Originally published in 1923, this title is a critical examination of Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis. A contemporary of Freud, the author sets out to evaluate his theories in a scientific manner, searching for evidence. The result is a rather scathing review of where this is lacking.

Floods generate both risks and benefits. In Langhorne Creek, South Australia, a historically-embedded system of shared floodwater management exists among farmers, who rely on semi-regular flood inundations as part of the region’s hydrosocial terroir – a dynamic conjunction of water, landscape, social relations and agricultural practice. Unruly floods coexist with a heavily regulated and precisely measured system of modern water management for viticultural irrigation across the region. Since the mid-twentieth century, groundwater extraction and new pipeline schemes have linked Langhorne Creek (...) to the Murray Darling Basin water management system, which has displaced flooding as the primary source of irrigation water. The associated modernist shift towards the rationalization of water as a measurable resource has acted to sideline flood irrigation. Yet, floods maintain important viticultural, ecological and social roles in Langhorne Creek, adding to the flexibility and resilience of the region in response to water management challenges. The system involves technological and infrastructural components, such as flood gates and channels, but also relies upon the cooperation and coordination of community members. Local vignerons suggest that flood irrigation is environmentally as well as economically beneficial, rejuvenating riparian wetlands along watercourses. A more formal acknowledgement of the specific regional experiences of water management in a wine region like Langhorne Creek helps to fill a gap between emplaced and hydrosocial understandings of flood irrigation and broader assumptions about flooding as wasteful and inefficient. (shrink)

One of the signal developments in contemporary criticism over the past several years has been the ascendancy of the colonial paradigm. In conjunction with this new turn, Frantz Fanon has now been reinstated as a global theorist, and not simply by those engaged in Third World or subaltern studies. In a recent collection centered on British romanticism, Jerome McGann opens a discussion of William Blake and Ezra Pound with an extended invocation of Fanon. Donald Pease has used Fanon to open (...) an attack on Stephen Greenblatt’s reading of the Henriad and the interdisciplinary practices of the new historicism. And Fanon, and published interpretations of Fanon, have become regularly cited in the rereading of the Renaissance that have emerged from places like Sussex, Essex, and Birmingham.1My intent is not to offer a reading of Fanon to supplant these others, but to read, even if summarily, some of these readings of Fanon. By focusing on successive appropriations of this figure, as both totem and text, I think we can chart out an itinerary through contemporary colonial discourse theory. I want to stress, then, that my ambitions here are extremely limited: what follows may be a prelude to a reading of Fanon, but does not even begin that task itself.2 1. See Jerome McGann, “The Third World of Criticism,” in Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History, ed. Marjorie Levinson et al., pp. 85-107, and Donald Pease, “Toward a Sociology of Literary Knowledge: Greenblatt, Colonialism, and the New Historicism,” in Consequences of Theory, ed. Barbara Johnson and Jonathan Arac.2. A properly contextualized reading of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the text to which I most frequently recur, should situate it in respect to such germinal works as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question Juive, Dominique O. Mannoni’s Psychologie de la colonisation, Germaine Guex’s La Névrose d’abandon, as well as many lesser known works. But this is only to begin to sketch out the challenge of rehistoricizing Fanon. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is coeditor of Transition, a quarterly review, and the author of Figures in Black and The Signifying Monkey, which received an American Book Award. (shrink)

In this paper I apply an old problem of Quine's (the inscrutability of reference in translation) to a new style of theory about mental content (causal/nomological/informational accounts of meaning) and conclude that no "naturalization" of content of the sort currently popular can solve Quine's "gavagai" enigma. I show how failure to solve the problem leads to absurd conclusions not about one's own mental life, but about the non-mental world. I discuss various ways of attempting to remedy the accounts so as (...) to avoid the problem and explain why each attempt at solving the problem would take the information theorists further from their self-assigned task of "naturalizing" semantics. (shrink)

Perhaps only Tar Baby is as enigmatic and compelling a figure from Afro-American mythic discourse as is that oxymoron, the Signifying Monkey.3 The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey—he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language—is our trope for repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope of chiasmus itself, repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act. If Vico and Burke, (...) or Nietzsche, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, are correct in identifying “master tropes,” then we might think of these as the “master’s tropes,” and of signifying as the slave’s trope, the trope of tropes, as Bloom characterizes metalepsis, “a trope-reversing trope, a figure of a figure.” Signifying is a trope that subsumes other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and also hyberbole, litotes, and metalepsis. To this list, we could easily add aporia, chiasmus, and catachresis, all of which are used in the ritual of signifying.The black tradition has its own subdivisions of signifying, which we could readily identify with the typology of figures received from classical and medieval rhetoric, as Bloom has done with his “maps of misprision.” In black discourse “signifying” means modes of figuration itself. When one signifies, as Kimberly W. Benston puns, one “tropes-a-dope.” The black rhetorical tropes subsumed under signifying would include “marking,” “loud-talking,” “specifying,” “testifying,” “calling out”, “sounding,” “rapping,” and “playing the dozens.”4 3. On Tar Baby, see Ralph Ellison, “Hidden Man and Complex Fate: A Writer’s Experience in the United States,” Shadow and Act, p. 147, and Toni Morrison, Tar Baby. On the black as quasi-simian, see Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds, p. 105; Aristotle Historia Animalium 606b; Thomas Herbert, Some Years Travels, pp. 16-17; and John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 8th ed., 2 vols., 2:53.4. Geneva Smitherman defines these and other black tropes and then traces their use in several black texts. Smitherman’s work, like that of Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and Abrahams, is especially significant for literary theory. See Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, pp. 101-66. See also nn. 13 and 14 below. (shrink)

Le pédagogue Antoine de La Garanderie (1920-2010) laisse un héritage intellectuel particulièrement riche et stimulant. Le rayonnement de sa pensée au cours des trois dernières décennies, tant en France qu'à l'étranger, et son influence sur les pratiques pédagogiques, formatives, voire thérapeutiques, font de lui l'une des figures marquantes de notre culture contemporaine. Cet ouvrage explore trois grands champs de réflexion et de recherche : le premier concerne la validité et la pertinence, au plan épistémologique, des recherches qu'il a conduites, désignées (...) sous le terme générique de " Gestion mentale ", et en référence à d'autres courants de pensée ; le second aborde l'orientation générale des expérimentations pédagogiques ou didactiques auxquelles ces recherches ont donné lieu et dont il convient d'évaluer la portée et la valeur, tant heuristiques que praxéologiques ; le troisième relève des fondements proprement anthropologiques où s'enracinent ses concepts et ses propositions et qu'il importe autant de dévoiler que de situer : sa foi en l'éducabilité, sa conception de l'évolution et du progrès. (shrink)

The present study concerns the issue of meaning in contemporary continental philosophy. In particular, it develops the two accounts of meaning offered by Heidegger and Levinas, each of whom presents us with a differing break from Husserl. As a first attempt to name the difference between these three thinkers, one could say that Husserl gives us an epistemological notion of meaning; whereas Heidegger gives us an ontological account, and Levinas gives us an ethical account. We will refine and reformulate this (...) division in relation to the issues of each chapter. ;We will thus see how both Heidegger and Levinas develop their separate notions in relation to Husserl's own revolutionary approach to the question of meaning. Whereas Husserl both replaced the term "experience" with the term "intuition" and gave a compelling account of the "prepredicative" roots of the meaningful, Heidegger advances the articulation of such a prepredicative realm of meaning even further than Husserl. He did so, however, in a way that ends up displacing Husserl's notion of intuition. This is the move from Husserl's account of phenomenological intuition to Heidegger's own notion of a more hermeneutic phenomenology . ;I will show how Heidegger articulates an account of meaning as that upon which any projection of understanding takes shape. Meaning becomes a quasi-transcendental, non-subjective notion of that which makes possible the disclosure of any "world." Levinas, on the other hand, offers an account of meaning---in intended opposition to Heidegger---as located primarily in the ethical exposure at the heart of language: in the "face-to-face" relation of Same and Other. He further develops his notion of meaning in terms of the notion of the saying and the said. Both Heidegger and Levinas give us a non-intentional account of the meaningful. For Heidegger it takes the form of a non-intentional background that makes possible both the "worldhood of the world" and the possibilities of Dasein . For Levinas, the meaningful is thought in terms of an interpersonal, quasi-ethical face to face relation between persons exposed to the vulnerability, obligation, and height of an "Other" in what he calls the "saying.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Christian Art of Dying: Learning from Jesus by Allen VerheyMandy Rodgers-GatesThe Christian Art of Dying: Learning from Jesus By Allen Verhey GRAND RAPIDS: WILLIAM B. EERDMANS, 2011. 423 PP. $30.00When Allen Verhey, my former adviser, learned that I would be writing this review, he warned me (with characteristic modesty) that I ought to be careful to critique something about his book, or people might become suspicious. It (...) seems fitting now that this piece is being published after his death, which gives me permission to praise the book without reserve.Over the last few decades, the topic of death and dying has garnered renewed interest among Christian ethicists, and Verhey has been at the center of these conversations. Such conversations have brought into focus the reality that death is not merely the cessation of a life lived well (the “true” subject of ethics) but also that “dying well” is a legitimate subject within ethics. Dying offers unique opportunities for practicing virtues and for loving God, self, and neighbor, and care for the dying and grieving represents an important test of the faithfulness of Christian communities.After beginning with his own assessment of death in the modern West—acknowledging the benefits and triumphs of medicine, along with the pitfalls of medicalized death and the failure of the Church to resist medicalization—Verhey moves to the heart of his book: a retrieval of the Ars Moriendi tradition. Verhey engages a fifteenth-century abridged manual on the art of dying that appeared within the wider genre, one accompanied by wood-block prints (whose images appear alongside Verhey’s text). Placing the little book within its historical context, Verhey describes the view of death presented in it, a “commendacion” of death. He then moves on to the Ars Moriendi’s presentation of temptations faced by the dying person (“Moriens”), the virtues required, and questions, instructions, and prayers for the dying. Along the way, Verhey offers some of his own analysis; but he reserves the bulk of his critique and reformulations for the third section of his book, “Toward a contemporary Ars Moriendi.”Verhey’s articulation of a contemporary Ars Moriendi begins with a “commendacion” of life, in contrast to the medieval commendation of death. He demonstrates how the lens of Jesus’s resurrection serves to illuminate a proper Christian view of death: life is a good—though not the ultimate good—and death and suffering per se ought not to be considered good. At the same time, we need not fear death. Death and suffering are not the greatest evils, and [End Page 191] sometimes they must be risked or accepted “for the sake of God’s cause in the world” (215). Taking its cue from the Ars Moriendi tradition of remembering Jesus, the next chapter traces some of the details of the Passion narratives, including the seven final words of Jesus, and comments on these as they pertain to a modern context of dying. This remembering is then brought to bear on a contemporary retelling of the virtues necessary for dying well—again, relying upon and yet transforming the earlier tradition in nuanced ways. Verhey’s final section, on Christian communities’ care for the dying, includes sustained reflection on the practices of those communities and the resources they offer, focusing particularly on prayer. It offers critiques and additions—for example, recognizing the value of increased silence at funerals, “instead of rushing to fill the silence of death with our words” (348).Verhey’s engagement with the Ars Moriendi literature offers a creative and exemplary use of tradition for a contemporary concern. Our age—one that often refuses to face death—is brought into conversation with another era, when people took their dying seriously. At the same time, Verhey is free with his critique of the tradition and the need to reshape it, primarily on theological grounds. The strength of this book, like all his work, lies in its attention to scripture and its theological nuance and depth. At the same time, he knew and understood people, and that knowledge and pastoral concern are evident throughout. Ultimately, he accomplishes what he expresses in the introduction: “I hope... (shrink)

Our decision to bracket “race” was designed to call attention to the fact that “races,” put simply, do not exist, and that to claim that they do, for whatever misguided reason, is to stand on dangerous ground. Fromm understands this all too well, it seems, judging from the satirical tone of his response. Were there not countries in which the belief in racial essences dictates social and political policy, perhaps I would have found Fromm’s essay amusing and our gesture merely (...) one more token of the academic’s tendency to create distinctions which common sense alone renders unnecessary. The joke, rather, is on Fromm: one’s task is most certainly not to remain “permanently quiet”; rather, our task is to utilize language more precisely, to rid ourselves of the dangers of careless usages of problematic terms which are drawn upon to delimit and predetermine the lives and choices of human beings who are not “white.” Fromm’s response only reinforces Todorov’s worry about not bracketing “race” every time it occurs in our texts, because “race” simply does not exist. (shrink)

When someone hosts a party, when governments choose an aid program, or when assistive robots decide what meal to serve to a family, decision‐makers must determine how to help even when their recipients have very different preferences. Which combination of people’s desires should a decision‐maker serve? To provide a potential answer, we turned to psychology: What do people think is best when multiple people have different utilities over options? We developed a quantitative model of what people consider desirable behavior, characterizing (...) participants’ preferences by inferring which combination of “metrics” (maximax, maxsum, maximin, or inequality aversion [IA]) best explained participants’ decisions in a drink‐choosing task. We found that participants’ behavior was best described by the maximin metric, describing the desire to maximize the happiness of the worst‐off person, though participant behavior was also consistent with maximizing group utility (the maxsum metric) and the IA metric to a lesser extent. Participant behavior was consistent across variation in the agents involved and tended to become more maxsum‐oriented when participants were told they were players in the task (Experiment 1). In later experiments, participants maintained maximin behavior across multi‐step tasks rather than shortsightedly focusing on the individual steps therein (Experiment 2, Experiment 3). By repeatedly asking participants what choices they would hope for in an optimal, just decision‐maker, and carefully disambiguating which quantitative metrics describe these nuanced choices, we help constrain the space of what behavior we desire in leaders, artificial intelligence systems helping decision‐makers, and the assistive robots and decision‐makers of the future. (shrink)

What importance does “race” have as a meaningful category in the study of literature and the shaping of critical theory? If we attempt to answer this question by examining the history of Western literature and its criticism, our initial response would probably be “nothing” or, at the very least, “nothing explicitly.” Indeed, until the past decade or so, even the most subtle and sensitive literary critics would most likely have argued that, except for aberrant moments in the history of criticism, (...) race has not been brought to bear upon the study of literature in any apparent way. Since T. S. Eliot, after all, the canonical texts of the Western literary tradition have been defined as a more or less closed set of works that somehow speak to, or respond to, “the human condition” and to each other in formal patterns of repetition and revision. And while most critics acknowledge that judgment is not absolute and indeed reflects historically conditioned presuppositions, certain canonical works do seem to transcend value judgments of the moment, speaking irresistibly to the human condition. The question of the place of texts written by the Other in the proper study of “literature,” “Western literature,” or “comparative literature” has, until recently, remained an unasked question, suspended or silenced by a discourse in which the canonical and the noncanonical stand as the ultimate opposition. In much of the thinking about the proper study of literature in this century, race has been an invisible quantity, a persistent yet implicit presence.This was not always the case, we know. By mid-nineteenth century, “national spirit” and “historical period” had become widely accepted categories within theories of the nature and function of literature which argued that the principal value in a great work of literary art resided in the extent to which these categories were reflected in that work of art Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois considered a culture’s formal social institution as the repository of its “guiding spirit,” while Giambattista Vico’s principi di una scienza nuova read literature against a complex pattern of historical cycles. Friedrich and August von Schlegel managed rather deftly to bring “both national spirit and historical period” to bear upon the interpretation of literature, as W. Jackson Bate has shown. But it was Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine who made the implicit explicit by postulating “race, moment, and milieu” as positivistic criteria through which any work could be read and which, by definition, any work reflected. Taine’s History of English Literature was the great foundation upon which subsequent nineteenth-century notions of “national literatures” would be constructed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is professor of English, comparative literature, and African studies at Cornell University. He has edited several books and has written Figures in Blood and The Signifying Monkey. (shrink)

The extremely well-known holiday television special Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is deconstructed to expose an underlying philosophical paradigm towards people, especially children, with disabilities that is mechanistic and utilitarian. This paradigm includes a static and over-determined view of any disability a person may have, and can be erroneously supported by a philosophy of “radical freedom.” Examples of this philosophy of disability as applied to the K-12 realm of special education are also provided, showing how the lessons learned from the (...) children’s movie are mirrored in the static conceptualization of the notion of disability in the general society and educational system. (shrink)

In 2006 the Government issued a White Paper in which it proposed a ban on human-animal embryo research pending greater clarity on its potential. The Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology initiated an Inquiry and concluded that such research was necessary and should be permitted immediately. The Government agreed and this is reflected in revised legislation. The Government has issued guidelines on the gathering and use of scientific advice and evidence, designed to ensure that these are “credible, reliable and (...) objective.” This article tests the Committee’s approach in the light of its remit and these, and other, relevant guidelines and concludes that it failed to meet these standards. Rather, it effectively ceded to an interest group the regulation of its own activities. The article ends by suggesting alterations to the Committee’s remit and composition designed to ensure that the public interest is better protected in future. (shrink)

The study of identity crosses all disciplinary borders to address such issues as the multiple interactions of race, class, and gender in feminist, lesbian, and gay studies, postcolonialism and globalization, and the interrelation of nationalism and ethnicity in ethnic and area studies. Identities will help disrupt the cliche-ridden discourse of identity by exploring the formation of identities and problem of subjectivity. Leading scholars in literary criticism, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy explore such topics as "Gypsies" in the Western imagination, the mobilization (...) of the West in Chinese television, the lesbian identity and the woman's gaze in fashion photography, and the regulation of black women's bodies in early 20th-century urban areas. This collection of twenty articles brings together the special issue of Critical Inquiry entitled "Identities" (Summer 1992), two other previously published essays, and five previously published critical responses and rejoinders, all of which is interrogated in two new essays by Michael Gorra and Judith Butler. Contributors include Elizabeth Abel, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Akeel Bilgrami, Daniel Boyarin, Jonathan Boyarin, Judith Butler, Hazel V. Carby, Xiaomei Chen, Diana Fuss, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Avery Gordon, Michael Gorra, Cheryl Herr, Saree S. Makdisi, Walter Benn Michaels, Christopher Newfield, Gananath Obeyesekere, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Sara Suleri, Katie Trumpener, and Joseph Valente. (shrink)

This study explains why the power of neoliberal business over the Mexican state increased during the last three decades of the twentieth century. It identifies three sources of increased neoliberal business power that occurred in conjunction with neoliberal reforms: (1) active mobilization by neoliberal business, (2) increased access to the state by neoliberal business, and (3) increased economic power of neoliberal business. It thereby contributes additional evidence that counters the view of Mexico’s state neoliberalizers as acting autonomously from business. It (...) further outlines two conditions that were instrumental in bringing about the increased power of neoliberal business: the onset of economic crisis in the 1970s, and a shift in foreign capital preferences in Mexico. The analysis demonstrates how Mexico’s sources and conditions of business power differed from those in advanced industrial societies, and outlines why the Mexican case may be a good starting point for devising a historically-contingent theory of business power in the semiperiphery. (shrink)

Chronological explanation of physics from early history through current studies geared to lay readers with limited mathematical training.

A literary historian might very well characterize the eighties as the period when race, class, and gender became the holy trinity of literary criticism. Critical Inquiry’s contribution to this shift in critical paradigms took the form of two special issues, ”Writing and Sexual Difference,” and “‘Race,’ Writing and Difference.” In the 1990s, however, “race,” “class,” and “gender” threaten to become the regnant clichés of our critical discourse. Our object in this special issue is to help disrupt the cliché-ridden discourse of (...) identity by exploring the formation of identities and the problem of subjectivity.Scholars in a variety of disciplines have begun to address what we might call the politics of identity. Their work expands on the evolving, anti-essentialist critiques of ethnic, sexual, national, and racial identities, particularly the work of those post-structuralist theorists who have articulated concepts of difference. The calls for a “post-essentialist” reconception of notions of identity have become increasingly common. The powerful resurgence of nationalisms in Eastern Europe provides just one example of the catalysts for such theorizing.Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of Assertion and Conditionals, Truth in Semantics, and Necessary Questions, has also published a novel, Avenging Angel, and a collection of essays, In My Father’s House. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is coeditor of Transition, a quarterly review, and the author of Figures in Black, The Signifying Monkey, and Loose Canons. His latest contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Critical Fanonism”. (shrink)

Since the Supreme Court upheld the partial birth abortion ban in 2007, more U.S. abortion providers have begun performing intraamniotic digoxin injections prior to uterine dilation and evacuations. These injections can cause medical harm to abortion patients. Our objective is to perform an in-depth bioethical analysis of this procedure, which is performed mainly for the provider’s legal benefit despite potential medical consequences for the patient.

Background The phenomenon of ‘moral distress’ has continued to be a popular topic for nursing research. However, much of the scholarship has lacked conceptual clarity, and there is debate about what it means to experience moral distress. Moral distress remains an obscure concept to many clinical nurses, especially those outside of North America, and there is a lack of empirical research regarding its impact on nurses in the United Kingdom and its relevance to clinical practice. Research aim To explore the (...) concept of moral distress in nursing both empirically and conceptually. Methodology Feminist interpretive phenomenology was used to explore and analyse the experiences of critical care nurses at two acute care trauma hospitals in the United Kingdom. Empirical data were analysed using Van Manen’s six steps for data analysis. Ethical considerations The study was approved locally by the university ethics review committee and nationally by the Health Research Authority in the United Kingdom. Findings The empirical findings suggest that psychological distress can occur in response to a variety of moral events. The moral events identified as causing psychological distress in the participants’ narratives were moral tension, moral uncertainty, moral constraint, moral conflict and moral dilemmas. Discussion We suggest a new definition of moral distress which captures this broader range of moral events as legitimate causes of distress. We also suggest that moral distress can be sub-categroised according to the source of distress, for example, ‘moral-uncertainty distress’. We argue that this could aid in the development of interventions which attempt to address and mitigate moral distress. Conclusion The empirical findings support the notion that narrow conceptions of moral distress fail to capture the real-life experiences of this group of critical care nurses. If these experiences resonate with other nurses and healthcare professionals, then it is likely that the definition needs to be broadened to recognise these experiences as ‘moral distress’. (shrink)

There has been increasing debate in recent years about the conceptualization of moral distress. Broadly speaking, two groups of scholars have emerged: those who agree with Jameton’s ‘narrow definition’ that focuses on constraint and those who argue that Jameton’s definition is insufficient and needs to be broadened. Using feminist empirical bioethics, we interviewed critical care nurses in the United Kingdom about their experiences and conceptualizations of moral distress. We provide our broader definition of moral distress and examples of data that (...) both challenge and support our conceptualization. We pre‐empt and overcome three key challenges that could be levelled at our account and argue that there are good reasons to adopt our broader definition of moral distress when exploring prevalence of, and management strategies for, moral distress. (shrink)

In recent years, the phenomenon of moral distress has been critically examined—and for a good reason. There have been a number of different definitions suggested, some that claimed to be consistent with the original definition but in fact referred to different epistemological states. In this paper, we re‐examine moral distress by exploring its relationship with moral agency. We critically examine three conceptions of moral agency and argue that two of these conceptions risk placing nurses' values at the center of moral (...) action when it ought to be the patient's values that shape nurses' obligations. We propose that the conception of moral agency advanced by Aimee Milliken which re‐centers patient values, should be more broadly accepted within nursing. We utilize a case example to demonstrate a situation in which the values of a patient's parents (surrogates) justifiably constrained nurses' moral agency, creating moral distress. Through an examination of constraints on nurse agency in this case, we illustrate the problematic nature of ‘narrow' moral distress and the value of re‐considering moral distress. Finally, we provide an action‐oriented proposal identifying mediating steps that we argue have utility for nurses (and other healthcare professionals) to mediate between experiences of narrow moral distress and the exercise of moral agency. (shrink)

Suffering is a ubiquitous yet elusive concept in health care. In a field devoted to the pursuit of objective data, suffering is a phenomenon with deep ties to subjective experience, moral values, and cultural norms. Suffering’s tie to subjective experience makes it challenging to discern and respond to the suffering of others. In particular, the question of whether a child with profound neurocognitive disabilities can suffer has generated a robust discourse, rooted in philosophical conceptualizations of personhood as well as the (...) academic and experiential expertise of practiced health-care professionals. The issue remains unresolved because it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to ever truly know an infant’s lived experience. But what if this is not the best question? What if instead of asking “can this infant suffer?” the discourse is broadened to ask “is there suffering here?” This latter question demands attention to patients’ subjective experiences of suffering, but also to the web of relationships that envelop them. Without losing sight of the importance of patients’ experiences, consideration of their relationships may elucidate the presence of suffering when the patients themselves are unable to provide the same clarity. In this essay, care ethics frames an examination of how suffering manifests in the loving and caring relationships that surround an infant with profound neurocognitive disabilities, changing those relationships and affecting the individuals within them. Exploring suffering through these relationships may offer clarity on the presence and content of suffering for infants with profound cognitive disabilities, in turn offering moral guidance for responding to suffering and supporting flourishing in this context. (shrink)

While Jameton’s (1984) definition of moral distress has been embraced by researchers and scholars for recognizing the many constraints that nurses experience on their moral agency, it has also been...

Background: Nurses face ethical issues and experience moral distress in their everyday work. A nursing ethics champion program was developed at a hospital in the United States. Methods: As part of a quality improvement project, pre- and post-training surveys were developed to assess whether the program was feasible and sustainable, enhanced nurse confidence in recognizing and addressing ethical issues and moral distress, and increased nurse knowledge of institutional resources for addressing the same. Qualitative and quantitative analyses were performed. Results: Thirteen (...) nurses from both the critical care and medical/surgical settings participated in the program. The program proved feasible. Attrition after the educational sessions raised concerns about sustainability. Survey results suggest an association between participating in the program’s educational sessions and increased nurse confidence in recognizing and addressing ethical issues and moral distress, as well as identifying institutional resources that can assist nurses with the same. Discussion: Opportunities for future nursing ethics champion programs include increasing the interactivity and duration of educational sessions, making programs multidisciplinary, and creating materials for nurses to more easily share with colleagues. It would be valuable for future research to measure the impact of nursing ethics champion programs on nursing turnover. Implications: A nursing ethics champion program has the potential to help nurses feel better equipped to navigate ethical issues and moral distress in their everyday work. (shrink)

Fertility clinicians participate in non-sexual reproductive projects by providing assisted reproductive technology (ART) to those hoping to reproduce, in support of their reproductive goals. In most countries where ART is available, the state regulates ART as a form of medical treatment. The predominant position in the reproductive rights literature frames the clinician’s role as medical technician, and the state as a third party with limited rights to interfere. These roles broadly align with established functions of clinician and state in Western (...) liberal democracies, where doctors have duties to provide safe, beneficial and legal healthcare to all who seek it. Recognised state responsibilities include safeguarding equitable access to medical services and protecting and promoting reproductive liberty.I argue against this normative moral framing of clinician and state involvement in non-sexual reproduction, suggesting that clinician and state join the non-sexual reproductive project at the point of triggering conception. Begetting a child is more than just the provision and regulation of healthcare; it generates rights and confers responsibilities on all who join this morally significant project. All who collaborate have the right to join or refuse to join the project. I suggest this is intuitively understood in the sexual realm, but not in the non-sexual realm. My key substantive claim is that non-sexual reproduction is a pluralist pursuit that morally implicates more than the genetic and gestational contributors. I find that while the moral basis of a clinician or the state’s right to refuse to join the ART project is the same as for those providing gestational or genetic input, the reasons that morally underpin their refusal differs. (shrink)

This article presents narratives from 13 Indigenous early career academics (ECAs) at one university in Auckland, New Zealand. These experiences are likely to represent those of Indigenous Māori and Pasifika ECAs nationally, given the small, centralised nature of the national academy of Aotearoa New Zealand. The narratives contain testimony, fictionalised vignettes of experience, and poetic expressions. Meeting the demands of an academic role in one’s first years of working at a university is a big deal for anyone; the extra pressures (...) and challenges for Indigenous Māori and Pacific staff are immense, yet little understood by White ‘others.’ A writing workshop was the initial catalyst of this collective writing project. Through these insider narratives, this article presents a collective description of, and response to, the experience of Māori and Pasifika early career academics. (shrink)

This year’s Waitangi Day, 6 February 2021, saw the revival of a favourite zombie in New Zealand politics when Judith Collins, the leader of the Opposition, complained about not getting a chance to...

The predominant position in the reproductive rights literature argues that access to assisted reproductive technologies (ART) forms part of an individual’s right to reproduce. On this reasoning, refusal of treatment by clinicians (via provision) violates a hopeful parent’s reproductive right and discriminates against the infertile. I reject these views and suggest they wrongly contort what reproductive freedom entitles individuals to do and demand of others. I suggest these views find their origin, at least in part, in the way we define (...) “reproduction” itself. This paper critically analyses two widely accepted definitions of human reproduction and demonstrates that both are fundamentally flawed. While the process of reproduction includes the biological acts of begetting and bearing a child, I argue that it does not extend to include rearing. This reworked definition has little impact in the realm of sexual reproduction. However, it has significant ethical implications for the formulation and assignment of reproductive rights and responsibilities in the non-sexual realm in two important ways. First, a claim to access ART where one has an intention to rear a child (but does not beget or bear) cannot be grounded in reproductive rights. Second, lacking an intention to rear does not extinguish the reproductive rights and responsibilities for those who collaborate in the process. I conclude that clinicians collaborate in non-sexual reproduction at the point of triggering conception (begetting) and therefore have the right to refuse to be involved in non-sexual reproduction, in some instances, as do all reproductive collaborators. (shrink)

Place, practice and status have played significant and interacting roles in the complex history of primatology during the early to mid-twentieth century. This paper demonstrates that, within the emerging discipline of primatology, the field was understood as an essential supplement to laboratory work. Founders argued that only in the field could primates be studied in interaction with their natural social group and environment. Such field studies of primate behavior required the development of existing and new field techniques. The practices and (...) sites developed by American primatologist Clarence Ray Carpenter were used to demonstrate that scientific standards could be successfully applied to the study of primates in the field. In an environment in which many field biologists fought for higher scientific status, Carpenter gradually adopted increasingly interventionist techniques. These techniques raised epistemological problems for studies whose value rested on the naturalness of the behaviors observed. Thus, issues of status shaped field practices and subsequently altered Carpenter's criteria for what constituted natural primate behavior. (shrink)

Catalysed by conversations amongst a group of colleagues, this article is an initial exploration of what happens to women academics aged 60+ who work in a university in Aotearoa New Zealand. This work is an example of when academic theories, in this case feminism, are called forth by real-world experiences – in this case, increasing academic job insecurity, catalysed by post-pandemic economic shortfalls. We blend together personal anecdotes and feminist analysis to show how women’s academic careers, which are commonly constrained (...) by motherhood in their younger years, are also curtailed at the senior end by processes of voluntary/involuntary retirement, as and when demanded by adverse fiscal conditions. (shrink)

This paper examines how young peoples’ lived experiences with personal technologies can be used to teach engineering ethics in a way which facilitates greater engagement with the subject. Engineering ethics can be challenging to teach: as a form of practical ethics, it is framed around future workplace experience in a professional setting which students are assumed to have no prior experience of. Yet the current generations of engineering students, who have been described as ‘digital natives’, do however have immersive personal (...) experience with digital technologies; and experiential learning theory describes how students learn ethics more successfully when they can draw on personal experience which give context and meaning to abstract theories. This paper reviews current teaching practices in engineering ethics; and examines young people’s engagement with technologies including cell phones, social networking sites, digital music and computer games to identify social and ethical elements of these practices which have relevance for the engineering ethics curricula. From this analysis three case studies are developed to illustrate how facets of the use of these technologies can be drawn on to teach topics including group work and communication; risk and safety; and engineering as social experimentation. Means for bridging personal experience and professional ethics when teaching these cases are discussed. The paper contributes to research and curriculum development in engineering ethics education, and to wider education research about methods of teaching ‘the net generation’. (shrink)

Empathy is sometimes so hard to achieve that one may wonder if it is a virtue for caregivers at all. Perhaps a caregiver cannot always know how a patient feels, and perhaps that knowledge is sometimes too painful to possess. A nuanced understanding of what empathy entails and of the conditions for attaining it can help ground its possibility.