Jianjun Mei: Cultural Interaction between China and Central Asia during the Bronze Age Charles Higham: The Origins of the Civilization of Angkor Ralph Hanna: Yorkshire Writers Christopher Ricks: Shakespeare and the Anagram Tony Wrigley: The Quest for the Industrial Revolution Linda Colley: 'This Small Island': Britain, Size and Empire Murray Pittock: Robert Burns and British Poetry Peter Pulzer: Special Paths or Main Roads? Making Sense of German History Wolf Lepenies: Overestimating Culture: A German Problem. Exile and Emigration, The (...) Survival of German Culture Angela Leighton: Elegies of Form in Bishop, Plath, Stevenson Nicholas Stern: Development as a Process of Change: Toward a Dynamic Public Economics Lord Woolf: Human Rights: Have the Public Benefitted? (shrink)

This was published in Cultural Critique (Winter 1991-92), pp. 5-32; revised and reprinted in Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity edited by Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman, University of Illinois Press, 1996; and in Feminist Nightmares: Women at Odds edited by Susan Weisser and Jennifer Fleischner, (New York: New York University Press, 1994); and also in Racism and Sexism: Differences and Connections eds. David Blumenfeld and Linda Bell, Rowman and Littlefield, 1995.

How parents talk about social events shapes their children’s understanding of the social world and themselves. In this study, we show that parents in a society that more strongly values individualism and one that more strongly values collectivism differ in how they talk about negative social events, but not positive ones. An animal puppet show presented positive social events and negative social events. All shows contained two puppets, an actor and a recipient of the event. We asked parents to talk (...) to their 3- and 4-years old children about these events. A total of 26 parent–child dyads from the United States and Japan participated. The principal dependent measure was how much parent talk referred to the actor of each type of social event. There were no cultural differences observed in positive events – both the United States and Japanese parents discussed actors more than recipients. However, there were cultural differences observed in negative events – the United States parents talked mostly about the actor but Japanese parents talked equally about the actor and the recipient of the event. The potential influences of these differences on early cognitive and social development are discussed. (shrink)

Although it is argued that social justice is a core concern for the discipline, nursing has not generally played a leadership role in the responses to many of the greatest social problems of our time. These include the accelerated rate of climate change, pandemic threats, systemic racism, growing health and social inequities, and the regulation of new technologies to ensure an equitable future ‘for all.’ In nursing codes of ethics, administration, education, policies, and practice, social justice is often claimed to (...) be a core value, yet it is rarely contextualized by philosophical or theoretical underpinnings. It appears that nurses’ commitment to social justice may stem more from a penchant for ‘doing good’ than an attempt to explore, understand, and enact what is meant by social justice from an ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspective. We contend that the dominance of a human science perspective in nursing contributes to a narrow definition of health and relegates many issues central to social justice to the margins of nurses’ care. In this article, we explore how the focus on ‘the human’ in the human science perspective may not only be limiting the capacity of nurses to develop strategies to adequately address social injustice, but in some instances, direct nurses to contribute to their very reproduction. We suggest that a critical interrogation of this human‐centric hegemony can identify avenues of rupture and introduce posthumanism as an additional philosophical perspective for consideration to help bridge the human‐social divide. (shrink)

An onslaught of ethically questionable actions by top government, business, and religious leaders during the 1980s has brought the issue of ethics in decision making to the forefront of public consciousness. This study examines the ethical orientation of university students in four decision-making situations. The dependent variable — ethical orientation toward work-related decisions — is measured through student responses to questions following four work-related vignettes. Possible responses to each vignette are structured to permit categorization of respondents into two broad orientations: (...) egoistic and ethical. Independent variables are academic major, ethics in business orientation, gender, and religiosity. Generally, students tended to choose an ethical orientation over an egoistic orientation in each vignette. Business majors were generally no less likely to choose an ethical orientation toward work-related decisions than nonbusiness majors. Respondents characterized by moral unity (belief in the consistency between general ethical principles and work-related ethical standards) were more likely to have an ethical orientation toward work-related decisions than those subscribing to the amoral theory of business. Females showed a consistent tendency to be more ethically oriented toward work-related decisions than males. Finally, respondents high on religiosity tended to be more ethically oriented. (shrink)

One way to teach or communicate embodied-relational existential understanding is to encourage the writing and reading of first person autobiographical phenomenological accounts. After briefly reviewing the field of first person phenomenological accounts, I offer my own example – one that uses a narrative-poetic form. I share my lived experience of coping with pain and hope to show how rich poetic phenomenological prose may facilitate lived understandings in others (be they our students, clients or colleagues). I argue that first person accounts (...) can powerfully evoke lived experience, especially where they focus on existential issues, use personal-reflexive and/or relational-dialogal forms, and draw on the arts. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 12, Special Edition July 2012. (shrink)

This paper investigates how reports concerning a given country’s prospects affect investment decisions in two stylized, artificial organizational settings. We designed a role-game laboratory experiment, where subjects were asked to make investment decisions for two types of fictitious companies from the same country. We found that when available reports included positive country prospects, subjects strategized more on investments regardless of the characteristics of their organization. When reports included negative prospects, however, certain organizational peculiarities influenced the subjects’ interpretations, with decision-makers opting (...) for more prudent plans when managing a more traditional company. Cognitive maps of decision makers showed that subjects considered investment strategies as a means to fulfil a company’s role expectations regarding appropriate decisions. Notwithstanding all caveats due to the artificial and simplified nature of our experimental setting, our findings indicate the need for more research on the effect of reports and prospect analysis on strategic decisions of companies, especially when business prospects are uncertain. (shrink)

Drawing on qualitative research evidence, this article offers an interpretation of morale which focuses on individual needs fulfilment. Three conceptual areas are discussed: morale as a group or an individual phenomenon; the dimensionality of morale; and the relationship between morale and satisfaction. It is suggested that work on morale has often been weakened by misinterpretation and misapplication and that what has often been presented as morale is, in fact, group cohesiveness or job satisfaction. Inappropriate generalisation has tended to obscure the (...) intricacies of morale and greater attention should now be paid to the individuality of influential factors. Salary and working conditions may be much less influential on morale than is generally thought. More significant, it is suggested, is the extent to which the job fulfils the individual's ‘ideal’. (shrink)

This book examines the intersections of bioethics, human rights and health equity. It does so through the contextual lenses of nation states while presenting global themes on rights, colonialism and bioethics. The book is framed by the following propositions on indigenous health: it is a human rights issue; it is located within the politics of colonization; and subjugated indigenous knowledges require restoring.

To those raised outside of Gitxsan and Witsuwit'en culture, the concept of a child, (or adult) claiming to be, or being attributed as, an ancestor returned as well as the person of this life, sounds like a split personality. In this paper, we examine a single example of this category from among the more than two hundred cases on record for the Gitxsan and Witsuwit'en of northwest British Columbia. The example serves to demonstrate that the Gitxsan and Witsuwit'en do not (...) construe the situation of someone "come back" as a divided self, but as an embedded self, a person with deep roots and double grounding in the territory and the kin group, doubly integrated into the nexus of social life. This contrasts with the poignant cases of people who were fostered or adopted out, sexually abused, and made to feel confused about their heritage. The autobiographical account of the second author is an example of a woman in this category. It demonstrates the response of shutting down emotion, and absenting oneself from the abusive situations by "leaving the body." Our analysis suggests that cultural definition of what is normal varies from Western to Gitxsan and Witsuwit'en culture. It suggests further that the definition of the experience as useful helps recovery of such individuals when they are reunited with their natal culture. (shrink)

Hans‐Georg Gadamer has been criticized by a wide range of feminist scholars who argue that his work neglects feminine aspects of understanding, many of which are essential to sound theorizing about educational contexts. In this essay, Linda O’Neill employs Virginia Woolf’s classic gender analysis both as a foil for Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and as an exemplar of feminist reasoning. Through her striking descriptions of embodied tradition, language, and transcendence, Woolf challenges and enriches Gadamer’s work. Bringing Gadamer into conversation with (...) Woolf offers expanded horizons for philosophers of education who choose to ground their studies of teachers and learners in a feminist epistemology resonant with the rich ambiguity of educational experience. This comparison, O’Neill concludes, suggests that the pluralistic reasoning of feminist inquiry offers engendered, embodied insights absent from Gadamer’s hermeneutics and crucial to what Patti Lather calls “fieldwork in philosophy,” an investigative alternative capable of informing sustainable educational policy, practice, and reform. (shrink)

This paper defends revisionism against a challenge: that it cannot convincingly hold that many instances of killing in war are morally wrong but should nonetheless remain legally permissible. The paper argues that we should view the relationship between the morality of war and the laws of war as analogous to the relationship between fundamental principles and rules of regulation in debates about theories of justice. This yields a fresh justification for the law’s divergence from morality, which absolves revisionism from the (...) twofold charge of being at once irrelevant and incoherent. It also helps clarify persisting ambiguities concerning the contrast between war and ‘ordinary life,’ the contested notion of a ‘deep morality’ of war, and revisionism’s relationship to ideal and non-ideal theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I present different ways in which transcendental argumentation has been used in contemporary debates in moral philosophy to justify the normative authority of morality. My aim is to defend strong “retorsive” transcendental argumentation as a way to ground a sort of critical realism in metaethics, comparing transcendental arguments proposed by Karl-Otto Apel, Christine Korsgaard and Alan Gewirth – which are sometimes referred to as “constitutivist” arguments. In particular, I endorse an argumentative strategy that considers the merits of (...) the respective positions while overcoming the limits of each. Such a strategy aims at grounding transcendentally the metaphysical fact of human value, making explicit the ontological implications of transcendental argumentation, and showing that a justification of fundamental values alone can ultimately make it possible to ground basic moral principles. (shrink)

In this book, as feminist, Marxist, postcolonial, and queer scholars, we argue that social reproduction is foundational to comprehending urbanization and urban transformations by contributing to the feminist project of writing social reproduction and everyday life into urban theory." Social reproduction is, of course, not just an analytical framing but also an organising call for feminist scholars and our contention is that if we want an urban theory for our time, it needs to be feminist. Feminism is not simply a (...) 'discipline,' 'theory', or 'ideology', but a worldview, a lived praxis that provides a platform for engaged analysis. The book's origins lie in our belief in the necessity of feminist urban knowledge production, a belief further endorsed by our prior critical engagement with the analytical framework of planetary urbanization and our collective ruminations during and post this engagement on the nature of urban theory (Reddy 2018; Ruddick et al. 2018). Not least the considerable response to the theme issue of Society and Space (Peake et al. 2018) showed us that there was an audience desirous of troubling the hegemony of urban theory. Moreover, our approach of working as a team across hierarchies of junior and senior scholars, generations, genders, sexualities, institutions, and disciplines-a praxis we refer to as "the intergenerational social reproductive labor of knowledge production" (Peake et al. 2018, p. 377)-had been fruitful and positive and we wanted it to continue. It was as much a pedagogical experience of reading and writing together, and sharing meals, as it was an exploration of our places within the academy and an intellectual foray into urban theory. And while Roza Tchoukaleyska left for Newfoundland, Elsa Koleth, a new post-doctoral fellow at the City Institute at York University, joined us. (shrink)

In the dyadic and triadic sharing of emotions, intentions, and behaviors in families, interactive synchrony is important to the early life experiences that contribute to the development of cultural cognition. This synchrony likely depends on neurobiological circuits, currently under study with brain imaging, that involve attention, stress response, and memory.

This is a reflection on the visual installation piece, Hanging On, produced collaboratively for the Feminist Legal Studies ‘At the Kitchen Table’ zine in 2016. The author and co-artist considers the research that informed and helped conceptually drive the aesthetics of the piece, including academic research on abortion within literary aesthetics. How these concepts ‘translated’ into hands-on artistic practice and physical materials is discussed, including the difficulties and knowledge gained from the process. The author finally considers the benefits of such (...) interdisciplinary, aesthetic encounters within contemporary feminist knowledge production. (shrink)

Some feminist commentators ignore Luce Irigaray’s contributions to rethinking classical and neoclassical theories of the market when their aims and hers are often largely of a piece. Other feminist commentators celebrate Irigaray’s writings by privileging a certain conception of the gift her philosophy is said to evoke because it challenges the logic of the market economy and its masculinist biases. Instead of viewing the market and the gift in a binary way, I argue that Irigaray examines the conditions of possibility (...) for transvaluing value and exchange as such. By way of an internal critique of economic texts and discourses, Irigaray draws out the available conceptual resources for the possibility of a model of exchange between two positively valued – sexuate – subjects. In this article I focus on the texts where Irigaray explicitly engages with key components of political economy – ‘Commodities among Themselves’, ‘Women on the Market’ and ‘Women, the Sacred and Money’ – and also her conceptualisation of a nonmarket economy in Elemental Passions. These brilliant and complex essays yield an understanding of the forms and the flows (value and exchange) of all economies (whether symbolic, linguistic, cultural or political) necessary for cultivating a sexuate economy. (shrink)

Just prior to his last fight, Beowulf delivers a long speech on the headlands above the dragon's cave . It is, with the exception of his report to Hygelac on returning from Heorot, Beowulf's longest and perhaps his most puzzling speech. Little has been written about the speech as a whole; in fact, rather little attention has been paid to any of Beowulf's speeches, which is perhaps not surprising given Beowulf's stated preference for deeds over words. “It is better for (...) a man to avenge his friend than to mourn much,” Beowulf tells Hrothgar, and indeed in a heroic narrative we might ordinarily expect actions to take precedence over words. So it dismays those who would judge the poem primarily as a heroic narrative to find, as Klaeber did, that despite the hero's initial appearance as “an aggressive war hero of the Achilles or Sigfrit type,” Beowulf is in fact “somewhat tame, sentimental, and fond of talking,” and nowhere more so than in this speech. (shrink)

The Clerk's Tale is the most elusive and least reassuring of Chaucer's religious tales. Though bad things happen to good people in the other religious narratives in the Canterbury collection, repeated assurances in those tales confirm that the world is governed by a powerful God intent on rewarding his faithful followers. By comparison, the Clerk and his tale are disturbingly silent on the subject of God's plan until the very end, leading many readers to categorize the tale as secular, developing (...) in what seems “a moral void” , or worse, a perverse story of a bullying tyrant and his spineless wife. In spite of Griselda's virtue, which is attributed to God's grace, she suffers alone, and the reasons for her suffering are made to seem arbitrary and weak. A domestic story of husband and wife set neither in the remote past nor far off in a heathen-filled land, the tale proceeds without the special effects of divine intervention that help guide our response to the stories of Constance, St. Cecilia, and the child-martyr of the Prioress's Tale. Miracles, mass conversions, and mysterious sea journeys seem out of the question in the closed and predictable world of Saluzzo. Even when Walter's people urge him to consider the problem of death, as arbitrary as it is inevitable, the solution they put forward is not transcendent or spiritual but prudential: Walter should settle down, take a wife, and produce an heir. Walter answers the people's mundane “preyere” to “delivere us out of al this bisy drede” in the pragmatic spirit in which it was delivered: he agrees to marry and promptly produces a child , removing what seems the only obstacle to complete “felicitee” in the realm. (shrink)

L’historienne Gerda Lerner était remarquable par son éloquence, sa perspicacité et son courage. Toujours prête à défendre l’importance de l’histoire dans sa quête de justice sociale, elle a consacré sa vie à démontrer que les femmes ont une histoire et que le fait de s’en rendre compte avait un impact sur la conscience collective. « Écrire l’histoire en pensant aux femmes », écrivait-elle dans l’un des essais qui composent le recueil intitulé Why History Matters: Life and Thought (1998), « po...