Here, we assess the usefulness of first-person methods for the study of embodiment during the rubber hand illusion (RHI). Participants observed a rubber hand being stroked synchronously and asynchronously with their concealed hand after which they made proprioceptive judgments about the location of their hand and completed a self-report questionnaire. A randomly selected cohort was further interviewed during the illusion and their transcripts analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Results showed that the IPA group experienced a more intense embodied experience (...) during the RHI, measured by proprioceptive distortion and self-report. IPA revealed four main themes of embodied experience: recalibration of the body schema; violation of the body schema; multisensory integration; and illusory experience over time. The report of agency was a significant predictor of proprioceptive distortion. This study shows how first-person methodologies can be empirically rigorous and how the introspective interview provides a rich, detailed account of embodied experience. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that misperceptions and illusory experiences can occur if sensory stimulation is withdrawn or becomes invariant even for short periods of time. Using a perceptual deprivation paradigm, we created a monotonous audiovisual environment and asked participants to verbally report any auditory, visual or body-related phenomena they experienced. The data (analysed using a variant of interpretative phenomenological analysis) revealed two main themes: (1) reported sensory phenomena have different spatial characteristics ranging from simple percepts to the feeling of immersion (...) in a complex multisensory environment and (2) the active contribution of the perceiver where participants report engaging in exploratory processes even when there is nothing to find. Detailed analysis of the qualitative data further showed that participants who reported more perceptual phenomena were more likely to report internal bodily sensations, move more during the experiment and score higher on the Revised Hallucination Scale than those reporting fewer percepts explicitly linking perceptual deprivation to somatic phenomena. The results demonstrate how the variety of sensory experiences induced by perceptual deprivation can give further insight into the factors mediating conscious awareness and may suggest ways in which the brain imposes meaning on the environment under invariant sensory conditions. (shrink)

This article discusses how doctoral candidates identify and navigate personal learning challenges on their journey to becoming researchers. Our study asked creative arts and humanities candidates t...

Farmers have been characterized as people whose ties to the land have given them a deep awareness of natural cycles, appreciation for natural beauty and sense of responsibility as stewards. At the same time, their relationship to the land has been characterized as more utilitarian than that of others who are less directly dependent on its bounty. This paper explores this tension by comparing the attitudes and beliefs of a group of conventional farmers to those of a group of organic (...) farmers. It was found that while both groups reject the idea that a farmer’s role is to conquer nature, organic farmers were significantly more supportive of the notion that humans should live in harmony with nature. Organic farmers also reported a greater awareness of and appreciation for nature in their relationship with the land. Both groups view independence as a main benefit of farming and a lack of financial reward as its main drawback. Overall, conventional farmers report more stress in their lives although they also view themselves in a caretaker role for the land more than do the organic farmers. In contrast, organic farmers report more satisfaction with their lives, a greater concern for living ethically, and a stronger perception of community. Finally, both groups are willing to have their rights limited (organic farmers somewhat more so) but they do not trust the government to do so. (shrink)

Background: Clinical investigation is a growing field employing increasing numbers of nurses. This has created a new specialty practice defined by aspects unique to nursing in a clinical research context: the objectives (to implement research protocols and advance science), setting (research facilities), and nature of the nurse–participant relationship. The clinical research nurse role may give rise to feelings of ethical conflict between aspects of protocol implementation and the duty of patient advocacy, a primary nursing responsibility. Little is known about whether (...) research nurses experience unique ethical challenges distinct from those experienced by nurses in traditional patient-care settings. Research objectives: The purpose of the study was to describe the nature of ethical challenges experienced by clinical research nurses within the context of their practice. Research design: The study utilized a qualitative descriptive design with individual interviews. Participants and research context: Participating nurses (N = 12) self-identified as having experienced ethical challenges during screening. The majority were Caucasian (90%), female (83%), and worked in outpatient settings (67%). Approximately 50% had > 10 years of research experience. Ethical considerations: The human subjects review board approved the study. Written informed consent was obtained. Findings: Predominant themes were revealed: (1) the inability to provide a probable good, or/do no harm, and (2) dual obligations (identity as a nurse vs a research nurse). The following patterns and subthemes emerged: conflicted allegiances between protocol implementation, needs of the participant, desire to advance science, and tension between the nurse–patient therapeutic relationship versus the research relationship. Discussion: Participants described ethical challenges specific to the research role. The issues are central to the nurse–participant relationship, patient advocacy, the nurse’s role in implementing protocols, and/or advancing science. Conclusion: Ethical challenges related to the specialized role of clinical research nurses were identified. More research is warranted to fully understand their nature and frequency and to identify support systems for resolution. (shrink)

Background: Clinical genomic implementation studies pose challenges for informed consent. Consent forms often include complex language and concepts, which can be a barrier to diverse enrollment, and these studies often blur traditional research-clinical boundaries. There is a move toward self-directed, web-based research enrollment, but more evidence is needed about how these enrollment approaches work in practice. In this study, we developed and evaluated a literacy-focused, web-based consent approach to support enrollment of diverse participants in an ongoing clinical genomic implementation study. (...) Methods: As part of the Cancer Health Assessments Reaching Many (CHARM) study, we developed a web-based consent approach that featured plain language, multimedia, and separate descriptions of clinical care and research activities. CHARM offered clinical exome sequencing to individuals at high risk of hereditary cancer. We interviewed CHARM participants about their reactions to the consent approach. We audio recorded, transcribed, and coded interviews using a deductively and inductively derived codebook. We reviewed coded excerpts as a team to identify overarching themes. Results: We conducted 32 interviews, including 12 (38%) in Spanish. Most (69%) enrolled without assistance from study staff, usually on a mobile phone. Those who completed enrollment in one day spent an average of 12 minutes on the consent portion. Interviewees found the information simple to read but comprehensive, were neutral to positive about the multimedia support, and identified increased access to testing in the study as the key difference from clinical care. Conclusions: This study showed that interviewees found our literacy-focused, web-based consent approach acceptable; did not distinguish the consent materials from other online study processes; and valued getting access to testing in the study. Overall, conducting empirical bioethics research in an ongoing clinical trial was useful to demonstrate the acceptability of our novel consent approach but posed practical challenges. (shrink)

Nurses have moral obligations incurred by membership in the profession to participate knowingly in health policy advocacy. Many barriers have historically hindered nurses from realizing their potential to advance health policy. The contemporary political context sets additional challenges to policy work due to polarization and conflict. Nursing education can help nurses recognize their role in advancing health through political advocacy in a manner that is consistent with disciplinary knowledge and ethical responsibilities. In this paper, the authors describe an exemplar of (...) Elizabeth Barrett's “Power as Knowing Participation in Change” theory as a disciplinary lens within a doctoral nursing health policy course. Barrett (radically) emphasizes “power as freedom” instead of “power as control.” This approach is congruent with nursing disciplinary values and enhances awareness of personal freedom and building collaborative relationships in the policy process. The theory was used in concert with other traditional policy content and frameworks from nursing and other disciplines. We discuss the role of nursing ethics viewed as professional responsibility for policy action, an overview of Barrett's theory, and the design of the course. Four student reflections on how the course influenced their thinking about policy advocacy are included. While not specific to policymaking, Barrett's theory provides a disciplinary grounding to increase students' awareness of freedom and choices in political advocacy participation. Our experience suggests that Barrett's work can be fruitful for enhancing nurses' awareness of choices to participate in change across settings. (shrink)

This article approaches the recent Wonder Woman film as a presentation of the tensions traditionally associated with the paradox of democratic foundations. Steeped in classical mythology, Wonder Woman adapts two origin myths from the Athenian polis: the myth of Pandora and the myth of the heroic colonizing demigod. Through its adaptation of these myths I argue that Wonder Woman offers two competing responses to the democratic paradox of founding. One is exceptionalist, where sovereign interventions by extraordinary ‘super-agents’ like Wonder Woman (...) are justified by their unique origins and identities. The second response subverts this narrative, however, offering a tragic depiction of democratic agency. Through the relationships formed with Diana’s human companions, I argue that Wonder Woman shows the insufficiency of a politics of heroic origins, suggesting agents must continually struggle to establish communities which do not ignore their historical failures or their powers to address these. Wonder Woman therefore provides important imaginative resources for resisting the kinds of seductive, exceptionalist political narrative it also presents. (shrink)

The power of compulsory heterosexuality regulates the sexuality of adolescent lesbians as strongly as it does their heterosexual peers. Marked with a sexual(ized) identity, young Southern lesbians in this life history study made claim to moral high ground by consistently identifying with the hegemonic good girl construct and by participating in the naming of women whose sexual behavior demonstrated a disregard for the ?rules.? The good girl/bad girl, the virgin/slut binaries, played significant roles in their identity claims, in their relationships, (...) and in their choices of friendships. Personal self-control (?just kissing?) is seen by these young women as admirable and sluts are seen as dangerous women who harm others and themselves. This article explores the marking of sluts and too experienced women in the life stories of White Southern adolescent lesbians and the continued social controls imposed on adolescent female sexuality through the devaluing of women's sexual agency. (shrink)

Representations of nonhuman wild animals in children's stories and toys underwent dramatic transformation over the years 1830-1915. During the earlier part of that period, wild animals were presented to children as being savage and dangerous, and that it was necessary for them to be killed or brutally constrained. In the 1890s, an animalcentric discourse emerged in Nature writing, along with an animal-human symbiosis in scientific child study that highlighted childhood innocence, resulting in a valuing of wild animals based upon their (...) similarity to humans. This article will describe the aesthetic devices of children's stories and play materials in relation to the dominant, emerging, and residual ideas about the wild communicated by adults to children through these means. (shrink)

Although the buying, selling, and trading of fossils has been a principle part of paleontological practice over the centuries, the commercial collection of fossils today has re-emerged into a pervasive and lucrative industry. In the United States, the number of commercial companies driving the legal, and sometimes illegal, selling of fossils is estimated to have doubled since the 1980s, and worries from academic paleontologists over this issue has increased accordingly. Indeed, some view the commercialization of fossils as one of the (...) greatest threats to paleontology today. In this article, I address the story of “Sue”—the largest, most complete, and most expensive Tyrannosaurus rex ever excavated—whose discovery incited a series of high-profile legal battles throughout the 1990s over the question of “Who owns Sue?” Over the course of a decade, various stakeholders from academic paleontologists and fossil dealers to Native Americans, private citizens, and government officials all laid claim to Sue. In exploring this case, I argue that assumptions of authority are responsible for initiating and sustaining debates over fossil access. Here, assumptions of authority are understood as assumptions of ownership, or expertise, or in some cases both. Viewing the story from this perspective illuminates the significance of fossils as boundary objects. It also highlights the process of boundary-work by which individuals and groups constructed or deconstructed borders around Sue and fossil access to establish their own authority. I draw on science studies scholarship as well as literature in the professionalization, commercialization, and valuation of science to examine how assumptions of authority facilitated one of the most divisive episodes in recent paleontological history and the broader debate on the commercial collection of vertebrate fossil material in the United Sates. (shrink)

In Rousseau's Republican Romance, Elizabeth Wingrove combines political theory and narrative analysis to argue that Rousseau's stories of sex and sexuality offer important insights into the paradoxes of democratic consent. She suggests that despite Rousseau's own protestations, "man" and "citizen" are not rival or contradictory ideals. Instead, they are deeply interdependent. Her provocative reconfiguration of republicanism introduces the concept of consensual nonconsensuality--a condition in which one wills the circumstances of one's own domination. This apparently paradoxical possibility appears at the (...) center of Rousseau's republican polity and his romantic dyad: in both instances, the expression and satisfaction of desire entail a twin experience of domination and submission.Drawing on a wide variety of Rousseau's political and literary writings, Wingrove shows how consensual nonconsensuality organizes his representations of desire and identity. She demonstrates the inseparability of republicanism and accounts of heterosexuality in an analysis that emphasizes the sentimental and somatic aspects of citizenship. In Rousseau's texts, a politics of consent coincides with a performative politics of desire and of emotion. Wingrove concludes that understanding his strategies of democratic governance requires attending to his strategies of symbolization. Further, she suggests that any understanding of political practice requires attending to bodily practices. (shrink)

Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse explores the roles of stories, figures, dreams, theories, facts, delusions, advertising, institutions, economic arrangements, publishing practices, scientific advances, and politics in twentieth- century technoscience. The book's title is an e-mail address. With it, Haraway locates herself and her readers in a sprawling net of associations more far-flung than the Internet. The address is not a cozy home. There is no innocent place to stand in the world where the book's author figure, FemaleMan, encounters DuPont's controversial laboratory rodent, OncoMouse. (...) Haraway sees the world of contemporary technoscience as a drama. Information sciences and life sciences are at the center of the dramatic action. Scenes are set in landscapes where maps of human genetic differences are stored in databases, racialized bodies are reconfigured by morphing for photographs in popular magazines, and transgenic mice important to breast cancer research are patented intellectual property. The actors are many, and not all are human. Beginning with the Modest Witness, the key figure in the Science Revolution, Haraway shows us the trouble lurking in race and gender- marked practices for attesting to matters of fact. In later scenes, Haraway explores the kinship relations among the many cyborg creatures produced in the late twentieth-century--in nuclear research, genetic engineering, reproductive technologies, computer-mediated representational practices, and mutations in biological approaches to "race.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Narrative Symposium:Living Organ DonationLaura Altobelli, Sherri Bauman, Janice Flynn, Andy Heath, Joseph Jacobs, Tim Joos, Amy K. Lewensten, Donna L. Luebke, Sarah A. McDaniel, Donald Olenick, Laurie E Post, Vicky Young, Blake Adams, Anonymous One, Michael Sauls, Christine Wright, Shannon D. Wyatt, and Cara Yesawich• An Altruistic Living Donor’s Story• Surgery for the Soul• Kidney Donation Story• The Essence of Giving—A Transplant Story• Love—the Risk (...) Worth Taking• My Donation Journey• A Life For A Life: My Gift To My Dad• Lessons Learned: The Realities of Living Organ Donation• Sarah’s List Exchange Experience• Accelerated Living Donation• Liver Donor Nightmare• Adrift After Donation• Getting Our Child Off Dialysis• A Living Donor’s Journey• The Spare Kidney• Living Donors are People Too• The Gift of Life—Walking by Faith• Journey of an Altruistic, Non–designated Living DonorCopyright © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Through narrative reflections of Jack?s story of inclusive recreational sport, the meaning of dignity in professional practice is explored. Jack?s story is one of respect, strong humiliation and embarrassment, and vulnerability. Through the lens of relational ethics, the aggression of a stranger illustrates how the lack of mutual respect, compassion and knowledge creates experiences of indignity. Jack?s story highlights how relationships can shape, constrain and enable lives. Understanding that which constitutes a dignified recreational sport context for instructors (...) and participants opens opportunities for authentic social relationships based upon respect of oneself, as well as others to emerge. Jack?s narrative further reinforces the need to create pedagogical spaces for discussions of various forms of dignity and ethical professional practice in inclusive recreational sport contexts. (shrink)

Nourishing the Inner Life of Clinicians and Humanitarians: The Ethical Turn in Psychoanalysis, demonstrates the demanding, clinical and humanitarian work that psychotherapists often undertake with fragile and devastated people, those degraded by violence and discrimination. In spite of this, Donna M. Orange argues that there is more to human nature than a relentlessly negative view. Drawing on psychoanalytic and philosophical resources, as well as stories from history and literature, she explores ethical narratives that ground hope in human goodness and (...) shows how these voices, personal to each analyst, can become sources of courage, warning and support, of prophetic challenge and humility which can inform and guide their work. Over the course of a lifetime, the sources change, with new ones emerging into importance, others receding into the background. Donna Orange uses examples from ancient Rome, from twentieth century Europe, from South Africa, and from nineteenth century Russia. She shows how not only can their words and examples, like those of our personal mentors, inspire and warn us; but they also show us the daily discipline of spiritual self-care, although these examples rely heavily on the discipline of spiritual reading, other practitioners will find inspiration in music, visual arts, or elsewhere and replenish the resources regularly. Nourishing the Inner Life of Clinicians and Humanitarians will help psychoanalysts to develop a language with which to converse about ethics and the responsibility of the therapist/analyst. This is an exceptional contribution highly suitable for practitioners and students of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Donna M. Orange teaches, consults, and offers study groups for psychoanalysts and gestalt therapists. She seeks to integrate contemporary psychoanalysis with radically relational ethics. Recent books are _Thinking for Clinicians: Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies _, and _The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice_, both from Routledge. (shrink)

This study analyzed 328 single- and group-authored stories composed by nine 4-year-olds in a mixed-age preschool class participating in a peer-oriented storytelling and story-acting practice. Group-authored stories were overwhelmingly told by same-gender groups. The frequencies, developmental trajectories, and functions of group-authored stories were different for girls and boys. Girls told mostly group-authored stories in the fall and single-authored stories in the spring. Group-authoring provided ‘brain-storming sessions’ for narrative experimentation; these stories were longer, with more dramatic problems and more sophisticated (...) character portrayals. By the spring, girls’ single-authored stories also included these features, suggesting internalized narrative gains. Boys consistently preferred single-authored stories, though in the spring the frequency and quality of their group-authored stories increased. These were longer, with more sophisticated character portrayals, than single-authored stories. Group-authored stories made a distinctive contribution to narrative development, partly by helping boys and girls overcome limitations of their preferred narrative genres. (shrink)

This article examines three divergent constructions about the salience of legal gender in lay people’s everyday lives and readiness to decertify gender. In our interviews (and survey data), generally participants minimised the importance of legal gender. The central argument in this article is that feminist socio-legal scholars applying legal consciousness studies to legal reform topics should find scrutinizing the construction of interview talk useful. We illustrate this argument by adapting and applying Ewick and Silbey’s (1998) ‘The Common Place of Law: (...) Stories from Everyday Life', ‘before’, ‘with’ and ‘against’ typology to interview talk about legal gender, and critique their cognitivist approach by offering a constructionist alternative. In our analysis, we offer a detailed discursive explication of three key legal consciousness themes. These themes offer a balanced representation of a dataset problematically ‘skewed’ towards sex-based rights feminist perspectives, namely that ‘before’ legal gender is an anti-decertification account, decertification would be risky for natal females; a ‘with’ legal gender construction is neither for nor against decertification per se, though the impact of decertification is produced in accounts as limited and unimportant; and ‘against’ legal gender is a pro-decertification classification, as not abolished legal gender is constructed as harmful to already marginalised groups. In concluding, we explore the reasoning for the lack of readiness for decertification currently, and return to the value of examining the construction of lay discourse about legal matters as talk is a form of social action. We suggest that applying discursive analysis to themes in legal consciousness studies enables a refocusing on the how rather than purely the what of divergent legal consciousnesses, and that this approach is a fruitful addition to feminist socio-legal studies. (shrink)

In this discipline-redefining book, Elizabeth T. Hurren maps the post-mortem journeys of bodies, body-parts, organs, and brains, inside the secretive culture of modern British medical research after WWII as the bodies of the deceased were harvested as bio-commons. Often the human stories behind these bodies were dissected, discarded, or destroyed in death. Hidden Histories of the Dead recovers human faces and supply-lines in the archives that medical science neglected to acknowledge. It investigates the medical ethics of organ donation, the (...) legal ambiguities of a lack of fully-informed consent and the shifting boundaries of life and re-defining of medical death in a biotechnological era. Hurren reveals the implicit, explicit and missed body disputes that took second-place to the economics of the national and international commodification of human material in global medical sciences of the Genome era. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

In this conversation, which took place across several months in the year 2021, Elizabeth Grosz describes her position with respect to “new materialism” and “the material turn”: while she emphasizes the necessity of materialist thought in the current situation marked by a global pandemic, she also stresses the equal importance of what she calls “the incorporeal”: an excess in and of matter, materiality’s heterogeneous virtuality, differentiality and becoming-other. Grosz describes the incorporeal as mutually implicated with materiality in a way (...) that eschews both monism and dualism. The conversation roughly follows five topics: 1. How does one conceive of ontology without fixity? 2. How does matter “make sense”? 3. Can we think sexual differences beyond cisgender binarism and oppositional dualism? 4. What are the ethico-political implications of a materialist thought predicated on becoming and immanence? 5. Is psychoanalysis compatible with materialism, and is there a materiality of the unconscious? In the course of this exceptional interview, Grosz discusses the works of Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Sigmund Freud, Luce Irigaray, Karen Barad, Friedrich Nietzsche, and of course Gilles Deleuze, among many others... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Handle With CareDonna TuckerMy name is Donna Tucker, and I'm a state tested nursing assistant (STNA)! I have been an STNA for 33 years. I simply love it. It is so rewarding to me to know I make a difference in the lives of my patients. I go in to my job with a smile on my face, an upbeat attitude, open arms, broad shoulders, ears, and a (...) caring heart. I set examples to all around me. I am a mentor, I am a go-to person for my director of nursing (DON). Other STNAs come to me with problems or questions or concerns and together we take care of it. I am an expert committee member for my state's aging panel. I am a committee member for Career Nursing Assistants. I work a lot with Geni Gipson, the founder of this committee. I am a published author and the mother of one daughter and two sons. I have six grandchildren. I just wouldn't like doing anything else. I love my job and family and my teacup poodle, Baby!Let's say I have talked to friends who are not STNAs about my job. I tell them that there is always going to be someone's grandma, grandpa, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, mother, father, etc. who will one day need to be placed in a home. I tell them how good I feel when I can help them. STNAs are not going away, and the door to the home I work at will not close. In some cases it's like taking care of a child. The way you give them a bath, dress them, feed them, take care of incontinence problems. No, I agree, not everyone can do my job. I hear that from my friends a lot. So I tell them, I thank God I can do the job I have.What I do when the resident comes to our facility, I introduce myself to them and to their family. I ask the resident, "Are you spoiled?" Sometimes they say no not at all. I tell them, "Well you are in for a treat. I love to spoil and that's one of the things we do around here." If they say yes, I tell them, "Well we have our work cut our for us, because we have to spoil you even more." I usually get lots of smiles from the family and resident. After they settle for a while, and the family is alone, I ask the [End Page 153] family questions about their loved one. I like to get a story about the resident from family so I can use it in my conversation later with the resident. I assure the family their loved one will be treated exactly the way they themselves would treat them. We are not trying to replace the family. We are filling in as family while they are away from the loved one. Then after the family is gone, I keep checking in on the resident, visit for a spell and chat. I ask them if they need anything. I just want the resident to feel safe, loved, and comfortable.Demanding family members can mean different things. For example, if they come in to help feed their loved one—I had a family member tell me, "I want mother's food now so I can feed her." I tell the family the cart that is coming now is room trays and as soon as we deliver the room trays, because we want our residents to get hot meals, I will call the kitchen and get that tray for your mother ASAP. Some family members just want you to drop all you are doing to assist their loved one. When a family member asks for something we are pretty prompt to get up and take care of it. It assures them that we will not put off anything asked of us. Sometimes it's the family member's way to show their loved one, "Well, I'll take care of this" so their loved one knows they are loved by family. Some family members just feel bad... (shrink)

This essay explores letter writing in late ancien régime France as a means of political contestation. Drawing from Rancière's notion of "illegitimate speakers," I retrace the story of an obscure Bastille prisoner, Geneviève Gravelle, whose letters to the king and the French public reveal the simultaneously political, literary, and aesthetic barriers impeding such illegitimate speech and the strategies used in attempting to overcome them. Attending to the historical-poetic context in which Gravelle's letters were composed and circulated, I elaborate, first, (...) a politics of voice that highlights the uncertain and multiply mediated processes on which political speech depends, and second, a politics of reading and writing in which sovereignty is both challenged and impersonated through the epistolary form. (shrink)

: The natural philosopher Michael Faraday and the psychologist Jean Piaget experimented directly with natural phenomena and children. While Faraday originated evidence for spatial fields mediating force interactions, Piaget studied children's cognitive development. This paper treats their experimental processes in parallel, taking as examples Faraday's 1831 investigations of water patterns produced under vibration and Piaget's interactions with his infants as they sought something he hid. I redid parts of Faraday's vibrating fluid activities and Piaget's hiding games. Like theirs, my experiences (...) showed that incomplete observations and confusions accompanied—and facilitated —experimental developments. While working with things in their hands, these experimenters' minds were also engaged, inferring new, more coherent understandings of the behaviors under study. Transitory ripples disclosed distinct patterns; infants devised more productive search methods. From the ripples, Faraday discerned an oscillatory condition that informed his subsequent speculations about light. From the infant search, Piaget identified experimenting as a child's means of developing self and world, later envisioning its infusion into education. Taken together, these two stories demonstrate that cognitive capacities emerge in the actual process of experimenting. This finding eclipses the historical context in its implications for education today. When learners pursue their own experiments, their minds develop. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Eleatic BergsonDonna Jones (bio)Suzanne Guerlac. THINKING IN TIME: AN INTRODUCTION TO HENRI BERGSON. Ithaca: Cornell UP 2006. [TT]In her Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson Suzanne Guerlac reminds her readers that the metaphysician has indeed been the subject of many hatreds, as the Bergsonist Gilles Deleuze once noted. But from this taut philosophical study one cannot easily make out any possible grounds for enmity; nor were (...) any expressed in the special Bergson issue of Modern Literary Notes edited by Guerlac. In this short review essay I shall voice some of that historic criticism, especially in regard to the social and political implications of his thought. Guerlac’s study may also win its own opponents for its sharp criticisms of Deleuze’s interpretations of Bergson and (in her reading) comically machinic view of life [TT 176–87]. This alone makes the book worth reading; it is also exhaustively researched, and I cannot remember learning as much from the footnotes of any other book.Bergson is presented here as a great metaphysician on the nature of time and space, the philosophical father of nonlinear science, and a theorist of concrete and affective individuality. Rejecting implicitly Leszek Kolakowski’s reading of two Bergsons, Guerlac presents him as neither a cosmologist who opposes life and matter nor an existentialist who retrieves consciousness by opposing time to space. Nor does he emerge as a systematic thinker in this study. In the last chapter Guerlac offers a dizzying defense of Bergson for providing the philosophical basis for cultural studies of the qualitative irreducibility of affectual states, the metaphysics of chaos theory, the critique of artificial intelligence, and the rudiments of an aesthetic theory of digital art and virtual reality.All of this follows from the epochal significance of Bergson’s metaphysical distinction between time and space as carefully grounded in the most advanced physics of his time. Guerlac does not discuss in any detail Bergson’s vitalist critiques of Darwinian biology in Creative Evolution, the work through which the metaphysical arsonist fired the modernist imagination in diverse, contradictory, and at times violent ways.1 Nor does she explore the occult and mystical themes that run throughout Bergson’s work and informed his personal and professional associations.In fact, Guerlac writes: “An explicit appeal to the social values of mystical experience in this study [The Two Sources of Morality and Religion] appeared to vindicate those who had criticized Bergson all along for being simply a mystic. And yet the title of the work, and the basis for the notion of closed and open societies, derive from scientific, not mystical discourse. They refer us to an opposition between closed and open systems in Sadi Carnot’s theories of thermodynamics” [TT 9]. Yet Bergson bases the opposition [End Page 21] between closed and open societies not in thermodynamics but in sociobiology. Having sociobiological reasons to believe in the power of the myths of closed morality on the human mind—groups that had instilled loyalty through myth and ritual had been more successful in the course of evolutionary history; that is, humans susceptible to myth have been successful in a positivist Darwinian sense—he called for the cooptation of such susceptibility by those myths and rituals that instilled loyalty to humanity as such. Humanity could dynamically extend the scope of sociability rather than follow the roles and customs that maintained a closed society in static equilibrium. Though Bergson would later courageously risk pneumonia to stand as an old man in the cold rain to register as a Jew in Vichy France, he claimed in this last book from 1932 that the only complete inspiration for universal openness could be found in Christian mysticism and mythology [Two Sources 227]. He explicitly criticized the insularity of the Judaic religion (and caricatured Eastern forms of mysticism). In other words, Bergson put his faith in Christian mystics alone and thus invited the charge of having laid the foundation for mystical and intolerant leadership.Bergson’s universal humanism also crashed on the limits of colonial racism. In considering closed primitive societies, Bergson called attention to missionary stories full of detailed accounts of childish and monstrous deeds. He implored his... (shrink)

We argue that we have obligations to future people that are similar in kind to obligations we have to current people. Modifying Michael Bratman’s account, we argue that as planning agents we must plan for the future to act practically in the present. Because our autonomy and selfhood are relational by nature, those plans will involve building affiliative bonds and caring for others. We conclude by grounding responsibility to future others by the way we plan through our social institutions. Our (...) account fills out the story of responsibility to future generations by referring only to ourselves, our practical identities, and practical reason. (shrink)

Suicide is a major problem in the United States, with the number of suicides annually exceeding the number of homicides by 10,000. Many studies have examined the relationship between media coverage of suicides and the suicide rate. This article reviews literature on imitative suicide and discusses implications of suicide stories on people in crisis. In addition, it explores the options for suicide coverage and gives suggestions for more ethical coverage that could save people's lives, rather than reinforcing suicide as an (...) option. (shrink)

Aby Warburg's Nachlass, the heart of the Warburg Institute Archive, is complemented by other large holdings which are no less remarkable. Quietly accumulating over the decades, still only provisionally cataloged, the vast corpus of letters filed as “General Correspondence” reveals itself to be a spectacularly rich resource for twentieth-century cultural and intellectual history. The secretariat was efficient: most everything was kept, letters received as well as copies of letters sent, meaning that the visitor to Woburn Square can sit in a (...) single archive, read both sides of exchanges, and follow conversations over years — a rare circumstance. The academic staff maintained contact with an impressively large number of internationally active scholars, working in many fields, and the letters are characteristically substantive. In this article, the author indicates how a book she is presently writing, Warburg Circles, 1929 – 1964, has been shaped by these archival holdings. She offers a brief history of the consolidated archive now located on the fourth floor of the Warburg Institute, a story that throws light on recent scholarly trends; and she gives examples of the sorts of historical insight that may be gained from this corpus of correspondence. (shrink)

How lovely to see an article co-authored by a person with schizophrenia and his psychiatrist! For hundreds of years, the perspectives of people receiving services was never published in medical/psychiatric journals. Then, some journals had a special section for "voices of lived experience" where people receiving services could write short, personal pieces—often they told dark and negative stories about all the pain they have experienced. Later, people with lived experience were on research teams and people with mental health challenges would (...) be co-authors. Then research projects were designed and led by people with mental health challenges (Sweeney, Beresford, Faulkner, Nettle, &... (shrink)

John Rawls pinpoints stability as the driving force behind many of the changes to justice as fairness from A Theory of Justice to Political Liberalism. Current debates about Rawlsian stability have centered on the possibility of maintaining one’s allegiance to the principles of justice while largely ignoring how citizens acquire a sense of justice. However, evaluating the account of stability in political liberalism requires attention to the impact of reasonable pluralism on both of these issues. I will argue that the (...) first question of Rawlsian stability – how a child acquires a sense of justice – remains unanswered in Political Liberalism. This fact has been overlooked by Rawls, his defenders, and his critics. The failure to attend to the ways reasonable pluralism undermines Rawls’s own story about a child’s moral development ultimately threatens Rawls’s account of stability in political liberalism – or so I will argue. Despite all of the changes Rawls makes to justice as fairness in order to resolve the stability challenge, Political Liberalism fails to deliver the robust stability Rawls seeks. (shrink)

'An alarming and illuminating book. The story of how we have allowed private corporations to patent genes, to stockpile human tissue, and in short to make profits out of what many people feel ought to be common goods is a shocking one. No one with any interest at all in medicine and society and how they interact should miss this book, and it should be required reading for every medical student,'--Philip Pullman.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Microaggressions in Medicine:Narratives, Trauma, and SilenceElizabeth Lanphier (bio)Lauren Freeman and Heather Stewart (2024) have written a richly researched and argued, while also highly engaging and accessible, book with Microaggressions in Medicine. They argue for why microaggressions are best understood on a harm-based account and situate this view within timely examples from a range of healthcare experiences. In their view, focusing on the harms produced by microaggressions shifts the locus (...) of concern from the agent committing a microaggression to the agent receiving it, and it enables an attribution of a microaggression regardless of an agent's intent or even awareness.Freeman and Stewart leave the reader with an expanded understanding of what microaggressions are and how they function. They also offer concrete and actionable suggestions for how healthcare environments and healthcare providers can work to prevent patients from receiving microaggressions in clinical care. Thinking alongside this book, I raise three points intended to further a conversation. The first is about narrative medicine as an additional resource. The second is the possibility for trauma-informed care to address background structural conditions that were beyond the book's scope. The third is to briefly inquire about whether this harm-based account could characterize certain cases of individual and institutional silence as a microaggression.1. Narrative medicineFreeman and Stewart situate their book within the philosophical literature on epistemic injustice, social justice, and feminist theory. So, it is not necessarily surprising that they only mention "narrative medicine," a term coined by Rita Charon (2001) about twenty-five years ago, in passing. They do cite core narrative medicine literature, including Sayantani DasGupta's (2008) account of "narrative humility," Arthur Frank's (1995) book The Wounded Storyteller, and a paper on listening to patient stories (Goldie 2011) in their recommendations and resources for mitigating microaggressions. When they do reference narrative [End Page 163] medicine, it is to suggest that "attending to the identities of patients ought to be more widely recognized as constitutive of good care" (Freeman and Stewart 2024, 182). But beyond illustrating the caring capacities of compassionate and skilled clinicians, narrative medicine offers a potential roadmap for how to get there.What I have elsewhere called a "technical definition of narrative medicine" (Lanphier 2021, 2024) is the narrative medicine methodology of close reading and reflective writing intended to produce three aims: attention (to texts or story), representation (trying to see the perspective of a story), and affiliation (partnering with a story's teller in a solidaristic way). This technical understanding of narrative medicine provides a method for developing skills of "ethical listening" and "medical humility" that Freeman and Stewart recommend. It also affords a structured form of training and practice that institutions can support to better enable healthcare workers to implement individual and environmental correctives to address microaggressions.Although narrative medicine is a resource poised to counter and respond to the very kinds of failures of listening, epistemic injustices, and quick assumptions with which Freeman and Stewart are concerned, narrative practices are not necessarily a fix for epistemic failures or bias. They also run their own risks, including narrative presumptions (Lanphier and Anani 2019), or narrative neglect (Saulnier 2020). Moreover, while the potential exists to scale narrative medicine through structured learning opportunities and broader institutional support, it primarily remains a tool for individual edification and enactment, not systems change.2. Trauma-informed careFreeman and Stewart (2024) describe how "microaggressions occur at the individual level and can be perpetrated by individuals, environments, or institutions" but that "ultimately, they are manifestations or symptoms of structural-level problems. Regardless of the level on which they occur, microaggressions always happen against the backdrop of social and structural oppression" (12). As other commentators point out, the authors recommend correctives primarily at individual and environmental levels (i.e., changing individual behaviors, making small modifications to clinical environments). Freeman and Stewart understand the limits of this scope, saying, "[W]e are well aware that such individual-level fixes can only ever take us so far and that they alone will never dismantle the oppressive structures themselves" (13). It is reasonable to identify achievable individual actions for the "unjust meantime" (Jaggar 2019) concurrent with social and structural... (shrink)

This paper investigates what it may mean to re-imagine learning through aesthetic experience with reference to John Dewey’s Art as Experience. The discussion asks what learning might look like when aesthetic experience takes centre stage in the learning process. It investigates what Dewey meant by art as experience and aesthetic experience. Working with Dewey as a philosopher of reconstruction of experience, the discussion examines responses to poetic writings and communication in learning situations. In seeking to discover what poetic writing does (...) within the experience of a reader and writer it considers three specific learning situations. Firstly there is an examination of a five-year old child’s experience of shared communication through the story of Horton the Elephant. Secondly there is an account of the responses of an 11-year-old child to poetry in a 1950s classroom setting, and later reconstructions of those experiences by the child as adult. Thirdly, the paper extends to intensive writing with 12 to 13-year-old children. The focus is on the process of learning via acts of expression as aesthetic experiences. Through art as experience the child develops perceptions that recover a coherence and continuity of aesthetic experience in art as in everyday life. (shrink)

Background: Explicating nurses’ moral identities is important given the powerful influence moral identity has on the capacity to exercise moral agency. Research objectives: The purpose of this study was to explore how nurses narrate their moral identity through their understanding of their work. An additional purpose was to understand how these moral identities are held in the social space that nurses occupy. Research design: The Registered Nurse Journal, a bimonthly publication of the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario, Canada, features a (...) regular column entitled, ‘In the End … What Nursing Means to Me …’ These short narratives generally include a story of an important moment in the careers of the authors that defined their identities as nurses. All 29 narratives published before June 2015 were analysed using a critical narrative approach, informed by the work of Margaret Urban Walker and Hilde Lindemann, to identify a typology of moral identity. Ethical considerations: Ethics approval was not required because the narratives are publicly available. Findings: Two narrative types were identified that represent the moral identities of nurses as expressed through their work: (1) making a difference in the lives of individuals and communities and (2) holding the identities of vulnerable individuals. Discussion: Nurses’ moral identities became evident when they could see improvement in the health of patients or communities or when they could maintain the identity of their patients despite the disruptive forces of illness and hospitalization. In reciprocal fashion, the responses of their patients, including expressions of gratitude, served to hold the moral identities of these nurses. Conclusion: Ultimately, the sustainability of nurses’ moral identities may be dependent on the recognition of their own needs for professional satisfaction and care in ways that go beyond the kind of acknowledgement that patients can offer. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Alexander and Persian WomenElizabeth Donnelly CarneyPerhaps the most dominant symbol of conquest in Greek literature is that of the captive woman, the wife, the mother, the daughter of some once great warrior now slave and perhaps concubine to the man who killed him. It is the image of Andromache led away to do demeaning work for some Greek that most haunts Hector when he foresees defeat; he hopes he (...) is dead before it happens (Il. 6.450–65). As the quarrel over Chryseis and Briseis demonstrates (Il. 1.26–31, 110–85), possession of the women of your enemy both symbolizes victory and is victory. 1 The family of Alexander’s mother, the Aeacids, asserted their essential Hellenism via connection to the great saga of Troy, not only by claiming descent from Achilles, through his son Neoptolemus, but also from Andromache, the captive of Neoptolemus. 2The strong influence of the story of Troy in Greek literature has created the image of a male Greek conquering and taking captive an Asian woman. 3 By the fifth century Greeks had defined themselves as superior because they had defeated Asians, Trojans and Persians had been conflated, and by then both were characterized as mere barbarians. 4 Thus the capture of Asian women by Greeks could be understood as part of the victory of civilization over barbarism.It is not incidental that the image is primarily one of a captive woman rather than a captive child; from the point of view of the ancient [End Page 563] world, the woman is the more compelling figure. 5 More important, women, perhaps because they themselves could not generate status easily, were perceived to have axi ma (‘reputation’), 6 to carry the status of their fathers and/or husbands or sons with them, status which could then be transmitted to the male who possessed them—thus the importance of Andromache, widow of the greatest Trojan warrior.Sexual possession of these bearers of status, whether legitimated by marriage or not, was a particularly powerful symbol of victory—a kind of second victory, both sexual and military, over the males to whom the women had belonged. Victory as rape and conquest as sexual union were commonplaces of Greek literature, metaphors but more than metaphors. 7Thus, that Alexander came into control of the women of the Persian royal family and other women of the Persian elite after the battle of Issus in 333 meant both that he had achieved a real victory and that he had acquired a potent set of symbols of that victory which he could manipulate to his own ends in the varying contexts of Macedonian, Greek, and Persian audiences. However, these Persian women were or could be, thanks to another old Greek literary tradition, dangerously ambiguous symbols to the Greeks and Macedonians. This tradition insisted that Persian monarchy had lost its original toughness by the fourth century and had become overly steeped in luxury. Much of this decadence was understood as effeminacy, often blamed on the role of royal women, especially in the education of princes (e.g., Plato Laws 3.694a–696a). If anything, [End Page 564] Greek tradition exaggerated the power and influence of royal Persian women, particularly the mothers of kings. Stories of scheming and seductive queens playing succession politics abounded. 8As is now generally recognized, most of this tradition is false, 9 a product of the Hellenic inclination to conceptualize in terms of polarities and to associate two different sorts of “others,” the foreigner and the female, 10 coupled with Hellenic suspicion of the role of women in monarchy, 11 and envy of the comparatively rich Persian culture. Greeks claimed to pride themselves on their austerity and to disdain the material wealth of the Persians, but in practice proved vulnerable to it. 12 In fact, a considerable part of the appeal and motivation for warfare in general and the Graeco-Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire in particular was the acquisition of that wealth and luxury supposedly so disdained and so often associated with women. 13Whatever one believes about the ethnicity of ancient Macedonians, one cannot assume that Macedonian views were identical to those [End Page... (shrink)

When parents must rely on public assistance and family shelters to provide for their children's most basic needs, they lose autonomy. Within a system of public assistance that already stigmatizes and isolates its beneficiaries, their family lives become subject to public scrutiny and criticism. They are _parenting in public._ This book is an in-depth examination of the realities of life for parents and their children in family shelters. The author uses the Massachusetts family shelter system to explore the impact of (...) asset and deficit-oriented help-giving approaches as they are experienced by mothers and service providers. The format of the book is unique. Following each chapter are the "reflections" of a mother who has parented in a shelter, a front-line worker, and a shelter director. The author and contributors propose a "Power With" policy and practice framework that runs counter to the prevailing "Power Over" cultural policy trends. Contributors include Rosa Clark, Brenda Farrell, Deborah Gray, Michele Kahan, Margaret A. Leonard, Mary T. Lewis, Nancy Schwoyer, and Elizabeth Ward. (shrink)