Myra Hird and Harlan Weaver have been invited by the editors of this special issue to enter into discussion with each other – to conduct a series of interchanges – because of the careful attention their research has paid to the ways in which transness as a lived reality is ontologized in humans, non-human animals, bacteria, and viruses. With this issue’s interchanges, we would like to further the conversation on critically approaching the consequences of merging transness with animality. In (...) the following series of four essay questions, we particularly invited each of these scholars to consider moments of classificatory tension in which taxonomies of human and non-human become inflected and redirected by the categories of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and geopolitical location. (shrink)

In Sex, Gender and Science , Myra Hird outlines the social study of science and nature, specifically in relation to sex, sex differences, and sexuality. She examines how Western understandings of sex are based less upon understanding material sex differences than on a discourse that emphasizes sex dichotomy over sex diversity and argues for a feminist engagement with scientific debate that embraces the diversity and complexity of nature.

Sociology of Science: A Critical Canadian Introduction provides an overview of how sociology approaches science and, to a lesser extent, technology. It examines how science developed as a set of theories about both what we know and how we know. The book provides a succinct critical examination of the current state of science studies with a particular emphasis on research conducted by Canadian scholars. Hird illustrates that science studies offers useful perspectives on current and ongoing sociological debates, such as (...) the strengths and limitations of social constructionism, as well as popular public debates, such as the ethics of stem-cell research. Using examples from throughout history and with a focus on the Canadian context, the book provides students with an examination of influential science studies concepts, theories, and debates and situates these theories and debates within contemporary field of sociology. (shrink)

Hird, G.R., Recursive properties of relations on models, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 63 241–269. We prove general existence theorems for recursive models on which various relations have specified recursive properties. These capture common features of results in the literature for particular algebraic structures. For a useful class of models with new relations R, S, where S is r.e., we characterize those for which there is a recursive model isomorphic to on which the relation corresponding to S remains (...) r.e., while that corresponding to R is not r.e.; immune; hyperimmune. The results are applied to vector spaces, Boolean algebras and abelian groups. In the case of vector spaces, this leads to a new kind supermaximal subspace of V∞. (shrink)

Feminist analyses have made important contributions to the sociocultural experiences of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding. This article draws upon recent theorizing within science studies to focus on the mattering of these processes. Specifically, the article expands upon Mauss's notion of the ‘gift’, which Diprose develops through the idea of ‘corporeal generosity’. I am interested in corporeal generosity insofar as it circumvents descriptions of relationships in terms of a closed economy in which resources are exchanged without excess or remainder. Corporeal generosity (...) refers to the often missed but nevertheless inescapable debt that a body owes to other bodies. At the same time, this embodied ‘gifting’ is both unpredictable and intrusive – there is as much possibility of threatening the integrity of bodies as there is of opening new possibilities. (shrink)

Ten years after the publication of the special issue of Social Epistemology on feminist epistemology, this paper explores recent feminist interest in the inhuman. Feminist science studies, cultural studies, philosophy and environmental studies all build on the important work feminist epistemology has done to bring to the fore questions of feminist empiricism, situated knowledges and knowing as an intersubjective activity. Current research in feminist theory is expanding this epistemological horizon to consider the possibility of an inhuman epistemology. This paper explores (...) these developments through the subject of waste. Waste, as both an epistemological and material phenomenon, invites timely questions about possibilities for acknowledging an inhuman epistemology. These questions appear to be particularly urgent from an environmental perspective. (shrink)

Canada is the world’s highest per capita municipal solid waste producer. By 2000, Canadians produced more annual waste per person than Americans; and by 2005, Canada produced nearly twice as much garbage as Japan (Conference Board of Canada 2008). By 2006, Canadians produced over 1000 kg of waste per person; 35 million tons of waste in a single calendar year (Statistics Canada 2008). The bulk of this waste ended up in landfills (ibid). In 2010, thirty percent of existing Canadian landfills (...) reached or surpassed capacity. Over one million tons of waste were exported out of Canada in 2002, much of it headed from southern Ontario to rural regions of Canada or to the United States (Statistics Canada 2005). Some cities .. (shrink)

Recent research has shown that a phase transformation of diamond to a different form of carbon is involved when diamonds are polished in the traditional fashion. The question as to how this phase transformation is activated and maintained to produce high wear rates is of great technological interest since it may radically change the way we view the processing of diamond. This paper describes the use of Raman spectroscopy to examine debris produced on the diamond polishing wheel, both during its (...) preparation and during polishing. In addition, polished diamond surfaces were examined for the possible existence of non-diamond surface layers in an attempt to identify material removal mechanisms. Raman spectroscopy proves ideal for these analyses because its relatively high spatial resolution is well suited to the analysis of small wear features and debris particles, and because of the wealth of information it reveals about chemical structure. This level of structural information has been lacking in previous analyses of diamond polishing debris. In addition to the non-diamond carbon found in the wear debris, significant quantities of two iron oxides, magnetite (Fe3O4) and haematite (α-Fe2O3), were also found. An interesting observation was that a transformation from magnetite to haematite could be induced either by using high power laser excitation or by frictional heating during polishing. It is suggested that some of the Raman peaks previously attributed to lonsdaleite might better be explained by the presence of these oxides. (shrink)

The distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ is challenged by arguments that ‘sex’ is equally a social construction, initiating a selfreflexive effort to return feminism to its foundational grounding. This article concerns intersexuality and transsexualism as two bodily forms that further suggest ‘sex’ as socially inscribed. I argue that feminist theory needs to ascertain whether the artificial emphasis on sexual difference, contra nature, is better able to effect social change than conjoined efforts to expose ‘sex’ as a construction intended to ground (...) divisions. Recent support for ‘multiple genders’ often remain dependent on a morphological notion of ‘sex’, and, as such, may not constitute a radical challenge to our current ‘sex’/‘gender’ system. (shrink)

Waste is a major global environmental issue that assembles socio-cultural and bio-geological processes in complex indeterminate relationships. Drawing on three case studies, this article explores the shifting environmental politics concerned with waste’s material, economic, political, and cultural ‘management’. The Canadian case studies – determining a new waste management technology in a mid-sized city in central Ontario, an open dump in a remote Nunavut community, and an abandoned gold mine in the Northwest Territories – suggest waste occasions particular material and political (...) mobilizations. Landfill leachate, colonialism, disinterested publics, freezing arsenic, global corporate investments, country food, land claims, neoliberal governance, permafrost, ravens, and a host of other socio-material forces both empower and thwart ‘management’ politics. Through these case studies, this article explores Isabelle Stengers’s assertion that participating citizenship is an ‘Empty Great Idea’, and a provocation to consider the contexts in which waste may generate acquiescent or objecting publics. (shrink)

Nigel Clark’s ‘ex-orbitant globality’ concerns the incalculability of other-than-human forces we typically fail to acknowledge, yet which haunt all considerations of environmental change. This article considers Gaia theory as a useful heuristic to register the ubiquity of bacteria to environmental activity and regulation. Bacteria are Gaia theory’s fundamental actants, and through symbiosis and symbiogenesis, connect life and matter in biophysical and biosocial entanglements. Emphasizing symbiosis might invoke the expectation of a re-inscription of the human insofar as the ubiquitous inter-connectivity of (...) life ultimately connects everything to the human. I want to argue toward the opposite conclusion: that bacterial liveliness suggests a profound indifference to human life. As such, symbiosis does not efface difference, nor its vigorous refusal to be absorbed within human formulations of world-remaking, including environmental change. Bacterial indifference’s radical asymmetry suggests the need for non-human centred theories of globality. (shrink)

Feminist philosophical analyses have recently returned to psychoanalytic theory's insights into the origins of gender. Freud's exegesis on social development holds gender to be a matter of identification, as opposed to an ontological condition of being. This article considers Judith Butler's use of psychoanalytic theory to argue that homosexuality both precedes and conditions the formation of heterosexual gender identification. While convinced the processes of identification do involve loss and are grieved in some way, I am less convinced that the precedence (...) of either heterosexuality or homosexuality can be logically sustained. I suggest that Butler's political commitment to subvert the hetero-normative gender system leads to a conflation of identification with desire, two distinct processes involving different psychic mechanisms. I want to argue that all gender is melancholic, as any restriction of pleasures entails loss; but the closer to the dominant heteronormative system the greater that failure. (shrink)

This paper concerns a theoretical struggle to situate childless women within contemporary feminist debates about gender, the body and sexuality. Although psychoanalytic theory offers a compelling approach to the body, a Freudian account of childless women has largely escaped investigation. This paper will provide such an analysis, arguing that competing interpretations of psychoanalytic theory reveal a salient tension in the interpretation of gender identification. On the one hand, some theorists focus on a social development model of gender identification. This model (...) emphasizes the sexual aim of reproduction as a salient feature of ‘normal’ gender identity development. In this paper, I argue this approach may pathologize childless women insofar as they ‘fail’ to socially develop in ways that conform to the imperative to sexually reproduce. On the other hand, a number of theorists argue against the foreclosure on gender identity that the social development model implies. An alternate interpretation of psychoanalytic theory calls attention to Freud's theory of ‘psychic bisexuality’ or ‘polymorphous perversity’. This notion invites a much more complex and ambivalent notion of gender identity as it emphasizes the temporal, fragile and incomplete process of gender identification. I aim to argue that this latter interpretation offers a space for childless women as it attempts to lay bare the hegemonic relationship between femininity and sexual reproduction. I draw upon the work of a number of feminist theorists who variously take up these central themes in Freudian psychoanalytic theory to further contest the reification of the association between femininity and maternity. (shrink)

Oracles and philosophy -- Oracles, allegory and mystery cults -- Debating oracles: pagan and Christian perspectives -- Debating oracles: Porphyry's letter to Anebo and Iamblichus' De mysteriis -- Divination, rationality and ritual in neoplatonism -- Divination inspiration, possession and contact with the gods in Iamblichus' De mysteriis -- Divination and theurgy in Iamblichus' De mysteriis -- Manifesting the gods: oracles as symbola.

Crystal Cordell - Metaphysics and Method in Plato's Statesman - Journal of the History of Philosophy 46:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.1 168-169 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Crystal Cordell University of TorontoÉcole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris Kenneth Sayre. Metaphysics and Method in Plato's Statesman. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xii + 265. Cloth, $75.00. In his most recent book on Plato, Kenneth Sayre argues that the Statesman is, (...) first and foremost, a dialogue on dialectical division, the aim of which is to produce better dialecticians . The author guides the reader through a rigorous analysis of several dialectical instruments deployed in Plato's late dialogues ,.. (shrink)

Summary John Harrison (1693–1776) is regarded as the father of chronometry. During his lifetime, he relentlessly pursued one of humankind's greatest and oldest challenges—that of finding the longitude at sea. In succeeding (according to the rules dictated by an Act of Parliament), he bequeathed to humankind the most accurate portable timekeeper the world had ever seen. It is a remarkable fact that his timekeeper, known today as H4, remains more accurate than the majority of expensive mechanical wristwatches manufactured today. Such (...) accuracy required novel approaches to address the various difficulties that befall all mechanical watches, and Harrison overcame many of these with his own innovations. The reduction or elimination of friction is one such problem with clocks and watches, and from an early age Harrison demonstrated his mastery in this subject. This is typified by his choice of woods in his early clocks, and in later clocks by his ‘grasshopper’ escapement. In the 1750s, Harrison's attention switched from clocks to watches, necessitating a hardwearing, low friction material to be found for the pallets in the escapement of his timekeepers. He found these properties in diamond, and in utilizing this to great effect in H4's escapement, he became one of the first people to use diamond as a high-tech material. This paper describes a scientific investigation into the diamond pallets of H4 using Raman microscopy, X-ray diffraction and optical microscopy, to elucidate why diamond was used rather than a more conventional jewel such as ruby, and to gain some insight into how Harrison might have achieved their unconventional morphology. From the evidence presented here, together with evidence collected from primary sources, it is shown that his use of diamond as a hard, low friction material was nothing other than extraordinary, and should be regarded in the same high esteem as his other technological gifts to the world. (shrink)

This book offers an opportunity for an anti deficit and positive examination of Black/Black-multiracial culture and its role in creating educational efficacy among academics of color. Through personal narrative, educational and learning theory, and creative writing/poetry, this hybrid text examines the cultural path to the doctorate.

This research demonstrates that interpersonal emotion regulation—attempts to manage others’ feelings—influences consumer perceptions during sales and service interactions impacting brand trust and loyalty. Building on previous research linking interpersonal emotion regulation to improved outcomes between people, across five experiments, we demonstrate that antecedent-focused interpersonal emotion regulation strategies result in enhanced brand loyalty and brand trust compared to response-focused interpersonal emotion regulation strategies. Analysis of mediation models reveals this effect is explained by changes in the consumer’s emotions, which in turn influence (...) evaluations of the service interaction and subsequently impacts brand outcomes. We identify reactance as a moderator of this effect, such that customers with low reactance to interpersonal regulation attempts exhibit more favorable brand trust and loyalty evaluations. Further, we demonstrate that the visibility of interpersonal emotion regulation represents an important boundary condition. These findings support the process model of interpersonal emotion regulation and generate important insights for both theory and practice. (shrink)

One of the most significant trends within linguistics in the 1970s has been the move away from the formalised models of language introduced by Chomsky towards an account of language that incorporates functional premises. As Charles Fillmore put it, in a 1972 paper, the emphasis on formalisation needs to be balanced by a consideration of what exactly it is that linguists want to formalise. Putting this another way, a contrast can be drawn between the stress laid in the 1960s on (...) the specification in formal terms of the common factors that underlie utterances and the stress laid in the 1970s on the specification in functional terms of the differences between language forms, as captured by such notions as dialect, style, level, etc. (shrink)

This research extends our understanding of ethical decision making on the part of leaders by merging social role and self-construal perspectives. Interdependent self-construal is generally seen as enhancing concern for justice and moral values. Across two studies, we tested the prediction that non-leading group members’ interdependent self-construal would be associated with lower levels of unethical decision making on behalf of their group but that, in contrast, this relationship would be weaker for leaders, given their social role. These predictions were experimentally (...) tested by assigning participants to the role of leader or non-leading group member, and assessing the association between their interdependent self-construal and their unethical decision making. Across both studies, interdependence predicted less unethical decision making on behalf of one’s group for non-leading group members. However, the leader role was shown to weaken, and even reverse, this relationship. This research demonstrates that self-construal influences group-based ethical decision making, but that the nature of this influence is moderated by social role. (shrink)

ABSTRACT : This paper explores two interconnected themes that reoccur throughout the Laches: reworking the role of the father and the harmony of one’s words with their actions, the Dorian mode. These two themes, in addition to the discussion of courage, will turn out to be directly relevant to the nurturing of the souls of the sons. The question then arises whether any of the interlocutors present are adequate father figures who might be able to nurture the souls of the (...) boys in a manner that is adequate. Judging by the conclusion of the dialogue, the only possible candidate is Socrates. (shrink)

This short paper serves as an introduction to the Projects section of this issue of Humanist Studies & the Digital Age, since the contributions are connected by the authors' participation in a roundtable at the Modern Language Association Annual Conference in 2017. The papers explore the research outcomes from developing and deploying different Digital Humanities projects with Italian Studies materials. The introduction outlines the different methodologies, critiques of digital approaches, and implications for the field offered by the four contributions. The (...) essay ultimately argues that through their humanistic engagement with the technology that drive the projects, the scholars connect their approaches to timely concerns facing all consumers and critics of digital and computational products. (shrink)

We conducted a survey of residents of Kingston, Ontario, Canada, (n = 107) to understand their attitudes to and experiences of waste management and governance. Currently, the municipality is emphasising waste diversion and exploring new waste processing systems (WPS; e.g., incineration) to reduce costs. Using Foucault's governmentality theory, our data suggest Kingston's reliance on an attitude-behaviour-context model of behaviour change successfully fosters an environmental citizenship identity based on waste diversion (e.g., recycling). However, we argue that the neoliberal governmentality upon which (...) the attitude-behaviour-context model is predicated elides the need for, and inhibits consideration of, broader societal change concerning urgent environmental issues involving consumption and waste. (shrink)

We discuss our concerns associated with three assumptions upon which the model of Levelt, Roelofs & Meyer is based: assumed generalisability of decontextualised experimental programs, assumed highly modular architecture of the language production systems, and assumed symbolic computations within the language production system. We suggest that these assumptions are problematic and require further justification.

A child sees all the things God has made, but wants to see God in person.

One of the more controversial uses of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) involves selecting embryos with a specific tissue type so that the child to be born can act as a donor to an existing sibling who requires a haematopoietic stem cell transplant. PGD with HLA tissue typing is used to select embryos that are free of a familial genetic disease and that are also a tissue match for an existing sibling who requires a transplant. Preimplantation HLA tissue typing occurs when (...) parents select embryos that are not at risk of a familial genetic disease to be a match for an existing sibling who requires a transplant. In Victoria, Australia, applications to use PGD with HLA tissue typing are reviewed by the Infertility Treatment Authority on a case by case basis. Preimplantation HLA tissue typing is prohibited prima facie because the embryo to be tested would not be at risk for a genetic abnormality or disease. Arguments for or against the use of PGD/HLA tissue typing are based on several key issues including the commodification and welfare of the donor child. This essay aims to show that that the same arguments apply to both PGD with HLA tissue typing and Preimplantation HLA tissue typing, and that the policy distinction between the two procedures is therefore ethically inconsistent. (shrink)

In “Racism and Bioethics: the myth of color blindness” Braddock convincingly argues that a “color blind” approach to triage and resource allocation in the setting of the COVID-19 pandemic pe...

Using Galileo Galilei's Saggiatore and Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso as a focal point, this article evaluates a mixed methods approach for identifying matches of words and phrases that are rich material for close reading and contextualization. The method focuses on ngram matches and networks of phrases that are used together. The similarity of Galileo's treatise to Ariosto's poem is compared to 45 other early modern Italian texts to evaluate the relative exceptionalism or normality of the findings. Ngram matches reveal a (...) series of previously unknown connections between the Saggiatore and Furioso, which indicate an analytical understanding of the poem, rather than borrowing of narrative or figurative expression. Network analysis offers a preliminary outline for two communities of texts that frequently use the same ngrams found in the Furioso. (shrink)

With concerns regarding climate change rising, companies and policy makers seek to understand the precursors to environmentally-friendly consumer choice. Decision modes are the qualitatively different psychological processes employed to arrive at decisions. Across six studies, the present project establishes (a) which decision modes are employed by consumers to decide between electricity plans that differ in environmental impact, and (b) how employed decision modes affect those choices. We demonstrate that consumers are most likely to use Calculation Modes when facing such choices. (...) Importantly, we find that Affect or Role Modes promote more environmentally-friendly choices, while Calculation Modes decrease environmentally-friendly choices. Experimentally promoting use of a Role Mode over a Calculation Mode increases selection of environmentally-friendly alternatives, and the relative degree of employing the Role Mode mediates this effect. Our findings provide insight into how decision mode usage can alter environmental decisions, and suggest mechanisms and tools for marketers and policy makers to influence consumer choice. (shrink)