This book draws on both the historical context & contemporary research evidence to present the roles of mental health social work, AMHP & BIA, within an ethical framework. Codes of practice & statutory legal requirements, such as the Mental Health Act, Mental Capacity Act & the Human Rights Act, are all considered.

Art viewers and critics talk as if visual artworks say things, express messages, or have meanings. For instance, Picasso’s 'Guernica' has been described as a “generic plea against the barbarity and terror of war”, forming a “powerful anti-war statement”. One way of understanding meaning in art is to draw analogies with language. My thesis explores how the notion of a speech act – an utterance with a performative aspect – can illuminate art’s power to ‘speak’. In recent years, philosophers of (...) art have explored speech act theory in relation to literary art, though barely at all in relation to visual art. Given the way we talk about painting, sculpture, installation, film, and photography, and given that artists have investigated performativity through their art, this neglect is surprising. My thesis develops two main arguments. First, artwork meaning is active. I argue that visual artworks, under certain conditions, are speech acts. They have propositional content, and they have a certain force: they can do things such as assert, protest, and criticise – things we would normally do with words. I defend these contested claims against several dissenters, and explore some consequences: in particular, I explore how art can lie, a hitherto neglected question. Second, artwork meaning is flexible. I argue that what an artwork says and does is affected by the context in which it’s displayed, and in particular, by its curation. As a result, an artwork’s content and force can vary from context to context. This goes against a dominant view in the philosophy of art – what I call ‘Originalism’ – that the meaning of an artwork is fixed by factors which held at the time of the work’s creation, and so cannot change across time. I argue that this is mistaken: artworks can change in meaning. Curatorial factors can affect an artwork’s content and force, and consequently its social effects. It is known that our verbal speech has the power to oppress and liberate people in a society. My thesis aims to show that art also has this power to shape society; through what it says, and through what it does. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that any account of how artworks lie must acknowledge (I) that artworks can lie at different levels of their content—what I call ‘surface’ and ‘deep’—and (II) that, for an artwork to lie at a given level, a norm of truthful communication such as Grice’s Maxim of Quality must apply to it. A corollary is that it’s harder than you might think for artworks to lie: Quality is not automatically ‘switched on’ during our engagement with art. (...) However, I show how a work’s curation and genre-membership can ‘switch on’ Quality, allowing artworks to lie at different levels. (shrink)

This article explores the intersections of power within transnational surrogacy in India, using the lens of geography to examine surrogate women’s and commissioning parents’ experiences and perceptions of space and mobility. The author analyzes ethnographic data within a geographical framework to examine how actors embody and experience power relations through space and movement, revealing how power is not simply about who moves and who doesn’t. Rather, in recognizing the specificity of the Indian context, and how different actors inhabit and move (...) through distinct spaces, a geographical lens reveals the shifting complexity of structures of agency and power. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in India, the author traces how both surrogate mothers and commissioning parents experience moments of mobility and movement punctuated by intervals of immobility and stillness, in distinct ways that illuminate the power relations inherent in transnational reproduction. (shrink)

There is widespread and growing concern among U.S. consumers about the treatment of farmed animals, and consumers are consequently paying attention to food product labels that indicate humane production practices. However, labels vary in their standards for animal welfare, and prior research suggests that consumers are confused by welfare-related labels: many shoppers cannot differentiate between labels that indicate changes in the way animals are raised and those that do not. We administered a survey to 1,000 American grocery shoppers to better (...) understand the extent to which consumers purchase and pay more for food with certain labels based on an assumption of welfare improvement. Results showed that 86% of shoppers reported purchasing at least one product with the following labels in the last year: “cage or crate-free”, “free-range”, “pasture-raised”, “natural”, “organic”, “no hormone”, “no antibiotic”, “no rBST”, “humane”, “vegetarian-fed”, “grass-fed”, “farm-raised”. Of those who purchased one of the aforementioned labels, 89% did so because they thought the label indicated higher-welfare production practices, and 79% consciously paid more for the product with the label because they thought that the label indicated better-than-standard animal welfare. However, many of these labels lack uniform standards for the production practices they represent, and some labels represent production practices that do not influence animal welfare, thus the degree of the animal welfare impact of a given label is highly variable. These results indicate that labels need to clearly and accurately specify their animal welfare benefits to improve the consumers’ ability to purchase products that align with their expectations. (shrink)

A robust stakeholder analysis requires extensive conceptual and empirical work. Yet it is often unclear how to effectively do so. This paper introduces a new method—the Stakeholder Tokens—for designers to elicit a more inclusive set of stakeholders and gain better understanding of stakeholder interrelationships and dynamics. Stakeholder Tokens present a playful hands-on design approach to support value sensitive design stakeholder analyses by employing a style of role play.

Fugitive Politics explores the intersection between politics and ecology, between the requirements for radical change and the unprecedented challenges posed by the global crisis, a dialectic has rarely been addressed in academia. Across eight chapters, Carl Boggs explores how systemic change may be achieved within the current system, while detailing attempts at achieving change within nation states. Boggs states that any notion of revolution seems fanciful in the current climate, contending that controlling elites have concentrated their hold on corporate power (...) along three self-serving fronts: technology (Big Tech) and the surveillance order, militarism and the warfare state, intensification of globalized power. Combined with this Boggs cites the fundamental absence of revolutionary counter-forces, arguing that after decades of subservice relevant, allied to the rise of identity politics and social movements, the Marxist theoretical legacy is now exhausted, and will not provide an exit from the crisis. Boggs concludes that the only possibility for fundamental change will come from an open style of politics, in the Jacobin tradition, operating within the overall structures of the current democratic state. Written for both an academic and general readership, in the US and beyond, Fugitive Politics will be of vital importance to those studying political theory, political philosophy, political history, Marxism and Marxist theory, authoritarian politics, ecology, environmental politics, and climate politics. (shrink)

Any intelligent debate on the ethical treatment of animals hinges on understanding their mental processes. The idea that consciousness in animals is beyond comprehension is usually traced to the 17th-century philosopher Ren? Descartes whose concept of animals as beast machines lacking consciousness influenced arguments for more than 200 years. But in reviewing Descartes' theory of mind, Daisie and Michael Radner demonstrate in Animal Consciousness that he did not hold the view so frequently attributed to him. In fact, they contend that (...) Descartes distinguished two types of consciousness, which make it easier to discuss the conscious experiences of animals and to trace the debate into the post-Darwinian era. (shrink)

Some visual artworks constitute hate speech because they can perform oppressive illocutionary acts. This illocution-based analysis of art reveals how responsive curation and artmaking undermines and manages problematic art. Drawing on the notion of counterspeech as an alternative tool to censorship to handle art-based hate speech, this article proposes aesthetic blocking and aesthetic spotlighting. I then show that under certain conditions, this can lead to eventual metaphysical destruction of the artwork; a way to destroy harmful art without physically destroying it.

In this controversial new book, Daisy Christodoulou offers a thought-provoking critique of educational orthodoxy. Drawing on her recent experience of teaching in challenging schools, she shows through a wide range of examples and case studies just how much classroom practice contradicts basic scientific principles. She examines seven widely-held beliefs which are holding back pupils and teachers: - Facts prevent understanding - Teacher-led instruction is passive - The 21st century fundamentally changes everything - You can always just look it up (...) -We should teach transferable skills - Projects and activities are the best way to learn - Teaching knowledge is indoctrination. In each accessible and engaging chapter, Christodoulou sets out the theory of each myth, considers its practical implications and shows the worrying prevalence of such practice. Then, she explains exactly why it is a myth, with reference to the principles of modern cognitive science. She builds a powerful case explaining how governments and educational organisations around the world have let down teachers and pupils by promoting and even mandating evidence-less theory and bad practice. This blisteringly incisive and urgent text is essential reading for all teachers, teacher training students, policy makers, head teachers, researchers and academics around the world. (shrink)

States all over the world have reacted to COVID-19 with quarantines of entire cities, provinces, and even nations. Previous studies and preliminary evidence from current lockdowns suggest that emergency measures protecting the public’s physical health by dislocating individuals, families, and social networks could well be causing a devastating public health crisis of mental ill-health in the months and years to come. This article is the first to take a public mental health ethics perspective in examining these lockdowns, the lodestar of (...) which is the right to mental health, rooted in the concept of human dignity. Even the strictest lockdowns are not necessarily unethical but are prone to damage mental health disproportionately, with vulnerable and disadvantaged populations being at particular risk. (shrink)

Colleen Glenney Boggs puts animal representation at the center of the making of the liberal American subject. Concentrating on the formative and disruptive presence of animals in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson, Boggs argues that animals are critical to the ways in which Americans enact their humanity and regulate subjects in the biopolitical state. Biopower, or a politics that extends its reach to life, thrives on the strategic ambivalence between who is considered human and (...) what is judged as animal. It generates a space of indeterminacy in which animal representations intervene to define and challenge the parameters of subjectivity. The renegotiation of the species line produces a tension that is never fully regulated. Therefore, as both figures of radical alterity and the embodiment of biopolitics, animals are simultaneously exceptional and exemplary to the biopolitical state. An original contribution to animal studies, American studies, critical race theory, and posthumanist inquiry, Boggs thrillingly reinterprets a long and highly contentious human-animal history. (shrink)

Ecology and Revolution: Global Crisis and the Political Challenge is an in-depth exploration and analysis of the global ecological crisis (going far beyond the issue of global warming) in the larger context of historical conditions and ...

Descartes uses the term "conscientia" (conscience) to apply both to consciousness of thinking and to the act of thinking itself. These are two different sorts of consciousness, And they stand in different relations to their objects. Consciousness as a way of thinking (c1) is neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of its object. Consciousness of thinking (c2) is both necessary and sufficient for the existence of its object. The distinction between c1 and c2 provides descartes with a way out (...) of hobbes's infinite regress and frees descartes from problematic theses concerning the evidence and incorrigibility of mental states. (shrink)

In order to explain the possibility of causal interaction between the mind and the body, Descartes claims that they are substantially united. It is argued that descartes is unsuccessful in reconciling this union with the radical dualism which is fundamental to his philosophy. Recent claims that the union of mind and body poses no problem for descartes are shown to be untenable.

Le livre de Didier Lett constitue un essai bienvenu de synthèse en français sur les principales questions concernant le genre au Moyen Âge. Il comporte trois parties, « Genre et identité », « Genre et culture », et « Genre et société », chacune de ces parties se distribuant en quatre chapitres. Une introduction où sont discutées les origines critiques et l’apparition en France du concept du genre, et un court épilogue résumant les conclusions de D. Lett encadrent le travail. (...) Le livre inclut u... (shrink)

In a professional learning community, teachers are organized into teams, committed to meeting on a regular basis to study their teaching strategies and the effects of those strategies on the students in their classrooms. Whatever the organizational structure, the teams have one goal, that is to improve teaching so that student learning is improved.

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of minor literature, deterritorialization and agrammaticality, this article explores the possibility of a ‘minor poetry’, considering various interpretati...

In a recent paper, James Edwin Mahon argues that literary artworks—novels in particular—never lie because they do not assert. In this discussion note, I reject Mahon’s conclusion that novels never lie. I argue that a central premiss in his argument—that novels do not contain assertions—is false. Mahon’s account underdetermines the content of literary works; novels have rich layers of content and can contain what I call ‘profound’ assertions, and ‘background’ assertions. I submit that Mahon therefore fails to establish that novels (...) never lie. (shrink)