknowledging that substantial differences exist among groups of women and girls on how they experience the world and their roles, prospects, and lives. (shrink)