A farming systems approach to development has meant many things over the past 15 years, depending on its institutional and ecological setting, its target populations, and the goals motivating its implementation. Despite the diversity of approaches, and the sometimes rancorous discussion over which was best and why, the approach is now recognized in many places as the only one that can identify and respond to the needs of limited resource farm families, especially those in marginal ecosystems. Involving an iterative process (...) of diagnosis, design, testing and extension, the farming system approach to date has done more to change research objectives at national and international institutions than to change actual farmer practices. By legitimizing what limited resource farmers do and why they do it, a farming systems approach lends itself to policy analysis as well. Recent research in farming systems suggests greater attention should be payed to exogenous variables, including policy and infrastructure, as well as to development of technology that really responds to the felt needs of limited resource farmers in improving their level of living. (shrink)

Schanbacer, William D: The Politics of Food: The Global Conflict Between Food Security and Food Sovereignty Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s10806-010-9267-1 Authors Cornelia Butler Flora, Iowa State University 317 East Hall Ames IA 50011-1070 USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863.

Attention to differences within communities is important in working toward sustainability of an agro-ecosystem. In the Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program, gender made a difference in terms of access and control over key resources – financial, human, natural, and social capital – critical for project success. Efforts to build social capital among women proved critical in developing both collective and households strategies for sustainability. The sites differed greatly in both landscape and lifescape. Women's position within (...) each landscape provided an important perspective with which to assess and act toward achieving ecosystem, economic, and social sustainability. (shrink)

Policies are set by governments in an attempt to bring about desired ends within a society. These ends are often vaguely put and phrased in terms of values. Agrarianism, as a value, has been used to justify current farm policy. Yet, that policy has also been used as a mechanism to solve a variety of problems for the United States: those of the rural sector, farmers themselves, and even the land upon which they farm. This paper tries to separate the (...) problems that are part of the farm crisis and to show how policies designed to solve one of the problems for one set of actors, and frequently defended in the name of agrarianism, may actually exacerbate the problems for other actors. An overarching value, however, that may further inhibit problem solution and lead us further into an expensive and ineffectual farm program is the basic value that planning is somehow bad. Agrarianism and the value of spontaneity underlie some of the current decision-making or lack thereof in the farm program. (shrink)

Arturo Escobar: Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s10806-010-9254-6 Authors Cornelia Butler Flora, Iowa State University Charles F. Curtiss Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Agriculture and Life Sciences, 317 East Hall Ames IA 50011-1070 USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863.

Sara Parkin: The Positive Deviant: Sustainability Leadership in a Perverse World Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-2 DOI 10.1007/s10806-011-9319-1 Authors Cornelia Butler Flora, Charles F. Curtiss Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Agriculture and Life Sciences, 317 East Hall, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011-1070, USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863.

Ideology is maintained anddriven by powerful symbols. Agricultural mediasuch as farm magazines achieve this byappropriating societal values of currency andincorporating them in imagery that accompanyadvertisements of agricultural products,including pesticides. Critical questionsrelating to environmental sustainability andsocial risks associated with the use of suchproducts are often masked as a result. Contentanalyses of two mid-western farm magazines fromthe 1940s to 1990s trace the socialconstruction of pesticide advertisements overtime, illuminating changing images ofpesticides in farm magazine advertisements inresponse to changes in the socio-culturalsetting. Changing images (...) reflect how theagricultural industry strategically repositionsitself to sustain market and corporate profitby co-opting dominant cultural themes atspecific historical moments in mediaadvertising. Sustainability implications in thebroad context of agriculture and society areexamined. (shrink)

The concept of well-being of rural families is part of a theory under construction in which new theoretical elements are constantly being incorporated. This research aims to determine the influence of farmers’ knowledge on the well‑being of cocoa growing families in the departments of Santander, Huila, Meta and Caquetá, Colombia. Four categories of farmers were identified with different levels of knowledge in the management of cocoa cultivation obtained through a cluster analysis. The well-being of cocoa farmers, understood as the balance (...) in the capital endowment of rural households, was obtained through the application of a semi-structured interview with 49 variables of human, cultural, social, political, natural, built, and financial capitals. The results show that cocoa knowledge is heterogeneous in the study area, with a slight improvement towards harvesting, post-harvest and transformation links. There is a positive relationship between cocoa knowledge and the well-being of cocoa farming families. Thus, producers with greater integral knowledge, with emphasis on post-harvest and bean transformation links, showed greater well-being. The Random Forest analysis identified that human capital (political, social, human, and cultural) made the greatest contribution to well-being. The findings show that cocoa knowledge contributes to the well-being of rural households to the extent that it favors vertical relationships (linkages with local governments) and horizontal relationships of producers (participation of association managers, sharing knowledge with friends, neighbors and partners, and cocoa training). (shrink)

Cacao cultivation is one of the most important livelihoods for rural households in Colombia, where it is promoted as a substitute for the illegal cultivation of coca. To strengthen Colombian cacao farming, it is important to understand the livelihood strategies associated with cacao cultivation and the impact of these different strategies on the well-being of Colombian rural households. We analyzed the impact of cacao cultivation on the livelihood strategies and well-being of rural households in western Colombia. Research with 92 rural (...) cacao-growing households produced a typology of household livelihood strategies derived from their approach to cacao production. Indicators of each household capital and level of well-being were identified for each type of households. Correlations between the capitals and the capitals of greater importance in shaping the well-being of rural households were analyzed. Three types of rural households were identified: Cacao Farmers, Diversified Farmers with Cacao, and New Cacao Farmers. Cacao farmers have the highest capitals endowments and level of well-being, followed by Diversified Farmers with Cacao, and New Cacao Farmers. The conditions of cacao cultivation in rural households result in differentiated access to resources from capitals; households with better development of the crop have consolidated greater well-being where human capital has been its major driving factor. Success of the cacao crop and its relationship with well-being of rural households depends on the convergence of different capital resources. Thus, institutional efforts to strengthen the cacao sector in Colombia must go beyond investment to establish new hectares and consider aspects such as: Strengthening the skills and knowledge of producers to improve crop management practices, Promoting the participation of household members in associations, Stimulating sensitivity to the rooting and sustainable management of the crop, and Promoting processes of technification and adaptation of the infrastructure of fermenters and dryers, which will make it possible to guarantee an adequate quality of the cacao bean. (shrink)

This paper looks at the languages of empowerment and control as they are expressed by authors writing about “indigenous knowledge.” We performed a content analysis on CIKARD News, a newsletter dealing with the concept of indigenous knowledge. This concept has become increasingly prominent in the discourse of alternative development, addressing issues of ecological sustainability and the empowerment of the rural poor. However, mediated by institutions that perpetuate global and local power asymmetries, the empowering potential of indigenous knowledge may be bypassed. (...) Instead, officials, researchers, and practitioners may utilize this knowledge for their own perceived ends, however good their intentions. In addition, there is already evidence that an indigenous knowledge approach is seen by major agencies as beneficial for integrating poorer populations into the global economy. Our analysis suggests that tensions persist among and within the writings of these authors between the desire to empower and the tendency for development to control rural populations. (shrink)

Dem Postmarxismus wird haufig ein mangelndes Verstandnis des Staats vorgeworfen. Dieser Band stellt sich dieser Lesart entgegen und zeichnet ein vielfaltiges Bild der Staatsverstandnisse von Abensour, Agamben, Badiou, Balibar, Bauman, Butler, Castoriadis, Deleuze und Guattari, Derrida, Hardt und Negri, Hall, Holloway, Lefort und Gauchet, Laclau und Mouffe, Nancy, Ranciere und zizek. Die Zugange dieser Autor_innen zum Staat werden anhand zentraler Konzepte in leicht zuganglicher Form dargestellt und von marxistischen und neomarxistischen Staatstheorien abgegrenzt. Im letzten Teil werden die gegenseitigen Beeinflussungen (...) zwischen postmarxistischen Staatsverstandnissen einerseits und feministischen und postkolonialen Zugangen andererseits beschrieben, wie auch die Verschrankung postmarxistischer Theorien mit zeitgenossischen politischen Bewegungen. Insgesamt bietet der Band damit einen erstmaligen Uberblick zu den Konzepten und der Bedeutung postmarxistischer Staatsverstandnisse. (shrink)

Deux ouvrages croisent la création des femmes artistes et les luttes féministes, liés à deux expositions à Los Angeles et à New York. Le premier dresse pour les années 1960 et 1970 un bilan rétrospectif des rapports entre la création des femmes et les mouvements féministes aux États-Unis et en Europe occidentale, le second partant des années 1990 jusqu’à aujourd’hui se veut tourné vers l’avenir et ouvert aux autres cultures. Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution : le titre exclamatif entend...

On Humour and the Comic in the Hebrew Bible. Edited by Y. T. Radday and A. Brenner.The Trouble With Kings: The Composition of rhe Book of Kings in the Deuteronomistic History. By Steven L. McKenzie.Sacred Space: An Approach to the Zheology of the Epistle to the Hebrews. By Marie E. Isaacs.Fourth Ezra: A Commentary on the Book of Fourth Ezra. By Michael Edward StonePaul the Convert: iShe Apostolate and Apostasy of Saul the Pharisee. By Alan F. Segal.Creative Biblical Exegesis: Christian (...) and Jewish Hermeneutics through the Centuries. Edited by Benjamin Uffenheimer and Henning Graf Reventlow.The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Escharology. By Brian E. Daley.The Emergence of the Laity in the Early Church. By Alexandre Faivre, translated by David Smith.Pastoral Life and Practice in the Early Church. By Carl A. Volz.The Making of the Creeds. By Frances Young.La correzione fratenia in s. Agosrino. By Agostino Clerici.Beaup and Revelation in the Thought of St Augustine. By Carol Harrison.Grace, Politics and Desire. Edited by Hugo Meynell.Boerhius and Aquinas. By Ralph McInerny.The Weight of Glory. A Vision and Practice for Christian Faith: The Future of Liberal Theology. Edited by D. W. Hardy and P. H. Sedgwick.Atonenrent and Incarnation. By Vernon White.Tragic Method and Tragic Theology: Evil in Contemporary Drama and Religious Thought. By L. D. Bouchard.Parmenides of Elea, Fragments: A Text and Translation, with an Introduction. By David Gallop.Language, Thought and Falsehood in Ancient Greek Philosophy. By Nicholas Denyer.Weakness of the Will. By Justin Gosling.Knowledge and the Sciences in Medieval Philosophy. Vol. I, edited by Monica Asztalos, John E. Murdoch and Ilkka Niiniluoto.Episcopal Power and Norenrine Sociev. 1000–1320. By George W. Dameron.Matins, Lauds and Vespers for St David's Day. By Owain Tudor Edwards.More's ‘Utopia’. By Dominic Baker‐Smith.Frontiers of Heresy: The Spanish Inquisitionfrom the Basque Lands to Sicily. By William Monter.Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1478–1834, By Stephen Haliczer.The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe. By Piero Camporesi, translated by Lucinda Byatt.Lucrecia's Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth‐Centun Spain. By Richard L. Kagan.Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth‐Century Spain: The Alumbrados. By Alastair Hamilton.Japan's Encounter with Christianiry: The Catholic Mission in Pre‐Modern Japan. By Neil S. Fujita.Galileo, Bellannine and the Bible. By Richard J.Augustine Baker's Inner Light: A Study in English Recusant Spirituality. By James Gaffney.The Prorestarit Evaqelical Awakening. By W. R. Ward.The Study of Anglicanism. Edited by Stephen Sykes and John Booty.The Anglican Tradition: A Handbook of Sources. Edited by G. R. Evans and J. Robert Wright.The Restoration Church of England, 1646‐1689. By John Spurr.Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. By Jon Butler.A Woman Styled Bold: The Life of Cornelia Connelly, 1809–1879. By Radegunde Flaxman.Cane Ridge: America's Pentecost. By Paul K. Conkin.Revivalism and Social Change: Christianio, Nation Building and the Market in the Nineteenth‐Century United States. By George M. Thomas.Church and State: The English Experience. By Adrian Hastings.Evelyn Underhill: Artist of the Infinite Life. By Dana Greene.Northern Ireland: Fairh and Faction. By Maurice Irvine.The Tragedy of Belief: Division, Politics, arid Religion in Ireland. By John Fulton.Shattered Vows: Exodus from the Priesthood. By David Rice.Making Saints: Inside the Vatican: Who Become Saints, Who Do Not, and Why. By Kenneth L. Woodward.Ecclesiae Memoria: Miscellanea in onorr del R. P. Josef Metzler, O. M. I. Edited by Willi Henkel. (shrink)

What is immediately strange about Sartre’s controversial preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is its mode of address. To whom is this preface written? Sartre imagines his reader as the colonizer or the French citizen who recoils from the thought of violent acts of resistance on the part of the colonized. Minimally, his imagined reader is one who believes that his own notions of humanism and universalism suffice as norms by which to assess the war for independence in (...) Algeria and similar efforts at decolonization. Sartre’s address to his audience is direct and caustic: “What does Fanon care whether you read his work or not? It is to his brothers that he denounces our old tricks”. At one point, he seems to take his implied readers aside, addressing the preface to them directly. (shrink)

The question of what makes a life livable is linked with the question, what makes for an inhabitable world. This last was not Scheler’s question, but it follows from the world that he describes, the world that he claims is exhibited through the tragic. When the world is an object immersed in sorrow, how is it possible to inhabit such a world? What about the persistence of uninhabitable sorrow? The answer lies less in individual conduct or practice than in the (...) forms of solidarity that emerge, across whatever distance, to produce the conditions for inhabiting the world. (shrink)

This volume focuses on democratic experimentalism, gathering a collection of original and previously unpublished essays focusing upon its major outlines, as well as specific aspects ¿ both promising and troublesome - of this theoretical approach. Together these essays offer conceptions of democracy and democratic governance that emphasize and highlight experimentalist aspects of pragmatic thought, particularly Deweyan pragmatism, and its relationship to instantiation in concrete social and political institutions. Issues of democratic governance, political organization and the relationship of law to democracy (...) are analyzed. (shrink)

Parts I through III of this paper will examine several, increasingly comprehensive forms of aggregation, ranging from insurance reimbursement “lock-in” programs to PDMPs to completely unified electronic medical records. Each part will advocate for the adoption of these aggregation systems and provide suggestions for effective implementation in the fight against opioid misuse. All PDMPs are not made equal, however, and Part II will, therefore, focus on several elements — mandating prescriber usage, streamlining the user interface, ensuring timely data uploads, creating (...) a national data repository, mitigating privacy concerns, and training doctors on how to respond to perceived doctor-shopping — that can make these systems more effective. In each part, we will also discuss the privacy concerns of aggregating data, ranging from minimal to significant, and highlight the unique role of stigma in motivating these concerns. In Part IV, we will conclude by suggesting remedial steps to offset this loss of privacy and to combat the stigma around SUDs and mental health disorders in general. (shrink)

The ethics and moral psychology of the Phaedo crucially depend on claims made uniquely about bodily desire. This paper offers an analysis and defense of the account of bodily desire in the dialogue, arguing that bodily desires – desires with their source in processes or conditions of the body – are characterized by three features: motivational pull, assertoric force, and intensity. Desires with these features target the soul’s rational functions with distinctive forms of imprisonment. They target the soul’s capacity to (...) rule with servility; and they target the soul’s capacity for knowledge with confinement in the visible world. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the present study, attentional bias was investigated as a potential predisposing mechanism for the contamination-related subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Fifty healthy participants with varying degrees of subclinical C-OC symptoms performed a visual search task to measure differential attentional biases elicited by neutral, disgust-, and fear-specific pictorial material. Participants had to find a target picture within five neutral distractor pictures randomly presented on different locations in an array. The task was to decide whether the array contained an unpleasant target picture (...) or not. In randomly-selected emotional trials, participants were further asked about the content of the picture and the confidence of their answer. The results show that the reaction times significantly differed between the emotional and neutral pictures. Participants were significantly more confident in answering questions referring to fear compared to disgust pictures. This effect was mar... (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of whether mental representations are compositional. Several researchers have claimed recently that there are empirical data that show mental representations to be context-sensitive in a way that threatens compositionality. Some have then gone on to claim that connectionist encoding schemes are well suited to accommodate such noncom-positionality. I argue here that the data do not show that mental representations are noncompositional, and that there are significant problems with the suggested interpretations of connectionist encoding schemes.

Analyses of care work typically speak of three necessary roles of care: the care worker, the care recipient, and an economic provider who makes care materially possible. This model provides no place for addressing the difficult political questions care poses for liberal representative democracy. I propose to fill this space with a new caring role to connect the care unit to the political sphere, as the economic provider connects the care unit to the economic sphere. I call this role that (...) of the “care claimant.” The labor of claiming care consists in the development, expression, and advancement of the interests of the care unit. The argument for employing this fourth care role begins by comparing Nel Noddings's phenomenological care unit to Sara Ruddick's family-based analysis. It then moves to discuss the way Eva Kittay emphasizes the dependency of the charge and its political ramifications to illustrate the need for a care claimant. After distinguishing the care claimant from the other roles of care, I examine the power relationships in the care unit and the position of the care claimant in the public sphere. (shrink)

In so many of his epistemological writings, Aristotle defends a sensible flavor of gradualism about our cognitive capacities: we start with the partial grasps afforded by what is better known to us, and if things go well, we end up with understandings of those objects better known by nature. The picture is of a step-wise process, rather than a transforming moment of illumination.

This article is the preface to a completed book manuscript, United Nations Human Rights Ethics. Based on the indivisibility of human rights, the Four Freedoms Speech, and the Preamble of the Universal Declaration, the book takes freedom of expression as the one human right. Other rights are modes of this one. For example, one exercises freedom of expression (speech) by exercising the right to life, access to courts, etc.. The book argues that human rights are primarily an ethical concept (introduced (...) by Rousseau) rather than a concept of international law. (shrink)

<I>Women and Social Transformation brings three women from different countries together into dialogue. Judith Butler is the most referenced author in current feminist literature, and we find the latest developments of her work in this book; Lidia Puigvert has recently reached international relevance with her contribution about the -other women-, who have not yet had a voice in feminism; and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim complements this debate with her work about immigrant women. The authors argue the need to open feminism to (...) the plurality of all women's voices, especially those who are in the margins. <I>Women and Social Transformation is a debate, and speaks about transforming gender relations, taking a distance from postmodern stances, and insisting on the need for egalitarian dialogue among women. This book gives back the meaning of the feminist struggle.". (shrink)

We address what it means to “engage in a relationship” and suggest Social Breathing as a model of immersing ourselves in the metaphorical social air around us, which is necessary for shared intention and joint action. We emphasize how emergent properties of social systems arise, such as the shared culture of groups, which cannot be reduced to the individuals involved. We argue that the processes involved in Social Breathing are: automatic, implicit, temporal, in the form of mutual bi-directional interwoven exchanges (...) between social partners and embodied in the coordination of the brains and behaviors of social partners. We summarize cross-disciplinary evidence suggesting that these processes involve a multi-person whole-brain-body network which is critical for the development of both we-ness and relational skills. We propose that Social Breathing depends on each individual’s ability to sustain multimodal interwovenness, thus providing a theoretical link between social neuroscience and relational/multi-person psychology. We discuss how the model could guide research on autism, relationships, and psychotherapy. (shrink)

In henadological Platonism, the significance of “the One” is understood to lie, not in an eminent singular entity, but in the modes of unity and the ways of being a unit. The science of units qua units is a systematic ground and counterweight to substance-based ontology, and manifests an organic bond with theology as the science of relation to supra-essential individuals or Gods. Because of the basic nature of unity relative to being, doctrines respecting unity tend to situate themselves as (...) critiques of ontology; they exhibit both an analytical and a soteriological value. For its part, bhakti is not a mere sectarian movement but rather an inquiry at once speculative and practical into the nature of the relationship between the human and the divine. It bridges the diverse genres of ancient Indian thought (including the theophanic/cultic, the epic, along with diverse philosophical perspectives) and displays key commonalities with henadological Platonism. This paper begins the process of identifying these common themes with particular reference to the Bhagavadgītā. Chief among its themes is the distinction between structuring cause and structured mixture, which runs through Platonism from the Phaedo to the doctrine of principles, and which parallels the account of action in the Gītā as freedom independent of result, insofar as the latter pertains to the solidarity of worldly causality heteronomous to the agency of the ātman. (shrink)

In this volume, Alessandro Capone and Antonino Bucca’s essay makes a case, based upon the theory of pragmemes and socio-pragmatics, for taking Donald Trump’s statement to Comey, “I hope you will let Flynn go,” as an attempt of the President to get the then Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Comey to illegitimately drop the Russian probe, therefore being an illegal act of obstruction of justice. Their argument rests upon the claim that in this specific case, deniers of obstruction of justice (...) claims, when faced with Trump’s statements, must adopt a false theory of language in order to justify their conclusions. In his response, Richard Warner argues that though much of Capone and Bucca’s claims are convincing, and that much of the analysis of language in their article is accurate, even accepting their pragmeme and socio-pragmatic driven analysis, the content of Trump’s statement to Comey is not unequivocal enough to warrant certainty as to the obstruction claim. In this chapter one conclusion will be that Capone, Bucca and Warner all offer very important arguments useful in the accurate interpretation of Trump’s statement, and for interpretation in law generally. This conclusion will be supported and made more explicit by reading the essays in relation to Karl Llewellyn’s own constitutional theory, a theory that sees the constitution as an institution just partially, even minimally, based upon a purportedly “literal” reading of text. A further conclusion will be that theories of language, implicit or explicit, do indeed inevitably influence the analysis of statements like Trump’s at a very deep and profound level. Yet, thought this is all correct, I will argue that Trump’s statement, in context, cannot be read with such specificity so, in itself, it is sufficient evidence of obstruction of justice. (shrink)

Thomas E. Wartenberg _Unlikely Couples: Movie Romance as Social Criticism_ Boulder: Westview Press, 1999 ISBN: 0-8133-3438-1 (hb); 0-8133-3439-X (pb) 254 pp.

Money has been a polarising and unresolved socio-economic issue for more than 300 years. In this article, we explore how the state became increasingly involved in money and, through the words of prominent monetary theorists, identify the problem of the state in money. We analyse Bitcoin to see if it is a solution to this problem but move on to contend that the political dimension needs to be the focus of theory in the 21st century and that control of the (...) supply of money, and the power that it gives, is the root of contention. (shrink)