What is the primary function of consciousness in the nervous system? The answer to this question remains enigmatic, not so much because of a lack of relevant data, but because of the lack of a conceptual framework with which to interpret the data. To this end, we have developed Passive Frame Theory, an internally coherent framework that, from an action-based perspective, synthesizes empirically supported hypotheses from diverse fields of investigation. The theory proposes that the primary function of consciousness is well-circumscribed, (...) serving the 'somatic nervous system[. For this system, consciousness serves as a frame that constrains and directs skeletal muscle output, thereby yielding adaptive behavior. The mechanism by which consciousness achieves this is more counterintuitive, passive, and “low level” than the kinds of functions that theorists have previously attributed to consciousness. Passive frame theory begins to illuminate (a) what consciousness contributes to nervous function, (b) how consciousness achieves this function, and (c) the neuroanatomical substrates of conscious processes. Our untraditional, action-based perspective focuses on olfaction instead of on vision and is 'descriptive' (describing the products of nature as they evolved to be) rather than 'normative' (construing processes in terms of how they should function). Passive frame theory begins to isolate the neuroanatomical, cognitive-mechanistic, and representational (e.g., conscious contents) processes associated with consciousness. (shrink)

In contrast to the conventional fund management industry with a profit-oriented logic based on risk and return, ethical and faith-based funds should follow the religious principles of their investment-style philosophy. Islamic funds should obey the theological teachings of the primary sources of Islam, the Quran and Sunnah, as stakeholders expect these religious teachings to influence the investment decisions of fund managers. In practice, Islamic fund managers use Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions ’s screening criteria, based on secondary (...) sources of Islam, which allow investments that are only partially halal to be included in their portfolios. This study finds that a more religious logic in screening practices, although impairing diversification, does not necessarily harm performance. Thus, Islamic investment funds, and the wider ethical fund management industry, should, and could, adopt stricter screening criteria that match their investment mandates and bring more ethical business practices to the industry. (shrink)

In order to support the professional development of high school preservice teachers during their initial university training as reflective practitioners an innovative educational design was placed in a classroom management course. With this design, inspired by the principles of the learning community (Brown, 1994), has assisted students to develop a collective discourse on their professional practice through their own issues in the secondary classroom management and their concerns during a five weeks internship. We make the assumption that the participation in (...) the development of a collective discourse on professional practice allows students to not only reflect on their practice, but also to gain significant professional learning. Thus, our study focuses on student engagement in the development of collective discourse and actions enabling them to advance it. (shrink)

In this paper James’s pluralism is examined in light of his critiques of ‘intellectualism’ and monistic idealism in order to elucidate his relationship to Hegel. Contrary to the strong anti-Hegelianism found throughout the writings of James, Hegel’s dialectic and speculative logic are able to give a rational account of the continuity of objects and relations within experience that James struggled to articulate in A Pluralistic Universe. Neither James nor Hegel is an absolute pluralist or monist due to the interdependence of (...) the concepts of unity and plurality, aptly described by Hegel in his Logic, and alluded to by James in various places throughout his work. Thus, the ambiguity of the nature of James’s pluralism previously noted by scholars is explained, and the relevance of Hegel and dialectic for pragmatist theory is elucidated. (shrink)

I shall hear address the question of whether or not feminist philosophers should accept Kantian markers for the boundary between the aesthetic and nonaesthetic realms. I shall look at the way gender operates at the point in Kant's philosophy at which the aesthetic and ethical attitudes intersect: in the experience of the sublime. As we shall see, the later developments within the Kantian system mean that women fit comfortably neither side of the aesthetic/ethical divide and, indeed, fall outside personhood altogether.

There is limited knowledge about cancer patients' experiences of uncertainty while waiting for genome sequencing results, and whether prolonged uncertainty contributes to psychological factors in this context. To investigate uncertainty in patients with a cancer of likely hereditary origin while waiting for genome sequencing results, we collected questionnaire and interview data at baseline, and at three and 12 months follow up. Participants had negative attitudes towards uncertainty at baseline, and low levels of uncertainty at three and 12 months. Uncertainty about (...) genome sequencing did not change significantly over time [t = 0.660, p = 0.510]. Greater perceived susceptibility for cancer [r = 0.14, p < 0.01], fear of cancer recurrence [r = 0.19, p < 0.01], perceived importance of genome sequencing [r = 0.24, p < 0.01], intention to change behavior if a gene variant indicating risk is found [r = 0.29, p < 0.01], perceived ability to cope with results [r = 0.36, p < 0.01], and satisfaction with decision to have genome sequencing [r = 0.52, p < 0.01] were significantly correlated with negative attitudes towards uncertainty at baseline. Multiple primary cancer diagnoses [B = −2.364 [−4.238, −0.491], p = 0.014], lower perceived ability to cope with results [B = −0.1.881 [−3.403, −0.359], p = 0.016] at baseline, greater anxiety about genome sequencing [B = 0.347 [0.148, 0.546], p = 0.0012] at 3 months, and greater perceived uncertainty about genome sequencing [B = 0.494 [0.267, 0.721] p = 0.000] at 3 months significantly predicted greater perceived uncertainty about genome sequencing at 12 months. Greater perceived uncertainty about genome sequencing at 3 months significantly predicted greater anxiety about genome sequencing at 12 months [B = 0.291 [0.072, 0.509], p = 0.009]. Semi-structured interviews revealed that while participants were motivated to pursue genome sequencing as a strategy to reduce their illness and risk uncertainty, genome sequencing generated additional practical, scientific and personal uncertainties. Some uncertainties were consistently discussed over the 12 months, while others emerged over time. Similarly, some uncertainty coping strategies were consistent over time, while others emerged while patients waited for their genome sequencing results. This study demonstrates the complexity of uncertainty generated by genome sequencing for cancer patients and provides further support for the inter-relationship between uncertainty and anxiety. Helping patients manage their uncertainty may ameliorate psychological morbidity. (shrink)

This paper investigates the diversity of mediated parent networks from the perspective of communicative figurations, by focussing on what kinds of networks can be identified (RQ1) and what expectations parents hold towards these networks (RQ2). It draws upon a qualitative, exploratory study conducted in Austria, Denmark, Portugal and the UK, with interviews conducted with parents across 16 families in 2021. Different kinds of parent networks are described in terms of size, perceived publicness, frames of relevance, actors involved, communicative practices, and (...) media ensembles. Our analysis of parents’ expectations shows that disappointment seems to be closely connected to practical sense, social barriers and exclusion. (shrink)

Concerns about the influence of financial interests on research have increased, along with research dollars from pharmaceutical and other for-profit companies. Researchers’ financial ties to industry sponsors of research have also increased. Financial interests in biomedical research could influence research design, conduct, or reporting, and could compromise data integrity, participant safety, or both. Investigators’ financial ties with for-profit companies may influence reported scientific results, and may have compromised research participant safety.Disclosure is one commonly accepted method of managing financial relationships in (...) order to minimize possible threats to scientific objectivity, the safety of research participants, or public trust in the integrity of clinical research. Disclosure is presumed useful to the extent that “it gives those who would be affected, or who are otherwise in a good position to assess the risks, information they need to make their own decision.”. (shrink)

Psychological safety is a shared belief among team members that it is safe to take interpersonal risks. It can enhance team learning, experimentation with new ideas, and team performance. Considerable research has examined the positive effects of PS in diverse organizational contexts and is now shifting its focus toward exploring the nature of PS itself. This study aims to enhance our understanding of PS antecedents and development over time. Based on the model of team faultlines and research on team diversity, (...) we examined the effects of demographic faultlines, team member personality, and member competencies on the development of PS. Over 5 months, 61 self-managed teams assessed their PS at the beginning, midpoint, and end of a research project. Results of a multilevel growth curve model show that PS decreased from project beginning to end. Initial levels of PS were especially low when teams had strong demographic faultlines and when team members differed in neuroticism. PS decreased more strongly over time when team members were diverse in agreeableness and assessed their task-related competencies to be relatively high. Our study identifies time and team composition attributes as meaningful predictors for the development of PS. We present ideas for future research and offer suggestions for how and when to intervene to help teams strengthen PS throughout their collaboration. (shrink)

This study explores the factors associated with neonatal mortality and maternal health care in Nepal. The subjects were 4375 births reported in the 1996 Nepal Family Health Survey. Maternal and child health care was found to have a significant association with neonatal mortality, although preceding birth interval and sex of child had stronger effects. Four aspects of maternal care were found to be highly associated with region, household ownership of assets, mothers education. This indicates that accessibility, affordability and availability of (...) maternal health care are important factors to consider in future research on neonatal mortality. (shrink)

This article begins with discussing challenges encountered while managing the epistemology of legal modes of thinking and social science, and the limits of relying on discipline-based methodologies for the advancement of empirical legal scholarship. In then discusses two approaches to empirical legal training employed in New York. Through this, it seeks to demonstrate the strengths of collaborative research with illustrations of a cross-national collaboration. Empirical research on law is a multi-method phenomenon. Ideally, empirical legal training means that students need and (...) can further foster a background in a broad range of social science methods and in a set of methods that can use triangulation or juxtaposition to capture the factors that explain law as a social phenomenon. (shrink)

TO ADDRESS THE ROLE OF CHILDREN AND FAMILIES IN STRUGGLES FOR justice, we must bear in mind not "family" in the abstract but particular families in particular times and places. The decisions and actions of particular families—certain African American and white families with children of high school age in Little Rock, Arkansas, during the academic years 1957 and 1958—prompted the controversy I reconsider here, between the German-born political philosopher Hannah Arendt and African American participants and leaders in the southern civil (...) rights movement, most famously represented by Martin Luther King Jr. (shrink)

This introductory essay argues that it is a mistake to represent Australian feminist philosophy as a kind of discourse theory that is “downstream” of the French post-structuralists or North American postmodernists. Starting with the local—and the specifically Australian modes of racial exclusion, in particular—and exploring some of the byways of philosophy, what we encounter is a range of ontological, ethical, and political models that allow a reconfiguration of self, community, and social change.

Childhood adversity is associated with altered or dysregulated stress reactivity; these altered patterns of physiological functioning persist into adulthood. Evidence from both preclinical animal models and human neuroimaging studies indicates that early life experience differentially influences stressor-evoked activity within central visceral neural circuits proximally involved in the control of stress responses, including the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC), paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN), bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) and amygdala. However, the relationship between childhood adversity and the (...) resting-state connectivity of this central visceral network remains unclear. To this end, we examined relationships between childhood threat and childhood socioeconomic deprivation, the resting-state connectivity between our regions of interest (ROIs), and affective symptom severity and diagnoses. We recruited a transdiagnostic sample of young adult males and females (n= 100; mean age = 27.28,SD= 3.99; 59 females) with a full distribution of maltreatment history and symptom severity across multiple affective disorders. Resting-state data were acquired using a 7.2-min functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) sequence; noted ROIs were applied as masks to determine ROI-to-ROI connectivity. Threat was determined by measures of childhood traumatic events and abuse. Socioeconomic deprivation (SED) was determined by a measure of childhood socioeconomic status (parental education level). Covarying for age, race and sex, greater childhood threat was significantly associated with lower BNST-PVN, amygdala-sgACC and PVN-sgACC connectivity. No significant relationships were found between SED and resting-state connectivity. BNST-PVN connectivity was associated with the number of lifetime affective diagnoses. Exposure to threat during early development may entrain altered patterns of resting-state connectivity between these stress-related ROIs in ways that contribute to dysregulated neural and physiological responses to stress and subsequent affective psychopathology. (shrink)

Although the context, such as the social policies or the professional world in mutation, highlights the emergence of a new professional project for educators of young children during their training period, the process of professionalization and the identity building involved during the training period will be more especially studied, in relation to the practical experience gathered during the internships (Wittorski, 2009). This experience awakes in the subject a reflection and a situation of identity building through the encounter and the interactions (...) with practical communities. While confronting with others, the student involves the realization, the self-continuity. Emotions and biographical facts are involved as well (Bourgeois et Barbier, 2006), thus maintaining the subject’s continuity and identity uniqueness through the perception of others. In this article, we will relate the process of professionalization and identity building to the concept of reliance, developed by Bolle de Bal (2003), within the scope of block-release training of educators of young children. (shrink)

Le propos de l'article est de mettre en regard les formes de la ritualisation scolaire et les constructions biographiques spécifiques dont est porteuse l'institution scolaire. Espace « abstrait » du monde, lieu d'un rapport autoréférentiel au savoir qui érige les signes et les discours en fins pour eux-mêmes, l'école est à elle-même sa propre scène: son mode d'action relève d'une performativité généralisée par laquelle elle ne cesse de faire coïncider ses accomplissements pratiques avec les signes qu'elle en produit. L'école trouve (...) les ressorts de cette performativité dans la mise en oeuvre d'espaces et de dispositifs ritualisés par lesquels elle effectue les actes d'enseignement-apprentissage dans le geste même de leur représentation. Dans ce cadre, la figure de 1' « élève », analysée comme un ensemble de prescriptions définissant les modes de participation à l'agir rituel de l'école, établit une injonction biographique particulière, qui entre en confrontation avec les figures de soi et l'expérience biographique des individus-élèves.The purpose of the paper is to look at the forms of ritual and school specific biographical constructions which carries the school. Space "abstract" of the world, rather than a self-referential relation to who erected the signs and speech purposes for themselves, the school itself is its own scene: its mode of action is a generalized performativity that it continues to match its practical accomplishments with the signs she produces. The school is the spring of this performativity in the implementation of spaces and mechanisms by which it performs ritualistic acts of teaching and learning in the very act of representation. In this context, Figure 1 "pupil", analyzed as a set of prescriptions defining the modes of participation in the ritual act of the school establishes a biographical special order, which comes into confrontation with oneself and figures the biographical experience of individuals-students. (shrink)

Chile and Colombia have undergone very different postconflict processes. Whereas in Chile there was an elite-based negotiated transition from a state terror regime, Colombia presents a gradual exit from an armed conflict involving multiple actors and taking place in one of Latin America’s most stable democracies. A strong common feature nevertheless exists in these two countries: important social movements—notably, student, afro-descendant, Indigenous, and peasant movements—that put forward memory, but which reach beyond the circle of direct victims. These “memory from below” (...) movements in both countries cannot be understood from their institutional contexts, since these are so different: while Chile’s democratic governments strengthened the amnesty law and led only to timid commemorative initiatives twenty years after the end of the dictatorship, Colombia adopted numerous laws that allowed an institutional presence of memory—notably, through the creation of the National Center for Historic Memory—while the armed conflict was still fully fledged. From a comparative politics perspective, these institutional differences lead one to investigate other causes for the presence of “memory from below” movements in both countries: interviews of participants show that these movements stem from a common understanding of the political role of memory, as well as from a common social imaginary of “shared suffering” that seeks to uncover state violence and that understands past human rights violations as being part of a historic continuum of structural and colonial violence aimed at criminalizing and crushing social movements in democracy. (shrink)

The present moment in human history is marked by the ever-accelerating movement across the world of materials, peoples and information, creating various problems and, of course, opportunities as well--especially, the movement of the people, which makes multiculturalism a major issue. Differences between the immigrants and the receiving society create conflict. One solution would be found in the legal provision for the equality of rights for all the members of society, including cultural minorities, but if the legal solution alone is considered (...) effective, there would be waste of resources accumulated in cultures as enabling agents of amenable human life. But multiple cultures in a single society easily become a source of conflict, as another culture encroaching upon one’s own culture is often felt as a threatening challenge to one’s identity, as identity is constructed in the subjective process of culture. It implies the master-and-slave struggle between two subjectivities. Cultural subjectivities, personal or collective, could be induced to constitute a complex system of federated subjectivities. Even such a system would not, however, completely eliminate tension and conflict. Intervention by an ethic universally conceived on the minimal basis would meet the urgent need to prevent escalation of conflict, but it would ultimately prepare a common ground for the development of a global culture incorporating multiple cultures as historically inherited resources for enrichment of human life. Ethical awareness is what reveals the otherness of the other and also the ontological ground of human life on earth ; as ethics and epistemology coincide, a human reason would emerge as the ground of a new global culture, and the world would hopefully become a single Lebensraum for entire humanity. (shrink)

Challenging the new political-economic “mainstream” that considers trade unions to be “complicit” in labor market dualization, this article’s analysis of union strategies in Italy and South Korea, most-different union movements perceived as unlikely cases for the pursuit of broader social solidarity, shows that in both countries unions have successively moved away from insider-focused strategies and toward “solidarity for all” in the industrial relations arena as well as in their social policy preferences. Furthermore, unions explored new avenues of political agency, often (...) in alliance with civil society organizations. This convergent trend toward a social model of unionism is ascribed to a response of unions to a “double crisis”: that is, a socioeconomic crisis, which takes the form of a growing periphery of the labor market associated with growing social exclusion, and a sociopolitical crisis, which takes the form of an increasing marginalization of the unions from the political process. (shrink)

Wit explores modes of reading representations of death and dying, both through the play’s sustained engagement with Donne’s Holy Sonnets and through Vivian’s self-reflexive approach to her illness and death. I argue that the play dramatizes reparative readings, a term coined by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick to describe an alternative to the paranoid reading practices that have come to dominate literary criticism. By analyzing the play’s reparative readings of death and dying, I show how Wit provides lessons about knowledge-making and reading (...) practices in the field of health humanities. (shrink)

This dissertation explores the ethics of human subjects research with particular attention to how clinical research on vaccines differs from research on therapies. The major differences are rooted in the fact that the benefits of vaccines and vaccine research accrue to the community to which vaccines belong by inducing herd immunity and thereby protecting both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. Therapeutics have no corresponding benefit to the community, the primary beneficiary is the individual. The ethical justification for conducting vaccine research in (...) a given community therefore should include an evaluation of the risks and benefits to the community as well as to involved individuals. Respect for individuals extends to respect for communities and for individuals as members of communities. A three way partnership between investigators, the community, and the community members is suggested as an ethical foundation for vaccine research. ;This model is then applied to the particular and complex case of testing a preventive HIV vaccine. HIV is an unique virus which continues to cause extraordinary devastation worldwide. The characteristics of HIV, its transmission and epidemiology, along with unprecedented scientific possibilities present a formidable challenge to the development and testing of an HIV vaccine. Using the community model, specific suggestions are made for the ethical conduct of clinical efficacy trials of HIV preventive vaccines. (shrink)